An extension of the recursively enumerable Turing degrees

Consider the countable semilattice _T consisting of the recursivelyenumerable Turing degrees. Although _T is known to be structurallyrich, a major source of frustration is that no specific, naturaldegrees in _T have been discovered, except the bottom and topdegrees, 0 and 0'. In order to overcome this difficulty, weembed _T into a larger degree structure which is better behaved.Namely, consider the countable distributive lattice _w consistingof the weak degrees (also known as Muchnik degrees) of massproblems associated with non-empty ₀¹ subsets of 2. It is knownthat _w contains a bottom degree 0 and a top degree 1 and isstructurally rich. Moreover, _w contains many specific, naturaldegrees other than 0 and 1. In particular, we show that in _wone has 0 < d < r₁ < f(r₂, 1) < 1. Here, d is theweak degree of the diagonally non-recursive functions, and r_nis the weak degree of the n-random reals. It is known that r₁can be characterized as the maximum weak degree of a ₀¹ subsetof 2 of positive measure. We now show thatf(r₂, 1) can be characterizedas the maximum weak degree of a ₀¹ subset of 2, the Turing upwardclosure of which is of positive measure. We exhibit a naturalembedding of _T into _w which is one-to-one, preserves the semilatticestructure of _T, carries 0 to 0, and carries 0' to 1. Identifying_T with its image in _w, we show that all of the degrees in _Texcept 0 and 1 are incomparable with the specific degrees d,r₁, andf(r₂, 1) in _w.