Peterdjones comments on The Useful Idea of Truth - Less Wrong
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Says who? Even if your multiversal theory is right, that doens't follow. Physics doens't prove anything about the meaning of the word "meaning".
Would a powerful AI, from the "run_ai<enter>" is pressed on the command line till it knows practically everything ever give a significant probability to violation of conservation of energy?
Humans are really amazingly bad at thinking about physics, (Aristotle is a notable example, he practically formalized intuitive physics which are dead wrong,) but what if you aren't?
I am nearly certain there exists some multiverse branch where humans study the avian migration patterns of the wild hog, but I too am nearly certain there is no multiverse branch within this mutiversal causal closure where even one electron spontaneously appears out of nothing and then goes on its merry way.
I agree this is a different viewpoint than a purely epistemological one, and that any epistemological agent can only approximate the function
(defun exists-in-mutiverse-p...), but if you want be stringent, physics is the way.Furthemore it patternmaches against my concept of how Tegmark invented his eponymous hypotheses: finding a basic premise and wondering if it is neccesary. Do we really need brains to talk about meaningful hypotheses, or do we just need a big universe.
I don't see how that addresses my comment. A sentence is meaningful or not because of the laws of language, not the laws of physics.