Re: A question for Bruno about Artificial Brains
On 4/1/2012 14:33, David Nyman wrote: Bruno, when you talk about the doctor offering one a replacement brain you usually describe the substitute as digital, although I think you have sometimes just said that it is artificial. My recent remarks about game physics got me thinking about this distinction, if indeed there is one. Suppose Dick's friend Harry, having been previously diagnosed with an incurable brain cancer, has had an artificial brain installed. The doctor tells Dick that he has replaced Harry's brain with a (very sophisticated!) battery-driven clockwork substitute. Harry tells Dick that the replacement has been entirely successful: After the operation I felt a little woozy at first, but I feel great now. My memory is excellent - if anything better than before - and my appreciation of the finer things in life is as vivid as ever. Dick is a bit sceptical at first (his faith in clockwork has been prejudiced by a rather unreliable fake Rolex he bought in Hong Kong) but over a period of several months of careful observation he finds he can't distinguish any difference whatsoever between Harry's new clockwork personality and his former self. Their friendship is undiminished. This turns out to be just as well, because - horror of horrors - Dick is shortly afterwards also diagnosed with a terminal brain condition. Should he now be willing to submit to the same procedure as Harry? He is still a little sceptical of clockwork, but the evidence of Harry's successful transformation is very difficult to discount, and the doctor shows him several other before and after videos with equally convincing outcomes. The artificial brains may be clockwork, but the doctor assures him it is clockwork of unprecedented sophistication and precision, unheard of even in the hallowed halls of Swiss horology. Dick has stumbled across the Everything List, and is rather persuaded by the computational theory of mind. Trouble is, the doctor is not of this persuasion. He tells Dick that the goal of the operation is only to substitute a clockwork analogue for the electro-chemical mechanisms of his organic brain, and that on this basis Dick can confidently expect that the same inputs will reliably elicit the same responses as before. Hearing this, Dick is now worried that, however successful the replacement of Harry's brain has been behaviourally, his friend is now essentially a mindless clockwork mechanism. Since he certainly doesn't want to suffer such an indignity, should he say no to the doctor? The question that troubles Dick is whether, assuming comp, he should accept a genuinely behaviourally-indistinguishable body, irrespective of its brain being organic or clockwork, as an equivalent avatar according to the rules of the comp game-physics. If so, Dick should have no reason not to accept a behaviourally-indistinguishable, clockwork-equipped body as enabling his continued manifestation relative to the familiar environments to which he has become so emotionally attached. Time is short, and he must act. What should he do? David It seems to me the question is if someone should bet in COMP. If Dick had trouble assigning consciousness to Harry because Dick was a solipsist then he might have a hard time betting on COMP. Of course, your post does not suggest that Dick had such an opinion, but it is just one of many unfalsifiable viewpoints (since one cannot know of any other consciousness than their own), but not something which we think is likely (by induction on observed behavior and its similarity to our internal states). If Dick thinks mechanism (COMP) is true, that is, the subjective experience that he has corresponds to the inside view of some abstract structure or process which is implemented in his brain. That is, that his brain does not have any magical properties that make it conscious and the fact that conscious experience that one has appear to place us relative to a physical brain (by induction). By induction we can also observe that changing our brain through medicine or drugs or other methods (for example, consider a thought experiment about the nature of consciousness when only small parts change: http://consc.net/papers/qualia.html ) also changes our conscious experience, but it shouldn't if whatever we change doesn't change our functionality. Not accepting that will result in all kinds of strange partial philosophical zombies, which to many people don't make sense, but Dick would have to decide for himself if they make sense for him or not - maybe even experiment on himself, after all, the COMP doctor is available. Dick should also consider the UDA and the proof that mechanism is incompatible with materialism (since Dick assumes the existence of mind and consciousness by default, I'm not considering that option here). If Dick thinks COMP is worth betting on, he now only has to worry about one thing: did his doctor choose the right substitution level? If the
Re: A question for Bruno about Artificial Brains
On 4/2/2012 00:43, Russell Standish wrote: On Sun, Apr 01, 2012 at 02:33:44PM +0100, David Nyman wrote: Bruno, when you talk about the doctor offering one a replacement brain you usually describe the substitute as digital, although I think you have sometimes just said that it is artificial. My recent remarks about game physics got me thinking about this distinction, if indeed there is one. ... Since he certainly doesn't want to suffer such an indignity, should he say no to the doctor? The question that troubles Dick is whether, assuming comp, he should accept a genuinely behaviourally-indistinguishable body, irrespective of its brain being organic or clockwork, as an equivalent avatar according to the rules of the comp game-physics. If so, Dick should have no reason not to accept a behaviourally-indistinguishable, clockwork-equipped body as enabling his continued manifestation relative to the familiar environments to which he has become so emotionally attached. Time is short, and he must act. What should he do? David Counter intuitively, he should say no to the doctor, regardless of whether he believes in COMP or not-COMP. If COMP is true, COMP immortality is true, and Dick will survive the cancer whether he gets his brain replaced or not. If COMP is not true, then he is committing suicide. I don't think it's that simple. COMP immortality would mean that he would survive, but the real question isn't if he will experience continuity to a state where he survives, but what is the probability that he well experience a future state where he doesn't become amnesiac or lose details he doesn't want to lose. A substitution at the right level (with the cancer removed) would let most of his continuations be those where he survives without amnesia. Him betting on COMP immortality (without doctor's help, only relying on white rabbits) might work, but the measure of him surviving unchanged or in a manner that he would prefer might be smaller than that with a correct digital substitution. However, the practical question is indeed if the doctor got the details right. If the doctor got it very wrong, he should still expect to survive the operation in some really unusual way (with or without digital brain). Cheers. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Theology or not theology (Re: COMP theology)
On 3/12/2012 05:50, John Clark wrote: On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 1:52 PM, Bruno Marchalmarc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Do they really have to state that they assume existence exists? You mean that primary matter exists? Yes that is an hypothesis. So your complaint is that a biologist like Richard Dawkins doesn't start all his books with I assume matter exists. Bruno, that's just nuts. A primary matter assumption is different from just a 'matter' assumption. The matter assumption can be reached through one's senses, it's a rather trivial, weak hypothesis to make. The primary matter assumption is that matter is ontologically primary and in some cases, that everything is just matter and nothing else (such as mind or math) exists independently. A non-primary matter assumption could for example be that matter is merely how some math looks from the inside - this does solve a variety of other problems (such as why something instead of nothing or all kinds of silly paradoxes found in popular religions (it makes no sense to create or destroy math, nor does it make sense to change it)). Either way, one should be clear what their assumptions are and try not to pretend like they don't exist or keep them hidden. It would be great if I could explain exactly why there is something rather than nothing but unfortunately I don't know how to do that, but a atheist does not need to, I am not sure anybody needs that A atheist would need that if a theist could explain why there is something rather than nothing, I would be in a pew singing hymns next Sunday if they could do that, but of course no God theory can provide even a hint of a hint of a answer to that. Nobody can answer that question without having some assumptions, and assumptions tend to be of the provably unprovable manner - or theological, or religious (as in they can never be reached through senses only and require some act of faith to believe them, no matter if evidence points with high probability that your assumption is right). I have no problem with those who say that they are not interested in such or such question. Well, personally I feel that anybody who has not even thought about it a little would be a bit dull, and somebody who thinks about it a lot is probably wasting time that could be more productively spent. A important part of genius is to know what problem to go after, it should be profound enough to make a big increase in our understanding but not so difficult as to be out of reach. For example in Darwin's day there was no possibility of figuring out how chemicals turned into life, but a real first class genius might be able to figure out how one species can change into another, and that's exactly where Darwin set his sights. But for Darwin's ideas to come into play you've got to start with a reproducing entity; so he could explain how bacteria turned into a man but not how chemicals turned into bacteria, so Darwin explained a hell of a lot but he didn't explain everything nor did he (or Dawkins) ever claim to. Only with those who assert that it is a false problem, a crackpot field It's not a crackpot field but I think you would have to admit that it does attract more that its fair share of crackpots. and this by letting believe that science has solve or dissolve the question, when it is hardly the case. But Dawkins has never done that, never, and being a biologist most of his books concern how the laws of chemistry (which is already something as he would be the first to admit) produced life, including advanced life like you and me. And Dawkins does not claim he has a complete explanation for even this much more limited (although still very profound) problem. Science in general and Dawkins in particular can't explain everything, but they can explain a lot. Religion can explain nothing, absolutely nothing. That depends on one's definition of religion. Most popular religions provide no explanation and only seek to fill in the explanatory void that some people have - they tend to do this rather badly, to the point where they don't even care about logical consistency. Most such religions cannot be believed or even seriously considered by anyone who values the search for truth. Personally, I like to think of a religious belief as an provably unprovable belief, however I'm not against the general concept. Why? We all need these provably unprovable beliefs to function - it doesn't matter if we're agnostic atheists or something else entirely - we all have these beliefs. I'll try to illustrate by giving some examples of such religious beliefs (not all of them compatible with each other), some held by atheists, agnostics, theists: - Belief that matter is ontologically primary, that is, there is nothing by some particular structure that is our world. - Belief that arithmetical sentences (or example in Peano Arithmetic) can be assigned a truth value - Belief in consistency of arithmetic - Belief in
Re: First person indeterminacy (Re: COMP theology)
On 3/12/2012 05:43, Stephen P. King wrote: On 3/11/2012 8:30 PM, acw wrote: On 3/12/2012 00:39, meekerdb wrote: This implies that our measure is strongly correlated with the regularity of physics. I'm not sure you can show that, but if it's true it means that physics is fundamental to our existence, even if physics can be explained by the UD. Only worlds with extremely consistent physics can support consciousness (which seems unlikely to me). Maybe, it's more of a conjecture, I don't posses the theoretical tools to make some headway on the issue for now. As for physics being essential, I'm not 100% sure, it might be for us, humans with physical brains and bodies, but I don't see why it would be for a SIM, or for a detailed emulation of a human body/brain: consider the case of such a SIMs living in a VR(Virtual Reality) simulation - they wouldn't really care what the underlying substrate would be, but then, they would know they are in a simulation (to some degree). A more interesting question might be not about SIMs living in VRs, but those beings which live in a physical world and have bodies and are self-aware of those bodies and their own embedding in such a physical world - what possible statistically stable laws of physics would be required for such beings (I think Tegmark called them Self-Aware Substructures)? Since we know we're in such a situation, what laws of physics are possible that have conscious self-aware observers with 'physical' bodies? Hi, Could it be that we are tacitly assuming that our notion of Virtual is such that there always exists a standard what is the Real version? If it is not possible to tell if a given object of experience is real or virtual, why do we default to it being virtual, as if it was somehow possible to compare the object in question with an unassailably real version? As I see it, if we can somehow show that a given object of experience is the _best possible_ simulation (modulo available resources) then it is real, as a better or more real simulation of it is impossible to generate. Our physical world is 'real' simply because there does not exist a better simulation of it. Sure, given a mathematical ontology, real is just the structure you exist in - an indexical. This real might be limited in some way (for example in COMP, you cannot help but get some indeterminacy like MW)- a newtonian physics simulation might be real for those living in it and which are embedded in it, although if this would really work without any indeterminacy, I'm skeptical of. I should have been more precise, when I said VR, I didn't merely mean a good digital physics simulation where the observer's entire body+brain is contained within, I meant something more high-level, think of Second Life or Blocks World or some other similar simulation done 1000 years from now with much more computational resources. The main difference between VR and physical-real is that one contains a body+brain embedded in that physical-real world (as matter), thus physical-real is also a self-contained consistent mathematical structure, while VR has some external component which prevents a form of physical self-awareness (you can't have brain surgery in a VR, at least not in the sense we do have in the real world). The main difference here is that the VR can be influenced by a higher level at which the VR itself runs, while a physical-real structure is completely self-contained. Onward! Stephen -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: First person indeterminacy (Re: COMP theology)
On 3/12/2012 08:04, Stephen P. King wrote: On 3/12/2012 2:53 AM, acw wrote: On 3/12/2012 05:43, Stephen P. King wrote: Hi, Could it be that we are tacitly assuming that our notion of Virtual is such that there always exists a standard what is the Real version? If it is not possible to tell if a given object of experience is real or virtual, why do we default to it being virtual, as if it was somehow possible to compare the object in question with an unassailably real version? As I see it, if we can somehow show that a given object of experience is the _best possible_ simulation (modulo available resources) then it is real, as a better or more real simulation of it is impossible to generate. Our physical world is 'real' simply because there does not exist a better simulation of it. Sure, given a mathematical ontology, real is just the structure you exist in - an indexical. This real might be limited in some way (for example in COMP, you cannot help but get some indeterminacy like MW)- a newtonian physics simulation might be real for those living in it and which are embedded in it, although if this would really work without any indeterminacy, I'm skeptical of. I should have been more precise, when I said VR, I didn't merely mean a good digital physics simulation where the observer's entire body+brain is contained within, I meant something more high-level, think of Second Life or Blocks World or some other similar simulation done 1000 years from now with much more computational resources. The main difference between VR and physical-real is that one contains a body+brain embedded in that physical-real world (as matter), thus physical-real is also a self-contained consistent mathematical structure, while VR has some external component which prevents a form of physical self-awareness (you can't have brain surgery in a VR, at least not in the sense we do have in the real world). The main difference here is that the VR can be influenced by a higher level at which the VR itself runs, while a physical-real structure is completely self-contained. Hi! I am mot exactly sure of what you mean by indexical. Your current state, time, location, birth place, brain state, etc are indexicals. The (observed) laws of physics are also indexicals, unless you can show that either only one possible set of laws of physics is possible or you just assume that (for example, in a primary matter hypothesis). As to brain surgery in VR, why not? All that is needed is rules in the program that control the 1p experience of content to some states in game structures. Our brains are made of matter and if we change them, our experience changes. In a VR, the brain's implementation is assumed external to the VR, if not, it would be a digital physics simulation, which is a bit different (self-contained). It might be possible to change your brain within the VR if the right APIs and protocols are implemented, but the brain's computations are done externally to the VR physics simulation (at a different layer, for example, brain program is ran separately from physics simulation program) . There's some subtle details here - if the brain was computed entirely through the VR's physics, UDA would apply and you would get the VR's physics simulation's indeterminacy (no longer a simulation, but something existing on its own in the UD*), otherwise, the brain's implementation depends on the indeterminacy present at the upper layer and not of the VR's physics simulation. This is a subtle point, but there would be a difference in measure and experience between simulating the brain from a digital physics simulation and external to it. In our world, we have the very high confidence belief that our brains are made of matter and thus implemented at the same level as our reality. In a VR, we may assume the implementation of our brains as external to the VR's physics - experienced reality being different from mind's body (brain) reality. The point is that if we are considering brains-in-vasts problems we need to also consider the other minds problems. We should not be analyzing this from a strict one person situation. You and I have different experiences up to and including the something that is like being Stephen as different from something that is like to being ACW. If we where internally identical minds then why would be even be having this conversation? We would literally know each others thought by merely having them. This is why I argue that plural shared 1p is a weakness in COMP. We have to have disjointness at least. We have different mind-states thus we have different experiences. I'm not entirely sure why would we share a mind if we didn't share a brain - it doesn't make much sense to me. Onward! Stephen -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send
Re: First person indeterminacy (Re: COMP theology)
On 3/12/2012 09:41, Stephen P. King wrote: On 3/12/2012 3:49 AM, acw wrote: On 3/12/2012 08:04, Stephen P. King wrote: On 3/12/2012 2:53 AM, acw wrote: On 3/12/2012 05:43, Stephen P. King wrote: Hi, Could it be that we are tacitly assuming that our notion of Virtual is such that there always exists a standard what is the Real version? If it is not possible to tell if a given object of experience is real or virtual, why do we default to it being virtual, as if it was somehow possible to compare the object in question with an unassailably real version? As I see it, if we can somehow show that a given object of experience is the _best possible_ simulation (modulo available resources) then it is real, as a better or more real simulation of it is impossible to generate. Our physical world is 'real' simply because there does not exist a better simulation of it. Sure, given a mathematical ontology, real is just the structure you exist in - an indexical. This real might be limited in some way (for example in COMP, you cannot help but get some indeterminacy like MW)- a newtonian physics simulation might be real for those living in it and which are embedded in it, although if this would really work without any indeterminacy, I'm skeptical of. I should have been more precise, when I said VR, I didn't merely mean a good digital physics simulation where the observer's entire body+brain is contained within, I meant something more high-level, think of Second Life or Blocks World or some other similar simulation done 1000 years from now with much more computational resources. The main difference between VR and physical-real is that one contains a body+brain embedded in that physical-real world (as matter), thus physical-real is also a self-contained consistent mathematical structure, while VR has some external component which prevents a form of physical self-awareness (you can't have brain surgery in a VR, at least not in the sense we do have in the real world). The main difference here is that the VR can be influenced by a higher level at which the VR itself runs, while a physical-real structure is completely self-contained. Hi! I am mot exactly sure of what you mean by indexical. Your current state, time, location, birth place, brain state, etc are indexicals. The (observed) laws of physics are also indexicals, unless you can show that either only one possible set of laws of physics is possible or you just assume that (for example, in a primary matter hypothesis). As to brain surgery in VR, why not? All that is needed is rules in the program that control the 1p experience of content to some states in game structures. Our brains are made of matter and if we change them, our experience changes. In a VR, the brain's implementation is assumed external to the VR, if not, it would be a digital physics simulation, which is a bit different (self-contained). It might be possible to change your brain within the VR if the right APIs and protocols are implemented, but the brain's computations are done externally to the VR physics simulation (at a different layer, for example, brain program is ran separately from physics simulation program) . There's some subtle details here - if the brain was computed entirely through the VR's physics, UDA would apply and you would get the VR's physics simulation's indeterminacy (no longer a simulation, but something existing on its own in the UD*), otherwise, the brain's implementation depends on the indeterminacy present at the upper layer and not of the VR's physics simulation. This is a subtle point, but there would be a difference in measure and experience between simulating the brain from a digital physics simulation and external to it. In our world, we have the very high confidence belief that our brains are made of matter and thus implemented at the same level as our reality. In a VR, we may assume the implementation of our brains as external to the VR's physics - experienced reality being different from mind's body (brain) reality. Hi, Umm, this looks like you are making a difference between a situation where your P.o.V. os stuck 'in one's head and a P.o.V. where it is free to move about. The difference that I'm trying to illustrate is about how the brain is implemented and with what it's entangled with, or what is required for its implementation. In the reality implementation case, a real brain is implemented by random machines below the substitution level. The experiences are also given by those machines if the brain/body are one and the same. The problem with VRs is that the physics, thus the generated sensory input (and output from player) is separated from actual mind's implementation - they run at different layers, thus we cannot use experienced sensory information to predict much about our mind's implementation (or what would happen next) without a specially designed VR which is made to facilitate just that (a special case VR). The measure differences
Re: First person indeterminacy (Re: COMP theology)
On 3/11/2012 21:44, R AM wrote: This discussion has been long and sometimes I am confused about the whole point of the exercise. I think the idea is that if comp is true, then the future content of subjective experience is indeterminated? Although comp might seem to entail 100% determinacy, just the contrary is the case. Is that correct? 3p indeterminacy in the form of the UD*, 1p determinacy from the perspective of those minds relative to bodies in the UD*. However, I think that if comp is true, future experience is not only indeterminate, but also arbitrary: our future experience could be anything at all. But given that this is not the case, shouldn't we conclude that comp is false? You're basically presenting the White Rabbit problem here. I used to wonder if that is indeed the case, but after considering it further, it doesn't seem to be: your 1p is identified with some particular abstract machine - that part is mostly determinate and deterministic (or quasi-deterministic if you allow some leeway as to what constitutes persona identity) in its behavior, but below that substitution level, anything can change, as long as that machine is implemented correctly/consistently. If the level is low enough and most of the machines implementing the lower layers that eventually implement our mind correspond to one world (such as ours), that would imply reasonably stable experience and some MWI-like laws of physics - not white noise experiences. That is to say that if we don't experience white noise, statistically our experiences will be stable - this does not mean that we won't have really unusual jumps or changes in laws-of-physics or experience when our measure is greatly reduced (such as the current statistically winning machines no longer being able to implement your mind - 3p death from the point of view of others). Also, one possible way of showing COMP false is to show that such stable implementations are impossible, however this seems not obvious to me. A more practical concern would be to consider the case of what would happen if the substitution level is chosen slightly wrong or too high - would it lead to too unstable 1p or merely just allow the SIM(Substrate Independent Mind) to more easily pick which lower-level machines implement it (there's another thought experiment which shows how this could be done, if a machine can find one of its own Godel-number). Ricardo. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: First person indeterminacy (Re: COMP theology)
On 3/12/2012 00:39, meekerdb wrote: On 3/11/2012 2:43 PM, acw wrote: On 3/11/2012 21:44, R AM wrote: This discussion has been long and sometimes I am confused about the whole point of the exercise. I think the idea is that if comp is true, then the future content of subjective experience is indeterminated? Although comp might seem to entail 100% determinacy, just the contrary is the case. Is that correct? 3p indeterminacy in the form of the UD*, 1p determinacy from the perspective of those minds relative to bodies in the UD*. I did make a mistake when typing that up: 3p indeterminacy in the form of the UD*, 1p determinacy from the perspective of those minds relative to bodies in the UD* was supposed to be 3p determinacy in the form of the UD*, 1p indeterminacy from the perspective of those minds relative to bodies in the UD*. However, I think that if comp is true, future experience is not only indeterminate, but also arbitrary: our future experience could be anything at all. But given that this is not the case, shouldn't we conclude that comp is false? You're basically presenting the White Rabbit problem here. I used to wonder if that is indeed the case, but after considering it further, it doesn't seem to be: your 1p is identified with some particular abstract machine - that part is mostly determinate and deterministic (or quasi-deterministic if you allow some leeway as to what constitutes persona identity) in its behavior, but below that substitution level, anything can change, as long as that machine is implemented correctly/consistently. If the level is low enough and most of the machines implementing the lower layers that eventually implement our mind correspond to one world (such as ours), that would imply reasonably stable experience and some MWI-like laws of physics - not white noise experiences. That is to say that if we don't experience white noise, statistically our experiences will be stable - this does not mean that we won't have really unusual jumps or changes in laws-of-physics or experience when our measure is greatly reduced (such as the current statistically winning machines no longer being able to implement your mind - 3p death from the point of view of others). This implies that our measure is strongly correlated with the regularity of physics. I'm not sure you can show that, but if it's true it means that physics is fundamental to our existence, even if physics can be explained by the UD. Only worlds with extremely consistent physics can support consciousness (which seems unlikely to me). Maybe, it's more of a conjecture, I don't posses the theoretical tools to make some headway on the issue for now. As for physics being essential, I'm not 100% sure, it might be for us, humans with physical brains and bodies, but I don't see why it would be for a SIM, or for a detailed emulation of a human body/brain: consider the case of such a SIMs living in a VR(Virtual Reality) simulation - they wouldn't really care what the underlying substrate would be, but then, they would know they are in a simulation (to some degree). A more interesting question might be not about SIMs living in VRs, but those beings which live in a physical world and have bodies and are self-aware of those bodies and their own embedding in such a physical world - what possible statistically stable laws of physics would be required for such beings (I think Tegmark called them Self-Aware Substructures)? Since we know we're in such a situation, what laws of physics are possible that have conscious self-aware observers with 'physical' bodies? Brent Also, one possible way of showing COMP false is to show that such stable implementations are impossible, however this seems not obvious to me. A more practical concern would be to consider the case of what would happen if the substitution level is chosen slightly wrong or too high - would it lead to too unstable 1p or merely just allow the SIM(Substrate Independent Mind) to more easily pick which lower-level machines implement it (there's another thought experiment which shows how this could be done, if a machine can find one of its own Godel-number). Ricardo. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: First person indeterminacy (Re: COMP theology)
