Observer-Moment Measure from Universe Measure
Hal Finney
fundamental: observer-moments or universes? I would say, with more
thought, that observer-moments are more fundamental in terms of explaining
the subjective appearance of what we see, and what we can expect.
An observer-moment is really all we have as our primary experience of
the world. The world around us may be fake; we may be in the Matrix or
a brain in a vat. Even our memories may be fake. But the fact that we
are having particular experiences at a particular moment cannot be faked.
But the universe is fundamental, in my view, in terms of the ontology,
the physical reality of the world. Universes create and contain observers
who experience observer-moments. This is the Schmidhuber/Tegmark model.
(I think Bruno Marchal may invert this relationship.)
In terms of measure, Schmidhuber (and possibly Tegmark) provides a means
to estimate the measure of a universe. Consider the fraction of all bit
strings that create that universe as its measure. In practice this is
roughly 1/2^n where n is the size of the shortest program that outputs
that universe. The Tegmark model may allow for similar reasoning,
applied to mathematical structures rather than computer programs.
Now, how to get from universe measure to observer-moment (OM) measure?
This is what I want to write about.
First, the measure of an OM should be the sum of contributions from
each of the universes that instantiate that OM. Generally there are
many possible universes that may create or contain a particular OM.
Some are variants of our own, where things are different that we have
not yet observed. For example, a universe which is like ours except
for some minor change in a galaxy billions of light years away could
contain a copy of us experiencing the same OMs. Even bigger changes
may not matter; for example if you flip a coin but haven't yet looked
at the result, this may not change your OM. Then there are even more
drastic universes, like The Matrix where we are living in a simulation
created in some kind of future or alien world.
Perhaps the most extreme case is a "universe" which only creates that OM.
Think of it as a universe which only exists for a brief moment and
which only contains a brain, or a computer or some such system, which
contains the state associated with that OM. This is the "brain in a
vat" model taken to the most extreme, where there isn't anything else,
and there isn't even a vat, there is just a brain. We would hope,
if our multiverse models are going to amount to anything, that such
universes would only contribute a small measure to each of our OMs.
Otherwise the AUH can't explain what we see.
But all of these universes contribute to the measure of our OMs.
We are living in all of them. The measure of the OM is the sum of the
contribution from each universe.
However, and here is the key point, the contribution to an OM from a
universe cannot just be taken as equal to the measure of that universe.
Otherwise we reach some paradoxical conclusions. For one thing,
a universe may instantiate a particular OM more than once. What do
we do in that case? For another, intuitively it might seem that the
contribution of a universe to an OM should depend to some extent on how
much of the universe's resources are devoted to that OM. An enormous
universe which managed to instantiate a particular OM in some little
corner might be said to contribute less of its measure to that OM than
if a smaller universe instantiates the same OM.
The most extreme case is a trivial universe (equivalently, a program,
in Schmidhuber terms) which simply counts. It outputs 1, 2, 3, 4, ...
forever. This is a small program and has large measure. At some point
it will output a number corresponding to any given OM. Should we count
the entire measure of this small program (one of the smallest programs
that can exist) to this OM? If so, it will seem that for every OM we
should assume that we exist as part of such a counting program, which
is another variant on the brain-in-a-vat scenario. This destroys the
AUH as a predictive model.
Years ago Wei Dai on this list suggested a better approach. He proposed
a formula for determining how much of a universe's measure contributes to
an OM that it instantiates. It is very specific and also illustrates
some problems in the rather loose discussion so far. For example,
what does it really mean to instantiate an OM? How would we know if a
universe is really instantiating a particular OM? Aren't there fuzzy
cases where a universe is only "sort of" instantiating one? What about
the longstanding problem that you can look at the atomic vibrations in
a crystal, select a subset of them to pay attention to, and have that
pattern match the pattern of any given OM? Does this mean that every
crystal instantiates every OM? (Hans Moravec sometimes seems to say yes!)
To apply Wei's method, first we need to get serious about what is an OM.
We need a formal model and description of a particular OM. Consider, for
example, someone's brain when he is having a particular experience. He is
eating chocolate ice cream while listening to Beethoven's 5th symphony,
on his 30th birthday. Imagine that we could scan his brain with advanced
technology and record his neural activity. Imagine further that with the
aid of an advanced brain model we are able to prune out the unnecessary
information and distill this to the essence of the experience. We come
up with a pattern that represents that observer moment. Any system which
instantiates that pattern genuinely creates an experience of that observer
moment. This pattern is something that can be specified, recorded and
written down in some form. It probably involves a huge volume of data.
So, now that we have a handle on what a particular OM is, we can more
reasonably ask whether a universe instantiates it. It comes down to
whether it produces and contains that particular pattern. But this may
not be such an easy question. It could be that the "raw" output format of
a universe program does not lend itself to seeing larger scale patterns.
For example, in our own universe, the raw output would probably be at
the level of the Planck scale, far, far smaller than an atomic nucleus.
At that level, even a single brain neuron would be the size of a galaxy.
And the time for enough neural firings to occur to make up a noticeable
conscious experience would be like the entire age of the universe.
It will take considerable interpretation of the raw output of our
universe's program to detect the faint traces of an observer moment.
And as noted above, an over-aggressive attempt to hunt out observer
moments will find false positives, random patterns which, if we are
selective enough, happen to match what we are looking for.
Wei proposed to solve both of these problems by introducing an
interpretation program. It would be take as its input, the output of the
universe-creation program. It would then output the observer moment in
whatever formal specification format we had decided on (the exact format
will not be significant).
So how would this program work, in the case of our universe? It would
have encoded in it the location in space and time of the brain which
was experiencing the OM. It would know the size of the brain and the
spatial distribution of its neurons. And it would know the faint traces
and changes at the Planck scale that would correspond to neural firings
or pauses. Based on this information, which is encoded into the program,
it would run and output the results. And that output would then match
the formal encoding of the OM.
Now, Wei applies the same kind of reasoning that we do for the measure
of the Schmidhuber ensemble itself. He proposes that the size of the
interpretation program should determine how much of the universe's measure
contributes to the OM. If the interpretation program is relatively small,
that is evidence that the universe is making a strong contribution to
the OM. But if the interpretation program is huge, then we would say
that little of the universe's measure should go into the OM.
In the most extreme case, the interpretation program could just encode the
OM within itself, ignore the universe state and output that data pattern.
In effect that is what would have to be done in order to find an OM
within a crystal as described above. You'd have to have the whole OM
state in the program since the crystal doesn't actually have any real
relationship to the OM. But that would be an enormous interpretation
program, which would deliver only a trivial measure.
For a universe like our own, the hope and expectation is that the
interpretation program will be relatively small. Such a program takes
the entire universe as input and outputs a particular OM. I did some
back of the envelope calculations and you will probably be amazed that
I estimate that such a program could be less than 1000 bits in size.
(This is assuming the universe is roughly as big as what is visible, and
neglecting the MWI.) Compared to the information in an OM, which I can't
even guess but will surely be at least gigabytes, this is insignificant.
Therefore we do have strong grounds to say that the universe which
appears real is in fact making a major contribution to our OMs.
To be specific, Wei's idea was to count the measure of a universe's
contribution to an OM as 1/2^(n+m), where n is the size of the program
that creates the universe, and m is the size of the interpretation
program that reads the output of the first program, and outputs the OM
specification from that. In effect, you can think of the two programs
together as a single program which outputs the formal spec of the OM,
and ask what are the shortest ways to do that. In this way you can
actually calculate the measure of an OM directly without even looking at
the intermediate step of calculating a universe. But I prefer thinking of
the two step method as it gives us a handle on such concepts as whether
we are living in the Matrix or as a brain in a vat.
Overall I think this is a very attractive formulation. It's quantitative,
and it gives the intuitively right answer for many cases. The counting
program contributes effectively no measure, because the only way we can
find an OM is by encoding the whole thing in the interpretation program.
And as another example, if there are multiple OMs instantiated by a
particular universe, that will allow the interpretation program to be
smaller because less information is needed to localize an OM. It also
implies that small universes will devote more of their measure to OMs
that they instantiate than large ones, which basically makes sense.
There are a few unintuitive consequences, though, such as that large
instantiations of OMs will have more measure than small ones, and likewise
slow ones will have more measure than fast ones. This is because in each
case the interpretation program can be smaller if it is easier to find the
OM in the vastness of a universe, and the slower and bigger an OM is the
easier it is to find. I am inclined to tentatively accept these results.
It does imply that the extreme future vision of some transhumanists,
to upload themselves to super-fast, super-small computers, may greatly
reduce their measure, which would mean that it would be like taking a
large chance of dying.
There is one big problem with the approach, though, which I have not yet
solved. I wrote above that a very short program could localize a given OM
within our universe. It only takes ~300 bits to locate a brain (i.e. a
brain-sized piece of space)! However this neglects the MWI. If we take
as our universe-model a world governed by the MWI, it is exponentially
larger than what we see as the visible universe. Every decoherence-time,
the universe splits. That's like picoseconds, or nanoseconds at best.
The number of splittings since the universe was created is vast, and
the size of the universe is like 2 (or more!) to that power.
Providing the information to localize a particular OM within the vastness
of a universe governed by the MWI appears to be truly intractable.
Granted, we don't necessarily have to narrow it down to an exact branch,
but unless there are tremendous amounts of de facto convergent evolution
after splits, it seems to me that the percentage of quantum space-time
occupied by a given OM is far smaller than the 1/2^1000 I would estimate
in a non-MWI universe. It's more like 1/2^2^100. At that rate the
interpretation program to find an OM would be much *bigger* than the one
that just hard-codes the OM itself. In short, it would appear that an MWI
universe cannot contribute significant measure to an OM, under this model.
That's a serious problem.
So there are a couple of possible solutions to this problem. One is to
reject the MWI on these grounds. That's not too attractive; this line of
argument is awfully speculative for such a conclusion. Also, creating a
program for a non-MWI universe requires a random number generator, which
is an ugly kludge and implies that quantum randomness is algorithmic
rather than true, a bizarre result. A more hopeful possibility is that
there will turn out to be structure in the MWI phase space that will
allow us to localize OM's much more easily than the brute force method
I assumed above. I have only the barest speculations about how that
might work, to which I need to give more thought.
But even with this problem, I think the overall formulation is the
best I have seen in terms of grappling with the reality of a multiverse
and addressing the issue of where we as observers fit into the greater
structure. It provides a quantitative and approximable measure which
allows us to calculate, in principle, how much of our reality is as it
appears and how much is an illusion. It answers questions like whether
copies contribute to measure. And it provides some interesting and
surprising predictions about how various changes to the substrate
of intelligence (uploading to computers, etc.) may change measure.
In general I think Wei Dai's approach is the best foundation for
understanding the place of observers within the multiverse.
Hal Finney
Lee Corbin
some very useful explanations. But I would like help in clarifying
even the first several paragraphs, in order to maximize my
investment in the remainder.
But first a few comments; these may be premature, but if so,
the comments should be ignored.
> Some time back Lee Corbin posed the question of which was more
> fundamental: observer-moments or universes? I would say, with more
> thought, that observer-moments are more fundamental in terms of explaining
> the subjective appearance of what we see, and what we can expect.
But in general, what do observer-moments explain? Or what does the
hypothesis concerning them explain? I just don't get a good feel
that there are any "higher level" phenomena which might be reduced
to observer-moments (I am still very skeptical that all of physics
or math or something could be reduced to them---but if that is
what is meant, I stand corrected). Rather, it always seems like
a number of (other) people are trying to explain observer-moments
as arising from the activity of a Universal Dovetailer, or a
Platonic ensemble of bit strings, or something.
> An observer-moment is really all we have as our primary experience of
> the world. The world around us may be fake; we may be in the Matrix or
> a brain in a vat. Even our memories may be fake. But the fact that we
> are having particular experiences at a particular moment cannot be faked.
Nothing could be truer.
> But the universe is fundamental, in my view, in terms of the ontology,
> the physical reality of the world. Universes create and contain observers
> who experience observer-moments. This is the Schmidhuber/Tegmark model...
Yes, but now arises my need for clarification:
> In terms of measure, Schmidhuber (and possibly Tegmark) provides a means
> to estimate the measure of a universe. Consider the fraction of all bit
> strings that create that universe as its measure.
I think that perhaps I know exactly what is meant; but I'm unwilling
to take the chance. Let's say that we have a universe U, and now we
want to find its measure (its share of the mega-multi-Everything
resources). So, as you write, we consider all the bit strings
that create U. Let's say for concreteness that only five bit strings
"really exist" in some deep sense:
010101110100101010011101010110001010110101...
101101110100010101111111001011010110100101...
001010100111010100111010001001000010101111...
11011101000100100001010l110110000101010011...
110010111010101110100010000101001010011111...
and then it just so happens that only 2 out of these five actually
make the universe U manifest. That is, in the innards of 2 of these,
one finds all the structures that U contains. Am I following so far?
> In practice this is roughly 1/2^n where n is the size of the
> shortest program that outputs that universe.
So each of these universes (each of the five, in my toy example)
has a certain Kolmogorov complexity? Each of the five can be
output by some program? But is that program infinite or finite?
Argument for finite: normally we want to speak of *short* programs
and so that seems to indicate the program has a limited size.
Argument for infinite: dramatically *few* bit strings that are
infinite in length have just a finite amount of information.
Our infinite level-one Tegmark universe, for example, probably
is tiled by Hubble volumes in a non-repeating irregular way so
that no program could output it.
Thanks,
Lee
> The Tegmark model may allow for similar reasoning,
> applied to mathematical structures rather than computer programs.
>
> Now, how to get from universe measure to observer-moment (OM) measure?
> This is what I want to write about....
Hal Finney
> But in general, what do observer-moments explain? Or what does the
> hypothesis concerning them explain? I just don't get a good feel
> that there are any "higher level" phenomena which might be reduced
> to observer-moments (I am still very skeptical that all of physics
> or math or something could be reduced to them---but if that is
> what is meant, I stand corrected). Rather, it always seems like
> a number of (other) people are trying to explain observer-moments
> as arising from the activity of a Universal Dovetailer, or a
> Platonic ensemble of bit strings, or something.
I would say that observer-moments are what need explaining, rather than
things that do the explaining. Or you could say that in a sense they
"explain" our experiences, although I think of them more as *being*
our experiences, moment by moment. As we agreed:
> > An observer-moment is really all we have as our primary experience of
> > the world. The world around us may be fake; we may be in the Matrix or
> > a brain in a vat. Even our memories may be fake. But the fact that we
> > are having particular experiences at a particular moment cannot be faked.
>
> Nothing could be truer.
That is the sense in which I say that observer-moments are primary;
they are the most fundamental experience we have of the world.
Everything else is only a theory which is built upon the raw existence
of observer-moments.
> > In terms of measure, Schmidhuber (and possibly Tegmark) provides a means
> > to estimate the measure of a universe. Consider the fraction of all bit
> > strings that create that universe as its measure.
>
> I think that perhaps I know exactly what is meant; but I'm unwilling
> to take the chance. Let's say that we have a universe U, and now we
> want to find its measure (its share of the mega-multi-Everything
> resources). So, as you write, we consider all the bit strings
> that create U. Let's say for concreteness that only five bit strings
> "really exist" in some deep sense:
>
> 010101110100101010011101010110001010110101...
> 101101110100010101111111001011010110100101...
> 001010100111010100111010001001000010101111...
> 11011101000100100001010l110110000101010011...
> 110010111010101110100010000101001010011111...
>
> and then it just so happens that only 2 out of these five actually
> make the universe U manifest. That is, in the innards of 2 of these,
> one finds all the structures that U contains. Am I following so far?
In the Schmidhuber picture, it's not that the strings contain U,
rather the strings are programs which when run on some UTM produce
U as the output. This corresponds to the concept you mention below,
the Kolmogorov complexity. KC is based on the length of programs that
output the objects (strings, or universes, or any other information
based entity). Measure as I am using it is 1/2^KC where KC is the
Kolmogorov complexity of an object.
> > In practice this is roughly 1/2^n where n is the size of the
> > shortest program that outputs that universe.
>
> So each of these universes (each of the five, in my toy example)
> has a certain Kolmogorov complexity? Each of the five can be
> output by some program?
Yes, I think this is equivalent to my conception, although when I spoke
of bit strings I was thinking of the inputs to the UTM while you are
talking about the outputs. But the basic idea is the same.
> But is that program infinite or finite?
>
> Argument for finite: normally we want to speak of *short* programs
> and so that seems to indicate the program has a limited size.
> Argument for infinite: dramatically *few* bit strings that are
> infinite in length have just a finite amount of information.
> Our infinite level-one Tegmark universe, for example, probably
> is tiled by Hubble volumes in a non-repeating irregular way so
> that no program could output it.
Now I think we are both talking about the inputs to the UTM. Should
we consider infinite length inputs?
I don't think it is necessary, for three reasons. First, due to the
way TM's work, in practice a random tape will only have some specific
number of input bits that ever get used. The chance of an infinite
number of bits being used is zero. Second, you could construct tapes
which used an infinite number of bits, but they would be of measure zero
and hence would make no detectable contribution to the actual numeric
predictions of the theory. Third, there are variants on UTMs which
only accept self-delimiting input tapes that have, in effect, lengths
that are easily determined. Greg Chaitin's work focuses on the use of
self-delimiting programs to achieve a more precise picture of algorithmic
complexity (which is equivalent to KC). The lengths of such programs
are inherently finite. These UTMs are equivalent to all others.
Note that you could, I think, create an infinite universe even using a
finite tape. I believe that our universe, even if infinite in Tegmark's
level-one sense, could be output by a finite program, at least in an
MWI model. The amount of information in such a universe is roughly zero;
all of the order that we see around us is due to splitting of universes.
See Tegmark's paper, http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/nihilo.html .
Hal
Bruno Marchal
Le 05-juin-05, à 05:53, Hal Finney a écrit :
> Lee Corbin writes:
>> But in general, what do observer-moments explain? Or what does the
>> hypothesis concerning them explain? I just don't get a good feel
>> that there are any "higher level" phenomena which might be reduced
>> to observer-moments (I am still very skeptical that all of physics
>> or math or something could be reduced to them---but if that is
>> what is meant, I stand corrected). Rather, it always seems like
>> a number of (other) people are trying to explain observer-moments
>> as arising from the activity of a Universal Dovetailer, or a
>> Platonic ensemble of bit strings, or something.
>
> I would say that observer-moments are what need explaining, rather than
> things that do the explaining. Or you could say that in a sense they
> "explain" our experiences, although I think of them more as *being*
> our experiences, moment by moment. As we agreed:
>
>>> An observer-moment is really all we have as our primary experience of
>>> the world. The world around us may be fake; we may be in the Matrix
>>> or
>>> a brain in a vat. Even our memories may be fake. But the fact that
>>> we
>>> are having particular experiences at a particular moment cannot be
>>> faked.
>>
>> Nothing could be truer.
All right. So you both (Hal Finney and Lee Corbin) with the first axiom
defining a knower. It is the incorrigibility axiom: let us write Cp for
"to know p" (or to be aware of p, or to be conscious of p).
incorrigibility can be stated by:
Cp -> p
Meaning that for any proposition p we have that Cp -> p is true.
The implication arrow "->" is just the classical implication. It has
nothing to do with notions of causality, or deduction or whatever ...
We can define A -> B by ((not A) or B) or (not (A and not B)) as this
can be verified by truth-table. I recall:
A -> B
1 1 1
1 0 0
0 1 1
0 1 0
OK?
>
> That is the sense in which I say that observer-moments are primary;
> they are the most fundamental experience we have of the world.
> Everything else is only a theory which is built upon the raw existence
> of observer-moments.
All right. I guess you agree that this is compatible with the fact that
such a theory, built upon the raw existence of OMs, could infer the
existence of more primitive objects, could explain how the "raw
existence of OM" emerges from those more primitive objects and explain
also how the theory of those more primitive objects emerge from the
(only apparently raw, now) observer moments. All this without being
circular. OK?
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Saibal Mitra
----- Original Message -----
From: ""Hal Finney"" <h...@finney.org>
To: <everyth...@eskimo.com>
Sent: Friday, June 03, 2005 08:10 PM
Subject: Observer-Moment Measure from Universe Measure
> To apply Wei's method, first we need to get serious about what is an OM.
> We need a formal model and description of a particular OM. Consider, for
> example, someone's brain when he is having a particular experience. He is
> eating chocolate ice cream while listening to Beethoven's 5th symphony,
> on his 30th birthday. Imagine that we could scan his brain with advanced
> technology and record his neural activity. Imagine further that with the
> aid of an advanced brain model we are able to prune out the unnecessary
> information and distill this to the essence of the experience. We come
> up with a pattern that represents that observer moment. Any system which
> instantiates that pattern genuinely creates an experience of that observer
> moment. This pattern is something that can be specified, recorded and
> written down in some form. It probably involves a huge volume of data.
>
> So, now that we have a handle on what a particular OM is, we can more
> reasonably ask whether a universe instantiates it.
Wouldn't it be better to think of OMs as programs just like we think of
universes? If you only look at patterns then you get the problem which you
later mention like crystals that can represent an OM of a person etc. The
patterns one is looking for should be capable of doing computations....
If I define OMs as a programs (in a particular computational state), then
that is the same as saying that OMs are universes in particular states. One
can then argue that these universes are very complex and have high measures
and are thus likely to be found embedded in simple, low measure, universes.
Then one can also address the problem of what qualia actually are. They are
'events' that occur in an OM's universe.
In case of persons one can think of the neural network formed by the brain.
The events that take place in the universe defined by the neural network are
the qualia we experience. So, I think that Wei's interpretation program has
to do more than just spot certain patterns localized in time.
