Re: Many worlds theory of immortality
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Hal Finney) To: everything-list@eskimo.com Subject: Re: Many worlds theory of immortality Date: Fri, 15 Apr 2005 15:27:25 -0700 (PDT) Jesse Mazer writes: Would you apply the same logic to copying a mind within a single universe that you would to the splitting of worlds in the MWI? If so, consider the thought-experiment I suggested in my post at http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/m4805.html -- Generally, I don't think the same logic applies to copying a mind in a single universe than to splitting of worlds in the MWI. Copying a mind will double its measure, while splitting one leaves it alone. That is a significant practical and philosophical difference. Doubles its measure relative to who? If I am copied while my friend is not, perhaps it makes sense that my measure is doubled relative to his. But what if our entire planet, or entire local region of the universe, was copied? The relative measure of any two people would not be changed, it seems. Perhaps you could say that the measure of observer-moments that take place after the the copying is higher than the measure of observer-moments that take place before it, but I'm not sure that'd be true either, it really depends on what your theory is about how measure should be assigned to different observer-moments. Part of the problem is you seem to be assuming measure can somehow be derived from the number of physical copies in a single universe, whereas I lean more towards the view that a TOE would ultimately be stated simply in terms of observer-moments and the measure on each, with the appearance of a physical universe just being a consequence of the particular types of observer-moments that have higher measure. So it seems that it partly depends whether one believes the third-person perspective or the first-person perspective is more fundamental. (Although even if you take the first-person perspective as more basic, you'd need more of a fleshed-out theory of how the appearance of an objective physical universe comes about to say for sure whether copying a mind in a single universe is the same or different from many-worlds splitting.) Jesse
RE: many worlds theory of immortality
Stathis Papaioannou wrote: Jesse Mazer writes (after quoting Stathis Papaioannou): No doubt, common implementations of your mind will predominate over more bizarre ones at any given point in time. It is also possible to imagine some scenarios where you survive indefinitely with all of your friends, for example implemented in an Omega Point computer. But eternity is a very long time. If it is possible that the Omega Point computer can break down, then, as Murphy teaches, it certainly *will* break down - eventually. Not if the probability of it breaking down decreases in a geometric way from century to century (or millennium to millennium, aeon to aeon, whatever) as more and more of the universe is incorporated into the giant distributed computing network (or as the increasing computing power allows for more and more sophisticated ways of anticipating and avoiding civilization-ending disasters). Like I said, if the probability of a catastrophic breakdown was 1/8 in one century, 1/16 in the next, 1/32 in the next, and so on, then the total probability of it breaking down at any point in the entire infinite history of the universe would be the sum of the infinite series 1/8+1/16+1/32+1/64+1/128+... , which is equal to 1/4. In such a branch there'd be a 3/4 chance that civilization would last forever. It is possible that the probability of the computer breaking down decreases geometrically with time, as you say. However, as t-infinity, it is nevertheless increasingly likely to deviate from this ideal behaviour, and the measure of branches of the multiverse in which it does will approach zero. Remember, it is not the probability in any single branch which is important (in fact, in the MWI that would be a meaningless concept), but the measure across all branches. It may be more likely to deviate from this ideal behavior, but it could deviate by approaching zero probability of breakdown faster than the ideal behavior predicts, instead of slower; when I said that the probability would be 1/8+1/16+1/32+..., I meant the *average* you get when you sum all possible future histories from that point, including both the histories where at some later time the probability was approaching zero even faster than predicted by the 1/8+1/16+... pattern along with the histories where at some later time it was approaching zero slower, or the probability of breakdown was even increasing. Since it's an average, that means that out of all future histories stemming from that time, in 3/4 of them civilization will never break down. Jesse
RE: many worlds theory of immortality
