On 13 Dec 2015, at 21:51, spudboy100 via Everything List wrote:
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.
I can't make sense of "appears to be eternal". Roses believes that
gardener are 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!
There is no doubt that electron are important, but that does not makes
them primitively real. No problem if you want to belief in primary
electron, but I am interested in where they come from, and what is
their nature. Moreover, you seem to use Occam here.
Yes, eternal is use for God, I don't have much a problem with that.
The God of computationalism is better seen out of time, as eternal is
still a physicalist notion. It is the same for the number: are 3 and
PI eternal? That makes no sense, they are out of the category of
things on which the notion of time can be applied.
I am a scientist, so I want to know the theories (assumption) on the
table and the formula used to test the theory. I assume
computationalism, which makes me no more believing in a primary or
Aristotelian physical universe. Then I test if the computationalist
theory explains well the physical stable appearances.
Bruno
-----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
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