RobbBB comments on Causal Universes - Less Wrong

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

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Comment author: bzealley 28 November 2012 03:39:13PM 11 points [-]

Isn't that "hint" just an observer selection effect?

Is it surprising that the correlation between "universes that are absolutely/highly causal" and "universes in which things as complex as conscious observers can be assembled by evolution and come to contemplate the causal nature of their universe" is very high? (The fitness value of intelligence must be at least somewhat proportional to how predictable reality is...)

I worry about this "what sort of thingies can be real" expression. It might be more useful to ask "what sort of thingies can we observe". The word "real", except as an indexical, seems vacuous.

Comment author: RobbBB 29 November 2012 02:08:09AM 1 point [-]

It's true that out of the conceivable indeterministic universes, most do not allow for evolvable high-level intelligence anything like ours. But it's also true that out of the conceivable universes that do allow for evolvable high-level intelligence like ours, most are not perfectly deterministic. So although the existence of intelligence may be explicable anthropically, I'm not sure the non-existence of Time Turners (and other causality-breaking mechanisms) is. Perfect determinism and complete chaos are not the only two options.