Re: One more question about measure
Quentin Anciaux writes: 1) assume an observer that can see. 2) assume that the observer can see only at a certain resolution/level (it's true that I can't see everything, I do not see quarks for example, nor my cells) Then, I can digitalize every image that I (assuming I'm an observer ;) can see. Now, I'll take an arbitrary image resolution far upper than I details I can actually be aware of. For example : 10x10 pixels, every pixels can have 16.5 millions colors (even if it has been proven that humans can only see less than 20 colors, just for the argument). Then the limit for the eyes to see individual images in a movie is approximately 40hz, so for the argument I will say that I need at least 100 frames by second (higher than what we can perceive). Now how much bits do I need to encode one hour of visual events ? It's simply 10x10x4x100x3600. So the needed number of bits to encode one hour of visual events at a resolution far higher than what we can perceive is finite... It's the same if you replace one hour by the length of a lifetime (+/- 80 years). So even if we are immortal, at a given time in the far away future, the visual events must repeat. You can also work out directly how many possible experiences a human can have. A normal brain has about 10^11 neurons, and each of these neurons can have only one of two states, on or off. This means that the maximum number of possible brain states is 2^10^11, so the number of possible experiences must be less than this. While this is a *huge* number (even if you take into account the fact that the vast majority of possible brain states are "nonsense" and don't give rise to experiences), it is nevertheless finite, and as you concluded, this means we would start repeating experiences if we lived long enough. However, many people who think about what life would be like if our species survives into the far future - many thousands or millions of years - envisage that our current biological form will be discarded in favour of something more durable and powerful, such as living as sentient software on a computer network. What will happen in this case depends on which cosmological model you follow, but if the network is forever expanding in size in an infinite universe, then there will always be more processing power for new experiences. --Stathis Papaioannou _ REALESTATE: biggest buy/rent/share listings http://ninemsn.realestate.com.au
How much unfortunate is Jack? (was: the copy and the chair (was: torture yet again]
Le 24-juin-05, à 15:54, Stathis Papaioannou a écrit : Lest anyone take Jonathan Colvin's thought experiment as evidence that the copy isn't "really" you, here is a variation in which the situation is reversed: Stathis' "the copy and the chair" is here http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/m7117.html You made your point. Let me give you an argument showing (incorrectly) that the notion of probability is not applicable in the duplication situations. I let you find where is the error. The argument is of course (*) a thought experiment and I present it through an imaginary story. In the "copy and the chair" you reverse the situation. Here I show it to be completely arbitrary. It is the story of my friend Jack. Jack is a computationalist practitioner, and he is also fond of the planet Mars. Unfortunately he married Jeanne who was anti computationalist. Nevertheless he promised to never leave her. And Jack is as honest as possible. Today, classical teleportation and duplication were common, but Jeanne just believes that those who are reconstituted are sort of "impostors", and that each time an "original" is scanned and annihilated, well, he just dye. One day Jack, who is a little bit tired arguing with Jeanne, found a proposition for a nice Job on Mars. He decides to duplicate itself, by being scanned, and then send on Mars and be reconstituted on it. All this without annihilation of the original, so as to be able not feeling guilty in front of Jeanne, and hurt her feeling in case she would know. Jack, who bet on comp, thought that he has a chance of 1/2 to "be the one who will enjoy working on Mars" After having done the experience. Jack-original was a little bit sad. Jack-1, the copy, was delighted: it has worked! Soon after, his news paper was offering even more jobs on Mars, actually 64 jobs. He decided to reiterate the "copy and paste" (no cut) 64 times. He thought that the probability he remains the original was 1/2^64 (= about 1/1,84 10^19) so that he would be rather unlucky to be the one feeling remaining the original! But as tautologies are tautologies, the original remains the original, so he was, as a computationalist, quite astonished failing again. He did even begin to doubt comp. On Mars, Jack-2, Jack-3, ..., Jack-65 were delighted and were thinking that they knew that trick could hardly fail! And then new jobs on Mars were still offered, dirty dangerous one. Jack (who is Jack-0) was beginning to doubt comp, and was thinking that Jeanne was perhaps right about the reconstituted people being "other". Still, its relation with Jeanne were bad enough he really wants to leave her, and its frustration not being on Mars was growing and growing. And perhaps Jack was not so honest, and he makes up the following plan: "I will just LET THE ORIGINAL GO ON MARS". And Jack promises to himself that, would he acknowledge to be the copy, he would stay with Jeanne. He even decides to delay the reconstitution, following that anti-comp superstition that being scanned, and reconstituted with a delay