From: Dirk Bruere (dirk.bruere@gmail.com)
Date: Tue Mar 07 2006 - 16:19:22 MST
On 3/7/06, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky <sentience@pobox.com> wrote:
>
> 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.
I would draw just the opposite conclusion - that the vast algorithmic
compressibility suggests the easiest Sim a Unicorn could get away with.
Dirk
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