I care about anthropics because from a few intuitive principles that I find interesting for partially unrelated reasons (mostly having to do with wanting to understand the nature of justification so as to build an AGI that can do the right thing) I conclude that I should expect monads (programs, processes; think algorithmic information theory) with the most decision-theoretic significance (an objective property because of assumed theistic pansychism; think Neoplatonism or Berkeleyan idealism) to also have the most let’s-call-it-conscious-experience. So I expect to find myself as the most important decision process in the multiverse. Then at various moments the process that is “me” looks around and asks, “do my experiences in fact confirm that I am plausibly the most important agent-thingy in the multiverse?”, and if the answer is no, then I know something is wrong with at least one of my intuitive principles, and if the answer is yes, well then I’m probably psychotically narcissistic and that’s its own set of problems.
I care about anthropics because from a few intuitive principles that I find interesting for partially unrelated reasons (mostly having to do with wanting to understand the nature of justification so as to build an AGI that can do the right thing) I conclude that I should expect monads (programs, processes; think algorithmic information theory) with the most decision-theoretic significance (an objective property because of assumed theistic pansychism; think Neoplatonism or Berkeleyan idealism) to also have the most let’s-call-it-conscious-experience. So I expect to find myself as the most important decision process in the multiverse. Then at various moments the process that is “me” looks around and asks, “do my experiences in fact confirm that I am plausibly the most important agent-thingy in the multiverse?”, and if the answer is no, then I know something is wrong with at least one of my intuitive principles, and if the answer is yes, well then I’m probably psychotically narcissistic and that’s its own set of problems.