This video is great.
[There was a comment here about transcribing, which I have removed.]
This video is great.
[There was a comment here about transcribing, which I have removed.]
In fact this talk and the others in the same series have been transcribed and published as a book: “The character of physical law”; here is a direct pdf link.
Is that a withdrawal of the entire approach or just one part of it?
On the FOM list, he writes:
Terrence Tao, at http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2011/09/ and independently Daniel Tausk (private communication) have found an irreparable error in my outline. (...)
(...) I withdraw my claim.
The consistency of P remains an open problem.
Specifically, Tao's comment:
I have read through the outline. Even though it is too sketchy to count as a full proof, I think I can reconstruct enough of the argument to figure out where the error in reasoning is going to be. Basically, in order for Chaitin's theorem (10) to hold, the Kolmogorov complexity of the consistent theory T has to be less than l. But when one arithmetises (10) at a given rank and level on page 5, the complexity of the associated theory will depend on the complexity of that rank and level; because there are going to be more than 2^l ranks and levels involved in the iterative argument, at some point the complexity must exceed l, at which point Chaitin's theorem cannot be arithmetised for this value of l.
(One can try to outrun this issue by arithmetising using the full strength of Q_0^*, rather than a restricted version of this language in which the rank and level are bounded; but then one would need the consistency of Q_0^* to be provable inside Q_0^*, which is not possible by the second incompleteness theorem.)
I suppose it is possible that this obstruction could be evaded by a suitably clever trick, but personally I think that the FTL neutrino confirmation will arrive first.
He's such a glorious mathematician. <3
He gave a more detailed comment on the n-Category Café.
Do you know Jon Williamson's work? It seems to give an answer to your question (but I've not read it yet). Here's the first paragraph of Section 9.1 “Mental yet Objective” of his book “Bayesian Nets and Causality”:
Here's a link to his papers on causality. At least the fifth, “Causality”, contains an introduction to epistemic causality.