The obvious application (to me) is figuring out how to make decisions once mind uploading is possible. This point is made, for example, in Scott Aaronson’s The Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine. What do you anticipate experiencing if someone uploads your mind while you’re still conscious?
Anthropics also seems to me to be relevant to the question of how to do Bayesian updates using reference classes, a subject I’m still very confused about and which seems pretty fundamental. Sometimes we treat ourselves as randomly sampled from the population of all humans similar to us (e.g. when diagnosing the probability that we have a disease given that we have some symptoms) and sometimes we don’t (e.g. when rejecting the Doomsday argument, if that’s an argument we reject). Which cases are which?
The obvious application (to me) is figuring out how to make decisions once mind uploading is possible. This point is made, for example, in Scott Aaronson’s The Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine. What do you anticipate experiencing if someone uploads your mind while you’re still conscious?
Anthropics also seems to me to be relevant to the question of how to do Bayesian updates using reference classes, a subject I’m still very confused about and which seems pretty fundamental. Sometimes we treat ourselves as randomly sampled from the population of all humans similar to us (e.g. when diagnosing the probability that we have a disease given that we have some symptoms) and sometimes we don’t (e.g. when rejecting the Doomsday argument, if that’s an argument we reject). Which cases are which?
Or even: deciding how much to care about experiencing pain during an operation if I’ll just forget about it afterwards. This has the flavor of an anthropics question to me.