What would you decide?

From: Marchal <marchal.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Tue Nov 20 03:20:02 2001

Wei Dai wrote (in the everything-list):


> Do you understand Marchal's postings? I really have trouble making sense
> of them. If you do, would you mind rephrasing his main ideas for me?



And Juergen Schmidhuber answered:


>No, unfortunately I do not understand him. But provability does seem
>important to him. Maybe someone else could post a brief and concise
>summary?


I appreciate very much Juergen talking now as if perhaps something
was understandable in my posts. That's a reconforting step. Thanks.

But I am astonished by Wei Dai's remark.
I guess I react even to much to it probably.
Here is why.

First: why saying this now after I send more than 500 posts to the list.
Second: I enter the list because I have seen many people sharing
similar ideas with mine, with somehow different formulations. In brief
everything exists ... with some measure. Then *you*, Wei,have discovered
that terrible ASSA/RSSA distinction which leads indeed toward mainly
two deeply different interpretations of "everything exists":
the absolute one which makes apparently possible bayesian type of
anthropic reasoning (on a very fuzzy reference base though).
The relative one, which in my opinion is the one by Everett with his
universal wave function. This one leads to the search of a neighborhood
structure between the observer-moment, alias possible first person
universe. (through the comp or even QM reversal).
Imo, the relative one need the or a 1-person/3-person distinction.

When you single out that important distinction you said that you
have accepted for a time the "relative" way, but then you change your
mind. So surely you see the main point.

Should I conclude you were not understanding only the *AUDA* posts,
which relies on Logic, Godel, etc. ?

What is exactly your opinion about the importance of that first and
third person point of view distinction when we discussed our possible
computational extensions (like in the WM self-duplication thought Exp.)?

To sum up, I mean, I don't understand at which step of the reasoning
you begin to be troubled. I believe both comp and QM are troubling
by themselves so the consequence of our belief can be troubling and
hard to believe, but then it is a good reason for trying to make
things precise (including the question).

I mean I could understand if you tell me that you are not convinced
by my argument for this or that reason.
Or that you are not interested, because it would be no relevant
for your decision theory. But you have been to vague I'm afraid.

Let me try one question which has been perhaps asked before by me
or someone else:
I ask you to accept comp for the sake of the argument, I ask you
to imagine you are taking each day a transporter which cut and paste
you from home to work and back again.

But then you learn that some "channels" are pirated by some sadical
people in need of chair ..., and some commercials tell you that by
paying a little more, your code can be quantum protected on some
channel making such piratery much more difficult if not impossible.

My question is: supposing you can afford it, would you pay for that
extra security? Are you willing to accept that a reasonable
computationalist practionner *should* pay for it?

What would you decide?

Bruno
Received on Tue Nov 20 2001 - 03:20:02 PST