Le 14-févr.-06, à 05:19, danny mayes wrote (to Ben):
I doubt Marchal's ideas will be made widely known or popularized in
the foreseeable future.
This looks like an encouraging statement :-)
The problem isn't with the name of his theory, or with any problem
with Bruno per se beyond
this: There doesn't seem to be an easily reducible way to summarize
the theory in a
manner that is digestible to anyone beyond the highly specialized in
similar fields.
I doubt this. I would even say that highly specialized people have more
difficulties due to the lack of a panoramic view of the subject, and
the lack of knowledge in the adjacent fields. Logicians doesn't really
know the conceptual problem of QM. And Physicist rarely know what a
formal system is all about. Both are unaware of the mind-body problem,
etc.
Probably popularization is technically more easy (but professionally
more dangerous).
My theory, in a first approximation, is just Mechanism, the
doctrine that we are machine, in the sense that we cannot see any
difference once we are substituted at some level of description of
ourselves. That theory already appears in some ancient Indian and
chinese texts, and is often attributed to Descartes.
Somehow my theory is already popularized in many science-fiction
books and essays. Dennet and Hofstadter are quite close in the book
Mind's I, which I recommend. They didn't see the first person comp
indeterminacy though. And, given that Hofstadter wrote an impressive
book on Godel's theorem, where he criticizes correctly the use of
Godel's incompleteness against mechanism, I thought awhile that it was
not even necessary I wrote my work. Almost like Judson Web, Hofstadter
sees that Godel's theorem could be a good news for Mechanism/Comp. My
work preceded those books for ten years, but has been trapped in a sort
of typically european bureaucratic nightmare which will make me
abandoning research for a while.
Have you read the Mind's I book? I think you could follow the UDA
argument easily if you have done that. The argument requires only some
passive understanding of what a digital universal machine (computer)
is.
I keep saying I have no theory. I have just a theorem or an argument
(informal and (hopefully) rigorous) according to which, if we take the
comp hyp. seriously enough then eventually physics should be
retrievable from [computer science + the amount of theological faith
needed for saying yes purposefully to the doctor].
I certainly understand the basics of some of his ideas,
If you understand the UDA, you get the point If not, you can
always ask questions or make critics.
but when it gets into all
his logical analysis I just have never found myself willing to devote
myself to the
time required to really get into the detail of where he is coming
from.
... because the logical analysis does not add anything. The UDA shows
that comp entails that necessarily physics is a branch of computer
science (in a large sense).
The logical analysis is the beginning of an *actual* derivation of
physics from computer science. This *illustrates* how such a
derivation, which is made necessary by UDA, can *actually* be
undertaken. The logical analysis also shows the relative consistency of
the enterprise. Would Godel's theorem be false, i.e. would truth be
equal to provability, all hypostases would collapse into classical
logic. Thanks to Godel's theorem, they are all different.
And I
would consider myself highly interested in these topics and at least
reasonably intelligent.
Do you have the little book by Smullyan Forever Undecided? It is a
very cute introduction to the logic G. Once you understand what is G,
you can understand all the other arithmetical hypostases (effective and
non effective person points of view, Theaetetical variants, see below).
Even something as mundane as the MWI (to this group at least) runs
into a
brickwall when presented to the layperson. You should see the
conversations
I have with my wife. Tell people everything is made of strings. Or
space and
time can be warped and curved. They may not understand the science and
math behind it at all, but at least you are speaking their language.
I think you have too much imagination which make you think my work is
technically difficult. It isn't. In Brussels my work has been
criticized has being too much easy. Argument of the type: my two years
old niece can do that! (*).
The world is not ready for his ideas.
From -500 to +500, the world has been ready for quite similar Platonist
Questioning, I tend to think now. And actually Plotinus seem to have
got the main points with almost all details (without comp!). After:
just 1000 years of a sort of obscurity with respect to the fundamental
questioning, and so much religious or ideological brainwashing that in
some countries we can even
