On 15 Sep 2011, at 22:22, meekerdb wrote:
On 9/15/2011 11:51 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 14 Sep 2011, at 07:27, meekerdb wrote:
On 9/13/2011 10:01 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Sep 13, 9:38 pm, meekerdb<[email protected]> wrote:
On 9/13/2011 4:07 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
The rules are at bottom the laws of physics.
That doesn't mean anything. The laws of physics are the rules.
That's
why I say it's circular reasoning. I ask you what is a rule,
and you
say it's at the bottom of laws, but laws are just another word
for
rule. There is no bottom, because there's nothing there. It's an
intellectual construct.
Of course it's an intellectual construct, but it has predictive
power.
I agree. Deferent and epicycle have predictive power too. It
doesn't
mean they can't be understood in a greater context with more
explanatory if not predictive power.
And that's what Bruno is trying to do - provide explanations in
terms of arithmetic; which he takes as basic. But explanation is
cheaper than prediction.
But comp predicts, given that it predicts the predictable
observable. To get more quantitative results asks for a lot of work
and time. But comp predicts all what is predictible, at different
levels or modalities, and it predict in principle much more given
that it gives a glimpse on the complexity of death and all first
person possible experiences. It shows also the abyssal complexity
of numbers' epistemologies, and it frees the universal machine from
all normative theories (the usual velleity of "other" local
universal machines).
It is not for practical quantitative prediction, at least not
before we get the physical laws from numbers' theology, but we are
interested in fundamental question, aren't we?
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Of course I don't expect you to be able explain why there are three
generations of leptons or tell me what dark matter is. But we need
some definite predictions to test a theory. To just 'predict'
linearity or complexity is not very impressive. Physics is a very
well developed field, so it's going to be hard to get from
arithmetic to a new result.
Hard? Without doubt. But it is necessary (that *is* the point). I
don't know what is dark matter, or if it exists. But I know that IF I
am a machine, then dark matter does not exist, nor any matter. And I
know that addition and multiplication decides all questions on the
*observation* on matter and dark matter in the long run. Necessarily
(that is what has been proved).
But theories of cogitation and consciousness are not well developed;
so it is there I would hope for some real predictions. Here's some
interesting observations from a friend. I wonder if your ideas
might explain them.
I insist that I have no ideas. I just show the consequences of
mechanism, which is assumed by almost everyone, with different degrees
of explicitness. Did the theory of evolution predict anything? You
must look at the mechanist assumption in a similar way: it shows that
the laws of physics are not a given (like some people believed for
biology and species before Darwin), but that the laws of physics
emerge, in a precise way, from the way the universal numbers relate to
each other.
To ask for using mechanism to say something concrete about dark
matter, today, would be like asking if the theory of evolution can
explain the action of some plant in the brain, or the working of my
personal computer.
I'll just quickly caveat how far we can extend existing findings, of
which there are a few in the last 4-5 years (see: www.wjh.harvard.edu/~dsweb/pdfs/06_01_EFC_DLS_ERG_RAS.pdf
-- this was done in Dan Schacter's lab at Harvard; Schacter is a
renowned memory researcher; and www.jneurosci.org/content/27/45/12190.full.pdf
-- this was featured in Nature Reviews in 2007). In terms of
memory and confidence, or how memory changes, Elizabeth Phelps at
NYU has done some ground breaking work.
These findings focused on what is happening in the brain during an
explicit statement of confidence in one's answer about some or other
semantic statement. The caveat is I am not sure how far we can
extend this to issues or questions for which an answer is unclear
and unavailable, or very difficult to ascertain because veracity may
depend on some type of understanding of conceptual material for
which the respondent has limited knowledge. It is one thing to have
confidence that the solution to the integral of cos x is sin x + C,
but another to have confidence that there is a god, or that
capitalism will fail. It seems in the latter two instances the
reward system is more important in neural processing. But in all
cases we are looking at the confidence in the belief that the memory
being retrieved is accurate.
During feelings of confidence in which the respondent is correct
(high-confidence and correct), medial and lateral parietal regions
are active indicating a role for these areas in post-retrieval
memory monitoring, but, note that limbic regions are also active for
confidence in a recognition decision. In other words, confidence
arises as a result of processing in regions associated with
familiarity, on the one hand (and this is where errors occur), and/
or regions that are more closely or directly linked with the problem
at hand - information that is used to solve the problem without so
much digging into our vast data stores.
The second paper goes further and shows the difference between older
and younger adults with respect to high confidence errors, among
other things. The interesting findings, in my opinion, include the
fact that the same brain regions (notably though is the DLPFC which
is becoming ever more important as a region of interest in cognitive
neuroscience- in this case it is thought to monitor or modulating
decision processes across cognitive functions) are active during low
confidence irrespective of whether or not a condition of true or
false recognition was the case. But during high confidence
different brain regions are active (posterior cingulate in this
case) across true recognition and false recognition.
The conclusion which can be drawn after reading the second paper is
that the MTL (medial temporal lobe, but includes the hippocampus and
parahippocampus among other structures) is involved in high
confidence feelings when the respondent is actually correct (and in
the low confidence and incorrect condition), and that frontoparietal
activity is dominant in cases where the respondent is highly
confident but incorrect (but also active in cases of low confidence
but correct recognition). There are other differences which can
distinguish the results in parens, but the details are probably not
interesting most here. It is interesting to note however that the
activation of the MTL and frontoparietal regions are virtual mirror
images across the high vs low confidence conditions for true and
false recognition - almost like a see saw. We are dealing with on
the one hand direct recollection in correct cases and familiarity in
incorrect cases.
What is amazing here is that the brain processes high-confidence
true and false recognition very differently, yet the feeling of
confidence appears indistinguishable. It might be interesting to
probe this.
The reward system was not a main region of interest in these
studies, however, feelings of confidence are correlated with
dopamine release, which necessarily involves the reward pathways and
hence the basal ganglia. The more often one feels correct about
something, especially in the absence of challenge, the more it
becomes part of a belief system - and the more likely a statement
fits into a belief system the more likely one is to be confident in
that statement. The confirmation of one's belief system creates a
rewarding feeling associated with these pathways.
It is very interesting, but I don't see why "my idea" should explain
those facts. It is *their* approach which are based on "my
idea" (mechanism) at the start. They discuss the aspects of the actual
human mind implementation in the brain. It illustrates my basic
postulates. You can't mention a paper based on "my" assumption and
discard the conceptual consequences of that same assumption.
Unless, of course, you have seen a reason to doubt the validity of the
UDA argument, in which case it would be nice if you could elaborate. I
did answer your remarks on both step 6, 7, and 8, but I am willing to
explain if it remains something unclear, and I am willing, at least
for awhile to add the 323 principle(*) in the definition of comp, if
that is the problem, although I didn't see any reason to say "yes" to
a digitalist doctor, if the 323 principle was not a consequence of
mechanism.
But here too, in our last conversation on the subject, you seem to
agree that comp implies the 323 principle.
Bruno
(*) The 323 principle asserts that if consciousness can be attributed
to a computer running some computation in which the register n° 323 is
not used, then the same consciousness can be similarly attributed to a
computer running that same computation, but where the register n° 323
has been removed from the computer.
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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