Re: The scope of physical law and its relationship to the substitution level
I don't think Newtonian physics is intuitive. Most people's intuition and experiences would not lead them to the idea that once set in motion an object continues to move forever, nor that the the total direction of matter is conserved. Even Descartes missed this. Jason On Sun, May 24, 2015 at 8:27 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 5/24/2015 5:05 AM, Pierz wrote: On Sunday, May 24, 2015 at 4:02:42 PM UTC+10, Brent wrote: On 5/23/2015 9:58 PM, Pierz wrote: On Saturday, May 23, 2015 at 8:36:40 PM UTC+10, Liz R wrote: I'm not sure why comp would predict that physical laws are invariant for all observers. I can see that it would lead to a sort of super-anthropic-selection effect, but surely all possible observers should exist somewhere in arithmetic, including ones who observe different physics (that is compatible with their existence) ? I really must dig up the old thread! But I'm not saying comp does entail invariant physics for all observers, just that if there are different physics, the substitution level must be very low indeed. Think of the original scenario in the UDA: a person in Washington is suddenly annihilated, and then duplicated in Helsinki and Moscow (or whatever). That operation creates a 50% probability of finding oneself in Helsinki or Moscow. But the ultimate point of the UDA is that one's actual probability of finding oneself in Helsinki or Washington depends on the total measure of *all* virtual environments within which that observer is instantiated in an environment that looks like one of those cities. One can't isolate a particular virtual system from the trace of the UD. So you can't create an arbitrary physics in an environment that looks like either city (or anywhere). Well you can, but any observer will always find their own physics to be the measure of *all* their continuations in arithmetic. So there can't be an environment that is like Helsinki or Moscow at some point but that has different physical laws. Carry this logic over to the scenario of a person standing in an empty room - the physics the person experiences will be the measure of all such identical persons standing in empty rooms. Experiencing physics I think needs some explication. If experiencing only refers to consciously thinking propositions, then one may not be experiencing much physics: the world seems 3D with colors, there's a mild temperature, air smells OK,... One doesn't directly, consciously experience the 2nd law, or the Born rule. The laws of physics are human inventions to describe and predict events. They're not out there in Nature; which is why we have to revise them from time to time as we find more comprehensive, more accurate laws. OK, but it doesn't seem relevant to the argument. We experience a world predictable and stable in certain ways that, now we're so sophisticated, we formalise into the science of physics. Bruno's claim is that these regularities are not intrinsic properties of some primary stuff, but emergent from the computational properties of observers - namely how often various continuations of those observers crop up relatively to one another in the abstract space of all possible continuations. I'm trying to make an admittedly difficult point about whether or not observers in different places can experience different physics within this paradigm, and if so, how that relates to substitution level. If you're worried about people experiencing physics let's just concentrate on observers who go to the trouble of doing physics experiments. It really doesn't matter. My point was that most people's conscious experience most of the time could be accommodated within a large range of physics. For example Newtonian physics seems intuitive while quantum mechanics isn't; but we think QM is the better theory. But Bruno claims that his theory implies QM and not Newtonian mechanics. So if people consciously experienced a Newtonian universe (which they once thought they did) would that falsify comp or would it just imply that the UD can instantiate Newtonian universes. Brent The question here is what constitutes the observer? How detailed would a simulation of me have to be before it became a subjective *duplicate* of me, its continuations my continuations? If there is a person A somewhere in the UD who is experiencing an empty room with physics A, and another identically configured person B somewhere else experiencing physics B, what is stopping the continuations of A mixing with the continuations of B, so that the measures combine into a merged physics? There has to be something in both observers' computational states that distinguishes them sufficiently that their experiences cannot interfere with one another - the comp equivalent of decoherence. (In fact if QM effects are the manifestation of UD observer measures, the threshold at which these effects start to kick in should probably give
Re: The scope of physical law and its relationship to the substitution level
Most people find it more intuitive than QM. But OK, consider people who experience Aristotelian physics. Brent On 5/24/2015 11:12 PM, Jason Resch wrote: I don't think Newtonian physics is intuitive. Most people's intuition and experiences would not lead them to the idea that once set in motion an object continues to move forever, nor that the the total direction of matter is conserved. Even Descartes missed this. Jason On Sun, May 24, 2015 at 8:27 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 5/24/2015 5:05 AM, Pierz wrote: On Sunday, May 24, 2015 at 4:02:42 PM UTC+10, Brent wrote: On 5/23/2015 9:58 PM, Pierz wrote: On Saturday, May 23, 2015 at 8:36:40 PM UTC+10, Liz R wrote: I'm not sure why comp would predict that physical laws are invariant for all observers. I can see that it would lead to a sort of super-anthropic-selection effect, but surely all possible observers should exist somewhere in arithmetic, including ones who observe different physics (that is compatible with their existence) ? I really must dig up the old thread! But I'm not saying comp does entail invariant physics for all observers, just that if there are different physics, the substitution level must be very low indeed. Think of the original scenario in the UDA: a person in Washington is suddenly annihilated, and then duplicated in Helsinki and Moscow (or whatever). That operation creates a 50% probability of finding oneself in Helsinki or Moscow. But the ultimate point of the UDA is that one's actual probability of finding oneself in Helsinki or Washington depends on the total measure of /all/ virtual environments within which that observer is instantiated in an environment that looks like one of those cities. One can't isolate a particular virtual system from the trace of the UD. So you can't create an arbitrary physics in an environment that looks like either city (or anywhere). Well you can, but any observer will always find their own physics to be the measure of *all* their continuations in arithmetic. So there can't be an environment that is like Helsinki or Moscow at some point but that has different physical laws. Carry this logic over to the scenario of a person standing in an empty room - the physics the person experiences will be the measure of all such identical persons standing in empty rooms. Experiencing physics I think needs some explication. If experiencing only refers to consciously thinking propositions, then one may not be experiencing much physics: the world seems 3D with colors, there's a mild temperature, air smells OK,... One doesn't directly, consciously experience the 2nd law, or the Born rule. The laws of physics are human inventions to describe and predict events. They're not out there in Nature; which is why we have to revise them from time to time as we find more comprehensive, more accurate laws. OK, but it doesn't seem relevant to the argument. We experience a world predictable and stable in certain ways that, now we're so sophisticated, we formalise into the science of physics. Bruno's claim is that these regularities are not intrinsic properties of some primary stuff, but emergent from the computational properties of observers - namely how often various continuations of those observers crop up relatively to one another in the abstract space of all possible continuations. I'm trying to make an admittedly difficult point about whether or not observers in different places can experience different physics within this paradigm, and if so, how that relates to substitution level. If you're worried about people experiencing physics let's just concentrate on observers who go to the trouble of doing physics experiments. It really doesn't matter. My point was that most people's conscious experience most of the time could be accommodated within a large range of physics. For example Newtonian physics seems intuitive while quantum mechanics isn't; but we think QM is the better theory. But Bruno claims that his theory implies QM and not Newtonian mechanics. So if people consciously experienced a Newtonian universe (which they once thought they did) would that falsify comp or would it just imply that the UD can instantiate Newtonian universes. Brent The question here is what constitutes the observer? How detailed would a simulation of me have to be before it became a subjective /duplicate/ of me, its continuations my continuations? If there is a person A somewhere in the UD who is experiencing an empty room with physics A, and
Re: Michael Shermer becomes sceptical about scepticism!
On 5/24/2015 5:34 AM, Pierz wrote: On Monday, May 4, 2015 at 9:08:30 PM UTC+10, spudb...@aol.com wrote: I sure did, Telmo. Scroll to the bottom and you shall view my last, number 26th, the last one. This kind of thing is interesting to me. I tend toward the materialist stuff since it seems to have potential. The mentalist stuff seems unreliable because people who have NDE's or trances have not come back with information. ? Highly debatable! It's true that so far I'm not aware of any experiments in which NDE subjects reported the content of cards put in places only visible from the ceiling (as some researchers have tried), but plenty of information has come back if you're willing to allow experiencers' spontaneous reports as evidence. For instance, the well documented case of a woman who was able to report accurately on the neurosurgery that was performed on her, including describing surgical tools, conversations and detail about procedures she could have had no knowledge of - all while her body was drained of blood, with a flatlining EEG. There are tons of such reports, And tons of them have been found to be confabulated and exaggerated, based on later memories and second hand reports.. Brent and studies have looked at the accuracy of these reports and found that they far exceeded the accuracy of surgery descriptions of patients asked to describe that they *thought* they would have seen if witnessing their own surgery. Yes of course this does not constitute any kind of scientific proof, but to sweepingly say they have not come back with information is also inaccurate. What you /can/ say is attempts to find some kind of information that NDE-ers can report in a reliable, replicable manner have so far been unsuccessful. -Original Message- From: Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com javascript: To: everything-list everyth...@googlegroups.com javascript: Sent: Mon, May 4, 2015 4:19 am Subject: Re: Michael Shermer becomes sceptical about scepticism! On Sun, May 3, 2015 at 9:19 PM, spudboy100 via Everything List everyth...@googlegroups.com javascript: wrote: Hi Telmo, I have tried the Other Side stuff for a bit, and found it wanting. Not so surprising... The topic is a string attractor for quacks, for sure. Steinhart, said he had some experiences but decided they were not that significant to himself. He is more buzzed, he said, but the beauty of mathematics, emotionally. Here is a crowd funded 3D augmented reality game, due out next year, called Night Terrors, so much for the paranormal, yes? We maybe, could, have the paranormal adventure any time we choose. http://www.ign.com/articles/2015/05/01/survival-horror-augmented-reality-game-night-terrors-maps-your-house http://www.ign.com/articles/2015/05/01/survival-horror-augmented-reality-game-night-terrors-maps-your-house Wow, this is a brilliant/terrifying idea! I cross-posted a message to Ben Goetzel on his Multiverse website, as well as on Guilio Prisco's Turing-Church website sight concerning Goetzel's non-response, to my question to him, about afterlife ideas, if any? He seemed to touch on this in a recent article, as well as his 2006, The Hidden Pattern, which I had downloaded, a couple of months ago. Any data or opinion on Goetzel's view on all this? Have you seen this? http://multiverseaccordingtoben.blogspot.de/2015/03/paranormal-phenomena-nonlocal-mind-and.html http://multiverseaccordingtoben.blogspot.de/2015/03/paranormal-phenomena-nonlocal-mind-and.html Telmo. Mitch -Original Message- From: Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com javascript: To: everything-list everyth...@googlegroups.com javascript: Sent: Sun, May 3, 2015 2:45 pm Subject: Re: Michael Shermer becomes sceptical about scepticism! Hi spudboy, I follow Ben Goetzel and have some of the books he recommends on the topic on my to-read list. I remain agnostic on this stuff, and just try to consider the simplest explanation, even if it's boring. In the case of this story, this sounds a lot like the event was staged by some nice person who cares about the bride. This doesn't mean that is the correct explanation, of course. What I am more curious about are replicable laboratory experiments. Some people, like Goetzel, are claiming that results with statistical significance are known. Maybe this is a nice opportunity for amateur science, because dealing with this topics would still career suicide for many people -- even if to find negative results. Of course believing in the supernatural is absurd -- what does that even mean? If, for example, ghosts were real, then
Re: What does the MGA accomplish?
