Re: Which universe are we in?

From: Bruno Marchal <marchal.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 2002 18:18:00 +0200

Hi Stephen,

At 10:24 -0400 10/07/2002, Stephen Paul King wrote:
> Is it the difference between 1-person and 3-person that is implicit
>here?


Yes.


>It seems to me that we have expectations about our 1-person aspect of
>experience that are, at best, unreasonable. On the otherhand, it seems to me
>that we need to provide some explanation for the simultaneouly unique and
>absolute appearence that our 1-person expereinces have - what are we to make
>of the concreteness of "what it is like to be 'me' experiencing 'me'".
> One possibility that I have considered is that these two 'me's are not
>one and the same, they are more like an object and its abstract
>representation.


Yes, but once you postulate comp you are willing to identify yourself
with a ... somehow abstract representation, or certainly with something
immaterial. For exemple, in a well developed comp civilisation, you could
choose each morning the body which you feel more suitable for the day.
And each evening you will do some backup of yourself, i.e. of your immaterial
relative abstract/concrete (it's a number) representation.
Now you will argue that you still need a concrete universe with physical
resource for making manifest your incarnation during the day.
But here I refer you to the uda reasoning which shows that if you can survive
such a backup then you loose all possible criteria for distinguishing if,
from one instant to some next one, you are still manifested by some
"physical" universe, or if you are manifest by some purely arithmetical
version of the
running of a program which approximates (perhaps perfectly, perhaps not) some
portion of that "universe", so that, with or without a physical universe, your
expectation must be given by a measure on all computations (living
immaterialy in
numberland), which are going through your actual state.
The slogan is that there is no need to run the UD. There is no need to imagine
we are living through the working of a screen saver of a computer in some other
universe (like Tim said), because the "apparantly singular universe" emerge
from all possible running which exists atemporaly in the "block arithmetical
truth". That's useful because that suppress the need for an infinite regress.
I don't know for sure if comp is true, and so you may be right
invoking "natural
resource", but at this stage you would just be stepping outside my working
hypothesis ;)


> Bruno, I still don't understand how your theory dispenses with the
>necessity of physical resources.


Honestly the necessity of apparent resource is what we must explain (if comp).
Now, either you mean some materialist concrete and singular decomposable
aristotelian stuff, and *I* ask you what do you mean by that. Or you accept
the idea that physical resources (including its necessity-like feature)
emerge from some inside view (first person plural) for collection of
machines (necessarily sparsely distributed in the deployement of the UD),
in which case it is clear that I don't dispense with those resources at all.
I just don't believe they are fundamental or primary. The primeness op 17 is
more primary (I think, or, by definition with comp).



>Another way of posing my question is
>perhaps: How can a Platonic Comp perform a computation without some analogue
>of persistence of memory or duration.


I have an explanation of persistence of memory with the Z1 logics, and it
can be related with JL Bell quantum logic. But that looks like an authoritative
answer isn'it? Roughly speaking you can bet we are embedded in a
deep (= +/- necessarily long computation, cf Bennett) computation
which dovetails
on some big (like the continuum) sets (the reals, the complex numbers
perhaps, perhaps the quaternions, why not the octonions ...), so that our type
of story is terribly rare, but our singular computations (with that similar
type) is terribly multiplied. (A little like our genome btw: your precise
DNA is unique on earth, but similar DNA code is numerous and kept to be
multiplied; It is also not unlike quantum states. (And this is related
with the very interesting notion of quantum depth, by David Deutsch)).
Now Platonic Comp don't *perform* any computation. All computations
are there, and notion like "performance" emerge, from our multiplied point of
views of finite being necessarily ignorant (but yet betting) on
(never completable) realities in which we are embedded.


> I can't seem to get the idea out of my head that information can not
>just refer to information itself but merely can encode the "address" of
>where and when it can be found - this is how I think Goedelization works.


I don't think there is an absolute "where" and "when" in arithmetic, but
the analogy between godelisation and programmation helps to figure out what
you intend to say I think. Information does not need to refer to
itself, though.
Only UTMs will makes reference relatively to emerging patterns, which are
emerging and stable relatively to their (the UTM) most probable computational
continuations.

Best Regards,

Bruno
Received on Wed Jul 10 2002 - 09:15:40 PDT