Comment on Contrived infinite-torture scenarios: July 2010

Sun, 25 Jul 2010 16:24:06 GMT

Disagree, but upvoted. Given that there's a canonical measure on configurations (i.e. the one with certain key symmetries, as with the L^2 measure on the Schrödinger equation), it makes mathematical sense to talk about the measure of various successor states to a person's current experience.

It is true that we have an evolved sense of anticipated experience (coupled with our imaginations) that matches this concept, but it's a nonmysterious identity: an agent whose subjective anticipation matches their conditional measure will make more measure-theoretic optimal decisions, and so the vast majority of evolved beings (counting by measure) will have these two match.

It may seem simpler to disregard any measure on the set of configurations, but it really is baked into the structure of the mathematical object.

Discuss