Multiverse-wide Cooperation via Correlated Decision Making

First published: 10 Aug. 2017
Last update: 14 Aug. 2017

Summary

Some decision theorists argue that when playing a prisoner's dilemma-type game against a sufficiently similar opponent, we should cooperate to make it more likely that our opponent also cooperates. This idea, which Douglas Hofstadter calls superrationality, has strong implications when combined with the insight from modern physics that we live in a large universe or multiverse of some sort. If we care about what happens in civilizations located elsewhere in the multiverse, we can superrationally cooperate with some of their inhabitants. That is, if we take their values into account, this makes it more likely that they do the same for us. In this paper, I attempt to assess the practical implications of this idea. I argue that to reap the full gains from trade, everyone should maximize the same impartially weighted sum of the utility functions of all collaborators. I also argue that we can obtain at least weak evidence about the content of these utility functions. In practice, the application of superrationality implies that we should promote causal cooperation, moral pluralism, moral reflection, and ensure that our descendants, who will be smarter and thus better at finding out how to benefit other superrationalists in the universe, engage in superrational cooperation.

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