Sean Carroll gets past "Step 3" of the UDA

[Jason Resch]

Like Max Tegmark, in "Our Mathematical Universe", who described how duplication of the person results in an inability to perfectly predict future outcomes and experiences, in this interview Sean Carroll describes how even with perfect knowledge of the universe and it's evolution one could not make future predictions about what one will experience due to duplication:

https://youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=TP5W2MG8Jjs&t=1h5m

Perhaps Carroll's explanation might help others who've struggled to get past Step 3.

Jason

[Philip Thrift]

There Sean Carroll meets Deepak Chopra.

@philipthrift 

[Bruno Marchal]

Let us pray ...

Bruno

Jason

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[Philip Thrift]

On Friday, September 20, 2019 at 11:22:24 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 19 Sep 2019, at 12:41, Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:

Like Max Tegmark, in "Our Mathematical Universe", who described how duplication of the person results in an inability to perfectly predict future outcomes and experiences, in this interview Sean Carroll describes how even with perfect knowledge of the universe and it's evolution one could not make future predictions about what one will experience due to duplication:

https://youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=TP5W2MG8Jjs&t=1h5m

Perhaps Carroll's explanation might help others who've struggled to get past Step 3.

Let us pray ...

Bruno

As Feyerabend saw (and foresaw)  science is now religion.

When a scientist proceeds from the mathematics of any theory to any certain ontology of nature, they are being a religious guru, not a scientific one.

@philipthrift

[John Clark]

On Thu, Sep 19, 2019 at 6:41 AM Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Perhaps Carroll's explanation might help others who've struggled to get past Step 3.

If Jason Resch reads Carroll's book as John Clark has done then Jason Resch will find that Carroll goes into considerable detail explaining what the personal pronoun "you" could mean when there are multiple copies of "you". And that is something John Clark has done many times on this list, and that is something Bruno has never done and is what makes step 3 not just wrong but silly. 

 John K Clark

[Jason Resch]

Were you being wrong or silly when you accepted it 6 years ago?

Jason

[John Clark]

On Sun, Sep 22, 2019 at 11:21 AM Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Were you being wrong or silly when you accepted it 6 years ago?

I don't know, it depends on what "it" was 6 years ago.

John K Clark

 

[Bruno Marchal]

I totally agree with Feyerabend, except I would have said that deducing an ontology, and taking it for granted (dogma) is the pseudo-religious trick.

Science has never been separated from religion, as this is logically impossible, but indeed, science, when used to claim ontology becomes pseudo-religion, and pseudo-science.

The only problem is that Feyerabend seemed to believe in the ontology of matter, in some of his text, and so fall in the trap that he described here.

Bruno

@philipthrift

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[Bruno Marchal]

On the contrary, each time I have used the nuances (1p, 3p, 1-plural-p)  to explain step 3, all your critics have suppress the nuances, usually using mockery and semantic play, without any argument understoodd by any on this list.

Then, if you think that Carroll’s got it right, you do accept step 3, (as Carroll accept it, according to Jason) and it is even more weird why you have not yet move to step 4.

Of course, we know that you will have a problem with step 7, as you believe that a computation is ream only off implemented in an assumed physical reality, but this contradict a century of computer science.

Bruno

 John K Clark

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[John Clark]

On Mon, Sep 23, 2019 at 6:31 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

> if you think that Carroll’s got it right, you do accept step 3, (as Carroll accept it, according to Jason) 

If Jason thinks Carroll accepts it then Jason is full of shit. And I've read Carroll's book, you haven't. You two should actually read the book, then we'll talk.

John K Clark

[Philip Thrift]

On Monday, September 23, 2019 at 5:23:52 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 20 Sep 2019, at 21:32, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Friday, September 20, 2019 at 11:22:24 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 19 Sep 2019, at 12:41, Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:

Like Max Tegmark, in "Our Mathematical Universe", who described how duplication of the person results in an inability to perfectly predict future outcomes and experiences, in this interview Sean Carroll describes how even with perfect knowledge of the universe and it's evolution one could not make future predictions about what one will experience due to duplication:

https://youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=TP5W2MG8Jjs&t=1h5m

Perhaps Carroll's explanation might help others who've struggled to get past Step 3.

Let us pray ...

Bruno

As Feyerabend saw (and foresaw)  science is now religion.

When a scientist proceeds from the mathematics of any theory to any certain ontology of nature, they are being a religious guru, not a scientific one.

I totally agree with Feyerabend, except I would have said that deducing an ontology, and taking it for granted (dogma) is the pseudo-religious trick.

Science has never been separated from religion, as this is logically impossible, but indeed, science, when used to claim ontology becomes pseudo-religion, and pseudo-science.

The only problem is that Feyerabend seemed to believe in the ontology of matter, in some of his text, and so fall in the trap that he described here.

Bruno

I wrote the sentence above (n a tweet). :)

I put the word "certain" in "certain ontology" to mean the opposite that it is always possibly updatable, and not final.

@philipthrift

[Jason Resch]

I guess you never clicked the link I provided at the start of this thread.  I'll transcribe it for those who can't access the video:

Sean Carroll:

So Isaac Newton came up with the rules of classical mechanics in the 1600s, but it wasn't until Laplace around the year 1800 that this implication of classical mechanics was realized.

It's a clockwork universe.  That the way classical mechanics works is if you tell me the state of a system right now at one moment by which in classical mechanics you would mean the position and the velocity of every part, and you knew the laws of physics and you had arbitrarily large computational capacity, 

Laplace said of vast intelligence okay then to that vast intelligence the past and future would be as determined and known as the present was because that's the clockwork universe is deterministic everything is fixed once you know the present moment.

Now quantum mechanics comes along and throws a spanner into the works a little bit if you're a many-worlds person Laplace is demon is still possible.

So if you know the wave function of the universe exactly and you have infinite calculational capacity you could predict the past and the future with perfect accuracy.

But! what you're predicting is all of the branches of the wavefunction so any individual person inside the wavefunction still experiences apparently random events.

Right, so you can't predict what will happen to you even if you can predict what will happen to the entire universe.

This is the essence of Step 3 of the UDA.  In an experiment involving duplication of persons, apparent randomness emerges.  There is no actual randomness in the complete system, but individual experiences will have the characteristic of randomness, in the sense of not being able to make definite predictions concerning their experiences.  Sean Carroll gets this.  Max Tegmark gets this.  You got it at least once 6 years ago on this list when you agreed that a forking computer process containing AIs could not predict which process they would end up in.  This is enough for you to proceed to the next step, which adds only a time delay to one of the duplicates.  You are almost there.

Jason

 

[Jason Resch]

On Mon, Sep 23, 2019 at 5:31 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

On 22 Sep 2019, at 11:43, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Thu, Sep 19, 2019 at 6:41 AM Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Perhaps Carroll's explanation might help others who've struggled to get past Step 3.

If Jason Resch reads Carroll's book as John Clark has done then Jason Resch will find that Carroll goes into considerable detail explaining what the personal pronoun "you" could mean when there are multiple copies of "you". And that is something John Clark has done many times on this list, and that is something Bruno has never done and is what makes step 3 not just wrong but silly. 

On the contrary, each time I have used the nuances (1p, 3p, 1-plural-p)  to explain step 3, all your critics have suppress the nuances, usually using mockery and semantic play, without any argument understoodd by any on this list.

Then, if you think that Carroll’s got it right, you do accept step 3, (as Carroll accept it, according to Jason) and it is even more weird why you have not yet move to step 4.

Of course, we know that you will have a problem with step 7, as you believe that a computation is ream only off implemented in an assumed physical reality, but this contradict a century of computer science.

Perhaps it is a manifestation of "buyer's remorse" (he spent $80,000 when he is already saved by arithmetic).

While he might have a problem with step 7, it appears John Clark does support arithmetical realism:

John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> 12/26/12

to everything-list

On Sat, Dec 22, 2012 at 11:05 AM, Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.com> wrote:

> Why do the natural numbers exist?

