. If
we are forced to attribute consciousness to sequences of events which
occur purely by luck, then causality can't play a significant role. This
is the rather surprising conclusion which I reached from these musings
on Boltzmann Brains.
Hal Finney
of the universe. A measure concept related to information
might therefore reduce the measure of such brains to insignificance.
Hal Finney
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Stathis Papaioannou [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
On 01/06/07, Hal Finney [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
The reference to Susskind is a paper we discussed here back
in Aug 2002, Disturbing Implications of a Cosmological Constant,
http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0208013 . The authors argued
Various projects exist today aiming at building a true Artificial
Intelligence. Sometimes these researchers use the term AGI, Artificial
General Intelligence, to distinguish their projects from mainstream AI
which tends to focus on specific tasks. A conference on such projects
will be held next
Part of what I wanted to get at in my thought experiment is the
bafflement and confusion an AI should feel when exposed to human ideas
about consciousness. Various people here have proffered their own
ideas, and we might assume that the AI would read these suggestions,
along with many other
Rolf writes:
World-Index-Compression Postulate: The most probable way for the
output of a random UTM program to be a single qualia, is through
having a part of the program calculate a Universe, U, that is similar
to the universe we currently are observing; and then having another
part of the
[I want to first note for the benefit of readers that I am Hal Finney
and no relation to Hal Ruhl - it can be confusing having two Hal's on
the list!]
Rolf Nelson writes:
UDASSA (if I'm interpreting it right, Hal?) says:
1. The measure of programs that produce OM (I am experiencing A, and
I
[By the way, I notice that I do not receive my own postings back in email,
which makes my archive incomplete. Does anyone know if there is a way to
configure the mailing list reflector to give me back my own messages?]
Russell Standish wrote:
On Wed, Sep 19, 2007 at 12:10:33PM -0700, Hal Finney
Stathis Papaioannou writes:
On 20/09/2007, Hal Finney [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
The lifetime formulation also captures the intuition many people have
that consciousness should not jump around as observer moments are
created in the various simulations and scenarios we imagine in our
it's possible they might get somewhere.
But at this point it looks like the resistance is too strong. Rather
than string theory making the multiverse respectable as we might hope,
it seems likely that the multiverse will kill string theory.
Hal Finney
measure. In the UDASSA model that
I prefer, OM measure is essentially the sum of the measures of all
programs that output that OM. If two universes instantiate it, both
contribute measure to it (as do Boltzmann brains, demons with boxes,
Matrixes and other simulators, etc.).
Hal Finney
Wei Dai writes:
I promised to summarize why I moved away from the philosophical position
that Hal Finney calls UD+ASSA. Here's part 1, where I argue against ASSA.
Part 2 will cover UD.
Consider the following thought experiment. Suppose your brain has been
destructively scanned and uploaded
data strings have
their meaning implicitly within themselves, because there is no
reasonable-length program that can interpret them as anything else.
Hal Finney
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though we know they will be forgotten and
not have lasting impact. If we extend that principle more generally,
I think it follows that we should try to have good experiences on days
when we have high measure.
Hal Finney
(Note that there are two Hals on this list)
Quentin Anciaux writes:
What I understand from that is as if you could influence probabilty, as if
knowing something or acting in some way will change your future Hal by
having him good moments... But if at every choice, every results exists
(whatever the measures of each one).. Some Hal
with the MWI.
It would be nice if there were a simple, information-based argument
similar to the one used for the multiverse, that would produce the Born
rule in the MWI.
Hal Finney
the state of your target system.
However you could not in general know which one matched it.
Nevertheless this shows that even if consciousness is a quantum
phenomenon, it is possible to have copies of it, at the expense of
some waste.
Hal Finney
experience yourself evolving
for a finite amount of time.
Unless... you constantly get bigger! Then you could escape the
limitations of the Bekenstein bound.
Hal Finney
to computers, etc.) may change measure.
In general I think Wei Dai's approach is the best foundation for
understanding the place of observers within the multiverse.
Hal Finney
?
Is it descriptions, the infinite bit strings? From what has been
presented so far, I don't understand how to relate our experience of
reality to this model.
That's it for the first page. Hopefully these questions will help to
show where I am getting confused.
