On 11 Feb 2012, at 21:32, acw wrote:
On 2/10/2012 13:54, Stephen P. King wrote:
On 2/9/2012 3:40 PM, acw wrote:
[SPK]
I do not see how this deals effectively with the concurrency
problem!
:-( Using the Platonia idea is a cheat as it is explicitly
unphysical.
But physics by itself does not explain consciousness either (as
shown
by MGA). Maybe I just don't see what the concurrency problem is.
It has no constraints of thermodynamics, no limits on speeds of
signals,
no explanation as to how an Ideal Form is defined, e.g. what is the
standard of its perfection, ect. It is no different from the
Realm of
God in religious mythos, so what is it doing here in our rational
considerations? Forgive me but I was raised by parents that where
Fundamentalists "Believers", so please understand that I have an
allergy
to ideas that remind me of the mental prison that I had to work
so hard
to escape.
I'm not asking you to share all of Plato's beliefs here. It's
merely a
minimal amount of "magic", not unlike the "magic" you have to accept
by positing a 3p world. The amount is basically this: arithmetical
(or
computational) sentences have truth values independent of anything
physical and consciousness/qualia may be how some such arithmetical
truth feels from the inside. Without at least some axioms, one
cannot
get anywhere, you can't reduce arithmetic to only logic and so on.
Why
would Platonia have to have the same constraints as our physical
realms - it need only obey to constraints of logic and math, which
usually means stuff that is contained within the Church Turing
Thesis
and its implications. Speed of signals? If some theory is
inconsistent, it's only there as part of the reasoning of some other
machine. Ideal Form? How do you define an integer or the axioms that
talk about arithmetic?
Popular religious mythos tend to be troublesome because they involve
*logically impossible* properties being attributed to Gods and other
beings - things which are inconsistent. It's not like one doesn't
assume some axioms in any theory - they are there in almost any
scientific theory. Yet, unlike popular religions, you're free to
evaluate your hypotheses and use evidence and meta-reasoning to
decide
which one is more likely to be true and then try to use the
results of
such theories to predict how stuff will behave or bet on various
things.
Of course, it's not hard to get trapped in a bad epistemology, and I
can see why you'd be extra skeptical of bad theories, however nobody
is telling you to believe a theory is true or false, instead it asks
you to work out the consequences of each theory's axioms (as well as
using meta-reasoning skills to weed down overly complex theories, if
you prefer using Occam's) and then either choose to use or not use
that particular theory depending if the results match your
observations/expectations/standards/... (if expectations are broken,
one would either have to update beliefs or theories or both).
Hi ACW,
What ever the global structure that we use to relate our ideas and
provide explanations, it makes sense that we do not ignore problems
that
are inconvenient. A big problem that I have with Platonia is that it
does not address the appearance of change that we finite semi-
autonomous
beings observe. The problem of time is just a corollary to this. I
would
prefer to toss out any postulates that require *any* "magic".
"Magic" is
like Arsenic poison, every little bit doubles the harmful effects.
"Magic" is only used for things which have to either be axioms or
which just cannot be reduced further. Arithmetic cannot be reduced
further. What we have as subjective experience is not directly
communicable, it is very 'magical', yet our theories must explain it
somehow. We may want to have no axioms at all, but such theories are
inconsistent as they can prove anything at all.
I make just a little technical remark. A theory without any axiom is
consistent, because it cannot prove anything, not even a falsity. It
has a model, indeed, all models are model of the empty theory. It
makes such a theory non interesting, but perfectly consistent. To be
inconsistent you will need axioms and rules such that you can prove a
proposition and its negation.
Otherwise I am OK with most of what you say. For the measure problem,
and the derivation of the physical laws, I use the self-reference
logics. I might come back on this, but it needs some background in
mathematical logic.
Bruno
Why
do we even need a notion of 3p except as a pedagogical tool? What we
need, at least, is a stratification scheme that allows us to
represent
these differences, but we need to understand that in doing this we
are
sneaking in the notion of a 3p that is equivalent to some kind of
agent
whose only mission is to observe differences and that is a fallacy
since
we are trying to explain observers in the first place.
Unless we have some way to handle a fundamental notion of change,
there
is no way to deal with questions of change and time. Please notice
how
many instances we are using verbs in our considerations of COMP
ideas.
Where and how does the change implicit in the verb, as like
"running the
UD", obtain? We cannot ignore this. I am highlighting the concurrency
problem b/c it shows how this problem cannot be ignored. The Platonic
Realm, especially the Arithmetic Realist one, is by definition
fixed and
static, nothing changes in it at all! How do we get the appearance of
time from it? It is possible to show how, but the proponents of COMP
need to explain this, IMHO. It is incoherent at best to make
statements
like "the UD is running on the walls of Platonia". How is that even a
meaningful claim?
Any objective model that features time can be made into a timeless
one by explaining how the state depends on the time and how they are
related. Time is a matter of relation between states. The continuity
of consciousness would be a matter of which OM you happen to be in
and how (or if) OMs are related to each other (for a relative
measure, they have to be, for an absolute one, no). This problem
seems to be similar/related to the problem of indexicals - which OM
you happen to be in, which observer you happen to be, what memories
you have and so on.
