Re: ROADMAP (well, not yet really...

[Colin Geoffrey Hales]

"David Nyman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
>
> Bruno Marchal wrote:
>
>> If grandmother asks for recalling the main difference between Plato and
Aristotle's theories of matter, I would just say that in Plato, the
visible (observable, measurable) realm is taken as appearances or
shadows related to a deeper unknown reality.

BTW Plato followed Heraclitus, who was already onto this.

Surely Plato's view more astute model to assemble an understanding of the
natural world than the assumption of Aristotlian/atomism thinking... that
the universe is made of chunky bits of stuff that literally are the
appearances we get and our descriptions of itfurthemore

The arisotlian view is clearly anatomically untenable anyway! If the
universe was literally made of appearances then when we opened up a brain
we would see them. We do not. What we see is the brain in the act of
delivering appearances. No 'appearance' of a brain is in any direct
relation to the appearances it delivers to us in the 1st person. Ergo the
structure and the appearances are not the same thing or at least are
validly explored on that basis.

This is empirical proof that at least in this small piece of thought
Plato's position was correct and Aristotle is just plain wrong. And Kant
too. The noumenon is most definitely real and scientifically
tractible.(see below)

The practical upshot of this is that the universe does not,  for example,
have atoms in it. It is made of some underlying structure behaving
"atomly" within our appearances. It is only us that insist on making it a
'thing'. That structure also behaves 'neutrino-ly' outside the scope of
our direct perceptions (qualia). The appearances (qualia) are likewise
delivered as behaviour of the very same structure. Plato's position
unifies matter and qualia as different behaviours of the same underlying
structure. So simple and obvious and practical and fits the evidence.

>
> A question from grandma:
>
> Since this deeper, unknown reality must forever be inaccessible to our
direct probing, I agree when you suggest that this may better be thought
of as theology, or at least metaphysics.

Juicy stuff here:

"Since this deeper, unknown reality must forever be inaccessible to our
direct probing"

The words 'direct probing' assume that indeed we are at some point
"directly probing". If you can justify any account that we directly probe
(whatever that means!) anything I'd like to see it! I would hold that the
'apprearances' we have and the 'underlying structure' are on an _equal_
epistemological footing in that

a) Depictions of regularity in appearances
b) Depictions of structure of a putative underlying natural world

both have equal access to qualia as evidence. It is the underlying
structure that delivers qualia into the brain. The two descriptive realms:
appearances and structure are on an equal footing and qualia unifies them
into a consistent set. The 'evidence', qualia, is evidence for BOTH
domains. Whatever the structure is, it must simultaneously a) deliver
qualia and all the rest of the structure in the universe and b) deliver
the contents of qualia (appearances) that result in our correlations of
appearances that we think of as empirical laws.

Therefore we have not one but 2 scientifically accessible realms of
scientific description of the natural world:

1) Statistics that are correlation of appearances
2) Statistics that are depictions of structure

Qualia are produced by 1) and enable 2) and tie both descriptions
intimately together as a consistent set. Currently we call 1) science and
slag off at 2) as 'mere metaphysics' or theology. This is just s
wrong! Indeed at least in a linguistic sense 2) is physics and 1) is
meta-physics (about it)! :-)

So...

"Since this deeper, unknown reality must forever be inaccessible to our
direct probing"

...is quite correct, but that does not stop us doing valid science on the
structure! Put another way this limitation in access does not justify
calling attempts to formulate theories of the structure as non-science.

Can you see how riddled with historical baggage our thinking is, how
biased our language is? This crazy situation has been going on for 2500
years. enough already!

cheers
colin hales




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RE: Can we ever know truth? - simulation

[John M]

Nick: the "practical" - "philosopher". 

I refer to my 'misunderstood' expression to Bruno: 
"NAME Calling" 
(which was a pun, meaning we "call" names and assign
meaning to it - in our OWN mindset, then fight for
THIS meaning against another person's meaning "called"
by the same NAME) - Bruno misunderstood it into its
original "un-pun" (vulgar?) connotation
( - sorry, Bruno -  )
well, your "solipsism" is such a 'name'. 

We live in our own one and pretend to be 'objective'. 

Indeed our (call it: First Person) mind formulates a
'world of solipsist reality' - one may consider it as
'primal', indeed it is a reflection to who knows what.

(Norman's 'reality' vs. Brent's "real real-reality").

Some people are more flexible in this (internal)
formulation and absorb impacts from others (what I
call 3rd person impact) others just stick to 'their
own'. 
Inevitably reformulating the topics into the original 
(solipsistic?) original positions to argue about.

I don't believe that such cycling is a perfect one: 
the argued-against positions have an impact. 
Slow, but adjusting. 

It is sort of a slow 'moving on'. 

John Mikes


--- Nick Prince <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> This is a form of solipsism  - it is difficult to
> attack it and defending it
> can be similarly time consuming.  I think we have to
> move on and believe
> there is a better approach - if only to get
> somewhere other than back to the
> beginning every time.
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
>   _  
> 
> - Original Message - 
> 
> From: Norman Samish   
> 
> To: everything-list@googlegroups.com 
> 
> Sent: Wednesday, August 09, 2006 12:53 PM
> 
> Subject: Can we ever know truth?
> 
>  
> 
> In a discussion about philosophy, Nick Prince said,
> "If we are living in a
> simulation. . ." 
> 
>  
> 
> To which John Mikes replied, "I think this is the
> usual pretension. . .   I
> think 'we simulate what we are living in' according
> to the little we know.
> Such 'simulation' - 'simplification' - 'modeling' -
> 'metaphorizing' - or
> even 'Harry Potterizing' things we think does not
> change the
> 'unknown/unknowable' we live in.  We just think and
> therefore we think we
> are."
> 
>  
> 
> This interchange reminded me of thoughts I had as a
> child - I used to wonder
> if if everything I experienced was real or a dream. 
> How could I know which
> it was?  I asked my parents and was discouraged, in
> no uncertain terms, from
> asking them nonsensical questions.  I asked my
> playmates and friends, but
> they didn't know the answer any more than I did.  I
> had no other resources
> so I concluded that the question was unanswerable
> and that the best I could
> do was proceed as if what I experienced was reality.
>  
> 
>  
> 
> Now, many years later, I have this list - and
> Wikipedia - as resources.
> But, as John Mikes (and others) say, I still cannot
> know that what I
> experience is reality.  I can only assume that
> reality is how things appear
> to me - and I might be wrong.
> 
>  
> 
> Norman Samish
> 
>  
> 
> 
>   _  
> 
> 
> No virus found in this incoming message.
> Checked by AVG Free Edition.
> Version: 7.1.405 / Virus Database: 268.10.8/415 -
> Release Date: 08/09/06
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>
> 


