Hi Brent,
Le 05-juin-05, à 13:21, Brent Meeker a écrit :
-----Original Message-----
From: Bruno Marchal [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Sunday, June 05, 2005 7:02 AM
To: "Hal Finney"
Cc: everything-list@eskimo.com
Subject: Re: Observer-Moment Measure from Universe Measure
Le 05-juin-05, à 05:53, Hal Finney a écrit :
Lee Corbin writes:
But in general, what do observer-moments explain? Or what does the
hypothesis concerning them explain? I just don't get a good feel
that there are any "higher level" phenomena which might be reduced
to observer-moments (I am still very skeptical that all of physics
or math or something could be reduced to them---but if that is
what is meant, I stand corrected). Rather, it always seems like
a number of (other) people are trying to explain observer-moments
as arising from the activity of a Universal Dovetailer, or a
Platonic ensemble of bit strings, or something.
I would say that observer-moments are what need explaining, rather
than
things that do the explaining. Or you could say that in a sense they
"explain" our experiences, although I think of them more as *being*
our experiences, moment by moment. As we agreed:
An observer-moment is really all we have as our primary experience
of
the world. The world around us may be fake; we may be in the
Matrix
or
a brain in a vat. Even our memories may be fake. But the fact
that
we
are having particular experiences at a particular moment cannot be
faked.
Nothing could be truer.
All right. So you both (Hal Finney and Lee Corbin) with the first
axiom
defining a knower. It is the incorrigibility axiom: let us write Cp
for
"to know p" (or to be aware of p, or to be conscious of p).
incorrigibility can be stated by:
Cp -> p
Meaning that for any proposition p we have that Cp -> p is true.
The implication arrow "->" is just the classical implication. It has
nothing to do with notions of causality, or deduction or whatever ...
We can define A -> B by ((not A) or B) or (not (A and not B)) as this
can be verified by truth-table. I recall:
A -> B
1 1 1
1 0 0
0 1 1
0 1 0
OK?
No. To be conscious of p, where p is some proposition, doesn't imply
that p is
true - one is often mistaken.
You are right. (i *was* supposing p true!)
It seems to me that the incorrigibility of
experience is just CCp->Cp, i.e. propositions that you seem to
perceive "p" may
be incorrigble. Cp->p only works where p isimplicitly is of the form
Cq.
OK, but this is Loeb theorem and I will use the B instead of C.
I continue to accept Cp -> p for standard knowledge. We don't say say
"John knew that (a+b)^2 = a^2 + b^2, but he was false" we say ""John
believed that (a+b)^2 = a^2 + b^2, but he was false" . By definition we
cannot know something false. It is the standard definition. But you are
right I should not have used the term "conscious" nor "aware" here!
Thanks for the correction,
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
