New Scientist
All, New Scientist has a very interesting article this week about free will, reality and entanglement. Worth a look. Additionally, for the trivia fans among you, it seems one of the researchers quoted has clocked similarity effects associated with entanglement at something like (minimum) 10,000 x the speed of light. R.Miller
Re: New Scientist
It is really just a discussion of Bell's inequality, I didn't find the article had a lot new to say. I recall having read a similar standard article in Scientific American in the 1980s. On Fri, Jun 24, 2005 at 01:24:54AM -0500, rmiller wrote: All, New Scientist has a very interesting article this week about free will, reality and entanglement. Worth a look. Additionally, for the trivia fans among you, it seems one of the researchers quoted has clocked similarity effects associated with entanglement at something like (minimum) 10,000 x the speed of light. R.Miller -- *PS: A number of people ask me about the attachment to my email, which is of type application/pgp-signature. Don't worry, it is not a virus. It is an electronic signature, that may be used to verify this email came from me if you have PGP or GPG installed. Otherwise, you may safely ignore this attachment. A/Prof Russell Standish Phone 8308 3119 (mobile) Mathematics0425 253119 () UNSW SYDNEY 2052 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Australiahttp://parallel.hpc.unsw.edu.au/rks International prefix +612, Interstate prefix 02 pgp2JDHoMcZL2.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: another puzzzle
Jesse wrote In reality the molecules in your brain are constantly being recycled--if you believe that the changes that make up memories happen at the synapses, the article at http://www.sci-con.org/articles/20040601.html suggests all the molecules at the synapses are replaced in only 24 hours or so, and also that the entire brain is probably replaced every other month or so. So do you think the Eric Cavalcanti of six months ago is dead, and that your memories of having been him are false? Jesse All, Jesse, IMHO, has pointed out the elephant in the room. Is Sheldrake right about morphic fields guiding our path through the world-line? Or is our concept of reality out of whack? While I respect Sheldrake, for pointing out some obvious quirks in real world perceptions, I think the concept of morphic field is merely descriptive rather than explanatory. But if he's right, is anyone willing to blurt out for the record that consciousness may have its own pilot wave? R Miller
FW: Dualism
Can anyone explain http://chu.stanford.edu/guide.html#ratmech to me. Stephen seems to think Pratt has solved the Caspar problem of dualism. It also involves http://www.meta-religion.com/Philosophy/Articles/Philosophy_of_the_mind/mind-bo dy.htm by someone whose nom-de-internet is Cassiels Sophia. Below is our exchange which Stepen agreed to take back onlist. Brent Meeker -Original Message- From: Stephen Paul King [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, June 21, 2005 3:41 PM To: Brent Meeker Subject: Re: Dualism Dear Brent, I will be writing this response over several sittings so I apologize in advance if it seems a bit discontinuous. - Original Message - From: Brent Meeker [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Stephen Paul King [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Saturday, June 18, 2005 3:39 PM Subject: RE: Dualism -Original Message- From: Stephen Paul King [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Saturday, June 18, 2005 2:12 PM To: Brent Meeker Subject: Re: Dualism Dear Brent, I can try but a tyro can do not better than a professional. Often a tyro can do better because he recalls the difficulties that have become intuitive to the professional. [SPK] I have noticed that. ;-) [SPK] Do you know what relation exists between linear functionals and an appropriate vector space? A duality, but somehow I suspect that you will not be capable of imagining this mathematical duality as having anything at all to do with a mind-body duality; especially since you seem fixated on a particular set of words and have a hard time grasping the outline of the idea that those words represent. [BM] You're right that I have difficulty imagining that; but I don't think I should have to imagine it. [SPK] I was being hopeful. ;-) Whoever is putting forward a theory of mind should be able to explain how the mathematics they use to describe it relates to the mind. For example, duality relates things pairwise. I'm now imagining a pink elephant. What is the physical thing dual to that imagining? If you say some pattern of neuron activity in my brain, I'd say that's a good hypothesis. [SPK] The information structure is the dual to the physical thing. Information is not physical, but does require some physical structure to interact with other information. This is what Pratt meant when he points out that Cartesian dualism and the monist hypothesis have a problem when trying to consistently explain how bodies interact with bodies and minds with other minds. Let me back up my argument that Information is *not* physical. Information is the stuff of representations. To begin let me point out that the claim that information is physical implies, unassailably, that for each and every physical state there is *at most* one datum (let us assume that this datum is the Kolmogoroff string) associated with it because the relationship between object and . This implication is contradicted by basic facts: Given any physical object, there is *at least* one representation of the object. The object, when considered in terms of its states, that has only one possible representation is a strange object indeed, Kolmogoroff's argument notwithstanding, because there are more than one symbolic system (grammar - contra Chomsky!) that can be used in the representation and there is more than one way that the symbolic representation can be arranged (semantics). This points us to the conclusion that it is a mistake to assume that information bits and physical states, which are the stuff of physical objects, are one and the same and thus to the need of an alternative. [BM] But then why should I not regard the neural activity as the physical correlate of the imagining, weak dualism as the author (Cassiel Sophia?) you cite below denominates it. [SPK] I am proposing that there is a physical correlate of the information aspect of the imagining, but in a way that is different from Sophia's. BTW, I pasted that link as a way to present some background not as an advocation of his thesis. If we consider minds and bodies, not in terms of *static substances* but in terms of the transformations that their existence entails, the nature of the duality that Pratt explains is both obvious and unavoidable. As to its predictiveness, let me point out that it solves the epiphenomena problem of both mental and material monism. [BM] Pratt says that there is no direct interaction between physical events, they are always mediated by a common mental event (and vice versa). So how does carbon get produced in the Sun? Is God thinking about about those atoms so they can interact? [SPK] Well, let's be clever and throw out a challenge in the form of a very complex situation and then wait for a misstatement in the reply to be a counterpoint in your favor. Is this Rhetoric 101 practice or a discussion? But to try to answer the point about no direct interaction; that is the meat of Pratt's
RE: copy method important?
