From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Tue Mar 07 2006 - 15:41:43 MST
Phillip Huggan wrote:
>
> Is there a solid logical refutation to the theory that the world was
> created 5 seconds ago by unicorns as a by-product of their dreams?
Yes. The world contains a vast amount of compressible order for which
the simplest explanation is physics. Either your hypothesis is that the
unicorns dreamed all of physics up to this point - which is simply
existing physics plus "unicorns", an unjustified penalty of Kolmogorov
complexity - or, even worse, the unicorns dreamed something that
coincidentally looks exactly like highly ordered physics. Either way,
physics alone is a simpler hypothesis with a far greater prior probability.
-- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://intelligence.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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