Re: Belief Statements
Hi John: Sorry this took awhile - I have been very busy. At 07:49 AM 1/31/2005, you wrote: Hi, Hal, I stepped out from this discussion a while ago, because it grew above my head (or attentional endurance), but I keep reading. Now is a remark of yours I want to ask about: I defined information as the potential to establish a boundary. A kernel is the potential to establish a particular boundary. I don't work with the rigor and discipline you display, - I am no designing engineer, nor administrator of people doing such precision - I let my intuition tease me. So more than a decade ago I identified (my?) information as acknowledged difference whereby the difference was the criterion for the existence. (Your ALL Nothing don't exist in this sense, I am sorry for the kill.) Acknowledged, of course by anything. Now I think a difference involves a boundary. Without such 'implied', no diference could be establihed. I feel a clsoeness here. Do you? A bit. I do not know how to do a one for one on acknowledged. Then the 2nd part: which invokes my more recent domain: wholeness (akin to Robert Rosen's complexity concept, the 'natural' one) where I consider models as the basis for our ways of thinking, since we cannot encompass the tota;lity in our little mind. Topical and other models, maps, territories, the sciences, ideas, etc. They are in intereffect, all of them, in diverse depth as Kampis identifies it (that part is what I am concerned about lately) and it gives some(!) natural basis for the topical/scientific model-selection. The models are surrounded by their boundaries and our reductionistic observation stops right there. Neglecting the 'beyond', which leads to paradoxes, poorly understood concepts, and all the misunderstanding we can explore in discussions like this one. I feel such chosen/selected models are akin to your kernels if they are not offended by it. Within boundaries that can occasionally be trasncended if one must. The difference is that I think (my) boundaries are selected. I am not sure how to work with this. My All contains all potential boundaries [kernels] including itself, the Nothing and the boundary between them [the Everything]. This I reconciled in the An All/Nothing multiverse model thread. At this level there can be no selection. However, the dynamic internal to the All selects kernels to which it gives physical reality for awhile. (Time is another open questionmark for me, I don't feel ready to address it). Time is tough. I am struggling with it re my posted effort to understand how choice in my (2) model can function and whether or not a SAS can be explained by that functioning. I do not think an ideal clock which is - as usually conceived - just a repeated loop of relative mechanical position has anything to do with time which seems more some measure of non repeated change. This is why I think that my oil canning boundaries within a kernel having physical reality are outside time. Did I miss some important aspect of yours? I do not know. I am working on a post to bring all my recent posts together. Hal Ruhl
Re: Belief Statements
Hi All: As I indicated in my last post I now see choice as an essential part of my (2). But what do I mean by choice and how does choice operate on the dynamic? Speculation: What is my idea of choice? In my (2) choice is the ability of a kernel currently having physical reality to select in part which kernel(s) next have physical reality and this selection is not a constant while a kernel has physical reality. This is not necessarily the same as free will. I think the first thing to notice is that by my definition of kernel the boundary establishing potential of a given kernel need not be associated with a fully fixed boundary. A boundary could for example have something like oil canning dents in it. The issue re the kernel is whether it is a particular boundary not a question of whether or not it is completely static. Such flexing or partially indeterminate features of a boundary partially determine the next kernel given physical reality. That is the current condition of the current kernel when the external dynamic moves physical reality partially determines which kernel(s) receive it. Thus the external dynamic would be inconsistent with its history which is a requirement of (2). Is this free will? Free will seems to require that one oil canning dent influence the state sequence of another oil canning dent in the same kernel while that kernel has physical reality. This seems an unnecessary step up in complexity for the total dynamic but it is not forbidden by the model since within a kernel the actual oil canning of a dent and its causes are not necessarily fixed. Surely this applies to large regions of the boundary containing many oil canning dents. What is a SAS in this venue? Taken over a large enough region of the boundary the mechanism described above could account for self aware in what is actually an overall timeless moment. I will try to put this all in a post to the An All/Nothing multiverse model thread. Hal Ruhl
RE: Belief Statements
At 10:19 01/02/05 -0800, Hal Finney wrote: Bruno writes: I am not sure that I understand what you do with that measure on programs. I prefer to look at infinite coin generations (that is infinitely reiterated self-duplications) and put measure on infinite sets of alternatives. Those infinite sets of relative alternative *are* themselves generated by simple programs (like the UD). Here is how I approach it, based on Schmidhuber. OK. But remember that Schmidhuber completely dismisses the distinction between first and third points of view, and so his approach cannot be used to explain both the laws of mind, the laws of matter and the relation between them. I have explained this before. Suppose we pick a model of computation based on a particular Universal Turing Machine (UTM). All right. And with Church's thesis Schmidhuber is right to invoke the compiler theorem when he justifies such a choice is arbitrary. Imagine this model being given all possible input tapes. At once? I cannot imagine that, except under the form of a UD. This follows from the two diagonalization posts to this list referred to in my url. It is really the closure of the set of partial recursive function which makes the comp whole comp definable. I will come back on the diagonalisations. It's the pillar of all the construction I try to describe (but also of a very large part of theoretical computer science, including Li and Vitanyi). There are an uncountably infinite number of such tapes, but on any given tape only a finite length will actually be used (i.e. the probability of using an infinite number of bits of the tape is zero). To *define* (only) the program. But during arbitrary runs of even very short programs all the tape will be used. In the sense that the needed part of the tape will grow in an unboundable way, getting at deep (in Bennett sense) large strings. Those are both absolutely (or Kolmogorov-chaitin improbable but are highly probable relatively to each other sligth variant (like the work of Shakespeare which is both coin-improbable and then reflect determined universal lobian anxieties (to be short). The only measure I can make sense of is the relative (to a state) measure of the histories (= computations from some 1 or 3 point of views) going through that states. This means that any program which runs is only a finite size, yet occurs on an infinite number of tapes. This is ambiguous for me. Where on the tapes ? In company of other programs ? Finite or recursive or recursively enumerable sets of programs? The fraction of the tapes which holds a given program is proportional to 1 over 2^(program length), if they are binary tapes. Yes but you postulate an infinite random structure at the start. What is that? Taking the inside view into account gives cheaply strong form of randomness the first person comp indeterminacy). This is considered the measure of the given program. An equivalent way to think of it is to imagine the UTM being fed with a tape created by coin flips. Now the probability that it will run a given program is its measure, and again it will be proportional to 1 over 2^(program length). I don't know whether this is what you mean by infinite coin generations but it sounds similar. By some aspect: I just show how comp gives sense to infinite coin generation by iterating self-duplications. In *that* situation (which is only partial relatively to the UD) we have a random noise. And if we duplicate the populations of observers we get a locally third person (in appearance) observable random noise, like Quantum Physicist *seems* to observe (but Many-Worlders know better). I believe you can get the same concept of measure by using the Universal Dovetailer (UD) but I don't see it as necessary or particularly helpful to invoke this step. To me it seems simpler just to imagine all possible programs being run, without having to also imagine the operating system which runs them all on a time-sharing computer, which is what the UD amounts to. The UD is just a program among others but it can be shown that it *is* the simplest program generating the most complex histories (actually all). But the complexity is judged from inside, by those self-aware programs generated in the many computations generated by the UD, and distributed in the whole execution of it (UD*). Now we cannot know in which computational history we belong, or more exactly we belong to an infinity of computational histories (undistinguishable up to now). (It could be all the repetition of your simple program) And by repetition of your simple program I think you mean the fact that there are an infinite number of tapes which have the same prefix (the same starting bits) and which all therefore run the same program, if it fits in that prefix. This is the basic reason why shorter programs have greater measure than longer ones, because there are a larger fraction of the tapes which have a given short prefix than a long one. That
RE: Belief Statements
On 1 Feb 2005 Hal Finney wrote: Here is how I approach it, based on Schmidhuber. Suppose we pick a model of computation based on a particular Universal Turing Machine (UTM). Imagine this model being given all possible input tapes. There are an uncountably infinite number of such tapes, but on any given tape only a finite length will actually be used (i.e. the probability of using an infinite number of bits of the tape is zero). This means that any program which runs is only a finite size, yet occurs on an infinite number of tapes. The fraction of the tapes which holds a given program is proportional to 1 over 2^(program length), if they are binary tapes. This is considered the measure of the given program. An equivalent way to think of it is to imagine the UTM being fed with a tape created by coin flips. Now the probability that it will run a given program is its measure, and again it will be proportional to 1 over 2^(program length). It sounds like this program-to-generate-all-programs includes a mechanism whereby there is a Pr=0.5 that it will halt (and go on to the next program) as it generates each bit. This will do the job, and it will favour shorter programs, but why rely on this particular program? And if you consider not a program-to-generate-all-programs, but simply the set of all possible programs, how do you arrive at this 1/2^n measure? --Stathis Papaioannou _ Credit Card. Apply online. 60 sec response. Must be over 18. AU only: http://ad.au.doubleclick.net/clk;11046970;10638934;f?http://www.anz.com/aus/promo/first0105ninemsn/default.asp
Re: Belief Statements
I would like to offer a resolution to my issue with my (2) by indicating that choice is the essential variable that allows the dynamic of an evolving Something over kernels within the All to be inconsistent with its history. This allows both the appearance of time and the appearance of choice to be not appearances at all. Hal
RE: Belief Statements
At 12:51 29/01/05 -0800, Hal Finney wrote: On 28 Jan 2005 Hal Finney wrote: I suggest that the answer is that accidental instantiations only contribute an infinitesimal amount, compared to the contributions of universes like ours. Stathis Papaioannou replied: I don't understand this conclusion. A lengthy piece of code (whether it represents a moment of consciousness or anything else) is certainly less likely to be accidentally implemented on some random computer than on the computer running the original software. But surely the opposite is the case if you allow that all possible computer programs run simply by virtue of their existence as mathematical objects. For every program running on a biological or electronic computer, there must be infinitely many exact analogues and every minor and major variation thereof running out there in Platonia. I'm afraid I don't understand your argument here. I am using the Schmidhuber concept that the measure of a program is related to its size and/or information complexity: that shorter (and simpler) programs have greater measure than longer ones. Do you agree with that, or are you challenging that view? My point was then that we can imagine a short program that can naturally evolve consciousness, whereas to create consciousness artificially or arbitrarily, without a course of natural evolution, requires a huge number of bits to specify the conscious entity in its entirety. You mention infinity; are you saying that there is no meaningful difference between the measure of programs, because each one has an infinite number of analogs? Could you explain that concept in more detail? I am not sure that I understand what you do with that measure on programs. I prefer to look at infinite coin generations (that is infinitely reiterated self-duplications) and put measure on infinite sets of alternatives. Those infinite sets of relative alternative *are* themselves generated by simple programs (like the UD). Now we cannot know in which computational history we belong, or more exactly we belong to an infinity of computational histories (undistinguishable up to now). (It could be all the repetition of your simple program) But to make an infinitely correct prediction we should average on all computational histories going through our states. Your measure could explain why simple and short subroutine persists everywhere but what we must do is to extract the actual measure, the one apparently given by QM, from an internal measure on all relatively consistent continuation of our (unknown!) probable computationnal state. This is independent of the fact that some short programs could play the role of some initiator of something persisting. Perhaps a quantum dovetailer ? But to proceed by taking comp seriously this too should be justify from within. Searching a measure on the computational histories instead of the programs can not only be justified by thought experiments, but can be defined neatly mathematically. Also a modern way of talking on the Many Worlds is in term of relative consistent histories. But the histories emerge from within. This too must be taken into account. It can change the logic. (And actually changes it according to the lobian machine). Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
RE: Belief Statements
Bruno writes: I am not sure that I understand what you do with that measure on programs. I prefer to look at infinite coin generations (that is infinitely reiterated self-duplications) and put measure on infinite sets of alternatives. Those infinite sets of relative alternative *are* themselves generated by simple programs (like the UD). Here is how I approach it, based on Schmidhuber. Suppose we pick a model of computation based on a particular Universal Turing Machine (UTM). Imagine this model being given all possible input tapes. There are an uncountably infinite number of such tapes, but on any given tape only a finite length will actually be used (i.e. the probability of using an infinite number of bits of the tape is zero). This means that any program which runs is only a finite size, yet occurs on an infinite number of tapes. The fraction of the tapes which holds a given program is proportional to 1 over 2^(program length), if they are binary tapes. This is considered the measure of the given program. An equivalent way to think of it is to imagine the UTM being fed with a tape created by coin flips. Now the probability that it will run a given program is its measure, and again it will be proportional to 1 over 2^(program length). I don't know whether this is what you mean by infinite coin generations but it sounds similar. I believe you can get the same concept of measure by using the Universal Dovetailer (UD) but I don't see it as necessary or particularly helpful to invoke this step. To me it seems simpler just to imagine all possible programs being run, without having to also imagine the operating system which runs them all on a time-sharing computer, which is what the UD amounts to. Now we cannot know in which computational history we belong, or more exactly we belong to an infinity of computational histories (undistinguishable up to now). (It could be all the repetition of your simple program) And by repetition of your simple program I think you mean the fact that there are an infinite number of tapes which have the same prefix (the same starting bits) and which all therefore run the same program, if it fits in that prefix. This is the basic reason why shorter programs have greater measure than longer ones, because there are a larger fraction of the tapes which have a given short prefix than a long one. It's also possible, as you imply, that your consciousness is instantiated in multiple completely different programs. For example, we live in a program which pretty straightforwardly implements the universe we see; but we also live in a program which implements a very different universe, in which aliens exist who run artificial life experiments, and we are one of those experiments. We also live in programs which just happen to simulate moments of our consciousness, purely through random chance. However, my guess is that the great majority of our measure will lie in just one program. I suspect that that program will be quite simple, and that all the other programs (such as the one with the aliens running alife experiments) will be considerably more complex. The simplest case is just what we see, and that is where most of our measure comes from. But to make an infinitely correct prediction we should average on all computational histories going through our states. Yes, I agree, although as I say my guess is that we will be close enough just by taking things as we see them, and in fact it may well be that the corrections from considering bizarre computational histories will be so tiny as to be unmeasurable in practice. Your measure could explain why simple and short subroutine persists everywhere but what we must do is to extract the actual measure, the one apparently given by QM, from an internal measure on all relatively consistent continuation of our (unknown!) probable computationnal state. This is independent of the fact that some short programs could play the role of some initiator of something persisting. Perhaps a quantum dovetailer ? But to proceed by taking comp seriously this too should be justify from within. Searching a measure on the computational histories instead of the programs can not only be justified by thought experiments, but can be defined neatly mathematically. Also a modern way of talking on the Many Worlds is in term of relative consistent histories. But the histories emerge from within. This too must be taken into account. It can change the logic. (And actually changes it according to the lobian machine). I'm losing you here. Hal Finney
Re: Belief Statements