A better question is do the natural numbers need a reason to exist? I don't know the answer to that but my hunch is no.

 

However he uses the static nature of arithmetical truth to presume that it cannot represent "real computations".  But he has not indicated why fundamental change (which I take to mean successive creation and destruction of states) should be necessary to computation, while the indexical eternal existence of each successive computational state won't do. John's theory that fundamental change is required leads to an infinity of philosophical zombies existing within the arithmetical computations, but I think John has also argued against philosophical zombies.  I would like him to answer the following questions:

1. Can the time evolution of John Clark's brain be described by the solutions to a particular Diophantine equation? (e.g. an equation with variables t and s, where t = number of Plank times since start of emulation, and s = the wave function describing all the particles in your skull)

2. Are those brain states found in the collection of solutions to that equation reflective of a philosophical zombie? (e.g. could we build a John Clark robot that behaved exactly as John Clark would by searching for solutions to this equation, which would not be conscious)

Jason

[Alan Grayson]

On Monday, September 23, 2019 at 9:23:29 AM UTC-6, Jason wrote:

On Mon, Sep 23, 2019 at 5:51 AM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Sep 23, 2019 at 6:31 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

> if you think that Carroll’s got it right, you do accept step 3, (as Carroll accept it, according to Jason) 

If Jason thinks Carroll accepts it then Jason is full of shit. And I've read Carroll's book, you haven't. You two should actually read the book, then we'll talk.

I guess you never clicked the link I provided at the start of this thread.  I'll transcribe it for those who can't access the video:

Sean Carroll:

So Isaac Newton came up with the rules of classical mechanics in the 1600s, but it wasn't until Laplace around the year 1800 that this implication of classical mechanics was realized.

It's a clockwork universe.  That the way classical mechanics works is if you tell me the state of a system right now at one moment by which in classical mechanics you would mean the position and the velocity of every part, and you knew the laws of physics and you had arbitrarily large computational capacity, 

Laplace said of vast intelligence okay then to that vast intelligence the past and future would be as determined and known as the present was because that's the clockwork universe is deterministic everything is fixed once you know the present moment.

 

But Laplace was wrong in one very important respect. One can never know the exact position and momentum of any particle, let alone the entire universe. There are no perfect measurements! Further, the situation is further aggravated by the Uncertainty Principle. In sum, using classical mechanics the future is NOT determined by its present, imprecise configuration. Not only is Laplace mistaken, but Carroll as well, who should know better. AG 

Now quantum mechanics comes along and throws a spanner into the works a little bit if you're a many-worlds person Laplace is demon is still possible.

So if you know the wave function of the universe exactly and you have infinite calculational capacity you could predict the past and the future with perfect accuracy.

But! what you're predicting is all of the branches of the wavefunction so any individual person inside the wavefunction still experiences apparently random events.

Right, so you can't predict what will happen to you even if you can predict what will happen to the entire universe.

This is the essence of Step 3 of the UDA.  In an experiment involving duplication of persons, apparent randomness emerges.  There is no actual randomness in the complete system, but individual experiences will have the characteristic of randomness, in the sense of not being able to make definite predictions concerning their experiences.  Sean Carroll gets this.  Max Tegmark gets this.  You got it at least once 6 years ago on this list when you agreed that a forking computer process containing AIs could not predict which process they would end up in.  This is enough for you to proceed to the next step, which adds only a time delay to one of the duplicates.  You are almost there.

Jason

 

[Alan Grayson]

On Monday, September 23, 2019 at 9:23:29 AM UTC-6, Jason wrote:

On Mon, Sep 23, 2019 at 5:51 AM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Sep 23, 2019 at 6:31 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

> if you think that Carroll’s got it right, you do accept step 3, (as Carroll accept it, according to Jason) 

If Jason thinks Carroll accepts it then Jason is full of shit. And I've read Carroll's book, you haven't. You two should actually read the book, then we'll talk.

I guess you never clicked the link I provided at the start of this thread.  I'll transcribe it for those who can't access the video:

Sean Carroll:

So Isaac Newton came up with the rules of classical mechanics in the 1600s, but it wasn't until Laplace around the year 1800 that this implication of classical mechanics was realized.

It's a clockwork universe.  That the way classical mechanics works is if you tell me the state of a system right now at one moment by which in classical mechanics you would mean the position and the velocity of every part, and you knew the laws of physics and you had arbitrarily large computational capacity, 

Laplace said of vast intelligence okay then to that vast intelligence the past and future would be as determined and known as the present was because that's the clockwork universe is deterministic everything is fixed once you know the present moment.

(Indentation fixed).

But Laplace was wrong in one very important respect. One can never know the exact position and momentum of any particle, let alone the entire universe. There are no perfect measurements! Further, the situation is further aggravated by the Uncertainty Principle. In sum, using classical mechanics the future is NOT determined by its present, imprecise configuration. Not only is Laplace mistaken, but Carroll as well, who should and does know better. AG

 

Now quantum mechanics comes along and throws a spanner into the works a little bit if you're a many-worlds person Laplace is demon is still possible.

So if you know the wave function of the universe exactly and you have infinite calculational capacity you could predict the past and the future with perfect accuracy.

But! what you're predicting is all of the branches of the wavefunction so any individual person inside the wavefunction still experiences apparently random events.

Right, so you can't predict what will happen to you even if you can predict what will happen to the entire universe.

The premise is wrong. Based on classical or quantum mechanics, one cannot predict the future of the universe, in part or in whole. AG 

[Brent Meeker]

On 9/23/2019 8:59 AM, Alan Grayson wrote:
> But Laplace was wrong in one very important respect. One can never
> know the exact position and momentum of any particle, let alone the
> entire universe. There are no perfect measurements!

Laplace knew that. His point was that the future (and the past) were
completely determined by the present state of the world.  Even though we
can't measure it perfectly, Laplace assumed that the variables like
position and  momentum had definite values.  That's what is
fundamentally different about quantum mechanics, they don't have
definite values.

> Further, the situation is further aggravated by the Uncertainty
> Principle. In sum, using classical mechanics the future is NOT
> determined by its present, imprecise configuration.

The uncertainty principle is part of QM not CM.  Just because you can't
measure it precisely, doesn't mean that the present configuration is not
precise; it means that we are ignorant of the precise values. This was
Einstein's idea, that QM was incomplete and its randomness was just an
expression of our ignorance, as in CM.

> Not only is Laplace mistaken, but Carroll as well, who should know
> better. AG

Neither Laplace nor Carroll is mistaken.

Brent

[Philip Thrift]

Both were/are superstitious, basically religiously so, in their fear/rejection of probabilities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laplace%27s_demon#Quantum_mechanical_irreversibility

@philipthrift

 

[John Clark]

On Mon, Sep 23, 2019 at 11:23 AM Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I guess you never clicked the link I provided at the start of this thread.  

I've done a lot better than click on a link that provides a brief synopsis, I've spent hours reading every page in the man's entire book and you and Bruno should do the same.

>You got it at least once 6 years ago on this list when you agreed that a forking computer process containing AIs could not predict which process they would end up in. 

I don't know what you're referring to so it's hard to know how to respond, but  since you can pinpoint the exact time, 6 years ago, you should be able to include the exact quote where I said I "got it" and enough context around it so it's clear who "they" are that failed to make a prediction, and even more important it's crystal clear exactly what the correct prediction would have turned out to be.  

> quoting Carroll: "Now quantum mechanics comes along and throws a spanner into the works a little bit if you're a many-worlds person Laplace is demon is still possible".

