On 2/26/2020 3:02 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 25 Feb 2020, at 22:24, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:On 2/25/2020 4:06 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:On 24 Feb 2020, at 03:29, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:On 2/23/2020 6:17 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:On 23 Feb 2020, at 01:12, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:On 2/22/2020 3:52 PM, Alan Grayson wrote:On Saturday, February 22, 2020 at 10:40:12 AM UTC-7, PGC wrote: On Thursday, February 20, 2020 at 1:55:39 PM UTC+1, Bruno Marchal wrote:On 20 Feb 2020, at 01:20, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <[email protected]> wrote: On 2/19/2020 12:15 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:Wittgenstein is at the core really of *linguistic pragmatism * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neopragmatism <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neopragmatism> Languages are tools. There is no truth "out there".My view is that "true" means different things in different contexts.And in different modes (of self-reference). The platonists dis understand that the absolute truth requires faith in something beyond “my consciousness” or “consciousness” (to take into account Terren Suydam’ remark). Wittgestein up to now still has the upper hand with those old arguments over anybody proposing science based ontological packages metaphysically: language will seduce people to overgeneralize, to confuse personal mysticism with reality, to engage in false equivalencies between terms used in formal contexts and everyday use of language, scientism etc. Slowly, yours truly is coming around to the idea that folks agreeing on ontology/reality/religion, which would guide research in some allegedly correct direction; spilling over positive effects into the world... that Wittgenstein may prove correct in that this is a confused product of muddled armchair thinking, not because of his generally negative stance, but because there seem to be positive developments out there that he couldn't have informed those arguments with. I see/predict metaphysics shifting from the naive armchair forms of identity, reality, matter etc. practiced here on this list with profound erudition, walking in circles for 20 years now (Wittgenstein says thousands of years) to optimization and more efficient pursuit of value and benefit questions instead, through say orchestration of highly sophisticated forms of organization applied to education, governing, finance, technology, problem solving, applied or theoretical etc. that are permissionless, universally accessible, require no hierarchy of politics, charlatan experts, control freaks, their sycophants, and bibles of some Messiah achieving miracles such as eternal life, self-duplication etc. Metaphysical setups that place less emphasis on truth, trust, power, control, or proof and more emphasis on "can entities such as ourselves be highly organized, solve specific survival problems over short and long terms, without trusting each other + instead assuming that folks will be opportunistic and idealistic?" Example: we don't agree on what reality may be, but we do agree on the need for habitable living space in the long term, nutrition, water, health, limiting self-destruction, expensive wars, standards of living etc. quite clearly. There ARE more appropriate politics and economics on the horizon. Metaphysics here, shifting our old-school conceptions of what first principles are, and you'd refute Wittgenstein instead of running from him. Engineering incentive and not what the game is but /how/ the game of life on this planet could be. About this, it is clear to me that in “I think thus I am”, Descartes use the “first person” I. Indeed he start from the doubt. Dubito ergo cogito, cogito ergo sum. Descartes did not prove the existence of Descartes, bit of his own consciousness, hoping others can do the same reasoning for themselves. Consciousness always refer to a first person experience implicitly: like God (truth) it is not a thing. You concede to Terren that "true means different things in different contexts" but everyday like clockwork you still barrage the list with your use of "large truth, 3p, reality that cannot be named, mechanism is incompatible with physicalism" and all the rest of it. I used to wonder why you don't pursue contact with linguists, physicists, a wider audience, and philosophers but this has ceased to surprise me. PNGCI think I finally got it -- what mechanism means for Bruno -- namely, that a human being can be perfectly simulated by a computer. But if that's what he means, how does it follow that mechanism is incompatible with physicalism?Because all possible computations (in the Turing sense) are implicit in arithmetic. And Bruno thinks arithmetic exists, and hence all threads of human (and non-human) consciousness exist in arithmetic.What exactly does Bruno mean by physicalism?That physics is the basic science; i.e. the ontology of physics, whatever it is, must give rise to everything else, including conscious thought.Why the incompatibility? Bruno? TIA, AGBruno's a fundamentalist. You can only have one, really real, true fundamental ontology.Given the sense of “fundamentalism” in the religious (pseudo-religious) domain, it might be useful to make precise that I do not defend any theory or religion. I just say that IF we can survive with an artificial brain, then physics becomes the science of available predictions by universal machine implemented in arithmetic.If arithmetic exists independent of physics.Then you should be able to give a definition of natural numbers, based on physical laws, and express those physical laws without using the notion of numbers. I don’t see how this is possible, at least with Mechanism. You have to assume something Turing universal, to get something Turing universal. We cannot prove the existence of something Turing universal withouDefinitions are in words. How do you define the words. As JKC correctly points out, examples are more important than definitions. I don't use physical laws to define natural numbers, I use ostensive definition by examples...which is exactly how you learned numbers at your mother's knee.Practically? I am OK with this. But when we do fundamental science, we must be clear on what we assume, and what we derive, and the point is that with mechanism, we can no more assume a physical universe.
And we should be clear that what we are doing are assuming and hypothesizing and reasoning about our assumptions and we are not bringing anything into existence thereby.
Brent
If we assume a physical universe to explain a first peson prediction, that would work if that physical universe is not Turing emulable, and, importantly, that it is able to make my consciousness, or my first person prediction, related to that physical universe. But with mechanism, that consciousness is brought by the corresponding computation in arithmetic. If not, you need a non computationalist theory of mind. If the mechanism by which the physical universe makes me conscious is Turing emulable, it is automatically already emulated in arithmetic, through infinitely many occurrences, and the first person prediction (physics) has to be a statistics on all (relative) computations.Mechanism just make precise and rigorous the old and antic “dream argument”. The LARC experience is a stunning evidence for the existence of the Higgs Boson, but not a proof, as I can conceive that I will wake up and realised that this LARC stuff was just a dream. We cannot prove any ontological evidence from any experience, but of course we can judge some evidences and accumulation of evidences making some belief more plausible than other.The concern for definitions and axioms only arose when you wanted to reason about numbers too big to comprehend or write down.It happens when we search a (fundamental) theory. With Mechanism, we have to derive physics from machine biology-psychology-theology, that is from the mathematics of arithmetical self-reference (from qG1*) (G1= G + (p->[]p).BrunoBrentt postulating the existence of something Turing universal. 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] <mailto:[email protected]>. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/e2073f78-fb67-66b6-7226-28b887881e87%40verizon.net <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/e2073f78-fb67-66b6-7226-28b887881e87%40verizon.net?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/1E52FB50-992D-461F-8501-E5E01CBADC23%40ulb.ac.be <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/1E52FB50-992D-461F-8501-E5E01CBADC23%40ulb.ac.be?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer>.
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