One of the most striking things about anthropics is that (seemingly) whatever approach is taken, there are very weird conclusions.
Yes. :) The first paragraph here identifies at least one problem with every anthropic theory I'm aware of.
I had a look at this: the KCA (Kolmogorov Complexity) approach seems to match my own thoughts best.
I'm not convinced about the "George Washington" objection. It strikes me that a program which extracts George Washington as an observer from insider a wider program "u" (modelling the universe) wouldn't be significantly shorter than a program which extracts any other human observer living at about the same time. Or indeed, any other animal meeting some crude definition of an observer.
Searching for features of human interest (like "le...
Nick Bostrom's self-sampling assumption treats us as a random sample from a set of observers, but this framework raises several paradoxes. Instead, why not treat the stuff we observe to be a random sample from the set of all stuff that exists? I elaborate on this proposal in a new essay subsection: "SSA on physics rather than observers?" At first glance, it seems to work better than any of the mainstream schools of anthropics. Comments are welcome.
Has this idea been suggested before? I noticed that Robin Hanson proffered something similar way back in 1998 (four years before Bostrom's Anthropic Bias). I'm surprised Hanson's proposal hasn't received more attention in the academic literature.