Is QTI false?
Nick Prince
And I want to put forward some issues arising from this.
It seems that (if MWI is true) we live in world(s) in which we appear
to live a finite, small lifetime of around 70 years. From the many
discussions on this list, it also seems to me that, this is the single
biggest argument (that I can understand) which points to the QTI being
false. Unfortunately it appears that the whole ASSA/RSSA debate -
which might have been a candidate for clarifying the issue - turns out
to be a confusing (to me anyway) and polarising approach.
So is QTI false?
Russell does put forward a possible solution in his book. He suggests
the idea that as memory fades with dementia then perhaps the conscious
mind becomes so similar to that of a newborn - or even unborn - baby
that perhaps “a diminishing?” consciousness always finds an
appropriate route (in some branch) to avoid a cul de sac event.
(This is one possible form of the No Cul De Sac Conjecture =NCDSC)
To avoid the cul de sac event, there would surely have to be a
critical stage whereby consciousness diminishes and reaches a form
of cusp at the point of lapsing into non existence and thereby
requiring the necessity of an extension route or branch to another
consistent universe. In short, from the third person POV, the person
dies but from the first person -(now primitive) consciousness – state,
there is rebirth. I am thinking that before we get to the croaking
Amoeba there is a discontinuity in what we understand as consciousness
– at least the form that applies to the NCDSC.
Now if all this were to be the case, then maybe it says something very
specific about the substrate on which consciousness runs. There would
be something special about the architecture which the substrate
employs to implement consciousness because it relies on a certain mode
of decay, facilitating the branching to a new born baby having an
appropriate structure (portal?) to secure a consistent extension of
the consciousness into another branch. Unless a computer could
simulate such a special substrate then it could not be used to
implement consciousness. This would mean that it would be wise to say
no to the Doctor! – Comp might be false?
The Turing principle (p135 of David Deutsch’s book – “the Fabric of
Reality”) would imply that, a universal machine could simulate the
physical structure of brains in such a way so as to be able to act as
a medium whereby, if the above argument is possible, consistent
extensions of conscious physical observers (persons) could avoid cul
de sacs. But until we can understand the nature of what consciousness
is, we are stumped as to how a computer can be programmed to implement
it. However some alien civilizations may have known these techniques
for ages now, thereby perhaps explaining why we each have lived even
as long as we now perceive we have. A stronger statement would be that
if universal virtual reality generators are physically possible, then
they must be built somewhere in some universes!
But supposing the above (reincarnational) speculation was false in
some way. In that case, I have yet to see a convincing argument as to
how the the no cul de sac conjecture can be reconciled with people
living to great ages. Whatever sampling assumption is applied, the
facts are that we don’t typically see people reaching ages greater
than 100+ yrs). Therefore either QTI is false or people just don’t
get old! Rather, the special physical conditions of death associated
with dementia or oxygen starvation of the brain, facilitate continued
extensions of consciousness by branching into worlds where we
supervene over new born babies (or something – animals, aliens?) -
accidental deaths of people of any “normal ages” we can think about
could of course be accommodated by the NCDSC).
The mechanics of such reincarnational transitions would be
interesting to speculate about since I see this as the only way out
for a QTI.
Nick Prince
Russell Standish
> In Russell’s book there is a section on “Arguments against QTI”
> And I want to put forward some issues arising from this.
>
> It seems that (if MWI is true) we live in world(s) in which we appear
> to live a finite, small lifetime of around 70 years. From the many
> discussions on this list, it also seems to me that, this is the single
> biggest argument (that I can understand) which points to the QTI being
> false. Unfortunately it appears that the whole ASSA/RSSA debate -
> which might have been a candidate for clarifying the issue - turns out
> to be a confusing (to me anyway) and polarising approach.
>
> So is QTI false?
>
> Russell does put forward a possible solution in his book. He suggests
> the idea that as memory fades with dementia then perhaps the conscious
> mind becomes so similar to that of a newborn - or even unborn - baby
> that perhaps “a diminishing?” consciousness always finds an
> appropriate route (in some branch) to avoid a cul de sac event.
> (This is one possible form of the No Cul De Sac Conjecture =NCDSC)
>
This is a variant of an argument that David Parfit uses in his book
"Reasons and Persons", where he considers a continuum from his mind
to that of Napoleon. (Don't flame me if I get the details wrong - the
essence is what is important). I hadn't read that book at the time I
wrote mine, otherwise, I would undoubtedly have cited it.
Now in the case of Parfit's argument, I find considerable doubt that
the argument can be made to work. Whilst, if I randomly knocked out 1%
of your neurons, you will still be awake, and probably little
different from the experience, if I knocked out certain "keystone" (as
the concept is called in ecology) neurons to a level of 1% of all
neurons, your brain function would fall apart quite rapidly. Yet to
transition from your brain to that of Napoleons would require rewiring
those same keystone neurons, and that, I believe casts significant
doubt that the continuum is possible, even in principle.
Now, we also know that infant minds are not a tabula rasa. So I am
sceptical that the transition of a dementiaed mind to an infant mind
is possible, for just the same reason.
>
> To avoid the cul de sac event, there would surely have to be a
> critical stage whereby consciousness diminishes and reaches a form
> of cusp at the point of lapsing into non existence and thereby
> requiring the necessity of an extension route or branch to another
> consistent universe. In short, from the third person POV, the person
> dies but from the first person -(now primitive) consciousness – state,
> there is rebirth. I am thinking that before we get to the croaking
> Amoeba there is a discontinuity in what we understand as consciousness
> – at least the form that applies to the NCDSC.
>
The no cul-de-sac conjecture is perhaps a bit of a misnomer. It is not
really well defined enough to embark on a proof, which it really ought
to be. Certainly, in the Theatetical formulation that Bruno is
investigating, there are NCDSC-like theorems in some hypostases, ([]p-><>p
IIRC). Also, in QM, an observation along the lines of something like
m(t)=<\psi(t)|P(o(t))|\psi(t)>, where P is a project operator onto all
worlds consistent with some observer o. The no cul-de-sac conjecture
would correspond to m(t) != 0, except on a set of measure
zero. Assuming m(t) is analytic, this is kind of obvious, but
unfortunately QM really only requires second order differentiability
of its objects, meaning that the proof never quite gets off the ground :(.
The observation that other people never seem to live beyond a certain
age is not evidence against the NCDSC. Only logical
impossibility can count. Even physical impossibility is insufficient,
because there is always the possibility of mind uploading into
machines that may be of arbitrary age.
Even Jacques Mallah accepted the possibility that people of
arbitrarily old age must exist somewhere in the Multiverse. What he
couldn't accept was the certainty of getting from here to there, that
the NCDSC implies. The refinement of that debate lead to the distinction of
ASSA vs RSSA, and the NCDSC.
>
> The mechanics of such reincarnational transitions would be
> interesting to speculate about since I see this as the only way out
> for a QTI.
>
> Nick Prince
>
>
Thanks for giving this some more thought.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
Mathematics
UNSW SYDNEY 2052 hpc...@hpcoders.com.au
Australia http://www.hpcoders.com.au
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
meekerdb
> In Russell�s book there is a section on �Arguments against QTI�
> And I want to put forward some issues arising from this.
>
> It seems that (if MWI is true) we live in world(s) in which we appear
> to live a finite, small lifetime of around 70 years. From the many
> discussions on this list, it also seems to me that, this is the single
> biggest argument (that I can understand) which points to the QTI being
> false. Unfortunately it appears that the whole ASSA/RSSA debate -
> which might have been a candidate for clarifying the issue - turns out
> to be a confusing (to me anyway) and polarising approach.
>
> So is QTI false?
>
> Russell does put forward a possible solution in his book. He suggests
> the idea that as memory fades with dementia then perhaps the conscious
> mind becomes so similar to that of a newborn - or even unborn - baby
> appropriate route (in some branch) to avoid a cul de sac event.
> (This is one possible form of the No Cul De Sac Conjecture =NCDSC)
>
Sure, the cul de sac is "avoided" by reaching the state of unconscious
which is then consistent with with many more continuations. e.g. as a
rock. The QTI is based on quantum theory of unitary evolution; not on
the survival of memories or consciousness. Those are claimed to be
consequences, so they must be justified from QM, not just promoted from
conjecture to axiom.
Brent
>
> To avoid the cul de sac event, there would surely have to be a
> critical stage whereby consciousness diminishes and reaches a form
> of cusp at the point of lapsing into non existence and thereby
> requiring the necessity of an extension route or branch to another
> consistent universe. In short, from the third person POV, the person
> dies but from the first person -(now primitive) consciousness � state,
> there is rebirth. I am thinking that before we get to the croaking
> Amoeba there is a discontinuity in what we understand as consciousness
> � at least the form that applies to the NCDSC.
>
> Now if all this were to be the case, then maybe it says something very
> specific about the substrate on which consciousness runs. There would
> be something special about the architecture which the substrate
> employs to implement consciousness because it relies on a certain mode
> of decay, facilitating the branching to a new born baby having an
> appropriate structure (portal?) to secure a consistent extension of
> the consciousness into another branch. Unless a computer could
> simulate such a special substrate then it could not be used to
> implement consciousness. This would mean that it would be wise to say
> no to the Doctor! � Comp might be false?
>
>
> The Turing principle (p135 of David Deutsch�s book � �the Fabric of
> Reality�) would imply that, a universal machine could simulate the
> physical structure of brains in such a way so as to be able to act as
> a medium whereby, if the above argument is possible, consistent
> extensions of conscious physical observers (persons) could avoid cul
> de sacs. But until we can understand the nature of what consciousness
> is, we are stumped as to how a computer can be programmed to implement
> it. However some alien civilizations may have known these techniques
> for ages now, thereby perhaps explaining why we each have lived even
> as long as we now perceive we have. A stronger statement would be that
> if universal virtual reality generators are physically possible, then
> they must be built somewhere in some universes!
>
> But supposing the above (reincarnational) speculation was false in
> some way. In that case, I have yet to see a convincing argument as to
> how the the no cul de sac conjecture can be reconciled with people
> living to great ages. Whatever sampling assumption is applied, the
> facts are that we don�t typically see people reaching ages greater
> than 100+ yrs). Therefore either QTI is false or people just don�t
> get old! Rather, the special physical conditions of death associated
> with dementia or oxygen starvation of the brain, facilitate continued
> extensions of consciousness by branching into worlds where we
> supervene over new born babies (or something � animals, aliens?) -
> accidental deaths of people of any �normal ages� we can think about
Bruno Marchal
On 31 Mar 2011, at 03:06, meekerdb wrote:
> On 3/30/2011 3:15 PM, Nick Prince wrote:
>> In Russell’s book there is a section on “Arguments against QTI”
>> And I want to put forward some issues arising from this.
>>
>> It seems that (if MWI is true) we live in world(s) in which we appear
>> to live a finite, small lifetime of around 70 years. From the many
>> discussions on this list, it also seems to me that, this is the
>> single
>> biggest argument (that I can understand) which points to the QTI
>> being
>> false. Unfortunately it appears that the whole ASSA/RSSA debate -
>> which might have been a candidate for clarifying the issue - turns
>> out
>> to be a confusing (to me anyway) and polarising approach.
>>
>> So is QTI false?
>>
>> Russell does put forward a possible solution in his book. He suggests
>> the idea that as memory fades with dementia then perhaps the
>> conscious
>> mind becomes so similar to that of a newborn - or even unborn - baby
>> that perhaps “a diminishing?” consciousness always finds an
>> appropriate route (in some branch) to avoid a cul de sac event.
>> (This is one possible form of the No Cul De Sac Conjecture =NCDSC)
>>
>
> Sure, the cul de sac is "avoided" by reaching the state of
> unconscious which is then consistent with with many more
> continuations. e.g. as a rock.
I am not sure this makes sense. By definition a cul-de-sac world has
no continuation. To be unconscious or dead (never more conscious)
means no more experience at all (if that means something).
> The QTI is based on quantum theory of unitary evolution; not on the
> survival of memories or consciousness. Those are claimed to be
> consequences, so they must be justified from QM, not just promoted
> from conjecture to axiom.
Assuming comp, QTI should be a particular case of Comp-TI. But this is
complex to analyzed for the reason that we can survive ith amnesia, so
that we can never be sure of who is the person who really survive.
Comp and QM TI might end up trivial if there is only one person in the
fundamental reality.
Russell is right. The presence or non-presence of cul-de-sac is a
question of points of view.
Precisely we have that G* proves the equivalence of Bp and Bp & Dp.
But the machine cannot see that equivalence. The modality Bp entails
the existence of cul-de-sac world at each states, and Bp & Dp
eliminates those end worlds.
People have to go back to the semantic of G or of normal modal logic
to see this. In a cul-de-sac world every statements are provable, but
none are possible or consistent.
With both QTI and COMP-TI we cannot go from being very old to being a
baby. We can may be get slowly younger and younger in a more
continuous way, by little backtracking. We always survive in the most
normal world compatible with our states. But some kind of jumps are
not excluded.
>
> Brent
>
>>
>> To avoid the cul de sac event, there would surely have to be a
>> critical stage whereby consciousness diminishes and reaches a form
>> of cusp at the point of lapsing into non existence and thereby
>> requiring the necessity of an extension route or branch to another
>> consistent universe. In short, from the third person POV, the person
>> dies but from the first person -(now primitive) consciousness –
>> state,
>> there is rebirth. I am thinking that before we get to the croaking
>> Amoeba there is a discontinuity in what we understand as
>> consciousness
>> – at least the form that applies to the NCDSC.
>>
>> Now if all this were to be the case, then maybe it says something
>> very
>> specific about the substrate on which consciousness runs. There
>> would
>> be something special about the architecture which the substrate
>> employs to implement consciousness because it relies on a certain
>> mode
>> of decay, facilitating the branching to a new born baby having an
>> appropriate structure (portal?) to secure a consistent extension of
>> the consciousness into another branch. Unless a computer could
>> simulate such a special substrate then it could not be used to
>> implement consciousness. This would mean that it would be wise to
>> say
>> no to the Doctor! – Comp might be false?
Comp might certainly be false. But I am not sure I see your point
here. There is an infinity of computational histories going through
your state. The substrate (matter) is "made-of" that infinity of
computations.
>>
>>
>> The Turing principle (p135 of David Deutsch’s book – “the Fabric of
>> Reality”) would imply that, a universal machine could simulate the
>> physical structure of brains in such a way so as to be able to act as
>> a medium whereby, if the above argument is possible, consistent
>> extensions of conscious physical observers (persons) could avoid cul
>> de sacs.
I think that the Turing principle is contradictory with Church thesis.
What we can do is to (re)define matter by adding the "& Dp" (= & ~D
~p) in each state. It is needed for defining the first person measure
"one" in the case of the first person indeterminacy. matter and
physics is a probability/credibility calculus on relative consistent
extensions.
>> But until we can understand the nature of what consciousness
>> is, we are stumped as to how a computer can be programmed to
>> implement
>> it.
