[ExI] Public draft of my book "Tales of the Turing Church"

Giulio Prisco giulio at gmail.com
Wed Oct 17 14:55:38 UTC 2018


Hi John, For some reasons I didn't receive your post (it went to
spam). Fortunately I am subscribed to the list also via my
Protonmail mailbox, where I found your post with the warning "This
email has failed its domain's authentication requirements. It may be
spoofed or improperly forwarded! " You may wish to review your email
settings. Same happened to me when I tried posting to the list via
Protonmail.
Comments inline below. I am copying giulio at turingchurch.net because I
am collecting comments received by email in that mailbox, please do
the same if you reply.

On Sun, Oct 14, 2018 at 5:05 AM John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Sat, Oct 13, Giulio Prisco <giulio at gmail.com> wrote in his book "Tales of the Turing Church":
>
>> https://turingchurch.net/tales-of-the-turing-church-public-draft-19758b5f362b
>>
>>
>> > I was very impressed and influenced by Tipler's book [The Physics Of Immortality] when I first read it more than 20 years ago.
>
>
> I was very impressed with Tipler's book 20 years ago too but not so much now because he made a number of predictions and said that if even one of those predictions turned out to be wrong his entire theory could not work. And most of Tipler's predictions did turn out to be wrong, some spectacularly wrong.
>
> Tipler predicted the expansion of the universe would slow down, stop, then change direction and collapse in on itself . From the heat of that imploding fireball he thought a hyper-advanced civilization could extract an infinite amount of energy and use that energy to perform a infinite number of calculations, not a very large number of them a infinite number of them.  We now know due to Dark Energy (which he did not predict) the expansion of the cosmos is accelerating not decelerating, so that fireball will never happen.
>
> And there were other errors. Tipler said the Higgs boson must be at 220GEV +- 20  but we now know it is 125.3GEV +- .5 .   And Tipler said  the Hubble constant must be less than or equal to 45 but it's 73.8 +- 2.4. We don't live in the sort of universe that Tipler thought we did. More than one of his predictions was wrong so if we take Tipler at his word his theory must be wrong.

As I say in the book I am a big fan of Tipler's spirit, but I don't
always agree with the details of his ideas and theories. However, re
"We don't live in the sort of universe that Tipler thought we did,"
Tipler is persuaded that we can MAKE the universe into the sort of
universe where an Omega Point scenario happens (purposeful
annihilation of baryons and all that). Remaking the universe with a
new design is, I believe, the most extropic goal.

>
>> > Everett’s used to be my favorite interpretation of quantum mechanics. I am less sure now, because Everett assumes the universal validity of quantum mechanics, and perhaps it’s too soon to be sure that a theory developed in the early 20th century is the ultimate scientific model of reality.
>
>
> Quantum Mechanics can't be the ultimate scientific model of reality because it says nothing about gravity, and we know nothing about Dark Energy and Dark Matter except that its 95% of reality. But Everett was assuming that whatever the ultimate laws of physics are they work the same way for conscious matter as non-conscious matter, and as we have have no reason to think otherwise that seems like a reasonable assumption. I like Many Worlds because it doesn't have to explain what an observer is or how consciousness works because it has nothing to do with it.
>
>> >An alternative reading of Everett is suggested by “Many Minds” interpretations (of Everett’s interpretation) where it’s an observer’s consciousness, rather than the universe, that splits in parallel streams unaware of each other
>
>
> If mind is what brains do then Many Minds and Many Worlds are the same interpretation because brains are made of matter.

I think MW and MM are strongly interrelated interpretations, but not
really the same interpretation. In MW the collapse happens objectively
out there, in MM it happens subjectively in the mind.
>
>> > I find irrational mechanics liberating. I agree with Rucker that whether the world is fully deterministic or not ([causally closed or open]) is a fundamental open issue, perhaps THE fundamental open issue in science.
>
>
> As far as consciousness is concerned I don't think it matters much if things are deterministic or not, we do what we do because of cause and effect (for a reason) and we are rational,  or we do things for no reason and we are irrational. To my mind there is a even deeper question than determinism is the world realistic, that it to say do things exist in a definite state before they are observed? We know from experimental results that Bell's Inequality is violated, therefore we know for certain that if the universe is deterministic then it can't be both local and realistic, at least one of those 2 things must be false.
>
> I don't see how locality could be wrong. If things were non-local a change anywhere would instantly change everything everywhere and before you could understand anything you'd have to understand everything. We certainly don't know everything but we do know a few things and I don't see how we could if things were non-local. And if things are not realistic then the moon doesn't exist when nobody is looking at it, and that seems like too high a price to pay for determinism.
>
> Actually if Everett is right then you could have all 3 to the multiverse's point of view because it evolves according to the wave equation and that is completely deterministic, but that's a bit of a cheat because you can't have a observer outside of the multiverse looking in at it.

