RE: Torture yet again
Jonathan Colvin writes: You are sitting in a room, with a not very nice man. He gives you two options. 1) He'll toss a coin. Heads he tortures you, tails he doesn't. 2) He's going to start torturing you a minute from now. In the meantime, he shows you a button. If you press it, you will get scanned, and a copy of you will be created in a distant town. You've got a minute to press that button as often as you can, and then you are getting tortured. What are you going to choose (Stathis and Bruno)? Are you *really* going to choose (2), and start pressing that button frantically? Do you really think it will make any difference? I'm just imagining having pressed that button a hundred times. Each time I press it, nothing seems to happen. Meanwhile, the torturer is making his knife nice and dull, and his smile grows ever wider. Cr^%^p, I'm definitely choosing (1). Ok, sure, each time I press it, I also step out of a booth in Moscow, relieved to be pain-free (shortly to be followed by a second me, then a third, each one successively more relieved.) But I'm still choosing (1). Now, the funny thing is, if you replace torture by getting shot in the head, then I will pick (2). That's interesting, isn't it? This is a good question. It reminds me of what patients sometimes say when their doctor confidently explains that the proposed treatment has only a one in a million risk of some terrible complication: yes, but what if I'm that one in a million? In a multiverse model of the universe, the patient *will* be that one in a million, in one millionth of the parallel worlds. This means you can arrange experiments so that the copies generated on the basis of an unlikely outcome are segregated, making it seem to this subset that the improbable is probable or, as in the above example, the contingent is certain. When you press the button in the torture room, there is a 50% chance that your next moment will be in the same room and and a 50% chance that it will be somewhere else where you won't be tortured. However, this constraint has been added to the experiment: suppose you end up the copy still in the torture room whenever you press the button. After all, it is certain that there will be a copy still in the room, however many times the button is pressed. Should this unfortunate person choose the coin toss instead? Say you do choose the coin option, and let's allow that you can toss the coin as many times as you want in the minute you have before the torture starts. If the MWI is true, in half of the subsequent worlds the coin comes up heads and the version of you in these worlds can still expect torture; while in the other half, the coin comes up tails and the torturer lets you go. Now, let's add this constraint: suppose that you are the copy for whom the coin always comes up heads, however many times you toss it. After all, in the MWI it is certain that there will be such a copy, however many times the coin is tossed. Should this unfortunate person give up on the coin and try begging for mercy while he still has some time left? Here's another version of the of problem, this time without torture. Suppose you have the opportunity to use a machine which, when you put $2 in a slot, will destructively analyse you and create 10 copies. Of these copies, 9 will each be given $1 million in cash, while the 10th copy will get nothing other than another opportunity to use a similar machine. Suppose you are the copy who keeps putting coins into the machines and not winning anything. How long will it be before you decide you are wasting your money? What these examples all have in common is that the unlucky copies are singled out and, ironically, it is these copies who have control over the process (button, coin) which results in their bad luck. If the experiments were changed so that, in the copying process, only one randomly chosen copy were actually implemented, the apparent probabilities would remain the same but it would not be possible to separate out an unlucky group, and the best choice would not be problematic. This is how probabilities work in a single world model, and our minds have evolved to assume that we live in such a world. --Stathis Papaioannou _ Dont just search. Find. Check out the new MSN Search! http://search.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200636ave/direct/01/
Re: Conscious descriptions
Le 22-juin-05, à 01:06, Russell Standish a écrit : On Tue, Jun 21, 2005 at 07:43:49PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: Turing's thesis: Any process that can be naturally called an effective procedure is realized by a Turing machine. Not OK. Please give me the page. 2nd edition, page 24, about 1/3 of the way down the page. OK. Not good for Li Vitanyi. Process and effective have different meaning in similar context. But this is just a vocabulary question. It is ok given they are (still) physicalist. Conjecture: All harnessable physical processes can be simulated by a Turing machine. By harnessable, we mean exploited for performing some computation. I suspect this is true. I don't understand. Again these are intuitive concepts. I would interpret this as saying that we can perform the same computation as any physical process, even if we cannot simulate the process itself (ie the process may do something more than computation). There is a danger in using those intuitive words without making clear the context. Could we simulate a truly random oracle with a Turing Machine? No, in the sense we cannot find a program which generates a provably infinite random string. Yes, with comp, in the sense it is enough to iterate infinitely often the self applied duplication. Machines with random oracles with computable means only compute the same class of functions as do Turing machines. (classic result by de Leeuw et al. in 1956) OK. Without computable means: random oracle makes them more powerfull. (Kurtz and Smith). Do you have a reference? Li Vitanyi appear to be unaware of this result. Sorry it was just Kurtz: KURTZ S. A., 1983, On the Random Oracle Hypothesis, Information and Control, 57, pp. 40-47. So, no I don't think the Turing thesis is needed for a universal machine. I still disagree. I will say more but I have a meeting now. I look forward to that. By definition a Universal digital or numerical machine is a machine which is able to compute all intuitively (effectively if you want) computable function. Church's thesis = the class of intuitively computable function is equal to the class of fortran computable function. Of course Church's original thesis use lambda instead of fortran! From this Church's Thesis (CT) is equivalent with the statement that a universal fortran machine is a universal (digital) machine. The reciprocal being obvious. So CT = There exists a Universal Machine.(I always mean Universal *digital* machine). Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Re: another puzzzle
Tom Caylor writes: quote-- The flip side of the coin is that apparently the probability of having a next OM is 100% (everything exists). In this theory, no matter what God does with 10^100 copies, there are 10^100^n other identical next OMs out there to replace them. It seems like what I've seen so far on this list is an exercise in forgetting that everything exists for a moment to do a thought experiment to conclude more about everything exists. --endquote That is the basic idea behind these thought experiments with copies: as a more easily understood analogy for what happens in the multiverse/plenitude. The relative measure of OM's does make a difference, because it determines which of the candidate successor OM's you are most likely to experience. In general, it is *far* more likely that a coherent series of OM's will occur as a result of brain activity than exotic, random events out there somewhere. Even if you die, it is far more likely that your next OM will come from scanning your frozen brain in the future, or reconstructing your mind by brute force simulation of every possible human mind in some massive future quantum computer, or some other deliberate effort on the part of our descendants, rather than some completely random process. --Stathis Papaioannou _ REALESTATE: biggest buy/rent/share listings http://ninemsn.realestate.com.au
Re: copy method important?
