[KevinTryon: Jacques Mallah]

[russell standish-2]

----- Forwarded message from Kevin Tryon <KevinTryon@...> -----

I see that one of the earlier participants on the Everything list has now
taken it upon himself to educate the masses because the "cat is out of the
bag" and QI has become a familiar topic to many.


http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0902/0902.0187.pdf


Does he say anything in this article that he hasn't said on the Everything
list in his struggles against QI?



----- End forwarded message -----

I have now read the whole of Jacques Mallah's "paper", and to put it
mildly, it is disappointing. I would have expected more from him. It
is neither the "definitive debunking" hoped for by the author, nor is
it persuasive in the rhetorical sense. What little technical detail he
provides obscures, rather than illuminates the issue.

So what is the paper? I mentioned the interesting comment on how we
should expect to find ourselves a Boltzmann brain shortly after the
big bang, but there was no follow up to this. I have no idea how he
came up with that notion.

His discussion of the Born rule is incorrect. The probability given by
the Born rule is not the square of the state vector, but rather the square
modulus of the inner product of some eigenvector with the original
state, appropriately normalised to make it a probability. After
observation, the state vector describing the new will be proportional
to the eigenvector corresponding the measured eigenvalue, but nothing
in QM says anything about its amplitude. Indeed it is conventional to
normalise the resulting state vector, as a computational convenience -
but this is an entirely different proposition to Mallah's.

What I think he is trying to discuss, somewhat clumsily, in the
section on measure, is the ASSA notion of a unique well-defined
measure for all observer moments. This has been discussed in this
list extensively, and also summarised in my book. But it would sure
confuse anyone not familiar with the notion.

He goes on to mention rather briefly in passing his doomsday style
argument against QI, but not in detail. Which is just as well, as that
argument predicts that we should be neonatal infants!

He also mentions Tegmark's amoeba croaks argument, which is not
actually an argument against QI, but rather a discussion of what QI
might actually mean. Contrary to what some people might think, QI
doesn't predict one would necessarily experience being vastly older
than the rest of the population. It just predicts that we should all
experience a "good innings", and that what happens after that is
rather unpredictable - it may be lapsing into senesence, it may be followed
by rebirth into a different consciousness, it may be a form of
afterlife, or of uploading Singulatarian style.

So sorry Jacques - you need to do better. I'm sure you can!

Cheers
--

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[Jack Mallah]

--- On Fri, 2/6/09, russell standish <lists@...> wrote:
> So sorry Jacques - you need to do better. I'm sure you can!

Russell, I expected there might be some discussion of my latest eprint on this list.  That's why I'm here now - to see if there are any clarifications I should make in it.  I intend to make it better - and perhaps I'll have you guys to thank!

Don't expect me to stick around.  I see the list hasn't changed much - Bruno is still pushing his crackpot UDA.  I could tell you what's wrong with his MGA, but I'm here to deal with the QS paper first.

> http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0902/0902.0187.pdf

> I mentioned the interesting comment on how we should expect to find ourselves a Boltzmann brain shortly after the big bang, but there was no follow up to this. I have no idea how he came up with that notion.

I wrote
"If one denies that the amount of “a person’s” consciousness can change as a function of time after it begins to exist and as long as there is at least some of it left, then in the quantum MWI, since there deterministically is some slight amplitude that any given particle configuration (such as that of a person’s brain) exists even shortly after the Big Bang, there would again be no reason to expect that a typical person would be the result of normal evolutionary processes – you would have been ‘born’ way back then."

Seems pretty straightforward to me:
1. Initially, before evolution occurred, a typical Boltzmann brain (BB) had about the same measure as a brain which was like what we consider a normal person's (an atypical BB).
2. The typical BB's all together vastly outnumbered the atypical ones, so they had much more total measure.
3. We are assuming here that a person's measure can't change as a function of time.
4. Therefore the initial measure advantage of the typical BB's would hold for all time.

Perhaps I should spell out the steps like that in the paper, but I thought it was self-explanatory already.

> His discussion of the Born rule is incorrect. The probability given by
> the Born rule is not the square of the state vector

Russell, Jesse Mazer has already pointed out that it is your discussion of my discussion of it that is incorrect.  It's true that people use various terminology (maybe I should have said squared norm instead of squared amplitude) and I was trying to keep technicalities to a minimum.  See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probability_amplitude

> After observation, the state vector describing the new will be
> proportional to the eigenvector corresponding the measured eigenvalue,
> but nothing in QM says anything about its amplitude. Indeed it is
> conventional to normalise the resulting state vector

That only makes sense in a collapse interpretation (or for practical convenience).  My guess is you looked up the Born Rule in some textbook and naturally it did not have an MWI perspective.

> What I think he is trying to discuss, somewhat clumsily, in the
> section on measure, is the ASSA notion of a unique well-defined
> measure for all observer moments.

The charge of 'clumsiness' is too vague for me to do anything about, so perhaps you could be more specific.  As for self-sampling, I didn't want to use that term because it can create the confusion that something random is really going on.  Instead I covered the Bayesian issues in my sections on the Reflection Argument and Theory Confirmation.

