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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   38489 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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You can imagine worlds where you don't exist, but imagining such worlds doesn't tell you anything about how likely they are.

Should we be able to come up with some prior probabilities?

Given that you (an observer) exist, what is the chance that you will empirically observe a universe with observers in scenario 1? Answer: 100%.

Given that you (an observer) exist, what is the chance that you will empirically observe a universe with observers in scenario 2? Answer: 100%.

Given that you (an observer) exist, what is the chance that you will empirically observe a universe with observers in scenario 3? Answer: 100%.

You seem to think that it's necessary to price into all predictions that you exist. I don't see why. Ignoring information while calculating probabilities is something you're allowed to do. The surprise only happens when you ask questions like "if, for now, we don't take that I exist into consideration, what would be the likelihood that there'd be any observation going on for a world in scenario 1? What about 2? Or 3?"

You're ignoring what I said: "the odds that you will observe a universe with observers is equal to 100%." There may be some probability of a universe without observers existing, but you can never actually observe this, and you therefore have no information about how likely it is to occur. You have no way to "take this into account" because you don't know if this scenario can even exist, or how likely it is.

I hadn't ignored it, it just seems that we'd parsed the sentence differently, once again disagreeing on whether we're a priori assuming you exist. I'd taken "no one exists" to be among the pool we're drawing from, while you didn't. In those cases, no one observes. Of course, if we're only taking into account the ones you observe, you are correct. I've just been trying to argue that we shouldn't do that.

First of all, it's not a given that the odds of observers are less than 100%. They are less than or equal to 100%. It's possible that a one-shot universe must necessarily create observers. We have no clue about the underlying physical process that would create such a universe and therefore we have no clue about the likelihoods. There may be no randomness involved.

Yes, that's one of the three possibilities that I'd mentioned (second quote in your last comment) that we should be updating towards.

Second, the odds that you will observe a universe with observers is 100% because the word "you" in that sentence necessarily implies the existence of at least one observer. The statement "in some of those worlds you don't observe anything at all" is incoherent, because there is no "you" in such worlds. The statement "you will always observe observers" is a tautology, it is necessarily true based on the definition of the word "you."

I don't think it's incoherent, it's just evidently not the way you specifically use sentences, and you're probably right that your use in this case is more normal.

and therefore no way to find out if their priors are correct or way off.

That's largely irrelevant. Yes, we should adjust our beliefs if we can get any evidence on that, but we should go with this in the mean time.

Alright. We have x:1-x (I'll go with this since going up to 1 is nicer than up to 100. No real difference, though.). We multiply by y:z. We get xy:z-xz. (This gives a 100xy/(xy+z-xz) chance it worked). We know that this is higher than before, since xy/(xy+z-xz)+(z-xz)/(xy+z-xz) still equals 1 and the ratio's been shifted towards the first, since y>z.

So you update from x to xy/(xy+z-xz), which is an increase in probability.

Do note that this analysis was holding y and z constant and only updating x, I assume you'd in actuality be having to update several things at once. I don't know the math to know how to do that. I'll note that this general case was explicitly what I was trying to do—I said that a few times. The numbers before were just examples.

The difference is, we know that hospitable planets are relatively rare. We have external knowledge about how planets form and can observe both planets with and without life. We didn't come to this conclusion based on the fact of our existence. We came to this conclusion by observing the external universe.

I think you might have been misunderstanding the argument I was trying to make right there. I was not making an argument about how common hospitable planets should be. I was making an argument about how commonly observers should find themselves on hospitable planets, interplanetary travel excepted.

