(This is speculative and not a battle-hardened opinion)
One could respond: The thing you want an explanation for, the thing which you have anticipations about, isn’t existence in its entirety. It’s differences between relevant ways that existence could be, and how you participate in existence, i.e. “what world you turn out to be in” or what you expect to see or how you think you can affect the world.
This sets up a dichotomy:
Things that you could reasonably think you might possibly be able to change, or anything contingently related to those things (e.g. a cause or effect of some of those things). These are things about which you have separate beliefs and preferences, because you want to track targets and realities separately in order to find more successful actions.
Things that you know, to the very core of your being, baked in from the start, that you couldn’t ever possibly change or that you won’t even consider as possibilities.
(Ok fine it’s not a dichotomy yet, I didn’t work it out, but maybe you can see what I’m trying to get at.)
For example, you wrote about “where recursive justification hits bottom”, and the loop of a simplicity prior justifying itself through the meta level: I believe in some kind of simplicity prior because it’s a simple hypothesis that such a prior will keep on being true and useful, given that it has been true and useful constantly up until now. Why not truly question the simplicity prior so hard that you stop evaluating its possible alternatives by the meta-level judgements of the simplicity prior itself? Seems a bit like a preference, in the sense that there might be a self-ratifying alternative state of mind, but you don’t like it / wouldn’t choose it. (The fact that it would be much less effective is something you only induce based on the simplicity prior!) The preference and the belief are kinda created in motion as already always mushed together, if you see what I mean.
The lottery is something you view as being under your control. If it was baked in, by evolution say, to only care about worlds where you win the lottery, then you really might be expecting to win the lottery. (Is there a toy model of this from the shutdown button indifference work?)
Maybe no one views Boltzmann brains as moral patients who we’d possibly be able to help?
The lottery is something you view as being under your control. If it was baked in, by evolution say, to only care about worlds where you win the lottery, then you really might be expecting to win the lottery.
And then, on how my model of reality actually works, you wouldn’t win the lottery. Do you think differently?
For example, you wrote about “where recursive justification hits bottom”, and the loop of a simplicity prior justifying itself through the meta level: I believe in some kind of simplicity prior because it’s a simple hypothesis that such a prior will keep on being true and useful, given that it has been true and useful constantly up until now. Why not truly question the simplicity prior so hard that you stop evaluating its possible alternatives by the meta-level judgements of the simplicity prior itself?
The map is not the territory. “Justifiable reason to believe something” is a map-thing that is not the same as “knowing why it happens” out in the territory. We have seen the universe be simple at us really really hard. We are justified in map-expecting our experiences to probably continue to be ordered. We don’t know what territory lies behind it.
(I timed out on fully thinking this through and better get back to work; I’ll try to summarize, and leave a half-finished ramble below.)
(I’ll repeat that I barely hold the view represented here; to me it’s a hypothesis / question. I assume you’ve heard this view before, but I’m just thinking it through. :) )
A supposed dissolution to the question
why do comparatively tiny numbers of orderly observer-moments seem to carry so much more weight-of-existence than the vastly more numerous horde of possible disorderly moments of conscious awareness?
is something along the lines of:
All mathematical structure is real, and that’s all that’s real.
There are different regions / elements of Structure, such as minds, experiences, facts, or worlds.
Many creatures need various “weights” over Structure.
A creature has to divide its efforts, so it has to divide up a finite total weight of caring across Structure.
A creature wants to act differently depending on what its affectable surroundings are like, so it needs something like a probability distribution over “possible worlds” (mathematically coherent contexts of affectable surroundings).
There’s no objective / intersubjective weight-of-existence to different regions of Structure.
More precisely, creatures would be far from fully agreeing on the sense in which comparatively tiny numbers of orderly experiences carry more weight-of-existence.
Probably a great “many” creatures would learn to / be born to distinguish map from territory, and to expect the territory to be simple.
Probably “weights over Structure” have to take on some sort of simplicity form, since any non-dogmatic weighting is some kind of simplicity weighting.