> He goes on to mention rather briefly in passing his doomsday style
> argument against QI, but not in detail.

I think the argument is presented in full.  What part is missing?

> Which is just as well, as that argument predicts that we should be neonatal infants!

I remembered that odd confusion of yours has been discussed on the list before, so I Googled it.  I found a 2003 post by Saibal Mitra that covers it.  I think I must have posted about it too, in the old days.

http://www.mail-archive.com/everything-list@.../msg04697.html

> "... once you take into account the possibility of dying then you will see a decrease. But ignoring that, the measure should be conserved. The measure for being in a particular state at age 30 should be much smaller than the measure for being in a particular state at age 4, but after summation over all possible states you can be in, you should find that the total measure is conserved."

Suppose you differentiate into N states, then on average each has 1/N of your original measure.  I guess that's why you think the measure decreases.  But the sum of the measures is N/N of the original.

This is trivially obvious so I saw no reason to mention it explicitly in the paper.  If there are people other than Russell with the same confusion, then I may add it in.

> He also mentions Tegmark's amoeba croaks argument, which is not
> actually an argument against QI, but rather a discussion of
> what QI might actually mean.

I quoted Tegmark verbatim.  He says "my brain cells will gradually give out (indeed, that's already started happening...) so that I keep feeling self-aware, but less and less so, the final "death" being quite anti-climactic, sort of like when an amoeba croaks."

'Final death' - those are his words, not mine.  You may not agree with him, but I don't see how you can deny that he is arguing against QI.

The discussion on amnesia and personal identity is very relevant, as perhaps people will realize that personal idenity is not well defined and that the whole QS/QI thing doesn't make any sense.




     


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[Brian Tenneson]

Dear Everything List,

Tegmark mentioned in an article the idea of self-aware structures, SAS.  
He wrote that the search for such structures is ongoing, i.e., he
postulated the existence of such structures without giving examples.

I'm wondering if consciousness and self-awareness has been
"mathematized" somewhere, preferably in documents I can download without
academic affiliation / subscription.

I'm inclined to thing agents might be a pathway to this end, as well as
what David Wolpert is calling a device.

Do any of the formalizations come close to being reflective of human
consciousness?  In other words a mathematical model of human consciousness?

Thank you.

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[Jesse Mazer]

Some parts of this message have been removed. Learn more about Nabble's security policy.

It seems to me that discussions of quantum immortality often founder on the fact that people don't make their assumptions about philosophy of mind explicit, or don't have a well-thought-out position on metaphysical issues relating to mind in the first place. For example, Jaques, are you assuming a purely physicalist metaphysics where the only truths are physical truths, or are you open to the idea that there might be truths about subjectivity (such as truths about what philosophers call 'qualia') which cannot be reduced to purely physical statements? Are you familiar with the ideas of philosopher David Chalmers, who takes the latter position? He doesn't advocate interactive dualism, where there's some kind of soul-stuff that can influence matter--he assumes that the physical world is "causally closed", so all physical events have purely physical causes, including all human behavior--but he argues that first-person subjective states and qualia are ontologically distinct from the brainstates that are associated with them, and that there may be some set of "psychophysical laws" which determine the relation between third-person-describable brainstates and first-person mental states. 

If one buys into the possibility of objective truths about mental states/qualia and psychophysical laws, it wouldn't be such a stretch to imagine that there may be objective truths about the first-person probabilities of experiencing different branches in either the MWI or duplication experiments in a single universe (so that you don't have to rely on decision theory, which depends on non-objective choices about which future possibilities you 'care' about, to discuss quantum immortality), and that these probabilities could be determined by some combination of an objective physical measure on different brainstates and some set of "psychophysical laws". If so, the question of quantum immortality would boil down to whether a given mind always has a 100% chance of experiencing a "next" observer-moment as long as a "next" brainstate exists somewhere, or whether there is some nonzero chance of one's flow of experience just ending.

Jesse

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[John Mikes]

Brian,

 

this reply of mine may be out of line usually followed on this list. I have had discussions on a dozen closely and remotely concerned lists over the past 17 years about the "thing?" called consciousness, following the yearly international conferences in Tucson AZ without a universally reached agreement WHAT to call so. Philosophers, neuroscientists, linguists, you name it, even physicists apply the 'name' to whatever fits their domains. It is a historically composed U-F-O - one variant being "awareness" another one "human". I settled with the 'functional' view, an activity? of relationships not restricted, so I was looking for the generalization of the many desultory phenomena coming up under this title.

 

What boiled down to not finding a limit in 'human', not even in 'living' (what is hard to identify to begin with) but a functional relationship all over. The early generalized ID came up as 'response to information' requiring a pointer to resonse: 'acknowledgement of and...' identifying at that time the 'information' concept as an 'acknowledged change...' (not specified  TO... and WHAT KIND OF...). I know: it needs further work in wording.

With such openness of conceptualization it seems far fetched to put it into a definitive mathematical framework. 

