The alien will use the same reasoning and conclude that humans are more valuable (in expectation) than aliens. That’s weird.
Granted, it is a bit weird.
At this point they have no evidence about what either human or alien experience is like, so they ought to be indifferent between switching or not. So they could be convinced to switch to benefitting humans for a penny. Then they will go have experiences, and regardless of what they experience, if they then choose to “pin” the EV-calculation to their own experience, the EV of switching to benefitting non-humans will be positive. So they’ll pay 2 pennies to switch back again. So they 100% predictably lost a penny. This is irrational.
I think it is helpful to work this argument out within a Bayesian framework. Doing so will require thinking in some ways that I’m not completely comfortable with (e.g. having a prior over how much pain hurts for humans), but I think formal regimentation reveals aspects of the situation that make the conclusion easier to swallow.
In order to represent yourself as learning how good human experiences are and incorporating that information into your evidence, you will need to assign priors that allow for each possible value human experiences might have. You will also need to have priors for each possible value alien experiences might have. To make your predictable loss argument go through, you will still need to treat alien experiences as either half as good or twice as good with equal probabilities no matter how good human experiences turn out to be. (Otherwise, your predictable loss argument needs to account for what the particular experience you feel tells you about the probabilities that the alien’s experiences are higher or lower, this can give you evidence that contradicts the assumption that the alien’s value is equally likely to be half or twice.) This isn’t straightforwardly easy. If you think that human experience might be either worth N or N/2 and you think alien experience might be either N/2 or N, then learning that human experience is N will tell you that the alien experience is worth N/2.
There are a few ways to set up the priors to get the conclusion that you should favor the alien after learning how good human experience is (no matter how good that is). One way is to assume off the bat that aliens are likely to have a higher probability of higher experiential values. Suppose, to simplify things a bit, you thought that the highest value of experience an human could have is N. (More realistically, the values should trail off with ever lower probabilities, but the basic point I’m making would still go through—alien’s possible experience values couldn’t decline at the same rate as humans without violating the equal probability constraint.) Then, to allow that you could still infer that alien experience is as likely to be twice as good as any value you could discover, the highest value an alien could have would have to be 2*N. It makes sense given these priors that you should give preference to the alien even before learning how good your experiences are: your priors are asymmetric and favor them.
Alternatively, we can make the logic work by assigning a 0 probability to every possible value of human experience (and a 0 to every possible value of alien experience.) This allows that you could discover that human experience had any level of value, and, conditional on however good that was, the alien was likely to have half or twice as good experiences. However, this prior means that in learning what human experience is like, you will learn something to which you previously assigned a probability of 0. Learning propositions to which you assigned a 0 is notoriously problematic and will lead to predictable losses if you try to maximize expected utility for reasons completely separate from the two envelopes problem.
I think switching has to be wrong, for symmetry based reasons.
Let’s imagine you and a friend fly out on a spaceship, and run into an alien spaceship from an another civilisation that seems roughly as advanced as you. You and your buddy have just met the alien and their buddy but haven’t learnt each others languages, when an accident occurs: your buddy and their buddy go flying off in different directions and you collectively can only save one of them. The human is slightly closer and a rescue attempt is slightly more likely to be successful as a result: based solely on hedonic utilitarianism, do you save the alien instead?
We’ll make it even easier and say that our moral worth is strictly proportional to number of neurons in the brain, which is an actual, physical quantity.
I can imagine being an EA-style reasoner, and reasoning as follows: obviously I should anchor that the alien and humans have equal neuron counts, at level N. But obviously there’s a lot of uncertainty here. Let’s approximate a lognormal style system and say theres a 50% chance the alien is also level N, a 25% chance they have N/10 neurons, and a 25% chance they have 10N neurons. So the expected number of neurons in the alien is 0.25*N/10 + 0.5*N + 0.25*(10N) = 3.025N. Therefore, the alien is worth 3 times as much a human in expectation, so we should obviously save it over the human.
Meanwhile, by pure happenstance, the alien is also a hedonic EA-style reasoner with the same assumptions, with neuron count P. They also do the calculation, and reason that the human is worth 3.025P, so we should save the human.
Clearly, this reasoning is wrong. The cases of the alien and human are entirely symmetric: both should realise this and rate each other equally, and just save whoevers closer.
If your reasoning gives the wrong answer when you scale it up to aliens, it’s probably also giving the wrong answer for chickens and elephants.
