Russell Standish wrote:
>I finally had a bit of a chance to glance through Nick's
thesis. I
>guess Nick stayed out of the ASSA/RSSA debate for good
reasons.
Maybe so :-)
>His SSSA introduced SSA over observer moments, so one could
rightly
>say that the ASSA and the RSSA are both examples of SSSA.
Note the
>SSSA clearly states that the reference class includes all
observer
>moments that don't differ by any relevant respect.
Yes, that's an applicability condition. I imagine that in many real cases,
maybe some observer-moments will differ in relevant respects, even some
observer-moments that belong to the same reference class - at least I don't
yet know any reason to rule out this case. In the context of QM, for
instance, one may want to assign weights to observer-moments that reflect
the amplitude of the branches of the universal wave function on which they
live. Possibly also things like clarity of consciousness etc. should be
taken into account. It is trivial to bake weightings of observer-moments
into SSSA-R, but I thought it would just complicate the formula and wouldn't
really add anything to do so, in the absence of interesting things to say
about how those weights are to be determined.
I do have some half-baked ideas about how the reference class is to be
defined, which I didn't include in the thesis. I might try them out here, if
they look promising after thinking some more about them.
Nick Bostrom
Dept. Philosophy, Logic, and Scientific method
London School of Economics
Homepage:
http://www.hedweb.com/nickb <
http://www.hedweb.com/nickb>
Received on Mon Jul 24 2000 - 09:57:54 PDT