Even in the case of a precise ID it may include non-mathematical domains (non physical as well: of course). 

The 'cutest' reply I received to my frequent inquery "what is Ccness?" was 

"Everybody knows what it is!" - Yes, but everybody knows it differently. 

 

I have no answers and am far away from fundamental understanding, (as an example: the 'numbers' are discontinuous entities and most processes are part of a continuum. Especially the mental ones (awareness).) -  we don't know the first thing of this world (Ccnss) we so precisely describe.

How does A  "turn" INTO B (smoothly!) if there is a gap in between? (The infinitesimals are still separate and calculus was the artifact to escape from this dilemma - a belief, not a real case indeed).

 

And please, save me from ancient sophistication, millennia ago the (Greek etc.) epistemic cognitive inventory of humanity was much much meagerer and 'smart' thinking was easier.  In David Bohm's principles: beyond increasing our 'explicate' world from the (unknown) 'implicate' we did a lot (what he did not include!) in Nicolas de Cusa's 3rd principle: to 'complicate' our world (at least our views about it). The ancients had is 'simplicate'-ly.

Oriental philosophy acknowledged our ignorance and blurrly built upon it.

(so do Zadeh and the 'fuzzy' scientists nowadays).

 

Best regards

 

John Mikes

 

 

 

On Sat, Feb 7, 2009 at 1:57 PM, Brian Tenneson <tennesb@...> wrote:

Dear Everything List,

Tegmark mentioned in an article the idea of self-aware structures, SAS.
He wrote that the search for such structures is ongoing, i.e., he
postulated the existence of such structures without giving examples.

I'm wondering if consciousness and self-awareness has been
"mathematized" somewhere, preferably in documents I can download without
academic affiliation / subscription.

I'm inclined to thing agents might be a pathway to this end, as well as
what David Wolpert is calling a device.

Do any of the formalizations come close to being reflective of human
consciousness?  In other words a mathematical model of human consciousness?

Thank you.

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[Quentin Anciaux-2]

Hi,

2009/2/7 Jack Mallah <jackmallah@...>

--- On Fri, 2/6/09, russell standish <lists@...> wrote:
> So sorry Jacques - you need to do better. I'm sure you can!

Russell, I expected there might be some discussion of my latest eprint on this list.  That's why I'm here now - to see if there are any clarifications I should make in it.  I intend to make it better - and perhaps I'll have you guys to thank!

Don't expect me to stick around.  I see the list hasn't changed much - Bruno is still pushing his crackpot UDA.  I could tell you what's wrong with his MGA, but I'm here to deal with the QS paper first.

Well I'm following this list from a long time now (even when you were still here) and I didn't see any proof from you of the crackpoting of UDA, if you don't mind to stay a little, I'd like to here your debunking of it.
 

> http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0902/0902.0187.pdf

> I mentioned the interesting comment on how we should expect to find ourselves a Boltzmann brain shortly after the big bang, but there was no follow up to this. I have no idea how he came up with that notion.

I wrote
"If one denies that the amount of "a person's" consciousness can change as a function of time after it begins to exist and as long as there is at least some of it left, then in the quantum MWI, since there deterministically is some slight amplitude that any given particle configuration (such as that of a person's brain) exists even shortly after the Big Bang, there would again be no reason to expect that a typical person would be the result of normal evolutionary processes – you would have been 'born' way back then."

Seems pretty straightforward to me:
1. Initially, before evolution occurred, a typical Boltzmann brain (BB) had about the same measure as a brain which was like what we consider a normal person's (an atypical BB).
2. The typical BB's all together vastly outnumbered the atypical ones, so they had much more total measure.
3. We are assuming here that a person's measure can't change as a function of time.
4. Therefore the initial measure advantage of the typical BB's would hold for all time.

You are here explicitely assuming ASSA, meaning that there exists an absolute measure over all OM... which seems to me dubious. Your argument here is not valid for relative continuation (RSSA).

Your argument is true for ASSA, but the thinking that there exists an absolute measure is non-sense for me.

Perhaps I should spell out the steps like that in the paper, but I thought it was self-explanatory already.

> His discussion of the Born rule is incorrect. The probability given by
> the Born rule is not the square of the state vector

Russell, Jesse Mazer has already pointed out that it is your discussion of my discussion of it that is incorrect.  It's true that people use various terminology (maybe I should have said squared norm instead of squared amplitude) and I was trying to keep technicalities to a minimum.  See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probability_amplitude

> After observation, the state vector describing the new will be
> proportional to the eigenvector corresponding the measured eigenvalue,
> but nothing in QM says anything about its amplitude. Indeed it is
> conventional to normalise the resulting state vector

That only makes sense in a collapse interpretation (or for practical convenience).  My guess is you looked up the Born Rule in some textbook and naturally it did not have an MWI perspective.

> What I think he is trying to discuss, somewhat clumsily, in the
> section on measure, is the ASSA notion of a unique well-defined
> measure for all observer moments.

