Any comments? Can anyone point me to similar speculations?
Thanks, Eric
A collection of thoughts (very much a work in early progress)
provoked by chapters 9 and 12 of A New Kind of Science
by Stephen Wolfram.
---
Caveat: The following was written hastily and in somewhat sloppy,
As I mentioned in an earlier post, titled quantum computational cosmology
why don't we assume/guess that the substrate (the fundamental concept of
the
universe or multiverse) is simply a capacity for there to be difference,
but also,
a capacity for all possible differences (and thus necessarily
Let me first apologize for not yet reading the mentioned references on
the subject,
John Mikes wrote:
As long as we cannot qualify the steps in a 'process' leading to the
emerged new, we call it emergence, later we call it process.
Just look back into the cultural past, how many
Stephen Paul King wrote:
Dear Russell,
Neat! I have been thinking of this idea in terms of a very weak
anthropic principle and a communication principle. Roughtly these are:
All observations by an observer are only those that do not contradict the
existence of the observer and any
I'm in the camp that thinks that emergent systems are real phenomena, and
that eventually, objective criteria would be able to be established that
would
allow us to say definitively whether an emerged system existed in some
time and place in the universe.
I think the criteria would have to do
Wolfram is fascinated by the generation of complexity and randomness
from simple
rules, and sees this as a fundamental and unexpected observation.
(As a long-time programmer, I'm puzzled by his surprise at this. My bugs
often have
a complex and seemingly random nature, even in programs thought
It is well known that a classical Santa Claus is not possible, because,
even with the best travelling salesperson algorithm at his disposal,
Santa would have to travel faster than the speed of light to deliver presents
to every household on Earth on Christmas Eve or morning, even considering the
Stephen Paul King wrote:
it seems to me that if
minds are purely classical when it would not be difficult for us to imagine,
i.e. compute, what it is like to be a bat or any other classical mind. I
see this as implied by the ideas involved in Turing Machines and other
Universal classical
See response attached as text file:
Joao Leao wrote:
Both seem to me rather vaccuous statements since we don't
really yet have a theory, classical or quantum or whathaveyou , of what a
mind is or does. I don't mean an emprirical, or verifiable, or decidable
or merely speculative theory! I mean
John M wrote:
Eric,
your proposal sounds like: here I am and here is my mind .
What gave you the idea that the two can be thought of as separate
entities?
The fact that we differentiate between a bowel movement and a thinking
process in philosophy ... does not MAKE them separate
entities.
Re: possible worlds in logic.
Logic (and its possible worlds semantics)
says nothing (precise) about external reality.
Logic only says something about the relationship of
symbols in a formal language.
Remember that the reason non-sloppy mathematicians
use non-meaningful variable-names (i.e.
Interleaving...
POINT 1
For example, truth is defined in formal logic with respect to,
again, formal models with an infinite
number of formal symbols in them. It is not defined with respect
to some vague correspondence with external reality.
Actually, science is just about such
On the likelihood of detecting alien intelligences:
(single-world case)
1. It is an enormously stupid conceit of us to assume that
aliens would be broadcasting, or tightbeaming something like
analog radio signals, for communication.
We ourselves have only being doing that for 100 years,
and will
John M wrote:
Eric:
do I detect in your 'circumstances' some 'anthropocentric/metric/logic'
restrictions? is the multiverse exclusively built according to the system
we devised on this planet as 'our physical laws'? (your 'factor' #1,
although you oincluded in factor #2 the (CLASSICAL
My comment at the bottom of the message.
Eric
Jean-Michel Veuillen wrote:
Eric Hawthorne wrote:
Unless a world (i.e. a sequence of information state changes)
has produced intelligent observers though, there will be
no one around in it to argue whether it exists or not.
Then our
R Hlywka wrote:
There are so many things we need to take into consideration. Genetics.
We are born with a specific preprogramed set of organization and
hardware. the way the neurons are preorganized, and the way they go
about utilizing and organizing and transfering specific information.
We
My physics is decades-old first-year U level (I'm a computer science type).
