RE: Amoeba croaks -

From: Marchal <marchal.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Thu Jan 14 01:23:48 1999

Hi James,

> But I think we need to be
>clear that classical probability is merely the way we perceive the
>relationship between universes in MWI.

This sound interesting but I am not sure I understand you fully, and I
would be happy if you could be a little more specific. Some people would
say that classical logic is the internal logic of individual branch in
the MWI.
My personal feeling (let us say) is that classical logic is the simplest
logic of communication between people-and/or-apparatus. This idea appear
to Bohr, but also Brouwer (the founder of intuitionnist (the first modern
non classical logic)). It is not unlike your idea once we look at people
as turing machines (perhaps).

>The thesis is impressive and the images came out perfectly.

Glad to hear that !

> My French is
>lousy but is C.2.3 not Max's experiment? Did you think of it first,
>simultaneously, or later? I look forward, anxiously, to the English
> version.

Indeed C.2.2 and C.2.3. are "Max's experiment". I publish the idea in my
1988 (french) paper, and in my 1991 (english) paper. As far as I know I
am the first having publish that. I discover later the idea in Hans
Moravec's book "Mind Children" (also 1988, Harvard University Press). I
guess Max didn't notice these works, because he comes from physics and
cosmology.
I find Max's paper (Many Worlds or Many Words) very interesting, although
I differ in the conclusion. There are also big similarities (and big
differences) between Max's TOE and what I call Mechanism. I guess there
are interesting common points with Schmidhuber too. But I don't think
computationnalism put the metaphysical question away : quite the
contrary, computationnalism makes these problem (mathematically)
formulable.
Please be patient for the english version because I am rather busy. You
can also try to get my papers with the bibliography in the thesis (in a
pre-internet manner, you know !).

Best luck for your thesis.

Bruno
Received on Thu Jan 14 1999 - 01:23:48 PST