Tom Caylor writes: Stathis wrote: How is this basically different to surviving the next minute? You are *far* more likely to be dead almost everywhere in the universe than you are to be alive. The common sense answer to this would be that you survive the next minute due to the continuous existence of your physical body. But once you accept that this is not necessary for survival, because as we have discussed before your physical body completely changes over time, and because if something like teleportation were possible it would mean destroying your body in one place and rebuilding it in a different place, possibly also a different time, then I think the conclusion above is inevitable. The only way you could *not* be immortal is if there is no successor OM after your earthly demise, anywhere or ever. In fact, Stathis, you and Hal concluded that everyone is immortal (in the death thread). I take this to mean that every person that is associated with every OM is immortal, since every OM has a successor. This implies to me that we don't need to worry about copying, or which copying method is good for creating more successor OMs, since we are guaranteed to always have a successor OM. It sounds like this discussion probably would go into dividing in infinity of one cardinality by an infinity with another cardinality. This is very problematic to say the least, since you have to get the cardinalities of both infinities right. This leads me to believe that the chances of coming up with the right answer are almost like the chances of coming up with the right answer to a problem by dividing by zero. I don't think Hal Finney was agreeing with me, I think he was pointing out how absurd my position was to lead to this conclusion! But I don't really understand your objection: are you disagreeing that your consciousness will continue as long as there is a successor OM somewhere, or are you disagreeing that there will be a successor OM somewhere if everything exists, or are you simply disagreeing that everything exists? I should add that immortality by this mechanism (or probably any other) will not necessarily involve frolicking in paradise for eternity. It may involve extreme unpleasantness, or you may progressively become more and more demented until your consciousness sort of fizzles out, for example. That is why it is important to do all the normal things people do to make life better for themselves and their descendants. What you want to do is increase the relative measure of good experiences and/or decrease the relative measure of bad experiences. --Stathis Papaioannou _ SEEK: Over 80,000 jobs across all industries at Australia's #1 job site. http://ninemsn.seek.com.au?hotmail
Re: Dualism and the DA
Le 21-juin-05, à 21:21, Pete Carlton a écrit : I think the practical differences are large, as you say, but I disagree that it points to a fundamental metaphysical difference. I think what appears to be a metaphysical difference is just the breakdown of our folk concept of I. Imagine a primitive person who didn't understand the physics of fire, seeing two candles lit from a single one, then the first one extinguished - they may be tempted to conclude that the first flame has now become two flames. Well, this is no problem because flames never say things like I would like to keep burning or I wonder what my next experience would be. We, however, do say these things. But does this bit of behavior (including the neural activity that causes it) make us different in a relevant way? And if so, how? This breakdown of I is very interesting. Since there's lots of talk about torture here, let's take this extremely simple example: Smith is going to torture someone, one hour from now. You may try to take steps to prevent it. How much effort you are willing to put in depends, among other things, on the identity of the person Smith is going to torture. In particular, you will be very highly motivated if that person is you; or rather, the person you will be one hour from now. The reason for the high motivation is that you have strong desires for that person to continue their life unabated, and those desires hinge on the outcome of the torture. But my point is that your strong desires for your own survival are just a special case of desires for a given person's survival - in other words, you are already taking a third-person point of view to your (future) self. You know that if the person is killed during torture, they will not continue their life; if they survive it, their life will still be negatively impacted, and your desires for the person's future are thwarted. Now, if you introduce copies to this scenario, it does not seem to me that anything changes fundamentally. Your choice on what kind of scenario to accept will still hinge on your desires for the future of any persons involved. The desires themselves may be very complicated, and in fact will depend on lots of hitherto unspecified details such as the legal status, ownership rights, etc., of copies. Of course one copy will say I pushed the button and then I got tortured, and the other copy will say I pushed the button and woke up on the beach - which is exactly what we would expect these two people to say. And they're both right, insofar as they're giving an accurate report of their memories. What is the metaphysical issue here? There are two *physical* issues here. 1) The simplest one is that if you agree with the comp indeterminacy (or similar) you get an explanation of the quantum indeterminacy without the collapse of the wave packet. This is mainly Everett contribution. 2) The less trivial one, perhaps, is that if you agree with the comp indeterminacy you get an a priori explosion of the number of appearances of first person white rabbits and the only way to solve this, assuming the SWE is correct, must consist in justifying the SWE from the comp indeterminacy bearing on all computational states/histories. The issue 1) is that an indeterministic physical theory is reduced to a deterministic physical theory. The issue 2) is that physics is reduced (at least in principle) to math/computer science. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Re: Measure, Doomsday argument
Russell, you wrote: ... - ... By contrast a universe that is just big enough (eg a few years old,...=... what 'years'? Terrestrial? some planet's in Oregon? lightyear(!?) or do you have a UTM (Universal Time Schedule) for the Plenitude? Sorry for the bartend to speak into John M - Original Message - From: Russell Standish [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Jonathan Colvin [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: everything-list@eskimo.com Sent: Wednesday, June 22, 2005 12:02 AM Subject: Re: Measure, Doomsday argument
