I completely agree, Arturo! And Everett’s many world’s interpretation have been 
criticised, I would say, killed, since long, for example by Healy and Stein, 
both in NOUS XVIII, 1984. The problem is conceptual; what does Everett mean by 
a world? Referring to your simple example below, one might reasonably ask; 
which individual is the reference of ’me’ in the two scenarios? It cannot be 
the same, of course. So Everett suggests that I have innumerable replicas in 
innumerable worlds. Well if you are allowed to postulate whatever you like, you 
can explain anything, and refute any unpleasant scientific observation. Quantum 
mechanics certainly does not force us to do that.

Lars-Göran

17 maj 2018 kl. 16:30 skrev tozziart...@libero.it<mailto:tozziart...@libero.it>:


Dear Bruno,

as far as you wrote and I understood, your Mechanistic framework requires the 
tenet that quantum wave collapse does not exist.

In order to prove that, you invoke the authority of Everett.


I want to provide a simple, very rough explanation (excuse me!), for the FISers 
unaware of the Everett's account:

You are in front of two streets, one turns left and the other turns rigth.

You have to choose where to turn.

If you turn left, you could not anymore turn right.

This is, very roughly speaking, what quantum wave collapse means: if you make a 
choice, it is irreversible in our Universe.



In order to avoid such irreversibility, Everett, who did not like quantum wave 
collapse, provided the following account:

every time you have to choose whether you have to turn left or right, the 
entire Universe splits in two different Universes: in one Universe you turn 
left, while another you turns right in another Universe.



Now, dear FISer, tell me if the Everett's approach is tenable or it is not, 
and, if your answer is that it is tenable, tell me how it could be even 
theoretically demonstrated.


Il 17 maggio 2018 alle 11.25 Bruno Marchal 
<marc...@ulb.ac.be<mailto:marc...@ulb.ac.be>> ha scritto:

Dear Arturo,


On 14 May 2018, at 12:25, tozziart...@libero.it<mailto:tozziart...@libero.it> 
wrote:


Daer Bruno,

first of all, sorry for the previous private communication, but for a mistake, 
I did not add the FIS list in the CC.


Concerning your Faith, i.e., arithmetic,

I agree it is faith, but it is less faith than any scientists. Especially that 
we need only a tiny part of the arithmetical truth.

Did you have heard about someone taking back his/her children from primary 
school when they are taught the laws of addition and multiplication, by 
claiming they have not that faith?




this appraoch... simply does not work for the description of physical and 
biological issues.

The approach just study the necessary logical consequence of assuming our 
bodies to be digitalisable.  I predicted all the quantum weirdness from this 45 
years ago. But then it took me 30 years to get precise mathematical 
predictions, which until now fits with the fact, when physicalism needs a 
brain-mind identity thesis which has been shown inconsistent.
I am not sure why you say that Mechanism cannot work for physical and 
biological issues. You might confuse the computable (like automata), and the 
semi-computable (like the universal Turing machine).





It is just in our mind.  See:

http://vixra.org/abs/1804.0132


What do you mean by “real world”?
I agree Euclid geometry is in our head. The whole physical reality is indeed 
shown to be “in the head” of *any* universal machine or universal number, etc.




I'm not confusing digital physics with Mechanism, and I read, of course, the 
work of Everett (the original mathematical one), and it is exactly like 
Mechanism: an untestable, fashinating analogy.  He wants, without any 
possibility of proof, to extend the realm of quantum dynamics to the whole 
macroscopic world.


For a logician; Everett is the Herbrand model of the Schroedinger equation, 
that is QM without the unintelligible “collapse” of the wave. Put simply: the 
“many-world” is just literal quantum mechanics without collapse.
Everett did not propose a new speculative theory: he just showed that we don’t 
need the collapse axiom, as QM + mechanism recovers it phenomenologically. Then 
my work shows this can work only if we recover also the wave itself from 
arithmetic (or Turing equivalent).

It is the collapse which is bad and unclear, and not needed, untestable, 
assumption.



When you state that:

"the reality becomes the universal mind (the mind of the universal Turing 
machine) and the physical is the border of the universal mind viewed from 
inside that universal mind".

you are saying something that, reductionistic or not (I do not understand your 
emphasis on this rather trascurable concepts of matter, reduction, and so on), 
needs to be clearly proofed, before becoming the gold standard.