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ROADMAP (failed but keep it for latter references)

[Bruno Marchal]

Hi,

Roadmap:


There are two things I can hardly separate: UDA, that is the Universal 
Dovetailer Argument, which is an argument showing that if you take 
seriously enough the hypothesis that we are digitalizable machine then 
it follows that *necessarily* the physical laws, among more things (see 
below), emerge from the relation between numbers, in a verifiable way.
This includes relative relations between particular numbers and what I 
will call from now on Universal Numbers.
And UDA points on a way to explicitly extract the physical laws: just 
interview one of those universal numbers.
I say above that the physical laws emerges, among more things
Among more? Not only UDA forces the quanta to emerge from numbers, but 
the interview shows that they emerge in the company of many non 
communicable truth, even many sort of non communicable truth, some of 
which are good candidates for playing the role of qualia. In that case 
quanta appears to be sharable qualia.

It is in the UDA that I have introduce the first and third person 
discussion (the expression itself coming from philosophy of mind). In 
the UDA the definition of first person *discourse* is quite specific: 
it is the content of a diary, or of any local memorization of a result 
of self-localisation (like Washington and Moscow) after 
self-duplicating experiments. Note that here some "universe" or 
"universal story" is presupposed in the thought experiment. Third 
person person discourse are then defined by the content of a diary of 
some external observer, where external refer to the 
reading-annihilating (cut) and reading reconstituting (copy) pair of 
boxes.

The last version of UDA has 8 steps: (CT is for Church's thesis)

1) classical teleportation (Here the 1-discourse is equivalent with the 
3-discourse, up to the use of the indexical "I" by the candidate)
2) Classical teleportation with delay (Here already the 1 and 3 
discourses diverge)
3) Self-duplication (Here the first person indeterminacy appears)
4) Self-duplication with asymmetric delay.
5) Teleportation without annihilation of the "original"
6) Virtual 1+2+3+4+5 (the preceding steps with virtual reconstitutions)
7) Universal 1+2+3+4+5 (Here appears the universal Machine and the 
Universal Dovetailer. CT is used)
8) Arithmetical 1+2+3+4+5 (Here the UD appears to be "just" Sigma1 
truth).

It follows from that that "ontologically" (perhaps in a weaker sense 
than usual, or at least in a weaker sense than Peter D. Jones' use of 
the term) the following theory is enough. It is often named Robinson 
Arithmetic and denoted by Q. It is a tiny segment of elementary 
arithmetic. As a theory, it is a very poor theory, completely incapable 
of making the slightest generalization. But yet able to prove all the 
sigma1 truth, which by Church thesis, makes it capable of representing 
all computable functions, that is the Fi and the Wi, etc. Put in 
another way, although Q has few provability abilities, it has the full 
universal power of a universal turing machine or of any (relative) 
universal number.

So:

TOE 1 (Ontology, formally presented)


Classical first order logic with equality,   together with the symbol 
0, s, +, *

The intended meanings of 0, s, + and * are respectively the number 
zero, the successor function (which sends a number n on its successor 
n+1), and addition and multiplication.

The axioms are:   (where "Ax" should be read: "for any number x", and 
"Ex" should be read "it exists x such that ", and "x ­ y" abbreviates 
~(x = y))

Q1)   Ax0 ­ s(x)
Q2)   AxAyx ­ y -> s(x) ­ s(y)
Q3)   Ax(x ­ 0  ->  Ey(x = s(y))

Together with the definition of addition:

Q4)   Axx + 0  =  x
Q5)   AxAy   x + s(y)  =  s(x + y)

and the definition of multiplication:

Q6)   Ax x * 0  =  0
Q7)   AxAyx * s(y) = (x * y) + x

Just remember that the roadmap point: UDA shows that "ontologically"  
Q1+Q2+Q3+Q4+Q5+Q6+Q7 is enough for a (comp) TOE.  As a machine, which 
dynamics is governed by the inference rules of logic (modus ponens, 
rule for the quantifiers), Q is recursively isomorphic to a UD.  By its 
Church-Turing completeness, it is universal for computability.

KEY REMARK: although computability-complete, the theory Q is very weak 
in term of provability power. It cannot even prove that any numbers has 
a successor (Ax Ey (y = s(x)), although Q can prove all individual 
statements Ey(y = s(0)), Ey(y=s(s(0))), Ey(y=s(s(s(0))), etc. Q can 
prove (modulo the notation) that 1+3 = 2*2,  that 1+3+5 = 3*3, that 
1+3+5+7 = 4*4, etc., but Q cannot, like the greeks, generalizes and 
concludes that the sum of any sum of the first odd positive integers 
are perfect squares. Q can prove, for each number n and m, that n+m = 
m+n, but cannot infer that (n + m = m + n) is true for all n. Still, Q 
has the full power of being able to prove ExP(x) in case P is decidable 
and true, and this makes Q sufficiently powerful to prove 
metamathematical statements like the 

Re: Difficulties in communication. . .

[Bruno Marchal]

Dear Norman,

Thanks. I think this could help. I would not attribute "atomism" to Plato (except through Pythagorism and the "platonic notion of substance"), and "my" Plato is mainly the one from the Theaetetus and Parmenides.
Recall me this when I will succeed to explain the arithmetical hypostases (the n-person notions).
I have written a roadmap which describes the half of it. I guess I fail.
The current conversation between David and Peter D. Jones is quite relevant. Peter D. Jones, 1Z, is right when he told David there is no (Aristotelian) substance, but wrong putting physics in 0-person, when with comp UDA shows it (should) belong(s) to first person plural. (If comp is true, etc.)

Bruno


Le 11-août-06, à 20:50, Norman Samish a écrit :

Dear Bruno,
 
I am sending this to you and not the Everything List - if you wish to respond on the List, please do so.
 
I and others have remarked on the difficulty we find understanding you.  In response, you have asked us to ask you specific questions. 
 