If you accept the classical theory of knowledge, it is easy. Computer
are already conscious. They have not the tools to manifest their
consciousness, and by programming them, we don't help them with that
respect. Consciousness is not programmable. It exists "in Platonia",
and a universal machine is only a sort of interface between different
levels of the Platonic reality (arithmetical truth).
>> However some alien civilizations may have known these techniques
>> for ages now, thereby perhaps explaining why we each have lived even
>> as long as we now perceive we have. A stronger statement would be
>> that
>> if universal virtual reality generators are physically possible, then
>> they must be built somewhere in some universes!
This is automatically true, even if there are no universe. The
arithmetical reality contains the differentiating flux of
consciousness, the many dreams. Not sure that the notion of (physical)
universe makes a global sense. It is a local reality as viewed from
inside. (inside views are defined by the modal variants of Bp).
>>
>> But supposing the above (reincarnational) speculation was false in
>> some way. In that case, I have yet to see a convincing argument as
>> to
>> how the the no cul de sac conjecture can be reconciled with people
>> living to great ages. Whatever sampling assumption is applied, the
>> facts are that we don’t typically see people reaching ages greater
>> than 100+ yrs). Therefore either QTI is false or people just don’t
>> get old!
?
QTI and COMP-TI are first person notion, not necessarily first person
plural.
>> Rather, the special physical conditions of death associated
>> with dementia or oxygen starvation of the brain, facilitate continued
>> extensions of consciousness by branching into worlds where we
>> supervene over new born babies (or something – animals, aliens?) -
>> accidental deaths of people of any “normal ages” we can think about
>> could of course be accommodated by the NCDSC).
>>
>> The mechanics of such reincarnational transitions would be
>> interesting to speculate about since I see this as the only way out
>> for a QTI
I think your idea are correct here. But they are hard to implement
technically due to the use of amnesia. But QTI use comp, and comp
force the exact QM to be derived from arithmetic. Only by doing the
math can we make precise that type of speculation.
Bruno
Stathis Papaioannou
I followed you up until that paragraph. Why should the rebirth from a
no-consciousness state say anything about the substrate on which
consciousness runs? It matters only that there be some entity that
remembers being the entity that faded away for that entity to be
reborn. How that entity is implementedt and whether it is even
causally related to the first entity in any way is irrelevant.
> The Turing principle (p135 of David Deutsch’s book – “the Fabric of
> Reality”) would imply that, a universal machine could simulate the
> physical structure of brains in such a way so as to be able to act as
> a medium whereby, if the above argument is possible, consistent
> extensions of conscious physical observers (persons) could avoid cul
> de sacs. But until we can understand the nature of what consciousness
> is, we are stumped as to how a computer can be programmed to implement
> it. However some alien civilizations may have known these techniques
> for ages now, thereby perhaps explaining why we each have lived even
> as long as we now perceive we have. A stronger statement would be that
> if universal virtual reality generators are physically possible, then
> they must be built somewhere in some universes!
>
> But supposing the above (reincarnational) speculation was false in
> some way. In that case, I have yet to see a convincing argument as to
> how the the no cul de sac conjecture can be reconciled with people
> living to great ages. Whatever sampling assumption is applied, the
> facts are that we don’t typically see people reaching ages greater
> than 100+ yrs). Therefore either QTI is false or people just don’t
> get old! Rather, the special physical conditions of death associated
> with dementia or oxygen starvation of the brain, facilitate continued
> extensions of consciousness by branching into worlds where we
> supervene over new born babies (or something – animals, aliens?) -
> accidental deaths of people of any “normal ages” we can think about
> could of course be accommodated by the NCDSC).
That we don't see extremely old people is consistent with QTI, since
from the third person perspective rare events such as living to a
great age happen only rarely. However, from the first person
perspective you will live to a great age, and this will happen in the
most probable way, even if it is improbable in absolute (third person)
terms.
> The mechanics of such reincarnational transitions would be
> interesting to speculate about since I see this as the only way out
> for a QTI.
>
> Nick Prince
-
Stathis Papaioannou
Stathis Papaioannou
<li...@hpcoders.com.au> wrote:
> This is a variant of an argument that David Parfit uses in his book
> "Reasons and Persons", where he considers a continuum from his mind
> to that of Napoleon. (Don't flame me if I get the details wrong - the
> essence is what is important). I hadn't read that book at the time I
> wrote mine, otherwise, I would undoubtedly have cited it.
>
> Now in the case of Parfit's argument, I find considerable doubt that
> the argument can be made to work. Whilst, if I randomly knocked out 1%
> of your neurons, you will still be awake, and probably little
> different from the experience, if I knocked out certain "keystone" (as
> the concept is called in ecology) neurons to a level of 1% of all
> neurons, your brain function would fall apart quite rapidly. Yet to
> transition from your brain to that of Napoleons would require rewiring
> those same keystone neurons, and that, I believe casts significant
> doubt that the continuum is possible, even in principle.
>
> Now, we also know that infant minds are not a tabula rasa. So I am
> sceptical that the transition of a dementiaed mind to an infant mind
> is possible, for just the same reason.
It doesn't have to happen by removal of neurons in a single
individual. The transition could happen, for example, by having a
series of separate individuals who share a proportion of their
predecessors' memories. They don't even have to run on the same
substrate, let alone the same brain.
--
Stathis Papaioannou
Bruno Marchal
I followed you up until the last sentence. How that entity is
implemented and whether it is even causally related to the first
entity in any way is irrelevant for the question of being reborn, OK,
but for computing the measure, and thus deriving the laws of the most
probable substrate with respect to which he is reborn (his physics),
you have to take into account the most probable computational
histories. The notion of cause emerges from that, and that is what
makes its "rebirth" relatively stable for him, and not an harry Potter
like sequence of luck. This makes the physical laws invariant for such
"rebirth", although we might find ourself at different level or layers
of some virtual reality of the future, so some apparent laws could be
expected to change.
It is here that if we apply Bayes' theorem (like in the Doomday
argument), we should be astonished not being already very old (from
our first person perspective). But Bayes cannot be applied in this
setting, as we have already discussed a lot in the past.
Bruno Marchal
>
>> The mechanics of such reincarnational transitions would be
>> interesting to speculate about since I see this as the only way out
>> for a QTI.
>>
>> Nick Prince
>
>
> -
> Stathis Papaioannou
Stephen Paul King
Bruno Marchal
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
***
Hi!
There seems to be a conflation of the ideas of the continuity of 1st
person Identity (over implementations/reincarnations) and Causality. Why is
this?
Onward!
Stephen
Bruno Marchal
Hi Stephen,
It is normal. Usually people take the comp hyp by assuming that
consciousness is related to a physical, or just a single implemented
computation, without taking into consideration the infinities of
computations leading to the same or equivalent states, as needed from
the first person perspective (plural or not). In fine the physical
computation is defined by the infinity of computations (executed by
the UD, or in arithmetic) leading to the equivalent state, and
physical causality emerges from all of them, leading to some
multiverse structure observable once we look at ourself below our comp
substitution level).
If this does not help, try to make your question more specific. It is
a difficult subject.
You like math, I think. I can define for you the 'arithmetical
physical causality': event A causes event B means that
BD(BD A -> BD B) is arithmetically true, with B and D being the new
box defined by the Bp & Dp translation in arithmetic.
Or something like that. Quantum logic (and also its arithmetical form)
has many notion of implication. The one above is the closer to the
Sazaki Hook which Hardegree used to show that orthomodularity in
quantum ortholattice is related to the notion of counterfactual. You
will find the reference in my papers.
Unfortunately orthomodularity is still an open problem in the
arithmetical 'quantum logic'. Eric Vandenbusche is currently trying to
optimize the G* theorem prover to get an answer.
Bruno
Stephen Paul King
-----Original Message-----
From: Bruno Marchal
Sent: Thursday, March 31, 2011 12:33 PM
To: everyth...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Is QTI false?
On 31 Mar 2011, at 15:35, Stephen Paul King wrote:
snip
Hi Stephen,
Bruno
***
Hi Bruno,
I understand the role of the infinities of computations and the
equivalence as you are considering them finally, from reading your papers
over and over and a brilliant discussion of the concept of quantum
superposition in Andrew Soltau's book Interactive Destiny, but am still not
seeing the conflation of physical causality and logical entailment. For one
thing they point in opposite directions! I still don't understand how you
persist in not seeing the implications of the Stone duality! Oh well, that
is your choice, but putting that aside the continuity of 1st person should
supervene on the UD, no? It seems to me that from the point of view of the
UD there is no before or after or this causing that. To the UD everything is
simultaneously given. Additionally, the way that the dovetailing seems to
work makes it so that the UD is dense on the space of computations in the
same way that the Reals are dense in the continuum. But how can this be?
I am very interested in Eric Vandenbusche's work. I will see that Google
yields from him...
Onward!
Stephen
Nick Prince
On Mar 31, 1:43 am, Russell Standish <li...@hpcoders.com.au> wrote:
> The observation that other people never seem to live beyond a certain
> age is not evidence against the NCDSC. Only logical
> impossibility can count. Even physical impossibility is insufficient,
> because there is always the possibility of mind uploading into
> machines that may be of arbitrary age.
am wondering if it is evidence against QTI! If we eventually end up
as Tegmark's amoeba then this can be deemed continuous in some sense
but hardly immortal. My definition of immortal (which I held for the
purpose of my posting) was that it would be more like a continuation
of self aware consciousness - ie the ability to recognise I was
experiencing an observer moment.
> arbitrarily old age must exist somewhere in the Multiverse. What he
> couldn't accept was the certainty of getting from here to there, that
> the NCDSC implies. The refinement of that debate lead to the distinction of
> ASSA vs RSSA, and the NCDSC.
arbitrarily very old and all other people had ages that were
distributed about a mean of 70 yrs (give or take thirty yrs) then that
would lead me to believe I was living in a very improbable universe -
I might suspect self delusion! I often wonder about so called
delusional conditions and their validity? In any case I would have
suspected that the NCDSC would bring me into the most probable
universes on the whole ( RSSA?). Hence if I was living to a very ripe
old age then I would expect others to be sharing this perception too
along with others who were even much older than me. I agree that we
might just be on the verge of discovering the uploading of minds into
computers, but if I had been a viking in 200 AD this would not really
be realistic - yet they too must still be alive somewhere if the
defined QTI I am considering is valid.
Nick
Nick Prince
> baby. We can may be get slowly younger and younger in a more
> continuous way, by little backtracking. We always survive in the most
> normal world compatible with our states. But some kind of jumps are
> not excluded.
Maybe what I am trying to say is that very old or dying brains might
deterorate in a specific way that allows the transition from an old to
a young mind i.e. the decaying brain becomes in some way homomorphic
to a young brain. Indeed this defines the consciousness I am
considering and is therefore subtrate dependent. If all of physics
can be simulated on a computer then no problem.
> If you accept the classical theory of knowledge, it is easy. Computer
> are already conscious. They have not the tools to manifest their
> consciousness, and by programming them, we don't help them with that
> respect. Consciousness is not programmable. It exists "in Platonia",
> and a universal machine is only a sort of interface between different
> levels of the Platonic reality (arithmetical truth).
including consciousness really emanates from platonia? Would you
agree that we exist eternally in platonia? If so then perhaps we need
only consider computationalism /QM as a means of comprehending the
steps to this understanding. This platonic realm is very useful but
hard to pin down as a concept.
Best
Nick
Nick Prince
> That we don't see extremely old people is consistent with QTI, since
> from the third person perspective rare events such as living to a
> great age happen only rarely. However, from the first person
> perspective you will live to a great age, and this will happen in the
> most probable way, even if it is improbable in absolute (third person)
> terms.
Hi Stathis
I am wondering how this might work out in practice. In particular, if
I find myself more and more in worlds where I am older, would I expect
to see others older and as old as me? If ageing happens in the most
probable way then would this not mean that I would expect to see this
as a first person plural experience because I would feel it improbable
if I were the only 500 year person around?
Nick
Stathis Papaioannou
The most probable way I can think of is that as you get older, medical
science advances and everyone lives longer, then eventually mind
uploading becomes available.
--
Stathis Papaioannou
Johnathan Corgan
> Or something like that. Quantum logic (and also its arithmetical form) has
> many notion of implication. The one above is the closer to the Sazaki Hook
> which Hardegree used to show that orthomodularity in quantum ortholattice is
> related to the notion of counterfactual. You will find the reference in my
> papers.
>
> Unfortunately orthomodularity is still an open problem in the arithmetical
> 'quantum logic'. Eric Vandenbusche is currently trying to optimize the G*
> theorem prover to get an answer.
And here I thought I was making progress in understanding Bruno's
thesis. I clearly have a *long* way further to go in my studies :-)
Johnathan Corgan
meek...@verizon.net
> With both QTI and COMP-TI we cannot go from being very old to being a
> baby. We can may be get slowly younger and younger in a more
> continuous way, by little backtracking. We always survive in the most
> normal world compatible with our states. But some kind of jumps are
> not excluded.
Hi Bruno
Maybe what I am trying to say is that very old or dying brains might
deterorate in a specific way that allows the transition from an old to
a young mind i.e. the decaying brain becomes in some way homomorphic
to a young brain.
Brent
Indeed this defines the consciousness I am
considering and is therefore subtrate dependent. If all of physics
can be simulated on a computer then no problem.
> If you accept the classical theory of knowledge, it is easy. Computer
> are already conscious. They have not the tools to manifest their
> consciousness, and by programming them, we don't help them with that
> respect. Consciousness is not programmable. It exists "in Platonia",
> and a universal machine is only a sort of interface between different
> levels of the Platonic reality (arithmetical truth).
This is an interesting comment! Are you saying that everything
including consciousness really emanates from platonia? Would you
agree that we exist eternally in platonia? If so then perhaps we need
only consider computationalism /QM as a means of comprehending the
steps to this understanding. This platonic realm is very useful but
hard to pin down as a concept.
Best
Nick
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To post to this group, send email to everyth...@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
stephenk
On Mar 31, 8:10 pm, meeke...@verizon.net wrote:
>
>
> On 03/31/11,Nick Prince<nickmag...@googlemail.com>wrote:>Bruno wrote
brain? After all, the brain of a human fetus has to grow to come
sufficient level of complexity to "turn on"... But given this, how to
we avoid disembodied minds if we are assuming that minds supervene
exclusively on brains (or equivalent)?
Onward!
Stephen
Russell Standish
>
> It is here that if we apply Bayes' theorem (like in the Doomday
> argument), we should be astonished not being already very old (from
> our first person perspective). But Bayes cannot be applied in this
> setting, as we have already discussed a lot in the past.
>
> Bruno Marchal
>
Superficially, this seems to be a very succinct form of Mallah's
argument. You're basically saying that given I'm Russell Standish, and
QTI, why don't I find myself arbitrarily far removed from the origin
(my birth).
