Yes, it seems totally reasonable for bounded reasoners to consider hypotheses (where a hypothesis like ‘the universe is as it would be from the perspective of prisoner #3’ functions like treating prisoner #3 as ‘an instance of me’) that would be counterfactual or even counterlogical for more idealized reasoners.
Typical bounded reasoning weirdness is stuff like seeming to take some counterlogicals (e.g. different hypotheses about the trillionth digit of pi) seriously despite denying 1+1=3, even though there’s a chain of logic connecting one to the other. Projecting this into anthropics, you might have a certain systematic bias about which hypotheses you can consider, and yet deny that that systematic bias is valid when presented with it abstractly.
This seems like it makes drawing general lessons about what counts as ‘an instance of me’ from the fact that I’m a bounded reasoner pretty fraught.
Fair enough.
Yes, it seems totally reasonable for bounded reasoners to consider hypotheses (where a hypothesis like ‘the universe is as it would be from the perspective of prisoner #3’ functions like treating prisoner #3 as ‘an instance of me’) that would be counterfactual or even counterlogical for more idealized reasoners.
Typical bounded reasoning weirdness is stuff like seeming to take some counterlogicals (e.g. different hypotheses about the trillionth digit of pi) seriously despite denying 1+1=3, even though there’s a chain of logic connecting one to the other. Projecting this into anthropics, you might have a certain systematic bias about which hypotheses you can consider, and yet deny that that systematic bias is valid when presented with it abstractly.
This seems like it makes drawing general lessons about what counts as ‘an instance of me’ from the fact that I’m a bounded reasoner pretty fraught.