Re: naturally selected ethics, and liking chocolate

2004-01-23 Thread Hal Finney
Eric Hawthorne writes: I think each form of emergent complex order which is capable of becoming intelligent and forming goals in general contexts problably would have by default an ethical principle promoting the continued existence of the most complex (high-level) emergent system in its

Re: Is group selection discredited?

2004-01-23 Thread Eric Hawthorne
Unfortunately, disallowing notions of group selection also disallows notions of emergent higher-level-order systems. You must allow for selection effects at all significantly functioning layers/levels of the emergent system, to explain the emergence of these systems adequately. For example, ant

probabilities measures computable universes

2004-01-23 Thread Juergen Schmidhuber
I browsed through recent postings and hope this delayed but self-contained message can clarify a few things about probabilities and measures and predictability etc. What is the probability of an integer being, say, a square? This question does not make sense without a prior probability

Re: probabilities measures computable universes

2004-01-23 Thread scerir
Are probabilities always and necessarily positive-definite? I'm asking this because there is a thread, started by Dirac and Feynman, saying the only difference between the classical and quantum cases is that in the former we assume the probabilities are positive-definite. Thus, speaking of

Re: Is the universe computable

2004-01-23 Thread Bruno Marchal
Dear Stephen, At 12:39 21/01/04 -0500, Stephen Paul King wrote: Dear Bruno and Kory, Interleaving. - Original Message - From: Bruno Marchal [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, January 21, 2004 9:21 AM Subject: Re: Is the universe computable At 02:50 21/01/04

Re: naturally selected ethics

2004-01-23 Thread CMR
Later analyses showed that this doesn't really work; that selfish behaviors have strong selective advantage compared to the relatively weak effects of group selection. It would be very difficult for an altruistic behavior to spread and persist within a group if it caused disadvantage to the

Re: probabilities measures computable universes

2004-01-23 Thread Hal Finney
Juergen Schmidhuber writes: What is the probability of an integer being, say, a square? This question does not make sense without a prior probability distribution on the integers. This prior cannot be uniform. Try to find one! Under _any_ distribution some integers must be more likely than