But if I'm not mistaken, there's no such thing as a 2C speed, or a 2C
closing
of separation between two objects. All speeds can only be measured
from some reference frame that is travelling with one of the objects
(say
Colin Hales wrote:
The real question is the ontological status of the 'nothing' in that
last sentence. I am starting to believe that the true nature of the
'fundamental' beneath qualia is not only about the 'stuff', but is
actually about all of it. That is, the 'stuff' and the 'not stuff'.
So.
My corollaries to:
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from
magic.
1. Any sufficiently detailed and correct reality simulation is indistinguishable from reality.
2. Any artificial consciousness which communicates in all
circumstances within the range of communication
Stephen Paul King wrote:
[SPK]
Oh, ok. I have my own version of the anthropic principle:
The content of a first person reality of an observer is the minimum
that is necessary and sufficient for the existence of that observer.
I am trying to include observer selection ideas in my
Lennart Nilsson wrote:
But in fact, the only thing that privileges the set of all
computational
operations that we see in nature, is that they are instantiated by
the laws of physics. It is only through our knowledge of the physical
world
that we know of the di.erence between computable
Perhaps you've heard of Thompson's Lamp. This is an IDEAL lamp, capable of
INFINITE switching SPEED and using electricity that travels at INFINITE SPEED.
Is it pedantic of me to point out that this is an IDEAL lamp, i.e. one which only
exists as an idea, and one which, because of its
Like I said, in mathematics, there MAY be an answer, depending what
mathematical theory
you choose. Even within mathematics, there may be questions that don't
have an answer, and
are ill-formed, and only seem well-formed because they seem to read ok
in informal English.
Without your extra
Someone wrote:
The paradox consists of the fact that the theory of multiverses tells us
that there must be infinite observers who experiment other physical laws.
There is not only the possibility of being wrong, it is the model itself
which proves to be wrong. In fact it tells us that there
Yes, this is Quantum Immortality in a nutshell. If the MWI is
correct, it is impossible to die from a subjective point of view.
Hooray!
Yes but there can be no communication from one possible world to another
(thus no cross-world awareness), because, think
about it, if I could communicate
Some of these questions may be profound, and some silly. (In fact, they
may be sorted in order of profound to silly.) My education is spotty
in these areas. I'm most interested in specific references that help
answer (or destroy)
these questions.
1. What test could determine if a computational
Could someone please send to the list and/or this lunatic the instructions
for unsubscribing from the list. My old machine's disk crashed taking my
email
archive with it so I don't have the removal instructions.
Thanks
Eric
Frank Flynn wrote:
the devil is watching you I put a curse on all of
Readers of this list interested in issues of personal identity in the
face of replication
might enjoy the Sci-Fi novel Kiln People by David Brin.
In the novel, a technology
has been discovered that allows a person's soul standing wave (sic) to
be copied into
a kind of bio-engineered clay
All this talk of quantum immortality seems like anthropocentric wishful
thinking to me.
You are a process. All physical objects are best understood as slow
processes.
A life process is a very complex physical pattern, which is an
arrangement of matter and energy in space-time,
that has
In the spirit of this list, one might instead phrase the question as:
Why is there everything instead of nothing?
As soon as we have that there is everything, then we have that some aspects
of everything will mold themselves into observable universes.
It is unsatisfying though true to observe
Norman Samish wrote:
...
I don't understand how there can be both something and nothing. Perhaps I
don't understand what you mean by nothing. By nothing I mean no thing,
not even empty space.
I think of it this way.
1. Information (a strange and inappropriately anthropocentric word - it
Frank wrote:
Indeed, I've always thought there was a dubious assumption there.
There isn't a universal time to pace the clock tics of a simulation.
Relativity forbids it.
Anyway, time is a subjective illusion.
Back to the question:
So what happens when the simulation diverges from regularity?
Jesse Mazer wrote:
Why, out of all possible experiences compatible with my existence, do
I only observe the ones that don't violate the assumption that the
laws of physics work the same way in all places and at all times?
Because a universe whose space-time was subject to different physical
Hal Finney wrote:
What about a universe whose space-time was subject to all the same
physical laws as ours in all regions - except in the vicinity of rabbits?