Similarly if I simulate the solar system on a pc, then this defines a
universe in which an event could be that jupiter is at a certain position at
a certain time. To 'see' this in terms of the electrons moving through the
transistors one has to first 'see' the program. Seeing the program requires
one to study the way the object interacts with its environment which means
that you have to take it out of the universe and study how it behaves when
you expose it to alternative inputs.
Saibal
Stephen Paul King
----- Original Message -----
From: "Bruno Marchal" <mar...@ulb.ac.be>
To: ""Hal Finney"" <h...@finney.org>
Cc: <everyth...@eskimo.com>
Sent: Sunday, June 05, 2005 3:02 AM
Subject: Re: Observer-Moment Measure from Universe Measure
>
> Le 05-juin-05, à 05:53, Hal Finney a écrit :
snip
>> That is the sense in which I say that observer-moments are primary;
>> they are the most fundamental experience we have of the world.
>> Everything else is only a theory which is built upon the raw existence
>> of observer-moments.
> [BM]
> All right. I guess you agree that this is compatible with the fact that
> such a theory, built upon the raw existence of OMs, could infer the
> existence of more primitive objects, could explain how the "raw existence
> of OM" emerges from those more primitive objects and explain also how the
> theory of those more primitive objects emerge from the (only apparently
> raw, now) observer moments. All this without being circular. OK?
>
Could you explain to us how it is necessary that sets of Observer
Moments must be "well founded" such that properties like "such a theory,
built upon the raw existence of OMs, could infer the existence of more
primitive objects" and "All this without being circular."?
Why do we insist on having an indivisible Atom from which All is
constructable? Is it not possible that the distinctions (read properties!)
between one OM and another are merely those that they do not have in common?
Instead of the idea of an Atom floating in the Void, let us consider the
idea of Indra's Net:
http://www.heartspace.org/misc/IndraNet.html
***
FAR AWAY IN THE HEAVENLY ABODE OF THE GREAT GOD INDRA, THERE IS A WONDERFUL
NET WHICH HAS BEEN HUNG BY SOME CUNNING ARTIFICER IN SUCH A MANNER THAT IT
STRETCHES OUT INDEFINITELY IN ALL DIRECTIONS. IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE
EXTRAVAGANT TASTES OF DEITIES, THE ARTIFICER HAS HUNG A SINGLE GLITTERING
JEWEL AT THE NET'S EVERY NODE, AND SINCE THE NET ITSELF IS INFINITE IN
DIMENSION, THE JEWELS ARE INFINITE IN NUMBER. THERE HANG THE JEWELS,
GLITTERING LIKE STARS OF THE FIRST MAGNITUDE, A WONDERFUL SIGHT TO BEHOLD.
IF WE NOW ARBITRARILY SELECT ONE OF THESE JEWELS FOR INSPECTION AND LOOK
CLOSELY AT IT, WE WILL DISCOVER THAT IN ITS POLISHED SURFACE THERE ARE
REFLECTED ALL THE OTHER JEWELS IN THE NET, INFINITE IN NUMBER. NOT ONLY
THAT, BUT EACH OF THE JEWELS REFLECTED IN THIS ONE JEWEL IS ALSO REFLECTING
ALL THE OTHER JEWELS, SO THAT THE PROCESS OF REFLECTION IS INFINITE
THE AVATAMSAKA SUTRA
FRANCIS H. COOK: HUA-YEN BUDDHISM : THE JEWEL NET OF INDRA 1977
***
I am suggesting that these "jewels" give us an excellent way to think of
OMs. If we are to allow for a value K {ranging from 0 to 1} to represent the
degree to which one "jewel" "reflects" or "is similar to" or "implies", it
seems that we get a very neat way to span a whole lot of logics and math
with a simple picture. And, to top it off, we have a way to deal with
infinite regress and circularity without paradox. (BTW, this is what
Non-Well founded set theory is trying to explain!)
Stephen
PS, for more info on Indra''s net see:
http://ccbs.ntu.edu.tw/FULLTEXT/JR-PHIL/ew25326.htm
and on its relation to NWF sets:
http://dialog.net:85/homepage/autobook.5/refautol.pdf
Lee Corbin
> Lee Corbin writes:
> > But in general, what do observer-moments explain? Or what does the
> > hypothesis concerning them explain? I just don't get a good feel
> > that there are any "higher level" phenomena which might be reduced
> > to observer-moments (I am still very skeptical that all of physics
> > or math or something could be reduced to them...
>
> [Yes] I would say that observer-moments are what need explaining, rather than
> things that do the explaining. Or you could say that in a sense they
> "explain" our experiences, although I think of them more as *being*
> our experiences, moment by moment. As we agreed:
>
> > > An observer-moment is really all we have as our primary experience of
> > > the world. The world around us may be fake; we may be in the Matrix or
> > > a brain in a vat. Even our memories may be fake. But the fact that we
> > > are having particular experiences at a particular moment cannot be faked.
> >
> > Nothing could be truer.
But, alas, I now contend, almost totally irrelevant! True yet irrelevant!
> That is the sense in which I say that observer-moments are primary;
> they are the most fundamental experience we have of the world.
> Everything else is only a theory which is built upon the raw existence
> of observer-moments.
I cannot help but vent here.
<VENT>
Pan-critical rationalism is very critical of the whole idea of
taking *anything* as "fundamental", as is well-known.
The whole quest for trying to find that which is "fundamental"
is deeply misguided, I submit. PCR takes absolutely nothing as
fundamental; it even, as is also well-known, invites you to
start anywhere with your conjectures.
What science (or all sensible thinking) strives to do is to
*reduce* one phenomenon to another as a means of providing for
(i) explanations (ii) predictions. Each is more important
than the other.
Giving into the urge to found things on some basis, the ancient
Cartesian rationalistic program, is nothing more than Euclid-envy.
A horrific quest for *certainty*, which is known to be impossible
and---perhaps if all our epistemologies were better---would be
an obvious wild-goose chase.
>From Descartes ("all that is certain is that I think therefore
I am") to Ayn Rand ("ethics and everything else can be derived
starting from A is A), I contend that this misguided quest has
caused no end of trouble and nonsense.
Does it really matter *what* is primary? I think not. When
you write "everything else is a theory built on OMs" I want
to scream. Nothing is built! Fie on rationalism! Fie on
fundamentalism!
> Everything else is only a theory which is built
> upon the raw existence of observer-moments.
No, no, no!
Anytime we have an urge to "start somewhere", or to regard X as
more basic than Y, danger flags should go up. Now again, we
should cheerfully reduce Y to X, and Z to Y, when we can, because
this helps us with (1) and (2), but we shouldn't even be troubled
in the slightest if we also end up reducing X to Z! No big deal!
Circular explanations are probably in the end even better than
ones that aren't circular! (Example: a dictionary defines all
the words in it.)
The only purposes when trying to achieve understanding
are, again, (1) explanation and (2) prediction.
</VENT>
Lee
Lee Corbin
> All right. So you both (Hal Finney and Lee Corbin) with the first axiom
Arghh! My new revelation says that axioms are fine if
you are doing math. But some of us are doing something
here that is entirely separate: philosophy. I love math;
it is my hobby. But axioms and all that shit are not
pertinent to my quests! Good luck with yours! That
may be the reason I can't read any of your papers?
> defining a knower. It is the incorrigibility axiom: let us write Cp for
more about "defining" and "axioms" ARGH!
> [Hal writes]
> > That is the sense in which I say that observer-moments are primary;
> > they are the most fundamental experience we have of the world.
> > Everything else is only a theory which is built upon the raw existence
> > of observer-moments.
>
> All right. I guess you agree that this is compatible with the fact that
> such a theory, built upon the raw existence of OMs, could infer the
> existence of more primitive objects, could explain how the "raw
> existence of OM" emerges from those more primitive objects and explain
> also how the theory of those more primitive objects emerge from the
> (only apparently raw, now) observer moments. All this without being
> circular. OK?
"Built"? "Emerge"? Bah, humbug.
As for circular, too bad your theories aren't circular! They'd
explain more.
Lee
Russell Standish
list, and indeed some of his postings influenced my "Why Occam's
Razor" paper. However, I do not recall his suggestions as being as
detailed as what you describe here. Do you have a reference to where
this might be written up? I'm also intrigued by the possibility of
demonstrating that transhumanist observer moments would have
substantially less measure than human observer moments. Such a result
would be a transhumanist counter to the Doomsday argument of course.
Cheers
On Fri, Jun 03, 2005 at 11:10:15AM -0700, "Hal Finney" wrote:
...
--
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Hal Finney
> I remembered Wei Dai posting on this topic in the early days of this
> list, and indeed some of his postings influenced my "Why Occam's
> Razor" paper. However, I do not recall his suggestions as being as
> detailed as what you describe here. Do you have a reference to where
> this might be written up? I'm also intrigued by the possibility of
> demonstrating that transhumanist observer moments would have
> substantially less measure than human observer moments. Such a result
> would be a transhumanist counter to the Doomsday argument of course.
Well, I tend to be a lot more long-winded than Wei. He did not write up
the idea formally but it was just something he proposed in the context
of one of our discussions on the list. I don't know if he even believes
in it now.
He proposed it in the context the thread on "consciousness based on
information or computation?" in January 1999, specifically
http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/m325.html , which I will take
the liberty of quoting here:
Wei Dai wrote:
: Let me be more specific and precise about my proposal. I propose that the
: measure of a conscious experience is related to the measure of the
: associated state information, and take this measure to be the universal a
: priori distribution.
:
: The universal a priori probability of a string is inversely related to the
: length of the shortest program that outputs that string (the distribution
: actually takes into account all programs, but the shortest ones contribute
: most to the distribution). Now take an AI running on some computer, and
: consider its state at some given time. The shortest program (P1) that
: produces this state as output probably consists of two parts. The first
: part of the program simulates the physical universe (which let's say is a
: newtonian universe) which contains the computer running the AI. The second
: part of the program extracts the AI's state from this simulation.
:
: Now if the *memory* elements containing the AI's state were doubled in
: size, that should allow the second part of the program to be shorter,
: since it would take less information to "find" the AI's state in the
: wavefunction simulation. The smaller program size implies a larger measure
: of the state.
:
: If the AI were simultaneously running on two computers, there would be two
: shortest programs that produce the state as output (they would be
: identical in the simulation part but slightly different in the extraction
: part), and these two programs together would make twice as much
: contribution to the universal a priori distribution as P1, and again the
: measure of the state would be increased.
This came out of a discussion in which I claimed it was obvious
that the size of an implementation should not matter, with regard to
its contribution to measure, and from this I concluded via a thought
experiment that the number of copies shouldn't matter(!), which causes
some problems. Wei then challenged this assumption that "size doesn't
matter" and followed up with this detailed proposal, which I eventually
came to like very much. The part about speed also mattering was my own
addition, but it is a pretty obvious corollary as speed is just a matter
of "size in time".
Hal Finney
Stathis Papaioannou
>There are a few unintuitive consequences, though, such as that large
>instantiations of OMs will have more measure than small ones, and likewise
>slow ones will have more measure than fast ones. This is because in each
>case the interpretation program can be smaller if it is easier to find the
>OM in the vastness of a universe, and the slower and bigger an OM is the
>easier it is to find. I am inclined to tentatively accept these results.
>It does imply that the extreme future vision of some transhumanists,
>to upload themselves to super-fast, super-small computers, may greatly
>reduce their measure, which would mean that it would be like taking a
>large chance of dying.
Could someone please explain what will happen to the hapless transhumanists
in their computer when their measure falls to alarmingly low levels? Will
they develop severe headaches, turn transparent like ghosts, or what?
--Stathis Papaioannou
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Bruno Marchal
Le 05-juin-05, à 13:21, Brent Meeker a écrit :
>
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Bruno Marchal [mailto:mar...@ulb.ac.be]
>> Sent: Sunday, June 05, 2005 7:02 AM
>> To: "Hal Finney"
>> Cc: everyth...@eskimo.com
>> Subject: Re: Observer-Moment Measure from Universe Measure
>>
>>
>>
>> Le 05-juin-05, à 05:53, Hal Finney a écrit :
>>
>>> Lee Corbin writes:
>>>> But in general, what do observer-moments explain? Or what does the
>>>> hypothesis concerning them explain? I just don't get a good feel
>>>> that there are any "higher level" phenomena which might be reduced
>>>> to observer-moments (I am still very skeptical that all of physics
>>>> or math or something could be reduced to them---but if that is
>>>> what is meant, I stand corrected). Rather, it always seems like
>>>> a number of (other) people are trying to explain observer-moments
>>>> as arising from the activity of a Universal Dovetailer, or a
>>>> Platonic ensemble of bit strings, or something.
>>>
>>> I would say that observer-moments are what need explaining, rather
>>> than
>>> things that do the explaining. Or you could say that in a sense they
>>> "explain" our experiences, although I think of them more as *being*
>>> our experiences, moment by moment. As we agreed:
>>>
>>>>> An observer-moment is really all we have as our primary experience
>>>>> of
>>>>> the world. The world around us may be fake; we may be in the
>>>>> Matrix
>>>>> or
>>>>> a brain in a vat. Even our memories may be fake. But the fact
>>>>> that
>>>>> we
>>>>> are having particular experiences at a particular moment cannot be
>>>>> faked.
>>>>
>>>> Nothing could be truer.
>>
>>
>>
>> All right. So you both (Hal Finney and Lee Corbin) with the first
>> axiom
>> defining a knower. It is the incorrigibility axiom: let us write Cp
>> for
>> "to know p" (or to be aware of p, or to be conscious of p).
>> incorrigibility can be stated by:
>>
>> Cp -> p
>>
>> Meaning that for any proposition p we have that Cp -> p is true.
>> The implication arrow "->" is just the classical implication. It has
>> nothing to do with notions of causality, or deduction or whatever ...
>> We can define A -> B by ((not A) or B) or (not (A and not B)) as this
>> can be verified by truth-table. I recall:
>>
>> A -> B
>> 1 1 1
>> 1 0 0
>> 0 1 1
>> 0 1 0
>>
>> OK?
>
> No. To be conscious of p, where p is some proposition, doesn't imply
> that p is
> true - one is often mistaken.
You are right. (i *was* supposing p true!)
> It seems to me that the incorrigibility of
> experience is just CCp->Cp, i.e. propositions that you seem to
> perceive "p" may
> be incorrigble. Cp->p only works where p isimplicitly is of the form
> Cq.
OK, but this is Loeb theorem and I will use the B instead of C.
I continue to accept Cp -> p for standard knowledge. We don't say say
"John knew that (a+b)^2 = a^2 + b^2, but he was false" we say ""John
believed that (a+b)^2 = a^2 + b^2, but he was false" . By definition we
cannot know something false. It is the standard definition. But you are
right I should not have used the term "conscious" nor "aware" here!
Thanks for the correction,
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Bruno Marchal
Le 05-juin-05, à 17:30, Stephen Paul King a écrit :
> FAR AWAY IN THE HEAVENLY ABODE OF THE GREAT GOD INDRA, THERE IS A
> WONDERFUL NET WHICH HAS BEEN HUNG BY SOME CUNNING ARTIFICER IN SUCH A
> MANNER THAT IT STRETCHES OUT INDEFINITELY IN ALL DIRECTIONS. IN
> ACCORDANCE WITH THE EXTRAVAGANT TASTES OF DEITIES, THE ARTIFICER HAS
> HUNG A SINGLE GLITTERING JEWEL AT THE NET'S EVERY NODE, AND SINCE THE
> NET ITSELF IS INFINITE IN DIMENSION, THE JEWELS ARE INFINITE IN
> NUMBER. THERE HANG THE JEWELS, GLITTERING LIKE STARS OF THE FIRST
> MAGNITUDE, A WONDERFUL SIGHT TO BEHOLD. IF WE NOW ARBITRARILY SELECT
> ONE OF THESE JEWELS FOR INSPECTION AND LOOK CLOSELY AT IT, WE WILL
> DISCOVER THAT IN ITS POLISHED SURFACE THERE ARE REFLECTED ALL THE
> OTHER JEWELS IN THE NET, INFINITE IN NUMBER. NOT ONLY THAT, BUT EACH
> OF THE JEWELS REFLECTED IN THIS ONE JEWEL IS ALSO REFLECTING ALL THE
> OTHER JEWELS, SO THAT THE PROCESS OF REFLECTION IS INFINITE
> THE AVATAMSAKA SUTRA
> FRANCIS H. COOK: HUA-YEN BUDDHISM : THE JEWEL NET OF INDRA 1977
> ***
> I am suggesting that these "jewels" give us an excellent way to
> think of OMs. If we are to allow for a value K {ranging from 0 to 1}
> to represent the degree to which one "jewel" "reflects" or "is similar
> to" or "implies", it seems that we get a very neat way to span a whole
> lot of logics and math with a simple picture. And, to top it off, we
> have a way to deal with infinite regress and circularity without
> paradox. (BTW, this is what Non-Well founded set theory is trying to
> explain!)
And Lee wrote in the same vain:
> As for circular, too bad your theories aren't circular! They'd
> explain more.
"My theories" are full of circular constructions! But as it is well
known circular construction can lead to paradoxes or even to frank
contradictions. Recursion theory, and then theoretical computer science
have provided founded semantics for most unfounded mathematical
structure appearing in computer science.
Don't forget I postulate comp which does give some importance to the
founded notion of bits and numbers. The magic is that bits and numbers
leads automatically and naturally to non-founded (circular) structure
with respect to universal machine/environment.
This is illustrated by the last post on combinators, which I have
introduced in part as an introduction to computer-theoretical circular
structure. I don't want to use Non-Well-founded set theory (nor any set
theory), nor category theory because the minimum of logic I use is
considered as already too abstruse to many. But those are very
interesting of course.
Note that John Case, one of the master of computer self-reference,
refers to the INDRA NET to introduce its generalization of Kleene fixed
point theorem. My whole approach is based on similar circular
self-reference, but, being programs or sets, mathematicians can use
them only when they have founded model of it. Look at the combinators:
it is only when Dana Scott provide founded models that the work on the
circular combinatory structures explodes in the literature.
Bruno
PS Lee, I will take some time to comment your posts. Thanks for your
patience.
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Hal Finney
> Hal Finney writes:
> >There are a few unintuitive consequences, though, such as that large
> >instantiations of OMs will have more measure than small ones, and likewise
> >slow ones will have more measure than fast ones. This is because in each
> >case the interpretation program can be smaller if it is easier to find the
> >OM in the vastness of a universe, and the slower and bigger an OM is the
> >easier it is to find. I am inclined to tentatively accept these results.
> >It does imply that the extreme future vision of some transhumanists,
> >to upload themselves to super-fast, super-small computers, may greatly
> >reduce their measure, which would mean that it would be like taking a
> >large chance of dying.
>
> Could someone please explain what will happen to the hapless transhumanists
> in their computer when their measure falls to alarmingly low levels? Will
> they develop severe headaches, turn transparent like ghosts, or what?
This is a kind of transformation that hasn't been possible in the world
before, so no normal phenomenon will exactly capture what happens.
To a first approximation, if their measure were reduced by 90%, what
would happen subjectively would be the same as if they took steps that
had a 90% chance of killing them, in this model.
Now, objectively this is different because it would require other people
to deal with their deaths. But subjectively it would be pretty much
the same.
Perhaps a closer approximation could be achieved if they were not only
killed, but somehow everyone else's memory was changed so that no one
remembered them or noticed that they were gone.
Imagine instead the question, what would it be like, subjectively,
to die instantly and without warning? It's a hard question to answer.
But it is related to the question, what would it be it like to have your
measure suddenly reduced? You could imagine your larger before-measure
as being represented by your mind being instantiated as many copies.
Then a certain percentage of those copies are instantly killed. What is
it like subjectively?
To the copies which remain, there is no subjective change. To the
copies which were killed, perhaps it is like nothing subjectively,
because there is no longer any subject there. But it is still a change.
I think a reduction of measure would be like a certain percentage of
my instances being instantly killed. When I imagine what it is like,
I picture myself being one of the unlucky instances. I stop and never
know I stopped, while other copies go on.
The other night I had a strange dream. I came into a room and met someone
whom I came to understand was myself. I was a copy who had been created
a few moments earlier, and he was the original. There was a switch on
the wall which would instantly destroy the copy, and I was supposed to
push it. But I hesitated. My own consciousness would be destroyed.
On the other hand I was supposedly a copy made just moments earlier,
so only a few seconds of memories would be lost, hardly consequential.
Still I had to face that dilemma: what would it feel like to just stop,
instantly?
Nervously, I went ahead and pushed the button, squeezing my eyes shut
and making a kind of mental "flinch" or jerk. To my surprise, I was
still there, and when I opened my eyes, the other person was gone.
It turned out that he was the copy and I was the original.
Imagine facing your copy, perhaps an exact copy whose mind is synchronized
with yours, and seeing a coin flip which will determine which one is
destroyed. Your measure will be halved. In a sense it will have no
subjective effect, your thoughts and memories will be preserved in one
of you. But in another sense you face a 50-50 chance of experiencing that
mysterous effect of instant death. I think it would be scary. Logically,
similar reductions of measure should be viewed in the same light.
Hal Finney
Bruno Marchal
Le 06-juin-05, à 01:40, Brent Meeker a écrit :
> What do you take to be the standard definition of "knows"? Is it "X
> knows Y"
> iff "X believes Y is true" and "Y is true"?
That's the one by Theaetetus.
> Or do you include Gettier's
> amendment, "X knows Y" iff "X believes Y is true" and "Y is true" and
> "There is
> a causal chain between the fact that makes Y true and X's belief that
> Y"?
It could depend of the axiom chosen to describe belief.
