Real-Life Anthropic Weirdness

So with what probability should Barack Obama believe he is on a holodeck, and how should this belief influence his behavior?

So if you find you ARE that friend, presumably you'd have no fear of stepping in front of that gun barrel yourself for a few million flips right afterwards. I mean it's pretty convincing proof. Then you get to see the confusion in each other's face!

Though you're both more likely to end up mopping your friend's blood of the floor.

On the whole, I think a good friend probably doesn't let a friend test the Quantum Theory of Immortality.

Although it was not via the lottery, my wife's sister won one million dollars on a TV show in the 1980s called "The one million dollar chance of a lifetime". It turns out that she and her husband would get $40,000 a year for 25 years, but they got divorced a few years later, so she received $20,000 a year until recently. It was quite a contrast between the show's promise to "make you a millionaire" and the actual very modest improvement in lifestyle from an extra $20,000 a year.

Anyway, none of you know her so this doesn't disprove the principle for you, but maybe it makes it a little more likely that I am in a simulation. The real problem with this conclusion is that it seems to require believing that most people (i.e. all of you readers among others) are zombies, which seems untenable. Otherwise my sister in law's presence on the holodeck puts me there, and you as well.

I get the feeling that there must be an "anthropic weirdness" literature out there that I don't know about. I don't know how else to explain why no one else is reacting to these paradoxes in the way that seems to me to be obvious. But perhaps my reaction would be quickly dismissed as naïve by those who have thought more about this.

The "obvious" reaction seems to me to be this:

The winner of the lottery, or Barack Obama for that matter, has no more evidence that he or she is in a holodeck than anyone else has.

Take the lottery winner. We all, including the winner, made the same observation. No one, including the winner, observed anything unusual. What we all saw was this: someone won the lottery that week. This is not an uncommon event. Someone wins the lottery in many weeks.

Perhaps people are confused because the winner will report this shared observation by saying

• "I won the lottery this week."

And, indeed, in that regard, the winner is unique. But, in the very way that I formulated this fact, the referent of "I" is defined to be the winner. Therefore, the above remark is logically equivalent to

• "The winner of the lottery this week won the lottery this week."

That hardly seems the sort of surprising evidence that might lead one to suspect holodecks. Moreover, it's what we all observed. With regards to evidence for holodecks or what have you, the winner is not in a special position.

Maybe people think, "But the winner predicted what the numbers would be beforehand, and he or she then observed those predictions come true. That gives the winner strong evidence for the false conclusion that he or she can predict lotteries."

But that conclusion just doesn't follow. We all observed the same thing: Millions of people tried to guess the numbers, and one (or a few) got them right. That's all that any of us saw. The number of correct predictions that we all saw was perfectly consistent with chance.

If the winner were unaware of all the other people who tried to guess the numbers, then he or she would be in trouble. Then he or she might validly reason "Just one person tried to guess the numbers, and that person got it right. Therefore, that person must have a special ability to predict the numbers." That's the person I pity, someone who had the misfortune to be exposed to extremely misleading observations. But normal lottery winners are not in that position.

I also don't see the asymmetry in the Quantum Theory of Immortality scenario. You and your friend both make the same observation: the version of you in the Everett branch where the gun doesn't go off doesn't get shot. Assuming that you both believe Many-Worlds, you both know that there are scads of branches out there where both your friend and your bullet-punctured remains "observed" (i.e., recorded in their physical structure), the gun's firing. And if you weren't convinced of Many-Worlds, then you will likely conclude that your model of physics is wrong because of the high probability that it assigned to the gun's firing. Rather than conclude that Many-Worlds is true, you will probably throw out QM altogether. (You might do this eventually even if you did go in believing Many-Worlds.) But, again, you have no privileged position over your friend here, because you don't see anything that he doesn't see.

Am I missing something? Are these paradoxes really this easy to dismiss?

Ha ha ha. Classic.

This is one of those stories you can show to would-be rationalists that will make them both laugh and think about probability. Well done.

