PlaidX comments on The Presumptuous Philosopher's Presumptuous Friend - Less Wrong

3 Post author: PlaidX 05 October 2009 05:26AM

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Comment author: PlaidX 06 October 2009 10:40:25PM 1 point [-]

the term "anthropic reasoning" is supposed to carve out a natural category in conceptspace

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.

Comment author: SilasBarta 06 October 2009 10:46:47PM *  1 point [-]

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.

Comment author: PlaidX 07 October 2009 04:26:52AM 0 points [-]

Fair enough!