Re: Solipsism (was: Numbers)
Le 17-mars-06, à 20:27, Hal Finney a écrit : Here is where I may depart from Bruno, although I am not sure. I argue that you can in fact set up a probability distribution over all of the places in the UD where your mind exists, and it is based roughly on the size of the part of the UD program that creates that information pattern. Recall that the UD in effect runs all programs at once. But some programs are shorter than others. I use the notion of algorithmic complexity and the associated measure, which is called the Universal Distribution (an unfortunate collision of the UD acronym). Basically this says that the measure of the output of a given UD program of n bits is 1/2^n. What remains to be explained here is how you attach the first person indeterminacy, (which is relative to any member of the class of the third person describable states occuring anywhere in the universal deployment) and the measure coming from your Universal Distribution. Given that a first person cannot be aware of any delays of reconstitution of himself in the deployment, it seems to me you need to provide more motivation for your distribution (which is also based on comp). How to avoid the inescapable redundancy of states and histories generated by the UD, and the fact that the delay-invariance indeterminacy forces us to take into account all finite portion of the deployment. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ 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 [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: Solipsism (was: Numbers)
Bruno: let me draw your attention to one little phrasing in Hal's (and everybody else's, I presume, as I read these posts)- text: If we assume... And if we do not? Or: many people think so ... - many think otherwise. John --- Bruno Marchal [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Le 17-mars-06, à 20:27, Hal Finney a écrit : John M writes: 1. do we have a REAL argument against solipsism? Let me express how solipsism can be analyzed in the model where physical reality is part of mathematical reality. Let us adopt Bruno's UDA perspective: the Universal Dovetailer (UD) is an abstract machine that runs all possible computer programs. In this way it creates all possible universes, and more... it creates all possible information objects: all of mathematics, logic, all written texts, everything. In particular it creates the information patterns of conscious entities like you and me. Let us assume that this in fact represents the reality of the multiverse, that what we perceive and experience is all caused by the operation of the UD, when it creates information patterns that correspond to those experienes. I know that many people here reject this hypothesis, but let us follow it forward to see what it can say about solipsism. The first thing to notice is that within the UD, each person exists more than once. There are many programs that include a particular information pattern in their output, in fact an infinite number of programs. Some of those programs will look much like the kind of model a physicist might construct for a theory of everything. It would include the physical laws and initial conditions that define our universe. Running that program forward would create the entire history of our universe, including the experiences of all of its inhabitants. However there are other kinds of programs that would also create the patterns of our conscious experiences. Some might do it purely by random chance: they might produce enormous outputs and somewhere buried in there will be the pattern that corresponds to a portion of our experience. Others would include bizarre universes such as one inhabited by aliens who create computer simulations of other kinds of beings, and who have created us. Yet another example would be a universe composed only of one person, with all that is outside of him being supplied by the computer program, perhaps from some kind of table of sensory impressions, so that only he is real within that universe. Solipsism is the doctrine that only I exist, that everything else is an illusion. In the context of the platonic multiverse, it would correspond to that last case: a portion of the UD program where only the one person is in his universe, and nothing else in the universe is real. So this raises the question: given that I exist multiple times within the UD structure, and given that in some of them the universe I see around me is real and in some of them it is an illusion, which is the reality for me? In which one do I actually exist? I believe Bruno argues, and I agree, that this is a meaningless question. You exist in all of them. There is no single instance of your information pattern which is really you. Your consciousness spans all of the places in the UD where it is instantiated. However, there is a related question which is relevant: what will happen next? If some of your consciousness is in the real universe, and some of it is in universes where you are an alien simulation, some in a universe where it is a random fluctuation, and some in a universe where you are all there is, how can you make a prediction about the future? In the random universe you would expect to disintegrate into chaos. In the aliens, they might open up the simulation and start talking to you. In the solipsism case, various bizarre things might happen. And in the plain vanilla universe, you would expect things to go along pretty much as you remember them. Here is where I may depart from Bruno, although I am not sure. OK. I argue that you can in fact set up a probability distribution over all of the places in the UD where your mind exists, and it is based roughly on the size of the part of the UD program that creates that information pattern. I will take the time to come back on this. I have a problem with this which is not entirely unrelated to our perennial ASSA/RSSA debate. Another problem is related with the fact that from the first person point of view it is hard to distinguish big and little programs, and their way of recurring hyper-redundantly. Recall that the UD in effect runs all programs at once. But some programs are shorter than others. I use the notion of algorithmic complexity and the associated
Re: Solipsism (was: Numbers)
Le 17-mars-06, à 20:27, Hal Finney a écrit : John M writes: 1. do we have a REAL argument against solipsism? Let me express how solipsism can be analyzed in the model where physical reality is part of mathematical reality. Let us adopt Bruno's UDA perspective: the Universal Dovetailer (UD) is an abstract machine that runs all possible computer programs. In this way it creates all possible universes, and more... it creates all possible information objects: all of mathematics, logic, all written texts, everything. In particular it creates the information patterns of conscious entities like you and me. Let us assume that this in fact represents the reality of the multiverse, that what we perceive and experience is all caused by the operation of the UD, when it creates information patterns that correspond to those experienes. I know that many people here reject this hypothesis, but let us follow it forward to see what it can say about solipsism. The first thing to notice is that within the UD, each person exists more than once. There are many programs that include a particular information pattern in their output, in fact an infinite number of programs. Some of those programs will look much like the kind of model a physicist might construct for a theory of everything. It would include the physical laws and initial conditions that define our universe. Running that program forward would create the entire history of our universe, including the experiences of all of its inhabitants. However there are other kinds of programs that would also create the patterns of our conscious experiences. Some might do it purely by random chance: they might produce enormous outputs and somewhere buried in there will be the pattern that corresponds