Re: ON THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING was Another TOE short paper
On Mar 9, 7:24 am, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 08 Mar 2011, at 15:54, 1Z wrote: On Mar 8, 1:43 pm, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 07 Mar 2011, at 21:48, David Nyman wrote: On 7 March 2011 15:56, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Reduction is not elimination snip Ontological reduction does not necessarily entail epistemological *elimination*, but it does entail ontological *elimination*. Bruno, this is what I was trying to say some time ago to Peter. Why ontological reduction does not necessarily entail epistemological *elimination* is of course precisely the question that mustn't be dodged or begged, which is what I'm convinced Peter is doing by insisting dogmatically that reduction is not elimination. The point is that a primitive-materialist micro-physical theory is implicitly (if not explicitly) committed to the claim that everything that exists is *just* some arrangement of ultimate material constituents. That's literally *all there is*, ex hypothesi. Despite the fact (and, a fortiori, *because* of the fact) that this is not what any of us, as observers, actually finds to be the case, we can nonetheless choose to deny or ignore this inconvenient truth. But if we do not so choose, we can perhaps see that here we have the materialist Hard Problem in perhaps its purest form: why should there be anything at all except an ensemble of quarks? (or whatever this month's ultimate constituent of everything is supposed to be). And why should any subset of an ensemble of quarks be localised as here or now? Adding computation to the materialist mix can't help, because computation is also just an arrangement of quarks, or whatever, and talking about emergence, or logical levels etc, can achieve nothing because after any amount of this logical gyrating *it's still all just quarks*. Of course, funnily enough, we manage nonetheless to talk about all these additional things, but then to claim that this talk can be materially identical to the quarks under some description is just to play circular and futile games with words. Plugging the conclusion into the premise can of course explain nothing, and simply begs the critical question in the most egregious way. The crucial difference in your theory, Bruno, to the extent that I've understood it, is that it is explicitly both analytic AND integrative. That is, it postulates specific arithmetical-computational ultimate components and their relations, AND it further specifies the local emergence of conscious first-person viewpoints, and their layers of composite contents, through an additional subtle filtering and synthesis of the relational ensemble. Hence, through a kind of duality of part and whole, it is able to avoid the monistic deathtrap, and consequently isn't forced to deny, or sweep under the rug, the categorical orthogonality of mind and body. In such a schema, the entire domain of the secondary qualities, including matter, time and space themselves, is localised and personalised at the intersection of these analytic and synthetic principles. I think that you have a clear understanding of that rather subtle and difficult issue. The problem with the materialist, once they use comp, and thus does not materialize the soul is that they have to identify a state of mind with a state of matter. Pain become literally neuronal firing or quark interaction. But pain is not neuronal firing, pain is a non pleasant subjective reality lived by person, and to equate pain with neuronal firing leads the most honest materialist scientist to the conclusion that pain somehow does not exist (eliminativism). Another option is open to them: it is a brute fact that the neuronal firing IS the pain, but physicalese descriptions of neuronal firing don't capture that because they are inadequate. Except that it is not a brute fact that the neuronal firing is the pain. That does not make sense. A neuronal firing is entirely descriptibe in a thrid person way, but a pain is not at all. If it is entirely describable, the identification fails. If the identification is true as a brute fact, then it is the description that is failing. Since it fails, we can't grasp the brute fact, but brute facts aren't necessarily graspable...that is the point of the jargon term brute fact. In the world of mathematics, ideas such as brute facts and unreachable noumena don't make sense, because mathematical objects are fully describable. Brute facts belong to realism, where certain things just are and there is no guarantee they will be comprehensible. You can associate them, but you can't equate them. You can identify 3-heat with molecular cinetic energy, but you cannot equate the sensation of heat with neuronal firing in the same way. The problem is that *any*
Re: ON THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING was Another TOE short paper
On 08/03/11 12:29, 1Z wrote: On Mar 8, 11:32 am, Andrew Soltauandrewsol...@gmail.com wrote: On 06/03/11 15:06, 1Z wrote: On Mar 4, 5:46 pm, Andrew Soltauandrewsol...@gmail.comwrote: The measurement problem is the question of why, or even if, collapse occurs. Certainly no coherent concept of how and why collapse occurs has been formulated in a manner which meets with general acceptance. It appears, as Davies and others explain, the appearance of collapse is purely subjective, It doesn't appear in an univocal way, since there are such things as objective collapse theories http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objective_collapse_theory OK, perhaps I stand corrected. But I am sure that no objective collapse theory has been formulated in a manner which meets with general acceptance. Subjective collapse theories, and no collapse theories have not met with general acceptance either! True of course. But there is definitely no need to posit physical collapse. as Everett demonstrates. MWI isn't usually presented as a subjective theory. Penrose argues that it makes surreptitious assumptions about how observers' minds work, but that is part of an argument against it. I would differentiate between Everett and MWI. MWI means to me many worlds in some way separate. That's vague. Worlds separate on decoherence but share the same space time A mixture Everett is without question, in my view, saying that there is one physical environment, That's vague too. The mixture and that it is only subjectively that there are different, determinate views of that environment. And that. Observers embedded in the system will see determinate results to interaction where in fact ever result occured. However, observer does not mean human here, since observation is fundamentally entanglement for Everett Everett states that there is only the appearance of collapse, and hence change, with respect to the memory of the observer. In this case, consciousness is necessarily central, as it is consciousness, and only consciousness, which encounters this appearance of collapse and change. It is only consciousness that consciously encounters everything else too. However, that does not make consciousness *ontologically* fundamental. It does if the physical system is static. If there is no change, objectively, only subjectively, this points to consciousness - phenomenal consciousness - being ontologically fundamental. On the other hand, the appearance of change refutes the static universe hypothesis. Unless the universe is indeed objectively static, and there is only the subjective appearance of collapse and change. We know there is an effective collapse, or the appearance of collapse, because we experience this subjectively. On the other hand, nothing in the physical world, including the physical body and the physical brain, can account for this. Whoah! What he have is a profusion of theores, with no clear winner What I mean is that if the physical domain is indeed static, as Davies, Barbour, Deutsch and others explain, then nothing physical can account for the appearance of change we encounter as observers. Well, *they* don't think that, Deutsch does. He states that the appearance of change is necessarily an illusion. Davies makes similar statements. Barbour simply leaves it at there is no time. Coupled with the inability to find any physiology corresponding to phenomenal consciousness, That's an odd thing to say. It is rather well known that phenomenal consciousness can be switched off by drugs. True, but when not switched off, when operating in an alive and awake human being, no physiological explanation can be found for phenomenal consciousness, as Chalmers spends the majority of a whole book carefully explaining. and Chalmers finding that there can be no such explanation, I infer this consciousness to be ontologically fundamental - an emergent property of the unitary system as a whole. But you could have observers in quantum mechanics with no phenomenality at all. All the problems of QM relate to access consciousness, ie to how observers get information. Certainly you could, the zombies that Chalmers talks about, mindless hulks in other commentaries. But invoking phenomenal consciousness as a system property solves the 'objectively static, subjective appearance of collapse and change' issue. I'm not aware of a problem of how observers get information in QM. Everett posits the basic mechanism of an observer as one with sensory apparatus and recording capability. As he demonstrates, this physical entity becomes a superposition - mixture of all possible states having made all possible versions of the observation, and only with respect to the contents of the memory is there a specific determinate outcome, which is perhaps what you are referring to as 'getting information'. (Agreed of course that all this is to do with access consciousness.) This seems to me to be exactly the same process as in RQM,
Re: Comp
On 08/03/11 14:15, 1Z wrote: On Mar 8, 11:10 am, Andrew Soltauandrewsol...@gmail.com wrote: On 06/03/11 19:24, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 06 Mar 2011, at 14:16, Andrew Soltau wrote: On 07/02/11 15:22, Bruno Marchal wrote: Comp makes precise that saying to be a machine is equivalent with saying that there is a level of functional substitution where my (first person) consciousness is invariant for a substitution made at that level. Comp can show that we can never known our level of substitution, and my reasoning works whatever I mean by my brain (it could be the entire galaxy or the entire observable universe if someone asks for it). CTM is vague on the level, and miss the point that we cannot know it, if it exists. Comp is also much more general than CTM, which relies usually on some amount of neurophilosophy, or on representationalist theory of the mind, and CTM is often criticized by 'externalist', like brent Meeker for example. But comp is not annoyed by externalism, given that it defines the (generalized) brain by the portion of universe you need, like possibly the matrix above. So comp is a very weak, and thus general, hypothesis. And the result is easy to describe: physics is not the fundamental branch. You say And the result is easy to describe: physics is not the fundamental branch.. This is the leap of yours I never understand. Do you posit that a mathematical universe with no physical content somehow automatically computes? Computations have been discovered by mathematicians, in mathematics. Yes but! I have no problem with the idea of a Platonic realm of mathematical structures simply existing, with or without the physical to instantiate them. I am aware this is a deep philosophical debate, but the Platonic concept seems somehow more straightforward than the physicalist concept. Is it? I'm not sure, I just said it seems so. If the Platonist supposes that there is some special mechanism of contact between the Platonic and physical worlds that explains mathematical knowledge, that is not straightforward. If there is no such mechanism, then mathematical reasoning has to be explained the way physicalists explain it, and the ontological posit of a Platonic world is a redundant extravagance. Surely, what Tegmark and, if I understand comp correctly, Bruno, are saying, is that this is the Platonic world, and the physical world is a process in the context of that Platonic environment. (I am lumping together the Platonic world and the arithmetical world, though there might be a distinction between them I have failed to make.) -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: ON THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING was Another TOE short paper
On 08/03/11 14:39, 1Z wrote: On Mar 8, 11:47 am, Andrew Soltauandrewsol...@gmail.com wrote: On 06/03/11 15:22, 1Z wrote: On Mar 4, 8:12 pm, Andrew Soltauandrewsol...@gmail.comwrote: On 04/03/11 19:10, Brent Meeker wrote:Collapse appears to instruments as well as people We don't have any evidence for that, Of course we do That was a rather blanket statement. But if we can doubt the existence of everything but our minds, then we don't have any evidence for it! But I think it is perfectly tenable to say that we cannot prove that the instruments which appear to us to be collapsed are in fact not collapsed, that there is only the appearance of collapse subjectively. That they really are collapsed is tenable too. Yes, but it is an assumption, a theory. What we have is evidence that subjectively there is collapse, and that objectively, 'most of the time', the wave equation applies, complete with decoherence producing a mixture of all possible states. How could one possibly disprove that? indeed, if we take either the concept of Wigner's friend or Rovelli's RQM seriously, We shouldn't take Wigner's friend as proving CCC, since it is intended as a reductio ad absurdum of it. OK, but I happen to think it is a precise explanation of how reality works. It is strange to regard something intended as a paradox as an explanation Maybe, but I have read leading figures in modern physics explaining that the world really is as Schroedinger's cat demonstrates. And RQM doesn't remotely have that implication. Yes it does. In RQM the environment is determinate where, and only where, the observer has observed it. In RQM, the observers knowledge becomes determinate when they observe something. As does the environment. The only determinacy is that much of the environment correlated with the observer by 'observation', which in RQM means physical interaction. If I am Wigner, and my friend goes off and does an experiment, the result is indeterminate in my version of the environment. Well, you don't know it. But you don't cause the friend to collapse, because there is no collapse in RQM. Agreed this is not the case.- that's why we can shared records of experiments and agree on them. Or, we can deduce those phenomena simply from the coherence of our personal systems.I'm not sure what you mean by account for collapse. I mean that if there is a unitary linear dynamics, with no collapse, as in Everett, no physical collapse, then there is the appearance of collapse only 'in consciousness'. But Everett can explain the apperarance of collapse to instruments... he doesn't need consciousness. Everett states very clearly that with respect to the physical body of the observer there is no collapse. I think the intruments the observer is using come under the same banner, the linear dynamics. He makes it very clear that it is only with regard to the record of sensory observations and machine configuration which I equate in his formulation with the functional identity of the observer, that there is the appearance of collapse. SInce you didn't say whether you mean human or machine observer, that doesn't clarify matters. As it happens, Everettian record making can be automated. True. He uses the example of a non human observer, so clearly his argument applies to non humans. This is pretty much exactly the definition of access consciousness, that of which the observer is directly and immediately aware. Access consciousness involves record making, and so do any number of non-conscious machines...seismographs, video recorders, etc. I don't think you can argue that consciousness is involved just because record making is. Agreed, access consciousness is, in this context, all to do with producing observations and instantiating the record of observations. (In the human observer, I take the record of machine configuration to be the observations of the internal state of the observer, as I explain in detail elsewhere.) At least one interpretation of QM, advocated by Peres, Fuchs, an Omnes for example, is that the collapse is purely epistemological. All that changes is our knowledge or model of the state and QM merely predicts probabilities for this change. That's what I thought I was saying! Fits my view. 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-list@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: ON THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING was Another TOE short paper
