Re: Are we simulated by some massive computer?
I saw the documentary movie Tibet: Cry of the Snow Lion the other day. In one scene, a group of monks is sitting around in a circle, and the Dalai Llama is overseeing. The monks are industriously and methodically placing individual tiny coloured beads (there are maybe 4 or 5 colours) around the perimeter of an enormous circular mandala pattern (made of 10s of 1000s of beads). The pattern has grown to almost two metres in diameter, and it features an extrordinarily elaborate kaleidoscopic pattern with perfect radial symmetry, and large complex patterns built on tiny patterns. If someone places a single bead out of its proper place in the pattern, the pattern will be distorted and it will not be possible to maintain the growing recursive pattern. But if every bead is placed correctly, the perimiter can grow by one bead width maintaining the order of the pattern, and the process can repeat, growing larger and larger. OBSERVABLE REALITY IS LIKE THE MANDALA. EVERYTHING MUST BE JUST SO, TO MAINTAIN THE OBSERVABLE ORDER OVER A LARGE PERIMETER. ALMOST EVERY CHOICE (ABOUT WHERE TO PLACE BEADS) OR ABOUT PROGRAM NEXT STEPS, LEADS TO CHAOS RAPIDLY. A SELECT FEW PATHS CAN MAINTAIN THE ORDER. p.s. Later in the movie, they return to this scene, with the monks around an enormous, wondrously complex circular pattern. A monk takes a wooden yardstick, and with a few brief sweeps, obliterates the pattern, leaving chaos. The chaos; the sand of beads, is cleared to one side, and a monk places a single bead in the centre of the circle That last part is the real lesson of the mandala. Eric George Levy wrote: Bruno, Bruno Marchal wrote: And a priori the UD is a big problem because it contains too many histories/realities (the white rabbits), and a priori it does not contain obvious mean to force those aberrant histories into a destructive interference process (unlike Feynman histories). It may be that using the observer as starting points will force White Rabbits to be filtered out of the observable world George
More on mandalas
The other thing to note about mandalas is that there can be more than one possible pattern that would maintain order and recursive complexity as it expands outward (i.e. forward in time). However, an observer subpattern embedded in one mandala (and created by ITS rules of order) can only see whatever order is in its own mandala pattern. A different mandala pattern, with slightly different rules, or with a different initial pattern, might arguably contain a White Rabbit subpattern, but alas the White Rabbit cannot be seen be our first observer, and vice versa, because the attempt to see the contents of another mandala pattern would necessarily destroy our own mandala pattern. Whatever (computational paths) would destroy the self-consistent mandala pattern of our universe are inherently unobservable by us. One way of looking at it is that light seen by an observer A can only illuminate A's universe pattern. That's kind of a definition of light, and of A, and of universe pattern, all at once.
Re: Definitation of Observers
pattern | physical pattern (constraint on the arrangement of matter and energy in space and time) | physical process (physical pattern with characteristics like that some regular and often localized, and yet complex form of change is of its essence. Can be described as comprised of states, events, and subprocesses) | | physical computational process physical sensing process | mind-of-intelligent-observer The | relation is "is-a" inheritance. Does that help successfully communicate what I mean by a pattern that computes and stores information about its surroundings? Eric Brent Meeker wrote: Eric Hawthorne wrote An observer is a pattern in space-time (a physical process) which engages in the processing and storage of information about its surroundings in space-time. This seems like a failure to communicate because of mixing levels of description. If you're going to define "observer" as a pattern you need to say what kind of pattern it is. If you skip to a functional, "processing and storage" or intentional "engages in" level of description then you introduce terms with no definite relation to patterns. Brent Meeker
Re: Definitation of Observers
An observer is a pattern in space-time (a physical process) which engages in the processing and storage of information about its surroundings in space-time. Its information processing is such that the observer creates abstracted, isomorphic, representative symbolic models of the structures and processes surrounding it, as well as other, purely abstract informational model structures. The observer has subprocesses of itself which process its representative models in such a way as to model, simulate, or calculate relations between informationally connected local parts of the space-time surroundings of the observer. These cognitive subprocesses also model, simulate, or calculate relations between the observer process itself and its surrounding structures and processes in space-time. An observer is constrained to exist as a substructure of an informationally self-consistent medium, and a medium in which notions of change, locality, and metric space and time can be defined. Further, an observer is constrained to exist in a locale which has a thermodynamic range of variation, and a fine-grained structural variety suitable for the random coalescence of structures (slow localized processes) which can attain auto-poietic (pattern-self-sustaining) properties relative to alternative patterns of organization of matter and energy. As a restatement and refinement of that constraint; the locale of the observer must be suitable for the emergence of and growth of stable, organized complex systems with adequate degrees of freedom to explore many possibilities for their form and function. Only in such a constrained environment could an observer general-information-processing-and-epresenting-and-abstracting process arise spontaneously and maintain itself long enough to do meaningful observation of its surroundings. An observer is constrained to perceive only informationally self-consistent states (with respect perhaps to some notion of locality and metric space-time) that its medium exhibits. It is conceivable that the medium exhibits other, informationally mutually inconsistent states, but any aspect of the extent of these other pseudo-states of the medium can in principle not be perceived by any information receiver and processor such as the observer. Hal Ruhl wrote: I would like to explore just exactly what the various members of the list mean by observer as in the following from Wei Dai's post. Hal
Re:The difference between a human and a rock
How does a human differ in kind from a rock? -Well both are well modelled as being slow processes (i.e. localized states and events) in spacetime. - A process is a particular kind of pattern of organization of some subregion of spacetime. - We share being made of similar kinds of matter particles that stay close to each other in spacetime for some finite time period, and some finite spatial extent. Oh, but you said how do we differ? Well, a human roganism is a sub-unit of a longer-lived species pattern within an organic emergent system eco-system pattern. A rock does not appear to have that much complexity of form and autopoietic function. A rock is one of those kind of local spacetime patterns or systems that doesn't have much choice about how it is. The laws of physics, and the nature of the rock's components and the thermodynamics of its vicinity are such that it pretty much collects into how it's going to be at some time, then is physically constrained to stay just that way, at macro scales anyhow, for a long period of time. Of course, being a big physical process pattern subject to the laws of thermodynamics, it is, actually, changing, and usually dissipating (disorganizing), just very, very slowly. A human organism pattern is existing at a thermodynamic range internally, and in a thermodynamic regime in its environment, that allows for more options. for how (and e.g. where) to be (over short time scales.) Interestingly, this makes for the presence of all kinds of other similar organic patterns with options, and interesting behaviours (like eating you for dinner, or infecting you and eating your cell structure.) In other words, this thermodynamic regime, and the particular kinds of atoms and chemical bonds in ecosystems, make for active competition for which should be the dominant pattern of organization of matter and energy in the vicinity. i.e. You can't always just be a rock, because there might be a creature with a hammer wanting to break you down into cement. Or you can't live for ever, as an organism, because something else wants to re-pattern your matter and energy; that is, the matter and energy your pattern has competed successfully to borrow for its form for a while. Clear as oozing primordial subterranean sulphur-vent mud? Ok but here's the interesting part of the story. Because there are options for how to be i.e. how to hold together at our organic ecosystem thermodynamic regime, there is pattern-competition for who is the most auto-poietic (i.e. what forms of matter and energy collection can hold together best, at the expense of others). And it turns out that life-like ecosystem patterns, species patterns, and organism patterns win out for a time, precisely because their main function is autopoiesis, and they eventually, through natural selection, get very good at it. And it may turn out that the way you survive best as a pattern in spacetime, assuming you have a certain thermodynamic range to work with, is to store inside yourself INFORMATION about that which is outside yourself and nearby. i.e. about your environment. In otherwords, pattern, if you want to live, get out there and start RE-PRESENTING aspects of your environment WITHIN YOURSELF (in some partly abstract form within some aspect of your own form.) Eventually, if you do that, simple representation of your environment. Ouch that hurt. I'm going to flail the other way outa here. or hmmm, my complex molecules like the smell and molecular fit of YOUR complex molecules will give way to complex representation within the organism of its environment, and complex action plans to be carried out to protect the organism (and its kin's) pattern from nastier aspects of the environment. So we get Hmmm. I think that guy and his army is out to get me and mine. I think I will pre-emptively strike on that other guy's country because he vaguely looks like the first guy. Ok, bad example. or you get Hmmm. What an intelligent (accurate environment-representer), capable (effective environment modifier and pacifier), and beautiful (pattern-form-average-conformant) woman she is. I'll ask her to marry me. Or something like that. And that's the major difference between humans and rocks. Our thermodynamic regime necessitates that we navigate options for our existence/non-existence as stable patterns by representing informationally, then navigating and affecting, our surrounding space, time, matter, and energy forms. Eric Hal Ruhl wrote: Hi Stephen: Observers: In this venue dances interact and change each other discontinuously by mutual collision or by exchanging smaller dances. How then does a human differ in kind from a rock? Should we expect them to differ in kind? Yours Hal
Re: Computational irreducibility and the simulability of worlds
Hal Finney wrote: How about Tegmark's idea that all mathematical structures exist, and we're living in one of them? Or does that require an elderly mathematician, a piece of parchment, an ink quill, and some scribbled lines on paper in order for us to be here? It seems to me that mathematics exists without the mathematician. And since computer science is a branch of mathematics, programs and program runs exist as well without computers. Ok, but real computers are math with motion. You have to have the program counter touring around through the memory in order to make a narrative sense of anything happening. Mathematics, being composed of our symbols, is an abstract re-presentation. I think what Tegmark must be saying is that something exists which is amenable to description by all self-consistent mathematical theories (logical sentence sets) , and by no inconsistent theories. To me, this is just equivalent to saying that all possible configurations of differences exist and that any SAS that represents its environment accurately (e.g. via abstract mathematics) is constrained, by its own being part of the information structure, to only perceive self-consistent configurations of differences as existing. Self-consistency of mathematical theory, as it translates from the representation level to the represented level, just means that things perceived can only be one way at a time, and that's the kind of thing that a consistent mathematical theory describes.
Re: The difference between a human and a rock
Hal Ruhl wrote: I see nothing in the rest of your post that makes my believe there is a difference of kind between rocks and humans. I believe it is a mistake to concentrate only on the reductionist theory of the very small, and to assume that there is nothing else interesting about systems that are larger. Theories of spacetime and matter's unit composition are not the be all and end all. To explain emergent system behaviour, you have to have a theory whose language is a vocabulary of various kinds of complex properties. This is because emergent systems, as one of their interesting properties, do not depend on all of the properties of their substrate. They only depend on those properties of the substrate which are essential to the interaction constraints that determine the macro behaviour of the system. Thus, in theory, you can change the system's substrate and still have the same complex system, at its relevant level of description. However, that being said, I think, Hal, that we're on a similar wavelength re. fundamental info physics. Ref. my previous everything-list posts on the subject: Riffing on Wolfram http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/m4123.html Re: The universe consists of patterns of arrangement of 0's and 1's? http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/m4174.html Re: The universe consists of patterns of arrangement of 0's and 1's? http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/m4183.html Constraints on everything existing http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/m4412.html Re: Constraints on everything existing http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/m4414.html Re: Constraints on everything existing http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/m4427.html Re: Running all the programs http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/m4525.html Re: 2C Mary - How minds perceive things and not things http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/m4534.html Re: are we in a simulation? http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/m4566.html Re: Fw: Something for Platonists http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/m4594.html Re: Why is there something instead of nothing? http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/m4896.html Re: Why is there something instead of nothing? http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/m4900.html Re: Is the universe computable? http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/m4950.html Warning, my vocab in these posts is a little informal.Go for the fundemental concepts if you can get them out of the writing. Cheers, Eric
Re: Gravity Carrier - could gravity be push with shadows not pull?
Caveat: This post will likely demonstrate my complete lack of advanced physics education. But here goes anyway. Is it possible to model gravity as space being filled with an all-directional flux of inverse gravitons? These would be particles which: 1. Zoom around EVERYWHERE with a uniform distribution of velocities (up to C in any direction). 2. Interact weakly with matter, imparting a small momentum to matter (in the direction that the iGraviton was moving) should they collide with a matter particle. The momentum comes at the cost that the iGraviton which collided with mass either disappears or at least reduces its velocity relative to the mass's velocity. So note that: 1. If there was just a single mass, it would not receive any net momentum by collisions from iGravitons because iGravitons with an even distribution of velocities impact it from all sides with equal probability, no matter what the mass's velocity. (This is true because C is the same for each mass no matter how it's travelling, so even distribution of velocities up to C is also the same from the perspective of each mass regardless of its velocity. 2. If two masses are near each other, they shadow each other from the flux of iGravitons which would otherwise be impacting them from the direction in between them. This shadowing would be proportional to the inverse square of the distances between the masses, and would be proportional to the probability of each mass colliding with (i.e. absorbing) iGravitons, and this probability would be proportional to the amount of each mass. (So the iGraviton shadow between the masses would have properties like a gravitational field). 3. The mutual shadowing from momentum-imparting flux from all directions means that net momentum would be imparted on the masses toward each other (by nothing other than the usual collisions with iGravitons from all other directions.) 4. The deficit of iGravitons (or deficit in velocity of them) in between absorbtive masses could be viewed as inward curvature of space-time in that region. Amount or velocity distribution of iGraviton flux in a region could correspond in some way with the dimensionality of space in that region. I find this theory appealing because 1. it's fundamental assumption for causation of gravity is simple (a uniformly-distributed-in-velocity-and-density flux of space-involved (i.e. space-defining) particles.) 2. The paucity of iGravitons (or high iGraviton velocities) in a region corresponding to inward-curving space is an appealingly direct analogy. You can visualize iGravitons as puffing up space and a lack of them causing space there to sag in on itself. I'd be willing to bet that someone has thought of this long before and that it's been proven that the math doesn't work out for it. Has anyone heard of anything like this? Is it proven silly already? Cheers, Eric
Re: Gravity Carrier - could gravity be push with shadows not pull?
Hal Finney wrote: Again, this is not really a multiverse question. I hate to be negative, but there are other forums for exploring nonstandard physics concepts. Alright I take your chastisement somewhat, while also grumbling a bit about list-fascism. For one thing it's possible that such a model, were it a valid reformulation, may be easier to equate to a computational/information-theoretic model of the universe/multiverse (which is in list-scope) than the standard formulation, in that it (the push model) gives a discretizable, local-interaction based model for the curvature of space-time. Eric
Re: Fw: Gravity Carrier - could gravity be push with shadows not pull?
Eric Cavalcanti wrote: But the main flaw, if I recall it, is that objects moving around in space would feel a larger flux of 'iGravitons' coming against the direction of movement, causing a decrease in velocity. So much for inertia... Ok but let's say (for fun) that the iGravitons were all moving at C in all directions with uniform density. So since C is perceived the same by an object no matter what the objects' velocity, there would be no additional iGraviton drag against the direction of the object's motion. Because the iGravitons coming up from behind would still be approaching at C. This property is exactly the property I was trying to convey about the iGravitons. That they don't cause drag no matter the velocity of the mass. Maybe that's just impossible, but there's something very weird about C remember.
