Was our universe created by someone?
9
68
170
10000
32%
chance
Define 'someone'?
Jan 26
In the spirit of "Updating Beliefs," here's something... I only recently thought it up, this is qualitative and hand-wavy obviously: P(Maker exists|we exist)=Priors for maker*P(We exist|Maker)/P(We exist). If we live in a simulation, this answers YES. If we don't, we're far more likely to exist if a maker exists than just exist in general. [fairly confident in all this reasoning] Or perhaps, in all the parallel universes, those with a maker have way more Us-People-Things than those without makers? Anyway I think P(We exist|Maker)/P(We exist)>>>1 both ways (but I am more confident in the first way) by hand-wavy reasoning.
Jun 1

This market will never resolve.

Manifans info:

subject: Universe Creator

fan: Believer

critic: Skeptic

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In the spirit of "Updating Beliefs," here's something... I only recently thought it up, this is qualitative and hand-wavy obviously:

P(Maker exists|we exist)=Priors for maker*P(We exist|Maker)/P(We exist). If we live in a simulation, this answers YES. If we don't, we're far more likely to exist if a maker exists than just exist in general. [fairly confident in all this reasoning]

Or perhaps, in all the parallel universes, those with a maker have way more Us-People-Things than those without makers?

Anyway I think P(We exist|Maker)/P(We exist)>>>1 both ways (but I am more confident in the first way) by hand-wavy reasoning.

How did you get the ManiFans info to work? I am trying to do it on one of my markets, but it doesn't work for me.

predicts YES

@JosephNoonan sorry that there's no documentation yet. You need the browser plugin to see anything. If your market is in the manifans group, it will get picked up by the plugin. Most markets don't need this manifans info, but in this case it makes the text string nicer. What's your market?

@kenakofer This is the market: https://manifold.markets/JosephNoonan/grue-vs-bleen-permanent-stock

I am trying to get it to display whether traders are "grue fans" or "bleen fans", rather than "grue vs. bleen fans" or critics

Define 'someone'?

predicts NO

@Sophia I'm curious for reasonable suggestions, though I'll probably leave the market vague.

@KCS So I basically had three questions I was wondering about:

1) 'someone' generally means something with a human-ish mind excludes, say, fish. So would an omnipotent creator-fish with a normal fishy mind be 'someone'? Even if it was highly intelligent, could a being be so alien that it didn't count as 'someone'? In short, do beings like Azathoth or Yog Sothoth 'count'?

2) Several religions involve multiple creators. And both Christianity's God and Hinduism's Brahman are kind of numerically ambiguous. Does the Trinity count as 'someone'? Would a pantheon working together?

3) Panpsychists hold that everything is conscious. If the universe was created by a primordial singularity with some kind of consciousness, that perceived itself to be choosing to do the whole 'Big Bang' thing, would that be 'someone'?

I'm fairly confident 2 should resolve 'yes', but my instincts on 1 (yes) and 3 (absolutely not) seem to completely contradict each other. I'm genuinely not sure what definition to suggest.