Yes, I think you are understanding the Boltzmann brain thing correctly. Originally, I planned to write the idea as if each distribution was represented by a person in a moral parliament, and they could bargain, form coalitions, and win and lose bets in influence-coins against each other. But I couldn’t find good thought experiments where the simpler idea of adding up the values in bounded utilities from each distribution fails, so I didn’t need to invoke the parliamentary vision yet.
I somewhat stand behind the “mystical” name: I feel something spooky is going in on those distributions. Significantly affecting those distributions routes through things like “even though the real weighting in the distribution doesn’t have much to do with mathematical simplicity, for some reason being in this wold with seemingly mathematically simple physics is an unusually great place to influence the distribution”. I think the best explanation for that often routes through something mystical, like the existence of gods.
Altogether, I think it’s maybe helpful to think of the “Updates of mathematical and mystical” section as a final step in the journey of trying to answer the question “what’s the probability that God exists?”
In the first post, I needed to discard the simple notion of probabilities for questions like this. But it’s a cop-out to just say “undefined”, I should still try to answer in the spirit of the question. So we get to something like how much influence the possibility of God’s existence has on my actions. I can try to answer that in the UDASSA framing, or in the Preferences without existence style non-realist UDASSA framing, but then that’s cheating, because it presupposes a mathematical prior, and my religious friends would rightfully object that we had no good reason to privilege mathematical weightings. So this third post tries to be my final answer, that even if we don’t pre-suppose a mathematical prior, and we care about start with a broader set of weightings we could possibly care about, we will still update back to a largely materialist world-view and not giving much weight to God after updating on our observations.
So is “caring about about happy experiences” a mystical distribution? But it just doesn’t matter much in practice or something? Or… it’s a subpart of the “caring about simple things” distribution? That’s what I’m confused about. (Also, I added an edit to my original message FYI).
Caring about happy experiences is very normal as part of your utility function, but not as part of your weighting.
I care about summing up the happiness of of all moments, weighted by how simple places in how simple universes they occur in—that’s pretty normal, you can hope that you will get back something like materialist utilitarianism from this.
I care about summing up the happiness of all moments, weighted by the ranking of the happiness itself—that’s some wacky stuff!
The best way I can make sense of putting happiness in my weightings (and not just in my utility function) is saying “I’m Gottfried Leibniz, and I believe we should make things better conditional on the assumption that we already live in the best of all logically possible worlds.” I think that’s what corresponds to saying that you put happiness in your weighting, ie you care more about the happiness of the already happiest places.
But I don’t think that the Leibniz-style weighting by happiness is a priori crazier than weighting by mathematical simplicity. This is where I disagree with Scott Garrabrant’s Preferences without Existence post—he assumes a priori without explanation that the weights need to be based on mathematical simplicity. I don’t love math that much, so I’m a priori considering some other weightings too, and I only get back to a ~materialist worldview by updating on my observations that the laws of physics look simple.
Ah, I see—gotcha. Do you also care about the dramaticness (or beauty, or truth) of all moments in the multiverse weighted by how simple they are? (Since you care about the happiness of all moments weighted by how simple they are, the happiness of all moments weighted by how happy they are, and the happiness of all moments weighted by how dramatic they are—if I am understanding correctly)
(EDIT: e.g. you seem to be endorsing an “all possible combinations” approach here: “I care about bringing more goodness to the worlds where truth is the most knowable, more understanding of truth to the most beautiful worlds, and more beauty to the best of worlds”)
I guess I got a bit carried away with poetic phrasing in that sentence, but I kind of endorse it. I’m not a pure hedonic utilitarian, I value multiple things, and truth and beauty are part of them. I have less uncertainty about the values in my utility function than about the weights though. Like people feeling happiness in the highly weighted moments certainly feels like an important part of what I’m optimizing for, and I feel there are not that many things as important as happiness that I want to put in my utility function. For example, I wouldn’t put dramaticness very high among the values I want to maximize.
On the other hand, I feel that mathematical simplicity is such an arbitrary concept to use as weighting. Why that? I don’t feel I have strong intuitions on which moments are more important than others (given that “every moment is equally important” is not an option in infinite multiverses), so I have a lot of approximately equally endorsed random ideas on what could be a weighting that makes some sense. Mathematical simplicity is one of them, but so is dramaticness and probably thousands of other things.
I think this was the biggest hole in the Preferences without Existence post (which I maybe consider the previous best attempt at metaphysics from my perspective) that it claims it as a principle of moral philosophy that you should care about moments weighted by mathematical simplicity, even though mathematical simplicity feels like a not very natural thing to be so fundamental in my moral philosophy. So here I attempt to explain that I think it’s more natural to start from many possible weightings, and then you can still use your updates from observing the world to get back to primarily concentrating on the mathematical simplicity flavored weightings.
