Re: Questions on Russell's Why Occam paper
On Thu, Jun 09, 2005 at 01:55:32AM +0100, Patrick Leahy wrote: [Russell Standish wrote]: The AP is a statement that observed reality must be consistent with the observer being part of that reality. Famously, this can be interpreted as either a trivial tautology (Brandon Carter's original intention, I think), or an almost-obviously false principle of necessity (Barrow Tipler's SAP). If you think there's a mystery here it suggests you go for the necessity version, but given your infinite ensemble the tautology would suffice perfectly well. Yes, if you think there is a concrete reality in which everything exists (your question of where does the observer live?), then the AP is a tautology. However, if you are prepared to allow for the possibility that observers exist nowhere, then things are not quite so simple. One can always imagine being the brain-in-the-vat observer a reality which does not contain a body, or a brain, in a vat or anywhere else. Usually in this scenario, the observer will conclude that there must be a body somewhere else, and so concludes that it is inhabiting some kind of virtual reality. However, this implicitly assumes there has to a brain somewhere, and so implies a reality somewhere else for the brain to inhabit. But what if the brain is not required? Obviously, the last conclusion is full blown solipsism, but that is hardly a knock down argument. Instead, one can take the Anthropic Principle as an assertion of the reality we inhabit, and experimentally test it. In all such cases is has been shown to be true, sometimes spectacularly. With the AP, one recovers some of the properties of a concrete reality, without all of it. In particular, Marchal's shared dreaming follows as a consequence, and it contradicts solipsism. You also said: The observer _is_ the interpreter. There may well be more than one observer in the picture, but they'd better agree! Why does this follow? snip It follows from the Anthropic Principle. If O_1 is consistent with its observed reality, and O_2 is consistent with its observed reality, and O_1 observes O_2 in its reality, then O_1 and O_2 must be consistent with each other (at least with respect to their observed realities). Ah. Just to be sure, do you mean that the string the observer attaches meaning to is the one which describes the very same observer? This seems to be implied by your comment above; but you don't say it or clearly imply it in your paper. Then you are implying that the observer can, in a finite time, read and attach meaning to a full (space-time) description of itself, including the act of reading this description and so on recursively. Not at all. Consistency is the only requirement. If the observer goes looking for erself, then e will find erself in the description. It doesn't imply the observer is doing this all the time. Which is impossible, of course. Of course. You also said: I'm not entirely sure I distinguish your difference between external world and internal representation. We're talking about observations here, not models. I'm sure you can distinguish *my* mental representation of the world from your own. Hence if we share a world, and you can't distinguish between that world and your internal representation, then you are not granting equal status to other observers such as me. I'm not sure that is the case. I have a theory of your mind. I get it most economically by observing my own mind, hence I'm self-aware. My theory of the mind says that you are doing the same thing. Isn't this symmetric? You also said (quoting me): My problem is that you are trying to make your observers work at two different levels: as structures within the universes generated (somehow!) by your bitstrings, but also as an interpretive principle for producing meaning by operating *on* the bitstrings. It's a bit like claiming that PCs are built by The Sims. Yes it is a bit like that. Obviously, the Anthropic Principle (or its equivalent) does not work with The Sims. Actually I don't see why not. The existence of The Sims implies a universe compatible with the existence of Sims. But granting this is not so for the sake of the argument, presumably the AP *will* apply to the Sims Mark VII which will be fully self-aware artificial intelligences. If the AP applies to the Sims Mark VII, then their reality will be a description containing a body corresponding to their intelligences. They will not be aware of the PC that their description is being generated on. We, who inhabit the world with the PC will not be aware of the countless other PCs, Macs, Xboxes, Eniacs, Turing machines, pebbles in Zen monasteries etc running Sims Mark VII. So the PC itself is actually irrelevant from the internal perspective of the Sims. But it will still be absurd to claim that the Sims are responsible for construction of PCs (assuming they are not connected to
Re: Another tedious hypothetical
rmiller wrote: At 11:08 PM 6/8/2005, Jesse Mazer wrote: (snip) You should instead calculate the probability that a story would contain *any* combination of meaningful words associated with the Manhattan project. This is exactly analogous to the fact that in my example, you should have been calculating the probability that *any* combination of words from the list of 100 would appear in a book title, not the probability that the particular word combination sun, also, and rises would appear. RM: Are you suggesting that a fair analysis would be to wait until Google Print has the requisite number of books available, download the text, then sic Mathematica onto them to look for word associations linked with a target? What limits would you place on this (if any?) Or would this be a useless (though certainly do-able) exercise? I'm saying that you have to select the possible targets before you actually go mining the data of old stories to see what's there (or at least you have to try to imagine you didn't know what was there when selecting the targets). If your choice of targets is explicitly based on what you find in the data you will get bad probability estimates, for reasons I've already explained (you haven't really responded to these arguments in any substantive way--for example, do you agree or disagree that basing the choice of target on knowledge of the data tends to lead to situations where, even if the correlations are pure coincidence, 1 out of x parallel versions of you would claim to see a 'hit' with a significance of 1 out of y, where y x?) . . . Would it be fair to test