Re: on simply being an SAS

From: Fred Chen <flipsu5.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Wed, 15 Dec 1999 22:08:33 -0800

 Christopher Maloney wrote:

> I don't like the description of this problem as the "dragon" problem
> or the "flying rabbit" problem. As someone (Fred, I think) posted
> recently, a dragon or a flying rabbit would not indicate lawless
> behavior, but rather, would indicate strange, complicated, different
> laws at work.
>
> I think that really what is being discussed (by all means speak up
> if you disagree) is the question of why we experience any physical
> laws at all. It seems to me that either we should expect the
> universe to be lawful, or we should expect our senses to provide
> pure white-noise static from this instant onward. I still can't
> get past the nagging conviction that I got a few weeks ago that
> none of the discussion I've read so far does anything to justify
> the expectation of law over chaos.

My post on being an SAS stated that we needed laws to be self-aware, conscious. These
don' t have to be laws of physics, even, just laws. Without laws (perceivable by the
SAS), no SAS. A discontinuity in the laws like a dragon is a complex thing, which would
blow up the computational information measure, making it less probable.

> Schmidhuber says that it has to do with the measure of the program
> to compute this universe and nothing else. Well, that doesn't work,
> IMO, because he doesn't define "this universe". Does he mean the
> universal wave function of QM? If so, that obviously has an infinite
> number of histories of me, so why isn't that multiple universes? If
> not, then I would think that this universe (i.e. this history) has
> actually a rather high information content. The info. content of
> QM only plummets when you take the whole wave function into account,
> nicht wahr?
>

The universal wave function representing multiple histories having fixed Schmiduber
measure makes more sense (to me at least). Otherwise, each individual universe's own
nuances contribute infinite 'excess information' which identify it but may not be
relevant to measure.

Fred

>

> --
> Chris Maloney
> http://www.chrismaloney.com
>
> "Donuts are so sweet and tasty."
> -- Homer Simpson
Received on Wed Dec 15 1999 - 22:13:38 PST

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