On 27 Jan 2010, at 19:31, Mark Buda wrote:
Bruno Marchal wrote:
Le 27-janv.-10, à 01:39, Mark Buda a écrit :
Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 25 Jan 2010, at 23:15, Mark Buda wrote:
On 25 Jan 2010, at 04:39, Mark Buda wrote:
Bruno Marchal wrote:
I would suggest the SANE 2004 paper:
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/publications/SANE2004MARCHAL.htm
In step 8, you seem to be doing away with the need for a physical
universe
of any sort, since it doesn't actually do anything.
If it was even there
in the first place. Is that correct?
OK, but you are using a rather strong Occam razor. You have either to
believe strongly in comp, or to have extracted already a big part of
physics to use it with some assurance.
I believe strongly in comp.
It is your right. I confess I find it the most plausible theory today.
But, like the Godelian sentence reltaive to the machine M, which
asserts its own unprovability by M, somehow the comp hypothesis
asserts its own unbelievability by machines. If we are machine, then
to use that fact, we need some form of faith, and nobody can make you
accept any comp practices.
One part at a time:
Yes, Doctor hypothesis: Physically, there is no part of my body that
can't
be replaced with a functional equivalent. At the subatomic level,
all the
protons, neutrons, and electrons are indistinguishable anyway. Any
cell in
my body could be replaced by a functional equivalent and I'd still
be me.
Any cell in my body could, in fact, just die, and I'd still be me, and
this happens all the time, and nobody finds it unusual.
My intuition for comp comes indeed from my reading of books in biology.
Some videos sum up them well:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PKjF7OumYo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mtLXpgjHL0
But after discovering Cantor-Post-Gödel-Kleene discovery, I will do
math instead of biology. "Cantor-Post-Gödel-Kleene" have solved the
conceptual problem of self-reference (both self-transformation, and
self-invocation).
We think there's a problem when it comes to replacing the brain
because we
believe that's where our consciousness "is", but it isn't.
Consciousness
isn't anywhere.
I agree with this.
Ask a primitive who believes he thinks with his heart
whether he'd go for a brain transplant and he'd have no more issues
with
self-identity than a modern-day human having a heart transplant.
Not so sure. The first time we made vaccination on "primiive's
children", they parents cut they arms of.
I am not sure it would be moral to even propose them a brain
transplant, because they would not been able to say "ys" qua
computatio. It is always delicate to apply medicine from one culture
to another. Medicine is always at the intersection of science, art,
and religion, and comp preserves this. Eventually it is a personal
question.
What would Phineas Gage have to say about comp, I wonder?
In "The Emperor's New Mind" Roger Penrose mentions a split-brain
patient,
P.S., who appeared to have two distinct consciousnesses after his
commissurotomy. This is consistent with the idea that for each "human"
there exists an infinite number of conciousnesses, each with a
similar set
of beliefs (including beliefs about the past). Before the surgery, no
omniscient being could have told P.S. which hemisphere his subjective
experience would end up in, because of the first person indeterminacy.
OK. But it is a very complex question, given the asymmetry of the
brains, etc.
I think that salvia divinorum (+ some other stuff like psilocibine)
can make the corpus callosum (linking the two hemispheres) sleeping a
short time, and that we may succeed in developing non surgical
protocol to deepen such analysis.
I wrote my dreams in diary since 1973, and on four rare occasions, I
got the feeling that I was doing two different (but sometimes slightly
interfering) dreams. Astonishingly enough, Jouvet, the french onirolog
(dream researcher) describes similar cases and he suggests the corpus
callosum could break down for awhile during sleep.
Because there were an infinite number of P.S. consciousnesses all
along,
and the commissurotomy partitioned them, literally and figuratively,
into
the sets that experienced the left-hemisphere future and right-
hemisphere
future.
For a more concrete example of more than one consciousness in one
body,
look at the case of Abigail and Brittany Hensel.
I follow them since a long time, and others.
Step 8 eliminates even that use of Occam, for a much weaker one.
Step 8
derives directly an epistemological contradiction between the
physical
supervenience thesis, and the digital mechanist thesis (comp). To be
sure, to apply this on the "real world", there is still an amount of
Occam needed to avoid the use of fanciful ad hoc definition of god or
matter allowing to say yes to the doctor and still believing in a
primitive form of matter. That is the usual obligatory use of
Occam in
any applied science.
I have to go. I hope I have been enough clear.
Bruno, in some sense, I feel that I am a self-referentially correct
arithmetical platonist universal Turing machine.
Then you are in danger. You may have faith in comp, but then self-
referential correctness is really something only God can judge.
Strictly speaking you can only know when you are not self-
referentially correct. Actually no machine can even just express its
self-referentially correctness, nor correctness in general. Comp
makes truth as unameable as God.
Would you please
interrogate me so I can give you the laws of physics? I don't quite
understand them myself
The basic mystery is: how could an infinite non computable statistics
give rise to a locally computable and sharable observable reality. I
understand the "trick of nature": basically making probabilities the
square of complex numbers amplitude. First person plural white rabbits
get rare by random phasing Feynman). To solve the matter problem, we
have to extract this from the universal machine introspection, and to
finish the solution of the mind problem, we have still to explain the
rarity of the first person singular white rabbits.
You may search this in "your head", but I believe it is more easy with
a universal machine instead. The reason is that you cannot know that
you are correct, but you can know that a simpler machine than you is
correct. And some are already lobian and have the same physics than
us. I mean, as far as "us" are self-referentially correct.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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