Bruno Marchal wrote: On 18 May 2015, at 02:31, Bruce Kellett wrote: LizR wrote: On 17 May 2015 at 11:44, Bruce Kellett bhkell...@optusnet.com.au I can see that computationalism might well have difficulties accommodating a gradual evolutionary understanding of almost anything -- after all, the dovetailer is there in Platonia before anything physical ever appears. So how can consciousness evolve gradually? This is the tired old misunderstanding of the concept of a block universe. It's as though Minkowski never existed. OK. Explain to me exactly how the block universe ideas work out in Platonia. I thought I saw an answer by Liz, but don't find it. No, Liz only snipes from the sidelines.she does not answer substantive questions. I am not sure that the block physical universe ideas work out in Platonia, although block physical multiverse appearance might be explainable by the rather canonical all computations, which is offered once we agree that 2+2 = 4, or any theorem of RA, is true independently of him/her/it. The block multiverse could well be a different concept from the block universe of the Minkowskian understanding of special relativity. The question arose in a discussion of the possibility of an evolutionary understanding of consciousness. This does not, on the face of it, appear to sit terribly easily in comp, since comp starts from the individual conscious moment or moments, and seeks to understand physics as somehow emergent from the statistics of all such instantiations of this set of computations in the UD. This does not appear to relate easily to an account of times before and after the existence of that particular consciousness. Part of my problem is that the UD does not execute any actual program sequentially: after each step in a program it executes the next step of the next program and so on, until it reaches the first step of some program, at which point it loops back to the start. So if the conscious moment is evinced by a logical sequence of steps by the dovetailer, it does not correspond to any particular program, but a rather arbitrary assortment of steps from many programs. Of course, given that all programs are executed, this sequence of steps does correspond to some program, somewhere, but not necessarily any of the ones partially executed for generating that conscious moment. There is also a question as to whether this sequence of computational steps generates one conscious moment -- of some shorter or longer duration (duration being in experienced time, since the computations are timeless) -- or whether a whole conscious life is generated by a continuous sequence of steps, or whether the whole history of the world that contains that consciousness (and all other conscious beings, past, present, and future) are generated by the same (extraordinarily long) continuous sequence of computational steps. If the idea is something along the lines of the latter possibility, then the block universe might well be the result. The problem then, of course, is that any particular consciousness will be generated an indefinitely great number of separate times for each time this whole universe is generated. This, of course, is the Boltzmann brain problem, and I do not think you have adequately addressed this. Of course, it is a poisonous gift, as it leads to the necessary search, for the computationalist, of a measure on the border of the sigma_1 reality. It is long to explain, but you might appreciate shortcuts, as the sigma_1 arithmetical reality emulates all rational approximations of physical equations, and so, abstracting from the (comp) measure problem temporarily, you can make sense of relative local block universe in that reality, as that part of the arithmetical reality mimics the physicists block universe or universes (perhaps only locally too). Generating all rational approximations of physical equations is not going to get you a block universe -- or any sort of universe, for that matter. The equations of physics describe the behaviour of the physical world, they are not that physical world -- map and territory again. Of course such shortcuts might not have the right measure, and so we need to use a vaster net. My point is that if our brains or bodies are Turing emulable then they are Turing emulated in a small part of the arithmetical reality. The first person points of view gives an internal perspective which is much complex, in fact of unboundable complexity, but with important invariants too. In the technic parts I exploit important relations between the sigma_1 truth, the sigma_1 provable and the (with CT) intuitively computable. I can explain, if you want, but my feeling is that you don't like the idea (that the aristotelian materialist dogma can be doubted), nor does it seems you are ready to involve in more of computer science. But if you don't study
Re: The scope of physical law and its relationship to the substitution level
On Monday, May 25, 2015 at 4:10:37 AM UTC+10, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 23 May 2015, at 12:36, LizR wrote: I'm not sure why comp would predict that physical laws are invariant for all observers I can see that it would lead to a sort of super-anthropic-selection effect, but surely all possible observers should exist somewhere in arithmetic, including ones who observe different physics (that is compatible with their existence) ? Those with different physics will have measure zero. Why? Because the laws of physics must be given by the sum on all computations below the substitution level, whatever any universal machine state can be in. Only geography will need the anthropic element, the physics needs only a mathematical statistics on all computation, going in actual state which are any state. Physics become a theorem of machine theology, itself a theorem of arithmetic (+ comp). Of course, today, we don't know how much the standard model is contingent or absolute. String theory diminish a large part of the contingent parts, but introduces complexity in other direction, with panorama of different sorts of physics. All this are open problem in comp. The goal of comp is to provide an explanation of the relation between consciousness/mind and appearance of matter and persistence, and this in some testable way. It is an explanation in the form of the formulation of a problem, or a reduction of a problem into another one. Bruno OK the 'invariant physics' you refer to is a very low-level one, i.e., the ultimate unifying laws. However, let me try to put my point about the substitution level another way to make it clearer. ISTM that it will be sufficient for there to be another region of the multiverse where the observable, everyday physics (things like particle masses etc) are different in order to force us to conclude that the substitution level must be as large as the observer's universe. Why? Because let's say there is an observer in another region of the multiverse whom I wish to duplicate here in *this* region, where the observable laws are different. I get a copy of that observer's memories etc and reproduce them here. Now suddenly that observer has a continuation that experiences the physics of *this* region. But if that was possible, then the physics of both regions would have merged, because observers in both regions would already be able to interfere with one another's measures. SO, in order to prevent such interference of measures and a merging of physics into an average measure, it must be that in order to duplicate an observer in another region, I need to duplicate the observer to such a deep level that the separation into the two regions is as it were enforced by the very definition of that observer. The observer must include the entire computational branch down to the point at which the two physics diverged. On 23 May 2015 at 21:23, Pierz pie...@gmail.com javascript: wrote: Some time ago on this list I had a fascinating exchange with Bruno that has stayed with me, fuelling some attacks of 4am philosophical insomnia - an affliction I imagine I'm not the only person on this list to suffer from! If you try to nail Bruno down on some aspects of his theory, he has a tendency to get all Sg Grz* and p[]p on you at a certain point, making it difficult to progress without a PhD in modal logic - despite the fact that I suspect that the ideas are fundamentally simple. Nevertheless in the course of the discussion, Bruno *did* acknowledge that his theory predicts that the laws of physics are invariant across space and time, because they are supposed to arise out of pure arithmetic (being the hypostases of the FPI bla blas). Indeed, for the dissolution of the material within the arithmetical to go through (logically), then the regularities that we call physical law cannot depend on geography, since *ex hypothesi* they arise from number relations which are prior to time and space. Yet physics - or cosmology - seems to be headed full-steam in a different direction, towards the conclusion that physical law is indeed dependent on geography, the laws we observe being dependent upon an observer selection process. That is, we see physical laws finely honed for life, because life can only exist in those regions where the laws are conducive to life. I'm less sure about this, but I think it might still be OK for physical law to geographically determined in this sense, so long as there are no other observers in different parts of the multiverse who see different laws, but to assume such a thing seems foolish. Why should we believe that of all the possible permutations of the parameters which determined physical, there is only a single solution which permits life? There might be many different So on the face of it, the recent measurements of the mass of the Higgs boson, which are strongly
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On Monday, May 25, 2015 at 4:58:53 AM UTC+10, Brent wrote: On 5/24/2015 4:09 AM, Pierz wrote: On Sunday, May 24, 2015 at 4:47:12 PM UTC+10, Jason wrote: On Sun, May 24, 2015 at 12:40 AM, Pierz pie...@gmail.com wrote: On Sunday, May 24, 2015 at 1:07:15 AM UTC+10, Jason wrote: On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 12:44 PM, Bruno Marchal mar...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 19 May 2015, at 15:53, Jason Resch wrote: On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 12:06 AM, Stathis Papaioannou stat...@gmail.com wrote: On 19 May 2015 at 14:45, Jason Resch jason...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, May 18, 2015 at 9:21 PM, Stathis Papaioannou stat...@gmail.com wrote: On 19 May 2015 at 11:02, Jason Resch jason...@gmail.com wrote: I think you're not taking into account the level of the functional substitution. Of course functionally equivalent silicon and functionally equivalent neurons can (under functionalism) both instantiate the same consciousness. But a calculator computing 2+3 cannot substitute for a human brain computing 2+3 and produce the same consciousness. In a gradual replacement the substitution must obviously be at a level sufficient to maintain the function of the whole brain. Sticking a calculator in it won't work. Do you think a Blockhead that was functionally equivalent to you (it could fool all your friends and family in a Turing test scenario into thinking it was intact you) would be conscious in the same way as you? Not necessarily, just as an actor may not be conscious in the same way as me. But I suspect the Blockhead would be conscious; the intuition that a lookup table can't be conscious is like the intuition that an electric circuit can't be conscious. I don't see an equivalency between those intuitions. A lookup table has a bounded and very low degree of computational complexity: all answers to all queries are answered in constant time. While the table itself may have an arbitrarily high information content, what in the software of the lookup table program is there to appreciate/understand/know that information? Understanding emerges from the fact that the lookup table is immensely large. It could be wrong, but I don't think it is obviously less plausible than understanding emerging from a Turing machine made of tin cans. The lookup table is intelligent or at least offers the appearance of intelligence, but it makes the maximum possible advantage of the space-time trade off: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space–time_tradeoff The tin-can Turing machine is unbounded in its potential computational complexity, there's no reason to be a bio- or silico-chauvinist against it. However, by definition, a lookup table has near zero computational complexity, no retained state. But it is counterfactually correct on a large range spectrum. Of course, it has to be infinite to be genuinely counterfactual-correct. But the structure of the counterfactuals is identical regardless of the inputs and outputs in its lookup table. If you replaced all of its outputs with random strings, would that change its consciousness? What if there existed a special decoding book, which was a one-time-pad that could decode its random answers? Would the existence of this book make it more conscious than if this book did not exist? If there is zero information content in the outputs returned by the lookup table it might as well return all X characters as its response to any query, but then would any program that just returns a string of X's be conscious? I really like this argument, even though I once came up with a (bad) attempt to refute it. I wish it received more attention because it does cast quite a penetrating light on the issue. What you're suggesting is effectively the cache pattern in computer programming, where we trade memory resources for computational resources. Instead of repeating a resource-intensive computation, we store the inputs and outputs for later regurgitation. How is this different from a movie recording of brain activity (which most on the list seem to agree is not conscious)? The lookup table is just a really long recording, only we use the input to determine to which section of the recording to fast-forward/rewind to. It isn't different to a recording. But here's the thing: when we ask if the lookup machine is conscious, we are kind of implicitly asking: is it having an experience *now*, while I ask the question and see a response. But what does such a question actually even mean? If a computation is underway in time when the machine responds, then I assume it is having a co-temporal experience. But the lookup machine idea forces us to the realization that different observers' subjective experiences (the pure qualia) can't be mapped to one another in objective time.
Re: The scope of physical law and its relationship to the substitution level
Pierz wrote: On Monday, May 25, 2015 at 4:10:37 AM UTC+10, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 23 May 2015, at 12:36, LizR wrote: I'm not sure why comp would predict that physical laws are invariant for all observers I can see that it would lead to a sort of super-anthropic-selection effect, but surely all possible observers should exist somewhere in arithmetic, including ones who observe different physics (that is compatible with their existence) ? Those with different physics will have measure zero. Why? Because the laws of physics must be given by the sum on all computations below the substitution level, whatever any universal machine state can be in. Only geography will need the anthropic element, the physics needs only a mathematical statistics on all computation, going in actual state which are any state. Physics become a theorem of machine theology, itself a theorem of arithmetic (+ comp). Of course, today, we don't know how much the standard model is contingent or absolute. String theory diminish a large part of the contingent parts, but introduces complexity in other direction, with panorama of different sorts of physics. All this are open problem in comp. The goal of comp is to provide an explanation of the relation between consciousness/mind and appearance of matter and persistence, and this in some testable way. It is an explanation in the form of the formulation of a problem, or a reduction of a problem into another one. Bruno OK the 'invariant physics' you refer to is a very low-level one, i.e., the ultimate unifying laws. However, let me try to put my point about the substitution level another way to make it clearer. ISTM that it will be sufficient for there to be another region of the multiverse where the observable, everyday physics (things like particle masses etc) are different in order to force us to conclude that the substitution level must be as large as the observer's universe. Why? Because let's say there is an observer in another region of the multiverse whom I wish to duplicate here in *this* region, where the observable laws are different. I get a copy of that observer's memories etc and reproduce them here. Now suddenly that observer has a continuation that experiences the physics of *this* region. But if that was possible, then the physics of both regions would have merged, because observers in both regions would already be able to interfere with one another's measures. SO, in order to prevent such interference of measures and a merging of physics into an average measure, it must be that in order to duplicate an observer in another region, I need to duplicate the observer to such a deep level that the separation into the two regions is as it were enforced by the very definition of that observer. The observer must include the entire computational branch down to the point at which the two physics diverged. I think you are largely right here. There is not even any reason to suppose that there is an 'invariant physics', even at the lowest of levels. If string theory is any guide, then laws such as electromagnetism, gravity, the weak and strong nuclear forces, and so on, depend on the topological windings of the Calabi-Yau manifolds that govern the compactification of the unobserved extra dimensions. Even the number of space-time dimensions might vary between these possibilities. With even slight modifications of the configurations that obtain in our universe, the physics would be very different, and there might well not be any 'invariant laws' at all. So I think you are probably right -- the substitution level must include the whole of the level I multiverse (the multiverse over which the same laws as we observe obtain). This, at least, will give a block universe from which sensible space and time parameters could be extracted. But how this is related to the comp summation over multiple instances of an individual's conscious moments escapes me completely. Bruce -- 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/d/optout.
