On 5/2/2017 1:09 PM, David Nyman wrote:
On 2 May 2017 7:21 p.m., "Brent Meeker" <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:On 5/2/2017 1:01 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:Your answer seems to be that physics can be an illusion of digital thought, therefore primary physics is otiose. But thought can't be a consequence of physics because....well you just don't see how it could be.Not at all. It cannot be because you need to give a role to the primary matter which is not emulable by the UD, nor FPI-recoverable.The obvious "role" is that some things exist and some don't. I don't know anyone who calls this "primary matter", but it's what is not UD emulable.But what are your grounds for discriminating which things exist and which don't?
Empiricism.
If anything, it strikes me that the history of human enquiry is rather conducive to the view that whatever limits we try to impose on "what exists" are in all likelihood destined soon to be surpassed.
Actually it has been the reverse. Relativity places a limit on speed, quantum mechanics places a limit on measurements, Goedel found a limit on proofs. Laplace was the last physicist who thought we could predict everything. We haven't been the center of the universe for a long time.
In any case, I still don't see that you've made a convincing argument for your "groundless" circular explanations.
It's not an argument - it's an observation that that's the way explanations work.
For example, based on your remarks above, you implicitly exclude "non physical" computations from your ontology (not forgetting what you said about ontology being theory dependent).
Not at all. I've never tried to make my "virtuous circle of explanation" exhaustive. I generally include "mathematics" in it, but just as indicator for all kinds of abstract, symbolic based systems.
A theory explicitly based on a computational ontology includes both physical and non physical. Of course you could go on to say that a physical computer could compute anything computable; but in that case we find ourselves at step 7 of the UDA and the putative physical machine then takes on the aspect of Bruno's invisible horses. Unless you want to say that the comp derivation of physics is thereby merely contingently impossible.
My reservation about that argument is Bruno argues as if all the UD has to do is reach some state and it will have instantiated his (or someone's) consciousness. But then I ask myself, "Consciousness of what?" He thinks the external world is a kind of shared illusion of an equivalence class of "consciousness" states. This is like the Boltzmann brain paradox without the solipism. The reasonable way I can see such an equivalence class having a non-zero measure is if the physics is computed - not just the conscious perceptions of physics. Then the physics and consciousness are not different ontologically, they are just different ways of organizing the states (like Bertrand Russell's neutral monism).
But this doesn't answer my empirical tequila test. Bruno replied that the (physical) tequila just interfered with the (physical) perception. But in that case the tequila would have no affect on mathematical reasoning - but it does.
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