On 22 Jan 2011, at 17:22, Andrew Soltau wrote:
On 22/01/11 08:44, Bruno Marchal wrote:
Hi Andrew,
On 21 Jan 2011, at 16:08, Andrew Soltau wrote:
Hi
I have an answer to the nature of the relation between the first-
person and specific third-person phenomena. It is based very
simply on logical type. Here's the concept as brief as I can make
it.
As Deutsch, Barbour, Davies, and others hold, the universe is
clearly static. Relativity shows us a static block universe, since
the whole of space-time is actual. The linear dynamics similarly
shows us a static block universe, a four dimensional array of
probability amplitudes for possible events. As with the
relativistic universe, progression along the linear time dimension
of space-time provides a moving picture, a changing reality. As
Penrose states, in the universe described by special relativity:
"... particles do not even move, being represented by “static”
curves drawn in space–time’. Thus what we perceive as moving 3D
objects are really successive cross-sections of immobile 4D
objects past which our field of observation is sweeping." (1994,
p. 389)
The collapse dynamics is the change to the linear dynamics. This
does not work at a global level, due to observers having different
simultaneities. In a relational qm, however, this is
straightforwardly the time evolution of the frame of reference of
the observer in the collapse dynamics, as described by Everett.
As Tegmark points out, Everett brings us the clear distinction
between the outside and inside views of a quantum state. On the
outside view, there is only the linear dynamics. On the inside
view, there are sporadic collapses as observations are made.
The remaining problem is that there is no viewpoint, in any
physical frame of reference, from which to view the change in the
frame of reference as observations are made. This is where logical
types comes in handy.
Taking the relational view:
The quantum state of the effective physical environment of the
observer defines a block universe of probability amplitudes. This
is like one frame of a movie, a four dimensional space-time matter
and energy movie. The quantum concept of time shows that all
possible such frames exist. Barbour "... calls each specific state
a 'Now', and this is what he is emphasising when he says that:
“Every Now is a complete, self-contained, timeless, unchanging
universe” (Folger, 2000). Each Now is a moment in the quantum
concept of time. All the moments exist, complete, 'already', like
the frames of a movie film. Thus Barbour: “... likens his view of
reality to a strip of movie film. Each frame captures one possible
Now” (Folger, 2000)"
With regard to a movie, a frame is a member of the set of the
frames comprising the movie: they are of different logical type.
With regard to the quantum concept of time, the same principle
holds. The quantum state of a physical environment at a specific
moment in the quantum concept of time is of the first, primitive,
logical type, while the set of all possible frames is of a second
logical type.
In order to run, the movie requires iteration. This is of a third
logical type: it is an operation which apples to all possible
movies, all possible sequences of frames. Similarly, in order for
there to be a transtemporal reality, even subjectively, there has
to be an iterator of the frames of reference defined by the
quantum state - I call them quantum mechanical frames of
reference. There can be no such physical process, as Deutsch,
Barbour, Davies, and others hold, and I'm with them. At the same
time, Everett shows how straightforward it is to explain the
appearance of collapse: as each observation is made, the frame of
reference changes to that of the next moment. The observer becomes
correlated with a different quantum state. as he states ... it is
not so much the system which is affected by an observation as the
observer, who becomes correlated to the system. (1973, p. 116; his
italics)
But from what perspective does this change take place? According
to Bitbol (1991, p. 7) this is the conversation out of which
Everett very much wishes to keep. But the question, of course,
stands.
My view is that we have experiential evidence of the answer,
bizarre though it is. I notice the world changing. So I am a
transtemporal observer. However, I also notice my body changing,
and my mind. Everything changes. This change is encountered from
the perspective of phenomenal consciousness. That would be just
odd, except for the fact that Chalmers that phenomenal
consciousness must necessarily be a fundamental feature of the
universe “... alongside mass energy and space-time” (1995). In
other words, in my view, it is an emergent property of the system
as a whole. And as such it is of the third logical type.
And the problem is solved. What we have discovered in the collapse
dynamics, but completely failed to recognise, is a system process.
Just as only a computer is in a position to access a sequence of
addresses in memory, containing a sequence of structures of
information defining the frames of a movie, so too only the
unitary system as an information processing whole is in a position
to access quantum state after quantum sate.