Hi, Hal, I stepped out from this discussion a while ago, because it grew above my head (or attentional endurance), but I keep reading. Now is a remark of yours I want to ask about: I defined information as the potential to establish a boundary. A kernel is the potential to establish a particular boundary. I don't work with the rigor and discipline you display, - I am no designing engineer, nor administrator of people doing such precision - I let my intuition tease me. So more than a decade ago I identified (my?) information as acknowledged difference whereby the difference was the criterion for the existence. (Your ALL Nothing don't exist in this sense, I am sorry for the kill.) Acknowledged, of course by anything. Now I think a difference involves a boundary. Without such 'implied', no diference could be establihed. I feel a clsoeness here. Do you? Then the 2nd part: which invokes my more recent domain: wholeness (akin to Robert Rosen's complexity concept, the 'natural' one) where I consider models as the basis for our ways of thinking, since we cannot encompass the tota;lity in our little mind. Topical and other models, maps, territories, the sciences, ideas, etc. They are in intereffect, all of them, in diverse depth as Kampis identifies it (that part is what I am concerned about lately) and it gives some(!) natural basis for the topical/scientific model-selection. The models are surrounded by their boundaries and our reductionistic observation stops right there. Neglecting the 'beyond', which leads to paradoxes, poorly understood concepts, and all the misunderstanding we can explore in discussions like this one. I feel such chosen/selected models are akin to your kernels if they are not offended by it. Within boundaries that can occasionally be trasncended if one must. The difference is that I think (my) boundaries are selected. (Time is another open questionmark for me, I don't feel ready to address it). Did I miss some important aspect of yours? John Mikes - Original Message - From: Hal Ruhl [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: everything-list@eskimo.com Sent: Sunday, January 30, 2005 12:33 PM Subject: Re: Belief Statements Hi Stephen: At 11:08 AM 1/30/2005, you wrote: Dear Hal, How do your kernels fundamentally differ from Julian Barbor's time capsules? I defined information as the potential to establish a boundary. A kernel is the potential to establish a particular boundary. SNIP Hal Ruhl
Re: Belief Statements
Hi Stephen: At 11:08 AM 1/30/2005, you wrote: Dear Hal, How do your kernels fundamentally differ from Julian Barbor's time capsules? I defined information as the potential to establish a boundary. A kernel is the potential to establish a particular boundary. When I said time in a previous post: In my opinion choice demands a non quantified time - that is a continuous flow in a = and there must be steps in a =. I was talking about a progression in the sequence not necessarily an ordered progression so perhaps time was the wrong word to use - it confused the issue. I am not familiar with Julian Barbor's time capsules. Do you have a URL where I could explore them? There seems to be a constant attempt by many to rework the idea of an a priori ordering, such that the universe - taken as a 3rd person representadum, or the conscious experience - the 1st person representadum, exist a priori and any notion of transitivity and change are merely some kind of illusion. I would actually prefer to work with my theory (1) but my issue here is how do I justify this given that the All and the Nothing are an [is,is not] definitional pair. Why would one member of such a pair have an existence that excludes the other. This forces me to theory (2) which seems free of choice not only in this aspect but in the aspect that the All already contains the entire ensemble of kernels. Given this I would be forced to believe (1) and that some unknown reason produces the initial existence asymmetry or invoke simplicity or some other mantra. This is, IMHO, an attempt to derive Becoming from Being. Why not try something different? Like deriving Being from Becoming? Well this may be close to describing a (the main resulting?) difference between (1) and (2) but again how do I justify using (1) which is more like Being from Becoming over (2) which is more like Becoming from Being since (2) seems more complete as a theory? Hal Ruhl
Re: Belief Statements
Hi Stephen: I took a look at Julian Barbour's time capsules and his Nows may be like my kernels but in my (2) the sequence of kernels is inconsistent with its past due to the = dynamic as I have indicated. A sequence of kernels may for a number of steps look like one could derive something fundamental for the sequence but this itself is an illusion. The inconsistent dynamic is the fundamental and contains no fundamental rules in its inconsistency let alone any that could be deduced from within the sequence. Hal Ruhl
Re: Belief Statements
Hal Ruhl wrote: Hi Stephen: I took a look at Julian Barbour's time capsules and his Nows may be like my kernels but in my (2) the sequence of kernels is inconsistent with its past due to the = dynamic as I have indicated. Barbour's idea is that there is no sequence to the time capsules at all, they all exist independently in a timeless manner. Some time capsules may contain records that appear more or less consistent with other time capsules, and the number of other capsules which have records consistent with a given capsule may have something to do with determining the probability of that time capsule, but there is no objective truth about the future or past of a given time capsule. Here's a good discussion of his theory, I don't know if you already read this one or not: http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge60.html He also wrote a book explaining his idea at greater length, called The End of Time: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0195145925/103-7046420-2415059 Jesse
Re: Belief Statements
Dear Jesse, Your description of Barbour's Time Capsules sounds about right. My problem with his idea, and may others like it, is that they seem to require some kind of ab initio preconstruction of the capsules, kernels, etc. and also some pre-existing harmony that connects them together. Becoming and derivative notions such as motion and the 1st person experience of a flow of time are all explained in terms of some illusion. The first problem I see with this is that no reason is given, other than some version of an anthropic principle, for the a priori necessity of the Illusion. Why not start of with the idea that Becoming is fundamental and use notions like Non-Well Founded streams to elaborate a hypothesis. The illusion then is explained simply as the 1st person representation of the computational aspect of the streams, ala Bruno Marchal's theory. To put it in metaphorical terms, we could say that 1st person conscious experience is how the Totality of Existence manifests/represents some finite aspect of itself to Itself. Stephen PS, this idea of mine is strongly influenced by the ideas discussed in Greg Egan's book Distress. - Original Message - From: Jesse Mazer [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: everything-list@eskimo.com Sent: Sunday, January 30, 2005 6:38 PM Subject: Re: Belief Statements Hal Ruhl wrote: Hi Stephen: I took a look at Julian Barbour's time capsules and his Nows may be like my kernels but in my (2) the sequence of kernels is inconsistent with its past due to the = dynamic as I have indicated. Barbour's idea is that there is no sequence to the time capsules at all, they all exist independently in a timeless manner. Some time capsules may contain records that appear more or less consistent with other time capsules, and the number of other capsules which have records consistent with a given capsule may have something to do with determining the probability of that time capsule, but there is no objective truth about the future or past of a given time capsule. Here's a good discussion of his theory, I don't know if you already read this one or not: http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge60.html He also wrote a book explaining his idea at greater length, called The End of Time: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0195145925/103-7046420-2415059 Jesse
RE: Belief Statements
On 28 Jan 2005 Hal Finney wrote: Here's how I look at the question of whether a bit string, if accidentally implemented as part of another program, would be conscious. . . . I would approach this from the Schmidhuber perspective that all programs exist and run, in a Platonic sense, and this creates all computable universes. Some programs create universes like ours, which have conscious entities. Other programs create random universes, which may, through sheer outlandish luck, instantiate patterns which match those of conscious entities. All consciousnesses exist in this model, and as Bruno emphasizes, from the inside there is no way to know which program instantiated you. In fact this may not even be a meaningful question. But what are meaningful to ask, in the Schmidhuber sense, are two things. First, what is the measure of your consciousness: how likely are you to exist? And second, among all of the instantiations of your consciousness in all the universes, how much of your measure does each one contribute? All well so far. I suggest that the answer is that accidental instantiations only contribute an infinitesimal amount, compared to the contributions of universes like ours. Our universe appears to have extremely simple physical laws and initial conditions. Yet it formed complex matter and chemistry which allowed life to evolve and consciousness to develop. Maybe we got some lucky breaks; the universe doesn't seem particularly fecund as far as we can tell, but conscious life did happen. The odds against it were not, as in the case of accidental instantiation, an exponential of an astronomical number. This means that the contribution to a consciousness from a lawful universe like the one we observe is almost infinitely greater than the contribution from accidental instantiations. I don't understand this conclusion. A lengthy piece of code (whether it represents a moment of consciousness or anything else) is certainly less likely to be accidentally implemented on some random computer than on the computer running the original software. But surely the opposite is the case if you allow that all possible computer programs run simply by virtue of their existence as mathematical objects. For every program running on a biological or electronic computer, there must be infinitely many exact analogues and every minor and major variation thereof running out there in Platonia. --Stathis Papaioannou _ Find love today with ninemsn personals. Click here: http://ninemsn.match.com?referrer=hotmailtagline
RE: Belief Statements
I recently posted that I seemed to have two theories re how my multiverse
might work. These are:
1) Nothing - Something = to completion.
2) {Nothing#(n) + All[(n-1) = evolving Somethings]} -
{Nothing#(n+1) + All[n = evolving
Somethings]} : repeat...
Here:
- is a spontaneous decay of a Nothing into a Something because of the
inherent logical
incompleteness of the Nothing.
= is a random path.
= is a path where each new step is inconsistent with prior steps.
In (1) choice within the Something is a necessary component of the =.
In (2) choice is precluded to avoid accumulation of net information.
My issue is that it seems one would like to base an explanation of how
worlds evolve on the presence of choice. However, since the [Nothing,All]
is a definitional pair, how does one justify selecting (1) over (2)?
In my opinion choice demands a non quantified time - that is a continuous
flow in a = and there must be steps in a =.
Hal Ruhl
RE: Belief Statements
On 28 Jan 2005 Hal Finney wrote: I suggest that the answer is that accidental instantiations only contribute an infinitesimal amount, compared to the contributions of universes like ours. Stathis Papaioannou replied: I don't understand this conclusion. A lengthy piece of code (whether it represents a moment of consciousness or anything else) is certainly less likely to be accidentally implemented on some random computer than on the computer running the original software. But surely the opposite is the case if you allow that all possible computer programs run simply by virtue of their existence as mathematical objects. For every program running on a biological or electronic computer, there must be infinitely many exact analogues and every minor and major variation thereof running out there in Platonia. I'm afraid I don't understand your argument here. I am using the Schmidhuber concept that the measure of a program is related to its size and/or information complexity: that shorter (and simpler) programs have greater measure than longer ones. Do you agree with that, or are you challenging that view? My point was then that we can imagine a short program that can naturally evolve consciousness, whereas to create consciousness artificially or arbitrarily, without a course of natural evolution, requires a huge number of bits to specify the conscious entity in its entirety. You mention infinity; are you saying that there is no meaningful difference between the measure of programs, because each one has an infinite number of analogs? Could you explain that concept in more detail? Hal Finney
RE: Belief Statements
I meant to define the symbol = as: = is a path over kernels where each new step is inconsistent with prior steps. Hal Ruhl
Re: Belief Statements
Dear Hal, What your defining seems to me to be a NOT map or else it is a mere random map. There is no consistent definition of an inconsistent map otherwise, IMHO. Please explain how I am wrong. ;-) Why not a map that is a path where the information associated with each step is consistent to some degree /delta with the information available about the prior steps? Stephen - Original Message - From: Hal Ruhl [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: everything-list@eskimo.com Sent: Saturday, January 29, 2005 3:43 PM Subject: RE: Belief Statements I meant to define the symbol = as: = is a path over kernels where each new step is inconsistent with prior steps. Hal Ruhl
Re: Belief Statements
At 06:29 PM 1/29/2005, you wrote: Dear Hal, What your defining seems to me to be a NOT map or else it is a mere random map. There is no consistent definition of an inconsistent map otherwise, IMHO. Please explain how I am wrong. ;-) I wanted to have a sequence that does not accumulate net information or have an rule that is itself net information. A random sequence has to check to see if its pattern fits some test for randomness. A path wherein each step is inconsistent with the past sequence seems to meet the requirements I desired. Why not a map that is a path where the information associated with each step is consistent to some degree /delta with the information available about the prior steps? In my opinion any such rule is net information. Hal Ruhl
Re: Belief Statements
Dear Hal, What do you propose as a means to explain the memory and processing required to be sure of inconsistency as opposed to consistency? Both options, it seems to me, require checking of some kind! All that is left is randomness, there is no such a thing as a true test for randomness that is finitely implementable! If we accept that option then we have to explain the apparent continuity that occurs in the 1st person aspect of the path. Stephen - Original Message - From: Hal Ruhl [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: everything-list@eskimo.com Sent: Saturday, January 29, 2005 7:17 PM Subject: Re: Belief Statements At 06:29 PM 1/29/2005, you wrote: Dear Hal, What your defining seems to me to be a NOT map or else it is a mere random map. There is no consistent definition of an inconsistent map otherwise, IMHO. Please explain how I am wrong. ;-) I wanted to have a sequence that does not accumulate net information or have an rule that is itself net information. A random sequence has to check to see if its pattern fits some test for randomness. A path wherein each step is inconsistent with the past sequence seems to meet the requirements I desired. Why not a map that is a path where the information associated with each step is consistent to some degree /delta with the information available about the prior steps? In my opinion any such rule is net information. Hal Ruhl
Re: Belief Statements
Hi Stephen: At 10:49 PM 1/29/2005, you wrote: Dear Hal, What do you propose as a means to explain the memory and processing required to be sure of inconsistency as opposed to consistency? It is not a logical inconsistency. What I am trying to convey is that each step in the sequence pays no attention to the prior sequence. That is a maximal inconsistency of progression to the sequence. Random and independent to me convey a testable behavior and I want to point to an untestable progression. Both options, it seems to me, require checking of some kind! All that is left is randomness, there is no such a thing as a true test for randomness that is finitely implementable! The embedding system component - the All - is already infinite, so an infinite test is containable therein. If we accept that option then we have to explain the apparent continuity that occurs in the 1st person aspect of the path. Such a path will link arbitrarily long strings of kernels that give the appearance of 1st person continuity, and this appearance can hold even if many other kinds of kernels intervene - the 1st person could not detect this. Hal Ruhl
RE: Belief Statements
At 09:41 27/01/05 +, Brent Meeker wrote: -Original Message- From: Bruno Marchal [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, January 27, 2005 2:32 PM To: everything-list@eskimo.com Subject: Re: Belief Statements With comp the mind-body relation is one-one in the body - mind direction, and one-many in the mind-body direction. It is counter-intuitive but no less than QM without collapse (Everett, Deutch). Bruno This seems doubtful to me. A mind (all minds we know of) think of themselves as associated with a body and they are so associated. As I understand your comp hypothesis it is that a mind-body can fork into two or more mind-body pairs - but it's no longer the same mind; so the relation is still one-to-one. Brent Meeker Only after the forking. Before it is, from a measure point of view, as if you were simultaneously in two equivalent computations (without this no interference-like phenomena would ever be possible). Remember the Y = II law. A forking leads two a multiplication of the computational history. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Re: Belief Statements
At 09:29 28/01/05 +1100, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On 28 Jan 2005 Bruno Marchal wrote: At 22:19 27/01/05 +1100, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: For example, if I am running an AI program on my computer and a particular bitstring is associated with the simulated being noting, I think, therefore I am, then should not the same bitstring arising by chance in the course of, say, a spreadsheet calculation give rise to the same moment of consciousness - regardless of whether the spreadsheet user or anyone other than the simulated being himself is or can be aware of this? But from the point of view of the simulated being himself he cannot have the slightest clue about which executions he is supported by. He is dispersed in 2^aleph0 computational histories and he can only bet on its most probable consistent extensions. You always talk like if the mind body relation was one-one, when with comp although you still can attach a mind to a [piece of relative object appearing in your most probable histories] the mind of the piece of relative object cannot attach an object to itself, only an infinity of such objects. With comp the mind-body relation is one-one in the body - mind direction, and one-many in the mind-body direction. It is counter-intuitive but no less than QM without collapse (Everett, Deutch). Bruno, I don't see where you think I disagree with you. I agree that a particular simulated mind may have multiple physical implementations, and that it is in general impossible for the mind to know which implementation it is supported by. I make the further point that it is not necessary, in general, for any conscious being at the level of the physical implementation to be aware that the implementation is being run, in order for the simulated being to be conscious. OK. So we can perhaps drop out the very idea that there is a physical run. I agree with Hal Finney view of the accidental running. Consciousness is attached to states together with their relative histories. Consciousness will then be related to the measure one continuations ... if the laws of physics can be derived from that. If not: comp is false. And this makes comp (in principle) testable (experimentally refutable). Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Re: Belief Statements