John Clark, it seems to me that you're intentionally ignoring the 1p (first person) point of view (qualia or subjective experience) and one's expectations from that point of view. To follow UDA and get COMP's conclusions you need these assumptions: Mind (1p), Mechanism (surviving a digital substitution), Church Turing Thesis(CTT) and an interpretation of arithmetic to give CTT sense (such as the existence of the standard model of arithmetic). If you take a eliminative materialist position, that is, saying the mind doesn't exist and thus also no subjective experience, you cannot even begin to follow the UDA - you've already assumed that the mind doesn't exist and only the physical universe does. Of course that's a bit problematic because you've only learned of this physical universe through your own subjective experiences. If you take 1p seriously, UDA asks you to predict what your *experiences* will be in a variety of situations. You can look at the 3p bodies/brains and assign/correlate certain 1p's to them, but one can consider duplication scenarios which don't disturb continuity at all - if the mind survived a digital substitution it is already a program that can be duplicated/merged/instantiated/... in a variety of ways - that program could even change substrates or be computed in all kinds of fragmented and strange ways and still maintain internal continuity. This may seem strange to you, so you might try to resolve it by only looking at the bodies instead of asking what *is experienced*, but that's a mistake and you will miss the point of the UDA that way because you're making the negation of the mind assumption or merely ignoring it. Also in QM MWI, you have the same splitting/duplication all the time as you do with COMP, and the splitting time is likely much shorter (at plank time or less), while subjective experience is at much slower scales relative to that (likely a variable rate of 1-120Hz due to neuron spiking times, although hard to confirm this practically). So I repeat again: UDA is about what is experienced from the first person of a conscious SIM(Substrate Independent Mind)/AGI and its implications for the ontology and physics and mostly about what would such a mind experience. Looking only at the body of such a SIM is completely missing the point or just assuming physicalism with hidden assumption that subjective experience does not exist and is a delusion. On 3/5/2012 21:30, John Clark wrote: On Mon, Mar 5, 2012 Bruno Marchalmarc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: What is the probability the Helsinki man will receive signals from Moscow turning him into the Moscow man? 100%. That's ambiguous. There is nothing ambiguous about it! Granted this thought experiment is odd but everything is crystal clear. According to the thought experiment you have been teleported to Moscow which means you will now be receiving sights and sounds and smells and tastes and feeling textures from Moscow instead of Helsinki. I say the probability of that happening is 100%, how can I tell if my prediction is correct? If after the experiment I can find something that says he is Bruno Marchal and that he feels like he is in one and only one place and that one place is Moscow then my prediction has been confirmed as being correct. After the experiment I CAN find such a thing so my prediction was correct. The fact that there is also a Bruno Marchal in Washington is irrelevant, it does not reduce the feeling that Bruno Marchal has that he is in one and only one place and that one place is Moscow by even a infinitesimal amount. If you say 100%, it means that you are talking on the first person that you can attribute to different people. Of course the first person can be attributed to different people because according to the thought experiment *YOU* have been duplicated, let me repeat that, YOU HAVE BEEN DUPLICATED. Although perfectly logical that is certainly a unusual situation, I've never been duplicated before and you probably haven't either, so it shouldn't be surprising that the results of such a unusual situation are odd, not illogical not self contradictory just odd. we get a paradox if you say that it is 100% for both Moscow and Washington. There is not the slightest thing paradoxical about it, in fact if I had said anything else then that WOULD have been paradoxical. Why? Because YOU HAVE BEEN DUPLICATED, that means your first person perspective has been duplicated and will remain identical until differing environmental factors cause the two of YOU to diverge; and even then they would both be Bruno Marchal they just wouldn't be each other. What is the probability the Helsinki man will receive signals from neither Washington nor Moscow and thus leaving him as the Helsinki man? 100%. In the protocol considered the Helsinki guy is annihilated. Fine, if that's the thought experiment then the probability the Helsinki man will receive signals from either
Re: Two Mathematicians in a Bunker and Existence of Pi
On 3/6/2012 06:59, meekerdb wrote: On 3/5/2012 9:34 PM, Jason Resch wrote: On Mon, Mar 5, 2012 at 10:42 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 3/5/2012 8:28 PM, Jason Resch wrote: On Mon, Mar 5, 2012 at 7:24 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 3/5/2012 4:57 PM, Jason Resch wrote: On Mon, Mar 5, 2012 at 12:26 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 3/5/2012 10:03 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: On 05.03.2012 18:29 meekerdb said the following: On 3/5/2012 3:23 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: The experiment takes an operational approach to what Pi means. During the initial stage of the experiment mathematicians prove the existence of Pi. When mathematicians 'prove the existence' of something they are just showing that something which satisfies a certain definition can be inferred from a certain set of axioms. In your example the mathematicians may define Pi as the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle in Euclidean geometry. But what does that mean if geometry is not Euclidean; and we know it's not since these mathematicians are in the gravitational field of the Earth. Mathematics is about abstract propositions. Whether they apply to reality is a separate question. Brent I agree that this assumption might not be the best one. I will think it over. However, I do not completely understand you. How the geometry of physical space in which mathematicians reside influences the definition of Pi? Mathematicians will consider just Euclidean geometry, that's it. In my view, whether the physical space Euclidean or not, does not influence the work of mathematicians. Exactly. Hence mathematics =/= reality. This is like comparing the kidney of a whale to a liver of a whale, and deciding whale=/=whale. You can't compare one limited subset of the whole (such as the local part of this universe) with another subset of the whole (euclidean geometry), and decide that the whole (of mathematics) is different from the whole (of reality). The same mathematicians in the same place could 'prove the existence' of the meeting point of parallel lines or that through a point there is more than one line parallel to a given line. So no matter what they measure in their bunker it will be consistent with one or the other. So you can only hold that mathematics=reality if you assume everything not self-contradictory exists in reality; Okay. but that was what the bunker thought experiment was intended to test. I fail to see how the bunker experiment tests this. The bunker experiment seems to assume that mathematical reality is or depends upon a physical representation. You've essentially made it untestable by saying, well it may fail HERE but somewhere (Platonia?) it's really true. People used to say Darwin's theory was untestable, because evolution was such a slow process they thought it could never be observed. Some on this list have argued that the hypothesis has already survived one test: the unpredictability in quantum mechanics. That specific retrodiction came from Bruno's hypothesis which is that universes are generated by computation. What is computable is much less than all mathematics. The existence of all mathematical structures implies the existence of all programs, which is observationally indistinguishable from Bruno's result taking only the integers to exist. That they are observationally indistinguishable is vacuously satisfied by them both being unobservable. I find the existence of all consistent structures to be a simpler theory. If the integers can exist, why cant the Mandlebrot set, or the Calabi–Yau manifolds? I didn't say that things descriable by those mathematics *can't* exist. I just said I don't believe they do. Yaweh *could* exist (and according to you does) but I don't believe he does. Comparing everything-type theories with a random personal deity with contradictory properties is a strawman. If instead we found our environment and observations of it to be perfectly deterministic, this would have ruled out mechanism+a single or finite universe. Further, there is a growing collection of evidence that in most universes, conscious life is impossible. There's a popular idea that most possible universes are inhospitable to conscious life: a theory that might well be false under Bruno's hypothesis in which consciousness and universes are both realized by computation. In Bruno's theory, physical universes are considered observations of minds. Hmm? Is that right? The UD* certainly must generate lots of programs without human-like consciousness, e.g. this universe in which dinosaurs weren't killed off. So I'm not clear on why there wouldn't be infinitely many universes without conscious beings. Dinosaurs could very well be conscious, but not self-conscious, sort of like in-a-moment experience with very few memories or continuity. Consciousness should not be
Re: COMP test (ontology of COMP)
On 3/1/2012 16:54, meekerdb wrote: On 3/1/2012 1:01 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 29 Feb 2012, at 21:05, meekerdb wrote: On 2/29/2012 10:59 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: Comp says the exact contrary: it makes matter and physical processes not completely Turing emulable. But it makes them enough TE so that you can yes to the doctor who proposes to replace some part of your brain (which is made of matter) with a Turing emulation of it? The doctor does not need to emulate the matter of my brain. This is completely not Turing *emulable*. It is only (apparently) Turing simulable, that is emulable at some digital truncation of my brain. Indeed matter is what emerges from the 1p indeterminacy on all more fine grained computations reaching my current states in arithmetic/UD. OK, but just to clarify: The emergent matter is not emulable because there are infinitely many computations at the fine grained level reaching your current state. But it is simulable to an arbitrary degree. The way I understand it, yes, it should be simulable for certain bounds, but never globally emulable - this in a twofold way: one in that the local 3p structure that we infer might contain reals in the limit (or rationals, computable reals) and another in that we can't know of all valid 1p continuations some of which could be outside the local 3p structure we estimated by induction. To elaborate in the first: consider a mathematical structure which has some symmetries and can be computed up to some level of detail k, but you can also compute it to a finer level of detail k+1, and to a finer level 2*k, ... and so on. Eventually in the limit, you get reals. We only care that the abstract structure that we call a mind is implemented in our bodies/brains which are implemented in some physical or arithmetical or computational substrate. Such implementations being statistically common (for example in a quantum dovetailer) make local future continuations probable. Of course, unusual continuations are possible and we cannot find them all due to Rice's theorem - we cannot know if some computation also happens to implement the structure/computations that represent our mind - we might be able to prove it in some specific case, but not in all cases. But I'm still unclear on what constitutes my current states. Why is there more than one? Is it a set of states of computations that constitutes a single state of consciousness? Even in the trivial case where we're given a particular physics implementation, we can find another which behaves exactly the same and still implements the same function (this is trivial because it's always possible to add useless or equivalent code to a program). However, for our minds we can allow for a lot more variability - I conjecture that most quantum randomness is below our substitution level and it faithfully implements our mind at the higher level (quasi-classically, at subst. level). Of course, there are some problems here - there can be continuations where we will think we are still 'ourselves', but our mind has been changed by stuff going below the substitution level - in which case, the notion of observer is too fuzzy and personal (when will we think we are not ourselves anymore? when will others think we are not ourselves?) A single computation can be implemented by an infinity of other computations, thus with COMP, an infinity of programs will all have the same subjective experience (some specific class which implements the observer). Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: COMP test (ontology of COMP)
On 3/1/2012 18:16, meekerdb wrote: On 3/1/2012 9:57 AM, acw wrote: On 3/1/2012 16:54, meekerdb wrote: On 3/1/2012 1:01 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 29 Feb 2012, at 21:05, meekerdb wrote: On 2/29/2012 10:59 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: Comp says the exact contrary: it makes matter and physical processes not completely Turing emulable. But it makes them enough TE so that you can yes to the doctor who proposes to replace some part of your brain (which is made of matter) with a Turing emulation of it? The doctor does not need to emulate the matter of my brain. This is completely not Turing *emulable*. It is only (apparently) Turing simulable, that is emulable at some digital truncation of my brain. Indeed matter is what emerges from the 1p indeterminacy on all more fine grained computations reaching my current states in arithmetic/UD. OK, but just to clarify: The emergent matter is not emulable because there are infinitely many computations at the fine grained level reaching your current state. But it is simulable to an arbitrary degree. The way I understand it, yes, it should be simulable for certain bounds, but never globally emulable - this in a twofold way: one in that the local 3p structure that we infer might contain reals in the limit (or rationals, computable reals) and another in that we can't know of all valid 1p continuations some of which could be outside the local 3p structure we estimated by induction. To elaborate in the first: consider a mathematical structure which has some symmetries and can be computed up to some level of detail k, but you can also compute it to a finer level of detail k+1, and to a finer level 2*k, ... and so on. Eventually in the limit, you get reals. We only care that the abstract structure that we call a mind is implemented in our bodies/brains which are implemented in some physical or arithmetical or computational substrate. Such implementations being statistically common (for example in a quantum dovetailer) make local future continuations probable. Of course, unusual continuations are possible and we cannot find them all due to Rice's theorem - we cannot know if some computation also happens to implement the structure/computations that represent our mind - we might be able to prove it in some specific case, but not in all cases. But I'm still unclear on what constitutes my current states. Why is there more than one? Is it a set of states of computations that constitutes a single state of consciousness? Even in the trivial case where we're given a particular physics implementation, we can find another which behaves exactly the same and still implements the same function (this is trivial because it's always possible to add useless or equivalent code to a program). However, for our minds we can allow for a lot more variability - I conjecture that most quantum randomness is below our substitution level and it faithfully implements our mind at the higher level (quasi-classically, at subst. level). Yes, I think that must be the case simply from considerations of biological evolution. But that implies that a state of consciousness or a state of mind is a computationally fuzzy object. We cannot know what computation we happen to be and even if we choose a doctor that does it correctly, we can find one machine of infinitely many equivalent ones. At the same time, the notion of universal computation is quite fuzzy - we can express it in infinitely many systems, yet even just one interpretation is enough to 'understand' what it is - the consequences of the Church-Turing Thesis. It is constituted by uncountably many threads through each of many (infinitely many?) states which are not identical but are similar enough to constitute a conscious state. Hmm. There can only be countably (infinitely) many programs or states (enumerable), but there can be uncountably many histories (in the limit, non-enumerable)... But the 1p view of this is to be conscious *of something*, which you describe as the computation seen from the inside. What is it about these threads through different states that makes them an equivalence class with respect to the computation seen from the inside? If they happen to be implementing some particular machine being in some particular state. The problem is that the machine can be self-modifiable (or that the environment can change it), and the machine won't know of this and not always recognize the change. This seems like a highly non-trivial problem to me. Brent Of course, there are some problems here - there can be continuations where we will think we are still 'ourselves', but our mind has been changed by stuff going below the substitution level - in which case, the notion of observer is too fuzzy and personal (when will we think we are not ourselves anymore? when will others think we are not ourselves?) A single computation can be implemented by an infinity of other computations, thus with COMP, an infinity of programs
Re: COMP test (ontology of COMP)
On 3/1/2012 19:06, meekerdb wrote: On 3/1/2012 10:39 AM, acw wrote: On 3/1/2012 18:16, meekerdb wrote: On 3/1/2012 9:57 AM, acw wrote: On 3/1/2012 16:54, meekerdb wrote: On 3/1/2012 1:01 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 29 Feb 2012, at 21:05, meekerdb wrote: On 2/29/2012 10:59 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: Comp says the exact contrary: it makes matter and physical processes not completely Turing emulable. But it makes them enough TE so that you can yes to the doctor who proposes to replace some part of your brain (which is made of matter) with a Turing emulation of it? The doctor does not need to emulate the matter of my brain. This is completely not Turing *emulable*. It is only (apparently) Turing simulable, that is emulable at some digital truncation of my brain. Indeed matter is what emerges from the 1p indeterminacy on all more fine grained computations reaching my current states in arithmetic/UD. OK, but just to clarify: The emergent matter is not emulable because there are infinitely many computations at the fine grained level reaching your current state. But it is simulable to an arbitrary degree. The way I understand it, yes, it should be simulable for certain bounds, but never globally emulable - this in a twofold way: one in that the local 3p structure that we infer might contain reals in the limit (or rationals, computable reals) and another in that we can't know of all valid 1p continuations some of which could be outside the local 3p structure we estimated by induction. To elaborate in the first: consider a mathematical structure which has some symmetries and can be computed up to some level of detail k, but you can also compute it to a finer level of detail k+1, and to a finer level 2*k, ... and so on. Eventually in the limit, you get reals. We only care that the abstract structure that we call a mind is implemented in our bodies/brains which are implemented in some physical or arithmetical or computational substrate. Such implementations being statistically common (for example in a quantum dovetailer) make local future continuations probable. Of course, unusual continuations are possible and we cannot find them all due to Rice's theorem - we cannot know if some computation also happens to implement the structure/computations that represent our mind - we might be able to prove it in some specific case, but not in all cases. But I'm still unclear on what constitutes my current states. Why is there more than one? Is it a set of states of computations that constitutes a single state of consciousness? Even in the trivial case where we're given a particular physics implementation, we can find another which behaves exactly the same and still implements the same function (this is trivial because it's always possible to add useless or equivalent code to a program). However, for our minds we can allow for a lot more variability - I conjecture that most quantum randomness is below our substitution level and it faithfully implements our mind at the higher level (quasi-classically, at subst. level). Yes, I think that must be the case simply from considerations of biological evolution. But that implies that a state of consciousness or a state of mind is a computationally fuzzy object. We cannot know what computation we happen to be and even if we choose a doctor that does it correctly, we can find one machine of infinitely many equivalent ones. At the same time, the notion of universal computation is quite fuzzy - we can express it in infinitely many systems, yet even just one interpretation is enough to 'understand' what it is - the consequences of the Church-Turing Thesis. It is constituted by uncountably many threads through each of many (infinitely many?) states which are not identical but are similar enough to constitute a conscious state. Hmm. There can only be countably (infinitely) many programs or states (enumerable), but there can be uncountably many histories (in the limit, non-enumerable)... But the 1p view of this is to be conscious *of something*, which you describe as the computation seen from the inside. What is it about these threads through different states that makes them an equivalence class with respect to the computation seen from the inside? If they happen to be implementing some particular machine being in some particular state. The problem is that the machine can be self-modifiable (or that the environment can change it), and the machine won't know of this and not always recognize the change. Hmmm. I thought the idea of the UD was to abstract computation away from any particular machine, so that states (or consciousness or the world) were identified with states of finitely many (but arbitrarily increasing) threads of computation. The UD has to be implemented somehow (for example in arithmetic or a physical machine, or in some other Turing Universal machine). The UD is a concrete program that can run on a TM or in any other language (as long
Re: The Relativity of Existence
On 3/2/2012 03:37, Richard Ruquist wrote: On Thu, Mar 1, 2012 at 7:14 PM, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 3/1/2012 9:27 AM, Bob Zannelli wrote: The Relativity of Existence Authors: Stuart Heinrichhttp://arxiv.org/find/physics/1/au:+Heinrich_S/0/1/0/all/0/1 Subjects: History and Philosophy of Physics (physics.hist-ph); General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc); Quantum Physics (quant-ph) Despite the success of physics in formulating mathematical theories that can predict the outcome of experiments, we have made remarkably little progress towards answering some of the most basic questions about our existence, such as: why does the universe exist? Why is the universe apparently fine-tuned to be able to support life? Why are the laws of physics so elegant? Why do we have three dimensions of space and one of time? How is it that the universe can be non-local and non-causal at the quantum scale, and why is there quantum randomness? In this paper, it is shown that all of these questions are answered if existence is relative, and moreover, it seems that we are logically bound to accept it. http://arxiv.org/pdf/1202.4545.pdf To be clear, the idea that our universe is really just a computer simulation is highly controversial and not supported by this paper. Of course there's no sense in which reality can be a computer simulation EXCEPT if there is a Great Programmer who can fiddle with the program. Otherwise the simulation and the reality are the same thing. By the principle of explosion, in any system that contains a single contradiction, it becomes possible to prove the truth of any other statement no matter how nonsensical[34, p.18]. There is clearly a distinction between truth and falsehood in our reality, which means that the principle of explosion does not apply to our reality. In other words, we can be certain that our reality is consistent. Hmm? I'd never heard ex falso quodlibet referred to as the principle of explosion before. But in any case there are ways for preventing a contradiction from implying everything, c.f. Graham Priest's In Contradiction. Contradictions are between propositions. Heinrich is saying that the lack of contradictions in our propositions describing the world implies the world is consistent. But at the same time he adopts a MWI which implies that contrary events happen all the time. In fact, there are an infinite number of ways to modify an axiomatic system while keeping any particular theorem intact. This is true if the axioms *and rules of inference* are strong enough to satisfy Godel's incompleteness theorem, something with a rule of finite induction (isn't that technically a schema for an infinite set of axioms?). Then you are guaranteed infinitely many true propositions which are not provable from your axioms, and each of those can be added as an axiom. Otherwise I think you only get to add infinitely many axioms by creating arbitrary names, like aa and ab... From the perspective of any self-aware being, something is real if it is true, A very Platonic and dubious proposition. True applies to propositions not things. 2+2=4 is true, but that doesn't imply anything is real. Holmes friend was Watson is true too. Recognizing this, the ultimate answer to the question of why our reality exists becomes trivial: because self-awareness can be represented axiomatically, any axiomatic system that can derive self-awareness will be perceived as being real without the need for an objective manifestation. This is what Bruno Marchal refers to a Lobianity, the provability within a system that there are unprovable true propositions. Marchal formulated this idea before Tegmark and has filled it out and made it more precise (and perhaps testable) by confining it to computation by a univeral dovetailer - not just any mathematics. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/publications/SANE2004MARCHALAbstract.html If you join the everything-list@googlegroups.com , he will explain it to you. Not many things can be proven objectively true, because any proof relying on axioms is not objective without proving that the axioms are also objectively true. This is confusion bordering on sophistry. He has introduced a new, undefined concept objective and stated that any objectively true statement has an objective proof. Proof is well defined since it means following from the axioms by the rules of inference. Proving something from no axioms just requires more powerful rules of inference. There's no principled distinction between rules of inference and axioms. If the ROE is correct, then reality is defined by the things that are provably true, and any additional undecidable statements simply have no bearing on that reality. But does he mean provably true from zero axioms plus the usual rules of first (or second) order logic? Earlier he argued that the world must be an axiomatic system because you could just define it by one
Re: The free will function
On 2/21/2012 02:27, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Feb 20, 2:53 pm, acwa...@lavabit.com wrote: On 2/20/2012 18:37, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Feb 20, 10:32 am, acwa...@lavabit.com wrote: On 2/20/2012 13:45, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Feb 19, 11:57 pm, 1Zpeterdjo...@yahoo.com wrote: On Feb 20, 4:41 am, Craig Weinbergwhatsons...@gmail.com wrote: .. Believable falsehoods are falsehoods and convincing illusions still aren't reality It doesn't matter if they believe in the simulation or not, the belief itself is only possible because of the particular reality generated by the program. Comp precludes the possibility of contacting any truer reality than the simulation. If those observers are generally intelligent and capable of Turing-equivalent computation, they might theorize about many things, true or not. Just like we do, and just like we can't know if we're right. Right, but true = a true reflection of the simulation. If I make a simulation where I regularly stop the program and make miraculous changes, then the most intelligent observers might rightly conclude that there is an omnipotent entity capable of performing miracles. That would be the truth of that simulation. They might end up with a simulation hypothesis being more plausible than pure chance if there was evidence for it, such as non-reducible high-level behavior indicating intelligence and not following any obvious lower-level physical laws. However, 'omnipotent' is not the right word here. I already explained why before - in COMP, you can always escape the simulation, even if this is not always obvious from the 3p of the one doing the simulation. Escape it maybe to a universal arithmetic level, but I still can't get out of the software and into the world of the hardware. There is only apparent hardware in an arithmetical ontology. Which means that it can indeed escape to a world of apparent hardware outside of *your* control. Our Gods may know better too. What I am saying is that Comp + MWI + Anthropic principle guarantees an infinite number of universes in which some entity can program machines to worship them *correctly* as *their* Gods. That's more difficult than you'd think. In COMP, you identify local physics and your body with an infinity of lower-level machines which happen to be simulating *you* correctly (where *you* would be the structures required for your mind to work consistently). A simulation of a digital physics universe may implement some such observers *once* or maybe multiple times if you go for the extra effort, but never in *all* the cases (which are infinite). As long as it happens in any universe under MWI, then there must be an infinity of variations stemming from that universe, and under the anthropic principle, there is always a chance that you are living in a simulation within one such universe. I was just assuming COMP, which is a bit wider than MWI, but should contain a variant compatible with it. In COMP, it's highly likely you're living in a simulation, but you're also living in more primitive forms (such as directly in the UD) - your 1p is contained in an infinity of machines. You would only care if some of those happen to be a simulation if the one doing the simulation modifies the program/data or entangles it with his history, or merely provides a continuation for you in his world, however any such continuations in digital physics interventionist simulations would be low-measure. Whether you care or not is a different issue from whether or not you can tell the difference if you did want to. I don't see how one could tell the difference. However, what I was talking about is that if experiencing your modifications has a 1/n probability and the probability of continuing to experience for a next moment would be 1/n^m, and the next moment 1/n^m^m and so on, for very large n and m, it might not really matter from the perspective of most your SIMs. If such a programmer decides to intervene in his simulation, that wouldn't affect all the other machines implementing said simulation and said observers(for example in arithmetic or in some UD running somewhere), That depends entirely on what kind of intervention the programmer chooses. If she wants to make half of the population turn blue, she can, and then when the sim is turned back on, everyone gasps and proclaims a miracle of Biblical proportions. I wasn't talking about the multiple observers in the simulation, but merely that an observer, with which we identify with his 1p is implemented by an infinity of machines (!), only some part of that correspond to someone simulating them. If someone decides to modify the simulation at some point, then only a small fraction of those 1p's would diverge from the usual local laws-of-physics and becme entangled with the laws of those doing the simulation - such continuations would be low-measure. How does that apply to my example though? Are you saying I can't turn everyone
Re: UD* and consciousness
