On 10/17/2012 8:45 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 16 Oct 2012, at 15:00, Stephen P. King wrote:
On 10/16/2012 8:23 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Tuesday, October 16, 2012 4:02:44 AM UTC-4, stathisp wrote:
There is of course the idea that the universe is actually a
simulation but that is more controversial.
A tempting idea until we question what it is a simulation of?
We can close this by considering when is a simulation of a "real
thing" indistinguishable from the "real thing"!
What law states that computations exist ab initio, but the capacity
to experience and participate in a simulated world does not?
Good point! Why not both existing ab initio?
But they exists ab initio in the arithmetical truth. So with comp, we
can postulate only the numbers, or the computations (they are
ontologically equivalent), then consciousness is semantical fixed
point, existing for arithmetical reason, yet not describable in direct
arithmetical term (like truth, by Tarski, or knowledge by
Scott-Montague. The Theaetetical "Bp & p" is very appealing in that
setting, as it is not arithmetically definable, yet makes sense in
purely arithmetical term for each p in the language of the machine
(arithmetic, say).
So we don't have to postulate consciousness to explain why machine
will correctly believe in, and develop discourse about, some truth
that they can know, and that they can also know them to be non
justifiable, non sharable, and possibly invariant for digital
self-transformation, etc.
Bruno
Hi Bruno,
We seem to have a fundamental disagreement on what constitutes
"arithmetic truth". In my thinking, the truth value of a proposition is
not separable from the ability to evaluate the proposition (as Jaakko
Hintikka considers <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-epistemic/>)
and thus is not some Platonic form that has some ontological weight in
an eternal "pre-established harmony" way. I do not believe that our
reality is merely some pre-defined program since I am claiming that the
"pre-definition" is an NP-Hard problem that must be solved prior to its
use.
The best fit for me is an infinity of 1p, each that is a bundle of
infinite computations, that eternally interact with each other (via
bisimulation) and not some frozen and pre-existing Being. My philosophy
is based on that of Heraclitus <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heraclitus>
and notthat of Parmenides <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parmenides>.
Being is defined in my thinking as the automorphisms within Becoming,
thus what is stable and fixed is just those things that relatively do
not change within an eternally evolving Universe.
--
Onward!
Stephen
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