Re: Two Mathematicians in a Bunker and Existence of Pi
Stephen, The life is full of paradoxes. My point was that while philosophers cannot solve apparently simple problems (well, these problems happen not to be simple), engineers continue doing their business successfully. How they do it? I believe, exactly this way, they try to understand what they do not know. Then they make trials, run tests, etc. and finally with some luck we get a new technology. Whether the theory of everything exists or not, happens not be essential for the success in engineering. I do not know why. Right now I am at the end of Beweistheorien (Proof Theories) by Prof Hoenen http://www.podcasts.uni-freiburg.de/podcast_content?id_content=24 At the end of his course, he considers the ontological arguments where the goal was to proof existence from pure logic. A pretty interesting attempt. Still there is a huge gap between logic and existence and it seems that engineers successfully fills it. Ask them, how they do it. Evgenii On 05.03.2012 14:34 Stephen P. King said the following: On 3/5/2012 7:01 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: John, It is not that bad to say that we do not know something. Yet, it might be even better to specify more accurately what exactly we do not know. Think of your younger colleagues that do chemistry research right now. Chemists have been quite successful and the story continues. The concepts of atom, molecule, macromolecule, electron density, etc. have helped a lot along this way. We may take this concepts ontologically or just pragmatically, this is after all not that important. Materials science seems not to be affected. Evgenii ... Hi Evgenii, This is a very fascinating statement to me and I find John's comments to be very wise! ...it might be even better to specify more accurately what exactly we do not know. Does it not lead to a paradox? For if we could state exactly what we do not know then it would be the case that we do in fact know it and thus we would known what we do not know, which appears to be a contradiction. Is this a sample of a more general kind of situation that is inevitable given the idea of self-reference? It seems to me that we need to consider that Bivalency http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_bivalence can be a source of error sometimes, or claim that knowledge is impossible. (note the bivalence here! LOL!) I am focusing on this because it it part of my overall critique of the idea of a Theory of Everything. For example, what exactly does it mean for a sentence to have a definite truth value absent the ability to evaluate that truth value? This is what I see your hypothetical situation as discussing Onward! Stephen -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Two Mathematicians in a Bunker and Existence of Pi
On 05 Mar 2012, at 19:03, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: On 05.03.2012 18:29 meekerdb said the following: On 3/5/2012 3:23 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: The experiment takes an operational approach to what Pi means. During the initial stage of the experiment mathematicians prove the existence of Pi. When mathematicians 'prove the existence' of something they are just showing that something which satisfies a certain definition can be inferred from a certain set of axioms. In your example the mathematicians may define Pi as the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle in Euclidean geometry. But what does that mean if geometry is not Euclidean; and we know it's not since these mathematicians are in the gravitational field of the Earth. Mathematics is about abstract propositions. Whether they apply to reality is a separate question. Brent I agree that this assumption might not be the best one. I will think it over. However, I do not completely understand you. How the geometry of physical space in which mathematicians reside influences the definition of Pi? Mathematicians will consider just Euclidean geometry, that's it. In my view, whether the physical space Euclidean or not, does not influence the work of mathematicians. In any case, the problem remains. What is mathematics under the assumption of physicalism? Do you have any idea? What most mathematicians believe is that mathematics are the laws true in all physical universes. And physics is true in one physical universe. But with the mechanist hypothesis, we know better: the physical laws are invariant in all numbers' dreams, and physical universe are shared computations. This explains also (not directly) the non sharable truth, the contingent one, etc. The advantage is that we can explain both quanta and qualia, without postulating a physical, nor a mental realm, just by listening to the machine, and not taking them for zombie. It hurts our intuition, today, but science always do that, since its claim that the earth is not the center of reality. With comp we can even understand why science has to hurt machine's intuition. So a physicalist has just to find non mechanist theory of mind, if we want the physical universe to be ontological (existing in some primary sense). Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Two Mathematicians in a Bunker and Existence of Pi
Craig, The danger to society comes not from mathematicians, rather it could come from technologists. Recently I have read Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto and the author shows that the society should pay more attention to what Silicon Valley geeks are silently doing. Just one quote Ideals are important in the world of technology, but the mechanism by which ideals influence events is different than in other spheres of life. Technologists don't use persuasion to influence you - or, at least, we don't do it very well. There are a few master communicators among us (like Steve Jobs), but for the most part we aren't particularly seductive. We make up extensions to your being, like remote eyes and ears (web-cams and mobile phones) and expanded memory (the world of details you can search for online). These become the structures by which you connect to the world and other people. These structures in turn can change how you conceive of yourself and the world. We tinker with your philosophy by direct manipulation of your cognitive experience, not indirectly, through argument. It takes only a tiny group of engineers to create technology that can shape the entire future of human experience with incredible speed. Therefore, crucial arguments about the human relationship with technology should take place between developers and users before such direct manipulations are designed. This book is about those arguments. As for sensations, I do not know. Yesterday after I have read your email, I went to an Italian restaurant. A small dinner, actually I wanted just a glass of good red Italian wine, but then I took also a small plate of cheese assorti with a couple of salad leaves, pepperoni and bread. I have enjoyed my dinner. Whether wine, bread, cheese, salad and pepperoni have enjoyed it too, I do not know. I would not mind, if they did. Evgenii On 05.03.2012 06:33 Craig Weinberg said the following: On Mar 4, 3:07 pm, Evgenii Rudnyiuse...@rudnyi.ru wrote: I personally still at the position that there are some material objects, atoms, molecules, crystals, etc., that are independent from the mind. If you assume that the human mind is the only sense in the entire cosmos then there are going to be a lot of strange conclusions that come up. Think about the hundreds of billions of galaxies...the billions of organisms on this planet alone.. were all of them utterly blind and deaf to their own existence for their entire history until the moment that Homo sapiens began to take an interest in them from their home on this remote speck of dust? Thereafter I have got suddenly a question, why mathematical models (physical laws) are working at all to describe the Universe when there was no mind. It has to do with levels of perception, or what I call perceptual inertia. Worlds. The more intelligent you are, the more worlds you can make sense of. The more you can make sense of the motivations and processes of lesser worlds. As the collective intelligence of our species has concentrated the knowledge available to each of us, we gathered meta-perceptual commonalities. Mathematical models are actually common perception/participation strategies as characterized by ourselves as outside observers. We are made of matter, so we see ourselves reflected in a particular way in matter. A way which is both intimately familiar and alien to us. The problem is that matter is only half of the story. We are also made of ourselves. We need mathematical models to plumb the depths of mysteries which are beyond our own frame of reference. Mysteries that cut across distant levels like physics and chemistry. The closer we get to our own level of perception however, the less mathematical models tell the whole story. Biology, zoology, anthropology, psychology, all benefit from mathematical models to some extent, but they fall short of modeling what it is to be alive, to be a person, etc. Mathematics is by definition an exterior facing manipulation. It begins by counting on our fingers - an exterior computation which transforms part of our body to a true set of objects - generic, recursive, controllable. Our fingers are not a mind. They are the beginnings of the mind offloading its grunt work onto objects. It is a way of generalizing part of ourselves to make it seem like it is not part of ourselves.' Right now, in the post-Enlightenment era, our success with mathematics has been so impressive that we have begun to imagine that we ourselves have a mathematical basis. It is a little like following the counting of the fingers back into the brain to find where smaller and smaller fingers are counting. If we try a sense-based model instead, there is no problem with mathematics being both a high level symbolic experience within a human cortex as well as indirect experiences of low level microcosmic events or other events which can be detected and controlled externally with physical instruments. This is what