For knowability I take the S4 axioms and rules:
1) axioms:
<all classical tautologies>
BX -> X
BX -> BBX
B(X->Y) -> (BX -> BY)
2) Rule:
X X -> Y X
----------- ----- (Modus ponens, necessitation)
Y BX
But in the interview of the Lobian machine I recover the S4 axioms +
Grz, from
defining "knowing X" by "proving X formally and X true" (I apply the
Theaetetus on
formal provability).
I cannot use Gettier's given that I have no notion of causality to
start with. (Recall
I don't have any physical notion to start with).
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Stathis Papaioannou
Hal,
What I think you're describing is akin to the traditional view of personal
identity as something firmly attached to a particular animal, computer or
whatever. The most important insight the observer moment concept offers, to
my mind, is that the observer effectively dies every moment, and the
illusion of an individual persisting through time is created by the
stringing together of appropriately related OM's. I wouldn't even call this
a theory; I think it is true ipso facto.
Consider an observer experiencing a series of conscious moments OM1, OM2,
OM3... etc. Just as OM3 is about to start, he is vapourised by a nuclear
explosion. Assuming for simplicity there are no parallel universes, the
observer has died. What does "dying" mean in this context? It means that his
last conscious moment was OM2, and there will be no more. Notice that
nothing special has "happened" to OM2; it is the same as if he had continued
living, and it is unaffected by what may or may not follow. Death consists
in the absence of successors to OM2. Therefore, provisionally, as each
conscious moment passes, the observer "dies" until or unless there is a
successor.
What counts as a successor to OM2? Normally, it would be OM3, implemented on
the same hardware or wetware as OM2. The important thing about OM3 is not
the physical substrate on which it is implemented, but the fact that it
recognises itself to be a successor to OM2. So if the nuked observer had
teleported himself to safety or uploaded his mind to a computer network
before the nuking, he would suddenly find himself in a different place,
experiencing OM3', which need not be the same as OM3 would have been,
provided it is recognisably a successor to OM2. If the observer had been
less prudent, but by a fantastic stroke of luck OM3'' was implemented on a
computer in the Andromeda galaxy a billion years in the future, OM3'' being
recognisably a successor to OM2 even if different from what OM3 or OM3'
would have been, then again our observer would have survived the disaster.
Now turn to your example. You and an exact copy whose mind is running in
lockstep with yours are awaiting the result of a coin toss. (Actually, you
should not be facing each other if your minds are in lockstep, since then
you would be seeing things differently). Let's say that you are both
experiencing OM2, as above, when the result of the toss is known and instant
death is meted out to one of you. Should you be worried? Well, whether you
are copy 1 or copy 2, once OM2 passes, it has vanished from the present
universe more completely than any nuclear blast could achieve, and
provisionally you are both dead, pending an appropriate successor OM. In
other words, at the end of OM2, you are both in exactly the same position.
What if you, copy 1, are the one who will suffer instant death? Certainly,
this would mean that your brain won't be producing any successor OM's. But
recall the earlier examples: it doesn't make any difference where or how or
with what delay the successor OM is implemented, as long as it is actually
implemented. So when copy 2's brain produces OM3, being the successor to
both yours and his OM2 (because they were the same), you won't notice that
anything at all has gone awry. In fact, you won't have any evidence that the
"instant death" has happened at all, unless you are actually shown copy 1's
dead body. That might be pretty scary, but at least you have survived.
Finally, getting back to the transhumanists in their computer, the same
result applies. If their measure - based on the number of copies in the
multiverse - steadily decreases, they won't notice anything at all as long
as *one* copy remains.
--Stathis Papaioannou
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Johnathan Corgan
> Imagine facing your copy, perhaps an exact copy whose mind is synchronized
> with yours, and seeing a coin flip which will determine which one is
> destroyed. Your measure will be halved. In a sense it will have no
> subjective effect, your thoughts and memories will be preserved in one
> of you. But in another sense you face a 50-50 chance of experiencing that
> mysterous effect of instant death. I think it would be scary. Logically,
> similar reductions of measure should be viewed in the same light.
As I'm sure many on the list are familiar, David Brin's "Kiln People" is
an interesting science fiction treatment of similar issues.
In this story, a technology exists by which one may copy one's "standing
wave" (forgive the cheesy pseudo-terminology) into a specially formed
clay-based body. These duplicates, or "dittos", have a limited (24
hour) lifespan before they self-destruct. Different clay templates are
manufactured to enhance different parts of the mind's functioning, so
one can create dittos that are better at abstract thinking, or that have
more tolerance to menial work, etc.
In this society, people create a variety of dittos on a daily basis to
conduct their business in the world while they themselves avoid risk or
stick to the more pleasant things. The dittos know exactly what to do
as they are the exact personality and memories of the original up to the
point of copying. They have a compulsion to return home prior to their
self-destruction so their memories can be reintegrated with their
original. (It wasn't clear, to me anyway, whether this compulsion was
forced or whether it was the consequence of the dittos understanding
that they would "die" if they didn't make it back to reintegrate.)
Brin's treatment of this scenario is well worth the read; it's like a
novel-length thought experiment. One scene follows the internal
dialogue of the protagonist as he enters the copying machine, and then
the individual internal dialogues of his copies. There is initial
continuity and then a divergence as each copy "discovers" which one he
is and thus what he must do for the day. And of course, each one feels
like he became that particular copy at random.
Some of the same issues about whether one should "care" about one's
copies (and whether the copies should care about the original) are
handled as well. In this story, though, since the dittos reintegrate
their memories, they know they will eventually have the memories of the
other copies, as well as what has happened with the original in the interim.
Neat stuff. There is a lot more along these lines, wrapped in a
suspense/murder/mystery storyline (the protagonist is a detective.) The
last third of the book gets a little dubious, though, but it is a good
read overall nonetheless.
-Johnathan
Hal Finney
> As I'm sure many on the list are familiar, David Brin's "Kiln People" is
> an interesting science fiction treatment of similar issues.
It is an interesting story which helps to make some of our philosophical
thought experiments more concrete. Making copies, destroying them, the
nondeterministic experience of wondering whether you will become the copy
or the original, all are addressed. However I found much to dislike in
the way Brin answers these questions. I wrote a review at
http://www.transhumanism.org/index.php/th/more/285/ . An excerpt:
"I was shocked and disgusted to see that [Brin] presents the golems as
having no human rights whatsoever. They are property, nothing more.
They have to step to the back of the bus, get out of the way of the
white, excuse me, human massas, put up with whatever humans want to do
to them. This shocking recreation of the worst abuses of the slavery
era is presented without much explanation by Brin, or much sensitivity
to the horrific history he is echoing..."
Hal Finney
Russell Standish
> ...but of course explanation is more fundamental than prediction.
>
> Tom Caylor
>
I wouldn't say that! Both of these properties are orthogonal to each
other. Typical scientific theories exist on a tradeoff curve (Pareto
front for those in the know) between explanatory power and predictive
power.
Cheers
Bruno Marchal
I agree with you. Explanation is much more important. It is also much
more difficult to agree on what *is* a good explanation. Prediction
could remain important, at least in principle, to possibly destroy our
favorite explanation, or to put doubt on them. Have you read the book
by René Thom: "prédire n'est pas expliquer"
Bruno
Le 06-juin-05, à 18:40, daddy...@aol.com a écrit :
> ...but of course explanation is more fundamental than prediction.
>
Brent Meeker
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Bruno Marchal [mailto:mar...@ulb.ac.be]
>Sent: Monday, June 06, 2005 12:36 PM
>To: Brent Meeker
>Cc: EverythingList list
>Subject: Re: Observer-Moment Measure from Universe Measure
>
>
>
In that case, how does "true" differ from "provable"? If it is simply a formal
system, with no facts which can make a proposition true by reference, then it
seems that there is no separate notion of "true" apart from "provable".
Brent Meeker
Lee Corbin
or explanation?
Now that I have been self-liberated from fear of circularity,
it's clear that: each is more important than the other!
Lee
P.S. Someone pointed out to me off-list that I was far from the
first to have had this epiphany about circular reasoning:
"However, I think Bruno already has this idea.
"Hence a Reality, yes. But not necessarily a
physical reality. Here is the logical dependence:
NUMBERS -> "MACHINE DREAMS" -> PHYSICAL -> HUMANS -> PHYSICS -> NUMBERS.
--- Bruno Marchal"
Bruno Marchal
Le 07-juin-05, à 00:31, Brent Meeker a écrit :
>> BM:
>> For knowability I take the S4 axioms and rules:
>>
>> 1) axioms:
>>
>> <all classical tautologies>
>>
>> BX -> X
>> BX -> BBX
>> B(X->Y) -> (BX -> BY)
>>
>> 2) Rule:
>>
>> X X -> Y X
>> ----------- ----- (Modus ponens, necessitation)
>> Y BX
>>
>> But in the interview of the Lobian machine I recover the S4 axioms +
>> Grz, from
>> defining "knowing X" by "proving X formally and X true" (I apply the
>> Theaetetus on
>> formal provability).
>>
>> I cannot use Gettier's given that I have no notion of causality to
>> start with. (Recall
>> I don't have any physical notion to start with).
>>
>> Bruno
>
> In that case, how does "true" differ from "provable"? If it is simply
> a formal
> system, with no facts which can make a proposition true by reference,
> then it
> seems that there is no separate notion of "true" apart from "provable".
I know you are honest, so I knew you would ask, and I am very glad
because you are putting your finger on the most utterly important
(admittedly subtle) point which gives sense to the interview of the
lobian machine, and which is really no less than Godel incompleteness
theorem (or better LOB's theorem, see below).
If B represents provability in sound (correct) formal system it is just
plainly true that
BX -> X
In particular if F represents a falsity (your favorite contradiction, P
& NOT P, for instance), then it is again plainly true that
BF -> F
BUT "BF -> F" is equivalent with NOT BF (P -> F has the same truth
table as NOT P).
So BF -> F is NOT BF, and this is a consistency statement: the false is
not provable.
So, given that we are talking about a sound formal system, we know that
BF->F is true, but as a consistency statement, we know also, by Godel's
second incompleteness theorem, that the system cannot prove its own
consistency: BF->F is true but not provable!!!!!!!!
Put in another way BF->F is true, but B(BF->F) is false. In particular
you see that B cannot behave like a knowledge modal operator!!!! In
particular again BF & F is truly equivalent to BF, but the machine
cannot prove that equivalence.
And so what logic does B obeys to?
Given the apparition of a gap between truth and provability we get two
logics, one for what the machine is able to prove about its own B, and
one for what is true about that B.
The first is G, and the second is G*. Note that the machine is sound,
which means all what the machine proves is correct, so that G is
included in G*. But G* is much larger than G. For example G* proves
that the machine is consistent -BF. G* proves that the machine cannot
prove its own consistency -B(-BF). G* prove that BP <-> (BP & P), but
the machine cannot prove it.
So it makes sense to define "knowledge", for the machine, by a new
modal operator Cp (say) defined by Cp = Bp & p. (Theaetetus) It can be
shown that it obeys the S4 axioms, and one more which is the grz
formula (the Grzegorczyk formula) which is rather ugly, it is:
B(B(p -> Bp) -> p)-> p
Perhaps ugly, but it should make Stephen happy, because it introduces
an irreversible temporality in the possible evolution of the machine
knowledge. To show this we should need the Kripke semantics stuff.
But my main point here is that by Godel incompleteness Bp -> p although
always true, is not always provable. LOB theorem says exactly when
Bp->p is provable, it is provable only when p is provable! The machine
M is closed for the rule:
if M proves Bp -> p then M proves p.
M can prove it! M proves B(Bp -> p) -> Bp
And Solovay will prove that this Lob's formula is enough, along with
B(p->q)->(Bp->Bq) to derive the whole discourse of the machine with the
modus ponens and the necessitation rule. (that's G). G* has as axioms
all the theorems of G, + Bp -> p, and is closed for the modus ponens
rule BUT NOT FOR THE NECESSITATION rule!!!!
Exercise 1: show that G* would be inconsistent if you add the
necessitation rule.
Exercise 2: what was precisely wrong in your comment?
Bruno
appendice:
Taken from my post: http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/m2855.html
with [] = B here.
I recall that a formal presentation of G is:
AXIOMS [](p -> q) -> ([]p -> []q) K
[]([]p -> p) -> []p L
RULES p p -> q p
-------- Modus Ponens --- Necessitation
q []p
and G* is
AXIOMS Any theorem of G
[]p -> p
RULES p p -> q
-------- Modus Ponens(only! No Necessitation rule!!!)
q
(Plus some "obvious but tedious" substitution rules)
Bruno Marchal
Le 07-juin-05, à 08:27, Lee Corbin a écrit :
> It's perfectly clear to me which of the two is more important:
> prediction
> or explanation?
>
> Now that I have been self-liberated from fear of circularity,
> it's clear that: each is more important than the other!
Here I think you contradict yourself (it's a bit worst than circular).
>
> Lee
>
> P.S. Someone pointed out to me off-list that I was far from the
> first to have had this epiphany about circular reasoning:
>
> "However, I think Bruno already has this idea.
>
> "Hence a Reality, yes. But not necessarily a
> physical reality. Here is the logical dependence:
>
> NUMBERS -> "MACHINE DREAMS" -> PHYSICAL -> HUMANS -> PHYSICS ->
> NUMBERS.
> --- Bruno Marchal"
But then you said to me: "As for circular, too bad your theories
aren't circular! They'd
explain more."
But ok, I should have written:
> PLATONIST NUMBERS -> "MACHINE DREAMS" -> PHYSICAL -> HUMANS -> HUMAN
> NUMBERS.
I don't think I was circular there.
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Jonathan Colvin
>To apply Wei's method, first we need to get serious about what
>is an OM.
>We need a formal model and description of a particular OM.
>Consider, for example, someone's brain when he is having a
>particular experience. He is eating chocolate ice cream while
>listening to Beethoven's 5th symphony, on his 30th birthday.
>Imagine that we could scan his brain with advanced technology
>and record his neural activity. Imagine further that with the
>aid of an advanced brain model we are able to prune out the
>unnecessary information and distill this to the essence of the
>experience. We come up with a pattern that represents that
>observer moment. Any system which instantiates that pattern
>genuinely creates an experience of that observer moment. This
>pattern is something that can be specified, recorded and
>written down in some form. It probably involves a huge volume of
>data.
Sorry for the delay in response, but eskimo started bouncing mail from my
other smtp for some unknown reason.
There's a question begging to be asked, which is (predictably I suppose, for
a qualia-denyer such as myself), what makes you think there is such a thing
as an "essence of an experience"? I'd suggest there is no such "thing" as an
observer-moment. I'm happy with using the concept as a tag of sorts when
discussing observer selection issues, but I think reifying it is likely a
mistake, and goes considerably beyond Strong AI into a full Cartesian
dualism. Is it generally accepted here on this list that a
substrate-independent thing called an "observer moment" exists?
Jonathan Colvin
Brent Meeker
I agree. There seems to be a jump from the Strong AI idea that a brain can be
instantiated in some medium other than neurons (e.g. a computer) to the idea
that the brain has "states" that instantiate "experiences". Somehow static
patterns get slipped in place of processes.
Brent Meeker
Hal Finney
> There's a question begging to be asked, which is (predictably I suppose, for
> a qualia-denyer such as myself), what makes you think there is such a thing
> as an "essence of an experience"? I'd suggest there is no such "thing" as an
> observer-moment. I'm happy with using the concept as a tag of sorts when
> discussing observer selection issues, but I think reifying it is likely a
> mistake, and goes considerably beyond Strong AI into a full Cartesian
> dualism. Is it generally accepted here on this list that a
> substrate-independent thing called an "observer moment" exists?
Here's how I attempted to define observer moment a few years ago:
Observer - A subsystem of the multiverse with qualities sufficiently
similar to those which are common among human beings that we consider
it meaningful that we might have been or might be that subsystem.
These qualities include consciousness, perception of a flow of time,
and continuity of identity.
Observer-moment - An instant of perception by an observer. An observer's
sense of the flow of time allows its experience to be divided into
units so small that no perceptible change in consciousness is possible
in those intervals. Each such unit of time for a particular observer
is an observer-moment.
So if you don't believe in observer-moments, do you also not believe
in observers? Or is it the -moment that causes problems?
Hal Finney
Bruno Marchal
Le 08-juin-05, à 07:51, Jonathan Colvin a écrit :
Not at all. You get dualism only because *you* are reifying
metaphysical notion like substantial matter, time etc.
> Is it generally accepted here on this list that a
> substrate-independent thing called an "observer moment" exists?
To be sure I have problem with the notion of observer moments, or more
precisely with the idea that observer-moments can be taken as
primitive.
With comp (which is stronger than strong AI, strictly speaking) it has
been proved that both
space-time-energy-matter-sharable-measurable-quantity AND their
qualitative features emerges from arithmetical truth. Comp implies a
"neutral monism".
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Patrick Leahy
Obviously, its the -moment. I'm pleased to see that Jonathan and Brent
have the same problem with the concept that I do.
Being an observer is a process. Slicing it into moments is OK
mathematically, where a "moment" corresponds to a calculus dt (and hence
is neither a particular length of time nor an instant). But to regard the
"observer-state" at a particular moment as an isolated entity which is
self-aware makes as much sense as regarding individual horizontal slices
through a brain as being self-aware. It is the causal relation between
successive brain states (incorporating incoming sense data) which
constitutes intelligence, and self-awareness is just an epiphenomenon on
top of intelligence, i.e. I would not agree that anything can be
self-aware but have no intelligence.
Paddy Leahy
Stathis Papaioannou
>There's a question begging to be asked, which is (predictably I suppose,
>for
>a qualia-denyer such as myself), what makes you think there is such a thing
>as an "essence of an experience"? I'd suggest there is no such "thing" as
>an
>observer-moment. I'm happy with using the concept as a tag of sorts when
>discussing observer selection issues, but I think reifying it is likely a
>mistake, and goes considerably beyond Strong AI into a full Cartesian
>dualism. Is it generally accepted here on this list that a
>substrate-independent thing called an "observer moment" exists?
I don't see why you make a big deal out of observer moments. You observe
something, so that's an observer moment; then you observe something else,
and that's another observer moment; and so on. There is no implied theory
about what brings about these OM's, how long a moment is, whether the OM's
can in any sense have an existence separate from the substrate they are
implemented on, whether a brain is necessary or a computer will do, whether
two different OM's belonging to the same observer can each be implemented on
different hardware, etc. These may be worthwhile questions to ask, and the
OM concept may help in the process of trying to find an answer, but the
concept itself does not constitute or imply a theory.
--Stathis Papaioannou
_________________________________________________________________
REALESTATE: biggest buy/rent/share listings
http://ninemsn.realestate.com.au
Saibal Mitra
description of the human brain. I.e. the minimum amount of information you
need to simulate the brain of a observer. This description changes over time
due to interactions with the environment. Even if there were no interactions
with the environment the description would change, but this change is fixed
by the original description.
So, I see no problem with Hal's way of thinking about OMs....
Observers are can be thought of as their own descriptions and thus universes
in their own right. Observer moments are observers in particular states i.e.
their ''personal'' universe being in a certain state. The causal relation
between successive states is already defined when we specify which observer
we are talking about. i.e., we have already specified the laws of physics
for the personal universe of an observer which defines the observer.
Specifying the initial state of the personal universes thus suffices.
Saibal
----- Original Message -----
From: "Patrick Leahy" <j...@jb.man.ac.uk>
To: "Hal Finney" <h...@finney.org>
Cc: <everyth...@eskimo.com>
Sent: Wednesday, June 08, 2005 01:04 PM
Subject: RE: Observer-Moment Measure from Universe Measure
>
Stathis Papaioannou
[quoting Hal Finney]
You're making it far more complicated than it needs to be. An observer
moment is just a period of conscious experience. Usually it is taken to be
the shortest possible period, which for a human is somewhere between 100 and
500 ms, but there is no reason not to discuss observer minutes, hours or
whatever seems appropriate to the context. The "real" entity is the
observer, not the observer moment, but it sometimes helps to divide up the
observer's experience into time slices just as it is helpful to divide up
the day into hours, minutes and seconds. The division does not imply any
theory about how the brain actually gives rise to conscious experience, any
more than clocks imply any theory about how the planet rotates on its axis.
Hal Finney
to capture the bare minimum that we know to be true about the world.
We don't know that our pasts are real. They could be imagined,
synthesized, or faked. We may have been created one second ago and be
destroyed one second in the future.
To start with the idea that we are observers, with a given history and
past timeline, is to assume more than is in evidence. For a valid
philosophical inquiry, we need to distinguish what we know from what we
assume.
All we know is the present moment. We assume a history to explain it,
but we must at least consider the possibility that the history is wrong.
The program I outlined at the start of this thread provides an
in-principle way of calculating how much contribution "fake" versions
of an observer-moment (such as brains in vats, or living in The Matrix)
make versus "real" versions (where conventional reality is as it seems).
Of course it is not tractable in practice; you'd have to simulate every
possible universe and see which ones instantiated a particular OM.
But the point is that we must consider the possibility that our pasts
are not real. And in truth, scientific experiments have shown that many
of our memories are partially incorrect or even entirely fabricated.
All that we know is the present moment. It is the raw content of our
experience as observers and it is what we must explain.
Hal Finney
Hal Finney
> But the problem I see is that we don't know with certainity the present moment
> either. I have thoughts and perceptions in a stream, these have finite
> durations (on the order of hundreds of milliseconds) that overlap one another.
> When you say we know a present moment you are introspecting a memory of what
> just happened and I think it likely that you are just confabulating that you
> not only read the above line but that you were *aware of reading it* at the
> time.
So what do you know? What would you use as a starting point in a
philosophical exploration? Do you assume the world is real? That it
is inconceivable that you are living in a simulation? Do you assume
that your memories are correct?