Jonathan Colvin wrote: Well, I was elaborating on Bruno's statement that worlds (maximal consistent set of propositions) of a FS are not computable; that even given infinite resources (ie. infinite time) it is not possible to generate a complete world. This suggests to me that it is *not* the case that given infinite time, eveything that can happen must happen. I must admit this is not my area of expertise; but it seems to me that the only other option of defining a world (identifying it with the FS itself) will, by Godel's incompleteness theorem, necessitate that there exist unprovable true propositions of world; the world will be incomplete, so again, not everything that can happen will happen. Jesse: Godel's incompleteness theorem only applies in cases where the statements have a meaning in terms of our mathematical model of arithmetic (see my comments at http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/m4584.html ). If your statements are something like descriptions of the state of a cellular automaton, then I don't see them having any kind of external meaning in terms of describing arithmetical truths, so there's no sense in which there would be unprovable but true statements. I was asking the question in the context of Tegmark's UE (by which all and only structures that exist mathematically exist physically), and whether it has relevance to the existence of all possible things. Frankly I'm not sure that Godel is relevant in that context; but then I'm not sure that it's irrelevant either. In this context statements like the descriptions of the states of cellular automata *can* be seen as describing arithmetical truths. No? Jonathan Colvin
Re: many worlds theory of immortality
Le 18-avr.-05, à 09:04, Jonathan Colvin a écrit : I was asking the question in the context of Tegmark's UE (by which all and only structures that exist mathematically exist physically), and whether it has relevance to the existence of all possible things. Frankly I'm not sure that Godel is relevant in that context; but then I'm not sure that it's irrelevant either. In this context statements like the descriptions of the states of cellular automata *can* be seen as describing arithmetical truths. No? That's correct. Any relative description of anything digital can be seen as describing some arithmetical truth. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Re: many worlds theory of immortality
Le 18-avr.-05, à 02:39, Jonathan Colvin a écrit : Well, I was elaborating on Bruno's statement that worlds (maximal consistent set of propositions) of a FS are not computable; that even given infinite resources (ie. infinite time) it is not possible to generate a complete world. This suggests to me that it is *not* the case that given infinite time, eveything that can happen must happen. I must admit this is not my area of expertise; but it seems to me that the only other option of defining a world (identifying it with the FS itself) will, by Godel's incompleteness theorem, necessitate that there exist unprovable true propositions of world; the world will be incomplete, so again, not everything that can happen will happen. But here I disagree, unless you put some constructive or effective constraint on what is a reality, but then you must abandon the comp hyp. The reason is admittedly subtle, perhaps, and is based on the distinction between first person point of view (pov) and third person pov. The comp hyp is a bet that I am a machine, and this entails that reality, whatever it is, cannot be described by an effective entity. That is: if I am a machine then reality cannot be a machine (the idea is that reality emerges from ALL computations relative to my state and this is essentially due to the fact that a first person cannot be aware of delays in some effective presentation of all computations (which exist by Church's thesis)). Please see the links to the Universal Dovetailer Argument (UDA) in the list and/or in my url. We can discuss that later 'cause now I'm too buzy alas ... But read the UDA and don't hesitate to send a catalog of objections, or questions. In english you can read either http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/publications/ SANE2004MARCHALAbstract.html or http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/publications/CCQ.pdf From the (pure) computer science point of view the difficulty here is related to the fact that a set can be effective although some of its subset is not (see the diagonalization posts in my url). This is not so astonishing the painting of the Joconde is more complex than the white paper which contains it. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Re: many worlds theory of immortality
Sathis wrote: a. ...I might agree that Heaven would be wonderful,... Indeed? to sing the same hymn the 30.000th time? and b. ...whether I would like something to be true or not has no bearing whatsoever on whether in fact it *is* true. What is true? IMO: true is MY 1st person mindset based upon the 3rd person mindsets I have received from others and have put in the objective chapter, which is MY subjective and virtual interpretation of who knows what. John M - Original Message - From: Stathis Papaioannou [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; everything-list@eskimo.com Sent: Sunday, April 17, 2005 9:28 PM Subject: Re: many worlds theory of immortality
Re: Free Will Theorem
On Apr 11, 2005, at 11:11 PM, Russell Standish wrote: I'm dealing with these questions in an artificial life system - Tierra to be precise. I have compared the original Tierra code, with one in which the random no. generator is replaced with a true random no. generator called HAVEGE, and another simulation in which the RNG is replaced with a cryptographically secure RNG called ISAAC. The results to date (and this _is_ work in progress) is that there is a distinct difference between the original Tierra PRNG, and the other two generators, but that there is little difference between HAVEGE and ISAAC. This seems to indicate that algorithmic randomness can be good enough to fool learning algorithms. That's a very interesting experiment -- you might be interested to know that Dennett (again, in Elbow Room) predicted something