Re: OMs are events

From: Brent Meeker <meekerdb.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Mon, 01 Aug 2005 22:16:24 -0700

Lee Corbin wrote:
> Hal writes
>
>
>>I did mention the question of whether a given calculation
>>instantiated a given OM. Maybe "instantiate" is not the
>>right word there. I meant to consider the question of whether
>>the first calculation added to the measure of the information
>>structure corresponding to the OM.
>
>
> I think that both the word and the meaning are clear.
>
> Consider the following "gentle seduction" approach. One
> day instead of artificial hearts, people get---piece by
> ---piece, artificial brains; and let us, just for the
> purpose of clarifying the above, suppose that this happens
> without much protest (say in the year 2100). Of course,
> *many* here do protest, but let's just imagine that it
> becomes accepted anyway.
>
> Then a lot of "people" are walking around with very complicated
> programs for minds. Since they act and talk just as we do, let's
> inquire as to how they would report on the above discussion.
>
> While someone's body is undergoing repair, it may happen that
> he or she can rent a replacement body. It may even happen that
> for the duration of the operation, their program (i.e. what we
> think of as their mind) is temporarily halted. This too would
> seem unobjectionable given the original premise above that in
> 2100 people have artificial brains made of silicon.
>
> Finally, instead of just being unconscious, that is, absent,
> during the operation, it might be that they could download
> their program into some small device that furnished only
> virtual reality. This too would be equally unobjectionable,
> given the aforesaid premise.
>
> So while some very small machine somewhere was "hosting" them,
> we could very well say that that particular machine was
> *instantiating* them, could we not? This is how I would use
> the terms. One could even go further and say that a person
> could be instantiated in more than one place at a time.
>
> After all, today we speak of your computer being able to
> instantiate a program (give runtime to), while my computer
> can do the same thing with a different instance of the
> same program.
>
> So the big "Everything" claim, or Schmidhuber conjecture, (or
> I don't know what to call it) is that you and I are *already*
> being instantiated by abstract mathematical patterns (the
> UDist, for Universal Distribution).

I'm uncertain whether "instantiated by abstract mathematical patterns" means
that the patterns are being physically realized by a process in time (as in the
  sci-fi above) or by the physical existence of the patterns in some static form
(e.g. written pieces of paper) or just by the Platonic "existence" of the
patterns within some mathematic/logic system.

Brent Meeker
Received on Tue Aug 02 2005 - 01:17:45 PDT