On 09 Oct 2011, at 18:30, John Clark (FOR list) wrote:
On Sat, Oct 8, 2011 Bruno Marchal <[email protected]> wrote:
> If you are a machine, you are duplicable (in principle)."
Yes. And if pure randomness is important to the feeling of self then
you are
not a machine and can not be duplicated because randomness (which by
its
very nature is non deterministic and is in fact the very definition of
random)
It is a definition of one precise form of randomness. Others exist,
but it would distract us from the topic.
can not be reliably duplicated. But my feeling of self continues
from one moment to the next so the only logical conclusion is that
randomness is not important in generating a feeling of continuity of
self.
OK. But that is not in the conclusion. That is the starting
assumptions. And below you might grasp that the first person
indeterminacy plays a key role in the ability to remain conscious in
lawful physical reality. But I am anticipating.
> you cannot predict in advance where you will feel to be."
You will feel to be where your sense organs are, the location of
your brain
is irrelevant provided it is not so distant that the speed of light
becomes
important, and if recent developments turn out to be true perhaps
not even
then.
The speed of light is not relevant. If you are told that you will be
reconstituted in a far away galaxy, or even in a different universe,
or a different multiverse, you have to take that reconstitution into
account to predict your next experience, no matter what. If not, you
would introduce a magical ability (that is, a non Turing emulable
ability) to persons.
If your eyes send you an image of the Kremlin then you will feel like
you're in Moscow, and if your eyes send you an image of the White
House you
will feel like you are in Washington. Of course in this example the
two
identical copies of yourself have received non-identical stimulation
and as
a result are no longer identical and will have diverged, but both of
them
have an equal right to call themselves Bruno Marchal because both can
remember being Bruno Marchal yesterday.
Yes. And those two Bruno Marchal have to recognize they could not have
guessed in advance where they will be reconstituted.
Ypu are pleading for comp here (alias computationalism, or DM =
digital mechanism).
> You cannot predict the result of the next self-localization."
So what? It would only take you a few minutes to write a computer
program
that will look at all the even numbers greater than 4 until it finds
the
smallest one that is not the sum of two odd primes and then stop,
but if the
computer this program is running on has X amount of memory you can
not in
general predict if it will stop before it reaches X.
That is a third person indeterminacy, which concerns some event in the
long run, and is quite different from the first person indeterminacy
which concerns the result of an immediate experiment, from the first
person point of view.
You can see a similar difference between the deterministic chaos (like
with weather) and the observation of an electron in the base {up,
down} when it is in the state up+down.
So what? Well, it is the discovery of the notion of first person
indeterminacy in the deterministic frame of digital mechanism.
> The first person experience, in this case, cannot be
> emulated by any deterministic process"
I'll bet you feel like your first person experience has continued from
yesterday to today, but I have a secret to tell you. Last night when
you
were asleep I scanned your body to the atomic precision Mr. Heisenberg
allows and recorded the position and momentum of all the atoms in
your body,
and then I destroyed your body, and then I used that information to
construct a new body, and you knew nothing about it until I told you
just
now. And yet you still feel like you because you remember being Bruno
yesterday.
Yes. That's what I call digital mechanism. Tthe assumption that indeed
I would still be Bruno Marchal after an experience like that. More
precisely DM assumes that there is a level of description of myself
such that I survive for a substitution made at that level.
> Who you? Which you? How to do that?"
I honestly don't understand the question, or what the alleged
problem is
supposed to be, or what "that" is that I'm supposed to explain. I'm
sure all
the copies of me will have an opinion on whether they are John K
Clark or
not, and if you ask them nicely they would be happy to tell you what
that
opinion is.
This is because I have explained only the key ideas. As I said, the
first person cannot be aware of the delays of reconstitution, nor of
the virtual or physical nature of those reconstitution.
So if we assume that there is a (primary) physical universe, and that
it is robust enough to run a universal dovetailer, then you can
understand that physics is in principle entirely deducible from
computer science (in the mathematical sense of Church, Post, Kleene,
Turing, Markov, ...) which makes physics a branch of pure number
theory (notably). To predict any experiment you can do, and verify it
from a first person view, like looking at the needle of some device,
you need to take into account the infinity of reconstitution of
yourself in the universal dovetailing, and the laws of physics should
be given by a statistics on all computations.
At this stage you can still avoid the conclusion by assuming that the
physical universe is little (non robust enough to run a signifiant
part of the universal dovetailing). But this is a red herring.
Indeed, the assumption of the existence of a robust universe can be
eliminated by another argument (the movie graph argument) which shows
that a digital machine cannot distinguish, not only virtual from
physical, but also cannot distinguish virtual from arithmetical. The
additive and multiplicative structure of the natural numbers is enough
to emulate all computations. We are already in the matrix, to put it
shortly, with a matrix existing by virtue of the well known laws of
addition and multiplication.
There is no problem with that, on the contrary. We found an
explanation of where the physical laws come from. It respects Dennett
criteria of explanation: that is, it explain physics without assuming
the physical, like Dennett ask for an explanation of consciousness
(but he does not ask this for an explanation of matter, curiously
enough).
When you do the math, a pretty nice bonus is offered. Incompleteness
provides an explanation of the difference of the communicable
knowledge and the non communicable knowledge, that is mainly the
quanta and the qualia. The mind body problem has been transformed
constructively, in that way, into a problem in arithmetic (a long time
ago). The precise logic of the observable has already been extracted,
and is confirmed (not refuted) by the quantum data.
You can see how QM evolved:
1) the old theory is SWE + unintelligible dualist theory of mind (the
collapse)
2) SWE + DM (Everett, Deutsch)
3) DM (your servitor)
Of course to use DM to prove or refute the physical existence of the
Higgs Boson, would be, at this stage, like to use string theory to
prepare coffee. DM will take time to be practical in physics, but
conceptually, we can understand, just by assuming the numbers+addition
+multiplication, where the coupling observed/observers come from, and
we can distinguish the quanta and the qualia. Actually, the quanta
appear as particular case of qualia, which makes physics a first
person plural (defined by duplication of entire populations), and this
fits nicely with the decoherence theory in the Quantum framework of
Everett and Deutsch. The theory provides also an explanation of many
feature of consciousness, defines simply as the machine state when
believing in a reality. And the theory (DM) is shown to be refutable,
making it into science, when it is considered usually as philosophy.
-- Bruno Marchal
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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