drnickbone comments on Papers framing anthropic questions as decision problems? - Less Wrong

3 Post author: jsalvatier 26 April 2012 12:40AM

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Comment author: drnickbone 30 April 2012 08:30:06PM *  0 points [-]

OK, the "surreals" contain the transfinite ordinals, hence they contain the infinite cardinals as well. So, surreals can indeed model universes of strictly infinite size i.e. not just non-standard finite size.

I think the SIA problem of weighting towards the "largest possible" models still applies though. Suppose we have identified two models of an infinite universe; one says there are aleph0 galaxies; the other says there are aleph1 galaxies. Under SIA, the aleph1 model gets all the probability weight (or decision weight).

If we have a range of models with infinities of different cardinalities, and no largest cardinal (as in Zermelo Fraenkel set theory) then the SIA probability function becomes wild, and in a certain sense vanishes completely. (Given any cardinal X, models of size X or smaller have zero probability.)

Comment author: endoself 30 April 2012 09:05:39PM 0 points [-]

Yes, this doesn't solve the problem of divergence of expected utility, it just lets us say that our infinite expected utilities are not converging rather than only having arbitrarily large real utilities fail to converge.