On 2/24/2012 20:51, Terren Suydam wrote: On Fri, Feb 24, 2012 at 3:30 PM, Terren Suydamterren.suy...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Feb 24, 2012 at 2:27 PM, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 2/24/2012 10:26 AM, Terren Suydam wrote: I certainly will. In the meantime, do you have an example from Damasio (or any other source) that could shed light on the pain/pleasure phenomenon? Terren http://www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/damasioreview.html I think emotions represent something above and beyond the more fundamental feelings of pleasure and pain. Fear, for example, is explainable using Damasio's framework as such, and I can translate it to the way I am asking the question as above: Question: What kind of organization arose during the evolutionary process that led directly to the subjective experience of fear? Answer: A cognitive architecture in which internal body states are modeled and integrated using the same representational apparatus that models the external world, so that one's adaptive responses (fight/flight/freeze) to threatening stimuli become integrated into the organism's cognitive state of affairs. In short, fear is what it feels like to have a fear response (as manifest in the body by various hormonal responses) to some real or imagined stimuli. Yes, that seems to be mostly it, but it's subtler than that. Those internal states that we have also include expectations and emotional memories - it can lead to the memory recall of various past sensations and experiences. Certain internal states will make certain behaviors more likely and certain thoughts (other internal states) more likely. We cannot communicate the exact nature of what internal states actually are - the qualia, but beyond a certain point we cannot say anything more than that we have them and us having them will usually correspond to some internal states in our instance of a cognitive architecture. You can substitute any emotion for fear, so long as you can identify the way that emotion manifests in the body/brain in terms of hormonal or other mechanisms. But when it comes to pain and pleasure, I don't think that it is necessary to have such an advanced cognitive architecture, I think. So on a more fundamental level, the question remains: What kind of organization arose during the evolutionary process that led directly to the subjective experience of pain and pleasure? That's a very interesting question. Pain and fear means aversion towards certain stimuli - that is, reducing the frequency that some stimuli will be experienced, which can lead to increased survivability. Pain is unfortunately a bit more complicated than that, it leads not only to future aversion, but involuntary action-taking - forcing an immediate quick response, which may not be backed by conscious thought. It can be seen as unpleasant, because it combines the memory of constantly being forced to have to take involuntary actions and the actions being aversive. Such involuntary actions can also be seen as a huge change in attention (allocation) - one becomes much less capable of consciously directing their attention. Pleasure is similar, but in reverse - it makes certain actions more likely to be performed, possibly even leading to some feedback loops. However, it seems that in humans, pleasure and compulsion have similar and almost parallel circuits, but are not identical. Pleasure may also have calming effects by reducing responses/actions instantly, the opposite of pain, while also making it more likely that actions that caused pleasure to be performed again - which is a bit similar to compulsion. In a nutshell, they correspond to mechanisms which lead to certain actions being more or less likely, and this eventually leads to complex goals and behavior - I'd say that's a huge reason for pain/pleasure responses to have evolved. Or put another way, what kind of mechanism feels pleasurable or painful from the inside? The notion of feeling is more complicated because it involves memories and complex feedback loops. Presumably the answer to this question occurred earlier in the evolutionary process than the emergence of fear, surprise, hunger, and so on. I like these articles/videos on how AGIs may get emergent emotions from simple basic drives: http://agi-school.org/2009/dr-joscha-bach-understanding-motivation-emotion-and-mental-representation http://agi-school.org/2009/dr-joscha-bach-understanding-motivation-emotion-and-mental-representation-2 http://agi-school.org/2009/dr-joscha-bach-the-micropsi-architecture http://www.cognitive-ai.com/ Terren To go a little further with this, take sexual orgasm. What is happening during orgasm that makes it so pleasurable? My guess is that it's a fairly complex emotional and somatic response that could get broken down into simpler parts. You could ask the same question differently: what makes some music good? what makes some food delicious? what makes a picture
Re: UD* and consciousness
On 2/24/2012 22:20, Terren Suydam wrote: On Fri, Feb 24, 2012 at 4:47 PM, acwa...@lavabit.com wrote: On 2/24/2012 20:51, Terren Suydam wrote: On Fri, Feb 24, 2012 at 3:30 PM, Terren Suydamterren.suy...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Feb 24, 2012 at 2:27 PM, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.netwrote: On 2/24/2012 10:26 AM, Terren Suydam wrote: I certainly will. In the meantime, do you have an example from Damasio (or any other source) that could shed light on the pain/pleasure phenomenon? Terren http://www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/damasioreview.html I think emotions represent something above and beyond the more fundamental feelings of pleasure and pain. Fear, for example, is explainable using Damasio's framework as such, and I can translate it to the way I am asking the question as above: Question: What kind of organization arose during the evolutionary process that led directly to the subjective experience of fear? Answer: A cognitive architecture in which internal body states are modeled and integrated using the same representational apparatus that models the external world, so that one's adaptive responses (fight/flight/freeze) to threatening stimuli become integrated into the organism's cognitive state of affairs. In short, fear is what it feels like to have a fear response (as manifest in the body by various hormonal responses) to some real or imagined stimuli. Yes, that seems to be mostly it, but it's subtler than that. Those internal states that we have also include expectations and emotional memories - it can lead to the memory recall of various past sensations and experiences. Certain internal states will make certain behaviors more likely and certain thoughts (other internal states) more likely. We cannot communicate the exact nature of what internal states actually are - the qualia, but beyond a certain point we cannot say anything more than that we have them and us having them will usually correspond to some internal states in our instance of a cognitive architecture. You can substitute any emotion for fear, so long as you can identify the way that emotion manifests in the body/brain in terms of hormonal or other mechanisms. But when it comes to pain and pleasure, I don't think that it is necessary to have such an advanced cognitive architecture, I think. So on a more fundamental level, the question remains: What kind of organization arose during the evolutionary process that led directly to the subjective experience of pain and pleasure? That's a very interesting question. Pain and fear means aversion towards certain stimuli - that is, reducing the frequency that some stimuli will be experienced, which can lead to increased survivability. Pain is unfortunately a bit more complicated than that, it leads not only to future aversion, but involuntary action-taking - forcing an immediate quick response, which may not be backed by conscious thought. It can be seen as unpleasant, because it combines the memory of constantly being forced to have to take involuntary actions and the actions being aversive. Such involuntary actions can also be seen as a huge change in attention (allocation) - one becomes much less capable of consciously directing their attention. All of that makes sense, but pain is more than unpleasant. Pain can be blindingly horrible... ask any migraine sufferer. What accounts for the intensity of such experiences? I'm asking this in terms of how, not why. How does it get to be so intense. Intense pain can make us scream or do things we would never do normally - irrational responses, but possibly advantageous when they first evolved. We could make a mechanistic theory for how pain manifests. Someone might suppress their reactions to pain with effort, but that doesn't mean that there weren't circuits triggered that would have led to certain actions if not for conscious effort (attention allocation) involved in preventing such behavior. Maybe we could see pain as the intense desire to perform certain immediate actions in response to some stimuli, against our better judgement. In the mechanistic version (when we look at the architecture and what it represents) we would see that the most likely outcome would be such random actions being performed. Actually accounting for the exact nature of the internal state beyond communicable parts (intensity of desire, involuntary reactions, etc) might not even be possible for any such theory. At best we might end up translating - X is a locally accessible goal, we expect goal X to lead to pleasure or fulfillment of subgoals or expectation of state to change in what we expect to be our favor or ... as we desire X. Many similar translations could be done for other emotional responses and more basic drives - the body can only do, but we think we can want. Thinking about this in detail in the a mechanistic framework tends to end up as a deconstruction/explanation for what exactly will is. Pleasure is similar, but in
Re: UD* and consciousness
On 2/22/2012 14:49, Terren Suydam wrote: However I don't understand how Mary could have anything but a single continuation given the determinism of the sim. How could a counterfactual arise in this thought experiment? Can you give a concrete example? Mary's brain/SIM implementation is deterministic. We would associate her 1p with all machines that happen to implement Mary's current state at the substitution level chosen. If Mary is lucky(or not), she might find herself in your digital physics VR simulation, thus your observation and inference of the 3p simulation would match Mary's 1p in that simulation. However, consider that in the UD, there would be many implementations for Mary's mind at that substitution level, some including that environment you chose for her. These implementations may be many times layered, for example, those implementing your physics and eventually you, and those implementing the physics, the simulation and eventually her. Now imagine your simulation has some irrelevant bit of functionality, let's say, an opcode RAND or some register 323, that bit of functionality was never used in Mary's implementation or of implementation of any underlying layers, it's just there in your implementation of the simulation. Mary's consciousness would never be changed by how you implemented RAND or r323, but let's say, she eventually decides to do a bit of programming in her simulation and uses that opcode and/or register by accident. What would happen? There can be many machines implementing (or even not implementing it at all) said opcode and/or register, however since Mary's own experience does not depend at all on it, all that part is indeterminate. Now instead of register 323 or RAND, make everything that Mary does not depend on and that is not inconsistent with her history as something subject to 1p invariancy in the UD - you'll find infinities of possible machines implementing Mary, even cases where the simulation is self-contained and completely disconnected from your physical world, running completely in the UD. Of course, I do wonder how stable such a VR reality would be - it might not be very high measure like our current quantum world where we have degrees of freedom like these everywhere (if MWI). -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: The free will function
On 2/22/2012 17:17, marty684 wrote: Bruno, If everything is made of numbers (as in COMP) which can express states to an arbitrary degree of precision, is there any room for chance or probability? And if so, how do they arise? (If you've been over this before, please refer me to the relevant posts, thanks.) marty a. There's an immense amount of chance (indeterminacy) from the 1st person perspective of the machine. Read the UDA (in Bruno's SANE2004 paper). The simplest example is the third step of the UDA. If someone makes 2 duplicate instances/copies of their selves (possible if brain admits a digital substitution level), we can expect to be either one or the other copy, with 1/2 probability. It's fairer than a classical coin toss, and likely the origin of the quantum nature of reality (see rest of UDA). -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: The free will function
On 2/20/2012 13:45, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Feb 19, 11:57 pm, 1Zpeterdjo...@yahoo.com wrote: On Feb 20, 4:41 am, Craig Weinbergwhatsons...@gmail.com wrote: .. Believable falsehoods are falsehoods and convincing illusions still aren't reality It doesn't matter if they believe in the simulation or not, the belief itself is only possible because of the particular reality generated by the program. Comp precludes the possibility of contacting any truer reality than the simulation. If those observers are generally intelligent and capable of Turing-equivalent computation, they might theorize about many things, true or not. Just like we do, and just like we can't know if we're right. Our Gods may know better too. What I am saying is that Comp + MWI + Anthropic principle guarantees an infinite number of universes in which some entity can program machines to worship them *correctly* as *their* Gods. That's more difficult than you'd think. In COMP, you identify local physics and your body with an infinity of lower-level machines which happen to be simulating *you* correctly (where *you* would be the structures required for your mind to work consistently). A simulation of a digital physics universe may implement some such observers *once* or maybe multiple times if you go for the extra effort, but never in *all* the cases (which are infinite). If such a programmer decides to intervene in his simulation, that wouldn't affect all the other machines implementing said simulation and said observers(for example in arithmetic or in some UD running somewhere), however a small part of the simulations containing observers will now be only implemented by the physics of the upper programmer's universe (and become entangled with them), possibly meaning a reduction in measure, however the probability of ending up in such a simulation is very low and as time passes it becomes less and less likely that said observers would keep on remaining in that simulation - if they die or malfunction (that's just one example), there will be continuations for them which are no longer supported by the upper programmer's physics. There can never be correct worship of some Matrix Lord/Administrator/... as they are not what is responsible for such observers being conscious, at best such programmers are only responsible for finding some particular program and increasing its measure with respect to the programmer's universe. Of course, if such a programmer wants to lift some beings from his simulation to run in his universe, he could do that and those would be valid continuations for the being living in that simulation. Running a physics simulation is akin to looking into a window, not to an act of universe creation, even if it may look like that from the simulator's perspective. Did say those mushrooms were nutiritios? Silly me, i mean poisonous. Poisonous is a term with a more literal meaning. 'Natural' has no place in MWI, comp, or the anthropic principle. I'm surprised that you would use it. I thought most people here were on board with comp's view that silicon machines could be no less natural as conscious agents than living organisms. What we are arguing about is the supernatural. No. What you are arguing about is the supernatural. What I am arguing about are gods (entities with absolute superiority or omnipotence over the subordinate entities who inhabit the simulations they create) and their inevitability in MWI. Except there is no omnipotence. The default meaning of the word is inconsistent, thus it's an impossible property. You can't change the truth of mathematical sentences. Physical omnipotence? Possible, but as I said before, it's very low probability to find yourself in an universe ruled by an interventionist god, at least in COMP, due to 1p-indeterminacy. For such a god to have complete control over you, he'd have toto handle all counterfactuals, which is not possible due to Rice's theorem. The only thing such a being can do is feel like he is in control when he modifies a simulation, he can't control all possible continuations observers in his simulation can take. If he wants to more directly affect them, he'd have to be on an even footing them with - in the same universe or in a simulation in which he has more direct participation, and then he'd no longer be omnipotent. You do not rescue the supernatural by rendering the natural meaningless. Why not? Besides, as I keep saying, I am not trying to rescue the supernatural, I am pointing out that God is not supernatural at all, it is an accurate description of the relationship between the programmer and the programmed. Yes, but for a 'programmed' to have an 1p, it has to be an ensemble of computations, yours being just a few finite ones in an infinite ensemble. Even if one can be confused/tricked for a finite amount of time about this, you can never be confused forever. Why do you think the programmer's reality
Re: The free will function
On 2/20/2012 18:37, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Feb 20, 10:32 am, acwa...@lavabit.com wrote: On 2/20/2012 13:45, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Feb 19, 11:57 pm, 1Zpeterdjo...@yahoo.comwrote: On Feb 20, 4:41 am, Craig Weinbergwhatsons...@gmail.comwrote: .. Believable falsehoods are falsehoods and convincing illusions still aren't reality It doesn't matter if they believe in the simulation or not, the belief itself is only possible because of the particular reality generated by the program. Comp precludes the possibility of contacting any truer reality than the simulation. If those observers are generally intelligent and capable of Turing-equivalent computation, they might theorize about many things, true or not. Just like we do, and just like we can't know if we're right. Right, but true = a true reflection of the simulation. If I make a simulation where I regularly stop the program and make miraculous changes, then the most intelligent observers might rightly conclude that there is an omnipotent entity capable of performing miracles. That would be the truth of that simulation. They might end up with a simulation hypothesis being more plausible than pure chance if there was evidence for it, such as non-reducible high-level behavior indicating intelligence and not following any obvious lower-level physical laws. However, 'omnipotent' is not the right word here. I already explained why before - in COMP, you can always escape the simulation, even if this is not always obvious from the 3p of the one doing the simulation. Our Gods may know better too. What I am saying is that Comp + MWI + Anthropic principle guarantees an infinite number of universes in which some entity can program machines to worship them *correctly* as *their* Gods. That's more difficult than you'd think. In COMP, you identify local physics and your body with an infinity of lower-level machines which happen to be simulating *you* correctly (where *you* would be the structures required for your mind to work consistently). A simulation of a digital physics universe may implement some such observers *once* or maybe multiple times if you go for the extra effort, but never in *all* the cases (which are infinite). As long as it happens in any universe under MWI, then there must be an infinity of variations stemming from that universe, and under the anthropic principle, there is always a chance that you are living in a simulation within one such universe. I was just assuming COMP, which is a bit wider than MWI, but should contain a variant compatible with it. In COMP, it's highly likely you're living in a simulation, but you're also living in more primitive forms (such as directly in the UD) - your 1p is contained in an infinity of machines. You would only care if some of those happen to be a simulation if the one doing the simulation modifies the program/data or entangles it with his history, or merely provides a continuation for you in his world, however any such continuations in digital physics interventionist simulations would be low-measure. If such a programmer decides to intervene in his simulation, that wouldn't affect all the other machines implementing said simulation and said observers(for example in arithmetic or in some UD running somewhere), That depends entirely on what kind of intervention the programmer chooses. If she wants to make half of the population turn blue, she can, and then when the sim is turned back on, everyone gasps and proclaims a miracle of Biblical proportions. I wasn't talking about the multiple observers in the simulation, but merely that an observer, with which we identify with his 1p is implemented by an infinity of machines (!), only some part of that correspond to someone simulating them. If someone decides to modify the simulation at some point, then only a small fraction of those 1p's would diverge from the usual local laws-of-physics and becme entangled with the laws of those doing the simulation - such continuations would be low-measure. however a small part of the simulations containing observers will now be only implemented by the physics of the upper programmer's universe (and become entangled with them), Not sure what you mean. Are you suggesting that the programmer of Pac Man can't reprogram it for zero gravity? Or for a Non-Euclidean Salvador Dali melting clock wormhole version? What effect would a physical universe have on a simulated universe if comp were true, beyond impacting the ability of the simulation to function as intended? What I'm saying is that if those observers within the simulation have 1p's (if COMP is true), then they are implemented by infinitely many simulations, only a few corresponding to your particular Matrix Lord, thus the probability that the ML would affect them is very low, however not null. In the sense that if you were in such a world, and someone happened to be simulating your physics and then suddenly decided
Re: The free will function
On 2/20/2012 03:35, Craig Weinberg wrote: If I am a simulation, and a programmer watches 'me' and can intervene and change my program and the program of my universe at will, then to me they are a true God, and I would be well advised to pray to them. I think you might be misunderstanding COMP. In COMP, your 1p is mostly identified with some true arithmetical sentences, some such sentences may talk about some particular physics being implemented by some UMs. If someone else runs an UM which partially computes your local physics (it's provably impossible to do so for the entire history tree of some observer), then they are merely observing some computation, sort of like looking into a window to your universe. If they chose to intervene, they would be entangling the computations of a copy-of-you with their own, however the chance of being in such a computation becomes astronomically lower. COMP makes being in an universe/simulation controlled by interventionist gods a very low probability event. Also, the longer the simulation + arbitrary changes keep going on, the lower the chance that you won't just end up in a version where nobody is changing your computations (what's simpler? program A ran by UM or program A ran by UM ran by UM2 ran by ...). There is however one way for such a god (a better term I heard used for such a being would be a Matrix Lord) to make his actions more likely to be experienced by you: simulate 'you'(as copied from his earlier digital physics simulation) in his own world. Also, COMP makes pure digital physics less likely locally, and false globally. Also, if said Matrix Lord decided to kill himself in his level of reality, he might have some unusual continuations over which he has no control over, same would be for the observer within his simulation. COMP makes any interventionist god's interventions very less likely to be experienced and in the limit, an observer will always escape such control. The main idea is to look at all possible consistent continuations within the UD, not just at what's possible within some local digital physics. Also, if there is nothing supernatural that can be experienced by an observer with a computable body: it's all somewhere in the UD, which itself is in arithmetic. However, if the observer's body is not computable, things are weirder, but that's non-COMP. Computationalism says that we have no way of knowing that has not happened yet and MWI (and Tegmark's Level 3 classification) demands that this is inevitable in some universes. In a scenario of infinite universes, how can any possibility be said to be supernatural? There is a supernatural/natual distinction in MWI based multiverses. If it is not supernatural for us to build a Turing machine and control the content of it's 'tape', then it cannot, cannot, can-not be supernatural for that UM to have its world be controlled by us. As long as the top level programmer is natural and resides in a top level MWI universe, there can be no limit to their omnipotence over their programs in comp. To claim supernatural distinctions within an emulation is to turn the programs into zombies, is it not? They become the second class citizens that I am criticized for suggesting. Controlling the content of the tape means that the UM no longer runs that one particular program that it was running, but something else entangled with your own computations (so UM0 becomes UM1 running modified UM0). Omnipotence is non-sense if it claims to change the consequences of the Church-Turing Thesis. CTT is either false or true, it can't be changed on a whim. Also, consciousness isn't associated with the physical state of the tape: MGA shows that it's not the case. It's associated with abstract computations which may also be contained in a physical body, although the notion of the physical itself becomes rather abstract. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/15/2012 07:07, Stephen P. King wrote: [SPK] Interesting. How then do we explain the fact that humans suffer all kinds of computational errors such as schizophrenia, dismorphia, etc. We intentionally lie... The list of computationally erroneous behavior of the brain is almost endless. How does this occur given COMP? But I digress. Explaining physical reality is to explain the properties that it has as opposed to those that it does not, UDA does not do that. It even presupposes things that are simply not possible in the physical world, such as teleportation and computations generating knowledge without the use of resources. Even a Reversible computer requires memory to compute and memory is a physical quantity. The notion of teleportation used in UDA is nothing magical or requiring new physics. The experiments in the UDA can be read as after someone said yes to the doctor and became a SIM(Substrate Independent Mind), thus after the substitution, they can know one of their godel numbers/programs (assuming correct observation). This essentially means that said program state can be transmitted and ran/instantiated anywhere you want and with any delay or order or form. A teleportation from A to B would merely require the SIM to stop itself in A, have another program transmit it to B(for example through the Internet or some other communication channel) and have someone run it in B, for example on a general purpose Turing-equivalent computer or more likely a special-purpose digital brain (for better performance within our physics) with access to an environment(or more, such as VRs). For all intents and purposes this isn't any different from me writing a program and you downloading it and running it on your own hardware. For UDA 1-5 this works trivially. For UDA 6, it also works, with changes in software. UDA 7 does make a stronger assumption: the sufficiently robust universe, however one doesn't really assume strong physical continuity by now (by 1-6), so I don't see UD even has to be coherently ran all at once and in a continuous manner (for example a running like that in Permutation City would work just well, in the dust). If you do consider some other 'everything' theories like Tegmark's or Schmidhuber, they also grant you an UD (and I would venture to say that your neutral Existence might also grant you such robust universes). UDA 8 you seem to disagree with, but I don't see what explanatory power could any primitively physical structure grant you: all possible digitalised observers and their continuations already have to be in the UD, thus you cannot use primitive physics for prediction. Thus the only claim that one could make for saving primitive physics would be that it allows for consciousness to manifest (for example by implementing the body). UDA 8 and MGA show that such a claim is specious and unnecessary. You seem to disagree with it, although its not clear to me as to why or how. You seem to claim that physical reality isn't primary (COMP agrees, it emerges from arithmetical/computational truth), although don't agree with the way it emerges in COMP or its nature(?)? Does that mean that you don't think that all possible observers are contained in the UD? To be frank, I'm still rather confused at what point your theory becomes incompatible or predicts different things than COMP (given the standard assumptions used in the UDA). -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/16/2012 15:59, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/16/2012 6:57 AM, acw wrote: On 2/15/2012 07:07, Stephen P. King wrote: [SPK] Interesting. How then do we explain the fact that humans suffer all kinds of computational errors such as schizophrenia, dismorphia, etc. We intentionally lie... The list of computationally erroneous behavior of the brain is almost endless. How does this occur given COMP? But I digress. Explaining physical reality is to explain the properties that it has as opposed to those that it does not, UDA does not do that. It even presupposes things that are simply not possible in the physical world, such as teleportation and computations generating knowledge without the use of resources. Even a Reversible computer requires memory to compute and memory is a physical quantity. The notion of teleportation used in UDA is nothing magical or requiring new physics. The experiments in the UDA can be read as after someone said yes to the doctor and became a SIM(Substrate Independent Mind), thus after the substitution, they can know one of their godel numbers/programs (assuming correct observation). This essentially means that said program state can be transmitted and ran/instantiated anywhere you want and with any delay or order or form. A teleportation from A to B would merely require the SIM to stop itself in A, have another program transmit it to B(for example through the Internet or some other communication channel) and have someone run it in B, for example on a general purpose Turing-equivalent computer or more likely a special-purpose digital brain (for better performance within our physics) with access to an environment(or more, such as VRs). For all intents and purposes this isn't any different from me writing a program and you downloading it and running it on your own hardware. For UDA 1-5 this works trivially. For UDA 6, it also works, with changes in software. UDA 7 does make a stronger assumption: the sufficiently robust universe, however one doesn't really assume strong physical continuity by now (by 1-6), so I don't see UD even has to be coherently ran all at once and in a continuous manner (for example a running like that in Permutation City would work just well, in the dust). If you do consider some other 'everything' theories like Tegmark's or Schmidhuber, they also grant you an UD (and I would venture to say that your neutral Existence might also grant you such robust universes). UDA 8 you seem to disagree with, but I don't see what explanatory power could any primitively physical structure grant you: all possible digitalised observers and their continuations already have to be in the UD, thus you cannot use primitive physics for prediction. Thus the only claim that one could make for saving primitive physics would be that it allows for consciousness to manifest (for example by implementing the body). UDA 8 and MGA show that such a claim is specious and unnecessary. You seem to disagree with it, although its not clear to me as to why or how. You seem to claim that physical reality isn't primary (COMP agrees, it emerges from arithmetical/computational truth), although don't agree with the way it emerges in COMP or its nature(?)? Does that mean that you don't think that all possible observers are contained in the UD? To be frank, I'm still rather confused at what point your theory becomes incompatible or predicts different things than COMP (given the standard assumptions used in the UDA). Dear ACW, Please rethink exactly what teleportation requires to be possible. It is not any different from the ability to copy information. Yes, COMP assumes that there is a subst. level, which means that stuff below the subst. level may vary (or even look like noise, due to 1p-indeterminacy, we tend to think of this, in our universe, as the quantum foam and the like). A doctor (which is included in the assumption, but if it weren't...) only need be able to copy/emulate either exactly at the right subst. level or slightly below it (copying at a higher level may entail memory loss or functionality loss or worse). What this effectively means is that you don't need to be able to read the full quantum state (which is not possible), but just quasi-classical states, which we can do and which should be either at subst. level or below. (If the subst. level was below, COMP would be practically false, as we do assume that the observer's universal number is at least partially stable at the subst. level). No violation of the no-cloning theorem here. And aside from that we can copy/transmit quasi-classical information pretty well. Onward! Stephen -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group
