Re: Interpretations, subjectivity
On Mon, Jul 12, 1999 at 09:07:17PM -0400, Hans Moravec wrote: > And we have no reason to believe that they don't exist. We've never > looked. My main example was a 3D Fourier transform of the sun > density: Each wave (direction, frequency) mode of the sun becomes a > point in the Fourier space. Adjacent points interact by energy > leaking between nearby wave modes due to medium nonlinearities. > > A Fourier transform is linear, and thus has very low logical depth. > If the sun is resolved into n elements (each about atomic size), a > linear transform can be expressed as a matrix with n^2 numeric > coefficients. If you restrict it to orthogonal transforms, the number > of degrees of freedom drops to n^2/2, I think. That's a huge space to > (something like 10^(10^50) combinations) to search, with low logical > depth. Can you guarantee that somewhere in there isn't a space or two > that has hosted self-replicators, evolution and intelligence? I didn't realize you meant the knob to be this big and have this many degrees of freedom. But again I would hardly call this interpretation, since the linear transform is providing more information than the sun. A simpler idea would be to look at all possible XORs of the sun considered as a bit string. Obviously you will end up with all possible strings of the same length, some of them having intelligent beings. How is this different from your idea? Perhaps what you're saying is that most of the transformed spaces would have its own laws of physics, similar to the 3D fourier transform. But if this is true you could embed a different computer in each space and perform n^2 computations simultanously with only n particles, which is impossible. In fact the number of transformed spaces with its own laws of physics must be at most a small constant (otherwise again you can do more than n computations with n particles), and since we know that the range of physical laws and constants that allow intelligent beings to evolve are very narrow, we can be fairly certain that none of these transformed spaces have evolved intelligent beings.
Re: Interpretations, subjectivity
Wei Dai: > ... we have no reason to believe that there exist intelligent beings > with low logical depth relative to the particle positions or motions > in the sun... And we have no reason to believe that they don't exist. We've never looked. My main example was a 3D Fourier transform of the sun density: Each wave (direction, frequency) mode of the sun becomes a point in the Fourier space. Adjacent points interact by energy leaking between nearby wave modes due to medium nonlinearities. A Fourier transform is linear, and thus has very low logical depth. If the sun is resolved into n elements (each about atomic size), a linear transform can be expressed as a matrix with n^2 numeric coefficients. If you restrict it to orthogonal transforms, the number of degrees of freedom drops to n^2/2, I think. That's a huge space to (something like 10^(10^50) combinations) to search, with low logical depth. Can you guarantee that somewhere in there isn't a space or two that has hosted self-replicators, evolution and intelligence? > And certainly the number of such beings could not be more than the > number of particles in the sun How do you figure this? Anyway, I'd be satisfied with 10^50 inhabited spaces among the 10^(10^50) possibilities! Obviously a needle-in-a-haystack problem that would require SETI or code-cracking style mass searches. > it would have to do so by simulating a new universe, perhaps with > the sun as the "seed" and the knob determining the physical > constants. In that case I see no reason to call the gadget an > interpretation device. I would expect the inhabitants to relate a long, documented, history covering the millions of years before my gadget found the setting revealing their world to me. And to tell me what happened in the interim when I dial them up at a later time. > Why do you believe that subjectivity is a subjective attribute? > Could subjectivity not be an objective attribute? I don't think so. Every attempt at an objective model I've ever seen is ill defined or full of paradoxes, just like objective attempts to define beauty. You know it when you see it, but different people see it differently. On the other hand, treating it as a subjective property that can be its own beholder seems to work just great. Pushed to extremes it produces some counterintuitive (but consistent) conclusions, like pan-psychism, but I actually enjoy those.
