>From: Bruno Marchal <marchal.domain.name.hidden>
>To: everything-list.domain.name.hidden
>Subject: Re: Request for a glossary of acronyms
>Date: Sat, 31 Jan 2004 16:11:39 +0100
>
>Here is an interesting post by Jesse. Curiously I have not been able to
>find it
>in the archive, but luckily I find it in my computer memory.
>
>Is that normal? I will try again later.
Thanks for reviving this post, it's in the archives here:
http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/m4882.html
It was part of this thread:
http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/index.html?by=OneThread&t=Request%20for%20a%20glossary%20of%20acronyms
>
>Jesse's TOE pet is very similar to the type of TOE compatible with the comp
>hyp, I guess everyone can see that.
>
>Jesse, imo, that post deserves to be developed. The way you manage to save
>partially the ASSA (Absolute Self-Sampling Assumption) is not very clear to
>me.
>
>Bruno
Well, the idea I discussed was somewhat vague, I think to develop it I'd
need to have better ideas about what a theory of consciousness should look
like, and I don't know where to begin with that. But as for how the ASSA is
incorporated, I'll try to summarize again and maybe make it a little
clearer. Basically my idea was that there would be two types of measures on
observer-moments: a relative measure, which gives you answers to questions
like "if I am currently experiencing observer-moment A, what is the
probability that my next experience will be of observer-moment B?", and an
absolute measure, which is sort of like the probability that my current
observer-moment will be A in the first place. This idea of absolute measure
might seem meaningless since whatever observer-moment I'm experiencing right
now, from my point of view the probability is 1 that I'm experiencing that
one and not some other, but probably the best way to think of it is in terms
of the self-sampling assumption, where reasoning *as if* I'm randomly
sampled from some group (for example, 'all humans ever born' in the doomsday
argument) can lead to useful conclusions, even if I don't actually believe
that God used a random-number generator to decide which body my preexisting
soul would be placed in.
So, once you have the idea of both a relative measure
('probability-of-becoming') and an absolute measure ('probability-of-being')
on observer-moments, my idea is that the two measures could be interrelated,
like this:
1. My probability-of-becoming some possible future observer-moment is based
both on something like the 'similarity' between that observer-moment and my
current one (so my next experience is unlikely to be that of George W. Bush
sitting in the White House, for example, because his memories and
personality are so different from my current ones) but also on the absolute
probability of that observer-moment (so that I am unlikely to find myself
having the experience of talking to an intelligent white rabbit, because
even if that future observer-moment is fairly similar to my current one in
terms of personality, memories, etc., white-rabbit observer-moments are
objectively improbable). I don't know how to quantify "similarity" though,
or exactly how both similarity and absolute probabilities would be used to
calculate the relative measure between two observer-moments...this is where
some sort of "theory of consciousness" would be needed.
2. Meanwhile, the absolute measure is itself dependent on the relative
measure, in the sense that an observer-moment A will have higher absolute
measure if a lot of other observer-moments that themselves have high
absolute measure see A as a likely "next experience" or a likely "past
experience" (ie there's a high relative measure between them). This idea is
based partly on that thought experiment where two copies of a person are
made, then one copy is itself later copied many more times, the idea being
that the copy that is destined to be copied more in the future has a higher
absolute measure because there are more future observer-moments
"reinforcing" it (see
http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/m4841.html for
more on this thought-experiment). I think of this whole idea in analogy to
the way Google's ranking system works: pages are ranked as more popular if
they are linked to by a lot of other pages that are themselves highly
ranked. So, the popularity of a particular page is sort of like the absolute
probability of being a particular observer-moment, while a link from one
page to another is like a high relative probability from one observer-moment
to another (to make the analogy better you'd have to use weighted links, and
you'd have to assume the weight of the link between page A and page B itself
depends partly on B's popularity).
The final part of my pet theory is that by having the two measures
interrelated in this way, you'd end up with a unique self-consistent
solution to what each measure would look like, like what happens when you
have a bunch of simultaneous equations specifying how different variables
relate to one another, and they determine a unique solution. This would
provide a rationale for having a non-arbitrary choice of absolute and
relative measure (see my comments about the 'arbitrariness problem' in my
very first post on this list at
http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/m2606.html ). Also, this type of TOE
would give a precise answer to the 'problem of the reference class' which
Nick Bostrom talks about in his work on the self-sampling assumption, the
answer being that you should reason as if you were randomly sampled from the
set of all observer-moments, weighted by their absolute measure. The final
benefit of this type of theory is that you wouldn't need a two-step
procedure of first coming up with a measure on "universes" and then
afterwards adding anthropic considerations as a second step--I think that
two-step idea depends on a fundamentally dualistic view of the mind/body
problem, as I said in my post at
http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/m5069.html
So, does any of this help explain how I try to save the ASSA? I guess it
depends on what you think the basic problem the ASSA has that requires it to
be "saved", I think Hal Finney was saying the problem was that it could lead
to predictions incompatible with those of the RSSA, while others seem to
have more of a philosophical problem with talking about the "probability"
that my current observer-moment could be anything other than what it
actually is (if 'I' were someone else, 'I' wouldn't be me!) What is your
basic objection to the ASSA, and do you think my pet theory offers at least
one possible way to resolve it?
Jesse Mazer
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Received on Sun Feb 01 2004 - 00:07:36 PST