I think I haven’t really thought about this possibility.
I know nothing about how things like false vacuum decay work (thankfully, I guess), about how tractable it is, and about how the minds of the agents would work on trying to trigger that operate. And my immediate impression is that these things matter a lot to whether my responses to the first two “obvious objections” sort of apply here as well and to whether “decay-conducive values” might be competitive.
However, I think we can at least confidently say that—at least in the intra-civ selection context (see my previous post) -- a potential selection effect non-trivially favoring “decay-conducive values”, during the space colonization process, seems much less straightforward and obvious than the selection effect progressively favoring agents that are more and more upside-focused (on long-time scales with many bits of selection). The selection steps are not the same in these two different cases and the potential dynamic that might lead decay-conducive values to take over seems more complex and fragile.
Thanks Will! :)
I think I haven’t really thought about this possibility.
I know nothing about how things like false vacuum decay work (thankfully, I guess), about how tractable it is, and about how the minds of the agents would work on trying to trigger that operate. And my immediate impression is that these things matter a lot to whether my responses to the first two “obvious objections” sort of apply here as well and to whether “decay-conducive values” might be competitive.
However, I think we can at least confidently say that—at least in the intra-civ selection context (see my previous post) -- a potential selection effect non-trivially favoring “decay-conducive values”, during the space colonization process, seems much less straightforward and obvious than the selection effect progressively favoring agents that are more and more upside-focused (on long-time scales with many bits of selection). The selection steps are not the same in these two different cases and the potential dynamic that might lead decay-conducive values to take over seems more complex and fragile.