Viliam_Bur comments on Causal Universes - Less Wrong

60 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 29 November 2012 04:08AM

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Comment author: Viliam_Bur 29 November 2012 07:46:44PM *  19 points [-]

This is not a full answer (I don't have one), just a sidenote: Believing to most likely not be a Boltzmann brain does not necessarily mean that Boltzmann brains are less likely. It could also be some kind of a survivor bias.

Imagine that every night when you sleep, someone makes hundred copies of you. One copy, randomly selected, remains in your bed. Other 99 copies are taken away and killed horribly. This was happening all your life, you just didn't know it. What do you expect about tomorrow?

From the outside view, tomorrow the 99 copies of you will be killed, and 1 copy will continue to live. Therefore you should expect to be killed.

But from inside, today's you is the lucky copy of the lucky copy, because all the unlucky copies are dead. Your whole experience is about surviving, because the unlucky ones don't have experiences now. So based on your past, you expect to survive the next day. And the next day, 99 copies of you will die, but the remaining 1 will say: "I told you so!".

So even if the Boltzmann brains are more simulated, and 99.99% of my copies are dying horribly in vacuum within the next seconds, they don't have a story. The remaining copy does. And the story says: "I am not a Boltzman brain".