Someone called me to task for this posting (I forget who, and I've lost the posting now). I tried to formulate the notion I expressed here more precisely, and failed! So I never responded.
What I had in mind was that future observer moment of my current one will at some point have a total measure diminishing at least as fast as an exponental function of OM age. This is simply a statement that it becomes increasingly improbable for humans to live longer than a certain age. Whilst individual OMs will have exponentially decreasing measure due to the linear increase in complexity as a function of universe age, total OM measure requires summing over all OMs of a given age (which can compensate). This total OM measure is a 3rd person type of quantity - equivalent to asking what is the probability of a conscious organism existing at universe age t. It seems plausible that this might diminish in some exponential or faster fashion after a few standard deviation beyond the mean time it takes to evolve consciousness, but I do not have any basis for making this claim. If we assume a normal distribution of times required for evolving consciousness, then the statement is true for example, but I'm wise enough to know that this assumption needs further justification. The distribution may be a meanless thing like a power law for example. So sorry if I piqued someones interest too much - but then we can leave this notion as a conjecture :) Cheers On Fri, Jul 28, 2006 at 12:07:37AM +1000, Russell Standish wrote: > Thanks for giving a digested explanation of the argument. This paper > was discussed briefly on A-Void a few weeks ago, but I must admit to > not following the argument too well, nor RTFA. > > My comment on the observer moment issue, is that in a Multiverse, the > measure of older observer moments is less that younger ones. After a > certain point in time, the measure probably decreases exponentially or > faster, so there will be a mean observer moment age. > > So contra all these old OMs dominating the calculation, and giving > rise to an expected value of Lambda close to zero, we should expect > only a finite contribution, leading to an expected finite value of > Lambda. > > We don't know what the mean age for an observer moment should be, but > presumably one could argue anthropically that is around 10^{10} > years. What does this give for an expected value of Lambda? > > Of course their argument does sound plausible for a single universe - > is this observational evidence in favour of a Multiverse? > > Cheers -- *PS: A number of people ask me about the attachment to my email, which is of type "application/pgp-signature". Don't worry, it is not a virus. It is an electronic signature, that may be used to verify this email came from me if you have PGP or GPG installed. Otherwise, you may safely ignore this attachment. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- A/Prof Russell Standish Phone 8308 3119 (mobile) Mathematics 0425 253119 (") UNSW SYDNEY 2052 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Australia http://parallel.hpc.unsw.edu.au/rks International prefix +612, Interstate prefix 02 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---