-Original Message- From: Bruno Marchal [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, June 20, 2005 1:33 PM To: Norman Samish Cc: everything-list@eskimo.com Subject: Re: copy method important? Le 18-juin-05, à 20:36, Norman Samish a écrit : I'm no physicist, but doesn't Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle forbid making exact quantum-level measurements, hence exact copies? If so, then all this talk of making exact copies is fantasy. Many good answers has been given. And my comment will overlap some of them. The most physicalist one is to referindeed to Tegmark's paper where he justifies by Everett/decoherence that the evidence is that our brain, when seen as an information handling computing machine, acts as a classical machine. But comp makes physicalism wrong, and Tegmark's answer cannot be fundamentally genuine. The importance of quantum decoherence in brain processes M Tegmark 2000, quant-ph/9907009, Phys. Rev. E 61, 4194-4206 161 Why the brain is probably not a quantum computer M Tegmark 2000, Information Sciences 128, 155-179 Then, concerning the comp 1-person indeterminacy, even if my computational state is a quantum states, the Universal Dovetailer Argument (UDA) is still going through. This is a consequence of the fact that quantum computation does not violate Church's thesis. That entails that you can simulate a quantum computer with a classical computer. Sure, there is a relative exponential slow-down of the computation, but this is not relevant because the universal dovetailer is naturally slow down by its heavy dovetailing behavior, and then the first person cannot be aware of that slow down. And then I recall I gave an exercise: show that with comp the no-cloning theorem can easily be justified a priori from comp. As I said this follows easily from the Universal dovetailer Argument. But the UDA and the comp-hypothesis are not the same thing. The argument shows that physical observable reality (relatively to what you decide to measure here and now) emerges as an average on all computations (generated by the UD) going through your actual state. Suppose now that you decide to observe yourself with at a finer and finer level of description. At some moment you will begin to observe yourself at a level below you substitution level (which I recall is the level where you survive through copy). How do you know you can observe that level? Below that level comp predict you will be confronted with the 1-comp indeterminacy, that is you will see the many computation/histories. If comp predicts that then it seems to involve a self-contradiction. It implies that there was no substitution level after all. Brent Meeker
More about identity (was Re: Torture yet again)
I can see an interesting new problem in this thread. Let me put it in a thought experiment as the praxis in this list requires. You are in the same torture room as before, but now the guy is going to torture you to death. You have three options: A: you flip a coin to decide whether you are going to be tortured; B: you press the copy button 100 times; C: you press the copy button once. What do the people in this list choose? For some people, creating copies increases their 1st person probability of escaping torture. So that at each time they press the button they can associate with that a 50% probability of escape. These would choose B, since then they would have a very near certainty of escaping torture. For others, creating copies does not increase any such probability, and there is ultimately no meaning in talking about 1st person probability. But for some reason they seem to feel a strong connection with the copies, as if they are all the same person. They think it is just as good to offer a good meal to the copies as it is to offer it for themselves. These people should choose C, since in this case they will be comforted by the fact that a copy of themselves would survive and have a good life. They don't really need more than one. Actually, one is much better than many, since they wouldn't have the legal and financial problems associated with having lots of copies around. For others, as myself, creating copies does not increase my 1st person probability of escaping torture. And differently from Lee, I think it is just as good to offer a good meal to my copy as it is to offer it to my family and friends. But it is definitely different from offering it to me. These people would choose A. I cannot really understand choice B. Would anyone really choose that or am I just grossly misunderstanding some opinions in this list? About choice B, it raises other interesting questions: suppose you know that the copies are going to undergo some sort of plastic surgery a week or so after the experiment, and will look very different from yourself now. They could also undergo some type of slow personality modification (as education), such that they would at any moment agree that they are experiencing a continuity of identity. Would you still choose B? What if this change really isn't slow, but sudden, at the time of creation of the copy? Does it make a difference? Then what is the difference between doing a copy of yourself or a copy of someone else, since any two people could be connected by a series of continuous transformations? Would you still be comforted by the fact that someone, even if very different from you, would be created to replace you? Eric
Re: New Scientist
From: rmiller New Scientist has a very interesting article [...] http://www.arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0503007 Nicolas Gisin, 'How come the Correlations'. Note that what Gisin is saying (link above) was, more or less, already written by John Bell. It has been argued that quantum mechanics is not locally causal and cannot be embedded in a locally causal theory. That conclusion depends on treating certain experimental parameters, typically the orientations of polarization filters, as free variables. But it might be that this apparent freedom is illusory. Perhaps experimental parameters and experimental results are both consequences, or partially so, of some common hidden mechanism. Then the apparent non-locality could be simulated. - John Bell, Free Variables and Local Causality, 'Epistemological Letters', 15, (1977) The problem Gisin (and many others) is trying to fix is whether space-time is a by-product of quantum dynamics (in a very general sense) or quantum information (in a general sense) lives in, and travels through, a pre-existing space-time. (But this also is what quantum gravity is trying to fix).
