QTI and eternal torment

[Nick Prince]

I’ve just read the following paper :


http://istvanaranyosi.net/resources/Should%20we%20fear%20qt%20final.pdf


which argues that it is possible to avoid the descent into decrepitude
that seems to follow from the quantum theory of immortality (QTI).
Aranyosi argues that this is plausible on the grounds that any death
branch would be preceded by an unconsciousness branch. Under normal
QTI circumstances, if we were Schrödinger’s cat we would come across
the (3p) node (L= Lives, D= Dies):


DDDDDD
LLLLLLL
LLLLLLL

To see the cat’s (1p), view we discard the DDDD branch, but we will
more than likely be harmed at each branch and therefore become more
decrepit.

If I understand it correctly, and keeping things simple, Aranyosi
seems to be arguing that, by assuming that unconsciousness precedes a
death branch, then for 3p we have two types of branching: (where
C=Conscious, U = unconscious). First a triple branch:


D DDDX
UUUUU..UUUUUUUUUU
C CCCCCCC

And also a double branch:


CCCCCCCC
CCCCC
UUUUUUU

Any combinations of these can be put together by matching U’s or C’s
to make a tree.

A 1p subjective experience comes by discarding all branches that
have death D preceded by U. Hence the first type of diagram would
never be experienced and the cat sees only the C to C/U branching.
You can join two of the second type of diagram – a CUC route simply
being sleep or fainting or anaesthetic etc.

I would argue though that U can still occur if one suffers significant
physical damage and hence decrepitude still follows?

[Nick Prince]

Oops - so the new branching diagrams came out wrong. OK they should
read

U to U or D or C and C to C or U.

[Bruno Marchal]

Hi Nick,

This is a bit unclear. How is U and D distinguished from the (absence
of) first person view?

Given that very minimal change in the brain seems to be able to send
someone in the "amnesic arithmetical heaven", as illustrated by some
drugs, I am not sure we should worry about QM immortality, which
arises itself from the comp immortality. It illustrates also that
backtracking might be more probable. Technically this is difficult to
compute, and if QM is true yet comp false, I would worry more on this.
I do appreciate that people are aware that notions of "after-life"
makes sense, and are hard to avoid with current theories. Yet, without
handling the whole theology, and not just its physical aspects, we can
come easily to weird conclusions. With comp there are too much open
problems to decide on this in any quick way. Of course we can
speculate. It is a fascinating subject.

Bruno

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[Johnathan Corgan]

On Fri, Jun 8, 2012 at 12:45 AM, Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

> This is a bit unclear. How is U and D distinguished from the (absence of)
> first person view?

I think this is actually the point--calculations of expected future
experiences based on now being in the neighborhood of D (which result
in "torment") should instead be calculated based on now being in the
neighborhood of the transition from C->U, as D and U are
indistinguishable. Calculating expectation on this basis results in
much better anticipated outcomes, according to the paper.

> Given that very minimal change in the brain seems to be able to send someone
> in the "amnesic arithmetical heaven", as illustrated by some drugs

The changes you note may be minimal in the macro sense (small delta
concentrations of receptor ligands in the synaptic cleft), but result
in profoundly different trajectories of firing patterns at the
systemic level.

Johnathan

[Nick Prince]

On Jun 8, 8:45 am, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
> Hi Nick,
>
> This is a bit unclear. How is U and D distinguished from the (absence
> of) first person view?

I've drawn the branches so that they represent a 3p viewpoint of
someone observing us over time - i.e. we are schrodingers cat! So U
means observer sees us as unconsciouss and D means observer sees us as
dead. The ist person view that we see would always be C according to
the branches I've drawn, provided that you discard all branches that
have death D preceded by U. I wish I could draw it but I'm limited on
this user interface.

ist branch is C -> U or C then from the U of this branch, we get U or
D or C

I'm bothered by the fact that the observer would end up seeing
zombies! If you have a C->U or C and then if the new branch from the U
is U -> D or U or C then 1p (cat) would see only C as expected. His
route woud be C->C because the whole second branch is deleted.
However the observer that goes down the U branch would see the cat go
into some sort of scenario resulting in U or C or D. If it turns
out that C occurs then the cat is seen as consciouss and yet it is
disjoint from the conscioussness of the original cat. I'll have to
really think about this one in terms of the early steps of your UDA.

>
> Given that very minimal change in the brain seems to be able to send
> someone in the "amnesic arithmetical heaven", as illustrated by some
> drugs, I am not sure we should worry about QM immortality, which
> arises itself from the comp immortality. It illustrates also that
> backtracking might be more probable. Technically this is difficult to
> compute, and if QM is true yet comp false, I would worry more on this.
> I do appreciate that people are aware that notions of "after-life"
> makes sense, and are hard to avoid with current theories. Yet, without
> handling the whole theology, and not just its physical aspects, we can
> come easily to weird conclusions. With comp there are too much open
> problems to decide on this in any quick way. Of course we can
> speculate. It is a fascinating subject.

What do you mean by backtracking?

> http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -

[Pierz]

I don't know, somehow this whole argument is not something I could take seriously enough to get worked up over - too many what ifs piled up on other what ifs. But I think I see a couple of flaws in this argument. Firstly, I am not sure about the equation of unconsciousness with death. Why should coma be any different from deep sleep - i.e. a state of minimal consciousness which one cannot remember in retrospect but which nevertheless is a legitimate 1p view? One does not miraculously avoid sleep each night (well, come to think of it, I do, but that's another story!). I think this is the point Bruno is making. But there's a deeper problem I think with the idea of avoiding the 'vicinity' of death. QI says you can never end up on a branch in which you are dead. That's clear enough - so long as you grant that death is 'no-point-of-view', i.e., there is no no afterlife. But *someone* ends up on all the branches, so long as there is a point of view associated with them. Even if there is a cul-de-sac branch in which the probability of death is 100%, some version of you goes down that track. So right up until the very brink of death, you should expect your experience to follow the probabilities given by normal physics and statistical expectations. You can't, by QI, 'foresee' that a branch is a cul-de-sac in advance and so trim it out of your possible futures. But because there is always a finite, if vanishingly small, probability of not dying, one might expect that one will always find oneself 'sliding along the edge of death' so to speak, always just barely avoiding oblivion. But this is reminiscent of Zeno's paradox. How can one's experience follow normal statistical rules right up until a certain limit, then diverge from them to an ever greater, more improbable extent? QI is another of the absurd paradoxes that arises when trying to reconcile objectivity and subjectivity. I think we'd be better adopting something analogous to Einstein's assumption with regard to speed - namely that the laws of physics appear the same to us regardless of our velocity. By the same type of reasoning, we should assume that the laws of statistical probability (physics) will continue to apply at every point of our experience, even at liminal points like death. I personally favour the idea of primary consciousness, so I'm quite happy with the idea that 1p experience bridges death. If you don't swallow that, I suppose the onus is on you to explain away the paradox by some other means.