If the hypothesis "this world is a holodeck" is normatively assigned a calibrated confidence well above 10-8, the lottery winner now has incommunicable good reason to believe they are in a holodeck. (I.e. to believe that the universe is such that most conscious observers observe ridiculously improbable positive events.)

Most conscious observers? I would think a universe/multiverse containing holodecks would still contain many people not in them. At best, you can conclude that most observers who don't see a world containing holodecks are in holodecks.

Possibly significant: the friend has some incommunicable evidence of his own – that he is conscious, in a world without holodecks, and didn't win the lottery – against (the winner)/(most observers) being in (a) holodeck(s).

Just for fun: Not only are we living in someone's holodeck fantasy, it's a badly written holodeck fantasy!

(Taken from http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2005/10/holodeck-scenario-part-i.html)

Let me weigh in on what I consider to be the worst possible catastrophe of them all. One that would explain every stupidity in the world today. That we are living in a very poor simulation.

...

All right, the notion is gaining some degree of plausibility. But suppose it's true. In that case, whose simulation are we living in? Some vast future Omega Point consciousness? Aliens, simulating weird alternative life forms? (Plausible, since human beings are so crazy.)

Naw, it should be simpler than that. And much more consistent with the irrationality we see around us?

How about this one? That we are all living inside someone else's Start Trek Holodeck dream. Is there any way we could test this hypothesis? A method that goes even deeper than cybernetics, neurophysiology or even physics?

Simply look around and see who has been impossibly fortunate, vastly out of all proportion to personal talent and competence, or even family privilege, or even any possible intervention by anomalous good luck!

Next, consider that a long-lasting Holodeck experience will not just be about being lucky, winning every poker hand and getting every girl. Heck, that's boring. Sitting around in a harem on a pile of jewels? feh. Gets tired quickly, take my word for it!

Anyway, if you simply win every hand, it's hard to forget that this is a simulation. If that is your aim -- to live in a wish fantasy while still being able to pretend it's real -- well then you want all the cool stuff to happen in ways that at least marginally let you fool yourself... into believing that you earned it all. Not because you dropped a lot of quarters into the Holodeck slot, but because you're more deserving. Because you’re gooder. Because you're better than everybody else.

Yeah! That’s the ticket. Tell the Holodeck computer to simulate real opponents - all the smug, assured, brainy types you hate. Only in this new universe they will lose despite all their fancy book smarts.

And your allies? Fun guys who know how to party and help you give wedgies to the smug, smartypants nerds. Yeah! As for luck? Well, set the game to easy, of course, but with LOTS of nerds to overcome and lots of social rules to flaut. And while victory should follow victory, it should never be TOO obvious. Make it gradual enough to last. So you can avoid the real enemy. Boredom.

All right, then, folks. Can YOU see anybody around you whose life we must clearly all be revolving around, in his personal holodeck program?

David Brin's answer is here: http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2005/10/holodeck-scenario-part-ii.html

That's the most amusing thing I've heard today. :)

After a lot of improbable things happen the main thing you have evidence for is that the universe is large enough to have improbable things happen. This could happen in MWI, or it could just happen in an ordinary very large universe. Or it could happen in a simulation that focuses on special events, so if your event is special this is also something that gets more support, relative to a small universe.

But I don't at all see how such events give you evidence about what sort of large universe you live in. And I don't see how winning the lottery is remotely unlikely enough to kick in such considerations.

As I alluded to in a previous discussion this sort of thing is veering quickly into the territory of the small world phenomenon in human social networks.

With something likely to be remarked on in idle chatter with casual acquaintances, such as winning a lottery, you end up with a unexpectedly large likelihood of becoming aware of a small number of links from yourself to someone who had (Unusual Event X) occur to them.

For those unfamiliar with QTI, it's a simple simultaneous test of many-worlds plus a particular interpretation of anthropic observer-selection effects: You put a gun to your head and wire up the trigger to a quantum coinflipper. After flipping a million coins, if the gun still hasn't gone off, you can be pretty sure of the simultaneous truth of MWI+QTI.

