RE: R�p : Thought Experiment #269-G (Duplicates)
Lee Corbin writes: [quoting Bruno Marchal] Why not choose D, that is I will see 0 on the wall OR I will see 1 on the wall. Okay, now you have switched back to the prior (prediction) level. Here is the reason not to say that. As the person who is about to be duplicated knows all the facts, he is aware (from a 3rd person point of view) that scientifically there will be *two* processes both of which are very, very similar. It will be false that one of them will be more him than the other. Therefore he must identify equally with them. Therefore, it is wrong to imply that he I will be one of them but not the other of them. But if you answer I will see 0 on the wall OR I will see 1 on the wall then it makes it sound as though one of those cases will obtain but not the other. (This is usually how we talk when Bruno admits, for example, that tonight he either will watch TV *or* he will not watch TV. But the case of duplicates is not like that. In the case of duplicates, it is a scientific fact that Bruno will watch TV (in one room) and will not watch TV (in the other room). In short, it will be true that Bruno will watch TV and will not watch TV---simply because there will be two instances of Bruno.) Is there any way of asking the question such that the answer is there is an even chance that I will see either a 1 or a 0? For example, every time I flip a coin it *seems* that I get either heads or tails, and not both. The objective truth may well be that coin-tossing causes duplication and I do, in fact, experience both, but don't realise it. I am interested in asking and/or answering the question assuming this sort of ignorance. Can it be done, or is it linguistically as well as physically and logically impossible? --Stathis Papaioannou _ FREE pop-up blocking with the new MSN Toolbar get it now! http://toolbar.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200415ave/direct/01/
Re: where do copies come from?
On Sun, Jul 10, 2005 at 11:49:53PM +1000, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: 3) Combining General and Particular Architectures Fusing information to combine apriori knowledge of general architecture brain functions, and particular architecture data obtained from in situ functional measurements (e.g. fMRI), neurological and psychological measurements, as well as self-analysis, it may be possible to reconstruct a functional copy of the brain close enough as to be indinstinguishable from the original by the owner. How does the owner knows it is indistinguishable? This is a whole topic. He could for example do a series of partial substitutions to find out if it feels the same or not. For example, he could substitute in sequence the visual cortex, the auditory cortex, some of the motor functions We may be closer to this goal than you think. OK, I agree it is possible, and I'm glad nobody is insisting that just the arrangement of neurons and their connections, such as could in theory have been determined by a 19th century histologist, is enough information to Exactly; it's a strawman position. Nobody claims a 5 m resolution satellite photo shows you what brands of pizza that shop on the corner is selling. emulate a brain. I think we would need to have scanning resolution close to the atomic level, and very detailed modelling of the behaviour of cellular subsystems and components down to the same level. I don't know how long it You need this level of detail only initially, to obtain empiric system parameters for an abstracted system level. You might want to reach down to ab initio level of theory, to obtain missing parameters for an MD simulation, to obtain switching behaviour of an ion channel, depending on modification, to obtain computational behaviour of a piece of dendrite (of course, you can also obtain that empirically from e.g. voltage-sensitive dye/patch-clamping). Even then, the actual simulation unit could be a few layers up, at abstract neocortex columns, or similiar. In the end, you have to destructively scan an animal to obtain your very large set of numbers, to enter into your simulation. Transiently, that disassembly might involve sampling some voxels at a high level of resolution, very possibly submolecular. That level of detail might be present in the voxel buffer, transiently, before being processed by algorithms, and destilled into a much smaller set of small integers. would take to achieve this, but I know that we are nowhere near it now. For example, consider our understanding of schizophrenia, an illness which If we had fully functional (discrete, fully introspective, traceable) models of individuals having schizophrenia, and controls, finding structural and functional deficits resulting in the phenotype would be effectively trivial. drastically changes almost every aspect of cognition. For half a century we have had drugs which ameliorate the psychotic symptoms patients with this illness experience, and we have been able to determine which receptors these drugs target. But despite decades of research, we still have no idea what the basic defect in schizophrenia is, how the drugs work, or any We don't have methods with sufficient resolution, that's all. clinically useful investigation which helps with diagnosis. Although fMRI and PET scans can show differences in cerebral blood flow compared to