Continuation of group selection and emergence discussion
Tianran Chen wrote (in private reply to my earlier post, but I thought this discussion generally interesting, hope that's ok Tianran): i do agree that many very valuable point of view had been criticised unfairly due to their 'group selection' nature. however, i am quite convinced that there are fundamental problems embedded in it. first of all, i think to look at evolution through a individual or group point of view is always dangerous. since they are not the fundamental unit of evolution. evolution, (in the sense which it is referred to in most biology context) DOES NOT manipulate individual NOR species directly, instead, it is always the small packets of genetic information (such as gene or meme) that is being manipulated. so, it is a safe theory about evolution should always able to be translated into languages in terms of gene or meme, and if a theory cannot, then it is not safe to use. and this is exactly the problem of 'group selection'. But just because it is the genes are being manipulated DIRECTLY does not mean that other factors are not important to understanding what's going on, and understanding what factors may be most ESSENTIALLY driving a particular evolutionary direction. For example, biology now understands that it is not single genes, but sets of genes acting together in regulatory networks, that are the fundamental units of "functionality" and therefore, of "adaptive or maladaptive functionality" in organisms. BECAUSE THE EVOLVABLE "GOAL" IS NOT SIMPLY TO MAXIMIZE THE CHANCE OF SURVIVAL OF AN ORGANISM OF THE NEXT SHORT-TERM ENCOUNTER. THE "GOAL" IS TO MAXIMIZE THE PROBABILITY OF SURVIVAL OF THE SUM TOTAL OF ALL OF THE ORGANISM'S ENCOUNTERS UP TO WHEN THE ORGANISM REPRODUCES. disagree. a gene's 'goal' is to maximize the availability of its own copies in the entire gene pool. so to look at it in individual level, it implies that an individual is more likely to behave in such a way that it tend to maximize the chance of some gene to replicate. and 'some gene' here, refered to not only genes in its own body, but also in other's body. one thing to notice here is that very often, individual try to do so at the cost of its own chance for breed. such behavior can be found commonly in social animals, symbiosis systems, and etc. again, here mention about the 'goal' of a gene. but what i really mean is that due the the selection pressure, genes who had survived selections behave in the way as if they had the 'goal' although they are really blind about future. so the 'goal' is simply a short hand notation, do not take it literally. You'll note that I was the one who started the practice of putting "GOAL" in quotes, indicating that it is not to be taken literally, but as a stand-in or short-hand for a complex set of factors that lead to a tendency of evolution to support one kind of trait over another. valid theories has to be general enough to explain all sorts of things in the domain, not just part of them. and now better theories does exist (such as self-gene, and memic evolution). so 'group selection' SHOULD be marked as obselete. I disagree with your last clause. To me, a fan of general theories of emergent complex ordered systems, of which life evolution is only one example, one of the most fundamental questions is what is the best scope-boundary that best defines what is the most "interesting" or "systematic" or "robust" system. What I mean by this is that we have a degree of free reign about what elements (of the world, universe, what have you) that we choose to include in our definition of a system. Or in other words, for ANY particular set of elements that have something to do with each other, some crazy guy will have the right to call THAT collection a perfectly valid system; his most important system perhaps. So you can imagine possible "system-scopes" or "system-boundaries" as being an infinitely variable set of concentric spheroids overlapping, Venn-diagram-like, being at wide ranges of spatiotemporal scales, and including/excluding different elements. Faced with such a scenario, one is forced to ask "are there any universal principles that would let me decide which "boundary-spheroid" is the most "systematic" or consideration-worthy system (at this spatiotemporal scale in this vicinity, anyway)? Or, both generalizing and specializing a bit; given that, for example natural systems tend to be "fractally functional"; that is, comprised of nested layers of smaller-scale functional systems, we can ask "how (at what scale boundaries) do we best divide this natural system up into nested layers (i.e. where if anywhere are the best-defined layer boundaries (those layer boundaries that are the best at separating of distinct functionalities) , and for EACH spatio-temporal-scale layer of this natural system, what are the best-defined system-scope spheroids? What are the system-scope spheroids that
Re: measure and observer moments
Given temporal proximity of two states (e.g. observer-moments), increasing difference between the states will lead to dramatically lower measure/probability for the co-occurrence as observer-moments of the same observer (or co-occurrence in the same universe, is that maybe equivalent?) . When I say two states S1, S4 are more different from each other whereas states S1,S2 are less different from each other, I mean that a complete (and yet fully abstracted i.e. fully informationally compressed) informational representation of the state (e.g. RS1) shares more identical (equivalent) information with RS2 than it does with RS4. This tells us something about what time IS. It's a dimension in which more (non-time) difference between co-universe-inhabiting states can occur with a particular probability (absolute measure) as the states get further from each other in the time of their occurrence. Things (states) which were (nearly) the same can only become more different from each other (or their follow-on most-similar states can anyway) with the passage of time (OR with lower probability in a shorter time.) Maybe? Eric Saibal Mitra wrote: - Original Message - From: Jesse Mazer [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, February 05, 2004 12:19 AM Subject: Re: Request for a glossary of acronyms Saibal Mitra wrote: This means that the relative measure is completely fixed by the absolute measure. Also the relative measure is no longer defined when probabilities are not conserved (e.g. when the observer may not survive an experiment as in quantum suicide). I don't see why you need a theory of consciousness. The theory of consciousness is needed because I think the conditional probability of observer-moment A experiencing observer-moment B next should be based on something like the "similarity" of the two, along with the absolute probability of B. This would provide reason to expect that my next moment will probably have most of the same memories, personality, etc. as my current one, instead of having my subjective experience flit about between radically different observer-moments. Such questions can also be addressed using only an absolute measure. So, why doesn't my subjective experience ''flit about between radically different observer-moments''? Could I tell if it did? No! All I can know about are memories stored in my brain about my ''previous'' experiences. Those memories of ''previous'' experiences are part of the current experience. An observer-moment thus contains other ''previous'' observer moments that are consistent with it. Therefore all one needs to show is that the absolute measure assigns a low probability to observer-moments that contain inconsistent observer-moments. As for probabilities not being conserved, what do you mean by that? I am assuming that the sum of all the conditional probabilities between A and all possible "next" observer-moments is 1, which is based on the quantum immortality idea that my experience will never completely end, that I will always have some kind of next experience (although there is some small probability it will be very different from my current one). I don't believe in the quantum immortality idea. In fact, this idea arises if one assumes a fundamental conditional probability. I believe that everything should follow from an absolute measure. From this quantity one should derive an effective conditional probability. This probability will no longer be well defined in some extreme cases, like in case of quantum suicide experiments. By probabilities being conserved, I mean your condition that ''the sum of all the conditional probabilities between A and all possible "next" observer-moments is 1'' should hold for the effective conditional probability. In case of quantum suicide or amnesia (see below) this does not hold. Finally, as for your statement that "the relative measure is completely fixed by the absolute measure" I think you're wrong on that, or maybe you were misunderstanding the condition I was describing in that post. I agree with you. I was wrong to say that it is completely fixed. There is some freedom left to define it. However, in a theory in which everything follows from the absolute measure, I would say that it can't be anything else than P(S'|S)=P(S')/P(S) Imagine the multiverse contained only three distinct possible observer-moments, A, B, and C. Let's represent the absolute probability of A as P(A), and the conditional probability of A's next experience being B as P(B|A). In that case, the condition I was describing would amount to the following: P(A|A)*P(A) + P(A|B)*P(B) + P(A|C)*P(C) = P(A) P(B|A)*P(A) + P(B|B)*P(B) + P(B|C)*P(C) = P(B) P(C|A)*P(A) +
Re: More on qualia of consciousness and occam's razor
Stathis Papaioannou wrote: ; you might even be able to read the brain, scanning for neuronal activity and deducing correctly that the subject sees a red flash. However, it is impossible to know what it feels like to see a red flash unless you have the actual experience yourself. So I maintain that there is this extra bit of information -subjective experience or qualia - that you do not automatically have even if you know everything about the brain to an arbitrary level of precision. Moreover, it cannot be derived even in theory from the laws of physics - even though, of course, it is totally dependent on the laws of physics, like everything else in the Universe. I'll grant you that the subjective experience of red etc cannot be derived from a theory of physics. However, by Occam's Razor we can say that the qualia that other people experience are the same as those that we experience. The reasoning is as follows: The theorem that the qualia are the same is justifiable on the simple theory that near-identical physical brain structure and function (amongst humans) leads to near-identical perception of the qualia of consciousness. What simple theory which is consistent with the rest of our scientific knowledge would justify that the qualia are significantly different? Right now, in the absence of such a qualia-difference-explaining theory, and with a plausible and simple and non-revolutionary and reasonable theory of qualia-sameness, a scientific-thinking default assumption should be qualia-sameness. Long aside: Parallel example: A similar Occam's Razor argument can explain why the scientific-thinking default assumption should be in the non-existence of God, except for the undeniable existence of God as a human abstract concept, like the concept of Nation-State. There is a simple and reasonable theory of intelligent co-operating agent behaviour which runs something like that 1. We do a lot of reasoning about how agents, and in particular animal agents and intelligent human agents, affect the outcomes in the world. 2. We do a lot of reasoning about how to influence these agents to act on the world as we would wish. 3. An unknown-agent proxy is an easy-to-understand extension to such an agent-behaviour and effects theory. 4. We can extend the same attitudes of obeisance and desire to please to the unknown-agent-proxy as we would to any powerful animal agent or powerful human (king, warlord) agent. If we do (we would reason), we may obtain the unknown-agent-proxy's favour and the outcome of unknown-agency events might come out in our favor. Aside: Note that the fundamental fallacy in the ancients' God-theory here is the ascription of unknown-cause events as being the effects of intelligent agency. This is an example of a theory that is elegant, simple, and wrong. Physical science and mathematics has by now provided alternative explanations (which have the advantage of being consistent with each other and with observation i.e. of being logical and scientific) for the vast majority of the types of events (cosmic and planetary origin, and life and human origin, weather, illness, love (reflection and elaboration of mating instincts into stories at conscious-level of brain, in an information-processing model of brain/mind), crop-failure, failure or success of various forms of psychological make-up and group-organizational behavior (reasons that kings might be successful or not) etc., 5. Humans with intellect and other leadership qualities would also see how to harness the power implicit in the populace's fear of and desire to be obeisant to the unknown-agent-proxy (i.e. the god). By proclaiming that they have special access to the god, knowledge of its intentions, ability to influence it etc. they can harness the psychologically based power that the god has over the believers' actions, and turn it into power that they themselves (the priesthood, the god-kings or just kings-by-divine-right) have over the populace. Convenient. Too convenient not to result in a whole entrenched societal structure of rules and hierarchical authority connected ultimately to the authority of the god itself. 6. Such an organised religion structure, or god-empowered government structure, if it succeeds in organizing people for an extended period of time, as it seems they did, would naturally tend to take on a life of its own, a self-reinforcing aspect, an autopoietic function as one of its functions. This self-preservation subfunction of the god-empowered governance organization would take the form of religious education about the great history of beneficial acts and mercies and wisdoms conferred on the people over their glorious history by the god via the god-henchmen. In my view, the governance aspect; that is the societal cohesion and organization aspect of always was the genuine essence of organized religions, and also of divine-right governments. The god-basis was just a
Re: More on qualia of consciousness and occam's razor - tiny addendum
Eric Hawthorne wrote: 6. Such an organised religion structure, or god-empowered government structure, if it succeeds in organizing people for an extended period of time, as it seems they did, would naturally tend to take on a life of its own, a self-reinforcing aspect, an autopoietic function as one of its functions. This self-preservation subfunction of the god-empowered governance organization would take the form of religious education about the great history of beneficial acts and mercies and wisdoms conferred on the people over their glorious history by the god via the god-henchmen. I should add that the other half of the autopoietic (self-preservative) subfunction of the god-fear-and-god-obeisance-empowered organization is of course the enforcement branch: Mechanisms would develop for enforcement-of-membership, rule-adherence, and enforcement that members conform to (express) the orthodox forms (orthodox in that particular organization of course) of belief in the deity. Thus we have religious intolerance, we have shunning, outcasting, excommunication, we have dehumanization as worthless infidels and enemies of adherents to other (incorrect and defiant) religious orthodoxies, and also, of course, stigmatization and de-valuing (not to mention torture and execution as an example) of those who profess not to believe in the god (or any god) at all. If I were living in the time (or a present-day place) of overwhelming and brutal dominance of god-empowered governance organizations (e.g. everywhere before the beginning of the last century, and in a number of fundamentalist-Islamic states (and southern US states? today,) I would have to profess belief in God to survive, and just hope that no-one heard the quotation-marks in my statement which indicate belief in the power of the god-myth concept in human psychology and thus in human society.
Flaw in denial of group selection principle in evolution discovered?
Blast from the recent past. This is pertinent to the previous discussions on evolution as a special case of emergent-system emergence. It was argued that group selection effects have been discredited in evolutionary biology. I counterargued that denying the possibility of a selection effect at each more-and-more complex system-level in a multi-layer complex-ordered emergent system (such as ecosystems, biological species etc) denies the likelihood of spontaneous emergence of those complex systems at all. I think I've found the source of the confusion regarding group selection effects. It goes like this: A species can evolve a group-benefit behaviour so long as the development of the behaviour does not, on average, reduce the reproductive success of individuals that engage in the group-benefit behaviour, and so long as the behaviour does confer, on average, a benefit to the reproductive chances of each individual in the well-behaving group. The key is in how we interpret average. The question is whether an individual organism always acts in each short-term encounter in a manner which maximizes their chance of survival-to-breeding-age IN THAT ENCOUNTER, or whether it is possible for the individual to wager that taking a slight risk now (and believing or observing that others will also do so) will lead to a better chance that the individual will survive ALL ENCOUNTERS from now up until it breeds. The organism doesn't have to be smart enough to believe in this wager. It is sufficient that the wager be on average beneficial to the individual.In that case, through repeated trials by multiple individuals, the behaviour which is group-adaptive and individually lifetime-average adaptive can evolve. BECAUSE THE EVOLVABLE GOAL IS NOT SIMPLY TO MAXIMIZE THE CHANCE OF SURVIVAL OF AN ORGANISM OF THE NEXT SHORT-TERM ENCOUNTER. THE GOAL IS TO MAXIMIZE THE PROBABILITY OF SURVIVAL OF THE SUM TOTAL OF ALL OF THE ORGANISM'S ENCOUNTERS UP TO WHEN THE ORGANISM REPRODUCES. So it is just a time-scale misunderstanding. Group-adaptive behaviours increase the member's probability of surviving to reproductive age, even if they slightly increase the chance of the indvidual losing some particular encounter. True extreme altruistic behavior which conveys CERTAINTY of death in a single encounter may not fit into this model, but it can be argued as to whether the altruistic individual believes they are going to die for certain in many incidents or not, or whether they hold out faint hope in which case the argument above could still hold. In any case, true certain death altruistic behaviour is an extreme anomoly case of group-adaptive behviour. Most group-adaptive behaviours are not of that kind, so extreme, definitely fatal altruism is not a good model for them. Eric
Re: Incompleteness and Knowledge - errata
Corrections inserted here to the following paragraph of my previous post. (Apologies for the sloppiness.) Eric Hawthorne wrote: so truth itself, as a relationship between representative symbols and that which is (possibly) represented, is probably a limited concept, and the limitation has to do with limits on the information that can be conveyed about one structure (e.g. all of reality) BY another structure (e.g. a formal system which is itself part of that reality.). Clearly an embedded structure (e.g. formal system or any finite representative system) cannot convey all information about both itself and the rest of reality which is not itself. There is not enough information in the embedded structure to do this.
Re: Modern Physical theory as a basis for Ethical and Existential Nihilism
Stathis Papaioannou wrote: fact vs. value; formal vs. informal; precise vs. vague; objective vs. subjective; third person vs. first person; computation vs. thought; brain vs. mind; David Chalmer's easy problem vs. hard problem of consciousness: To me, this dichotomy remains the biggest mystery in science and philosophy. I have very reluctantly settled on the idea that there is a fundamental (=irreducible=axiomatic) difference here, which I know is something of a copout. I really would like to have one scientific theory that at least potentially explains everything. As it is, even finding a clear way of stating the dichotomy is proving elusive. Some previous posts in the current thread have attacked this idea by, for example, explaining ethics in terms of evolutionary theory or game theory, but this is like explaining a statement about the properties of sodium chloride in terms of the evolutionary or game theoretic advantages of the study of chemistry. Yes, you can legitimately talk about ethics or chemistry in these terms, but in so doing you are talking meta-ethics or meta-chemistry, which I think is what Bruno means by level shift. I really think that to get a good grasp on this kind of issue, one has to get over ones-self. Step outside for a moment and consider whether you feeling conscious is as amazing or inexplicable as you think. Consciousness may very well just be an epi-phenomenon of a self-reflection-capable world-modelling representer and reasoner such as our brains. Minsky's society of mind idea isn't fully adequate as a consciousness explanation, but it makes inroads. Some of the most exciting work in this area IMHO is being done by the neurologist Antonio Damasio. Here is a review of his book on the topic of the feeling of consciousness: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/anthony.campbell1/bookreviews/r/damasio-2.html One of his key idea is that the lowest level of consciousness is just the brain's representation of the sensor data about what our body is doing (how it is positioned and moving, if it aches anywhere, and what we're seeing, hearing in each instant etc). He says this is the brain's representation for the purpose of homeostasis i.e. the instantaneous status of the body. This homeostatis awareness (reflection of sensor data in the brain) he calls the proto-self. Then comes a level (he calls core consciousness) at which those low-level sense data are integrated into a conceptual (or object-modelling) level to form a continuous stream of consciousness feeling. This is the watching a movie but you are in the movie sense. Finally, at the high level, is added (or filled in) ideas from the memory and planning facilities of the higher brain. So what we are doing here is adding in ideas about things which take time. We are adding in (to help explain the stream of consciousness object-movie that we're in) a whole bunch of remembered specific episodes and facts and generalized space-time-world-situation-model concepts that we produced by processing experience after experience after experience. And we are adding in hypotheses about how things could go if (i.e. object-movie-that-we're-in-explorations of counterfactuals and hypotheticals and desired future states and plan run-throughs for getting there.) This is just using the same watching-object-movie-that-I'm-in capability but to daydream (remember, or wish, or plan) alternative scenarios rather than the sense-data direct movie of the core-self. This highest level self, he calls the autobiographical self because the highest level sense of consciousness is in effect, us writing the story of ourselves (that we're in) as well as reading the story of ourself (that we're in) at the same time. It is a story, and not just a stream-of-consciousness, because it has added in memories and experiences from the past, to provide a meaningful causal narrative to ourself about what is going on now, and what is going to happen next. So highest-level consciousness IS an autobiographical story of ourself and our doings and present-time but past-experientially interpreted experiences. And that is just the back-and-forth-in-time (or sideways to hypotheticals/counterfactuals) extension of the core-self movie that I'm both watching AND sensing that I'm in it sense, which itself is the CONCEPTUAL-OBJECT-INTERPRETATION of the continuous stream of homeostasis raw sense-data that the brain is continually receiving and processing in real-time to know what the state of the body is and what it senses to be around it. This makes PERFECT sense (and feels almost adequate, as an explanation of the feeling of consciousness) to me. Eric p.s. before someone jumps in about how off-topic this is, I think that's narrow minded because understanding consciousness is integral to understanding observers and their role in physics.
