Re: White Rabbits and QM

From: Juergen Schmidhuber <juergen.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Wed, 17 Nov 1999 10:02:16 +0100

What about the ``rubbish universes''? Are there any? How do you tell them
from others, when everything depends on the interpreter? It is essential
to see that the external interpretation of some bitstring universe as,
say, a movie, or a proof, requires additional information. A complex
interpreter conveying a lot of algorithmic information can translate
a simple universe into a complex one, while a simple interpreter will
have complex output only if the universe itself is complex. Does that
mean we explicitly have to look at all possible interpreter algorithms
as well? No need to worry - they are already implicit in the original
list of all possible programs.

The `internal' interpretation of some universe by some locally evolved
observer dynamically depends on the changing observer who may not be aware
yet of certain aspects of his universe. Like Alistair (recall his comment
below) I'd hesitate to model a universe around the current abilities of
an observer that evolved in it.

Russell:
>>The answer is that the UTM is not important, but information
>>is. Information is only information when interpreted by something, and
>>the only things interpreting the universes are precisely the self-aware
>>substructures inhabiting the universes. We should expect to find ourselves
>>in a universe with one of the simplest underlying structures, according
>>to our own information processing abilities.>>

Alastair:
>I can't agree with this, if I understand you correctly. This implies that as
>our information processing abilities increase, we could in principle expect
>to find ourselves in another kind of universe.

Juergen
Received on Wed Nov 17 1999 - 01:04:30 PST