How are you counting persons? If two instances of a matter-configuration have identical experiences, are they one or two people? Is the observation they have weighted by two in likelihood?
If you have a mind and cut all its circuit wires lengthwise, is it now two minds?
I’m inclined to say no, these are the same mind and so they get no extra weight for there being two instances.
2)
The goal of hypothesis formation is to predict your observations. If you can specify your observations with fewer bits, you have a better hypothesis. If your hypothesis needs to pick you out of a population of size omega (unique elements), you need omega bits. That means that the hypothesis is the worst hypothesis possible. If the elements aren’t unique, and there are eg 2^100 unique beings (copied as many or as few times as you want) then you need 100 bits to pick yourself out. So increasing the number of people doesn’t strengthen the hypothesis.
One good reply to Pascal's mugging arguments is that the larger the mugger's threat, the less likely they are to actually fulfill it. Shouldn't SIA be counterbalanced by similar considerations too?
Student of set theory and logic here. Cantor defined Ω as the set of all ordinals. But the Burali–Forti Paradox shows that such a set cannot exist. That is, if we assume it exists, we can derive a contradiction.
Another remark: it is perhaps misleading to say that "there are Ω people," because Ω is an ordinal (at least it would be if it existed), not a cardinal. An ordinal signifies the order of a number. For example, 1, 2, 3 are ordinals in the sense of 2 succeeding 1 and coming before 3. This is quite different from 1, 2, or 3 conceived as cardinals, which in this case signify the number of elements, in other words, what you attempted to capture. The study of "very big numbers" as quantities rather than orders manifests in set theory as the study of large cardinals. ZFC famously cannot prove that they exist, so postulating the existence of one or more of these creates a strictly stronger set theory. I also suspect that "There is no largest cardinal," is true in ZFC. I will write a proof in the comments if I come across it.
If SIA is true, should I assume that everyone is having my exact string of experiences, no matter what they’re doing. It’s surely infinitely more likely that I’d experience these experiences in that case.
I find anthropics super interesting thanks for all the work you’ve done on it. It is one of those fields where every answer sounds crazy in some sort of way.
It's almost like you became a Guenonian, he called out the Infinite as the thing that unifies every religion. Maybe you would enjoy just jumping off the deep end and reading The Multiple States of the Being, which is about the Infinite, and a little over 90 pages.
Based on the anthropic data, wouldn't a theory that posits that the Earth has an average level of suffering be infinitely more probable than a theory that posits that ~100% of conscious existence is suffering-less and perfect? (theism)
Good poetry, but this post seems to be good evidence that your analysis has gone deeply off the rails somewhere.
Two issues:
1)
How are you counting persons? If two instances of a matter-configuration have identical experiences, are they one or two people? Is the observation they have weighted by two in likelihood?
If you have a mind and cut all its circuit wires lengthwise, is it now two minds?
I’m inclined to say no, these are the same mind and so they get no extra weight for there being two instances.
2)
The goal of hypothesis formation is to predict your observations. If you can specify your observations with fewer bits, you have a better hypothesis. If your hypothesis needs to pick you out of a population of size omega (unique elements), you need omega bits. That means that the hypothesis is the worst hypothesis possible. If the elements aren’t unique, and there are eg 2^100 unique beings (copied as many or as few times as you want) then you need 100 bits to pick yourself out. So increasing the number of people doesn’t strengthen the hypothesis.
One good reply to Pascal's mugging arguments is that the larger the mugger's threat, the less likely they are to actually fulfill it. Shouldn't SIA be counterbalanced by similar considerations too?
Student of set theory and logic here. Cantor defined Ω as the set of all ordinals. But the Burali–Forti Paradox shows that such a set cannot exist. That is, if we assume it exists, we can derive a contradiction.
Another remark: it is perhaps misleading to say that "there are Ω people," because Ω is an ordinal (at least it would be if it existed), not a cardinal. An ordinal signifies the order of a number. For example, 1, 2, 3 are ordinals in the sense of 2 succeeding 1 and coming before 3. This is quite different from 1, 2, or 3 conceived as cardinals, which in this case signify the number of elements, in other words, what you attempted to capture. The study of "very big numbers" as quantities rather than orders manifests in set theory as the study of large cardinals. ZFC famously cannot prove that they exist, so postulating the existence of one or more of these creates a strictly stronger set theory. I also suspect that "There is no largest cardinal," is true in ZFC. I will write a proof in the comments if I come across it.
If SIA is true, should I assume that everyone is having my exact string of experiences, no matter what they’re doing. It’s surely infinitely more likely that I’d experience these experiences in that case.
I find anthropics super interesting thanks for all the work you’ve done on it. It is one of those fields where every answer sounds crazy in some sort of way.
It's almost like you became a Guenonian, he called out the Infinite as the thing that unifies every religion. Maybe you would enjoy just jumping off the deep end and reading The Multiple States of the Being, which is about the Infinite, and a little over 90 pages.
Based on the anthropic data, wouldn't a theory that posits that the Earth has an average level of suffering be infinitely more probable than a theory that posits that ~100% of conscious existence is suffering-less and perfect? (theism)