RE: Everything Physical is Based on Consciousness
In reply to Lee Corbin on the Fabric of Reality List Lee, You gave us some wonderful examples of totally ridiculous Turing Machines that are nevertheless possible (I would at this point ask somebody to take away Charles' keyboard). You have noted that these TMs are improbable; we would not expect them to be instantiated in any great measure throughout the multiverse. They are similar to Harry Potter universes in this respect. Surely, though, the fact that they are improbable is not a blow against Bruno! His argument is concerned with measure and you are playing right into that. Let me try to explain... To make this easier, let's forget about physical reality for a while. Let's consider the Universal Dovetailer (UD). For those not in the know, the UD is a TM that systematically lists and executes all possible TMs. Because there are an infinite number of TMs, the UD cannot wait until all the TMs are listed before it executes them. It also cannot allow any one TM to monopolise the runtime, lest that TM never halts. So it must execute a step of one TM, then a step of another TM and so on, and it must do this while continuing to list the TMs. The first TMs off the list will be the simple ones - those with the shortest bitstrings and these are the first to be kicked off. Complex TMs with very long specifications will not be kicked off until much later. At any point in time in which they are still running, these complex TMs will have received less runtime than any simpler TM that is still running. This is important, as we shall see. As we have discussed, some (an infinite subset) of the TMs will support observers when they are executed. The observers and their worlds unroll as computational histories. What does an observer observe? It is important to see that the computational histories of different TMs can be identical up to a point and then diverge. So different TMs can produce the same observer history up to a point. The observer moment, then, is "simultaneously" generated by many different TMs. You can't pluck one history and say you are in that history. You are part of many identical histories that are about to diverge. And you can't pluck one TM and say that that is the TM that is instantiating you. Your history is generated by many different TMs. These are very important points. And, I think, the source of much confusion over Bruno's work. What an observer observes depends on all the computational histories their current moment is in and how the histories branch. The question also depends on what we mean by observer, but let's put that aside for now because I don't yet understand this part. Note that observer time has no relation to dovetailer time. Obviously, the computational history of a TM that consistently supports an observer can't be random. It must perform the computations necessary for an observer. Now the history might become random after the n-th step, at which point the observer no longer exists. Or the observer might morph into a completely different observer that has no memory of its former existence (I would argue that the observer is now a new observer). Or fluffy white bunny rabbits might appear. The TM's executing these histories first run an observer and then do something strange. Presumably this makes the TM more complex because the strangeness requires extra bits to specify. These TMs therefore get less runtime than the "unmodified" TM. OK, suppose you're in a set of identical computational histories that are unfolding on many different TMs. Some of those histories are about to go strange. For your existence as an observer to continue, they must go strange in such a way that they still support you as an observer. Given what I have said, do you think you are likely to branch into a strange world or to continue on in your normal world, whatever that may be? The measure of the computational history of the world where you continue on as normal is much larger than the measure of the computational history of the strange branch because the strange TMs receive less runtime (remember, many different TMs instantiate you). So, if you were an observer on the dovetailer, your computational history branches in such a way that some branches are much more probable than others. The world the observer observes will likely not be totally stupid. This is how you play into Bruno's hands! Writing the above has made me realize that I may have not been accurate in some of my earlier statements about Bruno's work. Apologies to Bruno. All I need now is to be convinced that we can give a satisfactory definition of an observer. Oh, and that we are most likely to observe QM. Brian Scurfield
Re: Everything Physical is Based on Consciousness
Dear Bruno, I, for one, will never think that you are any kind of a crack-pot! I am truly interested in your work on Godel Lob Logic. The only disagreement that we seem to have is over whether or not Ideal monism is sufficient to give necessity of our experience of a physical world. My criticism is intended to allow you to explain your idea further. If you have a means to solve the epiphenomena problem I would be very happy because my own alternative is not even close to the elegance of your idea; if anyone might look like a crackpot, it will be me. My idea, btw, is a form of process (not substance!) dualism derived from Vaughan Pratt's work on the Concurrency problem in computer science. http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/pratt95rational.html Kindest regards, Stephen - Original Message - From: "Bruno Marchal" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Thursday, May 05, 2005 10:47 AM Subject: Rép : Everything Physical is Based on Consciousness snip Brian wrote also this to Stephen: We need to be very careful that we are not elevating our internally generated abstraction of being able to "peek into the world from the outside" and yet be independent of it into a postulate. I agree. And I think what is missing in Bruno's stuff is some theory of what an observer is. That's what sets the whole thing alight. Of course I have a theory of what is an observer, and a knower, and a scientist. They are all given by variants on the Godel Lob Logic. But either I explain it in some simple ways, and I will look like a crackpot (because it *is* counter-intuitive). Or I explain the technics. And I will look like a crackpot who hides his crackpotness into jargon! Give me some time to find some intermediate pathway. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Re: Everything Physical is Based on Consciousness
Dear Brian, - Original Message - From: "Brian Scurfield" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Thursday, May 05, 2005 7:36 AM Subject: RE: Everything Physical is Based on Consciousness Stephen wrote: The perpetual question I have (about the epiphenomena problem that any form of Idealism has), regarding this notion of a Platonic Reality, is that IF all possible Forms of existence *exist* a priori - "from the beginning" - what necessitates any form of 1st person experience of a world that "evolves", has an irreversible arrow of time, etc. It seems to me that Plato's Ideal is the ultimate case of a system in thermodynamic equilibrium, and as such exhibits no change of any kind, per definition. What then is the origin of, at least, the illusion of change? How can Becoming derive from pure Being? [Brian] These, of course, are very good questions, and ones whose answers require a lot of hand-waving. In defense of Platonic Reality, I could retort that the questions can just as saliently be directed at the physical block Multiverse. As Charles frequently notes, the Block universe is inescapable unless you have an infinite number of time dimensions. [SPK] This idea about an infinite time dimensions seems inevitable if we take the bitstring idea seriously, especially when these bitstrings are such that they can be run in strictly series or parallel ways. But I would like to point out that such processes are the exception and not the rule in the "real" world. Think of the process of constructing a house, there are many different work crews specializing in one aspect of home construction or another, each trying to do their jobs. As anyone that has been in this industry would know, the hardest part of planning is in getting all of the crews scheduled so that they do not conflict or are left waiting on some other crew to start or finish. If we are going to take the computationalist claims seriously, then we must demand that they include concurrency problems in their models. ;-) BTW, I have mentioned before that there are serious problems with the "block universe" idea, one of them is this concurrency problem. While quantum mechanics, ignoring the collapse postulate, is strictly deterministic, the existence of canonical conjugacy between observable quantities, such as position and momentum, (exemplified by the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle) prevents us from even constructing a space-time manifold where each and every event can be one-to-one and onto mapped to others. Simply put, it is impossible to define the position and momenta quantities of particles or waves on a slice of space-time (a "Cauchy hypersurface") such that any thing resembling a classical manifold obtains; it simply is impossible. The best we can do is to break the manifold up into little pieces, attach distributions of quantities to them and then try to stitch them together. [SPK] Additionally, how do we justify the assumption that the mere a priori existence of Turing Machines does not necessitate some means to "implement" the TMs? It is one thing to claim that software can run on any suitable hardware, it is altogether something else to claim that "hardware" doesn't exist! [Brian] I share your feelings on this. Bruno's reply would, I think, go along the lines of: a TM and its computational history are just relationships among integers. Those relationships, just like any other mathematical relationships, need no hardware. When we discover a mathematical relationship and write it down, does it then become real? Possibly I am talking out of my hat here. [SPK] I hope that you are not just defining "realness" to be "only those aspect of existence that can be represented by some physical means, reversible or not". I would argue that this definition misses the mark since it is easily shown that unless two more observers can agree upon , say, a representation of a mathematical relationship, we have no way to know that the scratches in the sand are no more than random marks left by grazing birds. ;-) Reality is a 3rd person aspect, it is that which we can all agree upon. Putting it into Anthropic terms, it is that which is both consistent and necessary for our existence as observers and is capable of being faithfully communicated. I seem to have put the cart before the horse in my response to your statement above but is it intentional, I am trying to point out that any relationship has to include some means for it to have a meaning in order for us to even try to claim that that relationship is "real". My point is that to claim that numbers and relationships between then exists a priori to any means of associating "meaningfulness" to them is self-stultifying, especially claims that reduce those to whom "meaningfulness" matters the most namely "observers. By reducing observers to mere relationships between numbers and the appearance of change to some kind of transiti
