John,
On 12 Apr 2010, at 16:31, John Mikes wrote:
To Jason's fantasy-contest (just imagine and put it as 'reality?)
upon his
John, Jason did not imagine and then put as real. Instead, he was
*assuming* and then *deriving* consequences. You talk like if we could
ever know for sure anything objective. But sciences are collection of
beliefs/theories/assumption/hypothesis/postulates, and if a belief is
true, we cannot never know it as such.
What we can know does not belong to the scientific discourse, be it
the existence of god, or of headache.
We can make theories about those non communicable knowledge.
Yet, such theories about knowledge are beliefs, not knowledge. They
may be false.
> In an uploaded state you could spend all day eating from an
unlimited buffet
> of any food you could think of (and more) and get neither full nor
fat.
Well the Romans did that. Eating all the day, even days after days,
without stopping. Just vomit after the meal!
I have a memory of the same, when I had nothing to eat, was
miserable and hungry during WWII and 'dreamed' about delicious food...
Not a good memory though
I think I can understand, having known many people having survive that
period. But of course Jason was not talking about a human imagining
eating, but about an uploaded human in a virtual environment. (That is
possible assuming digital mechanism).
Now, if it has been completely uploaded with a genuine virtual body:
Jason is correct when saying that he *may* have an unlimited buffet,
but is, strictly speaking wrong that he can enjoy it, without bringing
modifications and changes in its 'virtual' body and brain, so as to be
able to appreciate it without vomiting in the virtual reality!
But this is irrelevant for Jason point, to be sure.
Nevertheless, this points on the fact that one day we will almost all
become virtual, for the purely economical reason that virtual food and
life will be less expensive that carbon based stuff. And more easily
spreadable in the galaxy. With some hope we can make Earth a Carbon
Museum.
This will not prove that mechanism is true. It will just be the time
to hope it to be true.
Of course, we are already arithmetical (by UDA). "Arithmetical" =
virtual and executed by the elementary arithmetical dovetailing, which
exists provably so in elementary arithmetic (assuming comp). And this
is refutable, given that the laws of physics become completely
derivable from number theory.
If you want, roughly speaking: sciences = sharable and correctable
third person beliefs. Religion = non communicable personal knowledge.
Now, *in* the theory "mechanism", you can prove many theorems about
the relations between beliefs and knowledge, and between science and
religion.
But proving a proposition concerning reality does not make it true. It
makes it only a theorem in a theory, which we can never know to be
true. Even if that very theory gives the correct mass of the Higgs
boson with one billion correct decimals, this will not make it
possible to know the mass of the boson, as such. We can know it only
in the serendipitously Theatetical sense, that we believe in a theory/
machine, and it happens that it is correct/self-referentially-correct.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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