The reason it seems like orderly experiences carry more weight-of-existence is that when you try to model “what exists”, you’re implicitly calling on background presumptions such as “the world is orderly”.
In other words, you’re basically assuming that orderly experiences carry more weight-of-existence.
This assumption is partly borne out by experience. In other words, it’s objective in the single-observer sense of “it’s still there even if I believe it’s not there, and it’s still there even if I don’t care about it”.
However, those hypotheticals “even if I try to believe” and “even if I don’t care about it” are still being evaluated (“it’s still there”) according to the assumption that the world is orderly. That assumption bakes in some degree of creature-dependent caring.
Partly, to some degree, you’re assuming that orderly experiences carry more weight-of-existence not because it’s borne out by experience, but rather because you don’t care what happens in worlds where experience is disorderly. That’s not to say that you wouldn’t consider a Boltzmann brain to not be a moral patient. Rather, you would consider a Boltzmann brain to be utterly beyond your ability to ever help out; and the way this appears in your mind is considering it less real.
More rambling:
And then, on how my model of reality actually works, you wouldn’t win the lottery. Do you think differently?
No, I agree.
We have seen the universe be simple at us really really hard. We are justified in map-expecting our experiences to probably continue to be ordered.
I agree, but I’m saying that the dynamic of going from observing “the universe has been simple really hard at us” to concluding “our experiences will probably continue to be ordered” is a dynamic, which you could in principle choose to not implement. Instead you could in principle choose to implement a dynamic that concludes “the universe is probably going to soon get bored of being simple, and start being disordered for a while”.
Why don’t you choose to implement that dynamic? I don’t think you should, and I think you can list various good reasons (it represents a more complicated hypothesis because you have to say the switchover point, it would result in less effective thinking, etc.), and I’d probably agree with your reasons. But from a perspective where anything about your mind is potentially up for questioning, those reasons are just more things you could question. If you questioned all of them all at once, in a very deep/expansive way that includes forbidding yourself from sneaking them in through a meta level, they wouldn’t be available to rederive / regrow each other. Or to say it another way:
… there might be a self-ratifying alternative state of mind ….
My current quasi-equilibrium (believing that for the most part the map is not the territory, explanations tend to be simple, the overall universe tends to be very simple in terms of unbounded algorithmic information, non-logical inference about X requires causal interaction with X, believing in something doesn’t make it so, etc.) is good and self-ratifying. I’m just saying that I could try to unwind it so far that you unwind all the ways it’s self-ratifying. Then, basically by construction, there’d be insufficient justification to regenerate my current quasi-equilibrium.
I don’t do that for various good reasons. But the good reasons have foundations that have always been present in me. I’m not fully questioning them; I don’t try out what it would be like to never have believed in the simplicity of the universe from the start. This is a kind of reflective stability. The thing that is stable—is it a belief or a preference? I’m saying that it’s pretty ambiguous to me, or I’m not sure what the question is asking. So when you ask:
If it is not coincidental, then indeed our currently orderly experience may continue to be orderly rather than dissolving back into chaos. We are then faced with the question of how and why reality works to make this not be the case.
I wonder whether your belief that reality works to make your experience not dissolve into chaos amounts to a prior commitment to care about worlds that are simple (and hence understandable, affectable, etc.). In other words, maybe the reason you “anticipate” regularities is “just” that you’re constructed to do so. Many of the worlds that surround [minds equivalent to you at this moment] actually do dissolve into chaos, and/or have just coalesced out of chaos. But you’re just not intuitively caring to have anticipations about them.
Instead you could in principle choose to implement a dynamic that concludes “the universe is probably going to soon get bored of being simple, and start being disordered for a while”.
Why don’t you choose to implement that dynamic?
Why, because I don’t expect to see that actually happen to me, of course! In a way that doesn’t depend at all on which anticipation-dynamic I try to implement, even if I could modify my own source code.
