Re: Modern Physical theory as a basis for Ethical and Existential Nihilism
Yes, this is exactly what I mean. I could be the most rational of people and still consistently hold the evil views I have described (for the sake of argument, of course!), because good and evil. You cannot prove that a moral axiom is correct or incorrect, nor can you assume that it will be self-evident to everyone else just because it appears so to you. What you can do is try to persuade by appealing to the emotions, bringing up your children to share your values, identifying and minimising the factors in society which lead to evil behaviour, and so on: in other words, what people have always tried to do. -Stathis Papaioannou From: Brent Meeker [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Stathis Papaioannou [EMAIL PROTECTED],[EMAIL PROTECTED] CC: Everything-list [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Modern Physical theory as a basis for Ethical and Existential Nihilism Date: Sun, 25 Jan 2004 18:20:24 +0500 On 25-Jan-04, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: Let me give a clearer example. Suppose I say that I believe it is a good and noble thing for the strong to oppress the weak, even to the point of killing them; and that if I were in charge I would promote this moral position in schools, through the media, and with changes to the criminal law, so that eventually it becomes accepted as the norm. How are you going to argue against this? You can't point out any errors of fact because I haven't made any empirical claims (other than the trivial one that this is what I in fact believe). You may try to point out the dire social consequences of such a policy, but where in the above have I said anything about social consequences? Frankly, I don't care what the effects of my policy are because I consider the destruction of weaklings in as painful a manner as possible of the greatest importance, and if God is just, I believe that I will go to heaven for having stuck to my moral principles. I know that many people would be horrified by what I propose, but I am certainly not the only one in history to have thought this way! The point is, you cannot argue against my moral position, because I don't present any arguments or make any claims. All you can do is disagree with me and state an alternative moral position. True. But I can point out to people that 'weakling' is a relative term and that you may well conclude they are weaklings in the future. I will remind them that they loved and cared for some of those killed as weaklings and this caused them much grief. I would ask them whether they have any reason to agree with your theology. I would suggest that we band together and kill you before you kill someone we love. Brent Meeker It would be easy for us, if we do not learn to understand the world and appreciate the rights, privileges and duties of all other countries and peoples, to represent in our power the same danger to the world that fascism did. --- Ernest Hemingway _ Get less junk mail with ninemsn Premium. Click here http://ninemsn.com.au/premium/landing.asp
Re: Subjective measure? How does that work?
Wei Dai wrote: On Sun, Jan 25, 2004 at 03:41:55AM -0500, Jesse Mazer wrote: Do you think that by choosing a different measure, you could change the actual first-person probabilities of different experiences? Or do you reject the idea of continuity of consciousness and "first-person probabilities" in the first place? The latter. I came to that conclusion by trying to develop a theory of first-person probabilities, failing, and then realizing that it's not necessary for decision making. If someone does manage to develop a theory that makes sense, maybe I'll change my mind. No one has tried to answer my other objection to an objective measure, which is that since there are so many candidates to choose from, how can everyone agree on a single one? I think that a notion of measure which is so flexible that there are infinite numbers of possible measures to choose from, is a wrong, or non-useful, definition of measure. I think people have to try harder to find a stronger and even more objective notion of measure. I would argue that all of the observers who co-exist should agree that 1. their universe has a very high measure, and 2. their universe generates complex order They should say "it's overwhelmingly most likely that we're observing a high-measure universe which generates complex order." I think the form of any high-measure universe which can generate complex order is exceedingly constrained, because the two constraints (high measure) and (generates complex order) can only be obtained with onerous constraints on form of universe (physical law etc). Eric
Re: Is the universe computable