Re: death
Hal Finney writes: I was trying to use Stathis' terminology when I wrote about the probability of dying. Actually I am now trying to use the ASSA and I don't have a very good idea about what it means to specify a subjective next moment. I think ultimately it is up to each OM as to what it views as its predecessor moments, and perhaps which ones it might like to consider its successor moments. Among the problems: substantial, short-term mental changes might be so great that the past OM would not consider the future OM to be the same person. This sometimes even happens with our biological bodies. I can easily create thought experiments that bend the connections beyond the breaking poing. There appears to be no bright line between the degree to which a past and future OM can be said to be the same person, even if we could query the OM's in question. Another problem: increases in measure from a past OM to a future OM. We can deal with decreases in measure by the traditional method of expected probability. But increases in measure appear to require probability 1. That doesn't make sense, again causing me to question the whole idea of a subjective probability distribution over possible next moments. I agree that it's difficult to specify what counts as a subjective next moment. That has to do with the way our minds have evolved to think, and we just have to leave it as unspecified or arrive at some arbitrary definition when considering physical theories. Is this the reason you have difficulty with the idea of assigning a subjective probability to the next moment or is there some more fundamental problem? Also, could you explain what you mean by increase/decrease in measure from a past to a future OM? --Stathis Papaioannou _ REALESTATE: biggest buy/rent/share listings http://ninemsn.realestate.com.au
RE: Torture yet again
Jesse Mazer wrote: Suppose there had already been a copy made, and the two of you were sitting side-by-side, with the torturer giving you the following options: A. He will flip a coin, and one of you two will get tortured B. He points to you and says I'm definitely going to torture the guy sitting there, but while I'm sharpening my knives he can press a button that makes additional copies of him as many times as he can. Would this change your decision in any way? What if you are the copy in this scenario, with a clear memory of having been the original earlier but then pressing a button and finding yourself suddenly standing in the copying chamber--would that make you more likely to choose B? I think this variation points to the major flaw in this thought experiment, which is the implicit assumption that copying is possible yet is not used. In fact, if copying is possible as the thought experiment stipulates, it would tend to be widely used. The world would be full of people who are copies. You would be likely to be an nth-generation copy. There would be no novelty as Jesse's variation suggests in allowing you to experience (presumably for the first time!) being copied. I keep harping on this because copying increases measure. It is different from flipping a coin, which does not increase measure. Your expectations going into a copy are different. To the extent that this language makes sense, I would say that you have a 100% chance of becoming the copy and a 100% chance of remaining the original. This is different from flipping a coin. You may think that it would feel the same way, but you've never tried it. Fundamentally, our perception of the world, our phenomenology, our sense of identity and our concept of future and past selves are not intrinsic, but are useful tools which have *evolved* to allow our minds to achieve the goals of survival and reproduction. In a world where copying is possible, we would evolve different ways of perceiving the world. I believe that in such a world, we would perceive the aftermath of copying very differently than the aftermath of flipping a coin. The effects are different, the evolutionary and survival implications are different. In the world of this thought experiment, if the additional copies are (via special dispensation) going to be treated well and given a good chance to survive and thrive, then yes, most people would press the button like crazy. It's just like today, if a bachelor were given the opportunity to have sex with a dozen beautiful women, he'd jump at the chance. It's not because of any intrinsic value in the act, it's because evolution has programmed him to take this opportunity to increase the measure of his genes. In the same way, pressing the button would increase the measure of your mind, and it would be equally as rewarding. In the spirit of this list, let me offer my own variation. It is like the original, except instead of torture you are offered a 50-50 chance to experience a delicious meal prepared by an expert chef. Or you can press the button to make some copies, in which case you get a 100% chance of having the meal. For me, pressing the button is a win-win situation, assuming the copies will be OK. I certainly don't think that pressing the button reduces the measure of my enjoyment of the food. Hal Finney
Re: another puzzzle
Stathis Papaioannou writes: That is the basic idea behind these thought experiments with copies: as a more easily understood analogy for what happens in the multiverse/plenitude. I don't agree, and in fact I think the use of copies as an analog for what happens in the multiverse is fundamentally misleading. If it were not, you could create the same thought experiments just by talking about flipping coins and such. What is the analog, in the multiverse, of pushing a button to make a copy? When faced with the chance of torture, you are going to push a button to make a copy. What does that correspond to in the multiverse? The closest I can suggest is flipping a coin such that you don't get tortured if it comes up heads. Well, that destroys the whole point of the thought experiment, doesn't it? Of course you'll flip the coin. Anyone would. Pushing a button to make a copy is completely different. That's why we have so much disagreement about what to do in that case, while there would be no disagreement about what to do if you could flip a coin to avoid being tortured. That in itself should be a give-away that the situations are not as analogous as some are suggesting. I would suggest going back over these thought experiments and substitute flipping coins for making copies, and see if the paradoxes don't go away. I believe that many of the paradoxes in the copy experiments are because people do not grasp the full meaning of what copying implies. They are thinking very much in the lines Stathis suggests, that it is a variant on flipping a coin. But it's not. Copying is fundamentally different from flipping a coin, because copying increases measure while coin flipping does not. Measure is crucially important in multiverse models because it is the only foundation for whatever predictive or explanatory ability they possess. Choosing to overlook measure differences in analyzing thought experiments inevitably leads to error. Treating copying like coin flipping is just such an error. If you would instead think through the full implications of copying you would see that it is completely different from flipping a coin. The increase of measure that occurs in copying manifests in the world in tangible and obvious ways. Its phenomenological consequences are no less important. These considerations must be included when analyzing thought experiments involving copies, otherwise you are led into paradox and confusion. Hal Finney
