On 30 Oct 2015, at 13:39, Pierz wrote:
So imagine a guy washed up on a small desert island after a plane
crash. Unfortunately during the plane crash he suffered a traumatic
injury which caused him to completely lose his memory. He wakes up
on the sure without the faintest clue about who he is or where he
comes from. He doesn't even remember that there are other people in
the world and that he was born of a mother and father. After sorting
out his immediate survival needs, being a philosophical type, he
begins to wonder about his own origins. He begins to speculate about
the what conditions might have given rise to him and the island he
finds himself on.
Without the benefit of the memory of any scientific knowledge, he is
struck by the strangeness of the fact that the world he finds
himself in seems so well-adapted to him - or he to it. Isn't it
marvellous, he reasons, that when I feel this particular unpleasant
sensation of dryness (which we, but not he, would call "thirst"), it
happens that there is some abundant substance I can locate that, if
conveyed into my mouth, relieves that sensation? Isn't it
astonishing that I have these dextrous digital appendages that seem
so perfectly made for constructing a shelter, or making and throwing
a spear? How to explain it?
Being more of a mathematician than a naturalist by nature, he
reasons that perhaps the explanation is simply this: the ocean that
he sees that appears to extend indefinitely in all directions is in
fact infinite. And scattered across that infinite ocean there are
other islands. He can see at least a couple from where he is, so if
the ocean is infinite there would end up being an infinity of such
islands. And if there are an infinite number of such islands, then
all possible arrangements of matter will eventually form by chance.
If they happen to form something conscious - and conscious enough to
reason about its origins - then that conscious being will be
required to be complex enough and well adapted enough to the stuff
around it that it can maintain its own integrity long enough to form
such deep thoughts.
OK, there are still some holes in his Theory of Everything (where
did the ocean come from?)
Oh!
Just imagine that the guy was lucky enough to save one thing in the
plane which crashed: an elementary introduction to arithmetic.
That will be enough. (If he has enough water of course).
The explanation is in the head of all universal universal machine. He
might be amnesic but also lost his entry senses. Again, first assuming
he still get the way to survive in some ways, then even without that
assumption.
The theory is not trivial, because the concept of Turing universality
is not trivial. Indeed incompleteness entails the machine to confuse
and then de-confuse truth, proof, knowledge, observable and sensible.
Once he will bet that he is no more than a modest universal numbers he
can understand that he is either in a dream of a normal dreamer, or a
normal dreamer, which means with the statistics given by all
computation imitating his current computation at the relevant level.
Thanks to the book, he win a lot of time to develop the higher
mathematics needs to solve the solution, and test it.
but a man has to draw the line somewhere.
The content of the elementary arithmetic book.
He is smart enough to see the lurking possibility of infinite
regress and skirt around it. With this he is satisfied and settles
back to eat another coconut, convinced he has found a coherent
explanation of his own existence...
The problem with his impoverished account, of course, is that it
misses a vast amount of structure in the world.
Here the elementary book provides a tremendous help, like galileo
understood.
But to get where the ocean come from, the universal machine must look
deep inside, up to the point of understanding that the observable is
non boolean and quantized.
The line he has drawn to stave off infinite explanatory regress is
clearly far too high in the hierarchy of complexity, but because of
the limited range of his experience, he is unlikely to see that. If
he could witness mating and birth, for instance, he might start to
wonder if he hadn't been a little hasty in his invocation of
infinite permutation as an explanatory principle. With sufficient
exposure to time and diverse biology, he might start to wonder about
the role of an evolutionary process.
It's clear how much better the evolutionary explanation is because,
armed with it, he might be able to make predictions. He might be
able to foresee, for instance, that his body should have robust
mechanisms for dealing with normal environmental vicissitudes.
Suffering his first minor wound, he might predict that the injury
would heal. On the other hand, with the "infinite permutations
theory", he could predict nothing at all. Though it offers a
somewhat satisfying conceptual neatness, it also lacks any
predictive power whatsoever.
You can see perhaps see where I'm going with this. I tend to believe
in a multiverse. But I also tend to believe that as an explanation
of fine-tunedness per se, the combination of a multiverse with the
anthropic principle is scientifically and philosophically bankrupt.
I believe that we are like desert island amnesiacs, lacking the
breadth of observation that we would need in order to see the
correct picture of how fine tuning arises in our local environment.
Lee Smolin's theory of an evolutionary universe gets closer, but
suffers from the serious flaw that he sees universes evolving
towards black-hole production, which is only incidentally or co-
incidentally related to life-friendliness.
My hunch is that the true explanation of fine-tuning (and hence of
the physical laws we observe) is one that involves our universe
being embedded in much larger multiversal structures and processes
which we probably can't even guess at with our current technological
and theoretical apparatus. The resort to "all possible structures"
flattens out infinity to a single dimension the same way that the
castaway amnesiac flattens out infinity to the level of the ocean. I
suspect the truth is much deeper and more complex and that the fined
universe we see is a result of a kind of deep computational process
in the same way that biological complexity is the end result of a
long computational process.
I agree that "all realities" + anthropic principle, miss the thing.
But this is still ASSA (the Absolute Self Sampling assumption already
discussed abd criticized in this list). Assuming digital mechanism,
the probabilities are always *relative* to a state and its indexical
representation, which in the case of the super-amnesic Peano
Arithmetic is given, in arithmetic, by Gödel arithmetic predicate []p.
And the difference between the points of view ([]p & p, ..) + The
restriction to the computation/sigma_1 sentences, shows that such
probabilities obeys non trivial laws.
You are right on the *deep* (I guess in Bennet sense) computational
processes, but each universal number has a deep number attached to it,
which sometimes I call the Post number, and which is its oracle for
the halting problem. The sequence for example, given by writing a zero
or a one for the stopping and non stopping programs (with 0 argument)
in the enumeration of the P_i (computing the phi_i with zero
argument). Chaitin number is not deep, as it compactifies the number
of Post, which mix infinite surprise plus a lot of redundancy, not
unlike the Mandelbrot set (which might be a compactification of a the
sigma_1 proofs/truth).
QM retro-confirms the mechanist interpretation of the
Neopythagoreanist interpretation of the five affirmative hypothesis of
Parmenides. The finding of those humans who where rationalist and
never dismissed the mystical experiences.
But PA knows that since always.
I guess we too, but it has already been hard to accept the primate as
cousins, and it will take time for people to admit PA belongs to the
family (of sentient beings).
Somehow, it is the universal (in the sense of Church, Turing, Post...)
which detrivialises and de-relativizes the "anthropism" and this on a
very solid "everything" (the computations, solid by Church-thesis). It
makes also a case for mathematicalism, or arithmeticalism (close by
itself to pythagoreanism).
Nice parable, Pierz (quite Aristotelian for a computationalist).
Bruno
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