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