Dear Kory, Interleaving below. - Original Message - From: Kory Heath [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, January 26, 2004 2:54 AM Subject: Re: Is the universe computable At 1/24/04, Stephen Paul King wrote: I should respond to Kory's ME == PE idea. In PE we find such things as thermodynamic entropy and temporality. If we are to take Kory's idea (that Mathspace doesn't require resources) seriously, ME does not. This seems a direct contradiction! Perhaps Kory has a paper on-line that lays out his thesis of Instantiationism. No, I wish had the energy to write such an online paper. :) Anyway, please note that my own position is not Instantiationism. This was the word I used to describe the position that I *don't* accept - i.e., the idea that computations need to somehow be physically instantiated in order for them (or more importantly, the SASs within them) to be real or conscious. If I had to come up with a name for my position, I might call it Mathematical Physicalism. [SPK] I am not arguing for the necessity of physical instatiation, in the sense of a prior. I am claiming that the notion of computation itself, however one wants to represent it, implicitly requires some form of implementation, even if such is merely possible if one is going to try to build a theoretical model of the world we experience, a world where we can not predict to arbitrary accurasy what is going to happen next. The idea I have is that the computations that render our worlds of experience are implemented by the unitary evolution of quantum mechanical systems and that these computations are not reducible to Turing Machines. Notice that this idea involves a form of realism for quantum wavefunctions similar to that proposed by Bohm and others. I have to confess that I'm not sure I'm following your argument. Are you referring to the tension between the static view of Mathspace, in which there is no concept of resources and computational structures exist all at once, and the dynamic, 1st-person view that we have as creatures, where time exists and resources are limited? I'm willing to admit that there's tension there, but it seems to me that the tension exists for the Instantiationist as well as the Mathematical Physicalist. [SPK] Yes, that tension is part of what I am trying to address. There is a similar situation involved in the problem of Time. One solution has been proposed by Julian Barbour with his idea of a time capsule. I hope that you get a chance to read his book The End of Time which discusses this idea. I have serious problems with Barbour's proposal and have found that it is the same problem that I trying to point out as existing in the various computalionalist theories. His best matching scheme involves the same kind of computational intractibility that disallows it to be taken as preexisting. All I can do is trundle out the same old thought experiments that we're all familiar with. Imagine a 2D CA in which the state of each cell is determined by the state of its neighbors one tick in the future as well as one tick in the past. Such CA cannot be computed one tick of the clock at a time like a regular CA. Instead you'd have to consider the whole structure as a 3D block of bits (one of the dimensions representing time) and somehow accrete the patterns within it. Or you could do a brute-force search through every possible block of bits, discarding all those that don't follow the rules. Some of the universes that you're left with may exhibit thermodynamic entropy and temporality - we can imagine a particular block universe that contains patterns which represent observers moving around, interacting with their environment, etc. - and yet from our perspective the whole structure is entirely static. [SPK] Your 3D CA will only work IF and only IF the computational content is Turing Machine emulable and this requires that the TM is specifiable with integers (enumerable). This, to me, explains why Comp proponents only seen to want the Intergers to exist and will go to great and clever lengths to explain why only they are needed. The problem is that there is a large class of physical systems that are not computable by TMs, i.e., they are intractable. Did you read the Wolfram quote that I included in one of my posts? Please read the entire article found here: http://www.stephenwolfram.com/publications/articles/physics/85-undecidability/2/text.html Another way of thinking of this is to concider the Laplacean notion where given the specification of the initial conditions and/or final conditions of the universe that all of the kinematics and dynamics of the universe would be laid out. The modern incarnation of this is the so-called 4D cube model of the universe. Again, these ideas only work for those who are willing to completely ignore the facts of computational complexity and the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle.
Is the universe compressable?
