Marcus Hutter

This is an illusion that noise can give you free will.

At least in that way, it's a feature.

But also, if you don't have noise, you have chaotic phenomena, which are effectively like noise.

So we can't get away with statistics even then.

I mean, think about rolling a dice and forget about quantum mechanics and you know exactly how you throw it.

But I mean, it's still so hard to compute the trajectory that effectively it is best to model it as coming out this way.

a number with probability one over six.

But from this sort of philosophical Kolmogorov complexity perspective, if we didn't have noise, then arguably you could describe the whole universe as, well, as a standard model plus generativity.

I mean, we don't have a theory of everything yet, but sort of assuming we are close to it or have it, plus the initial conditions, which may hopefully be simple.

And then you just run it and then you would reproduce the universe.

But that's spoiled by noise or by chaotic systems or by initial conditions, which, you know, may be complex.

So now if we don't take the whole universe with just a subset, you know, just take planet Earth.

Planet Earth cannot be compressed, you know, into a couple of equations.

This is a hugely complex system.

It may become complex, and that may be counterintuitive, but there's a very nice analogy, the library of all books.

So imagine you have a normal library with interesting books, and you go there, great, lots of information, and quite complex.

So now I create a library which contains all possible books, say, of...

500 pages.

So the first book just has A, A, A, A, A over all the pages.

The next book A, A, A and ends with B and so on.