Re: Primary matter

[Bruno Marchal]

> On 11 Jul 2018, at 14:02, Telmo Menezes  wrote:
> 
> Hi Bruno,
> 
> Another long delay…


Hi Telmo,

No problem. That is why I prefer mail than phone, we can think before 
answering, or take some rest :)



> 
>> I am not sure I commented your first paragraph, which might be a key for 
>> trying to define what could be an explanation. What would be like a 
>> satisfying explanation of consciousness, meaning, reality, etc.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>> On 20 Jun 2018, at 13:51, Telmo Menezes  wrote:
>>> 
>>> Hi Bruno,
>>> 
> I follow your reasoning, from one of your recent articles. This leaves
> me dissatisfied, but if I try to verbalize this dissatisfaction I feel
> stuck in a loop. Perhaps this illustrates your point.
 
 
 We might need to do some detour about what it would mean to explain 
 consciousness, or matter.
 I might ask myself if you are not asking too much, perhaps. Eventually, 
 something has to remain unexplainable for reason of self-consisteny. I 
 suspect it will be just where our intuition of numbers or combinators, or 
 of the distinction finite/infinite comes from (assuming mechanism), or 
 just why we trust the doctor!
>>> 
>>> I thought about it for some time. It seems that at a meta level, we
>>> are always stuck in this situation of "give me one miracle for free
>>> and everything else becomes explainable". The miracle can be matter,
>>> or consciousness, or arithmetic. I believe I have to accept this state
>>> of affairs for the reason of self-consistency that you express above,
>>> but I'm human and I still feel the curiosity. Epistemic limits are
>>> hard to accept.
>> 
>> 
>> Yes that is hard to accept, but that is why and how the universal machines 
>> create all the time.
>> 
>> I would not put on the same par complex metaphysical notions like matter 
>> (taken as primary) or consciousness (that nobody ever agree on a definition) 
>> and arithmetic, which is taught without problem, and I think, usually well 
>> understood.
>> 
>> The mathematicians agrees, explicitly sometimes, on the meaning of “and”,and 
>>  “or”, and “if … then”, etc.
>> 
>> To begin an explanation, we have to acknowledge some understanding, without 
>> which no explanation at all is possible. But that would be like telling to 
>> Einstein “Look, your theory assumes without much motivation the existence of 
>> the number 2, your project thesis is rejected”. Only in a theocracy, or 
>> philocracy or whatever-cracy can we do that. I think that’s why Orwell said 
>> that freedom is the right to say that 2+2=4. The truth tellers get burned 
>> alive more often than the liars.
> 
> My only problem with this is that I think your theory relies on
> numbers in a deeper way than Einstein’s.

I don’t think so. It takes seriously the idea that the brain is Turing 
emulable, and in that sense, I agree, but Einstein and the physicists theories 
are all realist on arithmetic.




> You can accept Einstein's
> theories without accepting mathematical realism. It could be that
> certain regularities in nature are feasibly described by math -- just
> as a human language and human thinking device.

I could agree on this for set theory, and some part of analysis, but I doubt 
that the conjecture of Goldbach or Riemann are related to language or humans.
Then here you presuppose some nature, which, when we do metaphysics is a very 
big assumption, without any supporting evidences (others than the usual 
extrapolation).


> 
> You ask more from the numbers, and you ask us to assume that
> arithmetic is fundamental.

Absolutely not. I show that mechanism implies the necessity to assume one 
universal machinery. It just happens that what we learn in primary school 
(arithmetic) is such a universal machinery, and I use it because less people 
knows the combinators or LISP expression.



> I think it might be, but shortly I am not
> convinced by the above equivalence that you propose.

I derive it from the assumption that our brain or body is Turing emulable. 




> 
>> For arithmetic, we must not confuse arithmetic (that kids understand very 
>> well) and “understanding how a machine can understand arithmetic”, still 
>> with “doing that “truly”, “consciously”" etc.
>> 
>> The beauty and grandiosity of the discovery of the universal machine is that 
>> we can formulate and solve partial the problem, and this using very 
>> classical definition, and just arithmetic, or just Kxy = x, and Sxyz = 
>> xz(yz), or any essentially undecidable theory, or sigma_1 complete set of 
>> numbers.
>> 
>> Then there is the key point that without assuming one universal machine or 
>> machinery, you cannot derived the notion from anything simpler. It is an 
>> important recursive invariant. This includes universal machine + some oracle 
>> (and the first person indeterminacy do suggest the possibility of oracles, 
>> and the necessity of the random oracle).
>> 
>> The miracle is not the incompleteness theorem. The 

Re: Primary matter

[Telmo Menezes]

Hi Bruno,

Another long delay...

> I am not sure I commented your first paragraph, which might be a key for 
> trying to define what could be an explanation. What would be like a 
> satisfying explanation of consciousness, meaning, reality, etc.
>
>
>
>> On 20 Jun 2018, at 13:51, Telmo Menezes  wrote:
>>
>> Hi Bruno,
>>
 I follow your reasoning, from one of your recent articles. This leaves
 me dissatisfied, but if I try to verbalize this dissatisfaction I feel
 stuck in a loop. Perhaps this illustrates your point.
>>>
>>>
>>> We might need to do some detour about what it would mean to explain 
>>> consciousness, or matter.
>>> I might ask myself if you are not asking too much, perhaps. Eventually, 
>>> something has to remain unexplainable for reason of self-consisteny. I 
>>> suspect it will be just where our intuition of numbers or combinators, or 
>>> of the distinction finite/infinite comes from (assuming mechanism), or just 
>>> why we trust the doctor!
>>
>> I thought about it for some time. It seems that at a meta level, we
>> are always stuck in this situation of "give me one miracle for free
>> and everything else becomes explainable". The miracle can be matter,
>> or consciousness, or arithmetic. I believe I have to accept this state
>> of affairs for the reason of self-consistency that you express above,
>> but I'm human and I still feel the curiosity. Epistemic limits are
>> hard to accept.
>
>
> Yes that is hard to accept, but that is why and how the universal machines 
> create all the time.
>
> I would not put on the same par complex metaphysical notions like matter 
> (taken as primary) or consciousness (that nobody ever agree on a definition) 
> and arithmetic, which is taught without problem, and I think, usually well 
> understood.
>
> The mathematicians agrees, explicitly sometimes, on the meaning of “and”,and  
> “or”, and “if … then”, etc.
>
> To begin an explanation, we have to acknowledge some understanding, without 
> which no explanation at all is possible. But that would be like telling to 
> Einstein “Look, your theory assumes without much motivation the existence of 
> the number 2, your project thesis is rejected”. Only in a theocracy, or 
> philocracy or whatever-cracy can we do that. I think that’s why Orwell said 
> that freedom is the right to say that 2+2=4. The truth tellers get burned 
> alive more often than the liars.

My only problem with this is that I think your theory relies on
numbers in a deeper way than Einstein's. You can accept Einstein's
theories without accepting mathematical realism. It could be that
certain regularities in nature are feasibly described by math -- just
as a human language and human thinking device.

You ask more from the numbers, and you ask us to assume that
arithmetic is fundamental. I think it might be, but shortly I am not
convinced by the above equivalence that you propose.

> For arithmetic, we must not confuse arithmetic (that kids understand very 
> well) and “understanding how a machine can understand arithmetic”, still with 
> “doing that “truly”, “consciously”" etc.
>
> The beauty and grandiosity of the discovery of the universal machine is that 
> we can formulate and solve partial the problem, and this using very classical 
> definition, and just arithmetic, or just Kxy = x, and Sxyz = xz(yz), or any 
> essentially undecidable theory, or sigma_1 complete set of numbers.
>
> Then there is the key point that without assuming one universal machine or 
> machinery, you cannot derived the notion from anything simpler. It is an 
> important recursive invariant. This includes universal machine + some oracle 
> (and the first person indeterminacy do suggest the possibility of oracles, 
> and the necessity of the random oracle).
>
> The miracle is not the incompleteness theorem. The miraculous theorem is that 
> the machine believing in induction axioms and simple laws can justify their 
> own conditional incompleteness theorem, so that they are aware of their 
> incompleteness, but not in any assertable way.

A perhaps naive question: the logic system within which the
incompleteness theorem is proved is itself bound to incompleteness.
Doesn't this force us to doubt incompleteness? But if we do, we are
basing our doubt on the thing that we are doubting. Is there a way out
here? It looks like a version of the "This sentence is false"
paradox...

> What would be like an explanation of the natural numbers? I have a lot of 
> them: you can explain them as n-times iteration function n is lambda f lambda 
> x ffx, or you can explain them by the successive applications of 
> reflexion and comprehension in set theory, etc. All this *are* interesting 
> views of the numbers, but logically they are assuming richer and more complex 
> theories (second order arithmetic, analysis, set theory, …).

I am ok with that. I accept that in any explanatory attempt, one
either reaches a brute fact of finds more turtles...

> With 

Re: Primary matter

[Bruno Marchal]

> On 2 Jul 2018, at 00:04, Brent Meeker  wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On 7/1/2018 5:07 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>> 
>>> On 29 Jun 2018, at 20:18, Brent Meeker >> > wrote:
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On 6/29/2018 3:34 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
 
> On 27 Jun 2018, at 20:43, Brent Meeker  > wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On 6/27/2018 1:42 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
>> On 27 June 2018 at 03:24, Brent Meeker  
>>  wrote:
>>> On 6/26/2018 2:32 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
 On 25 June 2018 at 19:54, Brent Meeker  
  wrote:
> On 6/25/2018 8:06 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
> 
> I don't think that's the case.  C seems to me to be capable to 
> explaining
> anything (e.g. we're living in the Matrix).  The theories of M are
> certainly
> incomplete, but if there is empirical data inconsistent with those
> theories
> it just shows they have limited domain. If there is empirical data 
> that
> is
> impossible to include in M how would we know; how could we be sure 
> that
> it
> could not be included?
> 
> I don't see how that fact that I am conscious and have a first person
> experience of reality could be explained by M.
> 
> I suggest you should think about what you accept as good explanations 
> of
> other phenomenon.
 I gave several examples before, regarding emergentist explanations.
 
 Suppose that Darwinian theory has not been discovered, and we have the
 following conversation:
 
 T: Where does life come from?
 B: Ah, well, it emerges from chemistry.
 T: Fine, how does that work?
 B: I told you, it emerges from chemistry. What kind of explanation
 were you expecting?
>>> I don't think Darwin had anything to do with discovering the chemical 
>>> basis
>>> of life, which I suppose is what you meant put in the future of the
>>> exchange.
>> Well, he discovered the principle of selection with variability, and
>> how this leads to biological complexification. That is no small part
>> of the puzzle. I meant Darwinism in the neo-Darwinism sense, including
>> Mendel's postulation of genes, Crick and Watson's discovery of DNA
>> structure and many other things.
>> 
>> Notice the difference. We have all of these mechanisms to back the
>> "life emerges from chemistry" theory. Each one explains a piece of the
>> puzzle. For consciousness we have nada.
> 
> But we don't have nada.  We have some understanding of how neurons work 
> and we've even made some AI based on neural nets that is surprisingly 
> intelligent in a narrow domain.  We know a lot about how a brain produces 
> consciousness from the way that injury or external stimulus affects 
> consciousness.  
 
 OK. But that leads to Mechanism. Then computer science explains 
 “consciousness” by showing that when a machine introspect itself, it 
 discover consciousness, i.e. immediate non-doubtable subjective belief in 
 some truth, yet a non provable (transcendent) one, not even definable 
 (like truth itself).And we get a mathematically very precise theory of 
 qualia. But the quanta have to be part of those qualia, and this make the 
 theory testable. It explain the why and how of consciousness, but also the 
 matter appearances, and this with all details, so that we can test the 
 mechanist theory of consciousness.
 
 
 
> 
> I know you're thinking, "But that doesn't explain why the brain processes 
> produce consciousness".  My point is that you don't ask why planets 
> produce gravity. 
 
 ?
 I though that this what Einstein asked for, and solved: mass produce 
 gravity by curving space-time.
 
 
 
> Once you have an equation that precisely predicts "what" you stop asking 
> "why”. 
 
 Hmm… Not if you are interested in metaphysics/theology. I stop only on 
 2+2=4.
 
 
 
> When we can predict, manipulate, and create intelligent human-like 
> behavior
 
 That will never happen, or it already happened with the discovery of the 
 universal machine. The question is when that machine will be as stupid as 
 human. But I guess this is vocabulary. I guess you mean “competent 
 machine”. The universal machine might be the most intelligent entities 
 ever, but also very fragile: it can become dumb to the point of believing 
 in its own intelligence, which is the mark of stupidity.
>>> 
>>> That's misusing the words.  It can't be stupid to believe in your own 
>>> intelligence if you are intelligent. 
>> 
>> You can’t assume it, or assert it, without asserting 

Re: Primary matter

[Brent Meeker]

On 7/1/2018 5:07 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:


On 29 Jun 2018, at 20:18, Brent Meeker > wrote:




On 6/29/2018 3:34 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:


On 27 Jun 2018, at 20:43, Brent Meeker > wrote:




On 6/27/2018 1:42 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:

On 27 June 2018 at 03:24, Brent Meeker  wrote:

On 6/26/2018 2:32 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:

On 25 June 2018 at 19:54, Brent Meeker  wrote:

On 6/25/2018 8:06 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:

I don't think that's the case.  C seems to me to be capable to explaining
anything (e.g. we're living in the Matrix).  The theories of M are
certainly
incomplete, but if there is empirical data inconsistent with those
theories
it just shows they have limited domain. If there is empirical data that
is
impossible to include in M how would we know; how could we be sure that
it
could not be included?

I don't see how that fact that I am conscious and have a first person
experience of reality could be explained by M.

I suggest you should think about what you accept as good explanations of
other phenomenon.

I gave several examples before, regarding emergentist explanations.

Suppose that Darwinian theory has not been discovered, and we have the
following conversation:

T: Where does life come from?
B: Ah, well, it emerges from chemistry.
T: Fine, how does that work?
B: I told you, it emerges from chemistry. What kind of explanation
were you expecting?

I don't think Darwin had anything to do with discovering the chemical basis
of life, which I suppose is what you meant put in the future of the
exchange.

Well, he discovered the principle of selection with variability, and
how this leads to biological complexification. That is no small part
of the puzzle. I meant Darwinism in the neo-Darwinism sense, including
Mendel's postulation of genes, Crick and Watson's discovery of DNA
structure and many other things.

Notice the difference. We have all of these mechanisms to back the
"life emerges from chemistry" theory. Each one explains a piece of the
puzzle. For consciousness we have nada.


But we don't have nada.  We have some understanding of how neurons 
work and we've even made some AI based on neural nets that is 
surprisingly intelligent in a narrow domain.  We know a lot about 
how a brain produces consciousness from the way that injury or 
external stimulus affects consciousness.


OK. But that leads to Mechanism. Then computer science explains 
“consciousness” by showing that when a machine introspect itself, it 
discover consciousness, i.e. immediate non-doubtable subjective 
belief in some truth, yet a non provable (transcendent) one, not 
even definable (like truth itself).And we get a mathematically very 
precise theory of qualia. But the quanta have to be part of those 
qualia, and this make the theory testable. It explain the why and 
how of consciousness, but also the matter appearances, and this with 
all details, so that we can test the mechanist theory of consciousness.






I know you're thinking, "But that doesn't explain why the brain 
processes produce consciousness".  My point is that you don't ask 
/*why*/ planets produce gravity.


?
I though that this what Einstein asked for, and solved: mass produce 
gravity by curving space-time.




Once you have an equation that precisely predicts /*"what"*/ you 
stop asking /*"why”*/.


Hmm… Not if you are interested in metaphysics/theology. I stop only 
on 2+2=4.




When we can predict, manipulate, and create intelligent human-like 
behavior


That will never happen, or it already happened with the discovery of 
the universal machine. The question is when that machine will be as 
stupid as human. But I guess this is vocabulary. I guess you mean 
“competent machine”. The universal machine might be the most 
intelligent entities ever, but also very fragile: it can become dumb 
to the point of believing in its own intelligence, which is the mark 
of stupidity.


That's misusing the words.  It can't be stupid to believe in your own 
intelligence if you are intelligent.


You can’t assume it, or assert it, without asserting you own 
consistency implicitly, which is enough to make you either 
inconsistent, or unsound.


Just like a logician to imagine that one must be consistent to be 
intelligent.


"No one has yet succeeded in inventing a philosophy at once credible and 
self-consistent. Locke aimed at credibility, and achieved it at the 
expense of consistency. Most of the great philosophers have done the 
opposite. A philosophy which is not self-consistent cannot be wholly 
true, but a philosophy which is self-consistent can very well be wholly 
false. The most fruitful philosophies have contained glaring 
inconsistencies, but for that very reason have been partially true."

   --- Bertrand Russell

Brent








If you're intelligent but don't believe it


… there will be no problem.





then you will act on the instructions of someone who is less intelligent.
..which would 

Re: Primary matter

[Bruno Marchal]

t; Hmm… Not if you are interested in metaphysics/theology. I stop only on 2+2=4.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>> When we can predict, manipulate, and create intelligent human-like behavior
>> 
>> That will never happen, or it already happened with the discovery of the 
>> universal machine. The question is when that machine will be as stupid as 
>> human. But I guess this is vocabulary. I guess you mean “competent machine”. 
>> The universal machine might be the most intelligent entities ever, but also 
>> very fragile: it can become dumb to the point of believing in its own 
>> intelligence, which is the mark of stupidity.
> 
> That's misusing the words.  It can't be stupid to believe in your own 
> intelligence if you are intelligent. 

You can’t assume it, or assert it, without asserting you own consistency 
implicitly, which is enough to make you either inconsistent, or unsound.





> If you're intelligent but don't believe it

… there will be no problem.




> then you will act on the instructions of someone who is less intelligent.
> ..which would be stupid.


That is right. But in that theory, to believe one is stupid is as much stupid 
than to believe you are intelligent. In all case, you can come to that 
conclusion only because someone told you so. You did just confuse []~ with ~[].

Bruno


> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>> questions about why that behavior is conscious will seem quaint, like 
>>> questions about why chemical reproduction constitutes life.
>> 
>> Here I disagree. Chemical are 3p (locally) notion, like life. So, there is 
>> no conceptual difficulties in relating them through 3p equations.
> 
> You have just become so inured to the modern solution that you no longer even 
> see the problem.  In the 19th century there were biologists who were like the 
> J. A. Wheeler of their day, saying, "Yes, but where is the spark of life in 
> this chemistry?"  That's my point; the problem isn't solved, it's dissolved.
> 
>> But for consciousness, there is a conceptual gap. Now, computer science 
>> solves that problem, mainly by showing why machine are unavoidably 
>> confronted to a huge conceptual gap, necessarily. The gap has a highly 
>> sophisticated mathematics (G* minus G and the modal variants imposed by that 
>> very gap).
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>> 
>>>>>> If you take Thomas Kuhn's ideas seriously, then consciousness seems to
>>>>>> be the current sticking point that is likely to trigger the next
>>>>>> paradigm shift. The exercise we've been through is one where you
>>>>>> insist that what Kuhn refers to as "normal science" can eventually
>>>>>> crack the problem, while I insist that it cannot. This sort of thing
>>>>>> happened before, it's not new.
>>>>> Did Newton explain gravity?  Did Einstein?
>>>> They did, in the sense that they refer to above: they described the
>>>> mechanism. We even have nice equations that make correct predictions
>>>> all the time. You know more about that than me.
> 
> Exactly.  But they didn't answer Wheeler's question, "What puts fire in the 
> equations?"  Newton answered, "Hypothesi non fingo."
> 
>>>> 
>>>>> Are you satisfied with the
>>>>> chemical explanation of life?
>>>> Yes. There are some mysteries remaining, my favorite one is how the
>>>> first self-replicators originated. But even there are several
>>>> plausible ideas.
>> 
>> It might be that this has to be a rare event, and thus a "quantum miracle”. 
>> I have reason to think that we might be alone in the universe, to get 
>> consciousness as deep as our, with a long and deep history. We might be rare 
>> in each branch of the multiverse, but be very numerous in the universal 
>> wave/arithmetic to get the measure right. I am not sure of this. It would be 
>> the comp solution of Fermi paradox. 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>>>> I don't think there's anything "normal" or "extra-normal" in science.  
>>>>> There
>>>>> is good science and better science; and they are measured by how
>>>>> comprehensive, accurate, and predictive they are.
>>>> Kuhn proposed the term "normal science" to mean the exploitation mode
>>>> of scientific discovery, while "paradigm shift" refers to the
>>>> explorative mode. Kuhn's idea is that normal science takes place most
>>>> of the time, incrementally improving understanding within

Re: Primary matter

[Brent Meeker]

nus G and the modal 
variants imposed by that very gap).







If you take Thomas Kuhn's ideas seriously, then consciousness seems to
be the current sticking point that is likely to trigger the next
paradigm shift. The exercise we've been through is one where you
insist that what Kuhn refers to as "normal science" can eventually
crack the problem, while I insist that it cannot. This sort of thing
happened before, it's not new.

Did Newton explain gravity?  Did Einstein?

They did, in the sense that they refer to above: they described the
mechanism. We even have nice equations that make correct predictions
all the time. You know more about that than me.


Exactly.  But they didn't answer Wheeler's question, "What puts fire in 
the equations?"  Newton answered, "Hypothesi non fingo."





Are you satisfied with the
chemical explanation of life?

Yes. There are some mysteries remaining, my favorite one is how the
first self-replicators originated. But even there are several
plausible ideas.


It might be that this has to be a rare event, and thus a "quantum 
miracle”. I have reason to think that we might be alone in the 
universe, to get consciousness as deep as our, with a long and deep 
history. We might be rare in each branch of the multiverse, but be 
very numerous in the universal wave/arithmetic to get the measure 
right. I am not sure of this. It would be the comp solution of Fermi 
paradox.






I don't think there's anything "normal" or "extra-normal" in science.  There
is good science and better science; and they are measured by how
comprehensive, accurate, and predictive they are.

Kuhn proposed the term "normal science" to mean the exploitation mode
of scientific discovery, while "paradigm shift" refers to the
explorative mode. Kuhn's idea is that normal science takes place most
of the time, incrementally improving understanding within the current
paradigm. When the limits of the pardigm are reached, improvement
stalls around certain issues and eventually a reexamination of the
base assumptions is necessary. This leads to a crisis and parts of the
edifice comes tumbling down. The quintessential example is classical
physics and Einstein.


And the stall comes from asking the wrong question: like where does 
the elan vitale reside  or how does the force of gravity reach out 
from a planet?


Newton was deeply trouble by this, and Einstein’s too. It is 
Einstein’s feeling that this could be explained which led him to the 
Relativity theory.
Then, physicalist are still using primary matter (stuffy or 
mathematical) which does not work better than élan vitale to explain 
the observable. Primary matter is the élan vitale of physicalism.


No.  It is your straw man metaphysics.  Physics don't care about 
metaphysics, so they don't even think about "primary matter".  It plays 
no role in their work as physicists.  That's why they are successful at 
finding comprehensive, accurate, and predictive theories...they avoid 
metaphysical assumptions.


Nobody have detect it until now, and its use is inconstant with 
mechanism (used by Darwin, and deducible from 
QM-without-collapse-nor-ad-hoc non computable hamiltonian).





or how can a physical process produce consciousness?


That question is clear, and with mechanism, we can say: it can’t.


But your argument starts with assuming that saying yes to the doctor is 
right, hence the overall arc of your argument is that of a reductio ad 
absurdum.  Then you try to locate the absurdity in "primary matter" 
which didn't even enter the argument.


Brent

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Re: Primary matter

[Bruno Marchal]

But for 
consciousness, there is a conceptual gap. Now, computer science solves that 
problem, mainly by showing why machine are unavoidably confronted to a huge 
conceptual gap, necessarily. The gap has a highly sophisticated mathematics (G* 
minus G and the modal variants imposed by that very gap).



> 
>> 
>>>> If you take Thomas Kuhn's ideas seriously, then consciousness seems to
>>>> be the current sticking point that is likely to trigger the next
>>>> paradigm shift. The exercise we've been through is one where you
>>>> insist that what Kuhn refers to as "normal science" can eventually
>>>> crack the problem, while I insist that it cannot. This sort of thing
>>>> happened before, it's not new.
>>> 
>>> Did Newton explain gravity?  Did Einstein?
>> They did, in the sense that they refer to above: they described the
>> mechanism. We even have nice equations that make correct predictions
>> all the time. You know more about that than me.
>> 
>>> Are you satisfied with the
>>> chemical explanation of life?
>> Yes. There are some mysteries remaining, my favorite one is how the
>> first self-replicators originated. But even there are several
>> plausible ideas.

It might be that this has to be a rare event, and thus a "quantum miracle”. I 
have reason to think that we might be alone in the universe, to get 
consciousness as deep as our, with a long and deep history. We might be rare in 
each branch of the multiverse, but be very numerous in the universal 
wave/arithmetic to get the measure right. I am not sure of this. It would be 
the comp solution of Fermi paradox. 




>> 
>>> I don't think there's anything "normal" or "extra-normal" in science.  There
>>> is good science and better science; and they are measured by how
>>> comprehensive, accurate, and predictive they are.
>> Kuhn proposed the term "normal science" to mean the exploitation mode
>> of scientific discovery, while "paradigm shift" refers to the
>> explorative mode. Kuhn's idea is that normal science takes place most
>> of the time, incrementally improving understanding within the current
>> paradigm. When the limits of the pardigm are reached, improvement
>> stalls around certain issues and eventually a reexamination of the
>> base assumptions is necessary. This leads to a crisis and parts of the
>> edifice comes tumbling down. The quintessential example is classical
>> physics and Einstein.
> 
> And the stall comes from asking the wrong question: like where does the elan 
> vitale reside  or how does the force of gravity reach out from a planet? 

Newton was deeply trouble by this, and Einstein’s too. It is Einstein’s feeling 
that this could be explained which led him to the Relativity theory.
Then, physicalist are still using primary matter (stuffy or mathematical) which 
does not work better than élan vitale to explain the observable. Primary matter 
is the élan vitale of physicalism. Nobody have detect it until now, and its use 
is inconstant with mechanism (used by Darwin, and deducible from 
QM-without-collapse-nor-ad-hoc non computable hamiltonian).



> or how can a physical process produce consciousness?

That question is clear, and with mechanism, we can say: it can’t. 

Bruno




> 
> Brent
> 
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Re: Primary matter

[Bruno Marchal]

> On 27 Jun 2018, at 06:31, Brent Meeker  wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On 6/26/2018 11:03 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>> 
>>> On 25 Jun 2018, at 18:37, Brent Meeker >> > wrote:
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On 6/25/2018 3:32 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
 
> On 23 Jun 2018, at 08:03, Brent Meeker  > wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On 6/22/2018 4:41 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
 This does not mean that a conscious machine is necessarily more 
 efficacious on all task,
>>> What is the added undecideable sentence implied by consciousness?
>> “I am conscious”.
> 
> What does that speed up?  Does the speed up from adding an undeciable 
> sentence suffer from Goodheart's curse?
> 
 
 Not sure what you mean. I would say “no”, in theory “I am not conscious” 
 can also bring a speed-up, despite being obviously consistent, like PA 
 with “I am inconsistent”. The speed-up is proved by constructive 
 diagonalisation, and is thus non-intuitive, except we can imagine than 
 being aware of one’s consciousness might help to planning, especially in 
 an environment habited by conscious entities.
 Consciousness is *the* speed-up mechanism. It makes us thinking using 
 model, semantic, meaning, instead of living the syntactical relation at 
 some low level. Meaning is easier than proof, even if it can be misleading 
 for individuals, it gives sense to sense, and priorities to higher goal, 
 like surviving.
>>> 
>>> That all sounds like wishful thinking and hand-waving. 
>> 
>> Not really. It is complicated theorems.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>> As I pointed out earlier, if you try to play tennis consciously you will 
>>> lose because you will be slow. 
>> 
>> On the contrary, you will be able to move more quickly that the adversary, 
>> in principle, in the long terms. That is why self-moving animals have 
>> developed more rapidly communicating cells, to anticipate/bet on the local 
>> future, without which we would even never play tennis. 
>> You might be confusing “being conscious” with “being conscious of being 
>> conscious”, which indeed would slow down if too much emphasise, like the 
>> famous millipedes losing its walking ability hen asking itself how it use 
>> its “thousand” legs.
> 
> Which is being conscious of walking, not being conscious of being conscious 
> of walking.  Just like being conscious of how to hit the tennis ball will 
> ruin you game.  It is necessary when learning to play (and you are bad at 
> it).  But Roger Federer never thinks "Now I will swing in an upward arc so as 
> to cause top spin."  He thinks, "Hit to the left corner.”

OK. But as you say yourself, consciousness is needed in the learning phase, and 
that is where the speed-up is needed. Then consciousness makes its “belief in a 
reality” speeding up the play too, as it makes something like “there is a left 
corner” meaningful, in a very quick way.

Bruno




> 
> Brent
> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>> Conscious thought no doubt helps in planning, but it also allows depression 
>>> and suicide.  Dogs don't commit suicide.  
>> 
>> Some dogs died after having refused to eat anything when their master/friend 
>> died. I agree it is not yet an intentional suicide, but dogs are not that 
>> dumb. The more we have neurons, the more stupidities we can do. It is the 
>> price of a Turing universal local reality, and of our own Turing 
>> universality.
>> 
>> Bruno
>> 
>> 
>>> 
>>> Brent
>>> 
>>> 
 
 Bruno
 
 
 
 
> Brent
> 
> 
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>>> 
>>> 
>>> -- 
>>> You 

Re: Primary matter

[Brent Meeker]

On 6/27/2018 1:42 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:

On 27 June 2018 at 03:24, Brent Meeker  wrote:


On 6/26/2018 2:32 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:

On 25 June 2018 at 19:54, Brent Meeker  wrote:


On 6/25/2018 8:06 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:

I don't think that's the case.  C seems to me to be capable to explaining
anything (e.g. we're living in the Matrix).  The theories of M are
certainly
incomplete, but if there is empirical data inconsistent with those
theories
it just shows they have limited domain. If there is empirical data that
is
impossible to include in M how would we know; how could we be sure that
it
could not be included?

I don't see how that fact that I am conscious and have a first person
experience of reality could be explained by M.

I suggest you should think about what you accept as good explanations of
other phenomenon.

I gave several examples before, regarding emergentist explanations.

Suppose that Darwinian theory has not been discovered, and we have the
following conversation:

T: Where does life come from?
B: Ah, well, it emerges from chemistry.
T: Fine, how does that work?
B: I told you, it emerges from chemistry. What kind of explanation
were you expecting?


I don't think Darwin had anything to do with discovering the chemical basis
of life, which I suppose is what you meant put in the future of the
exchange.

Well, he discovered the principle of selection with variability, and
how this leads to biological complexification. That is no small part
of the puzzle. I meant Darwinism in the neo-Darwinism sense, including
Mendel's postulation of genes, Crick and Watson's discovery of DNA
structure and many other things.

Notice the difference. We have all of these mechanisms to back the
"life emerges from chemistry" theory. Each one explains a piece of the
puzzle. For consciousness we have nada.


But we don't have nada.  We have some understanding of how neurons work 
and we've even made some AI based on neural nets that is surprisingly 
intelligent in a narrow domain.  We know a lot about how a brain 
produces consciousness from the way that injury or external stimulus 
affects consciousness.


I know you're thinking, "But that doesn't explain why the brain 
processes produce consciousness".  My point is that you don't ask 
/*why*/ planets produce gravity.  Once you have an equation that 
precisely predicts /*"what"*/ you stop asking /*"why"*/. When we can 
predict, manipulate, and create intelligent human-like behavior 
questions about why that behavior is conscious will seem quaint, like 
questions about why chemical reproduction constitutes life.





If you take Thomas Kuhn's ideas seriously, then consciousness seems to
be the current sticking point that is likely to trigger the next
paradigm shift. The exercise we've been through is one where you
insist that what Kuhn refers to as "normal science" can eventually
crack the problem, while I insist that it cannot. This sort of thing
happened before, it's not new.


Did Newton explain gravity?  Did Einstein?

They did, in the sense that they refer to above: they described the
mechanism. We even have nice equations that make correct predictions
all the time. You know more about that than me.


Are you satisfied with the
chemical explanation of life?