fMRI has voxel sizes at several mm^3, and temporal resolution of seconds. MRI microscopy does much better, but only works on insect/mouse-sized samples. Nondestructive methods do not scale into the volume. control subjects, this is a secondary effect. The brains of schizophrenia sufferers, looked at with any tools available to us, are essentially the same as normal brains. In other words, a very subtle, at present undetectable, change in the brains of these patients can cause gross cognitive and behavioural changes. http://www.google.com/search?num=100hl=enlr=safe=offclient=firefox-arls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficialq=molecular+schizophreniabtnG=Search would seem to disagree. -- Eugen* Leitl a href=http://leitl.org;leitl/a __ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Probabilistic Thinking (was Thought Experiment #269-G)
Stathis writes But if you answer I will see 0 on the wall OR I will see 1 on the wall then it makes it sound as though one of those cases will obtain but not the other. (This is usually how we talk when Bruno admits, for example, that tonight he either will watch TV *or* he will not watch TV. But the case of duplicates is not like that. In the case of duplicates, it is a scientific fact that Bruno will watch TV (in one room) and will not watch TV (in the other room). In short, it will be true that Bruno will watch TV and will not watch TV---simply because there will be two instances of Bruno.) Is there any way of asking the question such that the answer is there is an even chance that I will see either a 1 or a 0? For example, every time I flip a coin it *seems* that I get either heads or tails, and not both. The objective truth may well be that coin-tossing causes duplication and I do, in fact, experience both, but don't realise it. I am interested in asking and/or answering the question assuming this sort of ignorance. Can it be done, or is it linguistically as well as physically and logically impossible? Great question! I go so far as to agree with your sense here. Here is an example: suppose that a million copies of you are to be made every day, and for each of them, on the following day yet another million copies are made. (Thus after N days there are (10^6)^N copies.) Further, suppose that 1 of them will be 1000 feet under water, and the others simply find themselves at STP. Your choice every day is whether to don the very bulky and time- consuming diving equipment or not. It takes about half an hour to put it on, and after you have been copied, about half an hour to take it off. One day you are in a special hurry, and think, well, it's true that in 1 case I will die a rather ghastly death which will be very uncomfortable for about fifteen or twenty seconds, but in the other 999,999 cases I can get about my important affairs and save an hour of fiddling with the equipment. So that day you decide not to go through the ritual of putting on and taking off the equipment. And, sure enough, one of you finds himself in an unpleasant situation... *and in some sense regrets the decision*. Now logically, during the fifteen or twenty seconds it takes him to die he realizes that his duplicates live, and that in some sense it really was a good decision. But he also cannot help but feel that he was unlucky. A part of him must ask, now what was the chance of this??? At this point, he has relapsed into thinking of himself as an instance. (Torture is another way that instance-thinking can be aroused even in those with the broadest usage of I.) You know intellectually that you are doing just fine almost everywhere, but in this peculiar case you're dead. Yet it's probably *not* a good idea to put on the equipment everyday. There are two reasons (that should be regarded as completely equivalent): (1) in almost all cases I will save time (about a million hours all together) and (2) the odds are very small that I'll need the equipment. I contend that (2) should be taken as really meaning just (1) and that literally, (2) is incorrect. We all make these same choices every day: Should I drive to work this morning even though one in a million of me is going to die in a traffic accident? But to MWI devotees, the answer should be clear: it only *seems* unlucky that I'm *just* here with a broken body in a heap of twisted metal. The reality is that in most universes, today was not unlike all the other days. To quote you again, Is there any way of asking the question such that the answer is there is an even chance that I will see either a 1 or a 0? The objective truth may well be that coin-tossing causes duplication and I do, in fact, experience both, but don't realise it. I am interested in asking and/or answering the question assuming this sort of ignorance. Can it be done, or is it linguistically as well as physically and logically impossible? So I'm translating your question as, Is there any way of asking the question such that the answer is 'there is only a tiny chance that I'll be killed this morning on the way to work'?. Chance seems to be overridden by MWI, and also in the cases of duplicates. It's replaced by fractional thinking, I guess. We might still use the language of probability, but it should be just shorthand for the better description of the situation in terms of fractions (of me). Sound right? Lee
RE: where do copies come from?
