Contrived infinite-torture scenarios: July 2010

PlaidX

This is our monthly thread for collecting arbitrarily contrived scenarios in which somebody gets tortured for 3^^^^^3 years, or an infinite number of people experience an infinite amount of sorrow, or a baby gets eaten by a shark, etc. and which might be handy to link to in one of our discussions. As everyone knows, this is the most rational and non-obnoxious way to think about incentives and disincentives.

Please post all infinite-torture scenarios separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
No more than 5 infinite-torture scenarios per person per monthly thread, please.

Please post all infinite-torture scenarios separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
No more than 5 infinite-torture scenarios per person per monthly thread, please.

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.

Do we still have a disagreement? If we do, what is it?

1Vladimir_Nesov16y

I don't say that the nature of the match is particularly mysterious, indeed measure might count as an independent component of the physical laws as explanation for the process of evolution (and this might explain Born's rule). But decision-theoretically, it's more rational to look at what your prior actually is, rather than at what the measure in our world actually is, even if the two very closely match. It's the same principle as with other components of evolutionary godshatter, but anticipation is baked in most fundamentally. You don't discard measure at human level, it's a natural concept that captures a lot of structure of our preference, and so something to use as a useful heuristic in decision-making, but once you get to be able to work at the greater level of detail, physical laws or measures over the structures that express them cease to matter.

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Contrived infinite-torture scenarios: July 2010

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