Re: A sequel to my 1996 "ultimate ensemble theory" paper

From: Bruno Marchal <marchal.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2007 12:23:54 +0200

Le 11-avr.-07, ā 17:25, Max a écrit :

>
> Hi Folks,

Hi Max, Nice you remember us.


>
> After a decade of procrastination, I've finally finished writing up a
> sequel to that paper that I wrote back in 1996 (Is "the theory of
> everything'' merely the ultimate ensemble theory?) that's been the
> subject of so much interesting discussion in this group.


Are you aware of the critics I have made about it, and about
Schmidhuber approach? I am not sure you have taken those critics into
account in your new paper, although on some point it is indeed clearer.
Oh, I see you are mistaken about Godel's theorem (hope you don't mind
the typical frankness in our discussion, mainly for reason of being
short). Perhaps this will be an opportunity to have a straight
discussion, and to help the go beyond the usual gap between logicians,
which in my opinion have developed the right tools, and the physicists,
which in general have kept the right (scientific realist) motivations.




> It's entitled "The Mathematical Universe", and you'll find it at
> http://arxiv.org/pdf/0704.0646 and
> http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/toe.html
> - I'd very much appreciate any comments that you may have.

I will.


>
> The purpose of this paper is both to clarify what I mean by the Level
> IV Multiverse and to further explore various implications, so it has
> lots of discussion of stuff like the simulation argument, the relation
> to Schmidhuber's ideas, Gödel incompleteness and Church-Turing
> incomputability.


Schmidhuber leaves the list more than 5 years ago without answering
questions adressed to him. I hope you will be more serious. Apparently
you are not aware of my works, which I have explained more than once in
this list, and has been the subject of my PhD thesis in France a long
time ago (and this 20 years after having published the results). It is
not entirely your fault because I have not yet send my papers to the
arXiv.org or international journal. I don't submit more than one paper
every 500 years (g), and you are lucky because I have just do this
recently and my paper has been accepted for the cie 2007:
http://www.amsta.leeds.ac.uk/~pmt6sbc/cie07.html (nice if you could
come, but it is high level logic).
All my other papers was ordered by kind people with serious motivation
in my results or my approach (similar to ideas discussed in this list,
and indeed close (but quite different) of yours. You can find most of
those papers in my url below. Alas it does not contain my last two
papers (for copyright reason). One of the main result is that "if I am
a machine" then the observable universe cannot be described by a
machine: the laws of physics have to emerge from the math of cognition
(not of human cognition but of universal machine introspection). The
other result is a "direct" partial extraction of the physical laws by
the interview of an ideally self-referentially correct universal
machine, and evidences adds up that indeed there is a quantum computer
exploitable in "real time" in the neighborhood of almost all classical
universal machines. This shows there is plausibly a mathematical
justification of the qubits from the bits. So the
Everett-Graham-Deutsch-Zurek qubit from bit transformation admits a
reciprocal. This is going in your direction (classical platonist
mathematicalism), but like with Penrose, the reasons differ.


> Please let me apologize in advance for the fact that
> Sections III, IV and the appendix of this paper are quite technical,
> so if you're among the 99.99% who don't have a Ph.D. in theoretical
> physics, perhaps skip those sections. I've added links to more
> accessible papers touching on some of these issues at
> http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/toe.html, and I'll try to write
> something less obtuse soon.
>
> Finally, if you discover a good time stretching device, please let me
> know! Although I'm embarrassed that I haven't found the time to follow
> and participate in the fascinating discussions in this group, the fact
> that there's such interest has inspired and motivated me to continue
> pursuing these ideas despite the discouragement from mainstream
> academia. So thanks for the encouragement!

Thanks to you, Max. I appreciate very much your effort to explain
Everett. I really love your paper with Wheeler. And I appreciate you
have the courage you show in tackling very difficult questions which
are indeed a little bit out of the mainstream fashion. I have myself
got trouble after publishing the quantum suicide in 1988, like I got
problem in the seventies with the more general "computationist
suicide". You can consider my work as a generalisation of Everett's
(but see also Otto Rossler's endophysics) embedding of the subject (the
physicist) in the physical world (quantum mechanics), indeed I embed
the mathematician in arithmetic; or you can see it as a detailed
reconstruction of Penrose's argument, with similar conclusions
(although Penrose is deadly wrong on Godel). In my Siena paper, I show
that the interview of the self-referentially correct machine (I call
them Lobian in my thesis, papers and in this list) provides a cute,
transparent, purely arithmetical (but empirically testable),
interpretation of Plotinus's theology (including is Plato-Aristotelian
theory of matter: it is this one which makes the theory testable). This
shows also that once we assume the computationalist hypothesis (in the
form "I am a machine", not in the form the physical universe is a
machine), the theory of everything, whatever it is, splits into a
scientifically communicable part, and a scientifically not communicable
part, and this shows Plotinus is right in his critics of Aristotelian
theology. To be sure the machine does address some similar critics to
Plotinus.

Unfortunately I don't have find a way for stretching time, and I am
myself a bit busy. I will read your sequel at ease, and let you know my
comments. Hope you will be able to stretch time a bit by yourself so
that we will be able to discuss and clarify possible misunderstandings.
In the meantime you can read both the Universal Dovetailer Argument,
and an introduction to the Lobian interview in my paper:
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/publications/
SANE2004MARCHALAbstract.html

Best regards,

Bruno


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


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Received on Fri Apr 13 2007 - 06:24:07 PDT

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