gjm comments on Causal Universes - Less Wrong

60 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 29 November 2012 04:08AM

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Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 28 November 2012 06:13:09AM 22 points [-]

Mainstream status:

I haven't yet particularly seen anyone else point out that there is in fact a way to finitely Turing-compute a discrete universe with self-consistent Time-Turners in it. (In fact I hadn't yet thought of how to do it at the time I wrote Harry's panic attack in Ch. 14 of HPMOR, though a primary literary goal of that scene was to promise my readers that Harry would not turn out to be living in a computer simulation. I think there might have been an LW comment somewhere that put me on that track or maybe even outright suggested it, but I'm not sure.)

The requisite behavior of the Time Turner is known as Stable Time Loops on the wiki that will ruin your life, and known as the Novikov self-consistency principle to physicists discussing "closed timelike curve" solutions to General Relativity. Scott Aaronson showed that time loop logic collapses PSPACE to polynomial time.

I haven't yet seen anyone else point out that space and time look like a simple generalization of discrete causal graphs to continuous metrics of relatedness and determination, with c being the generalization of locality. This strikes me as important, so any precedent for it or pointer to related work would be much appreciated.

Comment author: gjm 28 November 2012 03:11:12PM 3 points [-]

I think there might have been an LW comment somewhere that put me on that track or maybe even outright suggested it

I certainly made a remark on LW, very early in HPMoR, along the following lines: If magic, or anything else that seems to operate fundamentally at the level of human-like concepts, turns out to be real, then we should see that as substantial evidence for some kind of simulation/creation hypothesis. So if you find yourself in the role of Harry Potter, you should expect that you're in a simulation, or in a universe created by gods, or in someone's dream ... or the subject of a book :-).

I don't think you made any comment on that, so I've no idea whether you read it. I expect other people made similar points.

Comment author: RobbBB 29 November 2012 04:10:14AM *  3 points [-]

It's more immediately plausible to hypothesize that certain phenomena and regularities in Harry's experience are intelligently designed, rather than that the entire universe Harry occupies is. We can make much stronger inferences about intelligences within our universe being similar to us, than about intelligences who created our universe being similar to us, since, being outside our universe/simulation, they would not necessarily exist even in the same kind of logical structure that we do.