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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   30777 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022

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And as a bonus to "why weren't we born into a Grabby civ at its peak", you can add "why am I not an 80kg blog of hydrogen somewhere in the middle of a star like the vast majority of matter in the universe?".

That would prevent you from being an agent which is capable of observing that it is in a universe. Realizing that life is much more likely to occur on planets is what starts you down the path of, if not rejecting the Copernican principle, at least refining it.

You also get hilarious results like Adam and Eve being able to hunt by just precommiting really hard to having sex (Adam says he will impregnate Eve and start all of humanity if a deer does not appear right this second in front of him, if he does impregnate her, then they are the first humans among trillions, an unbelievably unlikely position, therefore it must be the case that a deer appeared and he didn't impregnate Eve right then and there, which would merely make them the only humans to ever exist, a much less unlikely position)

I don't think I've ever seen anyone seriously suggest that anthropic reasoning works causally like this. I think once you condition on the known information of Adam's commitment, there is no contradiction any more.

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