I can’t tell if you already know this, but “infinite explanatory power” is equivalent to no real explanatory power. If it assigns equal probability to everything then nothing can be evidence in favor of it, and so on.
If it assigns equal probability to everything then nothing can be evidence in favor of it
Nope. If it assigns more probability to an observation than another hypothesis does (“It’s going to be raining tomorrow! Because AGI!), then the observation is evidence for it and against the other hypothesis. (Of course given how the actual world looks, anything that could be called “assigns equal probability to everything”, whatever that means, is going to quickly lose to any sensible model of the world.)
That said, I think being reasoned about instead of simulated really does have “infinite explanatory power”, in the sense that you can’t locate yourself in the world that does that based on an observation, since all observations are relevant to most situations where you are being reasoned about. So assigning probability to individual (categories of) observations is only (somewhat) possible for the instances of yourself that are simulated or exist natively in physics, not for instances that are reasoned about.
I can’t tell if you already know this, but “infinite explanatory power” is equivalent to no real explanatory power. If it assigns equal probability to everything then nothing can be evidence in favor of it, and so on.
Nope. If it assigns more probability to an observation than another hypothesis does (“It’s going to be raining tomorrow! Because AGI!), then the observation is evidence for it and against the other hypothesis. (Of course given how the actual world looks, anything that could be called “assigns equal probability to everything”, whatever that means, is going to quickly lose to any sensible model of the world.)
That said, I think being reasoned about instead of simulated really does have “infinite explanatory power”, in the sense that you can’t locate yourself in the world that does that based on an observation, since all observations are relevant to most situations where you are being reasoned about. So assigning probability to individual (categories of) observations is only (somewhat) possible for the instances of yourself that are simulated or exist natively in physics, not for instances that are reasoned about.