Yes. There are some mysteries remaining, my favorite one is how the
first self-replicators originated. But even there are several
plausible ideas.


I don't think there's anything "normal" or "extra-normal" in science.  There
is good science and better science; and they are measured by how
comprehensive, accurate, and predictive they are.

Kuhn proposed the term "normal science" to mean the exploitation mode
of scientific discovery, while "paradigm shift" refers to the
explorative mode. Kuhn's idea is that normal science takes place most
of the time, incrementally improving understanding within the current
paradigm. When the limits of the pardigm are reached, improvement
stalls around certain issues and eventually a reexamination of the
base assumptions is necessary. This leads to a crisis and parts of the
edifice comes tumbling down. The quintessential example is classical
physics and Einstein.


And the stall comes from asking the wrong question: like where does the 
elan vitale reside  or how does the force of gravity reach out from a 
planet?  or how can a physical process produce consciousness?


Brent

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Re: Primary matter

[Telmo Menezes]

On 27 June 2018 at 03:24, Brent Meeker  wrote:
>
>
> On 6/26/2018 2:32 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
>>
>> On 25 June 2018 at 19:54, Brent Meeker  wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> On 6/25/2018 8:06 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
>>>
>>> I don't think that's the case.  C seems to me to be capable to explaining
>>> anything (e.g. we're living in the Matrix).  The theories of M are
>>> certainly
>>> incomplete, but if there is empirical data inconsistent with those
>>> theories
>>> it just shows they have limited domain. If there is empirical data that
>>> is
>>> impossible to include in M how would we know; how could we be sure that
>>> it
>>> could not be included?
>>>
>>> I don't see how that fact that I am conscious and have a first person
>>> experience of reality could be explained by M.
>>>
>>> I suggest you should think about what you accept as good explanations of
>>> other phenomenon.
>>
>> I gave several examples before, regarding emergentist explanations.
>>
>> Suppose that Darwinian theory has not been discovered, and we have the
>> following conversation:
>>
>> T: Where does life come from?
>> B: Ah, well, it emerges from chemistry.
>> T: Fine, how does that work?
>> B: I told you, it emerges from chemistry. What kind of explanation
>> were you expecting?
>
>
> I don't think Darwin had anything to do with discovering the chemical basis
> of life, which I suppose is what you meant put in the future of the
> exchange.

Well, he discovered the principle of selection with variability, and
how this leads to biological complexification. That is no small part
of the puzzle. I meant Darwinism in the neo-Darwinism sense, including
Mendel's postulation of genes, Crick and Watson's discovery of DNA
structure and many other things.

Notice the difference. We have all of these mechanisms to back the
"life emerges from chemistry" theory. Each one explains a piece of the
puzzle. For consciousness we have nada.

>> If you take Thomas Kuhn's ideas seriously, then consciousness seems to
>> be the current sticking point that is likely to trigger the next
>> paradigm shift. The exercise we've been through is one where you
>> insist that what Kuhn refers to as "normal science" can eventually
>> crack the problem, while I insist that it cannot. This sort of thing
>> happened before, it's not new.
>
>
> Did Newton explain gravity?  Did Einstein?

They did, in the sense that they refer to above: they described the
mechanism. We even have nice equations that make correct predictions
all the time. You know more about that than me.

> Are you satisfied with the
> chemical explanation of life?

Yes. There are some mysteries remaining, my favorite one is how the
first self-replicators originated. But even there are several
plausible ideas.

> I don't think there's anything "normal" or "extra-normal" in science.  There
> is good science and better science; and they are measured by how
> comprehensive, accurate, and predictive they are.

Kuhn proposed the term "normal science" to mean the exploitation mode
of scientific discovery, while "paradigm shift" refers to the
explorative mode. Kuhn's idea is that normal science takes place most
of the time, incrementally improving understanding within the current
paradigm. When the limits of the pardigm are reached, improvement
stalls around certain issues and eventually a reexamination of the
base assumptions is necessary. This leads to a crisis and parts of the
edifice comes tumbling down. The quintessential example is classical
physics and Einstein.

Telmo.

> Brent
>
>
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Re: Primary matter

[Brent Meeker]

On 6/26/2018 11:03 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:


On 25 Jun 2018, at 18:37, Brent Meeker > wrote:




On 6/25/2018 3:32 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:


On 23 Jun 2018, at 08:03, Brent Meeker > wrote:




On 6/22/2018 4:41 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

This does not mean that a conscious machine is necessarily more efficacious on 
all task,

What is the added undecideable sentence implied by consciousness?

“I am conscious”.


What does that speed up?  Does the speed up from adding an 
undeciable sentence suffer from Goodheart's curse?




Not sure what you mean. I would say “no”, in theory “I am not 
conscious” can also bring a speed-up, despite being obviously 
consistent, like PA with “I am inconsistent”. The speed-up is proved 
by constructive diagonalisation, and is thus non-intuitive, except 
we can imagine than being aware of one’s consciousness might help to 
planning, especially in an environment habited by conscious entities.
Consciousness is *the* speed-up mechanism. It makes us thinking 
using model, semantic, meaning, instead of living the syntactical 
relation at some low level. Meaning is easier than proof, even if it 
can be misleading for individuals, it gives sense to sense, and 
priorities to higher goal, like surviving.


That all sounds like wishful thinking and hand-waving.


Not really. It is complicated theorems.



As I pointed out earlier, if you try to play tennis consciously you 
will lose because you will be slow.


On the contrary, you will be able to move more quickly that the 
adversary, in principle, in the long terms. That is why self-moving 
animals have developed more rapidly communicating cells, to 
anticipate/bet on the local future, without which we would even never 
play tennis.
You might be confusing “being conscious” with “being conscious of 
being conscious”, which indeed would slow down if too much emphasise, 
like the famous millipedes losing its walking ability hen asking 
itself how it use its “thousand” legs.


Which is being conscious of walking, not being conscious of being 
conscious of walking.  Just like being conscious of how to hit the 
tennis ball will ruin you game.  It is necessary when learning to play 
(and you are bad at it).  But Roger Federer never thinks "Now I will 
swing in an upward arc so as to cause top spin."  He thinks, "Hit to the 
left corner."


Brent





Conscious thought no doubt helps in planning, but it also allows 
depression and suicide.  Dogs don't commit suicide.


Some dogs died after having refused to eat anything when their 
master/friend died. I agree it is not yet an intentional suicide, but 
dogs are not that dumb. The more we have neurons, the more stupidities 
we can do. It is the price of a Turing universal local reality, and of 
our own Turing universality.


Bruno




Brent




Bruno





Brent


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Re: Primary matter

[Brent Meeker]

On 6/26/2018 2:32 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:

On 25 June 2018 at 19:54, Brent Meeker  wrote:


On 6/25/2018 8:06 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:

I don't think that's the case.  C seems to me to be capable to explaining
anything (e.g. we're living in the Matrix).  The theories of M are certainly
incomplete, but if there is empirical data inconsistent with those theories
it just shows they have limited domain. If there is empirical data that is
impossible to include in M how would we know; how could we be sure that it
could not be included?

I don't see how that fact that I am conscious and have a first person
experience of reality could be explained by M.

I suggest you should think about what you accept as good explanations of
other phenomenon.

I gave several examples before, regarding emergentist explanations.

Suppose that Darwinian theory has not been discovered, and we have the
following conversation:

T: Where does life come from?
B: Ah, well, it emerges from chemistry.
T: Fine, how does that work?
B: I told you, it emerges from chemistry. What kind of explanation
were you expecting?


I don't think Darwin had anything to do with discovering the chemical 
basis of life, which I suppose is what you meant put in the future of 
the exchange.




If you take Thomas Kuhn's ideas seriously, then consciousness seems to
be the current sticking point that is likely to trigger the next
paradigm shift. The exercise we've been through is one where you
insist that what Kuhn refers to as "normal science" can eventually
crack the problem, while I insist that it cannot. This sort of thing
happened before, it's not new.


Did Newton explain gravity?  Did Einstein?  Are you satisfied with the 
chemical explanation of life?


I don't think there's anything "normal" or "extra-normal" in science.  
There is good science and better science; and they are measured by how 
comprehensive, accurate, and predictive they are.


Brent

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Re: Primary matter

[Bruno Marchal]

> On 25 Jun 2018, at 18:37, Brent Meeker  wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On 6/25/2018 3:32 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>> 
>>> On 23 Jun 2018, at 08:03, Brent Meeker >> > wrote:
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On 6/22/2018 4:41 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>> This does not mean that a conscious machine is necessarily more 
>> efficacious on all task,
> What is the added undecideable sentence implied by consciousness?
 “I am conscious”.
>>> 
>>> What does that speed up?  Does the speed up from adding an undeciable 
>>> sentence suffer from Goodheart's curse?
>>> 
>> 
>> Not sure what you mean. I would say “no”, in theory “I am not conscious” can 
>> also bring a speed-up, despite being obviously consistent, like PA with “I 
>> am inconsistent”. The speed-up is proved by constructive diagonalisation, 
>> and is thus non-intuitive, except we can imagine than being aware of one’s 
>> consciousness might help to planning, especially in an environment habited 
>> by conscious entities.
>> Consciousness is *the* speed-up mechanism. It makes us thinking using model, 
>> semantic, meaning, instead of living the syntactical relation at some low 
>> level. Meaning is easier than proof, even if it can be misleading for 
>> individuals, it gives sense to sense, and priorities to higher goal, like 
>> surviving.
> 
> That all sounds like wishful thinking and hand-waving. 

Not really. It is complicated theorems.



> As I pointed out earlier, if you try to play tennis consciously you will lose 
> because you will be slow. 

On the contrary, you will be able to move more quickly that the adversary, in 
principle, in the long terms. That is why self-moving animals have developed 
more rapidly communicating cells, to anticipate/bet on the local future, 
without which we would even never play tennis. 
You might be confusing “being conscious” with “being conscious of being 
conscious”, which indeed would slow down if too much emphasise, like the famous 
millipedes losing its walking ability hen asking itself how it use its 
“thousand” legs.



> Conscious thought no doubt helps in planning, but it also allows depression 
> and suicide.  Dogs don't commit suicide.  

Some dogs died after having refused to eat anything when their master/friend 
died. I agree it is not yet an intentional suicide, but dogs are not that dumb. 
The more we have neurons, the more stupidities we can do. It is the price of a 
Turing universal local reality, and of our own Turing universality.

Bruno


> 
> Brent
> 
> 
>> 
>> Bruno
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>> Brent
>>> 
>>> 
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Re: Primary matter

[Bruno Marchal]

Hi Telmo,

I am not sure I commented your first paragraph, which might be a key for trying 
to define what could be an explanation. What would be like a satisfying 
explanation of consciousness, meaning, reality, etc.



> On 20 Jun 2018, at 13:51, Telmo Menezes  wrote:
> 
> Hi Bruno,
> 
>>> I follow your reasoning, from one of your recent articles. This leaves
>>> me dissatisfied, but if I try to verbalize this dissatisfaction I feel
>>> stuck in a loop. Perhaps this illustrates your point.
>> 
>> 
>> We might need to do some detour about what it would mean to explain 
>> consciousness, or matter.
>> I might ask myself if you are not asking too much, perhaps. Eventually, 
>> something has to remain unexplainable for reason of self-consisteny. I 
>> suspect it will be just where our intuition of numbers or combinators, or of 
>> the distinction finite/infinite comes from (assuming mechanism), or just why 
>> we trust the doctor!
> 
> I thought about it for some time. It seems that at a meta level, we
> are always stuck in this situation of "give me one miracle for free
> and everything else becomes explainable". The miracle can be matter,
> or consciousness, or arithmetic. I believe I have to accept this state
> of affairs for the reason of self-consistency that you express above,
> but I'm human and I still feel the curiosity. Epistemic limits are
> hard to accept.


Yes that is hard to accept, but that is why and how the universal machines 
create all the time.

I would not put on the same par complex metaphysical notions like matter (taken 
as primary) or consciousness (that nobody ever agree on a definition) and 
arithmetic, which is taught without problem, and I think, usually well 
understood.

The mathematicians agrees, explicitly sometimes, on the meaning of “and”,and  
“or”, and “if … then”, etc.

To begin an explanation, we have to acknowledge some understanding, without 
which no explanation at all is possible. But that would be like telling to 
Einstein “Look, your theory assumes without much motivation the existence of 
the number 2, your project thesis is rejected”. Only in a theocracy, or 
philocracy or whatever-cracy can we do that. I think that’s why Orwell said 
that freedom is the right to say that 2+2=4. The truth tellers get burned alive 
more often than the liars.

For arithmetic, we must not confuse arithmetic (that kids understand very well) 
and “understanding how a machine can understand arithmetic”, still with “doing 
that “truly”, “consciously”" etc.

The beauty and grandiosity of the discovery of the universal machine is that we 
can formulate and solve partial the problem, and this using very classical 
definition, and just arithmetic, or just Kxy = x, and Sxyz = xz(yz), or any 
essentially undecidable theory, or sigma_1 complete set of numbers.

Then there is the key point that without assuming one universal machine or 
machinery, you cannot derived the notion from anything simpler. It is an 
important recursive invariant. This includes universal machine + some oracle 
(and the first person indeterminacy do suggest the possibility of oracles, and 
the necessity of the random oracle).

The miracle is not the incompleteness theorem. The miraculous theorem is that 
the machine believing in induction axioms and simple laws can justify their own 
conditional incompleteness theorem, so that they are aware of their 
incompleteness, but not in any assertable way. 

What would be like an explanation of the natural numbers? I have a lot of them: 
you can explain them as n-times iteration function n is lambda f lambda x 
ffx, or you can explain them by the successive applications of 
reflexion and comprehension in set theory, etc. All this *are* interesting 
views of the numbers, but logically they are assuming richer and more complex 
theories (second order arithmetic, analysis, set theory, …).

With mechanism, we need to assume just one universal machine, or one 
recursively equivalent notion, to explain consciousness and its relation with 
the observable, sharable, etc. 

The explanation itself involves machine with rich belief, which believe in 
enough induction axiom to justify their conditional incompleteness, their 
“theology”, and know that they are universal, and the essential limitation, but 
also the trade-offs like between truth and assertability.

It is testable: for example by comparing the quantum logics due to 
self-references and the quantum logics inferred from observation.

Gödel’s second incompleteness theorem, <>t -> ~[] <>t,  already illustrates 
that some truth are not provable, nor assertable, nor even assumable, for 
logical reason.  Similarly, the qualia can be explained by immediate 
intensional/modal apprehension (non transitive) that comes from intensional 
variants of G and G*, whose existences are a consequence of incompleteness.

Mechanism circumscribes the mystery in the numbers/combinators, but it explains 
why it has to be a mystery, but it 

Re: Primary matter

[Telmo Menezes]

On 25 June 2018 at 19:54, Brent Meeker  wrote:
>
>
> On 6/25/2018 8:06 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
>
> I don't think that's the case.  C seems to me to be capable to explaining
> anything (e.g. we're living in the Matrix).  The theories of M are certainly
> incomplete, but if there is empirical data inconsistent with those theories
> it just shows they have limited domain. If there is empirical data that is
> impossible to include in M how would we know; how could we be sure that it
> could not be included?
>
> I don't see how that fact that I am conscious and have a first person
> experience of reality could be explained by M.
>
> I suggest you should think about what you accept as good explanations of
> other phenomenon.

I gave several examples before, regarding emergentist explanations.

Suppose that Darwinian theory has not been discovered, and we have the
following conversation:

T: Where does life come from?
B: Ah, well, it emerges from chemistry.
T: Fine, how does that work?
B: I told you, it emerges from chemistry. What kind of explanation
were you expecting?

If you take Thomas Kuhn's ideas seriously, then consciousness seems to
be the current sticking point that is likely to trigger the next
paradigm shift. The exercise we've been through is one where you
insist that what Kuhn refers to as "normal science" can eventually
crack the problem, while I insist that it cannot. This sort of thing
happened before, it's not new.

Telmo.

> Brent
> "A good answer is one that doesn't spoil the question."
>  -- P. T. Bridgeport (character in Walt Kelly's "Pogo")
>
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Re: Primary matter

[Brent Meeker]

On 6/25/2018 8:06 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:

I don't think that's the case.  C seems to me to be capable to explaining
anything (e.g. we're living in the Matrix).  The theories of M are certainly
incomplete, but if there is empirical data inconsistent with those theories
it just shows they have limited domain. If there is empirical data that is
impossible to include in M how would we know; how could we be sure that it
could not be included?

I don't see how that fact that I am conscious and have a first person
experience of reality could be explained by M.

I suggest you should think about what you accept as good explanations of 
other phenomenon.


Brent
"A good answer is one that doesn't spoil the question."
 -- P. T. Bridgeport (character in Walt Kelly's "Pogo")

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Re: Primary matter

[Brent Meeker]

On 6/25/2018 7:11 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

If not, mechanism is refuted (or we are in a malevolent simulation, which is 
better to never assume, as this can again explains everything, like super 
determinism or epiphenomenalism (as you said at the relevant place to Brent).


Does no one else see the irony of a theory being rejected on this list 
because it "explains everything"?


Brent

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Re: Primary matter

[Brent Meeker]

On 6/25/2018 3:32 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:


On 23 Jun 2018, at 08:03, Brent Meeker > wrote:




On 6/22/2018 4:41 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

This does not mean that a conscious machine is necessarily more efficacious on 
all task,

What is the added undecideable sentence implied by consciousness?

“I am conscious”.


What does that speed up?  Does the speed up from adding an undeciable 
sentence suffer from Goodheart's curse?




Not sure what you mean. I would say “no”, in theory “I am not 
conscious” can also bring a speed-up, despite being obviously 
consistent, like PA with “I am inconsistent”. The speed-up is proved 
by constructive diagonalisation, and is thus non-intuitive, except we 
can imagine than being aware of one’s consciousness might help to 
planning, especially in an environment habited by conscious entities.
Consciousness is *the* speed-up mechanism. It makes us thinking using 
model, semantic, meaning, instead of living the syntactical relation 
at some low level. Meaning is easier than proof, even if it can be 
misleading for individuals, it gives sense to sense, and priorities to 
higher goal, like surviving.


That all sounds like wishful thinking and hand-waving.  As I pointed out 
earlier, if you try to play tennis consciously you will lose because you 
will be slow.  Conscious thought no doubt helps in planning, but it also 
allows depression and suicide.  Dogs don't commit suicide.


Brent




Bruno





Brent


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Re: Primary matter

[Telmo Menezes]

On 21 June 2018 at 22:52, Brent Meeker  wrote:
>
>
> On 6/21/2018 3:55 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
>>
>> On 21 June 2018 at 00:53, Brent Meeker  wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> On 6/20/2018 4:51 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:

 Hi Bruno,

>> I follow your reasoning, from one of your recent articles. This leaves
>> me dissatisfied, but if I try to verbalize this dissatisfaction I feel
>> stuck in a loop. Perhaps this illustrates your point.
>
>
> We might need to do some detour about what it would mean to explain
> consciousness, or matter.
> I might ask myself if you are not asking too much, perhaps. Eventually,
> something has to remain unexplainable for reason of self-consisteny. I
> suspect it will be just where our intuition of numbers or combinators,
> or of
> the distinction finite/infinite comes from (assuming mechanism), or
> just why
> we trust the doctor!

 I thought about it for some time. It seems that at a meta level, we
 are always stuck in this situation of "give me one miracle for free
 and everything else becomes explainable". The miracle can be matter,
 or consciousness, or arithmetic.
>>>
>>>
>>> Do you see that is just another form of my circle of virtuous
>>> explanation.
>>> Start wherever you understand or accept the starting point and then you
>>> can
>>> go around the circle and get to everything else.
>>
>> I see your point and even concede that it might be the wise approach
>> for many things, but I don't think one can "get to everything else"
>> this way.
>>
>> The problem with my analogy with heliocentrism/geocentrism is that
>> these are, in the end, compatible -- but the same doesn't seem to
>> apply to materialism/computationalism. I think that Bruno proves
>> convincingly that the two are incompatible. I'm not sure if you are
>> convinced by the UDA argument or not. Are you?
>>
>> If one takes this incompatibility seriously, things become a bit more
>> tricky. In this case, and to expand on what I was suggesting:
>>
>> - There is a set of beliefs M that are consistent with materialism;
>> - There is a set of beliefs C that are consistent with computationalism;
>> - The intersection between M and C, let's call it A, is non-empty but;
>
>
> In the virtuous circle theory you could start with M and explain C or vice
> versa.  At least if C is a comprehensive theory as proposed.  So A=C=M.
>
>> - There are justified true beliefs that belong to C if one starts from
>> comp, but not to A, let's say C*
>
>
> Justified how?  By logical inference from Peano's axioms?

By direct experience: "I am conscious" or just "I am".

> Note that C and M
> proceed to produce explanations in different ways and M doesn't aim to
> produce beliefs, only theories.  I realize that Bruno uses "belief" as
> shorthand for a relation between computable and some ideal machine.  So it's
> not clear to me that "belief" means the same thing in C and M.
>
>> - There are justified true beliefs that belong to M if one starts from
>> materialism, but not to A, let's say M*
>> - Furthermore, there is empirical data that fits C* and not M*, and
>> vice-versa.
>
>
> I don't think that's the case.  C seems to me to be capable to explaining
> anything (e.g. we're living in the Matrix).  The theories of M are certainly
> incomplete, but if there is empirical data inconsistent with those theories
> it just shows they have limited domain. If there is empirical data that is
> impossible to include in M how would we know; how could we be sure that it
> could not be included?

I don't see how that fact that I am conscious and have a first person
experience of reality could be explained by M.

>>
>> Most people nowadays live only within A. It used to be the case that
>> people lived with A + R (R is some set of religious beliefs), and that
>> is more or less what enabled us to build civilization. R might be
>> wrong, but it is clearly useful (and also has a very dark side, of
>> course). A-only-living is the domain of mid-life crisis, existential
>> despair, hating Mondays and scientific utilitarianism.
>
>
> Get a grip, Telmo.  A is the best place to live.

Easy for you to say, now that you will be rolling in cash from your
gambling operation!

>> M* is the
>> domain of the emergentist project of neuroscience, and I would argue
>> is the proto-religion of many contemporary scientists, and especially
>> militant atheists. C* is the domain of neoplatonism. Not surprisingly,
>> it irritates M* people, and vice-versa.
>
>
> And it's the domain of the pseudo-science mystic who, feeling the loss of R,
> longs to recover that world view that puts them at the center of everything.

I think this goes to the core of the emotions underlying the debate. I
agree with you that desiring to be the center of everything is a
common form of egotistical delusion. I will add -- an you will not
like this one -- that standing in awe at "how small we are compared to
the universe, 

Re: Primary matter

[Bruno Marchal]

> On 25 Jun 2018, at 13:57, Telmo Menezes  wrote:
> 
> On 22 June 2018 at 13:31, Bruno Marchal  wrote:
>> 
>>> On 20 Jun 2018, at 13:51, Telmo Menezes  wrote:
>>> 
>>> Hi Bruno,
>>> 
>>>>> I follow your reasoning, from one of your recent articles. This leaves
>>>>> me dissatisfied, but if I try to verbalize this dissatisfaction I feel
>>>>> stuck in a loop. Perhaps this illustrates your point.
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> We might need to do some detour about what it would mean to explain 
>>>> consciousness, or matter.
>>>> I might ask myself if you are not asking too much, perhaps. Eventually, 
>>>> something has to remain unexplainable for reason of self-consisteny. I 
>>>> suspect it will be just where our intuition of numbers or combinators, or 
>>>> of the distinction finite/infinite comes from (assuming mechanism), or 
>>>> just why we trust the doctor!
>>> 
>>> I thought about it for some time. It seems that at a meta level, we
>>> are always stuck in this situation of "give me one miracle for free
>>> and everything else becomes explainable". The miracle can be matter,
>>> or consciousness, or arithmetic. I believe I have to accept this state
>>> of affairs for the reason of self-consistency that you express above,
>>> but I'm human and I still feel the curiosity. Epistemic limits are
>>> hard to accept.
>>> 
>>> Could it even be that it doesn't make sense to say that materialism is
>>> true or false, or that idealism is true or false and so on? I mean in
>>> the same sense that the sun is not really the center of the solar
>>> system (the center is just a human mental model), but assuming it
>>> makes it simpler to describe the orbits. Perhaps assuming materialism
>>> makes it easier to describe certain aspects of nature, while assuming
>>> comp makes it easier to describe others, but in the end we always have
>>> to sacrifice something. Model realism at the meta level…
>> 
>> 
>> We have to sacrifice something. But the point is that if the Brain or the 
>> body is Turing emulable, then we have to sacrifice materialism.
>> FAPP we lost nothing, unless we lose the appearance of matter, in which case 
>> the observation of matter refutes comp, but up to now we don’t loss them, 
>> and at least we have a rather simple explanation of consciousness, which has 
>> to be sacrificed if we want to keep matter in the ontology, but then I am 
>> still waiting for any non mechanist theory of consciousness (beyond the 
>> fairy tales).
> 
> I agree that comp and materialism are incompatible, you convinced me a
> long time ago.

OK.


> 
> My point is that, in certain extreme circumstances -- that Brent likes
> to point out -- we are bound to act as-if materialism is true.

I am not sure. We have to believe in the physical laws, and in physical 
objects. But don’t need to believe that the physical laws are primary, not that 
some primary matter exists primitively. 

Brent accused me recently of taking physics for granted, at the start of the 
UDA, but that is what all rational empiricist do. I would not have consecrated 
a so long time making mechanism experimentally refutable if I did not believe 
in a physical universe or reality. What is not taking for granted is the 
Metaphysical Theory asserting that a physical universe exists fundamentally. 
With mechanism, the fact that brain or classical computer exists must be 
explained from addition and multiplication only.




> Surgeries, for example. I don't believe that consciousness is an
> emergent property of brain activity, but at the same time I would
> prefer my surgeon to assume that.

Like the computationalist doctor. 

The doctor bets that your brain is a physical computer, and that the 
preservation of its functioning, at some level of description, assure that your 
consciousness will remains intact with respect to most computations supporting 
you, that is, with respect to the normal worlds, with measure close to 1, in 
arithmetic. But this works only if the “observable modes” gives physics. If 
not, mechanism is refuted (or we are in a malevolent simulation, which is 
better to never assume, as this can again explains everything, like super 
determinism or epiphenomenalism (as you said at the relevant place to Brent).




> This is a strange situation. I am
> not inclined toward hyper-relativistic ideas XX century
> post-modernism-style -- that seems like giving up on science and
> truth.

Sure. Post-Modernism style of pseudo-philosophy is non sensical relativism. 
Relativism, like positivis

Re: Primary matter

[Telmo Menezes]

On 22 June 2018 at 13:31, Bruno Marchal  wrote:
>
>> On 20 Jun 2018, at 13:51, Telmo Menezes  wrote:
>>
>> Hi Bruno,
>>
 I follow your reasoning, from one of your recent articles. This leaves
 me dissatisfied, but if I try to verbalize this dissatisfaction I feel
 stuck in a loop. Perhaps this illustrates your point.
>>>
>>>
>>> We might need to do some detour about what it would mean to explain 
>>> consciousness, or matter.
>>> I might ask myself if you are not asking too much, perhaps. Eventually, 
>>> something has to remain unexplainable for reason of self-consisteny. I 
>>> suspect it will be just where our intuition of numbers or combinators, or 
>>> of the distinction finite/infinite comes from (assuming mechanism), or just 
>>> why we trust the doctor!
>>
>> I thought about it for some time. It seems that at a meta level, we
>> are always stuck in this situation of "give me one miracle for free
>> and everything else becomes explainable". The miracle can be matter,
>> or consciousness, or arithmetic. I believe I have to accept this state
>> of affairs for the reason of self-consistency that you express above,
>> but I'm human and I still feel the curiosity. Epistemic limits are
>> hard to accept.
>>
>> Could it even be that it doesn't make sense to say that materialism is
>> true or false, or that idealism is true or false and so on? I mean in
>> the same sense that the sun is not really the center of the solar
>> system (the center is just a human mental model), but assuming it
>> makes it simpler to describe the orbits. Perhaps assuming materialism
>> makes it easier to describe certain aspects of nature, while assuming
>> comp makes it easier to describe others, but in the end we always have
>> to sacrifice something. Model realism at the meta level…
>
>
> We have to sacrifice something. But the point is that if the Brain or the 
> body is Turing emulable, then we have to sacrifice materialism.
> FAPP we lost nothing, unless we lose the appearance of matter, in which case 
> the observation of matter refutes comp, but up to now we don’t loss them, and 
> at least we have a rather simple explanation of consciousness, which has to 
> be sacrificed if we want to keep matter in the ontology, but then I am still 
> waiting for any non mechanist theory of consciousness (beyond the fairy 
> tales).

I agree that comp and materialism are incompatible, you convinced me a
long time ago.

My point is that, in certain extreme circumstances -- that Brent likes
to point out -- we are bound to act as-if materialism is true.
Surgeries, for example. I don't believe that consciousness is an
emergent property of brain activity, but at the same time I would
prefer my surgeon to assume that. This is a strange situation. I am
not inclined toward hyper-relativistic ideas XX century
post-modernism-style -- that seems like giving up on science and
truth. On the other hand, it seems that we are condemned to some
amount of relativism. Certain questions seem to be forever
undecidable, to steal a phrase. One example is politics: in every
political debate that I know of, both sides have a point.

It seems to me that this eternal dissatisfaction and "yes but"
feelings are part of "the state of affairs" at a very fundamental
level.

> It goes from the rough dissociated universal consciousness of Q to the 
> elaborate self-consciousness of PA or ZF, or us.
>
>
>
>
>
>> Darwinism does not seem to require it.
>
> It does. When the machine opts for <>p in the doubt between p and <>p, if 
> it let it go, in some sense, it transforms itself into a more speedy and 
> more efficacious machine, with respect to its most probable history.
> So, consciousness brings a self-speedable ability, which is quite handy 
> for self-moving being living in between a prey and a predator.

 I'm not convinced. Consider a simple computer simulation where agents
 are controlled by evolving rules. Agents can eat blue or red pills.
 90% of the time blue pills give them energy and red pills cause
 damage. 10% of the time the opposite happens. It is not possible to
 know before eating a pill. Let's say the rule system evolves to make
 the agents always eat blue pills and never red pills. Most of the time
 this helps the agents, precisely because it assumes the most probable
 histories. This is a simplified version of the sort of "decisions"
 that evolution makes, and I would say that it is reasonable to assume
 that our own evolutionary story consists of the accumulation of a
 great number of such decisions. I still don't see how consciousness
 makes a difference in such a mechanism.
>>>
>>> The reason why consciousness makes the difference is not related to the 
>>> environment, but is intrinsic to the machine itself.
>>>
>>> I am aware to be quick on this, but the reason is a bit mathematically 
>>> involved, and again, depends 

Re: Primary matter

[Bruno Marchal]

> On 23 Jun 2018, at 08:03, Brent Meeker  wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On 6/22/2018 4:41 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
 This does not mean that a conscious machine is necessarily more 
 efficacious on all task,
>>> What is the added undecideable sentence implied by consciousness?
>> “I am conscious”.
> 
> What does that speed up?  Does the speed up from adding an undeciable 
> sentence suffer from Goodheart's curse?
> 

Not sure what you mean. I would say “no”, in theory “I am not conscious” can 
also bring a speed-up, despite being obviously consistent, like PA with “I am 
inconsistent”. The speed-up is proved by constructive diagonalisation, and is 
thus non-intuitive, except we can imagine than being aware of one’s 
consciousness might help to planning, especially in an environment habited by 
conscious entities.
Consciousness is *the* speed-up mechanism. It makes us thinking using model, 
semantic, meaning, instead of living the syntactical relation at some low 
level. Meaning is easier than proof, even if it can be misleading for 
individuals, it gives sense to sense, and priorities to higher goal, like 
surviving.

Bruno




> Brent
> 
> 
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Re: Primary matter

[Brent Meeker]

On 6/22/2018 4:41 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

This does not mean that a conscious machine is necessarily more efficacious on 
all task,

What is the added undecideable sentence implied by consciousness?

“I am conscious”.


What does that speed up?  Does the speed up from adding an undeciable 
sentence suffer from Goodheart's curse?