The charge of 'clumsiness' is too vague for me to do anything about, so perhaps you could be more specific.  As for self-sampling, I didn't want to use that term because it can create the confusion that something random is really going on.  Instead I covered the Bayesian issues in my sections on the Reflection Argument and Theory Confirmation.

What measure then are you talking about ? Bayesian probabilities are relative, it is non-sense to talk about absolute measure.
 

> He goes on to mention rather briefly in passing his doomsday style
> argument against QI, but not in detail.

I think the argument is presented in full.  What part is missing?

What happen to your "you" ?
 

> Which is just as well, as that argument predicts that we should be neonatal infants!

I remembered that odd confusion of yours has been discussed on the list before, so I Googled it.  I found a 2003 post by Saibal Mitra that covers it.  I think I must have posted about it too, in the old days.

http://www.mail-archive.com/everything-list@.../msg04697.html

Well if absolute measure was true at the beginning I should live in a hyper galactical empire with billions and billions human being... it's not the case. Or even better I should not even age and live forever in a crowded place.
 

> "... once you take into account the possibility of dying then you will see a decrease. But ignoring that, the measure should be conserved. The measure for being in a particular state at age 30 should be much smaller than the measure for being in a particular state at age 4, but after summation over all possible states you can be in, you should find that the total measure is conserved."

Suppose you differentiate into N states, then on average each has 1/N of your original measure.  I guess that's why you think the measure decreases.  But the sum of the measures is N/N of the original.

This is trivially obvious so I saw no reason to mention it explicitly in the paper.  If there are people other than Russell with the same confusion, then I may add it in.

> He also mentions Tegmark's amoeba croaks argument, which is not
> actually an argument against QI, but rather a discussion of
> what QI might actually mean.

I quoted Tegmark verbatim.  He says "my brain cells will gradually give out (indeed, that's already started happening...) so that I keep feeling self-aware, but less and less so, the final "death" being quite anti-climactic, sort of like when an amoeba croaks."

'Final death' - those are his words, not mine.  You may not agree with him, but I don't see how you can deny that he is arguing against QI.

The discussion on amnesia and personal identity is very relevant, as perhaps people will realize that personal idenity is not well defined and that the whole QS/QI thing doesn't make any sense.

I agree with you here. As long as I don't have any convincing argument that I could be me without my memories, I equate personnal identity with memories.


Regards,
Quentin
 

--
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.

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[russell standish-2]

On Sat, Feb 07, 2009 at 10:05:14AM -0800, Jack Mallah wrote:
>
> --- On Fri, 2/6/09, russell standish <lists@...> wrote:
> > So sorry Jacques - you need to do better. I'm sure you can!
>
> Russell, I expected there might be some discussion of my latest eprint on this list.  That's why I'm here now - to see if there are any clarifications I should make in it.  I intend to make it better - and perhaps I'll have you guys to thank!

I'm happy to help - hopefully any criticisms I and others make will be
constructive. But it may take a few days, as work commitments intervene!

>
> > What I think he is trying to discuss, somewhat clumsily, in the
> > section on measure, is the ASSA notion of a unique well-defined
> > measure for all observer moments.
>
> The charge of 'clumsiness' is too vague for me to do anything about, so perhaps you could be more specific.  As for self-sampling, I didn't want to use that term because it can create the confusion that something random is really going on.  Instead I covered the Bayesian issues in my sections on the Reflection Argument and Theory Confirmation.

Fair comment. I will try to be more specific. But for now, take it as
a signpost that the discussion does not adequately explain the
concepts of "amount of consciousness", "effective probability",
the sampling measure used in anthropic arguments and the
interrelations between all of these.


--

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[Stathis Papaioannou-2]

2009/2/8 Jack Mallah <jackmallah@...>:

> Suppose you differentiate into N states, then on average each has 1/N of your original measure.  I guess that's why you think the measure decreases.  But the sum of the measures is N/N of the original.
>
> This is trivially obvious so I saw no reason to mention it explicitly in the paper.  If there are people other than Russell with the same confusion, then I may add it in.

I still find this confusing. Your argument seems to be that you won't
live to 1000 because the measure of 1000 year old versions of you in
the multiverse is very small - the total consciousness across the
multiverse is much less for 1000 year olds than 30 year olds. But by
an analogous argument, the measure of 4 year old OM's is higher than
that of 30 year old OM's, since you might die between age 4 and 30.
But here you are, an adult rather than a child. Should you feel your
consciousness more thinly spread or something?


--
Stathis Papaioannou

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[Günther Greindl]

Brian,

Tononi's information integration view of consciousness might fit your bill.

Overview:
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/jun08/6315

Paper (open access):
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2202/5/42

Cheers,
Günther

Brian Tenneson wrote:

> Dear Everything List,
>
> Tegmark mentioned in an article the idea of self-aware structures, SAS.  
> He wrote that the search for such structures is ongoing, i.e., he
> postulated the existence of such structures without giving examples.
>
> I'm wondering if consciousness and self-awareness has been
> "mathematized" somewhere, preferably in documents I can download without
> academic affiliation / subscription.
>
> I'm inclined to thing agents might be a pathway to this end, as well as
> what David Wolpert is calling a device.
>
> Do any of the formalizations come close to being reflective of human
> consciousness?  In other words a mathematical model of human consciousness?
>
> Thank you.
>
> >
>

--
Günther Greindl
Department of Philosophy of Science
University of Vienna
guenther.greindl@...

