Am Do, 7. Mai 2020, um 16:30, schrieb Bruno Marchal:
>
> > On 6 May 2020, at 12:58, Telmo Menezes <[email protected]> wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> > Am Mi, 6. Mai 2020, um 10:41, schrieb Bruno Marchal:
> >>
> >>> On 5 May 2020, at 21:25, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List
> >>> <[email protected]> wrote:
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> On 5/5/2020 4:54 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
> >>>> Physics works very well, to make prediction but as metaphysics, as the
> >>>> Platonist greeks understood, it simply does not work at all. It uses an
> >>>> identity thesis between mind and brain which is easy in one direction,
> >>>> but non-sensical in the other direction. It is not a matter of choice:
> >>>> if mechanism is true, the many physical histories must emerges from the
> >>>> many computations in all models of arithmetic, or in the standard model
> >>>> (as you prefer).
> >>> And you use the identity theory of all possible computation and
> >>> reality...which has no evidence in support of it and I see no reason to
> >>> believe.
> >>
> >> The existence of all computations is a theorem of arithmetic. If you
> >> understand 2+2=4 and similar, you can understand that all computations
> >> are emulated in (all) model(s) of arithmetic. That arithmetic is
> >> assumed in all theories made by physicists. But when you add an
> >> ontological physical universe, we have no mean to restrict the
> >> statistics on all computations on the “physical” computations without
> >> adding some magic in the theory.
> >>
> >> So, it seems you are the one adding an ontological commitment, to make
> >> magically disappear the consciousness of the relative number in
> >> arithmetic.
> >>
> >> The reason to believe this is just Mechanism. I have not find a reason
> >> to believe in a physical universe having an ontological primitive
> >> status, which would be a reason to believe in non-mechanism (and to
> >> reject Darwinism, molecular biology, even most physical equations,
> >> whose solutions when exploitable in nature are up to now always
> >> computable.
> >>
> >> We just can’t invoke an ontological commitment when we do science,
> >> especially in theology or metaphysics, unless some evidences are given
> >> for it. But there are no evidence at all. People confuse the real
> >> strong evidences for physical laws with evidence for laws who would be
> >> primary.
> >>
> >> You seem to have understood this better sometimes ago. I Hope you are
> >> not having any doubt that the arithmetical reality (not the theories!)
> >> emulate all computations, and that a universal machine (with oracles)
> >> cannot feel the difference between being emulated by this or that
> >> universal machinery.
> >
> > Yes, I have no problem with any of what you say above.
>
> OK.
>
>
> >
> > What I have been wondering about is something else: what exactly is meant
> > by "primitive"?
>
>
> It depends on what you are interested in. To solve the mind-body
> problem, the first difficulty is to formulate it, and for this the
> notion of “primitiveness” is required, for what we will take for
> granted to proceed.
>
> Basically X is considered as primitive if we have some reason to
> consider X as non explainable from something else, and judged as being
> more simple (technically/conceptually, … there is some matter of debate
> here of course).
Ok, but let me make the analogy with Copernicus' heliocentric model. It
provides a simpler model for planetary dynamics in the solar system than
assuming the earth at the center, but a more modern view on this debate is that
there is really no center anywhere in the universe. You just choose whatever
referential makes calculations easier.
I wonder if primitiveness is not like that. I believe that consciousness
becomes irreducible if one takes matter as primitive, and I agree that taking
the integers as primitive and proceeding as you do provides a perspective to
tackle the mind-body problem that simply is not available to materialism. At
the same time, it makes it very hard to explain why this particular dream that
I am experiencing has such and such specific features and patterns.
I guess I am in an extremely agnostic mood. Maybe it's the corona.
> Most materialist agrees that biology is explained, or explainable in
> principle by chemistry, itself explainable by particles/force physics.
> (And I agree with them on this).
Btw, have you seen this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=makaJpLvbow
I love that simulation for several reasons. Firstly because I was involved in
ALife / Complex Systems, and it is of course exciting to see such "biological"
behavior emerging from such simple rules. But also because it exposes a certain
emptiness in the idea of "explanation". It is not hard to imagine that one day
Wolfram will be successful, and will be able to produce a simple rule that
allows for complexity of the level we observe in the "real world". At the same
time, I do not really feel that things were explained at that point.
> Then if they are metaphysical materialist, they will have to explain
> psychology from biology, say, and usually they do believe that such an
> explanation is possible (and of course, we know or should know that
> this is impossible: but before judging this, it means that for a
> materialist (who believes that matter cannot be explained entirely from
> a simpler ontological assumption), if interested in the Mind-Body
> problem, he has to develop a phenomenology of mind coherent with its
> taking matter as primitive.
I agree with you, but I think you use "psychology" in a different sense than
they do. I think modern mainstream psychology is zombie psychology, in the
sense that it discards the first person.
> Similarly, a monist immaterialist (who assumes only immaterial
> relations, of the type mind or of the type number, or whatever) has to
> develop (extract, isolate, justify in a way or in another) a
> phenomenology of matter, or of matter conscious appearances in its
> theory of mind.
