Hal, thanks for explaining!
I think that your approach makes a lot of sense. Applying this to copying
experiments, the probability of finding yourself to be the digital copy is:
m1/[m1 + m2]
where m1 is the measure of the mental experience corresponding to knowing
that you are the digital copy and m2 the measure of the mental experience
corresponding to knowing that you are still in biological form. I think that
for practical implementations m1 = m2 because the digital implementation
will just simulate the brain, so the complexity of the translation program
would be practically the same.
Saibal
----- Original Message -----
From: ""Hal Finney"" <hal.domain.name.hidden>
To: <everything-list.domain.name.hidden>
Sent: Wednesday, June 21, 2006 08:49 AM
Subject: Re: Teleportation thought experiment and UD+ASSA
>
> "Saibal Mitra" <smitra.domain.name.hidden> writes:
> > I don't understand why you consider the measures of the programs that do
the
> > simulations. The ''real'' measure should be derived from the algorithmic
> > complexity of the laws of physics that describe how the computers/brains
> > work. If you know for certain that a computation will be performed in
this
> > universe, then it doesn't matter how it is performed.
>
> I think what you're saying here is that if a mental state is instantiated
> by a given universe, the contribution to its measure should just be
> the measure of the universe that instantiates it. And that universe's
> measure is based on the complexity of its laws of physics.
>
> I used to hold this view, but I eventually abandoned it because of a
> number of problems. I need to go back and collect the old messages
> and discussions that we have had and put them into some kind of order.
> But I can mention a couple of issues.
>
> One problem is the one I just wrote about in my reply to Russell, the
> fuzziness of the concept of implementation. In at least some universes
> we may face a gray area in deciding whether a particular computation,
> or more specifically a particular mental state, is being instantiated.
> Philosophers like Hans Moravec apparently really believe that every
> system instantiates virtually every mental state! If you look at the
> right subset of the atomic vibrations inside a chunk of rock, you can
> come up with a pattern that is identical to the pattern of firing of
> neurons in your own brain. Now, most philosophers reject this, they come
> up with various technical criteria that implementations have to satisfy,
> but as I wrote to Russell I don't think any of these work.
>
> The other problem arises from fuzziness in what counts as a "universe".
> The problem is that you can write very simple programs which will
> create your mental state. For example, the Universal Dovetailer does
> just that. But the UD program is much smaller than what our universe's
> physical laws probably would be. Does the measure of the UD "count" as a
> contribution to every mind it creates? If so, then it will dominate over
> the contributions from more conventional universes; and further, since
> the UD generates all minds, it means that all minds have equal measure.
> To reject the UD as a cheating non-universe means that we will need a
> bunch of ad hoc rules about what counts as a universe and what does not,
> which are fundamentally arbitrary and unconvincing.
>
> Then there are all those bothersome disputes which arise in this model,
> such as whether multiple instantiations should add more measure than
> just one; or whether a given brain in a small universe should get more
> measure than the same brain in a big universe (since it uses a higher
> proportion of the universe's resources in the first case). All these
> issues, as well as the ones above, are addressed and answered in my
> current framework, which is far simpler (the measure of a mental state
> is just its Kolmogorov measure - end of story).
>
>
> > The algorithmic complexity of the program needed to simulate a brain
refers
> > to a ''personal universe''. You can think of the brain as a machine that
is
> > simulating a virtual world in which the qualia we experience exist. That
> > world also exists independent of our brain in a universe of its own.
This
> > world has a very small measure defined by the very large algorithmic
> > complexity of the program needed to specify the brain.
>
> I agree with this, I think. The program needed to specify a mental state
> a priori would be far larger than the program needed to specify the laws
> of physics which could cause that mental state to evolve "naturally".
> Both programs make a contribution to the measure of the mental state,
> but the second one's contribution is enormously greater.
>
> The key point, due to Wei Dai, is that you can mathematically treat the
> two on an equal footing. As you have described it, we have a virtual
> world with qualia being created by a brain; and you have that same
> world existing independently as a universe of its own. Those are pretty
> different in a Schmidhuber type model. The second case is the output of
> one of the universe programs (a very very complex one). The first case
> is a rather intangible property of a universe program much like our own.
>
> To unify them we ask the question of how we can output a representation
> of that virtual world with qualia, using the shortest possible program.
> Assuming that there actually is a universe which naturally evolves
> a brain experiencing this mental state, we can do it with a two-part
> program: the first which creates and evolves the universe, and the second
> which analyzes the output of that universe to output the virtual world
> representation we seek. This second part basically translates the brain
> activity, part of the universe created by the first part, into whatever
> reprsentation we have chosen for the virtual world and qualia.
>
> Given that the universe created by the first part does evolve the
> brain states needed as input for the second part, the second part can
> be a relatively simple translation from physical to mental states.
> Therefore we can create a short program which outputs the virtual world
> and qualia in all its glory, and this short, two-part program will be
> the main contribution to the measure of that mental experience.
>
> Keep in mind that in this framework, we do not start with this two-part
> structure. The starting point is much simpler: all we want to know
> is, what is the Kolmogorov complexity of a mental experience? It is
> only once we begin analyzing the problem that we note as you did that
> building that mental experience as a universe of its own would require
> an enormously large program. And then we realize that we can make a
> much smaller program - with exactly the same output! - that has the two
> part structure I described here. We deduce that such a program is what
> is actually responsible for the measure of the experience.
>
> And from this we conclude that the contribution of a universe to the
> measure of a conscious experience is not the universe's measure itself,
> but that measure reduced by the measure of the program which outputs
> that conscious experience given the universe data as input. This then
> leads to the principle that a big brain in a small universe gets more of
> that universe's measure; that multiple instantiations of a consciousness
> within a universe mean more measure; and that fuzziness of the concept
> of an instantiation is no problem because it only affects the size of
> the numbers being multiplied together to get the measure contribution.
>
> As for the question above about the Universal Dovetailer universe, it is
> easily solved in this framework. The output of the UD is of essentially
> no help in producing the mental state in question, because the ouput is
> so enormous and we would have no idea where to look. Hence the UD does
> not make a dominant contribution to mental state measure and we avoid
> the paradox without any need for ad hoc rules.
>
> Hal Finney
>
> >
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Received on Tue Jun 27 2006 - 10:08:17 PDT