At 08:38 26/01/05 -0500, Tianran Chen wrote: Hal Finney wrote: I had a problem with the demonstration in Permutation City. They claimed to chop up a simulated consciousness timewise, and then to run the pieces backwards: first the 10th second, then the 9th second, then the 8th, and so on. And of course the consciousness being simulated was not aware of the chopping. The problem is that you can't calculate the 10th second without calculating the 9th second first. That's a fundamental property of our laws of physics and I suspect of consciousness as we know it. This means that what they actually did was to initially calculate seconds 1, 2, 3... in order, then to re-run them in the order 10, 9, 8 And of course the consciousness wasn't aware of the re-runs. But it's not clear that from this you can draw Egan's strong conclusions about dust. It's possible that the initial, sequential run was necessary for the consciousness to exist. I doubt this is the case. But the sequential run, actually the infinity of sequential runs, exist(s) like any runs of any partial recursive functions exists in any of those representations allowed by the arithmetical relations. From inside an observer cannot distinguish real, virtual or just arithmetical realities (it is a theorem with the comp hyp and reasonable definition of observation). First of all, I don't think you should call it law at all, since such property is indeed derived purely from the interpretation we had made so far about our world. Although these interpretations (QM, Relativity, super string and etc.) are in favor now, they are logically no more valid than Newton's physics at his time (or even now). If we all this time dependency a defect, then we (still) do not know whether it is a defect of theories we favored, or a defect of the world we are in now, or a defect of our reasoning ability, or even a resultant defect induced from some other defect of our world. Infinite (or at least very large) number of theory can be developed based on finite number of observed facts, just like infinite numer of curves can pass through finite number of common points. However, we have principles like Occam's Razor to choose between them. How do we know that some other theory may not suffer from this defect? Sure. That is why it is better to build a TOE from introspection than from observation. Then you can make it communicable in case you show it is the output of a machine belonging to a class of natural introspector. After that you can still compare with the facts. A case is made with the natural introspector played by Lobian machine (cf url below). Second, even with the physics we use nowadays, there are still simple problems that can be calculate NOT IN ORDER. For instance, the displace of a single pendular at any time can be calculate regardless of its history. Put into more formal way, there exist some turing machine that can calculate in constant (regard to the time) steps. More generally, dynamic systems and complex systems are the only thing that has history. However, many dynamic system can be translated (however messly) into simple system of equations that can be solved in constant time with some turing machine. Take gas for example, the position of each molecule is no doubt a hard problem that only expressed with dynamic system. However, if we are to talk about gas in a higher level in terms of volume, pressure, and temperature, then most problem can be expressed in simple systems that can be calculated in constant time. Finally, our physics world may be one of the limit that some problem cannot be solved in constant time. This had been talked about quite thoroughly in the discussion about super-turing computation. I don't have much to add on to that. Actually the comp hyp, once you distinguish first and third person point of views makes part of reality not turing-emulable at all, at least a priori (it is the consequence of the universal dovetailer argument). The apparent computability of physical laws must be explained and this without invoking any magical selector of substancial reality (universe). Conclusion: A world can be simulated IN or OUT OF ORDER, depending on the physics to be simulated, the world the simulator is in, and the design of the simulator (which is related to the level of intellegence of the designer in this particular case). It is not relevant. The ORDER of such simulation is defined from inside by the simulated people. From outside you need less than the block-arithmetical reality. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Re: Belief Statements
At 22:19 27/01/05 +1100, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: For example, if I am running an AI program on my computer and a particular bitstring is associated with the simulated being noting, I think, therefore I am, then should not the same bitstring arising by chance in the course of, say, a spreadsheet calculation give rise to the same moment of consciousness - regardless of whether the spreadsheet user or anyone other than the simulated being himself is or can be aware of this? But from the point of view of the simulated being himself he cannot have the slightest clue about which executions he is supported by. He is dispersed in 2^aleph0 computational histories and he can only bet on its most probable consistent extensions. You always talk like if the mind body relation was one-one, when with comp although you still can attach a mind to a [piece of relative object appearing in your most probable histories] the mind of the piece of relative object cannot attach an object to itself, only an infinity of such objects. With comp the mind-body relation is one-one in the body - mind direction, and one-many in the mind-body direction. It is counter-intuitive but no less than QM without collapse (Everett, Deutch). Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Re: Belief Statements
On 28 Jan 2005 Bruno Marchal wrote: At 22:19 27/01/05 +1100, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: For example, if I am running an AI program on my computer and a particular bitstring is associated with the simulated being noting, I think, therefore I am, then should not the same bitstring arising by chance in the course of, say, a spreadsheet calculation give rise to the same moment of consciousness - regardless of whether the spreadsheet user or anyone other than the simulated being himself is or can be aware of this? But from the point of view of the simulated being himself he cannot have the slightest clue about which executions he is supported by. He is dispersed in 2^aleph0 computational histories and he can only bet on its most probable consistent extensions. You always talk like if the mind body relation was one-one, when with comp although you still can attach a mind to a [piece of relative object appearing in your most probable histories] the mind of the piece of relative object cannot attach an object to itself, only an infinity of such objects. With comp the mind-body relation is one-one in the body - mind direction, and one-many in the mind-body direction. It is counter-intuitive but no less than QM without collapse (Everett, Deutch). Bruno, I don't see where you think I disagree with you. I agree that a particular simulated mind may have multiple physical implementations, and that it is in general impossible for the mind to know which implementation it is supported by. I make the further point that it is not necessary, in general, for any conscious being at the level of the physical implementation to be aware that the implementation is being run, in order for the simulated being to be conscious. --Stathis Papaioannou _ SEEK: Now with over 60,000 dream jobs! Click here: http://ninemsn.seek.com.au?hotmail
RE: Belief Statements
Brent Meeker wrote: For example, if I am running an AI program on my computer and a particular bitstring is associated with the simulated being noting, I think, therefore I am, then should not the same bitstring arising by chance in the course of, say, a spreadsheet calculation give rise to the same moment of consciousness - regardless of whether the spreadsheet user or anyone other than the simulated being himself is or can be aware of this? I think not. Consciousness is a narrative the brain constructs to form memories. It has a context. It is consciousness *of* something. A bitstring in a spreadsheet has a different context (unless the spreadsheet is simulation of some world) and isn't fulfilling the function of consciousness. So, how long a bitstring do you need to create a context? You could change the argument a little and consider the entire simulation of a world complete with conscious inhabitants; it would still only amount to a very long sequence of 1's and 0's running on a digital computer. If you believe in the computational hypothesis of mind, you believe two things about this computer program: (1) This sequence of binary digits has a special organisation, which can be understood as conforming to certain rules and relationships in a particular programming language; (2) Implementing the binary sequence on a digital computer results in a simulated world with inhabitants who are self-aware. You can stipulate that (1) must be true for (2) to be true, but it does not thereby follow that any conscious being in the physical world must be able to understand the details of (1) in order for (2) to be true. For example, suppose the computer language were devised by a long extinct civilization, and no-one alive now is able to understand it: should that make any difference to the simulation from inside? Similarly, if the entire computation occurs by chance in the course of another computation - a spreadsheet, a cryptography cracking program on the planet Zork, distributed throughout a computer network in tiny pieces as in the Egan story - how can the conscious beings inside possibly know this? --Stathis Papaioannou _ Click here for the latest chart ringtones: http://ringtones.com.au/ninemsn/control?page=/ninemsn/main.jsp
Re: Belief Statements
Stathis Papaioannou wrote: For example, if I am running an AI program on my computer and a particular bitstring is associated with the simulated being noting, I think, therefore I am, then should not the same bitstring arising by chance in the course of, say, a spreadsheet calculation give rise to the same moment of consciousness - regardless of whether the spreadsheet user or anyone other than the simulated being himself is or can be aware of this? Only if you believe it's the bitstring itself which is mapped to a particular conscious experience, rather than the causal pattern enacted by the AI program's computation that led it to produce that bitstring. So if you believe in psychophysical laws (to use a term I have seen some philosophers use), it depends on how these laws map facts about the physical world to facts about first-person experience. Jesse
Re: Belief Statements
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Hal Finney) To: everything-list@eskimo.com Subject: Re: Belief Statements Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2005 12:16:24 -0800 (PST) It is true that there are some physical systems for which we can predict the future state without calculating all intermediate states. Periodic systems will fall into this category if we can figure out analytically what the period is. But there are other systems where this is thought to be impossible; for example, chaotic systems. Chaotic systems are ones whose future behavior is sensitively dependent on the current state. Making even an infinitisimal change to the current state will cause massive changes in the future. I don't think it would be possible with any computational model to predict the state of a chaotic system far in the future without computing intermediate states. My guess is that consciousness as we know it is inherently chaotic. It seems like small changes to our beliefs and knowledge can lead to large changes in behavior. So often we experience being torn between alternate courses of action, where the tiniest change could tip us from one choice to the other. Neural behavior is inherently chaotic as well. Neurons are believed to sum the recent activity levels on their synapses and when this exceeds a threshold, the neuron suddenly and catastrophically fires a nerve impulse. It then goes through a refractory period (about 1 millisecond) in which it is unable to fire again until it has rested and regathered its strength, at which point it goes back to summing its inputs. If we plotted the net input strength to the neuron, it would be an irregular line with lots of little jags and bumps, and whenever it manages to exceed a certain level, there is a sudden firing. Probably we would often see the stimulation level approach that threshold line and fall back, not quite meeting the threshold, until we just reach it and another nerve impulse is fired. This kind of sensitive dependence on initial conditions is a recipe for mathematical chaos. Of course, this is not a rigorous proof, and it is conceivable that consciousness is not in fact chaotic even though it subjectively seems so, and even though its subtrate (the brain's neural net) is. Nevertheless it would be almost unbelievably bizarre to imagine that you could calculate the mental state of an 80 year old man, with all the memories of a lifetime, without actually calculating the experiences that led to those memories. In Egan's story, the computer is supposed to calculate his conscious experience of the 10th second first, then the 9th second, and so on. Suppose in the first (subjective) second he stutters on saying the number one, out of nervousness. Then the memory of that stutter will be present as he recites all the other numbers. Perhaps he will enunciate them more carefully in order to compensate. So when the system calculates that 10th second, it has to know what happened during the first second. Those events will be latent in his memories during the 10th second, and may influence his behavior. His conscious reactions to earlier events are in his memory at later times. So I don't see how it could possibly work to calculate the 10th second first. Two other minor points: in Egan's story, this experiment was not being done on dust. It was done on an ordinary computer. It was the result of this experiment, which is of course that there was no subjective awareness of the time scrambling, which was supposed to lend credence to the dust hypothesis. Second, quantum computers cannot efficiently solve NP complete problems, or at least they are not known to be able to. It's possible that ordinary computers can solve NP complete problems; no one has ever proven that they can't (this is the famous P = NP problem of computer science). And if it turns out that ordinary computers can handle them efficiently, then of course quantum computers will be able to as well, since they are a superset of ordinary computers. But if it turns out that P != NP and ordinary computers can't solve NP problems efficiently, there is no evidence that the situation will be different for quantum computers. Hal Finney _ FREE pop-up blocking with the new MSN Toolbar – get it now! http://toolbar.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200415ave/direct/01/
RE: Belief Statements
On 28 Jan 2005 Brent Meeker wrote: I'm not sure I understand the computational hyposthesis - and I certainly don't *believe* it. So you don't believe that even in principle a digital computer can be conscious? I think the challenge to this is going to come not from theoretical considerations, but from practical developments in AI in the coming decades. There will come a point where to insist that a computer is not conscious will be no more plausible than insisting you alone are conscious. (1) This sequence of binary digits has a special organisation, which can be understood as conforming to certain rules and relationships in a particular programming language; (2) Implementing the binary sequence on a digital computer results in a simulated world with inhabitants who are self-aware. You can stipulate that (1) must be true for (2) to be true, but it does not thereby follow that any conscious being in the physical world must be able to understand the details of (1) in order for (2) to be true. Sure. For example, suppose the computer language were devised by a long extinct civilization, and no-one alive now is able to understand it: should that make any difference to the simulation from inside? A good question. Another is, given any bitstring and a certain world, is there a language in which that bitstring simulates that world? Yes. This is the basic idea I am getting at. I don't see any way around it. Similarly, if the entire computation occurs by chance in the course of another computation - a spreadsheet, a cryptography cracking program on the planet Zork, distributed throughout a computer network in tiny pieces as in the Egan story - how can the conscious beings inside possibly know this? This would seem to be contrary to (1) supra - the tiny pieces not longer have a special organisation. No: they always have a special organisation, given the appropriate language, as per your point above. --Stathis Papaioannou _ Click here for the latest chart ringtones: http://ringtones.com.au/ninemsn/control?page=/ninemsn/main.jsp
RE: Belief Statements
Here's how I look at the question of whether a bit string, if accidentally implemented as part of another program, would be conscious. First, it's a little confusing what we mean by a bit string. Is this the program of the computer? A snapshot of its state? Can a program or a snapshot be conscious? Suppose that instead of talking about a bit string, we consider instead the actual sequence of states that the computer goes through. Then we could ask, if this sequence of states matched the sequence of states that was part of a conscious program, but in this case they happened accidentally as part of some other program, would they nevertheless create a consciousness? Second, even with this definition, it's an unreasonable question. That is, given what we know about the complexity of consciousness, it doesn't make sense that a computer could accidentally run a program that matched the run of a conscious simulation, for a long enough period that it would correspond to a perceptible moment of consciousness. The brain has something like 10^12 neurons and 10^15 synapses, and they'd probably have to be simulated at microsecond resolution (if not a million times smaller) to get a simulation that was at all accurate. This means that there would probably be something like 10^23 bits of information in a simulation of a tenth of a second of a human brain, if you capture all of the connectivity and timing information. There's no way that you could accidentally match a 10^23 bit pattern in this universe. Even if every sub-atomic particle in the observable universe were a computer, you'd be hard pressed to match even a 300 bit pattern by accident. The additional difficulty for the accidental match of a brain pattern is so much greater that our minds can't even conceive of how impossible it is. Third, even though it will never happen in our universe, if we believe in the multiverse then we have to admit that it will happen by accident, somewhere. So we might still want to answer the question of whether this accidental instantiation of the computation is conscious. I would approach this from the Schmidhuber perspective that all programs exist and run, in a Platonic sense, and this creates all computable universes. Some programs create universes like ours, which have conscious entities. Other programs create random universes, which may, through sheer outlandish luck, instantiate patterns which match those of conscious entities. All consciousnesses exist in this model, and as Bruno emphasizes, from the inside there is no way to know which program instantiated you. In fact this may not even be a meaningful question. But what are meaningful to ask, in the Schmidhuber sense, are two things. First, what is the measure of your consciousness: how likely are you to exist? And second, among all of the instantiations of your consciousness in all the universes, how much of your measure does each one contribute? This, then, is how I would approach the question. Not, is this accidental instantiation conscious; but rather, how much measure do such accidental instantiations contribute, compared to non-accidental ones like those we see in the universe around us? I suggest that the answer is that accidental instantiations only contribute an infinitesimal amount, compared to the contributions of universes like ours. Our universe appears to have extremely simple physical laws and initial conditions. Yet it formed complex matter and chemistry which allowed life to evolve and consciousness to develop. Maybe we got some lucky breaks; the universe doesn't seem particularly fecund as far as we can tell, but conscious life did happen. The odds against it were not, as in the case of accidental instantiation, an exponential of an astronomical number. This means that the contribution to a consciousness from a lawful universe like the one we observe is almost infinitely greater than the contribution from accidental instantiations. Therefore, I would suggest that the answer to the question of whether an accidental instantiation is conscious is simply this: it doesn't matter. Even if it is conscious, its contribution to the measure of that conscious experience is so small as to be completely negligible. Hal Finney
