Hi Abram, I agree mostly with Brent's reply. Other precision should appear in my explanation of the UDA to Kim, and in my answer to Ronald (Sunday). I will just add general remarks to Brent's reply.
Le 19-déc.-08, à 00:18, Abram Demski a écrit : > > [Sorry if this is a duplicate, I think that I did not send correctly > the first time.] > > Bruno, everyone, > > I've decided that it will be more productive/entertaining to post my > various concerns as a new topic. > > What is time? Third person sharable time could be an illusion. It seems to me that QM + General Relativity could lead to the idea that there is no real "physical time". With MEC this is a direct consequence of the UDA. First person time, or subjective, akin to Bergson notion of "duration" can be explained in the AUDA. It appears that the formal notion of first person leads naturally toward a temporal logic. Like in Plotinus, the "soul" is the creator of time. > > I'm going to ask a bunch of questions; for the sake of brevity, I'm > going to skip my arguments (which would mostly be reasons why > particular answers don't work). I'll argue once someone replies. > > If all possible universes exist, does that mean every possible moment, > or every possible timeline of moments? If "moments" is the answer, > then how are the moments connected? How would it matter, since the > moments already are what they are? If "timeline" is the answer, then > there is a similar question of how it matters. What do you mean by "how it matters"? It is a bit like free will. It exists because from our points of view we cannot know the "end of the novel". That ignorance, and thus free will is preserved by the mechanist hypothesis. It is even made intrinsical. > > If there is a physical universe, then is there some sort of basic > physical connection behind time? Open and difficult problem for the physics you can extract from comp. Of course, if there is a primary physical universe, we have to resolve the problem of marrying QM and GR before being able to answer your question. Very difficult question. > > If the universe is mathematical in nature, then what is the > mathematical connection between moments? What sort of mathematical > connection counts as time? I would say that it is logic-mathematical connections. With MEC those relations eventually originates with the natural number successor relation. I will say a bit more sunday in my answer to Ronaheld. The problem is that it is hard not being a bit technical here. You have to understand the mathematical concept of computation, and then to understand that those computations exists in arithmetic, and indeed are accessible through proof in a very tiny part of arithmetic: the theorems of Robinson Arithmetic (RA). RA is Peano Arithmetic *without* the induction axioms. PA is the lobian machine. And RA generated all the histories which notably contain all the Lobian machines. RA simulates PA like I can simulate Einstein's brain, or a Chinese brain. This is a subtle point where people do sometimes the Error of Searle with his Chinese Room. > > If (as was recently suggested, in connection with relativity) time > cannot really be divided into individual moments, then what is it? It is an ordering on machine knowledge states, and/or observation states. It is a very complex ordered structure (should be isomorphic to the lattice of open sets in a complex topological space and/or Hilbert Space). I approach the math of those spaces with the modal logic of self-reference and their intensional variants. > > Why do we experience time passing? Each of our knowledge state are relative state generated by "a most probable computation" (generated by the UD, or living in arithmetic). Mainly by ignorance, we feel our knowledge being divided into a sort of past-certainty, and sort of future-uncertainty. Those things can be described by modal logic. I argue all those modal logic arise from self-reference in arithmetic. > > Is it legitimate to think as if the next moment we experience will be > chosen randomly in some sense? Yes. I believe everyone in this list agree with this, but differ on the distribution law, the relative or absolute nature of the probabilities, and about the nature of the events on which the probability bears on. In the case of comp, I argue (through UDA+AUDA) that our next experience is chosen randomly on the set of all computations going through our actual state which have been generated by the UD, or are "living" in that tiny arithmetic. There are 2^aleph_0 histories. The measure should be non constructive (thus physics cannot be entirely described by a program or machine) > Does probability or randomness have a > role to play in the flow of time? I would say yes, given that once a universal machine observes itself it separates a growing "past" from a growing "future". There is a sort of self-diffraction: the better a machine observes itself, the bigger is the set of possible futures (consistent continuations of computations) she gets. > > In connection with UDA: what is the meaning of a first-person > probability due to uncertainty of the future? I will explain this soon to Kim. I suggest you ask in the case this remains unclear, or if you have objection. It is not possible to explain this shortly. > Is there any sense in > which such estimates can be more or less accurate if all possible next > moments do in fact occur? All what we have to do consists in finding discrepancies between the theory and the observations. I bet QM is correct, so I tend to bet that the comp estimation of the possible moments will give the same estimation than QM. This would explain where QM comes from. This remains to be seen of course, but formally, preliminary modest results are going in that direction. Bits and Qubits comes from each other. Hope this short answer to difficult questions can help. I will say more to Ronald Sunday, and I invite you to follow the KIM thread where I explain UDA. And perhaps then I can explain AUDA with the amount of technical details demanded. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
