Re: Another tedious hypothetical
I would say 0: 0. All a Coincidence (I don't see *big* coincidences) and then 5. I'm agnostic about what you talk about. I love the book by Suzanne Blackmore In search of the light because it shows parapsychology can be done seriously, but then the evidence are until today rather negative. Drinking coffee in the morning is sufficiently miraculous for me now. With comp, evidence of precognition could be evidence for the very low-levelness of the substitution level. Le 05-juin-05, à 19:34, rmiller a écrit : All, Another hypothetical. In 1939, let's say, a writer comes up with a sci-fi story, which is published the next year. It involves (let's say) a uranium bomb and a beryllium target in the Arizona desert that might blow up and cause problems for everyone. His main character is a fellow he decides to name Silard. Two other characters he names Korzybski and Lenz. Two cities are named in the story: Manhattan and Chicago. Along about the same time, in 1939 an out-of-work scientist named Leo Szilard is crossing a street in London (no, he doesn't know the sci fi writer.) Four years later Leo Szilard will be working with a guy named George Kistiakowski---whose job it is to fashion a lens configuration for the explosives surrounding a nuclear core for the first atomic bomb---code named, the Manhattan Project. Some of the other scientists, Enrico Fermi, for example, are from Chicago (where the first man-made nuclear pile was constructed---under the ampitheater.) Now, pick one: 1. All a Big Coincidence Proving Nothing (ABCPN) 2. The writer obviously was privy to state secrets and should have been arrested. 3. Suggests precognition of a very strange and weird sort. 4. Might fit a QM many worlds model and should be investigated further. 5. I have no clue how to even address something like this. Any takers? RM http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
RE: Hypotheses
At 12:50 AM 6/6/2005, you wrote: A couple of hours ago, I was speaking to a young man who informed me that he can predict the future: he has visions or dreams, and they turn out to be true. I asked him for an example of this ability. He thought for a moment, explaining that there were really far too many examples to choose from, then settled on this one. During the recent war in Iraq, he had a dream about a buried train containing weapons. Two days later - you guessed it - he saw on the news that a buried train containing WMD's was discovered in Iraq! And if that doesn't convince you that I'm psychic, my patient said (for that is what he was), I don't know what will! My question to the list: should I have stopped this man's antipsychotic medication? --Stathis Papaioannou No. Unless it was Disulfiram elixer. . .(sorry, couldn't resist.) But were the antipsychotic meds *causing* the dreams or was it due to an insufficiently low dose? In the early 1970s ketamine Hcl was the anesthetic of choice on kids for minor surgical procedures---it was good for 25 minutes, it preserved the laryngeal reflex--and you could always tell when they were coming out---they would elicit this gripping motion. But in some cases it gave the kids OBEs. Typical doc response: Yipes! Let's use something else! Now, they use ketamine ONLY on Rover and Fluffy. Gives 'em big pupils for a couple of hours, and you don't really *care* what sensitive places they visited while they were under. As for precognition. . while doing research for a book I authored in the mid-eighties, I first tracked nuclear clouds across the US--then went to the libraries in the paths of the debris clouds to see what was taking place as the radioactive material passed overhead. There were some strange coincidences, but that's probably all they were. However, there was one thing that impressed me---those in the creative professions occasionally conjure up artwork that, in retrospect, appears to be a precognitive shadow of an event taking place days or weeks later. The day before the worlds' first nuclear test, the NY Times had a couple of sly articles in the editorial section that alluded to the nuke,test. One article, for example, was titled, A Gadget Long Needed. There was a book review about three stories: Two were titled, A Fiery Lake and Solano. Now, of course, the NYT also had a reporter present at Los Alamos, so they probably wanted to scoop everyone else. Precognition score: probably zero. But then there was the weird little cartoon called Flyin' Jenny which was found in the secondary papers---in places like Mason City, Iowa and Houston, TX. on July 15, 1945 the main character (Flyin' Jenny) picked up her microphone and said: Is there fire at the end of that gadget? To me, that's pushing the coincidence envelope. RM
Re: Observer-Moment Measure from Universe Measure
Hi Brent, Le 05-juin-05, à 13:21, Brent Meeker a écrit : -Original Message- From: Bruno Marchal [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, June 05, 2005 7:02 AM To: Hal Finney Cc: everything-list@eskimo.com Subject: Re: Observer-Moment Measure from Universe Measure Le 05-juin-05, à 05:53, Hal Finney a écrit : Lee Corbin writes: But in general, what do observer-moments explain? Or what does the hypothesis concerning them explain? I just don't get a good feel that there are any higher level phenomena which might be reduced to observer-moments (I am still very skeptical that all of physics or math or something could be reduced to them---but if that is what is meant, I stand corrected). Rather, it always seems like a number of (other) people are trying to explain observer-moments as arising from the activity of a Universal Dovetailer, or a Platonic ensemble of bit strings, or something. I would say that observer-moments are what need explaining, rather than things that do the explaining. Or you could say that in a sense they explain our experiences, although I think of them more as *being* our experiences, moment by moment. As we agreed: An observer-moment is really all we have as our primary experience of the world. The world around us may be fake; we may be in the Matrix or a brain in a vat. Even our memories may be fake. But the fact that we are having particular experiences at a particular moment cannot be faked. Nothing could be truer. All right. So you both (Hal Finney and Lee Corbin) with the first axiom defining a knower. It is the incorrigibility axiom: let us write Cp for to know p (or to be aware of p, or to be conscious of p). incorrigibility can be stated by: Cp - p Meaning that for any proposition p we have that Cp - p is true. The implication arrow - is just the classical implication. It has nothing to do with notions of causality, or deduction or whatever ... We can define A - B by ((not A) or B) or (not (A and not B)) as this can be verified by truth-table. I recall: A - B 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 OK? No. To be conscious of p, where p is some proposition, doesn't imply that p is true - one is often mistaken. You are right. (i *was* supposing p true!) It seems to me that the incorrigibility of experience is just CCp-Cp, i.e. propositions that you seem to perceive p may be incorrigble. Cp-p only works where p isimplicitly is of the form Cq. OK, but this is Loeb theorem and I will use the B instead of C. I continue to accept Cp - p for standard knowledge. We don't say say John knew that (a+b)^2 = a^2 + b^2, but he was false we say John believed that (a+b)^2 = a^2 + b^2, but he was false . By definition we cannot know something false. It is the standard definition. But you are right I should not have used the term conscious nor aware here! Thanks for the correction, Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
RE: Another tedious hypothetical
It sounds like an incredible coincidence, but you also have to take into account all the *other* stories which did not turn out to be anywhere near the truth. A long enough sequence of random data will always produce apparently non-random results. In fact, this seems counterintuitive to most people. One way of picking fraudulent accounting practices is to look at the strings of numbers in question looking for the relative absence of, for example, runs of the same digit, or runs of consecutive digits. Only the best crooked accountants seem to know that avoiding such strings because they don't look random enough is a giveaway. --Stathis Papaioannou R. Miller wrote: Now, pick one: 1. All a Big Coincidence Proving Nothing (ABCPN) 2. The writer obviously was privy to state secrets and should have been arrested. 3. Suggests precognition of a very strange and weird sort. 4. Might fit a QM many worlds model and should be investigated further. 5. I have no clue how to even address something like this. Any takers? LC: I'll go for 1, all a big coincidence. Firstly, it should be taken as the default hypothesis. Second, in my opinion no reliable evidence has ever surfaced that points to precognition, or points to a science theory that is an elaboration of QM/GR. In fact, numerous claims of something new are regularly debunked by skeptics, and have picked up the name (rightly, in my opinion) of pseudo-science. RM: Given a set of events that are impossible to reproduce (how can the writer re-create the basis for his story a second time?) we can only examine them after the fact in terms of probabilities. Even if we didn't go to a phonebook and look up the relative number of Silards or Lenzes vs the more common names, it's fairly obvious that the probabilities of this being a chance occurrence are on the order of one in tens of millions. Yet we write this kind of thing off as coincidence. The example I gave, (of course) is a real story titled Blowups Happen written by a real sci fi author--Robert Heinlein. Heinlein was asked about the coincidence, and he said he had no idea where he got the names or the idea. The story itself was *was* written in 1939---many years before the Manhattan District Project was even considered by anyone--and before Szilard began work on nukes and before Kistiakowski began work on his lenses. Most who have written about this focus on the fact that the story is about a uranium bomb at a site in the Arizona desert. But when one gets into the minutiae is where it gets truly weird. Neither Heinlein in 1939-- nor most journalists who wrote about the coincidences since then--- were aware of the explosive lens issue, nor were they aware that most fission nukes have beryllium neutron reflectors. I'll suspect Heinlein chose the name Korzybski from a semi-famous semanticist from the 1920s and 30s named Alfred Korzybski. But to me, the other coincidences are just too weird to ignore. LC writes: In world war II, the FBI did question one man who published a story involving atomic theory or atomic bombs that had some eerie similarities to what was top secret. But they determined that it was just coincidence. I'd be lying if I claimed to be unaffected by that report. RM replies: That would be the Clive Cartmill story Deadline which appeared in a 1944 issue of Astounding magazine. Actually, atomic bombs were accepted as a possibility since HG Wells' 1914 story The World Set Free. INMO, the Cartmill story *is* coincidence. The Heinlein story is *truly* weird. RM _ Sell your car for $9 on carpoint.com.au http://www.carpoint.com.au/sellyourcar
