-----Original Message-----
From: Bruno Marchal <[email protected]>
To: everything-list <[email protected]>
Sent: Mon, May 8, 2017 6:51 am
Subject: Re: What are atheists for?
On 08 May 2017, at 06:50, spudboy100 via Everything List wrote:
What about an Ensemble (Deutsch and Tegmark), that is also, by
necessity, computationalist in nature.
Why? Most ensemble are typically not computable object.
Computability is an enormous restriction on the notion of set.
One way of doing this would be that algorithms, somehow produce
oodles of matter and energy, hence universes?
How could something non material produces something material?
Bruno
-----Original Message-----
From: Russell Standish <[email protected]>
To: everything-list <[email protected]>
Sent: Mon, May 8, 2017 12:44 am
Subject: Re: What are atheists for?
On Sun, May 07, 2017 at 07:26:02AM +0100, David Nyman wrote:
> On 7 May 2017 5:02 a.m., "Russell Standish"
<[email protected]> wrote:
> Anyway, back to our sheep (as they say in French). Bruno has been
> reluctant to really address the question of physical supervenience
in
> his work. It has to be such consciousness must be about something,
> which we may call the environment, or physics, and further that the
> mental state must be reflected into that environment to set up a
fixed
> point that anchors the consciousness into a meaningful
> environment. This will manifest as physica supervenience. Otherwise,
> the observed environment will collapse into meaningless noise, an
> effect I dubbed the Occam catastrophe.
>
> I know Bruno has sometimes talked about fixed points, and what he
> calls the "Dxx" trick, but I don't see any real derivation of
physical
> supervenience in his theories.
>
>
> Could you remind me how you deal with this issue in TON?
>
In ToN, I argue on the basis of the Occams razor and the Everything
hypothesis that we're most likely to find ourselves in the simplest
possible universe, namely one that is pretty noisy and devoid of
meaning. This I called the Occam catastrophe - a catstrophe for the
theory as it contradicts empirical evidence of us living in a complex
and meaningful universe.
My solution to the Occam catastrophe was to note that the anthropic
principle required that the universe be compatible with our existence
as an observer, ie to paraphrase Einstein, the universe must be as
simple as possible, but no simpler. In order for this compatibility to
exist, our conscious selves must be reflected into the observed
universe some how. In order for this reflected self to influence our
consciousness, we need to be self-aware. Hence my prediction, from
which I've never wavered, is that any substantive theory of
consciousness must require consciousness to be self-aware.
The epilogue to this, not appearing in ToN (and the flipside of the
argument, as it were) is that self-awareness requires supervenience on
physics (physics being defined as "what is observed", or
phenomena). If we didn't supervene on our observed world, then how in
hell can be be aware of ourselves.
This might seem like a virtuous circle of logic, but I think that is
only because the real reason why self-awareness is needed hasn't been
elucidated yet.
Conversely, if it can be shown that consciousness is possible without
self-awareness, then the whole Occam catastrophe argument comes to
bite again, implying that we don't, in fact, live in an everything
ensemble, moreover that computationalism is false.
Cheers
--
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
Principal, High Performance Coders
Visiting Senior Research Fellow [email protected]
Economics, Kingston University http://www.hpcoders.com.au
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
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http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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