On 12 Jan 2015, at 23:07, meekerdb wrote:
On 1/2/2015 2:45 PM, Jason Resch wrote:
On Fri, Jan 2, 2015 at 2:40 PM, John Clark <[email protected]>
wrote:
On Fri, Jan 2, 2015 at 6:31 AM, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]>
wrote:
> Define telepathy, telekinesis, and remote viewing.
No. Buy a dictionary, if you're still confused after that I'll try
to help you out but first you'll need to define define.
If you continued with the other steps of the universal dovetailer
argument, you would realize some of these questions aren't so cut
and dry.
If your brain has many instantiations in many universes/realities/
mathematical structures, then your consciousness is reviewing these
remote locations (and may next find itself in such a remote
location).
> So we don't have a bet,
I can't say I'm surprised, I've been offering this bet at the
beginning of the year for over a decade but even the staunchest
believer in the paranormal always chickens out when asked to put
his money where his mouth is.
The intention of your bet is unclear. Is it to show that close-
minded scientists who have a history of deciding not to even review
a paper that disagrees with their presuppositions will continue to
decide not even to review papers that disagree with their
presuppositions? Even if one strongly believed a surprising result
would be made in psi, the prejudice shown by leading journals on
the matter would still make such a debt unlikely to pay off.
Your insistence that scientists open with welcome arms ground-
shaking discoveries is disproved by the case of Hugh Everett, who
was met with ridicule and (worse) inattention.
"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its
opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its
opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is
familiar with it." -- Max Planck
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight
you, then you win." -- Mahatma Gandhi
Einstein was never recognized with a Nobel prize for his discovery
of relativity, the council thought his discovery was too
controversial.
> BTW, why sending this to the list. I have never heard people
defending para-psy.
Don't you remember Craig Weinberg? And my attack on parapsychology
upset you so much you called me a bigot.
parapsychology
1. the branch of psychology that deals with the investigation of
purportedly psychic phenomena, as clairvoyance, extrasensory
perception, telepathy, and the like.
psychic
1. of or relating to the human soul or mind; mental (opposed to
physical).
2. Psychology. pertaining to or noting mental phenomena.
3. outside of natural or scientific knowledge; spiritual.
4. of or relating to some apparently nonphysical force or agency:
psychic research; psychic phenomena.
5. sensitive to influences or forces of a nonphysical or
supernatural nature.
Much of what is discussed on this list concerns ontologies where
the mental exists beyond the physical, or is the foundation of the
physical, and so would be a "psychic" and accordingly a
"parapsychological" phenomenon.
> most scienstist practice argument of authority, given that they
believe or not a paper just by the title of a journal
Most scientists believe in reputation and in induction, so even if
they have not personally duplicated the exparament they think that
the numbers published in Science or Nature or Physical Review
Letters are probably correct.
A policy to only publish things that are well established serves to
protect the reputation of the journal as a reliable source for
probably valid results, but it serves to slow down the rate of
progress by hiding from view controversial but nonetheless correct
ideas.
But things would be quite different if experimental results were
printed on a processed dead tree in a fifth rate "science journal"
that nobody has ever heard of, or worse just data on a website run
by somebody nobody has heard of, or if they have wished they
hadn't. I know how to type too, I could easily start a website
saying perpetual motion is possible and even provide results of
experiments that I say I have performed supporting my claim. It
wouldn't take me 20 minutes.
I might add that with the exception of religion, a closely related
delusion, no area of human activity has been as riddled with as
much fraud as psi or ESP or spiritualism or whatever buzzword is in
fashion today for that drivel.
> the interesting question is what is the nature of God: a thing, a
person, a mathematical reality, etc.
It is none of those things, "God" is a 3 letter ASCII sequence with
the binary value of 01000111 01101111 01100100. And I have to
disagree with you, I don't find that very interesting.
> atheists are ally to the institutionalized religion.
And up is down and black is white and atheism is just a slight
variation of Christianity.
Atheists almost universally use the Christian's conception of God,
as the one they deny. Bruno rightly points out that they never go
so far as to deny all Gods, they just substitute one "basis for
existence" with another, which is also based on faith (and one
they're often blind to the fact that this belief rests on faith).
