There is an anthropic line of reasoning over Everettian branch universes where you can actually expect these types of highly unlikely events to happen more often than chance alone would predict if they promote futures with more Born-rule weighted observer-moments.
The response you posted seems to be referring to various concepts from theoretical physics and philosophy, specifically the ideas of the Everettian interpretation of quantum mechanics, anthropic reasoning, and the Born rule. Let's break these down:
Everettian interpretation of quantum mechanics: Also known as the Many-Worlds interpretation, it suggests that all possible alternate histories and futures are real, each representing an actual "world" or "universe". In layman's terms, it's the idea that there could be countless parallel universes where every possible outcome of an event happens.
Anthropic reasoning: This is a philosophical consideration that observations of the universe must be compatible with the conscious and sapient life that observes it. In other words, our ability to exist and observe influences how we should interpret the universe.
Born rule: In quantum mechanics, the Born rule is a statistical law that connects the mathematical formalism of quantum theory to experimental observations. It provides the probability that a measurement on a quantum system will yield a given result.
The responder seems to suggest that in a universe with many possible futures (as the Everettian interpretation would suggest), we are more likely to observe "black swan" events that lead to more possible futures.
The idea here is that if an event significantly increases the number of possible futures (like a breakthrough that extends human lifespan), then it effectively increases the number of "observer-moments". In other words, more possibilities for observers to exist and make observations. According to anthropic reasoning, this could make these events more likely to occur than pure chance would predict, because we're only able to observe futures in which we exist.
This line of reasoning is highly speculative and philosophical in nature, touching on deep and unresolved questions in physics and philosophy. It's an interesting thought experiment, but it's important to note that this isn't widely accepted or proven in the scientific community as of my knowledge cutoff in September 2021.
Just to add on the "nonsense" line. Using the antropic principle to talk about the future is completely absurd.
There is a huge amount of what I think in unawarded debate about applying it to the past (IMO, it's very clear where it should be used), but applying it to the future is completely against any kind of logic.
Why? If the argument works at this point in time when reflecting on our history what makes it stop working for future observers who reflect on their histories?
It can certainly lead you to some pretty wacky-sounding conclusions (looking at you Frank Tipler) but I can’t see why it’s obviously wrong for future observers to deploy it in just the same was as we do.
So you’re saying that that line of reasoning depends on people existing in the future and thinking about the same kinds of things we do now in the same kinds of ways (at least wrt this particular argument). I can see how that is not guaranteed, especially far into the future where it might become difficult to understand what qualifies as an observer-moment. It is certainly speculative.
Unfortunately it seems like we have hit an impasse. I don’t really understand why you think this is invalid but I would love to be proved wrong. If you would like to continue this discussion over email (or whatever) I’d love that: hn at echophase dot com
Ah I think I get it. While it might be true that the average (imagined) future observer will have a history which is anthropically biased in this way we cannot use this reasoning to make predictions about which particular future we will find ourselves in (because that’s random according to the usual Born rule probabilities).
I would really love the opportunity to clarify my thinking on this. Is there any way I could ask you to explain it to me in more detail? I can compensate you for your time.
I said "there is a line of reasoning...", I didn't say I fully believe it. It definitely depends on a lot of pretty speculative ideas. I'm happy to discuss this further if you'd like to point out exactly which parts of the argument you object to.
