Plus the doomsday argument, the possibility of coming up with a nice reference class, and that you should ignore scientific evidence if it tells you there were a lot of early humans
I really like the aliens who will protect us if the coin comes up heads and destroy us if it comes up tails because it does away with any nagging worry that retro causation or knowledge of the future is what gets the result.
"Freddie isn’t just assuming controversial bits of anthropic reasoning: no, it’s much worse than that. The truth is horrifying, appalling, grotesque, an affront to God and to beauty, to the good and the true, to the pure and saintly; a horrifying crime against being."
And there seems to be some conflation of prior and posterior probability. The prior probability I was born in a particular year is very low. The posterior probability conditioned on an observation of my birth certificate is nearly 1. How does that tell me anything?
There's some rhetorical slight of hand when you suppose examples like "God created two people with blue shirts and one with a green shirt." There we know the distribution and we can conclude something. But the general case is more like "I have a magic bag with an unknown number of unknown things. I reached in and pulled out an apple." How can you conclude anything more than "The bag contained at least one apple?"
>Furthermore, this could allow you to have psychic powers—as long as you agree to have a huge enough number of offspring unless a boulder rolls, or a deer drops dead at your feet, you could be confident that the boulder would roll and the deer would drop dead.
I don't think SSA really implies this. True, it does if you explicitly conditionalize on "if I do X/¬X, the boulder will/won't move, and I can do either X or ¬X." However, you shouldn't really be conditionalizing on this, but your evidence for this claim instead. When you take this into account, SSA will imply high probability for the weaker disjunction "either the boulder will move, or I'm wrong about the physical mechanics of the setup." For example, you could just be wrong about your ability to have lots of children. Or, failing that, that your future self will in fact successfully follow through with his/her commitment to have lots of children.
This still involves precognition, but that seems less bad than omnipotence, and I don't really understand the aversion to precognition anyway. If the point of anthropics is to deduce things about the world, including extremely strikingly weird things, it's not obvious to me why it's so bad that some of those things might be in the future rather than in the past (or in some other, spatiotemporally disconnected universe).
I'm new to this whole idea that deep questions can be settled by byzantine arguments based on probabilities. All this stuff with coin flips, sampling, etc. seems so weird and unconvincing. Are there philosophers who think this is all BS? If so, who are they, and do any of them write accessible Substack posts I can read? I'm looking for other perspectives on this sketchy anthropics business.
There's probably not going to be any philosophers who do explicitly that because anthropics is a very tiny and new field in philosophy. The best I can do is point out that a lot of philosophy proceeds by aggregating distinct and disjoint solutions to different problems, attempting to generalize a solution to all of them despite the problems' disunity, and then acting like there's some deep problem we have to resolve that will give "the" solution to our overly general question (which will probably make 0 empirical or testable predictions).
A classic example would be the debate about the analysis of knowledge, which consists in different people using "knowledge" in different circumstances in different ways, and by stipulating some sort of use condition for the word ("Whenever I see a facade of a red barn with a red barn actually behind it, I don't have knowledge of the red barn") that generates a pseudoproblem where other people will also stipulate different usages of the word and so the task of philosophy is to find out which statements are "really knowledge" because there's some superficial disagreement about how to use language. Anthropic reasoning also seems to me to fit this broad characterization, aggregating cases from where we reason probabilistically about pulling a marble out of a bag to whether or not we're about to experience doomsday to how we should reason about being selected from infinite sets, etc. There probably isn't going to be a unified "last word" on how we should reason about all these events because the way these problems were approached in isolation resulted in developing particular solutions to them so it's undermotivated to think there's a common thread running through them that we're gonna find (especially one resistant to counterxamples i.e. different approaches that are more or less useful in different circumstances).
I only skimmed it, but their debate seems to be centered on the anthropic principle as it applies to the fine tuning of the universe, not about the self-indication assumption and related probabilistic arguments.
I really like the aliens who will protect us if the coin comes up heads and destroy us if it comes up tails because it does away with any nagging worry that retro causation or knowledge of the future is what gets the result.
