Dear Marty,
On 08 Jul 2011, at 18:46, m.a. wrote:
Dear Bruno,
Can you imagine any way to test whether a higher
intelligence is monitoring the UD and occasionally modifying
it? marty a.
As much as I can imagine a higher intelligence monitoring the prime
numbers, and occasionally modifying them. Like if sunday, numbers get
new divisors.
In another word: hardly. (just remember than the UD, and its running,
is part of arithmetic).
Best,
Bruno
----- Original Message ----- From: "Bruno Marchal" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Friday, July 08, 2011 12:09 PM
Subject: Re: Bruno's blasphemy.
On 08 Jul 2011, at 01:59, Russell Standish wrote:
On Wed, Jul 06, 2011 at 10:12:45PM -0700, meekerdb wrote:
One that happens to be incompatible with
theory that our minds are computer programs.
Can you explain that? It seems to be Bruno's central claim, but so
far as I can see he only tries to prove that a physical reality is
otiose.
Brent
Here's my take on it. I guess you read the version I wrote 6 years
ago
in ToN.
Once you allow the existence of a universal dovetailer, we are far
more likely to be running on the dovetailer (which is a simple
program) than on a much more complicated program (such as simulating
the universe as we currently see it).
I am in a good mood, so I will respect that. I don't want to go in
the "details". Let just mention that I am not sure the size of the
UD code matter so much. If we assume the *physical* existence of a
forever running UD, then what counts is the number of computational
histories going in my current state. That the UD itself wins might
play a role. But the way I isolate a computer science isolation of
a formulation of the mind-body, even what you say, if correct, has
to be deduced from the self-introspecting discourse of the machine.
Under COMP, the dovetailer is
capable of generating all possible experiences (which is why it is
universal). Therefore, everything we call physics (electrons,
quarks,
electromagnetic fields, etc) is phenomena caused by the running of
the
dovetailer.
That's correct. Yet, I guess many people will suppose that this
comes from the fact that the UD will emulate some physical
phenomenon, like the computation of the heisenberg gigantic matrix
describing the observable evolution of the entire Milky Way +
Magellan and Co. Now, despite the UD does that indeed (trivially),
that computation itself is only playing an infinitesimal part in
*our* experience of the galaxy. A priori we have to take into
account *all* computations going through our actual 3-version of
our actual mind state. So the real physics, the one with the
"real" quanta and the qualia, results from the statistical
interference of a priori a vastly bigger set of computations.
By Church-Turing thesis, the dovetailer could be running
on anything capable of supporting universal computation. To use
Kantian terminology, what the dovetailer runs on is the noumenon,
unknowable reality, which need have no connection which the
phenomenon
we observe. In fact with the CT-thesis, we cannot even know which
noumenon we're running on, in the case there may be more than one.
We
might just as well be running on some demigod's child's playstation,
as running on Platonic arithmetic. It is in principle unknowable,
even
by any putative omniscient God - there is simply no matter of fact
there to know.
All UDs are equivalent, and physics, nor the whole theology, can't
depend of the initial choice.
We can take elementary arithmetic, the combinators, or any Turing
complete formalism.
So we can even take the (rational, not real) Newton laws (but that
would be confusing!), or a rational topological computer (but that
would be treachery with respect to the "correct" extraction of the
consciousness/matter coupling from the introspecting universal
machine discourse.
So ultimately, this is why Bruno eliminates the concrete dovetailer,
in the manner of Laplace eliminating God "Sire, je n'ai besoin de
cet
hypothese".
No, it is much worst, it is more like "Sire, Your hypothesis
(primitive matter) can't be used, and might only prevents the
finding of the solution to the mind body problem.
Anyway, Bruno will no doubt correct any mistaken conceptions
here :).
The impulse is stronger than me :)
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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