Or would you go in the other direction and say that it is possible that
you are not conscious, perhaps that you don't even exist?
It seems to me that we have to choose something between assuming that all
our memories are real and the world is exactly as it seems (which is too
much); or assuming that we might not exist (which is too little). The OM
seems to me to fit the bill as far as what is the right thing to assume.
What would you suggest as an alternative?
Hal Finney
Brent Meeker
>-----Original Message-----
>From: "Hal Finney" [mailto:h...@finney.org]
>Sent: Wednesday, June 08, 2005 6:11 PM
>To: everyth...@eskimo.com
>Subject: RE: Observer-Moment Measure from Universe Measure
>
>
I suggest we take thoughts (not assuming a thinker) as evidence - but not as
fundamental in the sense of incorrigble. For example, there is seeing of words
on my computer screen at this time (awkward in English to avoid saying "I
see.."). But perceptual evidence must be fitted with other evidence
(necessarily from memory) to support a theory of the world, including our
existence in it. In a metaphor, experiences are like the clues in a crossword
puzzle - how we intepret them must fit them together to complete the puzzle.
In fact I think this is where common-sense and science come from - except that
evolution already provided us with some modes of perception and some categories
of thought (c.f. Singer's "How the Mind Works").
Whatever we think we know amounts to a model or theory about "reality". It
seems to me that the object of these models is to explain and predict what we
experience. But if we take our experiences as fundamental what are we going to
do - explain "reality" in terms of them? I can see this as a project similar
to Bruno's, Experiences->Common-sense->Science->Experiences, where each "->"
corresponds to creating a model.
Brent Meeker
Jonathan Colvin
I don't believe in observers, if by "observer" one means to assign special
ontological status to mental states over any other arrangement of matter.
This is similar to the objection to the classic interpretation of QM,
whereby an "observation" is required to collapse the WF (how do you define
"observer"?..a rock?..a chicken?..a person?).
But this was in response to a comment that "it was time to get serious about
observer-moments". An observer is such a poorly defined and nebulous thing
that I don't think one can get serious about it. I'd note that your
definition is close to being circular.."an observer is something
sufficiently similar to me that I might think I could have been it". But how
do we decide what is "sufficient"? The qualities you list (consciousness,
perception etc) are themselves poorly defined or undefinable. We end up with
"an observer is an observer if I think it is an observer"; which is a bit
circular IMHO.
Jonathan Colvin
Bruno Marchal
Le 09-juin-05, à 01:19, Jonathan Colvin a écrit :
> I don't believe in observers, if by "observer" one means to assign
> special
> ontological status to mental states over any other arrangement of
> matter.
I don't believe in matters, if by "matters" one means to assign special
ontological status to some substance, by which it is mean (Aristotle)
anything entirely determined by its parts.
> This is similar to the objection to the classic interpretation of QM,
> whereby an "observation" is required to collapse the WF (how do you
> define
> "observer"?..a rock?..a chicken?..a person?).
Yes, but Everett did succeed his explanation of the apparent collapse
by defining an observer by "just" classical memory machine.
>
> But this was in response to a comment that "it was time to get serious
> about
> observer-moments". An observer is such a poorly defined and nebulous
> thing
> that I don't think one can get serious about it.
My definition is that an observer is a universal (Turing) machine. With
Church's thesis we can drop the "Turing" qualification.
Actually an observer is a little more. It is a sufficiently "rich"
universal machine.
To be utterly precise (like in my thesis) an observer is a lobian
machine, by which I mean any machine which is able to prove "ExP(x) ->
Provable("ExP(x))" for any decidable predicate P(x). ExP(x) means
there is a natural number x such that P(x), and "provable" is the
provability predicate studied by Godel, Lob and many others.
But then I need to explain more on the provability logic to explain the
nuances between the scientist machine, the knowing machine, the
observing machine, etc. You can look at my sane paper for an overview.
> I'd note that your
> definition is close to being circular.."an observer is something
> sufficiently similar to me that I might think I could have been it".
> But how
> do we decide what is "sufficient"? The qualities you list
> (consciousness,
> perception etc) are themselves poorly defined or undefinable.
Consciousness can be considered as a first person view of the result of
an automatic bet on the existence of a model (in the logician sense) of
oneself. From this we can explain why "consciousness" is not
representable in the language of a machine. And consciousness get a
role: self-speeding up oneself relatively to our most probable
computational histories.
It should develop in all self-moving mechanical entity.
I define variant of "first person view" by applying Theaetetus'
definition of knowledge (and "popperian" variants) on the Godel
self-referential provability predicate.
Perhaps you could try to tell me what do you mean by "matter?"
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Jonathan Colvin
> > I don't believe in observers, if by "observer" one means to assign
> > special ontological status to mental states over any other
> arrangement
> > of matter.
> I don't believe in matters, if by "matters" one means to
> assign special ontological status to some substance, by which
> it is mean (Aristotle) anything entirely determined by its parts.
Hehe, the usual response to idealism is to drop a rock onto the propounder's
finger, and then ask them if they still do not believe in material objects.
> > This is similar to the objection to the classic
> interpretation of QM,
> > whereby an "observation" is required to collapse the WF (how do you
> > define "observer"?..a rock?..a chicken?..a person?).
>
>
> Yes, but Everett did succeed his explanation of the apparent collapse
> by defining an observer by "just" classical memory machine.
But the point is that observation is not central to Everett's theory at all;
observation is wholly peripheral, and is only discussed insofar as why it
*appears* that a collapse happens.
<snip>
> Perhaps you could try to tell me what do you mean by "matter?"
Something that kicks back (has an effect on the universe). Note that this
excludes "epiphenomena" such as qualia or some interpretions of
consciousness, since it appears that the universe would keep running exactly
the same way without them.
Jonathan Colvin
Bruno Marchal
Le 09-juin-05, à 23:00, Jonathan Colvin a écrit :
> Bruno wrote:
>>> I don't believe in observers, if by "observer" one means to assign
>>> special ontological status to mental states over any other
>> arrangement
>>> of matter.
>
>> I don't believe in matters, if by "matters" one means to
>> assign special ontological status to some substance, by which
>> it is mean (Aristotle) anything entirely determined by its parts.
>
> Hehe, the usual response to idealism is to drop a rock onto the
> propounder's
> finger, and then ask them if they still do not believe in material
> objects.
And the usual answer of the idealist is that they dream sometimes on
rock dropped on their fingers. That proves nothing. With comp you can
invoke the matrix or Galouye's Simulacron III.
>
>>> This is similar to the objection to the classic
>> interpretation of QM,
>>> whereby an "observation" is required to collapse the WF (how do you
>>> define "observer"?..a rock?..a chicken?..a person?).
>>
>>
>> Yes, but Everett did succeed his explanation of the apparent collapse
>> by defining an observer by "just" classical memory machine.
>
> But the point is that observation is not central to Everett's theory
> at all;
> observation is wholly peripheral, and is only discussed insofar as why
> it
> *appears* that a collapse happens.
I have argued at length that this is a weak point in Everett. The idea
is that once you postulate comp like Everett does, then you need to
explain why you take only the quantum computation into account.
>
>
> <snip>
>
>> Perhaps you could try to tell me what do you mean by "matter?"
>
> Something that kicks back (has an effect on the universe).
I don't take the word "universe" as granted, still less physicalist
type of universe. Actually I search an explanation of just that. With
comp, my point is that universe emerges from all (immaterial,
mathematical) computations. Arithmetical truth alone can be shown to be
a vast "video game" or simulacron ... Perhaps you could study a little
bit of theoretical computer science. They are many conuter-intuitive
results which could help to think that what I say is at least pausible.
> Note that this
> excludes "epiphenomena" such as qualia or some interpretions of
> consciousness, since it appears that the universe would keep running
> exactly
> the same way without them.
All what I say is that if you are right on this point, then comp is
false. (Or there is an error in my thesis, but this I am always
assuming by default).
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Saibal Mitra
----- Original Message -----
From: "Brent Meeker" <meek...@rain.org>
To: "Saibal Mitra" <smi...@zeelandnet.nl>
Sent: Wednesday, June 08, 2005 02:23 PM
Subject: RE: Observer-Moment Measure from Universe Measure
>
>
> >-----Original Message-----
> >From: Saibal Mitra [mailto:smi...@zeelandnet.nl]
> >Sent: Wednesday, June 08, 2005 1:16 PM
> >To: Patrick Leahy; Hal Finney; jco...@ican.net; meek...@rain.org
> >Cc: everyth...@eskimo.com
> >Subject: Re: Observer-Moment Measure from Universe Measure
> >
> >
> >I think one should define an observer moment as the instantaneous
> >description of the human brain. I.e. the minimum amount of information
you
> >need to simulate the brain of a observer. This description changes over
time
> >due to interactions with the environment. Even if there were no
interactions
> >with the environment the description would change, but this change is
fixed
> >by the original description.
>
> That means that, supposing the brain is a classical, the "moment" cannot
be
> defined by a description of values, omitting rates; just as the path of a
> ballistic projectile cannot be specified by it location, omitting its
velocity.
> But to include rates means an implicit introduction of time and continuity
of
> OMs. This implies that OMs form causal chains and it makes no sense to
talk
> about the same OM being in two different chains.
That's true in an isolated personal universe that is not interacting with an
'outside world'. I could, e.g. take your brain and simulate that on a
computer. The evolution equations for your brain are deterministic, so the
simulation will describe a unique chain of causal links provided you fix the
boundary conditions.
If the personal universe is embedded in another universe (like in our case),
then the evolution equations will be constantly perturbed.
>
> But a lot of the motivation for OMs comes from the brain *not* being
classical;
> from the idea that the brain gets "copied" into Everett's multiple
relative
> states or MWIs. Decoherence in the brain is very much faster than the
> neurochemical processes - that's why it's approximately classical. So
what is
> going on when QM predicts different OMs? From Everett's point of view the
> brain must be treated as part of the QM system and it gets "copied" - but
not
> by itself. Its description must include its entanglement with the quantum
> systems observed. So it seems that in either case, classical or quantum,
an OM
> as a description of a brain state, has links outside itself. In the
classical
> case it has casual links in time. In the QM case it has Hilbert space
links to
> what has been observed.
I agree. But the entangled state of a brain with the rest of the universe in
the MWI corresponds to an ensemble of different worlds such that in each
member of the ensemble the brain is in some definite state.
>
> >So, I see no problem with Hal's way of thinking about OMs....
> >
> >
> >Observers are can be thought of as their own descriptions and thus
universes
> >in their own right. Observer moments are observers in particular states
i.e.
> >their ''personal'' universe being in a certain state. The causal relation
> >between successive states is already defined when we specify which
observer
> >we are talking about. i.e., we have already specified the laws of physics
> >for the personal universe of an observer which defines the observer.
> >Specifying the initial state of the personal universes thus suffices.
>
> That would hold for a classical brain in a classical universe. But does
it in
> a QM universe? I see a tension between the idea of "personal universe"
and
> quantum entanglement.
I don't see problems here. If you assume that our universe is described by
some fundamental laws of physics then those laws of physics also describe
our brains. The way a particular brain works is thus fixed. This then
defines the personal universe. Entanglement of the brain with another system
can only happen if there are interactions with the outside. Even in the
classic case these intercations make the evolution of the personal universe
nondeterministic.
Saibal
Saibal Mitra
----- Original Message -----
From: "Brent Meeker" <meek...@rain.org>
To: "Saibal Mitra" <smi...@zeelandnet.nl>
Sent: Sunday, June 12, 2005 02:43 AM
Subject: RE: Observer-Moment Measure from Universe Measure
>
>
> >-----Original Message-----
> >From: Saibal Mitra [mailto:smi...@zeelandnet.nl]
> >Sent: Sunday, June 11, 2000 4:01 PM
> >To: Brent Meeker; ":everything-list"@eskimo.com
> >Subject: Re: Observer-Moment Measure from Universe Measure
> >
> >
> >
> >> There seems to be a big jump between those last two sentences.
Defining
> >the
> >> laws of physics may define the *way* a brain works - but not its
content,
> >not
> >> the specifics of its processes - and the same for a universe.
> >>
> >> >Entanglement of the brain with another system
> >> >can only happen if there are interactions with the outside.
> >>
> >> Sure, and there must be such interactions according to what we know of
> >physics.
> >>
> >> >Even in the
> >> >classic case these intercations make the evolution of the personal
> >universe
> >> >nondeterministic.
> >>
> >> Right. But in that case on "observer moment", defined as: "...one
should
> >> define an observer moment as the instantaneous description of the human
> >brain.
> >> I.e. the minimum amount of information you need to simulate the brain
of a
> >> observer." may have to include a lot of the universe outside the brain,
> >i.e.
> >> all the part that the brain is entangled with. And in principle it's
> >> entangled with all those other MWs.
> >
> >
> >
> >I disagree here. Even a lot of what is going on inside the brain is not
> >relevant for consciousness. A well known example is that of people who
have
> >lost their sight due to brain damage. In some cases signals from their
eyes
> >still reach the brain but the part responsible for vision doesn't
function
> >anymore. In some cases these signals allow the person to avoid obstacles,
> >but the patient experiences such an avoidance movement as an involuntary
> >movement.
> >
> >
>
> Well that's an interesting point. You are dropping the definition of an OM
as
> the instantaneous description of a human brain and instead restricting it
to
> just enough of a description to...what?...capture
consciousness?...describe the
> content of consciousness?...to *be* conscious?
>
That's correct. Clearly an exact instanteneous description of the brain
contains too much information. So somehow you have to extract the OM form
that. Compare this to the computer that is simulating our solar system. The
computer running the simulation would be analogous to the brain, the
observer is analogous to the simulated virtual world which can be described
in terms of ''planets'', a ''sun'' and Newtonian laws of physics. An OM can
be specified by specifying the state of the virtual solar system.
Saibal
Saibal Mitra
Saibal
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Bruno Marchal
You didn't answer my last post where I explain that Bp is different
from Bp & p.
I hope you were not too much disturbed by my "teacher's" tone (which
can be enervating I imagine). Or is it because you don't recognize the
modal form of Godel's theorem:
~Bf -> ~B(~Bf),
which is equivalent to B(Bf -> f) -> Bf, by simple contraposition
"p -> q" is equivalent with "~p -> ~q", and using also that "~p" is
equivalent to "p -> f", where f is put for "false".
This shows that for a consistent (~Bf) machine, although Bf -> f is
true, it cannot be proved by the machine. Now (Bf & f) -> f trivially.
So Bf and Bf & f are not equivalent for the machine
(although they are for the "guardian angel").
Bruno
Hal Finney
OM measure in a Schmidhuberian multiverse model.
The method is basically to take all the universes where the OM appears
and to sum up the contribution they make to the OM measure. However,
the key idea is that this contribution has two components. One is the
measure of the universe. The greater the measure of the universe, the
greater the contribution to OM measure. But the other is the fraction
of the universe that is involved in the OM. This means that a smaller
universe that contains an OM gives a greater fraction of its measure
as its contribution to the OM measure. Smaller universes make more
contribution than larger ones.
This last step may seem ad hoc but in fact it can be seen in a very
natural way. It can be thought of as a two step way to output the
description of a given OM: first write a program to output a universe
with the OM in it, then write a program to take that universe and output
the OM. We can think of combining these two programs into one: write a
program that outputs the OM. Then, the sum of the measure of all such
programs is the measure of the OM.
That last sentence is merely the definition of measure in a Schmidhuberian
context - the measure of anything is the fraction of all programs that
output that thing. It IMPLIES the formula I described for downgrading a
universe's contribution to an OM by virtue of the relative size of the OM
compared to the universe. It can be said that we have derived and proven
that relationship by assuming this fundamental definition of measure.
Note that we could also write a program to output an OM without regard
to creating a universe first. However, I believe that at least for
observers like us, it will always be a much simpler program to first
create a universe and then find the OM in it. This lets evolution work
and everything is simple. Ultimately, this allows the AUH (all universe
hypothesis, ie the multiverse exists) to JUSTIFY the belief that we are
not brains (or OMs) in vats, that the universe is probably real.
Okay, so that's just restating what I had before in different words,
explaining it from a different perspective that might be more obvious.
Here are a couple of interesting additions.
First, what about our universe? Why is it so damn big? If the measure
of an OM is smaller in a big universe, the AUH should predict that
the universe is no bigger than it needs to be. Yet, looking around,
our universe looks a lot bigger than necessary. There's a lot of
wasted space.
I conclude that it is likely that the universe is not in fact much
bigger than it needs to be. It actually needs to be as big as it is.
This might imply that intelligent life is extremely rare in universes
like ours. Only by creating a truly enormous universe can we have a
good chance of creating observers.
Let me expand on this a little. All universes exist. Some have
complex laws of physics and some are simple. Some have complex initial
conditions and some are simple. Physicists believe that our universe
is relatively simple by both measures. The laws of physics are not
completely understood but the ones we know have a very simple mathematical
formulation. And the initial conditions also appear to represent a very
smooth and uniform condition immediately after the Big Bang. The bottom
line is that you would not have to write a very big program to simulate
our universe.
Yet, even with these simple laws, our universe supports life that can
evolve into consciousness. That's pretty amazing, maybe. What are
the odds that another universe with equally simple laws could do so?
We know that our own physical laws appear to be relatively "fine tuned"
such that even a tiny change in various properties would cause life as
we know it to be impossible. That suggests that maybe it is not so
easy to have life. Maybe almost no universes with laws as simple as
ours create life.
And, maybe life is not all that easy to create even in our universe.
What if life, at least intelligent life, is overwhelmingly unlikely,
even in a universe as well suited as our own? Maybe we need ten billion
light years' worth of galaxies, stars and planets in order to have a
decent chance of evolving life. Maybe, in short, our universe is as
big as it needs to be, given our laws of physics, to allow life to evolve.
There may be other sets of laws of physics that would be more fecund,
where life could evolve more easily. Those might get by with smaller
universes. But if so, the AUH would predict that such universes would
have much more complicated laws of physics and/or initial conditions
than our own. Otherwise we would live there.
Given that the universe is as big as we see, and given the AUH, we can
predict that it is not full of intelligent life. We can predict that
there should be almost no other intelligent civilizations within the
universe. This then solves the Fermi paradox - where are the aliens.
There are no aliens, not for cosmological distances.
This leads to my second point: what about infinities? In some models,
our own universe is infinite in size. Tegmark's level 1 multiverse
postulates a physically infinite space. His level 2 sees our universe
as an infinite bubble inside a larger chaotic inflation region, with
infinite numbers of other bubbles. How could my proposed formulation
of OM measure work if the universe is infinite in size? How can we
determine the fraction of universe measure dedicated to an OM if the
OM is infinitesimal in size compared to the universe?
I have two thoughts about this. One is that if the universe is truly
spatially infinite, any OM should be repeated infinite times, as Tegmark
predicts. Therefore the OM still occupies a finite fraction of the
universe resources, and we can calculate that fraction by taking the
limit as spatial size goes to infinity. I know that some people don't
like this limit approach, they get upset by trying to divide one infinity
by another, but in practice this method seems sensible and produces a
reasonable value.
The other approach focuses on a paradox between level 1 and level 2.
If the level 1 universe is infinite in extent, where are the level 2
universes? Other dimensions? That doesn't really work, physically.
Here is how I understand it. In physics, time and space are relative.
>From the level-2 perspective, our universe is finite in size. However,
it is constantly and eternally growing. From within the universe,
the level-1 perspective (our point of view!) time and space have gotten
shifted so that the finite-size but infinite-time outside view becomes
infinite-size from the inside view. I've seen drawings of this. It is
consistent to have a universe that looks spatially infinite but from the
outside is finite in size but constantly growing. It's all a matter of
event horizons and such.
This provides a method to at least partially solve the infinite-size
paradox. From the level 2 perspective, the universe is no longer infinite
in size, however it is infinite in time. This means that it takes only
a finite amount of computation to simulate the universe up to any given
point in space and time. We can simulate the past light cone of any point
in spacetime within our universe using a finite amount of computation,
even though the universe looks spatially infinite from each point.
This allows us to again apply our program to find OMs within the output
of the program creating a universe. Each OM appears after only a finite
length of output. And the farther out we go, the longer the OM-finding
program is going to need to be, because it has to localize the OM within
the output of the universe program. That means at some point we can
ignore further OM instances appearing in the tape as having negligible
measure (he says, waving his hands furiously) because the program to
find them would have to be so big.
In effect what we are saying is that there is a nonuniform measure
over spacetime in our own universe, one that tails off to zero in space
and time. Now, I'm not 100% sure how that works spatially, it seems to
suggest that there is a point in space that has more measure than all
others, which doesn't seem very physical. I'll have to think about it.
But it is basically consistent with the general Schmidhuber principle
that measure of X is 1/2^KC(X), applied to OMs. If we live in a level
2 multiverse, as our best physical theories suggest, then the measure
of the OMs in that multiverse have to work in a method similar to what
I have outlined here.
Hal Finney
Jonathan Colvin
> I wanted to add a few points to my earlier posting about how
> to derive OM measure in a Schmidhuberian multiverse model.
>
> The method is basically to take all the universes where the
> OM appears and to sum up the contribution they make to the OM
> measure. However, the key idea is that this contribution has
> two components. One is the measure of the universe. The
> greater the measure of the universe, the greater the
> contribution to OM measure. But the other is the fraction of
> the universe that is involved in the OM. This means that a
> smaller universe that contains an OM gives a greater fraction
> of its measure as its contribution to the OM measure.
> Smaller universes make more contribution than larger ones.