Of course, the objections to this are obvious, and have been discussed
before in this list. The above doomsday argument assumes a linear
sequence of OMs that characterise "Russell Standish", which cannot be
the case in a Multiverse (required for QTI). Sampling of Russell
Standish observer moments must be over all OMs that were born Russell
Standish, and weighted by the universal prior, giving more weight to
being a baby than an adult.
Now all we need is for Mallah to admit that the above is not a
strawman, and we're done. ASSA vs RSSA can be put in the dustbin :).
--
meekerdb
On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 02:52:44PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote:It is here that if we apply Bayes' theorem (like in the Doomday argument), we should be astonished not being already very old (from our first person perspective). But Bayes cannot be applied in this setting, as we have already discussed a lot in the past. Bruno MarchalSuperficially, this seems to be a very succinct form of Mallah's argument. You're basically saying that given I'm Russell Standish, and QTI, why don't I find myself arbitrarily far removed from the origin (my birth). Of course, the objections to this are obvious, and have been discussed before in this list. The above doomsday argument assumes a linear sequence of OMs that characterise "Russell Standish", which cannot be the case in a Multiverse (required for QTI). Sampling of Russell Standish observer moments must be over all OMs that were born Russell Standish, and weighted by the universal prior, giving more weight to being a baby than an adult.
Brent
Now all we need is for Mallah to admit that the above is not a strawman, and we're done. ASSA vs RSSA can be put in the dustbin :).
No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 8.5.449 / Virus Database: 271.1.1/3540 - Release Date: 03/30/11 09:54:00
Russell Standish
> >Standish, and weighted by the universal prior, giving more weight to
> >being a baby than an adult.
> Is that assuming that QM uncertainty increases to the future but not
> the past:?
>
> Brent
In QM, the state evolves unitarily, which conserves total
probability. However, not all observations are compatible with being
an OM of the person of interest (ie the observer dies in some
branches). Consequently, the total measure of observer moments must
diminish as a function of OM age, roughly given by the observed 3rd
person mortality curve. After 70-80 years, the total measure diminishes
rapidly, but not to zero (assuming no cul-de-sac).
Hence my statement - the measure must be biased towards being a baby.
Cheers
meekerdb
On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 09:52:25PM -0500, meekerdb wrote:Standish, and weighted by the universal prior, giving more weight to being a baby than an adult.Is that assuming that QM uncertainty increases to the future but not the past:? BrentIn QM, the state evolves unitarily, which conserves total probability. However, not all observations are compatible with being an OM of the person of interest (ie the observer dies in some branches).
Brent
Consequently, the total measure of observer moments must diminish as a function of OM age, roughly given by the observed 3rd person mortality curve. After 70-80 years, the total measure diminishes rapidly, but not to zero (assuming no cul-de-sac). Hence my statement - the measure must be biased towards being a baby. Cheers
No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 8.5.449 / Virus Database: 271.1.1/3540 - Release Date: 03/30/11 09:54:00
Russell Standish
>
> Couldn't the person have been born at different times too? QM
> Hamiltonians are time symmetric. If you try to infer the past you
> also have unitary evolution - just in the other direction. So I'm
> wondering where the arrow of time comes from in this view?
>
> Brent
The arrow of time comes from tieing the 1st person view (observer
moment) to the 3rd person unitary evolution via the anthropic
principle. Not all 3rd person states support the 1st person view.
I don't see what difference time translation symmetry of the birth
moment makes.
John Mikes
Bruno Marchal
AUDA certainly asks for some familiarity with logic, and logics. That
means work, 'course.
A good, but advanced book, helpful and important for that more
advanced part is the book by Robert Goldblatt:
Goldblatt, R. I. (1993). Mathematics of Modality. CSLI Lectures Notes,
Stanford California.
It contains his PhD thesis, + many papers with results that I use to
relate quantum logic with arithmetical self-reference.
And there are the books by Boolos, Smullyan, etc.
Bon courage :)
Bruno
smi...@zonnet.nl
an alleged proof that 1 + 1 = 3. You don't need to check to proof to
see that it must be wrong.
The reason why QTI is a paradoxical is because we have a finite memory.
The class of all observers that can represent you is some finite set of
machine states, so you can't have any memories that exceeds a certain
limit. Therefore, "you" can't live forever, stay the same person who
then also subjectively experiences an unbounded time evolution.
Saibal
Citeren Nick Prince <nickmag...@googlemail.com>:
Bruno Marchal
On 31 Mar 2011, at 23:41, Nick Prince wrote:
>> Bruno wrote
>> With both QTI and COMP-TI we cannot go from being very old to being a
>> baby. We can may be get slowly younger and younger in a more
>> continuous way, by little backtracking. We always survive in the most
>> normal world compatible with our states. But some kind of jumps are
>> not excluded.
>
> Hi Bruno
>
> Maybe what I am trying to say is that very old or dying brains might
> deterorate in a specific way that allows the transition from an old to
> a young mind i.e. the decaying brain becomes in some way homomorphic
> to a young brain.
At the software level of the brain, I think that this is very
plausible. It already happens during sleep, and with some drugs. But
this can take many modalities. Darwinian selection might even have
selected "brain features" helping the recovering of shocks and
disease. And what is best than a little visit in Mother Platonia :)
That the dead brain does that, is more Harry Potter like, but then
dying consists in following the most normal world where we survive,
and this, very plausibly, is not a *very* normal world, despite it
obeys the same physical laws. Eventually, where you go, might even
depend on you and on what you identify yourself with.
> Indeed this defines the consciousness I am
> considering and is therefore subtrate dependent.
The UD reasoning shows that there is just no substrate at all. The
apparent 'substrate" is "made-of" (an internal sort of projection) an
infinity of (digital) computations, that is number relations.
> If all of physics
> can be simulated on a computer then no problem.
Well, the substrate is not simulable on a computer. At least not a
priori. But your reasoning still go through, given that your mind is a
sort of truncation from that substrate, and that, by definition, you
survive on the (infinitely many) computations where you survive. But
this is indeterminate, if only because we cannot know our level of
substitution.
>
>> If you accept the classical theory of knowledge, it is easy. Computer
>> are already conscious. They have not the tools to manifest their
>> consciousness, and by programming them, we don't help them with that
>> respect. Consciousness is not programmable. It exists "in Platonia",
>> and a universal machine is only a sort of interface between different
>> levels of the Platonic reality (arithmetical truth).
>
>
> This is an interesting comment! Are you saying that everything
> including consciousness really emanates from platonia?
Yes.
> Would you
> agree that we exist eternally in platonia?
Yes. (but who "we"?)
Yes in a trivial sense. Comp makes arithmetical platonia enough, and
it contains our histories. It is the block ontological reality. It is
far greater than the computable (99,999...% of arithmetical truth is
not computable, decidable, etc.).
Yes, in less trivial senses:
- in the sense of the comp or quantum-like form of immortality, like
above.
- in the sense à-la 'salvia divinorum', which is that we might be
able to remain conscious out of time, space, etc. It is like
remembering we really are one and live in Platonia. With comp, that
would be like remembering that we are nothing more than a universal
machine. I have not yet a clear opinion on this. Both practically and
theoretically. But there is something interesting in lurking there. It
is related to the personal identity question, and who are we?
> If so then perhaps we need
> only consider computationalism /QM as a means of comprehending the
> steps to this understanding.
Sure.
> This platonic realm is very useful but
> hard to pin down as a concept.
With comp it is just the "well known" structure (N, +, *), often
called, by logicians, 'the standard model of Peano Arithmetic'. If you
accept that propositions like "24 is even" are true, or false,
independently of you and me, that almost enough. You can pin down the
arithmetical platonia by the set of true arithmetical sentences, or
even just the set of their Gödel numbers, so that it is only a
particular set of numbers. The arithmetical sentences are the
grammatically correct formula build from the logical symbol (A, E, x,
y, z, ..., &, V, ~, ->, (, ), = ) together with the symbol 0, s, +,
*. For example:
- the arithmetical truth 1 < 2 can be written
Ex(s(0) + x = s(s(0))),
- the arithmetical truth saying that if a number is more little than
another number, then it is more little than the successor of that
another number is written: AxAy((x < y) -> (x < s(y))), where x < y
abbreviates Ez(x+s(z) = y),
- the proposition "24 is even" can be written
Ez(z * s(s(0)) =
s
(s
(s
(s(s(s(s(s(s(s(s(s(s(s(s(s(s(s(s(s(s(s(s(s(0))))))))))))))))))))))))),
etc.
Best,
Bruno marchal
Bruno Marchal
Let us say that this is an open question in the comp physics. I
understand Pratt motivation, but imo, he simplifies too much the mind,
and abstract himself from the comp hyp. It might be that we have a
time relation A ===> B related to the "BD" definition involving A -> B.
> I still don't understand how you persist in not seeing the
> implications of the Stone duality!
Explain. I don't feel like missing it.
> Oh well, that is your choice,
I am problem driven. I don't make choice.
> but putting that aside the continuity of 1st person should supervene
> on the UD, no?
It is more correct to say that the first person defines it, and is
itself defined by number relations.
> It seems to me that from the point of view of the UD
This is ambiguous. The UD is not "really" a person. It is the
effective part of the arithmetical truth. t has no points of view.
> there is no before or after or this causing that.
I have already explained that the UD defines many sort of times. The
most basic one being its own steps number, but first persons 'define'
other sort of time.
> To the UD everything is simultaneously given. Additionally, the way
> that the dovetailing seems to work makes it so that the UD is dense
> on the space of computations in the same way that the Reals are
> dense in the continuum.
Not exactly, at least for most UDs. If the Mandelbrot set is a UD,
then it is a UD dense in the space of its own version of all
computations, but it is an exceptional situation.
> But how can this be?
> I am very interested in Eric Vandenbusche's work. I will see that
> Google yields from him...
It is a young bipolar genius, of the kind "perishing (not
publishing)". His only work are notes that he wrote to me with the
solution of the first open math question in my thesis. I have put them
on my web pages. Here is the link:
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/Vandenbussche/AxiomatisationZ.html
The solution of the open problem is in the first three slides. It
shows also that G and Z are bisimulable. The other slides comes from
some questions I asked to him. It includes a pretty result showing
that the sentences asserting their own Sigma_1 truth are false (a sort
of anti-Löbian phenomenon).
Best,
Bruno
Telmo Menezes
> QTI is trivially false, because it is a paradoxical result, similar to an
> alleged proof that 1 + 1 = 3. You don't need to check to proof to see that
> it must be wrong.
You could apply that exact same argument to any hypothesis that sounds
ridiculous to you.
> The reason why QTI is a paradoxical is because we have a finite memory. The
> class of all observers that can represent you is some finite set of machine
> states, so you can't have any memories that exceeds a certain limit.
> Therefore, "you" can't live forever, stay the same person who then also
> subjectively experiences an unbounded time evolution.
The paradox only exists if you disregard that he have the ability to
forget selectively. Since I have only lived a finite amount of time
and my memory is finite, there is a finite set of machine states that
is sufficient to represent "me" (whatever that means). I could
conceivably live forever and selectively forget, while always
maintaining the core states that preserve my identity.
Bruno Marchal
On 03/31/11, Nick Prince<nickmag...@googlemail.com> wrote:>Bruno wrote
> With both QTI and COMP-TI we cannot go from being very old to being a
> baby. We can may be get slowly younger and younger in a more
> continuous way, by little backtracking. We always survive in the most
> normal world compatible with our states. But some kind of jumps are
> not excluded.
Hi Bruno
Maybe what I am trying to say is that very old or dying brains might
deterorate in a specific way that allows the transition from an old to
a young mind i.e. the decaying brain becomes in some way homomorphic
to a young brain.
Why not consider that it becomes homomorphic to an unconscious brain? If your consciousness is a property of some bundle of UD computations it does not follow that the most probable continuation is also conscious.
We already know that if you get hit in the head the most probable continuation is unconsciousness for a time.
Bruno Marchal
On 01 Apr 2011, at 00:58, Russell Standish wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 02:52:44PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>>
>> It is here that if we apply Bayes' theorem (like in the Doomday
>> argument), we should be astonished not being already very old (from
>> our first person perspective). But Bayes cannot be applied in this
>> setting, as we have already discussed a lot in the past.
>>
>> Bruno Marchal
>>
>
> Superficially, this seems to be a very succinct form of Mallah's
> argument. You're basically saying that given I'm Russell Standish, and
> QTI, why don't I find myself arbitrarily far removed from the origin
> (my birth).
Applying some form of ASSA (which makes no sense, imo).
>
> Of course, the objections to this are obvious, and have been discussed
> before in this list. The above doomsday argument assumes a linear
> sequence of OMs that characterise "Russell Standish", which cannot be
> the case in a Multiverse (required for QTI). Sampling of Russell
> Standish observer moments must be over all OMs that were born Russell
> Standish, and weighted by the universal prior, giving more weight to
> being a baby than an adult.
Why am I not a baby?
What is the universal prior?
>
> Now all we need is for Mallah to admit that the above is not a
> strawman, and we're done. ASSA vs RSSA can be put in the dustbin :).
RSSA too? It is used in both QM and comp. But in wikipedia I have seen
a definition of SSA much restrictive than the one used in this list. I
prefer to keep on with the first-person indeterminacy instead of "RSSA".
-- Bruno
>
> --
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
> Mathematics
> UNSW SYDNEY 2052 hpc...@hpcoders.com.au
> Australia http://www.hpcoders.com.au
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
> Groups "Everything List" group.
> To post to this group, send email to everyth...@googlegroups.com.
> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com
> .
> For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en
> .
>
Bruno Marchal
On 01 Apr 2011, at 20:06, Telmo Menezes wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 1, 2011 at 7:20 PM, <smi...@zonnet.nl> wrote:
>> QTI is trivially false, because it is a paradoxical result, similar
>> to an
>> alleged proof that 1 + 1 = 3. You don't need to check to proof to
>> see that
>> it must be wrong.
>
> You could apply that exact same argument to any hypothesis that sounds
> ridiculous to you.
>
>> The reason why QTI is a paradoxical is because we have a finite
>> memory. The
>> class of all observers that can represent you is some finite set of
>> machine
>> states, so you can't have any memories that exceeds a certain limit.
>> Therefore, "you" can't live forever, stay the same person who then
>> also
>> subjectively experiences an unbounded time evolution.
>
> The paradox only exists if you disregard that he have the ability to
> forget selectively. Since I have only lived a finite amount of time
> and my memory is finite, there is a finite set of machine states that
> is sufficient to represent "me" (whatever that means). I could
> conceivably live forever and selectively forget, while always
> maintaining the core states that preserve my identity.
Indeed. Nick Prince made clear that he would accept a notion of
surviving as an infant, with plausibly less souvenirs.
Also, we might survive reconstituted in a future with technologies
making it possible to add more memories (hard disk).
