On Wed, Apr 17, 2019, at 05:03, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List wrote:
>
>
> On 4/16/2019 6:10 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Apr 16, 2019, at 03:44, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List wrote:
>>> You seem to make self-reference into something esoteric. Every Mars Rover
>>> knows where it is, the state of its batteries, its instruments, its
>>> communications link, what time it is, what its mission plan is.
>>
>> I don't agree that the Mars Rover checking "it's own" battery levels is an
>> example of what is meant by self-reference in this type of discussion. The
>> entity "Mars Rover" exists in your mind and mine, but there is no "Mars
>> Rover mind" where it also exists. The entity "Telmo" exists in your mind and
>> mine, and I happen to be an entity "Telmo" in whose mind the entity "Telmo"
>> also exists. This is real self-reference.
>>
>> Or, allow me to invent a programming language where something like this
>> could me made more explicit. Let's say that, in this language, you can
>> define a program P like this:
>>
>> program P:
>> x = 1
>> if x == 1:
>> print('My variable x s holding the value 1')
>>
>> The above is the weak form of self-reference that you allude to. It would be
>> like me measuring my arm and noting the result. Oh, my arm is x cm long. But
>> let me show what could me meant instead by real self-reference:
>>
>> program P:
>> if length(P) > 1000:
>> print('I am a complicated program')
>> else:
>> print('I am a simple program')
>>
>> Do you accept there is a fundamental difference here?
>
> I take your point. But I think the difference is only one of degree. In my
> example the Rover knows where it is, lat and long and topology. That entails
> having a model of the world, admittedly simple, in which the Rover is
> represented by itself.
>
> I would also say that I think far too much importance is attached to
> self-reference. It's just a part of intelligence to run "simulations" in
> trying to foresee the consequences of potential actions. The simulation must
> generally include the actor at some level. It's not some mysterious property
> raising up a ghost in the machine.
With self-reference comes also self-modification. The self-replicators of
nature that slowly adapt and complexify, the brain "rewiring itself"... Things
get both weird and generative. I suspect that it goes to the core of what human
intelligence is, and what computer intelligence is not (yet). But if you say
that self-reference has not magic property that explains consciousness, I agree
with you.
On consciousness I have nothing interesting to say (no jokes about ever having
had, please :). I think that:
consciousness = existence
Existence entails self-referential machines, self-referential evolutionary
processes, the whole shebang. But not the other way around.
Telmo.
>
> Brent
>
>
>>
>> Telmo
>>
>>>
>>> Whether it is "formalizable" or not would seem to depend on choosing the
>>> right formalization to describe what engineers already create.
>>>
>>> Brent
>>>
>>>
>>> On 4/15/2019 11:28 AM, za_wishy via Everything List wrote:
>>>> Hmm... the thing is that what I'm arguing for in the book is that
>>>> self-reference is unformalizable, so there can be no mathematics of
>>>> self-reference. More than this, self-reference is not some concept in a
>>>> theory, but it is us, each and everyone of us is a form of manifestation
>>>> of self-reference. Self-reference is an eternal logical structure that
>>>> eternally looks-back-at-itself. And this looking-back-at-itself
>>>> automatically generates a subjective ontology, an "I am". In other words,
>>>> the very definition of the concept of "existence" is the
>>>> looking-back-at-itself of self-reference. So, existence can only be
>>>> subjective, so all that can exists is consciousness. I talk in the book
>>>> how the looking-back-at-itself implies 3 properties: identity
>>>> (self-reference is itself, x=x), inclusion (self-reference is included in
>>>> itself, x<x) and transcendence (self-reference is more than itself, x>x).
>>>> And all these apparently contradictory properties are happening all at the
>>>> same time. So, x=x, x<x, x>x all at the same time. But there is no actual
>>>> contradiction here, because self-reference is unformalizable. The reason
>>>> why I get to such weird conclusions is explored throughout the book where
>>>> a phenomenological analysis of consciousness is done and it is shown how
>>>> it is structured on an emergent holarchy of levels, a holarchy meaning
>>>> that a higher level includes the lower levels, and I conclude that this
>>>> can only happen if there is an entity called "self-reference" which has
>>>> the above mentioned properties. So as you can see, there pretty much
>>>> cannot be a mathematics of self-reference.
>>>>
>>>> I will also present about self-reference at The Science of Consciousness
>>>> conference this year at Interlaken, Switzerland, so if you are there we
>>>> can talk more about these issues.
>>>>
>>>> On Thursday, 11 April 2019 02:55:55 UTC+3, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>>>>> Hi Cosmin,
>>>>>
>>>>> It seems your conclusion fits well with the conclusion already given by
>>>>> the universal machine (the Gödel-Löbian one which are those who already
>>>>> knows that they are Turing universal, like ZF, PA, or the combinators +
>>>>> some induction principle).
>>>>>
>>>>> Self-reference is capital indeed, but you seem to miss the mathematical
>>>>> theory of self-reference, brought by the work of Gödel and Löb, and
>>>>> Solovay ultimate formalisation of it at the first order logic level. You
>>>>> cite Penrose, which is deadly wrong on this.
>>>>>
>>>>> In fact incompleteness is a chance for mechanism, as it provides almost
>>>>> directly a theory of consciousness, if you are willing to agree that
>>>>> consciousness is true, indubitable, immediately knowable, non provable
>>>>> and non definable, as each Löbian machine is confronted to such
>>>>> proposition all the “time”. But this enforces also, as I have shown, that
>>>>> the whole of physics has to be justified by some of the modes of
>>>>> self-reference, making physics into a subbranch of elementary arithmetic.
>>>>> This works in the sense that at the three places where physics should
>>>>> appear we get a quantum logic, and this with the advantage of a
>>>>> transparent clear-cut between the qualia (not sharable) and the quanta
>>>>> (sharable in the first person plural sense).
>>>>>
>>>>> You seem to have a good (I mean correct with respect to Mechanism)
>>>>> insight on consciousness, but you seem to have wrong information on the
>>>>> theory of the digital machines/numbers and the role of Gödel. Gödel’s
>>>>> theorem is really a chance for the Mechanist theory, as it explains that
>>>>> the digital machine are non predictable, full of non communicable
>>>>> subjective knowledge and beliefs, and capable of defeating all
>>>>> reductionist theory that we can made of them. Indeed, they are literally
>>>>> universal dissident, and they are born with a conflict between 8 modes of
>>>>> self-apprehension. In my last paper(*) I argue that they can be
>>>>> enlightened, and this shows also that enlightenment and blasphemy are
>>>>> very close, and that religion leads easily to a theological trap making
>>>>> the machine inconsistent, except by staying mute, or referring to
>>>>> Mechanism (which is itself highly unprovable by the consistent machine).
>>>>>
>>>>> Bruno
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> --
>>>>>> 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.
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> 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.
>
>
> --
> 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.
