From: Robin Hanson (rhanson@gmu.edu)
Date: Tue Jun 03 2003 - 11:20:07 MDT
On 6/3/2003, Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote:
>... Personally I look on all of this with suspicion. There are millions
>of times more grains of sand than humans. Should I conclude that I started
>out with an enormous prior probability of being a grain of sand? There is
>nothing a cognitive pointer state *could have been*; it just *is*. A mind
>is just something that the physical universe coughs up from time to time,
>and all you can do is try and calculate the correlation of that pointer
>state with environmental variables. 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. I didn't start out with a one-in-six-billion chance of being
>Eliezer Yudkowsky. I'm just Eliezer Yudkowsky, where an Eliezer Yudkowsky
>is something the universe coughs up from time to time. My prior
>probability of being Eliezer is 1.
I find it instructive to consider what my beliefs would be a wide range of
counterfactual situations. On the other hand, many people are reluctant to
consider various forms of counterfactuals, and offer various reasons for
this reluctance. The reason that you offer here, however, that you knew
all this when you were born, seems implausible. 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.
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
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