Hi Bruno,
I see the goal that you have, as best I can understand your writtings and
discussions. I salute your valiant efforts. The ideas that I have expressed so
far, such as those in this exchange, are merely the misgivings and thoughts
that I have based on my long study of philosophy, I can claim no certification
nor degree. I am merely an amateur.
I still do not understand how it is conscivable to obtain a property that
is not implicit as a primitive from an assumption that is its contrary. I can
not obtain free energy from any machine and I can not obtain change from any
static structure. While it is true that one can agrue that the property of
"saltiness" can not be found in the properties of "Clorine" nor "Sodium", this
does not invalidate the question of origin because we can show that there is a
similarity of kind and mere difference in degree between saltiness and
chemical make up. Change and Staticness are categorically different in kind.
This proplem is not unique to many monists attempts. The eliminatists, such
as D.C. Dennett and other to refuse the existense of consciousness as a mere
epiphenomena or "illusion" tells us nothing about the unavoidability, modulo
Salvia for example, of qualia.
By relagating the notion of implementation, to Robinson Arithmatic, etc.,
one only moves the problem further away from the focus of how even the
appearence of change, dynamics, etc. obtain. The basic idea that you propose,
while wonderfully sophisticated and nuanced, is in essense no different from
that of Bishop Berkeley or Plato; it simply does not answer the basic question:
Where does the appearence of change obtain from primitives that by
definition do not allow for its existence?
Kindest regards,
Stephen
----- Original Message -----
From: Bruno Marchal
To: everything-list
Sent: Wednesday, May 13, 2009 11:11 AM
Subject: Re: 3-PoV from 1 PoV?
Hi Stephen,
On 12 May 2009, at 19:53, Stephen Paul King wrote:
Falsifiable bets. ;)
Not all. You bet the number zero makes sense, but you can hardly refute this.
You bet there is a reality, but you can't falsify this. Falsifiability just
accelerate the evolution of theories.
Works by John Case and its students make this a sort of law in theoretical
inductive inference: in a sense the Popper falsifiability theory has been
falsified :)
I agree it is a fundamental criterion of interestingness. It is not by chance
that I worked on showing digital mechanism to be an experimentally refutable
theory.
Leibniz' Monadology is difficult to comprehend because he starts off
with an inversion of the usual way of thinking about the world. By assuming
that the observer's point of view is the primitive, it follows that the notions
of space and time are secondary, "orderings", and not some independent
substance or container.
That would be too nice to be true. Leibniz would be captured by the 3h and
5th arithmetical "hypostases". I have already tried, but I fail, and I cannot
conclude.
A synchronization of many such 1PoV, given some simple consistensy
requirements, would in the large number limit lead to a notion of a "common
world of experience".
Don't you need some "common world of experience" to have a notion of
synchronization?
[spk]
No, not if all of the structure that one might attribute to a "commn
world of experience" is already within the notion of a monad. A Monad,
considered in isolation, is exactly like an infinite quantum mechanical system.
?
It has no definite set of particular properties, it has *all properties* as
possibilities.
What I am considering is to replace Leibniz' notion of a "pre-ordained
harmony", his version of a a priori existing measure, I propose a notion of
local ongoing process. A generalized notion of information processing or
computation, for example. We see this idea expressed by David Deutsch in his
book, The Fabric of Reality": "...think of all of our knowledge-generating
processes, ...., and indeed the entire evolving biosphere as well, as being a
gigantic computation. The whole thing is executiong a self-motivated,
self-generating computer program. ... it is a virtual-reality program in the
process of rendering, with ever increasing accuracy, the whole of existence."
pg. 317-318
When we consider an infinity of Monads, each, unless it is identical to
some other, is at least infinitesimably different. All of the aspects of a
collections of Monads that are identical collapse into a single state, a notion
of a background emerges from this. This idea is not different from the notion
of a "collective unconsciousness" that some thinkers like Karl Jung have
proposed. This leave us with finite distinctions between monads. Finite
distictions leads us to notions of distinguishing finite processes, etc.
The notion of "synchronization" is a figure of speach, a stand in, for
that is called "decoherence" in QM theory. By seeing that the phase relations
of many small QM systems tend to become entangled and no longed localizable, we
get the notion of a classical finite world. This is a "bottom up" explanation.
Remember that with comp we just cannot take physics for granted. It is the
whole point.
BTW: Notions, such as finitism, might be explained by intensionally
neglecting any continuance of thought that takes one to the conclusion that
infinities might actually exist!
Comp is the most finitist theory possible in which you can still give a name
to the natural numbers. It is not ultrafinitist in the sense that it shows
machines can speed-up relatively to each other by giving name to infinities.
But the infinities are epistemological, yet fundamental (physics is also
epistemological here!).
But here is the problem I have, merely "agreeing" that "all dynamics
are contained in the "block-arithmatic truth" will require me to neglect the
computational complexity of that "Block Truth".
It is not so much a question of "agreement" than of "seeing the point".
I don't see either why accepting that the dynamics are just emerging from
some statistical relations between numbers (as treated by numbers) would in any
way require you to neglect the computational complexity. On the contrary the
realities are explicitly emerging from that complexity, but not ONLY from that
complexity, it arises from the topologies of each "self-referencial" modalities
and other mathematical constraints. Of course this makes the work technic.
The idea of a Platonic Universe of Arithmetical truth is a notion that
is only coherent given the tacit assumption to some non-static process, such as
that implicit in thought, also co-exists. A What requires a To Whom. Being is
the Fixed-Point of Becoming.
To avoid confusion I would like to insist that what I call "Arithmetical
Realism or Platonism" is just the very common belief that the principle of the
excluded middle applies on the closed arithmetical sentences. (And I truly need
only this on the Sigma_1 sentences, so it works in Intuitionist Mathematics
too).
[spk]
The problem is that all notions such as "substitute", "misunderstood",
"understanding", "emerge", etc. all require some form of non-staticness.
I need the Robinson Axioms of Arithmetic for the ontology.
I need the Peano Arithmetic induction axioms and/or infinitely others for the
(internal and relative) epistemologies. I treat the case of the ideally
self-referentially correct machines.
If you understand UDA, you can understand that, except once for the "yes
doctor", I never go out of arithmetic. Indeed, that is what is made explicit in
AUDA. The appearance of dynamics in the machines' discourse is given by
computations, and they have purely arithmetical representations.
Simple existence, "necessary possibility", is not enough. The comp model is
wonderfull, but it requires an engine of implementation.
I give it. Robinson Arithmetic is the engine of implementation. Although I
could have taken any first order logical specification of any universal system.
I could have taken a Diophantine equation, or a base of combinators, or the
game of life of Conway. Physics emerge internally in a way not depending on the
ontological basic implementation system, and in a manner enough precise so that
we can compare the comp-physics and nature. Quantum physics, up to now,
confirms some weird aspect of comp (symmetry, many-worlds below the
substitution level, non locality, indeterminacies, non boolean logics fro
yes/no experiment, etc.).
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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