Dear Bruno,
Thank you for writing further on this. I can understand the metaphor of
“dreams shared by a continuum of running machines, and they can define (non
constructively) notion of worlds, and proximity of worlds” and agree with it if
I weaken the definition of the word “machine” to be something far removed from
the concrete idea that most persons have. The concern that I continue to have
is how do our models represent 1) a plurality of distinct 1-p (merely
postulating a plural 1-p is insufficient reasoning for me.), 2) the evolution
of those 1-p.
I see your theory as a very sophisticated form of idealism that still
suffers from the problem of epiphenomena. I say this because I cannot figure
out how your theory explain a common illusion of a physical world necessarily
emerges within the dreams of the “running” machines. How do the many dreams
have sufficient structure to act to supervene inertia?
Onward!
Stephen
I have been re-reading the Mauldin paper and trying to figure out how the
Movie Graph idea is not being used a device to amplify a refutation of Comp in
the paper.
From: Bruno Marchal
Sent: Friday, January 21, 2011 2:28 PM
To: everything-list@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: A paper by Bas C. van Fraassen
Colin,
David seems to understand we are closer than you might think. Here I answer
again to an interesting old post. I am not sure you commented my answer.
On 23 Oct 2010, at 23:37, 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.
In a sense this is an open problem. The expression 'Many dreams' is less false.
Then there are dreams shared by a continuum of running machines, and they can
define (non constructively) notion of worlds, and proximity of worlds.
2) QM will be recognized as merely an appearance of the world, not the world
as it is.
Not sure about that. OK for the hamiltonians, but not for the quantum principle
(linearity and symmetry in all directions).
3) The universe that exists now is.the only universe that exists at the
moment.
For the first person pov, yes. But it is a conscious state. I guess you are not
solipsist. The term 'universe' is vague here. Taken as a third person facts, it
is a form of cosmo-solipsism. We don't know that, and have evidences on the
contrary: the quantum facts, and digital mechanism once you get the first
person indeterminacy.
The numbers describe everything, but that counts for nothing.
The numbers relations defined from + and *, emulates everything, and that
counts for all possible internal views of arithmetic.
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)
That is unclear.
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.
It is a theory (QM without collapse). But the many dreams is a consequence of
digital mechanism too, in a testable way---by testing the physics.
You can always propose another theory. All theories have their own religiosity.
I made the comp one explicit most of the time. It is a theory akin to a
neoplatonist or perhaps neoneoplatonist (neoplatonism + Church thesis)
theology. In a rather transparent sense, it is the theology of the universal
numbers. The proper theological part is axiomatized by G* minus G, at the
propositional level.
(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.
But that is a consequence of comp. A computer instantiation of rules of how a
world appears to be IS NOT a world, indeed. Worlds are what is emerging from a
continuum of computations if a first person plural way.
Here you confuse digital physics, with the physics which has to be derived from
computer science when assuming comp (without eliminating consciousness).
6) COMP is false.... a computer instantiation of rules of how a brain appears
to be is not a brain.
OK. But I work in the theory comp, which means that by assumption "I", whatever
am I "really", am or is Turing emulable at some level of description.
Careful, in a sense the first person "I" (the one which enjoys and suffers for
example) is not really Turing emulable from its point of view. That explains
why comp is truly 'unbelievable' by Löbian machine, although trivially true for
the löbian machine!
7) Corollary: scientific description of how the world appears and what the
world is made of are not the same description _,
Again that is a consequence of comp.
and_ computer instantiations of either set is not a world.
Yes.
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.
I am partially OK. But the problem can become technical in such or such theory
or theories of mind.
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.
No, we agree on the important point 5 and 7. And if you really don't buy comp,
even if it makes the worlds, and the sensations undescribable, then I have no
problem with your attempt to introduce substance and physical unicity.
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.
The difference between natural and artificial is artificial. And thus natural
too, among machine developing big egos.
Löbian machine have already a problem with that. Their 8 'natural' different
view on arithmetical reality seems, for them, to contradict. There is a tension
between Bp and Bp & p. A bit like the right and left hemisphere, or the heart
and reason, may be.
---------------------
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.
Well. I have hide for long that it is machine's theology. It has not helped.
Now I don't hide it, especially that it makes clear that science has not decide
between Plato's and Aristotle "theologies".
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
It is testable by its physical parts. For consciousness, each one has to judged
by itself, and understand that it is a strong hypothesis, and that it might be
false.
If comp is true, it is unbelievable (which explains the need of an act of faith
in front of the doctor). It makes the comp people obliged to be NON proselyte.
NC (natural computation) and AC (artificial computation) is the crucial
distinction.
That distinction is relative to the selves or the egos. It is an indexical.
I don't think the QM/MWI proponent can conceive of that distinction.
In public science we must abstract from that distinction, and explain its
appearance by a logic of self-reference. In arithmetic it is basically the
distinction between Bp and Bp & p. G* knows they are the same, but the machine
don't know, and cannot know. Universal machine looking inward cannot NOT
conceive that distinction, and it will be hard for them to abstract it away.
But there is no need to eliminate that crucial distinction, given that with
comp,, the physical laws arise from that distinction.
With comp, those eliminating all indexicals have to eliminate the physical
worlds, which are first person plural (Bp & Dp & p).
Perhaps it might be helpful if those readers try and conceive of such a
situation, just as an exercise..
We do it all the time, but public science (Bp) abstracts itself from it, even
the science which tackle the distinction, by using some hypothesis.
With mechanism, this abstraction does NOT lead to the disappearance of the
person. On the contrary the abstract person and its role can be recognized as
preponderant, even in the making of the physical worlds. That is an admittedly
counter-aristotelians news.
Best,
Bruno
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
Sent: Thursday, October 21, 2010 10:35 PM
To: 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
Onward!
Stephen
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