Yes, I think you are understanding the Boltzmann brain thing correctly. Originally, I planned to write the idea as if each distribution was represented by a person in a moral parliament, and they could bargain, form coalitions, and win and lose bets in influence-coins against each other. But I couldn’t find good thought experiments where the simpler idea of adding up the values in bounded utilities from each distribution fails, so I didn’t need to invoke the parliamentary vision yet.
I somewhat stand behind the “mystical” name: I feel something spooky is going in on those distributions. Significantly affecting those distributions routes through things like “even though the real weighting in the distribution doesn’t have much to do with mathematical simplicity, for some reason being in this wold with seemingly mathematically simple physics is an unusually great place to influence the distribution”. I think the best explanation for that often routes through something mystical, like the existence of gods.
Altogether, I think it’s maybe helpful to think of the “Updates of mathematical and mystical” section as a final step in the journey of trying to answer the question “what’s the probability that God exists?”
In the first post, I needed to discard the simple notion of probabilities for questions like this. But it’s a cop-out to just say “undefined”, I should still try to answer in the spirit of the question. So we get to something like how much influence the possibility of God’s existence has on my actions. I can try to answer that in the UDASSA framing, or in the Preferences without existence style non-realist UDASSA framing, but then that’s cheating, because it presupposes a mathematical prior, and my religious friends would rightfully object that we had no good reason to privilege mathematical weightings. So this third post tries to be my final answer, that even if we don’t pre-suppose a mathematical prior, and we care about start with a broader set of weightings we could possibly care about, we will still update back to a largely materialist world-view and not giving much weight to God after updating on our observations.
So is “caring about about happy experiences” a mystical distribution? But it just doesn’t matter much in practice or something? Or… it’s a subpart of the “caring about simple things” distribution? That’s what I’m confused about. (Also, I added an edit to my original message FYI).
Caring about happy experiences is very normal as part of your utility function, but not as part of your weighting.
I care about summing up the happiness of of all moments, weighted by how simple places in how simple universes they occur in—that’s pretty normal, you can hope that you will get back something like materialist utilitarianism from this.
I care about summing up the happiness of all moments, weighted by the ranking of the happiness itself—that’s some wacky stuff!
The best way I can make sense of putting happiness in my weightings (and not just in my utility function) is saying “I’m Gottfried Leibniz, and I believe we should make things better conditional on the assumption that we already live in the best of all logically possible worlds.” I think that’s what corresponds to saying that you put happiness in your weighting, ie you care more about the happiness of the already happiest places.
But I don’t think that the Leibniz-style weighting by happiness is a priori crazier than weighting by mathematical simplicity. This is where I disagree with Scott Garrabrant’s Preferences without Existence post—he assumes a priori without explanation that the weights need to be based on mathematical simplicity. I don’t love math that much, so I’m a priori considering some other weightings too, and I only get back to a ~materialist worldview by updating on my observations that the laws of physics look simple.
Ah, I see—gotcha. Do you also care about the dramaticness (or beauty, or truth) of all moments in the multiverse weighted by how simple they are? (Since you care about the happiness of all moments weighted by how simple they are, the happiness of all moments weighted by how happy they are, and the happiness of all moments weighted by how dramatic they are—if I am understanding correctly)
(EDIT: e.g. you seem to be endorsing an “all possible combinations” approach here: “I care about bringing more goodness to the worlds where truth is the most knowable, more understanding of truth to the most beautiful worlds, and more beauty to the best of worlds”)
I guess I got a bit carried away with poetic phrasing in that sentence, but I kind of endorse it. I’m not a pure hedonic utilitarian, I value multiple things, and truth and beauty are part of them. I have less uncertainty about the values in my utility function than about the weights though. Like people feeling happiness in the highly weighted moments certainly feels like an important part of what I’m optimizing for, and I feel there are not that many things as important as happiness that I want to put in my utility function. For example, I wouldn’t put dramaticness very high among the values I want to maximize.
On the other hand, I feel that mathematical simplicity is such an arbitrary concept to use as weighting. Why that? I don’t feel I have strong intuitions on which moments are more important than others (given that “every moment is equally important” is not an option in infinite multiverses), so I have a lot of approximately equally endorsed random ideas on what could be a weighting that makes some sense. Mathematical simplicity is one of them, but so is dramaticness and probably thousands of other things.
I think this was the biggest hole in the Preferences without Existence post (which I maybe consider the previous best attempt at metaphysics from my perspective) that it claims it as a principle of moral philosophy that you should care about moments weighted by mathematical simplicity, even though mathematical simplicity feels like a not very natural thing to be so fundamental in my moral philosophy. So here I attempt to explain that I think it’s more natural to start from many possible weightings, and then you can still use your updates from observing the world to get back to primarily concentrating on the mathematical simplicity flavored weightings.