Hal Finney
Lee Corbin writes:
But in general, what do observer-moments explain? Or what does the
hypothesis concerning them explain? I just don't get a good feel
that there are any higher level phenomena which might be reduced
to observer-moments (I am still very skeptical that all of physics
or math
that size doesn't
matter and followed up with this detailed proposal, which I eventually
came to like very much. The part about speed also mattering was my own
addition, but it is a pretty obvious corollary as speed is just a matter
of size in time.
Hal Finney
Stathis Papaioannou writes:
Hal Finney writes:
There are a few unintuitive consequences, though, such as that large
instantiations of OMs will have more measure than small ones, and likewise
slow ones will have more measure than fast ones. This is because in each
case the interpretation
Robin Hanson's two papers on his mangled worlds concept,
http://hanson.gmu.edu/mangledworlds.html .
Hal Finney
of the worst abuses of the slavery
era is presented without much explanation by Brin, or much sensitivity
to the horrific history he is echoing...
Hal Finney
they might value them equally to themselves,
although I'm not sure how the exact numerical ratios would work out.
But people should become willing to sacrifice themselves if it would
save their copies.
Hal Finney
. Each such unit of time for a particular observer
is an observer-moment.
So if you don't believe in observer-moments, do you also not believe
in observers? Or is it the -moment that causes problems?
Hal Finney
Russell Standish writes:
On Mon, Jun 06, 2005 at 01:51:36PM -0700, Hal Finney wrote:
In particular, if an observer attaches sequences of meanings to sequences
of prefixes of one of these strings, then it seems that he must have a
domain which does allow some inputs to be prefixes of others
guidelines and examples we can use
to understand how people will behave if and when copying becomes possible.
Hal Finney
Brent Meeker wrote (accidentally offlist):
From: Hal Finney [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Copying is such a bonus that it swamps consideration of quality of life.
In a world where people have adapted to copying, they would work as
hard to make a copy as they would in our world to avoid dying (each
been burned into us since the origin of life.
I would not be quick disparage evolutionarily based reasoning. We are
creatures of evolution, and it is almost impossible to escape the bounds
that it has put around our ways of thought.
Hal Finney
and successors?
Hal Finney
in your model when someone dies in some fraction of the
multiverse? His absolute measure decreases, but where does the now-excess
water go?
Hal Finney
for 10
people. 10^100 is a really enormous number.
Hal Finney
back in the thread and see it.
Just a brief quote to set the stage should be enough.
If you want to reply point by point, fine, in that case it does make sense
to quote each point before replying. But quoting the whole message is
almost never necessary.
Hal Finney
this question. But in principle it will be calculable
once we have a good theory of consciousness and brain function. Then
we will know how to properly balance the two perspectives of OM vs
observer.
Hal Finney
is 1/2^KC(X), applied to OMs. If we live in a level
2 multiverse, as our best physical theories suggest, then the measure
of the OMs in that multiverse have to work in a method similar to what
I have outlined here.
Hal Finney
to it, a simple restatement of the Schmidhuber multiverse model.
Hal Finney
arguments lead to the same conclusion.
Hal Finney
, the reward from guessing right seems pretty slim
and unmotivating. Congratulations, you get to die. Whoopie.
Hal Finney
to gain correspondence with subjective probability. Therefore it
is most consistent to say that separate runs of identical programs do
count, they do add to the measure of the subjective experience.
Hal Finney
happend before you were born, you wouldn't be around to
consider these questions.
I think this is similar to the reasoning in the SIA.
Hal Finney
Stathis Papaioannou writes:
Hal Finney writes:
God creates someone with memories of a past life, lets him live for a
day, then instantly and painlessly kills him.
What would you say that he experiences? Would he notice his birth and
death? I would generally apply the same answers
.
In practice most people believe that consciousness does not depend
critically on quantum states, so making a copy of a person's mind would
not be affected by these considerations.
Hal Finney
Will (or at least behavior that is,
in principle, unpredictable) does exist.
Right, well, for many people, being at the mercy of unpredictable and
uncontrollable randomness may be free but it's hardly willful.
Hal Finney
measure, so that is death, death on a scale that has never been seen
before in the universe. (Compensated by birth on a scale that has never
been seen before... So morally maybe it's not that bad. Still it's
jerking people around to an amazing degree.)
