I’m not yet seeing that other peoples’ consciousness per se is relevant here. All that matters is that there be a vast pool of potential winners, conscious or otherwise. All that I (the winner, say) observed was that one of the members of this pool won.
If my prior belief had been that every member of the pool had an equal probability of winning, then I have no new evidence for the holodeck hypothesis after I observe my winning as opposed to any other member’s. I would have predicted in advance that some member of the pool would win that week, and that’s what I saw.
However, I take your point to be that it would not be rational to suppose that there were millions and millions of potential winners, each with an equal chance of winning. So, I now concede that initially there is a certain asymmetry between the lottery winner and a non-winner: The non-winner initially has stronger evidence that he or she was among the pool of potential winners, and that the odds of winning were distributed evenly throughout that pool. Of course, the winner has strong evidence for this, too. But I agree that the non-winner’s evidence is initially even stronger.
However, I disagree that these respective bodies of evidence are incommunicable, as Eliezer claimed. If I, the winner, observe you, the non-winner, sufficiently closely, then I will eventually have as much evidence as you have that you were a potential winner who had the same chance that I had. (And if it matters, I will eventually have as much evidence as you have that you are conscious. I side with Dennett in denying you an in-principle privileged access to your own consciousness.)
In the event that you win, you gain the information that a conscious person has won the lottery. When someone else wins, you merely gain the information that a “person” who may or may not be conscious has “won the lottery”.
The holodeck hypothesis predicts that interesting events are more likely to happen to conscious persons. Since you know that you are conscious, if you receive more than your fair share of interesting events, this seems to be (rather weak, but still real) evidence for the holodeck hypothesis.
I will eventually have as much evidence as you have that you are conscious.
For as long as you are studying me, yes. And then afterwards I get deleted and what you see of me is again just a few lines in an algorithm using up a couple of CPU cycles every hour.
(This post brought to you by universe.c, line 22,454,398,462,203)
I will eventually have as much evidence as you have that you are conscious.
For as long as you are studying me, yes. And then afterwards I get deleted and what you see of me is again just a few lines in an algorithm using up a couple of CPU cycles every hour.
Heh, true. But I confront the same possibility with regards to my observation of my own consciousness.
I’m not yet seeing that other peoples’ consciousness per se is relevant here. All that matters is that there be a vast pool of potential winners, conscious or otherwise. All that I (the winner, say) observed was that one of the members of this pool won.
If my prior belief had been that every member of the pool had an equal probability of winning, then I have no new evidence for the holodeck hypothesis after I observe my winning as opposed to any other member’s. I would have predicted in advance that some member of the pool would win that week, and that’s what I saw.
However, I take your point to be that it would not be rational to suppose that there were millions and millions of potential winners, each with an equal chance of winning. So, I now concede that initially there is a certain asymmetry between the lottery winner and a non-winner: The non-winner initially has stronger evidence that he or she was among the pool of potential winners, and that the odds of winning were distributed evenly throughout that pool. Of course, the winner has strong evidence for this, too. But I agree that the non-winner’s evidence is initially even stronger.
However, I disagree that these respective bodies of evidence are incommunicable, as Eliezer claimed. If I, the winner, observe you, the non-winner, sufficiently closely, then I will eventually have as much evidence as you have that you were a potential winner who had the same chance that I had. (And if it matters, I will eventually have as much evidence as you have that you are conscious. I side with Dennett in denying you an in-principle privileged access to your own consciousness.)
In the event that you win, you gain the information that a conscious person has won the lottery. When someone else wins, you merely gain the information that a “person” who may or may not be conscious has “won the lottery”.
The holodeck hypothesis predicts that interesting events are more likely to happen to conscious persons. Since you know that you are conscious, if you receive more than your fair share of interesting events, this seems to be (rather weak, but still real) evidence for the holodeck hypothesis.
For as long as you are studying me, yes. And then afterwards I get deleted and what you see of me is again just a few lines in an algorithm using up a couple of CPU cycles every hour.
(This post brought to you by universe.c, line 22,454,398,462,203)
Heh, true. But I confront the same possibility with regards to my observation of my own consciousness.
You believe in p-zombies?
No. But the simulation doesn’t need to run perfect simulations of humans who aren’t currently the focus of the, uh, holodeck customer’s attention.