Re: The difference between a 'chair' concept and a 'mathematical concept' ;)
I hope you will excuse my butting in here, but I was passing through on a different mission and became disturbed by reading some earlier posts of this thread. My 2 cents worth: I tend to think that David Nyman has the more sceptically acceptable slant on this. Mathematics and logic are constructions of the human brain. They are extremely useful, in appropriate contexts, because they allow effective, efficient and economical representations of processes in the world. There is no particularly good reason however to think that mathematical objects exist outside of human brains or phenotypic extensions such as computers. I think it IS fair to say though that, for example, numbers and formulae written on a page or blackboard are literal extenstions of the constructs within the active mathematical mind. That so much of what occurs in 'the world' CAN be represented by numbers and other mathematical/logical objects and processes, is better expained by assuming that the great 'IT' of noumenal nature is actually made up of many simple elements [taken firstly in the general sense]. This underlying simplicity which yet combines and permutates itself into vast complexity, is something we infer with good reason - it works! But you cannot DEDUCE from it that numbers and other mathematical objects exist 'out there', except in those particular regions of space time that happen now to be mathematically active brains. Regards Mark Peaty [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: David Nyman wrote: I fail to see any 'knock-down' character in this argument. Peter says that mathematical concepts don't refer to anything 'external', and on one level I agree with him. But they are surely derived from the contingent characteristics of experience, and AFAICS experience in this context reduces to the contents of our brains. So 'infinite sets' is just a model (brain material at another level of description) which IMO counts as a 'physical notion' unless you start off as an idealist. Put simply, you can't think mathematical thoughts without using your brain to instantiate them - and you don't literally have to instantiate an 'infinite set' in the extended sense in order to manipulate a model with the formal characteristics you impute to this concept. In fact, the inability to convert infinite and transfinite sets into physical notions is excellent empirical evidence that they *don't* exist in any literal sense - they don't need to, as their usefulness is as limit cases within models, not as literal existents (nobody has ever literally deployed an infinite set). A particular concrete (brain) instantiation of a mathematical concept can't be equivalent to the math concept itself. I pointed out that many different physical processes can implement the *same* algorithm - this shows that the mathematical concept of the algorithm can't be identified with any particular physical instantiation of it. Read up on the failure of simple Identity theories of mind. Surely you understand the difference between a *Class* (an abstract actegory) and an *Object* (a particular instance of the concept).? The Class is not the object That's the first part of the argument for platonism. (1) The second part of the argument is the argument from indispensibility - you can't remove mathematical concepts from theories of reality because some concepts (like inifnite sets for example) can't be converted into physical notions. (2) It's the combination of (1) and (2) that clinches it. This is a thoroughgoing contingentist position, and I don't see that it can be refuted except by rejecting contingentism and starting from idealism. But then you've begged what you're trying to prove. Aren't you guilty of the same thing? You're simply assuming that materialism is the ultimate metaphysics and trying to reduce everything to that. You do this because the human brain is only capable of representing *physical* things in conscious experience. But what is a *physical* thing really? For instance is the *length* of the computer screen in front of you an objective value? Someone moving close to light speed perpendicular to your computer screen would record a quite different value for the length of your computer screen than you would. This suggests that the physical form is not objectively real. What *is* objectively out, is a 4-dimensional world-time for your computer screen as described by general relativity but this 4-d world-time is a *mathematical* concept. One could imagine an alien race or a super-intelligence which had no consciousness of physical things, but *sensed* everything purely in *mathematical* terms. For instance imagine if they a way to *directly sense* 4-d world-lines. Then it might be 'obvious' to alien philosophers that mathematical things were objevtively real. 'If according to the simplest explanation, an entity is complex and autonomous, then that entity is
Re: Barbour's mistake: An alternative to a timless Platonia
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Now, how, you may ask, can these three things actually be 'incomprehensible' when I've just defined them? ;) I point out again that incomprehensible things could be referenced indirectly by their comprehensible effects. And I maintain that's all of any definitions of these three things actually do. After all: have you ever *seen* Energy, Volition and Information directly? Never! All definitions of these three things have only ever referenced them indirectly by their comprehensible effects! So these three things *could* logically be incomprehensible things. ... and indeed, by these tokens, we ourselves. We stand, as it were, with our feet in incomprehensibility: the noumenon presents a boundary to what we can know of our ontology, in the form of the energy and information that constitute our epistemology - what can be comprehended. On the subject of 'timelessness': must we not separate the notion of the *experience* of time from the separate issue of the compresent dimensional *existence* of 'times'? Our use of the same term for both may be profoundly misleading. The question 'why do we experience time?' is surely of the same order as 'why do we experience red?' You have remarked that 'qualia' are mathematical/ ontological categories (i.e. categories of the noumenon: a mathematical one, in your schema). 