What I did has been peer reviewed and verified by many people. Have you read my 
papers?
Did you find a problem, or are you just criticising the assumption/theory? Ask 
specific question, but normally all this has been clearly proofed.



A suggestion: you cold try to correlate your "physical border of the Universal 
mind viewed from inside that universal mind" with the holographic principle and 
the cosmic horizon.

I prefer to invoke the physical reality only for the testing. There is some 
possible analogy here, which might be interesting, but Mechanism is an 
hypothesis in psychology, or theology, not in physics, which needs to be 
entirely recovered from arithmetic (or Turing equivalent). For this type of 
Mechanist (Neo)platonism: looking at the physical universe is … cheating. 
(Somehow).




But in order to do that, you need a strong math, not to quote old philosophers 
that,

I have decided to study Mathematics for just that. My thesis is a PhD in 
mathematics and theoretical computer science. All what I say has been 
translated entirely in arithmetic, by using Gödel’s technic of arithmetisation 
of metamathematics. I got testable quantitative result which have been tested. 
I am not sure you have study my work, which is usually criticised for being … 
mathematics.



for a simple matter of luck, were able to inconsciously predict some recent 
developments of the modern science.

? I predicted the non-cloning theorem 30 years before the physicist get it, and 
much more.

Please study my papers before judging(*)




  I like logic, I love logic, I read logic, I study logic, I read a lot of the 
latin texts of the old philosophers that use it (in the Medioeval ones), but I 
have to confess that the scientific value of logic is close to zero.  Both of 
the ancient and of the "novel" logics.


The logicians are the one who discovered the universal machine (computer), 
before it was build. You are using one just now. You seem to ignore Gödel’s 
contribution, which in my opinion is, when we assume mechanism (the older 
metaphysical/theological assumption)  the most important result ever discovered 
by the humans.



Sorry again!


You don’t need to be sorry, but my feeling is that you are not aware of the 
result that I got. It is science, which means that it is not a question of 
agreeing or disagreeing, but of understanding or refuting.
Maybe you could study the following papers (if interested):

Marchal B. The computationalist reformulation of the mind-body problem. Prog 
Biophys Mol Biol; 2013 Sep;113(1):127-40

Marchal B. The Universal Numbers. From Biology to Physics, Progress in 
Biophysics and Molecular Biology, 2015, Vol. 119, Issue 3, 368-381.

B. Marchal. The Origin of Physical Laws and Sensations. In 4th International 
System Administration and Network Engineering Conference, SANE 2004, Amsterdam, 
2004.
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/publications/SANE2004MARCHALAbstract.html 
(sane04)

Plotinus PDF paper link:
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/publications/CiE2007/SIENA.pdf
(Reference: Marchal, B, 2007, B. Marchal. A Purely Arithmetical, yet 
Empirically Falsifiable, Interpretation of Plotinus’ Theory of Matter. In Barry 
Cooper S. Löwe B., Kent T. F. and Sorbi A., editors, Computation and Logic in 
the Real World, Third Conference on Computability in Europe June 18-23, pages 
263–273. Universita degli studi di Sienna, Dipartimento di Roberto Magari, 
2007).

The math part requires some background in mathematical logic including 
provability logics, like:

G. Boolos. 1979, The Unprovability of Consistency, an Essay in Modal Logic,
Cambridge University Press.

G. Boolos. The Logic of Provability. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 
1993.


Best,

Bruno

PS That is my second message. Possible comment next week.





---------- Messaggio originale ----------
Da: Bruno Marchal < marc...@ulb.ac.be<mailto:marc...@ulb.ac.be>>
A: FIS Webinar < fis@listas.unizar.es<mailto:fis@listas.unizar.es>>
Data: 14 maggio 2018 alle 11.48
Oggetto: Re: [Fis] [FIS] Is information physical?

Dear Arturo, Dear Colleagues,


On 11 May 2018, at 18:36, tozziart...@libero.it<mailto:tozziart...@libero.it> 
wrote:


Dear Bruno,
I'm sorry, but I cannot agree.


