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I think the condition from the beginning is that you're picking a unique girlfriend who knows all microphysical facts about your universe, including the content of any letters you have or will ever write.

Quantum mechanics forbids that much knowledge. If you take the present state and apply the advanced Green function to it, you don't end up with one distinct letter written. Similarly, if you take a future state where you wrote one particular set of letters and apply the retarded Green function to it, you don't get the present state. So she isn't your girlfriend yet... but she will be once you write or receive your last letter from her.

2Baughn13y

Doesn't that just mean you're picking one who's simulating this universe?

See in context

40 Acausal romance

by lukeprog

25th Feb 2012

1 min read

40

I just realized I haven't previously pointed the metaphysicians on Less Wrong to "Possible Girls," a hilarious paper about acausal romance:

The ability to causally interact with your partner is important to many aspects of happy romantic relationships, but not to all of them. It’s quite pleasant simply to know that your partner loves you and appreciates being loved by you. A loving relationship with a faraway person can enhance one’s self-esteem and turn loneliness into contentment. As a lonely philosopher, I’ve come to wonder: If [all possible worlds exist], can I have a loving relationship with someone from another possible world? ...The answer, I think, is yes.

Even if you don't read the whole thing, don't miss the final paragraph.

Acausal TradeRelationships (Interpersonal)World Modeling

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[-]fiddlemath13y370

That link asks me to "download attachment." In this context, that's a beautiful idea.

[-]cousin_it13y210

At first, I had some major hangups about impossible girls.

Beautiful. The author also has a blog where he posts stuff like this.

[-]DanPeverley13y10

I laughed, solved it, and am printing it off to share with friends and family. Thank you for showing me this.

[-]Emile13y180

The world's greatest lovers were undoubtedly Mellius and Gretelina, whose pure, passionate and soul-searing affair would have scorched the pages of History if they had not, because of some unexplained quirk of fate, been born two hundred years apart on different continents.

-- Terry Pratchett, Mort

[-]HeatDeath13y140

A potentially-existent immortal mind that knows and understands you down to the microphysical level and loves you and appreciates being loved by you?

Except for the stipulation of a feminine gender, that is /exactly/ the mode of relationship Christians advocate developing, and claim to have developed with God.

[-]andrew sauer4y10

I wonder if anyone has tried to argue for the existence of God in a similar way to this article?

[-]Will_Newsome13y120

Acausal marriage is a great way to lower your acausal taxes. Of course, most people don't actually pay their acausal taxes anyway.

[-]pedanterrific13y10

Not to mention, there's no law against acausal same-sex marriage. I guess there might be an acausal law against it, though. It's kinda hard to tell.

[-]lukeprog13y110

Oh yeah, and in case anyone is interested, I interviewed the author about this article and about the Humean theory of motivation, back in December 2010.

[-]Multipartite13y80

()

In practice, this seems to break down at a specific point: this can be outlined, for instance, with the hypothetical stipulation "...and possesses the technology or similar power to cross universe boundaries and appear visible before me in my room, and will do so in exactly ten seconds.".

As with the fallacy of a certain ontological argument, the imagination/definition of something does not make it existential, and even if a certain concept contains no apparent inherent logical impossibilities that still does not mean that there could/would exist a universe in which it could come to pass.

'All possible worlds' does not mean 'All imaginable worlds'. 'All possible people' does not mean 'All imaginable people'. Past a certain threshold of specificity, one goes from {general types of people who exist almost everywhere, universally speaking} to {specific types of people who only exist in the imaginations of people like you who exist almost everwhere, universally speaking}.

(As a general principle, for instance/incidentally, causality still needs to apply.)

Edit:

[-]Anubhav13y00

'All possible worlds' does not mean 'All imaginable worlds'. 'All possible people' does not mean 'All imaginable people'. Past a certain threshold of specificity, one goes from {general types of people who exist almost everywhere, universally speaking} to {specific types of people who only exist in the imaginations of people like you who exist almost everwhere, universally speaking}.

