SIA is equivalent to making a Bayesian update as if god (a non-reference class external observer) asks the question “Does the person with these characteristics (the characteristics of the physical person “I”) exist?” and gets a positive answer. (AKA. Update on one’s existence)
But why would god focus on those specific characteristics and raise that question at all. It makes sense for someone to be biased towards themself, such as you focusing on the name avturchin, and me on the name dadadarren, but why would a non-reference class external observer pay special attention to either？
If am understanding correctly, you are suggesting there is no reason to focus on characteristics like an ordinary name as it is only special to that person themself. But if a characteristic is indeed objectively special, like the color of dots in your example, then it is ok to perform the Bayesian update to more observers.
But it is impossible to say what characteristic is objectively special. There could be infinite ways to differentiate and group the dots, e.g. we could label them 1-100, isn’t the No.1 just as special as the red dot? Even from the god’s eye view, the purposed Bayesian update requires a prior sampling to justify. E.g. if god specifically asks “Is there an arrow on the red dot?”(instead of asking other questions such as “is there an arrow on No.1?” or something similar) and gets a positive answer. Then the calculation follows.
I agree with you that there needs to be some sense of “priory uniqueness” for the existing observer to suggest there are more of their kind, or else the evidence is just blandly “there is an observer”. I simply don’t agree there is any way to justify this uniqueness. SIA falsely created this sense of uniqueness using first-person bias. Yet that is not applicable from the god’s eye view whose supporters want to perform the calculation from.
In some sense, situation with SIA looks like as p-hacking: we select a hypothesis after we got the data.
But if we preselect uniqueness, any type of uniqueness works. For example, cells are numbered. Before the experiment, we choose the number 73. In that case, discovering that 73 was hit will be strong update for 100 attempts vs. only 10 attempts.
Yes! any characteristic works as long as it is preselected. But it needs to be actually selected or sampled.
Yet there is no sampling in anthropic problems. SIA assumes the first-person “I” (or “now”) is equivalent to a random sample. So it treats finding myself as the person who’s been created in room 73 the same way as if an external observer selected room 73 and finds someone exists in it. It is just an assumption that lacks any logical backing.
SIA is equivalent to making a Bayesian update as if god (a non-reference class external observer) asks the question “Does the person with these characteristics (the characteristics of the physical person “I”) exist?” and gets a positive answer. (AKA. Update on one’s existence)
But why would god focus on those specific characteristics and raise that question at all. It makes sense for someone to be biased towards themself, such as you focusing on the name avturchin, and me on the name dadadarren, but why would a non-reference class external observer pay special attention to either？
If am understanding correctly, you are suggesting there is no reason to focus on characteristics like an ordinary name as it is only special to that person themself. But if a characteristic is indeed objectively special, like the color of dots in your example, then it is ok to perform the Bayesian update to more observers.
But it is impossible to say what characteristic is objectively special. There could be infinite ways to differentiate and group the dots, e.g. we could label them 1-100, isn’t the No.1 just as special as the red dot? Even from the god’s eye view, the purposed Bayesian update requires a prior sampling to justify. E.g. if god specifically asks “Is there an arrow on the red dot?”(instead of asking other questions such as “is there an arrow on No.1?” or something similar) and gets a positive answer. Then the calculation follows.
I agree with you that there needs to be some sense of “priory uniqueness” for the existing observer to suggest there are more of their kind, or else the evidence is just blandly “there is an observer”. I simply don’t agree there is any way to justify this uniqueness. SIA falsely created this sense of uniqueness using first-person bias. Yet that is not applicable from the god’s eye view whose supporters want to perform the calculation from.
In some sense, situation with SIA looks like as p-hacking: we select a hypothesis after we got the data.
But if we preselect uniqueness, any type of uniqueness works. For example, cells are numbered. Before the experiment, we choose the number 73. In that case, discovering that 73 was hit will be strong update for 100 attempts vs. only 10 attempts.
Yes! any characteristic works as long as it is preselected. But it needs to be actually selected or sampled.
Yet there is no sampling in anthropic problems. SIA assumes the first-person “I” (or “now”) is equivalent to a random sample. So it treats finding myself as the person who’s been created in room 73 the same way as if an external observer selected room 73 and finds someone exists in it. It is just an assumption that lacks any logical backing.
The same can be said about SSA too.