Jesse Mazer wrote:
>
>
> I hadn't heard of the universal prior before, but I found a short
> description on Russell Standish's site:
> http://parallel.hpc.unsw.edu.au/rks/docs/occam/node2.html
> It seems to me that this is still a measure of sorts, based on dividing the
> set of turing machines into equivalence classes and then adopting a rule of
> "one equivalence class, one vote" (correct me if I'm wrong on this). What
> do you mean when you say it approximates any measure? Do you mean that any
> algorithmically generated measure will be approximated by the universal
> prior in some limit?
>
> Russell Standish's page also mentions another option I hadn't thought of: an
> observer-relative measure. Different types of information-processing SAS's
> might have different preferred measures depending on what type of UTM they
> are...although this would not solve the problem of why I find myself as this
> type of SAS rather than some other, or why I find myself in this type of
> universe as opposed to a completely different kind, it could at least allow
> for future predictions and an elimination of the white rabbit problem. But
> we'd still need a single rule to tell us which SAS's should use which
> measure.
>
> Jesse
> _________________________________________________________________
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>
Thanks for the rap! I sent my previous post before coming across this
one. Yes your summary is correct. However section 4 goes on to show
what sort of universe we expect to see ourselves in (ie the Multiverse
we find ourselves in - its the best explanation I've come across yet
for Quantum Mechanics), based on some pretty simple, and one would
hope uncontroversial assumptions about what it means to be conscious.
To go further on the measure problem would require attaching a
particular property of our observed universe to the anthropic
principle - eg why we find ourselves in 4D Minkowski
spacetime. Tegmark has some speculations on this matter, but it
doesn't go far enough.
Cheers
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Received on Wed Mar 14 2001 - 16:50:58 PST