Maybe the disagreement is in how we consider the alternative hypothesis to be? I’m not imagining a broken gun—you could examine your gun and notice it isn’t, or just shoot into the air a few times and see it firing. But even after you eliminate all of those, theres still the hypothesis “I’m special for no discernible reason” (or is there?) that can only be tested anthropically, if at all. And this seems worrying.
Maybe heres a stronger way to formulate it: Consider all the copies of yourself across the multiverse. They will sometimes face situations where they could die. And they will always remember having survived all previous ones. So eventually, all the ones still alive will believe they’re protected by fate or something, and then do something suicidal. Now you can bring the same argument about how there are a few actual immortals, but still… “A rational agent that survives long enough will kill itself unless its literally impossible for it to do so” doesn’t inspire confidence, does it? And it happens even in very “easy” worlds. There is no world where you have a limited chance of dying before you “learn the ropes” and are safe—its impossible to have a chance of eventual death other than 0 or 1, without the laws of nature changing over time.
just have a probabilistic model of the world and then condition on the existence of yourself (with all your memories, faculties, etc).
I interpret that as conditioning on the existence of at least one thing with the “inner” properties of yourself.
The problem, as I understand it, is that there seem to be magical hypothesis you can’t update against from ordinary observation, because by construction the only time they make a difference is in your odds of survival. So you can’t update them from observation, and anthropics can only update in their favour, so eventually you end up believing one and then you die.
Maybe the disagreement is in how we consider the alternative hypothesis to be? I’m not imagining a broken gun—you could examine your gun and notice it isn’t, or just shoot into the air a few times and see it firing. But even after you eliminate all of those, theres still the hypothesis “I’m special for no discernible reason” (or is there?) that can only be tested anthropically, if at all. And this seems worrying.
Maybe heres a stronger way to formulate it: Consider all the copies of yourself across the multiverse. They will sometimes face situations where they could die. And they will always remember having survived all previous ones. So eventually, all the ones still alive will believe they’re protected by fate or something, and then do something suicidal. Now you can bring the same argument about how there are a few actual immortals, but still… “A rational agent that survives long enough will kill itself unless its literally impossible for it to do so” doesn’t inspire confidence, does it? And it happens even in very “easy” worlds. There is no world where you have a limited chance of dying before you “learn the ropes” and are safe—its impossible to have a chance of eventual death other than 0 or 1, without the laws of nature changing over time.
I interpret that as conditioning on the existence of at least one thing with the “inner” properties of yourself.
I think in the real world, I am actually accumulating evidence against magic faster than I am trying to commit elaborate suicide.
The problem, as I understand it, is that there seem to be magical hypothesis you can’t update against from ordinary observation, because by construction the only time they make a difference is in your odds of survival. So you can’t update them from observation, and anthropics can only update in their favour, so eventually you end up believing one and then you die.
The amount that I care about this problem is proportional to the chance that I’ll survive to have it.