Sentences in this comment asserted with only 95% probability of making sense, read on at own peril.
There’s a mainstream program to derive the Born probabilities from physics and decision theory which David Wallace, especially, has done a lot of work on. If I remember correctly, he distinguishes two viewpoints:
“Subjective Uncertainty”, which says you’re a stage of some 4D space-time worm and you’re indexically uncertain which worm, because many of them have stages that are exactly alike
“Objective Determinism”, which says you’ll continue as all your future continuations and you should just maximize utility over them and see if doing so involves something that, even though it doesn’t express uncertainty, behaves like a probability
Wallace’s opinion is that both SU and OD are correct ways to think. (Given his assumptions, both allow a proof of the Born probabilities, but it’s easier with SU.) That strikes me as being parallel to Eliezer’s claims here. If you think SU is a wrong way to think and OD is a correct way to think, that strikes me as being parallel to everyone else’s claims here.
There’s an argument that SU and OD have different implications, e.g., OD allows you to care about inter-branch diversity and SU doesn’t. If something like OD gives you a way to reductionize “anticipation”, but you still want a different kind of “anticipation” that accords more with your intuitions, then you may be in trouble if their roles ever overlap. It seems to me one has more to do with decision-making and the other has more to do with conscious experience; those are completely different things and it’s important to keep them separate.
Anyway, since we can be reductionist about these 4D worms and we’re already being reductionist about decision theory, it shouldn’t be hard to figure out exactly how they relate.
Sentences in this comment asserted with only 95% probability of making sense, read on at own peril.
There’s a mainstream program to derive the Born probabilities from physics and decision theory which David Wallace, especially, has done a lot of work on. If I remember correctly, he distinguishes two viewpoints:
“Subjective Uncertainty”, which says you’re a stage of some 4D space-time worm and you’re indexically uncertain which worm, because many of them have stages that are exactly alike
“Objective Determinism”, which says you’ll continue as all your future continuations and you should just maximize utility over them and see if doing so involves something that, even though it doesn’t express uncertainty, behaves like a probability
Wallace’s opinion is that both SU and OD are correct ways to think. (Given his assumptions, both allow a proof of the Born probabilities, but it’s easier with SU.) That strikes me as being parallel to Eliezer’s claims here. If you think SU is a wrong way to think and OD is a correct way to think, that strikes me as being parallel to everyone else’s claims here.
There’s an argument that SU and OD have different implications, e.g., OD allows you to care about inter-branch diversity and SU doesn’t. If something like OD gives you a way to reductionize “anticipation”, but you still want a different kind of “anticipation” that accords more with your intuitions, then you may be in trouble if their roles ever overlap. It seems to me one has more to do with decision-making and the other has more to do with conscious experience; those are completely different things and it’s important to keep them separate.
Anyway, since we can be reductionist about these 4D worms and we’re already being reductionist about decision theory, it shouldn’t be hard to figure out exactly how they relate.