3 ms·

The other side of the wager is rarely considered (AKA Homer’s Wager): What if the Udon Noodle Monster exist and he intensely hates people who worship someone

• Xcelerate 3y ago
  Simple solution: consider the universal a priori probability of monster X as the negative exponentially weighted size of the minimum length Turing machine necessary to describe the monster, normalized against all other possible monsters Y, Z, etc. (if the monster isn’t describable by a computable process, we can’t change our behavior with regard to it so we’re screwed either way.) Then, consider a “reward program” that takes as input the computable description of a monster and returns the afterlife reward as a function of worship time. (There is some nuance here; should reward be defined as negative aggregate suffering? Median pleasure over afterlife duration? Do we include other people’s suffering in exchange for our own? Different debate.) At this point, you consider all possible divisions of finite worship time among the infinite set of monsters whose descriptions are partial recursive functions and compute the probability distribution of reward for each configuration using the universal a priori probabilities of monster existence (while taking into account second order effects, e.g. monster A reduces reward for time spent worshiping monster B). From here, you specify a minimum threshold of acceptable reward and select the configuration of worship time that corresponds to the highest probability of achieving that threshold.
  • tpoacher 3y ago
    Simple!