On Thu, Sep 07, 2017 at 09:44:02PM +1000, Bruce Kellett wrote: > On 6/09/2017 5:39 pm, Bruce Kellett wrote: > >On 6/09/2017 2:52 pm, Russell Standish wrote: > >>More importantly, I'm sure you appreciate that codings are also entirely > >>arbitrary, that every possible bitstring will represent the OM of me > >>sitting at this keyboard typing to you under some coding. It is only by > >>fixing a coding that we can talk about bit strings having meaning, ie > >>some bitstrings represent (eg the aforementioned OM) whilst others > >>don't. > > > >We have skirted round the coding problem. While I do not for a moment > >think that there is any possible coding that can relate every possible > >bitstring to my present (or any other) observer moment (there is no > >coding that can make a complex entity out of a string consisting > >entirely of ones, or of an infinite sequence of alternate 0s and 1s, > >and so on), the problem of where the coding comes from, and how it is > >interpreted, seems insurmountable. Perhaps that is, in fact, the > >Achilles heel of the whole enterprise. > > On reflection, I realize that coding is not really an issue if we > have a plenum consisting of all possible bit strings. After all, any > coding of any particular bitstring simply gives another bitstring -- > coding is nothing more than a map of the plenum to itself. So any > possible coding of any possible bitstring is already a string in the > pile! > > The question, then, is what particular strings are 'self-realizing' > as time capsules? If this is a possibility, how ever low the > probability, it must be realized among the infinite number of > bitstrings in the plenum. Nothing more need be done! > > Of course, we have not actually explained anything, but that is one > of the problems of any form of 'everythingism'. >
Of course. That is why explanations must be relativised to the observer. All that can be hoped to explain with any "everything" theory is the appearance of things, why some things appear more likely than others, given a particular observer, and then abstract away the local details of the observer to common properties of all observers. Another way of putting this is that observers cannot supervene on the collection of bitstrings, but rather on the interpretations of those bitstrings. It is the same way that in computationalism, observers do not supervene on the universal dovetailer, or even on specific program code, but rather on the computations themselves. One of my main points in my 2004 paper is that there is no external reference machine, like there is with Schmidhuber's "Great Programmer", but rather the observer defines the machine running the computations. Cheers -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Senior Research Fellow hpco...@hpcoders.com.au Economics, Kingston University http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
