On 10/23/2010 2:37 PM, Colin Hales wrote:
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.
You are presuming a lot about physicists. The idea that QM, and more
generally mathematics, is just description and a representation of one's
knowledge, not reality, is very common among physicists.
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..
I can conceive of it as relative. If there is a world N which is very
large and complex compared to a part, A, of that world and the
computation in A is used to represent something in N, then I can see
regarding A as artificial relative to the "real" N. But that's not an
absolute distinction, since N could be a simulation embedded in a still
larger computation.
I could also conceive of it as analog vs digital. It might be that the
real world can only be described by real or complex numbers and digital
computations can't completely simulate it - but this seems both very
doubtful and probably impossible to test.
So how do conceive the distinction?
Brent
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