Re: Are we simulated by some massive computer?
Bruno and George, amazing how accurately you describe in math words what I wrote in 1998 and put on the WEB in 1999, based on the 1997 paper (Pre-Geometric origins) of Rainer Zimmermann - the NARRATIVE (no math) of the (no Plato-based)Plenitude - Bigbangs unlimited, including ours. No comp, no simulation, just a plain logical 'story' how bigbangs have got to emerge. I work on comp-leting (!) it ever since. In plain langauge - give it some more 2-300 years. My purpose was to "keep the Big bang-like beginning" for the convenience (after I fought against the cosmologists' follies) and describe a logical necessity for it to occur with a subsequent history it underwent in our universe (amongst innumerable others) to re-dissipate into the Plenitude. They are not any similar to ours, I can't put Tegmar's ideas into them.All occur and dissipate aspatialy-atemporally. Related stuff: on the Karl Jaspers Forum (networks 2003): http://www.douglas.qc.ca/fdg/kjf/62-TAMIK.htm- while on the (apache) "Index of jamikes" - my website - the entries following:http//pages.prodigy.net/jamikes/... ...Plenitude00.html, ..bigbang.html, ...evolJuly00.html show my approach in its forming (not even by far any similar to yours). Just FYI - I claim no part in the UD-related thoughts.G Cheers John Mikes - Original Message - From: "Bruno Marchal" [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, May 11, 2004 9:59 AM Subject: Re: Are we simulated by some massive computer? At 15:51 10/05/04 -0700, George Levy wrote: BM: But you agree there is no plenitude without an UD. GL: No I don't agree. I don't agree that the UD is the origin of all things. But to say that there is no plenitude without an UD does not mean that the UD is the origin of all things. This is typical classical thinking. But I am a classical (boolean) thinker. (and actually it was a typical confusion between A-B and B-A, don't worry it happens all the time). To paraphrase "In the beginning there was the UD (eg. x=x+1). (Technical details: the UD is a little more than x = x+1, but OK) And the UD generated the Plenitude (eg. 0, 1, 2, 3, ...) Be careful. I thought we agreed that the Plenitude is a first person notion. the O, 1, 2, 3, could not even be used to describe a notion of 3-plenitude. The 3-plenitude is best described by the whole arithmetical truth, which has been proved to be not describable by any finite theory. It is not completely unifiable. . Out of the plenitude came out different worlds. But you *do* have understand the UDA argument (I have links!), and now you begin to talk like Schmidhuber. With the comp hyp only one physical world exists, and it is an emerging (from the 1-point of view) appearance. It emerges from all the comp histories. For exemple, although newtonian worlds are generated by the UD, no consciousness can ever stabilize on it because it is (or should be) of measure zero. Out of some of these worlds conscious creatures emerged. We are some of these creatures." And so this sentence has just no meaning with (classical) comp. This is 3rd person thinking. It leads to the mind-body problem. I resolve the mind-body problem at the outset by using the observer as a starting point. The "I" is both an observable fact and an axiom. "I" can observe that "I" am capable of logical thinking and that my thoughts are consistent. ( I will leave to you the detail regarding what kind of logic applies) My logical ability leads me to the principle of sufficient reason One way to phrase this principle is "If there is no reason for something not to be then it must be. Since I am in a particular state and there is no reason for me not to be in any other state, then I must also be in those states. This leads me to think that there are other observers beside myself, in fact, all possible observers. I can also apply this same principle to the world that I observe. If the world is in a particular state, and there are no reasons for this world to be in this particular state, then in must be in all possible states. This leads me to the plenitude. Thus the plenitude includes all possible worlds. The indistinguishability of which observer I am and (conjugately?) which world I occupy leads to first person indeterminacy. I agree with all this. my point is that this is indeed the correct (with comp) discourse of the first person. I can't say more without technics. If not recall me what you mean by the plenitude. Remember also that from a machine's point of view (1 or 3 whatever) the plenitude is given by the the UD, or more exactly its complete execution (UD*). I suppose "I" am the UD. Or maybe "I*" am the UD??? I don't know if this makes sense. I don't think so. It may be possible that the need to invoke a UD originates from classical 3rd person (objective or absolute) thinking in which
Re: Are we simulated by some massive computer?