Many worlds theory of immortality
> Russell Standish wrote:>>> With my TIME postulate, I say that a conscious observer necessarily> experiences a sequence of related observer moments (or even a> continuum of them). To argue that observer moments are independent of> each other is to argue the negation of TIME. With TIME, the measure of> each observer moment is relative to the predecessor state, or the RSSA> is the appropriate principle to use. With not-TIME, each observer> moment has an absolute measure, the ASSA>> That's an interesting idea, although I do have some problems with it. Ifone completely specifies the state of an observer at a given time, then this already contains a notion of time as experienced by the observer. So, I would say that the notion of an abserver moment is more like that of a tangent space in General Relativity than that of a single space-time point. Saibal -Defeat Spammers by launching DDoS attacks on Spam-Websites: http://www.hillscapital.com/antispam/
Fw: Many worlds theory of immortality
I think we agree on the observer moment. One should formulate questions in terms of observer moments and then there are no problems (in principle). Saibal > > > > - Oorspronkelijk bericht - > Van: "Stathis Papaioannou" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Aan: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; > Verzonden: Tuesday, May 03, 2005 03:47 PM > Onderwerp: Re: Many worlds theory of immortality > > > > 2 weeks ago Saibal Mitra wrote: > > > > > I don't think that the MW immortality is correct at all! In a certain > > >sense > > >we are > > > immortal, because the enseble of all possible worlds is a fixed static > > >entity. So, > > > you ''always'' find yourselve alive in one state or another. However, > you > > >won't > > > experience youself evolving in the infinite far future. > > > > > > > > > If you encounter a ''branching'' in which one of the possibilities is > > >death, that > > > branch cannot be said to be nonexistent relative to you. Quantum > > >mechanics > > >doesn't > > > imply that you can never become unconscious, otherwise you could never > > >fall > > >asleep! > > > > > > > > > Of course, you can never experience being unconscious. So, what to do > > >with > > >the branch > > > leading to (almost) certain death? The more information your brain > > >contains, the smaller the set of branches is in which you are alive (and > > >consistent with your experiences stored in your brain). The set of all > > >branches in which you could be alive doesn't contain any information at > > >all. > > >Since death involves complete > > > memory loss, the branch leading to death should be replaced by the > > >complete > > >set of all possibilities. > > > > ...and despite reading the last paragraph several times slowly, I'm afraid > I > > don't understand it. Are you saying there may never be a "next moment" at > > the point where you are facing near-certain death? It seems to me that all > > that is required is an observer moment in which (a) you believe that you > are > > you, however this may be defined (it's problematic even in "normal" life > > what constitutes continuity of identity), and (b) you remember facing the > > said episode of near-certain death (ncd), and it will seem to you that you > > have miraculously escaped, even if there is no actual physical connection > > between the pre-ncd and the post-ncd observer moment. Or, another way to > > escape is as you have suggested in a more recent post, that there is an > > observer moment somewhere in the multiverse in which the ncd episode has > > been somehow deleted from your memory. Perhaps the latter is more likely, > in > > which case you can look forward to never, or extremely rarely, facing ncd > in > > your life. > > > > It all gets very muddled. If we try to ruthlessly dispense with every > > derivative, ill-defined, superfluous concept and assumption in an effort > to > > simplify the discussion, the one thing we are left with is the individual > > observer-moments. We then try to sort these observer-moments into sets > which > > constitute lives, identities, birth, death, amnesia, mind duplication, > mind > > melding, multiple world branchings, and essentially every possible > variation > > on these and other themes. No wonder it's confusing! And who is to judge > > where a particular individual's identity/life/body/memory begins and ends > > when even the most detailed, passed by committee of philosophers set of > > rules fails, as it inevitably will? > > > > The radical solution is to accept that only the observer-moments are real, > > and how we sort them then is seen for what it is: essentially arbitrary, a > > matter of convention. You can dismiss the question of immortality, quantum > > or otherwise, by observing that the only non-problematic definition of an > > individual is identification with a single observer-moment, so that no > > individual can ever "really" live for longer than a moment. Certainly, > this > > goes against intuition, because I feel that I was alive a few minutes ago > as > > well as ten years ago, but *of course* I feel that; this is simply > reporting > > on my current thought processes, like saying I feel hungry or tired, and > > beyond this cannot be taken as a falsifiable statement about the state of > > affairs in the real world unless recourse is taken to some arbitrary > > definition of personal identity, such as would satisfy a court, for > example. > > > > Let me put it a different way. Situation (a) life as usual: I die every > > moment and a peson is reborn every moment complete with (most) memories > and > > other attributes of the individual who has just died. Situation (b) I am > > killed instantly, painlessly, with an axe every moment, and a person is > > reconstituted the next moment complete with (most) memories and other > > attributes of the individual who has just died, such that he experiences > no > > discontinuity. Aside from the blood and mess in (b), is there a > difference? > > Should I worry m
