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Douglas_Knight comments on Open Thread: July 2010, Part 2 - Less Wrong
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This is rather tangential to your point, but the universe looks very computationally cheap to me. In terms of the whole ensemble, quantum mechanics is quite cheap. It only looks expensive to us because we measure by a classical slice, which is much smaller. But even if we call it exponential, that is very quick by the standards of the Solomonoff prior.
Hm, I'm not sure I follow: both a classical and quantum universe are cheap, yes, but if you're using a speed prior or any prior that takes into account computational expense, then it's the cost of the universes relative to each other that helps us distinguish between which universe we expect to find ourselves in, not their cost relative to all possible universes.
I could very, very well just be confused.
Added: Ah, sorry, I think I missed your point. You're saying that even infinitely large universes seem computationally cheap in the scheme of things? I mean, compared to all possible programs in which you would expect life to evolve, the universe looks hugeeeeeee to me. It looks infinite, and there are tons of finite computations... when you compare anything to the multiverse of all things, that computation looks cheap. I guess we're just using different scales of comparison: I'm comparing to finite computations, you're comparing to a multiverse.
No, that's not what I meant; I probably meant something silly in the details, but I think the main point still applies. I think you're saying that the size of the universe is large compared to the laws of physics. To which I still reply: not large by the standards of computable functions.