Gawd, I've missed you Colin, you fierce old thing! Is it wet where
you are or is the inundation confined to poor old Brisbane?
I suppose you know that Bruno and you agree (at least in my estimation
of your lines of argument) that observation is the key phenomenon to
be explained at the outset, instead - as you rightly say - of just
being taken for granted. If this cardinal error is committed at the
starting gate, the rest of the argument inevitably runs in a circle.
Of course you and Bruno start from different premisses vis-a-vis the
primitives, but on the positive side either theory is (I presume) open
to empirical falsification.
One thing I haven't been able to fathom so far about your own ideas is
where you stand on what Bruno calls first-person indeterminacy, which
has come up again in a recent thread. You know, the transporter
thought experiment, or just the question in general of why I find
myself to be in this particular observer position (as raised in the
target paper). In other words, what is the relation, in your theory,
between the first-person and specific third-person phenomena? In
Bruno's computational approach, the relation seems to emerge via a
kind of filtering process or sieve of consciousness considered as a
whole through the infinity of possible computations. In this way the
computational "everything" is conceived as converging on consistent
first-person narratives as a consequence of various kinds of "measure"
- a very rough analogy would be the emergence of all possible books in
Borges' "Library of Babel". What would be the analogous ideas in
your own approach?
David
On 12 January 2011 22:50, Colin Hales <c.ha...@pgrad.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
> I confess to the usual level of exasperation. Yet again the great culturally
> maintained mental block subverts real progress. And, yet again, the
> participant doesn;t even know they are doing it. Garrett says ....
>
> "The key is that observers are just a particular type of information, as is
> everything else. That is, we assume that the Physical Church Turing Thesis
> (PCTT) ..blah blah blah...."
>
> WRONG WRONG WRONG.
>
> The author has somehow remained completely uninformed by the real message in
> the consciousness material cited in the article.
>
> Observers are NOT just a particular type of information!!!!
>
> The word information _was defined by an observer_, a human, USING
> observation. Like every other word it's just a metaphoric description of as
> thing, with meaning to a human. No matter what logical steps one proceeds
> to enact from this juncture, you are not describing anything that can be
> used to build or explain an observer. You are merely describing what an
> observer will see.
>
> What does it take to get something so simple across to physics?
>
> I'll have yet another go at it.
>
> Consider a SET_X = {BALL1, BALL2, BALL3, BALL4}
> This is a traditional 3-rd person (3P) view of the set created by a
> scientific act of OBSERVATION of the set of balls.
> BALL SET SCIENCE then proceeds to construct very clever mathematical
> descriptions of set member behaviour.
>
> BUT
>
> If you are the observer = BALL1, INSIDE SET X, the very act of observation
> results from the 1ST PERSON (1-P) relationship between [you, observer = BALL
> 1 ] and [the rest of the set, from within SET_X]. This description is not
> the same as the above description of SET_X!!!! Can't anyone see that ?? The
> ability to observe anything arises from that circumstance, not from the
> 3P-circumstance constructed by having observed.
>
> Science has not even begun to characterise SET_X in the 1P way.
> =================
>
> Every single attempt so far in science has the following generic form.....
>
> I am human scientist FRED. How we humans do observation is a real mystery. I
> like mysteries. And I am really good at maths. I will do the very clever
> maths of observation. Now where do I begin.......ASSUMING OBSERVATION
> ....... blah blah blah.....
>
> Then off we go into the weeds, YET AGAIN.
>
> FRED just doesn't get the difference between 1-P and 3-P. It's a systemic
> blindness.
>
> I'll just crawl off and fume for a while. I'll be OK soon enough! :-)
>
> Colin Hales
> <if you can't formulaically predict/build an observer with what you
> produced, you haven't explained observation and you don't really understand
> it>
>
>
> ronaldheld wrote:
>
> http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1101/1101.2198v1.pdf
> Any comments?
> Ronald
>
>
>
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