Jordan comments on It's not like anything to be a bat - Less Wrong

15 Post author: Yvain 27 March 2010 02:32PM

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Comment author: Jordan 27 March 2010 07:05:31PM *  3 points [-]

The anthropic principle is contingent on no additional information. For example, if sentient life exists elsewhere in the universe, your odds of being a human are vanishingly small.

True, assuming sentient life is common enough.

This would suggest sentient life does not exist elsewhere in the universe.

Not true. This is like saying that if you roll a million sided die and get 362,853 then the die must have been fixed because the chance of getting 362,853 is 1-in-a-million!

Comment author: Psychohistorian 27 March 2010 09:14:54PM -1 points [-]

if you roll a million sided die and get 362,853 then the die must have been fixed because the chance of getting 362,853 is 1-in-a-million!

Were that appropriate, the same mechanism would also defeat the reasoning in this post. While I agree with your ultimate conclusion, using solely the anthropic principle and no additional information, I believe you are compelled to conclude extraterrestrial life does not exist.

Comment author: Nick_Tarleton 27 March 2010 09:26:30PM *  1 point [-]

Were that appropriate, the same mechanism would also defeat the reasoning in this post.

I disagree. There is a natural category (sentience, reflectivity, etc.) that picks out humans over other Earthly animals and leads to a more-than-max-entropy prior for humans being more anthropically special*; this is not the case for either 362,853 or Earth.

* If you accept anthropic reasoning at all, that is. I'm sort of playing devil's advocate in this comment; this post mostly just pushes me further towards biting the bullet of UDT/collapsing epistemology to decision theory.