On 30 Aug 2011, at 19:24, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:
On 30.08.2011 17:11 Stathis Papaioannou said the following:
The subject feels he initiates and has control over the voluntary
movement but not the involuntary movement. That's the difference
between them. Both types of movement, however, are completely
determined by the low level behaviour of the matter in the brain,
which can in theory be modeled by a computer. No particle moves
unless it is pushed by another particle or force, otherwise it's
magic, like a table levitating.
I would appreciate if you could be more specific about the mechanism
on how movement of atoms leads for example to creation of a book
about consciousness. Such a book is after all just a collection of
atoms, this is true. For me however a self-assembly of such a book
is just a magic.
You might be interested in the work of Bennett in computer science. He
has introduced a notion of *deep object*. Roughly speaking an object
is deep when it is the result of *only* a very long computation. Deep
objects are characterized by having a mixture of redundancy and
randomness. Most plausibly, human books and genomes are deep object.
Chaitin's incompressible number is NOT deep, but Post number is (Post
number = 0, 001000111... with the ith decimal = 0 if phi_i stops and =
1 if phi_i does not stop, and phi_i is any enumeration of 'closed
programs' (program without inputs).
On 01.09.2011 05:14 Stathis Papaioannou said the following:
The atoms have to move in order to write the book. They have to move
inside the brain of the author, then his hands have to move, the
keys on the computer keyboard move, and so on. Also, things have to
happen prior to the book being written. The universe arises, stars
and planets form, life evolves, the author is born, photons from
books he has read on consciousness impact on his retina which then
leads to reactions in his visual cortex and language centre. It's all
very complex, of course, but there is a causal chain of events. If
Well, this was my question, to specify this casual chain of events.
Especially how movement of atoms creates conscious experience.
Otherwise this is just a matter of belief.
If we are machine, movement of atoms does not create consciousness. It
only makes some other person's consciousness relatively manifestable
to you. Consciousness is a non created thing. It is a (mathematical)
fixed point of self-observation by sufficiently rich machine or
numbers (the Löbian one).
you had the right physical theory and enough computing power you
could start with the Big Bang, run a computer simulation and end up
with the book. Quantum mechanics does not preclude such a
simulation.
This is also just a matter of belief, as you cannot prove it.
I like more science based on experimental studies. From such a
viewpoint, all we can say now is that we do not know this. Or can
you prove your viewpoint based on empirical studies?
Once we are interested in 'reality', we can never prove any statement.
But we can disprove some statement, and we can infer some theories,
which some luck remain stable.
From experimental studies we can say that all observable process in
nature seems to be computable, except for the collapse of the quantum
wave (but then Everett showed that we don't need it).
Nor is there any evidence that consciousness or humans violate the
current description of the physical world? On the contrary, we know
that self-observation by *machine* leads to complex uncontrollable
computations. We know that from both practice and theory. And the
theory explains that such machine can get stuck on phenomena that they
cannot explain, although they can explain *why* they cannot explain
them assuming themselves that they are machine. With mechanism we can
justify why that is the best we can hope for.
If it isn't the physical processes in the brain causing
consciousness it must be something else, i.e. something non-physical,
conveniently called a soul. The soul should be empirically detectable
if it has an effect on the body. It would be detectable by observing
that apparently magical physical processes occur in the brain, such
as an ion channel opening for no reason at all. We have no evidence
of such things happening. If the soul had no effect on the body but
simply mirrored its behaviour we would not have any empirical
evidence for it but as a hypothesis it should be eliminated by
Occam's Razor.
Well, you have still not explained how books self-assembly
themselves from atoms. This is some problem with your reasoning.
What Occam's Razor says about the creation of books?
Books are plausibly deep object. They require long computations.
Although, once they are there, they can be duplicated easily.
In general, I do not know what else exists, but I do have conscious
experience and it is unclear how to explain it starting from atoms
and physical laws that we know (in order to accept Bruno's theory I
have first to learn mathematical logic).
"My" theory is just Mechanism, or Digital Mechanism. It is not mine.
Well the idea to let the subst level varying is mine, and is a key to
understand the consequences.
The result showing that mechanism is incompatible with (even very
weak) materialism is mine indeed. It is the UD Argument. It is an
informal argument showing both *why* and *how* the physical laws comes
from the numbers. You don't need any mathematical logic to understand
it. You need just (at step seven) a passive understanding of Church
thesis (to understand that the Universal Dovetailer is a well defined
computer science notion).
Mathematical logic is needed only for the arithmetical (and more
abstract) version of UDA (AUDA).
AUDA is UDA for the machines.
Again, in this AUDA case, the result is not "my" theory, but the
machine's one. (well the ideal self-referentially correct platonist
and mechanist machines). I am just the guy saying "oh, look, we can
already listen to them".
I suggest that people not familiar with mathematical logic should
first completely grasp UDA, if they want to tackle the AUDA. Only
professional logicians find AUDA much more easy than UDA (but then
many of them dislike the very notion of consciousness, like other
scientists, note).
While it is not known if physics involves uncomputable functions,
all of known physics is computable.
Do you agree with Bruno's theory? If I understand him correctly,
then even one starts with comp, the 1st person view is still
uncomputable. Hence something uncomputable does exist.
I would like to insist that I have no theory. Just reasoning,
argument, informal (but rigorous) proof, and formalization of the
proofs in the language of some universal machine (not for making them
more rigorous, by for explaining the technical detail of how the laws
of quanta and qualia emerge). It is not a theory, but a theorem, in
the digital version of the old Milinda-Descartes mechanist theory of
life. "My" theory (mechanism) is believed by 99,9% of the rationalist
today. Unfortunately most are materialists, and ignore that this makes
them inconsistent.
I am currently explaining UDA on the entheogen forum(*), to people
without training in math, and up to now, they seem to get the points.
With the step seven, you can already have a good idea of why and how
the physical laws emerge from the numbers (in a testable) way.
Technically, you can still remain physicalist by postulating that the
physical universe is finite and not too big. The step 8 shows that
this move does not save physicalism.
You can ask any question. I will answer.
Bruno
(*) Here is UDA step 0:
http://www.entheogen.com/forum/showthread.php?t=28604
You will find easily the step 1, 2, and 3. The step 4 is in
preparation. I follow the sane04 presentation. You might help yourself
with the slide:
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/publications/SANE2004Slide.pdf
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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