On 19 Jan 2017, at 18:27, Brent Meeker wrote:
On 1/19/2017 12:55 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
Using God in the sense of whatever is needed to have a reality, and
maybe just that reality, helps to keep in mind that Primitive-
Matter existence needs an act of faith. Nobody can prove its
exoistence, and a materialist assumes that such a Primitive Matter
is at the origin of all other realities (biologicl, psychological,
etc.). It is your theology, apparently.
You're beating on your straw man. Nobody tries to prove the
existence of matter - it's an hypothesis used to explain the world.
It's defined ostensively.
That is not the "matter" we are talking about. Ostensive definitions
works also in multi-user sharable video games. The matter you are
talking about is the matter of the physicists, who will, in its own
field, be neutral on the primary or not aspect of that matter.
Physicalism/materialism is a metaphysical assumption, not a physical
one. I am talking on primary matter, not the indexically ostensive
reality we assume beyond the appearances. The question is: is there a
physical universe, we agree that there is a physical reality well
described by the observers.
We were doing metaphysics/theology here, not physics. It becomes math
with the computationalist hypothesis, and the appearance of matter is
a very special sort of universal number persistent and sharable
hallucinations (say). As they are token precise we can test that
physics with the usual observations to see if that fits (and that fits
'till now).
Whatever is the basic ontology of a theory of everything can be
nominated "primitive" - adding "matter" or "computation" or just
"stuff" doesn't add anything except confusion.
We don't need to elude the metaphysical question.
The problem, for the monist, is to explain the appearances, the
possible laws, from the less assumptions possible, and without hiding
realities, phenomenal or not, under the rug.
A theory of everything is a theory which unifies all domains of
sciences, and beyond, that is the relation between science and truth
based on the limitations of machines, formalisms and other finitely
describable things with respect to everything, notably the infinite,
which exists, or not.
For our topic, you need to explain how that God-Matter succeeds in
selecting some computation(s) among all computations.
You don't need to explain that if you don't assume all computations
exist.
I'm afraid there is not much choice in the matter.
You miss the creative bomb of the 20th century. If you believe in
"there is no biggest prime number", you have to believe in all
computations. If you can survive a physical digital functional
substitution at some finite level of substitution, you need some
amount of magic to influence your first person indetermination on
(2^aleph_0) computational histories (on machine's computations +
Oracles) realized in a tiny part of the arithmetical reality, which is
assumed already by anyone believing in *any* theory rich enough to
define or represent a universal number, be it physical or not.
I just translate the mind body problem in arithmetic (using
computationalism), and then it happens that the universal machine has
already the propositional solution (G1, G1*, S4Grz1, X1*, Z1*, and
their differences with the same minus the "1", for the qualia).
Astonishingly, it works, at least for the quanta. I doubt such a
simple and transparent approach will continue to work, as improvement
in the dialog with the numbers will no doubt progress. The theology of
machines is something rather simple, compared to their psychology.
Biology and embryology are conceptually solved by Kleene's second
recursion theorem, and generalizations and exploitations by John Case
and his students, who have extended the work of Putnam, Gold, and
others on the theoretical learning theory, notably. Like in theology,
many results are limitations and no-go theorems.
I think you miss the discovery of purely mathematical, even
arithmetical Turing universal relations. Just for the beauty of it, I
copy again below a system of diophantine relations which defines a
Turing universal system.
Bruno
Only bad faith fears reason.
Only bad reasons fear faith.
The Putnam-Davis-Robinson-Matiyasevich-Jones Polynomial equations:
We have that X is in W_Nu, that is phi_Nu(X) is defined, that is the
number/machine Nu stops on input data X, if and only if the following
system of polynomial equations ha a solution. It is short, and one
degree is very high (5^60), but we can diminish the degree to 4,
easily, by introducing a lot of other variables though. We can also
limit the syetm to one equation. From this you can conceive that once
you believe that 2+2=4 independently of you, then such a system
polynomial equation has or not solution, but this encoded the entire
universal
