Hi James,
>Bruno, I finally got around to replying to this missive of yours. But I am
>still not sure what you're saying as I don't know precisely what you mean
>by:
>"your mind (consciousness) includes your immediate expectations"
The idea comes from Helmholtz. He attempts to define conscious perception
as unsconscious inference. What I mean is that you cannot be conscious
(having a subjective private life) without having some implicit
expectation, if only the expectation that the next instant will looks
approximately the same as the current instant. The neurophysiological
study of dreams has shown that the cerebral stem play a role in trigging
the cortex for making these instinctive inferences (in dreams for
exemple). Actually such an idea can be find also in Descartes where
consciousness generates potential representations. Dostoiesvski also
describes consciousness as accessible truth.
A very good book on consciousness is the recent one by William SIEGER
("Theories of Consciousness", Routledge 1999). I recommand it. It is a
good introduction to the mind/body problem from Descartes to Quantum
approaches.
>Forthermore, the idea of transportation has no place in my ontololgy as all
>universes are discrete and contain no movement. Universes are related to
>other universes only by correlation, which is a subjective feature.
> You may
>see that your hand moves smoothly from one point to another. In fact, you
>have viewed a huge number of unrelated universes in such a
> way that they are
>related. It so happens that there is a universe in which you hand is at
>point a, and another in which your hand is at point a+1, and
> those universes
>appear to be related. But they are not. In an infinite multiverse universes
>which appear to have any relation you like do in fact exist. We appear to
>exist in those sets of universes which can be strung together so that the
>laws of physics appear to emerge (weak anthropic principle, my dear
> friend).
I totally agree with what you are saying here, with some nuances. Replace
Universe with Computationnal (and consistent) histories, etc. I will not
try to be more precise at this stage. Even in the restricted
interpretation of MWI these nuances exist.
BTW does someone understand why Tegmark does not include the "consistent
histories approach to QM" in the "many-world" type of QM-interpretation?
>I'm thinking of Tegmark's and Schmidhuber's ideas that complexity is only
>apparent when you see a subset of the simple reality, like the Mandelbrot
>set. This ties in nicely with the Buddhist idea that it is only our
>ignorance that allows us to see the world at all. Once you see the whole -
>like the Mandelbrot equation - you no longer see the one little piece of
> the set that you once thought so interesting and complex.
>It seems that *everything* has no meaning unless you view it from the very
>narrow subjective perspective that we have. If you take the Arcimedian
>perspective, then you can say nothing but 'everything is'. Resolution of
>separate phenomena can only occur as we occlude our vision.
>
>Before you can talk about anything, you have to define our level of
>ignorance. Or perhaps defining our level of ignorance is the only weay to
>define anything.
This is a very nice idea. In fact theoretical computer science is
partially based on this principle.
There exists also a lot of illustration of that idea in mathematical
logic. For exemple with Skolem paradox.
>Note that, although I can't see why our consciousnesses are not 'immortal'
>under MWI, that doesn't mean that I think we exist as separate entities
>undergoing successive experiences in time. And it doesn't mean I think it's
>good or desirable to be immortal.
I am glad you are aware of that. Sometime I hope comp is false.
Immortality, once you understand where it comes from with comp and/or
MWI, is not necessarily a good news.
The old materialist notion of death (eternal peace, nothingness) looks
like wishfull thinking now.
The fact that you don't necessarily think we exist as separate entities
undergoing successive experiences in time can be made more precise:
1) from the 3d person point of view, we are not separate entities
undergoing successive experiences in time.
2) ... but we (at least most of us) feel that we live as separate entities
undergoing successive experiences in time : and that should be explained.
>The 'great programmer' could have the intelligence and consciousness of an
>amoeba. And why bother talking about him if he's not needed - Ockam would
>not approve.
You need UD in the same way you need any program or numbers.
>The great program (Juergen, please correct me) looks something like LET
>A=A+1 GOTO START. Any ideas on how a program runs when you don't have a
>flow of time, but a static block universe?
... the same as newtonian time "occurs" in the static relativity
space-time.
>From the 3-person Archimedian point of view there is no running program.
Your remark about the "moving hand" applies here as well ...
Your "LET A=A+1 GOTO START" is correct but rather trivial (and
unpedagogical) as a UD. You could have choose the empty program as well.
I suggest you write a real UD :). That is : you choose a universal
machine, and you write an explicit generator of all the possible
execution of your universal machines. (= about 10 lines in PROLOG, 100
lines in LISP, 1000 lines in FORTRAN).
If you are courageous, you can write a dovetailer on the solutions of the
Dewitt-Wheeler equations !
Note that a UD is (recursively) equivalent to a program which almost
compute OMEGA Chaitin number.
>One point of disagreement with Juergen: you don't need infinite strings of
>great programmers. There need be no great programmer, just
> the program. And
>since there's no programmer to make it complicated,
> the program is as simple
>as it can be.
I guess Schmidhuber should'nt anthropomorphise UD. The great programmer
(Schmidhuber recognize that explicitely) is a program. Its execution
generates all possible (with Church's Thesis) possible UDs.
Once you admit a minimal amount of arithmetical platonism, you inherit
all the UDs, independently of your using or not using them.
Cheers, Bruno
Received on Fri Mar 05 1999 - 01:53:17 PST
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