Bruno Marchal wrote: At 15:51 10/05/04 -0700, George Levy wrote: BM: But you agree there is no plenitude without an UD. GL: No I don't agree. I don't agree that the UD is the origin of all things. But to say that there is no plenitude without an UD does not mean that the UD is the origin of all things. I am being the devil's advocate. I actually agree with you, except that I don't understand the need for a UD. To paraphrase In the beginning there was the UD (eg. x=x+1). (Technical details: the UD is a little more than x = x+1, but OK) And the UD generated the Plenitude (eg. 0, 1, 2, 3, ...) Be careful. I thought we agreed that the Plenitude is a first person notion. the O, 1, 2, 3, could not even be used to describe a notion of 3-plenitude. The 3-plenitude is best described by the whole arithmetical truth, which has been proved to be not describable by any finite theory. It is not completely unifiable. . Out of the plenitude came out different worlds. But you *do* have understand the UDA argument (I have links!), and now you begin to talk like Schmidhuber. Sorry that I wasn't clearer. I was just playing the devil's advocate. I do not agree with Schmidhuber, I agree mostly with you except that I don't see the need of a UD. With the comp hyp only one physical world exists, and it is an emerging (from the 1-point of view) appearance. It emerges from all the comp histories. For exemple, although newtonian worlds are generated by the UD, no consciousness can ever stabilize on it because it is (or should be) of measure zero. Out of some of these worlds conscious creatures emerged. We are some of these creatures. And so this sentence has just no meaning with (classical) comp. I agree with you. This is 3rd person thinking. It leads to the mind-body problem. I resolve the mind-body problem at the outset by using the observer as a starting point. The I is both an observable fact and an axiom. I can observe that I am capable of logical thinking and that my thoughts are consistent. ( I will leave to you the detail regarding what kind of logic applies) My logical ability leads me to the principle of sufficient reason One way to phrase this principle is If there is no reason for something not to be then it must be. Since I am in a particular state and there is no reason for me not to be in any other state, then I must also be in those states. This leads me to think that there are other observers beside myself, in fact, all possible observers. I can also apply this same principle to the world that I observe. If the world is in a particular state, and there are no reasons for this world to be in this particular state, then in must be in all possible states. This leads me to the plenitude. Thus the plenitude includes all possible worlds. The indistinguishability of which observer I am and (conjugately?) which world I occupy leads to first person indeterminacy. I agree with all this. my point is that this is indeed the correct (with comp) discourse of the first person. I can't say more without technics. As I said I think the UD is a remnant of 3rd person thinking. I don' t understand why you dislike so much 3-person thinking (although I appreciate very much your respect for the 1-person). It is not that I dislike the 3rd person. I believe that the 1st person is all there is. The 3rd person is only an approximation that 1st persons can use to communicate when they share the same approximate frame of reference. The first person can be useful, just like Newtonian mechanics can be useful. However, in certain situations the third person point of view just breaks down. 3-person thinking is called usually science. It is communicable falsifiable (mainly) propositions and proofs. Like a proof that 17 is a prime number. I agree. But only for observers sharing the same frame of reference. It is simpler to assume the plenitude as an axiom than an arbitrary UD. At least there is nothing arbitrary about the plenitude. But the UD is just a machine-independent (and thus non arbitrary) description of the comp plenitude as it can be talked about in a 3-person way by (consistent) machines. I keep insisting that the UD is not given as an possible explanation, but it is a *necessary problem* (once we postulate comp). I don't see why the UD is necessary. Maybe I am missing something. I did prove that that necessary problem is equivalent to the extraction of the physical laws from number theory/arithmetic. Why don't you use the observer himself to do this. It may be that using the observer as starting points will force White Rabbits to be filtered out of the observable world And again I totally agree. It *is* what is proved in my thesis. I have done two things: the other (related to an error in my thesis I talked about in some previous post) is the apparition of a new quantum logic (I did not command it!) and even (I must verify) an infinity of quantum
Re: Are we simulated by some massive computer?
