(or the copy counting is a bit subtle about the copies which are effectively encoding state onto coordinates)
That’s an interesting idea, thanks. Maybe caring about anthropic probabilities or measures of conscious experiences directly would make more sense than caring about the number of copies as a proxy.
If you take that idea seriously and assume that all anthropic probabilities of conscious experiences must sum to 1, then torture vs dustspecks seems to lose some of its sting, because the total disutility of dustspecking remains bounded and not very high, no matter how many people you dustspeck. (That’s a little similar to the “proximity argument”, which says faraway people matter less.) And being able to point out the specific person to be tortured means that person doesn’t have too low weight, so torturing that single person would be worse than dustspecking literally everyone else in the multiverse. I don’t remember if anyone made this argument before… Of course there could be any number of holes in it.
Also note that the thicker wires argument is not obviously wrong, because for all we know, thicker wires could affect subjective probabilities. It sounds absurd, sure, but so does the fact that lightspeed is independent of observer speed.
ETA: the first version of this comment mixed up Pascal’s mugging and torture vs dustspecks. Sorry. Though maybe a similar argument could be made for Pascal’s mugging as well.
Thinking about it some more: maybe the key is that it is not enough for something to exist somewhere, just as it is not enough for output tape in Solomonoff induction to contain the desired output string somewhere within it, it should begin with it. (Note that it is a critically important requirement). If you are using Solomonoff induction (suppose you got oracle and suppose universe is computable and so on), then your model contains not only laws of universe but also locator, and my intuition is that one model that has simplest locator is some very huge length shorter than the next simplest model, so all the other models except the one with simplest locator, have to be ignored entirely.
If we require that the locator is present somehow in the whole then the ultra-distant copies are very different while the nearby copies are virtually the same, and Kolmogorov complexity of concatenated strings can be used for count, not counting twice nearby copies (the thick wired monster only weights a teeny tiny bit more).
TBH i feel tho that utilitarianism goes in the wrong direction entirely. Morals can be seen as evolved / engineered solution to peer to peer intellectual and other cooperation, essentially. It relies on trust, not on mutual detailed modeling (which wastes computing power), and the actions are not quite determined by the expected state (which you can’t model), even though it is engineered with some state in mind.
edit: also I think the what ever stuff raises the problem with distant copies or MWI is subjectively disproved by this not saving you from brain damage of any kind (you can get drunk, pass out, wake up with a little bit fewer neurons). So we basically know something’s screwed up with naive counting for probabilities, or the world is small.
That’s an interesting idea, thanks. Maybe caring about anthropic probabilities or measures of conscious experiences directly would make more sense than caring about the number of copies as a proxy.
If you take that idea seriously and assume that all anthropic probabilities of conscious experiences must sum to 1, then torture vs dustspecks seems to lose some of its sting, because the total disutility of dustspecking remains bounded and not very high, no matter how many people you dustspeck. (That’s a little similar to the “proximity argument”, which says faraway people matter less.) And being able to point out the specific person to be tortured means that person doesn’t have too low weight, so torturing that single person would be worse than dustspecking literally everyone else in the multiverse. I don’t remember if anyone made this argument before… Of course there could be any number of holes in it.
Also note that the thicker wires argument is not obviously wrong, because for all we know, thicker wires could affect subjective probabilities. It sounds absurd, sure, but so does the fact that lightspeed is independent of observer speed.
ETA: the first version of this comment mixed up Pascal’s mugging and torture vs dustspecks. Sorry. Though maybe a similar argument could be made for Pascal’s mugging as well.
Thinking about it some more: maybe the key is that it is not enough for something to exist somewhere, just as it is not enough for output tape in Solomonoff induction to contain the desired output string somewhere within it, it should begin with it. (Note that it is a critically important requirement). If you are using Solomonoff induction (suppose you got oracle and suppose universe is computable and so on), then your model contains not only laws of universe but also locator, and my intuition is that one model that has simplest locator is some very huge length shorter than the next simplest model, so all the other models except the one with simplest locator, have to be ignored entirely.
If we require that the locator is present somehow in the whole then the ultra-distant copies are very different while the nearby copies are virtually the same, and Kolmogorov complexity of concatenated strings can be used for count, not counting twice nearby copies (the thick wired monster only weights a teeny tiny bit more).
TBH i feel tho that utilitarianism goes in the wrong direction entirely. Morals can be seen as evolved / engineered solution to peer to peer intellectual and other cooperation, essentially. It relies on trust, not on mutual detailed modeling (which wastes computing power), and the actions are not quite determined by the expected state (which you can’t model), even though it is engineered with some state in mind.
edit: also I think the what ever stuff raises the problem with distant copies or MWI is subjectively disproved by this not saving you from brain damage of any kind (you can get drunk, pass out, wake up with a little bit fewer neurons). So we basically know something’s screwed up with naive counting for probabilities, or the world is small.