Re: Modern Physical theory as a basis for Ethical and Existential Nihilism
Stathis Papaioannou wrote: Take these two statements: (a) Dulce et decorum est/ Pro patria mori (Wilfred Owen) (b) He died in the trenches during WW I from chlorine gas poisoning The former conveys feelings, values, wishes, while the latter conveys facts. The former is not true or false in the same way as the latter statement is. This has always seemed obvious to me and it has been stated in one form or another by philosophers of an empiricist bent since David Hume. Does anyone subscribing to this list really disagree that (a) and (b) are different at some fundamental level? Well since I don't really read Latin, this will be a little tough. Luckily this website does read latin. http://lysy2.archives.nd.edu/cgi-bin/words.exe?Dulce+et+decorum+est http://lysy2.archives.nd.edu/cgi-bin/words.exe?Pro+patria+mori So I'll assume that the second one is something like It's good to die for one's country. So what is this saying? It may simply be explaining that countries would do better if people were willing to die for them. If one were to do some kind of game-theory model of geopolitical evolution, one might conclude that this is factually true. What does the first one say? flattery is pleasing? or sweetness is a virtue? I'm sure that given enough time, one could show that both of these have a basis in evolution and specifically the evolution of successful cooperative social behaviour. Moral truths are complex truths. That doesn't make them less true. Just harder to explain. Eric
Re: Subjective measure? How does that work?
Wei Dai wrote: On Sun, Jan 25, 2004 at 03:41:55AM -0500, Jesse Mazer wrote: Do you think that by choosing a different measure, you could change the actual first-person probabilities of different experiences? Or do you reject the idea of continuity of consciousness and "first-person probabilities" in the first place? The latter. I came to that conclusion by trying to develop a theory of first-person probabilities, failing, and then realizing that it's not necessary for decision making. If someone does manage to develop a theory that makes sense, maybe I'll change my mind. No one has tried to answer my other objection to an objective measure, which is that since there are so many candidates to choose from, how can everyone agree on a single one? I think that a notion of measure which is so flexible that there are infinite numbers of possible measures to choose from, is a wrong, or non-useful, definition of measure. I think people have to try harder to find a stronger and even more objective notion of measure. I would argue that all of the observers who co-exist should agree that 1. their universe has a very high measure, and 2. their universe generates complex order They should say "it's overwhelmingly most likely that we're observing a high-measure universe which generates complex order." I think the form of any high-measure universe which can generate complex order is exceedingly constrained, because the two constraints (high measure) and (generates complex order) can only be obtained with onerous constraints on form of universe (physical law etc). Eric
Re: Subjective measure? How does that work?
Wei Dai wrote: On Sat, Jan 24, 2004 at 11:49:09PM -0500, Jesse Mazer wrote: But measures aren't just about making decisions about what to *do*, the main argument for a single objective measure is that such a measure could make predictions about what we *see*, like why we see regular laws of physics and never see any "white rabbits". Although Bob can decide that only universes where gravity is repulsive matter to him in terms of his decision-making (so that he'd be happy to bet his life's savings that a dropped ball would fall up), he'll have to agree with Alice on what is actually observed to happen when a particular ball is dropped. Well, when the ball is dropped, in one universe it falls down, and Bob has to agree with Alice, and in another universe it up, and Alice has to agree with Bob. Alice thinks the second universe is less important than the first, but Bob thinks it's more important. How do you break this symmetry? Well, each of us only experiences a single universe (and further, all of the other humans that we observe are also observing the same universe we are observing.) Even if one believes a strong version of MWI in which there are untold numbers of other us's experiencing other universes, it's still true that each of those duplicates only gets to experience a single universe. That's something about the nature of observation and observable universes themselves. So if Alice and Bob are IN the same universe, where balls fall down, they'd both be well-advised to "believe in" the facts of their own universe, and not some speculative, or at the very least completely inaccessible, alternate universe. From the perspective of an observer (within a universe), the universe they inhabit is more important. PRINCIPLES: --- 1. A UNIVERSE IS WHERE ONLY ONE OF THE POSSIBILITIES FOR ANYTHING HAPPENS. 2. EACH OBSERVER ONLY EXPERIENCES ONE UNIVERSE 3. COUNTERPART OBSERVERS SHOULD BE CONSIDERED DIFFERENT OBSERVERS, BECAUSE THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS CROSS-UNIVERSE ACCESSIBILITY OR EXPERIENCE. I simply do not believe that the notion of an observer being able to access or meaningfully experience the life of the observer's other-universe counterparts, even if counterpart is a well-formed notion. I'm familiar with all of the various logic variations of the notion of trans-world identity, and I find them to be model-level concepts (matters of representative opinion) more than object-level concepts. What I've learned about identity is that there is a mixture of objectivity and subjectivity (affected by focus of concern) to it as a concept. What trans-world identity means (or is useful for) if a premise of total inter-world inaccessibility is accepted, is questionable. Eric Without an objective measure, I don't think there's any way to explain why we consistently see outcomes that obey the known laws of physics (like why we always see dropped balls fall towards the earth). What good are the explanations provided by an objective measure, if I choose to use a different subjective measure for making decisions? How do these explanations help me in any way? Choosing a measure from some other universe that you speculate exists (with, necessarily, no evidence) is risky and counterproductive to your survival in your universe. I'd advise you to get out of the path of the falling ball. Even if "counterparts" makes sense (not granted), if all counterparts made decisions based on their speculations about other-world likely happenings, then all counterparts of that particular observer would quickly die off for sure. Observers like that would not evolve. Only home-body observers (with local-universe concerns) would.
Re: Subjective measure? How does that work?
Can you explain briefly why the choice of measure is subjective? I haven't read any of the books you mentioned (will try to get to them) but am familiar with computability theory and decision theory. In my favourite interpretation of the multiverse, as a very long (possibly lengthening) qubitstring containing all of the possible information-states implied in such a long bitstring, the absolute measure of any information-state (instantaneous state of some universe) would be the same as any other state of the same bitstring length. In that framing of things, I guess there's another definition of measure, which goes something like this: Let Ui be an internal-time-ordered set of information-states s1,s2,...,s(now)comprising an observable universe. Ui, to be observable, is constrained to be an informationally self-consistent (too complex a concept to get into right here) set of information-states. There is a constraint on any information-state which qualifies to be s(now+1) in any observable universe path s1,s2,...,S(now). Specifically, any information-state that can be S(now+1) must be informationally consistent (not law violating) in conjunction with s1,s2,...,S(now). Furthermore, the history that has evolved as s1,s2,...,s(now) has the result of determining the Ui-relative probability of any particular other information-state being able to become s(now+1) in that observable path. That now-in-an-observable-universe-relative probability of successorhood in that universe of any other information-state is then a universe-specific measure value, or more specifically, a now-state-of-universe specific measure value. That now-in-an-observable-universe measure (for potential successor information states for that universe state-set) may correspond to the probabilities of all the outcomes of all the wave equations of quantum-states which are observable in the now moment in that universe. As a comp sci person and not a physicist, I look forward to your read on where my interpretation is misguided, and for a better interpretation. Eric Wei Dai wrote: I have to say that I sympathize with Caesar, but my position is slightly different. I think there is a possibility that that objective morality does exist, but we're simply too stupid to realize what it is. Therefore we should try to improve our intelligence, through intelligence amplication, or artificial intelligence, before saying that objective morality is impossible and therefore we should just pursue other goals like survival, comfort or happiness. Some people have argued that in fact survival is an objective goal, because evolution makes sure that people who don't pursue survival don't exist. But if we assume that everything exists, the above statement has to be modified to an assertion that people who don't pursue survival have low measure. However the choice of measure itself is subjective, so why shouldn't one use a measure in which people who don't pursue survival have high measure (e.g., one which favors universes where those people survive anyway through good luck or benevolent gods)?
Re: Subjective measure? How does that work?
John M wrote: I find some inconsistencies in your post: qubitstring containing all of the possible information-states implied in such a long bitstring,... possible, of course, to OUR knowledge (imagination). Anthropomorph thinking about the MW. I'm really talking about "convertible to binary-representation" information states here. i.e. formal notion of information i.e. a count and structuring of discrete differences. As such, the number of information-states representable in a qubitstring of length n is 2 ^ n. Let Ui be an "internal-time-ordered" set of information-states s1,s2,...,s(now)comprising an observable universe. How 'bout the Uis where 'time' has not evolved? Excluded? Those Uj's are not observable (unless we change the conventional meaning of that word.) "Observe" as conventionally meant is defined with respect (at least indirectly) to notions of time. Observable by what means? Any means where information can be conveyed from something outside of the observer SAS, at the speed of light or lower, to the representing mechanism inside the observer. BY THE WAY. I'M NOT A PHYSICIST. Can someone who knows please clarify the answer to the rather basic question of whether something like the slit-experiment means anything (or DOES anything to the quantum phenomena of the photons) in the absence of a perceiving observer like ourselves. I'm fairly basically and profoundly ignorant on that score. i.e. can "the measuring experiment machine itself" without the person (or AI etc, or dog, say) to perceive the result, still cause a difference in "what happens" to the photons? We have a pretty narrow range in mind. Would you restrict the MWI to our cognitive inventory of 2004? Does that mean that the MW was "smaller" in 1000 (with the then epistemized contents of cognition)? The observable, classicized portion of the Ui observable universe was smaller in 1000, or at any previous time-within-itself than now, yes. Of course, to be precise, now actually means here-now, as these are inseparable in relativistic physics. ... must be informationally consistent (not law violating) in conjunction ... what "law"? presumed omniscient? Observed and verified physical laws of the Ui universe. Just malicious remarks. I appreciate to try and to criticize. I have no better ones. No problemo JM Eric
Re: Subjective measure and turing machine terminology
Wei Dai wrote: On Sat, Jan 24, 2004 at 12:21:40PM -0800, Eric Hawthorne wrote: Can you explain briefly why the choice of measure is subjective? I haven't read any of the books you mentioned (will try to get to them) but am familiar with computability theory and decision theory. Since you do not mention that you're familiar with the theory of algorithmic complexity, I suggest that you read the first book on that list ASAP. The following response might not make sense until you do. I took some small smattering of that stuff in comp sci undergrad, but essentially what it lets met understand is that some algorithms are O(1), O(n), O(nlogn),O(n^2) O(e^n) etc. I'm also generally familiar with Turing Machine concepts, but I'm rusty on the details. I'm a bit confused as to what is meant by a string having a lower algorithmic complexity. Does that mean that ths shortest program that could result in a symbol string of that form has a vertain algorithmic complexity that is lower than the algorithmic complexity that could compute some other string? What are these strings anyway? Symbol strings which are a finite subpart of the turing machine's tape, conceptually? A question that would arise with that definition above of what the "algorithmic complexity of a string" means is: Shortest algorithm that could generate that string starting with what as its input? Surely if the input were a string that was, say, just one value in one tape-position different than the output string, then any output string can be computed by a trivial turing machine program (one step or so) from that special input. So how do you define what the input is in assessing "the algorithmic complexity of a string?" Or is the string a sequence of instructions and datastore positions comprising the turing machine program itself? and we're discussing the inherent computational complexity of that particular program, for any (or average or whatever) input? I guess I have more trouble mapping directly in my head from turing machine programs to multiverse states than I do mapping raw bitstrings to multiverse states. The general question I asked above would seem to come down to "isn't the complexity of getting to some subsequent information state determined by what the previous information state is?" Second terminology thing: When you say "each universal Turing machine, again I get confused". Isn't "a turing machine" just the abstraction consisting of the movable read/write head and a tape? Isn't the correct terminology "each turing machine PROGRAM which is NP-complete" or which is "universal"? How can we have different machines themselves? Or is it conventional to say that "a turing machine" is "the movable head, plus its current position, plus a particular set of values on a tape (i.e. a particular program?) In normal computing terminology, the machine is the machine and the software program is the software program and the data is the data. If you can just help me a little with these terminology stumbling blocks, I'm sure I (and other computational-complexity-theory-tourists on the list) can understand the concepts. Basically, all of the sensible proposed measures are based on the universal distribution, which assigns a larger probabilities to strings that have lower algorithmic complexities. However there's actually an infinite class of universal distributions, one for each universal Turing machine, and there's no objective criteria for determining which one should be used. Another problem is that using the universal distribution forces you to assume that non-computable universes do not exist. If one does not want to make this assumption, then a more dominant measure need to be used (for example, based on a TM with an oracle for the halting problem or the complexity of a string's logical definition) but then there are even more measures to choose from (how high up the computability hierarchy do you go? how high up the set theoretic hierarchy?). Now suppose that two people, Alice and Bob, somehow agree that a measure M is the objectively correct measure, but Bob insists on using measure M' in making decisions. He says "So what if universe A has a bigger measure than universe B according to M? I just care more about what happens in universe B than universe A, so I'll use M' which assigns a bigger measure to universe B." What can Alice say to Bob to convince him that he is not being rational? I don't see what the answer could be.
Re: Is group selection discredited?
Unfortunately, disallowing notions of group selection also disallows notions of emergent higher-level-order systems. You must allow for selection effects at all significantly functioning layers/levels of the emergent system, to explain the emergence of these systems adequately. For example, ant colonies (as an emerged system) live for 15 years whereas the ants live for at most a year. Yet the colony (controlling for colony size) behaves diffently when it is a young colony (say its first five years) compared to when it is in its old age. (Essentially, the colony's behaviours become more conservative (less amenable to change of tactics.)) It would be very difficult to explain this solely from the perspective of the direct benefit to any individual ant's genes. For the benefit of ant-genes in general in the colony, yes. I think that it's just been too difficult to get adequate controlled studies to determine whether a group selection effect is happening. Because the individuals tend not to live at all if removed from their group. I think it is still an open debate. Group selection being discredited is just Dawkins and some like-minded people's favorite theory right now. Group selection is now discredited as an evolutionary force. See http://www.utm.edu/~rirwin/391LevSel.htm for some class lecture notes discussion group selection.