The subjective time grows in a non computable way (to say it grows a
lot) from the memory available. It is a sort of busy beaver function.
We already save some neuron memory space by using agenda, books and
computers.
Then in a steady universe, we might just develop indefinitely growing
brain. In some sense, "our" brain has grown a lot since we were amoebas.
Then we might become immortal by losing or making sleeping some
neurons, for example the neurons which handle the hallucination of
time. That the mystic way, and some plant are fascinating with that
respect.
There are many path, many possibilities. It is a rich and complex
subject.
Saibal is right on this: if we keep a fixed limited brain, we will
stop or cycle. But cycling forever can still be considered as a form
of immortality!
In Platonia, all occur. But it might depend on us which one can be
made more relatively probable. If we teach enough arithmetic to our
children, the most probable will be sorts of "Tipler-omega points". I
think.
Bruno
>> To post to this group, send email to everything-
>> li...@googlegroups.com.
>> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
>> everything-li...@googlegroups.com.
>> For more options, visit this group at
>> http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
>>
>>
>
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
> Groups "Everything List" group.
> To post to this group, send email to everyth...@googlegroups.com.
> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com
> .
> For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en
> .
>
Nick Prince
>
> - Show quoted text -
Ok Stathis thanks for that but what about the consciousness of the
viking living in 200 AD. The NCDSC will require some pretty unusual
branches to accomodate his survival. I've read some of your posts
before about personal identity and much of it makes a lot of sense.
I've thought about the possibility of mind uploads , even for my
viking friend but this would require the generation of huge numbers of
variants to ensure there was one which could provide a consistent
extension for him. Indeed it would mean every possible viking would
have to be generated from DNA possibilities alone as well as with
different memories. It's a bit of a tall order but not implausible.
It also means that many completely NEW vikings will be generated who
never existed in the past but think they did!
To keep everything more tidy I would expect that the laws of physics
might still hold in secret a form of epr effect across timelike
intervals rather than the more usual spacelike ones. This would
entail consciousness being able to be "tuned" to accept a state change
into the appropriate "person" in a similar way that measuring the spin
of a particle in one place "tunes the spin of a partner particle in
the well known way". There is no problem achieving contiuity if the
(appropriately complete) information about a person is kept safe over
the time interval as in Bruno's teleportation thought experiment.
However if we wanted to produce a Bostrom type ancestor simulation
then there would be a huge reduncy of consciousness generated in order
to enable consistent extensions to be available as the NCDSC would
need.
Regards
Nick
stephenk
The idea that the EPR effect would work across time-like as well
as space-like intervals makes sense in light of relativity. I am
surprised that more people have not looked into it! The main
difficulty I see is that there is a huge prejudice against the idea
that macroscopic systems can be entangled such that EPR type relations
could hold and have effects like you are considering here. Most of the
arguments for decoherence inevitably assume that *all* of the degrees
of freedom of a QM system are subject to one and the same decoherence
rate with its environment. What if this is not the case? What if there
is a stratification of sorts possible within macroscopic systems such
that degrees of freedom can decohere are differing rates? Correlations
of the EPR type would be possible within these, it seems to me...
Onward!
Stephen
Stathis Papaioannou
<nickmag...@googlemail.com> wrote:
> Ok Stathis thanks for that but what about the consciousness of the
> viking living in 200 AD. The NCDSC will require some pretty unusual
> branches to accomodate his survival. I've read some of your posts
> before about personal identity and much of it makes a lot of sense.
> I've thought about the possibility of mind uploads , even for my
> viking friend but this would require the generation of huge numbers of
> variants to ensure there was one which could provide a consistent
> extension for him. Indeed it would mean every possible viking would
> have to be generated from DNA possibilities alone as well as with
> different memories. It's a bit of a tall order but not implausible.
> It also means that many completely NEW vikings will be generated who
> never existed in the past but think they did!
You would survive in the most probable way given your circumstances,
but it's not difficult to think of a means of survival for any
possible situation. For example, if you are a viking it transpires
that you are living in a simulation and the programmers magically save
you. None of this is problematic if every possibility actually happens
somewhere in the multiverse. Also note that it does not have to be
your actual matter that continues in some form. It just has to be
another entity somewhere in the multiverse with a mind that is a
consistent extension of your mind at the moment of your demise.
--
Stathis Papaioannou
Nick Prince
less worry about conflict with relativity than there was originally
with spacelike effects. However if I understand decoherence
correctly, information from the system passes into the environment so
it is there somehow but very dispersed. I did write a paper once(when
I was younger and more stupid, so it has very doubtful worth) but I
tried to formalise mathematically how memories might be stored in
space time rather than in the brain at all ie working on the idea that
the brain was more of an aeriel rather than a hard drive. These
memories could then be later picked up by a simulated entity by
appropriate tuning. It was a stab in the dark.
Best
Nick
Nick Prince
Okay so in some sense if everything logically possible can be formally
represented in arithmetic as a kind of algorithm, then it exists along
with the UD in platonia. This "means" we are all in platonia
already. Indeed could the platonic reality not be equivalent to the
"great simulation" or Schmidhubers algorithmic TOE? I know they're not
actually the same because the latter are essentially encompassed by
the former but it might be difficult to detect a difference. It also
seems that this notion of platonic reality is anti materialistic like
saying all of reality is more of an idea than anything concrete. I
think some ancient Indian philosophical traditions hold a similar idea
that everything we see and experience is illusionary and actually is a
representation in some kind of universal mindstuff. Are all these
ideas not informally equivalent?
Best
Nick
Nick Prince
On Mar 31, 1:43 am, Russell Standish <li...@hpcoders.com.au> wrote:
> > In Russell’s book there is a section on “Arguments against QTI”
> > And I want to put forward some issues arising from this.
>
> > It seems that (if MWI is true) we live in world(s) in which we appear
> > to live a finite, small lifetime of around 70 years. From the many
> > discussions on this list, it also seems to me that, this is the single
> > biggest argument (that I can understand) which points to the QTI being
> > false. Unfortunately it appears that the whole ASSA/RSSA debate -
> > which might have been a candidate for clarifying the issue - turns out
> > to be a confusing (to me anyway) and polarising approach.
>
> > So is QTI false?
>
> > Russell does put forward a possible solution in his book. He suggests
> > the idea that as memory fades with dementia then perhaps the conscious
> > mind becomes so similar to that of a newborn - or even unborn - baby
> > that perhaps “a diminishing?” consciousness always finds an
> > appropriate route (in some branch) to avoid a cul de sac event.
> > (This is one possible form of the No Cul De Sac Conjecture =NCDSC)
>
> "Reasons and Persons", where he considers a continuum from his mind
> to that of Napoleon. (Don't flame me if I get the details wrong - the
> essence is what is important). I hadn't read that book at the time I
> wrote mine, otherwise, I would undoubtedly have cited it.
>
> Now in the case of Parfit's argument, I find considerable doubt that
> the argument can be made to work. Whilst, if I randomly knocked out 1%
> of your neurons, you will still be awake, and probably little
> different from the experience, if I knocked out certain "keystone" (as
> the concept is called in ecology) neurons to a level of 1% of all
> neurons, your brain function would fall apart quite rapidly. Yet to
> transition from your brain to that of Napoleons would require rewiring
> those same keystone neurons, and that, I believe casts significant
> doubt that the continuum is possible, even in principle.
>
> Now, we also know that infant minds are not a tabula rasa. So I am
> sceptical that the transition of a dementiaed mind to an infant mind
> is possible, for just the same reason.
>
>
> > To avoid the cul de sac event, there would surely have to be a
> > critical stage whereby consciousness diminishes and reaches a form
> > of cusp at the point of lapsing into non existence and thereby
> > requiring the necessity of an extension route or branch to another
> > consistent universe. In short, from the third person POV, the person
> > dies but from the first person -(now primitive) consciousness – state,
> > there is rebirth. I am thinking that before we get to the croaking
> > Amoeba there is a discontinuity in what we understand as consciousness
> > – at least the form that applies to the NCDSC.
>
> really well defined enough to embark on a proof, which it really ought
> to be. Certainly, in the Theatetical formulation that Bruno is
> investigating, there are NCDSC-like theorems in some hypostases, ([]p-><>p
> IIRC). Also, in QM, an observation along the lines of something like
> m(t)=<\psi(t)|P(o(t))|\psi(t)>, where P is a project operator onto all
> worlds consistent with some observer o. The no cul-de-sac conjecture
> would correspond to m(t) != 0, except on a set of measure
> zero. Assuming m(t) is analytic, this is kind of obvious, but
> unfortunately QM really only requires second order differentiability
> of its objects, meaning that the proof never quite gets off the ground :(.
> age is not evidence against the NCDSC. Only logical
> impossibility can count. Even physical impossibility is insufficient,
> because there is always the possibility of mind uploading into
> machines that may be of arbitrary age.
>
> Even Jacques Mallah accepted the possibility that people of
> arbitrarily old age must exist somewhere in the Multiverse. What he
> couldn't accept was the certainty of getting from here to there, that
> the NCDSC implies. The refinement of that debate lead to the distinction of
> ASSA vs RSSA, and the NCDSC.
>
>
> > The mechanics of such reincarnational transitions would be
> > interesting to speculate about since I see this as the only way out
> > for a QTI.
>
> > Nick Prince
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Mathematics
> Australia http://www.hpcoders.com.au
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -- Hide quoted text -
> - Show quoted text -
I have considered also the possibility that the NCDSC may not
necessarilly operate simultaneously - this would imply temporary 3rd
person culde sacs! Just as in Bruno's teleportation experiment, there
is no reason why the reconstitution of the individual cannot be
delayed. From the ist person pov, everything works the same and
continuity is experienced. I'm unsure how this fits in with MWI
though. Such delays would not be easily accounted for in the state
vector's superposition. Hence if someone reaches a NCDS event and
somehow later on they find a consistent extension in a simulation of
some sort, then what happens to the temporary branch cul de sac in
terms of a quantum mechanical explanation?
Nick Prince
Jason Resch
Jason
Bruno Marchal
What is the difference? The universal dovetailer is just an effective
(and older) version of the 'great programmer', and it is equivalent,
in provability terms, to sigma_1 completeness. It is thus equivalent
to 'just' a tiny and effective part of arithmetical truth. Then
Schmidhuber ignores the first person indeterminacy and exploits the
"all computations" idea differently (more in the ASSA way, with
priors). With the notion of digital physics he shows that he does not
really exploit it at all. But if digital physics implies comp, comp
refutes digital physics a priori (with the possibility to recover it
or not: open problem, but there is few chances, I would say).
So the TOE does not need more, at the ontological level than Robinson
Arithmetic, that is mainly the definition of addition and
multiplication on the integers. The rest are beliefs by (universal
numbers), and, from the point of view of the machines/numbers, the
measure on the computations, or on the Sigma_1 proofs. That determines
the entire consciousness flux, and its many-differentiation. But it is
an internal epistemology that numbers develop from inside just due to
addition and multiplication.
Now, it is fine, and very nice actually, to use combinators instead
of numbers, for having a less coarse grain of the notion of
computations, but in fine, any universal system do, and elementary
arithmetic is the best known.
BTW, not every logically possible can be represented in arithmetic,
but all the accessible "mental state" by a machine, can be, including
thought on higher cardinals, or galaxies. Consciousness appears, or
see all that, or part of that, only in the limit.
> I know they're not
> actually the same because the latter are essentially encompassed by
> the former but it might be difficult to detect a difference. It also
> seems that this notion of platonic reality is anti materialistic like
> saying all of reality is more of an idea than anything concrete. I
> think some ancient Indian philosophical traditions hold a similar idea
> that everything we see and experience is illusionary and actually is a
> representation in some kind of universal mindstuff. Are all these
> ideas not informally equivalent?
I certainly think so. In the long text "conscience et mécanisme" I
propose an arithmetical translation of the chinese TAO, on some
hermeneutical thinkers, like I did later for Plotinus. Plotinus is
often compared to some Indian or eastern traditions. It is only in
Occident that monistic immaterial monism is so rare. But it "sleeps"
in the Kaballah and in the Sufism. The problem is that most mystical
researchers where just persecuted, so they developed ways to hide the
doctrine which has lead to esoterism and, alas, to idolatry and
supersitition. A traditional failure of theology which already
appeared with Pythagorus.
Greeks were really "rational". They didn't put the mystical insight
under the rug. But all those who like to use authoritative arguments
fears the mystical side, because it is a side allergic to
authoritative arguments.
The math part exemplifies in a third person very transparent way that
mystical dimension of the universal machine(s). It shows that the
universal numbers are necessarily partially analytical and partially
mystical. This is the main quasi-obvious consequences of the splitting
between G (the self-referentially prouvable) and G* (the truth about
the "self-referentialy provable", even when not provable, but still
questionable). Consciousness is already a mystical state, just that
most of us are blasé about it!
Gödel did not just prove the limitation of the machine/theories, he
discovered also that machine/theories can discovered their own
limitations, including their necessary and possible geometries/
topologies, and then transform themselves.
meekerdb
Brent
No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com
Version: 8.5.449 / Virus Database: 271.1.1/3545 - Release Date: 04/01/11 18:36:00
stephenk
On Apr 2, 7:22 am, Nick Prince <nickmag.pri...@googlemail.com> wrote:
> Yes agreed. Also if timelike entanglements occurred there would be
> less worry about conflict with relativity than there was originally
> with spacelike effects. However if I understand decoherence
> correctly, information from the system passes into the environment so
> it is there somehow but very dispersed.
Yes, but only rarely is the "environment" an ideal gas or monolithic
solid such that our usual ideas of diffusion and dispersal will apply.
I suspect that we need to think about how decoherence works in a
framework that takes into consideration a wide variety of rates and
that considers how the phase entanglement is distributed. I have tried
to find work examining this and only recently some papers have come
out. See: http://www.quantiki.org/wiki/Decoherence-free_subspaces and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decoherence-free_subspaces
It took a while, but Tegmark's no-go is finally loosing its hold. (I
swear that guy is the reincarnation of Lord Kelvin!)
From what I can tell decoherence is more of an effects that
disperses among the many-worlds and not one that spreads within a
single world - like photons. We really do not have good physical
analogies for it!
>I did write a paper once(when
> I was younger and more stupid, so it has very doubtful worth) but I
> tried to formalise mathematically how memories might be stored in
> space time rather than in the brain at all ie working on the idea that
> the brain was more of an aeriel rather than a hard drive. These
> memories could then be later picked up by a simulated entity by
> appropriate tuning. It was a stab in the dark.
>
Interesting idea! It reminds me of Sheldrake's Morphic fields. I
think that James P. Hogan wrote a novel based on a similar idea also,
except in "Paths to Otherwhere" the ideas was to "tune" in on
differing parallel worlds and even travel between them.
I think that we still do not fully understand the implications of
QM.
Onward!