makes you sure to remain the original. So he scanned himself, with a program activating the reconstitution with a delay of one hour (say), and then, he was going on MARS, by usual 2 years trip by rocket (he was doubting! Note the irony here: he feels to leave Jeanne at the time he feels to get her point! ). You can imagine the disappointment of the copy on earth. "What! it fails again! Come on Please! Will I ever successfully quit earth? Jeanne did not see Jack was a copy, and Jack did not despair finding a way to go on mars, letting a copy or "an original" of him with Jeanne. In new attempts, he decides to select the one among copy/oiginal with a coin, among the original and the copy. It failed! He decides to use the decimal of PI written in binary as selector. It failed! He decides to use ieratively a quantum OR gate making the decision "arbitrarily sure": it still failed! This explains why my friend Jack was rather depressed the last time I saw him. Obviously, anyone on Earth will find eself with a necessarily disappointed "Jack", given that from our point of view the tautology alluded above is now: "the one who has been chosen to stay on Earth will have with certainty the experience of staying on Earth". For any strategy of choice (original/copy) we could suggest to Jack, we know, that the "Jack" who will stay on earth and come back to the bar will say: "it failed". That day in the bar, my friend Jack was feeling being incredibly unlucky. Was he right? Bruno (*) Those who believe that we cannot argue or prove proposition through thought experiment can read the mathematical part of my SANE paper where I show how to translate similar argument in arithmetic and/or computer science. In SANE I say that I substitute the FOLK or GRAND-MOTHER psychology (of the philosopher of mind) by a self-referentially correct (universal) machine (correct with res
Re: death
Le 24-juin-05, à 20:27, [EMAIL PROTECTED] a écrit : Bruno, I have to be honest and say that I'm just starting to get into this stuff out of a passing interesting and that I probably don't have time and priority to study the math that would be sufficient to make a significant contribution in my view. To be sure I was not asking a contribution! But you did point on something interesting. For instance, I just learned about Church's lamba calculus last night. It is probably better than learning about Church's lambda calculus tomorrow. So I probably went in over my head in citing Lowenheim-Skolem. But is not my statement correct with regard to Lowenheim-Skolem and cardinalities? If so, then perhaps the iffy part is the application to this topic (so perhaps I committed the 1004 fallacy here). Nevertheless, regarding the application, on the surface it just seems that to make any conclusions about whether there is a non-zero probability of something being true or happening, you need to know the cardinalities of the sets you are working with. Actually, not really. You need a measurable space. It is a set with a sigma algebra of subsets. Cantor found uncountable sets (high cardinality) with measure zero. It is very tricky, especially with comp. But with modal logic I have been able to isolate the measure one logic, without investing to much in measure theory. I will be gone on a marriage retreat this weekend, so I'll be back on Monday. A marriage retreat! This is what I should suggest to my friend Jack! Thanks, ;-) Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Re: another puzzzle
Le 24-juin-05, à 20:40, Eugen Leitl a écrit : On Fri, Jun 24, 2005 at 06:52:11PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: Why don't we terminate this pointless thread, until we can actually make numerical models of sufficiently complex animals and people, so the question completely renders itself irrelevant? You answer like if by making things more precise, automatically the question will then vanished away, like if you knew the theorem before No, the nature of identity and cognition can be already described with sufficient precision. By making some assumptions. It is important to state them clearly so that we can derive clear testable consequences of it. I hope you don't take for granted Aristotle theory of cognition which is incompatible not only with empirical facts, but also with quite general and seemingly innocent theoretical assumption, like comp. It's just empirically threads about personal identity are fueled by sentiments similiar to now obsolete ones: those about phlogiston, vis vitalis and creationism. These, too, have gone round in circles for decades and centuries, leading pretty much nowhere. I agree with you. But I do think it is irrational to believe that the mind-body problem is already solved. In particular with comp: it is not solved. Statements "I believe that first-person introspective view is special" I agree with you. It is no more special that the taste of my coffee in the morning. But this does not mean that the feeling of that taste does not exist, or that we have find an explanation how neurons are associated with that state. Many "scientist" are gifted overlooking detailed conceptual problems related to that issue. and "I'm convinced cognition is not a physical process described by known physical laws or require deep quantum magic", Needless to say "I'm convinced that ..." is always unscientific. Even "I am convinced by 1+1=2". This one could be a sincere communication to a friend, not a scientific assertion. Now, what I have done, is a proof that if comp is true then notion like space, matter, energy, are secondary on the relation