DSimon comments on Theists are wrong; is theism? - Less Wrong

5 Post author: Will_Newsome 20 January 2011 12:18AM

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Comment author: DSimon 26 January 2011 01:13:45PM 0 points [-]

Are you proposing that in the future we will necessarily end up using some large proportion of the universe's material for making interesting things? I mean, I agree that that's possible, but it hardly seems inevitable.

Comment author: timtyler 27 January 2011 09:30:36AM *  2 points [-]

I think that is more-or-less the idea, yes - though you can drop the "necessarily ".

Don't judge the play by the first few seconds.

Comment author: DSimon 28 January 2011 01:49:00PM *  2 points [-]

The reason I put in "necessarily" is because it seems like Will Newsome's anthropic argument requires that the universe was designed specifically for interesting stuff to happen. If it's not close to inevitable, why didn't the designer do a better job?

Comment author: timtyler 28 January 2011 09:36:43PM *  2 points [-]

Maybe there's no designer. Will doesn't say he's 100% certain - just that he thinks interestingness is "Bayesian evidence" for a designer.

I think this is a fairly common sentiment - e.g. see Hanson.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 29 January 2011 01:21:45AM 0 points [-]

Necessarily? Er... no. But I find the arguments for a decent chance of a technological singularity to be pretty persuasive. This isn't much evidence in favor of us being primarily computed by other mind-like processes (as opposed to getting most of our reality fluid from some intuitively simpler more physics-like computation in the universal prior specification), but it's something. Especially so if a speed prior is a more realistic approximation of optimal induction over really large hypothesis spaces than a universal prior is, which I hope is true since I think it'd be annoying to have to get our decision theories to be able to reason about hypercomputation...