Russell OK. You are suffering from 3rd person thinking which leads you to these conclusions: 1) As a scientist experimenting with this simulated creature, you have absolutely no evidence that this creature is conscious. 2) You believe that the creature (conscious or unconscious) is stuck in your simulation. 3) You believe that your simulator is the world of the creature. First person thinking leads to other conclusions: 1) You perceives this creature as a different instantation of your own "I." Therefore you believe that the creature has some form of consciousness, maybe not identical to your own, but nevertheless, consciousness. 2) The world this creature exists in is to some extent indeterminate. It may be your own simulator that you purchased with some government grant, or it could be another almost identical simulator that *[EMAIL PROTECTED] run on Alpha Centauri 1,000,000 years ago. Or it could be yet another one. Only the creature itself can perform experiments to refine its perception of its world. Should you pull the plug on your simulator, the creature would continue to exist somewhere or somewhen else in the plenitude. 3) The indeterminacy and the experiment that the creature can conduct are limited by its own perception of itself, of its mind, of its body and of its world. Its own mind will shape its own world. George Russell Standish wrote: Sorry, but I fail to see it as self evident. Imagine being a creature immersed in a virtual reality setup its entire life, a virtual reality that does not include a representation (ie a body) of the creature itself. Would that creature deduce that it is in a virtual reality, and that it has a body in another (unobservable to it) reality? Or would it even be conscious? Cheers On Tue, May 11, 2004 at 04:10:15PM -0700, George Levy wrote: Russell wrote However, the mind-body problem doesn't completely disappear - rather it is transformed into "Why the Anthropic Principle?". Once you have accepted that "I" exist and that "I" am capable of logical thinking and capable of following a logical chain, then the Anthropic principle becomes trivial. What "I" am and what "I" observe becomes the initial boundary condition for a logical chain leading to the proof of the existence of the world: "I am therefore the world is." This is the Anthropic Principle. George
Re: Are we simulated by some massive computer?
Dear George, My take of Russell's post is: Unless the creature had some experience that was not dismissible as a hallucination (1st person) and/or was witness by others (a proxy of 3rd person?) that lead him to the conclusion that it existed within a virtual reality then it would have no ability to make such a deduction. Another possibility is to consider the upper bound on the computational recourses required to generate the totality of theexperience of such a creature and ask if that creature could have a 1st person experience an event that required more than that upper bound. IMHO, this latter situation seem to be what D. Deutsch proposes as a test for his MWI. If we can create a physical implementation of a quantum computation that has greater computational power than that allowed by the classical (as per the Copenhagen Interpretation or other interpretations) case, then it would verify MWI. A failure of such would be a falsification. Kindest regards, Stephen - Original Message - From: George Levy To: Everything List Sent: Tuesday, May 11, 2004 7:57 PM Subject: Re: Are we simulated by some massive computer? RussellOK. You are suffering from 3rd person thinking which leads you to these conclusions: 1) As a scientist experimenting with this simulated creature, you have absolutely no evidence that this creature is conscious. 2) You believe that the creature (conscious or unconscious) is stuck in your simulation. 3) You believe that your simulator is the world of the creature.First person thinking leads to other conclusions: 1) You perceives this creature as a different instantation of your own "I." Therefore you believe that the creature has some form of consciousness, maybe not identical to your own, but nevertheless, consciousness. 2) The world this creature exists in is to some extent indeterminate. It may be your own simulator that you purchased with some government grant, or it could be another almost identical simulator that *[EMAIL PROTECTED] run on Alpha Centauri 1,000,000 years ago. Or it could be yet another one. Only the creature itself can perform experiments to refine its perception of its world. Should you pull the plug on your simulator, the creature would continue to exist somewhere or somewhen else in the plenitude. 3) The indeterminacy and the experiment that the creature can conduct are limited by its own perception of itself, of its mind, of its body and of its world. Its own mind will shape its own world.George Russell Standish wrote: Sorry, but I fail to see it as self evident. Imagine being a creature immersed in a virtual reality setup its entire life, a virtual reality that does not include a representation (ie a body) of the creature itself. Would that creature deduce that it is in a virtual reality, and that it has a body in another (unobservable to it) reality? Or would it even be conscious? Cheers On Tue, May 11, 2004 at 04:10:15PM -0700, George Levy wrote: Russell wrote However, the mind-body problem doesn't completely disappear - rather it is transformed into "Why the Anthropic Principle?". Once you have accepted that "I" exist and that "I" am capable of logical thinking and capable of following a logical chain, then the Anthropic principle becomes trivial. What "I" am and what "I" observe becomes the initial boundary condition for a logical chain leading to the proof of the existence of the world: "I am therefore the world is." This is the Anthropic Principle. George
Re: Are we simulated by some massive computer?
