Reading your responses here, I don't think we have much to disagree
on. Like you, I don't need a concrete universe, with concrete time
etc. It was largely your thesis that convinced me of that. Perhaps you
confuse me with Schmidhuber too much !
I wouldn't say that time is illusionary. Illusionary means that
something either not real, or is not what it seems.
I'd prefer to say that time (psychological) is an emergent property of
the 1st person description. (Emergent wrt the 3rd person). If you want
to know what I mean by emergence, please read my paper "On complexity
and emergence" - its fairly short.
By way of analogy, I remember from high school physics that
centrifugal force was called "imaginary". At the time I thought this
was bizarre - the force is real enough, its really a question of
reference frames. In the rotating reference frame, centrifugal force
is real, balancing centripetal force to make the orbiting body
motionless. In the non-rotating reference frame the centripetal force
causes the body to orbit (constant acceleration). Emergence has
something to do with reference frames...
Of course psychological time differs from coordinate time, which is a
3rd person concept, and quite possibly emergent as well (wrt a deeper
description of reality)
The correlation of psychological and coordinate time is interesting,
and I don't feel I understand it fully, but is probably not worth
delving into in this email.
Cheers
On Wed, May 04, 2005 at 09:14:13AM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>
> Le 04-mai-05, ? 01:53, Russell Standish a ?crit :
>
> >On this list, we seem to have two fairly clear camps: those who
> >identify observer moments as the fundamental concept, and those who
> >regard relationships between observer moments with equal ontological
> >status.
>
> OK. As you know I take the relationship into account.
>
>
> >
> >With my TIME postulate, I say that a conscious observer necessarily
> >experiences a sequence of related observer moments (or even a
> >continuum of them).
>
> With my COMP postulate I say the same. The purely mathematically state
> transition function plays the role of your TIME. We do experience a
> continuum of observer moments simultaneously (provably with comp) but
> just because we are related to a continuum of execution in the
> "mathematical" execution of the UD.
>
>
> >To argue that observer moments are independent of
> >each other is to argue the negation of TIME. With TIME, the measure of
> >each observer moment is relative to the predecessor state, or the RSSA
> >is the appropriate principle to use. With not-TIME, each observer
> >moment has an absolute measure, the ASSA.
>
> OK. You know I "belong" to the RSSA.
>
> >
> >On this postulate (which admittedly still fails rigourous statement,
> >and is not as intuitive as one would like axioms to be), hinges the
> >whole QTI debate, and many other things besides. With TIME, one has
> >the RSSA and the possibility of QTI. With not-TIME, one has the
> >ASSA,and Jacques Mallah's doomsday argument against QTI is valid. See
> >the great "RSSA vs ASSA debate" on the everything list a few years
> >ago.
> >
> >Now I claim that TIME is implied by computationalism.
>
> The "illusion" of time (and even of different sort of time like
> 1-person subjective duration to local 3-person parameter-time) is
> implied by comp.
>
> >Time is needed
> >for machines to pass from one state to another, ie to actually compute
> >something.
>
> I guess our divergence relies on the word "actually". If you need such
> a "concrete time" then you need even a "universe". Such actuality is an
> indexical. The only time I need is contained in arithmetical truth, in
> which I can embed all the block-space of all computational histories.
>
>
> >Bruno apparently disagrees, but I haven't heard his
> >disagreement yet.
>
> I am not sure I understand your TIME. Is it physical or mathematical?
>
> Cheers,
>
> Bruno
>
> http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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Received on Wed May 04 2005 - 05:22:07 PDT