Peter, your comments appear to illustrate a basic confusion between ontological and epistemological claims that makes me think that you haven't taken on board the fundamental distinction entailed in Bruno's original statement: Ontological reduction does not necessarily entail epistemological *elimination*, but it does entail ontological *elimination*. If we haven't resolved something so fundamental at the outset, it's no wonder you find what I go on to say so difficult to follow. As Bruno implies, the whole POINT of any ontological reduction programme is ontological elimination: it is an attempt (however incapable of final success it may be) to distinguish what REALLY exists from what APPEARS to exist. Hence it is of the greatest significance that ontological elimination doesn't also entail epistemological elimination; i.e. even when composites seem to have been shown to have no really real ontological status distinct from their components, they nonetheless somehow stubbornly hang on to their apparently real epistemological status. The relationship to the Hard Problem should now be clear, I think: the zombie is just the reduced ontology of the components, shorn of any composite epistemology. Since ontological reduction wants to say that this reduced state of affairs JUST IS what the real situation consists in, this shouldn't be a problem, and indeed this is the eliminativist position, however bizarre it may seem. However, unless we lapse into that sort of inconsistency, it manifestly IS a problem - i.e. the Hard one. David On 9 March 2011 01:24, 1Z peterdjo...@yahoo.com wrote: On Mar 9, 1:03 am, David Nyman da...@davidnyman.com wrote: On 8 March 2011 23:42, 1Z peterdjo...@yahoo.com wrote: How can they fail to be composite when they include interactions, structures and bindings? What ***are*** you on about? Say there is a pile of bricks that, under some externally-applied description, could be construed as a house; then that pile is what there is, not a pile + a house. Houses aren't heaps of rubble, they are bricks mortared together. And why shouldn't I say that such-and-such mortared-together bricks are a house - the house exists as does the bricks-and-mortar. Similarly if a theory says that what exists is just micro-physical bricks and their relations, then just those things are what one should expect to encounter - not those things + an open-ended zoo of higher-order composite entities. One *should* expect composite entities, because the relationships and binding between molecules are just the way they get composite entities get composed. If you mortar bricks together you intend to build something Since the theory of micro-bricks in relation supposes these to do all the work, what a priori reason would there be to posit additional composite entities on top of the bricks themselves? Well, under reductive explanation, they are not additional. Nor are they non-existent. They are identified with subsets of their component parts. In fact composites command our attention only in the context of observation after-the-micro-physical-facts, in the form of the non-micro-physical-facts - the so-called secondary qualities. So? Something may seem not to be composed of smaller parts, whilst actually being so. To dramatise this, Chalmers uses the metaphor of the zombie, for which no secondary qualitative composites exist, Zombies and qualia are another and much more specific issue. nor any apparent need of them. That's what I'm on about, but in a more general way. But it doesn't generalise! The HP is very specific. We can imagine zombies because we don't understand the neuron-qualia link. But we do understand the molecule-heat link, and the brick-house link. So it is insane to say that is just mortared-together bricks, not a building. David On Mar 8, 9:15 pm, David Nyman da...@davidnyman.com wrote: On 8 March 2011 12:16, 1Z peterdjo...@yahoo.com wrote: There are uncontroversial examples of successful reduction, eg the reduction of heat to molecular motion. In these cases the reduced phenomenon still exists. There is still such a thing as heat. People who sincerely think mind is reducible to brain states, therefore sincerely hold that mind is not nothing. If you think that is mistaken, you need to say why. My point has always been simply to hold materialist theory to account in its own terms. In these terms, when you have reduced heat to molecular motion, and thence to its putatively fundamental micro-constituents, you have thereby shown that there is NO HEAT at this fundamental level. To be clear: it is NOT the case that there is molecular motion AND heat; It is also not the case that there is molecular motion, that molecular motion is identical to heat, and there is nonetheless no heat. It *is* the case that there is molecular motion, *which is* heat. there is JUST molecular motion (or rather
Re: Movie cannot think
On 08/03/11 16:14, Brent Meeker wrote: On 3/8/2011 3:14 AM, Andrew Soltau wrote: What I am driving at here is the same question as in the email Comp. Granted that all possible states exist, what changes the point of the present moment from one to another. My referring to 'the thinker' was probably not a helpful metaphor. Given the universal numbers, what carries out the process whereby one is transformed into another? What makes the state of the thinker or the dreamer into the state of that entity at the next moment? Andrew I think the idea is analogous to the block universe. In Platonia all the states of the thinker and his relation to the world are computed in a timeless way. OK. But for any given definition of the thinker, there is a version of the world to which he corresponds. Whether considered as a physical entity, or a mind or a record of observations, I am instantiated in a specific version of the universe. On observation, this state changes. The observer is now in a new and different state, and is instantiated in a new and different version of the universe. If one steps back and looks at all the possible states of the thinker, existing in all the different corresponding states of the universe at each moment, the result is the movie film Barbour refers to. This is a timeless situation. The impression of time for the thinker is recovered by putting the states into a sequence which is implicitly defined by their content. So then you have a sequence, but still nothing actually happens. This is exactly the scenario Deutsch addresses. /Nothing/ can move from one moment to another. To exist at all at a particular moment means to exist there for ever. (1997, 263; his italics) One seems to pass from moment to moment, experiencing change. Deutsch, however, declares that this can only be an illusion. We do not experience time flowing, or passing. What we experience are differences between our present perceptions and our present memories of past perceptions. We interpret those differences, correctly, as evidence that the universe changes with time. We also interpret them, incorrectly, as evidence that our consciousness, or the present, or something, moves through time. (1997, 263) Physically, this is unassailable. However, we can explain the appearance of change very neatly, by saying that the frame of reference is changed, from one moment to the next to the next, with no change in anything physical. The only drawback is that this requires something 'outside' of the moments, and there is nothing outside the multiverse. The solution I propose is that phenomenal consciousness is an emergent property of this unitary system as a whole. In other words, this process is to the moments the way the computational capability of a computer is to the frames of a movie in solid state memory. Based on that, my belief is that, in the collapse dynamics of quantum mechanics, we have discovered evidence for a property of the unitary system in action, we just haven't recognised it as such. Which is why it gives rise to all the puzzles it does. 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-list@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: ON THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING was Another TOE short paper
On Mar 9, 12:50 pm, David Nyman da...@davidnyman.com wrote: Peter, your comments appear to illustrate a basic confusion between ontological and epistemological claims that makes me think that you haven't taken on board the fundamental distinction entailed in Bruno's original statement: Ontological reduction does not necessarily entail epistemological *elimination*, but it does entail ontological *elimination*. If we haven't resolved something so fundamental at the outset, it's no wonder you find what I go on to say so difficult to follow. As Bruno implies, the whole POINT of any ontological reduction programme is ontological elimination: it is an attempt (however incapable of final success it may be) to distinguish what REALLY exists from what APPEARS to exist. Hence it is of the greatest significance that ontological elimination doesn't also entail epistemological elimination; i.e. even when composites seem to have been shown to have no really real ontological status distinct from their components, they nonetheless somehow stubbornly hang on to their apparently real epistemological status. That is a confusing way of phrasing things. The crucial distinction is not real/apparent, because houses and heat are not held to be illusions. The crucial distinction is fundamental/non-fundamental. To reduce is to identify a higher-level phenomeonon with a more fundamental one. Note the phrase more fundamental. The wise reductionist does not claim to know what is really fundamental. That being the case, it is unwise to insist that the non-fundamental is unreal, since the reduction base might ultimately be non- fundamental itself One can reduce a house to mortared bricks without knowing that bricks are made of atoms. Neural activity is also non-fundamental, but where is the materialist who insists it is unreal? The relationship to the Hard Problem should now be clear, I think: the zombie is just the reduced ontology of the components, shorn of any composite epistemology. No. As I explained before, zombies are not business-as-usual reduction-means-elimination. We can imagine that zombies lack qualia, because we don't see how the alleged reduction base, their neural activity, would necessitate it. Far from being an example of reduction, that is a case where reductive explanation has *failed* to occur because where there is a successful reductive explanation, the necessity of the higher-level phenomenon being present is clear. If heat *is* molecular motion it *must* be present where molecular motion is present! There are no heat zombies -- the idea is unthinkable! Zombies are not a typical example of the problems of reduction, they are an instance of the reduction being bought too cheaply: the reductive materialist presents the off-the-peg conclusion that consciousness just is neural firing, without filling in the explanation that allows us to see that it *must be*, so that we instead remain being able to see that it *might not* be! -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: STEP THREE (was Re: ON THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING was Another TOE short paper)
On 08/03/11 18:41, Bruno Marchal wrote: 1) SWE what is SWE? -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: ON THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING was Another TOE short paper
On Mar 9, 1:46 pm, David Nyman da...@davidnyman.com wrote: On 9 March 2011 13:30, 1Z peterdjo...@yahoo.com wrote: Peter, this is too confusing, you seem to be debating a straw man. Let's try to keep it simple: am I to assume that you don't agree that ontological reduction entails ontological elimination? David Yep. Phlogiston was eliminated, heat was reduced. There's a difference -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: ON THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING was Another TOE short paper
On 9 March 2011 14:17, 1Z peterdjo...@yahoo.com wrote: Phlogiston was eliminated, heat was reduced. There's a difference So on this basis you would claim that heat is *ontologically* (i.e. not merely epistemologically) distinguishable from molecular motion? On Mar 9, 1:46 pm, David Nyman da...@davidnyman.com wrote: On 9 March 2011 13:30, 1Z peterdjo...@yahoo.com wrote: Peter, this is too confusing, you seem to be debating a straw man. Let's try to keep it simple: am I to assume that you don't agree that ontological reduction entails ontological elimination? David Yep. Phlogiston was eliminated, heat was reduced. There's a difference -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: ON THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING was Another TOE short paper
