Comment on Polarized gamma rays and manifest infinity

Sun, 31 Jul 2011 02:48:54 GMT

I'm still torn between thinking that the universe must follow a simplicity prior in some objective sense and there might be a way to find out what that objective prior is, and the idea that a prior is just a way of specifying how much we care about one universe versus another.

It doesn't seem to me that these are necessarily at odds---this ties in with the "is value/morality simple?" question, no?

(Optional conceptual soup: And obviously some mixture of the two is possible, and perhaps a mixture that changes over time/causality as things (decision procedures) get more timeless over time (evolution being timeful, humans less so, AIs even less so). One of my models of morality represents this as deals between algorithms with increasingly timeless discount rates, from hyperbolic to exponential to none, over time, where each algorithm gets satisfied but the more timeless algorithms win out over time by their nature (and are progressively replaced by ever more timeless algorithms until you have a completely acausal-trade-like situation). This highlights interesting parallels between discounting and cooperation---which can be thought of as symmetries between time and space, or future selves and present compatriots---and is generally a pretty useful perspective on the moral universe. That's the conclusion I have cached anyway. Ainslie's book "Breakdown of Will" provides some relevant background concepts.) (ETA: /Insert some sheer nonsense about the ergodic hypothesis and generally making analogies to statistical mechanics / probability theory / quantum information theory, simply because, well, at this point why not? I suspect that reading tons of academic paper abstracts without taking time to really understand any of them is a rather "attractive" form of pure Platonic wireheading.)

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