I currently think I don’t actually need to explain what I see. What is the advantage of explaing it? Under normal circumstances, it’s useful to explain why I see e.g. the washing machine not working, because that gives me useful predictions about how the washing machine will behave in the future, and knowing that is useful for fulfiling my values.
But if I have a preference like “life only has meaning if I win the lottery”, then I think it’s not action-relevant to find an explanation if I see myself winning. The day before the lottery, I was already only making follow-up plans for what to do if I win—that’s the only case where life has meaning. And it was not part of the plan to do an investigation of why I won the lottery—why would I want to waste my time on that? So when I actually win, I in fact don’t investigate it further.
To be clear, I think that caring a lot about universes where you win the lottery, at the expense of other universes, is a very sillly moral belief. If someone held this belief, I would tell them to meditate a little and play with a toddler and imagine if they would really care less about her if she was living in a universe where they don’t win the lottery. But if they come back saying that they genuinely only care about lottery-winning universes, then I can’t argue with their utility function.
I think having at least 0.1% of my caring allocated to short description-length space-time points is not that crazy of a moral belief. And once I have that, it’s reasonable to have a policy like “if I see an ordered world, I will act as if I was not a Boltzmann-brain, because these ordered situations are important for the 0.1% of my values, but are vanishingly rare and unimportant from the perspective of the 99.9%”.
I now see an ordered world, so in accordance with this policy, I act as if I was not a Boltzmann-brain. Acting as if I was not a Boltzmann-brain includes not looking for mechanistic explanations for why I’m not one, so I don’t do that.
What makes you think the explanation for why you won the lottery won’t help you make useful predictions about what follow-up actions will fulfill your values? For example, if the explanation were something like “the lottery was rigged, and there’s about to be a criminal investigation targeting you”, that seems pretty relevant to your follow-up plans.
Explanations of previously-mysterious phenomena are often useful in ways that are hard to foresee before you know the explanation.
If you think that understanding “normal” things is typically useful, why single out this one specific thing to be incurious about?
I think if I am not a Boltzmann-brain I do still want a mechanistic explanation of why not, even though my general decision-making process is robust to a scenario where non-Boltzmann brains are vanishingly rare.
interesting point of view, somewhar different from my own (perhaps not much, perhaps uncanny valley close?) - having observed myself winning the “lottery” over and over and fucking over again, I have dropped the lottery hypothesis long time ago, it’s not that I don’t care about 99.9% of something, it’s that the “wannabe mathematical thing” simply doesn’t exist, “philosophical possibility” is an incoherent(ish) concept for me, I am incapable to engage with counterlogicals in any productive way and I am deeply fascinated that people seemingly derive spiritual meaning from what appears nerd leg shooting
of course I am curious about mechanical explanations how this “lottery” was rigged / not a lottery at all, what is the principled way for it to not be a lottery (besides the unsatisfactory principle of induction by simple enumeration)
I currently think I don’t actually need to explain what I see. What is the advantage of explaing it? Under normal circumstances, it’s useful to explain why I see e.g. the washing machine not working, because that gives me useful predictions about how the washing machine will behave in the future, and knowing that is useful for fulfiling my values.
But if I have a preference like “life only has meaning if I win the lottery”, then I think it’s not action-relevant to find an explanation if I see myself winning. The day before the lottery, I was already only making follow-up plans for what to do if I win—that’s the only case where life has meaning. And it was not part of the plan to do an investigation of why I won the lottery—why would I want to waste my time on that? So when I actually win, I in fact don’t investigate it further.
To be clear, I think that caring a lot about universes where you win the lottery, at the expense of other universes, is a very sillly moral belief. If someone held this belief, I would tell them to meditate a little and play with a toddler and imagine if they would really care less about her if she was living in a universe where they don’t win the lottery. But if they come back saying that they genuinely only care about lottery-winning universes, then I can’t argue with their utility function.
I think having at least 0.1% of my caring allocated to short description-length space-time points is not that crazy of a moral belief. And once I have that, it’s reasonable to have a policy like “if I see an ordered world, I will act as if I was not a Boltzmann-brain, because these ordered situations are important for the 0.1% of my values, but are vanishingly rare and unimportant from the perspective of the 99.9%”.
I now see an ordered world, so in accordance with this policy, I act as if I was not a Boltzmann-brain. Acting as if I was not a Boltzmann-brain includes not looking for mechanistic explanations for why I’m not one, so I don’t do that.
What makes you think the explanation for why you won the lottery won’t help you make useful predictions about what follow-up actions will fulfill your values? For example, if the explanation were something like “the lottery was rigged, and there’s about to be a criminal investigation targeting you”, that seems pretty relevant to your follow-up plans.
Explanations of previously-mysterious phenomena are often useful in ways that are hard to foresee before you know the explanation.
If you think that understanding “normal” things is typically useful, why single out this one specific thing to be incurious about?
I think if I am not a Boltzmann-brain I do still want a mechanistic explanation of why not, even though my general decision-making process is robust to a scenario where non-Boltzmann brains are vanishingly rare.
interesting point of view, somewhar different from my own (perhaps not much, perhaps uncanny valley close?) - having observed myself winning the “lottery” over and over and fucking over again, I have dropped the lottery hypothesis long time ago, it’s not that I don’t care about 99.9% of something, it’s that the “wannabe mathematical thing” simply doesn’t exist, “philosophical possibility” is an incoherent(ish) concept for me, I am incapable to engage with counterlogicals in any productive way and I am deeply fascinated that people seemingly derive spiritual meaning from what appears nerd leg shooting
of course I am curious about mechanical explanations how this “lottery” was rigged / not a lottery at all, what is the principled way for it to not be a lottery (besides the unsatisfactory principle of induction by simple enumeration)