for ESP. . . We're not testing for ESP--only out-of-causal-order gestalts in popular literature that are associated with similar gestalts in literature (or national) events taking place at some future time. Yes, I was using ESP as an umbrella term for any mysterious foreknowledge that can't be explained in terms of currently-known types of information channels. Substitute foreknowledge not explainable in terms of known science for ESP in that sentence (and any other sentence where I talk about 'ESP') if you like. Or it might be explained by some of the more offbeat analytical procedures---say, involving exponential or Poisson probabilities as applied to delayed choice events. I know what delayed choice means in the context of QM, but what do you mean by applying exponential or Poisson probabilities to delayed choice? According to our current version of QM, it is possible to prove that delayed choice experiments cannot be used to send information backwards in time--are you suggesting a modification of QM, and if so, how exactly are exponential or Poisson probabilities involved? Again, my concern is that scientists are too willing to prejudge something before diving into it. OK, but this is a tangent that has nothing to do with the issue I raised in my posts about the wrongness of selecting the target (whose probability of guessing you want to calculate) using hindsight knowledge of what was actually guessed. As a former fed, I would wholeheartedly disagree. There is a grand tradition of avoiding analysis by whatever means are available, including hindsight knowledge invalidating the correlation. In other words, you shouldn't ever mine for data. Thankfully, that admonition is routinely ignored by many biostatisticians. I'm not saying you should never mine the data, I'm just saying if you want to do an actual calculation of the probability that a correlation would happen by coincidence, you can't use this type of hindsight knowledge in selecting the target whose probability-of-happening-by-coincidence you want to calculate. I've given several examples of how this leads to badly wrong answers, and again, you haven't really addressed those examples. If you don't want to discuss this specific issue then say so--I am not really interested in discussing the larger issue of what the correct way to calculate the probability of the Heinlein coincidences would be, I only wanted to talk about this specific way in which *your* method is obviously wrong. Thank you. (Finally!!!) Whew! That sentence has validated the entire horrid exercise. May I quote you??? Is this supposed to be validating your claim that scientists prejudge issues? Note that I'm not a scientist, and I'm also not prejudging things, I'm just saying I'd rather not discuss this right now, just because I personally am not that interested in it, and also because it's a distraction from the topic that I originally brought up. If I were to use your post as a jumping-off point to talk about some totally unrelated issue like the mechanics of cumulus cloud formation, and you were not that interested in talking about this issue and wanted to get back to the topics you were originally talking about, could I use that to validate my view that you are guilty of prejudging the
Re: Many Pasts? Not according to QM...
Le 08-juin-05, à 21:54, Jonathan Colvin a écrit : Jonathan Colvin: Beyond the empathetic rationale, I don't see any convincing argument for favoring the copy over a stranger. The copy is not, after all, *me* (although it once was). We ceased being the same person the moment we were copied and started diverging. Yes, this is exactly my position, except that I'm not sure I would necessarily care more about what happens to my copy than to a stranger. After all, he knows all my secrets, my bank account details, my passwords... it's not difficult to see how we might become bitter enemies. The situation is different when I am considering my copies in the future. If I know that tomorrow I will split into two copies, one of whom will be tortured, I am worried, because that means there is 1/2 chance that I will become the torture victim. When tomorrow comes and I am not the torture victim, I am relieved, because now I can feel sorry for my suffering copy as I might feel sorry for a stranger. You could argue that there is an inconsistency here: today I identify with the tortured copy, tomorrow I don't. But whether it is inconsistent or irrational is beside the point: this is how our minds actually work. Every amputee who experiences phantom limb pain is aware that they are being irrational because there is no limb there in reality, but knowing this does not make the pain go away. This is incorrect, I think. At time A, pre-split, there is a 100% chance that you will *become* the torture victim. The torture victim must have once been you, and thus you must become the torture victim with probability 1. There's no inconsistency here; you are quite right to be worried at time A, because you (at time A) *will* be tortured (at time B). The inconsistency comes with identifying (you at time A, pre-split) with (one of the you's at time B, post-split). There can be no one-to-one correspondence. To sum up I am duplicated, and one of the copy will be tortured, the other will not be tortured. You say that there is 100% chance I will be tortured. If we interview the one who is not tortured he must acknowledge his reasoning was false, and the proba could not have been = to 100% chance. Are you not identifying yourself with the one who will be tortured (in this case you make the error you pretend Stathis is doing. If not, it means you identified yourself with both, but this would mean you do the confusion between 1 and 3 person, given that we cannot *feel* to be two different individuals. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Re: Observer-Moment Measure from Universe Measure
Le 09-juin-05, à 01:19, Jonathan Colvin a écrit : I don't believe in observers, if by observer one means to assign special ontological status to mental states over any other arrangement of matter. I don't believe in matters, if by matters one means to assign special ontological status to some substance, by which it is mean (Aristotle) anything entirely determined by its parts. This is similar to the objection to the classic interpretation of QM, whereby an observation is required to collapse the WF (how do you define observer?..a rock?..a chicken?..a person?). Yes, but Everett did succeed his explanation of the apparent collapse by defining an observer by just classical memory machine. But this was in response to a comment that it was time to get serious about observer-moments. An observer is such a poorly defined and nebulous thing that I don't think one can get serious about it. My definition is that an observer is a universal (Turing) machine. With Church's thesis we can drop the Turing qualification. Actually an observer is a little more. It is a sufficiently rich universal machine. To be utterly precise (like in my thesis) an observer is a lobian machine, by which I mean any machine which is able to prove ExP(x) - Provable(ExP(x)) for any decidable predicate P(x). ExP(x) means there is a natural number x such that P(x), and provable is the provability predicate studied by Godel, Lob and many others. But then I need to explain more on the provability logic to explain the nuances between the scientist machine, the knowing machine, the observing machine, etc. You can look at my sane paper for an overview. I'd note that your definition is close to being circular..an observer is something sufficiently similar to me that I might think I could have been it. But how do we decide what is sufficient? The qualities you list (consciousness, perception etc) are themselves poorly defined or undefinable. Consciousness can be considered as a first person view of the result of an automatic bet on the existence of a model (in the logician sense) of oneself. From this we can explain why consciousness is not representable in the language of a machine. And consciousness get a role: self-speeding up oneself relatively to our most probable computational histories. It should develop in all self-moving mechanical entity. I define variant of first person view by applying Theaetetus' definition of knowledge (and popperian variants) on the Godel self-referential provability predicate. Perhaps you could try to tell me what do you mean by matter? Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
RE: Many Pasts? Not according to QM...
Stathis Papaioannou wrote: Subjectively, there is *always* a one to one correspondence between an earlier and a later version, even though from a third person perspective the relationship may appear to be one to many, many to many, or many to one. This is in part why reasoning as if observer moments can be sampled randomly from the set of all observer moments gives the wrong answer. Can you explain more why you think this one-to-one relationship implies it's incorrect to apply the self-sampling assumption to observer-moments? As I said in the Request for a glossary of acronyms thread (at http://tinyurl.com/5265d ), I am inclined to believe a final theory of everything would allow us to use both the ASSA (the theory would assign each observer-moment an absolute probability, and we could reason as if our current OM was randomly selected from the set of all possible OMs, weighted by their absolute probability) and the RSSA (for each OM, the theory would give a conditional probability that the observer's subsequent experience would be any other possible OM). If you're suggesting the two are incompatible, there's no need for them to be. Consider the following analogy--we have a bunch of tanks of water, and each tank is constantly pumping a certain amount of its own water to a bunch of other tanks, and having water pumped into it from other tanks. The ratio between the rates that a given tank is pumping water into two other tanks corresponds to the ratio between the probabilities that a given observer-moment will be succeeded by one of two other possible OMs--if you imagine individual water molecules as observers, then the ratio between rates water is going to the two tanks will be the same as the ratio between the probabilities that a given molecule in the current tank will subsequently find itself in one of those two tanks. Meanwhile, the total amount of water in a tank would correspond to the absolute probability of a given OM--at any given time, if you randomly select a single water molecule from the collection of all molecules in all tanks, the amount of water in a tank is proportional to the probability your randomly-selected molecule will be in that tank. Now, for most ways of arranging this system, the total amount of water in different tanks will be changing over time. In terms of the analogy, this would be like imposing some sort of universal time-coordinate on the whole multiverse and saying the absolute probability of finding yourself experiencing a given OM changes with time, which seems pretty implausible to me. But if the system is balanced in such a way that, for each tank, the total rate that water is being pumped out is equal to the total rate that water is being pumped in, then the system as a whole will be in a kind of equilibrium, with no variation in the amount of water in any tank over time. So in terms of OMs, this suggests a constraint on the relationship between the absolute probabilities and the conditional probabilities, and this constraint (together with some constraints imposed by a 'theory of consciousness' of some kind) might actually help us find a unique self-consistent way to assign both sets of probabilities, an idea I elaborated on in the Request for a glossary of acronyms thread. In terms of the QTI, accepting both the ASSA and RSSA seems to imply there would be no point at which our stream of consciousness would end, but the ASSA also implies that it's unlikely a typical observer-moment has memories of being extremely old, so it seems we'd have to accept some sort of immortality with amnesia--maybe as I approach death, my stream of consciousness will move into simpler and simpler OMs, and then eventually start climbing back up the ladder of complexity into the OMs of a different person who has no memory of my life. Or maybe the advanced transhuman intelligences of the future periodically like to wipe most of their memories and experience what it was like to be a human-level intelligence, so that at the end of my life my memories will be reintigrated with those of this larger intelligence (maybe this replaying of a life would be a necessary part of the merging of two distinct transhuman minds, something which transhuman intelligences would probably want to do if at all possible). There are probably other creative ways to have immortality (as implied by the RSSA) be compatible with the idea that my current OM is a typical one (as implied by the ASSA), too. Jesse
RE: Many Pasts? Not according to QM...
Stathis wrote: You are offered two choices: (a) A coin will be flipped tomorrow. If the result is heads, you will be tortured; if tails, you will not be tortured. (b) You will be copied 10 times tomorrow. One of the copies will be tortured, and the other 9 will not be tortured. By your reasoning, there is a 50% chance you will be tortured in (a) and a 100% chance you will be tortured in (b), so (a) is better. But I would say the probabilities are (a) 50% and (b) 10%, so (b) is clearly the better choice. H...I'd disagree. Emotionally, (a) feels the better choice to me; in (b) I'm definitely getting tortured, in (a) I may dodge the bullet. On a purely objective basis (attempting to mimimize the amount of torture in the world), (a) is also obviously superior. This would make an interesting poll. Who prefers (a) over (b)? Imagine what would happen if you chose (b). You enter the teleportation sending station, press the green button, and your body is instantly and painlessly destructively analysed. The information is beamed to 10 different receiving stations around the world, where an exact replica of you is created from local raw materials. One of these receiving stations is situated in a torture chambre, and the torture will commence immediately once the victim arrives. Now, what do you think you will actually experience the moment after you press the green button? Do you expect to feel any different because there are now 10 copies of you? Do you expect that the copy being tortured will somehow send signals to the other 9 copies? If not, then how will the 100% chance that one of the copies will be tortured affect you if you happen to be one of the other copies? How will I feel after pressing the button? Your question has a structural issue. You are asking what do you think you will experience the moment after you press the green button?. This question is ill-posed, because post-split, the pre-split you no longer clearly refers to any one person, so the question as posed is unanswerable. Of course, post split there will be ten Jonathan Colvins, each of whom calls themselves me. But there is no longer any one-to-one correspondence with the pre-split me, so it makes no sense to ask what I will experience after pushing the button. Jonathan Colvin
RE: Many Pasts? Not according to QM...
Bruno wrote: Jonathan Colvin: Beyond the empathetic rationale, I don't see any convincing argument for favoring the copy over a stranger. The copy is not, after all, *me* (although it once was). We ceased being the same person the moment we were copied and started diverging. Yes, this is exactly my position, except that I'm not sure I would necessarily care more about what happens to my copy than to a stranger. After all, he knows all my secrets, my bank account details, my passwords... it's not difficult to see how we might become bitter enemies. The situation is different when I am considering my copies in the future. If I know that tomorrow I will split into two copies, one of whom will be tortured, I am worried, because that means there is 1/2 chance that I will become the torture victim. When tomorrow comes and I am not the torture victim, I am relieved, because now I can feel sorry for my suffering copy as I might feel sorry for a stranger. You could argue that there is an inconsistency here: today I identify with the tortured copy, tomorrow I don't. But whether it is inconsistent or irrational is beside the point: this is how our minds actually work. Every amputee who experiences phantom limb pain is aware that they are being irrational because there is no limb there in reality, but knowing this does not make the pain go away. This is incorrect, I think. At time A, pre-split, there is a 100% chance that you will *become* the torture victim. The torture victim must have once been you, and thus you must become the torture victim with probability 1. There's no inconsistency here; you are quite right to be worried at time A, because you (at time A) *will* be tortured (at time B). The inconsistency comes with identifying (you at time A, pre-split) with (one of the you's at time B, post-split). There can be no one-to-one correspondence. To sum up I am duplicated, and one of the copy will be tortured, the other will not be tortured. You say that there is 100% chance I will be tortured. If we interview the one who is not tortured he must acknowledge his reasoning was false, and the proba could not have been = to 100% chance. Are you not identifying yourself with the one who will be tortured (in this case you make the error you pretend Stathis is doing. If not, it means you identified yourself with both, but this would mean you do the confusion between 1 and 3 person, given that we cannot *feel* to be two different individuals. There's a third possibility, which is that the I pre-split can not be identified with either of the post-split individuals. As per my reponse to Stathis, the question is ill-posed. You can interview the non-tortured individual post-split, and while it may feel to him that he is me, the same will be true for the other individual. So which is me? The most sensible response is that the question is ill-posed. If I take a loaf of bread, chop it half, put one half in one room and one half in the other, and then ask the question where is the loaf of bread?, we can likely agree that the question is ill-posed. The question what will I feel tomorrow only has an answer assuming that tomorrow there is a unique me. If I have been duplicated, there is no longer a definite answer to the question. Jonathan Colvin
RE: Many Pasts? Not according to QM...
I was working on an essay on the nature of thought experiments about copying, but it got bogged down, so I will make this short. I am trying to analyze it based on evolutionary considerations. Copying is much like biological reproduction and we can expect many of the same effects in a society in which copying is a long-standing and widely used technology. The most important effect is that making copies will be desirable. Just as genes try to reproduce themselves, so will people once that becomes possible, and for the same reason: successful reproducers occupy more of the universe's resources (i.e. have higher measure) and so these habits tend to become more widespread. When we consider thought experiments involving copies, it is important to understand these effects. It is truly different to make a set of copies than to experience a probabilistic event. Making copies increases your measure in the world; flipping a coin does not. The decisions you will make in the two cases are different as a result. One thought experiment was to consider two choices: flipping a coin and being tortured if it came up a certain way; versus making several copies and having one of them be tortured. Assuming the copies are all going to survive, clearly the latter would be the one selected by evolution. But note that this is still true if we reverse the probabilities: a small probabilistic chance of being tortured, versus making one copy (so there are two of you) and having one of them being tortured. There, too, I think the evolutionary approach would encourage making copies. Copying is such a bonus that it swamps consideration of quality of life. In a world where people have adapted to copying, they would work as hard to make a copy as they would in our world to avoid dying (each one changes measure by plus or minus 100%). It might be objected that this approach does not shed much light on what our expectations would be or should be about what we will experience when we go through these transformations. I agree with the perspective that there is truly no fact of the matter about what it is like to have one of these things happen. All we can really do is look at the experiences and memory of each person, at each moment. No one will disagree about what each person at each moment remembers and how many of them there are. That is really all there is, factually. Our attempt to make these novel situations fit our conventional expectations don't work because we currently have an implicit assumption of mental continuity which is violated by copying experiments. There really is no meaningful and non-arbitrary way to map our current ways of thinking about the future to a world where copying is possible. But what we can do is really just as good: we can predict how people would and should behave. Which preferences will they have in these thought experiments? How hard will they work to achieve one option versus another? Evolutionary theory provides guidelines and examples we can use to understand how people will behave if and when copying becomes possible. Hal Finney
RE: Many Pasts? Not according to QM...
Bruno wrote: (a) A coin will be flipped tomorrow. If the result is heads, you will be tortured; if tails, you will not be tortured. (b) You will be copied 10 times tomorrow. One of the copies will be tortured, and the other 9 will not be tortured. By your reasoning, there is a 50% chance you will be tortured in (a) and a 100% chance you will be tortured in (b), so (a) is better. But I would say the probabilities are (a) 50% and (b) 10%, so (b) is clearly the better choice. H...I'd disagree. Emotionally, (a) feels the better choice to me; in (b) I'm definitely getting tortured, in (a) I may dodge the bullet. On a purely objective basis (attempting to mimimize the amount of torture in the world), (a) is also obviously superior. This would make an interesting poll. Who prefers (a) over (b)? With comp, and assuming the copies will never be copied again and are immortal, then b. Ok, but why? Please explain your reasoning. Jonathan Colvin
collapsing quantum wave function
Jonathan Colvin wrote: If I take a loaf of bread, chop it half, put one half in one room and one half in the other, and then ask the question where is the loaf of bread?, we can likely agree that the question is ill-posed. Depending on definitions, this may indeed be an ill-posed question. On the other hand, with appropriate definitions, the question might be answered by The loaf is half in one room and half in the other, or The loaf no longer exists. This reminds me of my problems trying to understand the collapsing quantum wave function. I've heard of Schrödinger's Cat, which I'm told is half alive - half dead until the box is opened and the cat is observed. This observation collapses the quantum wave function, and the cat at that point is either alive or dead. Here's a variation. Is my interpretation correct? Suppose we take ten apparently identical ball bearings and put stickers on each with the identifiers 1 through 10. We leave the room where the balls with stickers are, and a robot removes the stickers and mixes the balls up so that we don't which ball is which. However, the robot remembers which sticker belongs on which ball. We come back into the room and pick one ball at random to destroy by melting it in an electric furnace. If at this point we ask What is the probability that the destroyed ball is ball '3'? we can truthfully answer My memory tells me that the destroyed ball has a one in ten probability of being '3.' However, by reviewing the robot's record we can see that 6 was, in fact, the one destroyed. Does this mean that the quantum wave functions of all ten balls collapsed at the moment we viewed the record and observed what happened to 6? Or did the wave function never exist, since the robot's record always showed the identity of the destroyed ball, irrespective of whether a human observed this identity or not?
RE: Many Pasts? Not according to QM...
Brent Meeker wrote (accidentally offlist): From: Hal Finney [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Copying is such a bonus that it swamps consideration of quality of life. In a world where people have adapted to copying, they would work as hard to make a copy as they would in our world to avoid dying (each one changes measure by plus or minus 100%). I don't think so. If you (and your copies) 90yrs old and infirm, would you want to make another copy? Consider the alternative of making a clone of yourself. A clone would be young and have a full life ahead. So beyond some age you would probably prefer a clone to a copy. Then you can relate this to having children, since having a child is, biologically speaking, have half a clone. Do people work hard to have as many children as possible? No. The biological drive is to have sex - not children. That makes sense, but it is consistent with what I wrote. I said that a person would work as hard to make a copy as to avoid dying. You are right that a 90 year old sick person might not care so much about having a copy compared to other alternatives. But by the same token, he would not care so much about dying either. One might suppose that a genetic disposition to have clones might spread and become dominant thru differential reproduction. And maybe it would in modern industrial society. But we know it didn't in the development of life on Earth. Sexual reproduction had the advantage. I think if you look at percentage of Earth biomass you will find that the majority is in simple, single-cell organisms which largely reproduce asexually. In a way, large multi-cellular animals like us represent an exotic and not very successful offshoot from the larger portion of Earth biology. So perhaps sex is overrated in terms of its reproductive advantages. Hal Finney
Re: Many Pasts? Not according to QM...
Russell Standish wrote: You are arguing that it is possible to have an absolute measure for each observer moment, as well as a relative measure on the transitions between observer moments. Of course this is correct. However, the ASSA and the RSSA are more than that. The SS stands for self sampling, ie the principle that one should reason as though one's own observer moment were sampled from the A or the R measure respectively. With the RSSA, only the birth moment is sampled according to an absolute measure, so it is an elaboration of the SSA. I'm not sure how compatible the ASSA is with the SSA. The ASSA and RSSA are incompatible principles, even if both absolute and relative measures are compatible. Well, perhaps the problem is that we don't have definite agreement on this list about how these acronyms are defined--for example, Hal Finney gave different definitions on the original Request for a glossary of acronyms thread, in his post at http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/m4778.html -- ASSA - The Absolute Self-Sampling Assumption, which says that you should consider your next observer-moment to be randomly sampled from among all observer-moments in the universe. RSSA - The Relative Self-Sampling Assumption, which says that you should consider your next observer-moment to be randomly sampled from among all observer-moments which come immediately after your current observer-moment and belong to the same observer. And as I said in my response to that post at http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/m4782.html , I would prefer to define the ASSA in terms of reasoning as if your *current* observer-moment is randomly sampled from the set of all observer-moments, weighted by each observer-moment's absolute probability. Jesse
RE: Many Pasts? Not according to QM...
Jonathan Colvin writes: You are offered two choices: (a) A coin will be flipped tomorrow. If the result is heads, you will be tortured; if tails, you will not be tortured. (b) You will be copied 10 times tomorrow. One of the copies will be tortured, and the other 9 will not be tortured. By your reasoning, there is a 50% chance you will be tortured in (a) and a 100% chance you will be tortured in (b), so (a) is better. But I would say the probabilities are (a) 50% and (b) 10%, so (b) is clearly the better choice. H...I'd disagree. Emotionally, (a) feels the better choice to me; in (b) I'm definitely getting tortured, in (a) I may dodge the bullet. On a purely objective basis (attempting to mimimize the amount of torture in the world), (a) is also obviously superior. This would make an interesting poll. Who prefers (a) over (b)? Imagine what would happen if you chose (b). You enter the teleportation sending station, press the green button, and your body is instantly and painlessly destructively analysed. The information is beamed to 10 different receiving stations around the world, where an exact replica of you is created from local raw materials. One of these receiving stations is situated in a torture chambre, and the torture will commence immediately once the victim arrives. Now, what do you think you will actually experience the moment after you press the green button? Do you expect to feel any different because there are now 10 copies of you? Do you expect that the copy being tortured will somehow send signals to the other 9 copies? If not, then how will the 100% chance that one of the copies will be tortured affect you if you happen to be one of the other copies? How will I feel after pressing the button? Your question has a structural issue. You are asking what do you think you will experience the moment after you press the green button?. This question is ill-posed, because post-split, the pre-split you no longer clearly refers to any one person, so the question as posed is unanswerable. Of course, post split there will be ten Jonathan Colvins, each of whom calls themselves me. But there is no longer any one-to-one correspondence with the pre-split me, so it makes no sense to ask what I will experience after pushing the button. From a third person perspective there is no one to one correspondence, but from a first person perspective, there is: each of the ten copies remembers being you pre-split. Perhaps I could ask the question differently. If it turns out that the many worlds interpretation of QM is true, then you will be duplicated multiple times in parallel universes in the next second. When you contemplate how you are going to feel in the next second in the light of this knowledge, do you expect anything different to what you would expect in a single world system? Is there any test you could do to determine whether there is one world or many? --Stathis Papaioannou _ Free wallpapers on Level 9 http://level9.ninemsn.com.au/default.aspx
Re: Many Pasts? Not according to QM...
On Thu, Jun 09, 2005 at 07:35:42PM -0400, Jesse Mazer wrote: Russell Standish wrote: You are arguing that it is possible to have an absolute measure for each observer moment, as well as a relative measure on the transitions between observer moments. Of course this is correct. However, the ASSA and the RSSA are more than that. The SS stands for self sampling, ie the principle that one should reason as though one's own observer moment were sampled from the A or the R measure respectively. With the RSSA, only the birth moment is sampled according to an absolute measure, so it is an elaboration of the SSA. I'm not sure how compatible the ASSA is with the SSA. The ASSA and RSSA are incompatible principles, even if both absolute and relative measures are compatible. Well, perhaps the problem is that we don't have definite agreement on this list about how these acronyms are defined--for example, Hal Finney gave different definitions on the original Request for a glossary of acronyms thread, in his post at http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/m4778.html -- ASSA - The Absolute Self-Sampling Assumption, which says that you should consider your next observer-moment to be randomly sampled from among all observer-moments in the universe. RSSA - The Relative Self-Sampling Assumption, which says that you should consider your next observer-moment to be randomly sampled from among all observer-moments which come immediately after your current observer-moment and belong to the same observer. How does this differ? The only difference I see is that the word measure is not mentioned explicitly, however random sampling implies sampling according to some measure. Sometimes uniform measure is implied by random sampling, but I can't see how Hal Finney might have thought that, as the measure is so patently nonuniform. And as I said in my response to that post at http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/m4782.html , I would prefer to define the ASSA in terms of reasoning as if your *current* observer-moment is randomly sampled from the set of all observer-moments, weighted by each observer-moment's absolute probability. Jesse I can't see that changing next to current makes any difference to the meaning, except if there is no next OM. If you are comparing the two - eg perhaps asserting a compatibility, then there must be a next OM. This is pedantry for pedantry sake. It does not change the fact that the RSSA and the ASSA are fundamentally incompatible principles. Cheers -- *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 pgpNaDnmSkr0v.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: collapsing quantum wave function
On Thu, Jun 09, 2005 at 04:09:15PM -0700, Norman Samish wrote: Here's a variation. Is my interpretation correct? Suppose we take ten apparently identical ball bearings and put stickers on each with the identifiers 1 through 10. We leave the room where the balls with stickers are, and a robot removes the stickers and mixes the balls up so that we don't which ball is which. However, the robot remembers which sticker belongs on which ball. We come back into the room and pick one ball at random to destroy by melting it in an electric furnace. If at this point we ask What is the probability that the destroyed ball is ball '3'? we can truthfully answer My memory tells me that the destroyed ball has a one in ten probability of being '3.' However, by reviewing the robot's record we can see that 6 was, in fact, the one destroyed. Does this mean that the quantum wave functions of all ten balls collapsed at the moment we viewed the record and observed what happened to 6? Or did the wave function never exist, since the robot's record always showed the identity of the destroyed ball, irrespective of whether a human observed this identity or not? Yes and no. In a 3rd person description of the situation, the Multiverse has decohered into 10 distinct universes at the moment the robot decides which ball it picks up. What about the 1st person description? According to the interpretation I follow, the observer is in fact superposed over all 10 branches, and only collapses into a single branch the moment the observer becomes aware of the robot's record. A more conventional physics interpretation would have the conscious observer as belonging to a definite branch since the Multiverse decohered, but not knowing which. I understand that David Deutsch holds this interpretation, for example. There is certainly no 3rd person experiment that can be done to distinguish between these two interpretations, and the only 1st person experiment I can think of relates to tests of quantum immortality. I find it hard to believe the no cul-de-sac conjecture would hold in the latter case. Cheers -- *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 pgp77oZWTfd0k.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Many Pasts? Not according to QM...
Russell Standish wrote: On Thu, Jun 09, 2005 at 07:35:42PM -0400, Jesse Mazer wrote: Russell Standish wrote: You are arguing that it is possible to have an absolute measure for each observer moment, as well as a relative measure on the transitions between observer moments. Of course this is correct. However, the ASSA and the RSSA are more than that. The SS stands for self sampling, ie the principle that one should reason as though one's own observer moment were sampled from the A or the R measure respectively. With the RSSA, only the birth moment is sampled according to an absolute measure, so it is an elaboration of the SSA. I'm not sure how compatible the ASSA is with the SSA. The ASSA and RSSA are incompatible principles, even if both absolute and relative measures are compatible. Well, perhaps the problem is that we don't have definite agreement on this list about how these acronyms are defined--for example, Hal Finney gave different definitions on the original Request for a glossary of acronyms thread, in his post at http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/m4778.html -- ASSA - The Absolute Self-Sampling Assumption, which says that you should consider your next observer-moment to be randomly sampled from among all observer-moments in the universe. RSSA - The Relative Self-Sampling Assumption, which says that you should consider your next observer-moment to be randomly sampled from among all observer-moments which come immediately after your current observer-moment and belong to the same observer. How does this differ? The only difference I see is that the word measure is not mentioned explicitly, however random sampling implies sampling according to some measure. Sometimes uniform measure is implied by random sampling, but I can't see how Hal Finney might have thought that, as the measure is so patently nonuniform. Hal didn't say anything about only sampling the birth moment randomly according to the absolute measure, or imply it as far as I understood him. And as I said in my response to that post at http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/m4782.html , I would prefer to define the ASSA in terms of reasoning as if your *current* observer-moment is randomly sampled from the set of all observer-moments, weighted by each observer-moment's absolute probability. Jesse I can't see that changing next to current makes any difference to the meaning, except if there is no next OM. If you are comparing the two - eg perhaps asserting a compatibility, then there must be a next OM. This is pedantry for pedantry sake. No, I'm not saying there is no next OM, my point was that the two methods can give different probabilities for my next OM--for example, a Jesse Mazer OM and a Russell Standish OM might have about equal absolute measure, but given my current OM, a Jesse Mazer OM would have much higher relative measure. It does not change the fact that the RSSA and the ASSA are fundamentally incompatible principles. Could you explain why you think they're fundamentally incompatible? In what type of situation would they lead to contradictory conclusions, for example? In terms of my water-tank analogy, if you happen to be riding on a water molecule, there doesn't seem to be any incompatibility between 1) reasoning as if your water molecule was randomly selected from the set of all molecules, so the probability your molecule will be in a given tank is proportional to the amount of water in that tank (absolute probability), and 2) assuming that the next tank you will find yourself in after this one is randomly sampled from all the tanks which your current tank is pumping water into, with each possible next tank weighted by the rate that the current tank is pumping water into that tank (conditional probability). Jesse
Re: Many Pasts? Not according to QM...
I'm new to this so I haven't read about all your people's different theories. I've read quite a bit on transhumanist stuff, Aubrey DeGrey, Freeman Dyson, ... it seems people are trying anything they can imagine, and expanding into what they can't imagine, to look for immortality. Now if continuous consciousness is not necessarily required for immortality, then why are you waiting around for copying? Won't cloning come far sooner? What is it about copying that is better than cloning. If you, or one of your copies,went on a hyperwarp trip to a far away galaxy, saw one of your copies, or one of your copies of a copy of a copy, a million years from now on some strange planet, there's a good chance you probably wouldn't like him/her and he/she wouldn't like you. Their behavior would be strange and probably disgusting. So what's the big deal? What's the difference between copying and having any intelligent life exist a million years from now in the universe? Why not just have children, and pour our lives into them? It's a lot easier, and we can do it now. I'm seriously wanting to know.