On Mar 9, 2:23 pm, David Nyman da...@davidnyman.com wrote: On 9 March 2011 14:17, 1Z peterdjo...@yahoo.com wrote: Phlogiston was eliminated, heat was reduced. There's a difference So on this basis you would claim that heat is *ontologically* (i.e. not merely epistemologically) distinguishable from molecular motion? No. I would say it is ontologically the same as molecular motion, and molecular motion exists, so heat exists, so heat was not eliminated -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Movie cannot think
On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 10:14 AM, Brent Meeker meeke...@dslextreme.comwrote: On 3/8/2011 3:14 AM, Andrew Soltau wrote: What I am driving at here is the same question as in the email Comp. Granted that all possible states exist, what changes the point of the present moment from one to another. My referring to 'the thinker' was probably not a helpful metaphor. Given the universal numbers, what carries out the process whereby one is transformed into another? What makes the state of the thinker or the dreamer into the state of that entity at the next moment? Andrew I think the idea is analogous to the block universe. In Platonia all the states of the thinker and his relation to the world are computed in a timeless way. The impression of time for the thinker is recovered by putting the states into a sequence which is implicitly defined by their content. Brent Bruno and others, Do you think that computations performed by a computer or brain within a block universe contribute to the computational histories of a person? I can see why in a movie they do not, as there is no mathematical relation between the frames. However, in a universe ruled by equations, it seems to me that a computer in a universe is leveraging relations in math to perform computations, albeit less directly than a platonic Turing machine running a program. To me it is like running a simulation of a brain on a virtual machine on physical hardware. The VM provides a level of abstraction, but ultimately its computations are still computations. In the same way a mathematical universe is a level of abstraction yet could still provide a platform for genuine computation (not descriptions of computation) to be performed. What do you think? 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-list@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: ON THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING was Another TOE short paper
On 9 March 2011 14:39, 1Z peterdjo...@yahoo.com wrote: So on this basis you would claim that heat is *ontologically* (i.e. not merely epistemologically) distinguishable from molecular motion? No. I would say it is ontologically the same as molecular motion, and molecular motion exists, so heat exists, so heat was not eliminated It seems that you persistently misunderstand the meaning of elimination in this context. If something can be shown to be a composite of more fundamental ontological components, it is of course disqualified (i.e. eliminated) thereby as an ontological fundamental, else such use of the terms ontological, fundamental and eliminated is rendered meaningless. Hence heat can indeed be eliminated from the catalogue of ontological fundamentals in this way, and understood as consisting in the more fundamental phenomenon of molecular motion. Of course the *concept* (and a fortiori the sensation) of heat isn't thereby eliminated epistemologically, but this is the very distinction we are trying to establish on a firm footing. The reductionist programme seeks to eliminate any need (in principle) to appeal to any and all non-fundamental ontological entities in precisely this way, and hence show ontology as resting on a single fundamental base, thereby situating composite entities at the epistemological level. David On Mar 9, 2:23 pm, David Nyman da...@davidnyman.com wrote: On 9 March 2011 14:17, 1Z peterdjo...@yahoo.com wrote: Phlogiston was eliminated, heat was reduced. There's a difference So on this basis you would claim that heat is *ontologically* (i.e. not merely epistemologically) distinguishable from molecular motion? No. I would say it is ontologically the same as molecular motion, and molecular motion exists, so heat exists, so heat was not eliminated -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: STEP THREE (was Re: ON THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING was Another TOE short paper)
On 09 Mar 2011, at 14:31, Andrew Soltau wrote: On 08/03/11 18:41, Bruno Marchal wrote: 1) SWE what is SWE? Sorry. It is Schroedinger Wave Equation. 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-list@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: ON THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING was Another TOE short paper
On 3/9/2011 3:28 AM, 1Z wrote: I can say yes to the doctor if my consciousness and qualia is related to a noumenal hinterland of the matter in my physical brain. That noumenal matter hinterland contradicts the idea that there is a level of description of myself where matter and physical structure can be replaced by arbitrary different matter and structure, once they preserve the computational relations, which are arithmetical, by digitality. Yep. Comp is a bad theory of qualia. We don't know how to write subroutines for phenomenality. Maybe we do. We just don't know that we know. That artificial people do not have real feelings is a staple of sci fi. To me that is an open question. Are philosophical zombies possible? It seems unlikely, but when I consider specific ideas about consciousness, such as Julian Jaynes, then it seems more plausible that conscious-like behavior could be evinced with such different internal processing that it would not realize consciousness as I experience it - though it might still be consciousness in Bruno's sense of being capable of mathematical self-reference. 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-list@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: ON THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING was Another TOE short paper
On 3/9/2011 4:00 AM, Andrew Soltau wrote: Coupled with the inability to find any physiology corresponding to phenomenal consciousness, That's an odd thing to say. It is rather well known that phenomenal consciousness can be switched off by drugs. True, but when not switched off, when operating in an alive and awake human being, no physiological explanation can be found for phenomenal consciousness, as Chalmers spends the majority of a whole book carefully explaining. Chalmers should take a lesson from Newton. When asked to explain how gravity worked he replied, Hypothesi non fingo. Brent The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work. --—John von Neumann -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: ON THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING was Another TOE short paper
On 09 Mar 2011, at 12:28, 1Z wrote: On Mar 9, 7:24 am, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 08 Mar 2011, at 15:54, 1Z wrote: On Mar 8, 1:43 pm, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 07 Mar 2011, at 21:48, David Nyman wrote: On 7 March 2011 15:56, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Reduction is not elimination snip Ontological reduction does not necessarily entail epistemological *elimination*, but it does entail ontological *elimination*. Bruno, this is what I was trying to say some time ago to Peter. Why ontological reduction does not necessarily entail epistemological *elimination* is of course precisely the question that mustn't be dodged or begged, which is what I'm convinced Peter is doing by insisting dogmatically that reduction is not elimination. The point is that a primitive-materialist micro-physical theory is implicitly (if not explicitly) committed to the claim that everything that exists is *just* some arrangement of ultimate material constituents. That's literally *all there is*, ex hypothesi. Despite the fact (and, a fortiori, *because* of the fact) that this is not what any of us, as observers, actually finds to be the case, we can nonetheless choose to deny or ignore this inconvenient truth. But if we do not so choose, we can perhaps see that here we have the materialist Hard Problem in perhaps its purest form: why should there be anything at all except an ensemble of quarks? (or whatever this month's ultimate constituent of everything is supposed to be). And why should any subset of an ensemble of quarks be localised as here or now? Adding computation to the materialist mix can't help, because computation is also just an arrangement of quarks, or whatever, and talking about emergence, or logical levels etc, can achieve nothing because after any amount of this logical gyrating *it's still all just quarks*. Of course, funnily enough, we manage nonetheless to talk about all these additional things, but then to claim that this talk can be materially identical to the quarks under some description is just to play circular and futile games with words. Plugging the conclusion into the premise can of course explain nothing, and simply begs the critical question in the most egregious way. The crucial difference in your theory, Bruno, to the extent that I've understood it, is that it is explicitly both analytic AND integrative. That is, it postulates specific arithmetical-computational ultimate components and their relations, AND it further specifies the local emergence of conscious first-person viewpoints, and their layers of composite contents, through an additional subtle filtering and synthesis of the relational ensemble. Hence, through a kind of duality of part and whole, it is able to avoid the monistic deathtrap, and consequently isn't forced to deny, or sweep under the rug, the categorical orthogonality of mind and body. In such a schema, the entire domain of the secondary qualities, including matter, time and space themselves, is localised and personalised at the intersection of these analytic and synthetic principles. I think that you have a clear understanding of that rather subtle and difficult issue. The problem with the materialist, once they use comp, and thus does not materialize the soul is that they have to identify a state of mind with a state of matter. Pain become literally neuronal firing or quark interaction. But pain is not neuronal firing, pain is a non pleasant subjective reality lived by person, and to equate pain with neuronal firing leads the most honest materialist scientist to the conclusion that pain somehow does not exist (eliminativism). Another option is open to them: it is a brute fact that the neuronal firing IS the pain, but physicalese descriptions of neuronal firing don't capture that because they are inadequate. Except that it is not a brute fact that the neuronal firing is the pain. That does not make sense. A neuronal firing is entirely descriptibe in a thrid person way, but a pain is not at all. If it is entirely describable, the identification fails. If the identification is true as a brute fact, then it is the description that is failing. Since it fails, we can't grasp the brute fact, but brute facts aren't necessarily graspable...that is the point of the jargon term brute fact. In the world of mathematics, ideas such as brute facts and unreachable noumena don't make sense, because mathematical objects are fully describable. Brute facts belong to realism, where certain things just are and there is no guarantee they will be comprehensible. Arithmetical truth is definable by Zermelo Fraenkel (a Löbian machine), but not by Peano Arithmetic (another simpler one). Most big object in math are not fully graspable, and if we are machine any notion of truth-about-us, is beyond our reach, yet a priori mathematical, assuming comp. fully describable
Re: Movie cannot think
On Mar 9, 1:24 pm, Andrew Soltau andrewsol...@gmail.com wrote: On 08/03/11 16:14, Brent Meeker wrote: On 3/8/2011 3:14 AM, Andrew Soltau wrote: What I am driving at here is the same question as in the email Comp. Granted that all possible states exist, what changes the point of the present moment from one to another. My referring to 'the thinker' was probably not a helpful metaphor. Given the universal numbers, what carries out the process whereby one is transformed into another? What makes the state of the thinker or the dreamer into the state of that entity at the next moment? Andrew I think the idea is analogous to the block universe. In Platonia all the states of the thinker and his relation to the world are computed in a timeless way. OK. But for any given definition of the thinker, there is a version of the world to which he corresponds. Whether considered as a physical entity, or a mind or a record of observations, I am instantiated in a specific version of the universe. On observation, this state changes. The observer is now in a new and different state, and is instantiated in a new and different version of the universe. If one steps back and looks at all the possible states of the thinker, existing in all the different corresponding states of the universe at each moment, the result is the movie film Barbour refers to. This is a timeless situation. The impression of time for the thinker is recovered by putting the states into a sequence which is implicitly defined by their content. So then you have a sequence, but still nothing actually happens. This is exactly the scenario Deutsch addresses. /Nothing/ can move from one moment to another. To exist at all at a particular moment means to exist there for ever. (1997, 263; his italics) One seems to pass from moment to moment, experiencing change. Deutsch, however, declares that this can only be an illusion. We do not experience time flowing, or passing. What we experience are differences between our present perceptions and our present memories of past perceptions. We interpret those differences, correctly, as evidence that the universe changes with time. We also interpret them, incorrectly, as evidence that our consciousness, or the present, or something, moves through time. (1997, 263) Movement of or through time is dismissed too easily here. Why don we have to experience our history one moment at a time if it all already exists (albeit with a sequential structure) Physically, this is unassailable. Hmm. The arguments in favour of the block universe are actually rather subtle However, we can explain the appearance of change very neatly, by saying that the frame of reference is changed, from one moment to the next to the next, with no change in anything physical. The Frame of Reference being non-physical? The only drawback is that this requires something 'outside' of the moments, and there is nothing outside the multiverse. The solution I propose is that phenomenal consciousness is an emergent property of this unitary system as a whole. If it is a property of the whole system, why are we each only conscious of one small spatio temporal area? Why bring consciousness in at all? Why not have a time-cursor that is responsible for the passage of time? In other words, this process is to the moments the way the computational capability of a computer is to the frames of a movie in solid state memory. Based on that, my belief is that, in the collapse dynamics of quantum mechanics, we have discovered evidence for a property of the unitary system in action, we just haven't recognised it as such. Which is why it gives rise to all the puzzles it does. 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-list@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: Movie cannot think