Hal Finney
back and forth,
tweaking here, changing there, taking a long time just to set up a small
patch of space-time in its output tape. This is another way to think of
where and when the alternatives for paradox free time travel could
be considered and rejected.
Hal Finney
,
then it seems like it should apply to changes in time as well as space.
Hal Finney
.
This is what increasing measure means to your genes. If people lived
in a regime where increasing measure were possible, I believe they would
come to adopt similar views, and for the same reason our genes did.
Hal Finney
more ambitious.
Hal Finney
that pleasant events happen on the high
measure days and unpleasant ones happen on the low measure days.
It's an interesting concept in any case. I need to think about it more,
but I'd be interested to hear your views.
Hal Finney
Bruno Marchal writes:
Le 19-juin-05, =E0 15:52, Hal Finney a =E9crit :
I guess I would say, I would survive death via anything that does not
reduce my measure.
But if the measure is absolute and is bearing on the OMs, and if that=20
is only determined by their (absolute) Kolmogorov
between the two situations.
Hal Finney
the DA is consistent with the fact that we don't live in
a magical universe, but it implies some mathematical properties of the
nature of computation which we are not yet in a position to verify.
Hal Finney
Bruno Marchal writes:
Le 20-juin-05, =E0 18:16, Hal Finney a =E9crit :
That's true, from the pure OM perspective death doesn't make sense
because OMs are timeless. I was trying to phrase things in terms of
the observer model in my reply to Stathis. An OM wants to preserve
the measure
where they can be copied.
Hal Finney
the cortex, hence
probably with lower information content.
Of course there are a lot more people than other reasonably large-brained
animals, so perhaps our sheer numbers cancel any penalty due to our
larger and more-complex brains.
Hal Finney
the button reduces the measure of my enjoyment of the food.
Hal Finney
involving copies, otherwise you are led into paradox
and confusion.
Hal Finney
Stathis Papaioannou writes:
Hal Finney writes:
Suppose you will again be simultaneously teleported to Washington
and Moscow. This time you will have just one copy waking up in each.
Then you will expect 50-50 odds. But suppose that after one hour,
the copy in Moscow gets switched
of taste and opinion for the
individuals involved to make the determination? Is this something that
reasonable people can disagree on, or is there an objective truth about
it that they should ultimately come to agreement on if they work at it
long enough?
Hal Finney
, but where time doesn't really exist (in some sense),
where there is no actual causality? I have trouble with this idea, but
I'd be interested to hear from those who think that such a distinction
exists.
Hal Finney
then connect its definition of measure to subjective experience using
the concept that higher measure states are more likely to be experienced.
This is the basic principle from which we attempt to make our predictions
and explanations.
Hal Finney
process and rule to answer
this kind of question.
Hal Finney
.
For an informational object, a sufficiently precise description is
equivalent to the object itself, in my view. And I am considering an
ontology where everything is an informational object.
Hal Finney
Jesse Mazer writes:
Hal Finney wrote:
I imagine that multiple universes could exist, a la Schmidhuber's ensemble
or Tegmark's level 4 multiverse. Time does not play a special role in
the descriptions of these universes.
Doesn't Schmidhuber consider only universes that are the results
, and all the ones that we would identify as observers fall
into that category.
Hal Finney
; in one the
photon is absorbed and in the other the photon continues in the 20
degree polarization state. Or you can run time backwards and get the
photon to be in the 40 degree state. I don't think the MWI helps much
with this.
Hal Finney
of our existence to
be successful.
Hal Finney
Russell Standish writes:
On Wed, Jul 13, 2005 at 04:20:27PM -0700, Hal Finney wrote:
=20
Right, that is one of the big selling points of the Tegmark and
Schmidhuber concept, that the Big Bang apparently can be described in
very low-information terms. Tegmark even has a paper arguing
HPO, if it is nevertheless able to solve every problem we
give it, it's probably worth the money!
Hal Finney
.
Translating this into a flow of time view seems quite challenging
and suggests that that viewpoint may not be as flexible in terms of
deep understanding of the notion of time.
Hal Finney
George Levy writes:
Hal Finney wrote:
http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/dimensions.html , specifically
http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/dimensions.pdf .
