Re: momentary and persistent minds

From: Wei Dai <weidai.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Tue, 9 Jun 1998 12:36:15 -0700

On Tue, Jun 09, 1998 at 08:42:40AM -0700, Hal Finney wrote:
> I have two questions:
>
> What does it mean to say "the probability that I am experiencing X"?
> Naively we would say that either I am experiencing X or I am not, and
> I know which is the case, so there is no probability involved. It seems
> that what is really being defined is "the probability that a random
> conscious event consists of someone experiencing X".

It's your prior probability before taking into account your actual
perceptions. Your posterior probabilities are of the form "the probability
that I am experiencing X, given that I am experiencing Y" where Y is
a complete description of your experiences, which would of
course be either 0 or 1. I think the prior probabilities are useful for
explaining why we're experiencing what we're experiencing.

> How do you come up with the probability assignments for events? Where did
> your 1/7, 2/7, etc. come from?

It's a good question what they should be in a general theory. For the
example I just made up some numbers for illustration.
Received on Tue Jun 09 1998 - 12:46:25 PDT