Hal Finney wrote:
Matt King writes:Oh I quite agree that it is overwhelmingly likely that we're not in a 'magical' universe anyway. My point concerned trying to *demonstrate* that we're not, which is easily done if you assume 'magical' universes with consistent macroscopic and microscopic physics are even rarer than 'magical' universes in general.
I should point out that there does remain a vanishingly small possibility that we could be in one of the extremely 'magical' universes where both macroscopic and microscopic laws of physics are skewed in a mutually consistent way, however given the tiny probability of this being the case I think it is quite safe to ignore it.
That seems rather extreme, because the probablity that we are in a "regular" "magical" universe is already vanishingly small and we would truly be safe in ignoring it. Even the probability of observing a single large scale violation of the laws of probability is vanishingly small. ("Magical" universes suffer from repeated large-scale violations.)
Going beyond that and asking for consistency between the physics of the
large and the small is really gilding the lily. I don't see what would
motivate you to draw the line there.
Matt.
-- ------------------------------------------------------------------------
When God plays dice with the Universe, He throws every number at once...
------------------------------------------------------------------------