On Mar 9, 3:06 pm, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 10:14 AM, Brent Meeker meeke...@dslextreme.comwrote: On 3/8/2011 3:14 AM, Andrew Soltau wrote: What I am driving at here is the same question as in the email Comp. Granted that all possible states exist, what changes the point of the present moment from one to another. My referring to 'the thinker' was probably not a helpful metaphor. Given the universal numbers, what carries out the process whereby one is transformed into another? What makes the state of the thinker or the dreamer into the state of that entity at the next moment? Andrew I think the idea is analogous to the block universe. In Platonia all the states of the thinker and his relation to the world are computed in a timeless way. The impression of time for the thinker is recovered by putting the states into a sequence which is implicitly defined by their content. Brent Bruno and others, Do you think that computations performed by a computer or brain within a block universe contribute to the computational histories of a person? I can see why in a movie they do not, as there is no mathematical relation between the frames. However, in a universe ruled by equations, it seems to me that a computer in a universe is leveraging relations in math to perform computations, albeit less directly than a platonic Turing machine running a program. It seems to me that a physical computer is leveraging causality, which is describable by some maths. Nothing happens because of maths, since maths can also describe the acausal, the uncomputable etc To me it is like running a simulation of a brain on a virtual machine on physical hardware. The VM provides a level of abstraction, but ultimately its computations are still computations. In the same way a mathematical universe is a level of abstraction yet could still provide a platform for genuine computation (not descriptions of computation) to be performed. What do you think? 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-list@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: ON THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING was Another TOE short paper
On 3/9/2011 4:30 AM, Andrew Soltau wrote: Omnes for example, is that the collapse is purely epistemological. All that changes is our knowledge or model of the state and QM merely predicts probabilities for this change. That's what I thought I was saying! No. Everett and Omnes are quite different. Omnes says the wave function is merely a representation of what we know about an initial state (e.g. one we've prepared in the laboratory) and the wave equation tells us the probabilities of what we will observe. Since the WF is just a representation of our knowledge, it abruptly changes (collapses) when we gain new knowledge. Everett on the other hand reifies the wave function and assumes it never collapses. 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-list@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: ON THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING was Another TOE short paper
On Mar 9, 4:30 pm, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 09 Mar 2011, at 12:28, 1Z wrote: On Mar 9, 7:24 am, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 08 Mar 2011, at 15:54, 1Z wrote: On Mar 8, 1:43 pm, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 07 Mar 2011, at 21:48, David Nyman wrote: On 7 March 2011 15:56, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Reduction is not elimination snip Ontological reduction does not necessarily entail epistemological *elimination*, but it does entail ontological *elimination*. Bruno, this is what I was trying to say some time ago to Peter. Why ontological reduction does not necessarily entail epistemological *elimination* is of course precisely the question that mustn't be dodged or begged, which is what I'm convinced Peter is doing by insisting dogmatically that reduction is not elimination. The point is that a primitive-materialist micro-physical theory is implicitly (if not explicitly) committed to the claim that everything that exists is *just* some arrangement of ultimate material constituents. That's literally *all there is*, ex hypothesi. Despite the fact (and, a fortiori, *because* of the fact) that this is not what any of us, as observers, actually finds to be the case, we can nonetheless choose to deny or ignore this inconvenient truth. But if we do not so choose, we can perhaps see that here we have the materialist Hard Problem in perhaps its purest form: why should there be anything at all except an ensemble of quarks? (or whatever this month's ultimate constituent of everything is supposed to be). And why should any subset of an ensemble of quarks be localised as here or now? Adding computation to the materialist mix can't help, because computation is also just an arrangement of quarks, or whatever, and talking about emergence, or logical levels etc, can achieve nothing because after any amount of this logical gyrating *it's still all just quarks*. Of course, funnily enough, we manage nonetheless to talk about all these additional things, but then to claim that this talk can be materially identical to the quarks under some description is just to play circular and futile games with words. Plugging the conclusion into the premise can of course explain nothing, and simply begs the critical question in the most egregious way. The crucial difference in your theory, Bruno, to the extent that I've understood it, is that it is explicitly both analytic AND integrative. That is, it postulates specific arithmetical-computational ultimate components and their relations, AND it further specifies the local emergence of conscious first-person viewpoints, and their layers of composite contents, through an additional subtle filtering and synthesis of the relational ensemble. Hence, through a kind of duality of part and whole, it is able to avoid the monistic deathtrap, and consequently isn't forced to deny, or sweep under the rug, the categorical orthogonality of mind and body. In such a schema, the entire domain of the secondary qualities, including matter, time and space themselves, is localised and personalised at the intersection of these analytic and synthetic principles. I think that you have a clear understanding of that rather subtle and difficult issue. The problem with the materialist, once they use comp, and thus does not materialize the soul is that they have to identify a state of mind with a state of matter. Pain become literally neuronal firing or quark interaction. But pain is not neuronal firing, pain is a non pleasant subjective reality lived by person, and to equate pain with neuronal firing leads the most honest materialist scientist to the conclusion that pain somehow does not exist (eliminativism). Another option is open to them: it is a brute fact that the neuronal firing IS the pain, but physicalese descriptions of neuronal firing don't capture that because they are inadequate. Except that it is not a brute fact that the neuronal firing is the pain. That does not make sense. A neuronal firing is entirely descriptibe in a thrid person way, but a pain is not at all. If it is entirely describable, the identification fails. If the identification is true as a brute fact, then it is the description that is failing. Since it fails, we can't grasp the brute fact, but brute facts aren't necessarily graspable...that is the point of the jargon term brute fact. In the world of mathematics, ideas such as brute facts and unreachable noumena don't make sense, because mathematical objects are fully describable. Brute facts belong to realism, where certain things just are and there is no guarantee they will be comprehensible. Arithmetical truth is definable by Zermelo Fraenkel (a Löbian machine),
Re: Movie cannot think
On 3/9/2011 5:24 AM, Andrew Soltau wrote: On 08/03/11 16:14, Brent Meeker wrote: On 3/8/2011 3:14 AM, Andrew Soltau wrote: What I am driving at here is the same question as in the email Comp. Granted that all possible states exist, what changes the point of the present moment from one to another. My referring to 'the thinker' was probably not a helpful metaphor. Given the universal numbers, what carries out the process whereby one is transformed into another? What makes the state of the thinker or the dreamer into the state of that entity at the next moment? Andrew I think the idea is analogous to the block universe. In Platonia all the states of the thinker and his relation to the world are computed in a timeless way. OK. But for any given definition of the thinker, there is a version of the world to which he corresponds. Whether considered as a physical entity, or a mind or a record of observations, I am instantiated in a specific version of the universe. On observation, this state changes. The observer is now in a new and different state, and is instantiated in a new and different version of the universe. If one steps back and looks at all the possible states of the thinker, existing in all the different corresponding states of the universe at each moment, the result is the movie film Barbour refers to. This is a timeless situation. The impression of time for the thinker is recovered by putting the states into a sequence which is implicitly defined by their content. So then you have a sequence, but still nothing actually happens. This is exactly the scenario Deutsch addresses. /Nothing/ can move from one moment to another. To exist at all at a particular moment means to exist there for ever. (1997, 263; his italics) One seems to pass from moment to moment, experiencing change. Deutsch, however, declares that this can only be an illusion. We do not experience time flowing, or passing. What we experience are differences between our present perceptions and our present memories of past perceptions. We interpret those differences, correctly, as evidence that the universe changes with time. We also interpret them, incorrectly, as evidence that our consciousness, or the present, or something, moves through time. (1997, 263) Physically, this is unassailable. However, we can explain the appearance of change very neatly, The appearance of change is already explained by the fact that there are different frames that have an implicit sequence and in which the observers state is different. Further explanation is just muddying the picture - at leas that's what Deutsch et al would say. by saying that the frame of reference is changed, f But this is no more than a magic finger pointing to the frames and saying, This one. And then this one. And then rom one moment to the next to the next, with no change in anything physical. The only drawback is that this requires something 'outside' of the moments, and there is nothing outside the multiverse. The solution I propose is that phenomenal consciousness is an emergent property of this unitary system as a whole. In other words, this process is to the moments the way the computational capability of a computer is to the frames of a movie in solid state memory. Based on that, my belief is that, in the collapse dynamics of quantum mechanics, we have discovered evidence for a property of the unitary system in action ??? Collapse is not unitary. Brent , we just haven't recognised it as such. Which is why it gives rise to all the puzzles it does. 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-list@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. -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: ON THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING was Another TOE short paper
On Mar 9, 4:47 pm, Brent Meeker meeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: On 3/9/2011 4:50 AM, David Nyman wrote: Peter, your comments appear to illustrate a basic confusion between ontological and epistemological claims that makes me think that you haven't taken on board the fundamental distinction entailed in Bruno's original statement: Ontological reduction does not necessarily entail epistemological *elimination*, but it does entail ontological*elimination*. This strikes me a mere semantic argumentation. Houses are made of bricks. Bricks are made of atoms. Atoms are made of strings. This is reduction; ontological reduction. X is reduce to Y and relations among Y. Elimination is not mentioned anywhere. There is no justification for eliminating anything; either ontologically or epistemologically (whatever that means?). There are still atoms and bricks and houses. Reduction is a word we invented to describe this. I don't know why someone wants to equate it with elimination. What would it mean to eliminate bricks? To banish them? To always refer to them by long descriptive phrases in terms of atoms? Brent Eliminativism argues that folk-psychology won't even survive as a convenient shorthand -- but that is an argument that goes way beyond reduction itself. House, heat etc are not subject to it. -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: ON THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING was Another TOE short paper
On 3/9/2011 5:30 AM, 1Z wrote: Zombies are not a typical example of the problems of reduction, they are an instance of the reduction being bought too cheaply: the reductive materialist presents the off-the-peg conclusion that consciousness just is neural firing, without filling in the explanation that allows us to see that it*must be*, so that we instead remain being able to see that it *might not* be! But keep in mind what counts as explanation. In science it is really just a model that tells us how something can manipulated. The molecular model of heat works as an explanation because it connects different phenomenon, e.g. heating of a gas due to compression, heating due to friction. I think eventually we will have a theory tells us which kind of neural firings or computation produce what kind of conscious thoughts. And that will be the end of explanation. 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-list@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: ON THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING was Another TOE short paper
