Re: the nothing but fallacy.
Every belief system has a core and a set of pseudo logic, which is a mix of pseudo arguments ad authoritas that justify their beliefs. Positivsts have Phisics as its core, defence shield. From this, almost everything else is derived. Because the law of angular momentum is true and is science, then science is true, and science is teach in universities, ergo everything teached in buildings next to the physics department is science, therefore is Truth. Physics use computers and publish in peer reviewed magazines, ergo long term Weather models are science, ergo global warming is Truth. Cultural determinism is Truth, because the sociology department is next to the physics department. All the truths of history, psychology, ethics and philosophy are the ones of the books that I read, because they are written by scientists that work in universities and are friends of physicists that have Nobel prizes. 2012/9/13 John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com: On Wed, Sep 12, 2012 Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net wrote: If religion is true I would be surprised if it DIDN'T appear in myths. And if religion is false I would be more than surprised I would be absolutely astonished if it DIDN'T appear in myths. The law of conservation of angular momentum is true so there are no myths about it and it needs none, but bullshit does, it needs myths very badly. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: If I ever doubt that there is a God,
Hi Terren, On 11 Sep 2012, at 19:45, Terren Suydam wrote: Hi Bruno, Maybe it's time to update your fractal zoom links :-) http://vimeo.com/12185093 Here's a couple 3d mandelbulb worlds which no doubt require significantly more than 1K to implement, but purely mathematical nonetheless: https://vimeo.com/18308069 https://vimeo.com/36857924 In 3D, without real stereo 3D, you can't distinguish zooming and travelling. So despite its beautiful magnificence, the Mandelbulb hides the growing complexity inherent in the M set. In general vimeo is superior to youtube because most video producers create HD-quality video. All of these will benefit from watching in full-screen. You ask a lot to my poor machine, but yes it is beautiful. These videos are a better answer to the question what is god? than anything that could be expressed in words, imho. And the answer is ? Don't mind to much :) Bruno Best, Terren On Tue, Sep 11, 2012 at 1:20 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 11 Sep 2012, at 13:27, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Bruno Marchal If I ever doubt that there is a God, the regularity of Newton's physics or the microscopic structure of a snowflake dispels such doubt. These show design. Design cannot be made randomly. So there must be some intelligence interweaved in Nature. I call that God. That nature has structure and laws, to me indicates that there must be some superintelligence at work. OK. And with comp a case can be made that it is the intelligence innate to arithmetic. Look how lawful and rich a very simple program, less than 1K, can define: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTuP02b_a7Y It is a succession of different zoom on the Mandelbrot set, which is basically defined by the set of complex number c such that the iteration, starting from z = 0, of z_n = (z_n-1)^2 + c don't diverge. If you can see intelligent design in a snowflake, I can see intelligent design in the Mandelbrot set, and in the circle too. It abounds in math and in arithmetic. Bruno Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/11/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Bruno Marchal Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-10, 13:17:52 Subject: Re: The poverty of computers Roger, I agree with John here. Except that his point is more agnostic than atheist. A better question to John would be: explain where consciousness and universes come from, or what is your big picture. John is mute on this, but his stucking on step 3 illustrates that he might be a religious believer in a material universe, or in physicalism. Perhaps. To be clear on atheism, I use modal logic (informally). if Bx means I believe in x, and if g means (god exists) A believer is characterized by Bg An atheist by B ~g An agnostic by ~Bg ~B~g But you can replace g by m (primitive matter), and be atheist with respect of matter, etc. Someone who say that he does not believe in God, usually take for granted other sort of God, that is they make a science, like physics, which is irreproachable by itself, into an explanation of everything, which is just another religion or pseudo religion, if not assumed clearly. I advocate that we can do theology as seriously as physics by making clear the assumptions. Like with comp which appears to be closer to Bg than to Bm. But g might be itself no more than arithmetical truth, or even a tiny part of it. Bruno On 10 Sep 2012, at 18:27, John Clark wrote: On Mon, Sep 10, 2012 Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net wrote: If you are an atheist, prove that God does not exist. If you can't, you are a hypocrite in attacking those that do believe that God exists. You haven't a leg to stand on. A fool disbelieves only in the things he can prove not to exist, the wise man also disbelieves in things that are silly. A china teapot orbiting the planet Uranus is silly, and so is God. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything- l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything- l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. 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-
Re: Simple proof that our intelligence transcends that of computers
On 30 Aug 2012, at 04:40, Terren Suydam wrote: hmmm, my interpretation is that in platonia, all computations, all the potential infinities of computations, have the same ontological status. Meaning, there's nothing meaningful that can be said with regard to any particular state of the UD - one can imagine that all computations have been performed in a timeless way. OK. And not only they all exist, (in the same sense as all prime numbers exist), but they all exist with a particular weighted redundancy, independent of the choice of the U in the UD. If so, it follows that the state that corresponds to my mind at this moment has an infinite number of instantiations in the UD (regardless of some arbitrary current state of the UD). In fact this is the only way I can make sense of the reversal, where physics emerges from the infinite computations going through my state. That's correct. Otherwise, I think the physics that emerges would depend in a contigent way on the particulars of how the UD unfolds. Yes. Whether the infinities involved with my current state are of the same ordinality as the infinitie of all computations, I'm not sure. But I think if it was a lesser infinity, so that the probability of my state being instantiated did approach zero in the limit, then my interpretation above would imply that the probability of my existence is actually zero. Which is a contradiction. This does not necessarily follows. We can be relatively rare. To exists more than an instant, we need only to have enough normal computations going through or state, but the initial state can be absolutely rare. The same might be true for the origin of life. Logically, as I am agnostic on this, to be sure. Bruno Terren On Wed, Aug 29, 2012 at 4:41 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: But there are no infinities at any give state - only potential infinities. Of course that also implies that you are never complete, since at any given state in the UD there still remain infinitely many computations that will, in later steps, go through the states instantiating you. Brent On 8/29/2012 9:04 AM, Terren Suydam wrote: It may not even be zero in the limit, since there's an infinity of computations that generate my state. I suppose it comes down to the ordinality of the infinities involved. Terren Not zero, only zero in the limit of completing the infinite computations. So at any stage short the infinite completion the probability of you is very small, but non-zero. But we already knew that. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com . To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything- l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com . For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: victims of faith