Re: Modern Physical theory as a basis for Ethical and Existential Nihilism
Stathis Papaioannou wrote: This sort of argument has been raised many times over the centuries, both by rationalists and by their opponents, but it is based the fundamental error of conflating science with ethics. Science deals with matters of fact; it does not comment on whether these facts are good or bad, beautiful or ugly, desirable or undesirable. These latter qualities - values - are necessarily subjective, and lie in the domain of ethics and aesthetics Saying that life is worth living, or that you believe it is bad to kill, are simply statements of your values and feelings, and as such are valid independently of any scientific theory. It may not be an error to equate science and ethics. Science continually moves into new domains. I'm of the opinion that there is a valid utilitarian theory of co-operating intelligent agent ethics. Utilitarian because the purpose of the ethical principles can be shown to be group success (i.e. emergent-system survival / success in the competition with other potential variants of emergent intelligent-agent systems that don't include ethical principles as behaviour guides for their the agents.) Note the subtlety that the utility NEED not be to an individual agent directly, but may only accrue to individuals in the group, ON AVERAGE, due to the ethics and moral rules generally obeyed by the group members, and the consequent floating of (almost) all boats. One of the common debates is between ethical/moral relativism versus absolutism. I call this a confusion due to oversimplification of the issue, rather than a debate. In this regard, this debate is as silly as the nature vs nurture debate and its influence on,say, human behaviour, in which the answer is of course it's a complex feedback loop involving the interaction of inherited traits and the accidents of life. Duh! There is no nature vs nurture. It's always nature AND nurture. Arguing about which is more fundamental is truly unproductive hair-splitting. We should be researching exactly how the feedback loops work instead. So completely analogously, with absolute, and relative morals and ethics. My position is that there are absolute ethical principles and moral rules, but that those are all general rules, not instantiated rules. (i.e. absolutes in ethics/morals are all universally quantified rules that apply to general classes of situations and actions.) Relativism is justified in as far as it is simply debate about how the absolute general ethical and moral principles should map (do map) onto the current particular situation at hand. This mapping may not be simple. A single situation can be boundary-scoped differently, for example, or its agents can be seen as engaging in several different kinds of acts, with many effects for each act, and the importance to the essence of the situation of each act and effect can be debated from different perspectives that involve the interests and knowledge of different agents. So the single situation may map validly to several different instantiations of several ethical principles. And the moral rules applicable to the situation may be subject then to legitimate debate. Relativism may also question whether some moralist group's absolute moral principles are general enough, and may argue with some validity that they are not general enough to be applied without frequent error (and tragedies of injustice). e.g. Dont Eat Pork -- Yeah, whatever however, Don't eat the kinds of meat that are often rotten and disease-ridden in our climate, like Pork may be a valid moral rule at some historical time and place. e.g. Thou shalt not kill. -- Well that's an easy to remember simplification, but a little over simplified and too specific. How about: Minimize the amount of quality-life-years lost in this encounter. So, women and children first into the lifeboats. You old geezers are shark-bait. Or.. Take out the guy wearing the bomb. Now. And relativism is also justified in as far as it is the correct observation that many (most) situations of complex interactions beteen multiple intelligent agents can be described from multiple perspectives (and/or multiple situation-scope inclusions/exclusions). A specific situation can be (probably validly) described as co-incident incidences of the several instances of several different general ethical principles. A to B Our people have lived here from time immemorial. And your grandfathers killed my grandmother. You are pestilent invaders. Get out or we will have a just war against you. B to A Our people have lived here from time immemorial. And your grandfathers killed my grandmother. You are pestilent invaders. Get out or we will have a just war against you. Clearly, it is easy to imagine a situation in which both A and B are factually correct, except perhaps in their use of the word just. Most complex interaction situations requiring application of ethics and moral rules are
Re: Ethics and morals (brief addendum)
Oh and Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. That's not Christianity. That's a successful strategy in game theory.
Re: Ethics and morals (brief addendum)
I don't think there's just one successful game theory strategy. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. is a kind of a planning-ahead strategy if you believe that others are going to use tit for tat. Maybe? And besides, I'm talking about a strategy that is beneficial to the group (and to group members indirectly thereby. Not a strategy that is most beneficial on average to the individual at each encounter. Frank wrote: Actually, the successful game theory strategy is tit for tat which would be quivalent to: an eye for an eye
Re: Are conscious beings always fallible?
How would they ever know that I wonder? Well let's see. I'm conscious and I'm not fallible. Therefore ;-) David Barrett-Lennard wrote: I'm wondering whether the following demonstrates that a computer that can only generate thoughts which are sentences derivable from some underlying axioms (and therefore can only generate true thoughts) is unable to think. This is based on the fact that a formal system can't understand sentences written down within that formal system (forgive me if I've worded this badly). Somehow we would need to support free parameters within quoted expressions. Eg to specify the rule It is a good idea to simplify x+0 to x It is not clear that language reflection can be supported in a completely general way. If it can, does this eliminate the need for a meta-language? How does this relate to the claim above? - David I don't see the problem with representing logical meta-language, and meta-metalanguage... etc if necessary in a computer. It's a bit tricky to get the semantics to work out correctly, I think, but there's nothing extra-computational about doing higher-order theorem proving. http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/HVG/HOL/ This is an example of an interactive (i.e. partly human-steered) higher-order thereom prover. I think with enough work someone could get one of these kind of systems doing some useful higher-order logic reasoning on its own, for certain kinds of problem domains anyway. Eric
Re: Modern Physical theory as a basis for Ethical and Existential Nihilism
Sorry. Can't help myself : Is there any point in completing that term paper really? On a few points. I don't believe in the point of view of nihilism because everything will happen in the multiverse, anyway, regardless of what I do.. My reasons are a little vague, but here's a stab at it: 1. I look at us group of human observer SAS's as results of and guardians of emerged complex order in our universe. In fact I believe our universe (its temporal arrow etc) is only observable because it is the set of paths through the multiverse that has all this emerged complex order in it.I believe these potentially observable sets of paths through the multiverse's general disorder are rare (of small measure.) 2. Somehow, all of us human observers are clearly in or observing the SAME set of paths through the multiverse. Now that is significant. It tells us that in the emergent-order paths of multiverse info-state evolution, that those paths are observable consistently to ANY observer that emerges as part of the emerged complex order present in those paths. 3. I see humans (or other intelligent lifeforms) as in some strange ways the smart-lookahead guardians of the particular piece of emergent-order their most a part of (their planet, their ecosystems, their societies, themselves).The reason we emerged (or are still here) is because we have helped make our emergent complex system successful (robust). 4. For some strange reason, I value the most complex yet elegant and robust emergent order (for itself). This is why for example, I'm an environmental activist in my spare (hah!) time. 5. I think if one values elegant, robust complex order, and if one is an active part of the elegant, robust, complex order, who emerged precisely so that a SAS of the emerged system could sense and make sense of the surroundings, and could model and influence the future, and guard the SAS's own existence and that of the whole emerged system of which it is a part, then guard away I say, actively, not nihilistically. Model your world. Predict its different possible futures, and use your emerged (and cultivated, same thing) wisdom to steer yourself, and your society, and your ecosystem, and your planet, away from harm and too-soon reduction to entropy. In the very, very end, it is said, entropy wins (like the house wins in Vegas.) But why not have as good a game as possible before it ends in a billion or trillions of years. 6. Of course, it doesn't make sense to try to protect (and advance in elegance) an emergent order that is indeed truly robust, does it? But my point back there was that we are supposed to be part of the emergent system's self-defense mechanism, because we can think and plan, and change things in our universe. 7. So can we change the multiverse as a whole? Probably not. But all that observers can ever co-observe is a single self-consistent universe in the multiverse. Look at earth and earthlife like a surfboard and surfer surfing this big coherent wave of informationally self-consistent order that is our universe. What we as the surfer can do is look ahead, and steer the board, and prolong the ride, and make it as amazing as possible before it tumbles into the vortex. That's enough control to say let's delay nihilism til the very last possible moment at least, shall we. Let's see where we might wash up if we keep riding well. Enough. Enough. This tortured analogy is killing me. 8. You may say that there's all these other virtual doppelganger surfers and surfboards (even on our same order-wave universe) so why bother steering anyway? One of us will make it. Yeah well I don't think so. I think all the emergent systems kind of compete with each other to organize things, and there's winners and losers, and the losers are all just info-noise. 8. I guess the above is premised on the supposition that we CAN steer. That we have any say over when and how our part of our universe degrades into entrop (info-noise.) This is really vague but I have some strange sense that what observing AGENT (actor) systems such as ourselves are doing is choosing (or having a part in choosing) the way in which their quantum world becomes their classical world. I think there's the possibility of free will there. It's like their steering the NOW wavefront itself (in their shared universe). If the possibly ordered paths through multiverse infospace near these observers are more than one possible path, maybe its the observers, by the sum total of their collective actions, that micro-manage the choice of future info-paths that will still be consistent with the path(s) their all on. Maybe the set of possible consistent and ordered paths is narrower and narrower as time goes on for them, but I think there are still choices to be made. It's possible that that's an illusion, but choice being an illusion is a concept for the theoretical meta-level, for OUTSIDE our universe path. Inside our path(s), our paths and the
The Facts of Life
CMR wrote: Indeed. The constraints to, and requirements for, terrestrial life have had to be revised and extended of late, given thermophiles and the like. Though they obviously share our dimensional requisites, they do serve to highlight the risk of prematurely pronouncing the facts of life. Just to be mischievous, I'll here pronounce the facts of life or more precisely a sketch of a theory of the emergence of life which will serve the purpose of partially constraining/ defining what is meant by life. This is a hobby project. The Emergence of Life Via Weak (Stochastic) Physical Pattern Replication == Definitions: pattern a form of order or regularity, which can be described by a finite and usually simple set of constraints. living organism is a subtype of spatially organized pattern of matter and energy with some distribution for a time period in some spatial region in otherwords, of physical pattern in space-time. ecosystem or supporting environment of an organism is also a subtype of physical pattern in space-time. species is also a subtype of physical pattern in space-time, ranging over a larger span of time than an organism pattern, and which includes instances over time of the subpatterns of the species pattern that constitute the individual organisms of the species. Abstract: - The natural selection process that results in the evolution of lifeforms as we know them can be extended backwards in time further than is traditionally assumed, to fully explain the emergence of life from chance-occurring patterns of matter and energy. A model of the form of this earliest natural selection process is presented, in terms of three specific weakenings of the self-replication and metabolism processes that lifeforms exhibit. Characteristics of a living organism: --- 1. It self-replicates (aka reproduces). Part of what this means is that the organism assimilates surrounding matter and energy so that they become part of its species pattern, if not necessarily of its own individual organism pattern. 2. It metabolizes. It ingests matter and energy and converts them to a form more directly usable for the maintenance of the form and function of the organism pattern and for its reproduction. 3. It is an autonomous agent (within some environmental constraints.) The matter and energy that is inside the organism pattern can replicate the pattern, and metabolize pattern-external matter and energy, in a relatively diverse set of surroundings, compared to its own form and function constraints anyway, and it can do these things substantially by itself so long as an appropriate supporting environment (which may not itself qualify as an organism but has some form and function constraints itself) is maintained near it. In a sense, this autonomous replicating and metabolizing criterion just helps us define a boundary around what matter and energy is the organism to and what is its environment. Thesis --- 1. Before there was strong individual-organism self-replication, there was weak (stochastic) replication of weakly constrained (and possibly physically dispersed) pre-organism patterns of matter and energy. The only property (constraint on form and function) that these patterns had to exhibit was just enough probability and frequency of just as roughly accurate pattern reproduction so as to maintain the order (i.e. the pattern constraints) of the pre-species pattern against the various forms of pattern-dissolution attacks that occurred in its environment. These attacks don't need to be explained much. They are comprised just of a.. the natural tendency of any physical system to increasing entropy (disorder) and b. active processes of dissolution of the pattern or its resources in its supporting environment where those active processes are the result of the actions of competing weakly-replicating, weakly-metabolising physical patterns in the vicinity. 2. Before there was strong organism-internalized metabolism process, there was weak (stochastic) pseudo-metabolism. That is there were processes of energy conversion (and temperature regimes and matter mobility regimes (e.g. liquid phases) ) IN THE VICINITY OF A WEAKLY REPLICATING PATTERN which were such as to support the (at least probabilistic) carrying on of the weak replication process of the pattern. That is, early metabolism could be defined as happening both within and in the environment of the pattern. Since the weakly replicating pattern initially may have been somewhat spatially distributed, and only stochastically present at various time intervals, it's just as well that we don't require that the pattern-supporting energy conversion processes (heat-engine processes) be carrried out initially entirely WITHIN the pattern (pre-organism) itself. Weak Replication and Weak Metabolism Concepts
Re: The Facts of Life and Hard AI
CMR wrote: I think it's useful here to note that from the strong AI point of view life as it could be is empahasized as opposed to life as we know it. It's also worth pointing out that the latter is based upon a single data point sample of all possible life, that sample consisting of life that (apparently) evolved on our planet. Given that, defining life in the universe, and certainly in all universes, based only upon that sample is speculative at best. (Unless, as some claim, our biosphere is truly unique; I doubt this is the case). Just to be clear I'm not at all attempting to dis the possibilities of hard artificial intelligence. I studied it to postgrad-level in the past, and would hope to be able to work in that field for real some day. The Emergence of Life paper is talking specifically about those sorts of life that can emerge WITHOUT THE ASSISTANCE OF AN ALREADY SMARTER, MORE-ORGANIZED AGENT. That's why that kind of life (natural life) is a truly emergent or (emergent from less-order) system. One way of looking at A.I. is that it may become in some attributes life-like (I prefer just to say it will become a true cognitive agent i.e. a true thinker (active modeler) without NECESSARILY also independently being a fully self-sufficient life-form. If WE can be considered part of the environment of AIs, then they are a life-form that uses US to reproduce (at least initially). It's traditional to think of the environment of a lifeform as less ordered than the lifeform itself, so this AI case, where the environment includes extremely ordered self-emergent SAS's (ourselves) is a little bit strange situation and it's hard to categorize. With AI, it's probably best just to say that there is another emergent system emerging, which is (at this stage) a combination of humans (the human-species pattern and its behaviours) and the software (informational) and computing hardware technological/cultural artifacts we produce, acting together to form the new emergent system. People do talk about AI computers/robots and nano-tech, in combination perhaps, becoming self-sufficient (self-replicating and self-advancing/adapting independent of their human creators.) I have no trouble believing that this is in-principle possible. I just want to point out that the properties for true long-term sustainability of pattern-order are HARD (difficult, onerous) requirements, not easy ones. Natural life (in the admittedly single case we know) is highly constrained because of the constraints on its long-term survival and incremental improvement in a less-ordered environment. It seems easier (but is it much easier really?) to get AIs to self-improve/self-sustain purely as virtual (informational) patterns or entities (i.e. as software and data ie. pure-informational entities/thinkers/knowledge-bases) rather than as informational/physical hybrids as we are. I suppose some of the people on the everything-list, myself included, may see the distinction between informational and physical as more just a matter of degree than of substance, so this is a puzzling area. Certainly both human-built computers and physical machines (robots eg mars rovers, nanobots etc) have a long way to go, not only in their basic FUNCTIONAL development, but perhaps more significantly and certainly more difficultly in their ROBUSTNESS (lack of brittleness) AND EVOLVABILITY ( META-EVOLVABILITY?) criteria, and their raw-material choice (natural life uses primarily the most commonly occurring-in-the-universe chemically-bondable elements (hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen etc) for good reason), before they could hope to be very self-sustainable. It is interesting to speculate that the mechanisms available to a future AI robot/nanotech-conglomerate/web-dweller for self-adaptation might be far more flexible and wide-ranging than those available to early natural life on Earth, because we are building AI's partly in our image, and we, after all, by becoming general thinker/planners (information maestros if you will) have managed to increase enormously the range of ways we can adapt the environment to our needs. (Caveat: As an eco-aware person however I can tell you the jury's out on whether we're doing this to system-survival-levels of sophistication, and the jury's leaning toward guilty of eco-cide - or more precisely guilty of severe eco-impoverishment and disordering). BTW I'm most excited today in the AI field by the possibilities that the combination of the WWWeb's information as accessed via google (and similar) and AI insights/technologies will have. The web is not a big distributed brain yet, but it could get there. Eric
Computational complexity of running the multiverse
