> On 3 Jul 2019, at 16:26, John Clark <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Tue, Jul 2, 2019 at 6:27 AM Bruno Marchal <[email protected] > <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: > > >> Science can guarantee that the new brain transplant operation you're about > >> to have today will be no different from the brain transplant operation you > >> already had > > > Science guarantee that we cannot be certain that compuytaionalism is true, > > It makes no difference if it's true or not,
It makes the difference between surviving a clinical operation and dying. Not sure why you say it makes no difference. Of course, if one dies, we cannot see the difference, but that does not seem to be relevant here. > whatever happened to you a year ago will happen again today if you say yes to > the doctor, if the old brain transplant did not lead to disaster there is no > reason to think the new one will either. It depends. If the old brain transplant was made at a correct substitution level, and the new one is not, there might be a difference. > > > nor that a doctor has chosen the right substitution level. > > You mean substituting one carbon atom for another is not the same as > substituting one carbon atom for another? That depends on the substitution level, and we can never be sure to have got it. If the substitution level is below the structure of the carbon atom then we could not survive the transplant. We need taking some risk each time we bet on a substitution level. Did you insist to copy the glial cells in your brain. Some years ago, it was thought they were just bricks to sustain the neurons, but today most neuroscientist think they participate in some information treatment, notably for pains/pleasure. They communicate by chemical waves in between themselves and also with some neuron. In science, we can only doubt, and evaluate the plausiblity of our ideas, and that coiners both the possible truth of Digital Mechanism, and the choice of the substation level. > > >>you've already had that turned the man you were a year ago into the man you > >>are today. > > > Assuming a lot of things, OK. > > The only thing you're assuming is X=X. Actually, I derive this one, when I take the combinatory axioms(*) What I assume is only few axioms, + the informal belief that consciousness is 1p- invariant for the digital brain substitution done at some right level. That assumption helps to motivate for the definition of “knowable” and “observable”, but we can also use the older motivation given by Plato and platonists. > > >> we can conclude that proof and truth are not the same thing and the wisdom > >> of saying yes or no to the doctor or yes or no to being frozen has nothing > >> to do with proof, it has to do with truth. > > >Absolutely. You make my point. And I call “intuition" and in some context > >“faith" when we use truth in the place of proof. That is why Mechanism is a > >religion: it needs some act of faith, > > As I said in the second half of my previous post (the half that you did not > respond to by the way) that is not faith. I repeat what I said here: > > Faith is believing in the virgin birth even though direct experience does not > reveal it. The religious knows correctly that faith exists because he > directly experienced faith, in this case about the virgin birth, but he did > not directly experience the virgin birth itself, but he believes it anyway. > It gets worse, he does not have a proof of it but believes it anyway. He > doesn't even have a plausible argument or one bit of evidence in favor of it > but he believes it anyway with every fibre of his being. And that's why faith > is a vice not a virtue. In the mathematical context where of course we provide more precise definition, and more general one. I have defined faith by any proposition that we accept as true despite it cannot be proved. This does not make faith into something irrational given that the non emptiness of G* minus G, and its (meta) decidability, explains that many machine can correctly inferred such truth, without being able to prove them. Eventually, that concerns all 3p theoretical propositions. From the existence of 0 to the existence of the moon. But that is in accordance with classical greek theology. Indeed Platonism encourage the skeptical attitude toward what we see, observe measure. The idea that seeing or observing provides a criterion of reality came with Aristotle. You have used Aristotle criterium many times. > > > as no one can prove it is correct. > > And I have absolutely no need to prove it to say yes to the doctor or yes to > being frozen. That's why I said yes. No problem with this. > > > But we can use it everyday without thinking, of course. > > You've got it backwards, people who don't think don't use it and thus they > say no. I was thinking about people who would use it as a mean of locomotion, without doing much metaphysics. Or like people asking to the doctor to take all decision, without asking any question, because they trust the doctor and feel incompetent to decide. People have the right to do that, but today many physicians ask the patient to sign a paper to avoid risk of trial by unsatisfied patients. > >> >> I don't know about Löbian machines because nobody on Earth except you >> >> knows what that is, > > > > Ojh? Why not ask me to recall the definition (I have given a lot of times). > > When I Google "Löbian machine" nothing comes up except stuff written by you. > Even