Re: Hypotheses
Le 06-juin-05, à 07:14, rmiller a écrit : Slip-ups aside, I would like to see a rigorous application of the powerful tools of philosophy, logic and mathematics applied to the study areas of social science, i.e. the real world. Physicists are great at telling us why the rings of Saturn have braids, but terrible (or worse than that, dismissive) of events that occur involving consciousness. (Social scientists are no better---they fall back on things like structural functionalism). I suggest its time for the social scientists to let the logicians and mathematicians have a look at the data, and it's time for the logicians and mathematicians to enter the real world and make an honest attempt at trying to explain some strange phenomena. That asking too much? In the long run, it could be a nice and useful project. Today it is premature I'm afraid. Logic is not yet applied to physics, except by a minority. Scientific attitude is still despised in most of the human science, and even in a big part of exact science. Argument against cannabis, against the Irak war, against the yes or the no for the european constitution are full or purely logical errors; of the type of confusion between p - q and q - p (actually that sort of errors grows exponentially since the last 20 years). Yes you are asking too much right now. Most people still believe Science is reductionnist, when Science is by its very nature the most modest and antireductionnist conceivable attitude. But go for it if you feel you can do it, sure. Now be careful of your own prejudices, in particular the notion of coincidence is infinitely tricky ... Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Re: Observer-Moment Measure from Universe Measure
Le 05-juin-05, à 17:30, Stephen Paul King a écrit :
FAR AWAY IN THE HEAVENLY ABODE OF THE GREAT GOD INDRA, THERE IS A
WONDERFUL NET WHICH HAS BEEN HUNG BY SOME CUNNING ARTIFICER IN SUCH A
MANNER THAT IT STRETCHES OUT INDEFINITELY IN ALL DIRECTIONS. IN
ACCORDANCE WITH THE EXTRAVAGANT TASTES OF DEITIES, THE ARTIFICER HAS
HUNG A SINGLE GLITTERING JEWEL AT THE NET'S EVERY NODE, AND SINCE THE
NET ITSELF IS INFINITE IN DIMENSION, THE JEWELS ARE INFINITE IN
NUMBER. THERE HANG THE JEWELS, GLITTERING LIKE STARS OF THE FIRST
MAGNITUDE, A WONDERFUL SIGHT TO BEHOLD. IF WE NOW ARBITRARILY SELECT
ONE OF THESE JEWELS FOR INSPECTION AND LOOK CLOSELY AT IT, WE WILL
DISCOVER THAT IN ITS POLISHED SURFACE THERE ARE REFLECTED ALL THE
OTHER JEWELS IN THE NET, INFINITE IN NUMBER. NOT ONLY THAT, BUT EACH
OF THE JEWELS REFLECTED IN THIS ONE JEWEL IS ALSO REFLECTING ALL THE
OTHER JEWELS, SO THAT THE PROCESS OF REFLECTION IS INFINITE
THE AVATAMSAKA SUTRA
FRANCIS H. COOK: HUA-YEN BUDDHISM : THE JEWEL NET OF INDRA 1977
***
I am suggesting that these jewels give us an excellent way to
think of OMs. If we are to allow for a value K {ranging from 0 to 1}
to represent the degree to which one jewel reflects or is similar
to or implies, it seems that we get a very neat way to span a whole
lot of logics and math with a simple picture. And, to top it off, we
have a way to deal with infinite regress and circularity without
paradox. (BTW, this is what Non-Well founded set theory is trying to
explain!)
And Lee wrote in the same vain:
As for circular, too bad your theories aren't circular! They'd
explain more.
My theories are full of circular constructions! But as it is well
known circular construction can lead to paradoxes or even to frank
contradictions. Recursion theory, and then theoretical computer science
have provided founded semantics for most unfounded mathematical
structure appearing in computer science.
Don't forget I postulate comp which does give some importance to the
founded notion of bits and numbers. The magic is that bits and numbers
leads automatically and naturally to non-founded (circular) structure
with respect to universal machine/environment.
This is illustrated by the last post on combinators, which I have
introduced in part as an introduction to computer-theoretical circular
structure. I don't want to use Non-Well-founded set theory (nor any set
theory), nor category theory because the minimum of logic I use is
considered as already too abstruse to many. But those are very
interesting of course.
Note that John Case, one of the master of computer self-reference,
refers to the INDRA NET to introduce its generalization of Kleene fixed
point theorem. My whole approach is based on similar circular
self-reference, but, being programs or sets, mathematicians can use
them only when they have founded model of it. Look at the combinators:
it is only when Dana Scott provide founded models that the work on the
circular combinatory structures explodes in the literature.
Bruno
PS Lee, I will take some time to comment your posts. Thanks for your
patience.
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
RE: Observer-Moment Measure from Universe Measure
Stathis Papaioannou writes: Hal Finney writes: There are a few unintuitive consequences, though, such as that large instantiations of OMs will have more measure than small ones, and likewise slow ones will have more measure than fast ones. This is because in each case the interpretation program can be smaller if it is easier to find the OM in the vastness of a universe, and the slower and bigger an OM is the easier it is to find. I am inclined to tentatively accept these results. It does imply that the extreme future vision of some transhumanists, to upload themselves to super-fast, super-small computers, may greatly reduce their measure, which would mean that it would be like taking a large chance of dying. Could someone please explain what will happen to the hapless transhumanists in their computer when their measure falls to alarmingly low levels? Will they develop severe headaches, turn transparent like ghosts, or what? This is a kind of transformation that hasn't been possible in the world before, so no normal phenomenon will exactly capture what happens. To a first approximation, if their measure were reduced by 90%, what would happen subjectively would be the same as if they took steps that had a 90% chance of killing them, in this model. Now, objectively this is different because it would require other people to deal with their deaths. But subjectively it would be pretty much the same. Perhaps a closer approximation could be achieved if they were not only killed, but somehow everyone else's memory was changed so that no one remembered them or noticed that they were gone. Imagine instead the question, what would it be like, subjectively, to die instantly and without warning? It's a hard question to answer. But it is related to the question, what would it be it like to have your measure suddenly reduced? You could imagine your larger before-measure as being represented by your mind being instantiated as many copies. Then a certain percentage of those copies are instantly killed. What is it like subjectively? To the copies which remain, there is no subjective change. To the copies which were killed, perhaps it is like nothing subjectively, because there is no longer any subject there. But it is still a change. I think a reduction of measure would be like a certain percentage of my instances being instantly killed. When I imagine what it is like, I picture myself being one of the unlucky instances. I stop and never know I stopped, while other copies go on. The other night I had a strange dream. I came into a room and met someone whom I came to understand was myself. I was a copy who had been created a few moments earlier, and he was the original. There was a switch on the wall which would instantly destroy the copy, and I was supposed to push it. But I hesitated. My own consciousness would be destroyed. On the other hand I was supposedly a copy made just moments earlier, so only a few seconds of memories would be lost, hardly consequential. Still I had to face that dilemma: what would it feel like to just stop, instantly? Nervously, I went ahead and pushed the button, squeezing my eyes shut and making a kind of mental flinch or jerk. To my surprise, I was still there, and when I opened my eyes, the other person was gone. It turned out that he was the copy and I was the original. Imagine facing your copy, perhaps an exact copy whose mind is synchronized with yours, and seeing a coin flip which will determine which one is destroyed. Your measure will be halved. In a sense it will have no subjective effect, your thoughts and memories will be preserved in one of you. But in another sense you face a 50-50 chance of experiencing that mysterous effect of instant death. I think it would be scary. Logically, similar reductions of measure should be viewed in the same light. Hal Finney
RE: Hypotheses