Georges Quenot writes: I do not believe in either case that a simulation with this level of detail can be conducted on any computer that can be built in our universe (I mean a computer able to simulate a universe containing a smaller computer doing the calculation you considered with a level of accuracy sufficient to ensure that the simulation of the behavior of the smaller computer would be meaningful). This is only a theoretical speculation. Hal Finney responded: What about the idea of simulating a universe with simpler laws using such a technique? For example, consider a 2-D or 1-D cellular automaton (CA) system like Conway's "Life" or the various systems considered by Wolfram. One of the issues is the computational complexity of "running all the possible i.e. definable programs" to create an informational multiverse out of which consistent, metric, regular, observable info-universes emerge. If computation takes energy (as it undeniably does WITHIN our universe), then an unfathomably impossibly large amount of "extra-universal" energy would be required to compute all info-universes. (def'n qubitstring = a bitstring capable of simultaneously holding all of its possible values i.e. all possible combinations of 1s and 0s in a bitstring of that length) For example, say that we have a relatively tiny info-multiverse consisting of a qubitstring where the qubitstring is only 1 billion bits long. i.e. It simultaneously exhibits (if queried appropriately) any of (2 raised to the power 1 billion) different information-states. Now lets imagine computation upon this qubitstring multiverse, in order for a god-computer to "tour" some set of info-states of the qubitstring in some "time-order" in order to simulate the operation of some universe within the qubitstring multiverse. Let's further imagine that the god-computer doesn't like to discriminate amongst its potential universes within the multiverse qubitstring, so it wants to try (just the next computation step, for now, in) all possible computations upon the multiverse qubitstring. How many ways of choosing the next computational step are there? Again, there are 2 to the power 1 billion ways at each step. So if the god-computer wants to simulate only 1 million discrete-computing-steps (defined as different-info-state-selecting steps) of each universe simulation, but to to do this for all possible "potential universes i.e. state-change traces" in the billion-qubit multiverse, then the number of ways of doing this (and we're saying all of these ways are going to get done, because the god-comp is non-favoring of one potential universe over another), the number of ways of simulating a million comp-steps in each universe is (2 to the power (1 million billion).) (express as 2 ^ 1,000,000,000,000,000) This "number of possible computing-step-sequences to compute all of these million-step-old universes is the same as the number of computing-steps NECESSARY to compute all these universes. - Now lets make the numbers more realistic. Our current universe has the following statistics (roughly!) # of protons = 10 ^ 78 # of material particles and photons = 10 ^ 88 (give or take) Entropy H = 10 ^ 88 = "the log of the number of possible velocities and positions of the material particles and photons" Bitstring length needed to represent a single "instantaneous state" of our universe IS THE SAME AS THE ENTROPY, so the bitstring needed to represent a "shortest distinguishable moment" of our universe is 10 ^ 88 bits long. So the qubitstring needed to "simultaneously" represent all possible moment-states of our universe is also 10 ^ 88 bits long. So, how many "shortest-distinguishable-moments" have their been in our universe since the big bang anyway? Well the shortest distinguishable moment of time is the Planck time unit = 10 ^ -43 seconds. And there have been 3 x 10 ^ 60 Planck time units in our own universe's lifetime so far. So, putting it all back together in the qubitstring-computational framework, The number of possible ways of choosing computing steps, to compute all possible info-universes up to those universe evolution stages of the same age and particle+photon population and entropy as ours is: (+- fudge factors): (Drum-roll please.) 42 (just kidding, it is.) 2 to the power (Entropy * the number of distinguishable time moments) = 2 to the power (bitstring-length * the number of distinguishable info states in each universe's sim. computation i.e. history) = 2 to the power ( (10 ^ 88) * (3 * 10 ^ 60) ) = == 2 to the power (10 ^ 148) (approximately) Which is the number of computing steps that must be done to compute the simulations of the histories of all possible universes of comparable age and particle population and entropy as our own. == - So
Re: Computational complexity of running the multiverse - errata
Eric Hawthorne wrote: So probably, the extra-universal notion of computing all the universe simulations is not traditional computation at all. I prefer to think of the state of affairs as being that the multiverse substrate is just kind of like a very large, passive qubitstring memory, capable of holding the qubits, that is of exhibiting, if appropriately queried, the different bit values in the information states (all 10 ^ 148 information-states in the histories of universes as big and old as ours, that is.) Correction: That last part should read: (all 2 ^ (10 ^ 88) information states that could be the instantaneous state of all possible universes as big and old as ours, that is.) Eric
Re: Tegmark is too physics-centric
Kory Heath wrote: Tegmark goes into some detail on the problems with other than 3+1 dimensional space. Once again, I don't see how these problems apply to 4D CA. His arguments are extremely physics-centric ones having to do with what happens when you tweak quantum-mechanical or string-theory models of our particular universe. Well here's the thing: The onus on you is to produce a physical theory that describes some subset of the computations of a 4D CA and which can explain (or posit or hypothesize if you will) properties of observers (in that kind of world), and properties of the space that they observe, which would be self-consistent and descriptive of interesting, constrained, lifelike behaviour and interaction with environment and sentient representation of environment aspects etc. My guess is that that physical theory (and that subset of computations or computed states) would end up being proven to be essentially equivalent to the physical theory of OUR universe. In other words, I believe in parochialism, because I believe everywhere else is a devilish, chaotic place. You can't just say there could be life and sentience in this (arbitrarily weird) set of constraints and then not bother to define what you mean by life and sentience. They aren't self-explanatory concepts. Our definitions of them only apply within universes that behave at least roughly as ours does. You'll have to come up with the generalized criteria for generalized N-D SAS's (what would constitute one) before saying they could exist. Eric
Re: Peculiarities of our universe
Hal Finney wrote: One is the apparent paucity of life and intelligence in our universe. This was first expressed as the Fermi Paradox, i.e., where are the aliens? As our understanding of technological possibility has grown the problem has become even more acute. It seems likely that our descendants will engage in tremendous cosmic engineering projects in order to take control of the very wasteful natural processes occuring throughout space. We don't see any evidence of that. Similarly, proposals for von Neumann self reproducing machines that could spread throughout the cosmos at a large fraction of the speed of light appear to be almost within reach via nanotechnology. Again, we don't see anything like that. So why is it that we live in a universe that has almost no observers? Wouldn't it be more likely on anthropic grounds to live in a universe that had a vast number of observers? Could be that 1. It's extremely rare to have a window for biological evolution to our level. (I highly recommend the well written basic-level but accurate and comprehensive new book called Origins of Existence by Fred Adams ISBN 0-7432-1262-2 which gives a complete summary of what had to happen for our emergence, and all the many ways how things could have gone differently, very few of which would lead to life anything like we know it.) 2. We're a distinguished member of the successful evolvers in the first available window-of-opportunity club. 3. If you believe 1 and 2, then note that we ourselves have not yet made galactically observable construction projects or self-replicating space-probes. Sure, we talk, but we haven't put our money where our mouth is yet. The (few, lucky to have emerged unscathed) other intelligent lifeforms in our observable universe may also not have done this within out lightcone (space-time horizon) of observability yet.
Re: Why no white talking rabbits?
Hal Finney wrote: What about a universe whose space-time was subject to all the same physical laws as ours in all regions - except in the vicinity of rabbits? And in those other regions some other laws applied which allow rabbits to behave magically? While this may be possible, we seem to have found so far that the universe admits of many simple regularities in its complex systems and its fundamental laws. Therefore many of the essential properties (future-form-and-behaviour-determining properties) of these complex systems admit of accurate description by SIMPLE, SMALL theories that describe these simple regularities in the complex systems. I challenge you to come up with a simple, small, (thus elegant), and accurately explanatory theory of how space-time could be as you propose above, and also how this wouldn't mess up a whole bunch of other observed properties of the universe. My point is I don't think you (or anyone)'d ever be able to come up with a small, simple, yet explanatory theory of the white rabbit universe you suggest. AND THAT THEREFORE, at least according to how we've always seen the essential aspects of the universe conform to simple elegant theories and laws before, THE RABBITS SCENARIO (bizarrely strange yet still straightforwardly observable spacetime pockets) IS UNLIKELY TO BE THE TRUE STATE OF AFFAIRS in the universe. Could such a bizarre universe exist? Well possibly, (I personally think not an observable one), but in any case it would be a highly difficult universe (unmodellable with simple models) and physicists would be unemployed in that universe, as their predictions based on simple, clever theories would never turn out to work. Magicians and wizards (those able to pretend they'd been responsible for the last bit of observed extreme weirdness) would hold sway. Eric
Why no white talking rabbits?
Jesse Mazer wrote: Why, out of all possible experiences compatible with my existence, do I only observe the ones that don't violate the assumption that the laws of physics work the same way in all places and at all times? Because a universe whose space-time was subject to different physical laws in different regions would not have been able to generate you and sustain you, or more precisely I suppose would only be able to generate and sustain you with infinitesimal probability. And it would be even more highly unlikely that should you have been magically conjured by this inconsistent-or-inconstant-physical-laws universe, that you would observe any other people (or rabbits, white or otherwise) because they themselves would have only infinitesimal probability of being magically, coincidentally conjured into that universe. It's better to find the all of the essential constraints (all the way back to 10^-43 seconds after the big bang) which made it highly probable that you (or something like you) would exist in the universe, and then explain how those constraints are all consistent with each other and with information theory, and then to realize that a set of constraints HAS TO BE consistent with (all of) each other and with information theory and with making your (or equivalent creature's) existence highly probable, in order for you to actually exist with any high probability. By the argument de facto, I think it's safe to say that things in the universe are such that people (or functional equivalents) are highly probable to exist on a small but significant set of planets (those with the right temperature ranges and proportions of different elements) in the galaxies in our observable portion of the universe. It is ONE HELL OF A DETAILED SET OF CONSTRAINTS that made all of this (us) highly probable, White talking rabbits with watches are inconsistent with those constraints, in ways too boring perhaps to get into. Ok, since we're way down here in the post, I'll get into it. General intelligence of human-like level (involving ability to hypothesize, abstract flexibly, construct a wide variety of functional, purposeful constructions out of raw materials, and plan actions and consequences in detail), only evolves by natural selection in critters that are physically equipped to DO SOMETHING with their intelligence. For a rabbit, it's pretty much limited to hopping about in more complex patterns to avoid being eaten, based on some kind of vastly intelligent psyching out of where its preditor is going to strike next, and to determining where to find the very best places to find the most nutritious and tasty grass. This is too limited a domain to require or select for a general, long-range constructing and planning mind-firmware to develop in a rabbit brain.. Another favorite of mine is why dolphins and whales are KIND OF intelligent (like a poodle or parrot is) but not extremely...So what, we're going to develop more complex tricky ways to bump things with our snouts? I don't think so. Group hunting (in a too-easy, too uniform, too acceleration-constrained-because viscous fluid habitat) is as complex as dolphin brains ever need to be. Cheers, Eric
Re: Is the universe computable?
Frank wrote: Indeed, I've always thought there was a dubious assumption there. There isn't a universal time to pace the clock tics of a simulation. Relativity forbids it. Anyway, time is a subjective illusion. Back to the question: So what happens when the simulation diverges from regularity? Some possibilities: a) The universe ends b) Pink elephants pop up everywhere c) It's already happening I like (c) Ok. How about: The multiverse is a very long qubit-string. (This is an informal statement to drive intuition.) Being a qubit string it simultaneously exhibits all of its potential information-states. If there is something like this qubitstring simultaneously exhibiting all possible information states, then note that to do computation, within that qubit-string, no actual computational process need take place. Any tour through any subset of the information states (i.e. visiting one information-state after another after another...) can be considered equivalent to a computation. Any tour through a subset of the information states which is such that the direction of the tour is restricted to only those successor information-states Si+1 (of the state Si we're currently at) which are different from Si by only a single bit-flip in a single position in the bitstring, and where that bit-flip would only happen based on some function of only the state of the bits in a local vicinity of the flipping bit, can be considered equivalent to a computation which is comprised solely of localized operations, similar to the kinds of computation we understand. So the universe (or any observable universe) could be a tour through a subset of the information-states of the qubit-string multiverse, which is such that the tour computes only self-consistent spaces and objects, perhaps using only local computational steps (part this computational locality is part of the secret of ensuring consistency, locality, metric etc properties of the space and the objects, prehaps). Observers which were self-aware substructures WITHIN the set of objects computed in a consistent tour, maybe can only observe other information states which are also within that tour. TIME AND LIGHTSPEED As Wolfram postulates, the concept of time and speed of light c within such an informational universe may be related to how fast the informational changes (from one state to another) can propagate (across the qubitstring) using only local computations as the medium of state-change propagation. It is wrong to suppose that this implies computational time outside of the qubitstring. How fast state-change propagates is purely a question of how the metric spacetime that the consistent tour defines can evolve in form within a consistent tour. The tour itself could be imagined to be real if you like (with the qubitstring really in some god-quantum-computer-thingy which has a god's-now-program- pointer which moves from state to state in the consistent tour). But it is better to think of the consistent tour as a virtual tour, an abstraction, defined by nothing more nor less than its BEING a subset of information states, and an order of traversal of those (very large) information states which is such that the ordered set of information-states IS and CONJURES reality. OBSERVERS, AND TOUR-TRAVERSAL AS THE TIME ARROW FOR OBSERVERS An OBSERVER is a set of local subsets of the some of the set of information-states in the consistent tour which is the universe. The notion of locality there is information-distance. OBSERVERS can observe any aspect (part) of the information states in the tour which has the following properties: 1. The observable substates must be within a light-cone of the observer. Photons or waves of light are information travelling through the set of information-states. They are closely related to the putative local computations which are imagined as defining sensible localized change between sets of information states. So the observable substates are those that are reachable from the observer states by local computations. These observation computations are computations that can affect the observer-part of the now information-state based on the prior-to-now configuration of other adjacent-to-the-observer parts of the prior-to-now information states, with the information moving at a speed of one local computation (or is that one bitshift) per information-state-distance in the consistent tour. Confusing? Yes I'm confused too. This bit's hard. (Pun intended) 2. Argument 1 implies that only parts (in some informational locality to the observer within the information-states) of PRIOR-IN-THE-TOUR information-states can be observed by the observer. That's what being in the light-cone from the observer implies: 1. Informationally-local to the observer's own states, and also 2. PRIOR in the consistent tour to the now-in-tour state of the observer. In fact we will stand these arguments on their heads now, and say that
Re: Why is there something instead of nothing?
In the spirit of this list, one might instead phrase the question as: Why is there everything instead of nothing? As soon as we have that there is everything, then we have that some aspects of everything will mold themselves into observable universes. It is unsatisfying though true to observe that there of course cannot be a case in which the question itself can be asked, and there simultaneously be nothing in that universe. I'm with the last respondent though in thinking that the right answer is that there is BOTH nothing and everything, but that the nothing is necessarily inherently unobservable by curious questioners like ourselves. Norman Samish wrote: Why is there something instead of nothing? Does this question have an answer? I think the question shows there is a limit to our understanding of things and is unanswerable. Does anybody disagree? Norman
Re: Why is there something instead of nothing?
Norman Samish wrote: ... I don't understand how there can be both something and nothing. Perhaps I don't understand what you mean by nothing. By nothing I mean no thing, not even empty space. I think of it this way. 1. Information (a strange and inappropriately anthropocentric word - it should just be called differences) is the most fundamental thing. 2. The plenitude, or multiverse (of possible worlds) can be conceived of as the potential for all possible information states or in other words, all possible sets of differences, or in otherwords, an infinite length qu-bitstring simultaneously exhibiting all of its possible states. 3. In that conception, nothing is just the special state of the qu-bitstring in which all of the bits are 0 (or 1 - there are two possible nothings, but they are equivalent, since 1 is defined only in its opposition to 0 and vice versa.) That is, in that conception, nothing is a universe in which there is no difference, and thus no structure. i.e. That state of the bitstring has zero entropy, or zero information. So it is truely nothing. 4. but that special state of the qu-bitstring is only one of the 2 to the power (bitstring-length) simultaneously existing information-states of the qu-bitstring. And some of the other sets of information-states are our universe (i.e. something.) and similar universes (everything? or at least everything of note.)
Re: Quantum immortality - pragmatics again.
All this talk of quantum immortality seems like anthropocentric wishful thinking to me. You are a process. All physical objects are best understood as slow processes. A life process is a very complex physical pattern, which is an arrangement of matter and energy in space-time, that has properties that allow it to cannibalize other matter and energy in its vicinity to retain its form for a while, but only for a while... The kind of process, or pattern, that you are has built-in time limits in it, which have to do with the imperfect maintenance of order in your bodily subprocesses (cellular processes). In other words, the kind of hoops that (Earthly) organic processes go through to be self-reproducing, and form-differentiating, and non-destructively evolvable, and so forth, seem to have limitations in their perfection of operation, as far as maintaining the existence of the individual organism. The individual organism's form does not HAVE to persist immortally, to ensure persistence of the self-reproducing pattern (species, ecosystems) as a whole. In fact it would be counterproductive to the persistence of the species and ecosystem as a whole if the individual organism patterns persisted indefinitely. So the pattern rules allow the intercession of disorder to eventually destroy each individual organism pattern. (When that process has run its useful (i.e. reproductive, and possibly meme-contributing) course.) I cannot imagine an alternate possible world in which a process would be constructed essentially as you are (as your process is), and yet would somehow miraculously avoid the cell replication errors and cell replication cessation that comes with age in our organic bodies. It would seem to be that only ridiculously small-measure scenarios could permit this kind of implausible immortality of organic structures, at least or organic structures bearing any great similarity to ours.
Social issues with replicated people
Readers of this list interested in issues of personal identity in the face of replication might enjoy the Sci-Fi novel Kiln People by David Brin. In the novel, a technology has been discovered that allows a person's soul standing wave (sic) to be copied into a kind of bio-engineered clay substance (molded into a shape like you and animated by some kind of enzyme-battery energy store that gives it about a day or two of life before expiry. ) These ditto people come in different qualities (more expensive to get a super-smart, super-sensitive version of yourself, cheap to get a worker-droid rough copy with fuzzy thinking capabilities and dulled senses.) The novel, apart from being a hard-boiled detective yarn in this world, explores issues of identity, and how social conventions and rights and responsibilities change with the presence of replication of personalities. Brin's one of the good writer sci-fi writers.