Re: What does the MGA accomplish?
On Saturday, May 9, 2015 at 8:24:51 AM UTC+10, Russell Standish wrote: On Fri, May 08, 2015 at 08:47:22AM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: It is only a new recent fashion on this list to take seriously that a recording can be conscious, because for a logician, that error is the (common) confusion between the finger and the moon, or between 2+2=4 and 2+2=4. It is only recently that we began seriously discussing the MGA at all (about the last 3 years). Why do you say conscious recording (playbacks) are the same as the confusion between 2+2=4 and 2+2=4? I don't even know what you mean by confusion between the finger and the moon... I don't know where that originally comes from, but most trippers know it! :) The finger that points to the moon is not the moon itself. The representation is not the thing. Cheers -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpc...@hpcoders.com.au javascript: 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/d/optout.
Re: The scope of physical law and its relationship to the substitution level
On 25 May 2015, at 13:53, Pierz wrote: On Monday, May 25, 2015 at 4:10:37 AM UTC+10, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 23 May 2015, at 12:36, LizR wrote: I'm not sure why comp would predict that physical laws are invariant for all observers I can see that it would lead to a sort of super-anthropic-selection effect, but surely all possible observers should exist somewhere in arithmetic, including ones who observe different physics (that is compatible with their existence) ? Those with different physics will have measure zero. Why? Because the laws of physics must be given by the sum on all computations below the substitution level, whatever any universal machine state can be in. Only geography will need the anthropic element, the physics needs only a mathematical statistics on all computation, going in actual state which are any state. Physics become a theorem of machine theology, itself a theorem of arithmetic (+ comp). Of course, today, we don't know how much the standard model is contingent or absolute. String theory diminish a large part of the contingent parts, but introduces complexity in other direction, with panorama of different sorts of physics. All this are open problem in comp. The goal of comp is to provide an explanation of the relation between consciousness/mind and appearance of matter and persistence, and this in some testable way. It is an explanation in the form of the formulation of a problem, or a reduction of a problem into another one. Bruno OK the 'invariant physics' you refer to is a very low-level one, i.e., the ultimate unifying laws. However, let me try to put my point about the substitution level another way to make it clearer. ISTM that it will be sufficient for there to be another region of the multiverse where the observable, everyday physics (things like particle masses etc) are different in order to force us to conclude that the substitution level must be as large as the observer's universe. Why? Because let's say there is an observer in another region of the multiverse whom I wish to duplicate here in *this* region, where the observable laws are different. I get a copy of that observer's memories etc and reproduce them here. Now suddenly that observer has a continuation that experiences the physics of *this* region. But if that was possible, then the physics of both regions would have merged, Not necessarily. It might be that we need to emulate locally, perhaps with a quantum computer, his own physical laws, and that we interface it properly, which should be possible, given comp is suppose to apply to him. because observers in both regions would already be able to interfere with one another's measures. Not necessarily, because the two region might have undergo deep long histories, and the linear multiplication would need white rabbit type of event for having the interference. SO, in order to prevent such interference of measures and a merging of physics into an average measure, it must be that in order to duplicate an observer in another region, I need to duplicate the observer to such a deep level that the separation into the two regions is as it were enforced by the very definition of that observer. The observer must include the entire computational branch down to the point at which the two physics diverged. I am not convinced. Interference needs very similar experience, or amnesia, but in this case, the other region might have a physics which can't interfere with us, because they have separated a long time ago, and are too much different. I use the trivia that above the substitution level we are Turing emulable. I might miss your point, also. The idea of inviting someone obeying to different physical laws here is not so easy to imagine. Comp would allow something like that, but only by simulating well enough the different physical laws locally. Bruno On 23 May 2015 at 21:23, Pierz pie...@gmail.com wrote: Some time ago on this list I had a fascinating exchange with Bruno that has stayed with me, fuelling some attacks of 4am philosophical insomnia - an affliction I imagine I'm not the only person on this list to suffer from! If you try to nail Bruno down on some aspects of his theory, he has a tendency to get all Sg Grz* and p[]p on you at a certain point, making it difficult to progress without a PhD in modal logic - despite the fact that I suspect that the ideas are fundamentally simple. Nevertheless in the course of the discussion, Bruno did acknowledge that his theory predicts that the laws of physics are invariant across space and time, because they are supposed to arise out of pure arithmetic (being the hypostases of the FPI bla blas). Indeed, for the dissolution of the material within the arithmetical to go through (logically), then the regularities that we call physical law cannot depend on
Re: What does the MGA accomplish?
On 25 May 2015, at 08:58, Bruce Kellett wrote: Bruno Marchal wrote: On 18 May 2015, at 02:31, Bruce Kellett wrote: LizR wrote: On 17 May 2015 at 11:44, Bruce Kellett bhkell...@optusnet.com.au I can see that computationalism might well have difficulties accommodating a gradual evolutionary understanding of almost anything -- after all, the dovetailer is there in Platonia before anything physical ever appears. So how can consciousness evolve gradually? This is the tired old misunderstanding of the concept of a block universe. It's as though Minkowski never existed. OK. Explain to me exactly how the block universe ideas work out in Platonia. I thought I saw an answer by Liz, but don't find it. No, Liz only snipes from the sidelines.she does not answer substantive questions. I am not sure that the block physical universe ideas work out in Platonia, although block physical multiverse appearance might be explainable by the rather canonical all computations, which is offered once we agree that 2+2 = 4, or any theorem of RA, is true independently of him/her/it. The block multiverse could well be a different concept from the block universe of the Minkowskian understanding of special relativity. The question arose in a discussion of the possibility of an evolutionary understanding of consciousness. This does not, on the face of it, appear to sit terribly easily in comp, since comp starts from the individual conscious moment or moments, and seeks to understand physics as somehow emergent from the statistics of all such instantiations of this set of computations in the UD. Comp just assumes the invariance of consciousness or first person experience for some digital substitution. It is an assumption of non magic, or non actual infinities playing some role and it is the default assumption of many materialist. Then UDA is an argument showing that this leads to the necessity of deriving physics from the math of the machine's dreams and their theoretical computer science important redundancies. Then a theory of consciousness is suggested, as the first person view of consistency, as it will corroborate both the comp discourse of the machine, and some common conscious experience (if you agree it is undoubtable, unjustifiable, unexpressible in 3p discourses, etc.). This does not appear to relate easily to an account of times before and after the existence of that particular consciousness. UDA explains the problem, and AUDA, which is UDA made so simple and elementary that we can explain it to any (Löbian) universal machine, and indeed, it is the machine's answer that I give. Part of my problem is that the UD does not execute any actual program sequentially: after each step in a program it executes the next step of the next program and so on, until it reaches the first step of some program, at which point it loops back to the start. The UD does execute sequentially *each* specific program, but the UD adds delays, due to its dovetailing duties, which we already know (step 2) that it does not change the first person experience of the entiuty supported by that execution. So if the conscious moment is evinced by a logical sequence of steps by the dovetailer, it does not correspond to any particular program, but a rather arbitrary assortment of steps from many programs. ? Each execution of the programs is well individuated in the UD*. You can descrbied them by sequences phi_i^k(j) k = 0, 1, 2, ...(with i and j fixed). Of course, given that all programs are executed, this sequence of steps does correspond to some program, somewhere, but not necessarily any of the ones partially executed for generating that conscious moment. Yes. So what? There is also a question as to whether this sequence of computational steps generates one conscious moment To be sure, I do not believe in one conscious moment. I believe that a person can be conscious of moment. But the consciousness of a moment is not associated with a moment, but with an infinity of instantiation of some relative computational state in (sigma_1) arithmetic. -- of some shorter or longer duration (duration being in experienced time, since the computations are timeless) -- or whether a whole conscious life is generated by a continuous sequence of steps, or whether the whole history of the world that contains that consciousness (and all other conscious beings, past, present, and future) are generated by the same (extraordinarily long) continuous sequence of computational steps. Good, you begin to see the problem. If the idea is something along the lines of the latter possibility, then the block universe might well be the result. The problem then, of course, is that any particular consciousness will be generated an indefinitely great number of separate times for each
Re: The scope of physical law and its relationship to the substitution level
On 25 May 2015, at 03:27, meekerdb wrote: On 5/24/2015 5:05 AM, Pierz wrote: On Sunday, May 24, 2015 at 4:02:42 PM UTC+10, Brent wrote: On 5/23/2015 9:58 PM, Pierz wrote: On Saturday, May 23, 2015 at 8:36:40 PM UTC+10, Liz R wrote: I'm not sure why comp would predict that physical laws are invariant for all observers. I can see that it would lead to a sort of super-anthropic-selection effect, but surely all possible observers should exist somewhere in arithmetic, including ones who observe different physics (that is compatible with their existence) ? I really must dig up the old thread! But I'm not saying comp does entail invariant physics for all observers, just that if there are different physics, the substitution level must be very low indeed. Think of the original scenario in the UDA: a person in Washington is suddenly annihilated, and then duplicated in Helsinki and Moscow (or whatever). That operation creates a 50% probability of finding oneself in Helsinki or Moscow. But the ultimate point of the UDA is that one's actual probability of finding oneself in Helsinki or Washington depends on the total measure of all virtual environments within which that observer is instantiated in an environment that looks like one of those cities. One can't isolate a particular virtual system from the trace of the UD. So you can't create an arbitrary physics in an environment that looks like either city (or anywhere). Well you can, but any observer will always find their own physics to be the measure of *all* their continuations in arithmetic. So there can't be an environment that is like Helsinki or Moscow at some point but that has different physical laws. Carry this logic over to the scenario of a person standing in an empty room - the physics the person experiences will be the measure of all such identical persons standing in empty rooms. Experiencing physics I think needs some explication. If experiencing only refers to consciously thinking propositions, then one may not be experiencing much physics: the world seems 3D with colors, there's a mild temperature, air smells OK,... One doesn't directly, consciously experience the 2nd law, or the Born rule. The laws of physics are human inventions to describe and predict events. They're not out there in Nature; which is why we have to revise them from time to time as we find more comprehensive, more accurate laws. OK, but it doesn't seem relevant to the argument. We experience a world predictable and stable in certain ways that, now we're so sophisticated, we formalise into the science of physics. Bruno's claim is that these regularities are not intrinsic properties of some primary stuff, but emergent from the computational properties of observers - namely how often various continuations of those observers crop up relatively to one another in the abstract space of all possible continuations. I'm trying to make an admittedly difficult point about whether or not observers in different places can experience different physics within this paradigm, and if so, how that relates to substitution level. If you're worried about people experiencing physics let's just concentrate on observers who go to the trouble of doing physics experiments. It really doesn't matter. My point was that most people's conscious experience most of the time could be accommodated within a large range of physics. For example Newtonian physics seems intuitive while quantum mechanics isn't; but we think QM is the better theory. But Bruno claims that his theory implies QM and not Newtonian mechanics. So if people consciously experienced a Newtonian universe (which they once thought they did) would that falsify comp or would it just imply that the UD can instantiate Newtonian universes. Which it can't. So, a Newtonian universe would have refute comp, and indeed even locality as the Newtonian universe is not local. But of course, a computationalist could say, that the newtonian character is illusory, and that by looking closer we will discover ... something like QM. Without Everett, I am not sure I would dare to defend the plausibility of the comp's consequences, especially with the quantum logic provided by the Theaetetus' definitions. Booleanity is not recovered in any points of view, but truth and proofs. All the material and psychological hypostases are non boolean. Bruno Brent The question here is what constitutes the observer? How detailed would a simulation of me have to be before it became a subjective duplicate of me, its continuations my continuations? If there is a person A somewhere in the UD who is experiencing an empty room with physics A, and another identically configured person B somewhere else experiencing physics B, what is stopping the continuations of A mixing with the continuations
Re: The scope of physical law and its relationship to the substitution level
On 24 May 2015, at 11:12, LizR wrote: The stability of natural laws is also the simplest situation, I think? (Isn't there something in Russell's TON about this?) Natural laws remain stable due to symmetry principles, which are simpler than anything asymmetric (although physics contains some asymmetries, of course, like matter vs antimatter). But simplicity is not by itself something which will multiply you enough. Simplicity is not enough. Then RA can be said to be simple but is of course quite non symmetrical. (We could take more symmetrical ontology, but again, I prefer to start from something not related to physics). I'm not sure about this person in an empty room - surely they experience all sorts of phenomena that can ultimately be traced to the laws of physics? An obvious one is the pull of gravity (or lack thereof). But I have to admit I can't see how one gets from the UDA to physics. The notion that physics falls out of all the computations passing through a specific observer moment seems approximately as difficult to explain as how physics operates if one assumes primary materialism - but of course physics based on primary materialism comes with the benefit that for 100s of years, people have believed the ontology to be correct, and they have slowly built up a body of knowledge on that basis. Hence comp finds itself doubly disadvantaged in that no one has worked out how it might work in practice, and also in that most people react with an argument from incredulity because they've been taught that physics is based on primary materialism. The point is that primary materialism, to operate, as to introduce a brain-mind 3p-1p identity thesis which is not sustainable when we assume comp. Then the difference is almost between the difference between ONE computation does this, and an infinity of computations of measure one does this. Except that when we do the math, we inherit the intensional variants of the G*/G distinction between truth and rational justififiability, which enrich the psycho and theo - logical part of the picture, usually ignored or denied. This is a bit like the situation with cars that run on something other than petrol, or subcritical nuclear reactors. No one has put in a century of research to work out how (say) alcohol driven cars might work, or 50 years of research on how thorium reactors might work. Or 300 years of thinking on how reality might be derived from computations. Well the first three hundred cars run on hemp, and were made of hemp, and people already asked at that time why using non renewable resource when renewable one where disposable? As long as prohibition continue, as long as the prohibitionist are not put in jail, politics does not exist. Bruno -- 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/d/optout. 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/d/optout.
