> On 20 Jun 2019, at 02:41, Pierz <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > On Tuesday, June 18, 2019 at 8:58:49 PM UTC+10, telmo wrote: > Hi Pierz, > > On Tue, Jun 18, 2019, at 04:15, Pierz wrote: >> >> I've been thinking and writing a lot recently about a conception of reality >> which avoids the debates about what is fundamental in reality. It seems to >> me that with regards to materialism, we find it very difficult to escape the >> evolutionarily evolved, inbuilt notion of "things" and "stuff" that our >> brains need in order to manipulate the world. > > Right. I think this points to a fundamental fact that is overlooked in the > dominant scientific paradigm of our age: that we are embedded in reality. We > are participants, looking at it from the inside. The contemporary paradigm > gives the utmost importance to the "third-person view" of reality, which is > nothing more than a model, if not a fantasy. > > The edifice collapses once you try to explain consciousness, because this > third person view model forces us to explain consciousness as an emergent > property of matter, and that doesn't work. An overlooked simple possibility > is that separating the notions of "consciousness" and "reality" is > nonsensical. There is no evidence of any "reality" outside of conscious > experience, nor can there be. > > But then you risk reification of consciousness itself
I agree that is the problem for those who want consciousness being fundamental. It is also a way to avoid searching a theory/explanation of it. It is not better than the reification of matter into primary matter. It is good as a simplifying assumption, but excessively bad as an hypothesis in metaphysics. > - something I have fallen into myself, but now am less sure about. Is > consciousness a "thing" in which experiences occur? Do we need such an > "ether" for experiences to propagate through? I totally agree with you that a > purely third person account of mind fails (any kind of "property dualism" > solution is nasty and ad hoc). I disagree. With mechanism, there is no dualism, but a through explanation why there has to be first person account by machines, and why it is not definable, not provable, yet indubitable and immediately know, and then that consciousness theory explains the “illusion of matter” in a completely precise way, and thus testable. Mathematical logic provides the tools to do this, but very few philosophers or physicists know it. > But do we need to find some new fundamental substrate? With mechanism, there is no substrate at all. Numbers or programs are not substrate. They are purely definable in the axiomatic relational way, and the apparent substrates are explained in term of the first person (plural) experience of the person supported by the number relation in arithmetic. > Perhaps there is one, but "the Tao that you can name is not the Tao”. Which is very similar to Gödel’s second incompleteness: <>t -> ~[]<>t. No machine at all can give a name or description of a reality enough rich to encompass itself. That explains why consciousness is necessary puzzling. > Even the Buddhists don't really believe in consciousness - the manifestations > of it are part of the veil of Maya and nirvana is a state of non-being. I am not sure of this. I think they say that for the awake-consciousness, which is always undecidable. Maybe you can give a reference here, so I can confirm. > Consciousness is an abstraction of our experiences, as matter is. What > certainly exists is the phenomenological field we share, a network of > relationships of which qualia and what we call matter are a part. Yes. And that follows from the relation between numbers, or combinators, etc. Any universal machinery will do. Physics is independent of the choice of the (immaterial) ontology. > > > I am not saying that there is no value in the third-person view, on the > contrary, it leads to myriad interesting things, namely the computer I am > using to type this email. But we have to be able to see models for what they > are. > > Consider a camera lens. I want to take a photo of something, which is to say, > I want to compress a 3D object into some 2D representation. Different lenses > provide different mappings, but there is no way to avoid the fact that, no > matter what lens you choose, something is lost. At the same time, there is no > "correct lens". They just produce different mapping, that may be more or less > useful depending on the situation. > > There are no cells, hearts, stars, atoms, people, societies, markets, ants, > music or any other such category outside of human language. These are words > that point to human mental models. These models please us, and we keep > playing the game. Sometimes we find even better models, but we are doing > nothing but coming up with new, perhaps better lenses. Ultimately, I think > this is an infinite game. > > Yep. David Deutsch says the same in The Beginning of Infinity. If the game is Turing emulable, that would be like the universal dovetailer (aka sigma-1 arithmetic), but the physics which emerges is provably NON Turing emulable. The first person indeterminacy domain is highly NOT computable, and note that consciousness itself is also far beyond the computable, as it is basically only definable by reference to truth (the top of all degrees of unsolvability). > > >> Yet QM and importantly the expected dissolution of time and space as >> fundamental entities in physics have made any such simple mechanistic notion >> of matter obsolete - what is left of matter except mathematics and some >> strange thing we can only call "instantiation" - the fact that things have >> specific values rather than (seeming to be) pure abstractions? What does a >> sophisticated materialist today