> Lets not forget this is Max Tegmark's list (BTW he is quoted in The
> Guardian newspaper today) and we all know his everything hypothesis and
> Juergen's version of that same hypothesis.
>
> What that postulates is that everything exists, and that means you exist
> and I exist in an infinity of all possible variations. I'm perfectly
> comfortable with this, as I am an MWI-er.
>
> In this view, the only reason you ever get a physical 'law' is that when
> the random relationships we see as laws break down (which is most of the
> time), we cease to be able to observe it, as the environment then ceases
> to be hospitable to life. The same reson an MWI-er will give for us never
> seeing a vacuum collapse: they occur, but we don't observe those
> eigenstates in which they do, as we aren't alive.
>
> (The above is all, of course, subject to the constraint that the language
> used includes an assumption of temporal asymmetry which does not exist -
> see Huw Price & more recently Julian Barbour & soon Vic Stenger's books)
>
> The question is, given that all worlds exist, and that the WAP explains
> why we find ourselves in a congenial environment, WHY have I never seen a
> flying rabbit? Why should not the 'laws' break a little bit, to allow
> non-lethal event like that, then repair themselves?
>
> James
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: hal.domain.name.hidden [SMTP:hal.domain.name.hidden.org]
> Sent: Thursday, October 21, 1999 5:19 PM
> To: everything-list.domain.name.hidden; james.higgo.domain.name.hidden.co.uk;
> juergen.domain.name.hidden
> Subject: RE: Turing vs math
>
> Why can't the simplest possible program be taken as computing a universe
> which includes us? We tend to say "it computes all universes" as though
> it computes more than one. Then it is fair to object that the program
> is too simple, because it computes more than one universe.
>
> But this is a semantic objection based on the definition of a universe.
> How do we know how many universes a given program computes? Is there
> an objective, well defined measure? That seems necessary in order to
> rule out a trivial counting or dovetailing program as one which creates
> our observable universe and our minds as a subset of its output.
>
> Wei Dai proposed a solution to this, which was to say that it is not
> enough to compute a universe that matches what I see; it must compute
> a universe which includes my mind. And then, he proposes that the
> probability measure should not be calculated as just the size of the
> universe program, but rather as the size of the program that computes
> the universe PLUS the size of the program that localizes (finds, locates)
> my mind within that universe.
>
> This provides an objective measure of the degree of
> overkill/redundancy/extra-universes produced by the universe simulation.
> Something objective like this seems necessary to reject the notion that
> we live in a universe produced by a trivial program.
>
> Hal Finney
>
> juergen.domain.name.hidden (Juergen Schmidhuber) writes:
> > Ah! The point is: the information content of a particular universe U is
> > the length of the shortest algorithm that computes U AND NOTHING ELSE.
> > But the shortest algorithm for everything computes all the other
> universes
> > too. Hence it does not convey the information about U by itself!
> >
> > Everything conveys much less info than most particular computable
> > objects. More is less. But to calculate the probability of a particular
> > universe you need to look at its particular algorithms, of course, not
> > at the collective probability of all universes.
Received on Thu Oct 21 1999 - 09:33:57 PDT
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