On 25 August 2017 at 21:51, Brent Meeker <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 8/25/2017 9:44 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 24 Aug 2017, at 20:57, Brent Meeker wrote:
On 8/24/2017 1:20 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
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.
That's where I think some imprecision sneaks in.
Yes-doctor was originally presented as substituting
some digitally simulated nuerons in the brain. But
then it was generalized to the whole brain. But we
think with more than our brain. Our body
contributes hormones and afferent and efferent
nerve impluses. And the environment provides
stimulation to those nerves and an arena within
which we act. All that is taken for granted in
answering "yes doctor" or teletransporting. So it
appears to me that you implicitly suppose all of
this is also digitally replaced.
The reasoning does not depend on the substitution level.
My version of mechanism is much weaker than all the
others. I assume only the existence of a substitution
level (such that your conscious experience would remain
invariant for a digital substitution made at that level).
If you want, you can take the Heinsenberg matrix of the
whole observable physical reality, at the level of the
(super)-strings, with 10^(10^(10^1000)) decimals exact
for the complex numbers and real numbers involved. The
thought experience become harder to imagine, but
eventually, it is "the real experience" of the step 7
which we have to take into account, that is "us"
confronted to all computations in the arithmetical
reality. The arithmetical reality emulates all
computations, and this includes the matrix above, and
infinitely any variants. It remains simpler to
understand the problem with thought experiements
involving "high" level, like the biochemistry of the
body, and understand at step 7 that the reasoning does
not depend on the level chosen.
To kill the consequences of computationalism is not
easy. Even lowering down the level to "infinitely low"
level, like using all decimals of the reals involved
would not guaranty the singularization used in the
mind-brain identity used by physicist when they invoke
the physical reality: you will need special infinities
not recovered by the first person indeterminacies. It
will look like Ptolemeaus epycicles. Primary Matter is
a sort of ether. It can only make the theories more
difficult. Maybe Primary Matter exists, but there has
never been any evidences, and I would say that even
without Digital mechanism, I am not sure why to
postulate it. Knocking on the table, or smashing
Super-speedy proton cannot serve as evidence for
primary matter, only for group theory and its
application in the art of prediction.
With mechanism, the laws of physics have a mathematical
origin, and somehow, they "evolved" from the numbers
exchanging piece of computations, but seen from the 1p
views. It works up to now.
I knew that would be your answer, but I think it defeats
your argument. If you have to go to a very low level (e.g.
atoms) and a very broad scope (e.g. the solar system) then
you are essentially digitizing and emulating everything.
This includes the physics-of-everything and the the
physics-of-the-mind. Then there is implicit in this a
physical explanation of mind.
But computationalism necessarily embraces a physical
explanation of mind and quite explicitly at that - it would be
false if it did not, since brains and minds are so obviously
entangled.
The difference is that the physical explanation of brains is
here the 'dual' of a machine-psychological one (i.e. a theory
of mental states as emulated in computation). For the theory to
be viable, both explanatory modalities must be the product of
observational filtering from a computational plenitude. The
consequence of such filtering, or self-selection, is that the
physical explanation becomes the extensional infrastructure, if
you like, for the beliefs and actions of the
machine-psychological one.