Re: Belief Statements
Dear Hal and Tianran, Assuming there is some aspect of consciousness that requires QM ( I side with Penrose on this) these out of order computations are impossible. This boils down to the fact that for systems that have time-like relationship with each other will have observable that are not commutative. We could ignore Penrose and make the same argument by pointing out that is the simulated consciousnesses, for example those of Alice and Bob of the EPR experiment, are to involve any hint of QM phenomena then the non-commutativity will rear its ugly head and nip off the idea in the bud. I am surprised that Greg Egan didn't notice this... Stephen - Original Message - From: Tianran Chen [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Hal Finney [EMAIL PROTECTED]; everything-list@eskimo.com Sent: Wednesday, January 26, 2005 8:38 AM Subject: Re: Belief Statements Hal Finney wrote: I had a problem with the demonstration in Permutation City. They claimed to chop up a simulated consciousness timewise, and then to run the pieces backwards: first the 10th second, then the 9th second, then the 8th, and so on. And of course the consciousness being simulated was not aware of the chopping. The problem is that you can't calculate the 10th second without calculating the 9th second first. That's a fundamental property of our laws of physics and I suspect of consciousness as we know it. This means that what they actually did was to initially calculate seconds 1, 2, 3... in order, then to re-run them in the order 10, 9, 8 And of course the consciousness wasn't aware of the re-runs. But it's not clear that from this you can draw Egan's strong conclusions about dust. It's possible that the initial, sequential run was necessary for the consciousness to exist. I doubt this is the case. First of all, I don't think you should call it law at all, since such property is indeed derived purely from the interpretation we had made so far about our world. Although these interpretations (QM, Relativity, super string and etc.) are in favor now, they are logically no more valid than Newton's physics at his time (or even now). If we all this time dependency a defect, then we (still) do not know whether it is a defect of theories we favored, or a defect of the world we are in now, or a defect of our reasoning ability, or even a resultant defect induced from some other defect of our world. Infinite (or at least very large) number of theory can be developed based on finite number of observed facts, just like infinite numer of curves can pass through finite number of common points. However, we have principles like Occam's Razor to choose between them. How do we know that some other theory may not suffer from this defect? Second, even with the physics we use nowadays, there are still simple problems that can be calculate NOT IN ORDER. For instance, the displace of a single pendular at any time can be calculate regardless of its history. Put into more formal way, there exist some turing machine that can calculate in constant (regard to the time) steps. More generally, dynamic systems and complex systems are the only thing that has history. However, many dynamic system can be translated (however messly) into simple system of equations that can be solved in constant time with some turing machine. Take gas for example, the position of each molecule is no doubt a hard problem that only expressed with dynamic system. However, if we are to talk about gas in a higher level in terms of volume, pressure, and temperature, then most problem can be expressed in simple systems that can be calculated in constant time. Finally, our physics world may be one of the limit that some problem cannot be solved in constant time. This had been talked about quite thoroughly in the discussion about super-turing computation. I don't have much to add on to that. Conclusion: A world can be simulated IN or OUT OF ORDER, depending on the physics to be simulated, the world the simulator is in, and the design of the simulator (which is related to the level of intellegence of the designer in this particular case).
Re: Belief Statements
Dear Stephen Stephen Paul King wrote: Dear Hal and Tianran, Assuming there is some aspect of consciousness that requires QM ( I side with Penrose on this) these out of order computations are impossible. This boils down to the fact that for systems that have time-like relationship with each other will have observable that are not commutative. We could ignore Penrose and make the same argument by pointing out that is the simulated consciousnesses, for example those of Alice and Bob of the EPR experiment, are to involve any hint of QM phenomena then the non-commutativity will rear its ugly head and nip off the idea in the bud. I am surprised that Greg Egan didn't notice this... Stephen Logically speaking, QM (not its interpretations) is simply a branch of applied mathematics (use the definition given by Foundation of Mathematics) that happen to agree with some observed facts. In another word, QM is a set of equations we used to describe phenomenon. If there is time dependency, then it is in the structure of those equations, not in the phenomenon. It is totally possible that later on, some totally different theories will be proposed that can describe the same set of observations and yet do not suffer from such time dependency problem. Isn't it? Let us suppose, later on, the super-string theory become favored by most serious physicsts, and let us pretend that there are some equation in the super-string theory that can support consciousness, and can be solved in constant steps with some turing machine. However unlikely, such possible shall not be ruled out. Also from another direction, isn't it possible that later some type of computation model (say quantum computer) can actually solve hard problems (say multi-body gravity problem) in constant time, then it can also simulate consciousness-supporting world out of order. I only had chance read a few sections novel, so sorry if I misunderstood some important details here. But the novel did not explicitly say which theory of physics the simulator was using, right?
Re: Belief Statements
Dear Tianran, QM is far more than a set of equations! It is a very predictive and falsifiable collection of principles and relationships. The most cunning of experimenters have been trying for almost 90 years to find a falsification, none yet has even been hinted. When a quantum gravity theory is found that unifies QM and General Relativity theory's realms of prediction, it will not contradict them, but will extend them. We see the same situation when we compare QM and GR to Newton's theory. It is one thing for a quantum computation to solve NP-Complete problems in polynomial time. It is something else to compute simulations of behaviors faster than Nature itself can complete them. The non-commutativity issue is a very important aspect of any theory that hopes to explain phenomena, it follows from the small but non-zero value of the Plank constant. From what I have studied of superstring theory (or its M-theory incarnation), the non-commutativity of canonically conjugate observables (such as position and momentum) is something that we should not expect to vanish. This is Not a time dependency, it is a concurrency problem. It involves the order of operations that naturally can not be avoided when more that one event is considered. In order to do simulations of consciousnesses that involve shuffling the ordering, it is necessary for each conscious event is computationally simulable independent of all others and this would include any possible experience including experiences of events that involes order sensitive measurements. If we could assume that all possible experienciable events exists, like a pile of shapshots, then we claim have to prove that for any given first person experience of living in a world with time there exists some sequence of snapshots that exist a priori in the pile, but this is not enough, we must be able to show the necessity of first person experiences. Why is it that I have a first experson experience of a world in which there is an asymmetry between past and future if the entire content of this experience exists priori to me? Why bother with an illusion of time? BTW, the N-boby problem is completely intractible in a world that takes Plank's constant to be zero because the number of solutions becomes infinite if the energy differences can be infinitely small. The problem is non-integrable. QM solves this problem partially by only allowing energy (involved in emmision and absorbtion events, which encompasses any and all interactions) to be integer multiples of the plank constant. All of this can be learned from a good QM for laymen book such as Roger Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind or John Gribbin's Schroedinger's Kittens. Stephen - Original Message - From: Tianran Chen [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Stephen Paul King [EMAIL PROTECTED]; everything-list@eskimo.com Sent: Wednesday, January 26, 2005 9:48 PM Subject: Re: Belief Statements Dear Stephen Stephen Paul King wrote: Dear Hal and Tianran, Assuming there is some aspect of consciousness that requires QM ( I side with Penrose on this) these out of order computations are impossible. This boils down to the fact that for systems that have time-like relationship with each other will have observable that are not commutative. We could ignore Penrose and make the same argument by pointing out that is the simulated consciousnesses, for example those of Alice and Bob of the EPR experiment, are to involve any hint of QM phenomena then the non-commutativity will rear its ugly head and nip off the idea in the bud. I am surprised that Greg Egan didn't notice this... Stephen Logically speaking, QM (not its interpretations) is simply a branch of applied mathematics (use the definition given by Foundation of Mathematics) that happen to agree with some observed facts. In another word, QM is a set of equations we used to describe phenomenon. If there is time dependency, then it is in the structure of those equations, not in the phenomenon. It is totally possible that later on, some totally different theories will be proposed that can describe the same set of observations and yet do not suffer from such time dependency problem. Isn't it? Let us suppose, later on, the super-string theory become favored by most serious physicsts, and let us pretend that there are some equation in the super-string theory that can support consciousness, and can be solved in constant steps with some turing machine. However unlikely, such possible shall not be ruled out. Also from another direction, isn't it possible that later some type of computation model (say quantum computer) can actually solve hard problems (say multi-body gravity problem) in constant time, then it can also simulate consciousness-supporting world out of order. I only had chance read a few sections novel, so sorry if I misunderstood some important details here. But the novel did not explicitly say which theory
RE: Belief Statements
Hi Hal, At 22:30 17/01/05 -0500, Hal Ruhl wrote: I reject Schmidhuber Comp because a sequence of world states [world kernels] which may indeed be Turing machine [or some extension there of] emulable is nevertheless managed by the system's dynamic which is external to the machine. Any sub component of a world kernel [such as myself] is subject to the same result thus my rejection of Personal Comp. I understand the sentences but I am completely lost to see relations with previous sentences of you. Have you try to sum up your theory (your theories) in a web page (like you did some years ago) ? I really think we should focus on a well established theory or language to make progress. As you know my results are based on classical first order arithmetic. But recently I came back to an old craving of me: lambda calculus and combinatory logic. I have discovered that combinators make it possible to simplify considerably my work (and this at many different levels). I will hardly resist to say more on this in a near future. The advantage of combinatory logic is that it is more quickly funny (as opposed to first order logic which beginning is tedious and hard (and I usually refer to textbook or to Podnieks pages). Informal Combinatory logic can be presented as an everything theory. It has a static and a dynamic: STATIC: K is a molecule S is a molecule if x and y are molecules then (x y) is a molecule. From this you can easily enumerate all possible molecules: K, S, (K K), (K S), (S K), (S S), ((K K) K), ((K S) K) ... DYNAMIC: For all molecules x and y, the molecules ((K x) y) produce x For all molecules x, y z, the molecules (((S x) y) z) produce y Exercices: what gives ((K K) K) ? what gives (K (K K)) ? Is there a molecule M such that (M x) gives x? That theory has been discovered by Shoenfinkel in 1920 and rediscovered by Curry and Church (the same as in Church thesis) in the 1930, and has had since many applications in practical and theoretical computer science. It is very fine grained and useful to compare many theories. I am sure that if you were willing to study it a little , it would inspire you for finding more understandable presentation of your ideas. Note that it does not subsumes comp, but, given that this theory is Turing complete, it is perhaps one of the better road toward computer science and its philosophies. It could interest everyone in this list and I am pretty sure many know it or have heard about it. I am currently translating my thesis in combinators language if only because I have discovered it provides huge helps to make concrete some otherwise too much abstract notion for good willing students and philosophers. I am leaving Brussels for Paris (First European Congress in Philo of Sciences) and I will be back in a few days. Regards, Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
RE: Belief Statements
What I am really talking about is availability of choice. My All/Nothing model appears to preclude choice. In this it seems a member of a class that assume all information already exists. Awhile ago I posted on another model in which there is a Nothing. This Nothing suffers the same incompleteness issue as the one in the All/Nothing model. In this case to resolve this issue the Nothing spontaneously decays into a Something which then sets off on a trip to completion. This model seems to insist on the presence of choice. Hal
Re: Belief Statements
I remember your previous posts on nothing, and how it decays. However, this concept requires an intelligence to be present with nothing to cause nothingness to decay, does it not? It is intelligence and consciousness which defines things and makes relative comparisons. Danny Mayes Hal Ruhl wrote: What I am really talking about is availability of choice. My All/Nothing model appears to preclude choice. In this it seems a member of a class that assume all information already exists. Awhile ago I posted on another model in which there is a Nothing. This Nothing suffers the same incompleteness issue as the one in the All/Nothing model. In this case to resolve this issue the Nothing spontaneously decays into a Something which then sets off on a trip to completion. This model seems to insist on the presence of choice. Hal -- Danny Mayes Law Office of W. Daniel Mayes 130 Waterloo St., SW P.O. Drawer 2650 Aiken, SC 29802 (803) 648-6642 (803) 648-4049 fax 877-528-5598 toll free [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Belief Statements
At 02:37 PM 1/18/2005, you wrote: I remember your previous posts on nothing, and how it decays. However, this concept requires an intelligence to be present with nothing to cause nothingness to decay, does it not? It is intelligence and consciousness which defines things and makes relative comparisons. Danny Mayes Actually no. The meaningful question that the Nothing must resolve is its own stability - persistence. This is the case in both models. It is a freshman physics question. The Nothing must resolve it but can not. This causes the decay into a Something if you will in both models. In the model free of an All once this happens it continues to complete itself by some path. This is a creation of information scenario. Choice is the way to do this. Hal
Re: Belief Statements
It may be a freshman philosophy question, but it can't be a physics question because you are dealing with issues occurring before our known physics were established. Hal Ruhl wrote: At 02:37 PM 1/18/2005, you wrote: I remember your previous posts on nothing, and how it decays. However, this concept requires an intelligence to be present with nothing to cause nothingness to decay, does it not? It is intelligence and consciousness which defines things and makes relative comparisons. Danny Mayes Actually no. The meaningful question that the Nothing must resolve is its own stability - persistence. This is the case in both models. It is a freshman physics question. The Nothing must resolve it but can not. This causes the decay into a Something if you will in both models. In the model free of an All once this happens it continues to complete itself by some path. This is a creation of information scenario. Choice is the way to do this. Hal -- Danny Mayes Law Office of W. Daniel Mayes 130 Waterloo St., SW P.O. Drawer 2650 Aiken, SC 29802 (803) 648-6642 (803) 648-4049 fax 877-528-5598 toll free [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Belief Statements
At 04:41 PM 1/18/2005, you wrote: It may be a freshman philosophy question, but it can't be a physics question because you are dealing with issues occurring before our known physics were established. You really miss the point. It is a question of logic and finding an unavoidable meaningful question for the Nothing. The question - various stabilities of a construct is first covered in freshman physics. Hal
RE: Belief Statements
At 01:32 16/01/05 +1100, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On 15/1/05 Bruno Marchal wrote: Obviously! But it is so only because you dismiss the failure induction problem. Also: third person identity is arguably an illusion. But I hardy doubt first person identity can ever be an illusion or that it could even be useful to consider like it. What is painful in pain for the suffering first person is mainly that the pain can last, and this independently of any precise idea the first person could have about who she is. This type of argument is often used to support the more common sense position on personal identity, but it is flawed. If I believe (as I do) that my future will consist of a series of people who live only for a moment, who believe they are me and share most of my memories, but aside from this similarity are no more me than any stranger is, then I shouldn't worry about my future suffering any more than I should worry about the suffering of a stranger. As a matter of fact, I would worry more if I expected to be tortured tomorrow than if I expected someone else would be tortured tomorrow. Therefore, the idea that continuity of personal identity is an illusion must be wrong, or at least my claim to believe this idea must be disingenuous. In fact, all this argument shows is that humans, and for that matter other animals, have evolved to behave as if the conventional view of personal identity is true. It is so primitive and deep-seated that belief is probably not the best word for it; it is more a feeling or instinct. And it is certainly not something I can overcome with mere reason! Nor is it interesting to do so. I don't think any notion of prediction keep sense. I am probably a little more oriented toward Popper-refutable theories where predictions are senseful. There wouln't be much point in arguing about all this if it were not for the theoretical possibility of teleportation, multiple universes, time travel and so on. Efforts to save the conventional view of personal identity in discussing these matters result in a complicated mess. If we allow that all that exists is individual moments of first person experience which can be grouped according to their similarity, as a stamp collector groups stamps, giving the impression of continuous streams of consciousness, all the apparent paradoxes and other difficulties disappear. But I am interested in the probabilities of those impressions of continuous streams. And I think those probabilities are relative (like in Everett relative state theory). Also if WE are machine then the physical laws are emergent on relations between numbers, and this in a sufficiently precise way to be tested; making the comp assumption (theory) Popper refutable itself. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
