Now I’m sure you’re going to say well a universe where intelligent beings just pop into existence fully formed is surely less simple than one where they evolve. However, when you give it some more thought that’s not true and it’s doubtful if Occam’s razor even applies to initial conditions.
I mean supposed for a moment the universe is perfectly deterministic (newtonian or no-collapse interp). In that case the Kolmogorov complexity of a world starting with a big bang that gives rise to intelligent creatures can’t be much less and probably is much more than one with intelligent creatures simply popping into existence fully formed After all, I can always just augment the description of the big bang initial conditions with ‘and then run the laws of physics for x years’ when measuring the complexity.
Nice argument! But note that in such a world, all evidence of the past (like fossils) will look like the creatures indeed evolved. So for purposes of most future decisions, the creatures can safely assume that they evolved. To break that, you need to spend more K-complexity.
Why assume whatever beings simulated us evolved?
Now I’m sure you’re going to say well a universe where intelligent beings just pop into existence fully formed is surely less simple than one where they evolve. However, when you give it some more thought that’s not true and it’s doubtful if Occam’s razor even applies to initial conditions.
I mean supposed for a moment the universe is perfectly deterministic (newtonian or no-collapse interp). In that case the Kolmogorov complexity of a world starting with a big bang that gives rise to intelligent creatures can’t be much less and probably is much more than one with intelligent creatures simply popping into existence fully formed After all, I can always just augment the description of the big bang initial conditions with ‘and then run the laws of physics for x years’ when measuring the complexity.
Nice argument! But note that in such a world, all evidence of the past (like fossils) will look like the creatures indeed evolved. So for purposes of most future decisions, the creatures can safely assume that they evolved. To break that, you need to spend more K-complexity.