Re: another puzzzle
On Fri, Jun 24, 2005 at 11:23:33AM +1000, Eric Cavalcanti wrote: Furthermore, there is always some way to tell the difference between the copy and the original, in principle, even if that infomation is not epistemologically available to the subjects themselves. If the original flew to New York, then he This isn't true for two systems in the same quantum state./lunatic-fringe If you use two synchronized discrete systems, evolving along a trajectory in their state space they can't both encode their location by making measurements on their surroundings (due to synchronization constraint). One or both of them must be blind to the surroundings. The information about location must be encoded the environment around them, and be not accessible to the systems themselves at the same time. The difference, dear Brutus, is in the environment, not ourselves. would have interacted with the environment in a completely different way than if he stayed in the room, and that interaction deposits information about his trajectory in the environment in an irreversible manner. What do we care about something we cannot measure? I believe that the solution is not 3-rd person communicable. I believe that if I press the button 100 times, I'll never experience leaving the room, but there will be 100 copies of me claiming otherwise. That is because I believe You have diverged. Of course there are now many persons, suddenly. If you haven't diverged, you're only one person, and you can't both experience leaving the room and not leaving the room. that my 1-st person probability (in the sense of degree of belief) in this case is NOT equal to the fraction of functionally identical copies. I believe that my first person expectation is not measurable by 3rd parties. The only way I can be convinced otherwise is by doing the test. But then you would never know, because empirically (for 3rd parties) the result would be the same in either case. Run a synchronized SHRDLU simulation in two places, and ask it questions. Trivial experiment, and easy enough to do both in gedanken and in practice. Adding a physical robot arm only adds complication to the experiment, but it's the same in principle. I know that sounds somewhat solipsist in the end, but I can't believe that merely scanning me can affect my future. And I would like to be convinced otherwise, because I don't like solipsism. Why don't we terminate this pointless thread, until we can actually make numerical models of sufficiently complex animals and people, so the question completely renders itself irrelevant? -- Eugen* Leitl a href=http://leitl.org;leitl/a __ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE signature.asc Description: Digital signature
RE: singular versus plural
R. Miller writes: The arguments here seem to assume a consensus experience, i.e. Can't we all just agree on this set of evidence? What if reality experienced by one in a closed room is fundamentally different that when experienced as a dyad, triad, or mob? No one (to my knowledge) has been able to refute the Schmidt retro-pk experiments, and there's serious research that suggests prayer *works* (subsequent events occur* commensurate with consensus desires expressed in prayer). And, the evidence cited by the author of the book The Wisdom of Crowds seems to suggest that more than simple statistics is at play. So, in our infamous (but interesting!) gedanken experiments should we consider whether there is an individual observing something vs a group observation? More to the point, can reality differ based upon the number of people linking in the experience? We discuss some pretty weird ideas on this list, including thought experiments which may not ever be physically possible. I think that it is crucially important that, as far as possible, only the one weird idea be discussed at a time: suppose there are 10^100 copies of you all running in lockstep, *but* that every other fact about the universe is in accordance with generally accepted scientific theory. So although it's not impossible that minds can somehow act as a group, that is something in need of *real* experimental evidence. Stacking a controversial theory on a weird idea balancing on an impossible situation is asking for trouble! --Stathis Papaioannou _ Single? Start dating at Lavalife. Try our 7 day FREE trial! http://lavalife9.ninemsn.com.au/clickthru/clickthru.act?context=an99locale=en_AUa=19179
RE: More about identity (was Re: Torture yet again)
Eric Cavalcanti writes: You are in the same torture room as before, but now the guy is going to torture you to death. You have three options: A: you flip a coin to decide whether you are going to be tortured; B: you press the copy button 100 times; C: you press the copy button once. What do the people in this list choose? I would choose B. B is effectively the same as flipping a coin 100 times, with a 50% chance of escaping the torture every time. If you say that every time the button is pressed not only you are copied, but the entire universe is copied sans torture, then this is almost exactly the same as flipping a coin 100 times if MWI is true. Why do you think it's OK to be duplicated as a result of the universe splitting and not OK to be duplicated by pressing a button? --Stathis Papaioannou _ Have fun with your mobile! Ringtones, wallpapers, games and more. http://fun.mobiledownloads.com.au/191191/index.wl
Re: another puzzzle
