Randomness Through Computation
BOOK ANNOUNCEMENT RANDOMNESS THROUGH COMPUTATION: Some Answers, More Questions Edited by H. Zenil (member of this mail discussion group) World Scientific Publishing Company http://www.worldscibooks.com/compsci/7973.html For a limited time, members of this discussion group can get a 25% discount from the WSPC online bookstore (http://www.worldscibooks.com/compsci/7973.html). Quote WJAN25B as you pre-order. This offer is valid from now till 20 February, 2011 (a day before release). Please do recommend the title to your library and colleagues. Description Dedicated to the memory of Ray Solomonoff (1926--2009) The volume consists of an indispensable set of chapters written by leading scholars, scientists and researchers in the field of Randomness, including related subfields specially but not limited to the strong developed connections to the Computability and Recursion Theory. Highly respected, indeed renowned in their areas of specialization, many of these contributors are the founders of their fields. The scope of Randomness Through Computation is novel. Each contributor shares his personal views and anecdotes on the various reasons and motivations which led him to the study of the subject. They share their visions from their vantage and distinctive viewpoints. In summary, this is an opportunity to learn about the topic and its various angles from the leading thinkers. Contents * Randomness as Circuit Complexity (and the Connection to Pseudorandomness) (E. Allender) * Randomness Everywhere: My Path to Algorithmic Information Theory (C.S. Calude) * Metaphysics, Metamathematics and Metabiology (G. Chaitin) * The Martin-Löf-Chaitin Thesis (J-P. Delahaye) * Computability, Algorithmic Randomness and Complexity (R.G. Downey) * Is Randomness Native to Computer Science? Ten Years After (M. Ferbus-Zanda S. Grigorieff) * The Impact of Algorithmic Information Theory on Our Current Views (P. Gács) * Scatter and Regularity Imply Benford's Law... and More (N. Gauvrit J-P. Delahaye) * Is Randomness Necessary? (R. Graham) * Algorithmic Randomness as Foundation of Inductive Reasoning and Artificial Intelligence (M. Hutter) * Randomness: A Tool for Constructing and Analyzing Computer Programs (A. Kucera) * Connecting Randomness to Computation (M. Li) * Some Bridging Results and Challenges in Classical, Quantum and Computational Randomness (G. Longo, C. Palamidessi T. Paul) * Randomness, Computability and Information (J.S. Miller) * Studying Randomness Through Computation (A. Nies) * Statistical Testing of Randomness: New and Old Procedures (A.L. Rukhin) * Randomness, Occam’s Razor, AI, Creativity and Digital Physics (J. Schmidhuber) * Algorithmic Probability — Its Discovery — Its Properties and Application to Strong AI (R.J. Solomonoff) * From Error-correcting Codes to Algorithmic Information Theory (L. Staiger) * Uncertainty in Physics and Computation (M.A. Stay) * Indeterminism and Randomness Through Physics (K. Svozil) * Probability is a Lot of Logic at Once: If You Don’t Know Which One to Pick, Take ’em All (T. Toffoli) * Randomness in Algorithms (O. Watanabe) * The Road to Intrinsic Randomness (S. Wolfram) * Panel discussion transcription (University of Vermont, Burlington 2007): Is The Universe Random? (C.S. Calude, J. Casti, G.J. Chaitin, Paul Davies, S. Wolfram K. Svozil) * Panel discussion transcription (University of Indiana Bloomington 2008): What is Computation? (How) Does Nature Compute? (C.S. Calude, G.J. Chaitin, E. Fredkin, T.J. Leggett, R. de Ruyter, T. Toffoli S. Wolfram) For pre-ordering details see the World Scientific webpage: http://www.worldscibooks.com/compsci/7973.html Also available through Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Randomness-Through-Computation-Answers-Questions/dp/9814327743/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: A paper by Bas C. van Fraassen
Colin, David seems to understand we are closer than you might think. Here I answer again to an interesting old post. I am not sure you commented my answer. On 23 Oct 2010, at 23:37, Colin Hales wrote: I am pretty sure that there is a profound misinterpretation and/or unrecognized presupposition deeply embedded in the kinds of discussion of which Van F and your reply and Bruno's fits. It's so embedded that there appears to be no way that respondents can type words from a perspective in which the offered view may be wrong or a sidebar in a bigger but unrecognised picture. It's very hard to write anything to combat view X when the only words which ever get written are those presuming X, and X is assuming a position of explaining everything, yet doesn't. In the long run I predict that: 1) The 'many worlds' do not exist and are a product of presuppositions about scientific description not yet understood by the proponents of MWI. In a sense this is an open problem. The expression 'Many dreams' is less false. Then there are dreams shared by a continuum of running machines, and they can define (non constructively) notion of worlds, and proximity of worlds. 2) QM will be recognized as merely an appearance of the world, not the world as it is. Not sure about that. OK for the hamiltonians, but not for the quantum principle (linearity and symmetry in all directions). 3) The universe that exists now is.the only universe that exists at the moment. For the first person pov, yes. But it is a conscious state. I guess you are not solipsist. The term 'universe' is vague here. Taken as a third person facts, it is a form of cosmo-solipsism. We don't know that, and have evidences on the contrary: the quantum facts, and digital mechanism once you get the first person indeterminacy. The numbers describe everything, but that counts for nothing. The numbers relations defined from + and *, emulates everything, and that counts for all possible internal views of arithmetic. Despite this, the many worlds are explorable, physically by 'virtual matter' behaving as if they existed (by an appropriate entity made of the stuff of our single universe) That is unclear. 