Re: QTI euthanasia (brouillon)

2008-11-05 Thread Bruno Marchal


Hi Günther,


 unfortunately I can't participate a lot at the moment because I'm quite
 busy, but I try to follow some of the discussion, and would like to 
 pose
 a question (to Bruno):

 Which is why I think philosophical zombies
 are impossible.

 I also think they are impossible, and you (Bruno) have already hinted
 once that you do not think them impossible,


I don't think them impossible because I have seen such zombies!
Indeed I have seen a false policeman on some road, they are for slowing 
down some cars.
I don't attribute consciousness to cartoon policeman, so that they are 
zombies, at least when I am a failed by them.
More exactly: I can conceive fake policemen in paper are not conscious, 
and that is all I need to accept I can be fail by some zombie.
Thus I can conceive zombies.
Developing this argument makes zombies logically conceivable, even, if 
I would refute the claim that a zombie acting exactly like I would act 
in any situation can exist. Accidental zombie can exist. It could 
depend what we put exactly in the term zombie.
I criticize sometimes Bohm Quantum mechanics by invoking the fact that 
the wave without particles is full of zombies.




 and here you clarify:

 If this were true, then the movie graph (step 8 without occam) would
 not been needed. Arithmetical truth is provably full of philosophical
 zombies if comp is true and step 8 false.

 Which arithemetical truths would correspond to philosophical zombies? I
 don't get this.


This is different. If I am a digital machine, the complete description 
and even emulation of the computations leading to my mental state, at 
the right level (which exists once we assume the comp hyp of course) is 
entirely encoded into prove of statement like the machine described by 
the number 43554500901655 (say) on imput 4545665450098987 (say) go to 
the state 67567689043. Such a description constitute a provable 
arithmetical truth (it is a typical Sigma_1 truth, actually a Sigma_0 
truth, meaning just it decidable.
So it is just a theorem in computer science: computations are encodable 
(and thus encoded) in the (additive+multiplicative) relations existing 
between numbers.
So, someone who does not believe in philosophical zombies, does not 
need the step 8 (the Movie Graph Argument MGA), because arithmetical 
truth does contains the computation describing, well, for example this 
very discussion we have here and now.
For me the MGA is needed because I don't want to rely on the non 
existence of zombie.




 I follow you that 1st person is recoverable by a 3rd person number
 theoretic description - or better, OMs are - but how would a zombie 
 come
 about? Can you give an example?


Just consider the computation which correspond to your actual real 
life. That computation is encoded (indeed an infinity of times) in the 
Universal Deploiement, which is itself encoded (indeed an infinity of 
times) in the set of all arithmetical truth. All right? Such a 
computation would define an arithmetical version of you, and would 
constitute a phisophical (indeed arithmetical) zombies.
If you define the zombies as having a material body, then it is 
different (again we should then better define zombie). But this move is 
irrelevant *after* the MGA.

Best regards,

Bruno Marchal



http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/


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Probability

2008-11-05 Thread Thomas Laursen

Hi everyone, I am a complete layman but still got the illusion that
maybe one day I would be able to understand the probability part of MW
if explained in a simple way. I know it's the most controversal part
of MW and that there are several competing understandings of
probability in MW, but still: none of them make sense to me! If every
line of history is realized then how can any line of history be more
probable than any other?

Kind regards,
Thomas Laursen

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Re: Probability

2008-11-05 Thread A. Wolf

 Hi everyone, I am a complete layman but still got the illusion that
 maybe one day I would be able to understand the probability part of MW
 if explained in a simple way. I know it's the most controversal part
 of MW and that there are several competing understandings of
 probability in MW, but still: none of them make sense to me! If every
 line of history is realized then how can any line of history be more
 probable than any other?

Mathematically, this isn't that hard to understand.  For example, consider 
the equation (1 / (x^2)) between 1 and positive infinity on the x axis.  The 
total area under the curve is 1, so it's a valid probability distribution. 
The area between x = 1 and x = 2 is 1/2, or 50%.  So if you pick a random 
point on the real number line between 1 and infinity, using that 
distribution, half the time that point will land between 1 and 2.  For any 
segment of the real line, you can determine exactly what the probability 
will be that a point will fall on it--even though the distribution extends 
forever.

The fact that there's an infinite number of choices doesn't mean that those 
choices can't be normalized to a probability distribution.  Gaussians 
(normal curves) describe most of the real data we measure in the sciences, 
in one way or another--and the mathematical expression for a Gaussian 
extends out forever.  Physics is filled with probabilities over infinite 
domains.

Anna


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