JOINING post
Hello Everyone, I am a 22 year old male who majored in computer science. I have some level of familiarity with Ultimate Ensemble, Digital physics, the many-worlds interpretation, as well as philosophy. Some people that have influenced my ideas include: Max Tegmark, David Deutsch, Wei Dai, Konrad Zuse, Daniel Dennett, Burkhard Heim, Stephen Wolfram, and Jürgen Schmidhuber. I've recently put together a cohesive paper regarding my ideas which can be found here http://home.gcn.cx/users/jason/ideas.html I am curious about other's opinions regarding one of my ideas in particular, that observers are far far more likely to find themselves in a universe that exhibits qualities of quantum mechanics (namely many worlds). This is because the number of observers will grow at an extremely high exponential rate compared to observers in a universe with only one history line. Along this same thought, could this also explain why the universe's initial conditions were extremely close to the maximum without causing an early gravitational collapse? Having more matter means more possibility for interactions, and therefore the universe will split at an even higher rate, causing universes with maximum initial conditions to quickly overtake universes with a lesser abundance of particles. In a sense, the number of particles in a many-worlds universe would determine the base in the exponential function that calculates how quickly the universe splits. Look forward to hearing your thoughts, 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 [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: The Meaning of Life
Le 02-janv.-07, à 13:59, Stathis Papaioannou a écrit : Mark Peaty writes: SP: ' In the end, what is right is an irreducible personal belief, which you can try to change by appeal to emotions or by example, but not by appeal to logic or empirical facts. And in fact I feel much safer that way: if someone honestly believed that he knew what was right as surely as he knew 2+2=4, he would be a very dangerous person. Religious fanatics are not dangerous because they want to do evil, but because they want to do good. ' MP: I agree with this, saving only that, on a 'numbers' basis, there are those whose personal evolution takes them beyond the dynamic of 'good' or 'evil' into the domain of power for its own sake. This entails complete loss of empathic ability and I think it could be argued that such a person is 'legislating' himself out of the human species. MP: I think a key point with 'irreducible personal belief' is that the persons in question need to acknowledge the beliefs as such and take responsibility for them. I believe we have to point this out, whenever we get the opportunity, because generally most people are reluctant to engage in analysis of their own beliefs, in public anyway. I think part of the reason for this is the cultural climate [meme-scape?] in which Belief in a G/god/s or uncritical Faith are still held to be perfectly respectable. This cultural climate is what Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennet have been criticising in recent books and articles. SP: 'I am not entirely convinced that comp is true' MP: At the moment I am satisfied that 'comp' is NOT true, certainly in any format that asserts that 'integers' are all that is needed. 'Quantum' is one thing, but 'digital' is quite another :-) The main problem [fact I would prefer to say] is that existence is irreducible whereas numbers or Number be dependent upon something/s existing. I have fallen into sometimes using the term comp as short for computationalism as something picked up from Bruno. On the face of it, computationalism seems quite sensible: the best theory of consciousness and the most promising candidate for producing artificial intelligence/consciousness (if they are the same thing: see below). Assuming comp, Bruno goes through 8 steps in his Universal Dovetailer Argument (UDA), eg. in this paper: http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/publications/SANE2004MARCHAL.htm All of the steps are relatively straightforward until step 8, I am glad to hear that. which invokes an argument discovered by Bruno and Tim Maudlin demonstrating that there is a problem with the theory that the mental supervenes on the physical. It seems that to be consistent you have to allow either that any computation, including the supposedly conscious ones, supervenes on any physical activity, I'm afraid this does not follow from Maudlin (1989) or me (1988). It is more related to the Putnam, Chalmers, Mallah (in the list) implementation problem. Maudlin shows that if comp is true and if physical supervenience is true then consciousness supervenes on no physical activity at all. From this absurdity he derives a problem for comp. Having comp as main hypothesis, I derive from such absurdity the difficulty of maintaining the physical supervenience theory. But even with just quantum mechanics, the notion of physical supervenience is not entirely clear. or that computations do not supervene on physical activity at all but are complete in themselves, consciousness included, by virtue of their status as Platonic objects. Bruno concludes that the latter is the case, but Maudlin appears to take both possibilities as obviously absurd and thus presents the paper as a problem with computationalism itself. Well, if you