On 13 Feb 2012, at 18:47, Stephen P. King wrote:
On 2/13/2012 12:11 PM, Joseph Knight wrote:
I think you should probably read Maudlin's paper for specifics. I
don't think thermodynamics will have much to do with the
conclusions, whatever they may be (and I don't think it's obvious
what exactly Maudlin showed).
Hi Joseph,
Thank you for the new link to Maudlin''s paper. I was having a
hard time finding my copy... As to your comment: Would you consider
exactly what a "computational structure" means in a universe that
allows for perpetual motion? (We are going to run a reductio
argument...)
One thing that I see is that in such a universe we would have a
huge White Rabbit problem because all brains in it would only be
those of the Boltzmann type. There could not be any invariant form
of sequencing that we could run a UD on. How so? Becasue in a
universe without thermodynamics there is no such a thing as a
sequence of events that is invariant with respect to transitions
from one observer to another, i.e. there would be no such thing as
time definable in a 'dimensional' sense. All sequences would be at
best Markov. With such a restriction to Markov processes, how to you
define a UD? Without a UD, how do we get COMP to work?
The UD can be emulated by a Markov process (all programs can).
The UD, and its many implementations works by virtue of the the laws
of addition and multiplication.
You seem to forget that the notion of implementation can be defined
precisely in arithmetic.
To define a notion of primary physical implementation, you need to
postulate primitive matter, and explains why it is Turing universal,
and use the already defined notion of arithmetical implementation to
justify that the physical activity is indeed a (local) implementation
of a universal number. But then you will run into the UDA/MGA
difficulties.
Bruno
Onward!
Stephen
On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 7:21 AM, Stephen P. King <[email protected]
> wrote:
Hi Folks,
I have been mulling over my conversations with Bruno, Joseph
and ACW in the EVERYTHING list and have a question. In SANE04 we
read the following:
"For any given precise running computation associated to some
inner experience, you
can modify the device in such a way that the amount of
physical activity involved is
arbitrarily low, and even null for dreaming experience which has
no inputs and no outputs.
Now, having suppressed that physical activity present in the
running computation, the
machine will only be accidentally correct. It will be correct only
for that precise computation,
with unchanged environment. If it is changed a little bit, it
will make the machine running
computation no more relatively correct. But then, Maudlin
ingenuously showed that
counterfactual correctness can be recovered, by adding non
active devices which will be
triggered only if some (counterfactual) change would appear
in the environment. Now this
shows that any inner experience can be associated with an arbitrary
low (even null) physical
activity, and this in keeping counterfactual correctness.
And that is absurd with the
conjunction of both comp and materialism."
Setting aside the problem of concurrency for now, how is it
that we are jumping over the difference between infinitely slow or
even "adiabatic" physical process and "null" physical process?
I may be not even wrong here, but in math isn't it true that there
is a big difference between a quantity being arbitrarily small and
a quantity being zero? I suspect that the folks in FOAR List that
have been discussing information and entropy might have a thought
on this.
--
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
.
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
--
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.