[meekerdb]

Even if computation is fundamental and physics is derivative, that still leaves consciousness as derivative too and possibly derivative from physics.  If 'you' is identified with certain computations, some of which constitute your consciousness it is still the case that there are a great many threads of computation that are *not* you, so it is possible that all those threads that are 'you' stop being you, e.g. you're dead.  Of course it may be that the threads constituting 'you' approach some simple state so that the closest continuation is the simple computational thread of a lizard, bacterium, or fetus.  So you now can think of 'you' as continuing in this way - although it becomes rather arbitrary which lizard you will be.

Brent

[Bruno Marchal]

On 08 Jun 2012, at 19:30, Johnathan Corgan wrote:

> On Fri, Jun 8, 2012 at 12:45 AM, Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be>
> wrote:
>
>> This is a bit unclear. How is U and D distinguished from the
>> (absence of)
>> first person view?
>
> I think this is actually the point--calculations of expected future
> experiences based on now being in the neighborhood of D (which result
> in "torment") should instead be calculated based on now being in the
> neighborhood of the transition from C->U, as D and U are
> indistinguishable. Calculating expectation on this basis results in
> much better anticipated outcomes, according to the paper.

OK, that makes sense (in comp). I will look at the paper, when I found
the time ... (exam period!).

>
>> Given that very minimal change in the brain seems to be able to
>> send someone
>> in the "amnesic arithmetical heaven", as illustrated by some drugs
>
> The changes you note may be minimal in the macro sense (small delta
> concentrations of receptor ligands in the synaptic cleft), but result
> in profoundly different trajectories of firing patterns at the
> systemic level.

That might be a reason to expect such deep jump in the very actual
conscious experience, when near death. Such experiences occur also at
sleep where we can easily jump from normal mundane state of
consciousness to quite "altered one", and this seems most plausible
for possible consistent continuations in extreme situation. That might
have evolutionary advantage also, like the ability to continue some
fight after big injuries, and there are evidences for this. The brain
is more than a neural net, it is a sophisticated chemical drug factory.

Bruno

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

[Pierz]

On Saturday, June 9, 2012 12:27:43 PM UTC+10, Brent wrote:

On 6/8/2012 7:02 PM, Pierz wrote:

I don't know, somehow this whole argument is not something I could take seriously enough to get worked up over - too many what ifs piled up on other what ifs. But I think I see a couple of flaws in this argument. Firstly, I am not sure about the equation of unconsciousness with death. Why should coma be any different from deep sleep - i.e. a state of minimal consciousness which one cannot remember in retrospect but which nevertheless is a legitimate 1p view? One does not miraculously avoid sleep each night (well, come to think of it, I do, but that's another story!). I think this is the point Bruno is making. But there's a deeper problem I think with the idea of avoiding the 'vicinity' of death. QI says you can never end up on a branch in which you are dead. That's clear enough - so long as you grant that death is 'no-point-of-view', i.e., there is no no afterlife. But *someone* ends up on all the branches, so long as there is a point of view associated wi
th them. Even if there is a cul-de-sac branch in which the probability of death is 100%, some version of you goes down that track. So right up until the very brink of death, you should expect your experience to follow the probabilities given by normal physics and statistical expectations. You can't, by QI, 'foresee' that a branch is a cul-de-sac in advance and so trim it out of your possible futures. But because there is always a finite, if vanishingly small, probability of not dying, one might expect that one will always find oneself 'sliding along the edge of death' so to speak, always just barely avoiding oblivion. But this is reminiscent of Zeno's paradox. How can one's experience follow normal statistical rules right up until a certain limit, then diverge from them to an ever greater, more improbable extent? QI is another of the absurd paradoxes that arises when trying to reconcile objectivity and subjectivity. I think we'd be better adopting something analogous to Einst
ein's assumption with regard to speed - namely that the laws of physics appear the same to us regardless of our velocity. By the same type of reasoning, we should assume that the laws of statistical probability (physics) will continue to apply at every point of our experience, even at liminal points like death. I personally favour the idea of primary consciousness, so I'm quite happy with the idea that 1p experience bridges death. If you don't swallow that, I suppose the onus is on you to explain away the paradox by some other means.

Even if computation is fundamental and physics is derivative, that still leaves consciousness as derivative too and possibly derivative from physics. 

I don't see how comp allows consciousness to be derived from physics, since comp assumes consciousness supervenes on computations that Bruno shows must be defined purely mathematically. But that aside, I'm not entirely sold on comp. Logic won't prove it - I think we all accept that - so while I can't refute comp, neither do I see myself forced to accept it. I remain agnostic on ontological questions, but I incline to a view of consciousness (not arithmetic) as primary. The gulf between the subjective and the objective remains mysterious and unbridged - what does "qualia are what computations feel like from the inside" really mean? Why is there an inside at all? To me, it's all just a little too neat - a simple package that seals up the universe inside it and declares it solved, but in a way that amounts to little more than saying "everything happens" - a supremely permissive explanatory context! But anyway, that's all a well-eaten can of worms. The point I'm making above is about the logic of the cited paper and is talking about MWI not comp.

 

If 'you' is identified with certain computations, some of which constitute your consciousness it is still the case that there are a great many threads of computation that are *not* you, so it is possible that all those threads that are 'you' stop being you, e.g. you're dead.  Of course it may be that the threads constituting 'you' approach some simple state so that the closest continuation is the simple computational thread of a lizard, bacterium, or fetus.  So you now can think of 'you' as continuing in this way - although it becomes rather arbitrary which lizard you will be.

 

Sure. In comp, the cessation of 'you' is merely an abrupt change in the state of certain computational threads. Identity is merely the continuity of self reference, and there are many ways, death being one of them (possibly), in which such continuity might be disrupted. It's one solution to the paradox I mention.

Brent

[Bruno Marchal]

On 08 Jun 2012, at 20:52, Nick Prince wrote:

On Jun 8, 8:45 am, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

Hi Nick,

This is a bit unclear. How is U and D distinguished from the (absence

of) first person view?

I've drawn the branches so that they represent a 3p viewpoint of
someone observing us over time - i.e. we are schrodingers cat!  So U
means observer sees us as unconsciouss and D means observer sees us as
dead.  The ist person view that we see would always be C according to
the branches I've drawn, provided that you discard all branches that
have death D preceded by U.  I wish I could draw it but I'm limited on
this user interface.

ist branch is C -> U or C then from the U of this branch, we get U or
D or C

I'm bothered by the fact that the observer would end up seeing
zombies! If you have a C->U or C and then if the new branch from the U
is U -> D or U or C then 1p (cat) would see only C as expected. His
route woud be C->C because the whole second branch is deleted.
However the observer that goes down the U branch would see the cat go
into some sort of  scenario  resulting in U or C or D.  If it turns
out that C occurs then the cat is seen as consciouss and yet it is
disjoint from the conscioussness of the original cat.  I'll have to
really think about this one in terms of the early steps of your UDA.

OK. In my opinion, based on the post, I would say that U and D are equivalent. 

There are no zombies, nor "absolute" bodies.

Given that very minimal change in the brain seems to be able to send

someone in the "amnesic arithmetical heaven", as illustrated by some

drugs, I am not sure we should worry about QM immortality, which

arises itself from the comp immortality. It illustrates also that

backtracking might be more probable. Technically this is difficult to

compute, and if QM is true yet comp false, I would worry more on this.

I do appreciate that people are aware that notions of "after-life"

makes sense, and are hard to avoid with current theories. Yet, without

handling the whole theology, and not just its physical aspects, we can

come easily to weird conclusions. With comp there are too much open

problems to decide on this in any quick way. Of course we can

speculate. It is a fascinating subject.

What do you mean by backtracking?

Imagine that you decide to kill yourself with an atomic bomb, so as to maximize your annihilation probability. Then it might be that your probability of surviving in a world where you are just not deciding to kill yourself is bigger than surviving from some quantum tunnel effect through the bomb's released energy. In that sense, the effect of the bomb makes you backtrack up to a reality where you are just not using the bomb. 

To solve this is really a question of comparing the measure on the computational histories, including the one with partial amnesia (which makes things more difficult, but already more quantum like, because amnesia might explain the fusion of computations, from the first person point of view). Reports of dreams and drug experiences involving partial momentary amnesia suggest that such a backtracking is highly plausible, imo. And the existence of quantum erasing suggests that our first person plural sharable computations allows such a backtracking to occur in "nature". Such a backtracking (proposed once by Saibal Mitra on this list) can also be used to defend the idea that there is only one person, and that personal identity is a relative "illusory" notion. We might be a "God" playing a trick to himself, notably by becoming amnesic on who and what he is.

Bruno

What, you ask, was the beginning of it all?

And it is this ...

Existence that multiplied itself

For sheer delight of being

And plunged into numberless trillions of forms

So that it might

Find 

Itself

Innumerably (Aurobindo)

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

[David Nyman]

On 9 June 2012 11:17, Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

> Such a backtracking (proposed once by Saibal Mitra on this list) can also be
> used to defend the idea that there is only one person, and that personal
> identity is a relative "illusory" notion. We might be a "God" playing a
> trick to himself, notably by becoming amnesic on who and what he is.

We seem to agree on this, at least some of the time! If we entertain
such notions, the question then presents itself - assuming one doesn't
accept, with Hoyle, that this similarly entails "only one" multiplexed
stream of consciousness - how "only one person" can be conceived as
being the subject of every experience "simultaneously"?

David

[meekerdb]

On 6/9/2012 2:44 AM, Pierz wrote:

On Saturday, June 9, 2012 12:27:43 PM UTC+10, Brent wrote:

On 6/8/2012 7:02 PM, Pierz wrote:

I don't know, somehow this whole argument is not something I could take seriously enough to get worked up over - too many what ifs piled up on other what ifs. But I think I see a couple of flaws in this argument. Firstly, I am not sure about the equation of unconsciousness with death. Why should coma be any different from deep sleep - i.e. a state of minimal consciousness which one cannot remember in retrospect but which nevertheless is a legitimate 1p view? One does not miraculously avoid sleep each night (well, come to think of it, I do, but that's another story!). I think this is the point Bruno is making. But there's a deeper problem I think with the idea of avoiding the 'vicinity' of death. QI says you can never end up on a branch in which you are dead. That's clear enough - so long as you grant that death is 'no-point-of-view', i.e., there is no no afterlife. But *someone* ends up on all the branches, so long as there is a point of view associated wi
th them. Even if there is a cul-de-sac branch in which the probability of death is 100%, some version of you goes down that track. So right up until the very brink of death, you should expect your experience to follow the probabilities given by normal physics and statistical expectations. You can't, by QI, 'foresee' that a branch is a cul-de-sac in advance and so trim it out of your possible futures. But because there is always a finite, if vanishingly small, probability of not dying, one might expect that one will always find oneself 'sliding along the edge of death' so to speak, always just barely avoiding oblivion. But this is reminiscent of Zeno's paradox. How can one's experience follow normal statistical rules right up until a certain limit, then diverge from them to an ever greater, more improbable extent? QI is another of the absurd paradoxes that arises when trying to reconcile objectivity and subjectivity. I think we'd be better adopting something analogous to Eins
t
ein's assumption with regard to speed - namely that the laws of physics appear the same to us regardless of our velocity. By the same type of reasoning, we should assume that the laws of statistical probability (physics) will continue to apply at every point of our experience, even at liminal points like death. I personally favour the idea of primary consciousness, so I'm quite happy with the idea that 1p experience bridges death. If you don't swallow that, I suppose the onus is on you to explain away the paradox by some other means.

Even if computation is fundamental and physics is derivative, that still leaves consciousness as derivative too and possibly derivative from physics. 

I don't see how comp allows consciousness to be derived from physics, since comp assumes consciousness supervenes on computations that Bruno shows must be defined purely mathematically.

But do the computations on which consciousness supervenes necessarily entail a physics?  I think they do.  I don't think it's possible for a consciousness, at least a human-like consciousness, to exist without a stable environment for it to be aware of, i.e. a physical world.

Brent

[meekerdb]

On 6/9/2012 3:17 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
> Imagine that you decide to kill yourself with an atomic bomb, so as to maximize your
> annihilation probability. Then it might be that your probability of surviving in a world
> where you are just not deciding to kill yourself is bigger than surviving from some
> quantum tunnel effect through the bomb's released energy. In that sense, the effect of
> the bomb makes you backtrack up to a reality where you are just not using the bomb.

Or if you died of a heart attack you might backtrack to when you ate that cheeseburger in
1965. But with such large discontinuities in memory it emphasizes the point that since
comp implies the possibility of duplication and forking, there is no well defined 'you'.
It is at best a working approximation.

Brent

[Nick Prince]

Hi Bruno

Yes I've re thought this one through and I agree - no zombies.

