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Johnicholas comments on Outlawing Anthropics: An Updateless Dilemma - Less Wrong
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Comments (194)
Cute.
You may be able to translate into the language of "wake, query, induce amnesia" - many copies would correspond to many wakings.
No, the dilemma depends on having many copies. You're trying to optimize the outcome averaged over all copies (before the copies are made), because you don't know which copy "you" will "be".
In the no-copies / amnesia version, the updateless approach is clearly correct. You have no data to update on - awakening in a green room tells you nothing about the coin tosses because either way you'd wake up in a green room at least once (and you forget about it, so you don't know how many times it happened). Therefore you will always refuse to play.
But we don't have the type of amnesia drugs required to manifest the Sleeping Beauty problem, and perhaps there is something about consciousness that would prevent them from ever being created. (Isn't there some law of physics that precludes the total destruction of information.)
I don't understand - what type of amnesia drug is required? For example, this lab:
http://memory.psy.cmu.edu/
apparently routinely does experiments induce temporary amnesia using a drug called midalozam. In general, I was under the impression that a wide variety of drugs have side effects of various degrees and kinds of amnesia, including both anterograde and retrograde.
Your proposal that consciousness might be conserved, and moreover that this might be proved by armchair reasoning seems a bit farfetched. Are you:
My first comment was (2) the second (1).
If DanArmk's comment is correct then it isn't important for my original comment whether there exists amnesia drugs.
If your post is correct then my second comment is incorrect.
Microscopic reversibility prohibits any destruction of the information necessary to run things backwards - and that's all the information in the universe as far as we know.