tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11168555.post484915802066952195..comments2024-03-28T03:22:24.202-04:00Comments on The Multiverse According to Ben: Eureeka!! -- The Underlying Logic Unifying Quantum Theory and General Relativity, Revealed Over a Plate of Sour Fish Consumed Over South ChinaBenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12743597120529571571noreply@blogger.comBlogger10125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11168555.post-53024810001448061842010-11-11T21:32:36.733-05:002010-11-11T21:32:36.733-05:00http://beyond-information.blogspot.com/http://beyond-information.blogspot.com/PeaceMessagehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07415862461912473626noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11168555.post-64868730148879900682009-11-21T16:55:01.114-05:002009-11-21T16:55:01.114-05:00Who knows where to download XRumer 5.0 Palladium? ...Who knows where to download XRumer 5.0 Palladium? <br />Help, please. All recommend this program to effectively advertise on the Internet, this is the best program!Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11168555.post-70863179192114247352008-08-04T10:31:00.000-04:002008-08-04T10:31:00.000-04:00Cannot 2nd order probabilities be converted to 1st...Cannot 2nd order probabilities be converted to 1st order? If you have 2 distributions, one applying with p1 and the other with 1-p1, then you can make a weighted average of them, which is a single distribution. Carry the process on recursively and you can reduce nth order probability to 1st order, for any n. <BR/><BR/>I don't doubt that there are some interesting mathematical things one could say about the 1st order probabilities that arise from this sort of reduction, for large enough n. To me, therefore, that would be the interesting question: what does a first order probability distribution look like that is the result of reduction from large n, for given properties of the higher order distributions?Daniel Berleanthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13412842896052865076noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11168555.post-48712384484743038532008-06-20T19:13:00.000-04:002008-06-20T19:13:00.000-04:00I tend to agree with Mitchell. Something that is i...I tend to agree with Mitchell. Something that is infinite cannot be compute (in a finite time). We live in a finite universe. If the universe is to be computable (which is still unproven, and perhaps unprovable), then there can be no infinites.<BR/><BR/>How do you get from n to n+1 if it requires an infinite number of steps?Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11168555.post-83830377599284078662008-06-19T07:18:00.000-04:002008-06-19T07:18:00.000-04:00Mitch: Complex probabilities DO make sense, just a...Mitch: Complex probabilities DO make sense, just as much as quantum logic makes sense, or the use of quantum state vectors to describe reality makes sense. <BR/><BR/>The counterintuitiveness of quantum mechanics implies that somewhere in the formalism of QM is going to be something counterintuitive. Whether one situates it in the probability formalism or somewhere else, it's still gonna be there.<BR/><BR/>As complex probabilities are mathematically consistent, if you find them a "senseless" foundation, the problem probably lies with the evolved biases of your human brain rather than w/ the formalism... '-)Ben Goertzelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01289041122724284772noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11168555.post-17387178612562634012008-06-19T07:16:00.000-04:002008-06-19T07:16:00.000-04:00Mitch: the concept of a "formal pseudo-concept" do...Mitch: the concept of a "formal pseudo-concept" doesn't make much sense to me. I can imagine, long ago, someone arguing to me that negative numbers are just a formal pseudoconcept. At first, they probably seemed just as nonsensical as complex or infinite-order probabilities.<BR/><BR/>But anyways, the speculations in this blog post obviously were not written up in such a way as to withstand skeptical criticism! Whether I will ever take time to try to write them up in such a way (or whether if I do so I'll be successful), of course remains to be seen...<BR/><BR/>For sure, my wild speculations are not 100% accurate in physics, AI or any domain ;-) ... in physics I have never progressed beyond wild speculations and interesting-looking math formalisms, whereas in AI I've gone a lot further due to having expended orders of magnitude more time... and, some of my AI speculations survived the concretization process, others not...<BR/><BR/>Whether infinite-order probabilities are an interesting generalization or not is another question, separate from any of my wild physics-related speculations. I think they will prove to be, but I have to do more math to prove it, and I lack the time right now.<BR/><BR/>IMO Barwise and Etchemendy showed that hypersets are an interesting generalization of sets, via showing they are a good way to model the semantics of self-referential statements. My feeling that infinite-order probabilities are useful is in the same vein.Ben Goertzelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01289041122724284772noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11168555.post-18934918609161073232008-06-19T02:04:00.000-04:002008-06-19T02:04:00.000-04:00Someone had better sound a negative note here: Com...Someone had better sound a negative note here: <BR/><BR/><A HREF="http://scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=332#comment-20978" REL="nofollow">Complex probability makes no sense as a foundational concept.