Beings that modify their own source code to expect to win the lottery are then promptly surprised by losing the lottery. Beings that modify their preferences to care much more about worlds in which they win the lottery, predominantly see themselves losing the lottery and ending up in the world they cared about less. If you decide to give up on anticipating that your vision stays ordered, it will nonetheless stay quite ordered. The dynamic by which we expect order is not an explanation for that order. “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” Even if you were a kind of being that could stop believing in order, it still wouldn’t go away.
Of which I have also said: The art of shepherding is not about using pebbles to control sheep, but letting sheep control pebbles.
Why not unwind our justification loop for expecting order? Why, because at the end of unwinding, we would still see order rather than chaos. You and I both know that’s true. But why is it true? Not the map-why of how do we justify believing it; the territory-why of “How did it end up that way?”
I believe you should be able to make progress by writing out different map-level and territory-level things. Let me try:
0) My prediction: I expect the universe to continue being ordered.
1) In-map explanation for why I came to believe it: I use a simplicity prior to predict my observations and trust my memory.
2) In-territory explanation for why my prediction succeeds: I’m a human (not a BB) in a simple universe.
The problem: I can’t trust my memory and justify the simplicity prior.
3) In-map justification for using the simplicity prior anyway: memory and simplicity aren’t provably reliable, but I don’t care about my life in case they are not reliable.
Potential crux A: (3) doesn’t undermine the fact that I’m correct only because of (2), so changing what I care about doesn’t change the outcome, yet it still counts as a justification of doing (1). If I cared about complex universes, I wouldn’t be justified in doing (1).
4) In-territory justification for using the simplicity prior anyway: I live in a multiverse where memory and simplicity aren’t reliable in every universe, but I don’t care about universes where they are not reliable.
5) Another in-territory justification for using the simplicity prior: God or some power makes the simplicity prior true in the multiverse.
Potential crux B: some will say (4) is not an explanation because I have to explain “how you go from experience 1 in universe 1 to experience 2 in universe 1 instead of experience 2 in universe 2” or something; others will say it’s all anthropic woo and any reasonable (5)-type theory is gonna be untestable by construction (until we die).
6) A deeper in-territory explanations for why my prediction (0) succeeds: “God/power did it” (see 5), “I got lucky once to end up in an ordered universe” (see 4), “all experience histories created by the multiverse exist, therefore this experience history was fated to be experienced anyway” (see 4). Due to crux B, I assume the latter can be disputed. The middle one can be criticized for being too lucky.
Why isn’t 3⁄4 a justification? Because of some philosophy regarding the flow of observer moments (crux B)?
On the topic of unwinding to some state of mind besides the simplicity prior- are the alternatives not uncomputable as a class?
That is: There is a finite number of theories below a certain level of complexity, so the simplicity prior allocates a finitely-small-amount-of its expectation to a finite number of outcomes. For the opposite of the simplicity prior, a complexity prior- where you prefer a theory more the more complicated it is- any theory you consider has an infinite number of even more complicated counterparts, because you can always make the theory more complicated by adding another detail, such that you replace ‘gravity’ with ‘gravity, except on tuesdays’ with ‘gravity except on tuesdays, except for next tuesday where there will be gravity after all’ and so on forever. As such, it’s impossible to compute the complexity prior.[1]
It appears this should apply to any prior that doesn’t contain the simplicity prior- Even without weighing towards complexity, if you don’t weigh towards simplicity, every question has an infinite number of equally good answers, like in the gravity answer above.
Priors which contain the simplicity prior have a similar problem, but one that’s closer to leaning on the simplicity prior itself rather than just the implementability of the prior- that is, you can implement ‘the simplicity prior, but theories with an even number of bits/words/etc are more likely’, but, with there being an infinite number of possible simplicity-prior-variations like this, making a decision between these possible priors, without using the simplicity prior, is itself uncomputable.[2]
A dynamic being impossible to implement- not just due to limited computational power but because there is no right answer within the dynamic, seems like a good reason not to implement it, that doesn’t itself depend on the simplicity prior.
