It seems to me that the idea of probability is tied up with the assumption that the universe you’re in is lawful enough for probability to be meaningful, and that you can expect to be able to validate that through your own past and future experiences. Anthropics thought experiments, and “God’s extreme coin toss” in particular, usually seem to violate that.
I feel as though I could equally well come up with conclusions like...
“I have been locked up in this room by some psycho who is sending me obviously false notes”.
“I am living in a simulation and I have no reason at all to trust the person running it to give me any valid information”.
“I and my surroundings are products of some absurd and probably acausal universe”.
“I am a Boltzmann brain and this will all be over shortly”.
“I do not have any information that I can legitimately use to assign probabilities to anything in any way at all”.
It seems to me that the idea of probability is tied up with the assumption that the universe you’re in is lawful enough for probability to be meaningful, and that you can expect to be able to validate that through your own past and future experiences. Anthropics thought experiments, and “God’s extreme coin toss” in particular, usually seem to violate that.
I feel as though I could equally well come up with conclusions like...
“I have been locked up in this room by some psycho who is sending me obviously false notes”.
“I am living in a simulation and I have no reason at all to trust the person running it to give me any valid information”.
“I and my surroundings are products of some absurd and probably acausal universe”.
“I am a Boltzmann brain and this will all be over shortly”.
“I do not have any information that I can legitimately use to assign probabilities to anything in any way at all”.