2008/6/14 Greg Egan <gregegan.domain.name.hidden>:
> The context in which I was discussing this at the N-Category Café is
> the claim by some cosmologists that we ought to favour A-type
> cosmological theories in which class 2 observers like us, with a clear
> Darwinian history, will not be outnumbered (over the whole history of
> the universe) by class 1 observers (Boltzmann brains).
There is also the argument that the appearance of having a "clear
Darwinian history" is not necessarily evidence that we are not
Boltzmann brains. This is because the problem of what sort of
observers would be generated by Boltzmann brains reduces to the
problem of what sort of observers would be generated by the ensemble
of all possible observer moments, or all possible computations. How
such an ensemble might give rise to the orderly world we observe has
been one of the main topics of discussion on this list over the years
(eg. see Russel's paper here:
http://www.journaloftheoretics.com/Links/Papers/ockham.pdf).
--
Stathis Papaioannou
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Received on Sat Jun 14 2008 - 04:35:54 PDT