Re: The Time Deniers

From: Russell Standish <r.standish.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2005 07:27:29 +1000

On Wed, Jul 13, 2005 at 04:20:27PM -0700, "Hal Finney" wrote:
>
> Right, that is one of the big selling points of the Tegmark and
> Schmidhuber concept, that the Big Bang apparently can be described in
> very low-information terms. Tegmark even has a paper arguing that it
> took "zero information" to describe it (but frankly I am getting pretty
> turned off on the "zero information" concept since several people here
> use it to describe completely different things, and if it really took
> zero information then there couldn't be more than one thing described,
> could it?).
>

Tegmark does not say his model has "zero information" (at least not in
the classic 1998 paper). His words were (pg 25 of my copy):

"In this sense, our "ultimate ensemble" of all mathematical structures
has virtually no algorithmic complexity at all."

Note, this is not zero, but simply small (at least compared with the
observed complexity of our frog perspective).

There is only one zero information object, and that is the set of all
descriptions (all infinite length bitstrings).

Cheers

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Received on Thu Jul 14 2005 - 20:31:55 PDT

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