You have to take into account your genesis. Being self-consistent will usually benefit an agent’s proliferation, so looking at the worlds where you believe you are [Human] you will be weightier where your ancestors remember stuff, and thus you too. It’s the same reason why bosons and fermions dominate our universe.
But suppose our universe is well-abstracting, and this specific dog didn’t set off any butterfly effects. The consequences of its existence were “smoothed out”, such that its existence vs. non-existence never left any major differences in your perceptions.
Unfortunately, this isn’t possible. Iirc, chaos theory emerged when someone studying weather patterns noticed using more bits of precision gave them completely different results than fewer bits. A dog will change the weather dramatically, which will substantially effect your perceptions.
A dog will change the weather dramatically, which will substantially effect your perceptions.
In this case, it’s about alt-complexity again. Sure, a dog causes a specific weather-pattern change. But could this specific weather-pattern change have been caused only by this specific dog? Perhaps if we edit the universe to erase this dog, but add a cat and a bird five kilometers away, the chaotic weather dynamic would play out the same way? Then, from your perceptions’ perspective, you wouldn’t be able to distinguish between a dog timeline and a cat-and-bird timeline.
In some sense, this is common-sensical. The mapping from reality’s low-level state to your perceptions is non-injective: the low-level state contains more information than you perceive on a moment-to-moment basis. Therefore, for any observation-state, there are several low-level states consistent with it. Scaling up: for any observed lifetime, there are several low-level histories consistent with it.
I think this is correct, but I would expect most low-level differences to be much less salient than a dog, and closer to 10^25 atoms dispersed slightly differently in the atmosphere. You will lose a tiny amount of weight for remembering the dog, but gain much more back for not running into it.
You have to take into account your genesis. Being self-consistent will usually benefit an agent’s proliferation, so looking at the worlds where you believe you are [Human] you will be weightier where your ancestors remember stuff, and thus you too. It’s the same reason why bosons and fermions dominate our universe.
Unfortunately, this isn’t possible. Iirc, chaos theory emerged when someone studying weather patterns noticed using more bits of precision gave them completely different results than fewer bits. A dog will change the weather dramatically, which will substantially effect your perceptions.
In this case, it’s about alt-complexity again. Sure, a dog causes a specific weather-pattern change. But could this specific weather-pattern change have been caused only by this specific dog? Perhaps if we edit the universe to erase this dog, but add a cat and a bird five kilometers away, the chaotic weather dynamic would play out the same way? Then, from your perceptions’ perspective, you wouldn’t be able to distinguish between a dog timeline and a cat-and-bird timeline.
In some sense, this is common-sensical. The mapping from reality’s low-level state to your perceptions is non-injective: the low-level state contains more information than you perceive on a moment-to-moment basis. Therefore, for any observation-state, there are several low-level states consistent with it. Scaling up: for any observed lifetime, there are several low-level histories consistent with it.
I think this is correct, but I would expect most low-level differences to be much less salient than a dog, and closer to 10^25 atoms dispersed slightly differently in the atmosphere. You will lose a tiny amount of weight for remembering the dog, but gain much more back for not running into it.