On Sat, Jan 07, 2012 at 07:02:52AM +0200, acw wrote: > On 1/6/2012 18:57, Bruno Marchal wrote: > > > >On 05 Jan 2012, at 11:02, acw wrote: > > Thanks for replying. I was worried my post was too big and few > people will bother reading it due to size. I hope to read your > opinion on the viability of the experiment I presented in my > original post.
Any chance you could break it up into smaller digestible pieces? > > > > >> > >> > >>To Bruno Marchal: > >> > >>Do you plan on ever publishing your thesis in english? My french is a > >>bit rusty and it would take a rather long time to walk through it, > >>however I did read the SANE and CC&Q papers, as well as a few others. > > > >I think that SANE is enough, although some people pushes me to submit to > >some more public journal. It is not yet clear if physicist or logician > >will understand. Physicists asks the good questions but don't have the > >logical tools. Logicians have the right tools, but are not really > >interested in the applied question. By tradition modern logicians > >despise their philosophical origin. Some personal contingent problems > >slow me down, too. Don't want to bore you with this. > > If it's sufficient, I'll just have to read the right books to better > understand AUDA, as it is now, I understood some parts, but also had > trouble connecting some ideas in the AUDA. > > >Maybe I should write a book. There is, on my url, a long version of the > >thesis in french: "conscience et mécanisme", with all details, but then > >it is 700 pages long, and even there, non-logician does not grasp the > >logic. It is a pity but such kind of work reveals the abyssal gap > >between logicians and physicists, and the Penrose misunderstanding of > >Gödel's theorem has frightened the physicists to even take any look > >further. To defend the thesis it took me more time to explain elementary > >logic and computer science than philosophy of mind. > > > > A book would surely appeal to a larger audience, but a paper which > only mentions the required reading could also be enough, although in > the latter case fewer people would be willing to spend the time to > understand it. There is a project underway to translate "Secret de l'amibe" into English, which IMHO is an even better introduction to the topic than Bruno's theses (a lot of technical detail has been supressed to make the central ideas digestible). We're about half way through at present - its a volunteer project though, so it will probably be another year or so before it is done/ > > >> > >>Does anyone have a complete downloadable archive of this mailing list, > >>besides the web-accessible google groups or nabble one? > >>Google groups seems to badly group posts together and generates some > >>duplicates for older posts. > > > >I agree. Google groups are not practical. The first old archive were > >very nice (Escribe); but like with all software, archiving get worst > >with time. nabble is already better, and I don't know if there are other > >one. Note also that the everything list, maintained by Wei Dai, is a > >list lasting since a long time, so that the total archive must be rather > >huge. Thanks to Wei Dai to maintain the list, despite the ASSA people > >(Hal Finney, Wei Dai in some post, Schmidhuber, ...) seems to have quit > >after losing the argument with the RSSA people. Well, to be sure Russell > >Standish still use ASSA, it seems to me, and I have always defended the > >idea that ASSA is indeed not completely non sensical, although it > >concerns more the geography than the physics, in the comp frame. > > > If someone from those early times still has the posts, it might be > nice if they decided to post an archive (such as a mailer spool). > For large Usenet groups, it's not unusual for people to have > personal archives, even from 1980's and earlier. > I have often thought this would be a very useful resource - sadly I never kept my own archive. It would probably be a good idea to webbot / spider to download the contents of the archives as they currently exist. > I had no idea that was the reason I don't seem them post > anymore(when I was looking at older posts, I saw they used to post > here). > For most people, the everything list is a side interest, and other priorities and interests will interfere with particpation. Bruno is one of the few people who has dedicated his life to this topic, so one shouldn't be too surprised if other people leave the list out of exhaustion :). > As for losing the "RSSA vs ASSA" debate, what was the conclusive > argument that tilts the favor toward RSSA (if it's too long, linking > to the thread will do)? In my personal opinion, I used to initially > consider ASSA as generally true, because assuming continuity of > consciousness is a stronger hypothesis, despite being 'felt' from > the inside, but then I realized that if I'm assuming > consciousness/mind, I might as well assume continuity as well (from > the perspective of the observer), otherwise I can't reason about my > future expectations. > There is a reasonably detailed discussion of this issue in my book. My recollection was that it was a kind of stalemate - an "agree to disagree" kind of thing. Nevertheless, I was curious at Bruno classifying me as an ASSA supporter, given my very public support of the RSSA. I can only assume he is referring to my insistance that the Anthropic Principle not only works, but is essential to eliminate the Occam catastrophe. But I see the AP as quite an orthogonal question to the RSSA vs ASSA debate. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics [email protected] University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
