Bruno Marchal wrote:
Hi John,
On 21 Jan 2010, at 22:19, John Mikes wrote:
Dear Bruno,
you took extra pain to describe (in your vocabulary) what I stand for
(using MY vocabulary).
-------------------------------------------------
On Thu, Jan 21, 2010 at 2:17 PM, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be
<mailto:marc...@ulb.ac.be>> wrote:
John,
What makes you think that a brain is something material? I mean
/primitively/ material.
JM:
I refer to 'matter' as a historically developed */figment/* as used
in "physical worldview" (I think in parentheses _by both of us_).
Nothing (materially) PRIMITIVE, it is an 'explanation' of poorly
understood and received observations at the various levels of the
evolving human mindset (~actual enriching epistemic cognitive
inventory and the pertinent (at that level) application of relational
changing (=function??).
I think we agree on that.
You know (I hope) that I pretend (at least) to have shown that
*IF* we are machine, and thus if our (generalized) brain is a
machine, (for example: we say "yes" to the doctor) *THEN* "we"
are immaterial, and eventually matter itself emerges from the
statistical interference of computations. The term computation is
taken in its original mathematical (and unphysical, immaterial)
sense (of Church, Turing, Post, ...)
Remember that "comp" is the belief (axiom, theory, hypothesis,
faith) that we can survive with an artificial digital (a priori
primitively material for the aristotelian) brain. Then I show
that if we believe furthemore that matter is primitive, like
99,999%of the Aristotelians, we get a contradiction.
JM:
"you have shown..." - your *_DESCRIPTION_ of comp* and I do not
throw out my belief to accept yours;
"Mine" is just the usual one, make enough pecise to prove theorems
from it. But it is really just Descartes, update with the discovery of
the universal machine.
first of all I carry a close, but different term for 'machine'
because IMO numbers are not "god-made" primitives.
I can prove that no theory can prove the existence of the natural
numbers without postulating them (or equivalent things).
They are the inventions in human speculation (cf: D. Bohm)
Of course I differ here. It is the notion of "humans" which is a
speculation by the numbers/machines.
Yet above you note that numbers can only be postulated. Isn't this an
example of misplacing the concrete? You point out that arithmetic is
not only almost all unknown but is, ex hypothesi, unknowable. ISTM that
can be read as a reductio against the reality of arithmetic. So why not
suppose that the natural numbers are just a model of perceptual
counting; and their potential infinity is a convenient fiction whereby
we avoid having to worry about where we might run out of numbers to
count with?
Brent
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