The problem is that there is a large class of physical systems that are not computable by TMs, i.e., they are intractable. Did you read the Wolfram quote that I included in one of my posts? Please read the entire article found here: Another way of thinking of this is to concider the Laplacean notion where given the specification of the initial conditions and/or final conditions of the universe that all of the kinematics and dynamics of the universe would be laid out. The modern incarnation of this is the so-called 4D cube model of the universe. Again, these ideas only work for those who are willing to completely ignore the facts of computational complexity and the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle. Stephen, Am I correct that you're essentially saying that our universe is algorithmically incompressible? If so I would agree and, interestingly, so does my friend Jim in a parallel thread I sparked from this very thread on the infophysics list a week or so back; thought I'd post it because he represents the hard info physical view on this subject much better than I could: From: Jim Whitescarver Subject: Re: [InfoPhysics] Fw: Is the universe computable In so far as the universe is logical it can be modeled as a logical information system. The information nature of the quantum makes such a model convenient. It seems surprising how closely nature obeys logic granting validity to science. If we suppose that it is indeed logical and has no other constraints outside that logic, we then find it is an incompressible computation, that cannot be represented with fewer states. The universe is computably as it is a computer, but only a computer larger than the universe itself could model it. In this sense, the universe is not technically computable in practical terms. Intractability, however, is not exclusive of there existing good solutions. Unknowability is inherent in complex systems and we can capitalize on the the uniformity of the unknowable in the world of the known. Consider a pure entropy source, e.g. a stationary uncharged black hole. It effective eats all the information that falls in irretrievably randomizing it into the distant future. It is not that systems falling in stop behaving determistically, it is that we no longer care what their state is effectively randomized and outside our window of observation. Nothing in our world covaries with what happens inside the black hole but we know that there would be correlations due to the determinism that exists independently on the inside and the outside. I am not saying we can compute all of this. What happens at any point is the result of the entire universe acting at that point at this instant. Clearly this is not knowable. Causes are clearly not locally deterministic. But we can represent the black hole as a single integer, its mass in Plank action equivalents. From this all it's relevant properties to our perspective are known in spite of however complex it is internally. All participants, modeled as information systems, are entropy sources like black holes, but we get samplings of their internal state suggesting a finite state nature and deterministic behavior. The distinction is whether we can determine what that deterministic systems is or not. We cannot without communicating with all the participants and that is not always possible. But given a set of perspectives, there is no limit to how closely we can model them. Where no model works randomness may be substituted and often we will get good, if not perfect, results. Even legacy quantum mechanics, misguidedly based on randomness, yields deterministic results for quantum interactions shown accurate to many dozens of decimal places. This suggests that simple deterministic models will most likely be found. Jim CMR -- insert gratuitous quotation that implies my profundity here --
Re: Is the universe computable
The problem is that there is a large class of physical systems that are not computable by TMs, i.e., they are intractable. Did you read the Wolfram quote that I included in one of my posts? Please read the entire article found here: Another way of thinking of this is to concider the Laplacean notion where given the specification of the initial conditions and/or final conditions of the universe that all of the kinematics and dynamics of the universe would be laid out. The modern incarnation of this is the so-called 4D cube model of the universe. Again, these ideas only work for those who are willing to completely ignore the facts of computational complexity and the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle. Stephen, Am I correct that you're essentially saying that our universe is algorithmically incompressible? If so I would agree and, interestingly, so does my friend Jim in a parallel thread I sparked from this very thread on the infophysics list a week or so back; thought I'd post it because he represents the hard info physical view on this subject much better than I could: From: Jim Whitescarver [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [InfoPhysics] Fw: Is the universe computable In so far as the universe is logical it can be modeled as a logical information system. The information nature of the quantum makes such a model convenient. It seems surprising how closely nature obeys logic granting validity to science. If we suppose that it is indeed logical and has no other constraints outside that logic, we then find it is an incompressible computation, that cannot be represented with fewer states. The universe is computably as it is a computer, but only a computer larger than the universe itself could model it. In this sense, the universe is not technically computable in practical terms. Intractability, however, is not exclusive of there existing good solutions. Unknowability is inherent in complex systems and we can capitalize on the the uniformity of the unknowable in the world of the known. Consider a pure entropy source, e.g. a stationary uncharged black hole. It effective eats all the information that falls in irretrievably randomizing it into the distant future. It is not that systems falling in stop behaving determistically, it is that we no longer care what their state is effectively randomized and outside our window of observation. Nothing in our world covaries with what happens inside the black hole but we know that there would be correlations due to the determinism that exists independently on the inside and the outside. I am not saying we can compute all of this. What happens at any point is the result of the entire universe acting at that point at this instant. Clearly this is not knowable. Causes are clearly not locally deterministic. But we can represent the black hole as a single integer, its mass in Plank action equivalents. From this all it's relevant properties to our perspective are known in spite of however complex it is internally. All participants, modeled as information systems, are entropy sources like black holes, but we get samplings of their internal state suggesting a finite state nature and deterministic behavior. The distinction is whether we can determine what that deterministic systems is or not. We cannot without communicating with all the participants and that is not always possible. But given a set of perspectives, there is no limit to how closely we can model them. Where no model works randomness may be substituted and often we will get good, if not perfect, results. Even legacy quantum mechanics, misguidedly based on randomness, yields deterministic results for quantum interactions shown accurate to many dozens of decimal places. This suggests that simple deterministic models will most likely be found. Jim
Re: Is the universe compressable?