'Time-as-experienced' is by the same token surely a qualitative meta-category - an experiential vector along which lies the successive qualitative states of information structures representing perceivers-and-their-perceptions. Again, human comprehension may seem to be a barrier here - to a more powerful understanding, our own level of temporal experience may lie transparent. But we may still expect that such a comprehension must take the form of *some* perceptual scheme of differentiation - and such differentiation of a perceptual field by some perceiver is what perhaps lies at the heart of any 'experience of time'. You may still feel that there is an essential 'dynamism' to the experience of time that is lacking in any 'block' view. To this I would simply suggest that dynamism entails a 'duality' of perspective - a 'fixed' point from which 'change' can be discerned. Can it be that the noumenon is the 'fixed point' for any observation? After all, we can see that each 'observer' compresently partakes of the incomprehensible and the comprehensible, the whole and the part, the global and the local, the ontic and the epistemic. Given the organisation of 'qualia' into temporal meta-structures - what Barbour calls time capsules - the *experience* of time may simply be the *qualitative* precondition whereby any information whatsoever becomes 'present' to some perceiver. David Those who have read my past threads and seen the summary of my metaphysics analysis (Mathematico-Cognition Reality Theory-MCRT) know that I think that time is an irreducible property of reality and my analysis suggests that even Barbour's configuration space (Platonia, the Multiverse whatever you want to call it) isn't truly timeless. The trouble with a timeless multiverse lies in the notion of 'the space of all mathematical possibilities'. Unfortunately the notion of 'all mathematical possibilities co-existing' is highly suspect, precisely because it's so ill-defined. There are some things in math for which the quantifier 'existence' is suspect infinite sets in particular. If 'the space of all possibilities' is itself still evolving as I suggested, then Platonia would not be timeless as Barbour (and many here on this list) thinks. Another reason for suspecting that Platonia isn't truly timeless lies in the fact that Barbour's Platonia is an attempt to totally remove 'boundary conditions' from science. Note that no attempts to remove boundary conditions from science have ever succeeded. Why should Barbour's theory suddenly be the exception? There's a very good reason for defining boundary conditions... because without an 'inside and 'outside' to an entity, one simply cannot analyze it as a dynamical system. That's why no attempt to remove boundary conditions from science has ever succeeded. Now when the 'system' under disussion is 'all of reality' it may seem tautological that 'there exists nothing outside reality because reality is everything that exists' but... well... this so called tautology is not neccesserily true! The trouble lies in the definition of a 'thing'. If there are incomprehensible things, then it may actually make sense to talk about them existing 'outside reality'. Standard philosophy only recognizes one quantifier for 'existence' but perhaps thre are several different notions. Again, Barbour's attempt to 'remove an outside to reality' also prevents us from analyzing reality as a dynamical system, because any system analysis requires us to define system boundaries and external actors. Again, no attempts to remove
Maudlin's argument
Bruno Marchal wrote in explaining Maudlin's argument: "For any given precise running computation associated to some inner experience, you can modify the device in such a way that the amount of physical activity involved is arbitrarily low, and even null for dreaming experience which has no inputs and no outputs. Now, having suppressed that physical activity present in the running computation, the machine will only be accidentally correct. It will be correct only for that precise computation, with unchanged environment. If it is changed a little bit, it will make the machine running computation no more relatively correct. But then, Maudlin ingenuously showed that counterfactual correctness can be recovered, by adding non active devices which will be triggered only if some (counterfactual) change would appear in the environment. I believe the argument is erroneous. Maudlin's argument reminds me of the fallacy in Maxwell's demon. To reduce the machine's complexity Maudlin must perform a modicum of analysis, simulation etc.. to predict how the machine performs in different situations. Using his newly acquired knowledge, he then maximally reduces the machine's complexity for one particular task, keeping the machine fully operational for all other tasks. In effect Maudlin has surreptitiously inserted himself in the mechanism. so now, we don't have just the machine but we have the machine plus Maudlin. The machine is not simpler or not existent. The machine is now Maudlin! In conclusion, the following conclusion reached by Maudlin and Bruno is fallacious. "Now this shows that any inner experience can be associated with an arbitrary low (even null) physical activity, and this in keeping counterfactual correctness. And that is absurd with the conjunction of both comp and materialism." Maudlin's argument cannot be used to state that "any inner experience can be associated with an arbitrary low (even null) physical activity." Thus it is not necessarily true that comp and materialism are incompatible. I think the paradox can be resolved by tracing how information flows and Maudlin is certainly in the circuit, using information, just like Maxwell's demon is affecting entropy. George --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
