On Wednesday, February 5, 2014 12:39:47 PM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote: > > > On 05 Feb 2014, at 14:28, Craig Weinberg wrote: > > > > On Wednesday, February 5, 2014 4:54:13 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote: > > > On 04 Feb 2014, at 18:20, Craig Weinberg wrote: > > > > On Tuesday, February 4, 2014 11:54:26 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote: > > > On 04 Feb 2014, at 12:46, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > > > On 4 February 2014 22:32, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]> wrote: > > > >>> My view is that if consciousness is epiphenomenal it's meaningless > >>> to > >>> ask why bodies emit utterances referring to the epiphenomenon. > >> > >> > >> > >> Why? You agree that there is still one way causal link. That is > >> consciousness is a necessary side, and real, effect of the brain > >> activity. > >> So why a body could not refer to it meaningfully? > > > > It's not that which would be meaningless: it would be meaningless to > > ask how a body could refer to an epiphenomenon, David's initial > > question. > > Not sure if a body can refer to anything (but we can say that, as an > abuse of language to be short). > > The question, it seems to me, remains: why a person (using her body) > could not refer to an epiphenomenon? > Why would that be meaningless? Why asking those question would be > meaningless? > > If I tell you "I feel myself conscious right now"? Is that meaningless? > It is meaningless that I hope you find that plausible? > > And is it meaningless to ask such question? > > May be, that's possible, but I need some justification. Without it, it > looks just like "don't try to understand, don't search, don't ask". > > I do think that the modal logic will provide a *very* powerful tool to > see many nuances and possibilities in this context. > > > > > > >> Ah, but then it looks like if there is a two way road, and > >> consciousness is > >> only a phenomenon. A quite peculiar one, as it relates 3p and 1p, > >> but still > >> a phenomenon, and it this leads to make physics also a 1p > >> phenomenon, why > >> not? > >> > >> Why do you think we gain by making consciousness into an > >> epiphenomenon? > > > > We don't have to explain why it apparently has no effect on matter yet > > we can still refer to it. > > May be we cannot [explain why it apparently has no effect on matter > yet we can still refer to it]. > > But if that is the case, the question remains: why? And here, comp, > and the arithmetization of metarithmetic, can explain, for similar > questions, why we cannot explain some truth. > > I think we can't decide that something does not need to be explained, > above the more elementary assumptions. > > > I think we must explain the elementary assumptions also, > > > Of course. But unless we want do philosophical obfuscation, there is also > a need of some good-willingness in accepting sharing some elementary belief. > > > Why would I share an elementary belief that I understand to be false? > > > Nobody ask you this. On the contrary, the idea is to start from what we > can agree on. > > Given the complexity of the problem we talk about, we might even ask if we > agree on the logical rules. >
Yes, we should. I begin from the assumption that logical rules are abstracted from comparisons across sensory experiences, and therefore have no independent existence of their own or casual effect. > > > > > > > So my question is what does need to be explained in the axioms of > arithmetic that I have given? For most people a first order logic axiom like > > 0 ≠ s(x) (for all x) is simpler to understand that any statement > involving terms like "sense" or "aesthetic". > > > It's not simpler for me, or someone who doesn't know the language of > mathematical notation. > > > It is conceptually simpler. I could have written instead: > > "0 is not equal to the successor of any number". > What are "not" and "equal" and "successor" if not aesthetic qualities in our imagination? > > Or write a longer sentence. It is intuitively trivial with the intended > standard intuitive notion of numbers: 0, 1, 2, 3, ... > Whatever you are thinking is intuitively trivial is probably exactly where I am saying that everything meaningful to consciousness must be. > > > > I have to figure out what is meant by s(x), which distracts me from the > question of whether s(x) is actually fictional and derived from a whole > history of philosophical formulation. > > > You confuse the intended notion with the relation between the humans and > that notion. We can always come back on this, but you should appeal to such > side notion only when you think that it invalidate the reasoning. If not > you do what we call in french "un procès d'intention", that is, you > attribute to your opponents statements that he never did. > > > I wasn't trying to say anything intentional, but the framing of the question in mathematical terms automatically buries the roots of mathematics itself, which is what I am saying is already sense and consciousness (not human of course). > > > > Once you know how to read the language, the sense making that it took to > get there, such as all of the childhood wiring of tactile and visual > metaphors crafted by patient teachers, are elided into the sub-personal > awareness. > > > We do that all the time. Again, if you are willing to argue, you must > invoke the elision only if it invalidates the argument. > It does invalidate the argument. I'm explaining why it might seem to you, and to many people, that mathematical abstractions could be primitive. I'm saying that mathematical thoughts emerge from much simpler feelings and expectations which are perceptual and tangible rather than conceptual. > > > > > With the bulk of the iceberg of sense making metaphor safely under water, > yes the tip seems much simpler than talking about something for which a > formal language has yet to exist. > > > I discovered formal language in biology. As far as Nature exists, it > exploits arguably the formal and the multiplicable all the times. A formal > system, fundamentally, is just a system defined by its form. > I'm explaining why it seems simpler to talk about math (an established formal language developed over thousands of years by billions of people) than it is to talk about aesthetic phenomena (which has no formal language except for the ad hoc one that I am trying to give it). I would say that Nature only exploits the formal, as part of Nature, we exploit the informal as well. > > > > > > The axiom here says 0 is not a successor of any natural number. A FAQ is > "is not 0 the successor of -1 ?", and the anwer is that we just accept "0 ≠ > s(x)" to eliminate the negative numbers, in which we are not interested > because we want a very simple Turing universal base. We could use all > integers, as they are also Turing universal with addition and > multiplication, but we have chosen the natural numbers. > Beyond that type of explanation, at this stage, asking for more is > obfuscation. > > > It would be obfuscation if we were asking about computation or math, but > I'm only interested in the relationship of consciousness to physics and > information. > > > Then *you* should stay mute about comp. You can't say that comp is false > and computer science irrelevant for sense and consciousness, and make > negative statement like my sun is law (who get an artficial brain) is a > zombie, without us asking to justify your point, without appealing on > "real", "true", "feel", "obvious", etc. > I don't use 'zombie', your sun in law is a doll or puppet. I don't understand why I'm supposed to stay mute about comp. It sounds like 'Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain." to me. If I find, through the success of the sense-primitive model, that comp is an impostor, why should I keep it a secret? Why shouldn't I help explain the difference between a doll and a person? > > UDA can certainly inspires attempt in that direction, as it seems to imply > an inflation of continuations, much larger a priori than the apparently > well defined local continuation we observe. > > But you insist that your first axiom is that comp is false. > Not just comp, all forms of functionalism, mechanism, materialism, structured realism, logical positivism, but also solipsism, idealism (to some degree), dualism, etc. I don't know that its an axiom, it's more of a consequence of the sense primitive rather than a form/information primitive. > > And I agree with the *feeling*, if only because *that* feeling, I think, > is understandable. Indeed, the more you grasp comp, the less it is > believable. That is, modulo some definitions, a theorem in comp. > > You can't ask us to start from such a strong negative statement. It leads > to p-zombie, and well, may daughter thinks differently, and I do not see > how you could contradict her. > It doesn't lead to p-zombie, because dolls can never be totally mistaken for non-dolls - not by everyone forever. Now can I ask you to start from the strong negative statement? > > > > > > > > > > > > and then we find that sense can only be self-explanatory. Nothing else can > be self explanatory because explanation itself can't be anything other than > a way of making sense. > > > I think that is Craig's fuel, and no comp fuel, to take sense has > fundamental. Epiphenomenalism has also that air of "let us not try to > understand". > > > I think that if you aren't seeing that sense is fundamental, it is because > you have stopped questioning it when you get to a comfortable level of > objective-seeming simplicity. > > > Sense is without doubt fundamental, and is indeed the base of the UDA > (with sense/consciousness assumed to be invariant for the digital > transplant). Then the math of comp makes it possible to pursue the > interrogation, not avoid it. > > > If you are agreeing that sense is fundamental then are you agreeing that > arithmetic truth is derived from sense? > > > No. Sense is fundamental, if only because only it pull us toward truth, > justice, etc. But with comp, somehow, it participates also in the building > of space, time, energies, realities, etc. > So you think that truth can exist even if it makes no sense? > > But sense is not primitive, it arises itself from the existing solutions > of diophantine polynomials. (A tiny part of arithmetical truth). > That's surreal that you can even say that. It's like saying that water is not primitive, it comes from chocolate milk. How could a diophantine polynomial exist if it doesn't have any sense to it? You must think that by sense I am talking about some kind of system that animals use to navigate their modal mazes. The sense that I mean is absolutely primitive. It allows the maze, the navigation, the animals, the 'system', the 'some' and 'kind'...all of them are ripples and echoes of primordial sense. > > > > > In comp terms, the reason that I disallow the digital transplant is that I > suspect that the capacity for sensory enrichment is nested-logarithmic, and > that there are thresholds in which that logarithm diagonalizes, if that > makes sense. > > > I have a large mind and I can make sense of this, but computability is > close for diagonalization, and anyway, if this is only something that you > *suspect*, you can't use it to invalidate a reasoning, especially at step 0 > (the stated assumptions). > If someone is going to potentially kill themselves to become a digital person, then we must consider invalidating the reasoning on suspicion. > > > > A biological organism, lets say a frog, represents a particular history of > sensory experience. If we assume fundamental sense, then the forgetting > that we experience in our momentary consciousness, and the loss of history > in death, is not fundamental. It is retained on the Absolute level, so that > what is expressed to us by the frog's living body (hopping, croaking, etc, > not just anatomically amphibian, but personality, character, metaphor) is > not only a what but also a who that recapitulates the entire history of the > individual frog, all frogs, amphibians, living organisms, etc. The frog > image that we are aesthetically acquainted with is the very tip of a tall > spire of history that our public facing senses render as collapsed into an > externalized presence. We can do this because both we and the frog, at the > bottom of our spires, share the same base of common sense. > > > No problem, but then you should be happy with the idea that after Gödel > the mathematicians have to extend that same base of common sense to all > universal numbers. > > The family is bigger than we thought. > I don't think that numbers are part of the family at all, except as a reflection. They are the common sense that any given 2D plane of a spire has about the 2D relations of other spire-circles in a plane. Number literacy is a language generated by sense imitating and extrapolating insensitivity. > > > > > The problem with digital substitution is that it just takes the collapsed > rendering and simulates it in our experience, so that the spire of history > which connects it to our experience and the Totality of experience is > missing entirely, replaced by an impersonal set of modal strategies to > navigate the un-inspired, flat terrain which fills the space between spires. > > > That would be the case if a 3p machine could think, but no 3p things can > think. Only 1p person think. You beg the question by a sort of decision of > not attributing an 1p person to a machine, but the math shows evidence for > a person. > There is no evidence of a person though. What would be evidence of a person? Math can only show a silhouette that seems to invite personhood, but that is only a blind spot within math where the mathematician belongs. > We get it freely when we apply Theaetus' definition on Gödel provability, > which indeed capture a recursive definition of the belief in > arithmetic/compute > What does that have to do with a person necessarily? Craig > ... -- 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.
