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Furslid comments on Fundamentals of kicking anthropic butt - Less Wrong
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There is the humanity of the observer to consider, but I don't think that simply adding existence and humanity transforms SIA into SSA.
The example for the sleeping beauty problem shows this. Under SIA, she can reason about the bet by comparing herself to a set of 3 possible waking beauties. Under SSA this is impermissible because there is only a class of one or two existent waking beauties. Under SIA, she knows her existence and her humanity but this does not change the reasoning possible.
SSA is impossible for sleeping beauty to use, because using it properly requires knowing if there are 1 or 2 waking beauties, which requires knowing the problem under consideration. The same problem would come up in any anthropic problem. As the answer to the question determines the set of SSA, the set of SSA cannot be a tool used in calculating the probabilities of different answers.
Depends on what you mean by "use." If you mean "use as a mysterious process that outputs probabilities," then you're right, it's unusable. But if you mean "use as a set of starting information," there is no problem.
I mean use as part of any process to determine probabilities of an anthropic problem. Mysterious or not. How can she use it as a set of starting information?
I may be misinterpreting, but to use either requires the identification of the set of items being considered. If I'm wrong, can you walk me through how sleeping beauty would consider her problem using SSA as her set of starting information?
Hm.
You're sort of right, because remember the Sweden problem. When we asked "what is the probability that I live in Sweden," using SSA, we didn't consider alternate earths. And the reason we didn't consider alternate earths is because we used the information that Sweden exists, and is a country in europe, etc. We made our reference class "humans on this earth." But if you try to pull those same shenanigans with Sleeping Beauty (if we use the problem statement where there's a copy of her) and make the reference class "humans who have my memories" you just get an "ERROR = DON'T HAVE COMPLETE INFORMATION ABOUT THIS REFERENCE CLASS."
But what do you do when you have incomplete information? You use probabilities! So you get some sort of situation where you know that P(copy 1 | tails) = P(copy 2 | tails), but you don't know about P(heads) and P(tails). And, hm, I think knowing that you're an observer that exists includes some sneaky connotation about mutual exclusivity and exhaustiveness of all your options.