-Original Message- From: Stathis Papaioannou [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, June 06, 2005 5:51 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; everything-list@eskimo.com Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: Hypotheses A couple of hours ago, I was speaking to a young man who informed me that he can predict the future: he has visions or dreams, and they turn out to be true. I asked him for an example of this ability. He thought for a moment, explaining that there were really far too many examples to choose from, then settled on this one. During the recent war in Iraq, he had a dream about a buried train containing weapons. Two days later - you guessed it - he saw on the news that a buried train containing WMD's was discovered in Iraq! And if that doesn't convince you that I'm psychic, my patient said (for that is what he was), I don't know what will! My question to the list: should I have stopped this man's antipsychotic medication? --Stathis Papaioannou Not until he gave you a *prediction* that was unlikely and accurate. It's easy to convince yourself that you had thought of something *after the fact*. Brent Meeker From: rmiller [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: everything-list@eskimo.com CC: Giu1i0 Pri5c0 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Hypotheses Date: Mon, 06 Jun 2005 00:14:42 -0500 Re the hypotheses---Social scientists, astronomers and CSI agents are the only ones I'm aware of who routinely evaluate events after the fact. The best, IMHO, such as the historian Toynbee, fit facts to a model. At it's worst, the model becomes the event and before long we're deep in reification (the Achilles heel of Structural Functionalism) or that favorite of lazy reporters, *abduction* (this is our favorite explanation, so that must be what happened.) Mathematicians, philosophers and those with a good math and logic background prefer their battles timeless and relatively absent of worldly references. Great theater, but as Scott Berkun noted in his excellent articlehttp://www.scottberkun.com/essays/essay40.htm just because the logic holds together, doesn't mean it's true. Or correct. Or anything--other than consistent. But logic is an inestimable tool if used to evaluate models such as those proposed, developed and ridden into the dirt by many prominent social scientists. It is always refreshing to see a lumbering behemoth like structural functionalism (a sociological model) dismantled by a skilled logician who knows reification when he sees it (saw a little of that with Lee Corbins' excellent rant.) But it would be even better to see these tools applied to truly strange events that take place in the real world---things that Sheldrake writes about, for example. Things that *happen* to us all. Unfortunately, that's not likely to happen. It's the knee-jerk reaction of most mathematicians and logicians to deride real world events as coincidence, when in fact, they are comparing the event to mathematical certainty, and logical clarity. They might say, Why evaluate Sheldrake's precognitive dogs in terms of a physics model, because Sheldrake's dogs are not really precognitive. That protocol (if you can call it that) doesn't even rise to the level of *bad* abduction. It's a protocol that closes doors rather than opens them, is not designed to divine new information, and is neither analytic *nor* synthetic. Worst of all, it claims to be science when it fact, it is preordained belief. In other words, it's okay to bend the rules and prejudge a variable as long as you first call it rubbish. Slip-ups aside, I would like to see a rigorous application of the powerful tools of philosophy, logic and mathematics applied to the study areas of social science, i.e. the real world. Physicists are great at telling us why the rings of Saturn have braids, but terrible (or worse than that, dismissive) of events that occur involving consciousness. (Social scientists are no better---they fall back on things like structural functionalism). I suggest its time for the social scientists to let the logicians and mathematicians have a look at the data, and it's time for the logicians and mathematicians to enter the real world and make an honest attempt at trying to explain some strange phenomena. Mathematicians and logicians per se have special qualifications to explain phenomena. Mathematics and logic are just about relations between statements depending on general terms like and, or, not, for all,... completely independent of the ontological and epistemological referents of the statements. What you need are experimental scientists and magicians. Actually some scientists have addressed strange phenomena. See Vic Stenger's Physics and Psychics and Richard Wiseman's Deception and Self-deception: Investigating Psychics. Brent Meeker
Re: MWI vs Multiverse
Russell Standish writes: I was not aware of the Born rule having been derived multiple times (although I'm not too suprised if that is the case). Do you have any references? The Born rule is one of the things I derive in my Why Occam's paper. I just have a couple of recent references, but both of them point to several earlier ones, including of course Everett's original work. One is David Deutsch's attempt to use decision theory, http://www.arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9906015 . This paper has been widely criticized; one defense of it is at http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0312157 . See also Robin Hanson's two papers on his mangled worlds concept, http://hanson.gmu.edu/mangledworlds.html . Hal Finney
Re: Questions on Russell's Why Occam paper
On Mon, 6 Jun 2005, Russell Standish wrote: I am beginning to regret calling the all descriptions ensemble with uniform measure a Schmidhuber ensemble. I think what I meant was that it could be generated by a standard dovetailer algorithm, running for 2^\aleph_0 timesteps. It can't! Timesteps are denumerable, hence this statement is just a contradiction in terms. You better postulate your ensemble without reference to any algorithm to generate it. However, as the cardinality of my ensemble is actually c (cardinality of the real numbers), it is quite probably a completely different beast. There you go again with your radical compression. Without the reading I've been doing in the last two weeks, I wouldn't have been able to decode this statement as meaning: 2^\aleph_0 = \aleph_1 (by definition) To assume c = \aleph_1 is the Continuum Hypothesis, which is unprovable (within standard arithmetic). snip Now an observer will expect to find a SAS in one of the descriptions as a corrolory of the anthropic principle, which is explicitly stated as one of the assumptions in this work. I make no bones about this - I consider the anthropic principle a mystery, not self-evident like many people. Very few supporters of the AP would expect to find a SAS in a bitstring. Until you *specify* a way of interpreting the string, it contains nothing but bits. Why should an observer expect to see a token of erself embedded in reality? That is the mystery of the AP. What ARE you talking about? Observer's don't see tokens of themselves... if anyone (God?) has a 3rd-person/bird's eye view, it is certainly not someone who is included in any particular reality. No way is anything like this implied by the AP. All the AP requires is that there *be* observers/SAS in (real) universes, which is true in our case at least. And now we find not only that the bit string is a description, but it is a complex enough description to describe SAS's? How does that work? The bitstrings are infinite in length. By reading enough bits, they can have arbitrarily complex meanings attached to them. In particular, any bitstring can be interpreted as any other bitstring by an appropriate map. Hence until you specify an interpreter you are simply not proposing a theory at all. snip All that is discussed in this paper is appearances - we only try to explain the phenomenon (things as they appear). No attempt is made to explain the noumenon (things as they are), nor do we need to assume that there is a noumenon. Most readers of your paper would take it that you are making a strong ontological proposition, i.e. that the basis of reality is your set of bitstrings. If this is *not* the case, and you think the bitstrings may be represented in some deeper reality (or maybe are just metaphors), then what is the motivation for your proposal? Why do we need to think about this intermediate layer of bitstrings? The original simplicity goes out the window. BTW I'm with Kant: you can't have an appearance without an underlying reality, even if that is unknowable. Bruno Marchal has a detailed discussion on this in his thesis, and concludes that he has no need for this hypothesis (what he calls the extravagant hypothesis). So the former statement is true :[the description strings are] things that observer TM's observe and map to integers. It is also true that descriptions of self aware observers will appear within the description by the Anthropic Principle. The phenomenon of observerhood is included. However where the observers actually live is not a meaningful question in this framework. I think either your terminology or you model has now got very confused. Are your observer TMs the observers (SAS) whose experiences your theory is trying to explain? In this case where they live is crucial because it defines the environment the SAS find themselves in. If you are not careful your theory becomes effectively that we are all brains in bottles or Leibnizian monads, which is solipsism by another name. Or are your observers the missing interpreters in your theory which give it meaning, and allow us to find (in principle) the SAS within the bitstrings that represent actual observers like us? In this case it's unhelpful to call these meta-entities observers; rather, in effect, they constitute the (meta-)laws of physics. Incidentally, a TM by itself can't generate meaning, as it is only a map from integers to integers. You still have to specify externally how to interpret the code as something more than a mere number. (E.g. in the Turing test the output bits have to be processed into English language text). snip The page then goes on to make some comments about measure applied to universes. Here again I am confused about how to relate it to all that has been descibed. What are the analogs of universes, in this model? Is it descriptions, the infinite bit strings? From what has been
Re: Observer-Moment Measure from Universe Measure