> A dualist has a even harder task, as he will take both mind and matter
> as primitive, and will have to derive a phenomenology of interactions
> between both. Today, few (serious) people believe that this could be
> meaningful.
Agreed.
> “materialism” is just naive physicalism: the idea that physics is the
> fundamental science. This makes matter into a primitive thing, and the
> theories will have to assume some primary physical elements, like
> atomes, or now, particles, or strings, etc.
>
> Mechanism leads to a neutral monism, where neither matter, nor mind, is
> taken as primitive, as they are explained (wrongly or correctly, we
> might not it is wrong through new expriements) from simpler
> (elementary arithmetic without induction).
Ok, so elementary arithmetic is taken as primitive. I have no doubt that this
is fruitful, but I wonder if it doesn't offer its own dead-ends.
> The beauty here (grin) is that fr the natural numbers, or more
> generally, for the universal machinery/machines, we can prove in all
> inductive extension of those machineries that they cannot be explained
> by anything which is not a universal machineries itself, so the
> numbers, with addition and multiplication and a bit of induction can
> explained that they have to be primitive.
>
> A physicalist might say that the superstrings are Turing universal, so
> we can take the super-strings as primitive, but then to explain
> consciousness, if he assumed Mechanism, he will have to justify the
> appearances of sperstrings from its primitive, and this will be very
> confusing if he start from the strings for the starting (primitive)
> universal machinery.
> Physics is "machine independent” (in the language of computer
> scientist): it means that it does not depend on the choice of the phi_i
> (the universal machinery).
>
> With mechanism, no universal machine can know which computations
> support it, among an infinity of computations. It is even a priori a
> non countable infinity, as the first person are determined by all
> oracles. And any first person prediction, and thus any reading of any
> experimental device, must be explained by a statistics on the first
> person indeterminacy where the domain of “reconstitutions” is basically
> the set of all true sigma_1 sentences, structured by the
> self-referential relevant modes.
>
> An explanation is always a reduction of what we don’t understand (like
> mind and matter) to something that we do understand or at least can
> accept as granted (like 0 + 0 = 0, 1 + 0 = 1, 2 + 0 = 2, … and others,
> like 2 + 0 = 2 -> Ex(2+x = 2), etc ).
>
> Consciousness is explained by being an invariant indubitable truth
> which is also non provable and non definable (without invoking some
> notion of truth) that all machine discover when looking inward (which
> is what G* proves, so that is proven by all (arithmetically sound)
> universal machines, although in the conditional way, like “assuming I
> am not wrong up to now then …, or assuming Mechanism, then …).
Yes, but we could also be crazy. We ourselves cannot escape Gödel. Which I
think is a beautiful thing, but I am in an agnostic mood. In other words, I
think that you place some "faith" in the natural numbers. No?
> Mechanism is the assumption that this invariant is also invariant for
> any relative digital functional substitution made at *some* level (it
> is a self-finitist local and relative assumption).
>
>
> > Does there have to be any X such that "primitive X" is true? This is a real
> > question, not a rhetorical one.
>
> You will fall in Brent’s virtuous circle (still a bit vicious to me).
I think that Brent is more optimistic than me. I don't think that creating real
AI will explain consciousness, even though I am interested in the problem of
creating real AI. My circle is totally vicious.
> Or in ZF + the non foundation axiom, like Stephen Paul King pressed me
> to do, although here you still have a notion of set taken as primitive,
> at least.
>
> With Mechanism, we get free such sort of circles, and spirales (!), in
> the phenomenology,. They are capable of being explained with the
> “simple" natural numbers. Taking such circle as primitive, is like
> deciding to avoid the search of an explanation to them, and like to
> avoid the experimental testing. Eventually you might been led to
> philosophical relativism and dilute truth (and causality,
> responsibility) etc.
>
> I can imagine a materialist psychologist claiming that the natural
> numbers are not primitive but explainable by a cultural
> anthropo-evolutionary genetic, say. But 1) he is confusing the human
> natural number theories with arithmetic, and 2) he is cheating, as his
> explanation will make only sense by an implicit acceptance of some
> universal machinery equivalent to the belief in RA, so, he is just
> confusing level of explanation. Yes, the human number theory is a
> fascinating subject, and it sustains the idea that 2+2=4 is “really
> absolutely” true, as all humans agree on this, and even many other
> mammals, actually. But that is a different subject matter than the one
> number theory is build for. This one avoid the philosophy of numbers
> by using the axiomatic method. It should be obvious that with
> mechanism, the discovery of the numbers by the numbers is part of the
> meta-arithmetic that Gödel’s showed embeddable in arithmetic. The real
> bomb is still Gödel’s 1931, even if it is the two theorems of Solovay
> which sums it all in G, and G*.
>
>
>
> >
> > Hope that you (and everyone else) are doing well!
>
> I wish you (and everyone) the best Take care.
>
> Bruno
>
>
>
>
> > Telmo
> >
> >> Bruno
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>>
> >>> Brent
> >>>
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