between numbers, and this in a verifiable way. "continuity matters" "location is part of system identity", "atoms themselves, not their spatiotemporal arrangement constitute identity" are such sterile arguments. That was a list of (vague) "hypotheses" not of arguments. Ultimatively, they cannot be refuted by means other than a direct demonstration, preferrably from a first-person perspective Nobody in this list has ever do that. Some have pointed to that possibility. But that has always been a minority with no sequels. There are argumentations, and of course we go quicky up to the point we disagree so as to been able to progress. There is even two camps (mainly). Those who search some absolute measure and those who believes in the need and importance of a relative measure (to sum up very shortly). (but even then, some observers will still remain unconvinced, claiming the zombie clause, or trying to get the experimenter persecuted for their murder). Some use of zombie in reasoning are valid, some are not. starting to find the axioms. But: replace "sufficiently complex animals and people" by "sufficiently complex machines" or by "sufficiently rich theories", and then computer science and logic illustrate and enlighten *already* the relevance of the question and the high counter-intuitive character of the possible answers). Absolutely. Apparently, too counter-intuitive for some people to accept, despite based on solid seat-of-the-pants science and empirically refuted by daily routine in IT. I'm not sure I understand? The counter-intuitive consequences of computer science have not been refuted by daily routine in IT. (Information Technologies?). But I don't think it is useful nor necessary to go to the math before understanding the "intuitive" but precise problems, and thought experiments like those in this (sequences) of threads are very illuminating. Why do you think the question is irrelevant? What do you Of course they're illuminating. But have they convinced many? It doesn't seem so. Well they should, or those not convinced should be asked to be kind enough to explain where in the argument they are not convinced, and in that case we always find that those people have not understand the hypothesis, or that we have been unclear But basically we tend to argue like in the proof of the irrationality of the square root of two. Now the problems are new (or it is new that we tackle them by the sc. method) and some people takes more time than other to figure out what we really talk about, but that is not a problem. Boltzman suicides himself in part due to the dogmatic opposition against the use of statistics in physics among physicist that time. Godel's theorem (like many solutions to Hilbert's problems) has been understood quasi at once,
Re: One more question about measure
Hi Quentin, Hi Bruno, Le Vendredi 24 Juin 2005 15:25, Bruno Marchal a écrit : Because if everything exists... every OM has a successor (and I'd say it must always have more than one), Perhaps. It depends of your definition of "OM", and of your "everything" theory. Let me tell you the "Lobian's answer": if I have a successor OM then I have a successor OM which has no successor OM. I don't understand this statement, for me, every OM has a successor, like every integer has. How could it be that an OM can't have a successor ? But I'm firmly convinced that the set of visual OM (I mean by visual, something an observer like a human can see) is finite. OK. But you could take the whole perception field. Our skin is finite too. Etc. Oh Stathis take even the state of each neurons ... Anyway, by the comp hyp I presuppose at once there is such finite description level. I have an example for this : 1) assume an observer that can see. 2) assume that the observer can see only at a certain resolution/level (it's true that I can't see everything, I do not see quarks for example, nor my cells) Then, I can digitalize every image that I (assuming I'm an observer ;) can see. Now, I'll take an arbitrary image resolution far upper than I details I can actually be aware of. For example : 10x10 pixels, every pixels can have 16.5 millions colors (even if it has been proven that humans can only see less than 20 colors, just for the argument). Then the limit for the eyes to see individual images in a movie is approximately 40hz, so for the argument I will say that I need at least 100 frames by second (higher than what we can perceive). Now how much bits do I need to encode one hour of visual events ? It's simply 10x10x4x100x3600. So the needed number of bits to encode one hour of visual events at a resolution far higher than what we can perceive is finite... It's the same if you replace one hour by the length of a lifetime (+/- 80 years). So even if we are immortal, at a given time in the far away future, the visual events must repeat. Not really because you assume our eyes are bounded. Any finite machine running forever recurs but not infinite or universal one. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Re: Dualism and the DA