>
> This last step may seem ad hoc but in fact it can be seen in
> a very natural way. It can be thought of as a two step way
> to output the description of a given OM: first write a
> program to output a universe with the OM in it, then write a
> program to take that universe and output the OM. We can
> think of combining these two programs into one: write a
> program that outputs the OM. Then, the sum of the measure of
> all such programs is the measure of the OM.
Ok, this second step I don't get. This implies that our measure is dependant
on our physical size. If I weigh 50 times as much as an adult than as I do
as a baby (my fraction of the universe has increased by a factor of 50),
then this implies that my measure should also have increased by a factor of
50. This doesn't seem right. Why should my measure depend on my physical
size? Should I take to stuffing my face with donuts at every opportunity to
increase my measure? How about if I hang lead weights from my belt? Does
that increase my measure?
I presume the answer is that rather than look at physical size/weight of our
bodies, one must try to calculate the proportion of the universe's
information content devoted to that part of our beings essential to being an
observer (probably something to do with the amount of grey matter). But
again, this surely changes as we age. My brain (and consciousness) at age 2
was much smaller than at age 30, and will start to shrink again as I get
senile. Does our measure increase with age? If we get brain surgery, does
our measure diminish? And once the transhumanist's dream of mental
augmentation is possible, will our measure increase as our consciousness
increases?
Jonathan Colvin
Hal Finney
> I presume the answer is that rather than look at physical size/weight of our
> bodies, one must try to calculate the proportion of the universe's
> information content devoted to that part of our beings essential to being an
> observer (probably something to do with the amount of grey matter).
Yes, I think that's right. Our bodies don't directly contribute to our
conscious experiences.
> But
> again, this surely changes as we age. My brain (and consciousness) at age 2
> was much smaller than at age 30, and will start to shrink again as I get
> senile. Does our measure increase with age?
I think you meant "decrease", at least in terms of becoming elderly.
Of course we already know that measure decreases with age due to the
continual risk of dying. But yes, I think this argument would suggest
that there is a small decrease in measure due to brain shrinkage.
It would not be a very large effect, though, I don't think.
> If we get brain surgery, does
> our measure diminish?
You mean if they cut out a piece of your brain? I guess that would
depend on whether it affected your consciousness. If it did you probably
have bigger problems than your measure decreasing. Your consciousness
would change so much that your previous self might not view you as the
same person.
> And once the transhumanist's dream of mental
> augmentation is possible, will our measure increase as our consciousness
> increases?
Yes, I think so, assuming the brains actually become bigger. Although
there is a counter-effect if the brains instead become faster and
smaller, as I wrote earlier. So this raises a paradox, why are we not
super-brains? Perhaps this is an argument against the possibility that
this will ever happen, a la the Doomsday Argument (why do we not live
in the Galactic Empire with its population billions of times greater
than today?).
Although these conclusions may be counter-intuitive, I find it quite
exciting to be able to derive any predictions at all from the AUH in the
Schmidhuber model. It suggests that uploading your brain to a computer
might be tantamount to taking a large chance of dying; unless you could
then duplicate your uploaded brain all over the world, which would greatly
increase your measure. And all this comes from the very simple assumption
that the measure of something is the fraction of multiverse resources
devoted to it, a simple restatement of the Schmidhuber multiverse model.
Hal Finney
Jonathan Colvin
There's a simple answer to that one. Presumably, a million years from now in
the Galactic Empire, the Doomsday argument is no longer controversial, and
it will not be a topic for debate. The fact that we are all debating the
Doomsday argument implies we are all part of the reference class: (people
debating the doomsday argument), and we perforce can not be part of the
Galactic Empire.
>
> Although these conclusions may be counter-intuitive, I find
> it quite exciting to be able to derive any predictions at all
> from the AUH in the Schmidhuber model. It suggests that
> uploading your brain to a computer might be tantamount to
> taking a large chance of dying; unless you could then
> duplicate your uploaded brain all over the world, which would
> greatly increase your measure. And all this comes from the
> very simple assumption that the measure of something is the
> fraction of multiverse resources devoted to it, a simple
> restatement of the Schmidhuber multiverse model.
I find these conclusions counter-intuitive enough to suggest that deriving
measure from a physical fraction of involved reasources is not the correct
way to derive measure. It is not unlike trying to derive the importance of a
book by weighing it.
Jonathan Colvin
Hal Finney
> There's a simple answer to that one. Presumably, a million years from now in
> the Galactic Empire, the Doomsday argument is no longer controversial, and
> it will not be a topic for debate. The fact that we are all debating the
> Doomsday argument implies we are all part of the reference class: (people
> debating the doomsday argument), and we perforce can not be part of the
> Galactic Empire.
Well, I don't want to open up discussion of the DA. Suffice it to say
that good thinkers have spent considerable amounts of time considering
it and don't necessarily think that this reply puts it to bed.
http://www.anthropic-principle.com has an exhaustive discussion.
[Regarding measure and size]
> I find these conclusions counter-intuitive enough to suggest that deriving
> measure from a physical fraction of involved reasources is not the correct
> way to derive measure. It is not unlike trying to derive the importance of a
> book by weighing it.
Don't be too eager to throw out this concept of measure. It is
fundamental to the Schmidhuber and Tegmark approach to the multiverse.
It allows deriving why induction works as well as Occam's razor.
It explains why the universe is lawful and has a simple description.
It allows us in principle to calculate how likely we are to be in The
Matrix or some such simulation vs a basement-level universe. It is
quite an amazing quantity of results from such a simple assumption.
I don't think you will find anything else like it in philosophy.
As far as the specific issue of measure and size, suppose you agree
that making copies of a structure increases its measure, but you object
to the idea that scaling up its size would do so. Years ago I came up
with a thought experiment that adopted the position you have, that size
doesn't matter. (That's what my wife kept telling me, after all...)
>From that I proved that copies didn't matter either, which wasn't too
appealing. Today I would say that my premise was wrong. Size matters.
Here is a simple example. Suppose we have a book in a computer memory.
Now we make two copies of the book in memory. Perhaps you will agree
that this increases its measure. Maybe the measure doubles, or maybe
it doesn't go up quite that much, but it does increase.
Now suppose we arrange the two copies interleaved in memory. Instead of
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..." in two places,
we have "IItt wwaass tthhee bbeesstt ooff ttiimmeess...". Is this
still two copies, or is it one copy with extra big data representation?
The difference is not so clear. This should suggest, maybe there isn't
any difference in terms of measure of the two cases.
I have several other examples I have used as well. In one I have a
pair of electronic computers running exactly the same program side by
side, in lockstep. This is two instances and arguably the program has
larger measure. Now I attach wires between the corresponding parts
of the electronic circuits that make up the computers. Point A in the
left computer is attached to point A in the right computer, and so on
for every circuit element. These wires have variable resistance that
can be smoothly changed from full conductivity to perfect insulation.
When the wires are insulated, there is no interaction between the two
computers and there are two copies. When the wires are conductive, the
corresponding circuit elements are electrically joined so the system acts
like a single computer that is twice as big. By varying the resistance
we can smoothly go from one case to the other.
Imagine a conscious program running on this system. When there are two
computers, perhaps there are two conscious entities, each with their
unique identity. When there is only one computer, there is only one
consciousness. Yet we can switch smoothly between the two. We can go
from two people to one and back! How much sense does that make?
I wouldn't put it like that today, but if we just focus on measure,
we again go from a pair of computations to a computation that is twice
as big. It makes sense that the two cases would have the same measure.
>From these and other thought experiments I find that it is not as
surprising as it seems at first to imagine that increasing size increases
measure. The fact that it follows immediately from Schmidhuber's simple
principle only came to me recently. I find it interesting and provocative
that these two independent arguments lead to the same conclusion.
Hal Finney
Jonathan Colvin
> Jonathan Colvin writes, regarding the Doomsday argument:
> > There's a simple answer to that one. Presumably, a million
> years from
> > now in the Galactic Empire, the Doomsday argument is no longer
> > controversial, and it will not be a topic for debate. The
> fact that we
> > are all debating the Doomsday argument implies we are all
> part of the
> > reference class: (people debating the doomsday argument), and we
> > perforce can not be part of the Galactic Empire.
>
> Well, I don't want to open up discussion of the DA. Suffice
> it to say that good thinkers have spent considerable amounts
> of time considering it and don't necessarily think that this
> reply puts it to bed.
> http://www.anthropic-principle.com has an exhaustive discussion.
Since it is coming from Nick B., over-exhaustive :)
I don't think anybody, Nick included, has yet come up with a convincing way
to define appropriate reference classes. Absent this, the only way to rescue
the DA seems to be a sort of dualism (randomly emplaced souls etc).
> [Regarding measure and size]
>
> > I find these conclusions counter-intuitive enough to suggest that
> > deriving measure from a physical fraction of involved reasources is
> > not the correct way to derive measure. It is not unlike trying to
> > derive the importance of a book by weighing it.
>
> Don't be too eager to throw out this concept of measure. It
> is fundamental to the Schmidhuber and Tegmark approach to the
> multiverse.
> It allows deriving why induction works as well as Occam's razor.
> It explains why the universe is lawful and has a simple description.
> It allows us in principle to calculate how likely we are to
> be in The Matrix or some such simulation vs a basement-level
> universe. It is quite an amazing quantity of results from
> such a simple assumption.
> I don't think you will find anything else like it in philosophy.
>
> As far as the specific issue of measure and size, suppose you
> agree that making copies of a structure increases its
> measure, but you object to the idea that scaling up its size
> would do so. Years ago I came up with a thought experiment
> that adopted the position you have, that size doesn't matter.
> (That's what my wife kept telling me, after all...) From
> that I proved that copies didn't matter either, which wasn't
> too appealing. Today I would say that my premise was wrong.
> Size matters.
Isn't there a counter argument, though? Imagine a Universe of size X, and
that observers have size Y<X. As Y increases towards X, the number of
possible observers in the Universe decreases, until at the limit Y=X a
universe can contain only one observer. Conversely, the smaller the Y, the
more observers the universe can contain (and presumably the larger the
measure). On this argument, *decreasing* our size should increase our
measure (in the same way that smaller universes have greater measure).
Jonathan Colvin
Russell Standish
>
> Since it is coming from Nick B., over-exhaustive :)
> I don't think anybody, Nick included, has yet come up with a convincing way
> to define appropriate reference classes. Absent this, the only way to rescue
> the DA seems to be a sort of dualism (randomly emplaced souls etc).
>
Nooo! - the DA does not imply dualism. The souls do not need to exist
anywhere else before being randomly emplaced.
Cheers
--
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Stephen Paul King
Pardon the intrusion, but in your opinion does every form of dualism
require that one side of the duality has properties and behaviors that are
not constrained by the other side of the duality, as examplified by the idea
of "randomly emplaced souls"?
The idea that all dualities, of say mind and body, allow that minds and
bodies can have properties and behaviours that are not mutually constrained
is, at best, an incoherent straw dog.
Kindest regards,
Stephen
Jonathan Colvin
>> Since it is coming from Nick B., over-exhaustive :) I don't think
>> anybody, Nick included, has yet come up with a convincing way to
>> define appropriate reference classes. Absent this, the only way to
>> rescue the DA seems to be a sort of dualism (randomly
>emplaced souls etc).
>>
>
>Nooo! - the DA does not imply dualism. The souls do not need
>to exist anywhere else before being randomly emplaced.
Ambiguous response. Are you saying that the DA requires that souls must be
randomly emplaced, but that this does not require dualism, or that the DA
does not require souls?
It seems to me that to believe we are randomly emplaced souls, whether or
not they existed elsewhere beforehand, is to perforce embrace a species of
dualism.
To rescue the DA (given the problem of defining a reference class), one must
assume a particular stance regarding counterfactuals of personal identity;
that "I" could have been someone else (anyone else in the reference class of
observers, for example). But unless I am an immaterial soul or other sort of
cartesian entity, this is not possible. If I am simply my body, then the
statement "I could have been someone else" is as ludicrous as pointing to a
tree and saying "Why is that tree, that tree? Why couldn't it have been a
different tree? Why couldn't it have been a lion?"
Jonathan Colvin
Jonathan Colvin
> Pardon the intrusion, but in your opinion does every form
>of dualism require that one side of the duality has properties
>and behaviors that are not constrained by the other side of
>the duality, as examplified by the idea of "randomly emplaced souls"?
> The idea that all dualities, of say mind and body, allow
>that minds and bodies can have properties and behaviours that
>are not mutually constrained is, at best, an incoherent straw dog.
I don't really uderstand the question the way you've phrased it (I'm not
sure what you mean by "mutually constrained"); I *think* you are asking
whether I believe that it is necessary that any duality must have mutually
exclusive properties (if not, please elaborate).
I think this is implied by the very concept of dualism; if the properties of
the dual entities (say mind and body, or particle and wave) are NOT mutually
exclusive, then there is no dualism to talk about. If the mind and the body
are identical, there is no dualism.
Jonathan Colvin
Jonathan Colvin
>> It seems to me that to believe we are randomly emplaced
>souls, whether
>> or not they existed elsewhere beforehand, is to perforce embrace a
>> species of dualism.
>
>minds and brains are distinct orthogonal things, interacting
>at a point - eg pineal gland. What I think of as mind is an
>emergent property of the interaction of large numbers of
>neurons coupled together. I do not think of emergent
>properties as dualism - but if you insist then we simply have
>a language game.
Nope, I'm thinking of dualism as "the mind (or consciousness) is separate
from the body". Ie. The mind is not identical to the body.
>
>>
>> To rescue the DA (given the problem of defining a reference class),
>> one must assume a particular stance regarding counterfactuals of
>> personal identity; that "I" could have been someone else
>(anyone else
>> in the reference class of observers, for example).
>
>True.
>
>> But unless I am an immaterial soul or other sort of
>cartesian entity,
>> this is not possible.
>
>I disagree completely. You will need to argue your case hard
>and fast on this one.
See below.
>
>> If I am simply my body, then the
>> statement "I could have been someone else" is as ludicrous
>as pointing
>> to a tree and saying "Why is that tree, that tree? Why couldn't it
>> have been a different tree? Why couldn't it have been a lion?"
>>
>> Jonathan Colvin
>
>The tree, if conscious, could ask the question of why it isn't
>a lion. The only thing absurd about that question is that we
>know trees aren't conscious.
That seems an absurd question to me. How could a tree be a lion? Unless the
tree's consciousness is not identical with its body (trunk, I guess), this
is a meaningless question. To ask that question *assumes* a dualism. It's a
subtle dualism, to be sure.
As a little boy once asked, "Why are lions, lions? Why aren't lions ants?"
Jonathan Colvin
Russell Standish
>
> Nope, I'm thinking of dualism as "the mind (or consciousness) is separate
> from the body". Ie. The mind is not identical to the body.
>
These two statements are not equivalent. You cannot say that the fist
is separate from the hand. Yet the fist is not identical to the
hand. Another example. You cannot say that a smile is separate from
someone's mouth. Yet a smile is not identical to the mouth.
> >
> >> But unless I am an immaterial soul or other sort of
> >cartesian entity,
> >> this is not possible.
> >
> >I disagree completely. You will need to argue your case hard
> >and fast on this one.
>
> See below.
>
Yah - I'm still waiting...
> >
> >> If I am simply my body, then the
> >> statement "I could have been someone else" is as ludicrous
> >as pointing
> >> to a tree and saying "Why is that tree, that tree? Why couldn't it
> >> have been a different tree? Why couldn't it have been a lion?"
> >>
> >> Jonathan Colvin
> >
> >The tree, if conscious, could ask the question of why it isn't
> >a lion. The only thing absurd about that question is that we
> >know trees aren't conscious.
>
> That seems an absurd question to me. How could a tree be a lion? Unless the
> tree's consciousness is not identical with its body (trunk, I guess), this
> is a meaningless question. To ask that question *assumes* a dualism. It's a
> subtle dualism, to be sure.
>
Of course a mind is not _identical_ to a body. What an absurd thing to
say. If your definition of dualism is that mind and body are not
identical, then this is a poor definition indeed. It is tautologically
true. My definition would be something along the lines of minds and
bodies have independent existence - ie positing the existence of
disembodied minds is dualism. Such an assumption is not required to
apply the Doomsday argument. I may make such assumptions in other
areas though - such as wondering why the Anthropic Principle is
valid. Not dualism implies the Anthropic Principle.
> As a little boy once asked, "Why are lions, lions? Why aren't lions ants?"
>
> Jonathan Colvin
>
I have asked this question of myself "Why I am not an ant?". The
answer (by the Doomsday Argument) is that ants are not conscious. The
question, and answer is quite profound.
Jonathan Colvin
>> Nope, I'm thinking of dualism as "the mind (or consciousness) is
>> separate from the body". Ie. The mind is not identical to the body.
>>
>
>These two statements are not equivalent. You cannot say that
>the fist is separate from the hand. Yet the fist is not
>identical to the hand.
Well, actually I'd say the fist *is* identical to the hand. At least, my
fist seems to be identical to my hand.
Another example. You cannot say that a
>smile is separate from someone's mouth. Yet a smile is not
>identical to the mouth.
Depends whether you are a Platonist (dualist) about smiles. I'd say a
smiling mouth *is* identical to a mouth.
>> >> But unless I am an immaterial soul or other sort of
>> >cartesian entity,
>> >> this is not possible.
>> >
>> >I disagree completely. You will need to argue your case
>hard and fast
>> >on this one.
>>
>> See below.
>>
>
>Yah - I'm still waiting...
Well, to explicate, the DA suffers from the issue of defining an appropriate
reference set. Now, we are clearly not both random observers on the class of
all observers(what are the chances of two random observers from the class of
all observers meeting at this time on the same mailing list? Googleplexianly
small). Neither are we both random observers from the class of "humans"
(same argument..what are the chances that both our birth ranks are
approximately the same?). For instance, an appropriate reference set for me
(or anyone reading this exchange) might be "people with access to email
debating the DA". But this reference set nullifies the DA, since my birth
rank is no longer random; it is constrained by the requirement, for example,
that email exists (a pre-literate caveman could not debate the DA).
The only way to rescue the DA is to assume that I *could have had* a
different birth rank; in other words, that I could have been someone other
than "me" (me as in "my body"). If the body I'm occupying is contingent (ie.
I could have been in any human body, and am in this one by pure chance),
then the DA is rescued. This seems to require a dualistic account of
identity. All theories that reify the observer are essentially dualistic,
IMHO.
>
>> >
>> >> If I am simply my body, then the
>> >> statement "I could have been someone else" is as ludicrous
>> >as pointing
>> >> to a tree and saying "Why is that tree, that tree? Why
>couldn't it
>> >> have been a different tree? Why couldn't it have been a lion?"
>> >>
>> >> Jonathan Colvin
>> >
>> >The tree, if conscious, could ask the question of why it isn't a
>> >lion. The only thing absurd about that question is that we
>know trees
>> >aren't conscious.
>>
>> That seems an absurd question to me. How could a tree be a lion?
>> Unless the tree's consciousness is not identical with its
>body (trunk,
>> I guess), this is a meaningless question. To ask that question
>> *assumes* a dualism. It's a subtle dualism, to be sure.
>>
>
>Of course a mind is not _identical_ to a body. What an absurd
>thing to say. If your definition of dualism is that mind and
>body are not identical, then this is a poor definition indeed.
>It is tautologically true.
Why do you say "of course"? I believe that I (my mind) am exactly identical
to my body (its brain, to be specific).
My definition would be something
>along the lines of minds and bodies have independent existence
>- ie positing the existence of disembodied minds is dualism.
>Such an assumption is not required to apply the Doomsday
>argument. I may make such assumptions in other areas though -
>such as wondering why the Anthropic Principle is valid. Not
>dualism implies the Anthropic Principle.
Then how can a tree be a lion without assuming that minds and bodies can
have independent existance? Assuming dualism, its easy; simply switch the
lion's mind with the tree's.
>> As a little boy once asked, "Why are lions, lions? Why
>aren't lions ants?"
>I have asked this question of myself "Why I am not an ant?".
>The answer (by the Doomsday Argument) is that ants are not
>conscious. The question, and answer is quite profound.
That doesn't seem profound; it seems obvious. Even more obvious is the
answer "If you were an ant, you wouldn't be Russell Standish. So it is a
meaningless question".
Switch the question. Why aren't you me (Jonathan Colvin)? I'm conscious
(feels like I am, anyway).
Jonathan Colvin
Russell Standish
> Russell Standish wrote:
> >> Nope, I'm thinking of dualism as "the mind (or consciousness) is
> >> separate from the body". Ie. The mind is not identical to the body.
> >>
> >
> >These two statements are not equivalent. You cannot say that
> >the fist is separate from the hand. Yet the fist is not
> >identical to the hand.
>
> Well, actually I'd say the fist *is* identical to the hand. At least, my
> fist seems to be identical to my hand.
>
Even when the hand is open????
>
> Another example. You cannot say that a
> >smile is separate from someone's mouth. Yet a smile is not
> >identical to the mouth.
>
> Depends whether you are a Platonist (dualist) about smiles. I'd say a
> smiling mouth *is* identical to a mouth.
>
Even when the mouth is turned down???
> Well, to explicate, the DA suffers from the issue of defining an appropriate
> reference set. Now, we are clearly not both random observers on the class of
> all observers(what are the chances of two random observers from the class of
> all observers meeting at this time on the same mailing list? Googleplexianly
> small). Neither are we both random observers from the class of "humans"
> (same argument..what are the chances that both our birth ranks are
> approximately the same?). For instance, an appropriate reference set for me
> (or anyone reading this exchange) might be "people with access to email
> debating the DA". But this reference set nullifies the DA, since my birth
> rank is no longer random; it is constrained by the requirement, for example,
> that email exists (a pre-literate caveman could not debate the DA).