There are different kinds of beliefs. The believer that has no strong evidences, know that he believe. He know that he believe. The second kind of believer does not know that he believe, because he live in a environment where the evidences are uncontested in the environment where he lives. For example a islamic comunity may find unthinkable that the Koran is not truth word by word. In the same way, positivists 100 years ago could find unthinkable to question the law of newtonian gravitation or the superiority of the white race according with the anthropological scientists of his time. These second kind of believers are the true believers. Science is a doxastic concept. it is too imprecise to be used in a serious talk about philosophical concepts, such is the concept of truth. If you mean science as the scientific method by the criteria of falsabilty, then science is not a criterium of truth, but a criterium of non-truth. Not even that, because it does not states what is non-truth now. Simply, is a method to decide it in the future if we follow that method, and this is not guaranteed, because it is simply a method. It is not a criteria. Therefore, true science is perpetual scepticism. A follower of the scientific method can not even discard that the myth of the virgin Mary is true. On the contrary, positivism, or scientism, is a perversion around the institution of science. It is a belief system of the second kind. Its founder, Auguste Compte wanted it to be a state-promoted religion. And it is. 2012/9/14 Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com: On Fri, Sep 14, 2012 at 4:45 AM, Alberto G. Corona agocor...@gmail.com wrote: I suppose that you mean that there are histories that everyone would identify as bullshit. Well, this changes nothing. A myth by definition is something believed by a group of people in the past. Most of them as intelligent or more that you and me . You and me believe in things that will be myths tomorrow. Most of them created by scientists. The mith of antropogenic global warming, the myth of cultural determinism for example.. There are many things that were scientific in the past race studies for example. Now there are gender studies... they were, and they are scientific and bullshit at the same time. I hope that this is clarifying. Global warming may turn out to be wrong, but it is not a myth. It is based on evidence and the evidence is debated. The virgin birth of Jesus, however, is completely different. It is not based on any evidence, because it is a matter of faith. Believers are actually proud of the fact that they have no evidence for it, will not change their mind (even in principle) if evidence against it arises, and there is hence no point arguing with them. Even worse, believers are inconsistent: they will dismiss other peoples' equivalent evidence-free beliefs as bullshit without a second thought. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: science only works with half a brain
On 13 Sep 2012, at 13:17, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Bruno Marchal and meekerdb, ROGER: Hi meekerdb First, science can only work with quantity, not quality, so it only works with half a brain. MEEKERDB [actually it is BRUNO]: Bad decision. You are the one cutting the corpus callosum here. ROGER: You have to. Quantity is an objective measure, quality is a subjective measure. Apples and oranges. You are too much categorical. Qualities can have objective features too. Modal logic, and other non standard logic are invented for that purposes. Geometry and topology can have non quantitative features, also. Secondly, meaning is not a scientific category. Model theory studies a form of meaning. If you decide that something is not scientific, you make it non scientific. So science can neither make nor understand meaningful statements. Logic has the same fatal problem. Only if you decide so. BRUNO ?: Not at all. Logic handle both syntactical or digital transformations, and its dual the corresponding semantical adjoint transformation. There is proof theory and model theory. Meaning is handle by non syntactical mathematical structures. There are many branches in logic, and semantic, alias Model Theory, is one of them. ROGER: Those are all tools for working with objective data such as numbers or written words. Not at all. Model studies infinite structure, some of them have no syntactical or finite counterparts. Then what do you do with subjective data ? Obviously you must throw it out. On the contrary, even with just the UDA, consciousness is the basic notion at the base of the whole reasoning (which annoys of course those who want to keep it under the rug). You are either a bit unfair, or ignorant of the UDA. Its role consists in showing that the subjective data and the 3p stuff are not easily reconciled with comp, as we must explain the physical 3p, from coherence condition on the subjective experience related to computations. BRUNO To separate science from religion looks nice, but it consists in encouraging nonsense in religion, and in science eventually. ROGER: Religion deals mainly with subjective issues such as values. morality, salvation, forgiveness. These are inextended or nonphysical human/divine issues. Yes, but that does not mean we cannot handle them with the scientific method. If not you would not even been arguing. The Bible was not written as a scientific textbook, but as a manual oof faith and moral practice. OK. Science deals entirely with objective issues such as facts, quantity, numbers, physical data. If you decide so, but then religious people should stop doing factual claims, and stop proposing normatible behavior. Science can study its own limitations, and reveal what is beyond itself. Like in neoplatonism, science proposes a negative theology, protecting faith from blind faith, actually. BRUNO: Science cannot answer the religious question, nor even the human question, nor even the machine question, but it *can* reduce the nonsense. Bruno ROGER: You can try, which is what atheists do. No atheists have a blind faith in a primary universe. They are religious, despite they want not to be. A scientist aware of the mind- body problem can only be agnostic, and continue the research for more information. Atheists are Christian, as John Clark illustrates so well. As I say, there are a few errors in facts in the Bible. Yes, like PI = 3. But physics and chemistry have no capabability of dealing with meaning, value, morality, salvation, etc. OK. Like electronics cannot explain the Deep Blue chess strategy. But computer science explains Deep Blue strategy, and it explains already why there is something like meaning, value, morality, salvation. Computer science deals with immaterial entity, developing discourse on many non material things, including knowledge, meaning, etc. As I said, you are the one defending a reductionist conception of machine, confusing them with nothing but their appearances. Bruno Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/12/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: meekerdb Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-11, 12:47:05 Subject: Re: victims of faith On 9/11/2012 5:58 AM, Jason Resch wrote: On Tue, Sep 11, 2012 at 6:54 AM, Roger Clough wrote: Hi meekerdb Science is science and religion is religion and never the two shall meet. I'm not sure about this Roger. The goal of a true science and true religion, in my opinion, is the search of truth. In the Bah ' Faith, it is said that a true science and true religion can never be in conflict. The Pope says the same about Catholicism. But that didn't keep the Church from saying heliocentrism was false, evolution didn't happen, disease is caused by
Re: questions on machines, belief, awareness, and knowledge
Hi Brian, On 13 Sep 2012, at 22:04, Brian Tenneson wrote: Bruno, You use B as a predicate symbol for belief I think. I use for the modal unspecified box, in some context (in place of the more common []). Then I use it mainly for the box corresponding to Gödel's beweisbar (provability) arithmetical predicate (definable with the symbols E, A, , -, ~, s, 0 and parentheses. Thanks to the fact that Bp - p is not a theorem, it can plays the role of believability for the ideally correct machines. What are some properties of B and is there a predicate for knowing/ being aware of that might lead to a definition for self-awareness? Yes, B and its variants: B_1 p == Bp p B_2 p = Bp Dt B_3 p = Bp Dt t, and others. btw, what is a machine and what types of machines are there? With comp we bet that we are, at some level, digital machine. The theory is one studied by logicians (Post, Church, Turing, etc.). Is there a generic description for a structure (in the math logic sense) to have a belief or to be aware; something like A |= I am the structure A ? Yes, by using the Dx = xx method, you can define a machine having its integral 3p plan available. But the 1p-self, given by Bp p, does not admit any name. It is the difference between I have two legs and I have a pain in a leg, even if a phantom one. G* proves them equivalent (for correct machines), but G cannot identify them, and they obeys different logic (G and S4Grz). Finally, on a different note, if there is a structure for which all structures can be 1-1 injected into it, does that in itself imply a sort of ultimate structure perhaps what Max Tegmark views as the level IV multiverse? A 1-1 map is too cheap for that, and the set structure is a too much structural flattening. Comp used the simulation, notion, at a non specifiable level substitution. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Simple proof that our intelligence transcends that of computers
