You are (mostly) a simulation.

I consider it bad form to do such a massive rewrite, thereby obsoleting the entire previous comment stream.

Regarding your new post, I think you need to taboo the word 'measure' and rewrite all your posts without it. It would make things much more clear for the rest of us. When communicating with others, it is more important to be clear and precise than it is to be compact, and your use of 'measure' is neither clear nor precise to a good number of your audience.

What the frakking Hell? Dust theory on its face gives almost uniformly false predictions. Now, we are admittedly confused about how to assign probabilities in cases like this, but confusion is a bad reason to adopt a radical new view of reality. That's not how confusion is supposed to work.

Eitan, I think you should set down exactly what you take "Dust Theory" to mean, for at least the following reasons: Not everyone has read "Permutation City"; those who have may have forgotten some details; the book may not nail down all those details firmly enough to make the term unambiguous; you might mean by it something slightly different from what Egan does.

(For the avoidance of doubt, that last one would not necessarily be a bad thing. The most credible thing deserving the name "Dust Theory" might not be quite the same as what's described in what is, after all, a work of fiction with its own narrative constraints.)

Can someone explain me what's the point of this post? No offense intended; reading the first paragraph made my mind literally explode wondering what the hell I've just read.

I haven't read Permutation City (a comment mentioned it) and in fact I approached all LW material I've read with only my previous experience and reasoning abilities, and ALL topics such as this that feel so meta, out-of-this-world, and seemingly with no practical implications make no sense to me.

Am I missing something?

Why are you in a simulation and not a Boltzmann brain? If the universe goes on forever after heat death, then there will be an infinite number of Boltzmann brain yous.

Now you just repeating Bostrom simulation argument. But why you rewrite early post is not clear as it will be misleading for commenters.

if you are still here, check this: https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.01826

Seems you were right after all with dust theory.

Also, is there any way to see your original version of the post?

Oh god I still can't get this thought out of my head. Can someone please tell me what they think of my solution to the problem?

I just read 'The Finale of the Ultimate Meta Mega Crossover' again. Is there a motivation for entities with unlimited computing power to simulate all possible programs in order? Or to take an interest in beings like me? Would that be enough to remove most of my measure from 'real' universes? I think probably not, but I need to be sure. I'm not thinking too clearly now.

EDIT: Wait a minute, this becomes more plausible after realizing someone out there in some universe has unlimited computing power. If so, could it affect measure? Or does only the density of the 'unlimited' universe itself affect measure? Please answer.

EDIT2: Max Tegmark argues that actual infinite quantities are not possible, because otherwise this causes trouble in the 'mathematical universe' model (only Gödel-complete mathematical structures can exist). If true, does this solve the problem? There may be universes with arbitrary amounts of computing power, but they still need to be optimized. Would the occasional intelligences that want to simulate humanlike beings overcome the measure of actually-existing universes like this one? Most such intelligences would want to simulate only the last few instants of life, but some (however rare) are certain to simulate the whole. And if they created billions of identical copies of me, would that increase measure as well?

The question is basically now: does the measure of my actual existence overcome the measure of worlds where I am simulated, even taking into account potentially limitless resources available to simulate?

I'm less panicked by this thought now, since if they are after my measure they must, in effect, simulate me exactly as I would really exist (taking into account the vertiginous question). So that part of my measure does not matter and I can value the part that really does correspond to an external reality.

Either way, if any of this is true (even with those that just simulate the last few instants of life) than an afterlife really does exist for everyone, regardless of quantum immortality.

EDIT3: OK, I think I've hit on a solution, but it'll take a while to type up.

You know Bostrom is arguing against unification, right?

Upvoted because I've come to similar conclusions and believe that simulation anthropics are interesting and worth discussing.

I didn't read your first version of the post. I guess you are being downvoted because of some combination of poor/obtuse presentation ('dust theory' is a poor name, it suggests ultra low probability worlds), history of presenting 'crazy' ideas, etc. I feel somewhat bad for you so I may create another supporting thread to present and discuss this general topic.

