Thought Experiment: The Optimal Wish

Thought Experiment: The Optimal Wish

By Andraž Đurič | 11 January 2026

Scenario: 

A god-like being offers you one wish with absolutely no limits.

What would you wish for?

Level 1 - Naive Approach: 

"I wish for world peace" / "I wish for universal happiness"

Problem: Assumes your specific values and understanding

are correct. What if your conception of "happiness" or

"peace" is flawed?

Level 2 - Ethical Delegation: 

"Do what is truly best for everyone that ultimately matters — according to ultimate reality"

Better: Delegates the ethical content to objective reality rather than your limited judgment.

Problem: Still assumes you've framed the question correctly.

What if "best" or "everyone" aren't the right concepts? 

Also, what does "ultimate reality" even mean? 

If it has normative structure, you're assuming moral realism. 

If it doesn't, there's nothing to defer to.

Level 3 - Self-Correcting: 

"And if this wish is flawed for what it's trying to achieve, fix it first, then execute"

Better: Adds a meta-level correction mechanism.

Problem: Still constrains the outcome to "wish-space." 

What if making no wish at all is optimal?

Level 4 - Maximal Openness:

"Defer this entire choice, including whether to act at all, to ultimate reality"

What this achieves:

● Removes ALL human cognitive limitations

● Doesn't assume a wish should be made

● Doesn't assume the scenario's framework is valid

● Allows for meta-level rejection (maybe doing nothing is correct)

● Complete epistemic humility

Problem: But this might just collapse back into Level 2. 

"Ultimate reality" is doing enormous metaphysical work here,

and we're still using our own judgment to decide that

deferring is correct.

Level 5 - The Fundamental Paradox:

Here's the core issue: you can't bootstrap yourself out of your

own epistemic position.

To defer to ultimate reality, you must first judge that deferring is correct. 

But that judgment uses your own cognitive faculties — the

very thing you're trying to bypass.

Any attempt to maximize correctness must reference something beyond yourself. 

But choosing what to reference still uses your own limited faculties.

This is reminiscent of the problem in epistemology where you

can't validate your reasoning without using that same

reasoning (the problem of the criterion).

Is this regress escapable, or a fundamental constraint on

being a finite, embedded agent?

A Possible Resolution:

After reflection, I think there might be a way through:

"Do what you ultimately wish for" (said to the god-being)

Why this might work:

Shifts agency entirely - You're not trying to formulate the

optimal outcome yourself. You're asking the god-being what

it would choose with its unlimited perspective.

● Uses the unlimited agent in front of you - Unlike "defer to

ultimate reality" (an abstract concept with metaphysical

baggage), you're deferring to an actual unlimited agent

present in the scenario.

● Minimal human framing - You're not claiming to know

what's right, how to access what's right, or even that

deferring is right. You're simply recognizing: there's an

unlimited being here, and I'm limited.

● Escapes your cognitive constraints - The god-being's "wish"

wouldn't be bound by human concepts of wishes, ethics,

outcomes, or even whether to act at all.

The key insight: You can't escape making some choice (even

silence is a choice), but you can make that choice point

directly to an unlimited perspective rather than trying to

access "correctness" through abstract metaphysical

concepts.

This might be as close to optimal as a limited being can get.

There Might Still Be a Wrinkle:

Even "do what you wish for" makes an assumption: that the

god-being's wishes are better or more correct than yours.

Why think that?

The being might be unlimited in power, but does that make it

unlimited in wisdom or goodness? A being could have infinite

power while being capricious, indifferent, or even malevolent.

Unless the scenario stipulates that the god-being is not just

powerful but also perfectly benevolent and omniscient, you're

still making a judgment call that its perspective is worth

deferring to. And if the scenario does stipulate that, then

you're back to importing metaphysical assumptions (perfect

goodness, perfect knowledge exist and can be instantiated).

So perhaps the regress is truly inescapable. 

The best we can do as embedded agents seems to be to make our choice while acknowledging our limitations and holding our judgment lightly, but still making it.

What do you think?

Have we found the optimal formulation, or does every approach ultimately circle back to the same irreducible limitation?

The Real Takeaway:

Notice what happened in developing this thought experiment:

I started at Level 2, then kept questioning my own assumptions. 

Each level emerged from asking "but what am I taking for granted here?"

Maybe that's the actual answer — not a perfect formulation, but a practice of continuous questioning.

The optimal wish might be unsolvable. 

But the process of examining your assumptions,

catching your hidden frameworks, and being willing to find

flaws in your own thinking — that's universally valuable.

Perhaps the answer isn't to find the perfect wish,

but to live your life questioning.

Please note:

I developed this thought experiment independently over a few

hours today. While I'm not aware of any existing

philosophical work that explores this exact formulation,

philosophy has a long history and I may be unknowingly

reinventing something already established. If this closely

resembles or duplicates existing work in decision theory,

meta-ethics, or philosophical theology, please let me know in

the comments and I'll add proper attribution. My primary

concern is giving credit where it's due if this ground has

already been covered.

Acknowledgment:

After publishing the initial version, I received valuable

feedback that helped sharpen the analysis, particularly

around the problem of epistemic bootstrapping and the

distinction between abstract deferral and agent-based

deferral. The collaborative thinking process revealed both the

potential resolution and its remaining challenges.

#DecisionTheory #Epistemology #MetaEthics #Philosophy #ThoughtExperiment