On 2/11/2012 6:29 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 11 Feb 2012, at 07:32, Stephen P. King wrote:
Hi ACW,
Thank you for the time and effort to write this up!!!
On 2/9/2012 3:40 PM, acw wrote:
Bruno has always said that COMP is a matter of theology (or
religion), that is, the provably unprovable, and I agree with this.
However, let's try and see why that is and why someone would take
COMP as an assumption:
- The main assumption of COMP is that you admit, at some level, a
digital substitution, and the stronger assumption that if you were
to implement/run such a Turing-emulable program, it would be
conscious and you would have a continuation in it. Isn't that a
strong theological assumption?
[SPK]
Yes, but it is the "substitution" of one configuration of "stuff"
with another such that the functionality (that allows for the
implementation/running of the Turing-emulable (Turing equivalence!))
program to remain invariant. One thing interesting to point out about
this is that this substitution can be the replacement of completely
different kinds of stuff, like carbon based stuff with silicon based
stuff and does not require a continuous physical process of
transformation in the sense of smoothly morphism the carbon stuff
into silicon stuff at some primitive level. B/c of this it may seem
to bypass the usual restrictions of physical laws, but does it really?
What exactly is this "physical stuff" anyway? If we take a hint
from the latest ideas in theoretical physics it seems that the
"stuff" of the material world is more about properties that remain
invariant under sets of symmetry transformations and less and less
about anything like "primitive" substances. So in a sense, the
physical world might be considered to be a wide assortment of bundles
of invariants therefore it seems to me that to test COMP we need to
see if those symmetry groups and invariants can be derived from some
proposed underlying logical structure. This is what I am trying to
do. I am really not arguing against COMP, I am arguing that COMP is
incomplete as a theory as it does not yet show how the appearance of
space, time and conservation laws emerges in a way that is invariant
and not primitive.
So you miss the UDA point. The UDA point is that if COMP is true, it
has to be complete as a theory, independently of the fact that the
shorter time to derive physics might be 10^1000 millenia. Comp
explains, by the UDA, that whatever you add to comp, or to RA, or to
the UD, cannot play any role in consciousness, including the feeling
that the worlds obeys some role. So if comp is correct the las of
physics have to be derived from arithmetic alone. Then AUDA makes a
non trivial part of the derivation. We have already the symmetry of
the core bottom physics, the quantum indeterminacy, non locality, non
cloning. But this is just for illustrating the consistency: the UDA
conclusion is that no matter what, the appearance of matter cannot use
any supplementary assumption to comp and/or arithmetic. You can sum up
the UD by "comp is not completable". It is the Bell-von Neuman answer
to Einstein, in your analogy below. Arithmetic is made conceptually
complete. Whatever you add to it will prevent the comp solution of the
mind-body problem, a bit like evruthing you add to the SWE will
reintroduce the measurement problem in quantum physics. Comp and
arithmetic are conceptually complete, but of epistemologically highly
incomplete and uncompletable.
Also, once you agree that stuff is not primitive, you have to define
it from your primitive terms, which I don't see possible given that
your primitive is the word "existence" which is not defined, nor even
a theory.
Hi Bruno,
You are still not addressing my questions and what I see as a
problem. The speed issue and completeness is not just addressing from an
internal perspective since we have to have invariance over many
different internal perspectives and these can vary over speed and
complexity. This is illustrated by the discussion of how "stuff" can
vary while preserving the functionality. The 'theory' of existence
follows naturally from neutral monism, you just need spend the effort to
understand it.
Think of this another way, we have a choice between belief that
"COMP is true" or "COMP is false". In order to have a coherent notion of
a bet, both "COMP is True" and "COMP is false" have to exist side by
side as equivalently possible. If we consider that they only can have
this "side by side equivalence" in the mind, then we obtain the
situation that their truth value is dependent on the choice, but that
would contradict COMP since built into it is the postulate that truth is
independent of belief. We have to look at COMP from the point of view of
many minds and not just one, but so far you have stoically resisted
doing this. Why?
OTOH, I am not arguing for any kind of return to naive realism or
that the physical world is the totality of existence. I do know that
I am just a curious amateur, so I welcome any critique that might
help me learn.