I read your "Roadmap for Grandmothers" with interest, thinking that I might qualify intellectually as the grandmother.  I found that attaching a meaning to your remarks took a lot of guesswork and effort, but I persisted.  You have something valuable for me to learn, so my efforts will not be wasted.
 
In response to your request for my point of view, I have paraphrased your remarks below, trying to make them easier for me to understand.  In so doing, I have made assumptions that may not be correct.  Nevertheless, this is my best guess about the meaning of what you are saying.  My comments are inserted in brackets.
 
Best wishes, 
Norman Samish

- Original Message - 
From: "Bruno Marchal" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: 
Sent: Friday, August 11, 2006 6:03 AM
Subject: ROADMAP (well, not yet really...
 
George asked me to explain the main points like if I was talking to a grandmother.  I guess he means someone with some motivation but with no background in math, physics or computer science. 
 
. . . I will begin by a short explanation to the "grandmother" and I will finish by extending the grandmother to a roadmap.  That is not only a summary, but a plan for progressing in my work and in our discussion.

Now if the grandmother knows about Aristotle and Plato, I can sum up by saying that about the nature of matter, we can show that if we assume that we are (numerical, digital) machine then Plato's theory of Matter is correct and Aristotle's theory of Matter is incorrect. 
 
[Plato's and Aristotle's theories are briefly described at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomism as ". . . Aristotle asserted that the elements of fire, air, earth, and water were not made of atoms, but were continuous.  Aristotle considered the existence of a void, which was required by atomic theories, to violate physical principles.  Change took place not by the rearrangement of atoms to make new structures, but by transformation of matter from what it was in potential to a new actuality.  A piece of wet clay, when acted upon by a potter, takes on its potential to be an actual drinking mug.  Aristotle has often been criticized for rejecting atomism, but in ancient Greece the atomic theories of Democritus and Plato remained "pure speculations, incapable of being put to any experimental test. . . "
 
At http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forms we are told of ". . . Plato's belief that the material world as it seems to us is not the real world, but only a shadow of the real world."]


If grandmother asks for recalling the main difference between Plato and Aristotle's theories of matter, I would just say that in Plato, the visible . . . realm is taken as appearances or shadows related to a deeper unknown reality. Aristotle's theory is more subtle.  Matter . . . can take any shape, and as such is vague and poorly defined.  Aristotle considers that vague and poorly defined property of matter to be real.  Aristotle supposes . . . a substrate (defined as something determinable by its parts. . . ).  This substrate is therefore the origin of naturalism, physicalism and materialism.  [This paragraph in particular required a lot of modification for me to understand.  It is likely that I have put words in your mouth that you did not intend.]

And now if Grandmother is interested, probably I would offer her an exemplar of Plotinus Enneads, and suggest she read the Ennead 3 treatise II, where he corrected Aristotle theory's of matter (indeterminateness, obscurity, privation, ...) with respect to the Plato theory. And that's it.
 
[Ennead 3 treatise II is available at http://classics.mit.edu/Plotinus/enneads.3.third.html.  
 
"2. But to halt at these nearest determinants, not to be willing to penetrate deeper, indicates a sluggish mind, a dullness to all that calls us towards the primal and transcendent causes. 

How comes it that the same surface causes produce different results? There is m

?

[Bruno Marchal]

I will probably probably resend the last post, it seems some words are 
lacking. Sorry. I will take the opportunity to make this one clearer 
before the one on the hypostases.

Good week-end,

Bruno

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/


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Re: ROADMAP (well, not yet really...

[David Nyman]

Colin Geoffrey Hales wrote:

> The words 'direct probing' assume that indeed we are at some point
> "directly probing". If you can justify any account that we directly probe
> (whatever that means!) anything I'd like to see it!

I see what you mean. Francis Bacon described our enterprise as to 'vex
Nature', an expression that has always rather tickled me, and I simply
meant that there comes a point at which Nature resists even the notion
of being vexed, and we're reduced to talk of something skulking 'behind
the scenes'. It was to this that Wittgenstein addressed his notorious
admonishment. So I'm (or rather grandma is) simply asking Bruno
whether, rather than invoking 'Number', or whatever, as lurking in this
shadowy region, it makes any real difference were we to re-cast comp in
something more like the form of words suggested - i.e as derived from
the (1st person) observables - 'nuff said.

> Can you see how riddled with historical baggage our thinking is, how
> biased our language is? This crazy situation has been going on for 2500
> years. enough already!

Yes, and I despair (almost) of remedying this, even if I knew how. My
own attempts at linguistic 'clarity' seemed destined only to muddy the
waters further, especially as I'm really trying to translate from
personal modes that are often more visual/ kinaesthetic than verbal,
gestalt than analytic.

That said, I rather like your 'adverbial' mode, which I think has also
cropped up in other contexts (didn't Whitehead attempt something of the
sort with his process view?) Nominalisation/ reification creates
conceptual confusions, embedded assumptions spawn others, as in all
language to do with time, which is already loaded with the assumption
of experiential dynamism, and hence can do nothing to help explain it.

My own hastily contrived usages were an attempt to expose the implicit
(and hence generally conceptually invisible) holding of the world 'at
arm's length' by the objectifying effect of 3rd person language, which
simultaneusly relegates 1st-person to a subsidiary role, to the extent
that some even feel impelled to deny its existence, or resort to
bizarre ontolgies in an attempt to 'reintroduce' it. Where McGinn and
Chomsky hold that it is the analytic/ synthetic modes of language that
puts 1st person beyond our ability to conceptualise, I feel that the
unacknowledged consensual projection of an 'objective model' as
'reality' has more to do with it.

My belief has been that restoring 1st person to some sort of centrality
would be part of the antidote, and I haven't yet (quite) lost hope on
this score. I look forward to the fruits of your own efforts in this
regard.