If I were trying to compute the complexity prior in finite time, I’d want to aggregate entire infinite classes of outcomes into one larger claim that shares all their details to save time, IE, ‘all theories wherein gravity works most of the time’. However, in doing so I would just be turning the complexity prior back into the simplicity prior, because the weight of a hypothesis-class is proportional to the fraction of all possible hypotheses which fall under it, which is proportional to its simplicity!
and also, if you picked a prior at random from this set, it would probably tell you to adopt the simplicity prior instead, because, ie, ‘simplicity but even-bitted theories are x2 likely’ adds more than 2 bits of complexity over the simplicity prior. Though I’m not sure whether it works out to ‘slightly over 50% odds of the simplicity prior’[3] or ‘approximately 100% odds of the simplicity prior’, it depends on how we abstract this infinity; the former if we figure each specific simplicity-prior-variant is equally likely to favor or not favor itself and that most of them do this by a huge amount that more than cancels out their complexity and so you get to the simplicity prior whenever a prior doesn’t favor itself, the latter if complexity tends to grow faster than self-favoring.
or slightly over 1⁄3 odds of the simplicity prior, if a prior that doesn’t favor itself has a 50% chance to not favor the simplicity prior either and end up on a new random prior that repeats the calculation. Or ~0% odds if each prior is so complex and specific that the odds of any prior coming up simplicity are minimal… or maybe that goes back to 50 / 100% because the odds of a prior not favoring itself the most go up by the same amount… It’s complicated but probably not relevant to the conclusion.
Something like this is true in a sense, I think. But you could unwind past assumptions that imply you have to “have a prior”. I mean, you’re not evading any law of course; you’ll just be incoherent (e.g. thrash around, or be dutch-bookable). But it’s a way you could be.
In a sense, yes- of course you can construct something without any given characteristic of a mind, such as an inert rock or a pair of dice.
That said, I’d argue the presence of something like a simplicity prior- not necessarily something that fits the formal definition of a prior, but some sort of tendency for simple beliefs over complicated ones- is a necessity of having beliefs of any kind at all.
For instance- you might have no prior belief, but whenever you generate a belief of any kind, assign it 50% probability. This isn’t a prior(it’s more like a change in how you update from your prior) and you end up with very stupid beliefs; but the ‘generate a belief of any kind’ step necessarily encodes a simplicity tendency, weakly in the sense that more complicated beliefs broadly require more of a prompt to pick out in the first place, and also strongly in the sense that your beliefs cannot be of infinite length, and any finite belief encodes a simplicity tendency over the far-more-numerous versions that are twice as complex. To generate even a single belief requires something at least resembling a simplicity prior.
You can dispense with having beliefs at all as well, but by that point we’re essentially dispensing with being a mind at all,[1] and that means you can no longer have a self-ratifying state of a mind for lack of a mind;[2] and if you have to unwind to a rock to avoid having a simplicity-tendency then that’s about as far from it being optional as is possible.[3]
I think for the purposes of this discussion many types of thoughts can be thought of as either being a type of belief or implying a belief, in that they follow the same rules of requiring some sort of preference for simplicity… either directly or just because they’re produced through a sequential process that takes finite time to reach a stopping point.
...I think I may have somewhat lost the thread here. The original argument here is something like ‘perhaps the reason the world seems orderly and not blotzmany, is just that we’re sneaking in that assumption by using reasoning that assumes an orderly world’, right? I guess this is somewhat true, in the sense that anthropically we can’t perceive something no mind perceives and you need a certain amount of order for a mind.[4] But it doesn’t seem to be true in a way that would work to avoid blotzman brains, and if we’re sneaking in that assumption anywhere I think it’s located inside our definition of ‘mind’ rather than how we reason about that definition.
(I actually expect- Insofar as we can draw any conclusions from this kind of subjective observation at all, which is not obviously the case- a stronger version of this where, ie, my subjective observations don’t draw from the pool of insect observations or even those of any other person, and so it’s not surprising that I don’t find myself being a fly even if there are a lot of flies, because anyone who finds themself a fly is a fly and not me, but that’s besides the point because blotzman brains can still match that criteria.)
