Re: Fear not Doomsday

From: Robin Hanson (rhanson@gmu.edu)
Date: Tue Jun 03 2003 - 12:11:55 MDT

  • Next message: naccts: "Re[2]: evolution and its implications."

    Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
    >>>... You can go forward from the discovery of new evidence; I'm not sure
    >>>it makes sense to selectively eliminate evidence you were born with and
    >>>ask what your "priors" were before that. ...
    >>... Perhaps you were born a much smarter baby that the rest of us, but
    >>most babies have no idea what their name is, how many humans have lived
    >>before them, how it is that a universe coughs up a mind, or even that
    >>they are in fact a mind that a universe coughed up.
    >
    >I was born with the evidence. I hadn't yet processed that evidence, but
    >at birth, I was human. There was never a point at which I started doing
    >anthropic calculations knowing I was a sentient being, but not that I was
    >human.

    But that is the situation with pretty much all the evidence we ever get or
    ever could get. The universe knew it when we were born, but we did not
    know it. If you're going to refuse to consider your priors over
    possibilities that the universe had rejected when you were born, you'll
    have to refuse to consider pretty much all possibilities other than the
    actual state of the universe.

    Robin Hanson rhanson@gmu.edu http://hanson.gmu.edu
    Assistant Professor of Economics, George Mason University
    MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444
    703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Tue Jun 03 2003 - 12:23:13 MDT