From: Adam A. Ford
Sent: Tuesday, June 07, 2011 7:30 PM
To: Wei Dai
Subject: H+ Summit @Melbourne 25-26th of June 2011 (Australia)
Hi Wei Dai,
I saw your everything list, and wanted to post an event there, but I am not a
member, and even if I became one would just be a newbie.
So if you feel
Recently I heard the news that Max Tegmark has joined the Advisory Board of
SIAI (The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, see
http://www.singinst.org/blog/2010/03/03/mit-professor-and-cosmologist-max-tegmark-joins-siai-advisory-board/).
This news was surprising to me, but in retrosp
I've placed a compressed mbox file at
http://www.ibiblio.org/weidai/everything-archive/. Add everything.bz2 to
this path for the full URL. (I'm trying not to post the full URL directly so
the email addresses inside won't get harvested by web robots.) It should be
complete as of now. I'll updat
Jack Mallah wrote:
> They might not, but I'm sure most would; maybe not exactly that U, but a
> lot closer to it.
Can you explain why you believe that?
> No. In U = Sum_i M_i Q_i, you sum over all the i's, not just the ones
> that are similar to you. Of course your Q_i (which is _your_ utili
> No. First, I don't agree that the real question is what the utility
> function is or should be. The real question is whether the measure, M, is
> conserved or whether it decreases. It's just that a lot of people don't
> understand what that means.
I agree that a lot of people don't unders
Jack, welcome back. I no longer read every post here, but I read this post
and found your positions pretty close to my own. This one, especially, I
totally agree with:
> The important thing to realize is that _definitions don't matter_!
> Predictions, decisions, appropriate emotions to a situa
y, July 03, 2008 8:49 AM
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: All feedback appreciated - An introduction to Algebraic Physics
> to: Wei Dai:
> Please:
> How can I find your 'Everything-Questionnaire'? (Not that I have the
> answers...)
> John Mikes
>
> On T
Bruno Marchal wrote:
> If Wei Dai agree, I could send it online: it is a 1,5 Mega QuickTime
> document attachment. I guess it is a bit too big. Some day I will put
> them on my web page. It does illustrate some points. The problem is
> that my all complex plane software does no
Rolf Nelson wrote:
> In the (3) I gave, you're indexed so that the thermal fluctuation
> doesn't dissolve until November 1, so your actions still have
> consequences.
Still not a problem: the space-time region that I can affect in (3) is too
small (i.e., its measure is too small, complexity too
Rolf Nelson wrote:
> On Oct 25, 7:59 am, "Wei Dai" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> I don't care
>> about (1) and (3) because those universes are too arbitrary or random,
>> and I
>> can defend that by pointing to their high algorithmic complexit
Brent Meeker wrote:
> That's a good argument assuming some laws of physics. But as I understood
> it, the "measure problem" was to explain the law-like evolution of the
> universe as a opposed to a chaotic/random/white-rabbit universe. Is it
> your interpretation that, among all possible worl
Rolf Nelson wrote:
> Wei, your examples are convincing, although other decision models have
> similar problems. If your two examples were the only problems that
> UDASSA had, I would have few qualms about adopting it over the other
> decision models I've seen. Note that even if you adopt a decisio
Rolf Nelson wrote:
> In standard decision theory, "odds" (subjective probabilities) are
> separated from utilities. Is "how much you care about the consequences
> of your actions" isomorphic to "odds", or is there some subtlety I'm
> missing here?
Your question shows that someone finally understa
Rolf Nelson wrote:
> Your observations to date are consistent with all three models. What
> are the odds that you live in (2) but not (1) or (3)? Surely the
> answer is "extremely high", but how do we justify it *mathematically*
> (and philosophically)?
My current position is, forget the "odds".
Rolf Nelson wrote:
> 1. Provides a possible explanation for the "Measure Problem" of why we
> shouldn't be "extremely surprised" to find we live in a lawful
> universe, rather than an extremely chaotic universe, or a homogeneous
> cloud of gas.
One thing I still don't understand, is in what sense
Russell Standish wrote:
> This is actually the SSSA, as originally defined by Bostrom. The ASSA
> is the SSSA applied to "next observer moments".
I guess there is a bit of confusing on these terms. I did some searching in
the mailing list archives to find out how they were originally defined.