You can dispense with having beliefs at all as well, but by that point we’re essentially dispensing with being a mind at all
To some extent yeah, but for example, think of a corporation or a state government or something. In some narrow-ish senses it has greater power / knowledge / ability / skill / capability compared to an individual human; and that’s not entirely just due to having collected several humans, but also partly due to some narrow usefulness of the corporate structures themselves, so this entity has some degree of its own reality if you see what I mean. In many important ways it’s incoherent, doesn’t have beliefs, isn’t a mind, is very inefficient, etc.; but it’s definitely some type of thingy, if you know what I mean, so such things aren’t necessarily uninteresting.
(This is speculative and not a battle-hardened opinion)
One could respond: The thing you want an explanation for, the thing which you have anticipations about, isn’t existence in its entirety. It’s differences between relevant ways that existence could be, and how you participate in existence, i.e. “what world you turn out to be in” or what you expect to see or how you think you can affect the world.
This sets up a dichotomy:
Things that you could reasonably think you might possibly be able to change, or anything contingently related to those things (e.g. a cause or effect of some of those things). These are things about which you have separate beliefs and preferences, because you want to track targets and realities separately in order to find more successful actions.
Things that you know, to the very core of your being, baked in from the start, that you couldn’t ever possibly change or that you won’t even consider as possibilities.
(Ok fine it’s not a dichotomy yet, I didn’t work it out, but maybe you can see what I’m trying to get at.)
For example, you wrote about “where recursive justification hits bottom”, and the loop of a simplicity prior justifying itself through the meta level: I believe in some kind of simplicity prior because it’s a simple hypothesis that such a prior will keep on being true and useful, given that it has been true and useful constantly up until now. Why not truly question the simplicity prior so hard that you stop evaluating its possible alternatives by the meta-level judgements of the simplicity prior itself? Seems a bit like a preference, in the sense that there might be a self-ratifying alternative state of mind, but you don’t like it / wouldn’t choose it. (The fact that it would be much less effective is something you only induce based on the simplicity prior!) The preference and the belief are kinda created in motion as already always mushed together, if you see what I mean.
The lottery is something you view as being under your control. If it was baked in, by evolution say, to only care about worlds where you win the lottery, then you really might be expecting to win the lottery. (Is there a toy model of this from the shutdown button indifference work?)
Maybe no one views Boltzmann brains as moral patients who we’d possibly be able to help?
And then, on how my model of reality actually works, you wouldn’t win the lottery. Do you think differently?
The map is not the territory. “Justifiable reason to believe something” is a map-thing that is not the same as “knowing why it happens” out in the territory. We have seen the universe be simple at us really really hard. We are justified in map-expecting our experiences to probably continue to be ordered. We don’t know what territory lies behind it.
(I timed out on fully thinking this through and better get back to work; I’ll try to summarize, and leave a half-finished ramble below.)
(I’ll repeat that I barely hold the view represented here; to me it’s a hypothesis / question. I assume you’ve heard this view before, but I’m just thinking it through. :) )
A supposed dissolution to the question
is something along the lines of:
All mathematical structure is real, and that’s all that’s real.
There are different regions / elements of Structure, such as minds, experiences, facts, or worlds.
Many creatures need various “weights” over Structure.
A creature has to divide its efforts, so it has to divide up a finite total weight of caring across Structure.
A creature wants to act differently depending on what its affectable surroundings are like, so it needs something like a probability distribution over “possible worlds” (mathematically coherent contexts of affectable surroundings).
There’s no objective / intersubjective weight-of-existence to different regions of Structure.
More precisely, creatures would be far from fully agreeing on the sense in which comparatively tiny numbers of orderly experiences carry more weight-of-existence.
Probably a great “many” creatures would learn to / be born to distinguish map from territory, and to expect the territory to be simple.
Probably “weights over Structure” have to take on some sort of simplicity form, since any non-dogmatic weighting is some kind of simplicity weighting.
The reason it seems like orderly experiences carry more weight-of-existence is that when you try to model “what exists”, you’re implicitly calling on background presumptions such as “the world is orderly”.