RE: Copies Count
Stathis Papaioannou writes: Hal Finney writes: Suppose you will again be simultaneously teleported to Washington and Moscow. This time you will have just one copy waking up in each. Then you will expect 50-50 odds. But suppose that after one hour, the copy in Moscow gets switched to the parallel computer so it is running with 10 times the measure; 10 copies. And suppose that you know beforehand that during that high-measure time period (after one hour) in Moscow you will experience some event E. Again, it's a two step process, each time considering the next moment. First, 50% chance of waking up in either Moscow or Washington. Second, 100% chance of experiencing E in Moscow or 0% chance of experiencing E in Washington. The timing is crucial, or the probabilities are completely different. Doesn't this approach run into problems if we start reducing the time interval before the extra copying in Moscow? From one hour, to one second, to one millisecond? At what point does your phenomenological expectation switch over from 90% Washington to 90% Moscow? And does it do so discontinuously, or is there a point at which you are just barely conscious enough in Moscow before the secondary duplication, that perhaps the two probabilities balance? I am doubtful that this approach works. Jesse Mazer suggested backwards causation, that the secondary copying in Moscow would influence the perceptual expectation of waking up in Moscow even before it happens. So he would say 90% Moscow from the beginning. However I think that has problems if we allow amnesia to occur in Moscow before the amplification. I have been enjoying these discussions but unfortunately I will have to take leave, I am going on vacation with the family for a week so I will have little chance to participate during that time. I'll look forward to catching up when I return - Hal Finney
RE: Torture yet again
Stathis wrote: When you press the button in the torture room, there is a 50% chance that your next moment will be in the same room and and a 50% chance that it will be somewhere else where you won't be tortured. However, this constraint has been added to the experiment: suppose you end up the copy still in the torture room whenever you press the button. After all, it is certain that there will be a copy still in the room, however many times the button is pressed. Should this unfortunate person choose the coin toss instead? If he shares your beliefs about identity, then if he changes his mind he will be be comitting the gambler's fallacy. However, after having pressed the button 100 times and with nothing to show for it except 100 tortures, his faith that he is a random observer might be shaken :). Jonathan Colvin
One more question about measure
Hi list, I have one more question about measure : I don't understand the concept of 'increasing' and 'decreasing' measure if I assume everything exists. Because if everything exists... every OM has a successor (and I'd say it must always have more than one), and concerning good or bad OM, every OM has good successor and bad successor. What I want to mean is that, I get 100% chance that at least one (I'd say many) of my futur selves will go in hell, and at least one (I'd say also many) will have great experiences. And this, whatever I do... because when I do something, the universe split, and there are branches were I do other thing. I can't constraint the choice. So what is the meaning of increasing and decreasing measure ? What is wrong in every OM has a successor in an everything context ? Quentin
Re: copy method important?
Stathis wrote: quote: I don't think Hal Finney was agreeing with me, I think he was pointing out how absurd my position was to lead to this conclusion! But I don't really understand your objection: are you disagreeing that your consciousness will continue as long as there is a successor OM somewhere, or are you disagreeing that there will be a successor OM somewhere if everything exists, or are you simply disagreeing that everything exists? end quote I'm disagreeing that your consciousness will "continue" as long as there is a successor OM somewhere. You have to consider the possibility that the instances where there is a successor OM somewhere makes up a subset of measure zero of the set needed for continued consciousness, whatever that is. Of course this even assumes that our consciousness can even jump across whatever boundaries there may bethere, e.g. between universes. And as I said before, I don't think that our identity is dependent on consciousness anyway, so I'm basically playing the devil's advocate in general when it comes to talking about the need and means of continued consciousness. I'm thinking on a future post having to do with this, and good experiences vs. bad experiences. Tom Caylor
Re: copy method important?
Tom wrote: quote: I'm disagreeing that your consciousness will "continue" as long as there is a successor OM somewhere. You have to consider the possibility that the instances where there is a successor OM somewhere makes up a subset of measure zero of the set needed for continued consciousness, whatever that is. Of course this even assumes that our consciousness can even jump across whatever boundaries there may bethere, e.g. between universes. And as I said before, I don't think that our identity is dependent on consciousness anyway, so I'm basically playing the devil's advocate in general when it comes to talking about the need and means of continued consciousness. I'm thinking on a future post having to do with this, and good experiences vs. bad experiences. end quote Correction of a sort: You have to consider the possibility that the instances where there is a successor OM somewhere makes up a subset of measure zero of the set of successorevents, whatever that is. Tom Caylor
Re: What is an observer moment?
