On 13 Sep 2011, at 23:20, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Sep 13, 3:44 am, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]> wrote:
On 12 Sep 2011, at 05:29, Craig Weinberg wrote:
This view of the psyche as being the inevitable result of sheer
biochemical momentum is not even remotely plausible to me. It denies
any input/output between the mind and the outside world and reduces
our cognition to an unconscious chemical reaction. If that were the
case then you could never have a computer emulate it without exactly
duplicating that biochemistry. My view makes it possible to at least
transmit and receive psychological texts through materials as
communication and sensation but your view allows the psyche no
existence whatsoever. It's a complete rejection of awareness into
metaphysical realms of 'illusion'.
No, it is the exact contrary. If we are digitalizable machine,
consciousness (of the numbers' relations, not of humans) is the
producer/selector of the physical realities.
The only thing rejected in metaphysics or in the illusions is the
primary matter of the Aristotelian physicalists.
Why do the numbers that believe in primary matter not count?
They count. But they are wrong (I assume comp throughout).
Why is
that particular illusion so pervasively accepted and how does it come
to be convincing to anyone?
Long histories, and evolution. The cat should better not doubt the
reality of the dog, and of the mouse.
The brain, but actually any machine, can't be programmed for facing
its own complexity.
But science is the art to go through the illusion. No, the earth is
not flat, and is not the center of reality. No the sun does not turn
around us, but we are turing around the sun, No, you can't find two
natural numbers whose relative proportion has a square equal to 2, etc.
The greek created science by taking some distance with what we see.
They discovered the arithmetical and mathematical reality, and this
inspired their theologies (or theory of everything). True, comp leads
to objective idealism, but then naturalism has failed on the mind-body
problem since a very long time. Why take physicalism as a dogma?
Anyway, I am personally neutral. I just show that mechanism is not
compatible with weak materialism (and thus also with all stronger
form), and I show that the truth can be found in the head of all
universal number. So why not to take a look?
I think the implications of the idea that we are numerical relations
don't match our experience.
Yes. All self-referentially correct machine agree with you.
I would expect that drugs would not have a
significant effect on our consciousness if it were truly independent
of substance.
On the contrary. Mechanism explains well what happens at the low
level, and of course the problem of interpreting the experience itself
might be much harder (and quite different in the aristotelian and
platonist interpretations).
It seems to suggest that our reality is merely a placebo
effect rooted in belief,
Yes, indeed.
and that the only thing keeping us from
omnipotence is an attitude adjustment.
Not really. It is our dependance of many other universal systems, and
their complex relations. And with mechanism, omnipotence makes no
sense at *any* level. Even God is overwhelmed by the divine intellect,
itself overwhelmed by the divine soul, and all this makes us more and
more humble in front of the unknown.
Why can't both physical and
arithmetic realities both be real?
They are, in a sense. But mechanism forces the physical to be derived
from the arithmetical (which is conceptually more simple). Poetically,
in oversimplifying, the physical reality is the border of a universal
mind, which is nothing but he mind of a universal machine.
So the mechanist hypothesis can explain both where consciousness
comes
from, and where the appearances of the laws of physics come from, and
this in a precise verifiable way, making mechanism testable (and
confirmed up to now).
I think that the mechanist hypothesis can only explain where the
mechanical aspects of consciousness and physics come from.
Not at all. Thanks to the Gödel-Löb-Solovay splitting of the
hypostases we get both the "mechanical", and the "true but non
mechanical" part of the theology. We get precisely both the quanta and
the qualia.
For
example, we can easily find arithmetic mechanics within a color wheel
or musical scale works, but if there were nothing to them but
arithmetic, then I would think that they would be interchangeable.
There would be a one to one translation whereby a particular melody
can be directly and unambiguously expressed visually. We should be
able to substitute one sense for another. Not only is that not the
case at all, but there doesn't seem to be anything in the arithmetic
descriptions of color that is colorful or music that is musical.
Without the experience of music, the arithmetic of musical notation
doesn't signify anything we care about.
Yes. But why would a machine not have a machine's experience. That's
part of the truth about the machine. Of course she will not been able
to prove to you that she has an experience, but then neither do I.
Experience is what connect or disconnect beliefs and truth.
To maintain a primary existence of matter, you have to conceive a non
computable notion of mind AND a notion of matter which succeeded in
diagonalizing against all computations.
I don't think you do. You just have to conceive of computation as an
intellectual category of sense rather than a source of sense.
? Is that enough to say "no" to the digitalist surgeon? Or to refuse
to give a steak to my sun in law? (you know the guy with a digital
brain).
I don't
understand how numbers are supposed to do anything by themselves.
The number 2 divides the number 8 by itself. The machine i will stop
on j, or will not stop on j, all by itself.
What
is it they are computing and why?
They are attracted by God.
Sense makes sense. You have a
subjective heads on one side chasing objective tails on the other side
that makes the coin spin. The heads side does the chasing, and the
tails side does the coining. It seems to me that arithmetic has no
equivalent symmetry that would account for the difference between
subject and object. What makes one number more or less subjective than
another?
By looking at themselves they discover the unknown, and its geometry.
Universal numbers have rich subjectivity.Löbian numbers already knows
that.
In fact you have to reify Matter, Mind and to reintroduce a kind of
identity which makes the mind-body problem non soluble, actually not
even addressable.
It's not addressable. The conception of the mind-body relation as a
problem is just a category error. How does the heads side of the coin
become tails? It doesn't.
Assuming we are machine leads to a precise formulation of that
problem. It reduces the mystery "why is there a physical universe" to
a mathematical problem "how does the numbers dreams cohere so well?".
And its gives the clues of the solution, because it shows that machine
dreams follows laws, deducible from the laws of addition and
multiplication.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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