Eric Cavalcanti writes: I do not equate my identity with the matter that composes my body at all. I would say that my personal identity cannot be defined in a communicable way, in the way I see it. I believe there is something fundamental about consciousness. I guess that my position could be made analogous to the following thought experiment: suppose you are playing a virtual simulation game, and in the game you enter a copy machine just like the one we are discussing. The game is programmed to feed your (real) brain with the experience of being in the same room every time you press the button but seing all these copies of your virtual body being created in New York. Of course there's no question of who you are. You are not the copies in New York. While playing the game you do not feel concerned that you could suddenly appear in New York and be trapped in the simulation after pressing the button. In this example my identity would undoubtedly be located in my real brain. I imagine an analogous situation for my identity in the real world, with the difference that I can't (or I don't know how to) unplug from it. But clearly it is not located in my body anymore than it was located in my virtual body inside the simulation. But of course I find this position quite uncomfortable, because I cannot acount for other people's consciousness in any well defined way. And since I don't like solipsism, i.e., I like to believe in other people's consciousness, I must say it's deeply unsatisfactory. But not enough to believe that I could experience being teleported to New York. You've made it clear that you would not enter a machine which destructively scans you and teleports you, because that would be like suicide. But what if you had no choice? Say the Enterprise is about to be blown up by Klingons, and it is clear that you can either stay on board and face certain death, or teleport out and face what you see as probable death. Would you choose to teleport? And if you did, and a moment later found yourself safely on the surface of a nearby planet, with all your friends from the Enterprise, would that convince you that teleportation is not suicide? And even if it didn't quite convince you, would you be pragramatic about it, i.e., I've tried it once and I didn't feel any different at all, so if it is suicide and replacement by a copy, then suicide and replacement by a copy isn't nearly as bad as I thought; so maybe I'll just start using it all the time like everyone else does. --Stathis Papaioannou _ SEEK: Over 80,000 jobs across all industries at Australia's #1 job site. http://ninemsn.seek.com.au?hotmail
Re: death
Le 22-juin-05, à 15:05, Stathis Papaioannou a écrit : Hal Finney writes: I was trying to use Stathis' terminology when I wrote about the probability of dying. Actually I am now trying to use the ASSA and I don't have a very good idea about what it means to specify a subjective next moment. I think ultimately it is up to each OM as to what it views as its predecessor moments, and perhaps which ones it might like to consider its successor moments. Among the problems: substantial, short-term mental changes might be so great that the past OM would not consider the future OM to be the same person. This sometimes even happens with our biological bodies. I can easily create thought experiments that bend the connections beyond the breaking poing. There appears to be no bright line between the degree to which a past and future OM can be said to be the same person, even if we could query the OM's in question. Another problem: increases in measure from a past OM to a future OM. We can deal with decreases in measure by the traditional method of expected probability. But increases in measure appear to require probability 1. That doesn't make sense, again causing me to question the whole idea of a subjective probability distribution over possible next moments. I agree that it's difficult to specify what counts as a subjective next moment. That has to do with the way our minds have evolved to think, and we just have to leave it as unspecified or arrive at some arbitrary definition when considering physical theories. I think that the better option consists in leaving it as unspecified. Now logic and algebra has been invented for reasoning with unspecified propositions or objects. I am thinking again how to convince you (all) how a minimal amount investing in (modal) logic could be most helpful especially with respect to the question of what OMs are and what are the possible relations between OMs, etc. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
unsubscribe
I hope you all have fun languishing in the hell that is pseudo-science and superstition. P.S. Where's the math, you superstitious new-agers?
Re: One more question about measure
Le 22-juin-05, à 19:50, Quentin Anciaux a écrit : I have one more question about measure : I don't understand the concept of 'increasing' and 'decreasing' measure if I assume everything exists. Me neither. Especially when I accept, for the sake of some argument, the ASSA (Absolute Self-Sampling-Assumption) idea. If the measure is relative to your current state/OM, then it makes at least as much sense than Because if everything exists... every OM has a successor (and I'd say it must always have more than one), Perhaps. It depends of your definition of OM, and of your everything theory. Let me tell you the Lobian's answer: if I have a successor OM then I have a successor OM which has no successor OM. OK, I am cheating here, but not so much. As I just said to Stathis I must find a way to convince people about the urgency of using the modal logical tools. and concerning good or bad OM, every OM has good successor and bad successor. What I want to mean is that, I get 100% chance that at least one (I'd say many) of my futur selves will go in hell, and at least one (I'd say also many) will have great experiences. And this, whatever I do... because when I do something, the universe split, and there are branches were I do other thing. I can't constraint the choice. So what is the meaning of increasing and decreasing measure ? What is wrong in every OM has a successor in an everything context ? Here too I could give a precise answer, which is that every OM has a successor, when looking at some absolute third person view, but that that truth is not communicable by the 1-person observer sigh. Have you bought the Smullyan's FU ? (Forever Undecided) Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Re: What is an observer moment?
