The following has long been a useful heuristic: if your usual theory says that something important looks like a big outlier, seek another theory where it isn’t. For example, when some physics calculations suggested that most brains like ours in the history of the universe would be random fluctuation “Boltzman brains” in the distant future, many took that as suggesting that those calculations were wrong. Which it seems that they in fact
So you agree either it's probability 0 that we live in a infinietly duplicated universe or it's probability 1? After all, the issue with the infinite case (sufficiently large finite get arbitrarily close) amplifies any non-zero prior to 1.
That very much seems wrong to me. And, indeed, it seems wrong because the version where you are biased toward multiple copies are answering a different question. They are answering the question of how you should bet if you are on the hook for all your duplicates (eg even a vanishingly small risk of all of you being tortured for a day really is infinietly bad) but that suggests it's not answering the question of what credence best reflects the evidence the world has infinite duplicates.
As far as I understand it, simulism does likey imply some sort of doomsday. It is probably a personal doomsday, though. The implication is not so much that the entire simulation will end soon, but the branch of the simulation containing us is fairly likely to end soon - since branches from a random point in a tree search are typically fairly short lived. Some level of speculation is involved in this line of reasoning, though.
Re: "even if I believed I was likely in a sim, still all those sim versions of creatures like me from this time would still be only a tiny fraction of future creatures. I'd still be weird."
If you learn that you are one of a million sims, you are a million times less weird than you were when you thought you were unique. You might still be weird, but you are less weird. Some weirdness may be unavoidable in this context. If you throw a D20, any particular result has a low probability of happening - but some result is inevitable.
Re: "I'm skeptical that I am more likely to be in a sim than in real, because interest in past sims falls away quickly with time distance."
IMO, the required sum is quite a bit more complex than that. We want to know what fraction of "people like you" are simulated. That does depend on how interest drops off over time - but it also depends on how big the future is, whether you live at an especially interesting time - and so on. The future could be very large. There is also an argument that now is an interesting time. It is the major evolutionary transition that leads to superintelligence. There's a reason why that might be important to understand. Our descendants will want to know what types of aliens they might encounter. The historical transition to superintelligence could contain important clues about that. This could be a much-simulated era - especially if intelligent life is rare.
I had seen that talk before, as I gave the talk just before it at that event. I'm skeptical that I am more likely to be in a sim than in real, because interest in past sims falls away quickly with time distance. But even if I believed I was likely in a sim, still all those sim versions of creatures like me from this time would still be only a tiny fraction of future creatures. I'd still be weird.
I do like the idea, that self-perception is just a local phenomenom that arises within a volume, described by a set of coordinates in whatever the universe uses.Therefore it is a volume-property and I am that volume.
Takes the pressure off the whole cognition-thing, since the problem literally moves away instantly with the underlying matter, never to be seen again and is some other volume's problem :)
This works nicely with the simulation-hypothesis. You'd have to model yourself being on a hard-drive somewhere. Not sure how much harddrive-space of a universe-simulation would be taken up by brains.But assuming almost all of it? Well, then it's no suprise anymore. The rock-experience would be incredibly exclusive.Though I think you'd still have to be surprised about: "Why am I not a dolphin?"Or anything else that has a brain for that matter.I am not aware that human brains would take comparitively more information to model.I mean... possibly our cognitive complexity would result in that? I could almost imagine it, but not sure.
I'm still midly surprised that I'm human and not a rat.Though if brains take up all the space, more complex brains take up even more...well 7 billion human brains probably have a large portion of the volume vs all the other animal brains of sufficient complexity.
Assuming, no simulation hypothesis?Uhm... I dunno, a string theorist might have an opinion. Not really sure, if/how they all deal with "information as elemental building block"-models.
Yes, we have clear evidence that we are not dead lumps of matter, nor simpler creatures, but even so we can be surprised to see such evidence. Yes, only creatures as smart as we are with language could even ask such questions via language. But that needn’t stop our surprise. Is there alternate theory that makes these less surprising?
I have a theory that makes it way more surprising:Why would you identify your "being" as "lumps of matter", instead of a specific volume of space in the universe?
Then the question could be turned into:Shouldn't I be surprised that I am in a volume of space, which occupies matter at all, rather some space in vacuum?
Note, that even if you were a rock, part of a sun, you'd have cause to be extremely suspicious!
