On 06 Feb 2017, at 23:32, Brent Meeker wrote:
On 2/6/2017 2:09 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
As such it has nothing to do with facts in the world.
Which world?
This world. The one I can interact with.
Ah! You mean this dream. yes, it looks we can share part of it, and
interact with many users, like in second life. But to believe there is
a primary world behind this requires an act of faith, and eventually,
even if true in any sensible sense, if computationalism is true, we
cannot use that faith, we have to reduce its appearance from a much
small act of faith, like in the faith that x + 0 = x, x + successor(y)
= successor(x + y), ...
Sorry, with computationalism, there is only a web of dreams, and it
is an open problem if those "cohere" enough to define a notion of
physical or sensible world.
So much the worse for computationalism.
Wait for the contradiction please. Up to now, we get only the quantum
weirdness.
But at least we get the quanta/qualia difference, and, a notion of
universal person becoming a key in the making of the realities (the
universal machine and the truth about its many internal views of the
arithmetical reality).
When you theory makes the existence of you world problematic - it's
best to revise the theory.
But this can only come from the fact that you believe in a world
existing fundamentally.
In science, that has been a wonderful hypothesis to focus on the
natural science, but it is just not valid to use that hypothesis like
if it was needed. And that hypothesis has failed on the person
science: the person and its consciousness and soul is just eliminated;
which contradict some data and evidence, making the *primary*
existence of the world problematical.
Fortunately, there is a much simpler theory, or scheme of theories:
any first order specification of any universal number/machine/programs/
words/system in the sense of Church, Post, Kleene, Turing, Markov
(quite different but shown equivalent for computability). I choose
Robinson Arithmetic for this, because people learn it in primary
school, and I have never heard about some parents taking back their
kids from the school, on the contrary, they agree all on this. And,
like Pythagoras already felt, this is enough to get the men and the
goddesses.
Physics keeps its importance, as it becomes somehow the border of the
universal mind (the mind of the universal machine. Physics is much
more well founded by this, a bit like chemistry is very well founded
by quantum mechanics. The physical *laws* become part of the theorems
of the machine's observable theory/theology, itself faithfully
embedded in term of arithmetical relations, and sets of arithmetical
relations, some computable, other not.
To do the research, you need to be agnostic, at least methodology. You
have said more than once that the consciousness problem will dissipate
in front of more and more clever/conscious machine, but I don't see
why or how, and I think that consciousness is the grain of dust which
eventually will halt the materialist religion. There is something
simpler than that, and which (and this is both a relief and a source
of anxiety) confront us to our gigantic personal ignorance, indeed,
with a complex but rich mathematical structure.
I am not saying that computationalism is true, just that it is
testable (up to a malevolent simulation à-la Boström). It might be
false, we just don't know yet. To get the whole physics, we need the
quantified version of G and G*, which I denote by qG and qG*. But the
russians who solved the question asked about this in Boolos 1979, and
that Boolos 1993 explains, is, as a theologian could expected,
negative: qG and qG* are as much undecidable that they can logically
be: qG is Pi_2, and qG* is Pi_1 in the oracle of the arithmetical
truth. The One is already overwhelmed by the Noùs! Some truth about
"the world of ideas" needs infinitely many God miracles/phone-call.
And this is only the theology of a simple Löbian machine, like Peano
Arithmetic.
Although a Löbian machine extravagantly rich like ZF, or ZF+kappa,
obeys to G and G* for the propositional logic of their self-reference
abilities, we cannot yet define their qG and qG*, which might not even
make sense, ---in fact the critics of modal logic by Marcus and Quine
do work for the "qG" and "qG*" of ZF. And for humans, it definitely
cannot be done ... by humans, but mathematical logic provides tools to
progress, and it is just logical that no machine can get in any
communicable way its full theological reality.
I don't know if computationalism is true, but I do like it, if only
because it puts the person at the heart of reality. Not the human
person, but *all* persons. We, the persons, eventually are the maker
of the sensible reality.
Bruno
Brent
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