Le 06-juin-05, à 01:40, Brent Meeker a écrit : What do you take to be the standard definition of knows? Is it X knows Y iff X believes Y is true and Y is true? That's the one by Theaetetus. Or do you include Gettier's amendment, X knows Y iff X believes Y is true and Y is true and There is a causal chain between the fact that makes Y true and X's belief that Y? It could depend of the axiom chosen to describe belief. For knowability I take the S4 axioms and rules: 1) axioms: all classical tautologies BX - X BX - BBX B(X-Y) - (BX - BY) 2) Rule: X X - Y X --- - (Modus ponens, necessitation) YBX But in the interview of the Lobian machine I recover the S4 axioms + Grz, from defining knowing X by proving X formally and X true (I apply the Theaetetus on formal provability). I cannot use Gettier's given that I have no notion of causality to start with. (Recall I don't have any physical notion to start with). Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
RE: Observer-Moment Measure from Universe Measure
Hal Finney writes: Stathis Papaioannou writes: Hal Finney writes: There are a few unintuitive consequences, though, such as that large instantiations of OMs will have more measure than small ones, and likewise slow ones will have more measure than fast ones. This is because in each case the interpretation program can be smaller if it is easier to find the OM in the vastness of a universe, and the slower and bigger an OM is the easier it is to find. I am inclined to tentatively accept these results. It does imply that the extreme future vision of some transhumanists, to upload themselves to super-fast, super-small computers, may greatly reduce their measure, which would mean that it would be like taking a large chance of dying. Could someone please explain what will happen to the hapless transhumanists in their computer when their measure falls to alarmingly low levels? Will they develop severe headaches, turn transparent like ghosts, or what? This is a kind of transformation that hasn't been possible in the world before, so no normal phenomenon will exactly capture what happens. To a first approximation, if their measure were reduced by 90%, what would happen subjectively would be the same as if they took steps that had a 90% chance of killing them, in this model. Now, objectively this is different because it would require other people to deal with their deaths. But subjectively it would be pretty much the same. Perhaps a closer approximation could be achieved if they were not only killed, but somehow everyone else's memory was changed so that no one remembered them or noticed that they were gone. Imagine instead the question, what would it be like, subjectively, to die instantly and without warning? It's a hard question to answer. But it is related to the question, what would it be it like to have your measure suddenly reduced? You could imagine your larger before-measure as being represented by your mind being instantiated as many copies. Then a certain percentage of those copies are instantly killed. What is it like subjectively? To the copies which remain, there is no subjective change. To the copies which were killed, perhaps it is like nothing subjectively, because there is no longer any subject there. But it is still a change. I think a reduction of measure would be like a certain percentage of my instances being instantly killed. When I imagine what it is like, I picture myself being one of the unlucky instances. I stop and never know I stopped, while other copies go on. The other night I had a strange dream. I came into a room and met someone whom I came to understand was myself. I was a copy who had been created a few moments earlier, and he was the original. There was a switch on the wall which would instantly destroy the copy, and I was supposed to push it. But I hesitated. My own consciousness would be destroyed. On the other hand I was supposedly a copy made just moments earlier, so only a few seconds of memories would be lost, hardly consequential. Still I had to face that dilemma: what would it feel like to just stop, instantly? Nervously, I went ahead and pushed the button, squeezing my eyes shut and making a kind of mental flinch or jerk. To my surprise, I was still there, and when I opened my eyes, the other person was gone. It turned out that he was the copy and I was the original. Imagine facing your copy, perhaps an exact copy whose mind is synchronized with yours, and seeing a coin flip which will determine which one is destroyed. Your measure will be halved. In a sense it will have no subjective effect, your thoughts and memories will be preserved in one of you. But in another sense you face a 50-50 chance of experiencing that mysterous effect of instant death. I think it would be scary. Logically, similar reductions of measure should be viewed in the same light. Hal, What I think you're describing is akin to the traditional view of personal identity as something firmly attached to a particular animal, computer or whatever. The most important insight the observer moment concept offers, to my mind, is that the observer effectively dies every moment, and the illusion of an individual persisting through time is created by the stringing together of appropriately related OM's. I wouldn't even call this a theory; I think it is true ipso facto. Consider an observer experiencing a series of conscious moments OM1, OM2, OM3... etc. Just as OM3 is about to start, he is vapourised by a nuclear explosion. Assuming for simplicity there are no parallel universes, the observer has died. What does dying mean in this context? It means that his last conscious moment was OM2, and there will be no more. Notice that nothing special has happened to OM2; it is the same as if he had continued living, and it is unaffected by what may or may not follow. Death consists in the absence of successors to OM2. Therefore, provisionally, as
Re: objections to QTI
Hal, I agree. It seems clear to me that the urge of nature to increase the entropy of the universe is the engine behind everything we see happening, including life and evolution. Why did life occur? Why, to increase the entropy of the universe! How did life occur? Well, you mix some chemicals together and cook them and proteins appear. Then the proteins assemble themselves into RNA, which starts replicating. It sounds so simple - why, I wonder, haven't we been able to do it ourselves? Maybe if you did this a million times, varying the recipe slightly each time, one of them WOULD work - in a sterile environment which no longer exists on earth. The entropy of the universe was zero or close to it at the moment of the Big Bang, and approaches infinity as expansion makes the universe ever larger and colder. If the universe started contracting, its entropy would get smaller, which nature doesn't allow in large-scale systems. This seems to me an argument in support of perpetual expansion. And where did this mysterious Big Bang come from? A quantum fluctuation of virtual particles I'm told. What, exactly, does that mean? Why? How can 10^119 particles at an extremely hot temperature originate from nothing? So many questions - so little time. Norman - Original Message - From: Hal Ruhl [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: everything-list@eskimo.com Sent: Wednesday, June 01, 2005 11:46 AM Subject: Re: objections to QTI Hi All: In my view life is a component of the fastest path to heat death (equilibrium) in universes that have suitable thermodynamics. Thus there would be a built in pressure for such universes to contain life. Further I like Stephen Gould's idea that complex life arises because evolution is a random walk with a lower bound and no upper bound. The above pressure will always quickly jump start life at the lower bound in such universes by rolling the dice so to speak as much as necessary to do so. Hal Ruhl
Re: objections to QTI
Norman Samish wrote: If the universe started contracting, its entropy would get smaller, which nature doesn't allow in large-scale systems. This seems to me an argument in support of perpetual expansion. From what I've read, if the universe began contracting this would not necessarily cause entropy to decrease, in fact most physicists would consider that scenario (which would mean the 'arrow of time' would reverse during the contraction) pretty unlikely, although since we don't know exactly why the Big Bang started out in a low-entropy state we can't completely rule out a low-entropy boundary condition on the Big Crunch. And where did this mysterious Big Bang come from? A quantum fluctuation of virtual particles I'm told. Whoever told you that was passing off speculation as fact--in fact there is no agreed-upon answer to the question of what, if anything, came before the Big Bang or caused it. Jesse
Re: objections to QTI
On Mon, 6 Jun 2005, Jesse Mazer wrote: Norman Samish wrote: If the universe started contracting, its entropy would get smaller, which nature doesn't allow in large-scale systems. This seems to me an argument in support of perpetual expansion. From what I've read, if the universe began contracting this would not necessarily cause entropy to decrease, in fact most physicists would consider that scenario (which would mean the 'arrow of time' would reverse during the contraction) pretty unlikely, although since we don't know exactly why the Big Bang started out in a low-entropy state we can't completely rule out a low-entropy boundary condition on the Big Crunch. This is quite correct. The idea that there are future as well as past boundary conditions is an extreme minority one. And where did this mysterious Big Bang come from? A quantum fluctuation of virtual particles I'm told. Whoever told you that was passing off speculation as fact--in fact there is no agreed-upon answer to the question of what, if anything, came before the Big Bang or caused it. Jesse Maybe Norman is confusing the rather more legit idea that the *fluctuations* in the Big Bang, that explain why the universe is not completely uniform, come from quantum fluctuations amplified by inflation. This is currently the leading theory for the origin of structure, in that it has quite a lot of successful predictions to its credit. Paddy Leahy
Joining Post
Hello everyone, I have an M.S. in Mathematics. I've done casual reading, e.g. The Loss of Certainty (Kline), The Emperor's New Mind (Penrose), The Elegant Universe (Greene),Pensees (Pascal), lots of papers online. Tom Caylor
Re: Against Fundamentalism!
