Virgil Șerbănuță edited untitled.tex  about 8 years ago

Commit id: 5c56d746075984ce8b6f48fba958e24b1fbae32a

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Now, it could happen that for any description there is a zero-probability property which is true for that description, making it likely that we can't find anything interesting this way. Fortunately, this is not true. Indeed, a property is written using a finite alphabet and has a finite length, so there is at most a countable number of such properties. Let $Y$ be this set. Then $P(Y)$, the probability of the set of observable descriptions for which at least one proposition in $Y$ is true, is at most the sum of the probabilities of all elements in $Y$, so $P(Y) = 0$.  This would not work if it also happen that each world has its own language where there are zero-probability properties which are true for their world, in which case the total set of zero-probability properties is not countable so we can't compute $P(Y)$ as above. However, we have an universal language available, which is the language of mathematics (if it's not convincing that within the constraints above it is an universal language, we could restrict the intelligent beings taken into account to ones which use mathematics). Then, since a system of axioms and its models are mathematical objects, we can restrict ourselves to only properties which can be expressed using a mathematical language.  We can then say that for virtually all descriptions, only properties with non-zero probability are true. Note that there are such properties, since for any zero-probability property $P$, not-$P$ has probability $1$. This means that, if the probability of our world being designed is non-zero, the only rational choices are that either our world is designed or only non-zero probability properties are true.  Now, let us return to the issue of observable descriptions being finite or infinite. With a finite alphabet, the set of finite observable descriptions is countable. Then the \ghilimele{is finite} property is a zero-probability one, so either our universe is designed, or at any point in time there will be an important part of our universe that we can observe but can't model no matter how hard we try.