TsviBT comments on Causal Universes - Less Wrong

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

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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."