Bruno Marchal wrote: Le 21-juin-05, 05:33, George Levy a crit : Note that according to this definition the set of observer states may also encompass states with inconsistent histories as long as they are indistinguishable. The possibilities of observer moment being partially associated with (slightly) inconsistent histories resolves the question of how valid but erroneous observer moments can exist. For example I could make an arithmetical mistake such as 8*5 = 56 or I temporarily believe that Christopher Columbus discovered America in 1592. An interesting thought is that a psychological first person can surf simultaneously through a large number of physical OMs With comp, we should say that the first person MUST surf simultaneously through an INFINITY of third person OMs. I agree there is and infinity of OM's that a psychological first person surfs through. But I would not say these OM's are "third person," because there is no third person to observe them. A psychological "third person" would be too spread out among OM's to observe any one in particular. (I would not use the term "physical" at all, because at this stage it is not defined. But with the negation of comp + assumption of slightly incorrect QM what you say seems to me plausible.) Are you saying that COMP does not admit (slightly) inconsistent histories? I am not sure if I agree with this. I can be a psychological first person and still say "yes doctor" to a computer transplant into my brain. George Levy
RE: Dualism and the DA
-Original Message- From: Bruno Marchal [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, June 22, 2005 8:16 AM To: Pete Carlton Cc: EverythingList Subject: Re: Dualism and the DA Le 21-juin-05, à 21:21, Pete Carlton a écrit : I think the practical differences are large, as you say, but I disagree that it points to a fundamental metaphysical difference. I think what appears to be a metaphysical difference is just the breakdown of our folk concept of I. Imagine a primitive person who didn't understand the physics of fire, seeing two candles lit from a single one, then the first one extinguished - they may be tempted to conclude that the first flame has now become two flames. Well, this is no problem because flames never say things like I would like to keep burning or I wonder what my next experience would be. We, however, do say these things. But does this bit of behavior (including the neural activity that causes it) make us different in a relevant way? And if so, how? This breakdown of I is very interesting. Since there's lots of talk about torture here, let's take this extremely simple example: Smith is going to torture someone, one hour from now. You may try to take steps to prevent it. How much effort you are willing to put in depends, among other things, on the identity of the person Smith is going to torture. In particular, you will be very highly motivated if that person is you; or rather, the person you will be one hour from now. The reason for the high motivation is that you have strong desires for that person to continue their life unabated, and those desires hinge on the outcome of the torture. But my point is that your strong desires for your own survival are just a special case of desires for a given person's survival - in other words, you are already taking a third-person point of view to your (future) self. You know that if the person is killed during torture, they will not continue their life; if they survive it, their life will still be negatively impacted, and your desires for the person's future are thwarted. Now, if you introduce copies to this scenario, it does not seem to me that anything changes fundamentally. Your choice on what kind of scenario to accept will still hinge on your desires for the future of any persons involved. The desires themselves may be very complicated, and in fact will depend on lots of hitherto unspecified details such as the legal status, ownership rights, etc., of copies. Of course one copy will say I pushed the button and then I got tortured, and the other copy will say I pushed the button and woke up on the beach - which is exactly what we would expect these two people to say. And they're both right, insofar as they're giving an accurate report of their memories. What is the metaphysical issue here? There are two *physical* issues here. 1) The simplest one is that if you agree with the comp indeterminacy (or similar) you get an explanation of the quantum indeterminacy without the collapse of the wave packet. This is mainly Everett contribution. I think Pete has a good point; I don't see how this bears on his analysis of I. 2) The less trivial one, perhaps, is that if you agree with the comp indeterminacy you get an a priori explosion of the number of appearances of first person white rabbits I don't see that either. The SWE doesn't predict that *everything* (which is what I presume you to mean by white rabbits) will happen. If it did it would be useless. and the only way to solve this, assuming the SWE is correct, must consist in justifying the SWE from the comp indeterminacy bearing But the indeterminancy of comp arises from equivocation about I as Pete noted. It assumes first that there is an I dependent on physical structure and then sees a problem in determining where the I goes when the structure is duplicated. on all computational states/histories. The fact that all these metaphysical problems and bizarre results are predicted by assuming *everything happens* implies to me that *everything happens* is likely false. I'm not sure what the best alternative is, but I like Roland Omnes view point that QM is a probabilistic theory and hence it must predict probabilities for things that don't happen. Brent Meeker
Re: death
Bruno Marchal writes:I will keep reading your posts hoping to make sense of it. Still I was about asking you if you were assuming the "multiverse context" or if you were hoping to extract (like me) the multiverse itself from the OMs. In which case, the current answer seems still rather hard to follow. Then in another post you just say: Jesse Mazer writes: It's a bit hard for me to come up with a satisfactory answer to this problem, because I don't start from the assumption of a physical universe at all--like Bruno, I'm trying to start from a measure on observer-moments and hope that somehow the appearance of a physical universe can be recovered from the subjective probabilities experienced by observers Bruno Marchal writes:And this answers the question. I am glad of your interest in the possibility to explain the universe from OMs, but then, as I said I don't understand how an OM could change its measure. What is clear for me is that an OM (or preferably a 1-person, an OM being some piece of the 1-person) can change its *relative* measure (by decision, choice, will, etc.) of its possible next OMs. end quotes Jesse, it seems to me that starting from a set of axioms, like the concept of a measure on observer-moments and "hope that somehow the appearance of a phyical universe can be recovered" is problematic in light of the upward and downward Lowenheim-Skolem theorems. Taking this into account, it seems that you can't conclude anything about the cardinality of the some aspect of the universe model'sdomain based on a set of axioms. I've brought up the problem of cardinalities before in the "copy method important?" thread. I think the cardinality would have to be an assumption... Tom Caylor
Re: Dualism and the DA
Brent Meeker: The fact that all these metaphysical problems and bizarre results are predictedby assuming *everything happens* implies to me that *everything happens* islikely false. I'm not sure what the best alternative is, but I like RolandOmnes view point that QM is a probabilistic theory and hence it must predictprobabilities for things that don't happen. end quote Actually, it occurred to me lately that saying "everything happens" may be the same as the paradox of the "set of all sets". Tom Caylor
