Juergen Schmidhuber wrote:
>
> Bill Jefferys wrote:
> >
> > >At 2:25 PM +0100 3/26/02, Juergen Schmidhuber wrote:
> >
> > >But unfortunately the anthropic principle does not have any
> > >predictive power. It does NOT predict there won't be any flying
> > >rabbits tomorrow.
> >
> > But Hoyle did use the AP to predict specific facts about nuclear
> > energy levels, which were subsequently found to be true. So your
> > first statement isn't correct, IMO.
> >
> > Bill
>
>
> The anthropic principle only says that the conditional probability
> of finding yourself in a universe compatible with your existence
> equals 1. So all the AP predicts is that our universe will remain
> compatible with our existence. This is trivial.
>
> You are claiming the AP necessarily implies a specific fact about
> nuclear energy levels? I greatly doubt that - can you give a proof?
This example is very well known (tought to all honours astrophysics
students), and is described in Barrow & Tipler's book for example. I
think Tegmark talks about it in his paper as well.
There are a host of other examples as well, described in the above
works, but the Hoyle example is the best known.
>
> Even if you could: there are many possible continuations of our
> universe that do allow for our continued existence and in which the
> energy levels are as they are now and in which flying rabbits do
> occur. My point is that the AP cannot explain at all why they
> should not occur (as long as they don't kill us).
>
The AP alone doesn't do it, but necessary constraints on observer
properties do. It is not necessary for us to live in a virtual reality
(ie algorithmically generated reality) in order to see higher
probability given to algorithmic descriptions of observed reality.
> But the theory of universal inductive inference can:
> http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/unilearn.html
>
>
>
> Juergen Schmidhuber http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/
>
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Received on Wed Mar 27 2002 - 16:28:51 PST