In which case you don’t need to worry about doing extra work to distinguish yourself from shot-you once your histories (ballistically) diverge. (EDIT: I think. This is weird.)
You do need to distinguish, it’s part of your history. If you are including your entire history as uncompressed sensory data, that will contain massive redundancy. The universe does not contain all possible beings in equal proportions. Imagine being the only person in an otherwise empty universe, very easy to point to. Now imagine that Omega makes 10100 copies, and tells each copy their own 100 digit id number. It takes 100 digits more complexity to point to any one person. The process of making the copies makes each copy harder to point to. The process of telling them id numbers doesn’t change the complexity. You only have 2 copies with id’s of “shot” and “not shot”.
Right, but suppose that everybody knows beforehand that Omega is going to preserve copy number 0 only (or that it’s otherwise a consequence of things you already know).
This “pays in advance” for the complexity of the number of the survivor. After t_1, it’s not like they’ve been exposed to anything they would be surprised about if they were never copied.
Ah, wait, is that the resolution? If there’s a known designated survivor, are they required to be simple to specify even before t_1, when they’re “mixed in” with the rest?
You do need to distinguish, it’s part of your history. If you are including your entire history as uncompressed sensory data, that will contain massive redundancy. The universe does not contain all possible beings in equal proportions. Imagine being the only person in an otherwise empty universe, very easy to point to. Now imagine that Omega makes 10100 copies, and tells each copy their own 100 digit id number. It takes 100 digits more complexity to point to any one person. The process of making the copies makes each copy harder to point to. The process of telling them id numbers doesn’t change the complexity. You only have 2 copies with id’s of “shot” and “not shot”.
Right, but suppose that everybody knows beforehand that Omega is going to preserve copy number 0 only (or that it’s otherwise a consequence of things you already know).
This “pays in advance” for the complexity of the number of the survivor. After t_1, it’s not like they’ve been exposed to anything they would be surprised about if they were never copied.
Ah, wait, is that the resolution? If there’s a known designated survivor, are they required to be simple to specify even before t_1, when they’re “mixed in” with the rest?
The centermost person and the person numbered 0 are simple to specify beforehand.
Given that you know what’s going on in the rest of the universe, the one that doesn’t get shot is also simple to specify.