But a less surprising framing would be:Look at "bits needed to describe a process"Then the prior is:Of all the bits that could describe the process, that is me, why did I end up `being` those very bits, that describe this creature?
Vaccum in space? Pretty simple to describe. Nothing much happens. A black hole? Lots of mass, but probably simple.[uhm... especially since time slows down?]Sun? Also not a lot of info required to model to some fidelity.
A human brain? There's a lot more information necessary in describing "process that moves skull-shaped object across volumes in space over time".
I don't exactly know how to formally describe this intuition, but it's related to "entropy" (which I don't understand).
Yes, only creatures as smart as we are with language could even ask such questions via language. But that needn’t stop our surprise.
I can see we might be surprised that there's any intelligent life in the universe at all. But if we take that much as a given, then surely there's no surprise that we are an instance of that intelligent life. Indeed it's inevitable, for the reason given (that we are of a kind that can ask such questions, viz. intelligent life). In any map of the universe - or of other possible ways the universe could have panned out - on which intelligent life is marked with red dots, we can be certain that if we're in the universe at all, we are one of the red dots. So no surprise there.
This may be partly a confusion about personal identity theory in philosophy. AFAIK that doesn't allow that we could have been non-sentient lumps of matter. In a possible world in which there are no humans, I simply don't exist (it's not that I could be a lump of lard or something).
(Though possibly I could have been human and otherwise similar to myself but so unintelligent, e.g. mentally disabled, that I was unable to ask such questions.)
The problem, as others have alluded to, is that this kind of reasoning is ill-defined. There is no robust notion of what 'the other "we"s that we could have been' even means. At best, it requires careful laying out of assumptions. At worst, as in Peter Gerdes' inciteful comment, it means a hidden notion that "we" are formless experience-havers who could have been instantiated as a variety of matter forms. But I don't know that souls exist, let alone that ensoulment works like that, so treating this as a base assumption seems dubious.
To give one alternative assumption, perhaps I could only ever have been me, because my experiential nature is fully integrated with and arises out of my physical form. If I wasn't precisely me, I would be someone else. This reasoning suggests that I am a different person than when I was 20, but that seems like a reasonable bullet to bite.
So you agree either it's probability 0 that we live in a infinietly duplicated universe or it's probability 1? After all, the issue with the infinite case (sufficiently large finite get arbitrarily close) amplifies any non-zero prior to 1.
That very much seems wrong to me. And, indeed, it seems wrong because the version where you are biased toward multiple copies are answering a different question. They are answering the question of how you should bet if you are on the hook for all your duplicates (eg even a vanishingly small risk of all of you being tortured for a day really is infinietly bad) but that suggests it's not answering the question of what credence best reflects the evidence the world has infinite duplicates.
As far as I understand it, simulism does likey imply some sort of doomsday. It is probably a personal doomsday, though. The implication is not so much that the entire simulation will end soon, but the branch of the simulation containing us is fairly likely to end soon - since branches from a random point in a tree search are typically fairly short lived. Some level of speculation is involved in this line of reasoning, though.
Re: "even if I believed I was likely in a sim, still all those sim versions of creatures like me from this time would still be only a tiny fraction of future creatures. I'd still be weird."
If you learn that you are one of a million sims, you are a million times less weird than you were when you thought you were unique. You might still be weird, but you are less weird. Some weirdness may be unavoidable in this context. If you throw a D20, any particular result has a low probability of happening - but some result is inevitable.
Re: "I'm skeptical that I am more likely to be in a sim than in real, because interest in past sims falls away quickly with time distance."
IMO, the required sum is quite a bit more complex than that. We want to know what fraction of "people like you" are simulated. That does depend on how interest drops off over time - but it also depends on how big the future is, whether you live at an especially interesting time - and so on. The future could be very large. There is also an argument that now is an interesting time. It is the major evolutionary transition that leads to superintelligence. There's a reason why that might be important to understand. Our descendants will want to know what types of aliens they might encounter. The historical transition to superintelligence could contain important clues about that. This could be a much-simulated era - especially if intelligent life is rare.
I had seen that talk before, as I gave the talk just before it at that event. I'm skeptical that I am more likely to be in a sim than in real, because interest in past sims falls away quickly with time distance. But even if I believed I was likely in a sim, still all those sim versions of creatures like me from this time would still be only a tiny fraction of future creatures. I'd still be weird.
This issue was addressed by Jaan Tallinn (2012) - in: "Why Now? A Quest in Metaphysics". He proposes a scenario in which we are, in fact typical.