Re: COMP theology
On 05 Mar 2012, at 19:23, meekerdb wrote: I don't see that it's any different than taking a 3p view and asking which body is the Helsinki one, the one in Moscow or the one in Washington. Most people would say Neither and that similarly one can say 'he' doesn't feel to be in either place, it is some duplicates that feel they are in W or M. They are only identified with the guy in Helsinki because they share many attributes with him - i.e. similar body and memories. But that would be an argulent for saying No to the doctor. That depends on what you care about. Would you rather have children or live forever? The point here is that with the statement above, you die with an artificial brain, which refute the comp assumption. it assumes that there is one 'I' and we can ask where this 'I' finds himself. But there is no 'I' in this sense. Of course there is such an I. Once your body has been reconstituted in both place, they both knows very well where that I feels to be, and this is known in advanced (believed and true, given that we assume the candidate believe in comp and that comp is true). Known in advance by whom? Not by either of the I's in M or W. That's why I said there is no I in the relevant sense of having been in Helsinki. Why? Both the one in M and in W knows perfectly well that they were in Helsinki before. Such an I is well defined. It is the owner of the memory together with the fact that those memory are known true, by us. But that I is not well defined because it can be duplicated and hence the owner of the memory is indefinite. Of course, that I, the 1-I, is not well defined. In AUDA it is even proved that it is not definable (accepting the classical theory of knowledge). But from his 1-I point of view, his *experience* is always well defined, comp just makes it not predictable, like if he look at the comp-multiplication movie (in my comment to JK Clark). But you seem to infer from experince is always well defined to the experience is *his*. Yes. When an 1-experience is well defined, then the 1-owner is well defined too. He is the one having that experience. As Bertrand Russell remarked, Descartes stopped one step short in his exercise of doubt. I think therefore I am. is dubious. He should have taken one for step to find There is thinking is indubitable. It's the I that is an inference. The 1-I is not inferred. It is experienced, or lived. So while the experience is well defined the meaning of his is ambiguous. The experience of the man in Washington belongs to the man in Washington, but not to the man in Helsinki. The guy in Washington knows that he is the guy who was in Helsinki. He has the same initial diary, plus I am in W now. The owner of the diary/memory *is* the definition (not a complete one!) of the 1-I, in the UDA. That's work well enough to get the first person indeterminacy, and the reversal. In the iterated WM duplication, most resulting persons, which by comp are still conscious rational people, will see that their memory contains incompressible random strings. I don't see how it is possible to remember an incompressible string - since it must be of infinite length. I don't know why you say that. Incompressible infinite string are usually defined by an infinite string whose finite initial fragment are incompressible. A finite string is incompressible if it is about the same length to the shorter program generating it. The majority of finite strings are incompressible, although the incompressibility of almost all individual string is undecidable for a fixed machine. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: First person indeterminacy (Re: COMP theology)
On 05 Mar 2012, at 22:30, John Clark wrote: On Mon, Mar 5, 2012 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: What is the probability the Helsinki man will receive signals from Moscow turning him into the Moscow man? 100%. That's ambiguous. There is nothing ambiguous about it! Granted this thought experiment is odd but everything is crystal clear. According to the thought experiment you have been teleported to Moscow which means you will now be receiving sights and sounds and smells and tastes and feeling textures from Moscow instead of Helsinki. I say the probability of that happening is 100%, how can I tell if my prediction is correct? If after the experiment I can find something that says he is Bruno Marchal and that he feels like he is in one and only one place and that one place is Moscow then my prediction has been confirmed as being correct. So it is not ambiguous because you take for granted that we were talking on the 1p, from your outsider perspective. So you are still talking about the 3-view on the 1-view. In particular, how will you explain to the Bruno in the other city? You told him that he will find himself in M with 100% chance. He will tell you that you were wrong. After the experiment I CAN find such a thing so my prediction was correct. The fact that there is also a Bruno Marchal in Washington is irrelevant, it does not reduce the feeling that Bruno Marchal has that he is in one and only one place and that one place is Moscow by even a infinitesimal amount. Well, if you don't listen to the BM in W, then you are right, but why would you not listen to him? If you say 100%, it means that you are talking on the first person that you can attribute to different people. Of course the first person can be attributed to different people because according to the thought experiment *YOU* have been duplicated, let me repeat that, YOU HAVE BEEN DUPLICATED. Although perfectly logical that is certainly a unusual situation, I've never been duplicated before and you probably haven't either, so it shouldn't be surprising that the results of such a unusual situation are odd, not illogical not self contradictory just odd. Assuming comp, we can say that we practice duplication, and even more complex self-transformation; since the time of the first amoeba. It is not unusual. If QM is true, we are multiplied (or differentiated) all the times. we get a paradox if you say that it is 100% for both Moscow and Washington. There is not the slightest thing paradoxical about it, in fact if I had said anything else then that WOULD have been paradoxical. Why? Because YOU HAVE BEEN DUPLICATED, that means your first person perspective has been duplicated and will remain identical until differing environmental factors cause the two of YOU to diverge; and even then they would both be Bruno Marchal they just wouldn't be each other. Which means that the body has been duplicated, and the 1-view has been duplicated in the 3-view perspective. But the 1-view from the 1-view perspective has not been duplicated. Like Everett said, the observer does not feel the split. You persistently confuse the 1-view from its own perspective (on which the probability/uncertainty bears), and the 1-view than an outsider can attribute to each reconstituted person. What is the probability the Helsinki man will receive signals from neither Washington nor Moscow and thus leaving him as the Helsinki man? 100%. In the protocol considered the Helsinki guy is annihilated. Fine, if that's the thought experiment then the probability the Helsinki man will receive signals from either Washington or Moscow is 100% so the probability he will remain the Helsinki man is 0%. Annihilate or don't, either way the results are deterministic. From the 3-view perspective. Not from the 1-view of the participants. In Helsinki he does not know where he will feel to be after pushing the reading/annihilating button. And after the experience the one in W cannot know why he is the one in W, and the same for the guy in M. This is even clearer with the iteration of that experience, where most person write long strings of W and M in their diary, like WWWMWMMWWMMWMWMMWWMWW, and are unable to find any algorithm justifying that past which looks random to them. What is the probability the Helsinki man will feel like the Moscow man? 0% because if he felt like the Moscow man he wouldn't be the Helsinki man anymore. In that case, the probability to survive, in the usual clinical sense, a teleportation experience is 0 But the usual clinical sense is totally useless in this case because this case is about as far from usual as you can get and still remain logical. Why do I say that? Because YOU HAVE BEEN DUPLICATED. Nothing unusual, with comp we do that all the time since the first amoeba (and before, to be
