Granted that the Catholic Church hierarchy is not feudalistic. But this suggests the question: during the height of European feudalism, the Catholic Church itself was - what? Rigidly hierarchical even then? Or did it in some way partake of the feudal lack of hierarchy and center?

Permutation City by Greg Egan has a very similar idea at its heart. According to wikipedia Tegmark has cited the novel, so apparently he agrees about the similarity.

Well, this bit seems wrong on Bishop's part:

Bishop responds that mere counterfactual sensitivity can't make a difference to consciousness: surely it's what actually happens to a system that matters, not what would have happened if things had gone differently

This is a false distinction if (as I believe) counterfactual sensitivity is part of what happens. For example, if what happens is that Y causes Z, then part of that is the counterfactual fact that if Y hadn't happened then Z wouldn't have happened. (Maybe this particular example can be nitpicked, but I hope that the fundamental point is made.)

Thus, there must be some sort of "fading qualia" process going on after all, unless either B1 is not conscious to begin with, or B2 is conscious after all.

If counterfactual sensitivity matters - and I think it does - then some sort of fading (I hesitate to call it "fading qualia" specifically - the whole brain is fading, in that its counterfactual sensitivity is gradually going kaput) is going on. And since the self is (by hypothesis) unable to witness what's happening, then this demonstrates how extreme our corrigibility with regard to our own subjective experiences is. Not at all a surprising outcome.

Thanks - I have nothing specifically in reply. Just to be clear about where I'm coming from, while I am not convinced that the future will unfold as you describe, neither am I convinced that it will not. So, I agree with you that popular failure to devote any attention to the scenario is myopic.

You are not facing the situation I'm describing, because it hasn't happened yet. It is a future speculation that would occur in a sufficiently transparent society. As long as you are unaware of most people's odd opinions, you can afford to shun the tiny minority of odd thinkers whose odd thoughts you are aware of, because in doing so you are only isolating yourself socially from that tiny minority, which is no skin off your nose. However, in a sufficiently transparent society you may, hypothetically, discover that 99% of everyone has at least one opinion which (previously) you were ready to shun a person for. In that hypothetical case, if you continue your policy of shunning those people, you will find yourself socially isolated to a degree that a homeless guy living under a bridge might feel sorry for. In that hypothetical situation, then, you may find yourself with no choice but to relax your standards about whether to shun people with odd opinions.

On second thought, in a sense it has happened. I happen to live in that world now, because I happen to think that pretty much everybody has views about as batty is moon-hoax theorists. In reaction to finding myself in this situation, I am not inclined to shun people who espouse moon-hoax-theory-level idiocy, because I would rather have at least one or two friends.

Second, even under the most optimistic "good" equilibrium, this argument applies only to those behaviors and opinions that are actually widespread. Those whose unconventional opinions and preferences are in a small minority, let alone lone-wolf contrarians, will have to censor themselves 24/7 or suffer very bad consequences.

I think it can apply even to minority opinions, because the minority opinions add up. Even if only 1% of the population has a given minority opinion, significantly more than 1% of the population is probably going to have at least one minority opinion about something. If people choose to be super-intolerant of 1% opinions, and if 70% of the population has at least one 1% opinion, then it's not 1% of the population that people will have to be super-intolerant of, but 70% of the population.

Or if 70% seems too extreme a possibility, try 30%. The point is that the sum total of small minorities adds up to a total that is less small, and this total will determine what happens. Take the extreme case: suppose the total adds up to 100%, so that 100% of the population holds at least one extreme-minority opinion. Can a person afford to ostracize close to 100% of the population (consisting of everybody who has at least one extreme-minority opinion that he does not share)? I think not. Therefore he will have to learn to be much more tolerant of extreme-minority opinions.

While that is only the extreme case, and 30% is not 100%, I think the point is made, that the accumulated total of all people who have minority opinions matters, and not merely the total for each minority opinion.

On the whole, I don't think that people are becoming more tolerant of disreputable behaviors and opinions, or that they are likely to become so in the future -- or even that the set of disreputable traits will become significantly smaller, though its composition undoubtedly will change.

It is commonly said that status competition is zero-sum. This seems a more certain invariant than what you just wrote above. If that's the case, then any change in the degree of tolerance will be perfectly matched by a corresponding change in the degree of conformity - and vice versa.

The picture you paint, however, is of the average person becoming more of a pariah, more unemployable, fewer friends, because they are haunted by that one ineradicable disreputable behavior in their past. This picture violates the assumption that status competition is zero-sum - an assumption which I have a stronger confidence in than I do in your claim that we are not going to become "more tolerant". In fact your claim is ambiguous, because there is surely no canonical way to compare different sets of taboo behavior so that the degree of tolerance of different cultures can be compared. It is a similar problem to the problem of adjusting for inflation with price indexes. I have more confidence in our ability to measure, and compare, the fraction of the population relegated to low status (eg unemployability), than I do in our ability to measure, and compare, the magnitudes of the sets of taboos of different societies.

You're assuming that because someone has made mistakes themselves they will judge others less harshly.

Actually, I don't think that's the only or most important factor. People who learn about the skeletons in your closet will compare you, not only to themselves, but to other people. If everyone has skeletons in their closet and everyone knows about them, then your prospective employer Bob (say) will be comparing the skeletons in your closet not only to the skeletons in his own closet, but more importantly to the skeletons in the closets of the other people who are competing with you for the same job.

As for people not making equal mistakes, to put it in simple binary terms merely for the purpose of making the point, divide people into "major offenders" and "minor offenders" and suppose major offenders are all equally major and minor all equally minor. If major offenders outnumber minor offenders, then being a major offender is not such a big deal since you're part of the majority. But if minor offenders outnumber major offenders, then only a minority of people will be major offenders and therefore only a minority will have to worry about a transparent society. So either way, the transparent society is not that big a thing to fear for the average person. It's a self-limiting danger. The more probable it is that the average person will be revealed to have Pervert Type A, the greater the fraction of people who will be revealed to be Pervert Type A, and therefore the harder it will be for other people to ostracize them, since to do so would reduce the size of their own social network.

But "given perfect knowledge of all market prices and individual preferences at every time and place, as well as unlimited computing power", you could predict how people would choose if they were not faced with legal and moving-cost barriers - e.g. imagine a philanthropist willing to pay the moving costs. So your objection to this metric seems to be a surmountable one, in principle, assuming perfect knowledge etc. The main remaining barrier to migration may be sentimental attachment - but given perfect knowledge etc. one could predict how the choices would change without that remaining barrier.

Applying this metric to Europa versus Earth, presumably Europans would choose to stay on Europa and humans would choose to stay on Earth even with legal, moving-cost, and sentimental barriers removed, indeed both would pay a great deal to avoid being moved.

In contrast to Europans versus humans, humans-of-one-epoch are not very different from humans-of-another-epoch.

If some price indexes are "clearly absurd", then they apparently have some value to us - for if they were valueless, then why call any particular one "absurd"? If they yield different results, then so be it - let us simply be open about how the different indexes are defined and what result they yield. The absence of a canonical standard will of course not be useful to people primarily interested in such things as pissing contests between nations, but the results should be useful nonetheless.

We commonly talk about tradeoffs, e.g., "if I do this then I will benefit in one way but lose in another". We can do the same thing with price indexes. "In this respect things have improved but in this other respect things have gotten worse."