Löb didn't know what a Löbian machine was. Well then read the stuff I have written, and ask if you don’t understand. I have given many different definitions, but they can be proved equivalent. Smullyan called them “system of type G”, but also “reflexive reasoner of type 4”. My definition is any universal machine, in the sense of Church, Post, Turing, Kleene, etc., which knows that she is universal. (I define “to know” by believing it and true, and I define belief by assertion. A machine beliefs P is she asserts P. This works well because I restrict myself to arithmetical sound machine. “Löbian” is usually mentioned by “enough rich”. But I avoid that expression, because in the computability context it means often “enough rich to be Turing universal”, and in the provability context it means usually “enough rich to prove Gödel’s second Incompleteness theorem, or Löb’s theorem. > > > A Löbian machine is a universal machine which know, and can prove, that she > > is universal. Typical example are Peano arithmetic (but not Robinson > > Arithmetic!), ZF, etc. > > Turing told us EXACTLY how to make a Turing Machine, but neither Löb or you > or anybody else told us even approximately how to make a Löbian machine. Now you know. Any theorem proving machine whose beliefs is a sound extension of Peano arithmetic is a Löbian machine. Boyer and Moore have implemented them, as I did if you look at the long version of my thesis. > > >> but yes you're right, she can't claim computationalism is true, she can't > >> claim she survived the teleportation, she can't even claim she survived > >> BEFORE the teleportation. She can't claim those things because she can't > >> prove them. Nevertheless she knows the truth, she knows for certain if she > >> survived or not and she knows for certain if computationalism is true or > >> not. > > > Very good. Yes, > > Then the rational thing is to say to the doctor is yes and the rational thing > to say about being frozen is also yes. And we both agree that the decision, > although entirely rational, cannot be proven to be rational. So what are we > arguing about? No problem, we agree, except that I use rational in a stricter sense than you, as I limit it to the proposition that we can prove. Maybe the misunderstanding comes from this. >> > >>the substitution level was enough low to say “I have survived”, bt you >> > >>cannot be sure that you did not lose some memory or abilities, > >> >> And the exact same thing is true every time you wake up in the morning. >> >> You have yet to give me a good reason, or even a mediocre reason, for >> >> saying No to the doctor or No to being frozen. > > >I am not arguing for organist Mechanism, I just argue that Mechanism is > >incompatible with Materialism i.e. Aristotle theology > > If I knew absolutely positively nothing about X except that X is incompatible > with Aristotelian theology then I would say that whatever X is it's probably > true. But you are the one who seems to take Aristotelian theology for granted. Aristotelian is the belief in Matter, and in the irreducibility of matter from anything no material. You are the one who claim sometimes to refute what I say by invoking your assumption that there is a PRIMARY physical reality, i.e. not reducible to some non physical reality (like the arithmetical reality). > > >> Being an axiom is a very exalted position but can you think of ANYTHING > >> more worthy of becoming an axiom than "Bruno Marchal is conscious"? I'll > >> bet you can't think of anything more obvious than that, although I can. > > > Nothing is really obvious here. > > Oh for God's sake! It's not obvious to you that you're conscious?? Yes, that is obvious to me, and indeed to all Löbian machine. But we agree on this, so what I meant was nothing, except personal consciousness (of course), is not obvious here. > Please name something that is more obvious to you. Please name something that > is more deserving of becoming an axiom. For all number x, 0 ≠ s(x) > >> >>> but I can conceive that mechanism wrong, and that indeed, the copy is >> >>> always unconscious, > > > >>Then you are always unconscious because YOU ARE A COPY of the man you were > >>last year, the atoms that made up that fellow have been replaced. > > > I am a copy at the right level, I guess, from studying molecular biology, > > and assuming some physical reality. > > It makes no difference even if you make the looney assumption that physical > reality is bogus. Bogus atoms were replaced in your bogus brain from last > year, and if you say yes to the doctor then bogus atoms will be replaced in > your bogus brain again. If the first bogus thing doesn't make you > uncomfortable then the second bogus thing shouldn't either because it's the > exact same bogus thing. That is the very argument to say that we have to take into account even the atoms simulated in arithmetic with the right conditions to make you conscious. As the arithmetical reality implement/emulate all computations, that becomes unavoidable. You make my point! > > > No problem in practice, but [...] > > The world is full of disastrous boondoggles that worked in theory so I'd much > rather have a problem in theory than a problem in practice, but in this case > there is no problem with either. Can’t comment, because I am not sure which problem you are alluding to. You should have leave the paragraph I was answering, and put my complete quote. You can elaborate if you are interested. > > > but for the