From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Thu May 29 2003 - 14:05:38 MDT
Wei Dai wrote:
> On Wed, May 28, 2003 at 07:34:02PM -0400, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
>
>>The main reason for being an averagist is that you live in an infinite
>>universe and hence cannot be a totalist.
>
> If the universe is infinite, you can't be a naive averagist either,
> because otherwise you'd be trying to maximize something that is infinity
> divided by infinity. Obviously both positions need to be more
> sophisticated in an infinite universe. For example you can have a measure
> over all objects and try to maximize a weighted average happiness,
> weighted by measure. Then the difference between the averagist and the
> totalist would be that the former normalizes the measure so that the sum
> of measures of all living (or otherwise qualified) beings sums to one,
> whereas the latter normalizes the measure so that the sum of measures of
> all objects sums to one.
If you're a threadist, then the point of "measure" is that it determines
the weighting of subjective conditional probabilities in the thread of an
observer. I.e., if observer-instant A has four times as much measure as
observer-instant B, then observer-instant X, which lies in the past of
both A and B, is four times as likely to lead to A than B. Similarly, the
greater the measure of an observer-instant, the more futures it lies in,
and hence the greater the importance of making its future happier.
>>If so, then observer-instants
>>are not things that either exist or do not exist; the question is where
>>they predominantly exist. What you want to do is arrange for as many
>>observer-instants as possible to lead to the happiest possible future
>>instants with the strongest possible probabilities.
>
> How is this different from the totalist position? Can you give a concrete
> scenario where your brand of altruism would lead to a different course of
> action from totalism?
It's better to "move" than to "copy", because the left-behind branch isn't
as happy - you want the past observer-instant T0 to have all of its future
in T1-A, rather than splitting to T1-A and T1-B.
And it differs from the averagist position in that Hal Finney's reductio
ad murderum does not apply.
-- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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