On 19 August 2014 01:53, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote: So the idea is that comp necessarily entails epistemological logics (the "dreams of the machines")
Except that it seems to be an epistemology very different from ones we usually practice. What's the last time you learned a fact about the world by proving it from Peano's axioms? Well, you frequently counsel me against arguing on the basis of personal incredulity. So I could respond by asking you when was the last time you learned a fact about the world by deducing it from the molecular structure of your brain. Given that we are committed to explaining the complex in terms of something simpler, then some sort of structure, defined molecularly or otherwise, must surely be implicated in what it means to learn a fact, even though we can't yet say precisely what it is. I guess I take the logics that Bruno investigates in AUDA to be at something analogous to the "molecular" level vis-a-vis any explanation of cognition or perception that would strike us as intuitively familiar. So just as an understanding of the dynamics of molecular bonding has turned out to be crucial to an appreciation of the possibilities of large-scale structure, the hope (or project) is that we can derive something of analogous relevance, to the structure of human-like cognition and perception, from a rigorous study of particular classes of more basic logical relations. that are *prior* to physics in the sense that only certain sub-classes will be characterised by the statistical dominance of physically-lawlike relations over their range of reference. It's pretty much like Bertrand Russell's neutral monism. There are events or states that classified one way constitute experiences or thoughts of individuals, and classified another way, some of them constitute objective physical events. That's not a bad way of putting it as a general position. My point though was that if we want to start from a very general notion of computation that doesn't presuppose physics, we must seek to justify the differentiation of a sub-class of lawlike physical realities from a much larger totality. According to comp, this differentiation is rooted in the statistical dominance of certain classes of internal "belief" or reference that are deducible from a quasi-ubiquitous form of self-referential "machine psychology". I guess it is only to be expected that a fundamental concept of this sort would strike us as being at some remove from any putative elaboration at the human scale. The devil, as ever, will be found in the detail. David On 8/18/2014 4:23 PM, David Nyman wrote: > > On 18 August 2014 23:27, Stathis Papaioannou <[email protected]> wrote: > > I'm not entirely clear on Bruno's argument on this last point. The way >> I see it, if a brain is simulated by a computer program, what is being >> simulated is the physics; and if comp is true, that means that >> simulating the physics will also reproduce the brain's consciousness. >> I'm not sure about computations instantiating consciousness without >> instantiating physics, and I'm not sure how instantiating the >> appearance of physics is different to instantiating (virtual) physics. >> > > I've always understood him to be saying, in the first place, that the > dovetailer necessarily generates certain classes of self-referential > computations. Very generally, such computations are then regarded as > emulating self-referred (i.e. first-personal or indexical) logics that in > turn are amenable to treatment as "beliefs" in realities or appearances. So > the idea is that comp necessarily entails epistemological logics (the > "dreams of the machines") > > > Except that it seems to be an epistemology very different from ones we > usually practice. What's the last time you learned a fact about the world > by proving it from Peano's axioms? > > > that are *prior* to physics in the sense that only certain sub-classes > will be characterised by the statistical dominance of physically-lawlike > relations over their range of reference. > > > It's pretty much like Bertrand Russell's neutral monism. There are events > or states that classified one way constitute experiences or thoughts of > individuals, and classified another way, some of them constitute objective > physical events. > > Brent > > I've always assumed that it's this logical priority of "machine > psychology" over the subsequent appearance of lawlike physical relations > that constitutes the postulated "reversal". > > David > -- > 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/d/optout. > > > -- > 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/d/optout. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. 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