Re: JOINING Post and On measure alteration mechanisms and other practical tests for COMP
On 15 Jan 2012, at 00:17, Russell Standish wrote: On Sat, Jan 07, 2012 at 07:02:52AM +0200, acw wrote: On 1/6/2012 18:57, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 05 Jan 2012, at 11:02, acw wrote: Thanks for replying. I was worried my post was too big and few people will bother reading it due to size. I hope to read your opinion on the viability of the experiment I presented in my original post. Any chance you could break it up into smaller digestible pieces? That would be good idea. read it twice, and generate too much comments in my head, and none seems to address the point. Now i am more busy, so acw will need to be patient I grasp his idea. To Bruno Marchal: Do you plan on ever publishing your thesis in english? My french is a bit rusty and it would take a rather long time to walk through it, however I did read the SANE and CCQ papers, as well as a few others. I think that SANE is enough, although some people pushes me to submit to some more public journal. It is not yet clear if physicist or logician will understand. Physicists asks the good questions but don't have the logical tools. Logicians have the right tools, but are not really interested in the applied question. By tradition modern logicians despise their philosophical origin. Some personal contingent problems slow me down, too. Don't want to bore you with this. If it's sufficient, I'll just have to read the right books to better understand AUDA, as it is now, I understood some parts, but also had trouble connecting some ideas in the AUDA. Maybe I should write a book. There is, on my url, a long version of the thesis in french: conscience et mécanisme, with all details, but then it is 700 pages long, and even there, non-logician does not grasp the logic. It is a pity but such kind of work reveals the abyssal gap between logicians and physicists, and the Penrose misunderstanding of Gödel's theorem has frightened the physicists to even take any look further. To defend the thesis it took me more time to explain elementary logic and computer science than philosophy of mind. A book would surely appeal to a larger audience, but a paper which only mentions the required reading could also be enough, although in the latter case fewer people would be willing to spend the time to understand it. There is a project underway to translate Secret de l'amibe into English, which IMHO is an even better introduction to the topic than Bruno's theses (a lot of technical detail has been supressed to make the central ideas digestible). We're about half way through at present - its a volunteer project though, so it will probably be another year or so before it is done/ Thanks to Russell and Kim. Does anyone have a complete downloadable archive of this mailing list, besides the web-accessible google groups or nabble one? Google groups seems to badly group posts together and generates some duplicates for older posts. I agree. Google groups are not practical. The first old archive were very nice (Escribe); but like with all software, archiving get worst with time. nabble is already better, and I don't know if there are other one. Note also that the everything list, maintained by Wei Dai, is a list lasting since a long time, so that the total archive must be rather huge. Thanks to Wei Dai to maintain the list, despite the ASSA people (Hal Finney, Wei Dai in some post, Schmidhuber, ...) seems to have quit after losing the argument with the RSSA people. Well, to be sure Russell Standish still use ASSA, it seems to me, and I have always defended the idea that ASSA is indeed not completely non sensical, although it concerns more the geography than the physics, in the comp frame. If someone from those early times still has the posts, it might be nice if they decided to post an archive (such as a mailer spool). For large Usenet groups, it's not unusual for people to have personal archives, even from 1980's and earlier. I have often thought this would be a very useful resource - sadly I never kept my own archive. It would probably be a good idea to webbot / spider to download the contents of the archives as they currently exist. That might be useful. Especially with things like NDAA, SOPA, etc. Looks like deeper threats than usual accumulate on the free world. I had no idea that was the reason I don't seem them post anymore(when I was looking at older posts, I saw they used to post here). For most people, the everything list is a side interest, and other priorities and interests will interfere with particpation. Bruno is one of the few people who has dedicated his life to this topic, so one shouldn't be too surprised if other people leave the list out of exhaustion :). In cognitive science, many confuse science and philosophy. I like philosophy but it is not my job. I don't defend any truth, but only attempt to criticize invalid arguments. As for losing the RSSA
Re: JOINING Post and On measure alteration mechanisms and other practical tests for COMP
On Sat, Jan 07, 2012 at 07:02:52AM +0200, acw wrote: On 1/6/2012 18:57, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 05 Jan 2012, at 11:02, acw wrote: Thanks for replying. I was worried my post was too big and few people will bother reading it due to size. I hope to read your opinion on the viability of the experiment I presented in my original post. Any chance you could break it up into smaller digestible pieces? To Bruno Marchal: Do you plan on ever publishing your thesis in english? My french is a bit rusty and it would take a rather long time to walk through it, however I did read the SANE and CCQ papers, as well as a few others. I think that SANE is enough, although some people pushes me to submit to some more public journal. It is not yet clear if physicist or logician will understand. Physicists asks the good questions but don't have the logical tools. Logicians have the right tools, but are not really interested in the applied question. By tradition modern logicians despise their philosophical origin. Some personal contingent problems slow me down, too. Don't want to bore you with this. If it's sufficient, I'll just have to read the right books to better understand AUDA, as it is now, I understood some parts, but also had