And in those other regions some other laws applied which allow rabbits
to behave magically?
While this may be possible, we seem to have
Hal Finney wrote:
One is the apparent paucity of life and intelligence in our universe.
This was first expressed as the Fermi Paradox, i.e., where are the aliens?
As our understanding of technological possibility has grown the problem
has become even more acute. It seems likely that our
Georges Quenot writes:
I do not believe in either case that a simulation with this level
of detail can be conducted on any computer that can be built in
our universe (I mean a computer able to simulate a universe
containing a smaller computer doing the calculation you considered
with a
Eric Hawthorne wrote:
So probably, the extra-universal notion of computing all the
universe simulations is not traditional computation
at all. I prefer to think of the state of affairs as being that the
multiverse substrate is just kind of like a
very large, passive qubitstring memory
Kory Heath wrote:
Tegmark goes into some detail on the
problems with other than 3+1 dimensional space.
Once again, I don't see how these problems apply to 4D CA. His
arguments are extremely physics-centric ones having to do with what
happens when you tweak quantum-mechanical or
CMR wrote:
Indeed. The constraints to, and requirements for, terrestrial life have had
to be revised and extended of late, given thermophiles and the like. Though
they obviously share our dimensional requisites, they do serve to highlight
the risk of prematurely pronouncing the facts of life.
CMR wrote:
I think it's useful here to note that from the strong AI point of view
life as it could be is empahasized as opposed to life as we know it.
It's also worth pointing out that the latter is based upon a single data
point sample of all possible life, that sample consisting of life that
How would they ever know that I wonder?
Well let's see. I'm conscious and I'm not fallible. Therefore ;-)
David Barrett-Lennard wrote:
I'm wondering whether the following demonstrates that a computer that can
only generate thoughts which are sentences derivable from some
underlying
axioms
Sorry. Can't help myself : Is there any point in completing that term
paper really?
On a few points.
I don't believe in the point of view of nihilism because everything
will happen in the multiverse, anyway, regardless of what I do..
My reasons are a little vague, but here's a stab at it:
1.
Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
This sort of argument has been raised many times over the centuries,
both by rationalists and by their opponents, but it is based the
fundamental error of conflating science with ethics. Science deals
with matters of fact; it does not comment on whether these facts
Oh and
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
That's not Christianity. That's a successful strategy in game theory.
I don't think there's just one successful game theory strategy.
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
is a kind of a planning-ahead strategy if you believe that others
are going to use tit for tat. Maybe?
And besides, I'm talking about a strategy that is beneficial to the group
(and
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
Can you explain briefly why the choice of measure is subjective? I
haven't read any of the
books you mentioned (will try to get to them) but am familiar with
computability theory
and decision theory.
In my favourite interpretation of the multiverse, as a very long
(possibly lengthening)
John M wrote:
I find some inconsistencies in your post:
qubitstring containing all of the possible information-states implied in
such a long bitstring,...
possible, of course, to OUR knowledge (imagination). Anthropomorph
thinking about the MW.
I'm really talking
Wei Dai wrote:
On Sat, Jan 24, 2004 at 12:21:40PM -0800, Eric Hawthorne wrote:
Can you explain briefly why the choice of measure is subjective? I
haven't read any of the
books you mentioned (will try to get to them) but am familiar with
computability theory
and decision theory
Wei Dai wrote:
On Sat, Jan 24, 2004 at 11:49:09PM -0500, Jesse Mazer wrote:
But measures aren't just about making decisions about what to *do*, the main
argument for a single objective measure is that such a measure could make
predictions about what we *see*, like why we see
Wei Dai wrote:
On Sun, Jan 25, 2004 at 03:41:55AM -0500, Jesse Mazer wrote:
Do you think that by choosing a
different measure, you could change the actual first-person probabilities of
different experiences? Or do you reject the idea of continuity of
consciousness and
Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
Take these two statements:
(a) Dulce et decorum est/ Pro patria mori (Wilfred Owen)
(b) He died in the trenches during WW I from chlorine gas poisoning
The former conveys feelings, values, wishes, while the latter conveys
facts. The former is not true or false in the
Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
fact vs. value;
formal vs. informal;
precise vs. vague;
objective vs. subjective;
third person vs. first person;
computation vs. thought;
brain vs. mind;
David Chalmer's easy problem vs. hard problem of consciousness:
To me, this dichotomy remains the biggest mystery
Corrections inserted here to the following paragraph of my previous
post. (Apologies for the sloppiness.)
