Eliezer Yudkowsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…I am curious actually, taking many worlds seriously, does that bring you any comfort in the sense that there is one branch of the wave function where humanity survives? Or do you not buy that? I’m worried that they’re pretty distant. I’m not sure it’s enough to not have Hitler, but it sure would be a start on things going differently in a timeline. But mostly, I don’t know. I’d say there’s some comfort from thinking of the wider spaces than that. As Tegmark pointed out way back when, if you have a spatially infinite universe that gets you just as many worlds as the quantum multiverse, if you go far enough in a space that is unbounded, you will eventually come to an exact copy of Earth or a copy of Earth from its past that then has a chance to diverge a little differently. So the quantum multiverse adds nothing. Reality is just quite large. Is that a comfort? Yeah. Yes, it is. That possibly our nearest surviving relatives are quite distant, or you have to go quite some ways through the space before you have worlds that survive by anything but the wildest flukes. Maybe our nearest surviving neighbors are closer than that. But look far enough and there should be some species of nice aliens that were smarter or better at coordination and built their happily ever after. And yeah, that is a comfort. It’s not quite as good as dying yourself, knowing that the rest of the world will be okay, but it’s kind of like that on a larger scale. And weren’t you going to ask something about orthogonality at some point? Did I not?…

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