>
This would be true if we are arguing about something that depended on
us communicating via email. The DA makes no such argument, so
therefore the existence of email, and of our communication is irrelevant.
> The only way to rescue the DA is to assume that I *could have had* a
> different birth rank; in other words, that I could have been someone other
> than "me" (me as in "my body"). If the body I'm occupying is contingent (ie.
> I could have been in any human body, and am in this one by pure chance),
> then the DA is rescued.
Yes.
> This seems to require a dualistic account of
> identity.
Why? Explain this particular jump of logic please? I'm not being
stubborn here, I seriously do not understand how you draw this conclusion.
> >
> >Of course a mind is not _identical_ to a body. What an absurd
> >thing to say. If your definition of dualism is that mind and
> >body are not identical, then this is a poor definition indeed.
> >It is tautologically true.
>
> Why do you say "of course"? I believe that I (my mind) am exactly identical
> to my body (its brain, to be specific).
>
Really? Even when you're not conscious? What about after you've died?
What about after brain surgery? After being copied by Bruno Marchal's
teletransporter?
>
> My definition would be something
> >along the lines of minds and bodies have independent existence
> >- ie positing the existence of disembodied minds is dualism.
> >Such an assumption is not required to apply the Doomsday
> >argument. I may make such assumptions in other areas though -
> >such as wondering why the Anthropic Principle is valid. Not
> >dualism implies the Anthropic Principle.
>
> Then how can a tree be a lion without assuming that minds and bodies can
> have independent existance? Assuming dualism, its easy; simply switch the
> lion's mind with the tree's.
The question "Why am I not a lion?" is syntactically similar to "Why I
am not an ant", or "Why I am not Jonathon Colvin?". The treeness (or
otherwise) of the questioner is rather irrelevant. In any case, the
answers to both the latter questions do not assume minds can be
swapped.
>
> >> As a little boy once asked, "Why are lions, lions? Why
> >aren't lions ants?"
>
> >I have asked this question of myself "Why I am not an ant?".
> >The answer (by the Doomsday Argument) is that ants are not
> >conscious. The question, and answer is quite profound.
>
> That doesn't seem profound; it seems obvious. Even more obvious is the
> answer "If you were an ant, you wouldn't be Russell Standish. So it is a
> meaningless question".
>
I _didn't_ ask the question "Assuming I am Russell Standish, why am I
not an ant?" I asked the question of "Why wasn't I an ant?". Its a
different question completely.
> Switch the question. Why aren't you me (Jonathan Colvin)? I'm conscious
> (feels like I am, anyway).
>
> Jonathan Colvin
>
This one is also easy to answer also. I'm just as likely to have been
born you as born me. But I have to have been born someone. I just so
happened to have been born me. This is called "symmetry breaking".
In the ant case it is different. It is around a million times more
likely that I would have been born an ant rather than a human
being. Consequently the answer is different.
Stathis Papaioannou
You find yourself in a locked room with no windows, and no memory of how you
got there. The room is sparsely furnished: a chair, a desk, pen and paper,
and in one corner a light. The light is currently red, but in the time you
have been in the room you have observed that it alternates between red and
green every 10 minutes. Other than the coloured light, nothing in the room
seems to change. Opening one of the desk drawers, you find a piece of paper
with incredibly neat handwriting. It turns out to be a letter from God,
revealing that you have been placed in the room as part of a philosophical
experiment. Every 10 minutes, the system alternates between two states. One
state consists of you alone in your room. The other state consists of 10^100
exact copies of you, their minds perfectly synchronised with your mind, each
copy isolated from all the others in a room just like yours. Whenever the
light changes colour, it means that God is either instantaneously creating
(10^100 - 1) copies, or instantaneously destroying all but one randomly
chosen copy.
Your task is to guess which colour of the light corresponds with which state
and write it down. Then God will send you home.
Having absorbed this information, you reason as follows. Suppose that right
now you are one of the copies sampled randomly from all the copies that you
could possibly be. If you guess that you are one of the 10^100 group, you
will be right with probability (10^100)/(10^100+1) (which your calculator
tells you equals one). If you guess that you are the sole copy, you will be
right with probability 1/(10^100+1) (which your calculator tells you equals
zero). Therefore, you would be foolish indeed if you don't guess that you in
the 10^100 group. And since the light right now is red, red must correspond
with the 10^100 copy state and green with the single copy state.
But just as you are about to write down your conclusion, the light changes
to green...
What's wrong with the reasoning here?
--Stathis Papaioannou
_________________________________________________________________
REALESTATE: biggest buy/rent/share listings
http://ninemsn.realestate.com.au
rmiller
>You find yourself in a locked room with no windows, and no memory of how
>you got there. \
(snip)
> The other state consists of 10^100 exact copies of you, their minds
> perfectly synchronised with your mind, each copy isolated from all the
> others in a room just like yours. Whenever the light changes colour, it
> means that God is either instantaneously creating (10^100 - 1) copies, or
> instantaneously destroying all but one randomly chosen copy.
RM's two cents worth: If all the 10^100 copies have exactly the same
sensory input, exactly the same past, exactly the same environment and have
exactly the same behavior systems, then there would be no overall increase
in complexity (no additional links between nodes), but there would overall
be a multiplication of intensity (10^100). Would this result in a more
clarified perception during the time period when one is represented
(magnified?) by 10^100? It's an open switch (i.e. who knows???) However,
the increase in intensity would *not* result in greater perception; that
would involve linking additional nodes---i.e. getting more neurons or
elements of the behavior system involved---and the number of links over the
10^100 copies would remain static.
If Stathis includes the possibility of chaos into the system at the node
level (corresponding to random fluctuations among interactions at the node
level) then these differences among the 10^100 copies would amount to
10^100 specific layers of the individual all linked by the equivalence of
the similarly-configured behavior systems. If one could see this from the
perspective of (say) Hilbert space, it may look like a deck of perfectly
similar individuals with minor variations or "fuzziness." These links as
well as the fuzziness over many worlds may be what corresponds to
consciousness.
Stephen Paul King
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jonathan Colvin" <jco...@ican.net>
To: "'Stephen Paul King'" <step...@charter.net>;
<everyth...@eskimo.com>
Sent: Thursday, June 16, 2005 1:14 AM
Subject: RE: Dualism and the DA
> Stephen Paul King wrote:
>> Pardon the intrusion, but in your opinion does every form
>>of dualism require that one side of the duality has properties
>>and behaviors that are not constrained by the other side of
>>the duality, as examplified by the idea of "randomly emplaced souls"?
>> The idea that all dualities, of say mind and body, allow
>>that minds and bodies can have properties and behaviours that
>>are not mutually constrained is, at best, an incoherent straw dog.
>
> I don't really uderstand the question the way you've phrased it (I'm not
> sure what you mean by "mutually constrained"); I *think* you are asking
> whether I believe that it is necessary that any duality must have mutually
> exclusive properties (if not, please elaborate).
[SPK]
The same kind of mutual constraint that exist between a given physical
object, say a IBM z990 or a 1972 Jaguar XKE or the human Stephen Paul King,
and the possible complete descriptions of such. It is upon this distiction
betwen physical object and its representations, or equivalently, between a
complete description and its possible implementations, that the duality that
I argue for is based. This is very different from the Cartesian duality of
"substances" (res extensa and res cognitas) that are seperate and
independent and yet mysteriously linked.
>
> I think this is implied by the very concept of dualism; if the properties
> of
> the dual entities (say mind and body, or particle and wave) are NOT
> mutually
> exclusive, then there is no dualism to talk about. If the mind and the
> body
> are identical, there is no dualism.
[SPK]
Mutual exclusivity does not make a dualism, and it should be obvious
that identity is not the negation of mutual exclusivity!
Stephen
rmiller
>You find yourself in a locked room with no windows, and no memory of how
>you got there. The room is sparsely furnished: a chair, a desk, pen and
>paper, and in one corner a light.
RM: You've just described me at work in my office.
>The light is currently red, but in the time you have been in the room you
>have observed that it alternates between red and green every 10 minutes.
>Other than the coloured light, nothing in the room seems to change.
RM. . .at my annual New Years' party.
RM: Nothing wrong with the premise or the reasoning IMHO. Happens to me
every day---while sitting at a traffic light alone in my car(s) all 10^100
of me come up with a great idea---I try to write it down and the light
changes to green.
daddy...@aol.com
Hal Finney
> You find yourself in a locked room with no windows, and no memory of how you
> green every 10 minutes. Other than the coloured light, nothing in the room
> revealing that you have been placed in the room as part of a philosophical
> experiment. Every 10 minutes, the system alternates between two states. One
> state consists of you alone in your room. The other state consists of 10^100
> exact copies of you, their minds perfectly synchronised with your mind, each
> copy isolated from all the others in a room just like yours. Whenever the
> light changes colour, it means that God is either instantaneously creating
> (10^100 - 1) copies, or instantaneously destroying all but one randomly
> chosen copy.
>
> Your task is to guess which colour of the light corresponds with which state
> and write it down. Then God will send you home.
Let me make a few comments about this experiment. I would find it quite
alarming to be experiencing these conditions. When the light changes
and I go from the high to the low measure state, I would expect to die.
When it goes from the low to the high measure state, I would expect that
my next moment is in a brand new consciousness (that shares memories
with the old). Although the near-certainty of death is balanced by the
near-certainty of birth, it is to such an extreme degree that it seems
utterly bizarre. Conscious observers should not be created and destroyed
so cavalierly, not if they know about it.
Suppose you stepped out of a duplicating booth, and a guy walked up with
a gun, aimed it at you, pulled the trigger and killed you. Would you
say, oh, well, I'm only losing two seconds of memories, my counterpart
will go on anyway? I don't think so, I think you would be extremely
alarmed and upset at the prospect of your death. The existence of
your counterpart would be small comfort. I am speaking specifically
of your views, Stathis, because I think you have already expressed your
disinterest in your copies.
God is basically putting you in this situation, but to an enormously,
unimaginably vaster degree. He is literally "playing God" with your
consciousness. I would say it's a very bad thing to do.
And what happens at the end? Suppose I guess right, all 10^100 of me?
How do we all go home? Does God create 10^100 copies of entire
universes for all my copies to go home to as a reward? I doubt it!
Somehow I think the old guy is going to kill me off again, all but one
infinitesimal fraction of me, and let this tiny little piece go home.
Well, so what? What good is that? Why do I care, given that I am
going to die, what happens to the one in 10^100 part of me? That's an
inconceivably small fraction.
In fact, I might actually prefer to have that tiny fraction stay in the
room so I can be reborn. Having 10^100 copies 50% of the time gives me
a lot higher measure than just being one person. I know I just finished
complaining about the ethical problems of putting a conscious entity in
this situation, but maybe there are reasons to think it's good.
So I don't necessarily see that I am motivated to follow God's
instructions and try to guess. I might just want to sit there.
And in any case, the reward from guessing right seems pretty slim
and unmotivating. Congratulations, you get to die. Whoopie.
Hal Finney
Jonathan Colvin
>> Russell Standish wrote:
>> >> Nope, I'm thinking of dualism as "the mind (or consciousness) is
>> >> separate from the body". Ie. The mind is not identical to
>the body.
>> >>
>> >
>> >These two statements are not equivalent. You cannot say
>that the fist
>> >is separate from the hand. Yet the fist is not identical to
>the hand.
>>
>> Well, actually I'd say the fist *is* identical to the hand.
>At least,
>> my fist seems to be identical to my hand.
>>
>Even when the hand is open????
Define "fist". You don't seem to be talking about a "thing", but some sort
of Platonic form. That's an expressly dualist position.
>> Another example. You cannot say that a
>> >smile is separate from someone's mouth. Yet a smile is not
>identical
>> >to the mouth.
>>
>> Depends whether you are a Platonist (dualist) about smiles.
>I'd say a
>> smiling mouth *is* identical to a mouth.
>>
>
>Even when the mouth is turned down???
As above. Is it your position that you are the same sort of thing as a
smile? That's a dualist position. I'd say I'm the same sort of thing as a
mouth.
>> Well, to explicate, the DA suffers from the issue of defining an
>> appropriate reference set. Now, we are clearly not both random
>> observers on the class of all observers(what are the chances of two
>> random observers from the class of all observers meeting at
>this time
>> on the same mailing list? Googleplexianly small). Neither
>are we both random observers from the class of "humans"
>> (same argument..what are the chances that both our birth ranks are
>> approximately the same?). For instance, an appropriate reference set
>> for me (or anyone reading this exchange) might be "people
>with access
>> to email debating the DA". But this reference set nullifies the DA,
>> since my birth rank is no longer random; it is constrained by the
>> requirement, for example, that email exists (a pre-literate
>caveman could not debate the DA).
>>
>
>This would be true if we are arguing about something that
>depended on us communicating via email. The DA makes no such
>argument, so therefore the existence of email, and of our
>communication is irrelevant.
It depends on us communicating per se. Thus, we could not be a pre-literate
caveman. In fact, the reference class of all people before the 19th century
is likely excluded, since the intellectual foundations for formulating the
DA were not yet present. Presumably in a thousand years the DA will no
longer be controversial, so it is likely that our reference class should
exclude such people as well. All these considerations (and I can think of
many others as well) nullify the naïve DA (that assumes our appropriate
reference class is simply "all humans".)
But your response above is ambiguous. I'm not sure if you are agreeing that
our appropriate reference class is *not* all humans, but disagreeing as to
whether email is important, or disagreeing with the entire statement above
(in which case presumably you think our appropriate refererence class for
the purposes of the DA is "all humans"). Can you be more specific about what
you disagree with?
>> The only way to rescue the DA is to assume that I *could have had* a
>> different birth rank; in other words, that I could have been someone
>> other than "me" (me as in "my body"). If the body I'm
>occupying is contingent (ie.
>> I could have been in any human body, and am in this one by pure
>> chance), then the DA is rescued.
>
>Yes.
Ok, at least we agree on that. Let's go from there.
>
>> This seems to require a dualistic account of identity.
>
>Why? Explain this particular jump of logic please? I'm not
>being stubborn here, I seriously do not understand how you
>draw this conclusion.
Read the above again (to which I assume you agree, since you replied "yes".)
Note particularly the phrase "If the body I'm occupying is contingent". How
can I "occupy" a body without a dualistic account of identity? How could "I"
have been in a different body, unless "I" am somehow separate from my body
(ie. Dualism)?
>> >Of course a mind is not _identical_ to a body. What an absurd thing
>> >to say. If your definition of dualism is that mind and body are not
>> >identical, then this is a poor definition indeed.
>> >It is tautologically true.
>>
>> Why do you say "of course"? I believe that I (my mind) am exactly
>> identical to my body (its brain, to be specific).
>>
>
>Really? Even when you're not conscious? What about after you've died?
>What about after brain surgery?
For the purposes of this discussion, yes to all.
After being copied by Bruno
>Marchal's teletransporter?
Let's not get into that one right now. That's a whole other debate.
>
>>
>> My definition would be something
>> >along the lines of minds and bodies have independent existence
>> >- ie positing the existence of disembodied minds is dualism.
>> >Such an assumption is not required to apply the Doomsday
>argument. I
>> >may make such assumptions in other areas though - such as wondering
>> >why the Anthropic Principle is valid. Not dualism implies the
>> >Anthropic Principle.
>>
>> Then how can a tree be a lion without assuming that minds and bodies
>> can have independent existance? Assuming dualism, its easy; simply
>> switch the lion's mind with the tree's.
>
>The question "Why am I not a lion?" is syntactically similar
>to "Why I am not an ant", or "Why I am not Jonathon Colvin?".
>The treeness (or
>otherwise) of the questioner is rather irrelevant. In any
>case, the answers to both the latter questions do not assume
>minds can be swapped.
You are dodging the question. Assuming for a second that lions and trees are
both conscious, you still haven't answered the question as to how a tree
could be a lion, without dualism of some sort.
>> >> As a little boy once asked, "Why are lions, lions? Why
>> >aren't lions ants?"
>>
>> >I have asked this question of myself "Why I am not an ant?".
>> >The answer (by the Doomsday Argument) is that ants are not
>conscious.
>> >The question, and answer is quite profound.
>>
>> That doesn't seem profound; it seems obvious. Even more
>obvious is the
>> answer "If you were an ant, you wouldn't be Russell
>Standish. So it is
>> a meaningless question".
>>
>
>I _didn't_ ask the question "Assuming I am Russell Standish,
>why am I not an ant?" I asked the question of "Why wasn't I an
>ant?". Its a different question completely.
It is a question that *assumes* dualism. The only way those can be different
questions is if "I" is not identical with "Russell Standish". Otherwise the
question is identical with "Why wasn't Russell Standish an ant?".
>> Switch the question. Why aren't you me (Jonathan Colvin)? I'm
>> conscious (feels like I am, anyway).
>This one is also easy to answer also. I'm just as likely to
>have been born you as born me. But I have to have been born
>someone. I just so happened to have been born me. This is
>called "symmetry breaking".
Again, you are *assuming* dualism in your statement. How could you possibly
have been me? If you *had* been me, what would the difference be in the
universe?
Jonathan Colvin
Quentin Anciaux
> Switch the question. Why aren't you me (Jonathan Colvin)? I'm conscious
> (feels like I am, anyway).
Hi Jonathan,
I think you do not see the real question, which can be formulated (using your
analogy) by :
Why (me as) Russell Standish is Russell Standish rather Jonathan Colvin ? I
(as RS) could have been you (JC)... but it's a fact that I'm not, but the
question is why I'm not, why am I me rather than you ? What "force" decide
for me to be me ? :)
Quentin
Quentin Anciaux
> One state consists of you alone in your room. The other state
> consists of 10^100 exact copies of you, their minds perfectly synchronised
> with your mind, each copy isolated from all the others in a room just like
> yours. Whenever the light changes colour, it means that God is either
> instantaneously creating (10^100 - 1) copies, or instantaneously destroying
> all but one randomly chosen copy.
>
> Your task is to guess which colour of the light corresponds with which
> state and write it down. Then God will send you home.
>
>
> But just as you are about to write down your conclusion, the light changes
> to green...
>
> What's wrong with the reasoning here?
Hi Stathis,
If I was in this position, I would not even try to guess, because you (or
god :) are explaining me that it is possible to copy me (not only "me", but
really all the behavior/feelings/mental state/indoor/outdoor state copying, a
copy as good as an original or a copy cannot say which is which and even a
3rd person observer could not distinguish). If it is the case, this means
that :
1- I'm "clonable"
2- I is not "real"
3- A single "I" does not means anything
So I ask you, if it's the case (real complete copy...), why should "I" guess
anything ? Who is the "I" that must guess ?
Quentin
Jonathan Colvin
>> Switch the question. Why aren't you me (Jonathan Colvin)? I'm
>> conscious (feels like I am, anyway).
>I think you do not see the real question, which can be
>formulated (using your
>analogy) by :
>
>Why (me as) Russell Standish is Russell Standish rather
>Jonathan Colvin ? I (as RS) could have been you (JC)... but
>it's a fact that I'm not, but the question is why I'm not, why
>am I me rather than you ? What "force" decide for me to be me ? :)
My argument is that this is a meaningless question. In what way could you
(as RS) have been me (as JC)? Suppose you were. How would the universe be
any different than it is right now? This question is analogous to asking
"Why is 2 not 3?". "Why is this tree not that telescope?". "Why is my aunt
not a wagon?".
The only way I can make sense of a question like this is to adopt a
dualistic position. In this case, the question makes good sense: "me" (my
soul, consciousness, whatever), might not have been in my body; it might
have been in someone else's.
It is easy to forget, I think, that the SSA is a *reasoning principle*, not
an ontological statement. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, we
should reason *as if* we are a random sample from the set of all observers
in our reference class. This is NOT the same as an ontological statement to
the effect that we *are* random observers, which seems hard to justify
unless we assume a species of dualism.
Jonathan Colvin
Russell Standish
in the room is more likely to be the high measure state than the low
measure state. (You didn't state what that colour was, but hopefully
the fictional prisoner can remember it).
With the RSSA, subsequent states tell you no information whatsoever
about which state is high measure. With the ASSA, you would expect
that the light remains in one state most of the time (googol out of
googol+1). So the fact that the light is alternating (and that you
trust that the letter is in fact true) implies that the ASSA does not
apply in this thought experiment.
Cheers
--
Jonathan Colvin
>>> Pardon the intrusion, but in your opinion does every form of
>>>dualism require that one side of the duality has properties and
>>>behaviors that are not constrained by the other side of the duality,
>>>as examplified by the idea of "randomly emplaced souls"?
>>> The idea that all dualities, of say mind and body, allow that
>>>minds and bodies can have properties and behaviours that are not
>>>mutually constrained is, at best, an incoherent straw dog.
>>
>> not sure what you mean by "mutually constrained"); I *think* you are
>> asking whether I believe that it is necessary that any duality must
>> have mutually exclusive properties (if not, please elaborate).
>
> [SPK]
>
> The same kind of mutual constraint that exist between a
>given physical object, say a IBM z990 or a 1972 Jaguar XKE or
>the human Stephen Paul King, and the possible complete
>descriptions of such. It is upon this distiction betwen
>physical object and its representations, or equivalently,
>between a complete description and its possible
>implementations, that the duality that I argue for is based.
>This is very different from the Cartesian duality of
>"substances" (res extensa and res cognitas) that are seperate
>and independent and yet mysteriously linked.
I'm not sure what a "complete description" is. Are we talking about a
dualism between, say, a perfect blueprint of a skyscraper and a skyscraper?
I'm not sure I'd call that equation a dualism at all. I'd call it a category
error. A description of a falling skyscraper can not hurt you (unless you
are also a description ... I agree with Bruno here), whereas a falling
skyscraper can. But please elaborate.
