Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 15 Oct 2012, at 18:25, John Mikes wrote: Thanks for a detailed inquisition upon my post. It did not convince me. #1: you postulate to ACCEPT your condition to begin with. I don't. (once you agree). That contradicts what is meant usually by a postulate. You put too much in the term accept. It is always for the sake of the argument. It does not mean you accept it as a truth. #2: Sorry for 'the inside': I meant 'of the change', - while you meant - of myself. #3: Arithmetical reality is a figment, just like the physical. I don't agree in adding and substracting as fundamental in nature's doings: it may be fundamental in HUMAN thinking. It means that you believe that the comp theory is false, as this is a consequence of it. But I don't know if comp is true or false. I don't do philosophy, as it is not my job. #4: Your arguments seem to be from the INSIDE of the box - just like those for other religions - no addition form the outside which comes only afterwards (once you agreed). Which outside? It seems that you add a postulate, which might be consistent or not with the theory, but you can't use it to invalidate the reasoning *in * a theory. #5: Agreeing - turning into 'disagreeing' once you change your belief in a theory? I think a theory is not the BASIS ; it is the upper mount sitting ON the basis. It is the basis of the theory, at least. Of course it is not the basis of the reality targeted by the theory. #6: I can always imagine other theories and that they may be correct - so you can ALWAYS disagree? Of course. We just don't know the truth, and we can always abandon a theory. But that is why we have to study them: to find the flaws. #7: To progress in ONE theory is not the goal. To progress in the least controversial one may be. Sure. If there is one. #8: Is Universal Machine COMPUTING, or COMPUTABLE? I thought the first one. What she does is computing, what she can do is computable, in the large sense which includes the fact that she might not stop, so that we cannot know what she is computing. Bruno John M On Sun, Oct 14, 2012 at 5:03 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 09 Aug 2012, at 23:48, John Mikes wrote: Let me try to shorten the maze and copy only whatever I want to reflect to. Sorry if it causes hardship - JM - On Thu, Aug 9, 2012 at 8:30 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 08 Aug 2012, at 23:00, John Mikes wrote: On Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 1:06 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 08 Aug 2012, at 00:18, John Mikes wrote: how can a machine (Loebian?) be curious? or unsatisfied? Universal machine are confronted with many problems The Löbian machine knows that she is universal, and so can grasp the preceding paragraph, and get in that way even much more questions, and she can discover even more sharply her abyssal ignorance. Löbianity is the step where the universal machine knows that whatever she could know more, that will only make her more ignorant with respect to the unknown. Yet, the machine at that stage can also intuit more and more the reason and necessity of that ignorance, and with comp, study the approximate mathematical description of parts of it. JM: looks to me that Univ. Mach. is a fictional charater like Alice in Wunderland, equipped with whatever you need to make it work. Like (my) infinite complexity. The difference is that once you agree on addition and multiplication, you can prove the existence of universal machine, and you can bet that you can implement them in the physical reality, as our concrete physical personal computer, and cells, brain etc, illustrate. JM: don't you see the weak point in your once you agree? I don't know what to agree in (agnosticism) so NO PROOF - What our 'cells, brain etc. illustrate' is (our?) figment. OK. I use agree with a weaker sense than you. Agreeing with x, does not mean that we believe x is true, but that we conjecture it when lacking other explanation or axiom, or for any other motivation. Agreeing only means, in science, that we are willing to share some hypothesis, for some time. In science we only make clear some local momentary *belief*. We never pretend something being true (only pseudo-scientist, or pseudo- religious people do that). BM: I think that change is an experience from inside. It follows, I think, from the hypothesis that we might survive through a computer emulation (my working hypothesis). JM: If I watch you to put on weight, I am not inside you. OK, but I don't see the point. And then there is nothing a universal machine can't be more in love than ... another universal machine. And then the tendency to reproduce and multiply, in many directions, that they inherit from the numbers and which leads to even more complexity and life, I would say. The arithmetical reality is full
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
Thanks for a detailed inquisition upon my post. It did not convince me. #1: you postulate to ACCEPT your condition to begin with. I don't. (once you agree). #2: Sorry for 'the inside': I meant 'of the change', - while you meant - of myself. #3: Arithmetical reality is a figment, just like the physical. I don't agree in adding and substracting as fundamental in nature's doings: it may be fundamental in HUMAN thinking. #4: Your arguments seem to be from the INSIDE of the box - just like those for other religions - no addition form the outside which comes only afterwards (once you agreed). #5: Agreeing - turning into 'disagreeing' once you change your belief in a theory? I think a theory is not the BASIS ; it is the upper mount sitting ON the basis. #6: I can always imagine other theories and that they may be correct - so you can ALWAYS disagree? #7: To progress in ONE theory is not the goal. To progress in the least controversial one may be. #8: Is Universal Machine COMPUTING, or COMPUTABLE? I thought the first one. John M On Sun, Oct 14, 2012 at 5:03 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 09 Aug 2012, at 23:48, John Mikes wrote: Let me try to shorten the maze and copy only whatever I want to reflect to. Sorry if it causes hardship - JM - On Thu, Aug 9, 2012 at 8:30 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 08 Aug 2012, at 23:00, John Mikes wrote: On Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 1:06 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 08 Aug 2012, at 00:18, John Mikes wrote: how can a machine (Loebian?) be *curious? or unsatisfied?* Universal machine are confronted with many problems The Löbian machine knows that she is universal, and so can grasp the preceding paragraph, and get in that way even much more questions, and she can discover even more sharply her abyssal ignorance. Löbianity is the step where the universal machine knows that whatever she could know more, that will only make her more ignorant with respect to the unknown. Yet, the machine at that stage can also intuit more and more the reason and necessity of that ignorance, and with comp, study the approximate mathematical description of parts of it. JM: looks to me that Univ. Mach. is a fictional charater like Alice in Wunderland, equipped with whatever you need to make it work. Like (my) infinite complexity. The difference is that once you agree on addition and multiplication, you can prove the existence of universal machine, and you can bet that you can implement them in the physical reality, as our concrete physical personal computer, and cells, brain etc, illustrate. *JM: don't you see the weak point in your * *once you agree?* *I don't know what to agree in (agnosticism) so NO PROOF* *- What our 'cells, brain etc. illustrate' is (our?) figment. * OK. I use agree with a weaker sense than you. Agreeing with x, does not mean that we believe x is true, but that we conjecture it when lacking other explanation or axiom, or for any other motivation. Agreeing only means, in science, that we are willing to share some hypothesis, for some time. In science we only make clear some local momentary *belief*. We never pretend something being true (only pseudo-scientist, or pseudo-religious people do that). BM: I think that change is an experience from inside. It follows, I think, from the hypothesis that we might survive through a computer emulation (my working hypothesis). *JM: If I watch you to put on weight, I am not inside you.* OK, but I don't see the point. And then there is nothing a universal machine can't be more in love than ... another universal machine. And then the tendency to reproduce and multiply, in many directions, that they inherit from the numbers and which leads to even more complexity and life, I would say. The arithmetical reality is full of life, populated by many sorts of universal numbers, with many possible sort of relations, and this put a sort of mess in the antic Platonia, and leads to transfinite unboundable complexity indeed. Bruno *JM: I don't want to bore you by where did that obscure LIFE come from? What is it? and how do you know what a universal (machine? number?) thinks/feels/wants/kisses? * *because you are ONE? OK, but not the only kind that may be, - I suppose. Do you deny that there may be other kinds of universal anythings? what do THEY love most? * I can always imagine other theories. And that they may be correct. But we will not progress in one theory, if at each line of our reasoning we propose a different theory. Then, if we are machine, it can be explained why there is only one kind of universal computable thing. Of course there will be many universal non computable thing, like a universal machine + one oracle. This is well known. Arithmetical truth is itself, in some sense, a universal (and non computable) entity. ...But observable is an
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 09 Aug 2012, at 23:48, John Mikes wrote: Let me try to shorten the maze and copy only whatever I want to reflect to. Sorry if it causes hardship - JM - On Thu, Aug 9, 2012 at 8:30 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 08 Aug 2012, at 23:00, John Mikes wrote: On Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 1:06 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 08 Aug 2012, at 00:18, John Mikes wrote: how can a machine (Loebian?) be curious? or unsatisfied? Universal machine are confronted with many problems The Löbian machine knows that she is universal, and so can grasp the preceding paragraph, and get in that way even much more questions, and she can discover even more sharply her abyssal ignorance. Löbianity is the step where the universal machine knows that whatever she could know more, that will only make her more ignorant with respect to the unknown. Yet, the machine at that stage can also intuit more and more the reason and necessity of that ignorance, and with comp, study the approximate mathematical description of parts of it. JM: looks to me that Univ. Mach. is a fictional charater like Alice in Wunderland, equipped with whatever you need to make it work. Like (my) infinite complexity. The difference is that once you agree on addition and multiplication, you can prove the existence of universal machine, and you can bet that you can implement them in the physical reality, as our concrete physical personal computer, and cells, brain etc, illustrate. JM: don't you see the weak point in your once you agree? I don't know what to agree in (agnosticism) so NO PROOF - What our 'cells, brain etc. illustrate' is (our?) figment. OK. I use agree with a weaker sense than you. Agreeing with x, does not mean that we believe x is true, but that we conjecture it when lacking other explanation or axiom, or for any other motivation. Agreeing only means, in science, that we are willing to share some hypothesis, for some time. In science we only make clear some local momentary *belief*. We never pretend something being true (only pseudo-scientist, or pseudo- religious people do that). BM: I think that change is an experience from inside. It follows, I think, from the hypothesis that we might survive through a computer emulation (my working hypothesis). JM: If I watch you to put on weight, I am not inside you. OK, but I don't see the point. And then there is nothing a universal machine can't be more in love than ... another universal machine. And then the tendency to reproduce and multiply, in many directions, that they inherit from the numbers and which leads to even more complexity and life, I would say. The arithmetical reality is full of life, populated by many sorts of universal numbers, with many possible sort of relations, and this put a sort of mess in the antic Platonia, and leads to transfinite unboundable complexity indeed. Bruno JM: I don't want to bore you by where did that obscure LIFE come from? What is it? and how do you know what a universal (machine? number?) thinks/feels/wants/kisses? because you are ONE? OK, but not the only kind that may be, - I suppose. Do you deny that there may be other kinds of universal anythings? what do THEY love most? I can always imagine other theories. And that they may be correct. But we will not progress in one theory, if at each line of our reasoning we propose a different theory. Then, if we are machine, it can be explained why there is only one kind of universal computable thing. Of course there will be many universal non computable thing, like a universal machine + one oracle. This is well known. Arithmetical truth is itself, in some sense, a universal (and non computable) entity. ...But observable is an internal notion. Nobody can observe the Universe, by definition of Universe. -- --??? -- --- JM: You may argue that I am still within a larger 'inside'. BM: Indeed. You see the point. JM: but in such case I've changed the perspective and my conclusions are not comparable. And about 'a' UNIVERSE? In my narrative of a 'Bigbang' story I visualize unlimited number and quality of universes. Some may be able to observe others. We are too simplistic for that. And - our thinking is adjusted to such simplicity, I am not proud to say so. Agnostic? Ignorant? Science is agnostic and ignorant. With comp, it can lead only to more agnosticism and ignorance. Science is only a lantern on the infinite unknown, and the more we put light on it, the more we can realize its bigness, and the amazingly shortness of our sight. We do agree on this, and all universal machines looking inward, and staying consistent in the process knows that. Like I said, the comp theory assesses a lot of what you say, and explains it also, in someway. This does *not* mean it is the correct theory, as this we will never know. Bruno
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On Mon, Aug 13, 2012 at 5:44 PM, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.auwrote: On Mon, Aug 13, 2012 at 03:56:35PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 13 Aug 2012, at 00:32, Russell Standish wrote: OK. But the question is: would an agent lost free-will in case no random oracle is available? I would have thought so. What about heuristics? When a question is to difficult to solve ideally, we fall back to easier or simpler strategies. In the end it might just be a raw vote between levels of firing activity in neurons considering the alternatives. This has nothing to do with randomness, and can be every bit as fast/efficient as a random oracle. Note that NO machine can ever distinguish a truly random sequence with some sequence which can be generated by machine more complex than themselves. That is true. But complex machines are expensive to run. Real random oracles, if available, are so much more convenient for evolution to use that to try to evolve sufficient complexity to achieve cryptographic strength in a pseudo random number generator. If we have access to such good random number generators in our brain, then why are people so bad at choosing random numbers? There would be no reason to publish books full of random numbers if people had anything approaching a statistically sound random number generator in their heads. Try and randomly choose 100 numbers between 1 and 10, and I bet you will find your results will be highly biased, and will fail most any statistical test for randomness. This article seems to confirm my point: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/47/science-math-philosophy/why-humans-so-bad-random-number-generation-327331/ Jason -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On Thu, Aug 16, 2012 at 2:12 AM, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.auwrote: On Wed, Aug 15, 2012 at 12:15:59PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 15 Aug 2012, at 10:12, Russell Standish wrote: On Tue, Aug 14, 2012 at 01:01:10PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 14 Aug 2012, at 12:30, Russell Standish wrote: Assuming the coin is operating inside the agent's body? Why would that be considered non-free? In what sense would the choice be mine if it is random? It is mine if the random generator is part of me. It is not mine if the generator is outside of me (eg flipping the coin). I don't see this. Why would the generator being part of you make it your choice? You might define me and part of me before. It is The self-other distinction is a vital part of conscsiousness. I don't think precise definitions of this are needed for this discussion. not clear if you are using the usual computer science notion of me, or not, but I would say that if the root of the choice is a random oracle, then the random oracle makes the choice for me. It does not matter if the coin is in or outside my brain, which is a local non absolute notion. My brain make a choice, therefore it is my choice. My boss orders me to do something, its not really my choice (unless I decide to disobey :). Why would this be any different with random number generators? A coin flips, and I do something based on the outcome. It is not my choice (except insofar as I chose to follow an external random event). My brain makes a random choice based on the chaotic amplification of synaptic noise. This is still my brain and my choice. It is like letting someone else take the decision for you. I really don't see how randomness is related to with free will (the compatibilist one). Compatibilism, ISTM, is the solution to a non-problem: How to reconcile free will with a deterministic universe. The very idea that we have to reconcile free-will with determinism seems to be a red herring to me. Agreed. But that is what all the fuss seems to be about. I try not to engage with it, as it is so century-before-the-last. It is a non-problem, because the universe is not deterministic. (The multiverse is deterministic, of course, but that's another story). But then you have to reconcile free-will with indeterminacy, and that makes not much sense. I don't think free-will (as I defined it of course) has anything to do with determinacy or indeterminacy. The fact that someone else can predict my behavior does not make it less free. Um, yes it does. I don't follow this. Can you explain how? If super intelligent aliens secretly came to earth and predicted your actions, how has that diminished the freedom you had before their arrival? Someone asked why this concept is important. It isn't for me, per se, but I would imagine that someone implementing an agent that must survive in a messy real world environment (eg an autonomous robot) will need to consider this issue, and build something like it into their robot. I agree with Bruno. A mind can only be made less free if it is built from non-deterministic parts, it is less free to be itself in its full sense because with parts that do not behave in predictable ways, there is no way to perfectly realize a given personality. They will always have some level of capriciousness that will stand in the way of that person realizing the person they are meant/designed to be. The mind will never work perfectly as intended, at best it can only asymptotically approach some ideal. I do agree with Russell that there are evolutionary advantages for access to a source of good randomness. It would enable people to choose better passwords, be better poker players, pick lottery numbers with fewer collisions, and so on. But I am not convinced humans access to anything approaching a good random number generator. If we did, I would see it more as a sense which is external to the mind. The mind could determinsitically decide to make use of inputs from this sense, but even if the mind never drew on this random oracle it would still be every bit as free to exercise its will. Jason -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 17 Aug 2012, at 01:43, Russell Standish wrote: On Thu, Aug 16, 2012 at 05:06:31PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 16 Aug 2012, at 09:12, Russell Standish wrote: Why would this be any different with random number generators? A coin flips, and I do something based on the outcome. It is not my choice (except insofar as I chose to follow an external random event). My brain makes a random choice based on the chaotic amplification of synaptic noise. This is still my brain and my choice. So you identify yourself with a brain, like Searle. With comp I would say that only a person makes choice, the solid material brain is already a construct from an infinity of random choice, but none can be said to mine, like if I found myself in Moscow instead of Washington after a WM-duplication, I can't say that I have chosen to be in Moscow. Via supervenience, yes. I'm not sure this is particularly Searle's position, though - I disagree with his diagnosis of the Chinese room, and rather follow Dennett in that. ... stuff elided, because we're in agreement ... I don't think free-will (as I defined it of course) has anything to do with determinacy or indeterminacy. The fact that someone else can predict my behavior does not make it less free. Um, yes it does. Why? Why would I be less free to eat blueberries in case everybody can predict that I will eat them. In the case everybody could predict that, then I would be able to predict it, and I would feel less free as a result. OK. I am no sure I agree. It is the point of disagreement. I can predict that I will take coffee each morning, but I do it freely, with minor exception (sometimes I do take tea instead, which gives sense to the fact that it is a constant free morning choice, as I am never entirely sure of what I will take. I don't see opposition between predictable and free-will, except that from the first person view we are confronted with some spectrum. In fact people vindicated free will in particular circumstance often say I am determined to do this or that. Free-will is basically self-determination in front of a choices spectrum. It is not a big deal, and I can easily throw the notion for will, responsibility, etc. I agree on the rest of your post, and so, don't comment either. Bruno In the case where some super intelligent observer could predict my actions, but I could not, and wasn't aware of the super intelligent observer's predictions, then we have an interesting case. I can't say whether I would feel less free in that situation or not. Alas, its a bit hard to perform the experiment. I don't think Libet-like experiments count - a machine capable of reading my decision before I become aware of my decision still does not evacuate the proposition that I freely made the decision. I do understand its a bit freaky, though... You did not reply my question: take the iterated WM-self-duplication. All the resulting people lives the experience of an random oracle. Why would they be more free than someone outside the duplication boxes? How could they use that random oracle for being more free than someone not using them, as they cannot select the outcome? In the setup of your teleporters, the source of randomness comes from outside of the person, so no, that doesn't have anything to with free will. But if you move the source of randomness to inside somehow, then sure it might do. I don't see what inside and outside have anything to do with the fact that a choice can't be helped with a random coin. A choice is driven by many factors like my personality, my culture, my life, my current appetite, and thousand of parameters. Sure, and also by completely random factors. If you only made completely random choices, it wouldn't seem like execising free will at all. One can perform this experiment, although curiously, humans make poor random number generators, statistically speaking. I don't see how my form of free will is non-comp. With comp everything is deterministic from the 3p view, like arithmetical truth is definite. Then from the 1-view, there are mainly two type of indeterminacy. The one due to self-multiplication in UD* (alias arithmetical truth), which, as you agree above can't play a role in free-will. Then there is the self-indeterminacy based on Turing, which is the one playing a role in free-will. But in both case, there is no indeterminacy in the big picture. If free-will necessicate a real 3p-free will, comp would be false, as we cannot Turing emulate it. Definitely not. Free will is not a 3p (aka syntactic level) concept. To say it is would be a confusion of levels, or a category error, putting it bluntly. The QM indeterminacy cannot work here, as it is a self-multiplication like in the first person indeterminacy. By contrast, your UD argument seems to argue for its necessary appearance. Yes. Someone asked why this concept is important. It isn't for me, per se, but
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 8/17/2012 12:51 AM, Jason Resch wrote: I don't follow this. Can you explain how? If super intelligent aliens secretly came to earth and predicted your actions, how has that diminished the freedom you had before their arrival? Someone asked why this concept is important. It isn't for me, per se, but I would imagine that someone implementing an agent that must survive in a messy real world environment (eg an autonomous robot) will need to consider this issue, and build something like it into their robot. I agree with Bruno. A mind can only be made less free if it is built from non-deterministic parts, it is less free to be itself in its full sense because with parts that do not behave in predictable ways, there is no way to perfectly realize a given personality. They will always have some level of capriciousness that will stand in the way of that person realizing the person they are meant/designed to be. The mind will never work perfectly as intended, at best it can only asymptotically approach some ideal. That's an interesting take, but why isn't caprice part of a personality? What's the standard of perfectly as intended if the intention were to be upredictable? And given that one's knowledge is never complete, game theory shows that being able to make a random choice is optimum in many situations. I do agree with Russell that there are evolutionary advantages for access to a source of good randomness. It would enable people to choose better passwords, be better poker players, pick lottery numbers with fewer collisions, and so on. But I am not convinced humans access to anything approaching a good random number generator. But good is relative. Humans aren't very good at arithmetic either, but they can do it and it's useful. If we did, I would see it more as a sense which is external to the mind. The mind could determinsitically decide to make use of inputs from this sense, but even if the mind never drew on this random oracle it would still be every bit as free to exercise its will. I agree with that. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 12:54 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 8/17/2012 12:51 AM, Jason Resch wrote: I don't follow this. Can you explain how? If super intelligent aliens secretly came to earth and predicted your actions, how has that diminished the freedom you had before their arrival? Someone asked why this concept is important. It isn't for me, per se, but I would imagine that someone implementing an agent that must survive in a messy real world environment (eg an autonomous robot) will need to consider this issue, and build something like it into their robot. I agree with Bruno. A mind can only be made less free if it is built from non-deterministic parts, it is less free to be itself in its full sense because with parts that do not behave in predictable ways, there is no way to perfectly realize a given personality. They will always have some level of capriciousness that will stand in the way of that person realizing the person they are meant/designed to be. The mind will never work perfectly as intended, at best it can only asymptotically approach some ideal. That's an interesting take, but why isn't caprice part of a personality? Caprice, as an element of personality can be simulated using chaotic, but deterministic, processes. But if the operation of, rather than external inputs to, a mind random, the mind will not be able to express itself 100% of the time. X% of the time you may be interacting with the flawlessly operating mind, and the (1 - X%) of the time, the mind fails to operate correctly due to a random failure of the mind's underlying platform. It is a bit like the difference between a computer with working memory, and one with a fault memory that occasionally causes bits to flip. A properly operating program can still exhibit unpredictable behavior because its internal operation can be hidden from inspection, but you never know what you might do if you have non-deterministic hardware. A computer with an internal hardware-based random number generator can still exercise its will 100% of the time, because the logical decisions made by the computer's processor remain 100% deterministic, and thus its program code retains its meaning. What's the standard of perfectly as intended if the intention were to be upredictable? A deterministic mind faced with the goal would have to use pseudo randomness. It is not difficult to remain unpredictable. For every n bits of of memory, a pseudo-random algorithm can produce on the order of 2^n bits of output before repeating. And given that one's knowledge is never complete, game theory shows that being able to make a random choice is optimum in many situations. One's will can remain free, and choose to defer to a random source. E.g., I choose to flip a coin to determine which shirt to wear. But if one loses the choice to decide what to do, due to randomness, then they have lost some freedom for their will: it wasn't their choice, it was that of the random process. E.g., I chose to wear the blue shirt not because my mind decided to, but because a cosmic ray hit my neuron and cause a cascade of other firings leading to the selection of the blue shirt. You can see this clearly if you imagine a sliding scale, on one side, decision making is made on 100% deterministic processes, on the other, 100% random. One obviously has no freedom if all decisions are made by something else (the random process), so my question is, at what point on this scale is maximum freedom achieved? I do agree with Russell that there are evolutionary advantages for access to a source of good randomness. It would enable people to choose better passwords, be better poker players, pick lottery numbers with fewer collisions, and so on. But I am not convinced humans access to anything approaching a good random number generator. But good is relative. Humans aren't very good at arithmetic either, but they can do it and it's useful. It is certainly worse than random oracles, cryptographically secure rngs, statistically sound but insecure rngs, and it seems much worse than even the very faulty C's rand() function. Therefore, I don't buy the argument that true randomness is an integral part of the mind, at least it isn't at a level we can use when we try to be random. Jason If we did, I would see it more as a sense which is external to the mind. The mind could determinsitically decide to make use of inputs from this sense, but even if the mind never drew on this random oracle it would still be every bit as free to exercise its will. I agree with that. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 15 Aug 2012, at 17:29, meekerdb wrote: On 8/15/2012 3:15 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: It is mine if the random generator is part of me. It is not mine if the generator is outside of me (eg flipping the coin). I don't see this. Why would the generator being part of you make it your choice? You might define me and part of me before. It is not clear if you are using the usual computer science notion of me, or not, but I would say that if the root of the choice is a random oracle, then the random oracle makes the choice for me. It does not matter if the coin is in or outside my brain, which is a local non absolute notion. I'd say the crucial difference is whether you chose to use the random oracle (i.e. flip a coin) or you make a random decision (due to a K40 decay) without knowing it. If I don't it, in what sense is it my free personal decision? Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On Wed, Aug 15, 2012 at 12:15:59PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 15 Aug 2012, at 10:12, Russell Standish wrote: On Tue, Aug 14, 2012 at 01:01:10PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 14 Aug 2012, at 12:30, Russell Standish wrote: Assuming the coin is operating inside the agent's body? Why would that be considered non-free? In what sense would the choice be mine if it is random? It is mine if the random generator is part of me. It is not mine if the generator is outside of me (eg flipping the coin). I don't see this. Why would the generator being part of you make it your choice? You might define me and part of me before. It is The self-other distinction is a vital part of conscsiousness. I don't think precise definitions of this are needed for this discussion. not clear if you are using the usual computer science notion of me, or not, but I would say that if the root of the choice is a random oracle, then the random oracle makes the choice for me. It does not matter if the coin is in or outside my brain, which is a local non absolute notion. My brain make a choice, therefore it is my choice. My boss orders me to do something, its not really my choice (unless I decide to disobey :). Why would this be any different with random number generators? A coin flips, and I do something based on the outcome. It is not my choice (except insofar as I chose to follow an external random event). My brain makes a random choice based on the chaotic amplification of synaptic noise. This is still my brain and my choice. It is like letting someone else take the decision for you. I really don't see how randomness is related to with free will (the compatibilist one). Compatibilism, ISTM, is the solution to a non-problem: How to reconcile free will with a deterministic universe. The very idea that we have to reconcile free-will with determinism seems to be a red herring to me. Agreed. But that is what all the fuss seems to be about. I try not to engage with it, as it is so century-before-the-last. It is a non-problem, because the universe is not deterministic. (The multiverse is deterministic, of course, but that's another story). But then you have to reconcile free-will with indeterminacy, and that makes not much sense. I don't think free-will (as I defined it of course) has anything to do with determinacy or indeterminacy. The fact that someone else can predict my behavior does not make it less free. Um, yes it does. You did not reply my question: take the iterated WM-self-duplication. All the resulting people lives the experience of an random oracle. Why would they be more free than someone outside the duplication boxes? How could they use that random oracle for being more free than someone not using them, as they cannot select the outcome? In the setup of your teleporters, the source of randomness comes from outside of the person, so no, that doesn't have anything to with free will. But if you move the source of randomness to inside somehow, then sure it might do. It looks like you do defend the old notion of free will, which basically assume non-comp. Using first person indeterminacy can't help, imo, but if you have an idea you can elaborate. I'm not sure what this old notion of free will is, but if it involves immaterial spirits, substance dualism and the like, then definitely not. I don't see how my form of free will is non-comp. By contrast, your UD argument seems to argue for its necessary appearance. Someone asked why this concept is important. It isn't for me, per se, but I would imagine that someone implementing an agent that must survive in a messy real world environment (eg an autonomous robot) will need to consider this issue, and build something like it into their robot. Cheers -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 8/16/2012 2:52 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 15 Aug 2012, at 17:29, meekerdb wrote: On 8/15/2012 3:15 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: It is mine if the random generator is part of me. It is not mine if the generator is outside of me (eg flipping the coin). I don't see this. Why would the generator being part of you make it your choice? You might define me and part of me before. It is not clear if you are using the usual computer science notion of me, or not, but I would say that if the root of the choice is a random oracle, then the random oracle makes the choice for me. It does not matter if the coin is in or outside my brain, which is a local non absolute notion. I'd say the crucial difference is whether you chose to use the random oracle (i.e. flip a coin) or you make a random decision (due to a K40 decay) without knowing it. If I don't it, in what sense is it my free personal decision? Don't do which? You can flip a coin and then change your mind and not do what it indicates, so whether to follow the coin or not is your decision. The decision due to the K40 decay is just another branch in Everett's multiverse. Brent Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/%7Emarchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 16 Aug 2012, at 09:12, Russell Standish wrote: On Wed, Aug 15, 2012 at 12:15:59PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 15 Aug 2012, at 10:12, Russell Standish wrote: On Tue, Aug 14, 2012 at 01:01:10PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 14 Aug 2012, at 12:30, Russell Standish wrote: Assuming the coin is operating inside the agent's body? Why would that be considered non-free? In what sense would the choice be mine if it is random? It is mine if the random generator is part of me. It is not mine if the generator is outside of me (eg flipping the coin). I don't see this. Why would the generator being part of you make it your choice? You might define me and part of me before. It is The self-other distinction is a vital part of conscsiousness. I don't think precise definitions of this are needed for this discussion. not clear if you are using the usual computer science notion of me, or not, but I would say that if the root of the choice is a random oracle, then the random oracle makes the choice for me. It does not matter if the coin is in or outside my brain, which is a local non absolute notion. My brain make a choice, therefore it is my choice. My boss orders me to do something, its not really my choice (unless I decide to disobey :). Why would this be any different with random number generators? A coin flips, and I do something based on the outcome. It is not my choice (except insofar as I chose to follow an external random event). My brain makes a random choice based on the chaotic amplification of synaptic noise. This is still my brain and my choice. So you identify yourself with a brain, like Searle. With comp I would say that only a person makes choice, the solid material brain is already a construct from an infinity of random choice, but none can be said to mine, like if I found myself in Moscow instead of Washington after a WM-duplication, I can't say that I have chosen to be in Moscow. It is like letting someone else take the decision for you. I really don't see how randomness is related to with free will (the compatibilist one). Compatibilism, ISTM, is the solution to a non-problem: How to reconcile free will with a deterministic universe. The very idea that we have to reconcile free-will with determinism seems to be a red herring to me. Agreed. But that is what all the fuss seems to be about. I try not to engage with it, as it is so century-before-the-last. I can agree with this. Still, I do like to debunk invalid conception of it. It is a non-problem, because the universe is not deterministic. (The multiverse is deterministic, of course, but that's another story). But then you have to reconcile free-will with indeterminacy, and that makes not much sense. I don't think free-will (as I defined it of course) has anything to do with determinacy or indeterminacy. The fact that someone else can predict my behavior does not make it less free. Um, yes it does. Why? Why would I be less free to eat blueberries in case everybody can predict that I will eat them. You did not reply my question: take the iterated WM-self-duplication. All the resulting people lives the experience of an random oracle. Why would they be more free than someone outside the duplication boxes? How could they use that random oracle for being more free than someone not using them, as they cannot select the outcome? In the setup of your teleporters, the source of randomness comes from outside of the person, so no, that doesn't have anything to with free will. But if you move the source of randomness to inside somehow, then sure it might do. I don't see what inside and outside have anything to do with the fact that a choice can't be helped with a random coin. A choice is driven by many factors like my personality, my culture, my life, my current appetite, and thousand of parameters. It looks like you do defend the old notion of free will, which basically assume non-comp. Using first person indeterminacy can't help, imo, but if you have an idea you can elaborate. I'm not sure what this old notion of free will is, but if it involves immaterial spirits, substance dualism and the like, then definitely not. OK. Me too. I don't see how my form of free will is non-comp. With comp everything is deterministic from the 3p view, like arithmetical truth is definite. Then from the 1-view, there are mainly two type of indeterminacy. The one due to self-multiplication in UD* (alias arithmetical truth), which, as you agree above can't play a role in free-will. Then there is the self-indeterminacy based on Turing, which is the one playing a role in free-will. But in both case, there is no indeterminacy in the big picture. If free-will necessicate a real 3p-free will, comp would be false, as we cannot Turing emulate it. The QM indeterminacy cannot work here, as it is a self-multiplication like in the first person indeterminacy.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 16 Aug 2012, at 15:06, meekerdb wrote: On 8/16/2012 2:52 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 15 Aug 2012, at 17:29, meekerdb wrote: On 8/15/2012 3:15 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: It is mine if the random generator is part of me. It is not mine if the generator is outside of me (eg flipping the coin). I don't see this. Why would the generator being part of you make it your choice? You might define me and part of me before. It is not clear if you are using the usual computer science notion of me, or not, but I would say that if the root of the choice is a random oracle, then the random oracle makes the choice for me. It does not matter if the coin is in or outside my brain, which is a local non absolute notion. I'd say the crucial difference is whether you chose to use the random oracle (i.e. flip a coin) or you make a random decision (due to a K40 decay) without knowing it. If I don't it, in what sense is it my free personal decision? Don't do which? You can flip a coin and then change your mind and not do what it indicates, so whether to follow the coin or not is your decision. The decision due to the K40 decay is just another branch in Everett's multiverse. Apology. I meant: if I don't know it. If I flip a coin and don't respect the output, the decision is mine indeed, but if I stick to my decision of following the random result, then, well, that decision (to follow the coin) is mine, but the decision to drink tea instead of coffee, with the coin, is the coin or God decision. I refer to the coin, and not to me. I can say that I abandon my decision to the coin throwing process. I stop to decide. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 8/16/2012 8:22 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 16 Aug 2012, at 15:06, meekerdb wrote: On 8/16/2012 2:52 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 15 Aug 2012, at 17:29, meekerdb wrote: On 8/15/2012 3:15 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: It is mine if the random generator is part of me. It is not mine if the generator is outside of me (eg flipping the coin). I don't see this. Why would the generator being part of you make it your choice? You might define me and part of me before. It is not clear if you are using the usual computer science notion of me, or not, but I would say that if the root of the choice is a random oracle, then the random oracle makes the choice for me. It does not matter if the coin is in or outside my brain, which is a local non absolute notion. I'd say the crucial difference is whether you chose to use the random oracle (i.e. flip a coin) or you make a random decision (due to a K40 decay) without knowing it. If I don't it, in what sense is it my free personal decision? Don't do which? You can flip a coin and then change your mind and not do what it indicates, so whether to follow the coin or not is your decision. The decision due to the K40 decay is just another branch in Everett's multiverse. Apology. I meant: if I don't know it. If I flip a coin and don't respect the output, the decision is mine indeed, but if I stick to my decision of following the random result, then, well, that decision (to follow the coin) is mine, but the decision to drink tea instead of coffee, with the coin, is the coin or God decision. I refer to the coin, and not to me. I can say that I abandon my decision to the coin throwing process. I stop to decide. It seems that it's a question of demarcating a somewhat fuzzy boundary between me and the rest of the world. As Dennett says, You can avoid responsibility for everything if you just make yourself small enough. You often refer to the person as the 1p view 'from the inside'. How 'big' is the person in this theory? What's the boundary between the person and the world he sees from his 1p view? Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 16 Aug 2012, at 17:44, meekerdb wrote: On 8/16/2012 8:22 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 16 Aug 2012, at 15:06, meekerdb wrote: On 8/16/2012 2:52 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 15 Aug 2012, at 17:29, meekerdb wrote: On 8/15/2012 3:15 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: It is mine if the random generator is part of me. It is not mine if the generator is outside of me (eg flipping the coin). I don't see this. Why would the generator being part of you make it your choice? You might define me and part of me before. It is not clear if you are using the usual computer science notion of me, or not, but I would say that if the root of the choice is a random oracle, then the random oracle makes the choice for me. It does not matter if the coin is in or outside my brain, which is a local non absolute notion. I'd say the crucial difference is whether you chose to use the random oracle (i.e. flip a coin) or you make a random decision (due to a K40 decay) without knowing it. If I don't it, in what sense is it my free personal decision? Don't do which? You can flip a coin and then change your mind and not do what it indicates, so whether to follow the coin or not is your decision. The decision due to the K40 decay is just another branch in Everett's multiverse. Apology. I meant: if I don't know it. If I flip a coin and don't respect the output, the decision is mine indeed, but if I stick to my decision of following the random result, then, well, that decision (to follow the coin) is mine, but the decision to drink tea instead of coffee, with the coin, is the coin or God decision. I refer to the coin, and not to me. I can say that I abandon my decision to the coin throwing process. I stop to decide. It seems that it's a question of demarcating a somewhat fuzzy boundary between me and the rest of the world. As Dennett says, You can avoid responsibility for everything if you just make yourself small enough. You often refer to the person as the 1p view 'from the inside'. The person is the subject who believe to have that view. he believes for example that he is the one in W, after the duplication. But the person is more abstract and complex than any of his 1-view. The knower, Bp p, is already closer to the notion of person, for a better approximation. How 'big' is the person in this theory? What's the boundary between the person and the world he sees from his 1p view? Only the person can answer that, and according to different experience, can give very different answer. Still, we can reason from semi-axiomatic presentation, and that answer is not needed for the reasoning. I current feeling, I can tell you, is that the number of possible person is either one, or two, but no more. I tend to think that all living creature are the same person, or the same double person, as we might need to be two to be conscious, somehow. I am not sure. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On Thu, Aug 16, 2012 at 05:06:31PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 16 Aug 2012, at 09:12, Russell Standish wrote: Why would this be any different with random number generators? A coin flips, and I do something based on the outcome. It is not my choice (except insofar as I chose to follow an external random event). My brain makes a random choice based on the chaotic amplification of synaptic noise. This is still my brain and my choice. So you identify yourself with a brain, like Searle. With comp I would say that only a person makes choice, the solid material brain is already a construct from an infinity of random choice, but none can be said to mine, like if I found myself in Moscow instead of Washington after a WM-duplication, I can't say that I have chosen to be in Moscow. Via supervenience, yes. I'm not sure this is particularly Searle's position, though - I disagree with his diagnosis of the Chinese room, and rather follow Dennett in that. ... stuff elided, because we're in agreement ... I don't think free-will (as I defined it of course) has anything to do with determinacy or indeterminacy. The fact that someone else can predict my behavior does not make it less free. Um, yes it does. Why? Why would I be less free to eat blueberries in case everybody can predict that I will eat them. In the case everybody could predict that, then I would be able to predict it, and I would feel less free as a result. In the case where some super intelligent observer could predict my actions, but I could not, and wasn't aware of the super intelligent observer's predictions, then we have an interesting case. I can't say whether I would feel less free in that situation or not. Alas, its a bit hard to perform the experiment. I don't think Libet-like experiments count - a machine capable of reading my decision before I become aware of my decision still does not evacuate the proposition that I freely made the decision. I do understand its a bit freaky, though... You did not reply my question: take the iterated WM-self-duplication. All the resulting people lives the experience of an random oracle. Why would they be more free than someone outside the duplication boxes? How could they use that random oracle for being more free than someone not using them, as they cannot select the outcome? In the setup of your teleporters, the source of randomness comes from outside of the person, so no, that doesn't have anything to with free will. But if you move the source of randomness to inside somehow, then sure it might do. I don't see what inside and outside have anything to do with the fact that a choice can't be helped with a random coin. A choice is driven by many factors like my personality, my culture, my life, my current appetite, and thousand of parameters. Sure, and also by completely random factors. If you only made completely random choices, it wouldn't seem like execising free will at all. One can perform this experiment, although curiously, humans make poor random number generators, statistically speaking. I don't see how my form of free will is non-comp. With comp everything is deterministic from the 3p view, like arithmetical truth is definite. Then from the 1-view, there are mainly two type of indeterminacy. The one due to self-multiplication in UD* (alias arithmetical truth), which, as you agree above can't play a role in free-will. Then there is the self-indeterminacy based on Turing, which is the one playing a role in free-will. But in both case, there is no indeterminacy in the big picture. If free-will necessicate a real 3p-free will, comp would be false, as we cannot Turing emulate it. Definitely not. Free will is not a 3p (aka syntactic level) concept. To say it is would be a confusion of levels, or a category error, putting it bluntly. The QM indeterminacy cannot work here, as it is a self-multiplication like in the first person indeterminacy. By contrast, your UD argument seems to argue for its necessary appearance. Yes. Someone asked why this concept is important. It isn't for me, per se, but I would imagine that someone implementing an agent that must survive in a messy real world environment (eg an autonomous robot) will need to consider this issue, and build something like it into their robot. Probabilist algorithm can be more efficacious and can solve problem that deterministic algorithm cannot, but in most case you can use pseudo-random one in most case. And if consciousness and free will necessitates a real 3p indeterminacy, then comp is violated, as this cannot be Turing emulated. Best, Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 14 Aug 2012, at 18:19, John Clark wrote: On Tue, Aug 14, 2012 at 6:30 AM, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: But he[me] agrees and even proposes a compatibilist definition [of free will] I'll let him speak to that, but its not the impression I get. All I said was that the only definition of free will that is not gibberish is the inability to always know what you will do next even in a unchanging environment, the meaning is clear and its not self contradictory. OK. We agree on that. I also said my definition was rarely used by anybody, is intellectually shallow, and has zero value; Not wen you succeed to formalize it. Then you can show, with computer science that notion like free-will, or consciousness, can have a role in the speeding of the evolution processes. This is done with all details in my long french text conscience mécanisme. but even so that makes it vastly superior to any other definition of that two word phrase. OK. Bruno John K Clark No, but it does need 1-randomness Imagine the iterated WM-duplication. Why would the resulting peoples have more free will than the same person not doing the experience? It seems to me that if a decision relies on a perfect coin, it is less free than if it relies on my partial self-indetermination, which itself is a deterministic process, although I cannot see it. Assuming the coin is operating inside the agent's body? Why would that be considered non-free? -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com . For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com . For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On Tue, Aug 14, 2012 at 01:01:10PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 14 Aug 2012, at 12:30, Russell Standish wrote: Assuming the coin is operating inside the agent's body? Why would that be considered non-free? In what sense would the choice be mine if it is random? It is mine if the random generator is part of me. It is not mine if the generator is outside of me (eg flipping the coin). It is like letting someone else take the decision for you. I really don't see how randomness is related to with free will (the compatibilist one). Compatibilism, ISTM, is the solution to a non-problem: How to reconcile free will with a deterministic universe. It is a non-problem, because the universe is not deterministic. (The multiverse is deterministic, of course, but that's another story). Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 15 Aug 2012, at 10:12, Russell Standish wrote: On Tue, Aug 14, 2012 at 01:01:10PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 14 Aug 2012, at 12:30, Russell Standish wrote: Assuming the coin is operating inside the agent's body? Why would that be considered non-free? In what sense would the choice be mine if it is random? It is mine if the random generator is part of me. It is not mine if the generator is outside of me (eg flipping the coin). I don't see this. Why would the generator being part of you make it your choice? You might define me and part of me before. It is not clear if you are using the usual computer science notion of me, or not, but I would say that if the root of the choice is a random oracle, then the random oracle makes the choice for me. It does not matter if the coin is in or outside my brain, which is a local non absolute notion. It is like letting someone else take the decision for you. I really don't see how randomness is related to with free will (the compatibilist one). Compatibilism, ISTM, is the solution to a non-problem: How to reconcile free will with a deterministic universe. The very idea that we have to reconcile free-will with determinism seems to be a red herring to me. It is a non-problem, because the universe is not deterministic. (The multiverse is deterministic, of course, but that's another story). But then you have to reconcile free-will with indeterminacy, and that makes not much sense. I don't think free-will (as I defined it of course) has anything to do with determinacy or indeterminacy. The fact that someone else can predict my behavior does not make it less free. You did not reply my question: take the iterated WM-self-duplication. All the resulting people lives the experience of an random oracle. Why would they be more free than someone outside the duplication boxes? How could they use that random oracle for being more free than someone not using them, as they cannot select the outcome? It looks like you do defend the old notion of free will, which basically assume non-comp. Using first person indeterminacy can't help, imo, but if you have an idea you can elaborate. Bruno Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything- l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com . For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com . For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 8/15/2012 3:15 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: It is mine if the random generator is part of me. It is not mine if the generator is outside of me (eg flipping the coin). I don't see this. Why would the generator being part of you make it your choice? You might define me and part of me before. It is not clear if you are using the usual computer science notion of me, or not, but I would say that if the root of the choice is a random oracle, then the random oracle makes the choice for me. It does not matter if the coin is in or outside my brain, which is a local non absolute notion. I'd say the crucial difference is whether you chose to use the random oracle (i.e. flip a coin) or you make a random decision (due to a K40 decay) without knowing it. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 14 Aug 2012, at 00:44, Russell Standish wrote: On Mon, Aug 13, 2012 at 03:56:35PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 13 Aug 2012, at 00:32, Russell Standish wrote: OK. But the question is: would an agent lost free-will in case no random oracle is available? I would have thought so. OK. This is incompatible with the usual comp. But probably compatible with comp-relative-to-an-oracle, for which UDA should still work (I currently think). Basicaly all recursion theory works the same with computability relativize to oracle. I don't see why this would entail comp is false though. Perhaps you could elaborate? Because comp implies that there is no randomness at the ontological level. Assuming that by ontological level, you mean what I call the syntactic level in my book. Ontology and syntax are different notion. With comp they are close, but not equivalent. Syntax concerns mainly finite symbols and finite sequences of symbols, finite sequences of sequences of symbols. Ontology concerns what we assume to exist independently of us. I am not sure symbols can be said to exist, as symbol, independently of us. but that might be a vocabulary detail. I do understand the difference between ontology (taken as that which exists) versus syntactic (the lowest implementation language). That which exists is fundamentally unknowable, and probably not sensible disucssed, hence I prefer to stick with more neutral labels like syntactic level. I disagree with this. With comp we know that the fundamental reality is given by *any* Turing complete system. What cannot be discussed is which one, but they are all equivalent. As for being independent of us, both syntactic and semantic levels are independent of us in the sense that two correspondents must agree on both in order to have a sensible conversation. I disagree. Semantics is personal and ill defined, and we don't have to agree on the semantics to discuss. We have only to agree with the syntactic provability rule. The whole field of logic is based on that: the validity of the reasoning are made independent of the semantics, which is always subjective and personal. I guess you are alluding to the self-indeterminacy (à-la Turing, not to be confused with the first person indeterminacy) which can make a decision looking random for the one who does it, I would have thought that first person indeterminancy would fit the bill perfectly. It can be used as a local random oracle, although in practice it is simpler to use a quantum algorithm. I doubt people would agree to duplicate themselves to make the right statistical choice. Actually, they will use coin or pseudo-random algorithm. I'm not sure that a pseudo-random algorithm would always be good enough, as unless it is cryptographically strong, evolution will make short work of breaking it. If a real random oracle is available, it would be some much easier to use that. Technically it can be shown, indeed, that random oracle are richer as a resource for problem solving than pseudo randomness, but the proof of this are very non constructive, so that it is hard to conceive any practical problem for which a random oracle is better. I am not sure I see the relation with cryptography. If you have a coin, then flipping a coin is a good approach. Most brains so not have coins, so I would expect a different mechanism to be used - eg synaptic thermal noise. But we don't know in Nature any random process, unless you believe in the collapse of the wave packet. Note that NO machine can ever distinguish a truly random sequence with some sequence which can be generated by machine more complex than themselves. That is true. But complex machines are expensive to run. But with comp we don't run machine. They all exists and run in arithmetic, and the appearances are internal selection. Below the subst level we are all confronted with an infinity of unbounded complexity (cf the white rabbits). Real random oracles, if available, They are available by first person indeterminacy. They are not ontologically real, but they are epistemologically real, and this plays a big role in the emergence of the physical reality. But I doubt it plays a role in our biological evolution. That would mean that our substititution level is lower than the quantum one, and I don't see any evidence for this. are so much more convenient for evolution to use that to try to evolve sufficient complexity to achieve cryptographic strength in a pseudo random number generator. With comp, the following are absolutely undecidable: - the cardinality of the universe is aleph_zero, or aleph_one, of 2^aleph_zero, etc. - there is a random oracle at play in our experience (although we know already that there is a random oracle at play in the *existence* and *stability* of our experiences). but which is not the non-compatibilist kind of randomness that
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On Mon, Aug 13, 2012 at 11:51:54AM -0400, John Clark wrote: On Sun, Aug 12, 2012 at 1:12 AM, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.auwrote are you really claiming that roulette wheels are conscious? I can't prove it or the opposite proposition but personally I feel that it's unlikely such things are conscious; but more to the point are you really claiming that roulette wheels have this thing you call free will? No - quite the opposite. I see we now agree that my definition does not include roulette wheels as having free will (unless in the unlikely circumstance they happen to be be consious). Free will requires randomness, but it is more than just randomness. Yes I know, all advocates of the free will noise say that, but the trouble is whenever they try to explain what that missing extra ingredient is they tie themselves up into logical knots in about .9 seconds. I don't understand why people can't just make the obvious conclusion that this thing called free will is of no use whatsoever in science or philosophy or law and is of no help in understanding how we or any other part of the Universe operates. Free will can only ever be applied to agents. Things that definitely aren't agents, such as roulette wheels cannot have it. You will probably ask for a definition of agency. Like life (and pornography), there are some definitions about what is and what is not an agent, but a hard and fast classification seems unlikely. But that doesn't stop one studying agent-based model, for example. I just can't tell you definitively the difference between agent based modelling and object oriented programming, as one seems to blend into the other. Only when considered at the syntactic level. At the semantic level, there are many alternatives. Many?? List them! Growth in complexity Information processing Irreversibility Wetness of water Colour of red ... and so on... One of these is choice. OK then explain the MEANING of choice, explain how if you chose it you didn't do it because you liked it and you didn't do it for any other reason either, AND in contradiction of all the laws of logic although you did it for no reason you didn't do it for no reason. I'd really like to know how that works! Why do I have to explain that I did something for no other reason? There will always be multiple modes of explanation. Agents will chose different courses of action depending on circumstances. How they do that (the efficient cause) will vary by agent and environmental stimuli. To chose optimally will require a mix of reasoning and random choice. What's the logical problem with this? As I said it doesn't take fans of the free will noise long to tie themselves up into logical knots. Maybe for some. -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 14 Aug 2012, at 12:30, Russell Standish wrote: Assuming the coin is operating inside the agent's body? Why would that be considered non-free? In what sense would the choice be mine if it is random? It is like letting someone else take the decision for you. I really don't see how randomness is related to with free will (the compatibilist one). Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On Tue, Aug 14, 2012 at 6:30 AM, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.auwrote: But he[me] agrees and even proposes a compatibilist definition [of free will] I'll let him speak to that, but its not the impression I get. All I said was that the only definition of free will that is not gibberish is the inability to always know what you will do next even in a unchanging environment, the meaning is clear and its not self contradictory. I also said my definition was rarely used by anybody, is intellectually shallow, and has zero value; but even so that makes it vastly superior to any other definition of that two word phrase. John K Clark No, but it does need 1-randomness Imagine the iterated WM-duplication. Why would the resulting peoples have more free will than the same person not doing the experience? It seems to me that if a decision relies on a perfect coin, it is less free than if it relies on my partial self-indetermination, which itself is a deterministic process, although I cannot see it. Assuming the coin is operating inside the agent's body? Why would that be considered non-free? -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