read carefully Maudlin, he concludes that throwing out comp does not solve his problem. He is aware that the problem is more related to physical supervenience than with comp. What is strange, with Maudlin, is that he wrote an excellent book on Bell's inequality and he seems aware that matter is not an easy concept too (so I don't understand why he feels so sorry for abandoning physical supervenience, when such a concept is not even clear once you understand that quantum matter is not well defined. MP: Why are we not zombies? The answer is in the fact of self-referencing. In our case [as hominids] there are peculiarities of construction and function arisen from our evolutionary history, but there is nothing in principle to deny self-awareness from a silicon-electronic entity that embodied sufficient details within a model of self in the world. The existence of such a model would constitute its mind, broadly speaking, and the updating of the model of self in the world would be the experience of self awareness. What it would be like TO BE the updating of such a model of self in the world is something we will probably have to wait awhile to be told :-) It seems
Re: The Meaning of Life
Le 03-janv.-07, à 03:46, Stathis Papaioannou a écrit : Bruno Marchal writes: It gets cumbersome to qualify everything with given the appearance of a physical world. As I have said before, I am not entirely convinced that comp is true, Nor am I. (Remind that no machine can, from its first person point of view, be entirely convinced that comp is true. Comp is an axiom for a theory, and the beauty of it is that comp can explain why it has to be a guess. The yes doctor has to be an act of faith. It is (meta?)-theological. precisely because because such ideas as a conscious computation supervening on any physical process This does not follow at all. We have already have some discussion about this and since then I have a more clear-cut argument. Unfortunately the argument is based on some result in mathematical logic concerning the distinction between real numbers and integers. We can come back on this in another thread. For a logician there is a case that real number are a simplification of the notion of natural number. An identical polynomial equation can be turing universal when the variables are conceived to belong to the integers, but is never turing universal when the variables belong to the reals. Well, a case can be made that the vacuum or on no physical process may be considered absurd. This would be fair enough in case the idea that consciousness supervenes on physical processes was not absurd in the first place. In all your post you do assume comp. For comp to be false you have to assume actual physical infinities and give a reason why consciousness supervenes on that. But in some reasoning it seems clear to me you talk life if comp is true, when referring to the functional role of neurotransmitters, the fact that slight change in the brain are permitted, etc. Standard computationalism says that mental processes supervene on physical processes, and moreover that these physical processes with their attendant mental processes may be emulated by a digital computer. Hmmm OK (say). The problems with this theory are: 1. The implementation problem: everything can implement a computation if you look at it the right way. Normally this is of no consequence - mapping the vibration of atoms in a rock to a word processing program would be at least as difficult as building a conventional computer and writing the software for it - but if computations can be conscious, then the conscious computations are hiding all around us. Here I disagree. This has never been proved, except that in quantum field theory a case can be developed for justifying that the quantum vacuum quantum-simulates the whole quantum multiverse. But this has nothing to do with comp. It is true with any realistic non collapse interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. Actually it less a problem for a computationalist because this is equivalent to some homogeneous addition of universal dovetailer everywhere (if that exists, which is not even the case). There is no reason this would change any relative and internal measure. But with my argument, anything physical, including the vacuum, is emergent from the dreams, so there is no Putnam-Chalmers-Mallah problem for comp. I explained this to Jacques Mallah some years ago. 2. The Maudlin/Marchal argument showing that even if you specify that a computer must handle counterfactuals in order to avoid the trivial conclusion (1), you end up concluding that physical processes are irrelevant to consciousness. You (BM) think that (1) is absurd but (2) is OK; Maudlin thinks that (1) and (2) are both absurd, and that therefore computationalism is a flawed theory. You would like to keep computationalism but drop the computers, i.e. the supervenience thesis. I am not certain which I would rather drop: computationalism or the idea of disembodied consciousness. I am quite willing to drop comp, once I get a real flaw. Now I have almost never take seriously the supervenience thesis, if only because it leads to an insoluble problem (more or less the one called mind-body problem in the literature). Also, one of my motivation since the beginning is to get an explanation for the appearance of matter. Physicists have developed, through Aristotelian philosophy, a methodology for progressing without addressing that question. It has been a powerful methodological idea, but it is flawful for those who ask themselves what is the nature of matter. I am worried how much it has been easy for physicist to accept pure non sense like wave collapse or Bohr unrealistic attitude. It works for building ships and bombs, not for getting a better understanding of what happen. It is quite possible, for example, that there is something special about the structure of the brain which leads to consciousness, and a digital computer will not be able to copy this, even if it copies 3rd person observable behaviour. Against that idea is
Re: The Meaning of Life
Le 03-janv.-07, à 04:00, Mark Peaty a écrit : SP: 'using the term comp as short for computationalism as something picked up from Bruno. On the face of it, computationalism seems quite sensible: the best theory of consciousness and the most promising candidate for producing artificial intelligence/consciousness' That is what I thought 'comp' meant. My approach to this is to adhere, as much as possible, to plain and simple English. Not being a 'mathematician' I stick with my type of sceptical method. To me this does not seem deeply problematic although is does of course limit the scope of conversations I can participate in. As far as I can see, Bruno's grand scheme depends on 'assume', like the economists do. Unfortunately that which is assumed remains, I believe, unprovable. Like any theory. By definition we cannot prove axioms in the theory, except trivially by one line argument: a proof that the number zero has no predecessor will look like see the first axiom. The axiom are just the minimal assumption we need to get the interesting propositions. If I could prove the axioms from something simpler, I would take those simpler things as axioms. Now, many people does take as axiom the unprovable assertion that there is a physical universe. I don't. I am not atheist about the universe, but I am agnostic. I believe less in a primitive physical universe (especially as an explanation of physics) than in more general god-like or mathematical-like reality. Furthermore there are deep, common sense, problems which undermine all these theories of universal emulation possibilities, never mind those potentially lethal :-) teleporting/fax holidays and cryogenic time shifts. Life is risky. Planes are also potentially lethal. Going out of the mother's womb is actually 100% lethal. People who cryogenizes, does it in general at the end of their life. For a computationalist practioners, refusing an artificial brain when your biological ,one is ill, will be considered as lethal! Like today some say that refusing, for religious reason, a tranfer of blood, is lethal. The biggest hurdle is the requirement for infinite computing ability. Only if you presuppose the need of a physical universe for the computations. But my point is that once you assume standard comp you have to drop out the idea of the *need* of a physical universe. No need for high math to understand this. The UDA is enough. The arithmetical UDA is needed just to derive the physics from the numbers, not to understand we have to derive physics from the numbers. This is simply the recognition that all measurements are approximations so the teleporter/fax machine could only ever send an approximate copy of me to whatever destination duty or holiday dreamings might lead me. Still, it is probable that I, as subjective experiencer, would not notice most anomalies, particularly if trying to fill in the temporal gaps caused by Bruno's gratuitous delays in reading me back out of his archive :-) This limitation hits all the 'Matrix' type scenarios as well: the emulation system would require essentially infinite computing capacity to reproduce any useful world that a real person inhabits. If on the other hand the Matrix is only concerned to make A world, its virtual reality inhabitants might be sustained [I am admitting this as a possibility] until they started engaging in real science. As I understand things the denizens of a Matrix type world would start to find real anomalies in their 'reality' unless the matrix machine could operate at a fineness of resolution unattainable by any experimental method the matrixians could devise. Actually you are completely right here, and in total accordance with comp. This is a subtle point which I have explain to Brett Hall (on this list and on the for list). With comp we can measure somehow our degree of dreaming. See the following argument in ten steps from the list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/everything-list@eskimo.com/msg05272.html There would be much less, or even no problem at all if they were all believers in 'Intelligent Design' of course. [I can put that very rudely as: the problem is not 'If our mind were simple enough to understand then we would be too dumb to understand it' but rather 'If Intelligent Design were really true then we have been designed to be so dumb that it really doesn't matter!'] Yeah... OK. Re Platonic objects - I think this is illusory. The numbers that people write down and think about are words in the language/s of logico-mathematics. But here I do disagree. Most mathematical truth, and the whole of arithmetical truth has nothing to do with language, nor anything to do with logic. You are confusing theories (of number, say) and what the subject-matter of those theories. Theories are related to language and logic, but the object of the theories is a priori independent. This is clearer
