On 23 Jan 2012, at 14:01, Craig Weinberg wrote:
Part I...I'll have to get back to this later for Part II
On Jan 21, 4:32 pm, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]> wrote:
Craig,
I assume comp all along.
Then why say that you are agnostic about comp?
If I was knowing that comp is true, or if I was a believer in comp, I
would not have to assume it.
I study the consequence of the comp *hypothesis*. Unlike philosophers
I never argue for the truth of comp, nor for the falsity of comp. But
as a logician I can debunk invalid refutation of comp. This does not
mean that comp is true for me.
During the Iraq war I have invalidated many reasoning against that
war, but I was not defending it. There were other arguments which were
valid.
But I realize some people lacked that nuance. Just for this modal
logic is very useful, because it is the difference between the
agnostic (~Bg) and the "atheist" (B~g).
When doing science, it is better to hide our personal beliefs, and to
abstract from them.
Why do numbers make machines or tapes? Do the want to? Do they
have a
choice?
As much choice and free will than you have. They too cannot
predicts
themselves and can be confronted to making decision with partial
information.
Where do they get this capacity?
From the laws of addition and multiplication, which makes arithmetic
already Turing Universal.
Where in addition and multiplication do we find free will?
Just addition and multiplication (and some amount of logic, which can
be made itself very little) appears to be Turing universal. But it is
a very *low level* programming language, so a proof of the existence
of a Löbian universal number is *very* long, and not easy at all. But
it can be done, and free-will, as I defined it, is unavoidable for
Löbian number. They have the cognitive ability to know that they
cannot predict themselves and have to take decision using very partial
information. This is true for all universal machine, but the Löbian
one are aware of that fact: they know that they have free-will. Of
course some people defines free-will by a sort of ability of
disobeying the natural laws, but this makes free-will senseless, as
John Clark often says.
Why do we never see it manifested in
our ordinary use of numbers?
With the computer and AI enterprise, you can see the embryonic
development of this.
It's only embryonic if it develops into a fetus. At this point it
appears to be developing into a purely human distribution system for
gossip and porn instead.
OK. But that is contingent of humans. I really don't know if
"artificial machine" will become intelligent thanks to the willingness
humans, despite the humans, or thanks to the unwillingness of humans.
You can also interpret, like Jon Clark did, the DNA as number, coded
in the chemistry of carbon, so that we can see it all around.
We don't see it in the usual use of little numbers, because it is not
there. The relations are either too poor, or not exploited enough.
Don't all relations have to arise ultimately from the usual use of
little numbers?
Not really. Everything concerning matter and consciousness comes from
an interplay between little numbers, and many big numbers. This comes
from the UDA, which explains that the inside view is somehow a
projection of the whole arithmetical truth.
This leads to something counter-intuitive, but not contradictory. the
big picture conceived from outside is not so big (it is the whole of
just arithmetic). But from inside it is provably bigger than any
formal approximation of the whole of math. It is *very* big. Note that
arithmetical truth is also bigger by itself than we thought before
Gödel. It is already not axiomatisable. There are no effective
theories of numberland.
Anyway, you are not convincing by pointing on everyday example, when
talking to a theoretician.
If the theory doesn't apply to reality, then I have no problem with
it. Fantasy sports are not my area of interest. It's only if it
conflicts with my ideas of realism that I would be curious.
Realism of what?
If comp is true, it has to apply on reality. That's why UDA makes comp
a testable hypothesis.
I assume comp, derive consequences which are observable, and so we can
make test.
It gives also a unification of qualia and quanta, consciousness and
matter. It might be that even false, it will remain interesting as an
example of theory. It might help to weaken comp to get the correct
picture.
To be sure the testable part requires not just comp, but also the
classical theory of knowledge.
Generally the point of counting is to
establish a deterministic quantitative relation.. that's sort of
what
counting is? If the numbers themselves made choices, then why should
we consider counting a reliable epistemology?
Counting use only the succession laws. The universal mess comes from
the mixture of addition and multiplication, as the prime numbers
already illustrates by their logarithmic "random" distribution.
Your question is a bit like "if criminals are made of chemical
reactions, should we continue to rely on chemistry?".
Are you saying then choice making is an emergent property of certain
mixed arithmetic modes only and not inherent in numbers then?