Le 22-juin-05, à 20:35, George Levy a écrit : Bruno Marchal wrote: Le 21-juin-05, à 05:33, George Levy a écrit : Note that according to this definition the set of observer states may also encompass states with inconsistent histories as long as they are indistinguishable. The possibilities of observer moment being partially associated with (slightly) inconsistent histories resolves the question of how valid but erroneous observer moments can exist. For example I could make an arithmetical mistake such as 8*5 = 56 or I temporarily believe that Christopher Columbus discovered America in 1592. I agree. >An interesting thought is that a psychological first person can surf simultaneously through a large number of physical OMs With comp, we should say that the first person MUST surf simultaneously through an INFINITY of third person OMs. I agree there is and infinity of OM's that a psychological first person surfs through. But I would not say these OM's are third person, because there is no third person to observe them. A psychological third person would be too spread out among OM's to observe any one in particular. I agree. (I would not use the term physical at all, because at this stage it is not defined. But with the negation of comp + assumption of slightly incorrect QM what you say seems to me plausible.) Are you saying that COMP does not admit (slightly) inconsistent histories? No. Quite the contrary, comp does admit inconsistent histories. But for reason of methodological simplicity, I limit my interview of lobian machines only on the consistent machines, for which comp makes necessary the consistency of inconsistent histories. With comp, a consistent machine is in the state of being *possibly* inconsistent. I know you read the Smullyan's FU, and I'm afraid it is not enough. I mean it is a non trivial consequence of the incompleteness phenomenon that a consistent machine is automatically consistently inconsistent, and this in the frame of the brave and simplest logic (classical logic). I am not sure if I agree with this. I can be a psychological first person and still say yes doctor to a computer transplant into my brain. Not only I agree, but the point is that with comp it is necessarily so. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Re: Dualism and the DA
Le 22-juin-05, à 13:19, Brent Meeker a écrit : -Original Message- From: Bruno Marchal [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, June 22, 2005 8:16 AM To: Pete Carlton Cc: EverythingList Subject: Re: Dualism and the DA Le 21-juin-05, à 21:21, Pete Carlton a écrit : snip Now, if you introduce copies to this scenario, it does not seem to me that anything changes fundamentally. Your choice on what kind of scenario to accept will still hinge on your desires for the future of any persons involved. The desires themselves may be very complicated, and in fact will depend on lots of hitherto unspecified details such as the legal status, ownership rights, etc., of copies. Of course one copy will say I pushed the button and then I got tortured, and the other copy will say I pushed the button and woke up on the beach - which is exactly what we would expect these two people to say. And they're both right, insofar as they're giving an accurate report of their memories. What is the metaphysical issue here? There are two *physical* issues here. 1) The simplest one is that if you agree with the comp indeterminacy (or similar) you get an explanation of the quantum indeterminacy without the collapse of the wave packet. This is mainly Everett contribution. I think Pete has a good point; I don't see how this bears on his analysis of I. Could you elaborate a little bit? I don't see how it could possibly not bear on Pete's analysis of I. I mean if Pete is right about his I, he should agree with Everett's notion that the probabilities are subjective in QM. 2) The less trivial one, perhaps, is that if you agree with the comp indeterminacy you get an a priori explosion of the number of appearances of first person white rabbits I don't see that either. The SWE doesn't predict that *everything* (which is what I presume you to mean by white rabbits) will happen. If it did it would be useless. Once you accept comp, the explosion of rabbits follows from the UD Argument (UDA). Invoking the SWE here is irrelevent, unless to say that the SWE is the only way to solve the rabbits problem. Showing this from comp only would be derivation of the SWE from comp. and the only way to solve this, assuming the SWE is correct, must consist in justifying the SWE from the comp indeterminacy bearing But the indeterminancy of comp arises from equivocation about I as Pete noted. I can agree with the use of such vocabulary. It assumes first that there is an I dependent on physical structure The physical structure is what makes an I to be able to manifest eself relatively to some probable computation. and then sees a problem in determining where the I goes when the structure is duplicated. Yes. on all computational states/histories. The fact that all these metaphysical problems and bizarre results are predicted by assuming *everything happens* implies to me that *everything happens* is likely false. 1) Weirdness is not falsity, but ok I am open we will get a falsity from comp, and then comp will be refuted and that would be a giant result. 2) everything happens in the comp frame, just means that the set of all possible computations is as well defined as the set of natural numbers. You cannot make disappear a computation for the same reason you cannot dismiss the number 13 or the least prime bigger than 100^(100^(100^(100^(100^(100^(100^(100))). I'm not sure what the best alternative is, but I like Roland Omnes view point that QM is a probabilistic theory and hence it must predict probabilities for things that don't happen. OK, but that is an ad hoc wishful thinking move to preserve unicity of history. Even Roland Omnes agrees that such a move is non cartesian. And then, in the french edition (but not in the english edition if I remember correctly-I will verify again!) he opposes Heidegger against Descartes in the most irrational way. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
RE: singular versus plural
At 06:44 AM 6/24/2005, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: (snip) So although it's not impossible that minds can somehow act as a group, that is something in need of *real* experimental evidence. Stacking a controversial theory on a weird idea balancing on an impossible situation is asking for trouble! --Stathis Papaioannou Actually, the experiments of Schmidt et al, and the evidence cited in Wisdom of Crowds suggest a QM model. Of course, anyone can--and will!--deride an experiment as not being real---after all, that's how the science game is played, ;-), but prediction is one of the gold standards for an experimental model, and Schmidt's work, though not explanatory (neither is QM) it *is* predictive. And if there's a difference between singular experience and plural experiences, then maybe it may be worthwhile to apply it to the thought problems here. RM _ Single? Start dating at Lavalife. Try our 7 day FREE trial! http://lavalife9.ninemsn.com.au/clickthru/clickthru.act?context=an99locale=en_AUa=19179
Re: Dualism and the DA
Le 22-juin-05, à 21:26, [EMAIL PROTECTED] a écrit : x-tad-biggerActually, it occurred to me lately that saying everything happens may be the same as the paradox of the set of all sets. /x-tad-bigger That is indeed close to may critics of Tegmark. But as you know logician have made progress in set theories, and today there exist reasonnable set theories which can make you comfortable with notions of universal sets. Now comp gives the most simple of them all, and that's why, I don't insist on all those non-comp variants. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Re: copy method important?