Re: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/16/2012 17:58, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/16/2012 11:54 AM, acw wrote: On 2/16/2012 15:59, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/16/2012 6:57 AM, acw wrote: On 2/15/2012 07:07, Stephen P. King wrote: [SPK] Interesting. How then do we explain the fact that humans suffer all kinds of computational errors such as schizophrenia, dismorphia, etc. We intentionally lie... The list of computationally erroneous behavior of the brain is almost endless. How does this occur given COMP? But I digress. Explaining physical reality is to explain the properties that it has as opposed to those that it does not, UDA does not do that. It even presupposes things that are simply not possible in the physical world, such as teleportation and computations generating knowledge without the use of resources. Even a Reversible computer requires memory to compute and memory is a physical quantity. The notion of teleportation used in UDA is nothing magical or requiring new physics. The experiments in the UDA can be read as after someone said yes to the doctor and became a SIM(Substrate Independent Mind), thus after the substitution, they can know one of their godel numbers/programs (assuming correct observation). This essentially means that said program state can be transmitted and ran/instantiated anywhere you want and with any delay or order or form. A teleportation from A to B would merely require the SIM to stop itself in A, have another program transmit it to B(for example through the Internet or some other communication channel) and have someone run it in B, for example on a general purpose Turing-equivalent computer or more likely a special-purpose digital brain (for better performance within our physics) with access to an environment(or more, such as VRs). For all intents and purposes this isn't any different from me writing a program and you downloading it and running it on your own hardware. For UDA 1-5 this works trivially. For UDA 6, it also works, with changes in software. UDA 7 does make a stronger assumption: the sufficiently robust universe, however one doesn't really assume strong physical continuity by now (by 1-6), so I don't see UD even has to be coherently ran all at once and in a continuous manner (for example a running like that in Permutation City would work just well, in the dust). If you do consider some other 'everything' theories like Tegmark's or Schmidhuber, they also grant you an UD (and I would venture to say that your neutral Existence might also grant you such robust universes). UDA 8 you seem to disagree with, but I don't see what explanatory power could any primitively physical structure grant you: all possible digitalised observers and their continuations already have to be in the UD, thus you cannot use primitive physics for prediction. Thus the only claim that one could make for saving primitive physics would be that it allows for consciousness to manifest (for example by implementing the body). UDA 8 and MGA show that such a claim is specious and unnecessary. You seem to disagree with it, although its not clear to me as to why or how. You seem to claim that physical reality isn't primary (COMP agrees, it emerges from arithmetical/computational truth), although don't agree with the way it emerges in COMP or its nature(?)? Does that mean that you don't think that all possible observers are contained in the UD? To be frank, I'm still rather confused at what point your theory becomes incompatible or predicts different things than COMP (given the standard assumptions used in the UDA). Dear ACW, Please rethink exactly what teleportation requires to be possible. It is not any different from the ability to copy information. Yes, COMP assumes that there is a subst. level, which means that stuff below the subst. level may vary (or even look like noise, due to 1p-indeterminacy, we tend to think of this, in our universe, as the quantum foam and the like). A doctor (which is included in the assumption, but if it weren't...) only need be able to copy/emulate either exactly at the right subst. level or slightly below it (copying at a higher level may entail memory loss or functionality loss or worse). What this effectively means is that you don't need to be able to read the full quantum state (which is not possible), but just quasi-classical states, which we can do and which should be either at subst. level or below. (If the subst. level was below, COMP would be practically false, as we do assume that the observer's universal number is at least partially stable at the subst. level). No violation of the no-cloning theorem here. And aside from that we can copy/transmit quasi-classical information pretty well. Hi ACW, There is a problem with this way of thinking in that it assumes that all of the properties of objects are inherent in the objects themselves and have no relation or dependence on anything else. This is is wrong. We know from our study of QM and the experiments that have been done
Re: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/16/2012 19:09, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/16/2012 1:16 PM, acw wrote: On 2/16/2012 17:58, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/16/2012 11:54 AM, acw wrote: On 2/16/2012 15:59, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/16/2012 6:57 AM, acw wrote: On 2/15/2012 07:07, Stephen P. King wrote: [SPK] Interesting. How then do we explain the fact that humans suffer all kinds of computational errors such as schizophrenia, dismorphia, etc. We intentionally lie... The list of computationally erroneous behavior of the brain is almost endless. How does this occur given COMP? But I digress. Explaining physical reality is to explain the properties that it has as opposed to those that it does not, UDA does not do that. It even presupposes things that are simply not possible in the physical world, such as teleportation and computations generating knowledge without the use of resources. Even a Reversible computer requires memory to compute and memory is a physical quantity. The notion of teleportation used in UDA is nothing magical or requiring new physics. The experiments in the UDA can be read as after someone said yes to the doctor and became a SIM(Substrate Independent Mind), thus after the substitution, they can know one of their godel numbers/programs (assuming correct observation). This essentially means that said program state can be transmitted and ran/instantiated anywhere you want and with any delay or order or form. A teleportation from A to B would merely require the SIM to stop itself in A, have another program transmit it to B(for example through the Internet or some other communication channel) and have someone run it in B, for example on a general purpose Turing-equivalent computer or more likely a special-purpose digital brain (for better performance within our physics) with access to an environment(or more, such as VRs). For all intents and purposes this isn't any different from me writing a program and you downloading it and running it on your own hardware. For UDA 1-5 this works trivially. For UDA 6, it also works, with changes in software. UDA 7 does make a stronger assumption: the sufficiently robust universe, however one doesn't really assume strong physical continuity by now (by 1-6), so I don't see UD even has to be coherently ran all at once and in a continuous manner (for example a running like that in Permutation City would work just well, in the dust). If you do consider some other 'everything' theories like Tegmark's or Schmidhuber, they also grant you an UD (and I would venture to say that your neutral Existence might also grant you such robust universes). UDA 8 you seem to disagree with, but I don't see what explanatory power could any primitively physical structure grant you: all possible digitalised observers and their continuations already have to be in the UD, thus you cannot use primitive physics for prediction. Thus the only claim that one could make for saving primitive physics would be that it allows for consciousness to manifest (for example by implementing the body). UDA 8 and MGA show that such a claim is specious and unnecessary. You seem to disagree with it, although its not clear to me as to why or how. You seem to claim that physical reality isn't primary (COMP agrees, it emerges from arithmetical/computational truth), although don't agree with the way it emerges in COMP or its nature(?)? Does that mean that you don't think that all possible observers are contained in the UD? To be frank, I'm still rather confused at what point your theory becomes incompatible or predicts different things than COMP (given the standard assumptions used in the UDA). Dear ACW, Please rethink exactly what teleportation requires to be possible. It is not any different from the ability to copy information. Yes, COMP assumes that there is a subst. level, which means that stuff below the subst. level may vary (or even look like noise, due to 1p-indeterminacy, we tend to think of this, in our universe, as the quantum foam and the like). A doctor (which is included in the assumption, but if it weren't...) only need be able to copy/emulate either exactly at the right subst. level or slightly below it (copying at a higher level may entail memory loss or functionality loss or worse). What this effectively means is that you don't need to be able to read the full quantum state (which is not possible), but just quasi-classical states, which we can do and which should be either at subst. level or below. (If the subst. level was below, COMP would be practically false, as we do assume that the observer's universal number is at least partially stable at the subst. level). No violation of the no-cloning theorem here. And aside from that we can copy/transmit quasi-classical information pretty well. Hi ACW, There is a problem with this way of thinking in that it assumes that all of the properties of objects are inherent in the objects themselves and have no relation or dependence on anything else. This is is wrong
Re: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/16/2012 19:26, meekerdb wrote: On 2/16/2012 10:16 AM, acw wrote: On 2/16/2012 17:58, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/16/2012 11:54 AM, acw wrote: On 2/16/2012 15:59, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/16/2012 6:57 AM, acw wrote: On 2/15/2012 07:07, Stephen P. King wrote: [SPK] Interesting. How then do we explain the fact that humans suffer all kinds of computational errors such as schizophrenia, dismorphia, etc. We intentionally lie... The list of computationally erroneous behavior of the brain is almost endless. How does this occur given COMP? But I digress. Explaining physical reality is to explain the properties that it has as opposed to those that it does not, UDA does not do that. It even presupposes things that are simply not possible in the physical world, such as teleportation and computations generating knowledge without the use of resources. Even a Reversible computer requires memory to compute and memory is a physical quantity. The notion of teleportation used in UDA is nothing magical or requiring new physics. The experiments in the UDA can be read as after someone said yes to the doctor and became a SIM(Substrate Independent Mind), thus after the substitution, they can know one of their godel numbers/programs (assuming correct observation). This essentially means that said program state can be transmitted and ran/instantiated anywhere you want and with any delay or order or form. A teleportation from A to B would merely require the SIM to stop itself in A, have another program transmit it to B(for example through the Internet or some other communication channel) and have someone run it in B, for example on a general purpose Turing-equivalent computer or more likely a special-purpose digital brain (for better performance within our physics) with access to an environment(or more, such as VRs). For all intents and purposes this isn't any different from me writing a program and you downloading it and running it on your own hardware. For UDA 1-5 this works trivially. For UDA 6, it also works, with changes in software. UDA 7 does make a stronger assumption: the sufficiently robust universe, however one doesn't really assume strong physical continuity by now (by 1-6), so I don't see UD even has to be coherently ran all at once and in a continuous manner (for example a running like that in Permutation City would work just well, in the dust). If you do consider some other 'everything' theories like Tegmark's or Schmidhuber, they also grant you an UD (and I would venture to say that your neutral Existence might also grant you such robust universes). UDA 8 you seem to disagree with, but I don't see what explanatory power could any primitively physical structure grant you: all possible digitalised observers and their continuations already have to be in the UD, thus you cannot use primitive physics for prediction. Thus the only claim that one could make for saving primitive physics would be that it allows for consciousness to manifest (for example by implementing the body). UDA 8 and MGA show that such a claim is specious and unnecessary. You seem to disagree with it, although its not clear to me as to why or how. You seem to claim that physical reality isn't primary (COMP agrees, it emerges from arithmetical/computational truth), although don't agree with the way it emerges in COMP or its nature(?)? Does that mean that you don't think that all possible observers are contained in the UD? To be frank, I'm still rather confused at what point your theory becomes incompatible or predicts different things than COMP (given the standard assumptions used in the UDA). Dear ACW, Please rethink exactly what teleportation requires to be possible. It is not any different from the ability to copy information. Yes, COMP assumes that there is a subst. level, which means that stuff below the subst. level may vary (or even look like noise, due to 1p-indeterminacy, we tend to think of this, in our universe, as the quantum foam and the like). A doctor (which is included in the assumption, but if it weren't...) only need be able to copy/emulate either exactly at the right subst. level or slightly below it (copying at a higher level may entail memory loss or functionality loss or worse). What this effectively means is that you don't need to be able to read the full quantum state (which is not possible), but just quasi-classical states, which we can do and which should be either at subst. level or below. (If the subst. level was below, COMP would be practically false, as we do assume that the observer's universal number is at least partially stable at the subst. level). No violation of the no-cloning theorem here. And aside from that we can copy/transmit quasi-classical information pretty well. Hi ACW, There is a problem with this way of thinking in that it assumes that all of the properties of objects are inherent in the objects themselves and have no relation or dependence on anything else. This is is wrong. We
Re: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/16/2012 20:40, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/16/2012 2:32 PM, meekerdb wrote: On 2/16/2012 11:09 AM, Stephen P. King wrote: All of this substitution stuff is predicated upon the possibility that the brain can be emulated by a Universal Turing Machine. It would be helpful if we first established that a Turing Machine is capable of what we are assuming it do be able to do. I am pretty well convinced that it cannot based on all that I have studied of QM and its implications. This where the paradox of the philosophical zombie arises. It seems pretty certain that a TM, given the right program, can exhibit intelligence. So can we then deny that it is conscious based on unobservable quantum entanglements (i.e. those that make its computation classical)? Brent So is intelligence and consciousness, ala having 1p, qualia and all that subjective experience stuff, the same thing in your mind? Surely they must be related. If not, you do indeed get the p. zombie problem: someone who acts in all respects like a different person with (assumed) consciousness, indistinguishable in behavior, yet without consciousness. The question boils down to: let's say you knew some person well, they one day got a digital brain transplant, they still behave more or less as you remember them, do you think they are now without consciousness or merely that their consciousness is a bit changed due to different quantum entanglements? Onward! Stephen -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/16/2012 22:37, meekerdb wrote: On 2/16/2012 1:00 PM, acw wrote: On 2/16/2012 20:40, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/16/2012 2:32 PM, meekerdb wrote: On 2/16/2012 11:09 AM, Stephen P. King wrote: All of this substitution stuff is predicated upon the possibility that the brain can be emulated by a Universal Turing Machine. It would be helpful if we first established that a Turing Machine is capable of what we are assuming it do be able to do. I am pretty well convinced that it cannot based on all that I have studied of QM and its implications. This where the paradox of the philosophical zombie arises. It seems pretty certain that a TM, given the right program, can exhibit intelligence. So can we then deny that it is conscious based on unobservable quantum entanglements (i.e. those that make its computation classical)? Brent So is intelligence and consciousness, ala having 1p, qualia and all that subjective experience stuff, the same thing in your mind? Surely they must be related. If not, you do indeed get the p. zombie problem: someone who acts in all respects like a different person with (assumed) consciousness, indistinguishable in behavior, yet without consciousness. The question boils down to: let's say you knew some person well, they one day got a digital brain transplant, they still behave more or less as you remember them, do you think they are now without consciousness or merely that their consciousness is a bit changed due to different quantum entanglements? I think substituting for neurons or even groups of neurons in the human brain would preserve consciousness with perhaps minor changes. Probably, otherwise, the nature of consciousness is really fickle and doesn't match our introspection ( http://consc.net/papers/qualia.html ). But when it comes to the question of whether an intelligent behaving robot is necessarily conscious, I'm not so sure. I think it would depend on the structure and programming. It would have *some kind* or consciousness, but it might be rather different from human consciousness. It would depend on the cognitive architecture and structures involved. If the cognitive architecture is something really different from ours, it might be hard to fathom a guess. I can also imagine some optimizers which are capable of giving intelligent answers, but I have trouble attributing it any meaningful consciousness (for example an AI which just brute-forces the problem and performs no induction or anything similar to how we think), while I'd potentially attribute similar consciousness to ours to some neuromorphic AI, and something stranger/not directly comprehensible to me to an AI which is based on our high-level psychology, but different in most other ways in implementation. I suppose if/when we do crack the AGI problem, there will be a lot of interesting things to investigate about the nature of such foreign consciousness. Note that Bruno answers the concern that interaction/entanglement with the environment by saying that the correct level of substitution may include arbitrarily large parts of the environment. I think this is problematic because the substitution (and the computation) are necessarily classical. In a way, that would keep some of COMP's conclusions still valid (weakening of the theory), but it's not very practical. I tend to instead think that machines implementing the observer below the substitution level can vary as much as they want as long as the observer is consistently implemented (a continuation where the observer isn't consistently implemented either no longer is a continuation of the observer or is a low-measure one, although some of these details do need to be worked out). One question that bothers me is if the observer is actually entangled quite a bit with these lower-level machines and if a digital substitution is performed at a higher level, the functionality may remain the same, but the measure/consistent extensions may get altered - better hope there's not too many white rabbits if the subst. level is too high, otherwise it would lead to unstable jumpy realities to SIMs. Brent Onward! Stephen -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: up to some resource bound
On 2/16/2012 23:08, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/16/2012 3:06 PM, acw wrote: On 2/16/2012 19:09, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/16/2012 1:16 PM, acw wrote: The assumption in COMP is that a subst. level exists, it's the main assumption! What does that practically mean? That you can eventually implement the brain (or a partial version of it) in a (modified) TM-equivalent machine (by CTT). It does not deny the quantum reality, merely says that the brain's functionality required for consciousness is classical (and turing-emulable). Although, I suppose some versions including oracles should be possible, and a weakening of COMP into simple functionalism may also be possible. Hi ACW, I understand the UDA, as I have read every one of Bruno's English papers and participated in these discussions, at least. You do not need to keep repeating the same lines. ;-) The point is that the doctor assumption already includes the existence of the equivalent machine and from there the argument follows. If you think such a doctor can never exist, yet that there still is an equivalent turing-emulable implementation that is possible *in principle*, I just direct you at www.paul-almond.com/ManyWorldsAssistedMindUploading.htm which merely requires a random oracle to get you there (which is given to you if MWI happens to be true). Does this in principle proof include the requirements of thermodynamics or is it a speculation based on a set of assumptions that might just seem plausible if we ignore physics? I like the idea of a random Oracles, but to use them is like using sequences of lottery winnings to code words that one wants to speak. The main problem is that one has no control at all over which numbers will pop up, so one has to substitute a scheme to select numbers after they have rolled into the basket. This entire idea can be rephrased in terms of how radio signals are embedded in noise and that a radio is a non-random Oracle. You can buy or build various RNGs which utilize quantum effects (or even use freely available ones), see: http://qrbg.irb.hr/ http://www.fourmilab.ch/hotbits/ http://qrng.physik.hu-berlin.de/ Many others exist. If MWI is true, some of these devices will generate true random outputs, that is, because in a world, the state is 0 and in another is 1, and so on for each next state. In the case of the thought experiment, you write a simple program that utilizes such a QRNG to generate a program (or a more advanced program that limits it to some specific types, for example a neural network map or a physics simulation or whatever) then run it. Hi ACW, Let us build a bit more on this thread because it is getting closer to the idea in my head that I have yet to find the exact words for (that is assuming that it can indeed be expressed in English! Some ideas require math...). If MWI is true, some of these devices will generate truly random outputs... These kind of devices are what I was intending when I wrote of Markov process in a previous response to Bruno. I Also mentioned some stuff about Boltzmann brains. Do you recall those ideas? OK, keep that in mind. Partially, I'll have to re-read some parts of those threads in context. In MWI, /*_all possible programs up to some resource bound you specified (as our hardware is resource bound) will run in some world_*/. That's the basic idea. If you think a digital subst. exist, *in principle* a sheaf of continuations will exist somewhere in some world after running this program. It's a rather ad-hoc and not very pretty solution, but if one admits a digital subst., then such an experiment would succeed (although the measure of such continuations may be low). I don't see anything contradicting thermodynamics here. I have highlighted in bold and underlines that part of what you wrote that I am trying to focus attention on. It is there that the problem that I see in UDA is. This is the problem that Maudlin's argument is leading us down the wrong path. I tried to get some attention on this last year (?) in a discussion of Maudlin's paper, but my thoughts never connected. http://old.nabble.com/Re%3A-A-comment-on-Maudlin%27s-paper-%E2%80%9CComputation-and-Consciousness%E2%80%9D-p30789143.html I did include the resource bound because, it's a practical issue with our physics, but even if it is a practical issue, it's not an insurmountable one: efficient and less efficient hardware that would be capable of running a simulation of our brains is already within our reach ( I can elaborate on what constitute reasonable resource bounds and the estimated size of the information contained in our brain at a subst. level expected by neuroscience, but I have to go for today, so I'll avoid it for now, but I can elaborate on it in another day if necessary). This means that while such an experiment is considered as a thought experiment, it's physically realizable in our world, and it doesn't even require future sci-fi tech. I'll re-read that thread as time
Re: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/14/2012 13:45, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/14/2012 5:13 AM, acw wrote: How does the existence on an entity determine its properties? Please answer this question. What do soundness and consistency even mean when there does not exist an unassailable way of defining what they are? Look carefully at what is required for a proof, don't ignore the need to be able to communicate the proof. Soundness and consistency have precise definitions. If you want an absolute definition of consistency, it could be seen as a particular machine never halting. Due to circularity of any such definitions, one has to take some notion of abstract computation fundamental (for example through arithmetic or combinators or ...) Dear ACW, I do like this definition of consistency as an (abstract) machine that never halts (its computation of itself). I like it a lot! We can use the language of hypersets http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-well-founded_set_theory to get consistent definitions in spite of the circularity. Ben Goertzel wrote a very nice paper that outlines the idea: goertzel.org/consciousness/consciousness_paper.pdf Ben Goertzel is one smart dude! Using hypersets to talk about such self-similar concepts sounds fine. That's a pretty interesting paper. I've read some of Ben Geortzel's other work before (mostly in the field of AGI), his ideas and work are quite interesting. Getting back to my basic question: How is it that the mere existence of an entity gives it a definition? The usual notion of a definition of a word is what is found to the right of a word listed in a dictionary, but are we going beyond that notion? If something does have existence, I will tend to assume it also has a consistent definition (even if we're not aware of it yet), although some things might either be undefinable in simpler terms (for example arithmetic) or they might require stronger theories than themselves to define them (such as arithmetical truth). The dictionary meaning of the word is too narrow, a better way of thinking about it is to think about what 'is' means. More precise definitions of the concept of definition can be given in more precise languages than English (such as programming languages), but that might be again too restrictive. How come that one definition and not some other or even a class of definitions? There may be many equivalent definitions, possibly even an infinity of them. Am I incorrect in thinking that definitions are a set of relations that are built up by observers though the process of observation of the world and communicating with each other about the possible content of their individual observations? You're not incorrect, but that's just the act of inferring or inducing a definition. However, something can have existence and should also have a proper definition (in some language) even if you haven't reached it. Someone does some reasoning and gives some pattern some name. I claim that the pattern's existence is independent of that person giving it a name. A person might not be able to properly communicate the pattern to others without introducing the pattern to others, but the pattern exists - their own bodies, world, knowledge, ... are such patterns. This is, after all, how dictionaries are formed (modulo the printing process, etc.)... When I am thinking of the existence of an entity, I am not considering that it is observed or that observation or measurement by an automated system occurred or anything else that might yield a definite count of what the properties of an entity are; I am just considering its existence per se. So I guess that I am not being clear... Okay. How does the mere existence of an entity act in any way as an observation of itself? Why that question? B/c it seems to me that that is what is required to have a consistent notion of an entity having properties merely by existing. So maybe you are thinking of what a hyperset is without realizing it! Hmm, you're right! Hypersets and hyperset-like concepts are quite common, especially in knowledge-representation. Onward! Stephen -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/14/2012 05:57, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/13/2012 11:18 PM, acw wrote: On 2/14/2012 02:55, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/13/2012 5:27 PM, acw wrote: [SPK] There is a problem with this though b/c it assumes that the field is pre-existing; it is the same as the block universe idea that Andrew Soltau and others are wrestling with. Why is a pre-existing field so troublesome? Seems like a similar problem as the one you have with Platonia. For any system featuring time or change, you can find a meta-system in which you can describe that system timelessly (and you have to, if one is to talk about time and change at all). Dear Kermit, OK, I will try to explain this in detail and check my math. I am good with pictures, even N-dimensional ones, but not symbols, equations and words... Think of a collection of different objects. Now think of how many ways that they can be arranged or partitioned up. For N objects, I believe that there are at least N! numbers of ways that they can be arranged. Now think of an Electromagnetic Field as we do in classical physics. At each point in space, it has a vector and a scalar value representing its magnetic and electric potentials. How many ways can this field be configured in terms of the possible values of the potentials at each point? At least 1x2x3x...xM ways, where M is the number of points of space. Let's add a dimension of time so that we have a 3,1 dimensional field configuration. How many different ways can this be configured? Well, that depends. We known that in Nature there is something called the Least Action Principle that basically states that what ever happens in a situation it is the one that minimizes the action. Water flows down hill for this reason, among other things... But it is still at least M! number of possible configurations. How do we compute what the minimum action configuration of the electromagnetic fields distributed across space-time? It is an optimization problem of figuring out which is the least action configured field given a choice of all possible field configurations. This computational problem is known to be NP-Complete and as such requires a quantity of resources to run the computation that increases as a non-polynomial power of the number of possible choices, so the number is, I think, 2^M! . The easiest to understand example of this kind of problem is the Traveling Salesman problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem: Given a list of cities and their pairwise distances, the task is to find the shortest possible route that visits each city exactly once. The number of possible routes that the salesman can take increases exponentially with the number of cities, there for the number of possible distances that have to be compared to each other to find the shortest route increases at least exponentially. So for a computer running a program to find the solution it takes exponentially more resources of memory and time (in computational steps) or some combination of the two. Yet the problem is decidable in finite amount of steps, even if that amount may be very large indeed. It would be unfeasible for someone with bounded resources, but not a problem for any abstract TM or a physical system (are they one and the same, at least locally?). Hi ACW, WARNING WARNING WARNING DANGER DANGER! Overload is Eminent! OK, please help me understand how we can speak of computations for situations where I have just laid out how computations can't exist. Computations can be encoded in Peano Arithmetic and many others timeless theories just as well. I'm not entirely sure I see what your proof is. Although if you deny any form of Platonia or Plentitude and any form of *primitive* physical reality, I'm not entirely sure what you're left with to represent computations. You'll have to present an understandable theory which is not primitively physical, nor platonic. Currently I only consider the timeless platonic versions as primitive physics: 1) doesn't make too much sense, especially since we're always talking about it only through math, thus it can just be 'math' 2) UDA+MGA show that it's superfluous if we do happen to admit a digital substitution. Adding 3p time does not fix the issue (as shown in my earlier thought experiment), and 1p time is too subjective to grant it continuity over too large intervals (we cannot guarantee continuity each time short term memory is cleared). If we take CTT at face value, then it requires some form of implementation. Implementation in arithmetic seems sufficient to me. Some kind of machine must be run. It's run by some sentences being either true or false. Are you sure that you are not substituting your ability to imagine the solution of a computation as an intuitive proof that computations exist as purely abstract entities, independent from all things physical? If COMP, they have to. Without COMP, but assuming a 3p, it's not hard to again get a similar result if one
Re: Truth values as dynamics?