</A> <BR/><BR/>Neither do infinite-order probabilities, really. Ben defines an infinite-order probability recursively, as a probability distribution over infinite-order probabilities. I do not see how this can be anything but a formal pseudo-concept, i.e. a generalization of a formalism intended to represent some reality, in such a way that the generalized formalism is no longer capable of representing the reality. <BR/><BR/>I might say in passing that a lot of math-intensive crypto-metaphysical speculation in the present consists of doing this - of taking some classical formalization of a known aspect of reality, formally generalizing it to the point of disconnection from reality, and then saying 'but maybe that's how reality is!' The great wellspring of inspiration in this regard is quantum mechanics, but there are other sources too. <BR/><BR/>A curious property of these infinite-order 'probabilities' is that they have an indexical aspect. Being themselves an element of the space on which they are a distribution, they must each assign <I>themselves</I> a 'probability'. Presumably Ben develops this stuff in his paper, perhaps by analogy with other formal theories of ill-founded sets, but (as must be abundantly obvious) I don't expect it to be relevant to anything real. <BR/><BR/>As for the final ingredient in this synthesis, 'causal networks' - that's not a problematic concept, but it's a super-generic one. At least it provides an almost-reality-based grounding for the other two ingredients. <BR/><BR/>So to sum up this critique, Ben, I think the part where you really go off the rails is with the 'infinite order' stuff. It would not be surprising to learn that quantum gravity can be formulated in terms of complex probabilities over causal networks. Every real-world quantum theory already has some element of causality in it, so you could even say that the theories we have already fit that description, for a sufficiently vague definition of 'causal network'. <BR/><BR/>But 'infinite order probabilities' sound to me like a <I>shallow</I> sort of generalization. All these years after Cantor and Peano, in a sense there is nothing more obvious than taking a mathematical operation and iterating it, even infinitely many times, in order to produce new concepts. But that doesn't mean that what results is profound, any more than the set {{{...}}} is necessarily the answer to the riddle of being, somehow - though I can't say how, exactly, it 's just gotta be, because it's - <I>infinite</I>! <BR/><BR/>There is a well-known book from the 1920s, Dunne's <I>An Experiment with Time</I>, in which the grand idea is that time can be observed from outside, but then that observer must inhabit its own time, and then there will be a third time from which the second time can be observed, and so on. Perhaps you will agree that if one has no particular apriori attraction to whatever metaphysical assumptions made this mode of thought appealing to Dunne, then that particular example of an infinitely iterated move - 'posit a second time outside the first' - seems merely an exercise in mental gymnastics, rather than a profound revelation. I submit that the same goes for infinite order probabilities. <BR/><BR/>If I try to imagine the feeling behind your sense of revelation, I think of the first original sentence I ever produced in Korean. It was 'I will go shopping by bus'. Not an earthshattering announcement but I was very pleased with myself, that I had mastered the combinatorics of Korean to the point that I could generate original, syntactically correct utterances. <BR/><BR/>I figure that your sense of revelation resulted from doing the same with all the current frontier thoughts you were thinking. You managed to synthesize them all into a single concept which is at least formally (if rather vaguely) well-defined, so for a moment it seemed like the answers to everything must inhabit that synthesis, if only its implications could be worked out. Whereas I think that at best what you've produced is another curiosity for the mathematical ontologist, something which might belong in a parable by Hofstadter but which is not going to be the answer to anything in real life. <BR/><BR/>Speaking to the galleries now, I wouldn't say that this flaming of Ben's theory of everything reflects badly on his work in AI. That involves actual finite algorithms and actual code. I think what we're seeing is a sort of recreational/inspirational creative activity which then gets brought down to earth when one returns to working with real computers and real programming languages. Ideally one's philosophy would also avoid speculative excess, but if the choice is between excess and lack, it's better to have excess. As the saying goes, too much is always better than not enough.Mitchellhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10768655514143252049noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11168555.post-34598368502710677702008-06-19T00:05:00.000-04:002008-06-19T00:05:00.000-04:00I'm reminded that I recently read (in The Modern M...I'm reminded that I recently read (in <A HREF="http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Mind-Intellectual-History-Century/dp/0060084383" REL="nofollow">The Modern Mind: An intellectual history of of the 20th century</A>) that in the 1930s the <I>Journal of the American Chemical Society</I> published many of Linus Pauling's papers unrefereed, because they could find no one to referee them! <BR/><BR/>But you probably knew that already from co-authoring the man's biography (<A HREF="http://www.amazon.com/Linus-Pauling-Life-Science-Politics/dp/0465006736" REL="nofollow">Linus Pauling: A Life In Science And Politics</A> is still on my reading list!)David Harthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02098536008064055636noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11168555.post-11113502556347413672008-06-18T20:13:00.000-04:002008-06-18T20:13:00.000-04:00You might be able to get somewhat rich does by mak...You might be able to get somewhat rich does by making a pet in SecondLife that does vaguely interesting things. Whether it's built on the Novamente platform or not.Michael Anissimovhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06217926458888484768noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11168555.post-29483735414372319862008-06-18T19:54:00.000-04:002008-06-18T19:54:00.000-04:00I think that grokking the whole of this post will ...I think that grokking the whole of this post will resemble the one-thousand-year digestion (or something like that) of that Star Wars monster. Meanwhile... what in hell is a Mongolian Skin-Peeler? :)Dr. Omnihttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11046760383604539018noreply@blogger.com