MixedNuts comments on Mixed Reference: The Great Reductionist Project - Less Wrong

29 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 05 December 2012 12:26AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (353)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: MixedNuts 05 December 2012 05:57:44PM 3 points [-]

I don't get it. Okay, obviously our universe is a mathematical structure, that's why physics works. "All math is real" is seductive, but "All computable math is real, but there are no oracles" is just weird; why would you expect that without experimental evidence of Church-Turing?

The idea that since there are twice as many infinite strings containing "1010" than "10100", the former must exist twice as much as the latter nicely explains why our universe is so simple. But I'm not at all convinced that universes like ours with stable observers are simpler than pseudorandom generators that pop out Boltzmann brains.

Comment author: Armok_GoB 05 December 2012 06:57:45PM 1 point [-]

That all math is "real" in some sense you observe directly any time you do any. The insight is not that math is MORE real than previously thought, but just that there isn't some additional find of realness. Sort of, this is an oversimplification.

Also check out: http://lesswrong.com/lw/1zt/the_mathematical_universe_the_map_that_is_the/

Comment author: shminux 05 December 2012 07:38:36PM 2 points [-]

Also check out: http://lesswrong.com/lw/1zt/the_mathematical_universe_the_map_that_is_the/

That post is a confused jumble of multiple misinterpretations of the word "exist".

Comment author: MixedNuts 05 December 2012 07:58:16PM 1 point [-]

If all levels of the Turing hierarchy are about as real, it's extremely unlikely our universe is at level zero. Yet Church-Turing looks pretty solid.

Comment author: endoself 08 December 2012 02:53:47AM *  1 point [-]

Combine this with the simulation hypothesis; a universe can only simulate less computationally expensive universes. (Of course this is handwavy and barely an argument, but it's possible something stronger could be constructed along these lines. I do think that much more work needs to be done here.)