“I do care about everything that exists. I am not particularly certain that all mathematically possible universes exist, or how much they exist if they do.”
I was confused by this for a while, but couldn’t express that in words until now.
First, I think existence is necessarily a binary sort of thing, not something that exists in degrees. If I exist 20%, I don’t even know what that sentence should mean. Do I exist, but only sometimes? Do only parts of me exist at a time? Am I just very skinny? It doesn’t really make sense. Just as a risk of a risk is still a type of risk, so a degree of existence is still a type of existence. There are no sorts of existence except either being real or being fake.
Secondly, even if my first part is wrong, I have no idea why having more existence would translate into having greater value. By way of analogy, if I was the size of a planet but only had a very small brain and motivational center, I don’t think that would mean that I should receive more from utilitarians. It seems like a variation of the Bigger is Better or Might makes Right moral fallacy, rather than a well reasoned idea.
I can imagine a sort of world where every experience is more intense, somehow, and I think people in that sort of world might matter more. But I think intensity is really a measure of relative interactions, and if their world was identical to ours except for its amount of existence, we’d be just as motivated to do different things as they would. I don’t think such a world would exist, or that we could tell whether or not we were in it from-the-inside, so it seems like a meaningless concept.
So the reasoning behind that sentence didn’t really make sense to me. The amount of existence that you have, assuming that’s even a thing, shouldn’t determine your moral value.
I imagine Eliezer is being deliberately imprecise, in accordance with a quote I very much like: “Never speak more clearly than you think.” [The internet seems to attribute this to one Jeremy Bernstein]
If you believe MWI there are many different worlds that all objectively exist. Does this mean morality is futile, since no matter what we choose, there’s a world where we chose the opposite? Probably not: the different worlds seem to have different different “degrees of existence” in that we are more likely to find ourselves in some than in others. I’m not clear how this can be, but the fact that probability works suggests it pretty strongly. So we can still act morally by trying to maximize the “degree of existence” of good worlds.
This suggests that the idea of a “degree of existence” might not be completely incoherent.
I suppose you can just attribute it to imprecision, but “I am not particularly certain …how much they exist” implies that he’s talking about a subset of mathematically possible universes that do objectively exist, but yet exist less than other worlds. What you’re talking about, conversely, seems to be that we should create as many good worlds as possible, stretched in order to cover Eliezer’s terminology. Existence is binary, even though there are more of some things that exist than there are of other things. Using “amount of existence” instead of “number of worlds” is unnecessarily confusing, at the least.
Also, I don’t see any problems with infinitarian ethics anyway because I subscribe to (broad) egoism. Things outside of my experience don’t exist in any meaningful sense except as cognitive tools that I use to predict my future experiences. This allows me to distinguish between my own happiness and the happiness of Babykillers, which allows me to utilize a moral system much more in line with my own motivations. It also means that I don’t care about alternate versions of the universe unless I think it’s likely that I’ll fall into one through some sort of interdimensional portal (I don’t).
Although, I’ll still err on the side of helping other universes if it does no damage to me because I think Superrationality can function well in those sort of situations and I’d like to receive benefits in return, but in other scenarios I don’t really care at all.
I was confused by this for a while, but couldn’t express that in words until now.
First, I think existence is necessarily a binary sort of thing, not something that exists in degrees. If I exist 20%, I don’t even know what that sentence should mean. Do I exist, but only sometimes? Do only parts of me exist at a time? Am I just very skinny? It doesn’t really make sense. Just as a risk of a risk is still a type of risk, so a degree of existence is still a type of existence. There are no sorts of existence except either being real or being fake.
Secondly, even if my first part is wrong, I have no idea why having more existence would translate into having greater value. By way of analogy, if I was the size of a planet but only had a very small brain and motivational center, I don’t think that would mean that I should receive more from utilitarians. It seems like a variation of the Bigger is Better or Might makes Right moral fallacy, rather than a well reasoned idea.
I can imagine a sort of world where every experience is more intense, somehow, and I think people in that sort of world might matter more. But I think intensity is really a measure of relative interactions, and if their world was identical to ours except for its amount of existence, we’d be just as motivated to do different things as they would. I don’t think such a world would exist, or that we could tell whether or not we were in it from-the-inside, so it seems like a meaningless concept.
So the reasoning behind that sentence didn’t really make sense to me. The amount of existence that you have, assuming that’s even a thing, shouldn’t determine your moral value.
I imagine Eliezer is being deliberately imprecise, in accordance with a quote I very much like: “Never speak more clearly than you think.” [The internet seems to attribute this to one Jeremy Bernstein]
If you believe MWI there are many different worlds that all objectively exist. Does this mean morality is futile, since no matter what we choose, there’s a world where we chose the opposite? Probably not: the different worlds seem to have different different “degrees of existence” in that we are more likely to find ourselves in some than in others. I’m not clear how this can be, but the fact that probability works suggests it pretty strongly. So we can still act morally by trying to maximize the “degree of existence” of good worlds.
This suggests that the idea of a “degree of existence” might not be completely incoherent.
I suppose you can just attribute it to imprecision, but “I am not particularly certain …how much they exist” implies that he’s talking about a subset of mathematically possible universes that do objectively exist, but yet exist less than other worlds. What you’re talking about, conversely, seems to be that we should create as many good worlds as possible, stretched in order to cover Eliezer’s terminology. Existence is binary, even though there are more of some things that exist than there are of other things. Using “amount of existence” instead of “number of worlds” is unnecessarily confusing, at the least.
Also, I don’t see any problems with infinitarian ethics anyway because I subscribe to (broad) egoism. Things outside of my experience don’t exist in any meaningful sense except as cognitive tools that I use to predict my future experiences. This allows me to distinguish between my own happiness and the happiness of Babykillers, which allows me to utilize a moral system much more in line with my own motivations. It also means that I don’t care about alternate versions of the universe unless I think it’s likely that I’ll fall into one through some sort of interdimensional portal (I don’t).
Although, I’ll still err on the side of helping other universes if it does no damage to me because I think Superrationality can function well in those sort of situations and I’d like to receive benefits in return, but in other scenarios I don’t really care at all.