Stathis Papaioannou wrote: Nevertheless, I still think it would be *extremely* difficult to emulate a whole brain. Just about every physical parameter for each neuron would be relevant, down to the atomic level. If any of these parameters are slightly off, or if the mathematical model is slightly off, the behaviour of a single neuron may seem to be unaffected, but the error will be amplified enormously by the cascade as one neuron triggers another. I don't think that follows. After all, we maintain the same personality despite the fact that these detailed parameters are constantly varying in our own neurons (and the neurons themselves are being completely replaced every few months or so); neural networks are not that brittle, they tend to be able to function in broadly the same way even when damaged in various ways, and slight imperfections in the simulated behavior of individual neurons could be seen as a type of damage. As long as the behavior of each simulated neuron is close enough to how the original neuron would have behaved in the same circumstances, I don't think occasional slight deviations would be fatal to the upload (but perhaps the first uploads will act like people who are slightly drunk or have a chemical imbalance or something, and they'll have to experiment with tweaking various high-level parameters--the equivalent of giving themselves simulated prozac or something--until they feel 'normal' again). Jesse
Re: where do copies come from?
I agree with Jesse. Nature (if that exists) build on redundancies. (As the UD). So if the substitution level is at the neural neurons, ``slight changes don't matter. Of course we don't really know our substitution level. It is consistent with comp the level is far lower. But then at that level the same rule operates. It probably converges to the linear. Bruno (PS: I will answer other posts asap). Le 10-juil.-05, à 20:22, Jesse Mazer a écrit : Stathis Papaioannou wrote: Nevertheless, I still think it would be *extremely* difficult to emulate a whole brain. Just about every physical parameter for each neuron would be relevant, down to the atomic level. If any of these parameters are slightly off, or if the mathematical model is slightly off, the behaviour of a single neuron may seem to be unaffected, but the error will be amplified enormously by the cascade as one neuron triggers another. I don't think that follows. After all, we maintain the same personality despite the fact that these detailed parameters are constantly varying in our own neurons (and the neurons themselves are being completely replaced every few months or so); neural networks are not that brittle, they tend to be able to function in broadly the same way even when damaged in various ways, and slight imperfections in the simulated behavior of individual neurons could be seen as a type of damage. As long as the behavior of each simulated neuron is close enough to how the original neuron would have behaved in the same circumstances, I don't think occasional slight deviations would be fatal to the upload (but perhaps the first uploads will act like people who are slightly drunk or have a chemical imbalance or something, and they'll have to experiment with tweaking various high-level parameters--the equivalent of giving themselves simulated prozac or something--until they feel 'normal' again). Jesse http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Re: where do copies come from?