>
>
>
>
>
>
> >> Given that very minimal change in the brain seems to be able to send
> >> someone in the "amnesic arithmetical heaven", as illustrated by some
> >> drugs, I am not sure we should worry about QM immortality, which
> >> arises itself from the comp immortality. It illustrates also that
> >> backtracking might be more probable. Technically this is difficult to
> >> compute, and if QM is true yet comp false, I would worry more on
> >> this.
> >> I do appreciate that people are aware that notions of "after-life"
> >> makes sense, and are hard to avoid with current theories. Yet,
> >> without
> >> handling the whole theology, and not just its physical aspects, we
> >> can
> >> come easily to weird conclusions. With comp there are too much open
> >> problems to decide on this in any quick way. Of course we can
> >> speculate. It is a fascinating subject.
>
> > What do you mean by backtracking?
>
> Imagine that you decide to kill yourself with an atomic bomb, so as to
> maximize your annihilation probability. Then it might be that your
> probability of surviving in a world where you are just not deciding to
> kill yourself is bigger than surviving from some quantum tunnel effect
> through the bomb's released energy. In that sense, the effect of the
> bomb makes you backtrack up to a reality where you are just not using
> the bomb.

Ok I'll look into this - I got a copy of Saibal's paper "Can we
change the past by forgetting"

I'll try to get round to reading it. I'm not sure whether this
involves abandoning causality as we know it though?
If such backtracking occurred though could we really be aware of it?

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Thanks for kind reply Bruno

Nick

[Bruno Marchal]

Probably because the experience of consciousness itself is not
temporal. But from each fist person picture, as everything physical
become an indexical (technically defined with the logic of self-
reference) we get deluded in both personal identity (I),present moment
(now), and present place (here). The same person get the "illusion" of
being different person at different times and in different places, but
those are the things which depends only on the atemporal relations
between relative universal numbers states (assuming comp). Just that
as seen from the (arithmetically, atemporally) implemented *knower*
(first person) it looks physically and temporally structured, as the
machine might already tell us, in the case of the ideally self-
refetentially correct machine.

I am not sure I understand your problem with that simultaneity. The
arithmetical relations are out of time. It would not make sense to say
that they are simultaneously true, because this refer to some "time",
and can only be used as a metaphor.

Think perhaps to the WM duplication with delay: it shows notably that
the "subjective" time is not connected causally to the "physical
time" (assuming one), the belief in a past of a subject is an
arithmetical construction, and it makes sense, quasi-tautologically,
along the computations which "satisfies or not" the beliefs.

The universal person might be the knower associated to any universal
machine, or any sigma_1 complete believer (provably equivalent with
respect of computability).

If you recognize yourself in that person, your are "obviously
immortal". Here, it would be like accepting a 8K computer for the
brain, leading to a version of yourself *quite* amnesic. But again
that 8K and bigger system but equivalent, or extending them, pullulate
in arithmetic. Consciousness' differentiation seems unavoidable there
too. Does this put some light on the question?

Bruno


http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

[Bruno Marchal]

You are *precisely* right on this, in comp.

We cannot know our substitution level, so a third person self is
already a bet.
Then we are distributed on infinities of computation below the subst
level.
And then, the fact the first person knower (Bp & p) has no name, so
that the question. Who am I? Not something having a name, but the
owner of the subjective experience.

The whole point of the thought experience consists in reasoning in a
way which does not depend on your conception of identity, it bears
only on statistical differentiation of diary notes and attempt toward
predictions.

I agree that "there is no well defined 'you'" makes a lot of sense,
but the key of comp is to bet that there is (in God's eyes) a
substitution level where you survive/notice-nothing after the digital
functional substitution. It is an invariant for consciousness.

Bruno


http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

[Bruno Marchal]

I have not read it.

>
> I'll try to get round to reading it. I'm not sure whether this
> involves abandoning causality as we know it though?

Causality is not a notion which makes sense to me, except as some
modality of self-reference, making it an higher emerging notion.

> If such backtracking occurred though could we really be aware of it?

Not in normal circumstances, but in arithmetic, not everything is
normal, and "normal" is relative too, from inside.

I really don't know, but some reports of some drugs describe
experiences which can look like some backtracking from the realted 1-
person reports.

Above our level, legalizing marijuana would already be a form of
backtracking like *any* acknowledgment of having be wrong, or lying.

Now, when we don't remember the lesson of history, and are in the
state of doing a sempiternal same error, we can also see it as a
backtracking. Looping programs bactrack all the time, without knowing,
for if they know, and have degrees of freedom, they can change the
circle into a spiral, and "progress".

Bruno

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>>
>> - Show quoted text -- Hide quoted text -
>>
>> - Show quoted text -- Hide quoted text -
>
>
> Thanks for kind reply Bruno
>
> Nick
>
>> - Show quoted text -
>

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[David Nyman]

On 10 June 2012 17:26, Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

> I am not sure I understand your problem with that simultaneity. The
> arithmetical relations are out of time. It would not make sense to say that
> they are simultaneously true, because this refer to some "time", and can
> only be used as a metaphor.

I agree with almost everything you say. I would say also that the
moments of experience, considered as a class, are themselves out of
time. What it takes to "create (experiential) time" - the notorious
"illusion" - is whatever is held to be responsible for the irreducible
mutual-exclusivity of such moments, from the perspective of the
(universal) knower. Hoyle does us the service of making this
mutual-exclusivity explicit by invoking his "light beam" to illuminate
the pigeon holes at hazard; those who conclude that this function is
redundant, and that the structure of pigeon holes itself somehow does
the work of "creating personal history", owe us an alternative
explanation of the role of Hoyle's beam.

I understand, of course, that these are just ways of thinking about a
state of affairs that is ultimately not finitely conceivable, but all
the same, I think there is something that cries out for explanation
here and Hoyle is one of the few to have explicitly attempted to
address it.

David

[Bruno Marchal]

David, I can't see the role of Hoyles' beam. The reason of the mutual
exclusivity of moments seems to me to be explained (in comp) by the
fact that a machine cannot address the memory of another machine, or
of itself at another moment (except trough memory). Hoyles' beam seem
to reintroduce a sort of external reality, which does not solve
anything, it seems to me, and introduces more complex events in the
picture.

Why do you think that pure indexicality (self-reference) is not
enough? It seems clear to me that from the current state of any
universal machine, it will look like a special moment is chosen out of
the others, for the elementary reason that such a state individuates
the "present moment here and now" from her point of view.

Of course, the idea that some time exists is very deep in us, and I
understand that the big comp picture is very counter-intuitive, but in
this case, it is a kind of difficulty already present in any atemporal
"static" view of everything, which already appears with general
relativity for example.

It is a bit subtle. "To be conscious here and now" is not an illusion.
"To be conscious of "here and now" " is an illusion. The "here and
now" is part of the brain (actually the infinities of arithmetical
relations) construction.