Brent

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Re: Primary matter

[Bruno Marchal]

> On 21 Jun 2018, at 12:55, Telmo Menezes  wrote:
> 
> On 21 June 2018 at 00:53, Brent Meeker  wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> On 6/20/2018 4:51 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
>>> 
>>> Hi Bruno,
>>> 
> I follow your reasoning, from one of your recent articles. This leaves
> me dissatisfied, but if I try to verbalize this dissatisfaction I feel
> stuck in a loop. Perhaps this illustrates your point.
 
 
 We might need to do some detour about what it would mean to explain
 consciousness, or matter.
 I might ask myself if you are not asking too much, perhaps. Eventually,
 something has to remain unexplainable for reason of self-consisteny. I
 suspect it will be just where our intuition of numbers or combinators, or 
 of
 the distinction finite/infinite comes from (assuming mechanism), or just 
 why
 we trust the doctor!
>>> 
>>> I thought about it for some time. It seems that at a meta level, we
>>> are always stuck in this situation of "give me one miracle for free
>>> and everything else becomes explainable". The miracle can be matter,
>>> or consciousness, or arithmetic.
>> 
>> 
>> Do you see that is just another form of my circle of virtuous explanation.
>> Start wherever you understand or accept the starting point and then you can
>> go around the circle and get to everything else.
> 
> I see your point and even concede that it might be the wise approach
> for many things, but I don't think one can "get to everything else"
> this way.
> 
> The problem with my analogy with heliocentrism/geocentrism is that
> these are, in the end, compatible -- but the same doesn't seem to
> apply to materialism/computationalism. I think that Bruno proves
> convincingly that the two are incompatible. I'm not sure if you are
> convinced by the UDA argument or not. Are you?
> 
> If one takes this incompatibility seriously, things become a bit more
> tricky. In this case, and to expand on what I was suggesting:
> 
> - There is a set of beliefs M that are consistent with materialism;
> - There is a set of beliefs C that are consistent with computationalism;
> - The intersection between M and C, let's call it A, is non-empty but;
> - There are justified true beliefs that belong to C if one starts from
> comp, but not to A, let's say C*
> - There are justified true beliefs that belong to M if one starts from
> materialism, but not to A, let's say M*
> - Furthermore, there is empirical data that fits C* and not M*, and 
> vice-versa.

I might miss something. Empirical data fits with C*, and might fit M*, but only 
by abandoning M (although consistent with M’s appearance).

Bruno



> 
> Most people nowadays live only within A. It used to be the case that
> people lived with A + R (R is some set of religious beliefs), and that
> is more or less what enabled us to build civilization. R might be
> wrong, but it is clearly useful (and also has a very dark side, of
> course). A-only-living is the domain of mid-life crisis, existential
> despair, hating Mondays and scientific utilitarianism. M* is the
> domain of the emergentist project of neuroscience, and I would argue
> is the proto-religion of many contemporary scientists, and especially
> militant atheists. C* is the domain of neoplatonism. Not surprisingly,
> it irritates M* people, and vice-versa.
> 
> On a practical level, it makes sense to operate in M* while performing
> surgery, but it does not make sense to restrict oneself to M* when
> trying to answer fundamental questions. I think that's the point where
> it becomes religious dogmatism - R*.
> 
> Telmo.
> 
>> Brent
>> 
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Re: Primary matter

[Bruno Marchal]

> On 21 Jun 2018, at 06:44, Brent Meeker  wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On 6/11/2018 8:32 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>> Hi Telmo,
>> 
>> 
>>> On 11 Jun 2018, at 13:53, Telmo Menezes  wrote:
>>> 
>>> Hi Bruno,
>>> 
>>> Sorry for the delay, had a friend visiting.
>> 
>> No problem. From tomorrow (Tuesday) to Friday, I have many oral exams (+ a 
>> conference in Nivelles, a city nearby). So take your time to comment and 
>> express the dissatisfaction.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>> 
 Ah! Let me try to answer.Keep in mind that I assume elementary arithmetic 
 and thus computations, etc.
 (I am not sure I need YD here, but it can help).
 
 
> - Why does consciousness even exist?
 Consciousness is somehow the doubt between consistency and truth (<>p v p).
 
 All universal number self introspecting meet this, and it is felt as 
 immediately obvious, and thus true, and undoubtable, yet non rationally 
 justifiable, and even non definable.
>>> I follow your reasoning, from one of your recent articles. This leaves
>>> me dissatisfied, but if I try to verbalize this dissatisfaction I feel
>>> stuck in a loop. Perhaps this illustrates your point.
>> 
>> We might need to do some detour about what it would mean to explain 
>> consciousness, or matter.
>> I might ask myself if you are not asking too much, perhaps. Eventually, 
>> something has to remain unexplainable for reason of self-consisteny. I 
>> suspect it will be just where our intuition of numbers or combinators, or of 
>> the distinction finite/infinite comes from (assuming mechanism), or just why 
>> we trust the doctor!
>> 
>> 
>> 
 It goes from the rough dissociated universal consciousness of Q to the 
 elaborate self-consciousness of PA or ZF, or us.
 
 
 
 
 
> Darwinism does not seem to require it.
 It does. When the machine opts for <>p in the doubt between p and <>p, if 
 it let it go, in some sense, it transforms itself into a more speedy and 
 more efficacious machine, with respect to its most probable history.
 So, consciousness brings a self-speedable ability, which is quite handy 
 for self-moving being living in between a prey and a predator.
>>> I'm not convinced. Consider a simple computer simulation where agents
>>> are controlled by evolving rules. Agents can eat blue or red pills.
>>> 90% of the time blue pills give them energy and red pills cause
>>> damage. 10% of the time the opposite happens. It is not possible to
>>> know before eating a pill. Let's say the rule system evolves to make
>>> the agents always eat blue pills and never red pills. Most of the time
>>> this helps the agents, precisely because it assumes the most probable
>>> histories. This is a simplified version of the sort of "decisions"
>>> that evolution makes, and I would say that it is reasonable to assume
>>> that our own evolutionary story consists of the accumulation of a
>>> great number of such decisions. I still don't see how consciousness
>>> makes a difference in such a mechanism.
>> The reason why consciousness makes the difference is not related to the 
>> environment, but is intrinsic to the machine itself.
>> 
>> I am aware to be quick on this, but the reason is a bit mathematically 
>> involved, and again, depends crucially of a discovery made by Gödel, and 
>> exposed in his paper “the length of proof”.
>> 
>> Gödel discovered the existence that if you have some essentially undecidable 
>> theory, like RA, PA, ZF, there are always undecidable sentences, like <>RA 
>> in RA, of <>ZF in ZF, etc, then if you add an undecidable sentence (in the 
>> theory T, say) to T, you get a theory which not only will prove infinitely 
>> more sentence than T, but that infinitely many proofs will be arbitrarily 
>> shorter in T+the undecidable sentence than the proof of it in T, making 
>> “somehow” T+the undecidable sentence much faster than T.
>> 
>> Even if the added sentence is false, we get that speeding-up
> 
> ?? What does it mean that it is false?  I thought "true" was undefinable. 

True about the machine M is not definable by the machine M, but can be defined 
by some cognitively richer machine. Arithmetical truth is definable in set 
theory, analysis, etc.
Here true meant “satisfied by the standard model of arithmetic, i.e. the usual 
structure (N, 0, +, *).



> Do you mean it contradicts some theorem of T? 

No. I mean false, not inconsistent. Take the sentence "PA proves '0=1’ ”. It is 
false, but by incompleteness you cannot prove it in PA. (PA cannot prove it). 
So, you can add the sentence “PA proves 0=1” to PA, and you still have a 
consistent (yet unsound) theory. And the speed-up will still apply. 


> But in that case it would make T+the undecidable (false) sentence speed up 
> the proof of every sentence.

T + the undecidable sentence remains consistent. The arithmetical []f -> f is 
not provable, and indeed the modal []p -> p not a theorem of G. It is a theorem 
of G*, and 

Re: Primary matter

[Bruno Marchal]

> On 20 Jun 2018, at 13:51, Telmo Menezes  wrote:
> 
> Hi Bruno,
> 
>>> I follow your reasoning, from one of your recent articles. This leaves
>>> me dissatisfied, but if I try to verbalize this dissatisfaction I feel
>>> stuck in a loop. Perhaps this illustrates your point.
>> 
>> 
>> We might need to do some detour about what it would mean to explain 
>> consciousness, or matter.
>> I might ask myself if you are not asking too much, perhaps. Eventually, 
>> something has to remain unexplainable for reason of self-consisteny. I 
>> suspect it will be just where our intuition of numbers or combinators, or of 
>> the distinction finite/infinite comes from (assuming mechanism), or just why 
>> we trust the doctor!
> 
> I thought about it for some time. It seems that at a meta level, we
> are always stuck in this situation of "give me one miracle for free
> and everything else becomes explainable". The miracle can be matter,
> or consciousness, or arithmetic. I believe I have to accept this state
> of affairs for the reason of self-consistency that you express above,
> but I'm human and I still feel the curiosity. Epistemic limits are
> hard to accept.
> 
> Could it even be that it doesn't make sense to say that materialism is
> true or false, or that idealism is true or false and so on? I mean in
> the same sense that the sun is not really the center of the solar
> system (the center is just a human mental model), but assuming it
> makes it simpler to describe the orbits. Perhaps assuming materialism
> makes it easier to describe certain aspects of nature, while assuming
> comp makes it easier to describe others, but in the end we always have
> to sacrifice something. Model realism at the meta level…


We have to sacrifice something. But the point is that if the Brain or the body 
is Turing emulable, then we have to sacrifice materialism. 
FAPP we lost nothing, unless we lose the appearance of matter, in which case 
the observation of matter refutes comp, but up to now we don’t loss them, and 
at least we have a rather simple explanation of consciousness, which has to be 
sacrificed if we want to keep matter in the ontology, but then I am still 
waiting for any non mechanist theory of consciousness (beyond the fairy tales).




> 
 It goes from the rough dissociated universal consciousness of Q to the 
 elaborate self-consciousness of PA or ZF, or us.
 
 
 
 
 
> Darwinism does not seem to require it.
 
 It does. When the machine opts for <>p in the doubt between p and <>p, if 
 it let it go, in some sense, it transforms itself into a more speedy and 
 more efficacious machine, with respect to its most probable history.
 So, consciousness brings a self-speedable ability, which is quite handy 
 for self-moving being living in between a prey and a predator.
>>> 
>>> I'm not convinced. Consider a simple computer simulation where agents
>>> are controlled by evolving rules. Agents can eat blue or red pills.
>>> 90% of the time blue pills give them energy and red pills cause
>>> damage. 10% of the time the opposite happens. It is not possible to
>>> know before eating a pill. Let's say the rule system evolves to make
>>> the agents always eat blue pills and never red pills. Most of the time
>>> this helps the agents, precisely because it assumes the most probable
>>> histories. This is a simplified version of the sort of "decisions"
>>> that evolution makes, and I would say that it is reasonable to assume
>>> that our own evolutionary story consists of the accumulation of a
>>> great number of such decisions. I still don't see how consciousness
>>> makes a difference in such a mechanism.
>> 
>> The reason why consciousness makes the difference is not related to the 
>> environment, but is intrinsic to the machine itself.
>> 
>> I am aware to be quick on this, but the reason is a bit mathematically 
>> involved, and again, depends crucially of a discovery made by Gödel, and 
>> exposed in his paper “the length of proof”.
>> 
>> Gödel discovered the existence that if you have some essentially undecidable 
>> theory, like RA, PA, ZF, there are always undecidable sentences, like <>RA 
>> in RA, of <>ZF in ZF, etc, then if you add an undecidable sentence (in the 
>> theory T, say) to T, you get a theory which not only will prove infinitely 
>> more sentence than T, but that infinitely many proofs will be arbitrarily 
>> shorter in T+the undecidable sentence than the proof of it in T, making 
>> “somehow” T+the undecidable sentence much faster than T.
>> 
>> Even if the added sentence is false, we get that speeding-up (even for 
>> interesting sentences as Eric Vandenbussche convinced me (He thought that 
>> this was false, but eventually he proved that statement true).
>> 
>> Blum has got a similar result in computer science, and eventually Blum & 
>> Marquez characterised the spedable machine/set (he used the w_i instead of 
>> the phi_i), and he obtained the 

Re: Primary matter

[Jason Resch]

On Thu, Jun 21, 2018 at 3:52 PM, Brent Meeker  wrote:

>
> Who is more dogmatic about their world view, the MWI'ists or the CI'ers?
> Which sounds more like a religion, "Everything exists, we just can't see
> it." or "Shut up and calculate."?
>
>
>
"Nor can I ever sufficiently admire [Copernicus and his followers]; they
have through sheer force of intellect done such violence to their own
senses as to prefer what reason told them over what sensible experience
plainly showed them ... " -- Galileo

Jason

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Re: Primary matter

[Brent Meeker]

On 6/21/2018 3:55 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:

On 21 June 2018 at 00:53, Brent Meeker  wrote:


On 6/20/2018 4:51 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:

Hi Bruno,


I follow your reasoning, from one of your recent articles. This leaves
me dissatisfied, but if I try to verbalize this dissatisfaction I feel
stuck in a loop. Perhaps this illustrates your point.


We might need to do some detour about what it would mean to explain
consciousness, or matter.
I might ask myself if you are not asking too much, perhaps. Eventually,
something has to remain unexplainable for reason of self-consisteny. I
suspect it will be just where our intuition of numbers or combinators, or of
the distinction finite/infinite comes from (assuming mechanism), or just why
we trust the doctor!

I thought about it for some time. It seems that at a meta level, we
are always stuck in this situation of "give me one miracle for free
and everything else becomes explainable". The miracle can be matter,
or consciousness, or arithmetic.


Do you see that is just another form of my circle of virtuous explanation.
Start wherever you understand or accept the starting point and then you can
go around the circle and get to everything else.

I see your point and even concede that it might be the wise approach
for many things, but I don't think one can "get to everything else"
this way.

The problem with my analogy with heliocentrism/geocentrism is that
these are, in the end, compatible -- but the same doesn't seem to
apply to materialism/computationalism. I think that Bruno proves
convincingly that the two are incompatible. I'm not sure if you are
convinced by the UDA argument or not. Are you?

If one takes this incompatibility seriously, things become a bit more
tricky. In this case, and to expand on what I was suggesting:

- There is a set of beliefs M that are consistent with materialism;
- There is a set of beliefs C that are consistent with computationalism;
- The intersection between M and C, let's call it A, is non-empty but;


In the virtuous circle theory you could start with M and explain C or 
vice versa.  At least if C is a comprehensive theory as proposed.  So A=C=M.



- There are justified true beliefs that belong to C if one starts from
comp, but not to A, let's say C*


Justified how?  By logical inference from Peano's axioms?  Note that C 
and M proceed to produce explanations in different ways and M doesn't 
aim to produce beliefs, only theories.  I realize that Bruno uses 
"belief" as shorthand for a relation between computable and some ideal 
machine.  So it's not clear to me that "belief" means the same thing in 
C and M.



- There are justified true beliefs that belong to M if one starts from
materialism, but not to A, let's say M*
- Furthermore, there is empirical data that fits C* and not M*, and vice-versa.


I don't think that's the case.  C seems to me to be capable to 
explaining anything (e.g. we're living in the Matrix).  The theories of 
M are certainly incomplete, but if there is empirical data inconsistent 
with those theories it just shows they have limited domain. If there is 
empirical data that is impossible to include in M how would we know; how 
could we be sure that it could not be included?




Most people nowadays live only within A. It used to be the case that
people lived with A + R (R is some set of religious beliefs), and that
is more or less what enabled us to build civilization. R might be
wrong, but it is clearly useful (and also has a very dark side, of
course). A-only-living is the domain of mid-life crisis, existential
despair, hating Mondays and scientific utilitarianism.


Get a grip, Telmo.  A is the best place to live.


M* is the
domain of the emergentist project of neuroscience, and I would argue
is the proto-religion of many contemporary scientists, and especially
militant atheists. C* is the domain of neoplatonism. Not surprisingly,
it irritates M* people, and vice-versa.


And it's the domain of the pseudo-science mystic who, feeling the loss 
of R, longs to recover that world view that puts them at the center of 
everything.




On a practical level, it makes sense to operate in M* while performing
surgery, but it does not make sense to restrict oneself to M* when
trying to answer fundamental questions. I think that's the point where
it becomes religious dogmatism - R*.


Who is more dogmatic about their world view, the MWI'ists or the 
CI'ers?  Which sounds more like a religion, "Everything exists, we just 
can't see it." or "Shut up and calculate."?


Brent

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Re: Primary matter

[Telmo Menezes]

On 21 June 2018 at 00:53, Brent Meeker  wrote:
>
>
> On 6/20/2018 4:51 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
>>
>> Hi Bruno,
>>
 I follow your reasoning, from one of your recent articles. This leaves
 me dissatisfied, but if I try to verbalize this dissatisfaction I feel
 stuck in a loop. Perhaps this illustrates your point.
>>>
>>>
>>> We might need to do some detour about what it would mean to explain
>>> consciousness, or matter.
>>> I might ask myself if you are not asking too much, perhaps. Eventually,
>>> something has to remain unexplainable for reason of self-consisteny. I
>>> suspect it will be just where our intuition of numbers or combinators, or of
>>> the distinction finite/infinite comes from (assuming mechanism), or just why
>>> we trust the doctor!
>>
>> I thought about it for some time. It seems that at a meta level, we
>> are always stuck in this situation of "give me one miracle for free
>> and everything else becomes explainable". The miracle can be matter,
>> or consciousness, or arithmetic.
>
>
> Do you see that is just another form of my circle of virtuous explanation.
> Start wherever you understand or accept the starting point and then you can
> go around the circle and get to everything else.

I see your point and even concede that it might be the wise approach
for many things, but I don't think one can "get to everything else"
this way.

The problem with my analogy with heliocentrism/geocentrism is that
these are, in the end, compatible -- but the same doesn't seem to
apply to materialism/computationalism. I think that Bruno proves
convincingly that the two are incompatible. I'm not sure if you are
convinced by the UDA argument or not. Are you?

If one takes this incompatibility seriously, things become a bit more
tricky. In this case, and to expand on what I was suggesting:

- There is a set of beliefs M that are consistent with materialism;
- There is a set of beliefs C that are consistent with computationalism;
- The intersection between M and C, let's call it A, is non-empty but;
- There are justified true beliefs that belong to C if one starts from
comp, but not to A, let's say C*
- There are justified true beliefs that belong to M if one starts from
materialism, but not to A, let's say M*
- Furthermore, there is empirical data that fits C* and not M*, and vice-versa.

Most people nowadays live only within A. It used to be the case that
people lived with A + R (R is some set of religious beliefs), and that
is more or less what enabled us to build civilization. R might be
wrong, but it is clearly useful (and also has a very dark side, of
course). A-only-living is the domain of mid-life crisis, existential
despair, hating Mondays and scientific utilitarianism. M* is the
domain of the emergentist project of neuroscience, and I would argue
is the proto-religion of many contemporary scientists, and especially
militant atheists. C* is the domain of neoplatonism. Not surprisingly,
it irritates M* people, and vice-versa.

On a practical level, it makes sense to operate in M* while performing
surgery, but it does not make sense to restrict oneself to M* when
trying to answer fundamental questions. I think that's the point where
it becomes religious dogmatism - R*.

Telmo.

> Brent
>
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Re: Primary matter

[Brent Meeker]

On 6/11/2018 8:32 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

Hi Telmo,



On 11 Jun 2018, at 13:53, Telmo Menezes  wrote:

Hi Bruno,

Sorry for the delay, had a friend visiting.


No problem. From tomorrow (Tuesday) to Friday, I have many oral exams (+ a 
conference in Nivelles, a city nearby). So take your time to comment and 
express the dissatisfaction.







Ah! Let me try to answer.Keep in mind that I assume elementary arithmetic and 
thus computations, etc.
(I am not sure I need YD here, but it can help).



- Why does consciousness even exist?

Consciousness is somehow the doubt between consistency and truth (<>p v p).

All universal number self introspecting meet this, and it is felt as 
immediately obvious, and thus true, and undoubtable, yet non rationally 
justifiable, and even non definable.

I follow your reasoning, from one of your recent articles. This leaves
me dissatisfied, but if I try to verbalize this dissatisfaction I feel
stuck in a loop. Perhaps this illustrates your point.


We might need to do some detour about what it would mean to explain 
consciousness, or matter.
I might ask myself if you are not asking too much, perhaps. Eventually, 
something has to remain unexplainable for reason of self-consisteny. I suspect 
it will be just where our intuition of numbers or combinators, or of the 
distinction finite/infinite comes from (assuming mechanism), or just why we 
trust the doctor!




It goes from the rough dissociated universal consciousness of Q to the 
elaborate self-consciousness of PA or ZF, or us.






Darwinism does not seem to require it.

It does. When the machine opts for <>p in the doubt between p and <>p, if it 
let it go, in some sense, it transforms itself into a more speedy and more efficacious 
machine, with respect to its most probable history.
So, consciousness brings a self-speedable ability, which is quite handy for 
self-moving being living in between a prey and a predator.

I'm not convinced. Consider a simple computer simulation where agents
are controlled by evolving rules. Agents can eat blue or red pills.
90% of the time blue pills give them energy and red pills cause
damage. 10% of the time the opposite happens. It is not possible to
know before eating a pill. Let's say the rule system evolves to make
the agents always eat blue pills and never red pills. Most of the time
this helps the agents, precisely because it assumes the most probable
histories. This is a simplified version of the sort of "decisions"
that evolution makes, and I would say that it is reasonable to assume
that our own evolutionary story consists of the accumulation of a
great number of such decisions. I still don't see how consciousness
makes a difference in such a mechanism.

The reason why consciousness makes the difference is not related to the 
environment, but is intrinsic to the machine itself.

I am aware to be quick on this, but the reason is a bit mathematically 
involved, and again, depends crucially of a discovery made by Gödel, and 
exposed in his paper “the length of proof”.

Gödel discovered the existence that if you have some essentially undecidable theory, like 
RA, PA, ZF, there are always undecidable sentences, like <>RA in RA, of <>ZF in 
ZF, etc, then if you add an undecidable sentence (in the theory T, say) to T, you get a 
theory which not only will prove infinitely more sentence than T, but that infinitely many 
proofs will be arbitrarily shorter in T+the undecidable sentence than the proof of it in T, 
making “somehow” T+the undecidable sentence much faster than T.

Even if the added sentence is false, we get that speeding-up


?? What does it mean that it is false?  I thought "true" was 
undefinable.  Do you mean it contradicts some theorem of T?  But in that 
case it would make T+the undecidable (false) sentence speed up the proof 
of every sentence.



(even for interesting sentences as Eric Vandenbussche convinced me (He thought 
that this was false, but eventually he proved that statement true).

Blum has got a similar result in computer science, and eventually Blum & 
Marquez characterised the spedable machine/set (he used the w_i instead of the 
phi_i), and he obtained the class of sub-creative set, which generalised the 
creative set (which correspond to the universal machine).
This means that if you take a slow universal machine, like the Babbage Machine, 
and a very efficacious machine, like a super-quantum computer, then you can by 
make the Babbage machine more rapid than the quantum computer on *almost* all 
inputs (= all except a finite number of exceptions), and even arbitrarily more 
rapid. Of course the “almost” limit seriously the applicability of that 
theorem, but in arithmetic, and for the FPI, that can play a rôle.

In particular, take a machine which observe itself, and as some inductive-inference 
ability. By Gödel, or G, the machine can prove that if she is consistent, then her 
consistency is not provable. The machine can also see that she never 

Re: Primary matter

[Brent Meeker]

On 6/20/2018 4:51 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:

Hi Bruno,


I follow your reasoning, from one of your recent articles. This leaves
me dissatisfied, but if I try to verbalize this dissatisfaction I feel
stuck in a loop. Perhaps this illustrates your point.


We might need to do some detour about what it would mean to explain 
consciousness, or matter.
I might ask myself if you are not asking too much, perhaps. Eventually, 
something has to remain unexplainable for reason of self-consisteny. I suspect 
it will be just where our intuition of numbers or combinators, or of the 
distinction finite/infinite comes from (assuming mechanism), or just why we 
trust the doctor!

I thought about it for some time. It seems that at a meta level, we
are always stuck in this situation of "give me one miracle for free
and everything else becomes explainable". The miracle can be matter,
or consciousness, or arithmetic.


Do you see that is just another form of my circle of virtuous 
explanation.  Start wherever you understand or accept the starting point 
and then you can go around the circle and get to everything else.


Brent

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Re: Primary matter

[Telmo Menezes]

Hi Bruno,

>> I follow your reasoning, from one of your recent articles. This leaves
>> me dissatisfied, but if I try to verbalize this dissatisfaction I feel
>> stuck in a loop. Perhaps this illustrates your point.
>
>
> We might need to do some detour about what it would mean to explain 
> consciousness, or matter.
> I might ask myself if you are not asking too much, perhaps. Eventually, 
> something has to remain unexplainable for reason of self-consisteny. I 
> suspect it will be just where our intuition of numbers or combinators, or of 
> the distinction finite/infinite comes from (assuming mechanism), or just why 
> we trust the doctor!

I thought about it for some time. It seems that at a meta level, we
are always stuck in this situation of "give me one miracle for free
and everything else becomes explainable". The miracle can be matter,
or consciousness, or arithmetic. I believe I have to accept this state
of affairs for the reason of self-consistency that you express above,
but I'm human and I still feel the curiosity. Epistemic limits are
hard to accept.

Could it even be that it doesn't make sense to say that materialism is
true or false, or that idealism is true or false and so on? I mean in
the same sense that the sun is not really the center of the solar
system (the center is just a human mental model), but assuming it
makes it simpler to describe the orbits. Perhaps assuming materialism
makes it easier to describe certain aspects of nature, while assuming
comp makes it easier to describe others, but in the end we always have
to sacrifice something. Model realism at the meta level...

>>> It goes from the rough dissociated universal consciousness of Q to the 
>>> elaborate self-consciousness of PA or ZF, or us.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
 Darwinism does not seem to require it.
>>>
>>> It does. When the machine opts for <>p in the doubt between p and <>p, if 
>>> it let it go, in some sense, it transforms itself into a more speedy and 
>>> more efficacious machine, with respect to its most probable history.
>>> So, consciousness brings a self-speedable ability, which is quite handy for 
>>> self-moving being living in between a prey and a predator.
>>
>> I'm not convinced. Consider a simple computer simulation where agents
>> are controlled by evolving rules. Agents can eat blue or red pills.
>> 90% of the time blue pills give them energy and red pills cause
>> damage. 10% of the time the opposite happens. It is not possible to
>> know before eating a pill. Let's say the rule system evolves to make
>> the agents always eat blue pills and never red pills. Most of the time
>> this helps the agents, precisely because it assumes the most probable
>> histories. This is a simplified version of the sort of "decisions"
>> that evolution makes, and I would say that it is reasonable to assume
>> that our own evolutionary story consists of the accumulation of a
>> great number of such decisions. I still don't see how consciousness
>> makes a difference in such a mechanism.
>
> The reason why consciousness makes the difference is not related to the 
> environment, but is intrinsic to the machine itself.
>
> I am aware to be quick on this, but the reason is a bit mathematically 
> involved, and again, depends crucially of a discovery made by Gödel, and 
> exposed in his paper “the length of proof”.
>
> Gödel discovered the existence that if you have some essentially undecidable 
> theory, like RA, PA, ZF, there are always undecidable sentences, like <>RA in 
> RA, of <>ZF in ZF, etc, then if you add an undecidable sentence (in the 
> theory T, say) to T, you get a theory which not only will prove infinitely 
> more sentence than T, but that infinitely many proofs will be arbitrarily 
> shorter in T+the undecidable sentence than the proof of it in T, making 
> “somehow” T+the undecidable sentence much faster than T.
>
> Even if the added sentence is false, we get that speeding-up (even for 
> interesting sentences as Eric Vandenbussche convinced me (He thought that 
> this was false, but eventually he proved that statement true).
>
> Blum has got a similar result in computer science, and eventually Blum & 
> Marquez characterised the spedable machine/set (he used the w_i instead of 
> the phi_i), and he obtained the class of sub-creative set, which generalised 
> the creative set (which correspond to the universal machine).

I am very interested in this but cannot find the reference... Can you give it?

> This means that if you take a slow universal machine, like the Babbage 
> Machine, and a very efficacious machine, like a super-quantum computer, then 
> you can by make the Babbage machine more rapid than the quantum computer on 
> *almost* all inputs (= all except a finite number of exceptions), and even 
> arbitrarily more rapid. Of course the “almost” limit seriously the 
> applicability of that theorem, but in arithmetic, and for the FPI, that can 
> play a rôle.

Very interesting, and I think related 

Re: Primary matter

[Bruno Marchal]

Hi Telmo,


> On 11 Jun 2018, at 13:53, Telmo Menezes  wrote:
> 
> Hi Bruno,
> 
> Sorry for the delay, had a friend visiting.


No problem. From tomorrow (Tuesday) to Friday, I have many oral exams (+ a 
conference in Nivelles, a city nearby). So take your time to comment and 
express the dissatisfaction. 




> 
> 
>> Ah! Let me try to answer.Keep in mind that I assume elementary arithmetic 
>> and thus computations, etc.
>> (I am not sure I need YD here, but it can help).
>> 
>> 
>>> 
>>> - Why does consciousness even exist?
>> 
>> Consciousness is somehow the doubt between consistency and truth (<>p v p).
>> 
>> All universal number self introspecting meet this, and it is felt as 
>> immediately obvious, and thus true, and undoubtable, yet non rationally 
>> justifiable, and even non definable.
> 
> I follow your reasoning, from one of your recent articles. This leaves
> me dissatisfied, but if I try to verbalize this dissatisfaction I feel
> stuck in a loop. Perhaps this illustrates your point.


We might need to do some detour about what it would mean to explain 
consciousness, or matter. 
I might ask myself if you are not asking too much, perhaps. Eventually, 
something has to remain unexplainable for reason of self-consisteny. I suspect 
it will be just where our intuition of numbers or combinators, or of the 
distinction finite/infinite comes from (assuming mechanism), or just why we 
trust the doctor!



> 
>> It goes from the rough dissociated universal consciousness of Q to the 
>> elaborate self-consciousness of PA or ZF, or us.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>> Darwinism does not seem to require it.
>> 
>> It does. When the machine opts for <>p in the doubt between p and <>p, if it 
>> let it go, in some sense, it transforms itself into a more speedy and more 
>> efficacious machine, with respect to its most probable history.
>> So, consciousness brings a self-speedable ability, which is quite handy for 
>> self-moving being living in between a prey and a predator.
> 
> I'm not convinced. Consider a simple computer simulation where agents
> are controlled by evolving rules. Agents can eat blue or red pills.
> 90% of the time blue pills give them energy and red pills cause
> damage. 10% of the time the opposite happens. It is not possible to
> know before eating a pill. Let's say the rule system evolves to make
> the agents always eat blue pills and never red pills. Most of the time
> this helps the agents, precisely because it assumes the most probable
> histories. This is a simplified version of the sort of "decisions"
> that evolution makes, and I would say that it is reasonable to assume
> that our own evolutionary story consists of the accumulation of a
> great number of such decisions. I still don't see how consciousness
> makes a difference in such a mechanism.

The reason why consciousness makes the difference is not related to the 
environment, but is intrinsic to the machine itself.

I am aware to be quick on this, but the reason is a bit mathematically 
involved, and again, depends crucially of a discovery made by Gödel, and 
exposed in his paper “the length of proof”.

Gödel discovered the existence that if you have some essentially undecidable 
theory, like RA, PA, ZF, there are always undecidable sentences, like <>RA in 
RA, of <>ZF in ZF, etc, then if you add an undecidable sentence (in the theory 
T, say) to T, you get a theory which not only will prove infinitely more 
sentence than T, but that infinitely many proofs will be arbitrarily shorter in 
T+the undecidable sentence than the proof of it in T, making “somehow” T+the 
undecidable sentence much faster than T.

Even if the added sentence is false, we get that speeding-up (even for 
interesting sentences as Eric Vandenbussche convinced me (He thought that this 
was false, but eventually he proved that statement true).

