Re: on simply being an SAS

From: Juergen Schmidhuber <juergen.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Thu, 16 Dec 1999 08:57:47 +0100

Christopher Maloney:

>It seems to me that either we should expect the
>universe to be lawful, or we should expect our senses to provide
>pure white-noise static from this instant onward. I still can't
>get past the nagging conviction that I got a few weeks ago that
>none of the discussion I've read so far does anything to justify
>the expectation of law over chaos.

>Schmidhuber says that it has to do with the measure of the program
>to compute this universe and nothing else. Well, that doesn't work,
>IMO, because he doesn't define "this universe". Does he mean the
>universal wave function of QM? If so, that obviously has an infinite
>number of histories of me, so why isn't that multiple universes? If
>not, then I would think that this universe (i.e. this history) has
>actually a rather high information content. The info. content of
>QM only plummets when you take the whole wave function into account,
<nicht wahr?

 Let me repeat: MWI is a by-product of the UTM set-up. The plain wave
 function permits many different histories of wave function collapses.
 But from the Great Programmer's view, there are no real "world splits"
 - there are just a bunch of different algorithms yielding identical
 results for some time, until they start computing different outputs.
 Obviously "this universe" is just the one with our particular history
 of "splits". Some histories are simpler than others. Those are more
 likely, according to the universal prior.

 Juergen
Received on Thu Dec 16 1999 - 00:00:55 PST