Re: Victor Korotkikh

From: Brent Meeker <meekerdb.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Thu, 14 May 2009 09:36:47 -0700

Bruno Marchal wrote:
> Ronald,
>
> On 14 May 2009, at 13:19, Ronald (ronaldheld) wrote:
>
>> Can you explain your Physics statement in more detail, which I can
>> understand?
>>
>
> UDA *is* the detailed explanation of that "physics statement". So it
> would be simpler if you could tell me at which step you have a problem
> of understanding, or an objection, or something. You can search UDA in
> the archives for older or more recent versions, or read my SANE2004
> paper:
>
> http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/publications/SANE2004MARCHALAbstract.html
>
> In a nutshell, the idea is the following. If we are machine we are
> duplicable. If we distinguish the first person by their personal
> memories, sufficiently introspective machine can deduce that they
> cannot predict with certainty they personal future in either self-
> duplicating experience, or in "many-identical-states preparation" like
> a concrete universal dovetailer would do "all the time".
> So, if you are concretely in front of a concrete universal dovetailer,
> with the guaranty it will never stop (in some steady universe à-la
> Hoyle for example), you are in a high state of first person
> indeterminacy, given that the universal dovetailer will execute all
> the computations going through your actual state.

I'm not sure how to understand "your state". Is it a finite piece of the state
of computation? In that case it seems it would be revisited arbitrarily many
times and in different orders relative to other states.

>Sometimes I have to
> remind the step 05 for helping the understanding here. In that state,
> from a first person perspective you don't know in which computational
> history you belong,

Is "history" meant in the sense of a thread in the completed infinite
computation, or does it mean just the "past" part of the thread going back to
the beginning of the UD?

Brent

>but you can believe (as far as you are willing to
> believe in comp) that there are infinitely many of them. If you agree
> to identify an history by its infinite steps, or if you accept the Y =
> II principle (that if a story bifurcate," Y ", you multiply their
> similar comp-past, so Y gives II), then you can understand that the
> cardinal (number) of your histories going through you actual state is
> 2^aleph_zero. It is a continuum. Of course you can first person
> distinguish only a enumerable quotient of it, and even just a finite
> part of that enumeration. "Stable consciousness" need deep stories
> (very long yet redundant stories, it is deep in Bennett sense) and a
> notion of linear multiplication of independent stories.
> Now the laws of arithmetic provides exactly this, and so you can, with
> OCCAM just jump to AUDA, but you have to study one or two book of
> mathematical logic and computer science before. (the best are Epstein
> & Carnielli, or Boolos, Burgess and Jeffrey).
> Or, much easier, but not so easy, meditate on the eighth step of UDA,
> which shows that form their first point of view universal machine
> cannot distinguish "real" from "virtual", but they cannot distinguish
> "real" from "arithmetical" either, so that the arithmetical realm
> defines the intrinsic first person indeterminacy of any universal
> machine. Actually the eighth step shows that comp falsifies the usual
> mind/physical-machine identity thesis, but it does not falsify a
> weaker mind/many-mathematical machines thesis.
>
> If interested I suggest you study UDA in Sane2004, and ask any
> questions, or find a flaw etc.
> (or wait for a more recent version I have yet to put on my page)
>
> Thanks for the reference to Kent's paper (it illustrates very well the
> knotty problems you get into when you keep Everett, materialism and
> the identity thesis, but I have read it only diagonally just now).
>
> Hope this helped a bit.
>
> Bruno

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Received on Thu May 14 2009 - 09:36:47 PDT

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