On 23 Aug 2017, at 20:43, Brent Meeker wrote:
On 8/23/2017 2:06 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
I am not someone proposing any new theory. I am someone showing
that the current materialist metaphysics just can't work with the
Mechanist hypothesis.
Refresh my understanding. What it the mechanist hyposthesis? Is it
the same as computationalism?
Yes.
Computationalism = Digital Mechanism = Mechanism = (Yes-Doctor +
Church's Thesis)
Or is it the same as yes-doctor plus reifying arithmetic?
No, it is (yes-doctor + Church's Thesis).
I do not add since long "Arithmetical Realism" because many people
tend to put to much into it, and is actually redundant with Church's
thesis. To just understand Church's thesis automatically assume we
believe in some "essentially undecidable theory", and this is
equiavalent with believing in the right amount of arithmetic.
I will write a post on the detailed starting point of the mathematics
needed to derive physics from "machine's theology".
From your use, these all seem slightly different to me. It would be
helpful to some firm definitions - not just usage.
I use them as completely equivalent, although in the literature they
are usually stronger. Putnam's functionalism is a version of Digital
Mechanism which assumes a substitition level rather high, where my
version just ask for the existence of a substitution level. My version
is the weaker form possible, and Maudlin, in his Olympia paper,
suggests that if we define mechanism in this way, it becomes trivial,
a bit like Diderot defined "rationalism" by Descartes' Mechanism.
So a firm definition of Mechanism (in my weak sense) is
1) Church's Thesis (a function from N to N is computable iff it exists
a combinator which computes it)
(There are many variants of this. You can replace also
"combinator" by "game of life pattern", or "fortran program" or "c++
program", or "quantum computer" etc.). Note that this asks for
"Arithmetical realism" which is only the believe that the RA axioms
makes "absolute sense", which means basically that not only 17 is
prime, but that this is true independently of me, you, or anyone, or
anything physical. All mathematicians are arithmetical realist. The
fight on realism is in Analysis or set theory, not arithmetic,
especially without induction axiom like with RA. Even a quasi ultra-
finitist like Nelson agrees with RA.
2) Yes-Doctor (= my consciousness is invariant for a digital physical
brain transplant made at some level of description of my (generalized)
brain.
It asserts the existence of that substitution level, and is equivalent
with accepting that we can use classical teleportation as a mean of
travel (UDA step 1).
Important Remark: that definition does not ask for surviving without a
physical brain/machine. That is indeed the object of the UDA
reasoning: showing that we cannot invoke God, or Primary-Matter to
block the immaterialist consequence of Digital Mechanism.
Primary or primitive means "in need to be necessarily assumed" or "non
derivable from anything else (up to some provable equivalence)".
Ask any precision if needed.
Bruno
Brent
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