4) The MWI has arisen as a result of a human need to make certain mathematics right, not the need to explain the natural world. This, in the longer term will be recognised as a form of religiosity which will be seen to imbue the physicists of this era, who are preselected by the education system for prowess in manupulating symbols. The difference between this behaviour and explaining the natural world is not understood by the physicists/mathematicians of this era. It is a theory (QM without collapse). But the many dreams is a consequence of digital mechanism too, in a testable way---by testing the physics. You can always propose another theory. All theories have their own religiosity. I made the comp one explicit most of the time. It is a theory akin to a neoplatonist or perhaps neoneoplatonist (neoplatonism + Church thesis) theology. In a rather transparent sense, it is the theology of the universal numbers. The proper theological part is axiomatized by G* minus G, at the propositional level. (In contrast, I regard myself as a scientist an explainer of things-natural ...which I claim as different to being a physicists/ mathematician in this strange era we inhabit) 5) COMP is false a computer instantiation of rules of how a world appears to be, and a world are not the same thing. But that is a consequence of comp. A computer instantiation of rules of how a world appears to be IS NOT a world, indeed. Worlds are what is emerging from a continuum of computations if a first person plural way. Here you confuse digital physics, with the physics which has to be derived from computer science when assuming comp (without eliminating consciousness). 6) COMP is false a computer instantiation of rules of how a brain appears to be is not a brain. OK. But I work in the theory comp, which means that by assumption I, whatever am I really, am or is Turing emulable at some level of description. Careful, in a sense the first person I (the one which enjoys and suffers for example) is not really Turing emulable from its point of view. That explains why comp is truly 'unbelievable' by Löbian machine, although trivially true for the löbian machine! 7) Corollary: scientific description of how the world appears and what the world is made of are not the same description _, Again that is a consequence of comp. and_ computer instantiations of either set is not a world. Yes. 8) The issue that causes scientific descriptions (like QM) to be confused with actual reality is a cultural problem in science, not a technical problem with what science has/has not discovered. I am partially OK. But the problem can become
Re: Observers and Church/Turing
Hi I have an answer to the nature of the relation between the first-person and specific third-person phenomena. It is based very simply on logical type. Here's the concept as brief as I can make it. As Deutsch, Barbour, Davies, and others hold, the universe is clearly static. Relativity shows us a static block universe, since the whole of space-time is actual. The linear dynamics similarly shows us a static block universe, a four dimensional array of probability amplitudes for possible events. As with the relativistic universe, progression along the linear time dimension of space-time provides a moving picture, a changing reality. As Penrose states, in the universe described by special relativity: ... particles do not even move, being represented by static curves drawn in space--time'. Thus what we perceive as moving 3D objects are really successive cross-sections of immobile 4D objects past which our field of observation is sweeping. (1994, p. 389) The collapse dynamics is the change to the linear dynamics. This does not work at a global level, due to observers having different simultaneities. In a relational qm, however, this is straightforwardly the time evolution of the frame of reference of the observer in the collapse dynamics, as described by Everett. As Tegmark points out, Everett brings us the clear distinction between the outside and inside views of a quantum state. On the outside view, there is only the linear dynamics. On the inside view, there are sporadic collapses as observations are made. The remaining problem is that there is no viewpoint, in any physical frame of reference, from which to view the change in the frame of reference as observations are made. This is where logical types comes in handy. Taking the relational view: The quantum state of the effective physical environment of the observer defines a block universe of probability amplitudes. This is like one frame of a movie, a four dimensional space-time matter and energy movie. The quantum concept of time shows that all possible such frames exist. Barbour... calls each specific state a 'Now', and this is what he is emphasising when he says that: Every Now is a complete, self-contained, timeless, unchanging universe (Folger, 2000). Each Now is a moment in the quantum concept of time. All the moments exist, complete, 'already', like the frames of a movie film. Thus Barbour: ... likens his view of reality to a strip of movie film. Each frame captures one possible Now (Folger, 2000) With regard to a movie, a frame is a member of the set of the frames comprising the movie: they are of different logical type. With regard to the quantum concept of time, the same principle holds. The quantum state of a physical environment at a specific moment in the quantum concept of time is of the first, primitive, logical type, while the set of all possible frames is of a second logical type. In order to run, the movie requires iteration. This is of a third logical type: it is an operation which apples to all possible movies, all possible sequences of frames. Similarly, in order for there to be a transtemporal reality, even subjectively, there has to be an iterator of the frames of reference defined by the quantum state - I call them quantum mechanical frames of reference. There can be no such physical process, as Deutsch, Barbour, Davies, and others hold, and I'm with them. At the same time, Everett shows how straightforward it is to explain the appearance of collapse: as each observation is made, the frame of reference changes to that of the next moment. The observer becomes correlated with a different quantum