Re: Two Mathematicians in a Bunker and Existence of Pi
On 06 Mar 2012, at 12:22, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: Stephen, The life is full of paradoxes. My point was that while philosophers cannot solve apparently simple problems (well, these problems happen not to be simple), engineers continue doing their business successfully. How they do it? I believe, exactly this way, they try to understand what they do not know. Then they make trials, run tests, etc. and finally with some luck we get a new technology. Whether the theory of everything exists or not, happens not be essential for the success in engineering. I do not know why. Right now I am at the end of Beweistheorien (Proof Theories) by Prof Hoenen http://www.podcasts.uni-freiburg.de/podcast_content?id_content=24 At the end of his course, he considers the ontological arguments where the goal was to proof existence from pure logic. This is weird. Since the failure of Whitehead and Russell, it is admitted that we cannot prove existence, even of the number zero, from logic alone. A pretty interesting attempt. Still there is a huge gap between logic and existence and it seems that engineers successfully fills it. Ask them, how they do it. This is weirder. Engineers prove that things exist, in theory which assume that some things exist. That is not different than proving the existence of prime or universal number or relation, from the assumption of the existence of the numbers. It is always relative proof of existence. Bruno On 05.03.2012 14:34 Stephen P. King said the following: On 3/5/2012 7:01 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: John, It is not that bad to say that we do not know something. Yet, it might be even better to specify more accurately what exactly we do not know. Think of your younger colleagues that do chemistry research right now. Chemists have been quite successful and the story continues. The concepts of atom, molecule, macromolecule, electron density, etc. have helped a lot along this way. We may take this concepts ontologically or just pragmatically, this is after all not that important. Materials science seems not to be affected. Evgenii ... Hi Evgenii, This is a very fascinating statement to me and I find John's comments to be very wise! ...it might be even better to specify more accurately what exactly we do not know. Does it not lead to a paradox? For if we could state exactly what we do not know then it would be the case that we do in fact know it and thus we would known what we do not know, which appears to be a contradiction. Is this a sample of a more general kind of situation that is inevitable given the idea of self-reference? It seems to me that we need to consider that Bivalency http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_bivalence can be a source of error sometimes, or claim that knowledge is impossible. (note the bivalence here! LOL!) I am focusing on this because it it part of my overall critique of the idea of a Theory of Everything. For example, what exactly does it mean for a sentence to have a definite truth value absent the ability to evaluate that truth value? This is what I see your hypothetical situation as discussing Onward! Stephen -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com . For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Two Mathematicians in a Bunker and Existence of Pi
On 06 Mar 2012, at 05:42, meekerdb wrote: On 3/5/2012 8:28 PM, Jason Resch wrote: On Mon, Mar 5, 2012 at 7:24 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 3/5/2012 4:57 PM, Jason Resch wrote: On Mon, Mar 5, 2012 at 12:26 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 3/5/2012 10:03 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: On 05.03.2012 18:29 meekerdb said the following: On 3/5/2012 3:23 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: The experiment takes an operational approach to what Pi means. During the initial stage of the experiment mathematicians prove the existence of Pi. When mathematicians 'prove the existence' of something they are just showing that something which satisfies a certain definition can be inferred from a certain set of axioms. In your example the mathematicians may define Pi as the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle in Euclidean geometry. But what does that mean if geometry is not Euclidean; and we know it's not since these mathematicians are in the gravitational field of the Earth. Mathematics is about abstract propositions. Whether they apply to reality is a separate question. Brent I agree that this assumption might not be the best one. I will think it over. However, I do not completely understand you. How the geometry of physical space in which mathematicians reside influences the definition of Pi? Mathematicians will consider just Euclidean geometry, that's it. In my view, whether the physical space Euclidean or not, does not influence the work of mathematicians. Exactly. Hence mathematics =/= reality. This is like comparing the kidney of a whale to a liver of a whale, and deciding whale=/=whale. You can't compare one limited subset of the whole (such as the local part of this universe) with another subset of the whole (euclidean geometry), and decide that the whole (of mathematics) is different from the whole (of reality). The same mathematicians in the same place could 'prove the existence' of the meeting point of parallel lines or that through a point there is more than one line parallel to a given line. So no matter what they measure in their bunker it will be consistent with one or the other. So you can only hold that mathematics=reality if you assume everything not self-contradictory exists in reality; Okay. but that was what the bunker thought experiment was intended to test. I fail to see how the bunker experiment tests this. The bunker experiment seems to assume that mathematical reality is or depends upon a physical representation. You've essentially made it untestable by saying, well it may fail HERE but somewhere (Platonia?) it's really true. People used to say Darwin's theory was untestable, because evolution was such a slow process they thought it could never be observed. Some on this list have argued that the hypothesis has already survived one test: the unpredictability in quantum mechanics. That specific retrodiction came from Bruno's hypothesis which is that universes are generated by computation. What is computable is much less than all mathematics. This is not my hypothesis. It might be Fredkin or Schmidhuber hypothesis, but not mine. My hypothesis is the hypothesis that I am a machine, which is ambiguous, so I put it in the form of yes doctor, which means that there exist a level such that my consciousness remains unchanged for a digital functional substitution done at that level. And then the reasoning shows that the physical universe(s), are not generated by any computation. Computations generated my consciousness, and the physical universe is what my consciousness can predict from the mixing of determinacy and 1-indterminacy in the UD* (or sigma_1 part of arithmetic). If instead we found our environment and observations of it to be perfectly deterministic, this would have ruled out mechanism+a single or finite universe. Further, there is a growing collection of evidence that in most universes, conscious life is impossible. There's a popular idea that most possible universes are inhospitable to conscious life: a theory that might well be false under Bruno's hypothesis in which consciousness and universes are both realized by computation. Not really. Only consciousness (although there are instant consciousness: each conscious interval might interfere with the result of the indeterminacy, and in case the level is very low, that might play a role in the qualia). In any case it doesn't warrant the conclusion that all possible universes exist. Well, it might be simpler to say that comp entails the non existence, and even the non sense of any ontologically primary physical universe. For a comp believer, physical universe is a failed hypothesis. It does not explain the appearance of physical universes, as UDA shows (or should show). This can also be considered as confirmation of the theory that there
Re: First person indeterminacy (Re: COMP theology)
