Le 19-juin-06, à 15:31, Russell Standish a écrit :
> I'm not so sure. At heart, I suspect he is a computationalist, however
> what he assumes in his papers is that the universe (that we see) is a
> single
> specific computation selected from the dovetailer algorithm. With COMP
> (and
> with functionalism too) we assume that consciousness supervenes on all
> consistent computations, which leads to your famous first person
> indeterminism result. Schmidhuber's assumption directly implies
> determinism (we are living inside one particular computation only).
>
> I do not see Schmidhuber's argument as inconsistent, but it does seem
> to contradict COMP, so Schmidhuber may have inconsistent faiths if he
> insists both on this argument and COMP.
I agree here. I still don't understand why you call "description" what
is really just a real number (or a real number from the unit interval).
I will try to read my Levin Solomonov literature, if only to see if we
are just quibbling on terminology or on something more fundamental. To
see program as prefix of infinite string is interesting if you are
interested in Kolmogorov-Chaitin-Solovay-Martin-Löf sort of (quasi
absolute) probability measure, like in the search of a Bayesian sort of
ASSA Udist (which, I have often argue miss the relative self-sampling
assumption forced by the 1-3 distinction).
I disagree (but this I already told you) with your mention of universal
dovetailing in Schmidhuber, given that if you select a specific
computation there is no more need to dovetail. This is, at the least,
pedagogically confusing. Sure, Church Thesis and Universal Machine
should play an important role in Schmidhuber, but there is no reason to
dovetail universally. This appears when you realize comp makes it
impossible to attach consciousness to any specific computation
(material or not) that is when you get the comp first person
indeterminacy.
A last note: speed prior, like in Schmidhuber second paper, seems to
contradict the basic idea of its first paper. With notion of prior we
can just go back to (theoretical) physics. QM is easily derivable from
few assumptions on probability and symmetry and math, but this I take
as cheating when asking fundamental questions. More technically the
speed prior seems to be in contradiction with the fact that "universal
machine" can be sped up infinitely (Blum speed up theorem). Speed prior
would favorize *big* programs. We can come back later on this more
technical issue.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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Received on Tue Jun 20 2006 - 06:01:47 PDT