Le 24-juin-05, à 22:43, Pete Carlton a écrit : (Sorry for the delay; I like to spend several hours writing here but I have had meetings to attend etc..) On Jun 22, 2005, at 4:19 AM, Brent Meeker wrote: Bruno wrote There are two *physical* issues here. 1) The simplest one is that if you agree with the comp indeterminacy (or similar) you get an explanation of the quantum indeterminacy without the collapse of the wave packet. This is mainly Everett contribution. I do see how comp / "first-person" indeterminacy can account for, or can be equivalent to, quantum indeterminacy. In other words, asking "Why am I the one in Washington instead of Moscow" is like asking "Why am I the one who sees the cat is still alive", etc. But my point is that we don't need to postulate "primitive" first-person phenomena like observer moments to account for the larger 3rd person fact, which is just that there will exist people who are going to ask these questions. I agree with you if the "larger 3rd person facts" are taken from computer science or arithmetic. I am far less sure that we must postulated "matter" "space" "time" etc. At the same time I think we must postulate 1 person existence and right (It is even in the constitution of most democratic country). And I don't think people take their own personal experience as a postulate, but more as a given. You never postulate you *feel* a headache. I'd rather postulate classes of third-person phenomena (such as those that fall into Dennett's 'intentional stance') Yes but Dennet is very naive on those points. he believes physics as something having no more problem of interpretation, like if we knew what matter really is! that are able to explain the *apparent* first-person phenomena such as the absence of white rabbits. Numbers explain better than anything relying on the matter postulate. Dennett associates the number to matter in a way incompatible with comp. I like Dennett, if you read him carefully he acknowledge not having make progress in the mind-body problem (despite deep ideas). That way Leibniz's principle of sufficient reason remains intact: it isn't the case that "There's no sufficient reason why I find myself in Moscow"; rather, there *is* a reason why there's one person in Moscow, and one in Washington, and they're both asking certain questions that contain the word "I". Right. But this makes them ignorant of their future in case they (re)do the experiment, keeping betting on comp. There is a first person indeterminacy. You get the point. But it is just a step in a much longer reasoning. 2) The less trivial one, perhaps, is that if you agree with the comp indeterminacy you get an a priori explosion of the number of appearances of first person white rabbits I don't see that either. The SWE doesn't predict that *everything* (which is what I presume you to mean by "white rabbits") will happen. If it did it would be useless. -or (if I understand correctly) it doesn't predict that everything will happen to the same extent. But, anyway, I agree that the white rabbit problem is real, although I see it as a third person problem rather than an (intrinsically) first person problem. Well, for a Tegmarkian there are varieties of 3-person Rabbit problems and 1-person rabbit problems. With comp there is a 1-person rabbit problems, and it is just open if some 2-rabbit problem will appear ... and the only way to solve this, assuming the SWE is correct, must consist in justifying the SWE from the comp indeterminacy bearing But the "indeterminancy" of comp arises from equivocation about "I" as Pete noted. It assumes first that there is an "I" dependent on physical structure and then sees a problem in determining where the "I" goes when the structure is duplicated. Right - I think that the "physical structure" (which I'm happy to equate with mathematical structure, or a program, etc.) You cannot do that. I mean you can, but it is a very strong assumption. With comp "physical striucture" is eventually identifiable with covering relation of computational histories ... is all there is - But OK. You are near comp, or Tegmark, Schmidhuber, ... and once you've explained that, you've explained everything. Schmidhuber error. I humbly think. What really happens is that when you do identify me with a program, you can use computer science to begin to formulate the 1-3 person problem. The "I" that comes out of it is a very useful pattern to us but it isn't something further, something primitive. It is not primitive. But the relation between 1-person and 3-person everybody takes for granted since 2300 years (Aristotle) just does not work. The best example I can think of where the "first person as primitive" reasoning takes us into weird territory, is the talk of "observer moments". I think that taking these as primitive leads us into error; I agre
Re: One more question about measure
Le Samedi 25 Juin 2005 18:51, Bruno Marchal a écrit : > Not really because you assume our eyes are bounded. Any finite machine > running forever recurs but not infinite or universal one. > > Bruno Yes I assume my eyes are bounded... because they are, physically speaking they are... And if I understand you correctly, you are saying that we are universal machine (or we are part of it) so that we can't recurs... But as I have showed, what I can see is finite (without taking into accound brain states which is more than 2 states for a neuron, 2 states or electrical states of the brains and not taking in account chemicals properties is not brain states)... what ever event a possible observer which could see all is finite... I take 10x10 resolution, taking an higher resolution will just reveal better and better detail, but we do not see infinite detail... (and I don't conceive my consciousness able to see/understand infinite detail). But if I read that an universal machine runing forever can't repeat, that means that the machine will "see" better details each time... but what does it means for us ? do you mean that we have to see better and better the world ? has we get asymptotically to an infinite age we should be aware of more details ? Quentin
