The simplest description can be found in Max Tegamark's paper "Is an
Ensemble theory the ultimate TOE?". He uses the term "frog
perspective" for 1st person, and "bird perspective" for 3rd person.
Bruno Marchal has also written quite a bit about it in Chapter 5 of
his (Lille) thesis. This is unfortunately is not as accessible as
Tegmark's paper (not only is it written in French, which is not
particularly a problem for me, but it is also written in the language
of modal logic, which I'm only slowly gaining an appreciation of its
power and utility).
From what I understand of the chapter, 1st person communicable phenomena is
described by a logic G, and incommunicable by G*\G. The square box
operator [] represents knowledge, ie []p means one knows p. The
interpretation of [] is basically that p is true, and that I can prove
it. So this is essentially what we might call "mathematical"
knowledge. How this relates to "physical" knowledge, which a la Popper
is more "not proven false", I don't really know.
3rd person phenomena on the other hand is identified with Z, where the
box operator corresponds to "proving p and not being able to prove p
is false", ie basically the collection of self-consistent formal
systems. Z seems remarkably similar to Max Tegmark's original proposal...
I'm still rereading these chapters, and I'm sure I'll have some more
questions on the subject other than "Where does Popper fit in?"
Cheers
On Sun, May 08, 2005 at 02:54:48PM -0400, Jeanne Houston wrote:
> I am a mere layperson who follows your discussions with great interest, so forgive me if I'm about to ask a question whose answer is apparent to all but me. I am very familiar with the "first person" and "third person" concept in everyday life and literature, but I am a little unclear about the specific meaning that it holds in these discussions; I feel like I'm missing something important that is blocking my understanding of how you are applying first and third person to your work in terms of multiverses and MWI. Could someone please direct me to some links that could help me better understand these perspectives as they apply to the discussions. Thank you.
>
> Jeanne
>
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Received on Sun May 08 2005 - 20:15:38 PDT