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byrnema comments on A Much Better Life? - Less Wrong
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Well, what is the difference between being a deterministic actor in a simulated world and a deterministic actor in the real world?
(How would your preference to not be wire-headed from current reality X into simulated reality Y change if it turned out that (a) X is already a simulation or (b) Y is a simulation just as complex and information-rich as X?)
This in response to people who say that they don't like the idea of wire-heading because they value making a real/objective difference. Perhaps though the issue is that since wire-heading means simulating hedonistic pleasure directly, the experience may be considered too simplistic and one-dimensional.
My tentative response to these questions is that if resources from a reality X can be used to simulate a better reality Y, then this might be the best use of X.
Suppose there are constraints within X (such as unidirectional flow of causality) making it impossible to make X "perfect" (for example, it might be seen that past evil will always blight the entirety of X no matter how much we might strive to optimize the future of X). Then we might interpret our purpose as creating an ideal Y within X.
Or, to put my argument differently: It is true that Y is spatially restricted compared to X, in that it is a physical subset of X, but any real ideal reality we create in X will at least be temporally restricted, and probably spatially restricted too. Why prefer optimizing X rather than Y?
Of course, if we have the universe at our disposal there's no reasons the better world we build shouldn't be digital. But that would be a digital world that, presumably, you would have influence in building.
With Psychohistorian's hypothetical, I think the main point is that the optimization is being done by some other agent.