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handoflixue comments on Causal Universes - Less Wrong
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I'm... really shocked to hear this from you, so maybe I'm missing something:
Yes, you're destroying Universe A, but also creating Universe B. Given that "B" will not-exist if we don't travel, and "A" will not-exist if we DO travel, it seems morally neutral to make such an exchange - either way there is an equal set of people-who-won't-exist. It's only a bad thing if you have some reason to favor the status-quo of "A exists", or if you're concerned about the consent of the billions of people whose lives you alter (in which case you should be equally concerned about getting their consent before killing evil villains, fixing the environment, or creating FAI, neh?)
Once you're viewing it as an otherwise-equal exchange, it's just a matter of the specifics of those universes. It's generally given in time travel stories that, at least from the protagonist's view, "B" has a higher expected utility than "A", so it would seem that time travel is the right choice.
If we use phrases like "extinguished the world", then people will get bothered, because most people view that as a "bad thing", and then people would choose "A" instead, so it seems like a useful policy (in a world with time travel) to not really draw attention to this.
My morality has a significant "status quo bias" in this sense. I don't feel bad about not bringing into being people who don't currently exist, which is why I'm not on a long-term crusade to increase the population as much as possible. Meanwhile I do feel bad about ending the existence of people who do exist, even if it's quick and painless.
More generally, I care about the process by which we get to some world-state, not just the desirability of the world-state. Even if B is better than A, getting from A to B requires a lot of deaths.
If you could push a button and avert nuclear war, saving billions, would you?
Why does that answer change if the button works via transporting you back in time with the knowledge necessary to avert the war?
Either way, you're choosing between two alternate time lines. I'm failing to grasp how the "cause" of the choice being time travel changes ones valuations of the outcomes.
Of course.
Because if time travel works by destroying universes, it causes many more deaths than it averts. To be explicit about assumptions, if our universe is being simulated on someone's computer I think it's immoral for the simulator to discard the current state of the simulation and restart it from a modified version of a past saved state, because this is tantamount to killing everyone in the current state.
[A qualification: erasing, say, the last 150 years is at least as bad as killing billions of humans, since there's essentially zero chance that the people alive today will still exist in the new timeline. But the badness of reverting and overwriting the last N seconds of the universe probably tends to zero as N tends to zero.]
But the cost of destroying this universe has to be weighed against the benefit of creating the new universe. Choosing not to create a universe is, in utilitarian terms, no more morally justifiable than choosing to destroy one.
That seems to be exactly the principle that is under dispute.
So is the argument that we should give up utilitarianism? (If so, what should replace it?) Or is there some argument someone has in mind for why annihilation has a special disutility of its own, even when it is a necessary precondition for a slight resultant increase in utility (accompanying a mass creation)?
I compute utility as a function of the entire future history of the universe and not just its state at a given time. I don't see why this can't fall under the umbrella of "utilitarianism." Anyway, if your utility function doesn't do this, how do you decide at what time to compute utility? Are you optimizing the expected value of the state of the universe 10 years from now? 10,000? 10^100? Just optimize all of it.
I'm not disputing that we should factor in the lost utility from the future-that-would-have-been. I'm merely pointing out that we have to weigh that lost utility against the gained utility from the future-created-by-retrocausation. Choosing to go back in time means destroying one future, and creating another. But choosing not to go back in time also means, in effect, destroying one future, and creating another. Do you disagree? If we weigh the future just as strongly as the present, why should we not also weigh a different timeline's future just as strongly as our own timeline's future, given that we can pick which timeline will obtain?
The issue for me is not the lost utility of the averted future lives. I just assign high negative utility to death itself, whenever it happens to someone who doesn't want to die, anywhere in the future history of the universe. [To be clear, by "future history of the universe" I mean everything that ever gets simulated by the simulator's computer, if our universe is a simulation.]
That's the negative utility I'm weighing against whatever utility we gain by time traveling. My moral calculus is balancing
[Future in which 1 billion die by nuclear war, plus 10^20 years (say) of human history afterwards] vs. [Future in which 6 billion die by being erased from disk, plus 10^20 years (say) of human history afterwards].
I could be persuaded to favor the second option only if the expected value of the 10^20 years of future human history are significantly better on the right side. But the expected value of that difference would have to outweigh 5 billion deaths.
Yes, I disagree. Have you dedicated your life to having as many children as possible? I haven't, because I feel zero moral obligation toward children who don't exist, and feel zero guilt about "destroying" their nonexistent future.
I agree. That does seem to be a key point in the disagreement.
There doesn't seem to be an obvious way to compute the relevant utility function segments of the participants involved.
OTOH "destroy the universe" is not a maxim one would wish to become universal law. Nor is it virtuous. It's clearly against the rights of those involved. Etc. Utilitiarianism seems to be performing particularly badly here. The more I read about it, the worse it gets.
I probably would, but the choice is very different. I happen to know what did happen, including all the things that didn't happen. By changing that I am abandoning the gauruntee that something at least as good as the status quo occurs. Most critically, I risk things like delaying a nuclear war such that a war occurs a decade later with superior technology and so leads to an extinction outcome.