It was my point that hospitable planets are relatively rare, and yet somehow we find ourselves on one. Why could that be? Did we just luck out? It's not like there couldn't be observers on inhospitable planets (I gave the example of chance quantum fluctuations, also providing a space suit or whatever is needed). And so, by your reasoning, you should pick priors on how likely any given planet is to be hospitable in this universe. Let's say 1/100000. I don't know the actual figure, but let's go with it. Okay, how should we decide which is more likely for you, an observer to exist on? Well, since both can happen, and, considering any given planet, given that you exist, the probability that you exist is 100%, we can't update our beliefs (per your reasoning), so we should still have a 1/100000 chance that we're on a hospitable planet, and we should be rather surprised to find ourselves on one.

See the equivalence:

You say:

  1. We pick priors for the relative likelihood of any random world being habitable.

  2. We draw no inferences the fact that we exist, since that happens in every world where we exist to observe it.

  3. We keep those probabilities for the chance we're in a habitable world.

Now, swap "world" for "planet".

  1. We pick priors for the relative likelihood of any random planet being habitable.

  2. We draw no inferences the fact that we exist, since that happens on every planet where we exist to observe it.

  3. We keep those probabilities for the chance we're on a habitable planet.

But in the planet case, those priors are clearly very different from what we see, due to the anthropic principle, which I think your arguments disallow.

Now let's look at how it appears under what I say.

  1. We pick priors for the relative likelihood of a random planet being habitable.

  2. We do draw inferences from the fact that we exist, shifting our probabilities very strongly towards planets that give us decent chances to exist.

  3. We use those adjusted probabilities to give us the chance we're on a habitable planet.

And for worlds:

  1. We pick priors for the relative likelihood of a random world being habitable.

  2. We draw inferences from the fact that we exist, shifting our probabilities very strongly towards worlds that give us decent chances to exist.

  3. We use those adjusted probabilities to give us the chance we're in a habitable world.

Imagine we had zero information about the universe beyond planet earth. Should we assume that planets with life are rare based on the fact that humans exist? Should we assume that earth is especially hospitable for life? Should we assume other planets even exist at all? In the absence of any external information, it's totally possible that planets with life are common and that earth is uniquely hostile to life compared with those other planets. Or it's possible that earth is the only planet. We would have no way of knowing, based merely on the observation that we exist.

I'm not seeing how this touches the arguments that I was making before. I wasn't arguing for the frequency of habitability among other planets, I was arguing for the likelihood that the particular one we're on is habitable. Am I seeing here that your argument is that we can have no priors? But I was kind of assuming that we were taking into account scientific knowledge of most planets being inhospitable. (I'm also confused since your arguments are all backwards—I don't see why humans existing should shift our beliefs towards life being rare, and so on.)

But we should, I suppose, think that many planets is more likely than in worlds where we don't exist, for anthropic principle reasons. (which, again, is exactly what I've been doing, but with worlds). And we should expect ourselves to be in one of the planets where life is common, I think, because more life exists on those, I'd think, so the "earth is uniquely hostile" seems less likely?

No, because we have no idea how "unlikely" the fine-tuning of our universe is. We have no reason to think that dice were rolled. It's possible that what seems to us like fine-tuning is actually just some necessary constraint of an underlying physical system that created the universe, such that the odds of fine-tuning were 100%. Or its possible that a fine-tuned universe was super unlikely and we just got lucky. We have no way of knowing.

See once again that it being necessary, or at least, fairly likely, even if it's one-shot was one of the possibilities I said we should update towards.

Likewise, there's no reason to assume that God likes creating fine-tuned universes. He might love rolling dice and creating trillions and trillions of dead universes for every living one. After all, he seems to love creating uninhabited planets, so why not uninhabited universes?

We don't have to assume he does to shift in that direction, we just need to think a God is more likely to create life than the one-shot real-and-not-just-apparent-fine-tuned case to shift probability from the latter toward the former. This doesn't seem like a crazy possibility to me, unlike the we-just-got-stupidly-lucky option, so the relative probability of theism to super-lucky should be raised.

If your response is much the same, I'll stop, since you won't listen (sorry, that's not true, that's just what it feels like) this is going nowhere, so feel free to have the last word. Thanks for the conversation.

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