Thanks for posting this, it’s an interesting idea.
I’m curious about your second-to-last paragraph: if our current evidence already favored SSA or SIA (for instance, if we knew that an event occurred in the past that had a small chance of creating a huge number of copies of each human, but we also know that we are not copies), wouldn’t that already have been enough to update our credence in SSA or SIA? Or did you mean that there’s some other category of possible observations, which is not obviously evidence one way or the other, but under this UDT framework we could still use it to make an update?
Thank you! No, I didn’t have any new kind of evidence in mind. Just a vague hope that we could use evidence to settle the question one way or the other, instead of saying it’s arbitrary. Since many past events have affected the Earth’s population, it seems like we should be able to find something. But I’m still very confused about this.
Thanks for posting this, it’s an interesting idea.
I’m curious about your second-to-last paragraph: if our current evidence already favored SSA or SIA (for instance, if we knew that an event occurred in the past that had a small chance of creating a huge number of copies of each human, but we also know that we are not copies), wouldn’t that already have been enough to update our credence in SSA or SIA? Or did you mean that there’s some other category of possible observations, which is not obviously evidence one way or the other, but under this UDT framework we could still use it to make an update?
Thank you! No, I didn’t have any new kind of evidence in mind. Just a vague hope that we could use evidence to settle the question one way or the other, instead of saying it’s arbitrary. Since many past events have affected the Earth’s population, it seems like we should be able to find something. But I’m still very confused about this.