Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 3

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Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 3 — LessWrong

11 Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 3

by OpenThreadGuy

7th Jul 2012

1 min read

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11

From the last thread:

From Costanza's original thread (entire text):

"This is for anyone in the LessWrong community who has made at least some effort to read the sequences and follow along, but is still confused on some point, and is perhaps feeling a bit embarrassed. Here, newbies and not-so-newbies are free to ask very basic but still relevant questions with the understanding that the answers are probably somewhere in the sequences. Similarly, LessWrong tends to presume a rather high threshold for understanding science and technology. Relevant questions in those areas are welcome as well. Anyone who chooses to respond should respectfully guide the questioner to a helpful resource, and questioners should be appropriately grateful. Good faith should be presumed on both sides, unless and until it is shown to be absent. If a questioner is not sure whether a question is relevant, ask it, and also ask if it's relevant."

Meta:

How often should these be made? I think one every three months is the correct frequency.

Costanza made the original thread, but I am OpenThreadGuy. I am therefore not only entitled but required to post this in his stead. But I got his permission anyway.

Meta:

I still haven't figured out a satisfactory answer to the previous meta question, how often these should be made. It was requested that I make a new one, so I did.
I promise I won't quote the entire previous threads from now on. Blockquoting in articles only goes one level deep, anyway.

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[anonymous]14y40

So, in the spirit of stupid (but nagging) questions:

The sequences present a convincing case (to me at least) that MWI is the right view of things, and that it is the best conclusion of our understanding of physics. Yet I don't believe it, because it seems to be in direct conflict with the fact of ethics: if all I can do is push the badness out of my path, and into some other path, then I can't see how doing good things matters. I can't change the fundamental amount of goodness, I can just push it around. Yet it matters that I'm good and not bad.

The 'keep your own path clean' answer is very unsatisfying, just because it doesn't work anywhere else. I can't just keep my own family, neighborhood, city, country, or planet clean. I can't even just decide to keep my own temporal chunk of the universe clean, while ignoring the rest and even at the expense of the rest of it. Why should this principle suddenly work in the case of other worlds? It seems ad hoc.

So my stupid question is this: why aren't MWI and ethics just flatly in conflict?

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Wei Dai13y00

So my stupid question is this: why aren't MWI and ethics just flatly in conflict?

This question used to worry me a lot too, and at one point I also considered the idea that we can't "change the fundamental amount of goodness" but just choose a path through the branching worlds.

The view that's currently prevalent among LWers who study decision theory is that you should think of yourself as being able to change mathematical facts, because decisions are themselves mathematical facts and by making decisions you determine other mathematical facts vi... (read more)

4Oscar_Cunningham14y

You're decisions aren't random! If you decide to do something then the vast majority of other selves you have will decide the same thing. When you do good you do indeed do good in all universes branching from this one. (But what if what I just said wasn't the case? Would you let your sense of ethics override the physical evidence? Look at the causal history of your morality: it comes from evolution. Do you think that if MW was true then evolution would be forced to happen differently, in order to give you different morals?

-3private_messaging14y

The issue is that the MWI does not address the phenomenon of single path being empirically special (your path). The theories as in the code that you would have when you use Solomonoff induction on your sensory input, have to address this phenomenon - they predict (or guess) sensory input not produce something which merely contains sensory input somewhere in the middle of enormous stream of alternatives. [putting aside for the moment that Solomonoff induction with Turing machine would have troubles with rotational and other symmetries] That is true of physics in general - it is by design is concerned with predicting our sensory input NOT 'explaining it away' by producing an enormous body of things within which the input can be found, and this is why MWI, the way it is now, is seen as unsatisfactory, and why having the un-physical collapse of CI is acceptable. The goal is to guess the sensory input the best, and thus choice of path - even if made randomly - has to be part of theory. Furthermore, if one is to seek the shortest 'explanatory' theory which contains you and your input somewhere within it, but doesn't have to include the 'guess where you are' part, the MWI is not the winner, a program that iterates over all theories of physics and simulates them, is - you get other sort of multiverse. edit: On a more general note, one shouldn't be convinced simply because one can't see a simpler alternative. It's very hard to see alternatives in physics. Here is a good article about the issue.

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