Dear Stephen, On 12 Aug 2012, at 20:15, Stephen P. King wrote: On 8/12/2012 10:56 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 12 Aug 2012, at 16:29, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: snip Is it possible to say that compatibilism is equivalent to Leibniz' pre-established harmony? Thiscan be *one* interpretation of Leibniz' pre-established harmony, but I doubt it is necessarily the only one. With comp you can interpret the pre-established harmony by the arithmetical truth, but to be honest, the harmony break down. The arithmetical truth can be considered as pre-established, but it is messy, infinitely complex, and beyond *all* theories, even theories of everything, provably so if comp is postulated. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ Dear Bruno, Given this remark about the PEH, do you agree with me that even though arithmetic truth is prior, that it is not accessible without physical actions? This depends of what you mean by physical action and accessible. With comp you can define the physical reality by what is observable by all numbers in arithmetic, and you can define the physical laws by what is observable and invariant for all observers in arithmetic. (and UDA suggests to define (in AUDA) observable-with-P = 1 by sigma_1, provable and consistent. For P ≠ 1, you can drop provable. Note that observable by numbers is a short way to say observable by the person supported by a number relatively to its most probable universal number (neighborhood). Then you can define sensible by sigma_1, provable, consistent and true. Observable leads to quanta, and sensible leads to qualia at the G* level. (Careful: that notion of level is NOT related to the substitution level notion). Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 13 Aug 2012, at 00:32, Russell Standish wrote: On Sun, Aug 12, 2012 at 04:24:22PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 12 Aug 2012, at 11:45, Russell Standish wrote: On Sun, Aug 12, 2012 at 11:01:09AM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 11 Aug 2012, at 09:45, Russell Standish wrote: Nevertheless, randomness is a key component of free will. So comp is false? I mean comp can only defend a compatibilist (or mechanist, deterministic) theory of free-will, like with the self- indetermination based on diagonalization. I have never seen how we can use randomness to justify free-will. May be you can elaborate? Bruno If there are several actions an agent may perform, and one optimal in terms of the agent's utility, but the utility is computationally unfeasible, then an agent can choose one of the actions by random choice. How? Agents perform actions. That is the meaning of agency. If random oracles are available to the agent, why shouldn't the agent use them. OK. But the question is: would an agent lost free-will in case no random oracle is available? I don't see why this would entail comp is false though. Perhaps you could elaborate? Because comp implies that there is no randomness at the ontological level. Assuming that by ontological level, you mean what I call the syntactic level in my book. Ontology and syntax are different notion. With comp they are close, but not equivalent. Syntax concerns mainly finite symbols and finite sequences of symbols, finite sequences of sequences of symbols. Ontology concerns what we assume to exist independently of us. I am not sure symbols can be said to exist, as symbol, independently of us. but that might be a vocabulary detail. There is no free will at the syntactic level, nor is there consciousness, nor human beings, wet water or any other emergent stuff. Free will only makes sense at the semantic level. The level which gives meaning to consious lives. OK. I guess you are alluding to the self-indeterminacy (à-la Turing, not to be confused with the first person indeterminacy) which can make a decision looking random for the one who does it, I would have thought that first person indeterminancy would fit the bill perfectly. It can be used as a local random oracle, although in practice it is simpler to use a quantum algorithm. I doubt people would agree to duplicate themselves to make the right statistical choice. Actually, they will use coin or pseudo-random algorithm. Note that NO machine can ever distinguish a truly random sequence with some sequence which can be generated by machine more complex than themselves. With comp, the following are absolutely undecidable: - the cardinality of the universe is aleph_zero, or aleph_one, of 2^aleph_zero, etc. - there is a random oracle at play in our experience (although we know already that there is a random oracle at play in the *existence* and *stability* of our experiences). Note that as there can be no conscious observer of the 3rd person deterministic subtsrate, it makes no sense to speak of free will for the entities of that substrate. OK. but which is not the non-compatibilist kind of randomness that some defender of free-will want to introduce. I have never met anyone wanting to do this. They sound like some sort of long-discredited Cartesian dualist. Are you sure they're not strawmen you have conjured up? John Clark seems to believe that they still exist, as he argues all the times against them, and then it seems to me that Craig Weinberg has defended such notion, I think. I don't think I have conjured up :) There was a deterministic/free will paradox in the 19th century, when Laplace's clockwork universe reigned supreme. But since the development of quantum mechanics in the 1920, the paradox was disolved. With the wave-collapse, which makes no sense. With Everett we are back to pure 3-person determinism, like with comp. And plasuibly the same kind of indeterminacy. Again, I can see this playing a role in problem solving, but not in free-will (as I defend the compatibilist notion of free-will). And as David Deutcsh is want to point out, for the price of a Multiverse, one can have one's deterministic cake and freely eat it too (sorry for mangling the metaphors :). But this works because the free will exists at a different level from that where determinism rules. I am OK with this, but this means that free-will does not need 3- randomness. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On Sun, Aug 12, 2012 at 1:12 AM, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.auwrote: If you look at what I actually say [about free will] (page 167 of ToN), It is the ability for a conscious entity to do somthing irrational. [...] Clearly the concept of rationality is also a can of worms Yes indeed rationality and irrationality are open to a lot of interpretations, but even so its not as big a can of worms as conscious entity. are you really claiming that roulette wheels are conscious? I can't prove it or the opposite proposition but personally I feel that it's unlikely such things are conscious; but more to the point are you really claiming that roulette wheels have this thing you call free will? Free will requires randomness, but it is more than just randomness. Yes I know, all advocates of the free will noise say that, but the trouble is whenever they try to explain what that missing extra ingredient is they tie themselves up into logical knots in about .9 seconds. I don't understand why people can't just make the obvious conclusion that this thing called free will is of no use whatsoever in science or philosophy or law and is of no help in understanding how we or any other part of the Universe operates. A random device will very rarely do something smart. My pocket calculator-roulette wheel hybrid can do something smart half the time and something dumb the other half, and such a combination device would be easy to make. Just like you, and me, and the dog, and a thermostat, and a rock, and a electron, and everything else in the universe, the dice and roulette wheel did what they did for a reason OR they did what they did for no reason. Only when considered at the syntactic level. At the semantic level, there are many alternatives. Many?? List them! One of these is choice. OK then explain the MEANING of choice, explain how if you chose it you didn't do it because you liked it and you didn't do it for any other reason either, AND in contradiction of all the laws of logic although you did it for no reason you didn't do it for no reason. I'd really like to know how that works! As I said it doesn't take fans of the free will noise long to tie themselves up into logical knots. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On Mon, Aug 13, 2012 at 03:56:35PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 13 Aug 2012, at 00:32, Russell Standish wrote: OK. But the question is: would an agent lost free-will in case no random oracle is available? I would have thought so. I don't see why this would entail comp is false though. Perhaps you could elaborate? Because comp implies that there is no randomness at the ontological level. Assuming that by ontological level, you mean what I call the syntactic level in my book. Ontology and syntax are different notion. With comp they are close, but not equivalent. Syntax concerns mainly finite symbols and finite sequences of symbols, finite sequences of sequences of symbols. Ontology concerns what we assume to exist independently of us. I am not sure symbols can be said to exist, as symbol, independently of us. but that might be a vocabulary detail. I do understand the difference between ontology (taken as that which exists) versus syntactic (the lowest implementation language). That which exists is fundamentally unknowable, and probably not sensible disucssed, hence I prefer to stick with more neutral labels like syntactic level. As for being independent of us, both syntactic and semantic levels are independent of us in the sense that two correspondents must agree on both in order to have a sensible conversation. I guess you are alluding to the self-indeterminacy (à-la Turing, not to be confused with the first person indeterminacy) which can make a decision looking random for the one who does it, I would have thought that first person indeterminancy would fit the bill perfectly. It can be used as a local random oracle, although in practice it is simpler to use a quantum algorithm. I doubt people would agree to duplicate themselves to make the right statistical choice. Actually, they will use coin or pseudo-random algorithm. I'm not sure that a pseudo-random algorithm would always be good enough, as unless it is cryptographically strong, evolution will make short work of breaking it. If a real random oracle is available, it would be some much easier to use that. If you have a coin, then flipping a coin is a good approach. Most brains so not have coins, so I would expect a different mechanism to be used - eg synaptic thermal noise. Note that NO machine can ever distinguish a truly random sequence with some sequence which can be generated by machine more complex than themselves. That is true. But complex machines are expensive to run. Real random oracles, if available, are so much more convenient for evolution to use that to try to evolve sufficient complexity to achieve cryptographic strength in a pseudo random number generator. With comp, the following are absolutely undecidable: - the cardinality of the universe is aleph_zero, or aleph_one, of 2^aleph_zero, etc. - there is a random oracle at play in our experience (although we know already that there is a random oracle at play in the *existence* and *stability* of our experiences). but which is not the non-compatibilist kind of randomness that some defender of free-will want to introduce. I have never met anyone wanting to do this. They sound like some sort of long-discredited Cartesian dualist. Are you sure they're not strawmen you have conjured up? John Clark seems to believe that they still exist, as he argues all the times against them, and then it seems to me that Craig Weinberg has defended such notion, I think. I don't think I have conjured up :) John Clark argues against anyone who utters the words free will. I don't think he particularly targets the spirit free will theorists (as Brent calls them). As for Craig, apologies for being rude, but I stopped reading his posts a long time ago. And as David Deutcsh is want to point out, for the price of a Multiverse, one can have one's deterministic cake and freely eat it too (sorry for mangling the metaphors :). But this works because the free will exists at a different level from that where determinism rules. I am OK with this, but this means that free-will does not need 3- randomness. No, but it does need 1-randomness -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 11 Aug 2012, at 09:45, Russell Standish wrote: On Fri, Aug 10, 2012 at 12:22:06PM -0400, John Clark wrote: On Thu, Aug 9, 2012 Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: Free will is the ability to do something stupid. Well OK, but there sure as hell is a lot of free will going around these days, even a pair of dice can be pretty stupid, the smart thing for it to do would be to come up with a 7, but sometimes it comes up with a 2 even though that number is 6 times less likely. Only a idiot would pick 2 but sometimes the dice does. As Homer Simpson would say Stupid dice. Roulette wheels do what they do, they never do anything different. Sure they do, sometimes they produce a 12 and sometimes they produce a 21. John K Clark In both your examples, (dice and roulette wheels), they always do something stupid (generate a random number). There is no choice in their actions, so it is senseless to assign agency to them. There is no optimisation of utility. I think you may be deliberately taking my statement out of context. Nevertheless, randomness is a key component of free will. So comp is false? I mean comp can only defend a compatibilist (or mechanist, deterministic) theory of free-will, like with the self- indetermination based on diagonalization. I have never seen how we can use randomness to justify free-will. May be you can elaborate? Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On Sun, Aug 12, 2012 at 11:01:09AM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 11 Aug 2012, at 09:45, Russell Standish wrote: Nevertheless, randomness is a key component of free will. So comp is false? I mean comp can only defend a compatibilist (or mechanist, deterministic) theory of free-will, like with the self- indetermination based on diagonalization. I have never seen how we can use randomness to justify free-will. May be you can elaborate? Bruno If there are several actions an agent may perform, and one optimal in terms of the agent's utility, but the utility is computationally unfeasible, then an agent can choose one of the actions by random choice. I don't see why this would entail comp is false though. Perhaps you could elaborate? -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 12 Aug 2012, at 11:45, Russell Standish wrote: On Sun, Aug 12, 2012 at 11:01:09AM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 11 Aug 2012, at 09:45, Russell Standish wrote: Nevertheless, randomness is a key component of free will. So comp is false? I mean comp can only defend a compatibilist (or mechanist, deterministic) theory of free-will, like with the self- indetermination based on diagonalization. I have never seen how we can use randomness to justify free-will. May be you can elaborate? Bruno If there are several actions an agent may perform, and one optimal in terms of the agent's utility, but the utility is computationally unfeasible, then an agent can choose one of the actions by random choice. How? I don't see why this would entail comp is false though. Perhaps you could elaborate? Because comp implies that there is no randomness at the ontological level. I guess you are alluding to the self-indeterminacy (à-la Turing, not to be confused with the first person indeterminacy) which can make a decision looking random for the one who does it, but which is not the non-compatibilist kind of randomness that some defender of free-will want to introduce. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 12.08.2012 16:24 Bruno Marchal said the following: On 12 Aug 2012, at 11:45, Russell Standish wrote: On Sun, Aug 12, 2012 at 11:01:09AM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 11 Aug 2012, at 09:45, Russell Standish wrote: Nevertheless, randomness is a key component of free will. So comp is false? I mean comp can only defend a compatibilist (or mechanist, deterministic) theory of free-will, like with the self- indetermination based on diagonalization. I have never seen how we can use randomness to justify free-will. May be you can elaborate? Bruno If there are several actions an agent may perform, and one optimal in terms of the agent's utility, but the utility is computationally unfeasible, then an agent can choose one of the actions by random choice. How? I don't see why this would entail comp is false though. Perhaps you could elaborate? Because comp implies that there is no randomness at the ontological level. I guess you are alluding to the self-indeterminacy (à-la Turing, not to be confused with the first person indeterminacy) which can make a decision looking random for the one who does it, but which is not the non-compatibilist kind of randomness that some defender of free-will want to introduce. Bruno, Is it possible to say that compatibilism is equivalent to Leibniz' pre-established harmony? Evgenii -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 12 Aug 2012, at 16:29, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: On 12.08.2012 16:24 Bruno Marchal said the following: On 12 Aug 2012, at 11:45, Russell Standish wrote: On Sun, Aug 12, 2012 at 11:01:09AM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 11 Aug 2012, at 09:45, Russell Standish wrote: Nevertheless, randomness is a key component of free will. So comp is false? I mean comp can only defend a compatibilist (or mechanist, deterministic) theory of free-will, like with the self- indetermination based on diagonalization. I have never seen how we can use randomness to justify free-will. May be you can elaborate? Bruno If there are several actions an agent may perform, and one optimal in terms of the agent's utility, but the utility is computationally unfeasible, then an agent can choose one of the actions by random choice. How? I don't see why this would entail comp is false though. Perhaps you could elaborate? Because comp implies that there is no randomness at the ontological level. I guess you are alluding to the self-indeterminacy (à-la Turing, not to be confused with the first person indeterminacy) which can make a decision looking random for the one who does it, but which is not the non-compatibilist kind of randomness that some defender of free-will want to introduce. Bruno, Is it possible to say that compatibilism is equivalent to Leibniz' pre-established harmony? Thiscan be *one* interpretation of Leibniz' pre-established harmony, but I doubt it is necessarily the only one. With comp you can interpret the pre-established harmony by the arithmetical truth, but to be honest, the harmony break down. The arithmetical truth can be considered as pre-established, but it is messy, infinitely complex, and beyond *all* theories, even theories of everything, provably so if comp is postulated. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 8/12/2012 10:29 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: On 12.08.2012 16:24 Bruno Marchal said the following: On 12 Aug 2012, at 11:45, Russell Standish wrote: On Sun, Aug 12, 2012 at 11:01:09AM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 11 Aug 2012, at 09:45, Russell Standish wrote: Nevertheless, randomness is a key component of free will. So comp is false? I mean comp can only defend a compatibilist (or mechanist, deterministic) theory of free-will, like with the self- indetermination based on diagonalization. I have never seen how we can use randomness to justify free-will. May be you can elaborate? Bruno If there are several actions an agent may perform, and one optimal in terms of the agent's utility, but the utility is computationally unfeasible, then an agent can choose one of the actions by random choice. How? I don't see why this would entail comp is false though. Perhaps you could elaborate? Because comp implies that there is no randomness at the ontological level. I guess you are alluding to the self-indeterminacy (à-la Turing, not to be confused with the first person indeterminacy) which can make a decision looking random for the one who does it, but which is not the non-compatibilist kind of randomness that some defender of free-will want to introduce. Bruno, Is it possible to say that compatibilism is equivalent to Leibniz' pre-established harmony? Evgenii Hi Evgenii, Yes, but with problems. -- Onward! Stephen Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. ~ Francis Bacon -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 8/12/2012 10:56 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 12 Aug 2012, at 16:29, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: On 12.08.2012 16:24 Bruno Marchal said the following: On 12 Aug 2012, at 11:45, Russell Standish wrote: On Sun, Aug 12, 2012 at 11:01:09AM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 11 Aug 2012, at 09:45, Russell Standish wrote: Nevertheless, randomness is a key component of free will. So comp is false? I mean comp can only defend a compatibilist (or mechanist, deterministic) theory of free-will, like with the self- indetermination based on diagonalization. I have never seen how we can use randomness to justify free-will. May be you can elaborate? Bruno If there are several actions an agent may perform, and one optimal in terms of the agent's utility, but the utility is computationally unfeasible, then an agent can choose one of the actions by random choice. How? I don't see why this would entail comp is false though. Perhaps you could elaborate? Because comp implies that there is no randomness at the ontological level. I guess you are alluding to the self-indeterminacy (à-la Turing, not to be confused with the first person indeterminacy) which can make a decision looking random for the one who does it, but which is not the non-compatibilist kind of randomness that some defender of free-will want to introduce. Bruno, Is it possible to say that compatibilism is equivalent to Leibniz' pre-established harmony? Thiscan be *one* interpretation of Leibniz' pre-established harmony, but I doubt it is necessarily the only one. With comp you can interpret the pre-established harmony by the arithmetical truth, but to be honest, the harmony break down. The arithmetical truth can be considered as pre-established, but it is messy, infinitely complex, and beyond *all* theories, even theories of everything, provably so if comp is postulated. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ Dear Bruno, Given this remark about the PEH, do you agree with me that even though arithmetic truth is prior, that it is not accessible without physical actions? -- Onward! Stephen Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. ~ Francis Bacon -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On Sun, Aug 12, 2012 at 04:24:22PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 12 Aug 2012, at 11:45, Russell Standish wrote: On Sun, Aug 12, 2012 at 11:01:09AM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 11 Aug 2012, at 09:45, Russell Standish wrote: Nevertheless, randomness is a key component of free will. So comp is false? I mean comp can only defend a compatibilist (or mechanist, deterministic) theory of free-will, like with the self- indetermination based on diagonalization. I have never seen how we can use randomness to justify free-will. May be you can elaborate? Bruno If there are several actions an agent may perform, and one optimal in terms of the agent's utility, but the utility is computationally unfeasible, then an agent can choose one of the actions by random choice. How? Agents perform actions. That is the meaning of agency. If random oracles are available to the agent, why shouldn't the agent use them. I don't see why this would entail comp is false though. Perhaps you could elaborate? Because comp implies that there is no randomness at the ontological level. Assuming that by ontological level, you mean what I call the syntactic level in my book. There is no free will at the syntactic level, nor is there consciousness, nor human beings, wet water or any other emergent stuff. Free will only makes sense at the semantic level. The level which gives meaning to consious lives. I guess you are alluding to the self-indeterminacy (à-la Turing, not to be confused with the first person indeterminacy) which can make a decision looking random for the one who does it, I would have thought that first person indeterminancy would fit the bill perfectly. Note that as there can be no conscious observer of the 3rd person deterministic subtsrate, it makes no sense to speak of free will for the entities of that substrate. but which is not the non-compatibilist kind of randomness that some defender of free-will want to introduce. I have never met anyone wanting to do this. They sound like some sort of long-discredited Cartesian dualist. Are you sure they're not strawmen you have conjured up? There was a deterministic/free will paradox in the 19th century, when Laplace's clockwork universe reigned supreme. But since the development of quantum mechanics in the 1920, the paradox was disolved. And as David Deutcsh is want to point out, for the price of a Multiverse, one can have one's deterministic cake and freely eat it too (sorry for mangling the metaphors :). But this works because the free will exists at a different level from that where determinism rules. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On Fri, Aug 10, 2012 at 12:22:06PM -0400, John Clark wrote: On Thu, Aug 9, 2012 Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: Free will is the ability to do something stupid. Well OK, but there sure as hell is a lot of free will going around these days, even a pair of dice can be pretty stupid, the smart thing for it to do would be to come up with a 7, but sometimes it comes up with a 2 even though that number is 6 times less likely. Only a idiot would pick 2 but sometimes the dice does. As Homer Simpson would say Stupid dice. Roulette wheels do what they do, they never do anything different. Sure they do, sometimes they produce a 12 and sometimes they produce a 21. John K Clark In both your examples, (dice and roulette wheels), they always do something stupid (generate a random number). There is no choice in their actions, so it is senseless to assign agency to them. There is no optimisation of utility. I think you may be deliberately taking my statement out of context. Nevertheless, randomness is a key component of free will. -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On Sat, Aug 11, 2012 at 3:45 AM, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.auwrote: In both your examples, (dice and roulette wheels), they always do something stupid (generate a random number). But you said free will is the ability to do something stupid so both dice and roulette wheels have free will. But perhaps it's the always that bothers you, after all sometimes people do smart things; so then rig up some dice with a pocket calculator and make a hybrid machine, usually the calculator produces the correct answer but on average of one time in 6 it does not and it does something dumb, like give the wrong answer. Now it has free will. There is no choice in their actions Just like you, and me, and the dog, and a thermostat, and a rock, and a electron, and everything else in the universe, the dice and roulette wheel did what they did for a reason OR they did what they did for no reason. The word choice does not help because there is no third alternative. I think you may be deliberately taking my statement out of context. Please note that I am not rejecting your definition, all I'm doing is using logic to see where it leads; if it ends up endowing things with free will that you don't want to have free will don't blame me, it's your definition not mine. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On Sat, Aug 11, 2012 at 12:10:04PM -0400, John Clark wrote: On Sat, Aug 11, 2012 at 3:45 AM, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.auwrote: In both your examples, (dice and roulette wheels), they always do something stupid (generate a random number). But you said free will is the ability to do something stupid so both dice and roulette wheels have free will. But perhaps it's the always that If you look at what I actually say (page 167 of ToN), It is the ability for a conscious entity to do somthing irrational. Sometimes I replace irrational with stupid, for effect, but irrational is what I really mean. Clearly the concept of rationality is also a can of worms, as per recent discussions, but I use the term in its usual philosophical and economics meaning. But I don't think that's at all the issue with your examples - are you really claiming that roulette wheels are conscious? Free will requires randomness, but it is more than just randomness. A random device will very rarely do something smart. bothers you, after all sometimes people do smart things; so then rig up some dice with a pocket calculator and make a hybrid machine, usually the calculator produces the correct answer but on average of one time in 6 it does not and it does something dumb, like give the wrong answer. Now it has free will. There is no choice in their actions Just like you, and me, and the dog, and a thermostat, and a rock, and a electron, and everything else in the universe, the dice and roulette wheel did what they did for a reason OR they did what they did for no reason. The word choice does not help because there is no third alternative. Only when considered at the syntactic level. At the semantic level, there are many alternatives. One of these is choice. For an explanation of syntactic versus semantic levels, see section 2.2 of my book. I think you may be deliberately taking my statement out of context. Please note that I am not rejecting your definition, all I'm doing is using logic to see where it leads; if it ends up endowing things with free will that you don't want to have free will don't blame me, it's your definition not mine. I never thought that any of your examples were conscious, thus immediately ruling out those examples. If you think they are, I'd need some convincing. A more interesting case is some complicated automaton, endowed with the ability to perform a random course of actions at appropriate times. I won't deny there are some grey areas there. For example, if it makes sense to speak of the robot having a mind, regardless of whether the robot is actually conscious or not, then I can see it could make sense to say the robot has free will. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 09 Aug 2012, at 22:38, John Clark wrote: On Thu, Aug 9, 2012 at 5:46 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: The mind-body comes from the fact that we don't grasp the relation between organized matter and the qualia-consciousness lived by the person experiencing it. We don't understand the details of that relationship but we do know some of the general outlines. We know that changing the organization of matter, such as the matter in the brain, changes the qualia- consciousness of the person and we know that changes in the qualia- consciousness chages external matter, as when you get hungry and decide to pick up the matter in a candy bar. Yes. But that is only a part of the problem description. The sort of matter the Large Hadron Collider investigates. I don't know if you call that apparent matter or primitive matter, I just call it matter. It is (obviously) apparent matter. Well then apparent matter covers one hell of a lot of ground and seems very interesting indeed, interesting enough to fully occupy the minds of thousands of geniuses for centuries. On the other hand primitive matter contains nothing of intellectually interest, at least nobody has found anything interesting to say about it yet. Apparent matter is quite literally astronomically rich while primitive matter is shallow and a utter bore. I agree. But most people, even physicist believe in some primitive matter. Obviously it is a way to sit down the mind and progress. If matter is only apparent, and if we are interested in fundamental question, we have to explain it without postulating it. That is what we can, and must, formulate mathematically once we assume comp. Primitive matter is a theological concept OK. Theology is a field of study without a subject so it's not surprising that there is nothing of note to say about primitive matter. But modern physics, and alas physicalism, is a descendant of Aristotle primary matter notion. It is was an error in theology (assuming comp), but it has been a quite fertile error which gave rise to current science. But if we assume comp, we have to move away from it. BTW, t looks I am explaing UDA again on the FOR list, you might make another try, and you can reply on it here if you want. You can also criticize the explanation given on FOAR. The roulette Wheels has no free will, as it is not a computer representing itself It's not a computer but even a rock represents itself, the hard part was developing language and figuring out that the symbols r-o-c-k can also represent it. I am not sure a rock represent itself, but I am not sure the word rock denotes anything clear. and its ignorance, as forced by my definition (yours + the important nuance that the system has to be partially aware of its ignorance). Very often I find that I am absolutely positively 100% certain that if X happens then I will do Y, but when X does happen I find I don't do anything even close to Y , and I find this is more the rule than the exception; to put it another way I am not aware of my ignorance. However I don't know for a fact that is true for other people, I don't even know for a fact that other people, or roulette Wheels, are aware of anything. OK. But you still bet on this. I guess. And I hope. I do know that a computer does not have the memory of the outcome of a calculation in its memory banks until it has finished the calculation and I can't help but feel that is evocative of something. There is another problem, to define free will you have to introduce the concept of awareness and to define awareness you have to introduce free will; Not at all. I agree that free will implies the presence of some consciousness, but consciousness and awareness does not demand any free-will. Think about having pain for example. I can easily conceive headache without free-will. I can't imagine free-will without consciousness, without enlarging even more its meaning. and regardless of what a being may or may not be aware of, that is to say regardless of what information it does or does not have in its memory, it does things for a reason or it does not, so you're still either a cuckoo clock or a roulette wheel. Not with comp: I am definitely a cuckoo clock, but à-la Babbage, i.e. a Turing universal one. it's the exact same notion that 99.9% of the people on this planet who call themselves a theist have, That is false, Like hell it is!! What sort of dream world are you living in? In a world full of buddhist, christian mystics, sufi, cabbalist, platonist, salvia smokers, traditionalist christians (who don't give a shit to truth but believe it is useful for adult to fake there is one). I have even never met a christian in Europa who is a literalist theist. Unfortunately they are materialist, and are not interested in (néo)Platonism. and even