"Freddie isn’t just assuming controversial bits of anthropic reasoning: no, it’s much worse than that. The truth is horrifying, appalling, grotesque, an affront to God and to beauty, to the good and the true, to the pure and saintly; a horrifying crime against being."
I don't really get these anthropic arguments at all - you have one sample from an unknown distribution. How can you infer anything from that?
And there seems to be some conflation of prior and posterior probability. The prior probability I was born in a particular year is very low. The posterior probability conditioned on an observation of my birth certificate is nearly 1. How does that tell me anything?
There's some rhetorical slight of hand when you suppose examples like "God created two people with blue shirts and one with a green shirt." There we know the distribution and we can conclude something. But the general case is more like "I have a magic bag with an unknown number of unknown things. I reached in and pulled out an apple." How can you conclude anything more than "The bag contained at least one apple?"
>Furthermore, this could allow you to have psychic powers—as long as you agree to have a huge enough number of offspring unless a boulder rolls, or a deer drops dead at your feet, you could be confident that the boulder would roll and the deer would drop dead.
I don't think SSA really implies this. True, it does if you explicitly conditionalize on "if I do X/¬X, the boulder will/won't move, and I can do either X or ¬X." However, you shouldn't really be conditionalizing on this, but your evidence for this claim instead. When you take this into account, SSA will imply high probability for the weaker disjunction "either the boulder will move, or I'm wrong about the physical mechanics of the setup." For example, you could just be wrong about your ability to have lots of children. Or, failing that, that your future self will in fact successfully follow through with his/her commitment to have lots of children.
This still involves precognition, but that seems less bad than omnipotence, and I don't really understand the aversion to precognition anyway. If the point of anthropics is to deduce things about the world, including extremely strikingly weird things, it's not obvious to me why it's so bad that some of those things might be in the future rather than in the past (or in some other, spatiotemporally disconnected universe).
"Freddie’s argument inherits gall of these problems! "
I think you mean "all" or "the gall"?
Fixed.
I'm new to this whole idea that deep questions can be settled by byzantine arguments based on probabilities. All this stuff with coin flips, sampling, etc. seems so weird and unconvincing. Are there philosophers who think this is all BS? If so, who are they, and do any of them write accessible Substack posts I can read? I'm looking for other perspectives on this sketchy anthropics business.
Well if it's bullshit, what's to replace it? You can't just not assign probabilities to where you are or what person you are.
Nothing forces anyone to assign probabilities to anything. Whole tribes of people have gone tens of thousands of years never using them
You can choose not to count but that doesn't stop numbers from existing.
There's probably not going to be any philosophers who do explicitly that because anthropics is a very tiny and new field in philosophy. The best I can do is point out that a lot of philosophy proceeds by aggregating distinct and disjoint solutions to different problems, attempting to generalize a solution to all of them despite the problems' disunity, and then acting like there's some deep problem we have to resolve that will give "the" solution to our overly general question (which will probably make 0 empirical or testable predictions).
A classic example would be the debate about the analysis of knowledge, which consists in different people using "knowledge" in different circumstances in different ways, and by stipulating some sort of use condition for the word ("Whenever I see a facade of a red barn with a red barn actually behind it, I don't have knowledge of the red barn") that generates a pseudoproblem where other people will also stipulate different usages of the word and so the task of philosophy is to find out which statements are "really knowledge" because there's some superficial disagreement about how to use language. Anthropic reasoning also seems to me to fit this broad characterization, aggregating cases from where we reason probabilistically about pulling a marble out of a bag to whether or not we're about to experience doomsday to how we should reason about being selected from infinite sets, etc. There probably isn't going to be a unified "last word" on how we should reason about all these events because the way these problems were approached in isolation resulted in developing particular solutions to them so it's undermotivated to think there's a common thread running through them that we're gonna find (especially one resistant to counterxamples i.e. different approaches that are more or less useful in different circumstances).
Are you referring to this?
https://www.edge.org/conversation/lee_smolin-leonard_susskind-smolin-vs-susskind-the-anthropic-principle
I only skimmed it, but their debate seems to be centered on the anthropic principle as it applies to the fine tuning of the universe, not about the self-indication assumption and related probabilistic arguments.