Blog: http://www.complexitystudies.org/
Thesis: http://www.complexitystudies.org/proposal/


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[Günther Greindl]

Hello Jack,

> I could tell you what's wrong with his MGA, but I'm here to deal with the QS paper first.

I appreciate your prioritizing your paper, but I would be interested in
what you find wrong with the MGA.

By the way, as I mentioned in a previous mail to John, my departure from
materialism started with this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Every-Thing-Must-Metaphysics-Naturalized/dp/0199276196/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1234106347&sr=8-1

I also read your paper, and I my main problem is that you have strong
physicalist (materialist) assumptions - that there is some matter in the
universe which "instantiates" brain states.

That is indeed a problematic view - so maybe you could relate your take
on the MGA?

Cheers,
Günther

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[Jack Mallah]

So far the responses here have not been as hostile as I feared :)

--- On Sat, 2/7/09, Jesse Mazer <lasermazer@...> wrote:

> are you open to the idea
> that there might be truths about subjectivity (such as
> truths about what philosophers call 'qualia') which
> cannot be reduced to purely physical statements? Are you
> familiar with the ideas of philosopher David Chalmers, who
> takes the latter position? He doesn't advocate
> interactive dualism, where there's some kind of
> soul-stuff that can influence matter--he assumes that the
> physical world is "causally closed", so all
> physical events have purely physical causes, including all

I am very familiar with David Chalmers' position.  My view is that he's wrong: If I have qualia, I don't find it plausible that they can have no influence over my spelled-out thoughts and words or actions, which is what epiphenomenalism would imply.  If "true qualia" must be in addition to whatever is making me think and say I have qualia, then I have no reason to think I have the "true" ones.  I am a reductive computationalist.

> If one buys into
> the possibility of objective truths about mental
> states/qualia and psychophysical laws, it wouldn't be
> such a stretch to imagine that there may be objective truths
> about the first-person probabilities of experiencing
> different branches in either the MWI or duplication
> experiments in a single universe (so that you don't have
> to rely on decision theory, which depends on non-objective
> choices about which future possibilities you 'care'
> about, to discuss quantum immortality), and that these
> probabilities could be determined by some combination of an
> objective physical measure on different brainstates and some
> set of "psychophysical laws". If so, the question
> of quantum immortality would boil down to whether a given
> mind always has a 100% chance of experiencing a
> "next" observer-moment as long as a
> "next" brainstate exists somewhere, or whether
> there is some nonzero chance of one's flow of experience
> just ending.Jesse

In the QI paper, in some of the arguments I explicitly appeal to functionalism.  Most MWIers are functionalists, so those arguments should apply for them.

If dualism is assumed, there are few limits on what can happen, but if Occam's razor is applied to it you can assume things won't end up much different than without it.  Chalmers himself is a computationalist (just not a reductive one).

The concept of measure, and the empirical arguments such as the Boltzmann Brains one and the general argument against immortality, should apply regardless of the physicalism/platonism/dualism debate.




     


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[Jack Mallah]

--- On Sun, 2/8/09, Stathis Papaioannou <stathisp@...> wrote:
> > Suppose you differentiate into N states, then on
> average each has 1/N of your original measure.  I guess
> that's why you think the measure decreases.  But the sum
> of the measures is N/N of the original.
>
> I still find this confusing. Your argument seems to be that you won't live to 1000 because the measure of 1000 year old versions of you in the multiverse is very small - the total consciousness across the multiverse is much less for 1000 year olds than 30 year olds. But by an analogous argument, the measure of 4 year old OM's is higher than that of 30 year old OM's, since you might die between age 4 and 30.
> But here you are, an adult rather than a child.

You might die between 4 and 30, but the chance is fairly small, let's say 10% for the sake of argument.  So, if we just consider these two ages, the effective probability of being 30 would be a little less than that of being 4 - not enough less to draw any conclusions from.

The period of adulthood is longer than that of childhood so actually you are more likely to be an adult.  How likely?  Just look at a cross section of the population.  Some children, more adults, basically no super-old folks.

> Should you feel your consciousness more thinly spread or something?

No, measure affects how common an observation is, not what it feels like.




     


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[Stathis Papaioannou-2]

2009/2/9 Jack Mallah <jackmallah@...>:

> You might die between 4 and 30, but the chance is fairly small, let's say 10% for the sake of argument.  So, if we just consider these two ages, the effective probability of being 30 would be a little less than that of being 4 - not enough less to draw any conclusions from.
>
> The period of adulthood is longer than that of childhood so actually you are more likely to be an adult.  How likely?  Just look at a cross section of the population.  Some children, more adults, basically no super-old folks.

