Re: valuable errors

From: Marchal <marchal.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Tue Apr 20 02:19:59 1999

Jacques Mallah wrote:
>On 16 xxx -1, Marchal wrote:
>> Suppose now some person, X0, is copied in (exactly) 1O instances. She
>> should
>> expect their future selves to be effectively randomly chosen, as you say,
>> among the 10 instances: X1, ... X10. (or 11 if the original is not
>> destroyed).
>>
>> Do you agree that, whatever the means used to quantify the indeterminism,
>> the immediate expectation of X will not depend:
>> a) neither of the "real"/virtual nature of the reconstitution,
>> b) nor of the absence or presence of finite delay of reconstitution?
>
> I don't know where you're going with this. It's all a special
>(conditional) case of the fact that a typical observer is effectively a
>randomly chosen observer. (Weighted by the measure which I take to be
>proportional to the number of implementations.)
> a) If the computation is implemented, it's implemented. I guess
>you mean it wouldn't depend on how closely the person's world view matched
>the physical reality.
> b) Obviously such a delay would not be detectable.


OK. Suppose now:
 1) That there is a real concrete universe (this seems to be obvious
for a lot of people, but I intend to show that it is ultimately false
or redundant in some way when we accept COMP and a minimal
amount of arithmetical realism).
 2) That a concrete UD is beeing completely executed in the universe.
I recall that UD is a program which generates all programs and which
dovetails on all their executions. By "completely executed" I mean the
program really never stops. The UD get all accessible computationnal
states.
This is what I call the "extravagant hypothesis" HE, because the
complete execution of the UD need an ever expansing cosmos with
an ever generating energy.

Now, whatever computationnal states I am in at this very instant, the UD
will generate it virtually, and it will generate also all possible
computationnal continuation for that state. I mean that the UD
will "reconstitute my-present-self" infinitely often in all possible
virtual environment.

So if I make a simple physical experiment, then, even if I believe our
"universe" obeys deterministic physical laws, I cannot use these laws
to make a prediction, I must take into account all "reconstitutions of my
my-present-self".
If the physical experiment is the "killing myself experiment", then I do
no more assurance that I will succed. (for exemple).
To sum up, because you agree with a) and b) above, I think you will agree
with:

COMP + HE entails [physics must be derivable from some kind of
conditionnal measure put on the set of computationnal continuation]

We do have strong evidence that there are "physical laws", so now either
COMP is false, or HE is false or [physics IS derivable from some kind of
conditionnal measure put on the set of computationnal continuation]. Do
you agree ?
(Note also that we cannot define the measure with the number of
implementations because there is an infinity of such implementations: we
really need a measure on the infinite set of computationnal
continuations).

If you agree so far, the only thing which I still need to show is that the
extravagant hypothesis can be eliminated. In that case if you keep
believing
in COMP, you will believe that [physics MUST be derivable from some kind
of
conditionnal measure put on the set of computationnal histories]. Here is
where I am trying to go: if COMP is true, physical laws emerge
necessarily on computations and information processing.

Bruno.
Received on Tue Apr 20 1999 - 02:19:59 PDT