On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 02:32:15PM -0800, Travis Garrett wrote: > I am somewhat flabbergasted by Russell's response. He says that he is > "completely unimpressed" - uh, ok, fine - but then he completely > ignores entire sections of the paper where I precisely address the > issues he raises. Going back to the abstract I say:
Sorry about that, but its a sad fact of life that if I don't get the general gist of a paper by the time the introduction is over, or get it wrong, I am unlikely to delve into the technical details unless a) I'm especially interested (as in I need the results for something I'm doing), or b) I'm reviewing the paper. I guess I don't see why there's a problem to solve in why we observe ourselves as being observers. It kind of follows as a truism. However, there is a problem of why we observe ourselves at all, as opposed to disorganised random information (the white rabbit problem) or simple uninteresting information (the occam catastrophe problem). I'm not sure you really address either of the latter two issues - you seem to be assuming away white rabbits in restricting yourself to "gauge invariant" information (which I assume can be formalised as the set of programs of a universal machine). I would be interested to know if your proposal could address the occam catastrophe issue though. Cheers. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Mathematics UNSW SYDNEY 2052 [email protected] Australia http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- 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.