Why do you think that death is bad? Perhaps that would clarify this conversation. I personally can't think of a reason that death is bad except that it precludes having good experiences in life. Nonexistence does the exact same thing. So I think that they're rationally morally identical.
Of course, if you're using a naturalist based intuitionist approach to morality, then you can recognize that it's illogical that you value existing persons more than potential ones and yet still accept that those existing people really do have greater moral weight, simply because of the way you're built. This is roughly what I believe, and why I don't push very hard for large population increases.
I think perhaps that 'Killing is bad' might be a better phrasing.
I would be more specific, and say that 'killing someone without their consent is always immoral' as well as 'bringing a person capable of consenting into existence without their consent is always immoral'. I haven't figured out how someone who doesn't exist could grant consent, but it's there for completeness.
Of course, if you want to play that time travel is killing people, I'll point out that normal time naturally results in omnicide every plank time, and creation of a new set of people that exist. You're not killing people, but simply selecting a different set of people that will exist next plank time.
That's a hell of a thing to take as axiomatic. Taken one way, it seems to define birth as immoral; taken another, it allows the creation of potentially sapient self-organizing systems with arbitrary properties as long as they start out subsapient, which I doubt is what you're looking for.
Neither of those people are capable of consenting or refusing consent to being brought into being.
The axiom, by the way, is "Interactions between sentient beings should be mutually consensual."
I guess we're looking at interpretation 2, then. The main problem I see with that is that for most sapient systems, it's possible to imagine a subsapient system capable of organizing itself into a similar class of being, and it doesn't seem especially consistent for a set of morals to prohibit creating the former outright and remain silent on the latter.
Imagine for example a sapient missile guidance system. Your moral framework seems to prohibit creating such a thing outright, which I can see reasoning for -- but it doesn't seem to prohibit creating a slightly nerfed version of the same software that predictably becomes sapient once certain criteria are met. If you'd say that's tantamount to creating a sapient being, then fine -- but I don't see any obvious difference in kind between that and creating a human child, aside from predicted use.
What's wrong with creating a sapient missile guidance system? What's the advantage of a sapient guidance system over a mere computer?
Given the existence of a sapient missile, it becomes impermissible to launch that missile without the consent of the missile. Just like it is impermissible to launch a spaceship without the permission of a human pilot...
Consider instead of time traveling from time T' to T, that you were given a choice at time T which of the universes you would prefer: A or B. If B was better you would clearly pick it. Now consider someone gave you the choice instead between B and "B plus A until time T' when it gets destroyed". If A is by itself a better universe than nothing, surely having A around for a short while is better than not having A around at all. So "B plus A until time T' when it gets destroyed" is better than B which in turn is better than A. So if you want your preferences to be transitive you should prefer the scenario where you destroy A at time T' by time traveling to B.
There are two weaknesses in the above: perhaps A is better than oblivion, but A between the times T and T' is really horrible (ie it is better in long term but negative value in short term). Then you wouldn't prefer having A around for a while over not having it at all. But this is a very exceptional scenario, not the world goes on as usual but you go back and change something to the better that we seem to be discussing.
Another way this can fail is if you don't think that saying you have both universes B and A (for a while) around is meaningful. I agree that it is not obvious what this would actually mean, since existence of universes is not something that's measurable inside said universes. You would need to invent some kind of meta-time and meta-universe, kind of like the simulation scenario EY was describing in the main article. But if you are uncomfortable with this you should be equally uncomfortable with saying that A used to exist but now doesn't, since this is also a statement about universes which only makes sense if we posit some kind of meta-time outside of the universes.
Values are not up for grabs. If they turn out to be asymmetrical and inelegant (like, for example, really caring more about people not getting killed than people getting born) then, well, they are asymmetrical and inelegant. Maybe the distinction between not-killing and creating is incoherent but I haven't yet seen an argument trying to demonstrate that without appeals to philosophical parsimony.
If you time travel, "Universe A" doesn't exist. If you don't, then "Universe B" doesn't exist.
They're BOTH universes which fail to exist if you chose the other one. No one dies - there's just a universe that doesn't exist because you didn't choose it.
If you time-travel, Universe A still existed once, and contrary to the preferences of the people there was then extinguished. The preferences of the people in not-yet-existent meta-future Universe B don't matter to me yet, because they may never exist.
Once Universe B is created, and if there was some way to restore Universe A, it'd be then that the preferences of the residents of the two universes (past and present) would weigh equally to my mind, having been equally real.
Universe A still used-to-exist , it just doesn't-exist-in-the-future. Universe B did NOT used-to-exist, and it will continue to not-exist-in-the-future unless you chose it.
In other words, both universes don't-exist-in-the-future if you don't chose them.
I suppose I'm lost on why one would consider "Universe A ceases to exist going forward" with "Universe A is destroyed". It feels like a really weird variant of the sunk cost fallacy, since Universe B failing to exist going forward isn't a big deal.
I can see arguments about time travel being complex, it's hard to predict the results, etc., but all else being equal it seems baffling to insist on A over B just because A happened to exist in the past.