>
> On Tue, 7 Sep 1999, Russell Standish wrote:
> > Anyway, back to our muttons - what you are saying is that ASSA is true
> > by definition. This is wrong. It is an assumption, just as the SSA is
> > an assumption (that's what the last A stands for, after all).
>
> That's your opinion. It is wrong.
> [At this point we could obviously trade the above line ad nauseaum.]
The SSA is not a true statement - for one thing it predicts that I
would be a chinese or indian peasant, which I clearly am not. I happen
to live in Australia, one of the most urbanised countries in the world
(more than 80% of Australians live in cities), but more amazingly I
was born in a remote rural community in Western Australia with the
closest city (Perth) being over 600km away, and the next closest
(Adelaide) being nearly 2000km away. This coincidence is about four
orders of magnitude less likely than being a Chinese peasant.
I suppose you could argue that Chinese peasants aren't likely to know
about the SSA, but in that case SSA would predict that I'm American.
What is true about the SSA is that it is a reasonable assumption in
the absence of further information. That further information
constrains the set of outcomes over which the SSA can be applied. In
my case, I have a history of 35 years of doing this and that. ASSA
ignores that. For example, I have an extremely low chance of
experiencing standing on the moon tomorrow. For Neil Armstrong on a
certain day in 1969, that chance would have been rather high. ASSA
would predict the same value for both of us - way too high for me, and
way too low for Neil. RSSA, on the other hand, takes into account our
respective histories, and gives more believable values.
Cheers
> Note that it is not always obvious when something is logically
> neccessary. The standard example is that a statement like "The
> 1234567th decimal digit of pi is a 7" is either true by definition, or
> it is false by definition. But it is certainly possible to either not
> know if it's true, or to be mistaken about it.
> (And, need I say, to assign Bayesian probabilities to its truth
> value, which for me at the moment is a little less than 1 in 10, since I
> just might have heard about such a coincidence if it was true.)
> In many cases (such as for noncomputable numbers) there is really
> no way to find out. In many other cases our brains seem to have ideas.
> In the case of the ASSA it seems a good postulate to take it as
> true. It's not so different from the case of "A or not A". There are,
> indeed, people who reject classical logic such as this "law of the
> excluded middle". They are generally not playing with a full deck, IMO.
> So it is with those who reject the ASSA.
> As for the last A, that's how this discussion started, with me
> saying I object to the term for that reason. Personally I call it the
> Copernican anthropic principle (CAP).
>
> - - - - - - -
> Jacques Mallah (jqm1584.domain.name.hidden)
> Graduate Student / Many Worlder / Devil's Advocate
> "I know what no one else knows" - 'Runaway Train', Soul Asylum
> My URL: http://pages.nyu.edu/~jqm1584/
>
>
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Dr. Russell Standish Director
High Performance Computing Support Unit,
University of NSW Phone 9385 6967
Sydney 2052 Fax 9385 6965
Australia R.Standish.domain.name.hidden
Room 2075, Red Centre
http://parallel.hpc.unsw.edu.au/rks
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Received on Wed Sep 08 1999 - 17:18:34 PDT