This post describes variations on a thought experiment involving the anthropic principle. The variations were developed through discussion with Andreas Albrecht, Charles Bennett, Leonid Levin, and Andrew Arrasmith at a conference at the Neils Bohr Institute in Copenhagen in October of 2019. I have not yet finished reading Bostrom’s “Anthropic Bias“, so I don’t know where it fits in to his framework. I expect it is subsumed into such existing discussion, and I would appreciate pointers.
The point is to consider a few thought experiments that share many of the same important features, but for which we have very different intuitions, and to identify if there are any substantive difference that can be used to justify these intuitions.
I will use the term “shocked” (in the sense of “I was shocked to see Bob levitate off the ground”) to refer to the situation where we have made observations that are extremely unlikely to be generated by our implicit background model of the world, such that good reasoners would likely reject the model and start entertaining previously disfavored alternative models like “we’re all brains in a vat”, the Matrix, etc. In particular, to be shocked is not supposed to be merely a description of human psychology, but rather is a normative claim about how good scientific reasoners should behave.
Here are the three scenarios: