On 3/17/2012 8:18 AM, David Nyman wrote:
On 16 March 2012 21:04, Stephen P. King<[email protected]> wrote:
Would it be not wrong to think of ordinary motion of an object through
space as a form of repetitive "cut and paste" operation?
You mean on the basis of the same assumptions as the UDA, I assume?
Hi David,
No, I was not thinking of the UD. I was just trying to understand
how we can obtain a model of motions that is invariant with respect to
Lorentz transformations from the constitutionalists ideas.
Well, insofar as movement through space encompasses the stepwise
evolution of discrete computational states, I suppose that this would
necessarily be the case. I'm not sure why you say this conclusion
would be "not wrong", unless it was a slip of the finger. In Bruno's
thought experiment, in effect the two copies ARE the original after it
has been "moved through space", albeit by exotic technology.
But why make copies of some "original" object when the program can
just generate many by paralleling running one subroutine or
simultaneously running multiple programs ala UD? My intuition is that we
need something the many client model of MMORPGs to get anything like
Lorentz invariant physical laws. I bring this up because it has always
bothered me that the concept of "physical laws" as often discussed in
our considerations of COMP seems to never consider Special or General
Relativistic considerations. I think that this is neglected because the
discussions seem to always revolve around considerations of a single
point of view and the views of many observers are relagated to some
ambiguous "plural shared 1p" term that is never exactly defined. It is
my contention that while considering only one observer is very
simplifying for our toy models and "back of the envelope" calculations
but at a price of ignoring many important and, IMHO, relevant concepts
in physics such as the problem of concurrency.
It is interesting to recall that Bruno's interest in these ideas was
sparked by consideration of amoebas, which are naturally able to split
themselves into two identical copies. If human beings were able to
perform a similar trick, cell-by-cell, and then wander off in
different directions, the divergence of personal identity from a
common source would in fact be seen as commonplace, not the stuff of
obscure logical thought experiments.
Yes, Bruno's ideas seemed to start with actual physical systems and
thoughts about how their first person views can be represented in logic.
That his reasoning lead to a sound argument against material monism is
not a surprise to me. I just disagree with the interpretation in term of
ideal monism as such ontological theories render impossible any
explanations of the physical world as something other than causally
ineffective illusions. I have been driven, kicking and screaming, to
consider some form of dualism. The failure of the dualism of Descartes
has almost completely poisoned that well, but I have found a very clever
way of rehabilitating dualism that was found by Vaughan Pratt and
explained in this paper: http://boole.stanford.edu/pub/ratmech.pdf
Onward!
Stephen
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