On 5/3/2017 12:54 PM, Quentin Anciaux wrote:
2017-05-03 21:46 GMT+02:00 Brent Meeker <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>:On 5/3/2017 9:47 AM, David Nyman wrote:On 2 May 2017 11:18 p.m., "Brent Meeker" <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: On 5/2/2017 2:29 PM, David Nyman wrote:On 2 May 2017 9:57 p.m., "Brent Meeker" <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: 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. That's a slogan not an explanation.That's right - you asked for grounds. I think you could be more helpful than this.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. Very selective. What about the string landscape, eternal inflation or for that matter the CUH? Maybe you'll say that these are as yet unproven hypotheses, but are you willing to say in principle​ they're barking up the wrong tree?Except for eternal inflation, they aren't even developed enough to be hypotheses. I'm willing to bet that they will imply limits on what exists. Even CUH does that, it implies real numbers and theories that assume them don't exist. Sure, but my point is that all these ideas lead to a broader ontology than you seemed to be suggesting: i.e the theoretical recipe for what exists and what doesn't extends beyond the physics we observe locally. But even comp doesn't claim that *everything* exists. In fact its ontology is extremely restrictive.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. Not all explanations. And in particular not ontological ones.You mean the fundamental elements of a theory - whose existence doesn't have an explanation. My idea of an explanation is one that brings understanding - not just stops explaining. So is mine. So is Bruno's. What's your point?An explanation that reaches understanding must end with an ontology that is already understood. Bruno accepts this. He thinks we understand Peano arithmetic. I think we only understand it because we refer it to experience with objects. But the broader point is that you can't just pick some theory with an ontology and say this theory explains things. The explanation is no good unless you already understand the theory's ontology. So explanations of different things bottom out on different ontologies for different people. This is why supernatural agents were popular explanations up until a few hundred years ago; agents are intuitively understood by people because, as social animals, evolution provided us with intuitions about other people. So itwas satisfying to explain a storm as the cloud-god was angry. Now, some physicists would say it is explained by theNavier-Stokes equation - but that wouldn't really be right either. In fact NOAA explains it with some simplified N-S plus some heuristics.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). Is this really different from what comp implies? Surely the computation of the physics and its appearance are indeed two different views of the same thing - 3p and 1p plural? As we appeared to have agreed​ earlier, at the point where physical computation and the substantive perception (aka reality) with which it is entangled emerge in tandem, virtuous explanatory equilibrium has been attained. But the difference in views is the key. The former (aka 3p or in my parlance the view from nowhere) is the ontology and the latter the epistemology it implies.But so far there is nothing in Bruno's theory that makes them "the same thing" every 1p thread of experience could be unrelated to every other - there would be no intersubjective agreement (or it would be of measure zero). I think this is what he calls "the white rabbit" problem.But this doesn't answer my empirical tequila test. Bruno replied that the (physical) tequila justinterfered with the (physical) perception. But in that case the tequila would have no affect on mathematical reasoning - but it does. You lost me.Have a few shots and then find the square root of 69696 in your head. According to Bruno our physical being is only a way of interacting with other physical things (like tequila), but for knowledge and beliefs about numbers the physical is otiose. Nonsense. You appear not to grasp the point that if comp is correct then the computational mechanisms dominating our experience (including our experience of mathematics) must those of the physics we typically observe.Depends on what you mean by comp. You seem to engage in the same equivocation as Bruno. On the one hand it means saying "yes" to the doctor. On the other hand it means accepting his whole argument from that purportedly proving that physics is otiose. So then the argument refers to itself and says if physics is otiose then the physics we observe must be that predicted by his theory.That's not it.. the thing is if *mind* is a computational object, then physics must be explained through computation, computations are not physical object... If physicalness is primary, then there aren't any computation, computations in a physically primary reality are only a "human view" on what is really going on.
This an extreme reductionist view, i.e. if X is the fundamental ontology then only X exists. But that leads to nonsense: "If the standard model is fundamental ontology then football doesn't exist." And it has the same affect of Bruno's theory: "If the basic ontology is computations then neither physics nor football exist."
.. Again if in this setting and you believe that mind is a sort of computation, imagine we capture your mind with a (though correct) program... then we run it on a different hardware... will it be conscious ? we run it 3x slower than real time ? still conscious ? 10x slower ? ... 10x faster ? (assuming each time we fed it an "external" virtual world inputs at the correct rate)
I have imagined that. It's part of Bruno's step 7 and 8. First, I don't think it sufficient to "capture ones mind". I think to be conscious also means to be able to act - but that's a quibble. The basic point is that I think you would have to simulate a virtual world in which Brent2.0 would be conscious. And that case you've not eliminated physics, you've simulated it.
I think the questions I posed to David about Mars Rover design are the interesting and important ones. A theory that can't discuss the differences of consciousness between a jumping spider and Watson is not in my view very interesting.
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