David

> "David Nyman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> >
> > Bruno Marchal wrote:
> >
> >> If grandmother asks for recalling the main difference between Plato and
> Aristotle's theories of matter, I would just say that in Plato, the
> visible (observable, measurable) realm is taken as appearances or
> shadows related to a deeper unknown reality.
>
> BTW Plato followed Heraclitus, who was already onto this.
>
> Surely Plato's view more astute model to assemble an understanding of the
> natural world than the assumption of Aristotlian/atomism thinking... that
> the universe is made of chunky bits of stuff that literally are the
> appearances we get and our descriptions of itfurthemore
>
> The arisotlian view is clearly anatomically untenable anyway! If the
> universe was literally made of appearances then when we opened up a brain
> we would see them. We do not. What we see is the brain in the act of
> delivering appearances. No 'appearance' of a brain is in any direct
> relation to the appearances it delivers to us in the 1st person. Ergo the
> structure and the appearances are not the same thing or at least are
> validly explored on that basis.
>
> This is empirical proof that at least in this small piece of thought
> Plato's position was correct and Aristotle is just plain wrong. And Kant
> too. The noumenon is most definitely real and scientifically
> tractible.(see below)
>
> The practical upshot of this is that the universe does not,  for example,
> have atoms in it. It is made of some underlying structure behaving
> "atomly" within our appearances. It is only us that insist on making it a
> 'thing'. That structure also behaves 'neutrino-ly' outside the scope of
> our direct perceptions (qualia). The appearances (qualia) are likewise
> delivered as behaviour of the very same structure. Plato's position
> unifies matter and qualia as different behaviours of the same underlying
> structure. So simple and obvious and practical and fits the evidence.
>
> >
> > A question from grandma:
> >
> > Since this deeper, unknown reality must forever be inaccessible to our
> direct probing, I agree when you suggest that this may better be thought
> of as theology, or at least metaphysics.
>
> Juicy stuff here:
>
> "Since this deeper, unknown reality must forever be inaccessible to our
> direct probing

Re: Are First Person prime?

[1Z]

David Nyman wrote:

> 1Z wrote:
>
> > Why shouldn't they denote that ? And what has that to do with
> > substances ?
> > The inside/outside distinction can be asserted is a single-substance
> > universe. The inside/outside distinction is enough to found the 1st/3rd
> > person divide, what
> > do you need a multiplicity of substances for.
>
> I agree. I was setting it up to knock it down.
>
> > It is not clear why they should be that fact. For one thing,
> > qualia seem not be structures in themselves. For another
> > the perceiver-perceptual-model is 3rd-personal comprehensible
> > and therefore part of the Easy problem. So you are simply
> > declaring that the HP rides on the back of the EP, for
> > reasons that canoot be undeerstood within the EP -- just as
> > Chalmers does.
>
> I don't see why you're resistant to the idea that qualia could have a
> structural aspect.

1) the don't seem to have, and they *are* what they seem
2) they are incommunicable in mathematical, and hence
sructrural terms.


> For one thing, they seem to be systematically
> correlated with physical phenomena (light, sound) which are structural/
> relational.

Correlation is not identity.

>  Also, they seem experientially (at least to me) to display
> mutual distributive relations that are analogous to, say, the frequency
> distribution of the colour spectrum.

Mutual relations are not internal relations. Purple
lies between red and blue, but being told that
doens't tell you what purple looks like unless you
already know what red and blue look like. Realtional
information about colours does not convey the colours
themselves.

>  So I don't see the suggestion that
> different qualia are different structural modulations of a substrate as
> so counter-intuitive.


If that were the case, there would be no HP, and threfore no
need for any first-personness worth arguing about.

> As to HP 'riding on the back of' EP, I'd rather put it that they are
> correlated, but probably don't map in a simple, one-to-one, 'identity'
> relation.

That is still pure Chalmers -- natural supervenience is not identity,
after all.

>  If this is simply 'neutral monism', so be it. Insofar that
> have been disagreeing over terminology, this is entirely fruitless, and
> we should try not to dispute any more over words. Perhaps I could
> replace the form of words 'global 1st person primitivity' with 'global
> neutral (0-person if you like) primitivity', as long as this is
> understood to be the backgound from which 1st-persons, under suitable
> conditions, emerge.

If you are going to continue being unable to specify what is
personal about your primordial 1st peson, then that would
be better, yes.

> > AFAIC that amounts to saying they supervene on the physical --
> > on the 0-personal.
>
> No, that's going too far, IMO. I'd rather have them both mapping onto a
> neutral substrate that is basic.

AFAICS, that *is* supervening. What do you think
supervening is ?

>  As I concede above, we could call this
> 0-personal, but this is surely not baldly equivalent to 'physical'.
> Just as we schematise the physical into chemical, biological,
> physiological levels etc, there may be analogous but different
> 'experiential layering' supporting the emergence of the conscious
> modalities we in fact encounter.

If they are not all just structure, there must be, yes.

The claim of physicalism (as opposed to materialism, or
neutral monism) is that everything is just
structured matter, and that all the layers reduce to
physics.

> > >and
> > > different types of structure yield different types of qualia.
> >
> > How and why ?
>
> How - by relational modulation of the 0-personal substrate.

If you modulate a bunch of relations , you get another bunch
of relations. That is no departure from reductive physicalism.

> Why -
> because of the infinite (or at least Vast) possibilities of modalities,
> range, etc. inherent in this, on the analogy of the physical/
> relational correlates (light, sound, taste, etc).
>
> > That would be equally true of a 0-personal substance, ie matter.
>
> But a 'neutral (0-personal?) substrate' is not a rigidly 'physical'
> one, if that's what you intend by 'matter'.

It all depends on what you mean by physical. For me,
what physicalism means beyond materialism is that
all properties are quantitiative and relational. A consequence
is that there is no layering of any significant kind.


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Re: Difficulties in communication. . .

[1Z]

Bruno Marchal wrote:
> Dear Norman,
>
> Thanks. I think this could help. I would not attribute "atomism" to
> Plato (except through Pythagorism and the "platonic notion of
> substance"), and "my" Plato is mainly the one from the Theaetetus and
> Parmenides.
> Recall me this when I will succeed to explain the arithmetical
> hypostases (the n-person notions).
> I have written a roadmap which describes the half of it. I guess I fail.
> The current conversation between David and Peter D. Jones is quite
> relevant. Peter D. Jones, 1Z, is right when he told David there is no
> (Aristotelian) substance,

That is, there is no plurality of substanes with essential
characteristics.
Just one bare subtrate.


> but wrong putting physics in 0-person, when
> with comp UDA shows it (should) belong(s) to first person plural. (If
> comp is true, etc.)

Comp could be true in a material universe, so comp does not
imply the non-existence of matter.


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Re: Difficulties in communication. . .

