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Newcomb, Bostrom, Calvin: Credence and the strange path to a finite afterlife

7 crmflynn 02 November 2015 11:03PM

This is a bit rough, but I think that it is an interesting and potentially compelling idea. To keep this short, and accordingly increase the number of eyes over it, I have only sketched the bare bones of the idea. 

     1)      Empirically, people have varying intuitions and beliefs about causality, particularly in Newcomb-like problems (http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Newcomb's_problemhttp://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irresistible_grace).

     2)      Also, as an empirical matter, some people believe in taking actions after the fact, such as one-boxing, or Calvinist “irresistible grace”, to try to ensure or conform with a seemingly already determined outcome. This might be out of a sense of retrocausality, performance, moral honesty, etc. What matters is that we know that they will act it out, despite it violating common sense causality. There has been some great work on decision theory on LW about trying to thread this needle well.

     3)      The second disjunct of the simulation argument (http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Simulation_argument) shows that the decision making of humanity is evidentially relevant in what our subjective credence should be that we are in a simulation. That is to say, if we are actively headed toward making simulations, we should increase our credence of being in a simulation, if we are actively headed away from making simulations, through either existential risk or law/policy against it, we should decrease our credence.

      4)      Many, if not most, people would like for there to be a pleasant afterlife after death, especially if we could be reunited with loved ones.

     5)      There is no reason to believe that simulations which are otherwise nearly identical copies of our world, could not contain, after the simulated bodily death of the participants, an extremely long-duration, though finite, "heaven"-like afterlife shared by simulation participants.

     6)      Our heading towards creating such simulations, especially if they were capable of nesting simulations, should increase credence that we exist in such a simulation and should perhaps expect a heaven-like afterlife of long, though finite, duration.

     7)      Those who believe in alternative causality, or retrocausality, in Newcomb-like situations should be especially excited about the opportunity to push the world towards surviving, allowing these types of simulations, and creating them, as it would potentially suggest, analogously, that if they work towards creating simulations with heaven-like afterlives, that they might in some sense be “causing” such a heaven to exist for themselves, and even for friends and family who have already died. Such an idea of life-after-death, and especially for being reunited with loved ones, can be extremely compelling.

     8)      I believe that people matching the above description, that is, holding both an intuition in alternative causality, and finding such a heaven-like-afterlife compelling, exist. Further, the existence of such people, and their associated motivation to try to create such simulations, should increase the credence even of two-boxing types, that we already live in such a world with a heaven-like afterlife. This is because knowledge of a motivated minority desiring simulations should increase credence in the likely success of simulations. This is essentially showing that “this probably happened before, one level up” from the two-box perspective.

     9)      As an empirical matter, I also think that there are people who would find the idea of creating simulations with heaven-like afterlives compelling, even if they are not one-boxers, from a simply altruistic perspective, both since it is a nice thing to do for the future sim people, who can, for example, probabilistically have a much better existence than biological children on earth can, and as it is a nice thing to do to increase the credence (and emotional comfort) of both one-boxers and two-boxers in our world thinking that there might be a life after death.

     10)   This creates the opportunity for a secular movement in which people work towards creating these simulations, and use this work and potential success in order to derive comfort and meaning from their life. For example, making donations to a simulation-creating or promoting, or existential threat avoiding, think-tank after a loved one’s death, partially symbolically, partially hopefully.

     11)   There is at least some room for Pascalian considerations even for two-boxers who allow for some humility in their beliefs. Nozick believed one-boxers will become two boxers if Box A is raised to 900,000, and two-boxers will become one-boxers if Box A is lowered to $1. Similarly, trying to work towards these simulations, even if you do not find it altruistically compelling, and even if you think that the odds of alternative or retrocausality is infinitesimally small, might make sense in that the reward could be extremely large, including potentially trillions of lifetimes worth of time spent in an afterlife “heaven” with friends and family.

