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MugaSofer comments on Privileging the Hypothesis - Less Wrong
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Comments (126)
You might value something you can't always see.
That didn't really answer the question. Can you give a context-specific answer?
I believe the traditional example is a spacecraft passing over the cosmological horizon. We cannot observe this spacecraft, so the belief "things passing over the cosmological horizon cease to exist" cannot be experimentally proved or disproved. And yet, if there are large numbers of people on such a craft, their continued survival might mater a great deal to us. If we believe they will die, we will choose not to send them - which might impose heavy costs due to i.e. overpopulation.
The analogy to many-worlds seems obvious - if true, it would mean the existence of people we cannot experimentally verify. This could have implications for, say, the value of creating new minds, because they'll already exist somewhere else.
The analogy is hand-waving. If the spacecraft has gone over the cosmological horizon, how did you ever conclude that it exists in the first place? Such a conclusion would only be possible if you observed the spacecraft before it crossed over. In other words, it passed an experimental test.
You have a spaceship. You believe that it will cease to exist if it passes the cosmological horizon. What empirical test are you failing?
I suppose I would not be failing an empirical test, but I would be going against the well established law of conservation of mass and energy, and we can conclude I am wrong with >99% certainty.
To prevent us from getting too hooked on the analogy and back to my original question, if there is a theory (Bohm) that cannot pass or fail an experimental test but does go against a well established principle (locality), why should we give it a second glance? (Again, not a rhetorical question.)
Precisely my point. The Law Of Conservation Of Energy is only well-established - empirically speaking - to hold within the observable universe. The Law Of Conservation Of Energy That I Can See is, of course, more complex, and there's no reason to privileged the hypothesis - as long as you have some way of assigning probabilities to things you can't observe.
Well, the Official LW Position (as endorsed by Eliezer Yudkowsky) is that you shouldn't. And, honestly, that makes a lot of sense. Some people, however, are determined to argue that the whole question is somehow meaningless or impossible to answer.
However, the conclusion that they don't subjectively cease to exist after we can no longer communicate with them follows unambiguously from the well-tested models of physics and cosmology. It does not require any strong extra assumptions, only some very weak ones, like that we are not in a cosmic-scale Truman show, or that the Copernican Principle holds.
By comparison, many-worlds is a strong extra assumption which has never been tested and is currently not testable (no, despite the popular misconception here, it does not follow from "just" the Schrodinger equation).
The "Truman Show Hypothesis" may violate the Copernican Principle, but it cannot be experimentally disproved.
I am not using this to argue for Many-Worlds; merely that we should care if Many-Worlds is true.
EDIT: A similar analogy would be that the ship turns into pure utilitronium, rather than vanishing. This might be a better analogy for the MWI for you.