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On Monday, May 25, 2015, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 5/24/2015 4:27 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On 25 May 2015 at 07:51, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 5/24/2015 11:28 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: In a virtual environment, destroying the body destroys the consciousness, but both are actually due to the underlying computations. How can those thumped know it's virtual. A virtual environment with virtual people doing virtual actions seems to make virtual virtually meaningless. The people won't necessarily know, but they could know, as it could be revealed by the programmers or deduced from some programming glitch (as in the film The Thirteenth Floor). But I don't think it makes a difference if they know or not. The answer to the obvious objection that if you destroy the brain you destroy consciousness, so consciousness can't reside in Platonia, is that both the brain and consciousness could reside in Platonia. Where ever they reside though you have to explain how damaging the brain changes consciousness. And if you can explain this relation in Platonia why won't the same relation exist in Physicalia. It could happen in both, but it is not evidence against a simulated reality to say that consciousness seems to be dependent on the apparently physical brain. -- 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/d/optout.
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On 25 May 2015, at 02:06, Jason Resch wrote: On Sun, May 24, 2015 at 3:52 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 23 May 2015, at 17:07, Jason Resch wrote: On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 12:44 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 19 May 2015, at 15:53, Jason Resch wrote: On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 12:06 AM, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: On 19 May 2015 at 14:45, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, May 18, 2015 at 9:21 PM, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: On 19 May 2015 at 11:02, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: I think you're not taking into account the level of the functional substitution. Of course functionally equivalent silicon and functionally equivalent neurons can (under functionalism) both instantiate the same consciousness. But a calculator computing 2+3 cannot substitute for a human brain computing 2+3 and produce the same consciousness. In a gradual replacement the substitution must obviously be at a level sufficient to maintain the function of the whole brain. Sticking a calculator in it won't work. Do you think a Blockhead that was functionally equivalent to you (it could fool all your friends and family in a Turing test scenario into thinking it was intact you) would be conscious in the same way as you? Not necessarily, just as an actor may not be conscious in the same way as me. But I suspect the Blockhead would be conscious; the intuition that a lookup table can't be conscious is like the intuition that an electric circuit can't be conscious. I don't see an equivalency between those intuitions. A lookup table has a bounded and very low degree of computational complexity: all answers to all queries are answered in constant time. While the table itself may have an arbitrarily high information content, what in the software of the lookup table program is there to appreciate/understand/know that information? Understanding emerges from the fact that the lookup table is immensely large. It could be wrong, but I don't think it is obviously less plausible than understanding emerging from a Turing machine made of tin cans. The lookup table is intelligent or at least offers the appearance of intelligence, but it makes the maximum possible advantage of the space-time trade off: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space– time_tradeoff The tin-can Turing machine is unbounded in its potential computational complexity, there's no reason to be a bio- or silico- chauvinist against it. However, by definition, a lookup table has near zero computational complexity, no retained state. But it is counterfactually correct on a large range spectrum. Of course, it has to be infinite to be genuinely counterfactual-correct. But the structure of the counterfactuals is identical regardless of the inputs and outputs in its lookup table. If you replaced all of its outputs with random strings, would that change its consciousness? What if there existed a special decoding book, which was a one-time-pad that could decode its random answers? Would the existence of this book make it more conscious than if this book did not exist? If there is zero information content in the outputs returned by the lookup table it might as well return all X characters as its response to any query, but then would any program that just returns a string of X's be conscious? A lookup table might have some primitive conscious, but I think any consciousness it has would be more or less the same regardless of the number of entries within that lookup table. With more entries, its information content grows, but it's capacity to process, interpret, or understand that information remains constant. You can emulate the brain of Einstein with a (ridiculously large) look-up table, assuming you are ridiculously patient---or we slow down your own brain so that you are as slow as einstein. Is that incarnation a zombie? Again, with comp, all incarnations are zombie, because bodies do not think. It is the abstract person which thinks, and in this case Einstein will still be defined by the simplest normal computations, which here, and only here, have taken the form of that unplausible giant Einstein look-up table emulation at the right level. That last bit is the part I have difficulty with. How can a a single call to a lookup table ever be at the right level. Actually, the Turing machine formalism is a type of look-up table: if you are scanning input i (big numbers describing all your current sensitive entries, while you are in state q_169757243685173427379910054234647572376400064994542424646334345787910190034 676754100687. (big number describing one of your many possible mental state, then change the state into q_888..99 and look what next. By construction that system behaves self-referentially correctly, so it
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia errata
Brent: would you include in your 'nomologics' all that stuff beyond our present knowledge as well? Same with causal, but in reverse. Probabilities depend on the borders we observe: change them and the results change as well. The same as statistical, with added functionality. Sorry for my haphazardous formulation - I could have done better. John Mikes On Sat, May 23, 2015 at 3:07 AM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: OOPS. I meant ...randomly means NOT in accordance... On 5/22/2015 11:15 PM, meekerdb wrote: And note that in this context randomly means in accordance with nomologically determined causal probabilities. It doesn't necessarily mean deterministically. 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/d/optout. -- 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/d/optout.
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On 24 May 2015, at 23:51, meekerdb wrote: On 5/24/2015 11:28 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On Monday, May 25, 2015, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 5/24/2015 1:52 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: Again, with comp, all incarnations are zombie, because bodies do not think. It is the abstract person which thinks But a few thumps on the body and the abstract person won't think either. So far as we have observered *only* bodies think. If comp implies the contrary isn't that so much the worse for comp. In a virtual environment, destroying the body destroys the consciousness, but both are actually due to the underlying computations. How can those thumped know it's virtual. A virtual environment with virtual people doing virtual actions seems to make virtual virtually meaningless. It is the difference between life and second life. Reality, and relative dreams. 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/d/optout. 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/d/optout.
What do you need to create a universe?
Suppose I wanted to create a new universe in my lab. What would I need to get started? The question may seem absurd. After all, the universe is enormous. It is billions of years old and, as far as we know, it contains all that ever existed and ever will exist. Still it appears that all this—including space, time, energy and matter—came into being with the Big Bang. If so, everything we know was created out of nothing. Or was it really? If it is possible to create a universe from nothing—except perhaps from some rules like in a computer program—what is to stop us from doing exactly that some time in the future? -- 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/d/optout.
Re: Physicists Are Philosophers, Too
Dear Samiya, I do not want to put you on the spot, indeed. Thank you for a decent and comprehensive reply. What I referred to as #1, #17 and #18 were references to YOUR post (as your 'numbered' verses from the Q'uran). I do not believe such discussion may ever result in a reasonable conclusion. Thanks for your patience John M On Sun, May 24, 2015 at 12:13 AM, Samiya Illias samiyaill...@gmail.com wrote: John M, I'm not sure I understand your questions. Can you kindly quote #1, #17 #18 so that I can try to respond to it? By the way, this thread started with a discussion about global warming, and I shared a news from European Space Agency regarding Glacial Melt in Antarctica. Is that an authentic news source? I later mentioned that I came across this research while trying to comprehend the verse from the Quran foretelling the eventual and inevitable heating of the seas and only shared the link to my blog. Liz asked a question, hence I responded. Bruno opined and quoted the Quran, and I responded. Nobody is required to believe. If you find the verses of the Quran stating truths, it's up to you to choose whether to accept or to reject it. If the scriptures are divine guidance and there is a Judgement in the Hereafter, then it's to our own personal benefit or loss whether we choose to believe or to reject. According to the Quran, God is not affected by our choice! The guidance is only there for whoever wishes to help themselves and strive for a better future by taking this temporal exam / role / aptitude test seriously. Why this temporal exam / role / aptitude test, I've already quoted the verses which state that humans chose to bear the Trust and therefore the need to be judged whether we qualify to inherit the everlasting Earth with Gardens, or cannot be trusted with it's well-being. To my mind, human actions (individual and collective), as well as inaction, which have contributed to global warming and the general state of the Earth are quite pertinent to our eligibility to inherit the permanent residence of the Hereafter. How many of us can be really trusted with something so precious and so permanent? Samiya On 23-May-2015, at 4:44 pm, John Mikes jami...@gmail.com wrote: Samiya, so far I kept out from the 'opposition' and tried to comply within my own agnosticism. Now I get tired of all that fairitale-discussion and ask some questions. LizR asked: *'Does God give any suggestions as to what we should do? * I start earlier:* Does God give any suggestions why we should accept it's(?!) existence?* You assign from the Q'uran the Creation. Easy cop-out. If an infinite wisdom created a world, why should it be so imperfect together with all its inhabitants - requiring constant improvement measures? *(...the One who created, knows and is in perfect control of everything to the minutest detail, and is therefore able to carry out His Will and keep His Promise,...) * There is a fundamental illogical factor (for human minds) in the mentioned quotes: Your #1 is questionable with the everlasting punishment upon a minuscule timeframe activity with negligible wisdom - sometimes not even having the 'means' to know, as e.g. handicapped/birthdefected etc. with death in childhood vs old rich imams. The latter maybe in the 'wrong faith(?) as Shiites(?), etc. Your #17 is a supposition without underlying support - includes also a threat. In your #18 you flatly deny the opposing opinion without support. In the entire position the Q'uran-based faith is postulated and required without support to the human mind. It is supported by threats - AND violence by terrorist groups in favor (practice?) of such threats. That is not the way to gain true believers - IMHO. Is there something better you could advise? John M On Sat, May 23, 2015 at 8:19 AM, Samiya Illias samiyaill...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, May 13, 2015 at 2:23 AM, Samiya Illias samiyaill...@gmail.com wrote: On 12-May-2015, at 9:39 pm, LizR lizj...@gmail.com wrote: On 13 May 2015 at 14:29, Samiya Illias samiyaill...@gmail.com wrote: 1) The Quran reminds us that humans have been made Incharge of Earth and hence are responsible for the welfare of the Earth and all in it Liz, you had asked: 'Does God give any suggestions as to what we should do? ' While reading the Quran this morning, I realized that I had failed to mention an important message: that we should not transgress the balance, and compassionately establish justice so that the delicate ecosystem is not thrown out of balance: [Al-Qur'an Chapter 55:1, 7-9, Translator: Sahih International] 1 The Most Merciful 7 And the heaven He raised and imposed the balance 8 That you not transgress within the balance. 9 And establish weight in justice and do not make deficient the balance. http://quran.com/55 [Al-Qur'an Chapter 42:17-18, Translator: Sahih International] 17 It is Allah who has sent down the Book in truth and
Re: What do you need to create a universe?
