On 25 Feb 2016, at 00:42, John Clark wrote:
On Wed, Feb 24, 2016 at 5:46 AM, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]>
wrote:
> theology remains taboo,
Theology remains stupid because it's the study of nothing,
It is the science of God. If your theory says there is no God, that is
still a theology, with or without proof. Note that such a proof is
doubtful unless you insist that God is the literal one of the fairy
tales coming with some fundamentalist reading of some sacred text.
In the theology of Plato, god is only a nickname of the absolute truth
that we search and intuit as being not definable (no name) and
transcendental (above our reason ability to prove).
After Gödel and Tarski, Arithmetical truth plays already the rôle of
Plotinus' notion of God, as it is simple, without name, transcendental
from the machine's point of view, and at the base of the ontology, and
the epistemology.
PS In my answer to Brent of yesterday, on that matter, I say that the
propositions of G* minus G are not accessible, but that was a typo
error, I meant not assertable or provable or rationally believable.
so both experts and novices have exactly the same level of knowledge
of the subject. Zero. Theology isn't taboo, theology is a
laughingstock
By theology, I eman the theory of everything, like the science of the
greek neopythagoricians (like Moderatus of Gadès) and neoplatonists
(like Plotinus, Porphyry, Proclus, Damascious, but actually also of
the more modern (19th) Benjamin Pierce, George Boole, de Morgan, who
invented the modern mathematical logic with the hope to take distance
in theology with christian authoritarianist dogma).
Theology has been very fruitful already, as physics and mathematics
are born from it. It is only the social professionalization goal of
19th century mathematicians which separate mathematics from its older
subbranch of theology (mathematician meant first: theologian skeptics
on primary matter). It was of course a good thing for mathematicians,
but that cut at the root the possibility of professionalization of
theology itself, with the usual benefits for the nominated charlatan.
But you defend the charlatan so that you can give sense to your non-
agnostic theology. This is like condemning astronomy because
horoscopes are crap. except that here theology is born science, and
has become crap only because religions have been mixed with politics.
As I say, that attitude is what make theology staying in the hand of
the charlatans.
A genuine atheist should love the idea that we can come back with the
scientific attitude in the search of god or of the first (primary)
principle.
Alas,non-agnostic atheists are stuck in the belief that there is only
one true notion of God: the judeo-christiano-islamic one. This is
needed for them to say that theology is laughingstock, I guess.
Theology is just the most fundamental science, and, as a science it is
agnostic. We can only propose theories, study observable consequences
and compare them through experiments, which I did. My goal was notably
to illustrate that some theology can be refuted experimentally. If the
logic of []p & <>t & p, with p semi-computable (sigma_1) departs too
much from quantum logic, then we can say that classical
computationalism is refuted. But we do get a quantum logic, so it is
not (yet) refuted.
> indeed, by definition theology is
the study of a grey amorphous vague ill defined blob named "God"
that does nothing and that nobody has ever seen.
But your perpetual use of primary matter confirms that you seem to
believe in Aristotle god: primary matter.
With the definition of god of the greek, indian, chinese, there is no
doubt that everybody believe in God. The interesting question is not
if God exists or not, but what is the nature of God: a physical
universe, a mathematical structure, a person, consciousness, etc.
>> I don't know what "singularize consciousness"
means
> The illusion that we are one person in one world.
That makes no sense. Both illusion and consciousness are perfectly
respectable subjective phenomenon, so if *we* (damn pronouns) have
the illusion that *we* (damn pronouns) are one person in one world
then *we* (damn pronouns) probably are. And the only reason John
Clark said "probably" was because of those damn pronouns.
With Mechanism this is completely clarified, we can be (and plausibly
are) many in the third person pictures, like when you say that the
person (once named Helsinki-guy) is in both Washington *and* Moscow.
That is the 3-self notion.
But each of us is only one in the first person sense of the self, the
1-self, which cannot be (and here it means cannot feel itself to be---
by the definition given of first-person) in both Washington and Moscow
from that perspective: he can write in his personal diary only the
name of one city: the one the duplicated person sees after opening the
door of its reconstitution box.
>> I'm not talking about "primitive matter" and am not
interested in it.
>Then you should not invoke it in your arguments.
Name one time I invoked "primitive matter" in my arguments that
intelligence needs matter. ONE TIME!
But then why do you disagree with anything I said, given that all what
I say is that the notion of primary matter is epistemologically
contradictory (or even ontologically when using Occam).
Most people call "primitive matter" simply "matter", because we are in
the paradigm of Aristotle theology. Only professional theologian
knowing Plato are aware that matter might be a derived concept, and so
with no need to be assumed or believed in some ontological commitment.
As professional theologian we should be neutral on this (science has
not decided between Plato and Aristotle, and be careful to say if we
talk about matter (the notion studied in physics) and primitive matter
(the notion of the metaphysical or theological physicalists).
>> There is at least as much evidence that you've got it
backwards and matter implies the existence of arithmetic;
>>Too much vague.
Which word didn't you understand?
The epistemological existence of the appearance of matter is a
consequence of arithmetic. If that is what you mean, then we agree.
Arithmetic is a consequence of any physical Truing complete subsystem
too, that is correct, but to get that matter, in the mechanist frame,
you need to postulate arithmetic (or some part of it) before.
>>Godel proved that some things are true but cannot be
asserted in mathematical language, but we've known for a very long
time that exactly the same thing is true of the English language.