Clearly, this reasoning is wrong. The cases of the alien and human are entirely symmetric: both should realise this and rate each other equally, and just save whoevers closer.
I don’t think it is clearly wrong. You each have separate introspective evidence and you don’t know what the other’s evidence is, so I don’t think you should take each other as being in the same evidential position (I think this is the gist of Michael St. Jules’ comment). Perhaps you think that if they do have 10N neurons, then the depth and quality of their internal experiences, combined with whatever caused you to assign that possibility a 25% chance, should lead them to assign that hypothesis a higher probability. You need not think that they are responding correctly to their introspective evidence just because they came to a symmetric conclusion. Maybe the fact that they came to a symmetric conclusion is good evidence that you actually have the same neuron count.
Your proposal of treating them equally is also super weird. Suppose that I offer you a bet with a 25% chance of a payout of $0.1, a 50% chance of $1, and a 25% chance of $10. It costs $1. Do you accept? Now I say, I will make the payout (in dollars) dependent on whether humans or aliens have more neurons. Your credences haven’t changed. Do you change your mind about the attractiveness of this monetary bet? What if I raise the costs and payout to amounts of money on the scale of a human life? What if I make the payout be constituted by saving one random alien life and the cost be the amount of money equal to a human life? What if the costs and payouts are alien and human lives? If you want to say that you should think the human and alien life are equally valuable in expectation, despite the ground facts about probabilities of neuron counts and assumed valuation schema, you’re going to have to say something uncomfortable at some point about when your expected values come apart from probabilities of utilities.
This seems to me like an attempt to run away from the premise of the thought experiment. I’m seeing lot’s of “maybes” and “mights” here, but we can just explain them away with more stipulations: You’ve only seen the outside of their ship, you’re both wearing spacesuits that you can’t see into, you’ve done studies and found that neuron count and moral reasoning skills are mostly uncorrelated, and that spacefilight can be done with more or less neurons, etc.
None of these avert the main problem: The reasoning really is symmetrical, so both perspectives should be valid. The EV of saving the alien is 2N, where N is the human number of neurons, and the EV of saving the human from the alien perspective is 2P, where P is the is alien number of neurons. There is no way to declare one perspective the winner over the other, without knowing both N and P. Remember in the original two envelopes problem, you knew both the units, and the numerical value in your own envelope: this was not enough to avert the paradox.
See, the thing that’s confusing me here is that there are many solutions to the two envelope problem, but none of them say “switching actually is good”. They are all about how to explain why the EV reasoning is wrong and switching is actually bad. So in any EV problem which can be reduced to the two envelope problem, you shouldn’t switch. I don’t think this is confined to alien vs human things either: perhaps any situation where you are unsure about a conversion ratio might run into two envelopy problems, but I’ll have to think about it.
See, the thing that’s confusing me here is that there are many solutions to the two envelope problem, but none of them say “switching actually is good”.
What I’ve been suggesting is that when looking inside the envelope, it might subsequently make sense to switch depending upon what you see: when assessing human/alien tradeoffs, it might make sense to prefer helping the aliens depending on what it is like to be human. (It follows that it could have turned out that it didn’t make sense to switch given certain human experiences—I take this to play out in the moral weights context with the assumption that given certain counterfactual qualities of human experience, we might have preferred different schemes relating the behavioral/neurological indicators to the levels of welfare.)
This is not at all a rare view among academic discussions, particularly given the assumption that your prior probabilities should not be equally distributed over an infinite number of possibilities about what each of your experiences will be like (which would be absurd in the human/alien case).
The humans and aliens have (at least slightly) different concepts for the things they’re valuing, each being informed by and partly based on their own direct experiences, which differ. So they can disagree on the basis of caring about different things and having different views.
This is like one being hedonistic utilitarian and the other being preference utilitarian. They’re placing value on different concepts. It’s not problematic for them to disagree.
I agree that having a prior and doing a bayesian update makes the problem go away. But if that’s your approach, you need to have a prior and do a bayesian update — or at least do some informal reasoning about where you think that would lead you. I’ve never seen anyone do this. (E.g. I don’t think this appeared in the top-level post?)
E.g.: Given this approach, I would’ve expected some section that encouraged the reader to reflect on their prior over how (dis)valuable conscious experience could be, and asked them to compare that with their own conscious experience. And if they were positively surprised by their own conscious experience (which they ought to have a 50% chance of being, with a calibrated prior) — then they should treat that as crucial evidence that humans are relatively more important compared to animals. And maybe some reflection on what the author finds when they try this experiment.
