I wrote to Nick Bostrom last year showing that in MWI his analogue between
the ball-filled urns does not apply. With the urns, either they are nearly
empty or not; with MWI we live for billions of years in some universes but
all die tomorrow in others. I can't remember what he replied.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Wei Dai [SMTP:weidai.domain.name.hidden]
> Sent: 28 January 1999 03:22
> To: hal.domain.name.hidden
> Cc: everything-list.domain.name.hidden
> Subject: Re: consciousness based on information or computation?
>
> 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 Thu Jan 28 1999 - 02:00:38 PST