RE: Brent's circular ontology [was: Is Consciousness Computable?]

['Chris de Morsella' via Everything List]

 

 

From: everything-list@googlegroups.com 
[mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of meekerdb
Sent: Saturday, July 12, 2014 12:18 PM
To: everything-list@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Brent's circular ontology [was: Is Consciousness Computable?]

 

On 7/12/2014 1:23 AM, LizR wrote:

Brent, 

 

You left me hanging a week or so ago, and never got back to me about something 
I'm interested in finding out more about.

 

On 2 July 2014 23:14, LizR <lizj...@gmail.com> wrote:

On 2 July 2014 17:06, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote:

On 7/1/2014 9:42 PM, LizR wrote:

On 2 July 2014 15:46, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote:

OK, so how does that work? Like I said, I don't understand it. Intuitively, 
saying that A causes B and B causes A doesn't appear to make sense, 

It's not a causal relationship, it's an explanatory "->".

 

Sorry I should have said "explains" although I thought it was obvious I was 
using causal in an explanatory sense, not a physical one. Anyway, please 
continue the explanation.

You don't understand what is meant by "physics -> biology" or "biology -> 
evolution -> mathematics" or "mathematics -> physics"?

 

Yes I do. 

 

And there you stopped. I'm still waiting for you to continue the explanation.

 

To refresh your memory, you said:

 

OK, except I think the chain is:
arithmetic -> information -> matter -> consciousness -> arithmetic

 

To which I objected that I couldn't see how this makes sense globally, even if 
each local step makes sense. You appear to be claiming that there is no such 
thing as a fundamental explanatory level. Since this flies in the face of 3+ 
centuries of scientific progress (based on reductionism, which assumes there is 
a fundamental explanatory level)


It's just that I noted that fundamental physics has become almost entirely 
abstract and mathematical, so that people like Tegmark and Wheeler started to 
speculate that the mathematics *is* the physics.  Lists like this that 
subscribe to everythingism Bruno's "comp" and Tegmark's MUH completely erase 
the boundary between math and physics.  The 3+ centuries of reductionist 
physics are also 3+ centuries of explaining things through synthesis of simpler 
(and presumably better understood) things.  At the same time I think 
mathematics is a human invention, a certain way of looking at the world made 
precise in language.  Humans and their inventions are explicable by evolution, 
biology, physics,...and mathematics.  So maybe the circle closes.  The usual 
objection of a circular explanation is it leaves stuff out, especially if it 
leaves out all the stuff you understand and just explains mystery X in terms of 
enigma Y.  But if the circle is big enough, if it encompasses everything, then 
either there's some part you understand and that allows you to reach all the 
rest; or you don't understand anything and there's no hope for you.

 

Brent ~ I like how you bring in biology (and our biological being) into this 
grand cycle. 

It seems natural to me that we are emergent vast-network phenomena dancing upon 
a self-replicating organic chemistry base, itself emerging from physical 
reality that, speculatively perhaps, can be hypothesized to emerge itself from 
an even more fundamental abstract mathematical reality. It would seem natural 
then to me that our brain functioning and the mind ->self-aware consciousness 
that emerges out of this underlying massively parallel network would itself be 
predisposed towards stumbling upon the actions and objects of math and 
eventually developing a theory of a mathematical universe.

If we *are* math then aren’t our minds, emergent from within also math and 
would naturally *think* in mathematical ways, developing a theory that *fit* 
the underlying biological->physical->fundamental-reality nature of our being.

 

Pardon my tangential excursion… for, one question leads to others.

What about question such as these: what was the first mover; the first root 
fundamental action (or elementary entity)? Or if there is no first mover; no 
beginning; no foundational root… then what? Even if all you need is a single 
bit and one, two or (?) basic operations to trigger a math emergence… from 
whence does that come?

 

Is the possibility that we will someday figure things out to this level or is 
an attempt to do so pure theoretical unobtanium? This is the “god” boundary 
where many invoke some kind of inexplicable principal and leave it as 
unexplored terra-incognita. 





, not to mention what most people would regard as logic (or at least common 
sense), this looks like a fairly radical revision of our theories of knowledge.

 

So I'd be interested to know more, if you're prepared to continue explaining.


As I said, I don't have my own TOE.  I just put forward the virtuous circle of 
explanation based on a suggestion of Bruno (which he's disavowed) as a counter 
example to the idea that reductionism must either bottom out or be like 
infinite Russian dolls.

 

Or… perhaps it could it be like the mythical snake eating its tail.

By, invoking retro-causality to say that Creation itself (i.e. the bottom) is 
an effect of itself. It helps, if one adopts the perspective that spacetime 
(and the – macro at least -- one way arrow nature of the time dimension) is 
itself emergent and non-local (until measured); then retro-causality becomes a 
little less weird. But spooky action at a distance is weird, and also quite 
well experimentally validated.

Cheers,

Chris



Brent




 

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