state. as he states /... it is not so much the system which is affected by an observation as the observer, who becomes correlated to the system./(1973, p. 116; his italics) But from what perspective does this change take place? According to Bitbol (1991, p. 7) this is the conversation out of which Everett very much wishes to keep. But the question, of course, stands. My view is that we have experiential evidence of the answer, bizarre though it is. I notice the world changing. So I am a transtemporal observer. However, I also notice my body changing, and my mind. Everything changes. This change is encountered from the perspective of phenomenal consciousness. That would be just odd, except for the fact that Chalmers that phenomenal consciousnessmust necessarily be a fundamental feature of the universe ... alongside mass energy and space-time (1995). In other words, in my view, it is an emergent property of the system as a whole. And as such it is of the third logical type. And the problem is solved. What we have discovered in the collapse dynamics, but completely failed to recognise, is a system process. Just as only a computer is in a position to access a sequence of addresses in memory, containing a sequence of structures of information defining the frames of a
Re: A paper by Bas C. van Fraassen
Dear Bruno, Thank you for writing further on this. I can understand the metaphor of “dreams shared by a continuum of running machines, and they can define (non constructively) notion of worlds, and proximity of worlds” and agree with it if I weaken the definition of the word “machine” to be something far removed from the concrete idea that most persons have. The concern that I continue to have is how do our models represent 1) a plurality of distinct 1-p (merely postulating a plural 1-p is insufficient reasoning for me.), 2) the evolution of those 1-p. I see your theory as a very sophisticated form of idealism that still suffers from the problem of epiphenomena. I say this because I cannot figure out how your theory explain a common illusion of a physical world necessarily emerges within the dreams of the “running” machines. How do the many dreams have sufficient structure to act to supervene inertia? Onward! Stephen I have been re-reading the Mauldin paper and trying to figure out how the Movie Graph idea is not being used a device to amplify a refutation of Comp in the paper. From: Bruno Marchal Sent: Friday, January 21, 2011 2:28 PM To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: A paper by Bas C. van Fraassen Colin, David seems to understand we are closer than you might think. Here I answer again to an interesting old post. I am not sure you commented my answer. On 23 Oct 2010, at 23:37, Colin Hales wrote: I am pretty sure that there is a profound misinterpretation and/or unrecognized presupposition deeply embedded in the kinds of discussion of which Van F and your reply and Bruno's fits. It's so embedded that there appears to be no way that respondents can type words from a perspective in which the offered view may be wrong or a sidebar in a bigger but unrecognised picture. It's very hard to write anything to combat view X when the only words which ever get written are those presuming X, and X is assuming a position of explaining everything, yet doesn't. In the long run I predict that: 1) The 'many worlds' do not exist and are a product of presuppositions about scientific description not yet understood by the proponents of MWI. In a sense this is an open problem. The expression 'Many dreams' is less false. Then there are dreams shared by a continuum of running machines, and they can define (non constructively) notion of worlds, and proximity of worlds. 2) QM will be recognized as merely an appearance of the world, not the world as it is. Not sure about that. OK for the hamiltonians, but not for the quantum principle (linearity and symmetry in all directions). 3) The universe that exists now is.the only universe that exists at the moment. For the first person pov, yes. But it is a conscious state. I guess you are not solipsist. The term 'universe' is vague here. Taken as a third person facts, it is a form of cosmo-solipsism. We don't know that, and have evidences on the contrary: the quantum facts, and digital mechanism once you get the first person indeterminacy. The numbers describe everything, but that counts for nothing. The numbers relations defined from + and *, emulates everything, and that counts for all possible internal views of arithmetic. Despite this, the many worlds are explorable, physically by 'virtual matter' behaving as if they existed (by an appropriate entity made of the stuff of our single universe) That is unclear. 4) The MWI has arisen as a result of a human need to make certain mathematics right, not the need to explain the natural world. This, in the longer term will be recognised as a form of religiosity which will be seen to imbue the physicists of this era, who are preselected by the education system for prowess in manupulating symbols. The difference between this behaviour and explaining the natural world is not understood by the physicists/mathematicians of this era. It is a theory (QM without collapse). But the many dreams is a consequence of digital mechanism too, in a testable way---by testing the physics. You can always propose another theory. All theories have their own religiosity. I made the comp one explicit most of the time. It is a theory akin to a neoplatonist or perhaps neoneoplatonist (neoplatonism + Church thesis) theology. In a rather transparent sense, it is the theology of the universal numbers. The proper theological part is axiomatized by G* minus G, at the propositional level. (In contrast, I regard myself as a scientist an explainer of things-natural ...which I claim as different to being a physicists/mathematician in this strange era we inhabit) 5) COMP is false a computer instantiation of rules of how a world appears to be, and a world are not the same thing. But that is a consequence of comp. A computer instantiation of rules of how a world appears to be IS NOT a world, indeed. Worlds are what is emerging
