Adam Brown

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, and 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 wave 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 in 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.

Yeah, I think there's a number of ways to think about this.

I think in part people's intuition is maybe formed in cases like

extinction where if you have an animal that's going extinct you know if half of the animals get wiped out that's somehow less bad than if both halves of the animals gets wiped out but that's because they really are going to interact in the future and there's there's you know the possibility of the of the you know those don't have non-overlapping future light cones that the two populations of some possibly extinct animal um

It's also the case that this is a pretty... Like, Born's Rule, narrowly defined, does not really have anything to say about this, how one should calculate the total utility.

It's just more of a sort of the natural utility measure that would come out of this.

Particularly when you get to the cosmological multiverse, I think that these are very difficult questions to answer.

Your intuition that two, you know,