Blum has got a similar result in computer science, and eventually Blum & 
Marquez characterised the spedable machine/set (he used the w_i instead of the 
phi_i), and he obtained the class of sub-creative set, which generalised the 
creative set (which correspond to the universal machine).
This means that if you take a slow universal machine, like the Babbage Machine, 
and a very efficacious machine, like a super-quantum computer, then you can by 
make the Babbage machine more rapid than the quantum computer on *almost* all 
inputs (= all except a finite number of exceptions), and even arbitrarily more 
rapid. Of course the “almost” limit seriously the applicability of that 
theorem, but in arithmetic, and for the FPI, that can play a rôle.

In particular, take a machine which observe itself, and as some 
inductive-inference ability. By Gödel, or G, the machine can prove that if she 
is consistent, then her consistency is not provable. The machine can also see 
that she never succeed in proving her consistency, and eventually link this 
with the fact that her consistency (<>t) is not provable. Then, the machine can 

Re: Primary matter

[Telmo Menezes]

Hi Bruno,

Sorry for the delay, had a friend visiting.


> Ah! Let me try to answer.Keep in mind that I assume elementary arithmetic and 
> thus computations, etc.
> (I am not sure I need YD here, but it can help).
>
>
>>
>> - Why does consciousness even exist?
>
> Consciousness is somehow the doubt between consistency and truth (<>p v p).
>
> All universal number self introspecting meet this, and it is felt as 
> immediately obvious, and thus true, and undoubtable, yet non rationally 
> justifiable, and even non definable.

I follow your reasoning, from one of your recent articles. This leaves
me dissatisfied, but if I try to verbalize this dissatisfaction I feel
stuck in a loop. Perhaps this illustrates your point.

> It goes from the rough dissociated universal consciousness of Q to the 
> elaborate self-consciousness of PA or ZF, or us.
>
>
>
>
>
>> Darwinism does not seem to require it.
>
> It does. When the machine opts for <>p in the doubt between p and <>p, if it 
> let it go, in some sense, it transforms itself into a more speedy and more 
> efficacious machine, with respect to its most probable history.
> So, consciousness brings a self-speedable ability, which is quite handy for 
> self-moving being living in between a prey and a predator.

I'm not convinced. Consider a simple computer simulation where agents
are controlled by evolving rules. Agents can eat blue or red pills.
90% of the time blue pills give them energy and red pills cause
damage. 10% of the time the opposite happens. It is not possible to
know before eating a pill. Let's say the rule system evolves to make
the agents always eat blue pills and never red pills. Most of the time
this helps the agents, precisely because it assumes the most probable
histories. This is a simplified version of the sort of "decisions"
that evolution makes, and I would say that it is reasonable to assume
that our own evolutionary story consists of the accumulation of a
great number of such decisions. I still don't see how consciousness
makes a difference in such a mechanism.


>> - What is the relationship between consciousness and matter?
>
> The first is true, the second is consistent.

Ok. It's hard to disagree.

> (And I hope that the first is first person and the second is first person 
> plural, but that is exactly what Everett or QM confirms, but is still unclear 
> in arithmetic.
>
>
>
>
>> - Is there a reality that is external to conscious perception?
>
>
> The arithmetical reality, from which conscious perception build up the 
> histories. Some having long and deep reason above the substitution level, as, 
> by the delay invariance in the first person perspective, below our 
> substitution level, we have only a statistics on many histories, obeying some 
> quantum (like) logic. The apparent primary physical reality is really a sum 
> on all “fictions”.
>
> As long as nature continue to verify this, I think that explain a lot. Note 
> that the soul ([]p & p) is not a machine, in its own perspective. Only in God 
> eyes, but even that is an open question for the completed quantified theory 
> of the soul, where evidences exist that even God is limited to that respect, 
> which might explain why even God cannot predict to you, where you will feel 
> after a duplication.

My intuitive understanding of FPI is that both branches occur, they
are both equally real and both are experienced in the first person,
but from within one branch one cannot perceive the other, so the
indeterminacy is, in a sense, an illusion created by the limitations
of our own awareness -- the same limitations, of course, that make the
human experience possible.

Cheers,
Telmo.

> Please, demolish me now. What do I miss? (Of course, I will be unable to 
> explain where the numbers comes from, but this, up to recursive equivalence, 
> the universal machine (Löbian like PA) can already explain to be not 
> explainable).
>
> Bruno
>
>
>
>
>
>>
>>> My view is scientifically speaking we never know anything "fundamental" and
>>> the search for it is like the hunting of the snark.  We seek theories with
>>> more scope and more accuracy, but being "more fundamental" doesn't entail
>>> that something is most fundamental.   Mystics like Bruno postulate something
>>> and then build structures on it which, by some (often small) agreement with
>>> experience, PROVE their postulates.  But as Feynman used to point out, this
>>> is Greek mathematics.  Science is like Persian mathematics in which the
>>> mathematician seeks to identify all the possible axiom sets that entail the
>>> observations.
>>
>> I tend to agree that scientifically we never know anything
>> fundamental. I do believe that it is possible to use reason to acquire
>> knowledge by means that are not the scientific method. I am certain
>> that I possess knowledge that was not acquired by scientific means,
>> for example I know how it feels to be me. Even if my metaphysical
>> obsessions are a fool's errand, I do think it is 

Re: Primary matter

[Bruno Marchal]

> On 10 Jun 2018, at 19:25, John Clark  wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On Sun, Jun 10, 2018 at 6:41 AM, Bruno Marchal  <mailto:marc...@ulb.ac.be>> wrote:
> 
> ​>>​I don't care who led what, and neither physics nor mathematical logic is 
> religion.  I asked 3 times but you did not provide one single example of an 
> improvement in theology between 500BC and 500AD . Not one.  
> 
> ​>​The improvement is from believing in giant Turtles to both modern physics 
> and mathematics,
> 
> God creating the world in 4004 BC in 6 days is just as inconsistent with the 
> facts as the Earth being held up by a giant turtle,


We agree on this. I have not read one book in (rational) theology which contest 
this, even when written by Christian. The big-Bang theory was developed by 
l’abbé Lemaitre, who was both christian theologian and cosmologist. That is why 
I suggest you to read the text of the rationalist theologian, and not the 
popular religion which have been imposed by terror and violence as it is 
happens when theology is withdrawn from science to political manipulation tool 
(lie a part of Health politics today, or genetics in the USSR, …).



>  and God tricking is to torture His son to death so He could forgive us for 
> eating a apple is just as stupid as a turtle. 

By theology, I have been ultra-clear that I talk only about the rationalist. 
None ever believed any literal account of any “sacred texts”, on the contrary, 
they foresaw all the problem which can happen if we abandon reason in the 
domain. 




> And  neither modern physics  nor mathematics is theology.  I asked  4  times 
> but you did not provide one single example of an improvement in theology 
> between 500BC and 500AD . Not one.  


Modern physics is not theology, obviously. But physics, like mathematics and 
mathematical logic are born from rational theology.  They they have separated, 
even more so in the context where theology has been separated from science.



> 
> ​>>​So you don't know of an example of a improvement in theology  made 
> between 500BC and 500AD but for some unspecified reason you believe there may 
> be such a example somewhere in some book and you want me to try to find one.
> 
> 
> > No, I want you to read them, and understand the improvement by yoursel​f
> 
> So if I read all the ancient books you recommend I could someday be smart 
> just like you? No thanks.
> 
>  
> ​> ​You just cannot separate theology of science, without making them both 
> inexact and inhuman.
> 
> I have no idea if that's true or not because I have no idea what "theology of 
> science " means.


That was a typo. I meant “…theology FROM science”. We cannot make that 
separation without making science, or a part of it, into a theology. That is 
why some people believes that “materialism” sides with science, where any 
serious scientists knowing a bit in the domain knows that there has never been 
any empirical evidence for primary matter. Not one. Is is a simplifying 
hypothesis, like “the earth is flat” is a simplifying hypothesis working well 
for architect, but problematic for airline and astronautics.




> Bruno, I don't believe you can write clearly in ANY language, except of 
> course for Brunospeak, and only one person on the planet is fluent in 
> Brunospeak. For example: 
> 
> ​"​your use of “primary matter”, that you call simply “matter” is not just 
> theological, but is invalid from a scientist (in theology) point of view.​“

That has been proved, and the systematic childish “debunking” of step 3 assures 
everybody of your lack or rationality in the cognitive science or philosophy of 
mind (or rational theology in the original sense of those who have begun the 
investigations.



> 
> In the unlikely event there is a God even He doesn't know what that means.


Like your constant negative tone and ad hominem sliding illustrates you have 
prejudices, on my person apparently. 


> 
> ​> ​Fundamental science and religion have always been the same thing​.​
> 
> So the pope is a scientist as was Osama bin Laden,


Again, you come back to your belief that the theology of the institionalized 
religion, which in occident has been persecuted for centuries, are the right 
theologian. You criticises the absurdity of religion, but by throwing the baby 
(rational theology) with the water (the fake theology imposed for political 
purpose), you help the fake and prevent the search of truth. That is why I say 
that the non-agnostic atheists (who share with the christian the religious 
belief in primary matter and who share the exclusively christian notion of God) 
are ally against the return of science and reason in the field. 

Bruno





> Einstein was a rabbi, and the words physics, mathematics, and even science 
> should all be retired and replace by t

Re: Primary matter

[John Clark]

On Sun, Jun 10, 2018 at 6:41 AM, Bruno Marchal  wrote:

​>>​
>> I don't care who led what, and neither physics nor mathematical logic is
>> religion.  I asked 3 times but you did not provide one single example of an
>> improvement in theology between 500BC and 500AD . Not one.
>
>
> ​>​
> *The improvement is from believing in giant Turtles to both modern physics
> and mathematics,*
>

God creating the world in 4004 BC in 6 days is just as inconsistent with
the facts as the Earth being held up by a giant turtle,  and God tricking
is to torture His son to death so He could forgive us for eating a apple is
just as stupid as a turtle.  And  neither modern physics  nor mathematics
is theology.  I asked  4  times but you did not provide one single example
of an improvement in theology between 500BC and 500AD . Not one.
>
>
​>>​
>> So you don't know of an example of a improvement in theology  made
>> between 500BC and 500AD but for some unspecified reason you believe there
>> may be such a example somewhere in some book and you want me to try to find
>> one.
>
>
>
> > No, I want you to read them, and understand the improvement by yoursel
> ​f
>

So if I read all the ancient books you recommend I could someday be smart
just like you? No thanks.



> ​> ​
> You just cannot separate theology of science, without making them both
> inexact and inhuman.
>

I have no idea if that's true or not because I have no idea what "theology
of science " means. Bruno, I don't believe you can write clearly in ANY
language, except of course for Brunospeak, and only one person on the
planet is fluent in Brunospeak. For example:

*​"​your use of “primary matter”, that you call simply “matter” is not just
theological, but is invalid from a scientist (in theology) point of view.​"*

In the unlikely event there is a God even He doesn't know what that means.

*​> ​Fundamental science and religion have always been the same thing​.​*


So the pope is a scientist as was Osama bin Laden, Einstein was a rabbi,
and the words physics, mathematics, and even science should all be retired
and replace by the single word "theology".  I'm curious, does anybody
besides Bruno think that would be a good idea?

​John K Clark​



> So you don't know of an example of a improvement in theology  made between
500BC and 500AD but for some unspecified reason you believe there may be
such a example somewhere in some book and you want me to try to find one.

No, I want you to read them, and understand the improvement by yourself

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Re: Primary matter

[Bruno Marchal]

> On 8 Jun 2018, at 20:14, John Clark  wrote:
> 
> On Fri, Jun 8, 2018 at 6:49 AM, Bruno Marchal  <mailto:marc...@ulb.ac.be>> wrote:
> 
> ​​>> ​Here? Where? You said there were many improvements in theology between 
> 500BC and 500AD and I asked for examples, and for the second time you were 
> unable to provide a single one. ​
> 
> ​> ​I provided them; already twice in this thread. You are simply lying here. 
> I gave the references.
> 
> You provided a list of people, you did not provide one single example of an 
> improvement in theology made between 500BC and 500AD . Not one.
> 
> ​>> ​​Be specific! What improvement in theology are you referring to? ​
>  
> ​> ​This who led to the first of mathematics, physics,  up to mathematical 
> logic.
> 
> I don't care who led what, and neither physics nor mathematical logic is 
> religion.  I asked 3 times but you did not provide one single example of an 
> improvement in theology between 500BC and 500AD . Not one.  

The improvement is from believing in giant Turtles to both modern physics and 
mathematics, and eventually that the ultimate reality is a immaterial  sort of 
person. It is slow and hard to explain, especially to someone having show so 
much bad faith, that I will not try to develop. But the improvement has stopped 
in Occident with the assassination of Hypatia (who was teaching math and 
Pltonius theology in Alexandria) and more so with Justinian closure or Plato 
Academy. Theology has continued to progress in the middle-east, up to Averroes. 
Unfortunately, in the Middle-east, Al Ghazali will win the date against 
Averroes, and science, including theology, will decline in the Middle-east 
since then. But Averoes ideas will survive in part and come “back” in Occident, 
leading to the renaissance. 

The big difference between Averoes and Al Ghazali is that Averoes explains that 
in theology, (which really just meant for him: fundamental science) the 
interpretation of texts and experiences has to be subdued to reason, where Al 
Ghazali defends, like the Muslim Brotherhood today, the idea that reason must 
be subdued to texts, which is a total drawback from the rational approach of 
the greek Theologian (again from Pythagorus to Damascus). That subduction of 
reason to texts is what allowed the political use of religion, which is a 
technic of control of people by “special interest”.

You just cannot separate theology of science, without making them both inexact 
and inhuman.

If the christians did not fall in that trap themselves, we would have avoided 
1500 years of dark ages, and we might not ever been so naïve to believe that 
there is a primary physical universe, given that there has never been any 
evidences for it.






>  
> ​> ​I gave the references, just read them.
> 
> So you don't know of an example of a improvement in theology  made between 
> 500BC and 500AD but for some unspecified reason you believe there may be such 
> a example somewhere in some book and you want me to try to find one.
> 
No, I want you to read them, and understand the improvement by yourself, but I 
make no illusion, given that you cannot understand step 3, which is far more 
simple than any of those old text. I have learned greek to be able to compare 
different translation.

Also, you seem to be not aware that your use of “primary matter”, that you call 
simply “matter” is not just theological, but is invalid from a scientist (in 
theology) point of view. 

Fundamental science and religion have always been the same thing, except when 
religion becomes a tools in (bad) politics. You just help those misuse of 
theology by special interest by refusing the coming back of reason and 
experiences in the field. You are a *de facto* ally of obscurantism. 

Bruno





> Bruno, is that really the best you can do? If it was reversed and I had said 
> something like that in our debates would it have convince you that I was 
> right? If so I could have saved a lot of time by just writing “some book 
> shows that you are wrong”
> 
> ​ over and over.​
> 
>  ​ ​John K Clark 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>  
> 
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Re: Green stars (was Primary matter)

[Lawrence Crowell]

On Thursday, June 7, 2018 at 6:22:14 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote:
>
>
>
> On 6/7/2018 3:24 PM, Russell Standish wrote: 
> > The appearance of colour is as much psychological as anything. We 
> > would have evolved to perceive ambient light as white - doesn't matter 
> > whether there are clear skies, or it is cloudy, the brain will adjust, 
> > given appropriate cues. 
>
> Yeah, my wife installed a blue canvas awning over our back patio. When I 
> sit out there reading a book and I look up, our yard which is so thick 
> with plants I call it "Marsha's jungle" looks faintly red. 
>
> Brent 
>

It does turn out the perception of green is not robust. Green when added to 
other colors tends not to have greenish coloration. Maybe other ETs out 
there might marvel at why there are so many green stars and few yellow ones.

LC

 [image: File:AdditiveColor.svg]

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Re: Primary matter

[John Clark]

On Fri, Jun 8, 2018 at 6:49 AM, Bruno Marchal  wrote:

​
>> ​>> ​
>> Here? Where? You said there were many improvements in theology between
>> 500BC and 500AD and I asked for examples, and for the second time you were
>> unable to provide a single one. ​
>
>
> ​>* ​*
> *I provided them; already twice in this thread. You are simply lying here.
> I gave the references.*
>

You provided a list of people, you did not provide one single example of an
improvement in theology made between 500BC and 500AD . Not one.

​>> ​
>> ​Be specific! What improvement in theology are you referring to? ​
>
>
> *​> ​This who led to the first of mathematics, physics,  up to
> mathematical logic.*
>

I don't care who led what, and neither physics nor mathematical logic is
religion.  I asked 3 times but you did not provide one single example of an
improvement in theology between 500BC and 500AD . Not one.


> ​> ​
> *I gave the references, just read them.*
>

So you don't know of an example of a improvement in theology  made between
500BC and 500AD but for some unspecified reason you believe there may be
such a example somewhere in some book and you want me to try to find one.
Bruno, is that really the best you can do? If it was reversed and I had
said something like that in our debates would it have convince you that I
was right? If so I could have saved a lot of time by just writing “some
book shows that you are wrong”
​ over and over.​


​ ​
John K Clark

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Re: Primary matter

[Bruno Marchal]

> On 8 Jun 2018, at 13:10, Brent Meeker  wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On 6/8/2018 3:54 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>> You confuse religion with argument per authority, and tat will continue as 
>> long as theology does not come back to science, which put reason before 
>> texts, and is modest in never claiming truth, but only means of testing 
>> ideas.
> 
> No, you are confusing religion and theology. 

OK. I do that sometimes. I try to use theology, the field. Religion means for 
me “conception of reality”, but its popular meaning is often impregnated with 
its current authoritarian trend.




> Very few religious people are theologians.  They believe things on faith 
> because they are told they are written in sacred texts.  It is a form of 
> social control which works fairly well. That is why it is so widespread. It 
> depends though on poisoning the minds of children with myths and elevating 
> faith without reason to a virtue.

I agree. Obviously that is not the religion or theology I am talking about. 

Bruno



> 
> Brent
> “When we come to believe, we have no desire to believe  anything else, for we 
> begin by believing that there is nothing else  which we have to believe….  I 
> warn people not to seek for anything  beyond what they came to believe, for 
> that was all they needed to  seek for. In the last resort,  however, it is 
> better for you to remain ignorant, for fear that you  come to know what you 
> should not know….  Let curiosity give place to  faith, and glory to 
> salvation. Let them at least be no hindrance, or  let them keep quiet.  To 
> know nothing against the Rule [of faith] is  to know everything.”
> --- Tertullian
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Re: Primary matter

[Brent Meeker]

On 6/8/2018 3:54 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
You confuse religion with argument per authority, and tat will 
continue as long as theology does not come back to science, which put 
reason before texts, and is modest in never claiming truth, but only 
means of testing ideas.


No, you are confusing religion and theology.  Very few religious people 
are theologians.  They believe things on faith because they are told 
they are written in sacred texts.  It is a form of social control which 
works fairly well. That is why it is so widespread. It depends though on 
poisoning the minds of children with myths and elevating faith without 
reason to a virtue.


Brent
“When we come to believe, we have no desire to believe  anything else, 
for we begin by believing that there is nothing else  which we have to 
believe….  I warn people not to seek for anything  beyond what they came 
to believe, for that was all they needed to  seek for. In the last 
resort,  however, it is better for you to remain ignorant, for fear that 
you  come to know what you should not know….  Let curiosity give place 
to  faith, and glory to salvation. Let them at least be no hindrance, 
or  let them keep quiet.  To know nothing against the Rule [of faith] 
is  to know everything.”

    --- Tertullian

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Re: Primary matter

[Bruno Marchal]

> On 7 Jun 2018, at 23:11, Brent Meeker  wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On 6/7/2018 10:12 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>>> On 7 Jun 2018, at 02:26, Brent Meeker  wrote:
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On 6/6/2018 10:28 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
 It does. When the machine opts for <>p in the doubt between p and <>p, if 
 it let it go, in some sense, it transforms itself into a more speedy and 
 more efficacious machine, with respect to its most probable history.
 So, consciousness brings a self-speedable ability, which is quite handy 
 for self-moving being living in between a prey and a predator.
>>> 
>>> Do you play tennis, Bruno?  Try thinking consciously about your strokes to 
>>> speed up your game.
>> 
>> Consciousness speed all computations (to be sure it is only on all inputs 
>> except a finite number of exception, so it might not be directly practical), 
>> but if that happen, you can guess that the one computing more quickly will 
>> be better at tennis.
> 
> Computing more quickly, but unconsciously.  However, I don't see anyplace for 
> the unconscious in your theory.  Yet almost all thinking, as information 
> processing, is unconscious.


?

What you say is coherent with mechanism. Consciousness requires sophisticated 
loop. The unconscious is anything without that loop. No numbers sequences will 
support consciousness without having the relations making it emulating a 
universal machine, for example.




> 
>> When its opponent strike the ball, he feels (rightly) that has more time to 
>> react.
>> 
>> I did not say that trying to be conscious cannot also impair. Just that 
>> consciousness speed-up the whole process. (Admittedly not in a usable 
>> algorithmic way). That still can be self for entities not aware of the first 
>> person delays, confronted to the limiting sum on all computations, here and 
>> now, below their substitution level.
> 
> The "limiting sum on all computations" refers to your model of the UD. 

My model? 

The UD and its execution is a consequence of Kxy = x and Sxyz = xy(zy), or 
arithmetic. 



> But that is timeless, i.e. exists in Platonia.

The natural numbers are timeless, and with the addition and multiplication 
laws, that defines a block mindscape. It is not more platonic that a quantum 
field or GR, or any model of any physical theories, but it assumes much less, 
solves the mind-body problem up to verifiable consequences, and indeed, it 
match well the theories inferred from observation so far, which is not the case 
of physicalism which has still to use an indent thesis refuted in the indexical 
Digital Mechanis theory.

Bruno



> 
> Brent
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Re: Primary matter

[Bruno Marchal]

> On 7 Jun 2018, at 21:58, Brent Meeker  wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On 6/7/2018 1:24 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>>> ee above, i.e. because it is necessary.  Science may well determine when 
>>> and where and what relations there are.  But not why.  That's the 
>>> "engineering" solution to the hard problem of consciousness for which I am 
>>> often criticized.
>> Because you limit science. Like the modern Muslim (since Al Ghazali)  and 
>> christians (since the Roman Empire) , you want to separate religion from 
>> science. This lead to obscurantism and authorianism, as the video on the 
>> decline of science in islam illustrates well.
> 
> No, I want to eliminate religion. 

But then you will transform some science into a religion.

That explains why you seem to defend materialism, despite the ack of any 
evidences and actually may evidence against it. 

It is just impossible, for any universal machine, to eliminate religion. When 
you do that, you impose automatically your own religion upon the others.




> The reliance on mystic insights of prophets to tell us why things are and why 
> we must do X and not Y.

You confuse religion with argument per authority, and tat will continue as long 
as theology does not come back to science, which put reason before texts, and 
is modest in never claiming truth, but only means of testing ideas.

Bruno




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Re: Primary matter

[Bruno Marchal]

> On 7 Jun 2018, at 20:01, John Clark  wrote:
> 
> 
> On Thu, Jun 7, 2018 at 12:50 PM, Bruno Marchal  > wrote:
> 
> ​> ​I meant: here are the improvements described, in the works of Pythagorus 
> to Damascus.
> 
> ​Here? Where? You said there were many improvements in theology between 500BC 
> and 500AD and I asked for examples, and for the second time you were unable 
> to provide a single one. ​

I provided them; already twice in this thread. You are simply lying here. I 
gave the references.



>  
> ​> ​Stopped by the fake religion
> 
> ​That's redundant, fake is the only type of religion there is, or at least it 
> is in every language except for Brunospeak where words like "religion" and 
> "God" mean whatever Bruno wants them to ​mean today, and what they mean 
> tomorrow could be entirely different.  

You confuse religion before and after it is mixed with authoritarian powers. 
Doing that, you let it in the hand of the authoritarian powers. That rhetoric 
has been used by Al Ghazali, with the decline of Science in Islam as a 
consequence, and of course that has been done by the christians 6 centuries 
before.




> 
> ​​>>​What progress?? ​
>  
> ​> ​The one from Pythagorus to Damascus in Occident.
> 
> ​Be specific! What improvement in theology are you referring to? ​ 

This who led to the first of mathematics, physics,  up to mathematical logic. I 
gave the references, just read them. It is part of the history of science. It 
works only when people are spiritually mature enough to subdue the texts to 
reason, instead of the contrary. 

You confine theology in the hand of those who misuse it for personal power. A 
bit like today, health is confined in the hand of those who invest on disease 
and catastrophes. 

Bruno




> 
> > ?
> 
> ​!
> 
> ​John K Clark​
> 
> 
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Re: Primary matter

[Russell Standish]

On Wed, Jun 06, 2018 at 06:41:35PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote:
> 
> > 
> > One way of moving forward is that when you talk about the "Robust"
> > universe case, you are effectively postulating Platonism of
> > computations.
> 
> ?
> 
> I have used “robust” only for a physical universe. It is a physical
universe in which we can run a UD.

This seems rather bizarre - so a non-robust universe can run a UD if
it is immaterial, or can't run a UD at all (regardless of
materiality).

Sure the point of "robustness" is that it can instantiate a UD
(actually I would argue, can instantiate enough of a UD for consious
computations to be implemented). The point of step 7 is that
materiality (which hasn't been defined) cannot have any observable
influence over phenomenality if a UD is implementable.

> Obviously, if our expansion continue for ever, we can make a case that
our universe is not robust.

I assume you're referring to Tiplers Omega point argument. However, if
quantum computers are possible in our universe, then it is robust.

> That would be a problem with step 7, but step 8 (or equivalent) makes this 
> non relevant.

But step 8 only works for universes too feeble to run a UD.


-- 


Dr Russell StandishPhone 0425 253119 (mobile)
Principal, High Performance Coders
Visiting Senior Research Fellowhpco...@hpcoders.com.au
Economics, Kingston University http://www.hpcoders.com.au


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Re: Green stars (was Primary matter)

[Brent Meeker]

On 6/7/2018 3:24 PM, Russell Standish wrote:

The appearance of colour is as much psychological as anything. We
would have evolved to perceive ambient light as white - doesn't matter
whether there are clear skies, or it is cloudy, the brain will adjust,
given appropriate cues.


Yeah, my wife installed a blue canvas awning over our back patio. When I 
sit out there reading a book and I look up, our yard which is so thick 
with plants I call it "Marsha's jungle" looks faintly red.


Brent

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Re: Green stars (was Primary matter)

[Russell Standish]

On Thu, Jun 07, 2018 at 10:05:34AM -0400, John Clark wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 6, 2018 at 11:26 PM, Brent Meeker  wrote:
> 
> > *> hasn't the Sun been getting hotter, which would mean moving from yellow
> > toward green rather than the other way.  And it's still still more a yellow
> > than green store. *
> 
> 
> There are intensely red stars and there are pale blue stars but there are
> no green stars; the reason has to do with the fact that curve of blackbody
> radiation energy output verses color of an object at a given temperature is
> NOT symmetrical. It also has to do with the fact that the eye has 3
> different receptors for color, one for the red, green and blue. A star that
> gives off the peak of its energy in the red will still give off a
> substantial amount of energy in the infrared but the eye can't see that,
> and due to the non-symmetrical blackbody curve the energy drops off rapidly
> in the green and blue part of the spectrum, so only (or almost only) the
> red receptor in the eye is stimulated so we see it as intensely red.
> 
> A hotter star that gives off most of its energy in the blue would still
> give off a lot in the red and green so all 3 receptors would be stimulated
> and we'd see it as white, or if it was very very hot a bluish white (the
> output would drop off rapidly in the ultraviolet but we can’t see that so
> it doesn’t matter). Due to the shape of the blackbody curve there is no
> temperature that would give off its radiant energy in the green but none in
> the red or blue so that only the green receptor is stimulated. You can have
> green lasers but unlike stars that light is not produced by blackbody
> radiation, and because only the green receptor is stimulated it looks
> intensely green.
> 
>  John K Clark
> 

The appearance of colour is as much psychological as anything. We
would have evolved to perceive ambient light as white - doesn't matter
whether there are clear skies, or it is cloudy, the brain will adjust,
given appropriate cues. When we look at the sun, some of the blue
light is scattered, giving the sun a yellow appearance. When the sun
is closer to the horizon, the rays pass through more of the
atmosphere, scattering even more of the the blue and green parts of
the spectrum, so the sun appears a deeper red. That infamous dress
from a couple of years ago shows what happens to our perceptions when
cues about the ambient light is removed.

Anyway, if your photosynthetic apparatus absorbed at a single
frequency which you can adjust, you would set it to absorb at 500nm
(green), which is the peak of the sun's spectrum. This
appears to be what evolution did with cyanobacteria, giving its
purply-red colour. Of course it would be better to absorb the whole
spectrum, and appear black, but evolution is not omnipotent :).

Cheers
-- 


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Principal, High Performance Coders
Visiting Senior Research Fellowhpco...@hpcoders.com.au
Economics, Kingston University http://www.hpcoders.com.au


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Re: Primary matter

[Brent Meeker]

On 6/7/2018 10:12 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 7 Jun 2018, at 02:26, Brent Meeker  wrote:



On 6/6/2018 10:28 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

It does. When the machine opts for <>p in the doubt between p and <>p, if it 
let it go, in some sense, it transforms itself into a more speedy and more efficacious 
machine, with respect to its most probable history.
So, consciousness brings a self-speedable ability, which is quite handy for 
self-moving being living in between a prey and a predator.


Do you play tennis, Bruno?  Try thinking consciously about your strokes to 
speed up your game.


Consciousness speed all computations (to be sure it is only on all inputs 
except a finite number of exception, so it might not be directly practical), 
but if that happen, you can guess that the one computing more quickly will be 
better at tennis.


Computing more quickly, but unconsciously.  However, I don't see 
anyplace for the unconscious in your theory.  Yet almost all thinking, 
as information processing, is unconscious.



When its opponent strike the ball, he feels (rightly) that has more time to 
react.

I did not say that trying to be conscious cannot also impair. Just that 
consciousness speed-up the whole process. (Admittedly not in a usable 
algorithmic way). That still can be self for entities not aware of the first 
person delays, confronted to the limiting sum on all computations, here and 
now, below their substitution level.


The "limiting sum on all computations" refers to your model of the UD.  
But that is timeless, i.e. exists in Platonia.


Brent

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Re: Primary matter

[Brent Meeker]

On 6/7/2018 1:24 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

ee above, i.e. because it is necessary.  Science may well determine when and where and 
what relations there are.  But not why.  That's the "engineering" solution to 
the hard problem of consciousness for which I am often criticized.

Because you limit science. Like the modern Muslim (since Al Ghazali)  and 
christians (since the Roman Empire) , you want to separate religion from 
science. This lead to obscurantism and authorianism, as the video on the 
decline of science in islam illustrates well.


No, I want to eliminate religion.  The reliance on mystic insights of 
prophets to tell us why things are and why we must do X and not Y.


Brent

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Re: Primary matter

[John Clark]

On Thu, Jun 7, 2018 at 12:50 PM, Bruno Marchal  wrote:

​> ​
> I meant: here are the improvements described, in the works of Pythagorus
> to Damascus.
>

​Here? Where? You said there were many improvements in theology between
500BC and 500AD and I asked for examples, and for the second time you were
unable to provide a single one. ​


> *​> ​Stopped by the fake religion*


​That's redundant, fake is the only type of religion there is, or at least
it is in every language except for Brunospeak where words like "religion"
and "God" mean whatever Bruno wants them to ​mean today, and what they
mean tomorrow could be entirely different.


​
>> ​>>​
>> What progress?? ​
>
>
> ​> ​
> The one from Pythagorus to Damascus in Occident.
>

​Be specific! What improvement in theology are you referring to? ​


*> ?*


​!

