"I think you're wrong" is not a position.

They way you're saying this, it makes it seem like we're both in the same boat. I have no idea what position you're even holding.

I feel like I'm doing the same thing over and over and nothing different is happening, but I'll quote what I said in another place in this thread and hope I was a tiny bit clearer.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/nnc/the_ai_in_marys_room/day2

I think the distinction between 'knowing all about' and 'seeing' red is captured in my box analogy. The brain state is a box. There is another box inside it, call this 'understanding'. We call something inside the first box 'experienced'. So the paradox hear is the two distinct states [experiencing (red) ] and [experiencing ( [understanding (red) ] ) ] are both brought under the header [knowing (red)], and this is really confusing.

Arguably it could simulate itself seeing red and replace itself with the simulation.

I think the distinction between 'knowing all about' and 'seeing' red is captured in my box analogy. The brain state is a box. There is another box inside it, call this 'understanding'. We call something inside the first box 'experienced'. So the paradox hear is the two distinct states [experiencing (red) ] and [experiencing ( [understanding (red) ] ) ] are both brought under the header [knowing (red)], and this is really confusing.

The big box is all knowledge, including the vague 'knowledge of experience' that people talk about in this thread. The box-inside-the-box is verbal/declarative/metaphoric/propositional/philosophical knowledge, that is anything that is fodder for communication in any way.

The metaphor is intended to highlight that people seem to conflate the small box with the big box, leading to confusion about the situation. Inside the metaphor, perhaps this would be people saying "well maybe there are objects inside the box which aren't inside the box at all". Which makes little since if you assume 'inside the box' has a single referent, which it does not.

Edit: I read your link, thanks for that. I can't say I got much of anything out of it, though. I haven't changed my mind, and my epistemic status regarding my own arguments hang changed; which is to say there is likely something subtle I'm not getting about your position and I don't know what it is.

I have no idea what your position even is and you are making no effort to elucidate it. I had hoped this line

I don't understand what disagreement is occurring here, hopefully I've given someone enough ammunition to explain.

Was enough to clue you in to the point of my post.

I think the argument is asserting that Mary post-brain surgery is a identical to Mary post-seeing-red. There is no difference; the two Mary's would both attest to having access some ineffable quality of red-ness.

To put it bluntly, both Marys say the same things, think the same things, and generally are virtually indistinguishable. I don't understand what disagreement is occurring here, hopefully I've given someone enough ammunition to explain.

Somewhere I got the impression that ... Sarah Perry of Ribbonfarm were LWers at some point.

She was/is. Her (now dead) blog, The View From Hell, is on the lesswrong wiki list of blogs. She has another blog, at https://theviewfromhellyes.wordpress.com which updates, albeit at a glacial pace.

I'm sorry that I over estimated my achievements. Thank you for being civil.

What do you expect to happen if you feed your code a problem that has no Turing-computable solution?

I'm actually quite interested in this. For something like the busy beaver function, it just runs forever with the output being just fuzzy and gets progressively less fuzzy but never being certain.

Although I wonder about something like super-tasks somehow being described for my model. You can definite get input from arbitrarily far in the future, but you can do even crazier things if you can achieve a transfinite number of branches.

If you're still interested in this (I doubt you are, there are more important things you can do with you are time, but still) you glance at this reply I gave to taryneast describing how it checks if a turing machine halts. (I do have an ulterior motive in pointing you there, seeing as I want to find that one flaw I'm certain is lurking in my model somewhere)

For some strange reason, your post wasn't picked up by my RSS feed and the little mail icon wasn't orange, Sorry to keep you waiting for a reply for so long.

The Halting proof is for Turing machines. My model isn't a turing machine, it's supposed to be more powerful.

You'll have to mathematically prove that it halts for all possible problems.

Not to sound condescending, but this is why I'm posting it on a random internet forum and not sending it to a math professor or something.

I don't think this is revolutionary, and I think there is very good possibility there is something wrong with my model.

I'll tell you what convinced me that this is a hyper-computer though., and I'll go a ahead and say I'm not overly familiar with the Halting inasmuch as I don't understand the inner workings as well as I can parrot facts about it. I'll let more experienced people tell me if this breaks some sort of conditional.

What my model essentially does is graft a time-travel formalism onto a something turing-complete. Since the turing -complete model of your choice is a special case of the model we just constructed, it's already turing complete. And the formalism itself already specifies that information can travel backwards through time, what has to be proven is that an algorithm can be constructed that solves the halting problem.

With all of that, we can construct an algorithm based off of the following assumptions about time travel

1. Inconsistent timelines "don't exist"*

2. A timeline is inconsistent if it sends back different information than it receives

3. If more than one timeline is consistent, then all are equally realized.

I have no idea if you read through the ramblings I linked, but the gist was that to simulate the model, at any given timestep the model receives all possible input from the future, organized into different branches. 'possible' is a important qualitfier, because the difference between the model being exponential in the size of the memory and exponential in an arbitrary quantity constrained to be smaller the size of the memory is whether you can tell if a given bit of memory is dependent on the future by looking at only the current state.

Next, I'll point out that because the model allows computation to be carried out between receiving and sending messages, you can use the structure of the model to do computation. An illustration:

• Suppose X is a turing machine you are interested in whether or not it halts

• 1. Receive extra input from the future (in the form of "X will halt after n timesteps" )

  • If null, goto 3 with n = 0

• 2. Is it properly formatted?

  • If not, halt without outputting t the past. (Halt.)

• 3. Simulate X for exactly n timesteps

  • If it halts before then, output "X will halt after m timesteps" where m is the number of cycles before it halted. Halt.

  • If it doesn't halt after n timesteps, output "X will halt after n+1 timesteps". Halt

I'll note this algorithm only appeared to me after writing my posts.

Here's how it works.

We can number each timeline branch based off of what it outputs to the past. If it outputs "X will halt after y timesteps" then it is machine y.

If X doesn't halt, machine y will simulate X up until y-1 timesteps, and output that it wil halt after y timesteps.

The above point should be emphasized. Recall above how a timeline is inconsistent and therefore "non-existent" if it's input doesn't match it's output. Thus, for a non-halting X, every machine y will be inconsistent, and the hyper-computer will halt immediately (things are a bit fuzzy here, I am 80% confident that if there is a problem with my model, it lies in this part).

If it halts at t=z, then y=z is that only consistent timeline. For timelines y>z, they output y+1, for timelines y<z, they output z. Making y=z a kind of attractor.

My problems with this timeline are as follows:

• I haven't been able to formulate the algorithm, without a) having every timeline inconsistent when the machine halts or b) the actual output uncertain (if it says it halts at z, you know for a fact it does, but if it says it doesn't halt, then you can't be sure)

• "non-existent" timelines have casual weight.

It's probably stupid to reply to comment from more than three years ago, but Antisocial personality disorder does not imply violence. There are examples of psychopaths who were raised in good homes that grew up to become successful assholes.