Re: 3-1 views (was: Re: Better Than the Chinese Room)
On 17 Feb 2014, at 19:49, John Clark wrote: On Sun, Feb 16, 2014 at 1:14 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: what exactly is the question? Be specific and DON'T HIDE BEHIND PRONOUNS WITH NO CLEAR REFERENT. The question is what do you [blah blah] DON'T HIDE BEHIND PRONOUNS WITH NO CLEAR REFERENT. I did, as you quote below. You = the unique 1p owner of your personal memory in Helsinki Then after the button has been pushed and the personal memory in Helsinki is not unique anymore who is the p in the 1p ? And why 1, what is so one-ish about it? You seem to have problem with english. I have answered that question many times. The p in the 1p is persons in both cities. There are one- ish in their own first person pov, on the which the question was about, as with comp we know that both feel unique, and both are genuine descendant of the person in Helsinki. In Helsinki you know that P(my experience will be the experience of seeing a unique city) = 1. Who is Mr. my? Be specific and DON'T HIDE BEHIND PRONOUNS WITH NO CLEAR REFERENT. The unique 1p owner of your [blah blah] DON'T HIDE BEHIND PRONOUNS WITH NO CLEAR REFERENT. Is Mr. p blah or blah? ? By comp we know that [blah blah] Well good for comp. the question asked was about his first person experience, Who is Mr. his, and who exactly is the person having this first person experience? Be specific, give names, and DON'T HIDE BEHIND PRONOUNS WITH NO CLEAR REFERENT. The question is asked to John-Clark with diary H, before the pushing on the button. Who is Mr. you? Be specific and DON'T HIDE BEHIND PRONOUNS WITH NO CLEAR REFERENT The owner of the H diary, before he pushes on the button If the owner of the diary, a certain Mr. he, is John Clark then the correct prediction would be that Mr. he will see both Washington AND Moscow. Not from their 1p view, unless you assume non Turing emulable telepathy. However if Mr. he is the fellow who is experiencing Helsinki right now then the correct prediction would be Mr. he will see neither Washington NOR Moscow. Simple calculus show that this prediction will be refuted by both copies. That should be enough to understand that they did not answer the right question. Or comp is false, and you would die in the simplest teleportation, without duplication, of step one. But then non- step-3 entials non-comp, which proves the point. But of course none of this really matters because predictions, good bad or indifferent, have nothing to do with identity and the feeling of self. Exactly. That's my point. Except that we are handling the prediction problem, not the identity problem which we have solved (we are both copies, in the 3p, but only one of them, in he 1p view). Well comp implies [blah blah] Well good for comp. Please go to step 4. Why? Because the first 3 steps were so free of ambiguity? The entire point of including strange but physically possible machines like duplicating chambers in a thought experiment is that it forces (or at least it should force) Bruno Marchal and John Clark to reexamine concepts that in a world without such machines seem so self evidently true that they're not worth thinking about. But even in these bizarre circumstances Bruno Marchal continues to use pronouns in exactly the same way that Bruno Marchal does in the everyday world when Bruno Marchal orders a pizza. No. Only when thinking about comp, or about Everett QM. In everyday life we use the pronouns I both for the 1p and 3p self-reference. The context supplies the information. But here, we have to make the distinction explicit. Your argument' consists of attributing a notion of I which I don't use at all. Duplicating chambers are not everyday things and thus everyday language is not good enough in a world that contains them; if the referent to personal pronouns was always unambiguous then the thought experiment itself would be unnecessary because the point it was trying to make would already be clear. That's why I ask you to take the distinction into account. It saves the whole reasoning from ambiguity. You just rename the indeterminacy into an ambiguity, but you convince no one. The 1p indeterminacy is 3p defined, and everyone who can read a diary and distinguish W from M can understand the argument. Bruno John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the
Re: What are numbers? What is math?
On 17 Feb 2014, at 17:34, Edgar L. Owen wrote: Hi Richard, Yes, that is a good example. R-computations, the R-math computations that actual compute the current information state of the universe, never have a halting problem because they are a program that always simply computes the next state from the current state which is ALWAYS possible. The Godel incompleteness and Halting problems only apply to H-math cases where a human mathematician comes up with a mathematical statement in advance, and then tries to get an automated system to computationally reach that state and thus prove it. That does not make sense. Reality doesn't work this way. It never 'imagines' any state to then try and reach it computationally. That would amount to teleology. R- math just always computes the next state from the present state. Just as ordinary software programs never have any problem at all in continually producing programmed output, so R-computations never do either. R-computations ALWAYS happily compute the current state of reality no matter what Bruno, Godel, or Turing or anybody else postulates about H-math. This is non sense. The notion of computation defined by Post, Church, etc. does not refer to humans, and with Church thesis is the most human independent epistemological notion ever. And you have not yet explained what *you* mean by computation, be them H or R. The proof of this is clearly that the universe DOES happily keep on existing, in spite of any H-mathematician telling us it doesn't or might not, or couldn't. The arithmetical universe might keep on existing, in some sense, perhaps. But you seem to conflate reality with physical reality. That cannot work if you assume computationalism. Bruno On Monday, February 17, 2014 9:07:35 AM UTC-5, yanniru wrote: Edgar, We recently learned on this list that a Turing machine does not halt based on real numbers and apparently can only halt for the natural numbers. I wonder if that may correspond to your claim of the computations of nature being different from the computations of humans. If I remember correctly you referred to the former as R computations and the latter as H computations. Richard On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 8:49 AM, Edgar L. Owen edga...@att.net wrote: Russell, And, as I mentioned, there is exhaustive evidence from cognitive science, and the sciences of physiology and perception, of the many specific different ways that humans DO model an external reality in their internal mental models of reality. Why do you just reject all this well documented science out of hand? Edgar On Sunday, February 16, 2014 6:54:48 PM UTC-5, Russell Standish wrote: On Sun, Feb 16, 2014 at 01:40:15PM -0800, Edgar L. Owen wrote: Russell, Well, there is overwhelming evidence of many sorts. The very fact that you and I can even communicate about this issue is one proof, unless you think I'm just a pesky figment of your imagination! It is evidence only of an intersubjective reality. That there is a common reality (to us) that we can agree on. Indeed, COMP, to take one theory of consciousness, predicts the existence of such an intersubjective reality. But, it is not evidence of a reality independent of all observers. And of course that can't possibly be true since I was here just fine before I ever met you The obvious fact that we have to eat and breathe to survive, unless you believe that just imagining food and oxygen is enough to sustain us. That is evidence of the Anthropic Principle (there is much stronger evidence of that too), ie what we observe as reality must be consistent with our existence within that reality. The Anthropic Principle does not imply an observer independent reality - that would be a reverse syllogism fallacy. So again I would say you are confusing the internal simulation of reality that all minds produce, and that everyone thinks is the real world he lives in, with the real external reality that all minds simulate each in their own way. Keep going. You still haven't provided any evidence that this real external reality actually exists! Until you do so, I will state that there is nothing here to confuse. Of course, if you actually succeed, not only will many people be surprised, you will undoubtedly be the most famous philosopher since Aristotle and Plato. Cheers -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpc...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it,
Re: 3-1 views
On 18 February 2014 02:35, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 2/17/2014 5:57 PM, David Nyman wrote: On 17 February 2014 20:15, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: But it is unambiguous under comp ex hypothesi: i.e. any classically adequate copy of me is equivalent to me. Under this hypothesis if I am duplicated both the resulting continuations are equivalent immediately posterior to duplication. Consequently I repeat my question: if *you* were duplicated in this manner, would you reasonably expect that either of the resulting equivalent continuations would experience a two-valued outcome? No, but as I said, that's regarding them as third persons. Well, the very logic of the hypothesis dictates that *both* continuations inherit the first personal perspective of the original and this will always be single-valued. But, as you said, there is an ineliminable ambiguity because neither can record anything first-personal that incorporates that third-personal doubleness. IOW it always seems as if there is only one of me (1p) even in the case that I know there are two of me (3p). Do you agree that this ambiguity is sufficient for step 3 to go through? You sound as though you want to sell me something. ? I have no interest buying the argument one piece at a time or swallowing it all at once. I'm interested in understanding it and it's consequences. Well, I cherished the hope that my questions might lead to your telling me your understanding of the consequences! I must admit though it does sometimes feel a bit like pulling teeth :) David Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How Wolves Change Rivers
On 18 February 2014 03:42, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: snip I have over and over. If I count my fingers, I get a number five. That number cannot reproduce the individual fingers and thumb of my hand. It's just a metaphor for a certain set of qualities associated with feeling and seeing my hand. There's the example of suits of cards being unnecessary to simulate all of the card games that exist. There's the example of sports being unlike games based only on mathematical rules because sports involves the limitations of the participants overcoming subjective aesthetics of pain and weakness to execute plays in the first place. There's the example of typefaces being unlike ASCII text, and timbre of a musical performance being unlike the sequence of notes on a page of sheet music. I can go on and on... How do you justify your counter claim? Do you really understand the mathematical argument you are supporting or are you just impressed that you can even understand part of it so it seems glamorous? Well, the UDA is a logical argument based on a specific premise (the computational theory of mind) and its purpose is to investigate rigorously the consequences of that premise, which are typically rather obfuscated in the literature. It is those consequences that are claimed to necessitate the reversal of physics and machine psychology. Not every step of the argument is uncontroversial, as the debate on this list gives testimony, but the to-and-fro has been instructive (at least to me) on the probable disposition of the issues. The mathematical analysis is highly specialised, at least in detail, and none of my references in our discussion have been to anything more than the general conceptual categories appealed to in that analysis, insofar as I can claim to have any mastery of them at this point. That said, it has been the diligent consideration of those categories over time that has led to my being much less certain that the puzzling categorical distinctions you refer to above are insoluble in a computational theory. I think, frankly, that wrangling over the possible references of terms like primordial and fundamental are beside the point. There is no question that any theory that doesn't dismiss consciousness at the outset (which In my view is simply incoherent) has to deal with its categorical distinctiveness from any possible functional description. But by the same token no such theory can avoid the heavy lifting of elucidating a lawful reciprocity between these two domains without trivialising the problems and even paradoxes that this entails. If comp led to a denial of the primordial nature of consciousness, in the sense I believe you intend, I would also be forced to reject it out of hand. But that does not seem to be the case, contrary to what I once imagined. What comp (if correct) seems rather to lead to is a principled account of the functional correlates of conscious actors. Such an account encompasses the functional claims of such actors to private acquaintance with a world of appearance filtered from the totality of computation. But the very logic of this account entails that it must always fail to capture an ineliminable gap between these claims and acquaintance per se. Moreover, that very failure must be strikingly apparent to the functional actors themselves. We might indeed say that whatever abides in this gap is primordial: it is not created by anything prior to it; but then no more are its functional correlates. Rather one might say that comp is a primordial account of the means by which that gap and its categorically unique contents are pulled into focus by a functional lens, if I may be permitted a metaphor of my own. My interest in comp does not preclude a desire to understand alternative theories; quite the opposite. It's just that I've managed to learn something distinctive from Bruno because of his dogged persistence in sticking to the point in discussion, whereas I cannot honestly say that I've had the same experience in discussions with you to this point. I'm perfectly willing to entertain the thought that this is because of some deficiency in me (god knows there are enough) but for me, your flights of metaphor raise more questions than they seem capable of answering. Perhaps Bruno's style of reasoning just suits my way of understanding things. David It is like taking the color wheel and saying that since values of HSV can me mapped to it, then knowing HSV coordinates will allow a blind person to see color. But this analogy suggests itself only because you have decided a priori to disbelieve some body that claims to be able to see what you can and behaves perfectly consistently with these claims. The difference is that I did not build the person out of mechanical parts specifically to be able to say that. It's not like Watson showed up in a turnip patch knowing how to play Jeopardy, or a ton of Barbie dolls showed up in a pit mine
Re: What are numbers? What is math?