[1Z]

1Z wrote:

> That is, there is no plurality of substances with essential
> characteristics.
> Just one bare subtrate.

Matter is a bare substrate with no properties of its own. The question
may well be asked at this point: what roles does it perform ? Why not
dispense with matter and just have bundles of properties -- what does
matter add to a merely abstract set of properties? The answer is that
not all bundles of posible properties are instantiated. What matter
adds to a bundle of properties is existence. Thus the concept of matter
is very much tied to the idea of contingency or "somethingism" -- the
idea that only certain possible things exist.
The other issue matter is able to explain as a result of having no
properties of its own is the issue of change and time. For change to be
distinguishable from mere succession, it must be change in something.
It could be a contingent natural law that certain properties never
change. However, with a propertiless substrate, it becomes a logical
necessity that the substrate endures through change; since all changes
are changes in properties, a propertiless substrate cannot itself
change and must endure through change.


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Re: Can we ever know truth? - simulation

[1Z]

> I think this is wrongheaded.  You doubt that you really assume "things are
> how they appear to me" - the Earth appears flat, wood appears solid, and
> electrons don't appear at all.  What one does is build, or learn, a model
> that fits the world and comports with "how they appear".  I see no reason
> not to call this model "reality", recognizing that it is provisional,
> because there's no point in speculating about a "really, real reality"
> except to suppose there is one so that the model is a model *of* something.

And so that the model can be corrected, and so that reality doesn't
disappear when the model doesactually , there are
aquire a lot of reasons for believing in reality.


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Re: ROADMAP (well, not yet really...

[jamikes]

Colin,
Thanks for expressing "my ideas" so eloquently.
However... (of course!)
I may interspace some remarks (as usual) on details. (I am more lenient on
the oldies (do rely on them less) because our epistemic enrichment could
work only on the 'timely' level of comprehension (buildability-up on the
'then' cognitive inventory and mind-function skills). Don't expect from me
to be too appreciative on our present level though. We try, as much as we
can.
*
I will insert initials.
John M
- Original Message -
From: "Colin Geoffrey Hales" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: 
Sent: Saturday, August 12, 2006 3:56 AM
Subject: Re: ROADMAP (well, not yet really...


>
> "David Nyman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> >
> > Bruno Marchal wrote:
> >
> >> If grandmother asks for recalling the main difference between Plato and
> Aristotle's theories of matter, I would just say that in Plato, the
> visible (observable, measurable) realm is taken as appearances or
> shadows related to a deeper unknown reality.
>
> BTW Plato followed Heraclitus, who was already onto this.
>
> Surely Plato's view more astute model to assemble an understanding of the
> natural world than the assumption of Aristotlian/atomism thinking... that
> the universe is made of chunky bits of stuff that literally are the
> appearances we get and our descriptions of itfurthemore
>
> The arisotlian view is clearly anatomically untenable anyway! If the
> universe was literally made of appearances then when we opened up a brain
> we would see them. We do not. What we see is the brain in the act of
> delivering appearances. No 'appearance' of a brain is in any direct
> relation to the appearances it delivers to us in the 1st person. Ergo the
> structure and the appearances are not the same thing or at least are
> validly explored on that basis.
[JM]:
I will come back to that darn "structure".  With a 'better look' we may
"see" more, just as we see more today than when that legendary king had the
brain of his philosopher sliced up to see all those smart ideas). The modern
neurologists claim to see it 'all' - including the term: "somehow".
>
> This is empirical proof that at least in this small piece of thought
> Plato's position was correct and Aristotle is just plain wrong. And Kant
> too. The noumenon is most definitely real and scientifically
> tractible.(see below)
>
> The practical upshot of this is that the universe does not,  for example,
> have atoms in it. It is made of some underlying structure behaving
> "atomly" within our appearances. It is only us that insist on making it a
> 'thing'.
[JM]:
After 1/2 century pioneering in making a new type of polymers: I agree.
I use a slightly different wording, but for the same idea.
You use "structure" - which is a term of our (present) imaging of what we do
not see. I don't go that far, don't assign our 'structureal' image to the
still unknown. Our present mental capability may be immature to categorize
it.
"Our structure" comes from a mathematical evaluation of that (partial) image
we so far exerienced within that limited model we pretend to observe.
>
>That structure also behaves 'neutrino-ly' outside the scope of
> our direct perceptions (qualia). The appearances (qualia) are likewise
> delivered as behaviour of the very same structure. Plato's position
> unifies matter and qualia as different behaviours of the same underlying
> structure. So simple and obvious and practical and fits the evidence.
>
> >
> > A question from grandma:
> >
> > Since this deeper, unknown reality must forever be inaccessible to our
> direct probing, I agree when you suggest that this may better be thought
> of as theology, or at least metaphysics.
>
> Juicy stuff here:
>
> "Since this deeper, unknown reality must forever be inaccessible to our
> direct probing"
>
> The words 'direct probing' assume that indeed we are at some point
> "directly probing". If you can justify any account that we directly probe
> (whatever that means!) anything I'd like to see it!
[JM]:
Amen. Me too.
>
>I would hold that the
> 'apprearances' we have and the 'underlying structure' are on an _equal_
> epistemological footing in that
>
> a) Depictions of regularity in appearances
> b) Depictions of structure of a putative underlying natural world
>
> both have equal access to qualia as evidence. It is the underlying
> structure that delivers qualia into the brain. The two descriptive realms:
> appearances and structure are on an equal footing and qualia unifies them
> into a consistent set. The 'evidence', qualia, is evidence for BOTH
> domains. Whatever the structure is, it must simultaneously a) deliver
> qualia and all the rest of the structure in the universe and b) deliver
> the contents of qualia (appearances) that result in our correlations of
> appearances that we think of as empirical laws.
[JM]:
Maybe reverse: we THINK about a structure because the 'qualia' reaching our
mind suggest such ideas. We are 'probing' the unkowable with the little we
derived in 

Re: Are First Person prime?

[David Nyman]

1Z wrote:

> 1) the don't seem to have, and they *are* what they seem
> 2) they are incommunicable in mathematical, and hence
> sructrural terms.

1) Well, this obviously depends on the subject of the seeming. To me,
'red', 'middle C', or 'bitter' all *do* seem to possess a sort of
directly sensed 'vibrational' quality that is essential, for example,
to why I would feel they were 'like' or 'unlike' other colours, sounds,
or tastes, or where they would *subjectively* lie in 'spectra'
analogous (but not identical) to those of 'physical' properties.

