selylindi comments on Pascal's Mugging: Tiny Probabilities of Vast Utilities - Less Wrong

39 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 19 October 2007 11:37PM

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Comment author: selylindi 13 January 2012 10:25:03PM *  1 point [-]

"Pascal's" Mugging requires me to believe that the apparent universe that we occupy, with its very low information content, is in fact merely part of a much larger program (in a causally linked and so incompressible way) which admits calculation within it of a specially designed (high-information content) universe with 3^^^^3 people (and not, say, as a side-effect of a low-information simulation that also computes other possibilities like giving immense life and joy to comparable numbers of people). The odds of that, if we use the speed priors, would seem to be 2^-(bits describing our universe + number of instructions to compute it):2^-(bits describing that vastly larger universe + number of instructions to compute it). That's going to be a minimum of 1:-2^(O(3^^^^3)), so by the speed prior this particular kind of probability falls away hugely faster than the utility grows.

However, I have little doubt that some creative philosopher can find some way to rescue the mugging argument in slightly different form.