F
Youness Ayaita wrote:
> Directly speaking: Since all observers must expect to get their next
> observer moments out of the same ensemble of observer moments, there
> is no reason to insist on different preferences.
Youness, ASSA does not mean what you think, that "all observers must expect
to ge
Hal Finney wrote:
> This is an interesting experiment, but I have two comments. First,
> you could tighten the dilemma by having the mad scientist flip a biased
> coin with say a 70% chance of coming up heads, but then he duplicates
> you if it comes up tails. Now you have it that the different st
In part one I argued against ASSA. Here I first summarize my
argument against UD, then against the general possibility of any single
objective measure.
1. There is an infinite number of universal Turing machines, so there
is an infinite number of UD. If we want to use one UD as an objective
measu
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 into a computer by a m
Here's my comment on David Wallace's 2005 paper, "Quantum Probability from
Subjective Likelihood:
improving on Deutsch's proof of the probability rule" available at
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/2302/. I think this is probably
one of the main works referred to in the New Scientist
Hal wrote:
> Yes, as you note later this is very similar to the concept I called
> UD+ASSA or just UDASSA and described in a series of postings to this
> list back in 2005. It was not original with me but actually was based
> on an idea of Wei Dai, who founded this last way back in
Jason wrote:
> I have seen two main justifications on this list for the everything
> ensemble, the first comes from information theory which says the
> information content of everything is zero (or close to zero). The
> other is mathematicalism/arithmatical realism which suggests
> mathematical t
> A year ago or so Wei Dai put an end to religious discussions on the list.
I don't remember if I did that a year ago or not, but I certainly think the
current discussion is off-topic. This mailing list is based on the premise
that all possible universes exist. Unless someone can th
I just remembered that Google Groups also has a file uploading/hosting
feature. You can find it at
http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list/files. It's already enabled,
so please go ahead and use it as an alternative, or for any files that don't
belong on Jason's wiki.
- Original Me
On Feb 13, 3:28 am, Brent Meeker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> You don't need an emailer that understands HTML to look at an attached
> jpeg, like the one I attach to this. :-) On the avoid-l mailing list the
> rule is to keep attachements under 500kb. Perhaps Wei Dai woul
Jason wrote:
I assumed bounded memory due to the limited amount of matter and energy
available to build the computer. For instance I've seen it said that the
total information content of this universe is about 10^90 bits. If a
civilization gathered all the mass and energy available in their un
Jason wrote:
If that is true then my underlying assumptions were flawed. My
argument assumed that a non-reversible universe could not be simulated
by a computer with bounded memory and using only reversible
computations. The way I arrived at this assumption was imagining a
non-reversible unive
Jason, I think there may be some incorrect assumptions behind your argument.
Let me state the facts as I understand them and you can check them against
your assumptions or correct me if I'm wrong.
The only reason we need reversible computation to do an infinite number of
computations is that phy
Your posts have been coming through. You can check
http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en yourself to see if your
posts have been received by the group.
- Original Message -
From: John Mikes
To: everything-list@googlegroups.com ; Wei Dai
Sent: Thursday, December 21
Sorry, John. I set your subscription to "no email" thinking you wanted to
unsubscribe. I've changed it back now. For future reference you can check your
subscription status at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list/subscribe.
- Original Message -
From: Kim Jones
To: everyt
Jesse Mazer:
I have a vague memory that there was some result showing the algorithmic
> complexity of a string shouldn't depend too strongly on the details of the
> Turing machine--that it would only differ by some constant amount for any
> two different machines, maybe? Does this ring a bell wit
Saibal Mitra wrote:
> How would an observer know he is living in a universe in which information
> is lost? Information loss means that time evolution can map two different
> initial states to the same final state. The observer in the final state
> thus
> cannot know that information really has b
Ti Bo wrote:
> On reversibility, there is the observation (I think acredittable to Tom
> Toffoli)
> that most/all irreversible systems have a reversible subsystem and the
> dynamics arrive in that
> subsystem after some (finite) time. Thus any system that we observe a
> while
> after it has starte
Jesse Mazer wrote:
> As for the question of why we live in a universe that apparently has this
> property, I don't think there's an anthropic explanation for it, I'd see
> it
> as part of the larger question of why we live in a universe whose
> fundamental laws seem to be so elegant and posess so
If we consider our observable universe as a computation, it's rather
atypical in that it doesn't seem to make use of the erase operation (or
other any operation that irreversibly erases information). The second law of
thermodynamics is a consequence of this. In order to forget anything
(decrea
Brent Meeker wrote:
> This seems to assume a dualism in which you are both a mathematical
> structure
> and at also stand outside the structure caring and making decisions.
