Bruce, Brent,
You are lucky I have not really the time to comment each line of your
posts, so to sum up, I thinks you miss the point or some point. Brent
made many valid replies to Bruce, though. So I will need to search
what is going wrong, which is exactly the point you miss.
I am absolutely not proposing a new theory, I just explain that there
is a "fatal" problem for theories assuming both physicalism and
*digital* mechanism, alias computationalism, in philosophy of mind, or
theology, or cognitive science. Which is, as Brent says, like Diderot
(!), a normal default theory (among rationalist and perhaps some
mystics).
The problem is: justifying the appearance of the physical laws and
measurements results from a statistics on on all first person relative
views supported by all relative computations. That generalizes what
Everett did on the universal wave (basically a quantum universal
dovetailer) to *all* universal dovetailer or sigma_1 complete sets.
But the mathematical logicians got the tools to translate this in
arithmetic, or in arithmetical terms, using what Gerson (expert on
Antic philosopher) call the standard theory of knowledge (true belief,
true 3p-finite-representation).
And it works in the sense of providing an intuitionist logic for the
first person (close to Brouwer Bergson Dogen (etc.) mystical theory of
consciousness), *and* a quantum logic for the observable (bettable and
repeatable, symmetrical, with a quantization (in some sense used in
Quantum Logic). (+ the star-difference G*\G, Z1*\Z1, etc. which
provide tools to handle the distinction between qualia (first person
singular measurable) and quanta (first person plural measurable)).
I just offer a way to refute a simple and classical version of
computationalism. Find a quantum tautology violated by nature and
which is a theorem in the quantum logic intrinsical to the (self)-
observing machine.
I am amazed this "simple" theory is not yet refuted. Getting a quantum
logic is not a long way to get a theorem à-la Gleason.
To get all this, you need to read my long text, or study some papers
by Goldblatt, some quantum logicians, perhaps von Neumann, piron or
Mittlestaedt, or Dalla Chiara. The key result is Goldblatt showing
the B modal logic axiomatize an interesting minimal quantum logic,
"talking" on alternate measurement results. Then you need to study the
logic of self-reference (from Gödel to Solovay).
The mind-body problem invites itself through QM in physics, but with
the discovery of the universal machine it introduces itself already in
arithmetic, and the bit-qubit relation is a two way road.
Bruno
On 15 Jun 2016, at 09:22, Bruce Kellett wrote:
On 15/06/2016 3:39 pm, Brent Meeker wrote:
On 6/14/2016 9:33 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote:
That seems to be assuming a lot! Assuming that consciousness is a
(type of) computation does not imply that non-arithmetical
substrates exist, much less that pencil and paper exist. Knowing
that something is true of the world that we experience does not
entail that its existence is necessary.
Bruno can start from his (neo-)platonist assumption that
arithmetic exists independently, and that arithmetic implements
all computations (Turing machines). But he then has to prove that
this assumption leads necessarily to the existence of a physical
world of the character that we observe.
I think that parts pretty easy. Having assumed arithmetic exists
it follows from Godel that all Turing computations exist (in
arithmetic). Among all computations are those instantiating our
conscious thoughts. Those conscious thoughts include those we call
perceptions which we interpret as experience of a physical world.
In which case Bruno's 7 or 8 step argument is irrelevant -- the
early steps do nothing but put forward a confused notion of personal
identity. If you assume all computations exist in arithmetical
platonia, the dovetailer follows automatically. But one is actually
no better off than if one started by assuming the physical world and
explaining both arithmetic and consciousness as products of evolution.
As I said this seems to have the same problem as Boltzmann's brain.
It would imply that any universe at all similar to ours has measure
zero. But eternal inflation may have the same problem of "proving
to much".
That seems to be the real problem with the computational approach --
how do we get the world we actually observe (and the consciousness
we actually experience) rather than just a mish-mash of everything,
with no distinct laws or thoughts. If one is going to appeal to
something like an inference to the best explanation, then
physicalism wins hands down: computationalism doesn't even get to
first base, whereas physicalism can provide a realistic mechanism
(evolution) that can readily give all the results one desires.
Application of Occam's razor leads to the same conclusion.
Bruce
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