On 27 Dec 2017, at 00:17, Brent Meeker wrote:
On 12/26/2017 8:16 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:On 22 Dec 2017, at 15:31, David Nyman wrote:On 22 Dec 2017 11:22, "Telmo Menezes" <te...@telmomenezes.com> wrote: On Thu, Dec 21, 2017 at 2:01 PM, David Nyman <da...@davidnyman.com> wrote: > On 21 December 2017 at 11:34, Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.com > wrote:>>>> > So we are told. But what if someone could look at a recorded MRI of you>> > brain and tell you what you were thinking? >>>> Why do you need the MRI? You can look at the text that I write and>> know what I'm thinking. We've been doing that all along.>> The text I write comes from my fingers hitting the keyboard, and the >> fingers move in a certain pattern because the muscles are activated by >> nerves that are connected to my brain and completely correlated to my >> neural activity. What does the MRI add beyond precision? How does this>> help solve the mystery that I am conscious, instead of a zombie? > > > Well put. >> However if we follow Bruno in taking the antique Dream Argument as our point > of departure (which to a certain extent can be made distinct from an> explicitly computationalist hypothesis) then the question becomes: >> Starting from the position that these present thoughts and sensations (i.e. > the 'waking' dream) are beyond doubt, and that they appear also to refer to > events in an externalised field of action, how does it come to be the case > that all this appears to play out in the very particular way it does?>> When the question is asked in some such way, it should perhaps not then be > unexpected that brains, nervous systems and bodies, as intrinsic components > of the field of action in question, appear precisely to be mechanisms (in > the generalised sense for now) for translating transactions, between> themselves and the remainder of that field, into action. And also> unsurprising that this continues to generalise whatever detailed level of > analysis is applied to the field in question, whether 'narrower' or 'wider' > in focus (i.e. the consistency requirement). And further that this is just > the sort of tightly-constrained and consistent set of mechanisms that we > might expect to be picked out from an even more generalised 'mechanistic'> environment, owing to the very particular requirements of the > 'self-observation' with which we began. >> So far, perhaps so un-Hard. But the question then still remains of the> precise relation between the phenomena of the dream itself and the> transactional mechanisms that make their appearance within it, including and > especially the aforementioned brains. If we turn for a moment to an analogy, > it doesn't surprise us, when watching a movie play out on an LCD screen, > that the mechanism that implements this playing out fails to resemble point > for point, although is obviously systematically correlated with, the > ultimate phenomena it stimulates the viewer into realising. But the reason > of course for our lack of surprise is that we consider the bulk of the > burden of such realisation to be shouldered by the viewer's brain, not by > the LCD device alone. So for that reason, no such loophole seems possible > for the final relation between the phenomena of the dream and the mechanisms> of the brain itself. It must somehow shoulder the final burden of> 'self-observation' and 'self-interpretation'; the matter can no longer be> 'externalised'. >> Hence to explicate the matter further, what is needed is a conceptual > apparatus - i.e. in the Western tradition, a mathematical theory - adequate > to the explication of an entirely 'internal' relation between the dream > phenomena and their transactional mechanisms. At this point, enter the > Computationalist Hypothesis, or of course any other theory that cares to > test its mettle for the purpose. ISTM that formulating the matter in this > way genuinely makes any putatively remaining 'Hard' problems seem less > intractable, at the cost of putting the 'Aristotelian' position on matter > into question (but arguably this is already a lost cause even within physics > itself). However in a sense it's also a different form of WYSIWYG, in that > the dream always and forever is both what you see and what you get. But if > you want to study its detailed mechanisms of action you need to delve into > the realms of unobservable abstraction. The slogan might then be: The> concrete is the subjective reflection of the abstract. David, excellent text. Taking the cue of your slogan (which I love), see if you agree: A possible model of what is happening is that there is an objective reality that is independent from any of us, and that is made of matter.OK, but even saying that is already assuming more than is actually warranted by the evidence, as your remarks about the epistemological circularity of emergentism point out. The more physics is successful in penetrating the mathematical structure of matter, the less like any naive version of an external 'world' it appears to be. The culmination of this is the realisation that the entirety of what we ordinarily take to be 'concrete' reality must inevitably be an epistemological construct, not an independent ontological fact, superadded to its mathematico-physical 'components'.We inhabit this reality, and the matter somehow generates theminds that dream the dream. The hard problem becomes hard because thedream takes a secondary role, and the hypothesized model is taken as the "hard truth". This model is very useful: it is a good way ofthinking when one is trying to build rockets or computers. However, itshould be treated as a tool and not more than that, until further notice. OK. To tackle the "hard problem", a different tool is more appropriate. This different tool puts the dream at the center of thestage. This should not sound crazy, because the dream is more real, ina sense. We experience the dream directly, while we only hypothesize the objective external world.Actually, the dream *is*, or more formally corresponds to, the epistemological reality which the mathematical theory implies or, more strongly, entails.Different questions can be asked of thismodel, for example: how does the presentation of an objective externalworld made of matter arise at the intersection of our dreams? Does this go in the direction of what you are saying? Yes. Bruno has sometimes characterised this as objective idealism.Yes, it is arguable to put the numbers in the domain of the ideas, although the primitive ideas can only be sort of God's idea, or the One, ...But we can be quite atheistic on this too. In that case, all we say is that we agree-on/assume the main RA axiomsBut the question is "Assume what?" That they are true...but "true" is not definable within logic.