to a portion of our experience. Others would include bizarre universes such as one inhabited by aliens who create computer simulations of other kinds of beings, and who have created us. Yet another example would be a universe composed only of one person, with all that is outside of him being supplied by the computer program, perhaps from some kind of table of sensory impressions, so that only he is real within that universe. Solipsism is the doctrine that only I exist, that everything else is an illusion. In the context of the platonic multiverse, it would correspond to that last case: a portion of the UD program where only the one person is in his universe, and nothing else in the universe is real. So this raises the question: given that I exist multiple times within the UD structure, and given that in some of them the universe I see around me is real and in some of them it is an illusion, which is the reality for me? In which one do I actually exist? I believe Bruno argues, and I agree, that this is a meaningless question. You exist in all of them. There is no single instance of your information pattern which is really you. Your consciousness spans all of the places in the UD where it is instantiated. However, there is a related question which is relevant: what will happen next? If some of your consciousness is in the real universe, and some of it is in universes where you are an alien simulation, some in a universe where it is a random fluctuation, and some in a universe where you are all there is, how can you make a prediction about the future? In the random universe you would expect to disintegrate into chaos. In the aliens, they might open up the simulation and start talking to you. In the solipsism case, various bizarre things might happen. And in the plain vanilla universe, you would expect things to go along pretty much as you remember them. Here is where I may depart from Bruno, although I am not sure. OK. I argue that you can in fact set up a probability distribution over all of the places in the UD where your mind exists, and it is based roughly on the size of the part of the UD program that creates that information pattern. I will take the time to come back on this. I have a problem with this which is not entirely unrelated to our perennial ASSA/RSSA debate. Another problem is related with the fact that from the first person point of view it is hard to distinguish big and little programs, and their way of recurring hyper-redundantly. Recall that the UD in effect runs all programs at once. But some programs are shorter than others. I use the notion of algorithmic complexity and the associated measure, which is called the Universal Distribution (an unfortunate collision of the UD acronym). Basically this says that the measure of the output of a given UD program of n bits is 1/2^n. Yes. And it is even a machine independent notion (modulo some constant). But big programs cannot be dismissed so easily, I will try to find a short explanation for why I think saying yes to the doctor makes, for the first person point of view,
Solipsism (was: Numbers)
John M writes: 1. do we have a REAL argument against solipsism? Let me express how solipsism can be analyzed in the model where physical reality is part of mathematical reality. Let us adopt Bruno's UDA perspective: the Universal Dovetailer (UD) is an abstract machine that runs all possible computer programs. In this way it creates all possible universes, and more... it creates all possible information objects: all of mathematics, logic, all written texts, everything. In particular it creates the information patterns of conscious entities like you and me. Let us assume that this in fact represents the reality of the multiverse, that what we perceive and experience is all caused by the operation of the UD, when it creates information patterns that correspond to those experienes. I know that many people here reject this hypothesis, but let us follow it forward to see what it can say about solipsism. The first thing to notice is that within the UD, each person exists more than once. There are many programs that include a particular information pattern in their output, in fact an infinite number of programs. Some of those programs will look much like the kind of model a physicist might construct for a theory of everything. It would include the physical laws and initial conditions that define our universe. Running that program forward would create the entire history of our universe, including the experiences of all of its inhabitants. However there are other kinds of programs that would also create the patterns of our conscious experiences. Some might do it purely by random chance: they might produce enormous outputs and somewhere buried in there will be the pattern that corresponds to a portion of our experience. Others would include bizarre universes such as one inhabited by aliens who create computer simulations of other kinds of beings, and who have created us. Yet another example would be a universe composed only of one person, with all that is outside of him being supplied by the computer program, perhaps from some kind of table of sensory impressions, so that only he is real within that universe. Solipsism is the doctrine that only I exist, that everything else is an illusion. In the context of the platonic multiverse, it would correspond to that last case: a portion of the UD program where only the one person is in his universe, and nothing else in the universe is real. So this raises the question: given that I exist multiple times within the UD structure, and given that in some of them the universe I see around me is real and in some of them it is an illusion, which is the reality for me? In which one do I actually exist? I believe Bruno argues, and I agree, that this is a meaningless question. You exist in all of them. There is no single instance of your information pattern which is really you. Your consciousness spans all of the places in the UD where it is instantiated. However, there is a related question which is relevant: what will happen next? If some of your consciousness is in the real universe, and some of it is in universes where you are an alien simulation, some in a universe where it is a random fluctuation, and some in a universe where you are all there is, how can you make a prediction about the future? In the random universe you would expect to disintegrate into chaos. In the aliens, they might open up the simulation and start talking to you. In the solipsism case, various bizarre things might happen. And in the plain vanilla universe, you would expect things to go along pretty much as you remember them. Here is where I may depart from Bruno, although I am not sure. I argue that you can in fact set up a probability distribution over all of the places in the UD where your mind exists, and it is based roughly on the size of the part of the UD program that creates that information pattern. Recall that the UD in effect runs all programs at once. But some programs are shorter than others. I use the notion of algorithmic complexity and the associated measure, which is called the Universal Distribution (an unfortunate collision of the UD acronym). Basically this says that the measure of the output of a given UD program of n bits is 1/2^n. This gives us a probability distribution over all the places our minds are implemented, such that the shortest program(s) get the bulk of the probability. This has relationships to such traditional notions as Occam's Razor, as Russell Standish has emphasized. Just as we say that the simplest explanation for our observations is likely to be correct, so we can say that the simplest program which creates our experiences is likely to be the one that governs what will happen next. In principle, it should become possible eventually to turn this reasoning into at least rough quantitative form. We will eventually have a complete model for our physical universe, so we can compute its measure and determine how big a contribution