In other words, you’re basically assuming that orderly experiences carry more weight-of-existence.
This assumption is partly borne out by experience. In other words, it’s objective in the single-observer sense of “it’s still there even if I believe it’s not there, and it’s still there even if I don’t care about it”.
However, those hypotheticals “even if I try to believe” and “even if I don’t care about it” are still being evaluated (“it’s still there”) according to the assumption that the world is orderly. That assumption bakes in some degree of creature-dependent caring.
Partly, to some degree, you’re assuming that orderly experiences carry more weight-of-existence not because it’s borne out by experience, but rather because you don’t care what happens in worlds where experience is disorderly. That’s not to say that you wouldn’t consider a Boltzmann brain to not be a moral patient. Rather, you would consider a Boltzmann brain to be utterly beyond your ability to ever help out; and the way this appears in your mind is considering it less real.
More rambling:
No, I agree.
I agree, but I’m saying that the dynamic of going from observing “the universe has been simple really hard at us” to concluding “our experiences will probably continue to be ordered” is a dynamic, which you could in principle choose to not implement. Instead you could in principle choose to implement a dynamic that concludes “the universe is probably going to soon get bored of being simple, and start being disordered for a while”.
Why don’t you choose to implement that dynamic? I don’t think you should, and I think you can list various good reasons (it represents a more complicated hypothesis because you have to say the switchover point, it would result in less effective thinking, etc.), and I’d probably agree with your reasons. But from a perspective where anything about your mind is potentially up for questioning, those reasons are just more things you could question. If you questioned all of them all at once, in a very deep/expansive way that includes forbidding yourself from sneaking them in through a meta level, they wouldn’t be available to rederive / regrow each other. Or to say it another way:
My current quasi-equilibrium (believing that for the most part the map is not the territory, explanations tend to be simple, the overall universe tends to be very simple in terms of unbounded algorithmic information, non-logical inference about X requires causal interaction with X, believing in something doesn’t make it so, etc.) is good and self-ratifying. I’m just saying that I could try to unwind it so far that you unwind all the ways it’s self-ratifying. Then, basically by construction, there’d be insufficient justification to regenerate my current quasi-equilibrium.
I don’t do that for various good reasons. But the good reasons have foundations that have always been present in me. I’m not fully questioning them; I don’t try out what it would be like to never have believed in the simplicity of the universe from the start. This is a kind of reflective stability. The thing that is stable—is it a belief or a preference? I’m saying that it’s pretty ambiguous to me, or I’m not sure what the question is asking. So when you ask:
I wonder whether your belief that reality works to make your experience not dissolve into chaos amounts to a prior commitment to care about worlds that are simple (and hence understandable, affectable, etc.). In other words, maybe the reason you “anticipate” regularities is “just” that you’re constructed to do so. Many of the worlds that surround [minds equivalent to you at this moment] actually do dissolve into chaos, and/or have just coalesced out of chaos. But you’re just not intuitively caring to have anticipations about them.
Why, because I don’t expect to see that actually happen to me, of course! In a way that doesn’t depend at all on which anticipation-dynamic I try to implement, even if I could modify my own source code.
Beings that modify their own source code to expect to win the lottery are then promptly surprised by losing the lottery. Beings that modify their preferences to care much more about worlds in which they win the lottery, predominantly see themselves losing the lottery and ending up in the world they cared about less. If you decide to give up on anticipating that your vision stays ordered, it will nonetheless stay quite ordered. The dynamic by which we expect order is not an explanation for that order. “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” Even if you were a kind of being that could stop believing in order, it still wouldn’t go away.
Of which I have also said: The art of shepherding is not about using pebbles to control sheep, but letting sheep control pebbles.
Why not unwind our justification loop for expecting order? Why, because at the end of unwinding, we would still see order rather than chaos. You and I both know that’s true. But why is it true? Not the map-why of how do we justify believing it; the territory-why of “How did it end up that way?”
I believe you should be able to make progress by writing out different map-level and territory-level things. Let me try:
0) My prediction: I expect the universe to continue being ordered.