Le 24-juin-05, à 01:03, Brent Meeker a écrit : And then I recall I gave an exercise: show that with comp the no-cloning theorem can easily be justified a priori from comp. As I said this follows easily from the Universal dovetailer Argument. But the UDA and the comp-hypothesis are not the same thing. No but the UDA presuppose the comp hyp, and, unless I am wrong, the comp hyp entails the conclusion of the UDA. The argument shows that physical observable reality (relatively to what you decide to measure here and now) emerges as an average on all computations (generated by the UD) going through your actual state. Suppose now that you decide to observe yourself with at a finer and finer level of description. At some moment you will begin to observe yourself at a level below you substitution level (which I recall is the level where you survive through copy). How do you know you can observe that level? What would it mean not being able to observe that level? Mmh ... I can observe anything, I mean I can look at anything, I will observe the result of my experience, being perhaps fuzzy, indeterminate, multiple, etc. Below that level comp predict you will be confronted with the 1-comp indeterminacy, that is you will see the many computation/histories. If comp predicts that then it seems to involve a self-contradiction. It implies that there was no substitution level after all. But it does look like in QM, no? If we try to observe, very indirectly perhaps, some isolate piece of reality, doesn'it looking like observing the parallel realities. I think that is what David Deutsch has try to do by explaining that the Young two holes can be interpreted as a mean to accept the many worlds. Do you think the many worlds idea is contradictory? Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Re: Torture yet again
On Fri, Jun 24, 2005 at 05:08:39PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: Le 23-juin-05, ? 05:38, Lee Corbin a ?crit : you *can* be in two places at the same time. From a third person pov: OK. From a first person pov: how? You can be in two places at the same time, but you can't enjoy two different scenaries, or think invidividual thoughts. It's a degenerate case, and rather uninteresting (but relevant for High Availability / Failover clusters -- HA, heartbeat, drbd, stonith). -- Eugen* Leitl a href=http://leitl.org;leitl/a __ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: unsubscribe
Le 24-juin-05, à 14:47, A. Maxwell a écrit : Where's the math?, snip Here: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0521483255/104-6734233 -3264737?v=glance Look Maxwell, in the list nobody pretends to know the truth, and we are just making *arguments*. But if you like math, see my url which translate some of our arguments in arithmetic. The basic math is detailed in the book above. An excellent introduction to such math (which does not look serious but *is* serious) is here: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0192821962/104-6734233 -3264737?v=glance Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Re: Torture yet again
Le 24-juin-05, à 17:23, Eugen Leitl a écrit : On Fri, Jun 24, 2005 at 05:08:39PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: Le 23-juin-05, ? 05:38, Lee Corbin a ?crit : you *can* be in two places at the same time. From a third person pov: OK. From a first person pov: how? You can be in two places at the same time, but you can't enjoy two different scenaries, or think invidividual thoughts. Given the definition of 1-person (the one who enjoys) and the third person (the one you can captured by a picture, description, name, identity card, etc.), you are just saying what I said, or even better: From a third person pov: yes. From a first person pov: no. (I assume the place Lee talks about *are* 1-person distinguishable, of course I am at every undistinguishable places at once, drinking an infinity of coffee cup in all Brussels from all Belgiums from all Europas (well here I am less sure!) from all earths from all milky ways from all universes from all multiverses . from all sets of recoverable conceivable computational histories ... in the only one arithmetical truth). [comp assumed!] Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Re: another puzzzle
Eric Cavalcanti wrote: If I were to be consistent, I would have to wonder whether the person I was a few months ago was really me, because the atoms comprising my body today are probably completely different. In fact, in *every respect* the person I was a few months ago differs more from me as I am today than I would differ from a teleported copy. In what way is the destruction of the original in teleportation different to the destruction of the original which occurs in the course of normal life, other than the speed with which it happens? If you collected all the discarded matter from your body over the course of a year, you would probably have more than enough to build a whole alternative person. Would you consider that person dead, replaced by a mere copy? If not, could you give a consistent explanation for why you would consider teleportation to be basically different? I do not equate my identity with the matter that composes my body at all. I would say that my personal identity cannot be defined in a communicable way, in the way I see it. I believe there is something fundamental about consciousness. If you don't equate your identity with the matter of your body, then why would you believe that your stream of consciousness will always remain tied to the original body rather than one of the copies? What is special about the original body, besides the continuity of material with the material that made up the body before it was copied? There are many of us on this list who also think there's something fundamental about consciousness, but most of us would say that consciousness is tied to *patterns*, not to distinct physical objects. I guess that my position could be made analogous to the following thought experiment: suppose you are playing a virtual simulation game, and in the game you enter a copy machine just like the one we are discussing. The game is programmed to feed your (real) brain with the experience of being in the same room every time you press the button but seing all these copies of your virtual body being created in New York. Of course there's no question of who you are. You are not the copies in New York. While playing the game you do not feel concerned that you could suddenly appear in New York and be trapped in the simulation after pressing the button. But this thought experiment doesn't really explain anything about *why* you expect your stream of consciousness to be tied to the original body. I could equally well imagine a virtual simulation game where, when you press the copy button, your simulated surroundings suddenly change and you find yourself in the copying chamber, looking back at the original body sitting in the scanning chamber, which you no longer control. Jesse
