Thank you Bruno!
You and Russell between you have managed to strike some sparks of
illumination from the rocky inside of my skull. There is no beacon fire
to report but I start to get a glimmering of why you want to *assume*
comp and see where it leads.
It seems that self-reference and recursion are fundamental properties of
anything that is "interesting" in all this, which rather seems to be the
flavour of the new millennium.
Just in thinking superficially about the Many Worlds though, it seems to
pose a 'binding problem'. Now, I know that might sound like a leakage of
concept from objections to identity theory in brain and mind theory. But
what I am thinking about is this bit:
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.
A human life must be a compilation of all these including the creation
of internal [synaptic change, etc] structure/record which endow the
ability to *be* the story. But when looking at this as a/n
[infinity^infinity] Many Worlds affair, none of the worlds could 'know'
that they are like or identical to others, surely? So I am puzzled. What
holds 'my lot' together? We seem always to be confronted by yet another
infinite regression.
******
A quick aside, hopefully not totally unrelated: Am I right that a valid
explanation of the zero point energy is that it is impossible *in
principle* to measure the state of something and therefore *we* must
acknowledge the indeterminacy and so must everything else which exists
because we are nothing special, except we think we know we are here, and
if we are bound by quantum indeterminacy, so is everything else [unless
it can come up with a good excuse!]?
[Perhaps this is more on Stathis's question to Russell: Is a real number
an infinite process?]
******
Regards
Mark Peaty CDES
mpeaty.domain.name.hidden
http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/
Bruno Marchal wrote:
> 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 Tue Mar 06 2007 - 03:44:32 PST