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 10 Aug 2012, at 00:48, Russell Standish wrote: On Wed, Aug 08, 2012 at 12:33:47PM -0400, John Clark wrote: On Tue, Aug 7, 2012 Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: I do claim to know what I mean by free will, Well maybe you do know what free will means but the trouble is you are unable to communicate that understanding to any of your fellow human beings and certainly not to me. That's the trouble with mystical experiences, even if they really do give you a deeper understanding of the world and are not just caused by indigestion, that new understanding helps only you and nobody else. I've never had a mystical experience but if I ever do I intend to keep quiet about it for that very reason. The meaning I use for free will has nothing to do with mysticism. I spend several pages on free will in my book, and I can sum it up by the statement that Free will is the ability to do something stupid. It is very close to the definition of some christians, where free-will is the ability to do something bad (like killing a child for an example). The notion of hell has been plausibly invented by fear of human free- will. Bruno I also note that there tends to be no agreement on the term, I will agree on any meaning of the term provided it is self consistent and non-circular and provided you don't complain when I use nothing but that definition and pure logic to take you to places you may not want to go, like endowing Roulette Wheels with free will. I'd like to see you do that. Roulette wheels do what they do, they never do anything different. I believe in Spinoza's god. I don't. When somebody says I believe in Spinoza's god it just means there is so much mystery complexity and beauty in the universe that it causes me to feel a sense of awe. I'm awed by the universe too but that is so many light years away from the original meaning of God that I believe both Spinoza and Einstein blundered in using the same word for both very different things; it just invites misunderstanding, it virtually begs for it. Fair comment. I don't feel the need to insist on this, which is why to a regular Christian, I will just say I'm an atheist. I think the problem is that even many hardcore atheists have a residual feeling that if you don't believe in something called G-O-D then you're somehow a morally bad person, so they redefine the word God in such a way as to make it impossible for anyone to disbelieve in it. Did you want to take a survey? I, for one, have no such attachment to the word God. Spinoza'a god is just a label for an idea - I would be just as happy to use the label Tao, as it seems to describe pretty much the same thing. It has nothing to do with morals. For some reason I just don't have as much affection for that particular word as most people, perhaps because no other word has caused more human misery or ignorance. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything- l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com . For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com . For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On Thu, Aug 9, 2012 Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: Free will is the ability to do something stupid. Well OK, but there sure as hell is a lot of free will going around these days, even a pair of dice can be pretty stupid, the smart thing for it to do would be to come up with a 7, but sometimes it comes up with a 2 even though that number is 6 times less likely. Only a idiot would pick 2 but sometimes the dice does. As Homer Simpson would say Stupid dice. Roulette wheels do what they do, they never do anything different. Sure they do, sometimes they produce a 12 and sometimes they produce a 21. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On Fri, Aug 10, 2012 at 6:01 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: I have even never met a christian in Europa who is a literalist theist. I'm not surprised that a European feels that way, if you don't count Antarctica it is the least religious spot on the surface of the Earth; but if a Christian is not a theist then he's a Christian in name only. In America I have never in my life met a Christian who was NOT a literal theist, not once. I'm the opposite of that, I'm a a-theist. Only the american creationists. For the others it is a legend, Bruno, I hate to break it to you but in America creationists are not rare, in the country with the most powerful military machine the world has ever seen most people think the Universe is less than 6 thousand years old because that's what the Bible says. With a bunch like that do you really think I can say I believe in Spinoza's God and not expect to be massively misinterpreted? If they know anything at all about Spinoza, and they probably don't, it's that he was Jewish; they'd probably ask me what synagogue I go to. ** I think that saint Thomas, well appreciated by the Church, makes already clear that God cannot be both omnipotent and omniscient. He also wondered if God could make a rock so heavy He couldn't lift it, but Thomas concluded that God was omnipotent anyway and the idea wasn't self contradictory, he had no idea why it wasn't self contradictory but he had faith it wasn't and God just made it work somehow. God works in mysterious ways and similar Bullshit flavored cop-outs. I have never met a Christian who believe literally that Jesus is a particular son of God. It is a legend. Even by European standards you must hang around with some very very unusual Christians! You share with the Christian the definition of God, Yes and it's right and just that I do. After all Christians and other religious people are the main users of God, they invented God and have a patent on Him so they have the right to define Him as they see fit; and I have the right to say they're full of shit for doing so. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 08 Aug 2012, at 19:38, John Clark wrote: On Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 11:55 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: With this thing you call comp if matter is organized in certain ways then the adjective conscious can be used to describe it and that's all that can be said about consciousness; ? I have no answer because I don't understand the question. The mind-body comes from the fact that we don't grasp the relation between organized matter and the qualia-consciousness lived by the person experiencing it. Then, assuming comp, any explanation of consciousness is forced to justify the appearance of matter without postulating it. Consciousness is the grain of sand capable of forcing an important paradigm shift in the plausibly the near future. however that's not all that can be said about matter; Apparent matter, or primitive matter. In our context everything is in that difference. The sort of matter the Large Hadron Collider investigates. I don't know if you call that apparent matter or primitive matter, I just call it matter. It is (obviously) apparent matter. Primitive matter is a theological concept used by physicalist. It is not (yet) a physical notion. The question is not addressed today in physics, only in the foundation of cognitive science. But QM kicked on that issue as the notion, by Einstein, of element of reality illustrated well. I see on this very list endless debates about if people have free will or not or if God exists or not and there is not the slightest agreement about what free will or God means. I gave the definitions. Here we go again! Yet again we have tales of the mythical era of Middle Earth where you gave all these wonderful definitions of free will and God and apparently also made a vow never ever to repeat them again for mortal man to hear. I provided definition, very close to yours, but *you* stick on the popular definition, which is no more studied by scientist. It is a bit like criticizing astronomy for lack in rigor in astrology. But you reject them! As I said before I will agree on any meaning of any word provided it is self consistent and non-circular and provided you don't complain when I use nothing but that definition and pure logic to take you to places you may not want to go, like endowing Roulette Wheels with free will or turning a bulldozer into God. If you don't like the consequences of your definition don't blame me, it's your definition not mine. You don't listen, even to your own definition, or mine if there is a nuance. The roulette Wheels has no free will, as it is not a computer representing itself and its ignorance, as forced by my definition (yours + the important nuance that the system has to be partially aware of its ignorance). Nor is the bulldozer a God, as it has a priori nothing to do with our existence. Atheism needs a precise notion of God That is very true it does, and it's the exact same notion that 99.9% of the people on this planet who call themselves a theist have, That is false, and even if true, that is not an argument. a omnipotent omniscient conscious being who created the universe. It follows logically, and using a convention of the English language that putting a a before a word can negate it, a atheist is someone who does not believe in that notion. It means not-god, and that is ambiguous. It can mean either I believe in Not-God, or I don't believe in God. I follow the standard definition atheism = I believe in the non existence of God. It is a hell of a difference with the agnostic who does not believe in God, but might also not believe in not-god. Then, by sticking furthermore on the christian God, you confirm quite nicely my statement that atheists are christians in disguise. You disbelieve in the same thing I do OK. but you seem ashamed of that fact and try to weasel out of it, but I'm proud to call myself a atheist. If it means agnostic, we are the same, except on the vocabulary issue. I could be more atheist in the sense that I have lost my faith in a primitive physical universe. And with comp we know that such a thing makes no sense. Like life has a physical origin, the physical has an arithmetical/psychological origin. To say that God made the universe, or that the universe simply exists are equivalent in their lack of explanation power. I don't believe in any literal definition, of God [...] I am not an atheist. You don't believe in God but you are not a atheist. That does not compute. No. I am an agnostic. I am a Pythagorean. I believe in 0, 1, 2, 3, ... Are you as uncomfortable as Pythagoras was about the square root of 2? A computable function. He didn't know about -1 but if he did I'll bet he wouldn't have liked it much, and I'll bet he would have really hated the square root of -1. With comp, a precise frontier between
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 08 Aug 2012, at 20:28, meekerdb wrote: On 8/8/2012 8:55 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 07 Aug 2012, at 17:24, John Clark wrote: On Tue, Aug 7, 2012 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: No, I find that normal. Atheism needs a precise notion of God to make, but all serious theologian and mystics tend to think that God, like truth or consciousness does not admit a simple definition, making atheism a very vague position, unless it means only I don't believe in the literalist abramanic definition of God. In which case 99% of the mundial population is atheist, and that makes the notion quite trivial. I don't believe in any literal definition, of God, universe, whole, etc. If that's what you believe, or rather what you don't believe, then why are you unable to utter the simple crystal clear declarative sentence I am a atheist ? Why all the gobbledegook? Because I am not an atheist. I am fascinated by most discourses by many theologians and mystics belonging to a wide variety of traditions. I have studied classical chinese to be sure I did not misinterpret the taoists, which have been my favorite for a long time. I have read Plato and Plotinus. I am a neoplatonist believer, if you want, and as far as I can conceive that comp is correct, I am a Pythagorean. But you're not a theist Theism, in the broadest sense, is the belief that at least one deity exists.[1] So I am a theist. In a more specific sense, theism is a doctrine concerning the nature of a monotheistic God and God's relationship to the universe.[2] [3] [4] So I am even more a theist, as I am monist (assuming comp, etc.). Theism, in this specific sense, conceives of God as personal, present and active in the governance and organization of the world and the universe. As such theism describes the classical conception of God that is found in Christianity, Judaism, Islam and some forms of Hinduism. I am probably much more taoist and buddhist, and sufi and cabbalist, and close to the Christian mystics. The others, like a part of the scientists today, bear too much on argument from authority and politics. They have willingly discourage the scientific attitude. You can find youtube video showing how mystics are still demonized by the Islamic and Christians mainstream. In fact it is like health politics, people prefer argument from authority in place of argument from observation and reflexion. The use of the word theism to indicate this classical form of monotheism began during the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century in order to distinguish it from the then-emerging deism which contended that God, though transcendent and supreme, did not intervene in the natural world and could be known rationally but not via revelation.[5] Which confirms what I just said. - hence John's question. Hence my conclusion. Atheists defend the conception of God coming from the political. Not from spiritual inquiry and scientific research, which is traditionally demonized by those who use God as an argument from authority. Your quote made my point even clearer. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 08 Aug 2012, at 23:00, John Mikes wrote: Bruno, your reply is appreciable (I donot use the pun: remarkable and write 'remarks' to it); On Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 1:06 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 08 Aug 2012, at 00:18, John Mikes wrote: Dear Bruno, congrats to yur interjected question: What does not exist then? It is cute. If I really HAVE to reply: The R e s t of the world. And if you insist to spell it out, you just 'create' it. G G I appreciate your mostly agreeing words, one question though: how can a machine (Loebian?) be curious? or unsatisfied? Universal machine are confronted with many problems. Avoiding looping, avoiding crashing, avoiding inconsistencies, avoiding incorrectness. They have duties: adding themselves and multiplying themselves, with all the relative troubles that result from the impossible simple merging of the addition and multiplcations laws (with the numbers: I could have taken abstraction and application with the lambda terms instead). The Löbian machine knows that she is universal, and so can grasp the preceding paragraph, and get in that way even much more questions, and she can discover even more sharply her abyssal ignorance. Löbianity is the step where the universal machine knows that whatever she could know more, that will only make her more ignorant with respect to the unknown. Yet, the machine at that stage can also intuit more and more the reason and necessity of that ignorance, and with comp, study the approximate mathematical description of parts of it. JM: looks to me that Univ. Mach. is a fictional charater like Alice in Wunderland, equipped with whatever you need to make it work. Like (my) infinite complexity. The difference is that once you agree on addition and multiplication, you can prove the existence of universal machine, and you can bet that you can implement them in the physical reality, as our concrete physical personal computer, and cells, brain etc, illustrate. somebody suggested to say 'organism' au lieu de machine, but it is not a fair transformation. OK. Finally I am too ignorant to appreciate 'ontological' in my worldview: in an everything that constantly changes it is hard to see 'being' vs. 'becoming'. But how can everything change? You can only change relatively to something else.--- I think that change is an experience from inside. It follows, I think, from the hypothesis that we might survive through a computer emulation (my working hypothesis). The everything is the being, and the change, or the becoming, or the creation and the annihilation, is how the everything looks from inside, in amnesic state with respect of the everything somehow. Universal machine are not necessarily just curious, they can be anxious too. They want to know if there is a pilot in the plane and a ground under their foot. And then there is nothing a universal machine can't be more in love than ... another universal machine. And then the tendency to reproduce and multiply, in many directions, that they inherit from the numbers and which leads to even more complexity and life, I would say. The arithmetical reality is full of life, populated by many sorts of universal numbers, with many possible sort of relations, and this put a sort of mess in the antic Platonia, and leads to transfinite unboundable complexity indeed. Bruno JM: intriguing idea about the 'change', indeed. I feel English semantics in it (French is even worse: changer is really from..into) - what I understand as my non-Anglo 'change' is a constant alteration of observables, some would put into the meaning of 'life' or 'creation'. But observable is an internal notion. Nobody can observe the Universe, by definition of Universe. From inside? a loose cannon: if I am observing something from 'outside of it' I still can see it change. Relatively to what? You may argue that I am still within a larger 'inside'. Indeed. You see the point. Sorry to get bugged down into semantical bickering. You are welcome. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 11:57 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 8/8/2012 2:31 PM, Platonist Guitar Cowboy wrote: So, according to you, we're always wrong to deny the existence of anything because to do so brings it into existence. We can't even have a clear conception of it without affirming its existence. I suppose that will find adherents on something called the Everything list, but think it's just intellectual mush. No, on your first statement. I clearly stated in the last post, that it's tricky navigating between tendencies to believe/entrance/enthrall ourselves and denial/amnesia. Because of this, a clear conception that you rightfully demand, cannot be sacrificed: what happened in so called fascist governments? What is happening war on drugs, prohibition etc.? I consider these to be highly fruitful questions in the sense of studying a paradox, but I refuse to position myself relative to their obvious absurdity in a are you for or against sense. Sure, they exist and of course we should study them. But in so doing we invariably have to navigate tricky terrain between our capacity to entrance ourselves/reification and denial, because we will believe or disbelieve to some degree in order for a clearer conception to emerge. For any observer after observation nothing's void of belief to some degree. People tend to call them, using evasive maneuver, working hypothesis in their papers, dissertations etc. but this denial of belief implies the same spectrum. Otherwise belief has to be subject to time constraints, which is of course nonsense. OK, so is there anything that *doesn't* exist? Brent Both in absolute terms or in a bounded sense, there are the usual options: Take your pick, and make Hawking wrong. I'm not here to convince you, merely suggesting the possibility of our distance/involvement with beliefs to have some bearing on their expression, which weakens somewhat the absolute status of whether we affirm or deny. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 8/9/2012 2:46 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: a omnipotent omniscient conscious being who created the universe. It follows logically, and using a convention of the English language that putting a a before a word can negate it, a atheist is someone who does not believe in that notion. It means not-god, and that is ambiguous. No, it's not ambiguous. Atheist means not-theist. Not-god would be atheo (which we all are). Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On Thu, Aug 9, 2012 at 5:46 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: The mind-body comes from the fact that we don't grasp the relation between organized matter and the qualia-consciousness lived by the person experiencing it. We don't understand the details of that relationship but we do know some of the general outlines. We know that changing the organization of matter, such as the matter in the brain, changes the qualia-consciousness of the person and we know that changes in the qualia-consciousness chages external matter, as when you get hungry and decide to pick up the matter in a candy bar. The sort of matter the Large Hadron Collider investigates. I don't know if you call that apparent matter or primitive matter, I just call it matter. It is (obviously) apparent matter. Well then apparent matter covers one hell of a lot of ground and seems very interesting indeed, interesting enough to fully occupy the minds of thousands of geniuses for centuries. On the other hand primitive matter contains nothing of intellectually interest, at least nobody has found anything interesting to say about it yet. Apparent matter is quite literally astronomically rich while primitive matter is shallow and a utter bore. Primitive matter is a theological concept OK. Theology is a field of study without a subject so it's not surprising that there is nothing of note to say about primitive matter. The roulette Wheels has no free will, as it is not a computer representing itself It's not a computer but even a rock represents itself, the hard part was developing language and figuring out that the symbols r-o-c-k can also represent it. and its ignorance, as forced by my definition (yours + the important nuance that the system has to be partially aware of its ignorance). Very often I find that I am absolutely positively 100% certain that if X happens then I will do Y, but when X does happen I find I don't do anything even close to Y , and I find this is more the rule than the exception; to put it another way I am not aware of my ignorance. However I don't know for a fact that is true for other people, I don't even know for a fact that other people, or roulette Wheels, are aware of anything. I do know that a computer does not have the memory of the outcome of a calculation in its memory banks until it has finished the calculation and I can't help but feel that is evocative of something. There is another problem, to define free will you have to introduce the concept of awareness and to define awareness you have to introduce free will; and regardless of what a being may or may not be aware of, that is to say regardless of what information it does or does not have in its memory, it does things for a reason or it does not, so you're still either a cuckoo clock or a roulette wheel. it's the exact same notion that 99.9% of the people on this planet who call themselves a theist have, That is false, Like hell it is!! What sort of dream world are you living in? and even if true, that is not an argument. Like hell it isn't! When somebody says they are a theist you can be 99.9% certain they believe in a omnipotent omniscient conscious being who created the universe, the remaining .1% are atheists but think the word theist sounds better. So a atheist, like me, is someone who does not believe what a theist does, someone who does not believe in a omniscient conscious being who created the universe. It's how the English language works. a omnipotent omniscient conscious being who created the universe. It follows logically, and using a convention of the English language that putting a a before a word can negate it, a atheist is someone who does not believe in that notion. It means not-god, That is quite simply wrong. A theist is not God, a theist is someone who believes in the existance of God and a atheist is someone who does not. Nor is the bulldozer a God, It is if God is a force greater than ourselves. as it has a priori nothing to do with our existence. OK new definition and thus new result, now my parents are God and so is the bus driver who drove my father to the dance where he met my mother. by sticking furthermore on the christian God, you confirm quite nicely my statement that atheists are christians in disguise. A very good disguise indeed! John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
Let me try to shorten the maze and copy only whatever I want to reflect to. Sorry if it causes hardship - JM - On Thu, Aug 9, 2012 at 8:30 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 08 Aug 2012, at 23:00, John Mikes wrote: On Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 1:06 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 08 Aug 2012, at 00:18, John Mikes wrote: how can a machine (Loebian?) be *curious? or unsatisfied?* Universal machine are confronted with many problems The Löbian machine knows that she is universal, and so can grasp the preceding paragraph, and get in that way even much more questions, and she can discover even more sharply her abyssal ignorance. Löbianity is the step where the universal machine knows that whatever she could know more, that will only make her more ignorant with respect to the unknown. Yet, the machine at that stage can also intuit more and more the reason and necessity of that ignorance, and with comp, study the approximate mathematical description of parts of it. JM: looks to me that Univ. Mach. is a fictional charater like Alice in Wunderland, equipped with whatever you need to make it work. Like (my) infinite complexity. The difference is that once you agree on addition and multiplication, you can prove the existence of universal machine, and you can bet that you can implement them in the physical reality, as our concrete physical personal computer, and cells, brain etc, illustrate. *JM: don't you see the weak point in your * *once you agree?* *I don't know what to agree in (agnosticism) so NO PROOF* *- What our 'cells, brain etc. illustrate' is (our?) figment. * BM: I think that change is an experience from inside. It follows, I think, from the hypothesis that we might survive through a computer emulation (my working hypothesis). *JM: If I watch you to put on weight, I am not inside you.* And then there is nothing a universal machine can't be more in love than ... another universal machine. And then the tendency to reproduce and multiply, in many directions, that they inherit from the numbers and which leads to even more complexity and life, I would say. The arithmetical reality is full of life, populated by many sorts of universal numbers, with many possible sort of relations, and this put a sort of mess in the antic Platonia, and leads to transfinite unboundable complexity indeed. Bruno *JM: I don't want to bore you by where did that obscure LIFE come from? What is it? and how do you know what a universal (machine? number?) thinks/feels/wants/kisses? * *because you are ONE? OK, but not the only kind that may be, - I suppose. Do you deny that there may be other kinds of universal anythings? what do THEY love most? * ...But observable is an internal notion. Nobody can observe the Universe, by definition of Universe. -- --*??? -- ---* JM: You may argue that I am still within a larger 'inside'. BM: Indeed. You see the point. *JM: but in such case I've changed the perspective and my conclusions are not comparable. And about 'a' UNIVERSE?* *In my narrative of a 'Bigbang' story I visualize unlimited number and quality of universes. Some may be able to observe others. We are too simplistic for that. And - our thinking is adjusted to such simplicity, I am not proud to say so. Agnostic? Ignorant?* You are welcome. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On Thu, Aug 09, 2012 at 04:38:27PM -0400, John Clark wrote: There is another problem, to define free will you have to introduce the concept of awareness and to define awareness you have to introduce free will; and regardless of what a being may or may not be aware of, that is to say regardless of what information it does or does not have in its memory, it does things for a reason or it does not, so you're still either a cuckoo clock or a roulette wheel. Why does the concept of awareness depend on free will? -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On Wed, Aug 08, 2012 at 12:33:47PM -0400, John Clark wrote: On Tue, Aug 7, 2012 Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: I do claim to know what I mean by free will, Well maybe you do know what free will means but the trouble is you are unable to communicate that understanding to any of your fellow human beings and certainly not to me. That's the trouble with mystical experiences, even if they really do give you a deeper understanding of the world and are not just caused by indigestion, that new understanding helps only you and nobody else. I've never had a mystical experience but if I ever do I intend to keep quiet about it for that very reason. The meaning I use for free will has nothing to do with mysticism. I spend several pages on free will in my book, and I can sum it up by the statement that Free will is the ability to do something stupid. I also note that there tends to be no agreement on the term, I will agree on any meaning of the term provided it is self consistent and non-circular and provided you don't complain when I use nothing but that definition and pure logic to take you to places you may not want to go, like endowing Roulette Wheels with free will. I'd like to see you do that. Roulette wheels do what they do, they never do anything different. I believe in Spinoza's god. I don't. When somebody says I believe in Spinoza's god it just means there is so much mystery complexity and beauty in the universe that it causes me to feel a sense of awe. I'm awed by the universe too but that is so many light years away from the original meaning of God that I believe both Spinoza and Einstein blundered in using the same word for both very different things; it just invites misunderstanding, it virtually begs for it. Fair comment. I don't feel the need to insist on this, which is why to a regular Christian, I will just say I'm an atheist. I think the problem is that even many hardcore atheists have a residual feeling that if you don't believe in something called G-O-D then you're somehow a morally bad person, so they redefine the word God in such a way as to make it impossible for anyone to disbelieve in it. Did you want to take a survey? I, for one, have no such attachment to the word God. Spinoza'a god is just a label for an idea - I would be just as happy to use the label Tao, as it seems to describe pretty much the same thing. It has nothing to do with morals. For some reason I just don't have as much affection for that particular word as most people, perhaps because no other word has caused more human misery or ignorance. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On Tue, Aug 07, 2012 at 11:24:59AM -0400, John Clark wrote: Yes I agree that is certainly needed, and yet I see on this very list endless debates about if people have free will or not or if God exists or not and there is not the slightest agreement about what free will or God means. People very very literally don't know what they're talking about, but whatever they're talking about they are doing so with great passion. It's no wonder the debate never goes anywhere! I don't think the second sentence follows from the first. I do claim to know what I mean by free will, which in accord with how Bruno uses it, but I also note that there tends to be no agreement on the term, and that the debates typically shed more heat than light, so I usually delete all threads with free will in the title without reading them. I can only surmise that the religious crowd have appropriated free will for their own purposes, and the anti-religious crowd seem to be hell bent on showing the nonsensical nature of that usage, rather than simply using a more sensible definition and getting on with it. As for God, if a Christian asks me, I would say I'm an atheist. It most clearly describes my position in terms they understand. If it is someone aware of philosophical nuances, I might give a more nuanced answer, such as Einstein's I believe in Spinoza's god. Is that so hard for the militant atheists to get? -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 07 Aug 2012, at 17:24, John Clark wrote: On Tue, Aug 7, 2012 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: I would be very interested if a theory of everything exists, but there is no reason ti think it must. That is why we need a bit of faith in fundamental research. The theory either exists or it does not and in either case faith is not needed to know that fundamental research will teach us more about how the world works. You need faith in some world/reality, to do *fundamental* science. But with comp, the question is easily settled. With this thing you call comp if matter is organized in certain ways then the adjective conscious can be used to describe it and that's all that can be said about consciousness; ? however that's not all that can be said about matter; Apparent matter, or primitive matter. In our context everything is in that difference. if a theory of everything exists then there is a finite amount of more stuff that can be said about matter and if there is not such a theory then there is a infinite amount of more stuff that can be said. To tell you the truth I don't even have a gut feeling about whether a theory of everything exists or not, I just don't know. Imagine if you and some of your friends decided to collaborate to prove something about the real numbers, but one of you thought real numbers meant a right triangle, another thought the points on a line, another thought it meant a oblate spheroid and still another a ice cream cone. You decide to worry about what real numbers means until after the proof is finished. Do you think the resulting proof would be any good? All what is needed is to agree on some basic properties for the terms of our theory. Yes I agree that is certainly needed, and yet I see on this very list endless debates about if people have free will or not or if God exists or not and there is not the slightest agreement about what free will or God means. I gave the definitions. But you reject them! You seem to prefer the literalist one, despite known to be from authority, and then you only mock them. To be honest I find this to be a quite unscientific attitude. People very very literally don't know what they're talking about, but whatever they're talking about they are doing so with great passion. It's no wonder the debate never goes anywhere! you can take such definition[ of God], and then be open to critics for some feature. We don't need to believe in their theory on God, to accept partially some definition. [...] It is frequent to have many definition/theories. then we compare, reason, etc. I just don't get it. If I said Is your name Bruno Marchal? you wouldn't respond, as Bill Gates once did under oath during a antitrust hearing, with That depends on what the meaning of is is , instead you'd just answer the damn question. But if I said are you a atheist? the response is full of evasions, obscure definitions, qualifications, demands for clarification, and enough legalese and general bafflegab to make the lawyer for a crooked politician gag. I just don't get it. No, I find that normal. Atheism needs a precise notion of God to make, but all serious theologian and mystics tend to think that God, like truth or consciousness does not admit a simple definition, making atheism a very vague position, unless it means only I don't believe in the literalist abramanic definition of God. In which case 99% of the mundial population is atheist, and that makes the notion quite trivial. I don't believe in any literal definition, of God, universe, whole, etc. If that's what you believe, or rather what you don't believe, then why are you unable to utter the simple crystal clear declarative sentence I am a atheist ? Why all the gobbledegook? Because I am not an atheist. I am fascinated by most discourses by many theologians and mystics belonging to a wide variety of traditions. I have studied classical chinese to be sure I did not misinterpret the taoists, which have been my favorite for a long time. I have read Plato and Plotinus. I am a neoplatonist believer, if you want, and as far as I can conceive that comp is correct, I am a Pythagorean. I believe in 0, 1, 2, 3, ... and all the rest is a logical consequence of addition and multiplication (and definitions). In particular, as far as I believe comp possible (that my brain works like a digital machine at some level), I don't believe in a primary universe or nature. Those are emergent pattern in arithmetic when seen from inside, by machine or relative number. I provide a constructive proof making the computationalist hypothesis testable. You stopped at step 3 for reason which still eludes me. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group,
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On Tue, Aug 7, 2012 Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: I do claim to know what I mean by free will, Well maybe you do know what free will means but the trouble is you are unable to communicate that understanding to any of your fellow human beings and certainly not to me. That's the trouble with mystical experiences, even if they really do give you a deeper understanding of the world and are not just caused by indigestion, that new understanding helps only you and nobody else. I've never had a mystical experience but if I ever do I intend to keep quiet about it for that very reason. I also note that there tends to be no agreement on the term, I will agree on any meaning of the term provided it is self consistent and non-circular and provided you don't complain when I use nothing but that definition and pure logic to take you to places you may not want to go, like endowing Roulette Wheels with free will. I believe in Spinoza's god. I don't. When somebody says I believe in Spinoza's god it just means there is so much mystery complexity and beauty in the universe that it causes me to feel a sense of awe. I'm awed by the universe too but that is so many light years away from the original meaning of God that I believe both Spinoza and Einstein blundered in using the same word for both very different things; it just invites misunderstanding, it virtually begs for it. I think the problem is that even many hardcore atheists have a residual feeling that if you don't believe in something called G-O-D then you're somehow a morally bad person, so they redefine the word God in such a way as to make it impossible for anyone to disbelieve in it. For some reason I just don't have as much affection for that particular word as most people, perhaps because no other word has caused more human misery or ignorance. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On Mon, Aug 6, 2012 at 4:31 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 8/6/2012 1:22 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: I agree. In fact denying God is a way to impose some other God. I don't think we can live more than one second without some belief in some God. I disagree. We live very well just assuming 3-space and time and material bodies and people (including ourselves). That is what we all bet on and evolution has built into us. We may hypothesize different fundamental ontologies, but it's not necessary and it's certainly not necessary to *believe in* them. Brent Here, a more aesthetic perspective as I can't really take sides here: Perhaps belief/disbelief is like color spectrum? For instance, regarding the facism example: I might not believe in it at all in the sense of standing behind it. But every time I use the term, I substantiate it consciously, even though I know that it does not even approximate standing for a cohesive or consistent social or political concept. The more I study it and make differentiations, the more I substantiate it. The idea is sort of like don't think pink elephant. It's not that we believe in them in the sense that we'd vote accordingly. Yet, somebody could spend their whole lives investigating pink elephants in literature, and even though they would never admit to believing in them, I would still maintain that they do, as they substantiate it more or less consciously. By concretizing a thought, like a carpenter or sculptor in physical terms, it transforms us. Even if we don't in the least bit like, stand behind, or believe to be true, we make it truer and will increasingly believe it, albeit unconsciously if we want to stay in denial about doing something we don't like. Writing/playing music that you don't believe in works like this. I guess forcing an open mind to defend fascism or some other idea they don't stand behind will have the same effect. Trivial point of all this: entertaining any notion enchants or entrances us, and given enough time uninhibited, will make us believe/disbelieve = same result as some conception of said notion (or its negation) dominates us. Disenchanting ourselves is trickier than most will have us believe as this is close to denial/amnesia. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 08 Aug 2012, at 00:18, John Mikes wrote: Dear Bruno, congrats to yur interjected question: What does not exist then? It is cute. If I really HAVE to reply: The R e s t of the world. And if you insist to spell it out, you just 'create' it. G G I appreciate your mostly agreeing words, one question though: how can a machine (Loebian?) be curious? or unsatisfied? Universal machine are confronted with many problems. Avoiding looping, avoiding crashing, avoiding inconsistencies, avoiding incorrectness. They have duties: adding themselves and multiplying themselves, with all the relative troubles that result from the impossible simple merging of the addition and multiplcations laws (with the numbers: I could have taken abstraction and application with the lambda terms instead). The Löbian machine knows that she is universal, and so can grasp the preceding paragraph, and get in that way even much more questions, and she can discover even more sharply her abyssal ignorance. Löbianity is the step where the universal machine knows that whatever she could know more, that will only make her more ignorant with respect to the unknown. Yet, the machine at that stage can also intuit more and more the reason and necessity of that ignorance, and with comp, study the approximate mathematical description of parts of it. somebody suggested to say 'organism' au lieu de machine, but it is not a fair transformation. OK. Finally I am too ignorant to appreciate 'ontological' in my worldview: in an everything that constantly changes it is hard to see 'being' vs. 'becoming'. But how can everything change? You can only change relatively to something else. I think that change is an experience from inside. It follows, I think, from the hypothesis that we might survive through a computer emulation (my working hypothesis). The everything is the being, and the change, or the becoming, or the creation and the annihilation, is how the everything looks from inside, in amnesic state with respect of the everything somehow. Universal machine are not necessarily just curious, they can be anxious too. They want to know if there is a pilot in the plane and a ground under their foot. And then there is nothing a universal machine can't be more in love than ... another universal machine. And then the tendency to reproduce and multiply, in many directions, that they inherit from the numbers and which leads to even more complexity and life, I would say. The arithmetical reality is full of life, populated by many sorts of universal numbers, with many possible sort of relations, and this put a sort of mess in the antic Platonia, and leads to transfinite unboundable complexity indeed. Bruno On Mon, Aug 6, 2012 at 4:22 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Hi John, On 05 Aug 2012, at 22:33, John Mikes wrote: Entertaining exchange on an 'existing' topic - that is denied. My usual stance: I am not an atheist because an atheist needs (a - more?) god(s) to deny. - god is a word still looking to be identified. As we read most 'denyers' assign the ultimate origin to such concept. Me, too: the infinite complexity (beyond our capability to comprehend). Does it have 'free will'? or 'conscious mind'? logical concluding capability? I am not sure 'it'(?) has anything. OK. Not in our terms at least. The 'infinite' complexity is a mere 'everything' in relation to everything beyond our concepts. Bruno had a 'cute' definition for theology (I could not repeat it now) and called 'us' gods. Nobody can deny his right to do so. It is frequent for the mystics. I usually distinguish the outer god (= what is ultimately really real) and the inner God, which is the aspect of the outer God which might be living in each if us, and perhaps be us. Denigrating faith is a pastime for the mental elite, yet without faith (and the rules ensured for the 'believers') humanity would not have survived so far in it's wickedness, brutality, or simply by selfishness. I agree. In fact denying God is a way to impose some other God. I don't think we can live more than one second without some belief in some God. The Löbian machine, when doing inference induction on themselves are bounded up to be theological as a simple consequence of incompleteness. Such Löbian bet-doing machines are bounded up to discover that truth is beyond their ability of justification. that will drive a natural curiosity in them, and also will make them forever unsatisfied, and growing on transfinite ladders of goals. It was a small price paid for the priests and prophets to help humanity survive. Did it slip out? you bet. Always. Please remember: I take 'existing' in terms of anything, having occurred in somebodies mind as a (rationale, or weird?) idea. Impossibilities included. What does not exist then? (And so far nobody answered my question
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 11:55 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: With this thing you call comp if matter is organized in certain ways then the adjective conscious can be used to describe it and that's all that can be said about consciousness; ? I have no answer because I don't understand the question. however that's not all that can be said about matter; Apparent matter, or primitive matter. In our context everything is in that difference. The sort of matter the Large Hadron Collider investigates. I don't know if you call that apparent matter or primitive matter, I just call it matter. I see on this very list endless debates about if people have free will or not or if God exists or not and there is not the slightest agreement about what free will or God means. I gave the definitions. Here we go again! Yet again we have tales of the mythical era of Middle Earth where you gave all these wonderful definitions of free will and God and apparently also made a vow never ever to repeat them again for mortal man to hear. But you reject them! As I said before I will agree on any meaning of any word provided it is self consistent and non-circular and provided you don't complain when I use nothing but that definition and pure logic to take you to places you may not want to go, like endowing Roulette Wheels with free will or turning a bulldozer into God. If you don't like the consequences of your definition don't blame me, it's your definition not mine. Atheism needs a precise notion of God That is very true it does, and it's the exact same notion that 99.9% of the people on this planet who call themselves a theist have, a omnipotent omniscient conscious being who created the universe. It follows logically, and using a convention of the English language that putting a a before a word can negate it, a atheist is someone who does not believe in that notion. You disbelieve in the same thing I do but you seem ashamed of that fact and try to weasel out of it, but I'm proud to call myself a atheist. I don't believe in any literal definition, of God [...] I am not an atheist. You don't believe in God but you are not a atheist. That does not compute. I am a Pythagorean. I believe in 0, 1, 2, 3, ... Are you as uncomfortable as Pythagoras was about the square root of 2? He didn't know about -1 but if he did I'll bet he wouldn't have liked it much, and I'll bet he would have really hated the square root of -1. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 8/8/2012 8:55 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 07 Aug 2012, at 17:24, John Clark wrote: On Tue, Aug 7, 2012 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be mailto:marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: No, I find that normal. Atheism needs a precise notion of God to make, but all serious theologian and mystics tend to think that God, like truth or consciousness does not admit a simple definition, making atheism a very vague position, unless it means only I don't believe in the literalist abramanic definition of God. In which case 99% of the mundial population is atheist, and that makes the notion quite trivial. I don't believe in any literal definition, of God, universe, whole, etc. If that's what you believe, or rather what you don't believe, then why are you unable to utter the simple crystal clear declarative sentence I am a atheist ? Why all the gobbledegook? Because I am not an atheist. I am fascinated by most discourses by many theologians and mystics belonging to a wide variety of traditions. I have studied classical chinese to be sure I did not misinterpret the taoists, which have been my favorite for a long time. I have read Plato and Plotinus. I am a neoplatonist believer, if you want, and as far as I can conceive that comp is correct, I am a Pythagorean. But you're not a theist /Theism, in the broadest sense, is the belief that at least one deity exists.[1] In a more specific sense, theism is a doctrine concerning the nature of a monotheistic God and God's relationship to the universe.[2] [3][4] Theism, in this specific sense, conceives of God as personal, present and active in the governance and organization of the world and the universe. As such theism describes the classical conception of God that is found in Christianity, Judaism, Islam and some forms of Hinduism. The use of the word theism to indicate this classical form of monotheism began during the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century in order to distinguish it from the then-emerging deism which contended that God, though transcendent and supreme, did not intervene in the natural world and could be known rationally but not via revelation.[5]/ - hence John's question. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 8/8/2012 10:05 AM, Platonist Guitar Cowboy wrote: On Mon, Aug 6, 2012 at 4:31 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 8/6/2012 1:22 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: I agree. In fact denying God is a way to impose some other God. I don't think we can live more than one second without some belief in some God. I disagree. We live very well just assuming 3-space and time and material bodies and people (including ourselves). That is what we all bet on and evolution has built into us. We may hypothesize different fundamental ontologies, but it's not necessary and it's certainly not necessary to *believe in* them. Brent Here, a more aesthetic perspective as I can't really take sides here: Perhaps belief/disbelief is like color spectrum? For instance, regarding the facism example: I might not believe in it at all in the sense of standing behind it. But there's an enormous difference between believing there is such a form of government as fascism and believing IN fascism. But every time I use the term, I substantiate it consciously, No you don't. You refer to it or imagine it - but you don't make it a substance. even though I know that it does not even approximate standing for a cohesive or consistent social or political concept. The more I study it and make differentiations, the more I substantiate it. The idea is sort of like don't think pink elephant. It's not that we believe in them in the sense that we'd vote accordingly. Yet, somebody could spend their whole lives investigating pink elephants in literature, and even though they would never admit to believing in them, I would still maintain that they do, as they substantiate it more or less consciously. But now you've changed the meaning of substantiate; thus continuing to fuzz up the meaning of words. By concretizing a thought, like a carpenter or sculptor in physical terms, it transforms us. But saying you don't believe in something is NOT making it concrete. Making and instance out of concrete is concretizing it. You're taking metaphors and turning them into ontologies by redefining words. This way is madness...or mysticism. Even if we don't in the least bit like, stand behind, or believe to be true, we make it truer and will increasingly believe it, albeit unconsciously if we want to stay in denial about doing something we don't like. So, according to you, we're always wrong to deny the existence of anything because to do so brings it into existence. We can't even have a clear conception of it without affirming its existence. I suppose that will find adherents on something called the Everything list, but think it's just intellectual mush. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
Bruno, your reply is appreciable (I donot use the pun: remarkable and write 'remarks' to it); On Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 1:06 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 08 Aug 2012, at 00:18, John Mikes wrote: Dear Bruno, congrats to yur interjected question: *What does not exist then?* It is cute. If I really HAVE to reply: *The R e s t of the world.* And if you insist to spell it out, you just 'create' it. G G I appreciate your mostly agreeing words, one question though: how can a machine (Loebian?) be *curious? or unsatisfied?* Universal machine are confronted with many problems. Avoiding looping, avoiding crashing, avoiding inconsistencies, avoiding incorrectness. They have duties: adding themselves and multiplying themselves, with all the relative troubles that result from the impossible simple merging of the addition and multiplcations laws (with the numbers: I could have taken abstraction and application with the lambda terms instead). The Löbian machine knows that she is universal, and so can grasp the preceding paragraph, and get in that way even much more questions, and she can discover even more sharply her abyssal ignorance. Löbianity is the step where the universal machine knows that whatever she could know more, that will only make her more ignorant with respect to the unknown. Yet, the machine at that stage can also intuit more and more the reason and necessity of that ignorance, and with comp, study the approximate mathematical description of parts of it. JM: looks to me that Univ. Mach. is a fictional charater like Alice in Wunderland, equipped with whatever you need to make it work. Like (my) infinite complexity. somebody suggested to say 'organism' au lieu de machine, but it is not a fair transformation. OK. Finally I am too ignorant to appreciate 'ontological' in my worldview: in an *everything* that constantly changes it is hard to see 'being' vs. 'becoming'. But how can everything change? You can only change relatively to something else.--- I think that change is an experience from inside. It follows, I think, from the hypothesis that we might survive through a computer emulation (my working hypothesis). The everything is the being, and the change, or the becoming, or the creation and the annihilation, is how the everything looks from inside, in amnesic state with respect of the everything somehow. Universal machine are not necessarily just curious, they can be anxious too. They want to know if there is a pilot in the plane and a ground under their foot. And then there is nothing a universal machine can't be more in love than ... another universal machine. And then the tendency to reproduce and multiply, in many directions, that they inherit from the numbers and which leads to even more complexity and life, I would say. The arithmetical reality is full of life, populated by many sorts of universal numbers, with many possible sort of relations, and this put a sort of mess in the antic Platonia, and leads to transfinite unboundable complexity indeed. Bruno JM: intriguing idea about the 'change', indeed. I feel English semantics in it (French is even worse: changer is really from..into) - what I understand as my non-Anglo 'change' is a constant alteration of observables, some would put into the meaning of 'life' or 'creation'. From inside? a loose cannon: if I am observing something from 'outside of it' I still can see it change. You may argue that I am still within a larger 'inside'. Sorry to get bugged down into semantical bickering. John M -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 9:59 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 8/8/2012 10:05 AM, Platonist Guitar Cowboy wrote: On Mon, Aug 6, 2012 at 4:31 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 8/6/2012 1:22 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: I agree. In fact denying God is a way to impose some other God. I don't think we can live more than one second without some belief in some God. I disagree. We live very well just assuming 3-space and time and material bodies and people (including ourselves). That is what we all bet on and evolution has built into us. We may hypothesize different fundamental ontologies, but it's not necessary and it's certainly not necessary to *believe in* them. Brent Here, a more aesthetic perspective as I can't really take sides here: Perhaps belief/disbelief is like color spectrum? For instance, regarding the facism example: I might not believe in it at all in the sense of standing behind it. But there's an enormous difference between believing there is such a form of government as fascism and believing IN fascism. Hence spectrum. The latter is a stronger form of belief than the former. But I don't believe such a form of government exists in sense of approximating a consistent set of positions (social, political etc.): that is mush to me and believing IN it is, and here I'm with you, worse. But every time I use the term, I substantiate it consciously, No you don't. You refer to it or imagine it - but you don't make it a substance. Platonist Guitar Cowboy: primary substance is imaginative for me. Whether physical or not; similar to the PDF you recently posted about physicists not being materialist; asking how Bruno would react. So if that's mush, than implications of that PDF is the same. even though I know that it does not even approximate standing for a cohesive or consistent social or political concept. The more I study it and make differentiations, the more I substantiate it. The idea is sort of like don't think pink elephant. It's not that we believe in them in the sense that we'd vote accordingly. Yet, somebody could spend their whole lives investigating pink elephants in literature, and even though they would never admit to believing in them, I would still maintain that they do, as they substantiate it more or less consciously. But now you've changed the meaning of substantiate; thus continuing to fuzz up the meaning of words. Not my intention, Brent. Just thought this could be picked up by the avatar name but can see perhaps reason for misunderstanding. By substantiate I am referring to the process wherein concept or its negation is reified. By concretizing a thought, like a carpenter or sculptor in physical terms, it transforms us. But saying you don't believe in something is NOT making it concrete. Making and instance out of concrete is concretizing it. You're taking metaphors and turning them into ontologies by redefining words. This way is madness...or mysticism. I beg to differ. If I say or act in accordance with, for instance I don't believe in the war on drugs/terror/immigrants etc., I am contributing to reification of all the frameworks, systems, ontologies on which the loaded issues stand: that drug prohibition has valid moral roots, that drug users are degenerate, that terror is a threat more serious than crime and thus requires more resources and production of weapons, justification of wars to fight it etc... Even when agents state I don't believe in war of... this reification takes place, naturalizing a form of discourse that is more ideological than sincere. Instead, the naturalization of this kind of BS posing as valid political discourse is a more appropriate position to take, as I don't want to take position in absurd discussions. And yet, I still do it much to often :) Even if we don't in the least bit like, stand behind, or believe to be true, we make it truer and will increasingly believe it, albeit unconsciously if we want to stay in denial about doing something we don't like. So, according to you, we're always wrong to deny the existence of anything because to do so brings it into existence. We can't even have a clear conception of it without affirming its existence. I suppose that will find adherents on something called the Everything list, but think it's just intellectual mush. No, on your first statement. I clearly stated in the last post, that it's tricky navigating between tendencies to believe/entrance/enthrall ourselves and denial/amnesia. Because of this, a clear conception that you rightfully demand, cannot be sacrificed: what happened in so called fascist governments? What is happening war on drugs, prohibition etc.? I consider these to be highly fruitful questions in the sense of studying a paradox, but I refuse to position myself relative to their obvious absurdity in a are you for or against sense. Sure, they exist and of course we should study
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 8/8/2012 2:31 PM, Platonist Guitar Cowboy wrote: So, according to you, we're always wrong to deny the existence of anything because to do so brings it into existence. We can't even have a clear conception of it without affirming its existence. I suppose that will find adherents on something called the Everything list, but think it's just intellectual mush. No, on your first statement. I clearly stated in the last post, that it's tricky navigating between tendencies to believe/entrance/enthrall ourselves and denial/amnesia. Because of this, a clear conception that you rightfully demand, cannot be sacrificed: what happened in so called fascist governments? What is happening war on drugs, prohibition etc.? I consider these to be highly fruitful questions in the sense of studying a paradox, but I refuse to position myself relative to their obvious absurdity in a are you for or against sense. Sure, they exist and of course we should study them. But in so doing we invariably have to navigate tricky terrain between our capacity to entrance ourselves/reification and denial, because we will believe or disbelieve to some degree in order for a clearer conception to emerge. For any observer after observation nothing's void of belief to some degree. People tend to call them, using evasive maneuver, working hypothesis in their papers, dissertations etc. but this denial of belief implies the same spectrum. Otherwise belief has to be subject to time constraints, which is of course nonsense. OK, so is there anything that *doesn't* exist? Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 06 Aug 2012, at 19:53, John Clark wrote: On Mon, Aug 6, 2012 at 12:25 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: You might also tell me what is your theory of everything If I had one I'd be the greatest and most famous scientist who ever lived. I'm not. or if you are even interested in that notion. I would be very interested if a theory of everything exists, but there is no reason ti think it must. That is why we need a bit of faith in fundamental research. But with comp, the question is easily settled. For the ontological realm, any first order logical specification of a universal system will do. Both physics and consciousness have to be derive from that, and the result is independent of the choice of the initial universal system. Only an obtuse Christian can believe that only the christian God gives the right meaning of the word God. There is no one right meaning to a word but to communicate we must agree on a meaning otherwise we very literally don't know what the hell we're debating. Imagine if you and some of your friends decided to collaborate to prove something about the real numbers, but one of you thought real numbers meant a right triangle, another thought the points on a line, another thought is meant a oblate spheroid and still another a ice cream cone. You decide to worry about what real numbers means until after the proof is finished. Do you think the resulting proof would be any good? All what is needed is to agree on some basic properties for the terms of our theory. But the abramanic God is already *quite* different for the muslim and the sufi, or for the israelite and the cabalist, or for the christian clergy and the christian mystics. They all are supposed to have made me and the entire universe and they all know everything that can be known Not for the mystics, nor even the Israelites. But you can take such definition, and then be open to critics for some feature. We don't need to believe in their theory on God, to accept partially some definition. I did provide a semi-axiomatic of God. and that's good enough to be called God in my book. But you said there are thousands of definitions of God, if so then the word is totally useless especially in philosophy. But not in science. It is frequent to have many definition/theories. then we compare, reason, etc. The entire point of words is communication and if nobody knows what it means then it's not a word it's just a noise. In math we never know the meaning of our terms, we just agree on some partial semi-axiomatic definitions. It's true that philosophers love the word God, but then philosophers haven't done any philosophy in centuries. For this I am atheist. There are no omniscient being(s). Then have the guts to just say you don't believe in God I don't believe in any literal definition, of God, universe, whole, etc. and stop all this nambe pambe depends on what you mean by God crap!! Why should the notion of God escape the usual technic in scientific reasoning? Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On Tue, Aug 7, 2012 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: I would be very interested if a theory of everything exists, but there is no reason ti think it must. That is why we need a bit of faith in fundamental research. The theory either exists or it does not and in either case faith is not needed to know that fundamental research will teach us more about how the world works. But with comp, the question is easily settled. With this thing you call comp if matter is organized in certain ways then the adjective conscious can be used to describe it and that's all that can be said about consciousness; however that's not all that can be said about matter; if a theory of everything exists then there is a finite amount of more stuff that can be said about matter and if there is not such a theory then there is a infinite amount of more stuff that can be said. To tell you the truth I don't even have a gut feeling about whether a theory of everything exists or not, I just don't know. Imagine if you and some of your friends decided to collaborate to prove something about the real numbers, but one of you thought real numbers meant a right triangle, another thought the points on a line, another thought it meant a oblate spheroid and still another a ice cream cone. You decide to worry about what real numbers means until after the proof is finished. Do you think the resulting proof would be any good? All what is needed is to agree on some basic properties for the terms of our theory. Yes I agree that is certainly needed, and yet I see on this very list endless debates about if people have free will or not or if God exists or not and there is not the slightest agreement about what free will or God means. People very very literally don't know what they're talking about, but whatever they're talking about they are doing so with great passion. It's no wonder the debate never goes anywhere! you can take such definition[ of God], and then be open to critics for some feature. We don't need to believe in their theory on God, to accept partially some definition. [...] It is frequent to have many definition/theories. then we compare, reason, etc. I just don't get it. If I said Is your name Bruno Marchal? you wouldn't respond, as Bill Gates once did under oath during a antitrust hearing, with That depends on what the meaning of is is , instead you'd just answer the damn question. But if I said are you a atheist? the response is full of evasions, obscure definitions, qualifications, demands for clarification, and enough legalese and general bafflegab to make the lawyer for a crooked politician gag. I just don't get it. I don't believe in any literal definition, of God, universe, whole, etc. If that's what you believe, or rather what you don't believe, then why are you unable to utter the simple crystal clear declarative sentence I am a atheist ? Why all the gobbledegook? John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
