You’re overextending a hack intuition. “Existence”, “measure”, “probability density”, “what you should anticipate”, etc. aren’t actually all the exact same thing once you get this technical. Specifically, I suspect you’re trying to set the later based on one of the former, without knowing which one since you assume they are identical. I recommend learning UDT and deciding what you want agents with your input history to anticipate, or if that’s not feasible just do the math and stop bothering to make the intuition fit.
Hm, so you’re saying that anticipation isn’t a primitive, it’s just part of one’s decision-making process. But isn’t there a sense in which I ought to expect the Born rule to hold in ordinary circumstances? Call it a set of preferences that all humans share — we care about futures in proportion to the square of the modulus of their amplitude (in the universal wavefunction? in the successor state to our Everett branch?). Do you have an opinion on exactly how that preference works, and what sorts of decision problems it applies to?
Induction. You have uncertainty about the extent to which you care about different universes. If it turns out you don’t care about the born rule for one reason or another the universe you observe is an absurdly (as in probably-a-Boltzmann-brain absurd) tiny sliver of the multiverse, but if you do, it’s still an absurdly tiny sliver but immensely less so. You should anticipate as if the born rule is true, because if you don’t almost only care about world where it is true, then you care almost nothing about the current world, and being wrong in it doesn’t matter, relatively to otherwise.
Hmm, I’m terrible at explaining this stuff. But the tl;dr is basically that there’s this long complicated reason why you should anticipate and act this way and thus it’s true in the “the simple truth” sense, that’s mostly tangential to if it’s “true” in some specific philosophy paper sense.
Oh, interesting. So just as one should act as if one is Jesus if one seems to be Jesus, then one should act as if one cares about world-histories in proportion to their L2 measure if one seems to care about world-histories in proportion to their L2 measure and one happens to be in a world-history with relatively high L2 measure. And if probability is degree of caring, then the fact that one’s world history obeys the Born rule is evidence that one cares about world-histories in proportion to their L2 measure.
I take it you would prefer option 2 in my original comment, reduce anticipation to UDT, and explain away continuity of experience.
Have I correctly characterized your point of view?
You’re overextending a hack intuition. “Existence”, “measure”, “probability density”, “what you should anticipate”, etc. aren’t actually all the exact same thing once you get this technical. Specifically, I suspect you’re trying to set the later based on one of the former, without knowing which one since you assume they are identical. I recommend learning UDT and deciding what you want agents with your input history to anticipate, or if that’s not feasible just do the math and stop bothering to make the intuition fit.
Hm, so you’re saying that anticipation isn’t a primitive, it’s just part of one’s decision-making process. But isn’t there a sense in which I ought to expect the Born rule to hold in ordinary circumstances? Call it a set of preferences that all humans share — we care about futures in proportion to the square of the modulus of their amplitude (in the universal wavefunction? in the successor state to our Everett branch?). Do you have an opinion on exactly how that preference works, and what sorts of decision problems it applies to?
Induction. You have uncertainty about the extent to which you care about different universes. If it turns out you don’t care about the born rule for one reason or another the universe you observe is an absurdly (as in probably-a-Boltzmann-brain absurd) tiny sliver of the multiverse, but if you do, it’s still an absurdly tiny sliver but immensely less so. You should anticipate as if the born rule is true, because if you don’t almost only care about world where it is true, then you care almost nothing about the current world, and being wrong in it doesn’t matter, relatively to otherwise.
Hmm, I’m terrible at explaining this stuff. But the tl;dr is basically that there’s this long complicated reason why you should anticipate and act this way and thus it’s true in the “the simple truth” sense, that’s mostly tangential to if it’s “true” in some specific philosophy paper sense.
Oh, interesting. So just as one should act as if one is Jesus if one seems to be Jesus, then one should act as if one cares about world-histories in proportion to their L2 measure if one seems to care about world-histories in proportion to their L2 measure and one happens to be in a world-history with relatively high L2 measure. And if probability is degree of caring, then the fact that one’s world history obeys the Born rule is evidence that one cares about world-histories in proportion to their L2 measure.
I take it you would prefer option 2 in my original comment, reduce anticipation to UDT, and explain away continuity of experience.
Have I correctly characterized your point of view?
Exactly! Much better than I could!