“This is all correct… except that Azerthoth isn’t smart enough to have invented counter factual trade!”—This answered this problem for me. Your chance of existing, depends on the past depends on how successful your genes were at propagating given the ancestral environment, but since none of your ancestors knew about counterfactual trade, genes to push people towards this behaviour wasn’t selected for. This then leads to the following question: If counterfactual trade becomes sufficiently widely known, as does the possibility of trading with Azathoth, does this logic work in the distant future? I actually don’t think that it does as no agent has a reason to adopt counterfactual trade unless they believe that a significant proportion of the human race used this to reason in the past and that there has been enough time for selection effects to ensure that humans who don’t reason in this way won’t come into existence. However, if generations of humans adopted this belief for mistaken reasons, then later humans might have a reason to accept this argument
“This is all correct… except that Azerthoth isn’t smart enough to have invented counter factual trade!”—This answered this problem for me. Your chance of existing, depends on the past depends on how successful your genes were at propagating given the ancestral environment, but since none of your ancestors knew about counterfactual trade, genes to push people towards this behaviour wasn’t selected for. This then leads to the following question: If counterfactual trade becomes sufficiently widely known, as does the possibility of trading with Azathoth, does this logic work in the distant future? I actually don’t think that it does as no agent has a reason to adopt counterfactual trade unless they believe that a significant proportion of the human race used this to reason in the past and that there has been enough time for selection effects to ensure that humans who don’t reason in this way won’t come into existence. However, if generations of humans adopted this belief for mistaken reasons, then later humans might have a reason to accept this argument