RE: Belief Statements
Hello Hal, In my particular All/Nothing approach my world kernels are packets of information necessary and sufficient to describe a particular state of a universe. The dynamic of the approach provides physical reality to world kernels in sequences [worlds] in a manner that is inconsistent with the dynamic's past [to avoid the net information necessary to describe a structured dynamic - even a random one]. This will produce sequences of world kernels [worlds] given physical reality that permit the continuation of large kernel sub components from kernel to kernel. Some of these sequences could be such that the entire kernels and the sequence of such could be properly emulated by a Turing machine. This however is not the same as the Turing machine emulating the entire evolution of that world since the dynamic that establishes the emulable sequence can terminate its emulability [or even just switch machines] without regard to the state of the emulating Turing machine. For this reason I must currently reject Schmidhuber Comp: The universe is computable/Turing emulable. Now if one envisions the physical reality evolution of sub components of the world kernels in such a sequence the result would be the same. ? So I find I must also reject ... Comp: I (you) am (are) computable/Turing emulable. I have no problem with that; but your phrasing is too fuzzy for me to follow the reason why you reject both Schmidhuber and the personal-comp. Do you really mean that your theory would made you say no to a doctor presenting you an artificial brain (even with a very low substitution level description of yourself) ? Remember that my point is just that is we are machine then physics is 100% derivable from computer science. (But even if we succeed to derive 100% of physics from comp this would not be a proof that comp is true). Regards, Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
RE: Belief Statements
Hi Bruno: At 09:51 AM 1/17/2005, you wrote: Hello Hal, snip mine Now if one envisions the physical reality evolution of sub components of the world kernels in such a sequence the result would be the same. ? So I find I must also reject ... Comp: I (you) am (are) computable/Turing emulable. I have no problem with that; but your phrasing is too fuzzy for me to follow the reason why you reject both Schmidhuber and the personal-comp. I reject Schmidhuber Comp because a sequence of world states [world kernels] which may indeed be Turing machine [or some extension there of] emulable is nevertheless managed by the system's dynamic which is external to the machine. Any sub component of a world kernel [such as myself] is subject to the same result thus my rejection of Personal Comp. Do you really mean that your theory would made you say no to a doctor presenting you an artificial brain (even with a very low substitution level description of yourself) ? First assume that choice is available to sub components of a world state. I would not accept because even if the dynamic is such that my world state sequence suffers only minor shifts such as jumping to slightly different machines I do not believe there is a current description of me low enough that the artificial brain would not lead to a divergence of my future history from what it would have been with my current biological brain. [The dynamic can eventually change my description on the fly in any event.] I would be selecting one future history vs another. Just having the procedure or not is such a selection [choice] [my current brain would suffer some alternate future history as well] and demonstrates that the two courses are not the same. Having no way to select between these future histories I would stay the course with what I had. Is choice available? There is no change taking place during the physical reality of a world kernel. Any sub component of a world kernel can not influence the next kernel selected for the sequence since influence is a change. Only the external dynamic selects the succeeding world kernel and this selection is inconsistent with any past selection. There is no choice. Remember that my point is just that is we are machine then physics is 100% derivable from computer science. I suspect that this may be correct for sequences that suffer only small shifts in the machine that can emulate them given that all the machines are after all computers by assumption. Allowing the ability to Turing emulate a sub component of a kernel in a portion of a sequence is the same as allowing the ability to Turing emulate the entire kernel containing the sub component in the same portion of the sequence since one can not establish an isolating cut between a sub component and the kernel it is a part of. (But even if we succeed to derive 100% of physics from comp this would not be a proof that comp is true). Exactly. Hal
RE: Belief Statements
Hi Bruno: In my particular All/Nothing approach my world kernels are packets of information necessary and sufficient to describe a particular state of a universe. The dynamic of the approach provides physical reality to world kernels in sequences [worlds] in a manner that is inconsistent with the dynamic's past [to avoid the net information necessary to describe a structured dynamic - even a random one]. This will produce sequences of world kernels [worlds] given physical reality that permit the continuation of large kernel sub components from kernel to kernel. Some of these sequences could be such that the entire kernels and the sequence of such could be properly emulated by a Turing machine. This however is not the same as the Turing machine emulating the entire evolution of that world since the dynamic that establishes the emulable sequence can terminate its emulability [or even just switch machines] without regard to the state of the emulating Turing machine. For this reason I must currently reject Schmidhuber Comp: The universe is computable/Turing emulable. Now if one envisions the physical reality evolution of sub components of the world kernels in such a sequence the result would be the same. So I find I must also reject ... Comp: I (you) am (are) computable/Turing emulable. Yours Hal Ruhl
Re: Belief Statements
I agree, if there is a continuity of memory, no mater how long some 3-person duration of unconsiousness might occur,, the different person aspect vanishes. I am what I remember myslef to be... Stephen - Original Message - From: Stathis Papaioannou [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; everything-list@eskimo.com Sent: Saturday, January 15, 2005 10:30 PM Subject: Re: Belief Statements On 15/1/05 Danny Mayes wrote: To have any sense perception there has to be the passage of an inordinately large amount of time as compared to the smallest units of time available. If each frame of time, the smallest divisible unit if you assume that time is discreet, is a different identity, there would be no perception. So you must expand the time frame out to at least a moment, which I'll define as the time for a passing thought. However, all of this seems nonsense to me. Where is the cuttoff point that you become a different person? It's easy to get confused over the meaning of terms like different person here. The basic idea I am trying to get across is that if a person or other conscious entity is destroyed and after a certain time period is (to an arbitrary level of fidelity) reconstructed, perhaps fom a different source of matter, then in general there is no way for that person to know that he hasn't just had a period of unconsciousness whilst still remaining the same person. Many would be shocked at the prospect of going through the above process, fearing that it would actually amount to being killed and then replaced by a deluded imposter. Literally, I suppose this is true. We could also argue about whether we should say that the original person has survived the process, or whether the pre- and post-reconstruction versions are identical. This is just semantics. The important point is that the normal flow of conscious experience is indistinguishable from / equivalent to dying and being replaced by a deluded imposter every moment. --Stathis Papaioannou _ SEEK: Now with over 60,000 dream jobs! Click here: http://ninemsn.seek.com.au?hotmail
RE: Belief Statements
On 15/1/05 Brent Meeker wrote: (quoting my post) It's easy to get confused over the meaning of terms like different person here. The basic idea I am trying to get across is that if a person or other conscious entity is destroyed and after a certain time period is (to an arbitrary level of fidelity) reconstructed, perhaps fom a different source of matter, then in general there is no way for that person to know that he hasn't just had a period of unconsciousness whilst still remaining the same person. Many would be shocked at the prospect of going through the above process, fearing that it would actually amount to being killed and then replaced by a deluded imposter. Literally, I suppose this is true. We could also argue about whether we should say that the original person has survived the process, or whether the pre- and post-reconstruction versions are identical. This is just semantics. The important point is that the normal flow of conscious experience is indistinguishable from / equivalent to dying and being replaced by a deluded imposter every moment. --Stathis Papaioannou I see some problems with the above view. First, the idea that the same person can have different physical realizations is based on the naturalistic view of thought and consciousness. Thought is some physical process. But then it seems this physical basis is ignored and a person is idealized as just the information processing. But there is no information without representation. Just because it is possible to realize a person in different physical media doesn't mean that the physical medium can be dispensed with. We can restrict ourselves to the one thing we know for certain about thought and consciousness (leaving aside the Problem of Other Minds), which is that it is associated with complex electrochemical processes in human brains. It doesn't change my argument. Second, there seems to be an assumption that a person is only a sequence of conscious thoughts. All conscious thought is associated with brains - and also with a lot of unconscious 'thought' or information processing. It is not at all clear that one could recreate the conscious stream of thought without the unconscious part. Again, let's agree that only the wet squishy thing inside our skulls is capable of thought. We certainly don't have any direct evidence to the contrary. Third, related to the second above, thought is a process that is distributed in both space, throughout the brain, as well as time. Hence relativity implies that there is no unique sequence of events corresponding to a single state of consciousness. Can you explain this third point? I've never understood why critics of computationalism think the brain is so fundamentally different from electronic computers. Whatever mysterious, as yet undiscovered of processes may be behind conscious thought, it all has to be done with at most a couple of dozen different elements taking part in chemical reactions. What else beyond this could there possibly be? --Stathis Papaioannou _ Are you right for each other? Find out with our Love Calculator: http://fun.mobiledownloads.com.au/191191/index.wl?page=191191text
Re: Belief Statements
At 15:01 13/01/05 -0500, John Mikes wrote: Your Honored Divinity! (Name: God Bruno M): Semantics is a great thing. I agree. Since IMO we all (meaning as you said not only humans, or livings) interfere in all changes of the world (here restricted to our universe) multilaterally, your 'god' definition holds and so theology can be called part of the 'natural sciences' we try to handle. I don't like to much the expression natural. (So I like your 'quoteq') I think it is an indexical expression, like here, now, etc. The separation between natural/artificial is artificial (and thus natural!). But, above all, a lot of people takes Nature as granted, and implicitly assume physicalism (which you know is incompatible with mechanism). As for being god I really mean the sense of Alan Watts. The other unique one, has no name (like the first person btw), and like any Whole once you accept mathematical realism. (But as a fellow-god, please. don't deny the s from my last name.) Oops. Please accept my modest loebian apologies. Divinely yours You are welcome, Bruno - Original Message - From: Bruno Marchal [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Danny Mayes [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: Stathis Papaioannou [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; everything-list@eskimo.com Sent: Thursday, January 13, 2005 10:49 AM Subject: Re: Belief Statements At 09:16 13/01/05 -0500, Danny Mayes wrote: Could you explain this last line? Bruno Marchal wrote: At 10:24 13/01/05 +1100, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: As for the failure of induction if all possible worlds exist, I prefer to simply bypass the problem. Mmm... I think you make the same mistake as David Lewis (In the plurality of worlds, but in counterfactuals it partially fix the mistake ...). You bypass the most interesting problem which actually makes refutable classes of mathematical theologies. I will try. I will also try to be short and you can consult my URL for more explanations including posts to this list. The starting point is the assumption that I (we, you) are turing emulable. Now computations are mathematical objects, and with some amount of arithmetical realism or platonism all computations exists in the same sense that all constructive reals exists. But some thought experiment show that if we are turing emulable then we cannot know which computations support us. Both Stathis and David Lewis are aware that with a many-worlds postulate, or even just with many computations postulates, there is a failure of induction problem. Indeed, a priori, if you make induction from all the computationnal histories going through your states you get many white rabbit stories if not just white noise, unless you discover that computations and observer relative to them are highly non trivial mathematical object so that the induction problem could perhaps be solved technically (and indeed progress has been made and sometimes I make attempt to convey a little bit of it). Solving the induction problem means in this context that we are able to justify why the average observer can predict some normal (reversible, linear) computation at the bottom and below. 'The term theology could be justified because it reminds us that once you accept the idea that your immediate most probable future consistent extension is determined by a mean on all your 2^Aleph0 maximal consistent extensions, and that you survive always on the most normal/near comp history, then the dyingnotion seems to belong to the category of wishful thinking (making us more ignorant). But theology, in this context can also just be defined by the study of what machines can correctly (or just consistently) prove and infer about themselves and their most probable computations, and here deep results in mathematical logic and in theoretical computer science give huge lightning (but necessitate of course some math work). (Now I am not sanguine about any words but I recall the term theology had been used by Plato to mean the study of the Gods, and then if you are willing to believe (with Alan Watts) that we are all Gods ... And, (this I add to John Mikes, if you permit Danny,) when I say we are Gods, John, I don't see any reason to limit the understanding of we to the humans. You know I talk on something far larger yet non trivial. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Re: Belief Statements
Stathis Papaioannou writes: Here is another irrational belief I hold, while I'm confessing. I am absolutely convinced that continuity of personal identity is a kind of illusion. If I were to be painlessly killed every second and immediately replaced by an exact copy, with all my memories, beliefs about being me, etc., I would have no way of knowing that this was happening, and indeed I believe that in a sense this IS happening, every moment of my life. Now, suppose I am offered the following deal. In exchange for $1 million deposited in my bank account, tonight I will be killed with a sharp axe in my sleep, and in the morning a stranger will wake up in my bed who has been brainwashed and implanted with all my memories at my last conscious moment. This stranger will also have had plastic surgery so that he looks like me, and he will then live life as me, among other things spending the $1 million which is now in my bank account. Stathis: Would YOU stay alive to observe? or would your self- (ego) also merge into that 'stranger' in which case IT IS YOU, not a stranger? (Such exchanges (much less perfect) occurs when someone is steeling your Social Security # and/or internet passwords (ha ha). Your thought experiment is neither so thought, nor so strange.) EPR was a better one. John Mikes
RE: Belief Statements
Hal Finney writes: Stathis Papaioannou writes: As for the failure of induction if all possible worlds exist, I prefer to simply bypass the problem. I predict that in the next few moments the world will most likely continue to behave as it always has in the past... Here I am a few moments later, and I am completely, horribly wrong. A zillion versions of me in other worlds are dying or losing consciousness as they watch fire-breathing dragons materialise out of nothing. So what? Those versions are not continuing to type to the end of this paragraph, while this one-in-a-zillion version manifestly is, and will continue to live life holding the delusional belief that the laws of physics will remain constant. This works OK to reject worlds where you die, but presumably there are also more worlds where you survive but see surprising failures of natural law than worlds where natural law exists. If you truly believe this, it should affect your actions, and you should not proceed under the assumption that everything will be normal. Most universes where you survive would probably be so lawless that you would just barely survive, so perhaps this would point to abandoning moral behavior and striving for brute survival at all costs. I.e. go out and steal from people, rob banks, commit murder without thought of the consequences, because it's far more likely that the street will turn to molten metal than that you'll be apprehended and sent to jail. Actually, no, I don't think most people (with past experience of an orderly world, as we have) WOULD behave in this way, even if it were proved beyond reasonable doubt that the lawless, disorganised universes always have and always will predominate. Having thought about this, I doubt that I would change my life much if this proof were provided, even if I didn't have to rely on death removing me from unspeakably horrible futures. I think the important bit psychologically is the understanding that the horrible and disorganised universes which will predominate in the future have also predominated in the past - which would of course mean that we have been incredibly lucky to have survived thus far. It shouldn't make any difference to what we should expect from here on, logically, but psychologically, I think it would. Suppose you are credibly informed by some very wicked and very powerful aliens that, starting tonight, you will be whisked from your bed, cloned a thousand times, one clone will be returned to bed unharmed, while the rest will be tortured horribly for the rest of their lives. This will then be repeated with the clone that goes unharmed the next night, and so on every night until that clone dies before the next cloning time is due. Given this bleak future, many people, perhaps most people, would understandably choose suicide now as the only way out. Now consider the same aliens credibly inform you of all the above, but with the additional information that, without your knowledge, the cloning/torture cycles have actually been going on since you were born. While the news would no doubt still be shocking, I suspect many people would say, So what? I've lived like this for years, and as far as this thread of consciousness which I identify as myself is concerned, I've done OK. As long as I can be sure that at least one thread of consciousness will continue as before, I would be stupid to kill myself now. You might say the attitude in the last paragraph is irrational, but I would be surprised if at least a substantial minority of subscribers to this list (who, I think it would be fair to say, as a group hold reason in higher esteem than the population as a whole does) would decide against suicide. Probably it would make a difference if we could witness the clones' torture rather than just knowing that it occcurs, but returning to the original question, what better way is there to isolate ourselves from unpleasantness than sequestering it, forever unreachable even in theory, in a parallel universe? --Stathis Papaioannou _ Express yourself instantly with MSN Messenger! Download today - it's FREE! http://messenger.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200471ave/direct/01/