On Monday, February 17, 2014 10:30:23 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: On 2/17/2014 7:09 PM, Russell Standish wrote: On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 06:32:35PM -0800, meekerdb wrote: On 2/17/2014 5:21 PM, Russell Standish wrote: On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 02:03:49PM -0800, meekerdb wrote: On 2/17/2014 1:55 PM, Russell Standish wrote: On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 05:33:48AM -0800, Edgar L. Owen wrote: Russell, All of science assumes an external reality independent of human observation. Who says? The replacement of tables and chairs by atoms and then by wave functions is just changing our best guess about ontology - it's not evidence that there is no mind independent ontology. The fact that there is intersubjective agreement on observations is still evidence for a mutual reality. Yes a mutual reality, but not a mind independent one. Certainly independent of any single mind. Certainly, but that only suggests that realism has to do with sharing common perceptions. A mutual reality requires that minds be mutually attuned to the same mutual range of sensitivity. We also have perceptions which we don't seem to share, and we can modulate between the two classes of perceptions intentionally as well as involuntarily. And the science formulated so far is independent of mind - It wants to be independent of mind, but really it is dependent on the mind's perception of the world perceived by the body (and technological bodies which extend the perception of our natural body). which is why Liz supposed that the past existed before it was observed (and constitutes a block universe past). that most everyday scientists usually just focus on mathematical descriptions of phenomena, and leave it at that. But if you ask them why mathematical descriptions are so successful? Wouldn't they just point at Occam's razor, if they've thought about it at all, that is? Or even go with Max Tegmark and say its all mathematics. Mathematics is just a different substrate, a different but still mind indpendent reality. Mathematics is even more dependent on the mind than science. It is the mind's view of the mind's measurement of itself as if it were the body. Notice that the main argument given for the reality of mathematics is the intersubjective agreement on the truths of mathematics; which gives the feeling it is discovered rather than invented. Ironically, mathematics is what the most mechanical range of our awareness has discovered about itself. The mistake is in attributing that narrow aesthetic to the totality. The problem is that mechanism is the product of insensitivity, so that it cannot prove that it is insensitive. When asked to simulate sense, it doesn't know how to show that it has failed. Or why do we all agree that's a chair over there? That one is obviously convention. Someone from remote Amazonia who's never seen a chair before wouldn't agree. They might not agree on the name, but they would agree there was an object there. The possibility of having a useable convention would seem to be a miracle if there is nothing mind-indpendent that correlates the perceptions of different persons. A dust mite would not necessarily agree that there was an object there. An entity which experienced the entire history of human civilization as a single afternoon might not agree that there was an object there. Neutrinos might not agree that there are objects at all. The existence of some mind independent reality is always the working assumption. Really? I don't think working scientists need to think about the issue much at all. Because it's an assumption so common they only question it unusual experiments - like tests of psychics. Whether they assume there is some kind of mind-independent reality, or are outrageous solipsists would not affect their ability to conduct experiments or do theory. One could still assume a mind-independent reality while assuming that one was the only mind. But they could not do either experiments or theory if they assumed the result depended on what they hoped or wished or expected. I agree, wishing is not science, but that need not be construed as evidence that physics is not ultimately metaphenomenal, and it doesn't mean that the equivalent of placebo effect and confirmation bias are not factors in all of science and nature in general. Craig Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Better Than the Chinese Room
On 17 February 2014 17:46, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 17 Feb 2014, at 14:13, David Nyman wrote: On 16 February 2014 16:17, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: The whole schema - physics included - would then have to be considered an epiphenomenon of some inaccessible ur-physics. Exactly. I'm not sure that it's exactly a contradiction just because of that, though, as in practice any putative ontological base - numbers included - must be inaccessible in this sense, except to theory. It illustrates, perhaps better than step 8, the difficulty of wanting a primitive matter having a primitive ontological reality capable of singularizing a conscious person capable to refer to it. I have to think more about this. I must say that it is this form of argument that most forcefully persuades me that the reversal of comp-physics is necessary if CTM is to be salvageable. Interesting. ISTM that MGA or Maudlin-style arguments tend to lead to somewhat ad hoc quibbling over the role of counterfactuals or the like. Strictly speaking MGA avoids the counterfactuals, but Maudlin does. And as quantum logic can be seen as a sort of logic of conditionals, or even counterfactuals, I am not sure if that confrontation with the counterfactuals is not interesting per se. There might be some sense in the quibble. Here, we see that the very notion of epiphenomenon is related to a notion of causality, with his typical one way (matter - consciousness) causality. But this asks for a notion of causality (which usually rise up the notion of counterfactuals). With comp (with the consequences) we can derive the main notion of causality for the indexical type of points of view [] (when A - B is a law: in all worlds where A is true, B is true: that is [](A - B). I must admit it hasn't been entirely clear to me why you decided that the MGA can go through without addressing the counterfactuals, especially since Maudlin felt he had to address them in his alternative formulation. I appreciate that Maudlin proceeds by trivialising the amount of activity involved in the computation whereas MGA relies on evacuating the notion of physical computation itself, but does the latter approach obviate the need to account for any possible counterfactual activity? But the comp account of consciousness - or indeed any non-eliminativist position - strongly entails that thought can refer only to epiphenomenal matter (to continue with that way of speaking). I guess that is the major attraction for idealist theories. It is easier to explain the illusion of matter to a conscious being than to explain the illusion of consciousness (a quasi contradiction) to a piece of matter. The leap from epiphenomenal to primitive matter then seems inadequately motivated, to say the least. OK. It is last God-of-the-gap. But it has a strong natural appeal, making the correct theory necessarily counterintuitive. The most typical explicit motivation is by appeal to evolutionary arguments - e.g. that we have evolved more-or-less accurate internal models to aid in our survival in the real external world of physics. But this appeal conceals a blatant begging of the question: yes, it must *appear* so, but it is precisely these appearances that we should seek to explain on independent grounds, not by assuming what is to be explained. I agree. I wonder if you have had any further thoughts? I have to say that the notion of epiphenomenon plunges me in an abyss of perplexity. The notion of causalities and responsibilities are modal realities, notably due to the nuances between true, justifiable, observable, knowable, etc. The natural picture we get assuming computationalism is conceptually transparent. We start from the arithmetical truth, which most people can understand the meaning of the sentences (before deciding its truth if ever). Then it is part of arithmetical truth that Turing (universal) machines exists and are involved in an intricate web of dreams, in which the self-referential constraints of relative self-correctness brought a non trivial invariant, sort of universal person. With comp it can only be a sort of baby, as any piece of life would particularizes it already. I often present the three primary hypostases in the order 1) p that is arithmetical truth 2) []p (beweisbar(p)) the intelligible 3) []p p (the soul, the first person, the knower (Theaetetus)) But the more logical order from inside is that we start from p, and keep p along with the logical birth of the man ([]p). So man is born with []p p, and it is only civilisation/honest-communication that taught him to separate []p from []p p. Epiphenomenalism might be related to our necessarily inability to see that, or know when, they are equivalent. A secret well kept by G* minus G, for the consistent, and a fortiori, the correct machines. I can speculate that the left brain is more
Re: 3-1 views (was: Re: Better Than the Chinese Room)
On Tue, Feb 18, 2014 at 9:33 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 17 Feb 2014, at 19:49, John Clark wrote: On Sun, Feb 16, 2014 at 1:14 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: what exactly is the question? Be specific and DON'T HIDE BEHIND PRONOUNS WITH NO CLEAR REFERENT. The question is what do you [blah blah] DON'T HIDE BEHIND PRONOUNS WITH NO CLEAR REFERENT. I did, as you quote below. You = the unique 1p owner of your personal memory in Helsinki Then after the button has been pushed and the personal memory in Helsinki is not unique anymore who is the p in the 1p ? And why 1, what is so one-ish about it? You seem to have problem with english. I have answered that question many times. The p in the 1p is persons in both cities. There are one-ish in their own first person pov, on the which the question was about, as with comp we know that both feel unique, and both are genuine descendant of the person in Helsinki. In Helsinki you know that P(my experience will be the experience of seeing a unique city) = 1. Who is Mr. my? Be specific and DON'T HIDE BEHIND PRONOUNS WITH NO CLEAR REFERENT. The unique 1p owner of your [blah blah] DON'T HIDE BEHIND PRONOUNS WITH NO CLEAR REFERENT. Is Mr. p blah or blah? ? By comp we know that [blah blah] Well good for comp. the question asked was about his first person experience, Who is Mr. his, and who exactly is the person having this first person experience? Be specific, give names, and DON'T HIDE BEHIND PRONOUNS WITH NO CLEAR REFERENT. The question is asked to John-Clark with diary H, before the pushing on the button. Who is Mr. you? Be specific and DON'T HIDE BEHIND PRONOUNS WITH NO CLEAR REFERENT The owner of the H diary, before he pushes on the button If the owner of the diary, a certain Mr. he, is John Clark then the correct prediction would be that Mr. he will see both Washington AND Moscow. Not from their 1p view, unless you assume non Turing emulable telepathy. However if Mr. he is the fellow who is experiencing Helsinki right now then the correct prediction would be Mr. he will see neither Washington NOR Moscow. Simple calculus show that this prediction will be refuted by both copies. That should be enough to understand that they did not answer the right question. Or comp is false, and you would die in the simplest teleportation, without duplication, of step one. But then non-step-3 entials non-comp, which proves the point. But of course none of this really matters because predictions, good bad or indifferent, have nothing to do with identity and the feeling of self. Exactly. That's my point. Except that we are handling the prediction problem, not the identity problem which we have solved (we are both copies, in the 3p, but only one of them, in he 1p view). Well comp implies [blah blah] Well good for comp. Please go to step 4. Why? Because the first 3 steps were so free of ambiguity? The entire point of including strange but physically possible machines like duplicating chambers in a thought experiment is that it forces (or at least it should force) Bruno Marchal and John Clark to reexamine concepts that in a world without such machines seem so self evidently true that they're not worth thinking about. But even in these bizarre circumstances Bruno Marchal continues to use pronouns in exactly the same way that Bruno Marchal does in the everyday world when Bruno Marchal orders a pizza. No. Only when thinking about comp, or about Everett QM. In everyday life we use the pronouns I both for the 1p and 3p self-reference. The context supplies the information. But here, we have to make the distinction explicit. Your argument' consists of attributing a notion of I which I don't use at all. Duplicating chambers are not everyday things and thus everyday language is not good enough in a world that contains them; if the referent to personal pronouns was always unambiguous then the thought experiment itself would be unnecessary because the point it was trying to make would already be clear. That's why I ask you to take the distinction into account. It saves the whole reasoning from ambiguity. You just rename the indeterminacy into an ambiguity, but you convince no one. That's it. From what I can understand in John's posts concerning the pronouns, he is just hammering away this tautology again and again, exploiting the very indeterminacy that is the consequence of this part of UDA, claiming it's some unfair, unclear, strange, non-standard ambiguity that implies bad reasoning. If John is serious and not trolling you/the list on this matter, this is probably why he thinks he found some flaw, when he seems to just underestimate the result of the argument at this point; because on the other hand to him it's so clear you can't predict the next moment... so trivial [+add some standard insult with an
Re: Better Than the Chinese Room
On 17 February 2014 06:07, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: On 17 February 2014 08:39, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 2/16/2014 5:14 PM, David Nyman wrote: On 17 February 2014 00:12, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: I don't think so. We know where the values of the Mars Rover are encoded and how they affect its behavior and we know how we could change them. That's about as good as reductionism gets. But now aren't you just substituting value as an epiphenomenon of physics in place of consciousness? Stathis could just as easily say that this was merely a manner of speaking and whatever occurs is simply a consequence of physical causation. I and I would agree with Stathis - except for the merely. I think Bruno was right when he observed that epi doesn't mean anything in this context. Stathis doesn't think that consciousness is separable from the physics; it's just talking about the same thing at a different level. We don't call life an epiphenomena of biochemistry. And I regard meaning in the same way, or as Dennett calls it the intentional stance. I think if I say consciousness is an epiphenomenon of biochemistry I should also say that life is. And should you not go on to say that biochemistry is an epiphenomenon of physics and physics is an epiphenomenon of well, something that is not itself epiphenomenal, I guess? The way you formulate the problem seems to tend to the conclusion that any and all appearances should strictly be considered an epiphenomenon of something more fundamental that cannot possibly be encountered directly. And, moreover, there is no entailment that any such something be straightforwardly isomorphic with any of those appearances. I'm not saying that this view is incoherent, by the way, but do you agree that something like this is entailed by what you say? David We don't say that, because while life is mysterious, it is not quite as mysterious as consciousness, and it seems to me that much of the philosophical discussion about consciousness occurs mainly because it seems mysterious. As a person somewhat familiar with biology I can see how life emerges from biochemistry, but I can't see how consciousness does in quite the same way. To put it differently, I can't imagine all the biochemistry being there but life absent, but I can imagine all the biochemistry being there but consciousness absent (though further reasoning may show that that to be impossible). But maybe that is just a failure of imagination. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Better Than the Chinese Room
On 18 Feb 2014, at 15:06, David Nyman wrote: On 17 February 2014 17:46, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 17 Feb 2014, at 14:13, David Nyman wrote: On 16 February 2014 16:17, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: The whole schema - physics included - would then have to be considered an epiphenomenon of some inaccessible ur-physics. Exactly. I'm not sure that it's exactly a contradiction just because of that, though, as in practice any putative ontological base - numbers included - must be inaccessible in this sense, except to theory. It illustrates, perhaps better than step 8, the difficulty of wanting a primitive matter having a primitive ontological reality capable of singularizing a conscious person capable to refer to it. I have to think more about this. I must say that it is this form of argument that most forcefully persuades me that the reversal of comp-physics is necessary if CTM is to be salvageable. Interesting. ISTM that MGA or Maudlin-style arguments tend to lead to somewhat ad hoc quibbling over the role of counterfactuals or the like. Strictly speaking MGA avoids the counterfactuals, but Maudlin does. And as quantum logic can be seen as a sort of logic of conditionals, or even counterfactuals, I am not sure if that confrontation with the counterfactuals is not interesting per se. There might be some sense in the quibble. Here, we see that the very notion of epiphenomenon is related to a notion of causality, with his typical one way (matter - consciousness) causality. But this asks for a notion of causality (which usually rise up the notion of counterfactuals). With comp (with the consequences) we can derive the main notion of causality for the indexical type of points of view [] (when A - B is a law: in all worlds where A is true, B is true: that is [](A - B). I must admit it hasn't been entirely clear to me why you decided that the MGA can go through without addressing the counterfactuals, especially since Maudlin felt he had to address them in his alternative formulation. I trap logically the audience when making them accepting that comp + physical supervenience, makes a sane computer equivalent with a disfunctioning computers helped by the relevant lucky cosmic rays. They have to throw out counterfactuals already to associate the particular consciousness with the particular physical activity. Maudlin shows this in showing that the counterfactualness can be restored in the deficient lucky machine by the introduction of physical inactive device. But with comp, and some reflexion, we can understand that consciousness is not related to particular computation, it is related to a person, which has, or not, the means to kick back on its local most probable reality among an infinity of one. I appreciate that Maudlin proceeds by trivialising the amount of activity involved in the computation whereas MGA relies on evacuating the notion of physical computation itself, but does the latter approach obviate the need to account for any possible counterfactual activity? No. I mean, I agree. That's why Maudlin's contribution is interesting. In fact the whole problem is the problem of counterfactuals. What is needed is a good notion of causality. But a notion of causality is a modal notion, and there is an inflation of modalities possible. A nightmare for a Quinean logician? Not necessarily. Being a machine, in the arithmetical sense, introduces its unavoidable internal modalities, definable or quasi-definable in arithmetic, where the cognitive psychological and theological propositions can always be unravelled in terms of reasonable infinite sets of numbers and number relations. But the comp account of consciousness - or indeed any non- eliminativist position - strongly entails that thought can refer only to epiphenomenal matter (to continue with that way of speaking). I guess that is the major attraction for idealist theories. It is easier to explain the illusion of matter to a conscious being than to explain the illusion of consciousness (a quasi contradiction) to a piece of matter. The leap from epiphenomenal to primitive matter then seems inadequately motivated, to say the least. OK. It is last God-of-the-gap. But it has a strong natural appeal, making the correct theory necessarily counterintuitive. The most typical explicit motivation is by appeal to evolutionary arguments - e.g. that we have evolved more-or-less accurate internal models to aid in our survival in the real external world of physics. But this appeal conceals a blatant begging of the question: yes, it must *appear* so, but it is precisely these appearances that we should seek to explain on independent grounds, not by assuming what is to be explained. I agree. I wonder if you have had any further thoughts? I have to say that the notion of epiphenomenon
Re: How does acceleration curve space? Can anyone provide an answer?
On Sun, Feb 16, 2014 at 12:54 PM, Edgar L. Owen edgaro...@att.net wrote: You say that You can tell if spacetime is curved or not by observing if light moves in a straight line or not. and then you say that light does NOT travel in a straight line in the accelerating elevator example you give. So, by your terminology, does that mean that the acceleration of the elevator IS curving space ? You should stop talking about space, it's 4D spacetime; but yes it's curved, although if you were inside that sealed elevator you couldn't tell if the curvature was caused by rockets accelerating the elevator in deep space or if it was caused by the Earth's gravity. Acceleration is absolute in that there is no need to look outside your reference frame to detect it, but according to General Relativity there is no way to tell the difference between it and being in a gravitational field. It seems like you might be saying that the acceleration does curve space Yes. And if that is true can we then say that the curvature of space is not absolute and the same for all observers, but is frame dependent, at least in the case of acceleration curving space? All observers will agree that spacetime inside the elevator is curved but they might not know if the curvature was cause by rockets or a gravitational field. But there are 2 things that all observers in any frame will agree on, the measured speed of light and the distance between two events in spacetime. And can we say this is a basic difference between the curvature of space by gravitation and by acceleration, that the curvature of space by gravitation is absolute in this sense, No, the curvature of both is equally fundamental and equally real. However it is true that General Relativity talks about a particular type of acceleration called Proper Acceleration, it is the acceleration of something relative to an observer in free fall (also called relative to a observer in a inertial frame). So gravity does not cause Proper Acceleration, you'd need a rocket for that, and anyone in free fall has a Proper Acceleration of zero (if you're in free fall you're not accelerating relative to the free falling skydiver next to you). John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Better Than the Chinese Room
On Tue, Feb 18, 2014 at 02:06:37PM +, David Nyman wrote: I must admit it hasn't been entirely clear to me why you decided that the MGA can go through without addressing the counterfactuals, especially since Maudlin felt he had to address them in his alternative formulation. I appreciate that Maudlin proceeds by trivialising the amount of activity involved in the computation whereas MGA relies on evacuating the notion of physical computation itself, but does the latter approach obviate the need to account for any possible counterfactual activity? If the counterfactuals are physical (Multiverse situation), then we are automatically in a robust universe (for which the reversal is already addressed by step 7). If the universe is not robust, then the counterfactuals are not physical, and so if physical supervenience were true, the counterfactuals are irrelevent to supervenience. -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Cool Cuttlefish footage
On Friday, February 14, 2014 7:47:27 PM UTC, Brent wrote: On 2/14/2014 7:12 AM, Platonist Guitar Cowboy wrote: Some members of the list have expressed fondness or interest for cuttlefish, which is why I post this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgdVVU8tBTQ The documentary is a bit sensational/over the top at times, but I'm not bothered as I just care about the footage. They used to be prominent at a beach I had access to as a kid and they've been a favorite member of our fauna to me ever since. I don't think I have to spell out in too much detail why this might be relevant or fun and refer to: it thinks itself into different form, skin structure, color etc. Why are our bodies, nervous systems, and skin so dull in comparison? We're all worm and slug descendants on some level right? Why did we pass up such useful and amazing features? Stupid nature/evolution... I want that feature. No, really: I want that! Can anybody hook me up? PGC I find cuttlefish fascinating. They are social, relatively intelligent, can communicate, able to grasp and manipulate things. It seems like they were all set to become the dominant large life form (instead of humans). Brent Yeah, but isn't the direction of things, in terms of what it took to get the human evolution lane, toward more constraint not less? It's a big assumption that the phenotype and environment they occupy contains significant higher evolution pathways. Th.ere might be a number of them, but if there are billions of times more pathways that move neutral to that or go the other way, then the question might become how many living planets like earth in the universe saw octopus hit the big time. Could be none. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating
Would this have happened if Japan had been using subcritical reactors with thorium fuel? On 19/02/2014, ghib...@gmail.com ghib...@gmail.com wrote: On Thursday, February 13, 2014 3:01:26 PM UTC, cdemorsella wrote: Ground water contamination levels at the sampled well site of 54,000Bq/ liter NHK http://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/english/news/20140213_22.html, Feb. 13, 2014: *Record cesium level in Fukushima plant groundwater* -- [Tepco] says water samples taken from a newly-dug well contained the highest levels of radioactive cesium detected so far in groundwater at the site [...] the record levels suggest that the leakage point could be near the well. [...] 600 times the government standard for radioactive wastewater that can be released into the sea. It is more than 30,000 times the level of cesium 137 found in water samples taken from another observation well to the north last week. [...] [Tepco has] yet to determine where the leak originates. In general the dangers arsing from nuclear fission power are grossly exaggerated. It's far and away the best answer to greenhouse emissions, that is also realistic. If we'd been building nuclear power stations the fracking locomotive wouldn't be the unstoppable force that it has become. on Many ways the dangers are blown out of proportion.. Even catastrophic meltdown that blow the roof off and spread the love like Chernobyl, do not result in a tiny fraction of the disasters that the standard models predict. Ten's of thousands were predicted to die. In the end, just 40 deaths from Chernobyl, and most of those the people sent in to get control in the aftermath. There have been revolutions in station design since plants like fukishima were built, and that disaster isn't shaping up to the dire predictions either. What most of all this derives out of, are long standing questions about the level of risk associated with exposure to radiation at low doses up to somewhere below the 200 mark. There's no firm evidence of substantial risk. There's plenty of evidence for genetic protection. There's a whole plethora of statistics we could reasonably expect if low dose exposure was anything like the risk that still sits there in the model. Airline cabin crew should have higher frequency cancer for all that time so near space for one example. They don't. Conversely there are some major natural radiation hotspots in the world. You'd expect those areas to produce more cancer and radiation poisoning related disease. But the opposite is true. People exposed to dramatically higher doses of radiation (inside the low dosage spectrum), actually become lower risks. There seems to be a triggerable genetic response when levels increase. I'm over-compensating in the other direction a bit here. Not because I love the bomb, but if you only knew the power of the dark side. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating
On 19/02/2014, ghib...@gmail.com ghib...@gmail.com wrote: I'm over-compensating in the other direction a bit here. Not because I love the bomb, but if you only knew the power of the dark side. Come ... join us... Don't be afraid... -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Cool Cuttlefish footage
On Sunday, February 16, 2014 10:23:27 AM UTC, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 15 Feb 2014, at 23:17, Russell Standish wrote: On Sat, Feb 15, 2014 at 11:08:07AM +0100, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 14 Feb 2014, at 20:47, meekerdb wrote: On 2/14/2014 7:12 AM, Platonist Guitar Cowboy wrote: I find cuttlefish fascinating. They are social, relatively intelligent, can communicate, able to grasp and manipulate things. It seems like they were all set to become the dominant large life form (instead of humans). A mystery: they don't live a long time. Usually intelligence go with a rather long life, but cuttlefishes live one or two years. Yes - I find that surprising also. Hard for them to dominate, also, as they have few protections, no shelter, and are edible for many predators, including humans. One could say the same about early home 2 millions years ago. The invention of the throwable spear changed all that. Yes. They survive by hiding and fooling. They can hunt with hypnosis (as you can see in the video). I feel privileged that these wonderful animals (giant cuttlefish) can be found less than 200 metres from my house. I have often observed them when snorkling or scuba diving. You are privileged indeed. I had to laugh at the Texan prof's comment that they are as least as smart as fish. That is weird indeed. fish are not known to be particularly clever. I do have a habit of underestimating fish intelligence, Me too ... but IMHO their intelligence equals that of some mammals or birds, and clearly outclasses fish. I agree. I think I mentioned the anecdote which convinced me they exhibit a second order theory of the mind, which may well be sufficient for consciousness. Which I call self-consciousness, and I think this is already Löbianitty. I do think that all animals have the first order consciousness, they can feel pain, and find it unpleasant, but can't reflect on it, nor assess I feel pain. they still can react appropriately. I m not sure, but it fits better with the whole picture. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ Allowing that brain science is a lot nearer the end of the beginning than the beginning of the end, all the functional evidence suggests humans and animals are much more alike in their experiences toward the lower levels of instinct, in its broader sense to include emotion and pain, anger, fear, bluff. It makes sense we experience that level of things pretty much the same. Neither animals nor humans are able to 'remember' agonizing pain. Or paralyzing fear. Both humans and animals can make associations between negative experiences and events or derivative instincts like fear, or threat, or whatever. There's no evidence or reason to think we experience any of that more deeply or insensely than animals. Or that we are any better at conjuring reflections about emotion and instinct after the event. We don't seem a lot better at remember dreams. So a lot of this is evolutionary legacy. Why would it necessarily be different for other low level machinations? It's a possibility, but the good money isn't on those numbers. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How does acceleration curve space? Can anyone provide an answer?
On 19/02/2014, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: In which theory? IIUC, acceleration of an infinitesimal point particle does not change the curvature of space. And acceleration of a massive particle only changes the curvature by the amount due to the increased kinetic energy of the particle. Acceleration of a point particle doesn't cause light crossing the particle to bend (because it's a point) but accel of a larger object does because light takes time to cross the object. But surely this doesn't mean space-time is really curved, or does it? Or is space-time curvature relative to an observer (surely not) ??? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What are numbers? What is math?
