[extropy-chat] the structure of randomness

[Russell Wallace]

On 12/31/05, Jeff Medina <analyticphilosophy at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 12/31/05, Russell Wallace <russell.wallace at gmail.com> wrote:
> >  But "much less than 10^10^89" and "much more than 10^10^89" are much
> bigger
> > targets than "just about exactly 10^10^89", and my argument requires
> only
> > those three categories.
>
> And less than 99^ 10 and more than 99^10 are much better targets than
> 99^10. And >n and <n are better targets than n, where n is any integer
> greater than 2 (or where n is any integer at all, if you take ">n and
> <n" as a union to which we're comparing the likelihood of n being the
> value). Your argument would apply equally no matter what the
> dimensions of the universe were, however you want to measure it
> (computational capacity, power requiring to run the sim, bits of
> information involved, number of particles observed or inferred, etc.).
> That makes it a non-argument.


It would apply equally to any N, provided N were large, but that doesn't
make it a non-argument, because we have N being generated independently in
two different ways (amount of computing power just barely adequate for a
ground level simulation of the visible universe, amount just barely
available to the simulator), which makes it unlikely that the two values
would match so nearly exactly.

- Russell
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