On 17 Feb 2012, at 06:53, Stephen P. King wrote:
On 2/17/2012 12:00 AM, meekerdb wrote:
On 2/16/2012 7:27 PM, Stephen P. King wrote:
On 2/16/2012 7:09 PM, acw wrote:
Do you understand at all the stuff about material and idea
monism that I
have mentioned previously? We are exploring the implications of
a very
sophisticate form of Ideal Monism that I am very much interested
in, as
it has, among other wonderful things, an unassailable proof that
material monism is WRONG. What I am trying to discuss is how
this is a
good thing but the ontological theory as a whole that it is
embedded in
has a problem that is being either a) misunderstood, b) ignored
or both.
To be fair, I still have trouble understanding your objections to
UDA 8/MGA, and this discussion has been going on for quite some
time now, maybe I'm just incapable of seeing the subtle
distinction that you're trying to draw. Bruno postulates
arithmetic or combinators, but if you want a different
ontological foundation, you can formulate it and see how it fits
within COMP (in case you assume it) and how that changes
predictions and/or explanations.
Hi ACW,
My objection to UDA 8/MGA is that it assumes something that is
is deeply problematic. There is a difference between Computational
universality, in the sense of any given recursively enumerable
algorithm is universal if it does not depend for its functional
properties on a particular physical implementation of it, and the
ideas that Recursively Enumerable Algorithms (REA) have properties
and "run" completely independent of the possibility of
implementation in physical hardware.
My proof is mathematical but may be very poorly explained
because I have a very hard time translating my thoughts into words
and for this I apologize. I am hoping that you can see past the
words and "grok" the meaning.
I am identifying the invariant aspect of a REA with a fixed
point in a manifold of transformations where the "points" that
make up the manifold represent the physical systems capable of
implementing the REA and then applying Brouwer's Fixed point
theorem:
How can Brouwer's fixed point theorem be applied computers of REAs,
they don't form a manifold.
Hi Brent,
This is where my inability to express this idea in English puts
me in a very unpleasant situation. Honestly, you might as well count
as just wrong. I'll accept that. But I will bet that I'm right. :-)
I just don't know how to explain my idea any better at the moment. I
will predict one thing, there will be a paper published within the
year that will cover this idea by someone with the right skills. I
will just be happy to have come to understand it on my own.
here is an example for Wiki.
In the plane
"Every continuous function f from a closed disk to itself has at
least one fixed point."
Think about this: Does the fixed point continue to exist if
the collection of points making up that closed disc or the
continuous transformations that are the functions where to vanish?
Answer: No. The same way a computation is no longer a computation
in the sense of universality when there is no "universe" for it.
The point is that unless it is possible for a physical system
to implement a REA, there is no such thing as an REA.
That's the crux of the disagreement. Bruno says 2 exists because
it's the successor of the successor of zero. I think it exists as
a concept because we invented it, along with counting (c.f. "The
Origin of Reason" by William S. Cooper). But I'm willing to take
it's existence, along with the rest of arithmetic, as an hypothesis
just to see where it leads.
You do realize that this gives a definition of "existence" that
is very different from that that almost all philosophers use. That's
OK, Bruno is not a philosopher although he does pretend to be one
very well. :-)
I guess it is just your dyslexia, but I have once said that despite I
can appreciate some philosopher, I insist that it is not my job. On
the contrary I try to illustrate that we can make reasoning and proofs
in field usually tackled by "philosophers". Many of them hate that,
actually.
So I doubt that I have ever pretended to be a philosopher, or please
give the quote, for it might make sense in a context where I plea for
the coming back of theology in the science academic department.
I don't believe in philosophy, nor science, but only in scientific
attitude, which are or should be domain independent. The max of that
scientific attitude has existed in Occident from -500 to +500, among
minorities of intellectual and mystics. Since about 1500 years half of
science are allowed to be inexact which is always cool for the usual
fear selling business and getting power.
In that sense, I disbelieve in academical philosophy (which was
dogmatically marxist at the time I made university studies, and it has
not really change up to discrete renamings).
In that sense I think that religion and philosophy can often slow
the progress in science. Theology should come back to academy, but
religion and philosophy belongs to the private sphere and should not
be taught, I think. But then the word "philosophy" has also very
different meaning in different countries, and the philosophical
curriculum can differ vastly from an institution to another, even in
the same country.
And then some academies are desperately rotten, like some other
institutions (press, media). The NDAA bill does not make too much
optimistic for the near future, especially the fact that the media
does not talk about it.
Democracies work only through the respect of power separation, but we
have not yet found the way how to sustain that separation for long.
Money is a wonderful sharing work mean, but when money becomes the
goal, it is transformed into the most addictive and toxic drug ever.
What makes science exact is that we are aware that theories are
hypotheses. Always.
But it is still common that people feel the contrary in the human
sciences, as we feel the contrary in everyday life. Everyone believe
he will wake up next day, despite this can only be a theory.
I doubt I have ever said that I am a philosopher. A theologian? I
don't think so. I come from biology, but when I discovered Gödel's
proof I understood that all the questions I had in biology have been
solved solved conceptually and completely (self-reproduction, self-
generation, embryogenesis). I explain that in the paper "amoeba,
planaria and dreaming machine". So I decided to do math, and to apply
logic to the study of mind. Alas, logic was classified as pure
mathematics, and they were not happy (to say the least) to see someone
wanting to apply pure math.
I have luckily been able to fund my work thanks to engineers,
physician (not physicists!) and applied scientists, who are indeed
more lucid and rigorous than pure mathematician in the applied fields.
It is not a coincidence.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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