Re: The Meaning of Life
Le 03-janv.-07, à 05:24, Brent Meeker wrote (to Mark Peaty) Remember that Bruno is a logician. When he writes infinite he really means infinite - not really, really big as physicists do. Almost all numbers are bigger than 10^120, which is the biggest number that appears in physics (and it's wrong). It is wrong? What number are you thinking about ? (I'm just curious). A case can be made that 10^154 occurs in physics through the relationship between String Theories and the Monster Group. More exactly: --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ 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 [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~--- also equal to: Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
RE: The Meaning of Life
Bruno Marchal writes: which invokes an argument discovered by Bruno and Tim Maudlin demonstrating that there is a problem with the theory that the mental supervenes on the physical. It seems that to be consistent you have to allow either that any computation, including the supposedly conscious ones, supervenes on any physical activity, I'm afraid this does not follow from Maudlin (1989) or me (1988). It is more related to the Putnam, Chalmers, Mallah (in the list) implementation problem. Maudlin shows that if comp is true and if physical supervenience is true then consciousness supervenes on no physical activity at all. From this absurdity he derives a problem for comp. Having comp as main hypothesis, I derive from such absurdity the difficulty of maintaining the physical supervenience theory. But even with just quantum mechanics, the notion of physical supervenience is not entirely clear. Maudlin starts off with the assumption that a recording being conscious is obviously absurd, hence the need for the conscious machine to handle counterfactuals. If it were not for this assumption then there would not have been much point to the rest of the paper. Actually, Putnam and Chalmers also think that the idea of any physical system implementing any computation is absurd. I am not sure of Mallah's position (he seems to have disappeared from the list after I joined), but Hal Finney seemed to give some credence to the idea, and outside the list Hans Moravec and Greg Egan seem also to at least entertain the possibility that it is true. I would be interested if anyone is aware of any other references. Although you have clearly stated that the two ideas - consciousness supervening on all physical processes and consciousness supervening on no physical process - are completely different I think they are related in that in both cases matter is irrelevant to consciousness, and we may as well say that what is important is computation as platonic object, not its accidental correlation with (putative) real world processes. They are also closely related in that the main argument against them is that's absurd. A second argument against them is also the same: the difficulty explaining why we don't suddenly find ourselves in white rabbit universes. or that computations do not supervene on physical activity at all but are complete in themselves, consciousness included, by virtue of their status as Platonic objects. Bruno concludes that the latter is the case, but Maudlin appears to take both possibilities as obviously absurd and thus presents the paper as a problem with computationalism itself. Well, if you read carefully Maudlin, he concludes that throwing out comp does not solve his problem. He is aware that the problem is more related to physical supervenience than with comp. What is strange, with Maudlin, is that he wrote an excellent book on Bell's inequality and he seems aware that matter is not an easy concept too (so I don't understand why he feels so sorry for abandoning physical supervenience, when such a concept is not even clear once you understand that quantum matter is not well defined. Throwing out comp throws out physical supervenience as well, so it can eliminate the problem. Keeping comp and throwing out physical supervenience is the tricky thing. MP: Why are we not zombies? The answer is in the fact of self-referencing. In our case [as hominids] there are peculiarities of construction and function arisen from our evolutionary history, but there is nothing in principle to deny self-awareness from a silicon-electronic entity that embodied sufficient details within a model of self in the world. The existence of such a model would constitute its mind, broadly speaking, and the updating of the model of self in the world would be the experience of self awareness. What it would be like TO BE the updating of such a model of self in the world is something we will probably have to wait awhile to be told :-) It seems reasonable to theorise that if an entity could behave like a conscious being, it must be a conscious being. It is the no-zombie theory. One question is: could behave like for how long? Now this question makes sense only for those who take the physical supervenience for granted. But then with comp, accepting my argument + Maudlin (say), there is no problem at all: consciousness of one individual supervene on an infinity of immaterial computations, never on anything singularized, by Matter or anything else. Matter's role consists in assembling coherent dream so that consciousness can manifest themselves relatively to other consciousness. The essence of matter relies in the possibility of inter-subjective constructions. However, the theory does not have the strength of logical necessity. It is quite possible that if nature had electronic circuits to play with, beings displaying
Re: The Meaning of Life
Le 03-janv.-07, à 06:39, Mark Peaty a écrit : BM: ' (= Bruno Marchal, not Brent Meeker) OK, except I don't see what you mean by on a number basis. We know that number have a lot of quantitative interesting relationships, but after Godel, Solovay etc.. we do know that numbers have astonishing qualitative relationship to (like the hypostases to mention it). ' MP: No no no, sorry, this is just me being colloquial. Nothing deep or important was intended! :-) I was responding to a *possible implication* in Stathis's statement about religious fanatics. I thought it was worth emphasising that, along with the deluded majority who think they are 'doing what is right', there are also those whose motivation is strictly instrumental and manipulative and who find willing collaborators amongst the naive fanatics. This situation is not confined to 'religious' organisations of course but to any sub-culture in which the description of the world has fallen into a closed loop. We agree on this. BM: 'Except that Dawking and Dennet fall in their own trap, and perpetuates the myth of a physical universe as an explanation. They continue to bury the mind/body problem under the rug.' MP: Well I think that we will rapidly reach our 'agree to differ' line with this one. I think physical just means both extended and able to be measured. I can agree with that. Actually can be measured is enough. Some measure will then be interpreted as extensions. But OK, sorry for not always cutting the air genuinely :-) If this is really what you mean by physical we could be closer than you think at first sight. What I don't believe in are the primitive material token. For example I do even believe there is a (comp) standard model of particles. But their token-materiality and primitivity is a deformed view from inside arithmetics. As such it is fairly close to self-evidently true, in my book. OK, so that is an 'anthropic' outlook but I exist and seem to be some sort of anthropos or whatever [sorry I never studied Greek and only ever achieved 35% in my one year of formal Latin studies :-]. It seems to me that physical is as physical does; as I wrote responding to Stathis, number is theory is just that - theory. See my preceding post. I agree to disagree on you on this :) It is incredibly useful in all manner of practical applications as well as effective in keeping lots of people off the streets doing amazing logical/arithmetical things for interest and entertainment's sake. I watch with awe and admiration, but I remain careful to acknowledge that a description is a description not the thing it is describing. I also consider that we have to distinguish a description and the thing it is describing. I could explain you without *much math* why the number reality can be shown to transcend all languages and theories, showing how much those things are different. Existence per se is ultimately mysterious Even number existence seems to me highly mysterious. But with the comp hyp there is a possibility that both the mystery of seemingly existing matter and the (really existing) mind can be explained from the mystery of numbers. This is not really a reduction (only if you have a reductionist view on number and machine at the start). and our experience of being here now is essentially paradoxical: the experience is what it is like to be the updating of a model of self in the world [always 'my' model] but we conflate the experience with actually BEING here now, when the experience is much more limited than that. I do agree. It would be much truer to say, I think, that this consciousness I take so much for granted is ABOUT my being here now. OK. It is coherent with my view that consciousness is somehow an instinctive belief in a reality. As much as anything I like to characterise it as: the registration of difference between what my brain predicted for perceiving and doing as opposed to what actually happened. And I do agree with this. My point is just that, once we take comp seriously enough, there is case that physics is no more the fundamental science. What remains? Since 1970 I call it (in order) biology, mathematics, biology, computer science, metamathematics, biology, theology, biology, theology, psychology (suggested by Delahaye), and I'm going back to (pagan) theology, at least in this list, for a time. But the name is not important, or should not be important for those who search understanding (in place of propaganda). Like you, I think, I am uneasy with all form of reductionism, Unlike you perhaps, I disagree with reductionist conceptions of the natural numbers and machines ... Truth about numbers and machine are provably not subject to complete or reductionist languages and theories. I am not pretending this is entirely obvious, and it is related to technical stuffs (which are easier than many people think, btw).
