Re: JOINING posts

From: Lennart Nilsson <leonard.nilsson.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Fri, 24 May 2002 09:50:55 +0200

My formal education ended back in the beginnings of the seventies with a
finished MA in sociology and an invitation to get a doctors degree at the
University of Stockholm. But life got in the way.

When my wife died two years ago I decided to write a book in order to
understand better some of my thinkings during all those years. I finished
the book in seven months and have since been trying to get it published.
That has proven very hard since Swedish is a small language. Max Tegmark,
who is swedish, even though he works in USA has read my manuscript and
promised to write a forward if I could get a bookcompany to publish it. He
said he was impressed and thought that my work was a fascinating hike in the
territory between philosophy and physics and that it was full of original
ideas! Unfortunately I don´t suppose many on this list is fluent in swedish,
but to give you an idea where I´m at I can show you the bibliography from
the book:

Bibliografi

Barrow, John D.: Universums födelse, Natur och Kultur, Stockholm 1995
Blackmore, Susan: The Meme Machine, Oxford University Press, New York 1999
Casti, John L.: Searching for certainty, Scribners, London 1992
Close, Frank: Lucifer´s Legacy, Oxford University Press, New York 2000
Davies, Paul: Superforce, Unwin Paperbacks, London 1985
Davies, P.C.W.; Brown J. (eds.): Superstrings - A Theory of Everything?,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1988
Dawkins, Richard: The Blind Watchmaker, Penguin Books, London 1988
Dawkins, Richard: Livets flod, Natur och Kultur, Stockholm 1996
Dennet, Daniel C.: Consciousness Explained, Penguin Books, London 1992
Dennet, Daniel C.: Darwin´s Dangerous Idea, Touchstone, New York 1996
Dennet, Daniel C.: Kinds of Minds - Toward an Understanding of
Consciousness, BasicBooks, New York 1996
Deutsch, David: The Fabric of Reality, Penguin Books, London 1997
Gell-Mann, Murray: Kvarken och Jaguaren, ICA-förlaget, Västerås 1994
Greene, Brian: The elegant universe, W.W. Norton & Company, New York 1999
Guttmann Y.M.: The concept of probability in statistical physics, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge 1999
Hawking, Stephen W.: Kosmos - En kort historik, Rabén Prisma, Stockholm 1992
Hawking, Stephen W.: Svarta hål och universums framtid, Rabén Prisma,
Stockholm 1994
Hoffmeyer, Jesper: Livstecken, Bonnier Alba, Stockholm 1997
Hutten, Ernest H.: The Ideas of Physics, Oliver & Boyd, Edinburgh, 1967
Jaynes, Julian: The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the
Bicameral Mind, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston 1982
Livio, Mario: The Accelerating Universe, John Wiley & Sons, New York 2000
Monod, Jacques: Slump och nödvändighet, Aldus/Bonniers, Stockholm 1972
Smolin, Lee: Three Roads to Quantum Gravity, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London
2000
Wick, David: The Infamous Boundary, Springer-Verlag, New York 1995

Artiklar

David Deutsch: Comment on "'Many Minds' Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics
by Michael Lockwood", British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 47 222-8
(1996)
David Deutsch: Proceedings of the Royal Society A455, 3129-3197 Quantum
Theory of Probability and Decisions (1999)
David Deutsch: Proceedings of the Royal Society A456, 1759-1774 Information
Flow in Entangled Quantum Systems (2000)
David Deutsch, Artur Ekert, Rossella Luppachini: Machines, Logic and Quantum
Physics, Bulletin of Symbolic Logic 3, 3 (September 2000)
David Deutsch: The Structure of the Multiverse, opublicerad artikel som blev
framsidesstoff i New Scientist (14 Juli 2001)
Horava & Witten: Eleven-dimensional supergravity on a manifold with
boundary, Nucl. Phys. B475 (1996)
Khoury, Ovrut, Steinhard, Turok: The Ekpyrotic Universe: Colliding Branes
and the Origin of the Hot Big Bang, arXiv:hep-th/0103239 (Mars 2001)
Tegmark & Wheeler: 100 Years of the Quantum, Scientific American (Februari
2001)
Max Tegmark: Is ``the theory of everything'' merely the ultimate ensemble
theory?, Annals of Physics 270, 1-51 (November 1998)
Michael Brooks: Enlightenment in the barrel of a gun, The Guardian (1997)
Anne Runehov: Mind, Brain, Quantum & Time: A Lockwoodian perspective,
Magisteruppsats vis Stockholms Universitet Filosofiska Institutionen (1999)
Steane & van Dam: Quantum entanglement looks like telepathy when three
physicist get together on a game show, Physics Today 35-39, (Februari 2000)