On 06 Mar 2012, at 00:14, acw wrote: John Clark, it seems to me that you're intentionally ignoring the 1p (first person) point of view (qualia or subjective experience) and one's expectations from that point of view. I think that John Clark does not miss the 1p and 3p distinction, but he misses the expectations from that point of view *about* that point of view. To follow UDA and get COMP's conclusions you need these assumptions: Mind (1p), Mechanism (surviving a digital substitution), Church Turing Thesis(CTT) and an interpretation of arithmetic to give CTT sense (such as the existence of the standard model of arithmetic). If you take a eliminative materialist position, that is, saying the mind doesn't exist and thus also no subjective experience, you cannot even begin to follow the UDA - you've already assumed that the mind doesn't exist and only the physical universe does. Of course that's a bit problematic because you've only learned of this physical universe through your own subjective experiences. But John is more subtle than most materialist eliminativist. He is willing to ascribe consciousness, even to the two reconstituted persons after a duplication, but he does not take their account into account. He does not listen to the guy with the sequence WWWMWWWMMMW who does acknowledge that this particular string was not precisely expected, and that he has no clue of what comes next for its next feeling in the duplication experience. If you take 1p seriously, UDA asks you to predict what your *experiences* will be in a variety of situations. By neglecting each particular account, and identifying himself (intellectually) with all the copies, he will claim that he can easily makes the prediction: he will experience all the situations. This might be true from some God pov, or from a complete outsider view, but of course that is not what we were asking. You can look at the 3p bodies/brains and assign/correlate certain 1p's to them, but one can consider duplication scenarios which don't disturb continuity at all - if the mind survived a digital substitution it is already a program that can be duplicated/merged/ instantiated/... in a variety of ways - that program could even change substrates or be computed in all kinds of fragmented and strange ways and still maintain internal continuity. This may seem strange to you, so you might try to resolve it by only looking at the bodies instead of asking what *is experienced*, but that's a mistake and you will miss the point of the UDA that way because you're making the negation of the mind assumption or merely ignoring it. He ignores only the 1-views on the 1-views, but does not ignore the existence of the 1-views. This makes possible for him to accept the existence of the mind, but also to trivialize its possible role, and to block at the start the reasoning. Also in QM MWI, you have the same splitting/duplication all the time as you do with COMP, and the splitting time is likely much shorter (at plank time or less), while subjective experience is at much slower scales relative to that (likely a variable rate of 1-120Hz due to neuron spiking times, although hard to confirm this practically). So I repeat again: UDA is about what is experienced from the first person of a conscious SIM(Substrate Independent Mind)/AGI and its implications for the ontology and physics and mostly about what would such a mind experience. Looking only at the body of such a SIM is completely missing the point or just assuming physicalism with hidden assumption that subjective experience does not exist and is a delusion. He probably want to save physicalism, but he is not eliminativist. He just ignore the 1-view of the 1-view, he attribute mind to body, but fails to see that the mind, from the point of view of the mind, does not feel nor live any split in the duplication experience, and feel always to be a singular person, living what is an undoubtable personal random experience. I'm afraid I will have to explain the betting approach, or the optimization of the life of the reconstituted person. This is enough to get the reversal physics/arithmetic, but is more tedious and long to show. Let me try to explain this first to someone who seem to be rather lucid on all this (you). Let us take again the multiplication-movie experience. But instead of multiplying only John Clark, into the 2^((16180 x 1) x (60 x 90) x 24, we have to multiply the couple [John Clark + a banker], and John, at the start, when still unique, is asked to choose the between the following bet: I bet a billion$ that I will see the movie Monty Python Flying circus or I bet a billion$ that I will see white noise. The bet is done with the banker, which is multiplied together with John. (it is the comp first person plural case). In this case it is
Re: Two Mathematicians in a Bunker and Existence of Pi
On 06.03.2012 14:21 Bruno Marchal said the following: On 06 Mar 2012, at 12:22, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: Stephen, The life is full of paradoxes. My point was that while philosophers cannot solve apparently simple problems (well, these problems happen not to be simple), engineers continue doing their business successfully. How they do it? I believe, exactly this way, they try to understand what they do not know. Then they make trials, run tests, etc. and finally with some luck we get a new technology. Whether the theory of everything exists or not, happens not be essential for the success in engineering. I do not know why. Right now I am at the end of Beweistheorien (Proof Theories) by Prof Hoenen http://www.podcasts.uni-freiburg.de/podcast_content?id_content=24 At the end of his course, he considers the ontological arguments where the goal was to proof existence from pure logic. This is weird. Since the failure of Whitehead and Russell, it is admitted that we cannot prove existence, even of the number zero, from logic alone. I have meant the history of such an attempt. It is interesting to learn how people have tried it and in what context. It was new for me. A pretty interesting attempt. Still there is a huge gap between logic and existence and it seems that engineers successfully fills it. Ask them, how they do it. This is weirder. Engineers prove that things exist, in theory which assume that some things exist. That is not different than proving the existence of prime or universal number or relation, from the assumption of the existence of the numbers. It is always relative proof of existence. Strictly speaking you are right. What I wanted to say is that engineers do not care about this but this does not prevent them from doing useful things. So in a way it is working. Evgenii Bruno -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: First person indeterminacy (Re: COMP theology)
On 5 March 2012 23:50, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: It's unclear as to whom you and your refers to. Let me suggest a heuristic. Assume that any given instance of experience (by which I mean just whatever is necessary to permit some sort of determination to be made) is selected at random from the class of all such moments. All personal-indexical references can then be taken as referring to the conjunction of this instance and whatever personal history is implied by its content and structure. This heuristic serves to justify the expectation, from the perspective of any such instance, of its substitution by other such instances. Insofar as such substitutions imply continuations of the present moment, they can be considered as constituting part of the future of a particular personal history. If this heuristic is applied consistently to the various thought experiments, (with the usual allowance for measure) it should be obvious that diary entries recoverable within any given experiential instance will typically record precisely the sort of prior uncertainty or indeterminacy, with respect to the present instance, that Bruno is talking about. David On 3/5/2012 3:23 PM, David Nyman wrote: On 5 March 2012 21:30, John Clarkjohnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: Yes. I John K Clark just saw a 90 minutes documentary on the history of asphalt, and as that is certainly one of the large but finite number of 90 minute movies I can see on that screen it is entirely consistent with my prediction that John K Clark will see every 90 minute movie that screen can show. For some reason that really puzzles me, you are systematically failing to answer the question as posed. It is equivalent to asking: if you knew that the entire stock of tickets in a lottery would be distributed among multiple 3-Johns, what is the probability that your future experience would be of poverty or wealth? Of course, you know in advance that one copy will end up rich, but the 3-situation is not at issue. The issue is only whether your next 1-experience will be of sudden wealth, or not. It can only be one or the other, not both, and which it will be is indeterminate in the usual sense of any lottery. The point being demonstrated is that, regardless of the 3-situation, you can never sum 1-experiences - they are always mutually exclusive. Isn't that clear? It's unclear as to whom you and your refers to. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Two Mathematicians in a Bunker and Existence of Pi
