How many-worlds understanding can increase agency
Expect best results for one-boxers
Prizes on offer! By effectiveideas.org! And the topic of the June competition, for which this post is written, is Building Agency. How to increase one’s personal agency and aim higher.
Looking at the results of the May competition, whose topic was The world in 2072, I observe that one of the five winners (indeed very good — En Kepeig, please write more posts) is described as presenting possible futures that “look wild”. The June and May topics may not be quite comparable, but never mind, let’s try it wild here as well. How an understanding of many-worlds theory can increase agency.
Where “many-worlds theory” is to mean the so-called many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics. To start with, is this view the right one? There is controversy about that. But I can invoke the authority of Max Tegmark, who in Many lives in many worlds, 2007 in Nature, finds himself stuck with it. For he prefers a “bird perspective”, he writes, a view at the equations from above, to the “frog perspective” of an observer living and perceiving inside the equations. Given the name of my blog (in fact inspired by Tegmark — more on frog/bird perspective and inside/outside view in the future, hopefully1), many-worlds is certainly the way to go here.
I will work with just a lay understanding of many worlds, without equations or anything technically “quantum”. After all, I’m merely the kind of person who occasionally comes across the notion of quantum immortality when reading the internet. Yes, creepy though it feels, it looks like we might all be set to become, if not quite immortal, then at least very old — subjectively. And attempts at suicide would be bound to fail — again, subjectively. This is because even if such an attempt works as planned in 98 percent of worlds, one’s further experience will come from the two percent where it does not. Simply because in the 98 percent, there is no further experience. See also the “anthropic shadow” in the wild May-competition winner.
The most that suicide attempts would result in, then, is getting oneself hurt; and, notably, causing grief for loved ones, who do have further experience in the 98 percent of worlds. Now, I’m certainly in no position to grasp what impact such detached reasoning might or might not have; but if it has any potential to prevent suicides in borderline cases, to that extent it will also increase future agency. What could be more opposed to building one’s agency than suicide?
My main point here is not that, however, but a more positive one. Where do we get our motivation from, a major driver of our agency? Realistically, for better or worse, some of it may well come from a desire to impress. For example, we might want to make someone happy who has always believed in us; or conversely, seek vindication in the eyes of someone who has always written us off. Many reflections on how to build agency, whether or not they aspire to be wild, could possibly benefit from taking into account this kind of thing. Here, however, there is a special case that acquires relevance. What if the people we care about in this way are already dead? They could be parents or grandparents, in particular.
Or we might want to vindicate someone else, rather than ourselves. An exotic example would be a scientist, one with a neglected but promising and important theory. (Such as John Yudkin, although he was born a bit earlier than would be ideal here.) True, if the theory is really so important, one would say that should be ample motivation on its own. But our psychology can be weird, so perhaps, even if it may not reflect your priorities in the abstract, “local fairness” happens to be what really turns you on; and thus you can get yourself fired up best by the prospect, not of “globally” improving the world, but of helping this particular scientist, who is old and doesn’t publish any more, to finally enjoy the recognition he or she deserves. And then, just when your project finally looks like it might get going, alas, they die . . .
Then get fired up by the prospect in other worlds, where they’re still alive! You have a choice, work on the project, or be too timid or lazy to do so. What is a “choice”? My philosophy on agency, free will and causality here is that these are real, and that they are emergent high-level concepts. Just like, say, cricket. So, you have this choice, and if you choose to work on the project, it indicates you have sufficient drive to move it forward, which increases the number of worlds where the scientist lives to finally enjoy the deserved recognition.
Except for me selecting such an exotic example, it seems we have arrived at a similar sort of motivating effect to that of common afterlife beliefs, where deceased ancestors look down from Heaven and watch what’s happening. In that sense, what we have here is familiar, and the quest for “wildness” has failed. And I assume that the whole point has been made before — given the popularity of an idea like quantum immortality. Nevertheless, let’s keep going; and I think the reasoning here is sounder than the common afterlife beliefs. In fact, I believe it to be completely sound. But then, on the other hand, clearly one could not possibly causally influence other worlds in the way I just asserted, right? What gives?
Newcomb’s paradox is instructive here, meaning a situation where you choose whether to accept a transparent bonus box with a small prize in it, in addition to an opaque box of unknown content that you get; but where you know that someone has competently predicted your choice and put a huge prize into the opaque box only if you were going to make the strange decision of rejecting your free bonus. This is a giant among paradoxes, as unlike many it is really and truly unresolvable — if one insists on our intuitions about causality, that is. But one should not so insist. Instead, we are dealing with an unusual scenario that our intuitions, fit to deal with what we can normally expect to encounter in reality, are not equipped to handle. Thus one might reasonably conclude that our concepts of free will and causality break down when confronted with Newcomb’s paradox. But what one could also do is hold on to these notions if possible, and stretch them to deal with the situation. In the case of Newcomb’s paradox, what is going on then amounts to “retro-causality”, causal influence of one’s decision into the past. (Which means the bonus is actually not free but very costly.) And in a rather similar way, in the cases from above, we can indeed have causal influence into other worlds, where the people we care about are still alive.
Incidentally, when I peruse Wikipedia to see what other people make of Newcomb’s paradox, I find that a notion of retro-causality in this context has been put forward by William Lane Craig. The whole thing really gets more and more religious . . .
Stating a proper commitment by cutting the word “hopefully” would have been a wise thing to do from an agency-building perspective, yet somehow the word is still in there. Fortunately, I can look forward to the winning June-competition entries for help!