​John K Clark​

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Re: Primary matter

[Bruno Marchal]

> On 7 Jun 2018, at 03:28, Bruce Kellett  wrote:
> 
> From: Bruno Marchal mailto:marc...@ulb.ac.be>>
>>> On 5 Jun 2018, at 03:34, Bruce Kellett < 
>>> bhkell...@optusnet.com.au 
>>> > wrote:
>>> 
>>> The difference is perhaps most easily captured in the use of the word 
>>> "exists". If we say that there "exists" an integer between 2 and 4, then 
>>> that could be called mathematical existence.
>> 
>> You can do that.
>> 
>>> And that is all that is necessary for mathematics to be used in the rest of 
>>> science.
>> 
>> Yes, but in metaphysics, we need to put all cart on the table, and 
>> eventually, with computationalism, we cannot make sense of anything more 
>> than elementary arithmetic for an ontological basic existence, the one which 
>> has to be assumed. (Or any Turing equivalent machinery).
>> 
>>> It is only when you go beyond this concept of mathematical existence and 
>>> use the word in the same way as we would say that the moon "exists", that 
>>> you run into trouble.
>> 
>> On the contrary, there will be indeed a integers in between 2 and 4. But the 
>> moon will get only a phenomenal existence. It will definitely not have the 
>> same sense as the arithmetical ExP(x), but the moon will only be 
>> “observable”, and that will be a modal existence, actually like 
>> []<>Ex[]<>P(x), with [] and <> a material modality (I have given three 
>> examples of them).
> 
> You agree, then, that the meaning of the word "exists" in "the moon exists" 
> is different from its meaning in "there exists an integer >2 and <4”.

Yes. 

The question will be what exist fundamentally, and how to derive the other 
existing things (in some other sense) from that.



> That is probably all we need. You claim that the first meaning ("the moon 
> exists") is secondary to the meaning in arithmetical existence. But that is 
> no more than your assertion.

If you mean my assumption, that is false. My assumption is Mechanism, which is 
neutral (at the start) on the nature of the physical reality.



> You want to say that the moon's existence is derivative -- depending 
> ultimately on arithmetical realism.

Yes. Physics becomes a (testable) machine theology, which is a branch of 
metamathematics, itself a branch of mathematics, with a very large part in 
arithmetic (its basic ontology).




> On the other hand, I say that the mode of existence of the moon is primary, 
> and arithmetic is totally derivable from a few axioms invented by human 
> creatures, who share their existence with the moon.

Then mechanism has to be false. You can say yes to the doctor, and even 
survives, but you need a gentle God with magical power to make sense of it. Why 
not, but the whole point is that we can test that, and the evidence got so far 
(by QM) favours elementary arithmetic instead of magical matter and magical god.

For example, "yes doctor" entails that the doctor will copy you at a level 
where all decimals are truncated, but your god gently keep in memory all the 
decimals, and correct the copy accordingly.




> 
> You want to claim that arithmetical existence is simpler than physical 
> existence. But that is clearly false because you cannot derive physics from 
> arithmetic,

That is what I have begun to do. I got all the weridness of QM-without-collapse 
before I knew the existence of QM. What seems weird in fundamental physics is 
necessary in arithmetic. 




> but I can derive arithmetic from physics

Show me the paper. I am not even sure you will be able to define physics 
without assuming the natural numbers.

What would it be like? A proof that string theory is Turing universal? We 
already know, as we have biological brain.

The physical reality is not physics. Physics is a theory (actually more than 
one still today), and all the theories assumes the natural numbers, or 
equivalent.

There is no doubt that the physical reality is Turing complete, as we are here, 
but that cannot be used to say that assuming the physical reality explain our 
first person experience. With mechanism, you need to give it some way to 
disturbs the consciousness flux which exists in arithmetic, or to abandon 
computationalism. But what are your evidence for physicalism? 




> -- humans did it as soon as they learned to count!


Even if I was OK with this (I am not) that would assume the physical reality, 
which is the thing I want to explain. 




> Claiming that the derivation of physics from arithmetic is "a work in 
> progress", so I have no right to criticize computationalism because that work 
> is not completed, is nothing more than special pleading based on unwarranted 
> and unevidenced assumptions.

?

Hmm… You have not yet study what I have done. It is not a matter of choice. I 
don’t need Mechanism to prove:

NOT Mechanism or NOT physicalism.

I mean, to solve the Mechanist mind-body problem, we have to derive physics in 
a very special way, and that is is 

Re: Primary matter

[Bruno Marchal]

> On 7 Jun 2018, at 02:26, Brent Meeker  wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On 6/6/2018 10:28 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>> It does. When the machine opts for <>p in the doubt between p and <>p, if it 
>> let it go, in some sense, it transforms itself into a more speedy and more 
>> efficacious machine, with respect to its most probable history.
>> So, consciousness brings a self-speedable ability, which is quite handy for 
>> self-moving being living in between a prey and a predator.
> 
> 
> Do you play tennis, Bruno?  Try thinking consciously about your strokes to 
> speed up your game.


Consciousness speed all computations (to be sure it is only on all inputs 
except a finite number of exception, so it might not be directly practical), 
but if that happen, you can guess that the one computing more quickly will be 
better at tennis. When its opponent strike the ball, he feels (rightly) that 
has more time to react.

I did not say that trying to be conscious cannot also impair. Just that 
consciousness speed-up the whole process. (Admittedly not in a usable 
algorithmic way). That still can be self for entities not aware of the first 
person delays, confronted to the limiting sum on all computations, here and 
now, below their substitution level.

Bruno




> 
> Brent
> 
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Re: Primary matter

[Bruno Marchal]

> On 6 Jun 2018, at 14:48, Telmo Menezes  wrote:
> 
>>> Yes, but why are the "lights on" inside me? Why are we not mechanisms,
>>> that do exactly what you describe, but without a first-person
>>> experience of it?
>> 
>> 
>> Ah, there's your problem.  Science doesn't answer "why" questions. That's
>> what I mean by people having an exaggerated idea of what science does.
>> Newton said, "Hypothesi non fingo."...but nobody speaks latin anymore.
> 
> Science does not answer "why" questions of an existential nature, for
> example "why does the universe exist?”,


Mechanism answers this, by 

1) the universe do not exist (God is not among the beings, in Plotinus’s terms)
2) the universal machine’s existence needs to assume at least one universal 
machinery (I choose Numbers because people know them since primary school)
3) the physical universe is entirely explained from the theology that all 
universal machine can find all by itself through introspection (but to 
communicate requires works à-la Gödel & Al.).




> but I disagree with the
> generalization. Science answers plenty of certain types of "why"
> questions:
> 
> Why are most plants green?
> Why are there so many different species?
> Why is the sun so bright?
> etc.
> 
> I believe that I am asking a question of the same nature as the above.
> There are certainly metaphysical questions to ask about consciousness,
> but here I am simply asking how it fits our current body of scientific
> theory. All of our most powerful theories seem to fit each other.
> Darwinism fits higher-order psychological and sociological theory, and
> it also fits chemistry, which fits particle physics and so on. In my
> view, consciousness is the odd thing that doesn't fit any of this.

The only problem with consciousness is that it cannot be attached to any 
representation, be it in the arithmetical reality, or in the physical reality. 
But we can explain why machine invoke consciousness in the sense that they know 
something being immediately true and undoubtable, yet non definable, non 
provable, etc. And it has role: it makes a first person like a sort of hero, 
with infinitely many bodies/representations in infinitely many computations, 
some sharable, some not, etc.

Even without Mechanism, it is a theorem of arithmetic that there is a sort of 
god who plays hide and seek with itself in arithmetic.

The modal logics makes the link between arithmetic rather simple and quick, but 
of course, it is important to realise that the G box ([]p) is what Gödel 
defines completely in arithmetic in his 1931 paper.

There is only a problem for those who want a physical universe, able to select 
the consciousness.

With Mechanism, consciousness differentiate in the arithmetical reality, and 
also fuse, all the (relative) time, measured here in number of steps of 
computations, or any more general Blum measure (memory space, number of 
occurence of this or that symbols, etc.).



> 
>>> You switched to intelligence. AI is fairly advanced now, it does not
>>> seem to require consciousness to do the things it describe. Perhaps it
>>> is conscious as a side-effect, but why?
>> 
>> 
>> See above, i.e. because it is necessary.  Science may well determine when
>> and where and what relations there are.  But not why.  That's the
>> "engineering" solution to the hard problem of consciousness for which I am
>> often criticized.
> 
> I criticize it because I find it circular: first one assumes that
> consciousness is correlated with human-like behavior, then one creates
> human-like behavior to show how consciousness originates…
> 

Yes, that is indeed one of the many ways people put consciousness under the 
rug. 





>>> 
 - Is there a reality that is external to conscious perception?
 
 
 It is a theory I have held a long time and it seems very well supported
 in
 my experience.  So I'm thinking that you exist and will read this.
>>> 
>>> I am not proposing solipsism. My question is: is there a reality that
>>> is external to *any* conscious perception? I don't see any evidence
>>> one way or the other, just models that help calculate things.
>> 
>> 
>> The problem with that is you stuck in "just".  Don't deprecated good models.
> 
> I don't criticize these good models. I ask that we don't forget what
> is assumed at the start.

Good models (theories) are good, and physics will remain our best predicting 
tools, but it simply cannot be related to consciousness if we don’t justify 
physics from a measure on all relative computations. Luckily, they have the 
right mathematical shape (quantum logic + quantisation) for doing that.

Bruno

PS I might have missed some mails. Don’t hesitate to resend them.





> 
> Telmo.
> 
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> To 

Re: Primary matter

[Bruno Marchal]

> On 7 Jun 2018, at 01:46, John Clark  wrote:
> 
> On Wed, Jun 6, 2018 at 9:48 AM, Bruno Marchal  > wrote:
> 
> > ​>> ​ From -500 to +500, theology has progressed a lot.
>  
> I​>> ​I'd like to see some examples of that.
> 
> ​> ​Pythagorus, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Plato, Moderatus of Gades, Plotinus, 
> Proclus, Porphyry, … Damascius. That describes the main theologians 
> responsible for the progress in Occident.
> 
> I didn't ask for a list of people, I asked for examples of theology improving 
> from 500​ ​BC to 500​ ​AD and you can't find a single one,


?

I meant: here are the improvements described, in the works of Pythagorus to 
Damascus. That is a line of communication in the field with a constant 
progress, getting indeed quite close to the theology of the universal machine. 
Including the very deep reflexion on numbers.




> well don't feel bad I can't either, although I can find examples of it 
> changing from one form of idiocy to a different form of idiocy.
>  
> > ​T​hat describes the main theologians responsible for the progress in 
> > Occident.
> 
> ​What progress?? ​ 


The one from Pythagorus to Damascus in Occident. Stopped by the fake religion 
when it has been institutionalised and that theology has become fairy tales to 
make us asleep in the filed, like the Soviet did with Genetics. 

But now I realised that the progress have seriously continued in the Middle 
East, where it ends at the eleventh century, but made enough progress to get 
through europa where the jewish-Islamic science of the Jewish a,d Islamic 
Neoplatonician led to the European Renaissance. 

It is only you, and the Pope, and the Ayatollah which confines theology in the 
texts. I realise that the neoplatonic Islam, the test is subdued to reason. 
Theology get sick and quickly authoritarian when the reason is subdued to the 
text, which is exactly what you do when you ask me to use the term God in the 
sense of the bible or the Quran, when I used it in the sense of the greek, and 
Indian, and Chinese rationalists.




> 
> ​> ​I am talking about theology, the science.
> 
> ​I don't know what that is.​ 

I see. 

I remind you that I have suggested many books. There are good books, and I have 
given references, including some explaining well that  even mathematical logic 
is born from neoplatonic concerns, despite the (anglican) church, probably by 
relation to dogma, and during fight between Unionists (only the One), and 
Trinitarians (The One has three main aspects). 
Brouwer and Cantor were both mystic. Cantor had long discussion on its 
transfinite with a Bishop). 

Einstein has a theology close to Spinoza, which helped him greatly, although it 
was a bit blind by its Aristotelian prejudices, but recently I got evidence 
that it got Gödel’s point, which is that theology can be done scientifically, 
and that immaterialism was still in the caucus. Gödel’s missed Mechanism and 
Church-thesis, and he was blinded by it will of finding a universal provability 
notion, which is forbidden by its own theorems, unless mechanism is false, …






> 
> > By the first person indeterminacy I cannot know, in Helsinki, which one I 
> > will feel to be.
>  
> ​I'm NOT asking ​"which one I will feel to be?”,


But the step 3 ask that.

You cannot change the question I am asking. 

What are you doing?





> I'm asking "after it was all over which ONE did YOU turn out to be”.


OK. I answer again.

After it was all over, there are two Bruno, one in Moscow, and one in 
Washington, and you have to ask them. Obviously the one in Washington will tell 
you “I am the one in Washington, and I was indeed unable to predict that in 
Hkesinki as my diary shows clearly. But my bet W v M was right, as I got W.
And the similar corresponding answer from the Moscow-guy.

It is enough one copy get wrong to say that the prediction was wrong. So, I the 
diary contained 100% Washington, despite the W-guy will say “my prediction was 
correct”, as the diary in Helsinki is duplicated, the guy in Moscow has written 
it “100% Washington” is refuted.

If in the diary you write 100% Washington and 100% Moscow, you just five the 
third person description of where the first person will survive, but that is 
not the first person result we talk about in the experience.




> Nobody can answer either one because neither one is a question. A question 
> needs more than a question mark.

Because you put the “first person” under the rug in the question. 



>  
> ​> ​read their diary. 
>  
> ​To hell​ ​with that stupid imbecilic pointless diary!!! ​

Showing your emotion make people suspect you have no point.


Bruno




> 
> ​> ​Assuming that there is a universe.
> 
> ​Assuming assumptions exist and assuming ​assuming ​assumptions exist and…​

> 
> ​​>> ​Randomness is impossible? What law of logic demands that EVERY event 
> have a cause? ​
> 
> ​> ​Rationality.
> 
> ​What about rationality? ​
>  
> ​> ​The same for “no cause”. It means 

FW: Primary matter

[Philip Benjamin]

[Philip Benjamin]
Primary matter? It has only physics? No chemistry? Without chemistry what use 
is it of? These questions apply to ALL matter, besides the question of aseity. 
Philip Benjamin
-Original Message-
From: everything-list@googlegroups.com  On 
Behalf Of Brent Meeker
Sent: Wednesday, June 06, 2018 3:31 PM
To: everything-list@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Primary matter
On 6/6/2018 5:48 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
>>> Yes, but why are the "lights on" inside me? Why are we not 
>>> mechanisms, that do exactly what you describe, but without a 
>>> first-person experience of it?
>>
>> Ah, there's your problem.  Science doesn't answer "why" questions. 

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Green stars (was Primary matter)

[John Clark]

On Wed, Jun 6, 2018 at 11:26 PM, Brent Meeker  wrote:

> *> hasn't the Sun been getting hotter, which would mean moving from yellow
> toward green rather than the other way.  And it's still still more a yellow
> than green store. *


There are intensely red stars and there are pale blue stars but there are
no green stars; the reason has to do with the fact that curve of blackbody
radiation energy output verses color of an object at a given temperature is
NOT symmetrical. It also has to do with the fact that the eye has 3
different receptors for color, one for the red, green and blue. A star that
gives off the peak of its energy in the red will still give off a
substantial amount of energy in the infrared but the eye can't see that,
and due to the non-symmetrical blackbody curve the energy drops off rapidly
in the green and blue part of the spectrum, so only (or almost only) the
red receptor in the eye is stimulated so we see it as intensely red.

A hotter star that gives off most of its energy in the blue would still
give off a lot in the red and green so all 3 receptors would be stimulated
and we'd see it as white, or if it was very very hot a bluish white (the
output would drop off rapidly in the ultraviolet but we can’t see that so
it doesn’t matter). Due to the shape of the blackbody curve there is no
temperature that would give off its radiant energy in the green but none in
the red or blue so that only the green receptor is stimulated. You can have
green lasers but unlike stars that light is not produced by blackbody
radiation, and because only the green receptor is stimulated it looks
intensely green.

 John K Clark

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Re: Primary matter

[Russell Standish]

On Wed, Jun 06, 2018 at 08:26:34PM -0700, Brent Meeker wrote:
> Interesting story.  But hasn't the Sun been getting hotter, which would mean
> moving from yellow toward green rather than the other way.  And it's still
> still more a yellow than green store.

The peak of the sun's spectrum is about 500nm, very much a green
colour. That it appears yellow probably has more to do with
preferential scattering of blue light by the atmosphere. Evolutionary
speaking, ambient daylight should appear white. How much that has
changed from ca 3 billion years ago, I'm not sure, except that the Sun
is warmer now than then.



>   So why don't the red/blue pigmented
> plants out compete the green ones.  I think there must be more to it.  Is
> the chlorophyll pathway more efficient?
>

I think it has more to do with cyanobacteria being intolerant of
oxygen, and plants not only being tolerant, but thriving in the
presence of oxygen. I couldn't find a quick statement of whether
cyanobacteria were more or less efficient than plants.



-- 


Dr Russell StandishPhone 0425 253119 (mobile)
Principal, High Performance Coders
Visiting Senior Research Fellowhpco...@hpcoders.com.au
Economics, Kingston University http://www.hpcoders.com.au


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Re: Primary matter

[Bruno Marchal]

> On 5 Jun 2018, at 23:43, Brent Meeker  wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On 6/5/2018 8:12 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
>> On 4 June 2018 at 20:30, Brent Meeker  wrote:
>>> 
>>> On 6/4/2018 3:13 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
>>>> Most scientists and scientifically-literate people I know assume that
>>>> consciousness emerges from brain activity without ever really thinking
>>>> about the ramifications of this hypothesis. I have had this
>>>> conversation several times, and I can usually tell that, when asked
>>>> certain questions, people are surprised to realize that this idea is
>>>> not on such solid grounds as they seemed to think.
>>> 
>>> Would you like to share those questions?
>> One of the questions is: what is emergence? Is it an ontological step
>> or an epistemological device? If you consider the classical examples:
>> statistical physics, ecosystems, societies, markets, cities, etc. I
>> think you will come to the conclusion that it is epistemological. We
>> do not have enough cognitive capacity to understand the world in terms
>> of the individual behaviors of every single human being, but we are
>> able to perceive and reason about higher-order patterns of behavior. I
>> know what amount of traffic to expect when I ride my bike in a bit,
>> because I know the higher-order patterns of my city. But I also know
>> that a sufficiently powerful intelligence could keep track of the
>> behavior every single person in the city instead. The same goes for
>> molecules, individual financial transactions and so on. There is a
>> cognitive limit that is breached by what we call emergence, but in all
>> of these cases we can go all the way down to the building blocks.
> 
> Yes, this comports with my idea that consciousness is in part a summarization 
> of experience for memory which is then called on for prediction.  That's why 
> we notice and remember unusual things.  We don't need anymore summaries about 
> commonplace things.
> 
>> 
>> This leads to my second question: if we assume emergence, then what is
>> the building block of consciousness? I think that it is easy to see
>> that either consciousness is qualitatively different or we haven't
>> found the building block yet. In either case, emergentism is a very
>> weak hypothesis, in the sense that it does not propose an explanatory
>> mechanism (unlike all other things above).
> 
> Functionalism would say the building block is a transformation of 
> information...something like a qubit gate.  Here's an interesting overview of 
> the non-functionalist ideas of monism:
> 
> 
> 'Russellian monism' New paper by Groff and Sam Coleman, forthcoming in Oxford 
> Companion to Consciousness, edited by Uriah Kriegel. 
> http://www.philipgoffphilosophy.com/uploads/1/4/4/4/14443634/russellian_monism.pdf
>  … #Panpsychism #Consciousness
> http://www.philipgoffphilosophy.com/uploads/1/4/4/4/14443634/russellian_monism.pdf


Hmm… The Tibetan have refuted this centuries ago. Mechanism refutes this too 
(exercise).
It is simpler to abandon primary matter. The paper is interesting as it shows 
the kind of non computable magic you need to solve the mind body problem to 
save both consciousness and matter. 
They are still blinded by their absence of doubt for a primitively material 
reality. 

Bruno



> 
>> 
>> The third question that I mention is aligned with Bruno's duplication
>> machines. If consciousness emerges from brain activity, which is
>> finite and made of fungible entities (atoms, molecules, particles,
>> whatever), then the same exact pattern that you are experiencing now
>> can, in principle be repeated many or infinite times, both across time
>> and space.
> 
> If time and space are infinite and everything (pattern) that can happen does.
> 
>> What happens then? Is there some magic property that still
>> makes you distinct across such instances? Or does it turn out that you
>> cannot really be said to be associated with any specific chunk of
>> matter?
> 
> I don't see why that's a problem.  It seems to implicitly demand that "you" 
> be unique and somehow distinct from all possible realizations.  Why should it 
> matter if momentarily in some far away galaxy there's someone who is 
> experiencing reading these words...but necessarily having the same next 
> thought of reading THESE worlds?
> 
> Brent
> 
>> 
>> I'm a lot of fun at parties.
>> 
>> Telmo.
>> 
>> 
>>> Brent
>>> 
>>> --
>>> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
>>> "Everything 

Re: Primary matter

[Bruno Marchal]

> On 5 Jun 2018, at 23:26, Brent Meeker  wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On 6/5/2018 7:42 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
>> On 4 June 2018 at 23:48, Brent Meeker  wrote:
>>> 
>>> On 6/4/2018 7:13 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
>>> 
>>> I am very grateful for mother medicine, but
>>> we should not pretend that its operative assumptions solve the
>>> fundamental questions.
>>> 
>>> What fundamental question do you refer to?  How to detect consciousness?
>>> How to produce consciousness?  How to prove (in the empirical sense) that
>>> consciousness is linked to brain activity? That's my concern, that one just
>>> throws up things that are syntactically questions but with no thought as to
>>> what might constitute an answer.
>>> 
>>> I understand your concern. I will just tell you what my main curiosities
>>> are:
>>> 
>>> 
>>> OK, I'll  take a stab at them.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> - Why does consciousness even exist? Darwinism does not seem to require it.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> It's a necessary feature of intelligence.  Intelligence requires "what-if"
>>> modeling of situations in order to foresee consequences.  Even a the lower
>>> animal level this implies modeling oneself in the simulation. In higher,
>>> social animals it includes being able to put yourself in the place of others
>>> in order to anticipate their repsonses, i.e. having a theory of mind.
>> Yes, but why are the "lights on" inside me? Why are we not mechanisms,
>> that do exactly what you describe, but without a first-person
>> experience of it?
> 
> Ah, there's your problem.  Science doesn't answer "why" questions.


Why?

That is again a prejudice, which the authorianist religious people like very 
much, as it means that science, by definition, will let the “why” in the hand 
of the manipulators that they are.




> That's what I mean by people having an exaggerated idea of what science does. 
>  Newton said, "Hypothesi non fingo."...but nobody speaks latin anymore.


People might have an exaggerated idea of what Natural Science does, perhaps. 

And might not have the imagination to conceive what science can do, when freed 
from the metaphysical prejudices. 

Mechanism illustrate a science giving the why, and the how. Not all the why, 
but most of it.




> 
>> 
>>> - What is the relationship between consciousness and matter?
>>> 
>>> Consciousness, as explained above, is the ability to perceive and act
>>> intelligently in the world by doing "what-if" simulations to foresee events.
>>> It is something that is instantiated by complex material systems that
>>> include memory and information processing; but we don't know exactly what
>>> kind.
>> You switched to intelligence. AI is fairly advanced now, it does not
>> seem to require consciousness to do the things it describe. Perhaps it
>> is conscious as a side-effect, but why?
> 
> See above, i.e. because it is necessary.  Science may well determine when and 
> where and what relations there are.  But not why.  That's the "engineering" 
> solution to the hard problem of consciousness for which I am often criticized.

Because you limit science. Like the modern Muslim (since Al Ghazali)  and 
christians (since the Roman Empire) , you want to separate religion from 
science. This lead to obscurantism and authorianism, as the video on the 
decline of science in islam illustrates well.

It is the separation of science and religion which leads to obedience to texts 
at the place of reason and reflexion in the field. That prevents progress in 
both science and religion.

Bruno



> 
>> 
>>> - Is there a reality that is external to conscious perception?
>>> 
>>> 
>>> It is a theory I have held a long time and it seems very well supported in
>>> my experience.  So I'm thinking that you exist and will read this.
>> I am not proposing solipsism. My question is: is there a reality that
>> is external to *any* conscious perception? I don't see any evidence
>> one way or the other, just models that help calculate things.
> 
> The problem with that is you stuck in "just".  Don't deprecated good models.
> 
>> 
>>> My view is scientifically speaking we never know anything "fundamental" and
>>> the search for it is like the hunting of the snark.  We seek theories with
>>> more scope and more accuracy, but being "more fundamental" doesn't entail
>>> that something is most fundamental.   Mystics like Bruno postulate something
>>> and then build structures on it which, by some (often small) agreement with
>>> experience, PROVE their postulates.  But as Feynman used to point out, this
>>> is Greek mathematics.  Science is like Persian mathematics in which the
>>> mathematician seeks to identify all the possible axiom sets that entail the
>>> observations.
>>> 
>>> I tend to agree that scientifically we never know anything
>>> fundamental. I do believe that it is possible to use reason to acquire
>>> knowledge by means that are not the scientific method. I am certain
>>> that I possess knowledge that was not acquired by scientific means,
>>> for example 

Re: Primary matter

[Bruno Marchal]

gt;> I agree. But I also think that materialism is refuted in all frame assuming 
>> digital mechanism.
> 
> I agree -- under that assumption.

OK.
Well, to be precise, you don’t need Mechanism to prove “Mechanism -> non 
Materialism”. But you need “mechanism” to imply “non materialism”. I guess that 
is what you meant.



> 
>> I also believe that digital mechanism solves (perhaps incorrectly in case it 
>> happens to be refuted) the "hard problem” of consciousness versus matter. At 
>> least for all conscious people who are OK with the ideas that consciousness 
>> is, for them, true, non doubtable, immediate, non definable, and non 
>> provable. That can be used as a semi-axiomatic theory of consciousness, and 
>> it can be shown that all (Löbian) universal machine are confronted with,  
>> and can described, such predicate.
>> More: Consciousness got an important role here: it speed a machine 
>> relatively to other machine. Consciousness select the computation (without 
>> magic, but like in the WM duplication), but it accelerates the self 
>> developing autonomy. It provides … free-will, which is not much the ability 
>> to say “no” to the authorities, be them parents, teacher, bishops, 
>> ayatollah, etc.
> 
> I have had an idea for some time, and I will describe it to see if it
> goes in the direction of what you are saying.
> 
> You could say it proposes a solution to the Fermi Paradox. My idea is
> to combine Darwinism, Many-Worlds and Anthropic reasoning: what if
> evolution works exactly as modern Biology describes it, but with a
> probability of success that is incredibly low? Then the multiverse
> could be a barren wasteland, with incredibly sporadic regions where
> entities like us evolved. This then becomes a complex version of your
> duplication machine, where I can only see Moscow if Moscow exists,
> which is to say, if I am in a computation that supports human
> existence.
> 
> This would also explain my disappointments with genetic programming :)

That makes sense. I think that mechanism might solve the Fermi paradox in that 
way. We are excessively rare in the physical universe, but multiplied by 
quasi-infinity locally in the multiverse. That has to happen for getting a 
deep, long and stable history. That is quite plausible, but far from being 
proved (for the technical reason this asks for more progress in provability 
logic, which is highly undecidable when quantifier are introduced. 
That is the weakness of Mechanism: it leads to very hard problem in math. But 
the contrary would be astonishing. In fact, the Z1* logic, if correct, might 
need a quantum computer to be tractable.




> 
>>> 
>>>> And by the way, the number of
>>>> times the phrase "primary matter" is mentioned in that article is exactly
>>>> the same number you will find it mentioned in any modern physics journal.
>>>> Zero.
>>> 
>>> I assumed I was not arguing with a string matching algorithm. In this
>>> case it does take a bit of semantic parsing:
>>> 
>>> "To materialists, matter is primary[...]"
>>> 
>>> Now, I am not a native English speaker, but I am fairly convinced that
>>> if you find the pattern:
>>> 
>>> N is A, where N is a noun and A is an adjective, you can equally
>>> allude to AN. For example you could write the equivalent sentence:
>>> 
>>> "Materialists believe in primary matter."
>>> 
>>> But if you insist on string-matching arguments:
>>> https://www.google.com/search?hl=en=primary%20matter
>>> 
>>> Modern physics journal:
>>> https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1014465327475
>>> 
>>>> The reason the “primary matter" debate is never going to get anywhere is
>>>> that philosophers write impassioned posts and even scholarly tomes about 
>>>> the
>>>> existence or non-existence of "primary matter" but never once ask 
>>>> themselves
>>>> what the hell the term is supposed to mean, and many don't even wonder what
>>>> "matter" means.
>>> 
>>> You illustrate the belief in primary matter frequently, when you argue
>>> with Bruno that a physical computer is necessary for computations to
>>> exist, or that physics is more fundamental than math. This is a
>>> position of belief in primary matter.
>>> 
>>>> Leibniz invented the silly catch phrase but, as is
>>>> customary whenever scientists put on their philosopher's hat, he was rather
>>>> vague (and Bruno even more vague) about what &q

Re: Primary matter

[Brent Meeker]

Interesting story.  But hasn't the Sun been getting hotter, which would 
mean moving from yellow toward green rather than the other way.  And 
it's still still more a yellow than green store.  So why don't the 
red/blue pigmented plants out compete the green ones.  I think there 
must be more to it.  Is the chlorophyll pathway more efficient?


Brent

On 6/6/2018 4:00 PM, Russell Standish wrote:

On Wed, Jun 06, 2018 at 03:16:31PM -0700, Brent Meeker wrote:


On 6/6/2018 8:19 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:

But in the early days of life on this planet random
mutation and natural selection stumbled upon a key molecule in the
photosynthesis process, chlorophyll, that just happens to be green and it
works OK, not perfectly but OK. In Evolution you don't have to be perfect
you just have to be better than the competition.  And once Evolution started
to go down the chlorophyll path it soon became committed and it became
virtually impossible to backtrack and look for something better than
chlorophyll.

Ok, so didn't you just explain why plants are green?

Is "It happened at random." an explanation?


FWIW, the photosynthesis story is much more interesting. The first
photosynthetic organisms absorbed light right at the peak of the Sun's
spectrum (being a yellow star, that's right in the yellow-green
band). As a consequence, these organisms reflected the red and blue
parts of the spectrum, appearing a purplish colour. Their modern day
descendents go by the name "red-blue algae", and tend to have rather
poisonous consequences on modern eukaryotic life when they get out of
control.

Then one day, an organism discovered a different photosynthetic path
based on chlorophyl. Because the oceans were covered in this purplish
stuff absorbing all the green light, all that remained was the red and
blue ends of the spectrum. Hence chlorophyl got optimised to absorb
those frequencies, reflecting back the remainder, which is green.
That is why modern plants are green, which is not an optimal colour nowadays.

BTW - red-blue algae find oxygen poisonous, it was photosynthetic
plants that killed off most of the red-blue algae, setting the scene
for animals to arise, which depend on their oxygen waste gas.

Cheers



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Re: Primary matter

[Bruce Kellett]

From: *Bruno Marchal* mailto:marc...@ulb.ac.be>>
On 5 Jun 2018, at 03:34, Bruce Kellett > wrote:


The difference is perhaps most easily captured in the use of the word 
"exists". If we say that there "exists" an integer between 2 and 4, 
then that could be called mathematical existence.


You can do that.

And that is all that is necessary for mathematics to be used in the 
rest of science.


Yes, but in metaphysics, we need to put all cart on the table, and 
eventually, with computationalism, we cannot make sense of anything 
more than elementary arithmetic for an ontological basic existence, 
the one which has to be assumed. (Or any Turing equivalent machinery).


It is only when you go beyond this concept of mathematical existence 
and use the word in the same way as we would say that the moon 
"exists", that you run into trouble.


On the contrary, there will be indeed a integers in between 2 and 4. 
But the moon will get only a phenomenal existence. It will definitely 
not have the same sense as the arithmetical ExP(x), but the moon will 
only be “observable”, and that will be a modal existence, actually 
like []<>Ex[]<>P(x), with [] and <> a material modality (I have given 
three examples of them).


You agree, then, that the meaning of the word "exists" in "the moon 
exists" is different from its meaning in "there exists an integer >2 and 
<4". That is probably all we need. You claim that the first meaning 
("the moon exists") is secondary to the meaning in arithmetical 
existence. But that is no more than your assertion. You want to say that 
the moon's existence is derivative -- depending ultimately on 
arithmetical realism. On the other hand, I say that the mode of 
existence of the moon is primary, and arithmetic is totally derivable 
from a few axioms invented by human creatures, who share their existence 
with the moon.


