On 04 Aug 2011, at 20:38, benjayk wrote:
Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 31 Jul 2011, at 19:31, benjayk wrote:
Bruno Marchal wrote:
The notion of a TOE usually is used in a reductionist sense, as a
theory that can be used to predict everything.
A TOE should do that, in principle at least.
Of course it should be able to predict everything which is
predictible, in the right condition. No one asks for a TOE which
can
predict things which are not predictible. No TOE can predict that
you
will feel to be, just after the duplication, in W or in M.
OK. But what is predictable may be quite limited in the end.
Predicting is not the goal of the TOE. It is just a little obligation
to be accepted as a scientific theory, so as to be refutable.
The goal is more like searching a bigger picture, rational, and which
help, first in formulating the mind-body problem, and then in solving
it as far as possible.
OK.
Bruno Marchal wrote:
Is there a
result showing that it is possible at all to derive precise physical
laws
from COMP and a bet on our substitution level?
Yes. And you don't need to know the substitution level, although a
comparison of the physics derived from comp, and the physics inferred
from measurement might suggest higher bounds for our substitution
level.
Alright. So which form would the physics derived from COMP take?
Comp already shows that it take the form of an uncertainty calculus on
computations. From comp it is easy to derive indeterminacy/
uncertainty, non locality, non clonability of the apparent primitive
matter. From comp + the classical theory of knowledge you get also
symmetry at the observable bottom (the laws are reversible, and
'particles' comes from invariance from such symmetries).
I can
hardly imagine that one / a few equation describes the physics for
all of
the omniverse.
Why? That is a bet also done by many physicists, and comp shows the
necessity of the existence of such an equation. Newton's laws already
explains a lot, and the quantum laws seems to be universal.
Empirically this is plausible, but again comp shows that it has to be
like that. Only geography and history can be very different, and needs
some amount of non trivial, and non deductible, purely contingent,
information.
I am not sure you are aware of how much QM (and Hamilton, or Maxwell)
already explains things.
There would probably be an infinity of laws with approximate
and local validity. How could this be formulated (let alone derived,
but I
probably would understand none of your explanations regarding that?).
You need to study a minimal amount of mathematical logic and
theoretical computer science. But with UDA alone, you can understand
all the points above, except the symmetry and what comes from the
classical theory of knowledge.
Bruno Marchal wrote:
Bruno Marchal wrote:
So no theory
can explain everything. But we can show the necessity of there
being
a gap.
OK. You are right. I will abandon the label TOE, for TOAE. Theory
of
almost everything.
Well, but the part that is unexplainable doesn't seem to be small at
all.
Frankly it explains almost nothing (which is the most we will ever
explain,
as there is infinitely much to explain!).
Well, you have admitted not having study the details, but normally it
explains a lot: indeed God, belief, knowledge, observation and
sensation, and all this including all reason why we cannot completely
understand what happens to be introspectively unexplainable. Ad
normally, in principle, it explains the origin of the physical laws,
without assuming anything physical.
Well, OK, saying it explains almost nothing might be too harsh.
There is
probably no objective way to say how much it explains, as the
unexplainable
part is (largly?) unmeasurable. But I don't see why it would be almost
nothing, so it's not a TOAE either.
I would say that comp explains almost everything. The only things
which it does not explain is not explainable in *any* theory. It is
the existence of numbers, and the befuddling aspect of consciousness.
But it explains why consciousnes must be befuddling, and why and how
machines get befuddled by it. In a (paradoxical) sense, the soul of
the machine will correctly NOT believe she is a machine, and perhaps
even correctly believe she is not a machine (once she identifies
herself with the 'inner god').
Bruno Marchal wrote:
Which is quite an astounding result, don't get me wrong, but let's
not make
the mistake of adjusting to the immodesty of the reductionist
materialists.
This way you may not be taken as seriously, but being modest and
honest
seems more important to me.
The modesty is in the reiterared act of faith of saying "yes" to the
doctor, and accepting the classical Church thesis. All the rest
follows from that: from the explainable to the ineffable.
It seems to me we postulate the ineffeable at the start by saying
"yes", and
so it's not really a conclusion of the theory, but we just give it a
place
in a theoretical framework.
OK. Here there is a difficulty on which I probably don't provide
enough explanation.
When we want to explain something, we have to accept at some level the
existence of that something. here we want to explain (as much as
possible) consciousness and matter. When I was young, I was told that
consciousness does not exist, or that it was a crackpot notion for
chatting monkeys. So the first goal was to explain that consciousness,
although apparently impossible to define, does exist, and plays some
role in the global picture. The use of teleportation provides a way to
illustrate that. Indeed it reduce the existence or the appearance of a
physical reality to a first person (plural) notion in computer
science. In fact it reduces physics to a theory of consciousness. Then
computer science provides a theory of consciousness, and explains how
consciousness emerges from numbers, except for a gap, which can be
made infinitesimal. Comp would become inconsistent if it closes that
gap, and I suspect any theory of consciousness would be like that.