Feel free to criticize my perhaps too much simple mind view on this, I
might miss your point,

Bruno


http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

[David Nyman]

On 11 June 2012 13:04, Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

> Why do you think that pure indexicality (self-reference) is not enough? It
> seems clear to me that from the current state of any universal machine, it
> will look like a special moment is chosen out of the others, for the
> elementary reason that such a state individuates the "present moment here
> and now" from her point of view.

Yes, but the expression "from the current state of any universal
machine" (different sense of universal, of course) already *assumes*
the restriction of universal attention to a particular state of a
particular machine. Hoyle on the other hand is considering a
*universal state of attention* and hence needs to make such isolation
of particulars *explicit*. The beam stands for the unique, momentary
isolation in experience of that single state from the class of all
possible states (of all possible machines). Thus, momentarily, the
*single* universal knower can be in possession of a *single* focus of
attention, to the exclusion of all others. This is the only
intelligible meaning of mutually-exclusive, considered at the
*universal level*.

If you remove such a principle of isolation, how can the state of
knowledge of the universal knower ever be anything other than a sum
over all experiences, which can never be the state of any single mind?
Sure, the states are "all there at once", but what principle allows
"you", in the person of the universal knower, to restrict your
attention to any one of them? It seems to me that, if one wants to
make sense of the notion of a *universal* locus of experience, with
personal identity emerging only as a secondary phenomenon, you are
bound in the first place to consider matters from that universal point
of view. And then you must not forget that this point of view, *as a
knower*, is also *your* point of view. Hence to the extent that you,
*as a merely subsidiary characteristic of such a universal point of
view*, are restricted to "one place, one time", so must it be equally
restricted.

Do remember that I accept that this is a heuristic, or way of
thinking; I do not know how, or if, it corresponds to any fundamental
principle of reality. But I think that if one purges one's mind of
the implicit assumptions I mention above, one can see that the notions
of "a single universal point of view" and "everything considered
together" are actually mutually exclusive. So pick one or the other,
but not both together.

David

[meekerdb]

That seems confused. The theory is that 'you' are some set of those states. If you
introduce an external 'knower' you've lost the explanatory function of the theory.

Brent

[Stephen P. King]

On 6/11/2012 8:04 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 10 Jun 2012, at 22:57, David Nyman wrote:

On 10 June 2012 17:26, Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

I am not sure I understand your problem with that simultaneity. The
arithmetical relations are out of time. It would not make sense to say that
they are simultaneously true, because this refer to some "time", and can
only be used as a metaphor.

I agree with almost everything you say.  I would say also that the
moments of experience, considered as a class, are themselves out of
time.  What it takes to "create (experiential) time" - the notorious
"illusion" - is whatever is held to be responsible for the irreducible
mutual-exclusivity of such moments, from the perspective of the
(universal) knower.  Hoyle does us the service of making this
mutual-exclusivity explicit by invoking his "light beam" to illuminate
the pigeon holes at hazard; those who conclude that this function is
redundant, and that the structure of pigeon holes itself somehow does
the work of "creating personal history", owe us an alternative
explanation of the role of Hoyle's beam.

I understand, of course, that these are just ways of thinking about a
state of affairs that is ultimately not finitely conceivable, but all
the same, I think there is something that cries out for explanation
here and Hoyle is one of the few to have explicitly attempted to
address it.

David, I can't see the role of Hoyles' beam. The reason of the mutual exclusivity of moments seems to me to be explained (in comp) by the fact that a machine cannot address the memory of another machine, or of itself at another moment (except trough memory). Hoyles' beam seem to reintroduce a sort of  external reality, which does not solve anything, it seems to me, and introduces more complex events in the picture.

Dear Bruno,

    Here we seem to be synchronized in our ideas!

    This "cannot access the memory of another machine" and "(cannot access memory ) of itself at another moment" is exactly the way that the concurrency problem of computer science is related to space and time! But now I am confused as you seem to recognize that a machine has and needs the resource of memory; it was my (mis)understanding that machines are purely immaterial, existing a a priori given strings of integers. How does memory non-access become encoded in a string? Is it the non-existence of a particular Godelization within a particular string that would relate to some other portion of a string?

Why do you think that pure indexicality (self-reference) is not enough? It seems clear to me that from the current state of any universal machine, it will look like a special moment is chosen out of the others, for the elementary reason that such a state individuates the "present moment here and now" from her point of view.

    How is the index establish a form of sameness? It seems to me that one needs at least bisimilarity to establish the connectivity.

Of course, the idea that some time exists is very deep in us, and I understand that the big comp picture is very counter-intuitive, but in this case, it is a kind of difficulty already present in any atemporal "static" view of everything, which already appears with general relativity for example.

It is a bit subtle. "To be conscious here and now" is not an illusion. "To be conscious of "here and now" " is an illusion. The "here and now" is part of the brain (actually the infinities of arithmetical relations) construction.

    The content of "to be conscious here and now" is exactly what Craig is discussing with "sense"! I see it as a form of fixed point considered in a computational sense, similar to what Wolfram pointed out in his Computational Intractibility in physics: the best possible simulation of a physical system is the system itself. You seem to say that this is a relation between an infinite number of arithmetical relations. Could you elaborate more on this?

Feel free to criticize my perhaps too much simple mind view on this, I might miss your point,

Bruno


http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

-- 
Onward!

Stephen

"Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed." 
~ Francis Bacon

[David Nyman]

On 11 June 2012 16:27, meekerdb <meek...@verizon.net> wrote:

That seems confused. The theory is that 'you' are some set of those states. If you introduce an external 'knower' you've lost the explanatory function of the theory.

Well, I'm referring to Hoyle's idea, which explicitly introduces such a knower.  But in any case it is a metaphor for the consciousness that supervenes on those states, as opposed to being, in an eliminative sense, merely "identical" with them.  As to "losing" the explanatory power of the theory, the argument, assuming it has any cogency, is designed precisely to test the limits of the explanatory adequacy of the theory in its bare form.

David

[Bruno Marchal]

On 11 Jun 2012, at 15:09, David Nyman wrote:

> On 11 June 2012 13:04, Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
>
>> Why do you think that pure indexicality (self-reference) is not
>> enough? It
>> seems clear to me that from the current state of any universal
>> machine, it
>> will look like a special moment is chosen out of the others, for the
>> elementary reason that such a state individuates the "present
>> moment here
>> and now" from her point of view.
>
> Yes, but the expression "from the current state of any universal
> machine" (different sense of universal, of course) already *assumes*
> the restriction of universal attention to a particular state of a
> particular machine.

But is that not the result of the fact that each machine has only
access to its own configuration?