Surely you need something to synchronise the perceptions of different observers? And I assume external physical reality is the simplest hypothesis for what that something is? Not that that ia an argument in its favour, I suppose (doesn't make testable predictions different from other ontologies). I can't offhand think of an experiment that would definitively show there is an external material reality. (Kicking a stone ... which causes some virtual photons to be exchanged between particles that may be mathematical objects, some sort of Poincare group thing perhaps... and is in any case only a series of sense impression... etc) On 19/02/2014, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: On Monday, February 17, 2014 10:30:23 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: On 2/17/2014 7:09 PM, Russell Standish wrote: On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 06:32:35PM -0800, meekerdb wrote: On 2/17/2014 5:21 PM, Russell Standish wrote: On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 02:03:49PM -0800, meekerdb wrote: On 2/17/2014 1:55 PM, Russell Standish wrote: On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 05:33:48AM -0800, Edgar L. Owen wrote: Russell, All of science assumes an external reality independent of human observation. Who says? The replacement of tables and chairs by atoms and then by wave functions is just changing our best guess about ontology - it's not evidence that there is no mind independent ontology. The fact that there is intersubjective agreement on observations is still evidence for a mutual reality. Yes a mutual reality, but not a mind independent one. Certainly independent of any single mind. Certainly, but that only suggests that realism has to do with sharing common perceptions. A mutual reality requires that minds be mutually attuned to the same mutual range of sensitivity. We also have perceptions which we don't seem to share, and we can modulate between the two classes of perceptions intentionally as well as involuntarily. And the science formulated so far is independent of mind - It wants to be independent of mind, but really it is dependent on the mind's perception of the world perceived by the body (and technological bodies which extend the perception of our natural body). which is why Liz supposed that the past existed before it was observed (and constitutes a block universe past). that most everyday scientists usually just focus on mathematical descriptions of phenomena, and leave it at that. But if you ask them why mathematical descriptions are so successful? Wouldn't they just point at Occam's razor, if they've thought about it at all, that is? Or even go with Max Tegmark and say its all mathematics. Mathematics is just a different substrate, a different but still mind indpendent reality. Mathematics is even more dependent on the mind than science. It is the mind's view of the mind's measurement of itself as if it were the body. Notice that the main argument given for the reality of mathematics is the intersubjective agreement on the truths of mathematics; which gives the feeling it is discovered rather than invented. Ironically, mathematics is what the most mechanical range of our awareness has discovered about itself. The mistake is in attributing that narrow aesthetic to the totality. The problem is that mechanism is the product of insensitivity, so that it cannot prove that it is insensitive. When asked to simulate sense, it doesn't know how to show that it has failed. Or why do we all agree that's a chair over there? That one is obviously convention. Someone from remote Amazonia who's never seen a chair before wouldn't agree. They might not agree on the name, but they would agree there was an object there. The possibility of having a useable convention would seem to be a miracle if there is nothing mind-indpendent that correlates the perceptions of different persons. A dust mite would not necessarily agree that there was an object there. An entity which experienced the entire history of human civilization as a single afternoon might not agree that there was an object there. Neutrinos might not agree that there are objects at all. The existence of some mind independent reality is always the working assumption. Really? I don't think working scientists need to think about the issue much at all. Because it's an assumption so common they only question it unusual experiments - like tests of psychics. Whether they assume there is some kind of mind-independent reality, or are outrageous solipsists would not affect their ability to conduct experiments or do theory. One could still assume a mind-independent reality while assuming that one was the only mind. But they could not do either experiments or theory if they assumed the result depended on what they hoped or wished or expected. I agree, wishing is not science, but that need not be construed as evidence that physics is not ultimately
Re: Better Than the Chinese Room
On 18 February 2014 22:34, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: On Tue, Feb 18, 2014 at 02:06:37PM +, David Nyman wrote: I must admit it hasn't been entirely clear to me why you decided that the MGA can go through without addressing the counterfactuals, especially since Maudlin felt he had to address them in his alternative formulation. I appreciate that Maudlin proceeds by trivialising the amount of activity involved in the computation whereas MGA relies on evacuating the notion of physical computation itself, but does the latter approach obviate the need to account for any possible counterfactual activity? If the counterfactuals are physical (Multiverse situation), then we are automatically in a robust universe (for which the reversal is already addressed by step 7). Right. Sorry if I'm being a bit slow. I can see that if there is a Multiverse then we automatically get the physical counterfactuals in any given situation. But I'm not sure that I get the point that a physical Multiverse guarantees the actual physical computation of the UD (or rather its completed trace), which I assume is necessary to the reversal (in the sense that the infinity of computation intrinsic to the UD* is assumed to swamp every competing measure). I guess that means that I haven't understood quite what is meant by robust here. Can you help with what I'm missing? If the universe is not robust, then the counterfactuals are not physical, and so if physical supervenience were true, the counterfactuals are irrelevent to supervenience. Yes, I get that part. So robust = Multiverse? David -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating
On Tuesday, February 18, 2014 10:50:19 PM UTC, Liz R wrote: Would this have happeed if Japan had been using subcritical reactors with thorium fuel? It's worth asking. I don't know the answer but if half the promise were half true for Thorium it'd be pretty hard to accept the risk portfolio would be no different. That said, through no fault of its own, Thorium is one of those minority cases of becoming the darling of the global village chatterati for about a year about 4 years ago, and is actually less well understood as mmthe outcome. I don't really know all that much about it, but it was misrepresented as a cure all. Thorium has a lot of major problems. That said, I'm up for it. Liz, I really wish I knew you back in the day. We'd be out there, me and you, in our green army surplus cnd logo painted on with a stolen bottle of tipex. p.s. not mocking by the way. I like your world view. On 19/02/2014, ghi...@gmail.com javascript: ghi...@gmail.comjavascript: wrote: On Thursday, February 13, 2014 3:01:26 PM UTC, cdemorsella wrote: Ground water contamination levels at the sampled well site of 54,000Bq/ liter NHK http://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/english/news/20140213_22.html, Feb. 13, 2014: *Record cesium level in Fukushima plant groundwater* -- [Tepco] says water samples taken from a newly-dug well contained the highest levels of radioactive cesium detected so far in groundwater at the site [...] the record levels suggest that the leakage point could be near the well. [...] 600 times the government standard for radioactive wastewater that can be released into the sea. It is more than 30,000 times the level of cesium 137 found in water samples taken from another observation well to the north last week. [...] [Tepco has] yet to determine where the leak originates. In general the dangers arsing from nuclear fission power are grossly exaggerated. It's far and away the best answer to greenhouse emissions, that is also realistic. If we'd been building nuclear power stations the fracking locomotive wouldn't be the unstoppable force that it has become. on Many ways the dangers are blown out of proportion.. Even catastrophic meltdown that blow the roof off and spread the love like Chernobyl, do not result in a tiny fraction of the disasters that the standard models predict. Ten's of thousands were predicted to die. In the end, just 40 deaths from Chernobyl, and most of those the people sent in to get control in the aftermath. There have been revolutions in station design since plants like fukishima were built, and that disaster isn't shaping up to the dire predictions either. What most of all this derives out of, are long standing questions about the level of risk associated with exposure to radiation at low doses up to somewhere below the 200 mark. There's no firm evidence of substantial risk. There's plenty of evidence for genetic protection. There's a whole plethora of statistics we could reasonably expect if low dose exposure was anything like the risk that still sits there in the model. Airline cabin crew should have higher frequency cancer for all that time so near space for one example. They don't. Conversely there are some major natural radiation hotspots in the world. You'd expect those areas to produce more cancer and radiation poisoning related disease. But the opposite is true. People exposed to dramatically higher doses of radiation (inside the low dosage spectrum), actually become lower risks. There seems to be a triggerable genetic response when levels increase. I'm over-compensating in the other direction a bit here. Not because I love the bomb, but if you only knew the power of the dark side. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com javascript:. To post to this group, send email to everyth...@googlegroups.comjavascript:. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating
Ghibbsa, I tend to agree, if nuclear reactors are just built to the high safety standards they need to be. Quite obviously they should be built to automatically shut down safely, rather than having melt downs. In general the aggregate risks of nuclear power are less than comparable amounts of other energy sources and there is enough of it to last ~250 years. 2. Also I think the solution to nuclear waste is pretty simple. One just encases it in lead within cement and drops it into oceanic subduction zones where it will be drawn down into the mantle, melted, dissolved and massively diluted. 3. Remember Nagasaki and Hiroshima were nuked not that long ago and yet people now live there quite happily and safely. Edgar On Tuesday, February 18, 2014 5:02:10 PM UTC-5, ghi...@gmail.com wrote: On Thursday, February 13, 2014 3:01:26 PM UTC, cdemorsella wrote: Ground water contamination levels at the sampled well site of 54,000Bq/ liter NHK http://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/english/news/20140213_22.html, Feb. 13, 2014: *Record cesium level in Fukushima plant groundwater* — [Tepco] says water samples taken from a newly-dug well contained the highest levels of radioactive cesium detected so far in groundwater at the site [...] the record levels suggest that the leakage point could be near the well. [...] 600 times the government standard for radioactive wastewater that can be released into the sea. It is more than 30,000 times the level of cesium 137 found in water samples taken from another observation well to the north last week. [...] [Tepco has] yet to determine where the leak originates. In general the dangers arsing from nuclear fission power are grossly exaggerated. It's far and away the best answer to greenhouse emissions, that is also realistic. If we'd been building nuclear power stations the fracking locomotive wouldn't be the unstoppable force that it has become. on Many ways the dangers are blown out of proportion.. Even catastrophic meltdown that blow the roof off and spread the love like Chernobyl, do not result in a tiny fraction of the disasters that the standard models predict. Ten's of thousands were predicted to die. In the end, just 40 deaths from Chernobyl, and most of those the people sent in to get control in the aftermath. There have been revolutions in station design since plants like fukishima were built, and that disaster isn't shaping up to the dire predictions either. What most of all this derives out of, are long standing questions about the level of risk associated with exposure to radiation at low doses up to somewhere below the 200 mark. There's no firm evidence of substantial risk. There's plenty of evidence for genetic protection. There's a whole plethora of statistics we could reasonably expect if low dose exposure was anything like the risk that still sits there in the model. Airline cabin crew should have higher frequency cancer for all that time so near space for one example. They don't. Conversely there are some major natural radiation hotspots in the world. You'd expect those areas to produce more cancer and radiation poisoning related disease. But the opposite is true. People exposed to dramatically higher doses of radiation (inside the low dosage spectrum), actually become lower risks. There seems to be a triggerable genetic response when levels increase. I'm over-compensating in the other direction a bit here. Not because I love the bomb, but if you only knew the power of the dark side. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What are numbers? What is math?
On Wed, Feb 19, 2014 at 12:06:30PM +1300, LizR wrote: Surely you need something to synchronise the perceptions of different observers? And I assume external physical reality is the simplest hypothesis for what that something is? Not that that ia an argument in its favour, I suppose (doesn't make testable predictions different from other ontologies). I can't offhand think of an experiment that would definitively show there is an external material reality. (Kicking a stone ... which causes some virtual photons to be exchanged between particles that may be mathematical objects, some sort of Poincare group thing perhaps... and is in any case only a series of sense impression... etc) I would agree that an objective external physical reality is the simplest explanation of the anthropic principle, and that idealist theories have some catching up to do. This problem is described in Theory of Nothing (p82, p164, p183). However, such objectivist ontologies have problems of their own, such as the incompatibility with COMP that Bruno uncovered. On the whole, idealism tends to fair better than physicalism over a range of topics, just not in the particular case of the Anthropic Principle. There seems to me to be a big confusion between intersubjectivity and objectivity in general. Most of the evidence presented in favour of objectivity is actually evidence in favour of intersubjectivity. The confusion is probably because as far as evolution is concerned, they are the one and same. -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating
On Tuesday, February 18, 2014 11:33:19 PM UTC, Edgar L. Owen wrote: Ghibbsa, I tend to agree, if nuclear reactors are just built to the high safety standards they need to be. Quite obviously they should be built to automatically shut down safely, rather than having melt downs. In general the aggregate risks of nuclear power are less than comparable amounts of other energy sources and there is enough of it to last ~250 years. 2. Also I think the solution to nuclear waste is pretty simple. One just encases it in lead within cement and drops it into oceanic subduction zones where it will be drawn down into the mantle, melted, dissolved and massively diluted. 3. Remember Nagasaki and Hiroshima were nuked not that long ago and yet people now live there quite happily and There's been major flooding in the UK the last 2/3 months, and a fantasy that popped up for me wasthe technology has advanced a lot. There was a time only the Icelanders could tap geothermals g economically. That is, engineering a mechanical arrangement involving,basically, bore holes down to near the depth of the rocky crust. Not too far to dig down in Iceland. But still, if the engineering was a plan to admire, it'd be infinite energy, effectively. Admittedly as stated there's a lot of scope left in there for impossibility in practice. Nice fantasy though. That said, had better. On Tuesday, February 18, 2014 5:02:10 PM UTC-5, ghi...@gmail.com wrote: On Thursday, February 13, 2014 3:01:26 PM UTC, cdemorsella wrote: Ground water contamination levels at the sampled well site of 54,000Bq/ liter NHK http://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/english/news/20140213_22.html, Feb. 13, 2014: *Record cesium level in Fukushima plant groundwater* — [Tepco] says water samples taken from a newly-dug well contained the highest levels of radioactive cesium detected so far in groundwater at the site [...] the record levels suggest that the leakage point could be near the well. [...] 600 times the government standard for radioactive wastewater that can be released into the sea. It is more than 30,000 times the level of cesium 137 found in water samples taken from another observation well to the north last week. [...] [Tepco has] yet to determine where the leak originates. In general the dangers arsing from nuclear fission power are grossly exaggerated. It's far and away the best answer to greenhouse emissions, that is also realistic. If we'd been building nuclear power stations the fracking locomotive wouldn't be the unstoppable force that it has become. on Many ways the dangers are blown out of proportion.. Even catastrophic meltdown that blow the roof off and spread the love like Chernobyl, do not result in a tiny fraction of the disasters that the standard models predict. Ten's of thousands were predicted to die. In the end, just 40 deaths from Chernobyl, and most of those the people sent in to get control in the aftermath. There have been revolutions in station design since plants like fukishima were built, and that disaster isn't shaping up to the dire predictions either. What most of all this derives out of, are long standing questions about the level of risk associated with exposure to radiation at low doses up to somewhere below the 200 mark. There's no firm evidence of substantial risk. There's plenty of evidence for genetic protection. There's a whole plethora of statistics we could reasonably expect if low dose exposure was anything like the risk that still sits there in the model. Airline cabin crew should have higher frequency cancer for all that time so near space for one example. They don't. Conversely there are some major natural radiation hotspots in the world. You'd expect those areas to produce more cancer and radiation poisoning related disease. But the opposite is true. People exposed to dramatically higher doses of radiation (inside the low dosage spectrum), actually become lower risks. There seems to be a triggerable genetic response when levels increase. I'm over-compensating in the other direction a bit here. Not because I love the bomb, but if you only knew the power of the dark side. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What are numbers? What is math?