RE: Belief Statements
At 10:24 13/01/05 +1100, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: 1. Every possible world can be simulated by a computer program. With the most usual (Aristotelian) sense of the term world, this assumption would entail the falsity of comp, which is that I can be simulated by a computer program. (I, or any of the class of observers I belong(s) to). But then, as you were indeed driving at, we cannot know in computations are supporting us, and there are actually 2^Aleph0 infinite histories going through your current state, and any notion of worlds is a subjective notion emerging from probabilistic interference among those computations. Actually those which support you + all those below (your substitution level). In the spirit of your thought experiment, let me ask you a personal question. Assume you have big motivation for going to Mars. You can now choose between a 100$ and a 1$ teletransporter machine (TTM). Let us assume you are not so rich that this difference count (or adjust the number relatively to your situation). The 100$ TTM has no security and it is known that billion of copies of yourself will be sold elsewhere, for example to the kind of hell you were pointing to. The 1$ TTM has quantum coded protection, so that the probability is very near one that no pirate will be able to copy you. Are you telling us that you will take the insecure low cost TTM ? Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
RE: Belief Statements
At 10:24 13/01/05 +1100, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: As for the failure of induction if all possible worlds exist, I prefer to simply bypass the problem. Mmm... I think you make the same mistake as David Lewis (In the plurality of worlds, but in counterfactuals it partially fix the mistake ...). You bypass the most interesting problem which actually makes refutable classes of mathematical theologies. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Re: Belief Statements
Could you explain this last line? Bruno Marchal wrote: At 10:24 13/01/05 +1100, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: As for the failure of induction if all possible worlds exist, I prefer to simply bypass the problem. Mmm... I think you make the same mistake as David Lewis (In the plurality of worlds, but in counterfactuals it partially fix the mistake ...). You bypass the most interesting problem which actually makes refutable classes of mathematical theologies. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Re: Belief Statements
At 09:16 13/01/05 -0500, Danny Mayes wrote: Could you explain this last line? Bruno Marchal wrote: At 10:24 13/01/05 +1100, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: As for the failure of induction if all possible worlds exist, I prefer to simply bypass the problem. Mmm... I think you make the same mistake as David Lewis (In the plurality of worlds, but in counterfactuals it partially fix the mistake ...). You bypass the most interesting problem which actually makes refutable classes of mathematical theologies. I will try. I will also try to be short and you can consult my URL for more explanations including posts to this list. The starting point is the assumption that I (we, you) are turing emulable. Now computations are mathematical objects, and with some amount of arithmetical realism or platonism all computations exists in the same sense that all constructive reals exists. But some thought experiment show that if we are turing emulable then we cannot know which computations support us. Both Stathis and David Lewis are aware that with a many-worlds postulate, or even just with many computations postulates, there is a failure of induction problem. Indeed, a priori, if you make induction from all the computationnal histories going through your states you get many white rabbit stories if not just white noise, unless you discover that computations and observer relative to them are highly non trivial mathematical object so that the induction problem could perhaps be solved technically (and indeed progress has been made and sometimes I make attempt to convey a little bit of it). Solving the induction problem means in this context that we are able to justify why the average observer can predict some normal (reversible, linear) computation at the bottom and below. 'The term theology could be justified because it reminds us that once you accept the idea that your immediate most probable future consistent extension is determined by a mean on all your 2^Aleph0 maximal consistent extensions, and that you survive always on the most normal/near comp history, then the dyingnotion seems to belong to the category of wishful thinking (making us more ignorant). But theology, in this context can also just be defined by the study of what machines can correctly (or just consistently) prove and infer about themselves and their most probable computations, and here deep results in mathematical logic and in theoretical computer science give huge lightning (but necessitate of course some math work). (Now I am not sanguine about any words but I recall the term theology had been used by Plato to mean the study of the Gods, and then if you are willing to believe (with Alan Watts) that we are all Gods ... And, (this I add to John Mike, if you permit Danny,) when I say we are Gods, John, I don't see any reason to limit the understanding of we to the humans. You know I talk on something far larger yet non trivial. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Re: Belief Statements
Your Honored Divinity! (Name: God Bruno M): Semantics is a great thing. I agree. Since IMO we all (meaning as you said not only humans, or livings) interfere in all changes of the world (here restricted to our universe) multilaterally, your 'god' definition holds and so theology can be called part of the 'natural sciences' we try to handle. (But as a fellow-god, please. don't deny the s from my last name.) Divinely yours John Mikes - Original Message - From: Bruno Marchal [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Danny Mayes [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: Stathis Papaioannou [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; everything-list@eskimo.com Sent: Thursday, January 13, 2005 10:49 AM Subject: Re: Belief Statements At 09:16 13/01/05 -0500, Danny Mayes wrote: Could you explain this last line? Bruno Marchal wrote: At 10:24 13/01/05 +1100, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: As for the failure of induction if all possible worlds exist, I prefer to simply bypass the problem. Mmm... I think you make the same mistake as David Lewis (In the plurality of worlds, but in counterfactuals it partially fix the mistake ...). You bypass the most interesting problem which actually makes refutable classes of mathematical theologies. I will try. I will also try to be short and you can consult my URL for more explanations including posts to this list. The starting point is the assumption that I (we, you) are turing emulable. Now computations are mathematical objects, and with some amount of arithmetical realism or platonism all computations exists in the same sense that all constructive reals exists. But some thought experiment show that if we are turing emulable then we cannot know which computations support us. Both Stathis and David Lewis are aware that with a many-worlds postulate, or even just with many computations postulates, there is a failure of induction problem. Indeed, a priori, if you make induction from all the computationnal histories going through your states you get many white rabbit stories if not just white noise, unless you discover that computations and observer relative to them are highly non trivial mathematical object so that the induction problem could perhaps be solved technically (and indeed progress has been made and sometimes I make attempt to convey a little bit of it). Solving the induction problem means in this context that we are able to justify why the average observer can predict some normal (reversible, linear) computation at the bottom and below. 'The term theology could be justified because it reminds us that once you accept the idea that your immediate most probable future consistent extension is determined by a mean on all your 2^Aleph0 maximal consistent extensions, and that you survive always on the most normal/near comp history, then the dyingnotion seems to belong to the category of wishful thinking (making us more ignorant). But theology, in this context can also just be defined by the study of what machines can correctly (or just consistently) prove and infer about themselves and their most probable computations, and here deep results in mathematical logic and in theoretical computer science give huge lightning (but necessitate of course some math work). (Now I am not sanguine about any words but I recall the term theology had been used by Plato to mean the study of the Gods, and then if you are willing to believe (with Alan Watts) that we are all Gods ... And, (this I add to John Mike, if you permit Danny,) when I say we are Gods, John, I don't see any reason to limit the understanding of we to the humans. You know I talk on something far larger yet non trivial. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
RE: Belief Statements
Bruno Marchal wrote: At 10:24 13/01/05 +1100, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: 1. Every possible world can be simulated by a computer program. With the most usual (Aristotelian) sense of the term world, this assumption would entail the falsity of comp, which is that I can be simulated by a computer program. (I, or any of the class of observers I belong(s) to). Huh? I thought I was saying the opposite. I certainly believe in comp. In the spirit of your thought experiment, let me ask you a personal question. Assume you have big motivation for going to Mars. You can now choose between a 100$ and a 1$ teletransporter machine (TTM). Let us assume you are not so rich that this difference count (or adjust the number relatively to your situation). The 100$ TTM has no security and it is known that billion of copies of yourself will be sold elsewhere, for example to the kind of hell you were pointing to. The 1$ TTM has quantum coded protection, so that the probability is very near one that no pirate will be able to copy you. Are you telling us that you will take the insecure low cost TTM ? It's a good question, and this is where the rational comes up against the emotional. If it were my first trip, I think I'd be very nervous about the cheap alternative, and I would pay the extra or avoid going if I couldn't afford it. However, if I had used the $100 service many times in the past (through choice or necessity), I don't think I would worry about using it again. Here is another irrational belief I hold, while I'm confessing. I am absolutely convinced that continuity of personal identity is a kind of illusion. If I were to be painlessly killed every second and immediately replaced by an exact copy, with all my memories, beliefs about being me, etc., I would have no way of knowing that this was happening, and indeed I believe that in a sense this IS happening, every moment of my life. Now, suppose I am offered the following deal. In exchange for $1 million deposited in my bank account, tonight I will be killed with a sharp axe in my sleep, and in the morning a stranger will wake up in my bed who has been brainwashed and implanted with all my memories at my last conscious moment. This stranger will also have had plastic surgery so that he looks like me, and he will then live life as me, among other things spending the $1 million which is now in my bank account. If I were rational, I should probably accept the above deal, on the grounds that my apparent continuity of personal identity will be the same as it always has been. If such a proposal were put to me, however, I would be horrified; and I am sure my friends and family would be too, even if they shared my philosophical beliefs about personal identity. I would also be horrified if offered the role of the stranger who takes someone else's place. I can't decide which would be worse. On the other hand, if I had been forced to go through the above transformation several times, I might get used to the idea and not be so worried. Rationally, it shouldn't make any difference. --Stathis Papaioannou _ Need a credit card fast? Apply online now! Must be over 18 and AU only: http://ad.au.doubleclick.net/clk;11046970;10638934;f?http://www.anz.com/aus/promo/first1004ninemsn/default.asp
RE: Belief Statements
Stathis Papaioannou writes: Here is another irrational belief I hold, while I'm confessing. I am absolutely convinced that continuity of personal identity is a kind of illusion. If I were to be painlessly killed every second and immediately replaced by an exact copy, with all my memories, beliefs about being me, etc., I would have no way of knowing that this was happening, and indeed I believe that in a sense this IS happening, every moment of my life. Now, suppose I am offered the following deal. In exchange for $1 million deposited in my bank account, tonight I will be killed with a sharp axe in my sleep, and in the morning a stranger will wake up in my bed who has been brainwashed and implanted with all my memories at my last conscious moment. This stranger will also have had plastic surgery so that he looks like me, and he will then live life as me, among other things spending the $1 million which is now in my bank account. That's an interesting thought experiment. I think the problem is that given human psychology, any such brainwashing is almost certain to be superficial and not to duplicate the deep mental structures which are part of our identity. The guy who wakes up in bed is still going to be a stranger, who merely resembles you in some ways. If we imagine instead that we are living voluntarily as members of a computer simulation (uploads), then it would be possible to actually have the stranger's mind be an exact copy of your own. However, in that case the copy would be so exact that there really isn't any sense in which you have been replaced by a stranger. The stranger would really be you, if he had the exact same mind and body as represented in the computer simulation. You could arbitrarily induce various levels of change in the copied mind, so that you would have a continuum from an exact copy, to one with some exceedingly small changes, to one which would be about as good as a brainwashed human being, to some that would be entirely different. Then I'm not sure what the sensible approach is as far as how much money to demand in exchange for such an alteration. After all, the money doesn't spring into existence, it is transferred from one person to another. From the larger perspective, why should you care about helping one human being over another? Once you start to think of the person waking up in bed as an arbitrary human being, who might or might not happen to resemble you, it becomes harder to adopt the identity-centric viewpoint where you only root for the one guy who is you. If you think of identity as an illusion, as many of these thought experiments seem to suggest, all we can fall back on is a universal altruism, where our goal is to maximize the total happiness of conscious entities. Such a goal is largely immune to these paradoxes, although it does have some problems of its own. Hal Finney
Re: Belief Statements
- Original Message - From: Bruno Marchal [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Alastair Malcolm [EMAIL PROTECTED]; everything-list@eskimo.com Sent: 11 January 2005 14:47 Subject: Re: Belief Statements I certainly agree. Now the problem is that there are many logics, and so there are many notion or logical possibility. It sounds like we may be using 'logics' for two different purposes. For me, basic logic is intended here (that of syllogisms and 'if it is true that p, then it cannot be the case that p is false'); any ambiguities between logics in directly describing a (physical-type) world would tend to be due to their particular application areas (for example temporal logic would not be geared to worlds with certain alternatives to time); others tend not to have this use at all (for example modal logic is more about consistency/proveability/necessity, or worlds in general). Again, in the same vein as my reply to Hal F, if a logic / formal system cannot describe an entity, it is either due to an inherent restriction (compared to other logics / formal systems), or else the entity is totally beyond our comprehension (in a formal sense). The choice of the logic (or logicS) will depend on some basic assumptions. . . . If you read the papers I am referring too, don't hesitate to ask questions. Is it still the case that the best english version of the relevant ideas are from your earlier posts to this list, as identified in your URL? I shall try to look at them at some stage. Alastair
Re: Belief Statements
At 09:45 12/01/05 +, Alastair Malcolm wrote: It sounds like we may be using 'logics' for two different purposes. For me, basic logic is intended here (that of syllogisms and 'if it is true that p, then it cannot be the case that p is false'); This is a little ambiguous. But I will take it as your acceptation of (at least) intuitionist basic logical system. any ambiguities between logics in directly describing a (physical-type) world would tend to be due to their particular application areas (for example temporal logic would not be geared to worlds with certain alternatives to time); And this will depend on some non-logical axiom you will postulate togeteher with the background logic. others tend not to have this use at all (for example modal logic is more about consistency/proveability/necessity, or worlds in general). Again, in the same vein as my reply to Hal F, if a logic / formal system cannot describe an entity, it is either due to an inherent restriction (compared to other logics / formal systems), or else the entity is totally beyond our comprehension (in a formal sense). OK. Is it still the case that the best english version of the relevant ideas are from your earlier posts to this list, as identified in your URL? I shall try to look at them at some stage. Perhaps better is my SANE paper, you can download it from http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/publications/SANE2004MARCHALAbstract.html I show that IF we are Turing-emulable THEN physics is, in a testable way, the geometry of the border of our ignorance. Where by our I refer to us the Loebian Machine. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Re: Belief Statements
At 18:12 11/01/05 -0500, John M quotes Russell Standish writing: (if I am correct in the quotes). 4) For those who believe in Computationalism, the Turing model of computation implicitly requires this Time postulate. Here I disagree a lot. Actually most models of computation does no require any Time Postulate. They need only Peano axioms of arithmetic. Time-steps of computations are build from the successor function : n - n+1 Reasoning on computations needs no more than the induction axioms (See Podnieks page for the first order arithmetic axioms). Even quantum computation does not (really) need time, but that is a less obvious statement about which we can discuss later. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Re: Belief Statements
Dear Russell, you wrote:
This sounds like a terminological difference. To me, data refers to
mere differences. Information has meaning. Observation attaches
meaning to data, creating informations from that data.
