On Jul 28, 4:29 am, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote: > We do have abandoned vitalism in biology, and we don't have any reason > to assume there is anything special in biology which would prevent > other materials to have any similar role. We can assume that the heart > is a biological pump, and nobody doubt that we can survive with an > artificial pump at its place.
There isn't anything special about biology other than that it is the only known source of life and that life is the only known source of feeling. The heart is not the only known source of pumping. When we find another material that can live without being biological or feel without being alive, then I would wholeheartedly agree that material could be used. The capacity to experience qualities is not like a tooth that can just be replaced with anything hard that's shaped right. > We have made the big discovery of the universal digital machine, and > we do have good reason to find highly plausible that a brain is a > biological universal machine. I agree, but the brain is also more a lot more than that because it hosts human experience. A machine cannot have an experience, it is the container, it is that which is experienced, but it has no capacity to experience anything as an abstract design. A silicon chip can experience that machine, but it experiences it as a single large molecule. Maybe we make a giant cell out of a mutant jellyfish and superimpose the machine on that - then you get a different range of possible experiences and sensitivities. > To assume the contrary leads to the need to introduce non Turing > emulable element in the brain, and we have no clue at all if that > exist, nor any clue why this would put any light on the mind-body > problem. I do have a clue that it exists. I am it. I live it. Yellow is not Turing emulable and I can imagine yellow anytime I want. > And *all* universal machine can imitate themselves completely (making > abstraction of "real time"). Not completely abstract. A UM can't emulate a program having better performance than it has. I can't make a virtual server run better or faster than the hardware node that it's running on. >So arithmetic can emulate a toilet paper > pebble computer which can emulate a topological quantum computer which > can emulate a wet human brain which can emulate arithmetic, etc. And > the notion of "real time" is a relative notion, in the > computationalist framework. I don't think arithmetic can do anything by itself. Human beings use arithmetic to do things for their own purposes, which are not arithmetic. I don't subscribe to a notion of real time. Even within human experience there are many different and conflicting time-like perceptions, some more real than others. Time is just perceptive relativity. A category of order. > I can appreciate a good poetical slogan to sum up a scientific theory, > but such slogan per se cannot be taken as such as a theory. It's not a theory, it's an observation. Consciousness is as poetic as it is logical. Poetry can't eat in your steakhouse? > > Why and how would there be a such thing as a first person point of > > view? > > With representational machine it is unavoidable. By their very > (arithmetical) existence they are connected to truth, and by their > representational abilities, they can only scratch on that truth. By > they natural cognitive ability it can be shown that they cannot not be > aware of the discrepancy between some possible truth and their > representation ability, so that machine can be aware of the difference > between what they can communicate to other machine, and what they can > figure out as true by introspection. If you accept Theaetetus > classical theory of knowledge (which defines knwoledge as true > opinion) this very paragraph belongs to such machine discourse. > It is a fact that introspective machine can know much more than what > they can prove or justified in any third person way. It seems arbitrary to me. Reverse engineered. If we all had eight separate personalities in different parts of our bodies, then we would say that it is arithmetically inevitable that 1p, 2p, 3p, 4p, 5p, 6p, 7p, and 8p perspectives would exist. There is absolutely nothing about an animated CAD drawing of DNA which suggests it should be associated with anything that feels or thinks. > > The idea of a granted anything presupposes causality as granted. I see > > causality as a consequence of existence - > > Existence of what? > > > that is, the unfolding of > > essential non-local, non-temporal sense through the existential > > process of timespace self-involution. > > This looks again like poetical jargon. Unfolding needs space: where > does that space come from? Space is simulated, as through mutual pantomime. It's like a decompression algorithm, padding the essential phenomena with null to generate the existential experience of division. Time is similar, only it's like a compression algorithm, collapsing energy events by self- significance. > Essential non-local? Are you assuming that the brain is a quantum > machine? The brain is the neurological machine through which anthropological experience is developed. Human experience is a personal anthropology through which the brain achieves significance. > "non-temporal sense through the existential process of timespace self- > involution" is not