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Technologos comments on Avoiding doomsday: a "proof" of the self-indication assumption - Less Wrong
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I'm relatively green on the Doomsday debate, but:
Isn't this inserting a hidden assumption about what kind of observers we're talking about? What definition of "observer" do you get to use, and why? In order to "observe", all that's necessary is that you form mutual information with another part of the universe, and conscious entities are a tiny sliver of this set in the observed universe. So the SIA already puts a low probability on the data.
I made a similar point before, but apparenlty there's a flaw in the logic somewhere.
Wouldn't the principle be independent of the form of the observer? If we said "universes with many human observers are more likely than universes with few," the logic would apply just as well as with matter-based observers or observers defined as mutual-information-formers.
But why is the assumption that universes with human observers are more likely (than those with few) plausible or justifiable? That's a fundamentally different claim!
I agree that it's a different claim, and not the one I was trying to make. I was just noting that however one defines "observer," the SIA would suggest that such observers should be many. Thus, I don't think that the SIA is inserting a hidden assumption about the type of observers we are discussing.
Right, but my point was that your definition of observer has a big impact on your SIA's plausibility. Yes, universes with observers in the general sense are more likely, but why universes with more human observers?
Why would being human change the calculus of the SIA? According to its logic, if a universe only has more human observers, there are still more opportunities for me to exist, no?
My point was that the SIA(human) is less plausible, meaning you shouldn't base conclusions on it, not that the resulting calculus (conditional on its truth) would be different.
That's what I meant, though: you don't calculate the probability of SIA(human) any differently than you would for any other category of observer.