The idea of a universe “without preset laws” seems strange to me. Say for example that you take your universe to be a uniform distribution over strings of length n. This “universe” might be highly chaotic, but it still has an orderly short description—namely, as the uniform distribution. More generally, for us to even SPEAK about “a toy universe” coherently, we need to give some sort of description of that universe, which basically functions as the laws of that universe(probabilistic laws are still laws). So even if such universes “exist”(whatever that means), we couldn’t speak or reason about them in any way, let alone run computer simulations of them.
if a short computation produces a random universe, then there is not going to be anything like a law of nature inside it. The existence of laws from the outside, and the observability of laws from the inside are different questions.
What are you implying here? It’s clear that *we*, or at least *you* exist, in the sense that the computation of our minds is being performed and inputs are being given to it. We can also say, (with slightly less certainty) that observable external physical objects such as atoms exist because the evolution of their states from one Planck instant to the next is being performed (even when we’re not observing it—if the easiest way to get from observation t1 to observation t2 is by computing all the intermediate states between t1 and t2, it’s likely that the external object exists on the entire interval [t1..t2]). This is my conception of an object’s existence, that the computation of an object’s state is being done. What is yours?
I largely agree with your conception. That’s sort of why I put scare quotes around exist—I was talking about universes for which there is NO finite computational description, which (I think) is what the OP was talking about. I think it would basically be impossible for us to reason about such universes, so to say that they ‘exist’ is kind of strange.
The idea of a universe “without preset laws” seems strange to me. Say for example that you take your universe to be a uniform distribution over strings of length n. This “universe” might be highly chaotic, but it still has an orderly short description—namely, as the uniform distribution. More generally, for us to even SPEAK about “a toy universe” coherently, we need to give some sort of description of that universe, which basically functions as the laws of that universe(probabilistic laws are still laws). So even if such universes “exist”(whatever that means), we couldn’t speak or reason about them in any way, let alone run computer simulations of them.
if a short computation produces a random universe, then there is not going to be anything like a law of nature inside it. The existence of laws from the outside, and the observability of laws from the inside are different questions.
What are you implying here? It’s clear that *we*, or at least *you* exist, in the sense that the computation of our minds is being performed and inputs are being given to it. We can also say, (with slightly less certainty) that observable external physical objects such as atoms exist because the evolution of their states from one Planck instant to the next is being performed (even when we’re not observing it—if the easiest way to get from observation t1 to observation t2 is by computing all the intermediate states between t1 and t2, it’s likely that the external object exists on the entire interval [t1..t2]). This is my conception of an object’s existence, that the computation of an object’s state is being done. What is yours?
I largely agree with your conception. That’s sort of why I put scare quotes around exist—I was talking about universes for which there is NO finite computational description, which (I think) is what the OP was talking about. I think it would basically be impossible for us to reason about such universes, so to say that they ‘exist’ is kind of strange.