Vladimir, many of these anthropic-sounding questions can also translate directly into “What should I expect to see happen to me, in situations where there are a billion X-potentially-mes and one Y-potentially-mes?” If X is a kind of me, I should almost certainly expect to see X; if not, I should expect to see Y. I cannot quite manage to bring myself to dispense with the question “What should I expect to see happen next?” or, even worse, “Why am I seeing something so orderly rather than chaotic?” For example, saying “I only care about people in orderly situations” does not cut it as an explanation—it doesn’t seem like a question that I could answer with a utility function.
I have not been able to dissolve “the amount of reality-fluid” without also dissolving my belief that most people-weight is in ordered universes and that most of my futures are in ordered universes, without which I have no explanation for why I find myself in an ordered universe and no expectation of a future that is ordered as well.
In particular, I have not been able to dissolve reality-fluid into my utility function without concluding that, by virtue of caring only about copies of me who win the lottery, I could expect to win the lottery and actually see that as a result.
Robin, the disjunctive support in favor of a Big World is strong enough that I’m willing to call it pretty much a done deal at this point—the strongest pillar being MWI. With regards to MWI, I would suggest that the number of decoherent regions of the configuration space would be vastly larger than the space of possibilities for neurons firing or not firing.
Vladimir, many of these anthropic-sounding questions can also translate directly into “What should I expect to see happen to me, in situations where there are a billion X-potentially-mes and one Y-potentially-mes?” If X is a kind of me, I should almost certainly expect to see X; if not, I should expect to see Y. I cannot quite manage to bring myself to dispense with the question “What should I expect to see happen next?” or, even worse, “Why am I seeing something so orderly rather than chaotic?” For example, saying “I only care about people in orderly situations” does not cut it as an explanation—it doesn’t seem like a question that I could answer with a utility function.
I have not been able to dissolve “the amount of reality-fluid” without also dissolving my belief that most people-weight is in ordered universes and that most of my futures are in ordered universes, without which I have no explanation for why I find myself in an ordered universe and no expectation of a future that is ordered as well.
In particular, I have not been able to dissolve reality-fluid into my utility function without concluding that, by virtue of caring only about copies of me who win the lottery, I could expect to win the lottery and actually see that as a result.
Robin, the disjunctive support in favor of a Big World is strong enough that I’m willing to call it pretty much a done deal at this point—the strongest pillar being MWI. With regards to MWI, I would suggest that the number of decoherent regions of the configuration space would be vastly larger than the space of possibilities for neurons firing or not firing.