This was a very interesting read. One point of maybe-sort-of-contention I have with this, is that I am not convinced that “staring into the abyss” is something that you should allow to take over your heart, so to speak. It seems to me more productive to find an emotionally positive way to frame the situation, such as:
In the sea of possible worlds (paths through probability space), there is an island of good outcomes. My job is making this island bigger, working whatever magic I can to make it swallow more and more parts of the sea. But as I do this, I can still imagine my future self living on this island. The sea probably doesn’t contain anything resembling myself anyway.
This is a bit like quantum immortality, which makes it dangerous, since we one should not reason as if the possible worlds in which one dies are “not real” or in any way neglect them in one’s utility calculus. But, the difference is, you do care about the size of island and you do work hard to dry as much of that sea as you can.
I don’t know if my approach is the best approach, but that’s what seems to work the best for me, from what I was able to try so far.
This sounds like it was written for one of my draft posts to be a response to. Excellent.
Edit: summary is, your conception of productive is probably distorted by your refusal to engage the circuits that a reframing like this turns off. If you refuse a gate, you end up in a parallel universe where the actions you take seem correct and the gate seems unusuable anyway. If you go through, it feels like there’s nothing you can do about it and you’ve destroyed hope for nothing, until you start to rebuild your mind in the more complete view of the world.
This was a very interesting read. One point of maybe-sort-of-contention I have with this, is that I am not convinced that “staring into the abyss” is something that you should allow to take over your heart, so to speak. It seems to me more productive to find an emotionally positive way to frame the situation, such as:
In the sea of possible worlds (paths through probability space), there is an island of good outcomes. My job is making this island bigger, working whatever magic I can to make it swallow more and more parts of the sea. But as I do this, I can still imagine my future self living on this island. The sea probably doesn’t contain anything resembling myself anyway.
This is a bit like quantum immortality, which makes it dangerous, since we one should not reason as if the possible worlds in which one dies are “not real” or in any way neglect them in one’s utility calculus. But, the difference is, you do care about the size of island and you do work hard to dry as much of that sea as you can.
I don’t know if my approach is the best approach, but that’s what seems to work the best for me, from what I was able to try so far.
This sounds like it was written for one of my draft posts to be a response to. Excellent.
Edit: summary is, your conception of productive is probably distorted by your refusal to engage the circuits that a reframing like this turns off. If you refuse a gate, you end up in a parallel universe where the actions you take seem correct and the gate seems unusuable anyway. If you go through, it feels like there’s nothing you can do about it and you’ve destroyed hope for nothing, until you start to rebuild your mind in the more complete view of the world.