Yes, if Many Worlds is correct then the Schrodinger Wave Equation of the Multiverse is all there is, and it is a 100% deterministic equation, so Laplace's demon could solve it and in theory you could too. And yet the empirical fact remains you  can NOT predict the future, at least not always and not perfectly. If Many Worlds could not explain this obvious glaring discrepancy it would be dead dead dead. But Many Worlds can explain it and can do so easily; you can't answer the question "What one and only one thing will you see tomorrow after the universe splits?" for exactly the same reason you can't answer Bruno's question "What one and only one thing will you  see tomorrow after you are duplicated and you become two and you see two different things?" The  difference is in the Many Worlds case, after the universe splits, if I asked you today what the correct answer you should have given yesterday was:

1) It would be obvious who the question was directed to.
2)  It would obvious what would have been the correct answer.

Neither of these things is true for Bruno's "question".

Of course Sean Carroll delves into this issue in far greater detail that I have here, and you'd know that if you had read the man's book as I have.

John K Clark

[Jason Resch]

On Mon, Sep 23, 2019 at 2:58 PM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Sep 23, 2019 at 11:23 AM Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I guess you never clicked the link I provided at the start of this thread.  

I've done a lot better than click on a link that provides a brief synopsis, I've spent hours reading every page in the man's entire book and you and Bruno should do the same.

>You got it at least once 6 years ago on this list when you agreed that a forking computer process containing AIs could not predict which process they would end up in. 

I don't know what you're referring to so it's hard to know how to respond, but  since you can pinpoint the exact time, 6 years ago, you should be able to include the exact quote where I said I "got it" and enough context around it so it's clear who "they" are that failed to make a prediction, and even more important it's crystal clear exactly what the correct prediction would have turned out to be.  

I did a few days ago, but you didn't respond.  I'll post it again:

This Halloween will mark 6 years since you agreed with Step 3, but said it was a let down (presumably because you thought it so obvious):

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/everything-list/5PR1FXp_CSU/73ltRVEHUtQJ

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/everything-list/5PR1FXp_CSU/PnuTSn_82PwJ

Should we expect another 6 years before you proceed through the next steps?  There's no rush, since you are freezing yourself this debate could go on another 10^100 years.

 

> quoting Carroll: "Now quantum mechanics comes along and throws a spanner into the works a little bit if you're a many-worlds person Laplace is demon is still possible".

Yes, if Many Worlds is correct then the Schrodinger Wave Equation of the Multiverse is all there is, and it is a 100% deterministic equation, so Laplace's demon could solve it and in theory you could too. And yet the empirical fact remains you  can NOT predict the future, at least not always and not perfectly. If Many Worlds could not explain this obvious glaring discrepancy it would be dead dead dead. But Many Worlds can explain it and can do so easily; you can't answer the question "What one and only one thing will you see tomorrow after the universe splits?" for exactly the same reason you can't answer Bruno's question "What one and only one thing will you  see tomorrow after you are duplicated and you become two and you see two different things?" The  difference is in the Many Worlds case, after the universe splits, if I asked you today what the correct answer you should have given yesterday was:

1) It would be obvious who the question was directed to.
2)  It would obvious what would have been the correct answer.

Neither of these things is true for Bruno's "question".

What's so special about duplicating universes?  Perhaps you can explain why one leads to apparent randomness and the other case does not.

 

Of course Sean Carroll delves into this issue in far greater detail that I have here, and you'd know that if you had read the man's book as I have.

Is anything I said about Carroll wrong?  What do you hope I will learn from reading Caroll's book?

Jason

[Alan Grayson]

On Monday, September 23, 2019 at 1:32:11 PM UTC-6, Brent wrote:

On 9/23/2019 8:59 AM, Alan Grayson wrote:
> But Laplace was wrong in one very important respect. One can never
> know the exact position and momentum of any particle, let alone the
> entire universe. There are no perfect measurements!

Laplace knew that. His point was that the future (and the past) were
completely determined by the present state of the world.  Even though we
can't measure it perfectly, Laplace assumed that the variables like
position and  momentum had definite values.  That's what is
fundamentally different about quantum mechanics, they don't have
definite values.

> Further, the situation is further aggravated by the Uncertainty
> Principle. In sum, using classical mechanics the future is NOT
> determined by its present, imprecise configuration.

The uncertainty principle is part of QM not CM. 

Yes, and I didn't indicate otherwise. AG 

Just because you can't
measure it precisely, doesn't mean that the present configuration is not
precise; it means that we are ignorant of the precise values. This was
Einstein's idea, that QM was incomplete and its randomness was just an
expression of our ignorance, as in CM.

 That's not the mainstream view today IIUC. It's that position and momentum as simultaneous values don't exist, not that we can't measure them precisely. AG

> Not only is Laplace mistaken, but Carroll as well, who should know
> better. AG

Neither Laplace nor Carroll is mistaken.

Carroll intentionally misstated Laplace's position in an attempt to make his reasoning plausible. So IMO he's not only wrong about MW, but dishonest as well. AG 

Brent

[Brent Meeker]

Did you tell Carroll that?

Brent

[John Clark]

On Mon, Sep 23, 2019 at 11:41 AM Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:

Jason thinks I must be suffering from buyer's remorse because I "spent $80,000 when he is already saved by arithmetic" he concludes this because on December 26 2012 at 12:34 PM I said " A better question is do the natural numbers need a reason to exist? I don't know the answer to that but my hunch is no". However in another post on December 26 2012 at 1:26 PM, less than 2 hours later I said "it is a fact that thinking of information as something physical has over the last century proven itself to be remarkably fertile and has led to the discovery of new knowledge, while thinking of information as ethereal was found to be sterile and has led to nowhere and nothing".

The existence of the natural numbers may or may not be a brute fact, but it is certainly NOT a brute fact that we teach our children the particular metric to measure the distance a natural number is from zero that yields results such as 2+2=4 and not one of the infinite number of other self consistent ones that the P-adic metric can provide. It is not a brute fact because there is a reason for it, we teach that one and only that one to children because it is the only one that is consistent with the physical world. And because that one is far more intuitive than any P-adic one. And it is more intuitive precisely because it is consistent with the physical world we see around us and P-adic is not.

 

> However he uses the static nature of arithmetical truth to presume that it cannot represent "real computations". 

There is a easy way to tell a "real computation" from the other sort. Your computer can make one sort of computation without a battery or a AC power outlet, but for the other sort your computer needs electricity.  And you can *do* something with one sort of calculation, but you can't *do* anything with the other sort of "calculation". 

> But he has not indicated why fundamental change (which I take to mean successive creation and destruction of states) should be necessary to computation,

Do I really need to indicate why you can't create or destroy something without making a change? I don't think so. But I think you need to indicate how, out of the set of all computations, you can pick the correct ones from the incorrect ones without the help of matter that obeys the laws of physics.  

I think meaning needs contrast. Michelangelo's David was carved from a single huge block of marble that was a 100 million years old, but it would be silly to say David was 100 million years old and Michelangelo did nothing but unpack it from the marble that was not part of David. And to make a real calculation rather than a pretend toy one you have to differentiate the correct from the incorrect, you not only have to mention the correct answer you have to make it clear that all the other answers, and there are a infinite number of them, are wrong. And for that you need a physical machine.

 > I think John has also argued against philosophical zombies.

I have indeed.

 

> John's theory that fundamental change is required leads to an infinity of philosophical zombies existing within the arithmetical computations,

My theory is NOTHING exists within arithmetical computations because arithmetical computations don't exist (existence being defined as stuff that can *do* things), but physical computations certainly exist and can *do" all sorts of things.

 

> 1. Can the time evolution of John Clark's brain be described by the solutions to a particular Diophantine equation? (e.g. an equation with variables t and s, where t = number of Plank times since start of emulation, and s = the wave function describing all the particles in your skull)

It can unless physics needs Real Numbers and it probably doesn't. Yes  Schrodinger's equation uses Real Numbers because it assumes space and time are continuous, but that is probably only approximately true.  And there are a infinite number of equations and mathematically there is absolutely nothing special about Schrodinger's equation, the only thing special about that particular equation is it conforms with our observations of how the physical world behaves.

