On 12/6/2019 6:49 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 6 Dec 2019, at 02:30, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List
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On 12/5/2019 4:28 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote:
On Fri, Dec 6, 2019 at 10:45 AM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List
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On 12/5/2019 8:29 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 5 Dec 2019, at 00:44, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List
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On 12/3/2019 1:08 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
This absurd conclusion depends only on the single world assumption, it's a
consequence of the non-existence of counterfactuals. Clearly actions as a
response to counterfactual inputs must be relevant for consciousness,
It's not clear to me. How can there be a response to an input ("input" to
what) that doesn't occur? And why would such a response be anything but crazy?
Why necessarily crazy? If you can prove this, you refute Mechanism.
Wow, I didn't expect it to be so easy. I have a dog. If my
dog died I'd get another dog. My dog didn't die today. The
counterfact then is that my dog did die today. So responding
the counterfact I get another dog.
In the counter situation, yes (relatively real or not, that is
not relevant here, but it has to make sense)
So you didn't really mean "response to counterfactual inputs".
You meant responses in some different world, where the input and
the response (and maybe everything else) are different.
The whole question about counterfactuals relates back to
philosophical questions about what counterfactuals can possible mean
when the antecedent is manifestly false. I think it was Lewis who
proposed an analysis of causation in terms of counterfactuals,
giving them meaning through the concept of "possible worlds".
Philosophy has moved on past this understanding of counterfactuals,
but it seems that Bruno is attached to the idea of multiple worlds,
so he thinks that consciousness depends on a "possible worlds"
understanding of the response to counterfactual inputs.
Bruno is a logician, so he looks at in terms of Kripke's possible
worlds modal logic.
I started from biology. I discovered Mechanism in the work of
Descartes and Darwin. I have just been lucky to discover Gödel’s
theorem before deciding to study biology, and it makes me realise that
what Descartes and Darwin described is realised in the number
relations. I will still remain a bit skeptical on this until I
eventually understood how solid the Church-Turing thesis is.
But unlike a physicist who takes mathematics and logic to be rules of
language intended to conserve the validity of inferences in the
language, he takes them to be proscriptive of reality.
No less than any physicist who use mathematics. Not just the
mathematical language, but also some mathematical truth.
You probably meant "No more than..." But what you wrote is correct:
"The direct, platonic, correspondence of physical theories to the nature
of reality ... is fraught with problems: First, theories are notoriously
temporary. We can never know if quantum field theory will not someday be
replaced with another more powerful model that makes no mention of
fields (or particles, for that matter). Second, as with all physical
theories, quantum field theory is a model—a human contrivance. We test
our models to find out if they work; but we can never be sure, even for
highly predictive models like quantum electrodynamics, to what degree
they correspond to “reality.” To claim they do is metaphysics. If there
were an empirical way to determine ultimate reality, it would be
physics, not metaphysics; but it seems there isn't."
Victor J Stenger
I'm bothered by his modal logic of "B" which seems to morph betweeen
"believes" and "proves" (beweisbar) which he justifies by saying he's
referring to perfect reasoner who therefore proves, and believes,
everything provable.
That is the lesson of Gödel’s theorem: “provable” does not entail
“true”, and “true” does not entail provable. And “provable”
(beweisbar) obey to a logic of belief, not of knowledge. And yes, I
use “perfect reasoner”, which simplifies a lot the derivation of
physics. Interrogating machines which lies, or are deluded is not
necessary for the solution of the metaphysical/theological mind-body
problem.
But it is highly unrealistic to assume the perfect reasoner not only
makes no mistakes, but also completes and knows all proofs.
But this not a model of human reasoning.
Right, but using “human reasoning” would make the whole derivation of
physics far more complex than necessary, especially that we want to
show that *all* correct universal machine find the same physics.
But that is begging the question. You may /want/ all correct universal
machines to find the same physics, but maybe there is no unique physics.
You could criticise newton for simplifying the sun up to a point. That
would be a poor critics of classical mechanics.
Factual doesn't enter into it, so how can counterfactual.
? (If you can elaborate. With mechanism, factual is an indexical)
With physics it's what is observed, what is intersubjectively agreed
upon. If factual is indicial then counterfactual is what no one indicates.
Brent
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