Re: A question concerning the ASSA/RSSA debate
On 20 Sep., 04:04, Russell Standish wrote: The way I use the term, the ASSA just refers to use a global measure for answering the question What is my next OM experienced. For other questions using a global measure over OMs, the original term SSSA (strong SSA) should be used. I'm aware of a few situations (mostly hypotheticals) where the SSSA is valid. The SSA refers to a global measure on birth moments, and the RSSA is typically based on the SSA. If the supporters of the ASSA use the term in the sense you describe, then I really don't understand them. If I ask what my next experience will be, I can only consider observer moments identifying themselves as myself, Youness Ayaita. Otherwise they should postulate that I is not linked to the process of self- identification, but that it is an absolute entity jumping from one observer moment to another. The everything list wiki has some notes on the RSSA/ASSA distinction - I'm wondering if these shouldn't be inserted directly into Wikipedia, as the everything wiki has been near death since its inception. Due to a momentary problem of my internet connection, I have no access to the everything wiki. So, I don't know how it looks. But in general, I strongly support the idea of establishing a wiki for us, and I would participate, too. One reason, of course, is to have a reference for the various definitions used in our discussions. I also see further reasons: For example, there are so many books and articles concerned with the anthropic principle and other ideas somehow linked to the Everything ensemble. It would be great to have a short summary and review of every interesting book/article one of us has read. This would simplify the process of finding adequate literature. We could also list famous philosophers and physicists (David Lewis, Max Tegmark, Hugh Everett, ...) of interest and copy the basic information out of Wikipedia (or at least give a link to Wikipedia). I'd also welcome the idea of summarizing the various theories individually defended by participants of this list in the wiki. The interdependency of the theories would be clear, and links to other articles to the wiki could be used. I don't like the current situation in which everyone is only concerned with his own website publishing articles there. A central website would be much more comfortable; of course, links to the specific homepages where the theories are described in detail, could be added without any problem. Youness --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: One solution to the Measure Problem: UTM outputs a qualia, not a universe
On 20/09/2007, Hal Finney [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The lifetime formulation also captures the intuition many people have that consciousness should not jump around as observer moments are created in the various simulations and scenarios we imagine in our thought experiments. That was the conclusion I reached in the posting referenced above, that teleportation might in some sense not work even though someone walks out of the machine thousands of miles away who remembers walking into it. The measure of such a lifetime would be substantially less than that of a similar person who never teleports. I have great conceptual difficulty with this idea. It seems to allow that I could have died five minutes ago even though I still feel that I am alive now. (This is OK with me because I think the best way to look at ordinary life is as a series of transiently existing OM's which create an illusion of a self persisting through time, but I don't think this is what you were referring to.) -- Stathis Papaioannou --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: No(-)Justification Justifies The Everything Ensemble
Le 19-sept.-07, à 11:56, Russell Standish a écrit :
On Tue, Sep 18, 2007 at 04:23:58PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote:
OK. You know I like your little book as an introduction to the field,
but, as you have already acknowledge, there is some lack in rigor in
it, and it is not even clear if eventually you are of the ASSA type or
RSSA type, or if you accept comp or not. Use of Bayes and Prior, for
I am clearly on the record, both in the book and also in the list
archives as an RSSA type.
I do not pretend the contrary. Only that it is not clear. (We have a
problem of communcation I think, not more)
As far as comp is concerned, I do not assume it, but accept it as a
model of what's going on. See page 79 of my book.
This does not help, unless you take some conseq of comp as granted,
like the reversal physics/number-theology, or a form of
mathematicalism, etc.
I do consider that the discovery (by Babbage, Post, Church, Turing,
...) of the Universal Machine is a major discovery of our time which
changes almost all what has been thought about machine up to then. This
is reflected in the computability theory, and I exploit those
theoretical consequences.
example, is a symptom of ASSA type reasoning. Distinction between 1
and
3 person points of view is symptom of the RSSA type of reasoning, (and
favored with comp).
Not if the prior were actually given by the observer erself.
?
This is
the main point of departure between Schmidhuber's and my approach.
Not equivalent. Equivalent status. Assumption of the set of all
infinite strings plays the same role as your assumption of
arithmetical realism, and that is of the ontological background.
I don't know. Let us fix a simple alphabet: {0, 1}. Then an infinite
string like
010001001110001010010111101001 . (infinite on the
right) can be seen as the chracteristic function of a subset of N (the
first 1 in the string means then that 0 is in the set,, the second one
that 1 is in the set etc. The resulting set is
{0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 9, 12, 13, 14, 22, 24, 27, 29, 34, 35, 37, 40, ...}
So there is a bijection between the set of infinite strings on the
{0,1} alphabet, and the subset of N. So without putting any
extra-stcruture on the set of infinite strings, you could as well have
taken as basic in your ontology the set of subset of N, written P(N).
Now, such a set is not even nameable in any first order theory. In a
first order theory of those strings you will get something equivalent
to Tarski theory of Real: very nice but below the turing world: the
theory is complete and decidable and cannot be used for a theory of
everything (there is no natural numbers definable in such theories).
From this I can deduce that your intuition relies on second order
arithmetic or analysis (and this is confirmed by the way you introduce
time). But then this again is really a strong assumption, far stronger
than arithmetical realism.
Stronger in what sense?
In the syntactical, or proof-theoretical sense. A theory A is stronger
than a theory B if A proves all theorems of B.
The set of theorems of B is included in the set of theorems of A. For
example PA is stronger (in that sense) than ROBINSON. (ROBINSON is PA
without the induction axioms).
Another example: QM + physical collapse is stronger than pure QM.
Caution: if a theory A is syntactically stronger than B, then B is
semantically stronger than A. Given that A has more axioms, it will
have less models. It is like in algebra: a big set of equations has
less solution than a little one. Syntax (theory+proof) and Semantics
(mathematical models) are in a sort of Galois correspondence: the more
you have axioms (the richer in theorems your theory is), the less you
have models.
I have only assumed just enough to make sense
of the notion of complexity.
I still don't know if you take all the strings in some first order
logical setting (in which case it will be not enough for defining a
notion of complexity) or if you take all the strings in some larger
(second order, mathematical instead of logical, etc.) sense, in which
case you take far too much.
Given the relation between all the strings and the set of subsets of
N, sometimes it seems to me you are just formulating (in some awkward
way, with all my respect) some acceptation of classical logic (boolean
algbra) pertaining on the natural numbers. In that case, your
assumption would be arithmetical realism.
To be sure, I still don't know if your ontic base is just nothing
(but then in which theory?) or the infinite strings (again, in which
theory and as I said you will to use rich mathematics for that), etc.
As you know, I am trying to go a little beyond the UDA result so as to
give a little smell of the real thing. The trouble is that the basic
tools of logic and axiomatic are not very well known by anybody but
the
professional logicians.
Its not so much that, but in
Re: One solution to the Measure Problem: UTM outputs a qualia, not a universe
[By the way, I notice that I do not receive my own postings back in email, which makes my archive incomplete. Does anyone know if there is a way to configure the mailing list reflector to give me back my own messages?] Russell Standish wrote: On Wed, Sep 19, 2007 at 12:10:33PM -0700, Hal Finney wrote: The lifetime formulation also captures the intuition many people have that consciousness should not jump around as observer moments are created in the various simulations and scenarios we imagine in our thought experiments. That was the conclusion I reached in the posting referenced above, that teleportation might in some sense not work even though someone walks out of the machine thousands of miles away who remembers walking into it. The measure of such a lifetime would be substantially less than that of a similar person who never teleports. Hal Finney I note that you have identified yourself with the the ASSA camp in the past (at least I say so in my book, so it must be true, right! :). What you are proposing above is an anti-functionalist position. The question is does functionalism necessarily imply RSSA, and antifunctionalism imply the ASSA? ie, does this whole RSSA/ASSA debate turn on the question of functionalism? The distinction I am drawing seems somewhat orthogonal to the RSSA/ASSA debate. Suppose someone is about to die in a terrible accident. From the 1st person perspective, RSSA would say that he expects to survive through miraculous good luck. ASSA would say that he expects to die and never experience anything again. Now suppose that in most universes an advanced, benevolent human/AI civilization later recreates his mental state and in effect resurrects him in a sort of heaven. Both ASSA and RSSA might now say that his expectation prior to the accident should be to wake up in this heaven, that that is his most likely next experience. My argument suggests otherwise, that the chance of this being his next experience would be rather low. However it basically leaves the RSSA/ASSA distinction intact. We would go back to the situation where RSSA predicts a miraculously lucky survival of the accident while ASSA predicts death. But actually my analysis is supportive of the ASSA in this form, in that the measure of a lifetime which ends in the accident is much higher than the measure of one which survives. As far as functionalism, I agree that this kind of analysis argues against it. Indeed the post from Wei Dai which introduced this concept, which I quote here, http://www.udassa.com/origins.html (apologies for the incompleteness of this web site), suggests that the size of a computer would affect measure, contradicting functionalism. Frankly I suspect that Bruno's analysis would or should lead to the same kind of conclusion. I wonder if he supports strict functionalism? Would he say yes doctor to any and all functional brain replacements? Or would some additional investigation be appropriate? I wonder where this leaves Mallah, who admits to computationalism, yet is died-in-the-wool ASSA? Indeed I have often wondered where in the world is Jacques Mallah, who was so influential on this list in the past but who seems to have vanished utterly from the net. Actually, I wrote that sentence based on previous Google searches, but just now I discovered that as of two weeks ago he has published his first communication in many years: http://arxiv.org/abs/0709.0544 . Here is his abstract, which seems similar in its goals to your own work: : The Many Computations Interpretation (MCI) of Quantum Mechanics : Authors: Jacques Mallah : (Submitted on 4 Sep 2007) : : Abstract: Computationalism provides a framework for understanding : how a mathematically describable physical world could give rise to : conscious observations without the need for dualism. A criterion : is proposed for the implementation of computations by physical : systems, which has been a problem for computationalism. Together : with an independence criterion for implementations this would allow, : in principle, prediction of probabilities for various observations : based on counting implementations. Applied to quantum mechanics, : this results in a Many Computations Interpretation (MCI), which is : an explicit form of the Everett style Many Worlds Interpretation : (MWI). Derivation of the Born Rule emerges as the central problem for : most realist interpretations of quantum mechanics. If the Born Rule : is derived based on computationalism and the wavefunction it would : provide strong support for the MWI; but if the Born Rule is shown not : to follow from these to an experimentally falsified extent, it would : indicate the necessity for either new physics or (more radically) : new philosophy of mind. I am looking forward to reading this! Hal --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are
Re: One solution to the Measure Problem: UTM outputs a qualia, not a universe
Stathis Papaioannou writes: On 20/09/2007, Hal Finney [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The lifetime formulation also captures the intuition many people have that consciousness should not jump around as observer moments are created in the various simulations and scenarios we imagine in our thought experiments. That was the conclusion I reached in the posting referenced above, that teleportation might in some sense not work even though someone walks out of the machine thousands of miles away who remembers walking into it. The measure of such a lifetime would be substantially less than that of a similar person who never teleports. I have great conceptual difficulty with this idea. It seems to allow that I could have died five minutes ago even though I still feel that I am alive now. (This is OK with me because I think the best way to look at ordinary life is as a series of transiently existing OM's which create an illusion of a self persisting through time, but I don't think this is what you were referring to.) You will probably agree that there are some branches of the multiverse where you did indeed die five minutes ago, and perhaps people are standing around staring in shock at your dead body. And supposing that you had just had a narrow escape from a perilous situation, you might even consider that those branches where you died are of greater measure than those where you survived. That's basically all my analysis says, as far as normal life. The main novelty is what it has to say about exotic thought experiments like teleportation and resurrection. Hal Finney --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: Rép : Observer Moment = Sigma1-Sentences
Dear Bruno, No. But making it precise and searching consequences helps to avoid misunderstanding. The comp hyp is really a religious belief: it *is* a belief in the fact that you can be reincarnated through a digital reconstitution of yourself relatively to some hopefully stable set of computational histories (on which you can only bet). So the question is not is comp true? The question is really: do you accept your daughter marries a computationalist. Ok, I'm with you :-) And my point is only that IF comp is true then the mind body problem is reduced into a derivation of physics (the eventually stable physical beliefs) from ... addition and multiplication (and there is a gift: it Why would this only be true in comp? What I find strange is the following: why do people find mind something strange - why not accept it as something fundamental like electromagnetism or gravity? (Of course, it is not a force (or is it?)) Many people say a materialist/physicalist attitude fails to explain the mind. I agree if one remains in a dualist view of the world, but not if mind is accepted as something natural - something which occurs automatically if certain organizational criteria are met. Yes indeed! But then how is it possible to convince someone who does not reason correctly, of the advantage of reasoning correctly? Answer: by letting him learn the consequences of reasoning incorrectly, if he can still learn after! Problem: about fundamental questions, this can take millennia, and more Agreed. Best, Günther -- Günther Greindl Department of Philosophy of Science University of Vienna [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.univie.ac.at/Wissenschaftstheorie/ Blog: http://dao.complexitystudies.org/ Site: http://www.complexitystudies.org --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: No(-)Justification Justifies The Everything Ensemble
On Thu, Sep 20, 2007 at 05:05:10PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: Le 19-sept.-07, à 11:56, Russell Standish a écrit : On Tue, Sep 18, 2007 at 04:23:58PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: OK. You know I like your little book as an introduction to the field, but, as you have already acknowledge, there is some lack in rigor in it, and it is not even clear if eventually you are of the ASSA type or RSSA type, or if you accept comp or not. Use of Bayes and Prior, for I am clearly on the record, both in the book and also in the list archives as an RSSA type. I do not pretend the contrary. Only that it is not clear. (We have a problem of communcation I think, not more) Sure - but on this point I have always been clear :) As far as comp is concerned, I do not assume it, but accept it as a model of what's going on. See page 79 of my book. This does not help, unless you take some conseq of comp as granted, like the reversal physics/number-theology, or a form of mathematicalism, etc. I do take the reversal, but not as granted. It is essentially a consequence of any ensemble theory of everything with a 1-3 distinction. This is most clearly enunciated from within a computationalist position, which is why I think your UDA is so important, (to convince the doubters) but in fact the result is much more general, and computationalism per se is not needed. I do consider that the discovery (by Babbage, Post, Church, Turing, ...) of the Universal Machine is a major discovery of our time which changes almost all what has been thought about machine up to then. This is reflected in the computability theory, and I exploit those theoretical consequences. Of course. But I also put Darwinian evolution up there with that (variation/selection is a powerful theory). example, is a symptom of ASSA type reasoning. Distinction between 1 and 3 person points of view is symptom of the RSSA type of reasoning, (and favored with comp). Not if the prior were actually given by the observer erself. ? As is stated in Why Occams Razor, and made more explicit in Importance of the Observer and Theory of Nothing, what is the U used in computing the universal prior? It can be nothing other than the observer. U needn't even be a machine, any partition of the strings into measurable subsets suffices. And this identification turns an essentially 3rd person account into a 1st person account. To talk about ASSA or RSSA one has to introduce some notion of time, or at least successor states. ... Stronger in what sense? In the syntactical, or proof-theoretical sense. A theory A is stronger than a theory B if A proves all theorems of B. The set of theorems of B is included in the set of theorems of A. For example PA is stronger (in that sense) than ROBINSON. (ROBINSON is PA without the induction axioms). Another example: QM + physical collapse is stronger than pure QM. Caution: if a theory A is syntactically stronger than B, then B is semantically stronger than A. Given that A has more axioms, it will have less models. It is like in algebra: a big set of equations has less solution than a little one. Syntax (theory+proof) and Semantics (mathematical models) are in a sort of Galois correspondence: the more you have axioms (the richer in theorems your theory is), the less you have models. As I have said, I have been taking David Deutsch's idea seriously, of combining a many universes ontology, with information theory and Darwinian evolution. (David also suggests Popperian epistemology as a fourth strand, but I consider this to be a special case of evolution). In order to do this, I need to assume whatever is needed to even make sense of these concepts. At a minimum it would seem to include some of set theory, of measure theory and classical logic, but maybe it can pared down to a more spartan set of axioms. The point is I don't really care what is involved, but someone else will bother themselves with these details. That is why I say I'm acting like a physicist. One way of connecting with what you do is to say that I assume the existence of UD*, without concerning myself about the existence of the UD. The CT thesis comes into play to justify the use of information theory. Regardless of what is really out there, all that we can know about it must come to us in the form of strings, and so we can just start with considering sets of strings. Hence computationalism is not assumed, but your universal dovetailer provides a computationalist model. It remains to be seen whether computationalism is the only possible model (I suspect not, but I don't know). I have only assumed just enough to make sense of the notion of complexity. I still don't know if you take all the strings in some first order logical setting (in which case it will be not enough for defining a notion of complexity) or if you take all the strings in some
Re: One solution to the Measure Problem: UTM outputs a qualia, not a universe
On 21/09/2007, Hal Finney [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: As far as functionalism, I agree that this kind of analysis argues against it. Indeed the post from Wei Dai which introduced this concept, which I quote here, http://www.udassa.com/origins.html (apologies for the incompleteness of this web site), suggests that the size of a computer would affect measure, contradicting functionalism. How does this contradict functionalism? Functionalism needs to be true in order for the computer program to be conscious in the first place. -- Stathis Papaioannou --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: One solution to the Measure Problem: UTM outputs a qualia, not a universe
On 21/09/2007, Hal Finney [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: You will probably agree that there are some branches of the multiverse where you did indeed die five minutes ago, and perhaps people are standing around staring in shock at your dead body. And supposing that you had just had a narrow escape from a perilous situation, you might even consider that those branches where you died are of greater measure than those where you survived. That's basically all my analysis says, as far as normal life. The main novelty is what it has to say about exotic thought experiments like teleportation and resurrection. Those branches where I have died (as opposed to those where I am about to die) are of zero measure, while those where I have survived are of non-zero measure. If you give the branches where I have died a vote when calculating my measure, then why not give the branches where I never existed a vote as well? I am dead almost everywhere in the multiverse. -- Stathis Papaioannou --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: Max Tegmark: The Mathematical Universe
Max himself posted about this on the everything-list here: http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list/browse_thread/thread/7da9934267f64acf/690ccf0715150a36#690ccf0715150a36 A popular article was also the feature in last week's 'New Scientist': http://www.newscientist.com/channel/fundamentals/mg19526210.500-mathematical-cosmos-reality-by-numbers.html --- Now is a good time for me to summarize my objections once again. As I said recently to Bruno, here's the problem with the idea that everything is mathematics: I think we need to draw a careful distinction between the *process* of reasoning itself, and the external entities that reasoning is *about* *(ie what it is that our theories are externally referencing). When you carefully examine what mathematics is all about, it seems that it is all about *knowledge* (justified belief). This is because math appears to be the study of patterns and when meaning is ascribed to be these patterns, the result is knowledge. So: so Math Meaningful Patterns Knowledge. Since math appears to be equivalent to knowledge itself, it is no surprise that all explanations with real explanatory power must use (or indirectly reference) mathematics. That is to say, I think it's true that the *process* of reasoning redcues to pure mathematics. However, it does not follow that all the entities being *referenced* (refered to) by mathematical theories, are themselves mathematical. It appears to me that to attempt to reduce everything to pure math runs the risk of a lapse into pure Idealism, the idea that reality is 'mind created'. Since math is all about knowledge, a successful attempt to derive physics from math would appear to mean that there's nothing external to 'mind' itself. As I said, there seems to be a slippery slipe into solipsism/idealism here. --- Another major problem is this idea of pure 'baggage free' description that Max talks about (the removal of all references to obervables , leaving only abstract relations). The problem with this , is that, by definition, it cannot possibly explain any observables we actually see. Notions of space and agency (fundamental to our empirical descriptions), cannot be derived from pure mathematics, since these notions involve attaching additional 'non-mathematical' notions to the pure mathematics. As I pointed out in another recent thread on this thread, the distinctions required for physical and teleological explanations of the world appear to be incommensurable with mathematical notions. We cannot possibly explain anything about the empirical reality we actually observe without attaching additional *non-mathematical* notions to the mathematics. I've talked often about 'the three types of properties' (for my property dualism) : Mathematical, Teleological and Physical. These three properties are based on three different kinds of distinction: Mathematics: The distinction is *model/reality* (or mind-body, information, concept). Teleology: The distinction is *observer/observerd* (self- other or 1st person/3rd person, intention) Physics: The distinction is *here/there* (space, geometry). These are simply three incommensurable types of distinction. You (believers in comp) can try to derieve the observer/observed and here/ there distinctions from the model/reality distinction all you want, you just won't succeed. --- There are yet more problems with Max's ideas. For instance, he says in the New Scientist article that: 'mathematical relations, are by definition eternal and outside space and time'. Certainly, there have to be *some* mathematical notions that are indeed eternal and platonic (if one believes in arthematical realism), but it also makes sense to talk about some kinds of mathematical objects that exist *inside* space-time and are not static. As I pointed out in another thread here, implemented algoithms (instantiated computations) are equivalent to *dynamic* mathematical objects which exist *inside* space-time: Let us now apply a unique new perspective on mathematics - we shall now attempt to view mathematics through the lens of the object oriented framework. That is to say, consider mathematics as we would try to model it using object oriented programming - what the classes, methods and objects of math? This is a rather un-usual way of looking at math. Mathematical entities, if they are considered in this way at all, are not regarded as 'Objects' (things with state, identity and behaviours) but merely as static class properties. For instance the math classes in the Java libraries consist of static (class) variables and class methods. But consider instead that there could be mathematical 'objects' (in the sense of entites with states, identities and behaviours). What could these mathematical 'objects' look like? if there are mathematical objects they have to be dynamic. This conflicts with standard platonic pictures of math as entities which are eternal and