Finally, this idea might be one worth filling in (I have been, in my private notes for over a year, but am a bit shy to debut that all just yet, even working up the courage to post this was difficult) if only because it is interesting, and could be used as a hook to get more people interested in existential risk, including the AI control problem. This is because existential catastrophe is probably the best enemy of credence in the future of such simulations, and accordingly in our reasonable credence in thinking that we have such a heaven awaiting us after death now. A short hook headline like “avoiding existential risk is key to afterlife” can get a conversation going. I can imagine Salon, etc. taking another swipe at it, and in doing so, creating publicity which would help in finding more similar minded folks to get involved in the work of MIRI, FHI, CEA etc. There are also some really interesting ideas about acausal trade, and game theory between higher and lower worlds, as a form of “compulsion” in which they punish worlds for not creating heaven containing simulations (therefore effecting their credence as observers of the simulation), in order to reach an equilibrium in which simulations with heaven-like afterlives are universal, or nearly universal. More on that later if this is received well.

Also, if anyone would like to join with me in researching, bull sessioning, or writing about this stuff, please feel free to IM me. Also, if anyone has a really good, non-obvious pin with which to pop my balloon, preferably in a gentle way, it would be really appreciated. I am spending a lot of energy and time on this if it is fundamentally flawed in some way.

Thank you.

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November 11 Updates and Edits for Clarification

     1)      There seems to be confusion about what I mean by self-location and credence. A good way to think of this is the Sleeping Beauty Problem (https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sleeping_Beauty_problem)

If I imagine myself as Sleeping Beauty (and who doesn’t?), and I am asked on Sunday what my credence is that the coin will be tails, I will say 1/2. If I am awakened during the experiment without being told which day it is and am asked what my credence is that the coin was tails, I will say 2/3. If I am then told it is Monday, I will update my credence to ½. If I am told it is Tuesday I update my credence to 1. If someone asks me two days after the experiment about my credence of it being tails, if I somehow do not know the days of the week still, I will say ½. Credence changes with where you are, and with what information you have. As we might be in a simulation, we are somewhere in the “experiment days” and information can help orient our credence. As humanity potentially has some say in whether or not we are in a simulation, information about how humans make decisions about these types of things can and should effect our credence.

Imagine Sleeping Beauty is a lesswrong reader. If Sleeping Beauty is unfamiliar with the simulation argument, and someone asks her about her credence of being in a simulation, she probably answers something like 0.0000000001% (all numbers for illustrative purposes only). If someone shows her the simulation argument, she increases to 1%. If she stumbles across this blog entry, she increases her credence to 2%, and adds some credence to the additional hypothesis that it may be a simulation with an afterlife. If she sees that a ton of people get really interested in this idea, and start raising funds to build simulations in the future and to lobby governments both for great AI safeguards and for regulation of future simulations, she raises her credence to 4%. If she lives through the AI superintelligence explosion and simulations are being built, but not yet turned on, her credence increases to 20%. If humanity turns them on, it increases to 50%. If there are trillions of them, she increases her credence to 60%. If 99% of simulations survive their own run-ins with artificial superintelligence and produce their own simulations, she increases her credence to 95%. 

2)  This set of simulations does not need to recreate the current world or any specific people in it. That is a different idea that is not necessary to this argument. As written the argument is premised on the idea of creating fully unique people. The point would be to increase our credence that we are functionally identical in type to the unique individuals in the simulation. This is done by creating ignorance or uncertainty in simulations, so that the majority of people similarly situated, in a world which may or may not be in a simulation, are in fact in a simulation. This should, in our ignorance, increase our credence that we are in a simulation. The point is about how we self-locate, as discussed in the original article by Bostrom. It is a short 12-page read, and if you have not read it yet, I would encourage it:  http://simulation-argument.com/simulation.html. The point about past loved ones I was making was to bring up the possibility that the simulations could be designed to transfer people to a separate after-life simulation where they could be reunited after dying in the first part of the simulation. This was not about trying to create something for us to upload ourselves into, along with attempted replicas of dead loved ones. This staying-in-one simulation through two phases, a short life, and relatively long afterlife, also has the advantage of circumventing the teletransportation paradox as “all of the person" can be moved into the afterlife part of the simulation.  

 

A Series of Increasingly Perverse and Destructive Games

11 nigerweiss 14 February 2013 09:22AM

Related to: Higher Than the Most High

 

The linked post describes a game in which (I fudge a little), Omega comes to you and two other people, and ask you to tell him an integer.  The person who names the largest integer is allowed to leave.  The other two are killed.

This got me thinking about variations on the same concept, and here's what I've come up, taking that game to be GAME0.  The results are sort of a fun time-waster, and bring up some interesting issues.  For your enjoyment...

