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Wei_Dai comments on Anthropics in a Tegmark Multiverse - Less Wrong Discussion

12 Post author: paulfchristiano 02 April 2011 06:34PM

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Comment author: Wei_Dai 03 April 2011 05:35:48AM 0 points [-]

I have a preference over the possible observer-moments which I personally may experience--I can consider two probability distributions over observer-moments and decide which one it would rather experience.

I'm curious what your thoughts are on this post.

Also, here are a couple of other problems that I ran into, which I think you might be interested in, or have some ideas about.

  • If you use a UTM-based distribution, which UTM do you choose? Is there a notion of complexity that is not relative to something more or less arbitrary?
  • Using a UTM-based distribution seems to imply ignoring all the copies of you who are living in uncomputable worlds. It would be nice to have a complexity-based measure over all of math, but that seems impossible.
Comment author: paulfchristiano 03 April 2011 08:07:00PM 0 points [-]

I was very confused about identical independent copies before. Right now the view given here is the best one I have thought of---more independent copies are more significant, just like copies running on more easily specified substrates. In this view copy immortality has no value--there is no difference between 2 copies with probability 1/2 and 1 copy with probability 1.

I have no idea how to choose a notion of complexity, either amongst UTMs or over some broader class of descriptions. I hope that at some point I will encounter a good argument for one choice or another, but I don't yet know of any and its not clear why there would be a good argument.

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