But a lot of what you've been writing makes explicit use of that term. Your post begins "First of all, let's assume that our minds really do work the way Dust Theory tells us". If what follows is less than perfectly clear on its own (as, at least for me, it is) then it's reasonable to try to use your allusion to Dust Theory to help disambiguate. But we can only do that in so far as we understand exactly what you're taking Dust Theory to be.

Then why would you begin to suspect that the pool of observers does not coincide with the set of minds that have a physical instantiation and dynamics? If there's a nontrivial probability distribution, then there's going to be SOME sort of rules involved, and physics gives us a really solid candidate for what those rules might be.

What did you mean by" they direct the AI to create billions of simulated humanities in the hope that this will serve as a Schelling point to them"

Eitan, I think you should set down exactly what you take "Dust Theory" to mean, for at least the following reasons: Not everyone has read "Permutation City"; those who have may have forgotten some details; the book may not nail down all those details firmly enough to make the term unambiguous; you might mean by it something slightly different from what Egan does.

(For the avoidance of doubt, that last one would not necessarily be a bad thing. The most credible thing deserving the name "Dust Theory" might not be quite the same as what's described in what is, after all, a work of fiction with its own narrative constraints.)

I consider it bad form to do such a massive rewrite, thereby obsoleting the entire previous comment stream.

Regarding your new post, I think you need to taboo the word 'measure' and rewrite all your posts without it. It would make things much more clear for the rest of us. When communicating with others, it is more important to be clear and precise than it is to be compact, and your use of 'measure' is neither clear nor precise to a good number of your audience.

...so you are arguing that probability doesn't mean anything? Something that will happen in 99.99% of universes can be safely assumed to occur in ours.

Absent other information.

You didn't get on to what you mean.

Karl Sims evolved simple blocky creatures to walk and swim (video). In the paper, he writes "For land environments, it can be necessary to prevent creatures from generating high velocities by simply falling over" - ISTR the story is that in the first version of the software, the winning creatures were those that grew very tall and simply fell over towards the target.

[Edited]

I am not expert. And it has to be based on facts about your neurosystem. So you could start with several experiments (blod tests etc). You could change diet, sleep more etc.

About rationality and lesswrong -> could you focus your fears to one thing? For example forgot quantum world and focus to superintelligence? I mean could you utilize the power you have in your brain?

OK, I've rewritten the OP. Sorry about panicking at first.