Lumifer comments on Newcomb, Bostrom, Calvin: Credence and the strange path to a finite afterlife - Less Wrong

7 Post author: crmflynn 02 November 2015 11:03PM

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Comment author: Lumifer 09 November 2015 04:17:46PM 0 points [-]

all copies make the same decisions ... all of the copies output the same decisions

All copies might make the same decisions, but the originals make different decisions.

Remember how upthread you talked about copies being relative and imperfect images of the originals? This means that the set of copies and the singleton of originals are different.

Comment author: jacob_cannell 09 November 2015 06:40:11PM *  0 points [-]

As individual variants they may have slight differences (less so for more advanced sims constructed later), but that doesn't matter.

The 'decision' we are talking about here is an abstract high level decision or belief concerning whether one will support the construction of historical sims (financially, politically, etc). The numerous versions of a person might occasionally make different decisions here and there for exactly what word to use or what not, but they will (necessarily by design) agree on major life decisions.

Remember how upthread you talked about copies being relative and imperfect images of the originals?

I never said "imperfect images" - that's your beef.

Comment author: Lumifer 09 November 2015 07:14:40PM 0 points [-]

I never said "imperfect images" - that's your beef.

Let me quote you:

Different levels of success require only getting close enough in mindspace, and is highly relative to one's subjective knowledge of the person.

What matters most is consistency. It's not like the average person remembers everything they said a few years ago, so that 10^10 figure is extremely generous. Our memory is actually fairly poor.

There will be multiple versions of past people - just as we have multiple biographies today. Clearly there is some objective sense in which some versions are more authentic, but this isn't nearly as important as you seem to think - and it is far less important than historical consistency with the rest of the world.

Given all this I can't see how you insist that copies make the same decisions as originals. In fact, in your quote you even have different copies making different decisions ("multiple versions").

Comment author: jacob_cannell 09 November 2015 07:34:28PM *  0 points [-]

The different versions arise from multiverse considerations. The obvious basic route to sim capture is recreating very close copies that experience everything we remember having experienced - a recreation of our exact specific historical timeline/branch.

But even recreating other versions corresponding to other nearby branches in the multiverse could work and is potentially more computationally efficient. The net effect is the same: it raises the probabillity that we exist in a sim created by some other version/branch.

So there are two notions of historical 'accuracy'. The first being accuracy in terms of exact match with a specific timeline, the other being accuracy in terms of matching only samples from the overall multiverse distribution.

Success only requires a high total probability that we are in a sim. It doesn't matter much which specific historical timeline creates the sim.

The idea of decision agreement still applies across different versions in the multiverse. It doesn't require exact agreement with every micro decision, only general agreement on the key decisions involving sim creation.

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