The only reason I’m using the free will terminology at all here is because the hypothesis under consideration (an entity with free will which resembles the Abrahamic God is responsible for the creation of our universe) was phrased in those terms. In order to evaluate the plausibility of that claim, we need a working definition of free will which is amiable to being a property of an algorithm rather than only applying to agents-in-abstract. I see no conflict between the basic notion of a divinely created universe and the framework for free will provided in the article hairyfigment links. One can easily imagine God deciding to make a universe, contemplating possible universes which They could create, using Their Godly foresight to determine what would happen in each universe and then ultimately deciding that the one we’re in is the universe They would most prefer to create. There’s many steps there, and many possible points of failure, but it is a hypothesis which you could, in principle, assign an objective Solomonoff prior to.
(Note: This post should not be taken as saying that the theistic hypothesis is true. Only that its likelihood can successfully be evaluated. I know it is tempting to take arguments of the form “God is a hypothesis which can be considered” to mean “God should be considered” or even “God is real” due to arguments being foot soldiers and it being really tempting to decry religion as not even coherent enough to parse successfully.)
Would you care to demonstrate? Preferably starting with explaining how the Solomonoff prior is relevant (note that a major point in theologies of all Abrahamic religions is that God is radically different from everything else (=universe)).
No, I would not care to demonstrate. A proof that a solution exists is not the same thing as a procedure for obtaining a solution. And this isn’t even a formal proof: it’s a rough sketch of how you’d go about constructing one, informally posted in a blog’s comment section as part of a pointless and unpleasant discussion of religion.
If you can’t follow how “It is possible-in-principle to calculate a Solomonoff prior for this hypothesis” relates to “We are dismissive of this hypothesis because it has high complexity and little evidence supporting it.” I honestly can’t help. This is all very technical and I don’t know what you already know, so I have no idea what explanation would be helpful to close that inferential distance. And the comments section of a blog really isn’t the best format. And I’m certainly not the best person to teach about this topic.
Exactly so.
The only reason I’m using the free will terminology at all here is because the hypothesis under consideration (an entity with free will which resembles the Abrahamic God is responsible for the creation of our universe) was phrased in those terms. In order to evaluate the plausibility of that claim, we need a working definition of free will which is amiable to being a property of an algorithm rather than only applying to agents-in-abstract. I see no conflict between the basic notion of a divinely created universe and the framework for free will provided in the article hairyfigment links. One can easily imagine God deciding to make a universe, contemplating possible universes which They could create, using Their Godly foresight to determine what would happen in each universe and then ultimately deciding that the one we’re in is the universe They would most prefer to create. There’s many steps there, and many possible points of failure, but it is a hypothesis which you could, in principle, assign an objective Solomonoff prior to.
(Note: This post should not be taken as saying that the theistic hypothesis is true. Only that its likelihood can successfully be evaluated. I know it is tempting to take arguments of the form “God is a hypothesis which can be considered” to mean “God should be considered” or even “God is real” due to arguments being foot soldiers and it being really tempting to decry religion as not even coherent enough to parse successfully.)
Would you care to demonstrate? Preferably starting with explaining how the Solomonoff prior is relevant (note that a major point in theologies of all Abrahamic religions is that God is radically different from everything else (=universe)).
No, I would not care to demonstrate. A proof that a solution exists is not the same thing as a procedure for obtaining a solution. And this isn’t even a formal proof: it’s a rough sketch of how you’d go about constructing one, informally posted in a blog’s comment section as part of a pointless and unpleasant discussion of religion.
If you can’t follow how “It is possible-in-principle to calculate a Solomonoff prior for this hypothesis” relates to “We are dismissive of this hypothesis because it has high complexity and little evidence supporting it.” I honestly can’t help. This is all very technical and I don’t know what you already know, so I have no idea what explanation would be helpful to close that inferential distance. And the comments section of a blog really isn’t the best format. And I’m certainly not the best person to teach about this topic.
Sure, that’s fine.