Comp like QM does not admit supplementary axioms, or variables, to
reinstall a physical realism.
This makes no sense to me. QM disallows for any particular realism
in the sense of property definiteness prior to observation. We do not
need to go through all of the no-hidden-variable theorems again, I hope!
In fact, the logic of QM is proven to not be faithfully capture in any
one form of Boolean representation because it is only representable as
an Orthocomplete Lattice. An OL is similar but not surjective to an
infinite number of Boolean Algebras and there does not exist a way to
pick out one of them in an a priori way. There is also the isomorphism
between any dualization of a finite vector space and between Hilbert
spaces of the same # of dimension that shows this same property.
OTOH, we can use the SSA idea to pick out a Boolean algebra by
identifying some sub-lattice of the OL, but this only works if we have
many observers, each with a set of local observables so that the
collection acts like the questioners in a Surprise 20 Questions game.
I think it is, but at the same time, it has solid consequences and a
belief in it can be justified for a number of reasons:
a) Fading qualia thought experiment, which shows that consciousness
is utterly fickle if it doesn't follow a principle of functional /
organizational invariance. Most of our sense data tends to point
that such a principle makes sense. Avoiding it means consciousness
does not correspond to brain states and p. zombies.
Certainly! We need a precise explanation for psycho-physical
parallelism.
But there is no psycho-physical parallelism. The metaphysical physical
*is* an illusion, naïve or not. The physical itself is arithmetical
truth see from the observable point of view (suggested to be handled
by the logics of observation Bp & Dt (& p), at the G and G* levels).
But cannot you see that this claim that "there is no
psycho-physical parallelism" completely undermines the entire result? An
illusion cannot act as a coherent substrate upon which representations
can be implemented. So in effect you are denying the existence of the
computer monitor with which you are reading this email, and the
whiteboards upon which you write your symbolic systems of equations and
your eyes that read this and everything else that acts as a relatively
stable substrate upon which one arithmetic truth can be compared to another.
The physical cannot be just the arithmetic truth for such is
singular, it has to be at least the comparison between a pair of
arithmetic truths and for this to be possible there has to be a
relatively stable substrate. There is no escape from this necessity.
My tentative explanation is that at our level a form of dualism
holds. A dualism quite unlike that of Descartes, since instead of
"separate substances", it is proposed that the logical and the
physical are two distinct aspect of reality that follow on equal yet
anti-parallel tracks. As Vaughan Pratt explains in his papers, the
logical processes and the physical processes have dynamics that have
arrows that point in opposite directions. Schematically and crudely
we can show a quasi-category theory diagram of this duality:
---- > X -----> Y ----->
| |
<----- A <------B <-----
I am OK with this. This is already derivable from the many dualisms
contained in the octalist machines points of view, notably between
"intelligible" (Bp) and (matter intelligible Bp & Dt). It does reverse
the arrow in a way akin to Pratt. It is not a parallelism, or
anti-parallelism, though, for the 1p and 3p are not symmetrical. Then
the qualia, and the first person plural quanta, are given by the
machine's semantics for the logic obeyed by Bp & Dt & p.
The diagram is strictly 3p. It would be helpful if you wrote up an
informal article on the octolism. It is very difficult to comprehend it
from just your discussion of the hypostases.
I have no idea what your neutral monism refer too, except a sort of
vague God-like notion of Existence, but that's not a (scientific)
theory, yet. And, by UDA, whatever it adds to comp and arithmetic has
to refute the comp physics, or comp itself. Craig is, at least,
coherent on this: he abandon comp, to save an unintelligible notion of
matter and mind (alas).
Read the discussion of neutral monism by Bertrand Russell and
others. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/neutral-monism/ is a good
overview (even though the pluralism of neutral entities assumption is
problematic as Spinoza understood). It would be helpful to you and the
rest of us if you spent some time refreshing your understanding of what
theology is by comparing the many theologies that already exist or by
learning from the wisdom of those that have done such studies. I hope
that Bertrand Russell is someone that you can respect as I respect your
skills and understanding of modal logics.
Onward!
Stephen
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