Run a computer simulation that contains a conscious observer and you have created reality. In another sense, however, all universes already exist and so you aren't creating anything, only forging a connection to another universe that's out there. Jason On 5/25/15, spudboy100 via Everything List everything-list@googlegroups.com wrote: Eric Steinhart believes like Dawkins does that it is evolution. That the simplest starter universe, with something like Conway's Life, can produce through a mathematical cascade effect, newer and eventually more complex universes. I guess I am dumb enough to look at a prime programmer analyst, coming up with an enormous program, but that is me, not Steinhart or Dawkins. Other speculations suggested slamming massive amounts of matter together, and the backlash would produce a big bang. Others have suggested compressing a black hole (astronomical) and viola, a b-b. Others still claim that if you can get a BH to spin fast enough, or have exotic matter you can open up or deflower, a BH by widening its' access valve, leaving universe to universe trade and communication. -Original Message- From: Frederik Goplen frederikgop...@gmail.com To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Mon, May 25, 2015 3:35 pm Subject: What do you need to create a universe? Suppose I wanted to create a new universe in my lab. What would I need to get started? The question may seem absurd. After all, the universe is enormous. It is billions of years old and, as far as we know, it contains all that ever existed and ever will exist. Still it appears that all this—including space, time, energy and matter—came into being with the Big Bang. If so, everything we know was created out of nothing. Or was it really? If it is possible to create a universe from nothing—except perhaps from some rules like in a computer program—what is to stop us from doing exactly that some time in the future? -- 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/d/optout. -- 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/d/optout. -- 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/d/optout.
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On 5/25/2015 5:16 AM, Pierz wrote: On Monday, May 25, 2015 at 4:58:53 AM UTC+10, Brent wrote: On 5/24/2015 4:09 AM, Pierz wrote: On Sunday, May 24, 2015 at 4:47:12 PM UTC+10, Jason wrote: On Sun, May 24, 2015 at 12:40 AM, Pierz pie...@gmail.com wrote: On Sunday, May 24, 2015 at 1:07:15 AM UTC+10, Jason wrote: On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 12:44 PM, Bruno Marchal mar...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 19 May 2015, at 15:53, Jason Resch wrote: On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 12:06 AM, Stathis Papaioannou stat...@gmail.com wrote: On 19 May 2015 at 14:45, Jason Resch jason...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, May 18, 2015 at 9:21 PM, Stathis Papaioannou stat...@gmail.com wrote: On 19 May 2015 at 11:02, Jason Resch jason...@gmail.com wrote: I think you're not taking into account the level of the functional substitution. Of course functionally equivalent silicon and functionally equivalent neurons can (under functionalism) both instantiate the same consciousness. But a calculator computing 2+3 cannot substitute for a human brain computing 2+3 and produce the same consciousness. In a gradual replacement the substitution must obviously be at a level sufficient to maintain the function of the whole brain. Sticking a calculator in it won't work. Do you think a Blockhead that was functionally equivalent to you (it could fool all your friends and family in a Turing test scenario into thinking it was intact you) would be conscious in the same way as you? Not necessarily, just as an actor may not be conscious in the same way as me. But I suspect the Blockhead would be conscious; the intuition that a lookup table can't be conscious is like the intuition that an electric circuit can't be conscious. I don't see an equivalency between those intuitions. A lookup table has a bounded and very low degree of computational complexity: all answers to all queries are answered in constant time. While the table itself may have an arbitrarily high information content, what in the software of the lookup table program is there to appreciate/understand/know that information? Understanding emerges from the fact that the lookup table is immensely large. It could be wrong, but I don't think it is obviously less plausible than understanding emerging from a Turing machine made of tin cans. The lookup table is intelligent or at least offers the appearance of intelligence, but it makes the maximum possible advantage of the space-time trade off: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space–time_tradeoff http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space%E2%80%93time_tradeoff The tin-can Turing machine is unbounded in its potential computational complexity, there's no reason to be a bio- or silico-chauvinist against it. However, by definition, a lookup table has near zero computational complexity, no retained state. But it is counterfactually correct on a large range spectrum. Of course, it has to be infinite to be genuinely counterfactual-correct. But the structure of the counterfactuals is identical regardless of the inputs and outputs in its lookup table. If you replaced all of its outputs with random strings, would that
Re: The Weakness of Panpsychism?
WAtch out, Liz! you are getting close to ask about PRIME NUMBERS, what
may mean a totally different trap!
John M
On Mon, Mar 16, 2015 at 6:33 PM, LizR lizj...@gmail.com wrote:
My apologies obviously you did mean finite.
This is very interesting although probably too much for my brain at the
moment.
What is all the stuff about S(S(0)) and {}, {{}}, etc? Doesn't that define
finite numbers?
On 17 March 2015 at 05:39, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote:
On 15 Mar 2015, at 21:29, meekerdb wrote:
On 3/15/2015 10:03 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
We cannot define the notion of finite number
This will make it very difficult to interpret the output of your computer.
I guess you are joking.
In case you are serious, you really should study a good book on logic.
Machines can handle many things that they cannot define.
To make my statement more precise, it means that we cannot build a theory
having all natural numbers and only the natural numbers as model, by using
first order logic. In fact no theory of any finite things can be formalized
in first order logic. There is no first order axiomatization of finite
group theory, of finite field, etc. There are good theories, even first
order theories, but they have infinite models.
We can formalized finiteness in ... second order logic. But this is a
treachery because this use the notion of finiteness (in explicit or
implicit way).
That is the root of the failure of logicism. Not only we have to assume
the natural numbers and they additive and multiplicative structure, (if we
want use them), but we can't interpret them categorically or univocally. It
is a strange world where it can be consistent for a machine to be
inconsistent.
What I really meant was: we cannot define the notion of number without
using the notion of finite number.
You might try, as a game to define natural number without using the
notion, like if explaining them to someone who does not grasp them at all
(if you can imagine that).
You might say I is a number, and: if x is a number, then Ix is a number.
The difficulty is in avoiding the person believe that I... become a
number, with a variety of meaning for ...
Bruno
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/d/optout.
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/d/optout.
--
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/d/optout.
--
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/d/optout.
Re: The scope of physical law and its relationship to the substitution level
On Sat, May 23, 2015 , Pierz pier...@gmail.com wrote: Bruno *did* acknowledge that his theory predicts that the laws of physics are invariant across space and time, because they are supposed to arise out of pure arithmetic We know from pure mathematics (by way of Noether's theorem discovered in 1915) that if the fundamental laws of physics do not change with time then the conservation of mass/energy must exist. And Noether also tells us that if the fundamental laws of physics do not change from one place to another then the law of conservation of momentum must exist. By the way, I don't think Emmy Noether received the credit she deserved for this enormously important discovery. So on the face of it, the recent measurements of the mass of the Higgs boson, which are strongly suggestive of a multiverse I don't think the discovery of the Higgs boson has much to say about the existence or nonexistence of the multiverse one way or the other. On the other hand the discovery of primordial gravitational waves would be pretty good evidence of the existence of the multiverse but nobody has ever detected them, everybody thought we had about a year ago but that turned out to be a false alarm. Maybe next year. might be seen as empirical evidence against 'comp'. Of that I have no opinion because nobody knows what comp means, least of all 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/d/optout.
Re: What do you need to create a universe?
Eric Steinhart believes like Dawkins does that it is evolution. That the simplest starter universe, with something like Conway's Life, can produce through a mathematical cascade effect, newer and eventually more complex universes. I guess I am dumb enough to look at a prime programmer analyst, coming up with an enormous program, but that is me, not Steinhart or Dawkins. Other speculations suggested slamming massive amounts of matter together, and the backlash would produce a big bang. Others have suggested compressing a black hole (astronomical) and viola, a b-b. Others still claim that if you can get a BH to spin fast enough, or have exotic matter you can open up or deflower, a BH by widening its' access valve, leaving universe to universe trade and communication. -Original Message- From: Frederik Goplen frederikgop...@gmail.com To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Mon, May 25, 2015 3:35 pm Subject: What do you need to create a universe? Suppose I wanted to create a new universe in my lab. What would I need to get started? The question may seem absurd. After all, the universe is enormous. It is billions of years old and, as far as we know, it contains all that ever existed and ever will exist. Still it appears that all this—including space, time, energy and matter—came into being with the Big Bang. If so, everything we know was created out of nothing. Or was it really? If it is possible to create a universe from nothing—except perhaps from some rules like in a computer program—what is to stop us from doing exactly that some time in the future? -- 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/d/optout. -- 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/d/optout.
Re: What do you need to create a universe?
What about such universes or subregions,domains, that sadly, lack a conscious observer? What creates or sends the observer, perhaps a jobs agency? Observer needed to alter empty spacetime region. Must be experienced in science, history, and philosophy, and mathematics. Willing to take on a trainee. -Original Message- From: Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Mon, May 25, 2015 4:41 pm Subject: Re: What do you need to create a universe? Run a computer simulation that contains a conscious observer and you have created reality. In another sense, however, all universes already exist and so you aren't creating anything, only forging a connection to another universe that's out there. Jason On 5/25/15, spudboy100 via Everything List everything-list@googlegroups.com wrote: Eric Steinhart believes like Dawkins does that it is evolution. That the simplest starter universe, with something like Conway's Life, can produce through a mathematical cascade effect, newer and eventually more complex universes. I guess I am dumb enough to look at a prime programmer analyst, coming up with an enormous program, but that is me, not Steinhart or Dawkins. Other speculations suggested slamming massive amounts of matter together, and the backlash would produce a big bang. Others have suggested compressing a black hole (astronomical) and viola, a b-b. Others still claim that if you can get a BH to spin fast enough, or have exotic matter you can open up or deflower, a BH by widening its' access valve, leaving universe to universe trade and communication. -Original Message- From: Frederik Goplen frederikgop...@gmail.com To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Mon, May 25, 2015 3:35 pm Subject: What do you need to create a universe? Suppose I wanted to create a new universe in my lab. What would I need to get started? The question may seem absurd. After all, the universe is enormous. It is billions of years old and, as far as we know, it contains all that ever existed and ever will exist. Still it appears that all this—including space, time, energy and matter—came into being with the Big Bang. If so, everything we know was created out of nothing. Or was it really? If it is possible to create a universe from nothing—except perhaps from some rules like in a computer program—what is to stop us from doing exactly that some time in the future? -- 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/d/optout. -- 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/d/optout. -- 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/d/optout. -- 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/d/optout.