trouble connecting some ideas in the AUDA. Maybe I should write a book. There is, on my url, a long version of the thesis in french: conscience et mécanisme, with all details, but then it is 700 pages long, and even there, non-logician does not grasp the logic. It is a pity but such kind of work reveals the abyssal gap between logicians and physicists, and the Penrose misunderstanding of Gödel's theorem has frightened the physicists to even take any look further. To defend the thesis it took me more time to explain elementary logic and computer science than philosophy of mind. A book would surely appeal to a larger audience, but a paper which only mentions the required reading could also be enough, although in the latter case fewer people would be willing to spend the time to understand it. There is a project underway to translate Secret de l'amibe into English, which IMHO is an even better introduction to the topic than Bruno's theses (a lot of technical detail has been supressed to make the central ideas digestible). We're about half way through at present - its a volunteer project though, so it will probably be another year or so before it is done/ Does anyone have a complete downloadable archive of this mailing list, besides the web-accessible google groups or nabble one? Google groups seems to badly group posts together and generates some duplicates for older posts. I agree. Google groups are not practical. The first old archive were very nice (Escribe); but like with all software, archiving get worst with time. nabble is already better, and I don't know if there are other one. Note also that the everything list, maintained by Wei Dai, is a list lasting since a long time, so that the total archive must be rather huge. Thanks to Wei Dai to maintain the list, despite the ASSA people (Hal Finney, Wei Dai in some post, Schmidhuber, ...) seems to have quit after losing the argument with the RSSA people. Well, to be sure Russell Standish still use ASSA, it seems to me, and I have always defended the idea that ASSA is indeed not completely non sensical, although it concerns more the geography than the physics, in the comp frame. If someone from those early times still has the posts, it might be nice if they decided to post an archive (such as a mailer spool). For large Usenet groups, it's not unusual for people to have personal archives, even from 1980's and earlier. I have often thought this would be a very useful resource - sadly I never kept my own archive. It would probably be a good idea to webbot / spider to download the contents of the archives as they currently exist. I had no idea that was the reason I don't seem them post anymore(when I was looking at older posts, I saw they used to post here). For most people, the everything list is a side interest, and other priorities and interests will interfere with particpation. Bruno is one of the few people who has dedicated his life to this topic, so one shouldn't be too surprised if other people leave the list out of exhaustion :). As for losing the RSSA vs ASSA debate, what was the conclusive argument that tilts the favor toward RSSA (if it's too long, linking to the thread will do)? In my personal opinion, I used to initially consider ASSA as generally true, because assuming continuity of consciousness is a stronger hypothesis, despite being 'felt' from the inside, but then I realized that if I'm assuming consciousness/mind, I might as well assume continuity as well (from the perspective of the observer), otherwise I can't reason about my future expectations. There is a reasonably detailed discussion of this issue in my book. My
Re: JOINING Post and On measure alteration mechanisms and other practical tests for COMP
On Fri, Jan 6, 2012 at 10:57 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Assuming all possible (consistent mathematical) structures is the simplest possible hypothesis. The problem with this is that this 'whole' might be a bit too large or inconsistent in itself (like Russell's Paradox), and like I've said before, there is no way for us finite humans to know an oracle when we see it. If we're a bit more modest, we can use the only mathematical notion that we know to be truly universal - computation as by CTT. OK. The main problem also is in the self-localization in the possible math structure. Comp entails a first person indeterminacy which distribute us in the mathematical reality, and what we perceive might NOT be a purely mathematical structure, but something supervening on it from the inside view. This is a point missed by people like Chalmers, Tegmark, Schmidhuber, etc. Bruno, would you say that Tegmark has still missed the point, given this article he co-authored: http://lesswrong.com/lw/3pg/aguirre_tegmark_layzer_cosmological/ http://arxiv.org/abs/1008.1066 Thanks, Jason -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: JOINING Post and On measure alteration mechanisms and other practical tests for COMP
On 07 Jan 2012, at 18:07, Jason Resch wrote: On Fri, Jan 6, 2012 at 10:57 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Assuming all possible (consistent mathematical) structures is the simplest possible hypothesis. The problem with this is that this 'whole' might be a bit too large or inconsistent in itself (like Russell's Paradox), and like I've said before, there is no way for us finite humans to know an oracle when we see it. If we're a bit more modest, we can use the only mathematical notion that we know to be truly universal - computation as by CTT. OK. The main problem also is in the self-localization in the possible math structure. Comp entails a first person indeterminacy which distribute us in the mathematical reality, and what we perceive might NOT be a purely mathematical structure, but something supervening on it from the inside view. This is a point missed by people like Chalmers, Tegmark, Schmidhuber, etc. Bruno, would you say that Tegmark has still missed the point, given this article he co-authored: http://lesswrong.com/lw/3pg/aguirre_tegmark_layzer_cosmological/ http://arxiv.org/abs/1008.1066 Thanks, Tegmark uses comp +swe, when comp makes it necessary to derive swe from universal number self-reference (which then gives both the quanta and the qualia (frely from the classical theory of knowledge). For the