Additionally, as soon as we have a system process of this nature,
this also explains the passage of time. As particles don't move,
the observational frame of refernce must move. But this has no
explanation. Nothing moves, nothing changes; its a block universe.
However, just as we sweep our eye across some grand picture at the
art gallery, taking in detail after detail, a system process is in
a position to sweep the field of observation past the immobile 4D
objects existing in the block universe of a specific quantum
state. This, I propose, is the only way one can successfully
explain the subjective passage of time along the linear time
dimension of space-time.
Thus the third person perspective is the objective view of an
observer, conventionally a body-mind, or in Everett's formulation
the record of sensory observations and machine configuration. In
the first person perspective, it is an emergent property of the
unitary system, Mind as Bitbol calls it.
All described in detail at http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/5554/
Most agree with your kind of indexical analysis here, I think. But
what is your theory of mind? It has been shown that if you take
the computationalist theory of mind, then you have to develop such
analysis to arithmetic. You have to extend the "now" in the quantum
waves, to the "now" in arithmetic (or in any first order extension
of any universal (in Turing sense) system). This gives a frame
where the physical laws originates from number's dreams gluing
conditions. The unitary evolution has a reason, and is itself an
emerging secondary phenomenon. It *has* to be like that for
respecting the constraints of the comp hypothesis. And there is a
net advantage: we get both the logic of observable quanta and
'experientiable' qualia by the machine's reflexion on its
incompleteness.
There is disadvantage. We are lead to difficult mathematical
problems. But the contrary would have been astonishing. One of
those problems has been solved, though. See my URL and the archive
of this list for more.
Bruno Marchal
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Hi Bruno
I have read your paper The first person computationalist
indeterminacy, and find myself in complete agreement. I think my
view goes a little 'further'.
I read your paper, and as those understanding Everett you might
understand the UDA reasoning which shows, notably, that your type of
indexical analysis has to be extended on arithmetic (or any sigma_1
complete or Turing universal) theory in case we assume that observers
are (locally and relatively) Turing emulable.
So time does not exist. But neither do space, nor energy, nor waves,
nor anything properly physical. We have to go back to Plato's kind of
theology, instead of Aristote's theology (defended by atheists and
christians, notably).
I am not sure where you stop in my paper. The first person
indeterminacy is the first step. Have you see that first person non
locality follows? And non clonability of matter? Eventually the movie
graph argument, shows that digital mechanism entails immateriality.
If you take then the classical theory of knowledge (Theatetus), that
is the idea that knowledge is just a belief which happen to be true
(or true in a context), then the material appearance obeys laws
constrained by the logic of self-reference.
You are on the right track, but still Aristotelians. I can use physics
(Everett) to provide illustration, but I cannot postulate anything
physical. It is the price of getting both the qualia and the quanta.
I agree with many points with Chalmers about the inexistence of any
reductive theory of consciousness. This is more or less a theorem for
the universal machine. Machine cannot define consciousness, nor truth,
nor knowledge, but they can define belief, and they can use it to meta-
define in a sort of way, those terms, once they postulate themselves
the mechanist hypothesis.
Another difference is that consciousness get a key role, and is not
epiphenomenal at all. It makes things accelerating. In a sense it is
the only force, and its exist due to the splitting of the self-
referentially correct logic of "I". (G, G*, ...).
Do you know logic? Do you know the theorem by Gödel, Löb and Solovay?
Or the theorem of Kleene. The theorem of Solovay encapsulate the main
use of Kleene's "self-referential" theorem. The first version of my
work use explicitly Kleene's second recursion theorem to handle self-
reproduction and self-reference, but by using Solovay theorem I have
reduced it to the use of eight modal logics. The 1952 book by Kleene
has been reedited recently, btw.
Again, as briefly as I can:
In my view Everett has already done all the heavy lifting. He
defines the functional identity of the observer as the state of the
memory, defined in turn as the record of sensory observations and
machine configuration. The two components are highly familiar to us.
The record of sensory observations of the world is a structure of
information with which every observer is intensely familiar; this is
the known world. This is the structure of information defining the
virtual reality the observer knows as 'the world'. I call it the
world hologram. (I have made up phrases for several phenomena
because I have not found simple labels for them in the existing
literature I have discovered.)