On 06 Mar 2012, at 16:40, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: On 06.03.2012 14:21 Bruno Marchal said the following: On 06 Mar 2012, at 12:22, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: Stephen, The life is full of paradoxes. My point was that while philosophers cannot solve apparently simple problems (well, these problems happen not to be simple), engineers continue doing their business successfully. How they do it? I believe, exactly this way, they try to understand what they do not know. Then they make trials, run tests, etc. and finally with some luck we get a new technology. Whether the theory of everything exists or not, happens not be essential for the success in engineering. I do not know why. Right now I am at the end of Beweistheorien (Proof Theories) by Prof Hoenen http://www.podcasts.uni-freiburg.de/podcast_content?id_content=24 At the end of his course, he considers the ontological arguments where the goal was to proof existence from pure logic. This is weird. Since the failure of Whitehead and Russell, it is admitted that we cannot prove existence, even of the number zero, from logic alone. I have meant the history of such an attempt. It is interesting to learn how people have tried it and in what context. It was new for me. OK. A pretty interesting attempt. Still there is a huge gap between logic and existence and it seems that engineers successfully fills it. Ask them, how they do it. This is weirder. Engineers prove that things exist, in theory which assume that some things exist. That is not different than proving the existence of prime or universal number or relation, from the assumption of the existence of the numbers. It is always relative proof of existence. Strictly speaking you are right. What I wanted to say is that engineers do not care about this but this does not prevent them from doing useful things. So in a way it is working. OK, but be careful not to become an instrumentalist, which, to be short, defines roughly truth by useful. The problem is that the notion of useful is subject dependent. In that sense, a proposition like cannabis is dangerous might be decided to be true, because it will work very well for a (large) category of persons (like pharmaceutical lobbies, jail lobbies, textile lobbies, steel lobbies, wood based paper lobbies, the underground untaxed economy, the children (who will find it everywhere and will not need to show the ID). Lies work very well, for some term, for some people, but it can deform truth, if that exists, and led science and eventually everyone go astray. Instrumentalism leads to manipulism, or gangsterism. It leads to the confusion between truth and power. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Two Mathematicians in a Bunker and Existence of Pi
On 3/6/2012 4:26 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: It's a language game. The word game is so fuzzy that this says nothing at all. Game theory is a branch of mathematics. But language says something. It says mathematics is about description. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Two Mathematicians in a Bunker and Existence of Pi
On 3/6/2012 5:54 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: That specific retrodiction came from Bruno's hypothesis which is that universes are generated by computation. What is computable is much less than all mathematics. This is not my hypothesis. It might be Fredkin or Schmidhuber hypothesis, but not mine. My hypothesis is the hypothesis that I am a machine, which is ambiguous, so I put it in the form of yes doctor, which means that there exist a level such that my consciousness remains unchanged for a digital functional substitution done at that level. And then the reasoning shows that the physical universe(s), are not generated by any computation. Computations generated my consciousness, and the physical universe is what my consciousness can predict from the mixing of determinacy and 1-indterminacy in the UD* (or sigma_1 part of arithmetic). If I had written universes are indirectly generated by computation, would that have reflected your view? The only catch I see is that you wrote can predict instead of must predict. Are you allowing for some agency here? Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: First person indeterminacy (Re: COMP theology)
On 06 Mar 2012, at 17:12, David Nyman wrote: On 5 March 2012 23:50, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: It's unclear as to whom you and your refers to. Let me suggest a heuristic. Assume that any given instance of experience (by which I mean just whatever is necessary to permit some sort of determination to be made) is selected at random from the class of all such moments. All personal-indexical references can then be taken as referring to the conjunction of this instance and whatever personal history is implied by its content and structure. OK. This heuristic serves to justify the expectation, from the perspective of any such instance, of its substitution by other such instances. Insofar as such substitutions imply continuations of the present moment, they can be considered as constituting part of the future of a particular personal history. OK. And with comp such substitutions imply continuations when there is a universal number/machine u running the the continuation in the UD (or the sigma_1 complete part of arithmetic). That's why comp predicts that if we look below our substitution level, the computations multiply effectively, because there are an infinity of such universal u. QM-without collapse/Everett witnesses the first person plural, which is just the contagion of the duplications from observers to observers. Bruno If this heuristic is applied consistently to the various thought experiments, (with the usual allowance for measure) it should be obvious that diary entries recoverable within any given experiential instance will typically record precisely the sort of prior uncertainty or indeterminacy, with respect to the present instance, that Bruno is talking about. David On 3/5/2012 3:23 PM, David Nyman wrote: On 5 March 2012 21:30, John Clarkjohnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: Yes. I John K Clark just saw a 90 minutes documentary on the history of asphalt, and as that is certainly one of the large but finite number of 90 minute movies I can see on that screen it is entirely consistent with my prediction that John K Clark will see every 90 minute movie that screen can show. For some reason that really puzzles me, you are systematically failing to answer the question as posed. It is equivalent to asking: if you knew that the entire stock of tickets in a lottery would be distributed among multiple 3-Johns, what is the probability that your future experience would be of poverty or wealth? Of course, you know in advance that one copy will end up rich, but the 3-situation is not at issue. The issue is only whether your next 1-experience will be of sudden wealth, or not. It can only be one or the other, not both, and which it will be is indeterminate in the usual sense of any lottery. The point being demonstrated is that, regardless of the 3-situation, you can never sum 1-experiences - they are always mutually exclusive. Isn't that clear? It's unclear as to whom you and your refers to. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything- l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com . For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: First person indeterminacy (Re: COMP theology)
On 3/6/2012 8:12 AM, David Nyman wrote: On 5 March 2012 23:50, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net wrote: It's unclear as to whom you and your refers to. Let me suggest a heuristic. Assume that any given instance of experience (by which I mean just whatever is necessary to permit some sort of determination to be made) is selected at random from the class of all such moments. All personal-indexical references can then be taken as referring to the conjunction of this instance and whatever personal history is implied by its content and structure. This heuristic serves to justify the expectation, from the perspective of any such instance, of its substitution by other such instances. Insofar as such substitutions imply continuations of the present moment, they can be considered as constituting part of the future of a particular personal history. If this heuristic is applied consistently to the various thought experiments, (with the usual allowance for measure) it should be obvious that diary entries recoverable within any given experiential instance will typically record precisely the sort of prior uncertainty or indeterminacy, with respect to the present instance, that Bruno is talking about. David I don't think I have a problem with the indeterminacy. Consider in your scenario that we duplicated a video camera instead of a person. When look at what the cameras in M and W have recorded in one we see pictures of Helsinki followed by pictures of Moscow and from the other we see pictures of Helsinki followed by pictures of Washington. The ambiguity comes when, before the duplication, we ask, What will this camera record?. This is ambiguous just as he is ambiguous. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: COMP theology