On 2/12/2012 15:48, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/11/2012 5:15 PM, acw wrote: On 2/11/2012 05:49, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/9/2012 3:40 PM, acw wrote: I think the idea of Platonia is closer to the fact that if a sentence has a truth-value, it will have that truth value, regardless if you know it or not. Sure, but it is not just you to whom a given sentence may have the same exact truth value. This is like Einstein arguing with Bohr with the quip: The moon is still there when I do not see it. My reply to Einstein would be: Sir, you are not the only observer of the moon! We have to look at the situation from the point of view of many observers or, in this case, truth detectors, that can interact and communicate consistently with each other. We cannot think is just solipsistic terms. Sure, but what if nobody is looking at the moon? Or instead of moon, pick something even less likely to be observed. To put it differently, Riemann hypothesis or Goldbach's conjecture truth-value should not depend on the observers thinking of it - they may eventually discover it, and such a discovery would depend on many computational consequences, of which the observers may not be aware of yet, but doesn't mean that those consequences don't exist - when the computation is locally performed, it will always give the same result which could be said to exist timelessly. [SPK] My point is that any one or thing that could be affected by the truth value of the moon has X, Y, Z properties will, in effect, be an observer of the moon since it is has a definite set of properties as knowledge. The key here is causal efficacy, if a different state of affairs would result if some part of the world is changed then the conditions of that part of the world are observed. The same thing holds for the truth value Riemann hypothesis or Goldbach's conjecture, since there would be different worlds for each of their truth values. My point is that while the truth value or reality of the moon does not depend on the observation by any _one_ observer, it does depend for its definiteness on the possibility that it could be observed by some observer. It is the possibility that makes the difference. A object that cannot be observer by any means, including these arcane versions that I just laid out, cannot be said to have a definite set of properties or truth value, to say the opposite is equivalent to making a truth claim about a mathematical object for whom no set of equations or representation can be made. You're conjecturing here that there were worlds where Riemann hypothesis or Goldbach's conjecture have different truth values. I don't think arithmetical truths which happen to have proofs have indexical truth values, this is due to CTT. Although most physical truths are indexical (or depend on the axioms chosen). We could limit ourselves to decidable arithmetical truths only, but you'd bump into the problem of consistency of arithmetic or the halting problem. It makes no sense to me that a machine which is defined to either halt or not halt would not do either. We might not know if a machine halts or not, but that doesn't mean that if when ran in any possible world it would behave differently. Arithmetical truth should be the same in all possible worlds. An observer can find out a truth value, but it cannot alter it, unless it is an indexical (context-dependent truth, such as what time it is now or where do you live). Of course, we cannot talk about the truth value of undefined stuff, that would be non-sense. However, we can talk about the truth value of what cannot be observed - this machine never halts is only true if no observation of the machine halting can ever be made, in virtue of how the machine is defined, yet someone could use various meta-reasoning to reach the conclusion that the machine will never halt (consistency of arithmetic is very much similar to the halting problem - it's only consistent if a machine which enumerates proofs never finds a proof of 0=1; of course, this is not provable within arithmetic itself, thus it's a provably unprovable statement for any consistent machine, thus can only be a matter of theology as Bruno calls it). Hi ACW, I am considering that the truth value is a function of the theory with which a proposition is evaluated. In other words, meaningfulness, including truth value, is contextual while existence is absolute. Of course it's a function of the theory. Although, I do think some theories like arithmetic, computability and first-order logic are so general and infectious that they can be found in literally any non-trivial theory. That is, one cannot really escape their consequences. At that point, one might as well consider them absolute. That said, an axiom that says you're now in structure X and state Y would be very much contextual. Hi ACW, I was considering something like a field of propositions what say I am now in structure X_i, state Y_j and an internal model Z_k and a truth value
Re: The Anthropic Trilemma - Less Wrong
On 2/12/2012 17:29, Stephen P. King wrote: Hi Folks, I would like to bring the following to your attention. I think that we do need to revisit this problem. http://lesswrong.com/lw/19d/the_anthropic_trilemma/ The Anthropic Trilemma http://lesswrong.com/lw/19d/the_anthropic_trilemma/ 21Eliezer_Yudkowsky http://lesswrong.com/user/Eliezer_Yudkowsky/27 September 2009 01:47AM Speaking of problems I don't know how to solve, here's one that's been gnawing at me for years. The operation of splitting a subjective worldline seems obvious enough - the skeptical initiate can consider the Ebborians http://lesswrong.com/lw/ps/where_physics_meets_experience/, creatures whose brains come in flat sheets and who can symmetrically divide down their thickness. The more sophisticated need merely consider a sentient computer program: stop, copy, paste, start, and what was one person has now continued on in two places. If one of your future selves will see red, and one of your future selves will see green, then (it seems) you should /anticipate/ seeing red or green when you wake up with 50% probability. That is, it's a known fact that different versions of you will see red, or alternatively green, and you should weight the two anticipated possibilities equally. (Consider what happens when you're flipping a quantum coin: half your measure will continue into either branch, and subjective probability will follow quantum measure for unknown reasons http://lesswrong.com/lw/py/the_born_probabilities/.) But if I make two copies of the same computer program, is there twice as much experience, or only the same experience? Does someone who runs redundantly on three processors, get three times as much weight as someone who runs on one processor? Let's suppose that three copies get three times as much experience. (If not, then, in a Big universe, large enough that at least one copy of anything exists /somewhere,/ you run into the Boltzmann Brain problem http://lesswrong.com/lw/17d/forcing_anthropics_boltzmann_brains/.) Just as computer programs or brains can split, they ought to be able to merge. If we imagine a version of the Ebborian species that computes digitally, so that the brains remain synchronized so long as they go on getting the same sensory inputs, then we ought to be able to put two brains back together along the thickness, after dividing them. In the case of computer programs, we should be able to perform an operation where we compare each two bits in the program, and if they are the same, copy them, and if they are different, delete the whole program. (This seems to establish an equal causal dependency of the final program on the two original programs that went into it. E.g., if you test the causal dependency via counterfactuals, then disturbing any bit of the two originals, results in the final program being completely different (namely deleted).) So here's a simple algorithm for winning the lottery: Buy a ticket. Suspend your computer program just before the lottery drawing - which should of course be a quantum lottery, so that every ticket wins somewhere. Program your computational environment to, if you win, make a trillion copies of yourself, and wake them up for ten seconds, long enough to experience winning the lottery. Then suspend the programs, merge them again, and start the result. If you don't win the lottery, then just wake up automatically. The odds of winning the lottery are ordinarily a billion to one. But now the branch in which you /win /has your measure, your amount of experience, /temporarily/ multiplied by a trillion. So with the brief expenditure of a little extra computing power, you can subjectively win the lottery - be reasonably sure that when next you open your eyes, you will see a computer screen flashing You won! As for what happens ten seconds after that, you have no way of knowing how many processors you run on, so you shouldn't feel a thing. Now you could just bite this bullet. You could say, Sounds to me like it should work fine. You could say, There's no reason why you /shouldn't /be able to exert anthropic psychic powers. You could say, I have no problem with the idea that no one else could see you exerting your anthropic psychic powers, and I have no problem with the idea that different people can send different portions of their subjective futures into different realities. I find myself somewhat reluctant to bite that bullet, personally. Nick Bostrom, when I proposed this problem to him, offered that you should anticipate winning the lottery after five seconds, but anticipate losing the lottery after fifteen seconds. To bite this bullet, you have to throw away the idea that your joint subjective probabilities are the product of your conditional subjective probabilities. If you win the lottery, the subjective probability of having still won the lottery, ten seconds later, is ~1. And if you lose the lottery, the subjective probability of having lost the lottery, ten
Re: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/14/2012 02:55, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/13/2012 5:27 PM, acw wrote: [SPK] There is a problem with this though b/c it assumes that the field is pre-existing; it is the same as the block universe idea that Andrew Soltau and others are wrestling with. Why is a pre-existing field so troublesome? Seems like a similar problem as the one you have with Platonia. For any system featuring time or change, you can find a meta-system in which you can describe that system timelessly (and you have to, if one is to talk about time and change at all). Dear Kermit, OK, I will try to explain this in detail and check my math. I am good with pictures, even N-dimensional ones, but not symbols, equations and words... Think of a collection of different objects. Now think of how many ways that they can be arranged or partitioned up. For N objects, I believe that there are at least N! numbers of ways that they can be arranged. Now think of an Electromagnetic Field as we do in classical physics. At each point in space, it has a vector and a scalar value representing its magnetic and electric potentials. How many ways can this field be configured in terms of the possible values of the potentials at each point? At least 1x2x3x...xM ways, where M is the number of points of space. Let's add a dimension of time so that we have a 3,1 dimensional field configuration. How many different ways can this be configured? Well, that depends. We known that in Nature there is something called the Least Action Principle that basically states that what ever happens in a situation it is the one that minimizes the action. Water flows down hill for this reason, among other things... But it is still at least M! number of possible configurations. How do we compute what the minimum action configuration of the electromagnetic fields distributed across space-time? It is an optimization problem of figuring out which is the least action configured field given a choice of all possible field configurations. This computational problem is known to be NP-Complete and as such requires a quantity of resources to run the computation that increases as a non-polynomial power of the number of possible choices, so the number is, I think, 2^M! . The easiest to understand example of this kind of problem is the Traveling Salesman problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem: Given a list of cities and their pairwise distances, the task is to find the shortest possible route that visits each city exactly once. The number of possible routes that the salesman can take increases exponentially with the number of cities, there for the number of possible distances that have to be compared to each other to find the shortest route increases at least exponentially. So for a computer running a program to find the solution it takes exponentially more resources of memory and time (in computational steps) or some combination of the two. Yet the problem is decidable in finite amount of steps, even if that amount may be very large indeed. It would be unfeasible for someone with bounded resources, but not a problem for any abstract TM or a physical system (are they one and the same, at least locally?). Now, given all of that, in the concept of Platonia we have the idea of ideal forms, be they the Good, or some particular infinite string of numbers. How exactly are they determined to be the best possible by some standard. Whatever the standard, all that matters is that there are multiple possible options of The Forms with the stipulation that it is the best or most consistent or whatever. It is still an optimization problem with N variables that are required to be compared to each other according to some standard. Therefore, in most cases there is an Np-complete problem to be solved. How can it be computed if it has to exist as perfect from the beginning? The problem is that you're considering a from the beginning at all, as in, you're imagining math as existing in time. Instead of thinking it along the lines of specific Forms, try thinking of a limited version along the lines of: is this problem decidable in a finite amount of steps, no matter how large, as in: if a true solution exists, it's there. I'm not entirely sure if we can include uncomputable values there, such as if a specific program halts or not, but I'm leaning towards that it might be possible. I figured this out when I was trying to wrap my head around Leindniz' idea of a Pre-Established Harmony. It was supposed to have been created by God to synchronize all of the Monads with each other so that they appeared to interact with each other without actually having to exchange substances - which was forbidden to happen as Monads have no windows. For God to have created such a PEH, it would have to solve an NP-Complete problem on the configuration space of all possible worlds. Try all possible solutions for a problem, ignore invalid ones. If the number of possible worlds
Re: The Anthropic Trilemma - Less Wrong
On 2/14/2012 03:00, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/13/2012 5:54 PM, acw wrote: On 2/12/2012 17:29, Stephen P. King wrote: Hi Folks, I would like to bring the following to your attention. I think that we do need to revisit this problem. http://lesswrong.com/lw/19d/the_anthropic_trilemma/ The Anthropic Trilemma http://lesswrong.com/lw/19d/the_anthropic_trilemma/ snip I gave a tentative (and likely wrong) possible solution to it in another thread. The trillema is much lessened if one considers a relative measure on histories (chains of OMs) and their length. That is, if a branch has more OMs, it should be more likely. The first horn doesn't apply because you'd have to keep the copies running indefinitely (merging won't work). The second horn, I'm not so sure if it's avoided: COMP-immortality implies potentially infinite histories (although mergers may make them finite), which makes formalizing my idea not trivial. The third horn only applies to ASSA, not RSSA (implicit in COMP). The fourth horn is acceptable to me, we can't really deny Boltzmann brains, but they shouldn't be that important as the experience isn't spatially located anyway(MGA). The white rabbit problem is more of a worry in COMP than this horn. The fifth horn is interesting, but also the most difficult to solve: it would require deriving local physics from COMP. My solution doesn't really solve the first horn though, it just makes it more difficult: if you do happen to make 3^^^3 copies of yourself in the future and they live very different and long lives, that might make it more likely that you end up with a continuation in such a future, however making copies and merging them shortly afterwards won't work. Hi ACW, This solution only will work for finite and very special versions of infinite sets. For the infinities like that of the Integers, it will not work because any proper subset of the infinite set is identical to the complete set as we can demonstrated with a one-to-one map between the odd integers and the integers. Hence why it's a measure, not a sets cardinality. Although, you're right, it's not obvious to me how this can be solved in a satisfactory manner with infinite non-merging histories. One could give up on finding a computable measure and just consider each history as it is, without trying to quantify directly over all histories. Such a measure would be most likely uncomputable, although it'd still be better than nothing. It's not obvious that some histories wouldn't be finite if one considers their mergers with other histories (consider the case of humans which have finite brains and memories, eventually a loop/merge would exist if they don't self-modify somehow, simply because of finite amount of memory, even in the case of a SIM which never dies or deteriorates due to biological issues). Given that the number of computations that a universal TM can run is at least the countable infinity of the integers, we cannot use a comparison procedure to define the measure. (Maybe this is one of the reasons many very smart people have tried, unsuccessfully, to ban infinite sets...) Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately?), one cannot avoid the countable infinity of naturals. Onward! Stephen -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Time and Concurrency Platonia?
On 2/10/2012 13:54, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/9/2012 3:40 PM, acw wrote: [SPK] I do not see how this deals effectively with the concurrency problem! :-( Using the Platonia idea is a cheat as it is explicitly unphysical. But physics by itself does not explain consciousness either (as shown by MGA). Maybe I just don't see what the concurrency problem is. It has no constraints of thermodynamics, no limits on speeds of signals, no explanation as to how an Ideal Form is defined, e.g. what is the standard of its perfection, ect. It is no different from the Realm of God in religious mythos, so what is it doing here in our rational considerations? Forgive me but I was raised by parents that where Fundamentalists Believers, so please understand that I have an allergy to ideas that remind me of the mental prison that I had to work so hard to escape. I'm not asking you to share all of Plato's beliefs here. It's merely a minimal amount of magic, not unlike the magic you have to accept by positing a 3p world. The amount is basically this: arithmetical (or computational) sentences have truth values independent of anything physical and consciousness/qualia may be how some such arithmetical truth feels from the inside. Without at least some axioms, one cannot get anywhere, you can't reduce arithmetic to only logic and so on. Why would Platonia have to have the same constraints as our physical realms - it need only obey to constraints of logic and math, which usually means stuff that is contained within the Church Turing Thesis and its implications. Speed of signals? If some theory is inconsistent, it's only there as part of the reasoning of some other machine. Ideal Form? How do you define an integer or the axioms that talk about arithmetic? Popular religious mythos tend to be troublesome because they involve *logically impossible* properties being attributed to Gods and other beings - things which are inconsistent. It's not like one doesn't assume some axioms in any theory - they are there in almost any scientific theory. Yet, unlike popular religions, you're free to evaluate your hypotheses and use evidence and meta-reasoning to decide which one is more likely to be true and then try to use the results of such theories to predict how stuff will behave or bet on various things. Of course, it's not hard to get trapped in a bad epistemology, and I can see why you'd be extra skeptical of bad theories, however nobody is telling you to believe a theory is true or false, instead it asks you to work out the consequences of each theory's axioms (as well as using meta-reasoning skills to weed down overly complex theories, if you prefer using Occam's) and then either choose to use or not use that particular theory depending if the results match your observations/expectations/standards/... (if expectations are broken, one would either have to update beliefs or theories or both). Hi ACW, What ever the global structure that we use to relate our ideas and provide explanations, it makes sense that we do not ignore problems that are inconvenient. A big problem that I have with Platonia is that it does not address the appearance of change that we finite semi-autonomous beings observe. The problem of time is just a corollary to this. I would prefer to toss out any postulates that require *any* magic. Magic is like Arsenic poison, every little bit doubles the harmful effects. Magic is only used for things which have to either be axioms or which just cannot be reduced further. Arithmetic cannot be reduced further. What we have as subjective experience is not directly communicable, it is very 'magical', yet our theories must explain it somehow. We may want to have no axioms at all, but such theories are inconsistent as they can prove anything at all. Why do we even need a notion of 3p except as a pedagogical tool? What we need, at least, is a stratification scheme that allows us to represent these differences, but we need to understand that in doing this we are sneaking in the notion of a 3p that is equivalent to some kind of agent whose only mission is to observe differences and that is a fallacy since we are trying to explain observers in the first place. Unless we have some way to handle a fundamental notion of change, there is no way to deal with questions of change and time. Please notice how many instances we are using verbs in our considerations of COMP ideas. Where and how does the change implicit in the verb, as like running the UD, obtain? We cannot ignore this. I am highlighting the concurrency problem b/c it shows how this problem cannot be ignored. The Platonic Realm, especially the Arithmetic Realist one, is by definition fixed and static, nothing changes in it at all! How do we get the appearance of time from it? It is possible to show how, but the proponents of COMP need to explain this, IMHO. It is incoherent at best to make statements like the UD is running on the walls of Platonia. How is that even
Re: Free Floating entities
On 2/10/2012 14:01, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/9/2012 3:40 PM, acw wrote: Another way to think of it would be in the terms of the Church Turing Thesis, where you expect that a computation (in the Turing sense) to have result and that result is independent of all your implementations, such a result not being changeable in any way or by anything - that's usually what I imagine by Platonia. It is a bit mystical, but I find it less mystical than requiring a magical physical substrate (even more after MGA) - to me the platonic implementation seems to be the simplest possible explanation. If you think it's a bad explanation that introduces some magic, I'll respond that the primitively physical version introduces even more magic. Making truth changeable or temporal seems to me to be a much stronger, much more magical than what I'm considering: that arithmetical sentences do have a truth value, regardless if we know it or not. [SPK] I am only asking that we put the abstract world of mathematics on an even footing with the physical world, I am _not_ asking for a primitive physical world. I will say again, just because a computation is independent for any particular implementation that I, you or any one else is capable of creating does not eliminate the necessity that somehow it must be implemented physically. Universality of computation is NOT the severing of computation from its physical implementability. This is not the same kind of claim as we see of the ultrafinitist and/or constructivist; it is just a realistic demand that ideas cannot be free floating entities. We cannot believe in free floating numbers any more than we can believe in disembodies spirits and ghosts. What is a non-primitive physical world, what is it based on? 'Existence'? What is that, sounds primitive to me. If we accept 'existence' as primitive, how does math and physical arise out of it? It seems so general to me that I can't imagine anything at all about it, to the point of being a God-like non-theory (although I can sympathize with it, just that it cannot be used as a theory because it's too general. We'll probably have to settle with something which we can discuss, such as a part of math.) Why is 'physical' implementation so important? Those free floating numbers could very well represent the structures that we and our universe happen to be and their truths may very well sometimes be this thing we call 'consciousness'. As for 'spirits' - how does this 'consciousness' thing know which body to follow and observe? How does it correlate that it must correlate to the physical states present in the brain? How does it know to appear in a robotic body or VR environment if someone decides to upload their mind (sometime in the far future)? What's this continuity of consciousness thing? Granted that some particular mathematical structure could represent the physical, I'm not sure it makes sense gran the physical any more meaning than that which we(our bodies) observe as being part of. Hi ACW, A non-primitive world would be a world that is defined by a set of communications between observers, however the observers are defined. The notion of a cyclical gossiping as used in graph theory gives a nice model of how this would work and it even shows a nice toy model of thermodynamic entropy. See #58 here http://books.google.com/books?id=SbZKSZ-1qrwCpg=PA32lpg=PA32dq=cyclical+gossiping+graph+theorysource=blots=NAvDjdj7u-sig=kk03XrGRBzdVWI09bh_-yrACM64hl=ensa=Xei=jCI1T8TpM4O4tweVgMG_Agsqi=2ved=0CC8Q6AEwAg#v=onepageqf=false for a statement of this idea. Also see http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Gossiping.html A model which allows communication might be nicer to look at, but I don't see why it's *required*. I also don't see how it predicts different things than a model which just has a 'shared computation'/'shared substrate' for each observer? Onward! Stephen -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Truth values as dynamics?