And I'm very surprised that as soon as you mentioned the Planck Time in the above you didn't realize you had left the world of pure dimensionless numbersand was talking numbers with physical units associated with them, like measures of time and space and mass and energy and electrical charge.

> 2. Are those brain states found in the collection of solutions to that equation reflective of a philosophical zombie?

No.

> could we build a John Clark robot that behaved exactly as John Clark would by searching for solutions to this equation, which would not be conscious

No. And it would not behave exactly like John Clark, it would not behave at all because without physics there would be no way to search through solutions to that equation or to any other.

John K Clark

[Jason Resch]

On Mon, Sep 23, 2019 at 5:44 PM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Sep 23, 2019 at 11:41 AM Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:

Jason thinks I must be suffering from buyer's remorse because I "spent $80,000 when he is already saved by arithmetic" he concludes this because on December 26 2012 at 12:34 PM I said " A better question is do the natural numbers need a reason to exist? I don't know the answer to that but my hunch is no". However in another post on December 26 2012 at 1:26 PM, less than 2 hours later I said "it is a fact that thinking of information as something physical has over the last century proven itself to be remarkably fertile and has led to the discovery of new knowledge, while thinking of information as ethereal was found to be sterile and has led to nowhere and nothing".

The existence of the natural numbers may or may not be a brute fact, but it is certainly NOT a brute fact that we teach our children the particular metric to measure the distance a natural number is from zero that yields results such as 2+2=4 and not one of the infinite number of other self consistent ones that the P-adic metric can provide. It is not a brute fact because there is a reason for it, we teach that one and only that one to children because it is the only one that is consistent with the physical world. And because that one is far more intuitive than any P-adic one. And it is more intuitive precisely because it is consistent with the physical world we see around us and P-adic is not.

 

> However he uses the static nature of arithmetical truth to presume that it cannot represent "real computations". 

There is a easy way to tell a "real computation" from the other sort. Your computer can make one sort of computation without a battery or a AC power outlet, but for the other sort your computer needs electricity.  And you can *do* something with one sort of calculation, but you can't *do* anything with the other sort of "calculation". 

> But he has not indicated why fundamental change (which I take to mean successive creation and destruction of states) should be necessary to computation,

Do I really need to indicate why you can't create or destroy something without making a change? I don't think so. But I think you need to indicate how, out of the set of all computations, you can pick the correct ones from the incorrect ones without the help of matter that obeys the laws of physics.  

How do you suppose the laws of physics pick out the correct physical outcomes from among all possibilities?  You presume there is a physical world governed by physical laws.  But you deny an arithmetical world governed by arithmetical laws.  Yet, assuming an arithmetical world governed by arithmetical laws, you can derive the appearance of a physical universe governed by physical laws.

 

I think meaning needs contrast. Michelangelo's David was carved from a single huge block of marble that was a 100 million years old, but it would be silly to say David was 100 million years old and Michelangelo did nothing but unpack it from the marble that was not part of David. And to make a real calculation rather than a pretend toy one you have to differentiate the correct from the incorrect, you not only have to mention the correct answer you have to make it clear that all the other answers, and there are a infinite number of them, are wrong. And for that you need a physical machine.

 > I think John has also argued against philosophical zombies.

I have indeed.

 

> John's theory that fundamental change is required leads to an infinity of philosophical zombies existing within the arithmetical computations,

My theory is NOTHING exists within arithmetical computations because arithmetical computations don't exist (existence being defined as stuff that can *do* things), but physical computations certainly exist and can *do" all sorts of things.

 

> 1. Can the time evolution of John Clark's brain be described by the solutions to a particular Diophantine equation? (e.g. an equation with variables t and s, where t = number of Plank times since start of emulation, and s = the wave function describing all the particles in your skull)

It can unless physics needs Real Numbers and it probably doesn't. Yes  Schrodinger's equation uses Real Numbers because it assumes space and time are continuous, but that is probably only approximately true.  And there are a infinite number of equations and mathematically there is absolutely nothing special about Schrodinger's equation, the only thing special about that particular equation is it conforms with our observations of how the physical world behaves.

And I'm very surprised that as soon as you mentioned the Planck Time in the above you didn't realize you had left the world of pure dimensionless numbersand was talking numbers with physical units associated with them, like measures of time and space and mass and energy and electrical charge.

If you think physical laws are computable, then time, space, mass, etc. can all be reduced to computation (and computation is the manipulation of pure numbers).

 

> 2. Are those brain states found in the collection of solutions to that equation reflective of a philosophical zombie?

No.

> could we build a John Clark robot that behaved exactly as John Clark would by searching for solutions to this equation, which would not be conscious

No. And it would not behave exactly like John Clark, it would not behave at all because without physics there would be no way to search through solutions to that equation or to any other.

Physical laws somehow pick out the correct solutions (without needing some higher order computer plugged into a power outlet), so why can't the same mechanism that powers physical law power arithmetical law?

Jason

[Brent Meeker]

On 9/23/2019 4:23 PM, Jason Resch wrote:
> Yet, assuming an arithmetical world governed by arithmetical laws, you
> can derive the appearance of a physical universe governed by physical
> laws.

If only it were so.  So far it's hand waving aspiration.

Brent

[Bruno Marchal]

On 23 Sep 2019, at 12:50, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Sep 23, 2019 at 6:31 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

> if you think that Carroll’s got it right, you do accept step 3, (as Carroll accept it, according to Jason) 

If Jason thinks Carroll accepts it then Jason is full of shit.

Easy, gross and .. not a valid argument.

And I've read Carroll's book, you haven't. You two should actually read the book, then we'll talk.

More than one people told you since long that QM many-worlds use the first person indeterminacy more or less explicitly.

Bruno

John K Clark

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[Bruno Marchal]

On 23 Sep 2019, at 17:41, Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Sep 23, 2019 at 5:31 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

On 22 Sep 2019, at 11:43, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Thu, Sep 19, 2019 at 6:41 AM Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Perhaps Carroll's explanation might help others who've struggled to get past Step 3.

If Jason Resch reads Carroll's book as John Clark has done then Jason Resch will find that Carroll goes into considerable detail explaining what the personal pronoun "you" could mean when there are multiple copies of "you". And that is something John Clark has done many times on this list, and that is something Bruno has never done and is what makes step 3 not just wrong but silly. 

On the contrary, each time I have used the nuances (1p, 3p, 1-plural-p)  to explain step 3, all your critics have suppress the nuances, usually using mockery and semantic play, without any argument understoodd by any on this list.

Then, if you think that Carroll’s got it right, you do accept step 3, (as Carroll accept it, according to Jason) and it is even more weird why you have not yet move to step 4.

Of course, we know that you will have a problem with step 7, as you believe that a computation is ream only off implemented in an assumed physical reality, but this contradict a century of computer science.

Perhaps it is a manifestation of "buyer's remorse" (he spent $80,000 when he is already saved by arithmetic).

I am not sure. The saving in arithmetic might be close to the Indian Nirvana idea. Technological immortality is for those who want save their ego, their local memories, and somehow procrastinate the Nirvana, and pursue the Samsara.

Saying “yes” ti the doctor is rather vain, if the goal is only to prolongate existence, but it can be sensefull if the goal is being able to see the next soccer cup.

While he might have a problem with step 7, it appears John Clark does support arithmetical realism:

Clark is like my early opponent. They mocked it quite loudly and publicly before studying the argument, just because they see word like “consciousness” or “reality”, and when they understand there is a reasoning, a theory, means of testing it, they do not want to admit they were wrong.

Some people cannot change their mind.

It is sad that people open to the MW shows difficulties for the simpler and more obvious (provable) “many-computation” in arithmetic.

Now Clark seems also to have some more genuine  difficulties in mathematical logic, as he confused theory and models regularly. To his discharge, mathematical logic is poorly taught, when taught.

