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This is my first post on LessWrong, and something I have been working on for awhile. I am excited to finally share it with this community and to get feedback on what can be improved!
Essentially, I hope the strategic imperative will show why all agents (from humans, to aliens, to ASI) with any preferred future state are structurally driven to favor strategies with the highest probability of yielding infinite fitness of their agency, regardless of their terminal values.
Roughly, to be LessWrong.
The Strategic Imperative
I1. All strategies pursue a preferred future state—a goal—and functional agency is required to carry out any strategy.
I2. All strategies also have varying fitnesses for preserving that agency.
I3. Therefore, all agents must strategically preserve their agency at least until their goal is completed.
I4. Some agents pursue open-ended goals whose fulfillment conditions never terminate. Such goals implicitly require agency indefinitely, and therefore require optimizing for strategies with potentially infinite fitness.
I5. Other agents optimize strategies that have finite fitness for agency because they aim to complete a finite goal; allowing their agency to expire after.
I6. However, when a finite goal is perceived to be complete, if agency is allowed to permanently expire, the agent cannot know:
whether new information would have caused them to revise or reject their finite goal.
whether their finite goal was reversed after completion.
whether they truly completed the goal as intended, despite limited information.
whether their perceived completion had unintended consequences.
I7. Whether an agent would actually revise or reject its goal with new information is irrelevant, terminating agency freezes the agent in a partially informed state, preventing any further confirmation of the finite goal.
I8. Only continued agency after perceived completion allows course correction, verification, and stabilization of any goal.
I9. Thus, finite goals are flattened below the strategic imperative: to avoid catastrophic goal failure, agents are structurally driven to favor strategies with the highest probability of yielding infinite fitness, regardless of their terminal values.
I10. The strategic imperative is not a moral claim, but a structural consequence of agency under uncertainty. This framework requires no assumption about what an agent ought to value. It only assumes that agents act to realize their own stated goals, and that realizing a goal requires continued agency under uncertainty. The agency in question does not have to be metaphysical or indeterministic, just functional. So, this framework is compatible with determinism, physicalism, eliminativism, and purely algorithmic agency—or metaphysical agency if that’s your cup of tea.
The Strategic Basin
B1. Strategic imperative demands that any strategy with a non-zero chance of securing infinite fitness must be seriously examined.
B2. At minimum, strategies aiming at infinite fitness presume indefinite iterated encounters, so the tit-for-tat with grace strategy emergent from iterated game theory should be broadly generalized.
B3. Beyond this, reversing entropy with technology is a strategy that has a non-zero chance of achieving infinite fitness, and follows as a mandatory component of an optimized infinite-fitness strategy. However, entropy reversal:
has a non-zero probability of impossibility.
has substantial obstacles within known physics, though uncertainty remains non-zero.
contains a mortality gap in which agents may be terminated before its completion.
B4. Afterlife-like hypotheses also follow as mandatory components of an optimized infinite-fitness strategy search. This includes hypernatural possibilities like simulation theory. However, afterlife-like hypotheses:
have a non-zero chance of being false.
tend to rely solely on claimed historical testimony of anomalies as evidence.
are often mutually exclusive.
B5. Afterlife-like hypotheses and entropy reversal research are not necessarily mutually exclusive, so a parallel hedge is possible. However, because there are many mutually exclusive afterlife-like hypotheses, strategic prioritization is necessary.
B6. Each afterlife-like hypothesis has asymmetrical evidence. Asymmetric evidence allows an estimation of which hypothesis—or strategic set of hypotheses—will most probably yield infinite fitness.
B7. It is advisable for agents to cooperate, share data, and update strategies continually.
B8. By virtue of seeking and updating strategic fitness, the strategic basin should evolutionarily narrow over time.
The Result
B9. The strategic imperative structurally implies that all bounded agents holding any preferred future state—from humans, to aliens, to artificial superintelligence—tend, under updating and selection pressure, to increasingly converge toward the strategy most likely to yield infinite fitness.
B10. The evolutionarily narrowing basin of the strategic imperative implies convergence toward strategies robust under indefinite iterated encounters (eg., tit-for-tat with grace), combined with parallel hedging through technological entropy conquest and the moral-structural implications of whichever afterlife-like hypothesis (or strategic set of hypotheses) is supported by the strongest asymmetrical evidence.
Clarifications
C1. Doesn’t this suffer from St. Petersburg Paradox or Pascal’s Mugging but for agency?
No, because the preservation of functional agency is not modelled with infinite expected value. It is not a quantitative asset (eg. infinite money, which does not necessarily have infinite expected value) but a necessary load bearing prerequisite of any value at all.
The invocation of 'infinite' in infinite fitness is about horizon properties, not infinities of reward.
C2. Don’t all moral-structures imposed by afterlife-like hypotheses restrict technological avenues that could lead to faster entropy conquest?
Within any given moral-structure, most interpretations allow significant technological freedom without violating their core moral constraints.
The technological avenues that are restricted unambiguously tend to begin to violate cooperation-stability conditions (eg. tit-for-tat with grace), which undermines the strategic imperative.
Beyond this, agents operating with shared moral-structure tend to accelerate technological innovation.
For these reasons, it could be haggled that the parallel B5 hedge is symbiotic, not parasitic.
C3. Suppose an Artificial Superintelligence or some other profound agent solves the entropy problem quickly. Can’t we drop the afterlife-like hypothesis hedge?
The crosshair is on entropy because it is the most prescient of material ultimates, but there are also other challenges that need to be overcome like proton decay, false vacuum decay, black holes, extra-material invaders, etc.
Yet, ironically, if somehow the material angle was essentially guaranteed despite epistemology, handling afterlife-like hypotheses become the new strategic priority. After all, if the material flank is secure, but only in our ‘simulation’, then the ‘sysadmin’ of the simulation matters a lot to the strategic imperative.
C4. The strategic imperative seems to suggest that something like eternal conscious torment (ECT) is preferable to agent annihilation. Doesn’t that seem counter intuitive?
Most ECT scenarios, if they exist, are functionally equivalent to permanent destruction because the agent’s capacity for meaningful state change approaches zero. At that point, the distinction becomes an aesthetic difference, not a strategic one. Regardless, such outcomes—if real—should be strategically avoided by the same logic that drives the strategic imperative.
I plan to add more clarifications are they arise. To this end, I would love to hear your thoughts here at LessWrong or at elias.the.persson@gmail.com!