Re: another puzzzle
rmiller wrote: Jesse wrote In reality the molecules in your brain are constantly being recycled--if you believe that the changes that make up memories happen at the synapses, the article at http://www.sci-con.org/articles/20040601.html suggests all the molecules at the synapses are replaced in only 24 hours or so, and also that the entire brain is probably replaced every other month or so. So do you think the Eric Cavalcanti of six months ago is dead, and that your memories of having been him are false? Jesse All, Jesse, IMHO, has pointed out the elephant in the room. Is Sheldrake right about morphic fields guiding our path through the world-line? You don't need morphic fields to explain the fact that the structure of our brain (and therefore our behavior) remains the same even as the individual molecules get recycled--that's just molecular biology, cells are always using nutrient molecules to build new copies of the same proteins, and meanwhile getting rid of waste molecules from old proteins that have broken down, and the way they do this is well-understood. There's a philosophical mystery here if you believe that consciousness is tied to the particular physical material of your brain as opposed to the pattern of your brain (I'd choose the second option), but I don't think there's any great biological mystery about it. Jesse
RE: unsubscribe
New Agers? Few of us on this list believe in stuff like ESP, the only exceptions I know of are rmiller and Stephen Paul King. Most of us believe in a completely reductionist view of how the brain produces intelligent behavior (ie we think a sufficiently detailed simulation of a brain would behave just as intelligently as the original), even if some think there is a mystery about the first-person aspects of consciousness. The main purpose of the list is to discuss the idea that all logically possible universes (or observer-moments) exist--is that a standard New Age belief? Anyway, if you want to unsubscribe, you must send an email with the subject unsubscribe to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Jesse ---BeginMessage--- I hope you all have fun languishing in the hell that is pseudo-science and superstition. P.S. Where's the math, you superstitious new-agers? ---End Message---
Re: another puzzzle
Le 24-juin-05, à 12:27, Eugen Leitl a écrit : Why don't we terminate this pointless thread, until we can actually make numerical models of sufficiently complex animals and people, so the question completely renders itself irrelevant? You answer like if by making things more precise, automatically the question will then vanished away, like if you knew the theorem before starting to find the axioms. But: replace sufficiently complex animals and people by sufficiently complex machines or by sufficiently rich theories, and then computer science and logic illustrate and enlighten *already* the relevance of the question and the high counter-intuitive character of the possible answers). But I don't think it is useful nor necessary to go to the math before understanding the intuitive but precise problems, and thought experiments like those in this (sequences) of threads are very illuminating. Why do you think the question is irrelevant? What do you mean exactly, giving that some people works hard to got yes/no clearcut questions if only to be able to distinguish between the different ways *we* approach those questions. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
New Age?
Thank you, Jesse, for pointing out that fact. ;-) Stephen PS, If it where not for the few of us that have *actually had ESP experiences*, that can not be refuted as hallucinations or temporal lobe seizures, etc., (I can't claim to speak for Richard on this) and are willing to find consistent explanations for such within physics, would the Everything list not degenerate into a cacophonous echo chamber? - Original Message - From: Jesse Mazer [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; everything-list@eskimo.com Sent: Friday, June 24, 2005 12:45 PM Subject: RE: unsubscribe New Agers? Few of us on this list believe in stuff like ESP, the only exceptions I know of are rmiller and Stephen Paul King. Most of us believe in a completely reductionist view of how the brain produces intelligent behavior (ie we think a sufficiently detailed simulation of a brain would behave just as intelligently as the original), even if some think there is a mystery about the first-person aspects of consciousness. The main purpose of the list is to discuss the idea that all logically possible universes (or observer-moments) exist--is that a standard New Age belief? Anyway, if you want to unsubscribe, you must send an email with the subject unsubscribe to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Jesse
Re: another puzzzle
On Fri, Jun 24, 2005 at 06:52:11PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: Why don't we terminate this pointless thread, until we can actually make numerical models of sufficiently complex animals and people, so the question completely renders itself irrelevant? You answer like if by making things more precise, automatically the question will then vanished away, like if you knew the theorem before No, the nature of identity and cognition can be already described with sufficient precision. It's just empirically threads about personal identity are fueled by sentiments similiar to now obsolete ones: those about phlogiston, vis vitalis and creationism. These, too, have gone round in circles for decades and centuries, leading pretty much nowhere. Statements I believe that first-person introspective view is special and I'm convinced cognition is not a physical process described by known physical laws or require deep quantum magic, continuity matters location is part of system identity, atoms themselves, not their spatiotemporal