I take a disagreement as a courtesy to pursue a conversation, which would be 
boring without them.

But, what I say has been proved, peer reviewed by many, so it is perhaps more a 
matter of understanding than of agreeing.

Or you are just telling me that you disbelieve in Mechanism. I prefer to remain 
agnostic.

Mechanism is my working hypothesis. The idea is to take it seriously until we 
find a contradiction (internal or with the observation). It is a common by 
default type of hypothesis, held by many people, notably most materialist. But 
here I can prove that (even weak) materialism (the belief in ontological 
primary substances/matter) is inconsistent with (even weak) mechanism. See my 
papers for this, it is not entirely obvious.




"eve­ntually I found a co­nceptually isomorphic explanation in ari­thmetic."  
Isomorphy is a dangerous claim: the underliying mechanisms in biology could be 
something other than isomorphism (i.e., an Ehresmann connection in a hyperbolic 
manifold, as it occurs in gauge theories).


Nothing in the observation point on either primary matter, nor on non 
mechanism. I am not sure why you think that Ehresmann connection or gauge 
theories are non mechanist. Actually Mechanism entails that the physical 
phenomenology cannot be mechanistic. You might confuse Mechanism in the 
cognitive science with digital physics.

Digital physics (the idea that the physical reality is Turing emulable) does 
not make any sense. It entails mechanism, but mechanism entails the falsity of 
digital physics (see my paper or ask question: that is not obvious). So, with 
or without Mechanism, Digital Physics makes no sense.





Futhermore, you simply change the name of the primum movens, the first 
principium: instead of calling it physics, you call it arithmetic.  This is as 
fideistic as the Carnap's physicalist claims.

?

Physics assumes Arithmetic.

Arithmetic do not assume physics.

I can follow you with the idea that arithmetic still ask for some faith, but 
the amount is less than assuming a primary physical reality.

Then, I have never heard about parents taking back their kids when they are 
taught elementary arithmetic.

Also, with mechanism, we need to assume only a Turing universal machinery. With 
less than that, we get no universal machinery at all. With one of them, we get 
all of them. I simply use arithmetic because everyone are familiar with it. The 
theology and physics of machine do not depend on the choice of the universal 
system assumed at the start. It is an important new invariant of physics. 
Indeed, it determines entirely physics (always assuming Mechanism (aka 
computationalism).





"If you think that a brain is not Turing emul­able, you might be the one to 
whom people can ask".  The burden of the final proof is yours, because your 
claim is stronger and less conventional than mine.

Mechanism is a common, implicit or explicit, hypothesis among philosophers and 
scientists. It is a very old theory, already in “the question of Milinda” (a 
buddhist old text), and of course Descartes. Diderot identified it with 
rationalism. That makes sense, because to assume its negation consists in 
adding something for which we do not have any evidence (until now).

Maybe you confuse computable (like automata) and semi-computable (like Turing 
machine). It is the existence of universal machine which is responsible for the 
incompleteness of theories, because there is no complete theory possible for 
anything enough rich to prove the existence of universal machine, like, 
amazingly enough, already very elementary arithmetic.




  If you say that angels do exist, you have to provide the proof, it's not me 
that have to provide the proofs that they do not exist.


But you are the one saying that “angels” exist, with “angels” pointing on 
something not “computable nor semi-computable” in nature or the mind …

Mechanism is just the conjunction of the Church-Turing thesis (CT) + “yes 
doctor” (YD, the idea that we can survive with a brain digital prosthesis). A 
version of Mechanism is that there is no magic at play in our body.

Then it seems that you claim a form of weak materialism, but there too, you are 
the one reifying the notion of primary-matter. That is a strong axiom in 
metaphysics, and there are no evidences for it. It is a natural extrapolation 
from the mundane experience, and we can understand why evolution has select 
such a belief, as we need to take the existence of prey and predator seriously. 
But this, as the Indian and Greeks understood a long time ago, does not provide 
any evidence of primary matter (a notion absent of any book in physics).



"I will ask your evidence for the wave collapse." This is indeed a strange 
claim.  There are tons of published papers that demonstrate the wave collapse.

?

You might give one reference. I have never found one. I would say that there 
are evidences for the wave only.
The collapse is an addition to avoid the many-histories/worlds/minds, which 
follows from taking the wave seriously, as the experimental interference 
invites us to do. It introduces an non intelligible cut between the observed 
and the observer. It introduces indeterminacy and non locality. And there are 
many incompatible theories for the collapse, which is indeed rather non 
intelligible.

Then, with Mechanism, the problem is that we have to extract the wave too, from 
*all* computations, and not just the quantum one. But that is what I have done: 
I extracted a quantum logic where machines have to expect it: a measure on all 
computations.



You may discuss why and how it occurs, but you cannot negate this clear, 
polite, puzzling, experimentally-detected phenomenon.


I would suggest you to study the work of Everett, who by using only the wave 
and Mechanism, explains entirely the appearance of a collapse without assuming 
it.
Then, as I say, bu using mechanism, Everett missed that all computations are 
already in arithmetic, and that universal digital machine cannot detect in the 
first person way if they are emulated by any basic particular universal 
machine, and the wave itself required to be explained by digital information 
theory (aka computer science).

Here, very often people misses that all computations are not just described in 
elementary arithmetic, but are realised, in virtue of the true relations among 
numbers. 99% of this has been found by Gödel, but Gödel missed the point, done 
later by Turing, Post, Church, Kleene, etc.


I think that your theory has just analogies with quantum dynamics, and the 
analogy is the worst enemy of science.

There is no analogy. When you say “yes doctor”, the digital brain in the head 
will not be an analogy. The rest followed by logic and elementary arithmetic.




This seems the same type of theories that claim, for a simple analogy, that the 
brain and consciousness work at quantum levels.

But if we postulate collapse, all the evidence becomes evidence for this. Yet, 
Abner Shimony has refuted, or show the amount of magic, needed to sustain that 
consciousness reduces the wave packet.

You might study my papers, as all what I say just follow from CT + YD. 
(Church’s Thesis + “Yes doctor”). Sometimes I call it Indexical 
computationalism, to distinguish it from Digital physics (in metaphysics. 
Digital physics can be useful as an approximation in some branches of physics).



Sorry, but diplomacy has never been my first virtue…

No problem Arturo, as long as you don’t use insult or mockery, or ad hominem 
remarks, or things like that, which I take as “I have no argument but dislike 
what you did”.

My feeling is that you might ignore the important difference between computable 
and semi-computable, and you might think that mechanism is a reductionism, when 
it is more like a vaccine against the reductionist conception of machine and 
numbers, enforced by the incompleteness theorem.

You can guess that mechanism is less reductionist than non-mechanism, as the 
mechanist will say yes to his daughter when she want to marry a man with a 
prosthetic brain, where the non-mechanist will treat such a man as a less 
human, if not a( philosophical) zombie. Then you seem to assume a primary 
physical universe, which eventually do not make sense with the mechanist 
hypothesis.

To sum up; I have done two things:

- I have shown that (weak) mechanism is logically incompatible with (weak) 
materialism. So there is no problem with Materialists who reject Mechanism: as 
they should.

_ I have shown, by keeping up with my mechanist hypothesis, how to recover the 
physical appearance and its stability from arithmetic (or anything Turing 
equivalent). That makes Mechanism testable, by comparing the physics “in the 
head of the universal machine/number” with the observation. I did indeed 
extracted already the propositional physical logic, and got a quantum logic, 
which fits well with the one of the quantum physical logician (and is richer, 
so it makes new prediction). If mechanism is false, this provides in the Mong 
run a method to evaluate how much mechanism is wrong, and, who knows, to detect 
primary matter. But up to now, the empirical study of nature confirms 
Mechanism, more than Materialism.

I don’t know if mechanism is true or false. But I will not hide that I find it 
elegant. Arithmetic gives the third person sharable information, and 
incompleteness + non definability gives a platonic sort of first person 
information “theology” which includes the physical (material) appearances as an 
unavoidable phenomenology. I predicted the many-worlds from mechanism and 
arithmetic much before I knew about quantum physics, but it took me 30 years of 
works to derive precisely the quantum logical formalism. Needless to say, many 
open problems remains, but if we count the experimental evidences, they all add 
yup to mechanism, and none add up to (even weak) materialism. With Mechanism, 
Mark Burgin is right: information is not physical, but so is matter and the 
whole object of physics. Abstractly; the reality becomes the universal mind 
(the mind of the universal Turing machine) and the physical is the border of 
the universal mind viewed from inside that universal mind. Again, I do not 
defend that claim. I show it testable only.

Best regards,


Bruno





--
Inviato da Libero Mail per Android

venerdì, 11 maggio 2018, 06:03PM +02:00 da Bruno Marchal  
marc...@ulb.ac.be<mailto:marc...@ulb.ac.be> :

Dear Arturo,


On 10 May 2018, at 15:23,   tozziart...@libero.it<mailto:tozziart...@libero.it> 
 wrote:


Dear Bruno,
You state:
"IF indexical digital mechanism is correct in the cognitive science,
THEN “physical” has to be defined entirely in arithmetical term, i.e. 
“physical” becomes a mathematical notion.
...Indexical digital mechanism is the hypothesis that there is a level of 
description of the brain/body such that I would survive, or “not feel any 
change” if my brain/body is replaced by a digital machine emulating the 
brain/body at that level of description".

The problem of your account is the following:
You say "IF" and "indexical digital mechanism is the HYPOTHESIS”.

Yes, indeed. It is my working hypothesis. The idea came when asking myself how 
an amoeba can build an amoeba. Then I discovered the solution provided by 
molecular genetics, and eventually I found a conceptually isomorphic 
explanation in arithmetic. Note that by making explicit the use of the level of 
description, my hypothesis is much weaker than most form of computationalism 
you can see in the literature. My reasoning would remain valid even if my body 
is the entire universe, described by quantum string theory with 10^(10^100) 
exact decimals.


Therefore, you are talking of an HYPOTHESIS: it is not empirically tested and 
it is not empirically testable.

I start from an hypothesis and show, on the contrary that it is testable. I 
predicted well before I knew anything on quantum mechanics that Mechanism 
entails that if we look at nature below our substitution level, we should find 
the trace of infinitely many computations, and only later did I discover that 
quantum mechanics, without the wave collapse, entails something very similar. 
But Mechanism leads also to a complete formalism for both quanta and qualia, 
and here too, the theory/hypothesis match with facts. As it predicts a richer 
formalism, some crucial tests remain to be done.




You are starting with a sort of postulate: I, and other people, do not agree 
with it.

I prefer to not say my opinion. I am not defending Mechanism. I show it 
testable. My goal consists in showing that we can do metaphysics with the 
scientific method, where we never claim that something is true, just that the 
evidences makes it plausible.

The negation of the digital mechanist theory is usually considered as more 
“extra-ordinary”, as it implies either actual infinities, or some sort of 
magic. If you think that a brain is not Turing emulable, you might be the one 
to whom people can ask: what is your evidence? You might need to refer to 
something non computable in Nature and not recoverable through the first person 
indeterminacy. Note that mechanism entails that physics is NOT emulable by a 
Turing machine, and that consciousness is NOT emulable by a machine), so you 
need special sort of infinities. In fact, non-computationalism can only benefit 
from the study of computationalism, as it shows what is need for a theory to be 
a non-computationalist theory of mind.




The current neuroscience does not state that our brain/body is (or can be 
replaced by) a digital machine.

At which level?

Except for the famous but controversial “reduction of the wave packet” we still 
don’t have find in Nature a non computable process. That might exist, as we can 
“mathematically” find non computable solution to the Schroedinger equation, but 
those are not of the type we observe anywhere.




In other words, your "IF" stands for something that possibly does not exist in 
our real world.  Here your entire building falls down.

?

It falls down because you are making the contrary hypothesis, the hypothesis 
that something is not Turing emulable in nature, nor recoverable by the first 
person indeterminacy. That might be possible, but that has not been proved, nor 
even really defined. Your own hypothesis falls down by a similar argument than 
yours, but your own hypothesis is not as well clear as mine, unless you invoke 
the wave collapse? In that case, I will ask your evidence for the wave collapse.

You cannot use the word “real”. That is the same mistake than using the word 
God. What is real is what we search. We cannot start from the answer.