A random collection of questions about info-cosmology
Some of these questions may be profound, and some silly. (In fact, they may be sorted in order of profound to silly.) My education is spotty in these areas. I'm most interested in specific references that help answer (or destroy) these questions. 1. What test could determine if a computational hypothesis holds? 2. Is it enough that a theory be elegant and explain all the known physics observations, or does the test of the theory also have to rule out all competing theories, or at least force all known competing theories to add ugly complex terms to themselves to continue to work? 3. Is it not true that the kind of computation that computes the universe or multiverse must be an energy-free computation, because energy itself is INSIDE the computed universe, and it would be paradoxical if it also had to be OUTSIDE. 4. What range of energy regimes and physical laws are required to produce spontaneous order where the order retains the dynamism required for life. (e.g. as opposed to producing one big, boring crystal.) 5. Do these special energy regimes and physical law sets NECESSARILY produce spontaneous order with the required dynamism? 6. Why does spontaneous order emerge in these energy/law regimes? 7. If we were in a possible world where thermodynamics ran backwards (entropy decreased), would the time-perception of observers within that world also run backwards? Would these backwards worlds (as far as classical physical observations go, anyway) thus be equivalent to and theoretically equatable with the corresponding possible world which was the same except that thermodynamics runs forwards as we are used to? 8. What is the significance of the fact that observers like ourselves (possibly with some notion of free will) are separated in space and can only communicate / cooperate with each other at the speed of light. They cannot interfere with some decisions that the other makes, because the other has already made the decision before a lightspeed communication can tell them or force them to stop. Imagine Jane on Venus and Joe on Mars getting into an argument. Immediately after receiving Joe's last communication (which he sent an hour ago), Jane decides to detonate her solar-system bomb in frustration and spite. Nothing Joe can say or do can stop her, because it will take two hours for him to know she's about to push the button, and communicate his desperate and well-crafted plea for forgiveness. The idea of FUNDAMENTALLY independent decision makers co-existing seems interesting. Open ended question. It's just as if Joe and Jane lived at different times. (And yet they CAN communicate with each other, just slowly. Hmmm)
Re: Unsolicited weirdness
Could someone please send to the list and/or this lunatic the instructions for unsubscribing from the list. My old machine's disk crashed taking my email archive with it so I don't have the removal instructions. Thanks Eric Frank Flynn wrote: the devil is watching you I put a curse on all of you that bad thing will happen to you and your love ones you may die to bad keep on sending me these email and the curse will get stronger so get fucked
Re: Quantum accident survivor
Yes, this is Quantum Immortality in a nutshell. If the MWI is correct, it is impossible to die from a subjective point of view. Hooray! Yes but there can be no communication from one possible world to another (thus no cross-world awareness), because, think about it, if I could communicate with another world, then the other world would by definition be in my world (where I define my world as all parts of the universe that I can influence with a lightspeed communication), so it would just be some other part of my world. Oops. The bottom line is that if there are other possible worlds existing, they can be of nothing other than theoretical interest to us. Damn. So try to avoid running into any creatures weilding large scythes or other sharp implements tonight. Eric
Re: multiverse paradox of a number of posts back
Someone wrote: The paradox consists of the fact that the theory of multiverses tells us that there must be infinite observers who experiment other physical laws. There is not only the possibility of being wrong, it is the model itself which proves to be wrong. In fact it tells us that there are infinite places and times in this multiverse where, if any people observe the world around them in the same way we are doing hic et nunc, they necessarly find another model to describe the universe. So the outcome of the model is that it must be wrong in infinite places and times, and the paradox is that we have proved that it is wrong, but we have been able to draw this conclusion because we have considered the hypothesis of applying the physical system itself. But if it was wrong, the conclusions would be wrong, too. Apologies to long-time list members for re-iterating like a broken record... I think when people speculate about other universes in the multiverse, they continually fail to grasp the likely extremely constrained nature of OBSERVABLE universes. An observable universe MUST be structured/defined so as to be capable of evolving self-aware substructures (SAS's) such as ourselves, in order for it to be in-principle observable. I posit that these constraints are EXTREMELY ONEROUS. No, this is not some naive anthropocentrism. I'm working from intuitions about emergent systems theory, and notions of the highly constrained energy regimes in which self-organization of systems can occur (At least, self-organization of systems that have properties likely to lead to coherent observer-systems.) IT COULD BE that all alternative people MUST be seeing a universe very similar to ours, or indeed possibly EXACTLY ours, simply because otherwise their self-organization would NECESSARILY break down in their universe, and they couldn't observe. In other words, it COULD be that there is only one OBSERVABLE POSSIBLE world. Now that's an extreme, I admit, but I think it's closer to the truth than imagining infinite numbers of really weird, unimaginable observers in really weird, unimaginable alternative universes. The main point is that the constraints required to produce EMERGENT SYSTEMS that can be classified as what we think of as OBSERVERS may be, again EXTREMELY onerous, extremely possibility-constraining constraints. There may be, in the imagination, other weirdo observers coming up with a weirdo model of the universe, but maybe some inconsistency in the notion of their existence (as complex, stable systems in a complex yet stable habitat) in their world means that they simply CAN'T exist. Eric
Re: Ideal lamps
Perhaps you've heard of Thompson's Lamp. This is an IDEAL lamp, capable of INFINITE switching SPEED and using electricity that travels at INFINITE SPEED. Is it pedantic of me to point out that this is an IDEAL lamp, i.e. one which only exists as an idea, and one which, because of its transcendence of the speed of light, can never exist in our universe? Therefore, there are probably many fanciful or mathematical answers which work within one ideal, abstract, mathematical model of the situation or another. These models must all be incorrect models of known reality however. I'm with Hal. The question doesn't mean anything about the real world. This just means I'm too lazy to try to figure it out, but sometimes that's the right answer. Eric
Re: Ideal lamps
Like I said, in mathematics, there MAY be an answer, depending what mathematical theory you choose. Even within mathematics, there may be questions that don't have an answer, and are ill-formed, and only seem well-formed because they seem to read ok in informal English. Without your extra axiom, for example, the question is infinity odd or even is not well-formed, because infinity is not a number, and only numbers (integers) can be odd or even. (CAVEAT: IANAM) Eric
Re: Fw: Something for Platonists
Lennart Nilsson wrote: But in fact, the only thing that privileges the set of all computational operations that we see in nature, is that they are instantiated by the laws of physics. It is only through our knowledge of the physical world that we know of the di.erence between computable and not computable. So it's only through our laws of physics that the nature of computation can be understood. It can never be vice versa. I don't agree. I think computability is a pure abstract property describing the reachability of some states (or state descriptions) from others via a set of incrementally different states (or state descriptions). I think computability is tied to notions of locality. But computability may define locality and not the other way around. Eric -- We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. - Oscar Wilde
Re: are we in a simulation?
Stephen Paul King wrote: [SPK] Oh, ok. I have my own version of the anthropic principle: The content of a first person reality of an observer is the minimum that is necessary and sufficient for the existence of that observer. I am trying to include observer selection ideas in my definition of anthropy. ;-) I conjecture that the third-person aspect could be defined in terms of a so-called communication principle: An arbitrary pair of observers and only communicate within the overlap or set theoretic intersection of their first person realities. To me, that is too complicated a theory. I think reality is a structure/system that is a set of paths through the plenitude, where those paths exhibit properties like self-consistency, coherence, locality, stability, energy etc. That structure can contain observers that can observe the very structure they are part of, precisely because of those properties of self-consistency, coherence, locality, stability etc that the structure (i.e. those paths through a state-space plenitude) exhibits. Every observer will see the structure from their own limited point of view (from their place and time within it) so there will be disagreements about it, but fundamentally, the observers (those who can observe and communicate with each other) are within the same structure and are viewing parts of the same thing. If that is physicalist I don't know. It still seems purely mathematico-logical to me. But I'm just positing a larger structure that is a commons that is observed by parts of itself. I think this is Tegmarkian anthropy. Look at it this way. The content of reality of an observer is (their limited perspective on) the minimum (self-consistent structure) that is necessary for themselves, and all the other observers they observe, and for the whole sustaining environment for them and the physics that produced it, to exist. I wrote this just before much better and my email client flipped out and killed it. So sorry for the sleepy, angry, more muddled version you got. Eric -- We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. - Oscar Wilde
Re: Are we in a simulation
My corollaries to: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. 1. Any sufficiently detailed and correct reality simulation is indistinguishable from reality. 2. Any artificial consciousness which communicates in all circumstances within the range of communication behaviours of conscious humans, is indistinguishable from a human consciousness. Further to 1. - Because reality may be a set of programs selected from the plenitude of all possible state changes, a programmed simulation of it, if it was really any good, would essentially be reality. In fact, there is perhaps a law that any completely precise simulation of reality is identical to reality, by definition. Further to 2. - The qualia of consciousness (i.e. the feeling or experience of consciousness and how sense data seem to us) are only explainable to other conscious beings through communication and observable behaviour. The only but compelling reason to assume that others experience essentially the same kind of qualia that you do (their red is like your red) etc. is that the simplest theory would say that since our brains are similar, and, since communication assures us that the behaviours of our minds (yours and mine) are similar, then the qualia are also similar. A theory that postulated substantial differences in qualia-experience for different people would be hard pressed to explain why it is different. You don't have to explain why qualia-experience is similar from person to person. That's just the simplest (and thus the default) theory. Since all qualia of consciousness, and all other results of consciousness, are only explainable to or able to be made evident to other conscious beings via communication and other behaviours (i.e. through patterns in I/O), we might be forced to say that it is impossible in principle to prove the existence of anything in human consciousness that is different than the consciousness of an artificial mind that communicated and behaved indistinguishably from a conscious human (in all kinds of circumstances, contexts.) Consciousness's only manifestation outside itself is via I/O. If the I/O patterns are indistinguishable, it is simplest to say that the consciousness processes themselves are essentially equivalent. 8-Count --- I fall twisted. I lie at a strange angle. I stand corrected. The punchline came out of nowhere. Eric -- We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. - Oscar Wilde
Response to R.Hlywka's brain/mind comments
R Hlywka wrote: There are so many things we need to take into consideration. Genetics. We are born with a specific preprogramed set of organization and hardware. the way the neurons are preorganized, and the way they go about utilizing and organizing and transfering specific information. We are predisposed if you will. However, there's also nurture. Even from starting in the womb, we recieve biorythms of our mother, which our whole body sets to. What she ingests, the anxieties she feels. We feel. Not that it's a good or bad thing. Yes. Ok. I left out some details. One way of looking at it though is that the brain evolved from hard-wired control-system hardware to become a more and more general information processor. This must have something to do with the fact that the terrestrial environment has lots of different opportunities for an ecological generalist with opposable thumbs, if only that generalist can figure out what to do (how to behave) in novel situation-types. You could even say that the human brain (cortex?) has distinguished itself from the brains of other animals by the evolution of this general computing capability (and the consequent ability to do abstract thinking, situation-modelling with hypotheticals, conceptualizing, precise but extensible linguistic commucation, introspection etc.) even if (granted) the general computing ability is employed in habitual and stereotypical ways most of the time, and is optimized to support those habitual or instinctual patterns. Many other animal species share with us the hard-wired or firm-wared kinds of behaviours that you ascribe to our brains. We have gone further than any of them in generalizing the information-processing and storage capabilities of our brains so that they are turing-equivalent AND ALSO still optimized for carrying out instinctual behaviours, albeit in creative ways. You brain is so much more than a computer.. think of it like a galaxy or even it's own universe. I think that's going a little far in the Carl Sagan direction. This all brings up more questions. What about memory transfer. We code our memory by the continious rearangement of pathways. Unless you could copy the coding and rearrangement, decode it by that persons CODING... I don't remember claiming (maybe someone else claimed) you could copy a mind. I do believe we'll eventually be able to build them, (and not out of traditional organic materials) but if we do build them, then once each A-mind starts processing and assiimilating information from its uniquely situated point-of-view and its unique experiences/learning sessions, then it will become different from all other A-minds and from all other human minds, in the same way that ours are different from each other because of nurture. There would be ways to mimic differences in built-in biases, preferences, cognition-optimization-directions etc as well, if that was useful for groups of A-minds. The task is not only to understand what a human brain does in the process of its being/becoming a mind. The task is to figure out IN GENERAL what being a mind is and to figure out how the human brain is doing THAT and also what are all the things that something other than a human brain would have to do to be also doing THAT. Eric
Re: 2C Mary - Check your concepts at the door
My physics is decades-old first-year U level (I'm a computer science type). But if I'm not mistaken, there's no such thing as a 2C speed, or a 2C closing of separation between two objects. All speeds can only be measured from some reference frame that is travelling with one of the objects (say A) or another, and no other object (say B) can be observed to be closing at faster than C. Similarly, if we're measuring the approach speed of A from our reference frame that is travelling with B, we can never observe A approaching at greater than C. I'm not really sure how this relativistic stuff impinges on the rest of your argument. I've always held out the weirdness of what happens to the concept of speed at high speeds to be an example of the limited domain of applicability of every concept idea. i.e. speed only makes sense at low speeds, paradoxically enough. Similarly, color wouldn't make sense below the size of wavelengths of light, etc. What this tells us is that words (terms) e.g. speed, color, right-wing zealot make sense only within delineated contexts. (e.g. the latter term probably is hard to apply to slugs, but then again... ok it is really hard to apply to rocks sensibly..) Words are descriptions which arguably only make sense within a (theory - in the formal-logic sense) or at most within a closely related cluster of similar theories. Theories just being possibly large but finite self-consistent logical descriptions of lots of things and relationships between those things. Every theory has a domain of discourse that it can be said to be about. It may be a very broad domain of discourse, but there will always be perfectly valid and coherent other concepts and theories whose domains of discourse bear no relationship (or no essential relationship) whatsoever to the domain of discourse of the first theory. -- We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. - Oscar Wilde
Re: 2C Mary - How minds perceive things and not things
Colin Hales wrote: The real question is the ontological status of the 'nothing' in that last sentence. I am starting to believe that the true nature of the 'fundamental' beneath qualia is not only about the 'stuff', but is actually about all of it. That is, the 'stuff' and the 'not stuff'. So. Anyone care to comment on the ontological status of 'not thing'? I believe our brains and minds are difference engines. What they do is respond in a feedback loop with perceptual signals in such a way as to continually sort things, by the single rule of this is more different from that than it is from that, so I'll represent that comparative level of difference (in a compact way that can be stored and retrieved quickly). In other words, it organizes its internal representation of what's out there so that the more different, less different relations between representational symbols in the brain are as close as possible to mirroring the more different, less different relations among chunks of reality. Objects in the world, for example, are individuated (their boundaries from other objects determined, and thus the extent that their identity applies to) on the basis of a rigorously mathematical, and simple, algorithm of these are the best clusters of all kinds of similarities and their boundaries are where the most differences (of many kinds) occur. This individuation by difference-measurement applies equally well when turned inward on itself to create abstract theories of abstract domains (e.g. higher math and logic, language about thoughts). I would contend that notions like abstraction into generalization-specialization hierarchies of noun and verb (thing and relationship) concepts emerge spontaneously if you simply mix a represent the differences principle with an achieve most compact representation principle. So what does all this musing about conceptualization of the world have to do with the world (universe) itself, or what that universe really is ? That's a hard one. The best I could come up with is that the multiverse or plenitude is the capacity for all differences and configurations of differences to manifest themselves. Most parts of that will be ungrokable by brains like ours because only those parts which have organized configurations of differences exhibiting space-time-like locality, energy, matter etc which behave within limits that allow formation of emergent systems of bigger, observable, simple configurations of differences will be observable universes (to difference-engine brains like ours that were lucky enough to emerge as one of those emergent systems in a hospitable energy regime. Or Whatever. -- We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. - Oscar Wilde
Re: Constraints on everything existing
My comment at the bottom of the message. Eric Jean-Michel Veuillen wrote: Eric Hawthorne wrote: Unless a world (i.e. a sequence of information state changes) has produced intelligent observers though, there will be no one around in it to argue whether it exists or not. Then our universe did not exist before there were intelligent observers in it, which is not true. I think that is better to say that all self-consistent mathematical structures exist. To restrict existence to universes containing SASs (self-aware structures) is not only is very cumbersome but leads to contradictions. Perhaps we're just quibbling about terminology. My argument for a narrower definition of exists would be that if everything (or even just everything self consistent) exists, then perhaps existence in that sense is not that interesting a concept. So I posit that a better definition of exists or classically exists is: self-consistent, and metric and organized to the degree to be observable Notice that this does not require is observed. It requires would be observable if observers happened to be around. So our Earth 3 billion years ago was still observable in this sense, even though we weren't there yet. So, in otherwords, I define exists as that which is an aspect of a structure which is of the form/behaviour as to be, in principle, observable. I think we will be able to define a set of properties (stronger than just self-consitency) that will define in principle, observable. -- difficult exercise. All other self-consistent mathematical structures are, to me, just potentially or partially existent, because there is something wrong with their properties that would make them, in principle, unobservable. Vague statement building up this intuition: The operative question is whether a mathematical structure can only be abstract (without observable instantiation) or whether it can also be tract. I would argue that these other less-than-existent self-consistent mathematical structures may be part of quantum potentiality but can never be part of an existent world that exhibits classical physical properties. Eric
Re: Constraints on everything existing
John M wrote: Eric: do I detect in your 'circumstances' some 'anthropocentric/metric/logic' restrictions? is the multiverse exclusively built according to the system we devised on this planet as 'our physical laws'? (your 'factor' #1, although you oincluded in factor #2 the (CLASSICAL existence) modifier.) Brings to mind Mr Square's opponents in Abbott's Flatland, with the 2-D vs 3-D joke. It may seem that way (anthropocentric) but when I say intelligent observer I mean any kind of intelligent observer or couched in some more terminology any emergent system or pattern that functions as an intelligent observer. So no, I'm not talking about a human-centric anthropic principle, I'm talking about an arbitrary intelligent observer, generically defined. As you would expect, I would guess that there are some pretty tight constraints on how an intelligent observer would have to function to be considered such, but human is definitely too narrow a definition of it. I see intelligent observer production as being a threshold level of organization achieved by certain constraint regimes on all sequences of state changes. Of course, as a thought experiment, you could set a lower threshold criterion for fully existing worlds, such as the ability to be organized enough to produce some interesting (non-trivial) stable emergent systems that seem to exhibit some higher-level functions including self-preserving functions. Unless a world (i.e. a sequence of information state changes) has produced intelligent observers though, there will be no one around in it to argue whether it exists or not. Which brings us around to the conclusion that after all, the question of classical existence or not of some world is only ever a concern of intelligent observers. It is not really a concern for the non-thinking aspects of worlds or potential worlds, precisely because those parts are content to just be, or maybe be, as the case may be. Those parts are just the potential for information. Only when something comes along that cares to conceptualize about the various possibilities borne of different states of information, does there arise a question of existence, and then, it is a question of existence from the perspective of those that can observe and care about such things.
