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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

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BOR does have implications for when we have zero evidence. And that would be to choose the most minimal potential hypothesis...

...Which presumes you can rank the hypotheses from minimal to less so. By what measure are you ranking them? What are you measuring? If you were measuring something, the thing you were measuring would be evidence, no? If you don't have that, you have nothing to measure, and the measurement is indeterminate.

Suppose we have two integers, each of them incomplete.

[unknown digits excluded]193692 [unknown digits excluded]923013

From that dataset, I do not think there is a way to say which of those numbers is larger. I don't think you can do it with Kolmogorov Complexity. I don't think you can do it with Bayesian Occam's Razor. I don't think you can do it with minimum message length. I don't think you can do it with Shannon entropy. I don't think you can do it at all, in any rigorous, meaningful way. The only correct answer is mu, because there is insufficient data to calculate or reason from.

If I argued that we should presume that the second number is bigger, because of all the numbers we've run into, the ones with a 9 in the leftmost place tend to be larger than numbers with a 1 in the leftmost place, that would not be a rigorous proof that the second number was actually bigger. On the other hand, if we take those two integers and multiply them by zero, we know that the result is precisely zero.

After all, I presume you admit that there could be evidence along the lines of say, the cosmic microwave background radiation spelling out "God here. Glad you're reading this, good to see you're advancing up the tech tree" in English, and you (and I) would have no qualms about ascribing that as evidence for God causing the Big Bang?

It would be evidence of something, sure. Likewise, I have already agreed that if the Standard model had demonstrated a closed-loop cosmology from within its own logic, that likewise would be evidence that materialistic explanations were simpler. If a physics breakthrough is made that allows the loop to be closed without appealing to unobservables/unfalsifiables, that too would be evidence. None of those have actually happened, though, so none of that evidence is available to influence our decisions here and now.

In a similar vein, to the extent that you expect a universe designed by the Judeo Christian deity to differ in any way from one that's purely mechanistic, the absence of such evidence is Bayesian evidence of absence.

I don't currently have such expectations, and am not sure why I should. If datapoints contradict my understanding of God, why should I not modify my understanding of God to account for them? In any case, my belief that a God exists to be reasoned about is axiomatic, not conclusive.

It may be more complex. It is not necessarily so.

Then it seems to me that God may be more complex, but is not necessarily so. If you think it plausible that complexity might be removed by mechanisms you can neither define or demonstrate in any concrete fashion, why should I not do the same? If we could rigorously define and demonstrate such mechanisms, the matter would of course be different. But you can't in the case of "better physics". Likewise, I could submit various ontological arguments, but cannot define or demonstrate their validity either, and so do not count them.

Besides, it's not just the Big Bang we're considering, it's the Big Bang and everything else.

What data does "everything else" provide about what's behind the Big Bang? How does this data allow you to rank the complexity of "physics loop" versus "simulation"?

Minimum message length (MML) is a Bayesian information-theoretic method for statistical model comparison and selection.

It seems to me that this fails for the same reason that KC and BOR fail. We don't have a statistical model to compare, so tools for comparing statistical models don't help. Likewise for Bayes: you have no meaningful prior for "thing that exists outside anything we have observed or experienced.", whether that is a basement simulation or a true physics loop. All the evidence tells us such a thing exists. None of the evidence illuminates its nature.

It provides a formal information theory restatement of Occam's Razor: even when models are equal in their measure of fit-accuracy to the observed data, the one generating the most concise explanation of data is more likely to be correct.

"it's a sim lol" is shorter that "unknown physics maintain a infinite looping universe". Clearly Simulationism is more likely to be correct.

I kid, I kid. Obviously, neither of those arbitrary sentences are a "model" in the sense your excerpt described. ...Only, it seems exceedingly obvious to me that no "models" exist for either simulationism or true-physics, in the sense MML requires to function. This is the same argument I made against KC and BOR, because it seems generally applicable. Am I wrong? Have you confident about the answer here because you've actually crunched the numbers yourself, or have seen someone else who has?

All beliefs are not a choice, assuming you're using "choice" in the standard sense. A person suffering from Capgras delusion, who believes that his kin have been replaced by body snatchers, is not choosing to think so. You can argue with him, shake him about, shock him with a cattle prod, and he will never relent. The disease has stolen away even the option for him to think otherwise. A schizophrenic does not "choose" to think he's the reincarnation of Jesus or Napoleon.

A fair point. Allow me be more specific: All reasoned beliefs are chosen. I have no experience of capgras delusion, nor schizophrenia, so I take no position on the nature of their beliefs.