“Now an alien reaches into this space, and plucks out one person, and instantiates them. How does this change anything about the moral responsibility that attaches to how this person made their choice, out there in Platonic space… if you see what I’m trying to get at here?”
It depends on the properties of the alien. I don’t consider metaphysical systems or trends to be holistically meaningful, but there is some sense in which they correspond to fundamental recurring psychological tendencies, some additional minor sense in which they can, in principle, if stripped of most of their particulars, serve as proto-scientific templates for later tentative theories some of which may turn out to be true, etc. So in that narrow and abnormal sense we have gnostic paranoia vs creator worship.
You say elsewhere in this sequence that there are no universally persuasive arguments, and your general anxiety is about unaligned AI. So the relevance of knowing an alien instantiated you out of probability space, is that the average human already has deep seated, maybe irrational but still consistent and expected priors about agentic creative forces, that will alter their decision making process if they realize one actually exists and is responsible for their existence.
An actual Christian would not be troubled by the conjunction of “there are no universally persuasive arguments” and “you were created to make a decision”, because Christian belief just is the belief in a benevolent creator, there is no room within that belief system for the set of implications that would be obvious to pretty much precisely the negative space of belief in a benevolent creator.
Your writing is weirdly compartmentalized. You never publicly combine the timeless decision making theory or the big universe cosmology with the AI misalignment paranoia. You never publicly combine even the two ideas mentioned above. I don’t believe that you have never actually combined them privately. My initial instinct is to lecture you about this but since you’ve doubtlessly thought more than exactly one step further into the dark that would be stupid. You have your reasons, but it is very annoying to be on the opaque outside of them.
“Now an alien reaches into this space, and plucks out one person, and instantiates them. How does this change anything about the moral responsibility that attaches to how this person made their choice, out there in Platonic space… if you see what I’m trying to get at here?”
It depends on the properties of the alien. I don’t consider metaphysical systems or trends to be holistically meaningful, but there is some sense in which they correspond to fundamental recurring psychological tendencies, some additional minor sense in which they can, in principle, if stripped of most of their particulars, serve as proto-scientific templates for later tentative theories some of which may turn out to be true, etc. So in that narrow and abnormal sense we have gnostic paranoia vs creator worship.
You say elsewhere in this sequence that there are no universally persuasive arguments, and your general anxiety is about unaligned AI. So the relevance of knowing an alien instantiated you out of probability space, is that the average human already has deep seated, maybe irrational but still consistent and expected priors about agentic creative forces, that will alter their decision making process if they realize one actually exists and is responsible for their existence.
An actual Christian would not be troubled by the conjunction of “there are no universally persuasive arguments” and “you were created to make a decision”, because Christian belief just is the belief in a benevolent creator, there is no room within that belief system for the set of implications that would be obvious to pretty much precisely the negative space of belief in a benevolent creator.
Your writing is weirdly compartmentalized. You never publicly combine the timeless decision making theory or the big universe cosmology with the AI misalignment paranoia. You never publicly combine even the two ideas mentioned above. I don’t believe that you have never actually combined them privately. My initial instinct is to lecture you about this but since you’ve doubtlessly thought more than exactly one step further into the dark that would be stupid. You have your reasons, but it is very annoying to be on the opaque outside of them.