On 9/22/2011 11:22 AM, Jason Resch wrote:
On Thu, Sep 22, 2011 at 7:55 AM, Stephen P. King
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 9/22/2011 1:19 AM, Jason Resch wrote:
[SPK]
Sure, let us consider this similarity to Leibniz'
"per-established harmony" idea. Could you sketch your thoughts on
the similarity that you see? I have my own thoughts about
pre-established harmony, but I see, in Craig's ideas, other
concepts similar to those of Leibniz that do relate to a notion of
"harmony" and other somewhat unrelated concepts but not
necessarily include the "pre-established" aspect. I haev an
argument against the concept of "pre-established" as Leibniz uses it.
From what I understand of Craig's theory it describes a difference
between first person and third person experience/reality. Each being
two sides of the same coin, where first person experience is the
interior side of what its like to be the material. The first person
experience of is indeterminable (and possibly relies on the
indeterminism of physics?) and can cause physical changes above and
beyond what can be predicted by any third-person physics. While we
are a machine according to this theory, we are a special machine due
to our history as organisms and the special properties of the carbon,
hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, etc. which form the basis of our
biochemistry. Functional equivalence is either not possible, or will
lead to various brain disorders or zombies.
[SPK]
Hi Jason!
Excellent post!! But can you see how this is really not so different
from Bruno's "result"?! Bruno just substitutes (N, +, *) of matter and
the 1p experience is the 'inside dream" of Arithmetic. Same basic
outline, very different semantics, but a radically different
interpretation... Craig does make a big deal about "special properties"
but the properties of carbon, etc. do matter when it comes to real
functionality. While it is true that we can build universal Turing
machine equivalents out of practically anything, explaining and modeling
the physical world is not about computations that do not require
resources or can run forever or such "ideal" things, it is about how all
this stuff that has particular properties interacts with each other. We
simply cannot dismiss all of the details that encompass our reality by
just invoking computational universality. What is that truism? The Devil
is in the Details!
My own thesis follows this same outline, except that I propose that
the topological spaces are the "outside" and algebras (which would
include Bruno's (N, +, *) and minds are the inside. This outline
dispenses with the problem of psycho-physical parallelism that I will
make a comment on below. There is no need to explain why or how matter
and mind are harmonized or synchronized when, ultimately, they are jsut
two different (behaviorally and structuraly) aspect of each other, all
of this follow from M. Stone's representation theorem.
My idea is a bit tricky because we have to treat topological spaces
(such as the totally disconnected compact Hausdorff spaces dual to
Boolean logics) both as the form and content of 1p and as mathematical
objects. This is not a problem because math is all about representing 1p
and more! This makes sense because mathematical representations can both
represent themselves and be what they represent. WE see this explained
in a round about way in Stephen Wolfram's essay on intractability and
physics. The basic idea of the essay is that physical systems are,
effectively, the best possible computational model of themselves. We do
not need to postulate computations separate from the physical processes
themselves, if we are going to stay int eh semi-classical realm. If we
wish to go to a fully quantum model, they the wavefunction (and its
evolution) of a physical system is the computation itself of that system.
Vaughan Pratt argued that QM is just a consequence of the way that
the stone duality is implemented. I am just taking this ideas and
exploring them for flaws and falsification, but to do so I have to be
able to fully explain them (not an easy job!) but that is what is
necessary to claim that I understand them.
This assessment of Craig's idea seems accurate from what I can tell
at the start but falls down on the epiphenomena bit AFAIK...
Consciousness to Craig is an epiphenomenon, since he has said there is
no reason to evolve this tehnicolor cartesian theater.
I need to get his comment on this statement about the Cartesian
theater.
The similarity I see to the pre-established harmony is that Liebniz
posits two realities, a physical reality and reality of experiences.
Each follows their own laws independently of the other, but physics
does not affect or could not implement a mind, nor is the mind really
affecting physics. Instead, physical law is such that it coincides
with what a mind would do even if there were no mind, and the mind
experiences what physical law would suggest even if there were no
physical world. It is analagous to a matrix-world where we
experiencing a pre-recorded life and experiencing everything of that
individual. Liebniz postulated his idea when it became clear that
Newton's laws suggested a conservation of not only energy (as
Descartes was aware) but also momentum. Therefore an immaterial soul
could have no affect on physics. This led Leibniz to the idea that
God setup both to necessarily agree before hand.