Hi Stephen Stephen Paul King wrote: Dear George, My take of Russell's post is: Unless the creature had some experience that was not dismissible as a hallucination (1st person) and/or was witness by others (a proxy of 3rd person?) that lead him to the conclusion that it existed within a virtual reality then it would have no ability to make such a deduction. True. But from its own point of view its world would then be indeterminate. The creature would occupy several worlds as long as this indeterminacy exists. George
Re: Are we simulated by some massive computer?
I saw the documentary movie Tibet: Cry of the Snow Lion the other day. In one scene, a group of monks is sitting around in a circle, and the Dalai Llama is overseeing. The monks are industriously and methodically placing individual tiny coloured beads (there are maybe 4 or 5 colours) around the perimeter of an enormous circular mandala pattern (made of 10s of 1000s of beads). The pattern has grown to almost two metres in diameter, and it features an extrordinarily elaborate kaleidoscopic pattern with perfect radial symmetry, and large complex patterns built on tiny patterns. If someone places a single bead out of its proper place in the pattern, the pattern will be distorted and it will not be possible to maintain the growing recursive pattern. But if every bead is placed correctly, the perimiter can grow by one bead width maintaining the order of the pattern, and the process can repeat, growing larger and larger. OBSERVABLE REALITY IS LIKE THE MANDALA. EVERYTHING MUST BE JUST SO, TO MAINTAIN THE OBSERVABLE ORDER OVER A LARGE PERIMETER. ALMOST EVERY CHOICE (ABOUT WHERE TO PLACE BEADS) OR ABOUT PROGRAM NEXT STEPS, LEADS TO CHAOS RAPIDLY. A SELECT FEW PATHS CAN MAINTAIN THE ORDER. p.s. Later in the movie, they return to this scene, with the monks around an enormous, wondrously complex circular pattern. A monk takes a wooden yardstick, and with a few brief sweeps, obliterates the pattern, leaving chaos. The chaos; the sand of beads, is cleared to one side, and a monk places a single bead in the centre of the circle That last part is the real lesson of the mandala. Eric George Levy wrote: Bruno, Bruno Marchal wrote: And a priori the UD is a big problem because it contains too many histories/realities (the white rabbits), and a priori it does not contain obvious mean to force those aberrant histories into a destructive interference process (unlike Feynman histories). It may be that using the observer as starting points will force White Rabbits to be filtered out of the observable world George
More on mandalas
The other thing to note about mandalas is that there can be more than one possible pattern that would maintain order and recursive complexity as it expands outward (i.e. forward in time). However, an observer subpattern embedded in one mandala (and created by ITS rules of order) can only see whatever order is in its own mandala pattern. A different mandala pattern, with slightly different rules, or with a different initial pattern, might arguably contain a White Rabbit subpattern, but alas the White Rabbit cannot be seen be our first observer, and vice versa, because the attempt to see the contents of another mandala pattern would necessarily destroy our own mandala pattern. Whatever (computational paths) would destroy the self-consistent mandala pattern of our universe are inherently unobservable by us. One way of looking at it is that light seen by an observer A can only illuminate A's universe pattern. That's kind of a definition of light, and of A, and of universe pattern, all at once.