Yes. The numbers plays a role only through their additive and
multiplicative structures, and to the relations, which includes the
computable one, you can define from this.
Each universal machine is a particular machine. Even the virgin,
non
programmed one.
You are a universal machine, at least. (Even if you have a non
machine
component).
Me the person, or me the biography?
The person is not really a number. But in all its histories/
computations it acts as a relative numbers, through its body
described
above his substitution level.
Is my life a machine within which
I exist as another machine or are we both the same machine?
Your life is a sequence of machines states, and typically, it is
self-
changing machine. To be more precise would need boring and
distracting
vocabulary issue, the understanding of UDA, etc.
Your life is not a machine. I have translated "to be a machine" by
the
more operational "to accept a digital brain transplant" to study the
consequences without defining completely what person and life are
(which can hardly be done).
Keep in mind that I do not defend mechanism. I just explain that IF
mechanism is true, then Plato/Plotinus are correct, and Aristotle
primitive matter, and physicalism are not correct.
My position is that P/P Mechanism and A/pm/p are correct in some
sense, incorrect in some sense, both correct and incorrect in another
sense, and neither correct nor incorrect in another sense. The
invariant universal truth is sense.
You are basically right. This can be made precise in the comp theory.
I know that you believe in non-comp.
Is that supposed to invalidate the observations? Programs do get
tired? They do catch colds?
With comp, that is obvious.
At what point do programs develop the capacity to get tired? Is it a
matter of complexity or degree of self-reference?
Yes, like some robot can feel themselves wet, in the sense of finding
a shelter if it rains.
With some amount of self-reference they can
develop qualia, and rememorable qualia, which can help to speed the
recollection.
I think this is critically flawed. Nothing I know of suggests that
qualia from quantity can develop at all.
By Gödel's theorem, and the existence of intensional modal variant,
there is room for quality.
If that were the case a
person should be able to learn to see visual qualia with other sense
organs.
You might provide an argument. Only the brain, and some nerves
concentrations behaves in a way making them able to use the modal
(qualitative) relations between numbers.
High resolution greyscale images should turn into color.
relatively to which person and which brain?
I
have not seen anything that suggests to me that qualia would or could
speed recollection either. To the contrary, it would be an additional
abstraction layer with significant resource overhead. If what you say
were true, computers would not need graphics accelerator cards, rather
they would need accelerator cards if graphics were not available to
speed up computation. I really can't see any credible argument against
this.
You point on the hard part of the consciousness problem. What I can
show is that machines observing themselves cannot avoid this too.
Eventually it is part of a Löbian machine to tell you "believe it or
not, but I am not a zombie, I can't prove this too you, but I know it
in my bones".
The difficulty is that the qualia are not associated to a machine, nor
a machine state, but to a more complex relational structure between
that states and the set of all possible environment/continuations. The
Gödelian modalities helps to figure out the structure of those
relations.
Qualia serves users, not machines.
But of course both "are machine" with the comp hypothesis.
With "are machine" in the "yes doctor" quasi operational sense.
I can accept a sense that the first person is not a machine, but this
might been confusing.
It is insurmountably
nonsensical and metaphysical.
You should try to argue for this.
It is to say, it's faster to count to
1000 if the numbers taste like different fruits.
?
In that case they can discover that they cannot prove
that they have *genuine* qualia. This happens with not so much self-
referential abilities.
All qualia is genuine. How could it be otherwise?
A zombie talking about its feeling of the color red, would talk about
a non genuine qualia. With non-comp, zombie makes sense.
I know that you believe in comp.
Then you are wrong. I am agnostic on this. As I should be: no
correct
machine believes in comp (nor in non-comp). We just cannot know.
That
is why I insist that we need some act of faith to say "yes" to the
doctor. That is why I insist that it is a theology, and that we are
forced to accept that people thinks differently.
The way I've found to get beyond that is through sense. Sense
bridges
the gap and connects the dots. It says to us, you cannot know, but
yet, it seems like you do, and that has to be good enough. Does it
seem like the universe is mechanistic and arithmetic?
By UDA, reality is not WYSIWYG. What we see is a reflect of something
bigger, like arithmetical truth. This contains the many non
arithmetical properties leading to person, consciousness, matter,
etc.
How do numbers 'see'?
By having relation with itself semblable to a dreaming robot.
