The problem is that if you don’t update on the proportions of sentients who have your particular experience, then there are much simpler hypotheses than our current physical model which would generate and “explain” your experiences, namely, “Every experience happens within the dust.”
To put it another way, the dust hypothesis is extremely simple and explains why this experience exists. It just doesn’t explain why an ordered experience instead of a disordered one, when ordered experiences are such a tiny fraction of all experiences. If you think the latter is a non-consideration then you should just go with the simplest explanation.
Traditional explanations are for updating; this is probably a relevant tension. If you don’t update, you can’t explain in the sense of updating. The notion of explanation itself has to be revised in this light.
Are the Boltzmann brain hypothesis and the dust hypothesis really simpler than the standard model of the universe, in the sense of Occam’s razor? It seems to me that it isn’t.
I’m thinking specifically about Solomonoff induction here. A Boltzmann brain hypothesis would be a program that correctly predicts all my experiences up to now, and then starts predicting unrelated experiences. Such a program of minimal length would essentially emulate the standard model until output N, and then start doing something else. So it would be longer than the standard model by however many bits it takes to encode the number N.
The problem is that if you don’t update on the proportions of sentients who have your particular experience, then there are much simpler hypotheses than our current physical model which would generate and “explain” your experiences, namely, “Every experience happens within the dust.”
To put it another way, the dust hypothesis is extremely simple and explains why this experience exists. It just doesn’t explain why an ordered experience instead of a disordered one, when ordered experiences are such a tiny fraction of all experiences. If you think the latter is a non-consideration then you should just go with the simplest explanation.
Traditional explanations are for updating; this is probably a relevant tension. If you don’t update, you can’t explain in the sense of updating. The notion of explanation itself has to be revised in this light.
Are the Boltzmann brain hypothesis and the dust hypothesis really simpler than the standard model of the universe, in the sense of Occam’s razor? It seems to me that it isn’t.
I’m thinking specifically about Solomonoff induction here. A Boltzmann brain hypothesis would be a program that correctly predicts all my experiences up to now, and then starts predicting unrelated experiences. Such a program of minimal length would essentially emulate the standard model until output N, and then start doing something else. So it would be longer than the standard model by however many bits it takes to encode the number N.