On 2/28/2012 4:33 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 27 Feb 2012, at 20:02, Stephen P. King wrote:
On 2/27/2012 12:26 PM, ronaldheld wrote:
What observations or measurements can I perform that would falsify
COMP?
Hi,
Any measurement of a physical process that cannot be simulated by
a Turing Machine equivalent computation.
That would contradict digital physics. But digital physics is
self-contradictory (indeed it implies comp which implies the falsity
of digital physics). Roughly speaking: if "I" am a machine, then
everything else is not.
Dear Bruno,
Let me see if my thoughts are correct as I can best write them.
COMP is the conjunction of "Yes Doctor", the Church Thesis and
Arithmetic Realism, correct? I am now not sure of the definition of
"Digital physics" given this thread so far... From what I can tell, Yes
Doctor is built on the idea of functional substitutability at some level
or scale for physical systems, such that a given algorithm will run on
any functionally equivalent physical system; it is basically a
restatement of computational universality. This idea shows us that our
consciousness is not dependent on a particular form of physical system
if and only if our consciousness is algorithmic or computable in the
Turing sense. I am agnostic on this because I do not see any evidence
(pace Tegmark) that our brain's implementation of consciousness does not
involve quantum entanglement.
My answer to Ronald's question was based on what I thought I
understood of COMP, so it seems that I still do not understand COMP.
Does not COMP require that any observation of our physical world be
faithfully representable as a _finite_ list of yes or no type questions
and their answers?
IOW, any non-computational physical process.
Comp implies non-comp (non Turing emulable first plural person)
physical processes. Indeed the "comp primitive matter" is not Turing
emulable, it is an infinite sum on infinite computations.
But this definition (of "comp primitive matter") is fraught with
the measure problem! Does this exclude an infinite collection of
possible worlds to represent the physical systems that can implement
that infinite computations? I suppose that you could say that it does as
the UD "will generate all possible Turing machine states, infinitely
often (why?), which (by comp) includes all your virtual reconstitutions
corresponding to (hopefully) consistent extensions of yourself, in all
possible (locally) emulable environments or computational histories."
The usual idea that I am considering is that a physical system will
have to be potentially infinite to satisfy the requirements of a
universal Turing machine, as it has to have at least an infinite tape.
You write:
"Instead of linking [the pain I feel] at space-time (x,t) to [a machine
state] at space-time
(x,t), we are obliged to associate [the pain I feel at space-time
(x,t)] to a type or a sheaf of
computations (existing forever in the arithmetical Platonia which
is accepted as existing
independently of our selves with arithmetical realism)."
This seems to bypass the requirement of the concrete implementation
of the UTM by appeal to the independent of the truth value of sigma_1
sentences (or equivalent) such that you can then claim that:
"not only physics has been epistemologically reduced to machine
psychology, but that ''matter'' has been ontologically reduced to
''mind'' where mind is defined as the object study of fundamental
machine psychology."
Therefore any considerations of, for example, thermodynamics is
irrelevant as such would be derivable from the "accidental correctness"
of Sigma_1 sentences. This is interesting on its own as it strongly
resembles the "occasionalism
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occasionalism>" of Malebranche and others
that was proposed to explain psycho-psychical parallelism between mental
and physical events. Pratt's residuation
<http://books.google.com/books?id=2o9m_Z3nzYkC&pg=PA108&lpg=PA108&dq=vaughan+pratt+residuation&source=bl&ots=Za-09Qp9uM&sig=tpt00W53pzzRQyqjppg-OCO_75Q&hl=en&sa=X&ei=QOZMT9GUOZKztweczfU7&sqi=2&ved=0CCEQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=vaughan%20pratt%20residuation&f=false>
solves this problem without AR's idealism, among other things, by
reducing global computations to pairwise interactions between a
potentially infinite number of computations. This is a form of
accidentalism <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accidentalism>, but is more
subtle as the relationship between mental and physical states/events
does not need a causal explication. Additionally, Pratt's residuation
proposal (similar to this
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residuated_lattice> concept) generates
only consistent extensions of first person indeterminacy modulo
arbitrarily large memory resources. It is only when memory resources are
limited to being finite ("Forgetfulness" as what occurs in the Telephone
game <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_whispers>) that inconsistent
extensions might occur.
My skepticism of your interpretation of COMP has always turned on
the allegation of eliminatism (in the sense of "that ''matter'' has been
ontologically reduced to ''mind''") that you seem to derive from the
independence of truth valuation, for example that because the primeness
of 17 is completely independent of our knowledge of 17ness or primeness
properties, that the truth value alone of "17 is prime" is sufficient to
determine the properties that the sentence "17 is prime" implies _to the
exclusion of all others_. I have looked at your Strobe argument
<http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/%7Emarchal/lillethesis/these/node26.html#SECTION00724100000000000000>
and MGA but I still do not see how it is that the reduction follow. I
have not had the "aha" moment. :-( I am not convinced by Maudlin's
arguments
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Fabric-of-Reality/message/11020>. How
does the truth value determine the properties of a referent absent the
possibility of prior identification of the referent? How can the
exactness of the properties of an entity follow only from its potential
existence as an entity? It is how you answer these questions that I need
to understand.
So to refute comp you need to find a non recoverable, by the first
person indeterminacy, physical processes. If there were evidences that
the wave function collapse, that might be considered as a refutation
of comp. But after a century of the collapse speculation, we can only
say that this evidences is meagre.
OK, so we have to show a counter-example to the recoverability of
physical process by first person indeterminancy (IPI)? Could you
elaborate a bit more on how IPI covers all possible physical processes
without assuming AR? I ask this because it seems to me that AR is what
allows your entire thesis to run. My problem with AR is that it prevents
us from finding any solutions to many problems including the concurrency
problem
<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa213029%28v=sql.80%29.aspx> as
it assumes property definiteness absent specifiably. You are tacitly
assuming that all possible computations can inspect each other
simultaneously and act upon each other without any occurrence of a
conflict or contradiction. This tells me that you do not understand the
concurrency problem!
This is an aspect of the problem of time that many thinkers have
not considered. This problem is seen in the statement: "Time exists
because not everything can occur all at once". Simultaneity is not a
simple and unproblematic concept in ontology.
Onward!
Stephen
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