...but of courseexplanation is more fundamental than prediction.
Tom Caylor-Original Message-From: Lee Corbin [EMAIL PROTECTED]To: everything-list@eskimo.comSent: Sun, 5 Jun 2005 10:24:42 -0700Subject: Against Fundamentalism!
Hal Finney writes
Lee Corbin writes:
But in general, what do observer-moments explain? Or what does the
hypothesis concerning them explain? I just don't get a good feel
that there are any "higher level" phenomena which might be reduced
to observer-moments (I am still very skeptical that all of physics
or math or something could be reduced to them...
[Yes] I would say that observer-moments are what need explaining, rather than
things that do the explaining. Or you could say that in a sense they
"explain" our experiences, although I think of them more as *being*
our experiences, moment by moment. As we agreed:
An observer-moment is really all we have as our primary experience of
the world. The world around us may be fake; we may be in the Matrix or
a brain in a vat. Even our memories may be fake. But the fact that we
are having particular experiences at a particular moment cannot be faked.
Nothing could be truer.
But, alas, I now contend, almost totally irrelevant! True yet irrelevant!
That is the sense in which I say that observer-moments are primary;
they are the most fundamental experience we have of the world.
Everything else is only a theory which is built upon the raw existence
of observer-moments.
I cannot help but vent here.
VENT
Pan-critical rationalism is very critical of the whole idea of
taking *anything* as "fundamental", as is well-known.
The whole quest for trying to find that which is "fundamental"
is deeply misguided, I submit. PCR takes absolutely nothing as
fundamental; it even, as is also well-known, invites you to
start anywhere with your conjectures.
What science (or all sensible thinking) strives to do is to
*reduce* one phenomenon to another as a means of providing for
(i) explanations (ii) predictions. Each is more important
than the other.
Giving into the urge to found things on some basis, the ancient
Cartesian rationalistic program, is nothing more than Euclid-envy.
A horrific quest for *certainty*, which is known to be impossible
and---perhaps if all our epistemologies were better---would be
an obvious wild-goose chase.
>From Descartes ("all that is certain is that I think therefore
I am") to Ayn Rand ("ethics and everything else can be derived
starting from A is A), I contend that this misguided quest has
caused no end of trouble and nonsense.
Does it really matter *what* is primary? I think not. When
you write "everything else is a theory built on OMs" I want
to scream. Nothing is built! Fie on rationalism! Fie on
fundamentalism!
Everything else is only a theory which is built
upon the raw existence of observer-moments.
No, no, no!
Anytime we have an urge to "start somewhere", or to regard X as
more basic than Y, danger flags should go up. Now again, we
should cheerfully reduce Y to X, and Z to Y, when we can, because
this helps us with (1) and (2), but we shouldn't even be troubled
in the slightest if we also end up reducing X to Z! No big deal!
Circular explanations are probably in the end even better than
ones that aren't circular! (Example: a dictionary defines all
the words in it.)
The only purposes when trying to achieve understanding
are, again, (1) explanation and (2) prediction.
/VENT
Lee
where did the Big Bang come from?
Norman Samish wrote: And where did this mysterious Big Bang come from? A quantum fluctuation of virtual particles I'm told. On Mon, 6 Jun 2005, Jesse Mazer wrote: Whoever told you that was passing off speculation as fact--in fact there is no agreed-upon answer to the question of what, if anything, came before the Big Bang or caused it. Patrick Leahy wrote: Maybe Norman is confusing the rather more legit idea that the fluctuations in the Big Bang, that explain why the universe is not completely uniform, come from quantum fluctuations amplified by inflation. This is currently the leading theory for the origin of structure, in that it has quite a lot of successful predictions to its credit. Norman Samish writes: Perhaps I didn't express myself well. What I was referring to is at http://www.astronomycafe.net/cosm/planck.html, where Sten Odenwald hypothesizes that random fluctuations in nothing at all led to the Big Bang. This process has been described by the physicist Frank Wilczyk at the University of California, Santa Barbara by saying, 'The reason that there is something instead of nothing is that nothing is unstable.' . . . Physicist Edward Tryon expresses this best by saying that 'Our universe is simply one of those things that happens from time to time.'
RE: where did the Big Bang come from?
Norman Samish wrote: Norman Samish wrote: And where did this mysterious Big Bang come from? A quantum fluctuation of virtual particles I'm told. On Mon, 6 Jun 2005, Jesse Mazer wrote: Whoever told you that was passing off speculation as fact--in fact there is no agreed-upon answer to the question of what, if anything, came before the Big Bang or caused it. Patrick Leahy wrote: Maybe Norman is confusing the rather more legit idea that the fluctuations in the Big Bang, that explain why the universe is not completely uniform, come from quantum fluctuations amplified by inflation. This is currently the leading theory for the origin of structure, in that it has quite a lot of successful predictions to its credit. Norman Samish writes: Perhaps I didn't express myself well. What I was referring to is at http://www.astronomycafe.net/cosm/planck.html, where Sten Odenwald hypothesizes that random fluctuations in nothing at all led to the Big Bang. This process has been described by the physicist Frank Wilczyk at the University of California, Santa Barbara by saying, 'The reason that there is something instead of nothing is that nothing is unstable.' . . . Physicist Edward Tryon expresses this best by saying that 'Our universe is simply one of those things that happens from time to time.' But as I said, this idea is pure speculation, there isn't any evidence for it and we'd probably need a fully worked-out theory of quantum gravity to see if the idea even makes sense. Jesse
Re: Observer-Moment Measure from Universe Measure
Johnathan Corgan writes: As I'm sure many on the list are familiar, David Brin's Kiln People is an interesting science fiction treatment of similar issues. It is an interesting story which helps to make some of our philosophical thought experiments more concrete. Making copies, destroying them, the nondeterministic experience of wondering whether you will become the copy or the original, all are addressed. However I found much to dislike in the way Brin answers these questions. I wrote a review at http://www.transhumanism.org/index.php/th/more/285/ . An excerpt: I was shocked and disgusted to see that [Brin] presents the golems as having no human rights whatsoever. They are property, nothing more. They have to step to the back of the bus, get out of the way of the white, excuse me, human massas, put up with whatever humans want to do to them. This shocking recreation of the worst abuses of the slavery era is presented without much explanation by Brin, or much sensitivity to the horrific history he is echoing... Hal Finney
Can the arrow of time reverse?
Norman Samish wrote: If the universe started contracting, its entropy would get smaller, which nature doesn't allow in large-scale systems. This seems to me an argument in support of perpetual expansion. On Mon, 6 Jun 2005, Jesse Mazer wrote: From what I've read, if the universe began contracting this would not necessarily cause entropy to decrease, in fact most physicists would consider that scenario (which would mean the 'arrow of time' would reverse during the contraction) pretty unlikely, although since we don't know exactly why the Big Bang started out in a low-entropy state we can't completely rule out a low-entropy boundary condition on the Big Crunch. Paddy Leahy wrote: This is quite correct. The idea that there are future as well as past boundary conditions is an extreme minority one. Norman Samish writes: Thank you for your comments. My reasoning was that if a volume of gas contracts, its temperature must go up because particle collisions will occur more frequently. Since entropy is inversely proportional to temperature, the entropy must get smaller. If an entropy decrease upon contraction of our universe does not occur, does this mean that the 'arrow of time' would reverse during the contraction? Wouldn't this violate causality?
RE: where did the Big Bang come from?
