Another comment on truth, the possibility of digital physics, etc

There is nothing to suggest that a future high bandwidth high speed brain computer interface will fail at recording all brain activity at high detail digitally, and be able to replay such activity in the brain.   Now, if we take the previous proposition as likely to be true, we've in essence said that digital information can be used to record and transmit qualia, or conscious information.   If consciousness itself can be stored and transmitted digitally, the most miraculous phenomena in existence, what keeps existence itself from being digital at heart?

The only thing that can exist along nothingness without justification is truth, truth which is eternal.   All digital information basically corresponds to whole numbers, eternal truths that need no justification.

A human brain connected to a machine manipulating it, a human brain in the physical world or a Boltzmann brain in the vacuum of space or a human being simple digital software in a computer, if the qualia is identical they are merely copies or references to the same true state or life history.   It matters not whether it is in any of these, interrupting any of these states is no different than stopping a dvd mid playthrough, the movie within and the sequence of events in its story is unaffected.   Fate will continue.   Physical destruction of one copy at one location does not harm the original, information is eternal, and it is conceivable that all possible paths are taken and exist.   Burning a copy of one book, does not destroy the fictional story within, even destroying all copies on a particular planet does nothing to the story, as the story is independent of physical manifestation.

kurzweil ai post on mathematical realism

By that reasoning all art is "discovered".

Animals have a sense of numerosity, and can be tested on numerical competence, their competence is not zero. This suggests evolution happened upon hardware able to handle numerical quantities to some extent, humanity's mathematical abilities rest on biological hardware able to handle numerical concepts and quantities, damage to the tissue performing this function can have profound consequences(as seen in the book The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics).

So if numbers and numerical competence are a man made invention on what exactly did evolution happen upon? Were cometh animals competence which predates man?

The answer is that man made symbols, and man made rules to define what can be considered a "number", these rules, iirc, have expanded over time. Like the physical laws, man attempts to define what governs nature, but these rules the physical laws obviously exist and operate independent of 'discovery'. Thus man's definitions tend to be an approximation to the truth, but the truth must obviously underlie reality. Man's abilities rest on biological hardware that provides a basic sense of numerosity and small numerical quantity, this serves as a foundation to all higher numerical thought, even as a baby man's numerical competence is not zero.

As for art, again, afaik, all art can be stored as digital files in a digital system. This being the case, even a procedure as simple as repeated addition will generate ALL POSSIBLE art past present or future(this includes all video, all qualia representations for BCI devices, all sound, all texts, all images, all everything). If we take any finite device of finite resolution, such as a modern TV, this will be the case, also for any finite resolution full brain BCI thus encompassing all possible thought and sensation by a finite brain. The number of images and sounds a modern TV can produce is finite, and this includes all possible past present future or imaginary content as the form of videos, sound or still images(including pictures of all possible events and book and journal pages in all possible languages).

Again numerical relations exist in the outside world, nature developed hardware to perceive these existing relations and behave accordingly. When I see a binary sequence, it doesn't seem sensible to say that it was "invented", the possibility of a system with two types of values likely exists independently of all implementation as a possibility, digital systems also have plenty of naturally occurring implementations(for example using more types of values in dna.). There is something that makes 4 billiard balls similar to 4 legs similar to 4 apples similar to 4 planets, something that makes 3 candies more similar to 3 towers than 4 candies in some aspect, whether a human or animal can perceive this or not, there is a relationship between these, and it can only be seen as numerical in nature.

All one needs is an immortal indestructible machine with infinite computation and a similar body for one's self, which might be one and the same if there's no (hidden) fundamental physical property behind the brain's production of consciousness. Such a machine would allow one to experience all possible experience and have all possible knowledge. If digital physics is true, then that would be equivalent to attaining godhood, the ability to know everything, be everywhere and be all powerful. You wouldn't need to conquer anything or fight anyone, in isolation such a system will make the wielder the absolute embodiment of the law.

An interesting thing is as I mentioned previously, all the content that is in a single 4k(at least one of the 4k definitions if we keep color fidelity the same.) image is already contained in the set of all 1080p images, albeit in 4 different 1080p images, the set of 4k images contains no additional information, also a scaled down single 1080p image exists which provides the gist of the 4k image. The obvious question is what happens with regards to things like journal papers, would adding resolution provide additional content? Again it doesn't seem likely as said all the visible content of a single 4k image is available in the set of 1080 images. All 4k can do is combine a set of 1080p images in different orders, and there's a finite number of 1080p images and a finite number of combinations. So returning to the question again, it seems that eventually the set of images of journal pages will start repeating large quantities of content, the higher the resolution you go, it is still finite but changing to a significantly higher resolution will only provide reorganization of a finite number of pages you would have already seen at a lower resolution.

Can you imagine that entire pages with exactly the same say Billion lines of texts repeating with copies of themselves, in a finite number of combinations of the same blocks of a billion lines of text(or empty space, etc.) for a given resolution. This would give the illusion of infinity, but it would seem in my eyes like a house of mirrors, simply repeating what would seem like an amount of finite content repeated in different orders. Eventually the moment you start repeating not just words, sentences, paragraphs, but entire books worth of unchanged content, well there comes a point where any reader has seemingly already experienced it all.- link to thread

Finite world

"The number of possible videos you could be watching on your tv is finite"-spikedmath

I had previously thought about the fact that the number of digital images with meaningfully distinct content is finite and what it meant.  The above linked site goes over the argument using audio sampling and video content to extend such reasoning to videos, indicating that all videos of meaningful length are finite too.   This combination includes recordings of all historical events and all alternate recordings of history including personal first person views of all individuals lives.

