Re: Peculiarities of our universe

From: Wei Dai <weidai.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Mon, 12 Jan 2004 20:22:14 -0500

On Sun, Jan 11, 2004 at 09:57:18AM -0800, Hal Finney wrote:
> [...] That is
> (turning to the Schmidhuber interpretation) it must be much simpler
> to write a program that just barely allows for the possibility of life
> than to write one which makes it easy. This is a prediction of the AUH,
> and evidence against it would be evidence against the AUH.

"evidence against it would be evidence against the AUH" is similar to the
Doomsday Argument. Let's assume that in fact universes with lots of
intelligent life don't all have much lower measure than our own. Then AUH
implies the typical observer should see many nearby intelligent life. Your
argument is that since we don't see many nearby intelligent life, AUH is
probably false. In the Doomsday Argument, the non-doomsday hypothesis
implies the typical observer should have a high birth rank, and the
argument is that since we have a low birth rank, the non-doomsday
hypothesis is probably false.

I want to point this out because many people do not think the DA is valid
and some have produced counterarguments. Some of those counterarugments
may work against Hal's argument as well.
Received on Mon Jan 12 2004 - 20:24:20 PST