Re: are we in a simulation?
George Levy writes: > > > Oh, sorry, I'm supposed to ignore that, aren't I? I guess you had some neat graphics in your message that made all that HTML necessary, along with requiring two copies of the text. Unfortunately for me, I didn't see the special effects, since I am using a text-based mail system. > Discreteness may be important in our world for the development of > consciousness, but it is certainly not necessary across worlds. I > believe therefore that the differences between the simulations is > infinitesimal - not discrete - and therefore that the number of > simulations is infinite like the continuum. The last part doesn't follow. It could be that the number of simulations is infinite like the rational numbers, which would still allow for the differences between simulations to be infinitesimal. In that case the number of simulations is countably infinite rather than uncountable. Personally I am uncomfortable with the infinity of the continuum, it seems to be a much more troublesome concept than is generally recognized. I would not want to invoke it unless absolutely necessary. I think the rest of your argument works just as well with a countable infinity as an uncountable one. Hal Finney
Re: a prediction of the anthropic principle/MWT
John: "The fact that we're alive shows ..." How do you know? do you have a distinction between solipsism and realism? "Perhaps we should carefully compare how often the other planets have been hit with how often we have: They certainly look more craterful" Do other planets have similar corrosive gas and erosive water surface conditions, to erase the craters? Did Jupiter have none of those, because in its gaseous surface nothing remains? WE are looking at a snapshot and draw conclusions on millions of years, without recognizing the differences contributoing to what we see. Maybe this is a reason for the mising detailed studies (or should be). And PLEASE! do not advise governments to spend on scientific grounds! it will only increase our tax burden and more stupidity will be paid by uneducated politicians. Best John Mikes - Original Message - From: John Collins To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Saturday, June 07, 2003 7:07 AM Subject: a prediction of the anthropic principle/MWT The fact that we're alive shows that as a species we've been historically very 'lucky', the biggest 'break' being in the finely tuned initial conditions for our universe. At least a level I many-worlds theory is needed to explain this. But in a higher level MWT this good luck might have extended further. For instance, our planet might have experienced an unusually high number of 'near misses' with other astronomical bodies. Now that we're here to watch, the universe will be forced to obey the law of averages, so there could be a significantly higher probability of a deadly asteroid collision than would be indicated by the historical frequeny of said events. Perhaps we should carefully compare how often the other planets have been hit with how often we have: They certainly look more craterful Have there been any serious studies into this? It's not just idle philosophial musings, it affects the way our governments should be spending our money (or rather your money; I'm a non-earning student).
Re: are we in a simulation?
John Collins wrote: George Levy wrote: >Everytime a "measurement" is made, the set of worlds spanned >by this consciousness is defined more narrowly, but the >number in the set remains infinite. In addition, each >simulation in the set need not belong to the same "level." >We're faced with the strange possibility that the >consciousness spans an infinite number of simulations >distributed over widely different levels. I agree that we are simultaneously in many simulations, and I would agree that there are uncountably many possible 'histories' or situations consistent with our consiousness and known history. But I think only a countable number Why countable? What is the actual count? Can you even give an approximate answer? In fact I could ask "why infinitely countable (aleph nul)?" of the 'classical universes' (and certainly only a small fraction) we might be in are simulations. If we look at the 'total knowledge' of any living being, including the things not consciously known but constrained to be decided by the classical history they evolved from (so, for instance, 'what killed the dinosaurs' is probably a question with a definite answer, for us, but the trajectory of a certain electron is not; the former would form part of my 'total knowledge' because if I worked out the answer by looking at enough historical evidence, I would get the same answer each time), it is always finite. As you suggest, any arrangement of matter consistent with this 'total knowledge' is a possibility for the universe we will find ourselves in on making further measurements, and if we live forever, and keep making new measurements, then there will be a countable number of possible universes we will encounter. But at any finite time, we will only know a finite amount, and therefore only impose a finite number of constraints on the possible universe precisely, this is why our perception is fuzzy, because it corresponds to many universes. we will find ourselves in (see my note below on living forever versus having lived forever for more on this). the relevance of this to the current issue is that the super-beings who would emulate us obey the same rules: The 'whole world' of any living being at any given time in their history, being determined only by their thoughts, and the classical histories likely to give rise to those thoughts, can be described by a finite amount of information. Therefore the total number of situations in which a conscious being is simulating our universe is countable. Not really, because you could still have an infinite number of identical copies. So the types may be countable but the instances.are uncountably infinite. George
Re: are we in a simulation?