On Mar 9, 3:25 pm, David Nyman da...@davidnyman.com wrote: On 9 March 2011 14:39, 1Z peterdjo...@yahoo.com wrote: So on this basis you would claim that heat is *ontologically* (i.e. not merely epistemologically) distinguishable from molecular motion? No. I would say it is ontologically the same as molecular motion, and molecular motion exists, so heat exists, so heat was not eliminated It seems that you persistently misunderstand the meaning of elimination in this context. If something can be shown to be a composite of more fundamental ontological components, it is of course disqualified (i.e. eliminated) thereby as an ontological fundamental But that's *not* what elimination means as in eliminativism. The point of eliminativism is that the eliminated thing doesn't exist at all. Moreover, it is difficult to see why anyone would complain about a sense of elimination that just means non-fundamental, when we don't necessarily know what is fundamental, and we are going to continue using the term else such use of the terms ontological, fundamental and eliminated is rendered meaningless. Hence heat can indeed be eliminated from the catalogue of ontological fundamentals in this way, and understood as consisting in the more fundamental phenomenon of molecular motion. Of course the *concept* (and a fortiori the sensation) of heat isn't thereby eliminated epistemologically More importantly, the concept has a referent. It is just the same referent as another concept. But if your are going to call that elimination, what are you going to call what happened to phlogiston? Extermination? , but this is the very distinction we are trying to establish on a firm footing. The reductionist programme seeks to eliminate any need (in principle) to appeal to any and all non-fundamental ontological entities in precisely this way, and hence show ontology as resting on a single fundamental base, thereby situating composite entities at the epistemological level. It is hard to see what you mean by epistemological there. I don't think it is a synonym for non fundamental -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: ON THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING was Another TOE short paper
On 9 March 2011 16:21, Brent Meeker meeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: To me that is an open question. Are philosophical zombies possible? It seems unlikely, but when I consider specific ideas about consciousness, such as Julian Jaynes, then it seems more plausible that conscious-like behavior could be evinced with such different internal processing that it would not realize consciousness as I experience it - though it might still be consciousness in Bruno's sense of being capable of mathematical self-reference. My reading of Jaynes (and TOOCITBOTBM is one of my favourites) is that by non-conscious he actually meant non-self-conscious. The non-self-conscious person essentially obeys the voices in her head, but when these can no longer provide guidance, internal dialogue - and with it, self-consciousness - may emerge as a superior survival strategy. However I don't believe Jaynes thought that the bicameral person literally lacked phenomenal experience. David On 3/9/2011 3:28 AM, 1Z wrote: I can say yes to the doctor if my consciousness and qualia is related to a noumenal hinterland of the matter in my physical brain. That noumenal matter hinterland contradicts the idea that there is a level of description of myself where matter and physical structure can be replaced by arbitrary different matter and structure, once they preserve the computational relations, which are arithmetical, by digitality. Yep. Comp is a bad theory of qualia. We don't know how to write subroutines for phenomenality. Maybe we do. We just don't know that we know. That artificial people do not have real feelings is a staple of sci fi. To me that is an open question. Are philosophical zombies possible? It seems unlikely, but when I consider specific ideas about consciousness, such as Julian Jaynes, then it seems more plausible that conscious-like behavior could be evinced with such different internal processing that it would not realize consciousness as I experience it - though it might still be consciousness in Bruno's sense of being capable of mathematical self-reference. 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-list@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. -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Movie cannot think
On 09 Mar 2011, at 16:06, Jason Resch wrote: On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 10:14 AM, Brent Meeker meeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: On 3/8/2011 3:14 AM, Andrew Soltau wrote: What I am driving at here is the same question as in the email Comp. Granted that all possible states exist, what changes the point of the present moment from one to another. My referring to 'the thinker' was probably not a helpful metaphor. Given the universal numbers, what carries out the process whereby one is transformed into another? What makes the state of the thinker or the dreamer into the state of that entity at the next moment? Andrew I think the idea is analogous to the block universe. In Platonia all the states of the thinker and his relation to the world are computed in a timeless way. The impression of time for the thinker is recovered by putting the states into a sequence which is implicitly defined by their content. Brent Bruno and others, Do you think that computations performed by a computer or brain within a block universe contribute to the computational histories of a person? Let us defined the block multiverse by the (sub)universal dovetailer which wins the measure battle. If, in that structure, we implement a computer or a brain, then it will contribute to the history of the person (and that is why we can say yes to a doctor, because the artificial brain that he build is supposed to respect the measure of the actual history of its patient. Note that although there is a block-universal-dream, it is an open question if this leads to a well defined physical universe. It might be possible that not all machine dreams can glue together, leading to multi-multiverses, ... I can see why in a movie they do not, as there is no mathematical relation between the frames. OK. Nice. However, in a universe ruled by equations, it seems to me that a computer in a universe is leveraging relations in math to perform computations, albeit less directly than a platonic Turing machine running a program. To me it is like running a simulation of a brain on a virtual machine on physical hardware. The VM provides a level of abstraction, but ultimately its computations are still computations. OK. In the same way a mathematical universe is a level of abstraction yet could still provide a platform for genuine computation (not descriptions of computation) to be performed. What do you think? I can only agree. Arithmetical truth, and precisely the sigma_1 arithmetical truth (the true proposition having the shape ExP(x) with P(x) provably decidable) emulate all possible computations (it is a sort of canonical UD living in (emulated by) elementary arithmetic. 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-list@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: ON THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING was Another TOE short paper
On 09 Mar 2011, at 17:49, 1Z wrote: On Mar 9, 4:30 pm, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: OK. I guess you associate pain to the primitive matter. But that is even more incoherent with respect to the comp hypothesis. There is nothing mystical about the falsehood of comp. It is quite possible for comp to be false whilst naturalism remains true. My point is just that IF comp is true, then naturalism is false. Or if you prefer, that if naturalism is true, then comp is false. So I certainly agree here. Computationalism is not per se a theory of qualia. How can it be a theory of consciousness without being a theory of qualia? In that sense all right. Comp is the theory which accept as axiom that my brain/body is Turing emulable at some level. But in that sense, comp is a theory of everything. Indeed, it even makes elementary arithmetic a theory of everything, with both quanta and qualia derivable from digital machine's self-reference. Yep. Comp is a bad theory of qualia. As I said, Comp is the assumption that qualia are preserved through functional substitution at some level. A theory of qualia emerges from the self-reference logic. A theory of indescribable something-or-others does More precisely, a theory of describable and indescribable oneself can prove and infer about oneself. But then if you abandon comp at this stage, it means I have made my point. I thought you were defending COMP + MAT(*) I was pointing out that COMP does not imply not-MAT once PLATO is dropped. COMP may be a bad theory for other reasons. COMP makes no sense at all without Plato (that is we need to believe that phi_x(y) converges or does not converge. No more is needed for the epistemological reversal. Or show the flaw in UDA, or show where more than such Plato is used. If you have a theory of qualia using primitive matter, and coherent with comp, then you should be able to use it to extract a flaw in the UD Argument. Here's one: minds can be computed, but they only have real conscious if they run on the metal (at the zeroth level of abstraction). That's not your version of COMP, but it is adequate for most AI researchers, and for anybody who wants to be reincarnated in silicon Then there is a flaw in UDA+MGA. Where? (*) For the new people: MAT = weak materialism = the common doctrine that primitive matter exists, or that matter exists at the basic ontological level. We don't know how to write subroutines for phenomenality. Assuming comp, it is enough to write the code of a universal machine. For example RA (Robinson Arithmetic) has qualia, but RA lacks the cognitive ability to understand the notion of qualia. If you give it the induction axioms (getting PA), you get a Löbian machine, and it has the full power to find its own theory of qualia. Assuming indescribability is a sufficient, and not just a necessary feature of qualia That contradicts what you said in the preceding post. But then my task is even more simple, given that machine can access to the indescribability of their qualia. That artificial people do not have real feelings is a staple of sci fi. And ? So the intuitions that underly the HP also underly the badness of COMP as a theory of qualia What is HP? 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-list@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: ON THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING was Another TOE short paper
On 9 March 2011 17:22, 1Z peterdjo...@yahoo.com wrote: The point of eliminativism is that the eliminated thing doesn't exist at all. Just so. At a reduced ontological level, heat doesn't exist at all - it's just molecular motion, no more, no less, and any explanation invoking heat could in principle be entirely eliminated by one invoking molecular motion. Moreover, it is difficult to see why anyone would complain about a sense of elimination that just means non-fundamental, when we don't necessarily know what is fundamental, and we are going to continue using the term Not knowing what (if anything) may ultimately turn out to be the bottom level doesn't stop us from knowing that, in the hierarchy of explanation, molecular motion is a more fundamental level than heat. And the question of whether we go on using the eliminated term is an epistemological matter (i.e. it concerns what we know and can say) not an ontological one (concerning what ultimately exists). More importantly, the concept has a referent. It is just the same referent as another concept. But if your are going to call that elimination, what are you going to call what happened to phlogiston? Extermination? If here you want to say that phlogiston was eliminated, then you are clearly using the word in a non-standard way. Phlogiston is just a theoretical term of an incorrect theory of combustion, and hence no longer has a place in the replacement theory. Heat, on the other hand, is believed to refer correctly to a more fundamental underlying molecular phenomenon, and hence can be retained as a theoretical concept, though eliminated as a fundamental entity in its own right. The reductionist programme seeks to eliminate any need (in principle) to appeal to any and all non-fundamental ontological entities in precisely this way, and hence show ontology as resting on a single fundamental base, thereby situating composite entities at the epistemological level. It is hard to see what you mean by epistemological there. I don't think it is a synonym for non fundamental In effect, it *is* a synonym for non-fundamental. If, as reductive programmes envisage, ontology can be grounded somewhere in a finite set of ultimate entities and their relations, then non-fundamental entities (composites) must be aspects of what we know, not what things ultimately are. David On Mar 9, 3:25 pm, David Nyman da...@davidnyman.com wrote: On 9 March 2011 14:39, 1Z peterdjo...@yahoo.com wrote: So on this basis you would claim that heat is *ontologically* (i.e. not merely epistemologically) distinguishable from molecular motion? No. I would say it is ontologically the same as molecular motion, and molecular motion exists, so heat exists, so heat was not eliminated It seems that you persistently misunderstand the meaning of elimination in this context. If something can be shown to be a composite of more fundamental ontological components, it is of course disqualified (i.e. eliminated) thereby as an ontological fundamental But that's *not* what elimination means as in eliminativism. The point of eliminativism is that the eliminated thing doesn't exist at all. Moreover, it is difficult to see why anyone would complain about a sense of elimination that just means non-fundamental, when we don't necessarily know what is fundamental, and we are going to continue using the term else such use of the terms ontological, fundamental and eliminated is rendered meaningless. Hence heat can indeed be eliminated from the catalogue of ontological fundamentals in this way, and understood as consisting in the more fundamental phenomenon of molecular motion. Of course the *concept* (and a fortiori the sensation) of heat isn't thereby eliminated epistemologically More importantly, the concept has a referent. It is just the same referent as another concept. But if your are going to call that elimination, what are you going to call what happened to phlogiston? Extermination? , but this is the very distinction we are trying to establish on a firm footing. The reductionist programme seeks to eliminate any need (in principle) to appeal to any and all non-fundamental ontological entities in precisely this way, and hence show ontology as resting on a single fundamental base, thereby situating composite entities at the epistemological level. It is hard to see what you mean by epistemological there. I don't think it is a synonym for non fundamental -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to
