You have initiated an interesting topic concerning the decision whether to consider the 3rd person view or the 1st person view to be fundamental. It is also natural to say that our experiences or qualia are fundamental, and that the existence of an external universe that we inhabit merely is a theoretical construct. But on the one hand, the sciences assuming the existence of an external universe have had great success, and if we want to apply the power of mathematics, it seems much more promising to study the external universe than to study personal experiences or qualia.
I have always been hopeful that both approaches will finally turn out to be equivalent. Those who prefer the 3rd person view are interested in the question which universe we---being observers---must expect, leading to the self-sampling assumption. The fact that we are interested in 1st person views is also expressed by the anthorpic principle. So, the transition is made by the anthropic principle in combination with the self-sampling assumption. You, starting from the first person view, must give an answer to the question why the assumption of an external universe is so successful. You give this answer with the help of your "World-Index-Compression Postulate". Thus, this postulate is somehow complementary to the self- sampling assumption and the anthropic principle. So far, I'm no supporter of the idea imagining our universe (or our experiences) being the output of a Turing Machine. I feel more satisfied with the idea that everything exists per se which I justify using my "no-justification" or, since I know of it, also using the "zero information principle". This is why I let it to others to analyse your ideas in detail. I'll prefer the role of the interested reader. Nonetheless, I have one critical remark. I cannot accept your reasoning against previous approaches to solve the measure problem. You wrote: "But if both the Goldilocks Universe and the blackbody radiation universe are infinite in size, then both have an infinite number of observers. [...] Maybe we say, 'The Goldilocks Universe produces more observers per cubic meter.' " The considerations trying to solve the measure problem have not been that primitive, but much better. The concept of a cubic meter won't make sense in most of the universes, and to compare infinities in a rigorous manner is nothing new to mathematicians. Both, Standish and Schmidhuber (and surely others, too) have given well-advised attempts to solve the problem. Youness --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
