Le 05-juin-05, à 19:45, Lee Corbin a écrit :

Bruno provides the exercise

I notice that many people seek refuge in the "no-copying" theorem of
QM.

Exercise: 1) Show by a qualitative informal reasoning that if we are
Turing emulable then a no-cloning theorem is a necessity.

My best guess right now?  Your challenge would be a futile exercise
in word play!  "no-cloning" involves quantum mechanics.



I don't think QM has a copyright on the non copy theorems!
I have been prudent enough to talk on "a", and not "the" Zurek-Wootters-Diecks non copy theorems. In france there is a law of non cloning of embryo. What are you saying?




So far as
I know, computability theory (e.g. Rogers 1967) says ABSOLUTELY
NOTHING about quantum mechanics, and they are in two completely
different intellectual domains.



Why does the David Deutsch FOR book mention comp/turing as an important thread of the book. Everett uses comp in its derivation of the collapse. I'm glad you mention Rogers' classical introduction to computability theory, which is excellent, but is a book on pure computability theory, not on applied computability theory. Since when is it forbidden to apply one field on another. I really don't understand your remark.

All what I say is that someone who understands the 8 UDA steps should easily be able to convince him/herself that whatever matter could *be*, it cannot be cloned. This can be shown in a short sentence. It is almost trivial. (once UDA is thoroughly understood: this is probably less trivial, and from your conversation with Stathis I can infer you have trouble at the step 3, in the SANE paper: http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/publications/ SANE2004MARCHALAbstract.html





Let me know when the newspapers announce that you've derived
QM from computability theory.


I have only show that if comp is true then QM is derivable from comp theory.
I do have derive a little bit of QM.



Or any blasted physics equation
whatsoever. (I'm sorry that I have neither the time nor the
expertise to digest your technical papers.)



Except the step 7 which need a passive understanding of Church's thesis, there is nothing technical in the UDA reasoning. I agree the interview of the machine on UDA is more difficult, because it presupposes some background in logic and computability theory. But it is not necessary for the understanding of the UDA (universal dovetailer argument) which gives the main result.





In another thread, Bruno wrote

This is the central problem from those who are deeply concerned as
to *why* 1st person experiences exist.  Too bad that to me, it's
just obvious that they must.  I literally cannot conceive of how
it could be different!  (Poor me, I suppose---in some ways some
of us just have too little imagination, I truly guess.)

The problem is not so much "why" 1-person experiences exist, but how
they are related to 3-person descriptions, and which one.
How do *you* explain the relation?

If I were a great novelist, I might be able to convey certain 1st
person experiences to you (but that is possible *only* because the
two organisms Bruno and Lee are so similar).  But I'm not a great
novelist, and so I can't.



Here you make the category error which is made by so many physicalists or materialists. I am not asking you to convey some of your first person experience (well actually with your aargh and other humbug you do succeed but that's beyond the poin :). But at least you accept the existence of those 1-experience (unlike the materialist eliminativist a-la-Churchland). My question is how do you related them to third person describable things?





Therefore, we can only talk about what is in the world, from tables
to trees to mountains and stars.


Ah ? This is a so ambiguous statement that I cannot comment it.


*People* occupy an infinitesimal
portion of what's out there. The maze of internal events which make
each one of them feel and think is interesting, but is a very difficult
physiological problem.


It is a physiological problem once you are both computationalist and physicalist, but UDA shows those two options are incompatible. Please tell me where I am wrong. If you want we can go step by step with little posts. I am afraid you take for granted, perhaps unconsciously Aristotle theory of mind and substance. It just does not work with comp.



I claim that it has nothing to do with serious
philosophy,


You talk of serious philosophy, but are explicitly against the use of definition and postulates (axioms) in some of your posts. How could we progress. Beside I don't believe in some clear boundary between science and philosophy. Those are, imo, purely conventional construct. In France and Belgium philosophy belongs to literature.




and is just a hideous distraction, possibly stemming from
confusion at the semantic level and disturbed sr. Bad epistemology,
in a phrase.


I could agree if you give arguments. Without arguments it just looks like insults (almost).



THERE ISN'T A PROBLEM!

?


(Yes, okay, to computer scientists and
physiologists there is, but not to philosophers or others interested
in getting their ontology and epistemology straight.) The evolved
creatures all have their responses and their internal workings;
and that's *all* there is to it!


You do confuse here 1-discourse and 3-discourse. It is easy to build machine capable of reporting their internal states. But that does not explain the presence of qualia associate with those reports. On the contrary pure 3-explanation of those self-referential reports seems to evacuate the need of the internal and non communicable qualia. Note that this is really what I have solved in the comp-frame with the Lobian machine interview, and this, I accept, is more difficult to grasp than just UDA. I agree that for many, it is hard to understand the mind-body problem, but I think this is due to some blind acceptation of aristotle naturalism.



I am an evolved creature; and if I can't understand that that same
conclusions apply just as much to me as to the creatures I study,
then I'm yielding to nonsense.


Here I totally agree with you. But that does not per se evacuate the qualia problem, which is a problem for me *and* for the Lobian machines I study, for exemple.


Bruno

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/


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