Hi stathis, Le Dimanche 10 Juillet 2005 13:22, Stathis Papaioannou a écrit : Nevertheless, I still think it would be *extremely* difficult to emulate a whole brain. while I agree with you about the difficulty to emulate a brain that already exists (such as emulate you or me for example), I don't think it is as such difficult as to emulate a conscious being. I remenber not so long ago the project mindpixel which was about to learn the common sense to a machine. I do think that passing the turing test is possible, and if it is one day succesfully passed by a machine (and not once but several time), It will be a proof that we are indeed turing emulable... if it is so, Bruno's theory will not be far from the truth ;) Quentin
RE: The Time Deniers
Again travel has forced me to take an absence from this list for a while, but I think I will be home for several weeks so hopefully I will be able to catch up at last. One question I would ask with regard to the role of time is, is there something about time (and perhaps causality) that goes over and above the equations or natural laws that control and define a given universe? Let us imagine a Cellular Automaton based universe; for simplicity, let it be a 1-dimensional CA such as those studied in detail in Wolfram's book. We have an x dimension and a t dimension, and some rules which are the natural laws of that universe. A sample rule might be s[x,t+1] = s[x,t] XOR (s[x-1,t] OR s[x+1],t]). This means that the state at position x and time t+1 is the exclusive-or of the state at the previous time (s[x,t]) and the OR of the left and right neighbor states. In other words, a cell reverses its state if either of its neighbors is on. Wolfram investigates all 256 possible rules which determine a cell's next state from the previous state of the cell and its two neighbors. Some lead to surprisingly complex patterns and it is conceivable that such universes might even be complex enough to allow life and consciousness to evolve. So we have a notion of time, t, and space, x. The question is this. If we don't *call* it time, does that change things? Suppose we have a universe with 2 spatial dimensions, x and y. But it is governed by the same rule: s[x,y+1] = s[x,y] XOR (s[x-1,y] OR s[x+1],y]). Here I have replaced t in the rule above by y. Does this make a difference? I think we will agree that it does not. Changing the letter t to the letter y does not change the fundamental nature of this universe. It only changes how we describe it. Then we can ask, is this rather abstract description of the universe, in terms of its natural laws, enough for us to know whether the consciousnesses that exist in it are really conscious? Or do we need to know more? Do we need to know details about how the universe was created (whatever that means!)? Do we need to know if there is a flow of causality in this universe? My answer is that the natural laws ought to be enough. If we can find a reasonable interpretation (defined rigorously as a mapping whose information content is significantly smaller than the pattern itself) of a pattern in the universe as something that we would consider a conscious observer in our own universe, then we would be right to say that this CA universe has consciousness. (More precisely, that this CA universe contributes measure to these instances and kinds of conscious observers.) I don't think it makes sense to demand more information than the natural laws (like, what kind of universal-computer is running to interpret these laws, what algorithm it uses, how sequential is it, is it allowed to backtrack and change things, etc.). The laws themselves define the universe. The two are, in a sense, equivalent. That is all the information there is. The laws should be, in fact they must be, enough to answer the question about whether the consciousness which appears in such a universe is real. That's how it appears to me. In our own universe, we too have natural laws that relate to space and time. One such law is from Newton: d2x/dt2 = Force/Mass (i.e. F=ma). Relativity and QM have their own laws that refer to x, y, z, and t. Generally, t is treated differently than the other coordinates, which are all treated the same. But obviously we could substitute some other letter, say q, for t and it would not make a difference. A universe with quime instead of time would be the same. So again, is it enough to look at the natural laws of our universe in order to decide whether the consciousnesses within it are real? Or do we need more? Can we imagine a universe like ours, which follows exactly the same natural laws, but where time doesn't really exist (in some sense), where there is no actual causality? I have trouble with this idea, but I'd be interested to hear from those who think that such a distinction exists. Hal Finney
RE: The Time Deniers
Hal Finney writes Can we imagine a universe like ours, which follows exactly the same natural laws, but where time doesn't really exist (in some sense), where there is no actual causality? You yourself have already provided the key example in imagining a two dimensional CA where the second dimension can be taken as y instead of t. If we can find a reasonable interpretation... of a pattern in the [this CA] universe as something that we would consider a conscious observer in our own universe, then we would be right to say that this CA universe has consciousness. I would be VERY HAPPY to abandon my belief that somehow time is special. It's very annoying to suspect myself of simply having a failure of imagination, in that I could not---as Einstein perhaps did---see our 4-D block universe as just any old 4-D continuum. But I encounter a runaway reductio that smashes up my attempt to *believe*. Okay, so suppose we have a book one trillion times as large as Wolfram's (or as big as we need to have), and we cut out all the pages and line them up so that we have a two dimensional layout that is recognizably a conscious entity. This now, as you know, no longer exhibits any *time* at all; it is a succession of frozen states, that is, each horizontal line of the CA is, as you describe, connected to the next only by..., only by what? Well, it seems that it is *we* who spot the connection. We guess and then accept that there is a rule that