Your anthropic explanation of measure in the context of other physical laws sounds feasible, but I don’t think it’s a viable strategy for explaining physical laws themselves, or that anthropic explanations are as widely applicable as many people tend to apply them.
For example, you asked “why aren’t we in that world instead of this one?”, but I don’t think it’s a meaningful question. See what form your anthropic explanation of measure in the post has: it follows directly from formalization of the question, as are all mathematical arguments. For example, you formalize “expected observations” as “those consistent with me continuing to operate”. But you can’t similarly “re-formalize” things that are already defined in an incompatible way, for example you can’t formalize human as a dolphin, and thus seek to answer the question of why you are a human and not a dolphin.
This is actually relevant to recent discussions of decision theory: you always control fixed things, that are already defined. To control X, you must know what X is, and that definition determines the outcome of control as well, even “before” you’ve decided. Similarly, a question of “Why is X not Y?” presupposes a notion of X being Y, which is often clearly not possible, given definitions of X and Y, just as you can prove that in Newcomb’s problem, the payoff of 17 doesn’t ever happen, even without assuming anything about your possible action.
(Of course, this discussion diverges from the topic of the post, and returns to that of my prior comment linked above.)
On one hand, I agree with pretty much everything you wrote: anthropic explanations that actually work are very hard to come by, what I wrote sounds like the good kind, extending it to other physical laws beyond measure won’t work.
On the other hand, I’d be very cautious to declare any question as meaningless. For now I withhold judgment on the issue of dolphins because I don’t know enough. “Round manhole covers are round by definition” is correct, but not always complete.
Your anthropic explanation of measure in the context of other physical laws sounds feasible, but I don’t think it’s a viable strategy for explaining physical laws themselves, or that anthropic explanations are as widely applicable as many people tend to apply them.
For example, you asked “why aren’t we in that world instead of this one?”, but I don’t think it’s a meaningful question. See what form your anthropic explanation of measure in the post has: it follows directly from formalization of the question, as are all mathematical arguments. For example, you formalize “expected observations” as “those consistent with me continuing to operate”. But you can’t similarly “re-formalize” things that are already defined in an incompatible way, for example you can’t formalize human as a dolphin, and thus seek to answer the question of why you are a human and not a dolphin.
This is actually relevant to recent discussions of decision theory: you always control fixed things, that are already defined. To control X, you must know what X is, and that definition determines the outcome of control as well, even “before” you’ve decided. Similarly, a question of “Why is X not Y?” presupposes a notion of X being Y, which is often clearly not possible, given definitions of X and Y, just as you can prove that in Newcomb’s problem, the payoff of 17 doesn’t ever happen, even without assuming anything about your possible action.
(Of course, this discussion diverges from the topic of the post, and returns to that of my prior comment linked above.)
On one hand, I agree with pretty much everything you wrote: anthropic explanations that actually work are very hard to come by, what I wrote sounds like the good kind, extending it to other physical laws beyond measure won’t work.
On the other hand, I’d be very cautious to declare any question as meaningless. For now I withhold judgment on the issue of dolphins because I don’t know enough. “Round manhole covers are round by definition” is correct, but not always complete.