Re: Interpretations, subjectivity
On Thu, Jul 08, 1999 at 01:01:32AM -0400, Hans Moravec wrote: > Thinking about interpretations brought me to the all-universes position! > You may remember the early stages of the rumination in in Mind Children, > where I discussed possible beings in Fourier and other transforms of > normal space, each transform being a different interpretation and an > independent universe, for which the others were merely background noise. > The interpretation route connects a lot of possible worlds to our > present experience, and opens the possibility of seeing some of > them. I imagined a gadget that, as you turned a knob, scanned through > a large number of possible transforms, say of the sun. Most of the > setting would show noise, but just possibly you find a transform where > intelligent beings had evolved like the ones I postulated in > the Fourier domain. (Visual and audio interfaces to simulators and > video games already do this in a premeditated way, allowing > us to interpret confusing electron motions in a handful of silicon bits > as the exciting life of the Super Mario Brothers.) You must be familiar with the concept of logical depth of a string, which is defined as the number of steps it takes for the shortest program to produce the string as output. Now consider the logical depth of a string x relative to y, which is the number of steps it takes for the shortest program on input y to produce x as output. The visual and audio interfaces of games work because the logical depth of the Super Mario Brothers video and audio have low logical depth relative to the electron motions in the computer chips. On the other hand we have no reason to believe that there exist intelligent beings with low logical depth relative to the particle positions or motions in the sun. And certainly the number of such beings could not be more than the number of particles in the sun, which means opportunity for interpretation would be limited if it existed at all. In all likihood, if your gadget did work, it would have to do so by simulating a new universe, perhaps with the sun as the "seed" and the knob determining the physical constants. In that case I see no reason to call the gadget an interpretation device. > On the one hand, an engineer who completely understands a robot has no > need to attribute subjectivity to it, since she can fully explain, and > even predict, everything the robot does from a mechanistic model > of the designed interaction of its parts. Why do you believe that subjectivity is a subjective attribute? Could subjectivity not be an objective attribute?
Re: Interpretations, subjectivity
Christopher Maloney wrote: > You forgot to mention the other phrase I used, "patently absurd"Now, when I >dismiss the concept of zombies out of hand, I don't > think I'm being unscientific. Quite the contrary -- it feels to > me like those who ponder their (possible) existence are being > unscientific. ... > > I really didn't want to have this conversation -- go bother > someone else about it. Please just accept that I've dismissed > the notion to my own satisfaction. > Sigh. Calling something "patently absurd" without giving specific evidence of absurdity (i.e., logical contradiction or experimental falsification) is hardly how science should be practiced. Everett's original relative-sate idea was dismissed by many physicists of the day simply on the grounds that it lead to "absurdities," which just meant conclusions that, because of subjective bias, they found uncongenial. Point made, end of topic unless someone else has something specific to add. Steve Price, M.D.
Re: Interpretations, subjectivity
Christopher Maloney : Ugh, I don't even want to *talk* about zombies. I find the whole concept patently absurd, and in a way, ethically repugnant. By that I mean that it seems to me awfully grandiose and anthro- centric to even presume that some other creature that exhibits all the traits of consciousness and thoughtfulness, could some- how not be conscious or thoughtful. SLP: Closing the door on something by saying that it is "ethically repugnant" is the most outrageous and anti-scientific approach imaginable. Primitivists once held anesthesia and airplanes as "ethically repugnant" because they allegedly encroached on territory that God had forbidden to mankind. Similar mentalities today hold human cloning and germ line engineering "ethically repugnant" for the same reason, and the political clout they wield may actually (and tragically) delay implementation of these important technologies by a few years. I am both surprised and disappointed that someone on this list would adopt such an anti-science point of view. Consider this point. To a savage, anything that moves by its own power seems "alive" When the first railroads were introduced in Africa in the 19th century, many ignorant natives (lacking an understanding of what life actually is) actually thought that locomotives were living creatures. Anyone who sumptuarily declares that a device "that exhibits all the traits of consciousness and thoughtfulness" must somehow necessarily be "conscious or thoughtful" runs the risk of committing the same error as the savage. Steve Price, MD
Re: Interpretations, subjectivity
HM: This makes our own self-awareness a circular object: its causes only exist when we already admit to its existence. SLP: No. Logically, for any A, the cause of A must PRECEDE A's existence. Here, I use the word "precede' to describe a logical and not necessarily a temporal relation. But a human's self-awareness is generated by a physical system, a brain, which is a macroscopic object inhabiting a quasi-classical physical domain where there is a well-defined time direction. So in this particular case, "precede' ALSO has a well-defined temporal sense. HM: But isn't a tenet of the larger discussion that existence itself a similarly circular business: universes exist because beings within them perceive them. But those beings exist only if you admit the existence of the universes that contain them. SLP: This is Wheeler's "self-excited circuit" nonsense. Universes exist because of physical laws that have nothing whatever to do with self-aware systems. Self-aware systems are particular CONSEQUENCES of physical law, not vice-versa.One great virtue of Everett's original relative state formulation was that it was able to assert this in a very clean way and give an explicit understanding of why "measurements" on quantum systems show the particular patterns they do to physical recording devices necessarily embedded within the universal wave function. Your claims would (a) effectively return us to Bohr's Copenhagen nuttiness and (b) imply some type of primacy of consciousness metaphysics. How, for example, would you reconcile the origin of our local, observable universe some 13 billion years ago with the fact that consciousness did not evolve until a much later time? HM: Works for me. SLP: I'm puzzled. Please explain how. Steve Price, MD