intelligible for me. I'm saying that the singularity - the level at which the cosmos is a single phenomenon (think of the big bang as a balloon inflating so that the galaxies on the outside are stretched further away from each other on the surface, while the interior of the big bang is the breath inflating it) divides itself continuously - stretches itself not by expanding into some presumed space outside of itself (there is none) but by generating the opposite of itself - emptiness - to flood inward and turn the singularity into gazillions of discrete astrophysical events. It looks like a balloon expanding to us because our bodies, planet, solar system, galaxy is embedded on the surface, but objectively it is not possible for the balloon to literally expand since the singularity has no exterior. The result is, self-involution of emptiness. Emptiness between material phenomena is space, emptiness between signifying experiences (known as 'energy' in 3p exterior) is time. This is why 'time flies when you're having fun'...high significance perceptions pinch the frame of reference relativistically. It's like compressing an application compared to a large empty jpeg. The application has more signifying details so it has a larger memory storage footprint. > OK. That is your non comp assumption, but then you introduce the > special infinities, which explains nothing, but add complexity for an > obscure purpose. I'm not sure what the special infinities that I introduce are. > > We would have no way of knowing whether that 1p > > experience carries over to the clones. > > We have no way of knowing if we survive anesthesia or just drinking > coffee. We have no way to attribute 1p experience to anybodies (even > ours). The argument is empty by being too much universal. We can't attribute 1p experience to our own body but we can certainly attribute it to ourselves. Therefore all we would have to do to veryify 1p experience in something else is to make it part of ourselves and observe the difference. > But biology shows that the identity of our atoms has no role in the > building of our personal identity: metabolism changes them all the > time. The geographical-physical context changes even more. Sure, but is there really anything that doesn't change all the time except for our own 1p experience of being who we remember ourselves to be? We know that memory isn't located in specific neurons. It doesn't work that way. > > You could emulate it if you knew what you were emulating, but you > > can't predict what yellow would taste like in a universe where color > > is a flavor and carbon is based on imaginary flat-bubble geometry.. > > You cannot build a theory by speculating on imaginary problems. This > hides the genuine problem. I think that it exposes the problem with a purely computational approach to solving the genuine problem. > That difference can only rely in your assumption that our description > needs a special infinite fine graining. I don't assume infinite fine graining, I suggest ontological incompatibility. Experience and a description of experience are fundamentally incompatible. The description can only be interpreted by an experiencer and the experiencer can only be described through experience. >Arithmetic emulates all > finite graining, and many sort of infinite one which can be shown to > be relevant from the 1p of the machines. I agree, but the 1p of the materials which host the machine are never going to be the same as our 1p unless the material can experience the arithmetic just like we experience it. Arithmetic itself is not an experience. It requires an experiencer. > The weakness of the non-comp approaches is that you have to > diagonalize against all machines, but machines are, by a sort of > mathematical miracle, immune to diagonalization. Non-comp remains > logically coherent, but asks for a very complex theory, including > speculation on facts for which we have no evidence. zoom.. over my head. What's diagonalize and why would i have to do it against all machines? > Unicorns are convenient fiction to help the children sleep, like fairy > tales. But if a scientist explains a fact by referring to Unicorns, > the fiction become inconvenient. Hydrogen, on the contrary is a very > useful convenient fiction in current theories and application. No > doubt it is a stable and observable pattern, but we cannot extrapolate > from such a fact that hydrogen atoms are *primitively* real. Are you saying that arithmetic is primitively real, and if so, why? If not, then are so saying that nothing is primitively real, and if so doesn't that make whatever is 'most real' de facto primitively real? If you are going to say that we can simulate our consciousness and our world arithmetically, then are not those maths primitively real in the simulation context? > >>> What do addition and multiplication emerge from? > > >> I don't know. That is why I assume them. What ever you assume > >> (cosmos?, cells, water, molecules, fields, consciousness?) I will ask > >> where that come from. Comp start from the simplest to get the riddle > >> of the puzzle, not from the complex, which *is* the problem. > > > I see something like pain as being simpler than addition or > > multiplication. > > But that's says it all. It is obvious that pain is simpler to grasp > than addition and multiplication, from a 1p point