cousin_it comments on The Born Probabilities - Less Wrong

16 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 01 May 2008 05:50AM

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Comment author: Wei_Dai 17 September 2009 07:13:16AM 1 point [-]

My guess is that the Born's Rule is related to the Solomonoff Prior. Consider a program P that takes 4 inputs:

  • boundary conditions for a wavefunction
  • a time coordinate T
  • a spatial region R
  • a random string

What P does is take the boundary conditions, use Schrödinger's equation to compute the wavefunction at time T, then sample the wavefunction using the Born probabilities and the random input string, and finally output the particles in the region R and their relative positions.

Suppose this program, along with the inputs that cause it to output the description of a given human brain, is what makes the largest contribution to the probability mass of the bitstring representing that brain in the Solomonoff Prior. This seems like a plausible conjecture (putting aside the fact that quantum mechanics isn't actually the TOE of this universe).

(Does anyone think this is not true, or if it is true, has nothing to do with the answer to the mystery of "why squared amplitudes"?)

This idea seems fairly obvious, but I don't recall seeing it proposed by anyone yet. One possible direction to explore is to try to prove that any modification to Born's rule would cause a drastic decrease in the probability that P, given random inputs, would output the description of a sentient being. But I have no idea how to go about doing this. I'm also not sure how to develop this observation/conjecture into a full answer of the mystery.

Comment author: cousin_it 17 September 2009 07:24:03AM 0 points [-]

The Solomonoff prior depends on the encoding of algorithms, the Born rule doesn't. Or am I missing anything?

Comment author: Wei_Dai 17 September 2009 05:18:10PM 0 points [-]

That seems like a general argument against the whole Solomonoff Induction approach. I'd be happy to see the dependence on an encoding of algorithms removed, but until someone finds a way to do so, it doesn't seem to be a deal-breaker. I think my claim should apply to any encoding of algorithms one might use that isn't contrived specifically to make it false.