Another problem is the problem of space as we see in the way that 1p
indeterminacy is defined in UDA. We read of a notion of "cutting and
pasting". Cut 'from" where and pasted "to" where? How is the
difference
in "position" of say, Washington and Moscow, obtain in a Realm that
has
nothing like "space"? Unless we have a substrate of some kind that
transformations can act upon and yet the transformations and the
substrate are not distinguished, there is no "cut and pasting"
possible.
If you accept a digital substitution, then cutting and pasting is
merely a matter of instantiating some program twice, one in
Washington and another in Moscow. If you want it to be more
fanciful, you can imagine the reconstruction of the whole body, but
I don't see how that would change the outcome. The way I see it, you
expect to be either in W or M after such an experiment, and after
performing it, there are now at least 2 valid continuations (well,
an infinity of them with the UD, but let's ignore the "mostly the
same" or "very unusual and very rare" ones for now) which are the
most probable continuations. It's undecidable from your perspective
before performing the experiment (let's call it S0) if your next
state will be Washington (S1W) or Moscow (S1M). You could consider
your history until now as being contained in S0, for example in a
more "proof theoretic" arithmetical way, it could be a proof of the
existence of your history and OMs until now. Now as the next
possible state is indeterminate (and undecidable), you'd have to add
the location as an axiom and thus you obtain 2 theories: S1M and
S1W. They would both have OMs associated with them, but they are now
different theories/histories.
The scope of the first part of the UDA is to show that if COMP
(digital subst.), you cannot depend on time and space or even
implementation substrate to tell what your next continuation will be
like (one needs to be able to show that most continuations should be
local, otherwise you have the white rabbit problem and COMP would be
false as our experiences are stable).
As a side-note I'll present a quick thought experiment similar to
UDA step 4, but instead of considering the indeterminacy as going
forward in time, I'll show that it goes backward in time as well
(this becomes irrelevant in UDA step 7, but might as well present it
here):
Consider a machine with sufficient memory to run a SIM and offer an
interface with the world. Consider that in year 2050, such a SIM
exists, now he runs a special program (will explain later) on a
different machine, the program crashes/does nothing, the SIM now
lives 100 years until 2150, but accidentally his emulator crashes
and he was careless with backups and thus he's now 3p dead in that
2150. Suddenly the SIM finds himself back in 2050 with his memories
from 2150, what happened?
The program happened to run a truly random program that can be
generated from quantum noise (assuming MWI), given a 1bit QRNG: 1)
if qrng() = 0, stop and run program 2) if qrng() = 1, append qrng()
to program, goto 1. (the machine this runs on is the one originally
considered)
This shows that the indeterminacy is strongly time independent (be
it backwards or forward), although that should already be obvious by
UDA step 7/8. Of course, the 2050 continuation was just one of an
infinity possible, but it is at least one possible one, thus it
should also happen, along with the rest (all the possibilities are
as real, just not all are as probable).
This might seem very formal and strange, so you could think of it
another way: with COMP, a mind/an observer is an abstract structure
and given some particular implementation of that observer there are
many possible implementations for the next state of the observer so
that the observer be consistent and work fine (at the low-level).
The substrate can very well vary below the substitution level (but
such a level may very well be quite low, and undergoing a
substitution at a higher level would entail some detail/memory loss
and possibly even alter the measure). The continuations are always
random programs from the UD, and there should be an infinite
ensemble of them which happen to implement the observer being in
some particular state, the main requirement be that they implement
the next state of the observer correctly, such that the observer
remain consistent (relatively to the previous state). Also, we
cannot depend on the continuations to always lie at a later state
within the UD, a continuation can be at an earlier state as shown by
my previous thought experiment (unless of course you have a very
strong continuity assumption, in which case COMP is false, because
you would never survive the initial substitution, yet strangely your
SIM version would think he is you, which makes me wonder how this is
any different from someone undergoing an operation under anesthesia
or just waking up after sleeping - it should be noted that just a
wipe of the short-term memory is sufficient for such doubts).
What makes the difference between the substrate and the
transformation?
Bruno et al seems to consider this in terms of Godel numbering
schemes
but what distinguishes a Godel number of a program from a program?
The observer's abstract structure is what remains invariant, while
all the implementations change, quantum foam can be seen as that
"competition between machines which implement the observer". We
cannot know which program implements us or our lower substrates at
any given state and how much of the generalized brain does it
include (environment), this does not mean that we can't say "yes" to
such a digitalist doctor, merely that we can't be sure that we'll be
correct (of the level being correct, of continuity, of nature of
qualia, etc), so it's a bet. The observer itself is subject to
change, consciousness itself requires this change, learning and
forgetting is just one example of such a change. In a relative way,
we might be able to think of a continuous-OM which is represented by
change between 2 states (such as S0->S1M and S0->S1W), and of our
histories as an infinite graph representing such state changes
(although finding even all continuations from a given OM is
uncomputable and a making a program which can decide if any
particular machine represents a continuation for some other one is
again impossible, although likely solvable for some specific cases,
just never *all* of them).
Onward!
Stephen
I'll try to answer some of the other posts a bit later. I'm still
not completely satisfied with my current answer as to what
constitutes a continuation as well as how OMs are selected (measure
problem). I might elaborate more on this in other posts.
--
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
.
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 [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.
