If I then learn about timeless quantum physics and realize there's no such thing as the past anyway, and certainly not pasts that lead to particular futures, I'd settle for a world with a lower entropy, in which a relatively high number of Feynman paths reach here.
Funny you should say that. I, for one, have the terminal value of continued personal existence (a.k.a. being alive). On LW I'm learning that continuity, personhood, and existence might well be illusions. If that is the case, my efforts to find ways to survive amount to extending something that isn't there in the first place
Of course there's the high probability that we're doing the philosophical equivalent of dividing by zero somewhere among our many nested extrapolations.
But let's say consciousness really is an illusion. Maybe the take-home lesson is that our goals all live at a much more superficial level than we are capable of probing. Not that reductionism "robs" us of our values or anything like that... but it may mean that cannot exist an instrumentally rational course of action that is also perfectly epistemically rational. That being less wrong past some threshold will not help us set better goals for ourselves, only get better at pursuing goals we pre-committed to pursuing.
continuity, personhood, and existence might well be illusions. If that is the case, my efforts to find ways to survive amount to extending something that isn't there in the first place
Can you say more about how you get from "X is an illusion" to "X isn't there in the first place"?
To clarify that question a little... suppose I'm thirsty in the desert, and am pursuing an image of water, and I eventually conclude to my disappointment that it is just a mirage.
I'm doing two things here:
Let's say Bob's terminal value is to travel back in time and ride a dinosaur.
It is instrumentally rational for Bob to study physics so he can learn how to build a time machine. As he learns more physics, Bob realizes that his terminal value is not only utterly impossible but meaningless. By definition, someone in Bob's past riding a dinosaur is not a future evolution of the present Bob.
There are a number of ways to create the subjective experience of having gone into the past and ridden a dinosaur. But to Bob, it's not the same because he wanted both the subjective experience and the knowledge that it corresponded to objective fact. Without the latter, he might as well have just watched a movie or played a video game.
So if we took the original, innocent-of-physics Bob and somehow calculated his coherent extrapolated volition, we would end up with a Bob who has given up on time travel. The original Bob would not want to be this Bob.
But, how do we know that _anything_ we value won't similarly dissolve under sufficiently thorough deconstruction? Let's suppose for a minute that all "human values" are dangling units; that everything we want is as possible and makes as much sense as wanting to hear the sound of blue or taste the flavor of a prime number. What is the rational course of action in such a situation?
PS: If your response resembles "keep attempting to XXX anyway", please explain what privileges XXX over any number of other alternatives other than your current preference. Are you using some kind of pre-commitment strategy to a subset of your current goals? Do you now wish you had used the same strategy to precommit to goals you had when you were a toddler?