I enjoyed this post and think it should help reduce confusion in many future discussions, thanks!
Some comments on your remarks about anthropics:
Different anthropic theories partially rely on metaphysical intuitions/stories about how centered worlds or observer moments are ‘sampled’, and have counterintuitive implications (e.g., the Doomsday argument for SSA and the Presumptuous philosopher for SIA).
I’m not sure why this is an indictment of “anthropic reasoning” per se, as if that’s escapable. It seems like all anthropic theories are trying to answer a question that one needs to answer when forming credences, i.e., how do we form likelihoods P(I observe I exist | world W)? (Which we want in order to compute P(world W | I observe I exist).)
Indeed just failing to anthropically update at all has counterintuitive implications, like the verdict of minimal-reference-class SSA in Joe C’s “God’s coin toss with equal numbers.”[no longer endorsed]And mrcSSA relies on the metaphysical intuition that oneself was necessarily going to observe X, i.e., P(I observe I exist | world W) = P(I observe I exist | not-W) = 1(which is quite implausible IMO).[I think endorsed, but I feel confused:] And mrcSSA relies on the metaphysical intuition that, given that someone observes X, oneself was necessarily going to observe X, which is quite implausible IMO.
I enjoyed this post and think it should help reduce confusion in many future discussions, thanks!
Some comments on your remarks about anthropics:
I’m not sure why this is an indictment of “anthropic reasoning” per se, as if that’s escapable. It seems like all anthropic theories are trying to answer a question that one needs to answer when forming credences, i.e., how do we form likelihoods P(I observe I exist | world W)? (Which we want in order to compute P(world W | I observe I exist).)
Indeed just failing to anthropically update at all has counterintuitive implications, like the verdict of minimal-reference-class SSA in Joe C’s “God’s coin toss with equal numbers.” [no longer endorsed]
And mrcSSA relies on the metaphysical intuition that oneself was necessarily going to observe X, i.e., P(I observe I exist | world W) = P(I observe I exist | not-W) = 1(which is quite implausible IMO).[I think endorsed, but I feel confused:] And mrcSSA relies on the metaphysical intuition that, given that someone observes X, oneself was necessarily going to observe X, which is quite implausible IMO.