Suppose I did something extremely risky as a child and survived. The
multiverse is as a result much more densely filled with my childhood
OM's. Now, it is true that a randomly sampled OM out of all the
possible OM's available to me is more likely to be one of these
childhood OM's, but random sampling of this sort is not how life
works. When I anticipate my future, the only options I need consider
are those OM's which have my present OM in their immediate subjective
past. I can't jump backwards into my childhood and I can't stand still
at the present moment if my present OM's measure is increased
enormously, any more than can I suddenly find myself a different
person entirely because their measure is a lot greater than mine.
Given that I am who I am now, there are constraints as to what
candidate OM's are allowed in the lucky dip for my next conscious
moment.


--
Stathis Papaioannou

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[Jack Mallah]

-- On Mon, 2/9/09, Stathis Papaioannou <stathisp@...> wrote:
> Suppose I did something extremely risky as a child and survived. The multiverse is as a result much more densely filled with my childhood OM's. Now, it is true that a randomly sampled OM out of all the possible OM's available to me is more likely to be one of these childhood OM's, but random sampling of this sort is not how life works. When I anticipate my future, the only options I need consider are those OM's which have my present OM in their immediate subjective past. I can't jump backwards into my childhood and I can't stand still at the present moment if my present OM's measure is increased enormously, any more than can I suddenly find myself a different person entirely because their measure is a lot greater than mine.
> Given that I am who I am now, there are constraints as to what candidate OM's are allowed in the lucky dip for my next conscious moment.

This sort of talk about "random sampling" and "luck" is misleading and is exactly why I broke down the roles of effective probability into the four categories I did in the paper.

If you are considering future versions of yourself, in the MWI sense, there is no randomness involved.  Depending on how you define "you", "you" will either be all of them, or "you" are just an observer-moment and can consider them to be "other people".  Regardless of definitions, this case calls for the use of Caring Measure for decision making.




     


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[Bruno Marchal]

On 07 Feb 2009, at 19:05, Jack Mallah wrote:

Bruno is still pushing his crackpot UDA.  

What is it that you (still) don't understand? (good idea to resume UDA again, and so the question is asked also to the newbies). 

Please help yourself by printing  the  PDF slide

1) The (re)definition of computationalism, or digital mechanism, in the form of "yes doctor" + Church thesis? Note that the list has convince me to suppress the "arithmetical realism" hypothesis, because it is contained in the "Church thesis", and some people put to much metaphyical baggage in the word "realism". (step 1).

2) The first person/third person distinction (like Schmidhuber, who leaves the list after complaining this distinction made no sense)?  Is it the invariance of the first person experience for the addition of third person delays which makes problem? (step 2)

3) have you a problem with the first person indeterminacy in self-duplication experience (my main old contribution) like Chalmers, who lives the room at this step when I explained UDA at the ASSC meeting in Brussels many years ago? (step 3)

4) The invariance of any method for quantifying first person indeterminacy with respect to the addition of asymmetrical delays? (step 4)

5) The same in experiences where the third person "original" is not annihilated? (step 5)

6) The same in experiences where the reconstitution, although still "physical" are virtual (step 6).

Most people have no problem up to here. Sometimes Brent Meeker complains that I should make clearer that the environment can still play some role at this stage, but this is part of my definition of "generalized brain".

 7) So, is it in the seventh step: where you are in front of a concrete never ending running of a Universal Dovetailer?  Do you have a problem with the idea of universal dovetailing? (step 7)

I could tell you what's wrong with his MGA, ....

8) Are you acknowledging you get the UDA (1...7)? It is just UDA_8 you have some trouble with? Then it means you have made some progress since our last conversation. I could stop here, because MGA can be eliminated with some Occam Razor. MGA is really the little cerise on the top of the cake.  I do have been myself a bit annoyed by its subtle taste and difficulty until I discovered recently, through conversation with patient (and polite) people in the list,  that the difficulties reside more in a too quick understanding of the seventh step than in MGA per se. Many are not always clear about the distinction between what is a computation (in Platonia), and a description of a computation (in platonia). The progress is that I have now a version of MGA in two steps: MGA1 and MGA2. Forget MGA3: it is a product of my non awareness that the seventh step has to be exposed with more caution, especially to non-mathematician. This is what I am planning to do, with the help of Kim, and this includes to start the math (needed here) from scratch. The hope is to make the ending of the UDA, and the beginning of the AUDA, more available to a wider audience. 

Concerning your paper I have nothing to add that has not been already told or asked to you. Obviously it does not take into account the Universal Dovetailer Argument.

I see you have make some progress on the subject (but not yet on diplomacy, unless your "crackpot" wording is just an affectionate mark: I could be OK with that. Well we will see).

Welcome back to the list Jacques, 

Bruno

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

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[Jack Mallah]

--- On Mon, 2/9/09, Bruno Marchal <marchal@...> wrote:
> good idea to resume UDA again

Bruno, I will post on the subject - but not yet.  I do not want to get sidetracked from improving my paper.

