Re: Questions on Russell's "Why Occam" paper

From: Bruno Marchal <marchal.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 17:56:50 +0200

Le 10-juin-05, à 14:59, Patrick Leahy a écrit :

>> Russell Standish:
>> If the AP applies to the Sims Mark VII, then their reality will be a
>> description containing a "body" corresponding to their intelligences.
>> They will not be aware of the PC that their description is being
>> generated on. We, who inhabit the world with the PC will not be aware
>> of the countless other PCs, Macs, Xboxes, Eniacs, Turing machines,
>> pebbles in Zen monasteries etc running Sims Mark VII. So the PC
>> itself is actually irrelevant from the internal perspective of the
>> Sims.
>
> Well at least we agree on that. No strange loops in this picture, so
> it is unlike the picture you outline in your paper.
>


Aargh .... Bad luck! A point where I disagree with both Schmidhuber
*and* Standish, at least here apparently.

To explain I must assume comp and ... (for one) explicitly the *result*
of my thesis. In a nutshell: it is that, if comp is assumed, then the
correct law of physics are derivable from comp. (it makes comp
testable: derive physics from comp and compare with empirical physics).
I will call the physics derived from comp: the comp-physics.

Please admit this if only for the sake of the argument.

Suppose I build a simulated city with some self-aware entities evolving
in that simulated environment. Then

Either I simulate the correct comp physics, then apparently the
simulated entity cannot know they are simulated by me, but actually
this sentence has no meaning, because they are simulated by 2^aleph_0
immaterial stories (constituting arithmetical truth), so it is only in
a weak sense that they are failed. (actually it is not even possible to
simulate comp physics except in the "ridiculous" sense of running
(really) the universal dovetailer.

Or I simulate incorrect comp physics, then the only way we could say
the simulated entity are failed is
1) either by killing them (in some absolute way) when they discover
discrepancies between the comp-physics they can find by herself and
their fake environment. But in that case their story is finite and its
measure can be shown equal to 0. Or
2) eithert I keep up correcting the simulation, but then in the limit I
don't fail them. Or I limit the cognitive ability of the entities, but
then either I will failed to genuinely fail them, or I will make them
inconsistent (and here too the measure can be shown equal to zero, and
that is related to the non-cul-sac phenomenon).


It is an amazing positive consequence of machine's incompleteness that
you cannot genuinely failed any (relatively simulated or not) machine
having enough introspection power for a "very long time".

Apparently, In machine's platonia, all lies leads soon or later to a
(recognizable) catastroph.

Tp prevent falling into an inconsistency, this last conclusion follows
from comp, and remember that if comp is correct we cannot "know" it is
correct, and we cannot probably know that all lies leads soon or later
to a (recognizable) catastroph. But if you *bet* on comp, you can bet
on it!

Bruno


http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Received on Fri Jun 10 2005 - 11:57:43 PDT

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