physical reality you can say that he is very close to comp, with Everett and Deutsch, but he missed the comp reversal between physics and number's 'theology'. He does not address the mind body problem, and seems unaware that comp reduces it in justifying swe (or the 'correct physical laws') from the math of self-observing universal machine. It is still an Aristotelian. He still infer (from observation) the unitary evolution. But he uses comp, so by UDA the unitary evolution must be derived from elementary arithmetic. From a platonist view, he is still cheating. He is still trying to copy on nature. He missed, following a long tradition, the mind-body problem, despite his physics, and even his metaphysics (mathematicalism) is very close to the comp needed physics. Yet UDA explains (or is supposed to explain) that physics *has to* be justified by universal introspection (and so based on G, G* and the intensional variants, to get that measure on the UD*, or on the sigma_1 propositions). It is very good physics, from a comp view. But he misses that physical realities are a first person sharable numbers' dreams. Like Everett explains the phenomenology of the collapse, comp asks for a phenomenological account of the swe in arithmetic. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: JOINING Post and On measure alteration mechanisms and other practical tests for COMP
On 1/6/2012 18:57, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 05 Jan 2012, at 11:02, acw wrote: Hello everything-list, this is my first post here, but I've been reading this list for at least half a year, and I'm afraid this post will be a bit long as it contains many thoughts I've had on my mind for quite some time now. Welcome acw. It looks like you wrote an interesting post. But it is very long, as are most sentences in it. I will make some easy comments. I will come back on it later, when I have more time. Thanks, I look forward to the full response. A bit about me: I'm mostly self-taught in the matters concerning the topics of 'everything-list' (Multiverse hypotheses, philosophy of science, 'rationalism', theory of computation, cognitive science, AI, models of computation, logic, physics), and I greatly enjoy reading books and papers on the related subjects. My main activities center mostly around software development and a various other fields directly related to it. OK. Self-teaching is often of better quality than listening to others. It's fine and allows one to better study some matters, but it also may lead to gaps in knowledge if one isn't aware of the gaps. I will give my positions/assumptions first before talking about the actual topic I mentioned in the subject. One of my positions (what I'm betting on, but cannot know) is that of computationalism, that is, that one would survive a digital substitution. OK. As you know that is my working hypothesis. As a scientist I don't know the truth. I certainly find it plausible, given our current knowledge, and my main goal is to show that it leads to testable consequences. Mainly, it reduces the mind body problem into an arithmetical pure body problem. Neither do I claim to know the truth, or should anyone else, if someone claims to know it, they may be telling a lie, voluntarily or not. Our senses aren't that reliable to claim absolute knowledge about the world and even when talking about mathematical truth, the incompleteness theorem applies to everyone. Instead of truth, I tend to assign a theory a high confidence value, or to consider it more probable than others, but the only thing that we can really do beyond that is testing, falsification or verification of our expectations/theories. It sort of was the main goal of my post - to show that there are some practical ways to test COMP that one might be able to do some day. There are however many details regarding this that would have to be made more precise and topic's goal is to elucidate some of these uncertainties and invite others to give their ideas on the subject. Why computationalism? Chalmers' Absent Qualia, Fading Qualia, Dancing Qualia thought experiment/argument shows that one can be forced to believe some seemingly absurd things about the nature of consciousness if functionalism is false (that is, if one assumes that conscious nature depends on more than just functional organization, such as some magical properties of matter). Taking it from functionalism to computationalism isn't very hard either, all it takes is assuming no concrete infinities are involved in the brain's implementation and the CTT(Church Turing Thesis) does the rest. OK. And if you make explicit that COMP assumes only the existence of a level, then you see that COMP, as discussed on this list, is a weaker hypothesis that all the comp discussed in the literature. That is why I refer to the generalized brain. The level can be so low that the generalized brain is an entire galaxy or even a multiverse quantum state. This does not make the assumption trivial, the main reversal, between Aristotle theology and Plato theology still follows. Too low a level and functionalism is no longer very practically testable, but the consequences of COMP (reversal) would still apply if it's true. In my example (the experiment) from the previous post, I tried to assume a reasonable (mid(atomic)/high(neurons or higher)) substitution level, in that it could be tested someday. Such a mid/high-substitution level allows for the mind's implementation to become substrate independent (SIM), but if the new implementation isn't too exact, would the continuation likely or not: it should be conscious, but would it be likely to experience a continuation into a SIM after saying 'yes' to the doctor? Would it be more likely to end up amnesiac and just choose not to become a SIM? I've discussed the matter of errors or inexact 'copies' in the previous post and will wait for your response on that part before going into more details again. In a way, I think it might be more reasonable to consider the mind's implementation and the environment's implementation separately (even if environment+mind are at least one (and infinity of) TM in COMP) as the environment has more chance to vary and only indirectly leads to conscious experience, or that it might be more of a wildcard. While I cannot ever know if