place his or her faith in exactly? Something >> along the lines of the idea that the world is fundamentally describable by >> mathematics, impersonal and reducible to the operation of its simplest >> components. With regards to the last part - reductionism - that also seems >> to be hitting a limit in the sense that, while we have some supposed >> candidates for fundamental entities (whether quantum fields, branes or >> whatever), there is always a problem with anything considered "fundamental" >> - namely the old turtle stack problem. If the world is really made of any >> fundamental entity, then fundamentally it is made of magic - since the >> properties of that fundamental thing must simply be given rather than >> depending on some other set of relations. While physicists on the one hand >> continually search for such an entity, on the other they immediately reject >> any candidate as soon as it is found, since the question naturally arises, >> why this way and not that? What do these properties depend on? Furthermore, >> the fine tuning problem, unless it can be solved by proof that the world >> *has* to be the way it is – a forlorn hope it seems to me – suggests that >> the idea that we can explain all of reality in terms of the analysis of >> parts (emergent relationships) is likely to collapse – we will need to >> invoke a cosmological context in order to explain the behaviour of the >> parts. It's no wonder so many physicists hate that idea, since it runs >> against the deep reductionist grain. And after all, analysis of emergent >> relationships (the parts of a thing) is always so much easier than analysis >> of contextual relationships (what a thing is part of). > > I have the utmost respect and interest in Physics, but I think that > contemporary physicists suffer from the problem of having convinced > themselves that their field, and their filed alone, can produce "the correct > lens". Most scientific fields have a lot to learn from Physics when it comes > to rigor, but at the same time physicists underestimate how much easier it is > to achieve rigor when you are dealing with very low levels of complexity (as > compared to Biology, Psychology, Sociology and so on). > > Yes exactly. It really needs to be pointed out that we can only barely > calculate the states of the simplest atoms, using all the supercomputers > available to us! All material things, including a minute portion of the vacuum, needs the entire sigma_1 truth as an oracle to be emulated. No computer at all will ever been able to simulate this. The mystery is in the explanability of the physical reality. At first sight, mechanism entails an explosion of continuations. It is the very subtle consequence of incompleteness which saves the physical realm, in the Mechanist setting. > Yet the successful analysis of these isolated, microscopic physical systems > is supposed to convince us that we understand all of physical reality "in > principle"? This laughable idea that we live in a computer simulation of some > advanced civilization - when we can't even simulate a single fucking oxygen > atom?! We sure are clever apes, but it's even more impressive how impressed > we are with ourselves. Yes, that is how I have proven that we can test if we are in an emulation of not. And thanks to the quantum, we have evidence that we are not in simulation. We are in the infinitely one which are run in the tiny segment of the arithmetical reality, which is a segment of all models of arithmetic. > > > I think it would be good if Physics found its way back to a more humble and > wise position, being proud of the great lenses it creates, but understanding > that we also need other lenses in our toolkit. > > Another thing I think is that the epistemic boundaries of current scientific > fields have reached a point of diminishing returns, and we really should take > seriously the project of crossing these boundaries without sacrificing rigor > -- the elusive dream of interdisciplinarity without bullshit. > > You have to sacrifice some rigour. Psychology is an example of a field where > rigour has been applied, and the effect has been the sterilisation of > imagination. I agree, but that was fake rigour, based on reductionist metaphysics. That happens because rigorous in theology is still forbidden in many circles. It is easy to reintroduce rigour in the human science, by adding interrogation marks. The problem are the fake certainties that people are trained to believe, when theology is in the hand of authoritarian societies. > Psychology as a discipline has a giant chip on is shoulder about its status > as a "soft" science. So they inject more and more rigour in the form of > statistical analysis, and what have we been left with? Cognitive Behavioural > Therapy. CBT is fine and good, helpful in many cases, but it's a terribly > limited approach to human beings, and it reduces therapists to technicians > and patients to something like faulty machines. The universal machine already know better. That is not rigour. Only appearance of face rigour. > People are far richer than that, but the problem is that statistical methods > are very blunt instruments that require a high degree of standardisation of > technique and the levelling out of as much other variation as possible, with > the result that all the richness of what actually occurs in therapy is lost, > and you end up with lowest-common-denominator therapy as the only sanctioned > therapeutic modality. We certainly do need quantitative analyses to keep us > honest in psychology as in other areas, but rigour is not the only > consideration, and quantitative methods come with their own costs. In some > areas, what we need is not necessarily more rigour, but more tolerance of > uncertainty, more imagination, more experimentation, combined with corrective > critical analysis which may or may not include a quantitative component. Or better hypothesis. Mechanism explains why we need both the qualitative, well analysed through the communicable and incommunicable self-referential statements, and the quantitative. > >> >> To get to the point then, I am considering the idea of a purely relational >> ontology, one in which all that exists are relationships. There are no >> entities with intrinsic properties, but only a web of relational properties. >> Entities with intrinsic properties are necessary components of any finite, >> bounded theory, and in fact such entities form the boundaries of the theory, >> the "approximations" it necessarily invokes in order to draw a line >> somewhere in the potentially unbounded phenomenological field. In economic >> theory for instance, we have “rational, self-interested” agents invoked as >> fundamental entities with rationality and self-interest deemed intrinsic, >> even though clearly such properties are, in reality, relational properties >> that depend on evolutionary and psychological factors, that, when analysed, >> reveal the inaccuracies and approximations of that theory. I am claiming >> that all properties imagined as intrinsic are approximations of this sort - >> ultimately to be revealed as derived from relations either external or >> internal to that entity. > > I agree. > >> >> Of course, a purely relational ontology necessarily involves an infinite >> regress of relationships, but it seems to me that we must choose our poison >> here - the magic of intrinsic properties, or the infinite regress of only >> relational ones. > > I am not sure that a relational ontology must suffer from infinite regress, > it can instead be self-referential. The ontology of "strange loops", as > proposed by Hofstadter. > > Gotta read Hofstadter some day. I have thought of the possibility of circular > set of relationships, but then the circular system itself would be a brute > fact. Infinite regress is not necessarily something "suffered", unless what > we are hoping for is some intrinsic property, some solid ground somewhere. It is not an exaggeration to say that theoretical computer scienc, if not the whole mathematical logic field, is based on how Gödel and Kleene have solved the “infinite regress problem” of all circular definition. Hofstadter’s “Gödel, Escher, Bach” is excellent. He is the only physicist that I know who is not wrong on Gödel and its relation with Mechanism. > > I think this is the only way out of the fact that we are observing an object > from the inside, so self-referentiality is unavoidable. This is also why I > claim that computer science might be more fundamental than Physics, because > computer science is the field with the tools to tackle self-referentiality / > recursion. But again, I am being silly. Perhaps it is just another lens. > >> I prefer the latter. (Note that I am using a definition of relational >> properties that includes emergent properties as relational, though the >> traditional philosophical use of those terms probably would not. The reason >> is that I am interested in what is ontologically intrinsic, not semantically >> intrinsic.) >> >> What would such a conception imply in the philosophy of mind? Traditionally, >> the “qualiophiles” have defined qualia as intrinsic properties, yet (while I >> am no fan of eliminativism) I think Dennett has made a strong case against >> this idea. Qualia appear to me to be properties of relationships between >> organisms and their environments. > > My only problem with this idea is how quickly it goes over "relationships > between organisms and their environments", as if there is some clear > distinction or boundary between the two categories. Right now I am looking at > this text, in my computer screen, and I am me looking at my computer screen. > This is true of all objects we know. When we say apple, we mean "a human > being's experience of an apple", even if we are not consciously aware of > that. But we say "apple" for short. > > And I am saying "organisms and their environments" for short. It is hard to > talk at all without such shortcuts. I do not believe that organisms are > fundamentally separate from their environments. > >> >> They are not fundamental, but then neither is the “stuff” of which organisms >> and environments are made. We simply cannot ask about fundamental >> properties, but must confine ourselves to the networks of relationships we >> find ourselves embedded in, and from which we, as observer-participants, >> cannot be extricated. > > Exactly. > >> “Third person” accounts, including physics, are abstractions from >> aggregations of first person accounts, and none can rise so high above the >> field of observation as to entirely transcend their origins in the first >> person. Thus there are certainly objective truths, but not Objective Truths, >> that is truths that are entirely unbound to any observer and which nominate >> the absolute properties of real objective things. > > I think so too. > >> >> Note that the “relationalism” I am proposing does not in any way imply >> *relativism*, which flattens out truth claims at the level of culture. Nor >> does it make consciousness “primary”, or mathematics. I cannot personally >> reconcile the interior views (qualia, if you like, though I think that terms >> places an unwarranted emphasis on “what experiences are like” rather than >> the mere fact of experience) with a purely mathematical ontology. >> >> One obvious objection to this whole idea is the counter-intuitiveness of the >> idea of relationships without “things” being related. Yet I think the fault >> lies with intuition here. Western thinking is deeply intellectually addicted >> to the notion of “things”. David Mermin has interpreted QM in terms of >> “correlations only” – correlations without correlata as he puts it – an >> application of similar ideas to quantum theory. Part of the objection I >> think lies in the semantics of the word “relationship”, which automatically >> causes us to imagine two things on either side of the relation. It would be >> better to think in terms of a web, then, than individual, related entities. >> Or simply say that the related entities are themselves sets of >> relationships. Mathematics provides a good example of such a purely >> relational domain – a number exists solely by virtue of its relationships >> with other numbers. It has no intrinsic properties. >> >> Yet what then of the problem of specific values – the instantiation aspect >> of materialism? To quote Hedda Mørch: “… physical structure must be >> realized or implemented by some stuff or substance that is itself not purely >> structural. Otherwise, there would be no clear difference between physical >> and mere mathematical structure, or between the concrete universe and a mere >> abstraction.” >> >> We can overcome such an objection by invoking the first person perspective. >> Mørch credits the specific values of entities in our environment (some >> specific electron having this position, that momentum and so on) to some >> property of “being instantiated in something intrinsic”, harking back to >> Kant’s Ding an Sich. Yet there is an alternative way of viewing the >> situation. Let us imagine that each integer was conscious and able to >> survey its context in the field of all numbers. Take some number, let us say >> 7965. When number 7965 looks around, it sees the number 7964 right behind >> it, and the number 7966 right ahead. Trying to understand itself and the >> nature of its world, it starts doing arithmetic and finds that everything >> around it can be understood purely in terms of relational properties. Yet it >> says to itself, how can this be? Why do the numbers around me have the >> specific values they do? What “breathes fire” into those arithmetical >> relations to instantiate the specific world I see? Yet 7965 is wrong. It is >> ignoring the significance of the first-person relation that places it within >> a specific context that defines both it and the world it sees. >> >> Note that I am not, like Bruno, actually suggesting that numbers are >> conscious. > > I do not think that this is what Bruno claims. In fact, most of what you > write seems compatible with what Bruno says, but he will correct me if I am > wrong. > > Yes, I know Bruno doesn't believe 7965 can reason, but he thinks mathematics > implements reasoning. It follows from “yes doctor”. This seems to be not known: but the existence of all computations in the arithmetical reality (the models, standard or not, of any known theory of arithmetic) is a fact. Even provable in Peano arithmetic. > I like Bruno's ideas, I have no ideas. I have just shows the theory obtained by any universal computationalist machine introspectiog itself. Every statement I make is either a theorem in Peano arithmetic, or in very limited extensions of arithmetic, like in Torkel Franzen’s book “Inexhaustibility”. > but his is a mathematical ontology that starts with arithmetic, whereas mine > is a relational ontology that starts with the phenomenological field. But then, Telmo, you put the mystery in the ontology, and this in a way which makes you condemning all machines into zombie. I just listen to the machine, and explain what they already tell us. I don’t think that PA is a zombie, especially by its silence on the fundamental question, and then the use of G*, with the interrogation marks. > Maybe they are compatible views, maybe they aren't. I remain unconvinced > about qualia arising in arithmetical structures, but these are deep > questions. I may be wrong. I am still not sure if what many miss here is not just some knowledge of mathematical logic. I would be please if people tell me if they do understand that incompleteness makes all nuance of provability obligatory, and why the non definable one would not explain the qualia, including why that is necessarily felt as mysterious (which is eventually related to the fact that the first person *is* not a machine from its own point of view. Indeed it is anon definable abstract type distributed on the whole arithmetical reality: that is not a machine! (I have commented both Pierz and Telmo, here, sorry for that). Bruno > > Telmo. > >> The point of the thought experiment is merely to show how specific values >> can exist within a first person account, without us needing to invoke some >> unknowable thing-in-itself or substrate of intrinsic properties. >> >> Grateful for any comments/critiques. >> >> >> -- >> 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] <javascript:>. >> To view this discussion on the web visit >> https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/868bd041-299a-4618-9586-4b6362755cd7%40googlegroups.com >> >> <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/868bd041-299a-4618-9586-4b6362755cd7%40googlegroups.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer>. > > > -- > 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 view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/5ae9eebe-46c8-4bf0-b022-dba89c63e9bf%40googlegroups.com > > <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/5ae9eebe-46c8-4bf0-b022-dba89c63e9bf%40googlegroups.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer>. -- 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 view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/3AED6905-EBD6-4C56-BBA2-D1217A99E908%40ulb.ac.be.
