> On 25 Sep 2018, at 15:35, Philip Thrift <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On Tuesday, September 25, 2018 at 7:12:13 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:
> 
>> On 24 Sep 2018, at 07:28, Philip Thrift <[email protected] <javascript:>> 
>> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> On Sunday, September 23, 2018 at 10:55:52 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>> 
>>> On 23 Sep 2018, at 13:37, Philip Thrift <[email protected] <>> 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 <[email protected] <>> 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 <[email protected] <>> 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 <[email protected] <>> wrote:
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> On Wed, Sep 19, 2018 at 7:20 PM Philip Thrift <[email protected] <>> 
>>>>>> 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/
>>>>>  
>>>>> <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 
>>>>> <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 
>>>> <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 
>>>> <https://groups.google.com/d/msg/everything-list/ZDKbxJuQYt4/Z7C1ePCzAwAJ> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> By Pure Computationalism [ 
>>>> https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/computation-physicalsystems 
>>>> <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 
>>> <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/S007961071300028X>
>>> https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0079610715000887 
>>> <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),
> 
> Just ask. I will send you some papers I have published there.
> 
> 
> 
>> 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.)
> 
> Are you talking about FOL and its lisp-like tower?. That is an interesting 
> (albeit a bit naive metaphysically) approach. If you like Smith, you should 
> like the general (and much older) theory, which is actually the theory of any 
> universal machine when studying itself. But Smith belongs to the mechanist 
> family, no doubt.
> 
> 
> 
>> 
>> 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.
> 
> You might read the sane paper (already available on my URL, see above). 
> Mechanism protects the machine from  (basically) all reductionism, including 
> the 19th century conception of machine and numbers, and it shows rather 
> directly that (reductive and non reductive) materialism are both inconsistent 
> with mechanism. 
> 
> Bruno
> 
> 
> 
> 
> If you have PDFs of
> 
> 
> 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.
>  
> I will read those  [  email:  cloudversed at gmail dot com ].


Done.




> 
> I have read
> http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/publications/SANE2004MARCHALAbstract.html
> 
> Two points:
> 
> 1. Nonreductive materialism holds that physicalism is false.
> see, for example, https://people.umass.edu/lrb/files/bak06agaM.pdf

Indeed. But Comùputationalism, aka Digital Mechanism, makes all form of 
metaphysical materialism either inconsistent or spurious (like involving 
involving epicycles or worst “invisible horses”, violating Occam in a some 
strong sense).



> 
> (Physicalism came from the  idea that everything can be reduced to physics, 
> which turns out to be models of purely quantitative information. See 
> Tegmark's Mathematical Universe.)

That can be a subject of discussion later. Tegmark’s form of mathematicalism is 
still physicalism, although not materialism. But he has progressed toward 
computationalism, certainly.


> 
> 2. A computation (what I call real computation) that incorporates 
> experiential states (e-states) in addition to informational states (i-states) 
> would be be different from any i-state-only computation

Very good! That is recovered in the discourse of the machine which introspect 
itself (in the the Gödel-Kleene mathematical precise). To confuse a 
i-state-only and a e-state, is akin to a confusion between first person and 
third person, or a confusion between []p and []p & p.  That is also part of the 
debate between in between the neoplatonist theologians. A good book 
illustrating this “Ancient Epistemology,” by Gerson (an expert on Plotinus). 
You might study my PDF on how I “translate” Plotinus in Arithmetic through the 
nuance brought by incompleteness on “provability”. Incompleteness makes it from 
the machine perspective into believability, and by disguishing truth and 
provability, it gives sense to the standard theory of knowledge of Theaetetus, 
and it enforces different logics and mathematics for believability, 
knowability, observability, sensibility. Incompleteness also divides those 
logics into a machine justifiable (and representational part) and a non 
justifiable part (still representational) added with non representational, non 
represensatble part.

The observable is the invariant in the ‘bettable', on all (halting) computation 
(multiplied somehow by the non halting one), that is, with [] for Gödel’s 
beweisbar arithmetical modality (the “Löbian Machine”), what you can 
“meta-represent” through []p & <>t, and []p & <>t & p. I can motivate for those 
definition both through through experience, and by using the standard 
definition of the neoplatonist philosopher/théologian.





> (that means any Turing or hyper-Turing or reflective-Turing machine, or 
> anything made of just "numbers”).

Maybe you could define what you mean by hyper-Turing machine. I have heard 
different definitions.

Nor am I sure what you mean by made of just numbers. What I assume is that 
there is a level of description of my “physical body” such that I would survive 
if my “physical body” is emulated at that level, and this relatively to the 
normal physical continuations.

Many people miss that universal machine (sigma_1 complete theories are such) 
are confronted to the non computable, and the first person indeterminacy 
entails that below our substitution level, we are emulated by infinitely many 
universal number/machine. 




> The latter may emulate consciousness, but will not *be* conscious.

Equivalently the consciousness weigh will be of measure null, may be, or you 
introduce weird zombies.

Or you talk about the oracle, the gods are not conscious, I can make some sense 
of this, but I would judge all possible notion of oracle. The usual sigma_1 
machine cannot distinguish an oracle with a machine more complex than itself. 
Yet by reasoning we can understand that the sigma_1 machine are confronted with 
some oracle, and “time” is a sort of halting oracle (yet not self-halting 
oracle) in the limit. 

People must be careful that the digital surgeon provides them with an authentic 
Turing machine, or combinator, or any universal number, and not with an 
hyper-Turing machine.



> 
> (Whether a conscious brain can be be manufactured with totally different 
> elements depends on the e-states different matter can have.)


I prefer to not assume matter. My point is that IF we can survive a digital 
brain transplant at some level, then physics is reduced to a statistics on 
first person experience on a universal dovetailing (aka the set of all true 
sigma_1 sentence structured by some modalities of self-reference.

The beauty here is that G* shows that all modalities are confronted to the same 
(sigma_1) truth, but the machine cannot not structured in a non equivalent way 
(yet related). 





> 
> We can only make things out of matter, and we can only make new matter with 
> the matter we have.


I guess you have to say no to the digitalis surgeon. All what I say is IF 
Digital Mechanism is correct, then physics has to be extracted from the 
modalities of self-reference, and so we can test it. Up to now, the Matter 
modalities do obey quantum logics, and the hope is that they are enough 
“hilbertian” to have an equivalent of (arithmetic termed) Gleason theorem.

Matter exists phenomenologically with Mechanism, but what exist ontologically 
is any term of any Turing complete theory, or Turing universal machine. 

It looks we might work in very different theory.

Bruno





> 
> - pt
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