> I see you have make some progress on the subject (but not yet on  
> diplomacy, unless your "crackpot" wording is just an affectionate  
> mark: I could be OK with that. Well we will see).

I will admit that diplomacy is not always my strong suit when dealing with controversial subjects.

My characterization of it is sincere, not affectionate, though mainly what made me say that is that you call it a proof.  It's an argument, not a proof, and the argument fails to be convincing.  Now many people make arguments that I don't buy and I don't necessarily call those arguments crackpot, but I will if they make too-strong claims.

> Welcome back to the list Jacques,

Thanks :)




     


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[Jack Mallah]

--- On Sat, 2/7/09, Quentin Anciaux <allcolor@...> wrote:
> 2009/2/7 Jack Mallah <jackmallah@...>
> > 1. Initially, before evolution occurred, a typical Boltzmann brain (BB) had about the same measure as a brain which was like what we consider a normal person's (an atypical BB).
> > 2. The typical BB's all together vastly outnumbered the atypical ones, so they had much more total measure.
> > 3. We are assuming here that a person's measure can't change as a function of time.
> > 4. Therefore the initial measure advantage of the typical BB's would hold for all time.
>
> You are here explicitely assuming ASSA, meaning that there exists an absolute measure over all OM... which seems to me dubious. Your argument here is not valid for relative continuation (RSSA).

Hi.  In the above, I was describing the consequences of #3, the assumption that a person's measure can't change over time.  That assumption is certainly not what people have been calling the "ASSA" - obviously, I believe that measure does change as a function of time.  Rather, #3 is my attempt to put what you call the "RSSA" in well-defined terms so that its consequences can be explored.

> > Instead I covered the Bayesian issues in my sections on the Reflection Argument and Theory Confirmation.
> >
> What measure then are you talking about ? Bayesian probabilities are relative, it is non-sense to talk about absolute measure.

I don't understand your comment.  The sections of my paper that I mentioned explain how to use what I call "effective probabilities" in certain situations.  If there is a problem with those procedures that you would like to point out, that would make it impossible to use them, you'd have to be a lot more specific.

> > > He goes on to mention rather briefly in passing his doomsday style
> > > argument against QI, but not in detail.
> >
> > I think the argument is presented in full.  What part is missing?
>
> What happen to your "you" ?

Do you mean "why don't you reach the super-old ages"?  The number of super-old "copies of you" is much less than for normal ages.  This is equivalent to "most copies of you die off first".  Which is equivalent to "most people die off first".  It is irrelevant whether the people are different, or similar enough to be called "copies".

The You you know (no quotes around it this time) is just one copy among the "you" ones that are similar to you.

In other words, perhaps too compactly said for people to appreciate, "your" measure is reduced.




     


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[Bruno Marchal]

Hi Jack,

On 09 Feb 2009, at 18:19, Jack Mallah wrote:

--- On Mon, 2/9/09, Bruno Marchal <marchal@...> wrote:

good idea to resume UDA again

Bruno, I will post on the subject - but not yet.  I do not want to get sidetracked from improving my paper.

I guess you understand that I do think that an understanding of the UDA could improve, if not disprove your paper. Let us hope, for you, that I am wrong.

I see you have make some progress on the subject (but not yet on  

diplomacy, unless your "crackpot" wording is just an affectionate  

mark: I could be OK with that. Well we will see).

I will admit that diplomacy is not always my strong suit when dealing with controversial subjects.

Damned! You *have* improved!

My characterization of it is sincere, not affectionate, though mainly what made me say that is that you call it a proof.  It's an argument, not a proof, and the argument fails to be convincing.  Now many people make arguments that I don't buy and I don't necessarily call those arguments crackpot, but I will if they make too-strong claims.

If that is the issue then don't worry, I am not so much sanguine about calling it a "proof". Actually, in the "Brussels' thesis", it is not even presented as an argument. It was presented as a paradox. The original names are PDU (Paradoxe du Doveteller Universel) and PGF (Paradoxe du Graphe Filmé). The goal consisted in explaining that the mind body problem, or the hard consciousness problem was not yet solved. Indeed my point was that it seems that (Naive) Mechanism and (Naive) Materialism are hardly capable of being compatible. "Naive" in the sense that I give precise definition of those terms, with all the carts on the table.

Now, it happens also that the thought experiment is of a "platonic destructive" type of thought experiment, in the nomenclature of James Brown's book on thought experiments(*). Such thought experiments makes principles incompatible, strictly speaking they are proof: it would be just tedious to present them in a first order axiomatization (and this would be unnecessary given the translation into arithmetic). So, although I am not sanguine about it (mainly because once you understand the argument, you understand what I modestly *mean* when I say it is a proof), I feel I would hide a fact by just playing it as a paradox. That paradox is an argument, and that argument is a deduction, once you are willing to take seriously enough the ASSUMPTION that you could survive through a digital "truncation", without of course adhering to any willingness of eliminating the (first) person and consciousness. 

Somehow I just show that the comp assumption is machine-incredible but precise enough to be falsifiable.

