the term “anthropic reasoning” is supposed to carve out a natural category in conceptspace
If it doesn’t carve out such a category, maybe that’s because it’s a malformed concept, not because we’re using it wrong. Off the top of my head, I see no reason why the existence of the observer should be a special data point that needs to be fed into the data processing system in a special way.
Strangely enough, that’s actually pretty close to what I believe—see my comment here.
So, despite all this arguing, we seem to have almost the same view!
Still, given that it’s a malformed concept, you still need to remain as faithful as possible to what it purports to mean, or at least note that your example can be converted into a clearly non-anthropic one without loss of generality.
If it doesn’t carve out such a category, maybe that’s because it’s a malformed concept, not because we’re using it wrong. Off the top of my head, I see no reason why the existence of the observer should be a special data point that needs to be fed into the data processing system in a special way.
Strangely enough, that’s actually pretty close to what I believe—see my comment here.
So, despite all this arguing, we seem to have almost the same view!
Still, given that it’s a malformed concept, you still need to remain as faithful as possible to what it purports to mean, or at least note that your example can be converted into a clearly non-anthropic one without loss of generality.
Fair enough!