On the outside,
yes. Everything outside of myself seems like it could be
quantified as
a single story with countless discrete parts. Inside myself seems
like
there are many stories and meanings, all shifting and catching the
light in different ways at different times - a constant flux of
significance which re-contextualizes many stories and meanings
simultaneously.
Well said.
Thanks :)
I propose another possibility. Imagine a universe where things can
become what they actually are without running a program. Running a
program supervenes not only on sequential recursion but on a whole
universe of logical consequence, ideas of representation, memory,
continuous temporal execution, etc. What if those things are
aspects
of particular experience and not universal primitives?
I don't know what is a universe. That's part of what I want an
explanation for, that is in term of simple things that I can
understand, like elementary arithmetic or combinatorics.
What is it you mean when you talk of universal machines then? What
are
they universal to?
A universal machine is just a machine which can simulate any other
machine through their finite description and their inputs. It a
mathematical concept, but nature can emulate (simulate exactly) those
machines. This happened recurrently on this planet, with the
development of the genome, brain cells, thought, mind, language, and
now computer.
Ok, so for your theory, the universe is the set of all machines, their
inputs, and outputs.
And their relative code, and their relations with infinities of
universal numbers, etc.
What I'm saying is that inputs and outputs don't
need a machine to define them as such.
Indeed, non computable functions have <input-output> which are not
effectively describable by machine. In the usual classical set
theoretic sense, most functions are like that. Most functions are not
computable. But if you are using such function, you have to tell us
which one.
Instead you have one primordial
mass-energy singularity
I don't take such notion for granted. I want understand them.
which multiplies/divides itself spatially and
temporally.
Nor this.
Each division entails inherent input-outputs to the other
parts and the whole. It's subtractive and implicit, like a spectrum. A
prism does not have to illustrate each hue of the spectrum
mechanically and digitally, it just exposes the optical sense that is
already inherent in white light.
Sense is inherent in light?
How? What would that mean?
But you are sidetracking my point:
**Things may not need to run a program to be what they already
are.**
I agree. We don't need to implement arithmetic for it being true, for
example.
Right. Or for truth to be truth.
*It is programs which need things to become what they are not.*
But they usually belong to complex histories/computations which
provide them with many things. Indeed, a priori, too much things (the
white rabbit problems).
Whatever histories they are part of needs to be fully explicated and
projected onto whatever is executing them. The microprocessor never
'learns' the operating system, each structure must be recursively and
discretely enacted. Nothing is elided unless it is synthetically
condensed with a compression algorithm or something. The hardware
doesn't learn or grow in a machine. In a brain/mind it does.
How. If you can really answer that question, I will be able to tell if
this already happens in Numberland, or not. So we might see if your
theory is comp-compatible or not.
This bit of common (universal) sense is what your view seems to be
missing or hiding or denying. The result is a perfectly logical
theory
of an anti-cosmos in which intangible programs simulate thingness to
achieve irrelevant tangibility as a meaningless side effect. If you
can just turn it inside out, you will see that we participate in a
real universe directly,
The old Chinese-Indian-Greek dream argument makes me already doubting
we can see a real universe directly. We see what our brains succeed
to
filter and represent.
Think of it not as filtered or represented but condensed and
presented. We are directly presented with a real human world,
That's your assumption, belief, or theorem. It would be nice if you
could be clearer on your assumptions.
You are perhaps lucky to talk with a logician, but logician likes when
you distinguish clearly what you assume, and what you derive.
which is
condensed from the real worlds our dozens of organs, trillions of
You should better avoid the use of the word "real". Given that our
discussion is precisely on what is real, or on what is primitively real.
cells, (x)tillions of molecules which are literally within us, as well
as it is influenced by our fractional participation in the worlds
which exist without us - our social group, civilization, species,
biosphere, planet, solar system, galaxy, cosmos.
All those terms make sense. But they do not denote anything
primitively real.
I argue that if we assume digital mechanism, all that emerges from a,
mathematically complex and counter-intuitive self-referential
properties of universal 'numbers.
All what I say is that if we assume comp we get automatically a "many-
worlds interpretation, made by universal numbers, of arithmetic. With
two main parts, the communicable and the non communicable.
and that ideas cannot embody things on their
own.
That's true, but ideas can embody the idea that things can own
bodies.
Not actual bodies, only ideal bodies.
Actual bodies are relative ideal bodies seen from inside. Bodies are
experience type, not primitively material token, in the comp theory
(when well understood).
My mind doesn't have the first
clue how to embody by own body. If I want to stand up, I can only say
that I do stand up, not that I provide or process any information that
results in a result of 'the body' standing.
You will not ask a email application to explain how they function at a
low level.
You might be a dreaming butterfly.
My perception is not that
I am commanding my body to execute a standing program, but that I am
directly standing myself - it costs me effort personally so that I
don't want to keep standing all day.
Please take a seat.
To be able to seat without doing too much effort, and "directly" is
made possible by collection of amoebas who got the cable, and about
(x)tillions of phone communications. I know you agree with that
because you asserts that our consciousness is somehow related of
their consciousness (is it a sum? what is the function?).
But the higher level of the human person, is indeed a quite
sophisticate higher level function. We can't think for our cells, nor
can we know the complex molecular phenomena, except by making theories
and observations, and reading books, etc.
Now, what everybody try to tell you is that, all levels having lawful
description in nature are computable, so that your theory just look
argument for a low comp substitution level. If not, you invoke a
particular non computable, and non Turing recoverable by first person
indeterminacy, and we might be interested in knowing which one.
Codes and mechanisms are what real objects do to each other, but
objects are not codes themselves. They are a chunks of the
singularity
with masses and densities.
I don't know that.
That's what they seem like though.
Yes. But that's the key difference.
Programs tend to encounter errors
and crash, or encounter latency, pixelation, etc. Matter doesn't ever
falter in it's own presentation though. An iron anvil never drops it's
gravity pointer and flies through the ceiling spontaneously or changes
back and forth from iron to cobalt because the anvil class of programs
has a bad line of code.
It just a matter of first person plural probability calculus.
What if the
entire cosmos is a monad; a boundless and implicit firmament
through
which objects and experiences are diffracted? The primordial
dynamic
is not mechanism but stillness and stasis, like a spectrum to a
prism.
All that is Turing emulable, and doesn't add to the understanding.
A boundless and implicit firmament is Turing emulable?
Actually-infinite complex cellular automata might not been Turing
emulable, but they are still Turing recoverable in case such infinite
firmament is necessary for consciousness. So let us reason from comp
and see if an actual infinite firmament is necessary.
If you postulate it exists in some primitive way, you just postulate
an infinitely complex assumption.
If we start counting from 0, your way makes sense. I start counting
from 1, with 0 being the absence of any number so it has to be an
afterthought.
I don't understand.
If we start with 0 as the first number, then the second
number is no more likely to be 1 than it is to be any number.
In which theory?
Beginning with unity and singularity is infinite in the sense that
without anything else to relate to it can only be boundless, but it is
not infinitely complex, it is infinitely simple. Complexity arises
through the fragmentation-division and multiplication-recapitulation
of the 1.
Complexity arise from addition and multiplication. With comp, it is
enough.
I postulate white light which presents each division
(diffraction really, as it is not truly divided but revealed like a
sliced onion) as a range of color. The color is the diffraction and
the diffraction is the color. You could say that all numbers exist
inside of 1 and that 0 does not exist but insists as a potential (ie
Cantor Set evanescence).
I am afraid this does not make much sense for me.
Anchored in that stable unity, matter is the more direct
representation of this singularity (ie the many alchemical
references
to 'stone').
But what is matter?
The discrete diffractions of the monad.
Hmm... Why not. But this should be made clear in some context, with
precise definition of discrete (you will need Church thesis, or
topology), monad, and what do you mean by monad diffraction.
Cool. I'm putting together a new website, trying to improve it and
prep for the TSC conference in April. Give it a look if you like, and
see if it's any clearer than the old site: http://multisenserealism.com/thesis/
Monad diffraction is the interior experience of the big bang.
Words like "interior", "experience" and "big bang" are more complex
and theory dependent than "Monad diffraction".
It looks like playing with words.
Instead
of a fragmentation across space (really an induction of space into the
1), it is the induction of frequency and amplitude (time, energy) into
the now. 'Now' is what 1 feels like.
The expression might have a sense in the comp theory. In my early
writings I do describe self-observation, under the substitution
level,
as a processes of self-diffraction, putting you into infinities of
computational continuations. Matter is, well not generated, but
recover, through that process. But this is just a way to describe the
first person indeterminacy, and terms like diffraction have physical
(optical) precise meaning, so I keep that for the pause café.
