I am pretty sure that there is a profound misinterpretation and/or
unrecognized presupposition deeply embedded in the kinds of discussion
of which Van F and your reply and Bruno's fits. It's so embedded that
there appears to be no way that respondents can type words from a
perspective in which the offered view may be wrong or a sidebar in a
bigger but unrecognised picture. It's very hard to write anything to
combat view X when the only words which ever get written are those
presuming X, and X is assuming a position of explaining everything, yet
doesn't.
In the long run I predict that:
1) The 'many worlds' do not exist and are a product of presuppositions
about scientific description not yet understood by the proponents of MWI.
2) QM will be recognized as merely an appearance of the world, not the
world as it is.
3) The universe that exists now is.the only universe that exists at the
moment. Despite this, the "many worlds" are explorable, physically by
'virtual matter' behaving as if they existed (by an appropriate entity
made of the stuff of our single universe)
4) The MWI has arisen as a result of a human need to make certain
mathematics right, not the need to explain the natural world. This, in
the longer term will be recognised as a form of religiosity which will
be seen to imbue the physicists of this era, who are preselected by the
education system for prowess in manupulating symbols. The difference
between this behaviour and explaining the natural world is not
understood by the physicists/mathematicians of this era.
(In contrast, I regard myself as a scientist .... an explainer of
things-natural ...which I claim as different to being a
physicists/mathematician in this strange era we inhabit)
5) COMP is false.... a computer instantiation of rules of how a world
appears to be, and a world are not the same thing.
6) COMP is false.... a computer instantiation of rules of how a brain
appears to be is not a brain.
7) Corollary: scientific description of how the world appears and what
the world is made of are not the same description _and_ computer
instantiations of either set is not a world.
8) The issue that causes scientific descriptions (like QM) to be
confused with actual reality is a cultural problem in science, not a
technical problem with what science has/has not discovered.
9) That most of the readers of this list will stare at this list of
statements and be as mystified about how I can possibly think they are
right as I am about those readers' view that they can't be right.
BTW I have a paper coming out in Jan 2011 in 'Journal of Machine
Consciousness' in which I think I may have proved COMP false as a 'law
of nature' ... here in this universe, (or any _actual_ universe,
really). At the least I think the argument is very close....and I have
provided the toolkit for its final demise, which someone else might use
to clinch the deal.
This leads to my final observation:
10) I think the realization of the difference between 'wild-type'
computation (actual natural entities interacting) and 'artificial
computation' (a computer made of the actual entities interacting, waving
its components around in accordance with rules /symbols defined by a
third party) will become mainstream in the long run.
---------------------
It's quite possible that the COMP of the Bruno kind is actually right ,
but presented into the wrong epistemic domain and not understood as
such. Time will tell. The way the Bruno-style' COMP can be right is for
it to make testable predictions of the outward appearance of the
mechanism for delivery of phenomenal consciousness in brain material
NC (natural computation) and AC (artificial computation) is the crucial
distinction. I don't think the QM/MWI proponent can conceive of that
distinction. Perhaps it might be helpful if those readers try and
conceive of such a situation, just as an exercise..
cheers
colin hales
Bruno Marchal wrote:
HI Stephen,
Just a short reply to your post to Colin, and indirectly to your last
posts.
On 22 Oct 2010, at 10:53, Stephen Paul King wrote:
Dear Colin,
Let me put you are ease, van Fraassen has sympathies with the
frustrations that you have mentioned here and I share them as well,
but let's look closely at the point that you make here as I think
that it does to the heart of several problems related to the notion
of an observer. OTOH, it seems to me that you are suggesting that
the objective view is just a form of consensus between all of those
subjective view, no? Also, the notion of a measurement is discussed
in detail in the paper. I wonder if you read far enough to see
it...If we buy the computationalist interpretation of the mind then
there is nothing necessarily special about a human brain; the
discussions about computational universality give us a good argument
for that.
OK. So we agree on the basic. But if you take the comp hypothesis
seriously enough, then you might understand that assuming set theory
or quantum mechanics is either contradictory (worst case) or redundant.
Thanks for the van Fraassen paper. I have already argue that the
"modal interpretation" of QM is a form of MWI, and that paper confirms
my feeling. Not sure it is really new if you read with some attention
the entire thesis by Everett.
First of all we need to admit that if we are to be consistent
with the mathematical prescriptions of quantum mechanics, each and
every one of those scientists and table lamps, as physical objects,
have a wave function of sorts associated with them and, assuming that
they could interact, are entangled with each other. “Being in the
universe” implies to me that that there is a sharing of context and
maybe even a common basis of sorts. But is that all there is to it?