 

THE GAMES:

GAME1: Omega takes you and two strangers (all competent programmers), and kidnaps and sedates you.  You awake in three rooms with instructions printed on the wall explaining the game, and a computer with an operating system and programming language compiler, but no internet.  Food, water, and toiletries are provided, but no external communication.  The participants are allowed to write programs on the computer in a language that supports arbitrarily large numerical values.  The programs are taken by Omega and run on a hypercomputer in finite time (this hypercomputer can resolve the halting problem and infinite loops, but programs that do not eventually halt return no output).  The person who wrote the program with the largest output is allowed to leave.  The others are instantly and painlessly killed.  In the event of a tie, everyone dies.  If your program returns no output, that is taken to be zero.    

GAME2: Identical to GAME1, except that each program you write has to take two inputs, which will be the text of the other players' programs (assume they're all written in the same language).  The reward for outputting the largest number apply normally.  

GAME3: Identical to Game2, except that while you are sedated, Omega painlessly and imperceptibly uploads you.  Additionally, the instructions on the wall now specify that your program must take four inputs - blackbox functions which represent the uploaded minds of all three players, plus a simulation of the room you're in, indistinguishable from the real thing.  We'll assume that players can't modify or interpret the contents of their opponents' brains.  The room function take an argument of a string (which controls the text printed on the wall, and outputs whatever number the person in the simulation's program returns).

 

In each of these games, which program should you write if you wish to survive?  

 

SOME DISCUSSION OF STRATEGY: 

GAME1: Clearly, the trivial strategy (implement the Ackerman or similar fast-growing functions and generate some large integer), gives no better than random results, because it's the bare minimal strategy anyone will employ, and your ranking in the results, without knowledge of your opponents is entirely up to chance / how long you're willing to sit there typing nines for your Ackermann argument.

A few alternatives for your consideration:

1: if you are aware of an existence hypothesis (say, a number with some property which is not conclusively known to exist and could be any integer), write a program that brute-force tests all integers until it arrives at an integer which matches the requirements, and use this as the argument for your rapidly-growing function.  While it may never return any output, if it does, the output will be an integer, and the expected value goes towards infinity.  

2: Write a program that generates all programs shorter than length n, and finds the one with the largest output.  Then make a separate stab at your own non-meta winning strategy.  Take the length of the program you produce, tetrate it for safety, and use that as your length n.  Return the return value of the winning program.

On the whole, though, this game is simply not all that interesting in a broader sense.  

GAME2: This game has its own amusing quirks (primarily that it could probably actually be played in real life on a non-hypercomputer), however, most of its salient features are also present in GAME3, so I'm going to defer discussion to that.  I'll only say that the obvious strategy (sum the outputs of the other two players' programs and return that) leads to an infinite recursive trawl and never halts if everyone takes it.  This holds true for any simple strategy for adding or multiplying some constant with the outputs of your opponents' programs.    

 

GAME3: This game is by far the most interesting.  For starters, this game permits acausal negotiation between players (by parties simulating and conversing with one another).  Furthermore, anthropic reasoning plays a huge role, since the player is never sure if they're in the real world, one of their own simulations, or one of the simulations of the other players.  

Players can negotiate, barter, or threaten one another, they can attempt to send signals to their simulated selves (to indicate that they are in their own simulation and not somebody else's).  They can make their choices based on coin flips, to render themselves difficult to simulate.  They can attempt to brute-force the signals their simulated opponents are expecting.  They can simulate copies of their opponents who think they're playing any previous version of the game, and are unaware they've been uploaded.  They can simulate copies of their opponents, observe their meta-strategies, and plan around them.  They can totally ignore the inputs from the other players and play just the level one game.  It gets very exciting very quickly.  I'd like to see what strategy you folks would employ.  

 

And, as a final bonus, I present GAME4 :  In game 4, there is no Omega, and no hypercomputer.  You simply take a friend, chloroform them, and put them in a concrete room with the instructions for GAME3 on the wall, and a linux computer not plugged into anything.  You leave them there for a few months working on their program, and watch what happens to their psychology.  You win when they shrink down into a dead-eyed, terminally-paranoid and entirely insane shell of their former selves.  This is the easiest game.  

 

Happy playing!