On Sunday, September 23, 2018 at 10:55:52 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>
>
> On 23 Sep 2018, at 13:37, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com <javascript:>>
> wrote:
>
>
>
> On Sunday, September 23, 2018 at 4:41:56 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>>
>>
>> On 23 Sep 2018, at 09:00, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> On Sunday, September 23, 2018 at 1:28:02 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> On 22 Sep 2018, at 11:40, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Saturday, September 22, 2018 at 2:48:15 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On 21 Sep 2018, at 19:55, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Wed, Sep 19, 2018 at 7:20 PM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> >> Mind is what a brain does
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>> >*And walking and running is what the legs do. *
>>>>> *There is no "walking" like some Platonic immaterial universal except
>>>>> for some pair of legs to be doing it.*
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Right, there is no thinking without a brain (biological or electronic)
>>>> to do it.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Assuming your ontological commitment, but that is pseudo-religion.
>>>>
>>>> Or equivalently: you confuse matter and primitive matter. Nobody doubt
>>>> that to have human or biological consciousness, we need a human brain or
>>>> some electronic device, but that is irrelevant.
>>>>
>>>> What has been proved, (see Kleene’s 1952 book) is that the arithmetical
>>>> reality emulates all computations. No need of any more assumption than
>>>> Church thesis and the very elementary arithmetic.
>>>>
>>>> But an ontological physical reality is only metaphysical speculation or
>>>> hypothesis, and in our setting it is invalid to use it as a
>>>> counter-argument. The most you can do, if you really want to take your
>>>> ontology for granted, is to reject Digital Mechanism or to find a mistake
>>>> in my argument, without using your ontological commitment (which would beg
>>>> the question).
>>>>
>>>> Up to now, you have failed to that.
>>>>
>>>> Bruno
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>> It still seems to me that consciousness itself could be an argument
>>> against a purely information-based ontology. ("Information" meaning based
>>> purely on numbers, combinators, etc.)
>>>
>>> Philip Goff and Michael Shermer discussed basically this:
>>>
>>>
>>> https://scottbarrykaufman.com/podcast/solving-the-mysteries-of-consciousness-free-will-and-god-with-michael-shermer-and-philip-goff/
>>>
>>>
>>> via https://twitter.com/Philip_Goff/status/1043053992916467714
>>>
>>> (In there there is an about 1 hour podcast.)
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> My summary (fits in a tweet) of Goff:
>>>
>>> "Physicalism, based on pure informationality (quantitative states and
>>> language} is not sufficient to explain consciousness, but a materialism
>>> (one greater than physicalism) that is based on experientiality
>>> (qualitative states and language) in addition to informationality, may be.”
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> That is short. You might elaborate. I can refer you to my papers which
>>> shows that you cannot have both materialism/physicalism and Mechanism. Many
>>> believe that materialism and mechanism go well together, but they are
>>> logically incompatible. With mechanism, physics is reduced to arithmetic
>>> “seen from inside”.
>>>
>>> I would say that mechanism explains rather well consciousness, through
>>> computer science and the logic of self-reference ((which basically predict
>>> consciousness (indubitable, non provable and non definable sort of
>>> knowledge), but with the price of forcing to drive the physical appearance
>>> from that theory of consciousness.
>>>
>>> Bruno
>>>
>>>
>> That was my reply in a tweet to Goff's [
>> https://twitter.com/Philip_Goff/status/1043053992916467714 ] to
>> summarize in my own words the Goff view.
>>
>> I elaborate further in my previous post here on *Realistic
>> Computationalism*:
>>
>>
>>
>> https://groups.google.com/d/msg/everything-list/ZDKbxJuQYt4/Z7C1ePCzAwAJ
>>
>>
>> By Pure Computationalism [
>> https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/computation-physicalsystems ] I mean
>> that everything
>>
>>
>> Which everything? What are your basic metaphysical assumption?
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> can be seen as computation with quantitative information (numbers,
>> basically) alone.
>>
>> Given Goff's definition of physicalism, physicalism is consistent with
>> (pure) computationalism. But it's not sufficient for consciousness (Goff,
>> Strawson) , even if computation is extended to hypercomputation.
>>
>> But then materialism > physicalism (i-states + e-states > i-states).
>>
>>
>>
>> At this stage materialism and physicalism can be identified, and we can
>> add nuances later.
>>
>> But with computationalism, neither materialism (even weak, the belief in
>> some matter not reducible to something else) nor physicalism are consistent
>> with Mechanism. A short argument can be find here:
>>
>> B. Marchal. The Origin of Physical Laws and Sensations. In 4th
>> International System Administration and Network Engineering Conference,
>> SANE 2004, Amsterdam, 2004.
>> http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/publications/SANE2004MARCHALAbstract.html
>> (sane04)
>>
>>
>> More details are given here:
>>
>> Marchal B. The computationalist reformulation of the mind-body problem.
>> Prog Biophys Mol Biol; 2013 Sep;113(1):127-40
>>
>> Marchal B. The Universal Numbers. From Biology to Physics, Progress in
>> Biophysics and Molecular Biology, 2015, Vol. 119, Issue 3, 368-381.
>>
>>
>>
>> Bruno
>>
>>
> As far as I can tell from the summaries:
>
> https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S007961071300028X
> https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0079610715000887
>
> Realistic Computationalism (*RealComp*) is still greater than Pure
> Computationalism (PureComp, or just Comp, which includes all in the above
> two references)
>
> and it is basically Philip Goff's view:
>
> PureComp emulates how things behave, but not how they are in themselves.
>
>
> Good. In arithmetic computable entails arithmetic, but most attribute of
> the computable thing are not computable, that is why the machine will be
> identify with her beliefs, and this makes each machine very different, that
> is how consciousness differentiate in arithmetic to begin with.
>
> Bruno
>
>
>
In your *Progress in Biophysics & Molecular Biology* papers (which I'd like
to see), it would be interesting to see how this relates to *reflection*
(the subject beginning with Brian Cantwell Smith's fundamental thesis) in
programming language theory. (This is the study of code that is
"self-aware", can reason about and modify itself, etc.)
In the case of consciousness, if it is something beyond pure informational
processing - which a lot of physicists think physics just is (Tegmark,
Carroll, ...) - it could be that chemistry and/or biology is not reducible
to physics = not reducible to pure informational processing.
This is called *nonreductive materialism*.
- pt
--
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.