The record of machine configuration in a human observer cannot be a
full and complete record of the state of the neural system from
moment to momet, for obvious reasons.
But that is what Kleene's theorem makes possible. You can write a
program printing, or using, its entire personal code. What you cannot
do is a program writing its complete trace (history). But you can
write a program outputting a program writing that history.
Mathematical self-reference is highly counter-intuitive.
But if one takes the sensorium as the interface between experiencer
and experienced, the record of machine configurations is simply the
record of the representations of the state of the body-mind in the
sensorium. Thus the record of machine configuration is a structure
of information equally intensely familiar to us, the self identity
avatar figure in the world hologram, aka me.
In my view, Everett simply defines, as the functional identity of
the observer, the experiential reality meaning the known world,
with the self identity avatar at its centre. I'm very happy to go
along with that as it seems to fit the experiential facts.
Clearly, the world hologram is simply a structure of information in
the mind of the observer, in turn instantiated in the body of the
observer, one's usual concept of identity. However, the same
identical world hologram is instantiated in a very large number of
versions of the effective physical environment - all those that
instantiate an observer with that record of sensory observations and
machine configuration. In an Everettian no-collapse universe, all
exist.
All = everuything consistent with the quantium principle. I guess. It
is not "all" in the arithmetical sense. Mechanism makes physics the
surface of simething bigger (as seen from inside), and simplest (as
think from outside).
Thus the effective physical environment of this structure of
information is the simultaneous reality of all of these versions of
the environment, a phenomenon I call 'universe superposition'. The
result is an effective physical environment determinate only where
observed by this observer, as in Rovelli's RQM. This is examined in
detail in The World Hologram
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/5551/
The cut in the von Neumann chain is here made at the level of the
sensorium.
You mean the phenomenology of the cut.
Thus only that which has been observed in the sensorium is
determinate in the effective physical environment, and all else is
indeterminate. This of course means that the body itself where not
observed is, like the rest of the environment of the world hologram,
indeterminate except where observed. The same goes even for the mind
as usually conceptualised. Only those attributes of mind observed in
terms of sensory experience, thoughts, feelings, and the attributes
that can be inferred from the history of observations of the body-
mind, are determinately so of this observer, and all else is
indeterminate. The result is exactly the reality one is familiar
with.
We think of ourselves as minds in bodies,
That's the main illusion. Bodies are in our head!
and recognise that almost all of the hundred trillion or so cell
structure is unknown to us except in the most broad brush terms, and
the same goes for the mind.
What is objective is what is doubtable, and communicable, and
falsifiable and evolving ...
What is conscious is undoubtable, but non communicable. Consciousness
is undoubtable, but all consciousness content is doubtable, except one
(the consciousness fact itself).
If we take Everett at face value, it is only what is observed in the
sensorium that is determinate,
I am not sure I understand. In Everett the indeterminate is contagious
to the environment? Everything is determinated as view from outside
(the wave). From inside things appears indeterminate, but this is
because we are ourselves multiplied. Like in the first person
indeterminacy. Universe splits, although with comp it is better to say
that consciousness differentiates.
Reality is just arithmetic truth view from inside. It is the
consciousness of the universal (and Löbian) machine which
differentiate along deep (and hopefully enough linear) computations.
and thus forms part of the genuine identity, all else being
indeterminate in this version of this reality - the effective
physical environment. Using the language of your paper The first
person computationalist indeterminacy, and equating the functional
identity of the observer with the world hologram:
World hologram? I guess this might corrspond to the number theoretical
matrix! The border of the universal dovetailer is a bit like an
hologram. Like the border of the Mandelbrot set. But that is an
accident of representation. The game takes shape from the self-
reference abilities of those universal numbers. See my URL for the
mathematics. It is Everett's embedding of the physicist in physical
reality extended to the embedding of the 'mathematician' (the Löbian
machine) in arithmetic.
for any part of our mind, other than the structure of information
defining the world hologram itself, there exist a level of
description such that those parts can be said functional, and thus
substitutable by functionally equivalent prosthesis, so that the
subject experimenting that substitution will not experience any
changes.
