Bruno writes
> Actually I was about to say that nominal question are suggestive
> (anybody can answer by principle of a mailing list), and nominal
> question when thread interferes makes possible to send less
> mails. But I agree here I miss miserably ...
Not sure what mistake you think you made :-) but whatever, it
could not have been very important.
> I take the opportunity to ask you Lee what is your expectation in front
> of the running of a Universal Dovetailer?
Well, I once got fairly up to speed on the subject of the UD (i.e.,
I understood it about half as well as you, Hal, Schmidhuber, and
the rest of the gang here), but it just didn't grab my enthusiasm.
So I will take the liberty of imagining a scenario that may have
a (small) chance of answering your question.
I find out that some aliens have set up a colony on the moon.
Worse, they've subscribed to the everything list, and having
never had had the notion before on their home planet, are
designing---AND INTENDING TO CUT LOOSE---a Universal Dovetailer
made from some weird computronium substance!
This will either be very good news, or very bad news, because the
compute speed of their substance is utterly incredible. If they
turn the damned thing on for even one whole second, it's easy to
calculate that any given human being will have most of his solar
system OMs generated by it, all his life on Earth relegated to
relative insignificance.
I think that I would be in favor. Because I am having a good life
(i.e. better than one-percent worth living), and believe than
human happiness derives mostly from chemicals in the brain
produced by genetic settings. So most of the copies of Lee
Corbin that are generated by the UD should, on the average,
also have good lives.
(It's possible that even miserable people reading this can find
solace in supposing that their genetic setting are not an
intrinsic part of their identity, and that in most instantiations
in most universes, their lives are rather good.)
But alas, that's the limit of my knowledge about the UD.
And my eyes glaze over every time I come to extended discussions
about "1st person", considering as I do those to be a linguistic
mistake/death-spiral almost as bad as discussions about qualia.
Lee
> Like with Stathis (and with some other a longer time ago) I feel like
> you understand the six first steps of UDA, including the 1-person
> indeterminacy (which is independent on the identity question as we have
> already agreed sometimes ago); so I am very interested if you get the
> seventh one, that is the reversal (with the extravagant hypothesis that
> there is a physical universe).
> (Step eight will eliminate that "extravagant" hypothesis from the
> reasoning, but is not the current main point, if I can say).
>
> PS I take the opportunity to repeat that I do not pretend that Hal
> Finney or even Schmidhuber and others are wrong in their "complexity
> based" approach to the measure problem, just that they does not provide
> explanations how their approaches make the first person white rabbit
> disappearing (but I' sure Kolmogorov complexity could play some key
> role, and I encourage those interested to dig deeper. Wei Dai has
> already mentionned the remarkable book by Li and Vitanyi (Springer
> Verlag 1993). We tackle an hard problem: it is not a luxe to approach
> it in different ways.
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Received on Fri Jul 07 2006 - 00:40:24 PDT