What makes you say "stand outside the structure"? I'd say instead that I am
a mathematical structure that cares and makes
Is there a difference between physical existence and mathematical existence?
I suggest thinking about this problem from a different angle.
Consider a mathematical substructure as a rational decision maker. It seems
to me that making a decision ideally would consist of the following steps:
1. I
The list move is now complete. Please start sending your posts to the new
address: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Also, the list will now be
archived at both http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list and
http://www.mail-archive.com/everything-list@eskimo.com/.
For those of you using Procmail to filter
I'm moving the Everything mailing list to Google Groups, for better
archiving and easier administration. While this is in progress, you may
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niversal Turing machine in algorithmic information theory. Our aesthetic
choices can therefore be encoded into this free parameter.
- Original Message -
From:
Kim
Jones
To: Wei Dai
Cc: everything-list@eskimo.com
Sent: Tuesday, February 14, 2006 10:40
PM
Subject:
Hal wrote:
> I also get the impression that Susskind's
attempts to bring "disreputable"> multiverse models into "holy" string
theory is more likely to kill> string theory than to rehabilitate
multiverses. Perhaps I am getting a> biased view by only reading
this one blog, which opposes strin
I'm not sure what's going on with escribe.com, but there's a second archive
at http://www.mail-archive.com/everything-list%40eskimo.com/.
- Original Message -
From: "Hal Ruhl" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To:
Sent: Wednesday, August 24, 2005 9:14 PM
Subject: archive?
Hi All:
I have not been
Hal Finney wrote:
No doubt this is true. But there are still two somewhat-related problems.
One is, you can go back in time to the first replicator on earth, and
think of its evolution over the ages as a learning process. During this
time it learned this "intuitive physics", i.e. mathematics an
Couple of comments to the post below.
1. P=?NP is a purely mathematical problem, whereas the existence of an HPO
box is an emperical matter. If we had access to a purported HPO box while
P=?NP is still unsolved, we can use the box to exhaustively search for
proofs of either P=NP or Phttp://www.in
>> Correct me if wrong, but isn't the halting
problem only>> undecidable when the length of the program is
unbounded? Wouldn't the AI assign non-zero>> probability to a machine
that solved the halting problem for>> programs up to size S? (S is the
number of stars in the sky, grains of sand,>
One day, Earth is contacted by a highly
advanced alien civilization, and they tell us that contrary to what most of us
think is likely, not all of the fundamental physical laws of our
universe are computable. Furthermore, they claim to be able to
manufacture black boxes that work as oracles
On Tue, Apr 20, 2004 at 12:42:16PM -0700, Hal Finney wrote:
> One thing I've never understood about this approach is exactly how a
> computation is considered to be a set. Take a 1D cellular automaton
> for example as a simple computational model, with a specified set of
> rules and particular ini
This is an imaginary conversation between me and a Bayesian. His answers
are in parenthesis. Do you find this line of argument convincing?
Consider all possible worlds consistent with your memories and current
experiences. In other words, all possible worlds that contain at least one
obser
On Tue, Feb 03, 2004 at 02:55:53PM -0800, Pete Carlton wrote:
> But even this goes way out in front of what we can possibly know. You
> say we have no idea what these feelings are like to experience--but why
> should we assume we even are entitled to ask this question?
Here's my basic philosoph
On Thu, Jan 29, 2004 at 11:33:15AM -0800, Hal Finney wrote:
> What about arguments that attempt to estimate the fraction of observers
> who are in simulations versus in base realities, such as Nick Bostrom's
> Simulation Argument, www.simulation-argument.com?
>
> Are you saying that such arguments
On Sun, Jan 25, 2004 at 03:41:55AM -0500, Jesse Mazer wrote:
> Do you think that by choosing a
> different measure, you could change the actual first-person probabilities of
> different experiences? Or do you reject the idea of continuity of
> consciousness and "first-person probabilities" in th
On Sun, Jan 25, 2004 at 09:51:47AM -0800, Hal Finney wrote:
> But we can solve this conundrum while retaining symmetry. Rationality
> should demand allegience to the observed measure. It is irrational to
> cling to a measure which has been rejected repeatedly by observations.
