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DanArmak comments on Rationality Quotes May 2012 - Less Wrong
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Only while the island is smaller than half the world :-)
Anyway, I can always measure your shore and get any result I want.
No, you can only get an answer up to the limit imposed by the fact that the coastline is actually composed of atoms. The fact that a coastline looks like a fractal is misleading. It makes us forget that just like everything else it's fundamentally discrete.
This has always bugged me as a case of especially sloppy extrapolation.
Of course you can't really measure on an atomic scale anyway because you can't decide which atoms are part of the coast and which are floating in the sea. The fuzziness of the "coastline" definition makes measurement meaningless on scales even larger than single atoms and molecules, probably. So you're right, and we can't measure it arbitrarily large. It's just wordplay at that point.
The island of knowledge is composed of atoms? The shoreline of wonder is not a fractal?
Perhaps it's composed of atomic memes ?
I think this conversation just jumped one of the sharks that swim in the waters around the island of knowledge.
And assuming an arbitrarily large world, as the area of the island increases, the ratio of shoreline to area decreases, no? Not sure what that means in terms of the metaphor, though...
Eventually the island's population can't fit all at once on the shore, and so not everyone can gather new wonder.
And when you discover modal realism, you realize that everything is known in some universe and there is no sea after all.
Then you realize that in almost all universes there is no life, and consequently, no land...
Now I'm confused, so I guess I'm out.
Modal realism says "all possible worlds are as real as the actual world" (Wikipedia). In different possible worlds there are different laws of physics, almost all of which don't allow for life. In some proportion of those where they do allow for life, there's no life anyway (it seems to be rare in our universe). In some proportion of universes with life, there is no sentient life...
Without sentient life, there's no knowledge, so no shore. No shore means no land.
Well, shoot.
Cf. Larry Niven's early short story "Bordered in Black".