Re: Are we simulated by some massive computer?
At 15:51 10/05/04 -0700, George Levy wrote: BM: But you agree there is no plenitude without an UD. GL: No I don't agree. I don't agree that the UD is the origin of all things. But to say that there is no plenitude without an UD does not mean that the UD is the origin of all things. This is typical classical thinking. But I am a classical (boolean) thinker. (and actually it was a typical confusion between A-B and B-A, don't worry it happens all the time). To paraphrase In the beginning there was the UD (eg. x=x+1). (Technical details: the UD is a little more than x = x+1, but OK) And the UD generated the Plenitude (eg. 0, 1, 2, 3, ...) Be careful. I thought we agreed that the Plenitude is a first person notion. the O, 1, 2, 3, could not even be used to describe a notion of 3-plenitude. The 3-plenitude is best described by the whole arithmetical truth, which has been proved to be not describable by any finite theory. It is not completely unifiable. . Out of the plenitude came out different worlds. But you *do* have understand the UDA argument (I have links!), and now you begin to talk like Schmidhuber. With the comp hyp only one physical world exists, and it is an emerging (from the 1-point of view) appearance. It emerges from all the comp histories. For exemple, although newtonian worlds are generated by the UD, no consciousness can ever stabilize on it because it is (or should be) of measure zero. Out of some of these worlds conscious creatures emerged. We are some of these creatures. And so this sentence has just no meaning with (classical) comp. This is 3rd person thinking. It leads to the mind-body problem. I resolve the mind-body problem at the outset by using the observer as a starting point. The I is both an observable fact and an axiom. I can observe that I am capable of logical thinking and that my thoughts are consistent. ( I will leave to you the detail regarding what kind of logic applies) My logical ability leads me to the principle of sufficient reason One way to phrase this principle is If there is no reason for something not to be then it must be. Since I am in a particular state and there is no reason for me not to be in any other state, then I must also be in those states. This leads me to think that there are other observers beside myself, in fact, all possible observers. I can also apply this same principle to the world that I observe. If the world is in a particular state, and there are no reasons for this world to be in this particular state, then in must be in all possible states. This leads me to the plenitude. Thus the plenitude includes all possible worlds. The indistinguishability of which observer I am and (conjugately?) which world I occupy leads to first person indeterminacy. I agree with all this. my point is that this is indeed the correct (with comp) discourse of the first person. I can't say more without technics. If not recall me what you mean by the plenitude. Remember also that from a machine's point of view (1 or 3 whatever) the plenitude is given by the the UD, or more exactly its complete execution (UD*). I suppose I am the UD. Or maybe I* am the UD??? I don't know if this makes sense. I don't think so. It may be possible that the need to invoke a UD originates from classical 3rd person (objective or absolute) thinking in which several separate physical worlds are simulated. I would be prudent before linking objective with absolute. I could argue that only the subjective is absolute (for example it is hard to relativize actual pain ...). Also, I insist (I know you did got that probably subtle point), but with comp the adjective physical cannot be applied to anything capable of being emulated (because the physical is a sum on all possible emulations at once, and that cannot be emulated). As I said I think the UD is a remnant of 3rd person thinking. I don' t understand why you dislike so much 3-person thinking (although I appreciate very much your respect for the 1-person). 3-person thinking is called usually science. It is communicable falsifiable (mainly) propositions and proofs. Like a proof that 17 is a prime number. The comp hypothesis may be better off without a UD simply because it is possible to derive the plenitude without a UD. And should you refuse to accept the observer as a starting point, you could assume the plenitude as a starting pont axiom. It is simpler to assume the plenitude as an axiom than an arbitrary UD. At least there is nothing arbitrary about the plenitude. But the UD is just a machine-independent (and thus non arbitrary) description of the comp plenitude as it can be talked about in a 3-person way by (consistent) machines. I keep insisting that the UD is not given as an possible explanation, but it is a *necessary problem* (once we postulate comp). I did prove that that necessary problem is equivalent to the extraction of the physical laws
