teageegeepea comments on Bloggingheads: Robert Wright and Eliezer Yudkowsky - Less Wrong

6 Post author: Liron 07 August 2010 06:09AM

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

Comments (127)

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

Comment author: LucasSloan 07 August 2010 08:37:31AM *  3 points [-]

The main problem in the discussion that appeared to me is the fact that the present state of the universe is really unlikely, and you would never get it by chance. This is true and the universe does naively appear to have been designed to produce us. However, this is a priori massively unlikely. This implies that we exist in a universe that tries out many possibilities (many worlds interpretation) and anthropic bias ensures that all observers see weird and interesting things. Robert's problem is that he gets an emotion kick out of ascribing human-friendly purpose to survivorship bias. I'm pretty sure that nothing other than the most painstaking argument is going to get him to realize his folly, and that just isn't going to happen in one hour video chats.

Comment author: teageegeepea 08 August 2010 04:31:49PM 0 points [-]

Have you read Sean Carroll's "From Eternity to Here"? It's a fairly layman-friendly take on that problem (or I suppose more accurately, the problem of why the past was in such an improbable state of low entropy). I think his explanation would fall under Carl Schulman's "Big World" category.