Wouldn't it be true that in the manyworld, every quantum branchings that
is decoupled from other quantum branchings would in effect
turn
out to be easier to solve than the general case.
Hal Finney
measure and making predictions.
Hal Finney
to life but each is in its own universe,
so we can't see the result. But they are all just as real as our own.
In fact one of the equations might even be our own universe but we can't
easily tell just by looking at it.
Hal Finney
.
I don't think this works, for the reasons I have just explained.
Mathematics and logic are more than models of reality. They are
pre-existent and guide us in evaluating the many possible models of
reality which exist.
Hal Finney
Forwarded on behalf of Brent Meeker:
On 24-Jul-05, you wrote:
Brent Meeker writes:
Here's my $0.02. We can only base our knowledge on our experience
and we don't experience *reality*, we just have certain
experiences and we create a model that describes them and
predicts them. Using
Boolean circuit and finding the smallest efficient description. Maybe
finding the smallest Boolean circuit is in NP; it's not obvious to me
but it's been a while since I've studied this stuff. But even if we
could find such a circuit I'm doubtful that all the rest of Aaronson's
scenario follows.
Hal
Brent Meeker wrote:
[Hal Finney wrote:]
When you observe evidence and construct your models, you need some
basis for choosing one model over another. In general, you can create
an infinite number of possible models to match any finite amount of
evidence. It's even worse when you
. Otherwise he has to say that all programs exist
which happen to include an information pattern corresponding to him,
the observer who is making this claim. That's not a very compelling
theoretical model.
Hal Finney
is not necessarily an argument
against this variant of the QTI, and may in fact be considered evidence
in favor of a long or even immortal life span.
Hal Finney
[1] Near the end of http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/m6905.html
strange that if consciousness is,
in the metaphysical sense, so easy that it's omnipresent, then why do
so few systems actually exhibit it?
Hal Finney
simulations can do it (with proper input); universe simulations can do it
(using a subset of their output).
Hal Finney
that all these arguments are only
persuasive and indicative and certainly do not amount to a proof.
Nevertheless it is my hope that by pursuing these ideas we can construct
testable propositions which, if verified, will add weight to the
possibility that this is the nature of reality.
Hal Finney
Quentin Anciaux writes:
Le Lundi 01 Août 2005 05:32, Hal Finney a écrit :
I am generally of the school that considers that calculations can be
treated as abstract or formal objects, that they can exist without a
physical computer existing to run them.
I completely agree with that... but I
. It seems to be an interesting
intermediate case.
My tentative opinion is that it does make sense to ascribe Platonic
existence to such things but I am interested to hear other people's
thoughts.
Hal Finney
Brent Meeker wrote (he always forgets to forward to the list):
Hal Finney wrote:
I'd be curious to know whether you think that Platonic existence could
include a notion of time.
I think timelessness is a defining characteristic of Platonic existence. I
use scare quotes because I'm
system is completely
captured by the modal logics G and G*.
Well, you lost me on that one!
Hal Finney
can play, but the basic ideas are present.
Hal Finney
supervene
on physicality.
Hal Finney
, self-awareness, and consciousness for example.
Hal Finney
is
*incompatible* with QM. This is the contradiction that he sees.
I'll stop here and invite Godfrey to comment on whether this is the
admission of incompatibility between premises and conclusions that he
was referring to above.
Hal Finney
of comp (aka Yes Doctor) + CT + AR. Then you
could make it clear when you are just talking about computationalism,
and when you are including the additional concepts.
Hal Finney
mind to be uploaded into a computer, but who
would insist that the computer must be physical! A mere potential or
abstractly existing computer would not be good enough. I suspect that
such views would not be particularly rare among computationalists.
Hal Finney
measurement.
Hal Finney
into getting the wrong idea about the physics.
Hal Finney
of generalized Occam's
Razor, we will have a very good explanation of the universe we see.
Hal Finney
= observable things + unobservable things
and equivalently
the multiverse = this universe + unobservable things
Are you saying that you don't agree that the anthropic principle applied
to an ensemble of instances has greater explanatory power than when
applied to a single instance?
Hal Finney
? Consciousness is
hard to test for; would there be purely functional limitations that you
could predict?
Hal Finney
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