1) In-map explanation for why I came to believe it: I use a simplicity prior to predict my observations and trust my memory.
2) In-territory explanation for why my prediction succeeds: I’m a human (not a BB) in a simple universe.
The problem: I can’t trust my memory and justify the simplicity prior.
3) In-map justification for using the simplicity prior anyway: memory and simplicity aren’t provably reliable, but I don’t care about my life in case they are not reliable.
Potential crux A: (3) doesn’t undermine the fact that I’m correct only because of (2), so changing what I care about doesn’t change the outcome, yet it still counts as a justification of doing (1). If I cared about complex universes, I wouldn’t be justified in doing (1).
4) In-territory justification for using the simplicity prior anyway: I live in a multiverse where memory and simplicity aren’t reliable in every universe, but I don’t care about universes where they are not reliable.
5) Another in-territory justification for using the simplicity prior: God or some power makes the simplicity prior true in the multiverse.
Potential crux B: some will say (4) is not an explanation because I have to explain “how you go from experience 1 in universe 1 to experience 2 in universe 1 instead of experience 2 in universe 2” or something; others will say it’s all anthropic woo and any reasonable (5)-type theory is gonna be untestable by construction (until we die).
6) A deeper in-territory explanations for why my prediction (0) succeeds: “God/power did it” (see 5), “I got lucky once to end up in an ordered universe” (see 4), “all experience histories created by the multiverse exist, therefore this experience history was fated to be experienced anyway” (see 4). Due to crux B, I assume the latter can be disputed. The middle one can be criticized for being too lucky.
Why isn’t 3⁄4 a justification? Because of some philosophy regarding the flow of observer moments (crux B)?
On the topic of unwinding to some state of mind besides the simplicity prior- are the alternatives not uncomputable as a class?
That is: There is a finite number of theories below a certain level of complexity, so the simplicity prior allocates a finitely-small-amount-of its expectation to a finite number of outcomes. For the opposite of the simplicity prior, a complexity prior- where you prefer a theory more the more complicated it is- any theory you consider has an infinite number of even more complicated counterparts, because you can always make the theory more complicated by adding another detail, such that you replace ‘gravity’ with ‘gravity, except on tuesdays’ with ‘gravity except on tuesdays, except for next tuesday where there will be gravity after all’ and so on forever. As such, it’s impossible to compute the complexity prior.[1]
It appears this should apply to any prior that doesn’t contain the simplicity prior- Even without weighing towards complexity, if you don’t weigh towards simplicity, every question has an infinite number of equally good answers, like in the gravity answer above.
Priors which contain the simplicity prior have a similar problem, but one that’s closer to leaning on the simplicity prior itself rather than just the implementability of the prior- that is, you can implement ‘the simplicity prior, but theories with an even number of bits/words/etc are more likely’, but, with there being an infinite number of possible simplicity-prior-variations like this, making a decision between these possible priors, without using the simplicity prior, is itself uncomputable.[2]
A dynamic being impossible to implement- not just due to limited computational power but because there is no right answer within the dynamic, seems like a good reason not to implement it, that doesn’t itself depend on the simplicity prior.
If I were trying to compute the complexity prior in finite time, I’d want to aggregate entire infinite classes of outcomes into one larger claim that shares all their details to save time, IE, ‘all theories wherein gravity works most of the time’. However, in doing so I would just be turning the complexity prior back into the simplicity prior, because the weight of a hypothesis-class is proportional to the fraction of all possible hypotheses which fall under it, which is proportional to its simplicity!
and also, if you picked a prior at random from this set, it would probably tell you to adopt the simplicity prior instead, because, ie, ‘simplicity but even-bitted theories are x2 likely’ adds more than 2 bits of complexity over the simplicity prior. Though I’m not sure whether it works out to ‘slightly over 50% odds of the simplicity prior’[3] or ‘approximately 100% odds of the simplicity prior’, it depends on how we abstract this infinity; the former if we figure each specific simplicity-prior-variant is equally likely to favor or not favor itself and that most of them do this by a huge amount that more than cancels out their complexity and so you get to the simplicity prior whenever a prior doesn’t favor itself, the latter if complexity tends to grow faster than self-favoring.
