Neal’s approach (even according to Neal) doesn’t work in Big Worlds, because then every observation occurs at least once. But full non-indexical conditioning tells us with near certainty that we are in a Big World. So if you buy the approach, it immediately tells you with near certainty that you’re in the conditions under which it doesn’t work.
What I especially like about FNC is that it refuses to play the anthropic game at all. That is, it doesn’t pretend that you can ‘unwind all of a person’s observations’ while retaining their Mind Essence and thereby return to an anthropic prior under which ‘I’ had just as much chance of being you as me. (In other words, it doesn’t commit you to believing that you are an ‘epiphenomenal passenger’.)
FNC is just ‘what you get if you try to answer those questions for which anthropic reasoning is typically used, without doing something that doesn’t make any sense’. (Or at least it would be if there was a canonical way of individuating states-of-information.)
Neal’s approach (even according to Neal) doesn’t work in Big Worlds, because then every observation occurs at least once. But full non-indexical conditioning tells us with near certainty that we are in a Big World. So if you buy the approach, it immediately tells you with near certainty that you’re in the conditions under which it doesn’t work.
Sure, that’s a fair criticism.
What I especially like about FNC is that it refuses to play the anthropic game at all. That is, it doesn’t pretend that you can ‘unwind all of a person’s observations’ while retaining their Mind Essence and thereby return to an anthropic prior under which ‘I’ had just as much chance of being you as me. (In other words, it doesn’t commit you to believing that you are an ‘epiphenomenal passenger’.)
FNC is just ‘what you get if you try to answer those questions for which anthropic reasoning is typically used, without doing something that doesn’t make any sense’. (Or at least it would be if there was a canonical way of individuating states-of-information.)