My feeling is that you confuse the universal machine, which is only partially 
computable, and confronted to a lot of non computable truth in arithmetic with 
the pre-Godelian conception of the machine, closer to to the notion now called 
automata. I guess I will have opportunity to make this clear.

I would like to insist (and detailed perhaps later) that Mechanism is the less 
reductionist theory we can imagine. Indeed, a universal machine can refute all 
complete theories about itself. It is a sort of universal dissident. More 
intuitively, it does not qualify as zombie a man or woman who would have 
survived with some brain prosthesis. The moral question will eventually be this 
one: “do you accept that your son or daughter marry someone having got an 
artificial hippocampus prosthesis?

Bruno



--
Inviato da Libero Mail per Android

giovedì, 10 maggio 2018, 02:46PM +02:00 da Bruno Marchal  
marc...@ulb.ac.be<mailto:marc...@ulb.ac.be> :

(This mail has been sent previously , but without success. I resend it, with 
minor changes). Problems due to different accounts. It was my first comment to 
Mark Burgin new thread “Is information physical?”.


Dear Mark, Dear Colleagues,


Apology for not answering the mails in the chronological orders, as my new 
computer classifies them in some mysterious way!
This is my first post of the week. I might answer comment, if any, at the end 
of the week.


On 25 Apr 2018, at 03:47, Burgin, Mark < 
mbur...@math.ucla.edu<mailto:mbur...@math.ucla.edu>> wrote:


Dear Colleagues,

I would like to suggest the new topic for discussion

                                      Is information physical?

That is an important topic indeed, very close to what I am working on.

My result here is that

IF indexical digital mechanism is correct in the cognitive science,

THEN  “physical” has to be defined entirely in arithmetical term, i.e. 
“physical” becomes a mathematical notion.

The proof is constructive. It shows exactly how to derive physics from 
Arithmetic (the reality, not the theory. I use “reality” instead of “model" 
(logician’s term, because physicists use “model" for “theory").

Indexical digital mechanism is the hypothesis that there is a level of 
description of the brain/body such that I would survive, or “not feel any 
change” if my brain/body is replaced by a digital machine emulating the 
brain/body at that level of description.

Not only information is not physical, but matter, time, space, and all physical 
objects become part of the universal machine phenomenology. Physics is reduced 
to arithmetic, or, equivalently, to any Turing-complete machinery. Amazingly 
Arithmetic (even the tiny semi-computable part of arithmetic) is Turing 
complete (Turing Universal).

The basic idea is that:

1) no universal machine can distinguish if she is executed by an arithmetical 
reality or by a physical reality. And,

2) all universal machines are executed in arithmetic, and they are necessarily 
undetermined on the set of of all its continuations emulated in arithmetic.

That reduces physics to a statistics on all computations relative to my actual 
state, and see from some first person points of view (something I can describe 
more precisely in some future post perhaps).

Put in that way, the proof is not constructive, as, if we are machine, we 
cannot know which machine we are. But Gödel’s incompleteness can be used to 
recover this constructively for a simpler machine than us, like Peano 
arithmetic. This way of proceeding enforces the distinction between first and 
third person views (and six others!).

I have derived already many feature of quantum mechanics from this (including 
the possibility of quantum computer) a long time ago.  I was about sure this 
would refute Mechanism, until I learned about quantum mechanics, which verifies 
all the most startling predictions of Indexical Mechanism, unless we add the 
controversial wave collapse reduction principle.

The curious “many-worlds” becomes the obvious (in arithmetic) many computations 
(up to some equivalence quotient). The weird indeterminacy becomes the simpler 
amoeba like duplication. The non-cloning of matter becomes obvious: as any 
piece of matter is the result of the first person indeterminacy (the first 
person view of the amoeba undergoing a duplication, …) on infinitely many 
computations. This entails also that neither matter appearance nor 
consciousness are Turing emulable per se, as the whole arithmetical 
reality—which is a highly non computable notion as we know since Gödel—plays a 
key role. Note this makes Digital Physics leaning to inconsistency, as it 
implies indexical computationalism which implies the negation of Digital 
Physics (unless my “body” is the entire physical universe, which I rather 
doubt).


My opinion is presented below:


   Why some people erroneously think that information is physical

   The main reason to think that information is physical is the strong belief 
of many people, especially, scientists that there is only physical reality, 
which is studied by science. At the same time, people encounter something that 
they call information.
   When people receive a letter, they comprehend that it is information because 
with the letter they receive information. The letter is physical, i.e., a 
physical object. As a result, people start thinking that information is 
physical. When people receive an e-mail, they comprehend that it is information 
because with the e-mail they receive information. The e-mail comes to the 
computer in the form of electromagnetic waves, which are physical. As a result, 
people start thinking even more that information is physical.
   However, letters, electromagnetic waves and actually all physical objects 
are only carriers or containers of information.
   To understand this better, let us consider a textbook. Is possible to say 
that this book is knowledge? Any reasonable person will tell that the textbook 
contains knowledge but is not knowledge itself. In the same way, the textbook 
contains information but is not information itself. The same is true for 
letters, e-mails, electromagnetic waves and other physical objects because all 
of them only contain information but are not information. For instance, as we 
know, different letters can contain the same information. Even if we make an 
identical copy of a letter or any other text, then the letter and its copy will 
be different physical objects (physical things) but they will contain the same 
information.
   Information belongs to a different (non-physical) world of knowledge, data 
and similar essences. In spite of this, information can act on physical objects 
(physical bodies) and this action also misleads people who think that 
information is physical.

OK. The reason is that we can hardly imagine how immaterial or non physical 
objects can alter the physical realm. It is the usual problem faced by dualist 
ontologies. With Indexical computationalism we recover many dualities, but they 
belong to the phenomenologies.




   One more misleading property of information is that people can measure it. 
This brings an erroneous assumption that it is possible to measure only 
physical essences. Naturally, this brings people to the erroneous conclusion 
that information is physical. However, measuring information is essentially 
different than measuring physical quantities, i.e., weight. There are no 
“scales” that measure information. Only human intellect can do this.

OK. I think all intellect can do that, not just he human one.

Now, the reason why people believe in the physical is always a form of the 
“knocking table” argument. They knocks on the table and say “you will not tell 
me that this table is unreal”.

I have got so many people giving me that argument, that I have made dreams in 
which I made that argument, or even where I was convinced by that argument … 
until I wake up.

When we do metaphysics with the scientific method, this “dream argument” 
illustrates that seeing, measuring, … cannot prove anything ontological. A 
subjective experience proves only the phenomenological existence of 
consciousness, and nothing more. It shows that although there are plenty of 
strong evidences for a material reality, there are no evidences (yet) for a 
primitive or primary matter (and that is why, I think, Aristotle assumes it 
quasi explicitly, against Plato, and plausibly against Pythagorus).

Mechanism forces a coming back to Plato, where the worlds of ideas is the world 
of programs, or information, or even just numbers, since very elementary 
arithmetic (PA without induction, + the predecessor axiom) is already Turing 
complete (it contains what I have named a Universal Dovetailer: a program which 
generates *and* executes all programs).

So I agree with you: information is not physical. I claim that if we assume 
Mechanism (Indexical computationalism) matter itself is also not *primarily* 
physical: it is all in the “head of the universal machine/number” (so to speak).

And this provides a test for primary matter: it is enough to find if there is a 
discrepancy between the physics that we infer from the observation, and the 
physics that we extract from “the head” of the machine. This took me more than 
30 years of work, but the results obtained up to now is that there is no 
discrepancies. I have compared the quantum logic imposed by incompleteness 
(formally) on the semi-computable (partial recursive, sigma_1) propositions, 
with most quantum logics given by physicists, and it fits rather well.

Best regards,

Bruno
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Arturo Tozzi

AA Professor Physics, University North Texas

Pediatrician ASL Na2Nord, Italy

Comput Intell Lab, University Manitoba

http://arturotozzi.webnode.it/



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Arturo Tozzi

AA Professor Physics, University North Texas

Pediatrician ASL Na2Nord, Italy

Comput Intell Lab, University Manitoba

http://arturotozzi.webnode.it/

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Lars-Göran Johansson
Seniorprofessor i teoretisk filosofi



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