Stephen
snip
Russell Standish
>
> Hi Russell
> I have considered also the possibility that the NCDSC may not
> necessarilly operate simultaneously - this would imply temporary 3rd
> person culde sacs! Just as in Bruno's teleportation experiment, there
> is no reason why the reconstitution of the individual cannot be
> delayed. From the ist person pov, everything works the same and
> continuity is experienced. I'm unsure how this fits in with MWI
> though. Such delays would not be easily accounted for in the state
> vector's superposition. Hence if someone reaches a NCDS event and
> somehow later on they find a consistent extension in a simulation of
> some sort, then what happens to the temporary branch cul de sac in
> terms of a quantum mechanical explanation?
>
> Nick Prince
>
It doesn't really make sense to say 3rd person cul-de-sacs. These would be
just regular deaths, as we see all around us, all the time.
When you say temporary cul-de-sacs, do you mean after which there is
some kind of amnesia, and then you follow a non cul-de-sac history? If
these really existed, then I would say the NCDS conjecture is refuted,
and QTI, stricto-sensu, is false. But, its going to be hard to come up
with such a scenario. The best I could do was after decapitation,
there are reports of some people indicating they're still conscious
seconds later. But even these scenarios are not immune to the waking
up after a dream explanation.
Cheers
--
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
Mathematics
smi...@zonnet.nl
namely that it "really exists", and then we are trying to argue that
you can still have immortality (in different senses). However, it is
far more natural to assume that time does not exist and then you get
immortality (in the sense of my conscious states that have a finite
memory always existing) in a far more straightforward way.
That time does not exist is a quite natural assumption. To see this,
assume that it does exist. But then, since time evolution is given by a
unitary transform, the past still exists in a scrambled way in the
present (when taking into account parallel universes). E.g. your past
brain state of ten years ago can still be described in terms of the
physical variables as they exist today. Of course such a description is
extremely complicated involving the physical state of today's
multiverse within a sphere of ten lightyears.
Then assuming that the details of implementation does not affect
consciousness (as long as the right program is being run), one has to
conclude that your past state of coinsciousess exists also today. You
could therefore just as well assume that time does not exist, as the
two possibilities are operationally equivalent.
Saibal
Citeren Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be>:
Stephen Paul King
Are you defining time as isomorphic to the Real number line? Could it be
that all of these "proofs of the nonexistence of time" are really just
proofs that time is *not* that but something else entirely? It seems to me
that we are thinking of the way that we can chronometrize events in our past
with real number values and concluding that this labeling scheme extends
into the future in a unique way, the problem is that if we take General
Relativity seriously this is a non-started of an idea. The relativity of
simultaneity coupled with general covariance does not permit any form of
unique labeling events. We really need to stop assuming a Newtonian Absolute
chronometrization of events. Time is a local measure of change, nothing
more.
Onward!
Stephen
***
-----Original Message-----
From: smi...@zonnet.nl
Sent: Saturday, April 02, 2011 8:27 PM
To: everyth...@googlegroups.com
Stathis Papaioannou
> But then why is your demise relevant? Presumably because if you did not die
> then the most consistent extension would be that your consciousness remain
> associated with your body - but as your body/brain deteriorates the most
> consistent extension becomes....what? another deteriorating brain? Why is
> it not just the continuingly deteriorating brain already associated with
> "you"?
It is, and eventually you will become completely demented and die. But
there is a possible successor from this state who regains your
memories and remembers at least the early stages of the deterioration,
as well as a successor who remains moderately demented. There is no
guarantee that you will survive indefinitely with most of your
memories, although most societies in which you live will aim for this
ideal, which I think makes it a bit more likely. But in the worst case
you could survive indefinitely in pain and misery.
--
Stathis Papaioannou
Stathis Papaioannou
> When you say temporary cul-de-sacs, do you mean after which there is
> some kind of amnesia, and then you follow a non cul-de-sac history? If
> these really existed, then I would say the NCDS conjecture is refuted,
> and QTI, stricto-sensu, is false. But, its going to be hard to come up
> with such a scenario. The best I could do was after decapitation,
> there are reports of some people indicating they're still conscious
> seconds later. But even these scenarios are not immune to the waking
> up after a dream explanation.
You lose consciousness every day then wake up again with most of your
memories intact. The same could happen after decapitation, though with
greater difficulty. The information in your brain prior to
decapitation could be collected and used to resurrect you at the Omega
Point, and hence there would be no (permanent, first person)
cul-de-sac.
--
Stathis Papaioannou
stephenk
On Apr 1, 1:58 pm, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
> On 31 Mar 2011, at 20:16, Stephen Paul King wrote:
>
> > -----Original Message----- From: Bruno Marchal
> > Sent: Thursday, March 31, 2011 12:33 PM
> > To: everyth...@googlegroups.com
> > Subject: Re: IsQTIfalse?
>
> > On 31 Mar 2011, at 15:35, Stephen Paul King wrote:
>
> > snip
>
> > I understand the role of the infinities of computations and the
> > equivalence as you are considering them finally, from reading your
> > papers over and over and a brilliant discussion of the concept of
> > quantum superposition in Andrew Soltau's book Interactive Destiny,
> > but am still not seeing the conflation of physical causality and
> > logical entailment. For one thing they point in opposite directions!
>
> Let us say that this is an open question in the comp physics. I
> understand Pratt motivation, but imo, he simplifies too much the mind,
> and abstract himself from the comp hyp. It might be that we have a
> time relation A ===> B related to the "BD" definition involving A -> B.
>
arrows. Pratt does speculate that there is a duration component
involved in interactions.
"It is ironic that Cartesian philosophy, whose guiding dictum was to
question
everything, should question causal interaction between the mental and
physical
planes before that within the planes. The latter problems must have
posed an
insufficient challenge to the Cartesians. We argue that the converse
is the case:
between is actually easier than within!
We interpret interaction as causality. Causality is directional, but
the direction depends on whether we have in mind physical or mental
causality. We interpret x |= a ambiguously as the time elapsed between
the occurrence of the
physical a and its impression on the mental state x, and as the truth
value of a as a proposition.
The former is physical causality or impression, flowing forward in
time from events to states. The latter is mental causality or
inference, flowing backwards in time from the thought of a to the
inference of a’s"
His use of the word "causation" is unfortunate but we can forgive
him because there is no correct word for the relation that he is
considering. The idea if more analogous to the arrow of implication in
logic but in a physical context. Because of the linear superpositions
of QM we cannot think of causality as a strict bijection. It is
possible to derive the bijective aspects but we cannot start with
them. This is the key idea that Pratt is exploring!
What one has to understand is that he is considering evolution of
both logical structures and their dual Stone spaces under a single
system, the Chu transform. All he is doing is taking the Stone
Representation theorem and the Pontryagin duality seriously that there
is a general duality between logical algebras and certain kinds of
spaces and if one allows for the possibility that the logical
structures can evolve then there would be a co-evolution in the dual
spaces, an evolution that looks exactly like that we are considering
in physics: particles moving around in space-time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone%27s_representation_theorem_for_Boolean_algebras
"A simple version of Stone's representation theorem states that any
Boolean algebra B is isomorphic to the algebra of clopen subsets of
its Stone space S(B). The full statement of the theorem uses the
language of category theory; it states that there is a duality between
the category of Boolean algebras and the category of Stone spaces.
This duality means that in addition to the isomorphisms between
Boolean algebras and their Stone spaces, each homomorphism from a
Boolean algebra A to a Boolean algebra B corresponds in a natural way
to a continuous function from S(B) to S(A). In other words, there is a
contravariant functor that gives an equivalence between the
categories. This was an early example of a nontrivial duality of
categories.
The theorem is a special case of Stone duality, a more general
framework for dualities between topological spaces and partially
ordered sets."
from: http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2008/11/variations_on_pontryagin_duali.html
"Pontryagin duality goes like this. Suppose A is a locally compact
Hausdorff topological abelian group. Let A * be the set of
characters: that is, continuous homomorphisms f:A→U(1). A * becomes
an abelian group thanks to pointwise multiplication of characters. It
becomes a topological group with the compact-open topology — that is,
the topology of uniform convergence on compact sets. We call A * the
Pontryagin dual of A.
Then, A * is again a locally compact Hausdorff topological abelian
group, and
A **≅A
in a natural way!
For example, we have
ℤ *≅U(1)
and
U(1) *≅ℤ
ℝ is its own dual! More generally, for any finite-dimensional real
vector space V with its usual topology, V * is the same as the dual
vector space. So, Pontryagin duality generalizes vector space
duality."
The Pontryagin duality extends Stone spaces such that they are
capable of exactly representing "particles" in that they are
"disconnected". Thus we have minds - as evolving logical structures -
and bodies - as fields of separate locally compact Hausdorff
topological groups. What connects them are the properties - what they
do.
> > I still don't understand how you persist in not seeing the
> > implications of the Stone duality!
>
> Explain. I don't feel like missing it.
>
existence. We need the physical world to be the interface between our
separate minds, otherwise we will be trapped in the UD in endless
Poincare recursions. This is the nightmare that Nietzsche saw.
> > Oh well, that is your choice,
>
> I am problem driven. I don't make choice.
>
far I have only seen discussions in your papers in terms of
"interviews" between different logics. What you are calling
interviews, I would call them interpretations or mappings. There is no
notion of separable entities having anything like what you and I are
doing right now here. You wrote brilliantly about your idea of
interviews here http://www.mail-archive.com/everyth...@googlegroups.com/msg08457.html
But I will continue to argue that "the logic of arithmetical self-
reference" is not an exchange of information between separate minds.
It is at most the exploration of 1p aspect of a logic by that logic.
It is solipsism at its most exquisite form. (Please understand that
this is not a bad thing, solipsism is thinking and dreaming about
one's thoughts in a closed and convex form).
But there is something else that troubles me even more.
You wrote in http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/publications/CiE2007/SIENA.pdf
:
"Each hypostase will be interpreted by a set of arithmetical
sentences.
Plotinus’ One is interpreted by Arithmetical Truth, i.e the set of all
true arithmetical sentences. In
case we were interviewing ZF, we would have needed the more complex
set-theoretical truth. In any
case, it follows from Tarski theorem that such a truth set is not
defineable by the machine on which
such truth bears. Nevertheless, she can already, but indirectly, point
to its truth set by some sequence
of approximations, and there is indeed a sense to say that Lobian
machines are able to prove their
own “Tarski theorem”, illustrating again the self-analysis power of
those theorem prover machines. See
Smullyan’s book [60] for a sketch of that proof and reference therein.
In this sense we recover the “One”
ineffability, and it is natural to consider arithmetical truth as the
(non-physical) cause and ultimate
reality of the arithmetical machine. This is even more appealing for a
neoplatonist, than just a platonist,
given the return of the neoplatonist to the Pythagorean roots of
platonism [52]. The atomical verifiable
“physical” proposition will be modelized by the Σ1 sentences. Note
that the machine can define the
restricted, computationalist, notion of Σ1-truth."
The problem is that "the set of all true arithmetical sentences" is
a very narrow, but deep, interpretation of the One. How can I define
such things as Zeno's paradox and its solution, for example? There is
no way to define an infinitesimal or a derivative that I can find. How
do I recover the calculus? Your model has no expressions that can be
used to act as a clock... Thus it is no surprise that the whole
structure is frozen. There is no room in it for the idea of evolution,
nothing 'becomes". Everything just "is". Every fiber of my being
screams out in revulsion at this! I am not a Σ1 sentence!
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=12&ved=0CGgQFjAL&url=http%3A%2F%2Fciteseerx.ist.psu.edu%2Fviewdoc%2Fdownload%3Fdoi%3D10.1.1.66.6645%26rep%3Drep1%26type%3Dpdf&rct=j&q=%22I%20am%20not%20a%20number%22&ei=QuWXTf2_CJCO0QGLquTkCw&usg=AFQjCNHUw_V2FSvbiVGXt-ivhgdbu55n4g&sig2=NwY4YJrHlExXauSu-ceiRQ&cad=rja
> > but putting that aside the continuity of 1st person should supervene
> > on the UD, no?
>
> It is more correct to say that the first person defines it, and is
> itself defined by number relations.
>
content of my 1p in this moment as I type this post. In fact it is far
more likely that it codes noise. We have to resort to all kinds of
fancy constructions to get around this fact and I find that the fact
that this must be done is a sign that something is wrong in our
thinking here.
The fact that we can represent a history of events as a sequential
narrative is OK, but this is not time. Time is a measure of the change
in one aspect relative to some other that can be decided by some third
aspect. In a frozen structure there is no change, thus there is, by
definition, no time. Strings of numbers are not time just as records
of the output of a Geiger Counter is not time.
> > It seems to me that from the point of view of the UD
>
> This is ambiguous. The UD is not "really" a person. It is the
>
> > there is no before or after or this causing that.
>
> I have already explained that the UD defines many sort of times. The
> most basic one being its own steps number, but first persons 'define'
> other sort of time.
>
communicate. Your definition of 'times" seems to be just a sort of
sequence, a string of numbers. How many possible strings are there?
What is the chances of an arbitrarily chosen string to code, say
Beethoven's 5th and not some randomness? See my previous claim!
> > To the UD everything is simultaneously given. Additionally, the way
> > that the dovetailing seems to work makes it so that the UD is dense
> > on the space of computations in the same way that the Reals are
> > dense in the continuum.
>
> Not exactly, at least for most UDs. If the Mandelbrot set is a UD,
> then it is a UD dense in the space of its own version of all
> computations, but it is an exceptional situation.
>
version of the axiom of choice that does not lead to Banach-Tarski
paradox. I think the solution is in the idea of the record keeping
that you have mentioned... The idea is that the list of properties of
a set is contained to be finite and constructable (but not necessarily
Turing computational!) so that one is not needing to assume an
infinite list of properties. Non-well founded sets allows us to do
this but that is a discussion for some other day. Peter Wegner wrote
extensively about this. http://www.cs.brown.edu/~pw/
I am exploring this with Andrew Soltau. Hopefully we will have a
result soon.
> > But how can this be?
> > I am very interested in Eric Vandenbusche's work. I will see that
> > Google yields from him...
>
> It is a young bipolar genius, of the kind "perishing (not
> publishing)". His only work are notes that he wrote to me with the
> solution of the first open math question in my thesis. I have put them
> on my web pages. Here is the link:
>
> http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/Vandenbussche/AxiomatisationZ.html
>
beg you!
> The solution of the open problem is in the first three slides. It
> shows also that G and Z are bisimulable. The other slides comes from
> some questions I asked to him. It includes a pretty result showing
> that the sentences asserting their own Sigma_1 truth are false (a sort
> of anti-Löbian phenomenon).
Onward!
Stephen
Bruno Marchal
I think you preach the choir. Except perhaps for Stephen, most of us
agree that time, and the whole physicalness is a 'collective
hallucination', or a first person (plural) mind construct. There is
even a plant which can make you feel, in some way, that time (and
space) does not exist, and does not need to exist for being conscious
(and that's a quite amazing hallucination by itself).