2) They are by definition incommunicable in mathematical or any other
language, but this does not in my *experience* equate to their being
'structureless' in *feel*. If I attempt to imagine what the 'bare
substrate' would *feel* like, I am frankly at a loss because it *seems*
to be devoid of content - what would there be to be 'felt'? But beyond
the substrate we have the equally fundamental IMO notion of
differentiation (a neutral term I'm using because it isn't committed to
a purely 'physical' view) and it seems to me that the intersection of
substrate and differentiation could well *be* the direct experience of
content. I also call such content 'structure' because it is
differentiated but if you'd rather reserve this for the relational
idea, so be it.

> Correlation is not identity.

Precisely. But the correlation of qualia with structurally
differentiated 'physical' phenomena leads to the intuition that qualia
themselves may be an *experiential synthesis* based on structural
differentiation of the same bare ('property-less' in your own terms)
substrate. The substrate, as you say elsewhere, provides enduring
existence within which the properties manifest and change. I'm
suggesting that the *existence* of the differentiated substrate
*synthesises* the qualia (i.e. they entail multiple differentiations)
and the mutual *relations* of the differentiated substrate *are* the
'properties'.

BTW, when I meditate on a substrate whose differentiation resolves into
'me' 'you' and other persons, I tend to 'take it personally'.  The
'impersonal' gaps between persons are IMO no different in kind than the
gaps between my own experiences at different times, places, branches of
MW, etc. The substrate is in these terms a single 'potential
experiencer'. The actual experiences it possesses are then a function
of an infinite network of differentiation. I've said something
elsewhere about the implications of this for the perception of time
both as discrete, rather than totalised, experiences, and as a
'dynamic' quale, mediated by discrete 'capsules' of locally-delimited
information.

> Mutual relations are not internal relations. Purple
> lies between red and blue, but being told that
> doens't tell you what purple looks like unless you
> already know what red and blue look like. Realtional
> information about colours does not convey the colours
> themselves.

Nothing can 'tell you what purple looks like'. Purple is a medium that
carries information, not information itself. However, the *feel* of
purple may seem related to the *feel* of blue. Isn't this ultimately a
matter for each 'seemer' to meditate on?

> If that were the case, there would be no HP, and threfore no
> need for any first-personness worth arguing about.

I don't think that the HP is a useful idea. I think there is existence
and this is something I 'take personally' because it *seems* to
manifest as me, and other mes, all of whom I find it intuitive to
conceive as subsets of a much Vaster me, with 'conscious regions' (e.g.
'me yesterday', 'me on the branch where I didn't have that last beer',
'Peter five minutes ago') and 'unconscious regions' (e.g. 'me after
that last beer', interstellar space, a rock). The EP is the observable
behaviour (information content) of all this, insofar as we have access
to and can make sense of it.

> That is still pure Chalmers -- natural supervenience is not identity,
> after all.

Well, if 'experience' is the fact of *being* differentiable existence,
and 'the physical' is the observable relations thereof, then both
ultimately 'supervene' on there being something rather than nothing.
Further correlation is IMO an empirical issue from which might stem a
more robust theoretical model embracing both. If this is the substance
of Chalmers' claim then I suppose I would go along with it.

> > How - by relational modulation of the 0-personal substrate.
>
> If you modulate a bunch of relations , you get another bunch
> of relations. That is no departure from reductive physicalism.

Yes, but that's not what I meant. You experience as the fact of *being*
the 'modulated' (differentiated) substrate, not *observing* it (i.e. as
information). You do of course observe it, but that then is 2nd-order,
the relational level of information, not the substrate level of
existence. This is why I insist that differentiation is as 'primitive'
as the substrate, in the sense that there is nothing in the notion of

Re: Are First Person prime?

[1Z]

David Nyman wrote:

> 1Z wrote:
>
> > 1) the don't seem to have, and they *are* what they seem
> > 2) they are incommunicable in mathematical, and hence
> > sructrural terms.
>
> 1) Well, this obviously depends on the subject of the seeming. To me,
> 'red', 'middle C', or 'bitter' all *do* seem to possess a sort of
> directly sensed 'vibrational' quality that is essential, for example,
> to why I would feel they were 'like' or 'unlike' other colours, sounds,
> or tastes, or where they would *subjectively* lie in 'spectra'
> analogous (but not identical) to those of 'physical' properties.

They have some mathematical/structural properties, but they a
re underdefined by those properties -- theya
re far from the wholes tory.

> 2) They are by definition incommunicable in mathematical or any other
> language, but this does not in my *experience* equate to their being
> 'structureless' in *feel*.

I disagree. I can discern no structure *within* the taste
of lemon or the colour red. There are relations between
tastes, colours and so on, but they underdiefine the tastes
and colurs themselves.

> If I attempt to imagine what the 'bare
> substrate' would *feel* like, I am frankly at a loss because it *seems*
> to be devoid of content - what would there be to be 'felt'? But beyond
> the substrate we have the equally fundamental IMO notion of
> differentiation (a neutral term I'm using because it isn't committed to
> a purely 'physical' view) and it seems to me that the intersection of
> substrate and differentiation could well *be* the direct experience of
> content.

The substrate could be differnentiated into properties
that have no further reducible structure -- ie qualities.

>  I also call such content 'structure' because it is
> differentiated but if you'd rather reserve this for the relational
> idea, so be it.



> > Correlation is not identity.
>
> Precisely. But the correlation of qualia with structurally
> differentiated 'physical' phenomena leads to the intuition that qualia
> themselves may be an *experiential synthesis* based on structural
> differentiation of the same bare ('property-less' in your own terms)
> substrate.

What is an  experiential synthesis ?

> The substrate, as you say elsewhere, provides enduring
> existence within which the properties manifest and change. I'm
> suggesting that the *existence* of the differentiated substrate
> *synthesises* the qualia (i.e. they entail multiple differentiations)
> and the mutual *relations* of the differentiated substrate *are* the
> 'properties'.
>
> BTW, when I meditate on a substrate whose differentiation resolves into
> 'me' 'you' and other persons, I tend to 'take it personally'.  The
> 'impersonal' gaps between persons are IMO no different in kind than the
> gaps between my own experiences at different times, places, branches of
> MW, etc.

