Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue

From: Benjamin Udell <budell.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Thu, 12 Jan 2006 23:12:13 -0500

Russell, list,

> Tegmark's 4 level "Multiverse" (actually the Multiverse is only one of the levels) does not really have viewpoints at each level.
> In my book, which largely follows the tradition of this list, there is 3 viewpoints identified: 1st person, 1st person plural and 3rd person.
> The 3rd person corresponds to the bird viewpoint of the Multiverse, or Tegmark Level 3 'verse. Calling it a viewpoint is a stretch of the language since necessarily observers must be embedded in the Multiverse.

Where does Tegmark say that the Multiverse is only one of the levels? Which one?

What is meant by "viewpoint"? Tegmark's elementary description of the four levels sounds like the outline of four viewpoints, with "frog" and "bird" marking the extremes of a four-step set of gradations. Level IV is associated with "pure" maths. Level III is associated with alternatives among cases, which marks it as associated with maths of logic, information, probability, etc., despite what Tegmark says about logic's being the most general and underlying thing in maths. Level III is more "abstract" than Level II and actualizes alternate outcomes across quantum branchings, while Level II actualizes alternate outcomes in various times and places along a single branch, so that the two levels come out the same in their features. Level II seems associable with statistical theory, some areas of information theory, and some other fields deal in a general way with gathering data from various actual places and times and drawing ampliatively-inductive conclusions from parts, samples!
 , etc., to totalities. Level I, with its possibly idiosyncratic constants, initial conditions, historical dependencies, seems associable with physical, chemical, life sciences and human & social studies. So those seem four viewpoints with distinctive content and associations, though not the kind of content which the idea of viewpoint seems to have received on the everything list, which is decidedly not to say that there's anything wrong with the kind of content given on the everything list to the idea of viewpoint.

Is it Tegmark's view, that the bird's eye view is associated particularly with Level III, or does it depend on ideas as developed on the everything list? Why wouldn't a view be associated with Level IV as well? (I thought that, at least in Tegmark's view, the bird's eye view _was_ Level IV).

> Both of the 1st person viewpoints correspond to the frog viewpoint, the difference being the 1st person plural is an objective viewpoint - all things in the 1pp vpt will be agreed upon by 2 or more observers, whereas the 1p vpt is subjective, containing items such as quantum immortality that are _necessarily_ subjective.

The idea of quantum immortality doesn't seem like something that you could call an "experience." If you found yourself alive even after what seemed an unlikely long period of time, after a series of periodic extraordinary escapes, any other observers would agree that you're still alive -- in other words, you'd still be alive from the 1pp vpt. Only in the case where _no records_ remain of your much earlier existence, nothing but your personal memory of it, would quantum immortality seem possibly like an experience, an "especially" subjective one. The quantum immortality idea seems like, not an experience, but an idea requiring one's intellectually adopting some sort of 3rd-person view.

Nevertheless, I've liked the idea of distinguishing an inclusive 1st-&-2nd person "we," both addressor and addressee, from an exclusive 1st person addressor-only, so I'm glad to see it pop up in this context.

Best, Ben Udell

> I have tried to identify 1pp with G and 1p with G*, but I'm really unsure that the analogy is sound.
> Cheers

On Thu, Jan 12, 2006 at 01:18:21PM -0500, Benjamin Udell wrote:
> A question arises for me here and elsewhere. To what extent do you hold with Tegmark's Four-Level Multiverse view and to what extent is your theory logically linked to it? I ask this because, for instance, in such a Four-Level world, I'd expect not just two salient views (bird's eye & frog's eye, 3rd-person & 1st-person, etc.), but four. I'd expect not just mind-matter dichotomies but 4-chotomies. And so on. In some cases, one may argue that one distinction across the 4-chotomy is more important than the other, say in the case of inference, where arguably the truth-perservative versus truth-nonpreservative is a more important distinction, more like a chasm, than is the distinction between falsity-preservative and falsity-nonpreservative, but I'd still want to know about that the four-way distinction because its relevance should not be presumptively precluded, especially in a Tegmarkian four-level Multiverse. For me there it's partly a matter of some non-maximal degree of s!
 ur!
> eness on my part, and partly a matter of my motivation; I take an interest in patterns of four-way logical distinctions, though I do wander from that interest in an interesting place like this.
>
> Best, Ben Udell
Received on Thu Jan 12 2006 - 23:14:12 PST