> On 16 Apr 2019, at 10:28, 'Cosmin Visan' via Everything List > <[email protected]> wrote: > > Yes, no need to apply. They are using the concept of self-reference in a > misleading way. The true meaning of self-reference is an entity that refers > to itself. There are several problems with the way in which they are using > the concept. First problem is that "machine" is not an entity. "Machine" is > just an idea in consciousness, it doesn't have an independent existence, it > doesn't have any ontological status, it doesn't exist as an entity. And since > it doesn't exist, it cannot refer to itself, or for that matter it cannot do > anything. Only consciousness (and its forms of manifestation: qualia) has > ontological status.
If we accept Church or Turing thesis, machine, computation and computable are not only very well defined, but they are defined in elementary arithmetic. No need to assume anything more, besides some invariance principle for consciousness. > > The second issue is that the way self-reference refers to itself is to > incorporate itself in the very act of referring. But that is what is made possible by a famous result by Kleene in mathematical logic or theoretical computer science. The basic idea is very simple: to make a machine referring to itself, like M(y) = F( y, “M”), you build the machine D, which send x on F(y, ‘x’x’’), and apply it to its description: D’D’ = F(y, ‘D’D’’). I can explain more on this. > Basically, the observer, the observed, and the act of observation are all one > and the same thing. Observation is still another thing, that you have to relate to notion of truth, belief, knowledge, etc. When done with the standard definition recatsed in theoretical computer science, we find a quantum logical formalism at the exact place where we must find the structure of the observable reality. This was for me a confirmation that Mechanism is plausible, and materialism is not plausible. > I'm pretty much you cannot think of a machine in these terms. So a > "self-referential machine" is just words-play. Of course I disagree completely. > It doesn't have anything in common whatsoever with the true characteristics > of the true self-reference. What is true, is that we should not confuse this person self-reference, which is mathematicalisable, if I can say, and first person self-reference, which is not, but provably so in the mechanist meta theory. And, yes, we have to invoke “truth” here, but here, we can use the standard notion of truth discovered by Tarski. Bruno > > On Tuesday, 16 April 2019 09:24:46 UTC+3, Philip Thrift wrote: > So, no need to apply? :) > > > Seeking Research Fellows in Type Theory and Machine Self-Reference > > > -- > 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] > <mailto:[email protected]>. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected] > <mailto:[email protected]>. > Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list > <https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list>. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout > <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.
