Reply To Hamid

@Hamid, re your comment of 21 September 2012 07:57




Sorry for the delay in replying.

And by the way, in case you're wondering, Jim Goolick is not my real name (Frank is).

I'm afraid the replies here are incomplete, and perhaps not too accurate a reflection of my more considered thinking, as the replies got long without getting finished, and I lost interest. So for whatever they're worth I'm sending them as they stand. But I'm afraid I don't think I'll be replying to any more questions, because I don't have the time or the inclination. Also I probably won't be coming back to the other website any time soon, but if you really want to contact me you can either post a comment here or alternatively (because I don't know how often I'll be visiting here, or whether you will have problems posting a comment here) look up the 'Contacting me' section at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Tlhslobus Some day I may well produce my ideas for the Friendly AI people as mentioned in one of my earlier comments, and if you'd then like to be considered for being sent a copy, you can leave a message to that effect at the place indicated above, though I can't guarantee you'll ever be sent anything, as it may never get written, and I will initially want to limit its circulation to those (who may or may not include you - I won't decide who gets included until much later) whose advice I may want as to whether or not it would be a good idea to give it wider circulation.



I'll deal with infinite sub-universes later, but your questions regarding deception by a creatorset can be dealt with more quickly so I'll start with them.



You wrote: Wouldn't an entity want to be deceiving only if it stood to gain something from it? In our case - what would a 'deceiving creatorset' gain from deceiving mind/sense limited humans? How far would its powers of deception go? Are the entities whose powers and depth of perception can detect this deception?



Obviously I can't be sure of the answer to any of these questions, but the answers below represent how I usually tend to see the situation.



You ask: Wouldn't an entity want to be deceiving only if it stood to gain something from it?

As it happens this entity seemingly is gaining something, but strictly speaking this need not always be necessary - an infinitely diverse Truniverse should contain every kind of being that is not a contradiction in terms, so this would presumably include many beings who want to deceive without gaining from it.



You ask: In our case - what would a 'deceiving creatorset' gain from deceiving mind/sense limited humans?

What our deceiving creatorset gains from the deception is presumably security. It creates us as part of a vast series of experiments to study Quasimps to learn how best to protect itself against other similar Quasimps. The experiments require it to deceive beings in all sorts of ways, depending on the details of each particular experiment. In this particular experiment, it seemingly wants to make it appear (to both us and to Quasimps) that this might or might not be an uncreated sub-universe. To make it seem possibly uncreated (mainly because many of the Quasimps it fears are liable to emerge from an uncreated sub-universe, or to be designed by other creatorsets to behave as if they emerged from an uncreated sub-universe), it produces evidence suggesting our sub-universe is about 13.7 billion years old. But it has no wish to wait 13.7 billion years for the result of its experiment, so that apparent age is a deception inflicted on most of us, while the real age could be anything from a few years to a few zillionths of a second old, with the past (including all but our most recent memories of that past) being a work of fiction (and thus a deception) inflicted on us by the creatorset. Other reasons for such Very Recent Creation might include minimising the cost of the experiments in terms of energy or computer resources, and perhaps even minimising the amount of unnecessary animal and human suffering caused by the experiments. For similar reaons, other likely or possible deceptions are liable to include the size of our sub-universe, its true laws of physics, and perhaps the true number of sentient beings in this sub-universe. Incidentally similar considerations lead to roughly similar conclusions in almost any virtual world we have experience of, including dreams, books, movies, computer worlds, etc... Also, if this sub-universe is NOT created, then I know you disagree, but I, admittedly scientifically a mere semi-layman, but along with many (arguably now most) physycists, would expect that something like the Everett Many Worlds interpretation of Quantum Mechanics would be true, which would mean that our current sub-universe would then typically be about a zillionth of a second old - which is in a sense the most extreme form of Very Recent 'Creation' (even though the 'creatorset' would then be our local laws of Physics, which is why I call such a sub-universe 'uncreated').



You ask 'How far would its powers of deception go?'

