steven0461 comments on Where Experience Confuses Physicists - Less Wrong

17 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 26 April 2008 05:05AM

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Comment author: Wei_Dai 30 September 2009 09:07:53PM 3 points [-]

To expand upon this a bit more, consider:

  • In standard anthropic reasoning, you should expect to find yourself at coordinate 2 with high probability before you've observed anything other than "I'm sentient", and also anticipate observing experimental results consistent with being at coordinate 2.
  • Under SIA, you should expect to live in a world with measure proportional to thickness^2, even if the world has no fifth dimension.
  • Under UDT, you care equally about every coordinate c, but will act as if you care mostly about c=2, because that is where you can create the most value with your decisions. (And same for worlds without the fifth dimension.)

So this seems to be a perfectly good (possible) solution.

Comment author: steven0461 30 September 2009 10:53:22PM *  4 points [-]

sentient

I think it would be a good habit for people here to take explicit notice whenever decision-making concepts and consciousness/sentience concepts occur in association. Other than that decision-makers can have preferences about consciousness/sentience, decision-making and consciousness/sentience don't obviously have anything to do with each other. (Not that I object to parent comment, I just needed a place to say this.)

Comment author: Wei_Dai 30 September 2009 11:53:34PM *  2 points [-]

Yes, I agree. In fact, in UDT, decision making doesn't depend on consciousness/sentience, but in the standard formulation of anthropic reasoning, it does. So I would count that as an advantage for UDT (and actually it was the original motivation for me to consider it).

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