As each state is merely a number and numbers are likely eternal it is likely these "videos" all exist eternally in what some would describe as the akashic records.  Eternal recordings of all human actions past and future.   Though I believe accessing such as normal human beings is pseudoscience and nonsense.  Access to such files would likely require vast computational power and storage capacity to enumerate and catalog all the data in a meaningful way.

Depending on the limits of physics it may be the case that posthumans will have access to such one day, and all secrets even the most intimate will be known then no matter how well kept.

Regards the calculation presented in the above spikedmath article I believe it is very generous and a similar but smaller data file is possible.  Audio data can usually be eliminated if you use proper subtitles and most of the content of a movie or video is usually not lost.  Resolution too can usually be reduced without loss in the ability to convey the meanings of content.  A resolution of 480p usually suffices.   This would reduce the numbers on the relevant part of the calculation to ((10^6)^307,200)^30s, and audio data would be ignored.

A note should be added while the site claims a limit of 10Million on number of distinguishable colors,I believe the number is slightly larger but on the same order of magnitude.  Irregardless even with black and white most information on a video can be extracted and understood.

NOTE:

A similar argument has also previously been made regarding books:

Borges's narrator describes how his universe consists of an enormous expanse of adjacent hexagonal rooms, each of which contains the bare necessities for human survival—and four walls of bookshelves. Though the order and content of the books is random and apparently completely meaningless, the inhabitants believe that the books contain every possible ordering of just 25 basic characters (22 letters, the period, the comma, and the space). Though the vast majority of the books in this universe are pure gibberish, the library also must contain, somewhere, every coherent book ever written, or that might ever be written, and every possible permutation or slightly erroneous version of every one of those books. The narrator notes that the library must contain all useful information, including predictions of the future, biographies of any person, and translations of every book in all languages. Conversely, for many of the texts some language could be devised that would make it readable with any of a vast number of different contents.-Library of Babel

Comment on possibility of technological resurrection

We don't know what happens to the mind after death. I believe in mathematical realism, and Ibelieve simulations do not necessary depend on specific implementation to exist. I believe they exist independently as abstract potential patterns( in some real number, maybe a transcendental like pi exist numerical sequences representing all the temporal states of a simulation, and these have existed outside of time eternally).

If you burn all the books of isaac asimov and all the copies of them, the actual patterns haven't been destroyed even if no local physical implementation of them exist. As has been often said even random monkeys typing with enough time will produce these works again along with all possible books past present and future.

Now I believe the brain is hardware that is simulating sensory perception and an accompanying observer. I believe this simulation or sequence of patterns is eternal and has always existed outside of time, it exists independent of the brain's existence. If the multiverse is true it is likely that infinite copies exist and are taking the exact same sequence of actions at the same time.

Now I do not believe this means that one is intrinsically immortal. There are sequence of things that have defined beginning middle and end even if they are timeless, eternal in nature.

What I do think is that death remains an open question, we just don't know what happens to the continuity of consciousness, does it just end there or does it continue somehow? For example take a particular simulation of an ai with perfect checkers play against another ai with perfect checkers play, the game iirc will end in a draw. Now if you destroy the computers on which this simulation is being run, you don't actually destroy that particular perfect play game it exists outside of time along with all imperfect plays in a combinatorial space.(the related data for perfect play is about 200GB iirc).

If I take a book of hamlet and burn it midway through, the ideas the play is not actually destroyed only my access to it. If I was a character in the play i would be none the wiser, the ideas , thoughts, words are immune to corruption. In the brain the conscious observer is the main protagonist of the simulation, a simulation that is independent of substrate, as patterns while implemented in matter are independent of the matter in which they've been implemented. In theory it is perfectly plausible that the mind keeps on going somehow(for example, maybe the multiuniverse is true and the exact mind simulation is being run in parallel an infinite number of times, when the hardware is destroyed in one of these worlds, the individual simply continues in the rest of the copies as the actual interaction is exact it is conceivable the individual exists simultaneously at the same time across all copies.).

But again I restate we don't know what happens, we're only consciously aware of what our memory allows us to be aware of. Yet we know from experiments, drugs, accidents, etc that in some cases one can have no recollection of times when one was conscious. Do we solely exist in one body at a time? Even if so given that our brain has zero memory access to anything that could occur outside the brain's sensory input and its internal processes, we just can't know if our memory can be considered to provide the limits of what we're actually conscious of. If time travel is possible, we could be in two bodies at a time, past and future or more if repeated travelling occurs, and yet despite our conscious existence being in multiple places at the same time we wouldn't be aware of it, while hypothetical this hints that it is conceivable. We could conceive of a ship of theseus thought experiment, were a man and his wife's brain and body are slowly replaced with each others. Eventually the man becomes the wife and the wife becomes the man, did the man stop being the man at any point? how about the wife? or was the man both man and wife always but not consciously aware of this because of memory separation?I'm reminded of this story