in the “Updates on the Mystical and Mathematical” section, is there an implicit reasoning step that your acausal effects on e.g. the most dramatic worlds must be small because you don’t observe your current experience to be in a very dramatic world? Talking about the acausal effects would be my first hypothetical argument for “So the portion of me that cares about the most dramatic worlds needs to fall back to explanations like:”, rather than talking about how this world might be a simulation by a drama-loving deity.
It feels related that I don’t understand this reasoning step: “So if I gave 0.1% weight to myself terminally caring about mathematically simple worlds, then I think for any particular X, I should only give 0.1% weight to the assumption that the best way to influence the worlds with X is somehow mysteriously through getting influence when it looks like the world around me runs on mathematically simple rules.” Why would these two quantities be related?
How do you have acausal effects on the most dramatic possible universe? I usually imagine acausal effects coming in two types:
a) Once we achieve maturity, we try to engage in acausal trade in different universes—I mostly imagine this as us being in a simulation or something like that and serving the values of the simulators in our world to some degree, in return for being released from the simulation and being given resources in the outside world.
b) some of our current actions have correlations with other actions in different universes, and we want to take that into account. I think ECL talks about this, but I haven’t actually read much on ECL.
Point a), acausal trade, just means that there is an entity in the most dramatic possible universe who for some reason takes an interest in what happens with us, and is willing to give us resources in their universe in return for something. Because I imagine this entity as a simulator, I’m often thinking of it as some kind of deity. And I feel that that there is a common factor of “how weird it is to give special value to mathematically simple physics” that determines both how much I care about mathematically simple worlds, and how much I should expect entities in other types of universes to care about mathematically simple worlds. That’s what I mean by both being 0.1% in the example.
(Note that acausally dealing with entities in the most dramatic universes and so on feels pretty different to me than acausallly dealing with entities in e.g. other quantum branches. When trading with other quantum branches, I think we will probably have some kind of common currency of the trade, and the more galaxies we conquer, the more we can trade with. When dealing with entities in the most dramatic universes who for some reason care about us, I feel like all bets are off, what they want and I wouldn’t prioritize conquering the galaxies that much. That’s why I emphasize acquiring personal wisdom and virtue as the most robust strategy for dealing with these entities from very exotic universes.)
Point b) is admittedly different, and maybe I should have emphasized it more. When I think about which decision-process I should use for my current actions such that generalizing that decision-process across weird regions of the multiverse leads to positive results, I feel that “just do what seems best based on causal considerations” seems almost always the right choice. I think maybe the main deviation from the causally optimal strategy is some amount of extra kindness towards beings with different values. But I think this effect is pretty weak in practice.
I already mentioned this Point b) effect in my previous post (see this section) because I think the same Point b) considerations apply when thinking of the correlationary effects of our actions in a normal quantum multiverse or in the more exotic universes I talk about here. But I agree I should have probably emphasised the Point b) considerations more here too, because even if they only suggest a small deviation from the causally optimal strategy in our current actions, they still plausibly overwhelm the also small effect coming from the preferences of super unpredictable entities in Point a).
in the “Updates on the Mystical and Mathematical” section, is there an implicit reasoning step that your acausal effects on e.g. the most dramatic worlds must be small because you don’t observe your current experience to be in a very dramatic world? Talking about the acausal effects would be my first hypothetical argument for “So the portion of me that cares about the most dramatic worlds needs to fall back to explanations like:”, rather than talking about how this world might be a simulation by a drama-loving deity.
It feels related that I don’t understand this reasoning step: “So if I gave 0.1% weight to myself terminally caring about mathematically simple worlds, then I think for any particular X, I should only give 0.1% weight to the assumption that the best way to influence the worlds with X is somehow mysteriously through getting influence when it looks like the world around me runs on mathematically simple rules.” Why would these two quantities be related?
How do you have acausal effects on the most dramatic possible universe? I usually imagine acausal effects coming in two types:
a) Once we achieve maturity, we try to engage in acausal trade in different universes—I mostly imagine this as us being in a simulation or something like that and serving the values of the simulators in our world to some degree, in return for being released from the simulation and being given resources in the outside world.
b) some of our current actions have correlations with other actions in different universes, and we want to take that into account. I think ECL talks about this, but I haven’t actually read much on ECL.
Point a), acausal trade, just means that there is an entity in the most dramatic possible universe who for some reason takes an interest in what happens with us, and is willing to give us resources in their universe in return for something. Because I imagine this entity as a simulator, I’m often thinking of it as some kind of deity. And I feel that that there is a common factor of “how weird it is to give special value to mathematically simple physics” that determines both how much I care about mathematically simple worlds, and how much I should expect entities in other types of universes to care about mathematically simple worlds. That’s what I mean by both being 0.1% in the example.
(Note that acausally dealing with entities in the most dramatic universes and so on feels pretty different to me than acausallly dealing with entities in e.g. other quantum branches. When trading with other quantum branches, I think we will probably have some kind of common currency of the trade, and the more galaxies we conquer, the more we can trade with. When dealing with entities in the most dramatic universes who for some reason care about us, I feel like all bets are off, what they want and I wouldn’t prioritize conquering the galaxies that much. That’s why I emphasize acquiring personal wisdom and virtue as the most robust strategy for dealing with these entities from very exotic universes.)
Point b) is admittedly different, and maybe I should have emphasized it more. When I think about which decision-process I should use for my current actions such that generalizing that decision-process across weird regions of the multiverse leads to positive results, I feel that “just do what seems best based on causal considerations” seems almost always the right choice. I think maybe the main deviation from the causally optimal strategy is some amount of extra kindness towards beings with different values. But I think this effect is pretty weak in practice.
I already mentioned this Point b) effect in my previous post (see this section) because I think the same Point b) considerations apply when thinking of the correlationary effects of our actions in a normal quantum multiverse or in the more exotic universes I talk about here. But I agree I should have probably emphasised the Point b) considerations more here too, because even if they only suggest a small deviation from the causally optimal strategy in our current actions, they still plausibly overwhelm the also small effect coming from the preferences of super unpredictable entities in Point a).