On 13 Sep 2012, at 20:08, Stephen P. King wrote: On 9/13/2012 12:05 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 13 Sep 2012, at 13:55, Stephen P. King wrote: Hi benjayk, This is exactly what I have been complaining to Bruno about. He does not see several things that are problematic. 1) Godel numberings are not unique. Thus there is no a single abslute structure of relations, there is an infinity that cannot be reduced. On the contrary, I insist on this. That's part of the domain of the 1-indeterminacy, all working coding will do their work, if I dare to say. We already know this, and is part of the problem that we try to just formulate clearly. Dear Bruno, Oh, right, I missed that implication, but do you see my point as well? The diagonalization applies to everything, even your result. ? On the contrary, everything I say depends on the fact that diagonalization does not apply to computability. The point that I am trying to emphasize is that we can never be at the ultimate level, I can' agree more, given that the ultimate level (the one we can mistake with primitive matter) consists in a sum on infinitely many computations (how ever we solve the measure problem). we can at best point at it and approximate/represent it. OK. It is the comp truncateness. Any approximation will have dual aspects, one partly logical and abstract and the other concrete an physical. In our setting physical needs to be (re)defined. The reasoning for this is that meaningfulness is 3p, it is never just 1p (if we assumed that it was 1-p we would get a degeneracy condition and only have a bet of its truth and nowhere to cash in if it where true by many other 1-p's). The concept that some people have used for this is the notion of a witness in the sense that it is not sufficient for me to know that X is true, X must be true to at least two witnesses that are not under my control. This explanation is very crude still, my apologies. Yes, it is hard to make sense. 2) the physical implementations of the representations cannot be abstracted away without making the entire result meaningless. This is correct for human perception, but with comp the physical implementations that you need at that level are explained by a non physical (and somehow deeper) phenomenon. Yes, but I am not considering human perception; I am assuming panprotopsychism: everything is aware So you quit comp, here, right? and has a 1-p, my conjecture is that the UD rides on the unitary evolution of the QM system and thus each and every QM ssytem is an observer and has some level of awareness. It is for this reason that I am motivated to assume that the universe is quantum and that the classical picture is just an image that the universe generates via our interactions with each other. You abandon comp to come back to physicalism, but then you lost the comp explanation of both consciousness and matter. Comp gives both a conceptual explanation of the coupling matter/consciousness, and a way to test it from the solution of the measure problem (already mathematical for the measure one which give already the quantum-like logics). Bruno Bruno -- Onward! Stephen http://webpages.charter.net/stephenk1/Outlaw/Outlaw.html -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com . For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: The poverty of computers
On 12 Sep 2012, at 18:47, John Clark wrote: On Wed, Sep 12, 2012 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: makes a bridge between two fields, What two fields? The study of the notion of truth, (epistemology, philosophy, metaphysics, it is interdisciplinary) and theology. Translation from the original bafflegab: The truth is important. And already behave like the notion of God, or what is the more common about it in many traditions. And by the way, there is no field of theology, it has nothing intelligent to say because it has not discovered any facts. Theology is a science. Aristotle hypothesis of the existence of a primary universe has been refuted, so we can progress in it. The physical science is a product of a theology. Plato's questions are at the origin of science. But Plato lived 2500 years ago and we are no longer at the origin of science, it's time to move on. Not at all. Theology has been stolen by politics, 1500 years ago, we have to backtrack if we want to be rational on that issue. It is no use to say more if you don't have read it, and don't want to get informed. I didn't say I haven't read Plato, I said I knew more philosophy than he did, a lot more. You know a lot of things, but knowing is not a valid argument in science. Making you defending Aristotle theology, confusing it with the physical science. There is no doubt that somebody around here is confused because I have said more than once that Aristotle was the worst physicist who ever lived. Even his reputation as a great logician is overstated, he used some very intricate pure logic and concluded with certainty that women MUST have fewer teeth than men. They don't. Aristotle had a wife, he could have counted her teeth at any time but never bothered to because like most philosophers he already knew the truth, or thought he did. Aristotle is one of the first very big scientists. To be wrong is the natural fate of all serious scientists. He was wrong not just on physics, he was wrong on theology (at least with respect to comp).. But physics is allowed in academy, so we can correct his physics. Unfortunately his theology is not allowed in academy, so if you say that it is incorrect you are mocked in the academy, and ignored, of course, from the churches. Result: we can't progress. Again atheism goes hand in hand with the fundamentalist christians and muslims. They both defend, in their own ways, the idea that Aristotle theology has to remain unchanged. I don't buy your religion, John. I have never seen a paper in physics assuming a primitive physical reality, still less a paper showing how to test such idea. I have no idea what you mean We understand that because you have stopped the thinking at step 3. but I will say this, if you have never seen a physics paper even attempt to do something then its probably not very important because they've attempted some pretty wacky things. ? Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Re: If I ever doubt that there is a God,
Hi John Clark Generating sets gets you nowhere unless you can also generate intelligence. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/14/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: John Clark Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-13, 16:26:42 Subject: Re: If I ever doubt that there is a God, On Tue, Sep 11, 2012 at 5:20 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: Statistically, shouldn't we see this simple 1K sequence frequently in nature? I mean precisely. Shouldn't there be hundreds of species of beetle that have patterns on their backs which are derived exclusively from the Mandelbot set. There's nothing special about the Mandelbrot Set, it's just the first example found where huge complexity can be generated from very little. And if you want to see what can be done with a 400 meg file just look in a mirror, that's about the size of the human genome; you could burn the entire thing onto a CD and still have room for 100 pop songs from iTunes. ? John K Clark ? ? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Re: imaginary numbers in comp
Hi John Clark Right. The problem with the Chinese Room argument is that there is no way to generate a reasonable answer. 9/14/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: John Clark Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-13, 15:58:20 Subject: Re: imaginary numbers in comp On Thu, Sep 13, 2012 at 1:38 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: This is the symbol grounding problem pointed out by Searle's Chinese Room I've said it before I'll say it again,? Searle's Chinese Room is the single stupidest thought experiment ever devised by the mind of man. Of course even the best of us can have a brain fart from time to time, but Searle baked this turd pie decades ago and apparently he still thinks its quite clever, and thus I can only conclude that John Searle is as dumb as his room.? ? John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: imaginary numbers in comp
On 13 Sep 2012, at 22:08, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Thursday, September 13, 2012 3:58:21 PM UTC-4, John Clark wrote: On Thu, Sep 13, 2012 at 1:38 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.com wrote: This is the symbol grounding problem pointed out by Searle's Chinese Room I've said it before I'll say it again, Searle's Chinese Room is the single stupidest thought experiment ever devised by the mind of man. Of course even the best of us can have a brain fart from time to time, but Searle baked this turd pie decades ago and apparently he still thinks its quite clever, and thus I can only conclude that John Searle is as dumb as his room. The only way that you can think that it's stupid is if you don't understand it. It's the same thing as Leibniz Mill. His particulars may be a bit more elaborate than they need to be, but the point he makes is the same that has been made before by many others: The map is not the territory. The menu is not the meal. To my mind, the fact that you have particular animus toward the Chinese Room can only be because on some level you know that it is a relatively simple way of proving something that you are in deep denial about. Why else would it bother you in particular? Are there other philosophical arguments that bother you like this? I am with Clark on this, Craig. Searle either begs the question or confuses a program with the machine running the program. Dennett and Hofstadter explains this already very well in Mind's I. It is the same error as believing that RA can think like PA when emulating PA. But when RA emulates PA, it is like when I emulate another program, or Einstein's brain, I don't become that other program, nor do I become Einstein, in such case. It is again a confusion of level. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