I have no idea why you would think that.

> The substrate is in these terms a single 'potential
> experiencer'.

It's a potential everything. Why an experiencer in particular ?

> The actual experiences it possesses are then a function
> of an infinite network of differentiation. I've said something
> elsewhere about the implications of this for the perception of time
> both as discrete, rather than totalised, experiences, and as a
> 'dynamic' quale, mediated by discrete 'capsules' of locally-delimited
> information.
>
> > Mutual relations are not internal relations. Purple
> > lies between red and blue, but being told that
> > doens't tell you what purple looks like unless you
> > already know what red and blue look like. Realtional
> > information about colours does not convey the colours
> > themselves.
>
> Nothing can 'tell you what purple looks like'. Purple is a medium that
> carries information, not information itself. However, the *feel* of
> purple may seem related to the *feel* of blue. Isn't this ultimately a
> matter for each 'seemer' to meditate on?
>
> > If that were the case, there would be no HP, and threfore no
> > need for any first-personness worth arguing about.
>
> I don't think that the HP is a useful idea.

That's hardly relevant! Problems are problems. They
don't slink away if you accuse them of uselessness.

>  I think there is existence
> and this is something I 'take personally' because it *seems* to
> manifest as me, and other mes, all of whom I find it intuitive to
> conceive as subsets of a much Vaster me, with 'conscious regions' (e.g.
> 'me yesterday', 'me on the branch where I didn't have that last beer',
> 'Peter five minutes ago') and 'unconscious regions' (e.g. 'me after
> that last beer', interstellar space, a rock).

Ontology is all about what you take as fundamental,
and why. Your grounds for taking the me/not-me
distinction as fundamental seem subjective and inutitive rather
than logical.

>  The EP is the observable
> behaviour (information content) of all this, insofar as we have access
> to and can make sense of it.


There must be a reason why the Ep is easy.

>

Re: Are First Person prime?

[Brent Meeker]

1Z wrote:
> 
> David Nyman wrote:
...
>>Well, if 'experience' is the fact of *being* differentiable existence,
>>and 'the physical' is the observable relations thereof, then both
>>ultimately 'supervene' on there being something rather than nothing.
> 
> 
> No. There being something rather than nothing is only
> 1 buit of  information: not enough for a universe to
> supervene on.

This may not be the problem you think it is.  In quantum mechanics there can 
be negative information and there are some (speculative) theories of the 
universe that have it originating from at state with only one bit of 
information.  Then complexity we see is due to the separation of entangled 
states by the inflation of the universe.  Unitary evolution of the 
wave-function of the universe must preserve information.  In these theories, 
as my friend Yonatan Fishman put it, "The universe is just nothing, rearranged."

Brent Meeker

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Re: Are First Person prime?

[David Nyman]

1Z wrote:

On 8/13/06, 1Z <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> > but as I say, I can't help 'taking
> > personally' the existent thing from which I and all persons are
> > emanating. I think, imaginatvely, that if one pictures a 'block
> > universe', Platonia, MW, or any non-process conception of reality, this
> > is more intuitive,
>
> I don't see why it should be. It does not conform to our
> experience.

> >  because everything is 'just there' - superposed, as
> > it were. So, sure there's a 'layer' at which the individual 1st-person
> > 'emerges', but it's taking everything else 'working together' to
> > manifest it. So in this sense, for me, it's all 'personal'. But maybe
> > not for you.

This business of what 'conforms to our experience' I think is fairly
deep. I used to be adamant that, whether or not 'timeless' theories
could be shown to be true or false on any other grounds, that they
simply didn't 'conform to our experience'. I was, however, also
suspicious of my own doubts: after all, we can't feel the earth moving,
and everyone knows you need to keep pushing things or otherwise they
grind to a halt. So I tried to go on an imaginative journey that might
take me into this apparently static realm but nevertheless preserve
something like 'what we experience'.

In my mind's eye I placed myself in the various 'points of view' that
'timelessly' exist within these structures. What would I see? Well,
whatever was manifested to me in virtue of 'my' local capabilities and
the perceptual information available to this 'me'. Would these
experiences be discrete, or would they be overlaid or 'smeared' with
information from other perspectives? Well, it seemed to me that what is
characteristic about our experience, what makes it seem 'sequential',
is precisely what we *can no longer* or *can't yet* see, the
information we *don't* have access to. And so despite the 'superposed'
existence of these other states, delimitations of access to information
would act to make each capsule discrete. All the capsules capable of it
are 'conscious', but the localisation of information prevents there
being a 'totalising' point of view.

The next puzzle for me was why any of this would 'feel' dynamic. This
IMO is a subset of the qualia issue - i.e. why does anything feel
anyhow? Now, given that the arena under consideration consists in a
both a 'substrate' and the structures within it, it has both
distributed and all-at-once aspects. Could it not be the the dynamic
temporal 'feel' is the tension between these two? All dynamism derives
from contrast, and this seems to offer it. Putting these elements
together (over a period of time involving many 'thought voyages') has
re-aligned my intuition to make the scenario seem more plausible, at
least experientially.

Finally we come to the question of all these 'mes'. They all exist, and
they're all conscious (the ones that are, that is). What's different
about the other parts of the structure? Why aren't *they* conscious?
They're just organised differently, just like the parts *within*
persons that aren't conscious (ever), or the part that just went to
sleep, or died. So the whole structure, reflexively, *to itself*, is
manifesting consciously, unconsciously, and no doubt every nuance in
between and beyond. That's my capital-P Personal. I strongly suspect
that you find this way of thinking uncongenial, which is absolutely
fine by me. But I've tried to describe it as clearly as I can, and
perhaps we can do no better than leave it at that.

> That isn't at all clear to me - mainly because you
> are nto makign the all-improtant distinction between
> structures-structures and qualia-structures.

The qualia-structures are the fact of *being* the differentiated
substrate, and they manifest as 'feel', as distinct from 'possessing
properties'. The structure-structures are the observed relations
derived from these experiences, which also give us our relational or
'property' view of things.

