On 01 Sep 2017, at 00:59, Brent Meeker wrote:
On 8/31/2017 2:20 AM, David Nyman wrote:
On 29 Aug 2017 04:39, "Brent Meeker" <[email protected]> wrote:
On 8/28/2017 10:50 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 28 Aug 2017, at 02:44, Brent Meeker wrote:
On 8/27/2017 10:50 AM, David Nyman wrote:
On 25 August 2017 at 21:51, Brent Meeker <[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.
Right.
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.
But what if, as seems likely, the "filter" is the consistency and
quasi-classical nature of the physical, and the mental can only
exist within that physics?
Then Mechanism is false.
It doesn't make mechanism false. As David noted mechanism assumes
that some specific physical substitutions preserve consciousness -
but not just ANY physics. Some physics, in which for example there
was no 'wave function' collapse or it's MWI equivalent there would
be no classical physics with discrete objects.
Mechanism makes no assumptions about physics other than that *some*
consistent physics must be deeply implicated in the Bp and p
relation. The observation that the physics we actually observe is
rather tightly constrained seems to imply that its relation with
our particular species of consciousness is in some sense canonical,
although it doesn't necessarily imply the non-extractability of
other variations of physics or, for that matter, other species of
consciousness from computation. However, these considerations don't
alter the fact that physics and consciousness are derived rather
than assumed in the mechanistic theory.
That's just Bruno's assertion. All that is derived is very general
schema in which number theoretic proofs stand in for beliefs.
You are confusing UDA, which shows that physics is a branch of
arithmetic, with AUDA, which shows how concretely derive the logic of
the observable, and confirms up to now that we get what we observe/
infer (quantum logic, many worlds, etc.).
This leaves, as Bruno says, lots of white rabbits.
That leaves us in the position of showing that there is no white
rabbits or, to refute computationalism by showing there are still
white rabbits, and then you can try to invent some matter or god able
to eliminate them, but that will in any case refute mechanism.
What if getting rid of those white rabbits tightly constrains
consciousness and physics to something like what we observe?
Exactly. Getting rid of the white rabbit = proving the existence of
the relevant measure = deriving physics from machine theology (alias
elementary arithmetic).
Bruno
Brent
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