Re: ON THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING was Another TOE short paper
On Mar 9, 5:56 pm, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: In that sense all right. Comp is the theory which accept as axiom that my brain/body is Turing emulable at some level. But in that sense, comp is a theory of everything. Indeed, it even makes elementary arithmetic a theory of everything, with both quanta and qualia derivable from digital machine's self-reference. Comp is not a TOE without Platonism But then if you abandon comp at this stage, it means I have made my point. I thought you were defending COMP + MAT(*) I was pointing out that COMP does not imply not-MAT once PLATO is dropped. COMP may be a bad theory for other reasons. COMP makes no sense at all without Plato (that is we need to believe that phi_x(y) converges or does not converge. Platonism is not bivalence No more is needed for the epistemological reversal. Or show the flaw in UDA, or show where more than such Plato is used. If you have a theory of qualia using primitive matter, and coherent with comp, then you should be able to use it to extract a flaw in the UD Argument. Here's one: minds can be computed, but they only have real conscious if they run on the metal (at the zeroth level of abstraction). That's not your version of COMP, but it is adequate for most AI researchers, and for anybody who wants to be reincarnated in silicon Then there is a flaw in UDA+MGA. Where? You can't disprove materialism without assuming Platonism That artificial people do not have real feelings is a staple of sci fi. And ? So the intuitions that underly the HP also underly the badness of COMP as a theory of qualia What is HP? The Hard Problem -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: ON THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING was Another TOE short paper
On Mar 9, 6:00 pm, David Nyman da...@davidnyman.com wrote: On 9 March 2011 17:22, 1Z peterdjo...@yahoo.com wrote: The point of eliminativism is that the eliminated thing doesn't exist at all. Just so. At a reduced ontological level, heat doesn't exist at all - It does, because it is identified with something that does exist it's just molecular motion, no more, no less, and any explanation invoking heat could in principle be entirely eliminated by one invoking molecular motion. Or vice versa. But replacement of a description by an equivalent or synonymous one does not show that neither has a referent Moreover, it is difficult to see why anyone would complain about a sense of elimination that just means non-fundamental, when we don't necessarily know what is fundamental, and we are going to continue using the term Not knowing what (if anything) may ultimately turn out to be the bottom level doesn't stop us from knowing that, in the hierarchy of explanation, molecular motion is a more fundamental level than heat. And the question of whether we go on using the eliminated term is an epistemological matter (i.e. it concerns what we know and can say) not an ontological one (concerning what ultimately exists). The question of whether we continue using the term is ontological, because the issue of whether it has something to refer to is ontological (albeit not fundamentally so). We *can* stop using the term pholgiston because it has nothing to refer to. More importantly, the concept has a referent. It is just the same referent as another concept. But if your are going to call that elimination, what are you going to call what happened to phlogiston? Extermination? If here you want to say that phlogiston was eliminated, then you are clearly using the word in a non-standard way. No, you are, because elimnativism and reductionism are different ideas. Phlogiston is just a theoretical term of an incorrect theory of combustion, and hence no longer has a place in the replacement theory. Heat, on the other hand, is believed to refer correctly to a more fundamental underlying molecular phenomenon, and hence can be retained as a theoretical concept, though eliminated as a fundamental entity in its own right. Fine. So reductionist materialists only believe that mind doesn't exist in its own right...whereas eliminativists believe it doesn't exist at all. The reductionist programme seeks to eliminate any need (in principle) to appeal to any and all non-fundamental ontological entities in precisely this way, and hence show ontology as resting on a single fundamental base, thereby situating composite entities at the epistemological level. It is hard to see what you mean by epistemological there. I don't think it is a synonym for non fundamental In effect, it *is* a synonym for non-fundamental. If, as reductive programmes envisage, ontology can be grounded somewhere in a finite set of ultimate entities and their relations, then non-fundamental entities (composites) must be aspects of what we know, not what things ultimately are. They are neither: they are what things non-ultimately are. Aspects of knowledge would be things like truth and justification -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Molecular Motion and Heat, was ON THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING was Another TOE short paper
When you compare heat and molecular motion, first it would be good to define what molecular motion is. At the beginning, the molecules and atoms were considered as hard spheres. At this state, there was the problem as follows. We bring a glass of hot water in the room and leave it there. Eventually the temperature of the water will be equal to the ambient temperature. According to the heat theory, the temperature in the glass will be hot again spontaneously and it is in complete agreement with our experience. With molecular motion, if we consider them as hard spheres there is a nonzero chance that the water in the glass will be hot again. Moreover, there is a theorem (Poincaré recurrence) that states that if we wait long enough then the temperature of the glass must be hot again. No doubt, the chances are very small and time to wait is very long, in a way this is negligible. Yet some people are happy with such statistical explanation, some not. Hence, it is a bit too simple to say that molecular motion has eliminated heat at this level. Then we could say that molecules and atoms are not hard spheres but quantum objects. This however brings even more problems, as we do not have macroscopic objects then. Let me quote Laughlin to this end By the most important effect of phase organisation is to cause objects to exist. This point is subtle and easily overlooked, since we are accustomed to thinking about solidification in terms of packing of Newtonian spheres. Atoms are not Newtonian spheres, however, but ethereal quantum-mechanical entities lacking that most central of all properties of an object – an identifiable position. This is why attempts to describe free atoms in Newtonian terms always result in nonsense statements such as their being neither here nor there but simultaneously everywhere. It is aggregation into large objects that makes a Newtonian description of the atoms meaningful, not the reverse. One might compare this phenomenon with a yet-to-be-filmed Stephen Spilberg movie in which a huge number of little ghosts lock arms and, in doing so, become corporeal. So I personally not that sure that molecular motion has more meaning *ontologically* than heat. Evgenii P.S. For those who love heat, entropy, and information: http://blog.rudnyi.ru/2010/12/entropy-and-artificial-life.html On 09.03.2011 15:39 1Z said the following: On Mar 9, 2:23 pm, David Nymanda...@davidnyman.com wrote: On 9 March 2011 14:17, 1Zpeterdjo...@yahoo.com wrote: Phlogiston was eliminated, heat was reduced. There's a difference So on this basis you would claim that heat is *ontologically* (i.e. not merely epistemologically) distinguishable from molecular motion? No. I would say it is ontologically the same as molecular motion, and molecular motion exists, so heat exists, so heat was not eliminated -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: ON THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING was Another TOE short paper
On 3/9/2011 8:49 AM, 1Z wrote: If you have a theory of qualia using primitive matter, and coherent with comp, then you should be able to use it to extract a flaw in the UD Argument. Here's one: minds can be computed, but they only have real conscious if they run on the metal (at the zeroth level of abstraction). That's not your version of COMP, but it is adequate for most AI researchers, and for anybody who wants to be reincarnated in silicon But how do we know what the zeroth level is? What is really meant is OUR level - the one in which we can give ostensive definitions. Which is my point about BIVs. We can only know them to be conscious insofar as they can be grounded in our zeroth level. 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-list@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: ON THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING was Another TOE short paper
On 3/9/2011 9:24 AM, David Nyman wrote: On 9 March 2011 16:21, Brent Meekermeeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: To me that is an open question. Are philosophical zombies possible? It seems unlikely, but when I consider specific ideas about consciousness, such as Julian Jaynes, then it seems more plausible that conscious-like behavior could be evinced with such different internal processing that it would not realize consciousness as I experience it - though it might still be consciousness in Bruno's sense of being capable of mathematical self-reference. My reading of Jaynes (and TOOCITBOTBM is one of my favourites) is that by non-conscious he actually meant non-self-conscious. The non-self-conscious person essentially obeys the voices in her head, but when these can no longer provide guidance, internal dialogue - and with it, self-consciousness - may emerge as a superior survival strategy. However I don't believe Jaynes thought that the bicameral person literally lacked phenomenal experience. David Yes, I realize there are kinds of consciousness. I thought the interesting idea in Jaynes was that perceptual consciousness, which I'm sure my dog has, was co-opted by evolution to become self-consciousness. Specifically that with the development of language, communication of aural information became very important. The brain evolved to internalize this into an inner-narration to realize the advantage of keeping one's thought's to oneself (e.g. decpetion). It would imply that if, for example written communication was invented before language, then our brains might implement consciousness through an inner text (like those ribbons across the bottom of a TV news program) instead of an inner voice. This is what leads me to speculate that there could be completely different modes of internal cogitation that we could not easily identify even though the external behavior was what we could call conscious. The intelligent Mars Rover may be an example of this. 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-list@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: ON THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING was Another TOE short paper
On Mar 9, 5:15 pm, Brent Meeker meeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: On 3/9/2011 5:30 AM, 1Z wrote: Zombies are not a typical example of the problems of reduction, they are an instance of the reduction being bought too cheaply: the reductive materialist presents the off-the-peg conclusion that consciousness just is neural firing, without filling in the explanation that allows us to see that it*must be*, so that we instead remain being able to see that it *might not* be! But keep in mind what counts as explanation. In science it is really just a model that tells us how something can manipulated. As opposed to what? I think explanation supports modal claims. I think models do as well. If you always get a result however you manipulate a model, it's necessary within that model. If you sometimes do, it's possible. Never, impossible. -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Movie cannot think
On 3/9/2011 9:36 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: I can see why in a movie they do not, as there is no mathematical relation between the frames. OK. Nice. But they do have a relation via the thing that was filmed. 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-list@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: ON THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING was Another TOE short paper
On 3/9/2011 11:46 AM, 1Z wrote: On Mar 9, 5:15 pm, Brent Meekermeeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: On 3/9/2011 5:30 AM, 1Z wrote: Zombies are not a typical example of the problems of reduction, they are an instance of the reduction being bought too cheaply: the reductive materialist presents the off-the-peg conclusion that consciousness just is neural firing, without filling in the explanation that allows us to see that it*must be*, so that we instead remain being able to see that it *might not* be! But keep in mind what counts as explanation. In science it is really just a model that tells us how something can manipulated. As opposed to what? As opposed to stories about what exists, but can never be tested. Brent I think explanation supports modal claims. I think models do as well. If you always get a result however you manipulate a model, it's necessary within that model. If you sometimes do, it's possible. Never, impossible. -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: ON THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING was Another TOE short paper
