From: Chris Capel (pdf23ds@gmail.com)
Date: Wed Jul 20 2005 - 07:48:02 MDT
On 7/20/05, Peter de Blanc <peter.deblanc@verizon.net> wrote:
> If we inject some rigor into this, subjective reality consists of
> sensory data - in its most primitive form, a binary string. Objective
> reality, then, would be the Turing machine which produced this string.
> Occam's Razor suggests that, of the multiple Turing machines which
> produce this string, the smallest one is most likely to describe the
> universe.
Size, in thise case, presumably being the complexity of the
computations done by the machine, not the size of the data that it
works on. It would only model the physical laws that govern the
universe, and start with some set of data describing the conditions at
the big bang that we don't count against its size. Otherwise, the
simplest machine would be one which randomly comes up with new things
to introduce to the Cartesian Theater of our subjectivity that happen
to rationally agree with everything the individual person knows at the
time. In other words, life is just a dream. Because then the machine
doesn't have to bother modeling the rest of the universe (which we
assume a machine modeling objective reality would do) which would
probably vastly simplify the size of the machine.
Chris Capel
-- "What is it like to be a bat? What is it like to bat a bee? What is it like to be a bee being batted? What is it like to be a batted bee?" -- The Mind's I (Hofstadter, Dennet)
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