Yeah, it wasn’t really trying to be a conclusive refutation of pattern theory, I think that could end up being too long. It was more about, showing that some of the reasons people have for believing it, hopefully clearly enough that you can see why I wouldn’t buy them, some readers would recognize that their own pattern theory intuition was arrived at via those sorts of reasoning, and seeing that reasoning rendered explicitly, it would be easy to see the problems in it, and relinquish the belief.
If you have some other reason to think that base level reality is pattern-compressed, addressing that would be beyond the scope of the article and I’m not even sure you’re wrong because I’m probably not familiar with your argument.
I guess the weirdness argument could have been an explicit reduction to absurdity of pattern theory? I didn’t emphasize this, but isn’t there an argument that very stochastic physical laws like our own would not look like they do, if the pattern theory were true? Our impression of the existence of consistent physical laws, at least on the newtonian level, is just a product of normal timelines being more frequent, but under a pattern theory, no unique pattern is more frequent than any other. I’m not completely sure. It’s conceivable that if you reason through what patternist weirdness would end up looking like, deeply enough, it would eventually end up explaining quantum physics, or something (similarly (equivalently?) to wolfram’s hypergraph merges?). So I don’t want to treat it as damning. I can’t really tell where it goes.
Yeah, it wasn’t really trying to be a conclusive refutation of pattern theory, I think that could end up being too long. It was more about, showing that some of the reasons people have for believing it, hopefully clearly enough that you can see why I wouldn’t buy them, some readers would recognize that their own pattern theory intuition was arrived at via those sorts of reasoning, and seeing that reasoning rendered explicitly, it would be easy to see the problems in it, and relinquish the belief.
If you have some other reason to think that base level reality is pattern-compressed, addressing that would be beyond the scope of the article and I’m not even sure you’re wrong because I’m probably not familiar with your argument.
I guess the weirdness argument could have been an explicit reduction to absurdity of pattern theory? I didn’t emphasize this, but isn’t there an argument that very stochastic physical laws like our own would not look like they do, if the pattern theory were true? Our impression of the existence of consistent physical laws, at least on the newtonian level, is just a product of normal timelines being more frequent, but under a pattern theory, no unique pattern is more frequent than any other.
I’m not completely sure. It’s conceivable that if you reason through what patternist weirdness would end up looking like, deeply enough, it would eventually end up explaining quantum physics, or something (similarly (equivalently?) to wolfram’s hypergraph merges?). So I don’t want to treat it as damning. I can’t really tell where it goes.