From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Mon Feb 10 2003 - 16:45:04 MST
John K Clark wrote:
> "Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" <sentience@pobox.com> Wrote:
>
> >I once found many-world hypotheses very depressing
>
> I don't really see why. It's true that in a infinite number of universes
> hideous things beyond description happen to you, but it is equally true that
> in a infinite number of universes wonderful things beyond imagining
> happen to you; it seems to me the most logical emotional state regarding
> parallel universes should be neutral.
The problem is when the existence of all possible universes and subjective
experiences interferes with your ability to make choices dependending on
which futures come into existence. But as long as you can define a
measure of relative frequency on those subjective experiences, the
relative frequency of happy subjective experiences relative to unhappy
ones remains strongly dependent on our choices. The probabilities and
goal dynamics seem to stay the same for an egoist-temporalist trying to
control the subjective future probabilities of their own timeline, and an
altruist-Platonist who believes that relative frequencies within a
timeless reality are correlated with the output of the deterministic,
multiply instantiated, Platonic computational processes that we experience
as decisionmaking.
-- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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