The_Duck comments on The Fabric of Real Things - Less Wrong

16 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 12 October 2012 02:11AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (305)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: The_Duck 12 October 2012 07:45:18AM 1 point [-]

As I read it, the rule does not forbid epiphenomena. Epiphenomena are caused by ordinary things that we can observe, so they are connected to us by causal links, even though we can never discover these links, since epiphenomena do not themselves cause anything we can observe.

This seems like a coherent way the universe could be, but isn't. The machine simulating the universe could constantly scan it for blue objects and populate a list of all blue objects--but without using that list for anything further. This would be an epiphenomal blue-ness tag.