On 2/11/2012 05:49, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/9/2012 3:40 PM, acw wrote: I think the idea of Platonia is closer to the fact that if a sentence has a truth-value, it will have that truth value, regardless if you know it or not. Sure, but it is not just you to whom a given sentence may have the same exact truth value. This is like Einstein arguing with Bohr with the quip: The moon is still there when I do not see it. My reply to Einstein would be: Sir, you are not the only observer of the moon! We have to look at the situation from the point of view of many observers or, in this case, truth detectors, that can interact and communicate consistently with each other. We cannot think is just solipsistic terms. Sure, but what if nobody is looking at the moon? Or instead of moon, pick something even less likely to be observed. To put it differently, Riemann hypothesis or Goldbach's conjecture truth-value should not depend on the observers thinking of it - they may eventually discover it, and such a discovery would depend on many computational consequences, of which the observers may not be aware of yet, but doesn't mean that those consequences don't exist - when the computation is locally performed, it will always give the same result which could be said to exist timelessly. [SPK] My point is that any one or thing that could be affected by the truth value of the moon has X, Y, Z properties will, in effect, be an observer of the moon since it is has a definite set of properties as knowledge. The key here is causal efficacy, if a different state of affairs would result if some part of the world is changed then the conditions of that part of the world are observed. The same thing holds for the truth value Riemann hypothesis or Goldbach's conjecture, since there would be different worlds for each of their truth values. My point is that while the truth value or reality of the moon does not depend on the observation by any _one_ observer, it does depend for its definiteness on the possibility that it could be observed by some observer. It is the possibility that makes the difference. A object that cannot be observer by any means, including these arcane versions that I just laid out, cannot be said to have a definite set of properties or truth value, to say the opposite is equivalent to making a truth claim about a mathematical object for whom no set of equations or representation can be made. You're conjecturing here that there were worlds where Riemann hypothesis or Goldbach's conjecture have different truth values. I don't think arithmetical truths which happen to have proofs have indexical truth values, this is due to CTT. Although most physical truths are indexical (or depend on the axioms chosen). We could limit ourselves to decidable arithmetical truths only, but you'd bump into the problem of consistency of arithmetic or the halting problem. It makes no sense to me that a machine which is defined to either halt or not halt would not do either. We might not know if a machine halts or not, but that doesn't mean that if when ran in any possible world it would behave differently. Arithmetical truth should be the same in all possible worlds. An observer can find out a truth value, but it cannot alter it, unless it is an indexical (context-dependent truth, such as what time it is now or where do you live). Of course, we cannot talk about the truth value of undefined stuff, that would be non-sense. However, we can talk about the truth value of what cannot be observed - this machine never halts is only true if no observation of the machine halting can ever be made, in virtue of how the machine is defined, yet someone could use various meta-reasoning to reach the conclusion that the machine will never halt (consistency of arithmetic is very much similar to the halting problem - it's only consistent if a machine which enumerates proofs never finds a proof of 0=1; of course, this is not provable within arithmetic itself, thus it's a provably unprovable statement for any consistent machine, thus can only be a matter of theology as Bruno calls it). Hi ACW, I am considering that the truth value is a function of the theory with which a proposition is evaluated. In other words, meaningfulness, including truth value, is contextual while existence is absolute. Of course it's a function of the theory. Although, I do think some theories like arithmetic, computability and first-order logic are so general and infectious that they can be found in literally any non-trivial theory. That is, one cannot really escape their consequences. At that point, one might as well consider them absolute. That said, an axiom that says you're now in structure X and state Y would be very much contextual. Onward! Stephen -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send
Re: COMP theology
On 2/11/2012 06:32, Stephen P. King wrote: Hi ACW, Thank you for the time and effort to write this up!!! On 2/9/2012 3:40 PM, acw wrote: Bruno has always said that COMP is a matter of theology (or religion), that is, the provably unprovable, and I agree with this. However, let's try and see why that is and why someone would take COMP as an assumption: - The main assumption of COMP is that you admit, at some level, a digital substitution, and the stronger assumption that if you were to implement/run such a Turing-emulable program, it would be conscious and you would have a continuation in it. Isn't that a strong theological assumption? [SPK] Yes, but it is the substitution of one configuration of stuff with another such that the functionality (that allows for the implementation/running of the Turing-emulable (Turing equivalence!)) program to remain invariant. One thing interesting to point out about this is that this substitution can be the replacement of completely different kinds of stuff, like carbon based stuff with silicon based stuff and does not require a continuous physical process of transformation in the sense of smoothly morphism the carbon stuff into silicon stuff at some primitive level. B/c of this it may seem to bypass the usual restrictions of physical laws, but does it really? It bypasses a lot of restrictions, see UDA step 1-7, and my previous example with the past time-travel. With UDA step 7, it makes the primitively physical either forever unknowable and with step 8 and MGA it makes it superfluous/unnecessary. What exactly is this physical stuff anyway? If we take a hint from the latest ideas in theoretical physics it seems that the stuff of the material world is more about properties that remain invariant under sets of symmetry transformations and less and less about anything like primitive substances. So in a sense, the physical world might be considered to be a wide assortment of bundles of invariants therefore it seems to me that to test COMP we need to see if those symmetry groups and invariants can be derived from some proposed underlying logical structure. This is what I am trying to do. I am really not arguing against COMP, I am arguing that COMP is incomplete as a theory as it does not yet show how the appearance of space, time and conservation laws emerges in a way that is invariant and not primitive. I guess I have the temerity to play Einstein against Bruno's Bohr. :-) Yes, modern physics does indeed point us toward our physics being quite simple and symmetrical, where by 'simple' I mean 'low complexity' (in the Occam, or Solomonoff inductive sense, Kolmogorov complexity, ...). COMP seems to argue toward that as well, although I don't think we can just look at some UD implementation and find some machines partially implementing our universe right at the start - we don't have those kinds of computational resources. Smarter ways to get to physics through AUDA might be better ideas, but I do think that whatever our physics is, we'll have to use some indexical properties, we cannot rely on a single universe assumption. OTOH, I am not arguing for any kind of return to naive realism or that the physical world is the totality of existence. I do know that I am just a curious amateur, so I welcome any critique that might help me learn. I'm a novice myself. You seem to be much more knowledgeable than me in some subjects (such as category theory). I think it is, but at the same time, it has solid consequences and a belief in it can be justified for a number of reasons: a) Fading qualia thought experiment, which shows that consciousness is utterly fickle if it doesn't follow a principle of functional / organizational invariance. Most of our sense data tends to point that such a principle makes sense. Avoiding it means consciousness does not correspond to brain states and p. zombies. Certainly! We need a precise explanation for psycho-physical parallelism. In COMP, the physical is a shadow of arithmetical truth. Making it too much more than that will either introduce zombies or some substrate dependence (which part of the UDA do you disagree with?). My tentative explanation is that at our level a form of dualism holds. A dualism quite unlike that of Descartes, since instead of separate substances, it is proposed that the logical and the physical are two distinct aspect of reality that follow on equal yet anti-parallel tracks. As Vaughan Pratt explains in his papers, the logical processes and the physical processes have dynamics that have arrows that point in opposite directions. Schematically and crudely we can show a quasi-category theory diagram of this duality: X - Y - | | - A --B - The vertical lines represent the Stone duality relation and the horizontal arrow represent logical entailment and physical causation. The chaining (or /residuation/) rule is X causes Y iff B necessitates A, where X and A and duals and Y
Re: Ontological Problems of COMP
On 2/7/2012 06:11, meekerdb wrote: On 2/6/2012 9:55 PM, acw wrote: On 2/7/2012 05:08, meekerdb wrote: On 2/6/2012 5:37 PM, acw wrote: On 2/7/2012 00:28, meekerdb wrote: On 2/6/2012 3:50 PM, acw wrote: I'm not so sure to term ``body'' is as meaningful if we consider the extremes which seem possible in COMP. After a digital substitution, a body could very well be some software running somewhere, on any kind of substrate, with an arbitrary time-frame/ordering (as long as 1p coherent), it could even run directly on some abstract machine which is not part of our universe (such as some machine emulating another machine which is contained in the UD) - the only thing that the mind would have in common is that some program is being instantiated somewhere, somehow. In this more extreme form, I'm not sure I can see any difference between a substrate that has the label 'physical' and some UD running in abstract Platonia. If you can show why the 'physical' version would be required or how can someone even tell the difference between someone living in a 'physical' world vs someone living in a purely mathematical (Platonic) world which sees the world from within said structure in Platonia and calls it 'physical'. It seems that 'physical' is very much what we call the structure in which we exist, but that's indexical, and if you claim that only one such structure exists (such as this universe), then you think COMP is false (that is, no digital substitution exists) or that arithmetic is inconsistent (which we cannot really know, but we can hope)? Physics is already extremely abstract and mathematical, so it is really not a big step to suppose that the fundamental ontology is mathematics or computation as Bruno, Tegmark, and others have speculated. The big step is between supposing that somethings happen and some don't versus everything (in some sense) happens. To say there must be substrate, some 'ur-stuff', is really just to say that some things have existence (the ur-stuff) and some don't. Brent What do you mean by 'ur-stuff'? Some structure which is more privileged than others with 'existence'? Not structure, just 'existence'. As in, more general than 'structure'? I'm a bit confused about this. In my opinion, the claim that some things (for example, some computations) don't happen is incredibly strong. It makes sense for someone who has only lived in one universe to say that any other universe doesn't exist because his classical rationality (such as Russell's teapot, the requirement for a burden of proof) says that we can't really claim existence for things we don't have direct evidence for. On the other hand, Occam's razor makes us favor the simplest possible theories. A theory which explicitly has to deny some structures or computations from existing is much more complex and stronger (and thus will be favored less by Occam or its formalizations). But Occam's razor is just a rule-of-thumb. A Russell Standish points out, in the simplest possible theory nothing exists. Yet something does exist, thus any theory will have to be a 'something'. Some theories (such as Platonia) do give an easy solution to the 'why'. Occam's razor may be a rule of the thumb, but doesn't mean it's not valid, it can also be formalized (although, I won't insist on it, because most formalizations will instantly bias the winner to some 'everything' theory - for example if the formalization is towards computable stuff, the bias is toward the UD). Either way, even ignoring the explicitly stated Occam's razor, when we'll consider some theory for the physics of our local universe, we'll inevitably wonder why these particular laws and the typical answers tend to be either all possibilities, we're just one of them or don't ask or divine magic. You can guess which answer I prefer. COMP as derived from UDA/MGA already places great constraints on what the ontology has to be given the assumption that our brains do admit a digital substitution and such an act is survivable. Does it? I thought it entailed infinitely many different universes with physics limited only by the constraint that they be locally computable. To me it seems that it says that you don't need anything more than the UD (or arithmetical truth or ...). Even if there was something more, a Turing-emulable body will never be able to find out. Although, I guess that's a core part of this debate - would some transfinite stuff in the ontology be able to affect the measure or continuations of a machine/brain (assuming COMP)? Any theory which claims the UD's existence, but limits the laws of physics to only a single instance of some string theory, with only one history and one universe and so on is incredibly strong/very complex, thus shouldn't be favored (by Occam). It also leads to many other questions such as: why this mathematical structure is granted existence, but the others are not? and the conflict between mechanism and materialism as shown in the MGA. To me
Re: Ontological Problems of COMP
On 2/7/2012 06:15, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/6/2012 6:50 PM, acw wrote: On 2/6/2012 06:25, Stephen P. King wrote: Hi ACW, On 2/4/2012 1:53 PM, acw wrote: snip Before reading the UDA, I used to think that something like Tegmark's solution would be general enough and sufficient, but now I think 'just arithmetic' (or combinators, or lambda calculus, or ...) or is sufficient. Why? By the Church-Turing Thesis, these systems posses the same computability power, that is, they all can run the UD. I agree with this line of reasoning, but I see no upper bound on mathematics since I take Cantor's results as real. There is not upper bound on the cardinality of Mathematics. I see this as an implication of the old dictum Nature explores all possibilities. The question is if transfinite extensions are considered as part of the foundation, what different consequences will follow for COMP or the new theory? [SPK] I am not sure, but they seem to be necessary for completeness. Maybe, although it's also questionable if it makes that much sense to put it in the ontology if it won't have any discernible effect on the experienced sense data or measure. Now, if we do admit a digital substitution, all that we can experience is already contained within the UD, including the worlds where we find a physical world with us having a physical body/brain (which exist computationally, but let us not forget that random oracle that comes with 1p indeterminacy). Not quite, admitting digital substitution does not necessarily admit to pre-specifiability as is assumed in the definition of the algorithms of Universal Turing machines, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithm it just assumes that we can substitute functionally equivalent components. What do you mean by ``pre-specifiability''? Care to elaborate? The algorithm is a finite and specifiable list of computational steps or states. It only makes sense that the algorithm exists at least simultaneous or prior to its implementation by a physical system. It cannot come into existence after the implementation. It comes into the existence after the implementation? While I can see how some UD runs a copy of itself as well, I'm not entirely I see the problem here with what I said. Unless, your issue is along the lines of 1p experience actually being some truth being temporally created or merely what happens when some particular computations happens within some timeframe, as opposed to existing platonically - I'm not sure I can completely agree with this opinion although I've shared it a long time ago, currently I prefer to think consciousness could work in situations like this: consider a SIM(substrate independent mind), consider computing parts of its mind in temporally disconnected or random order (include some VR(Virtual Reality) environment with it, so it's mostly self-contained, although it could get some input/sense-data from the world doing the computation), possibly also implement spatial or algorithmic disconnects, possibly even add some homomorphic encryption such that no outside observer could understand the computations that are actually happening (yet all the computations are happening) - if COMP is correct, that SIM should be conscious, and this consciousness won't be spatially or temporally connected, yet the SIM will experience continuity! In a way, consciousness is like that inner interpreter. In a more extreme form, you could consider someone running some computation of a self-contained OS+VR+SIM(s) machine and stopping computing that machine, and it should still have continuations, be it in the UD or anywhere those future computations may be found (be they physically or platonically), and possibly externally acausal (if considering physics or MGA-like thought experiments), but internally causal and continuous (from 1p(s)). Maybe my thought experiment is a bit extreme, although I can't see any obvious refutation of it within the context of COMP(well, some simulations may be very low measure or unstable, compared to those which allow for more easier/cheaper locally stable 1p indeterminacy, but this is a fixable problem by adding access to undefined functionality/random oracles). Functional equivalence does not free us from the prison of the flesh, it merely frees us from the prison of just one particular body. ;-) I'm not so sure to term ``body'' is as meaningful if we consider the extremes which seem possible in COMP. My point about the flesh is that functional equivalence allows for computational universality but does not eliminate the necessity of the physical. My primary contention is that computation is a process that requires resources and is not just sum platonic free lunch. What is the limit on those resources? What if the machine is always finite, but unbounded in the limit (although the limit is never reached for any observer)? If the physical always has some specific finite upper bound, how do you justify
Re: Ontological Problems of COMP
On 2/6/2012 06:25, Stephen P. King wrote: Hi ACW, On 2/4/2012 1:53 PM, acw wrote: One can wonder what is the most general theory that we can postulate to explain our existence. Tegmark postulates all of consistent mathematics, whatever that is, but is 'all of consistent mathematics' consistent in itself? I have read several papers that argue strongly that it cannot be! For instance see: http://arxiv.org/abs/0904.0342 The fact that there are set theories that use axioms that are completely opposite each other is another strong indication of this. It's what I was suspecting as well. I'll have to read that paper when time allows. Schmidhuber postulates something much less, just the UD, but strangely forgets the first-person or the what the implementation substrate of that UD would be (and resorts to a Great Programmer to hand-wave it away). I wonder why Schmidhuber held back? Did he fear ridicule? I have no idea why, although it might indeed be a touchy topic as we can see in the long discussions on this mailing list. Before reading the UDA, I used to think that something like Tegmark's solution would be general enough and sufficient, but now I think 'just arithmetic' (or combinators, or lambda calculus, or ...) or is sufficient. Why? By the Church-Turing Thesis, these systems posses the same computability power, that is, they all can run the UD. I agree with this line of reasoning, but I see no upper bound on mathematics since I take Cantor's results as real. There is not upper bound on the cardinality of Mathematics. I see this as an implication of the old dictum Nature explores all possibilities. The question is if transfinite extensions are considered as part of the foundation, what different consequences will follow for COMP or the new theory? Now, if we do admit a digital substitution, all that we can experience is already contained within the UD, including the worlds where we find a physical world with us having a physical body/brain (which exist computationally, but let us not forget that random oracle that comes with 1p indeterminacy). Not quite, admitting digital substitution does not necessarily admit to pre-specifiability as is assumed in the definition of the algorithms of Universal Turing machines, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithm it just assumes that we can substitute functionally equivalent components. What do you mean by ``pre-specifiability''? Care to elaborate? Functional equivalence does not free us from the prison of the flesh, it merely frees us from the prison of just one particular body. ;-) I'm not so sure to term ``body'' is as meaningful if we consider the extremes which seem possible in COMP. After a digital substitution, a body could very well be some software running somewhere, on any kind of substrate, with an arbitrary time-frame/ordering (as long as 1p coherent), it could even run directly on some abstract machine which is not part of our universe (such as some machine emulating another machine which is contained in the UD) - the only thing that the mind would have in common is that some program is being instantiated somewhere, somehow. In this more extreme form, I'm not sure I can see any difference between a substrate that has the label 'physical' and some UD running in abstract Platonia. If you can show why the 'physical' version would be required or how can someone even tell the difference between someone living in a 'physical' world vs someone living in a purely mathematical (Platonic) world which sees the world from within said structure in Platonia and calls it 'physical'. It seems that 'physical' is very much what we call the structure in which we exist, but that's indexical, and if you claim that only one such structure exists (such as this universe), then you think COMP is false (that is, no digital substitution exists) or that arithmetic is inconsistent (which we cannot really know, but we can hope)? If there's any difference between a physical and non-physical implementation in the context of COMP, I'd like to know what it is and what effect it has. This idea goes back to my claim that the Pre-established harmony http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-established_harmony idea of Leibniz is false because it requires the computation of an infinite NP-Complete problem to occur in zero steps. As we know, given even infinite resources a UTM must take at least one computational step to solve such a NP-Complete problem. My solution to this dilemma is to have an eternally running process at some primitive level. Bruno seems to identify this with the UD, but I claim that he goes too far and eliminates the becoming nature of the process. I think the idea of Platonia is closer to the fact that if a sentence has a truth-value, it will have that truth value, regardless if you know it or not. In essence, Platonia might very well contain Chaitin's constant of some machine, even if we cannot know it (although we can make guesses
Re: Ontological Problems of COMP
On 2/7/2012 00:28, meekerdb wrote: On 2/6/2012 3:50 PM, acw wrote: I'm not so sure to term ``body'' is as meaningful if we consider the extremes which seem possible in COMP. After a digital substitution, a body could very well be some software running somewhere, on any kind of substrate, with an arbitrary time-frame/ordering (as long as 1p coherent), it could even run directly on some abstract machine which is not part of our universe (such as some machine emulating another machine which is contained in the UD) - the only thing that the mind would have in common is that some program is being instantiated somewhere, somehow. In this more extreme form, I'm not sure I can see any difference between a substrate that has the label 'physical' and some UD running in abstract Platonia. If you can show why the 'physical' version would be required or how can someone even tell the difference between someone living in a 'physical' world vs someone living in a purely mathematical (Platonic) world which sees the world from within said structure in Platonia and calls it 'physical'. It seems that 'physical' is very much what we call the structure in which we exist, but that's indexical, and if you claim that only one such structure exists (such as this universe), then you think COMP is false (that is, no digital substitution exists) or that arithmetic is inconsistent (which we cannot really know, but we can hope)? Physics is already extremely abstract and mathematical, so it is really not a big step to suppose that the fundamental ontology is mathematics or computation as Bruno, Tegmark, and others have speculated. The big step is between supposing that somethings happen and some don't versus everything (in some sense) happens. To say there must be substrate, some 'ur-stuff', is really just to say that some things have existence (the ur-stuff) and some don't. Brent What do you mean by 'ur-stuff'? Some structure which is more privileged than others with 'existence'? In my opinion, the claim that some things (for example, some computations) don't happen is incredibly strong. It makes sense for someone who has only lived in one universe to say that any other universe doesn't exist because his classical rationality (such as Russell's teapot, the requirement for a burden of proof) says that we can't really claim existence for things we don't have direct evidence for. On the other hand, Occam's razor makes us favor the simplest possible theories. A theory which explicitly has to deny some structures or computations from existing is much more complex and stronger (and thus will be favored less by Occam or its formalizations). COMP as derived from UDA/MGA already places great constraints on what the ontology has to be given the assumption that our brains do admit a digital substitution and such an act is survivable. Any theory which claims the UD's existence, but limits the laws of physics to only a single instance of some string theory, with only one history and one universe and so on is incredibly strong/very complex, thus shouldn't be favored (by Occam). It also leads to many other questions such as: why this mathematical structure is granted existence, but the others are not? and the conflict between mechanism and materialism as shown in the MGA. To me it seems like privileging the indexicals, which seems like a popular conservative materialist position, although I do wonder why it is that popular - it just favors one magic over the other (this structure, my structure is special, all the others aren't), thus I'm not so sure it's the most rational choice possible, despite that being its aim. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Ontological Problems of COMP
On 2/7/2012 05:08, meekerdb wrote: On 2/6/2012 5:37 PM, acw wrote: On 2/7/2012 00:28, meekerdb wrote: On 2/6/2012 3:50 PM, acw wrote: I'm not so sure to term ``body'' is as meaningful if we consider the extremes which seem possible in COMP. After a digital substitution, a body could very well be some software running somewhere, on any kind of substrate, with an arbitrary time-frame/ordering (as long as 1p coherent), it could even run directly on some abstract machine which is not part of our universe (such as some machine emulating another machine which is contained in the UD) - the only thing that the mind would have in common is that some program is being instantiated somewhere, somehow. In this more extreme form, I'm not sure I can see any difference between a substrate that has the label 'physical' and some UD running in abstract Platonia. If you can show why the 'physical' version would be required or how can someone even tell the difference between someone living in a 'physical' world vs someone living in a purely mathematical (Platonic) world which sees the world from within said structure in Platonia and calls it 'physical'. It seems that 'physical' is very much what we call the structure in which we exist, but that's indexical, and if you claim that only one such structure exists (such as this universe), then you think COMP is false (that is, no digital substitution exists) or that arithmetic is inconsistent (which we cannot really know, but we can hope)? Physics is already extremely abstract and mathematical, so it is really not a big step to suppose that the fundamental ontology is mathematics or computation as Bruno, Tegmark, and others have speculated. The big step is between supposing that somethings happen and some don't versus everything (in some sense) happens. To say there must be substrate, some 'ur-stuff', is really just to say that some things have existence (the ur-stuff) and some don't. Brent What do you mean by 'ur-stuff'? Some structure which is more privileged than others with 'existence'? Not structure, just 'existence'. As in, more general than 'structure'? I'm a bit confused about this. In my opinion, the claim that some things (for example, some computations) don't happen is incredibly strong. It makes sense for someone who has only lived in one universe to say that any other universe doesn't exist because his classical rationality (such as Russell's teapot, the requirement for a burden of proof) says that we can't really claim existence for things we don't have direct evidence for. On the other hand, Occam's razor makes us favor the simplest possible theories. A theory which explicitly has to deny some structures or computations from existing is much more complex and stronger (and thus will be favored less by Occam or its formalizations). But Occam's razor is just a rule-of-thumb. A Russell Standish points out, in the simplest possible theory nothing exists. Yet something does exist, thus any theory will have to be a 'something'. Some theories (such as Platonia) do give an easy solution to the 'why'. Occam's razor may be a rule of the thumb, but doesn't mean it's not valid, it can also be formalized (although, I won't insist on it, because most formalizations will instantly bias the winner to some 'everything' theory - for example if the formalization is towards computable stuff, the bias is toward the UD). Either way, even ignoring the explicitly stated Occam's razor, when we'll consider some theory for the physics of our local universe, we'll inevitably wonder why these particular laws and the typical answers tend to be either all possibilities, we're just one of them or don't ask or divine magic. You can guess which answer I prefer. COMP as derived from UDA/MGA already places great constraints on what the ontology has to be given the assumption that our brains do admit a digital substitution and such an act is survivable. Does it? I thought it entailed infinitely many different universes with physics limited only by the constraint that they be locally computable. To me it seems that it says that you don't need anything more than the UD (or arithmetical truth or ...). Even if there was something more, a Turing-emulable body will never be able to find out. Although, I guess that's a core part of this debate - would some transfinite stuff in the ontology be able to affect the measure or continuations of a machine/brain (assuming COMP)? Any theory which claims the UD's existence, but limits the laws of physics to only a single instance of some string theory, with only one history and one universe and so on is incredibly strong/very complex, thus shouldn't be favored (by Occam). It also leads to many other questions such as: why this mathematical structure is granted existence, but the others are not? and the conflict between mechanism and materialism as shown in the MGA. To me it seems like privileging the indexicals, which seems like
