Re: Interpretations, subjectivity & spread-spectrum

From: Hans Moravec <hpm.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Thu, 15 Jul 1999 21:11:53 -0400

Wei Dai:
> Interesting, but we still have no reason to believe there exist
> intelligent life in alternate interpretations of the sun.

And we have no reason not to! Just as we have no reason to believe
radio transmissions don't exist if we've never turned on a receiver.

> But the key point I want to make is that not all interpretations are
> equally valid. Some interpretations are more "natural" than others
> in the sense of having smaller relative logical depth and smaller
> relative information content.

Greater logical depth doesn't make it "less valid,", just farther away
in "interpretation space", which in my mind is very analogous to
regular space. You have to do more work to vist a friend on Mars than
one next door, but that doesn't make your Martian friend less real or
less valid. Your friend may have little mass compared to the amount
of mass you must expend to visit or communicate, but so what?


> If not all interpretations are equal, the dividing line between
> reality and interpretation doesn't really matter. A model where
> everything is objective and nothing is subject to interpretation may
> be isomorphic to a model where everything is interpretation, if each
> object in the first model corresponds to an interpretation in the
> second model and their weights are the same.

I might agree with the second part of that, but I don't
understand the first sentence.

> But what is wrong with a theory that gives a set of all objects that
> exist, a measure on the set, and for each object in the set its
> subjective experience (which might be null if it's not conscious)?

I didn't get that either.
Received on Thu Jul 15 1999 - 18:14:08 PDT