On Fri, Oct 13, 2006 at 03:38:13AM -0000, marc.geddes.domain.name.hidden wrote:
>
>
> Russell Standish wrote:
> > On Thu, Oct 12, 2006 at 08:40:40AM -0000, marc.geddes.domain.name.hidden wrote:
> > >
> > > All the anthropic reasoning stuff is bunk in my opinion. It's based on
> > > the faulty idea that one can reason about consciousness by equating
> > > observer moments with parts of the block universe. But as I suggest
> > > above, you can't do this.
> > >
> >
> > I'm not entirely sure what to make of what you say here, except that
> > it seems to be a criticism of the ASSA (that each observer moment is
> > selected independently of any other from an absolute measure distribution).
> >
> > >
>
>
> The implicit assumption in anthropic reasoning is that the observer
> moments are in some sense *already there* (i.e the future and past are
> already layed down in the block universe). This is what I waas
> disputing. If the observer moments do *not* in fact pre-exist in a
> fully formed or consistent fashion, then you cannot apply standard
> statistical reasoning about the chances of an 'observer moment' being
> instantiated.
>
> Re-read what I said. I was disputing the block universe as reagrds
> observer moments. If Observer moments don't actually exist until we
> come to them via the river of time, then they cannot be reasoned about
> using standard statistical methods to talk about pre-existing
> frequencies.
>
Most ensemble theories of everything would postulate that all possible
observer moments are already "there" in the ensemble. This is
certainly true of my construction, as Bruno's and Deutsch's
Multiverse. It is debatable in Schmidhuber's though, as he seems to
have some notion of time that his "Great Programmer" lives in. I'm
not sure what the status of Tegmark's ensemble is, but I doubt there
is any external temporality in that.
I suspect in that case you would disagree with most of the ensemble
theories discussed here then.
OTOH, if we're looking at it in terms of an emergent duality picture
like I suggested, the observer moments do exist in the block
multiverse, but when asking about appearances this is irrelevant, and
one can only ask the question "what is the probability distribution of
my next observer moment". This is the RSSA.
Cheers
--
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----------------------------------------------------------------------------
A/Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
Mathematics
UNSW SYDNEY 2052 R.Standish.domain.name.hidden
Australia http://parallel.hpc.unsw.edu.au/rks
International prefix +612, Interstate prefix 02
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Received on Fri Oct 13 2006 - 00:40:09 PDT