> Hoyle on the other hand is considering a
> *universal state of attention* and hence needs to make such isolation
> of particulars *explicit*. The beam stands for the unique, momentary
> isolation in experience of that single state from the class of all
> possible states (of all possible machines).

Why could not each machine do the same? Consider the WM-duplication.
The body reconstituted in Moscow has access only to the memory
reimplemented in M, + the further new change, which includes the
feeling "Oh I am the one in Moscow". From the point of view of the
"universal person" this is only a particular windows, and both are
lived, but not (at this stage at least) from the point of view of the
subject in M. I am not sure a beam has to focus on him, for making his
experience more genuine. Would the beam have to dovetail on the two
reconstitution, making recurrently one of a them into a zombie?

It seems to me that the beam introduces only supplementary
difficulties. The reason why we feel disconnected is related to our
self-identification with our "most recent memories", which become
disconnected in the differentiation of consciousness.

We are all the same person, in a sense similar to the W-guy and the M-
guy are the same Helsinki-guy, just with different futures, and by
work, they can understand the significance of this, or even experience
it through some induced amnesia. The beam is like to reintroduce a
sort of "conscious selection" on some conscious order, which seems to
me made unnecessary by the use of indexicals (self-reference being
what theoretical computer science handles the best).

> Thus, momentarily, the
> *single* universal knower can be in possession of a *single* focus of
> attention, to the exclusion of all others.

"He" always focus on the whole experience of consciousness, which
might be the same for similar creature, and the *relative* truth
differentiate by themselves. "He" lives them "out of time", and time
+personal differentiation is the fate of those machine which
individuates themselves to such personal memories. It is useful when
doing shopping or any concrete things locally. No doubt evolution has
put some pressure, and every day life pushes a bit in that direction,
but eventually your first person identity remains a private matter,
and there is matter of choice.

> This is the only
> intelligible meaning of mutually-exclusive, considered at the
> *universal level*.

I don't see this. It looks like adding something which seems to me
precisely made unnecessary with comp.

>
> If you remove such a principle of isolation, how can the state of
> knowledge of the universal knower ever be anything other than a sum
> over all experiences, which can never be the state of any single mind?

Hmm... You don't know that!
Jouvet, others, including myself in my dream diary notes, have
described (experimented) the possibility of awakening from two
simultaneous dreams. I can conceive this "easily" for any finite
number of experiences, and less easily for an infinite numbers. The
implementation is simple, just connect the memories so that the common
person in all different experiences awaken in a state having all those
memories personally accessible. For the two experiences/dreams case,
Jouvet suggested that it might be provoked by the "paralysis" of the
corpus callosum, indeed, in some REM sleep.

And the UD generates all possible type of "corpus callosum" *possible
(consistent)*. In such a state we might be able to relativize more the
difference, and build on more universal things, and then differentiate
again.

> Sure, the states are "all there at once", but what principle allows
> "you", in the person of the universal knower, to restrict your
> attention to any one of them?

He looks at all of them, from "out of time" (arithmetic). It is only
from each particular perspective that it looks like it is disconnected
from the others. That is, with comp, "just" an illusion, easily
explainable by the locally disconnected memories of machines sharing
computations/dreams.

> It seems to me that, if one wants to
> make sense of the notion of a *universal* locus of experience, with
> personal identity emerging only as a secondary phenomenon, you are
> bound in the first place to consider matters from that universal point
> of view.

But that is what I think I sketched in arithmetic by the self-
reference logic (on which all machines obeys as long as they are self-
referentially correct relatively to the local more probable
computations).

It is the "I" of a universal baby. It lives in all of us, and he
experiences all or dissimilarities, but locally, it is in that
disconnected manner, until he recognizes itself.

> And then you must not forget that this point of view, *as a
> knower*, is also *your* point of view. Hence to the extent that you,
> *as a merely subsidiary characteristic of such a universal point of
> view*, are restricted to "one place, one time", so must it be equally
> restricted.

Why? It is only the extension that makes the restriction. And a sort
of amnesia that we are still there without the restriction. It is
attachment. The fear of death is a useful program, for the evolution
of life, and too quick illumination can impedes its flow, although it
can speed it also in other occasion. The human "G*" does contain truth
which we are not supposed to justify or even say. A theoretical
theology is always eventually a *very* near inconsistency type of
study, and that is why it is very important to make clear the
assumptions, and the ways of reasoning.

>
> Do remember that I accept that this is a heuristic, or way of
> thinking; I do not know how, or if, it corresponds to any fundamental
> principle of reality. But I think that if one purges one's mind of
> the implicit assumptions I mention above, one can see that the notions
> of "a single universal point of view" and "everything considered
> together" are actually mutually exclusive. So pick one or the other,
> but not both together.

Frankly I don't see the problem. The single universal point of view is
the consciousness of the universal baby, say. We are all
simultaneously that baby, in the sense similar that the W and M guys
are the same than the Helsinki one, except that we have forget to be
that baby. Imagine that the W and M people forget they have been the
person in Helsinki, and are no more able to "recognize" themselves.

The universal consciousness might be the consciousness of the virgin
universal machine, and exists out of time and space. But with all the
personal relations that universal numbers can develop with respect of
other universal numbers, such a consciousness will, from all the other
points of view, super-differentiate and fuse, and do things we have
not the imagination to figure. Comp makes us humble, for machines can
only scratch infinities, even if their consciousness supervenes on
those infinities.

Yet we might be able to remember or understand intellectually that we
are "that" universal baby-person, making us quite ignorant as "he"
posses much more variate extensions than "our local "me"", and our
single life does not answer his original questioning (it adds
complexity, at first sight).

At least with comp, "it" has the same physical laws, at the root
level, and the same classical theology (the set of true sentences
involving itself). All this grows up in complexity, from the average
machine points of view, and the first pov of the machine is really not
even nameable by that machine. It is big. Hubble galaxies, our
observable and apparently sharable physical universe describes an
infinitesimal village in comparison to that.

The idea that such a single universal point of view can considered and
memorize every points of view, like if that universal baby can awaken
and remember all dreams, in case of super coherent arithmetical
"corpus callosum" is, I'm afraid, a complex open problem (in
theoretical computer science and machine's theology).

Bruno

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

[Bruno Marchal]

I don't think so. With comp you have to distinguish completely the easy "concurrency" problem, from the harder "physical concurrency problem". It is easy to emulate interacting program in the sense I have to use to explain that a machine cannot access the meory of another machine. And obviously the UD or arithmetic implements ad nauseam such kind of interactions. But then the physical laws emerge from the statistics on *all* computation, and all such interaction, and from this we must justify physics, including the physical logic of interaction. But that is a separate problem, and the Z and X logic suggest how to proceed by already given a reasonable arithmetical quantization (it shows also that it is technically difficult to progress).