or slightly over 1⁄3 odds of the simplicity prior, if a prior that doesn’t favor itself has a 50% chance to not favor the simplicity prior either and end up on a new random prior that repeats the calculation. Or ~0% odds if each prior is so complex and specific that the odds of any prior coming up simplicity are minimal… or maybe that goes back to 50 / 100% because the odds of a prior not favoring itself the most go up by the same amount… It’s complicated but probably not relevant to the conclusion.
Something like this is true in a sense, I think. But you could unwind past assumptions that imply you have to “have a prior”. I mean, you’re not evading any law of course; you’ll just be incoherent (e.g. thrash around, or be dutch-bookable). But it’s a way you could be.
In a sense, yes- of course you can construct something without any given characteristic of a mind, such as an inert rock or a pair of dice.
That said, I’d argue the presence of something like a simplicity prior- not necessarily something that fits the formal definition of a prior, but some sort of tendency for simple beliefs over complicated ones- is a necessity of having beliefs of any kind at all.
For instance- you might have no prior belief, but whenever you generate a belief of any kind, assign it 50% probability. This isn’t a prior(it’s more like a change in how you update from your prior) and you end up with very stupid beliefs; but the ‘generate a belief of any kind’ step necessarily encodes a simplicity tendency, weakly in the sense that more complicated beliefs broadly require more of a prompt to pick out in the first place, and also strongly in the sense that your beliefs cannot be of infinite length, and any finite belief encodes a simplicity tendency over the far-more-numerous versions that are twice as complex. To generate even a single belief requires something at least resembling a simplicity prior.
You can dispense with having beliefs at all as well, but by that point we’re essentially dispensing with being a mind at all,[1] and that means you can no longer have a self-ratifying state of a mind for lack of a mind;[2] and if you have to unwind to a rock to avoid having a simplicity-tendency then that’s about as far from it being optional as is possible.[3]
I think for the purposes of this discussion many types of thoughts can be thought of as either being a type of belief or implying a belief, in that they follow the same rules of requiring some sort of preference for simplicity… either directly or just because they’re produced through a sequential process that takes finite time to reach a stopping point.
and also because ‘this state of mind is more correct’ is a belief.
...I think I may have somewhat lost the thread here. The original argument here is something like ‘perhaps the reason the world seems orderly and not blotzmany, is just that we’re sneaking in that assumption by using reasoning that assumes an orderly world’, right? I guess this is somewhat true, in the sense that anthropically we can’t perceive something no mind perceives and you need a certain amount of order for a mind.[4] But it doesn’t seem to be true in a way that would work to avoid blotzman brains, and if we’re sneaking in that assumption anywhere I think it’s located inside our definition of ‘mind’ rather than how we reason about that definition.
(I actually expect- Insofar as we can draw any conclusions from this kind of subjective observation at all, which is not obviously the case- a stronger version of this where, ie, my subjective observations don’t draw from the pool of insect observations or even those of any other person, and so it’s not surprising that I don’t find myself being a fly even if there are a lot of flies, because anyone who finds themself a fly is a fly and not me, but that’s besides the point because blotzman brains can still match that criteria.)
To some extent yeah, but for example, think of a corporation or a state government or something. In some narrow-ish senses it has greater power / knowledge / ability / skill / capability compared to an individual human; and that’s not entirely just due to having collected several humans, but also partly due to some narrow usefulness of the corporate structures themselves, so this entity has some degree of its own reality if you see what I mean. In many important ways it’s incoherent, doesn’t have beliefs, isn’t a mind, is very inefficient, etc.; but it’s definitely some type of thingy, if you know what I mean, so such things aren’t necessarily uninteresting.
Do you take the data in need of explanation to be a stream of orderly experiences, or one moment of orderly experience?
One moment of orderly experience that includes remembering an ordered story of how it came to be.