Counter to a simple SWI Fermi argument
On the likelihood of detecting alien intelligences: (single-world case) 1. It is an enormously stupid conceit of us to assume that aliens would be broadcasting, or tightbeaming something like analog radio signals, for communication. We ourselves have only being doing that for 100 years, and will be ceasing to do it before the next 100 are up, having switched to a combination of closed fibre-optic and massively spread-spectrum (i.e. noise-like) digital radio. 2. We have not built dyson spheres, nor are we likely to. There were a number of crazy megaproject engineering fantasies that we had for the first few short years after we discovered how to build with reinforced concrete, and Dyson spheres were one of them. (As were those incredibly ugly but functional 60s and 70s concrete skyscrapers. The first crude phalluses erected using a new but not completely mastered building technique. I'd like to think that we have a slightly more refined sense of megaproject risk analysis now that will prevent us doing quixotic projects like Dyson spheres. 3. We can barely detect planets the the size of Jupiter around nearby stars today. Why would we be able to detect non-radiating dyson spheres? Wouldn't we mistake them for black holes at the least? 4. The life span of a higher mammal species (clad, actually i.e. tree of derived species i.e. branch of evolution) like ours is estimated in biology to be 5 to 10 million years, and we're a significant way through our tenure, so we'd better hurry up sending out those self-replicating V-ger robot probes all over the place for them to be detected a million years hence. We'll probably be gone (as a species and clad) by the time the reply arrives.
Re: Possible Worlds, Logic, and MWI
Re: possible worlds in logic. Logic (and its possible worlds semantics) says nothing (precise) about external reality. Logic only says something about the relationship of symbols in a formal language. Remember that the reason non-sloppy mathematicians use non-meaningful variable-names (i.e. terms) is to avoid names that connote something in the world and would lead one astray in understanding the precise formal semantics of the mathematical formulae. e.g. of problematic meaningful variable names: one = 2. two = 2. four = 4. therefore, one + two = four. This strict anonymous symbols interpretation is how one must treat formal logic and propositions expressed in formal logic too. Every time I read someone bemoaning how logic has difficulty with expressing what is going to happen in future, I think, why would you expect a formal system of symbols to have anything to do with future time in reality? As far as I know, there is no good formulation of a formal connection between a formal system and reality -unbalanced quotes, the secret cause of asymmetry in the universe. How's that for a quining paragraph? Is there? For example, truth is defined in formal logic with respect to, again, formal models with an infinite number of formal symbols in them. It is not defined with respect to some vague correspondence with external reality. Someone was writing about correspondence theory with this goal in mind many years back, and that sounded interesting. I haven't read Tegemark et al. What do they say about the formalities of how mathematics extends to correspond to, or to be? external reality? To me, there is still a huge disconnect there. E.g. again, Godel's incompleteness theorem is a theorem about the properties and limitations of formal symbolic systems. The original theorem says nothing whatsoever about reality itself, whatever that may informally be, nor about the limitations of human minds, unless we take minds to be theorem provers working on formal symbolic systems.
Re: Possible Worlds, Logic, and MWI
Interleaving... POINT 1 For example, truth is defined in formal logic with respect to, again, formal models with an infinite number of formal symbols in them. It is not defined with respect to some vague correspondence with external reality. Actually, science is just about such correspondences with external reality. I haven't argued that logic alone is a substitute for science, measurement, experimentation, refutation, correction, adjustment, model-building All I was saying is that the semantics that define the meaning with respect to each other of symbols and symbol-relationships is formal and, within each given well-formed framework, inarguable. whereas the semantics of the mapping of formal models to their supposed subject is not, itself, formal (yet anyway), and hence is suspect as to whether we understand it or get it right all the time. With science, all we have is: this formal symbol system (theory) A seems to correspond better to our current observations than any competing formal symbol system (theory) B (that we've conceived of so far), so we'll consider A (as a whole) to be TRUE i.e. the best observation-corresponding theory (for now.) This scientific process works pretty well but is somehow loosy-goosy and unsatisfying. Do theories which replace other older, now discredited theories, keep getting better and better? Probably yes. But what is the limit of that? Is there one? Or a limit in each domain about which we theorize? But hold on, most of the scientific revolutions tell us that we had a nice theory, but were theorizing about a badly-scoped, badly conceptualized idea of what the domain was. A better theory is usually a better set of formal, interacting concepts which map to a slightly (or greatly) differently defined and scoped external domain than the last theory mapped to. None of this is very straightforward at all. For example, would you go out on a limb and say that Einstein's theories are the best (and only true) way of modelling the aspects of physics he was concerned with? If so, would you be equally confident that his theories cover essentially all the important issues in that domain? Or might someone else, someday, re-conceptualize a similar but not 100% overlapping domain, and create an even more explanatory theory of fundamental physics than he came up with? Can we ever say for sure, until that either happens or doesn't? You can interpret the history of science in two ways: either we were just really bad at it back then (in Newton's day) and wouldn't make those kind of mistakes in our theory formation today, or you can say, no we're about as good at it as always, maybe a little more refined in method but not much, and we'll continue to get fundamental scientific revolutions even in areas we see as sacrosanct theory today. And the new theory will not so much disprove the existing one (as Einstein didn't really disprove Newton) but rather will be just relegating the old theory to be an approximate description of a partially occluded view of reality. And then one day, will the same thing happen again to that new theory? Is there an endpoint? What would the definition of that endpoint be? (SILLY) POINT 2 As far as I know, there is no good formulation of a formal connection between a formal system and reality -unbalanced quotes, the secret cause of asymmetry in the universe. How's that for a quining paragraph? I don't understand your secret cause of asymmetry in the universe point. We understand some things about symmetry breaking in particle physics theories, via gauge theories and the like. If you want more than this, you'll have to expand on what you mean here. It is a Koan (kind of). A self-referential, absurd example of a notion that an imbalance in a formal symbol system (the words I'm using, and the quotes) could possibly be the cause of asymmetry in the physical universe. It is an attempt to highlight the problems we get into when we confuse the properties of a model with the properties of the thing we are TRYING to model with it. Quining is the use of self-reference in sentences, often to achieve paradox. It is a childish ploy. e.g. of a Quine: Is not a sentence is not a sentence.
Re: The Mind (off topic, but then, is anything off topic on this list?)
John M wrote: Eric, your proposal sounds like: here I am and here is my mind . What gave you the idea that the two can be thought of as separate entities? The fact that we differentiate between a bowel movement and a thinking process in philosophy ... does not MAKE them separate entities. Eric's first law of abstraction: (known variously as the trivially profound law or the profoundly trivial law:) Every two things are both the same and different. Bowel movements and mental processes. They are both physical processes in the body, it's true. The difference is that a mental process is in its essence a process of representation (re presentation) of reality and similarly structured potential realities. That is, it is a process of using some aspect in the brain as a stand-in for some aspect of the external world. And it is a process of doing so in a way that is flexible and general enough to allow the generation of representations (mental stand-ins) of new hypothetical or counterfactual states of the external reality, as well as of actual states. Thus we can think of how things we have not directly apprehended might be, and how things that haven't yet taken place could be, if only this would happen, or, sadly but instructively, of how things might have been. Models of the mind: Back when 90% of the world and its behaviour was unknown and attributed to God, the mind and soul was thought to be an earthbound, temporarily trapped part of the greater mind of God. During the early industrial age, the mind was thought by some to be the process of operation of a machine comprised of cogs and gears and things like steam power. And today, we believe that the brain is a computer and the mind is software. The conventional wisdom is that this theory is as naive as the earlier theories; that we are similarly deluded by our present-day fetish with computers. But I think this dismissal of brain-as-computer, mind-as-software is facile. I think our theories of mind have been improving over time. The brain IS a form of machine, as the 19th century people thought. And much more specifically, the brain IS a form of universal computing machine, as we think today. Let me ask this. What category of machine do we have that can hold in it symbolic representations that have correspondences with aspects of the external world? What category of machine do we have whose representations of the world are manipulable and malleable in ways that can correspond to changes in the state of the external world? The computer of course. What part of the computer stores the representations of the world? Well I guess we could say its disk and memory. But what part of the computer performs the manipulations on the symbols which sometimes correspond to the formation of hypotheses about the state of the external world? It's not really part of the computer at all. It is the software. The historical thinker who came closest to understanding the nature of the mind was undoubtedly Plato, who first understood a world of abstract concepts, his world of ideals. The only thing he didn't know is that you could build a machine (the computer) capable of holding inside itself and manipulating those ideals, and that in fact we already had a particularly sophisticated form of that type of machine on top of our shoulders. Our brains. Where is Plato's world of ideals? He didn't know. We do. It is the representative and asbstracted representative information about the world stored symbolically in our brains, manipulated by the cognitive software running on our brains. The brain-mind duality is solved (and now officially boring). If you can say that you truly understand: 1) the distinction between computing software and computing hardware, 2) issues such as what makes one piece of software different from or the same as another versus what makes one piece of hardware different from versus the same as another, 3) What the relationship of computing software to computing hardware 4) How the essential particulars of high-level software gain independence from particulars of computing hardware through the construction of hierarchies of levels or layers of software process with emergent behaviours at each level, and yet you claim not to know what a mind is with respect to a brain, then I would say you're just not thinking hard enough about the issue.
Re: The Mind (off topic, but then, is anything off topic on this list?)
See response attached as text file: Joao Leao wrote: Both seem to me rather vaccuous statements since we don't really yet have a theory, classical or quantum or whathaveyou , of what a mind is or does. I don't mean an emprirical, or verifiable, or decidable or merely speculative theory! I mean ANY theory. Please show me I am wrong if you think otherwise. If you don't like my somewhat rambling ideas on the subject, below, perhaps try A book by Steven Pinker called How the Mind Works. It's supposed to be pretty good. I've got it but haven't read it yet. Eric - What does a mind do? A mind in an intelligent animal, such as ourselves, does the following: 1. Interprets sense-data and symbolically represents the objects, relationships, processes, and more generally, situations that occur in its environment. Extra buzzwords: segmentation, individuation, cutting the world with a knife into this and not-this (paraphrased from Zen The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) 2. Creates both specific models of specific situations and their constituents, and abstracted, generalized models of important classes of situations and situation constituents, using techniques such as cluster analysis, logical induction and abduction, bayesian inference (or effectively equivalent processes). Extra buzzwords: structure pump, concept formation, episodic memory 3. Recognizes new situations, objects, relationships, processes as being instances of already represented specific or generalized situations, objects, relationships, processes. The details of the recognition processes vary across sensory domains, but probably commonly use things like: matching at multiple levels of abstraction with feedback between levels, massively parallel matching processes, abstraction lattices. Extra buzzwords: patterns, pattern-matching, neural net algorithms, constraint-logic-programming, associative recall 4. Builds up, through sense-experience, representation, and recognition processes, over time, an associatively interrelated library of symbolic+probabilistic models or micro-theories about contexts in the environment. 5. Holds micro-theories in degrees of belief. That is, in degrees of being considered a good simple, corresponding, explanatory, successfully predictive model of some aspect of the environment. 6. Adjusts degrees of belief through a continual process of theory extension, hypothesis testing against new observations, incremental theory revision, assessment of competing extended theories etc. In short, performs a mini, personalized equivalent of the history of science forming the evolving set of well-accepted scientific theories. Degree of belief in each micro-theory is influenced by factors such as: a. Repeated success of theory at prediction under trial against new observations b. Internal logical consistency of theory. c. Lack of inconsistency with new observations and with other micro-theories of possibly identical or constituent-sharing contexts. d. Generation of large numbers of general and specific propositions which are deductively derived from the assumptions of the theory, and which are independently verified as being corresponding to observations. e. Depth and longevity of embedding of the theory in the knowledge base. i.e. the extent to which repeated successful reasoning from the theory has resulted in the theory becoming a basis theory or theory justifying other extended or analogous theories in the knowledge base. 7. Creates alternative possible world models (counterfactuals or hypotheticals), by combining abstracted models with episodic models but with variations generated through the use of substitution of altered or alternative constituent entities, sequences of events, etc. Extra buzzwords: Counterfactuals, possible worlds, modal logic, dreaming 8. Generates, and ranks for likelihood, extensions of episodic models into the future, using stereotyped abstract situation models with associated probabilities to predict the next likely sequences of events, given the part of the situation that has been observed to unfold so far. 9. Uses the extended and altered models, (hypotheticals, counterfactuals), as a context in which to create and pre-evaluate through simulation the likely effectiveness of plans of action designed to alter the course of future events to the material advantage of the animal. 10. Chooses a plan. Acts on the world according to the plan, either indirectly, through communication with other motivated intelligent agents, or directly by controlling its own body and using tools. 10a. Communicates with other motivated intelligent agents to assist it in carrying out plans to affect the environment: Aspects of the communication process: - Model (represent and simulate) the knowledge, motivations and reasoning processes of
Re: Quantum Probability and Decision Theory
Stephen Paul King wrote: it seems to me that if minds are purely classical when it would not be difficult for us to imagine, i.e. compute, what it is like to be a bat or any other classical mind. I see this as implied by the ideas involved in Turing Machines and other Universal classical computational systems. Ah, but human thinking is a resource-bounded, real-time computational activity. Despite the massive parallelism of brain computation, we are of necessity lazy evaluators of thoughts. If we weren't, we'd all go mad or become successful zen practitioners. Sure, we do some free-form associative thought, and ponder connections subconsciously in the background, but if there's one thing my AI and philosophy studies have taught me, it is that prioritization and pruning of reasoning are fundamental keys. There are an infinite number of implications and probability updates that could be explored, given our present knowledge. But clearly we're only going to do task-directed, motivationally directed, sense-data-related subsets of those inferences, and a finite amount of related associative inference in the background to support those. Therefore, if nothing else, we can't imagine what it is like to be a bat because we would have to have the reasoning time and resources to explore all of a bat's experience to get there. And it would also be difficult and probably impossible, because the bat's mind at birth would be preloaded with different firmware instinctive behaviours than ours is. Also, the bat's mind would be connected to a different though analogous set of nerves, sense organs, and motor control systems, and to a differently balanced neurochemical emotional (reasoning prioritization) system. Regarding emulating another person's experience. The trouble is, again, that you'd have to emulate all of it from (before) birth, because clearly our minds are built up of our individual experiences and responses to our environment, and our own particularly skewed generalizations from those, as much as from anything else. And again, you'd have to compensate (emulate) for the subtle but vast differences in the firmware of each person's brain as it came out of the womb. It's an impossible project in practical terms, even if the brains are Turing equivalent, which they are. You don't need to resort to QM to explain the difficulty of emulating other minds. It's simply a question of combinatorics and vast complexity and subtlety of firmware, experience and knowledge. Remember on the other hand that human linguistic communication only communicates tips of icebergs of meaning explicitly in the words, and assumes that the utterer and the reader/listener share a vast knowledge, belief and experience base, and have similar tendencies toward conjuring up thinking contexts in response to the prodding of words. (Words are to mentally stored concepts as URLs are to documents). In order to communicate, we do have to emulate (imagine) our target audience's thought patterns and current thinking context and emotional state, so that we can know which sequence of words is likely to direct their thoughts and feelings thus and so as we wish to direct them. Eric
Quantum Omni-Presents
It is well known that a classical Santa Claus is not possible, because, even with the best travelling salesperson algorithm at his disposal, Santa would have to travel faster than the speed of light to deliver presents to every household on Earth on Christmas Eve or morning, even considering the rotation of the planet and different time zones. Isn't the answer obvious? Santa claus, using the isolation of the North Pole to get some peace and quiet 11 months a year to do serious research (the 12th month being unfortunately filled with squealy violin-heavy Christmas music piped through the north pole mansion on tinny speakers), has long ago cracked the mysteries of a TOE and has reigned in the power of quantum entanglement to achieve simultaneous present delivery, and even, to the very observant, those likely to be disturbed in their sleep by a stirring mouse, to appear in every house, if in shadowy form and only for a moment. The significance of the chimney in this theory is yet to be determined. Perhaps it is the most massive object in the house on which a lock can be obtained, so that the presents aren't accidentally deposited on top of sleeping residents or out in the back yard. There are more mysteries to be solved here, clearly.
