Tom_McCabe2 comments on Searching for Bayes-Structure - Less Wrong

19 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 28 February 2008 10:01PM

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Comment author: Tom_McCabe2 29 February 2008 01:44:59AM 10 points [-]

"yes, you can express anything in Bayesian terms. You can express anything in C, too"

A Turing-equivalent programming language (eg, lambda calculus) provides very little useful information about the universe, because you can use it to produce almost anything. It's very simple to write a C program that spits out 2 + 2 = 5, or any other incorrect statement you want. You can't do this with Bayesian logic- you can't juggle the math around and get a program written in Bayes-language that assigns a 1% probability to the Sun rising.

"this doesn't mean the universe is a program,"

The laws of physics the universe runs on are provably Turing-equivalent.