On Sat, Feb 8, 2020, 5:28 PM Matt Mahoney <mattmahone...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 1. I flip a fair coin. I peek at the result without showing you. It is > heads. What is the probability that the coin came up heads? > Probability does not describe the state of a system. It describes the belief by an agent that a future event will happen, on a scale from 0 to 1. Different agents can have different beliefs based on different knowledge or different models and both be correct. > 2. While you sleep I plan to make 5 atom for atom identical copies of you > in different rooms. Then I will roll a die and pick one of the six still > sleeping copies to kill instantly. Knowing this, what is your subjective > probability that you will wake up in the same room? > Probability can be accurately estimated by a large number of independent trials. If an event happens m times out of n, 0 < m < n, then the probability is m/n. If I copy you every night for n nights (making 5^n copies of you), then on average each copy would remember waking up in a different room 5/6 of the time. Making a copy of you and killing either the original or the copy both have the same effect as doing nothing. If this seems counter intuitive, it's because humans evolved to fear death, and as social animals, to grieve the death of others. A computer does neither because it wasn't programmed to. > 3. (Bostrom's simulation argument). There is a 1% chance that sometime in > the next billion years that we will create a computer simulation of the > present day world and run a million copies of it. What is the probability > that we are living in a simulation? > Probability is a measure of belief in future events. But since there is no test for living in a simulation, there are no future events to predict and the question is meaningless. ------------------------------------------ Artificial General Intelligence List: AGI Permalink: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/Tefd74cfe5df991e0-M931e15a56e04daed64c53061 Delivery options: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription
