Re: the one universe

From: Wei Dai <weidai.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Fri, 17 Apr 1998 11:31:34 -0700

Let me try to generalize the argument that under the universal prior the
1UH gives really wierd results. The idea is simply that any sufficiently
large and/or long universe that doesn't repeat has a good chance of
including a person with mind state M, so knowing that at least one person
with mind state M exists in the real universe doesn't allow you to
eliminate most of them from the set of possible universes. If we want to
get a result that says the real universe is likely to be in a class of
intuitively acceptable universes, we would have to build that directly
into our prior. That is, make them a priori more likely to be real than
all other large/long universes.

Several questions follow if this argument is sound. First, is it
acceptable to consciously construct priors with a built in preference for
intuitively acceptable universes? If so how should this be done? If not
the 1UH is not as intuitive as we thought. We would have to either reject
the 1UH or accept the conclusion that the real universe is likely to be
really weird.
Received on Fri Apr 17 1998 - 11:35:16 PDT