Dear Bruno, congrats to yur interjected question: *What does not exist then?* It is cute. If I really HAVE to reply: *The R e s t of the world.* And if you insist to spell it out, you just 'create' it. G I appreciate your mostly agreeing words, one question though: how can a machine (Loebian?) be *curious? or unsatisfied?* somebody suggested to say 'organism' au lieu de machine, but it is not a fair transformation. Finally I am too ignorant to appreciate 'ontological' in my worldview: in an *everything* that constantly changes it is hard to see 'being' vs. 'becoming'. John M On Mon, Aug 6, 2012 at 4:22 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Hi John, On 05 Aug 2012, at 22:33, John Mikes wrote: Entertaining exchange on an 'existing' topic - that is denied. My usual stance: I am not an atheist because an atheist needs (a - more?) god(s) to deny. - god is a word still looking to be identified. As we read most 'denyers' assign the ultimate origin to such concept. Me, too: the infinite complexity (beyond our capability to comprehend). Does it have 'free will'? or 'conscious mind'? logical concluding capability? I am not sure 'it'(?) *has* anything. OK. Not in our terms at least. The *'infinite' complexity* is a mere 'everything' in relation to everything beyond our concepts. Bruno had a 'cute' definition for theology (I could not repeat it now) and called 'us' gods. Nobody can deny his right to do so. It is frequent for the mystics. I usually distinguish the outer god (= what is ultimately really real) and the inner God, which is the aspect of the outer God which might be living in each if us, and perhaps be us. Denigrating faith is a pastime for the mental elite, yet without faith (and the rules ensured for the 'believers') humanity would not have survived so far in it's wickedness, brutality, or simply by selfishness. I agree. In fact denying God is a way to impose some other God. I don't think we can live more than one second without some belief in some God. The Löbian machine, when doing inference induction on themselves are bounded up to be theological as a simple consequence of incompleteness. Such Löbian bet-doing machines are bounded up to discover that truth is beyond their ability of justification. that will drive a natural curiosity in them, and also will make them forever unsatisfied, and growing on transfinite ladders of goals. It was a small price paid for the priests and prophets to help humanity survive. Did it slip out? you bet. Always. Please remember: I take 'existing' in terms of anything, having occurred in somebodies mind as a (rationale, or weird?) idea. Impossibilities included. What does not exist then? (And so far nobody answered my question satisfactorily (for me) to show a justification for the (religious?) god-concept from *outside the box*(not induced by some hint to any faith-related momenta, dream, etc.). So 'god' exists IMO, because it is set into many minds (even if not identically).) This assumes mind, persons, at the ontological level. It seems you make things more complex by not delineating what is existing ontologically (like numbers with comp) and epistemologically like matter, dreams, consciousness, etc. Bruno It is a long winded topic, not likely to close with agreement. John M On Sun, Aug 5, 2012 at 3:50 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: John, I provide another answer to your last comment to me: On 03 Aug 2012, at 17:34, John Clark wrote: On Fri, Aug 3, 2012 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Define theology The study of something that does not exist. Not so bad after, after all. In AUDA the machine theology can be defined by something which is supposed to be responsible, willingly or not, for my existence, and which I cannot prove to exist. I remeber having already some times ago provided this definition. Then, the logic of theology is given, at the propositional level, by G* minus G. (if you have read my posts on those modal logics and Solovay theorem). For example t (consistency, ~[]f) belongs to G* minus G. Consistency is true for the machine, but it cannot prove it. Yet the machine can guess it, hope it, find it or produce it as true with some interrogation mark. Theology is the study of the transcendent truth, which can be defined, in a first approximation, by the non provable (by the machine) truth. Define God The God I don't believe in is a omniscient omnipotent being who created the universe. If you define God, as so many fans of the word but not the idea do, I remain astonished why atheists defend a so particular conception of God. This confirms what I have already explained. Atheism is a variant of christianism. They defend the same conception of God than the Christians, as you do all the time. Note that philosophers use often the term God in the general and original sense of theology: as being,
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
Hi Stephen, On 05 Aug 2012, at 17:43, Stephen P. King wrote: On 8/5/2012 3:50 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: John, I provide another answer to your last comment to me: On 03 Aug 2012, at 17:34, John Clark wrote: On Fri, Aug 3, 2012 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Define theology The study of something that does not exist. Not so bad after, after all. In AUDA the machine theology can be defined by something which is supposed to be responsible, willingly or not, for my existence, and which I cannot prove to exist. I remeber having already some times ago provided this definition. Then, the logic of theology is given, at the propositional level, by G* minus G. (if you have read my posts on those modal logics and Solovay theorem). For example t (consistency, ~[]f) belongs to G* minus G. Consistency is true for the machine, but it cannot prove it. Yet the machine can guess it, hope it, find it or produce it as true with some interrogation mark. Theology is the study of the transcendent truth, which can be defined, in a first approximation, by the non provable (by the machine) truth. Dear Bruno, It is hard to explain transcendence. That is why I approximate it by p ~Bp, or G* minus G (and intensional variant of this like Z1* minus Z1). Define God The God I don't believe in is a omniscient omnipotent being who created the universe. If you define God, as so many fans of the word but not the idea do, I remain astonished why atheists defend a so particular conception of God. This confirms what I have already explained. Atheism is a variant of christianism. They defend the same conception of God than the Christians, as you do all the time. I agree. They are anti-christians. Yes. That are the same modulo the absolute value, so to speak. Note that philosophers use often the term God in the general and original sense of theology: as being, by definition, the transcendental cause of everything. Which is the definition I use. Any one that actually thinks that God is a person, could be a person, or is the complement (anti) of such, has truly not thought through the implications of such. For me, and comp, it is an open problem. as a force greater than myself then I am a devout believer because I believe in gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong nuclear force. I believe in bulldozers too. But I have already told you that God is supposed to be responsible for our existence; which is not the case for the bulldozer. But gravity and physical force/matter could have been a more serious answer, as it describe the perhaps primary physical world, and that can obey the definition of God I gave, for a physicalist, and is indeed again a common belief of christians and atheists. I am agnostic, and correct computationalist are atheists with respect to such material God. Bruno! You are falling into the same trap with this verbiage! Taking the anti-thesis of a thesis still requires that the thesis is possibly true. ? (where did I say the contrary? I insist that if comp is true, then it has to be possible, from the machine povs that comp is false). Like t, it entails the consistency of its negation: t - (~ t). If a machine is consistent, then it is consistent that the machine is inconsistent. If comp is true, then it is consistent that comp (and its consequences) is (are) false. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 05 Aug 2012, at 19:26, meekerdb wrote: On 8/5/2012 12:50 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: John, I provide another answer to your last comment to me: On 03 Aug 2012, at 17:34, John Clark wrote: On Fri, Aug 3, 2012 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Define theology The study of something that does not exist. Not so bad after, after all. In AUDA the machine theology can be defined by something which is supposed to be responsible, willingly or not, for my existence, and which I cannot prove to exist. I remeber having already some times ago provided this definition. Then, the logic of theology is given, at the propositional level, by G* minus G. (if you have read my posts on those modal logics and Solovay theorem). For example t (consistency, ~[]f) belongs to G* minus G. Consistency is true for the machine, but it cannot prove it. Yet the machine can guess it, hope it, find it or produce it as true with some interrogation mark. Theology is the study of the transcendent truth, which can be defined, in a first approximation, by the non provable (by the machine) truth. Define God The God I don't believe in is a omniscient omnipotent being who created the universe. If you define God, as so many fans of the word but not the idea do, I remain astonished why atheists defend a so particular conception of God. I'm astonished that you think accepting the definition of a being by those who claim to believe in it is 'defending' it. There are thousand definition of God, but as a scientist I limit myself on sharable semi-axiomatic definitions. I do that for geometry (i reject the intuitive common notion of line for axiomatic definition of points and lines), so why would I not do this for theology, unless I would like to defend some dogma in the field? I accept the definition of Fascism by those who claim it is the best form of government, but that doesn't mean I defend Fascism. But they would not *define* fascism by best form of government. For the christians you seem to accept that they have find the best definition of God. So it is different. This confirms what I have already explained. Atheism is a variant of christianism. They defend the same conception of God than the Christians, as you do all the time. Note that philosophers use often the term God in the general and original sense of theology: as being, by definition, the transcendental cause of everything. as a force greater than myself then I am a devout believer because I believe in gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong nuclear force. I believe in bulldozers too. But I have already told you that God is supposed to be responsible for our existence; Doesn't that responsibility require 'free will'? I was using responsible in the large non human sense of reason, itself in the large sense, like when we see that a tempest is responsible for the death of many people. Perhaps this is not a practice in english, but we do that in french. Sorry if this was an french only expression. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
Hi John, On 05 Aug 2012, at 22:33, John Mikes wrote: Entertaining exchange on an 'existing' topic - that is denied. My usual stance: I am not an atheist because an atheist needs (a - more?) god(s) to deny. - god is a word still looking to be identified. As we read most 'denyers' assign the ultimate origin to such concept. Me, too: the infinite complexity (beyond our capability to comprehend). Does it have 'free will'? or 'conscious mind'? logical concluding capability? I am not sure 'it'(?) has anything. OK. Not in our terms at least. The 'infinite' complexity is a mere 'everything' in relation to everything beyond our concepts. Bruno had a 'cute' definition for theology (I could not repeat it now) and called 'us' gods. Nobody can deny his right to do so. It is frequent for the mystics. I usually distinguish the outer god (= what is ultimately really real) and the inner God, which is the aspect of the outer God which might be living in each if us, and perhaps be us. Denigrating faith is a pastime for the mental elite, yet without faith (and the rules ensured for the 'believers') humanity would not have survived so far in it's wickedness, brutality, or simply by selfishness. I agree. In fact denying God is a way to impose some other God. I don't think we can live more than one second without some belief in some God. The Löbian machine, when doing inference induction on themselves are bounded up to be theological as a simple consequence of incompleteness. Such Löbian bet-doing machines are bounded up to discover that truth is beyond their ability of justification. that will drive a natural curiosity in them, and also will make them forever unsatisfied, and growing on transfinite ladders of goals. It was a small price paid for the priests and prophets to help humanity survive. Did it slip out? you bet. Always. Please remember: I take 'existing' in terms of anything, having occurred in somebodies mind as a (rationale, or weird?) idea. Impossibilities included. What does not exist then? (And so far nobody answered my question satisfactorily (for me) to show a justification for the (religious?) god-concept from outside the box (not induced by some hint to any faith-related momenta, dream, etc.). So 'god' exists IMO, because it is set into many minds (even if not identically).) This assumes mind, persons, at the ontological level. It seems you make things more complex by not delineating what is existing ontologically (like numbers with comp) and epistemologically like matter, dreams, consciousness, etc. Bruno It is a long winded topic, not likely to close with agreement. John M On Sun, Aug 5, 2012 at 3:50 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: John, I provide another answer to your last comment to me: On 03 Aug 2012, at 17:34, John Clark wrote: On Fri, Aug 3, 2012 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Define theology The study of something that does not exist. Not so bad after, after all. In AUDA the machine theology can be defined by something which is supposed to be responsible, willingly or not, for my existence, and which I cannot prove to exist. I remeber having already some times ago provided this definition. Then, the logic of theology is given, at the propositional level, by G* minus G. (if you have read my posts on those modal logics and Solovay theorem). For example t (consistency, ~[]f) belongs to G* minus G. Consistency is true for the machine, but it cannot prove it. Yet the machine can guess it, hope it, find it or produce it as true with some interrogation mark. Theology is the study of the transcendent truth, which can be defined, in a first approximation, by the non provable (by the machine) truth. Define God The God I don't believe in is a omniscient omnipotent being who created the universe. If you define God, as so many fans of the word but not the idea do, I remain astonished why atheists defend a so particular conception of God. This confirms what I have already explained. Atheism is a variant of christianism. They defend the same conception of God than the Christians, as you do all the time. Note that philosophers use often the term God in the general and original sense of theology: as being, by definition, the transcendental cause of everything. as a force greater than myself then I am a devout believer because I believe in gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong nuclear force. I believe in bulldozers too. But I have already told you that God is supposed to be responsible for our existence; which is not the case for the bulldozer. But gravity and physical force/matter could have been a more serious answer, as it describe the perhaps primary physical world, and that can obey the definition of God I gave, for a physicalist, and is indeed again a common belief of christians and atheists. I am
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 8/6/2012 3:12 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: Hi Stephen, On 05 Aug 2012, at 17:43, Stephen P. King wrote: On 8/5/2012 3:50 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: John, I provide another answer to your last comment to me: On 03 Aug 2012, at 17:34, John Clark wrote: On Fri, Aug 3, 2012 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be mailto:marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Define theology The study of something that does not exist. Not so bad after, after all. In AUDA the machine theology can be defined by something which is supposed to be responsible, willingly or not, for my existence, and which I cannot prove to exist. I remeber having already some times ago provided this definition. Then, the logic of theology is given, at the propositional level, by G* minus G. (if you have read my posts on those modal logics and Solovay theorem). For example t (consistency, ~[]f) belongs to G* minus G. Consistency is true for the machine, but it cannot prove it. Yet the machine can guess it, hope it, find it or produce it as true with some interrogation mark. Theology is the study of the transcendent truth, which can be defined, in a first approximation, by the non provable (by the machine) truth. Dear Bruno, It is hard to explain transcendence. That is why I approximate it by p ~Bp, or G* minus G (and intensional variant of this like Z1* minus Z1). Dear Bruno, Forgive me that I am slow on this or even dumb... p is true (or false) and not belief that p Is that right? I am still learning the jargon. Define God The God I don't believe in is a omniscient omnipotent being who created the universe. If you define God, as so many fans of the word but not the idea do, I remain astonished why atheists defend a so particular conception of God. This confirms what I have already explained. Atheism is a variant of christianism. They defend the same conception of God than the Christians, as you do all the time. I agree. They are anti-christians. Yes. That are the same modulo the absolute value, so to speak. HA HA! :-) Nice! Note that philosophers use often the term God in the general and original sense of theology: as being, by definition, the transcendental cause of everything. Which is the definition I use. Any one that actually thinks that God is a person, could be a person, or is the complement (anti) of such, has truly not thought through the implications of such. For me, and comp, it is an open problem. ? Why? It's not complicated! A person must be, at least, nameable. A person has always has a name. Say that it is X. There is something that is not that person and that something must therefore have a different name: not-X. What is God's name? ... It cannot be named because there is nothing that it is not! Therefore God cannot be a person. Transcendence eliminates nameability. The Abrahamist think that Satan is the anti-God, but that would be a denial of God's transcendence. There are reasons why Abrahamists do not tolerate logic, this is one of them. as a force greater than myself then I am a devout believer because I believe in gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong nuclear force. I believe in bulldozers too. But I have already told you that God is supposed to be responsible for our existence; which is not the case for the bulldozer. But gravity and physical force/matter could have been a more serious answer, as it describe the perhaps primary physical world, and that can obey the definition of God I gave, for a physicalist, and is indeed again a common belief of christians and atheists. I am agnostic, and correct computationalist are atheists with respect to such material God. Bruno! You are falling into the same trap with this verbiage! Taking the anti-thesis of a thesis still requires that the thesis is possibly true. ? (where did I say the contrary? I insist that if comp is true, then it has to be possible, from the machine povs that comp is false). Like t, it entails the consistency of its negation: t - (~ t). If a machine is consistent, then it is consistent that the machine is inconsistent. If comp is true, then it is consistent that comp (and its consequences) is (are) false. Bruno A material god would be nameable and thus not transcendent. -- Onward! Stephen Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. ~ Francis Bacon -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 06 Aug 2012, at 12:22, Stephen P. King wrote: On 8/6/2012 3:12 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: Hi Stephen, On 05 Aug 2012, at 17:43, Stephen P. King wrote: On 8/5/2012 3:50 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: John, I provide another answer to your last comment to me: On 03 Aug 2012, at 17:34, John Clark wrote: On Fri, Aug 3, 2012 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Define theology The study of something that does not exist. Not so bad after, after all. In AUDA the machine theology can be defined by something which is supposed to be responsible, willingly or not, for my existence, and which I cannot prove to exist. I remeber having already some times ago provided this definition. Then, the logic of theology is given, at the propositional level, by G* minus G. (if you have read my posts on those modal logics and Solovay theorem). For example t (consistency, ~[]f) belongs to G* minus G. Consistency is true for the machine, but it cannot prove it. Yet the machine can guess it, hope it, find it or produce it as true with some interrogation mark. Theology is the study of the transcendent truth, which can be defined, in a first approximation, by the non provable (by the machine) truth. Dear Bruno, It is hard to explain transcendence. That is why I approximate it by p ~Bp, or G* minus G (and intensional variant of this like Z1* minus Z1). Dear Bruno, Forgive me that I am slow on this or even dumb... p is true (or false) and not belief that p Is that right? I am still learning the jargon. Define God The God I don't believe in is a omniscient omnipotent being who created the universe. If you define God, as so many fans of the word but not the idea do, I remain astonished why atheists defend a so particular conception of God. This confirms what I have already explained. Atheism is a variant of christianism. They defend the same conception of God than the Christians, as you do all the time. I agree. They are anti-christians. Yes. That are the same modulo the absolute value, so to speak. HA HA! :-) Nice! Note that philosophers use often the term God in the general and original sense of theology: as being, by definition, the transcendental cause of everything. Which is the definition I use. Any one that actually thinks that God is a person, could be a person, or is the complement (anti) of such, has truly not thought through the implications of such. For me, and comp, it is an open problem. ? Why? It's not complicated! A person must be, at least, nameable. A person has always has a name. Why? Say that it is X. There is something that is not that person and that something must therefore have a different name: not-X. What is God's name? ... It cannot be named because there is nothing that it is not! Therefore God cannot be a person. Transcendence eliminates nameability. The Abrahamist think that Satan is the anti-God, but that would be a denial of God's transcendence. There are reasons why Abrahamists do not tolerate logic, this is one of them. With comp if God exists it has no name, but I don't see why it would make it a non person. God is unique, it does not need a name. as a force greater than myself then I am a devout believer because I believe in gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong nuclear force. I believe in bulldozers too. But I have already told you that God is supposed to be responsible for our existence; which is not the case for the bulldozer. But gravity and physical force/matter could have been a more serious answer, as it describe the perhaps primary physical world, and that can obey the definition of God I gave, for a physicalist, and is indeed again a common belief of christians and atheists. I am agnostic, and correct computationalist are atheists with respect to such material God. Bruno! You are falling into the same trap with this verbiage! Taking the anti-thesis of a thesis still requires that the thesis is possibly true. ? (where did I say the contrary? I insist that if comp is true, then it has to be possible, from the machine povs that comp is false). Like t, it entails the consistency of its negation: t - (~ t). If a machine is consistent, then it is consistent that the machine is inconsistent. If comp is true, then it is consistent that comp (and its consequences) is (are) false. Bruno A material god would be nameable and thus not transcendent. Why? In which theory? Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On Sun, Aug 5, 2012 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: I remain astonished why atheists defend a so particular conception of God. And I remain astonished that so many people think the idea of God is idiotic but still have such a strong emotional attachment to the ASCII characters G-O-D that they insist on still using them even though they don't even claim to know what G-O-D means. This confirms what I have already explained. Atheism is a variant of christianism. And so atheism and Christianity now join free will and God as words that mean absolutely positively nothing. When I tell people I'm a atheist I might as well just burp at them or tell them I'm a teapot for all it will inform them about what I think. They defend the same conception of God than the Christians, as you do all the time. Yes, Christians and I do have one thing in common, we both think that it might be good if words mean something. Otherwise when I say I don't believe in God I wouldn't even know what it is I don't believe. And I also have the same conception of Santa Claws as small children do, the only difference between us is that they think he exists and I don't. Note that philosophers use often the term God in the general and original sense of theology: Maybe that's part of the reason philosophers no longer do philosophy and haven't found anything important in a thousand years or so. as being, by definition, the transcendental cause of everything. Cause? If its still involved with cause and effect then I don't see what makes it transcendental; if it’s a cause we should be able to perform experiments on God just like any other aspect of our world; assuming of course that God exists. I have already told you that God is supposed to be responsible for our existence; which is not the case for the bulldozer. Excellent! Apparently I've convinced you that words should actually mean something, it may not be very close to what most people mean by the word God but at least you mean something. So now that I know what we're talking about and God is not a force greater than myself I can now say that I no longer think a bulldozer is God and I now know that my parents were God. I am agnostic Technically I suppose I too am agnostic about a omnipotent omniscient conscious being that created the universe but you've got to decide how to live your life and emotionally I'm a atheist because, although I can't prove that He does not exist, I think I can prove that God is just silly. Beliefs are a emotional state and nobody believes only in things he can prove, and even more important nobody believes in things they think are silly. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On Sun, Aug 5, 2012 at 4:33 PM, John Mikes jami...@gmail.com wrote: My usual stance: I am not an atheist because an atheist needs (a - more?) god(s) to deny. - god is a word still looking to be identified. I disagree. Except for those who fall in love with a word but don't like what the word represents the meaning of God is clear; it's also silly but that's another story. So unlike free will when most people say God I know what they're talking about, the only exception is when philosophers say God and then even they don't know what they're talking about. So I can say I don't believe in God but I can't say I don't believe in free will because I don't know what it is I'm not supposed to believe in. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 8/6/2012 1:22 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: I agree. In fact denying God is a way to impose some other God. I don't think we can live more than one second without some belief in some God. I disagree. We live very well just assuming 3-space and time and material bodies and people (including ourselves). That is what we all bet on and evolution has built into us. We may hypothesize different fundamental ontologies, but it's not necessary and it's certainly not necessary to *believe in* them. Brent The Löbian machine, when doing inference induction on themselves are bounded up to be theological as a simple consequence of incompleteness. Such Löbian bet-doing machines are bounded up to discover that truth is beyond their ability of justification. that will drive a natural curiosity in them, and also will make them forever unsatisfied, and growing on transfinite ladders of goals. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 8/6/2012 5:29 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: ? Why? It's not complicated! A person must be, at least, nameable. A person has always has a name. Why? Otherwise he is identifiable only by description and then there is no uncertainty about Bruno-in-Helsinki becoming Bruno-in-Washington or Bruno-in-Moscow; they are all uniquely identified only by description. That was the whole crux of your argument with John Clark. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 06 Aug 2012, at 16:31, meekerdb wrote: On 8/6/2012 1:22 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: I agree. In fact denying God is a way to impose some other God. I don't think we can live more than one second without some belief in some God. I disagree. We live very well just assuming 3-space and time and material bodies and people (including ourselves). That is what we all bet on and evolution has built into us. We may hypothesize different fundamental ontologies, but it's not necessary and it's certainly not necessary to *believe in* them. We have a problem of vocabulary. I define belief by assumptions and/ or derivation from assumption. I say that all self-observing machine has to be theological for they are confronted to truth which are not at the level of the basic assumption, but that they can still, or have to, assume to be true at some meta-level, with some faith. Like when saying yes to a computationalist doctor, or just praying/hoping for our own sanity. The trick is probably in the including yourself, which is richer than a basic local assumption like space and the moon. And the question is not about believing this or that, but in making a theory coherent with the facts and our currently favorite theory, comp :). Once you agree that physicalism is problematic, God is a good name for whatever is the reason of our conscious existence. You can call it the ONE, or the Tao, you can call it how you like, because by definition, it has no name, no definite pointer, nor definitions (like the physical universe, btw). Only Atheists and Christians define GOD by the Christian or Abramanic GOD, but the notion is much older than that, and has always been discussed by reasonable people, even if they needs to hide, or to be cautious, for cannabis-like reasons (i.e. the exploitation by some others of lies and the fear selling). And the Atheists and Christians take for granted the creation, which is not a rational nor justifiable scientific attitude (just a good methodological simplification). No problem if atheists could agree that they are doing theology or metaphysics, in case they reify the object of that methodology, when situating the creation in the primitive realm. The problem is only for those who seem to ignore that fact. They confuse truth and opinion. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 06 Aug 2012, at 16:38, meekerdb wrote: On 8/6/2012 5:29 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: ? Why? It's not complicated! A person must be, at least, nameable. A person has always has a name. Why? Otherwise he is identifiable only by description and then there is no uncertainty about Bruno-in-Helsinki becoming Bruno-in-Washington or Bruno-in-Moscow; they are all uniquely identified only by description. That was the whole crux of your argument with John Clark. In that protocol they get two names after the experience, so the first person remains unameable. By construction they have a definite name, assuming the doctor has chosen the right level. The name is what has be scanned. The indeterminacy is that such a name can be copied, making the person indeterminate on its future immediate experience. John Clark just inconsistently define his future personal experience by the linear conjunction of the two (yet incompatible) first person experiences, which directly contradict the statement in the diaries, on which the indeterminacy bear. The first person has no name, but it can get one when some other person give him one relative name (like the W-man or the M-man, or their bodies description at the right comp level). And the ONE (arithmetical truth, in the translation of plotinus in arithmetic) has no description at all, no name, but I would not deduce from that that it is not a person. I don't think personally, today, that it is a person, but I can hardly be sure. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 06 Aug 2012, at 16:10, John Clark wrote: On Sun, Aug 5, 2012 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: I remain astonished why atheists defend a so particular conception of God. And I remain astonished that so many people think the idea of God is idiotic but still have such a strong emotional attachment to the ASCII characters G-O-D that they insist on still using them even though they don't even claim to know what G-O-D means. This confirms what I have already explained. Atheism is a variant of christianism. And so atheism and Christianity now join free will and God as words that mean absolutely positively nothing. When I tell people I'm a atheist I might as well just burp at them or tell them I'm a teapot for all it will inform them about what I think. Read Aldous Huxley philosophia perennis. You might also tell me what is your theory of everything, or if you are even interested in that notion. To define theology by christian theology can only be done by a christian (and I would say a particularly obtuse Christian, as the one I know are open to non christian theologies, and quite critical against all form of certainties in that domain. They defend the same conception of God than the Christians, as you do all the time. Yes, Christians and I do have one thing in common, we both think that it might be good if words mean something. Only an obtuse Christian can believe that only the christian God gives the right meaning of the word God. Otherwise when I say I don't believe in God I wouldn't even know what it is I don't believe. Some hope remains. And I also have the same conception of Santa Claws as small children do, the only difference between us is that they think he exists and I don't. But the abramanic God is already *quite* different for the muslim and the sufi, or for the israelite and the cabalist, or for the christian clergy and the christian mystics. Comp seems coherent with the God of the mystics, and diverges quickly from any clergy or God from authority. But you have decide that the christian clergy is right, which confirms that you are not just christian, but fundamentalist christian. You can make sense only of the God of the clergy. Note that philosophers use often the term God in the general and original sense of theology: Maybe that's part of the reason philosophers no longer do philosophy and haven't found anything important in a thousand years or so. as being, by definition, the transcendental cause of everything. Cause? If its still involved with cause and effect then I don't see what makes it transcendental; if it’s a cause we should be able to perform experiments on God just like any other aspect of our world; assuming of course that God exists. I was not using cause in the physical sense, but more in the sense of reason. I have already told you that God is supposed to be responsible for our existence; which is not the case for the bulldozer. Excellent! Apparently I've convinced you that words should actually mean something, it may not be very close to what most people mean by the word God but at least you mean something. So now that I know what we're talking about and God is not a force greater than myself I can now say that I no longer think a bulldozer is God and I now know that my parents were God. This is not even coherent, and you misread or over-interpret what I say. I am agnostic Technically I suppose I too am agnostic about a omnipotent omniscient conscious being For this I am atheist. There are no omniscient being(s). The notion can be shown to be self-contradictory. The GOD of comp is already overwhelmed by the DIVINE-INTELLECT, itself overwhelmed by the UNIVERSAL SOUL, and things get worse. In fact the comp notion of matter can almost be defined by the things about which GOD lose control. This is intuited by Aristotle and recast in Platonism by Plotinus, and fits quite nicely both UDA and AUDA. that created the universe but you've got to decide how to live your life and emotionally I'm a atheist That explains something. because, although I can't prove that He does not exist, I think I can prove that God is just silly. Not the concept. Up to now, you just allude that the only interesting meaning of God was the Santa Klaus version of it, not the unameable (but still capable of being circumscribed in the negative neoplatonist way) reason of our existence. Beliefs are a emotional state Mental state. Often related to emotion, but the serious work consists in first letting the emotion in the closet. I know it is not easy. and nobody believes only in things he can prove, Correct. for two reasons: we have to start from basic assumptions, even if unconscious and inherit from the parents or the biology of the brain, and we have to assume some self-consistency to give sense to the
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 8/6/2012 10:29 AM, John Clark wrote: On Sun, Aug 5, 2012 at 4:33 PM, John Mikes jami...@gmail.com mailto:jami...@gmail.com wrote: My usual stance: I am not an atheist because an atheist needs (a - more?) god(s) to deny. - god is a word still looking to be identified. I disagree. Except for those who fall in love with a word but don't like what the word represents the meaning of God is clear; it's also silly but that's another story. So unlike free will when most people say God I know what they're talking about, the only exception is when philosophers say God and then even they don't know what they're talking about. So I can say I don't believe in God but I can't say I don't believe in free will because I don't know what it is I'm not supposed to believe in. John K Clark Hey John, Are you lobbying for the job of Chief Commissioner of the Ministry of Truth? -- Onward! Stephen Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. ~ Francis Bacon -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 8/6/2012 10:31 AM, meekerdb wrote: On 8/6/2012 1:22 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: I agree. In fact denying God is a way to impose some other God. I don't think we can live more than one second without some belief in some God. I disagree. We live very well just assuming 3-space and time and material bodies and people (including ourselves). That is what we all bet on and evolution has built into us. We may hypothesize different fundamental ontologies, but it's not necessary and it's certainly not necessary to *believe in* them. Hi Brent, You are almost making a good point! But I think that Bruno actually covers that with the claim that it is possible to believe in them. We need to carefully distinguish between necessity and possibility even though they are duals. As I see it, the choice of not believing a particular ontology leads to an actual choice of the current consensus ontology within which the chooser is embedded. This is the very same thing as the citizen that refuses to vote is actually voting for whoever the actual winner of an election turns out to be, because if ve http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ve_%28pronoun%29 had actually voted then ve could have voted for some other other than the eventual winner. -- Onward! Stephen Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. ~ Francis Bacon -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 8/6/2012 9:25 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: Yes, Christians and I do have one thing in common, we both think that it might be good if words mean something. Only an obtuse Christian can believe that only the christian God gives the right meaning of the word God. In the English speaking world that is know as the no true Scotsman fallacy. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On Mon, Aug 6, 2012 at 12:25 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: You might also tell me what is your theory of everything If I had one I'd be the greatest and most famous scientist who ever lived. I'm not. or if you are even interested in that notion. I would be very interested if a theory of everything exists, but there is no reason ti think it must. Only an obtuse Christian can believe that only the christian God gives the right meaning of the word God. There is no one right meaning to a word but to communicate we must agree on a meaning otherwise we very literally don't know what the hell we're debating. Imagine if you and some of your friends decided to collaborate to prove something about the real numbers, but one of you thought real numbers meant a right triangle, another thought the points on a line, another thought is meant a oblate spheroid and still another a ice cream cone. You decide to worry about what real numbers means until after the proof is finished. Do you think the resulting proof would be any good? But the abramanic God is already *quite* different for the muslim and the sufi, or for the israelite and the cabalist, or for the christian clergy and the christian mystics. They all are supposed to have made me and the entire universe and they all know everything that can be known and that's good enough to be called God in my book. But you said there are thousands of definitions of God, if so then the word is totally useless especially in philosophy. The entire point of words is communication and if nobody knows what it means then it's not a word it's just a noise. It's true that philosophers love the word God, but then philosophers haven't done any philosophy in centuries. For this I am atheist. There are no omniscient being(s). Then have the guts to just say you don't believe in God and stop all this nambe pambe depends on what you mean by God crap!! John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
John, I provide another answer to your last comment to me: On 03 Aug 2012, at 17:34, John Clark wrote: On Fri, Aug 3, 2012 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Define theology The study of something that does not exist. Not so bad after, after all. In AUDA the machine theology can be defined by something which is supposed to be responsible, willingly or not, for my existence, and which I cannot prove to exist. I remeber having already some times ago provided this definition. Then, the logic of theology is given, at the propositional level, by G* minus G. (if you have read my posts on those modal logics and Solovay theorem). For example t (consistency, ~[]f) belongs to G* minus G. Consistency is true for the machine, but it cannot prove it. Yet the machine can guess it, hope it, find it or produce it as true with some interrogation mark. Theology is the study of the transcendent truth, which can be defined, in a first approximation, by the non provable (by the machine) truth. Define God The God I don't believe in is a omniscient omnipotent being who created the universe. If you define God, as so many fans of the word but not the idea do, I remain astonished why atheists defend a so particular conception of God. This confirms what I have already explained. Atheism is a variant of christianism. They defend the same conception of God than the Christians, as you do all the time. Note that philosophers use often the term God in the general and original sense of theology: as being, by definition, the transcendental cause of everything. as a force greater than myself then I am a devout believer because I believe in gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong nuclear force. I believe in bulldozers too. But I have already told you that God is supposed to be responsible for our existence; which is not the case for the bulldozer. But gravity and physical force/matter could have been a more serious answer, as it describe the perhaps primary physical world, and that can obey the definition of God I gave, for a physicalist, and is indeed again a common belief of christians and atheists. I am agnostic, and correct computationalist are atheists with respect to such material God. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 8/5/2012 3:50 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: John, I provide another answer to your last comment to me: On 03 Aug 2012, at 17:34, John Clark wrote: On Fri, Aug 3, 2012 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be mailto:marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Define theology The study of something that does not exist. Not so bad after, after all. In AUDA the machine theology can be defined by something which is supposed to be responsible, willingly or not, for my existence, and which I cannot prove to exist. I remeber having already some times ago provided this definition. Then, the logic of theology is given, at the propositional level, by G* minus G. (if you have read my posts on those modal logics and Solovay theorem). For example t (consistency, ~[]f) belongs to G* minus G. Consistency is true for the machine, but it cannot prove it. Yet the machine can guess it, hope it, find it or produce it as true with some interrogation mark. Theology is the study of the transcendent truth, which can be defined, in a first approximation, by the non provable (by the machine) truth. Dear Bruno, It is hard to explain transcendence. Define God The God I don't believe in is a omniscient omnipotent being who created the universe. If you define God, as so many fans of the word but not the idea do, I remain astonished why atheists defend a so particular conception of God. This confirms what I have already explained. Atheism is a variant of christianism. They defend the same conception of God than the Christians, as you do all the time. I agree. They are anti-christians. Note that philosophers use often the term God in the general and original sense of theology: as being, by definition, the transcendental cause of everything. Which is the definition I use. Any one that actually thinks that God is a person, could be a person, or is the complement (anti) of such, has truly not thought through the implications of such. as a force greater than myself then I am a devout believer because I believe in gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong nuclear force. I believe in bulldozers too. But I have already told you that God is supposed to be responsible for our existence; which is not the case for the bulldozer. But gravity and physical force/matter could have been a more serious answer, as it describe the perhaps primary physical world, and that can obey the definition of God I gave, for a physicalist, and is indeed again a common belief of christians and atheists. I am agnostic, and correct computationalist are atheists with respect to such material God. Bruno! You are falling into the same trap with this verbiage! Taking the anti-thesis of a thesis still requires that the thesis is possibly true. -- Onward! Stephen Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. ~ Francis Bacon -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 8/5/2012 12:50 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: John, I provide another answer to your last comment to me: On 03 Aug 2012, at 17:34, John Clark wrote: On Fri, Aug 3, 2012 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be mailto:marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Define theology The study of something that does not exist. Not so bad after, after all. In AUDA the machine theology can be defined by something which is supposed to be responsible, willingly or not, for my existence, and which I cannot prove to exist. I remeber having already some times ago provided this definition. Then, the logic of theology is given, at the propositional level, by G* minus G. (if you have read my posts on those modal logics and Solovay theorem). For example t (consistency, ~[]f) belongs to G* minus G. Consistency is true for the machine, but it cannot prove it. Yet the machine can guess it, hope it, find it or produce it as true with some interrogation mark. Theology is the study of the transcendent truth, which can be defined, in a first approximation, by the non provable (by the machine) truth. Define God The God I don't believe in is a omniscient omnipotent being who created the universe. If you define God, as so many fans of the word but not the idea do, I remain astonished why atheists defend a so particular conception of God. I'm astonished that you think accepting the definition of a being by those who claim to believe in it is 'defending' it. I accept the definition of Fascism by those who claim it is the best form of government, but that doesn't mean I defend Fascism. This confirms what I have already explained. Atheism is a variant of christianism. They defend the same conception of God than the Christians, as you do all the time. Note that philosophers use often the term God in the general and original sense of theology: as being, by definition, the transcendental cause of everything. as a force greater than myself then I am a devout believer because I believe in gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong nuclear force. I believe in bulldozers too. But I have already told you that God is supposed to be responsible for our existence; Doesn't that responsibility require 'free will'? Brent which is not the case for the bulldozer. But gravity and physical force/matter could have been a more serious answer, as it describe the perhaps primary physical world, and that can obey the definition of God I gave, for a physicalist, and is indeed again a common belief of christians and atheists. I am agnostic, and correct computationalist are atheists with respect to such material God. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/%7Emarchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 8/5/2012 1:26 PM, meekerdb wrote: On 8/5/2012 12:50 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: John, I provide another answer to your last comment to me: On 03 Aug 2012, at 17:34, John Clark wrote: On Fri, Aug 3, 2012 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be mailto:marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Define theology The study of something that does not exist. Not so bad after, after all. In AUDA the machine theology can be defined by something which is supposed to be responsible, willingly or not, for my existence, and which I cannot prove to exist. I remeber having already some times ago provided this definition. Then, the logic of theology is given, at the propositional level, by G* minus G. (if you have read my posts on those modal logics and Solovay theorem). For example t (consistency, ~[]f) belongs to G* minus G. Consistency is true for the machine, but it cannot prove it. Yet the machine can guess it, hope it, find it or produce it as true with some interrogation mark. Theology is the study of the transcendent truth, which can be defined, in a first approximation, by the non provable (by the machine) truth. Define God The God I don't believe in is a omniscient omnipotent being who created the universe. If you define God, as so many fans of the word but not the idea do, I remain astonished why atheists defend a so particular conception of God. I'm astonished that you think accepting the definition of a being by those who claim to believe in it is 'defending' it. I accept the definition of Fascism by those who claim it is the best form of government, but that doesn't mean I defend Fascism. Dear Brent, Your statement is a nonsequitur. In your acceptance of the definition of fascism (as given by fascism promoters) is a tacit acceptance of the existence of fascism as an actual matter of fact. The atheists that Bruno is criticising are making claims against the existence of the Christan or more generally the Abrahamic concept of god. Bruno's point might be construed as that any and all claims for or against a particular definition must assume as possibly existing the entity in question. The concept of God as defined by its usage by most philosophers (not just the small minority of Christian apologists) is nowhere isomorphic to the definition of God as defined by Christians and therefore is immune to your critique. This confirms what I have already explained. Atheism is a variant of christianism. They defend the same conception of God than the Christians, as you do all the time. Note that philosophers use often the term God in the general and original sense of theology: as being, by definition, the transcendental cause of everything. as a force greater than myself then I am a devout believer because I believe in gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong nuclear force. I believe in bulldozers too. But I have already told you that God is supposed to be responsible for our existence; Doesn't that responsibility require 'free will'? Why are you tacitly assuming the Abrahamic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abrahamic_religions theory of free-will? You could accept the secular version as it is used in game theory (that I defined in a previous post) but you seem to ignore or refuse this possibility. Why do you think that the concept of autonomy http://www.google.com/webhp?source=search_app#hl=engs_nf=1gs_mss=autonomy%20gamcp=20gs_id=1fxhr=tq=autonomy+game+theorypf=psclient=psy-aboq=autonomy+game+theorygs_l=pbx=1bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.fp=a2397979472d9e8ebiw=1680bih=937 or, its equivalent, agency (in economics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_%28economics%29) requires the Abrahamic theory? I think thou doth protest too much http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_lady_doth_protest_too_much,_methinks.! -- Onward! Stephen Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. ~ Francis Bacon -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
Entertaining exchange on an 'existing' topic - that is denied. My usual stance: I am not an atheist because an atheist needs (a - more?) god(s) to deny. - god is a word still looking to be identified. As we read most 'denyers' assign the ultimate origin to such concept. Me, too: the infinite complexity (beyond our capability to comprehend). Does it have 'free will'? or 'conscious mind'? logical concluding capability? I am not sure 'it'(?) *has* anything. Not in our terms at least. The *'infinite' complexity* is a mere 'everything' in relation to everything beyond our concepts. Bruno had a 'cute' definition for theology (I could not repeat it now) and called 'us' gods. Nobody can deny his right to do so. Denigrating faith is a pastime for the mental elite, yet without faith (and the rules ensured for the 'believers') humanity would not have survived so far in it's wickedness, brutality, or simply by selfishness. It was a small price paid for the priests and prophets to help humanity survive. Did it slip out? you bet. Always. Please remember: I take 'existing' in terms of anything, having occurred in somebodies mind as a (rationale, or weird?) idea. Impossibilities included. (And so far nobody answered my question satisfactorily (for me) to show a justification for the (religious?) god-concept from *outside the box* (not induced by some hint to any faith-related momenta, dream, etc.). So 'god' exists IMO, because it is set into many minds (even if not identically).) It is a long winded topic, not likely to close with agreement. John M On Sun, Aug 5, 2012 at 3:50 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: John, I provide another answer to your last comment to me: On 03 Aug 2012, at 17:34, John Clark wrote: On Fri, Aug 3, 2012 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Define theology The study of something that does not exist. Not so bad after, after all. In AUDA the machine theology can be defined by something which is supposed to be responsible, willingly or not, for my existence, and which I cannot prove to exist. I remeber having already some times ago provided this definition. Then, the logic of theology is given, at the propositional level, by G* minus G. (if you have read my posts on those modal logics and Solovay theorem). For example t (consistency, ~[]f) belongs to G* minus G. Consistency is true for the machine, but it cannot prove it. Yet the machine can guess it, hope it, find it or produce it as true with some interrogation mark. Theology is the study of the transcendent truth, which can be defined, in a first approximation, by the non provable (by the machine) truth. Define God The God I don't believe in is a omniscient omnipotent being who created the universe. If you define God, as so many fans of the word but not the idea do, I remain astonished why atheists defend a so particular conception of God. This confirms what I have already explained. Atheism is a variant of christianism. They defend the same conception of God than the Christians, as you do all the time. Note that philosophers use often the term God in the general and original sense of theology: as being, by definition, the transcendental cause of everything. as a force greater than myself then I am a devout believer because I believe in gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong nuclear force. I believe in bulldozers too. But I have already told you that God is supposed to be responsible for our existence; which is not the case for the bulldozer. But gravity and physical force/matter could have been a more serious answer, as it describe the perhaps primary physical world, and that can obey the definition of God I gave, for a physicalist, and is indeed again a common belief of christians and atheists. I am agnostic, and correct computationalist are atheists with respect to such material God. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On Sun, Aug 5, 2012 at 8:45 PM, Stephen P. King stephe...@charter.net wrote: Dear Brent, Your statement is a nonsequitur. In your acceptance of the definition of fascism (as given by fascism promoters) is a tacit acceptance of the existence of fascism as an actual matter of fact. The atheists that Bruno is criticising are making claims against the existence of the Christan or more generally the Abrahamic concept of god. Bruno's point might be construed as that any and all claims for or against a particular definition must assume as possibly existing the entity in question. The concept of God as defined by its usage by most philosophers (not just the small minority of Christian apologists) is nowhere isomorphic to the definition of God as defined by Christians and therefore is immune to your critique. This confirms what I have already explained. Atheism is a variant of christianism. They defend the same conception of God than the Christians, as you do all the time. Note that philosophers use often the term God in the general and original sense of theology: as being, by definition, the transcendental cause of everything. as a force greater than myself then I am a devout believer because I believe in gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong nuclear force. I believe in bulldozers too. But I have already told you that God is supposed to be responsible for our existence; Doesn't that responsibility require 'free will'? Why are you tacitly assuming the Abrahamic theory of free-will? You could accept the secular version as it is used in game theory (that I defined in a previous post) but you seem to ignore or refuse this possibility. Why do you think that the concept of autonomy or, its equivalent, agency (in economics) requires the Abrahamic theory? I think thou doth protest too much! -- Onward! Stephen Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. ~ Francis Bacon -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