Jason
--
[SPK]
About this pre-established harmony: Leibniz proposed it as a way to
select the "best of possible worlds", given all possible, and explain
the synchrony of events (that his hypothesis of Monads required to
exist) between monads.
Recall that the monads are "windowless" and to not exchange
substances. (BTW, this effectively makes them totally disconnected
spaces if we consider the topological implication of this property of
windowlessness!) Monads have both internal aspects (defining 1p content)
and external aspects (defining physical reality) that , as you point out
"... follow their own laws independently of the other, but physics does
not affect or could not implement a mind, nor is the mind really
affecting physics"; but if we follow my thesis there would be no minds
without physics nor physics without minds per se, as the duality between
algebras and topological spaces is a form of "natural transformation"
between Categories. Yes, there would be physics for monads that do not
have self-awareness - such as electrons and quarks, but self-awareness
is a higher order computational modeling process that need not be
instantiated (pace Russell) but is possible given sufficient topological
and, dually, algebraic structure. So this thesis implies a very weak
form of panpsychism.
It can be proven that Leibniz's pre-ordained harmony implies a
logical contradiction and thus is flawed: even an omnipotent god cannot
perform computations of infinite NP-Complete problems in zero time -
which is exactly what is required to have god establish the harmony of
the universe prior to creating it or as you wrote: "God setup both to
necessarily agree before hand". How can one perform a task that requires
an eternity to complete the set up in the first place? It cannot ever begin!
The alternative to Leibniz' self-contradicting explanation is to
consider that the NP-Complete computation as running for eternity, it
never begins and it never ends - kinda like Bruno's UD* - and 1p are
finite instances or "streams" of this eternal computational process.
Each stream instantiates a Monad and the psycho-physical parallelism is
the natural result of the Stone duality between the insidge (logical
algebras) and the outside (topological spaces), no need to have an
explanation of mind and body interactions! All the neat stuff follows
from considering how minds interact with each other. The appearance of a
"beginning of time (and space!)" that we seem to have is simply an
artifact of the finiteness of our 1p.
One interesting and strange twist of this idea is that it implies
that we never actually observe the outside aspects of monads (Leibniz
does mention this in his Monadology), we only experience the internal
representations of them. This twist is a form of the argument that we
find in the Matrix thought-experiment that since we cannot prove that we
are not in a matrix we should assume that we are and work out the
consequences. This idea also seems consistent with Russell's thesis that
"the set of all the universes that make up the Multiverse, contains no
information at all, and is in fact Nothing; it is just from the inside,
as mere descriptions -- bits of strings -- that we are, that there
/seems/, from our point of view, to be something." quoting from
http://www.scitechexplained.com/2010/06/theory-of-nothing-written-by-russell-k-standish-the-multiverse-quantum-immortality-and-the-meaning-of-life/
Recall how Observer moments are finite? Does this not imply
that there is an event horizon effect in the history of an observer
whose 1p is given in terms of OMs? This is an effective cut-off on
information that follows from its ability to only resolve a finite
amount of information, which is just another way of saying that OMs are
finite. Thus this idea implies that the "singularity" of the Big bang
never happened nor necessarily exists, an interesting and
counter-intuitive implication! (Penrose and Hawking's singularity
theorems work only if gravity exists at infinitesimal size/ infinite
energy scale and this is, on its face, merely an idealization.) We would
see an event horizon in our most distant past, but not because there is
an infinite gravitational gradient behind it. Because of this (and
considerations such as those that Russell explains in his book), my
thesis implies the "perfect cosmological principle" that any average
observer would see pretty much the same thing as any other no matter
where in a universe it found itself. All observers would see an event
horizon in their distant past and would see a universe that they believe
is middle aged.
This idea also how the appearence of a Cartesian theater effect,
that (pace Dennett) actually explains something without an actual
infinite regress of explanations! Basically, the homunculus of the
Cartesian Theater model is proposed to be something like a "strange
attractor" on the configuration space or, by the dually, computation
space of the brain. The attractor is a computational model of the global
behavior of the brain and is capable of computing simulations of itself
since, if we believe in computational universality, a model of a
computation is a computation too. So the experience that we have of
being a "driver in a body" makes sense, given that what we actually
experience of the world is the brain's Virtual Reality simulation of the
world *and* this simulation is a computation capable of simulating
itself, albeit at a lower resolution and level of complexity. Since the
brain has access to finite physical resoulces to run the computations
there will be a short truncation of the regress of simulations within
simulations; maybe only 3 to 4 recursions, I figure, at the most.
Onward!
Stephen
--
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