associates each horizontal line with the next one. Not so simple as the rule you give (i.e., s[x,t+1] = s[x,t] XOR (s[x-1,t] OR s[x+1],t]), of course, but nonetheless entirely objective after we see it. We can call it time---or not---, just as you also point out. (I will later claim that what is missing is the underlying continuous machinery, but to do so right now would be to miss the point of your argument.) So we have this sequence of horizontal lines which are connected by a rule. The input to the rule is line N and the output is line N+1. Indeed, I am tortured by the resemblance to quantum states: we seem in our own comfy universe to have a succession of states connected only by the Schrödinger equation. One interesting point about this two dimensional consciousness is that it's not clear (to me) whether it needs to persist in our time. That is, would it make any difference if we destroy this large two dimensional map? On the one hand, since it seems to be independent of time, the answer would be no, but on the other, what if Hal Finney and Wei and whoever, is right about UDs and measure, and destruction of the 2-D layout makes it harder to find when all the OMs are being counted up by Heaven? I don't know. But anyway, for me, the horrid reductio always kicks in at this point: what should it matter if these 1-D lines composing the layout are scattered in space? What does it matter if they're chopped up? Is it really only the case that they're harder to find? That they're less manifest in Everything? It's too hard to believe. Do we not need a *continuous* parameter? Are we not back with Zeno wondering how the arrow can move if it's just in a succession of instants? It seems to me that Zeno would have been right for any *finite* number of locations (or instants), and there would have been no such thing as true motion. Lee
RE: The Time Deniers
Hal Finney wrote: So again, is it enough to look at the natural laws of our universe in order to decide whether the consciousnesses within it are real? Or do we need more? Can we imagine a universe like ours, which follows exactly the same natural laws, but where time doesn't really exist (in some sense), where there is no actual causality? I have trouble with this idea, but I'd be interested to hear from those who think that such a distinction exists. For me, it's not that I think it's meaningful to imagine a universe just like ours but without causality, rather it's that I think causality is probably important to deciding whether a particular system in our universe counts as a valid instantiation of some observer-moment, and thus contributes to the measure of that observer-moment (which in turn affects the likelihood that I will experience that observer-moment in the future). I think if you run a simulation of an observer, and record the output and write it down in a book which you then make thousands of copies of, the static description in all the books most likely would not have any effect on the measure of that observer, since these descriptions lack the necessary causal structure. I sort of vaguely imagine all of spacetime as an enormous graph showing the causal links between primitive events, with the number of instantiations basically being the number of spots you could find a particular sub-graph representing an observer-moment embedded in the entire graph; the graphs corresponding to the physical process that we label a book would not have the same structure as graphs corresponding to the physical process that we label as a simulation of a particular observer. Of course, as I've discussed with you earlier, I'd also speculate that the appearance of an objective physical universe (the graph representing all of spacetime) somehow emerges from a more basic theory that assigns both absolute and conditional measures to every possible observer-moment (each represented in my visual picture by a sub-graph). Jesse
RE: where do copies come from?
Jesse Mazer wrote: [quoting Stathis Papaioannou] Nevertheless, I still think it would be *extremely* difficult to emulate a whole brain. Just about every physical parameter for each neuron would be relevant, down to the atomic level. If any of these parameters are slightly off, or if the mathematical model is slightly off, the behaviour of a single neuron may seem to be unaffected, but the error will be amplified enormously by the cascade as one neuron triggers another. I don't think that follows. After all, we maintain the same personality despite the fact that these detailed parameters are constantly varying in our own neurons (and the neurons themselves are being completely replaced every few months or so); neural networks are not that brittle, they tend to be able to function in broadly the same way even when damaged in various ways, and slight imperfections in the simulated behavior of individual neurons could be seen as a type of damage. As long as the behavior of each simulated neuron is close enough to how the original neuron would have behaved in the same circumstances, I don't think occasional slight deviations would be fatal to the upload... Perhaps, perhaps not. For one thing, in the brain's case we are relying on the laws of chemistry and physics, which in the real world are invariable; we don't know what would happen if these laws were slightly off in a simulation. For another, we do know that tiny chemical changes, such as a few molecules of LSD, can make huge behavioural changes, suggesting that the brain is exquisitely sensitive to at least some parameters. It is likely that multiple error correction and negative feedback systems are in place to ensure that small changes are not chaotically amplified to cause gross mental changes after a few seconds, and all these systems would have to be simulated as well. The end result may be that none of the cellular machinery can be safely ignored in an emulation, which is very far from modelling the brain as a neural net. I may be wrong, and it may be simpler than I suggest, but as a general rule, if there were a simpler and more economical way to do things, evolution would have found it. --Stathis Papaioannou _ SEEK: Over 80,000 jobs across all industries at Australia's #1 job site. http://ninemsn.seek.com.au?hotmail
Re: where do copies come from?