Re: Ontological Problems of COMP
On 2/4/2012 14:38, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/4/2012 8:58 AM, David Nyman wrote: On 4 February 2012 12:22, Bruno Marchalmarc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: No, I am not. I bet that comp is TRUE, but I don't see COMP as requiring that the physical world is supervening on numbers (up to isomorphisms) as primitives. So you have to explicitly show what is not valid in the UDA1-8. You miss something, let us try to find out what. I am not missing a thing, Bruno. You are missing something that is obvious to the rest of us. If someone else can confirm this, and put some light on what Stephen is saying, I would be pleased. Bruno, I used to think that you were indeed missing something that is obvious to the rest of us. I don't think so any longer, because I understand now that you are presenting a theory and your arguments consequently derive strictly from the axioms and assumptions of that theory. I don't pretend to understand all aspects of that theory of course, but through discussion and the contrast of ideas I have come a bit closer than when I started. I don't know if it will help at all for me to state here my understanding of what might motivate the theory in the first place, but I'll try. Firstly, as you have so often said, the informational/computational theory of mind (CTM) is more or less the default assumption in science. Indeed this conclusion seems almost unavoidable given that brain research seems to imply, more or less unambiguously, the correlation of mental states with relations, rather than relata. However, CTM in its uncritically-assumed form continues to be combined with the additional assumption of an Aristotelian primitively-physical state of affairs. This leads directly either to denialism of the first-person, or alternatively to some ill-defined species of property dualism. These consequences by themselves might well lead us to reject such primitive-physicalism as incoherent, even without an explicit reductio ad absurdum of the unambiguous association of conscious states with physical computation. Either way, in order to retain CTM, one is led to contemplate some form of neutral monism. The question of what form such a neutral theory should take now arises. Since the theory is explicitly *computational*, the axioms and assumptions of such a theory should obviously be restricted to the absolute minimum necessary to construct a computational universe (in the traditional sense of universe) or rather to indicate how such a universe would necessarily construct itself, given those axioms and assumptions. The basic assumption is of a first-order combinatorial system, of which numbers are the most widely-understood example. Given the arithmetical nature of such a universe, construction and differentiability of composite entities must necessarily derive from arithmetical assumptions, which permits the natural emergence of higher-order structural integration via the internal logic of the system. Of particular note is the emergence in this way of self-referential entities, which form the logical basis of person-hood. Since the reality of first-person localisation is not denied in this theory (indeed the theory positively seeks to rationalise it), the system is not posited as having merely third-personal status, but as possessing a first-person self-referential point-of-view which is associated with consciousness. Perhaps it is this aspect of the theory which is the most tricky, as it cuts across a variety of different intuitions about consciousness and its relation to the phenomena it reveals. For rather than positing a primitively-physical universe which instantiates conscious states, the theory must reverse the relation and posit conscious states that instantiate physical phenomena. In so doing, it exposes itself to empirical refutation, since those phenomena must be, at least, consistent with ordinary observation (although they also predict, in the limit, observations of high improbability). It is this last issue of instantiation which seems to be one of main bones of contention between Stephen and yourself, though I'm not sure why this is the case. From my own perspective, unsophisticated though it may be, it seems reasonable that the emergence of truly physical phenomena should indeed be the result of personal instantiation in the conjunction of consciousness and computation. After all, when do questions as to what is truly physical emerge, other than in the context of what is truly experiential? The rest is calculation. David Dear David, Does my claim that our primitive ground must be neutral with respect to any properties make any sense? It like the zero of arithmetic from which we can extricate any set of positive and negative quantities in pairs such that their sum is equal to zero. What I see in Bruno's interpretation of COMP is that it permits for the primitive to have a set of properties (numbers and + and *) to the exclusion of its complementary opposites. Since this is a
Re: Qualia and mathematics
On 1/31/2012 14:28, Pierz wrote: I'll tell you a campfire story of my own. One day my grandmother was going to drive my mother home across town. We were at my gran's place at the time and a close friend of mine was present. As they were about to leave, my friend went suddenly pale. She said Don't leave! I have a really bad feeling. She is a super practical, down to earth person and not given to weird freak outs and anxiety attacks. She was so insistent about it that my grandmother and mother decided to humour her. After about 30 minutes she (my friend) said,It's OK, you can go now. They went, and were stopped when they turned off the freeway by a row of police cars. Julian Knight had just shot dead six drivers from a neighbouring park in what's now called the Hoddle Street massacre. That was when my mother remembered the dream she'd had the previous night of driving with my grandmother and saying to her, get down, there's shooting. Now of course this story is supremely unimpressive to you because a) I might be lying, exaggerating, misremembering, on drugs, mentally ill etc and b) it's just a random story and very unlikely things must happen occasionally, right? For me though it's something else. I know I'm not on drugs/lying crazy etc. As for b) I could write it off as a truly incredible coincidence if I hadn't seen so many similar types of things. For instance, I was present with that same friend when she had another such 'attack'. Out of the blue she was filled with a sudden, horrible dread and could hardly breathe. As I say, she has no anxiety disorders and I've never known her to have any such type of panic attack except on these two occasions. It turned out her best friend had been killed in a car accident at that moment. I don't tell you this to persuade, but to make the point that *if* I was telling the truth, it would be rational in my view for me to believe that something was at play beyond your mundane explanation. I actually don't see anything supernatural though. I see something natural that we don't understand, something that challenges the material view of mind. It's not scientific evidence, sure, but that doesn't make it irrational to be persuaded by it. Yet someone doesn't need too wild theories to give possible, but unverifiable explanations to those anecdotes. I'll ignore case a) here as it's not very interesting and look for what possible explanations you could have for it. b) seems good, but let's consider the case where such experiences are more repeatable (from your perspective). If considered within the context of MWI or COMP, you could conjecture that the cases where something hadn't happened, such as your grandmother having a scary dream that led her to stop you at some given time from going somewhere to your death (dreams are especially good candidates for things that can be influenced by more chaotic dynamics and noise, such as things going on below the substitution level or at quantum level). To put it another way - you can only experience things consistent with you being alive (Anthropic principle or more limited forms like Quantum Theory of Immortality or COMP Theory of Immortality) - it's all one useful coincidence caused by the law of large numbers, from the laws of physics/the machines that run you to more deterministic high-level physics emerging. Of course, since such a coincidence was a complex, many step event, I'd be willing to think that the relative measure of one's computations is stacked towards longer (if not even non-terminating) computations, thus histories which lead you to longer locally stable physics are much more probable than those which lead to more non-local unusual continuations, this might very well have to do with those self-reference laws and whatever machines mostly won the measure battle for this local physics we have now. As for the other example, I have no idea why your other friend had that 'attack', I can't see any better explanation for now than just some confirmation bias on your part. As an anecdote, I did have a few of my own short brushes with potential death and got saved by some small, but not too unusual coincidences. Unlike others which tend to just jump to some organized religion and praise some magical being for saving them whenever they have a brush with death (or just very unusual coincidences), I just ended up chalking them up to slight measure reductions and I hope it didn't lead to too much sadness to my friends and family in those branches where 'I' didn't survive (assuming COMP or some MW-like theories). -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Superfluous Qualia Challenge For Comp
On 1/31/2012 18:44, Craig Weinberg wrote: When we close our eyes, we still see visual noise, even in total darkness. If qualia were based on computation, we should expect that no sensory input should equate to total blackness, since there is no information to report. Since we can dream or imagine total darkness without this kind of noise, that would indicate that what we are seeing in this visual noise is related to the neurology of the optic nerve and retina rather than Top-down pattern generation. This is consistent with the multisense realism approach, that we see our own experience without noise, but when we focus our attention to the external facing senses, we see through the experiences of the living tissues of the brain and sense organs, not just 'our own'. With a representational qualia model, we should expect our visual system to behave like a window on a computer screen. We should not be able to see 'static' from the program's logic. Static would come from the unintended consequence of analog hardware, it has no reasonable place in a purely computational world, especially since we can easily conceive of a noiseless visual field. Why the difference between the total darkness we can see in our experience, memory, and imagination, and the darkness we can see when we focus on literally looking at darkness through our eyes? There is absolutely nothing contradicting COMP about seeing noise when other patterns are not being organized by the cortex's hierarchy - no correction/prediction occurs (such as in HTM models). Let's take it one step at a time, first all the images captured by the eye or even an ideal photon receptor are noisy, this has nothing to do with analog and everything to do with how photons and photon detectors work. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_noise Image noise can also originate in film grain and in *the unavoidable shot noise of an ideal photon detector*. A digital or analog camera would get similar amounts of noise as the eye, actually probably less than the eye. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed-eye_hallucination http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_snow Closed-eye hallucinations and closed-eye visualizations (CEV) are a distinct class of hallucination. These types of hallucinations generally only occur when one's eyes are closed or when one is in a darkened room. They are a form of phosphene. .. The noise probably originates from thermal noise exciting the photoreceptor cells in the retina Why don't we see clean images instead of a noisy convoluted mess during our daily lives? Because we actually see patterns which also happen to correct the input data (look at the hierarchical structure of the cortex or read On Intelligence for some examples. I could also link some PLoS articles about this, but I don't have them handy right now.) - we don't usually see raw unfiltered inputs. Static and noise can occur just as well within COMP - they are incredibly common within the UD at various levels. Set up a system with some random rules and you have a good chance of observing noise. Noise is so damn easy to make... However, if considered from the COMP perspective, even incompressible noise (Kolmogorov random) is very common due to 1p indeterminacy. I think you must have the wrong conception about what COMP really is. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Superfluous Qualia Challenge For Comp
On 1/31/2012 19:01, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Jan 31, 12:45 pm, acwa...@lavabit.com wrote: A digital or analog camera would get similar amounts of noise as the eye, actually probably less than the eye. Why do you say that? Have you ever taken a photo with the lens cap on? First, the eyes don't have a perfect lens cap, photons get through quite well. Second, no, but I've seen photos taken in almost (as was feasible to be) dark rooms, and there tends to be some noise, if you don't see it, try using some filters to better differentiate the pixels. I just looked at my digital camera in my phone and blocked the lens with my hand and there is no noise or snow whatsoever. Check the pixel values directly then. In an very dark room, a human might as well not perceive any noise as well. Noise is perceived when there's still a few photons here and there hitting the retina. If I unplug the monitor from my computer but leave it powered on - no snow. That's normal if you have a DVI or HDMI digital display - if the data is transmitted digitally, that greatly reduces the chances of it getting damaged. The problem I was talking about wasn't as much about display and transmitting as much as of the limitation of an ideal photon detector. I've seen you mention Feynman and QED - surely that would have given you a decent understanding on the limitations of capture devices (and no, QM does not contradicted by COMP: COMP predicts the 1p indeterminacy which gives rise locally to some QM/observational laws). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed-eye_hallucinationhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_snow Closed-eye hallucinations and closed-eye visualizations (CEV) are a distinct class of hallucination. These types of hallucinations generally only occur when one's eyes are closed or when one is in a darkened room. They are a form of phosphene. Phosphene is nothing more than a name. Calling them hallucinations is a loaded term. They are visual qualia, to me pretty obviously related to the physical neurology of the optical system and not to any computational interpretation software. You all can disagree, but I know that what I see seems like analog 'respiration', not digital representation. I take it you didn't read the rest of the article? The noise is inherent in any accurate simulation of such systems, be they the eye, an ideal photon detector or some quantum systems. Sure, hallucinations is a term, but is it 'wrong'? If for some reason I've been very tired and my cognitive load is high, my brain could start making errors when recognizing certain patterns - I would be hallucinating as whatever it is I was perceiving wasn't the correct perception. Any such mismatches would be hallucinations. Feed just noise into a neural network and you'll be sure it'll be making errors, and thus hallucinate - how do you think dreaming works? If what you perceive is likely 3p correct, it's not a hallucination. OF course, 3p being an inference done from the 1p, you can only bet on what is real and what isn't, you cannot ever truly know, and with COMP, real is just sharable reality. Also, you are very sure about your raw access to analog data, I wonder where you derive that confidence from. I have absolutely no way of knowing I have *direct* access to any analog data, actually I would be very skeptical of that, because of the implications it would have for local physics. Even with qualia, I don't see infinitely complex details - the only thing that I can communicate is that my view is coherent and unified. .. The noise probably originates from thermal noise exciting the photoreceptor cells in the retina That should be easy enough to test. The point though, is that it has no business leaking into our visual software. No computer has comparable thermal noise that leaks into the software, does it? You can get RF interference, sure, but why would a program tuned precisely to represent some things and not others include unfiltered noise in it's representation? I know it's not evidence that contradicts comp, but it's not supportive of it at all. I'm sorry, but I don't understand what you mean by 'leaking'. If the data that I captured is noisy (such as visual data), the software will handle noisy data. Nothing more, nothing less. If I do some image recognition or filter or *dynamically reconstruct* the image, it may look much cleaner, which is not that much different from what our visual system is *sometimes* doing (when it was enough matching patterns). Why don't we see clean images instead of a noisy convoluted mess during our daily lives? Because we actually see patterns which also happen to correct the input data (look at the hierarchical structure of the cortex or read On Intelligence for some examples. I could also link some PLoS articles about this, but I don't have them handy right now.) - we don't usually see raw unfiltered inputs. We shouldn't ever see raw unfiltered inputs,
Re: Qualia and mathematics
On 1/27/2012 15:36, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Jan 27, 12:49 am, acwa...@lavabit.com wrote: On 1/27/2012 05:55, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Jan 26, 9:32 pm, acwa...@lavabit.com wrote: There is nothing on the display except transitions of pixels. There is nothing in the universe, except transitions of states Only if you assume that our experience of the universe is not part of the universe. If you understand that pixels are generated by equipment we have designed specifically to generate optical perceptions for ourselves, then it is no surprise that it exploits our visual perception. To say that there is nothing in the universe except the transitions of states is a generalization presumably based on quantum theory, but there is nothing in quantum theory which explains how states scale up qualitatively so it doesn't apply to anything except quantum. If you're talking about 'states' in some other sense, then it's not much more explanatory than saying there is nothing except for things doing things. I'm not entirely sure what your theory is, Please have a look if you like: http://multisenserealism.com Seems quite complex, although it might be testable if your theory is developed in more detail such that it can offer some testable predictions. but if I had to make an initial guess (maybe wrong), it seems similar to some form of panpsychism directly over matter. Close, but not exactly. Panpsychism can imply that a rock has human- like experiences. My hypothesis can be categorized as panexperientialism because I do think that all forces and fields are figurative externalizations of processes which literally occur within and through 'matter'. Matter is in turn diffracted pieces of the primordial singularity. Not entirely sure what you mean by the singularity, but okay. It's confusing for us because we assume that motion and time are exterior conditions, by if my view is accurate, then all time and energy is literally interior to the observer as an experience. I think most people realize that the sense of time is subjective and relative, as with qualia. I think some form of time is required for self-consciousness. There can be different scales of time, for example, the local universe may very well run at planck-time (guesstimation based on popular physics theories, we cannot know, and with COMP, there's an infinity of such frames of references), but our conscious experience is much slower relative to that planck-time, usually assumed to run at a variable rate, at about 1-200Hz (neuron-spiking freq), although maybe observer moments could even be smaller in size. What I think is that matter and experience are two symmetrical but anomalous ontologies - two sides of the same coin, so that our qualia and content of experience is descended from accumulated sense experience of our constituent organism, not manufactured by their bodies, cells, molecules, interactions. The two both opposite expressions (a what how of matter and space and a who why of experience or energy and time) of the underlying sense that binds them to the singularity (where when). Accumulated sense experience? Our neurons do record our memories (lossily, as we also forget), and interacting matter does lead to state changes. Although, this (your theory) feels much like a reification of matter and qualia (and having them be nearly the same thing), and I think it's possible to find some inconsistencies here, more on this later in this post. Such theories are testable and falsifiable, although only in the 1p sense. A thing that should be worth keeping in mind is that whatever our experience is, it has to be consistent with our structure (or, if we admit, our computational equivalent) - it might be more than it, but it cannot be less than it. We wouldn't see in color if our eyes' photoreceptor cells didn't absorb overlapping ranges of light wavelengths and then processed it throughout the visual system (in some parts, in not-so-general ways, while in others, in more general ways). The structures that we are greatly limit the nature of our possible qualia. I understand what you are saying, and I agree the structures do limit our access to qualia, but not the form. Synesthesia, blindsight, and anosognosia show clearly that at the human level at least, sensory content is not tied to the nature of mechanism. We can taste color instead of see it, or know vision without seeing. This is not to say that we aren't limited by being a human being, of course we are, but our body is as much a vehicle for our experience as much as our experience is a filtered through our body. Indeed the brain makes no sense as anything other than a sensorimotive amplifier/condenser. Synesthesia can happen for multiple reasons, although one possible cause is that some parts of the neocortical hierarchy are more tightly inter-connected, which leads to sense-data from one region to directly affect processing of sense-data from an
Re: Qualia and mathematics
On 1/26/2012 08:19, Pierz wrote: As I continue to ponder the UDA, I keep coming back to a niggling doubt that an arithmetical ontology can ever really give a satisfactory explanation of qualia. It seems to me that imputing qualia to calculations (indeed consciousness at all, thought that may be the same thing) adds something that is not given by, or derivable from, any mathematical axiom. Surely this is illegitimate from a mathematical point of view. Every mathematical statement can only be made in terms of numbers and operators, so to talk about *qualities* arising out of numbers is not mathematics so much as numerology or qabbala. Here of course is where people start to invoke the wonderfully protean notion of ‘emergent properties’. Perhaps qualia emerge when a calculation becomes deep enough.Perhaps consciousness emerges from a complicated enough arrangement of neurons. But I’ll venture an axiom of my own here: no properties can emerge from a complex system that are not present in primitive form in the parts of that system. There is nothing mystical about emergent properties. When the emergent property of ‘pumping blood’ arises out of collections of heart cells, that property is a logical extension of the properties of the parts - physical properties such as elasticity, electrical conductivity, volume and so on that belong to the individual cells. But nobody invoking ‘emergent properties’ to explain consciousness in the brain has yet explained how consciousness arises as a natural extension of the known properties of brain cells - or indeed of matter at all. In the same way, I can’t see how qualia can emerge from arithmetic, unless the rudiments of qualia are present in the natural numbers or the operations of addition and mutiplication. And yet it seems to me they can’t be, because the only properties that belong to arithmetic are those leant to them by the axioms that define them. Indeed arithmetic *is* exactly those axioms and nothing more. Matter may in principle contain untold, undiscovered mysterious properties which I suppose might include the rudiments of consciousness. Yet mathematics is only what it is defined to be. Certainly it contains many mysteries emergent properties, but all these properties arise logically from its axioms and thus cannot include qualia. I call the idea that it can numerology because numerology also ascribes qualities to numbers. A ‘2’ in one’s birthdate indicates creativity (or something), a ‘4’ material ambition and so on. Because the emergent properties of numbers can indeed be deeply amazing and wonderful - Mandelbrot sets and so on - there is a natural human tendency to mystify them, to project properties of the imagination into them. But if these qualities really do inhere in numbers and are not put there purely by our projection, then numbers must be more than their definitions. We must posit the numbers as something that projects out of a supraordinate reality that is not purely mathematical - ie, not merely composed of the axioms that define an arithmetic. This then can no longer be described as a mathematical ontology, but rather a kind of numerical mysticism. And because something extrinsic to the axioms has been added, it opens the way for all kinds of other unicorns and fairies that can never be proved from the maths alone. This is unprovability not of the mathematical variety, but more of the variety that cries out for Mr Occam’s shaving apparatus. Why would any structure give rise to qualia? We think some structure (for example our brain, or the abstract computation or arithmetical truth/structure representing it) does and we communicate it to others in a 3p way. The options here are to either say qualia exists and our internal beliefs (which also have 'physical' correlates) are correct, or that it doesn't and we're all delusional, although in the second case, the belief is self-defeating because the 3p world is inferred through the 1p view. It makes logical sense that a structure which has such beliefs as ourselves could have the same qualia (or a digital substitution of our brain), but this is *unprovable*. If you don't eliminate qualia away, do you think the principle described here makes sense? http://consc.net/papers/qualia.html If we don't attribute consciousness to some structures or just 'how a computation feels from the inside' then we're forced to believe that consciousness is a very fickle thing. As for arithmetic/numbers - Peano Arithmetic is strong enough to describe computation which is enough to describe just about any finite structure/process (although potentially unbounded in time) and our own thought processes are such processes if neuroscience is to be believed. Arithmetic itself can admit many interpretation and axioms tell you what 'arithmetic' isn't and what theorems must follow, not what it is - can you explain to me what a number is without appealing to a model or interpretation? Arithmetical
Re: Qualia and mathematics
On 1/27/2012 03:27, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Jan 26, 5:52 pm, Russell Standishli...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: On Jan 26, 1:19 am, Pierzpier...@gmail.com wrote: of my own here: no properties can emerge from a complex system that are not present in primitive form in the parts of that system. There What about gliders emerging from the rules of Game of Life? There are no primitive form gliders in the transition table, nor in static cells of the grid. There is nothing to the gliders except transitions of the static cells. The interpretation that there is a visual pattern gliding is only our perception of it. It's Beta movement. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_movement Craig There is nothing on the display except transitions of pixels. There is nothing in the universe, except transitions of states (unless a time continuum (as in real numbers) is assumed, but that's a very strong assumption). (One can also apply a form of MGA with this assumption (+the digital subst. one) to show that consciousness has to be something more abstract than merely matter.) It doesn't change the fact that either a human or an AI capable of some types of pattern recognition would form the internal beliefs that there is a glider moving in a particular direction. This belief would even be strengthened if you increase the resolution of your digital array/grid by enough, have some high-level stable emergent patterns in it and only allow sensing (either by an external party or something embedded in it) in an inexact, potentially randomized way (such as only being able to sense an average of the block, for example, if trying to access an NxN-sized block, you'd only be able to access a quantized average, and the offsets being sensed would be randomized slightly) - they would even prefer to work with a continuum because there's no easy way of establishing a precise resolution or sensing at that low level, but regardless of how sensing (indirectly accessing data) is done, emergent digital movement patterns would look like (continuous) movement to the observer. Also, it would not be very wise to assume humans are capable of sensing such a magical continuum directly (even if it existed), the evidence that says that humans' sense visual information through their eyes: when a photon hits a photoreceptor cell, that *binary* piece of information is transmitted through neurons connected to that cell and so on throughout the visual system(...-V1-...-V4-IT-...) and eventually up to the prefrontal cortex. Neurons are also rather slow, they can only spike about once per 5ms (~200Hz), although they rarely do so often. (Note that I'm not saying that conscious experience is only the current brain state in a single universe with only one timeline and nothing more, in COMP, the (infinite amount of) counterfactuals are also important, for example for selecting the next state, or for splits and mergers). -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Qualia and mathematics
