On 14 Jun 2014, at 00:01, meekerdb wrote:
On 6/13/2014 2:22 PM, David Nyman wrote:
On 13 June 2014 20:44, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote:
under
physicalism, in accounting for the origin of matter (which is
basic).
This makes it coherent, at least in principle, to ask for an
exhaustive physical accounting of any given state of affairs. In
the
final analysis *everything* must be reducible, by assumption, to
one
or another description of some basic set of underlying physical
relations.
Under computationalism, by contrast, the epistemological logic is
absolutely central in differentiating the lawful appearances of
matter
from the exhaustive redundancy of the computational base. Hence on
these assumptions, even in principle, no state of affairs above the
level of the basic ontology could ever be exhaustively accounted
for
by any catalogue of descriptions, however sophisticated or
multi-levelled, of its merely physical dispositions, absent the
selective logic of its epistemology.
?? Too dense for me.
I think logic can be accounted for in 3p and can be observed in
brains, as
in computers.
I'm sorry if it's hard to follow my drift, but I'm also a little
flummoxed that we're still flogging this particular horse. Why is
such
a fundamental distinction between physicalism and computationalism
still so contentious after all the to-ing and fro-ing on this very
point on this list over the years? We are not debating the
correctness
of either of the theories under discussion, but rather the
distinctively different role that is played by their various
conceptual elements.
To summarise, then: physicalism is the hypothesis that an
exhaustively
reduced account of any state of affairs whatsoever can, in principle,
be rendered by reference to a particular, restricted class of
fundamental entities and relations.
So those fundamental entities can be numbers and the relations can
be functions in arithmetic?
I guess David meant "physical fundamental entities", that is
"observable". The physicalist declares that something is real if it is
observable.
Platonist and mystics, or believers, tends to assume that the
"observable" has some non observable reason to exist. They bet on
something else, going from numbers (Pythagorus), an intelligible
reality (Plato), mathematics (Xeusippes), the one (Plotin), ... and
yes the fairy tales god(s) (once research in theology get forbidden,
be it with plants, dances, or logic and math, still today).
Given this scope, it must be true,
ex hypothesi, that any and all higher-order derivatives, for example
computational or neurological states, are re-descriptions (known or
unknown) of the basic entities and relations and hence always fully
reducible to them. Consequently such higher-order concepts, though
explanatorily indispensible, are ontologically disposable; IOW, it's
the basic physics that, by assumption, is "doing all the work".
I see nothing in your explication that really defines or
distinguishes physicalism from any other 'ism that proposes to
explain everything in terms of some fundamental entities. I tried
to give a definition that "physical" meant "sharable" in an
operational sense.
Sharable by who? By the universal numbers? I am all with you.
Did you reject that definition? In the above you seem to just
assume that we know what is meant by physicalism and physics and we
just know it's inadequate.
By contrast, computationalism, as formulated in the UDA, leads to the
hypothesis of an arithmetical ontology resulting in a vastly
redundant
computational infinity.
And this is different from string theory because string theory
assumes real numbers which makes it bigger than a computational
infinity?
Yes. That's why Tegmark is fuzzy on the ontology. The term
"mathematica" can't be defined in mathematics. All attempts have
failed up to now. My be with Quine NF, ...
But with Church thesis we do have the miracle of a something both
universal, and effective. The universal machine, and the limiting
border of its capacities, which by the first person delay invariance
get in touch with the machines statistically stable machine's point of
view.
This being the case, there is a dependency
from the outset on a fundamental selective principle
Which is?
The consciousness of the owner of the memory diary.
in order to
justify the appearance of a lawlike observational physics
The justification of lawlike observation in physics is a topic of
research, mostly centered around hopes that decoherence theory will
explain the appearance of the classical world, which is necessary
for observation.
Decoherence theory does not need to make the other "world"
disappearing. That would reintroduce linearity where it can't be, if
QM is correct. Decoherence just explains why it is hard to get the
trace of the interference effect with the macroscopic states.
; IOW before
it can advance to the stage that physicalism has already assumed at
the outset. That selective principle is a "universal observational
psychology", based on the universal digital machine, whose primary
role is to justify the singularisation of a particular, lawlike
physics that comports with observation.
You use "singularisation" a lot. I don't know what it means. I
don't think said selective principle exists. It just something
Bruno says must exist for his theory to work.
? On the contrary. Comp makes the selective principle obvious. It is
just obvious the W guy will feel like if his consciousness was
selected in W, and same for the M guy. Robots would do trivially the
same, and consciously so if they got the right program.
So he assumes is a posteriori instead of a priori.
It should be clear, therefore, that the "psychology of observation"
is
not itself reducible to basic physics in this scheme of things. That
would be an egregious confusion of levels.
Only because you have assumed (which was the question) that
psychology cannot be realized on the level of physics. Suppose (as
I think happens in one of Smullyan's stories) you are connected to a
brain scanner and this scanner can then predict what you will do,
including such thoughts as you remember, over the next 30sec or some
short period over which you external experience is predictable.
Would this imply that your psychology was reducible to physics?
No more than you can reduce a good chess programs to its arithmetical
body or Gödel number.
Here physics provides many universal machines (something we need to
explain) and we can implement machine in physics (apparently biology
exploits this), but the body is not the same entity than the person
owing the body. They obeys to different laws.
Physics handles magnificently the observable, but does not address the
theological, the psychological, etc. It is normal, and not a critics,
except when people takes physicalism + mechanism, as this needed a use
of "magical" non Turing emulable nor FPI recoverable matter only
to ... prevent further research.
Bruno
I expect you will object that this isn't *everything* and that
something is missed - but what is it and is it something that can be
shared in any conceivable theory or is it simply ineffable 1p?
Moreover, it is not
straightforwardly reducible to the underlying arithmetical entities
and relations, because the selective principle in question *depends"
on complex, computationally-instantiated epistemological states
What's an epistemological state of an arithmetical entity? Sounds
like an egregious confusion of levels to me. :-)
and
their relation to modes of arithmetical truth. Absent those states
and
modes, there would be no physics, no observer and nothing to observe.
At least that's Bruno's theory.
Consequently, neither computation, nor the epistemological states it
emulates, are dispensable (i.e. fully reducible) in this schema.
It's not clear what "emulates" means. I think Bruno proposes that
arithmetical computation actually instantiates modal states like
belief. But I think that may be stretching the meaning of
"belief". If belief is defined in terms of propensity to act
certain ways in certain contexts, then it seems it can be physically
instantiated too.
Brent
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