On 28 Jul 2011, at 17:41, Craig Weinberg wrote:
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.
That made it non Turing emulable. So you postulate the negation of comp.
You could at least be agnostic.
By postulating non-comp you refer to something unfathomable as a
primitive element in your theory, without showing how it put light on
the mind body problem.
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.
Strictly speaking the universal machine is known being beyond human
mathematics. It is an unknown. You could say "yes the brain of the
blue man is a lot more than the brain of the orange man, because it
hosts the blue human experience.
A machine cannot have an experience, it is the
container, it is that which is experienced,
No. The machine itself is not experienced. The experience of the
machine is experienced, and it may, or not, refer to some
representational level.
but it has no capacity to
experience anything as an abstract design.
What is abstract? What is concrete?
I don't buy that there is necessarily a given physical universe. It is
only an Aristotelian rumor, based on a gross extrapolation on our
animal experience. But it fails, both on mind *and* matter.
A silicon chip can
experience that machine, but it experiences it as a single large
molecule.
How do you know that?
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.
That's unclear and ambiguous.
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.
Machines *lives* also non Turing emulable realities, and they can
identify their fist person with it. So "living it" is not an argument
against comp. It is more a confirmation.
Yellow is not
Turing emulable and I can imagine yellow anytime I want.
That is not a reason why a machine cannot do that to.
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.
Yes, it can. A UM can emulate all programs, including transfinite
hierachies of relatively more performant programs. Indeed UM are self-
speeding entities.
I can't make a virtual server run better or
faster than the hardware node that it's running on.
You can, but for contingent reason related to your own most probable
level, you lost the speed on a finite numbers on inputs. All this is
not relevant for the reversal between physics and machine's biology/
theology.
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.
I think you are quite wrong on this, but we may debate on the meaning
of "doing".
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.
Good. It is a relative notion.
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.
OK. We agree on that.
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.
I would say it is a personal interpretation of an observation.
Consciousness is as poetic as
it is logical. Poetry can't eat in your steakhouse?
It is a theorem: put two UN isolated for a time on a island, once will
become poet, the other engineer.
Poetry has it room and function in computerland.
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.
They don't need to be separated in our bodies, but some part of the
brain might focus on some of them. Yes.
There is absolutely nothing about
an animated CAD drawing of DNA which suggests it should be associated
with anything that feels or thinks.
Movies does not think, right.
Computer does not think either. Nor brain.
People think, thanks to brain.
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,
Not bad!
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.
That looks nice, but contains too many implicit statement making it
rather abstruse.
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.
That might be true at some level, but take for granted too many
assumptions.
Neurological machines, if they are machines at all, are Turing
emulable, unless you thing that a neuronological machine go to analog
states related to the special infinities that you have to add to make
it non-turing emulable.
"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.
Where does the cosmos come from?
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'..
You make jumps, which are hard to follow.
.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.
The one you need to believe we cannot be Turing emulable.
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.
Yes.
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.
I am not sure that God can do that.
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.
OK. But it does not answer my question.
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
Yes. That is the goal. To at least get a formulation, perhaps of some
subproblems. We get already a lot of informations.
to solving the genuine problem.
You talk like a guru. There is only theories, and the mind-body
problem will have a formulation with respect of the theory (initial
assumption) you choose.
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.
If you believe in a cosmos, you will need infinite graining in your
theory of mind, for relating the cosmos with your consciousness.
Experience and a description of experience are
fundamentally incompatible.
That is correct, at least from the machine point of view (but not
necessarily in Gods 'eye).
For the other, here I think again on the fact that G* prove Bp <-> (Bp
& p), but the machine cannot prove that, nor know that.
The description can only be interpreted by
an experiencer and the experiencer can only be described through
experience.
That's right. And? You might be confusing mathematical truth and
mathematical theories.
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.
Where does the experiencer comes from?
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?
Diagonalization is a tool in theoretical computer science, to study
the structure of what is non computable, degrees of unsolvability,
etc. It comes from set theory, where Cantor used it to study the
degrees of infinities of sets.
Mecanical consept are immune for that tool, making the notion of *all
computation* the most solid of all epistemological realities, indeed
it makes it arithmetical, among other things.
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?
I do say that indeed.
I believe in it, and I have never seen someone sincerely disbelieving
it.
It can be proved minimal in a strong sense. You can't derive the
numbers laws from anything simpler (like logic for the early
logicists, nor physics, nor the pure real numbers, etc). So it is
certainly a good place to start.
And since Gödel & Co. We know arithmetic (arithmetical truth) is
inexhaustible, full of surprises, etc. It contains the Indra's net in
the form a fractal web where all UMs and LUMs reflect on each others.
It is full of life, and big bangs.
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,
That is indeed wrong.
but my whole
hypothesis is that they are both involuted subsets of each other.
That makes sense at some level. You might intuit the crazy relation
between Bp and Bp & p.
The introspective machine might agree with you, if you were not so
undiplomatic as to refuse to listen to her at the start.
To
understand addition and multiplication you have to be a person of
sufficient age and competence to do that.
You need only to be a universal machine.
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.
You are almost right. That is why we need to come back on modest
academical theology. Again, machines agree with you on that point.
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.
Good intuition. The Löbian machine agrees. Löbian machine are the
universal machine knowing, in some precise weak sense that they are
universal.
Probably UMs agrees too, but they cannot express it.
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?
With comp we need nothing more than a universal system. Anyone would
do, and special one can be used to better formulate some problem, or
even for better hiding them. Caution.
Typically physicist search for the one which fits the most with
observation, but this just won't do if we assume we are machines, by
the UD Argument, notably.
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.
Fair enough. The problem is that your stance assumes too much among
the things I ask an explanation for.
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.
That is like equating two mysteries, to pretend there is no one.
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.
That does not follow. All you need is a theory of perspective and some
imagination.
Your view takes the relation between 1p and 3p for
granted..
What? The study of that relation is made extremely non trivial in comp.
Both with and without the classical knowledge theory.
.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.
Good description of what need to be explained, not assumed.
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.
So it would be helpful you make clear what you are assuming.
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).
Why would it be a reduction. Physics does not go very far in the
mathematical complexity. I think you confuse truth and the theories
which attempt to put some light on truth. In math, those things are
very deeply different.
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.
You have a reductionist view on what machines are able to do, and on
what they can possibly experience.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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