of view. You don't > even need to explain it to a child. > But addition and multiplication is more simple than any possible > explanation of what is pain. To have a pain you need a body. To > explain what is a body, you need a rich geometry. To explain what is > that rich geometry you need addition and multiplication. That's the difference between the 1p perspective and the 3p. It is almost universally assumed that 1p is a subset of 3p, but my whole hypothesis is that they are both involuted subsets of each other. To understand addition and multiplication you have to be a person of sufficient age and competence to do that. The self explains the body through feeling and experience, thought and reflection on those experiences, normalized formulaic representations of those observations (medicine, biology, chemistry, geometry, etc) but the self cannot be explained through the body or medicine, biology, etc. It is wholly unprecedented from the evidence of 3p geometries/ ontologies/topologies. > Birds know how to fly. This does not make aerodynamics a simple science. > The explanation is that a bird has a complex theory of flying which > has emerged from a very long computation (by mutation and selection). > Likewise we have a very complex brain which makes easy to have pain, > but that is not an argument for saying that pain is simple. There are > many very simple things, like consciousness, time, space, which are > simple to live, but hard to explain in the usual 3p sense of > explanation. It's not hard to explain in the usual 3p sense of explanation - it's impossible to explain. That's what I'm trying to illustrate. I understand your point completely, but I'm showing you a new way of looking at it. 1p and 3p are different ends of phenomenology. They cannot be collapsed into each other. Each extends far beyond each other. To try to express 1p in 3p or vice versa is folly. There is no substitute or simulation for experience. > > Wouldn't those be the natural primitives? > > In life it makes sense. It does not when we look for a theoretical > frame to solve or just to formulate the mind body problem. Then the theoretical frame is now the problem. Isn't that what science is? > > Arithmetic > > logic is symbolic and requires higher order thinking to comprehend. It > > needs to be explained - usually through concrete example. Once the > > language is imprinted on our minds, it seems quite simple and > > intuitive, just as words written in our own language appear to already > > be readable when we look at them, but objectively it is the meaning > > behind the letters and numbers that is the phenomenological reality. > > It's gestural, experiential, raw sensorimotive coherence which > > precedes the names we give it. > > I agree with this, at the level of the mundane consensual reality. You > cannot use that in a theory. Again, it sounds like you are telling me that my theory about reality has to fit into a convention about theory. At this level of ontology, we are talking about how we ourselves make sense, so it's not out of the question that it would transcend previous sense-making conventions. >You could have said to Einstein that we > know very well what matter is, and that his construction involving the > speed of light and arcane mathematical symbols just makes things more > complex than the phenomenology of matter. That's probably exactly what classical physicists said at the time. I'm the one exploding assumptions in this case though. I'm saying that we don't have to look at the universe as a 3p phenomenon pretending to be 1p - it's literally both. Seems like a paradox - that the Earth is both flat and round, but if you made a simulation based only on a round Earth, what it looks like from space, and had never encountered flatness, you would have no way of anticipating our ordinary 1p experience. Your view takes the relation between 1p and 3p for granted...that flatness is mathematically inherent in roundness - which it is, but only if you know what flat is already. If you build a cosmos from scratch, like a video game, with no knowledge of what you are aiming for - 1p phenomenology would not inevitably follow from geometry. In fact , it is literally the opposite of anything that could follow from arithmetic, and that's what I'm saying; it's not poetic, it's actually what the cosmos is doing...making crazy private universes of experience that share a common public universe of non- experience. > Your approach seems to > prevent by option *any* 3p approaches of the 1p mystery. This does not > only seem non scientific, it seems anti-scientific. No, it just means that we have to be more scientific about it. We should see 1p mystery objectively in it's own terms. A feeling is a phenomenon. An experience is a phenomenon. There are things that we can say about what they are and what they are not without reducing them to their opposite (math). It makes a greater sense. Then we can get on with the business of correlating 3p with 1p so we can record and design full sensory movies, build translators to communicate with each other more effectively as well as other species, maybe even inanimate materials.. Basically become God by spreading what we are around the universe rather than try to reinvent the wheel as a square. Craig http://s33light.org -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
