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kokotajlod comments on Preferences without Existence - Less Wrong Discussion
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As I understand it, your attempted solution to the Problem of Induction is this:
(a) Deny that there is a fact of the matter about what our future experiences will be like
(b) Care about things in inverse proportion to the Kolmogorov complexity of the structure in which they are embedded.
This is why it all adds up to normality. Without (a), people could say: Go ahead, care about whatever you want, but under your belief system you ought to expect the world to dissolve into high-complexity chaos immediately! And without (b), people could say: Go ahead, deny the existence of a future. But the vast majority of your counterparts affected by your actions inhabit complex, chaotic worlds; one implication of this is that you should live life in the moment.
Is this correct?
That sounds correct.
Okay. I've considered this view for a while now, but I can't bring myself to hold it.
I'm mostly OK with step (a), though I still have niggling doubts.
Step (b) is the problem. My values/utility function just doesn't work like that. I realize that if I choose my values appropriately, I can make the mathematical multiverse add up to normality.
But that's nothing special--give me any wacky set of beliefs about the world, and I can choose values such that it all adds up to normality.
I'm having trouble seeing why people in complicated, anti-inductive worlds are less valuable than people in simple, inductive worlds. Maybe they are less beautiful in some abstract aesthetic sense, but they aren't less valuable in the relevant moral sense--if I can help them, I should, and I ought to feel bad if I don't.
I address this concern here:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/jn2/preferences_without_existence/aj4w
There should be a an alarm bell when he said "majority of your counterparts" and you accepted that.
Regardless, I'm curious because if you truly think all mathematical structures exist shaped and countable in proportion to how many Kolmogorov descriptions account for each, then you should not care about nearly anything and should live in the moment. Since nothing you do will ever change which Kolmogorov descriptions exist or fail to exist., in your deflated conception of existence.
I was interpreting his rejection to b to be replaced by something else in which "majority of your counterparts" makes sense.
I do not agree with this.
The counterfactual in which I thought I was agreeing that you should live in the moment was a scenario in which there was some other distribution in which most worlds are complex. (i.e. uniform over all programs expressible)