Eric Hawthorne wrote:
so truth itself, as
a relationship between representative symbols and that which is
(possibly) represented, is probably a limited
concept, and the limitation has
Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
; you might even be able to read the brain, scanning for neuronal
activity and deducing correctly that the subject sees a red flash.
However, it is impossible to know what it feels like to see a red
flash unless you have the actual experience yourself.
So I
Eric Hawthorne wrote:
6. Such an organised religion structure, or god-empowered government
structure, if it succeeds in organizing
people for an extended period of time, as it seems they did, would
naturally tend to take on a life of its own, a
self-reinforcing aspect, an autopoietic function
Blast from the recent past.
This is pertinent to the previous discussions on evolution
as a special case of emergent-system emergence.
It was argued that group selection effects have been discredited in
evolutionary biology. I counterargued that denying the possibility of
a selection effect at
Given temporal proximity of two states (e.g. observer-moments),
increasing difference between the states will lead to dramatically
lower measure/probability
for the co-occurrence as observer-moments of the same observer (or
co-occurrence in the
same universe, is that maybe equivalent?) .
Tianran Chen wrote (in private reply to my earlier post, but I thought
this discussion
generally interesting, hope that's ok Tianran):
i do agree that many very valuable point of view had been
criticised unfairly due to their 'group selection' nature.
however, i am quite convinced that
Caveat: This post will likely demonstrate my complete lack of advanced
physics education.
But here goes anyway.
Is it possible to model gravity as space being filled with an
all-directional flux of inverse gravitons? These would be
particles which:
1. Zoom around EVERYWHERE with a uniform
Hal Finney wrote:
Again, this is not really a multiverse question. I hate to be negative,
but there are other forums for exploring nonstandard physics concepts.
Alright I take your chastisement somewhat, while also grumbling a bit
about list-fascism.
For one thing it's possible that such a
Eric Cavalcanti wrote:
But the main flaw, if I recall it, is that objects moving around in space
would feel a larger flux of 'iGravitons' coming against the direction
of movement, causing a decrease in velocity. So much for inertia...
Ok but let's say (for fun) that the iGravitons were all
How does a human differ in kind from a rock?
-Well both are well modelled as being slow processes (i.e. localized
states and events) in spacetime.
- A process is a particular kind of pattern of organization of some
subregion of spacetime.
- We share being made of similar kinds of matter
Hal Finney wrote:
How about Tegmark's idea that all mathematical structures exist, and we're
living in one of them? Or does that require an elderly mathematician,
a piece of parchment, an ink quill, and some scribbled lines on paper in
order for us to be here?
It seems to me that mathematics
Hal Ruhl wrote:
I see nothing in the rest of your post that makes my believe there is
a difference of kind between rocks and humans.
I believe it is a mistake to concentrate only on the reductionist theory
of the very small, and to assume that there
is nothing else interesting about systems
I saw the documentary movie Tibet: Cry of the Snow Lion the other day.
In one scene, a group of monks is sitting around in a circle, and the
Dalai Llama is
overseeing.
The monks are industriously and methodically placing individual tiny
coloured
beads (there are maybe 4 or 5 colours)
around
The other thing to note about mandalas is that there can be more than
one possible pattern
that would maintain order and recursive complexity as it expands outward
(i.e. forward in time).
However, an observer subpattern embedded in one mandala (and created by
ITS rules of order)
can only see
An observer is a pattern in space-time (a physical process) which
engages in the processing and storage
of information about its surroundings in space-time. Its information
processing is such that the observer
creates abstracted, isomorphic, representative symbolic models of the
structures and
a pattern that
computes and stores information about
its surroundings?
Eric
Brent Meeker wrote:
Eric Hawthorne wrote
An observer is a pattern in space-time (a physical
process) which engages
in the processing and storage
of information about its surrounding
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