On 18 Oct 2013, at 23:02, John Mikes wrote:
Bruno: "what" is a person? (according to the US Supreme Court lately:
a Corporation, but I don't buy that)
You are right. Making a corporation into a person is a total shameful
superdangerous idea (for our human rights).
A person is an abstract type related to machines or entities having
enough self-referential power.
How can a Turing Machine EMULATE something different from it?
(I know very little about the T.M.: is it infinite?)
The universal machines is a finite object, and it is universal because
it can emulate all other machines, which are different from itself.
You wrote: ..."we (our souls) are in touch with the infinite..."
Is a person different from 'it's' SOUL?
A person has two aspects (even 8, even 4 + 4*infinity). The first
person pov (the soul, Bp & p, the memory content when true, etc.), and
the third person aspect (the body, of the code, what the doctor can
put on an hard disk, or sent through space).
How can WE (and who is that?)
We, the Löbian machine-dreamers.
be in touch with the infinite? Are "WE" infinite? is our "SOUL"
finite?
Yes and no.
Our bodies are finite, but our souls, to be able to think, needs to go
through at least two sates, and the second one is determined through
infinities of computations, as explained in the UDA.
I never met Mr Soul so far.
It is the first person. It is all your immaterial aspects including
your current consciousness. "soul" is a good term to distinguish it
from the body, which with comp is owned by the soul, and can be
replaced by another.
IMO Descartes invented it for his duality to escape from the threat
of the inquisition. (Spinoza was luckier: he did not have to go that
far, he was only 'shunned' by his Jewish brethren.)
Is it wrong to try to KNOW (understand maybe) what we are talking
about?
It is wrong to pretend we know. But we can always try, by making our
beliefs enough precise so as to be testable. We learn when our
apparent knowledge appears to have been a wrong belief.
Bruno
John Mikes
On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 3:22 PM, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be>
wrote:
On 18 Oct 2013, at 18:03, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Friday, October 18, 2013 10:34:14 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 18 Oct 2013, at 15:23, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
> On 18 October 2013 12:24, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>>> The decision to go to the store, A, is associated with certain
brain
>>> processes, and the getting in the car and driving to the store,
B,
>>> is
>>> associated with different brain processes. The brain processes
>>> associated with A *cause* the brain processes associated with B.
>>> That
>>> is to say, a scientist anywhere in the universe could observe the
>>> physical processes A and the physical processes B and see how the
>>> former lead to the latter without necessarily having any idea
about
>>> the supervenient consciousness.
>>
>>
>> Ok, I can work with this. First let me say that, given your
>> assumptions,
>> your reasoning is absolutely correct. The assumptions themselves,
>> although I
>> don't think they are even conscious, are also completely
>> reasonable. That is
>> a perfectly reasonable expectation about nature, and it is one
that
>> I myself
>> shared until fairly recently.
>>
>> Starting with the first assumption: >"The decision to go to the
>> store, A, is
>> associated with certain brain processes"
>>
>> To that I say, lets slow down a moment. What do we know about
about
>> the
>> association? As far as I know, what we know is that
>>
>> 1) measurable changes in brain activity occur in synchronization
to
>> self-reported or experimentally inferred changes in subjective
>> states.
>> 2) the regions of the brain affected have been mapped with a high
>> degree of
>> consistency and specificity (although the anomalies, such as with
>> people who
>> live seemingly normal lives with large parts of their brain
>> 'missing' makes
>> that kind of morphological approach potentially naive)
>> 3) that externally induced brain changes will induce changes in
>> subjective
>> experience (so that brain changes cannot be epiphenomenal).
>>
>> What we do not know is that
>>
>> 4) the entirety of our experiences are literally contained
within the
>> tissues of the brain, or its activities.
>> 5) that the brain activity which we can observe with our
contemporary
>> instruments is the only causal agent of subjective experience.
>
> OK up to here.
>
>> 6) that subjective experiences cannot cause observable brain
>> changes (to the
>> contrary, we count on subjects being able to voluntarily and
>> spontaneously
>> change their own brain activity).
>
> We don't know this for sure, but it goes against every scientific
> observation. If a subjective experience is supervenient on the
> underlying physical process then the observable brain changes can
all
> be attributed to this underlying physical process.
The subjective experience cannot be supervenient on the underlying
physical process *only*. It can only be supervenient with some
abstract type that the underlying physical process can incarnate
locally. This made eventually the "underlying process" itself
supervenient on infinities of computations (or perhaps more general
abstract processes in case comp is false).
If comp is false, then it might not be general abstract processes,
but the opposite: proprietary diffractions of a single concrete
"pre-longing" (sense, experience). A pro-cess is a going forward,
or discarding of the past, but what I suggests prefigures spacetime
entirely. There is no underlying process, there is a fundamental
eternal now/here from which all 'theres' and 'thens' appear in
contradistinction. Like a subroutine or a circuit, it is the
fundamental pull to return to the higher level which allows
coherence to the function. Functions which do not return data to
the originating inquiry, or representations which fail to ground
themselves in aesthetic presentations, are, like a computer with no
i/o ports, completely useless.
Interpreting your term very favorably, the ideally correct machine
might relate.
Of course we can see only one process, as we cannot feel the
differentiation of the computations supporting us.
Neither can computations feel us.
Sure. Computations are not of the same type as person. A computation
cannot no more think than a brain or a neuron. Those are category
errors. Only a person can think and live.
Comp is not the statement than computation can think, but that
thinking person can be emulated by (Turing) universal machines.
If computations could feel anything, then feelings would be
redundant.
?
If neurons could think then brain would be redundant ?
Feelings need computation to persist publicly,
OK. And comp says that it is enough.
but computations, were they able to make sense in and of
themselves, would have no plausible need for even geometry, much
less flavors or colors.
It is not the computations which makes sense of themselves, it is
the believers, the knowers, the feeler, the observers, which appears
naturally when a universal machine look inward and outward.
There is a large variety of nameable and also non nameable behavior
in the spectrum of the universal machines, and her consciousness
surf and differentiate on the arithmetical neighborhood of the
infinite. I mean, by the invariance of consciousness from delays of
computations, or length of the computations, we (our souls) are in
touch with the infinite; without other magic than arithmetic (which
is no so astonishing, after Gödel we know that the arithmetical
reality escapes all effective theories.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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