Joel wrote:
>What is weird from one perspective is not too weird in another. Some might
>thing it's strange, and others might not.
I agree. So what I say is that we must explain why the "world" seems to
*remain* normal to us.
Suppose you have a theory of elementary particles, and that your theory
predicts
that if you send a neutron on a proton with enough energy, then you get a
virtual
mad cows lasting for 0.00134sec.
And then you do the experiment, and you get nothing (except the proton
and neutron).
You agree that you must explain the absence of madcows, I guess.
Well, with everything-like type of TOEs, there is a necessity to explain
the
apparence of lawfull regularities, because those TOEs (like the Everett
one)
a priori entails to much possible continuations, there is an
induction-inflation.
In this list, oversimplifying a little bit, there are two sort of
approaches
with respect to that inflation.
1) The Schmidhuber-Ruhl-Dobrzelewski-... approaches (SRD). (Please don't
take such
denomination too seriously).
The SRD makes abstraction of the first person and does not take into
account
the first person description. There is some agreement that there are
still third
person white rabbits, and they hunt them by using some absolute
self-sampling
assumption (Nick Bostrom SSA, see
http://www.analytic.org/)
based on universal prior.
2) The other approaches, which take into account the fact that we have
not yet
solved the mind body problem. In particular if we accept the
computationalist thesis,
then it is possible to show explicitily that consciousness cannot be
associate
neither with "physical activity", nor even with any single computation,
but only to
dense and continuous sheaves of infinite computations. You still have to
explain
the absence of the third person whabbits (and universal prior could still
be
useful although my own track of 3-whabbits is more based on Bennett
notion of depth),
but, you get 1-person whabbits too (and a priori vastly numerous, at
least 2^aleph0).
To track them you need a refined *relative SSA*, which can be seen as a
conditionalisation on your "actual" states.
Some are hunting the 3-whabbits,
and some are hunting the 3-whabbits + the 1-whabbits.
No doubt that that summary is rough, but I wanted to be short.
Bruno
Received on Thu Jun 21 2001 - 07:54:01 PDT