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rwallace comments on Polarized gamma rays and manifest infinity - Less Wrong Discussion

16 Post author: rwallace 30 July 2011 06:56AM

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Comment author: rwallace 30 July 2011 08:02:35PM 1 point [-]

I don't think so. Think of it this way, even when we consider only computable universes, we distinguish between the size of the description and the size of the output. If we counted across outputs, we would expect the observed universe to be a random bit stream, therefore we would expect to be Boltzmann brains, therefore we would expect to observe only the minimum order necessary for observation at all. As we actually observe much more order than this, we believe the right way to do it is to count across descriptions with a prior biased towards shorter ones. And even uncountably infinite universes can have finite descriptions.

Comment author: Mitchell_Porter 31 July 2011 06:52:51AM 0 points [-]

I don't understand your response; but all I'm saying is that discrete universes are going to be measure zero in a multiverse which includes continua.

Comment author: rwallace 01 August 2011 05:55:08AM 0 points [-]

See my reply to Why no uniform weightings for ensemble universes? for a longer explanation of why not.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 31 July 2011 03:00:31AM *  0 points [-]

If we counted across outputs, we would expect the observed universe to be a random bit stream

Why should I expect that? Who decides what is designated as random?