linkhyrule5 comments on Causal Universes - Less Wrong

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

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Comment author: linkhyrule5 17 August 2013 09:58:18PM 1 point [-]

Question - isn't the sheer abundance of cyclic graphs something of a large argument we are in an acausal universe? If time travel is simply very difficult it's probable that we'd never see it in our past light cone by chance (or at all barring intelligent intervention), and locally such a universe looks causal: events have causes even if they don't have a First Cause.

Comment author: TsviBT 17 August 2013 10:14:44PM 1 point [-]

How did you decide that our prior regarding the causal structure of the universe should be a somewhat uniform distribution over all directed graphs??

Comment author: linkhyrule5 17 August 2013 10:26:03PM *  1 point [-]

I didn't - but I did do a back-of-the-envelope calculation, which predicts that there are something like a googolplex times more graphs with one cycle than there are acyclic paths, assuming 10^60 nodes (the number of Planck times since the beginning of the universe.)

And I don't have a prior that says that an acausal universe should have a probability penalty of one over googolplex.

Comment author: TsviBT 18 August 2013 06:13:41PM 2 points [-]

a googolplex times more graphs with one cycle than there are acyclic paths

(I assume you meant "acyclic graphs")

And I don't have a prior that says that an acausal universe should have a probability penalty of one over googolplex.

If this sort of reasoning worked, you could find strong arguments for all sorts of (contradictory) hypotheses. For instance:

Surely, the universe has an underlying n-dimensional (topological) manifold. Since all of the infinitely many n-dimensional manifolds are not homotopy equivalent to the n-sphere, except for the sphere itself, the universe must not be an n-sphere. Therefore, there are holes in the universe.

or

Surely, the universe has an underlying set. Let A be the cardinality of that set. Then, since all cardinalities (except for countably many) are larger that Aleph_0, the universe is not countable. Therefore, the universe is not Turing computable.

or

There probably isn't a God because topology

or

By the Poincare recurrence theorem, all of this has happened before and all of this will happen again.

I mean, your observation is interesting, but I don't think it constitutes a "large argument". You can't just slap reasonable-ish priors onto spaces of mathematical objects, and in general using math for long chains of inference often only works if it's exactly the right sort of math.

Comment author: linkhyrule5 18 August 2013 09:50:04PM *  0 points [-]

(I assume you meant "acyclic graphs")

No, I meant acyclic paths - I am not at all sure that that is the correct term, but I meant something like "no branches" - there is only one possible path through the graph and it covers all the nodes.

And, well, point granted. Honestly I was expecting something like that, but I couldn't see where the problem was*, so I went ahead and asked the question.

... yeah, in retrospect this allows for silly things like "surely rocks must fall up somewhere in the universe."