But extracting "immortality" from the fact that the fundamental
reality is a block static structure might disappoint many "immortality
amateur". People hope for explicit continuation, and some kind of
continuity. Now the block arithmetical static structure is so rich
that the immortality question is only a complex problem which needs
progress in the math (notably on the arithmetical hypostasis) and all
that.
In any case, science is not a priori wishful thinking, so we have to
say: let us compute or let us see. It might also depend on our ability
to convince our descendants to build some omega points in our
neighborhood, or to rely on the whole arithmetical structure, etc.
The real practical question is, I think, can we avoid unpleasant
lasting states? Does that exist? How to make the probability lower, etc.
Bruno
>>> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com
>>> .
>>> For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en
>>> .
>>>
>>
>> http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
>> Groups "Everything List" group.
>> To post to this group, send email to everything-
>> li...@googlegroups.com.
Bruno Marchal
Correct. But arithmetical structure are enough (or please mention a
flaw in UDA).
> We need the physical world to be the interface between our
> separate minds,
Eventually with comp, the physical world is recovered by defining it
as an interface between our different minds, or as the gluing dreams
processes. We need a physical world. No doubt on this. The point is
that we don't need a primary physical world.
> otherwise we will be trapped in the UD in endless
> Poincare recursions. This is the nightmare that Nietzsche saw.
I doubt this, but if that were true, that would not been a reason to
abandon comp. Only a reason to hope that comp is false. But comp is
not yet sufficiently developed to start having premature fear of it.
>
>>> Oh well, that is your choice,
>>
>> I am problem driven. I don't make choice.
>>
>
> [SPK] You are choosing to not consider multiple interacting minds.
Why do you say so? comp starts from the interaction between a patient
and its doctor.
Comp is an hypothesis. If it leads to solipsism, that would be a
reason to abandon it, indeed. But everything points on the fact that
there is all the room needed for mind interaction, and even that this
is what stabilizes the first person plural in the long run.
> So
> far I have only seen discussions in your papers in terms of
> "interviews" between different logics.
There is an 'interview' between a human (you and/or me) and a
universal machine. The logics are related by representation theorems,
as usual.
> What you are calling
> interviews, I would call them interpretations or mappings.
"interview" just means that I am in front of the machine, and I have
to ask her about each different points of view. I just translate the
usual classical theory of knowledge in terms that the machine can
understand. So of course, we are lead to mappings and representations.
> There is no
> notion of separable entities having anything like what you and I are
> doing right now here.
You are not at the right level. You could criticize string theory
because it does not bring you a pizza at home tonight.
The interaction comes from the linear combinatory algebra. But if I
posit at the start, I will lose the qualia. I have to derive that
linear algebra from the gluing property of the machine dreams (UDA
shows we don't have choice in that matter).
If eventually the machine dreams does not glue well enough, we will
know that comp is false, with some degree.
> You wrote brilliantly about your idea of
> interviews here http://www.mail-archive.com/everyth...@googlegroups.com/msg08457.html
> But I will continue to argue that "the logic of arithmetical self-
> reference" is not an exchange of information between separate minds.
It is not supposed to be that. The logic of Bp & Dp should bring such
a thing, or, if you can prove it prevents such exchanges, then comp
+Theaetetus is refuted.
> It is at most the exploration of 1p aspect of a logic by that logic.
> It is solipsism at its most exquisite form. (Please understand that
> this is not a bad thing, solipsism is thinking and dreaming about
> one's thoughts in a closed and convex form).
It is not solipsism-the philosophy.
Bp & p, and Bp & Dp & p, leads to "lived solipsism", which is the case
for the first person internal experiences. But the modality without "&
p" are not solipsist at all. You are conflating different modalities.
It is basically solved at the start, because real numbers are
epistemological, or meta, construction. Comp suggests that the
ontology is discrete, because we can explain the beliefs and uses of
the rest from that.
> There is
> no way to define an infinitesimal or a derivative that I can find.
Because comp makes the real numbers a simplification, and it makes
calculus a handy tool for manipulating big numbers and and
epistemological mind constructs. Analysis and physics are
epistemology. This follows from UDA + some amount of Occam.
> How
> do I recover the calculus?
In the stable numbers' dream.
> Your model has no expressions that can be
> used to act as a clock...
I told you that the definition of integers *is* a clock. Arithmetic
starts from a clock.
And besides, I have no model. Only a theory (that I am digitalizable
at some level, yes doctor + CT).
> Thus it is no surprise that the whole
> structure is frozen.
The point is that after Gödel, nothing is more dynamical than
Platonia, when seen by the creature defined internally in Platonia.
If you assume a real fundamental time, you have just to abandon comp
(and special relativity which makes time an illusion too).
Anyway, time and space are things which I prefer to search an
explanation for, than assuming them at the start.
> There is no room in it for the idea of evolution,
> nothing 'becomes".
When the UD is executed, all the becoming becomes. And so all possible
evolutions develop. You could as well criticize SR and GR, and QM
(without collapse).
I mean, this is a place where comp already agree with most physicists,
except Prigogine.
> Everything just "is".
Only in God's eye.
> Every fiber of my being
> screams out in revulsion at this!
There is no reason, but apart from solipsism, we cannot use such
affirmation as an argument. You could say that Energy is not equal to
mc^2 because we can do horrible bombs with that idea.
> I am not a Σ1 sentence!
I guess you mean: my mental state is not UD-accessible. Just say "no"
to the digitalist surgeon, Stephen. I don't know if that is true or
not. My point is that if it is true, then physics is a branch of
number theory, and I show how time space and physics can indeed to be
retrieve. There is already subjective duration, but not yet space.
We would disagree only if you want both
- a fundamental basic *primary* time, and
- saying yes to the doctor.
OK?
Despite the title of that paper ("I am not a number, I am a free
variable"), it is quite coherent with comp, even philosophically
close, given that the 1-I can be seen as the "free" places of your
possible occurrences in a continuum of computations.
>
>>> but putting that aside the continuity of 1st person should supervene
>>> on the UD, no?
>>
>> It is more correct to say that the first person defines it, and is
>> itself defined by number relations.
>>
>
> [SPK] OK, but the numbers can code noise just as they can code the
> content of my 1p in this moment as I type this post. In fact it is far
> more likely that it codes noise. We have to resort to all kinds of
> fancy constructions to get around this fact and I find that the fact
> that this must be done is a sign that something is wrong in our
> thinking here.
My point is not that it is true, but that it is a consequence of the
comp hyp. If you can show that 'something is wrong', then you refute
comp.
> The fact that we can represent a history of events as a sequential
> narrative is OK, but this is not time. Time is a measure of the change
> in one aspect relative to some other that can be decided by some third
> aspect. In a frozen structure there is no change, thus there is, by
> definition, no time. Strings of numbers are not time just as records
> of the output of a Geiger Counter is not time.
IN GR there is no time either, and even more so in most Quantum GR. At
the same time you can see GR as the science of time. You are confusing
God's point of view, with the relative points of view of the
"terrestrial" beings.
>
>>> It seems to me that from the point of view of the UD
>>
>> This is ambiguous. The UD is not "really" a person. It is the
>> effective part of the arithmetical truth. It has no points of view.
>>
>>
>>> there is no before or after or this causing that.
>>
>> I have already explained that the UD defines many sort of times. The
>> most basic one being its own steps number, but first persons 'define'
>> other sort of time.
>>
>
> [SPK] OK, but please try to understand what I am trying to
> communicate. Your definition of 'times" seems to be just a sort of
> sequence, a string of numbers. How many possible strings are there?
> What is the chances of an arbitrarily chosen string to code, say
> Beethoven's 5th and not some randomness? See my previous claim!
Probabilities are relative to states, themselves relative to histories/
computation. Your question is meaningless. I'm afraid.
>
>>> To the UD everything is simultaneously given. Additionally, the way
>>> that the dovetailing seems to work makes it so that the UD is dense
>>> on the space of computations in the same way that the Reals are
>>> dense in the continuum.
>>
>> Not exactly, at least for most UDs. If the Mandelbrot set is a UD,
>> then it is a UD dense in the space of its own version of all
>> computations, but it is an exceptional situation.
>>
>
> [SPK] Yes, but there are infinitely many such sets!
There is an infinity of UDs. But they reflect each other in a way
which makes them equivalent ontologically. They have the same internal
epistemologies. That is why we have to recover quantum computation
from number theory.
> We need a local
> version of the axiom of choice that does not lead to Banach-Tarski
> paradox. I think the solution is in the idea of the record keeping
> that you have mentioned... The idea is that the list of properties of
> a set is contained to be finite and constructable (but not necessarily
> Turing computational!) so that one is not needing to assume an
> infinite list of properties. Non-well founded sets allows us to do
> this but that is a discussion for some other day. Peter Wegner wrote
> extensively about this. http://www.cs.brown.edu/~pw/
> I am exploring this with Andrew Soltau. Hopefully we will have a
> result soon.
Nice. Note that Wegner says many things "against CT", which I believe
is true in the comp-physics, but irrelevant for the problem of
deriving physics from numbers.
>
>>> But how can this be?
>>> I am very interested in Eric Vandenbusche's work. I will see that
>>> Google yields from him...
>>
>> It is a young bipolar genius, of the kind "perishing (not
>> publishing)". His only work are notes that he wrote to me with the
>> solution of the first open math question in my thesis. I have put
>> them
>> on my web pages. Here is the link:
>>
>> http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/Vandenbussche/AxiomatisationZ.html
>>
>
> [SPK] WOW! Amazing work! Please get this guy to publish in English! I
> beg you!
>
>> The solution of the open problem is in the first three slides. It
>> shows also that G and Z are bisimulable. The other slides comes from
>> some questions I asked to him. It includes a pretty result showing
>> that the sentences asserting their own Sigma_1 truth are false (a
>> sort
>> of anti-Löbian phenomenon).
>
> [SPK] Could you elaborate on this bisimulation?
The B of the logic Z can be define in G by Bp & Dt, and the D of Z, by
Bf v Dp (the D of Z is really the usual logican's notion of relative
consistency).
Vandenbussche found that you can dually reverse that translation: the
B of G can be defined in Z by Bp v Df, and the D of G can be defined
in Z by Dp & Bt.
Be careful to interpret the B and D in the right logic. I should
perhaps write this in the following less ambiguous (but less readable)
way:
B_z A == B_g A & D_g t
D_z A == D_g A v B_g f
B_g A == B_z A v D_z f
D_g A == D_z A & B_z t
The two lines above are the usual definition of the Z box (the second
follows by duality on Bp & Dt)
The two last lines are Vandenbussche inversion. It leads toward an
axiomatization of Z, Z1, Z* and Z1*.
So despite their very different semantics, and "hypostasic role", G
and Z are variants of each other. The same for G1 and Z1, G1* and Z1*.
Unfortunately there is no such transformation available for the logics
X. (X, X1, X*, X1*)
We conjecture that G and X are not bisimulable, nor probably S4Grz and
X.
Bruno
Stephen Paul King
Stephen Paul King
Bruno Marchal
Hi,I need to issue a clarification. What the heck does inertia – the property of remaining in a given state of motion unless acted upon by an external force have - to do with Nietzian Recurrence? Consider the UD as eternally running. Within it are all possible worlds expressed as strings of integers.
What prevents a given string from being arbitrarily extended by one more integer and another and another and another ....? Nothing! Thus is the string happens to be a particle moving through space, how would we code the effect of a force acting upon that particle such that it experiences a change in its momentum? What would distinguish the “force acting upon the entity” from the entity itself?
How does a string of Integers alone code all of the interactions between the entities that it represents? Oh, that’s right, if I assume ideal monism I am not allowed to think that numbers “represent” physical events.
In ideal monism there is no physicality at all, there is only numbers and relations between numbers encoded in the numbers themselves via Gödelization.
So ok, we can Gödelize the Gödel numbers and then Gödelize them again ab infinitum. So far no problems. But how do we Gödelize the computation of whether or not a smooth diffeomorphism exists between pair of space-time manifolds? Or more generally, does there exist a Gödel number for a theory equivalent to a general solution to an arbitrarily large NP-Complete problem? If there is then it might lead to a proof that P = NP. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P_versus_NP_problemI confess that I still do not have a wording to express my thought on this, but I need to put this claim out there.
From: Stephen Paul KingSent: Sunday, April 03, 2011 5:22 PMSubject: Re: Causality = 1p Continuity?Hi Bruno,Sometimes I feel that you are not reading what I write at all. :(-----Original Message-----From: Bruno MarchalSent: Sunday, April 03, 2011 1:03 PMSubject: Re: Causality = 1p Continuity?snip> We need the physical world to be the interface between our> separate minds,> otherwise we will be trapped in the UD in endless> Poincare recursions. This is the nightmare that Nietzsche saw.[BM]I doubt this, but if that were true, that would not been a reason toabandon comp. Only a reason to hope that comp is false. But comp isnot yet sufficiently developed to start having premature fear of it.[SPK] Unless there is something that acts as a limit on the expressions of the UD then how do we recover inertia?
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To post to this group, send email to everyth...@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Nick Prince
On Apr 2, 11:21 pm, stephenk <stephe...@charter.net> wrote:
> Hi Nick,
>
> On Apr 2, 7:22 am, Nick Prince <nickmag.pri...@googlemail.com> wrote:
>
> > Yes agreed. Also if timelike entanglements occurred there would be
> > less worry about conflict with relativity than there was originally
> > with spacelike effects. However if I understand decoherence
> > correctly, information from the system passes into the environment so
> > it is there somehow but very dispersed.
>
> [SPK]
> Yes, but only rarely is the "environment" an ideal gas or monolithic
> solid such that our usual ideas of diffusion and dispersal will apply.
> I suspect that we need to think about how decoherence works in a
> framework that takes into consideration a wide variety of rates and
> that considers how the phase entanglement is distributed. I have tried
> to find work examining this and only recently some papers have come
> - Show quoted text -
think that he looked at my paper and used a reference to, I think?
alligned himself with Matti Pitkanen who was a referee for the paper.
Pitkanen promotes Topological Geometrodynamics and somehow this
accounts for consciousness etc - I think? Unfortunately I am no good
at quantum field theory and GMD seems full of it - I really can't
understand any of it. He uses p-adic numbers but it's a while since I
read about it. He has quite a few papers out on vixra.org. so I guess
I should browse them again.
Best wishes
Nick
Stephen Paul King
-----Original Message-----
From: Nick Prince
Sent: Monday, April 04, 2011 1:55 PM
To: Everything List
Subject: Re: Is QTI false?
Yes Sheldrakes ideas are just the kind of thing I was thinking of. I
think that he looked at my paper and used a reference to, I think?
alligned himself with Matti Pitkanen who was a referee for the paper.
