Perspectives are bundle of commitments about:
- What do I measure?
- What am I going to pay attention to?
- How do I weave that information together into some sort of model of what’s going on.
- What should I do next?
The extent to which your perspective gives you extra efficacy in the world is the extent to which you / your perspective / hypothesis is right.
Link to originalThe perspective always matters: Who is the observer (observer relativity), what kind of questions are you asking?
“You are the same person as you were X time ago”: Nobody cares whether you have same atoms / cells. You can expect a consistent behaviour / relationship.
Are perspectives real? What is an observer?
Arguing about what something “really is” is mistaken.
E.g. in biology, there are a variety of levels and sub-systems, observing each other and seeing different computations happening.
They are not just doing one thing or something it is “really doing”, but just what can every sub-system squeeze out of some kind of computational model.Levin: “I come from a bit of an idealist perspective … What there are in the world is perspectives. When an observer sees something, that’s not just as if, but as real as it gets. If you can find, study, manipulate, … an observer that sees something. By seeing something and making use of it, you are making it real, and that’s what it means to be real.”
The notion of the observer is a strong one, not a constructivist observer that sits outside of space and time. It is not omniscient, omnipotent, separate, above, privileged, … it is literally within the observations itself.
An example how different perspectives can be utilized for computation:
Transclude of polycomputing#^89b73d
Everything is a differential battle between perspectives.
References
Conversation between Josh Bongard, Atoosa Parsa, Richard Watson, and I