Baysian conundrum

I find that I often get hung up on background assumptions that go into human capital creation in these hypothetical copy-of-a-person scenarios.

One model here is that I should anticipate with near certainty having a few random thoughts, then ending up in Hawaii for a while and then ceasing to exist(!), and neither forming new memories nor reminiscing about previous events. In other words I should anticipate imminent metaphysically imposed death right after an ironically pleasant and existential-fear-tinged vacation.

The reason is that CPU will still cost something and presumably the version of me that has to pay for those cycles will not want to have 1000 dependents (or worse still 1000 people with legitimate claims to 1/1001th of my upload self's wealth) that drain her CPU budget.

Another model is that I should "anticipate remembering" being cold for a while, then running a bunch of close-ended sims whose internal contents mattered almost not at all to the rest of the world. Then I'd shut them down, feel the oath to be fulfilled, and wonder what the point was exactly. Then for the next 1000 subjective years I would get to reminisce about how naive I was about how resource constraints, subjective experiences, and memories of subjective experiences interrelate.

Those scenarios paper over a lot of details. Are the sims deterministic with identical seeds? I think then my answer is a roughly 50/50 expectation, with 999 of the sims being a total waste of joules.

Are the sims going to be integrated with my future self's memory somehow? That seems like it would be a big deal to my "real self" and involve making her dumber (mentally averaged with either 1 or 1000 people like me who lacks many of her recent and coolest memories).

And so on.

The key theme here is that "human capital" is normally assumed to be "a thing". These thought experiments break the assumption and this matters. Souls (rooted in bodies or in the future just in the cloud) are more or less cultivated. Creating new souls has historically been very costly and involved economic consequences. The game has real stakes, and the consequences of things like brain surgery resonate for a long time afterwards. If something doesn't have "consequential resonance" then it is in a sort of "pocket universe" that can be safely discounted from the perspective of the causal domains, like ours, which are much vaster but also relatively tightly constrained.

Possibly the scariest upload/sim scenario is that the available clock cycles are functionally infinite, and you can spawn a trillion new selves every subjective second, for centuries, and it's all just a drop in the bucket. None of the souls matter. All of them are essentially expendable. They re-merge and have various diff-resolution-problems but it doesn't matter because there are a trillion trillion backups that are mostly not broken and its not like you can't just press the "human virtue" button to be randomly overwritten with a procedurally generated high quality soul. Whenever you meet someone else they have their own unique 1-in-10^50-sort-of-brokeness and it doesn't even seem weird because that's how nearly everyone is. This is the "human capital is no longer a thing" scenario, and I think (but am not absolutely sure) that it would be a dystopian outcome.

This is similar to Eliezer's algorithm for winning the lottery and many other scenarios that have been discussed on LW. I don't know the answer.

First, I wouldn't call it a solution, since the original "you" will not get transported, and the em-you will suffer 1000 times unnecessarily. Second, consider reading the various anthropic arguments, such as SSA, SIA, Sleeping beauty and such, if you are so inclined.

Two fluid model of anthropics. The two different fluids are "probability" and "anthropic measure." Probabilities come from your information, and thus you can manipulate your probability by manipulating your information (e.g. by knowing you'll make more copies of yourself on the beach). Anthropic measure (magic reality fluid) measures what the reality is - it's like how an outside observer would see things. Anthropic measure is more properly possessed by states of the universe than by individual instances of you.

Thus a paradox. Even though you can make yourself expect (probability) to see a beach soon, it doesn't change the fact that you actually still have to sit through the cold (anthropic measure). Promising to copy yourself later doesn't actually change how much magic reality fluid the you sitting there in the cold has, so it doesn't "really" do anything.

I've actually been trying to actually invoke something like this, at some point after the singularity I plan to go into a simulation that starts out with my life pre-singularity, then awesome/impossible adventures start. There's kludges involved in getting it to seem like it has any hope of working, because my expected reason for why future-me will want to do this is that adventures are more fun if you think they're real (I'd prefer this to simple wireheading, and probably also to reality) and that makes the fact that I'm planning this now evidence against it. I don't have much input to make on the actual question, just declaring my interest in it.

What's the probability that you'd be in a tropical paradise in one minute?

Depends on whether you consider the simulated people "you" or not. Also depends on whether "in one minute" is by our world clock, or clocks in future time, by our world clocks, saying one minute from now.

This is actually isomorphic to the absent-minded driver problem. If you precommit to going straight, there is a 50/50 chance of being at either one of the two indistinguishable points on the road. If you precommit to turning left, there is a nearly 100% chance of being at the first point on the road (Since you wouldn't continue on to the second road point with that strategy.) It seems like probability can be determined only after a strategy has been locked into place.

