On 14 Apr 2016, at 19:09, smitra wrote:
On 13-04-2016 14:54, Jason Resch wrote:
On Tue, Apr 12, 2016 at 5:26 PM, smitra <[email protected]> wrote:
What we experience is always a computation performed by our brain
and the best theories we have will not allow one to definitely say
that you are not a brain in a vat. Another thing is that you are
always located in your present moment, so any notion of the past is
just a theory, you cannot distinguish between a fictitious past and
what you think is the real past. Everything you know now about what
you think is the past is just a consequence of what exists in your
brain right now.
Then invoking physics to argue that the concept of an external
universe including its history is correct is not going to work in a
rigorous way, because according to quantum mechanics there will be
contributions to the amplitude of your present observations coming
from anomalous histories. While these contributions are suppressed
by astronomically large factors, if you write down a theory where
you make them exactly zero, you get a flawed theory that will
violate unitary time evolution.
I think it is even looser than that. When you're not thinking of what
color your toothbrush is, your "mind algorithm" exists within a
context of all possibilities mutually consistent with your current
state of awareness at that point in time. When the memory makes it to
your conscious mind, you select or narrow down the set of universes
your mind can belong to, but then expand the set for other things no
longer in your mind, such as what your mother's face looks like (when
you are only thinking of your toothbrush's color)
Yes I agree. I think I discussed this with Bruno some time ago, but
it was hidden within some other discussion. If we consider ourselves
as algorithms
I think "algorithm" is too much ambiguous. We are "programs" or
"machine" or "numbers" which encode some possible algorithm with
respect to some possible universal number/machine/environment.
That might play some important role, because our "soul" is attached to
an infinity of programs (leading to conscious-equivalent states) which
are executed in the arithmetical reality. That is why computationalism
predicts that if we look at ourself (including perhaps some part of
the environment) below our substitution level, we must see the
"fuzziness" due to the arbitrary subcomputations done there.
I say "below", like if the level was a scale, but it is actually a
question of isolation, like in QM. We are independent of the things
from which we can be isolated.
then in each instant that we can distinguish we are different
algorithms.
OK. especially that we can put the data (measured at some moment) into
the programs.
I pointed to the formalism in this article:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1305.1615
that is quite natural if you think of states of observers as
algorithms, as you then need to specify a mapping between initial
and final states. In the article it is explained that a natural
formulation of quantum mechanics involves doing precisely that. So,
it seems to me that when attempting to derive quantum mechanics from
some theory of computationalism, you would need to focus on this
aspect of quantum mechanics (which is not present in classical
theories).
The difference between, say, 10^(-10^1000000000) and 0 is actually
a big deal here, it proves that our existence is not confined to
some naive classical notion of a single universe. The picture that
we instead get is radically different than the one painted by most
physicists who ignore the small details and argue on the basis of
the flawed notion of "for all practical matters".
Once we find physical constants compatible with our existence,
discovering continued decimal expansions of those constants is a bit
like following the trail of a random number generator's output. Until
a physicist narrows it down, you again live in a mix of possible
physical universes. Or you might say, before you learn the values by
reading it in a book, those insignificant digits might be a mix of
all
possible values.
A more natural picture that is consistent with all of physics (all
= including the astronomically small amplitudes), is the idea that
what exists are just algorithms. An algorithm can be specified by
mathematical rules, it specifies the relation between input and
output. From the point of view of an algorithm, a universe may
appear to exist, but what really exists is that algorithm. Other
algorithms then also exist but they have to be considered as
different universes. So, what exists is a multiverse where each
element is an algorithm in some specific computational state.
This sounds like Bruno's theory:
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/publications/SANE2004MARCHALAbstract.html
[1]
In particular, this means that you are your own universe, and one
second ago you were a different person, so that person is a
different universe. Time evolution is an information preserving
mapping between different universes, there is nothing that really
evolves or changes.
This remind's me of Wei Dai's (this list's founder) "really simple"
explanation of QM: http://www.weidai.com/qm-interpretation.txt [2]
Also, the person you think you were when you were a small child is
the same child that ended up being persons that are totally
different from you, including people who died centuries ago. In
fact, I claim that if you pick two random persons, say, Genghis Khan
and Albert Einstein then under inverse time evolution the child they
were will converge to each other and eventually merge with each
other.
What differentiates to meditative thoughtless minds? Is an amnesiac
or
meditative mind a focal point for different consciousnesses? When a
mind reaches a point of zero information content as it approaches
death is it the same as a newly formed mind with zero information
content before birth?
I guess so. I would prefer to think in terms of observer moments, so
at the moment you are close to death, that's a different "you"
compared to what you consider to be your previous versions. Once you
lose the memory of your past, what is left of you will exist in a
far larger set of environments including in bodies that are not dying.
This is true even for mothers and their children, the fact that the
mother gave birth to her children is not a problem because a fetus
in a womb cannot detect in which womb it is. As you go back in time,
what it is aware of and what its mother was aware of when it was a
fetus become identical.
You might enjoy this: http://philpapers.org/archive/ZUBOST.pdf [3]
I'll read it!
When we were born, we wouldn't immediately have known about modern
technology, so the experiences for the newborn baby do not localize
it in time all that much. If you were born in the year 1960, you
could just as well have born in the year 1800, 1200 or 2260. This
means that you were born in all these possibilities, you started to
branch out into the different possibilities only after you became
aware of these facts.
But, of course, it's not consistent to leave other animals out of
the equation. In principle one has to consider all possible
algorithms, some of which are implemented by the brains of spiders,
T-Rex or some alien animal that doesn't exist here on Earth.
To quote the above paper:
"I still believe, as I did in 1961, that if the pattern of a life is
anywhere, anytime extended, that life itself is extended. But now I
believe as well that there is no limit to the type of one's
experience, that all experience belongs to you, to me, to the one
self of experience. Suppose you are killed on the way to visit a
friend. If anywhere, any time in all reality there exists the
experience of that visit, without the intervening death, you are
there, making that visit. But everyone else, all conscious beings,
will be there with you, as you. And you will be with them too, in
everything they experience, because they are you. There is no
alienated self that ceases to exist when a particular organism dies.
Neither is there a real progress of experiences, a moving present.
And so death, when seen as an obliteration of the person and an end
of his experience, is an illusion."
Jason
This sounds very interesting.
OK,
Bruno
Saibal
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Links:
------
[1] http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/publications/SANE2004MARCHALAbstract.html
[2] http://www.weidai.com/qm-interpretation.txt
[3] http://philpapers.org/archive/ZUBOST.pdf
[4] https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list
[5] https://groups.google.com/d/optout
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