Re: One more question about measure
Hi Quentin, Stathis Quentin Anciaux wrote: Hi list, I have one more question about measure : I don't understand the concept of 'increasing' and 'decreasing' measure if I assume everything exists. Because if everything exists... every OM has a successor (and I'd say it must always have more than one), and concerning good or bad OM, every OM has "good" successor and "bad" successor. What I want to mean is that, I get 100% chance that at least one (I'd say many) of my futur selves will go in hell, and at least one (I'd say also many) will have great experiences. And this, whatever I do... because when I do something, the universe split, and there are branches were I do other thing. I can't constraint the choice. So what is the meaning of increasing and decreasing measure ? What is wrong in every OM has a successor in an everything context ? Quentin Hi Quentin In my opinion you are right in suspecting that there is something wrong with increasing or decreasing measure. Since a conscious observer cannot subjectively distinguish between a large (infinite) number of observer moment, he occupies or "surfs" over all of them. Taking a quantum branch does not reduce the number of observer moments because they are still an infinite number of them, and merging branches does not increase the number of observer moment because their sum is also infinite. For this reason I am a firm believer that one can only talk about relative measure (and the RSSA) and not about absolute measure (and the ASSA). Relative measure is the ratio of the number of observer moments before an event and the number after the event. Thus in discussing measure you must define two points: before and after. And you must define an observer and the person or object being observed. If the number of OMs goes to infinity, we can still take a ratio "in the limit". Since the actual number of OMs is infinite, we can normalize measure by defining relative measure for an observer observing himself as equal to 1: that is the number of OMs for an observer divided by the number of OMs for the observer). A given observer can then calculate the relative measure for someone else going between two states as the ratio of the number of OM's between those two states. Thus if an observer carried with him a relative measure measuring instrument (that measures the number of OM's and divides them by themselves) he would find that no matter how risky his behavior is, his own measure remains invariant and fixed at 1. From my own point of view, my relative measure today is not greater or smaller than my relative measure yersterday. The measure of an old and sick man is not greater or smaller than that of a healthy baby that he observes. Some of the other threads in this list (i.e., another puzzle described by Stathis) discuss experiments in which observers are copied and destroyed. Answers to these questions depend on which two points are selected to define relative measure. George Levy Stathis Wrote: Another puzzle: You find yourself in a locked room with no windows, and no memory of how you got there. The room is sparsely furnished: a chair, a desk, pen and paper, and in one corner a light. The light is currently red, but in the time you have been in the room you have observed that it alternates between red and green every 10 minutes. Other than the coloured light, nothing in the room seems to change. Opening one of the desk drawers, you find a piece of paper with incredibly neat handwriting. It turns out to be a letter from God, revealing that you have been placed in the room as part of a philosophical experiment. Every 10 minutes, the system alternates between two states. One state consists of you alone in your room. The other state consists of 10100 exact copies of you, their minds perfectly synchronised with your mind, each copy isolated from all the others in a room just like yours. Whenever the light changes colour, it means that God is either instantaneously creating (10100 - 1) copies, or instantaneously destroying all but one randomly chosen copy. Your task is to guess which colour of the light corresponds with which state and write it down. Then God will send you home. Having absorbed this information, you reason as follows. Suppose that right now you are one of the copies sampled randomly from all the copies that you could possibly be. If you guess that you are one of the 10100 group, you will be right with probability (10100)/(10100+1) (which your calculator tells you equals one). If you guess that you are the sole copy, you will be right with probability 1/(10100+1) (which your calculator tells you equals zero). Therefore, you would be foolish indeed if you don't guess that you in the 10100 group. And since the light right now is red, red must correspond with the 10100 copy state and green with the single copy state. But just as you are about to write down your conclusion, the light changes to green...
Re: Measure, Doomsday argument
No :) - these arguments do not depend on precise timescales - ROTFL. Big and old just means big and old enough for evolution to take place. Cheers On Wed, Jun 22, 2005 at 07:55:12AM -0400, jamikes wrote: Russell, you wrote: ... - ... By contrast a universe that is just big enough (eg a few years old,...=... what 'years'? Terrestrial? some planet's in Oregon? lightyear(!?) or do you have a UTM (Universal Time Schedule) for the Plenitude? Sorry for the bartend to speak into John M - Original Message - From: Russell Standish [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Jonathan Colvin [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: everything-list@eskimo.com Sent: Wednesday, June 22, 2005 12:02 AM Subject: Re: Measure, Doomsday argument -- *PS: A number of people ask me about the attachment to my email, which is of type application/pgp-signature. Don't worry, it is not a virus. It is an electronic signature, that may be used to verify this email came from me if you have PGP or GPG installed. Otherwise, you may safely ignore this attachment. A/Prof Russell Standish Phone 8308 3119 (mobile) Mathematics0425 253119 () UNSW SYDNEY 2052 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Australiahttp://parallel.hpc.unsw.edu.au/rks International prefix +612, Interstate prefix 02 pgpp4G31MME6k.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Conscious descriptions
On Wed, Jun 22, 2005 at 09:25:09AM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: Conjecture: All harnessable physical processes can be simulated by a Turing machine. By harnessable, we mean exploited for performing some computation. I suspect this is true. I don't understand. Again these are intuitive concepts. I would interpret this as saying that we can perform the same computation as any physical process, even if we cannot simulate the process itself (ie the process may do something more than computation). There is a danger in using those intuitive words without making clear the context. Could we simulate a truly random oracle with a Turing Machine? No - what that conjecture states is that we cannot use a random oracle to compute something no computable on a Turing machine. No, in the sense we cannot find a program which generates a provably infinite random string. How do you prove the output random? I thought it wasn't possible. All we can say is that the output is random with measure 1. Yes, with comp, in the sense it is enough to iterate infinitely often the self applied duplication. But then you can't separate out the random string (unless you are one!), so again it is not a computation. (At least not harnessable) Do you have a reference? Li Vitanyi appear to be unaware of this result. Sorry it was just Kurtz: KURTZ S. A., 1983, On the Random Oracle Hypothesis, Information and Control, 57, pp. 40-47. Thanks - I will look that up. As you probably aware I am fascinated by this topic. By definition a Universal digital or numerical machine is a machine which is able to compute all intuitively (effectively if you want) computable function. Church's thesis = the class of intuitively computable function is equal to the class of fortran computable function. Of course Church's original thesis use lambda instead of fortran! From this Church's Thesis (CT) is equivalent with the statement that a universal fortran machine is a universal (digital) machine. The reciprocal being obvious. So CT = There exists a Universal Machine.