Many worlds theory of immortality
I would have to read about these theories, but I think that it doesn't matter if you work with complex measures. Saibal - Oorspronkelijk bericht - Van: Ben Goertzel Aan: Bruno Marchal ; Saibal Mitra CC: everything-list@eskimo.com Verzonden: Tuesday, May 03, 2005 02:11 PM Onderwerp: RE: Many worlds theory of immortality Saibal, Does your conclusion about conditional probability also apply to complex-valued probabilities a la Youssef? http://physics.bu.edu/~youssef/quantum/quantum_refs.html http://www.goertzel.org/papers/ChaoQM.htm -- Ben Goertzel -Original Message-From: Bruno Marchal [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]Sent: Tuesday, May 03, 2005 4:20 AMTo: Saibal MitraCc: everything-list@eskimo.comSubject: Re: Many worlds theory of immortalityLe 16-avr.-05, à 02:45, Saibal Mitra a écrit : Both the suicide and copying thought experiments have convinced me that thenotion of a conditional probability is fundamentally flawed. It can bedefined under ''normal'' circumstances but it will break down precisely whenconsidering copying or suicide.This is a quite remarkable remark. I can related it to the COMBINATORS thread.In a nutshell: in the *empirical* FOREST there are no kestrels (no eliminators at all),nor Mockingbird, warblers or any duplicators. Quantum information behaveslike incompressible fluid. Universes differentiate, they never multiplies. Deutsch is right on that point. I use Hardegree (ref in my thesis(*)) He did show thatquantum logic can be seen as a conditional probability logic. We will come back on this (it's necessarily a little bit technical). I am finishing atechnical paper on that. The COMBINATORS can help to simplify considerablythe mathematical conjectures of my thesis.Bruno(*) Hardegree, G. M. (1976). The Conditional in Quantum Logic. In Suppes, P., editor, Logic and Probability in Quantum Mechanics, volume 78 of Synthese Library, pages 55-72. D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht-Holland.
Implications of MWI
> - Oorspronkelijk bericht - > Van: "Bruno Marchal" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Aan: "Saibal Mitra" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > CC: "everything" > Verzonden: Tuesday, May 03, 2005 11:39 AM > Onderwerp: Re: Implications of MWI > > > > > > > Le 01-mai-05, à 16:51, Saibal Mitra a écrit : > > > > > The MWI made me take the idea of multiple universes/multiple realities > > > serious. When I joined this list I believed that quantum suicide could > > > work, > > > but I later found out that it cannot possibly work. I now believe that > > > there > > > exists an ensemble of all possible mathematical > > > models/descriptions/computer > > > programs. These things exist in a mathematical sense. For this idea to > > > work > > > (to yield predictions that are consistent with the known laws of > > > physics) > > > one has to assume that there exists a measure that prefers simple > > > programs > > > over complex programs. > > > > > > Why? You may be right, but why? How will you make abstraction of > > complex programs > > generated by the DU and getting close to your actual computational > > states? > > What about complex programs generating simple programs? > > > > I do believe simple programs play some role, but not because they would > > have > > an higher measure, just because they will handle genuine relationship > > with all > > the running of all other programs. > > > > Well, I just obseve that we live in a universe which is described by > relatively simple laws of physics. The actual reason for that could perhaps > be explained by your theory. > > > Saibal > >
Re: Many worlds theory of immortality
On 4 May 2005 George Levy wrote: I believe that according to some or most participants in this list, transitions between observer moments is representing "Time." I have also been talking about observer moments in the past but I have always skirted around the issue of defining them. The concept of observer moment is not clear. For example, you could compare each observer moment to the node of a graph and the transitions from one observer moment to the links of the graph. However, it is well known that a graph can be transformed by changing each node into a polygon. Each link then becomes a node. In this new format, you could view "Time" as being represented by the nodes. We are left with two representations of consciousness: the first is a feeling of becoming (the first representation in which the links represent time) and the second is a feeling of being (the second representation in which the nodes represent time). Ultimately observer-moments are the stuff that makes up the plenitude. They are more fundamental than any physical object and more basic than time and space. If we are to assume some fundamental entity, I think that observer-moments qualify. Descartes came up with "I think, therefore I am" when he asked himself if there was anything in the world that was safe from extreme scepticism. Modest though his conclusion sounds, it can be argued that he went too far in assuming that a thought implies a thinker. If he had stopped at "I think", then that would really have been the one thing that was beyond all doubt: the observer-moment. --Stathis Papaioannou _ MSN Messenger v7. Download now: http://messenger.ninemsn.com.au/
