On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 11:47 AM, Stephen P. King <[email protected]>wrote:
> On 2/13/2012 12:11 PM, Joseph Knight wrote: > > I think you should probably read Maudlin's > paper<http://www.finney.org/%7Ehal/maudlin.pdf>for specifics. I don't think > thermodynamics will have much to do with the > conclusions, whatever they may be (and I don't think it's obvious what > *exactly > *Maudlin showed). > > > Hi Joseph, > > Thank you for the new link to Maudlin''s paper. I was having a hard > time finding my copy... As to your comment: Would you consider exactly what > a "computational structure" means in a universe that allows for perpetual > motion <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_motion>? > You should be aware that our universe allows for perpetual motion. > > (We are going to run a reductio argument<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum> > ...) > > One thing that I see is that in such a universe we would have a huge > White Rabbit problem because all brains in it would only be those of the > Boltzmann > type <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain>. There could not be > any invariant form of sequencing that we could run a UD on. How so? Becasue > in a universe without thermodynamics > A Big universe "with thermodynamics" will still admit perpetual motion machines (in fact, our Universe is such a universe). Are you aware that, in the 19th century, classical thermodynamics was transformed into a statistical theory? You made a huge (and incorrect) leap from "admits a perpetual motion machine" to "no thermodynamics". If you can have Boltzmann Brains you can have Universal Dovetailers run for arbitrary (even infinite) amounts of time. At any rate, the notion of a "sufficiently robust universe" is a provisional premise that is dropped later in the UDA, so it's not important. > there is no such a thing as a sequence of events that is invariant with > respect to transitions from one observer to another, i.e. there would be no > such thing as time definable in a 'dimensional' sense. All sequences would > be at best Markov <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markov_property>. With > such a restriction to Markov processes, how to you define a UD? Without a > UD, how do we get COMP to work? > > > > Onward! > > Stephen > > > > > On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 7:21 AM, Stephen P. King <[email protected]>wrote: > >> Hi Folks, >> >> I have been mulling over my conversations with Bruno, Joseph and ACW >> in the EVERYTHING list and have a question. In SANE04 we read the following: >> >> "For any given precise running computation associated to some inner >> experience, you >> can modify the device in such a way that the amount of >> physical activity involved is >> arbitrarily low, and even null for dreaming experience which has no >> inputs and no outputs. >> Now, having suppressed that physical activity present in the >> running computation, the >> machine will only be accidentally correct. It will be correct only for >> that precise computation, >> with unchanged environment. If it is changed a little bit, it will >> make the machine running >> computation no more relatively correct. But then, Maudlin >> ingenuously showed that >> counterfactual correctness can be recovered, by adding non active >> devices which will be >> triggered only if some (counterfactual) change would appear in the >> environment. Now this >> shows that any inner experience can be associated with an arbitrary low >> (even null) physical >> activity, and this in keeping counterfactual correctness. And >> that is absurd with the >> conjunction of both comp and materialism." >> >> Setting aside the problem of concurrency for now, how is it that we >> are jumping over the difference between infinitely slow or even " >> adiabatic <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adiabatic_process>" physical >> process and "null" physical process? >> >> I may be not even wrong here, but in math isn't it true that there is a >> big difference between a quantity being arbitrarily small and a quantity >> being zero? I suspect that the folks in FOAR List that have been discussing >> information and entropy might have a thought on this. >> > > -- > 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. > -- Joseph Knight -- 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.
