On 08 Nov 2014, at 14:09, David Nyman wrote:
On 8 November 2014 07:54, LizR <[email protected]> wrote:
Are not the relations between the subsystems part of the ontology?
Explicitly so in arithmetical realism, I would say.
Not really. Perhaps I could respond both to you and Brent in one
here. I'm trying to make an explicit distinction between an assumed
ontology and its (possible) epistemological consequences. In comp,
the assumed ontology is restricted to basic arithmetical relations;
physics likewise is a search for a fundamental level of explanation
in terms of which everything else can explicitly (at least in
principle) be rendered. Of course, one can speak in terms of systems
and sub-systems composed of such basic entities and relations. But
it is surely a guiding principle of reductive explanation that such
composites, and the relations between them, must ultimately be
exhaustively accountable in terms of the fundamental ontological
assumptions. If that were not the case, the attempted "reduction"
would merely have been unsuccessful.
Indeed it is only in terms of some explicit point of view that we
are ever forced to contemplate a strong form of emergence, or
"realism", about any level of composition over and above the
reductive base.
But the universal numbers do that all by themselves. If
computationalism is correct, the existence of your relative states are
theorem already in RA. Now, you consciousness is determined not by
such existences but by all existences, as you are spreaded and
distributed infinitely in that arithmetic, and we can't see you in any
place, as you are at all places, in a limiting structure, from inside.
And you are richer than the whole ontology, in some sense (you believe
in PA or even in ZF, fro example, or in a "physical universe", which
normally must be recovered by the invariance of the first person for
that infinite self-multiplication, and whatever can be recovered in
that internal limit. Apparently we get things like the quantum
machinery, as part of a vaster quale machinery.
We can or not put the basic Turing machinery in the ontology, because
we can prove it to exist, in the 3p sense, in arithmetic. But we can't
prove the existence of an electron, we can only prove or explain why
the average machine in some normal cluster of histories develop the
locally correct believe in electron, which are plausibly explainable
in a manner similar to Vic Stenger, from principle which have to be
derived from the sum on all computations, as seen from the first
person perspective.
If Graziano says that consciousness does not exist, then he should
add, neither the physical universes. All there is 2+2=4 and the
consequences of that type of truth, which includes coherent sets of
"number hallucinations", which still obeys laws, and infinitely
complex laws actually.
Strictly speaking, composite systems and relations are
*epistemologically* real, rather than ontologically so, in any
strong sense. In fact so-called "weak emergence" isn't really
emergence at all as, objectively speaking, nothing is to be
conceived as being "there" over and above the basic entities and
their relations. So my point is that it is simply self-defeating to
deny that there is in fact any such thing as epistemological
realism, as Graziano explicitly does. In attempting to do so, he
simply cuts the ground from under his own claim.
I think so. He invents a mystery (a fundamental physical universe) to
hide another mystery: consciousness.
Bruno
David
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