dankane comments on Where Philosophy Meets Science - Less Wrong

24 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 12 April 2008 09:21PM

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Comment author: dankane 01 February 2012 08:30:09PM 2 points [-]

To reply years after the original post...

There is a relative notion of Kolmogorov complexity. Roughly K(X| Y) is the size of the smallest program that outputs X given Y as input. I agree that K(Thor | Human) << K(Thor), but I believe that this is still much larger than K(Maxwell|Human). This is because K(Maxwell|Human) <= K(Maxwell), which is really small. On the other hand to specify Thor given a description of a human, you get huge savings on describing how a humanoid works, but still have the task of describing what lightning actually is (as well as the task of describing how Thor's thoughts translate into lightning).