I agree that it’s a different claim, and not the one I was trying to make. I was just noting that however one defines “observer,” the SIA would suggest that such observers should be many. Thus, I don’t think that the SIA is inserting a hidden assumption about the type of observers we are discussing.
Right, but my point was that your definition of observer has a big impact on your SIA’s plausibility. Yes, universes with observers in the general sense are more likely, but why universes with more human observers?
Why would being human change the calculus of the SIA? According to its logic, if a universe only has more human observers, there are still more opportunities for me to exist, no?
My point was that the SIA(human) is less plausible, meaning you shouldn’t base conclusions on it, not that the resulting calculus (conditional on its truth) would be different.
Surely the extremes “update on all available information” and “never update on anything” are each more plausible than any mixture like “update on the observation that I exist, but not on the observation that I’m human”.
I agree that it’s a different claim, and not the one I was trying to make. I was just noting that however one defines “observer,” the SIA would suggest that such observers should be many. Thus, I don’t think that the SIA is inserting a hidden assumption about the type of observers we are discussing.
Right, but my point was that your definition of observer has a big impact on your SIA’s plausibility. Yes, universes with observers in the general sense are more likely, but why universes with more human observers?
Why would being human change the calculus of the SIA? According to its logic, if a universe only has more human observers, there are still more opportunities for me to exist, no?
My point was that the SIA(human) is less plausible, meaning you shouldn’t base conclusions on it, not that the resulting calculus (conditional on its truth) would be different.
That’s what I meant, though: you don’t calculate the probability of SIA(human) any differently than you would for any other category of observer.
Surely the extremes “update on all available information” and “never update on anything” are each more plausible than any mixture like “update on the observation that I exist, but not on the observation that I’m human”.