The argument was “higher rate of entropy production is correlated with more observers, probably. So we should expect to find ourselves in chunks of reality that have high rates of entropy production”
I guess it wasn’t just observers, but (non reversible) computations
ie, anthropic reasoning was the justification for using the entropy production criteria in the first place. Yes, there is a question of fractions of observers that are conscious, etc… but a universe that can’t support much in the way of observers at all probably can’t support much in the way of conscious observers, while a universe that can support lots of observers can probably support more conscious observers than the other, right?
Now I’m not understanding how your response applies.
My point was: the entropic principle estimates the probability of observers per unit volume by using the entropy per unit volume. But this follows immediately from the second law and conservation of phase space; it’s necessarily true.
To the extent that it assigns a probability to a class that includes us, it does a poor job, because we make up a tiny fraction of the “observers” (appropriately defined) in the universe.
The argument was “higher rate of entropy production is correlated with more observers, probably. So we should expect to find ourselves in chunks of reality that have high rates of entropy production”
I guess it wasn’t just observers, but (non reversible) computations
ie, anthropic reasoning was the justification for using the entropy production criteria in the first place. Yes, there is a question of fractions of observers that are conscious, etc… but a universe that can’t support much in the way of observers at all probably can’t support much in the way of conscious observers, while a universe that can support lots of observers can probably support more conscious observers than the other, right?
Or did I misunderstand your point?
Now I’m not understanding how your response applies.
My point was: the entropic principle estimates the probability of observers per unit volume by using the entropy per unit volume. But this follows immediately from the second law and conservation of phase space; it’s necessarily true.
To the extent that it assigns a probability to a class that includes us, it does a poor job, because we make up a tiny fraction of the “observers” (appropriately defined) in the universe.