On 18 Aug 2014, at 15:17, David Nyman wrote:
On 18 August 2014 12:19, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]> wrote:
Then the arithmetical realism suggests the existence of
approximation of physical realities, without observers. The falling
leaf will make a sound (a 3p wave), but of course, without
observers, there will be no perception or qualia actualized there.
Isn't it perhaps more the case that without observers there is no
"there" there (as Gertrude Stein might have put it)?
Imagine someone making a video game. The game is such that if the user
kill this dragon, he can go to the basement, and if he can kill the
bats, he can go in the attic. He has managed enough counterfactuals so
that the user can do things, in both the basement, and in the attic.
But, unfortunately, he made a bug, which made the dragon just
invincible, so that no user at can ever go in the basement.
I want to say that there is still a "there" there (to pursue with
Gertrude Stein way to put this).
Because the realtive there is defined by the correct number relation,
that the programmer did. "there" would not be there, in case he would
have forget to program that part.
Of course those are neither physical in the materialist sense, nor in
the comp sense, where physics emerge from the infinite sum, a priori
not computable.
The indexical reality attributable to observation is a bit like one
of the rare intelligible books adrift in the ocean of dross that
constitutes the Library of Babel. But unlike Borges's alphabetic
Library, the structure of the programmatic Library generated by the
dovetailer entails the presence of "books" that are self-
interpreting and self-locating. It's only in the context of such
self-actualisation that one could truly say that there is a physical
"there" there, if you see what I mean.
I can agree, as the term "physical" is used in two senses: the "real"
one (the comp one or the physicalist one), and the locally emulated by
this or that program. Like the program which emulates at the level of
quark or strings the observable portion of the universe, starting from
one huge number which describes the state of the universe 10 years.
That program and its execution is contained in the arithmetical
relations, but his role in the measure might be negligible, perhaps
even compared to another program doing the same thing, except that it
start at 10^(- 73) seconde after the big bang, which might still
negligible compared to ... etc.
The pre-observational "approximation" you mention above strikes me
more as the prerequisite potential for the actualisation of
intelligible physical realities, somewhat in the sense that the
Library of Babel might represent an analogous potential for the
actualisation of intelligible books.
Perhaps this is a quibble, but personally I find the notion of
physical reality as something that exists "independent of us" to be
a slippery, not to say equivocal, concept.
It might be, we just don't know what gives the sum on all
computations, but notion of "there" makes sense, independently of us,
and of physics, in the natural geometrical situations, embedded in
number relation, so that those geometries are independent of us,
exactly in the sense that "17 is prime" is independent of us.
Obviously some kind of *potential* for such reality must exist
independently of observation, and comp indeed is a thesis about
precisely what might constitute that potential. If comp is correct,
physical realities are like flecks of gold filtered from the Vastly
redundant dross spewed from the dovetailer. The filtration is in
turn a consequence of the self-referential statistics encountered by
a plurality of "natural knowers" directly entailed by the theory.
OK.
So in point of fact, if comp is correct, there isn't a physical
reality that can truly be seen as entirely "independent of us";
Well it has to be for its laws, as it has to be the same laws for all
machine. But that physics contains also the non communicable parts,
which is the only which really makes no sense at all, without
observers or subjects.
indeed this is what prevents the mind from being swept under the rug
of physics. According to comp, physics is nothing other than the
summation of lawlike constraints on the possibilities of observation;
OK.
it's this that constitutes the "reversal of physics and machine
psychology".
I can agree. But it is not entirely, as I suspect you might prefer, a
reversal between 3p reality and 1p reality, as we continue to have a
big 3p reality: the arithmetical reality which contains computer
science and the machine's dream-support (the relevant computations).
So the reversal is made possible and sensical, because it is supported
by the arithmetical relations driving the "consciousness fluxes" in
the relatively most probable continuations.
Bruno
David
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