Jonathan Colvin
Stephen Paul King
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jonathan Colvin" <jco...@ican.net>
To: "'Stephen Paul King'" <step...@charter.net>;
<everyth...@eskimo.com>
[SPK]
Let me turn the question around a little. Are Information and the
material substrate one and the same? If not, this is a dualism.
Stephen
Stathis Papaioannou
>Stathis wrote:
> > You find yourself in a locked room with no windows, and no memory of how
>you got there....
> > What's wrong with the reasoning here?
>
>
>This is also in response to your explanation to me of copying etc. in your
>last post to "Many pasts?..."
>I think there is too much we don't know about quantum behavior vs.
>macro-matter (e.g. human bodies) behavior to say that copying, and
>subsequent diverging histories, is not like dividing by zero. I think that
>even if it were possible to copy a body (i.e. exactly) and have more than
>one copy at the same time, for the purposes of your thought-experiment why
>wouldn't it be the equivalent of quantum entanglement where you really have
>the equivalent of just the original? This is where I think the reasoning
>in your puzzle is flawed. Having 10^100+1 identical bodies is equivalent
>to having one body, so it makes it a 50/50 chance. Until the information
>is actually revealed, it would be just like the copying didn't happen,
>therefore there is no way to tell which state (copied or not copied) is
>currently in effect. Even though this may not be an appealing option, I
>believe that copying, if possible, wouldn't change anything having to do
>with identity (it doesn't "add to the measure"). Like Einstein said,
>insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a
>different result.
>
>In addition, even if copying a body with two subsequent diverging histories
>were possible, why wouldn't this become just like two different people?
>Who cares if there are disputes? That's nothing new. What does that have
>to do with consiousness? I don't believe that identity is dependent on
>consciousness.
The idea of "exact copying" not being consistent with QM is raised quite
often on this list. The problem with this is that you don't need literally
exact copying to get the same mental state. If you did, our minds would
diverge wildly after only nanoseconds, given the constant changes that occur
even at the level of macromolecules, let alone the quantum state of every
subatomic particle. It is like saying you could never copy a CD, because you
could never get the quantum states exactly the same as in the original.
Brains are far more complex than CD's, but like CD's they must be tolerant
of a fair amount of noise at *way* above the quantum level, or you would at
the very least turn into a different person every time you scratched your
head. If this does not convince you, then you can imagine that the thought
experiments involving "exact" copying are being implemented on a (classical)
computer, and the people are actually AI programs. Once the difficulty of
creating an AI was overcome, it would be a trivial matter to copy the
program to another machine (or as a separate process on the same machine)
and give it the same inputs.
As for your other questions: yes, of course once the copies diverge they are
completely different people. For the purposes of this exercise, however, I
am assuming they *don't* diverge. In that case, I agree you have given the
correct answer to my puzzle: from a first person perspective, identical
mental states are the same mental state, and at any point there is a 50-50
chance that you are either one of the 10^100 group or on your own. But not
everyone on this list would agree, which is why I made up this puzzle.
--Stathis Papaioannou
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Jesse Mazer
>I agree you have given the correct answer to my puzzle: from a first
>person perspective, identical mental states are the same mental state, and
>at any point there is a 50-50 chance that you are either one of the 10^100
>group or on your own. But not everyone on this list would agree, which is
>why I made up this puzzle.
Would you say that because you think running multiple identical copies of a
given mind in parallel doesn't necessarily increase the absolute measure of
those observer-moments (that would be my opinion), or because you don't
believe the concept of absolute measure on observer-moments is meaningful at
all, or for some other reason?
Jesse
Eric Cavalcanti
>
> You find yourself in a locked room with no windows, and no memory of how you
> got there.
(...)
> Every 10 minutes, the system alternates between two states. One
> state consists of you alone in your room. The other state consists of 10^100
> exact copies of you, their minds perfectly synchronised with your mind, each
> copy isolated from all the others in a room just like yours.
>
> and write it down. Then God will send you home.
> But just as you are about to write down your conclusion, the light changes
> to green...
>
> What's wrong with the reasoning here?
To make the story more visualisable, imagine that God throws a coin
(since he doesn't play dice) to decide whether he will initialise the system
in state A (one person) or B (many). We can imagine that at this point
the universe is split in two, and in universe 1 there are many people
in the room, while in universe 2 there is only one.
After ten minutes, God switches the state of *both* universes. In
universe 1 there is now one person in the room, while in universe 2
there are many, most of which with a false memory of being there
for more than 10 minutes.
This happens for a while before the people in the rooms start to learn
about the experiment and God's game. But you can convince yourself
that it doesn't matter much what was the initial state and how many times
the light has switched; if you believe God's story, the most likely is that
you have just been created after the last switch, and you have a false
memory of being there for a while.
Eric.
Jonathan Colvin
Russell Standish wrote:
>> >> Well, actually I'd say the fist *is* identical to the hand.
>> >At least,
>> >> my fist seems to be identical to my hand.
>> >>
>> >Even when the hand is open????
>>
>> Define "fist". You don't seem to be talking about a "thing",
>but some
>> sort of Platonic form. That's an expressly dualist position.
>
>
> fist: a clenched hand, esp. as used in boxing
>
>>
>> >> Another example. You cannot say that a
>> >> >smile is separate from someone's mouth. Yet a smile is not
>> >identical
>> >> >to the mouth.
>> >>
>> >> Depends whether you are a Platonist (dualist) about smiles.
>> >I'd say a
>> >> smiling mouth *is* identical to a mouth.
>> >>
>> >
>> >Even when the mouth is turned down???
>>
>> As above. Is it your position that you are the same sort of
>thing as a
>> smile? That's a dualist position. I'd say I'm the same sort of thing
>> as a mouth.
>>
>
>thing as a smile or a mouth? What do you mean?
A mouth is a "thing". A smile is not. If I define myself as "the body that
calls itself Jonathan Colvin", that is the same sort of thing as a mouth (a
material object). A smile is a different category entirely. But we are
getting side-tracked here.
>> But your response above is ambiguous. I'm not sure if you
>are agreeing
>> that our appropriate reference class is *not* all humans, but
>> disagreeing as to whether email is important, or disagreeing
>with the
>> entire statement above (in which case presumably you think our
>> appropriate refererence class for the purposes of the DA is "all
>> humans"). Can you be more specific about what you disagree with?
>>
>
>The reference class is all conscious beings. Since we know of
>no other conscious beings, then this is often taken to be "all
>humans". The case of extra terrestrial intelligences certainly
>complicates the DA, however DA-like arguments would also imply
>that humans dominate to class of conscious beings. This
>conclusion is not empirically contradicted, but if it ever
>were, the DA would be refuted.
Absent a good definition for "conscious", this reference class seems
unjustifiable. Could I have been a chimpanzee? If not, why not? Could I have
been an infant who died at the age of 5? And why pick on "conscious" as the
reference class. Why couldn't I have been a tree?
>Constraining the reference to class to subsets of conscious
>beings immediately leads to contradictions - eg why am I not a
>Chinese, instead of Australian - Chinese outnumber Australians
>by a factor of 50 (mind you a factor of 50 is not really
>enough to base anthropic arguments, but one could easily finesse this).
Indeed. This is a further indication that there are problems with the DA.
>> >> The only way to rescue the DA is to assume that I *could
>have had*
>> >> a different birth rank; in other words, that I could have been
>> >> someone other than "me" (me as in "my body"). If the body I'm
>> >occupying is contingent (ie.
>> >> I could have been in any human body, and am in this one by pure
>> >> chance), then the DA is rescued.
>> >
>> >Yes.
>>
>> Ok, at least we agree on that. Let's go from there.
>>
>> >
>> >> This seems to require a dualistic account of identity.
>> >
>> >Why? Explain this particular jump of logic please? I'm not being
>> >stubborn here, I seriously do not understand how you draw this
>> >conclusion.
>>
>> Read the above again (to which I assume you agree, since you replied
>> "yes".) Note particularly the phrase "If the body I'm occupying is
>> contingent". How can I "occupy" a body without a dualistic
>account of identity? How could "I"
>> have been in a different body, unless "I" am somehow
>separate from my
>> body (ie. Dualism)?
>>
>
>I have just finished Daniel Dennett's book "Consciousness
>Explained", and gives rather good account of how this is
>possible. As our minds develop, first prelingually, and then
>as language gains hold, our self, the "I" you refer to,
>develops out of a web of thoughts, words, introspection
>constrained by the phylogeny of the body, and also by the
>environment in which my self "awakened" (or bootstrapped as it were).
>
>Since this must happen in all bodies with the requisite
>structure (ie humans, and possibly som non-humans), it can
>easily be otherwise. It can easily be contingent.
>
>Yet Daniel Dennett is expressly non-dualist. I'm sure he'd be
>most interested if you were to label him as a dualist.
This is simply an account of how we gain a sense of self. I don't see the
relevance to this discussion. I sincerely doubt that Dennett would find the
question "Why I am I me and not someone else?" meaningful in any way. How
could *your* self have awakened or been bootstrapped in someone else's body?
Dennett expressly *denies* that we "occupy" our minds.
>...
>>
>> You are dodging the question. Assuming for a second that lions and
>> trees are both conscious, you still haven't answered the question as
>> to how a tree could be a lion, without dualism of some sort.
>>
>
>I think I have given several examples of such answers. And
>above I gave yet another answer, this time from Daniel Dennett.
With respect, I don't see that you've anything of the sort.
>> It is a question that *assumes* dualism. The only way those can be
>> different questions is if "I" is not identical with "Russell
>Standish".
>
>Of course "I" am not identical with "Russell Standish". The
>latter is simply a name. I could walk into deed office and
>change it tomorrow. I don't believe that changes "me", though.
>
>As I have said many times, nonidentity of coincident things is
>not a definition of dualism!
>
>>
>> >> Switch the question. Why aren't you me (Jonathan Colvin)? I'm
>> >> conscious (feels like I am, anyway).
>>
>> >This one is also easy to answer also. I'm just as likely to
>have been
>> >born you as born me. But I have to have been born someone.
>I just so
>> >happened to have been born me. This is called "symmetry breaking".
>>
>> Again, you are *assuming* dualism in your statement. How could you
>> possibly have been me? If you *had* been me, what would the
>difference
>> be in the universe?
>I am assuming no such thing! Unless you insist on an
>absolutely trivial definition of dualism that noone else agrees with!
I don't think it is trivial at all. I think it is key. And you didn't answer
the question. If you had been me, how would the universe be any different?
And if the universe isn't different under that circumstance, how does it
make sense to say "I might have been you"?
In the process of writing this email, I did some googling, and it seems my
objection has been independantly discovered (some time ago). See
http://hanson.gmu.edu/nodoom.html
In particular, I note the following section, which seems to mirror my
argument rather precisely:
"It seems hard to rationalize this state space and prior outside a religious
image where souls wait for God to choose their bodies.
This last objection may sound trite, but I think it may be the key. The
universe doesn't know or care whether we are intelligent or conscious, and I
think we risk a hopeless conceptual muddle if we try to describe the state
of the universe directly in terms of abstract features humans now care
about. If we are going to extend our state desciptions to say where we sit
in the universe (and it's not clear to me that we should) it seems best to
construct a state space based on the relevant physical states involved, to
use priors based on natural physical distributions over such states, and
only then to notice features of interest to humans."
I've looked for rebuttals of Hanson, and haven't found any. Nick references
him, but comments only that Hanson also seems to be comitted to the SIA (not
sure why he thinks this).
Jonathan Colvin
Hal Finney
> In the process of writing this email, I did some googling, and it seems my
> objection has been independantly discovered (some time ago). See
> http://hanson.gmu.edu/nodoom.html
>
> In particular, I note the following section, which seems to mirror my
> argument rather precisely:
>
> "It seems hard to rationalize this state space and prior outside a religious
> image where souls wait for God to choose their bodies.
> This last objection may sound trite, but I think it may be the key. The
> universe doesn't know or care whether we are intelligent or conscious, and I
> think we risk a hopeless conceptual muddle if we try to describe the state
> of the universe directly in terms of abstract features humans now care
> about. If we are going to extend our state desciptions to say where we sit
> in the universe (and it's not clear to me that we should) it seems best to
> construct a state space based on the relevant physical states involved, to
> use priors based on natural physical distributions over such states, and
> only then to notice features of interest to humans."
>
> I've looked for rebuttals of Hanson, and haven't found any. Nick references
> him, but comments only that Hanson also seems to be comitted to the SIA (not
> sure why he thinks this).
There was an extensive debate between Robin Hanson and Nick Bostrom
on the Extropians list in mid 1988. You can pick it up from the point
where Robin came up with the "rock/monkey/human/posthuman" model which
he describes in the web page you cite above, at this link:
http://forum.javien.com/conv.php?new=true&convdata=id::vae825qL-Gceu-2ueS-wFbo-Kwj0fIHLv6dh
You can also try looking this earlier thread,
http://forum.javien.com/conv.php?new=true&convdata=id::U9mLfRBF-z8ET-BDyq-8Sz1-5UotvKx2iIS2
and focus on the postings by Nick and Robin, which led Robin to produce
his formal model.
I think if you look at the details however you will find it is Robin
Hanson who advocates the "you could have been a rock" position and Nick
Bostrom who insists that you could only have been other people. This
seemed to be one of the foundations of their disagreement.
As far as the Self Indication Axiom, it might be due to such lines as
this, from Robin's essay you linked to:
"And even if everyone had the same random chance of developing amnesia,
the mere fact that you exist suggests a larger population. After all,
if doom had happend before you were born, you wouldn't be around to
consider these questions."
I think this is similar to the reasoning in the SIA.
Hal Finney
Eugen Leitl
> Applying the SSA, the colour of the light when you first find yourself
> in the room is more likely to be the high measure state than the low
> measure state. (You didn't state what that colour was, but hopefully
> the fictional prisoner can remember it).
The subjective duty cycle is 1:1. Because of the "their minds perfectly
synchronized" constraint there's only one individuum. The number of instances doesn't
matter, because they have no chance of experiencing anything else but what
the sync master experiences.
Unless I'm missing something there's no way to tell but to flip a coin, which
gives you a 0.5 probability of being sent home.
--
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.leitl.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
Bruno Marchal
Le 17-juin-05, à 07:47, Eric Cavalcanti a écrit :
> if you believe God's story, the most likely is that
> you have just been created after the last switch, and you have a false
> memory of being there for a while.
I don't see why you call that memory "false". Suppose you begin to play
chess with the computer at your job office, and, after having save the
play on a disk, you continue to play chess with your computer at home.
Would say the computer at home has false memories of the play?
In that case it is obvious that comp makes *all* memories false, so
that we can drop out the adjective "false", it does not add
information.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Bruno Marchal
equivalent with why am I the one in Washington and not the one in
Moscow after a WM duplication. It is strictly unanswerable. Even a God
could not give an adequate explanation (assuming c.).
Bruno
Le 16-juin-05, à 23:02, Quentin Anciaux a écrit :
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Stathis Papaioannou
You can only experience being one person at a time, no matter how faithful
and how numerous the copies are. A simpler example than the above to
demonstrate what this would be like is given by Bruno Marchal in step 3 of
his UDA. You get into a teleporter in Brussels, and it transmits the
information to build a copy of your body to Moscow and Washington. To a
third person observing this, he notes, as you have above, that after the
teleportation there is no longer a "toi", because you have become a "vous"
(and not because we're being polite). For you, the effect is that you find
yourself *either* in Moscow *or* Washington, each with probability 0.5.
Unless you meet the other Quentin, there is no way you can tell, however
many times you try this, that the machine operator hasn't flipped a coin to
decide which (one) city to send you. This is rather like the many worlds
interpretation of quantum mechanics, where all possibilities are realised,
so that it is a deterministic theory, but from the viewpoint of the
inhabitants of any of the worlds, it is indistinguishable from the
probabilistic Copenhagen interpretation.
--Stathis Papaioannou
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Stathis Papaioannou
I was still trying to put some sort of reply together to your last post, but
I think your water analogy is making me more rather than less confused as to
your actual position on these issues, which is obviously something you have
thought deeply about. With the puzzle in this thread, I was hoping that it
would be clear that the subject in the room *has* to experience the light
changing colour every 10 minutes, and therefore can draw no conclusion about
which state is the high measure one. It seems that many on this list would
indeed say that running a mind in parallel increases its measure, and some
would say (eg. Saibal Mitra in recent discussions - I still have to get back
to you too, Saibal) that the subject would therefore find himself
continually cycling in the 10^100 group.
To summarise my position, it is this: the measure of an observer moment is
relevant when a given observer is contemplating what will happen next. If
there are 2N successor OM's where he will experience A and 3N successor OM's
where he will experience B, then he can assume Pr(A)=0.4 and Pr(B)=0.6. Only
the ratio matters. Moreover, the ratio/ relative measure can only be of
relevance at a particular time point, when considering the immediate future.
To say that an individual will not live to 5000 years even though there
exist OM's where he is this age, because his measure is much higher when he
is under 100 years of age, makes no sense to me.
Now, minimising acronym use, could you explain what your understanding is of
how measure changes with number of copies of an OM which are instantiated,
and if it doesn't, then how does it change, and when you use it in
calculating how someone's life will go from OM to OM. Also, you have talked
about memory loss, perhaps even complete memory loss, while still being you:
in what sense are you still you? Isn't that like saying I am the
reincarnation of Alexander the Great or something? You say we need a theory
of consciousness to understand these things, but don't you mean a theory of
personal identity? I can't see the former knocking on our door in the near
future, but I'm pretty confidant about the latter.
Thanks for the effort you are putting into explaining this stuff.
--Stathis Papaioannou
_________________________________________________________________
Sell your car for $9 on carpoint.com.au
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Jonathan Colvin
insist that this question is meaningful, I don't see how this is possible
without assuming a dualism of some sort (exactly which sort I'm trying to
figure out).
If the material universe is identical under situation (A) (I am copy #1 in
washington) and (B) (I am copy#2 in washington), then in what way does it
make sense to say that situation A OR situation B might have obtained?
This seems to be the crux of the objection to any theory which reifies 1st
person phenomena.
Jonathan Colvin
Hal Finney
meaningfully take counterfactuals. At some level it is completely
mundane to say things like, if I had taken a different route to work
today, I wouldn't have gotten caught in that traffic jam. We aren't
thrown into a maelstrom of existential confusion as we struggle to
understand what it could mean to have different memories than those
we do. How could I have not gotten into that traffic jam? What would
happen to those memories? Would I still be the same person? We deal
with these kinds of counterfactuals all the time. They are one of our
main tools for understanding the world and learning which strategies
work and which don't.
Then there are much more extreme counterfactuals. Apple Computer head
Steve Jobs gave a pretty good graduation speech at Stanford last week,
http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html.
He explains that he was adopted, and his life was changed in a major
way by the circumstances. His biological mother, an unwed grad student,
wanted him raised by college graduates, so he was set to be adopted by
a lawyer and his wife. At the last minute the lawyer decided he wanted
a girl, so Jobs ended up being given to a blue collar couple, neither of
whom had gone to college. They were good parents and treated him well,
sacrificing so he could go to college, but after six months Jobs dropped
out, seeing little value to consuming his family's entire savings.
He continued to attend classes on the sly, got into computers and the
rest is history.
But imagine how different his life would have been if the original
plan had gone through and he had been adopted by a successful lawyer,
perhaps raised in an upper class household with his every wish met.
He would have gone to an Ivy League college and probably done well.
But it would have been a totally different life path.
Does it make sense for Jobs to say, who would I have been if that had
happened? Or would he have been such a totally different person that
this stretches the idea of a counterfactual beyond reason? I think his
telling the story demonstrates that he does think this way sometimes.
Yet none of the memories or experiences that he has would have been
present in this other version. At most the two versions might have shared
some personality traits, but even those are often strongly influenced
by upbringing - his tenacity in the face of adversity, for example,
might never have become so strong in a life where everything came easily.
Probably there are many people in the world who are at least as similar
to Steve Jobs in personality as the person he would have been if his
early life had gone that other way.
The point is that we can imagine a range of counterfactuals where the
difference is a matter of degree, not kind, from trivial matters all
the way up to situations where we would have to consider ourselves a
different person. There is no bright line to draw that I can see.
So yes, if you can imagine what it would have been like to eat something
else for breakfast, then you should be able to imagine what it would have
been like to be born as someone else. It's the same basic technique,
just applied to a greater degree.
Hal Finney
Jonathan Colvin
Those are counterfactuals regarding personal circumstance, and do not seem
particularly controversial, even admitting that it is not straightforward to
define a single theory of personal identity that "covers all the bases".
There's a continuous, definable identity that follows a
physical/causal/genetic/mental chain all the way from when egg and sperm met
up to Jobs' graduation. It does not seem problematic to alter contingent
aspects of this identity-chain and yet insist that we retain the "same"
Jobs.
It is a great deal harder to see how to make sense of a counterfactual such
as "Who would I be if my mother and father hadn't had sex?", or "who would I
be if they'd had sex a day later and a different egg and sperm had met?".
I have to disagree with you here, and state that this sort of counterfactual
seems to indeed embody a difference of kind, not just degree. We're not
talking about "imagining_whats_it_likeness". We are talking about me *being*
someone different.
Jonathan Colvin
Jonathan Colvin
I think Robin is assuming (as I do) that the only way counterfactuals such
as "I could have been someone/something else" make sense, absent dualism, is
if we adopt a strictly physical identity theory (ie. The atoms in my body
could have been a rock rather than a person).
Nick then points out that if you were a rock, you wouldn't be you (it looks
like he's assuming a pattern identity theory such as Morovacs'). I agree
with Nick that if you were a rock, you wouldn't be you. But under pattern
identity theory, if you were someone else, you wouldn't be you either.
