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Viliam_Bur comments on Stupid Questions (10/27/2014) - Less Wrong Discussion
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Hi everyone, I have a question related to the possibility that we live in an infinite universe, and the ethical implications that follow. I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and I've looked over Nick Bostrom's paper on infinite ethics which, if I understand it correctly, suggests that in an infinite universe containing infinite positive value (good) and infinite negative value (evil), it appears to be the case that nothing we do can ever really matter ethically because all we can do is a finite amount of good or evil (which has no impact on an infinite value).
But I have seen discussions of multiverse ethics on Less Wrong where commenters are seemingly talking as if they are able to act in an ethically meaningful way in an infinite cosmos, talking about something referred to as their "measure", and of increasing their measure. I'm afraid I do not understand at all what they are talking about.
Can someone please explain in layman's terms what this sort of talk is all about (sometimes the discourse at Less Wrong is over my head, so as simply and clearly as possible please!). What is "your measure" and how can it be that it matters if the amount of positive value and negative value in the universe is infinite? Sorry if I am misunderstanding something basic and this question is stupid. Thanks!
If the universe is infinite, then there are infinitely many copies of me, following the same algorithm, so my decisions create infinite amounts of good or evil (through my copies which decide the same way).
Or, to see it from another angle, if the universe is literally infinite, then it is more or less infinitely repetitive. So let's take a part of universe containing a copy of approximately everything, and treat this part as a finite universe, which is just replicated infinitely many times.
Your "measure" is the proportion of your copies to the infinite universe.
Does this follow? The set of computable functions is infinite, but has no duplicate elements.
The measure of simple computable functions is probably larger than the measure of complex computable functions and I probably belong to the simpler end of computable functions.
Ok, I think that helps a bit. But if there are infinite copies, how can you talk of proportions? It's not like anything you do decreases or increases the number of copies, right?