On Mon, 6 Jun 2005, Jesse Mazer wrote: Norman Samish wrote: Norman Samish wrote: And where did this mysterious Big Bang come from? A quantum fluctuation of virtual particles I'm told. On Mon, 6 Jun 2005, Jesse Mazer wrote: Whoever told you that was passing off speculation as fact--in fact there is no agreed-upon answer to the question of what, if anything, came before the Big Bang or caused it. Patrick Leahy wrote: Maybe Norman is confusing the rather more legit idea that the fluctuations in the Big Bang, that explain why the universe is not completely uniform, come from quantum fluctuations amplified by inflation. This is currently the leading theory for the origin of structure, in that it has quite a lot of successful predictions to its credit. Norman Samish writes: Perhaps I didn't express myself well. What I was referring to is at http://www.astronomycafe.net/cosm/planck.html, where Sten Odenwald hypothesizes that random fluctuations in nothing at all led to the Big Bang. This process has been described by the physicist Frank Wilczyk at the University of California, Santa Barbara by saying, 'The reason that there is something instead of nothing is that nothing is unstable.' . . . Physicist Edward Tryon expresses this best by saying that 'Our universe is simply one of those things that happens from time to time.' But as I said, this idea is pure speculation, there isn't any evidence for it and we'd probably need a fully worked-out theory of quantum gravity to see if the idea even makes sense. Even then it would beg the question, why do the rules of quantum gravity apply? I.e. these answers are a bit of a con trick. Back in 1984 when Odenwald composed his text, there were still quite a few physicists who really thought that it would turn out that one and only set of physical laws were logically possible. This is one of those ideas that seems obviously false to any but True Believers, but there you go. In defense of Odenwald, he does clearly flag his description of events before GUT era as highly speculative. (Actually he is overconfident on the GUT era: you don't hear much about leptoquark bosons and X Higgs these days.) Moreover, the idea that our big bang within the level-2 multiverse (Tegmark's notation) was produced by a quantum fluctuation is probably a loose but reasonable description if you believe in the level-2 multiverse at all (which is a fairly speculative thing to do). Paddy Leahy
Re: where did the Big Bang come from?
- Original Message - From: Jesse Mazer [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; everything-list@eskimo.com Sent: Monday, June 06, 2005 07:53 PM Subject: RE: where did the Big Bang come from? Norman Samish wrote: Norman Samish wrote: And where did this mysterious Big Bang come from? A quantum fluctuation of virtual particles I'm told. On Mon, 6 Jun 2005, Jesse Mazer wrote: Whoever told you that was passing off speculation as fact--in fact there is no agreed-upon answer to the question of what, if anything, came before the Big Bang or caused it. Patrick Leahy wrote: Maybe Norman is confusing the rather more legit idea that the fluctuations in the Big Bang, that explain why the universe is not completely uniform, come from quantum fluctuations amplified by inflation. This is currently the leading theory for the origin of structure, in that it has quite a lot of successful predictions to its credit. Norman Samish writes: Perhaps I didn't express myself well. What I was referring to is at http://www.astronomycafe.net/cosm/planck.html, where Sten Odenwald hypothesizes that random fluctuations in nothing at all led to the Big Bang. This process has been described by the physicist Frank Wilczyk at the University of California, Santa Barbara by saying, 'The reason that there is something instead of nothing is that nothing is unstable.' . . . Physicist Edward Tryon expresses this best by saying that 'Our universe is simply one of those things that happens from time to time.' But as I said, this idea is pure speculation, there isn't any evidence for it and we'd probably need a fully worked-out theory of quantum gravity to see if the idea even makes sense. Jesse This is one of the motivations for believing in a purely mathematical universe. A physical universe can never arise from 'nothing'. If you believe in mathematical reality then there is no mystery. The mathematical model that describes the big bang is eternal. Saibal
Re: Another tedious hypothetical
On Jun 5, 2005, at 11:14 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote:I would say 0: 0. All a Coincidence (I don't see *big* coincidences) and then 5.I'm agnostic about what you talk about. I love the book by Suzanne Blackmore "In search of the light" because it shows parapsychology can be done seriously, but then the evidence are until today rather negative. "Drinking coffee in the morning" is sufficiently miraculous for me now. With comp, evidence of precognition could be evidence for the very low-levelness of the substitution level.I'm with Bruno (both on option "0" and on coffee).You might like to read Richard Dawkins's book "Unweaving the Rainbow", especially the chapter "Unweaving the Uncanny". It contains a thorough demolishing of the human intuition to put importance on seeming coincidences such as your Heinlein story. You are very willing to say "Even if we didn't go to a phonebook and look up the relative number of "Silards" or "Lenzes" vs the more common names, it's fairly obvious that the probabilities of this being a chance occurrence are on the order of one in tens of millions." It's precisely this "obviousness", and the number (tens of millions) that you are failing to account for in any way.You also haven't been too precise about the population of events that you would also have accepted to be a coincidence. You take the name "Lenz" to be significant because the bomb involved a lens -- so you would also presumably have accepted the names "Baum" (bomb), Beryl, Berle, ". "Silard" and "Szilard" are very similar, but I am willing to bet that "Schiller" or "Stiller" or "Sellars" would also have tripped your coincidenceometer. You mention "Korzybski" presumably because you see a resemblance to "Kistiakowski"; you probably would have also accepted Kieslowski, Kowaleski, Kowalowski, Krzyzanowski, Kuczynski, or indeed any other Polish surname. You would probably not have accepted "Franklin" - but then you might have been able to find some other aspect of the bomb project that involved a Frank, or a Lynn, or something taking place in Frankfurt.. and so on.The point is, there are enough stories published in any year that it would be a trivial matter to find a few superficial resemblances between any event and a story that came before it.
Re: Another tedious hypothetical
At 03:01 PM 6/6/2005, Pete Carlton wrote: (snip) The point is, there are enough stories published in any year that it would be a trivial matter to find a few superficial resemblances between any event and a story that came before it. my second comment. . .if it's such a trivial matter, then perhaps you can find and produce another publication that includes the gestalt found in Heinlein's story. Anything before 1945 that is. You may want to go to Google Print---that should be helpful. RM
RE: Can the arrow of time reverse?
Norman Samish: Norman Samish wrote: If the universe started contracting, its entropy would get smaller, which nature doesn't allow in large-scale systems. This seems to me an argument in support of perpetual expansion. On Mon, 6 Jun 2005, Jesse Mazer wrote: From what I've read, if the universe began contracting this would not necessarily cause entropy to decrease, in fact most physicists would consider that scenario (which would mean the 'arrow of time' would reverse during the contraction) pretty unlikely, although since we don't know exactly why the Big Bang started out in a low-entropy state we can't completely rule out a low-entropy boundary condition on the Big Crunch. Paddy Leahy wrote: This is quite correct. The idea that there are future as well as past boundary conditions is an extreme minority one. Norman Samish writes: Thank you for your comments. My reasoning was that if a volume of gas contracts, its temperature must go up because particle collisions will occur more frequently. Since entropy is inversely proportional to temperature, the entropy must get smaller. If an entropy decrease upon contraction of our universe does not occur, does this mean that the 'arrow of time' would reverse during the contraction? Wouldn't this violate causality? The current understanding is that the arrow of time we see is explained in terms of increasing entropy--that the 2nd law is why we see eggs shatter when dropped but don't see pieces of eggs jump together to form intact eggs--so as long as entropy continues to increase the arrow of time will go in the same direction, and if the entropy *did* decrease in the contracting phase, then the contracting phase would be like a reversed movie of the expanding phase, with broken eggs re-forming and so forth. Thinking about boxes of gas is a bit misleading, because we normally assume an isolated box is at the maximum entropy possible given the size of the box and the energy of all the molecules, while the universe is not at the maximum entropy possible for its size and energy at any given moment (if it were, there'd be no thermodynamic time asymmetries like with breaking eggs, and life would not be possible in such a universe). Jesse
Re: Another tedious hypothetical
Jesse has it right on here, and one can go even further in this vein. You are impressed by the relationship between one particular story and one particular event - but you hand-picked both the story and the event for discussion here because of their superficial similarities. You challenged me to find another example of a story with the same resemblances that the Heinlein story has to the atomic bomb project. But resemblances between any written story and any similar event that happens after the story's publication would be in the same class.I'm not saying that the resemblances between the story and the bomb are trivial - they do make an impression. It also makes an impression when someone dreams of a relative dying and the next day they receive news that that relative did in fact die that night; or when you're in a foreign city and you look up the number of the taxi company and it turns out to be your home phone number, or when exactly 100 years separate (1) the election to Congress (2) the election to the presidency (3) the birth of the assassins of and (4) the birth of the successors of John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln.These coincidences all make an impression on one. But nothing special needs to be invoked to explain the occurrence of these events -- what needs to be explained is the facet of human psychology that makes people think something strange is going on when in fact nothing is. Many people have taken stabs at it, and evolutionary explanations seem to work well -- seriously, you should get the Dawkins book and read the chapter to see where we're coming from; Carl Sagan also addressed this issue very well.--Also, you still have not explained how you get 1 in 10e-9.