Absent some sort of identity dualism, this is not any improvement on
physical identity.
The last time I discussed the issue of personal identity with Nick, he
agreed with me that the answer to the question "why am I me and not someone
else?" was *not* "I am a random observer, and so I'm me by chance", but
"it's a meaningless question; I could not have been anyone else". But that
discussion was not in the context of the DA.
Jonathan Colvin
Pete Carlton
On Jun 17, 2005, at 10:24 AM, Hal Finney wrote:
>
> Does it make sense for Jobs to say, who would I have been if that had
> happened?
Yes, it makes sense, but only because we know that the phrase "Who
would I have been", uttered by Steve Jobs, is just a convenient way
for expressing a third-person proposition, "What would have happened
to Steve Jobs if...". Which in turn is also a short way of asking
about the whole world, i.e., "What would the world have been like if
Steve Jobs had been adopted by someone else". The part of the world
that's the main target of this question is the part that wears
turtlenecks, makes Apple computers and calls itself Steve - so here
it just gets replaced by "I". But logically, by asking "who would I
have been", Steve's not inquiring into anything that a third-person
observer could not also inquire into.
The apparent problems can be solved by translating these questions
into third-person terms. for example,
> So yes, if you can imagine what it would have been like to eat
> something
> else for breakfast, then you should be able to imagine what it
> would have
> been like to be born as someone else.
For breakfast: what would have happened to the world (especially the
Steve Jobs part of the world) if Steve Jobs had had something else
for breakfast?
For birth: what would the world be like if Steve Jobs hadn't been
born, but his biological parents had had some other child?
There's no sense in asking "what if I was born as someone else", no
more than there is asking "what would Steve Jobs be like if Steve
Jobs had never been born?" But there is sense in asking what would
be different about the world. The problems here all come from
overzealous emphasis on the "first person perspective". In other
words, I think the mistake is made by asking the question "what would
>it< have been like", instead of the question "what would >the
world< have been like". The thing that the "it" refers to (a first-
person perspective, presumably) is not a thing that exists in the
world framed by the question.
Daddy...@aol.com
Daddy...@aol.com
Stathis Papaioannou
Just to clarify my view on copies, if they start to diverge from me the
moment they are created, then they aren't me and I don't care about them in
a *selfish* way. That is, if a copy experiences a pain, I don't experience
that pain, which I think is as good a test as any to distinguish self from
other. This doesn't mean I should be indifferent to the copy's suffering
just because he is a copy; I should treat him just like anyone else. What my
actual attitude to the copy would be I'm not really sure, having never been
in such a situation. I might be resentful and uncomfortable around him, or I
may be over-solicitous. But whatever my feelings are, there is a good chance
they will be reciprocated.
Your scenario with the person being shot when he has just walked out of a
duplicating booth reminds me of a number of SF novels where people "back up"
their minds on a regular basis, in case they get killed in an accident. This
may help the dead person's family, but it always seemed to me rather
pointless from a selfish point of view, since I would still be losing the
memories since the backup, and I would therefore still be afraid of dying.
If the backup were done continually, within milliseconds of any thought or
experience, that would be a different matter.
Which brings us to death. My definition of death is that it occurs at a
particular time point in an observer's life when there is no successor
observer moment ever, anywhere. So with the backup example above, if you
suffered a fatal accident today and had the instantant backup machinery
going, everything up to the moment you lost consciousness would have been
recorded, so your mind can be emulated using the data, and you wake up as an
upload (or robot , or newly grown human clone) just as you would wake up in
hospital if the accident had rendered you unconscious rather than killed
you. Whereas if you had only the el cheapo once a day backup, the last thing
you see before you are killed is the last thing you will ever see.
With my example, it is important to remeber that the 10^100 copies are
*exact* copies which stay in lockstep for the full 10 minutes. If they were
initially exact copies and then allowed to diverge, terminating them after
10 minutes would be an act of mass murder, because once they are terminated,
their memories and personalities are gone forever: there is no successor OM.
(Whether you can call it murder, which is bad, when God does it is an
interesting aside, since by definition God never does anything bad.)
However, with the exact copies as described, there definitely *is* a
successor OM, provided by the single copy in the room when the 10 minutes is
up. The continuity is even better than with the "instant" backup machine
described above, since nothing special needs to be done other than allow one
of the 10^100 to continue living. So in this case, terminating the 10^100
copies is not murder at all, because subjectively, all the copies' stream of
consciousness would continue seamlessly.
Finally, there is the idea that a conscious entity's measure has some effect
on the entity. If you have given an explanation of why you think this is so,
I have missed it or (more likely) not recognised it. Do you think there is
any empirical test that can be done to demonstrate higher or lower measure?
Do you accept the way I have presented the thought experiment above, i.e.
that when God creates or destroys 10^100 copies the subject notices
absolutely nothing other than the light changing colour, or do you think he
would notice some other difference? If so, it would have to be an *enormous*
difference, given the numbers we are talking about; what difference would it
make if the ratio were, say, 2:1 instead? Can you honestly say that this
subjective effect of measure isn't something that will be cut down by
Occam's Razor as a needless complication?
Sorry if the last paragraph sounds like I'm being provocative, but this one
topic seems to be the source of most of the disagreement between us.
--Stathis Papaioannou
Hal Finney writes:
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Russell Standish
this differ from "What is it like to be a bat?"
Presumably Jonathon Colvin would argue that this latter question is
meaningless, unless immaterial souls existed.
I still find it hard to understand this argument. The question "What
is it like to be a bat?" still has meaning, but is probably
unanswerable (although Dennett, I notice considers it answerable,
contra Nagel!)
Cheers
Hal Finney
> Do you accept the way I have presented the thought experiment above, i.e.
> that when God creates or destroys 10^100 copies the subject notices
> absolutely nothing other than the light changing colour, or do you think he
> would notice some other difference? If so, it would have to be an *enormous*
> difference, given the numbers we are talking about; what difference would it
> make if the ratio were, say, 2:1 instead? Can you honestly say that this
> subjective effect of measure isn't something that will be cut down by
> Occam's Razor as a needless complication?
I would first use the word "subjects" not "subject" for the many copies
involved in your experiment. Most of them will experience the same thing
as the subject in the following experiment:
God creates someone with memories of a past life, lets him live for a
day, then instantly and painlessly kills him.
What would you say that he experiences? Would he notice his birth and
death? I would generally apply the same answers to the 10^100 people
who undergo your thought experiment.
Hal Finney
jamikes
I cannot keep to myself remarks on TWO kinds of "unreasonabilities" surfaced
and are still being discussed to saturation (euphemism).
#1: the use of the conditional form. This, as usually applied, pertains to a
select aspect of the model without (of course) taking the "rest of the
world" into consideration which effacts/affects all changes. One cannot
think of changing one aspect and disregard the result of ALL influences onto
it.
Maybe Job's bluecollar parents provided a firm and steady grip on his
growing up giving him the discipline to become a successful person, while
the affluent couple's possibilities would have led him into drugs and/or
crime.
Si "nisi" non esset, perfectus quodlibet esset.
It's a mind-game. Sci (or not so sci?) - fi???
One closing idea: the world is deterministic: All
that happens has its origin in intereffectiveness, we have access only to a
limited cognitive circle. So those 'facts' we want to hypothetically change
are determined by the OM circumstances. It is nonsense: just like the 10^100
pensimilar copies in 10^100 pensimilar universes - all according to our
(human and present) understanding, design and conditions. Our own
mind-limited artifact.
#2: Over the millennia faith-strategists invented dualism to imply something
that 'survives' us and can be praised or punished just to secure the grip of
'faith' (organizations?) on the 'faithful, aoup carrying such memes over
millennia. It was not an esoteric thought: the basic reductionist thinking
humanity developed with its limited models gave rise to "thinking in things"
ie cut models, without understanding of the total interconnectedness.
If we step a bit further, we find that "the world" is change, process,
"substance" is reduceable into such and it is our reductionist logic that
looks for "material substance" on traditional basis.
The process, change, ie. the 'function' usually assigned to such 'substance'
as being considered a separable entity (like spirit, soul, consciousness,
power, whatever) and voila: we have dualism.
I do not imply that the "soul" is the "function" of the "body": the unit we
realize as our model of a human being (or anything else) is considered as
having a substrate AND a function separately. So the personalized function
can(??) 'survive' the substrate's demise. Bovine excrement: there is an
intrinsic unity of 'functional units' - no "mind" separable from the (so
called) material tool: the neuronal brain (and its functions).
I don't blame Descartes: in his time dualistic basis kept him from the
inquisition. And we cannot judge by our present epistemic level of ongoing
information at our cognitive inventory, the outcome of another (lower?)
level conclusion. Ptolemy was right in his rite. Passé.
I like this list, because it 'thinks' for the future. Of course sometimes it
is hard to shake off the firm handcuffs in thinking by traditional terms. We
all have been brainwashed into them.
Please, excuse my unorthodoxy
John Mikes
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jonathan Colvin" <jco...@ican.net>
To: "'"Hal Finney"'" <h...@finney.org>; <everyth...@eskimo.com>
Sent: Friday, June 17, 2005 4:34 PM
Subject: RE: Dualism and the DA
> Hal Finney wrote:
> >It's an interesting question as to how far we can comfortably
> >or meaningfully take counterfactuals. At some level it is
> >completely mundane to say things like, if I had taken a
> >different route to work today, I wouldn't have gotten caught
> >in that traffic jam.
SNIP
> >Computer head Steve Jobs gave a pretty good graduation speech at Stanford
last week, ...
SNIP
> >Does it make sense for Jobs to say, who would I have been if
> >that had happened?
> >The point is that we can imagine a range of counterfactuals ...
> >...
>
> Those are counterfactuals regarding personal circumstance, and do not seem
> particularly controversial, even admitting that it is not straightforward
to
> define a single theory of personal identity that "covers all the bases".
SNIP
> as "Who would I be if my mother and father hadn't had sex?", or "who would
I
> be if they'd had sex a day later and a different egg and sperm had met?".
>
> I have to disagree with you here, and state that this sort of
counterfactual
> seems to indeed embody a difference of kind, not just degree. We're not
> talking about "imagining_whats_it_likeness". We are talking about me
*being*
> someone different.
>
> Jonathan Colvin
> -----------------------------
> And may I quote: Russell St.
to JC Thursday, June 16, 2005 2:00 AM:
(attachment):
>>>On Wed, Jun 15, 2005 at 10:30:11PM -
>>>Jonathan Colvin wrote:
>>>> Nope, I'm thinking of dualism as "the mind (or consciousness) is
separate from the >>>>body". Ie. The mind is not identical to the body.
>>>> - RS:
>>>These two statements are not equivalent. >>>You cannot say that the fist
is separate from >>>the hand. Yet the fist is not identical to the
>>>hand. Another example. You cannot say that >>>a smile is separate from
someone's mouth. >>>Yet a smile is not identical to the mouth.
>>>... JC:
>>>>> As a little boy once asked, "Why are >>>>lions, lions? Why aren't
lions ants?"
>>>> Jonathan Colvin
(RS):
>>>I have asked this question of myself "Why I >>>am not an ant?". The
answer (by the >>>Doomsday Argument) is that ants are not >>>conscious. The
question, and answer is quite >>>profound.
(Here I object: ants ARE conscious, of course not "Humanly Conscious" but
that is definitional.JM)
Bruno Marchal
Le 18-juin-05, à 13:09, Eric Cavalcanti a écrit :
> But with comp, then yes, I agree that the memory of the newly created
> copies is just as "real" as any other memory.
ok
> Or maybe not quite. Because
> we cannot find any evidence that we were created 10 minutes ago. That
> hypothesis is indistinguishable of the hypothesis that we have been
> existing
> continually over time.
Except in our thought experiments (which *assumes* comp). A comp
practitioner, who accepts to travel with teleporters will have evidence
(but no proof though) that his "local body" has been created recently
when he goes out of the reconstitution box.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Bruno Marchal
Le 17-juin-05, à 19:44, Jonathan Colvin a écrit :
> Bruno wrote:
>> Note that the question why am I me and not my brother is
>> strictly equivalent with why am I the one in Washington and
>> not the one in Moscow after a WM duplication. It is strictly
>> unanswerable. Even a God could not give an adequate
>> explanation (assuming c.).
> Ok, does that not imply that it is a meaningless question?
Not at all.
> If you want to
> insist that this question is meaningful, I don't see how this is
> possible
> without assuming a dualism of some sort (exactly which sort I'm trying
> to
> figure out).
>
> If the material universe is identical under situation (A) (I am copy
> #1 in
> washington) and (B) (I am copy#2 in washington), then in what way does
> it
> make sense to say that situation A OR situation B might have obtained?
Just ask the one in Washington. He will tell you that he feels really
be the one in washington. The experience from his personal point of
view *has* given a bit of information "he feels himself to be the one
in washington, and not in Moscow". At this stage he can have only an
intellectual (3-person) knowledge that its doppelganger has been
reconstituted in Moscow. And he remember "correctly by comp" his past
history in Brussels.
It is even simpler to reason by assuming, well not comp, but the fact
that the reasoner believes in comp, not as a philosopher, but as
someone practicing comp everyday. He believes that, as far as he is
consistent he will remain consistent (or alive with its correct
memories) after a teletransportation from Brussels to Mars. An
independant unknown reconstitution elsewhere will not change the fact
that he survives. So he believes he will survive a duplication, in the
same mundane sense that he would survive a medical operation. Only, he
can by introspection realize that the reconstitution will break the
3-symmetry of the duplication. By numerical identity and 3-symmetry he
knows he will no convey one bit of information to an external observer
(by saying I am the one in W), but he *knows* he is the one in w, like
the other konws he is the one in m. (unless he is transformed into a
zombie after the duplication, but by definition of comp that should not
happen). The "or" situation makes sense from the first person point of
views. Then, by introspective anticipation the one in brussels will
infer he is just maximally ignorant about where, in W or M he feel to
be after the experiment will be done.
>
> This seems to be the crux of the objection to any theory which reifies
> 1st
> person phenomena.
You are right, but only from the naturalist/physicalist/materialist
theoretical point of view. With comp I suspect (let us say) that it is
the crux of the objection to any theory which reifies the 3 person
phenomena (except a part of arithmetic).
The fact is that when I have a headache, or just when someone I care
off has a headache, I am not sure I find even just polite the
accusation of reification. If I am the one with the headache, I would
consider as a lie to myself to believe I am reifying the headache.
Contrarily if you tell me there are moon, galaxies, big bangs and
gluons, and when I ask you the evidences, you can give me only numbers
which represent relative but apparently stable relation with other
numbers. This I don't take as an evidence for moons and gluons, but
only as evidence that we probably share a long and non trivial comp
history. But with comp, the stability of that history is in need to be
explained, without reifying anything substancial, material or physical:
it *is* the 1-dragon problem.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Stathis Papaioannou
Hal Finney writes:
>God creates someone with memories of a past life, lets him live for a
>day, then instantly and painlessly kills him.
>
>What would you say that he experiences? Would he notice his birth and
>death? I would generally apply the same answers to the 10^100 people
>who undergo your thought experiment.
Some people might argue that death is not intrinsically bad; rather, it is
the pain and anxiety associated with dying and the grief the dying person's
loved ones will go through that is bad. I don't agree, and it appears you
don't either: death *is* intrinsically bad. Knowing that I will never again
have any experiences of any kind is something I find deeply disturbing, and
I think that most people, if they are honest with themselves, would feel the
same way. Therefore, in the example you have given, if God creates someone
and then kills him, painlessly or not, that is bad. In my thought
experiment, if the 10^100 copies are allowed to diverge after they are
created and then all but one killed, that would be very bad indeed.
Similarly, if the 10^100 copies were created, stayed perfectly synchronised,
and then all of them killed, that would be very bad.
Before continuing, it is worth looking at the definition of death. The
standard medical definition will not do for our purposes, because it doesn't
allow for future developments such as reviving the cryogenically preserved,
mind uploads, teleportation etc. A simple, general purpose definition which
has been proposed before on this list is that a person can be said to die at
a particular moment when there is no chance that he will experience a "next
moment", however that experience might come about. Equivalently, death
occurs when there is no successor observer moment, anywhere or ever.
One consequence of this definition is that everyone who appears to be dead
can only be said to be provisionally dead, until it can actually be shown
that there will never be a successor OM anywhere in the multiverse (or
whatever larger mathematical structure contains it). Even people who are
unconscious or in the dreamless phase of sleep, having no guarantee that
they will ever wake up again, can be said to be provisionally dead. Taking
this idea further, a person can be said to be provisionally dead with the
passing of every conscious moment, since (QTI aside) it is never certain
that there will be a successor OM. You could say that death happens to us
all the time and is no big deal; it's not living again which is the problem.
Returning to your example, if God creates a person, call him A, and a day
later kills him, A will be really dead (as opposed to provisionally dead) if
there will never be any successor OM's to his last conscious moment. Now,
suppose God kills A and then creates an exact copy of A along with his
environment, call him B, on the other side of the planet. B has all of A's
memories up to the moment before he was killed. This destruction/creation
procedure is, except for the duplication of the environment, exactly how
teleportation is supposed to work. I think most people on this list would
agree that teleportation (if it could be made to work, which not everyone
does agree is possible) would be a method of transportation, not execution:
even though the original dies, the copy has all his memories and provides
the requisite successor OM in exactly the same way as would have happened if
the original had continued living. So in the example above, if B is an exact
copy of A in an exact copy of A's environment, A would "become" B and not
even notice that there had been any change.
Now, consider the same situation with one difference. Instead of creating B
at the instant he kills A, God creates A and B at the same time, on opposite
sides of the planet but in exactly the same environment which will provide
each of them with exactly the same inputs, and their minds at all time
remain perfectly synchronised. God allows his two creatures to live for a
day, and then instantly and painlessly kills A. In the previous example, we
agreed that the creation of B means that A doesn't really die. Now, we have
*exactly* the same situation when A is killed: B is there to provide the
successor OM, and A need not even know that anything unusual had happened.
How could the fact that B was present a day, a minute or a microsecond
before A's death make any difference to A? All that matters is that B is in
the correct state to provide continuity of consciousness when A is killed.
Conversely, A and A's death cannot possibly have any direct effect on B. It
is not as if A's soul flies around the world and takes over B; rather, it
just so happens (because of how A and B were created) that B's mental states
coincide with A's, or with what A's would have been if he hadn't died.
The above mechanism would still work even if, as in my thought experiment,
there were 10^100 exact copies running in lockstep and all but one died.
Each one of the 10^100-1 copies would experience continuity of consciousness
through the remaining copy, so none would really die.
--Stathis Papaioannou
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rmiller
>(snip)
>The above mechanism would still work even if, as in my thought experiment,
>there were 10^100 exact copies running in lockstep and all but one died.
>Each one of the 10^100-1 copies would experience continuity of
>consciousness through the remaining copy, so none would really die.
RM: None would really die only if the behavioral configurations were
uniform and equal (thus equivalent) *and* only if their environment was in
an equivalent state. However, that is not the case here. The environment
and behavioral configurations of those who died are not commensurate with
the one who lived. No equivalence means differing results---and differing
paths. Let's look at it this way: take two boxes, perfectly equivalent in
every way and place inside each two similar marbles. Assume that both
systems are equivalent configurations and are, in effect, copies of one
another. When you remove one marble from its box, the other marble doesn't
follow suit---it stays put.
rmiller
Though we're not discussing entanglement per se, some of these examples
surely meet the criteria. So, my thought question for the day: is the
method of copying important?
Example #1: we start with a single marble, A. Then, we magically
create a copy, marble B--perfectly like marble B in every way. . .that is,
the atoms are configured similarly, the interaction environment is the
same--and they are indistinguishable from one another.
Example #2: we start with a single marble A. Then, instead of
magically creating a copy, we search the universe, Tegmarkian-style, and
locate a second marble, B that is perfectly equivalent to our original
marble A. All tests both magically avoid QM decoherence problems and show
that our newfound marble is, in fact, indistinguishable in every way from
our original.
Here's the question: Are the properties of the *relationship*
between Marbles A and B in Example #1 perfectly equivalent to those in
Example #2?
If the criteria involves simply analysis of configurations at a
precise point in time, it would seem the answer must be "yes." On the
other hand, if the method by which the marbles were created is crucial to
the present configuration, then the answer would be "no."
R. Miller
Jonathan Colvin
>On "What would it be like to have been born someone else", how
>does this differ from "What is it like to be a bat?"
>
>Presumably Jonathon Colvin would argue that this latter
>question is meaningless, unless immaterial souls existed.
>
>I still find it hard to understand this argument. The question
>"What is it like to be a bat?" still has meaning, but is
>probably unanswerable (although Dennett, I notice considers it
>answerable, contra Nagel!)
Nooooo...
"What is it like to be (or have been born) a bat?" is a *very* different
question than "Why am I me rather than a bat?".
Certainly, assuming immaterial souls or a similar identity dualism, (and
that "I" am my soul, not my body), and that bats have souls like people, it
is a meaningful question to ask "why am I me rather than a bat", or to state
that "I could have been a bat", because my soul could have been placed in a
bat rather than a human body. The universe would be objectively different
under the circumstances "I am Jonathan Colvin" and "I am a bat".
If you want to insist that "What would it be like to be a bat" is equivalent
to the question "What would the universe be like if I had been a bat rather
than me?", it is very hard to see what the answer could be. Suppose you
*had* been a bat rather than you (Russell Standish). How would the universe
be any different than it is now? If you can answer that question, (which is
the key question, to my mind), then I'll grant that the question is
meaningful.
Jonathan Colvin
Norman Samish
making exact quantum-level measurements, hence exact copies? If so, then
all this talk of making exact copies is fantasy.
Norman Samish
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
R. Miller
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