My Lives and Deaths in a Big World

Among the describable moments where I remember this moment as the last one that I experienced, maybe a lot of them involve dying as my thermal fluctuation of a brain, filled with hallucination, returns to non-existence.

That situation isn't one I normally consider when going about my life, and so the question arises of whether my behavior is adapted to it.

Maybe it make reflective sense, and not just intuitive sense, to not care much about the observer moments in the lives of Boltzmann brains, because one's decisions as instantiated in Boltzmann brains won't have much of any effect on those brains' surrounding environments, given that the rest of one's supposed body probably won't exist there to be actuated, and even if one's bodies do exist, one would still be effectively swatting in the dark at imagined flies.

Taking this idea a little further, we find the suggestion that we should perhaps generally care less about incarnations of our bodies which are more disconnected from their surroundings, those being less perceptive or less powerful to effect changes. Consider however that this is surely not the principle which informs our intuitive expectations of worldly permanence and our intuitive lack of concern for observer moments that arise in thermal fluctuations: if so, we'd also disbelieve that we could be blinded or demented or paralyzed.

In locales where brains persist long enough to effect biological reproduction, it's little surprise that brains evolve with expectations of sensory persistence. If we endorse the value of our intuitions of sensory persistence, then perhaps the process of evolution which endowed us with those intuitions can also provide us with principles for forming reasoned beliefs regarding how to act in a universe or multiverse large enough to contain many incarnations of our minds in different locales.

"Act as though only those future moments are real in which you might reproduce" doesn't sound like wisdom. What other possible lessons could we abstract from evolution? "Act to achieve good states in worlds where you can do so"? That might  be a principle which prescribed avoiding paralysis in EEA, while excluding thermal weirdness. Although it sounds much less evolution-y than the first one.

Complementary to the topic of intuitive dis-belief in fluctuation-death is our intuitive actual-belief in total death - i.e. in the complete cessations of our subject experience, despite arguments suggesting subjective immortality of minds in a big world. And yet the explicit reasons for discounting the decision theoretic value of Boltzmann moments (of seemingly extraordinary death) listed above do not seem to provide complementary reasons to discount extraordinary survival scenarios.

And so once again I am left wondering whether my evolved intuitions are ill suited to thriving in a big world.

We've all heard the quantum immortality thought experiment, and we've mostly all found some reason to not commit quantum suicide. Beyond this, I know almost no sources of relevant advice.

Of course Robin Hanson wrote How To Live In A Simulation, and Eliezer Yudkowsky once made the intriguing suggestion that one should open one's eyes to decrease world simulation measure when bad things happen (and to close one's eyes to reduce simulation load when good things happen). This advice is in the right weirdness neighborhood, but not obviously relevant to taking Boltzmann brains or subjective immortality seriously.

Cultural Relays

This post is sort of a response to “Don’t Be a Relay in the Network”, but I've tried to make it self-contained.

Some websites have strong information currents; there are lots of posts, and new ones are constantly pushing older ones out from their place of prioritized visibility on the top of the stack, down toward the archives of darkness. The archives are so dark that the stack is effectively a pipe, with old posts being forgotten entirely, at least from the memories of site users. 

New, highly visible posts are the best place for site users to write comments if they're looking to socialize, and so the speed that new posts get buried under even newer posts is a strong determiner of how long people will stay in a comment thread before leaving for newer content and larger crowds. When the incentives for conversation are particularly bad on a streaming media channel, people move away from commenting at all and toward a media consumption strategy that consists of only snap-judgements: liking, disliking, sharing, following, and blocking. In short, click and click and do not stop. 

Like watching televised shows, this clicky strategy allows users to stay abreast of topical content, and like watching televised shows, this clicky strategy can not support a thriving culture where people interact with each other or make things of value. Even in less extreme cases which do support socialization, a stronger information current makes for a culture with a shorter memory, where ideas and references have a briefer shelf life of cultural relevance.

The original essay suggests that this state of affairs is poor for the prosperity and mental health of site users, because they lose their personal significance in the community as creators when they only passively consume media produced by large-scale external forces or thoughtless group dynamics. Users of websites with strong information currents are attuning themselves to the dominant rhythms of an impersonal culture, says the author, and each user becomes less of a person and more of a mere relay in the network, doing little but passing and blocking signals.

The prosperity of mental life is a fine thing. I'd like to list some additional reasons to resist becoming a relay in the network. Firstly, some information merits, for one’s own use, a deeper understanding, produced by long, deliberative research and contemplation. If you become a Relay, you will fail yourself. A person must have a long memory to learn some things of great value.

Another reason that we should invest more time in valuing and responding to content has a universalizing character. The author mentions a “clever, fictive metaphor bandied about by pseudo-mystical techno-utopians”, that a society is a mind and its members are as neurons. I, being such a techno-utopian, am of course putting this metaphor to use. The third reason is this: there are things which can not be achieved by cultures with short memories and fleeting interests. If we imagine setting the ratio of time that members of a community will devote to gaining broad informedness versus deep understanding, we see that the short memory extreme, with its vanishing and exploding feedback gradients, has few and shoddy basins of attraction.

Like the narrative distorted into myth, like the speech distorted into chants and slogans and soundbites, like the joke distorted into habitual references, like the interests distorted into stereotypes, and like the motive appeals distorted into click-bait, the products of short memory culture cannot sustain context or nuance. These are washed away by the current of topicality, and much value goes with them, down into the dark archives. 

So, it is good to resist becoming a relay in the network. If you want to relay some signals, fine, but then also go spelunking in the dark. Write about old works. Reinforce others who try to connect disparate fields and those who show that they've engaged with their ideas at length. Work on long term projects. Ultimately, build a creative culture with a long memory, because that is necessarily the domain of complex human flourishing.