Re: What do you need to create a universe?
I would say a novel may help make a blueprint, a direction, a precis, but not a cosmos itself. Once upon a time.. -Original Message- From: LizR lizj...@gmail.com To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Mon, May 25, 2015 6:44 pm Subject: Re: What do you need to create a universe? Writing a novel is one way. On 26 May 2015 at 09:13, spudboy100 via Everything List everything-list@googlegroups.com wrote: What about such universes or subregions,domains, that sadly, lack a conscious observer? What creates or sends the observer, perhaps a jobs agency? Observer needed to alter empty spacetime region. Must be experienced in science, history, and philosophy, and mathematics. Willing to take on a trainee. -Original Message- From: Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Mon, May 25, 2015 4:41 pm Subject: Re: What do you need to create a universe? Run a computer simulation that contains a conscious observer and you have created reality. In another sense, however, all universes already exist and so you aren't creating anything, only forging a connection to another universe that's out there. Jason On 5/25/15, spudboy100 via Everything List everything-list@googlegroups.com wrote: Eric Steinhart believes like Dawkins does that it is evolution. That the simplest starter universe, with something like Conway's Life, can produce through a mathematical cascade effect, newer and eventually more complex universes. I guess I am dumb enough to look at a prime programmer analyst, coming up with an enormous program, but that is me, not Steinhart or Dawkins. Other speculations suggested slamming massive amounts of matter together, and the backlash would produce a big bang. Others have suggested compressing a black hole (astronomical) and viola, a b-b. Others still claim that if you can get a BH to spin fast enough, or have exotic matter you can open up or deflower, a BH by widening its' access valve, leaving universe to universe trade and communication. -Original Message- From: Frederik Goplen frederikgop...@gmail.com To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Mon, May 25, 2015 3:35 pm Subject: What do you need to create a universe? Suppose I wanted to create a new universe in my lab. What would I need to get started? The question may seem absurd. After all, the universe is enormous. It is billions of years old and, as far as we know, it contains all that ever existed and ever will exist. Still it appears that all this—including space, time, energy and matter—came into being with the Big Bang. If so, everything we know was created out of nothing. Or was it really? If it is possible to create a universe from nothing—except perhaps from some rules like in a computer program—what is to stop us from doing exactly that some time in the future? -- 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/d/optout. -- 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/d/optout. -- 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/d/optout. -- 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/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to
Re: The scope of physical law and its relationship to the substitution level
On 5/25/2015 9:56 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 24 May 2015, at 11:12, LizR wrote: The stability of natural laws is also the simplest situation, I think? (Isn't there something in Russell's TON about this?) Natural laws remain stable due to symmetry principles, which are simpler than anything asymmetric (although physics contains some asymmetries, of course, like matter vs antimatter). But simplicity is not by itself something which will multiply you enough. Simplicity is not enough. Then RA can be said to be simple but is of course quite non symmetrical. (We could take more symmetrical ontology, but again, I prefer to start from something not related to physics). I'm not sure about this person in an empty room - surely they experience all sorts of phenomena that can ultimately be traced to the laws of physics? An obvious one is the pull of gravity (or lack thereof). But I have to admit I can't see how one gets from the UDA to physics. The notion that physics falls out of all the computations passing through a specific observer moment seems approximately as difficult to explain as how physics operates if one assumes primary materialism - but of course physics based on primary materialism comes with the benefit that for 100s of years, people have believed the ontology to be correct, and they have slowly built up a body of knowledge on that basis. Hence comp finds itself doubly disadvantaged in that no one has worked out how it might work in practice, and also in that most people react with an argument from incredulity because they've been taught that physics is based on primary materialism. The point is that primary materialism, to operate, as to introduce a brain-mind 3p-1p identity thesis which is not sustainable when we assume comp. Then the difference is almost between the difference between ONE computation does this, and an infinity of computations of measure one does this. Except that when we do the math, we inherit the intensional variants of the G*/G distinction between truth and rational justififiability, which enrich the psycho and theo - logical part of the picture, usually ignored or denied. This is a bit like the situation with cars that run on something other than petrol, or subcritical nuclear reactors. No one has put in a century of research to work out how (say) alcohol driven cars might work, or 50 years of research on how thorium reactors might work. Or 300 years of thinking on how reality might be derived from computations. Well the first three hundred cars run on hemp, and were made of hemp, and people already asked at that time why using non renewable resource when renewable one where disposable? ?? I don't think Karl Benz made any part of the first car from hemp and he ran it on alcohol and benzene. Henry Ford, as an experiment, made car with a body of plastic from soy beans, but not hemp. 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/d/optout.
Re: The scope of physical law and its relationship to the substitution level
On 5/25/2015 9:31 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 25 May 2015, at 03:27, meekerdb wrote: On 5/24/2015 5:05 AM, Pierz wrote: On Sunday, May 24, 2015 at 4:02:42 PM UTC+10, Brent wrote: On 5/23/2015 9:58 PM, Pierz wrote: On Saturday, May 23, 2015 at 8:36:40 PM UTC+10, Liz R wrote: I'm not sure why comp would predict that physical laws are invariant for all observers. I can see that it would lead to a sort of super-anthropic-selection effect, but surely all possible observers should exist somewhere in arithmetic, including ones who observe different physics (that is compatible with their existence) ? I really must dig up the old thread! But I'm not saying comp does entail invariant physics for all observers, just that if there are different physics, the substitution level must be very low indeed. Think of the original scenario in the UDA: a person in Washington is suddenly annihilated, and then duplicated in Helsinki and Moscow (or whatever). That operation creates a 50% probability of finding oneself in Helsinki or Moscow. But the ultimate point of the UDA is that one's actual probability of finding oneself in Helsinki or Washington depends on the total measure of /all/ virtual environments within which that observer is instantiated in an environment that looks like one of those cities. One can't isolate a particular virtual system from the trace of the UD. So you can't create an arbitrary physics in an environment that looks like either city (or anywhere). Well you can, but any observer will always find their own physics to be the measure of *all* their continuations in arithmetic. So there can't be an environment that is like Helsinki or Moscow at some point but that has different physical laws. Carry this logic over to the scenario of a person standing in an empty room - the physics the person experiences will be the measure of all such identical persons standing in empty rooms. Experiencing physics I think needs some explication. If experiencing only refers to consciously thinking propositions, then one may not be experiencing much physics: the world seems 3D with colors, there's a mild temperature, air smells OK,... One doesn't directly, consciously experience the 2nd law, or the Born rule. The laws of physics are human inventions to describe and predict events. They're not out there in Nature; which is why we have to revise them from time to time as we find more comprehensive, more accurate laws. OK, but it doesn't seem relevant to the argument. We experience a world predictable and stable in certain ways that, now we're so sophisticated, we formalise into the science of physics. Bruno's claim is that these regularities are not intrinsic properties of some primary stuff, but emergent from the computational properties of observers - namely how often various continuations of those observers crop up relatively to one another in the abstract space of all possible continuations. I'm trying to make an admittedly difficult point about whether or not observers in different places can experience different physics within this paradigm, and if so, how that relates to substitution level. If you're worried about people experiencing physics let's just concentrate on observers who go to the trouble of doing physics experiments. It really doesn't matter. My point was that most people's conscious experience most of the time could be accommodated within a large range of physics. For example Newtonian physics seems intuitive while quantum mechanics isn't; but we think QM is the better theory. But Bruno claims that his theory implies QM and not Newtonian mechanics. So if people consciously experienced a Newtonian universe (which they once thought they did) would that falsify comp or would it just imply that the UD can instantiate Newtonian universes. Which it can't. So, a Newtonian universe would have refute comp, and indeed even locality as the Newtonian universe is not local. But of course, a computationalist could say, that the newtonian character is illusory, and that by looking closer we will discover ... something like QM. So you are claiming that it would be impossible to have a conscious being that experienced a Newtonian universe - that this would produce a logical contradiction? 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/d/optout.
Re: What do you need to create a universe?
Writing a novel is one way. On 26 May 2015 at 09:13, spudboy100 via Everything List everything-list@googlegroups.com wrote: What about such universes or subregions,domains, that sadly, lack a conscious observer? What creates or sends the observer, perhaps a jobs agency? Observer needed to alter empty spacetime region. Must be experienced in science, history, and philosophy, and mathematics. Willing to take on a trainee. -Original Message- From: Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Mon, May 25, 2015 4:41 pm Subject: Re: What do you need to create a universe? Run a computer simulation that contains a conscious observer and you have created reality. In another sense, however, all universes already exist and so you aren't creating anything, only forging a connection to another universe that's out there. Jason On 5/25/15, spudboy100 via Everything List everything-list@googlegroups.com wrote: Eric Steinhart believes like Dawkins does that it is evolution. That the simplest starter universe, with something like Conway's Life, can produce through a mathematical cascade effect, newer and eventually more complex universes. I guess I am dumb enough to look at a prime programmer analyst, coming up with an enormous program, but that is me, not Steinhart or Dawkins. Other speculations suggested slamming massive amounts of matter together, and the backlash would produce a big bang. Others have suggested compressing a black hole (astronomical) and viola, a b-b. Others still claim that if you can get a BH to spin fast enough, or have exotic matter you can open up or deflower, a BH by widening its' access valve, leaving universe to universe trade and communication. -Original Message- From: Frederik Goplen frederikgop...@gmail.com To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Mon, May 25, 2015 3:35 pm Subject: What do you need to create a universe? Suppose I wanted to create a new universe in my lab. What would I need to get started? The question may seem absurd. After all, the universe is enormous. It is billions of years old and, as far as we know, it contains all that ever existed and ever will exist. Still it appears that all this—including space, time, energy and matter—came into being with the Big Bang. If so, everything we know was created out of nothing. Or was it really? If it is possible to create a universe from nothing—except perhaps from some rules like in a computer program—what is to stop us from doing exactly that some time in the future? -- 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/d/optout. -- 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 athttp://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visithttps://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- 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 toeverything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group athttp://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visithttps://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- 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/d/optout. -- 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/d/optout.
Re: What does the MGA accomplish?
Bruno Marchal wrote: On 25 May 2015, at 08:58, Bruce Kellett wrote: Part of my problem is that the UD does not execute any actual program sequentially: after each step in a program it executes the next step of the next program and so on, until it reaches the first step of some program, at which point it loops back to the start. The UD does execute sequentially *each* specific program, but the UD adds delays, due to its dovetailing duties, which we already know (step 2) that it does not change the first person experience of the entiuty supported by that execution. So if the conscious moment is evinced by a logical sequence of steps by the dovetailer, it does not correspond to any particular program, but a rather arbitrary assortment of steps from many programs. ? Each execution of the programs is well individuated in the UD*. You can descrbied them by sequences phi_i^k(j) k = 0, 1, 2, ...(with i and j fixed). But each step of the dovetailer is just a single application of the axioms of the Turing machine in question: one of the Kxy gives x, Sxyz gives xz(yz), for example. These single steps are all that there is in the dovetailer. But such steps lack a context -- they make no sense on their own. You could simply claim that the two basic steps are all that is needed -- consciousness self-assembles by taking as many of these in whatever order is needed. If the next step of program phi_i is some 10^50 or so dovetailer steps away, the only thing that could possibly link these is the program phi_i itself -- the actual execution of the steps is entirely secondary. In which case, one would say that consciousness resides in the program phi_i itself - execution on the dovetailer is not required. I do not think you would want to go down this path, so you need something to give each step a context, something to link the separate steps that are required for consciousness. The teleportation arguments of Steps 1-7 are insufficient for this, since in that argument you are teleporting complete conscious entities, not just single steps of the underlying program. Of course, given that all programs are executed, this sequence of steps does correspond to some program, somewhere, but not necessarily any of the ones partially executed for generating that conscious moment. Yes. So what? I was trying to give you a way out of the problems that I have raised above. If you don't see that the sequential steps of the actual dovetailer program give the required connectivity, then what does? You did, some time ago, claim that the dovetailer steps gave an effective time parameter for the system. But even that requires a contextual link between the steps -- something that would be given by the underlying stepping -- which is not the stepping of each individual program phi_i. Bruce -- 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/d/optout.
