rwallace comments on Forcing Anthropics: Boltzmann Brains - Less Wrong

17 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 07 September 2009 07:02PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (59)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: rwallace 07 September 2009 11:55:51PM 0 points [-]

It's a tricky category of question alright - you can make it even trickier by varying the procedure by which the copies are created.

The best answer I've come up with so far is to just maximize total utility. Thus, I choose the billion to one side because it maximizes the number of copies of me that hold true beliefs. I will be interested to see whether my procedure withstands your argument in the other direction.

(And of course there is the other complication that strictly speaking the probability of a logical coin is either zero or one, we just don't know which. But even though such logical uncertainties are not strictly speaking matters of probability, it is sometimes most useful to treat them as such in a particular context.)