Congratulations, you have discovered that most philosophy isn't worth the paper it's written on.

[-]Luke_A_Somers13y70

I don't like how every time you send or receive a love letter from her you're adding conditions. Under this framework, that means you're changing your girlfriend! I'm not sure what the point of monogamy is if every time you correspond with your mate you switch to a new one.

[-]Steven_Bukal13y40

[-]Luke_A_Somers13y20

[-]Baughn13y20

Doesn't that just mean you're picking one who's simulating this universe?

[-]Nisan13y70

See also Ana Ng, which is about acausal romance within the actual world.

[-]Anubhav13y40

Region-locked youtube videos FTW!

[-]Nisan13y00

Oh, dear. Well, it's the music video to Ana Ng by They Might Be Giants.

[-]Bill_McGrath13y00

A near-perfect pop song.

[-]ShardPhoenix13y70

With the sex ratio around here we might have to take what we can get.

[-]Psychosmurf13y60

Who says we have to restrict our choice of mates to Less Wrong?

[-]mwengler13y60

What a relief to read this post! All along I have thought I was in love with someone imaginary.

[-]TheOtherDave13y40

"I'd be foolish to ignore the possibility that if we'd ever actually met you would have hated me..."
Mystery, Hugh Laurie

Which is to say, sometimes acausal romances have certain perceived advantages.

[-]Anubhav13y40

Possibly related: acausal sex

[-]J_Taylor13y30

Everyone forgets the importance of acausal foreplay and acausal cuddling.

[-]lavalamp13y30

A "girlfriend" having the ability to specify the author's world with "microphysical detail" clearly has a great amount of computational power available to her, and the author ought to expect some minuscule amount of his measure to awaken in said girlfriend's universe, having just been fabricated via their equivalent of nanotechnology...

[-]Paul Crowley13y20

If you have some meaningful way to assign measure to these things then the whole idea falls apart. However that's quite philosophically tricky AFAICT.

[-]lavalamp13y10

If you have some meaningful way to assign measure to these things then the whole idea falls apart.

Sure, but why ruin a perfectly good theory by estimating how much you should anticipate it? :)

[-]Anubhav13y00

The MST3K mantra applies to philosophy to a far greater extent than it applies to works of fiction.

[-]lavalamp13y10

MST3K mantra = "I should relax, it's just a show"?

Tone doesn't translate in comments very well, my comment was intended to be humorous...

[-]mindspillage13y20

This has just beat out Alan Sidelle's "The Answering Machine Paradox" (paywalled, sorry) as my favorite philosophical paper.

[-]lukeprog13y60

Hey look! I "found" a copy that isn't paywalled.

[-]Multipartite13y00

(Absent(?) thought after reading: one can imagine someone, through a brain-scanner or similar, controlling a robot remotely. One can utter, through the robot, "I'm not actually here.", where 'here' is where one is doing the uttering through the robot, and 'I' (specifically 'where I am') is the location of one's brain. The distinction between the claim 'I'm not actually here' and 'I'm not actually where I am' is notable. Ahh, the usefulness of technology. For belated communication, the part about intention is indeed significant, as with whether a diary is written in the present tense (time of writing) or in the past tense ('by the time you read this[ I will have]'...).) enjoyed the approach

[-]andrew sauer4y00

Oh man, I think I came up with something very similar to this whilst being extremely horny and extremely lonely

[-]Alex_Altair13y00

Do we agree that Many Worlds provides a justification for modal realism? It certainly wouldn't imply every "possible" world, just every world dictated by the Schrödinger equation.

[-]endoself13y20

I don't think anyone here is using Many Worlds to justify modal realism. The author of the linked paper doesn't even consider modal realism very likely.

[-]Multiheaded13y00

Hah, that's nothing surprising. I always knew that Asuka and me would always love each other, even should it prove impossible for us to ever meet. (I consider substitutes to be vulgar.) *

*Link is highly NSFW, and that website/tabloid is generally devoted to reinforcing stereotypes about the anime fandom.

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