Re: What does the MGA accomplish?
meekerdb wrote:
On 5/25/2015 5:54 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote:
Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 25 May 2015, at 08:58, Bruce Kellett wrote:
Part of my problem is that the UD does not execute any actual
program sequentially: after each step in a program it executes the
next step of the next program and so on, until it reaches the first
step of some program, at which point it loops back to the start.
The UD does execute sequentially *each* specific program, but the UD
adds delays, due to its dovetailing duties, which we already know
(step 2) that it does not change the first person experience of the
entiuty supported by that execution.
So if the conscious moment is evinced by a logical sequence of steps
by the dovetailer, it does not correspond to any particular program,
but a rather arbitrary assortment of steps from many programs.
?
Each execution of the programs is well individuated in the UD*. You
can descrbied them by sequences
phi_i^k(j) k = 0, 1, 2, ...(with i and j fixed).
But each step of the dovetailer is just a single application of the
axioms of the Turing machine in question: one of the
Kxy gives x,
Sxyz gives xz(yz),
for example. These single steps are all that there is in the
dovetailer. But such steps lack a context -- they make no sense on
their own. You could simply claim that the two basic steps are all
that is needed -- consciousness self-assembles by taking as many of
these in whatever order is needed.
If the next step of program phi_i is some 10^50 or so dovetailer steps
away, the only thing that could possibly link these is the program
phi_i itself -- the actual execution of the steps is entirely
secondary. In which case, one would say that consciousness resides in
the program phi_i itself - execution on the dovetailer is not
required. I do not think you would want to go down this path, so you
need something to give each step a context, something to link the
separate steps that are required for consciousness.
The teleportation arguments of Steps 1-7 are insufficient for this,
since in that argument you are teleporting complete conscious
entities, not just single steps of the underlying program.
Of course, given that all programs are executed, this sequence of
steps does correspond to some program, somewhere, but not
necessarily any of the ones partially executed for generating that
conscious moment.
Yes. So what?
I was trying to give you a way out of the problems that I have raised
above. If you don't see that the sequential steps of the actual
dovetailer program give the required connectivity, then what does? You
did, some time ago, claim that the dovetailer steps gave an effective
time parameter for the system. But even that requires a contextual
link between the steps -- something that would be given by the
underlying stepping -- which is not the stepping of each individual
program phi_i.
I think what it boils down to is that steps in phi_{i}, where {i} is a
set indexing programs supporting a particular consciousness, must be
linked by representing consciousness of the same thing, the same
thought. But I think that requires some outside reference whereby they
can be about the same thing. So it is not enough to just link the
phi_{i} of the single consciousness, they must also be linked to an
environment. I think this part of what Pierz is saying. He says the
linkage cannot merge different physics, so effectively the thread of
computations instantiating Bruce's consciousness imply the computation
of a whole world (with physics) for Bruce's consciousness to exist in.
My original question here concerned the connectivity in Platonia for the
computational steps of an individual consciousness. But I do agree that
we have to go beyond this because consciousness is conscious of
*something*, viz., an external world, so that has to be part of the
computation -- so that when I hit you hard on the head, your self in
Platonia loses consciousness. There is endless connectivity between the
self and the world external to the self -- and this covers all space and
time, because my consciousness can be changed by a CMB photon. Hence my
thinking that the whole universe (multiverse) may well have to be
included in the same connected simulation in Platonia.
Bruno does not seem to have thought along these lines.
Bruce
--
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/d/optout.
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On 5/25/2015 10:48 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On Monday, May 25, 2015, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 5/24/2015 4:27 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On 25 May 2015 at 07:51, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 5/24/2015 11:28 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: In a virtual environment, destroying the body destroys the consciousness, but both are actually due to the underlying computations. How can those thumped know it's virtual. A virtual environment with virtual people doing virtual actions seems to make virtual virtually meaningless. The people won't necessarily know, but they could know, as it could be revealed by the programmers or deduced from some programming glitch (as in the film The Thirteenth Floor). But I don't think it makes a difference if they know or not. The answer to the obvious objection that if you destroy the brain you destroy consciousness, so consciousness can't reside in Platonia, is that both the brain and consciousness could reside in Platonia. Where ever they reside though you have to explain how damaging the brain changes consciousness. And if you can explain this relation in Platonia why won't the same relation exist in Physicalia. It could happen in both, but it is not evidence against a simulated reality to say that consciousness seems to be dependent on the apparently physical brain. A reality is only simulated relative to some more real reality - so I'm not sure what the point of referring to a simulated reality is. The question is whether the move to Platonia really solves the mind-body problem or just rephrases it as the body-mind problem. 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/d/optout.
Re: The scope of physical law and its relationship to the substitution level
On 5/25/2015 10:45 AM, John Clark wrote: On Sat, May 23, 2015 , Pierz pier...@gmail.com mailto:pier...@gmail.com wrote: Bruno /did/ acknowledge that his theory predicts that the laws of physics are invariant across space and time, because they are supposed to arise out of pure arithmetic We know from pure mathematics (by way of Noether's theorem discovered in 1915) that if the fundamental laws of physics do not change with time then the conservation of mass/energy must exist. And Noether also tells us that if the fundamental laws of physics do not change from one place to another then the law of conservation of momentum must exist. By the way, I don't think Emmy Noether received the credit she deserved for this enormously important discovery. And to expand on that point, note that if we find a law of physics that depends explicitly on time or location, we would be reluctant to consider it fundamental and we would look for some more fundamental law that explained its dependence. Incidentally, what Noether proved is that for each symmetry in the Lagrangian of a physical system there is a corresponding conserved quantity and vice versa. So for an expanding universe, one that has no time-like Killing vector field, there is no conserved mass/energy. John Baez (Joan's cousin) has a good essay on this online. 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/d/optout.
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On 5/25/2015 11:55 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 24 May 2015, at 23:51, meekerdb wrote: On 5/24/2015 11:28 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On Monday, May 25, 2015, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 5/24/2015 1:52 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: Again, with comp, all incarnations are zombie, because bodies do not think. It is the abstract person which thinks But a few thumps on the body and the abstract person won't think either. So far as we have observered *only* bodies think. If comp implies the contrary isn't that so much the worse for comp. In a virtual environment, destroying the body destroys the consciousness, but both are actually due to the underlying computations. How can those thumped know it's virtual. A virtual environment with virtual people doing virtual actions seems to make virtual virtually meaningless. It is the difference between life and second life. Reality, and relative dreams. That's the question, can such a difference be meaningful if the world is defined by conscious experience. In the examples you give, the virtual is distinguished because it is not a rich and complete and consistent as real life. 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/d/optout.
Re: What do you need to create a universe?
I was speaking metaphorically. There are those who think a new universe may form inside a black hole, of course. (This isn't safe in the lab OR easy to communicate with, however.) On 26 May 2015 at 10:52, spudboy100 via Everything List everything-list@googlegroups.com wrote: I would say a novel may help make a blueprint, a direction, a precis, but not a cosmos itself. Once upon a time.. -Original Message- From: LizR lizj...@gmail.com To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Mon, May 25, 2015 6:44 pm Subject: Re: What do you need to create a universe? Writing a novel is one way. On 26 May 2015 at 09:13, spudboy100 via Everything List everything-list@googlegroups.com wrote: What about such universes or subregions,domains, that sadly, lack a conscious observer? What creates or sends the observer, perhaps a jobs agency? Observer needed to alter empty spacetime region. Must be experienced in science, history, and philosophy, and mathematics. Willing to take on a trainee. -Original Message- From: Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Mon, May 25, 2015 4:41 pm Subject: Re: What do you need to create a universe? Run a computer simulation that contains a conscious observer and you have created reality. In another sense, however, all universes already exist and so you aren't creating anything, only forging a connection to another universe that's out there. Jason On 5/25/15, spudboy100 via Everything List everything-list@googlegroups.com wrote: Eric Steinhart believes like Dawkins does that it is evolution. That the simplest starter universe, with something like Conway's Life, can produce through a mathematical cascade effect, newer and eventually more complex universes. I guess I am dumb enough to look at a prime programmer analyst, coming up with an enormous program, but that is me, not Steinhart or Dawkins. Other speculations suggested slamming massive amounts of matter together, and the backlash would produce a big bang. Others have suggested compressing a black hole (astronomical) and viola, a b-b. Others still claim that if you can get a BH to spin fast enough, or have exotic matter you can open up or deflower, a BH by widening its' access valve, leaving universe to universe trade and communication. -Original Message- From: Frederik Goplen frederikgop...@gmail.com To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Mon, May 25, 2015 3:35 pm Subject: What do you need to create a universe? Suppose I wanted to create a new universe in my lab. What would I need to get started? The question may seem absurd. After all, the universe is enormous. It is billions of years old and, as far as we know, it contains all that ever existed and ever will exist. Still it appears that all this—including space, time, energy and matter—came into being with the Big Bang. If so, everything we know was created out of nothing. Or was it really? If it is possible to create a universe from nothing—except perhaps from some rules like in a computer program—what is to stop us from doing exactly that some time in the future? -- 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/d/optout. -- 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 athttp://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visithttps://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- 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 toeverything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group athttp://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visithttps://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- 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
Re: What does the MGA accomplish?
On 5/25/2015 5:54 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote:
Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 25 May 2015, at 08:58, Bruce Kellett wrote:
Part of my problem is that the UD does not execute any actual program sequentially:
after each step in a program it executes the next step of the next program and so on,
until it reaches the first step of some program, at which point it loops back to the
start.
The UD does execute sequentially *each* specific program, but the UD adds delays, due
to its dovetailing duties, which we already know (step 2) that it does not change the
first person experience of the entiuty supported by that execution.
So if the conscious moment is evinced by a logical sequence of steps by the
dovetailer, it does not correspond to any particular program, but a rather arbitrary
assortment of steps from many programs.
?
Each execution of the programs is well individuated in the UD*. You can descrbied them
by sequences
phi_i^k(j) k = 0, 1, 2, ...(with i and j fixed).
But each step of the dovetailer is just a single application of the axioms of the Turing
machine in question: one of the
Kxy gives x,
Sxyz gives xz(yz),
for example. These single steps are all that there is in the dovetailer. But such steps
lack a context -- they make no sense on their own. You could simply claim that the two
basic steps are all that is needed -- consciousness self-assembles by taking as many of
these in whatever order is needed.
If the next step of program phi_i is some 10^50 or so dovetailer steps away, the only
thing that could possibly link these is the program phi_i itself -- the actual execution
of the steps is entirely secondary. In which case, one would say that consciousness
resides in the program phi_i itself - execution on the dovetailer is not required. I do
not think you would want to go down this path, so you need something to give each step a
context, something to link the separate steps that are required for consciousness.
The teleportation arguments of Steps 1-7 are insufficient for this, since in that
argument you are teleporting complete conscious entities, not just single steps of the
underlying program.
Of course, given that all programs are executed, this sequence of steps does
correspond to some program, somewhere, but not necessarily any of the ones partially
executed for generating that conscious moment.
Yes. So what?
I was trying to give you a way out of the problems that I have raised above. If you
don't see that the sequential steps of the actual dovetailer program give the required
connectivity, then what does? You did, some time ago, claim that the dovetailer steps
gave an effective time parameter for the system. But even that requires a contextual
link between the steps -- something that would be given by the underlying stepping --
which is not the stepping of each individual program phi_i.
I think what it boils down to is that steps in phi_{i}, where {i} is a set indexing
programs supporting a particular consciousness, must be linked by representing
consciousness of the same thing, the same thought. But I think that requires some outside
reference whereby they can be about the same thing. So it is not enough to just link the
phi_{i} of the single consciousness, they must also be linked to an environment. I think
this part of what Pierz is saying. He says the linkage cannot merge different physics, so
effectively the thread of computations instantiating Bruce's consciousness imply the
computation of a whole world (with physics) for Bruce's consciousness to exist in.