So, in UDA, I do, at the meta-level, postulate consciousness, or
postulate that *you* are conscious enough to give sense to the
invariance of consciousness and first person subjective reality for
all the comp transformation (adding a delay, changing the level of
hardware/software, etc.). But then the reasoning leads to the reversal
physics/biology (or psychology, or theology), and then I use the
miracle of Church thesis (already used in the UDA-7, note) and
incompleteness, to explain consciousness and matter.
So the first postulation is just a matter of agreeing that we have
something to explain: consciousness, which was not, and is not yet
well understood by most scientists), and matter. And then, the AUDA
eliminate the postulates at the ontological level.
I show, that in the comp theology, matter and consciousness are
already epistemologically existing, implicitly, in the laws of
addition and multiplication of the natural numbers.
Bruno Marchal wrote:
Bruno Marchal wrote:
And in that sense, comp provides, I think, the first coherent
picture of
almost everything, from God (oops!) to qualia, quanta included, and
this by assuming only seven arithmetical axioms.
I tend to agree. But it's coherent picture of everything includes
the
possibility of infinitely many more powerful theories. Theoretically
it may
be possible to represent every such theory with arithmetic - but
then we can
represent every arithmetical statement with just one symbol and an
encoding
scheme, still we wouldn't call "." a theory of everything.
So it's not THE theory of everything, but *a* theory of everything.
Not really. Once you assume comp, the numbers (or equivalent) are
enough, and very simple (despite mysterious).
They are enough, but they are not the only way to make a theory of
everything. As you say, we can use everything as powerful as
numbers, so
there is an infinity of different formulations of theories of
everything.
For any theory, you have infinities of equivalent formulations. This
is not a defect. What is amazing is that they can be very different
(like cellular automata, LISP, addition+multiplication on natural
numbers, quantum topology, billiard balls, etc.
The conclusion of UDA is that consciousness and physics does not
depend on the initial theory. The laws of physics are invariant for
the change of the basis phi_i. I think that is the deepest invariant
we can imagine.
Bruno Marchal wrote:
The many more powerful theories are internal views *in* the number
realm,
but strictly
speaking they are introducing the complexity, and should be compared
to event taken "place" in the number realm.
How do you know the more powerful theories are just internal views,
and not
implicit in the "yes" (consciousness)? We might just get what we
(implicitly) assume at the start, and give it a place in the theory.
Exactly. That is what we call deriving something in a theory. We make
explicit what is implicit in the axioms. That is how a theory works.
After the derivation, we can confront it with the observation of
nature. My main point is that all this makes comp+Theaetetus testable.
If the test disprove that theory, we might improve the Theatetus'
theory of knowledge. But that is already done, in a way, in the
derivation of the many hypostases (4 + 4*infinity).
I just try to put light on a problem, and shows that we are basically
wrong since we have separated theology from science/academy, or worst,
since we have separated mysticism from rationalism. The study of
consciousness does not leave much opportunity in that respect. This
does not mean we should allow 1p-statements in the 3p-scientific
statements, like Craig seems to do, but we must allow 3p-statements on
the possible 1p-notions defined or approximated in diverse 3p-theories.
I think you might be troubled by the fact that with comp we have both
that:
- arithmetic explains conceptually almost everything (including the
epistemological existence of mind and matter, and even of the one with
no name and some of its 'emanations')
- it shows us, the terrestrial beings, ignorant in the extreme, and
this quasi forever, with respect to predict the 'behavior' of mind,
matter, and the one with no name, and its emanations.
And all this in a relative constructive way, making the main heros
(the UMs and LUMs) sort of natural trouble makers, universal
dissidents, destroyer of normative theories in all domains, skeptics
of all authoritative arguments, in short, free thinkers and free
explorers.
And all this naturally, with the very idea that advertising or
institutionalizing such freedom can kill it, for a time, in the
neighborhood.
A weakness, for the study of physics, (common with String Theory,
though) is that we still don't know if the physics allows different
parameters or not. If all the hypostases would have collapsed into
simple logic, physics would have been purely geographical and observer
dependent. The physical omniverse would have been like a continuum of
multimultimulti-verse.
But they don't collapse, thanks to incompleteness, so there is a non
trivial comp physics, that you could define by what all UMs can
observe and share (and what all LUMs can see and reflect about). Is
the mass of the proton given by a physical law, or is it geographical?
Open problem. I expect centuries to decide questions like that.
That leads to a second weakness: this machine's theology needs hard
mathematics. But then that was the goal: to transform the mind-body
problem into a problem of mathematics, and nobody said that
theoretical computer science is simple or even just very well known,
today. It should be tautological that comp relies on computer science.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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