Quentin Anciaux writes: Nevertheless, I still think it would be *extremely* difficult to emulate a whole brain. while I agree with you about the difficulty to emulate a brain that already exists (such as emulate you or me for example), I don't think it is as such difficult as to emulate a conscious being. I remenber not so long ago the project mindpixel which was about to learn the common sense to a machine. I do think that passing the turing test is possible, and if it is one day succesfully passed by a machine (and not once but several time), It will be a proof that we are indeed turing emulable... if it is so, Bruno's theory will not be far from the truth ;) I agree: it will be *far* easier to build a conscious machine than to emulate a particular brain, just as it is far easier to build a pump than an exact, cell for cell analogue of a human heart. In the case of the heart the simpler artificial pump might be just as good, but in the case of a brain, the electrical activity of each and every neuron is intrinsically important in the final result. --Stathis Papaioannou _ REALESTATE: biggest buy/rent/share listings http://ninemsn.realestate.com.au
Re: where do copies come from?
Stathis Papaioannou wrote: It is likely that multiple error correction and negative feedback systems are in place to ensure that small changes are not chaotically amplified to cause gross mental changes after a few seconds, On the other hand, the above may be precisely how consciousness operates! Picture a system that traverses through many different states as chaotic attractor cycles, and outside stimuli act to nudge the system between grossly different chaotic attractors. You have a system that needs to be exquisitely tuned to subtle input changes, yet also robust in the face of other types of changes (damage, etc.) In the brain, these state trajectories would be neuronal firing patterns and synaptic chemical gradients. Determining the chaotic attractors themselves would be neuronal morphology and ion channel types and locations. The short-term information about a brain might not need to be stored in order to reconstruct a brain. That is, individual neuron on-off states and synaptic chemical gradients may be how you feel and what you are thinking this moment--but discarding (or not measuring) this info might only mean the reconstructed brain would start from some blank state. Chaotic attractor dynamics would pull the system into one of the aforementioned chaotic cycles and the system as a whole would eventually recreate the short-term firing patterns and chemical gradients needed for normal functioning. (The above might be wrong in particulars, but I strongly suspect the concept of small changes perturbing a chaotic system to shift between chaotic attractors will play a role in the ultimate explanation of how neuronal processes give rise to conscious experience.) -Johnathan
UD + ASSA
Bruno asked a while back for various people to try to encapsulate their favorite theory or model of the everything exists concept, so I will try to describe my current views here. Basically it can be summed up very simply as: Universal Distribution (UD) plus ASSA (absolute self selection assumption). Traditional philosophy distinguished between ontology, the study of the nature of reality, and epistemology, which examines our relation to and understanding of the world. I can adopt this distinction and say that the UD is the ontology, and that the epistemology is roughly the ASSA. As you will see, my ontology is stronger than my epistemology. [Note, UD is often used to mean Universal Dovetailer, a different concept.] For the ontology, the UD is a probability distribution over information objects (i.e. information patterns) which I assume is the fundamental system of measure in the multiverse. It is defined with respect to an arbitrary Universal Turing Machine (UTM) and basically is defined as the fraction of all possible input program strings that produce that information pattern as output. I am therefore implicitly assuming that only information objects exist. Among the information objects are integers, universes, computer programs, program traces (records of executions), observers, and observer-moments. The UD is an attractive choice because it is dominant, meaning that it is asymptotically within a constant factor of any other distribution, including UD's defined by other UTMs. This is why it is called universal. It is often considered the default probability distribution when no information is available. This makes it a natural choice, perhaps the only natural choice, for a distribution over information objects. The UD defines a probability or measure for every information object. This is the basic ontology which I assume exists. It is the beginning and ending of my ontology. A few additional points are worth making. Time does not play a significant role in this model. An information object may or may not include a time element. Time is merely a type of relationship which can exist among the parts of the information object, just as space is another type. In