Will_Newsome comments on A Rationalist's Tale - Less Wrong

82 Post author: lukeprog 28 September 2011 01:17AM

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Comment author: Will_Newsome 11 September 2011 11:22:52PM 2 points [-]

In order to write a computer program that actually computes (rather than models) Maxwell's equations you have to write a program that writes out a physical universe, and if you want a program that describes Maxwell's equations then the interpretation you choose is more a matter of pragmatic decision theory than of algorithmic probability theory, at least in practice. (Bounded agents aren't exactly committing an error of rationality when they don't try to act like Homo Economicus; that would be decision theoretically insane.)

But anyway. Specific things in the universe don't seem to be caused by gods. Indeed, that'd be hella unparsimonious: "God chose to add some ridiculous number of bits into His program just to make it such that there was a 'Messiah gets crucified' attractor?". The local universe as a whole, on the other hand, is this whole other thing: there's the simulation argument.