essentially, I believe in all possible things, and all entities existing in all possible contexts.
Dust Theory has a problem: there are many more possible chaotic worlds than possible ordered worlds. Therefore each conscious observer must believe that they appeared in the smallest ordered bubble that can sustain them; in other words, that the beautiful order they observe is an accident, and chaos will reach us at the speed of light any moment now. So, do you really think you will morph into a pheasant tomorrow?
There are many more chaotic worlds, but simple worlds will be more common within those chaotic worlds. For example, for any universe you can get another universe by adding “You turn into a pheasant”, but you can also get one by adding “Universe A exists inside of it”. Because the latter is presumably simpler, it will occur more often. There will also be universes that have “Universe A + you turn into a pheasant exists inside of it” but there will be more with “Universe A exists inside of it twice” and so on. In short, although virtually every universe is chaotic, most of the people living in them will be the ones living in ordered universes inside of them.
The ordered universes have a higher weight. The weight decreases exponentially with the chaos, so that there’s a finite probability of a finitely chaotic world.
In order to say there are “more” chaotic worlds, you have to pick a measure to put on the space of all possible worlds.
If you did want to put a measure on the space of all possible worlds, nothing forces you to put more weight on the chaotic ones than the ordered ones.
With a measure, you can give probabilities to things—but as you’ve noticed, those probabilities may not correspond to your current informal notion of probability.
Alternatively, the conscious observer simply interprets the surrounding chaos as ordered in some way. Despite the fact that I will be a pheasant tomorrow and I was a pushme-pullyou yesterday, I always perceive myself as the same continuous being.
Don’t people actually do this anyway? It’s called “storytelling”: the knack for finding meaning in the random series of events that is reality.
Why would any random conscious being be formed so as to interpret its particular surrounding chaos as ordered? The theory as proposed establishes no connection between “what an agent interprets as normal” and “what an agent observes at any given instant”.
Dust Theory has a problem: there are many more possible chaotic worlds than possible ordered worlds. Therefore each conscious observer must believe that they appeared in the smallest ordered bubble that can sustain them; in other words, that the beautiful order they observe is an accident, and chaos will reach us at the speed of light any moment now. So, do you really think you will morph into a pheasant tomorrow?
There’s two possible counterarguments to this:
There are many more chaotic worlds, but simple worlds will be more common within those chaotic worlds. For example, for any universe you can get another universe by adding “You turn into a pheasant”, but you can also get one by adding “Universe A exists inside of it”. Because the latter is presumably simpler, it will occur more often. There will also be universes that have “Universe A + you turn into a pheasant exists inside of it” but there will be more with “Universe A exists inside of it twice” and so on. In short, although virtually every universe is chaotic, most of the people living in them will be the ones living in ordered universes inside of them.
The ordered universes have a higher weight. The weight decreases exponentially with the chaos, so that there’s a finite probability of a finitely chaotic world.
In order to say there are “more” chaotic worlds, you have to pick a measure to put on the space of all possible worlds.
If you did want to put a measure on the space of all possible worlds, nothing forces you to put more weight on the chaotic ones than the ordered ones.
With a measure, you can give probabilities to things—but as you’ve noticed, those probabilities may not correspond to your current informal notion of probability.
Alternatively, the conscious observer simply interprets the surrounding chaos as ordered in some way. Despite the fact that I will be a pheasant tomorrow and I was a pushme-pullyou yesterday, I always perceive myself as the same continuous being.
Don’t people actually do this anyway? It’s called “storytelling”: the knack for finding meaning in the random series of events that is reality.
This is even crazier! Do you really think you weren’t a human being yesterday? If yes, for Cthulhu’s sake why?
Why would any random conscious being be formed so as to interpret its particular surrounding chaos as ordered? The theory as proposed establishes no connection between “what an agent interprets as normal” and “what an agent observes at any given instant”.