Well, I guess I’ll have to wait for the details, but off-hand it doesn’t seem that this will work. If action A is “have another child”, and the issue is that you don’t want to do that if the child is going to die if the Earth is destroyed soon in a cataclysm, then the action A is one that can be taken by a wide variety of organisms past and present going back hundreds of millions of years. But many of these you would probably not regard as having an appropriate level of sentience, and some of them that you might regard as sentient seem so different from humans that including them in the reference class seems bizarre. Any sort of line drawn will necessarily be vague, leading to vagueness in probabilities, perhaps by factors of ten or more.
FNC = Full Non-indexical Conditioning, the method I advocate in my paper.
Well, I guess I’ll have to wait for the details, but off-hand it doesn’t seem that this will work. If action A is “have another child”, and the issue is that you don’t want to do that if the child is going to die if the Earth is destroyed soon in a cataclysm, then the action A is one that can be taken by a wide variety of organisms past and present going back hundreds of millions of years. But many of these you would probably not regard as having an appropriate level of sentience, and some of them that you might regard as sentient seem so different from humans that including them in the reference class seems bizarre. Any sort of line drawn will necessarily be vague, leading to vagueness in probabilities, perhaps by factors of ten or more.
FNC = Full Non-indexical Conditioning, the method I advocate in my paper.