You want to claim that arithmetical existence is simpler than physical 
existence. But that is clearly false because you cannot derive physics 
from arithmetic, but I can derive arithmetic from physics -- humans did 
it as soon as they learned to count! Claiming that the derivation of 
physics from arithmetic is "a work in progress", so I have no right to 
criticize computationalism because that work is not completed, is 
nothing more than special pleading based on unwarranted and unevidenced 
assumptions.


Physics is clearly simpler than arithmetic because it "exists" without 
any further work -- arithmetic requires the existence of a conscious 
mind, and minds have not yet evolved in computationalism.


Bruce

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Re: Primary matter

[Brent Meeker]

On 6/6/2018 10:28 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

It does. When the machine opts for <>p in the doubt between p and <>p, if it 
let it go, in some sense, it transforms itself into a more speedy and more efficacious 
machine, with respect to its most probable history.
So, consciousness brings a self-speedable ability, which is quite handy for 
self-moving being living in between a prey and a predator.



Do you play tennis, Bruno?  Try thinking consciously about your strokes 
to speed up your game.


Brent

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Re: Primary matter

[Russell Standish]

On Wed, Jun 06, 2018 at 03:16:31PM -0700, Brent Meeker wrote:
> 
> 
> On 6/6/2018 8:19 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
> > > But in the early days of life on this planet random
> > > mutation and natural selection stumbled upon a key molecule in the
> > > photosynthesis process, chlorophyll, that just happens to be green and it
> > > works OK, not perfectly but OK. In Evolution you don't have to be perfect
> > > you just have to be better than the competition.  And once Evolution 
> > > started
> > > to go down the chlorophyll path it soon became committed and it became
> > > virtually impossible to backtrack and look for something better than
> > > chlorophyll.
> > Ok, so didn't you just explain why plants are green?
> 
> Is "It happened at random." an explanation?
> 

FWIW, the photosynthesis story is much more interesting. The first
photosynthetic organisms absorbed light right at the peak of the Sun's
spectrum (being a yellow star, that's right in the yellow-green
band). As a consequence, these organisms reflected the red and blue
parts of the spectrum, appearing a purplish colour. Their modern day
descendents go by the name "red-blue algae", and tend to have rather
poisonous consequences on modern eukaryotic life when they get out of
control.

Then one day, an organism discovered a different photosynthetic path
based on chlorophyl. Because the oceans were covered in this purplish
stuff absorbing all the green light, all that remained was the red and
blue ends of the spectrum. Hence chlorophyl got optimised to absorb
those frequencies, reflecting back the remainder, which is green.
That is why modern plants are green, which is not an optimal colour nowadays.

BTW - red-blue algae find oxygen poisonous, it was photosynthetic
plants that killed off most of the red-blue algae, setting the scene
for animals to arise, which depend on their oxygen waste gas.

Cheers

-- 


Dr Russell StandishPhone 0425 253119 (mobile)
Principal, High Performance Coders
Visiting Senior Research Fellowhpco...@hpcoders.com.au
Economics, Kingston University http://www.hpcoders.com.au


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Re: Primary matter

[John Clark]

On Wed, Jun 6, 2018 at 9:48 AM, Bruno Marchal  wrote:

>
> ​>> ​
> * From -500 to +500, theology has progressed a lot.*
>


I
> ​>> ​I
> 'd like to see some examples of that.


> *​> ​Pythagorus, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Plato, Moderatus of Gades,
> Plotinus, Proclus, Porphyry, … Damascius. That describes the main
> theologians responsible for the progress in Occident.*


I didn't ask for a list of people, I asked for examples of theology
improving from 500
​ ​
BC to 500
​ ​
AD and you can't find a single one, well don't feel bad I can't either,
although I can find examples of it changing from one form of idiocy to a
different form of idiocy.


> > ​T​
> hat describes the main theologians responsible for the progress in
> Occident.
>

​What progress?? ​


*​> ​I am talking about theology, the science.*
>

​I don't know what that is.​



> *> By the first person indeterminacy I cannot know, in Helsinki, which one
> I will feel to be.*


​I'm NOT asking ​"which one I will feel to be?", I'm asking "after it was
all over which *ONE* did *YOU* turn out to be". Nobody can answer either
one because neither one is a question. A question needs more than a
question mark.


> ​> ​
> *read their diary. *
>

​To hell​

​with that stupid imbecilic pointless diary!!! ​

​> ​
> *Assuming that there is a universe.*
>

​Assuming assumptions exist and assuming ​
assuming
​assumptions exist and...​

​
>> ​>> ​
>> Randomness is impossible? What law of logic demands that *EVERY* event
>> have a cause? ​
>
>
> ​> *​*
> *Rationality. *
>

​What about rationality? ​


> ​> ​
> The same for “no cause”. It means only: we don’t see the cause yet.
>


Interesting theology, how did you get that information? Did the Holy Ghost
​come to you in a dream and tell you that reality was like a infinite
Matryoshka doll and that A was caused by B and B was caused by C and C was
caused by D and D was caused by E and E was caused by F and F was ...

​> ​
> God exist, it is not omnipotent, nor omniscient.
>

​Then why do you call him "God", what's so godlike about him? And what does
the God theory make clear that we wouldn't understand without it? The
answers to those questions must be one of those things your non-omniscient
God doesn't know.

John K Clark

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Re: Primary matter

[Brent Meeker]

On 6/6/2018 8:19 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:

But in the early days of life on this planet random
mutation and natural selection stumbled upon a key molecule in the
photosynthesis process, chlorophyll, that just happens to be green and it
works OK, not perfectly but OK. In Evolution you don't have to be perfect
you just have to be better than the competition.  And once Evolution started
to go down the chlorophyll path it soon became committed and it became
virtually impossible to backtrack and look for something better than
chlorophyll.

Ok, so didn't you just explain why plants are green?


Is "It happened at random." an explanation?

Brent

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Re: Primary matter

[Brent Meeker]

On 6/6/2018 5:48 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:

Yes, but why are the "lights on" inside me? Why are we not mechanisms,
that do exactly what you describe, but without a first-person
experience of it?


Ah, there's your problem.  Science doesn't answer "why" questions. That's
what I mean by people having an exaggerated idea of what science does.
Newton said, "Hypothesi non fingo."...but nobody speaks latin anymore.

Science does not answer "why" questions of an existential nature, for
example "why does the universe exist?", but I disagree with the
generalization. Science answers plenty of certain types of "why"
questions:

Why are most plants green?
Why are there so many different species?
Why is the sun so bright?
etc.

I believe that I am asking a question of the same nature as the above.
There are certainly metaphysical questions to ask about consciousness,
but here I am simply asking how it fits our current body of scientific
theory. All of our most powerful theories seem to fit each other.
Darwinism fits higher-order psychological and sociological theory, and
it also fits chemistry, which fits particle physics and so on. In my
view, consciousness is the odd thing that doesn't fit any of this.


OK.  But does it "fit" anything? Does it fit arithmetic?  or 
computation?  We know it's correlated with brain functions because if we 
mess with the brain it messes with consciousness.  That's more that 
Newton knew when he invented gravity.  People thought it didn't "fit" 
either because they  thought in terms of contact forces.  How could a 
"field" act on anything?  Newton didn't even know how to see if messing 
with the field would mess with orbits.





You switched to intelligence. AI is fairly advanced now, it does not
seem to require consciousness to do the things it describe. Perhaps it
is conscious as a side-effect, but why?


See above, i.e. because it is necessary.  Science may well determine when
and where and what relations there are.  But not why.  That's the
"engineering" solution to the hard problem of consciousness for which I am
often criticized.

I criticize it because I find it circular: first one assumes that
consciousness is correlated with human-like behavior,


But that's not an assumption; it's an observation.


then one creates
human-like behavior to show how consciousness originates...


"What I cannot create, I do not understand"
    --- Richard Feynman

Brent



- Is there a reality that is external to conscious perception?


It is a theory I have held a long time and it seems very well supported
in
my experience.  So I'm thinking that you exist and will read this.

I am not proposing solipsism. My question is: is there a reality that
is external to *any* conscious perception? I don't see any evidence
one way or the other, just models that help calculate things.


The problem with that is you stuck in "just".  Don't deprecated good models.

I don't criticize these good models. I ask that we don't forget what
is assumed at the start.

Telmo.



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Re: Primary matter

[Bruno Marchal]

> On 4 Jun 2018, at 16:13, Telmo Menezes  wrote:
> 
> On 3 June 2018 at 23:01, Brent Meeker  wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> On 6/3/2018 4:10 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
>>> 
>>> On 1 June 2018 at 22:37, Brent Meeker  wrote:
 
 
 On 6/1/2018 7:49 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
>> 
>> Physical theories of the brain, based on extensive empirical research,
>> have
>> linked the mind and consciousness to physical brain activity in
>> irrefutable
>> ways.
> 
> The above statement is pseudoscience. Given that there is no
> scientific instrument that can detect consciousness, no empirical
> research on this question is possible at the moment. If you disagree,
> please provide references to publications that describe such an
> instrument.
 
 
 The instrument used to detect consciousness is a body.  You see if it
 acts
 intelligently and reacts to the environment.  You see if it responds to
 stimuli. You may even look at fMRI or otherwise monitor brain activity.
 If
 it was responsive earlier, you ask it if it remembers the period in which
 is
 was unresponsive.  You ask it if it feels as if time passed.
 
 Of course you will object that none of these directly detects
 consciousness
 vs unconsciousness.  But science doesn't directly detect quarks either.
>>> 
>>> My objection is deeper than the question of direct detection. To make
>>> your argument work you say that "science doesn't directly
>>> detect[...]". The problem with this claim is that science does not
>>> detect anything, science is a concept. Human being detect things, and
>>> they do it through the lens of their conscious experience. This places
>>> consciousness at a qualitatively different standing than quarks or any
>>> other object of scientific inquiry.
>> 
>> 
>> That's your consciousness which you detect directly (although some dispute
>> even that).
> 
> I know, I was kind of being a smartass.
> 
>> But the object of scientific inquiry is consciousness as it can
>> be described, explained, caused, designed in ways that we can
>> intersubjectively agree on.
> 
> I agree.
> 
>>> 
>>> What I claim is that there is no scientific instrument that can
>>> distinguish consciousness from non-consciousnes, because we don't even
>>> know what "non-cosnciousness" means. *All* scientific instruments
>>> detect consciousness, because consciousness must be present for *any
>>> sort of detection* to even occur. No scientific instrument detects
>>> consciousness on anyone but its user, directly OR indirectly.
>> 
>> 
>> The "indirectly" is simply false.  As any emergency medical technician can
>> attest.
> 
> When you and me talk about quarks, we are both pointing to an object
> that we cannot see, but that is a model that makes sense of
> observations that we can both confirm. We are on equal footing. When
> we are talking about consciousness, we are talking about the very
> thing that we "observe with". Everything. I argue that you don't fully
> appreciate the qualitative difference between these two things, and
> the profound implications of these differences when it comes to
> attempting to make sense of reality.
> 
> The emergency medical technician can detect things that are correlated
> with behavior, and which are connected to causal mechanisms of
> behavior that are more or less understood. I insist: we appear to have
> no way of knowing the boundaries of the consciousness phenomenon.
> Panpshyschists hold that everything is conscious. Dennett argues that
> nothing is. Emergentists believe that brains are conscious, but do not
> know at what level of complexity they become conscious. This is the
> problem: what you allude to is useful for medicine, but not terribly
> valuable for our discussion.
> 
>>> For this
>>> latter claim to be made, one must assume that consciousness and
>>> behavior are linked.There is overwhelming evidence that brain activity
>>> and memory formation are linked, and that brain activity and behavior
>>> are linked. For medical purposes, the consciousness-behavior
>>> assumption is very useful! I am very grateful for mother medicine, but
>>> we should not pretend that its operative assumptions solve the
>>> fundamental questions.
>> 
>> 
>> What fundamental question do you refer to?  How to detect consciousness?
>> How to produce consciousness?  How to prove (in the empirical sense) that
>> consciousness is linked to brain activity? That's my concern, that one just
>> throws up things that are syntactically questions but with no thought as to
>> what might constitute an answer.
> 
> I understand your concern. I will just tell you what my main curiosities are:

Ah! Let me try to answer.Keep in mind that I assume elementary arithmetic and 
thus computations, etc.
(I am not sure I need YD here, but it can help).


> 
> - Why does consciousness even exist?

Consciousness is somehow the doubt between consistency and truth (<>p v p). 

All 

Re: Primary matter

[Bruno Marchal]

> On 5 Jun 2018, at 16:42, Telmo Menezes  wrote:
> 
> On 4 June 2018 at 23:48, Brent Meeker  wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> On 6/4/2018 7:13 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
>> 
>> I am very grateful for mother medicine, but
>> we should not pretend that its operative assumptions solve the
>> fundamental questions.
>> 
>> What fundamental question do you refer to?  How to detect consciousness?
>> How to produce consciousness?  How to prove (in the empirical sense) that
>> consciousness is linked to brain activity? That's my concern, that one just
>> throws up things that are syntactically questions but with no thought as to
>> what might constitute an answer.
>> 
>> I understand your concern. I will just tell you what my main curiosities
>> are:
>> 
>> 
>> OK, I'll  take a stab at them.
>> 
>> 
>> - Why does consciousness even exist? Darwinism does not seem to require it.
>> 
>> 
>> It's a necessary feature of intelligence.  Intelligence requires "what-if"
>> modeling of situations in order to foresee consequences.  Even a the lower
>> animal level this implies modeling oneself in the simulation. In higher,
>> social animals it includes being able to put yourself in the place of others
>> in order to anticipate their repsonses, i.e. having a theory of mind.
> 
> Yes, but why are the "lights on" inside me? Why are we not mechanisms,
> that do exactly what you describe, but without a first-person
> experience of it?
> 
>> - What is the relationship between consciousness and matter?
>> 
>> Consciousness, as explained above, is the ability to perceive and act
>> intelligently in the world by doing "what-if" simulations to foresee events.
>> It is something that is instantiated by complex material systems that
>> include memory and information processing; but we don't know exactly what
>> kind.
> 
> You switched to intelligence. AI is fairly advanced now, it does not
> seem to require consciousness to do the things it describe. Perhaps it
> is conscious as a side-effect, but why?
> 
>> - Is there a reality that is external to conscious perception?
>> 
>> 
>> It is a theory I have held a long time and it seems very well supported in
>> my experience.  So I'm thinking that you exist and will read this.
> 
> I am not proposing solipsism. My question is: is there a reality that
> is external to *any* conscious perception? I don't see any evidence
> one way or the other, just models that help calculate things.
> 
>> My view is scientifically speaking we never know anything "fundamental" and
>> the search for it is like the hunting of the snark.  We seek theories with
>> more scope and more accuracy, but being "more fundamental" doesn't entail
>> that something is most fundamental.   Mystics like Bruno postulate something
>> and then build structures on it which, by some (often small) agreement with
>> experience, PROVE their postulates.  But as Feynman used to point out, this
>> is Greek mathematics.  Science is like Persian mathematics in which the
>> mathematician seeks to identify all the possible axiom sets that entail the
>> observations.
>> 
>> I tend to agree that scientifically we never know anything
>> fundamental. I do believe that it is possible to use reason to acquire
>> knowledge by means that are not the scientific method. I am certain
>> that I possess knowledge that was not acquired by scientific means,
>> for example I know how it feels to be me.
>> 
>> 
>> It ain't so much what you don't know that gets you into trouble, as what you
>> know that ain't so.
>>  --- Josh Billings
> 
> Indeed.
> 
>> Even if my metaphysical
>> obsessions are a fool's errand, I do think it is valuable to know
>> where the boundaries of scientific knowledge are, and be humble enough
>> to recognize them.
>> 
>> 
>> I think it is scientists who are most aware of the boundaries of scientific
>> knowledge.  Non-scientists tend to look at technology and think, "Oh we can
>> make airplanes so we know all about flying."  Scientists know that there's
>> no proof that the Navier-Stokes equations will converge to a solution for a
>> particular case.  That doesn't however mean that the boundary is fixed and
>> can't be pushed back.  So when scientists propose to study consciousness,
>> non-scientists think, "Oh they want to explain it like Newton explained
>> gravity and Maxwell explained radio waves.  Put it in mathematical formulae.
>> That's impossible.  I have consciousness and I know it's not mathematical (I
>> can't even do math)."  Scientists are thinking, "We'll make an approximate
>> but limited model of consciousness, like Newton did of gravity, so we'll be
>> able to predict some phenomena of consciousness, like Maxwell did for EM."
> 
> Well but you know my objections, namely with the instrumentation issue.
> 
>> I feel that a lot of resistance to this stuff comes from a fear that
>> one is trying to slide religion or the supernatural through the back
>> door, so to speak. I trust that you believe that I am not trying to
>> sell 

Re: Primary matter

[Bruno Marchal]

Hi Russell,


> On 5 Jun 2018, at 01:32, Russell Standish  wrote:
> 
> On Mon, Jun 04, 2018 at 03:50:33PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>> 
>> You seem to confuse arithmetical realism, used in all branches of science, 
>> and Platonism (which is part of the consequence). To define mathematically 
>> what a computation is, we need arithmetical realism. In SANE04, my 
>> definition is redundant because the Church-Turing thesis makes no sense at 
>> without arithmetical realism. 
> 
> Hi Bruno, I think you need to be aware that your writings do not help
> here, and that perhaps you need to clarify the point. For a long time
> I understood Arithmetic Realism <=> Platonism of the integers, but now
> I understand you make a more subtle distinction.

Yes. I have acknowledge that already. It is better to not make “arithmetical” 
realism into the definition of Computationalism, because people put too much in 
it, and it is actually the minimal amount of acceptation in math to make sense 
of the Church-Turing thesis. Since then I define comp by YD + CT, without AR.

I have introduced AR originally to emphasise that I do not assume more than 
arithmetical realism. It was a way to show how few assumption is made. It is 
not a metaphysical assumption. The only metaphysical, or theological, or 
psychological assumption uses is in the YD. It was also warning for 
intuitionists, or ultrafinitists. 


I

> 
> One way of moving forward is that when you talk about the "Robust"
> universe case, you are effectively postulating Platonism of
> computations.

?

I have used “robust” only for a physical universe. It is a physical universe in 
which we can run a UD. Obviously, if our expansion continue for ever, we can 
make a case that our universe is not robust. That would be a problem with step 
7, but step 8 (or equivalent) makes this non relevant.

 I have defined Arithmetical Realism sometimes by saying that an arithmetical 
realist is someone who does not take his kids back from school when he heard 
that they have been taught that there is no greatest prime number, like if that 
was bs).

Arithmetical realism implies Realism on computations. By Matiyazevic, we have 
explicitly that realism on the existence and non existence of solutions of 
Diophantine equation is enough.


> So you can then move on to discussing the non-robust
> case, which I take to be some kind of ultrafinitism in fact.

At step seven. Yes, a physicalist ultrafinitism can be used to prevent the 
immaterialist consequence. 
But only at step seven, and that moves is made into an appeal to magic in step 
8, or just with Occam, and the fact that computations exists in arithmetic (and 
not just as description, which certainly do not exist as some computation can 
be infinite, and there is no infinite in arithmetic).



> 
> A more detailed discussion of the distinction between arithmetic realism
> and platonism would help here.

Yes. Note that I have already explained, but maybe you were not there, why I 
prefer the expression “arithmetical realism” better than arithmetical 
platonism, used by mathematicians.

The reason is that I use Platonism in the sense of Plato, a loose and general 
sense of skepticism about primary matter or physicalism. It was more a 
philosophy-calism, or idealism, not excluding forms of mathematicalism, like 
the starting idea of Pythagorus (only numbers).

So arithmetical realism is a recall that in the storyline we will follow you 
have signed up with the excluded middle principle: either phi_678(890) 
converges (stops), or it does not. Precisely, either the translation of all 
facts making phi_678(890) converging are arithmetically true, or they aren’t.

I use “Platonism” for a variety of theologies, which have progressed from Plato 
to Damascus, with two apparent remarkable peak in clarity with Moderatus of 
Gades (by deduction because we lost his texts) and Plotinus (we have the entire 
texts!).

It is a theology in the greek term of the sense: that is a theory of God, or 
Truth, guessed as transcendent, with an explanation of where it comes from, and 
why and how it make your consciousness here and now, and where the illusion 
comes from, etc. 
God is just the nickname of “theory of everything”. With Mechanism, it will be, 
with respect to the sound machine, the sigma_1 truth (but that is a “secret”, a 
theorem of G*).





> For instance, why did you feel the need
> to include arithmetic realism as a distinct axiom from the CT thesis
> in the first place?

To avoid any confusion in case the member of the jury was intuitionist or 
ultrafinitist. 

It really does not means much more than believing that (3^3) + (4^3) + (5^3) = 
(6^3) is certainly true, or certainly false, independently of verifying it or 
not. 

To implement a computation, you need a reality, to make sense for example of a 
proposition like “ at t

Re: Primary matter

[Telmo Menezes]

On 6 June 2018 at 17:08, John Clark  wrote:
>
>
> On Wed, Jun 6, 2018 at 8:48 AM, Telmo Menezes 
> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> >
>> Science answers plenty of certain types of "why"
>> questions:
>
>
> It would be more accurate to say Science answers "how” questions; "why"
> questions imply intent and intent needs somebody to have a intention and
> there may not be one.


"Why is a wh-word. We use why to talk about reasons and explanations."

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-grammar/question-words/why

An example given:
"Why is the Earth round?"

I understand this "how"/"why" distinction to explain the nature of
science, but it doesn't really work as an absolute rule when applied
to everyday speech. Reasons can be attributed to evolutionary
dynamics, for example.

>> > Why are most plants green?
>
>
> If somebody intended plants to get energy from the sun He would have made
> them black, even red or blue would have been more efficient than green
> because our sun pumps out more energy in the green part of the spectrum than
> in the red or the blue, and so plants just waste most of light’s energy by
> reflecting it away.

Sure, I agree that there is overwhelming evidence for incompetent
design (aka evolution), as opposed to intelligent design.

> But in the early days of life on this planet random
> mutation and natural selection stumbled upon a key molecule in the
> photosynthesis process, chlorophyll, that just happens to be green and it
> works OK, not perfectly but OK. In Evolution you don't have to be perfect
> you just have to be better than the competition.  And once Evolution started
> to go down the chlorophyll path it soon became committed and it became
> virtually impossible to backtrack and look for something better than
> chlorophyll.

Ok, so didn't you just explain why plants are green?

Telmo.

> John K Clark
>
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Re: Primary matter

[John Clark]

On Wed, Jun 6, 2018 at 8:48 AM, Telmo Menezes 
wrote:



​> ​
> *Science answers plenty of certain types of "why"​ ​questions:*
>

It would be more accurate to say Science answers "how” questions; "why"
questions imply intent and intent needs somebody to have a intention and
there may not be one.

> *Why are most plants green?*


If somebody intended plants to get energy from the sun He would have made
them black, even red or blue would have been more efficient than green
because our sun pumps out more energy in the green part of the spectrum
than in the red or the blue, and so plants just waste most of light’s
energy by reflecting it away. But in the early days of life on this planet
random mutation and natural selection stumbled upon a key molecule in the
photosynthesis process, chlorophyll, that just happens to be green and it
works OK, not perfectly but OK. In Evolution you don't have to be perfect
you just have to be better than the competition.  And once Evolution
started to go down the chlorophyll path it soon became committed and it
became virtually impossible to backtrack and look for something better than
chlorophyll.

​ John K Clark​

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Re: Primary matter

[Bruno Marchal]

> On 5 Jun 2018, at 03:34, Bruce Kellett  wrote:
> 
> From: Bruno Marchal mailto:marc...@ulb.ac.be>>
>> 
>> You seem to confuse arithmetical realism, used in all branches of science, 
>> and Platonism (which is part of the consequence). To define mathematically 
>> what a computation is, we need arithmetical realism. In SANE04, my 
>> definition is redundant because the Church-Turing thesis makes no sense at 
>> without arithmetical realism. 
> 
> It is not at all clear what you mean by arithmetical realism -- there seem to 
> be two distinct concepts that are confused.

I have defined it many time, sometimes with quite lengthy explanations, 
sometimes much quicker. 

The shortest definition is that it is the belief that the excluded middle can 
be applied to arithmetical proposition, even when we cannot test them. In fact 
I use only “sigma_1 realism”, or pi_1 realism, which can be paraphrased into 
the the statement that when we run a machine/program, either it stops or it 
does not stop (with default hypothesis like no asteroid, no lack of memory, 
etc.).

Arithmetical realism is used by almost all sciences, except some subpart of 
mathematics.



> The difference is perhaps most easily captured in the use of the word 
> "exists". If we say that there "exists" an integer between 2 and 4, then that 
> could be called mathematical existence.

You can do that.


> And that is all that is necessary for mathematics to be used in the rest of 
> science.

Yes, but in metaphysics, we need to put all cart on the table, and eventually, 
with computationalism, we cannot make sense of anything more than elementary 
arithmetic for an ontological basic existence, the one which has to be assumed. 
(Or any Turing equivalent machinery).




> It is only when you go beyond this concept of mathematical existence and use 
> the word in the same way as we would say that the moon "exists", that you run 
> into trouble.

On the contrary, there will be indeed a integers in between 2 and 4. But the 
moon will get only a phenomenal existence. It will definitely not have the same 
sense as the arithmetical ExP(x), but the moon will only be “observable”, and 
that will be a modal existence, actually like []<>Ex[]<>P(x), with [] and <> a 
material modality (I have given three examples of them).




> The Church-Turing thesis is nothing magical -- it states only that any 
> function computable by a human using some algorithm is also computable by a 
> Turing machine.

I am more or less OK. Better to avoid here “using some algorithm” as the 
Church-Turing thesis is introduced to define just that.




> One side of this -- the human computing via an algorithm -- requires physical 
> existence of the human.

I can agree, but the key point is that the physical existence does not be 
primary, and does not need a physical ontology to be observable and physical 
for the human. 

The fact that the relation between some numbers implements (all) computation(s) 
is enough to doubt (at least) the need to assume an ontological physical 
reality. There are no evidence at all for such a primary reality.




> The other side -- the Turing machine -- does not necessarily require a 
> physical machine -- the definition of the machine and its operations would 
> suffice.

Nice. 



> So the Church-=Turing thesis, in itself, contains a confusion of the two 
> meanings of "exists”.

The Church-Turing thesis is agnostic on the physical ontology. But it is based 
on arithmetical realism, as it is is made conceptually consistent by the 
closure of an infinite set for Cantor's diagonalisation, and the fact that some 
program does not halt. For the total computable function, there is no 
Church-thesis ever possible, and no universal machine, etc.




> 
>> If anyone would believe that arithmetical realism is false, we would have 
>> heard argument that Rieman hypothesis or the twin conjecture or Goldbach are 
>> senseless. But that does not exist.
> 
> That is only one meaning of the word "exists" -- arithmetical realism as I 
> have defined it above. This is not a mode of existence that would allow any 
> actual computation -- it allows only descriptions of computations.

Not at all. The following theory: classical logic +

0 ≠ s(x)
s(x) = s(y) -> x = y
x = 0 v Ey(x = s(y)) 

Contains all descriptions of all computations, but implement none of them.

Yet, the following theory does: classical logic +

0 ≠ s(x)
s(x) = s(y) -> x = y
x = 0 v Ey(x = s(y))
x+0 = x
x+s(y) = s(x+y)
x*0=0
x*s(y)=(x*y)+x

It is only through 


x+0 = x
x+s(y) = s(x+y)
x*0=0
x*s(y)=(x*y)+x


That the theory becomes Turing universal, and essentially incomplete 
(incomplete-able).

You do seem to confuse, like many others, then difference between “having a 
description in arithmetic”, and being (arithmetically) true.



> 
> But then, I don't expect that this will convince you that platonism is the 
> confusion of the two meanings of the word "exists", or that the UD in 
> platonia 

Re: Primary matter

[Bruno Marchal]

> On 4 Jun 2018, at 21:05, Brent Meeker  wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On 6/4/2018 6:50 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>> 
>> There is not one argument here.
>> 
>> You seem to confuse arithmetical realism, used in all branches of science, 
>> and Platonism (which is part of the consequence). To define mathematically 
>> what a computation is, we need arithmetical realism.
> 
> Science doesn't need arithmetical realism in the sense of numbers exist in a 
> Platonic realm. 

Good, because I have never used the idea that “numbers exist in a Platonic 
realm”. I use only that facts like Ex(x+2 = 5), and that this does not assume 
any temporal or spatial reality assumption.



> Science, and everyday life, uses arithmetic as a language to describe things.

That is not true. They use the fact that the arithmetical relations are true, 
independently of any language to describe them. 
String theory would have called cheater if they would have decided that 
1+2+3+4+ … = -1/12 just to make the photon massless. But it makes sense when 
arithmetic take into account the mathematics of the prime number (the zeta 
function), and that was a nontrivial discovery and surprised. You confuse the 
arithmetical reality that we can explore, and the linguistic tools and theories 
that we use to explore it.





>   Numbers are abstractions from instances of sets of things.

You can represent them in that way, but usually, we don’t, so to see that 
number theory assumes much less than set theory.
Then, you seem to assume some things, but the whole point is that we have to 
assume things at the start, and we are searching the simplest one from which we 
can explain the rest, including consciousness.




> 
>> In SANE04, my definition is redundant because the Church-Turing thesis makes 
>> no sense at without arithmetical realism.
>> If anyone would believe that arithmetical realism is false, we would have 
>> heard argument that Rieman hypothesis or the twin conjecture or Goldbach are 
>> senseless. But that does not exist.
> 
> Descriptions don't exist in the same sense as the thing described.


Yes, that is my point. The arithmetical reality is much more than any theory 
can ever unify. That might, or not, be the case with the physical reality. 
Computationalism suggest that the physical reality is like that, but it is an 
open problem.

Bruno



> 
> Brent
> 
>> 
>> If you could avoid ad hominem remark, that would be nice. Also.
>> 
>> Bruno
> 
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Re: Primary matter

[Bruno Marchal]

> On 4 Jun 2018, at 19:12, John Clark  wrote:
> 
> On Mon, Jun 4, 2018 at 10:38 AM, Bruno Marchal  <mailto:marc...@ulb.ac.be>> wrote:
> 
> ​> ​ From -500 to +500, theology has progressed a lot.
> 
> ​I'd like to see some examples of that.


Pythagorus, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Plato, Moderatus of Gades, Plotinus, 
Proclus, Porphyry, … Damascius. That describes the main theologians responsible 
for the progress in Occident. But Damascus was the last platonic scholars, and 
after him, the Plato Academy is close, and theology is stolen by the 
pseudo-politics and becomes an instrument of power only preventing the 
research. The neoplatonicians will move to Middle-East, leading, notably to the 
Enlightenment of Islam, and the development of science, including the 
translation of the greeks, up to the 11th century, where, unfortunately, there 
too, theology is abandoned to the political power. Al Ghazali, notably sided 
with those who subdued reason to the texts, unlike the neoplatonician, like the 
muslim Bektashis or the Alevis who subdue the interpretation of text to reason, 
and forbid the literal readings of the “Book”. Still, all that Islamic and Jew 
enlighten period will go through to Europa, and bring science again at the 
academy, but not completely, as theology remains in the hand of the 
institutions.



> Religion didn't progress logically it just got dumber. Moses didn't claim to 
> be God, Jesus did. And the entire crucifixion thing is comically stupid. God 
> can do anything but He can't forgive the human race because one of them ate 
> an apple when He told them not to, so he arranged to get his son (who was 
> really Him) to get tortured to death by those same humans, after that God 
> gained the ability to forgive mankind. If this is true then God is an 
> imbecile Hmm ... now that I think about it that could explain a lot.
> And moral teaching declined as well. As cruel as the Old Testament God was at 
> least when you were dead you were obliterated and He stopped messing with 
> you, but if you place one toe out of line the New Testament God will use all 
> His infinite power to torture you in fiendish new ways for an infinite number 
> of years (the Bible does not make it clear if that infinity is denumerable or 
> not but considering His sadistic nature my guess would be it is not)  
> 

I am talking about theology, the science. It has no sacred texts, no legend, 
nor even myth (except for Plato, who relies of them for pedagogical purpose 
only, but has been misunderstood on this by some school of thought). 