Right, this is more of a figurative diffraction, especially since
there is 'nothing' doing the diffracting (literally, it is 0 which
gaps the ÷ of the 1?).
I don't see an atom of sense here. Sorry.
Carved out of the singularity
using the knife of interior figurative diffraction (feeling/being,
sequence, significance, time) which is expressed as literal
diffraction on the exterior (indirect detection, objects, space,
relativity, topology)
Too much sense here. Sorry. You have to find a way to make your
statement more precise if you want to convince a scientist.
I'm trying to get at the primordial interior-exterior divisions, and
how the interior is diffracted one way, using an alphabet of feeling
and being through time and the exterior is diffracted the opposite
way, using indirect representations of objects across space.
?
The subjective correlate would be silent and dark void as
well as solar fusion and stellar profusion. This is realism.
This is imagination.
Imagination is part of realism.
At a different level. If you forget this you blur fiction and the
reality we are searching. (Not the reality we would have found).
There is a level at which fiction and reality are blurred, and a level
at which they are rigorously demarcated. Both levels are real as well
as the continuum of levels between them. I am calling the former the
profound edge and the latter the pedestrian fold (of the multisense
continuum).
http://multisenserealism.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/label_comp8a.jpg
?
It is our experience, but it is
impossible to emulate mechanically.
This looks like non-comp, but it can be derived from comp.
Experience,
consciousness are NOT Turing emulable. Only local bodies, through
which experience can be manifested relatively to experience and
bodies
of other (universal or not) machines.
The picture we get is counter-intuitive. It is the price of comp, but
it is natural for Platonists, and comp leads to Platonism, even to
some Neoplatonism à-la Plotinus.
It's valuable to look at it that way too. My view is counter-intuitive
as well, but mainly because our intuition has been numbed by our
culture of occidental instrumentalism. We see with our own eyes what
happens when we turn on a light, but we disqualify it from
consideration because of optics, physics, biology, evolution, blah
blah blah.
Yes. It is a tradition to put the mind body problem under the rug.
My point is that if we take the comp hyp seriously, simple thought
experience shows how the express it in arithmetical term and axiomatic
definition, and that it leads to test. Making it scientific in the
usual academical sense of the term.
We become disenchanted with our own perception in favor of
knowledge about the mechanism associated with it's delivery.
That's the mistake indeed. The beauty is that with the progress in
machine theory the mistake becomes palpable. That's why I think it is
interesting to understand that the current materialist theologies are
not compatible with mechanism.
All we
have to do is realize that seeing is not just a complex process of
billions of discrete particles and 'signals', but it is also a very
simple and biologically common non-process.
What do you mean by biological in this context. What makes you think
that there are no simple biologically common non-processes in
arithmetic? If they are non computable, why do you want make them non
Turing 1-recoverable?
The disenchantment is due to the fact that people believe that
mechanism is the answer.
But mechanism is the question.
Provably so once you assume mechanism. That's the beauty of it.
In the least, it provides a non physical frame, yet widespread, the
belief in arithmetic, where we can explain where the beliefs in
physical laws come from (even as qualia), and, the hard part, why they
are locally self-referentially correct.
Many organisms have eyes,
others have antennas, others have cilia. From quorum sensing we can
infer that the molecules which make up living bacteria are able to
sense molecules of chemicals being produced by other bacteria. How do
we know this is not a form of seeing or tasting?
I bet it is a form of seeing or tasting.
Cells are already universal, and I can attribute them consciousness,
and I might think that "me" needs the level of "physics" around the
Heisenberg uncertainty, to say "yes" to the doctor. But this is for
surviving in the closest sense of being "me" in the very long turn.
"We" can survive, but lost things, at higher level too, and this leads
to the question who are we, personal identity, etc.
I am OK with consciousness on some scale, or even perhaps non
temporal, for very simple entities. Indeed I can attribute
consciousness to any universal arithmetical relation. I think self-
consciousness begins with Löbianity, and this leads only to more
questions for them.
Mechanism, well understood, is antireductionist for all universal
numbers. It is as much a re-enchantment as a promise for infinities of
mess. Universal machines oscillates between freedom and security, they
want both, but there are local tradeoff. With security you loose
universality, and with freedom you crash from time to times.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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