Ah - interesting. Despite being on a short holiday in the Bay of Islands I have TON with me (and Confederacy of Dunces) so I can check that out. As far as the evidence not being in favour of what people think, I guess that is because they simply assume objective reality, much as lots of people assume time flows (say) - and then it isn't surprising they end up showing what they've assumed excuse me while I go and persue TON. On 19/02/2014, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: On Wed, Feb 19, 2014 at 12:06:30PM +1300, LizR wrote: Surely you need something to synchronise the perceptions of different observers? And I assume external physical reality is the simplest hypothesis for what that something is? Not that that ia an argument in its favour, I suppose (doesn't make testable predictions different from other ontologies). I can't offhand think of an experiment that would definitively show there is an external material reality. (Kicking a stone ... which causes some virtual photons to be exchanged between particles that may be mathematical objects, some sort of Poincare group thing perhaps... and is in any case only a series of sense impression... etc) I would agree that an objective external physical reality is the simplest explanation of the anthropic principle, and that idealist theories have some catching up to do. This problem is described in Theory of Nothing (p82, p164, p183). However, such objectivist ontologies have problems of their own, such as the incompatibility with COMP that Bruno uncovered. On the whole, idealism tends to fair better than physicalism over a range of topics, just not in the particular case of the Anthropic Principle. There seems to me to be a big confusion between intersubjectivity and objectivity in general. Most of the evidence presented in favour of objectivity is actually evidence in favour of intersubjectivity. The confusion is probably because as far as evolution is concerned, they are the one and same. -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Better Than the Chinese Room
On Tue, Feb 18, 2014 at 11:22:55PM +, David Nyman wrote: On 18 February 2014 22:34, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: On Tue, Feb 18, 2014 at 02:06:37PM +, David Nyman wrote: I must admit it hasn't been entirely clear to me why you decided that the MGA can go through without addressing the counterfactuals, especially since Maudlin felt he had to address them in his alternative formulation. I appreciate that Maudlin proceeds by trivialising the amount of activity involved in the computation whereas MGA relies on evacuating the notion of physical computation itself, but does the latter approach obviate the need to account for any possible counterfactual activity? If the counterfactuals are physical (Multiverse situation), then we are automatically in a robust universe (for which the reversal is already addressed by step 7). Right. Sorry if I'm being a bit slow. I can see that if there is a Multiverse then we automatically get the physical counterfactuals in any given situation. But I'm not sure that I get the point that a physical Multiverse guarantees the actual physical computation of the UD (or rather its completed trace), which I assume is necessary to the reversal (in the sense that the infinity of computation intrinsic to the UD* is assumed to swamp every competing measure). I guess that means that I haven't understood quite what is meant by robust here. Can you help with what I'm missing? Fair enough - it's a bit subtle. A quantum computation running in a Multiverse has all possible states of its input bits executed simulatenously. That is the meaning of a qubit. I can run a variant of the dovetailer algorithm that actually executes its program in parallel, exponentially speeding up the process. Our observed universe has sufficient quantum computing resources to be able to run enough of the UD to end up emulating conscious observers. It seems clear to me that the physical processes we see instantiating consciousness are quantum in nature, spread out over the Multiverse, executing a collection of programs like a dovetailer, including conscious ones. So whilst the Multiverse may not be strictly speaking robust in the sense of having infinite computational resources, it does have sufficient resources to emulate enough of the dovetailer to include consious programs, and in fact is doing so, by virtue of the fact we observe consioud processes. This is enough for the distinction beween step 7 and step 8. If the universe is not robust, then the counterfactuals are not physical, and so if physical supervenience were true, the counterfactuals are irrelevent to supervenience. Yes, I get that part. So robust = Multiverse? Sort of. Maybe. :) Certainly, the presence of a UD entails a Multiverse. And a Multiverse containing conscious entities is sufficiently robust for the reversal to occur. BTW - for those wanting to know if I ever changed my mind - until a year ago, I thought the Multiverse was a clear contraindicator to the Maudlin/MGA argument. And recently the realisation that all programs correspond to the proof of some sigma_1 proposition resolved a qualm I had with the use of Theatetus's notion of knowledge when applied to machines. Cheers -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What are numbers? What is math?
On 2/17/2014 10:15 PM, Russell Standish wrote: On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 09:18:32PM -0800, meekerdb wrote: On 2/17/2014 8:58 PM, Russell Standish wrote: On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 07:30:23PM -0800, meekerdb wrote: But there is a weaker form. However unlikely one thinks strings or singularities or multiple-worlds are, one may still hypothesize that there is *some* reality as the explanation for the intersubjective agreement that is consistently observed. Sure - one may hypothesise so. But does it assist in any scientific experiment to do so? And is there any evidence to support the hypothesis, or is it simply like pre-classical physics - good enough to get the next meal. The same kind of evidence as for any scientific theory. It not only assists, the repeatability of experiments by persons with different minds tests it. I don't see why. It merely tests _inter_subjectivity, not objectivity. I cannot think of a single test of objectivity, off the top of my head. I don't think there's any difference between objectivity and inter-subujective agreement. I tend to use them interchangably. Certainly independent of any single mind. And the science formulated so far is independent of mind - which is why Liz supposed that the past existed before it was observed (and constitutes a block universe past). Supposed, maybe, but certainly not evidence of it. Whose to say that our past is not simply hewn out of the primordial Multiverse by our observations, which progressively fix which world (and history) we inhabit? Why our then; why not my and why not a brain is a vat? Why not nothing but a momentary dream? Some hypotheses are more fruitful than others, lead to more predictions, provide a more succinct model of the world. Not sure what your point is here. It's our, because we're having this conversation. Not necessarily. Maybe you're just imagining it. The existence of some mind independent reality is always the working assumption. Really? I don't think working scientists need to think about the issue much at all. Because it's an assumption so common they only question it unusual experiments - like tests of psychics. Assuming the assumption is common for the sake of argument, can you think of a situation where that assumption has any bearing on the experiment being performed? Sure. The experimenters don't try to think special thoughts about or during the experiment to influence the result - contrast prayer. What does that have to do with whether there is an objective reality or not? It has to do with whether what they do is mind-independent or not. You're taking mind dependent to mean observed somewhere, sometime by some mind. So do you agree that the results of scientific observations (those for which there is inter-subjective agreement) are independent of which particular minds do the observing. It _is_ reasonable to assume that one's private thoughts will not affect the experiment's outcome. But that is not the same as assuming the phenomena is due to some objective reality. Whether they assume there is some kind of mind-independent reality, or are outrageous solipsists would not affect their ability to conduct experiments or do theory. One could still assume a mind-independent reality while assuming that one was the only mind. But they could not do either experiments or theory if they assumed the result depended on what they hoped or wished or expected. I certainly have never asserted that. The reality we observe must be compatible with our existence. Any observed reality must be compatible with the existence of an observer. But we suppose that there are many different possible observed worlds. Real ones? Some features of those worlds are accidental (mere geography), and only shared by some worlds. Other features are shared by all observable worlds (what we call physics). The question is whether any feature shared by all possible observed worlds Is that possible worlds that are observed or worlds that might possibly be observed? possible worlds that are observed But this is incoherent. When we formulate a theory about the big bang or how fossils were formed or how our Mars Rover is functioning the theory is that those things really happen whether anyone observes them or not. Now you may say that eventually someone will observe them, but that is already theory laden. The big bang is observed via satellite telescopes which send down digital images which are displayed on LED screens which send photons to your retina which sends signals along your optic nerve...and THEN observation takes place? But observation of what? nerve impluses? There is no observation without theory, which includes some kind of ontology to define the observation. You don't have to assume your theory includes what is really real, but it has to include a theory of observation if you are to go beyond from pure solipistic dreams. is due to some reason other than the fact
Re: 3-1 views
On 2/17/2014 10:25 PM, Quentin Anciaux wrote: 2014-02-18 3:35 GMT+01:00 meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net: On 2/17/2014 5:57 PM, David Nyman wrote: On 17 February 2014 20:15, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: But it is unambiguous under comp ex hypothesi: i.e. any classically adequate copy of me is equivalent to me. Under this hypothesis if I am duplicated both the resulting continuations are equivalent immediately posterior to duplication. Consequently I repeat my question: if *you* were duplicated in this manner, would you reasonably expect that either of the resulting equivalent continuations would experience a two-valued outcome? No, but as I said, that's regarding them as third persons. Well, the very logic of the hypothesis dictates that *both* continuations inherit the first personal perspective of the original and this will always be single-valued. But, as you said, there is an ineliminable ambiguity because neither can record anything first-personal that incorporates that third-personal doubleness. IOW it always seems as if there is only one of me (1p) even in the case that I know there are two of me (3p). Do you agree that this ambiguity is sufficient for step 3 to go through? You sound as though you want to sell me something. I have no interest buying the argument one piece at a time or swallowing it all at once. I'm interested in understanding it and it's consequences. It's seems to me that following the argument step by step is then the thing to do... and if you disagree with a step, explain why... When an argument is a reductio you don't necessarily know which step to disagree with. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How does acceleration curve space? Can anyone provide an answer?
On Tuesday, February 18, 2014 9:44:58 PM UTC, Russell Standish wrote: On Tue, Feb 18, 2014 at 01:28:09PM -0500, John Clark wrote: On Sun, Feb 16, 2014 at 12:54 PM, Edgar L. Owen edga...@att.netjavascript: wrote: You say that You can tell if spacetime is curved or not by observing if light moves in a straight line or not. and then you say that light does NOT travel in a straight line in the accelerating elevator example you give. So, by your terminology, does that mean that the acceleration of the elevator IS curving space ? You should stop talking about space, it's 4D spacetime; but yes it's curved, although if you were inside that sealed elevator you couldn't tell if the curvature was caused by rockets accelerating the elevator in deep space or if it was caused by the Earth's gravity. Acceleration is absolute in that there is no need to look outside your reference frame to detect it, but according to General Relativity there is no way to tell the difference between it and being in a gravitational field. It seems like you might be saying that the acceleration does curve space Yes. In which theory? IIUC, acceleration of an infinitesimal point particle does not change the curvature of space. And acceleration of a massive particle only changes the curvature by the amount due to the increased kinetic energy of the particle. Hi Russell - isn't the equivalence principle for acceleration vs falling approximate for theoretical purposes only? It's only really the case for two point particles, or not? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How does acceleration curve space? Can anyone provide an answer?
On Wed, Feb 19, 2014 at 11:57:21AM +1300, LizR wrote: On 19/02/2014, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: In which theory? IIUC, acceleration of an infinitesimal point particle does not change the curvature of space. And acceleration of a massive particle only changes the curvature by the amount due to the increased kinetic energy of the particle. Acceleration of a point particle doesn't cause light crossing the particle to bend (because it's a point) but accel of a larger object does because light takes time to cross the object. I'm sure the particle size is not relevant. A point-like concentration of mass-energy will still curve spacetime with an approximate 1/r^2. But surely this doesn't mean space-time is really curved, or does it? Or is space-time curvature relative to an observer (surely not) ??? Spacetime curvature is independent of the observer - in the sense that it is a rank 2 tensor, although its components will vary according to the observer's reference frame (just like your x,y coordinates change whenever I move around my house). I'm unsure whether my comment about kinetic energy contributing to curvature is correct though. In the particle's instantaneous inertial reference frame, the kinetic energy is always zero. Maybe Brent or someone else could comment. -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Better Than the Chinese Room
On 19 February 2014 00:15, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: On Tue, Feb 18, 2014 at 11:22:55PM +, David Nyman wrote: On 18 February 2014 22:34, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: On Tue, Feb 18, 2014 at 02:06:37PM +, David Nyman wrote: I must admit it hasn't been entirely clear to me why you decided that the MGA can go through without addressing the counterfactuals, especially since Maudlin felt he had to address them in his alternative formulation. I appreciate that Maudlin proceeds by trivialising the amount of activity involved in the computation whereas MGA relies on evacuating the notion of physical computation itself, but does the latter approach obviate the need to account for any possible counterfactual activity? If the counterfactuals are physical (Multiverse situation), then we are automatically in a robust universe (for which the reversal is already addressed by step 7). Right. Sorry if I'm being a bit slow. I can see that if there is a Multiverse then we automatically get the physical counterfactuals in any given situation. But I'm not sure that I get the point that a physical Multiverse guarantees the actual physical computation of the UD (or rather its completed trace), which I assume is necessary to the reversal (in the sense that the infinity of computation intrinsic to the UD* is assumed to swamp every competing measure). I guess that means that I haven't understood quite what is meant by robust here. Can you help with what I'm missing? Fair enough - it's a bit subtle. A quantum computation running in a Multiverse has all possible states of its input bits executed simulatenously. That is the meaning of a qubit. I can run a variant of the dovetailer algorithm that actually executes its program in parallel, exponentially speeding up the process. Our observed universe has sufficient quantum computing resources to be able to run enough of the UD to end up emulating conscious observers. It seems clear to me that the physical processes we see instantiating consciousness are quantum in nature, spread out over the Multiverse, executing a collection of programs like a dovetailer, including conscious ones. So whilst the Multiverse may not be strictly speaking robust in the sense of having infinite computational resources, it does have sufficient resources to emulate enough of the dovetailer to include consious programs, and in fact is doing so, by virtue of the fact we observe consioud processes. This is enough for the distinction beween step 7 and step 8. Ah, right. So one has to keep in mind that it takes the running of the UD (or at least enough of it) to support a coherent formulation of CTM in the first place (essentially because once one assumes that consciousness supervenes on computation it becomes illegitimate to place arbitrary restrictions on what computations are deemed to exist). If so, assuming CTM, one can then use the a posteriori fact of conscious observation to justify the claim that the Multiverse must be robust enough (in that sense) to support the UD, especially given the independent plausibility of this assumption. Is that it, more or less? You're right that it's subtle. It's easy to miss (Edgar for one seems to miss it completely). It seems to require a conceptual leap to the necessity of a computational infinity with observer selection as the arbitrator of the stability of physical appearance (the Programmatic Library of Babel). Perhaps the UDA could spell this out more explicitly in step 7 (I can't bring to mind what it actually says at that point)? If the universe is not robust, then the counterfactuals are not physical, and so if physical supervenience were true, the counterfactuals are irrelevent to supervenience. Yes, I get that part. So robust = Multiverse? Sort of. Maybe. :) Certainly, the presence of a UD entails a Multiverse. And a Multiverse containing conscious entities is sufficiently robust for the reversal to occur. BTW - for those wanting to know if I ever changed my mind - until a year ago, I thought the Multiverse was a clear contraindicator to the Maudlin/MGA argument. And recently the realisation that all programs correspond to the proof of some sigma_1 proposition resolved a qualm I had with the use of Theatetus's notion of knowledge when applied to machines. I'll have to think about that :) Cheers David Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
Re: What are numbers? What is math?
