Re: Consistency?

From: Hal Ruhl <hjr.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Sun, 20 May 2001 20:48:51 -0700

Dear Bruno:

At , you wrote:

>Your critics on the usefulness of the notion of consistency is
>similar to the critics by Schmidhuber on the use of provability.

I also see my critique as similar to and something of an extension of
Juergen's argument. However, I believe I see different consequents.


>You still seem to believe that there is a particular evolving formal
>systems capable of generating "our (perhaps splitting) universe".

I do not see the evolution of a particular universe as a "generation" or
any sort of extraction from an initial packet of compressed information.

I do intend to study your argument over the summer, but for now I will try
to clarify my position as it currently stands as an interim response to
your post.

Each of my "formal" systems has a single axiom and a set of rules [rather
like rules of grammar] for judging which other strings are "well formed
successor" strings to the axiom or to each of its successors in turn. The
acceptable strings are not "well formed formulas" in the sense of being
theorems that extract "truth" from the original axiom.

There are no independent rules of inference.

The strings to be judged are all present in the Everything as parts of a
meta "pattern".

The meta pattern is "stirred" by an Everything/Nothing alternation based on
an incompleteness or undecidable re the stability of both.

Each of my "formal" systems is actually a shifting isomorphism to the
strings within the Everything. A shift is a state to state transition for
a universe - what I consider the observable. The rules of inference [the
physics and mathematics] of a particular system are derived from the rules
of grammar.

>In particular you seem to believe that a pure third person description
>of that evolving system is enough.

My conscious observer is a structure within a given one of my "formal"
systems that is necessarily the frequent nexus of multiple acceptable
successor configurations to its isomorphic portion of the current string.

>But in that case comp is false.

At the moment I can not judge but I suspect that my position encompasses
comp as one type of included rules of grammar.

>And you will need some strong non
>computationalist hypothesis.

I do not see my position as supporting Juergen's because I see Chaitin's
type of incompleteness as countering a computationalist approach. Each of
my "formal" systems has at least a little "do not care" in its rules of
grammar.

>And you take the risk of hiding the
>mind-body problem in the process. (This follows from UDA and/or the
>movie-graph argument or Maudlin's one).
>
>With comp you have no choice, for isolating the laws of physics,
>other than to compute the measure on your computational (DU-accessible)
>consistent continuations as seen by some "first person point of view".
>That is what the UDA argument explicitely shows, isn'it?

Actually [if DU is UD] I think that is what I just said - sort of. My
particular rules of grammar imply the particular rules of inference. The
"computation" is a judgement as to acceptability of successor strings and
the result is "consistent" with these rules. However, the rules of grammar
can have a "do not care" component.

As to the rest of your post I will wait until I think I understand your
position much better than I do now.

As for the comments from John Mikes: John I think your first part is an
agreement with my position. However, I do not see a SAS as accepting a new
state but rather its current configuration establishes the set of possible
alternate next states. All of these may be accepted in a branching
universe. My argument against splitting is a narrow one applied to my
application of Chaitin's type of incompleteness and its series of
resolutions for a particular universe.

Hal
Received on Sun May 20 2001 - 18:08:37 PDT