army1987 comments on Against Devil's Advocacy - Less Wrong

28 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 09 June 2008 04:15AM

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Comment author: Unknown 09 June 2008 05:01:54AM 0 points [-]

A much stronger argument for the chocolate cake would be that there must be some incredibly small probability that atoms would be come together by chance to form a chocolate cake in the asteroid belt. However, all physical possibilities are real, according to the argument for many worlds. Therefore there is actually a chocolate cake in the asteroid belt. It just happens to be very distant from our blob of amplitude.

A similar case: there must be a world where your arm transforms into a blue tentacle, even if this world has an incredibly small amount of amplitude. Granted that you don't expect to see this happen, there is still a different version of Eliezer who does see it happen. Of course, as you have argued, he cannot explain it. But what do you think he says about it when people ask why it happened? Does he begin to believe in magic?

Comment author: [deleted] 26 September 2013 02:26:37PM 4 points [-]

Therefore there is actually a chocolate cake in the asteroid belt. It just happens to be very distant from our blob of amplitude.

The only way to interpret the determiners in “there is a chocolate cake in the asteroid belt” that complies with Egan's Law refers to ‘our’ asteroid belt in this blob of amplitude.