I'm really having a lot of trouble understanding why the answer isn't just:

1000/1001 chance I'm about to be transported to a tropical island 0 chance given I didn't make the oath.

Assuming that uploaded you memory blocks his own uploading when running simulations.

We have no idea how consciousness work, how probabilities can be assigned on expectation of being a given person, or the expectation of experiencing something. "If there are a million ants for every living human being, why am I a person instead of an ant?" may be a meaningful question, or then again it may not.

But to answer your question, my expectation is that for the probability of 'tropical paradise in one minute' to exceed 50% the calculation of your simulated selves combined will need to take up a physical volume that exceeds the volume taken up by your current brain (or the portion of your current brain devoted to your consciousness).

Hmm. Let's consider this from the perspective of you, having just entered the simulation and considering keeping your oath. (This doesn't directly focus on the probabilities in your question, but I did find the subsequent thoughts fascinating enough to upvote your original question for inspiration)

You currently distinctly remember 1440 minutes of cold suck.

Based on your Oath, you're going to do do 1000 simulations. Each of these will have only 1 minute of cold suck, and 1439 minutes of identical tropical beach paradise.

There's probably going to need to be some strategic memory blocking, in between each session, of course. If you were to do spend this time only for novel super fun, you would have 1,440,000 minutes of novel super fun. Instead, you'll have 1,000 identical minutes of cold suck, and 1000 copies of 1,439 minutes of tropical fun. (if you make the tropical fun different each time, you might be able to reconstruct it to 1,439,000 minutes of novel super tropical fun)

Note: this will not provide any benefit to you, at this point. It would provide benefit to past you, but you're past that you.

Although, conveniently, you are in a simulation, so you can just probabilistically steal fun from the future, again. Sure, the minute where you're considering keeping or breaking your oath sucks, but you can set up 1000 simulations where you come by and say "Congratulations! You don't have to follow that oath after all. I already did it for you."

Of course, doing that means you are having 1000 more minutes of suck (where you are worried about the cost of keeping your oath) added to the future, in addition to the previous 1000 minutes of suck, where you are worried about the cold prior to upload, in addition to the 1440 minutes of cold suck you actually experienced.

If you were to continue doing this repeatedly that would add up to a large number of added minutes of suck. (How many minutes of suck would you add to your simulation if it ran forever?)

Or... you could just edit your memory to think "Yep, I fulfilled that Silly Oath." or just decide 'Actually, I guess I hit the one in a million chance I thought of.' not edit your memory, and never worry about it again.

Also, if you really believe it is correct to steal time from the future to give yourself more fun now... you don't even need a simulator or the ability to make binding verbal oaths. That technology exists right this second.

What's odd is that this basically makes the scenario seem like the transhumanist parallel to junk food. Except, in this case from your perspective you already ate the healthy food, and you're being given the opportunity to essentially go back in time and retroactively make it so that you ate junk food.

Which leads me to the realization "I could never take an oath strong enough to bind my future self to such a course of activity, so I'm almost certainly going to be sitting here for the next 1439 minutes freezing... Oh well."

Let's consider a similar problem. Suppose you've just discovered that you've got cancer. You decide to buy a pill that would erase your memory of diagnosis. From your new perspective, your chance of having cancer will be 2%. In this situation, you can change your knowledge about your odds of having cancer or not, but you can't change whether you actually have cancer, or reduce the probability of someone with your symptoms having cancer.

What seems to make this situation paradoxical is that when you make a decision, it seems to change the probability that you had before you made the decision. This isn't quite what happens. If you accept determinism, you were always going to make that decision. If you had known that you were going to make this decision before you actually made it, then your probability estimate wouldn't have changed when you made the decision. The reason why the probability changes is that you have gained an additional piece of information, that you are the kind of person to make a vow to simulate yourself. You might have assigned a smaller probability to the chance that you were such a person before you decided to actually do it.

If you stick with subjective probability, and assume an appropriate theory of mind, then your subjective probability of experiencing paradise would be about 1000/1001 in the first case, about 0 in the latter case.

If we're talking about some sort of objective probability, then the answer depends on the details of which theory of mind turns out to be true.

Was this inspired by this short story? Its about a infinitely powerful computer simulating the universe. Which of course contains a simulation of an infinitely powerful computer simulating the universe and so on. Since there are infinite layers of simulations, the odds of any one person being simulated is 1.

I'd say that an observer is something ephemeral. You a minute from now is someone else, who just happens to have a memory of being you a minute ago. You existing is not even strictly a requirement for this. Messing around with what observers remember being you in no way affects anthropics.

There is no guarantee that uploaded humans will have simulation capabilities that detailed in the first stages of uploading technology.