On 09 Mar 2011, at 16:06, Jason Resch wrote:
On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 10:14 AM, Brent Meeker
<meeke...@dslextreme.com> wrote:
On 3/8/2011 3:14 AM, Andrew Soltau wrote:
What I am driving at here is the same question as in the email Comp.
Granted that all possible states exist, what changes the point of
the present moment from one to another. My referring to 'the
thinker' was probably not a helpful metaphor. Given the universal
numbers, what carries out the process whereby one is transformed
into another? What makes the state of the thinker or the dreamer
into the state of that entity at the next moment?
Andrew
I think the idea is analogous to the block universe. In Platonia
all the states of "the thinker" and his relation to the world are
"computed" in a timeless way. The impression of time for "the
thinker" is recovered by putting the states into a sequence which is
implicitly defined by their content.
Brent
Bruno and others,
Do you think that computations performed by a computer or brain
within a block universe contribute to the computational histories of
a person?
Let us defined the block multiverse by the (sub)universal dovetailer
which wins the "measure battle". If, in that structure, we implement
a computer or a brain, then it will contribute to the history of the
person (and that is why we can say yes to a doctor, because the
artificial brain that he build is supposed to respect the measure of
the actual history of its patient.
Note that although there is a block-universal-dream, it is an open
question if this leads to a well defined physical universe. It might
be possible that not all machine dreams can glue together, leading to
multi-multiverses, ...
I can see why in a movie they do not, as there is no mathematical
relation between the frames.
OK. Nice.
However, in a universe ruled by equations, it seems to me that a
computer in a universe is leveraging relations in math to perform
computations, albeit less directly than a platonic Turing machine
running a program. To me it is like running a simulation of a brain
on a virtual machine on physical hardware. The VM provides a level
of abstraction, but ultimately its computations are still
computations.
OK.
In the same way a mathematical universe is a level of abstraction
yet could still provide a platform for genuine computation (not
descriptions of computation) to be performed. What do you think?
I can only agree. Arithmetical truth, and precisely the sigma_1
arithmetical truth (the true proposition having the shape "ExP(x) with
P(x) provably decidable) emulate all possible computations (it is a
sort of canonical UD living in (emulated by) elementary arithmetic.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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