On 12/17/2013 1:33 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 17 Dec 2013, at 00:58, meekerdb wrote:
On 12/16/2013 2:05 PM, LizR wrote:
On 17 December 2013 10:43, meekerdb <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Is that another way of saying you don't think Arithmetical Realism is
correct?
(Which is fair enough, of course, it is a supposition.)
Yes. I think it is a questionable hypothesis.
Yes, I think so too on days with an 'R' in them.
Well if you don't think AR is correct, then of course it sounds magical
(although
that leaves the problem of how those equations which somehow (magically?)
control
the behaviour of atoms actually do so.)
I don't think they 'control' them, I think they describe them (to the best
of our
knowledge). Notice that this explains "where the laws of physics come from";
they're invented by us.
Bad phraseology on my part. What I meant was, there is a possible problem of
"unreasonable effectiveness" that AR purports to explain, but which otherwise remains
"magical".
Obviously the laws of physics as written down and taught and understood by us were
invented by us, but we have this hope that they correspond to something real out
there, and it's at least possible that the "something real out there" comes in a form
(something like) the laws we've invented to describe it, and may be in a form
/exactly/ like some laws we will one day invent. On that glorious day it may seem like
splitting haris to say that mass, energy, space and time are in some magical way
different from the equations describing them, assuming such equations exist.
True, the models /might/ be accurate. But even if they are we can't know it with any
certainty.
Except our own consciousness here and now, we cannot have any certainty, in any
scientific matter.
Science is doubt, and leads to more doubt, always.
That's one thing that bothers me about Bruno's definition of knowledge as "true
belief". We may have true beliefs by accident.
Yes.
But notice that the 'laws of physics' don't describe everything - in general they rely
on 'boundary conditions' which are not part of the laws. Most theories of cosmogony
put forward rely some randomness, e.g. 'quantum fluctuations', as boundary conditions.
I don't believe in any 3p-randomness. I mean, no more than in Santa Klaus. That's why I
consider Everett to be the first sensical version of QM.
Not believing can be just as dogmatic as belief. Everett doesn't pretend to fix boundary
conditions.
Secondly, note that even as physics becomes more successful in predictive power and
more comprehensive in scope, it's ontology changes drastically, from rigid bodies to
classical fields to elementary particles to quantum field operators. What stays roughly
constant are the experimental facts.
Yes. A reason more to appreciate that with comp, the ontology can be reduced to its
minimal (0 and successor, of K and S and their applications).
Bruno, has a good point about 'primitive matter'. It doesn't really mean
anything
except 'the stuff our equations apply to.'; but since the equations are
made up
descriptions, the stuff they apply to is part of the model - not
necessarily the
ding an sich. To say physicist assume primitive matter is little more than
saying
that they make models and some stuff is in the model and some isn't - which
of
course is contrary to the usual assumption on this list. :-)
Yes, some people on this list seem to read far more into the existence of matter
(energy, etc) than that it's just the object referred to in some equations. (Arguments
that the UD couldn't really exist because there aren't enough resources in the
universe to build one, for example.)
Bruno et al may also have a good point about the (lack of) supervenience of mind on
matter, although I'm still trying to get my head around that one (appropriately enough).
I don't think the supervenience of mind on material processes is any more problematic
than its supervenience on computation.
Supervenience of mind on material processes is refuted by the UDA.
I don't think it does.
It just doesn't make any sense anymore, unless you put in matter a magic which is non
Turing emulable, nor FPI recoverable, but then I don't see how I could say "yes" to a
doctor.
The nice thing about Bruno's theory is that it provides a model which might explain the
incommunicable nature of consciousness. And he even provides a critereon, Lobianity,
for whether a computer is conscious.
Hmm... I accumulated evidence that consciousness starts with universality. Löbianity
would give self-consciousness, or reflexive consciousness.
But it leaves so much of the physical aspects of consciousness and perception
unexplained,
This means you have not yet get the full understanding of UDA or AUDA. The reasoning
shows that all physical aspects are entirely explained or explainable. Indeed if you can
find one not explained phenomenon in nature, you will refute comp.
Of course the explanation has been derived by a reasoning, and need to be done (like in
AUDA), and this means to pursue the math of AUDA, and solve the open problem there.
I have no theory. I just show that the mind body problem *has to* be reduced into a
purely arithmetical problem of machine psychology or theology.
Exactly. Your theory *must* explain everything because it is assumed to
explain everything.
except by hand-waving "it must be so", that I find plenty of room for doubt.
You can only invalidate the reasoning. No need of doubting here. Of course you can doubt
on comp.
Of course I doubt comp too. But I'm not sure the UDA proves what you claim it does. ISTM
that it requires anticipating all possible events in the MG in order to have
counterfactual completeness. But that seems impossible. Second, you make the argument in
terms of a dream, obviously to isolate consciousness from the world. But I'm not
convinced that is valid. Without experience of the world, would dreams be possible? In
any case it seems like a suspicious move. And if you allow interaction with the world then
the MG program grows into a simulation of the whole world (or a very large part of it).
You dismiss this by saying it just means the substitution level includes everything out to
Hubble sphere. But then you are no longer talking about replacing a brain, you're talking
about creating a whole, simulated world - and in such detail that there's no distinction
between it being 'real' or 'simulated'.
Brent
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email
to [email protected].
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