Which is more interesting? Complexity or Simplicity?
Wolfram is fascinated by the generation of complexity and randomness from simple rules, and sees this as a fundamental and unexpected observation. (As a long-time programmer, I'm puzzled by his surprise at this. My bugs often have a complex and seemingly random nature, even in programs thought to be trivially simple. ;-) But seriously, we were taught in 3rd or 4th year comp sci. that if your computing system can do IFs, LOOPs, and SUBROUTINE CALLS (or equivalent), it can compute anything that can be computed (anything that can be computed using a finite number of computing steps operating on finite data, that is). It is a universal computer. It is not really surprising at all to a programmer that some simple combinations of IFs LOOPs and SUBROUTINE calls can start to generate assymetric output, which when fed back in as input data can lead to non-linear systems and complexity, and even randomness, in a hurry. - Wolfram criticizes current scientific theories, almost all based on simple mathematical equations, as being able to model only the simple and regular aspects of systems. These aspects, he seems to imply, might in many cases not be the most interesting aspects of the systems. We are only describing those aspects, and those particular systems, he says, because simple regularities are all that our pathetically limited mathematical equation toolbox allow us to describe. And there is so much more interesting complexity to the world, which cellular automata can better emulate. - But what if, in general, irregular complexity is boring, and it is only really fundamental simplicities, and emerged simplicities, that are interesting? What if mathematical-equation-based science was right all along? Alright. Overly simple arrangements might be a little dull (limited in capacity for interesting properties or behaviours) too. What if there is a kind of interesting range of complexity of system. A system characterised by simplicities and order sufficient to ensure some regular structures (identifiable system components, hierarchical organization of components) and regular behaviours, but with enough constrained complexities of interaction between components to make the system capable of a range of non-trivial behaviour and interaction with other systems or components. Is this a kind of system that is only of interest to us with our particular human interests? Or is there anything more fundamentally important about systems with particular levels or arrangements or mixes of order and complexity? Are there, for example, any general rules about the mix of simplicity, order, and complexity (arrangements of entropy) that can produce higher-level emerged systems which may have properties of being identifiable, sustainable or recurring, instrumental in even higher level systems etc. This is way out there stuff vaguely sketched. I know. In any case, I tend to agree with Kurzweil's criticism of Wolfram that Wolfram doesn't focus enough the issue of how we find rules that produce the emergence of higher-level order (simplicities, but with enough mobility to be interesting). Wolfram, he says, focusses purely on the generation of arbitrary complexity, and that's only part of the picture.
Re: The universe consists of patterns of arrangement of 0's and 1's?
Stephen Paul King wrote: Dear Russell, Neat! I have been thinking of this idea in terms of a very weak anthropic principle and a communication principle. Roughtly these are: All observations by an observer are only those that do not contradict the existence of the observer and any communication is only that which mutually consistent with the existence of the communicators. I will read you paper again. ;-) Yes! That's exactly it. Now how about this. Observers are not constrained to observe a single path through potential-state space, but rather, are constrained to only observe )and communicate via) one of the paths (or all of the paths) that remain consistent with existence. So there is room for (a limited form of) free will and limited observation of quantum uncertainty in these theories, if necessary. Eric
Is emergence real or just in models?
I'm in the camp that thinks that emergent systems are real phenomena, and that eventually, objective criteria would be able to be established that would allow us to say definitively whether an emerged system existed in some time and place in the universe. I think the criteria would have to do with factors such as: 1. There is something systematic in evidence There is simplicity and regularity of structure and/or behaviour, when some view (with some granularity level and some inclusion/exclusion of aspects of the phenomenon) is taken of the system. Aside: Note that although the taking of the abstracted view of the system is a modelling/representation task, the fact that the real system conforms to (yields experimental observations consistent with) some simple abstract and systematic model is not a model-domain phenomenon; it is a real phenomenon. If it were not, we could not expect the real system to behave according to the model. If the real system does behave according to the model, then clearly it does have some of its real properties which correspond exactly to the abstract model properties. 2. The systematic aspects of the phenomenon emerged. The system emerged from configurations of subsystems or constituent parts, which having so configured themselves, give rise to the systematic form or behviour of the whole. 3. The simple, regular, and systematic form or behaviour of the whole, having so emerged, is generic and self-defining, in terms of simplicities, regularities etc, and so could, theoretically at least, have emerged from other constituents, by other means, in other contexts. - Some of the interesting related questions are: Why do higher-level systems emerge in our universe? Is there something about some systems that allows the system and its constituent parts to out-compete alternative configurations of matter and energy? For self-reproducing, evolving life systems, the answer seems clearly to be yes. But is it really only the genes that are selected for by natural selection, or is it also the organism as a whole system, or even whole groups of organisms which function well together. The fact that humans have outcompeted other animals of our size by 100s and 1000fold population factors on Earth may suggest that our complex co-operative systematic group behaviours, themselves, may be both a means and a subject of evolutionary success. Maybe it is because humans are so well suited to creating emergent systems (technologies, adaptive cultural behaviours) at will that we (the constituent parts of those systems) have outcompeted our competitors. (Yes, I know we're messing things up royally as we go too, but that may come home to roost and is a topic for another day and another forum.) Are high-level phenomena such as cultural memes and technological developments also systems which are selected for in a competitive evolutionary process? But is natural selection also true of any other non-living emerged systems? In some cases, the basic forces and properties of matter seem to produce emergent systems (galaxies, solar systems) which don't so much out-compete alternative configurations of matter and energy, but are the only possible configurations of matter and energy, given the rules. Nevertheless, it is still somewhat interesting that they form systems which have obvious simplicities about their form and behaviour at macro levels. Why should that be so? Any reason? Just a random collection of thoughts on the topic. --- In summary: - Properties of being systematic, simple, regular are absolute, logical properties, just as the property of being one thing versus being two things is an absolute logical property. However, just because these are logical properties does not mean that the things which manifest those properties (have isomorphic correspondences to those properties, assuming some consistent, regular individuating rules and representation rules) are not real. - Emergence of high-level systems is real (and may then be modelled and experimentally verified). - Emergent systems may have evolutionary advantages over non-systematic configurations of matter and energy, which may be one explanation for their prevalence.
Re: The universe consists of patterns of arrangement of 0's and 1's?
As I mentioned in an earlier post, titled quantum computational cosmology why don't we assume/guess that the substrate (the fundamental concept of the universe or multiverse) is simply a capacity for there to be difference, but also, a capacity for all possible differences (and thus necessarily all possible configurations of differences) to potentially exist. If we assume that all possible configurations of differences can potentially exist and that that unexplained property (i.e. the capacity to manifest any configuration of differences) is THE nature of the substrate, then a computation can just be defined as a sequence of states selected from all of the potential difference-configurations inherent in the substrate. I don't even think that this notion of a computation requires energy to do the information processing. My main notion in the earlier post was that some selections of a sequence of the substrate's potential states will corresponds to order-producing computations (computations which produce emergent structure, systems, behaviour etc). Such an order-producing sequence of substrate potential-states might be considered to be the observable universe (because the order generation in that sequence was adequate to produce complex systems good enough to be sentient observers of the other parts of that state-sequence). If we number the states in that selected order-producing sequence of substrate states from the first-selected state to the last-selected state, we have a numbering which corresponds to the direction of the time arrow in that observable universe. My intuition is that the potential-states (i.e. potentially existing configurations of differences) of the substrate may correspond to quantum states and configurations of quantum entanglement, and that selection of meaningful or observable sequences of potential states corresponds to decoherence of quantum states into classical states. Eric Stephen Paul King wrote: It is the assumption that the 0's and 1's can exist without some substrate that bothers me. If we insist on making such an assuption, how can we even have a notion of distinguishability between a 0 and a 1?. To me, its analogous to claiming that Mody Dick exists but there does not exists any copies of it. If we are going to claim that all possible computations exists, then why is it problematic to imagine that all possible implementations of computations exists as well. Hardware is not an epiphenomena of software nor software an epiphenomena of hardware, they are very different and yet interdependent entities.
Re: emergence (or is that re-emergence)
Let me first apologize for not yet reading the mentioned references on the subject, John Mikes wrote: As long as we cannot qualify the steps in a 'process' leading to the emerged new, we call it emergence, later we call it process. Just look back into the cultural past, how many emergence-mystiques (miracles included) changed into regular quotidien processes, simply by developing more information about them. I did not say: the information. Some. I don't think this is correct. A fundamental concept when talking about emergence ought to be the pattern, or more precisely, the interesting, coherent, or perhaps useful pattern; useful perhaps in the sense of being a good building block for some other pattern. Process is a subset of pattern, in the sense in which I'm using pattern. Also, system is a subset of pattern. Q: How do you know when you have completely described a pattern? Two examples, or analogies, for what I mean by this question: e.g. 1 I used to wonder whether I had completely proved something in math, and would go into circles trying to figure out how to know when something was sufficiently proved or needed more reductionism i.e. The old Wait a minute: How do we know that 1 + 1 = 2? problem. The gifted mathematicians teaching me seemed to have no trouble knowing when they were finished proving something. It was intuitively obvious -- load of cods wallop of course. And I still wonder to this day if they were simply way smarter than me or prisoners of an incredibly limited, rote-learned math worldview. The point is, every theory; every description of states-of-affairs and processes or systems (patterns) using concepts and relationships, has a limited domain-of-discourse, and mixing descriptions of patterns in different domains is unnecessary and obfuscates the essentials of the pattern under analysis. e.g. 2 Is the essence of human life in the domain of DNA chemistry, or in the domain of sociobiology, psychology, cultural anthropology? Are we likely to have a future DNA based theory of psychology or culture? Definitely not. Cellular processes and psychology and culture are related, but not in any essential manner. A: Let's define a complete description of a pattern as a description which describes the essential properties of the pattern. The essential properties of the pattern are those which, taken together, are sufficient to yield the defining interestingness, coherence, or usefulness of the pattern. Note that any other properties (of the medium in which the pattern lives) are accidental properties of the incarnation of the pattern. Note also that the more detailed mechanisms or sub-patterns which may have generated each particular essential property of the main pattern are irrelevant to the creation of a minimal complete description of the main pattern being described. As long as the property of the main pattern has whatever nature it has to have as far as the pattern is concerned, it simply doesn't matter how the property got that way, or what other humps on its back the property also has in the particular incarnation. And that level-independence or spurious-detail independence or simply abstractness of useful patterns is one of the reasons why it makes sense to talk about emergence. e.g.of level-independence of a pattern. 1. Game of Pong 2a. Visual Basic 2b. Pascal program 2c. Ping-pong table, program on PCon a Mac ball, bats, players 3a. x86 ML program 3b. PowerPC ML program3c. Newtonian physics of everyday objects 4a. voltage patterns in 4b. voltage patterns in silicon NAND gates Gallium Arsenide NOR gates (you get the idea) Key: - 1. The main pattern being described 2, 3, 4. Lower-level i.e. implementation-level or building-block-level patterns whose own internal details are irrelevant to the emergence of the main pattern, which emerges essentially identical from all three of very different lower level building-block patterns. So in summary, an emergent pattern is described as emergent because it emerges, somehow, anyhow, doesn't matter how, as an abstract, useful, independently describable pattern (process, system, state-of-affairs). A theory of the pattern's essential form or behaviour need make no mention of the properties of the substrate in which the pattern formed, except to confirm that, in some way, some collection of the substrate properties could have generated or accidentally manifested each pattern-essential property. A theory of form and function of the pattern can be perfectly adequate, complete, and predictive (in the pattern-level-appropriate domain of discourse), without making any reference to the substrate properties. This is not to say that any substrate can generate any pattern. There are constraints, but they are of many-to-many
Riffing on Wolfram
Any comments? Can anyone point me to similar speculations? Thanks, Eric A collection of thoughts (very much a work in early progress) provoked by chapters 9 and 12 of A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram. --- Caveat: The following was written hastily and in somewhat sloppy, informal terms, with casual or vague use of some arguably pseudo-scientific terms, like de-quantized or classicized by which I mean something like the process whereby a single state or average of quantum probabilities seems to take on importance so as be considered the actual state of some particle etc. after it is observed. --- Wolfram postulates that space-time is a network (of nodes and connections), manipulated by simple programs which have the characteristics that: 1. the only thing they do is make local adjustments to the configuration of the network (e.g. replace a node by 3 nodes joined by connections, erase a connection etc.) 2. They are order-invariant (causally-invariant he calls it) in their global effect. It doesn't matter which time-order the local replacement rules fire in. and he goes on to begin to prove how relativity, gravity, matter etc. work out nicely in such a model. But he doesn't say what the substrate of the universe network is, and he cannot yet fit quantum theory into his model, which got me to thinking: --- Quantum Computational Cosmology?? - E.H. 2002 --- --- --- The universe is information. More specifically, it is emergent --- order within an infinite-bandwidth signal, or in other words, is just --- a particular, priveleged view of all-possible information, all at once. --- On reading Wolfram's book, and in particular the part about physics as CAs operating on a network to produce space-time, matter, energy, I was prompted to have the following ideas. Please excuse the lack of rigour. I'm just trying to convey intuitions here and get some feedback on whether anyone thinks there's promise in this direction or if there are other references people can point me to. These questions arise: 1. What would the network of nodes and arcs between nodes, in Wolfram's spacetime-as-network be made of? i.e. what is the substrate of Wolfram's universe network? 2. How do we define the time arrow and what makes the universe as it appears to be? My essential concepts are these: Principle 1 - The substrate is simply (all possible arrangements of differences) - or perhaps put another way, the substrate of the universe is the capacity for all possible information, The fundament is the binary difference. Each direct difference is an arc, and network nodes are created simply by virtue of being the things at either end of a direct difference. Let's posit that there is a multiverse, which we can think of as all possible states of all possible universes, or as the information substrate of the universe. An information-theoretic interpretation of the multiverse might say that it is defined as: a universe with just one thing and no differences (boring) + a universe with one difference (ergo, two things) + all possible configurations of two differences + all possible configurations of three differences + etc. ----- A binary difference - the fundamental unit of information A --- B -- two things, A and B, created just by virtue of being defined to be at the opposite poles of the binary difference. To define a particular configuration of the universe, that is, a network of binary direct-difference relationships between a certain number of postulated individuals, you can use binary bits, as follows: The individual things are denoted A,B,C... A 1 in the matrix (below left) denotes that a direct difference exists between the column-labeling individual and the row-labeling individual. E D C B AB - C E 1 0 1 1 / \ D 0 0 1 equivalent to A - E C 1 0 \ / B 1D Every fundamental-level thing that exists is either at the end of a direct difference from another thing, or is reachable by some chain of direct differences from the other thing. things which are not reachable by a chain of direct differences from some other thing do not exist. So why don't we posit that the Wolfram network that describes the form of spacetime at its smallest-grained (i.e. plank-length) level is in fact comprised of nodes and arcs which have no other reality (no other material that they are made of) other than binary differences. i.e.