The algorithm of the experiential reality is simplicity itself,
being the one Everett addresses. The time evolution of the world
hologram progresses with the addition of each observation. This is
the collapse dynamics, which is experienced subjectively as change
of the environment. All possible neural, or other, computational
algorithms that could give rise to this addition of this observation
to this world hologram are instantiated in the no-collapse universe,
and all are included in the universe superposition of environments
instantiating this observer making this observation, ie making this
transition from one moment in the quantum concept of time
? I guess you mean the MWI conception of time.
to the next. (thus all simulations of the reality of this observer
are included in the universe superposition, along with all possible
physical instantiations of it, which is handy when considering
quantum immortality in a wider sense than usually taken.)
All everything-type of immortalities are rather frightful, a priori,
but I might be wrong on that. Mind can backtrack by amnesia, and this
is what happens when computational histories "fuse".
The experiential reality evolves in time in accordance with the
standard von Neumann-Dirac formulation.
Why? This cannot be taken for granted. You might be an aristotelian
(this is common since 1500 years). I am agnostic on all theological
matter, but I like to listen to the universal numbers looking inward.
I have lost the faith in a primary physical universe. Mechanism and
weak materialism are (epistemologically) incompatible. Their
conjunction leads to person elimination.
In between observations, the linear dynamics proceeds, subjectively
even if not objectively, and as it does so the next observation is
formulated in the sensorium. On the formulation of the next
observation, the world hologram changes, as does the universe
superposition, the physical reality of this structure of
information, meaning simply the effective physical environment. As
Everett avers, objectively, all possible versions of this
observation take place in the linear dynamics, but subjectively,
with respect to each idiosyncratic version of the world hologram, a
specific observation is determinately made. Tegmark clarifies this
distinction as being Everett's brilliant exposition on the
difference between the inside and outside views of a quantum state.
The period of time between observations is the specious present,
which, it turns out in this context, is not specious! That is the
now in the experiential reality. A grossly oversimplified algorithm
of experiential reality is given at the end of Logical Types in
Quantum Mechanics at
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/5554/
The fundamental computational process of the unitary system is
simply the timebase, the movement of the experiential frame of
reference along the linear time dimension of spacetime, as described
by Penrose (at lightspeed, as described by Greene). The moving of
this now is the algorithmic process. while(1){t=t+1;}
Given simply that algorithm, in the context of the unitary linear
dynamics, you get the appearance of collapse, to observers, defined
as the state of the memory of the observer, as Everett demonstrates.
It seems to me that if to that you add phenomenal consciousness as
an epiphenomenon of the fundamental system process, you get the sum
total of what we are experiencing.
Hmm... You are unfortunately right on this. You are still eliminating
consciousness, imo, and the person. The advantage of comp is that it
is non reductive both on the basic consciousness, but also on its
role. The universal machine, once Löbian, defeats all normative
theories about her. The Löbian machine is a universal dissident.
Authorities (user of authoritative arguments) cannot like that.
In my view, we are world holograms, virtual realities, each in a
physical reality determinate only where defined by observations
formulated in the sensorium. The other observers one encounters are
icons, in the virtual reality, of other observers, similarly
defining their own versions of the effective physical environment.
In one's personal parallel reality, one has a very different status
to other observers in that reality, being the determinant of that
reality. In my reality, only I am truly real, as in solipsism. On
the other hand, all observers are very clearly equally real and
existent, so I call it multisolipsism.
You have to derive this if you are willing to believe our bodies are
Turing emulable at some level of description (computationalism,
digital mechanism, or simply mechanism). The whole physicalness is a
first person (indexical) notion. And taking into account Solovay's
splitting logics, you get the qualia, and a role for consciousness.
Good job Andrew, but if you are OK with the comp assumption, you have
to realize that such an analysis has to be developed by pure self-
reference, independently of the physical observations. But today, the
math exists and you don't have to look inward, you can program a
universal machine to do that. The shape of their discovery appears in
Gödel, Löb and Solovay, and the Russians' work for the first order
extension of those Solovay logics. Mathematical logic and computer
science have a lot to say, once we assume we are digital machine (that
should be obvious).
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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