Also, it would really help if you link to earlier discuss of anthropics - some of these issues have been discussed at length here in the past.

I feel sorry that I inspired this thread by my comment but did not elaborate it enough. Basically I have multilevel depositorium of wild ideas, with wildest are on the top. (I think I should make a map about it :) So I peak an idea from the next level of the depositorium, not the wildest one, to help Eltan. As I know that it is wild idea I can't take it for granted and I understand that it needs more profound explanation. As I write slowly on foreign language, I was hesitated to go for long explanation which will only spoil my carma afterwords.

Basically, my idea would be easy to explain using quantum multiverse hypothesis. The explanatory logic when could be ported to Dust theory.

1. Different minds have different probabilities to exist in multiverse.
2. When, IF there is a way to influence probabilities of existence, when minds able to do so will dominate. It is just another explanation for natural selection and evolutionary psychology, nothing new here.
3. If there is other ways to change distribution of minds in different branches of multiverse, some minds will use it and will dominate and most likely we are such type of minds. Or, simply speaking, if magic is physically possible, when such magic capable mids would dominate, so they will be an attractor in total multiverse mind space. (Again, if you see Bostrom's UN++ article you could find rational explanation how a mind could manipulate probability of future reality by almost magical means but in fact using Doomsday argument). It all depends of word "if", so we can't take it for granted.

I was speaking about it only to illustrate what is an attractor of minds in complex universe. Different complex universes has different mind attractors, for example, if time travel is possible, where will be constant loops as attractors.

Now we move to the topic. Suppose that many me-like-expirineces exist in different worlds. If I narrow my experience, it may exist in many more worlds. If I narrow it to a point, I could be almost everybody. When I open my eyes, and I become one of trillions different observers. Resulting process may be explained as jumping of consciousness from one observer to another. Personally, I think it is not a problem at all, as after many jumps consciousness will return to original observer and it will not have observable consequences.

Lets assume for the sake of the argument that such jumping may happen.

This jumping of consciousness from one observer to another may be represented as a line in the set of all possible observers, and such line may go almost infinite and random until it meet an observer that somehow prevents its jumping - he will be an attractor. How he could do it? His consciousness must be more stable and each small part of it must be more firmly connected with other.

Now the things go wilder. We will evaluate human consciousness for these criteria. Human has almost constant dreaming during sleep time, and I suggested that it may prevent consciousness from loosing its exact correspondence to mostly human and "his" world. (But on the next level of wilderness we could remember that yogis deliberately tries to experience one point state. I had it once during dream. It like a become a point even without colors or difference between audio and video.)

Also humans have qualia that are uniform inside all visual field (which is strange in fact). So any small qualia, any green point is enough to firmly correspondent to all possible experiences and thus stabilise them against jumping. I think that qualia are needed mostly to strictly stabilise worlds. I understood that I went too far for rationalist forum, so I will stop with my speculations how qualia stabilise the world.

When I was a youth I wondered where my consciousness came from. How it came that I perceived, that my consciousness was mine. Where it came from. What good luck that the consciousness that was I had such good parents and home. I could have been someone else, someone suffering. I conceived many consciousness instances like processors waiting for a being (e.g. a baby) to become conscious and start 'executing' in it. But where were these? Were these the souls? And were did they go when we die?

It was quite obvious that even if these instances 'persisted' that they carried no state from one physical being to the next. Otherwise there'd be effects from that. Like memory. I obviously had no memory of having been in other being previously. Some people seemed to claim it but not concvincingly so. And also memory was encoded in the brain and that decayed. So the only persistent thing about my imaginary consciousness processors were ... the concept of a processor being necessary. And that seems to have solved the mystery for me then.

Curiously these ideas mostly came in the evening when sleep was near but I never thought that the consciousness would break by sleep.

What do you mean, we're attractors to other consciousnesses?

OK, I've rewritten the OP. Sorry about panicking at first.