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cousin_it comments on Shock Level 5: Big Worlds and Modal Realism - Less Wrong
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But chocolate bars don't turn into hamsters. The universe is predictable. Why are we discussing this stuff when we already know it isn't true?
Some universes are predictable. Others are predictable until tomorrow, and after that, chocolate bars turn into hamsters.
I'm talking about our universe. Don't try to confuse me.
What makes you think so? Pure shock value?
I'm willing to (provisionally) believe in MWI, but not Tegmark's ensemble. You haven't provided any actual evidence why the latter is true, and chocolate bars indicate that it's almost certainly false. Here's the cousin_it scale of science-worthiness:
This is true.
This works.
This sounds true.
This sounds neat.
From the looks of things, you have yet to rise above level 4.
No. That's just one small part of the evidence, far from sufficient and I would say far from necessary. By itself, these ideas would cause me to say "so much the worse for chaotic inflation theory" which is, as far as I know, not terribly well confirmed (or more to the point, not terribly clear in its proper interpretation).
If I understand it correctly, chaotic inflation theory implies a multitude of universes with differing but stable physical laws, not a multitude of universes that evolved just like ours but will soon begin turning chocolate bars into hamsters.
If arbitrarily large universes exist, then there would be people with arbitrarily large computers running every possible program. From that you would get worlds in which chocolate bars turn into hamsters.
Question: Tegmark, in one of his multiverse papers, suggests that ordering measure by complexity seems to be an explanation for finding ourselves in a simple universe as well as a possible to answer to the question 'how much relative existence do these structures get?' My intuition says rather strongly that this is almost assuredly correct. Do you know of any other sane ways of assigning measure to 'structures' or 'computations' other than complexity?
Could you elaborate? It seems to me that because there exists a much greater number of complex computations than there are simple computations, we should expect to find ourselves in a complex one. But this, obviously, does not seem to be the case.
Doesn't follow at all. A large variety of physical laws and universe sizes doesn't imply arbitrarily large computers. It's quite possible that sentient life that can build computers exists only in universes with parameters very much like ours, and our particular universe seems to have hard physical limits on the size of computers before they collapse into black holes or whatever.
Who said anything about sentient life? Arbitrarily numerous computers should simply emerge, within this universe though not this Hubble volume, and should run every computation.
There's no upper limit on the size of a computer in our universe. Black holes are only a problem if you assume a very dense computer.
Moreover, it isn't that hard to construct hypothetical rules for a universe that could easily have arbitrarily large Turing machines. For example, simply using the rules of Conway's Game of Life.
Rather, what we know (anthropically) is that the typical observer-moment comes from an ordered history within a big, simple universe. If the universe works as we think it does (just assuming MWI, not Level IV), then there do exist Boltzmann brains in the same state as my current brain, and some of them have successor states where they do see the chocolate-hamster singularity.
But the measure of those observer-moments is dwarfed by the measure of the observer-moments in orderly contexts, or else my memories wouldn't match my experiences and my current experiences would be highly unlikely to be this low in entropy.
Chocolate bars have a very low probability of turning into hamsters. A chocolate bar is one configuration of elementary particles, and a hamster is another, and there are lots of particles that may or may not be in the space of that chocolate bar at any given point in time.
Our universe is predictable, in that very low probability events happen with a very low frequency, but this does not entail that very low probability events never happen.