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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Torture vs. Dust vs. the Presumptuous Philosopher: Anthropic Reasoning in UDT - Less Wrong
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An important point about the Presumptuous Philosopher is that so far the apparent universe has kept on getting bigger and bigger, and someone back at the dawn of time who said, "I don't know how exactly, but I predict that as we learn more about reality our model of the world will just keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger" would have been exactly and shockingly right.
At this point I apply the meta-principle of rationality, "Don't criticize people when they are right , even if you disagree with how they got there - wait to criticize their methods for an occasion when they are actually wrong." I.e., the Presumptuous Philosopher is a poor battleground on which to attack SIA, because if used as a heuristic in the past - correctly, not to stake everything on particular theories, but to say that whatever winning theory would make the apparent universe larger - it would have racked up an unbroken string of victories.
I don't think that that's right. Back when it was Big Bang vs Steady State, Steady State lost, even though it implied a larger Universe.
Maybe the ultimate winning theory will hold the Universe to be larger still. But, insofar as there have yet been victories, that one did not go to the one advocating the larger universe.
Hello from five years in the future. Multiverse theories of what caused the Big Bang are now taken very seriously. Creation just got larger again.
The Presumptuous Philosopher doesn't think that in every particular clash the bigger hypothesis wins, because there are many possible ways for the universe to be big. The Presumptuous Philosopher just says the universe eventually turns out to be big. Big Bang won over Steady State, but in an open universe (which I believe this is) the Big Bang universe is "infinite" anyway. Now, infinity is a special case, and I suspect that the configuration space may be finite; but that's a separate story - the point is, the universe still turned out to be very big, just not in the particular Steady State way.