Christian_Szegedy comments on Forcing Anthropics: Boltzmann Brains - Less Wrong

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

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Comment author: Christian_Szegedy 08 September 2009 12:59:37AM *  5 points [-]

I would have answered 1B:1 (looking forward to the second post to be proved wrong), however I think a rational agent should never believe in the Boltzmann brain scenario regardless.

Not because it is not a reasonable hypothesis, but since it negates the agent's capabilities of estimating prior probabilities (it cannot trust even a predetermined portion of its memories) plus it also makes optimizing outcomes a futile undertaking.

Therefore, I'd generally say that an agent has to assume an objective, causal reality as a precondition of using decision theory at all.