I tend to think that fundamental reality is real but nonlocal.

>
>> >According to Hoyle, consciousness itself is a byproduct of the process of choosing a route - or, using Sir Fred's analogy, lopping the unrealized branches of the Everett tree.
>
>
> Hoyle glosses over what he means by "choosing" but there are only 2 things it could mean, you made the choice you did for a reason or you didn't, so you're either a Cuckoo Clockor a  roulette wheel, but we're not going to learn much from that. I agree that consciousness is a byproduct but not of choice of intelligence, if Darwin was right it has to be. Evolution can't select for something it can't see and it can see intelligence but it can't see consciousness any better than we can directly see it in others, and yet I know for a fact random mutation and natural selection produced at least one conscious being (me) and probably many billions more. So consciousness must be a byproduct and is just the way data feels like when it is being processed.
>
>> > I do NOT think that active consciousness and free will can arise in a Life universe.
>
>
> We know you can make a Turing Machine in the Life universe and if you can do that then you can make make a intelligent machine and if you did that you've got a conscious machine, or at least you do unless Darwin was wrong. I don't think he was wrong.
>
>>
>> > Randomness is hardly more appealing than determinism: In neither case we have free agency.
>
>
> And yet one of those 2 things must be true, everything either happens for a reason of it doesn't, X is either true or its not true unless of course if X is gibberish. I conclude the free will idea is so bad its not even wrong.
>
>>
>> > If one doesn’t make a fundamental difference in-principle between matter and life (I don’t),
>
>
> I don't either.
>
>>
>> > super-determinism should be called just determinism:
>
>
> I don't agree. Determinism just means if you know the laws of physics and the initial conditions then you can figure out exactly what the future is going to be, but it says nothing specific about what those specific conditions are. But Super-determinism says that out of the astronomical and possibly infinite number of states the universe could have stared out with when it was born it just happened to be in the one and only state in which after 13.8 billion years if would cause us to be fooled and make us thing things were not deterministic when they really are. Although not logically impossible that seem to me to be astronomically improbable, maybe infinity so.

Superdeterminism says that the past determines the future not only for
inert matter, but also for thinking observers. Your choice to measure
a spin in one or another direction couldn't have been different,
because it was predetermined. So superdeterminism is a way out of
quantum paradoxes. But determinism and superdeterminism are the same
only if we make the assumption that mind is matter. I don't understand
your point on initial conditions.
>
>>
>> > despite the butterfly effect, despite the fact that chaotic evolution is unpredictable in practice, and even despite the fact that strongly fractal chaotic evolution is undetermined in principle, many experts emphasize that chaos is deterministic chaos.
>
>
> Even if the laws of physics worked the way Newton thought they did and even if you knew the initial conditions you'd have to perform a calculation before you could determine what's going to happen next. Theoretically you can perform a calculation without using energy but If you don't have a infinite memory then at some point you're going to have to erase the scratchpad stuff you used to make the calculation. And in 1961 Landauer proved it takes a minimum amount of energy to erase one bit of information and he told us exactly how much that is and it turns out to be .0172 electron volts. So as you're calculating its future state you're going to be giving off heat and alternating the system you're thinking about in small but unknown ways. After that the chaos and the Butterfly Effect take over and even Newton's world is not deterministic.

This is a VERY interesting point. I posted this argument to the list a
few years ago: Erasing information requires energy per Landauer
principle. An ideal reversible computer doesn't erase information, and
therefore makes optimal use of energy. The universe as a whole can't
have an external energy input, so it must be a reversible computer.
Therefore, all information is preserved. Since collapse erases
information, the universe must be an Everett multiverse and the
apparently lost information must be scattered across branches.
>
> John K Clark
>
>
>
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