> If classical defi
On Sat, Jan 24, 2004 at 07:31:50PM -0800, Eric Hawthorne wrote:
>I took some small smattering of that stuff in comp sci undergrad, but
Algorithmic information theory is generally not taught in undergrad
courses. At least I didn't see it during my CS undergrad years.
(Which is too bad because
On Sat, Jan 24, 2004 at 11:49:09PM -0500, Jesse Mazer wrote:
> But measures aren't just about making decisions about what to *do*, the main
> argument for a single objective measure is that such a measure could make
> predictions about what we *see*, like why we see regular laws of physics and
>
On Sat, Jan 24, 2004 at 12:21:40PM -0800, Eric Hawthorne wrote:
> Can you explain briefly why the choice of measure is subjective? I
> haven't read any of the
> books you mentioned (will try to get to them) but am familiar with
> computability theory
> and decision theory.
Since you do not menti
On Sun, Jan 25, 2004 at 01:01:42AM +1100, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
> If I stop with (a) above, I am simply
> saying that this is how I feel about suffering, and this feeling is not
> contingent on the state of affairs in any actual or possible world [there, I
> got it in!].
(a) as stated is i
I have to say that I sympathize with Caesar, but my position is slightly
different. I think there is a possibility that that objective morality
does exist, but we're simply too stupid to realize what it is. Therefore
we should try to improve our intelligence, through intelligence
amplication, or ar
These books have been mentioned on the list before, but I'm recommending
them again because a lot of new members have joined since we last talked
about them. To motivate you to read these books, I've given some questions
that each book helps answer or provide the necessary background knowledge
to d
On Fri, Jan 23, 2004 at 09:04:20PM -0800, Hal Finney wrote:
> Do you think it would come out differently with a universal distribution?
There are an infinite number of universal distributions. Some of them
assign greater probability to even integers, some of them assign greater
probability to od
The latter two papers can be found on JSTOR. I've placed copies at
http://www.ibiblio.org/weidai/Many_Minds.pdf
http://www.ibiblio.org/weidai/Many_Minds_Replies.pdf
The first paper doesn't seem to be online anywhere. There's an online
archive for Synthese at
http://www.kluweronline.com/issn/0039-
On Tue, Jan 06, 2004 at 05:32:05PM +0100, Georges Quenot wrote:
> Many other way of simulating the universe could be considered like
> for instance a 4D mesh (if we simplify by considering only general
> relativity; there is no reason for the approach not being possible in
> an even more general wa
On Sun, Jan 11, 2004 at 09:57:18AM -0800, Hal Finney wrote:
> [...] That is
> (turning to the Schmidhuber interpretation) it must be much simpler
> to write a program that just barely allows for the possibility of life
> than to write one which makes it easy. This is a prediction of the AUH,
> and
On Wed, Nov 12, 2003 at 10:11:04PM -0500, Jesse Mazer wrote:
> Of course not, no more than I would treat the copy who materialized in a
> room with the portrait of the candidate who went on to lose the election as
> a zombie. From the point of view of myself about to be duplicated, it was
> cert
On Wed, Nov 12, 2003 at 04:34:27AM -0500, Jesse Mazer wrote:
> Applied to quantum immortality, this "anticipatory" idea suggests it would
> not be as if the universe is allowing events to go any which way right up
> until something is about to kill me, and then it steps in with some
> miraculous
Apparenly the mailing list software does not like "unsubscribe" in the
subject field. It thinks you're mistakenly sending an unsubscribe request
to the list address instead of the request address.
Thanks for pointing out the typo on the web page. I've fixed it now.
- Forwarded message -
> But in fact, the only thing that privileges the set of all
> computational operations that we see in nature, is that they are instantiated by
> the laws of physics.
I would dispute this. The set of computable operations may also be
privileged in that only a universe with laws of physics that ins
On Tue, Jan 14, 2003 at 02:45:15PM -0800, Hal Finney wrote:
> Another angle on this argument takes an even broader view. Let us
> consider all observer-moments in the multiverse. By eliminating those
> observer-moments which have a negative quality of life, we improve
On Wed, Jan 08, 2003 at 04:07:47PM -0800, Hal Finney wrote:
> How could we go about modelling a universe like this?