>  
> 
>> ​>> ​Leibniz invented the silly catch phrase but, as is customary whenever 
>> scientists put on their philosopher's hat, he was rather vague (and Bruno 
>> even more vague)
> 
> ​> ​Not at all. There is not one statement I make which is not a precise
> 
> ​Then tell me, which unique person is Mr. YOU after Mr. You is no longer 
> unique?

By the first person indeterminacy I cannot know, in Helsinki, which one I will 
feel to be. After, you must ask them the question personally, or read their 
diary. 




>  
> ​>> ​about what "primary matter” means; and that's why specialists in the 
> study of matter, physicists, have never found the idea useful. 
> 
> ​> ​Solving fundamental question is not necessary useful, or not directly 
> useful.
> 
> By “useful” I don't just mean the ability to make a better can opener, I also 
> mean the ability to pry out more secrets about how the universe works,

Assuming that there is a universe. But that is an hypothesis in 
theology/metaphysics which contradicts computationalism.




> and Leibniz's idea has never been shown to be able to do that. That wouldn't 
> be so bad if it could do other things but "primary matter" can't seem to make 
> a better can opener either.  

Indeed. But most people confuse it with matter.



> 
>  ​> ​Free-will is often defined by an ability to do something randomly, 
> 
> Free-will is NOT often described that way, I have but I've never heard anyone 
> else do so; I like it because, although it is not useful to the slightest 
> degree it is one of the very few free will definitions that is not pure 
> gibberish. ​​ 
> 
> ​> ​but that is impossible 
> 
> ​Randomness is impossible? What law of logic demands that EVERY event have a 
> cause? ​ 


Rationality. But it is not the idea that randomness does not exist, or that 
some event might have no cause. What is irrational is to call that principle in 
any explanation. It is like confusing an UFO with a design by an alien. An UFO 
is just a flying object that we have not been able to identity. We can’t use 
that to invoke God or Alien in the explanation. The same for “no cause”. It 
means only: we don’t see the cause yet. Postul

Re: Primary matter

[Telmo Menezes]

>> Yes, but why are the "lights on" inside me? Why are we not mechanisms,
>> that do exactly what you describe, but without a first-person
>> experience of it?
>
>
> Ah, there's your problem.  Science doesn't answer "why" questions. That's
> what I mean by people having an exaggerated idea of what science does.
> Newton said, "Hypothesi non fingo."...but nobody speaks latin anymore.

Science does not answer "why" questions of an existential nature, for
example "why does the universe exist?", but I disagree with the
generalization. Science answers plenty of certain types of "why"
questions:

Why are most plants green?
Why are there so many different species?
Why is the sun so bright?
etc.

I believe that I am asking a question of the same nature as the above.
There are certainly metaphysical questions to ask about consciousness,
but here I am simply asking how it fits our current body of scientific
theory. All of our most powerful theories seem to fit each other.
Darwinism fits higher-order psychological and sociological theory, and
it also fits chemistry, which fits particle physics and so on. In my
view, consciousness is the odd thing that doesn't fit any of this.

>> You switched to intelligence. AI is fairly advanced now, it does not
>> seem to require consciousness to do the things it describe. Perhaps it
>> is conscious as a side-effect, but why?
>
>
> See above, i.e. because it is necessary.  Science may well determine when
> and where and what relations there are.  But not why.  That's the
> "engineering" solution to the hard problem of consciousness for which I am
> often criticized.

I criticize it because I find it circular: first one assumes that
consciousness is correlated with human-like behavior, then one creates
human-like behavior to show how consciousness originates...

>>
>>> - Is there a reality that is external to conscious perception?
>>>
>>>
>>> It is a theory I have held a long time and it seems very well supported
>>> in
>>> my experience.  So I'm thinking that you exist and will read this.
>>
>> I am not proposing solipsism. My question is: is there a reality that
>> is external to *any* conscious perception? I don't see any evidence
>> one way or the other, just models that help calculate things.
>
>
> The problem with that is you stuck in "just".  Don't deprecated good models.

I don't criticize these good models. I ask that we don't forget what
is assumed at the start.

Telmo.

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Re: Primary matter

[Brent Meeker]

On 6/5/2018 8:12 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:

On 4 June 2018 at 20:30, Brent Meeker  wrote:


On 6/4/2018 3:13 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:

Most scientists and scientifically-literate people I know assume that
consciousness emerges from brain activity without ever really thinking
about the ramifications of this hypothesis. I have had this
conversation several times, and I can usually tell that, when asked
certain questions, people are surprised to realize that this idea is
not on such solid grounds as they seemed to think.


Would you like to share those questions?

One of the questions is: what is emergence? Is it an ontological step
or an epistemological device? If you consider the classical examples:
statistical physics, ecosystems, societies, markets, cities, etc. I
think you will come to the conclusion that it is epistemological. We
do not have enough cognitive capacity to understand the world in terms
of the individual behaviors of every single human being, but we are
able to perceive and reason about higher-order patterns of behavior. I
know what amount of traffic to expect when I ride my bike in a bit,
because I know the higher-order patterns of my city. But I also know
that a sufficiently powerful intelligence could keep track of the
behavior every single person in the city instead. The same goes for
molecules, individual financial transactions and so on. There is a
cognitive limit that is breached by what we call emergence, but in all
of these cases we can go all the way down to the building blocks.


Yes, this comports with my idea that consciousness is in part a 
summarization of experience for memory which is then called on for 
prediction.  That's why we notice and remember unusual things.  We don't 
need anymore summaries about commonplace things.




This leads to my second question: if we assume emergence, then what is
the building block of consciousness? I think that it is easy to see
that either consciousness is qualitatively different or we haven't
found the building block yet. In either case, emergentism is a very
weak hypothesis, in the sense that it does not propose an explanatory
mechanism (unlike all other things above).


Functionalism would say the building block is a transformation of 
information...something like a qubit gate.  Here's an interesting 
overview of the non-functionalist ideas of monism:



'Russellian monism' New paper by Groff and Sam Coleman, forthcoming in 
Oxford Companion to Consciousness, edited by Uriah Kriegel. 
http://www.philipgoffphilosophy.com/uploads/1/4/4/4/14443634/russellian_monism.pdf 
… #Panpsychism #Consciousness

http://www.philipgoffphilosophy.com/uploads/1/4/4/4/14443634/russellian_monism.pdf



The third question that I mention is aligned with Bruno's duplication
machines. If consciousness emerges from brain activity, which is
finite and made of fungible entities (atoms, molecules, particles,
whatever), then the same exact pattern that you are experiencing now
can, in principle be repeated many or infinite times, both across time
and space.


If time and space are infinite and everything (pattern) that can happen 
does.



What happens then? Is there some magic property that still
makes you distinct across such instances? Or does it turn out that you
cannot really be said to be associated with any specific chunk of
matter?


I don't see why that's a problem.  It seems to implicitly demand that 
"you" be unique and somehow distinct from all possible realizations.  
Why should it matter if momentarily in some far away galaxy there's 
someone who is experiencing reading these words...but necessarily having 
the same next thought of reading THESE worlds?


Brent



I'm a lot of fun at parties.

Telmo.



Brent

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Re: Primary matter

[Brent Meeker]

On 6/5/2018 7:58 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:

If I understand correctly, you define free-will as the ability to act
independently from other people, biological instincts and so on. My
problem is that free-will must be free from something. I can accept it
as a relative concept -- my free-will in relation to what other people
want me to do, as you say.


As Dennett puts it, that's all the free-will worth having.  You don't 
want to do stuff at random.  You don't want to do stuff inconsistent 
with you genetics, education, life experience, ethics,...you want to do 
stuff consistent with who you are.


Brent


But isn't it the case that, if you zoom out
enough, there is nothing for the will to be free from? Just a bunch of
stuff happening? If your Universal Dovetailer is the source-code of
reality, doesn't it contain all computations? Then whatever I choice I
make "here" is replaced by another choice somewhere else. I have the
impression that free-will in this context amounts to an inability to
perceive everything.

Best,
Telmo.


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Re: Primary matter

[Brent Meeker]

On 6/5/2018 7:42 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:

On 4 June 2018 at 23:48, Brent Meeker  wrote:


On 6/4/2018 7:13 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:

I am very grateful for mother medicine, but
we should not pretend that its operative assumptions solve the
fundamental questions.

What fundamental question do you refer to?  How to detect consciousness?
How to produce consciousness?  How to prove (in the empirical sense) that
consciousness is linked to brain activity? That's my concern, that one just
throws up things that are syntactically questions but with no thought as to
what might constitute an answer.

I understand your concern. I will just tell you what my main curiosities
are:


OK, I'll  take a stab at them.


- Why does consciousness even exist? Darwinism does not seem to require it.


It's a necessary feature of intelligence.  Intelligence requires "what-if"
modeling of situations in order to foresee consequences.  Even a the lower
animal level this implies modeling oneself in the simulation. In higher,
social animals it includes being able to put yourself in the place of others
in order to anticipate their repsonses, i.e. having a theory of mind.

Yes, but why are the "lights on" inside me? Why are we not mechanisms,
that do exactly what you describe, but without a first-person
experience of it?


Ah, there's your problem.  Science doesn't answer "why" questions. 
That's what I mean by people having an exaggerated idea of what science 
does.  Newton said, "Hypothesi non fingo."...but nobody speaks latin 
anymore.





- What is the relationship between consciousness and matter?

Consciousness, as explained above, is the ability to perceive and act
intelligently in the world by doing "what-if" simulations to foresee events.
It is something that is instantiated by complex material systems that
include memory and information processing; but we don't know exactly what
kind.

You switched to intelligence. AI is fairly advanced now, it does not
seem to require consciousness to do the things it describe. Perhaps it
is conscious as a side-effect, but why?


See above, i.e. because it is necessary.  Science may well determine 
when and where and what relations there are.  But not why.  That's the 
"engineering" solution to the hard problem of consciousness for which I 
am often criticized.





- Is there a reality that is external to conscious perception?


It is a theory I have held a long time and it seems very well supported in
my experience.  So I'm thinking that you exist and will read this.

I am not proposing solipsism. My question is: is there a reality that
is external to *any* conscious perception? I don't see any evidence
one way or the other, just models that help calculate things.


The problem with that is you stuck in "just".  Don't deprecated good models.




My view is scientifically speaking we never know anything "fundamental" and
the search for it is like the hunting of the snark.  We seek theories with
more scope and more accuracy, but being "more fundamental" doesn't entail
that something is most fundamental.   Mystics like Bruno postulate something
and then build structures on it which, by some (often small) agreement with
experience, PROVE their postulates.  But as Feynman used to point out, this
is Greek mathematics.  Science is like Persian mathematics in which the
mathematician seeks to identify all the possible axiom sets that entail the
observations.

I tend to agree that scientifically we never know anything
fundamental. I do believe that it is possible to use reason to acquire
knowledge by means that are not the scientific method. I am certain
that I possess knowledge that was not acquired by scientific means,
for example I know how it feels to be me.


It ain't so much what you don't know that gets you into trouble, as what you
know that ain't so.
   --- Josh Billings

Indeed.


Even if my metaphysical
obsessions are a fool's errand, I do think it is valuable to know
where the boundaries of scientific knowledge are, and be humble enough
to recognize them.


I think it is scientists who are most aware of the boundaries of scientific
knowledge.  Non-scientists tend to look at technology and think, "Oh we can
make airplanes so we know all about flying."  Scientists know that there's
no proof that the Navier-Stokes equations will converge to a solution for a
particular case.  That doesn't however mean that the boundary is fixed and
can't be pushed back.  So when scientists propose to study consciousness,
non-scientists think, "Oh they want to explain it like Newton explained
gravity and Maxwell explained radio waves.  Put it in mathematical formulae.
That's impossible.  I have consciousness and I know it's not mathematical (I
can't even do math)."  Scientists are thinking, "We'll make an approximate
but limited model of consciousness, like Newton did of gravity, so we'll be
able to predict some phenomena of consciousness, like Maxwell did for EM."

Well but you know my objections, 

Re: Primary matter

[Telmo Menezes]

On 4 June 2018 at 20:30, Brent Meeker  wrote:
>
>
> On 6/4/2018 3:13 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
>>
>> Most scientists and scientifically-literate people I know assume that
>> consciousness emerges from brain activity without ever really thinking
>> about the ramifications of this hypothesis. I have had this
>> conversation several times, and I can usually tell that, when asked
>> certain questions, people are surprised to realize that this idea is
>> not on such solid grounds as they seemed to think.
>
>
> Would you like to share those questions?

One of the questions is: what is emergence? Is it an ontological step
or an epistemological device? If you consider the classical examples:
statistical physics, ecosystems, societies, markets, cities, etc. I
think you will come to the conclusion that it is epistemological. We
do not have enough cognitive capacity to understand the world in terms
of the individual behaviors of every single human being, but we are
able to perceive and reason about higher-order patterns of behavior. I
know what amount of traffic to expect when I ride my bike in a bit,
because I know the higher-order patterns of my city. But I also know
that a sufficiently powerful intelligence could keep track of the
behavior every single person in the city instead. The same goes for
molecules, individual financial transactions and so on. There is a
cognitive limit that is breached by what we call emergence, but in all
of these cases we can go all the way down to the building blocks.

This leads to my second question: if we assume emergence, then what is
the building block of consciousness? I think that it is easy to see
that either consciousness is qualitatively different or we haven't
found the building block yet. In either case, emergentism is a very
weak hypothesis, in the sense that it does not propose an explanatory
mechanism (unlike all other things above).

The third question that I mention is aligned with Bruno's duplication
machines. If consciousness emerges from brain activity, which is
finite and made of fungible entities (atoms, molecules, particles,
whatever), then the same exact pattern that you are experiencing now
can, in principle be repeated many or infinite times, both across time
and space. What happens then? Is there some magic property that still
makes you distinct across such instances? Or does it turn out that you
cannot really be said to be associated with any specific chunk of
matter?

I'm a lot of fun at parties.

Telmo.


> Brent
>
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Re: Primary matter

[Telmo Menezes]

provable. That can be used as a semi-axiomatic theory of consciousness, and 
> it can be shown that all (Löbian) universal machine are confronted with,  and 
> can described, such predicate.
> More: Consciousness got an important role here: it speed a machine relatively 
> to other machine. Consciousness select the computation (without magic, but 
> like in the WM duplication), but it accelerates the self developing autonomy. 
> It provides … free-will, which is not much the ability to say “no” to the 
> authorities, be them parents, teacher, bishops, ayatollah, etc.

I have had an idea for some time, and I will describe it to see if it
goes in the direction of what you are saying.

You could say it proposes a solution to the Fermi Paradox. My idea is
to combine Darwinism, Many-Worlds and Anthropic reasoning: what if
evolution works exactly as modern Biology describes it, but with a
probability of success that is incredibly low? Then the multiverse
could be a barren wasteland, with incredibly sporadic regions where
entities like us evolved. This then becomes a complex version of your
duplication machine, where I can only see Moscow if Moscow exists,
which is to say, if I am in a computation that supports human
existence.

This would also explain my disappointments with genetic programming :)

>>
>>> And by the way, the number of
>>> times the phrase "primary matter" is mentioned in that article is exactly
>>> the same number you will find it mentioned in any modern physics journal.
>>> Zero.
>>
>> I assumed I was not arguing with a string matching algorithm. In this
>> case it does take a bit of semantic parsing:
>>
>> "To materialists, matter is primary[...]"
>>
>> Now, I am not a native English speaker, but I am fairly convinced that
>> if you find the pattern:
>>
>> N is A, where N is a noun and A is an adjective, you can equally
>> allude to AN. For example you could write the equivalent sentence:
>>
>> "Materialists believe in primary matter."
>>
>> But if you insist on string-matching arguments:
>> https://www.google.com/search?hl=en=primary%20matter
>>
>> Modern physics journal:
>> https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1014465327475
>>
>>> The reason the “primary matter" debate is never going to get anywhere is
>>> that philosophers write impassioned posts and even scholarly tomes about the
>>> existence or non-existence of "primary matter" but never once ask themselves
>>> what the hell the term is supposed to mean, and many don't even wonder what
>>> "matter" means.
>>
>> You illustrate the belief in primary matter frequently, when you argue
>> with Bruno that a physical computer is necessary for computations to
>> exist, or that physics is more fundamental than math. This is a
>> position of belief in primary matter.
>>
>>> Leibniz invented the silly catch phrase but, as is
>>> customary whenever scientists put on their philosopher's hat, he was rather
>>> vague (and Bruno even more vague) about what "primary matter” means; and
>>> that's why specialists in the study of matter, physicists, have never found
>>> the idea useful.
>>
>> It is normal that they don't find it useful, since they are interested
>> in physics and not in metaphysics -- although, of course, it is
>> possible to be interested in both.
>>
>>> And “free will” is a idea that’s even worse, but of course
>>> that hasn’t stopped philosophers from generating a vast quantity of verbiage
>>> about that too.
>>
>> With that I agree.
>
> See my reply to Clark on this. Free-will is often defined by an ability to do 
> something randomly, but that is impossible and that is just, imho, a very bad 
> definition. If you read the neoplatonist, or study the behaviour of the 
> neoplatonist, like I just described, or like in the video on Islam that I 
> just gave, and still in my buffer:
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60JboffOhaw
>
> You will see that free-will was exactly what the literalist were opposed (who 
> defend literal interpretation of sacred texts as dogmatic truth).
>
> Free-will is the ability to determine oneself, with respect to Nature, or the 
> Pope. Free-will is almost more a right than a metaphysical truth. Today, this 
> is taught to pilots of airliners.the encouragement to the copilots to say to 
> the commandant or the captain of the plane that they are wrong. That is not 
> obvious, especially when they come from the army. More than a hundred 
> passenger planes have crashed despite the cockpit recorder show that the 
> copilot

Re: Primary matter

[Telmo Menezes]

On 4 June 2018 at 23:48, Brent Meeker  wrote:
>
>
> On 6/4/2018 7:13 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
>
> I am very grateful for mother medicine, but
> we should not pretend that its operative assumptions solve the
> fundamental questions.
>
> What fundamental question do you refer to?  How to detect consciousness?
> How to produce consciousness?  How to prove (in the empirical sense) that
> consciousness is linked to brain activity? That's my concern, that one just
> throws up things that are syntactically questions but with no thought as to
> what might constitute an answer.
>
> I understand your concern. I will just tell you what my main curiosities
> are:
>
>
> OK, I'll  take a stab at them.
>
>
> - Why does consciousness even exist? Darwinism does not seem to require it.
>
>
> It's a necessary feature of intelligence.  Intelligence requires "what-if"
> modeling of situations in order to foresee consequences.  Even a the lower
> animal level this implies modeling oneself in the simulation. In higher,
> social animals it includes being able to put yourself in the place of others
> in order to anticipate their repsonses, i.e. having a theory of mind.

Yes, but why are the "lights on" inside me? Why are we not mechanisms,
that do exactly what you describe, but without a first-person
experience of it?

> - What is the relationship between consciousness and matter?
>
> Consciousness, as explained above, is the ability to perceive and act
> intelligently in the world by doing "what-if" simulations to foresee events.
> It is something that is instantiated by complex material systems that
> include memory and information processing; but we don't know exactly what
> kind.

You switched to intelligence. AI is fairly advanced now, it does not
seem to require consciousness to do the things it describe. Perhaps it
is conscious as a side-effect, but why?

> - Is there a reality that is external to conscious perception?
>
>
> It is a theory I have held a long time and it seems very well supported in
> my experience.  So I'm thinking that you exist and will read this.

I am not proposing solipsism. My question is: is there a reality that
is external to *any* conscious perception? I don't see any evidence
one way or the other, just models that help calculate things.

> My view is scientifically speaking we never know anything "fundamental" and
> the search for it is like the hunting of the snark.  We seek theories with
> more scope and more accuracy, but being "more fundamental" doesn't entail
> that something is most fundamental.   Mystics like Bruno postulate something
> and then build structures on it which, by some (often small) agreement with
> experience, PROVE their postulates.  But as Feynman used to point out, this
> is Greek mathematics.  Science is like Persian mathematics in which the
> mathematician seeks to identify all the possible axiom sets that entail the
> observations.
>
> I tend to agree that scientifically we never know anything
> fundamental. I do believe that it is possible to use reason to acquire
> knowledge by means that are not the scientific method. I am certain
> that I possess knowledge that was not acquired by scientific means,
> for example I know how it feels to be me.
>
>
> It ain't so much what you don't know that gets you into trouble, as what you
> know that ain't so.
>   --- Josh Billings

Indeed.

> Even if my metaphysical
> obsessions are a fool's errand, I do think it is valuable to know
> where the boundaries of scientific knowledge are, and be humble enough
> to recognize them.
>
>
> I think it is scientists who are most aware of the boundaries of scientific
> knowledge.  Non-scientists tend to look at technology and think, "Oh we can
> make airplanes so we know all about flying."  Scientists know that there's
> no proof that the Navier-Stokes equations will converge to a solution for a
> particular case.  That doesn't however mean that the boundary is fixed and
> can't be pushed back.  So when scientists propose to study consciousness,
> non-scientists think, "Oh they want to explain it like Newton explained
> gravity and Maxwell explained radio waves.  Put it in mathematical formulae.
> That's impossible.  I have consciousness and I know it's not mathematical (I
> can't even do math)."  Scientists are thinking, "We'll make an approximate
> but limited model of consciousness, like Newton did of gravity, so we'll be
> able to predict some phenomena of consciousness, like Maxwell did for EM."

Well but you know my objections, namely with the instrumentation issue.

> I feel that a lot of resistance to this stuff comes from a fear that
> one is trying to slide religion or the supernatural through the back
> door, so to speak. I trust that you believe that I am not trying to
> sell anything like that. I only proclaim my ignorance, and the
> ignorance of everyone else.
>
>
> Just like a lot of resistance to materialism comes from people who want an
> immortal soul.

I have no doubt 

Re: Primary matter

[Brent Meeker]

On 6/4/2018 4:39 PM, Russell Standish wrote:

On Mon, Jun 04, 2018 at 02:48:01PM -0700, Brent Meeker wrote:

It's a necessary feature of intelligence.  Intelligence requires "what-if"
modeling of situations in order to foresee consequences. Even a the lower
animal level this implies modeling oneself in the simulation. In higher,
social animals it includes being able to put yourself in the place of others
in order to anticipate their repsonses, i.e. having a theory of mind.

Not many species of animal appear to do this. But yes, I think the
evolutionary account is valid, and goes by the name of Machiavellian
Intelligence theory.

But this implies that consciousness is identified with self-awareness?


There's a lower level of awareness which is just distinguishing self 
from environment which even one-celled animals have; but I wouldn't call 
them conscious.


Brent





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Re: Primary matter

[Russell Standish]

On Mon, Jun 04, 2018 at 03:50:33PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote:
> 
> You seem to confuse arithmetical realism, used in all branches of science, 
> and Platonism (which is part of the consequence). To define mathematically 
> what a computation is, we need arithmetical realism. In SANE04, my definition 
> is redundant because the Church-Turing thesis makes no sense at without 
> arithmetical realism. 

Hi Bruno, I think you need to be aware that your writings do not help
here, and that perhaps you need to clarify the point. For a long time
I understood Arithmetic Realism <=> Platonism of the integers, but now
I understand you make a more subtle distinction.

One way of moving forward is that when you talk about the "Robust"
universe case, you are effectively postulating Platonism of
computations. So you can then move on to discussing the non-robust
case, which I take to be some kind of ultrafinitism in fact.

A more detailed discussion of the distinction between arithmetic realism
and platonism would help here. For instance, why did you feel the need
to include arithmetic realism as a distinct axiom from the CT thesis
in the first place?


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Visiting Senior Research Fellowhpco...@hpcoders.com.au
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Re: Primary matter

[Bruce Kellett]

From: *Bruno Marchal* mailto:marc...@ulb.ac.be>>


You seem to confuse arithmetical realism, used in all branches of 
science, and Platonism (which is part of the consequence). To define 
mathematically what a computation is, we need arithmetical realism. In 
SANE04, my definition is redundant because the Church-Turing thesis 
makes no sense at without arithmetical realism.


It is not at all clear what you mean by arithmetical realism -- there 
seem to be two distinct concepts that are confused. The difference is 
perhaps most easily captured in the use of the word "exists". If we say 
that there "exists" an integer between 2 and 4, then that could be 
called mathematical existence. And that is all that is necessary for 
mathematics to be used in the rest of science. It is only when you go 
beyond this concept of mathematical existence and use the word in the 
same way as we would say that the moon "exists", that you run into 
trouble. The Church-Turing thesis is nothing magical -- it states only 
that any function computable by a human using some algorithm is also 
computable by a Turing machine. One side of this -- the human computing 
via an algorithm -- requires physical existence of the human. The other 
side -- the Turing machine -- does not necessarily require a physical 
machine -- the definition of the machine and its operations would 
suffice. So the Church-=Turing thesis, in itself, contains a confusion 
of the two meanings of "exists".


If anyone would believe that arithmetical realism is false, we would 
have heard argument that Rieman hypothesis or the twin conjecture or 
Goldbach are senseless. But that does not exist.


That is only one meaning of the word "exists" -- arithmetical realism as 
I have defined it above. This is not a mode of existence that would 
allow any actual computation -- it allows only descriptions of computations.


But then, I don't expect that this will convince you that platonism is 
the confusion of the two meanings of the word "exists", or that the UD 
in platonia cannot compute anything.



If you could avoid ad hominem remark, that would be nice. Also.


I don't think you know the meaning of '/ad hominem/'. You seem to think 
that any personal remark is '/ad hominem/'. But strictly, '/argumentum 
ad hominem/' is something quite different. Look it up!


Bruce

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Re: Primary matter

[John Clark]

On Mon, Jun 4, 2018 at 7:07 PM, Russell Standish 
wrote:

>
>> ​>​
>> Free-will is NOT *often* described that way, I have but I've never heard
>> ​
>> anyone else do so;
>
>
> ​> ​
> I'm _sure_ you've heard me describe it that way. It's in my book.


​I'm glad to hear I'm not alone!​


> ​> ​
> My
> ​
> usual formulation is "free will is the ability to do something
> stupid", which could be paraphrased as "do something irrational".



If I believe 2+2= 5 that would certainly be stupid but it may not be
irrational, there could be a reason I believe that, its just that whatever
that reason is it has nothing to do with what 2+2 actually is. Or I could
have that belief for no reason whatsoever, in other words it could be
random. Or there could be a reason but not one I'm aware of, but I would
still classify that as irrational because I don't know why I believe it I
just know I do.


> ​>​
> Not only is it not gibberish, but it also turns out that acting
> a little bit irrational is useful, in that you prevent your enemies
> from exploiting the predictability of you actions if you were
> perfectly rational.
>

If its rational then there was a reason for it, and if randomness or
pseudo-randomness was used judiciously and sparingly that strategy could be
smart too in certain circumstances.

John K Clark

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Re: Primary matter

[Brent Meeker]

On 6/4/2018 4:07 PM, Russell Standish wrote:

On Mon, Jun 04, 2018 at 01:12:57PM -0400, John Clark wrote:

​>* ​*
*Free-will is often defined by an ability to do something randomly, *


Free-will is NOT *often* described that way, I have but I've never heard
anyone else do so;

I'm _sure_ you've heard me describe it that way. It's in my book. My
usual formulation is "free will is the ability to do something
stupid", which could be paraphrased as "do something irrational". But
effectively, that is the same thing as "do something randomly", at
least for some definitions of "random".


I like it because, although it is not useful to the
slightest degree it is one of the very few free will definitions that is
not pure gibberish. ​​


Not only is it not gibberish, but it also turns out that acting
a little bit irrational is useful, in that you prevent your enemies
from exploiting the predictability of you actions if you were
perfectly rational.


I would point out that even acting perfectly rationally doesn't entail 
that your actions will be predictable by your enemies.  In general you 
will have different information than other people.


Brent



Cheers


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Re: Primary matter

[Russell Standish]

On Mon, Jun 04, 2018 at 02:48:01PM -0700, Brent Meeker wrote:
> 
> It's a necessary feature of intelligence.  Intelligence requires "what-if"
> modeling of situations in order to foresee consequences. Even a the lower
> animal level this implies modeling oneself in the simulation. In higher,
> social animals it includes being able to put yourself in the place of others
> in order to anticipate their repsonses, i.e. having a theory of mind.

Not many species of animal appear to do this. But yes, I think the
evolutionary account is valid, and goes by the name of Machiavellian
Intelligence theory.

But this implies that consciousness is identified with self-awareness?

-- 


Dr Russell StandishPhone 0425 253119 (mobile)
Principal, High Performance Coders
Visiting Senior Research Fellowhpco...@hpcoders.com.au
Economics, Kingston University http://www.hpcoders.com.au


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Re: Primary matter

[Russell Standish]

On Mon, Jun 04, 2018 at 01:12:57PM -0400, John Clark wrote:
> > ​>* ​*
> > *Free-will is often defined by an ability to do something randomly, *
> 
> 
> Free-will is NOT *often* described that way, I have but I've never heard
> anyone else do so;

I'm _sure_ you've heard me describe it that way. It's in my book. My
usual formulation is "free will is the ability to do something
stupid", which could be paraphrased as "do something irrational". But
effectively, that is the same thing as "do something randomly", at
least for some definitions of "random".

> I like it because, although it is not useful to the
> slightest degree it is one of the very few free will definitions that is
> not pure gibberish. ​​
>

Not only is it not gibberish, but it also turns out that acting
a little bit irrational is useful, in that you prevent your enemies
from exploiting the predictability of you actions if you were
perfectly rational.

Cheers
-- 


Dr Russell StandishPhone 0425 253119 (mobile)
Principal, High Performance Coders
Visiting Senior Research Fellowhpco...@hpcoders.com.au
Economics, Kingston University http://www.hpcoders.com.au


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Re: Primary matter

[Brent Meeker]

On 6/4/2018 7:13 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:

I am very grateful for mother medicine, but
we should not pretend that its operative assumptions solve the
fundamental questions.

What fundamental question do you refer to?  How to detect consciousness?
How to produce consciousness?  How to prove (in the empirical sense) that
consciousness is linked to brain activity? That's my concern, that one just
throws up things that are syntactically questions but with no thought as to
what might constitute an answer.

I understand your concern. I will just tell you what my main curiosities are:


OK, I'll  take a stab at them.



- Why does consciousness even exist? Darwinism does not seem to require it.


It's a necessary feature of intelligence.  Intelligence requires 
"what-if" modeling of situations in order to foresee consequences. Even 
a the lower animal level this implies modeling oneself in the 
simulation. In higher, social animals it includes being able to put 
yourself in the place of others in order to anticipate their repsonses, 
i.e. having a theory of mind.



- What is the relationship between consciousness and matter?
Consciousness, as explained above, is the ability to perceive and act 
intelligently in the world by doing "what-if" simulations to foresee 
events.  It is something that is instantiated by complex material 
systems that include memory and information processing; but we don't 
know exactly what kind.



- Is there a reality that is external to conscious perception?


It is a theory I have held a long time and it seems very well supported 
in my experience.  So I'm thinking that you exist and will read this.





My view is scientifically speaking we never know anything "fundamental" and
the search for it is like the hunting of the snark.  We seek theories with
more scope and more accuracy, but being "more fundamental" doesn't entail
that something is most fundamental.   Mystics like Bruno postulate something
and then build structures on it which, by some (often small) agreement with
experience, PROVE their postulates.  But as Feynman used to point out, this
is Greek mathematics.  Science is like Persian mathematics in which the
mathematician seeks to identify all the possible axiom sets that entail the
observations.

I tend to agree that scientifically we never know anything
fundamental. I do believe that it is possible to use reason to acquire
knowledge by means that are not the scientific method. I am certain
that I possess knowledge that was not acquired by scientific means,
for example I know how it feels to be me.


It ain't so much what you don't know that gets you into trouble, as what 
you know that ain't so.

  --- Josh Billings


Even if my metaphysical
obsessions are a fool's errand, I do think it is valuable to know
where the boundaries of scientific knowledge are, and be humble enough
to recognize them.