For example:
Bruno Marchalcannot consistently assert this sentence"
It's true but Bruno Marchal cannot say it. It had been
thought that mathematics avoided the frailties of human language but
Godel proved that was not so.
> Which makes exactly my point.
So we agree, mathematics is a language as is English.
That does not follow from what you say. On the contrary,
incompleteness, or any no-go theorem, can be used to argue, like Gödel
and some others did, for some mathematical realism independent of any
language or formal system used to described it. Then mathematical
logician made clear the distinction between language and theories. You
need a language to have a theory, be it a physical or mathematical
theory, but that does not transform the arithmetical reality or the
physical theory into a language.
>> 2+2=5 is a fantasy because 2 physical objects and 2
physical objects never equal 5 physical objects, and because 2+2=5
can produce logical contradictions, but 2+2=5 is still a equation
written in the mathematical language.
> So you agree that mathematical truth is different from
mathematical language. Good.
I agree that truth is different from language. English can talk
about the truth and so can mathematics, but English can also talk
about things that don't exist and so can mathematics. Both languages
are capable of writing fiction and nonfiction. And even a well
written English novel with no plot holes is still fiction; and even
a mathematical proof that is logically self consistent might be
fictitious too. If mathematics is indeed a language it would be
hard to avoid the conclusion that some mathematical statements, even
self consistent ones, are fictitious.
Such notion are relativized through the use of model theory.
So, such a question needs to be addressed in the frame of a theory.
You seem to accept digital mechanism, so you do give sense to 2+2=4,
and I guess you agree it is true. Then with digital mechanism, it
happens that we can no more postulate a primary physical reality, and
this one become a self-referential mode of the universal machine
(precisely the mode []p & <>t) with p sigma_1.
of course for this you need quite more than step 3.
The number 7 is not a material concept or thing, but it is not fiction.
The formula that 7 is less than 8 talk on immaterial things, but is
true.
The statement that some memory register contains the number 6 can be
implemented physically with a physical box containing 6 physical
pebbles in some physical reality, but it can also be implemented in
arithmetic by using the chinese lemma in number theory to represent
the register or sequence of registers through one number or a fixed
number of numbers, the same for all sequences. That extends to the
full notion of computations and computability.
> Then it can't do anything.
>>You assume again physicalism and/or primary matter.
I don't give a damn if matter is primary, all I know is it's
needed to do things; show me a purely mathematical Turing
Machine that can do something, anything, and I'll change my mind.
See example in all textbook in computer science.
Of course, what you say is trivially impossible if you mean the
showing of a purely mathematical machine acting on a physical reality
without being represented or implemented in that physical reality. But
that is also true in pure arithmetic: the program-number x cannot
compute y if there is no universal number in arithmetic implementing
it (in the purely immaterial sense of implementation given by the
computer scientist).
> Did Alcor propose you an analog brain?
No. All Alcor promises to do is to use extreme cold to retain
as much information in my brain as they can when I die. Given the
present state of technology they can do nothing more.
So you can be reconstituted by a computationalist or not. This is
really saying "yes" to any doctor, "analogist" and computationalist at
once.
>> When somebody makes a AI worthy of the name (probably
in less than 40 years and possibly much less)
> It is done.
No it has not been done. When a AI worthy of the name is made
you will know, everybody will know because the world will change
beyond all recognition.
It is only recent that the human male believe the human female can
think (and vote). Do you expect the human to assess machine thinking
so easily. You already illustrate that this is not the case, as the
Löbian machine can already think like you and me, and most research in
mathematical logic can be seen as a dialog between humans and such
immaterial machines.
Not only they can think, but they are naturally mystical, and their
theology, provided by such dialogs when adding trivial inductive
inference abilities (see "Conscience et Mécanisme" for all details) is
isomorphic to the theories of many human theologian (the
neopythagoricians and the neoplatonists).
>> the debate is over and so is the mind-body problem.
> Thanks to you deny of the FPI, sure!
I issue the following challenge, find one person on the face of
the Earth who denies the existence of the first person. I don't
think you can do it.
I can't agree more with you on this, although when I was young such
notion where discarded as psychological or ... theological. Glad you
are more modern than that.
The challenge I gave you is to find one person disbelieving in the
First Person Indeterminacy, like you claim often to be.
>> RA can't compute 2+2.
> Word play.
AKA thinking.
RA can compute f(x) = y for all (Turing) computable function f, in the
precise sense that if f(x) = y there is a formula of pure arithmetic
F(x,y) such that if F(m, n) then RA proves both F(m,n) and
proves F(m, n) & F(m, r) -> n = r.
All computations can be emulated by a proof of a sigma_1 sentence. A
set is RE iff it can be defined as the set of y such that ExP(x, y)
with P decidable (sigma_0).
> your Aristotelian believe in Primary matter,
Well... I don't can if matter is primary or not and I think
Aristotle was a fool, but other that that your above statement is
fine, provided of course you don't care what words mean.
You said that matter is needed to have consciousness or to do something.
If you mean by "matter is needed" the fact that when there is
consciousness there is matter, then we agree, indeed that what happens
in arithmetic, all conscious machine have a physics, indeed this is
how the arithmetical reality looks like to machine in arithmetic.
But if you mean by "matter is needed" that we have to *postulate*, in
the TOE or theology, some matter in the theory, then that matter is
primary by definition, and that primary matter is what is shown
epistemologically contradictory with Mechanism.
Bruno
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