Re: my current position (was: AUDA)
On Tue, Jan 15, 2002 at 08:24:13PM -0700, Brent Meeker wrote: I don't understand reason about your compassion. The point is that you have a feeling about a possible future you imagine and so you take action to avoid that future. What I mean is that future should be the causal future of the external universes/computations that you are a part of, and not just your subjective future first-person experiences.
Re: my current position (was: AUDA)
Wei Dai wrote: Suppose someone offered you $1000, but if you accepted Earth would be destroyed and everyone on it killed as soon as you die. Would you take that offer? Even if you did I'm sure most people wouldn't. This is because I include in the first person its possible compassion feeling for what are possible others. (This is similar to what Brent Meeker said in its last post). Compassion, although it bears on others, is a feeling, isn't it? I admit the decision theory approach I gave in the last post has problems, some of which you've pointed out. But what's the alternative? I've been thinking about this issue for several years, starting with the expected-first-person-experiences approach (if you read the earlier archives you'll see many posts from me on this). I did. (and it is why I try to understand your evolution). The very beginning of this discussion-list by you and Hal Finney has been very attractive to me at the start. I still don't understand your shift. GTM means general Turing machine. It's defined in Jürgen Schmidhuber's paper at http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/toesv2/. Please read it if you haven't already. I red it. I prefer its first paper, although its philosophical conclusions contradict what I found interesting in it. We discussed that. Wait, even in the infinite the ratios will not be the same in general. Why do you think they will be? Not so easy question indeed. But here the methodology I use forces me to define the measure by the AUDA logic Z1*. The infinite ratios will be the same thanks (hopefully) to the non trivial constraints given by computational self-reference. Remember that our first person expectations rely on *all* our consistent (self)-extensions. If you read Schmidhuber's paper, you'll see that he offers several measures for consideration. He believes that the Speed Prior is the correct objective measure, This cannot be. The UDA shows our first person experiences cannot be aware of delays taken by any universal (classical or quantum, but immaterial) machine accessing our current states. Classical real time is definitely an emerging phenomena from UD* (all execution of UD). UDA predict that we are (perhaps) quick to be computed but our neighborhoods must be necessary much slow to be computed. (In that sense it predicts the computing power superiority of our neighborhood). You can interpret my work as saying that IF we are made of bits then we are necessarily embedded in a qubit made reality. I have made some recent progress in that direction. Normally Z1* should be equivalent to some sort of generic quantum computer. The incredible progress in that field could lead more quickly than I expected to a refutation or confirmation of comp. Suppose you want to crack a bank's encryption key, which is worth $4 million to you, and there are two ways to do it. You can spend $2 million to build a quantum computer to crack the key, or you can spend $3 million to build a classical computer to do this. Now if you believe the Speed Prior is the correct measure, then you'll think that the quantum computer will very likely fail, and therefore you should go with the classical computer instead.But if you believe the Universal Prior is the correct measure, then you'll think that both computers will work and you'll go with the quantum computer because it's cheaper. OK. However, there's another way to think about this situation that doesn't involve an objective measure. The fast-to-compute and the slow-to-compute universes both exist. You are taking the expression universe too literaly. The slow-to- compute multiverse is equivalent to the sheaf of locally quick to compute single computations, but we belong to the mutiverse: we belong to all universes. Objective measure are useful for taking into account the proportion of histories and this is what makes decision worthly senseful. (The fast-to-compute universes are the ones where quantum computers fail.) So when you adopt the Speed Prior you're really saying I know the slow-to-compute universes exist (and my actions affect what happens in them), but I just don't care very much about those universe. But (sorry for repetition) the UDA forces us to take those slow universe/computation into account. That's exactly the point of question 7 in the conversation with Joel Dobrzelewski. (links at http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/m3044.html, step 7 is at http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/m2992.html). You must care about those slow universe because their slowness just comes from the fact that their multiply you in important proportion. It is the very base of my proof that comp entails the quantum, and why if we are bit-describable then those bit are qubit made. To me the attraction of think about it the second way is that it allows us to just say that all universes exist. We don't have to say that objectively one universe has a higher measure than another. What does that mean anyway? If all universes exist,
Re: my current position (was: AUDA)
Hello Wei On 15-Jan-02, Wei Dai wrote: On Tue, Jan 15, 2002 at 12:47:18PM +0100, Marchal wrote: This is because I include in the first person its possible compassion feeling for what are possible others. (This is similar to what Brent Meeker said in its last post). Compassion, although it bears on others, is a feeling, isn't it? But what is the compassion about? In this case it's about events that you'll never experience in the first person. If you want to reason about your compassion and make rational decisions based on it, you have to do it from the third-person point of view. I don't understand reason about your compassion. The point is that you have a feeling about a possible future you imagine and so you take action to avoid that future. It doesn't have to be something after you die. If you decide not to stroll across the freeway because you have a bad feeling about getting hit by a truck and so you decide not to stroll across the freeway you have made a here-and-now decision about avoiding something - and hence never experiencing it. You are reasoning about your actions with your feeling (compassion?) as part of a premise. You're not reasoning *about* your feeling (which I suppose would be called '3rd person'). Brent Meeker If people are good only because they fear punishment and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed. -- Einstein