On 1/27/2012 05:55, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Jan 26, 9:32 pm, acwa...@lavabit.com wrote: There is nothing on the display except transitions of pixels. There is nothing in the universe, except transitions of states Only if you assume that our experience of the universe is not part of the universe. If you understand that pixels are generated by equipment we have designed specifically to generate optical perceptions for ourselves, then it is no surprise that it exploits our visual perception. To say that there is nothing in the universe except the transitions of states is a generalization presumably based on quantum theory, but there is nothing in quantum theory which explains how states scale up qualitatively so it doesn't apply to anything except quantum. If you're talking about 'states' in some other sense, then it's not much more explanatory than saying there is nothing except for things doing things. I'm not entirely sure what your theory is, but if I had to make an initial guess (maybe wrong), it seems similar to some form of panpsychism directly over matter. Such theories are testable and falsifiable, although only in the 1p sense. A thing that should be worth keeping in mind is that whatever our experience is, it has to be consistent with our structure (or, if we admit, our computational equivalent) - it might be more than it, but it cannot be less than it. We wouldn't see in color if our eyes' photoreceptor cells didn't absorb overlapping ranges of light wavelengths and then processed it throughout the visual system (in some parts, in not-so-general ways, while in others, in more general ways). The structures that we are greatly limit the nature of our possible qualia. Your theory would have to at least take structural properties into account or likely risk being shown wrong in experiments that would be possible in the more distant future (of course, since all such experiments discuss the 1p, you can always reject them, because you can only vouch for your own 1p experiences and you seem to be inclined to disbelieve any computational equivalents merely on the ground that you refuse to assign qualia to abstract structures). As for 'the universe', in COMP - the universe is a matter of epistemology (machine's beliefs), and all that is, is just arithmetical truth reflecting on itself (so with a very relaxed definition of 'universe', there's really nothing that isn't part of it; but with the classical definition, it's not something ontologically primitive, but an emergent shared belief). What I'm talking about is something different. We don't have to guess what the pixels of Conway's game of life are doing because, we are the ones who are displaying the game in an animated sequences. The game could be displayed as a single pixel instead and be no different to the computer. I have no idea how a randomly chosen computation will evolve over time, except in cases where one carefully designed the computation to be very predictable, but even then we can be surprised. Your view of computation seems to be that it's just something people write to try to model some process or to achieve some particular behavior - that's the local engineer view. In practice computation is unpredictable, unless we can rigorously prove what it can do, and it's also trivially easy to make machines which we cannot know a damn thing about what they will do without running them for enough steps. After seeing how some computation behaves over time, we may form some beliefs about it by induction, but unless we can prove that it will only behave in some particular way, we can still be surprised by it. Computation can do a lot of things, and we should explore its limits and possibilities! (unless a time continuum (as in real numbers) is assumed, but that's a very strong assumption). (One can also apply a form of MGA with this assumption (+the digital subst. one) to show that consciousness has to be something more abstract than merely matter.) It doesn't change the fact that either a human or an AI capable of some types of pattern recognition would form the internal beliefs that there is a glider moving in a particular direction. Yes, it does. A computer gets no benefit at all from seeing the pixels arrayed in a matrix. It doesn't even need to run the game, it can just load each frame of the game in memory and not have any 'internal beliefs' about gliders moving. Benefit? I only considered a form of narrow AI which is capable of recognizing patterns in its sense data without doing anything about them, but merely classifying it and possibly doing some inferences from them. Both of this is possible using various current AI research. However, if we're talking about benefit here, I invite you to think about what 'emotions', 'urges' and 'goals' are - we have a reward/emotional system and its behavior isn't undefined, it can be reasoned about, not only that, one can model structures like
Re: Question about PA and 1p
On 1/11/2012 19:22, Stephen P. King wrote: Hi, I have a question. Does not the Tennenbaum Theorem prevent the concept of first person plural from having a coherent meaning, since it seems to makes PA unique and singular? In other words, how can multiple copies of PA generate a plurality of first person since they would be an equivalence class. It seems to me that the concept of plurality of 1p requires a 3p to be coherent, but how does a 3p exist unless it is a 1p in the PA sense? Onward! Stephen My understanding of 1p plural is merely many 1p's sharing an apparent 3p world. That 3p world may or may not be globally coherent (it is most certainly locally coherent), and may or may not be computable, typically I imagine it as being locally computed by an infinity of TMs, from the 1p. At least one coherent 3p foundation exists as the UD, but that's something very different from the universe a structural realist would believe in (for example, 'this universe', or the MWI multiverse). So a coherent 3p foundation always exists, possibly an infinity of them. The parts (or even the whole) of the 3p foundation should be found within the UD. As for PA's consciousness, I don't know, maybe Bruno can say a lot more about this. My understanding of consciousness in Bruno's theory is that an OM(Observer Moment) corresponds to a Sigma-1 sentence. I think you might be confusing structures/relations which can be contained within PA with PA itself. On 1/11/2012 12:07 PM, acw wrote: On 1/10/2012 17:48, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 10 Jan 2012, at 12:58, acw wrote: On 1/10/2012 12:03, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 09 Jan 2012, at 19:36, acw wrote: To put it more simply: if Church Turing Thesis(CTT) is correct, mathematics is the same for any system or being you can imagine. I am not sure why. Sigma_1 arithmetic would be the same; but higher mathematics (set theory, analysis) might still be different. If it's wrong, maybe stuff like concrete infinities, hypercomputation and infinite minds could exist and that would falsify COMP, however there is zero evidence for any of that being possible. Not sure, if CT is wrong, there would be finite machines, working in finite time, with well defined instructions, which would be NOT Turing emulable. Hypercomputation and infinite (human) minds would contradict comp, not CT. On the contrary, they need CT to claim that they compute more than any programmable machines. CT is part of comp, but comp is not part of CT. Beyond this, I agree with your reply to Craig. In that response I was using CT in the more unrestricted form: all effectively computable functions are Turing-computable. I understand, but that is confusing. David Deutsch and many physicists are a bit responsible of that confusion, by attempting to have a notion of effectivity relying on physics. The original statement of Church, Turing, Markov, Post, ... concerns only the intuitively human computable functions, or the functions computable by finitary means. It asserts that the class of such intuitively computable functions is the same as the class of functions computable by some Turing machine (or by the unique universal Turing machine). Such a notion is a priori completely independent of the notion of computable by physical means. Yes, with the usual notion of Turing-computable, you don't really need more than arithmetic. It might be a bit stronger than the usual equivalency proofs between a very wide range of models of computation (Turing machines, Abacus/PA machines, (primitive) recursive functions (+minimization), all kinds of more current models of computation, languages and so on). Yes. I even suspect that CT makes the class of functions computable by physics greater than the class of Church. That could be possible, but more evidence is needed for this(beyond the random oracle). I also wonder 2 other things: 1) would we be able to really know if we find ourselves in such a world (I'm leaning toward unlikely, but I'm agnostic about this) 2) would someone performing my experiment(described in another message), lose the ability to find himself in such a world (I'm leaning toward 'no, if it's possible now, it should still be possible'). If hypercomputation was actually possible that would mean that strong variant of CT would be false, because there would be something effectively computable that wasn't computable by a Turing machine. OK. In a way, that strong form of CT might already be false with comp, only in the 1p sense as you get a free random oracle as well as always staying consistent(and 'alive'), but it's not false in the 3p view... Yes. Comp makes physics a first person plural reality, and a priori we might be able to exploit the first plural indeterminacy to compute more function, like we know already that we have more processes, like that free random oracle. The empirical fact that quantum computer does not violate CT can make us doubt about this. In the third
Re: An analogy for Qualia
On 1/10/2012 17:48, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 10 Jan 2012, at 12:58, acw wrote: On 1/10/2012 12:03, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 09 Jan 2012, at 19:36, acw wrote: To put it more simply: if Church Turing Thesis(CTT) is correct, mathematics is the same for any system or being you can imagine. I am not sure why. Sigma_1 arithmetic would be the same; but higher mathematics (set theory, analysis) might still be different. If it's wrong, maybe stuff like concrete infinities, hypercomputation and infinite minds could exist and that would falsify COMP, however there is zero evidence for any of that being possible. Not sure, if CT is wrong, there would be finite machines, working in finite time, with well defined instructions, which would be NOT Turing emulable. Hypercomputation and infinite (human) minds would contradict comp, not CT. On the contrary, they need CT to claim that they compute more than any programmable machines. CT is part of comp, but comp is not part of CT. Beyond this, I agree with your reply to Craig. In that response I was using CT in the more unrestricted form: all effectively computable functions are Turing-computable. I understand, but that is confusing. David Deutsch and many physicists are a bit responsible of that confusion, by attempting to have a notion of effectivity relying on physics. The original statement of Church, Turing, Markov, Post, ... concerns only the intuitively human computable functions, or the functions computable by finitary means. It asserts that the class of such intuitively computable functions is the same as the class of functions computable by some Turing machine (or by the unique universal Turing machine). Such a notion is a priori completely independent of the notion of computable by physical means. Yes, with the usual notion of Turing-computable, you don't really need more than arithmetic. It might be a bit stronger than the usual equivalency proofs between a very wide range of models of computation (Turing machines, Abacus/PA machines, (primitive) recursive functions (+minimization), all kinds of more current models of computation, languages and so on). Yes. I even suspect that CT makes the class of functions computable by physics greater than the class of Church. That could be possible, but more evidence is needed for this(beyond the random oracle). I also wonder 2 other things: 1) would we be able to really know if we find ourselves in such a world (I'm leaning toward unlikely, but I'm agnostic about this) 2) would someone performing my experiment(described in another message), lose the ability to find himself in such a world (I'm leaning toward 'no, if it's possible now, it should still be possible'). If hypercomputation was actually possible that would mean that strong variant of CT would be false, because there would be something effectively computable that wasn't computable by a Turing machine. OK. In a way, that strong form of CT might already be false with comp, only in the 1p sense as you get a free random oracle as well as always staying consistent(and 'alive'), but it's not false in the 3p view... Yes. Comp makes physics a first person plural reality, and a priori we might be able to exploit the first plural indeterminacy to compute more function, like we know already that we have more processes, like that free random oracle. The empirical fact that quantum computer does not violate CT can make us doubt about this. In the third person, there's no need to consider more than UD, which seems to place some limits on what is possible, but in the first person, the possibilities are more plentiful (if COMP). Also, I do wonder if the same universality that is present in the current CT would be present in hypercomputation (if one were to assume it would be possible) Yes, at least for many type of hypercomputation, notably of the form of computability with some oracle. - would it even retain CT's current immunity from diagonalization? Yes. Actually the immunity of the class of computable functions entails the immunity of the class of computable functions with oracle. So the consistency of CT entails the consistency of some super-CT for larger class. But I doubt that there is a super-CT for the class of functions computable by physical means. I am a bit agnostic on that. OK, although this doesn't seem trivial to me. As for the mathematical truth part, I mostly meant that from the perspective of a computable machine talking about axiomatic systems - as it is computable, the same machine (theorem prover) would always yield the same results in all possible worlds(or shared dreams). I see here why you have some problem with AUDA (and logic). CT = the notion of computability is absolute. But provability is not absolute at all. Even with CT, different machine talking or using different axiomatic system will obtain different theorems. In fact this is even an easy (one diagonalization) consequence
Re: Question about PA and 1p
On 1/11/2012 19:22, Stephen P. King wrote: Hi, I have a question. Does not the Tennenbaum Theorem prevent the concept of first person plural from having a coherent meaning, since it seems to makes PA unique and singular? In other words, how can multiple copies of PA generate a plurality of first person since they would be an equivalence class. It seems to me that the concept of plurality of 1p requires a 3p to be coherent, but how does a 3p exist unless it is a 1p in the PA sense? Onward! Stephen My understanding of 1p plural is merely many 1p's sharing an apparent 3p world. That 3p world may or may not be globally coherent (it is most certainly locally coherent), and may or may not be computable, typically I imagine it as being locally computed by an infinity of TMs, from the 1p. At least one coherent 3p foundation exists as the UD, but that's something very different from the universe a structural realist would believe in (for example, 'this universe', or the MWI multiverse). So a coherent 3p foundation always exists, possibly an infinity of them. The parts (or even the whole) of the 3p foundation should be found within the UD. As for PA's consciousness, I don't know, maybe Bruno can say a lot more about this. My understanding of consciousness in Bruno's theory is that an OM(Observer Moment) corresponds to a Sigma-1 sentence. I think you might be confusing structures/relations which can be contained within PA with PA itself. On 1/11/2012 12:07 PM, acw wrote: On 1/10/2012 17:48, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 10 Jan 2012, at 12:58, acw wrote: On 1/10/2012 12:03, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 09 Jan 2012, at 19:36, acw wrote: To put it more simply: if Church Turing Thesis(CTT) is correct, mathematics is the same for any system or being you can imagine. I am not sure why. Sigma_1 arithmetic would be the same; but higher mathematics (set theory, analysis) might still be different. If it's wrong, maybe stuff like concrete infinities, hypercomputation and infinite minds could exist and that would falsify COMP, however there is zero evidence for any of that being possible. Not sure, if CT is wrong, there would be finite machines, working in finite time, with well defined instructions, which would be NOT Turing emulable. Hypercomputation and infinite (human) minds would contradict comp, not CT. On the contrary, they need CT to claim that they compute more than any programmable machines. CT is part of comp, but comp is not part of CT. Beyond this, I agree with your reply to Craig. In that response I was using CT in the more unrestricted form: all effectively computable functions are Turing-computable. I understand, but that is confusing. David Deutsch and many physicists are a bit responsible of that confusion, by attempting to have a notion of effectivity relying on physics. The original statement of Church, Turing, Markov, Post, ... concerns only the intuitively human computable functions, or the functions computable by finitary means. It asserts that the class of such intuitively computable functions is the same as the class of functions computable by some Turing machine (or by the unique universal Turing machine). Such a notion is a priori completely independent of the notion of computable by physical means. Yes, with the usual notion of Turing-computable, you don't really need more than arithmetic. It might be a bit stronger than the usual equivalency proofs between a very wide range of models of computation (Turing machines, Abacus/PA machines, (primitive) recursive functions (+minimization), all kinds of more current models of computation, languages and so on). Yes. I even suspect that CT makes the class of functions computable by physics greater than the class of Church. That could be possible, but more evidence is needed for this(beyond the random oracle). I also wonder 2 other things: 1) would we be able to really know if we find ourselves in such a world (I'm leaning toward unlikely, but I'm agnostic about this) 2) would someone performing my experiment(described in another message), lose the ability to find himself in such a world (I'm leaning toward 'no, if it's possible now, it should still be possible'). If hypercomputation was actually possible that would mean that strong variant of CT would be false, because there would be something effectively computable that wasn't computable by a Turing machine. OK. In a way, that strong form of CT might already be false with comp, only in the 1p sense as you get a free random oracle as well as always staying consistent(and 'alive'), but it's not false in the 3p view... Yes. Comp makes physics a first person plural reality, and a priori we might be able to exploit the first plural indeterminacy to compute more function, like we know already that we have more processes, like that free random oracle. The empirical fact that quantum computer does not violate CT can make us doubt about
Re: An analogy for Qualia
On 1/10/2012 12:03, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 09 Jan 2012, at 19:36, acw wrote: On 1/9/2012 19:54, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Jan 9, 12:00 pm, Bruno Marchalmarc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 09 Jan 2012, at 14:50, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Jan 9, 6:06 am, Bruno Marchalmarc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: I agree with your general reply to Craig, but I disagree that computations are physical. That's the revisionist conception of computation, defended by Deustch, Landauer, etc. Computations have been discovered by mathematicians when trying to expalin some foundational difficulties in pure mathematics. Mathematicians aren't physical? Computations are discovered through a living nervous system, one that has been highly developed and conditioned specifically for that purpose. Computation and mechanism have been discovered by many people since humans are there. It is related to the understanding of the difference between finite and infinite. The modern notion has been discovered independently by many mathematicians, notably Emil Post, Alan Turing, Alonzo Church, Andrzei Markov, etc. With the comp. hyp., this is easily explainable, given that we are somehow made of (in some not completely Aristotelian sense to be sure) computations. They are making those discoveries by using their physical brain though. Sure, but that requires one to better understand what a physical brain is. In the case of COMP(given some basic assumptions), matter is explained as appearing from simpler abstract mathematical relations, in which case, a brain would be an inevitable consequence of such relations. We can implement computation in the physical worlds, but that means only that the physical reality is (at least) Turing universal. Theoretical computer science is a branch of pure mathematics, even completely embeddable in arithmetical truth. And pure mathematics is a branch of anthropology. I thought you already agreed that the arithmetical truth are independent of the existence of humans, from old posts you write. Explain me, please, how the truth or falsity of the Riemann hypothesis, or of Goldbach conjecture depend(s) on anthropology. Please, explain me how the convergence or divergence of phi_(j) depends on the existence of humans (with phi_i = the ith computable function in an enumeration based on some universal system). The whole idea of truth or falsity in the first place depends on humans capacities to interpret experiences in those terms. We can read this quality of truth or falsity into many aspects of our direct and indirect experience, but that doesn't mean that the quality itself is external to us. If you look at a starfish, you can see it has five arms, but the starfish doesn't necessarily know it had five arms. Yet that the fact the starfish has 5 arms is a fact, regardless of the starfish's awareness of it. It will have many consequences with regards of how the starfish interacts with the rest of the world or how any other system perceives it. If you see something colored red, you will know that you saw red and that is 'true', and that it will be false that you didn't see 'red', assuming you recognize 'red' the same as everyone else and that your nervous system isn't wired too strangely or if your sensory systems aren't defective or function differently than average. Consequences of mathematical truths will be everywhere, regardless if you understand them or not. A circle's length will depend on its radius regardless if you understand the relation or not. Any system, be they human, computer or alien, regardless of the laws of physics in play should also be able to compute (Church-Turing Thesis shows that computation comes very cheap and all it takes is ability of some simple abstract finite rules being followed and always yielding the same result, although specific proofs for showing Turing-universality would depend on each system - some may be too simple to have such a property, but then, it's questionable if they would be powerful enough to support intelligence or even more trivial behavior such as life/replicators or evolution), and if they can, they will always get the same results if they asked the same computational or mathematical question (in this case, mathematical truths, or even yet unknown truths such as Riemann hypothesis, Goldbach conjecture, and so on). Most physics should support computation, and I conjecture that any physics that isn't strong enough to at least support computation isn't strong enough to support intelligence or consciousness (and computation comes very cheap!). Support computation and you get any mathematical truth that humans can reach/talk about. Don't support it, and you probably won't have any intelligence in it. To put it more simply: if Church Turing Thesis(CTT) is correct, mathematics is the same for any system or being you can imagine. I am not sure why. Sigma_1 arithmetic would be the same; but higher mathematics (set theory, analysis) might still
Re: An analogy for Qualia
On 1/9/2012 19:54, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Jan 9, 12:00 pm, Bruno Marchalmarc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 09 Jan 2012, at 14:50, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Jan 9, 6:06 am, Bruno Marchalmarc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: I agree with your general reply to Craig, but I disagree that computations are physical. That's the revisionist conception of computation, defended by Deustch, Landauer, etc. Computations have been discovered by mathematicians when trying to expalin some foundational difficulties in pure mathematics. Mathematicians aren't physical? Computations are discovered through a living nervous system, one that has been highly developed and conditioned specifically for that purpose. Computation and mechanism have been discovered by many people since humans are there. It is related to the understanding of the difference between finite and infinite. The modern notion has been discovered independently by many mathematicians, notably Emil Post, Alan Turing, Alonzo Church, Andrzei Markov, etc. With the comp. hyp., this is easily explainable, given that we are somehow made of (in some not completely Aristotelian sense to be sure) computations. They are making those discoveries by using their physical brain though. Sure, but that requires one to better understand what a physical brain is. In the case of COMP(given some basic assumptions), matter is explained as appearing from simpler abstract mathematical relations, in which case, a brain would be an inevitable consequence of such relations. We can implement computation in the physical worlds, but that means only that the physical reality is (at least) Turing universal. Theoretical computer science is a branch of pure mathematics, even completely embeddable in arithmetical truth. And pure mathematics is a branch of anthropology. I thought you already agreed that the arithmetical truth are independent of the existence of humans, from old posts you write. Explain me, please, how the truth or falsity of the Riemann hypothesis, or of Goldbach conjecture depend(s) on anthropology. Please, explain me how the convergence or divergence of phi_(j) depends on the existence of humans (with phi_i = the ith computable function in an enumeration based on some universal system). The whole idea of truth or falsity in the first place depends on humans capacities to interpret experiences in those terms. We can read this quality of truth or falsity into many aspects of our direct and indirect experience, but that doesn't mean that the quality itself is external to us. If you look at a starfish, you can see it has five arms, but the starfish doesn't necessarily know it had five arms. Yet that the fact the starfish has 5 arms is a fact, regardless of the starfish's awareness of it. It will have many consequences with regards of how the starfish interacts with the rest of the world or how any other system perceives it. If you see something colored red, you will know that you saw red and that is 'true', and that it will be false that you didn't see 'red', assuming you recognize 'red' the same as everyone else and that your nervous system isn't wired too strangely or if your sensory systems aren't defective or function differently than average. Consequences of mathematical truths will be everywhere, regardless if you understand them or not. A circle's length will depend on its radius regardless if you understand the relation or not. Any system, be they human, computer or alien, regardless of the laws of physics in play should also be able to compute (Church-Turing Thesis shows that computation comes very cheap and all it takes is ability of some simple abstract finite rules being followed and always yielding the same result, although specific proofs for showing Turing-universality would depend on each system - some may be too simple to have such a property, but then, it's questionable if they would be powerful enough to support intelligence or even more trivial behavior such as life/replicators or evolution), and if they can, they will always get the same results if they asked the same computational or mathematical question (in this case, mathematical truths, or even yet unknown truths such as Riemann hypothesis, Goldbach conjecture, and so on). Most physics should support computation, and I conjecture that any physics that isn't strong enough to at least support computation isn't strong enough to support intelligence or consciousness (and computation comes very cheap!). Support computation and you get any mathematical truth that humans can reach/talk about. Don't support it, and you probably won't have any intelligence in it. To put it more simply: if Church Turing Thesis(CTT) is correct, mathematics is the same for any system or being you can imagine. If it's wrong, maybe stuff like concrete infinities, hypercomputation and infinite minds could exist and that would falsify COMP, however there is zero evidence for any
Re: JOINING Post and On measure alteration mechanisms and other practical tests for COMP
On 1/6/2012 18:57, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 05 Jan 2012, at 11:02, acw wrote: Hello everything-list, this is my first post here, but I've been reading this list for at least half a year, and I'm afraid this post will be a bit long as it contains many thoughts I've had on my mind for quite some time now. Welcome acw. It looks like you wrote an interesting post. But it is very long, as are most sentences in it. I will make some easy comments. I will come back on it later, when I have more time. Thanks, I look forward to the full response. A bit about me: I'm mostly self-taught in the matters concerning the topics of 'everything-list' (Multiverse hypotheses, philosophy of science, 'rationalism', theory of computation, cognitive science, AI, models of computation, logic, physics), and I greatly enjoy reading books and papers on the related subjects. My main activities center mostly around software development and a various other fields directly related to it. OK. Self-teaching is often of better quality than listening to others. It's fine and allows one to better study some matters, but it also may lead to gaps in knowledge if one isn't aware of the gaps. I will give my positions/assumptions first before talking about the actual topic I mentioned in the subject. One of my positions (what I'm betting on, but cannot know) is that of computationalism, that is, that one would survive a digital substitution. OK. As you know that is my working hypothesis. As a scientist I don't know the truth. I certainly find it plausible, given our current knowledge, and my main goal is to show that it leads to testable consequences. Mainly, it reduces the mind body problem into an arithmetical pure body problem. Neither do I claim to know the truth, or should anyone else, if someone claims to know it, they may be telling a lie, voluntarily or not. Our senses aren't that reliable to claim absolute knowledge about the world and even when talking about mathematical truth, the incompleteness theorem applies to everyone. Instead of truth, I tend to assign a theory a high confidence value, or to consider it more probable than others, but the only thing that we can really do beyond that is testing, falsification or verification of our expectations/theories. It sort of was the main goal of my post - to show that there are some practical ways to test COMP that one might be able to do some day. There are however many details regarding this that would have to be made more precise and topic's goal is to elucidate some of these uncertainties and invite others to give their ideas on the subject. Why computationalism? Chalmers' Absent Qualia, Fading Qualia, Dancing Qualia thought experiment/argument shows that one can be forced to believe some seemingly absurd things about the nature of consciousness if functionalism is false (that is, if one assumes that conscious nature depends on more than just functional organization, such as some magical properties of matter). Taking it from functionalism to computationalism isn't very hard either, all it takes is assuming no concrete infinities are involved in the brain's implementation and the CTT(Church Turing Thesis) does the rest. OK. And if you make explicit that COMP assumes only the existence of a level, then you see that COMP, as discussed on this list, is a weaker hypothesis that all the comp discussed in the literature. That is why I refer to the generalized brain. The level can be so low that the generalized brain is an entire galaxy or even a multiverse quantum state. This does not make the assumption trivial, the main reversal, between Aristotle theology and Plato theology still follows. Too low a level and functionalism is no longer very practically testable, but the consequences of COMP (reversal) would still apply if it's true. In my example (the experiment) from the previous post, I tried to assume a reasonable (mid(atomic)/high(neurons or higher)) substitution level, in that it could be tested someday. Such a mid/high-substitution level allows for the mind's implementation to become substrate independent (SIM), but if the new implementation isn't too exact, would the continuation likely or not: it should be conscious, but would it be likely to experience a continuation into a SIM after saying 'yes' to the doctor? Would it be more likely to end up amnesiac and just choose not to become a SIM? I've discussed the matter of errors or inexact 'copies' in the previous post and will wait for your response on that part before going into more details again. In a way, I think it might be more reasonable to consider the mind's implementation and the environment's implementation separately (even if environment+mind are at least one (and infinity of) TM in COMP) as the environment has more chance to vary and only indirectly leads to conscious experience, or that it might be more of a wildcard. While I cannot ever know