John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> 12/26/12

to everything-list

On Sat, Dec 22, 2012 at 11:05 AM, Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.com> wrote:

> Why do the natural numbers exist?

A better question is do the natural numbers need a reason to exist? I don't know the answer to that but my hunch is no.

 

However he uses the static nature of arithmetical truth to presume that it cannot represent "real computations".  But he has not indicated why fundamental change (which I take to mean successive creation and destruction of states) should be necessary to computation, while the indexical eternal existence of each successive computational state won't do. John's theory that fundamental change is required leads to an infinity of philosophical zombies existing within the arithmetical computations, but I think John has also argued against philosophical zombies.  I would like him to answer the following questions:

1. Can the time evolution of John Clark's brain be described by the solutions to a particular Diophantine equation? (e.g. an equation with variables t and s, where t = number of Plank times since start of emulation, and s = the wave function describing all the particles in your skull)

2. Are those brain states found in the collection of solutions to that equation reflective of a philosophical zombie? (e.g. could we build a John Clark robot that behaved exactly as John Clark would by searching for solutions to this equation, which would not be conscious)

I let people guess what John Clark could say, above his taking granted a fundamental primary time (like Prigogine) or a fundamental primary physical universe (like the Aristotelians).

Bruno 

Jason

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[Bruno Marchal]

On 23 Sep 2019, at 17:59, Alan Grayson <agrays...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Monday, September 23, 2019 at 9:23:29 AM UTC-6, Jason wrote:

On Mon, Sep 23, 2019 at 5:51 AM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Sep 23, 2019 at 6:31 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

> if you think that Carroll’s got it right, you do accept step 3, (as Carroll accept it, according to Jason) 

If Jason thinks Carroll accepts it then Jason is full of shit. And I've read Carroll's book, you haven't. You two should actually read the book, then we'll talk.

I guess you never clicked the link I provided at the start of this thread.  I'll transcribe it for those who can't access the video:

Sean Carroll:

So Isaac Newton came up with the rules of classical mechanics in the 1600s, but it wasn't until Laplace around the year 1800 that this implication of classical mechanics was realized.

It's a clockwork universe.  That the way classical mechanics works is if you tell me the state of a system right now at one moment by which in classical mechanics you would mean the position and the velocity of every part, and you knew the laws of physics and you had arbitrarily large computational capacity, 

Laplace said of vast intelligence okay then to that vast intelligence the past and future would be as determined and known as the present was because that's the clockwork universe is deterministic everything is fixed once you know the present moment.

 

But Laplace was wrong in one very important respect. One can never know the exact position and momentum of any particle, let alone the entire universe.

Like in arithmetic. We can never know-for-sure which machine we are, nor which computations “run” us. 

That does not make arithmetic non deterministic. Likewise, quantum mechanics is a purely deterministic theory, independently that we, from inside, cannot use it to predict our future 1p (plural) experiments.

There are no perfect measurements! Further, the situation is further aggravated by the Uncertainty Principle. In sum, using classical mechanics the future is NOT determined by its present, imprecise configuration. Not only is Laplace mistaken, but Carroll as well, who should know better. AG 

Laplace is mistaken with respect to the quantum theory.

Carroll is just incomplete with respect to Mechanism (and with respect to the problem of qualia, consciousness, which is not his domain of investigation.

Bruno

Now quantum mechanics comes along and throws a spanner into the works a little bit if you're a many-worlds person Laplace is demon is still possible.

So if you know the wave function of the universe exactly and you have infinite calculational capacity you could predict the past and the future with perfect accuracy.

But! what you're predicting is all of the branches of the wavefunction so any individual person inside the wavefunction still experiences apparently random events.

Right, so you can't predict what will happen to you even if you can predict what will happen to the entire universe.

This is the essence of Step 3 of the UDA.  In an experiment involving duplication of persons, apparent randomness emerges.  There is no actual randomness in the complete system, but individual experiences will have the characteristic of randomness, in the sense of not being able to make definite predictions concerning their experiences.  Sean Carroll gets this.  Max Tegmark gets this.  You got it at least once 6 years ago on this list when you agreed that a forking computer process containing AIs could not predict which process they would end up in.  This is enough for you to proceed to the next step, which adds only a time delay to one of the duplicates.  You are almost there.

Jason

 

 

Now quantum mechanics comes along and throws a spanner into the works a little bit if you're a many-worlds person Laplace is demon is still possible.

So if you know the wave function of the universe exactly and you have infinite calculational capacity you could predict the past and the future with perfect accuracy.

But! what you're predicting is all of the branches of the wavefunction so any individual person inside the wavefunction still experiences apparently random events.

Right, so you can't predict what will happen to you even if you can predict what will happen to the entire universe.

This is the essence of Step 3 of the UDA.  In an experiment involving duplication of persons, apparent randomness emerges.  There is no actual randomness in the complete system, but individual experiences will have the characteristic of randomness, in the sense of not being able to make definite predictions concerning their experiences.  Sean Carroll gets this.  Max Tegmark gets this.  You got it at least once 6 years ago on this list when you agreed that a forking computer process containing AIs could not predict which process they would end up in.  This is enough for you to proceed to the next step, which adds only a time delay to one of the duplicates.  You are almost there.

Jason

 

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[Bruno Marchal]

On 24 Sep 2019, at 00:43, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Sep 23, 2019 at 11:41 AM Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:

Jason thinks I must be suffering from buyer's remorse because I "spent $80,000 when he is already saved by arithmetic" he concludes this because on December 26 2012 at 12:34 PM I said " A better question is do the natural numbers need a reason to exist? I don't know the answer to that but my hunch is no". However in another post on December 26 2012 at 1:26 PM, less than 2 hours later I said "it is a fact that thinking of information as something physical has over the last century proven itself to be remarkably fertile and has led to the discovery of new knowledge, while thinking of information as ethereal was found to be sterile and has led to nowhere and nothing".

The existence of the natural numbers may or may not be a brute fact, but it is certainly NOT a brute fact that we teach our children the particular metric to measure the distance a natural number is from zero that yields results such as 2+2=4 and not one of the infinite number of other self consistent ones that the P-adic metric can provide. It is not a brute fact because there is a reason for it, we teach that one and only that one to children because it is the only one that is consistent with the physical world. And because that one is far more intuitive than any P-adic one. And it is more intuitive precisely because it is consistent with the physical world we see around us and P-adic is not.

 

> However he uses the static nature of arithmetical truth to presume that it cannot represent "real computations". 

There is a easy way to tell a "real computation" from the other sort. Your computer can make one sort of computation without a battery or a AC power outlet, but for the other sort your computer needs electricity.  And you can *do* something with one sort of calculation, but you can't *do* anything with the other sort of "calculation". 

> But he has not indicated why fundamental change (which I take to mean successive creation and destruction of states) should be necessary to computation,

Do I really need to indicate why you can't create or destroy something without making a change? I don't think so. But I think you need to indicate how, out of the set of all computations, you can pick the correct ones from the incorrect ones without the help of matter that obeys the laws of physics.  

I think meaning needs contrast. Michelangelo's David was carved from a single huge block of marble that was a 100 million years old, but it would be silly to say David was 100 million years old and Michelangelo did nothing but unpack it from the marble that was not part of David. And to make a real calculation rather than a pretend toy one you have to differentiate the correct from the incorrect, you not only have to mention the correct answer you have to make it clear that all the other answers, and there are a infinite number of them, are wrong. And for that you need a physical machine.

 > I think John has also argued against philosophical zombies.

I have indeed.

But then you accept infinitely many zombie in arithmetic, or deny the theorem in arithmetic sating that the computations exist (and *are* computation).

 

> John's theory that fundamental change is required leads to an infinity of philosophical zombies existing within the arithmetical computations,

My theory is NOTHING exists within arithmetical computations because arithmetical computations don't exist

False with exist taken in the same sense as in “their exists no biggest prime number”.

