But who says the water has to optimise for "lowest possible place"? Maybe it's just optimising for "occupying local minima". Out of all the possible arrangements of the water molecules in the entire universe that the water might move towards if you fill a bucket from the ocean and then tip it out again, it sure seems to gravitate towards a select few, pun intended.
How can we define optimisation in a way that doesn't let us just say "it's optimising to end up like that" about any process with an end state?
Because there's a simpler hypothesis (gravity) that not only explains the behavior of water, but also the behavior of other objects, motions of the planets, etc. There is still some tiny amount of probability allocated to the optimization hypothesis, but it loses out to the sheer simplicity and explanatory power of competing hypotheses.
Today's post, Aiming at the Target was originally published on 26 October 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Belief in Intelligence, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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