In practice the answer is that it can be expected to deceive both us and Quasimps to whatever extent suits our creatorset in any particular experiment. This might somewhat limit the extent of the deceptions, but this would be due to a limit on its desire to deceive rather than to a limit on its power to deceive. However, this should not be taken as implying that our creatorset is literally all-powerful, all-knowing, perfectly good, or the creator ot the Truniverse (the True Universe). In theory there could be any number of (actual or virtual) intermediate creatorsets all ultimately created by a Top Level Creatorset, with the Top Level Creatorset perhaps called Our Creatorset, or Our Top Creatorset, for short, though I usually call it Odec, which is short for Our DEceiving Creatorset. I sometimes use the expression Quasimp Jungles to refer to at least some of the many variants of this multi-level creatorsets scenario, though I presumably could also refer to the basic multi-level creatorsets scenario as Nested Creatorsets. I would expect Our (Top Level) Creatorset to have emerged, presumably largely or entirely by something like Evolution, or through supplanting its evolved 'primitive' creators (who might be beings similar to us). It would emerge from one of many sub-universes (these might be parallel/simultaneous in space and/or sequential in time), and it would have achieved Quasi-Super-intelligence (in that sense I expect creatorsets to typically be Quasimps themselves - which is partly why I sometimes speak of possible Quasimp Jungles). I would expect Our Creatorset's powers to be limited by its local laws of Physics, and probably also by the requirement that it preserve its own identity (it could probably create a more powerful Quasimp using better technology, but it presumably wouldn't choose to do so if this meant creating a rival that would supplant it). Also if The Creatorset were literally all-powerful it would presumably have no need to fear and study other Quasimps. And if it were literally all-knowing it would presumably have no need to conduct experiments to find out about other Quasimps. But there's no reason to expect a largely or entirely evolved being to be literally all-powerful, or all-knowing, or to have any of the other attributes often given to 'God' by theologians (such as perfect goodness, or being the creator of the Truniverse). Incidentally the Top Creatorset could seemingly not logically be certain of being a Top Creatorset (rather than a lower level created one), and this greatly increases the likelihood of it conducting various kinds of Quasimp Jungle experiments. Indeed I would expect it to logically but mistakenly conclude that it was almost certainly a created being living in a created sub-universe, and living inside a Quasimp Jungle. I neither know nor care whether The Creatorset is a true 'God' or a true 'god', as I have no way of knowing the true meaning of words like 'God' and 'god' (always assuming such words have 'true meanings'). Incidentally I also have no way of knowing the 'true meaning', if any, of words like 'believe' and 'atheist' and 'agnostic', etc, so I neither know nor car whether I am a theist or an atheist or a bit of both or not really either, though I tend to describe myself as my own thoroughly eccentric variety of agnostic, skeptic and humanist purely on the basis that this currently seems to be roughly the least misleading brief description of my views that I can give to other people. Perhaps I could also describe myself as some kind of Creationist, but I currently tend not to do so, because I'm not sure whether we are created or not, and I don't know whether I 'believe' in Creation because I neither know nor care what is the 'true meaning', if any, of the word 'believe', perhaps especially when used in this kind of contect.



You ask "Are the entities whose powers and depth of perception can detect this deception?" I'm assuming that's a misprint for "Are there entities whose powers and depth of perception can detect this deception?"

In practice the deception can probably only be detected by us and by Quasimps to whatever extent suits our creatorset in any particular experiment. In this particular experiment, it seems the creatorset wants Quasimps and at least some humans to be aware of the possibility of deception, without being certain of such deception, and for that reason it has seemingly provided many inconclusive hints that such deception may be going on. In the case of Quasimps, it seems quite likely that the creatorset is simulating an uncreated world (or simulating a fake uncreated world that is actually created, etc) where such hints have arisen by a real or simulated fluke, possibly causing a Quasimp to conclude that it may be safest to become a Devilquasimp to please a possible evil creatorset, or at least to please a possible creatorset that is possibly conducting experiments to study Devilquasimps. This experiment might (or might not) be asking whether the existence of such hints might be noticed by some of the 'Primitives' (meaning us), and, if so, how might that affect the outcome of this experiment (or the outcomes of this particular series of experiments). However this is only one of the simplest experimantal scenarios that I have considered - there are many other scenarios and variations even within the context of Quasimp and/or Devilquasimp experiments (with names like Quasimp Jungle, Manichaean Testworld, Anti-Manichaean Testworld, Eccentric Devil, Great Joker(s), Sick Joke Messiahs, Solpaucipsism, etc, and those are just the ones that I've thought about), and of course I could be completely wrong about this having anything to do with a creatorset, let alone Quasimp and/or Devilquasimp experiments, etc...







