[ExI] Fwd: [tt] The Habitable Epoch of the Early Universe

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

On Thu, Dec 12, 2013 at 6:30 PM, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:
>
>
> Yes, but I was not talking about your judgement of your situation in that sentence. Merely about the fact that in the generic case (it is always possible to construct contrived counterexamples) anomalous observers are going to be the minority compared to non-anomalous observers.


### So, I reacquainted myself with the Sleeping Beauty, and I am
decisively on the thirder position. No ifs ands or buts there - the
problem is clearly stated, no ambiguities are present. But, once we
start using terms like "possible" vs. "actual", things start being
very murky. As David Deutsch would say, these terms are very
theory-laden. Somehow it is difficult for me to make a clear
connection between the definitions of SSA/SIA and reasoning about the
physical world. Now I really don't know if the landscape is less or
more likely and how does SSA vs. SIA relate there - would you be able
to expand on your reasoning behind "SSA would weaken the fine tuning
of cosmological constant" but SIA maybe not?

I tend to think there is vanishingly little to be derived from mere
existence - almost all of our knowledge and beliefs come from our
interpretation of the *details* of our existence, which determine our
notions of possibility and actuality.

Imagine two variations on Sleeping Beauty - the Calendar Beauty and
the Ignorant Beauty. Calendar Beauty can look at a calendar, and knows
whether it's Monday or Tuesday. Ignorant Beauty does not know about
the experiment at all, if asked "What is the likelihood of heads?" she
says "What are heads?".

Calendar Beauty changes her reference class (if I understand it
correctly) by looking at the calendar, and can give at least some
definite answers (if Tuesday - tails). Ignorant Beauty has no basis
for an answer at all - the total absence of information is equivalent
to having no prior and no logically valid procedure for producing any
answers.

Attempts to use anthropic reasoning to put constraints on the
generation of physical explanatory and predictive theories are like
trying to trying to use "Cogito ergo sum" to advance quantum mechanics
- all the real knowledge comes from the physics/math part and the
anthropic part merely comes for a ride. We are like the Ignorant
Beauty painstakingly deciphering cryptic notes found by the bedside
and building an image of the whole situation, with the awareness of
existence playing almost no role in generating correct answers (aside
from the trivial "We are here because it is possible to be here").

Rafal