Is there any crucial consideration I’m missing? For instance, are there reasons to think agents/civilizations that care about suffering might – in fact – be selected for and be among the grabbiest?
I think I buy your overall claim in your “Addressing obvious objections” section that there is little chance of agents/civilizations who disvalue suffering (hereafter: non-PUs) winning a colonization race against positive utilitarians (PUs). (At least, not without causing equivalent expected suffering.) However, my next thought is that non-PUs will generally work this out, as you have, and that some fraction of technologically advanced non-PUs—probably mainly those who disvalue suffering the most—might act to change the balance of realized upside- vs. downside-focused values by triggering false vacuum decay (or by doing something else with a similar switching-off-a-light-cone effect).
In this way, it seems possible to me that suffering-focused agents will beat out PUs. (Because there’s nothing a PU agent—or any agent, for that matter—can do to stop a vacuum decay bubble.) This would reverse the post’s conclusion. Suffering-focused agents may in fact be the grabbiest, albeit in a self-sacrificial way.
(It also seems possible to me that suffering-focused agents will mostly act cooperatively, only triggering vacuum decays at a frequency that matches the ratio of upside- vs. downside-focused values in the cosmos, according to their best guess for what the ratio might be.[1] This would neutralize my above paragraph as well as the post’s conclusion.)
My first pass at what this looks like in practice, from the point of view of a technologically advanced, suffering-focused (or perhaps non-PU more broadly) agent/civilization: I consider what fraction of agents/civilizations like me should trigger vacuum decays in order to realize the cosmos-wide values ratio. Then, I use a random number generator to tell me whether I should switch off my light cone.
Additionally, one wrinkle worth acknowledging is that some universes within the inflationarymultiverse, if indeed it exists and allows different physics in different universes, are not metastable. PUs likely cannot be beaten out in these universes, because vacuum decays cannot be triggered. Nonetheless, this can be compensated for through suffering-focused/non-PU agents in metastable universes triggering vacuum decays at a correspondingly higher frequency.
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.
I enjoyed this post, thanks for writing it.
I think I buy your overall claim in your “Addressing obvious objections” section that there is little chance of agents/civilizations who disvalue suffering (hereafter: non-PUs) winning a colonization race against positive utilitarians (PUs). (At least, not without causing equivalent expected suffering.) However, my next thought is that non-PUs will generally work this out, as you have, and that some fraction of technologically advanced non-PUs—probably mainly those who disvalue suffering the most—might act to change the balance of realized upside- vs. downside-focused values by triggering false vacuum decay (or by doing something else with a similar switching-off-a-light-cone effect).
In this way, it seems possible to me that suffering-focused agents will beat out PUs. (Because there’s nothing a PU agent—or any agent, for that matter—can do to stop a vacuum decay bubble.) This would reverse the post’s conclusion. Suffering-focused agents may in fact be the grabbiest, albeit in a self-sacrificial way.
(It also seems possible to me that suffering-focused agents will mostly act cooperatively, only triggering vacuum decays at a frequency that matches the ratio of upside- vs. downside-focused values in the cosmos, according to their best guess for what the ratio might be.[1] This would neutralize my above paragraph as well as the post’s conclusion.)
My first pass at what this looks like in practice, from the point of view of a technologically advanced, suffering-focused (or perhaps non-PU more broadly) agent/civilization: I consider what fraction of agents/civilizations like me should trigger vacuum decays in order to realize the cosmos-wide values ratio. Then, I use a random number generator to tell me whether I should switch off my light cone.
Additionally, one wrinkle worth acknowledging is that some universes within the inflationary multiverse, if indeed it exists and allows different physics in different universes, are not metastable. PUs likely cannot be beaten out in these universes, because vacuum decays cannot be triggered. Nonetheless, this can be compensated for through suffering-focused/non-PU agents in metastable universes triggering vacuum decays at a correspondingly higher frequency.
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.
Yep, I was about to comment on the same thing. Would like to see what OP has to say