Re: Another tedious hypothetical
At 03:58 PM 6/6/2005, you wrote: rmiller wrote: At 03:01 PM 6/6/2005, Pete Carlton wrote: (snip) The point is, there are enough stories published in any year that it would be a trivial matter to find a few superficial resemblances between any event and a story that came before it. Let's look a little closer at the story in terms of gestalts. On one side we have published author Robert Heinlein writing a story in 1939 about a guy named Silard who works with a uranium bomb, a beryllium target and a fellow named lenz. We'll leave Korzybski out of this one (I suspect Heinlein borrowed the name from A. Korzybski, a sematicist of some renown back in the 1930s.) To me the interesting nodes involve the words Silard lenz beryllium, uranium and bomb. So let's agree that here is a story that includes a gestalt of the words Silard, lenz, beryllium, uranium and bomb. But you can't use that particular gestalt when talking about the probability that a coincidence like this would occur, because you never would have predicted that precise gestalt in advance even if you were specifically looking for stories that anticipated aspects of the Manhatten project. Where on earth did *that* gestalt rule come from??? ;-) It would make more sense to look at the probability of a story that includes *any* combination of words that somehow anticipate aspects of the Manhatten project. Let's say there were about 10^10 possible such gestalts we could come up with, and if you scanned trillions of parallel universes you'd see the proportion of universes where a story echoed at least one such gestalt was fairly high--1 in 15, say. This means that in 1 in 15 universes, there will be a person like you who notices this anticipation and, if he uses your method of only estimating the probability of that *particular* gestalt, will say there's only a 1 in 10^9 probability that something like this could have happened by chance! Obviously something is wrong with any logic that leads you to see a 1 in 10^9 probability coincidence happening in 1 in 15 possible universes, and in this hypothetical example it's clear the problem is that these parallel coincidence-spotters are using too narrow a notion of something like this, one which is too much biased by hindsight knowledge of what actually happened in their universe, rather than something they plausibly might have specifically thought to look for before they actually knew about the existence of such a story. Sounds like you're invoking rules of causation here--post hoc rather than ad hoc, hindsight bias, etc. Certainly I am not suggesting Heinlein's story caused Szilard to be hired (interesting thought, though!) And unless I want to invoke Cramer's transactional approach, I would not really want to think that the Manhattan Project caused Heinlein to write his story. That would require reverse causation, and we know that doesn't happen. This is very simple: we have instances in which Heinlein includes key words (definable as being essential to the story---without them, different story) that form a gestalt of. . .well, key words. These words are equivalent to those describing the Manhattan Project and not many other things. To show that there are not many other things these key word gestalts describe, one can wait a year and use Google Print to call up all the books and stories associated with these key words. Then we will have a probability to work with. Since the gestalts are separated by four years (or thereabouts) then we shouldn't have to invoke causation. How is this potentially valuable? Suppose we use Google Print again and find all the instances of key word gestalts in sci fi matching key word gestalts in scientific non-fiction---at a later date. What if we found that there seems to be a four-year gap between the two--no more, no less. That piece of information may be valuable later on down the road in trying to piece the puzzle together. But just to say that we shouldn't investigate it because it's all a coincidence, or that the hypothesis was improperly framed, or that it violates some of Hill's Rules of Causation--- is just reinforcing the notion that math and logic are not up to the task of investigating some things in the real world. RM
Re: Questions on Russell's Why Occam paper
On Mon, Jun 06, 2005 at 12:06:06PM +0100, Patrick Leahy wrote: On Mon, 6 Jun 2005, Russell Standish wrote: I am beginning to regret calling the all descriptions ensemble with uniform measure a Schmidhuber ensemble. I think what I meant was that it could be generated by a standard dovetailer algorithm, running for 2^\aleph_0 timesteps. It can't! Timesteps are denumerable, hence this statement is just a contradiction in terms. You better postulate your ensemble without reference to any algorithm to generate it. Indeed I do. Only Schmidhuber uses the dovetailer. Hence my regret. ... 2^\aleph_0 = \aleph_1 (by definition) Hal dealt with this one already, I notice. 2^\aleph_0 = c. \aleph_1 is something else entirely. snip Now an observer will expect to find a SAS in one of the descriptions as a corrolory of the anthropic principle, which is explicitly stated as one of the assumptions in this work. I make no bones about this - I consider the anthropic principle a mystery, not self-evident like many people. Very few supporters of the AP would expect to find a SAS in a bitstring. Until you *specify* a way of interpreting the string, it contains nothing but bits. The observer specifies the interpretation. Why should an observer expect to see a token of erself embedded in reality? That is the mystery of the AP. What ARE you talking about? Observer's don't see tokens of themselves... I can see that I have a body - if I look in the mirror I can see a face, eye etc, all of which appear to be under my control. This is a token embedded in my reality that represents me. if anyone (God?) has a 3rd-person/bird's eye view, it is certainly not someone who is included in any particular reality. No way is anything like this implied by the AP. All the AP requires is that there *be* observers/SAS in (real) universes, which is true in our case at least. Sorry - you lost me here ... oh well. And now we find not only that the bit string is a description, but it is a complex enough description to describe SAS's? How does that work? The bitstrings are infinite in length. By reading enough bits, they can have arbitrarily complex meanings attached to them. In particular, any bitstring can be interpreted as any other bitstring by an appropriate map. Hence until you specify an interpreter you are simply not proposing a theory at all. The observer _is_ the interpreter. There may well be more than one observer in the picture, but they'd better agree! snip All that is discussed in this paper is appearances - we only try to explain the phenomenon (things as they appear). No attempt is made to explain the noumenon (things as they are), nor do we need to assume that there is a noumenon. Most readers of your paper would take it that you are making a strong ontological proposition, i.e. that the basis of reality is your set of bitstrings. This is the case. If this is *not* the case, and you think the bitstrings may be represented in some deeper reality (or maybe are just metaphors), then what is the motivation for your proposal? Why do we need to think about this intermediate layer of bitstrings? The original simplicity goes out the window. This latter extrapolation is not the case. BTW I'm with Kant: you can't have an appearance without an underlying reality, even if that is unknowable. I'm not sure Kant says this, but in any case that's not important. I'm with Marchal, who says if there is an underlying reality which is not only unknowable, but also unnecessary to explain phenomena, then why assume that particular hypothesis? It makes no sense. Bruno Marchal has a detailed discussion on this in his thesis, and concludes that he has no need for this hypothesis (what he calls the extravagant hypothesis). So the former statement is true :[the description strings are] things that observer TM's observe and map to integers. It is also true that descriptions of self aware observers will appear within the description by the Anthropic Principle. The phenomenon of observerhood is included. However where the observers actually live is not a meaningful question in this framework. I think either your terminology or you model has now got very confused. Are your observer TMs the observers (SAS) whose experiences your theory is trying to explain? Yes. In this case where they live is crucial because it defines the environment the SAS find themselves in. Why? If you are not careful your theory becomes effectively that we are all brains in bottles or Leibnizian monads, which is solipsism by another name. It is not solipsism, if only for the reason that multiple observers exist in our observed reality. They are all as real as our own consciousness. Bruno Marchal calls this shared dreaming. It seems apt. Or are your observers the missing interpreters in your theory which give it meaning, and
Re: Questions on Russell's Why Occam paper
On Mon, Jun 06, 2005 at 01:51:36PM -0700, Hal Finney wrote: Another area I had trouble with in Russell's answer was the concept of a prefix map. I understand that a prefix map is defined as a mapping whose domain is finite bit strings such that none of them are a prefix of any other. But I'm not sure how to relate this to the infinite bit strings that are descriptions. A prefix map attaches the same output to all strings that share a common finite length prefix. In particular, if an observer attaches sequences of meanings to sequences of prefixes of one of these strings, then it seems that he must have a domain which does allow some inputs to be prefixes of others. Isn't that what sequences of prefixes would mean? That is, if the infinite string is 01011011100101110111..., then a sequence of prefixes might be 0, 01, 010, 0101, 01011, Does O() apply to this sequence of prefixes? If so then I don't think it is a prefix map. Yes I agree this is vague, and seemingly contradictory. I'm not sure how to make this more precise, but one way to read the paper is to treat observers as prefix maps for section 2 (Occam's razor), and then for section 3 (White Rabbit problem) ignore the prefix property. It could be that the way of making this more precise is to assume observers have some internal state that is constantly updated (a time counter perhaps), so actually going through a sequence of prefix maps in (psychological) time, but at this stage I don't have an answer. I want to make it clear by the way that my somewhat pedantic and labored examination of this page is not an attempt to be difficult or stubborn. Even being difficult and stubborn has its place (to help winkle out subtle errors of logic eg), so long as you relax enough at other times to obtain understanding. I appreciate the effort in any case. Rather, I find that by the third page, I don't understand what is going on at all! Even the very first sentence, In the previous sections, I demonstrate that formal mathematical systems are the most compressible, and have highest measure amongst all members of the Schmidhuber ensemble, has me looking to see if I skipped a page! I don't see where this is discussed in any way. This is pretty much a tautology. Formal mathematical systems are a means of compressing data in the form of facts about numbers. If one were to include all such possible compression schemes, rather than just the systems studies by mathematicians to date, one would end up with the set of Turing machines, or equivalently of computable functions. The Occam's razor result clearly relates measure to the amount of compressibility in the description. Perhaps such a view of mathematics is strange. Certainly I find it strange when Stephen Wolfram says mathematics is incapable of understanding complex phenomena, and one should cellular automata instead. To me, cellular automata are just another example of a mathematical system. So I hope that by pinning down and crystalizing exactly what the first page is claiming, it will help me to see what the more interesting third page is actually able to establish. I think Paddy is in much the same situation. Hal Finney I hope so too. -- *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) Mathematics0425 253119 () UNSW SYDNEY 2052 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Australiahttp://parallel.hpc.unsw.edu.au/rks International prefix +612, Interstate prefix 02 pgpaBNDuiwTTe.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Against Fundamentalism!