Hi R AM, What exactly did you wish to communicate in your post? On 8/5/2012 4:40 PM, R AM wrote: On Sun, Aug 5, 2012 at 8:45 PM, Stephen P. King stephe...@charter.net wrote: Dear Brent, Your statement is a nonsequitur. In your acceptance of the definition of fascism (as given by fascism promoters) is a tacit acceptance of the existence of fascism as an actual matter of fact. The atheists that Bruno is criticising are making claims against the existence of the Christan or more generally the Abrahamic concept of god. Bruno's point might be construed as that any and all claims for or against a particular definition must assume as possibly existing the entity in question. The concept of God as defined by its usage by most philosophers (not just the small minority of Christian apologists) is nowhere isomorphic to the definition of God as defined by Christians and therefore is immune to your critique. This confirms what I have already explained. Atheism is a variant of christianism. They defend the same conception of God than the Christians, as you do all the time. Note that philosophers use often the term God in the general and original sense of theology: as being, by definition, the transcendental cause of everything. as a force greater than myself then I am a devout believer because I believe in gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong nuclear force. I believe in bulldozers too. But I have already told you that God is supposed to be responsible for our existence; Doesn't that responsibility require 'free will'? Why are you tacitly assuming the Abrahamic theory of free-will? You could accept the secular version as it is used in game theory (that I defined in a previous post) but you seem to ignore or refuse this possibility. Why do you think that the concept of autonomy or, its equivalent, agency (in economics) requires the Abrahamic theory? I think thou doth protest too much! -- Onward! Stephen Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. ~ Francis Bacon -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- Onward! Stephen Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. ~ Francis Bacon -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 8/5/2012 4:33 PM, John Mikes wrote: Entertaining exchange on an 'existing' topic - that is denied. My usual stance: I am not an atheist because an atheist needs (a - more?) god(s) to deny. - god is a word still looking to be identified. As we read most 'denyers' assign the ultimate origin to such concept. Me, too: the infinite complexity (beyond our capability to comprehend). Does it have 'free will'? or 'conscious mind'? logical concluding capability? I am not sure 'it'(?) */_has_/* anything. Not in our terms at least. The /_'infinite' complexity_/ is a mere 'everything' in relation to everything beyond our concepts. Bruno had a 'cute' definition for theology (I could not repeat it now) and called 'us' gods. Nobody can deny his right to do so. Denigrating faith is a pastime for the mental elite, yet without faith (and the rules ensured for the 'believers') humanity would not have survived so far in it's wickedness, brutality, or simply by selfishness. It was a small price paid for the priests and prophets to help humanity survive. Did it slip out? you bet. Always. Please remember: I take 'existing' in terms of anything, having occurred in somebodies mind as a (rationale, or weird?) idea. Impossibilities included. (And so far nobody answered my question satisfactorily (for me) to show a justification for the (religious?) god-concept from *_outside the box_* (not induced by some hint to any faith-related momenta, dream, etc.). So 'god' exists IMO, because it is set into many minds (even if not identically).) It is a long winded topic, not likely to close with agreement. John M Dear John, I, for one, agree with you! It is nice to see that at least one other person understands the point being made. ;-) -- Onward! Stephen Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. ~ Francis Bacon -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 02 Aug 2012, at 21:55, John Clark wrote: On Wed, Aug 1, 2012 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: The problem is I have no conception of free will and neither do you nor does anybody else, at least not a consistent coherent one that has any depth. This contradicts your own definition of free will that you already find much better. It is hard to follow you. That's because you aren't paying attention. I said the values of other definitions of free will were negative but mine was much more valuable, it has zero value. 2) Free Will is the inability to always predict ones actions even in a unchanging environment. My definition is basically your 2), and this since the beginning. And you can restate it as you don't know what the result of a calculation will be until you finish it ; unlike other free will definitions it's clear and isn't self contradictory, but it also isn't deep and it isn't useful so its value is zero, but zero is greater than -10 or -100. You do the same error as with theology and notions of Gods. You want them to be handled only by the crackpots. Crackpots should have a monopoly on crackpot ideas and theology and notions of God are crackpot ideas. Define God, theology and crackpot idea. You talk like if you have solve the mind-body problem, the origin of things, etc. I remind you that I am using those terms in the pre-christian original sense, and then I approximate those meaning in the frame of computer science. See for example the arithmetical interpretation of Plotinus' theory. Intelligence theories are not nearly as easy to come up with [as consciousness theories] but are far far easier to test, its simple to separate the good from the bad. It is actually very simple. I define a machine as intelligent, if it is not a stupid machine. I did not ask for a definition I asked for the Fundamental Theorem of Intelligence that explains how intelligence works and can be proven to be correct by making a dumb thing, like a collection of microchips, smart. Hard to come up with but simple to test, it would be the other way around if we were dreaming up new consciousness theories. There is no recipe for intelligence. Only for domain competence. Intelligence can diagonalize again all recipes. Even for competence, effective recipes are not tractable, and by weakening the test criteria, it is possible to show the existence of a non constructive hierarchy of more and more competent machines. It can be proved that such hierarchy are necessarily not constructive, so that competence really can evolve only through long stories of trial and errors. Intelligence is basically a non constructive notion. It is needed for the development of competence, but competence itself has a negative feedback on intelligence. Competent people can get easily stuck in their domain of competence, somehow. If you are interested in theoretical study of competence, you might read the paper by Case and Smith, or the book by Oherson, Stob, Weinstein (reference in my URL). Bruno John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com . For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On Fri, Aug 3, 2012 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Define God The God I don't believe in is a omniscient omnipotent being who created the universe. If you define God, as so many fans of the word but not the idea do, as a force greater than myself then I am a devout believer because I believe in gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong nuclear force. I believe in bulldozers too. theology The study of something that does not exist. and crackpot idea. Examples work better than definitions in this case, in most cases actually. There are 3 types: 1) A minor crackpot is someone who works very hard on a problem and produces absolutely nothing of value, and there is little or no hope of him or anybody else doing better in the immediate future. Part of genius is knowing what problems have the potential to be solved with existing intellectual tools and which do not. In 1859 Darwin realized there was no hope of him figuring out how life started, but if he worked very hard he might figure out the origin of species. And he did, and he left the origin of life to later generations, Darwin knew that if he tried in his day he'd just be spinning his wheels. This type of crackpot is the most interesting and in some ways is almost heroic, but at the end of the day they are just wasting their time. You might even say that Einstein turned into this sort of crackpot during the last 20 years of his life with his doomed attempts to develop a unified field theory uniting electromagnetism and gravity, if he had died in 1935 instead of 1955 physics would have been changed very little despite the herculean amount of work he put in during those two decades. 2) A mid-level crackpot is someone who advocates ideas that have already been proven wrong. 3) The least interesting crackpot is the major crackpot, he advocates ideas that are so bad they are not even wrong. There is no recipe for intelligence. Prove that and you will have made a major advance in the field. Only for domain competence. OK, so give me a recipe for a competent mind in the domain of understanding how biology works, or meteorology, or how to write funny jokes. Intelligence can diagonalize again all recipes. I don't see how the diagonal argument can work if you include things like induction, statistical laws, and if X and Y then PROBABLY Z. I don't know the recipe for intelligence but I am certain these things are some of the ingredients. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 03 Aug 2012, at 17:34, John Clark wrote: On Fri, Aug 3, 2012 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Define God The God I don't believe in is a omniscient omnipotent being who created the universe. If you define God, as so many fans of the word but not the idea do, as a force greater than myself then I am a devout believer because I believe in gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong nuclear force. I believe in bulldozers too. I knew you were a believer. Good to acknowledge the fact. Indeed, if you believe in primary force and primary gravity, you are an aristotelian believer, like christians and unlike many platonists. I am agnostic on this, but comp itself is atheist with respect of those aristotelian gods. Of course I already knew that because you did say that you are atheists in the christian sense of the word. theology The study of something that does not exist. I don't know about theologians interested in square circles or unicorns. That definition is much to vast. and crackpot idea. Examples work better than definitions in this case, in most cases actually. There are 3 types: 1) A minor crackpot is someone who works very hard on a problem and produces absolutely nothing of value, and there is little or no hope of him or anybody else doing better in the immediate future. Part of genius is knowing what problems have the potential to be solved with existing intellectual tools and which do not. In 1859 Darwin realized there was no hope of him figuring out how life started, but if he worked very hard he might figure out the origin of species. And he did, and he left the origin of life to later generations, Darwin knew that if he tried in his day he'd just be spinning his wheels. This type of crackpot is the most interesting and in some ways is almost heroic, but at the end of the day they are just wasting their time. You might even say that Einstein turned into this sort of crackpot during the last 20 years of his life with his doomed attempts to develop a unified field theory uniting electromagnetism and gravity, if he had died in 1935 instead of 1955 physics would have been changed very little despite the herculean amount of work he put in during those two decades. 2) A mid-level crackpot is someone who advocates ideas that have already been proven wrong. 3) The least interesting crackpot is the major crackpot, he advocates ideas that are so bad they are not even wrong. All that is a bit cliché. The not even wrong is also an easy way to dismiss an argument without taking the time to study it. This does not mean that in some case a proposition cannot be indeed not even wrong. There is no recipe for intelligence. Prove that and you will have made a major advance in the field. See Conscience et mecanisme. It is easy (but in french). Of course it depends on accepting some definitions, and it needs some background in recursion theory/computer science. Only for domain competence. OK, so give me a recipe for a competent mind in the domain of understanding how biology works, or meteorology, or how to write funny jokes. Sorry, I have been unclear. There are no general recipe for arbitrary competence in arbitrary domain. Intelligence can diagonalize again all recipes. I don't see how the diagonal argument can work if you include things like induction, statistical laws, and if X and Y then PROBABLY Z. I don't know the recipe for intelligence but I am certain these things are some of the ingredients. Diagonalization works well in the inductive inference field. For example Royer extended the whole speed-up theorem (which works for proof (Gödel) and computations (Blum)) to inference inductive, probabilistic or not. The construct are based on diagonalization. You seem to be not aware of the field of computational learning theory, which is as much based on diagonalization than provability and computability theory. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 02 Aug 2012, at 00:27, RMahoney wrote: Bruno wrote: And my (older) definition asks for one more thing: it is that the subject know (is aware or is conscious) about that inability and that he can still make the decision. There is a reflexion on the possibilities. If not, all non sentient beings have trivially free will. This is pretty much what I was thinking... It appears we live in a cause and effect universe. Things do not happen without cause. There is a decision making process each concious being embodies that is governed by cause and effect, while the being cannot understand the process in it's entirety, so thinks they have some magic called free will. The being has a will, the being embodies the decision making mechanism, the being's mechanism makes a choice, even if the being decides to make a random choice, it is the being's choice. The being's very existence is made possible by cause and effect, and so it's decisions are governed likewise. The being emodies a will, it can be called a free will if you like, but it is not free from the cause effect process. Even though in a multiverse a cause can have multiple effects. I agree with you. Of course, I would add that the physical cause-and-effect universe we live in is a theological (or biological, psychological) pattern emerging from the laws of cause and effect of the numbers, which in this case are just the laws of addition and multiplication together with some logical inference rule, like the modus ponens. But this is another topic, and it is not really needed for an account of the free- will notion. But that's another issue. A being can embody a will, a free will as the being views it, but still be governed by a complex cause effect process. Absolutely. That is the compatibilist or mechanist idea of will or free will. The concepts are not really at odds with one another, as this being sees it. Yes. It comes from the fact that we cannot use the basic laws we supervene on to predict our behavior. We can do it trivially only, and in a non constructive way, as we cannot be sure which machine we are, and have to bet on some substitution level. No lawyer will ever justify the non responsibility, or the absence of (free)-will of an agent by invoking the fact that the murderer (say) was just obeying to the physical laws. That would be trivial, and the judge can condemn the murderer to any pain by invoking himself that he is just obeying to the physical laws. Plausibly true, but trivial, and non sensical as it makes everyone non responsible of anything, and this without without changing the verdict, and even making possible arbitrary one, and this leads to a form of person elimination akin to materialist eliminativism (à-la Churchland couple). Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On Wed, Aug 1, 2012 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: The problem is I have no conception of free will and neither do you nor does anybody else, at least not a consistent coherent one that has any depth. This contradicts your own definition of free will that you already find much better. It is hard to follow you. That's because you aren't paying attention. I said the values of other definitions of free will were negative but mine was much more valuable, it has zero value. 2) Free Will is the inability to always predict ones actions even in a unchanging environment. My definition is basically your 2), and this since the beginning. And you can restate it as you don't know what the result of a calculation will be until you finish it ; unlike other free will definitions it's clear and isn't self contradictory, but it also isn't deep and it isn't useful so its value is zero, but zero is greater than -10 or -100. You do the same error as with theology and notions of Gods. You want them to be handled only by the crackpots. Crackpots should have a monopoly on crackpot ideas and theology and notions of God are crackpot ideas. Intelligence theories are not nearly as easy to come up with [as consciousness theories] but are far far easier to test, its simple to separate the good from the bad. It is actually very simple. I define a machine as intelligent, if it is not a stupid machine. I did not ask for a definition I asked for the Fundamental Theorem of Intelligence that explains how intelligence works and can be proven to be correct by making a dumb thing, like a collection of microchips, smart. Hard to come up with but simple to test, it would be the other way around if we were dreaming up new consciousness theories. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On Tue, Jul 31, 2012 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Free will is the ability to make a willing choice Are you saying WILLING choices is the great definition you keep claiming I'm ignoring, this is the famous it ? Willing? So free will is will that is free. Well, at least that's not gibberish, in fact just like all tautologies it's even true. among alternatives we can be partially conscious of. So we have to drag in a illusive concept like consciousness if we want to define free will, and of course being conscious means being able to make a free choice based on the desires of your will, and around and around we go. I think that I do not believe in your conception of free will. The problem is I have no conception of free will and neither do you nor does anybody else, at least not a consistent coherent one that has any depth. Pebble have plausibly no (free) will, as they obey to simple computable laws. Butterflies have plausibly free will, because they obey high level complex computable laws Then the dividing line between something that has free will and something that does not is as vague and imprecise as the dividing line between simple and complex. And it depends on who's doing the judging, what's simple to you may be complex to me. After all, even brain surgery is simple if you know how. And a 30 year old home PC running the DOS 1.0 operating system had free will because it operated in complex ways, at least complex by human standards, by that I mean if it started to behave in odd ways people had difficulty figuring out exactly why, I know this from personal experience. And a helium atom also has free will because its very complex to calculate from first principles what its electromagnetic emission spectrum will look like, you need a supercomputer and even then its only a approximation. I have said many times there are only 2 definitions of free will that are not gibberish: 1) Free Will is a noise made by the mouth. 2) Free Will is the inability to always predict ones actions even in a unchanging environment. I thought you did. So free-will is not just noise. I also said that unfortunately nobody except me seems to use either meaning of the term, and from their context it's clear that whatever they mean when they say free will it is not even close to the 2 non-gibberish ones; well 3 if you count free will is will that's free. To believe in consciousness has been a reason to present many young researchers as crackpot in many universities for a long time. Everybody this side of a loony bin believes in consciousness, the problem is that consciousness theories are just too easy to dream up and there is no way to tell a good one from a bad one. If you want to be assured of not being called a crackpot then forget consciousness and find a good theory of intelligence; they are not nearly as easy to come up with but are far far easier to test, its simple to separate the good from the bad. And oh I almost forgot, a good theory of intelligence will also make you a couple of dozen billion dollars, and that is not a major disadvantage; after all even philosophers have to eat. why do you continue to fight against the whole notion of free-will? I don't fight against the notion because there is no notion there to fight, there is only amorphous gas. Why not defend your definition [of free will] Because I don't like my definition very much, although it's clear and consistent it is not deep and it is not useful. I think my definition of free will has zero value, but to toot my own horn I must say that is a huge improvement over other definitions because they have large negative values. If no human being ever again wrote or spoke the words free will again the world would not suffer one single bit. No other idea in law or philosophy has caused more confusion wasted more time or sent more perfectly good biological brains into infinite loops than the free will noise. I gave a definition. I just did. You even just said excellent. I gave it not you and it was a example not a definition and it was about consciousness not free will. All I have is a mediocre definition of free will that isn't good for much and nobody except me uses. So free will like God and luminiferous aether are words and terms that should join other extinct things in the English language, words like methinks,cozen,fardel, huggermugger, zounds and typewriter. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 01 Aug 2012, at 18:05, John Clark wrote: On Tue, Jul 31, 2012 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Free will is the ability to make a willing choice Are you saying WILLING choices is the great definition you keep claiming I'm ignoring, this is the famous it ? Willing? So free will is will that is free. Well, at least that's not gibberish, in fact just like all tautologies it's even true. No I was not saying it is the great definition. I have given you the definition already. among alternatives we can be partially conscious of. So we have to drag in a illusive concept like consciousness if we want to define free will, I think so, yes. and of course being conscious means being able to make a free choice based on the desires of your will, Nobody ever said that. and around and around we go. No. We just suppose you have an idea of what consciousness is. We might agree on some axioms: like is true and undoubtable, although unprovable or communicable to another in any rational way. And things like that. Free will might plausibly needs consciousness, but consciousness (of some pain for example) does not need a priori free- will, although the subject is complex, and we can expect some relations between them. I think that I do not believe in your conception of free will. The problem is I have no conception of free will and neither do you nor does anybody else, at least not a consistent coherent one that has any depth. This contradicts your own definition of free will that you already find much better. It is hard to follow you. Pebble have plausibly no (free) will, as they obey to simple computable laws. Butterflies have plausibly free will, because they obey high level complex computable laws Then the dividing line between something that has free will and something that does not is as vague and imprecise as the dividing line between simple and complex. And it depends on who's doing the judging, what's simple to you may be complex to me. After all, even brain surgery is simple if you know how. Indeed. And a 30 year old home PC running the DOS 1.0 operating system had free will because it operated in complex ways, at least complex by human standards, by that I mean if it started to behave in odd ways people had difficulty figuring out exactly why, I know this from personal experience. No. PC DOS 1.0 is conscious, because of being Robinsonian, or Turing universal, but it is not Löbian, and I think free-will, like self- consciousness requires Löbianity. And a helium atom also has free will because its very complex to calculate from first principles what its electromagnetic emission spectrum will look like, you need a supercomputer and even then its only a approximation. An helium atom might be Turing universal, I can imagine. But still, I doubt that without being programmed to believe in arithmetical induction, he will be naturally Löbian. Those are obviously difficult question. I have said many times there are only 2 definitions of free will that are not gibberish: 1) Free Will is a noise made by the mouth. 2) Free Will is the inability to always predict ones actions even in a unchanging environment. I thought you did. So free-will is not just noise. I also said that unfortunately nobody except me seems to use either meaning of the term, My definition is basically your 2), and this since the beginning. You don't discuss with person, you discuss with the imaginary person you associate with them, up to the point of attributing them the contrary to what they say, it seems to me. and from their context it's clear that whatever they mean when they say free will it is not even close to the 2 non-gibberish ones; well 3 if you count free will is will that's free. I work with the comp hyp, so you can even guess that I can't only defend a compatibilist (determinist) conception of free-will, à-la 2). To believe in consciousness has been a reason to present many young researchers as crackpot in many universities for a long time. Everybody this side of a loony bin believes in consciousness, At least most people agree publicly, but sometimes they still despise the whole subject. the problem is that consciousness theories are just too easy to dream up and there is no way to tell a good one from a bad one. You are so wrong. Study many of them and you will see difference. We can make assumption, agree on principle and reason. The study is of course contaminated by its hotness and cultural relation, and can attract many crackpots, often institutionalized in some ways, but this does not make serious studies less serious. There are also a lot of experimental data and subjective reports to work with, and then there is computer science, and the mathematical question of what can an ideally correct computer prove and guess
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
Bruno wrote: And my (older) definition asks for one more thing: it is that the subject know (is aware or is conscious) about that inability and that he can still make the decision. There is a reflexion on the possibilities. If not, all non sentient beings have trivially free will. This is pretty much what I was thinking... It appears we live in a cause and effect universe. Things do not happen without cause. There is a decision making process each concious being embodies that is governed by cause and effect, while the being cannot understand the process in it's entirety, so thinks they have some magic called free will. The being has a will, the being embodies the decision making mechanism, the being's mechanism makes a choice, even if the being decides to make a random choice, it is the being's choice. The being's very existence is made possible by cause and effect, and so it's decisions are governed likewise. The being emodies a will, it can be called a free will if you like, but it is not free from the cause effect process. Even though in a multiverse a cause can have multiple effects. But that's another issue. A being can embody a will, a free will as the being views it, but still be governed by a complex cause effect process. The concepts are not really at odds with one another, as this being sees it. - Roy -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/everything-list/-/_qrKLv_hUk4J. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 30 Jul 2012, at 19:42, John Clark wrote: On Mon, Jul 30, 2012 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: religious people defined it [free will] often by the ability to choose consciously And those very same religious people define consciousness as the ability to have free will, and around and around we go. and people from the law can invoke it as a general precondition for making sense of the responsibility idea. That is precisely what it does NOT do and is why the free will noise turns the idea of responsibility, which is needed for any society to work, into ridiculous self contradictory idiocy. Only for those defending idiotic definition in idiotic theories, but without making precise such theories we can not refute them. The Free prefix is just an emphasis, and I don't take it too much seriously. You say that but I don't believe it ? (what can I say to such an assertion?) Does it matter I say anything, if you believe I am not saying what I think. This is ridiculous. and I don't think even you really believe it, otherwise you'd just say will means you want to do some things and don't want to do other things and we'd move on and talk about other things, but you can't seem to do that and keep inserting more bafflegab into the free will idea and not the will idea. I don't care at all about free-will. The notion is not used in my derivation and work. It is just a simple application of the comp theory. It illustrates that the argument against mechanism based on the free-will absence for machine is not valid, for it confuse absolute and relative self-indeterminacy. It can be mean things like absence of coercion. In other words I can't do everything I want to do. I don't need a philosopher to figure that out and doesn't deserve the many many millions of words they have written about free will? You are doing a confusion level. I could say I don't need artificial intelligence to be able to think. It necessitate many thousand years of evolution and interaction for you to be able to do what you want to do, and the question here is could machine do that, and how, and what does it mean, etc. I never said that such a definition makes everything clear, nor do I have said it was marvelous, nor even self-consistent. I did say that you ignore it, for reason which eludes me, I don't ignore it, in fact in post after post after post I have asked you, almost begged you, to tell me even approximately if that's the best you can do, what it is; but for reasons which eludes me you will not do so. ? I have done so, each time you asked. Free will is the ability to make a willing choice among alternatives we can be partially conscious of. The first person indeterminacy has nothing to do with free will. I don't know what first person indeterminacy is You have oscillate between non sense and trivial. I was hoping you were in the trivial mode. If you are will you be kind enough to tell us if you agree with the step 4 (in sane04)? but I know that your above statement is true because nothing has anything to do with free will. I think that I do not believe in your conception of free will. In Conscience et Mécanisme I even use it to explain that free will has nothing to do with absolute determinacy or indeterminacy. In other words free will has nothing to do with things that happen for a reason and free will has nothing to do with things that do not happen for a reason. I agree, and that means that free will is something that doesn't do anything, so free will does have one property, infinite dullness. The absolute was bearing on the or. Free-will can be said to have anything to do with determinacy. Without determinacy, even the notion of machine (and thus person, with comp) stops doing sense. In the human fundamental sense, most of the time we don't have definition, That is very true. Except for mathematics and formal logic precise definitions are usually not very important because we have something better, examples. If you can't provide a definition then give me a set containing examples of things that have free will and a set containing examples of things that don't have free will; and be consistent about it, explain why elements like Bruno Marchal and John K Clark belong in the same set but elements like Cuckoo Clocks and Roulette Wheels belong in the other set. Well thanks for answering for me. I give you another example. Pebble and butterflies. Pebble have plausibly no (free) will, as they obey to simple computable laws. Butterflies have plausibly free will, because they obey high level complex computable laws making them possible to hesitate, between different nectars, flowers, etc. Of course we can never be sure for another creature than oneself. It can only be a personal feeling after observations of many pebbles and butterflies.
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 30 Jul 2012, at 20:08, meekerdb wrote: On 7/30/2012 4:01 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: Le 28-juil.-12, à 18:46, John Clark a écrit : On Sat, Jul 28, 2012 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: You goal does not seem in discussing ideas, but in mocking people. That is not true, my goal has two parts: 1) Figuring out what you mean by free will. Free-will is an informal term use in many informal setting. religious people defined it often by the ability to choose consciously between doing bad things or not, and people from the law can invoke it as a general precondition for making sense of the responsibility idea. In cognitive science we can at least approximate it in different ways, and basically, with computationalism it is the ability to make choice in absence of complete information, and knowledge of that incomplete feature. I'm not clear on why you emphasize incomplete information? What would constitute complete information? and why how would that obviate 'free will'. Is it coercive? I agree with Russell's answer. If the information was complete (with respect to what is relevant), then there would be no choice at all. I would know that right I will make a cup of coffee, or perhaps not, instead of hesitating about it. The Free prefix is just an emphasis, and I don't take it too much seriously. It can be mean things like absence of coercion. 2) Figuring out if what you say about free will is true. We cannot know truth, but can propose hypotheses and definition, and then reason from there. I have never completed the first goal, so it's a bit maddening when you keep claiming over and over and over that sometime in the unspecified past you provided a marvelous exact self consistent definition of free will that makes everything clear and that for some unspecified reason, or perhaps for no reason at all, I am ignoring it. I never said that such a definition makes everything clear, nor do I have said it was marvelous, nor even self-consistent. I did say that you ignore it, for reason which eludes me, but which I guess is a lack of interest in the corresponding mundane notions, which is the object of many studies, books, debate, etc. The onoly question is in solving problem. To say free will is noise just hides problems. Before I can solve a problem I need to know what the problem is and I don't, and you don't know either. You just seem to be unaware of all the questions in the foundation of the cognitive science. May be you could read tthe book by Micahel Tye: eight problems on consciousness. I don't find any link to either the book or the author. Can you point to a source? http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2tid=5670 (yes ten problems, not eight!, and it is Michael, not Micahel 'course). Free will is one of them. It is clear and quite readable. Of course the author is not aware that comp is incompatible with physicalism. You really talk like a pseudo-priest having answers to all questions. Wow, calling a guy who doesn't like religion religious! Never heard that one before, at least not before the sixth grade. If you don't believe in some fundamental reality, then we are just wasting time when discussing with you, given that this list is devoted in the search of a theory of everything. If you believe in some fundamental reality, then you are religious in the larger (non necessarily christian) sense that I have already given. In the fundamental science, those who pretend not doing religion are the most religious, but probably they are not aware of this. I'd say that you are more wedded to the words 'religion' and 'God' than the concepts which they formerly denoted. :-) Yeah ... machines have necessarily a rational part, and a non-rational part, and religion is an attempt to makes them dialog (at least) or fuse, eventually. All machine get religious. Atheists are doubly religious believer, as they - 1) seem to give sense to Christian-like no-name and Saints, and believe that they don't exist, and - 2) they believe in the Aristotelian Primary Matter, which is a sort of God too, in the former sense of theology as used by the greeks one thousand years before religion get mainly political brainswashing tool. Amusigly I discover recently a book describing quite similar debate about the question that philosophy is part or not of theology among some neoplatonists. Theology is just the science of what transcend us. Only solipsist can believe that does not exist. Science will resume when theology will come back in the academy. Today's science is mainly don't ask and make money or wait retirement. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe
