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PlaidX comments on The Presumptuous Philosopher's Presumptuous Friend - Less Wrong
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Do you consider the original presumptuous philosopher problem to involve anthropic reasoning? What is it that's required to be undefined for reasoning to be anthropic?
Anthropic reasoning is any reasoning based on the fact that you (believe you) exist, and any condition necessary for you to reach that state, including suppositions about what such conditions include. It can be supplemented by observations of the world as it is.
In this problem, most of the problems that purport to use anthropic reasoning, and the original presumptuous philosopher problems, they are just reasoning from arbitrary givens, which don't even generalize to anthropic reasoning. Each time, someone is able to point out a problem isomorphic to the one given, but lacking a characteristically anthropic component to the reasoning.
Anthropic reasoning is simply not the same as "hey, what if someone did this to you, where these things had this frequency, what would you conclude upon seeing this?" That's just a normal inference problem.
Just to show that I'm being reasonable, here is what I would consider a real case of anthropic reasoning.
"I notice that I exist. The noticer seems to be the same as that which exists. So, whatever the computational process is for generating my observations must either permit self-reflection, or the thing I notice existing isn't really the same thing having these thoughts."
To me, that just indicates that anthropic reasoning is valid, or at least that what we're calling anthropic reasoning is valid.
Well, that just means that you're doing ordinary reasoning, of which anthropic reasoning is a subset. It does not follow that this (and topics like it) is anthropic reasoning. And no, you don't get to define words however you like: the term "anthropic reasoning" is supposed to carve out a natural category in conceptspace, yet when you use it to mean "any reasoning from arbitrary premises", you're making the term less helpful.
If it doesn't carve out such a category, maybe that's because it's a malformed concept, not because we're using it wrong. Off the top of my head, I see no reason why the existence of the observer should be a special data point that needs to be fed into the data processing system in a special way.
Strangely enough, that's actually pretty close to what I believe -- see my comment here.
So, despite all this arguing, we seem to have almost the same view!
Still, given that it's a malformed concept, you still need to remain as faithful as possible to what it purports to mean, or at least note that your example can be converted into a clearly non-anthropic one without loss of generality.
Fair enough!