A possible brain wave model of body and mind
Hi John Clark Thanks very much for your enlightening response. My original and still surviving purpose was to provide a means of dealing with but not mixing two different categories. Perhaps set theory would be better, but I am clueless there. However, the existence of brain waves and the conflation there of mind and body suggests a possi bly more fruitful model: body= extended=wave amplitude mind = inextended = wave phase If there is any truth to that or any other model it should be possible to see if this could make any physical sense. Fourier transforms might also aid interpretation. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/14/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: John Clark Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-13, 15:40:51 Subject: Re: imaginary numbers in comp On Thu, Sep 13, 2012 at? Roger Clough wrote: would it make any sense to do comp using complex numbers, where the real part is the objective part of the mental the imaginary part is the subjective part of the mental The names real and imaginary are unfortunate because imaginary numbers are no more subjective than real numbers, but for historical reasons I guess we're stuck with those names. From a physics perspective think of the real numbers as dealing with magnitudes and the imaginary numbers as dealing in rotations in two dimensions; that's why if you want to talk about speed the real numbers are sufficient but if you want to talk about velocity you need the imaginary numbers too because velocity has both a magnitude and a direction.? ? The square root of negative one is essential if mathematically you want to calculate how things rotate. It you pair up a Imaginary Number(i) and a regular old Real Number you get a Complex Number, and you can make a one to one relationship between the way Complex numbers add subtract multiply and divide and the way things move in a two dimensional plane, and that is enormously important. Or you could put it another way, regular numbers that most people are familiar with just have a magnitude, but complex numbers have a magnitude AND a direction. Many thought the square root of negative one (i) didn't have much practical use until about 1860 when Maxwell used them in his famous equations to figure out how Electromagnetism worked. Today nearly all quantum mechanical equations have ani in them somewhere, and it might not be going too far to say that is the source of quantum weirdness. The Schrodinger equation is deterministic and describes the quantum wave function, but that function is an abstraction and is unobservable, to get something you can see you must square the wave function and that gives you the probability you will observe a particle at any spot; but Schrodinger's equation has an i in it and that means very different quantum wave functions can give the exact same probability distribution when you square it; remember with i you get weird stuff like i^2=i^6 =-1 and i^4=i^100=1. All the rotational properties can be derived from Euler's Identity: e^i*PI +1 =0 . ? John K Clark ? John K Clark ? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Re: imaginary numbers in comp
Hi John Clark The difference is that a computer has no intelligence, cannot deal with qualia, and is not alive. My brain has all of these features in spades. ibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: John Clark Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-13, 13:15:54 Subject: Re: imaginary numbers in comp On Thu, Sep 13, 2012 at 12:11 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: I reject comp, because it cannot access feelings or qualities And you have deduced this by using the nothing but fallacy: even the largest computer is nothing but a collection of on and off switches. Never mind that your brain is nothing but a collection of molecules rigorously obeying the laws of physics. ? John K Clark ? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: On marrying a talking doll
On 13 Sep 2012, at 13:53, Roger Clough wrote: Again, if my daughter is human, why would she want to marry a robot ? She wants a talking doll I suppose. Probably needs a shrink. No. She just want to marry Jim. It is nice guy. She is glad that he survived the brain transplant. She does not consider him as a robot, but as a fully human being, just with new clothes. If you believe this is impossible, it means either that you believe that Jim's mind, cannot be Turing emulable, which is a metaphysical stance, and you can't impose it to your daughter, or that he is a zombie. From her point of view, you behave like a racist, which judge people from the character of their body, and throw their souls and subjectivity in the trash. You are the one telling your daughter that Jim is nothing but a bunch of metallic and silicon. She *knows* Jim, and recognize him through the transformation. You can't know that she is wrong, do you? Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Re: the nothing but fallacy.
Hi John Clark You're a slow learner. Science deals with facts, religion deals with values. So angular momentum and religion differ like apples and oranges. Myths about numerical values would be unintelligible. (Religious) values can only be taught and explained by myths and stories. Bible stories are generally based on true happenings. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/14/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: John Clark Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-13, 13:03:16 Subject: Re: the nothing but fallacy. On Wed, Sep 12, 2012? Roger Clough wrote: If religion is true I would be surprised if it DIDN'T appear in myths. And if religion is false I would be more than surprised I would be absolutely astonished if it DIDN'T appear in myths. The law of conservation of angular momentum is true so there are no myths about it and it needs none, but bullshit does, it needs myths very badly.? John K Clark ? ? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Zombieopolis Thought Experiment
Hi Craig Weinberg His very first sentence is wrong. Conscious experience is an expression of nonphysical mind, although it may deal with physical topics. It is widely accepted that conscious experience has a physical basis. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/14/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Craig Weinberg Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-13, 15:03:13 Subject: Zombieopolis Thought Experiment If anyone is not familiar with David Chalmers Absent Qualia, Fading Qualia, Dancing Qualia You should have a look at it first. This thought experiment is intended to generalize principles common to both computationalism and functionalism so that the often confusing objections surrounding their assumptions can be revealed. Say that we have the technology to scan the city of New York by means of releasing 100,000 specially fitted cats into the streets, which will return to the laboratory in a week's time with a fantastically large amount of data about what the cats see and feel, smell and taste, hear, their positions and movements relative to each other, etc. We now set about computing algorithms to simulate the functions of Brooklyn such that we can tear down Brooklyn completely and replace it with a simulation which causes cats released into the simulated environment to behave in the same way as they would have according to the history of their initial release. Indeed, cats in Manhattan travel to and from Brooklyn as usual. Perhaps to get this right, we had to take all of Brooklyn and grind it up in a giant blender until it becomes a paste of liquified corpses, garbage, concrete, wood, and glass, and then use this substrate to mold into objects that can be moved around remotely to suit the expectations of the cats. Armed with the confidence of the feline thumbs-up, we go ahead and replace Manhattan and the other boroughs in the same way, effectively turning a city of millions into a cat-friendly cemetery. While the experiment is not a PR success (Luddites and Fundamentalists complain loudly about a genocide), our cats assure us that all is well and the experiment is a great success. Craig -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/everything-list/-/5BbVwrPfmSoJ. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Re: Re: The poverty of computers
Hi Craig Weinberg Faith can be expressed as a belief, but faith itself is inner trust, confidence, etc. Faith Noun:Complete trust or confidence in someone or something. Strong belief in God or in the doctrines of a religion, based on spiritual apprehension rather than proof. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/14/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Craig Weinberg Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-13, 13:21:50 Subject: Re: Re: The poverty of computers On Thursday, September 13, 2012 8:43:39 AM UTC-4, rclough wrote: Hi Bruno Marchal The shared part of religion (or science) is called belief(s). They are exclusively in the fom of words. For example words from the Bible, and the Creeds. The personal or private part of religion is called faith. It is not belief, for it is wordless, is more like trust or motivation. Religion trusts its creeds, science trust the laws of physics etc. It sounds like you are talking about the particular forms of religion though. In some other traditions, faith can be the public proclamation in words and belief is the privately expressed as wordless. Craig -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/everything-list/-/mUtjBvMhl8sJ. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Re: victims of faith
Hi Alberto G. Corona All religious beliefs are at the bottom unfounded. So is the fact that you are real unfounded. All scientific theories moreover are founded on assumptions, which by definition are unfounded. Need I go on ? Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/14/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Alberto G. Corona Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-13, 14:45:42 Subject: Re: victims of faith 2012/9/13 Stathis Papaioannou : On Wed, Sep 12, 2012 at 8:22 PM, Alberto G. Corona wrote: There is no difference at all between religious mitifications and other mitifucatuons . See form, example the paper about Darwin that I posted. religion is a label that appears when the mith is old enough it has enough believers and the object of mitification is far away in time. People are reluctant to admit that they have unfounded beliefs. Specially if they have been educated in the belief that any belief is bad and into the belied that they have no beliefs. But to have a commong ground of beliefs is a prerequisite for individual and social life. I think that my theory of social capital, mytopoesis and belief and the assimilaion of good and truth is sound in evolutuionary terms, and provides a factual/operation definition of Truth in the world of the mind, which is the only world accesible to us. If I tell you that a spirit appeared to me last night and told me that you should give me all your money or else the world will be destroyed, what will you say to me? That it's as true as any other myth, understandable in evolutionary terms, on a par with scientific fact? Or will you just say, without thinking too hard, that it's bullshit? I suppose that you mean that there are histories that everyone would identify as bullshit. Well, this changes nothing. A myth by definition is something believed by a group of people in the past. Most of them as intelligent or more that you and me . You and me believe in things that will be myths tomorrow. Most of them created by scientists. The mith of antropogenic global warming, the myth of cultural determinism for example.. There are many things that were scientific in the past race studies for example. Now there are gender studies... they were, and they are scientific and bullshit at the same time. I hope that this is clarifying. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Re: the nothing but fallacy.
Hi Alberto G. Corona Physicalism is founded on unfounded assumptions. There is no physical certainly in this world. Get over it. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/14/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Alberto G. Corona Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-14, 03:18:47 Subject: Re: the nothing but fallacy. Every belief system has a core and a set of pseudo logic, which is a mix of pseudo arguments ad authoritas that justify their beliefs. Positivsts have Phisics as its core, defence shield. From this, almost everything else is derived. Because the law of angular momentum is true and is science, then science is true, and science is teach in universities, ergo everything teached in buildings next to the physics department is science, therefore is Truth. Physics use computers and publish in peer reviewed magazines, ergo long term Weather models are science, ergo global warming is Truth. Cultural determinism is Truth, because the sociology department is next to the physics department. All the truths of history, psychology, ethics and philosophy are the ones of the books that I read, because they are written by scientists that work in universities and are friends of physicists that have Nobel prizes. 2012/9/13 John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com: On Wed, Sep 12, 2012 Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net wrote: If religion is true I would be surprised if it DIDN'T appear in myths. And if religion is false I would be more than surprised I would be absolutely astonished if it DIDN'T appear in myths. The law of conservation of angular momentum is true so there are no myths about it and it needs none, but bullshit does, it needs myths very badly. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Re: victims of faith
Roger: right But there are two types of people: the ones that know that believe, that know that they are unfounded and the others that believe that known, who don´t know that they are unfounded 2012/9/14 Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net: Hi Alberto G. Corona All religious beliefs are at the bottom unfounded. So is the fact that you are real unfounded. All scientific theories moreover are founded on assumptions, which by definition are unfounded. Need I go on ? Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/14/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Alberto G. Corona Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-13, 14:45:42 Subject: Re: victims of faith 2012/9/13 Stathis Papaioannou : On Wed, Sep 12, 2012 at 8:22 PM, Alberto G. Corona wrote: There is no difference at all between religious mitifications and other mitifucatuons . See form, example the paper about Darwin that I posted. religion is a label that appears when the mith is old enough it has enough believers and the object of mitification is far away in time. People are reluctant to admit that they have unfounded beliefs. Specially if they have been educated in the belief that any belief is bad and into the belied that they have no beliefs. But to have a commong ground of beliefs is a prerequisite for individual and social life. I think that my theory of social capital, mytopoesis and belief and the assimilaion of good and truth is sound in evolutuionary terms, and provides a factual/operation definition of Truth in the world of the mind, which is the only world accesible to us. If I tell you that a spirit appeared to me last night and told me that you should give me all your money or else the world will be destroyed, what will you say to me? That it's as true as any other myth, understandable in evolutionary terms, on a par with scientific fact? Or will you just say, without thinking too hard, that it's bullshit? I suppose that you mean that there are histories that everyone would identify as bullshit. Well, this changes nothing. A myth by definition is something believed by a group of people in the past. Most of them as intelligent or more that you and me . You and me believe in things that will be myths tomorrow. Most of them created by scientists. The mith of antropogenic global warming, the myth of cultural determinism for example.. There are many things that were scientific in the past race studies for example. Now there are gender studies... they were, and they are scientific and bullshit at the same time. I hope that this is clarifying. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Scientific Faith: Science and nothing but-ism
Scientific Faith: Science and nothing but-ism Scientists commonly assume that if you develop a theory and make a mesasurement that produces the expected result, the reason for that result is nothing-but your theory. Right ? Maybe, maybe not. Two completely different theories can predict the same result. I suspect the same is also true in mathematics. And even logicians can get into debates. The situation gets much worse in the so-called human sciences because in the first case you cannot tell if what you found is a cause or an effect. Or perhaps something you overlooked actually caused it. Humans and society are infinitely complex. Economics and politics are perhaps the most delusive, especially considering the complexity of an economy and that changes can take years to show up. Hence the never-ending debate over whether Keynes was right or wrong. I leave you with this: Very little is certain in this contingent world. And those that say you are certainly wrong are perhaps unknowingly bully you. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/14/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Bruno Marchal Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-13, 10:36:30 Subject: Re: a creator must know what he is doing (must have intelligence). Hi Roger, On 13 Sep 2012, at 12:36, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Bruno Marchal But those mechanims are just mechanisms. You are just doing the just fallacy. A variant of the nothing but fallacy. They do not know what they do, We do have serious evidence that some mechanism, actually most of them, when above a treshold of complexity (Turing sigma_1 completeness, universality, more exactly L bianity) might be able to know (something obeying the S4 logic) when looking inward. They can look inward by the second recursion theorem of Kleene, that is through the use of the Dx = xx syntactical trick (plausibly already done by the double RNA strings at the molecular level I think). There is already a sense for not taking them as zombie. (philosophical zombie) that knowing combined with choice of what to do being another description of intelligence, which is what makes a creator greater than his creations. You are limiting the power of God. With comp, God has not all power, but He/She/It *can* at least create something/someone more powerful than He/She/It-Self. At his God exam, God was asked to chose between two problems: - to make a stone so heavy that he can't lift it up. - to make a creature more powerful than itself. Basically that is what happens in Neoplatonism with: GOD == NOUS == SOUL == MATTER (sensible + intelligible) In arithmetic, the machine looking inward suggests a toy theology, if you want: TRUTH == PROVABILITY == KNOWER == MATTER (sensible + intelligible) Although it is more like PROVABILITYMATTER (sensible + intelligible) TRUTH == PROVABILITY == KNOWER == MATTER (sensible + intelligible) as the machine distinguishes the provable and non provable but true parts of those discourses. It is useful to get the difference of discourse between quanta and qualia. Bruno - Receiving the following content - From: Bruno Marchal Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-12, 13:07:32 Subject: Re: If I ever doubt that there is a God, On 12 Sep 2012, at 14:00, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Bruno Marchal Any creator has to be greater than his creations. Why? The Universal Dovetailer, is smaller than what it does, and what it created. The Mandelbrot program is very small, but it creates the most complex object, full or subtle mixing of order and randomness. The complexity of the universal machine gives a threshold above which objects have more complex behavior than their description, somehow. It is a surprising, but known phenomenon (by logicians and computer scientist) that arithmetic, despite very simple elementary beings (0, and its successors), and laws operating on them, addition and multiplication, is full of complex mathematical processes, unsolvable or very hard problems, etc. Just think about the distribution of the prime numbers, or inform yourself. In arithmetic, above universality, the creators are all overwhelmed by their creation. They can even lost themselves in them. This can be also compared to Plotinus, where the ONE is fundamentally simple, and can't help itself not letting emanating from itself, the NOUS, Plato universal intelligence, which put order on Platonia, but also makes some mess, and then the inner god, the universal soul, does not help, and it can hurt. If we ant keep the fundamental principle on God, like being responsible for our existence, being unameable, then with comp there is a God, but It is not omnipotent, nor
Re: Re: On marrying a talking doll
Hi Bruno Marchal My judgment was overly harsh if they transplanted something living along with the computer transplant or partial transplant. But it doesn't look too promising that the result would even be alive. I don't know why you keep imputing racism on me just because I realistically allow that there can be differences in people. For one thing, I'm no way as smart as you are. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/14/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Bruno Marchal Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-14, 06:46:21 Subject: Re: On marrying a talking doll On 13 Sep 2012, at 13:53, Roger Clough wrote: Again, if my daughter is human, why would she want to marry a robot ? She wants a talking doll I suppose. Probably needs a shrink. No. She just want to marry Jim. It is nice guy. She is glad that he survived the brain transplant. She does not consider him as a robot, but as a fully human being, just with new clothes. If you believe this is impossible, it means either that you believe that Jim's mind, cannot be Turing emulable, which is a metaphysical stance, and you can't impose it to your daughter, or that he is a zombie. From her point of view, you behave like a racist, which judge people from the character of their body, and throw their souls and subjectivity in the trash. You are the one telling your daughter that Jim is nothing but a bunch of metallic and silicon. She *knows* Jim, and recognize him through the transformation. You can't know that she is wrong, do you? Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Re: imaginary numbers in comp
Hi Craig Weinberg I agree. But I never say never. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/14/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Craig Weinberg Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-13, 12:11:51 Subject: Re: imaginary numbers in comp This is why I reject comp, because it cannot access feelings or qualities, whereas feelings can and do access arithmetic (even directly as rhythm, music, some forms of visual art, etc). Because we know about feelings, we can project that knowledge on top of arithmetic ideas and conceive of 'numbers which are fundamentally unlike numbers' which metaphorically can remind of us the contrast between logic and feeling. There are some interesting ways to use that and explore concepts like imaginary numbers with that in mind which I do think can yield worthwhile results when we unpack them and reapply them as metaphors for subjectivity. The problem is that arithmetic is the opposite of feeling. Machines are the opposite of living beings. Subjective numbers then are like a Moon that treats the Sun like a Moon'. Craig On Thursday, September 13, 2012 11:45:53 AM UTC-4, rclough wrote: Hi everything-list Since human thought and perception consists of both a logical quantitative or objective component as well as a feelings-spiritual qualitative or subjective components, would it make any sense to do comp using complex numbers, where the real part is the objective part of the mental the imaginary part is the subjective part of the mental ? Isn't there an intuitive mathematics ? Roger Clough, rcl...@verizon.net 9/13/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/everything-list/-/YbsU-sTenVgJ. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Needed: A calculus of pleasure and pain.
Hi Craig Weinberg Fortunately or unfortunately, capitalism is Darwinism, pure and simple. So it can prepare for a better future, although it can be painful at present. My own take on this is that there needs to be a calculus of pleasure and pain. Jeremy Bentham suggested perhaps an impfect one. In lieu of that, I am all for food stamps and safety nets. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/14/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Craig Weinberg Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-13, 12:28:09 Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Racism ? How's that implied ? On Thursday, September 13, 2012 8:33:47 AM UTC-4, rclough wrote: Hi Craig Weinberg The fact is that the only incentive businesses look to is profit. So demonizing profit doesn't do any good. And urging them to hire workers doesn't work. Sounds exactly like cancer. The only incentive cancer looks to is growth. As long as any institution partitions itself off from responsibility to the full spectrum of human experience I think it is doomed to be a force for oppression. You can tell when this happens because the effect of the institution is inverted to its cause. Businesses perpetuate financial bondage rather than freedom. Hospitals perpetuate sickness and misery rather than health. Schools neutralize intellectual curiosity. Religions foment intolerance and the abuse of the innocent. It's inevitable since by definition the first order of business for an institution is to ensure its own growth and survival at all costs...which becomes the sole purpose forever. Craig Clough, rcl...@verizon.net 9/13/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Craig Weinberg Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-12, 20:03:27 Subject: Re: Re: Re: Racism ? How's that implied ? On Tuesday, September 11, 2012 8:32:21 AM UTC-4, rclough wrote: Hi Craig Weinberg I am intolerant of stupidity and deception, particularly when the idea of carbon credits pops up. This suggests that Global warming is just a method of raising taxes, diminishing coal and oil, and even globally sharing the wealth. Thankfully china won't go along with this stupidity. It all seems to be politics rather than science. I don't know enough about it to say too much about it. I think that the point is to make it political so that the greatest polluters will have an incentive to pollute less. Otherwise, why would they ever reduce emissions? Personally I think that the only issue that matters is overpopulation. As long as we have seven billion people making billions more people, nothing will stop the devaluation of they quality of human life, and of human lives. Whether it's the threat of running out of oil, food, water, or money, it doesn't really matter which comes first. It's like putting more and more fish in an overstocked fish tank, the bigger ones just eat more and more of the smaller ones while the whole thing fills up with crap. Craig Roger Clough, rcl...