Hardly! being a table lamp, when considered from the quantum
perspective is not so simple. We cannot assume that there is any
definiteness of properties in a sharp sense. When we consider a Table
Lamp or any other physical object in isolation at best we have a
superposition of possible properties, and what is the outcome of
measurement is given in terms of restrictions upon those
possibilities by the possible properties and modes of possible
interaction of all of the tables, chairs, beds, etc. that are in the
room with that table lamp and beyond. We cannot assume that what
something ‘is’ is somehow invariant with respect to changes in the
interactions that it has with all of the other objects. This is a
very subtle point that need to be carefully considered.
The notion of a Table lamp in isolation literally dissolves into
nothing when we remove all those other objects upon which its
definiteness of state persists. The conflation that has persistent
for more than 2000 years is the idea that object in themselves are
what they are. I am reminded of Einstein’s quit to Bohr that the moon
would still exists if he was not looking at it. My response to
Einstein is that he is not the only one interacting with the moon. We
need to take the whole web of interactions into account when we
consider the definiteness of properties otherwise we are only
considering bare existence and that tell us nothing at all about
properties.
It should be obvious, if you get the UDA, that physical reality does
not have a "view of nowhere" or an ultimate third person describable
reality. Mechanism makes the physical reality a first person plural
reality, with the person played by the Löbian machine or Löbian
number. There is still a boolean ultimate third person view available:
arithmetic (or combinators, lamda calculus, etc.).
And this contradicts nothing written by Pratt, who is indeed a little
less naïve than those defending the identity thesis. But Pratt
scratches only the surface of the mind-body problem: he identifies the
physical with the set-theoretical (which is not so much senseless
actually, but far from leading to extracting QM from numbers), nor
does he tackle any problem in the cognitive science (qualia,
undefinability, rôle of consciousness, etc.). But his SET/SET^op
duality is rather natural for a category theory minded attempt to go
toward a formulation of the mind-body problem. His duality is also
100% mathematical a priori, which makes him mathematicalist like
Tegmark, and like comp (with some nuances).
In november I will have a bit more time, and I could add something on
both van Fraassen-Rovelli and Pratt.
Best,
Bruno
*From:* Colin Hales <mailto:c.ha...@pgrad.unimelb.edu.au>
*Sent:* Thursday, October 21, 2010 10:35 PM
*To:* everything-list@googlegroups.com
<mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com>
*Subject:* Re: A paper by Bas C. van Fraassen
Hi,
Looks like and interesting read.... but the initial gloss-over I had
revealed all the usual things that continue to frustrate and
exasperate me....
Why won't people that attend to these issues do some
neuroscience...where the only example of a real "observer" exists.?
Why does characterising the actual reality get continually conflated
with characterisation of the reality as it appears to the observer
(with a brain/scientist observer I mean)?
Why does scientific measurement continue to get conflated with
scientific observation which continues to get conflated with
scientific evidence which then gets confusedly applied to systems of
description which are conflated with actual reality?
There _is_ a view from nowhere!
It is acquired with objectivity, which originates in a totally
subjective capacity delivered by the observer's brain material.
In a room of 100 scientists in an auditorium there are 100 subjective
views and ZERO objective views. There is ONE 'as-if' '/virtual
objective view which is defined by agreement between multiple
observers. But no "measurement" is going on. There's 100 entities
'BEING' in the universe.
The Van Frassen discussion seems to conflate 'being' somewhere and
'observing'. A table lamp gets to BE. It is intimately part of its
surrounds and has a unique perspective on everything that is 'not
table lamp', but the lamp NOT observing in the sense scientists
observe (with a brain). A brain is in the universe in the same way a
table lamp is in the universe - yet the organisation of the brain
(same kind of atoms/molecules) results in a capacity to
scientifically observe. This 'observe' and the 'observe' that is
literally BEING a table lamp, are not the same thing! Grrrrrrrrrrrr!
This conflation has been going on for 100 years.
I vote we make neuroscience mandatory for all physicists. Then maybe
one day they'll really understand what 'OBSERVATION' is and the
difference between it and 'BEING', 'MEASUREMENT and 'EVIDENCE' and
_then_ what you can do with evidence.
There. Vent is complete. That's better. Phew!
:-)
Colin Hales.
Stephen Paul King wrote:
Hi Friends,
Please check out the following paper by Bas C. van Fraassen for
many ideas that have gone into my posts so far, in particular the
argument against the idea of a “view from nowhere”.
www.princeton.edu/~fraassen/abstract/*Rovelli_sWorld*-*FIN*.pdf
<http://www.princeton.edu/%7Efraassen/abstract/Rovelli_sWorld-FIN.pdf>
Onward!
Stephen
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