Hi George,
>
> Bruno,
>
> Thank you for still working on my post. I am working on the reply, in
> particular designing the set of function or number that can be
> diagonalized to generate a large number. I shall be busy this weekend
> with family matters but I will reply to you in detail.
Take it easy we have all the time. In case of trouble don't hesitate to
ask for hints or supplementary explanations. This is said for everyone.
>
> I agree that the idea of quantum suicide did not originate with
> Tegmark,
> even though he is the one who popularized it.
Sure. He wrote a beautiful paper. Note that he is unaware of the more
general and more simple (?) comp immortality.
> The idea also came to me
> independently in the early 1990's as I was pondering the Scroedinger
> cat
> experiment. What if I was the cat? How would I feel? What if I was the
> scientist conducting the experiment and I was inside a larger box
> enclosing the whole experiment? Would I feel the superposition? These
> are very obvious questions to ask. This Scroedinger cat experiment
> approximately dates to the 1920-1930's (?) and it is very well possible
> that others have had the same thought.
I think Schroedinger used the cat for explaining a paradoxical feature
of QM, and I have not see suggestions by him that comp leads to either
many world or quantum immortality (as Everett and Deutsch will do for
the many-world, but not the immortality question though.
I think that in the "priority" matter (a boring subject but then
friends said that I must defend myself a little bit more) the criteria
is the date of the publication. It is one thing to get an idea and a
different thing to publish it. You need to f็ind the idea but also to
get the nerves to make it public. I have not publish so much "easy"
readable (original) thing not to insist a little bit on this,
especially given that I still somehow paying a hard price for having
dare to work on such questions in the seventies. I suspect a little bit
Russell (notably in his book) to dismiss how much both the universal
dovetailer and comp-immortality was (and still is actually) original in
the "TOE" framework. Russell makes often (in posts and in his preprint
book) the confusion between the notion of "Universal Machine",
Schmidhuber great programmer (which does not dovetail) and the
Universal Dovetailer. Those notions are related but are not at all
equivalent in the search for a TOE, neither extensionally, nor
intensionally (different programs and different functions).
I developed and defended those ideas very early. This explains in part
why I have been confronted with an obvious natural skepticism, and this
is why I have provided the logical analysis (well to be true I got this
one simultaneously as I explained in the 1988 paper: it is even the
reason why I have chose to do math and not physics). Actually the
"heart of the matter" explanations will consist in showing how much
universal dovetailing and Church thesis are non trivial notions.
Paradoxically enough, the widespread use of computer hide the
complexity. You need training in diagonalization to doubt Church's
thesis!
The same with the comp first person indeterminacy. Probably my main
easy (for you in this quite open-minded list) discovery. Remember that
Schmidhuber did leave the list by refusing explicitly the first-third
person distinction (which explain why his great programmer does not
need to dovetail). It is not just a question of priority, it is a
question of getting the notions right before.
Another point. james Higgo told us explicitly that, despite quantum
suicide, Tegmark did not believe in the quantum immortality consequence
of the quantum hyp, showing the big nuance between the immortality and
suicide points, often confuse in posts or elsewhere. Oops I must leave
...
Best,
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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Received on Thu May 11 2006 - 07:01:45 PDT