Re: The Irrationality of Physicalism
On 21 Jul 2010, at 20:17, Brent Meeker wrote: On 7/21/2010 4:12 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: logic is a confusing term. Informally non logic = error, madness, pain, ... To fight against logic is dramatic when you see how people accept so easily conclusion of invalid inference (like in the political health debate). Cooper seems unaware of the branch of math called logic, which illustrates that there is many logics. There is almost as much logic as they are mathematical structures. Then classical logic is the most simple and polite logic to describe all those different logics. Cooper is well aware of that. But he proposes non-classical logics different from modal extensions. To be sure I have not read Cooper. But when I say that classical logic is the best tool for studying non classical logic, I was not thinking of modal extension of classical logic. The success of quantum logic, intuitionistic logic, relevance logic, fuzzy logic, etc. is due to the fact that they have nice semantics as can be shown by using classical logic. It is just false that science is classical-logic centred. Since the Brouwer-Cantor debate, weak logics (non classical sub-logic) have kept the attention of the professional logicians. And in science, classical logic is almost ignored. And in day-life, even much of logic (classical or not) is quasi-systematically ignored. You can be sure that the number of people executed or in jail due to error in logic is very big. Just think about the smoker of cannabis in the USA, to take just one example. SO...taken with the quotes I provided in my initial response to Brent, how friendly do you think he sounds to your position? I think he sounds friendlier to mine! Cooper's position is non sense. I'm afraid. He is the one stuck on Aristotelian logic. He is interested in logic as a component of reason, by which he means decision theory as well as inference. But he notes that decision theory needs to be expanded to consider temporal relations. He proposes to extend logic by finding evolutionarily stable logics. His program is fairly radical - not at all stuck in classical logic. All right then. I am not opposed to such kind of research. I have myself study genetic regulatory system in term of different logics. That may be interesting. Then again, he does not address the comp issue. All what I was asking (to Rex) was why he thought that Cooper's view is not friendly with the consequences of the comp hypothesis, which are radical, but at another level (the level of the origin of the physical laws). Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: numbers?
Dear John, On 21 Jul 2010, at 22:03, John Mikes wrote: Dear Bruno, on diverse lists I bounce into the 'numbers' idea - in different variations. I wonder if your position states that the world (whatever) has been 'erected' (wrong word) based on integer numbers and their additive multiplicity, or it can be 'explained' by such? The answer is it can be explained by such. The world is not computable. It is not a number, nor is it made of numbers. It is not so much a mosition of mine (which I keep for myself) than a point, or proof, or argument. All what I say is that if we are Turing emulable, then the phsyical lwas are no more fundamental, and are a consequence of the way the numbers are related with each other. But the comp non locality, and the comp indeterminacy entails that matter is in principle a highly non computational stuff. The fact that the world seems partially computable g-has to be explained. We can no more (assuming the comp hyp) take the existence of laws for granted. Instead of number, we have the choice of taking any terms from any Turing-complete theory. I would take the combinators or the lambda terms if people were not so freaked out by new mathematical symbols. At least numbers are taught in school. It makes a big difference in my agnostic views (I dunno) because to explain is human logic (never mind which kind) All right. Sure. while to erect means ontological bind - what I cannot condone in its entire meaning. Consciousness came up as being primary or not: I hope thought of in my version, as response to information - with response in ANY way and information as our acquired knowledge of relations among components of the totality (unlimited wholeness). OK. Numbers, however, as I referred to earlier - quoting David Bohm, are 'human inventions' - unidentified further. I think it is a human discovery. I find a bit pretentious the idea that we have made them. You may say so, but assuming comp, you would have to say that galaxies and dinosaurs are human inventions too. That would be confusing, to say the least. I put in the hypothesis of comp (if only to making sense) that I take some truth like 1+2=3 as being a non local, atemporal, and aspatial statement. It does not depend of the apparition of humans. Of course the symbol 1, and 2 are human invention, but they should not be confused with the abstract objects they are pointing too. I could have written the same assertion in english with a sentence like the successor of zero added to the successor of the successor of 0 gives the successor of the successor of the successor of zero. When we do theories, we have to start from something. If you agree that 1+2=3, we can proceed. Now I got additional news from Keith Devlin (Stanford U., The Math Gene: How Matheamtical Thinking Evolved and Why Numbers Are Like Gossip - plus other ~2 dozen books) I read with interest his book on information. who stated that: Numbers are so ubiquitous and seem so concrete, it is easy to forget they are a human invention and a recent one at that, dating back only 10,000 years. Though the things we count are often in the world, the numbers we use to count them are figments of our imagination. For that reason we should not be surprised (though we usually are) to discover they are usually influenced by the way our brains work. ... When we try to attach numbers to things in the world , as William Poundstone describes, we find psychology gets into the mix. Numbers may be - I think they are - among the most concrete and precise ways to describe our world, but they are still a human creation, and as such they reflect us as much as the things in our environment. ~2,500 years ago 'math' with the then recently acquired 'numbers- knowledge' had but a little domain to overcome and our awe for the wisdom of the old Greeks accepted the numbers as 'GOD. I have no problem to use numbers for explaining most of the world (the only exceptions I carried earlier were the 'non-quantizable' concepts - earlier, I said, because lately I condone in my agnosticism that there may be ways (beyond our knowledge of yesterday) to find quantitative characteristics in those, as well) Both are true. Some qualitative things can have quantitative features. And numbers themselves have a lot of qualitative features, some of them having no quantitative features at all. After Gödel's incompleteness result, humans assuming comp can say: already about the numbers we can only scratch the surface. Comp kills reductive thinking at his root. Digital mechanism is the most modest and humble hypothesis in the field. but in our 'yesterday's views' I don't want to give up to find something more general and underlying upon which even the numbers can be used and applied for the world, of which our human mind is a part - that invented the numbers. That is the idea.