Wouldn't any of several multiverse theories predict the survival outcome, and therefore you can't conclude that the quantum MWI is correct? That is, a world which is single, yet contains you infinitely many times due to being spatially infinite, will also "collapse" every so often and let you survive. Or the simulation masters could be selectively manipulating the quantum events to make people who do weird experiments like this survive (no, I don't think this is likely at all).

Why would observing your own survival make you extremely confident of quantum MWI as opposed to other multiverse or savior theories?

From a statistical standpoint, lottery winners don't exist - you would never encounter one in your lifetime, if it weren't for the selective reporting.

When you said that, it seemed to me that you were saying that you shouldn't play the lottery even if the expected payoff - or even the expected utility - were positive, because the payoff would happen so rarely.

Does that mean you have a formulation for rational behavior that maximizes something other than expected utility? Some nonlinear way of summing the utility from all possible worlds?

If someone suggested that everyone in the world should pool their money together, and give it to one person selected at random (pretend for the sake of argument that utility = money), people would think that was crazy. Yet the idea of maximizing expected utility over all possible worlds assumes that an uneven distribution of utility to all your possible future selves is as good as an equitable distribution among them. So there's something wrong with maximizing expected utility.

But what is your watching friend supposed to think? Though his predicament is perfectly predictable to you - that is, you expected before starting the experiment to see his confusion - from his perspective it is just a pure 100% unexplained miracle.

OK, I don't get this at all, but I totally understand the lottery example. I think Tyrrell McAllister raised this question, but only his other question was ever addressed. Are the two cases really the same? If so, how?

It's true that, as the person next to the gun, you should expect to live with the same probability you give to the truth of the QTI. And that your friend should expect you to live with probability 2^(-n), where n is the number of coinflips. But for each branch where you live, both you and your friend are getting evidence for the truth of QTI. The only difference is that if you die from your POV, that pretty much disproves QTI, but if you die from your friend's point of view, he only gets n bits of information (number of coinflips before you die). So after a million - 1 flips, both you and your friend are virtually certain of QTI. But if, on the millionth flip, you die, it's disproved from your perspective, but virtually unchanged from your friend's.

It's true that only a small fraction of branches will contain a friend (or a public, for that matter) that becomes convinced of QTI, and that even if QTI isn't true, and even if MWI isn't true, that there would still be a very small chance that you would live (and thus be falsely convinced of the truth of QTI--poor you!). But the special distinction in the holodeck case is that winning the lottery personally would be more likely to happen in a sim, whereas someone else winning it would not. In the QTI case, there isn't any alternate theory that becomes more or less likely just because you're the one behind the gun.

I get the feeling that I missed a lot of prediscussion to this topic. I am new here and new to these types of discussions, so if I am way off target please nudge me in the right direction. :)

If the statistics of winning a lottery are almost none, they are not none. As such, the chances of a lottery winner existing as time goes on increases with each lottery ticket purchased. (The assumption here is that "winner" simply means "holding the right ticket".)

Furthermore, it seems like the concept of the QTI is only useful if you already know what the probability of it being true /and/ find it helpful to consider yourself in the other variations as an extension of your personal identity. Otherwise, you are just killing yourself to prove a point to someone else.

But I really do not understand this:

"If the hypothesis 'this world is a holodeck' is normatively assigned a calibrated confidence well above 10-8, the lottery winner now has incommunicable good reason to believe they are in a holodeck."

Why are the probabilities of the world being a holodeck tied to the probability of guessing a number correctly? It seems like this is the same reasoning that leads people to believing in Jesus just because his face showed up on their potato chip. It just sounds like a teleological argument with a different target. Or was that the point and I missed it?

PS) Is it better to post once with three topics, or three times with one topic each?

I've pondered a toned-down version of this argument in the context of religious experience and other hallucinations. Also, this is an important consideration for Utilitarian-style Pascalian religion.

I also knew someone whose family won the lottery, though I don't remember how much.

I don't think it's an exception to the Agreement Theorem. All you have to do to to communicate the evidence is give your friend root access to your brain so he can verify you aren't lying. Of course Omega could have just rigged your brain so you think you survived a million QTI tests, but that possibility shouldn't worry your friend any more than it worries you.

also, BTW one of my Dad's ham radio buddies won the lottery recently.