Pitkanen promotes Topological Geometrodynamics and somehow this
accounts for consciousness etc - I think? Unfortunately I am no good
at quantum field theory and GMD seems full of it - I really can't
understand any of it. He uses p-adic numbers but it's a while since I
read about it. He has quite a few papers out on vixra.org. so I guess
I should browse them again.
Best wishes
Nick
**
Hi Nick,
I know Matti well, we have been discussing his theory for quite a while
in a private group that Hitoshi Kitada hosts. He used topological notions to
try to explain consciousness. We are very interested in your comments on
his work!
Onward!
Stephen
Nick Prince
> Mathematics
> Australia http://www.hpcoders.com.au
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -
Hi Russell
Sorry I'm not making it clear what I meant – but I think I may have
got a handle on it now. I was thinking about Bruno’s thought
experiment. Suppose I am encoded in Brussels, my original is destroyed
and I am reconstituted in Moscow and Washington. The reconstitution
in Moscow is immediate, but in Washington, it takes place after a
delay of a year or so.
Now this single universe process is assumed to carry over into the
case of a universe which splits via MWI, at an appropriate time, into
one where I survive some disaster and another in which I do not. But
suppose in the one where I do not survive, the medics manage to make a
copy of me which gets activated a year or so later. This then mirrors
Bruno’s experiment. Now I think I was getting mixed up about
Microscopic and macroscopic things and thought that somehow this
violated QM in some way. However as long as the copying process
produces an “appropriate” Hamiltonian representing the “me” which is
sufficient to encapsulate what was essentially my consciousness and
“state” prior to the split, then the gap should be just the same as in
Bruno’s example. Would you (anyone) disagree? What constitutes an
appropriate Hamiltonian of me is another issue, but in principle this
is what I am thinking is the way to approach the two parallel
situations.
Best
Nick
Nick Prince
> - Show quoted text -
Well what interested me was that I thought he was saying a similar
thing as me but in a much more rigorous and very knowledgeable but
different way in terms of the physics, but accounting for all the
connections with field theory etc. However, as I said, I really did
not have the background to evaluate or understand anything he was
saying in his work. I was really very grateful that he considered my
own ideas as even worth putting in a journal when it was really only a
speculative stab at proposing a possible way in which physics might
favour the reconstitution of past structures in the absence of
information. So yes some sort of morphogenesis affect and I thought
that this might actually explain how we remember things and may be the
way that copying of consciousness might be possible.
Please convey my regards to Matti and thanks for once giving me some
consideration.
I will look at his work again.
Nick
Russell Standish
>
> Hi Russell
>
>
> Sorry I'm not making it clear what I meant – but I think I may have
> got a handle on it now. I was thinking about Bruno’s thought
> experiment. Suppose I am encoded in Brussels, my original is destroyed
> and I am reconstituted in Moscow and Washington. The reconstitution
> in Moscow is immediate, but in Washington, it takes place after a
> delay of a year or so.
>
> Now this single universe process is assumed to carry over into the
> case of a universe which splits via MWI, at an appropriate time, into
> one where I survive some disaster and another in which I do not. But
> suppose in the one where I do not survive, the medics manage to make a
> copy of me which gets activated a year or so later. This then mirrors
> Bruno’s experiment. Now I think I was getting mixed up about
> Microscopic and macroscopic things and thought that somehow this
> violated QM in some way. However as long as the copying process
> produces an “appropriate” Hamiltonian representing the “me” which is
> sufficient to encapsulate what was essentially my consciousness and
> “state” prior to the split, then the gap should be just the same as in
> Bruno’s example. Would you (anyone) disagree? What constitutes an
> appropriate Hamiltonian of me is another issue, but in principle this
> is what I am thinking is the way to approach the two parallel
> situations.
>
> Best
>
> Nick
>
Thanks Nick. I had got the wrong end of the stick. You have cleverly
highlighted an intuition pump that exposes a potential difference
between QM and COMP. If you took causality to be important for
consciousness then you would have to disagree at Bruno's step 4 of the
UDA. You would also disregard continuations that existed outside our
future light cone - such as the case of Tegmark's level 1 Multiverse
(spatially separated regions of spacetime that happen to have the same
microscopic configuration).
I think that causality is a red herring here (and possibly even a
misleading concept). What counts is consistency between prior and
successor observer moments. Then step 4 goes through in the quantum
multiverse, as it does in Bruno's teleportation experiment.
On a somewhat related issue, let me proved that time machines are
possible, in principle. Consider David Deutsch's discussion of time
travel in which he resolves the grandfather paradox by means of the
multiverse. When you travel back in time, and then folloow the normal
course of history, you will end up (with near certainty - ie
probability 1) in a different branch to where you started. If you kill
your own grandfather, you will definitely end up in a branch in which
your grandfather never had your father.
To travel in time and (multi-) space in the Multiverse has to be
equivalent to selecting a particular book from the Library of
Babel. And how might you do that? There is no catalogue - the
catalogue is somewhere there in the library, along with all its false
cousins. The only possibility is to have the book to start with, then
you could find its copy in the library. Just the same, time travel in
the multiverse requires you to have an accurate description of the
past observer moment - and the machine can only select an OM that is
consistent with your description, it cannot know which of the
infinitely many consistent OMs you had in mind, though.
So all you need to go back in time is a sufficiently powerful virtual
reality generator to generate the experience of what you remembered
being at that time. The future history will, of course, unfold
completely differently, just as in the example above, so any such
machine will be useless for winning the lottery.
Cheers
--
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
Mathematics
Nick Prince
> - Show quoted text -
Thanks for the interesting reply
Give me some time to have a think about your comments.
Nick
Nick Prince
On Apr 2, 12:08 pm, Stathis Papaioannou <stath...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 2, 2011 at 10:38 AM, Nick Prince
>
Thanks for helpfulful replies.
You say that none of this is problematic if every possibility actually
happens. I'm wondering if you are thinking of Tegmarks levels 1-4
universes. By this I mean do you think there no limits to what is
possible or that logically impossible things happen like having a
square circle or something. When people on the list talk of the
plenitude or multiverse I wonder if some think the laws of physics are
different or whether it is just the " physical constants". I accept
that most will think that level 1 is quite rich for many possiblities,
but not every possibility. I would think that Logical possibility is a
limit except logical would have to mean arithmetical truth as Bruno
speaks of. Logical - as in "common sense" can often be far from
common.
Best wishes
Nick
Stathis Papaioannou
Even Tegmark's Level 1 multiverse is sufficient to provide
continuation of consciousness at every apparently terminal event; for
example through the device of waking from a dream.
--
Stathis Papaioannou
Saibal Mitra
My point is that time as a pointer that points to what exists and what not
(anymore or yet), cannot exist. You can indeed map the set of all such
pointers to the real line. I agree that relativity is inconsistent with
such an idea of time.
Saibal
Stephen Paul King
survive a digital functional substitution of my generalised body/brain
made at that level, + Church Thesis (CT: digital = turing) + Arithmetical
Platonism (AR: the belief that arithmetical propositions obeys
classical logic, and this independently of my own cognitive ability).
To sum up: COMP = \exists n SURV-SUBST(n) + CT + AR “
for the decor.
c) CUD: there is a Concrete running of a
UD in the concrete universe.
d) 3-locality: computations are locally
implementable in the
concrete universe. That is it is possible
to separate two
implementations of two computations in such a
way that the result
of one of these computations will not
interfere with the result
of the other one. Computations can be
independent.
More generally the result of a computation is
independant of
any event occuring a long way (out of the light
cone) from that
computation.”
Church thesis and Arithmetical Realism). The UD simulates all
possible digital devices in a quasi-parallel manner).
computation of its Chaitin \Omega number).
there is a concrete universe and a concrete running of a UD in it.
This need a sort of steady state universe or an infinitely expanding
universe to run the complete infinite UD.
Suppose you let a pen falls. You want predict what will happen.
Let us suppose your brain is in state S at the beginning of the
experiment. The concrete UD will go to that state infinitely often
and compute all sort of computational continuations. This is
equivalent to reconstitutions. It follows from 11 that your
expectation are undetermined, and the domain of the indeterminism
is given by the (infinite) set of reconstitutions. To predict,
with COMP, what will happen you must take into account all
possible histories going through the state S of your brain.
And here clearly the NEURO hypothesis is not used. Even if your
real brain state is the state of the actual concrete universe,
with COMP that state will be generated (infinitely often) by the
UD. Same reasoning if your brain state is the quantum state of
the universe, so the reasoning works even if the brain is a
non local quantum object (if that exists). So the physics is
determined by the collection of your computational continuations
relatively to your first person actual state.”
14) If 'that' physics is different from
the traditional empirical
physics, then you refute COMP. But with COMP you
will not refute
COMP, isn't it? So with COMP you will derive the laws of
physics,
i.e. invariant and similarities in the 'average' continuations of
yourself (defining the measure on the computationnal continuations).
Exercice: why should we search a measure
on the computational
continuations and not just the computational states?
Hint: with
just the computational states only, COMP predicts white noise for
all experiences. (ok Chris ?). With the continuations, a priori
we must
just hunt away the 'white rabbit' continuations.
You can also show that
Schmidhuber's 'universal prior' solution
works only in the case the level of
substitution
is so low that my generalised brain is the entire multiverse.
(see below).
15) Once you explain why arithmetical
machines are statistically right
to believe in physical laws without any
real universe, such a real
universe is redundant.
By Arithmetical
Realism and OCCAM razor, there is no need
to run the concrete UD, nor is
there any need for a real concrete
Universe.
(Or you can use the movie
graph argument to show that a first
person is not able to distinguish
real/virtual/and *Arithmetical*
nature of his own implementations, and this
eliminates OCCAM.)”
>> It is a young bipolar genius, of the kind "perishing (not>> publishing)". His only work are notes that he wrote to me with the>> solution of the first open math question in my thesis. I have put>> them>> on my web pages. Here is the link:>>>>
Bruno Marchal
Hi Bruno,"Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more"!-----Original Message-----From: Bruno MarchalSent: Sunday, April 03, 2011 1:03 PMSubject: Re: Causality = 1p Continuity?>> On 03 Apr 2011, at 05:15, stephenk wrote:snip>>>> [SPK] That logical structures alone are insufficient to model our>> existence.> Correct. But arithmetical structure are enough (or please mention a> flaw in UDA).[SPK]I wish to be doubly sure that I am not arguing against a straw man, therefore I will be quoting from and commenting on:“COMP is the hypothesis that there is a level such that I
survive a digital functional substitution of my generalised body/brain
made at that level, + Church Thesis (CT: digital = turing) + Arithmetical
Platonism (AR: the belief that arithmetical propositions obeys
classical logic, and this independently of my own cognitive ability).To sum up: COMP = \exists n SURV-SUBST(n) + CT + AR “
“b) CU: there is a Concrete Universe, whatever it is. This is need
for the decor.c) CUD: there is a Concrete running of a UD in the concrete universe.
You account for this by introducing CUD (CUD necessitates the existence of CU). The CU and CUD involve a measure of change that can be identified with “time” that is invariant under parameterizations (by the teleportation with delay argument), or equivalently there must exist a spatial distance interval, because there must be some arbitrary parameter to distinguish 3-localities from each other. If all 3-localities are exactly isomorphic in their content then by the law of indiscernibles they are all one and the same. All that one would have, maybe, is endomorphic maps from the 3-local to the 3-local, but even those would require the existence of a concrete structure that is their dual.
But this invariance does not eliminate the fact that the UD must be run to be said to generate the digital simulations that are equivalent (under 10 –13 of UDA) to 1p and their continuations.
This parameterization invariant notion of time (or space) is necessary for any expression/implementation of AR.
AR must be expressible as some belief in each 1p (modulo coherent and soundness):
for AR to exist
then it is necessary that a 1p believe that AR exists and the statement “AR exists” is true. If the belief that AR exists cannot be expressed by a CUD then AR cannot be said to exist since it would be impossible to express the statement “AR exists”. Diagonalizations require some form of CU support or else they all collapse into Nothing.
You then argue that AR + OCCAM allows you to eliminate CUD and thus CU.
But there is a problem with this! AR necessitates CUD to be distinct from Nothing (per R. Standish’s definition and argument http://www.amazon.com/Theory-Nothing-Russell-Standish/dp/1921019638/)!
Just because “Real” and “Virtual” are 1p indistinguishable (which is an isomorphism) does not necessitate that Arithmetic representations of the 1p = 1p (which is an identity).
To do this is to violate the Representation theorem because an isomorphism is not an identity, it is a mapping between two distinct entities.1) SURV-SUBST(n) implies the existence of 1p
2) SURV-SUBST(n) necessitates CUD.
3) 1p necessitates CUD.
4) if CUD does not exist, then neither does SURV-SUBST(n) and thus 1p does not exist.5) if 1p does not exist, then AR cannot be expressed since AR/1p = Nothing.6) If AR cannot express on any 1p, then AR cannot exist.7) Thus if CUD does not exist, then AR does not exist.
QED.You are assuming that AR can exist and be expressive without any support or supervenience. How is this so? Consider how AR must exist as distinct from Nothing otherwise AR is equivalent to Nothing
and have no properties or orderings or valuations or distinguishing features or properties at all. We see in the Representation theorem that “every abstract structure with certain properties is isomorphic to a concrete structure (such as a transformation group on some set.).” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representation_theorem
For AR to exist as distinct from Nothing then there must exist a concrete structure, a CU,
that it is isomorphic to and yet is distinct from by any 1p. This is especially important in light of the fact that the CU that is necessary for the UD
requires a parameter invariant notion of interval and this requirement cannot be achieved if AR = Nothing. This kind of flaw flows, in my humble opinion, from the mistake of assuming that because we can map the sequencing of events in a 1p history to the positive Reals then the sequence of events of all 1p = the positive reals. This reasoning fails because of the requirements of general covariance that is an empirically verified fact of our experienciable reality.
General covariance demands that for all of the representations of the symmetry groups of the CU there exists a smooth diffeomorphism between them for all 1p; all observers must see the same form of physical laws otherwise there is a preferred frame of reference. A preferred frame of reference is equivalent (via your “real is indistinguishable from virtual” argument!)
to a special 1p that can act as a computational oracle to decide whether or not any given generic 1p contains self-contradictory information, white rabbits, cul-de-sacs, etc. I believe that the “measure” that you keep referencing is just another form of this oracle. If that oracle exists then P=NP! See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P_versus_NP_problem
In conclusion: Unless one has something to be mindful of there is no need to have a mind at all. A mind at least must have a concrete implementation of itself to be able to exist for some other mind. A mind that does not exist for any other Mind has not means to define itself as distinct from Nothing.
>> We need the physical world to be the interface between our>> separate minds,> Eventually with comp, the physical world is recovered by defining it> as an interface between our different minds, or as the gluing dreams> processes. We need a physical world. No doubt on this. The point is> that we don't need a primary physical world.[SPK]I agree 100%. We do not need a “primary physical world”.
But by my argument above we do need some non-primary form of CU to run the UD so that AR can be expressed.
