I don't feel that invisible horses were ever used or needed to explain the internal combustion engine, and despite this, horse power was always a better used analogy as nobody believed in unseeable horses, even back then! Occam's Razor is useful as Newtonian physics, but at the sub-atomic scale it fades from the scene and melts before the behavior of the quantum. Occam's razor can also be a box to keep people from asking what yourself and Sir Occam, consider unnecessary complexity. It is a good tool, but it doesn't help everything, eveywhere,
Look at this Gizmodo article by George Dvorsky. It speaks of Italian physicists discovering something far more import than the mass of the Higgs particle. They have discovered the eternal. We now may understand that the particle we call the electron is eternal, it is perpetual. http://gizmodo.com/electron-lifespan-is-at-least-5-quintillion-times-the-1747606990 Knowing that a particle appears to be eternal. It is also the basis of all materialism, apparently. No solids without electron and all that. Electrons, also happen to make humans and their lives, and so, I surmise, include other objects that comprise the universe, such as stars, dog poop on a sidewalk in Brussels, and the diet cola I am now drinking. This is also quite beyond poor Occam's knife, yet it seems very significant, indeed. A particle that is part of the Alps and is also flowing along as part of your brain, and it's eternal, or 5 quadrillion times the current life-age of the universe. It's a number of years that is surely post-astronomical, as well as perhaps, post cosmological. By definition, as you and I enjoy theology talk, the ancient Hebrews, aka, Jews worship, by definition, the eternal, referred in passing, as, "The Eternal, Our God." This is said in prayers,as well. I will ask a Hindu fellow, living in North Shore, Chicago, whom, among the Hindu deities he feels the Jews worship? No not money, for that would make me a raging apostate ;-) I am betting he may say, Brahma, basically the master of time and such. I could ask, my niece by marriage, and see what she says-she's an atheist. Think, Bruno, every electron is a piece of eternity. I wonder if electrons somehow comprise eternal mind? Please bring in Occam now! -----Original Message----- From: Bruno Marchal <[email protected]> To: everything-list <[email protected]> Sent: Fri, Dec 11, 2015 12:54 pm Subject: Re: Is consciousness hypercomputable? On 11 Dec 2015, at 17:50, spudboy100 via Everything List wrote: Bruno, can there not be layers of what you describe as "fundamental" to reality. Astronomers have surmised that there is a greater physical area beyond the detectable Hubble Volume. Might not there be space enough for both your primal layer and Max Tegmark's. Why would we need this, as the problem is that we cannot use the physical reality (any physical reality) to explain the origin of the physical, once we assume computationalism. That would be like asking car drivers to still believe that their car are pulled by invisible horses, despite we get the point of the car movement just using thermodynamics. Let us use Occam razor, and not postulate things which in our case provably make the problem arising again. It is like doing a theory to prevent an explanation to be tested. It is not really rational. Maybe a layer of dragons and unicorns, however, more functionally, a layer that acts as a relational or block-chain database, being merely the Platonic? If our body is Turing-emulable, we cannot use more than a universal system. I use elementary arithmetic to fix the thing. And it works, both for consciousness and matter (until now), so why adding axioms which re-introduces the problem which has been solved (modulo the possible refutation in the future). Why makes things more complex than what our theory asks us. We need no creator, no creation, no unicorn, just the numbers in which we already believe in. But then, we know after Gödel that the numbers are not that simple (of course number theorists "knew" this firsthand, and the Pythagorean mystics too). Bruno -----Original Message----- From: Bruno Marchal <[email protected]> To: everything-list <[email protected]> Sent: Fri, Dec 11, 2015 4:11 am Subject: Re: Is consciousness hypercomputable? On 11 Dec 2015, at 02:46, Dan wrote: Digital physics rests upon the Strong Church-Turing Thesis, which posits that nature does not admit non-computable real numbers: If digital physics is correct, then my body is Turing emulable. But then, the universal dovetailer argument shows that you need to derive physics from a statistics on the natural number computable relations, which entails that physics cannot be computable. This means that digital physics entails its own contrary, and thus digital physics is self-contradictory. This does not prevent digital physics from having applications, but it is wrong on the fundamental level. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church%E2%80%93Turing_thesis#Philosophical_implications AI researcher Ben Goertzel discusses the "Hypercomputable Humanlike Intelligence hypothesis, which suggests that the crux of humanlike intelligence is some sort of mental manipulation of uncomputable entities – i.e., some process of “hypercomputation” [1-6].": http://goertzel.org/papers/CognitiveInformaticsHypercomputationPaper.pdf This recent article seems to imply that there non-computable real numbers exist in nature. Would you agree? If so, does this not falsify the Strong Church Turing Thesis? That then seems to make the HHI hypothesis possible, and if the HHI hypothesis could be verified then according to Goertzel's argument science would never be able to describe cognition. (He's concerned about the implications that would have for neuroscience and AI, naturally.): http://factor-tech.com/connected-world/21062-a-fundamental-quantum-physics-problem-has-been-proved-unsolvable/ I've only come across this mailing list after reading Standish's "Theory of Nothing." On my blog, I have been compiling various recent work regarding the fabric of reality. It attempts to tie together Chaitin's metabiology (life as evolving software), Hoffman's Interface Theory of Perception and Dynamics of Two Conscious Agents, modeling by Deutsch/Wallace of the Born rule using rational agents and decision theory, Standish's derivation of QM as implementation of evolution, Alex Wissner-Gross's Entropic Causal Forces relating intelligence to emergence/entropy, Frieden's Extreme Physical Information which seems to explain evolution as a program applying the anthropic principle and operating on particles and ideas (which are simply dual aspects of information, taken from a multiverse of infinite bit strings a la Standish or plentitude of mathematical structures a la Tegmark). It also considers the work of Bolognesi in "Algorithmic Causal Sets for a Computational Spacetime" and Schmidhuber's Goedel Machine,Theory of Creativity, and universal dovetailer. I suppose my current hypothesis about the fabric of reality (prior to fully grasping Tegmark's hypothesis) can be summarized as follows: Your attribution are wrong. See my papers in my URL below, or on research gate for the more recent one. But Tegmark and Schmidhuber missed the first person indeterminacy, and mainly the global first person indeterminacy, which is that if we are machine we are duplicable, and this leads to a first person indterminacy. See perhaps this paper: http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/publications/SANE2004MARCHALAbstract.html Then they miss the fact that all computations are emulated in virtue of the true relation between numbers (or of the true relations in any Turing complete theory), which means that to make any prediction on first person experience (which is what we do when doing an experience in physics) we need to make a statistics on all computations seen from the first person point of view (the global FPI). Nature is reduced to an emerging first person (sharable) reality. Particles and ideas are two sides of the same coin: information. Information is a pure third person construct, so it cannot help to solve the problem. You need to structure information by the first person apprehension. See the paper mentioned above to understand this with more details. I explain this on this list since some time. You might consult the archive or read the sane04 paper. Driven by the anthropic Extreme Physical Information principle that nature is kind to observers (as efficiently as possible-- Occam's razor), ideas and "particles" evolve algorithmically in much the same way that genes do. What remains to be answered is why nature should be kind to observers, or - perhaps more fundamentally- what does it really mean to be an observer? Is it just a rational agent, similar perhaps to a Goedel machine? When we say nature is kind to observers, do we really imply that the rational agents ensure their own existence by maximizing novel pattern compression progress and possible future actions (as suggested by Hoffman's Conscious Agent Thesis)? Please forgive me if I repeat myself or produce "word salad" -- it can be difficult for me to sequence my thoughts linearly as I struggle to get them all down, so upon request I will clarify what I mean by anything above. I appreciate your patience and am eager to read your reply. I suggest you read the paper above: http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/publications/SANE2004MARCHALAbstract.html So that you can catch the wagon where we have arrived. My work on the "Goedel machine" (which I call Löbian machine), the universal dovetailer argument are much older, and much advanced that most citation you give. The only problem is that in the math part I use some amount of mathematical logic which is not very well known. Your intution is right: ideas evolve, but not like algorithm, which would single out one basic algorithm at the origin of the physical reality. That is possible, but must be derived from the statistics on all computations. It makes physics not entirely computable, but perhaps no more complex that computable + a random oracle (to use the FPI). Bruno -- 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. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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 https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
