On Mon, Mar 24, 2008 at 01:40:58PM -0000, Alastair Malcolm wrote:
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Russell Standish" <lists.domain.name.hidden>
> To: <everything-list.domain.name.hidden>
> Sent: Friday, March 21, 2008 1:30 AM
> Subject: Re: Malcom/Standish white rabbit solution
>
>
> >>
> >> Comparing identical OM's/OM sequences, it seems to me that I am most
> >> likely
> >> to be ['in'] that sequence of OM occurrences that is in one of the
> >> simplest universes that can produce them (cet. par.). (Reason given
> >> below.)
> >
> > You are assuming a measure over all histories, rather than birth
> > moments or observer moments.
>
> No. Please see below.
>
> >This is a rather different SSA than has
> > been usually proposed (ASSA or RSSA). I can see a possible connection here
> > to
> > the Schmidhuber II approach (measure over programs), but it is
> > contradictory to either the Marchal dovetailer (subjective
> > indeterminism) or my all strings approach (which I consider to be
> > essentially just starting from the dovetailer trace UD* and assuming a
> > uniform prior on the strings).
> >
>
>
> >> In your 'Why Occam's Razor' paper, sect 2, following a discussion of the
> >> Schmidhuber ensemble and the Universal Prior, it is stated "If we assume
> >> the
> >> self-sampling asssumption [...t]his implies we should find ourselves in
> >> one
> >> of the simplest (in terms of C-0[Complexity of description x]) possible
> >> universes capable of supporting self-aware substructures (SASes). This is
> >> the origin of physical law...".
> >
> > The SSA refers to birth moments. The "universe" is sort of code for
> > the history up to that point in time. The White Rabbit problem
> > concerns what happens after that point in time.
> >
> > An assumption of a noumenal reality is enough, of course, to eliminate
> > white rabbits in conjunction with the arguments in section 2 of Why
> > Occams Razor. But noumenal reality has its own set of problems,
> > including being incompatible with quantum facts, something that Bruno
> > has been at pains to point out.
>
> If your 'noumenal reality' is the same as the 'compressed ('u')reality' I
> use in my paper, I can't see where it has any more of a problematical
> relationship with (say) mwi qm than the basic physicalist approach does.
> (Neither can I find any references to noumen* and qm/quantum together in the
> everything archives by Bruno. If by 'noumenal reality', you just mean
> materialism, that's a different kettle of fish.)
Sorry - I have used the term "noumenal reality" a few times in
correspondence with Colin Hales. Bruno would call the concept
"Concrete universe", and rereading your paper, it is not the same as
your "u-reality", since you use that to refer to ensembles such as the
bitstring ensemble, or all mathematics and so on, which are idealist
abstract things.
In my book I do say a materialist is someone positing that a concrete
reality exists (p159) then note on page 177 that Lockwood
distinguishes between physicalism and materialism, with materialism
just meaning that supervenience holds (which need not imply the
existence of a concrete reality, but does imply the anthropic
principle).
Note on page 59, I use the term physicalism. To be consistent, I
should have used physicalism on p159 - oh dear!
>
> >
> > What I find is that most explanations requiring noumenal reality can
> > also be explained by simply assuming the anthropic principle. It is
> > possible that the AP suffices to banish white rabbits also. However,
> > the AP becomes a little mysterious without noumenal reality, which I
> > do discuss at several points in my book. It remains, IMHO, an unsolved
> > problem.
> >
> >> If one takes the description string x (up to
> >> some finite limit) as (minimally) representing a universe (and from which
> >> OM's are derived), then application of your equivalence class method
> >> should
> >> solve the WR problem directly (check out my roughly equivalent method at
> >> www.physica.freeserve.co.uk/pa01.htm) - this hopefully answers your point
> >> above about the origin of our being almost certainly in one of the
> >> simplest
> >> SAS-supporting universes: the premise can be all logically possible
> >> universes (or just 'entities'), some or all of which are representable by
> >> description strings (say).
> >
> > Its been a while since I read your paper, but IIRC it was largely a
> > paraphrase of the same argument I put in section 3 of Why Occams Razor.
>
> Re-reading this section under the interpretation provided in your recent
> email (where you talk about phenomenally cohering OM's) convinces me that
> you are saying something fundamentally different. Your section 2 is
> certainly closer - I previously assumed from other comments that you were
> taking it as read that any minimal specification of an OM (eg via a program,
> description string etc) would have to implicitly include all the OM's in
> that universe - that is the simplicity that a TOE is aiming for.
The minimal specification including all OMs in a universe could not be
sufficient to specify the OMs completely. There must always be some random
component to the complete specification of an OM.
> The
> 'cohering OM's' are then automatically catered for - they are part of the
> same representing description string (or whatever represents them). This
> would then coincide with my own approach: the measure is taken over (say)
> bit strings minimally representing all possible relevant universes (or just
> 'entities', since minimal universe representations are assumed to provide
> the simplest representations of normal OM's), and not over 'histories'.
>
This is measure over birth moments (which is handled by section
4.1). Subsequent moments must also include fairly random additional
data - this is dealt with in section 4.2, which indicates that this
additional random data is extremely unlikely to be interpreted as
miraculous, but rather just interpreted as noise on top of the
regularities contained in the birth moment. I note that you have this
argument now in your pb01.htm paper, not in pa01.html which is where I
remembered it to be. Have you swapped things around?
--
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
A/Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
Mathematics
UNSW SYDNEY 2052 hpcoder.domain.name.hidden
Australia http://www.hpcoders.com.au
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Received on Mon Mar 24 2008 - 19:34:08 PDT