Unless there exists a CU there cannot be a AR since AR is isomorphic to some CU per the representation theorem.
It is necessary for both Abstract and Concrete structures to exist as distinct from Nothing.
Stephen Paul King
Russell Standish
> Hi Bruno,
>
>
> Onward!
>
> Stephen
>
I confess I got lost too with your presentation. My gut feeling is your
discomfort stems from an "almost magical" insertion of the subjective
(ie a knower) into the UDA. Another way of putting it is "what runs
the UD?".
However, the knower is introduced explicitly with the "yes, doctor"
assumption - that I survive with my "brain" substituted by a digital
device. What is this "I" if it isn't the knower? What possible meaning
can "survive" have, without there being a sense of "being"?
Externally, a UD just exists as a static program (just a number that
exists platonically). However, once you have a knower, you can run the
UD, albeit viewed from the inside. In my book I make this explicit
with the TIME postulate, but I don't see anything hugely controversial
about it. It is not referring to any external time, just that the
knower cannot experience all experiences at once.
Have I put my finger on it, or is this just wide of the mark?
Stephen Paul King
AR must be expressible as some belief in each 1p (modulo coherent and soundness):
for AR to exist
then it is necessary that a 1p believe that AR exists and the statement “AR exists” is true. If the belief that AR exists cannot be expressed by a CUD then AR cannot be said to exist since it would be impossible to express the statement “AR exists”. Diagonalizations require some form of CU support or else they all collapse into Nothing.
For AR to exist as distinct from Nothing then there must exist a concrete structure, a CU,
Bruno Marchal
Hi Bruno,
Ummm,, again I completely fail to communicate a basic idea to you. My apologies.
Have you read Russell’s book?
Stephen Paul King
Bruno Marchal
-----Original Message-----From: Russell StandishSent: Wednesday, April 13, 2011 8:07 PMSubject: Re: A possible flaw un UDA?I confess I got lost too with your presentation. My gut feeling is yourdiscomfort stems from an "almost magical" insertion of the subjective(ie a knower) into the UDA. Another way of putting it is "what runsthe UD?".However, the knower is introduced explicitly with the "yes, doctor"assumption - that I survive with my "brain" substituted by a digitaldevice. What is this "I" if it isn't the knower? What possible meaningcan "survive" have, without there being a sense of "being"?
Externally, a UD just exists as a static program (just a number thatexists platonically). However, once you have a knower, you can run theUD, albeit viewed from the inside. In my book I make this explicitwith the TIME postulate, but I don't see anything hugely controversialabout it. It is not referring to any external time, just that theknower cannot experience all experiences at once.
Have I put my finger on it, or is this just wide of the mark?--**[SPK] Hi Russell,Yes, that is part of the discomfort. Another is a feeling that the UDA is the semantic equivalent of building a beautiful castle in midair. One first erects is a brilliant scaffolding then inserts the castle high up on top of the scaffolding. We then are invited to think that the castle will stay in place after the scaffolding is removed. Let me be clear, I find Bruno's idea to be work of pure genius. I delight in it and I deeply admire Bruno and his tenacity. I just was to remove these nagging doubts I have about it. I want to be absolutely sure that it can stand up to ferocious and diligent attacks before I will commit to it.
Let us consider in detail an idea that emerged here in my post and Bruno's response:***start cut/pasteHi Stephen,On 13 Apr 2011, at 02:35, Stephen Paul King wrote:AR must be expressible as some belief in each 1p (modulo coherent and soundness):[BM] Why? It is true, but I don't see the relevance.
for AR to exist[BM]What do you mean by "AR exists"? That is ambiguous. And what you are saying begin to look like "archeology is needed for dinosaur to exist". The very idea of AR is that 1+1=2 does not need a human for being true. Of course, a human or some alien is needed to say that "1+1=2" is believed.
then it is necessary that a 1p believe that AR exists and the statement “AR exists” is true. If the belief that AR exists cannot be expressed by a CUD then AR cannot be said to exist since it would be impossible to express the statement “AR exists”. Diagonalizations require some form of CU support or else they all collapse into Nothing.[BM] Why does diagonalization need a CU?...
For AR to exist as distinct from Nothing then there must exist a concrete structure, a CU,[BM] I doubt this.end cut/paste***Why does diagonalization need a concrete universe? So that it can represent something other than itself to some thing other than itself. Does not more than one 1p exist? If only one 1p can exist then we have a perfect example of a solipsism, no? If the 1p are purely relations between numbers “as seen from the inside” (an idea that I find to be wonderful and useful and expressed in the myth of the Net of Indra), does this not lead to a duality between the numbers and the representations that the multiple 1p have of themselves, a duality exactly like what we see in the representation theorems that I have referenced previously?What I am thinking is that the sum of the inside views of the 1p is a CU that cannot be removed or reduced to just the existence of the numbers themselves so long as the numbers are collection of entities that have some differences between themselves. In other words the numbers are not Nothing.
They are “something to something else” and that ‘somethingness’ is concrete and irreducible even if it is the “inside looking out” aspect of the numbers. The fact that there is an ‘inside’ that is different from an ‘outside’ demands the kind of duality that I am proposing.
We talk a lot about Gödel's brilliant idea of representing propositions of a theory that includes arithmetic using arithmetic statements so that we can consider the theory to be able to “make statements about itself”. We go on and consider Turing and others that showed how this can be done in wider settings. All well and good. But do these “theories” or “abstract machines” actually have the property that we are ascribing to them absent a “knower”, to use your word and implied definition? What does it means to claim that something has such and such properties when it is in principle impossible to determine if indeed that claim is true? That sounds a bit too much like the idea of blind faith that we chastise religious fanatics for!
Sure, we can go thru a long litany of reasonings and tangential evidence and analogies, but if we remove the very ability to determine truth as we know it,
how can we continue to claim that truth exists unsupported (in the sense of supervenience) by any representation of it that is not the entity itself? Please help me figure this out. Can truth exist if all that exists is Nothing without an Everything that is its dual (as per your and Hal Ruhl’s definition) and capable of manifesting concreteness?
I think that “the knower cannot experience all experiences at once” is telling us something very important about what a knower is, something not obvious!
Did you see my response to Russell’s comment on this thread? I was using his definition of Nothing that is defined in his book.
I have more questions that puzzle me from your responses. You wrote: “ The reason I assumed explicitly AR was for reason of clarity, but AR is redundant, given that you need it to make sense of Church thesis. As it is written in sane04, and in the text you quote AR is just the idea that classical logic can be applied to arithmetic. “What is the status of AR now in your thinking?
“AR gives all you need to have a concrete (even if immaterial) implementation of the UD. In a sense, it arguable that AR is more concrete than anything suggested by physical experiments and physical theories.”Does not AR require a 1p, such that we cannot say that one can exist without the other?
Colin Hales
I was wondering if anyone out there knows of any papers that connect
computational processes to thermodynamics in some organized fashion. The
sort of thing I am looking for would have statements saying
cooling is ....(info/computational equivalent)
pressure is ..(info/computational equivalent)
temperature is ....
volume is ....
entropy is ....
I have found a few but I think I am missing the good stuff.
here's one ...
Reiss, H. 'Thermodynamic-Like Transformations in Information Theory',
Journal of Statistical Physics vol. 1, no. 1, 1969. 107-131.
cheers
colin
Russell Standish
has some good introductions to it in his Lectures in Physics series (I
forget which volume), IIRC. This was more focussed on the
thermodynamics of computation (eg what efficiency limits are there on
processing bits).
Later on, there was some work basing statistical mechanics on
information theory. Denbigh and Denbigh was a good book from the early
'80s that talked about this. This stuff is kind of the reverse side of
the coin to Slizard's stuff.
Cheers
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
> To post to this group, send email to everyth...@googlegroups.com.
> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com.
> For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
--
Bruno Marchal
Energy cost is due to erasure of information only (Landauer
principle), and you can compute without erasing anything, as you need
to do if you do quantum computation. You might search on Landauer,
Bennett, Zurek, and on the Maxwell daemon.
Bruno
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
> Groups "Everything List" group.
> To post to this group, send email to everyth...@googlegroups.com.
> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com
> .
> For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en
> .
>
Stephen Paul King
Evgenii Rudnyi
I used to work in chemical thermodynamics for awhile and I give you the
answer from such a viewpoint. As this is the area that I know, then my
message will be a bit long and I guess it differs from the viewpoint of
people in information theory.
CLASSICAL THERMODYNAMICS
First entropy has been defined in classical thermodynamics and the best
is to start with it. Basically here
The Zeroth Law defines the temperature. "If two systems are in thermal
equilibrium with a third system, then they are in thermal equilibrium
with each other".
The Second Law defines the entropy. "There exist an additive state
function such that dS >= dQ/T" (The heat Q is not a state function)
The Third Law additionally defines that at zero K the change in entropy
is zero for all processes that allows us to define unambiguously the
absolute entropy. Note that for the energy we always have the difference
only (with an exception of E = mc^2).
That's it. The rest follows from above, well clearly you need also the
First Law to define the internal energy. I mean this is enough to
determine entropy in practical applications. Please just tell me entropy
of what do you want to evaluate and I will describe you how it could be
done.
A nice book about classical thermodynamics is The Tragicomedy of
Classical Thermodynamics by Truesdell but please do not take it too
seriously. Everything that he writes is correct but somehow classical
thermodynamics survived until now, though I am afraid it is a bit
exotic. Well, if someone needs numerical values of the entropy, then
people do it the usual way of classical thermodynamics.
STATISTICAL THERMODYNAMICS
Statistical thermodynamics was developed after the classical
thermodynamics and I guess many believe that it has completely replaced
the classical thermodynamics. The Boltzmann equation for the entropy
looks so attractive that most people are acquainted with it only and I
am afraid that they do not quite know the business with heat engines
that actually were the original point for the entropy.
Here let me repeat that I have written recently to this list about heat
vs. molecular motion, as this give you an idea about the difference
between statistical and classical thermodynamics (replace heat by
classical thermodynamics and molecular motion by statistical).
At the beginning, the molecules and atoms were considered as hard
spheres. At this state, there was the problem as follows. We bring a
glass of hot water in the room and leave it there. Eventually the
temperature of the water will be equal to the ambient temperature.
According to the heat theory, the temperature in the glass will be hot
again spontaneously and it is in complete agreement with our experience.
With molecular motion, if we consider them as hard spheres there is a
nonzero chance that the water in the glass will be hot again. Moreover,
there is a theorem (Poincar� recurrence) that states that if we wait
long enough then the temperature of the glass must be hot again. No
doubt, the chances are very small and time to wait is very long, in a
way this is negligible. Yet some people are happy with such statistical
explanation, some not. Hence, it is a bit too simple to say that
molecular motion has eliminated heat at this level.
INFORMATION ENTROPY
Shannon has defined the information entropy similar way to the Boltzmann
equation for the entropy. Since them many believe that Shannon's entropy
is the same as the thermodynamic entropy. In my view this is wrong as
this is why
http://blog.rudnyi.ru/2010/12/entropy-and-artificial-life.html
I believe that here everything depends on definitions and if we start
with the entropy as defined by classical thermodynamics then it has
nothing to do with information.
INFORMATION AND THERMODYNAMIC ENTROPY
Said above, in my viewpoint there is meaningful research where people
try to estimate the thermodynamic limit for the number of operations.
The idea here to use kT as a reference. I remember that there was a nice
description on that with references in
Nanoelectronics and Information Technology, ed Rainer Waser
I believe that somewhere in introduction but now I am not sure now. By
the way the book is very good but I am not sure if it as such is what
you are looking for.
Evgenii
On 15.04.2011 02:27 Colin Hales said the following:
meekerdb
relation is between what constraint you impose on the substance and
dQ/T. You note that it is calculated assuming constant pressure - that
is a constraint; another is assuming constant energy. In terms of the
phase space in a statistical mechanics model, this is confining the
system to a hypersurface in the the phase space. If you had more
information about the system, e.g. you knew all the molecules were
moving the same direction (as in a rocket exhaust) that you further
reduce the part of phase space and the entropy. If you knew the
proportions of molecular species that would reduce it further. In
rocket exhaust calculations the assumption of fixed species proportion
is often made as an approximation - it's referred to as a frozen entropy
calculation. If the species react that changes the size of phase space
and hence the Boltzmann measure of entropy.
Brent
Evgenii Rudnyi
> Entropy and information are related. In classical thermodynamics the
> relation is between what constraint you impose on the substance and
> dQ/T. You note that it is calculated assuming constant pressure -
> that is a constraint; another is assuming constant energy. In terms
> of the phase space in a statistical mechanics model, this is
> confining the system to a hypersurface in the the phase space. If you
> had more information about the system, e.g. you knew all the
> molecules were moving the same direction (as in a rocket exhaust)
> that you further reduce the part of phase space and the entropy. If
> you knew the proportions of molecular species that would reduce it
> further. In rocket exhaust calculations the assumption of fixed
> species proportion is often made as an approximation - it's referred
> to as a frozen entropy calculation. If the species react that changes
> the size of phase space and hence the Boltzmann measure of entropy.
>
> Brent
First how do you define information? According to Shannon?
Then if we consider a thermodynamic system, the Second Law
dS >= dQ/T
does not impose constraints as such. It is held for any closed system
and for any process. The only assumption here is that the system
possesses a temperature. If one can define temperature than the entropy
follows according to the Second Law unambiguously and I do not see how
one additionally will need information, whatever it means.
If you speak about reaction chemistry, let us consider a simple exercise
from classical thermodynamics.
Problem. Given temperature, pressure, and initial number of moles of
NH3, N2 and H2, compute the equilibrium composition.
To solve the problem one should find thermodynamic properties of NH3, N2
and H2 for example in the JANAF Tables and then compute the equilibrium
constant.
From thermodynamics tables (all values are molar values for the
standard pressure 1 bar, I have omitted the symbol o for simplicity but
it is very important not to forget it):
Del_f_H_298(NH3), S_298(NH3), Cp(NH3), Del_f_H_298(N2), S_298(N2),
Cp(N2), Del_f_H_298(H2), S_298(H2), Cp(H2)
2NH3 = N2 + 3H2
Del_H_r_298 = Del_f_H_298(N2) + 3 Del_f_H_298(H2) - 2 Del_f_H_298(NH3)
Del_S_r_298 = S_298(N2) + 3 S_298(H2) - 2 S_298(NH3)
Del_Cp_r = Cp(N2) + 3 Cp(H2) - 2 Cp(NH3)
To make life simple, I will assume below that Del_Cp_r = 0, but it is
not a big deal to extend the equations to include heat capacities as well.
Del_G_r_T = Del_H_r_298 - T Del_S_r_298
Del_G_r_T = - R T ln Kp
When Kp, total pressure and the initial number of moles are given, it is
rather straightforward to compute equilibrium composition. So, the
entropy is there. What do you mean when you state that information is
also involved? Where is in this example the related information, again
whatever it is?