Re: Evidence for the simulation argument

From: Bruno Marchal <marchal.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Mon, 5 Mar 2007 16:31:23 +0100

Le 05-mars-07, à 15:03, Mark Peaty a écrit :


> Nobody here has yet explained in plain-English why we have entropy. Oh
> well, surely, in the Many Worlds, that's just one of the universes that
> can happen!


Not really. That would make the comp hyp or the everything idea
trivial, and both the "everything hyp" and the "comp hyp" would loose
any explicative power. (It *is* the problem with Schmidhuber's comp,
*and* with Tegmark's form of mathematicalism: see older posts for
that).




> Except that, for plain-English reasons stated above, there
> are *and always have been* infinity x infinity x infinity of entropic
> universes.
>
> It doesn't make sense. Call me a heretic if you like, but I will
> 'stick
> to my guns' here: If it can't be put into plain-English then it
> probably
> isn't true!



I will try. I will, by the same token, answer Mohsen question here:




Mohsen:
> I don't know if in the hypothesis of simulation, the conflict of
> Countable and Uncountable has been considered.




1) I assume the comp hyp, if only for the sake of the reasoning. The
comp hyp is NOT the hypothesis of simulation, but it is the hypothesis
that we are in principle self-simulable by a digital machine.

2) Then we have to distinguish the first person points of view (1-pov)
from third person points of view (3-pov), and eventually we will have
to distinguish all Plotinus' hypostases. With comp, we are duplicable.
I can be read and cut (copy) in Brussels, and be "pasted" in Washington
and Moscow simultaneously. This gives a simple example where:
a) from the third point of view, there is no indeterminacy. An external
(3-pov) observer can predict Bruno will be in Washington AND in Moscow.
b) from a first person point of view, there is an indeterminacy, I will
feel myself in washington OR in Moscow, not in the two places at once.

3) Whatever means I use to quantify the first person indeterminacy, the
result will not depend on possible large delays between the
reconstitutions, nor of the virtual/material/purely-mathematical
character of the reconstitution.

4) There exist a universal dovetailer (consequence of Church thesis,
but we could drop Church thesis and define comp in term of turing
machine instead).

5) Never underestimate the dumbness of the universal dovetailer: not
only it generates all computational histories, but it generates them
all infinitely often, + all variations, + all "real" oracles (and those
oracles are uncountable).

6) this means that if I take the comp hyp seriously, then, to predict
the results of any experiment/experience, I have to "localize" all the
infinitely many instantiations of my current state in the UD, look at
the uncountable comp histories going through that states, and compute
the statistics bearing on all consistent first person
self-continuation.

7) A naive reading of this leads to predict white rabbits (indeed the
lewis Carroll one) and perhaps white noise, that is too much entropy
... This leads to a cheap refutation of comp, ...

8) ... except that the math shows this is a bit too cheap. Now if comp
is correct, AND if the physical laws are (approximately) correct, then
we have to extract the physical laws
a) without assuming the existence of a physical universe,
b) from the comp statistics.

My (more technical) result is that computer science and mathematical
logics gives already clues that indeed we can recover the physical laws
from computer science, once we get the relevant description of the
different points of view.

In particular, for Mohsen's question, the conflict between countable
and uncountable appears to be an unavoidable conflict between first and
third person points of view. The first person is bound up to interact
with uncountable physical apparent reality.
But all self-referentially correct universal machine introspecting
herself can discover the unavoidability of that conflict, and somehow
"meta-solve" it, indeed by distinguishing explicitly those points of
view again. When she does this, she discover a more subtle tension
between recursively countable and non recursively countable. This
tension is creative and can be proposed as a beginning of explanation
of life and local neguentropy.

All this makes comp, and its related "theology" (theory of everything
including persons, say), empirically testable: derive the comp-physics
and compare with empirical nature.

Must go. Hope this helps, (see papers in my url for more, or just ask)

Bruno

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/


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Received on Mon Mar 05 2007 - 10:31:44 PST

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