On 30 Dec 2017 21:38, "Brent Meeker" <[email protected]> wrote:
On 12/30/2017 7:41 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 26 Dec 2017, at 22:06, Brent Meeker wrote: On 12/26/2017 6:48 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 23 Dec 2017, at 03:13, Brent Meeker wrote: On 12/22/2017 4:50 PM, David Nyman wrote: On 22 Dec 2017 23:16, "Brent Meeker" <[email protected]> wrote: On 12/22/2017 6:31 AM, David Nyman wrote: On 22 Dec 2017 11:22, "Telmo Menezes" <[email protected]> wrote: On Thu, Dec 21, 2017 at 2:01 PM, David Nyman <[email protected]> wrote: > On 21 December 2017 at 11:34, Telmo Menezes <[email protected]> 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'. But that it is a mind-independent ontological fact is part of its construction, and necessarily so; since what it is intended to explain is our intersubjective agreement about an external world. Of course you can reject this and assume solipsism, or simply assume that the consistency of the "external world" as compared to dreams and imagination is just an accident. I fail to see how your second sentence necessarily follows from your first. Why would the assumption of the mind-dependent construction of a concrete, substantial reality lead either to solipsism or the conclusion that the observed consistencies are accidental? It doesn't. I said that if you *reject *the existence of a mind-independent external world, then you will be driven to solipism or to some accidental correlation with other minds who report things consistent with your perception (aka the white rabbit problem). Even with DM (Digital Mechanism), there is a Löbian-mind independent reality (arithmetic, computer science). DM even proves that there is a physics independent of the human-mind, but not of the Löbian (much more general) mind. Then either there is too much white rabbits in DM, and DM is reflect, or there is no, and the math and the today's results suggest there is not. To say that such constructions are dependent on a mind is not at all to say that they are dependent on one mind alone, or indeed that minds as a class are independent of anything beyond themselves. The concept rules out neither a plurality of such constructions nor their participation in a common causal nexus. My point is rather that this very causal nexus - ex hypothesi the entire reductionist project - need not (indeed must not) assume that such 'emergent' levels of description amount in any way to superadded causal influences. One might imagine that an omniscient 'observer', in apprehending the entire causal mechanism at its roots, as it were, would not fail to comprehend any aspect of its evolution, without reference to any notion of emergence whatsoever. I think our disagreement centres, as ever, on different uses of the notion of an ontology. I'm perfectly willing to agree with you that we are at liberty to use the term promiscuously depending on context. No doubt. My slogan is, "Epistemology precedes ontology." By definition this does not make sense, but I guess you mean "Epistemology precedes the choice of an ontology". You want to count experiences as elements of ontology, but I think of them as bits of knowledge, stuff we know. Yes, but Aristotelian metaphysics assumes that "seeing, observing, measuring" is the criteria of truth/knowledge, where the Platonists are skeptical. They don't doubt about what they see is mostly real, but they doubt that it is the ultimate reality. They are aware of the mind-body problem, as a serious difficulty. >From this stuff we know we infer/invent models of what exists, which include ontologies. yes, with "model" in the sense of "theory". But physics usually does not aboard the problem of ontology. Ture, many people just use almost unconsciously the Aristotelian metaphysics, but that is not part of the physical science. There is not one paper arguing for the (metaphysical) existence of a physical universe in physics. They assume only measurable numbers, and infer relations between numbers. That there is a universe behind those relations is speculation without evidence. That's about the craziest idea of "without evidence" I can imagine. "Your honor, my client Herr Eichmann cannot be found guilty because there is not one paper arguing for the metaphysical existence of physical Jews." Fortunately the physical evidences are enough. But when you do metaphysics, you just need to put the card on the tables. I think you really confuse the evidence for matter, which are overwhelming, and evidence for physicalism or materialism; which metaphysically result from a gross extrapolation, especially when you know that elementary arithmetic generates all possible machine's dreams. And I think you confuse possibility with realization. Why stop at computationalism? Honestly Brent, how often does the bleeding obvious need to be restated? At the fundamental level we are of course n ever dealing directly with empirical phenomena, but always with what we theorise as lying 'invisibly' behind those phenomena and hence serving to explicate their observable behaviour. Consequently what you are misnaming 'realisation' in this context is essentially coterminous with explanatory power. The mathematics in which the 'laws' of physics are expressed are also 'realised' in precisely the same sense. Hence, to the extent we assume (until contradicted by evidence) that those laws of physics are, in some limit, finitely computable, we are equating them with some particularised subset of the entire class of all finitely completable computations. This in itself is sufficient motivation to generalise the 'fundamental' entities and relations underlying both that subset, and the class as a whole, to those characteristic of computation itself. These entities and relations are sufficiently well-known not to require repetition here. Then the task is to understand in what ways that 'physical' subset could have become thus particularised, as the mathematics underlying the behaviour of the aforementioned observable phenomena. Why not, as Tegmark originally did, assume all mathematics is realized? He's moved on, I believe, to essentially the same ontological assumptions vis-a-vis computability as Bruno, although he proceeds from that point somewhat differently. But in any case, Occam dictates that we take no more than is required to explain what is observed. So far as the rest of mathematics is concerned, I guess that would be relevant only to the extent that other such areas might conceivably contribute to the measure problem, but I signally lack the competence to offer any opinion on that. Given that with DM all histories are in arithmetic, with up to now indication of the "right" measure, there is less reason today to speculate on a so strong ontological commitment, especially when it makes all possible theories of mind even more speculative compared to Mechanism. Indeed this is an indispensable aid to comprehension across a wide range of fields. But in the present case we must be particularly careful to eliminate all our tacitly projected 'emergent' interpretations. Otherwise the danger is that we shall be arguing in a vicious, rather than a virtuous, circle. And the fundamental premise of reductionism is that - absent any further interpretation - the evolution of physical states is an entirely bottom-up process. I think that's just saying "mind-independent" in different words. Physics' story of the world is not exactly all "bottom up". It includes the Past Hypothesis and, in most interpretations, randomness. Materialism, physicalism, and reductionism are not all exactly the same thing. Bottom up all the way down, if you want a slogan. And yet somehow that bottom up process is tightly implicated in the construction of 'emergent' phenomenal realities that, once apprehended, somehow resist reduction to their components. I don't know what that means. Could you be more explicit and give and example? I think that David allludes to the "p" in Bp & p, or in Bp & Dt & p. After Gödel and Traski we know that "p" (the truth of p" is a non reducible notion (precisely, no reducible to any 3p theory, even non mechanist one). You write things like that, and I understand they are accurate in your domain of discourse, but it is only in mathematical logic that "true" is an irreducible notion. With Tarski theory of truth, we have theory of truth for the arithmetical formula which has not more demanding than the use of real number in analysis. Logic is just mathematics. You would have criticized Einstein by telling him that the multiplication of m with c^2 is only a convenient fiction. As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality. -- Albert Einstein It is indeed a pity that we can no longer consult Einstein's brain on such matters. It never ceases to amaze me what people are pleased to attribute to the old man these days. David Brent -- 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 [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. 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 [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