You are courageous to discuss your paper here, after the RSSA wins on the ASSA on this list :) 

For example when you say to Stathis:

This sort of talk about "random sampling" and "luck" is misleading and is exactly why I broke down the roles of effective probability into the four categories I did in the paper.

If you are considering future versions of yourself, in the MWI sense, there is no randomness involved.  

 Do you mean that you stop at UDA step 3? No first person indeterminacy? No first person?

Take it easy. Best,

Bruno

(*)  Brown, J. R. (1991). The laboratory of the mind. Routledge, London.

Welcome back to the list Jacques,

Thanks :)

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

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[Quentin Anciaux-2]

2009/2/9 Jack Mallah <jackmallah@...>

--- On Sat, 2/7/09, Quentin Anciaux <allcolor@...> wrote:
> 2009/2/7 Jack Mallah <jackmallah@...>
> > 1. Initially, before evolution occurred, a typical Boltzmann brain (BB) had about the same measure as a brain which was like what we consider a normal person's (an atypical BB).
> > 2. The typical BB's all together vastly outnumbered the atypical ones, so they had much more total measure.
> > 3. We are assuming here that a person's measure can't change as a function of time.
> > 4. Therefore the initial measure advantage of the typical BB's would hold for all time.
>
> You are here explicitely assuming ASSA, meaning that there exists an absolute measure over all OM... which seems to me dubious. Your argument here is not valid for relative continuation (RSSA).

Hi.  In the above, I was describing the consequences of #3, the assumption that a person's measure can't change over time.  That assumption is certainly not what people have been calling the "ASSA" - obviously, I believe that measure does change as a function of time.  Rather, #3 is my attempt to put what you call the "RSSA" in well-defined terms so that its consequences can be explored.

> > Instead I covered the Bayesian issues in my sections on the Reflection Argument and Theory Confirmation.
> >
> What measure then are you talking about ? Bayesian probabilities are relative, it is non-sense to talk about absolute measure.

I don't understand your comment.  The sections of my paper that I mentioned explain how to use what I call "effective probabilities" in certain situations.  If there is a problem with those procedures that you would like to point out, that would make it impossible to use them, you'd have to be a lot more specific.

> > > He goes on to mention rather briefly in passing his doomsday style
> > > argument against QI, but not in detail.
> >
> > I think the argument is presented in full.  What part is missing?
>
> What happen to your "you" ?

Do you mean "why don't you reach the super-old ages"?  The number of super-old "copies of you" is much less than for normal ages.  This is equivalent to "most copies of you die off first".  Which is equivalent to "most people die off first".  It is irrelevant whether the people are different, or similar enough to be called "copies".

I find it dubious for a moment to have a measure by itself and that from moment to moment this measure decrease. I could accept that two moments relative to each other have a certain probability to be the successor of each other and it means something.

Also I still don't understand how I could be 30 years old and not 4, there are a lot more OM of 4 than 30... it is the argument you use for 1000 years old, I don't see why it can hold for 30 ? Also even if absolute measure had sense, do you mean that the measure of a 1000 years old OM is strictly zero (not infinitesimal, simply and strictly null) ? If it is what you mean, could you prove it ?
 

The You you know (no quotes around it this time) is just one copy among the "you" ones that are similar to you.

In other words, perhaps too compactly said for people to appreciate, "your" measure is reduced.

My measure relative to what ?

Regards,
Quentin

--
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.

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[Stathis Papaioannou-2]

2009/2/10 Jack Mallah <jackmallah@...>:

> This sort of talk about "random sampling" and "luck" is misleading and is exactly why I broke down the roles of effective probability into the four categories I did in the paper.
>
> If you are considering future versions of yourself, in the MWI sense, there is no randomness involved.  Depending on how you define "you", "you" will either be all of them, or "you" are just an observer-moment and can consider them to be "other people".  Regardless of definitions, this case calls for the use of Caring Measure for decision making.

It seems that the disagreement may be one about personal identity. It
is not clear to me from your paper whether you accept what Derek
Parfit calls the "reductionist" theory of personal identity. Consider
the following experiment:

There are two consecutive periods of consciousness, A and B, in which
you are an observer in a virtual reality program. A is your
experiences between 5:00 PM and 5:01 PM while B is your experiences
between 5:01 PM and 5:02 PM, subjective time. A is being implemented
in parallel on two computers MA1 and MA2, so that there are actually
two qualitatively identical streams of consciousness which we can call
A1 and A2. At the end of the subjective minute, data is saved to disk
and both MA1 and MA2 are switched off. An external operator picks up a
copy of the saved data, walks over to a third computer MB, loads the
data and starts up the program. After another subjective minute MB is
switched off and the experiment ends.

As the observer you know all this information, and you look at the
clock and see that it is 5:00 PM. What can you conclude from this and
what should you expect? To me, it seems that you must conclude that
you are currently either A1 or A2, and that in one minute you will be
B, with 100% certainty. Would you say something else?



--
Stathis Papaioannou

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