On Tue, Feb 18, 2014 at 04:19:33PM -0800, meekerdb wrote: On 2/17/2014 10:15 PM, Russell Standish wrote: On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 09:18:32PM -0800, meekerdb wrote: I don't think there's any difference between objectivity and inter-subujective agreement. I tend to use them interchangably. Pity. Because its confusing. If this is an argument over whether intersubjective realities exist, then we're both arguing on the same side. However, Edgar was arguing that a truly objective, observer independent reality must exist. That is different. Not sure what your point is here. It's our, because we're having this conversation. Not necessarily. Maybe you're just imagining it. Someone once coined the phrase real as I am real. In any Platonic idealist theory (such as COMP), you are as real as me. If I'm imagining you, I am also imagining myself. It has to do with whether what they do is mind-independent or not. You're taking mind dependent to mean observed somewhere, sometime by some mind. No - a little stronger than that. I mean that what is observed is necessarily consistent with being observed by some mind. So do you agree that the results of scientific observations (those for which there is inter-subjective agreement) are independent of which particular minds do the observing. Only if the inter-subjective agreement extends to all possible minds. In ToN, I argue that the laws of quantum mechanics have this nature. But only because those laws can be derived from considerations of what it means to observe something. That means that those are laws of physics, not geography. But that means those laws depend on the act of observation (or are grounded in the act of observation). Is that possible worlds that are observed or worlds that might possibly be observed? possible worlds that are observed But this is incoherent. When we formulate a theory about the big bang or how fossils were formed or how our Mars Rover is functioning the theory is that those things really happen whether anyone observes them or not. It doesn't seem essential to the theory. All that matters is the predicted observations. Now you may say that eventually someone will observe them, but that is already theory laden. The big bang is observed via satellite telescopes which send down digital images which are displayed on LED screens which send photons to your retina which sends signals along your optic nerve...and THEN observation takes place? But observation of what? nerve impluses? There is no observation without theory, which includes some kind of ontology to define the observation. You don't have to assume your theory includes what is really real, but it has to include a theory of observation if you are to go beyond from pure solipistic dreams. Sure. I'm not sure what your point is though. You're just admitting the theory doesn't need to make ontological claims in order to be effective. is due to some reason other than the fact that observers necessarily exist in those worlds. For there to be a mind independent reality, there needs to be such a facts. So a world must have physics that *permits* observers in order that it be our world. But worlds don't have to have *geography* that permits observers, e.g. this universe between inflation and the recombination. So they can be mind independent. Just so long as some geography permits the observers, such as on a rocky planet on a middling start some 13 billion years after those events. But the theory derived to explain that observation also entails that no one need have observed it. Really? How so? I could believe that mathematical facts (about say the integers) could fit that category, and thus be the basis of a fundamental ontology. But even in COMP, we cannot distinguish between an ontology of Peano arithmetic, or of Curry combinators, say. Once your ontology has the property of Turing completeness, you could choose any such ontology and be none the wiser. Doesn't this make the whole notion of an ontological reality rather meaningless? Then you would have structural realism. Yeah - fair enough. That position is largely a defeat of the idea that we can know an ontological basis of phenomena. But that's just the radical skepticism that we can't *know* anything. All theories are provisional. It's more than that. It's actually a theory making the claim that the actual ontology (if such a thing has meaning) has no observable consequences. But a geographical fact that is unobservable is mind independent and our best theories entail that many such facts exists. Which ones? How can unobserved facts exist? -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales
Re: What are numbers? What is math?
Russell, and Liz, Depends on what we mean by an objective physical reality. Actually an external objective reality is one of the several most convincing arguments FOR a computational reality. An external reality, as opposed to the internal realities of our individual simulations of that reality leads directly to the conclusion that that external reality IS a computational reality. The way this works is that the best way to determine what external reality is is simply to progressively subtract everything that the human mind adds to it in its simulation of it. When we do this we find that all that is left IS a computational reality, just evolving logico-mathematical information. In my book I present a couple dozen things that mind adds to external reality in its simulation of it, and what is left after we subtract them. We imagine external reality as the familiar classical level physical dimensional world populated by things of our ordinary experience. But this is completely wrong. For example, external reality itself has no position or location, no orientation, no size, no innate proper time scale, no motion, because these are all necessarily relative to some observer. So without an observer reality itself has none of these attributes. Reality itself is nowhere, in no place, has no position, no orientation, no relative motion, no innate time scale. Also external reality itself contains no images of any thing, because its light is unfocused without the lenses of the eyes of some observer. So reality itself contains no images of things. If we imagine it having them we are wrong. Also reality itself doesn't even contain individual things. Reality itself is a continuous computational information nexus. The whole notion of a thing is something constructed by mind by piecing together different types of qualia that tend to occur in association. Robotic AI clearly demonstrates this complex process... And the whole notion of physical objects is a mental phenomenon. Physical objects in the sense of individual things having colors, textures, feelings, etc. exist only in mind's simulation of reality, not in reality itself. These are all information about how observers INTERACT with various logical structures in the external world. The list goes on and on. I can present more if anyone likes. Anyway when we subtract all these things that mind adds to reality in its internal simulation of it, we find that all that is left of actual reality is a logico-mathematical structure consisting only of computationally evolving information. So the reality we actually live in is not at all the reality we think we live in. The reality we think we live in, the classical material dimensional world, is entirely a construction of mind, EXCEPT for snippets of logical structure extracted from the true external reality, which is a logico-mathematical computational structure. It is only these logical structures that exist in external reality. When we function in reality, we are just acting to some degree in logical consistency with these external logical structures. So it is the very concept of an external reality, understood in this light, that directly LEADS us to the inevitable conclusion of a computational reality. Thus the notion of an external reality IS consistent with it being a computational reality, because it leads directly to it. Edgar On Tuesday, February 18, 2014 6:51:57 PM UTC-5, Russell Standish wrote: On Wed, Feb 19, 2014 at 12:06:30PM +1300, LizR wrote: Surely you need something to synchronise the perceptions of different observers? And I assume external physical reality is the simplest hypothesis for what that something is? Not that that ia an argument in its favour, I suppose (doesn't make testable predictions different from other ontologies). I can't offhand think of an experiment that would definitively show there is an external material reality. (Kicking a stone ... which causes some virtual photons to be exchanged between particles that may be mathematical objects, some sort of Poincare group thing perhaps... and is in any case only a series of sense impression... etc) I would agree that an objective external physical reality is the simplest explanation of the anthropic principle, and that idealist theories have some catching up to do. This problem is described in Theory of Nothing (p82, p164, p183). However, such objectivist ontologies have problems of their own, such as the incompatibility with COMP that Bruno uncovered. On the whole, idealism tends to fair better than physicalism over a range of topics, just not in the particular case of the Anthropic Principle. There seems to me to be a big confusion between intersubjectivity and objectivity in general. Most of the evidence presented in favour of objectivity is actually evidence in favour of intersubjectivity. The confusion is probably
Re: Better Than the Chinese Room
On Wed, Feb 19, 2014 at 12:39:59AM +, David Nyman wrote: On 19 February 2014 00:15, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: On Tue, Feb 18, 2014 at 11:22:55PM +, David Nyman wrote: On 18 February 2014 22:34, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: On Tue, Feb 18, 2014 at 02:06:37PM +, David Nyman wrote: I must admit it hasn't been entirely clear to me why you decided that the MGA can go through without addressing the counterfactuals, especially since Maudlin felt he had to address them in his alternative formulation. I appreciate that Maudlin proceeds by trivialising the amount of activity involved in the computation whereas MGA relies on evacuating the notion of physical computation itself, but does the latter approach obviate the need to account for any possible counterfactual activity? If the counterfactuals are physical (Multiverse situation), then we are automatically in a robust universe (for which the reversal is already addressed by step 7). Right. Sorry if I'm being a bit slow. I can see that if there is a Multiverse then we automatically get the physical counterfactuals in any given situation. But I'm not sure that I get the point that a physical Multiverse guarantees the actual physical computation of the UD (or rather its completed trace), which I assume is necessary to the reversal (in the sense that the infinity of computation intrinsic to the UD* is assumed to swamp every competing measure). I guess that means that I haven't understood quite what is meant by robust here. Can you help with what I'm missing? Fair enough - it's a bit subtle. A quantum computation running in a Multiverse has all possible states of its input bits executed simulatenously. That is the meaning of a qubit. I can run a variant of the dovetailer algorithm that actually executes its program in parallel, exponentially speeding up the process. Our observed universe has sufficient quantum computing resources to be able to run enough of the UD to end up emulating conscious observers. It seems clear to me that the physical processes we see instantiating consciousness are quantum in nature, spread out over the Multiverse, executing a collection of programs like a dovetailer, including conscious ones. So whilst the Multiverse may not be strictly speaking robust in the sense of having infinite computational resources, it does have sufficient resources to emulate enough of the dovetailer to include consious programs, and in fact is doing so, by virtue of the fact we observe consioud processes. This is enough for the distinction beween step 7 and step 8. Ah, right. So one has to keep in mind that it takes the running of the UD (or at least enough of it) to support a coherent formulation of CTM in the first place (essentially because once one assumes that consciousness supervenes on computation it becomes illegitimate to place arbitrary restrictions on what computations are deemed to exist). If so, assuming CTM, one can then use the a posteriori fact of conscious observation to justify the claim that the Multiverse must be robust enough (in that sense) to support the UD, especially given the independent plausibility of this assumption. Is that it, more or less? You're right that it's subtle. It's easy to miss (Edgar for one seems to miss it completely). It seems to require a conceptual leap to the necessity of a computational infinity with observer selection as the arbitrator of the stability of physical appearance (the Programmatic Library of Babel). Perhaps the UDA could spell this out more explicitly in step 7 (I can't bring to mind what it actually says at that point)? I have promised (to myself) to write a paper discussing these issues (something along the lines of MGA revisted), because I don't think the current literature adequately addresses this. But I have so many projects! Whilst I don't think the Multiverse necessarily entails the leap to computational infinity, I think it must have sufficient computational power to entail the independence of physics from ontology (of the concrete quantum universe). Anyway, hopefully I can get to that paper so that we can discuss this more. -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this
Re: How Wolves Change Rivers
On 18 February 2014 17:14, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: Moreover, that very failure must be strikingly apparent to the functional actors themselves. Why do you think that isn't the pathetic fallacy though? Quite simply because the whole argument is based on the premise that the computational theory of mind is true and hence if the tendency to attribute sense to the functional actors is pathetic, we must apply it to ourselves ex hypothesi. It's interesting that Bruno says he originally formulated the UDA as a reductio: i.e. in the full expectation that the logic of CTM would break down. And indeed, it turns out that it can only be salvaged by a reversal that establishes computational self-reference as the arbitrator of observational consistencies that would otherwise be swamped by an infinity computational noise. The clear alternative is to abandon CTM, but if it is to be salvaged (and there are robust independent motivations to do so) the entailment is that the entire domain of action and meaning is a self-referential Platonic landscape of dreams. The rigour of the UDA was the first thing that I appreciated because more typically the real difficulties associated with the premise (such as the inherent ambiguity of the relation between physics and computation/information) are obfuscated. Of course we have already agreed that if you reject the premise of CTM in the first place none of the conclusions can follow. But I'm still not sure why you reject it. It can't just be because it is implausible that a human brain (or even part of it) could be replaced by anything based on, or even suggested by, the present state of technology, surely? The premise is agnostic as to the level of substitution, which might be arbitrarily low as long as all the functional relations of the appropriate level are retained. The UD (or rather its completed trace) mandates ex hypothesi both the presence of a computational infinity and the differential selection of consistency of observation (modulo an unresolved measure issue to bias the filtration towards of normal versus pathological outcomes). In sum, it's like a Programmatic Library of Babel. ISTM that what recommends such a theory over some form of identity theory is the implausibility on its face that the lines of fracture of the domain of appearance could ever be made to coincide with those of physical structure (as, for, example, biology does with physics). And panpsychist theories are essentially identity theories with the addition of some kind of interior/exterior (or in Gregg Rosenberg's case effective/receptive) distinction. Computational / informational theories seem to offer an exponentially more powerful model for recursively generating, combining and recombining hierarchies of levels, parts and wholes and Bruno's arithmetical development of the UDA suggests at the least some potentially fruitful lines for further investigation. But what I really don't see is how this idea is at war with the basic thrust of your intuition that sense is an ineliminable part of all this from the beginning. There's no suggestion that sense is created ex nihilo by computation, only that it might be the key to understanding the fracture lines of interiority/exteriority (a sort of computational lensing, as I suggested). That said, to be honest I strongly disagree that the subject/object distinction is either simple or basic, or that a collection of micro-distinctions of this kind could combine to form a more comprehensive one. I agree that it must seem basic at the outset to any subject, for roughly analogous reasons to why we typically never question why we can't see the back of our heads, but probably only before considerable further reflection on the matter. I think it takes a lot of functional work to make a subject, or an object for that matter, even though the eventual domain of objective appearance that manifests to such a subject is inherent (though uninformed) from the beginning. David -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Better Than the Chinese Room
On 19 February 2014 01:09, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: Anyway, hopefully I can get to that paper so that we can discuss this more. I look forward to it :) David -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What are numbers? What is math?
