uninverted 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: [deleted] 09 August 2010 07:37:40AM 0 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.

Any hypothesis that assigns a really low probability to the present state of the universe is probably wrong.

Comment author: LucasSloan 09 August 2010 05:41:47PM *  2 points [-]

That's what I said.

(The universe is in a state such that to uniquely determine it, we need a very complicated theory. Therefore, we should look for less complicated theories which contain it and many other things, and count on anthropics to ensure we only see the parts of the universe we're accustomed to.)