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/
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