relativity theory, time is different from space in the sign (positive/negative) by which its effects are made known on the metric. Among universes, some may have a time dimension, some may not; some may have more than one dimension of time. Similarly, they could have different dimensions of space, or perhaps fractal dimensions. Observers are by definition information systems that are similar to us, and since time is intimately bound up in our perception of the world, observers will be information objects which do include a time element. It is also worth noting that the UD measure is non-computable. However it can in practice be approximated, and that seems good enough for my purposes. Another point relates to the question of copies. One way to interpret the UD is to imagine infinite numbers of UTMs operating on all possible programs. The measure of an object is the fraction of the UTMs which output that object. This inherently requires that copies count, even exact copies. The more copies of an information object are created, the more measure it has. A final point: I strongly suspect that the biggest contribution to the measure of observers (and observer-moments) like our own will arise from programs which conceptually have two parts. The first part creates a universe similar to the one we see where the observers evolve, and the second part selects the observer for output. I argued before that each part can be relatively small compared to a program which was hard-wired to produce a specific observer and had all the information necessary to do so. Small programs have greater measure (occupy a greater fraction of possible input strings) hence this would be the main source of measure for observers like us. For the epistemology, we need some way to relate this definition of measure to our experience of the world. This is necessary to give the theory grounding and enable it to make predictions and explanations. What we want is to be able to explain things by arguing that they correspond to high-measure information patterns. We also want to be able to make predictions by saying that higher measure outcomes are more likely than lower measure ones. To achieve this I want to adopt a relatively vague statement like: You are more likely to be a high measure information object. Obviously this statement raises many questions. It seems to suggest that you might be a table, or the number 3. It also has problems with the passage of time. When are you a given information object? Are you first one and then another? If you start off as one, do you stay the same? I am not necessarily prepared to fully explain and answer all of these problems. At this point I am trying to keep to the big picture. Objects have measure, and
Re: where do copies come from?
Dear Johnathan, I find this idea to be very appealing! It seesm to imply that consciousness per say has more to do with the attractor in state space that any particular tableaux of neutron firings. This, of course, would not fit well with the material eliminativists to be forced to extend the same ontological status that we extend to flesh and blood and hardware and electromagnetic fields to such entities as strange attractors ! ;-) http://www.newdualism.org/papers/M.Robertson/churchl.pdf Kindest regards, Stephen - Original Message - From: Johnathan Corgan [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Stathis Papaioannou [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; everything-list@eskimo.com Sent: Sunday, July 10, 2005 10:48 PM Subject: Re: where do copies come from? Stathis Papaioannou wrote: It is likely that multiple error correction and negative feedback systems are in place to ensure that small changes are not chaotically amplified to cause gross mental changes after a few seconds, On the other hand, the above may be precisely how consciousness operates! Picture a system that traverses through many different states as chaotic attractor cycles, and outside stimuli act to nudge the system between grossly different chaotic attractors. You have a system that needs to be exquisitely tuned to subtle input changes, yet also robust in the face of other types of changes (damage, etc.) In the brain, these state trajectories would be neuronal firing patterns and synaptic chemical gradients. Determining the chaotic attractors themselves would be neuronal morphology and ion channel types and locations. The short-term information about a brain might not need to be stored in order to reconstruct a brain. That is, individual neuron on-off states and synaptic chemical gradients may be how you feel and what you are thinking this moment--but discarding (or not measuring) this info might only mean the reconstructed brain would start from some blank state. Chaotic attractor dynamics would pull the system into one of the aforementioned chaotic cycles and the system as a whole would eventually recreate the short-term firing patterns and chemical gradients needed for normal functioning. (The above might be wrong in particulars, but I strongly suspect the concept of small changes perturbing a chaotic system to shift between chaotic attractors will play a role in the ultimate explanation of how neuronal processes give rise to conscious experience.) -Johnathan
