Unknowns comments on Contrived infinite-torture scenarios: July 2010 - Less Wrong

24 Post author: PlaidX 23 July 2010 11:54PM

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

Comments (188)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 25 July 2010 10:22:57AM *  8 points [-]

This falls in the same confused cluster as anticipated experience. You only anticipate certain things happening because they describe the fraction of the game you value playing and are able to play (plan for), over other possibilities where things go crazy. Observations don't provide evidence, and how you react to observations is a manner in which you follow a plan, conditional strategy of doing certain things in response to certain inputs, a plan that you must decide on from other considerations. Laws of physics seem to be merely a projection of our preference, something we came to value because we evolved to play the game within them (and are not able to easily influence things outside of them).

So "credence" is a very imprecise idea, and certainly not something you can use to make conclusions about what is actually possible (well, apart from however it reveals your prior, which might be a lot). What is actually possible is all there in the prior, not in what you observe. This suggests a kind of "anti-Bayesian" principle, where the only epistemic function of observations is to "update" your knowledge about what your prior actually is, but this "updating" is not at all straightforward. (This view also allows to get rid of the madness in anthropic thought experiments.)

(This is a serious response. Honest.)

Edit: See also this clarification.

Comment author: Unknowns 25 July 2010 02:48:16PM 2 points [-]

This is crazy.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 25 July 2010 03:09:06PM 1 point [-]

Yes, quite absurd.