I don’t understand your other objection as fully (“thinking about long-tail probability distributions should convince you that that wouldn’t add up to normality”).
I’m saying that your objection doesn’t add up to the Born probabilities. Say you set up an observation such that it can have one result with 90% probability (and the device lights up with a 0), or a large number of other results with dwindling probabilities attached (the device lights up with some positive integer). Note that in the system with you observing this, there wouldn’t be a reason for the first state to branch any faster thereafter than any of the others.
Your suggested anthropic probabilities would say that, since there are many “more” distinct versions of you that see numbers greater than 0 than versions of you that see 0, you should expect seeing 0 to be very unlikely. But this is just wrong.
The configurations corresponding to copies of you have to be weighted by measure, and the simplest extrapolation of subjective anticipation is to say that the futures of ordinary physical-you add up as equivalent to one copy of you instantiated in each such branch, even should that copy be identical across branches.
EDIT: Actually, on further reflection, I may have misunderstood you. If you’re talking about a finite version like Hanson’s Mangled Worlds, where you can count identical configurations by multiplicity, then you’re at least not violating the Born probabilities. But then, it seems clear that you should count computer-simulated identical copies by Everett multiplicity as well, which it appears you’re not.
To me, probability is observed reality, and the irrelevance of multiple identical/fully-isomorphic copies is a philosophical given. The state of our knowledge is certainly not large enough to disallow that conjunction.
Push me for details, and I’m less sure. I suspect that once you’re inside the 90% side of the wave function, you actually do branch faster; I’m certainly not aware of any mathematical demonstrations that this isn’t so, even within our current incomplete quantum understanding. It could also be that probability only appears to work because consciousness quickly ceases to exist in those branches in which it’s violated on a large scale, though there are obvious problems with that line of argument.
Anyway, if you accept these two postulates—one observationally, and the other philosophically—then the human’s logic works.
I’m saying that your objection doesn’t add up to the Born probabilities. Say you set up an observation such that it can have one result with 90% probability (and the device lights up with a 0), or a large number of other results with dwindling probabilities attached (the device lights up with some positive integer). Note that in the system with you observing this, there wouldn’t be a reason for the first state to branch any faster thereafter than any of the others.
Your suggested anthropic probabilities would say that, since there are many “more” distinct versions of you that see numbers greater than 0 than versions of you that see 0, you should expect seeing 0 to be very unlikely. But this is just wrong.
The configurations corresponding to copies of you have to be weighted by measure, and the simplest extrapolation of subjective anticipation is to say that the futures of ordinary physical-you add up as equivalent to one copy of you instantiated in each such branch, even should that copy be identical across branches.
(I’m not quite comfortable with this; the question of what I ought to expect if 2 identical copies are run together troubles me. But the above at least explains my objection to your argument, I hope.)
EDIT: Actually, on further reflection, I may have misunderstood you. If you’re talking about a finite version like Hanson’s Mangled Worlds, where you can count identical configurations by multiplicity, then you’re at least not violating the Born probabilities. But then, it seems clear that you should count computer-simulated identical copies by Everett multiplicity as well, which it appears you’re not.
To me, probability is observed reality, and the irrelevance of multiple identical/fully-isomorphic copies is a philosophical given. The state of our knowledge is certainly not large enough to disallow that conjunction.
Push me for details, and I’m less sure. I suspect that once you’re inside the 90% side of the wave function, you actually do branch faster; I’m certainly not aware of any mathematical demonstrations that this isn’t so, even within our current incomplete quantum understanding. It could also be that probability only appears to work because consciousness quickly ceases to exist in those branches in which it’s violated on a large scale, though there are obvious problems with that line of argument.
Anyway, if you accept these two postulates—one observationally, and the other philosophically—then the human’s logic works.