WHAT do you observe if you have to create the meaning? I find it a reverse
route, to learn the quantities (data) and then enrich them with meaning to
make it 'information'. Don't forget that there is ample information
(meanings galore) - unquantizable, where the 'bits' don't even come into the
picture. All those are its (in my nomenclature).
I wonder if I am alone with this terminology?
Far we are not: in my terminology to 'absorb' (acknowledge, imbibe) a
difference implies the meaning part as well, so the datum gets it when it
becomes information. Of course data can be non-quantitative.
*
Then you wrote:
Again this is terminology. By timelike I was referring to the
process of bringing two entities together for comparison. Nothing
more, not less. Perhaps pre-timelike is a more accurate term, but I
like to egg the pudding!
You probably missed my example anticipating such reply:
... observation can compare e.g. overlapping pictures,
atemporarily, in one
when WE do not bring together comparables one after the other.
I don't deny the time factor, just want to leave open the possibility of an
atemporal worldview (which is still a big problem for me, too).
*
Then again I have a reply to your:
Not sure how remark to point 4 relates to this one. Does it mean you
don't believe in QM? Or that QM is not universal within the plenitude?
(I'd agree with you there) Or that QM is an accidental feature of our
world? (I'm inclined to disagree with you here)
First I find it an 'out-of-bounds' argumentative twist to change my term
human representational way of OUR world model into your
accidental feature of our world.
The linear THEORY of QM about the - originally- (nonlinear?) world of
microscopic physics is not a 'feature' of the world. I answered this
differentiation after #4 (cf: Comp-Turing), that's why I referred to it
after #5 (QM) as similarly a limited model based anthropologism. Sorry if a
critical remark on QM hit mores sensitive chords.
*
Small potato: (on the religious discussion-example)
No ideas can be proven. Surely you know that from Popper.
Right you are, let's change it to 'justified'/'explained'. That can be
logical, even if Sir Karl did not exclude it from existence. What I meant
is: first the believers should explain what their belief is based on, then I
can argue against it. Not in reverse (time!).
I don't start to argue against something the existence of which I don't see
justified or explained, just because the other side would like to put me
into a more vulnerable position in the argumentation.
*
To your final par:
Comp QM aren't part of the belief system here. They are interesting
afterthoughts. The belief system relates to ideas about what
information means - I don't really see you disputing this, although I
do see some misunderstandings; the existence of a plenitude of
data (which I don't see you disputing either); and the Anthropic
Principle, which you may well dispute, as its a decidedly dodgy
proposition.
Information I coined more than 10 years ago (maybe a review is actual, one
reason why I entered this discussion: to get new input ideas) was:
Absorbed (acknowledged) difference. By any contraption capable of doing so
('meaning' implied). Any difference, from an electrical charge to an
economical controversy in S-W Asia. Now I see 'observation' as very close to
this. And: to 'experience' as well.
My plenitude is a feature in my NARRATIVE (not even a hypo-thesis)
needed for a story of Big Bangs (unlimited) to start the multiverse in a way
acceptable for human logic (- without the controversies in the physical
cosmological BB fable.) It lacks data, serves ONE purpose, I refuse to
discuss details of it, it is unobservable and unexplained.
Sorry, I did not read your paper on the AP, maybe you made some sense to it.
So far I see in it only us, god's real children as the most important
feature in the world.
Merry Xmas! (oops: it is past).
John Mikes
- Original Message -
From: Russell Standish [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: John M [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: everything-list@eskimo.com
Sent: Tuesday, January 11, 2005 8:19 PM
Subject: Re: Belief Statements
On Tue, Jan 11, 2005 at 06:12:28PM -0500, John M wrote:
SNIP, Quotes for reply see above in the text.
RE: Belief Statements
On 9 January 2005 Alastair Malcolm wrote: This is a fascinating discussion list, full of stimulating ideas and theories, but I would be interested to know what people *actually* believe on the subject of many/all worlds - what one would bet one's house or life on, given that one were forced to choose some such bet. I believe it is logically necessary that all possible worlds exist, based on a number of ideas that have been discussed many times on this list: 1. Every possible world can be simulated by a computer program. 2. It is not, in general, possible to distinguish between a simulated world and a real world. 2a. If there is no empirical or logical way to distinguish with certainty between a real and a simulated world, one may as well say there is no essential difference between them [interesting, but not really necessary for the rest of this argument]. 3. Consider a computer running a simulation complete with conscious beings. This particular computer was designed by a now extinct civilization, and although the hardware still appears to be working, the compiler, instruction manual and computer language documentation have all been lost. 3a. The result of (3) is that the simulated world continues to run on the computer, even though there can be no communication between it and us in the real world where the computer exists physically. (Idea for a story: maybe that's why the gods used to talk to us in ancient times but no longer do!) 4. A computer need not be a box that runs Windows or Linux. Conceivably, a computer could consist of the idle passage of time, or the set of natural numbers, operated on by some hugely complex look-up table. In Greg Egan's 1994 novel Permutation City, it is pointed out that a simulated being's experiences are the same if the computation is run backwards, forwards, chopped up into individual pieces and randomly dispersed throughout the world-wide network; the computation somehow assembles itself out of dust - out of omnipresent, apparently randomly distributed ones and zeroes. 4a. In other words, no hardware, whether physical or simulated (if these are different things) is necessary for the implementation of a computation. Every possible computation is implemented out there in the realm of pure mathematics, so every possible world necessarily exists. Now, the above argument is sometimes taken as being self-evidently absurd. Hilary Putnam and John Searle have actually used it in this way to attack strong A.I. theories. The objection is that the effort and information needed to construct the look-up table in (4) is at least as great as that which would be needed to construct and program a computer in the conventional way. An analogy can be made with a block of marble: in a sense, it does contain every possible statue, but this is not any help to the sculptor. But all this means is that we cannot, in this world, communicate with or make any use of the type of computer described in (3) or (4). The other worlds may exist, but we can never know this directly. As for the failure of induction if all possible worlds exist, I prefer to simply bypass the problem. I predict that in the next few moments the world will most likely continue to behave as it always has in the past... Here I am a few moments later, and I am completely, horribly wrong. A zillion versions of me in other worlds are dying or losing consciousness as they watch fire-breathing dragons materialise out of nothing. So what? Those versions are not continuing to type to the end of this paragraph, while this one-in-a-zillion version manifestly is, and will continue to live life holding the delusional belief that the laws of physics will remain constant. --Stathis Papaiaonnou _ Searching for that dream home? Try http://ninemsn.realestate.com.au for all your property needs.
RE: Belief Statements
Stathis Papaioannou writes: 1. Every possible world can be simulated by a computer program. I'm not sure that this is the best definition of a possible world. I'm concerned that we are hiding a lot of assumptions in this word. It relates to my earlier comment about ambiguity in which constitutes the multiverse. 4. A computer need not be a box that runs Windows or Linux. Conceivably, a computer could consist of the idle passage of time, or the set of natural numbers, operated on by some hugely complex look-up table. In Greg Egan's 1994 novel Permutation City, it is pointed out that a simulated being's experiences are the same if the computation is run backwards, forwards, chopped up into individual pieces and randomly dispersed throughout the world-wide network; the computation somehow assembles itself out of dust - out of omnipresent, apparently randomly distributed ones and zeroes. I had a problem with the demonstration in Permutation City. They claimed to chop up a simulated consciousness timewise, and then to run the pieces backwards: first the 10th second, then the 9th second, then the 8th, and so on. And of course the consciousness being simulated was not aware of the chopping. The problem is that you can't calculate the 10th second without calculating the 9th second first. That's a fundamental property of our laws of physics and I suspect of consciousness as we know it. This means that what they actually did was to initially calculate seconds 1, 2, 3... in order, then to re-run them in the order 10, 9, 8 And of course the consciousness wasn't aware of the re-runs. But it's not clear that from this you can draw Egan's strong conclusions about dust. It's possible that the initial, sequential run was necessary for the consciousness to exist. As for the failure of induction if all possible worlds exist, I prefer to simply bypass the problem. I predict that in the next few moments the world will most likely continue to behave as it always has in the past... Here I am a few moments later, and I am completely, horribly wrong. A zillion versions of me in other worlds are dying or losing consciousness as they watch fire-breathing dragons materialise out of nothing. So what? Those versions are not continuing to type to the end of this paragraph, while this one-in-a-zillion version manifestly is, and will continue to live life holding the delusional belief that the laws of physics will remain constant. This works OK to reject worlds where you die, but presumably there are also more worlds where you survive but see surprising failures of natural law than worlds where natural law exists. If you truly believe this, it should affect your actions, and you should not proceed under the assumption that everything will be normal. Most universes where you survive would probably be so lawless that you would just barely survive, so perhaps this would point to abandoning moral behavior and striving for brute survival at all costs. I.e. go out and steal from people, rob banks, commit murder without thought of the consequences, because it's far more likely that the street will turn to molten metal than that you'll be apprehended and sent to jail. Hal Finney
Re: Belief Statements
At 10:32 09/01/05 +, Alastair Malcolm wrote: For my own part, I give strong credibility (50%) to the existence of many worlds in some guise or other, and in particular to the existence of all logically possible(*) worlds (alpw). I certainly agree. Now the problem is that there are many logics, and so there are many notion or logical possibility. The choice of the logic (or logicS) will depend on some basic assumptions. In particular with the computationalist hypothesis (comp) there is a necessity to distinguish precisely notions like first and third person point of view and this leads to different notion of logical possibilities. The Modal logics can help here. You can read my papers referred in my URL below. A good book introducing the main logics I am using is the book by Smullyan Forever Undecided. Actually I'm working currently with still another type of logic: the Shoenfinkel Curry Combinatory Logics. This will help for linking my work with the mainstream logical work of today's logicians (linear logic, for example). Here too Smullyan wrote a very nice introductory book To Mock a Mockingbird. I strongly recommend it. A classical treatise is the North-Holland book on the Lambda Calculus by Henk Barendregt. Combinatory logics (and its sister the lambda calculus) has failed concerning its initial goal to provide a logical foundation of the whole of mathematics. But Combinatory Logics has been, and still is, very useful in the foundation of computer science (which itself is indispensable through the comp hyp). Not really the time to say much more now, but my point is that logical possibility is a notion which we should'nt take for granted. Logic is a field full of surprise and unexpected results. Concerning your question of believing in the many worlds, I can only give you a rough summary of the conclusion of the work I have done in the comp frame. With the Church thesis (see the diagonalization posts to this list and referred in my url) there is a universal notion of computation (unlike provability, proofs, etc.), and all computations exist (the comp form of everything). Giving the discrepancy between first and third person notion (see my papers or see my posts to the list) no observer-machine can ever know which computations support them, and physical reality (whatever it is) must emerge from the interference (in an a priori larger sense than the quantum sense) of all the computations which are rich enough to support your processing. This can be computed and compare to actual physics. Until now the comparison tend to confirm both the quantum hyp. and the comp hyp. Note that physics is made secondary with respect to computer science, or logic, or arithmetics. The combinatory logics make possible, in principle, to distinguish the apparition (in the eyes of the Lobian machine) of classical physics and quantum physics (and this is new, I mean it is not explicitly in my thesis). The common point between my work, Smullyan's Forever undecided, and Smullyan To mock a Mockingbird is, of course, the study of self-reference, which is the main tool to define formally the first and third person views. If you read the papers I am referring too, don't hesitate to ask questions. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Re: Belief Statements
(Sorry for the convoluted editing: it comes from
Russell's format as
attachment only, without strraight readability
as an e-mail)
- Original Message -
From: "Russell Standish" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: "John M" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: "Hal Ruhl" [EMAIL PROTECTED]; everything-list@eskimo.com
Sent: Monday, January 10, 2005 6:50
PM
Subject: Re: Belief
Statements
Dear Russell,
since you e-mail without words
(only an attachment) I copy your text here to give my reply to it - interspaced,
if you don't mind :
--
On Mon, Jan 10, 2005 at 04:08:15PM -0500,
John M wrote: At 07:40 PM 1/9/2005, you wrote:
(Russell Standish):
A compromise on these two views
occurs through my assumption of "Time" being a necessary property of
bserverhood. Sure atemporal worldsexist, but there's nobody in them to
observe them. Similarly, Hal Ruhl's dynamic process is simply the process of
observation.
Cheers (R.St.) Russell seems to
restrict 'observerhood' to timed worlds (maybe: humans?) ("there's nobody
in them to observe them").
I leave 'observation' open to ANY
absorption of information, in 'our' sense or otherwise. I don't 'deny'
existence to formats we have no idea about. We just don't know. (JM
)
*
( R St now )
:
It is an assumption (or perhaps postulate: the
Time postulate). It isamenable to debate, just as Euclid's axioms are. I
offer the following points in its favour:
1) Observation is the process of creating
information, by distinguishing differences between things (aka
bits).