I’ve never seen anyone attempt this. My explanation for why is that this doesn’t really make any sense. Similar to Tomasik, I think questions about “how much to value humans vs. animals having various experiences” comes down to questions of values & ethics, and I don’t think that these have common units that it makes sense to have a prior over.
Granted, it is a bit weird.
I think it is helpful to work this argument out within a Bayesian framework. Doing so will require thinking in some ways that I’m not completely comfortable with (e.g. having a prior over how much pain hurts for humans), but I think formal regimentation reveals aspects of the situation that make the conclusion easier to swallow.
In order to represent yourself as learning how good human experiences are and incorporating that information into your evidence, you will need to assign priors that allow for each possible value human experiences might have. You will also need to have priors for each possible value alien experiences might have. To make your predictable loss argument go through, you will still need to treat alien experiences as either half as good or twice as good with equal probabilities no matter how good human experiences turn out to be. (Otherwise, your predictable loss argument needs to account for what the particular experience you feel tells you about the probabilities that the alien’s experiences are higher or lower, this can give you evidence that contradicts the assumption that the alien’s value is equally likely to be half or twice.) This isn’t straightforwardly easy. If you think that human experience might be either worth N or N/2 and you think alien experience might be either N/2 or N, then learning that human experience is N will tell you that the alien experience is worth N/2.
There are a few ways to set up the priors to get the conclusion that you should favor the alien after learning how good human experience is (no matter how good that is). One way is to assume off the bat that aliens are likely to have a higher probability of higher experiential values. Suppose, to simplify things a bit, you thought that the highest value of experience an human could have is N. (More realistically, the values should trail off with ever lower probabilities, but the basic point I’m making would still go through—alien’s possible experience values couldn’t decline at the same rate as humans without violating the equal probability constraint.) Then, to allow that you could still infer that alien experience is as likely to be twice as good as any value you could discover, the highest value an alien could have would have to be 2*N. It makes sense given these priors that you should give preference to the alien even before learning how good your experiences are: your priors are asymmetric and favor them.
Alternatively, we can make the logic work by assigning a 0 probability to every possible value of human experience (and a 0 to every possible value of alien experience.) This allows that you could discover that human experience had any level of value, and, conditional on however good that was, the alien was likely to have half or twice as good experiences. However, this prior means that in learning what human experience is like, you will learn something to which you previously assigned a probability of 0. Learning propositions to which you assigned a 0 is notoriously problematic and will lead to predictable losses if you try to maximize expected utility for reasons completely separate from the two envelopes problem.
I think switching has to be wrong, for symmetry based reasons.
Let’s imagine you and a friend fly out on a spaceship, and run into an alien spaceship from an another civilisation that seems roughly as advanced as you. You and your buddy have just met the alien and their buddy but haven’t learnt each others languages, when an accident occurs: your buddy and their buddy go flying off in different directions and you collectively can only save one of them. The human is slightly closer and a rescue attempt is slightly more likely to be successful as a result: based solely on hedonic utilitarianism, do you save the alien instead?
We’ll make it even easier and say that our moral worth is strictly proportional to number of neurons in the brain, which is an actual, physical quantity.
I can imagine being an EA-style reasoner, and reasoning as follows: obviously I should anchor that the alien and humans have equal neuron counts, at level N. But obviously there’s a lot of uncertainty here. Let’s approximate a lognormal style system and say theres a 50% chance the alien is also level N, a 25% chance they have N/10 neurons, and a 25% chance they have 10N neurons. So the expected number of neurons in the alien is 0.25*N/10 + 0.5*N + 0.25*(10N) = 3.025N. Therefore, the alien is worth 3 times as much a human in expectation, so we should obviously save it over the human.
Meanwhile, by pure happenstance, the alien is also a hedonic EA-style reasoner with the same assumptions, with neuron count P. They also do the calculation, and reason that the human is worth 3.025P, so we should save the human.
Clearly, this reasoning is wrong. The cases of the alien and human are entirely symmetric: both should realise this and rate each other equally, and just save whoevers closer.
If your reasoning gives the wrong answer when you scale it up to aliens, it’s probably also giving the wrong answer for chickens and elephants.