I think it is scientists who are most aware of the boundaries of 
scientific knowledge.  Non-scientists tend to look at technology and 
think, "Oh we can make airplanes so we know all about flying." 
Scientists know that there's no proof that the Navier-Stokes equations 
will converge to a solution for a particular case.  That doesn't however 
mean that the boundary is fixed and can't be pushed back.  So when 
scientists propose to study consciousness, non-scientists think, "Oh 
they want to explain it like Newton explained gravity and Maxwell 
explained radio waves.  Put it in mathematical formulae.  That's 
impossible.  I have consciousness and I know it's not mathematical (I 
can't even do math)."  Scientists are thinking, "We'll make an 
approximate but limited model of consciousness, like Newton did of 
gravity, so we'll be able to predict some phenomena of consciousness, 
like Maxwell did for EM."




I feel that a lot of resistance to this stuff comes from a fear that
one is trying to slide religion or the supernatural through the back
door, so to speak. I trust that you believe that I am not trying to
sell anything like that. I only proclaim my ignorance, and the
ignorance of everyone else.


Just like a lot of resistance to materialism comes from people who want 
an immortal soul.


Brent

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Re: Primary matter

[Brent Meeker]

On 6/4/2018 6:50 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:


There is not one argument here.

You seem to confuse arithmetical realism, used in all branches of 
science, and Platonism (which is part of the consequence). To define 
mathematically what a computation is, we need arithmetical realism.


Science doesn't need arithmetical realism in the sense of numbers exist 
in a Platonic realm.  Science, and everyday life, uses arithmetic as a 
language to describe things.  Numbers are abstractions from instances of 
sets of things.


In SANE04, my definition is redundant because the Church-Turing thesis 
makes no sense at without arithmetical realism.
If anyone would believe that arithmetical realism is false, we would 
have heard argument that Rieman hypothesis or the twin conjecture or 
Goldbach are senseless. But that does not exist.


Descriptions don't exist in the same sense as the thing described.

Brent



If you could avoid ad hominem remark, that would be nice. Also.

Bruno


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Re: Primary matter

[Brent Meeker]

On 6/4/2018 3:13 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:

Most scientists and scientifically-literate people I know assume that
consciousness emerges from brain activity without ever really thinking
about the ramifications of this hypothesis. I have had this
conversation several times, and I can usually tell that, when asked
certain questions, people are surprised to realize that this idea is
not on such solid grounds as they seemed to think.


Would you like to share those questions?

Brent

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Re: Primary matter

[John Clark]

On Mon, Jun 4, 2018 at 10:38 AM, Bruno Marchal  wrote:

​> *​*
> * From -500 to +500, theology has progressed a lot.*
>

​
I'd like to see some examples of that. Religion didn't progress logically
it just got dumber. Moses didn't claim to be God, Jesus did. And the entire
crucifixion thing is comically stupid. God can do anything but He can't
forgive the human race because one of them ate an apple when He told them
not to, so he arranged to get his son (who was really Him) to get tortured
to death by those same humans, after that God gained the ability to forgive
mankind. If this is true then God is an imbecile Hmm ... now that I
think about it that could explain a lot.

And moral teaching declined as well. As cruel as the Old Testament God was
at least when you were dead you were obliterated and He stopped
messing with you, but if you place one toe out of line the New Testament
God will use all His infinite power to torture you in fiendish new ways for
an infinite number of years (the Bible does not make it clear if that
infinity is denumerable or not but considering His sadistic nature my guess
would be it is not)

> ​>> ​
> Leibniz invented the silly catch phrase but, as is customary whenever
> scientists put on their philosopher's hat, he was rather vague (and Bruno
> even more vague)
>
> ​> ​
> *Not at all. There is not one statement I make which is not a precise*
>

​
Then tell me, which unique person is Mr. YOU after Mr. You is no longer
unique?


> ​>> ​
>> about what "primary matter” means; and that's why specialists in the
>> study of matter, physicists, have never found the idea useful.
>
>
> *​> ​Solving fundamental question is not necessary useful, or not directly
> useful.*
>

By “useful” I don't just mean the ability to make a better can opener, I
also mean the ability to pry out more secrets about how the universe works,
and Leibniz's idea has never been shown to be able to do that. That
wouldn't be so bad if it could do other things but "primary matter" can't
seem to make a better can opener either.


> ​>* ​*
> *Free-will is often defined by an ability to do something randomly, *


Free-will is NOT *often* described that way, I have but I've never heard
anyone else do so; I like it because, although it is not useful to the
slightest degree it is one of the very few free will definitions that is
not pure gibberish. ​​


​>* ​*
> *but that is impossible *


​Randomness is impossible? What law of logic demands that *EVERY* event
have a cause? ​


​>​
> * that is just, imho, a very bad definition.*
> ​[...] ​
> *Free-will is the ability to say no to God *


​Speaking of bad definitions... there is no God... but if there were then
being omnipotent He would have the ability to cause us to want to say yes
to Him... and if God is not causing us to say stuff then there are only 2
possibilities:

1) Something other than God is causing us to say no and therefore saying no
was deterministic.
2) Nothing caused us to say it and therefore saying no was random.

 John K Clark

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Re: Primary matter

[Bruno Marchal]

> On 3 Jun 2018, at 21:56, Brent Meeker  wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On 6/3/2018 3:40 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
>> On 1 June 2018 at 19:41, Brent Meeker  wrote:
>>> 
>>> On 6/1/2018 12:15 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
>>>> On 31 May 2018 at 19:57, Brent Meeker  wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>> On 5/31/2018 2:06 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> You're a bit naughty Brent. You sometimes use this maneuver of
>>>>>> nonchalantly listing something that is being discussed -- but that you
>>>>>> don't like -- along with something else that is obviously outdated or
>>>>>> silly.
>>>>> 
>>>>> It's not that I "don't like" primary matter, it's that I think it's an
>>>>> invented term that nobody actually postulates.
>>>> >From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism#Overview :
>>>> 
>>>> "To idealists, spirit or mind or the objects of mind (ideas) are
>>>> primary, and matter secondary. To materialists, matter is primary, and
>>>> mind or spirit or ideas are secondary, the product of matter acting
>>>> upon matter."
>>> 
>>> I concede the point.
>> Thanks for saying.
>> 
>>> There are many who consider that matter can explain
>>> mind, so in the Materialism vs Idealism debate they are taking matter as
>>> prior, and one may infer, as primary.  But the few who actually think about
>>> the ontology of "matter", like Wheeler, Hawking, Tegmark,...do not just
>>> postulate some "primary matter" and in fact ask questions like, "What makes
>>> the equations fly."  They do not even insist that there is an ur-stuff that
>>> is matter.  Which was my point that if there is an ur-stuff then the
>>> ur-stuff makes both mind and matter and whatever else so there's little
>>> point in calling is either matter or mind.
>> I would say that you are alluding to ontological difficulties from
>> within a Materialist position -- the idea that it is impossible to
>> know, or that there is no ground reality from which one can build such
>> an ontology. I have no antipathy for these positions, and I think I
>> understand why they would arise. My antipathy is towards what I
>> consider an authoritarian rejection of metaphysical questions -- that
>> in fact such questions do not matter, and that one should stop asking
>> them. That sounds like the ultimate hubris to me -- I don't have an
>> answer, and the questions hint too much at the true dimensions of our
>> ignorance, so I forbid the questions.
> 
> You refer to authoritarian rejection of metaphysical questions. I don't think 
> I asserted any authoritarian privilege (do I have any?).   I only argued that 
> some questions are meaningless and that whether the ur-stuff of the world is 
> mind or matter is one of them.  We infer the existence of matter from 
> perceptions (which is mental) but we also infer that it's existence and 
> certain organization is necessary for perception.  

OK. But the whole point is that does not necessitate primary matter or 
physicalism. The necessary organisation appears already in arithmetic once we 
bet on the mechanist assumption. Then adding matter to select some 
consciousness makes the mind-body problem intractable, and the use of primary 
matter in metaphysics to avoid the immaterialist consequences are invalid.



> There is need not be some principle of hierarchy; we should always keep in 
> mind the possiblity of virtuous circles of explanation.

Maybe you should define this more precisely. It looks poetical, and not helping 
to solve a problem.
What would be an experience capable of refining this?

I can make sense of them, but only with respect to some basic Turing universal 
ontology/assumption. Then OK, but that does not solve the mind-body problem per 
se. Scientists, like formula, and verification procedure.




> 
>> 
>> I think you avoid a different discussion, that can be traced back to
>> Plato's cave thought experiment. This question is about the
>> ontological status of the entire concept of matter. Does it exist
>> outside the experience of a conscious entity, or is it just the shadow
>> of some other more fundamental reality, filtered through the conscious
>> entity's perception? This doesn't change physics one iota, but it
>> might change how physics' role is perceived in our culture. This
>> latter issue, which has nothing to do with science and all to do with
>> ego is, in my view, the true reason why many physicists so violently
>> reject the disc

Re: Primary matter

[Bruno Marchal]

> On 3 Jun 2018, at 20:40, Telmo Menezes  wrote:
> 
> On 2 June 2018 at 17:10, John Clark  wrote:
>> On Fri, Jun 1, 2018 at 3:15 AM, Telmo Menezes 
>> wrote:
>> 
>>>>>> I'd like to see Bruno actually quote some well known philosophers or
>>>>>> scientist using the term.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>>> Materialism vs. Idealism is one of the oldest philosophical debates,
>> 
>> Yes, and like all old philosophical debates philosophers have not moved one
>> inch closer to a resolution of the problem in the last 2000 years, they just
>> keep going around and around in circles. That's not to say gigantic progress
>> in philosophy hasn't been made, its just that philosophy is no longer done
>> by philosophers, its done by scientists and mathematicians.
> 
> What you are alluding to is more or less how the idiot Greeks
> operated. They also tended to be all of those things at the same time.
> I have no particular sympathy for modern academic "philosophers", but
> this is a bit like expecting an academic literary critic to write a
> novel that one wold care to read. Is there a lot of bullshit in
> academia? Sure. Also true in the sciences.
> 
>> Newton, Gauss,
>> Darwin, Maxwell, Cantor, Einstein, Hubble, Godel,Turing, Everett, and Watson
>> and Crick advanced the field of philosophy enormously; Karl Popper did not.
> 
> There have been tremendous philosophical advances in modern history
> outside of the natural sciences. The entire world was a laboratory for
> many of these ideas. Some of the American founding fathers were
> philosophers, and so was Karl Marx. I could also mention ethics -- and
> again many such ideas made their way into how our civilization is
> organized. We could also discuss issues of meaning, and the many
> viewpoints surrounding one of the original philosophical questions:
> "how to live a good life?".
> 
> I would say that you simply have a bias for the natural sciences, and
> don't really care for other fields of inquiry.
> 
>>> 
>>>> The uber-mainstream wikipedia defines materialism as a belief in that
>>> matter is primary.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism#Overview :
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> "To idealists, spirit or mind or the objects of mind (ideas) are primary,
>>> and matter secondary. "
>> 
>> 
>> It would seem to me that statement is about as un-controversial and
>> non-profound as a statement can be.
> 
> The profoundity of ideas is a personal and subjective assessment. I
> don't think it really has any bearing on validity or relevance.
> Depending on my state of mind, the ideas that I find the most profound
> at a given moment vary a great deal. Also certain life events turn
> cliches into deep wisdom, and vice-versa.
> 
>> In this context "secondary" doesn't mean
>> second rate, it just means there is a difference between nouns and verbs.
>> “Stuff" is not the same as "doing stuff" and doing stuff is secondary
>> because stuff obviously can't do anything if stuff doesn't exist. I'm not
>> saying this is deep I'm just saying its true.
> 
> You are imposing your own metaphysics on the article. It's not a
> question of something being "second rate". In the materialist view,
> mind is secondary to matter, but nobody uses this to claim that mind
> is some second rate thing. It's a question of weather there exists
> some reality independent from the perception of conscious entities
> where what we call "matter" can be said to exist, even when we are not
> looking. I am not trying to convince you that idealism is correct (I
> am not convinced myself), I am just arguing that it is a perfectly
> coherent hypothesis, that has not been proved nor disproved.

I agree. But I also think that materialism is refuted in all frame assuming 
digital mechanism. 
I also believe that digital mechanism solves (perhaps incorrectly in case it 
happens to be refuted) the "hard problem” of consciousness versus matter. At 
least for all conscious people who are OK with the ideas that consciousness is, 
for them, true, non doubtable, immediate, non definable, and non provable. That 
can be used as a semi-axiomatic theory of consciousness, and it can be shown 
that all (Löbian) universal machine are confronted with,  and can described, 
such predicate. 
More: Consciousness got an important role here: it speed a machine relatively 
to other machine. Consciousness select the computation (without magic, but like 
in the WM duplication), but it accelerates the self developing 

Re: Primary matter

[Bruno Marchal]

> On 2 Jun 2018, at 17:10, John Clark  wrote:
> 
> On Fri, Jun 1, 2018 at 3:15 AM, Telmo Menezes  <mailto:te...@telmomenezes.com>> wrote:
> 
> >> I'd like to see Bruno actually quote some well known philosophers or 
> >> scientist using the term.
>  
> > Materialism vs. Idealism is one of the oldest philosophical debates,
> Yes, and like all old philosophical debates philosophers have not moved one 
> inch closer to a resolution of the problem in the last 2000 years, they just 
> keep going around and around in circles.
> 

Only by people like you who defend dogma with or without saying. But what you 
say is pure catholic propaganda. From -500 to +500, theology has progressed a 
lot. It gave rise to both physics and mathematics. And the atom of renting 
serious theology by the British some century ago gave birth to Mathematical 
Logic, but then the logicians were literally forced to hide both the 
entertaining and the theological motivations to have the right to teach it 
academically. That is well explained in the book by Daniel Cohen on the 
Victoria Era.



> That's not to say gigantic progress in philosophy hasn't been made, its just 
> that philosophy is no longer done by philosophers, its done by scientists and 
> mathematicians.  Newton, Gauss, Darwin, Maxwell, Cantor, Einstein, Hubble, 
> Godel,Turing, Everett, and Watson and Crick advanced the field of philosophy 
> enormously;
> 
That is true, but only partially. Yet it illustrates my point. To separate 
philosophy from science is just impossible. It consists usually to take for 
granted the current philosophical paradigm.



> Karl Popper did not.
> 
>   > The uber-mainstream wikipedia defines materialism as a belief in that 
> matter is primary.
>  
> From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism#Overview : 
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism#Overview :>
>  
> "To idealists, spirit or mind or the objects of mind (ideas) are primary, and 
> matter secondary. "
> 
> ​It would seem to me that statement is about as un-controversial and 
> non-profound as a statement can be. In this context "secondary" doesn't mean 
> second rate, it just means there is a difference between nouns and verbs. 
> “Stuff" is not the same as "doing stuff" and doing stuff is secondary because 
> stuff obviously can't do anything if stuff doesn't exist. I'm not saying this 
> is deep I'm just saying its true. And by the way, the number of times the 
> phrase "primary matter" is mentioned in that article is exactly the same 
> number you will find it mentioned in any modern physics journal. Zero.
>  
> The reason the “primary matter" debate is never going to get anywhere is that 
> philosophers write impassioned posts and even scholarly tomes about the 
> existence or non-existence of "primary matter”

?




> but never once ask themselves what the hell the term is supposed to mean,


Well, then you should appreciate my work, as (and that was the goal), I show 
that primary matter is a testable idea. It canot make any sense with mechanism, 
but physics must be given by the logic and mathematics of the first person 
(plural) view on the sigma_1 sentences. I predicted all quantum weirdness from 
this, but also AI, and the development of computer science from this before 
realising that QM, which I thought to be anti-mechanist for awhile, actually 
confirmed all the computationalist weirdness. When my colleagues begun to 
realise that, I got the pressure to do the PhD thesis, which has been 
understood by all scientists who read it, and has got problem only with very 
rare people having the materialist dogma., but having some “social influence” 
also.



> and many don't even wonder what "matter" means.  Leibniz invented the silly 
> catch phrase but, as is customary whenever scientists put on their 
> philosopher's hat, he was rather vague (and Bruno even more vague)

Not at all. There is not one statement I make which is not a precise first 
order or second order statement in arithmetic, except for the experimental 
verification of course.



> about what "primary matter” means; and that's why specialists in the study of 
> matter, physicists, have never found the idea useful. 

Solving fundamental question is not necessary useful, or not directly useful.

But since almost five years I am studying Bektashi Islam, as I have begun to 
realise that, even more than the Caballa and the mystic christians, who have 
never completely abandoned neoplatonism, the Bektashi are the closer to the 
theology of the machine. Then, last week I discovered that the Albania was the 
only country with more jews after than before the war. The whole population 
have saved and hidden the jews and those threatened by the naz

Re: Primary matter

[Telmo Menezes]

On 3 June 2018 at 23:01, Brent Meeker  wrote:
>
>
> On 6/3/2018 4:10 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
>>
>> On 1 June 2018 at 22:37, Brent Meeker  wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> On 6/1/2018 7:49 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
>
> Physical theories of the brain, based on extensive empirical research,
> have
> linked the mind and consciousness to physical brain activity in
> irrefutable
> ways.

 The above statement is pseudoscience. Given that there is no
 scientific instrument that can detect consciousness, no empirical
 research on this question is possible at the moment. If you disagree,
 please provide references to publications that describe such an
 instrument.
>>>
>>>
>>> The instrument used to detect consciousness is a body.  You see if it
>>> acts
>>> intelligently and reacts to the environment.  You see if it responds to
>>> stimuli. You may even look at fMRI or otherwise monitor brain activity.
>>> If
>>> it was responsive earlier, you ask it if it remembers the period in which
>>> is
>>> was unresponsive.  You ask it if it feels as if time passed.
>>>
>>> Of course you will object that none of these directly detects
>>> consciousness
>>> vs unconsciousness.  But science doesn't directly detect quarks either.
>>
>> My objection is deeper than the question of direct detection. To make
>> your argument work you say that "science doesn't directly
>> detect[...]". The problem with this claim is that science does not
>> detect anything, science is a concept. Human being detect things, and
>> they do it through the lens of their conscious experience. This places
>> consciousness at a qualitatively different standing than quarks or any
>> other object of scientific inquiry.
>
>
> That's your consciousness which you detect directly (although some dispute
> even that).

I know, I was kind of being a smartass.

>  But the object of scientific inquiry is consciousness as it can
> be described, explained, caused, designed in ways that we can
> intersubjectively agree on.

I agree.

>>
>> What I claim is that there is no scientific instrument that can
>> distinguish consciousness from non-consciousnes, because we don't even
>> know what "non-cosnciousness" means. *All* scientific instruments
>> detect consciousness, because consciousness must be present for *any
>> sort of detection* to even occur. No scientific instrument detects
>> consciousness on anyone but its user, directly OR indirectly.
>
>
> The "indirectly" is simply false.  As any emergency medical technician can
> attest.

When you and me talk about quarks, we are both pointing to an object
that we cannot see, but that is a model that makes sense of
observations that we can both confirm. We are on equal footing. When
we are talking about consciousness, we are talking about the very
thing that we "observe with". Everything. I argue that you don't fully
appreciate the qualitative difference between these two things, and
the profound implications of these differences when it comes to
attempting to make sense of reality.

The emergency medical technician can detect things that are correlated
with behavior, and which are connected to causal mechanisms of
behavior that are more or less understood. I insist: we appear to have
no way of knowing the boundaries of the consciousness phenomenon.
Panpshyschists hold that everything is conscious. Dennett argues that
nothing is. Emergentists believe that brains are conscious, but do not
know at what level of complexity they become conscious. This is the
problem: what you allude to is useful for medicine, but not terribly
valuable for our discussion.

>> For this
>> latter claim to be made, one must assume that consciousness and
>> behavior are linked.There is overwhelming evidence that brain activity
>> and memory formation are linked, and that brain activity and behavior
>> are linked. For medical purposes, the consciousness-behavior
>> assumption is very useful! I am very grateful for mother medicine, but
>> we should not pretend that its operative assumptions solve the
>> fundamental questions.
>
>
> What fundamental question do you refer to?  How to detect consciousness?
> How to produce consciousness?  How to prove (in the empirical sense) that
> consciousness is linked to brain activity? That's my concern, that one just
> throws up things that are syntactically questions but with no thought as to
> what might constitute an answer.

I understand your concern. I will just tell you what my main curiosities are:

- Why does consciousness even exist? Darwinism does not seem to require it.
- What is the relationship between consciousness and matter?
- Is there a reality that is external to conscious perception?

> My view is scientifically speaking we never know anything "fundamental" and
> the search for it is like the hunting of the snark.  We seek theories with
> more scope and more accuracy, but being "more fundamental" doesn't entail
> that something is most fundamental.   Mystics 

Re: Primary matter

[Bruno Marchal]

> On 1 Jun 2018, at 19:41, Brent Meeker  wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On 6/1/2018 12:15 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
>> On 31 May 2018 at 19:57, Brent Meeker  wrote:
>>> 
>>> On 5/31/2018 2:06 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> You're a bit naughty Brent. You sometimes use this maneuver of
>>>> nonchalantly listing something that is being discussed -- but that you
>>>> don't like -- along with something else that is obviously outdated or
>>>> silly.
>>> 
>>> It's not that I "don't like" primary matter, it's that I think it's an
>>> invented term that nobody actually postulates.
>> >From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism#Overview :
>> 
>> "To idealists, spirit or mind or the objects of mind (ideas) are
>> primary, and matter secondary. To materialists, matter is primary, and
>> mind or spirit or ideas are secondary, the product of matter acting
>> upon matter."
> 
> I concede the point.  There are many who consider that matter can explain 
> mind, so in the Materialism vs Idealism debate they are taking matter as 
> prior, and one may infer, as primary.  But the few who actually think about 
> the ontology of "matter", like Wheeler, Hawking, Tegmark,...do not just 
> postulate some "primary matter”

Tegmark tends to not postulate it at all. (But his approach still miss the 
mind-body problem, and he is unclear on it, although his more recent taking 
into account of computation and “simulation argument” (step 6) make it closer 
to computationalism.



> and in fact ask questions like, "What makes the equations fly."  They do not 
> even insist that there is an ur-stuff that is matter.  Which was my point 
> that if there is an ur-stuff then the ur-stuff makes both mind and matter and 
> whatever else so there's little point in calling is either matter or mind.  
> However, that's not a reason to avoid trying to produce mind from matter, as 
> in AI.  And one is free to try to produce matter from mind.

Of course. But when we assume mechanism, we are obliged to explain matter 
appearance from a theory of mind. Physics becomes a branch of psychology or 
theology. Theology is better, because it separate what is transcendent, what is 
non provable and true,  from what is justifiable.

Of course, everybody has the right to not be interested in the mind-body 
problem, but we have to stop the habit to confuse “non interesting for me”, 
with “false” or “inconsistent” or “senseless”, or “not interesting for 
everybody”, …

Bruno



> 
> Brent
> 
> Brent
> 
>> 
>>> I'd like to see Bruno
>>> actually quote some well known philosophers or scientist using the term.
>> Materialism vs. Idealism is one of the oldest philosophical debates,
>> and I am 100% sure you know that. The uber-mainstream wikipedia
>> defines materialism as a belief in that matter is primary.
>> 
>>> I
>>> think he reads people like Dennett or Churchland who defend the possibility
>>> of a physical explanation of consciousness and, since he thinks
>>> consciousness is more fundamental than physics, he wants to accuse them of
>>> believing in "primary matter".
>> Well, they do -- exactly on the terms described in the Wikipedia
>> article above. I refer to Wikipedia not because it is an authoritative
>> source (it is not, of course), but because it is so mainstream -- as
>> evidence against your claim that this is all something Bruno dreamed
>> up.
>> 
>> Telmo.
>> 
>>>> "Oh you think that quantum mechanics and consciousness might be
>>>> connected? How are those Deepak Chopra teachings working for you?"
>>>> etc...
>>>> 
>>>> So, forgetting the elan vitale, I would like you to make you position
>>>> more precise. Do you think that tax money should only be applied to
>>>> research that is obviously and immediately useful?
>>> 
>>> Of course not.
>>> 
>>>> Or are you ok with
>>>> trusting tenured academics and peer-review to decide what gets funded?
>>>> In the second case, I guess we must all have some tolerance for ideas
>>>> that we don't agree with, right?
>>> 
>>> Right.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Brent
>>> 
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Re: Primary matter

[Bruno Marchal]

> On 1 Jun 2018, at 14:35, Bruce Kellett  wrote:
> 
> From: Bruno Marchal mailto:marc...@ulb.ac.be>>
>>> On 1 Jun 2018, at 11:46, Bruce Kellett < 
>>> bhkell...@optusnet.com.au 
>>> > wrote:
>>> 
>>> From: Bruno Marchal mailto:marc...@ulb.ac.be>>
> On 1 Jun 2018, at 03:25, Bruce Kellett < 
> bhkell...@optusnet.com.au 
> > wrote:
> 
> From: Bruno Marchal < marc...@ulb.ac.be 
> >
>> 
>> > On 31 May 2018, at 02:33, Brent Meeker < 
>> > meeke...@verizon.net 
>> > > wrote:
>> > 
>> > Of course something can make some computations unreal, namely their 
>> > non-existence in the world. 
>> 
>> Which World?
> 
> Rhetorical flourish!
 
 Not at all. 
 
 You know, God was a nickname for “the ultimate truth we are searching when 
 doing fundamental science”, and the “blasphemy” was for any invocation and 
 special use of of concept like “true”, “reality”, “world” … the use of 
 this is invalid. You could as well invoke miracle.
 
 So you lack some background in metaphysics and/or what is the scientific 
 attitude.
>>> 
>>> I think the intellectual battles of the classical era are well behind us.
>> 
>> ?
>> 
>>> It was realized a long time ago that these idea are ultimately sterile,
>> 
>> Which ideas? The metaphysical question? Yes, the answer to them have been 
>> imposed by terror since 1500 years. That has not solved them.
> 
> The problems were sterile, and it was realized that there was no useful 
> question to answer.
> 
> 
>>> and the scientific approach has gradually achieved dominance.
>> 
>> In the natural science, thanks to the Enlightenment period, made possible by 
>> the jews and muslim metaphysicians who were able to continue the research in 
>> the Middle east for six more centuries. 
>> 
>> But in theology, the least we can say is that the scientific approach has 
>> not yet taken dominance. The choice is still between an inconsistent 
>> materialism or the pope-ayatollah (the boss is right) kind of theories.
>> 
>> You are not helping science by abandoning the field to the professional con 
>> men.
> 
> I am certainly not abandoning the field to you!
> 
> 
>>> I think you should abandon this outmoded framework for your thinking and 
>>> join the rest of the world in the 21st century.
>> 
>> You are the one abandoning the scientific attitude here.
>> 
>> 
>> You cannot appeal to an ontological commitment in science.
> 
> There is no ontological commitment in phenomenology -- unless you want to 
> deny the existence of consciousness….
 
 Ah, so you think that the notion of world used by Brent was 
 phenomenological?
 
 That makes my point in that case, as physics must becomes 
 phenomenological, which was all I needed to justify.
>>> 
>>> Physics is, as is all science, based on observation and experiment. The 
>>> phenomena are the subject matter of science.
>> 
>> Not the fundamental science, which try to infer some simple relations 
>> accounting for the origin and phenomena.
> 
> The "fundamental science" as you call it is an illusion. There quite possibly 
> are no simple relations accounting for the origin and the phenomena. The 
> phenomena have to be described and understood on their own terms.
> 
> 
> 
>>> But the phenomena are matters of sensory experience, not of abstract 
>>> axiomatic reasoning. That, too, was realized a long time ago when Kant's 
>>> attempt to make 3-dimensional Euclidean space a necessity of thought failed.
>> 
>> Kant failed? Show me the paper.
> 
> Any textbook on non-Euclidean geometry would suffice.
> 
>> Only his premise based on some naive interpretation of the physics of his 
>> time was false. Its main idea is implied and generalised  by Mechanism. And 
>> the opposite idea requires a non Turing emulable machine in the body, which 
>> is usually considered as speculative (no evidence at all, and a lot of 
>> strong counterevidences, like the failure of physicalism to link mind and 
>> matter since very long).
> 
> Physical theories of the brain, based on extensive empirical research, have 
> linked the mind and consciousness to physical brain activity in irrefutable 
> ways.
> 
>> By saying this you do show that you identify science with Aristotelian 
>> Materialism. That is bad science, and bad philosophy. 
> 
> Sez you. But then, you are no authority..
> 
>> Here is you god, selecting an histories, or a class of histories. How? 
>> Magical power? Then I can no more say yes to the doctor without praying 
>> or something.
> 
> More empty rhetorical flourishes. We know that when you resort to your 
> store of empty rhetorical flourishes that you 

Re: Primary matter

[Telmo Menezes]

On 3 June 2018 at 21:56, Brent Meeker  wrote:
>
>
> On 6/3/2018 3:40 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
>>
>> On 1 June 2018 at 19:41, Brent Meeker  wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> On 6/1/2018 12:15 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
>>>>
>>>> On 31 May 2018 at 19:57, Brent Meeker  wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> On 5/31/2018 2:06 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> You're a bit naughty Brent. You sometimes use this maneuver of
>>>>>> nonchalantly listing something that is being discussed -- but that you
>>>>>> don't like -- along with something else that is obviously outdated or
>>>>>> silly.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> It's not that I "don't like" primary matter, it's that I think it's an
>>>>> invented term that nobody actually postulates.
>>>>
>>>> >From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism#Overview :
>>>>
>>>> "To idealists, spirit or mind or the objects of mind (ideas) are
>>>> primary, and matter secondary. To materialists, matter is primary, and
>>>> mind or spirit or ideas are secondary, the product of matter acting
>>>> upon matter."
>>>
>>>
>>> I concede the point.
>>
>> Thanks for saying.
>>
>>> There are many who consider that matter can explain
>>> mind, so in the Materialism vs Idealism debate they are taking matter as
>>> prior, and one may infer, as primary.  But the few who actually think
>>> about
>>> the ontology of "matter", like Wheeler, Hawking, Tegmark,...do not just
>>> postulate some "primary matter" and in fact ask questions like, "What
>>> makes
>>> the equations fly."  They do not even insist that there is an ur-stuff
>>> that
>>> is matter.  Which was my point that if there is an ur-stuff then the
>>> ur-stuff makes both mind and matter and whatever else so there's little
>>> point in calling is either matter or mind.
>>
>> I would say that you are alluding to ontological difficulties from
>> within a Materialist position -- the idea that it is impossible to
>> know, or that there is no ground reality from which one can build such
>> an ontology. I have no antipathy for these positions, and I think I
>> understand why they would arise. My antipathy is towards what I
>> consider an authoritarian rejection of metaphysical questions -- that
>> in fact such questions do not matter, and that one should stop asking
>> them. That sounds like the ultimate hubris to me -- I don't have an
>> answer, and the questions hint too much at the true dimensions of our
>> ignorance, so I forbid the questions.
>
>
> You refer to authoritarian rejection of metaphysical questions. I don't
> think I asserted any authoritarian privilege (do I have any?).

I didn't mean you. I meant Bruce's original message with his
"irrefutable evidence" and attempts to shut down debate without
providing any actual arguments.

>  I only
> argued that some questions are meaningless and that whether the ur-stuff of
> the world is mind or matter is one of them.  We infer the existence of
> matter from perceptions (which is mental) but we also infer that it's
> existence and certain organization is necessary for perception.   There is
> need not be some principle of hierarchy; we should always keep in mind the
> possiblity of virtuous circles of explanation.

Ok, I understand your position. To quote the Simpsons:

(Homer tucks Bart in)
Homer: Well, good night, son.
Bart: Um, Dad?
Homer: Yeah?
Bart: What is the mind? I-is it just a.. system of impulses, or... is
it... something tangible?
Homer: Relax! What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind.
(Homer laughs)
Bart: (unconvinced) Th..anks, Dad...
Homer: Good night, son. (Homer turns off the light and leaves -
although Bart remains confused)

>>
>> I think you avoid a different discussion, that can be traced back to
>> Plato's cave thought experiment. This question is about the
>> ontological status of the entire concept of matter. Does it exist
>> outside the experience of a conscious entity, or is it just the shadow
>> of some other more fundamental reality, filtered through the conscious
>> entity's perception? This doesn't change physics one iota, but it
>> might change how physics' role is perceived in our culture. This
>> latter issue, which has nothing to do with science and all to do with
>> ego is, in my view, the true reason why many physicists so violently