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To: Doctor Stochastic; Physicist; betty boop; tortoise; StJacques; marron; cornelis; Matchett-PI; ...
Thank you for your posts!

I do appreciate what you are saying, but in this discussion of splitting rocks, it must be noted that there is no such thing as a table of random numbers – since all the numbers are the effect of a cause, whatever that might be – algorithm, tossing of die, your ingenuity, even Brownian motion. (based on Wolfram’s response to Chaitin’s Omega)

From the frog’s perspective (Tegmark) that observation makes no difference – the table of evidently random numbers could just appear in his timeline. But from the bird’s perspective, there is nothing random at all.

Yours is a tipping point example, much like Schrödinger’s cat with greater obscurity. Schrödinger gives us two choices, dead cat/live cat – but you suggest a tipping point in the eye of the beholder.

I counter that at the root, what is obscure or distinctive is a mathematical structure to the observer, i.e. the answer depends on whether the observer is a frog or a bird. The bird would see a distinctive tipping point which the frog could not see.

Nevertheless, frog or bird, I would suggest that the question the frog could ask is: what is the Kolmogorov complexity of the unaltered table? If it is a low complexity, then what he would observe to be a range of tipping possibilities is knowably false from his frogness view. If it is a high complexity, he’ll have to ask the bird.

745 posted on 01/14/2005 10:20:03 AM PST by Alamo-Girl
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To: Alamo-Girl

OK, "this big gap between certainty and naive experience" would then be the distance between said frog and bird.


747 posted on 01/14/2005 10:24:46 AM PST by cornelis
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