I’m a physicist with experience in philosophy of physics. I am interested in understanding complex problems in physics, philosophy, and logic.
Parabalt
Karma: 0
I’m a physicist with experience in philosophy of physics. I am interested in understanding complex problems in physics, philosophy, and logic.
Hi. I’m new but willing to engage in the logical analysis accepting MWT.
After reading the longest comment chain, it seems as though what matters to you is the expected utility of all observer moments across both the quantum multiverse/simulation multiverse. I think I have a different approach to Pascal’s Wager that may interest you. Also, I believe there are some physical and logical limitations in worrying about aliens with AGI performing acausal blackmail.
You say that the many-gods objection to Pascal’s wager is not satisfying as it leads to being tortured no matter what you do. I would like to push back on that a little. In Pascal’s wager, you can conceive of infinitely many gods who will reward you regardless of your approach to Pascal’s wager. You can conceive of infinitely many gods who will torture you regardless of your approach to Pascal’s wager. You can conceive of infinitely many realities in which there is no god.
You cannot know which reality you are in, but that doesn’t mean that you are now going to be tortured no matter what you do. Many of the infinite possibilities are good or neutral. By a measure that treats each god possibility as interchangeable the good/neutral chance is 2⁄3. Personally, I would also argue that any good or bad god that is more likely to exist would leave evidence of such existence, and I find none. As such, conditioning on the state of the world leads me to treat the neutral case as significantly more likely than any other. Therefore I am most likely going to live a normal life, and the utility of any fringe possibilities cancel out.
Let’s extend this to casual extortion. Firstly, for an alien with an aligned AGI to recognize that you are susceptible to acausal extortion, they would have to be able to decode the continuously exponentially suppressed interference between the branches. The computing power necessary for this is well beyond physical limits of computation. They cannot know the specific form of your conscience experience and therefore cannot simulate punishments. Therefore you have no reason to fear their punishments.
Secondly, let’s assume that somehow the alien can learn about you. Yes, they can create more simulated copies than “real” copies of your consciousness because branching will create about as many real copies of them as of you. However, we now return to the relevance of the Many-Gods objection. There will be infinitely many aliens that simulate rewards for not succumbing to the acausal extortion. There will be infinitely many aliens simulating exactly your unmodified life.
At this point we are playing with infinities. It is a fact that we do not have enough information to know about the ratios of benevolent, malevolent, and neutral aliens with aligned AGI. (Remember that they physically can’t know about you anyway and therefore can’t simulate you.) Claiming that one should be more common than the other is an illogical guess. Claiming that they are all equally likely is an illogical guess as well. The only logical thing to do is to not act on scenarios of absolute ignorance.
This differs from the Pascal’s wager case because the AGIs sit within reality and as such their possibilities of existence are constrained by it. Additionally, since you do not know the weight of your current quantum branch, you have no means of conditionalizing the probabilities of their existence on the state of your world.
By the laws of physics, you can not be extorted. However, even if you could, you cannot even approach calculating the ratio of future moments of suffering, pleasure, or neutrality caused by such extortion. Any action based on such attempts is irrational, so you cannot rationally come to fear being punished.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. I’ve wanted to reply to someone who takes acausal extortion seriously for a while. Thanks for the opportunity!