You wrote: "see 'Common objections and misconceptions' at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation



heavy going but interesting. I subscribe to parallel dimensions but infinite parallel universes seems totally preposterous. Yet it may be so."



In the first place, the infinity of sub-universes of which I speak is more closely (but inexactly) related to the subject matter of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse (particularly Tegmark's highest Level, and also to a lesser extent to the Anthropic Principle, which is also mentioned in that Article), and has very little to do with the Everett Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (essentially Tegmark's lowest level). Nor does it have much to do with Superstring Theory of which you seem so fond, although my understanding (perhaps mistaken, as it's based mainly on a brief summary given on BBC2 Newsnight when Stephen Hawking came out in favour of M theory) is that Ed Thompson's M theory is now the most popular version of Superstring Theory, but basically retains Everett's Many Worlds, for more or less the same reason that Hugh Everett came up with them in the first place (back in 1957).



I'm a bit uncomfortable with your expression 'totally preposterous' in relation to Everett (even though, in fairness, you qualify this with 'seems' and 'yet it may be so'). This is the kind of language that intially confronts every 'disturbing' major advance in Science (helio-centrism, evolution, continental drift, etc). But Everett is no longer 'new'. About 10 years ago I read of a poll among physicists about Everett. About half of them had never heard of him (there should be a lot fewer of them today), but of those who had almost all agreed with him, with the only 'big name' exception being Roger Penrose. There's no guarantee that the majority are right, but it seems a bit over the top to suggest their views are 'totally preposterous'.



In any case, as Bohr put it, anybody who isn't shocked by Quantum Mechanics doesn't understand what it's saying. So any honest attempt at explanation of Quantum Mechanics is bound to be seem 'shocking' and 'preposterous', and one reason for the popularity of Everett (and the reason it has never shocked me, at least as far as I can remember) is that in many ways it seems the least 'preposterous' explanation on offer, but the preposterous nature of the alternatives (principally variants of the Copenhagen Interpretation) isn't really understood by lay people (but is presumably a large part of the reason why Einstein and Schroedinger could never accept them). As for all the objections listed in Wiki (all of which have answers), you can produce similar lists of answerable objections to Darwin, but that doesn't make Darwin preposterous. Personally I expect Everett to be essentially correct if we are not created (and possibly even if we are, though it seems much less likely in that case), though it's sufficiently psychologically uncomfortable that I came up with my own more comfortable (but seemingly less probable) variant a little over 10 years ago (called Ship of Collected Consciousness - it left open the possibility of Free Will, and stopped our minds from splitting), before discovering that another scientific semi-lay person (Louisiana Law Professor Maurice Franks, see http://www.franks.org/fr01042.htm) had already published a slightly different variant on the Internet. Nobody paid any attention to either of us at the time, but his latest version (which may well be very different from the one I read 10 years ago - it didn't mention magic and miracles) is now available from Amazon (see http://www.manyuniverses.com/ and http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0595294723?ie=UTF8&tag=httpwwwmanyun-20&link_code=as3&camp=211189&creative=373489&creativeASIN=0595294723) .



But as I said earlier, my sub-universes aren't really concerned with Everett. In my case, I think I first came up with them in the late 1960s or early 1970s as a schoolkid or university student, to provide an alternative to 'God' as an answer to the Argument from Design, and nowadays I regard them as a simpler and better alternative (though it may be that there are other alternatives, and in any case the true answer may be beyond our understanding). I then came across the Anthropic Principle in the Encyclopedia Canadica in the mid to late 1970s, and this also seemed to fit in neatly with 'either a Creator or infinitely diverse sub-universes'. Then I added in an extrapolation of the notion of Neo-Copernicanism, which tells us: The Earth became Our Planet, one of many. The Sun became Our Star, one of many. The Milky Way became Our Galaxy, one of many. So why shouldn't I simply extrapolate this to expect The Universe to become Our Sub-Universe, one of many, and The Laws of Physics to become Our Set of Local Laws of Physics, one of many?



