Nisan comments on Forcing Anthropics: Boltzmann Brains - Less Wrong

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

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (59)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 07 September 2009 08:41:50PM 3 points [-]

The problem is that if you don't update on the proportions of sentients who have your particular experience, then there are much simpler hypotheses than our current physical model which would generate and "explain" your experiences, namely, "Every experience happens within the dust."

To put it another way, the dust hypothesis is extremely simple and explains why this experience exists. It just doesn't explain why an ordered experience instead of a disordered one, when ordered experiences are such a tiny fraction of all experiences. If you think the latter is a non-consideration then you should just go with the simplest explanation.

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.