Dear CMR, I honestly do not see where Jim's comments add anything cogent to the discussion that was not covered in the Wolfram's article that I referenced previously. :_( But I do appreciate that you brought it to my attention. Please forward this post to Jim. What I am trying to figure out is if it is possible to salvage some aspects of the computation idea, for example most of Bruno Marchal's work on 1st and 3rd person aspects, and dovetail them into a our experiential world is a simulation model. I think that this is possible but it requires that the computations that are both ongoing (not one that is timelessly preexisting like a Platonia), updatable and implemented in the quantum mechanical realm itself. Of course this requires that we grant ontological reality to wavefunctions and their attendant mathematical objects, such as Hilbert spaces. ;-) My idea is to identify the unitary evolution of the wavefunction itself as the computation that is generating the simulation of the world. But instead of trying to have a single computation simulating a single classical world we have a potential infinite number of QM systems (Hitoshi Kitada's Local systems www.kitada.com ) each generating a repertoire of simulations of classical systems. BTW, in Kitada's theory the observers themselves are taken to be the QM systems and their observations are classical, an inversion of the treatment of observers and observables by the Copenhagen interpretation. The simulated classical systems are taken to be the possible worlds of experience, similar to Barbour's time capsules but without any kind of prespecified arrangement or best matching in an a priori sense. Think of these simulated classical systems as finite patches of space-time with particle trajectories, fields, etc. embedded in them and have some duration or thickness in time associated; Qcomps have been shown (by D. Deutsch!!) to be able to simulate not just static portraits of classical systems but can simulate the dynamics and kinematics, movies instead of snapshots if you will. ;-) The coordinating of the simulated worlds is another issue that I am also working on using a generalization of the notion of periodic gossiping over graphs. ;-) Kindest regards, Stephen - Original Message - From: CMR [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, January 26, 2004 6:05 PM Subject: Is the universe compressable? The problem is that there is a large class of physical systems that are not computable by TMs, i.e., they are intractable. Did you read the Wolfram quote that I included in one of my posts? Please read the entire article found here: Another way of thinking of this is to concider the Laplacean notion where given the specification of the initial conditions and/or final conditions of the universe that all of the kinematics and dynamics of the universe would be laid out. The modern incarnation of this is the so-called 4D cube model of the universe. Again, these ideas only work for those who are willing to completely ignore the facts of computational complexity and the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle. Stephen, Am I correct that you're essentially saying that our universe is algorithmically incompressible? If so I would agree and, interestingly, so does my friend Jim in a parallel thread I sparked from this very thread on the infophysics list a week or so back; thought I'd post it because he represents the hard info physical view on this subject much better than I could: From: Jim Whitescarver Subject: Re: [InfoPhysics] Fw: Is the universe computable In so far as the universe is logical it can be modeled as a logical information system. The information nature of the quantum makes such a model convenient. It seems surprising how closely nature obeys logic granting validity to science. If we suppose that it is indeed logical and has no other constraints outside that logic, we then find it is an incompressible computation, that cannot be represented with fewer states. The universe is computably as it is a computer, but only a computer larger than the universe itself could model it. In this sense, the universe is not technically computable in practical terms. Intractability, however, is not exclusive of there existing good solutions. Unknowability is inherent in complex systems and we can capitalize on the the uniformity of the unknowable in the world of the known. Consider a pure entropy source, e.g. a stationary uncharged black hole. It effective eats all the information that falls in irretrievably randomizing it into the distant future. It is not that systems falling in stop behaving determistically, it is that we no longer care what their state is effectively randomized and outside our window of observation. Nothing in our world covaries with what happens inside the black hole but we know that there would be correlations due to the determinism that
Occam's Razor now published
A brief heads up that my paper Why Occam's Razor will appear in the June issue of Foundations of Physics Letters. The full reference is: Standish, R.K. (2004) ``Why Occam's Razor'' Foundations of Physics Letters, 17, 255-266. Cheers A/Prof Russell Standish Director High Performance Computing Support Unit, Phone 9385 6967, 8308 3119 (mobile) UNSW SYDNEY 2052 Fax 9385 6965, 0425 253119 () Australia[EMAIL PROTECTED] Room 2075, Red Centrehttp://parallel.hpc.unsw.edu.au/rks International prefix +612, Interstate prefix 02 pgp0.pgp Description: PGP signature