Re: my current position (was: AUDA)
On 11-Jan-02, Wei Dai wrote: I don't agree with this, because as I said earlier people expend effort to obtain results that they'll never see, for example by writing wills. Clearly what is a gain for a subject is not only based on first person experiences. Suppose someone offered you $1000, but if you accepted Earth would be destroyed and everyone on it killed as soon as you die. Would you take that offer? Even if you did I'm sure most people wouldn't. I think you take to narrow a view of first person experience. Most people feel anxiety contemplating their surviving children being destitute or the end of life on Earth. That feeling is a first person experience as much as any other. Brent Meeker Philosophie ist der systematische Missbrauch einer eigens zu diesem Zweck entwickelten Terminologie. ---Wolfgang Pauli
Re: my current position (was: AUDA)
Wei writes: Suppose you want to crack a bank's encryption key, which is worth $4 million to you, and there are two ways to do it. You can spend $2 million to build a quantum computer to crack the key, or you can spend $3 million to build a classical computer to do this. Now if you believe the Speed Prior is the correct measure, then you'll think that the quantum computer will very likely fail, and therefore you should go with the classical computer instead. But if you believe the Universal Prior is the correct measure, then you'll think that both computers will work and you'll go with the quantum computer because it's cheaper. However, there's another way to think about this situation that doesn't involve an objective measure. The fast-to-compute and the slow-to-compute universes both exist. (The fast-to-compute universes are the ones where quantum computers fail.) So when you adopt the Speed Prior you're really saying I know the slow-to-compute universes exist (and my actions affect what happens in them), but I just don't care very much about those universe. I'm having a lot of trouble understanding this view. Why should you care more or less about slow to compute universes? What kinds of considerations would influence your decision to care about such universes? Isn't it an empirical question which prior obtains (speed vs universal)? You want to maximize your gains, so you try to figure out from reason and observation which prior is true. For example you could build a small quantum computer and see if worked. If not that would suggest that the speed prior is true, if it does work that suggests the universal prior is true. Suppose you observe that quantum computers don't work. What does that mean in your formulation? Does it mean that you have decided to care about a certain kind of universe? Why should this fact change what you care about? Hal
Re: my current position (was: AUDA)
On Fri, Jan 11, 2002 at 04:59:47PM -0800, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'm having a lot of trouble understanding this view. Thanks for taking the time to write the questions. I hope this response helps. Why should you care more or less about slow to compute universes? I don't see any reason to care more or less about slow to compute universes, so I care about them as much as fast to compute universes. But in general it's an arbitrary subjective choice. What kinds of considerations would influence your decision to care about such universes? For example, you might be living inside a simulation and also in a real world (for whatever definition of real), and you can decide that you don't care about what happens in simulations as much as in real universes. But you don't need a rational justification for it, in the same way that you don't need a rational justification for preferring, say, abstract art to representational art. Isn't it an empirical question which prior obtains (speed vs universal)? No, I argue it's not, it's a matter of preference. Note that Jurgen Schmidhuber also argues that it's not, but I think his position is that it's a matter of logical necessity. (Have you read his TOESV2 paper yet, BTW?) Note that in both of our approaches you'd do the same things if you adopt the same prior. But our justifications/interpretations are different. You want to maximize your gains, so you try to figure out from reason and observation which prior is true. For example you could build a small quantum computer and see if worked. If not that would suggest that the speed prior is true, if it does work that suggests the universal prior is true. Let's see how this would work in my approach. If you adopt the speed prior, then you care about the fast-to-compute universes so little that you wouldn't even bother building a small quantum computer as an experiment. Even if you observed someone else's quantum computer working, you'd continue to act as if quantum computing was impossible because you care more about the universes where that experience was the result of a hallucination. In Schmidhuber's approach, you'd think that the probability you being in a universe where the quantum computer would work is so small that it's not worth trying. If you observed someone else's quantum computer working, you'd think that it happened because you hallucinated. (BTW, Jurgen, if I'm misinterpreting please let me know.) Now suppose you adopt the universal prior instead, and assume that the measure of the fast-to-compute universes is now small but significant compared to the slow-to-compute universes. In my approach, you'd do an quantum computing experiment in order to choose different actions in different universes. (I.e. so you don't have to make the same decision in both kinds of universes, but can condition your decision based on which kind of universe you're in.) If you observe the quantum computer not working, you'd think that you can no longer affect the slow-to-compute universes, and therefore do not have to consider them any more in making your decisions. (But you know that versions of you in other universes have observed the quantum computer working, and that they can stop considering the fast-to-compute universes.) Suppose you observe that quantum computers don't work. What does that mean in your formulation? Does it mean that you have decided to care about a certain kind of universe? Why should this fact change what you care about? No it doesn't change what you care about, it only changes what universes you can affect, and by extension which ones you can no longer affect and don't have to worry about anymore. So the point of making observations (and remembering them) is to minimize the measure of universes you will affect and have to consider when you choose a course of action.