A mathematical model should be straightforward. For a computational model,
consider a program that takes an infinitely long string as input, which it
interprets as the description
On Tue, Jan 14, 2003 at 11:20:26AM -0800, Tim May wrote:
> "The point here is that rational decision makers should choose actions
> on the basis of their _efficacy in bringing out desirable results_
> rather than their auspiciousness as harbingers of these results."
>
> (p. 150, "The Foundations
This post seems to be off topic for the list. Can we please drop it,
unless there is some connection to ensemble theories of everything that
I'm missing?
On Tue, Jan 14, 2003 at 09:52:23AM -0800, Eric Hawthorne wrote:
> On the likelihood of detecting alien intelligences:
> (single-world case)
>
Continuing with my last post...
On Fri, Jan 10, 2003 at 08:54:38PM -0800, Tim May wrote:
> Why would there be any reason to try to maximize the utility of this
> "big picture"?
>
> For those of us who don't even strive for "the greatest good for the
> greatest number" in a single-branch universe
On Fri, Jan 10, 2003 at 08:54:38PM -0800, Tim May wrote:
> But in this, the only universe I will ever, ever have contact with, I
> optimize as best I can. And I assume all the myriad mes are doing the
> same in their universes, forever disconnected from mine.
You're taking the question too perso
This is a test. Duraid, please allow this post to go through to your
subscribers. Once I confirm this works, I'll update the everything-list
web page to add a link to your list page.
To clarify, this list is not being moderated. Every post sent by a
subscriber to [EMAIL PROTECTED] will go through and be reflected
to all subscribers. It will then be forwarded to Duraid's "lotsofthings"
mailing list, where Duraid will select the ones he considers of high
quality and send them
On Fri, Jan 03, 2003 at 11:48:08PM +0100, Saibal Mitra wrote:
> Actually, one doesn't have to dig very deep in the archive. This very thread
> is an example of an off topic irrelevant discussion. Irrelevant, because
> there are so few other postings that should not have appeared on this list.
Perh
On Fri, Jan 03, 2003 at 04:48:03PM +1100, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> Everyone: Why am I posting _this_ rant to the list, I hear you ask? To
> advertise another list, lotsofthings. It's intended to be a moderated
> everything-list. Please visit
> http://list.infiniteloop.ca/listinfo/lotsofthings
On Thu, Dec 26, 2002 at 08:21:38PM -0500, Stephen Paul King wrote:
> Forgive me if my writting gave you that opinion. I meant to imply that
> any mind, including that of a bat, is quantum mechanical and not classical
> in its nature. My ideas follow the implications of Hitoshi Kitada's theory
>
On Wed, Dec 18, 2002 at 08:54:30PM -0500, Stephen Paul King wrote:
> Two ideas would seem to mute this strange thought.
>
> 1) The no-cloning theorem, iff the world follows QM and not just classical
> physics.
Are you saying the no-cloning theorem will prevent copying of minds? What
about AIs
On Wed, Dec 04, 2002 at 04:00:07PM +0100, Marchal Bruno wrote:
> Have you read the "revisited" paper by Wallace on Everett/decision
> theory? Quite interesting imo, and relevant for some discussion,
> about MWI and decision theory we have had on this list.
>
> http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/docum
On Fri, Sep 27, 2002 at 11:53:10PM -0700, George Levy wrote:
> After discussing the idea of QS with their dear friend Mercutio, Romeo
> and Juliet decide to go ahead with the project. Mercutio design the
> machine and under his instruction, Balthasar, Romeo's loyal servant,
> builds a QS contr
On Thu, Sep 26, 2002 at 12:46:29PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote:
> I would say the difference between animals and humans is that humans
> make drawings on the walls ..., and generally doesn't take their body
> as a limitation of their memory.
It's possible that we will never be able to access more
On Thu, Sep 26, 2002 at 02:58:57PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote:
> Originally the passage from the first person to the first person plural was
> done in reaction to my ex-boss wanting an explanation of the comp
> indeterminacy in term of betting games.
What do you mean by this? Explanation or refe
On Wed, Sep 25, 2002 at 12:02:20PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote:
> Just to tell you that the Joyce book you refer to us is indeed
> interesting and could motivate for mathematical tools common in decision
> theory, philosophical logic, and theories related to the machine interview
> I am engaged in.
On Tue, Sep 24, 2002 at 03:20:54PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote:
> I mentioned Deutsch for his account of time in term of parallel universes.
