Here's another theorlogy question for Bruno. You once responded in disbelief if I remember "surely you can't be serious" when I suggested that God might be derived from a Boltzmann Brain? It's a ridiculous idea, but maybe a ridiculous idea that seemingly, may be correct. It is nothing I am relying on, merely, a fantastic idea that appeals because it may be ground in the qauantum as well as thermodynamics. A bit of fun.
http://www.universetoday.com/122964/will-minds-appear-in-the-cosmos/ -----Original Message----- From: Bruno Marchal <[email protected]> To: everything-list <[email protected]> Sent: Fri, Feb 26, 2016 3:37 am Subject: Re: Cryonics punched cards and the brain 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 -- 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. 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