(existence being defined as stuff that can *do* things),

In metaphysics or theology when done with the scientific attitude, this invoke your personal ontological commitment.

That is as funny as the drawing of the guy doing a proof and invoking a miracle.

That is not even religion, but pseudo-religion or pseudo-science.

but physical computations certainly exist and can *do" all sorts of things.

That is like the priest of the institutionalised religion. You talk like if you knew the truth. That is automatically invalid.

Bruno 

 

> 1. Can the time evolution of John Clark's brain be described by the solutions to a particular Diophantine equation? (e.g. an equation with variables t and s, where t = number of Plank times since start of emulation, and s = the wave function describing all the particles in your skull)

It can unless physics needs Real Numbers and it probably doesn't. Yes  Schrodinger's equation uses Real Numbers because it assumes space and time are continuous, but that is probably only approximately true.  And there are a infinite number of equations and mathematically there is absolutely nothing special about Schrodinger's equation, the only thing special about that particular equation is it conforms with our observations of how the physical world behaves.

And I'm very surprised that as soon as you mentioned the Planck Time in the above you didn't realize you had left the world of pure dimensionless numbersand was talking numbers with physical units associated with them, like measures of time and space and mass and energy and electrical charge.

> 2. Are those brain states found in the collection of solutions to that equation reflective of a philosophical zombie?

No.

> could we build a John Clark robot that behaved exactly as John Clark would by searching for solutions to this equation, which would not be conscious

No. And it would not behave exactly like John Clark, it would not behave at all because without physics there would be no way to search through solutions to that equation or to any other.

John K Clark

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[Bruno Marchal]

Not all. We get first that a physical universe has to be perceive by the numbers, that explains why we believe in a physical universe, without ontological commitment. Only that is far better than an extrapolation from an ostentatious exhibit.

Secondly, the proof is constructive. It says physics is given by those precise modes of self-reference.

Thirdly, we get the full quantum logic, with testable difference (the arithmetical quantum logic has been shown richer than most physical quantum one).

Fourthly, we get a theory of qualia and consciousness coherent with the prediction on pur first person experience, where physicalism, when rigorous, has to eliminate or dismiss qualia and consciousness.

Physicalism has never work, except by denying the mind, but with Digital Mechanism, we know why, and we know how to improve/correct it.

The real trouble are for those who defend both Mechanism and Materialism/Physicalism, be it with one world or many.

Bruno





>
> Brent

>
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[John Clark]

On Mon, Sep 23, 2019 at 4:22 PM Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:

> This Halloween will mark 6 years since you agreed with Step 3,

BULLSHIT!

This is the entire post and even though 6 years has passed I stand by every word and wouldn't change anything:

On Thu, Oct 31, 2013 at 2:12 PM, Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:

>  A) The test described where the simulation process forks 8 times and 256 copies are created and they each see a different pattern of the ball changing color

Duplicating a brain is not enough, the intelligence has NOT forked until there is something different about them, such as one remembering seeing a red ball and the other remember seeing a green ball, only then do they fork. It was the decision made by somebody or something outside the simulation to make sure all 256 saw a difference sequence of colored balls that created 256 distinct minds. And to a simulated physicist a decision made outside the simulation would be indistinguishable from being random, that is to say the simulated laws of physics could not be used to figure out what that decision would be.  

>  B) A test where the AI is not duplicated but instead a random number generator (controlled entirely outside the simulation) determines whether the ball changes to red or blue with 50% probability 8 times Then the AI (or AIs) could not say whether test A occurred first or test B occurred first.

Both A and B are identical in that the intelligence doesn't know what it is going to see next; but increasingly convoluted thought experiments are not needed to demonstrate that everyday fact. The only difference is that in A lots of copies are made of the intelligence and in B they are not; but as the intelligence would have no way of knowing if a copy had been made of itself or not nor would it have any way of knowing if it was the original or the copy, subjectively it doesn't matter if A or B is true.

So yes, subjectively the intelligence would have no way of knowing if A was true or B, or to put it another way subjectively it would make no difference.  

> I reformulated the UDA in a way that does not use any pronouns at all, and it doesn't matter if you consider the question from one view or from all the views, the conclusion is the same.

Yes, the conclusion is the same, and that is the not very profound conclusion that you never know what you're going to see next, and Bruno's grand discovery of First Person Indeterminacy is just regular old dull as dishwater indeterminacy first discovered by Og the caveman. After the big buildup it's a bit of a letdown actually.

  John K Clark

 

>> important it's crystal clear exactly what the correct prediction would have turned out to be.  

> I did a few days ago, but you didn't respond.  I'll post it again:

First, consider this experiment:
Imagine there is a conscious AI (or uploaded mind) inside a virtual environment (an open field)
Inside that virtual environment is a ball, which the AI is looking at and next to the ball is a note which reads:
"At noon (when the virtual sun is directly overhead) the protocol will begin.  In the protocol, the process containing this simulation will fork (split in two), after the fork, the color of the ball will change to red for the parent process and it will change to blue in the child process (forking duplicates a process into two identical copies, with one called the parent and the other the child). A second after the color of the ball is set, another fork will happen.  This will happen 8 times leading to 256 processes, after which the simulation will end."
Now, with the understanding of that experiment, consider the following:
If the AI (or all of them) went through two tests, test A, and test B

 A) The test described where the simulation process forks 8 times and 256 copies are created and they each see a different pattern of the ball changing color

 B) A test where the AI is not duplicated but instead a random number generator (controlled entirely outside the simulation) determines whether the ball changes to red or blue with 50% probability 8 times

Then the AI (or AIs) could not say whether test A occurred first or test B occurred first.

Do you agree that it is impossible for any entity within the simulation to determine whether test A was executed first, or whether test B was executed first, with higher than a 50% probability?

Yes of course I agree with that, but that doesn't mean Bruno's "question isn't gibberish as is his "proof"!  Unlike Bruno's thought experiment you did not use any personal pronouns and I congratulate you for that, although why you made it so convoluted is a mystery to me. And unlike Bruno you didn't demand predictions of events where the veracity of the predictions could never be judged, not even long after the events in question were over. Because of Quantum Indeterminacy you can't say for certain if a atom of Uranium will decay tomorrow but at least the day after tomorrow you'll know, but with Bruno's "first person indeterminacy" no one and no thing will ever have any way of knowing or even know what he was suposed to know, and yet he still talks about probability as if it has meaning in that context.    

You could have used personal pronouns in case B but not for case A because in that case there is no such thing as THE first person, there are lots of them, and as a result although your thought experiment didn't teach us anything we didn't already know at least it didn't produce gibberish.

There is one other point, for case A, the one that has relevance for Many Worlds, you say "after the fork, the color of the ball will change" however, and Carroll specifically mentions this in his book, a mind (not to be confused with a brain) does not fork until AFTER a change is detected by it. So in Bruno's thought experiment a mind is not duplicated and then there is some sort of halfass metaphysical mystery as to how one of them is chosen to see Washington and the other is chosen to see Moscow, instead the very act of seeing Washington is what has turned the Helsinki Man into the Washington Man. So there is no "first person indeterminacy" and the answer to the grand question "Why am I the Washington Man?" has a mundane answer that is nevertheless 100% correct, because you saw Washington.

> All I ask is whether or not any entity at any time has access to information that can distinguish between iterated forking or randomized switching.  

No, and that is why it's so hard to get experimental proof that Many Worlds is correct or proof it is incorrect, and the same is true for every other quantum interpretation.

 

>>The  difference is in the Many Worlds case, after the universe splits, if I asked you today what the correct answer you should have given yesterday was:

1) It would be obvious who the question was directed to.
2)  It would obvious what would have been the correct answer.

Neither of these things is true for Bruno's "question".

> What's so special about duplicating universes? 

Well, for one thing in your thought exparament there is someone outside of the simulation observing it, but by the definition of the multiverse there is nobody and nothing outside of it to observe a universe splitting. And that's pretty special.  