> I don't remember if Deutsch deduced this explicitly from relativity.
> (I lend his book so I cannot verify now).
> I was just doing the following caricatura
On Tue, Sep 24, 2002 at 12:18:36PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote:
> You are right. But this is a reason for not considering classical *second*
> order logic as logic. Higher order logic remains "logic" when some
> constructive assumption are made, like working in intuitionist logic.
> A second order
On Sat, Sep 21, 2002 at 11:50:20PM -0700, Brent Meeker wrote:
> I was not aware that 2nd-order logic precluded independent
> propositions. Is this true whatever the axioms and rules of
> inference?
It depends on the axioms, and the semantic rules (not rules of inference
which is a deductive conc
On Sat, Sep 21, 2002 at 10:26:45PM -0700, Brent Meeker wrote:
> I don't see how this follows. If you have a set of axioms, and
> rules of inference, then (per Godel) there are undecidable
> propositions. One of these may be added as an axiom and the
> system will still be consistent. This will
On Sat, Sep 21, 2002 at 09:20:26PM -0400, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> For those of you who are familiar with Max Tegmark's TOE, could someone tell
> me whether Georg Cantor's " Absolute Infinity, Absolute Maximum or Absolute
> Infinite Collections" represent "mathematical structures" and, therefo
On Thu, Sep 05, 2002 at 12:08:39PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote:
> This comes from the fact that MWI is explained most of the time
> in the context of non relativistic QM (which assumes time and space).
> But this problem disappear once you take into account the
> space time structure of relativisti
On Thu, Sep 05, 2002 at 07:32:49PM -0700, Hal Finney wrote:
> This was an interesting paper but unfortunately the key point seemed
> to pass by without proof. On page 5, the proposal is to use entangled
> particles to try to send a signal by measuring at one end in a sequence
> of different bases
On Wed, Sep 04, 2002 at 10:48:38AM -0700, Tim May wrote:
> And, putting in a plug for modal/topos logic, the essence of nearly
> every interpretation, whether MWI or Copenhagen or even Newtonian, is
> that observers at time t are faced with unknowable and branching
> futures.
How useful is mod
On Mon, Sep 02, 2002 at 12:51:09PM +1000, Russell Standish wrote:
> This set of all descriptions is the Schmidhuber approach, although he
> later muddies the water a bit by postulating that this set is generated
> by a machine with resource constraints (we could call this Schmidhuber
> II :). This
On Sat, Aug 17, 2002 at 04:55:59PM -0700, Brent Meeker wrote:
> I think what the paper says is that when matter/energy have
> thinned out enough so that we have essentially empty space
> again, a de Sitter universe, a vacuum fluctuation can start
> a new universe.
You're not understanding the pap
Thank you for the explanation on S4, IL, and CL. I'm interested in
more details, but rather than bombarding you with endless questions, can
you suggest a book on this topic? Something that talks about
what you just did, but in more detail?
Unfortunately I'm still not able to understand much of
On Fri, Aug 16, 2002 at 12:26:10AM +0200, Saibal Mitra wrote:
> I haven't read the paper in detail, so I could be wrong. Consider the two
> alternatives:
>
> 1) true cosmological constant
>
> 2) no true cosmological constant
>
> We also assume SIA. Is it the case that there are much fewer obser
On Thu, Aug 15, 2002 at 11:28:28PM +0200, Saibal Mitra wrote:
> I think that the difference is that invoking the SIA does not affect the
> conclusion of the paper.
Why do you say that? I think SIA affects the conclusion of the paper the
same way it affects the Doomsday argument.
It's kind of f
- Forwarded message from Wei Dai <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -
Date: Thu, 15 Aug 2002 13:28:43 -0700
From: Wei Dai <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: Nature Article
On Thu, Aug 15, 2002 at 12:45:17AM -0400, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> Dyson, L., Kleban, M
I don't know why Nick hasn't told us about his new book. I just found out
about it on his web site:
Anthropic Bias: Observation Selection Effects in Science and Philosophy
Nick Bostrom, Routledge, New York, July 2002
There are some free sample chapters at
http://www.anthropic-principle.com/boo
On Wed, Aug 14, 2002 at 04:38:45PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote:
> Your general question was "Why using modal logic when
> quantifying on worlds is enough". My basic answer was
> that Kripke's possible world semantics works only on a
> subset of the possible modal logics.
Let me generalize my quest
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