On 15 Aug 2012, at 14:16, Roger wrote:
Hi Bruno Marchal
The materialists don't seem to have a very specific idea of what
governs us (the self)
and its actual (live) governing. The self is something like a
homunculus, which as
Dennet correctly remarks, leads to an infinite regress in materialism.
He is wrong. here materialism can work, in a first approximation, by
the use of the Dx = xx idea that I just briefly explain.
I use "materialism" in the weak sense: doctrine according to which
matter exists primitively or ontologically. It is that weak hypothesis
which is contradict by the mechanist hypothesis. If we are machine,
matter is *only* a derivative of the mind of the numbers (in the
general sense, or not).
But there's no such
problem with the monad, which is nonmaterial, nonphysical.
Non materiality helps, but does not solve all problem per se. The word
monad is not very precise. How would you explain it to a fourteen
years old?
Bruno
Roger , rclo...@verizon.net
8/15/2012
Leibniz would say, "If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so
everything could function."
----- Receiving the following content -----
From: Bruno Marchal
Receiver: everything-list
Time: 2012-08-14, 11:01:03
Subject: Re: Peirce on subjectivity
On 14 Aug 2012, at 14:00, Roger wrote:
Hi Bruno Marchal
I'm way out of touch here. What is comp ?
Roughly speaking comp is the idea that we can survive with a
computer for a brain, like we already believe that we can survive
with a pump in place of a heart.
This is the position of the materialist, but comp actally
contradicts the very notion of matter, or primitive ontological
matter. That is not entirely obvious.
I don't think you can have a symbolic theory of subjectivity, for
theories are contructed
in symbols, and subjectivity is awareness of the symbols and
hopefully what they mean.
We can use symbols to refer to existing non symbolic object. We
don't confuse them.
CS Peirce differentiates the triadic connections between symbol and
object and awareness
in his theory of categories:
FIRSTNESS (perceiving an object privately) -- raw experience of an
apple
SECONDNESS (comparing inner and outer worlds) - looking up the
proper word symbol for the image in your memory
[Comparing is the basis of thinking.]
THIRDNESS: (doing or expressing publicly in words) - saying "That's
an apple."
No problem.
Bruno
Roger , rclo...@verizon.net
8/14/2012
----- Receiving the following content -----
From: Bruno Marchal
Receiver: everything-list
Time: 2012-08-13, 11:53:51
Subject: Re: Why AI is impossible
Hi Jason,
On 13 Aug 2012, at 17:04, Jason Resch wrote:
On Mon, Aug 13, 2012 at 8:08 AM, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be>
wrote:
William,
On 12 Aug 2012, at 18:01, William R. Buckley wrote:
The physical universe is purely subjective.
That follows from comp in a constructive way, that is, by giving
the means to derive physics from a theory of subejectivity. With
comp any first order logical theory of a universal system will do,
and the laws of physics and the laws of mind are not dependent of
the choice of the initial universal system.
Bruno,
Does the universal system change the measure of different programs
and observers, or do programs that implement programs (such as the
UDA) end up making the initial choice of system of no consequence?
The choice of the initial universal system does not matter. Of
course it does matter epistemologically. If you choose a quantum
computing system as initial system, the derivation of the physical
laws will be confusing, and you will have an hard time to convince
people that you have derived the quantum from comp, as you will
have seemed to introduce it at the start. So it is better to start
with the less "looking physical" initial system, and it is
preferable to start from one very well know, like number + addition
and multiplication.
So, let us take it to fix the thing. The theory of everything is
then given by the minimal number of axioms we need to recover
Turing universality.
Amazingly enough the two following axioms are already enough, where
the variable are quantified universally. I assume also some
equality rules, but not logic!
x + 0 = x
x + s(y) = s(x + y)
x * 0 = 0
x*s(y) = (x *y) + x
This define already a realm in which all universal number exists,
and all their behavior is accessible from that simple theory: it is
sigma_1 complete, that is the arithmetical version of Turing-
complete. Note that such a theory is very weak, it has no negation,
and cannot prove that 0 ≠ 1, for example. Of course, it is
consistent and can't prove that 0 = 1 either. yet it emulates a UD
through the fact that all the numbers representing proofs can be
proved to exist in that theory.
Now, in that realm, due to the first person indeterminacy, you are
multiplied into infinity. More precisely, your actual relative
computational state appears to be proved to exist relatively to
basically all universal numbers (and some non universal numbers
too), and this infinitely often.
So when you decide to do an experience of physics, dropping an
apple, for example, the first person indeterminacy dictates that
what you will feel to be experienced is given by a statistic on
all computations (provably existing in the theory above) defined
with respect to all universal numbers.
So if comp is correct, and if some physical law is correct (like
'dropped apples fall'), it can only mean that the vast majority of
computation going in your actual comp state compute a state of
affair where you see the apple falling. If you want, the reason why
apple fall is that it happens in the majority of your computational
extensions, and this has to be verified in the space of all
computations. Everett confirms this very weird self-multiplication
(weird with respect to the idea that we are unique and are living
in a unique reality). This translated the problem of "why physical
laws" into a problem of statistics in computer science, or in
number theory.
Now, instead of using the four axioms above, I could have started
with the combinators, and use the two combinator axioms:
((K x) y) = x
(((S x) y) z) = ((x z) (y z))
This define exactly the same set of "all computations", and the
same statistical measure problem, and that is what I mean by saying
that the initial axioms choice is indifferent as long as you start
from something which define a UD, or all computations (that is: is
Turing or sigma_1 complete).
Now, clearly, from the first person points of view, it does look
like many universal system get relatively more important role. Some
can be geographical, like the local chemical situation on earth (a
very special universal system), or your parents, but the point is
that their stability must be justified by the "winning universal
system" emerging from the competition of all universal numbers
going through your actual state. The apparent winner seems to be
the quantum one, and it has already the shape of a universal system
which manage to eliminate abnormal computations by a process of
destructive interferences. But to solve the mind body problem we
have to justify this destructive interference processes through the
solution of the arithmetical or combinatorial measure problem.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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