My formal education ended back in the beginnings of the seventies with a finished MA in sociology and an invitation to get a doctors degree at the University of Stockholm. But life got in the way.
When my wife died two years ago I decided to write a book in order to understand better some of my thinkings during all those years. I finished the book in seven months and have since been trying to get it published. That has proven very hard since Swedish is a small language. Max Tegmark, who is swedish, even though he works in USA has read my manuscript and promised to write a forward if I could get a bookcompany to publish it. He said he was impressed and thought that my work was a fascinating hike in the territory between philosophy and physics and that it was full of original ideas! Unfortunately I don´t suppose many on this list is fluent in swedish, but to give you an idea where I´m at I can show you the bibliography from the book: Bibliografi Barrow, John D.: Universums födelse, Natur och Kultur, Stockholm 1995 Blackmore, Susan: The Meme Machine, Oxford University Press, New York 1999 Casti, John L.: Searching for certainty, Scribners, London 1992 Close, Frank: Lucifer´s Legacy, Oxford University Press, New York 2000 Davies, Paul: Superforce, Unwin Paperbacks, London 1985 Davies, P.C.W.; Brown J. (eds.): Superstrings - A Theory of Everything?, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1988 Dawkins, Richard: The Blind Watchmaker, Penguin Books, London 1988 Dawkins, Richard: Livets flod, Natur och Kultur, Stockholm 1996 Dennet, Daniel C.: Consciousness Explained, Penguin Books, London 1992 Dennet, Daniel C.: Darwin´s Dangerous Idea, Touchstone, New York 1996 Dennet, Daniel C.: Kinds of Minds - Toward an Understanding of Consciousness, BasicBooks, New York 1996 Deutsch, David: The Fabric of Reality, Penguin Books, London 1997 Gell-Mann, Murray: Kvarken och Jaguaren, ICA-förlaget, Västerås 1994 Greene, Brian: The elegant universe, W.W. Norton & Company, New York 1999 Guttmann Y.M.: The concept of probability in statistical physics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1999 Hawking, Stephen W.: Kosmos - En kort historik, Rabén Prisma, Stockholm 1992 Hawking, Stephen W.: Svarta hål och universums framtid, Rabén Prisma, Stockholm 1994 Hoffmeyer, Jesper: Livstecken, Bonnier Alba, Stockholm 1997 Hutten, Ernest H.: The Ideas of Physics, Oliver & Boyd, Edinburgh, 1967 Jaynes, Julian: The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston 1982 Livio, Mario: The Accelerating Universe, John Wiley & Sons, New York 2000 Monod, Jacques: Slump och nödvändighet, Aldus/Bonniers, Stockholm 1972 Smolin, Lee: Three Roads to Quantum Gravity, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London 2000 Wick, David: The Infamous Boundary, Springer-Verlag, New York 1995 Artiklar David Deutsch: Comment on "'Many Minds' Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics by Michael Lockwood", British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 47 222-8 (1996) David Deutsch: Proceedings of the Royal Society A455, 3129-3197 Quantum Theory of Probability and Decisions (1999) David Deutsch: Proceedings of the Royal Society A456, 1759-1774 Information Flow in Entangled Quantum Systems (2000) David Deutsch, Artur Ekert, Rossella Luppachini: Machines, Logic and Quantum Physics, Bulletin of Symbolic Logic 3, 3 (September 2000) David Deutsch: The Structure of the Multiverse, opublicerad artikel som blev framsidesstoff i New Scientist (14 Juli 2001) Horava & Witten: Eleven-dimensional supergravity on a manifold with boundary, Nucl. Phys. B475 (1996) Khoury, Ovrut, Steinhard, Turok: The Ekpyrotic Universe: Colliding Branes and the Origin of the Hot Big Bang, arXiv:hep-th/0103239 (Mars 2001) Tegmark & Wheeler: 100 Years of the Quantum, Scientific American (Februari 2001) Max Tegmark: Is ``the theory of everything'' merely the ultimate ensemble theory?, Annals of Physics 270, 1-51 (November 1998) Michael Brooks: Enlightenment in the barrel of a gun, The Guardian (1997) Anne Runehov: Mind, Brain, Quantum & Time: A Lockwoodian perspective, Magisteruppsats vis Stockholms Universitet Filosofiska Institutionen (1999) Steane & van Dam: Quantum entanglement looks like telepathy when three physicist get together on a game show, Physics Today 35-39, (Februari 2000) Webbpublikationer E. T. Jaynes: Probability Theory: The Logic of Science, fragment till ett bokmanuskript från Juni 1994, PDF-format på webbadressen bayes.wustl.edu (Augusti 2001) Christoph Schiller: Motion Mountain - Hiking beyond space and time along the concepts of modern physics, lärobok i fysik under utarbetande, PDF-format på webbadressen dse.nl/motionmountain/welcome.html (Augusti 2001) ----- Original Message ----- From: "Wei Dai" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Thursday, May 23, 2002 7:47 PM Subject: JOINING posts > I find that I often have trouble understanding posts on this mailing list, > given the wide range of intellectual ground that it covers. It seems that > people sometimes assume a background in an academic field, and I'm not > even sure what the field is, or how to get up to date or at least familiar > with it. On the other hand, sometimes a poster is just a crank and isn't > making any sense at all. It can be hard to tell the difference. > > Perhaps it would help if list members each posts a short biography of > themselves, and tell us their intellectual backgrounds. What fields are > you familiar with, what relevant books/papers have you read, etc.? This > way, if you don't understand someone's post, you can look up his JOINING > post in the archive and figure out what background he is assuming. I got > this idea from the SL4 mailing list; maybe it will work here as well. > > To begin with myself, I work as a cryptographic engineer, which means I > design and implement computer security mechanisms, with a focus on the > cryptographic parts. I have a BA in computer science, and have taken > courses in linguistics, theory of computation, number theory, algebra, > probability theory, and game theory. > > I think I first encountered the idea that all possible universes exist in > the novel _Permutation City_ by Greg Egan, and then in Tegmark and > Schmidhuber's papers. I started this mailing list after reading both of > those papers. > > I've scanned through _An Introduction to Kolmogorov Complexity and Its > Applications_, Ming Li and Paul Vitanyi, and read parts of it in enough > detail to have found several previously unreported errors. It's about > algorithmic information theory, and I personally think it is the single > most important book for list members to read. > > Here are some other books that I've read outside of formal education that > seem relevant. > > _The Selfish Gene_, Richard Dawkins. Theory of evolution. > _Gödel, Escher, Bach - an Eternal Golden Braid_, Douglas Hofstadter. On > self-reference. > _Maxwell's Demon: Entropy, Information, Computation_. Entropy and the > physics of computation. > _Philosophy of Mathematics: Structure and Ontology_, Stewart Shapiro. > > I'm finding that I don't have enough knowledge about foundations of > mathematics, foundations of decision theory, and quantum mechanics. I'm > currently reading the following books to rectify the situation: > > _The Foundations of Causal Decision Theory_, James Joyce > _A Modern Approach to Quantum Mechanics_, John S. Townsend > _Foundations Without Foundationalism : A Case for Second-Order Logic_, > Stewart Shapiro > > Ok, who wants to go next? >