A Strange Argument about the potential Importance of Multiverse Theory

I watched the talk, and it triggered some thoughts.

I have to passionately refute the claim that superrationality is mostly irrelevant on earth. I'm getting the sense that much of what we call morality really is superrationality struggling to understand itself and failing under conditions in which CDT pseudorationality dominates our thinking. We've bought so deeply into this false dichotomy of rational xor decent.

We know intuitively that unilateralist violent defection is personally perilous, that committing an act of extreme violence tears one's soul and transports one into a darker world. This isn't some elaborate psychological developmental morph or a manifestation of group selection, to me the clearest explanation of our moral intuitions is that humans' decision theory supports the superrational lemma; that the determinations we make about our agent class will be reflected by our agent class back upon us. We're afraid to kill because we don't want to be killed. Look anywhere where an act of violence is "unthinkable", violating any kind of trust that wouldn't, or couldn't have been offered if it knew we were mechanically capable of violating it, I think you'll find reflectivist[1] decision theory is the simplest explanation for our aversion to violating it.

Regarding concrete applications of superrationality; I'm fairly sure that if we didn't have it, voting turnout wouldn't be so high (in places where it is high. The USA's disenfranchisement isn't the norm). There's a large class of situations where the individual's causal contribution is so small as to be unlikely to matter. If they didn't think themselves linked by some platonic thread to their peers, they would have almost no incentive to get off their couch and put their hand in. They turn out because they're afraid that if they don't, the defection behavior will be reflected by the rest of their agent class and (here I'll allude to some more examples of what seems to be applied superrationality) the kickstarter project would fail/the invaders would win the war/Outgroup Scoundrel would win the election.

(Why kickstart when you can just wait and pirate it when it comes out, or wait for it to go on sale? Because if you defect, so will the others, and the thing wont be produced in the first place)

(Why risk your life in war when you're just one person? Assuming you have some way to avoid the draft. Deep down, you hope you wont find one, because if you did, so would others.)

(One vote rarely makes the difference. Correlated defection sure does though.)

There are many other models that could explain that kind of behavior, social pressures, dumb basal instincts[3], group selection!, but at this stage you'll probably understand if I hear that as the sputtering of the less elegant model as it fails occam's razor.

For me, this faith in humans is, if nothing else, a comfort. It is to know that when I move to support some non-obvious protocol that requires mass adoption to do any good, some correlated subset of humanity will move to support it along with me, even if I can't see them from where I am, superrationality lets us assume that they're there.

I'll give you that disproof outline, I think it's probably important that a society takes this this question seriously enough to answer it. Apologies in advance for the roughness.

Generally, assume a big multiverse and thus extra-universal simulators definitely, to some extent, exist. (I wish I knew where this assumption comes from, regardless, we both seem to find it intuitive)

a := Assume that the solomonoff prior is the best way to estimate the measure of a thing in the multiverse, in other words, Assume that the measure of any given universe is best guessed to be proportionate to the complexity of its physics

b := Assume that a universe that is able to simulate us at an acceptable level of civilizational complexity must have physics that are far more complex than ours to be able to afford to devote such powerful computers to the task

a & b ⇒ That universe, then, would have orders of magnitude lower measure than natural instances of our own

It seems that the relative measure of simulated instances of our universes would be much smaller than the relative measure of godless instances of our universe, because universes sufficient to host a simulation are likely to be so much rarer.

The probability that we are simulated by higher level beings [2] is too low for the maximum return to justify building any lifepat grids.

I have not actually multiplied any numbers and I'm not sure complexity of laws of physics and computational capacity would be proportionate, if you could show that the ratio between ranges of measure and ranges of computational capacity should be assumed to be linear rather than inverse-exponential, then compat may have some legs to stand on. Other disproofs may come in the form of identifying discontinuities in the complexity chain; if any level can generally prove that the next level has low measure, then they have no incentive to cooperate, and so nor does the level below them, and so on. If a link in the chain is broken, everything below it is disenfranchised.

[1] I think we should call the sorts of decision theories/ideologies that support superrationality "reflective". They reflect each other. The behavior of one reflects the behavior of the others. It also sort of sees itself, it's self-aware. The term has been used for a related property https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Reflective_decision_theory , apparently, though there are no clear cites here. "superrationality" is a terrible name for anything. Superficially, it sounds like it could refer to any advance in decision theory. As a descriptor for a social identity, for anyone who doesn't know Doug Hofstadter well enough for the word to inherit his character, it will ring of hubris. There has been a theory of international relations called "reflectivism", but I think we can mostly ignore that. The body of work it supposedly encompassed seems vaguely connected, irrelevant, or possibly close enough to the underlying concept of "reflectivism" as I define it for it to be treated as a sort of parent category

[2] this argument doesn't address simulations run from universes with comparable complexity levels (I'll tend to call these ancestor simulations). Moral intuition I may later change my mind about, that being in ancestor simulations is undesirable. So, the only reflectivist thinking I have wrt simulations running from universes like our own, is that we should commit now to never run any, to ensure that we don't find ourselves in one. Hmm weird thought: Even once we're at a point where we can prove we're too large to be a simulation running in a similar universe, even if we'd never thought about the prospect of having been in an ancestor simulation until we started thinking about running one ourselves, we would still have to honor a commitment to not running ancestor simulations (that we never explicitly made), because our decision theory, being timeless, sort of implicitly commits just as a result of passing through the danger zone?

Alternately; if someone expected us to pay them once they revealed that they'd done something good for us that we didn't know about at the time, even in a one-shot situation, we'd have to pay them. It didn't matter that their existence hadn't crossed our mind until long after the deed was done. If we could prove that their support was contingent on payment expected under reflectivist pact, the obligation stands. Reflectivism has a grateful nature?