I don’t think it is clearly wrong. You each have separate introspective evidence and you don’t know what the other’s evidence is, so I don’t think you should take each other as being in the same evidential position (I think this is the gist of Michael St. Jules’ comment). Perhaps you think that if they do have 10N neurons, then the depth and quality of their internal experiences, combined with whatever caused you to assign that possibility a 25% chance, should lead them to assign that hypothesis a higher probability. You need not think that they are responding correctly to their introspective evidence just because they came to a symmetric conclusion. Maybe the fact that they came to a symmetric conclusion is good evidence that you actually have the same neuron count.
Your proposal of treating them equally is also super weird. Suppose that I offer you a bet with a 25% chance of a payout of $0.1, a 50% chance of $1, and a 25% chance of $10. It costs $1. Do you accept? Now I say, I will make the payout (in dollars) dependent on whether humans or aliens have more neurons. Your credences haven’t changed. Do you change your mind about the attractiveness of this monetary bet? What if I raise the costs and payout to amounts of money on the scale of a human life? What if I make the payout be constituted by saving one random alien life and the cost be the amount of money equal to a human life? What if the costs and payouts are alien and human lives? If you want to say that you should think the human and alien life are equally valuable in expectation, despite the ground facts about probabilities of neuron counts and assumed valuation schema, you’re going to have to say something uncomfortable at some point about when your expected values come apart from probabilities of utilities.
This seems to me like an attempt to run away from the premise of the thought experiment. I’m seeing lot’s of “maybes” and “mights” here, but we can just explain them away with more stipulations: You’ve only seen the outside of their ship, you’re both wearing spacesuits that you can’t see into, you’ve done studies and found that neuron count and moral reasoning skills are mostly uncorrelated, and that spacefilight can be done with more or less neurons, etc.
None of these avert the main problem: The reasoning really is symmetrical, so both perspectives should be valid. The EV of saving the alien is 2N, where N is the human number of neurons, and the EV of saving the human from the alien perspective is 2P, where P is the is alien number of neurons. There is no way to declare one perspective the winner over the other, without knowing both N and P. Remember in the original two envelopes problem, you knew both the units, and the numerical value in your own envelope: this was not enough to avert the paradox.
See, the thing that’s confusing me here is that there are many solutions to the two envelope problem, but none of them say “switching actually is good”. They are all about how to explain why the EV reasoning is wrong and switching is actually bad. So in any EV problem which can be reduced to the two envelope problem, you shouldn’t switch. I don’t think this is confined to alien vs human things either: perhaps any situation where you are unsure about a conversion ratio might run into two envelopy problems, but I’ll have to think about it.
What I’ve been suggesting is that when looking inside the envelope, it might subsequently make sense to switch depending upon what you see: when assessing human/alien tradeoffs, it might make sense to prefer helping the aliens depending on what it is like to be human. (It follows that it could have turned out that it didn’t make sense to switch given certain human experiences—I take this to play out in the moral weights context with the assumption that given certain counterfactual qualities of human experience, we might have preferred different schemes relating the behavioral/neurological indicators to the levels of welfare.)
This is not at all a rare view among academic discussions, particularly given the assumption that your prior probabilities should not be equally distributed over an infinite number of possibilities about what each of your experiences will be like (which would be absurd in the human/alien case).
The humans and aliens have (at least slightly) different concepts for the things they’re valuing, each being informed by and partly based on their own direct experiences, which differ. So they can disagree on the basis of caring about different things and having different views.
This is like one being hedonistic utilitarian and the other being preference utilitarian. They’re placing value on different concepts. It’s not problematic for them to disagree.
I agree that having a prior and doing a bayesian update makes the problem go away. But if that’s your approach, you need to have a prior and do a bayesian update — or at least do some informal reasoning about where you think that would lead you. I’ve never seen anyone do this. (E.g. I don’t think this appeared in the top-level post?)
E.g.: Given this approach, I would’ve expected some section that encouraged the reader to reflect on their prior over how (dis)valuable conscious experience could be, and asked them to compare that with their own conscious experience. And if they were positively surprised by their own conscious experience (which they ought to have a 50% chance of being, with a calibrated prior) — then they should treat that as crucial evidence that humans are relatively more important compared to animals. And maybe some reflection on what the author finds when they try this experiment.
I’ve never seen anyone attempt this. My explanation for why is that this doesn’t really make any sense. Similar to Tomasik, I think questions about “how much to value humans vs. animals having various experiences” comes down to questions of values & ethics, and I don’t think that these have common units that it makes sense to have a prior over.