What do you mean with “never-entered” (or “entered”) states? Ones Joe doesn’t (does) declare real to live out? If so, the two probably correlate but Joe may be mistaken. A full simulation of our universe running on sufficient hardware would contain qualia, so the infinitely powerful process which gives Joe the knowledge which he uses to decide which universe is best may contain qualia as well, especially if the process is optimised for ability-to-make Joe-certain-of-his-decision rather than Joe’s utility function.
‘he’ in that sentence (‘that isn’t the procedure he chose’) still referred to Joe. Zubon’s description doesn’t justify the claim, it’s a description of the consequence of the claim.
My original objection was that ‘they’ (“I think they would have given up on this branch already.”) have a different procedure than Joe has (“all you have to do is do a brute force search of the space of all possible actions, and then pick the one with the consequences that you like the most.”). Whomever ‘they’ refers to, you’re expecting them to care about human suffering and be more careful than Joe is. Joe is a living counterexample to the notion that anyone with that kind of power would have given up on our branch already, since he explicitly throws caution to the wind and runs a brute force search of all Joe::future universes using infinite processing power, which would produce an endless array of rejection-worthy universes run at arbitrary levels of detail.
Regardless of whether undoing would work, I presume that never-entered states would not have qualia associated with them.
What do you mean with “never-entered” (or “entered”) states? Ones Joe doesn’t (does) declare real to live out? If so, the two probably correlate but Joe may be mistaken. A full simulation of our universe running on sufficient hardware would contain qualia, so the infinitely powerful process which gives Joe the knowledge which he uses to decide which universe is best may contain qualia as well, especially if the process is optimised for ability-to-make Joe-certain-of-his-decision rather than Joe’s utility function.
I meant, Zubon’s description did not justify your claim that ‘that isn’t the procedure he chose’.
‘he’ in that sentence (‘that isn’t the procedure he chose’) still referred to Joe. Zubon’s description doesn’t justify the claim, it’s a description of the consequence of the claim.
My original objection was that ‘they’ (“I think they would have given up on this branch already.”) have a different procedure than Joe has (“all you have to do is do a brute force search of the space of all possible actions, and then pick the one with the consequences that you like the most.”). Whomever ‘they’ refers to, you’re expecting them to care about human suffering and be more careful than Joe is. Joe is a living counterexample to the notion that anyone with that kind of power would have given up on our branch already, since he explicitly throws caution to the wind and runs a brute force search of all Joe::future universes using infinite processing power, which would produce an endless array of rejection-worthy universes run at arbitrary levels of detail.