In UDASSA, the most likely explanation for your experiences is the shortest program that generates them. For sufficiently complex experiences, this probably looks like: laws of physics + initial conditions + a locator pointing to you within the simulation.
But take shrimp: They evolved brains, which means their experiential stream has structure worth predicting. So it’s compressible. The shortest program that generates shrimp-experience probably isn’t “our laws of physics + initial conditions + a locator for this particular shrimp.” Plausibly a much simpler program would produce the same output.
If so, almost all the measure on shrimp-like experiences doesn’t route through our universe, but through simpler Turing machines. The shrimp you see swimming around are exponentially downweighted rounding errors, the overwhelming majority of shrimp-kind lives elsewhere.
The shortest program that generates shrimp-experience probably isn’t “our laws of physics + initial conditions + a locator for this particular shrimp.
You sure about that? Locating a particular shrimp isn’t that many more bits than locating a particular human on Earth. Population difference only a few OOMs.
But the argument is not: ‘Shrimp are hard to locate’.
The claim is: Shrimp experience (1) consists of quite few bits and (2) is still compressible. Therefore we can expect them to be generated by a quite short program that is plausibly shorter than K(our physics + initial conditions + locator).
And if you think shrimp have too complex experiences, then feel free to insert e.g. ‘planaria’ or ‘bacteria’.
UDASSA: There Are No Shrimp In This Universe
In UDASSA, the most likely explanation for your experiences is the shortest program that generates them. For sufficiently complex experiences, this probably looks like: laws of physics + initial conditions + a locator pointing to you within the simulation.
But take shrimp: They evolved brains, which means their experiential stream has structure worth predicting. So it’s compressible. The shortest program that generates shrimp-experience probably isn’t “our laws of physics + initial conditions + a locator for this particular shrimp.” Plausibly a much simpler program would produce the same output.
If so, almost all the measure on shrimp-like experiences doesn’t route through our universe, but through simpler Turing machines. The shrimp you see swimming around are exponentially downweighted rounding errors, the overwhelming majority of shrimp-kind lives elsewhere.
Corollary: you are also someone’s shrimp.
From discussion with @Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel
You sure about that? Locating a particular shrimp isn’t that many more bits than locating a particular human on Earth. Population difference only a few OOMs.
No, I am not sure!
But the argument is not: ‘Shrimp are hard to locate’. The claim is: Shrimp experience (1) consists of quite few bits and (2) is still compressible. Therefore we can expect them to be generated by a quite short program that is plausibly shorter than K(our physics + initial conditions + locator). And if you think shrimp have too complex experiences, then feel free to insert e.g. ‘planaria’ or ‘bacteria’.
Does that clarify?