You weren’t created by Prometheus; you were created by Azathoth, The God That is Evolution by Natural Selection. You are the product of an ongoing optimization process that is trying to maximize reproductive fitness. Azathoth wants you to maximize your number of descendants; if you fail to have descendants, Azathoth will try not to have created you. If your intelligence reduces your reproduction rate, Azathoth will try not to grant you intelligence. If the Darwinian-optimal choice conflicts with the moral one, Azathoth wants you to choose evil.
It would seem, then, that any decision theory that demands that you one-box (or that allows you to survive the similar Parfit’s Hitchhiker problem), also demands that you try to maximize your reproductive fitness. In many cases this injunction would be benign: after all, Azathoth created our morality. But in far too many, it is repugnant; there can be no doubt that in many commonplace situations, Azathoth wants you to cheat, or rape, or murder. It seems that in such cases you should balance a decreased chance of having existed against the rest of your utility function. Do not worship Azathoth, unless you consider never having existed to be infinitely bad. But do make sacrifices.
Creating something that you predict will work is a different thing to killing things that don’t work. In the case of a lot of evolutionary reasoning we can more or less get away with equating the two (as well as personifying) because the evolution happened over a large time scale with a relatively stable gradient. The individual generations can kind of be blurred in together. But when considering what we want to do we can’t take this kind of short cut.
Doing the things that you describe as “what Azeroth wants” would, if all else was equal, lead us to expect that it is more likely that people similar to us will exist in the future. But when looking in the other direction we don’t conclude that submitting to Azeroth makes you more likely exist but rather that the people who do exist are less likely to betray Azeroth.
All of this is basically an elaboration of “No, part two is not a Newcomblike decision task”.
Azazoth does not uncreate you for failing to maximize reproductive fitness.
Short explanation: Look around. People who don’t try to maximize reproductive fitness are still getting away with existing.
Long explanation:
Omega is able to pull this stunt because it was able to accurately predict how many boxes you would take before you do so, and chose accordingly. Evolution can’t predict what I do until in fact I do it. And because of that, I get away with whatever I do (or at least don’t get punished by evolution).
Evolution doesn’t operate on the level of individuals, its a statistical process in which genes which lead to a higher proportion of copies of themselves in a population to become more widespread in said population.
So yes, my genes were influenced by this, and I have many built-in mechanisms which happen to make me more likely to have children. But evolution wouldn’t even be able to notice any failure to maximize genetic fitness on my part until I died without having children.
There is a point though, in saying that the future will have less of my genes, and thus fewer people like me in it. But I’d rather have a few kids that I personally raise and teach than many kids spread out where I don’t even see them.
On top of that, I don’t really care about genetic similarity. I think that I’d rather have 16 great-grandchildren who were raised according to values and ideas similar to mine than 100ish who share my genes, but nothing else with me.
Creating something that you predict will work is a different thing to killing things that don’t work. In the case of a lot of evolutionary reasoning we can more or less get away with equating the two (as well as personifying) because the evolution happened over a large time scale with a relatively stable gradient. The individual generations can kind of be blurred in together. But when considering what we want to do we can’t take this kind of short cut.
Doing the things that you describe as “what Azeroth wants” would, if all else was equal, lead us to expect that it is more likely that people similar to us will exist in the future. But when looking in the other direction we don’t conclude that submitting to Azeroth makes you more likely exist but rather that the people who do exist are less likely to betray Azeroth.
All of this is basically an elaboration of “No, part two is not a Newcomblike decision task”.
NB: Azathoth, not Azeroth.
cough
I loved Warcraft III. Apparently it shows.
Entirely agreed with comment I replied to
Azazoth does not uncreate you for failing to maximize reproductive fitness.
Short explanation: Look around. People who don’t try to maximize reproductive fitness are still getting away with existing.
Long explanation: Omega is able to pull this stunt because it was able to accurately predict how many boxes you would take before you do so, and chose accordingly. Evolution can’t predict what I do until in fact I do it. And because of that, I get away with whatever I do (or at least don’t get punished by evolution).
Evolution doesn’t operate on the level of individuals, its a statistical process in which genes which lead to a higher proportion of copies of themselves in a population to become more widespread in said population.
So yes, my genes were influenced by this, and I have many built-in mechanisms which happen to make me more likely to have children. But evolution wouldn’t even be able to notice any failure to maximize genetic fitness on my part until I died without having children.
There is a point though, in saying that the future will have less of my genes, and thus fewer people like me in it. But I’d rather have a few kids that I personally raise and teach than many kids spread out where I don’t even see them.
On top of that, I don’t really care about genetic similarity. I think that I’d rather have 16 great-grandchildren who were raised according to values and ideas similar to mine than 100ish who share my genes, but nothing else with me.