And for another thing in the Many Worlds case, after the universe splits, if I asked you today what the correct answer you should have given yesterday was:

1) It would be obvious who the question was directed to.

2)  It would be obvious what would have been the correct answer.

Neither of these things is true for Bruno's "question". 

 

> Perhaps you can explain why one leads to apparent randomness but the other does not lead to randomness

 

One leads to apparent randomness, but Bruno's "question" does not lead to randomness or non-randomness, it leads to gibberish.

 

> Is anything I said about Carroll wrong? 

Yes obviously, you said he would agree with Bruno.

 

> What do you hope I will learn from reading Caroll's book?

You might learn what Many Worlds is saying, and just as important what it is not saying.

John K Clark

[Philip Thrift]

It's a bit like a Twilight Zone:

A Many Worlds defender is against Arithmetic Reality.

@hilipthrift 

[John Clark]

On Mon, Sep 23, 2019 at 7:23 PM Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> I think you need to indicate how, out of the set of all computations, you can pick the correct ones from the incorrect ones without the help of matter that obeys the laws of physics.  

> How do you suppose the laws of physics pick out the correct physical outcomes from among all possibilities? 

You don't have to explain why a phenomena works the way it does to prove it does in fact work that way. I don't need to explain how physical law gained the ability to tell the difference between things that work and things that don't because I have concrete (pun intended) proof that it does in fact have that ability. If physical law says a bridge will not collapse under a given load then it won't collapse, if it says it will then you'd better not go on that bridge. That's why bridge engineers study physics and not p-adic arithmetic.

 

> You presume there is a physical world governed by physical laws.

Yes.

 

  > But you deny an arithmetical world governed by arithmetical laws. 

I don't deny that at all, but there are a infinite number of self consistent arithmetical worlds, including the 3-adic world where 300 is smaller than 8/45 because in that world 300 is only 1/3 distance units from zero but 8/45 is 9 units. However out of that infinite number of ways distance along the number line could be measured one of them is unique, it stands out for only one reason, it is the only one that is consistent with physical law, and that is the reason we teach that one and only that one to our children, and that is the reason first graders say 2+2=4 and the reason third graders say 300 is larger than 8/45.

 

> Yet, assuming an arithmetical world governed by arithmetical laws, you can derive the appearance of a physical universe governed by physical laws.

Baloney! There is no way somebody can start with nothing but arithmetic and derive the laws of Newton Einstein and Quantum Mechanics without also deriving a infinite number of other physical laws that do NOT conform with experimental observation. No way.  

>> I'm very surprised that as soon as you mentioned the Planck Time in the above you didn't realize you had left the world of pure dimensionless numbers and was talking numbers with physical units associated with them, like measures of time and space and mass and energy and electrical charge.

> If you think physical laws are computable,

I think physical laws can make computations, and if a clever programer has access to a physical Turing Machine he can use a few simple physical laws to predict what will happen when a huge number of those simple laws interact in astronomically complex ways. That's what a meteorologist does when he makes a computer model of a hurricane.   

 

> then time, space, mass, etc. can all be reduced to computation (and computation is the manipulation of pure numbers).

There is no way pure arithmetic can come up with the Planck Time, it can't find anything special about the number 5.39245 *10^-44 seconds because it is not a pure number, there is no way pure arithmetic can know what the hell a second is, or time in general, or space, or electrical charge, or angular momentum or...

John K Clark

[John Clark]

On Mon, Sep 23, 2019 at 11:59 AM Alan Grayson <agrays...@gmail.com> wrote:

>>  Sean Carroll:

So Isaac Newton came up with the rules of classical mechanics in the 1600s, but it wasn't until Laplace around the year 1800 that this implication of classical mechanics was realized.

It's a clockwork universe.  That the way classical mechanics works is if you tell me the state of a system right now at one moment by which in classical mechanics you would mean the position and the velocity of every part, and you knew the laws of physics and you had arbitrarily large computational capacity, 

Laplace said of vast intelligence okay then to that vast intelligence the past and future would be as determined and known as the present was because that's the clockwork universe is deterministic everything is fixed once you know the present moment.

 

> But Laplace was wrong in one very important respect. One can never know the exact position and momentum of any particle, let alone the entire universe. There are no perfect measurements! Further, the situation is further aggravated by the Uncertainty Principle. In sum, using classical mechanics the future is NOT determined by its present, imprecise configuration. Not only is Laplace mistaken, but Carroll as well, who should know better. AG 

Oh for christ sake! That remark is as stupid as your crap about the flying saucer people in New Mexico. Do you really think Sean Carroll, a professor of physics at one of the best universities in the world, doesn't know that?! 

John K Clark

 

Now quantum mechanics comes along and throws a spanner into the works a little bit if you're a many-worlds person Laplace is demon is still possible.

So if you know the wave function of the universe exactly and you have infinite calculational capacity you could predict the past and the future with perfect accuracy.

But! what you're predicting is all of the branches of the wavefunction so any individual person inside the wavefunction still experiences apparently random events.

Right, so you can't predict what will happen to you even if you can predict what will happen to the entire universe.

This is the essence of Step 3 of the UDA.  In an experiment involving duplication of persons, apparent randomness emerges.  There is no actual randomness in the complete system, but individual experiences will have the characteristic of randomness, in the sense of not being able to make definite predictions concerning their experiences.  Sean Carroll gets this.  Max Tegmark gets this.  You got it at least once 6 years ago on this list when you agreed that a forking computer process containing AIs could not predict which process they would end up in.  This is enough for you to proceed to the next step, which adds only a time delay to one of the duplicates.  You are almost there.

Jason

 

 

Now quantum mechanics comes along and throws a spanner into the works a little bit if you're a many-worlds person Laplace is demon is still possible.

So if you know the wave function of the universe exactly and you have infinite calculational capacity you could predict the past and the future with perfect accuracy.

But! what you're predicting is all of the branches of the wavefunction so any individual person inside the wavefunction still experiences apparently random events.

Right, so you can't predict what will happen to you even if you can predict what will happen to the entire universe.

This is the essence of Step 3 of the UDA.  In an experiment involving duplication of persons, apparent randomness emerges.  There is no actual randomness in the complete system, but individual experiences will have the characteristic of randomness, in the sense of not being able to make definite predictions concerning their experiences.  Sean Carroll gets this.  Max Tegmark gets this.  You got it at least once 6 years ago on this list when you agreed that a forking computer process containing AIs could not predict which process they would end up in.  This is enough for you to proceed to the next step, which adds only a time delay to one of the duplicates.  You are almost there.

Jason

 

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[Alan Grayson]

On Tuesday, September 24, 2019 at 12:19:40 PM UTC-6, John Clark wrote:

On Mon, Sep 23, 2019 at 11:59 AM Alan Grayson <agrays...@gmail.com> wrote:

>>  Sean Carroll:

So Isaac Newton came up with the rules of classical mechanics in the 1600s, but it wasn't until Laplace around the year 1800 that this implication of classical mechanics was realized.

It's a clockwork universe.  That the way classical mechanics works is if you tell me the state of a system right now at one moment by which in classical mechanics you would mean the position and the velocity of every part, and you knew the laws of physics and you had arbitrarily large computational capacity, 

Laplace said of vast intelligence okay then to that vast intelligence the past and future would be as determined and known as the present was because that's the clockwork universe is deterministic everything is fixed once you know the present moment.

 

> But Laplace was wrong in one very important respect. One can never know the exact position and momentum of any particle, let alone the entire universe. There are no perfect measurements! Further, the situation is further aggravated by the Uncertainty Principle. In sum, using classical mechanics the future is NOT determined by its present, imprecise configuration. Not only is Laplace mistaken, but Carroll as well, who should know better. AG 

Oh for christ sake! That remark is as stupid as your crap about the flying saucer people in New Mexico. Do you really think Sean Carroll, a professor of physics at one of the best universities in the world, doesn't know that?! 