RE: The Time Deniers
I wasn't very clear in my last post. What I meant was this: (a) A conscious program written in C is compiled on a computer. The C instructions are converted into binary code, and when this code is run, the program is self-aware. (b) The same conscious program is written in some idiosyncratic programming language, created by a programmer who has since died. He has requested in his will that the program be compiled, then all copies of the compiler and all the programmer's notes be destroyed before the program is run. Once these instructions are carried out, the binary code is run, and the program is self-aware as before - although it is difficult or impossible for an outsider to work out what is going on. (c) A random string of binary code is run on a computer. There exists a programming language which, when a program is written in this language so that it is the same program as in (a) and (b), then compiled, the binary code so produced is the same as this random string. Is this nonsense? Is (c) fundamentally different from (b)? If not, doesn't it mean that any random string implements any program? We might not know what it says, but if the program is self-aware, then by definition *it* knows. --Stathis Papaioannou From: Lee Corbin [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: everything-list@eskimo.com Subject: RE: The Time Deniers Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2005 15:42:49 -0700 Stathis writes Lee Corbin writes: But it is *precisely* that I cannot imagine how this stack of Life gels could possibly be thinking or be conscious that forces me to admit that something like time must play a role. Here is why: let's suppose that your stack of Life boards does represent each generation of Conway's Life as it emulates a person If a stack of gels like this amounts to the conscious experience of an entity, then it certainly wouldn't hurt to move them farther apart... Next, we alter the orientations of the gels... So, for me, since it is absurd to think that either vibrating bits of matter (an example Hal Finney quotes) or random patches of dust (Greg Egan's theory of Dust) can actually give runtime to entities, then I have to draw the line somewhere. Where I have always chosen is this: if states, no matter now represented, are not causally connected with each other, consciousness does not obtain. If you remember Egan's dust theory in Permutation City, you probably also remember that he did the same manipulations of a computation running in time as you suggest doing with the Life board stacks in space. Do you not think a computation would work if chopped up in this way? If you are speaking of the earlier part of the Greg Egan novel (which I claim to entirely understand) then no, he did not isolate a person's experiences down to *instants*. He would run a minute's worth now, a minute's worth then, and mix them up in order. But! The only causal discontinuities were *between* the successive sessions (each session at least a minute long---but I'd be happy with a millisecond long). The idea that any computation can be implemented by any random process, given an appropriate programming language (which might be a giant lookup table, mapping [anything] - [line of code]) is generally taken as being self-evidently absurd. Not sure I understand. Since you are talking about a *process*, then for my money we're already half-way there! (I.e., the Time Deniers have not struck.) Suppose that we have a trillion by trillion Life Board and the program randomly assigns pixels for each generation. Then, yes, I guess I agree with you: we have achieved nothing: the random states are admittedly connected by causal processes (your machine is an ordinary causal process operating in *time*), but nothing intelligent is being implemented. It's not even implementing a wild rain-storm. (Of course, the Time Deniers, as I understand them, would be perfectly happy to let this machine run for 10^10^200 years, and then identify (pick out) a sequence of apparently related states, in fact, a sequence that seemed to be you or me having a conscious experience. They'd be quite happy (many of them at least) to say that once again Stathis or Lee had been implemented in the universe and had had some conscious experience (i.e. OMs). The argument goes that that the information content of the programming language must contain all the information the random system is supposed to be producing, so this system is actually superfluous. This means we have won no computational benefit by setting up this odd machine. I'm following so far. However, the programming language is only there so that the machine can interact with the environment. If there is no programming language and no I/O, the machine can be a complete solipsist. You've lost me, sorry. Could you explain what you mean and where you are going here? This might occur also if some future archaeologist finds an