But now I am confused as you seem to recognize that a machine has and needs the resource of memory;

This is quite typical in computer science. Most machines have memories. Like they have often read and write intructions to handle those memories.

it was my (mis)understanding that machines are purely immaterial, existing a a priori given strings of integers.

You were right. This has nothing to do that the program i in the list of the phi_i, can have memories. A large part of computer science can be entirely arithmetized. 

You might think to study a good book on theoretical computer science to swallow definitely that fact. All proposition on machine are either arithmetical statements, or arithmetically related statements. I work both in comp, and in arithmetic. 

How does memory non-access become encoded in a string?

Why would we need to encode the non access. It is enough that the numbers involved have no access.

The computation phi_i(j)^k has no access to the computation phi'(j')^k, if i ≠ i' and j ≠ j', for example.

But non-access can be implemented in various ways. It is just not relevant.

Is it the non-existence of a particular Godelization within a particular string that would relate to some other portion of a string?

It is more simple. See above.

Why do you think that pure indexicality (self-reference) is not enough? It seems clear to me that from the current state of any universal machine, it will look like a special moment is chosen out of the others, for the elementary reason that such a state individuates the "present moment here and now" from her point of view.

    How is the index establish a form of sameness? It seems to me that one needs at least bisimilarity to establish the connectivity.

Of course, the idea that some time exists is very deep in us, and I understand that the big comp picture is very counter-intuitive, but in this case, it is a kind of difficulty already present in any atemporal "static" view of everything, which already appears with general relativity for example.

It is a bit subtle. "To be conscious here and now" is not an illusion. "To be conscious of "here and now" " is an illusion. The "here and now" is part of the brain (actually the infinities of arithmetical relations) construction.

    The content of "to be conscious here and now" is exactly what Craig is discussing with "sense"! I see it as a form of fixed point considered in a computational sense, similar to what Wolfram pointed out in his Computational Intractibility in physics: the best possible simulation of a physical system is the system itself.

Wolfram miss the first person person indeterminacy and thus the comp mind body problem. 

You seem to say that this is a relation between an infinite number of arithmetical relations. Could you elaborate more on this?

UDA1-8 explains that. Tell me where you have a problem. Tell me if it is before or after step seven, without doing any philosophy, because that would be very confusing here. We can discuss philosophy after, when you grasp why physics has to emerge from arithmetic, once we assume comp, which is the whole purpose of UDA to explain.

If not, like Craig, you will just describe your correct first person intuition that comp is false, shared by all ideally correct machines. If I (3p) is a machine, then I (1p) is not a machine from its 1p view, even if G* "knows" that it is a correct *machine*.

Bruno

Feel free to criticize my perhaps too much simple mind view on this, I might miss your point,

Bruno


http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

-- 
Onward!

Stephen

"Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed." 
~ Francis Bacon

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http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

[David Nyman]

On 12 June 2012 17:36, Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

Yes, but the expression "from the current state of any universal
machine" (different sense of universal, of course) already *assumes*
the restriction of universal attention to a particular state of a
particular machine.

But is that not the result of the fact that each machine has only access to its own configuration?

That's too quick for me.  To say that "each machine has only access to its own configuration", is still merely to generalise; to go from this to some particular machine requires one instance to be discriminated from the whole class.  So what, you may retort, "your" states just "discriminate themselves as you".  The problem to my mind, with looking at things in this way, is that for there to be a universal knower, each state must primarily belong to "you qua that knower" (which is what makes it universal) and only secondarily to "you qua some local specification".  If this be so, it is circular to invoke those secondary characteristics, which become definite only after discrimination, to justify the discrimination in the first place.

ISTM that the two of us must actually be thinking of something rather different when we conceive a universal person or knower.  For you, IIUC, this idea is consistent with many different states of consciousness obtaining "all together"; consequently the viewpoint of this species of universal person can never be reducible to any particular single perspective.  I'm unsatisfied with this (as presumably was Hoyle) because it leaves me with no way of justifying "why am I David" that isn't circular.  I can of course say that I'm David because the given state (here, now) happens to be one of David's states of mind, but the problem in this view is that this is completely consistent, mutatis mutandis, with Bruno's saying exactly the same. By contrast, Hoyle's heuristic allows me to say I'm David because a state of David happens momentarily to be the unique perspective of the whole.  As Schrödinger puts it, not a piece of the whole, but in a certain sense the whole; Hoyle's heuristic makes explicit that "certain sense".

I suspect that the difference between us is that it is not your intention to justify the feeling of change directly from your mathematical treatment, but rather to demonstrate the existence of an eternal structure from which that experience could be recovered extra-mathematically.  You often refer to the inside view of numbers in this rather inexplicit manner (forgive me if I have inadvertently missed your making the details explicit elsewhere).  Hoyle however seemed to be directly concerned with rationalising this feeling by associating it with a unique dynamic process operating over the system as whole.  That's the difference, I think, and it may be irreconcilable.

David

[Bruno Marchal]

On 12 Jun 2012, at 22:48, David Nyman wrote:

On 12 June 2012 17:36, Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

Yes, but the expression "from the current state of any universal
machine" (different sense of universal, of course) already *assumes*
the restriction of universal attention to a particular state of a
particular machine.

But is that not the result of the fact that each machine has only access to its own configuration?

That's too quick for me.  To say that "each machine has only access to its own configuration", is still merely to generalise; to go from this to some particular machine requires one instance to be discriminated from the whole class.  So what, you may retort, "your" states just "discriminate themselves as you".  The problem to my mind, with looking at things in this way, is that for there to be a universal knower, each state must primarily belong to "you qua that knower" (which is what makes it universal) and only secondarily to "you qua some local specification".  If this be so, it is circular to invoke those secondary characteristics, which become definite only after discrimination, to justify the discrimination in the first place.

ISTM that the two of us must actually be thinking of something rather different when we conceive a universal person or knower.  For you, IIUC, this idea is consistent with many different states of consciousness obtaining "all together"; consequently the viewpoint of this species of universal person can never be reducible to any particular single perspective.  I'm unsatisfied with this (as presumably was Hoyle) because it leaves me with no way of justifying "why am I David" that isn't circular.

I think it is justified by the working of a computer and the computer science definition of self. It explains self-reference in a non circular way.

The question "why am I David" is twofold:

- One aspect is "trivial" and admit the same explanation as "why am I in W and not in M" in the WM-duplication. Here comp can explain that there is no answer possible to that question (first person indeterminacy).

- The other aspect is less trivial and concerns the very ability to refer to oneself. Here comp, or just computer science can entirely explain what happens. I often explain quickly (perhaps too much quickly) that such reference result from the double diagonalization trick on duplication. Cf: if Dx produces xx, then DD produces DD. We can come back on that, and will, on the FOAR list, most probably.

