Giskard

On the same day I posted my original comment I later realized what I said was wrong, and I'll soon edit it to reflect that.

Regarding your response: I think I have a guess on the important difference you're referring to. They both seem to be equivalent to an Incubator Sleeping Beauty, but see consideration 2 bellow.

1

I think another useful (at least to me) way of seeing/stating what is happening here is that all of the following sentences are true, in an ISB and your two experiments:

• The probability (from an external POV) that the coin was Heads or Tails is 1/2.
• Each individual "me" (however many there are) will experience the coin being Heads

But Heads outcome in Incubator Sleeping Beauty is not. You are not randomly selected among two immaterial souls to be instantiated. You are a sample of one. And as there is no random choice happening, you are not twice as likely to exist when the coin is Tails and there is no new information you get when you are created.

I am twice as likely to exist when the coin is Tails! After all, if the coin is Tails, then there are two of me. I understand how this can lead to a thirder conclusion:

1. Heads implies one chance for me to exist.
2. Tails implies two chances for me to exist.
3. I observe that I exist.

I think I don't understand what makes you say that anthropic reasoning requires "reasoning from a perspective that is impartial to any moment". The way I think about this is the following:

• If I imagine how an omnitemporal, omniscient being would see me, I imagine they would see me as a randomly selected sample from all humans, past present and future (which don't really exist for the being).
• From my point of view, it does feel weird to say that "I'm a randomly selected sample", but I certainly don't feel like there is anything special about the year I was born. This, combined with the fact that I'm obviously human, is just a from-my-point-of-view

For now, I see no reason to deviate from the simple explanations to the problems OP posited.

Why am I me?

Well, "am" (an individual being someone), "I" and "me" (the self) are tricky concepts. One possible way to bypass (some of) the trickiness is to consider the alternative: "why am I not someone else"?

Well, imagine for a moment that you are someone else. Imagine that you are me. In fact, you've always been me, ever since I was born. You've never thought "huh, so this is what it feels like to be someone else". All you've ever thought is "what would it be like to be someone else?". Then one day you tried... (read 380 more words →)

So, I'm 10 years late. Nevertheless I'm throwing my two cents into this comment, even if it's just for peace of mind.

Mostly agree with the litany, as I interpret it as saying not that "there are no negative consequences to handling the truth", but saying instead that "the negative consequences of not handling the truth are always worse than the consequences of handling it". However, upon serious inspection I also feel unsure about it, on the corner cases of truths which could have an emotional impact over people (or on me) greater than their concrete impact.

With that said, my suggestion 10 years ago would have been to include the Litany of Gendlin... (read more)

In this article, you posit that "positive sum networks will out-compete [...] antisocial capitalism [...]".

If I understand correctly, this is due to cooperative systems of agents (positive-sum networks) producing more utility than purely-competitive systems. You paint a good picture of this phenomenon happening, and I think you are describing something similar to what Scott Alexander is in In Favor of Niceness, Community, and Civilization.

However, the question then becomes "what exactly makes people choose to cooperate, and when?" You cite the Prisoner's Dilemma as a situation where the outcome Cooperate/Cooperate is better than the outcome Compete/Compete for both players. That is true, but the outcome Compete/Cooperate is better for player 1 than any... (read more)