On Wed, Jan 27, 1999 at 05:29:42PM -0800, hal.domain.name.hidden wrote:
> It is difficult for me to understand what this premise would mean.
> I know that I am a human being in a certain place and time. How can
> I say that I might be, or might have been, a poor Chinese peasant?
> An inhabitant of ancient Rome? Or a bug eyed alien?
>
> The one way I can make sense of this is a rather weak reading: if all
> conscious entities try to draw a conclusion based on the assumption
> that they are randomly selected from among all conscious entities,
> then most of them would be right. Suppose it turns out, for example,
> that most conscious entities exist in groups near others, rather than
> in isolation. Then for most conscious entities, the conclusion that
> "I am near others" would be true.
The way I see it, the premise should not be used to draw conclusions, but
rather serves as an explanation. Because you already know you are a human
being named Hal Finney, it no longer matters that you are a random sample
of all beings. However, the premise helps explain why you are Hal Finney
and not some bug-eyed alien, namely that Hal has a larger measure than the
alien (assuming that is actually true).
Here's an analogy: suppose you have just been dealt a hand in a card game.
Since you know what cards you have, the distribution from which they were
chosen no longer matters and won't help you play, but that distribution
helps explain why you got the cards you did.
> If we could show that among instances of me, most were in lawful
> universes, that would be a good first step. It would not show why I
> existed in the first place, but it would give me reason to conclude that
> the apparent lawfulness of the universe was not an illusion.
But I am not seeking a justification for believing that the universe is
really lawful. I'm seeking an explanation for why it appears lawful.
> The doomsday argument has a large amount of literature on it. Nick
> Bostrom has a page at http://www.anthropic-principle.com/preprints.html
> with several links to it. These people have spent a lot more time
> thinking about it than I have, and if there is an error, no one seems
> to agree on it. Nick and Robin Hanson had a long debate about the
> subject on the extropians list a few months ago, but were not able to
> come to agreement. (They seemed to bog down on the issue of the proper
> reference class, whether it made sense to say that I might have been
> a rock. That was what I got out of the debate, anyway.)
The typical setup for a DA is two possible universes with some a priori
probability for one of them being the real one. It doesn't seem to apply
directly to a theory where all objects/universes exist.
Received on Wed Jan 27 1999 - 19:24:52 PST