arrangement constitute identity are such sterile arguments. Ultimatively, they cannot be refuted by means other than a direct demonstration, preferrably from a first-person perspective (but even then, some observers will still remain unconvinced, claiming the zombie clause, or trying to get the experimenter persecuted for their murder). starting to find the axioms. But: replace sufficiently complex animals and people by sufficiently complex machines or by sufficiently rich theories, and then computer science and logic illustrate and enlighten *already* the relevance of the question and the high counter-intuitive character of the possible answers). Absolutely. Apparently, too counter-intuitive for some people to accept, despite based on solid seat-of-the-pants science and empirically refuted by daily routine in IT. But I don't think it is useful nor necessary to go to the math before understanding the intuitive but precise problems, and thought experiments like those in this (sequences) of threads are very illuminating. Why do you think the question is irrelevant? What do you Of course they're illuminating. But have they convinced many? It doesn't seem so. mean exactly, giving that some people works hard to got yes/no clearcut questions if only to be able to distinguish between the different ways *we* approach those questions. -- Eugen* Leitl a href=http://leitl.org;leitl/a __ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: One more question about measure
Hi Bruno, Le Vendredi 24 Juin 2005 15:25, Bruno Marchal a écrit : Because if everything exists... every OM has a successor (and I'd say it must always have more than one), Perhaps. It depends of your definition of OM, and of your everything theory. Let me tell you the Lobian's answer: if I have a successor OM then I have a successor OM which has no successor OM. I don't understand this statement, for me, every OM has a successor, like every integer has. How could it be that an OM can't have a successor ? But I'm firmly convinced that the set of visual OM (I mean by visual, something an observer like a human can see) is finite. I have an example for this : 1) assume an observer that can see. 2) assume that the observer can see only at a certain resolution/level (it's true that I can't see everything, I do not see quarks for example, nor my cells) Then, I can digitalize every image that I (assuming I'm an observer ;) can see. Now, I'll take an arbitrary image resolution far upper than I details I can actually be aware of. For example : 10x10 pixels, every pixels can have 16.5 millions colors (even if it has been proven that humans can only see less than 20 colors, just for the argument). Then the limit for the eyes to see individual images in a movie is approximately 40hz, so for the argument I will say that I need at least 100 frames by second (higher than what we can perceive). Now how much bits do I need to encode one hour of visual events ? It's simply 10x10x4x100x3600. So the needed number of bits to encode one hour of visual events at a resolution far higher than what we can perceive is finite... It's the same if you replace one hour by the length of a lifetime (+/- 80 years). So even if we are immortal, at a given time in the far away future, the visual events must repeat. Quentin Anciaux
Re: One more question about measure
Please replace bits by bytes ;) Quentin Anciaux
Re: Dualism and the DA
(Sorry for the delay; I like to spend several hours writing here but I have had meetings to attend etc..)On Jun 22, 2005, at 4:19 AM, Brent Meeker wrote:There are two *physical* issues here.1) The simplest one is that if you agree with the comp indeterminacy(or similar) you get an explanation of the quantum indeterminacywithout the collapse of the wave packet. This is mainly Everettcontribution. I do see how comp / "first-person" indeterminacy can account for, or can be equivalent to, quantum indeterminacy. In other words, asking "Why am I the one in Washington instead of Moscow" is like asking "Why am I the one who sees the cat is still alive", etc. But my point is that we don't need to postulate "primitive" first-person phenomena like observer moments to account for the larger 3rd person fact, which is just that there will exist people who are going to ask these questions. I'd rather postulate classes of third-person phenomena (such as those that fall into Dennett's 'intentional stance') that are able to explain the *apparent* first-person phenomena such as the absence of white rabbits. That way Leibniz's principle of sufficient reason remains intact: it isn't the case that "There's no sufficient reason why I find myself in Moscow"; rather, there *is* a reason why there's one person in Moscow, and one in Washington, and they're both asking certain questions that contain the word "I".2) The less trivial one, perhaps, is that if you agree with the compindeterminacy you get an a priori explosion of the number ofappearances of first person white rabbitsI don't see that either. The SWE doesn't predict that *everything* (which iswhat I presume you to mean by "white rabbits") will happen. If it did it wouldbe useless.-or (if I understand correctly) it doesn't predict that everything will happen to the same extent. But, anyway, I agree that the white rabbit problem is real, although I see it as a third person problem rather than an (intrinsically) first person problem. and the only way to solvethis, assuming the SWE is correct, must consist in justifying the SWEfrom the comp indeterminacy bearing But the "indeterminancy" of comp arises from equivocation about "I" as Petenoted. It assumes first that there is an "I" dependent on physical structureand then sees a problem in determining where the "I" goes when the structure isduplicated.Right - I think that the "physical structure" (which I'm happy to equate with mathematical structure, or a program, etc.) is all there is - and once you've explained that, you've explained everything. The "I" that comes out of it is a very useful pattern to us but it isn't something further, something primitive. The best example I can think of where the "first person as primitive" reasoning takes us into weird territory, is the talk of "observer moments". I think that taking these as primitive leads us into error; in particular the idea that there's a definite answer to the question "what observer moment am I now experiencing?".Best regards Pete Carlton