@verizon.net 9/11/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Craig Weinberg Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-11, 00:40:08 Subject: Re: Re: Racism ? How's that implied ? Hi Roger, It's ok not to be obsessed with cleaning up the environment, but why be intolerant of people who are? Same with people who spend a lot of time talking in public about issues of racial discrimination. If you are going to speak and act on behalf of millions of people who are not speaking and acting, it is understandable that you might also be the type of person who is strongly motivated. What you don't seem to appreciate is that being able to not have to think about race is a luxury that non-whites do not have. That doesn't mean you have to make the world fair for everyone, but the least that we who have that luxury could do is acknowledge that we have that privilege. Have you ever considered what it would be like for you in a world with an alternate history? Where the Cherokee Nation developed guns and steel before the Europeans and colonized it using Siberian slaves instead? You could listen to descendants of those invaders and slavers discuss how the whining of pink people, their scapegoats and victims for centuries in a hostile land, is really not their cup of tea. Craig On Monday, September 10, 2012 7:19:44 AM UTC-4, rclough wrote: Hi Craig Weinberg Not that I am against cleaning up the environment, but I am not obsessed with the idea. Integrating with Nature is also a main principle of the Communist Manifesto. Roger Clough, rcl...@verizon.net 9/10/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God,
Re: Re: science only works with half a brain
Hi Bruno Marchal Objective things are things that can be measured (are extended) and so are quantitative. Numbers can apply. Science applies. Computers can deal with them. Subjective things are inextended and so cannot be measured directly, at least, nor dealt with by computers at least directly. I think a more practical division would be the body/mind split. Perhaps set theory might work, I don't understand it. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/14/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Bruno Marchal Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-14, 04:09:27 Subject: Re: science only works with half a brain On 13 Sep 2012, at 13:17, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Bruno Marchal and meekerdb, ROGER: Hi meekerdb First, science can only work with quantity, not quality, so it only works with half a brain. MEEKERDB [actually it is BRUNO]: Bad decision. You are the one cutting the corpus callosum here. ROGER: You have to. Quantity is an objective measure, quality is a subjective measure. Apples and oranges. You are too much categorical. Qualities can have objective features too. Modal logic, and other non standard logic are invented for that purposes. Geometry and topology can have non quantitative features, also. Secondly, meaning is not a scientific category. Model theory studies a form of meaning. If you decide that something is not scientific, you make it non scientific. So science can neither make nor understand meaningful statements. Logic has the same fatal problem. Only if you decide so. BRUNO ?: Not at all. Logic handle both syntactical or digital transformations, and its dual the corresponding semantical adjoint transformation. There is proof theory and model theory. Meaning is handle by non syntactical mathematical structures. There are many branches in logic, and semantic, alias Model Theory, is one of them. ROGER: Those are all tools for working with objective data such as numbers or written words. Not at all. Model studies infinite structure, some of them have no syntactical or finite counterparts. Then what do you do with subjective data ? Obviously you must throw it out. On the contrary, even with just the UDA, consciousness is the basic notion at the base of the whole reasoning (which annoys of course those who want to keep it under the rug). You are either a bit unfair, or ignorant of the UDA. Its role consists in showing that the subjective data and the 3p stuff are not easily reconciled with comp, as we must explain the physical 3p, from coherence condition on the subjective experience related to computations. BRUNO To separate science from religion looks nice, but it consists in encouraging nonsense in religion, and in science eventually. ROGER: Religion deals mainly with subjective issues such as values. morality, salvation, forgiveness. These are inextended or nonphysical human/divine issues. Yes, but that does not mean we cannot handle them with the scientific method. If not you would not even been arguing. The Bible was not written as a scientific textbook, but as a manual oof faith and moral practice. OK. Science deals entirely with objective issues such as facts, quantity, numbers, physical data. If you decide so, but then religious people should stop doing factual claims, and stop proposing normatible behavior. Science can study its own limitations, and reveal what is beyond itself. Like in neoplatonism, science proposes a negative theology, protecting faith from blind faith, actually. BRUNO: Science cannot answer the religious question, nor even the human question, nor even the machine question, but it *can* reduce the nonsense. Bruno ROGER: You can try, which is what atheists do. No atheists have a blind faith in a primary universe. They are religious, despite they want not to be. A scientist aware of the mind- body problem can only be agnostic, and continue the research for more information. Atheists are Christian, as John Clark illustrates so well. As I say, there are a few errors in facts in the Bible. Yes, like PI = 3. But physics and chemistry have no capabability of dealing with meaning, value, morality, salvation, etc. OK. Like electronics cannot explain the Deep Blue chess strategy. But computer science explains Deep Blue strategy, and it explains already why there is something like meaning, value, morality, salvation. Computer science deals with immaterial entity, developing discourse on many non material things, including knowledge, meaning, etc. As I said, you are the one defending a reductionist conception of machine, confusing them with nothing but their appearances. Bruno Roger Clough,
Qualitative calculations with binary numbers
Hi Bruno Marchal IMHO in Platonia (the Eternal) all logical statements must always be either true or false forever. However, in this everyday world, where time is a factor, such necessary logical statements become contingent, and may only sometimes be true. And possibly not everywhere. The I Ching provides a numerical way of combining, separating, and systematically manipulating qualitative situations, since these have visually been associated to trigrams of binary numbers. For example 111 or all yang lines is male and yang-ish. 000 is female and having softer heavier female qualitites. Then combining and reading down from left to right, 00 is female 11 is male. 111000 or male over female is stagnation while 000111 with female over male, is bliss. Which is what womens' lib teaches. There's so much more to such manipulations that it would take a book to show them all. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/14/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Bruno Marchal Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-14, 03:38:43 Subject: Re: Simple proof that our intelligence transcends that of computers On 30 Aug 2012, at 04:40, Terren Suydam wrote: hmmm, my interpretation is that in platonia, all computations, all the potential infinities of computations, have the same ontological status. Meaning, there's nothing meaningful that can be said with regard to any particular state of the UD - one can imagine that all computations have been performed in a timeless way. OK. And not only they all exist, (in the same sense as all prime numbers exist), but they all exist with a particular weighted redundancy, independent of the choice of the U in the UD. If so, it follows that the state that corresponds to my mind at this moment has an infinite number of instantiations in the UD (regardless of some arbitrary current state of the UD). In fact this is the only way I can make sense of the reversal, where physics emerges from the infinite computations going through my state. That's correct. Otherwise, I think the physics that emerges would depend in a contigent way on the particulars of how the UD unfolds. Yes. Whether the infinities involved with my current state are of the same ordinality as the infinitie of all computations, I'm not sure. But I think if it was a lesser infinity, so that the probability of my state being instantiated did approach zero in the limit, then my interpretation above would imply that the probability of my existence is actually zero. Which is a contradiction. This does not necessarily follows. We can be relatively rare. To exists more than an instant, we need only to have enough normal computations going through or state, but the initial state can be absolutely rare. The same might be true for the origin of life. Logically, as I am agnostic on this, to be sure. Bruno Terren On Wed, Aug 29, 2012 at 4:41 PM, meekerdb wrote: But there are no infinities at any give state - only potential infinities. Of course that also implies that you are never complete, since at any given state in the UD there still remain infinitely many computations that will, in later steps, go through the states instantiating you. Brent On 8/29/2012 9:04 AM, Terren Suydam wrote: It may not even be zero in the limit, since there's an infinity of computations that generate my state. I suppose it comes down to the ordinality of the infinities involved. Terren Not zero, only zero in the limit of completing the infinite computations. So at any stage short the infinite completion the probability of you is very small, but non-zero. But we already knew that. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com . To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything- l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com . For more options, visit this group at
