Kim, Russell I appreciate your concern and propositions. I have a friend who thinks about making a book with a subsubsection only (in french), and I think that you could make hundreds of books from "Conscience et Mécanisme". And I believe this could give money to the publishers, and the translators and even the author, and even leads to movie and t-shirts! Everything I say follows from the idea, which can or cannot be in fashion, of self-duplication. I make this clearer in the "The secret of the Amoeba" (the book ordered by the Grasset french publisher). Self and self-duplication is a perennial thought object with a strong appeal to the art. Have you read Borgess?
Also, mechanism is today the most believed idea, but few are aware of the startling consequences, and of the non triviality and generality of the notion of "universal machine/number/system/...". And my work can also be seen just as enthusiasm in front of the universal machine mathematical world. Well I am afraid I have to die for this being true. For sad and boring circumstantial circumstances. And then Mirek is right too and I should write a book (and a paper), instead. But , and this is part of a problem, I have progressed, and I have progressed on the obviously most delicate point at the heart of computationalism (alas), the fundamental difference it introduced into public provability (about numbers, machines and machine's discourses) and truth about those things. And the fact that universal machine can observe that difference, and can actually *live* that difference. It is the theological part. It is already in "Conscience and Mécanisme", with the chapter "theology and modality". But there I almost define "theology" by "modal logic" following a sort of tradition. The many modal logics have been conceived to help reasoning on fundamental metaphysical and theological issues, and nowadays computer science enlarge that sets of theories. The progress is in the arithmetical interpretation of Plotinus. The Gödel provability predicates illustrates the appearance of a purely mathematical modality, but the "yes doctor" hypothesis/act of faith justifies, for each machines an "abstract" mathematical theology, which has 8 "natural hypostases", with 3 of them justifying or describing the comp physics (making that theology testable), quanta and qualia being distinguished by the Gödel inherited splitting between the modalities. A toy theology with a complete cosmogony and theogony It is weird. And to be sure, the white rabbit problem has not been solved, only translated into a purely mathematical problem. Anyway I am a bit stuck. Both by boring contingent difficulties and interesting necessary difficulties. Explaining the consequences of comp in this list, like currently, could augment (or diminish) the probability that I write the book, or perhaps I could write the book on-line, so that when more than five or ten people acknowledge a chapter is clear enough I go to the next chapter, I dunno. Anyway many thanks for the interest, and please, you have my permission to translate. I can make links to those translations if I don't find them not correct, but then we can discuss (thanks for crediting). You can be part of the second possible volume of "the secret of the amoeba", the story of the thesis, asked by Grasset and the journal LE MONDE in 1998. But I expect before some understanding and acknowledgment of understanding or of not understanding. I like the idea to explain to Kim, because it means starting from zero for the math and computer science part, this could provides possible technical annexes for the book making wider the audience. Kim, to be frank I am not sure you can translate something without understanding it, but I am sure you can understand the main part of it, at least up to the point of trusting results in some books without going in the details. Interdisciplinary research asks for being professionally unprofessional, to smell the level of pertinence and develop a sensibility to the 1004 fallacies, which can grow at the frontiers of the fields. When I say, you can, I admittedly make abstraction of time, things are not easy, Of course when I see the argument for making illegal salvia divinorum I feel a bit depressed about humans and believe it is about time people learn elementary logic. There is a sort of pseudo "human science" which want to defend irrationalism, in the name of liberty, and which is very useful for arbitrary manipulation of facts and then lifes. We should certainly not prosecute someone for making an arithmetical, or a statistical, or a logical error, given that learning needs errors. But sometimes I think we should be able to prosecute those who makes the *same* error again, and again, and again, and again, ... (generally to rise fear about something or someone or somepeople). Best regards, Bruno On 31 Jan 2009, at 03:20, Kim Jones wrote: > > > On 31/01/2009, at 3:37 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: > >>> >>> I've also tried to dig through both Bruno's thesis with the help of >>> google translator. It works for a while but soon one hits a wall >>> with a >>> difficult sentence/paragraph which is hard to understand even if it >>> stands as the author inteded - and extra hard to understand if its >>> meaning is corrupted by the translation. >>> >>> Bruno, I'd love to read your thesis in english, but I fully >>> understand >>> how hard it must be to get a good translation that you would be >>> happy >>> with. At the end, it might be easier to start from scratch, take the >>> essential from both thesis, update a little bit and write a book in >>> english on your own directly. Is that an option for you? >> > > Bruno reads beautifully in French. > > I have offered to translate some of his stuff - the Brussels thesis is > a wonderful read in French, I can't really understand the stuff about > the construction of the computer because I have no background in > computer science, but I can translate all the text into good, > idiomatic English if I could generate some little income in the > process. He has said "The road to hell is paved with the best of > intentions" to me in the past, and I agree with him on that, also that > publishing deals will benefit the publisher, not the author, but there > are many people (me included) who love his stuff now and wish it could > be presented to a wider audience. > > Failing that, a few of you might have to learn French, which would > benefit your brain cells anyway. French is just English pronounced > wrongly anyway ;-) > > K > > > http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
