On Tue, Sep 05, 2017 at 11:58:57AM +1000, Bruce Kellett wrote: > > I have no problems with the assumption that all forms of data can be > represented by bitstrings. On the other hand, I do have some > difficulty accepting off-hand that all possible bitstrings exist in > some sense or the other. Quantum MWI does not entail this. It might > be Tegmark's level IV multiverse, but that is problematic too.
They appear in Bruno's theories as the trace of the universal dovetailer, and also similarly appear in Schmidhuber's Great Programmer idea, which features a universal dovetailer. As for Tegmark level 4, that is a rather ambiguous and ill-defined thing, but if you restricted it to the enumeration of all finite axiomatic systems, you end up with a pile of bitstrings again. > > >OTOH - quarks and electrons are already rather structured things - > >having properties like like mass, spin, charge, colour charge, lepton > >and baryon number, all of which are presently unexplained and taken as > >"given". > > Your bitstrings are highly structured objects, too, but they are > taken as unexplained "givens". See above justifications. > > >These elementary paticle properties do appear to be related to various > >symmetries, such as mass being the conserved property related to > >space-time translational symmetry > > That is energy. Despite E = mc^2, rest mass is not explained by > time-translation invariance -- mass requires the equivalence > principle; which may be a symmetry, but not one subject to Noether's > theorem. > Rest mass is the invariant magnitude of 4-momentum vector, which is itself the conserved quantity of space-time translational symmetry. > > - so ISTM that the path to > >explaining them will be to connect these symmetries to necessary > >properties of conscious observation > > This seems to be rather like Vic Stenger's idea of deriving much of > physics from POVI -- basically from symmetry principles. My problem > with Vic's idea was always that he took the symmetries he wanted > from experience and observation, while ignoring the multitude of > other possible symmetries. So his approach gave a very convenient > introduction to, and summary of, much of known physics, but it was > based on experience; not in any sense an /a priori /derivation. > That is a fair critique, which is why I have always said we need to take Stenger's approach to a greater extreme, whereby which symmetries are observed, and which are broken have some grounding in the property of observation. Otherwise Stenger's approach is still just stamp collecting. Obviously, we don't have a clue how to do that at the moment. > > - it may be that these can be > >derived from partitioning sets of bitstrings in the way I propose, or > >more may be required, such as considering how Turing machines or > >neural networks classify things. That remains to be seen. > > > >BTW - my goal is not to explain the observer, but to explain > >appearances in terms of the observer. The former is probably all to > >hard a nut to crack at present, but the latter might just be doable. > > I think that if you are to explain QM in terms of observer moments, > you have to give some account of the observer, and what > distinguishes an observer moment from an arbitrary bit string. But I do - see the discussion of time and projection postulates in the book, as well as the evolutionary framework within which it sits. Obviously, we would like a more detailed account of observation at some point, but that seems like a good start. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Senior Research Fellow hpco...@hpcoders.com.au Economics, Kingston University http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