Re: JOINING post
Hi Jason, Welcome, Le 03-janv.-07, à 11:07, Jason a écrit : http://home.gcn.cx/users/jason/ideas.html I will take a look once I get enough time. It seems you belong to the ASSA group, that is you accept some form of bayesianism for fundamental probability question. Hope you will wake them up ... (ASSA = absolute self-sampling assumption). You should read Nick Bostrom and the posts by Hal Finney, Wei Dai and some others in the list archive) ... Apparently we agree on mathematicalism ... 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 [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: The Meaning of Life
SP: 'Recall that ordinary life does not involve anything like perfect copying of your brain from moment to moment. Thousands of neurons are dying all the time and you don't even notice, and it is possible to infarct a substantial proportion of your brain and finish up with just a bit of a limp. So although a copy of your brain will need to meet some minimum standard this standard will fall far short of perfect copying at the quantum level.' MP: Yes this bit is actually quite scary if you think about it too much! :-0 Maybe true wisdom does indeed entail imbibing a certain amount of ethanol each day, [medicinal dry Red according to St Paul I believe] just to smooth out any awkward gaps in the transcription! However, the main thrust of my assertion about infinite resources was more to do with the need, in making a copy of something, to go well within the tolerances when taking the initial measurements because the digital copy, once made, has got to provide ALL the information necessary for reconstitution and this involves not simply something admittedly BIG but static, but in fact all sufficient information to reproduce all salient changes and transformations occurring at the time of read out. Admittedly the traveller will not be aware of many discrepancies because, to paraphrase your statement above, the process of living is inherently noisy anyway. The communication utility's engineers will have to ensure that all measuring, storing, transmission, and reconstitution processes operate to a resolution finer than the normal entropic noise of life because they will not know just which features/life processes are salient at the copying time. SP: 'You don't actually have to emulate the entire universe, just enough to fool its inhabitants. For example, you don't need to emulate the appearance of a snowflake in the Andromeda galaxy except in the unlikely event that someone went to have a look at it.' MP: I think this turns on how smart the inhabitants are, which ultimately comes down to whether or not they have discovered scientific method or not. Scientific method makes the species much smarter - despite themselves! If the matrixian species discovers scientific method, the matrix maker [Nerd, the Holy One] will have to lift his/her/its game to be able to cover all scientific questions the matrixians ask. That will not be easy! I am not sure if what I am saying relates well to what Colin Hales was saying about 1st person awareness and the nature of scientific endeavour, I don't think I really understood Colin's argument. I am fairly confident here though that scientific method imposes a discipline upon sentient observers that provokes the asking of truly interesting questions which eventually must lead to the true 'edges' of the practically testable world. The Nerd god will be forced to expend exponentially greater resources each time the matrixians make a new discovery in basic science otherwise his children, the matrixians, will come to smell a Rat. SP: 'They don't exist as material objects but they are true independently of whether anyone discovers mathematical truths. The number 17 is prime because it's prime, not because someone discovered it was prime.' MP: True, but it doesn't EXIST until someone or something discovers it. This is somewhat analogous to the tree falling in the forest of the deaf or absent. My take on the real world is that the Existent, or the existing [for those with eliminativist leanings], has/have a not-quite-opposite. The two are somehow not the same but they interpenetrate in a dynamic way that amounts to a constant adjustment, consolidation and simplification of the one which I think entails a constant adjustment, diversification, spreading and compexifying of the other. If that sounds bad and not 'well formed' then you are right and it is probably much worse than you fear but who cares! this is metaphysics noumenal ontology not boring old mathematics! [sorry, just joking! I'm adjusting the medication at the moment but it's all under control :-] I think the upshot of this is that quantity in my version of the real world goes something like 'one, two, three, many ... ' and so forth but each of those words applies to what is only an approximation anyway. Exactness doesn't come into it and the initial separation, THIS TIME, so to speak, was about what we might call 12+ billion years ago, if you get my drift. And why did it happen? Because it could I suppose, but do we really care? For me the central feature of this is not numbers, counting and so forth because that is just stuff that people do, and some a lot more than others. For me the central feature is that what I have described constitutes connectivity and the true universal matrix. The One - which might be called the Existent - broke or split, and started collapsing . It has never stopped collapsing but is still all connected. The Other - what
Re: The Meaning of Life
Mark Peaty wrote: SP: 'using the term comp as short for computationalism as something picked up from Bruno. On the face of it, computationalism seems quite sensible: the best theory of consciousness and the most promising candidate for producing artificial intelligence/consciousness' What Bruno calls comp isn't standard computaitonalism, it has an element of Platonism. --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ 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 [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: The Meaning of Life
Stathis Papaioannou wrote: Although you have clearly stated that the two ideas - consciousness supervening on all physical processes and consciousness supervening on no physical process - are completely different I think they are related in that in both cases matter is irrelevant to consciousness, In the second case, matter is relevant to consc. since it is relevant to physical processes. --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ 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 [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: The Meaning of Life
Bruno Marchal wrote: Le 03-janv.-07, à 05:24, Brent Meeker wrote (to Mark Peaty) Remember that Bruno is a logician. When he writes infinite he really means infinite - not really, really big as physicists do. Almost all numbers are bigger than 10^120, which is the biggest number that appears in physics (and it's wrong). It is wrong? What number are you thinking about ? (I'm just curious). A case can be made that 10^154 occurs in physics through the relationship between String Theories and the Monster Group. More exactly: I was thinking of Weinberg's calculation of the energy density of the vacuum. Which is often referred to as the worst estimate in physics. I'm sure you can come up with bigger numbers based on more speculative theories. Didn't Leonard Susskind estimate the string landscape to have 10^500 local solutions? But my point was just that mathematicians (and logicians) often mean something different than physicist when they talk about infinite. Phyisicists usually just mean a number whose inverse can be neglected. Brent Meeker --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ 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 [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: The Meaning of Life
Mark Peaty wrote: SP: 'You don't actually have to emulate the entire universe, just enough to fool its inhabitants. For example, you don't need to emulate the appearance of a snowflake in the Andromeda galaxy except in the unlikely event that someone went to have a look at it.' MP: I think this turns on how smart the inhabitants are, which ultimately comes down to whether or not they have discovered scientific method or not. Scientific method makes the species much smarter - despite themselves! If the matrixian species discovers scientific method, the matrix maker [Nerd, the Holy One] will have to lift his/her/its game to be able to cover all scientific questions the matrixians ask. That will not be easy! I am not sure if what I am saying relates well to what Colin Hales was saying about 1st person awareness and the nature of scientific endeavour, I don't think I really understood Colin's argument. I am fairly confident here though that scientific method imposes a discipline upon sentient observers that provokes the asking of truly interesting questions which eventually must lead to the true 'edges' of the practically testable world. The Nerd god will be forced to expend exponentially greater resources each time the matrixians make a new discovery in basic science otherwise his children, the matrixians, will come to smell a Rat. Maybe we already have. The linearity and unitary evolution of QM implies that we exist in superpositions of states - but we only experience one. Brent Meeker Is that the truth? No, but it's a lot simpler. --- Walt Kelly, in Pogo --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ 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 [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
RE: The Meaning of Life
Peter Jones writes: SP: 'using the term comp as short for computationalism as something picked up from Bruno. On the face of it, computationalism seems quite sensible: the best theory of consciousness and the most promising candidate for producing artificial intelligence/consciousness' What Bruno calls comp isn't standard computaitonalism, it has an element of Platonism. Standard computationalism involves the idea that consciousness can be captured by a computer program running on a computer. Bruno keeps the first part but challenges the second, suggesting that the idea of the physical process in the computer actually causing the conscious experience is flawed, as per Maudlin's paper. Thus he does not begin with the idea that conscious computations exist as Platonic objects (although I think he did suspect this all along) but ends with it as a conclusion from examining the claims of standard computationalism. Always risky to summarise someone else's ideas when they're watching, but perhaps Bruno could comment if I have it wrong. Stathis Papaioannou _ Be one of the first to try Windows Live Mail. http://ideas.live.com/programpage.aspx?versionId=5d21c51a-b161-4314-9b0e-4911fb2b2e6d --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ 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 [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: The Meaning of Life
For my benefit, could you flesh that out in plain English please? Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ 1Z wrote: Mark Peaty wrote: SP: 'using the term comp as short for computationalism as something picked up from Bruno. On the face of it, computationalism seems quite sensible: the best theory of consciousness and the most promising candidate for producing artificial intelligence/consciousness' What Bruno calls comp isn't standard computaitonalism, it has an element of Platonism. --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ 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 [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
RE: The Meaning of Life
Peter Jones writes: Stathis Papaioannou wrote: Although you have clearly stated that the two ideas - consciousness supervening on all physical processes and consciousness supervening on no physical process - are completely different I think they are related in that in both cases matter is irrelevant to consciousness, In the second case, matter is relevant to consc. since it is relevant to physical processes. Did you mean in the first case...? Matter is irrelevant to the extent that any piece of matter will do for a computation and a change in the matter does not change the computation - unless you are considering the special subset where the computation interacts with the substrate of its implementation, which is all the computations we are ever going to encounter, by definition. From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: A set of properties A supervenes upon another set B just in case no two things can differ with respect to A-properties without also differing with respect to their B-properties. From this definition, the mental does not supervene on the physical in either of the cases I mentioned. Stathis Papaioannou _ Be one of the first to try Windows Live Mail. http://ideas.live.com/programpage.aspx?versionId=5d21c51a-b161-4314-9b0e-4911fb2b2e6d --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ 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 [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
