I spent a lot of time in the late 90s trying to work out a coherent system of thinking about probabilities that involved things like “your subjective experience has an equal chance of continuing down any branch” but could not make it work out.
Eventually I gave up and went down the road of UDASSA and then UDT, but “your subjective experience has an equal chance of continuing down any branch” seems to be the natural first thing that someone would think of when they think about probabilities in the context of multiple copies/branches. I wish there is a simple and convincing argument why thinking about probabilities this way doesn’t work, so people don’t spend too much time on this step before they move on.
The implied difference between making N copies straight away, and making two copies and then making N-1 copies of one of them, might be a simple convincing argument that something really odd is going on.
I wish there is a simple and convincing argument why thinking about probabilities this way doesn’t work
It doesn’t? If I flip a fair coin, I can think of the outcomes as “my subjective experience goes down the branch where heads comes up” and “my subjective experience goes down the branch where tails comes up”, and the principle works.
Maybe nothing—maybe the fundamental unit of conscious experience is the observer-moment and that continuity of experience is an illusion—but the consensus on this site seems to be that it’s worth talking about in situations like eg quantum suicide or simulation.
One inferential step is too little. Really you need an interval sufficiently long for the person to think coherently and do decision theory, but short enough that they don’t get copied at all.
And just what does that mean?
I spent a lot of time in the late 90s trying to work out a coherent system of thinking about probabilities that involved things like “your subjective experience has an equal chance of continuing down any branch” but could not make it work out.
Eventually I gave up and went down the road of UDASSA and then UDT, but “your subjective experience has an equal chance of continuing down any branch” seems to be the natural first thing that someone would think of when they think about probabilities in the context of multiple copies/branches. I wish there is a simple and convincing argument why thinking about probabilities this way doesn’t work, so people don’t spend too much time on this step before they move on.
The implied difference between making N copies straight away, and making two copies and then making N-1 copies of one of them, might be a simple convincing argument that something really odd is going on.
Yeah, that one is nasty nasty nasty.
It doesn’t? If I flip a fair coin, I can think of the outcomes as “my subjective experience goes down the branch where heads comes up” and “my subjective experience goes down the branch where tails comes up”, and the principle works.
Maybe nothing—maybe the fundamental unit of conscious experience is the observer-moment and that continuity of experience is an illusion—but the consensus on this site seems to be that it’s worth talking about in situations like eg quantum suicide or simulation.
Maybe the inferential step would work better than the observer moment?
One inferential step is too little. Really you need an interval sufficiently long for the person to think coherently and do decision theory, but short enough that they don’t get copied at all.