Juergen Schmidhuber wrote >But there _is_ a modern religion based on universal principles. >More precisely, on universal computers.
I can give sense to that. I cannot give 3-sense to the word "modern" though, it is a typical (plural) first person expression, which add nothing to a "scientific" or "axiomatic" or 3-defensible debate. >According to the Great Programmer Religion, the Great Programmer wrote a >very short program that computes all computable universes. One of them >is ours. So the Great Programmer is not even the UD. The UD, with Church Thesis, wrote all programs and execute all programs. The problem consists in explaining appearance of beliefs like "our universe" from possible (consistent) inside point of views scattered in UD* (UD's work). >Some disciples of this religion find it plausible because the short >program is the simplest explanation of all observations. The UD is the shortest explanation then. Although a shallow one which only permits a (re)formulation of the mind body problem. With comp the appearance of big bang and cosmos must be explained. If you make the distinction between 1-person and 3-person you get an "absolute" form of indeterminism (the self-duplication) making it possible to define a measure on the consistent extensions, which, I repeat are scattered in UD*. You have still not explain to me how you predict your reasonably next experience in the simple WM duplication. Nor, a fortiori, how the 1-person can take into account the delay of reconstitution accessed by the UD (which is necessary to do if you want single out one program in UD* and one computation. With comp we must take all computations into consideration. See http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/m3044.html for links to more explanations. > >Others find it increasingly plausible because our own, currently >quite primitive virtual realities are getting more sophisticated all >the time. We observe a speed-up factor of 10^6 every 20 years, possibly >10^30 in the ongoing century. More and more people, especially kids, are >in regular contact with virtual realities, and to them the new religion >may seem just like a natural extrapolation. Good argument, corresponding to a new version of the old dream argument. Good argument for comp, but nocturnal dream recall us also that certainty of being awake relatively to a neighborhood does not entails that neighborhood is our "true" neighborhood. Remembering dreams (especially the common non lucid one) can help to anticipate the possibility of inconsistency (<>[]f, A theorem of G* which is not a theorem of G, although G proves <>t -> <>[]f). I mean "<>[]f" is a typical true and anticipable but non provable proposition by self-observing sound machines. Both the thought experiences and their arithmetical translations illustrates our necessary ignorance about which sheaf of coherent computations we belong to. Comp, without QM, entails strong form of non trivial indeterminacy and non-locality. Look at http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/m2855 for a purely arithmetical interpretation of Bell original inequality (cf [] = godel provability predicate, <> = -[]-, p represent \Sigma_1 sentence (= UD accessible). Is that inequality violated in the UTM mindscape? Open question (although there are argument showing that it would be quite astonishing that those inequalities are not violated. Before going into such technics it would help us if you told us what is wrong with the comp 1-person indeterminism in the simple self-duplication experiment. We discuss that before, but I am still not sure to be able to make sense of your critics. Bruno