If a model predicts that an observer will exist, there should be no surprise felt from being said observer, since there is nothing left to explain.
I do like the idea, that self-perception is just a local phenomenom that arises within a volume, described by a set of coordinates in whatever the universe uses.Therefore it is a volume-property and I am that volume.
Takes the pressure off the whole cognition-thing, since the problem literally moves away instantly with the underlying matter, never to be seen again and is some other volume's problem :)
This works nicely with the simulation-hypothesis. You'd have to model yourself being on a hard-drive somewhere. Not sure how much harddrive-space of a universe-simulation would be taken up by brains.But assuming almost all of it? Well, then it's no suprise anymore. The rock-experience would be incredibly exclusive.Though I think you'd still have to be surprised about: "Why am I not a dolphin?"Or anything else that has a brain for that matter.I am not aware that human brains would take comparitively more information to model.I mean... possibly our cognitive complexity would result in that? I could almost imagine it, but not sure.
I'm still midly surprised that I'm human and not a rat.Though if brains take up all the space, more complex brains take up even more...well 7 billion human brains probably have a large portion of the volume vs all the other animal brains of sufficient complexity.
Assuming, no simulation hypothesis?Uhm... I dunno, a string theorist might have an opinion. Not really sure, if/how they all deal with "information as elemental building block"-models.
Yes, we have clear evidence that we are not dead lumps of matter, nor simpler creatures, but even so we can be surprised to see such evidence. Yes, only creatures as smart as we are with language could even ask such questions via language. But that needn’t stop our surprise. Is there alternate theory that makes these less surprising?
I have a theory that makes it way more surprising:Why would you identify your "being" as "lumps of matter", instead of a specific volume of space in the universe?
Then the question could be turned into:Shouldn't I be surprised that I am in a volume of space, which occupies matter at all, rather some space in vacuum?
Note, that even if you were a rock, part of a sun, you'd have cause to be extremely suspicious!
But a less surprising framing would be:Look at "bits needed to describe a process"Then the prior is:Of all the bits that could describe the process, that is me, why did I end up `being` those very bits, that describe this creature?
Vaccum in space? Pretty simple to describe. Nothing much happens. A black hole? Lots of mass, but probably simple.[uhm... especially since time slows down?]Sun? Also not a lot of info required to model to some fidelity.
A human brain? There's a lot more information necessary in describing "process that moves skull-shaped object across volumes in space over time".
I don't exactly know how to formally describe this intuition, but it's related to "entropy" (which I don't understand).
No, I don't see that.
contest -> context
“But there’s no particular good reason to expect civilizations to have anything near that average number of future descendants.”
Given the contest that you’ve provided, doesn’t Bayes’ Theorem provide such a reason?
Yes, only creatures as smart as we are with language could even ask such questions via language. But that needn’t stop our surprise.
I can see we might be surprised that there's any intelligent life in the universe at all. But if we take that much as a given, then surely there's no surprise that we are an instance of that intelligent life. Indeed it's inevitable, for the reason given (that we are of a kind that can ask such questions, viz. intelligent life). In any map of the universe - or of other possible ways the universe could have panned out - on which intelligent life is marked with red dots, we can be certain that if we're in the universe at all, we are one of the red dots. So no surprise there.
This may be partly a confusion about personal identity theory in philosophy. AFAIK that doesn't allow that we could have been non-sentient lumps of matter. In a possible world in which there are no humans, I simply don't exist (it's not that I could be a lump of lard or something).
(Though possibly I could have been human and otherwise similar to myself but so unintelligent, e.g. mentally disabled, that I was unable to ask such questions.)
Huh? A calculation that undermines physics is flawed.
The problem, as others have alluded to, is that this kind of reasoning is ill-defined. There is no robust notion of what 'the other "we"s that we could have been' even means. At best, it requires careful laying out of assumptions. At worst, as in Peter Gerdes' inciteful comment, it means a hidden notion that "we" are formless experience-havers who could have been instantiated as a variety of matter forms. But I don't know that souls exist, let alone that ensoulment works like that, so treating this as a base assumption seems dubious.
To give one alternative assumption, perhaps I could only ever have been me, because my experiential nature is fully integrated with and arises out of my physical form. If I wasn't precisely me, I would be someone else. This reasoning suggests that I am a different person than when I was 20, but that seems like a reasonable bullet to bite.