jimrandomh comments on The Anthropic Trilemma - Less Wrong

24 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 27 September 2009 01:47AM

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

Comments (218)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: jimrandomh 12 March 2010 09:51:11PM 1 point [-]

Tafter thinking about the Anthropic Trilemma for awhile, I've come up with an alternative resolution which I think is better than, or at least simpler than, any of the other resolutions. Rather than try to construct a path for consciousness to follow inductively forwards through time, start at the end and go backwards: from the set of times at which an entity I consider to be a copy of me dies, choose one at random weighted by quantum measure, then choose uniformly at random from all paths ending there.

The trick is that this means that while copying your mind increases the probability of ending up in the universe where you're copied, merging back together cancels it out perfectly. This means that you can send information back in time and influence your path through the universe by self-copying, but only log(n) bits of information or influence for n copies that you can't get rid of without probably dying.