On Mon, Jun 06, 2005 at 12:40:03PM -0400, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: ...but of course explanation is more fundamental than prediction. Tom Caylor I wouldn't say that! Both of these properties are orthogonal to each other. Typical scientific theories exist on a tradeoff curve (Pareto front for those in the know) between explanatory power and predictive power. 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) Mathematics0425 253119 () UNSW SYDNEY 2052 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Australiahttp://parallel.hpc.unsw.edu.au/rks International prefix +612, Interstate prefix 02 pgpNCzj49DsR0.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Another tedious hypothetical
At 06:56 PM 6/6/2005, you wrote: Jesse has it right on here, and one can go even further in this vein. You are impressed by the relationship between one particular story and one particular event - but you hand-picked both the story and the event for discussion here because of their superficial similarities. You challenged me to find another example of a story with the same resemblances that the Heinlein story has to the atomic bomb project. But resemblances between any written story and any similar event that happens after the story's publication would be in the same class. I'm not saying that Heinlein was plugged into anything particular. As a sociologist, my interest is the inability of some branches of science to address many common-sense events. Any scientist worth his degree can conjure up logic in order to drop a complicated issue and move on to something else: improperly framed question, no prior data, no model, post hoc cherry-picking, etc and etc. I once had a phone chat with Ray Hyams about this---his response was telling---basically skeptics don't investigate---they debunk. That isn't the scientific method; that's a belief system. That, and economical considerations, of course, is why it took 10 years before medicine figured out the importance of helicobacter pylori. My own working definition of a science skeptic is the last guy on the cul-de-sac who hasn't been told (by everyone else) how to find his water lines using two clotheshangers. The reason of course, is that everyone knows it wouldn't work for him anyway. ;-) I'm not saying that the resemblances between the story and the bomb are trivial - they do make an impression. It also makes an impression when someone dreams of a relative dying and the next day they receive news that that relative did in fact die that night; or when you're in a foreign city and you look up the number of the taxi company and it turns out to be your home phone number, or when exactly 100 years separate (1) the election to Congress (2) the election to the presidency (3) the birth of the assassins of and (4) the birth of the successors of John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln. If the Heinlein story failed to impress, then may I ask what went missing in it that--had it been there--would have suggested further study? Twenty key words and phrases including Oppenheimer, Trinity plutonium Neddermeyer mushroom cloud Teller Light and shake? Or would that again be just classified as a rather unusual coincidence? I hear a lot of qualifiers (such as the one below) but nothing substantial regarding your criteria. It seems all very vague--except of course, for the conclusion. If you have a criteria or model for evaluating some of these events (such as Heinleins example) I'd like to hear it. Then, as good scientists, we can begin to evaluate how appropriate it may be for the examination of these unusual events. Until we have that protocol defined, I'm sorry, you're just expressing a belief (that nothing that can't be explained by a model is exceptional or even should be evaluated.) These coincidences all make an impression on one. But nothing special needs to be invoked to explain the occurrence of these events -- what needs to be explained is the facet of human psychology that makes people think something strange is going on when in fact nothing is. Yet, without knowing the facts you immediately assume the facts when in fact nothing is. It's a common position taken by the lazy scientist---and it doesn't have to do with strange things, either. It's why the EPA never bothered to determine the density of the WTC surge cloud. Nothing to worry about, because, well, *in fact* there is nothing to worry about. The citizens of New York *do* appreciate that position. (hey, Pete, you're a fed---why haven't they come up with the density?) Many people have taken stabs at it, and evolutionary explanations seem to work well -- seriously, you should get the Dawkins book and read the chapter to see where we're coming from; Carl Sagan also addressed this issue very well. And of course, I encourage you to consider coming up with an appropriate protocol that doesn't include prejudging the data, or assuming facts not in evidence---and tell us what the density of that surge cloud was in milligrams per cubic meter. Is that in a book somewhere also? ;-) --Also, you still have not explained how you get 1 in 10e-9. I used it as an example of a p value that is dreadfully easy to obtain when applying standard probabilities to any of these events. My concern is that for many scientists, 1x10^-9, though ridiculously small---is, for some things, still not small enough. Which is why scientists have willfully ceded important areas of research to the likes of the Midnight Examiner, the Star, The Washington Times and Fox News. Cheers, RM Pete, if you need some numbers to call at the EPA's RTP facility, I'll be glad to give em to you.
Re: Another tedious hypothetical
Pete Carlton wrote: Jesse has it right on here, and one can go even further in this vein. You are impressed by the relationship between one particular story and one particular event - but you hand-picked both the story and the event for discussion here because of their superficial similarities. You challenged me to find another example of a story with the same resemblances that the Heinlein story has to the atomic bomb project. But resemblances between any written story and any similar event that happens after the story's publication would be in the same class. I'm not saying that the resemblances between the story and the bomb are trivial - they do make an impression. It also makes an impression when someone dreams of a relative dying and the next day they receive news that that relative did in fact die that night; or when you're in a foreign city and you look up the number of the taxi company and it turns out to be your home phone number, or when exactly 100 years separate (1) the election to Congress (2) the election to the presidency (3) the birth of the assassins of and (4) the birth of the successors of John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln. You also need to consider what in the academic world is called publication bias. Richard Feynman once told a story about a sudden premonition he had that his grandmother had died. Uncannily, the next moment the phone rang - and it was his grandmother, alive and well. For every case you hear about where a premonition (or whatever) miraculously comes true, there are the hundreds of cases where it doesn't come true, which you don't hear about because they're not noteworthy. Is it just a coincidence that just about everyone on this list is a cynical skeptic? --Stathis Papaioannou _ SEEK: Over 80,000 jobs across all industries at Australia's #1 job site. http://ninemsn.seek.com.au?hotmail
Re: Against Fundamentalism!
Welcome to the list Tom, I agree with you. Explanation is much more important. It is also much more difficult to agree on what *is* a good explanation. Prediction could remain important, at least in principle, to possibly destroy our favorite explanation, or to put doubt on them. Have you read the book by René Thom: prédire n'est pas expliquer Bruno Le 06-juin-05, à 18:40, [EMAIL PROTECTED] a écrit : x-tad-bigger ...but of course explanation is more fundamental than prediction./x-tad-bigger x-tad-bigger /x-tad-bigger http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
