I promised to summarize why I moved away from the philosophical position that Hal Finney calls UD+ASSA. Here's part 1, where I argue against ASSA. Part 2 will cover UD.
Consider the following thought experiment. Suppose your brain has been destructively scanned and uploaded into a computer by a mad scientist. Thus you find yourself imprisoned in a computer simulation. The mad scientist tells you that you have no hope of escaping, but he will financially support your survivors (spouse and children) if you win a certain game, which works as follows. He will throw a fair 10-sided die with sides labeled 0 to 9. You are to guess whether the die landed with the 0 side up or not. But here's a twist, if it does land with "0" up, he'll immediately make 90 duplicate copies of you before you get a chance to answer, and the copies will all run in parallel. All of the simulations are identical and deterministic, so all 91 copies (as well as the 9 copies in the other universes) must give the same answer. ASSA implies that just before you answer, you should think that you have 0.91 probability of being in the universe with "0" up. Does that mean you should guess "yes"? Well, I wouldn't. If I was in that situation, I'd think "If I answer 'no' my survivors are financially supported in 9 times as many universes as if I answer 'yes', so I should answer 'no'." How many copies of me exist in each universe doesn't matter, since it doesn't affect the outcome that I'm interested in. Notice that in this thought experiment my reasoning mentions nothing about probabilities. I'm not interested in "my" measure, but in the measures of the outcomes that I care about. I think ASSA holds intuitive appeal to us, because historically, copying of minds isn't possible, so the measure of one's observer-moment and the measures of the outcomes that are causally related to one's decisions are strictly proportional. In that situation, it makes sense to continue to think in terms of subjective probabilities defined as ratios of measures of observer-moments. But in the more general case, ASSA doesn't hold up. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
