Dwarkesh Patel: belief

Transcript context

…Good question. I think I'm going to say yes and no. I mean, it's clearly, if correct, let's just take the quantum case, which is perhaps even more secure than the cosmological multiverse case. In the quantum case, it really does look like the default expectation, given everything we understand about quantum mechanics, should be the many-worlds interpretation in which the universe keeps branching off, and there'd be more and more branches. Every time, or almost every time you come to a point of quantum a measurement, we might colloquially say is made that the universe branches, and then every possibility is represented still in the grander wave function. That's a pretty profound thing to learn about the ontology of the world. If correct, it seems like it should be the default expectation. And you might say, maybe I don't care about existential risk in our universe because we blow each other up or turn into goo or whatever. Okay, that's sad for us. Maybe our world has vacuum decay, but there are some other branches of the wave function where it's not. And so some other branches will have made different choices in the past, and they're sort of guaranteed somewhere in the branches of the wave function to be a flourishing world. And so I'm not so bothered. I would say that that's, I'm not going to tell you what utility function you should place on the wave function, but Born is. There's the Born rule in quantum mechanics. And that tells you that you shouldn't just say, if it's there in one branch, that's just as good as anything else. Born's rule, which is one of the foundational rules in quantum mechanics, tells you how much to care about each branch. You don't care about them equally. It says that the correct way to calculate the expectation value of anything is to calculate its value in each branch and weight those branches by the square of the amplitude of the weight function, which is some particular quantity, and then add together all of those different answers. So that's a linear answer, which is to say that the total utility of the universe is the sum of the utility in each of these branches appropriately weighted by Born's rule. So if that's true, you should hope to make our branch as good as possible, just because whatever is going on in the other branch, the total utility is just the sum of what's going on in that branch and what's going on our branch. And so you should try as hard as you can to make our branches as great as possible. Nevertheless, I do kind of understand that you might have a portfolio theory that seems to be inconsistent with Born's rule, but is somehow intuitive, in which somehow it's not just a linear function on these universes. This would only be applicable if you are a total utilitarian who then there's a sort of very straightforward way in which we can dismiss this and be like, it's one of these. It seems like in physics, there's always these kinds of things where, like, oh, we think we discovered something new, but how would you look at that? The speed of light is still conserved. And similarly here, like, oh, infinite universes. Ah, but would you look at that? That has no implications on our decisions. But most people are not total utilitarians. And if you have some very simple thought experiments to illustrate a couple. Suppose that there are two universes and, sorry, two worlds in two different cosmic horizons who will never interact with each other causally, but each one has intelligent life and civilization and beauty and everything we might care about. If one of the two gets extinguished, I'm like, pretty sad. And this is, both of these make up the entire universe. If both of them get extinguished, I'm more than twice as sad. There's something to that sort of finality which makes existential risk salient in the first place. And if you agree with that intuition, then I think you should be inclined to think that there is something significant about the fact that in some base reality, like genuinely the story carries forward. On the other end, if you're somebody who cares about minimizing the downside of people talking about suffering, risk or something. Right. The idea that if it's physically possible to have a universe full of torture, it's actually in fact happening or will happen again is like you could just be like, ah, but the amplitude on that is so small or the square of the amplitude is so small. And.…

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