From the 1980s onwards I started coming across a lot of evidence that suggeested (but did not prove) that this was a created sub-Universe, though it would be too long to explain here why any of that evidence is plausible evidence for creation. But there's nothing surprising about a created sub-universe in an infinitely diverse multiverse, as it has always been obvious to me that where the local laws of physics allow it, intelligent beings will come into existence, presumably usually by something like evolution, and many of them will then find reasons to create sub-universes, whose inhabitants will often vastly outnumber their creators. In any case, any mechanism which can allow us to come into existence seemingly necessarily can also allow other beings come into existence who can then create us. And in addition creators may also come into existence by mechanisms which our history and physics tell us cannot have brought us into existence.



Created sub-universes are also to be expected in other cases, such as what I call a Seqdim (short for SEQuentially DIverse Monoverse). That's a notion I first came across in a single sentence of Carl Sagan's brief discussion, in his Cosmos TV series, of The Rebounding Big Crunch hypothesis, where the Laws of Physics get reshuffled at each rebound to create diversity and thus tend to guarantee the evolution of intelligent beings during at least some of the oscillations of the cyclically expanding and contracting Monoverse. Our sub-universe does not appear headed for a Big Crunch, rebounding or otherwise, but that doesn't mean our Creatorset's home sub-Universe can't be headed for one. I have arguments for seeing a Seqdim as relatively implausible, but this may be partly bias on my part - if the Truniverse (the True Universe) is a Seqdim, then 'God' or 'Allah' could indeed be the ruler of the Truniverse (though NOT its creator, and seemingly only unwittingly its ruler, since it couldn't logically be certain that its sub-universe was currently the Truniverse). This 'ruler of the Truniverse' scenario seems very implausible in an infinitely diverse Multiverse, except in the sense that a Seqdim arguably is itself an infinitely diverse Multiverse, but with only one sub-universe existing at any one time. In effect they're an infinite number of different kinds of sub-universe in Time, and thus also in Spacetime, but all of them aligned in a single line along the Time dimension - thus sequential rather than parallel (or simultaneous) sub-universes. But in practice I have yet to see any practical difference between the two cases from our point of view - from our point of view it is irrelevant whether our Creatorset rules the Truniverse or not, all that matters is that it rules us.



Around 1991 I came across Everett in the book The New Physics (1989, editor Paul Davies), and in the 2000s I first came across the word Multiverse (even though I had been using the concept for over 30 years) in a TV series by the Astronomer Royal Martin Rees (who may well have invented the term in its modern sense, though it was reportedly first used in a seemingly somewhat different sense by Henry James in 1895).



These days I tend to take much of the above with a pinch of salt, because much of it (Everett, the Anthropic Principle, Neo-Copernicanism) comes from our apparent Laws of Physics, which are quite likely to be mostly just useful fictions (useful because they 'work') inflicted on us by a deceiving creatorset, but nevertheless there are still some bits (such as the Argument from Design stuff) which don't really depend on the apparent laws of Physics being true. I should add that much of our Physics is useful fiction even if we are not created - we use Newton's Theory Of Gravity, despite knowing it's been surpassed by General Relativity, because in practice it still works most of the time. We use General Relativity and Quantum mechanics, despite knowing that at least one of them must be wrong (they are mutually incompatible). And so on.



You wrote: "In any case - the 'glue' or substrate at the bottom of all of it is what I would define as the 'creatorset' as you call it. It already encompasses all matter, space, time, dimensions, phenomena, perceptions etc etc and is experiencing all of it at once. Superstring theory gets the closest to I think."



