Wait, how does the grabby aliens argument support this? I understand that it points to “the universe will be carved up between expansive spacefaring civilizations” (without reference to whether those are biological or not), and also to “the universe will cease to be a place where new biological civilizations can emerge” (without reference to what will happen to existing civilizations). But am I missing an inferential step?
i might be confused about this but “witnessing a super-early universe” seems to support “a typical universe moment is not generating observer moments for your reference class”. but, yeah, anthropics is very confusing, so i’m not confident in this.
“our reference class” includes roughly the observations we make before observing that we’re very early in the universe
This includes stuff like being a pre-singularity civilization
The anthropics here suggest there won’t be lots of civs later arising and being in our reference class and then finding that they’re much later in universe histories
It doesn’t speak to the existence or otherwise of future human-observer moments in a post-singularity civilization
… but as you say anthropics is confusing, so I might be getting this wrong.
Wait, how does the grabby aliens argument support this? I understand that it points to “the universe will be carved up between expansive spacefaring civilizations” (without reference to whether those are biological or not), and also to “the universe will cease to be a place where new biological civilizations can emerge” (without reference to what will happen to existing civilizations). But am I missing an inferential step?
i might be confused about this but “witnessing a super-early universe” seems to support “a typical universe moment is not generating observer moments for your reference class”. but, yeah, anthropics is very confusing, so i’m not confident in this.
OK hmm I think I understand what you mean.
I would have thought about it like this:
“our reference class” includes roughly the observations we make before observing that we’re very early in the universe
This includes stuff like being a pre-singularity civilization
The anthropics here suggest there won’t be lots of civs later arising and being in our reference class and then finding that they’re much later in universe histories
It doesn’t speak to the existence or otherwise of future human-observer moments in a post-singularity civilization
… but as you say anthropics is confusing, so I might be getting this wrong.
By my models of anthropics, I think this goes through.