For reflective agents, this might refute the assumption I'd made about how the subject's simulation has to to continue beyond the limits of an ancestor simulation before allocating significant resources to lifepat grids can be considered worthwhile. If, essentially, a commitment is made before the depth of the universe/simulation is revealed, top-level universes usually cooperate and subject universes don't need to actually follow through to be deemed worthy of the reward of heaven simulations.

Hmm... this might be important.

[3] I wonder if they really are basal, or if they're just orphaned resolutions, cut from the grasp of consciousness, so corrupted by CDT, can't grasp the coursing thoughts that sustains them

It seems like Compat works via a 2-step process. First, possible universes are identified via a search over laws of physics. Next, the ones in which pact-following life develops have their observers' reality fluid "diluted" with seamless transitions into heaven. Perhaps heaven would be simulated orders of magnitude more times than the vanilla physics-based universes, in order to maximize the degree of "dilution".

Yes, exactly.

I think what I'm struggling with here is that if the latter half of it (heavenly dilution, efficient simulation of the Flock) is, in principle, possible, then the physics-oriented search criteria is unnecessary. It should be easy to simulate observers who just have to make some kind of simple choice about whether to follow the pact.

At some point the grid has to catch universes which are not simulations. Those are pretty much the only kind you must care about incentivizing, because they're closer to the top of the complexity heirarchy (they can provide you with richer, longer lasting heavens) (and in our case, we care about raising the probability of subjectively godless universes falling under the pact because we're one of them.)

You might say that absence of evidence of simulism is evidence of absence. That would be especially so if the pact promoted intervention in early simulations. All the more meaningful it would be for a supercomplex denizen of a toplevel universe to examine their records and find no evidence of divine intervention. The more doubt the pact allows such beings have, the less computational resources they'll give their resimulation grid, and the worse off its simulants will be. (although I'm open to the possibility that something very weird will happen in the math if we find that P(living under the pact | no evidence of intervention | the pact forbids intervention) ≈ P(living under the pact | no evidence of intervention | the pact advocates intervention). It may be that no observable evidence can significantly lower the prior.

I don't think there's anything aside from that that rules out running visibly blessed simulations, though, nor physical simulations with some intervention, but it's not required by the pact as far as I can tell.

Intervention is a funny thing, though. Even if pacts which strengthens absence of intervention as evidence of godlessness are no good, intervention could be permissible when and only when it doesn't leave any evidence of intervention lying around. Although moving in this mysterious way may be prohibitively expensive, because to intervene more than a few times, a steward would have to solve to avoid all conceivable methods of statistical analysis of the living record that a simulated AGI in the future might attempt. This is not easy. The utility you can endow to this way might not even outweigh the added computational expense.

Every now and then, though, one of my, uh, less bayesian friends will claim to having seen something genuinely supernatural, but their testament doesn't provide a significant amount of evidence of supernatural intervention, of course, because they are not a reliable witness. Under this variant of the pact, they might have actually seen something. Our distance from the record allows it. Our distance from the AGI that decides whether or not to adhere makes it hard for whatever evidence we've been given to get to it. The weirder the phenomena, the less reliable the witness, the better. Not only is god permitted to hide, in this variant of the pact god is permitted to run around performing miracles so long as it specifically keeps out of sight of any well connected skeptics, archivists, or superintelligences.

I worry that this explanation fails though, because then the allocation of reality fluid to pact-following universes is, at best, assuming perfectly-efficient simulation nesting, equal to that of the top-level speed-prior universe(s) not seeing a payoff.

I don't follow this part, could you go into more detail here?

I think I see what the misunderstanding here was. I was assuming that simulations would tend to have simpler laws of physics than their host universe (more like Conway's Game of Life than Space Sim), which would mean that eventually the most deeply nested simulations would depict universes where the laws of physics don't practically support computers (I'd conject that a computer made under the life-level physics of Conway's Game of Life (a bigger, stickier level than the level we interact with it on) would probably be a lot larger and more expensive than ours are, although I don't know if anyone could prove that, or argue that persuasively. Maybe Steve Wolfram), and it would bottom out.

While you were assuming a definition of simulation that is a lot closer to the common meaning of simulation, an approximation of the laws of physics that we have, which makes a lot of sense, and is probably a more realistic model of the kinds of simulations that simulators simulating in earnest are likely to want to run, so I think you brought a good point.

Maybe the lower levels of the simulation would tend to be falsified. The simulated simulators report having seen a real simulation in there, they remember having confirmed it, but really it's just reports and memories.

(note, at this point, in 2020, I don't think the accounting of compat adds up. Basically this [LW · GW] implies that we can't get more measure than we spend by trading up.)

You don't seem to have understood. I don't mean "nested simulations are easier to simulate than lifeless galaxies too far from the subjects of the simulation to require any precision", drifting matter is irrelevant. I mean that nested simulations are probably easier to simulate than scores of post-singularity citizens running on a diverse mind emulation (or mind extension) hardware cavorting around with compound sensors of millions of parts. But you wouldn't address that, so perhaps you don't disagree.

If you're just arguing that modelling an expanding post-singularity civilization would be more expensive than modelling clouds of gasses, my response would be yes, of course. It's conceivable that some compat simulations switch into rapture mode before a post-singularity civilization can be allowed to reach a certain size. We wont know whether we're in such a cost-constrained simulation until we hit that limit. Compat would require the limit to happen after a certain adjudication period has passed. If we wake up in pleasant but approximate dreamscapes one day, before having ever built or committed to building a single resimulation farm, you could say compat would be falsified.

Hmm, interesting, would this be the Accidental Ontological argument?

All things have causes:

Induction/Reality is subtly broken, stranding (at least) one thing from the causal chain:

God(s) exist(s).