EGI comments on 2013 Less Wrong Census/Survey - Less Wrong

78 Post author: Yvain 22 November 2013 09:26AM

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Comment author: EGI 28 November 2013 09:10:15AM *  0 points [-]

What does it mean to not have Kolmogorov complexity?

What I meant is, that (apart from positional information) you can only give one bit of information about the thing in question: it is there or not. There is no internal complexity to be described. Perhaps I overstreched the meaning of Kolmogorov complexity slightly. Sorry for that.

Do you mean that the entity is capable of engaging in non-computable computations?

No.

Comment author: pragmatist 28 November 2013 10:01:36AM 3 points [-]

What I meant is, that (apart from positional information) you can only give one bit of information about the thing in question: it is there or not. There is no internal complexity to be described. Perhaps I overstreched the meaning of Kolmogorov complexity slightly. Sorry for that.

There's a quite popular view hereabouts according to which the universal wave function is ontologically basic. If that view is correct, or even possibly correct, your construal of "ontologically basic" cannot be, since wave functions do have internal complexity.

Comment author: EGI 29 November 2013 11:51:49AM 1 point [-]

Interesting thought. So how would you define ontologically basic?

Comment author: JoshuaZ 28 November 2013 08:28:21PM -1 points [-]

I don't think that' a slight overstretch: how many bits you can give about something doesn't have much to do with its K-complexity. Moreover, I'm not sure what it means to say that you can only talk about something being somewhere and its existence. How then do you distinguish it from other objects?