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Post #1169007
2026-04-13 16:28 UTC
The decision theory stuff itself ought to be called out more for playing pretty fast and loose with reality to begin with. “If you have a supercomputer that perfectly simulates blah blah blah” is such a fundamentally bad premise because once you presume such a thing exists you’re committing to the same basic metaphysical problems that you would if you replaced the computer with God. In particular I think it commits you to hard determinism at which point there’s no sense arguing about what the right action is because the answer was set in stone not just before you entered the room but when the initial state of the universe was set up. Like, there’s a version of this where the question is meaningful in which case the premise is impossible, and a version where we accept the premise as given and render the question pointless. Why are you doing decision theory in a hypothetical world where nobody really makes decisions?
Or we could acknowledge that yudkowskian decision theory is just singularity apologetics and accept the impossible elements of the premise on faith.
Replies (2)
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Luckily we should be getting trickle down free will, since all universes are (of course) able to develop technology to perfectly simulate universes of lesser complexity, which seems to imply the existence of a special universe of ultimate complexity where all others emanate from, possibly in line with ain soph or equivalent mystical concept.
I don’t know how that squares with that blabbing about the tegmarkian multiverse that supposedly posits that mathematically simple universes “exist ‘more’”, which siskind probably just included to reinforce his consciousness as a non-physical, mathematical object premise.
Open ##1169006
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On a different note, 'our god means you have no free will' is also quite opposed to what I got from Christianity.
Open ##2765584