My apologies if I'm mistaking your or Pierz's ideas.
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/d/optout.
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On Tuesday, May 26, 2015 at 6:49:51 AM UTC+10, Brent wrote: On 5/25/2015 5:16 AM, Pierz wrote: On Monday, May 25, 2015 at 4:58:53 AM UTC+10, Brent wrote: On 5/24/2015 4:09 AM, Pierz wrote: On Sunday, May 24, 2015 at 4:47:12 PM UTC+10, Jason wrote: On Sun, May 24, 2015 at 12:40 AM, Pierz pie...@gmail.com wrote: On Sunday, May 24, 2015 at 1:07:15 AM UTC+10, Jason wrote: On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 12:44 PM, Bruno Marchal mar...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 19 May 2015, at 15:53, Jason Resch wrote: On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 12:06 AM, Stathis Papaioannou stat...@gmail.com wrote: On 19 May 2015 at 14:45, Jason Resch jason...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, May 18, 2015 at 9:21 PM, Stathis Papaioannou stat...@gmail.com wrote: On 19 May 2015 at 11:02, Jason Resch jason...@gmail.com wrote: I think you're not taking into account the level of the functional substitution. Of course functionally equivalent silicon and functionally equivalent neurons can (under functionalism) both instantiate the same consciousness. But a calculator computing 2+3 cannot substitute for a human brain computing 2+3 and produce the same consciousness. In a gradual replacement the substitution must obviously be at a level sufficient to maintain the function of the whole brain. Sticking a calculator in it won't work. Do you think a Blockhead that was functionally equivalent to you (it could fool all your friends and family in a Turing test scenario into thinking it was intact you) would be conscious in the same way as you? Not necessarily, just as an actor may not be conscious in the same way as me. But I suspect the Blockhead would be conscious; the intuition that a lookup table can't be conscious is like the intuition that an electric circuit can't be conscious. I don't see an equivalency between those intuitions. A lookup table has a bounded and very low degree of computational complexity: all answers to all queries are answered in constant time. While the table itself may have an arbitrarily high information content, what in the software of the lookup table program is there to appreciate/understand/know that information? Understanding emerges from the fact that the lookup table is immensely large. It could be wrong, but I don't think it is obviously less plausible than understanding emerging from a Turing machine made of tin cans. The lookup table is intelligent or at least offers the appearance of intelligence, but it makes the maximum possible advantage of the space-time trade off: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space–time_tradeoff The tin-can Turing machine is unbounded in its potential computational complexity, there's no reason to be a bio- or silico-chauvinist against it. However, by definition, a lookup table has near zero computational complexity, no retained state. But it is counterfactually correct on a large range spectrum. Of course, it has to be infinite to be genuinely counterfactual-correct. But the structure of the counterfactuals is identical regardless of the inputs and outputs in its lookup table. If you replaced all of its outputs with random strings, would that change its consciousness? What if there existed a special decoding book, which was a one-time-pad that could decode its random answers? Would the existence of this book make it more conscious than if this book did not exist? If there is zero information content in the outputs returned by the lookup table it might as well return all X characters as its response to any query, but then would any program that just returns a string of X's be conscious? I really like this argument, even though I once came up with a (bad) attempt to refute it. I wish it received more attention because it does cast quite a penetrating light on the issue. What you're suggesting is effectively the cache pattern in computer programming, where we trade memory resources for computational resources. Instead of repeating a resource-intensive computation, we store the inputs and outputs for later regurgitation. How is this different from a movie recording of brain activity (which most on the list seem to agree is not conscious)? The lookup table is just a really long recording, only we use the input to determine to which section of the recording to fast-forward/rewind to. It isn't different to a recording. But here's the thing: when we ask if the lookup machine is conscious, we are kind of implicitly asking: is it having an experience *now*, while I ask the question and see a response. But what does such a question actually even mean? If a computation is underway in time when the machine responds, then I assume it is having a co-temporal experience. But the lookup machine idea forces us to the realization that
Re: The scope of physical law and its relationship to the substitution level
On 26 May 2015 at 04:56, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 24 May 2015, at 11:12, LizR wrote: The stability of natural laws is also the simplest situation, I think? (Isn't there something in Russell's TON about this?) Natural laws remain stable due to symmetry principles, which are simpler than anything asymmetric (although physics contains some asymmetries, of course, like matter vs antimatter). But simplicity is not by itself something which will multiply you enough. Simplicity is not enough. Then RA can be said to be simple but is of course quite non symmetrical. (We could take more symmetrical ontology, but again, I prefer to start from something not related to physics). I think the idea in TON is that simple cases are easier to generate computationally, and hence have a higher measure in the space of all computations. Or something like that. Maybe Russell will put me right on this. -- 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/d/optout.
Re: The scope of physical law and its relationship to the substitution level
On 25 May 2015 at 05:50, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 5/24/2015 2:12 AM, LizR wrote: The stability of natural laws is also the simplest situation, I think? (Isn't there something in Russell's TON about this?) Natural laws remain stable due to symmetry principles, which are simpler than anything asymmetric (although physics contains some asymmetries, of course, like matter vs antimatter). I'm not sure about this person in an empty room - surely they experience all sorts of phenomena that can ultimately be traced to the laws of physics? An obvious one is the pull of gravity (or lack thereof). But I have to admit I can't see how one gets from the UDA to physics. The notion that physics falls out of all the computations passing through a specific observer moment seems approximately as difficult to explain as how physics operates if one assumes primary materialism - but of course physics based on primary materialism comes with the benefit that for 100s of years, people have believed the ontology to be correct, and they have slowly built up a body of knowledge on that basis. Hence comp finds itself doubly disadvantaged in that no one has worked out how it might work in practice, and also in that most people react with an argument from incredulity because they've been taught that physics is based on primary materialism. This is a bit like the situation with cars that run on something other than petrol, or subcritical nuclear reactors. No one has put in a century of research to work out how (say) alcohol driven cars might work, or 50 years of research on how thorium reactors might work. Or 300 years of thinking on how reality might be derived from computations. Well actually cars running on alcohol raced on U.S. tracks through most of the 20th century. Hardly the same as millions being built and honed to meet consumer demand worldwide over a century, is it? A thorium reactor was built and operated in the 50's. The use of 'a' here is rather telling, Again there hasn't anything like been the time and effort expended. I think a more accurate analogy would working out how cars would run on trigonometry or philology. That is nothing like as accurate an analogy. The correct metaphor is to find two things that could in theory be equally plausible, one of which has been chosen due to historical accident, and the other of which has been virtually ignored. So, A+ for (as usual) desperately finding something wrong with what I've said, but in this case D- for the actual content of your objections. -- 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/d/optout.
Re: The scope of physical law and its relationship to the substitution level
On 26 May 2015 at 10:39, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 5/25/2015 10:45 AM, John Clark wrote: On Sat, May 23, 2015 , Pierz pier...@gmail.com wrote: Bruno *did* acknowledge that his theory predicts that the laws of physics are invariant across space and time, because they are supposed to arise out of pure arithmetic We know from pure mathematics (by way of Noether's theorem discovered in 1915) that if the fundamental laws of physics do not change with time then the conservation of mass/energy must exist. And Noether also tells us that if the fundamental laws of physics do not change from one place to another then the law of conservation of momentum must exist. By the way, I don't think Emmy Noether received the credit she deserved for this enormously important discovery. And to expand on that point, note that if we find a law of physics that depends explicitly on time or location, we would be reluctant to consider it fundamental and we would look for some more fundamental law that explained its dependence. Incidentally, what Noether proved is that for each symmetry in the Lagrangian of a physical system there is a corresponding conserved quantity and vice versa. So for an expanding universe, one that has no time-like Killing vector field, there is no conserved mass/energy. John Baez (Joan's cousin) has a good essay on this online. Yes, the fact that energy isn't conserved in the actual universe has long been a source of (minor) amusement to me. But generally, as Brent says, given some apparent assymmetry the natural tendency of science is to look for some law in which things *are* conserved and try to explain why they aren't in this particular case - graduating from a flat Earth that isn't at the centre of the universe is an example of this. (This hasn't yet happened for matter and antimatter, or indeed something and nothing, but we live in hope). -- 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/d/optout.
Re: The scope of physical law and its relationship to the substitution level
On 26 May 2015 at 05:45, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, May 23, 2015 , Pierz pier...@gmail.com wrote: Bruno *did* acknowledge that his theory predicts that the laws of physics are invariant across space and time, because they are supposed to arise out of pure arithmetic We know from pure mathematics (by way of Noether's theorem discovered in 1915) that if the fundamental laws of physics do not change with time then the conservation of mass/energy must exist. And Noether also tells us that if the fundamental laws of physics do not change from one place to another then the law of conservation of momentum must exist. By the way, I don't think Emmy Noether received the credit she deserved for this enormously important discovery. One of the understatements of the century, although I think Einstein, Hilbert and others gave her the credit she was due. But not the world outside the scientific establishment. Indeed it took years for her to get any sort of academic post if I remember correctly. -- 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/d/optout.
Re: Michael Shermer becomes sceptical about scepticism!
On 25 May 2015 at 00:34, Pierz pier...@gmail.com wrote: On Monday, May 4, 2015 at 9:08:30 PM UTC+10, spudb...@aol.com wrote: I sure did, Telmo. Scroll to the bottom and you shall view my last, number 26th, the last one. This kind of thing is interesting to me. I tend toward the materialist stuff since it seems to have potential. The mentalist stuff seems unreliable because people who have NDE's or trances have not come back with information. ? Highly debatable! It's true that so far I'm not aware of any experiments in which NDE subjects reported the content of cards put in places only visible from the ceiling (as some researchers have tried) This could invalidate the top-down view often reportedly experienced in NDEs, but my 13 year old daughter told me the other day that she can easily imagine herself from an outside viewpoint (we weren't talking about NDEs or anything like that) so it is certainly possible for people to do this. Hence people being conscious in some sense during NDEs isn't invalidated by their inability to spot cards hidden on top of cabinets, even if the viewpoint described is. It remains possible that they are aware of their surroundings.mind you I'm also very sceptical of this woman's report, how exact and well testified is it, and could she have picked up the information smoe other way? -- 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/d/optout.
Re: The scope of physical law and its relationship to the substitution level
LizR wrote: On 26 May 2015 at 05:45, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com mailto:johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: Of that I have no opinion because nobody knows what comp means, least of all Bruno. Comp is the theory that consciousness is the product of Turing-emulable processes, i.e. that it's a computation. Actually, that strictly does not follow. All that follows is that a computer can emulate certain physical processes upon which consciousness supervenes. This does not mean that consciousness is a computation, in Platonia or anywhere else. All that we know from the evidence is that consciousness supervenes on physical brains. Bruce The idea that we may one day create AIs is based on the same assumption. There are a couple of extra assumptions to do with certain mathematical ideas being correct (e.g. the Church-Turing thesis, I believe). But I believe it's a fairly standard theory used by a lot of scientists - Hugh Everett III for example used it in his thesis. For clarity I have called this comp1 and Bruno's results derived from it comp2, but unless someone can show a fault in the argument connecting them this is a purely nominal distinction. -- 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/d/optout.
Re: The scope of physical law and its relationship to the substitution level
On 26 May 2015 at 05:45, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: Of that I have no opinion because nobody knows what comp means, least of all Bruno. Comp is the theory that consciousness is the product of Turing-emulable processes, i.e. that it's a computation. The idea that we may one day create AIs is based on the same assumption. There are a couple of extra assumptions to do with certain mathematical ideas being correct (e.g. the Church-Turing thesis, I believe). But I believe it's a fairly standard theory used by a lot of scientists - Hugh Everett III for example used it in his thesis. For clarity I have called this comp1 and Bruno's results derived from it comp2, but unless someone can show a fault in the argument connecting them this is a purely nominal distinction. -- 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/d/optout.
