At 10:28 -0700 3/07/2002, Hal Finney wrote: >On Thu, Jun 27, 2002 at 03:59:49PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: >> Now, and we have discussed this before, I have no understanding of the >> expression "being inside a universe". > >Isn't it necessary to back up here, and to first define what is a >universe? And then, what does it mean for something (not a conscious >observer) to be inside a universe? And only then to ask what it means >to be a conscious observer inside a universe, which I think is what >Bruno was getting at? > >If we adopt a simple Schmidhuber formulation, a universe corresponds >to the output of a computer program.
Or try this nuance: an universal story corresponds to the *running* of a computer program. >Every computer program creates a >universe. In a very large sense of the word "universe". Perhaps a little too large sense imo. >In general, universes are created by more than one computer >program. The measure of a universe is proportional to the number of >computer programs which create it. Glad you say so. This is *not* true for Schmidhuber and those who keep an absolute interpretation of the SSA (cf Bostrom Self-Sampling Assumption). Big and slow programs are discrimate away by Juergen, I argued this cannot be done a priori. >Obviously most computer programs will not create "interesting" universes. >I have been reading Wolfram's book A New Kind of Science. He shows >that programs tend to generate one of four different kinds of output: >simple, repetitive, random, or structured. Only the last category >create outputs that we might recognize as a universe like our own, one >with persistent structure and potentially complex dynamics. The other >categories would produce "universes" that have no meaningful structure >and which we can ignore. Wolfram ignores the distinction between first and third person point of view. Look for works by Svozil and Rossler for physicist-based motivations for a similar distinction (named exo and endo physics by Rossler). >Asking whether something is inside a particular universe means asking >whether this "something" corresponds to a structure which exists in the >output of the program that defines the universe. Somewhere there is a >program which defines our own universe, and if we look at the output of >that program we would see structures corresponding to atoms, to planets, >to galaxies, etc. We can then say that these objects exist inside >that universe. I don't think we can look into an "output" in that way. For the same reason we cannot look at your sleeping brain for seeing if you are dreaming about a banana. This is again linked to the 1/3 distinction. >Then we can apply the same rule to conscious observers. We can define >a conscious observer as a particular computational structure, and if we >can locate such a structure inside the program output that corresponds >to a universe, then we can say that the observer is inside that universe. >This seems to be a much more naive and literal interpretation of the all >universe model than what most of our contributors have been discussing >lately. Are there flaws in this simple formulation which require a more >subtle approach? I would say the flaws are both in the too much static view of a computer output programs, where I think "universe" are first person emergent on the running of all computations. -Bruno
