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RichardKennaway comments on Fixedness From Frailty - Less Wrong
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I read Omega as being like the ideal frictionless pucks, point masses, and infinitely flexible and inextensible cords of textbook physics problems. To object that such materials do not exist, or to speculate about the advances in technology that must have happened to produce them is to miss the point. These thought experiments are works of fiction and need not have a past, except where it is relevant within the terms of the experiment.
Yes. But there are people on LW seriously claiming to assign a nonzero (or non-zero-plus-epsilon) probability of Omega - a philosophical abstraction for the purpose of thought experiments on edge cases - manifesting in the real world. At that point, they've arguably thought themselves less instrumentally functional.
Being charitable, they assign a non-zero probability to the possibility of something coming into existence that is powerful enough to have the kinds of powers that our fictional Omega has. This is subtly different from believing the abstraction itself will come to life.