On 2/11/2012 5:09 PM, Joseph Knight wrote:
On Sat, Feb 11, 2012 at 11:41 AM, Stephen P. King
<stephe...@charter.net <mailto:stephe...@charter.net>> wrote:
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.
[JK]
Yet ""COMP is true" AND "COMP is false"" is necessarily false.
Hi Joseph,
I agree, they are false as a proposition iff they are given in a
single proposition or evaluated as such, as your usage of " bracketing
shows. This is one of the problems that I see in the COMP based theory
and why one has to have something else in addition to propositions. This
'something else', I propose, is physical matter or a quantum logic as
underlying structure. This latter possibility works because of the
non-distributive nature of its logic but it requires additional
structure to derive the Born postulate
<http://www.google.com/#hl=en&cp=14&gs_id=7&xhr=t&q=Born+postulate&pf=p&sclient=psy-ab&site=&source=hp&pbx=1&oq=Born+postulate&aq=0&aqi=g1g-v1&aql=&gs_sm=&gs_upl=&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.,cf.osb&fp=f2900e4a30b61916&biw=1120&bih=612>.
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,
[JK]
How? Just because you bet on something doesn't make it a correct bet.
Just because you hold two contradictory propositions to have equal
credence, doesn't make them both correct. I don't see where this is
coming from.
[SPK]
One must have at least two different (orthogonal?) alternatives and
a selection mechanism that can operate on all of them for a betting
scheme to be possible.
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.
[JK]
The UDA only shows that they cannot be ontologically primitive, or
"fundamental".
[SPK]
I agree, but that restriction is not eliminative. What you need to
understand is that what ever the UDA is defined to be, for it to be more
than just a theoretical construct, it has to be able to be generated or
implemented somehow, otherwise it is much like a concept that cannot be
communicated or known. Would it even be a concept?
Consider an (unrealistically long) dream wherein the dreamer observes
several violations of the real-life laws of physics (wrong proton
mass, broken glasses reassembling themselves, whatever.). He then
reasonably concludes that he is dreaming. In other words he reduces
his experience in the dream to a "more fundamental" physical reality
wherein he is asleep, his brain is in state X, and so on. He is
therefore denying the primitiveness of his dream -- it is, in your
terminology, an illusion.
[SPK]
This situation assumes that the content of the dream can be known
to contain violations, e.g. that there is some other set of experiences
which are a standard of correctness against which the content of the
dream can deviate. If the Dreamer never experiences another world except
for that "physics violating" version it would never know and would
accept it as "real", in fact it would have no reason to consider that it
might be "unreal".
[JK]
It seems to me that by your reasoning, the idea that the dreamer is
dreaming undermines the result itself, so that no one can ever
legitimately say "I am dreaming". If I see a cup of coffee getting
hotter on a cold day, or have conversations with long-dead relatives,
I cannot say that I am dreaming, because if I am dreaming then there
is no reason to take my reasoning seriously. (A lot of lucid dreamers
would beg to differ!)
Is this a misrepresentation of your view? It is a somewhat subtle issue.
[SPK]
No, you are making a good point. My comment in response is that
such a situation requires the ability to distinguish alternatives as
well as the possibility of "being in" or "finding oneself in"
alternatives. Comp covers this with the cut and paste idea and shows how
1p indeterminism works. My only difficulty with COMP is the eliminatist
interpretation of it. One has to have real alternative states that
co-exist at the level level even if they support propositions that are
mutually contradictory.
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.
[JK]
How do you know this?
[SPK]
OK, lets reason our way through this. How exactly does one
Arithmetic Truth act upon another such that there is a difference
between a pair of non-interacting ATs and a pair of interacting ATs. To
be consistent, we cannot project the ATs into and onto entities that
have the per-assumed possibility of interaction or not, we have to take
them as primitive. Does this construction even make sense? No! If we
force it then we find ourselves, as evaluators of those ATs, in a
quandary much like Descartes with his version of dualism. How does the
mental and material interact? I claim, with Vaughn Pratt, that they do
not interact at all! A better question, asked by Pratt, is how can a
pair of minds or propositions interact?
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.
[JK]
I agree, this would be very helpful. I wouldn't mind if it got a
little technical, either.
[SPK]
I am hopeful that Bruno will see the benefit in writing this
description up.
Onward!
Stephen
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