(I always mean Universal *digital* machine). Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ Fair enough. Its really a harmless terminological thing. For me, we have universal Turing machines, provably equivalent to universal Fortran machines provably equivalent to universal partial recursive functions etc. Since they are all the same thing under equivalence, why not just call them universal machines. CT just adds an extra thing the intuitively computable universal machine, to use your terminology. Since I don't have an issue with the CT thesis, just its various stronger manifestations, we are in fact talking about the same thing anyway. Cheers -- *PS: A number of people ask me about the attachment to my email, which is of type application/pgp-signature. Don't worry, it is not a virus. It is an electronic signature, that may be used to verify this email came from me if you have PGP or GPG installed. Otherwise, you may safely ignore this attachment. A/Prof Russell Standish Phone 8308 3119 (mobile) Mathematics0425 253119 () UNSW SYDNEY 2052 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Australiahttp://parallel.hpc.unsw.edu.au/rks International prefix +612, Interstate prefix 02 pgpd9mPWpCMld.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: another puzzzle
Hal Finney writes: Stathis Papaioannou writes: That is the basic idea behind these thought experiments with copies: as a more easily understood analogy for what happens in the multiverse/plenitude. I don't agree, and in fact I think the use of copies as an analog for what happens in the multiverse is fundamentally misleading. If it were not, you could create the same thought experiments just by talking about flipping coins and such. What is the analog, in the multiverse, of pushing a button to make a copy? When faced with the chance of torture, you are going to push a button to make a copy. What does that correspond to in the multiverse? When you flip a coin in the multiverse, you are copied many times along with the rest of the universe, with half the copies seeing heads and the other half tails. If an experience such as torture is dependent on the outcome, half the copies will be tortured and the other half won't. From a first person perspective, it looks like there is only one universe with probabilistic laws; from a godlike third person perspective, it is all deterministic, with every possible outcome occurring in some branch or other. The difference between the multiverse and thought experiments with copies is, of course, that in the latter case only a part of the universe is duplicated, and it is possible that the copies will meet. If you control conditions in copying thought experiments to eliminate the effects of these differences, then they should be a good analogy for what happens in the multiverse. --Stathis Papaioannou _ Dont just search. Find. Check out the new MSN Search! http://search.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200636ave/direct/01/
RE: Pareto laws and expected income
(JC) My consciousness (or degree of such) is a complicated function of my evolutionary history, but the problem is so multifactorial it is inappropriate to use anthropic reasoning. Nonsense. You are either conscious, in which case you will observe something, or you are not, which case you don't. This is a simple two state logic. That seems a remarkable assertion. As I grow from a fetus to an adult, is there one particular interval of planck time where I go from being an unconscious object to a conscious observer? It is unlikely to be resolvable to the planck scale, but I do expect there to be a first observer moment (ie resolvable on the millisecond scale). It may not be possible to pin down exactly when this occurs with human beings, however, just as it is extraordinarily difficult to draw a dividing line between conscious animals and unconscious ones. Likely because there *is* no dividing line. Why would you think that consciousness / observerness is a two state property? Jonathan Colvin
RE: Copies Count
Hal Finney writes: Stathis Papaioannou writes: Hal Finney writes: Suppose you will again be simultaneously teleported to Washington and Moscow. This time you will have just one copy waking up in each. Then you will expect 50-50 odds. But suppose that after one hour, the copy in Moscow gets switched to the parallel computer so it is running with 10 times the measure; 10 copies. And suppose that you know beforehand that during that high-measure time period (after one hour) in Moscow you will experience some event E. Again, it's a two step process, each time considering the next moment. First, 50% chance of waking up in either Moscow or Washington. Second, 100% chance of experiencing E in Moscow or 0% chance of experiencing E in Washington. The timing is crucial, or the probabilities are completely different. Doesn't this approach run into problems if we start reducing the time interval before the extra copying in Moscow? From one hour, to one second, to one millisecond? At what point does your phenomenological expectation switch over from 90% Washington to 90% Moscow? And does it do so discontinuously, or is there a point at which you are just barely conscious enough in Moscow before the secondary duplication, that perhaps the two probabilities balance? The time interval is the minimum time interval for you to experience a conscious moment, which is also the minimum interval for two exact copies to diverge so that they are no longer identical. It is the same question as how long you can be alive as the original in a teleportation thought experiment before you mind being killed. I would say that if you walk out of the teleportation booth and then someone comes along and shoots you a minute later, that's bad, because you have had time to become a different person since the teleportation and the teleported copy no longer provides continuity of consciousness. It could be argued that there would only be a minute of experience lost and maybe it doesn't matter, but I would agree with your (HF) previous post on just this question that it *does* matter. Similarly with whether there is a sharp or gradual transition: I think there would be a sharp transition between the point where you wouldn't notice if you got shot and the point where you would mind very much. I am not sure exactly what the smallest possible conscious interval is, but it would certainly be longer than a millisecond and shorter than a second. I am doubtful that this approach works. Jesse Mazer suggested backwards causation, that the secondary copying in Moscow would influence the perceptual expectation of waking up in Moscow even before it happens. So he would say 90% Moscow from the beginning. However I think that has problems if we allow amnesia to occur in Moscow before the amplification. I have been enjoying these discussions but unfortunately I will have to take leave, I am going on vacation with the family for a week so I will have little chance to participate during that time. I'll look forward to catching up when I return - I wish I were unfortunate enough to have to take leave! I have been enjoying these discussions too, and hope you have a good break. --Stathis Papaioannou _ Sell your car for $9 on carpoint.com.au http://www.carpoint.com.au/sellyourcar
