Hi Bruno Marchal I'm still trying to digest it, but Leibniz' principles that
a) every explanation is a cause, and b) every substance can be causative and c) every substance is alive (and presumably intelligent) Allow the possibility of computers being conscious. And alive. And intelligent. At least in the Leibnizian sense that all substances are alive, etc. I had been thinking in conventional ways that according to Leibniz are wrong. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/26/2012 "Forever is a long time, especially near the end." -Woody Allen ----- Receiving the following content ----- From: Bruno Marchal Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-25, 11:20:17 Subject: Re: questions on machines, belief, awareness, and knowledge Hi Roger Clough > Hi Bruno Marchal > > Do you believe that a computer has a physical mind > that can be conscious ? My personal beliefs are private. With comp a computer (universal machine/number) has no physical mind, nor a primitive physical body. But it has an infinity of non physical bodies. It is bizarre, and I am not sure this can be understood without taking the comp first person indeterminacy into account. Knowing the work of Everett in QM can help to illustrate, but QM is not assumed in comp. > The immanent is that which is in spacetime, is extended and physical. > The transcendent is that which is outside of spacetime, is not > extended and is nonphysical. I can be OK with that vocabulary. > > Platonia is transcendent, numbers are transcendent, arithmetic is > transcendent. OK. Although I am myself using transcendent in a more restricted form, but I can be OK with this for awhile. > Yet you seem to believe that mind is immanent, not transcendent. The mind of the universal machine is transcendent, and it obeys transcendental laws, but my particular mind yesterday when listening to music and drinking coffee was immanent. The mind has the two aspects, as it is transcendent, but from its perspective it has, most of the time, immanent aspect. In fact, that is what consciousness does all the time: connecting transcendence and immanence, through self- dfferentiation. The physical has those two aspects too (with comp): it connects the universal physical laws with the geographical particular local and relative reality. > Isn't there a conflict in such an understanding ? You tell me. > In idealism the ideal world is the reflection of the actual world, That might not exist, even in Platonia. With comp, we can take a very little Platonia (arithmetical truth, or even a tiny part of it). Note that comp is neutral monist. The transcendental truth is very simple, and entirely delimited by the laws of addition and multiplication (or anything Turing equivalent). The rest are digital machines (or relative number) psychological projections: they are lawful too. > so that the material brain is reflected in the ideal mind, > but one critical difference. > Thought requires that somewhere there's a someone or something > in the driver's seat. I can't imagine a material self, it has > to be mental-- transcendent, in Platonia or the mind. > It is what causes motion and makes decisions. No problems here, except that there is no physical brain in Platonia, nor really (primitive) physical brain on earth, unless you redefine "physical" explicitly through the coherence conditions on the possible computations/dreams by numbers. Those coherence conditions cannot be imposed on the theory. They have to be extracted from the logics of (machine) self-reference. > Platonia always rules ! OK, but like Plotinus and the neoplatonists, even Platonia is just a "servant of God" or an "emanation of God", who or which is the reason why Platonia "exists". The advantage of comp is that it explains the origin of the "three gods" from arithmetic, in the sense that almost all numbers will believe correctly in three "objects/subjects" verifying most discourses made about them by mystics and open minded rationalists Indian, Chinese and Greeks. You can take a look at my "Plotinus" paper for more on this. Like the neoplatonists, comp leads to a form of platonist pythagoreanism. My main point is not a defense of that idea, but that such theory (mainly comp + classical theory of knowledge) is empirically testable. It is hard to imagine a more testable theory, as the whole of physics is derivable from arithmetic in a precise way. Only local geographies and local histories are not derivable, not even by a god. Bruno > > > Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net > 9/25/2012 > "Forever is a long time, especially near the end." -Woody Allen > > > ----- Receiving the following content ----- > From: Bruno Marchal > Receiver: everything-list > Time: 2012-09-24, 10:45:01 > Subject: Re: questions on machines, belief, awareness, and knowledge > > > On 24 Sep 2012, at 16:39, Stephen P. King wrote: > >> On 9/24/2012 9:34 AM, Roger Clough wrote: >>> Hi meekerdb >>> >>> The computer can mechanically prove something, >>> but it cannot know that it did so. It cannot >>> sit back with a beer and muse over how smart it is. >>> >>> >> Hi Roger, >> >> What you are considering that a computer does not have is the >> ability to model itself within its environment and compute >> optimizations of such a model to guide its future choices. This can >> be well represented within a computational framework and it is >> something that Bruno has worked out in his comp model. (My only beef >> with Bruno is that his model is so abstract that it is completely >> disconnected from the physical world and thus has a "body" problem.) > > But that is the "scientific success" of the comp theory (not > "model") : it reduces the mind body problem to a body problem, in a > precise realm, with a technic to extract the "laws of bodies", making > comp an utterly scientific, in Popper sense, theory. You still miss > the point. The body problem is not a defect, it is the main success of > comp. > > Bruno > > http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ > > > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google > Groups "Everything List" group. > To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com > . > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en > . > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google > Groups "Everything List" group. > To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com > . > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en > . > http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. 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