On Fri, Oct 12, 2018 at 5:26 AM John Rose <[email protected]> wrote:
> By "shades of randomness" or "more random" I mean something that would be > more difficult to find a shorter description comparably. If there are two > strings one generated from low quality plastic dice and one from beta decay > the beta decay source would be "more random". Just terminology I suppose. By "more random" I think you mean less predictable. Predictability depends on the observer's knowledge and computing power (which together determines intelligence). Kolmogorov assumes unlimited computing power, which is equivalent to unlimited knowledge. > I would also pursue due to separatedness this being a reason for > consciousness. There are better theories out there in general for separated > agents. The environment is not infinitely dense, information is spread out. > It takes energy to retrieve bits thus virtualization and thus communication. It takes kT ln 2 = 9.57 x 10^-24 joules per kelvin to retrieve (and copy) a bit of information. But let's not confuse that with consciousness. In quantum mechanics, an observer is anything that writes into a memory device. Writing memory is a statistically irreversible operation in a universe made of atoms that otherwise obey time-reversible physics (or charge-parity-time reversibility in the case of the weak force). In Everett's many-world interpretation, the universe is described by a wave equation, a pair of second order differential equations over 10^120 variables. It has an exact solution. That solution contains observers that observe particles. To the observer, particles appear unpredictably because it has limited knowledge and computing power and cannot compute the solution. This is a big source of confusion. An observer need not be conscious. What we commonly call consciousness in the human brain is the feelings (reinforcement signals) associated with perception and thinking. It's just neurons performing a computation. -- -- Matt Mahoney, [email protected] ------------------------------------------ Artificial General Intelligence List: AGI Permalink: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/T55454c75265cabe2-M98af4f38b3ef6ebca2fcf38e Delivery options: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription
