. If
we are forced to attribute consciousness to sequences of events which
occur purely by luck, then causality can't play a significant role. This
is the rather surprising conclusion which I reached from these musings
on Boltzmann Brains.
Hal Finney
Wei Dai writes:
I promised to summarize why I moved away from the philosophical position
that Hal Finney calls UD+ASSA. Here's part 1, where I argue against ASSA.
Part 2 will cover UD.
Consider the following thought experiment. Suppose your brain has been
destructively scanned and uploaded
data strings have
their meaning implicitly within themselves, because there is no
reasonable-length program that can interpret them as anything else.
Hal Finney
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it's possible they might get somewhere.
But at this point it looks like the resistance is too strong. Rather
than string theory making the multiverse respectable as we might hope,
it seems likely that the multiverse will kill string theory.
Hal Finney
measure. In the UDASSA model that
I prefer, OM measure is essentially the sum of the measures of all
programs that output that OM. If two universes instantiate it, both
contribute measure to it (as do Boltzmann brains, demons with boxes,
Matrixes and other simulators, etc.).
Hal Finney
[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
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
[I want to first note for the benefit of readers that I am Hal Finney
and no relation to Hal Ruhl - it can be confusing having two Hal's on
the list!]
Rolf Nelson writes:
UDASSA (if I'm interpreting it right, Hal?) says:
1. The measure of programs that produce OM (I am experiencing A, and
I
Rolf writes:
World-Index-Compression Postulate: The most probable way for the
output of a random UTM program to be a single qualia, is through
having a part of the program calculate a Universe, U, that is similar
to the universe we currently are observing; and then having another
part of the
Part of what I wanted to get at in my thought experiment is the
bafflement and confusion an AI should feel when exposed to human ideas
about consciousness. Various people here have proffered their own
ideas, and we might assume that the AI would read these suggestions,
along with many other
Various projects exist today aiming at building a true Artificial
Intelligence. Sometimes these researchers use the term AGI, Artificial
General Intelligence, to distinguish their projects from mainstream AI
which tends to focus on specific tasks. A conference on such projects
will be held next
Stathis Papaioannou [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
On 01/06/07, Hal Finney [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
The reference to Susskind is a paper we discussed here back
in Aug 2002, Disturbing Implications of a Cosmological Constant,
http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0208013 . The authors argued
of the universe. A measure concept related to information
might therefore reduce the measure of such brains to insignificance.
Hal Finney
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computationalism would say that consciousness depends on the results of
counterfactual tests done in other branches or worlds of the multiverse.
Hal Finney
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Any mapping which could specify such an entity will be enormous and will
not contribute meaningfully to the measure of such entities.
Hal Finney
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is an illusion and is not real.
Hal Finney
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in that regard, though.
Hal Finney
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Saibal Mitra writes:
From: Hal Finney [EMAIL PROTECTED]
The real problem is not just that it is a philosophical speculation,
it is that it does not lead to any testable physical predictions.
The string theory landscape, even if finite, is far too large for
systematic exploration. Our
of hand-waving we
sometimes get away with around here, explaining why bunnies can't fly),
the anthropic universe is not physics. It is philosophy, and physicists
want nothing to do with it.
Hal Finney
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is an important issue to get right and to be clear about.
Hal Finney
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Stathis Papaioannou writes:
Hal Finney writes:
What I argued was that it would be easier to find the trace of a person's
thoughts in a universe where he had a physically continuous record than
where there were discontinuities (easier in the sense that a smaller
program would suffice
Lee Corbin writes:
Stathis writes
Hal Finney in his recent thread on teleportation thought
experiments disagrees with the above view. He suggests
that it is possible for a subject to apparently undergo
successful teleportation, in that the individual walking
out of the receiving
numerous observers, then that would contradict the theory in this form.
Hal Finney
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of evolutionary constraints.
Hal Finney
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Bruno raises a lot of good points, but I will just focus on a couple
of them.
The first notion that I am using in this analysis is the assumption that a
first-person stream of consciousness exists as a Platonic object. My aim
is then to estimate the measure of such objects. I don't know
Russell Standish [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
On Tue, Jun 20, 2006 at 09:35:12AM -0700, Hal Finney wrote:
I think that one of the fundamental principles of your COMP hypothesis
is the functionalist notion, that it does not matter what kind of system
instantiates a computation. However I
to mental state measure and we avoid
the paradox without any need for ad hoc rules.
Hal Finney
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Stathis Papaioannou [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
Hal Finney writes:
I should first mention that I did not anticipate the conclusion that
I reached when I did that analysis. I did not expect to conclude that
teleportation like this would probably not work (speaking figurately
. But if there is no way
in principle to tell whether a system implements a person, then this
philosophy is meaningless since its basic assumption has no meaning.
The MWI doesn't change that.
Hal Finney
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Stathis Papaioannou [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
I am reminded of David Chalmer's paper recently mentioned by Hal Finney,
Does a Rock Implement Every Finite State Automaton?, which looks at
the idea that any physical state such as the vibration of atoms in a
rock can be mapped onto any
.
Hal Finney
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.
Hal Finney
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, and be non-functional. But if you change its
shape, it won't be the same neuron in terms of its functional behavior.
If you brought neurons over from Napoleon's brain but altered them
in the process to match your own neurons physically and functionally,
then you would never stop being yourself.
Hal
, these programs take no inputs,
while functions should have at least one input variable.
What do you understand a dovetailer to be, in the context of computable
functions?
Hal Finney
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, let me live
P1000(1000) years. That's a number so big that from our perspective it
seems like it's practically infinite. But of course from the infinite
perspective it seems like it's practically zero.
Hal Finney
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would argue strongly against us living in such a universe.
Hal Finney
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Hal Finney
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consciousness ought to be a pretty big red flag that we should
not be making facile assumptions about who has it and who doesn't!
(Or, if you say that we can in fact define consciousness, tell me how
to know which AI programs have it, and which don't?)
Hal Finney
yesterday we are able to eventually verify predictions of
this model in terms of physical observations, we would have achieved
a unification of physics and philosophy far deeper than has ever been
accomplished before.
Hal Finney
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that it is time for physics to explore alternative ideas.
The hostile NY Times book review is just one example.
Hal Finney
? Consciousness is
hard to test for; would there be purely functional limitations that you
could predict?
Hal Finney
= observable things + unobservable things
and equivalently
the multiverse = this universe + unobservable things
Are you saying that you don't agree that the anthropic principle applied
to an ensemble of instances has greater explanatory power than when
applied to a single instance?
Hal Finney
of generalized Occam's
Razor, we will have a very good explanation of the universe we see.
Hal Finney
measurement.
Hal Finney
into getting the wrong idea about the physics.
Hal Finney
mind to be uploaded into a computer, but who
would insist that the computer must be physical! A mere potential or
abstractly existing computer would not be good enough. I suspect that
such views would not be particularly rare among computationalists.
Hal Finney
of comp (aka Yes Doctor) + CT + AR. Then you
could make it clear when you are just talking about computationalism,
and when you are including the additional concepts.
Hal Finney
is
*incompatible* with QM. This is the contradiction that he sees.
I'll stop here and invite Godfrey to comment on whether this is the
admission of incompatibility between premises and conclusions that he
was referring to above.
Hal Finney
, self-awareness, and consciousness for example.
Hal Finney
can play, but the basic ideas are present.
Hal Finney
supervene
on physicality.
Hal Finney
system is completely
captured by the modal logics G and G*.
Well, you lost me on that one!
Hal Finney
. It seems to be an interesting
intermediate case.
My tentative opinion is that it does make sense to ascribe Platonic
existence to such things but I am interested to hear other people's
thoughts.
Hal Finney
Brent Meeker wrote (he always forgets to forward to the list):
Hal Finney wrote:
I'd be curious to know whether you think that Platonic existence could
include a notion of time.
I think timelessness is a defining characteristic of Platonic existence. I
use scare quotes because I'm
Quentin Anciaux writes:
Le Lundi 01 Août 2005 05:32, Hal Finney a écrit :
I am generally of the school that considers that calculations can be
treated as abstract or formal objects, that they can exist without a
physical computer existing to run them.
I completely agree with that... but I
strange that if consciousness is,
in the metaphysical sense, so easy that it's omnipresent, then why do
so few systems actually exhibit it?
Hal Finney
simulations can do it (with proper input); universe simulations can do it
(using a subset of their output).
Hal Finney
that all these arguments are only
persuasive and indicative and certainly do not amount to a proof.
Nevertheless it is my hope that by pursuing these ideas we can construct
testable propositions which, if verified, will add weight to the
possibility that this is the nature of reality.
Hal Finney
. Otherwise he has to say that all programs exist
which happen to include an information pattern corresponding to him,
the observer who is making this claim. That's not a very compelling
theoretical model.
Hal Finney
is not necessarily an argument
against this variant of the QTI, and may in fact be considered evidence
in favor of a long or even immortal life span.
Hal Finney
[1] Near the end of http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/m6905.html
Boolean circuit and finding the smallest efficient description. Maybe
finding the smallest Boolean circuit is in NP; it's not obvious to me
but it's been a while since I've studied this stuff. But even if we
could find such a circuit I'm doubtful that all the rest of Aaronson's
scenario follows.
Hal
Brent Meeker wrote:
[Hal Finney wrote:]
When you observe evidence and construct your models, you need some
basis for choosing one model over another. In general, you can create
an infinite number of possible models to match any finite amount of
evidence. It's even worse when you
.
I don't think this works, for the reasons I have just explained.
Mathematics and logic are more than models of reality. They are
pre-existent and guide us in evaluating the many possible models of
reality which exist.
Hal Finney
Forwarded on behalf of Brent Meeker:
On 24-Jul-05, you wrote:
Brent Meeker writes:
Here's my $0.02. We can only base our knowledge on our experience
and we don't experience *reality*, we just have certain
experiences and we create a model that describes them and
predicts them. Using
to life but each is in its own universe,
so we can't see the result. But they are all just as real as our own.
In fact one of the equations might even be our own universe but we can't
easily tell just by looking at it.
Hal Finney
turn
out to be easier to solve than the general case.
Hal Finney
measure and making predictions.
Hal Finney
George Levy writes:
Hal Finney wrote:
http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/dimensions.html , specifically
http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/dimensions.pdf .
Wouldn't it be true that in the manyworld, every quantum branchings that
is decoupled from other quantum branchings would in effect
.
Translating this into a flow of time view seems quite challenging
and suggests that that viewpoint may not be as flexible in terms of
deep understanding of the notion of time.
Hal Finney
HPO, if it is nevertheless able to solve every problem we
give it, it's probably worth the money!
Hal Finney
of our existence to
be successful.
Hal Finney
Russell Standish writes:
On Wed, Jul 13, 2005 at 04:20:27PM -0700, Hal Finney wrote:
=20
Right, that is one of the big selling points of the Tegmark and
Schmidhuber concept, that the Big Bang apparently can be described in
very low-information terms. Tegmark even has a paper arguing
, and all the ones that we would identify as observers fall
into that category.
Hal Finney
; in one the
photon is absorbed and in the other the photon continues in the 20
degree polarization state. Or you can run time backwards and get the
photon to be in the 40 degree state. I don't think the MWI helps much
with this.
Hal Finney
.
For an informational object, a sufficiently precise description is
equivalent to the object itself, in my view. And I am considering an
ontology where everything is an informational object.
Hal Finney
Jesse Mazer writes:
Hal Finney wrote:
I imagine that multiple universes could exist, a la Schmidhuber's ensemble
or Tegmark's level 4 multiverse. Time does not play a special role in
the descriptions of these universes.
Doesn't Schmidhuber consider only universes that are the results
process and rule to answer
this kind of question.
Hal Finney
, but where time doesn't really exist (in some sense),
where there is no actual causality? I have trouble with this idea, but
I'd be interested to hear from those who think that such a distinction
exists.
Hal Finney
then connect its definition of measure to subjective experience using
the concept that higher measure states are more likely to be experienced.
This is the basic principle from which we attempt to make our predictions
and explanations.
Hal Finney
of taste and opinion for the
individuals involved to make the determination? Is this something that
reasonable people can disagree on, or is there an objective truth about
it that they should ultimately come to agreement on if they work at it
long enough?
Hal Finney
the button reduces the measure of my enjoyment of the food.
Hal Finney
involving copies, otherwise you are led into paradox
and confusion.
Hal Finney
Stathis Papaioannou writes:
Hal Finney writes:
Suppose you will again be simultaneously teleported to Washington
and Moscow. This time you will have just one copy waking up in each.
Then you will expect 50-50 odds. But suppose that after one hour,
the copy in Moscow gets switched
Bruno Marchal writes:
Le 20-juin-05, =E0 18:16, Hal Finney a =E9crit :
That's true, from the pure OM perspective death doesn't make sense
because OMs are timeless. I was trying to phrase things in terms of
the observer model in my reply to Stathis. An OM wants to preserve
the measure
where they can be copied.
Hal Finney
the cortex, hence
probably with lower information content.
Of course there are a lot more people than other reasonably large-brained
animals, so perhaps our sheer numbers cancel any penalty due to our
larger and more-complex brains.
Hal Finney
,
then it seems like it should apply to changes in time as well as space.
Hal Finney
.
This is what increasing measure means to your genes. If people lived
in a regime where increasing measure were possible, I believe they would
come to adopt similar views, and for the same reason our genes did.
Hal Finney
more ambitious.
Hal Finney
that pleasant events happen on the high
measure days and unpleasant ones happen on the low measure days.
It's an interesting concept in any case. I need to think about it more,
but I'd be interested to hear your views.
Hal Finney
Bruno Marchal writes:
Le 19-juin-05, =E0 15:52, Hal Finney a =E9crit :
I guess I would say, I would survive death via anything that does not
reduce my measure.
But if the measure is absolute and is bearing on the OMs, and if that=20
is only determined by their (absolute) Kolmogorov
between the two situations.
Hal Finney
the DA is consistent with the fact that we don't live in
a magical universe, but it implies some mathematical properties of the
nature of computation which we are not yet in a position to verify.
Hal Finney
measure, so that is death, death on a scale that has never been seen
before in the universe. (Compensated by birth on a scale that has never
been seen before... So morally maybe it's not that bad. Still it's
jerking people around to an amazing degree.)
Hal Finney
back and forth,
tweaking here, changing there, taking a long time just to set up a small
patch of space-time in its output tape. This is another way to think of
where and when the alternatives for paradox free time travel could
be considered and rejected.
Hal Finney
Stathis Papaioannou writes:
Hal Finney writes:
God creates someone with memories of a past life, lets him live for a
day, then instantly and painlessly kills him.
What would you say that he experiences? Would he notice his birth and
death? I would generally apply the same answers
.
In practice most people believe that consciousness does not depend
critically on quantum states, so making a copy of a person's mind would
not be affected by these considerations.
Hal Finney
Will (or at least behavior that is,
in principle, unpredictable) does exist.
Right, well, for many people, being at the mercy of unpredictable and
uncontrollable randomness may be free but it's hardly willful.
Hal Finney
happend before you were born, you wouldn't be around to
consider these questions.
I think this is similar to the reasoning in the SIA.
Hal Finney
, the reward from guessing right seems pretty slim
and unmotivating. Congratulations, you get to die. Whoopie.
Hal Finney
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