George Levy wrote: >Everytime a "measurement" is made, the set of worlds spanned >by this consciousness is defined more narrowly, but the >number in the set remains infinite. In addition, each >simulation in the set need not belong to the same "level.">We're faced with the strange possibility that the >consciousness spans an infinite number of simulations >distributed over widely different levels. I agree that we are simultaneously in many simulations, and I would agree that there are uncountably many possible 'histories' or situations consistent with our consiousness and known history. But I think only a countable number of the 'classical universes' (and certainly only a small fraction) we might be in are simulations. If we look at the 'total knowledge' of any living being, including the things not consciously known but constrained to be decided by the classical history they evolved from (so, for instance, 'what killed the dinosaurs' is probably a question with a definite answer, for us, but the trajectory of a certain electron is not; the former would form part of my 'total knowledge' because if I worked out the answer by looking at enough historical evidence, I would get the same answer each time), it is always finite. As you suggest, any arrangement of matter consistent with this 'total knowledge' is a possibility for the universe we will find ourselves in on making further measurements, and if we live forever, and keep making new measurements, then there will be a countable number of possible universes we will encounter. But at any finite time, we will only know a finite amount, and therefore only impose a finite number of constraints on the possible universe we will find ourselves in (see my note below on living forever versus having lived forever for more on this). the relevance of this to the current issue is that the super-beings who would emulate us obey the same rules: The 'whole world' of any living being at any given time in their history, being determined only by their thoughts, and the classical histories likely to give rise to those thoughts, can be described by a finite amount of information. Therefore the total number of situations in which a conscious being is simulating our universe is countable. Also, the total number of finite chains of one being simulating another simulating a third etc. is countable (being a set of finite subsets of a countable set). We are left with the infinite chains of simulation. Here there are two possibilities: either the chain forms a 'loop', in whih case it has actually already been counted in the finite chains (so there are countably many of these [you may also reject them as 'unphysical']) or there is a new 'being' at every step up the chain. But I do not see how these constructions could 'really' be said to tend to any limit (which would be uncountable) as there is, unlike with real numbers, no way to say when two chains are 'getting close together': The next stage could always make them totally different, by any measure (but given the axiom of choice, these universes will be 'real', mathematically at least. But they won't be 'dense' as I'll get on to now..). Whether or not you accept that these limits exist, it is nevertheless the case that we are more likely, on making measurements, and reducing the number of universes we might be in to find more assortments of non-living matter than aliens, including those aliens who might 'turn out' to be controlling us. Any series of new measurements we make can be seen as adding to our 'total knowledge' as described above, a new stream of data, whih you could translate into a string of 0s and 1s (The fact that the data is genuinely new to us means that it is necessarily a discrete uniform distribution of 0s and 1s, apart from correlations you may have itroduced into the data by 'translating it' from whatever form you found it in). Then for a sufficiently long 'string' there would be a very small probability that this information would correspond to the existence of some living being, but it would be much more likely to correspond to a bunch of 'dead' particles (physically, I would see a typical measurement process as 'collecting thermal radiation from a black hole' or 'going over the cosmic horizon to see what you find' or 'absorbing a photon' [these examples are roughly in decreasing order of probability of finding 'life', but even with the last eample it is in principle possible: you could fire a super-energy gamma ray at a gold sheet and a virus might come out the other side]).For any finite 'chain' of information there is a small but finite chance of finding 'life', and even finding'life simulating us' but as you make the chain infinite (as we would have to to 'discover' an infinite chain of universes all simulating in a chain) the probability of finding forever higher and higher levels of life tends to zero. This is because a
Re: a prediction of the anthropic principle
Hal Finney Wrote: >However I think the anthropic prediction in such cases is >that our history would have been just barely good enough to >allow life like us to form. If meteor bombardment should >have wiped us out, we would predict that we would have >experienced a history of heavy meteor strikes, not quite >enough to wipe us out, but enough to be very troublesome >. Robin Hanson has a>couple of papers on this, http://hanson.gmu.edu/greatfilter.html>and a more technical one at http://hanson.gmu.edu/hardstep.pdf. ..Thanks, they were interesting. I don't think 'not getting suddenly wiped out' can be described in the same terms as the 'difficult steps' he analyses, but we have been hit by a lot of not-completely-deadly astronomical bodies. The effect of these could be very crudely fitted in to his analysis if we suggest that each asteroid impact wastes a certain amount of time, by wiping out promising species, etc. Then if we use as a random variable the total time wasted, and if the expected time wasted is much bigger than the time for one 'step' (about 1/2 a billion years), and the probability distribution of the time lost is sufficiently flat for small times, then we might expect to have 'wasted' one step-size recovering from meteors.. However, I don't think all te conditions I've described are actually met: For one thing, some meteors might be helpful, for instance if they killed off powerful but incurably stupid competition. If the probability distribution for lost time had a large negative tail then we would expect to get as many helpful meteor strikes as possible until the unlikelyness cost of having a larger negative time-loss would equal the likelyness gain achieved by the 'extra time'. On a more general point, I think one thing that isn't stressed clearly enough in the articles you referenced is that if we take as given that intelligient life evolved on preisely one planet within our cosmic horizon, and look at the variation of some parameters corresponding to how difficult the evolutionary steps must have been (and must still be for the pond scum on other planets) we would expect them to be difficult enough so that intelligence only appears once, but for things to then be more difficult is less likely. So where he says the expected time for us to evolve is approximately greater than 30 billion years or something (the precise figure depending on the number of hospitable planets), I would say it's approximately equal.
RE: 2C Mary
Bruno Marchal > > At 23:35 03/06/03 +1000, Colin Hales wrote: > >Dear Folks, > > > >Once again I find myself fossicking at the boundaries and need to ask > >one of those questions. My first experience with an asker of such a > >question was in the last couple of years at high school. I'll tell > >you about it because, well, the list could use a little > activity and I > >hope the 'fabric' list doesn't mind the rather voluminous joining > >post. The story: > > > Your post is not very clear to me. If you can link me (us) to a place > where you elaborate a little bit, that could help ... > > Bruno > > Hi Bruno, I've enjoyed the list dialog but I'm on a mission and the dialog is off it. Selfish, but I have a timescale. I'll likely resume here: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/MindBrain/ I am trying to delineate and explain to myself, in way convincing enough for general consumption, what may be the only 'fundamental' aspect of a very deep physicalist model of qualia. This fundamental aspect may be related to the nature of the deep structure of spacetime that causes EPR style apparent non-locality. Things are proximal deep down that don't appear proximal to us at the macro-3-space scale we inhabit. That proximity is inherited because it makes the matter we are constructed of. What it means is that inverse phenomenology, which you experience as 'appearance' when matter is acting like it is interacting with exotic matter that doesn't even exist, may inherit nonlocality. Split a single brain apart and you still have one entity having one set of qualia. At least that's what I'm trying to work out. My clumsy first pass at this is 2C Mary. I hope I get better at it! cheers, Colin
