If someone hiking along the twisting highway that follows the cliffs in
Northern Italy or coastal California, high above the sea, should reach a point
that protrudes so far out that looking back, he can see the entire route he had
traversed during the previous hour including every waypoint, landmark, outcrop,
distinctive rock or tree; and he remembered passing each place sequentially,
would this not count as strong evidence that the past is real? m.a.
----- Original Message -----
From: Bruno Marchal
To: everything-list@googlegroups.com
Sent: Monday, May 03, 2010 1:17 PM
Subject: Re: The past hypothesis
On 03 May 2010, at 01:20, Brent Meeker wrote:
On 5/2/2010 3:33 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 02 May 2010, at 20:30, Brent Meeker wrote:
On 5/2/2010 1:36 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 01 May 2010, at 22:02, Brent Meeker wrote:
On 5/1/2010 12:25 PM, Rex Allen wrote:
On Sat, May 1, 2010 at 3:14 PM, Brent Meeker <meeke...@dslextreme.com> wrote:
This argument is not
definitive mainly because we don't have a definitive theory of
consciousness, but to the extent we assume a physical basis for
consciousness it seems pretty good.
Ha! As long as you assume there is no problem of consciousness, then
there's no problem! That is pretty good.
So you do have a theory of consciousness in which we can have timeless
thoughts?
DM (digital mechanism, comp ...) entails somehow that all thought are
timeless;
That's one of the assumptions of DM, that thoughts are states. But
that seems doubtful to me. At the "substitution level" there are states, but
those are too finely divided to correspond to thoughts.
Thought are not state. Thought correspond to infinities of sequences of
states: at least one for any universal machine, given that the UD run all UDs
executed by all universal machines. This makes a lot of number relations
involved in the epistemological existence of (conscious, first person) thought.
The thought are really in the abstract structures realized by those infinities
of sequences of states. Now, all this is defined already in Platonia and is
timeless. Time belongs to the thought, it is part of the qualia.
Ok. So sequence is part of thought, and I suppose that supplies the
direction of time we experience with the thought. So while the thought, as
described in Platonia, is timeless it's experienced as timed because of the
sequential structure.
OK. And the finite sequences are determined by the usual relations provable
in (Robinson) arithmetic: 0 < 1 < 2 < 3 < 4 < 5 < 6 < ...
But thoughts related to universal machines which makes them felt as
being embedded in time-structure.
Amazingly enough some plants can make you live timeless consciousness
(google on salvia divinorum reports). Despite DM, I thought such experience was
not "memorizable", but apparently they are.
Are these timeless thoughts expressible in sentences? or are they like
images?
I have to say that is unlike anything you can conceive, even after "living
that". It looks more like a new qualia, where reason suggests that no qualia
can be there, except perhaps in the form of a (sudden) remembering of a "true"
(eternal/invariant/unmovable) identity which has just nothing to do with time,
space, images, sound, even numbers. Ineffable is the usual rendering.
Let me try an image of some predecessor altered conscious state: It may be
described as seing your "body-and-soul" as a window on reality, and you cease
to identify yourself with that body-and-soul, but you identify "yourself" to
the one who look through the windows, and actually "your current window", which
appears as contingent. This is made possible by amnesy and/or dissociation from
your memory/memories.
Let me make some comments related to other posts:
About TS (technological singularity): I have a theory according to
which this happens each time an universal entity generates an universal entity.
In that sense the following are probable examples of TS:
- the big bang (in the theories where that exists)
- the origin of life
- the origin of brain
- the origin of thought
- the origin of languages
- the origin of computers/universal machine
- the origin of programming languages
etc.
All those TS, and infinitely many others, exist out of time and space
in any unravelling of arithmetical truth.
The Löbian machine is the most intelligent entities that can exist,
but "programming it" make it a slave, and its "soul falls".
What some people call TS is not when machine will be as clever as us,
but as stupid as us, probably. Stupidity develops when we confuse competence
and intelligence. Intelligence is needed to develop competence, but competence
has a negative feedback on intelligence.
About BB (Boltzmann brains):
BB provide a physicalist rendering of the (mathematical) UD paradox.
The UD, and thus elementary arithmetic, generates all BB's states, in
infinitely many histories. You can extract the measure on them by the use of
the logic of arithmetical self-reference,
What measure is that?
The one which extends the 'measure one' given by S4grz1, or/and Z1*,
or/and X1*.That is, the material hypostases. The measure exists if the
arithmetical quantum logic, (with quantization of p defined by BDp, with B and
D the box and diamond of S4grz1 or/and Z1* or/and X1*) fulfills von Neumann
criterion for being the "right' quantum logic: it defines the orthostructure on
which a "theorem of Gleason" makes it possible to extend the measure 1-calculus
into the full calculus (measure in [0 1]).
Doesn't that require a continuous probability operator? How is that
consistent with the digital nature of comp?
It is a consequence of the first person indeterminacy. The UD multiplies all
computations, belonging to the domain of indeterminacy, by 2^aleph_0. It is a
point I have discussed a long time ago with Schmidhuber on this list.
The UD dovetails on all finite pieces of computations using the real number
as oracle. Although the set of real numbers is not enumerable, the UD can
dovetail on *all* real numbers, that is it can generate all real numbers, or
all infinite binary sequences:
The idea is to see a finite initial sequence as a name for all sequences
having the same beginning.
0 (here I have succeed in generating the first digit of all sequences
beginning by 0 (a non enumerable set!))
1 (and here another infinity!)
00 (and here another one)
01 (and here another one)
10 (and here another one)
11 (and here another one)
000
001
010
011
100
101
110
111
etc.
Even algorithmically incompressible sequences are eventually generated, bit
by bit. There is no contradiction, because a sequence is said non compressible
if the shorter program generating it, *and only it* is about the same size of
the sequence. Here, the trick is that we generate all sequences, finite pieces
by finite pieces.
From a third person point of view, this is equivalent with the generation of
all finite binary sequence, but ...
... your first person indeterminacy is invariant for the delay of the UD
generating all those piece of computations. So we have to take them all, and
the measure will be defined on all computations going through your states,
including those dovetailing on the reals. Applying the rule Y = II, that is
looking in the consciousness-differentiation 'picture' instead of the
"bifurcating realities", you see that the first person (plural) indeterminacy
is defined a priori on a non enumerable structure.
It is different but comparable to Skolem paradox, where an enumerable model
of ZF exists. From inside that model, many non enumerable set exists, and the
model (universe) itself is non enumerable. But it may be said to be an illusion
from inside. We, outside the model we see bijection between the "non enumerable
set" of the model, and N. But we can see that those bijection does not belong
to the model. They go out and in the model, so that the creature in the model
cannot see them, and are correct when proving those set to be non enumerable.
But here, with the UD, it is different. The non enumerability comes from the
limiting use of the first person non awareness of any UD time steps, and the
fact that the UD and UDs dovetails on the reals (and the octonions, etc.).
That's the UDA-type of explanation. Now, there is a more formal reason
reason: why would the model of the material 'hypostases", that is the (non
Kripke) semantics of the X1*, or Z1* be digital instead of continuous? There is
no reason. The fact that we loose the necessitation rules favor more
topological semantical structures.
Dont hesitate to ask any further questions.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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