On Tue, Feb 18, 2014 at 04:57:04PM -0800, Edgar L. Owen wrote: Thus the notion of an external reality IS consistent with it being a computational reality, because it leads directly to it. Edgar So you have just painted yourself into a Platonic idealist corner. The only ontological properties of relevance is that of universal computation. We could just as easily be running on the stuff of Peano arithmetic (as Bruno suggests) as on Babbage's analytic engine in some fantastic Steampunk scenario. Furthermore, since universal dovetailers will dominate the measure of conscious programs, we will observe an FPI-like screen over the activities of those programs - we must be staring at the Nothing I talk about in my book. This is just a consequence of the UDA. But the Nothing is not an ontology - it is a really a statement that ontology is unknowable, and not even really meaningful in any sense. Cheers -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What are numbers? What is math?
Russell, and Brent, Well, yes and no. At the first level I do claim an objective external reality. But that that objective external reality consists only of computationally evolving information continually computing the current state of the universe. It is not the familiar classical world in which we think we exist. That is entirely in our mind, a construct of mind. I also claim that every biological being internally simulates that external information reality as the apparently physical reality (which can be an intersubjective or cultural reality shared by observers) in which it mistakenly believes it lives. But on the second level, I also point out that that objective external information reality can be considered to consist only of generic observers, because what all experience basically is is what I call Xperience, namely the alteration of information forms in computational interaction with other information forms. Human EXperience is just the alteration of internal mental information forms encoding that human's model of reality. So human Experience is a subset of generic Xperience. So I do claim an objective external reality to any ONE observer, but that that external reality itself consists entirely of the Xperiences of information forms of each other. In other words there is an external reality to any particular observer that CONSISTS of the realities of all other observers. The utility of this model is that it leads directly to an explanation of consciousness, because human EXperience is now seen as essentially the same process as all computational interaction, and thus of the fundamental process of reality. And since the information computations take place in the realm of reality or existence, they are real and actual and present. This means human Experience, as a subset of Xperience, is also real and actual and present and manifest, and this is what we call consciousness, when it occurs in the specialized information forms that humans use to represent reality. It is the actual immanent self-manifestation of reality that is consciousness. Edgar On Tuesday, February 18, 2014 7:58:45 PM UTC-5, Russell Standish wrote: On Tue, Feb 18, 2014 at 04:19:33PM -0800, meekerdb wrote: On 2/17/2014 10:15 PM, Russell Standish wrote: On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 09:18:32PM -0800, meekerdb wrote: I don't think there's any difference between objectivity and inter-subujective agreement. I tend to use them interchangably. Pity. Because its confusing. If this is an argument over whether intersubjective realities exist, then we're both arguing on the same side. However, Edgar was arguing that a truly objective, observer independent reality must exist. That is different. Not sure what your point is here. It's our, because we're having this conversation. Not necessarily. Maybe you're just imagining it. Someone once coined the phrase real as I am real. In any Platonic idealist theory (such as COMP), you are as real as me. If I'm imagining you, I am also imagining myself. It has to do with whether what they do is mind-independent or not. You're taking mind dependent to mean observed somewhere, sometime by some mind. No - a little stronger than that. I mean that what is observed is necessarily consistent with being observed by some mind. So do you agree that the results of scientific observations (those for which there is inter-subjective agreement) are independent of which particular minds do the observing. Only if the inter-subjective agreement extends to all possible minds. In ToN, I argue that the laws of quantum mechanics have this nature. But only because those laws can be derived from considerations of what it means to observe something. That means that those are laws of physics, not geography. But that means those laws depend on the act of observation (or are grounded in the act of observation). Is that possible worlds that are observed or worlds that might possibly be observed? possible worlds that are observed But this is incoherent. When we formulate a theory about the big bang or how fossils were formed or how our Mars Rover is functioning the theory is that those things really happen whether anyone observes them or not. It doesn't seem essential to the theory. All that matters is the predicted observations. Now you may say that eventually someone will observe them, but that is already theory laden. The big bang is observed via satellite telescopes which send down digital images which are displayed on LED screens which send photons to your retina which sends signals along your optic nerve...and THEN observation takes place? But observation of what? nerve impluses? There is no observation without theory, which includes some kind of ontology to define the observation. You don't have to assume your theory includes what is
Re: What are numbers? What is math?
On 19/02/2014, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: Which ones? How can unobserved facts exist? You can observe their consequences without observing the facts. E.g. millions of people have observed that the sun shines without understanding or knowing about nuclear fusion. But maybe you mean how can facts exist that are not grounded in observation at some point? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Cool Cuttlefish footage
On Saturday, February 15, 2014 10:16:19 PM UTC, Brent wrote: On 2/15/2014 2:17 PM, Russell Standish wrote: On Sat, Feb 15, 2014 at 11:08:07AM +0100, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 14 Feb 2014, at 20:47, meekerdb wrote: On 2/14/2014 7:12 AM, Platonist Guitar Cowboy wrote: I find cuttlefish fascinating. They are social, relatively intelligent, can communicate, able to grasp and manipulate things. It seems like they were all set to become the dominant large life form (instead of humans). A mystery: they don't live a long time. Usually intelligence go with a rather long life, but cuttlefishes live one or two years. Yes - I find that surprising also. Which is not doubt related to having only one clutch of young. But I wonder what is the evolutionary and physiological reason for that? Brent Evolution doesn't do reverse very effectively. The viability of the concept is fairly heavily tied in with forward gearing, in that what is there can be combined someway with what else is already there, layers built over the top, traits exchanging characters, and extending the potential for interoperability in the process. All which just for illustrative purposes. But that same more typical process, causes existing traits to become 'hangers' for subsequent or parallel traits. So traits become necessary not only for what they manifest, but as links in infrastructure that other traits depend on. So going backwards, as in eliminating traits, reeling back to an earlier state, is exponentially more complex and correspondingly exponentially less efficient, and less probable. An adaptive progression lead into new possibilities and continue to do so indefinitely. But it can go the other way. It can walk into a blind alley. And depending on the complexity of the adaptations that got it there, it could well stay there right through to extinction. It's a simplification because the complexity obviously increases for more embedded traits, whereas can be minimal for the extremities. The hand builds on what was already there in the flipper, and the flipper could feasibly likewise build on what was already there in the hand. The extremities might be translatable both ways...if both those ways sit along side. But is that a reverse or does it just look a bit like a reverse? But even that is immensely rare by comparison with the forward gear. Which one has to take note of, since there is no known directional bias in the conception of evolution. So why not major migrations from land to sea,. Reconquering the world where once long ago you had to run away. But it never happens. Dolphins and Whales have no analogue. They only returned to the sea in a strictly historical sense involving geologically separated epochs. They did not reverse much if at all,. They became a new idea, a mammal of the ocean. Might get a longer species life in exchange by way of consolation. But that dysfunctional family life, might not be reversible, and doesn't have to have a psychological or evolutionary advantage anywhere else than that dead end niche, which is barren, which drives concept desertification on the psychological side as the major source of selection forces, since anything more than barren is surplus to requirements and connects to nowhere. Poor Octupus. How long has she been stuck there. If evolution can't do it, perhaps we can do something for them, if we feel sure there's something of the special and the untapped. If you ever do consider it, perhaps spare a thought for me and my dysfunctional nature and try doing something for me. Bloody octopus lovers. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What are numbers? What is math?
On Wed, Feb 19, 2014 at 02:34:57PM +1300, LizR wrote: On 19/02/2014, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: Which ones? How can unobserved facts exist? You can observe their consequences without observing the facts. E.g. millions of people have observed that the sun shines without understanding or knowing about nuclear fusion. Yes - but obviously nuclear fusion is an observed fact (somewhere in the Multiverse). But maybe you mean how can facts exist that are not grounded in observation at some point? Yes, that is what I mean. But Brent talked about unobserved facts, so we'd better let him elaborate what he means. -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
RE: What are numbers? What is math?
how can facts exist that are not grounded in observation at some point? Russell and Liz are wandering around the countryside and Liz points at the ground and says: there's a gold coin buried right there. Russell says: no there isn't They both walk on without looking. And in the subsequent march of history no - one ever looks. Surely, at least one unobserved fact was stated? Maybe even 2 if you are an MWIer. Date: Wed, 19 Feb 2014 14:10:34 +1100 From: li...@hpcoders.com.au To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: What are numbers? What is math? On Wed, Feb 19, 2014 at 02:34:57PM +1300, LizR wrote: On 19/02/2014, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: Which ones? How can unobserved facts exist? You can observe their consequences without observing the facts. E.g. millions of people have observed that the sun shines without understanding or knowing about nuclear fusion. Yes - but obviously nuclear fusion is an observed fact (somewhere in the Multiverse). But maybe you mean how can facts exist that are not grounded in observation at some point? Yes, that is what I mean. But Brent talked about unobserved facts, so we'd better let him elaborate what he means. -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating
If it had been a liquid salt type thorium reactor as prototyped at Oak Ridge in the 50's, it could not have happened. The thorium salt is a solid at room temperature and is not water soluble. Brent On 2/18/2014 2:50 PM, LizR wrote: Would this have happened if Japan had been using subcritical reactors with thorium fuel? On 19/02/2014, ghib...@gmail.com ghib...@gmail.com wrote: On Thursday, February 13, 2014 3:01:26 PM UTC, cdemorsella wrote: Ground water contamination levels at the sampled well site of 54,000Bq/ liter NHK http://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/english/news/20140213_22.html, Feb. 13, 2014: *Record cesium level in Fukushima plant groundwater* -- [Tepco] says water samples taken from a newly-dug well contained the highest levels of radioactive cesium detected so far in groundwater at the site [...] the record levels suggest that the leakage point could be near the well. [...] 600 times the government standard for radioactive wastewater that can be released into the sea. It is more than 30,000 times the level of cesium 137 found in water samples taken from another observation well to the north last week. [...] [Tepco has] yet to determine where the leak originates. In general the dangers arsing from nuclear fission power are grossly exaggerated. It's far and away the best answer to greenhouse emissions, that is also realistic. If we'd been building nuclear power stations the fracking locomotive wouldn't be the unstoppable force that it has become. on Many ways the dangers are blown out of proportion.. Even catastrophic meltdown that blow the roof off and spread the love like Chernobyl, do not result in a tiny fraction of the disasters that the standard models predict. Ten's of thousands were predicted to die. In the end, just 40 deaths from Chernobyl, and most of those the people sent in to get control in the aftermath. There have been revolutions in station design since plants like fukishima were built, and that disaster isn't shaping up to the dire predictions either. What most of all this derives out of, are long standing questions about the level of risk associated with exposure to radiation at low doses up to somewhere below the 200 mark. There's no firm evidence of substantial risk. There's plenty of evidence for genetic protection. There's a whole plethora of statistics we could reasonably expect if low dose exposure was anything like the risk that still sits there in the model. Airline cabin crew should have higher frequency cancer for all that time so near space for one example. They don't. Conversely there are some major natural radiation hotspots in the world. You'd expect those areas to produce more cancer and radiation poisoning related disease. But the opposite is true. People exposed to dramatically higher doses of radiation (inside the low dosage spectrum), actually become lower risks. There seems to be a triggerable genetic response when levels increase. I'm over-compensating in the other direction a bit here. Not because I love the bomb, but if you only knew the power of the dark side. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What are numbers? What is math?
On Wed, Feb 19, 2014 at 03:42:48AM +, chris peck wrote: how can facts exist that are not grounded in observation at some point? Russell and Liz are wandering around the countryside and Liz points at the ground and says: there's a gold coin buried right there. Russell says: no there isn't They both walk on without looking. And in the subsequent march of history no - one ever looks. Surely, at least one unobserved fact was stated? Maybe even 2 if you are an MWIer. Nice example. I would say it is not a fact (in this universe). Of course, in the Multiverse, there will be observers of both facts, as well as worlds, like ours, in which it is not a fact (a superposition in other words). But I can see that someone like Deutsch would say that the Multiverse is decohered, and that there is a matter of fact about whether the coin is there, even if we don't know it. I just happen to disagree with Deutsch, and can think of no experiment to distinguish whether he's right or I'm right. -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How does acceleration curve space? Can anyone provide an answer?
On 2/18/2014 4:30 PM, Russell Standish wrote: On Wed, Feb 19, 2014 at 11:57:21AM +1300, LizR wrote: On 19/02/2014, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: In which theory? IIUC, acceleration of an infinitesimal point particle does not change the curvature of space. And acceleration of a massive particle only changes the curvature by the amount due to the increased kinetic energy of the particle. Acceleration of a point particle doesn't cause light crossing the particle to bend (because it's a point) but accel of a larger object does because light takes time to cross the object. I'm sure the particle size is not relevant. A point-like concentration of mass-energy will still curve spacetime with an approximate 1/r^2. But surely this doesn't mean space-time is really curved, or does it? Or is space-time curvature relative to an observer (surely not) ??? Spacetime curvature is independent of the observer - in the sense that it is a rank 2 tensor, although its components will vary according to the observer's reference frame (just like your x,y coordinates change whenever I move around my house). I'm unsure whether my comment about kinetic energy contributing to curvature is correct though. In the particle's instantaneous inertial reference frame, the kinetic energy is always zero. Maybe Brent or someone else could comment. Of course things don't just accelerate all by themselves. John Clark seems to think that just measuring in an accelerating frame warps spacetime, which as Russell points out is not consistent with curvature being an invariant. When a mass accelerates, conservation laws require that stress-energy be conserved. So from the standpoint of Einstein's equation the right side T_a_b is just getting rearranged. No mass-energy is created. So we can consider the case of two masses (one an elevator if you like) connected by a long spring and oscillating together and apart. Locally the curvature of spacetime must change to reflect their changing positions. Their gravitationl effect will be greater than if they were not moving because they and the spring have more stress-energy. But there is no net increase due to the acceleration per se. Note that the system does not radiate gravitational waves because it is only bipolar and gravity waves are quadrupole. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How does acceleration curve space? Can anyone provide an answer?
