Boltzmann brains were discussed in many places, not sure what the best link would be.
Sorry, I should have been more precise - I've read about Boltzmann brains, I just didn't realise the connection to UDT.
In the current context this calls for time discount because we don't want the utility function to be dominated by the well being of those guys.
This is the bit I don't understand - if these agents are identical to me, then it follows that I'm probably a Boltzmann brain too, as if I have some knowledge that I am not a Boltzmann brain, this would be a point of difference. In which case, surely I should optimise for the very near future even under old-fashioned causal decision theory. Like you, I wouldn't bite this bullet.
If your utility function involves an infinite time span it would be typically impossible to prove arbitrarily tight bounds on it since logical sentences that contain unbounded quantifiers can be undecidable.
I didn't know that - I've studied formal logic, but not to that depth unfortunately.
I don't understand what you mean by maximizing measure.
I was meaning in the sense of measure theory. I've seen people discussing maximising the measure of a utility function over all future Everett branches, although from my limited understanding of quantum mechanics I'm unsure whether this makes sense.
I don't think it's a promising approach, but if you want to pursue it, you can recast it in terms of finite utility (by assigning new utility "1" when old utility is "infinity" and new utility "0" in other cases).
Yeah, I doubt this would be a good approach either, in that if it does turn out to be impossible to achieve unboundedly large utility I would still want to make the best of a bad situation and maximise the utility achievable by the finite amount of negentropy available. I imagine a better approach would be to add the satisfying function to the time-discounting function, scaled in some suitable manner. This doesn't intuitively strike me as a real utility function, as its adding apples and oranges so to speak, but perhaps useful as a tool?
If I understand you correctly it's the same as destabilizing the vacuum which I mentioned earlier.
Well, I'm approaching the limit of my understanding of physics here, but actually I was talking about alpha-point computation which I think may involve the creation of daughter universes inside black holes.
This is a nice fantasy but unfortunately strongly incompatible with what we know about physics. By "strongly" I mean that it would take a very radical update to make it work.
It does seem incompatible with e.g. the plank time, I just don't know enough to dismiss it with a very high level of confidence, although I'm updating wrt your reply.
Your reply has been very interesting, but I must admit I'm starting to get seriously point out that I'm starting to get out of my depth here, in physics and formal logic.
This is the bit I don't understand - if these agents are identical to me, then it follows that I'm probably a Boltzmann brain too...
In UDT you shouldn't consider yourself to be just one of your clones. There is no probability measure on the set of your clones: you are all of them simultaneously. CDT is difficult to apply to situations with clones, unless you supplement it by some anthropic hypothesis like SIA or SSA. If you use an anthropic hypothesis, Boltzman brains will still get you in trouble. In fact, some cosmologists are trying to find models w/...
Cross-posted from my blog.
Yudkowsky writes:
My own projection goes more like this:
At least one clear difference between my projection and Yudkowsky's is that I expect AI-expert performance on the problem to improve substantially as a greater fraction of elite AI scientists begin to think about the issue in Near mode rather than Far mode.
As a friend of mine suggested recently, current elite awareness of the AGI safety challenge is roughly where elite awareness of the global warming challenge was in the early 80s. Except, I expect elite acknowledgement of the AGI safety challenge to spread more slowly than it did for global warming or nuclear security, because AGI is tougher to forecast in general, and involves trickier philosophical nuances. (Nobody was ever tempted to say, "But as the nuclear chain reaction grows in power, it will necessarily become more moral!")
Still, there is a worryingly non-negligible chance that AGI explodes "out of nowhere." Sometimes important theorems are proved suddenly after decades of failed attempts by other mathematicians, and sometimes a computational procedure is sped up by 20 orders of magnitude with a single breakthrough.