Nisan comments on Forcing Anthropics: Boltzmann Brains - Less Wrong

17 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 07 September 2009 07:02PM

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Comment author: Nisan 25 February 2011 03:02:52AM 1 point [-]

Are the Boltzmann brain hypothesis and the dust hypothesis really simpler than the standard model of the universe, in the sense of Occam's razor? It seems to me that it isn't.

I'm thinking specifically about Solomonoff induction here. A Boltzmann brain hypothesis would be a program that correctly predicts all my experiences up to now, and then starts predicting unrelated experiences. Such a program of minimal length would essentially emulate the standard model until output N, and then start doing something else. So it would be longer than the standard model by however many bits it takes to encode the number N.