On Tue, Feb 18, 2014 at 1:28 PM, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, Feb 16, 2014 at 12:54 PM, Edgar L. Owen edgaro...@att.net wrote: You say that You can tell if spacetime is curved or not by observing if light moves in a straight line or not. and then you say that light does NOT travel in a straight line in the accelerating elevator example you give. So, by your terminology, does that mean that the acceleration of the elevator IS curving space ? You should stop talking about space, it's 4D spacetime; but yes it's curved, although if you were inside that sealed elevator you couldn't tell if the curvature was caused by rockets accelerating the elevator in deep space or if it was caused by the Earth's gravity. Acceleration is absolute in that there is no need to look outside your reference frame to detect it, but according to General Relativity there is no way to tell the difference between it and being in a gravitational field. You are simply incorrect here, John. There is no sense in which an observer in an accelerating elevator in the flat spacetime of special relativity could correctly conclude that spacetime has any curvature--the fact that light curves relative to a coordinate system where the elevator is at rest is completely irrelevant, since there's no principle of physics that says curved light paths imply curved spacetime. In fact the observer inside the elevator should have ways of measuring curvature if he can measure second-order effects, or if the size of the elevator is taken as non-infinitesimal, and in either case he could definitely conclude that spacetime was *not* curved within an elevator accelerating in flat SR spacetime. The equivalence principle only says there's no way to tell the difference between acceleration and gravity *if* you only look at a first-order approximation to the equations of physics in your region, and *if* your region is infinitesimally small. But in that case there's no way for you to measure spacetime curvature at all, so there's no valid reason for concluding that spacetime in your region is curved. Jesse -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What are numbers? What is math?
On 2/18/2014 4:58 PM, Russell Standish wrote: On Tue, Feb 18, 2014 at 04:19:33PM -0800, meekerdb wrote: On 2/17/2014 10:15 PM, Russell Standish wrote: On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 09:18:32PM -0800, meekerdb wrote: I don't think there's any difference between objectivity and inter-subujective agreement. I tend to use them interchangably. Pity. Because its confusing. If this is an argument over whether intersubjective realities exist, then we're both arguing on the same side. Good, because that's the only operational meaning I can attach to objective. However, Edgar was arguing that a truly objective, observer independent reality must exist. That is different. Not sure what your point is here. It's our, because we're having this conversation. Not necessarily. Maybe you're just imagining it. Someone once coined the phrase real as I am real. In any Platonic idealist theory (such as COMP), you are as real as me. If I'm imagining you, I am also imagining myself. It has to do with whether what they do is mind-independent or not. You're taking mind dependent to mean observed somewhere, sometime by some mind. No - a little stronger than that. I mean that what is observed is necessarily consistent with being observed by some mind. So not actually observed, just consistent with and some mind. But how is consistent with to be evaluated. Does it mean merely logically possible? or nomologically possible? If the latter, then it means using theories in which some things happen unobserved. So do you agree that the results of scientific observations (those for which there is inter-subjective agreement) are independent of which particular minds do the observing. Only if the inter-subjective agreement extends to all possible minds. In ToN, I argue that the laws of quantum mechanics have this nature. But only because those laws can be derived from considerations of what it means to observe something. That means that those are laws of physics, not geography. But that means those laws depend on the act of observation (or are grounded in the act of observation). Is that possible worlds that are observed or worlds that might possibly be observed? possible worlds that are observed But this is incoherent. When we formulate a theory about the big bang or how fossils were formed or how our Mars Rover is functioning the theory is that those things really happen whether anyone observes them or not. It doesn't seem essential to the theory. All that matters is the predicted observations. Now you may say that eventually someone will observe them, but that is already theory laden. The big bang is observed via satellite telescopes which send down digital images which are displayed on LED screens which send photons to your retina which sends signals along your optic nerve...and THEN observation takes place? But observation of what? nerve impluses? There is no observation without theory, which includes some kind of ontology to define the observation. You don't have to assume your theory includes what is really real, but it has to include a theory of observation if you are to go beyond from pure solipistic dreams. Sure. I'm not sure what your point is though. You're just admitting the theory doesn't need to make ontological claims in order to be effective. But effective means predicting events not yet observed and even unobservable events - unless you make observe so broad as to include any inference from any evidence. is due to some reason other than the fact that observers necessarily exist in those worlds. For there to be a mind independent reality, there needs to be such a facts. So a world must have physics that *permits* observers in order that it be our world. But worlds don't have to have *geography* that permits observers, e.g. this universe between inflation and the recombination. So they can be mind independent. Just so long as some geography permits the observers, such as on a rocky planet on a middling start some 13 billion years after those events. But the theory derived to explain that observation also entails that no one need have observed it. Really? How so? The plasma was too chaotic to allow records or memory - hence the smoothness of the CMB. I could believe that mathematical facts (about say the integers) could fit that category, and thus be the basis of a fundamental ontology. But even in COMP, we cannot distinguish between an ontology of Peano arithmetic, or of Curry combinators, say. Once your ontology has the property of Turing completeness, you could choose any such ontology and be none the wiser. Doesn't this make the whole notion of an ontological reality rather meaningless? Then you would have structural realism. Yeah - fair enough. That position is largely a defeat of the idea that we can know an ontological basis of phenomena. But that's just the radical skepticism that we can't *know* anything. All theories are provisional. It's more than
Re: Block Universes
On Sun, Feb 16, 2014 at 9:40 AM, Edgar L. Owen edgaro...@att.net wrote: Jesse, OK, I'm back... Let me back up a minute and ask you a couple of general questions with respect to establishing which past clock times of different observers were simultaneous in p-time The only clocks in this example are the real actual ages of two twins 1. Do you agree that each twin always has a real actual age defined as how old he actually is (to himself)? Yes or no? Yes, in the sense that at each point on his worldline he has an actual age at that point, which is just the proper time between his birth and that point. But if you're suggesting a unique true actual age, as opposed to just each point having its own actual age, then I would have to change my answer to no. 2. Do you agree that this real actual age corresponds by definition to the moment of his actually being alive, to his actual current point in time? (As a block universe believer you can just take this as perception or perspective rather than actuality if you wish - it won't affect the discussion). Yes or no? If by perspective you mean that each point on his worldline takes his experiences at that point (including his age) to be the current point in time, then yes. Now assume a relativistic trip that separates the twins 3. Do you agree that IF, for every point of the trip, we can always determine what ACTUAL age of one twin corresponds to the ACTUAL age of the other twin, and always in a way that both twins AGREE upon (that is frame independent), that those 1:1 correspondences in actual ages, whatever they are, must occur at the same actual times? That this would give us a method to determine what (possibly different) actual ages occur at the same actual p-time moment in which the twins are actually alive with those (possibly different) actual ages? Yes or no? IF we had a method to determine a unique 1:1 correspondence in ages for separated twins, then yes, that could reasonably be interpreted as a demonstration of absolute simultaneity, telling us which ages occur at the same actual times. But I don't believe you can find any such method for determining a unique frame-independent 1:1 correspondence in relativity. Since I am answering your questions, are you willing to answer mine? In the post that you are responding to I requested that you respond to my questions at https://groups.google.com/d/msg/everything-list/jFX-wTm_E_Q/xtjSyxxi4awJ , especially the part at the end about the meaning of same point in spacetime (i.e. whether two events happening at the same space and time coordinates in a single coordinate system automatically implies that they satisfy the operational definitions of same point in spacetime I had given, and whether you'd agree that this means they must have happened at the same moment in p-time). You ignored that request in your response. I'll even narrow it down to a single question I asked in that post: 'If we have some coordinate system where relativity predicts the event of Alice's clock reading 30 happens at exactly the same space and time coordinates as the event of Bob's clock reading 40, do you agree or disagree that this means relativity automatically predicts these two events would satisfy the various operational meanings of same point in spacetime I gave at https://groups.google.com/d/msg/everything-list/jFX-wTm_E_Q/AZOhnG04__AJ , regardless of whether Alice and Bob had synchronized their clocks in the past or not? Please give me a clear agree/disagree answer to this question' For example, say that in some particular coordinate system Alice's coordinate position x as a function of coordinate time t is x(t)=80, i.e. she is at rest at position coordinate x=80, and her age T (proper time since birth) as a function of coordinate time t is T(t)=t+10. Meanwhile Bob's coordinate position as a function of coordinate time is x(t)=68+(0.6c)*t, i.e. at t=0 he is at x=68 and he is moving in the positive x-direction at 0.6c, and his age T' as a function of coordinate time t is T'(t)=24+0.8*t. Then at t=20 in this coordinate system, they will both be at position x=80, and Alice's age will be T=20+10=30 while Bob's will be T'=24+0.8*20=24+16=40. So the question above is asking whether, in an example like this one, you'd agree that their reaching these ages at the same space and time coordinates implies they must actually meet at the same point in spacetime when Alice is 30 and Bob is 40, according to the operational definitions I gave earlier (like the one involving bouncing light signals back and forth and noting when the time for them to bounce back approaches zero). Jesse -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com.
Re: 3-1 views
2014-02-19 1:21 GMT+01:00 meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net: On 2/17/2014 10:25 PM, Quentin Anciaux wrote: 2014-02-18 3:35 GMT+01:00 meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net: On 2/17/2014 5:57 PM, David Nyman wrote: On 17 February 2014 20:15, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: But it is unambiguous under comp ex hypothesi: i.e. any classically adequate copy of me is equivalent to me. Under this hypothesis if I am duplicated both the resulting continuations are equivalent immediately posterior to duplication. Consequently I repeat my question: if *you* were duplicated in this manner, would you reasonably expect that either of the resulting equivalent continuations would experience a two-valued outcome? No, but as I said, that's regarding them as third persons. Well, the very logic of the hypothesis dictates that *both* continuations inherit the first personal perspective of the original and this will always be single-valued. But, as you said, there is an ineliminable ambiguity because neither can record anything first-personal that incorporates that third-personal doubleness. IOW it always seems as if there is only one of me (1p) even in the case that I know there are two of me (3p). Do you agree that this ambiguity is sufficient for step 3 to go through? You sound as though you want to sell me something. I have no interest buying the argument one piece at a time or swallowing it all at once. I'm interested in understanding it and it's consequences. It's seems to me that following the argument step by step is then the thing to do... and if you disagree with a step, explain why... When an argument is a reductio you don't necessarily know which step to disagree with. But you seem to concentrate on the non-argument of possible meeting of a duplication experiment like John Clark, if there is a point to be made, and if you can explain why the mere possibility for the doppelganger to meet render probability calculus meaningless, John Clark has been asked this question for year and cannot answer it, it seems he prefer trolling than answering this simple question... Arguing against step three and FPI, is also arguing against MWI. If you're arguing against both then I agree. Quentin Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. (Roy Batty/Rutger Hauer) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: 3-1 views (was: Re: Better Than the Chinese Room)
On 18 Feb 2014, at 19:52, John Clark wrote: On Tue, Feb 18, 2014 at 3:33 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: if Mr. he is the fellow who is experiencing Helsinki right now then the correct prediction would be Mr. he will see neither Washington NOR Moscow. Simple calculus show that this prediction will be refuted by both copies. Bullshit! Both copies will have equally vivid memories of being Mr. he We agree on that, and we agreed this means that both copies are, from their 1p view, survivors. Both can say I am the H-guy, like I can say today that I am the guy having answered your post of last week. and neither is experiencing Helsinki right now, therefore Mr. he sees neither Washington nor Moscow. So, this is my first post to you, despite I remember having sent other post? You are gravely irrational, and contradict your own terms. If Mr he sees neither W or M, then he died, and then comp is false. We also died each time we measure a spin, or anything. In AUDA this is a confusion between []p and []p t. You get the 3-1 view, and seems unable to come back in your bodies after the button pushing. You leave the body, and never come back. Or comp is false Fine, then comp is false. And now that we both agree that comp is false there is no need for either of us to ever use that word again. OK. you use ~step-3 - ~comp is false, so you agree that comp - step 3. So please move to step 4, whose question can only clarify to you the 1p/3p distinction that you omitted up to now. Or you believe we have refuted comp. That would be a gigantic discovery, but it is unfortunately only your traditional fake (I think now) confusion between the 1p and 3p pov. we are both copies, in the 3p, but only one of them, in he 1p view That depends entirely on who the hell Mr. we is. Bruno Marchal is addicted to pronouns. Pronouns does not introduce any problem, when you agree that after the duplication we are both copies, in the 3p view, and only one of them, in the 1p view. I am addicted to the precision needed to move on. You are addicted to irrelevant point to mask you absence of argument, I think., and this absent of *your habit to forget the precisions introduced. and everyone who can read a diary and distinguish W from M can understand the argument. Apparently not. Haven't you ever wondered why your colleagues don't agree that you've made a world class discovery? Well this is why. Which colleagues? If you know a scientist having trouble with this, give me a name. I have never met someone stopping at step 3. I have only heard about non convinced philosophers, but they have never accept to meet me, or even to reply to a letter. It is only bad politics and I think you are just doing defamation, which illustrates again your lack of argument. I am happy you think it is a world class discovery, but let us be modest, it is a reminder that the mind-body problem is not solved, and that science has not decided between Aristotle and Plato. The discovery (the thesis) is in the math part: that machines have a non trivial intrinsic quantum physics/logic associated with them through self-reference. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
