things to do: theories of everything

• reply to Max Tegmark's latest e-mail of course!

• write down, as coherently as I can, as much as possible of my ideas for a meta-theory of theories of everything - i.e. the thing I call "patternism".

• -> Max:
  "quantum suicide" will actually yield the experience of
  unreliable apparatus (incl. your own limbs etc.), but I suppose this
  is a verification too, in its own way, since it's a surprising
  result for those very reliability statistics.
  + "quantum genocide" using false vacuum -> true vacuum?!
  + probability-like weightings in UET: maybe in fact
    Kolmogorov-Chaitin complexity for prior could be replaced by (say)
    quantum Kolmogorov-Chaitin complexity!
  + you get a "spiky prior adding up to 1"
  	when you use Kolmogorov-Chaitin complexity on reals;
  	but far from being ad hoc, this is actually an articulation
  	of the implicit prior we've all used for centuries!!!
  (e.g. in "normal science":
  	get 1.738+/-0.002 -> no special guess;
  	get 2.001+/-0.002 -> guess it's 2, and predict better
  			equipment will give (say) 2.00001+/-0.00002;
  	get 3.141+/-0.002 -> guess it's pi, and predict better
  			equipment will give (say) 3.14158+/-0.00002.)
  

• apply "spiky prior" to time parameter (to be precise, to things that act as clock readings from the frog perspective) - I think this may give a qualitatively new and unexpected refutation of the Carter-Leslie doomsday argument!

  Quick summary of basic idea: The traditional argument that we and our intellectual successors can't possibly continue into infinite future time, because then the effective probability would be exactly zero that "I" [the person reasoning thus] could be so early as number 1 trillion or whatever in the chronological listing of intelligent beings, becomes invalid when one uses the Kolmogorov-Chaitin complexity prior - "early" beings like ourselves are given decently large (and in particular non-zero!) weightings. The corresponding argument that it's unlikely we continue for some very long but finite future time - that is, the classic doomsday argument - breaks down in much the same way.

• apply spiky prior (generalized from the reals to whatever structures we need, but still deserving of the acronym since it'll still be "spiky" etc!) to subjective history, giving a "standing out effect" (a la The Fabric of Reality chapter 8) for "organized thought threads": new justification for "quantum suicide"? (UET suicide, to be precise!) [However, exactly what quasi-ethical concepts like justification can be taken to mean in the context of the UET is still unclear to me, so this is very provisional.]

• for that matter, the fact that we get a "standing out effect" for life (and thought) itself, again (and this time explicitly!) a la The Fabric of Reality chapter 8, provides a new justification for (or systematization of) the [weak only? or strong and final too?!] anthropic principle. In particular: Leslie's remark in "Universes" that we can expect the TOE (really the "TOE of our domain") to look very messy and ad hoc when expressed in traditional mathematical terms is freshly justified: it's not really messy or ad hoc, it's the output of the (short!) Turing machine program "run a universal dovetailer and search for examples of successful fine-tuning by looking for the standing out effect of life and thought a la The Fabric of Reality chapter 8". (Slogan: we live in one of the spikes of the spiky prior!)

• The position basis (or a position-like successor in quantum gravity) can now be taken as objectively special - it's the (or an) output of "dovetail looking at the wavefunction of the cosmos in all possible choices of basis and find the one(s) with extant brain-like entities, which will as usual stand out a la The Fabric of Reality chapter 8". This too is a short Turing machine program - a spike of the spiky prior!

• apply spiky prior to computation: what's "UET computing" like?! (by analogy with quantum computing.) [NB: it's not just "computing as it would be in the theory for `your domain'": the "domains" of the UET aren't truly computationally isolated - when you say you're "in" one domain, e.g. QFT(3+1)D, you're unavoidably also "in" all other domains which correctly "implement" (instantiate) you at something like folk psychology level!]

• what's Kolmogorov-Chaitin complexity like on (say) R->R? or (R->R)->(R->R)?! etc.

• Kolmogorov-Chaitin complexity on reals:
  should we try to avoid w-completions of zoom-instructions
  (-,0,+ ; L,M,R) giving closed intervals as the "opens"?
  ---e.g. on [-1, 1]: {w-completions of "-|"} = [-1, 0], not (-1, 0)!
  ---then {0} (=[-1,0]n[0,1]) will be an open!
  	is this OK, or outrageous?!
  

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