I’ve seen this argument but didn’t manage to find the paper. It goes further: imagine that the space of possible universes looks like a sphere in R^n centered at the origin and one axis represents a utility function that encodes God’s preferences about whether a universe should exist(1) or not and the 0 on the axis is just where God’s preferences switch from “would rather exist than not” to “would rather not exist”(2). Then the vast majority of universes that God instantiates are just barely worth existing, and you should expect to find yourself in a universe where the problem of evil is not resolved by “actually things are pretty great, good job God!” or by “we live in a hell dimension, God is the worst”.
(1) Assume “should exist” makes sense. I realize none of us knows what this means. (2) Luckily? For an underlying reason? Anyway it’s one plausible shape, more likely than any specific squiggly blob, and the argument works for lots of other shapes like a cone with its point in the +util direction.
I’ve seen this argument but didn’t manage to find the paper. It goes further: imagine that the space of possible universes looks like a sphere in R^n centered at the origin and one axis represents a utility function that encodes God’s preferences about whether a universe should exist(1) or not and the 0 on the axis is just where God’s preferences switch from “would rather exist than not” to “would rather not exist”(2). Then the vast majority of universes that God instantiates are just barely worth existing, and you should expect to find yourself in a universe where the problem of evil is not resolved by “actually things are pretty great, good job God!” or by “we live in a hell dimension, God is the worst”.
(1) Assume “should exist” makes sense. I realize none of us knows what this means.
(2) Luckily? For an underlying reason? Anyway it’s one plausible shape, more likely than any specific squiggly blob, and the argument works for lots of other shapes like a cone with its point in the +util direction.