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shminux comments on Caring about possible people in far Worlds - Less Wrong
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Comments (32)
In your existential multiversal angst, have you noticed your confusion?
You keep worrying about untestables and treating progressively more horrible mental constructs as if they were in any sense real. Basically, you behave like a medieval peasant believing every Brothers Grimm-type story anyone tells them. You Pascal-mug yourself by privileging a few scary tales out of an uncountable amount of possible ones.
This line of thinking is the real LW Basilisk, not the tame Roko's type. Posts like that is the worst of the worst of Less Wrong, and I blame Eliezer for pushing his pet untestable, the MWI, which is what started the whole nonsense.
EDIT: apparently I misunderstood the post, the author was not suffering from the many-worlds angst, but rather trying to elucidate that it does not make sense to do so.
Thank you. That is the exact kind of nausea I was expecting to cause. The post works.
Still, it seems that you remain secure about the concepts that I'm doubting play a role under some considerations do play a role.
If you are secure about the role that "existence" plays in moral discussion, please clarify it. One way of doing that is by describing a function where on one axis you have different theories about many-worlds as the ones I described in my previous post, and in the other axis you have what exists given our epistemic evidence if that theory turns out to be correct.
Not sure what you mean here.
I prefer not to use the term "existence" at all, people have an intuitive idea of what it means, but they tend to disagree a lot when trying to formalize it.
I don't find the notion of many worlds useful at all, so your suggested description does not work for me. The closest I come to many worlds is the decision-theoretic "possible worlds", i.e potential outcomes resulting from one's potential actions, over which one either computes some sort of utility function or to which one applies deontological shortcuts. This explicitly excludes all the imaginable worlds you have no influence over, such as the "far worlds" you seem to be preoccupied with.
Fair enough. So basically if my post was trying to immunize readers, you'd be immune already.
I agree that people should refrain from using the word 'existence'. If they are many worlds supporters, I think they still need some work done, that the concept of existence was attempting to do, but I claimed here fails to.
If, like you, they are not many-world supporters, then 'existence' only means causally connected to me. And the word can be avoided without paying any price by saying its equivalent.
I'm confused. From your posts I get an impression that you take "existence of many worlds" seriously, yet from your comments it seems like you don't give this untestable much credence. Which is it?
The latter, which I was clarifying in an edit to the original post as you asked.
I still think it is productive to instrumentally talk of Many Worlds, to see which concepts break.
I see. I'm not sure whether one can tell which concepts break once you subscribe that "anything is possible", which is basically what multiverse many worlds is about.
Can you expand on that? I'm no sort of expert, and I've never been entirely clear why I should care, but that said I've always understood MWI to be about "everything possible is actual," and not "anything is possible."
You are right, MWI is about "everything possible is actual [somewhere]". "Anything is possible" is one of the conclusions of the pseudo-scientific Tegmarkery. (It qualifies as pseudo-science because of its unfalsifiability.)
But let's take the MWI proper and see where it leads us. Take a simple example of radioactive decay. A nucleus has a constant decay rate, and so there is an equal chance of detecting the decay between time t and t+dt for any t. They are all equally possible outcomes. From the MWI postulate it follows that they are all actual outcomes somewhere. (Here I am simplifying the situation somewhat, every possible combination, as well as magnitude and direction of the decay products' momenta corresponds to a separate outcome and hence a separate world.)
This means that there are infinitely many worlds where the Sun (or the Earth) spontaneously exploded due to all its decayable nuclei decaying at the same time. Admittedly, these words, though uncountably infinitely many of them there may be, are probably a set of measure zero among all the possibilities, though, not being a mathematician, I am not at all sure how some uncountable infinities can be smaller than others.
Now, if you allow outcomes like that, it is only a small step to constructing a world with nearly arbitrary properties. You want unlimited power? Find a possible world where atmospheric hydrogen spontaneously fuses in just the right way in just the right place to give you all the energy you need. No laws of physics are violated. You want to shoot laser beams from your eyes? There is a tiny chance of level inversion and stimulated emission at any non-zero temperature. And so on. Almost any techno-babble can be actualized in infinitely many of the Many Worlds, if you construct them carefully enough.
Cool, that's what I thought.
Sure. If anything possible is actual, then highly implausible possible states are actual, including highly implausible possible states I would really really like to be in, but am not. But, again: why should I care? What difference does it make?
Again... really? I'm even less of a Tegmark expert than I am an MWI expert, which is saying something, but my understanding of Tegmark is more "even impossible things are actual."
Another scary campfire story for amateur philosophers? It may be time to make a list.
Huh? This comment feels like a response to something else; is there some context I'm missing? There's nothing scary, and no Pascal's mugging, that I can find here.
No, you are not missing anything (apart from perhaps the last two years of this user's comment history).