JM: IMO observation does
NOT CREATE information, it collects it. Information is the acknowledged
difference and I agree with point 2: there must be at least 1 mutual dimension
for a comparison (to have an acknowledgeabledifference) aka
information.
Two dimensionally unconnected 'facts' do not constitute a difference, nor
provide information on the two together. Desultory knowledge is irrelevant in
this case.
(Bits: I may not
understand it right, but IMO a 'bit' does not disclose a meaning - it is
applicable in any context applied.
So I would reverse
Wheeler's 'it from bit' into 'bit from it'. We do not 'create' the world
according to the computer bits - but in the contrary, the bits represent (stand
for) the "its".)
2) To have a difference, obviously requires at
least one dimension.
3) To compare two different entities requires
that the properties of the two entities be brought together
(inside the observer's "mind"). Thus the one required dimension
must be "timelike",
withthe observer passing from point to point.
JM: I don't see the
conclusion about "timelike":observation can compare e.g. overlapping
pictures atemporarily, in one.
But this, again, is the
reflection of human habits (logic and capabilities).
If we consider
'information'as I propose in generalization:
acknowledged
difference, not restricted how and by what acknowledged, "our" time
concept does not enter the picture.
4) For those who believe in Computationalism,
the Turing model of computation implicitly requires this Time
postulate.
JM: I don't. It is a human
representational way of OUR world model. Even if we try to 'apply' it to "other"
worlds.
5) It appears to be a necessary ingredient to
obtain Quantum Mechanics from first principles (see my "Why Occams Razor"
paper)
JM: ditto, see my remark
to #4
None of this is a proof. However, it is very
persuasive andgeneral. For someone to claim that this postulate is invalid,
theywould probably need to show a model of observation that invalidates it,
just as Gauss showed Euclid's 5th axiom was not necessary by showing a
consistent geometry in which he axiom was invalid. And that would be a very
interesting development.
JM: Nobody has
toshow an unproven idea as invalid. The idea must be verified first for
argumentation. Furthermore: it is nice to show an alternative, however an
unlikely idea can be deemed unlikely without providing an alternative.
Ideas are 'persuasive'
within the belief system they fit into. Comp and QM are "general" chapters
within the (limited) model we have in contemporary science about THIS world. Not
valid in an openminded multiverse of no restrictions.
Cheers
Russell
Standish
Re-Cheers
John
Mikes
Re: Belief Statements
- Original Message - From: Hal Finney [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: everything-list@eskimo.com Sent: 09 January 2005 16:21 Subject: Re: Belief Statements Alastair Malcolm writes: For my own part, I give strong credibility (50%) to the existence of many worlds in some guise or other, and in particular to the existence of all logically possible(*) worlds (alpw). For me the existence of one world (ours) so conveniently life-suited - sufficiently spatio-temporally extended and quiescent but with particular properties enabling wide diversity in chemistry etc - demands a specific explanation, and the only other candidate final explanation - a Creator (say a God, or a 'higher' civilisation) - suffers (at least) the problem of requiring an explanation for *it*. That's a great question. I agree that assuming that this is the only world is quite problematic. On the other hand it does not necessarily follow that all possible or conceivable worlds exist. From hearing some physicists speak, I get the impression that they are being dragged kicking and screaming towards many worlds and anthropic ideas, but are resisting. They still hope to come up with some kind of mathematical or philosophical reason to at least restrict the number of possible worlds. I would be interested to know if anyone could think of any possible mathematical or philosophical restriction that that could be, other than deductive logic itself. At a minimum they are looking for dependencies among many superficially independent aspects of the observable universe. In fact, you could describe that as the fundamental goal of physics. They might accept that certain physical constants have a certain accidental or contingent aspect, that there is no fundamental reason why they have those values; but they want to minimize the number of constants for which this is true, and find ways to show that other constants and properties depend on these few arbitrary ones. Unfortunately all the basic physical principles that frame any minimisation of the number of arbitrary constants are themselves based solely on what happens to occur in our particular universe. I also think that AUH (all universe hypothesis) admits too many alternative formulations which may not all be consistent. That would seem to force the metaverse to choose between, say, Schmidhuber and Tegmark. Yet how can that be? It doesn't seem to make sense that there are two inconsisent ways that all universes can exist. One must be careful that the mode-of-representation tail doesn't wag the physical dog: the neutrality of not giving preference to any particular complete entity itself (both in terms of number, or just existence) implies that it is what the representation *refers to* that is crucial, so any inconsistencies in, say, measure between modes of representation merely reflect the fact that different codes within a mode (bit strings, mathematical forms etc) can in certain circumstances refer to the same entity. (This is not to devalue their potential role, when used carefully, as a guide in overall relative measure estimates.) Alastair
Re: Belief Statements
- Original Message - From: Norman Samish [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: everything-list@eskimo.com Sent: 09 January 2005 19:28 Subject: Re: Belief Statements I can't conceive of space-time being anything other than infinite. The existence of all logically possible worlds seems necessary in infinite space-time, where . . . anything that can happen must happen, not only once but an infinite number of times. By 'worlds' I didn't mean planets - I effectively meant universes. Apologies for any confusion here. Please also be aware of the difference between logical possibility (defined in my earlier post) and physical possibility (conformity to the physical laws). Alastair
Re: Belief Statements
Comments below, please. John M - Original Message - From: Hal Ruhl [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: everything-list@eskimo.com Sent: Sunday, January 09, 2005 8:16 PM Subject: Re: Belief Statements Hi Russell: My dynamic in part produces worlds that appear to have time as a property but also produces all kinds of worlds that have no time in the sense of there being any ordered sequence. There are also worlds that are just a single kernel that is given physical reality in a manner commensurate with the features of the dynamic. Hal At 07:40 PM 1/9/2005, you wrote: (Russell Standish) A compromise on these two views occurs through my assumption of Time being a necessary property of observerhood. Sure atemporal worlds exist, but there's nobody in them to observe them. Similarly, Hal Ruhl's dynamic process is simply the process of observation. Cheers (R.St.) Russell seems to restrict 'observerhood' to timed worlds (maybe: humans?) (there's nobody in them to observe them). I leave 'observation' open to ANY absorption of information, in 'our' sense or otherwise. I don't 'deny' existence to formats we have no idea about. We just don't know. Hal (above) mentions dynamic, in our usual sense, a sequence in time, as a property of the world (the one (kind?) we live in). Reference to ORDERED sequence, ordered as we have it (in time). I mentioned several times (!) tha one problem I struggle with is how to fashion 'change' in an atemporal system? where the 'from' and 'to' are not fixed? This seems to be beyond our imagination - however I don't deny its existence (see above). Our 'model' of the 'world' disallows these variations, but - that's where the reductionistic models fail to represent the wholeness (totality). Sciences are reductionistic, so I accept the reply that my idea is not scientific (in today's definitions of the sciences). JM
Re: Belief Statements
Hi Russell: At 06:50 PM 1/10/2005, you wrote: It is an assumption (or perhaps postulate: the Time postulate). It is amenable to debate, just as Euclid's axioms are. I offer the following points in its favour: 1) Observation is the process of creating information, by distinguishing differences between things (aka bits). I can not agree with this given my model. Physical Reality is brought to world kernels in some sequence by the dynamic. As I stated before each step of the dynamic is inconsistent with its past [see the All/Nothing multiverse model thread]. As such there is no dimensionality to it or perhaps one could call it infinitely dimensioned. All world kernels preexist within the All. Information is not created or destroyed. Switched on and off in terms of physical reality is a better view. However, world kernels are of different informational content [size] so a world can look like information is created if the sequence of kernels consists of kernels of increasing size. 2) To have a difference, obviously requires at least one dimension. Worlds can of course have non zero finite dimensionality. However, differences are not distinguishable by some other difference [a difference is what I take to be that which is pointed to by the term observer]. 3) To compare two different entities requires that the properties of the two entities be brought together (inside the observer's mind). Thus the one required dimension must be timelike, with the observer passing from point to point. As stated above a difference can not compare [distinguish] other differences. However, a difference can change as the dynamic moves to different kernels and this can look like an act such as distinction and appear [memory - false or not] as if directed by the difference that changes. 4) For those who believe in Computationalism, the Turing model of computation implicitly requires this Time postulate. Some kernel sequences could appear to be the successive outputs of a computer but this is just appearance. 5) It appears to be a necessary ingredient to obtain Quantum Mechanics from first principles (see my Why Occams Razor paper) Quantum Mechanics and Relativity appear to be just consequences of some world kernels having a non zero, finite difference in size and the dynamic providing a physical reality to a sequence of such world kernels - a non zero, discrete step evolution of the applicable world. Hal
Re: Belief Statements
Alastair Malcolm writes: For my own part, I give strong credibility (50%) to the existence of many worlds in some guise or other, and in particular to the existence of all logically possible(*) worlds (alpw). For me the existence of one world (ours) so conveniently life-suited - sufficiently spatio-temporally extended and quiescent but with particular properties enabling wide diversity in chemistry etc - demands a specific explanation, and the only other candidate final explanation - a Creator (say a God, or a 'higher' civilisation) - suffers (at least) the problem of requiring an explanation for *it*. That's a great question. I agree that assuming that this is the only world is quite problematic. On the other hand it does not necessarily follow that all possible or conceivable worlds exist. From hearing some physicists speak, I get the impression that they are being dragged kicking and screaming towards many worlds and anthropic ideas, but are resisting. They still hope to come up with some kind of mathematical or philosophical reason to at least restrict the number of possible worlds. At a minimum they are looking for dependencies among many superficially independent aspects of the observable universe. In fact, you could describe that as the fundamental goal of physics. They might accept that certain physical constants have a certain accidental or contingent aspect, that there is no fundamental reason why they have those values; but they want to minimize the number of constants for which this is true, and find ways to show that other constants and properties depend on these few arbitrary ones. I also think that AUH (all universe hypothesis) admits too many alternative formulations which may not all be consistent. That would seem to force the metaverse to choose between, say, Schmidhuber and Tegmark. Yet how can that be? It doesn't seem to make sense that there are two inconsisent ways that all universes can exist. To me that suggests a weakness in our understanding which further study will improve upon. But it means that we can't claim to understand the AUH or to really know what it would mean for all universes to exist. As far as the MWI of QM, my understanding is that advanced theoretical physicists believe QM will be shown to be false(!). It is expected to be merely an approximation to some deeper theory which will also explain general relativity. If all we had was QM, I think the MWI would very likely be true. However, given that QM will be replaced by string theory or loop quantum gravity or some other model, I don't know enough about those to say whether the MWI will still be the simplest explanation. All in all I'd say that I see too much confusion and uncertainty to hold to any position regarding the existence of multiple universes. Hal Finney
Re: Belief Statements
I can't conceive of space-time being anything other than infinite. The existence of all logically possible worlds seems necessary in infinite space-time, where . . . anything that can happen must happen, not only once but an infinite number of times. The difficulty, as Hal Finney points out, is that we so far do not know what can happen. Why does infinite space-time exist? Perhaps because it must - what alternative could there be? Norman Samish . - Original Message - From: Hal Finney [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: everything-list@eskimo.com Sent: Sunday, January 09, 2005 8:21 AM Subject: Re: Belief Statements Alastair Malcolm writes: For my own part, I give strong credibility (50%) to the existence of many worlds in some guise or other, and in particular to the existence of all logically possible(*) worlds (alpw). For me the existence of one world (ours) so conveniently life-suited - sufficiently spatio-temporally extended and quiescent but with particular properties enabling wide diversity in chemistry etc - demands a specific explanation, and the only other candidate final explanation - a Creator (say a God, or a 'higher' civilisation) - suffers (at least) the problem of requiring an explanation for *it*. That's a great question. I agree that assuming that this is the only world is quite problematic. On the other hand it does not necessarily follow that all possible or conceivable worlds exist. From hearing some physicists speak, I get the impression that they are being dragged kicking and screaming towards many worlds and anthropic ideas, but are resisting. They still hope to come up with some kind of mathematical or philosophical reason to at least restrict the number of possible worlds. snip All in all I'd say that I see too much confusion and uncertainty to hold to any position regarding the existence of multiple universes. Hal Finney
Re: Belief Statements
My views on the subject of a multiverse are: 1) The base level embedding system should have no net information. 2) The base level embedding system should have a dynamic. The above seem to have consequences: i) There can be no down select [limitation] on the number of worlds. ii) There can be no down select on the properties of worlds. Comments so far: What is a world? In my view a world is just some sequence of temporary physical reality given to individual members of an infinite ensemble of preexisting packets of information I call kernels. Such members of the ensemble would be world kernels. A world kernel encodes a single state. A portion of some such kernels could be considered to be a memory [perhaps a false one] of past states. The dynamic of (2) gives a brief physical reality to world kernels in some sequence thereby producing a world. iii) Each step of the dynamic must be inconsistent with its past. Comments: Eventually the dynamic gives physical reality to world kernels in a sequence that has an evolution with respect to sub components [non isolated of course] within these kernels that seems to them consistent with some set of rules. There can be no down select on the types of rules. I have posted my proposal for such a base level embedding system in the An All/Nothing multiverse model thread. Hal
Re: Belief Statements
Dear Hal, in my multiverse it is a characteristic of this 'our' world to have developed (into?) a space and time system. I would not assign time to all others just becauseso we can understand it better. (The story of the driver who looks for his (in the darkenss) dropped carkeys around the corner under the streetlamp, because there he can see better). I don't understand (or know) how to handle atemporal worlds, but - Hey! - do we understand everything? (only on this list). Have a good 2005 John Mikes - Original Message - From: Hal Ruhl [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: everything-list@eskimo.com Sent: Sunday, January 09, 2005 4:01 PM Subject: Re: Belief Statements My views on the subject of a multiverse are: 1) The base level embedding system should have no net information. 2) The base level embedding system should have a dynamic. The above seem to have consequences: i) There can be no down select [limitation] on the number of worlds. ii) There can be no down select on the properties of worlds. Comments so far: What is a world? In my view a world is just some sequence of temporary physical reality given to individual members of an infinite ensemble of preexisting packets of information I call kernels. Such members of the ensemble would be world kernels. A world kernel encodes a single state. A portion of some such kernels could be considered to be a memory [perhaps a false one] of past states. The dynamic of (2) gives a brief physical reality to world kernels in some sequence thereby producing a world. iii) Each step of the dynamic must be inconsistent with its past. Comments: Eventually the dynamic gives physical reality to world kernels in a sequence that has an evolution with respect to sub components [non isolated of course] within these kernels that seems to them consistent with some set of rules. There can be no down select on the types of rules. I have posted my proposal for such a base level embedding system in the An All/Nothing multiverse model thread. Hal
Re: Belief Statements
Hi Russell: My dynamic in part produces worlds that appear to have time as a property but also produces all kinds of worlds that have no time in the sense of there being any ordered sequence. There are also worlds that are just a single kernel that is given physical reality in a manner commensurate with the features of the dynamic. Hal At 07:40 PM 1/9/2005, you wrote: A compromise on these two views occurs through my assumption of Time being a necessary property of observerhood. Sure atemporal worlds exist, but there's nobody in them to observe them. Similarly, Hal Ruhl's dynamic process is simply the process of observation. Cheers
