On 08 Sep 2017, at 09:08, Bruce Kellett wrote:
On 8/09/2017 11:40 am, Russell Standish wrote:
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.
But the observer must be found within your plenum -- the collection
of bitstrings -- there is nowhere else from which one could get an
observer.
Another way of putting this is that observers cannot supervene on the
collection of bitstrings, but rather on the interpretations of those
bitstrings.
I cannot make sense of this. If the observers are not to be found in
the bitstrings, which make up everything there is, then they do not
exist.
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.
The dovetailer assembles a plenum of computations -- provided one
can make sense of this -- so computations are all that there is, and
the observer must be found among the computations. If the dovetailer
simply assembles a pile of machine states, then you have a problem
finding the observer.
That is right, but fortunately, a computation, when executed, is not a
pile of states, is more like a precisely structured set of states. We
still cannot found the observer there, except for some of them, but
that is not important, because the observer itself can do that.
Bitstring are not enough, here I agree with you.
Bruce
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.
It is enough to use the fact that elementary arithmetic is a "great
programmer". If someone believe that 2+2=4 independently of himself or
of a universe, then, the whole dovetailing is there too. But with the
reals or the bitstring, we get too much things, without enough
structure. You (Russell) are right that the observer recognize its own
computation(s), but you still need the computations for this.
Bruno
Cheers
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