Caledonian2 comments on Timeless Beauty - Less Wrong

10 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 28 May 2008 04:32AM

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Comment author: Caledonian2 29 May 2008 02:45:30AM 0 points [-]

if your position is that observers do not exist in sequences that would produce disordered observations

No, that's wrong.

Observing entities do not exist in walks through the Library in which ordered perceptions of themselves do not exist. Postulating an observer therefore requires postulating a minimal amount of order, which is considerably greater than what would arise from a randomly-chosen walk on average.

Order is not sufficient, of course - all walks containing observers are highly ordered, but not all highly-ordered walks are observed.

If you use an even more abstract sense of 'observer' and 'observation', such as the way they are traditionally used when discussing certain properties of quantum mechanics, then this argument doesn't hold - but neither does the ability of the argument to address the matter of orderliness in the first place.