aspera comments on Where Recursive Justification Hits Bottom - Less Wrong

41 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 08 July 2008 10:16AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (73)

Sort By: Old

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: aspera 23 November 2012 05:27:11AM 1 point [-]

I think it would be possible to have an anti-Occam prior if the total complexity of the universe is bounded.

Suppose we list integers according to an unknown rule, and we favor rules with high complexity. Given the problem statement, we should take an anti-Occam prior to determine the rule given the list of integers. It doesn't diverge because the list has finite length, so the complexity is bounded.

Scaling up, the universe presumably has a finite number of possible configurations given any prior information. If we additionally had information that led us to take an Anti-Occam prior, it would not diverge.