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This sounds circular to me. Why are you willing to bet a large amount of money that this teacup won't turn into a pheasant? Why do we happen to have a "preference" for a highly ordered world?
One approach to answering that question is the one I gave here. Another possibility is that there is something like "objective morality" going on. Another one is that our preferences are simply arbitrary and there is no further explanation.
So I think this is still an open question, but there's probably an answer one way or another, and the fact that we don't know what the right answer is yet shouldn't count against Tegmark's idea. Furthermore, I think denying Tegmark's idea only leads to more serious problems, like why does one universe "exist" and not another, and how do we know that one universe exists and not two or three?
There may be a grain of truth in this kind of theory, but I cannot see it clearly yet. How exactly do you separate statements about the mind ("probability as preference") from statements about the world? What about bunnies, for example? Bunnies aren't very smart, but their bodies seem evolved to make some outcomes more probable than others, in perfect accord with our idea of probability. The same applies to plants, that have no brains at all. Did evolution decide very early on that all life should use our particular "random" concept of preference? (How is it encoded in living organisms, then?) Or do you have some other mechanism in mind?
The shared traits come from shared evolution, that operates in the context of our physics and measure of expected outcomes. The concept of expectation implies evolution (given some other conditions), and evolution in its turn makes organisms that respect the concept of expectation (that is, persist within evolution, get selected).
If you believe in "measure of expected outcomes", there's no problem. Wei was trying to dissolve that belief and replace it with preference encoded in programs, or something. What do you think about this now?
To make it more pithy: are there, somewhere in the configuration space of our universe, evolved pointy-eared humanoids that can solve NP-complete problems quickly because they don't respect the Born probabilities? Are they immune to "spontaneous existence failure", from their own point of view?
What do you mean by "believe"? To refer to the concept of evolution (as explanation for plants and bunnies), you have to refer to the world, and not just the world, but the world equipped with measure (quantum mechanical measure, say). Without that measure, evolution doesn't work, and the world won't behave as we expect it to behave. After that is understood, it's not surprising that evolution selected organisms that respect that measure and not something else.
So, I'm not assuming measure additionally, the argument is that measure is implicit in your very question.
The NP-solving creatures won't be in our universe in the sense that they don't exist in the context of our universe with its measure. When you refer to our universe, you necessarily reference measure as part. It's like a fundamental law, a necessary part of specification of what you are talking about.
Um, no. I don't know of any fundamental dynamical laws in QM that use measure. You can calculate the evolution of the wavefunction without mentioning measure at all. It only appears when we try to make probabilistic predictions about our subjective experience. You could equip the same big evolving wavefunction with a different measure, and get superintelligent elves. Or no?
Yes, but then you won't be talking about our world in the usual sense, because, say, classical world won't work as expected anymore given those laws (measure). If you don't include measure, you don't get any predictions about what you expect to see in reality, while that's what physics is normally all about.
Uh... So, our subjective experience matches the Born probabilities because our minds are implemented with macroscopic gears, which require classical physics (and thus Born probabilities) to function in a stable manner? This sounds like it might be an explanation, but we'd need to show that other probability rules lead to unstable physics (no planets, or no proteins, or something like that). And even if we had proof of that, I think some leftover mystery would still remain.
I begin to feel that the mystery has been dissolved. Even if other measures (or indeed physical laws) lead to lawful enough processes that can also support evolution, it doesn't impact the notion of anticipation, because our anticipation matches our evolution, and our evolution exists in the process under our measure.
Also, it's not specifically minds that are macroscopic and depend on measure, it's evolution itself that is thus macroscopic and selects replicators that replicate under that measure. For minds, anticipation matching measure is just another psychological adaptation, not necessarily a perfect match, but close enough.
As another crazy hypothesis, building on the previous one, it's possible that we don't particularly care about our reality or our measure, like we don't care whether a person is in a biological body or uploaded, so that we will build our goodness out of different mathematics, having no effect on our reality. Thus, when we run the FAI, "nothing happens" in our world. Let's hope this applies to most UFAIs, that will therefore have no ill effect, because they don't care about our world or our measure.
Evolution happened in that ordered world, and it built systems that are expected (and hence, expect) to work in the ordered world, because working in ordered world was the criterion for selecting them in that ordered world in the past. In order to survive/replicate in an ordered world (narrow subset of what's possible), it's adaptive to expect ordered world.