On 09 May 2011, at 04:53, Stephen Paul King wrote:
Hi Russell,
Did you see the rest of that post?
How does my sketch (replicated here) work out as a probability?
“ My parents lived in a certain area when this body that I
associate with was born, their respective parents lived in Texas and
Main, etc. This location, while subject to indeterminacy via Bruno’s
teleportation/copying argument, does seem to at least partially
address the question of “why do I find myself in a particular place,
time, body, etc.?” So maybe my difficulty is in understanding the
motivation of the DA and this in turn makes me less than sanguine
about the “Ants are not conscious” argument. I worry that we are
misapplying our knowledge of the mathematics of statistics to morph
the Hard Problem into a problem of measure.
I think that the ‘Surprise 20 Questions’ idea that John Wheeler
considered in his famous ‘It from Bit’ paper might be more
appropriate. Any OM that is a possible continuance of another OM
must not contain information that is inconsistent with any previous
OM in its sequence, up to some constant that relates to the upper
bound on the resolving power of a typical measurement. We
additionally need to consider that possible interactions between
physical systems would also constrain the information in the OMs
such that no OM in a sequence could contain information that
contradicts that of another that is related to some separate but co-
existing system.
Instead of thinking of the content of OMs in terms of some
statistical measure, I think that it might be a better idea to
consider exactly how OM are sequenced together such that the White
Rabbit problem is minimized. This method is what Pratt uses in his
residuation idea in his process dualism solution to the concurrency
problem, where each state/event transition occurs so long as both
physical conservation laws and logical non-contradiction laws are
upheld. It seems to me that this bypasses the measure problem
completely.”
From what I can tell, the probability would be 1 if the quantity
of look-back for “consistency of the next state” requirement (for a
chaining of OMs) that goes to the event horizon of the Big bang...
The idea is that any new OM to be added to the sequence can only be
one that is consistent with all the prior OMs. This automatically
reduces if not eliminates the White Rabbit problem!
Not at all. Dreams illustrates that consistency is too cheap a priori
for that. Truth, instead of consistency, could reduce the WR problem,
but comp prevents its use. The consistency (Dt) is needed (like in Bp
& Dt), and is the base of the mathematical formulation of the measure
problem in the self-reference logic. BY Gödel's compeletness theorem,
consistency requirement is equivalent with the no cul-de-sac assumption.
Bruno
To address your question directly: The SSA seems to assume (and
maybe even require!) an eternalist based notion of an ensemble of
OMs, that all of its members exist simultaneously, such that the
random sample is distributed evenly over all of its members. This,
as far as I can tell, eliminated the possibility of taking into
consideration who my parents might be, but it does so by tacitly
assuming that simultaneous existence of the members of the ensemble.
I see this as equivalent to postulating an absolute observer outside
of a block universe that can count all of the humans.
If we apply a similar structured reasoning about consciousness,
it makes sense that we would arrive at the conclusion that self-
awareness is required for consciousness to exist! This happen, I
think, because of the external observer implication! Such an
external observer would be one that could formulate the “I think,
therefor I am” predicate for itself and thus be self-aware per that
predication: I believe that “I think that I exist” and its thought
that “I exist” is true. This is fancy but smells fallacious. Any
argument that requires, tacitly or explicitly, the existence of an
external observer of the system or ensemble or whatever cannot be
used to define the properties of consciousness unless we are going
to admit an anti-foundation axiom. I advocate the AF axiom for other
reasons...
I favor a non-eternalist notion when it comes to considerations
of OM sequencing for this reason. I assumed (silly me!) that you
would take the implications of your TIME postulate as a reasoning
against the eternalist aspect of the SSA’s ensemble: “Time is what
prevents everything from happening at once” (J.A. Wheeler). My
reading of various papers on the concurrency problem and the problem
of time in Quantum gravity leads me to the form: “Time exists
because everything cannot happen at at once”, a bit different from
Wheeler’s version. We cannot simultaneously measure non-commuting
observables plus that impossibility of synchronizing large networks
given a finite signal propagation plus the P =/= NP assumption plus
the computational intractability of simulating arbitrarily precisely
physical systems are some of the reasons.
Onward!
Stephen
From: Russell Standish
Sent: Sunday, May 08, 2011 6:27 PM
To: everything-list@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Against the Doomsday hypothesis
On Sat, May 07, 2011 at 12:57:25AM -0400, Stephen Paul King wrote:
> HI Russell,
>
> I don’t get it!
>
Surely you can see that the original doomsday argument does not depend
on details of who your parents might be?
Cheers
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Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
Principal, High Performance Coders
Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au
University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au
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