Strong upvoted. Wrote roughly similar thing, but I think that this position leads to total hedonistic utilitarianism, and that the “retrospective probability of finding oneself as another point” in the block universe of empty individualism could even force a superintelligence to change the utility function to the simplest. I’m interested in your opinion on this matter, since you seem to share some of my premises and you don’t seem to be a total hedonistic utilitarian, so you can probably prove me wrong. I won’t make you read the whole post if you don’t want to, but in short—I think that you cannot strive for complex values, because the “joy of scientific discovery” or something among these lines will not be experienced by you-point and you could find yourself with different values, so it only makes sense to maximize pure pleasure.
Hmm good question. Coordinating with other time slices of your body is a very tough problem if you take empty individualism seriously (imo it is the closest to the truth of the three, but I’m not certain by any means). From the perspective of a given time slice, any experience besides the one they got is not going to be experienced by them, so why would they use their short time to get a spike in pleasure in a future time slice of the body they’re in, rather than a smaller but more stable increase in pleasure for any other time slice, same body or not? If the duration of a time slice is measured in seconds, even walking to the fridge to get a candy bar is essentially “altruism” for future time slices to enjoy it.
In terms of coordination for other goals, you can use current time slices to cultivate mental patterns in themselves that future ones are then more likely to practice such as equanimity, accepting “good-enough” experiences, recognizing that your future slices aren’t so different from others and using that as motivation for altruism, and even making bids with future time slices. If this time slice can’t rely on future ones to enact it’s goals, future ones can’t rely on even further future ones either, vastly limiting what’s possible (if no time slice is willing to get off the couch for the benefit of other slices, that being will stay on the couch until it’s unbearable not to). Check out George Ainslie’s Breakdown of Will for a similar discussion on coordinating between time slices like that https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Pr%C3%A9cis-of-Breakdown-of-Will-Ainslie/79af8cd50b5bd35e90769a23d9a231641400dce6
Other strategies that are way less helpful for aligning ai are more just making use of the fact that we evolved to not feel like time slices, probably because it makes it easier to coordinate between them. So there’s a lot of mental infrastructure already in place for the task
On the fear of different values, I think you need to figure out which values you actually care if future slices hold and make sure they are all well grounded and can be easily re-derived, and the ones that aren’t that important you just need to hold loosely and accept that your future selves might value something else and hope that their new values are well founded. That’s where cultivating mental patterns of strong epistemology comes in, you actually want your values to change for the better, but not for the worse
I’ve added your post to my reading list! So far it’s a pretty reliable way for me to get future time slices to read something :)
Strong upvoted. Wrote roughly similar thing, but I think that this position leads to total hedonistic utilitarianism, and that the “retrospective probability of finding oneself as another point” in the block universe of empty individualism could even force a superintelligence to change the utility function to the simplest. I’m interested in your opinion on this matter, since you seem to share some of my premises and you don’t seem to be a total hedonistic utilitarian, so you can probably prove me wrong. I won’t make you read the whole post if you don’t want to, but in short—I think that you cannot strive for complex values, because the “joy of scientific discovery” or something among these lines will not be experienced by you-point and you could find yourself with different values, so it only makes sense to maximize pure pleasure.
Hmm good question. Coordinating with other time slices of your body is a very tough problem if you take empty individualism seriously (imo it is the closest to the truth of the three, but I’m not certain by any means). From the perspective of a given time slice, any experience besides the one they got is not going to be experienced by them, so why would they use their short time to get a spike in pleasure in a future time slice of the body they’re in, rather than a smaller but more stable increase in pleasure for any other time slice, same body or not? If the duration of a time slice is measured in seconds, even walking to the fridge to get a candy bar is essentially “altruism” for future time slices to enjoy it.
In terms of coordination for other goals, you can use current time slices to cultivate mental patterns in themselves that future ones are then more likely to practice such as equanimity, accepting “good-enough” experiences, recognizing that your future slices aren’t so different from others and using that as motivation for altruism, and even making bids with future time slices. If this time slice can’t rely on future ones to enact it’s goals, future ones can’t rely on even further future ones either, vastly limiting what’s possible (if no time slice is willing to get off the couch for the benefit of other slices, that being will stay on the couch until it’s unbearable not to). Check out George Ainslie’s Breakdown of Will for a similar discussion on coordinating between time slices like that https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Pr%C3%A9cis-of-Breakdown-of-Will-Ainslie/79af8cd50b5bd35e90769a23d9a231641400dce6
Other strategies that are way less helpful for aligning ai are more just making use of the fact that we evolved to not feel like time slices, probably because it makes it easier to coordinate between them. So there’s a lot of mental infrastructure already in place for the task
On the fear of different values, I think you need to figure out which values you actually care if future slices hold and make sure they are all well grounded and can be easily re-derived, and the ones that aren’t that important you just need to hold loosely and accept that your future selves might value something else and hope that their new values are well founded. That’s where cultivating mental patterns of strong epistemology comes in, you actually want your values to change for the better, but not for the worse
I’ve added your post to my reading list! So far it’s a pretty reliable way for me to get future time slices to read something :)