John K Clark

Before you shoot your mouth off, read what I wrote in response to Brent. Sean DOES know better, but he deliberately twisted Laplace's view to fit his foolish agenda. Not very honest. As for flying saucers, they're really much more probable than believing that some fool who does a double slit experiment can create possibly uncountable worlds replete with stars, galaxies, and living being; or nothing at all like that. I call it hubris on steroids, but to some who are misguided, it seems quite normal. AG 

 

Now quantum mechanics comes along and throws a spanner into the works a little bit if you're a many-worlds person Laplace is demon is still possible.

So if you know the wave function of the universe exactly and you have infinite calculational capacity you could predict the past and the future with perfect accuracy.

But! what you're predicting is all of the branches of the wavefunction so any individual person inside the wavefunction still experiences apparently random events.

Right, so you can't predict what will happen to you even if you can predict what will happen to the entire universe.

This is the essence of Step 3 of the UDA.  In an experiment involving duplication of persons, apparent randomness emerges.  There is no actual randomness in the complete system, but individual experiences will have the characteristic of randomness, in the sense of not being able to make definite predictions concerning their experiences.  Sean Carroll gets this.  Max Tegmark gets this.  You got it at least once 6 years ago on this list when you agreed that a forking computer process containing AIs could not predict which process they would end up in.  This is enough for you to proceed to the next step, which adds only a time delay to one of the duplicates.  You are almost there.

Jason

 

 

Now quantum mechanics comes along and throws a spanner into the works a little bit if you're a many-worlds person Laplace is demon is still possible.

So if you know the wave function of the universe exactly and you have infinite calculational capacity you could predict the past and the future with perfect accuracy.

But! what you're predicting is all of the branches of the wavefunction so any individual person inside the wavefunction still experiences apparently random events.

Right, so you can't predict what will happen to you even if you can predict what will happen to the entire universe.

This is the essence of Step 3 of the UDA.  In an experiment involving duplication of persons, apparent randomness emerges.  There is no actual randomness in the complete system, but individual experiences will have the characteristic of randomness, in the sense of not being able to make definite predictions concerning their experiences.  Sean Carroll gets this.  Max Tegmark gets this.  You got it at least once 6 years ago on this list when you agreed that a forking computer process containing AIs could not predict which process they would end up in.  This is enough for you to proceed to the next step, which adds only a time delay to one of the duplicates.  You are almost there.

Jason

 

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[John Clark]

On Tue, Sep 24, 2019 at 2:27 PM Alan Grayson <agrays...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Tuesday, September 24, 2019 at 12:19:40 PM UTC-6, John Clark wrote:

On Mon, Sep 23, 2019 at 11:59 AM Alan Grayson <agrays...@gmail.com> wrote:

>>  Sean Carroll:

So Isaac Newton came up with the rules of classical mechanics in the 1600s, but it wasn't until Laplace around the year 1800 that this implication of classical mechanics was realized.

It's a clockwork universe.  That the way classical mechanics works is if you tell me the state of a system right now at one moment by which in classical mechanics you would mean the position and the velocity of every part, and you knew the laws of physics and you had arbitrarily large computational capacity, 

Laplace said of vast intelligence okay then to that vast intelligence the past and future would be as determined and known as the present was because that's the clockwork universe is deterministic everything is fixed once you know the present moment.

 

> But Laplace was wrong in one very important respect. One can never know the exact position and momentum of any particle, let alone the entire universe. There are no perfect measurements! Further, the situation is further aggravated by the Uncertainty Principle. In sum, using classical mechanics the future is NOT determined by its present, imprecise configuration. Not only is Laplace mistaken, but Carroll as well, who should know better. AG 

Oh for christ sake! That remark is as stupid as your crap about the flying saucer people in New Mexico. Do you really think Sean Carroll, a professor of physics at one of the best universities in the world, doesn't know that?! 

John K Clark

> Before you shoot your mouth off, read what I wrote in response to Brent. Sean DOES know better, but he deliberately twisted Laplace's view to fit his foolish agenda. Not very honest. As for flying saucers, they're really much more probable than [...]

You sir are an ass.

John K Clark

[Alan Grayson]

According to Brent, Laplace was aware that due to inherent measurement inaccuracies we cannot know the exact configuation of the universe at any time, so in fact we can't predict its past and future with any accuracy (only for relatively short durations). But this is what Carroll omitted in his use of Laplace and the alleged predictable universe under CM, which was undone by QM.  AG

[Alan Grayson]

I will also note your dishonesty, or shall we say cowardice, in trucating my comment. AG 

[John Clark]

On Tue, Sep 24, 2019 at 4:06 PM Alan Grayson <agrays...@gmail.com> wrote:

> According to Brent, Laplace was aware that due to inherent measurement inaccuracies we cannot know the exact configuation of the universe at any time, so in fact we can't predict its past and future with any accuracy (only for relatively short durations). But this is what Carroll omitted in his use of Laplace 

Alan, for god's sake, your digging yourself into a deeper and deeper hole! Read the man's damn book before you do any more pontificating about Carroll unless you enjoy publicly making a fool of yourself.

  John K Clark

[Alan Grayson]

It's core claim is crap for the masses, so I won't waste my time. Enjoy your fantasy. AG 

[Bruno Marchal]

On 24 Sep 2019, at 15:40, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Sep 23, 2019 at 4:22 PM Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:

> This Halloween will mark 6 years since you agreed with Step 3,

BULLSHIT!

This is the entire post and even though 6 years has passed I stand by every word and wouldn't change anything:

On Thu, Oct 31, 2013 at 2:12 PM, Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:

>  A) The test described where the simulation process forks 8 times and 256 copies are created and they each see a different pattern of the ball changing color

Duplicating a brain is not enough, the intelligence has NOT forked until there is something different about them, such as one remembering seeing a red ball and the other remember seeing a green ball, only then do they fork. It was the decision made by somebody or something outside the simulation to make sure all 256 saw a difference sequence of colored balls that created 256 distinct minds. And to a simulated physicist a decision made outside the simulation would be indistinguishable from being random, that is to say the simulated laws of physics could not be used to figure out what that decision would be.  

>  B) A test where the AI is not duplicated but instead a random number generator (controlled entirely outside the simulation) determines whether the ball changes to red or blue with 50% probability 8 times Then the AI (or AIs) could not say whether test A occurred first or test B occurred first.

Both A and B are identical in that the intelligence doesn't know what it is going to see next; but increasingly convoluted thought experiments are not needed to demonstrate that everyday fact. The only difference is that in A lots of copies are made of the intelligence and in B they are not; but as the intelligence would have no way of knowing if a copy had been made of itself or not nor would it have any way of knowing if it was the original or the copy, subjectively it doesn't matter if A or B is true.

So yes, subjectively the intelligence would have no way of knowing if A was true or B, or to put it another way subjectively it would make no difference.  

> I reformulated the UDA in a way that does not use any pronouns at all, and it doesn't matter if you consider the question from one view or from all the views, the conclusion is the same.

Yes, the conclusion is the same, and that is the not very profound conclusion that you never know what you're going to see next,

In a self duplication experience (of course!).

and Bruno's grand discovery of First Person Indeterminacy is just regular old dull as dishwater indeterminacy first discovered by Og the caveman.

No, Og the caveman was not talking on self-duplication. Without a microscope he couldn’t see dividing themselves, and without Kleene’s second recursion theorem, he could not see that this self-duplication is emulated in arithmetic infinity many often.

Ad that is not the grand discovery. Just an important, but indeed extremely easy step in a longer reasoning.

And Jason is right, after all we don’t need the assessment of the cave man. If you agree, as you agree here, just move on step 4, which is already a bit more subtile, like showing that Parick Closer continuer theory is incompatible with Mechanism (which he indeed criticised if I remember well).

Bruno

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