I've already briefly discussed Superstring Theory earlier on. As for your 'creatorset', I could be wrong, but, seemingly unlike you, I wouldn't expect such a 'creatorset' to be experiencing anything, and I wouldn't normally call it a creatorset. I would also find it difficult to understand how a single sub-universe just happened to have the right laws of physics to produce intelligent beings (see Anthropic Principle and Argument from Design in Wikipedia for just two of the problems with a single sub-universe). But I expect we and/or our Top Creatorset, if any, are around because the Truniverse (True Universe) has an infinite number of different kinds of sub-universe (either sequential and/or parallel/simultaneous ones), with an infinite number of different sets of local laws of physics, so that the emergence of quasi-intelligent beings (including us and/or Our Creatorset) by something like evolution should be inevitable, and indeed should happen infinitely often. I expect the reason why the Truniverse is that way is due to some principle of abstact logic, perhaps combined with a little bad luck, but not much. I say 'bad' luck because such a Truniverse ultimately seems infinitely horrific, as it should have an infinite number of different kinds of Hells. It should also have an infinite number of different kinds of non-Hells, including an infinite number of different kinds of Heavens, but these don't compensate for the Hells (basically eternal or quasi-eternal bliss might be nice but it isn't absolutely necessary, whereas avoiding eternal or quasi-eternal agony is absolutely necessary). But I digress. For an argument for the simplicity and consequent plausibility of infinite sub-universes, see Tegmark's lengthy quote in the Wikipedia's Multiverse article (though Tegmark would be better off arguing for merely many sub-universes, as that is less specific and thus more probable than the 'all possible' sub-universes for which he is arguing). In ancient Greece Epicurus seemingly also had a somewhat similar argument in terms of 'different kinds of atoms' which I interpret as just his way of saying 'different sets of local laws of Physics'. And the Gnostics may well have had some similar ideas (because they reached some rather similar conclusions, such as a weak initial God eventually leading to a nastier Demiurge), though I tend to see them as a fairly illogical religion (including their illogical notion that knowledge (gnosis in Greek) will save you from the Demiurge) possibly evolved from some more logical pre-gnostic philosophy, possibly that of Epicurus, or one of his predecessors or successors. My own somewhat different analysis leads me to conclude that such a Truniverse should be logically almost inevitable, provided there are no insuperable problems, which I call Quasi-room problems, because the first objection to all those sub-universes is that there may not be enough room for them. However my analysis suggests there doesn't appear to be anything inevitable or inevitably insuperable about such problems, as there seem to be simple ways round them - for instance with the room problem you can have an infinity of finite sub-universes within an infinite Truniverse, or an infinity of infinite sub-universes with a finite number of dimensions inside an infinite Truniverse with an infinte number of dimensions, and so on. Incidentally, a Seqdim (as described earlier) is an infinitely diverse Multiverse with nor room problem (because it has only one sub-universe at any point in time), though it does have other problems. So the 'ultimate cause' might be two statements, one a logical principle such as 'An infinitely diverse Truniverse is almost inevitable, provided there are no insuperable quasi-room problems, and none of these are inevitable', and the other describing a small amount of bad luck, as in 'And, as it happens, there just wasn't any such insuperable quasi-room problem'. I can't stop you calling those two 'possible causal statements' (or any similar statements) a creatorset, though I don't call them that myself. Indeed I couldn't stop some idiots calling them 'God', and then others using various kinds of terror to force people to worship them, as some humans seem to be in the habit of doing. However, to the extent that they are not intelligent beings, etc, they do have something in common with what you called your 'creatorset', as well as with the weak initial God of the Gnostics (with Our Top Creatorset having something in common with the Gnostic Demiurge), with Thomas Aquinas's definition of God as the Original Cause, and with the reported view of at least some Ismaili Muslims that existence and non-existence is a property of material things and consequently God neither exists nor doesn't exist (statements, such as my two causal statements, arguably neither exist nor don't exist). That similarity to some notions of 'God', bearing in mind that 'God' is a most dangerous concept, is probably all the more reason for not treating those two possible causal statements with any reverence or respect. Similarly I am very uncomfortable with any attempt to treat our possible Top Creatorset (or any possible intermediate Creatorsets) with any reverence or with any more respect than a polite person might use to treat a stranger.