On 3/6/2012 4:21 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 05 Mar 2012, at 19:23, meekerdb wrote: I don't see that it's any different than taking a 3p view and asking which body is the Helsinki one, the one in Moscow or the one in Washington. Most people would say Neither and that similarly one can say 'he' doesn't feel to be in either place, it is some duplicates that feel they are in W or M. They are only identified with the guy in Helsinki because they share many attributes with him - i.e. similar body and memories. But that would be an argulent for saying No to the doctor. That depends on what you care about. Would you rather have children or live forever? The point here is that with the statement above, you die with an artificial brain, which refute the comp assumption. I may 'die' but I have two progeny who are as identical to me as I am to who I was yesterday. it assumes that there is one 'I' and we can ask where this 'I' finds himself. But there is no 'I' in this sense. Of course there is such an I. Once your body has been reconstituted in both place, they both knows very well where that I feels to be, and this is known in advanced (believed and true, given that we assume the candidate believe in comp and that comp is true). Known in advance by whom? Not by either of the I's in M or W. That's why I said there is no I in the relevant sense of having been in Helsinki. Why? Both the one in M and in W knows perfectly well that they were in Helsinki before. OK. But then what is it they 'knew in advance'? Such an I is well defined. It is the owner of the memory together with the fact that those memory are known true, by us. But that I is not well defined because it can be duplicated and hence the owner of the memory is indefinite. Of course, that I, the 1-I, is not well defined. In AUDA it is even proved that it is not definable (accepting the classical theory of knowledge). But from his 1-I point of view, his *experience* is always well defined, comp just makes it not predictable, like if he look at the comp-multiplication movie (in my comment to JK Clark). But you seem to infer from experince is always well defined to the experience is *his*. Yes. When an 1-experience is well defined, then the 1-owner is well defined too. He is the one having that experience. You may say the owner is defined by the experience, but then who is the owner becomes ill-defined under duplication. It spoils the continuity of 'he'. As Bertrand Russell remarked, Descartes stopped one step short in his exercise of doubt. I think therefore I am. is dubious. He should have taken one for step to find There is thinking is indubitable. It's the I that is an inference. The 1-I is not inferred. It is experienced, or lived. I thought you had already agreed that 'I', meaning the persistent being, is inferred from experience. Do you think that you directly experience continuity in time? That may be, but it is contrary to the idea of observer moments and digital states. So while the experience is well defined the meaning of his is ambiguous. The experience of the man in Washington belongs to the man in Washington, but not to the man in Helsinki. The guy in Washington knows that he is the guy who was in Helsinki. He has the same initial diary, plus I am in W now. But equally the guy in Moscow 'knows' he is the guy who was in Helsinki. So when you ask the guy in Helsinki what he will experience, 'he' is ambiguous. The owner of the diary/memory *is* the definition (not a complete one!) of the 1-I, in the UDA. That's work well enough to get the first person indeterminacy, and the reversal. In the iterated WM duplication, most resulting persons, which by comp are still conscious rational people, will see that their memory contains incompressible random strings. I don't see how it is possible to remember an incompressible string - since it must be of infinite length. I don't know why you say that. Incompressible infinite string are usually defined by an infinite string whose finite initial fragment are incompressible. A finite string is incompressible if it is about the same length to the shorter program generating it. But that depends on the program and the coding, does it not? And given a fixed finite string there is a coding that makes it trivial compressible. The majority of finite strings are incompressible, although the incompressibility of almost all individual string is undecidable for a fixed machine. OK, so memory contains strings that are incompressible by that brain. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at
Re: First person indeterminacy (Re: COMP theology)
2012/3/6 meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net On 3/6/2012 8:12 AM, David Nyman wrote: On 5 March 2012 23:50, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net wrote: It's unclear as to whom you and your refers to. Let me suggest a heuristic. Assume that any given instance of experience (by which I mean just whatever is necessary to permit some sort of determination to be made) is selected at random from the class of all such moments. All personal-indexical references can then be taken as referring to the conjunction of this instance and whatever personal history is implied by its content and structure. This heuristic serves to justify the expectation, from the perspective of any such instance, of its substitution by other such instances. Insofar as such substitutions imply continuations of the present moment, they can be considered as constituting part of the future of a particular personal history. If this heuristic is applied consistently to the various thought experiments, (with the usual allowance for measure) it should be obvious that diary entries recoverable within any given experiential instance will typically record precisely the sort of prior uncertainty or indeterminacy, with respect to the present instance, that Bruno is talking about. David I don't think I have a problem with the indeterminacy. Consider in your scenario that we duplicated a video camera instead of a person. When look at what the cameras in M and W have recorded in one we see pictures of Helsinki followed by pictures of Moscow and from the other we see pictures of Helsinki followed by pictures of Washington. The ambiguity comes when, before the duplication, we ask, What will this camera record?. This is ambiguous just as he is ambiguous. The question is indexical... it it not he but I... in the thought experiment *you* are the one duplicated, and you ask yourself your own expectation for your next moment. Maybe what is you is not well defined for something outside of you (us ;) ) but I expect you know what you are, and feel... and hence you is well defined for yourself from your POV. Quentin Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.**comeverything-list@googlegroups.com . To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscribe@ **googlegroups.com everything-list%2bunsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/** group/everything-list?hl=enhttp://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . -- All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: First person indeterminacy (Re: COMP theology)
On 3/6/2012 9:27 AM, Quentin Anciaux wrote: 2012/3/6 meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net On 3/6/2012 8:12 AM, David Nyman wrote: On 5 March 2012 23:50, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: It's unclear as to whom you and your refers to. Let me suggest a heuristic. Assume that any given instance of experience (by which I mean just whatever is necessary to permit some sort of determination to be made) is selected at random from the class of all such moments. All personal-indexical references can then be taken as referring to the conjunction of this instance and whatever personal history is implied by its content and structure. This heuristic serves to justify the expectation, from the perspective of any such instance, of its substitution by other such instances. Insofar as such substitutions imply continuations of the present moment, they can be considered as constituting part of the future of a particular personal history. If this heuristic is applied consistently to the various thought experiments, (with the usual allowance for measure) it should be obvious that diary entries recoverable within any given experiential instance will typically record precisely the sort of prior uncertainty or indeterminacy, with respect to the present instance, that Bruno is talking about. David I don't think I have a problem with the indeterminacy. Consider in your scenario that we duplicated a video camera instead of a person. When look at what the cameras in M and W have recorded in one we see pictures of Helsinki followed by pictures of Moscow and from the other we see pictures of Helsinki followed by pictures of Washington. The ambiguity comes when, before the duplication, we ask, What will this camera record?. This is ambiguous just as he is ambiguous. The question is indexical... it it not he but I... in the thought experiment *you* are the one duplicated, and you ask yourself your own expectation for your next moment. Maybe what is you is not well defined for something outside of you (us ;) ) but I expect you know what you are, and feel... At any given moment. But when you ask about my future, and under the hypothesis I may be duplicated, then that future I is not longer indicial, it is ambiguous...which is the source of the indeterminacy. Brent and hence you is well defined for yourself from your POV. Quentin Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com mailto:everything-list%2bunsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com http://www.avg.com Version: 2012.0.1913 / Virus Database: 2114/4853 - Release Date: 03/05/12 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Two Mathematicians in a Bunker and Existence of Pi
On 06 Mar 2012, at 17:53, meekerdb wrote:
On 3/6/2012 5:54 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
That specific retrodiction came from Bruno's hypothesis which is
that universes are generated by computation. What is computable
is much less than all mathematics.