understanding of the consequence, > > If you say yes to the doctor and your atoms are replaced then the > consequences, assuming there are some, will be the same as the consequences > you already experienced from being replaced over the last year. Counter-example: my memories could be at the level of quart and gluons. > >> > I defined the theology [...] > > I'm not interested in theology. > > > Typically, you break the quote where I defined theology. > > I already know what the definition of theology is in English and I have no > wish to learn what the word means in Brunospeak > because its only used by you on this list and nowhere else. Many told you already that I am using theology and the religious terms used by philosophers and theoreticians, and even the educated christians, jews and Muslims I am working with. There are tuns on book on this. Only atheists asks us to use the term used by radical christians. It is weird. > I've found that one good indicator that somebody is talking moonshine is if > they insist on redefining common words (like theology and God) in radical new > ways and love to dream up new homemade acronyms. And nobody does that more > than you. In science we change all definitions and theories all the times. You insist that theology is stupid, but you insist that we should not change the definition/theories. You say that you are not interested in theology, but you act like a priest defending the dogmatic definition in the field. Like Einstein said “Atheists […], they are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chain which they have thrown off after hard struggle”. > > >It seems you have a problem with the word theology, > > Wow, you are very perceptive! Yes, I do have a problem with that word because > serious people don't use it when discussing serious problems. I guess by “serious” you mean “physical”. But the whole problem is here. You define as “non serious” anyone which dare to share some doubt about the existence of primitive physical notions. That is, with respect to the mind-body problem, a super-begging of the question. I understand why you dislike theology when done with the scientific method. It is because it looks like it ask for being able to doubt on Aristotle’s primary matter. You believe in the metaphysical assumption of weak materialism: Matter = Primary Matter All scientist interested in this matter are agnostic. Only con-scientists, and naïve materialist, would say that science has decided this question. > > > a bit like the fanatic atheists Einstein talked about: > > … there are the fanatical atheists whose intolerance is of the same kind as > the intolerance of the religious fanatics and comes from the same source. > They are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chain which > they have thrown off after hard struggle. > > I'm a libertarian so I'm not intolerant of religion, I'm not going to > physically stop you from making a fool of yourself, you have that right. But > by the same token I have the right to hold you in contempt if you make a fool > of yourself. Of course you are not intolerant on religion. You keep defending Aristotle religion, embraced eventually by the Christians and the Muslims. You defend Materialism. For a platoniciansx, this is the big axiom; God exists by definition, because God by definition, is the fundamental reality what we search. With mechanism, it is at first sight something in between the sigma_-truth and the (full) arithmetical truth. I might be more intolerant than you. I accept that M believes in the religion M* if M* does not contradict M’s beliefs. The problem today is not with religion, but with inconstant religion enforced by authoritative arguments (which is always a form of violence). (Ideally correct) religion is the set of truth which extends (ideally correct) science. The mathematical definition of the theology of (ideally sound) machine is given by Tasrki minus Gödel, and Solovay did the precise math and axiomatises somehow this difference by G* minus G. G* (minus G) axiomatises, at the modal propositional level, all proposition which are true but not provable by the machine about itself. You can read G* as a sort of God telling the machine Thou shall not say that zero is equal to the successor of zero. (G* proves ~[]f) Thou shall not say that Thou shall not say that zero is equal to the successor of zero. (G* proves ~[](~[]f) Thou shall say that if thou shall not say a falsity then you shall not say that thou shall not say a falsity (~[]f -> ~[](~[]f), Thou live in a reality (<>t, equivalent with ~[]f). Thous shall not say that thou live in a reality, Etc. It explains the difficulty of theology. The basic mystical state is the “mundane consciousness” that we all live and know very well, despite being able to define it and to ascribe it to the others, and with more difficulty when they are different and behave differently. Yet, for the soul “consistency” (<>t) is trivial, and indeed, the soul, or the knower if you prefer, is its own reality, and that is reflected in the logic S4Grz which axiomatise the logic of ([]p & p). The dual <> becomes <>p v p, and <>t v t is provable. Yet, incompleteness makes []p -> p false as a general proposition (and is not provable), which makes here all the difference. The eight notion of selves provided (imposed) by incompleteness on the ideally correct machine put a lot of light on the mind-body issue, and at the same time, is automatically consistent (and sound with mechanism) by being able to be interpreted in arithmetic. > > >I understand that the guy who has survived a first experience of > >teleportation or artificial brain transplant, or feel that way, will be > >convinced that Mechanism is true. The point is that even for him, it is not > >a proof. > > Oh for Gods sake! You keep saying that and I keep saying yes yes I know. Excellent! > And I also keep saying it doesn't matter a gnat's ass if there is a proof or > not, what matters is if it's true or not. Because you are a practionners, and I congratulate you for this. But I am interested in solving the mind-body problem, which with mechanism consists in solving the hard problem of matter, which with mechanism enforces to derive the theory of the machine observable *only* from that difference between G and G*, and for the intensional variants. And there are two independent motivations for the definition (of belief, knowledge and observation), either doing the thought experience (and studying a bit of mathematical logic), or to study classical antic philosophy *befpre* Aristotle, or with “Aristotle” reinterpreted in Plato, that is (Plotinus) neoplatonism. > > > That is not a problem in practice, > > So there is no problem in saying yes to the doctor's practical question or > saying yes to the practice of being frozen. Absolutely no problem. There would be a problem only if you impose that practice to some adults. For your little kids, I guess the simplest and most fair solution is to let the parent decide. I have no certainty here. There is only an intellectual problem for you if you maintain both a belief is some primary matter and in mechanism. But that is not grave unless you decide to publish in the field (actually, that error is so common since 1500 years, that this would not be a “real” problem at all, alas. > > >> Mechanism requires arithmetic in the same way a brick requires the English > >> word "brick”. > > > A brick does not resonate the word “brick”. But the definition of a digital > > machine requires the truth of the laws of addition and multiplication, > > Machines have no use for definitions That is debatable. Definition are the Macro in programming language, and a list interpreter understand the use of definition. I think I will make a glossary, once I have a bit more time. > and all the definitions in the world can't figure out what 2+2 is. Words cannot, nor number, but, amazingly enough, Words plus some simple operation on the words, or number with addition and multiplication, can do that. Necessarily with Mechanism, in the sense of how you figure it out. > >>Non Aristotelian? How odd to divide things up between stuff Aristotle knew > >>and stuff he didn't, one pile is infinitely larger than the other. > > >That the case for all of us. I mention Aristotle’s view, because it is the > >current paradigm. > > Of course it's the current paradigm! Aristotle was an ignoramus and after > 2500 years of progress we have become less ignorant and thus more > Non-Aristotelian. Aristotelian = Metaphysical materialism. It is assumed by the current majority religion in the world today, including atheism. That is inconsistent with Mechanism. There is no problem with the physical science, but only what some people called scientific materialism. That is why consistent materialist do search for non-mechanist theory of mind. Here, computer science remains very useful, as Church-Thesis makes clear the necessary existence of many non computable relations in arithmetic. Most of them are non computable, and there are degrees of non-computability. But today, most claim on “non computability” made by materialist confuse computation and some other modality, very often close to S4Grz type of non formalisable entities. I agnostic. Just a logician who says that Mechanism and Physicalism are incompatible, with a constuticve proof showing exactly how to derive physics, and showing that what is already obtained fits better with the empirical facts than the materialist theories which justifies the psycho-matter parallelism with an identity thesis which cannot work with the digital Mechanist hypothesis. > > > Of course it is contra Pythegoreans and Platonic thinking, > > And Pythagoras was a ignoramus too and Plato an even bigger one, so today we > also embrace the Non-Pythagorean and Non-Platonic view. We know (or should know) better today. Aristotle is made less plausible, and the Church-Turing thesis rehabilitate Pythagorus, and Plato. Yes, that happens. > > >> There is a word for rigorous metaphysics, it's called "physics", you > >> should try it someday. > > > That is what I call the Aristotelian postulate. God is Matter. > > A much better definition of the English word "God" would be "a grey amorphous > blob of indeterminate size that need not be intelligent or conscious"; that > way no logical person could ever call themself an atheist or even an > agnostic, assuming of course you don't also change the definition of atheist > and agnostic. You believe in a grey amorphous blob of indeterminate size? I am agnostic in theology. I do research. Bruno > > John K Clark > > > -- > 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/CAJPayv2-aQ%2BXzrfsHH8XJzNOwnNYbq6nYLO0Fkuh-aptPvvgOA%40mail.gmail.com > > <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv2-aQ%2BXzrfsHH8XJzNOwnNYbq6nYLO0Fkuh-aptPvvgOA%40mail.gmail.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/E1DEE0B9-53F6-4C3E-8383-322FB4A02BF5%40ulb.ac.be.
