simon2 comments on The Conscious Sorites Paradox - Less Wrong

9 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 28 April 2008 02:58AM

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Comment author: simon2 29 April 2008 12:11:04AM 0 points [-]

Eliezer: OK, so you object to branching indifference.

Here is what I was going to reply until I remembered that you support mangled worlds:

"So, I guess I'll go buy a lottery ticket, and if I win, I'll conduct an experiment that branches the universe 10^100 times (eg. single electron Stern-Gerlach repeated less than 1000 times). That way I'll be virtually certain to win."

Now, I suppose with mangled worlds and a low cutoff you can't quite rule out your point of view experimentally this way. But you're still proposing a rule in which if you have a world which splits into world A and world B, they have probability 1/2 each, and then when world B splits into B1 and B2, it changes the probability of A to 1/3 - until an unobserved physical process turns the probability of A back to 1/2. Seems a little odd, no?