As I’ve already pointed out to another infinite set atheist, you could get the appearance of a continuous wavefunction without actually requiring infinite computing power to simulate it. All you need to do is make the simulation lazy—add more trailing digits in a just-in-time fashion.
Whether or not that counts as complicating the rules for the purpose of solomonoff induction is.. hard to say.
Furthermore, a “continuous” function could very well contain a finite amount of information, provided it’s frequency range is limited. But then, it wouldn’t be “actually” continuous.
I just didn’t want to complicate things by mentioning Shannon.
That would be reasonable, but it’s not clear to me what “their own view” about that would look like. My impression is that most physicists see the universe as (at least functionally) continuous, with a few people working on determining upper bounds for how small the discrete spatial elements of the universe could be, and getting results like “well, any cells would be as much smaller than our scale as our scale is from the total size of the observable universe.”
Here’s my guess:
“Continuous” is a reference to the wave function as described by current laws of physics.
Eliezer is “infinite set atheist”, which among other things rule out the possibility of an actually continuous fabric of the universe.
As I’ve already pointed out to another infinite set atheist, you could get the appearance of a continuous wavefunction without actually requiring infinite computing power to simulate it. All you need to do is make the simulation lazy—add more trailing digits in a just-in-time fashion.
Whether or not that counts as complicating the rules for the purpose of solomonoff induction is.. hard to say.
Furthermore, a “continuous” function could very well contain a finite amount of information, provided it’s frequency range is limited. But then, it wouldn’t be “actually” continuous.
I just didn’t want to complicate things by mentioning Shannon.
That would be reasonable, but it’s not clear to me what “their own view” about that would look like. My impression is that most physicists see the universe as (at least functionally) continuous, with a few people working on determining upper bounds for how small the discrete spatial elements of the universe could be, and getting results like “well, any cells would be as much smaller than our scale as our scale is from the total size of the observable universe.”