This is not my hypothesis. It might be Fredkin or Schmidhuber
hypothesis, but not mine. My hypothesis is the hypothesis that I
am a machine, which is ambiguous, so I put it in the form of yes
doctor, which means that there exist a level such that my
consciousness remains unchanged for a digital functional
substitution done at that level.
And then the reasoning shows that the physical universe(s), are not
generated by any computation. Computations generated my
consciousness, and the physical universe is what my consciousness
can predict from the mixing of determinacy and 1-indterminacy in
the UD* (or sigma_1 part of arithmetic).
If I had written universes are indirectly generated by computation,
would that have reflected your view?
Better.
But the presence of the word generated might still lead to confusion
in this setting. Universe(s) are only observed, It is, or they are the
'natural solution' of the comp diophantine measure problem, which bear
on the first person.
The only catch I see is that you wrote can predict instead of
must predict. Are you allowing for some agency here? m
I allow for agency, but not at that level. Indeed Matter, but matter
only, is what the mind cannot act on. But the mind can act on the
mind, and agency emerges at higher levels.
No. The reason why my consciousness can predict, as opposed to must
predict, is the first person indeterminacy. It is the fact that I
cannot know which machine I am, nor which computations executes the
relevant states.
We can have partial information set, like, assuming bla-bla-bla, if I
am duplicate in {W, M}, I will feel to be in M or in W. That is
disjuncts. But by UDA-(step 8 included), I have to say at each instant
I will be in u1, u2, u3, u4, ... that is the infinite sequence of
programs generating my current state. They all compete in the measure,
and we can only see the result of that from inside. Here the 1p and
its invariance for the delays explains that such results never
appear in the UD, but is on the border of UD*.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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Re: Theology or not theology (Re: COMP theology)
On Mon, Mar 5, 2012 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: You keep saying this, but non-comp has nothing to do with solipsism. Baloney. Here is a simple logical counter-example. take any dualist theory in which *all* humans have a non mechanical soul responsible for their consciousness. This is logically conceivable Yes that is logically conceivable, but there is not a human on this planet who believes in that theory except when they are discussing philosophy on the internet, because if they did and were consistent they would also believe that other humans were conscious ALL the time, including the times purely mechanical movements of other human's arms and legs and tongues indicated they were not behaving intelligently, such as when they were sleeping or under anesthesia or dead. That's why non-comp fans are MASSIVELY self contradictory. in addition to being untrue, has brought more misery to the world than any other single thing You confuse religion/theology, with what some humans have done with it. Please don't give me that tired old line about how a very few have corrupted the noble concept of religion, religious idiocy and religious evil is the norm not the exception. God needs to be a person. In some tradition, and it is a mystery why you stick on those tradition, given that you criticize them so vigorously. Because God is just a word and morons fools and some of the most evil people who have ever walked the Earth have mutilated that word far beyond any hope of repair. Language evolves and like biological Evolution it almost never goes backwards and retraces it's steps, let me give a example: The word gay means happy and until just a few decades ago that's all it meant, but today if I use that word just to indicate that somebody is happy I am issuing a invitation to be misunderstood. I have a even better example, technically the word pedophile means a lover of children, well there is nothing wrong with that in fact it's a virtue, people should like children, but today it means more than that and its far too late for the word to be rehabilitated, so I would never dream of calling someone a pedophile unless I had rock solid evidence they were a monster. In the same way the word God has gone too far, it has much too much baggage to be rehabilitated now. So use another word, there are lots to choose from. some, like Richard Dawkins presents science as if it was a sort of alternative, which makes science into pseudo-science I have no idea what your complaint with Richard Dawkins is, I've read all his books and think he's terrific. if you agree with Gödel's formalization of Saint-Anselmus' definition of God [...] That was in Godel's later years when he went off the rails and thought he had a rock solid logical proof for the existence of God, fortunately even at his worst he retained enough sanity to know he should not publish the thing. Godel was I think an even greater logician than Aristotle; nevertheless he was always a very odd man and he got odder as he got older. He sealed his windows shut because he thought night air was deadly, he wore heavy woolen coats on even the hottest days because he thought the cold was deadly too, and for unknown reasons he insisted on putting cheap plastic flamingos on his front lawn. He ended up starving himself to death, he refused to eat because he thought unnamed sinister forces were trying to poison him. The great logician weighed 65 pounds when he died in 1978 from lack of food brought on by paranoia. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Two Mathematicians in a Bunker and Existence of Pi
On 06 Mar 2012, at 17:32, meekerdb wrote: On 3/6/2012 4:26 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: It's a language game. The word game is so fuzzy that this says nothing at all. Game theory is a branch of mathematics. But language says something. It says mathematics is about description. Mathematicians search what is language independent, and description independent. They don't like when a result depends on the choice of a base. Mathematics is more about structures and laws. Math uses languages, but is not a language, even if it can be used as such in physics. But there is more to that. Are you agnostic about the question if reality is physical, or mathematical, or theological or ?. To say that math is on description seem a bit physicalist. Comp makes the tiny sigma_1 segment of arithmetic rather fundamental. We don't (nor can need) more reality than that, for this is from inside (epistemologically, ...) *very* big, and structured. It is far bigger from inside than from outside. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: First person indeterminacy (Re: COMP theology)
2012/3/6 meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net On 3/6/2012 9:27 AM, Quentin Anciaux wrote: 2012/3/6 meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net On 3/6/2012 8:12 AM, David Nyman wrote: On 5 March 2012 23:50, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net wrote: It's unclear as to whom you and your refers to. Let me suggest a heuristic. Assume that any given instance of experience (by which I mean just whatever is necessary to permit some sort of determination to be made) is selected at random from the class of all such moments. All personal-indexical references can then be taken as referring to the conjunction of this instance and whatever personal history is implied by its content and structure. This heuristic serves to justify the expectation, from the perspective of any such instance, of its substitution by other such instances. Insofar as such substitutions imply continuations of the present moment, they can be considered as constituting part of the future of a particular personal history. If this heuristic is applied consistently to the various thought experiments, (with the usual allowance for measure) it should be obvious that diary entries recoverable within any given experiential instance will typically record precisely the sort of prior uncertainty or indeterminacy, with respect to the present instance, that Bruno is talking about. David I don't think I have a problem with the indeterminacy. Consider in your scenario that we duplicated a video camera instead of a person. When look