 I can of course say that I'm David because the given state (here, now) happens to be one of David's states of mind, but the problem in this view is that this is completely consistent, mutatis mutandis, with Bruno's saying exactly the same.

But that is why we can both exist, consistently. If that would not be the case, it seems to me that one of us would be a zombie for some moment.

By contrast, Hoyle's heuristic allows me to say I'm David because a state of David happens momentarily to be the unique perspective of the whole.  

I don't see why the beam heuristic would explain that, nor why the absence of the beam would prevent that. I just don't see.

The beam seems to reintroduce an external structure to the 3p reality, which is hard to justify by itself. 

If such a beam is conceivable, why could we not conceive a lot of beams, perhaps as much beams as they are subjects, so that we can disallow zombie?

What is the nature of the beam? How does it work? 

Is the existence of the beam compatible with comp? How would the doctor justify that the beam will target my digital brain state? Is the action of the beam Turing emulable?

In a sense, the DU itself acts like a beam, given that it go through each possible subjective state *one* at a time, but then the UD-time itself is non material, and the states are linked only by their relation with (all) the universal numbers linking them, and that makes the explanation by comp complete, with respect to that qustion. So the call for such a beam seems to me very similar to the argument that a concrete physical universal dovetailer is needed for consciousness to exist, which makes the explanation of physics by comp circular, and then cannot work because it relies on a physical supervenience which happens to be incompatible with comp (step 8). Here too the beam seems to introduce a difficulty in both the physical supervenience and the computational one.

As Schrödinger puts it, not a piece of the whole, but in a certain sense the whole; Hoyle's heuristic makes explicit that "certain sense".

I agree with Schroedinger. Given that "time is an illusion", I have no problem with a universal observer looking through both our eyes, and even being our common deep self simultaneously. 

I suspect that the difference between us is that it is not your intention to justify the feeling of change directly from your mathematical treatment,

I am not sure. The logic of self-reference ([]p, in G) leads to the first person ([[]p &p), S4Grz), which can be used to explain why the subject feels that things are time-asymmetrical, why knowledge evolves, etc). Adding a beam would makes all machines states, when not under the beam, into sort of zombie states.

but rather to demonstrate the existence of an eternal structure from which that experience could be recovered extra-mathematically.  

OK, but no more extramathematical than the notion of arithmetical truth is for arithmetical machine. That "extramathematics" is the same as the one use implicitly each time we grasp the notion of some infinite set, like with the statement, let N be {0, 1, 2, ...}. It is minimal and unavoidable. And withoit doubt mysterious, but that is why we have to assume arithmetic explicitly.

You often refer to the inside view of numbers in this rather inexplicit manner (forgive me if I have inadvertently missed your making the details explicit elsewhere).  

May be you are just missing the logic of self-reference. The inside view of numbers is easily conceivable once you assume comp, and accept to attribute consciousness to statical computations as they are defined by the arithmetical relation. That is why we need so few math in the UDA. But for those people who feel uneasy with cognitive science and thought experience, it is the AUDA which makes the whole picture arithmetically consistent, by providing the explanation of how machines are able to refer to themselves, in a third person way first (G, G*), and in a first person way (S4Grz). The feeling associate with them are given by other modalities (like Bp & p & Dt), which are unavoidable for any sufficiently rich (cognitively, Löbian) machine, by the incompleteness phenomenon. Without this, I would have abandoned comp since long.

Hoyle however seemed to be directly concerned with rationalising this feeling by associating it with a unique dynamic process operating over the system as whole.  

If only I could figure out what it does, and how it does it.

That's the difference, I think, and it may be irreconcilable.

I am not sure what you really mean here.

Is it irreconcilable with the comp hypothesis? I tend to think so, because I don't see the need to add in a program some call to the beam (subroutine, oracle?) to make the universal person conscious through it. The implementable reference to oneself seems to play that trick. Or the UD and arithmetical truth is "beam" enough, so to speak.

Is it irreconcilable with the UD Argument? I tend to think so, because it introduces a non mechanical element, and a curious, very weird, form of supervenience.

(If the beam is mechanical, then it is just a question of substitution level, I guess).

I am aware you are using it only as an heuristic, but as I said, I don't see what it solves. It looks like it would only reintroduce a "real" time for consciousness in the picture, and that it reintroduces mystery, to account for what should be, with comp, only an illusion, like the fact that "her, now and me" would have a sort of absolute status, which I think has only a relative existence, even if we feel the contrary "here and now".

Bruno

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

[David Nyman]

On 13 June 2012 14:12, Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

The question "why am I David" is twofold:

- One aspect is "trivial" and admit the same explanation as "why am I in W and not in M" in the WM-duplication. Here comp can explain that there is no answer possible to that question (first person indeterminacy).

I disagree that this is trivial.  I don't think you can say that comp explains that there is no answer, only that it shows that there is no answer possible in the comp framework.  We know that there must be two viewpoints after duplication and that each, self-referentially, will believe itself to be unique.  So in effect comp assumes that these two viewpoints can't be experienced by the same person, which is of course entirely reasonable, having already distinguished two persons between whom the viewpoints may be distributed.  However, this is in direct contradiction to any idea that both can be the unique perspective of a single universal person (which is how this conversation began) unless one is equivocating about the sense of "unique viewpoint".

To recover a non-equivocally unique viewpoint, it must of course be the case that, in identifying with David, the universal person is not identifying with Bruno and vice versa.  This seems troublesome, in that it might seem to imply that Bruno and David are partial zombies (which heaven forfend!).  But is this really so?  There is no implication that such "momentary" associations are unfolding in a literal background time, only that transitions between moments are experientially real in some sense, even if you choose to call it illusory at the level of a particular theory.  Hence there is a fortiori no suggestion at any juncture of the person identified with both David or Bruno merely "mimicking consciousness"; all moments are equitably conscious in due course and in due measure.  Experientially, of course, no two experiential moments "occupy the same time", but that's not news.  As we have both remarked, the "physical bodies" one observes are a kind of virtual rendering, not the "person herself"; they are synchronised, not simultaneous.

I don't know if this kind of view is irreconcilable with comp.  You sometimes allude to the One as a kind of universal knower, and I suppose I tend to think of comp in terms of a One that is computationally structured.  If this is in any way coherent, it is not necessarily inconsistent with comp to think of the attention of such a One as being equitably distributed in such a manner, as long as one resists being too naively realistic about it.  I also feel that one should avoid using "illusory" to wave away whatever cannot be explained in a particular theory; rather one should perhaps just say that an explanation of that phenomenon is beyond the scope of the theory.

David