RE: Torture yet again
Jonathan Colvin writes: Stathis wrote: When you press the button in the torture room, there is a 50% chance that your next moment will be in the same room and and a 50% chance that it will be somewhere else where you won't be tortured. However, this constraint has been added to the experiment: suppose you end up the copy still in the torture room whenever you press the button. After all, it is certain that there will be a copy still in the room, however many times the button is pressed. Should this unfortunate person choose the coin toss instead? If he shares your beliefs about identity, then if he changes his mind he will be be comitting the gambler's fallacy. However, after having pressed the button 100 times and with nothing to show for it except 100 tortures, his faith that he is a random observer might be shaken :). Yes, but do you agree it is the same for any probabilistic experiment in a many worlds cosmology? If you sit down and toss a coin 100 times in a row, there will definitely be one version of you who has obtained 100 heads in a row, just as there will definitely be one version of you (the one still in the torture room) who has nothing to show after pushing the button 100 times. --Stathis Papaioannou _ Single? Start dating at Lavalife. Try our 7 day FREE trial! http://lavalife9.ninemsn.com.au/clickthru/clickthru.act?context=an99locale=en_AUa=19179
RE: Torture yet again
Hi everyone, I've been in heated discussions about duplicates for 39 years now, and so I just don't have much patience with it any more. I have not read many of the recent posts, but I have always gone along with the viewpoint that more runtime is good, and that it linearly bestows benefit on one. I do notice this email: Jonathan Colvin writes: Stathis wrote: When you press the button in the torture room, there is a 50% chance that your next moment will be in the same room and and a 50% chance that it will be somewhere else where you won't be tortured. However, this constraint has been added to the experiment: suppose you end up the copy still in the torture room whenever you press the button. After all, it is certain that there will be a copy still in the room, however many times the button is pressed. Should this unfortunate person choose the coin toss instead? To me, it's always been a big mistake to employ the language of probability; you *will* be in the room where the torture is and you *will* be in the room where it's not, because you *can* be in two places at the same time. If he shares your beliefs about identity, then if he changes his mind he will be be comitting the gambler's fallacy. However, after having pressed the button 100 times and with nothing to show for it except 100 tortures, his faith that he is a random observer might be shaken :). You may want to read a story, The Pit and the Duplicate that I wrote many years ago, which dwells on the ironies of being duplicates. It's a little like Stathis's point here. http://www.leecorbin.com/PitAndDuplicate.html Lee
RE: Torture yet again
Stathis wrote: When you press the button in the torture room, there is a 50% chance that your next moment will be in the same room and and a 50% chance that it will be somewhere else where you won't be tortured. However, this constraint has been added to the experiment: suppose you end up the copy still in the torture room whenever you press the button. After all, it is certain that there will be a copy still in the room, however many times the button is pressed. Should this unfortunate person choose the coin toss instead? If he shares your beliefs about identity, then if he changes his mind he will be be comitting the gambler's fallacy. However, after having pressed the button 100 times and with nothing to show for it except 100 tortures, his faith that he is a random observer might be shaken :). Yes, but do you agree it is the same for any probabilistic experiment in a many worlds cosmology? If you sit down and toss a coin 100 times in a row, there will definitely be one version of you who has obtained 100 heads in a row, just as there will definitely be one version of you (the one still in the torture room) who has nothing to show after pushing the button 100 times. Yes, I agree. There are always going to be an unfortunate few. I think I know where this is going; if manyworlds is correct, there will be 10sup100 copies of me created in the next instant to which nothing bad happens, and a much smaller measure to whom something nasty happens, quite by chance. Presumably if I choose 50% over 10 copies, I should also choose 50% over 10sup100 copies, so if given the option between the status quo (assuming manyworlds) and a seemingly much higher chance of something nasty happening, I should choose the higher chance of nastiness (if I'm being consistent). There's not much answer to that; probably if I was convinced that manyworlds is correct, and something nasty *is* bound to happen to a small number of me in the next instant, I *would* choose the copies. In our thought experiment the subject knows he's getting tortured; unless we can prove manyworlds the nastiness is only conjecture. If that wasn't where you were heading, forgive the presumption... :) Jonathan Colvin
RE: Torture yet again
I (Jonathan Colvin) wrote: When you press the button in the torture room, there is a 50% chance that your next moment will be in the same room and and a 50% chance that it will be somewhere else where you won't be tortured. However, this constraint has been added to the experiment: suppose you end up the copy still in the torture room whenever you press the button. After all, it is certain that there will be a copy still in the room, however many times the button is pressed. Should this unfortunate person choose the coin toss instead? If he shares your beliefs about identity, then if he changes his mind he will be be comitting the gambler's fallacy. However, after having pressed the button 100 times and with nothing to show for it except 100 tortures, his faith that he is a random observer might be shaken :). Yes, but do you agree it is the same for any probabilistic experiment in a many worlds cosmology? If you sit down and toss a coin 100 times in a row, there will definitely be one version of you who has obtained 100 heads in a row, just as there will definitely be one version of you (the one still in the torture room) who has nothing to show after pushing the button 100 times. Yes, I agree. There are always going to be an unfortunate few. I think I know where this is going; if manyworlds is correct, there will be 10sup100 copies of me created in the next instant to which nothing bad happens, and a much smaller measure to whom something nasty happens, quite by chance. Presumably if I choose 50% over 10 copies, I should also choose 50% over 10sup100 copies, so if given the option between the status quo (assuming manyworlds) and a seemingly much higher chance of something nasty happening, I should choose the higher chance of nastiness (if I'm being consistent). There's not much answer to that; probably if I was convinced that manyworlds is correct, and something nasty *is* bound to happen to a small number of me in the next instant, I *would* choose the copies. In our thought experiment the subject knows he's getting tortured; unless we can prove manyworlds the nastiness is only conjecture. If that wasn't where you were heading, forgive the presumption... :) Ok, you've convinced me (or did I convince myself?). I've joined the ranks of the button pushers (with large number of copies anyway). But the probabilities seem to make a difference. For instance if there's a 50% chance of torture vs. 3 copies with one getting tortured for sure, I'll still choose the 50%. Don't ask me at which number of copies I'll start pushing the button; I dunno. Jonathan Colvin
