Suppose that a digital computer is having a conscious experience. We could then make an exact copy of this conscious experience and run it on a second computer. Does this act have any moral significance? If the experience is a happy one, have we increased the amount of happiness in...
I wrote the below about a year ago as an entry into 3blue1brown's "Summer of Math Exposition" contest. It is supposed to be an introduction to anthropic reasoning, based on the ideas in the book 'Anthropic Bias' by Nick Bostrom, that doesn't assume a strong maths background. It uses the...
This is a really interesting point! If the universe is big enough that any concievable computer program exists somewhere, and all conscious experience can be represented as a classical computer program, then yes, under what I'm calling the "Ignore Copies" view, nothing would matter. Nick Bostrom makes this point in the "Quantity of experience" paper I referenced (I think it's an important reason why he doesn't like the "Ignore Copies" view).
But I don't think MWI on its own necessarily predicts that the universe is this big. In fact, I'm fairly sure that it doesn't (why would it? Edit: Now think Donald is right here and I was wrong) So I think in... (read more)
Thank you!
I have added a list of references, collecting all of the links from the post, and I also added a couple I found helpful but did not end up explicitly referring to in the text.
Suppose that a digital computer is having a conscious experience. We could then make an exact copy of this conscious experience and run it on a second computer. Does this act have any moral significance? If the experience is a happy one, have we increased the amount of happiness in the world? If the experience is a painful one, have we increased the amount of pain?
It is plausible that we should answer "no" to each of the above questions. The argument for this view claims that the question "How many physical copies of a conscious experience are there?" is not well defined, and therefore cannot matter. I will refer to this as... (read 8057 more words →)
That's a nice way of looking at it. It's still not very clear to me why the SIA approach of apportioning among possible observers is something you should want to do. But it definitely feels useful to know that that's one way of interpreting what SIA is saying.
That's a fair point! I have probably undersold the idea here. I've edited the post to add a comment about this.
You raise lots of good objections there. I think most of them are addressed quite well in the book though. You don't need any money, because it seems to be online for free: https://www.stafforini.com/docs/Parfit%20-%20Reasons%20and%20persons.pdf And if you're short of time it's probably only the last chapter you need to read. I really disagree with the suggestion that there's nothing to learn from ethical philosophy books.
For point 1: Yes you can value other things, but even if people's quality of life is only a part of what you value, the mere-addition paradox raises problems for that part of what you value.
For point 2:That's not really an objection to the argument.
For point 3: I... (read more)
Is that definitely right? I need to have an in-depth read of it, which I won't have time for for a few days, but from a skim it sounds like they admit that FNC also leads to the same conclusions as SIA for the presumptuous philosopher, but then they also argue that isn't as problematic as it seems?
Thanks, I'll check it out!
Thanks for the comment! That's definitely an important philosophical problem that I very much glossed over in the concluding section.
It's sort of orthogonal to the main point of the post, but I will briefly say this: 10 years ago I would have agreed with your point of view completely. I believed in the slogan you sometimes hear people say: "we're in favour of making people happy, and neutral about making happy people." But now I don't agree with this. The main thing that changed my mind was reading Reasons+Persons, and in particular the "mere-addition paradox". That's convinced me that if you try to be neutral on making new happy people, then you... (read more)
I agree that skepticism is appropriate, but I don't think just ignoring anthropic reasoning completely is an answer. If we want to make decisions on an issue where anthropics is relevant, then we have to have a way of coming up with probabilistic estimates about these questions somehow. Whatever framework you use to do that, you will be taking some stance on anthropic reasoning. Once you're dealing with an anthropic question, there is no such thing as a non-anthropic framework that you can fall back on instead (I tried to make that clear in the boy-girl example discussed in the post).
The answer could just be extreme pessimism: maybe there just is no... (read more)
I wrote the below about a year ago as an entry into 3blue1brown's "Summer of Math Exposition" contest. It is supposed to be an introduction to anthropic reasoning, based on the ideas in the book 'Anthropic Bias' by Nick Bostrom, that doesn't assume a strong maths background. It uses the well known Boy or Girl Paradox as a toy example to introduce the key ideas. I've not seen this done elsewhere, but I think it's a really nice way to understand the key differences between the competing approaches to anthropic reasoning. Sharing here in case anyone finds it interesting or useful.
The Doomsday Argument
Consider the following claim:
Humans will almost certainly go extinct within... (read 5440 more words →)
That's a very strong argument, thanks! You've changed my mind! I hadn't appreciated how big the multiverse in MWI could be, but that's a good way to think about it.
In terms of what impact this has on my arguments here, I still think it doesn't affect them, except that I now hope that Ignore-Copies and MWI are not both true at the same time. So in that sense I guess it's a good thing that they seem to be in conflict with one another!
The mangled worlds hypothesis is also extremely interesting! I hadn't come across it before, but as derivations of the Born rule go, this reads as the closest thing I've... (read more)