JoachimSchipper comments on Causal Universes - LessWrong

60 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 29 November 2012 04:08AM

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Comment author: JoachimSchipper 28 November 2012 09:10:29PM 0 points [-]

I don't think it's unfair to put some restrictions on the universes you want to describe. Sure, reality could be arbitrarily weird - but if the universe cannot even be approximated within a number of bits much larger than the number of neurons (or even atoms, quarks, whatever), "rationality" has lost anyway.

(The obvious counterexample is that previous generations would have considered different classes of universes unthinkable in this fashion.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 November 2012 05:43:44AM 2 points [-]

Sure, reality could be arbitrarily weird - but if the universe cannot even be approximated within a number of bits much larger than the number of neurons (or even atoms, quarks, whatever), "rationality" has lost anyway.

Why? If the universe has features that our current computers can't approximate, maybe we could use those features to build better computers.