Assume what? The axioms, classical logics.It is like assuming the moon when sending a rocket. No need of using metaphysics before we agree on some minimal amounts of thing.
So is "true" an empirical predicate?
Provably not in the theology of the machine. It is more a spiritual kind-of-thing. It is the first hypostases, but with computatuionalism, eventually we substitute truth with sigma_-truth (understanding that it needs some faith).
If so then arithmetic and logic and mathematics are abstractions to model and discuss the empirical world.
May be, but what you call empirical might itself the result of what some particular relatively concrete abstraction can discover when looking inward. No need to dismiss the empirical world because it would not be primary, but have a mathematical explanation.
Bruno
Brent(0 is different from the successors, etc.), then derive the ideas from the talk and the silence of the universal machine.That last idea (!) has grown those last year, because, contrary to what I said years ago, I begin to suspect that if we add an infinity axiom, or ven just the induction axioms, in the basic "ontological theory", we do get genuine uneliminable "white rabbits". So infinity is "only" a mind tool, its crucial importance (even in, or better: on, pure arithmetic) in all the epistemologies which rely to it by its relation with truth (the mode with "& p").It takes the basic idealistic intuition and connects it with reason via an objective notion of mechanism. And in so doing, it holds out the hope of doing adequate service to both the epistemological and ontological components of the theory, without distorting, trivialising, or dismissing either.OK. Except that I should perhaps insist that I start from reason, and amoebas (my initial objective notion of mechanism comes from amoebas and Watson's Molecular Biology of the Gene. My main inspiration has been biology for a long time. I would not have found the Gödel's technic in time, I would have become a (molecular) biologist: DNA and gene regulation (Jacob and Monod) was my first example of universal programming language, and the cells my first computers ...). The problem was OK, but what about consciousness and meaning, which was easier with the simple Löbian arithmetical machine, for which logicians have built theories of truth and meaning/semantics/models than the more complex corresponding notions in biology, phenotype, brains, etc. Gödel's completeness and incompleteness theorem are the first result in "exact machine theology". But chut... some academics believe that theology cannot be treated exactly, which is actually partially correct, but partially only.Perhaps the most elusive insight in the philosophy of mind is that neither of these components is truly separable or coherently eliminable from a viable theory of ultimate origins (aka TOE). Consequently a successful theory of mind cannot be a last-ditch addendum, a sort of cherry on the cake, to an otherwise completed 'TOE'. The 'fire' of which Hawking has memorably spoken is, in a subtle but crucial sense, already present at the origin.The fire is consciousness, which is the "little dust" which eventually will defeat the last phlogiston concept of the humans: "observable primitive matter". That, very plausibly, and certainly with DM, does not exist. But DM is testable, so we can test indirectly weak materialism. QM suggest that DM is correct, but who knows? may be in ten thousand year we will discover that the arithmetical material hypostases (Z1*, X1*, S4Grz1) are violated by nature. That would be astonishing of course, and would made us either into p-zombies knowing that they are p- zombies or that we are in a malevolent normal simulation(purposefully failed in a normal history (which cost a lot of works for the failer) or that computationalism is false.BrunoDavid Telmo. > David > >> >> Telmo. >> >> -->> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups>> "Everything List" group.>> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an>> email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.>> To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com . >> Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list .>> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > > > --> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups> "Everything List" group.> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an> email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.> To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com . > Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list .> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. --You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. 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