Why is it not possible that *being* a substrate differentiated in a
particular way just *feels like* a particular existential/ experiential
quality to the differentiated substrate in question? I find the choice
of vocabulary here almost impossible, because it's not the sort of
thing we're used to trying to communicate. But we're trying to
comprehend a sort of reflexivity, a 'seeming-to-itself'. How would you
prefer to characterise it? Is it critical to your conception that
qualia are individual irreducible 'feels' and are subjectively neither
analysable or synthesisable even to the 'feeler'? I feel that we're
getting to the point here where the problem stems from interpreting our
personal experience in characteristically different ways, and this may
simply be irreconcilable. As you say:

> I disagree. I can discern no structure *within* the taste
> of lemon or the colour red. There are relations between
> tastes, colours and so on, but they underdiefine the tastes
> and colurs themselves.

I agree about the underd

Re: Dual-Aspect Science (a spawn of the roadmap)

[Colin Geoffrey Hales]

David Nyman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
>
> Yes, and I despair (almost) of remedying this, even if I knew how. My
own attempts at linguistic 'clarity' seemed destined only to muddy the
waters further, especially as I'm really trying to translate from
personal modes that are often more visual/ kinaesthetic than verbal,
gestalt than analytic.

I have these very same difficulties and I try my very hardest to use the
minimal number of most-accessible words in their popular mode. Not always
successfully...but you have to start somewhere. My origins are as an
engineer immersed in the natural (electrical) world. Thousands of hours of
waiting during commissioning, thinking for a couple of decades to
surface and try to describe what you have seen after this...is a
challenge.

>
> That said, I rather like your 'adverbial' mode, which I think has also
cropped up in other contexts (didn't Whitehead attempt something of the
sort with his process view?) Nominalisation/ reification creates
conceptual confusions, embedded assumptions spawn others, as in all
language to do with time, which is already loaded with the assumption of
experiential dynamism, and hence can do nothing to help explain it.
>

ASIDE, for the record, dual aspect science (from the previous post).  I)
APPEARANCE ASPECT. Depictions (statistics) of regularity (correlations of
agreed 'objects' within) in appearances
II) STRUCTURE ASPECT. Depictions (Statistics) of structure of an
underlying natural world based on organisations of one or more posited
structural primitives.

Both have equal access to qualia as evidence. Qualia are evidence for
both. Whatever the structure is, scientists are made of it and it must
simultaneously a) deliver qualia and all the rest of the structure in the
universe(II) and b) deliver the contents of qualia (appearances) that
result in our correlations of appearances that we think of as empirical
laws(I). This is a complete consistent set of natural laws, none of which
literally 'are' the universe but are merely 'about' it.

back to David's words re language...'adverbial' descriptions:

Nicholas Rescher has wrested process thought from the Whitehead
sequestration of it. Rescher uses the adverbial mode quite convincingly in
his latest works. Thank goodness...far too much religious/cultish detritus
smattered throughout the Whitehead camp. They have no right to 'own' the
process view. I hope those days are over now.

The adverbial depiction is very apt as it stops us being deluded into the
assumption of 'nouns' and 'things'. In day to day life nouns and things
are very very useful, but the assumption that just because our language
has them and we have agreed to their presence in the universe's
appearance...does not mean that the language tokens are actually
instantiated!

Adverbial descriptions are far more general in that they easily unify all
natural world behaviour as a single process that can deal with 'verby
things' like rainstorms, that are inherently processual and apparent lumpy
things (like lions) that behave 'nounly'. Qualia naturally fit into this
idea. There is no thing 'red' in your head. The universe is behaving
red-ly in your head. NOTE: An ideal object 'red' may be said to exist in
'platonia'. But so what! This is about _our_ universe, not some
abstraction.

> My own hastily contrived usages were an attempt to expose the implicit
(and hence generally conceptually invisible) holding of the world 'at
arm's length' by the objectifying effect of 3rd person language, which
simultaneusly relegates 1st-person to a subsidiary role, to the extent
that some even feel impelled to deny its existence, or resort to bizarre
ontolgies in an attempt to 'reintroduce' it. Where McGinn and Chomsky hold
that it is the analytic/ synthetic modes of language that puts 1st person
beyond our ability to conceptualise, I feel that the
unacknowledged consensual projection of an 'objective model' as
> 'reality' has more to do with it.
>
> My belief has been that restoring 1st person to some sort of centrality
would be part of the antidote, and I haven't yet (quite) lost hope on this
score. I look forward to the fruits of your own efforts in this regard.
>
> David

Your plea has not gone unheard. V.S. Ramachandran said "...the need to
reconcile the first and third person accounts of the universe...is the
single most important problem in science." (Phantoms in the Brain .229)

and there's McGinn in 'the mysterious flame' where he makes a convincing
case for us having a profoundly inadequate view of matter. I agree! I'd
say there isn't any such 'thing'! :-)

Note Ramachandran is not saying 'physics' or 'neuroscience' or
'consciousness studies' is affected but SCIENCE, all of it. He is
absolutely right. Qualia are our entire source of scientific evidence. We
have nothing else. They are an appearance (as a measurement supplied to us
inside our heads by the a

RE: Interested in thoughts on this excerpt from Martin Rees

[Stathis Papaioannou]

Russell Standish writes:

> Precisely my point!
> 
> On Tue, Aug 08, 2006 at 08:42:04AM -0700, 1Z wrote:
> > 
> > 
> > Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
> > 
> > > By increasing the measure locally in our universe, are you making no 
> > > difference, or only a
> > > small amount of difference to the measure overall in Platonia?
> > 
> > You can't "make a difference" in Platonia. There is no time there,
> > no change, and no causality.

It's like making a difference in a material, deterministic world, which we 
assume has time, change 
and causality aplenty. 

Stathis Papaioannou
_
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RE: Interested in thoughts on this excerpt from Martin Rees

[Stathis Papaioannou]

Russell Standish writes:

> Precisely my point!
> 
> On Tue, Aug 08, 2006 at 08:42:04AM -0700, 1Z wrote:
> > 
> > 
> > Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
> > 
> > > By increasing the measure locally in our universe, are you making no 
> > > difference, or only a
> > > small amount of difference to the measure overall in Platonia?
> > 
> > You can't "make a difference" in Platonia. There is no time there,
> > no change, and no causality.

It's like making a difference in a material, deterministic world, which we 
assume has time, change 
and causality aplenty. 

Stathis Papaioannou
_
Be one of the first to try Windows Live Mail.
http://ideas.live.com/programpage.aspx?versionId=5d21c51a-b161-4314-9b0e-4911fb2b2e6d
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