> You really seem to act that a bishop of religious atheism,
Wow, calling a guy known for disliking religion religious, never
heard that one before, at least I never heard it before I was 12.
> Do you believe in a PRIMARY physical universe? Or are you
agnostic on this?
I can't answer that until I understand the question. I know what
you mean by "primary", it's a brute fact, the end of a long chain
of "why?" questions, but I'm a little fuzzy about "physical
universe", and I don't want definitions I want examples. Are only
nouns part of the physical universe or are adjectives and adverbs
part of it too? Are quarks or superstrings part of the physical
universe? Is information part of the physical universe? Are
thoughts part of the physical universe? Are the integers part of
the physical universe? What about the Real Numbers or Complex
Numbers? And if all these things are part of the physical universe
you need to give me at least one example of something that isn't.
Where do you think "the buck stops" when it comes to explaining our
apparent existence in a physical world? Below are some examples.
I've underlined the "ultimate cause" inherent in these different
belief systems:
Idealists: God->Mind
Christians: God->Universe->Brains->Mind
Physicalists/Atheists: Universe->Brains->Mind
Platonists: Mathematical Truth->Number relations->Minds
Tegmark: Math->Mathematical Objects->Self Aware Sub-structures
What does the ontological chain in your would view look like, and
what do you place at the far left?
That there is something fundamental is a mere prejudice, a dogma of
mathematics that everything must be traceable to axioms. Ordering of
explanations may be:
HUMANS->LANGUAGE->MATHEMATICS->PHYSICS->CHEMISTRY->BIOLOGY-
>EVOLUTION->HUMANS
But this describes only the human understanding of the human. The term
"PHYSICS" denote the human physical knowledge, and not the physical
reality (primary or not). If not that would look anthropomorphic, and
ridiculous for the aliens.
People decry circular explanations, but that is only when the circle
fails to include some sector they understand. Explanation must
always refer to something understood,
Yes. And we must start from agreeing on some principles, and the way
to do that, with clear relationship between syntax and meaning are
studied in logic (mathematical and philosophical logics).
The intuitive understanding of computationalism, including Church's
thesis, helps to understand that matter and consciousness have to be
explained entirely (except for some necessary justifiable gaps) in
term of numbers and (sigma_1) relations between numbers.
so if the circle of explanation is big enough to encompass
everything it is guaranteed to either include something you
understand or you are simply incapable of understanding.
And it is better to start from something children are supposed to
understand, like addition and multiplication. That is not entirely
trivial, and with computationalism it is enough, except for that
belief in the invariance of consciousness for the digital substitution
at some finite level of description, which made the connection with
consciousness and the first person knowledge (and psychology,
theology, abstract biologies, etc.).
All we need is a universal system, in the Post-Church-Kleene-Turing-
Markov sense. With the Church-Turing Thesis, the existence of
universal systems is provable in RA. Indeed RA proves the existence of
machines having much bigger ability than itself, like PA and ZF, which
here are looked through their infinitely many representations in
arithmetic.
This solves the hard consciousness problem, I think, and it reduces
the *hard problem of matter*, that is the problem of justifying the
appearance of matter and physical laws, to the problem of justifying
the uniqueness of some measure on the sigma_1 sentences, related to a
logic of self-reference (to get the main different points of view).
Then AUDA shows, up to the open problems, the solution provided by the
Gödel-Löbian universal machine (which is mainly a universal machine
betting on enough induction axioms, so that she knows, in a weak
technical sense, that she is universal (and she knows that she will
put some mess in Platonia, also).
There are two form of irrationalism. The irrationalism which
contradicts the rational. That one I dismiss. Then there is the
irrationalism which does not contradict the rational, but only
extended it. That one is important, and it drives all souls to God, as
long as they are able to change their mind, or their theories, on it.
A religion is only a conception of reality (hopefully partially
sharable with others). And it is not a given, it is a goal. Then,
science, which means doubts and doubts and doubts, is the only tool.
But we need some faith that our ignorance is an ignorance about *some*
thing to get the motivation to search.
Bruno
Brent
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