Laplace’s principle of indifference makes history useless

Model the universe in discrete time with only one variable, which can take values 0 and 1. The history of the universe up to time t is a vector of length t consisting of zeroes and ones. A deterministic universe is a fixed sequence. A random universe is like drawing the next value (0 or 1) according to some probability distribution every period, where the probabilities can be arbitrary and depend in arbitrary ways on the past history.
The prior distribution over deterministic universes is a distribution over sequences of zeroes and ones. The prior determines which sets are generic. I will assume the prior with the maximum entropy, which is uniform (all paths of the universe are equally likely). This follows from Laplace’s principle of indifference, because there is no information about the distribution over universes that would make one universe more likely than another. The set of infinite sequences of zeroes and ones is bijective with the interval [0,1], so a uniform distribution on it makes sense.
After observing the history up to time t, one can reject all paths of the universe that would have led to a different history. For a uniform prior, any history is equally likely to be followed by 0 or 1. The prediction of the next value of the variable is the same after every history, so knowing the history is useless for decision-making.
Many other priors besides uniform on all sequences yield the same result. For example, uniform restricted to the support consisting of sequences that are eventually constant. There is a countable set of such sequences, so the prior is improper uniform. A uniform distribution restricted to sequences that are eventually periodic, or that in the limit have equal frequency of 1 and 0 also works.
Having more variables, more values of these variables or making time continuous does not change the result. A random universe can be modelled as deterministic with extra variables. These extras can for example be the probability of drawing 1 next period after a given history.
Predicting the probability distribution of the next value of the variable is easy, because the probability of 1 is always one-half. Knowing the history is no help for this either.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

WordPress Anti Spam by WP-SpamShield