Webbpublikationer

E. T. Jaynes: Probability Theory: The Logic of Science, fragment till ett
bokmanuskript från Juni 1994, PDF-format på webbadressen bayes.wustl.edu
(Augusti 2001)
Christoph Schiller: Motion Mountain - Hiking beyond space and time along the
concepts of modern physics, lärobok i fysik under utarbetande, PDF-format på
webbadressen dse.nl/motionmountain/welcome.html (Augusti 2001)

----- Original Message -----
From: "Wei Dai" <weidai.domain.name.hidden>
To: <everything-list.domain.name.hidden>
Sent: Thursday, May 23, 2002 7:47 PM
Subject: JOINING posts


> I find that I often have trouble understanding posts on this mailing list,
> given the wide range of intellectual ground that it covers. It seems that
> people sometimes assume a background in an academic field, and I'm not
> even sure what the field is, or how to get up to date or at least familiar
> with it. On the other hand, sometimes a poster is just a crank and isn't
> making any sense at all. It can be hard to tell the difference.
>
> Perhaps it would help if list members each posts a short biography of
> themselves, and tell us their intellectual backgrounds. What fields are
> you familiar with, what relevant books/papers have you read, etc.? This
> way, if you don't understand someone's post, you can look up his JOINING
> post in the archive and figure out what background he is assuming. I got
> this idea from the SL4 mailing list; maybe it will work here as well.
>
> To begin with myself, I work as a cryptographic engineer, which means I
> design and implement computer security mechanisms, with a focus on the
> cryptographic parts. I have a BA in computer science, and have taken
> courses in linguistics, theory of computation, number theory, algebra,
> probability theory, and game theory.
>
> I think I first encountered the idea that all possible universes exist in
> the novel _Permutation City_ by Greg Egan, and then in Tegmark and
> Schmidhuber's papers. I started this mailing list after reading both of
> those papers.
>
> I've scanned through _An Introduction to Kolmogorov Complexity and Its
> Applications_, Ming Li and Paul Vitanyi, and read parts of it in enough
> detail to have found several previously unreported errors. It's about
> algorithmic information theory, and I personally think it is the single
> most important book for list members to read.
>
> Here are some other books that I've read outside of formal education that
> seem relevant.
>
> _The Selfish Gene_, Richard Dawkins. Theory of evolution.
> _Gödel, Escher, Bach - an Eternal Golden Braid_, Douglas Hofstadter. On
> self-reference.
> _Maxwell's Demon: Entropy, Information, Computation_. Entropy and the
> physics of computation.
> _Philosophy of Mathematics: Structure and Ontology_, Stewart Shapiro.
>
> I'm finding that I don't have enough knowledge about foundations of
> mathematics, foundations of decision theory, and quantum mechanics. I'm
> currently reading the following books to rectify the situation:
>
> _The Foundations of Causal Decision Theory_, James Joyce
> _A Modern Approach to Quantum Mechanics_, John S. Townsend
> _Foundations Without Foundationalism : A Case for Second-Order Logic_,
> Stewart Shapiro
>
> Ok, who wants to go next?
>
Received on Fri May 24 2002 - 00:50:53 PDT

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