Hi Alastair,
Thanks, this is very helpful. These are exactly the sorts of questions the view needs to face. On your first point: * “Observer-moments as states of consciousness require an explanation - they are too complex just to be acceptable as ‘brute facts’ (especially if ‘add-ons’ are included).” I agree that this is a real pressure point. My response would be that every worldview has to stop somewhere. The standard alternative is to take the whole physical universe, together with its laws and initial conditions, as a brute fact. That is not obviously a cheaper stopping point than observer-moments. And even if one accepts the whole physical universe as brute, one still has no explanation at all of why any observer-moment should be experienced. One simply has laws, matter, and then an unexplained consciousness relation. So ACP is not claiming that observer-moments are simple in the everyday sense, only that they may be the least bad starting point. I do agree, though, that if too much is packed into them at the primitive level, the theory risks winning too cheaply. On your second point: * “I can't believe that Nature had a sole proclivity towards directly creating these elements of consciousness, or indeed any such proclivity at all (IOW one shouldn't expect it to be inherently human-centered).” I agree that it should not be human-centred. “Observer-moment” is meant in a fully general sense, not a specifically human one. We begin from a human observer-moment only because that is the evidence we happen to have, not because the theory is supposed to privilege human minds. On your third point: * “I am not sure how communication between OMs (or their highest-weighted sequences) in different minds would work - aren't we in danger of solipsism here - would we be talking to a real other mind or just a zombie mind of the law-based product of our own current OM?” I do not think ACP is committed to solipsism, though I agree this needs careful handling. The claim is not that only my current observer-moment is real. The claim is that my current observer-moment is the starting evidence from which explanation proceeds. Other minds are then part of the simplest lawful world-model explaining that experience, just as physics itself is inferred rather than primitively given. So, the aim is not to collapse reality into a private theatre, but to explain why experience presents itself as a lawful shared world containing other minds. And on your last point: * “Also, do we have a ‘consciousness/OM -> laws/compression -> evolved-brains -> physical-consciousness’ loop here? (Back to the Hard Problem?).” This is probably the deepest issue. My intention is not a vicious loop, but a reversal of explanatory order. The standard picture says: laws first, then matter, then brains, then somehow consciousness. ACP says: observer-moments are fundamental, laws are inferred as the best compression of their structure, and brains are then understood as lawful structures within that inferred world that support further observer-moments. That does not remove every residual difficulty, but I think it avoids the usual hard-problem structure better than the standard matter-first view does. In short, ACP certainly does not remove all brute fact. The hope is only that it gives a deeper and more unified stopping point than “these laws, these initial conditions, and somehow consciousness appears”. Thanks again for your feedback. Regards - Steven Ridgway From: [email protected] <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Alastair Sent: 15 March 2026 07:39 To: Everything List <[email protected]> Subject: Re: Anthropic Compression Principle (ACP) Hi Steven Some thoughts/problems on an initial look at your impressive book: - Observer-moments as states of consciousness require an explanation - they are too complex just to be acceptable as 'brute facts' (especially if 'add-ons' are included). - I can't believe that Nature had a sole proclivity towards directly creating these elements of consciousness, or indeed any such proclivity at all (IOW one shouldn't expect it to be inherently human-centered). - I am not sure how communication between OMs (or their highest-weighted sequences) in different minds would work - aren't we in danger of solipsism here - would we be talking to a real other mind or just a zombie mind of the law-based product of our own current OM? Also, do we have a 'consciousness/OM -> laws/compression -> evolved-brains -> physical-consciousness' loop here? (Back to the Hard Problem?). But I will need to study the book more carefully - I've probably missed something. Alastair On Monday, March 9, 2026 at 9:23:35 PM UTC [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> wrote: Hi, I have written a draft manuscript developing a theory I call the Anthropic Compression Principle (ACP), and I thought some people here might find it interesting. The core idea is that observer-moments are fundamental, that their measure should be weighted by algorithmic simplicity / generative support, and that the lawful physical world we observe is best understood as the simplest generative compression of experience rather than as an unexplained base from which consciousness somehow later emerges. The project sits somewhere between anthropic reasoning, algorithmic information theory, philosophy of mind, and foundations of physics. It draws on ideas related to Bostrom’s SSSA, Solomonoff induction, UDASSA, Tegmark-style mathematical ontology, and some of the implementation / continuity issues explored in Greg Egan, though it is not identical to any of those. This is a substantial draft rather than a finished formal theory, and I would be very interested in critical feedback, especially on: * whether the central formal picture is coherent * whether counting detector complexity really helps with arbitrary implementation worries * whether the treatment of observer-moments and measure avoids naive copy-counting * whether the relation to existing views is stated fairly * whether the theory seems genuinely scientific in schematic form, or still too underdeveloped The manuscript is attached below. I would be very grateful for any serious comments. Regards – Steven Ridgway -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> . To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/d8f9c42d-e5de-4a7c-a271-434ff34506dbn%40googlegroups.com <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/d8f9c42d-e5de-4a7c-a271-434ff34506dbn%40googlegroups.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer> . -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/089401dcb45d%24221916a0%24664b43e0%24%40ridgway.com.
