army1987 comments on Causal Universes - Less Wrong
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It really seems you need to taboo "real" here, and instead ask some related questions such as:
which types of universes could observe which other types of universe (an universe which can observe you you can also, obviously, "travel" to)? Which universes could trade, in the broadest senses of the word, with which other universe? What types of creatures in which types of universes are capable of consistently caring about things in what types of universes?
Specifically it seems likely that your usage of "real" in this case refers to "things that humans could possibly, directly or indirectly, in principle care about at all.", which is the class of universes we must make sure to include in our priors for where we are.
Yep. Gary Drescher in Good and Real makes the point that there's no inherent difference between the real universe and other mathematically possible universes (essentially Tegmark's MUH, but put in a more comprehensible (for me at least) way), and “real” is just a deictic, meaning ‘contained in the universe the speaker is in’. (But if we found that the Kolgomorov complexity of this universe is much larger than what would suffice for sentient beings to arise in it, that might mean that there's something else that makes this universe real other than the fact that we are in it.)