Technologos comments on Torture vs. Dust vs. the Presumptuous Philosopher: Anthropic Reasoning in UDT - Less Wrong
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Suppose we modify the situation so that there is an infinite list of possible Theories of Everything, T1, T2, T3, ... With each theory predicting a trillion observers, a trillion trillion observers, a trillion trillion trillion observers, and so on. Additionally, from some other prior info gleaned from scientific insight, the probability of Tn being true is 2^(-n).
SIA here would suggest we live in the universe with the most observers... which in this case doesn't exist.
Even if we somehow constrained the number of observers to be bounded above by (e.g.) the number of cubed Planck lengths in the universe, our hypothesis under SIA would be... that all such cubes did in fact contain an observer?
That's just a way the universe could turn out to be bigger, not the only way.
Indeed. I just was suggesting that, insofar as we have no evidence of the massive number of observers under SIA, we would have to invent rather unsupported models of the world in order to implement it.