Re: White Rabbits and QM/Flying rabbits and dragons

From: Marchal <marchal.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Wed Nov 24 06:57:30 1999

Russell Standish wrote:

>I will need to reread your thesis and white rabbit paper before
>commenting on your criticisms much more. However, I'm a little
>surprised by your following comment, because it seems to me that I
>solved the WR problem in first person only. (Not that I started out
>trying to do this). Maybe I'm solving a different WR problem :)

Well, your "error" (with comp, IMO), is that you still attach the
first person to a third person body/universe. This is why you
think that the universal prior are enough to solve the WR (white
rabbit problem).
By comp we survive multiplication of oneself, and our experience
doesn't depend of the time we are reconstituted. That is why,
concerning our first person experiences, we must quantify the domain of
indeterminacy (due to the "natural" multiplication given by universal
dovetailing) on the set of all relatively consistent extension or
computational continuation of oneself.
There is 2^aleph_0 such computational continuations.
In that case universal prior are not enough, and, as I was saying to
Wei Dai, the littleness of the "originel explanation" is not enough.
Two other phenomena must occur and be explained: the depth of the
computation and the explosion of the number of relative parallel
universe (computation). Note that MWI + decoherence theory" solve
that problem, because decoherence is essentially a
(super)entanglement of the object with environment including the
(third person) observer, and that explain the big numbers of very similar
worlds we can expect to be.
But with comp the fact that [MWI + decoherence
theory" solve that problem] does not solve the (WR) problem unless
we explicitely derived QM from the set of relatively
consistent computational extensions of oneself.
It seems Schmidhuber does not realise that QM is a confirmation of comp.
He seems to be glad having a computational interpretation/view of MWI.
He does not realise that comp by itself implies the communicable
observable
indeterminacy and the relativeness of states.
Now comp implies a priori a much more big indeterminacy, especially if
you include the "pure" observable-but-not-communicable indeterminacy,
so...
... we must explain the absence of third person white rabbit + the
absence of first person white rabbit.
Universal prior make the disappearance of the first person view of the
third person rabbits, and it explain why white rabbits does neither appear
in our sharable collection of experiences nor in our scholar manuals.
But universal prior still doesn't explain why I, personally, should not
expect departing slowly and continuously from these laws and observing
personal and first-person-only white rabbits.
Note that with a strong NON-comp axiom you can "solve" that problem
easily by attaching (ad-hoc-ly) the first person to the
"material and univoquial " third person. (But what would that mean ?).


Russell Standish wrote also to Alastair:

>I'm glad you [Alastair] understand, because it is a subtle point.
>Tegmark is
>embedded in Schmidhuber,

If by the whole mathematics, you mean A whole set of consistent
mathematical theories producible by (consistent) machines, I can agree.
(The problem is that there are a lot of such sets, including
orthogonal one which are mutually exclusive).
So this embedding is difficult to make precise.

>but Schmidhuber is but one element of
>Tegmark.

Yes, sure. And whith Church Thesis this embedding can be made precise
independently of the mathematical fuzziness of "Tegmark's Whole Math".
I.e the embedding is formalism independant.


>This naturally implies an infinite recursion of Tegmark's ensemble
>containing an element which generates whole ensemble over again, just
>as Schmidhuber's ensemble contains the "Great programmer" generating
>the whole ensemble again.

Yes.

>There doesn't appear to be any problems with
>this remarkable fact though.

I hope so. Nevertheless, that remains to be seen.

Bruno
Received on Wed Nov 24 1999 - 06:57:30 PST