Implications of Tononi's IIT?
Buongiorno, Everything List! I have been lurking here since mid-2009, and had hoped to have a better intellectual foundation to support me before I posted anything of my own, but I would really like to ask this question. Giulio Tononi's Integrated Information Theory (IIT) states that consciousness is integrated information. In Consciousness as Integrated Information: a Provisional Manifesto he writes, referring to the sensor chip in a digital camera: In reality, however, the chip is not anintegrated entity: since its 1 million photodiodes have no wayto interact, each photodiode performs its own local discriminationbetween a low and a high current completely independent of whatevery other photodiode might be doing. In reality, the chipis just a collection of 1 million independent photodiodes, eachwith a repertoire of two states. In other words, there is nointrinsic point of view associated with the camera chip as awhole. This is easy to see: if the sensor chip were cut into1 million pieces each holding its individual photodiode, theperformance of the camera would not change at all. Considering this, can consciousness be Turing emulable? That is, can a Turing machine integrate information? I want to expand my question here, but I don't have the knowledge to do so without distracting from the main question I'm asking. So, all I can say is, details greatly appreciated! - Allen Consciousness as Integrated Information: a Provisional Manifesto (Tononi G 2008): http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19098144 Qualia: The Geometry of Integrated Information (Balduzzi D, Tononi G 2009): http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19680424 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Implications of Tononi's IIT?
On 7/22/2010 3:33 PM, Allen Kallenbach wrote: Buongiorno, Everything List! I have been lurking here since mid-2009, and had hoped to have a better intellectual foundation to support me before I posted anything of my own, but I would really like to ask this question. Giulio Tononi's Integrated Information Theory (IIT) states that consciousness is integrated information. In Consciousness as Integrated Information: a Provisional Manifesto he writes, referring to the sensor chip in a digital camera: In reality, however, the chip is not an^ integrated entity: since its 1 million photodiodes have no way^ to interact, each photodiode performs its own local discrimination^ between a low and a high current completely independent of what^ every other photodiode might be doing. In reality, the chip^ is just a collection of 1 million independent photodiodes, each^ with a repertoire of two states. In other words, there is no^ intrinsic point of view associated with the camera chip as a^ whole. This is easy to see: if the sensor chip were cut into^ 1 million pieces each holding its individual photodiode, the^ performance of the camera would not change at all. Considering this, can consciousness be Turing emulable? That is, can a Turing machine integrate information? I want to expand my question here, but I don't have the knowledge to do so without distracting from the main question I'm asking. So, all I can say is, details greatly appreciated! - Allen Consciousness as Integrated Information: a Provisional Manifesto (/Tononi/ G 2008): http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19098144 Qualia: The Geometry of Integrated Information (/Balduzzi/ D, /Tononi/ G 2009): http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19680424 Sure. Consider a Mars Rover. It has a camera with many pixels. The voltage of the photodetector of each pixel is digitized and sent to a computer. The computer processes the data and recognizes there is a rock in its path. The computer actuates some controller and steers the Rover around the rock. So information has been integrated and used. Note that if the information had not been used (i.e. resulted in action in the environment) it would be difficult to say whether it had been integrated or merely transformed and stored. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Implications of Tononi's IIT?
On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 5:33 PM, Allen Kallenbach allenkallenb...@yahoo.cawrote: Considering this, can consciousness be Turing emulable? That is, can a Turing machine integrate information? I want to expand my question here, but I don't have the knowledge to do so without distracting from the main question I'm asking. So, all I can say is, details greatly appreciated! - Allen A Turing machine can essentially do anything with information that can be done with information. They are universal machines in the same sense that a pair of headphones is a universal instrument, though practical implementations have limits (a Turing machine has limited available memory, a pair of headphones will have a limited frequency and amplitude range), theoretically, each has an infinite repertoire. There is no conceivable instrument whose sound could not be reproduced by an ideal pair of headphones, just as there is no conceivable physical machine whose behavior could not be reproduced by an ideal Turing machine. This implies that given enough memory, and the right programming a Turing machine can perfectly reproduce the behavior of a person's Brain. Does this make the Turing machine conscious? If not it implies that someone you know could have their brain replaced by Turing machine, and that person would in every way act as the original person, yet it wouldn't be conscious. It would still claim to be conscious, still claim to feel pain, still be capable of writing a philosophy paper about the mysteriousness of consciousness. If a non-conscious entity could in every way act as a conscious entity does, then what is the point of consciousness? There would be no reason for it to evolve if it served no purpose. Also, what sense would it make for non-conscious entities to contemplate and write e-mails about something they presumably don't have access to? (As Turing machines running brain software necessarily would). There is a concept in which any Turing machine can emulate any other. This is what allows for such technology as virtual machines, and game system emulators. An old Atari game running on an emulator has no way to tell whether it is running on a physical Atari game console or within an emulator program running on a modern desktop computer. In fact there is no way any program can determine the ultimate, or actual physical substrate on which it is running. Extending this principle, if a brain's behavior can be reproduced by software, such software will have no way of knowing whether it is running on a real brain or on a bunch of computer chips. If a person did feel different, for example by not experiencing anything, or experiencing consciousness differently, this would violate the idea that software can never know for certain what its hardware is. Jason -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