On 9 March 2011 19:09, 1Z peterdjo...@yahoo.com wrote: Fine, Peter, have it your way. We can't seem to progress beyond vocabulary difficulties to the substance. No doubt I have been less than persuasive, and thus have failed to convince you that there is indeed any substance. But since I have nothing further to add at this point, I'll stop here (and so save you some typing, as you are wont to say). David On Mar 9, 6:00 pm, David Nyman da...@davidnyman.com wrote: On 9 March 2011 17:22, 1Z peterdjo...@yahoo.com wrote: The point of eliminativism is that the eliminated thing doesn't exist at all. Just so. At a reduced ontological level, heat doesn't exist at all - It does, because it is identified with something that does exist it's just molecular motion, no more, no less, and any explanation invoking heat could in principle be entirely eliminated by one invoking molecular motion. Or vice versa. But replacement of a description by an equivalent or synonymous one does not show that neither has a referent Moreover, it is difficult to see why anyone would complain about a sense of elimination that just means non-fundamental, when we don't necessarily know what is fundamental, and we are going to continue using the term Not knowing what (if anything) may ultimately turn out to be the bottom level doesn't stop us from knowing that, in the hierarchy of explanation, molecular motion is a more fundamental level than heat. And the question of whether we go on using the eliminated term is an epistemological matter (i.e. it concerns what we know and can say) not an ontological one (concerning what ultimately exists). The question of whether we continue using the term is ontological, because the issue of whether it has something to refer to is ontological (albeit not fundamentally so). We *can* stop using the term pholgiston because it has nothing to refer to. More importantly, the concept has a referent. It is just the same referent as another concept. But if your are going to call that elimination, what are you going to call what happened to phlogiston? Extermination? If here you want to say that phlogiston was eliminated, then you are clearly using the word in a non-standard way. No, you are, because elimnativism and reductionism are different ideas. Phlogiston is just a theoretical term of an incorrect theory of combustion, and hence no longer has a place in the replacement theory. Heat, on the other hand, is believed to refer correctly to a more fundamental underlying molecular phenomenon, and hence can be retained as a theoretical concept, though eliminated as a fundamental entity in its own right. Fine. So reductionist materialists only believe that mind doesn't exist in its own right...whereas eliminativists believe it doesn't exist at all. The reductionist programme seeks to eliminate any need (in principle) to appeal to any and all non-fundamental ontological entities in precisely this way, and hence show ontology as resting on a single fundamental base, thereby situating composite entities at the epistemological level. It is hard to see what you mean by epistemological there. I don't think it is a synonym for non fundamental In effect, it *is* a synonym for non-fundamental. If, as reductive programmes envisage, ontology can be grounded somewhere in a finite set of ultimate entities and their relations, then non-fundamental entities (composites) must be aspects of what we know, not what things ultimately are. They are neither: they are what things non-ultimately are. Aspects of knowledge would be things like truth and justification -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: ON THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING was Another TOE short paper
On 9 March 2011 19:43, Brent Meeker meeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: Yes, I realize there are kinds of consciousness. I thought the interesting idea in Jaynes was that perceptual consciousness, which I'm sure my dog has, was co-opted by evolution to become self-consciousness. Specifically that with the development of language, communication of aural information became very important. The brain evolved to internalize this into an inner-narration to realize the advantage of keeping one's thought's to oneself (e.g. decpetion). It would imply that if, for example written communication was invented before language, then our brains might implement consciousness through an inner text (like those ribbons across the bottom of a TV news program) instead of an inner voice. This is what leads me to speculate that there could be completely different modes of internal cogitation that we could not easily identify even though the external behavior was what we could call conscious. The intelligent Mars Rover may be an example of this. Interesting, you've given me something new to think about. Thanks David On 3/9/2011 9:24 AM, David Nyman wrote: On 9 March 2011 16:21, Brent Meekermeeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: To me that is an open question. Are philosophical zombies possible? It seems unlikely, but when I consider specific ideas about consciousness, such as Julian Jaynes, then it seems more plausible that conscious-like behavior could be evinced with such different internal processing that it would not realize consciousness as I experience it - though it might still be consciousness in Bruno's sense of being capable of mathematical self-reference. My reading of Jaynes (and TOOCITBOTBM is one of my favourites) is that by non-conscious he actually meant non-self-conscious. The non-self-conscious person essentially obeys the voices in her head, but when these can no longer provide guidance, internal dialogue - and with it, self-consciousness - may emerge as a superior survival strategy. However I don't believe Jaynes thought that the bicameral person literally lacked phenomenal experience. David Yes, I realize there are kinds of consciousness. I thought the interesting idea in Jaynes was that perceptual consciousness, which I'm sure my dog has, was co-opted by evolution to become self-consciousness. Specifically that with the development of language, communication of aural information became very important. The brain evolved to internalize this into an inner-narration to realize the advantage of keeping one's thought's to oneself (e.g. decpetion). It would imply that if, for example written communication was invented before language, then our brains might implement consciousness through an inner text (like those ribbons across the bottom of a TV news program) instead of an inner voice. This is what leads me to speculate that there could be completely different modes of internal cogitation that we could not easily identify even though the external behavior was what we could call conscious. The intelligent Mars Rover may be an example of this. 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-list@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. -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Molecular Motion and Heat, was ON THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING was Another TOE short paper
On 9 March 2011 19:22, Evgenii Rudnyi use...@rudnyi.ru wrote: So I personally not that sure that molecular motion has more meaning *ontologically* than heat. Actually, I agree with you. Of course whatever we can speak or theorise about is, strictly, entirely epistemological and consequently those aspects we label ontological are properly a subset of the theory of knowledge. And of course even in these terms it isn't clear that the physical is simply reducible to independently existing fundamental entities and their relations. Even though I was attempting to pursue some rather obvious consequences of the idea that reality might be so reducible, I accept that the relation between what we know and what may ultimately ground such knowledge is doubtless altogether more complex, subtle and opaque. David When you compare heat and molecular motion, first it would be good to define what molecular motion is. At the beginning, the molecules and atoms were considered as hard spheres. At this state, there was the problem as follows. We bring a glass of hot water in the room and leave it there. Eventually the temperature of the water will be equal to the ambient temperature. According to the heat theory, the temperature in the glass will be hot again spontaneously and it is in complete agreement with our experience. With molecular motion, if we consider them as hard spheres there is a nonzero chance that the water in the glass will be hot again. Moreover, there is a theorem (Poincaré recurrence) that states that if we wait long enough then the temperature of the glass must be hot again. No doubt, the chances are very small and time to wait is very long, in a way this is negligible. Yet some people are happy with such statistical explanation, some not. Hence, it is a bit too simple to say that molecular motion has eliminated heat at this level. Then we could say that molecules and atoms are not hard spheres but quantum objects. This however brings even more problems, as we do not have macroscopic objects then. Let me quote Laughlin to this end By the most important effect of phase organisation is to cause objects to exist. This point is subtle and easily overlooked, since we are accustomed to thinking about solidification in terms of packing of Newtonian spheres. Atoms are not Newtonian spheres, however, but ethereal quantum-mechanical entities lacking that most central of all properties of an object – an identifiable position. This is why attempts to describe free atoms in Newtonian terms always result in nonsense statements such as their being neither here nor there but simultaneously everywhere. It is aggregation into large objects that makes a Newtonian description of the atoms meaningful, not the reverse. One might compare this phenomenon with a yet-to-be-filmed Stephen Spilberg movie in which a huge number of little ghosts lock arms and, in doing so, become corporeal. So I personally not that sure that molecular motion has more meaning *ontologically* than heat. Evgenii P.S. For those who love heat, entropy, and information: http://blog.rudnyi.ru/2010/12/entropy-and-artificial-life.html On 09.03.2011 15:39 1Z said the following: On Mar 9, 2:23 pm, David Nymanda...@davidnyman.com wrote: On 9 March 2011 14:17, 1Zpeterdjo...@yahoo.com wrote: Phlogiston was eliminated, heat was reduced. There's a difference So on this basis you would claim that heat is *ontologically* (i.e. not merely epistemologically) distinguishable from molecular motion? No. I would say it is ontologically the same as molecular motion, and molecular motion exists, so heat exists, so heat was not eliminated -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: ON THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING was Another TOE short paper
On Mar 9, 10:33 pm, David Nyman da...@davidnyman.com wrote: On 9 March 2011 19:09, 1Z peterdjo...@yahoo.com wrote: Fine, Peter, have it your way. We can't seem to progress beyond vocabulary difficulties to the substance. Unfortunately non-vocabulary differences have to be expressed in vocabulary. As do vocabulary differences, for that matter. -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: ON THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING was Another TOE short paper
On Mar 9, 7:28 pm, Brent Meeker meeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: On 3/9/2011 8:49 AM, 1Z wrote: If you have a theory of qualia using primitive matter, and coherent with comp, then you should be able to use it to extract a flaw in the UD Argument. Here's one: minds can be computed, but they only have real conscious if they run on the metal (at the zeroth level of abstraction). That's not your version of COMP, but it is adequate for most AI researchers, and for anybody who wants to be reincarnated in silicon But how do we know what the zeroth level is? Then hypothesis that the physical world is zero level is consistent with the hypothesis that we are and must be running on the metal. Many other scenarios are possible. But only coherence was asked for (see above) What is really meant is OUR level - the one in which we can give ostensive definitions. Which is my point about BIVs. We can only know them to be conscious insofar as they can be grounded in our zeroth level. A BIV that is grounded in our level is no BIV at all. That would be like a novel consisting entirely of historical facts. -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Molecular Motion and Heat, was ON THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING was Another TOE short paper
On Mar 9, 7:22 pm, Evgenii Rudnyi use...@rudnyi.ru wrote: When you compare heat and molecular motion, first it would be good to define what molecular motion is. At the beginning, the molecules and atoms were considered as hard spheres. At this state, there was the problem as follows. We bring a glass of hot water in the room and leave it there. Eventually the temperature of the water will be equal to the ambient temperature. According to the heat theory, the temperature in the glass will be hot again spontaneously and it is in complete agreement with our experience. OK. With molecular motion, if we consider them as hard spheres there is a nonzero chance that the water in the glass will be hot again. I don't see the difference. Both seem to predict the same thing Moreover, there is a theorem (Poincar recurrence) that states that if we wait long enough then the temperature of the glass must be hot again. No doubt, the chances are very small and time to wait is very long, in a way this is negligible. Yet some people are happy with such statistical explanation, some not. Hence, it is a bit too simple to say that molecular motion has eliminated heat at this level. I still don't see the difference Then we could say that molecules and atoms are not hard spheres but quantum objects. This however brings even more problems, as we do not have macroscopic objects then. Let me quote Laughlin to this end By the most important effect of phase organisation is to cause objects to exist. This point is subtle and easily overlooked, since we are accustomed to thinking about solidification in terms of packing of Newtonian spheres. Atoms are not Newtonian spheres, however, but ethereal quantum-mechanical entities lacking that most central of all properties of an object an identifiable position. This is why attempts to describe free atoms in Newtonian terms always result in nonsense statements such as their being neither here nor there but simultaneously everywhere. It is aggregation into large objects that makes a Newtonian description of the atoms meaningful, not the reverse. One might compare this phenomenon with a yet-to-be-filmed Stephen Spilberg movie in which a huge number of little ghosts lock arms and, in doing so, become corporeal. So I personally not that sure that molecular motion has more meaning *ontologically* than heat Ermm... so you are saying that the classical explanation of heat reduces it to the motions of molecules with individually well-defined positions and velocities --whereas Qm reuires that those things can only be defined in a kind of reverse- reductionism scenario where the parts acquire their properties from the whole? Is that right? I am not sure that really breaks anything in thermodynamics, because quantum entities still can have well-defined kinetic energies without having well defined positions or velocities. Evgenii P.S. For those who love heat, entropy, and information: http://blog.rudnyi.ru/2010/12/entropy-and-artificial-life.html On 09.03.2011 15:39 1Z said the following: On Mar 9, 2:23 pm, David Nymanda...@davidnyman.com wrote: On 9 March 2011 14:17, 1Zpeterdjo...@yahoo.com wrote: Phlogiston was eliminated, heat was reduced. There's a difference So on this basis you would claim that heat is *ontologically* (i.e. not merely epistemologically) distinguishable from molecular motion? No. I would say it is ontologically the same as molecular motion, and molecular motion exists, so heat exists, so heat was not eliminated -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: ON THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING was Another TOE short paper
