Dear Bruno and FIS colleagues, Here are my three comments on the current discussion: (1) It seems to me that one thing should be taken into account: computationalism is not a monolithic body of theory, and old approaches should not be mixed with the current ones.
Here is what Matthias Scheutz says (and I agree) in Computationalism: New Directions: "Classical computationalism -- -the view that mental states are computational states -- -has come under attack in recent years. Critics claim that in defining computation solely in abstract, syntactic terms, computationalism neglects the real-time, embodied, real-world constraints with which cognitive systems must cope. Instead of abandoning computationalism altogether, however, some researchers are reconsidering it, recognizing that real-world computers, like minds, must deal with issues of embodiment, interaction, physical implementation, and semantics. This book lays the foundation for a successor notion of computationalism. It covers a broad intellectual range, discussing historic developments of the notions of computation and mechanism in the computationalist model, the role of Turing machines and computational practice in artificial intelligence research, different views of computation and their role in the computational theory of mind, the nature of intentionality, and the origin of language." http://books.google.se/books?id=Y59zyNWnNfYC&printsec=front_cover&redir_esc=y (2) "The usual critics always assume type of first person/third person identity thesis which are incompatible both with computationalism or with quantum mechanics." (Bruno) All we know with confidence about the first person is from the third persons accounts about first persons. When it comes to first person accounts on the same first person, the "person" telling the story anyway is not the same person experiencing the world, because those two exist in different instants of time. (Here I refer to Minsky's view of dynamical societies of mind) So my account about my experiences comes from my memory and is a reconstruction. Psychologists know how unreliable self- accounts are. Why not simply admit that all the knowledge about the first person simply comes from the third persons accounts about first persons? (3) When it comes to digital/analog and discrete/continuous debate, it must be pointed out that some of computationalist approaches are purely discrete (what here is called digital) while others allow for both discrete and continuous representations.* I also agree with Hector and Wolfram that physics has primacy. If at some level of abstraction such as quantum mechanics one observes both continuum and discrete states, that means understanding the nature as a computational system at that level of abstraction, computations are both discrete and continuous (like computations of an analog computer). Our models of reality are not the same thing as reality. It is not the reality that is continuous or discrete - it is our best models of reality that are continuous or discrete. Reality is always more than our models. We are discussing our models. We are always in a search for the best (richest, most productive, most general etc.) models of reality, and we learn through the process and we will continue to learn. Learning does not depend only on the nature of reality, it also depends on human effort invested in our interactions with the world and the construction of increasingly better models. Best regards, Gordana *A very good and elucidating account of the discrete, continuous, analog, digital will be found in: Maley, C.J. Analog and digital, continuous and discrete. Philos. Stud. 2010, 155, 117-131. Also here: http://www.mdpi.com/2078-2489/2/3/460 From: fis-boun...@listas.unizar.es [mailto:fis-boun...@listas.unizar.es] On Behalf Of Bruno Marchal Sent: den 12 maj 2012 11:03 To: Hector Zenil Cc: fis@listas.unizar.es Information Science Subject: Re: [Fis] Stephen Wolfram discussing his ANKS in Reedit this Monday On 12 May 2012, at 00:55, Hector Zenil wrote: On Fri, May 11, 2012 at 11:23 PM, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be<mailto:marc...@ulb.ac.be>> wrote: On 11 May 2012, at 13:10, Hector Zenil wrote: Information that readers may find interesting: Stephen Wolfram has written the first in a series of blogs posts about NKS titled "It's Been 10 Years; What's Happened with A New Kind of Science?": http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/05/its-been-10-years-whats-happened-with-a-new-kind-of-science/ Stephen will also be hosting an Ask Me Anything (AMA) on Reddit, where he will be taking questions about NKS and his research program on Monday, May 14 at 3pm EST. I think it is a good opportunity to start an interesting discussion about several topics, including of course information and computation. It looks like advertising for a type of universal system, the cellular automata. Coincidently, Wolfram wrote today (http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/05/living-a-paradigm-shift-looking-back-on-reactions-to-a-new-kind-of-science/): "Looking through reviews, there are some other common themes. One is that A New Kind of Science is a book about cellular automata-or worse, about the idea (not in fact suggested in the book at all) that our whole universe is a giant cellular automaton. For sure, cellular automata are great, visually strong, examples for lots of phenomena I discuss. But after about page 50 (out of 1280), cellular automata no longer take center stage-and notably are not the type of system I discuss in the book as possible models for fundamental physics." Using cellular automata has an important role in modeling physics, notably diffusion processes. Using other models can hev their role, like quantum computation. My critics is about the implicit use of any particular computable model, which, I can argue, cannot work for a logical reason. If we are machine, then it means that there is a level of substitution of my part where my consciousness remains invariant for local functional substitution. This entails a notion of first person indeterminacy and makes us distributed on infinities of computations (that is not entirely trivial to explain; please look at the papers in my URL), so that physics arise more from a sum on all computational model than a particular computational model. This lead to verifiable consequence of computationalism, already explaining most quantum weirdness. It makes also computationalism testable. I gave an algorithm generating the experimental device configuration testing the physics as we have to extracted it from comp, accepting the classical theory of knowledge (the modal logic S4). People keep repeating what other say about others... (in this case, that his view is all about cellular automata). My view comes from the reading on the first edition of his book, sometimes ago, I admit. And then from the blog you kindly send to us, which does not address the quantum nature of the physical reality, nor consciousness, nor the (computationalist) mind body problem (my domain of study). ... Digital physics implies computationalism, but if you take the 1/3 person points of view distinction into account, computationalism entails a non digital physics. So digital physics is conceptually erroneous. See the references in my URL for a proof of that statement. You need only Church's Turing thesis, and the assumption that consciousness is invariant for *some* digital transformation (which follows from computationalism). This does not preclude that cellular automaton are very interesting, and can have many applications, but it is not clear to make it into a new science. We want to ask what about that science is, for it does not seem to address the most fundamental questions. Then perhaps you can ask him next Monday on his Reedit session I think he has some concerns about the place of observers in a digital world scenario. My point is that if "we" are digital, the world, or whatever responsible for the existence of our consciousness, cannot be digital. We must dissociate the hypothesis of a digital world and the hypothesis of the locally "digitalness" of person (computationalism). Digital physics implies computationalism, but computationalism implies the negation of digital physics. As for computationalism, he as I do, think that the question is about physics, the answer won't come therefore from a model of math or computation. But it can't come from physics, without begging the question of where physics come from, as Wheeler did foreseen. This is assuming Aristotelianism at the start, which is inconsistent with the assumption that "we" are locally digital. And as I said, computationalism in the cognitive science is incompatible with weak form of materialism and with physicalism in physics. I currently explain this in detail currently on the FOAR mailing list, if you are interested(*). The usual critics always assume type of first person/third person identity thesis which are incompatible both with computationalism or with quantum mechanics. Non computational Aristotelianism is consistent (even if not quite plausible, but who knows, really), but digital Aristotelianism is provably inconsistent. If computationalism is true, we have to come back to the oldest kind of science of all: Plato, in which physics is an aspect of a vaster reality. I can't of course be sure that some systematic mistake doesn't still exist in the reasoning, and I would certainly be pleased if someone found a (real) logical flaw (as opposed to dogma, argument per authority, personal convictions or to the philosophical hand waving we are so much used to in that fundamental domain since more than a millennium). - Bruno Marchal (*) http://groups.google.com/group/foar?hl=en http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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