On 6/18/2012 1:04 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 17 Jun 2012, at 19:35, John Clark wrote:
On Sun, Jun 17, 2012 at Bruno Marchal <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>
wrote:
> We can perhaps agree that consciousness-here-and-now is the only truth we
know
which seems undoubtable, so it might be more easy to explain the illusion
of matter
to consciousness than the illusion of consciousness to a piece of matter.
If consciousness is more fundamental than matter then it's difficult to explain why
it's easy to find examples of matter without consciousness but nobody has yet found a
single example of consciousness without matter.
This is debatable. nobody has found, nor can found, example of primitive matter. It is a
metaphysical hypothesis brought by Aristotle (and of course it is a popular
extrapolation among animals)
And almost all numbers have not been found.
Now, it is easy, when assuming comp, to have example of consciousnes without *primitive*
matter, like all experiences emerging from the arithmetical computations.
Yeah yeah I know, it's all just a illusion, but why only that illusion? Why is the
"illusion" always that matter effects consciousness and consciousness effects matter if
one is more fundamental than the other?
Because consciousness, to be relatively manifestable, introduced a separation between me
and not me, and the "not me" below my substitution level get stable and persistent by
the statistical interference between the infinitely many computations leading to my
first person actual state.
How does on computation interfere with another? and how does that define a conscious
stream of thought that is subjective agreement with other streams of thought?
Brent
So in arithmetic we can explain why numbers believe in consciousness and matter. In
physics, we cannot unless we abandon comp and introduce special non turing emulable, nor
first person recoverable, special infinities.
>> I don't see why it *MUST* be due to a deeper physical phenomenon;
nearly
every physicists alive says some things have no cause
> You might provide references.
Why? I think it would have been pompous and downright condescending to do so, you will
certainly have no trouble finding such references without my help.
I don't find them. I can think only about the wave collapse, and perhaps the big bang.
But I don't see this being said explicitly by physicists.
It is a bit problematical for a computationalist, for the notion of "cause" is a rather
fuzzy high level notion.
But if I had said "many physicist think it is a logical necessity that every event must
have a cause" then THAT would indeed need references!
> Event without reason might exist but cannot be invoked to explain
anything.
To say that X happened not for any physical reason and not because of God but for no
reason whatsoever is a explanation and it might even be true, but the trouble is it
might not be and if you assume its true and give up there is no hope of ever finding
the true reason if there is one. So there is the possibility we could spend eternity
looking for something that does not exist.
> To invoke them as such is just equivalent with "I dunno and will never
know".
These answers to a question are all different:
1) I dunno. (What is the capital of Wyoming?)
2) I dunno and may never know. (Is the Goldbach Conjecture true?)
3) I dunno and will never know. (What are the first hundred digits of Chaitin's Omega
Constant?)
This one, you can know, if you are patient enough. But you will not know it and also
know that you know it, so you can still doubt. Chaitin's constant can be computed *in
the limit*. Its decimal will stabilize, you just don't know when.
4) Although meaningful the question has no answer. (Why is there something rather than
nothing?)
OK, but the question can be reduced to "why there are natural numbers obeying addition
and multiplication law".
And either a chain of "why" question is infinitely long or it is not and you eventually
come to a "why" question that cannot be answered because there is no reason behind it.
But this can be (and should be) accepted for the initial axioms of a theory, not for
what we want to explain. A physical event without a cause or a reason does not make much
sense to me (and makes no sense with comp).
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ <http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/%7Emarchal/>
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