Comment on Preferences without Existence

Sun, 09 Feb 2014 21:58:18 GMT

If I assume Solomonoff induction, then it is in a way reasonable to care less about people running on convoluted physics, because then I would have to assign less "measure" to them. But you rejected this kind of reasoning in your post, and I can't exactly come to grips with the "physics racism" that seem to logically follow from that.

Suppose I wanted to be fair to all, i.e., avoid "physics racism" and care about everyone equally, how would I go about that? It seems that I can only care about dynamical processes, since I can't influence static objects, and to a first approximation dynamical processes are equivalent to computations (i.e., ignoring uncomputable things for now). But how do I care about all computations equally, if there's an infinite number of them? The most obvious answer is to use the uniform distribution: take an appropriate universal Turing machine, and divide my "care" in half between programs (input tapes) that start with 0 and those that start with 1, then divide my "care" in half again based on the second bit, and so on. With some further filling in the details (how does one translate this idea into a formal utility function?), it seems plausible it could "add up to normality" (i.e., be roughly equivalent to the continuous version of Solomonoff Induction).

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