On 09 Mar 2011, at 19:10, 1Z wrote: On Mar 9, 5:56 pm, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: In that sense all right. Comp is the theory which accept as axiom that my brain/body is Turing emulable at some level. But in that sense, comp is a theory of everything. Indeed, it even makes elementary arithmetic a theory of everything, with both quanta and qualia derivable from digital machine's self-reference. Comp is not a TOE without Platonism Remind me what you mean by Platonism. In the derivation I use only arithmetical realism. Platonism per se is in the conclusion. But then if you abandon comp at this stage, it means I have made my point. I thought you were defending COMP + MAT(*) I was pointing out that COMP does not imply not-MAT once PLATO is dropped. COMP may be a bad theory for other reasons. COMP makes no sense at all without Plato (that is we need to believe that phi_x(y) converges or does not converge. Platonism is not bivalence But arithmetical realism is, formally, the excluded middle principle. I accept the truth of A v ~A, for A sigma_1. No more is needed for the epistemological reversal. Or show the flaw in UDA, or show where more than such Plato is used. If you have a theory of qualia using primitive matter, and coherent with comp, then you should be able to use it to extract a flaw in the UD Argument. Here's one: minds can be computed, but they only have real conscious if they run on the metal (at the zeroth level of abstraction). That's not your version of COMP, but it is adequate for most AI researchers, and for anybody who wants to be reincarnated in silicon Then there is a flaw in UDA+MGA. Where? You can't disprove materialism without assuming Platonism This does not show where is the flaw. That artificial people do not have real feelings is a staple of sci fi. And ? So the intuitions that underly the HP also underly the badness of COMP as a theory of qualia What is HP? The Hard Problem HP, which is nothing than the mind body problem, and is really HPM+HPM (HPMind+HPmatter) underlies the difficulty of any theory. 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-list@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: Movie cannot think
On 09 Mar 2011, at 20:51, Brent Meeker wrote: On 3/9/2011 9:36 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: I can see why in a movie they do not, as there is no mathematical relation between the frames. OK. Nice. But they do have a relation via the thing that was filmed. The point consists in showing that the projection of the movie does not generate consciousness. Not that consciousness did not exist in relation with the movie. With the movie, we can upload the boolean plane machine, and make that consciousness again manifested. But the movie itself does not compute anything. It describes a computation and consciousness is in the computation, not in the description of the computation. The relation between the movie and the computation is akin to the relation between a proof and the Gödel number of that proof. They are related, but they are not the same thing. It is a subtle point. It is nicely capture formally with the self- reference logic, where we can show that p - Bp, but only because we know that the machine is correct (by definition or choice). The machine cannot know that. Then I showed that a movie is a relative thing. for an observer, there is a movie in front of a immobile spectator, but for another observer there is an immobile pellicle with a moving observer. But comp makes the observer's presence not needed, so that the consciousness cannot supervene on the running of the movie, given that for another observer there is no running at all. Of course the movie displays the same physical activity as the boolean graph, and this means that consciousness, if we keep comp, has to be related to the abstract computation, not on his implementation is such or such universal system. But then consciousness, pain, qualia are often considered as abstract/ immaterial, so it is not so astonishing that we have to identify it with abstract relation that a person/machine can have with herself. But this means that we have to solve the mind-body problem by explaining the illusion of matter from the consciousness, and not the contrary. 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-list@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: ON THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING was Another TOE short paper
On 3/9/2011 4:15 PM, 1Z wrote: On Mar 9, 7:28 pm, Brent Meekermeeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: On 3/9/2011 8:49 AM, 1Z wrote: If you have a theory of qualia using primitive matter, and coherent with comp, then you should be able to use it to extract a flaw in the UD Argument. Here's one: minds can be computed, but they only have real conscious if they run on the metal (at the zeroth level of abstraction). That's not your version of COMP, but it is adequate for most AI researchers, and for anybody who wants to be reincarnated in silicon But how do we know what the zeroth level is? Then hypothesis that the physical world is zero level is consistent with the hypothesis that we are and must be running on the metal. Many other scenarios are possible. But only coherence was asked for (see above) What is really meant is OUR level - the one in which we can give ostensive definitions. Which is my point about BIVs. We can only know them to be conscious insofar as they can be grounded in our zeroth level. A BIV that is grounded in our level is no BIV at all. That would be like a novel consisting entirely of historical facts. A BIV that is conscious is like a historical novel. A human BIV with input simulating the perceptions of a Drtywxz on planet Uwipjt might possibly be conscious, as a Boltzmann brain might be. 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-list@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: ON THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING was Another TOE short paper
On 09 Mar 2011, at 20:09, 1Z wrote: On Mar 9, 6:00 pm, David Nyman da...@davidnyman.com wrote: On 9 March 2011 17:22, 1Z peterdjo...@yahoo.com wrote: The point of eliminativism is that the eliminated thing doesn't exist at all. Just so. At a reduced ontological level, heat doesn't exist at all - It does, because it is identified with something that does exist it's just molecular motion, no more, no less, and any explanation invoking heat could in principle be entirely eliminated by one invoking molecular motion. Or vice versa. But replacement of a description by an equivalent or synonymous one does not show that neither has a referent Moreover, it is difficult to see why anyone would complain about a sense of elimination that just means non-fundamental, when we don't necessarily know what is fundamental, and we are going to continue using the term Not knowing what (if anything) may ultimately turn out to be the bottom level doesn't stop us from knowing that, in the hierarchy of explanation, molecular motion is a more fundamental level than heat. And the question of whether we go on using the eliminated term is an epistemological matter (i.e. it concerns what we know and can say) not an ontological one (concerning what ultimately exists). The question of whether we continue using the term is ontological, because the issue of whether it has something to refer to is ontological (albeit not fundamentally so). We *can* stop using the term pholgiston because it has nothing to refer to. More importantly, the concept has a referent. It is just the same referent as another concept. But if your are going to call that elimination, what are you going to call what happened to phlogiston? Extermination? If here you want to say that phlogiston was eliminated, then you are clearly using the word in a non-standard way. No, you are, because elimnativism and reductionism are different ideas. Phlogiston is just a theoretical term of an incorrect theory of combustion, and hence no longer has a place in the replacement theory. Heat, on the other hand, is believed to refer correctly to a more fundamental underlying molecular phenomenon, and hence can be retained as a theoretical concept, though eliminated as a fundamental entity in its own right. Fine. So reductionist materialists only believe that mind doesn't exist in its own right...whereas eliminativists believe it doesn't exist at all. The reductionist programme seeks to eliminate any need (in principle) to appeal to any and all non-fundamental ontological entities in precisely this way, and hence show ontology as resting on a single fundamental base, thereby situating composite entities at the epistemological level. It is hard to see what you mean by epistemological there. I don't think it is a synonym for non fundamental In effect, it *is* a synonym for non-fundamental. If, as reductive programmes envisage, ontology can be grounded somewhere in a finite set of ultimate entities and their relations, then non-fundamental entities (composites) must be aspects of what we know, not what things ultimately are. They are neither: they are what things non-ultimately are. Aspects of knowledge would be things like truth and justification That's correct. But if that analysis was possibly successful, there would be no HP. Consciousness does exist in its own right, unlike heat, and so the analogy with heat break down ... unless you push the comp hypothesis to its ultimate conclusion and make primitive matter a convenient fiction. In that reversed direction we attach an immaterial (and self-referential property like knowledge Bp ( p)), to an immaterial entity (well an infinity of them). The hard problem comes from the insistence to privilege a particular type of 'physical' implementation. Consciousness becomes a person attribute, like a belief in a reality, and we can explain why it has unfathomable feature, why it is not definable, etc. matter becomes more complex to recover, and that is the point of the reversal. Appearance of matter does not disappear though, as the logic of the consistent belief and knowledge (the modality defined by Bp Dp ( p) illustrate. 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-list@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: Movie cannot think
On Mar 9, 11:33 am, 1Z peterdjo...@yahoo.com wrote: On Mar 9, 1:24 pm, Andrew Soltau andrewsol...@gmail.com wrote: On 08/03/11 16:14, Brent Meeker wrote: On 3/8/2011 3:14 AM, Andrew Soltau wrote: What I am driving at here is the same question as in the email Comp. Granted that all possible states exist, what changes the point of the present moment from one to another. My referring to 'the thinker' was probably not a helpful metaphor. Given the universal numbers, what carries out the process whereby one is transformed into another? What makes the state of the thinker or the dreamer into the state of that entity at the next moment? Andrew I think the idea is analogous to the block universe. In Platonia all the states of the thinker and his relation to the world are computed in a timeless way. OK. But for any given definition of the thinker, there is a version of the world to which he corresponds. Whether considered as a physical entity, or a mind or a record of observations, I am instantiated in a specific version of the universe. On observation, this state changes. The observer is now in a new and different state, and is instantiated in a new and different version of the universe. If one steps back and looks at all the possible states of the thinker, existing in all the different corresponding states of the universe at each moment, the result is themoviefilm Barbour refers to. This is a timeless situation. The impression of time for the thinker is recovered by putting the states into a sequence which is implicitly defined by their content. So then you have a sequence, but still nothing actually happens. This is exactly the scenario Deutsch addresses. /Nothing/ can move from one moment to another. To exist at all at a particular moment means to exist there for ever. (1997, 263; his italics) One seems to pass from moment to moment, experiencing change. Deutsch, however, declares that this can only be an illusion. We do not experience time flowing, or passing. What we experience are differences between our present perceptions and our present memories of past perceptions. We interpret those differences, correctly, as evidence that the universe changes with time. We also interpret them, incorrectly, as evidence that our consciousness, or the present, or something, moves through time. (1997, 263) Movement of or through time is dismissed too easily here. Why don we have to experience our history one moment at a time if it all already exists (albeit with a sequential structure) Physically, this is unassailable. Hmm. The arguments in favour of the block universe are actually rather subtle However, we can explain the appearance of change very neatly, by saying that the frame of reference is changed, from one moment to the next to the next, with no change in anything physical. The Frame of Reference being non-physical? The only drawback is that this requires something 'outside' of the moments, and there is nothing outside the multiverse. The solution I propose is that phenomenal consciousness is an emergent property of this unitary system as a whole. If it is a property of the whole system, why are we each only conscious of one small spatio temporal area? Why bring consciousness in at all? Why not have a time-cursor that is responsible for the passage of time? In other words, this process is to the moments the way the computational capability of a computer is to the frames of amoviein solid state memory. Based on that, my belief is that, in the collapse dynamics of quantum mechanics, we have discovered evidence for a property of the unitary system in action, we just haven't recognised it as such. Which is why it gives rise to all the puzzles it does. Brent There may be a solution to the question of finiteness, such as in why are we each only conscious of one small spatio temporal area? A possible answer is that our consciousness involves the consumption of free energy (work) that does not have access to infinite power supplies within any finite duration. Action is defined in units of energy and time This also can be related to the Bekenstein bound. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bekenstein_bound Onward! Stephen -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
