It seems to me that bacteria are adapted to their environment, not a mix of all possible environments based on simplicity. You can view evolution as a learning process that absorbs knowledge about the world and updates a “prior” to a “posterior”. (Shalizi has a nice post connecting Bayesian updating with replicator dynamics, it’s only slightly relevant here, but still very interesting.) Even if the prior was simplicity-based at the start, once evolution has observed the first few bits of a sequence, there’s no more reason for it to create a mind that starts from the prior all over again. Using the posterior instead would probably make the mind much more efficient.
So if you say your preferences are simplicity-based, I don’t understand how you got such preferences.
Would you still have this complaint if I instead said that I care about the subset of universes which contain me following simplicity based preferences?
To me, at least as I see it now, there is no difference between saying that I care about all universes weighted by simplicity and saying that I care about all universes containing me weighted by simplicity, since my actions to not change the universes that do not contain me.
I am saying that my decision procedure is independent of those preferences, so there is no evolutionary disadvantage to having them. Does that address your issue?
It seems to me that bacteria are adapted to their environment, not a mix of all possible environments based on simplicity. You can view evolution as a learning process that absorbs knowledge about the world and updates a “prior” to a “posterior”. (Shalizi has a nice post connecting Bayesian updating with replicator dynamics, it’s only slightly relevant here, but still very interesting.) Even if the prior was simplicity-based at the start, once evolution has observed the first few bits of a sequence, there’s no more reason for it to create a mind that starts from the prior all over again. Using the posterior instead would probably make the mind much more efficient.
So if you say your preferences are simplicity-based, I don’t understand how you got such preferences.
Would you still have this complaint if I instead said that I care about the subset of universes which contain me following simplicity based preferences?
To me, at least as I see it now, there is no difference between saying that I care about all universes weighted by simplicity and saying that I care about all universes containing me weighted by simplicity, since my actions to not change the universes that do not contain me.
In the post you described two universes that don’t contain you, and said you cared about the simpler one more. Or am I missing something?
I am saying that my decision procedure is independent of those preferences, so there is no evolutionary disadvantage to having them. Does that address your issue?