at what the cameras in M and W have recorded in one we see pictures of Helsinki followed by pictures of Moscow and from the other we see pictures of Helsinki followed by pictures of Washington. The ambiguity comes when, before the duplication, we ask, What will this camera record?. This is ambiguous just as he is ambiguous. The question is indexical... it it not he but I... in the thought experiment *you* are the one duplicated, and you ask yourself your own expectation for your next moment. Maybe what is you is not well defined for something outside of you (us ;) ) but I expect you know what you are, and feel... At any given moment. But when you ask about my future, and under the hypothesis I may be duplicated, then that future I is not longer indicial, it is ambiguous...which is the source of the indeterminacy. It is the source of inderteminacy... but from your POV it is not ambiguous... after the duplication, each copy will not feel any ambiguity about the past... and before the experience, you won't feel any ambiguity about yourself, only an inability to predict your next expectation... which is the 1p-indeterminacy. Quentin Brent and hence you is well defined for yourself from your POV. Quentin Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 2012.0.1913 / Virus Database: 2114/4853 - Release Date: 03/05/12 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Two Mathematicians in a Bunker and Existence of Pi
On Mar 6, 7:07 am, Evgenii Rudnyi use...@rudnyi.ru wrote: Craig, The danger to society comes not from mathematicians, rather it could come from technologists. Yes. I don't think the problem is with mathematicians, it's with hospital administrators, insurance companies, investment banks, attorneys, judges, governments, etc who feel compelled to apply mathematical-seeming solutions to all human problems. Recently I have read Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto I saw that too. It's good to see him back around. and the author shows that the society should pay more attention to what Silicon Valley geeks are silently doing. Just one quote Ideals are important in the world of technology, but the mechanism by which ideals influence events is different than in other spheres of life. Technologists don't use persuasion to influence you - or, at least, we don't do it very well. There are a few master communicators among us (like Steve Jobs), but for the most part we aren't particularly seductive. We make up extensions to your being, like remote eyes and ears (web-cams and mobile phones) and expanded memory (the world of details you can search for online). These become the structures by which you connect to the world and other people. These structures in turn can change how you conceive of yourself and the world. We tinker with your philosophy by direct manipulation of your cognitive experience, not indirectly, through argument. It takes only a tiny group of engineers to create technology that can shape the entire future of human experience with incredible speed. Therefore, crucial arguments about the human relationship with technology should take place between developers and users before such direct manipulations are designed. This book is about those arguments. As for sensations, I do not know. Yesterday after I have read your email, I went to an Italian restaurant. A small dinner, actually I wanted just a glass of good red Italian wine, but then I took also a small plate of cheese assorti with a couple of salad leaves, pepperoni and bread. I have enjoyed my dinner. Whether wine, bread, cheese, salad and pepperoni have enjoyed it too, I do not know. I would not mind, if they did. Hehe. It is hard to imagine that there are experiences going on in the wine and cheese, but really, not much more than it is hard to imagine billions of organisms and molecules being there instead of what we think we see and taste. Not sure whether the bread knows the difference between being on a plate or in a stomach, but I have less of a problem imagining that the cells of our tongue and stomach are sharing a bit of celebratory feelings with our brain at having eaten them Craig. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Two Mathematicians in a Bunker and Existence of Pi
On 3/6/2012 12:52 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 06 Mar 2012, at 17:53, meekerdb wrote:
On 3/6/2012 5:54 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
That specific retrodiction came from Bruno's hypothesis which is
that universes are generated by computation. What is computable is
much less than all mathematics.
This is not my hypothesis. It might be Fredkin or Schmidhuber
hypothesis, but not mine. My hypothesis is the hypothesis that I am
a machine, which is ambiguous, so I put it in the form of yes
doctor, which means that there exist a level such that my
consciousness remains unchanged for a digital functional
substitution done at that level.
And then the reasoning shows that the physical universe(s), are not
generated by any computation. Computations generated my
consciousness, and the physical universe is what my consciousness
can predict from the mixing of determinacy and 1-indterminacy in the
UD* (or sigma_1 part of arithmetic).
If I had written universes are indirectly generated by computation,
would that have reflected your view?
Better.
But the presence of the word generated might still lead to confusion
in this setting. Universe(s) are only observed, It is, or they are the
'natural solution' of the comp diophantine measure problem, which bear
on the first person.
The only catch I see is that you wrote can predict instead of must
predict. Are you allowing for some agency here? m
I allow for agency, but not at that level. Indeed Matter, but matter
only, is what the mind cannot act on. But the mind can act on the
mind, and agency emerges at higher levels.
Dear Bruno,
Why does it seem that you are tacitly accepting the definition of
matter as a substance as Descartes did in his substance dualism? If
matter is an appearance (and not a substance), does this not allow a
form of mind acting on matter? One only need to consider that the
selection process whereby the next state in time of a configuration of
matter is done by a computation.
A real example of this idea is implemented in the generation of
MMORPG games
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massively_multiplayer_online_role-playing_game#System_architecture
that are very popular. Consider the Bostrom-like
http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html question: Since we
cannot prove that our physical reality is not a MMORPG virtual world,
should we not bet that it actually is? One test for this question is to
consider the upper bounds on the ability to detect differences in
features at smaller and smaller scales. If, for example, space-time is
granular then this would almost certainly prove that our physical
world is isomorphic to a MMORPG. This idea would be compatible with COMP
if we can identify the players of the MMORPG with the individual
Löbian machines.
Given that some very resent observations of ultra-high energy gamma
photons indicate that space-time is not granular, we need a more
sophisticated theory to get the idea to work.
No. The reason why my consciousness can predict, as opposed to must
predict, is the first person indeterminacy. It is the fact that I
cannot know which machine I am, nor which computations executes the
relevant states.
We can have partial information set, like, assuming bla-bla-bla, if I
am duplicate in {W, M}, I will feel to be in M or in W. That is
disjuncts. But by UDA-(step 8 included), I have to say at each instant
I will be in u1, u2, u3, u4, ... that is the infinite sequence of
programs generating my current state. They all compete in the measure,
and we can only see the result of that from inside. Here the 1p and
its invariance for the delays explains that such results never
appear in the UD, but is on the border of UD*.
Does not first person indeterminacy also occur in any kind of
displacement of relative position, no matter how small that displacement
might be? But we have to consider more than one kind of change. We have
to consider relative changes for all possible observables such that
thecanonical conjugate rule
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonical_conjugate is preserved.
Onward!
Stephen
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