Re: White Rabbits and QM

From: Marchal <marchal.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Thu Nov 18 03:51:12 1999

Russell Standish wrote (in his recent paper p.2):

> <<We assume the *self-sampling assumption*, essentially
> that we expect to find ourselves in one of the
> universes with greatest measure, subject to the
> constraints of the anthropic principle. This implies
> we should find ourselves in one of the simplest
> possible universes capable of supporting self-aware
> substructures (SASes). This is the origin of physical
> laws ....>>

This is only the "third-person" formulation of the problem.
Even if you succeed to explain the absence of white rabbit
from that particular form of SSA (self-sampling assumption)
then, with comp, there are still reason to expect the
apparition of the rabbit FROM A FIRST PERSON POINT OF VIEW.

It seems that you have not seen the point in the UDA. You
are still linking the first person univocally to his
third person describable body.
Chris Malloney alludes to an explanation power of the
computational indeterminacy, but the truth is that
A PRIORI the computational indeterminacy is so strong that
it looks like a refutation of comp. The UDA shows that with
comp there are more rabbits to be expected.

I could summarize my critics to your strategy (and
Schmidhuber's one) in the following way:

You will perhaps explain the absence of third-person view
of rabbits, but you will still not explain the absence
of first-person view of rabbits.

I am not saying your strategy is incorrect, I am saying
it is not enough. Like some physicist you are still keeping
completely the mind-body problem under the rug.
Remember that (especially) with comp you cannot associate so
easily mind/consciousness with matter/physical-process.
This follows from either UDA + OCCAM, or from the movie graph
alias Maudlin's argument (cf archive).

Bruno
Received on Thu Nov 18 1999 - 03:51:12 PST