similar; that for all the cases where randomness impacts an organism's choices, true randomness would be practically indistinguishable from sufficiently unpredictable pseudorandomness. I'm glad you're doing these experiments. How does your true random number generator work? Do you have preliminary results posted somewhere? Anyway, I think that the important question of free will is not Could I have done otherwise than I did in >this exact circumstance, but this: Am I so constituted that I will act the way I did in circumstances >relevantly like this, but will be able to change my behavior in the way I want to when circumstances change?. In other words -- we really don't care whether or not we'd do the same thing over and over again if circumstances were exactly the same. That kind of free will, what you would get from indeterminism, is not at all what people care about when they think about whether they have free will or not. What we care about is whether we have self-control. You said The whole debate you quote from Dennett seems quaint and out of date... , but I think it's very useful (and actually it was from the Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, not from Dennett). There's been a lot of definitional hair-splitting here about just what free will is and isn't; I propose to approach the question in a different way: What do you personally care about? Does it matter to you whether the universe is deterministic or not? Would it matter to you if you realized someone was using subliminal advertising on you to make you buy things? (I'm not suggesting that what we want to be the case has any influence on what is the case; I'm just trying to get at what people mean when they say free will.) Well, it looks like there are as many definitions of free will as there are people taking part in the debate -- which is precisely why we need to talk about it, and why it's a good idea be familiar with at least the high points of the past 2500 years of philosophical literature on the subject, in order to avoid making the same mistakes that other brilliant minds have made. Pete
Re: Free Will Theorem
On Apr 11, 2005, at 11:11 PM, Russell Standish wrote: I'm dealing with these questions in an artificial life system - Tierra to be precise. I have compared the original Tierra code, with one in which the random no. generator is replaced with a true random no. generator called HAVEGE, and another simulation in which the RNG is replaced with a cryptographically secure RNG called ISAAC. The results to date (and this _is_ work in progress) is that there is a distinct difference between the original Tierra PRNG, and the other two generators, but that there is little difference between HAVEGE and ISAAC. This seems to indicate that algorithmic randomness can be good enough to fool learning algorithms. It definitely should be. At least certain types of cryptographic random number generators are reducible to factoring. That means that if any program can distinguish the output from the crypto RNG from the output of a true RNG, you could factor a large number such as an RSA modulus. This would be an important and completely unexpected cryptographic result. Assuming that factoring is truly intractable, crypto RNGs are as good as real ones, and deterministic universes are indistinguishable from nondeterministic ones. Hal
RE: many worlds theory of immortality
Brent Meeker wrote: I feel that I am the same person as I was five years ago even though hardly any of the atoms in my body are the same now as then. The body and brain of the younger me have disintegrated as completely as if I had died and been cremated. Certainly, the change has been gradual over time, but the fact remains that I am now comprised of different matter, with different spacetime coordinates, in a configuration only approximately copying that of my younger self. Moreover, my reconstructed brain provides me with only approximately the same memories as my younger self, in addition to the newer memories. Without resorting to science fiction thought experiments (mind uploading, teleportation etc.), I think this demonstrates that consciousness and personal identity are malleable and mobile, even if you restrict yourself to implementation on brains. But there is a causal, material chain connecting your brain today and your younger brain. If your brain suffers a concussion or anesthesia, do you suppose your consciousness goes somewhere else? Brent Meeker Why should this causal, material chain be significant to the final result? Your body slowly disintegrates and is (approximately) reconstructed atom by atom, so you don't notice a discontinuity, and it doesn't hurt. If the timing and order of the process were changed, so that your body is destroyed in one operation and a copy reconstructed at a different place and time in another operation, all you would notice is a period of unconsciousness, like being knocked out and waking up later in hospital. As for where your consciousness goes when you are unconscious, that is my point: it doesn't go anywhere. Consciousness (and the associated sense of personal identity) is a process, not a material object. You can still make the point that we have no evidence that human-level consciousness can be implemented outside of a human brain, but I believe the above considerations show that it is not tied to a particular brain. --Stathis Papaioannou _ Dont just search. Find. Check out the new MSN Search! http://search.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200636ave/direct/01/
