Re: Variations in measure

From: Wei Dai <weidai.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Wed, 19 Dec 2001 11:07:29 -0800

On Wed, Dec 19, 2001 at 09:39:09AM -0800, hal.domain.name.hidden wrote:
> This suggests that the simplicity explanation against flying-rabbit
> universes is not strong, because the total collection of flying-rabbit
> universes is close in measure to the simple universe to which they
> rerpesent exceptions. That's the problem as I see it.

If by flying-rabbit you mean any deviation from simplicity, then I agree
with you. Notice that our own universe is full of quantum randomness, but
we don't see any pattern to the randomness. Similarly, an observer in a
Conway's life universe may observe these anomolies that you described, but
most observers would perceive them as random fluctuations rather than
flying rabbits.

The universes where the deviations form patterns meaningful to their
observers would collectively have a very small measure compared to the
universes where the deviations are perceived as random, because in the
former case the programs to generate the meaningful deviations would have
to contain information about what kinds of deviations would be meaningful
to the observers, and that would make them much longer than programs that
simply generate random deviations.
Received on Wed Dec 19 2001 - 11:08:37 PST