Re: Re: Re: The poverty of computers
Hi John Clark Faith is to me at least a virtue since it is associated with hope and love. Religion is not faith. It is a social tradition of men. Men-- you know-- whose lives can be natsy, brutish and short. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/14/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: John Clark Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-13, 10:58:09 Subject: Re: Re: The poverty of computers On Thu, Sep 13, 2012? Roger Clough wrote: Theology is based on faith I understand that theology is based on faith, what I don't understand is why faith is supposed to be a virtue. and moral practice. Then why is the history of religion a list of one atrocity after another? ? John K Clark ? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Re: Re: victims of faith
Hi Alberto G. Corona That's why I stick to orthodoxy and the creeds. Hard to go wrong that way. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/14/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Alberto G. Corona Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-14, 07:27:26 Subject: Re: Re: victims of faith Roger: right But there are two types of people: the ones that know that believe, that know that they are unfounded and the others that believe that known, who don? know that they are unfounded 2012/9/14 Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net: Hi Alberto G. Corona All religious beliefs are at the bottom unfounded. So is the fact that you are real unfounded. All scientific theories moreover are founded on assumptions, which by definition are unfounded. Need I go on ? Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/14/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Alberto G. Corona Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-13, 14:45:42 Subject: Re: victims of faith 2012/9/13 Stathis Papaioannou : On Wed, Sep 12, 2012 at 8:22 PM, Alberto G. Corona wrote: There is no difference at all between religious mitifications and other mitifucatuons . See form, example the paper about Darwin that I posted. religion is a label that appears when the mith is old enough it has enough believers and the object of mitification is far away in time. People are reluctant to admit that they have unfounded beliefs. Specially if they have been educated in the belief that any belief is bad and into the belied that they have no beliefs. But to have a commong ground of beliefs is a prerequisite for individual and social life. I think that my theory of social capital, mytopoesis and belief and the assimilaion of good and truth is sound in evolutuionary terms, and provides a factual/operation definition of Truth in the world of the mind, which is the only world accesible to us. If I tell you that a spirit appeared to me last night and told me that you should give me all your money or else the world will be destroyed, what will you say to me? That it's as true as any other myth, understandable in evolutionary terms, on a par with scientific fact? Or will you just say, without thinking too hard, that it's bullshit? I suppose that you mean that there are histories that everyone would identify as bullshit. Well, this changes nothing. A myth by definition is something believed by a group of people in the past. Most of them as intelligent or more that you and me . You and me believe in things that will be myths tomorrow. Most of them created by scientists. The mith of antropogenic global warming, the myth of cultural determinism for example.. There are many things that were scientific in the past race studies for example. Now there are gender studies... they were, and they are scientific and bullshit at the same time. I hope that this is clarifying. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: victims of faith
On 9/14/2012 4:02 AM, Alberto G. Corona wrote: There are different kinds of beliefs. The believer that has no strong evidences, know that he believe. He know that he believe. The second kind of believer does not know that he believe, because he live in a environment where the evidences are uncontested in the environment where he lives. For example a islamic comunity may find unthinkable that the Koran is not truth word by word. In the same way, positivists 100 years ago could find unthinkable to question the law of newtonian gravitation or the superiority of the white race according with the anthropological scientists of his time. These second kind of believers are the true believers. Hi Alberto, These true believers seem to hav a filtering system such that they never notice data that would contradict what which they hold to be true. This is like a nocebo effect http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/12/opinion/sunday/beware-the-nocebo-effect.html. Science is a doxastic concept. it is too imprecise to be used in a serious talk about philosophical concepts, such is the concept of truth. Umm, I would say that you are considering scientism the true belief in science as having explanations of everything such that if science does not (currently!) have an explanation some some phenomena, then the phenomena is not real. If you mean science as the scientific method by the criteria of falsabilty, then science is not a criterium of truth, but a criterium of non-truth. Agreed! if you cannot be wrong then you cannot be correct either. Not even that, because it does not states what is non-truth now. Simply, is a method to decide it in the future if we follow that method, and this is not guaranteed, because it is simply a method. It is not a criteria. Therefore, true science is perpetual scepticism. Umm, this is too much like Hume's methodology. One must allow for speculation and conjecture as possibly true until refuted for oneself. The burden of proof is always on the proposer of a conjecture. A follower of the scientific method can not even discard that the myth of the virgin Mary is true. On the contrary, positivism, or scientism, is a perversion around the institution of science. It is a belief system of the second kind. Its founder, Auguste Compte wanted it to be a state-promoted religion. And it is. Indeed! 2012/9/14 Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com: On Fri, Sep 14, 2012 at 4:45 AM, Alberto G. Corona agocor...@gmail.com wrote: I suppose that you mean that there are histories that everyone would identify as bullshit. Well, this changes nothing. A myth by definition is something believed by a group of people in the past. Most of them as intelligent or more that you and me . You and me believe in things that will be myths tomorrow. Most of them created by scientists. The mith of antropogenic global warming, the myth of cultural determinism for example.. There are many things that were scientific in the past race studies for example. Now there are gender studies... they were, and they are scientific and bullshit at the same time. I hope that this is clarifying. Global warming may turn out to be wrong, but it is not a myth. It is based on evidence and the evidence is debated. The evidence has strong indications of being manipulated for the purpose of a political agenda. The way that the sensors are distributed and their data is weighed is the subject of a lot of controversy We do not have models that are accurate enough to even accurately retrodict the variation in temperatures so why are we trusting them in their predictions?. The virgin birth of Jesus, however, is completely different. It is not based on any evidence, because it is a matter of faith. Believers are actually proud of the fact that they have no evidence for it, will not change their mind (even in principle) if evidence against it arises, and there is hence no point arguing with them. Even worse, believers are inconsistent: they will dismiss other peoples' equivalent evidence-free beliefs as bullshit without a second thought. I agree with Stathis here. Faith, it is has any meaning can only be forward looking in the sense that it is a belief that some theory will not be falsified in the future. To have faith in some theory that considers something in the past that contradicts facts in the present is an invocation of special circumstances that are somehow unique. I argue strongly against such as this idea is a form of White Rabbit. It is, if true, an local inconsistency that somehow is not pathological. -- Stathis Papaioannou - -- Onward! Stephen http://webpages.charter.net/stephenk1/Outlaw/Outlaw.html -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
Re: science only works with half a brain
On 9/14/2012 4:09 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 13 Sep 2012, at 13:17, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Bruno Marchal and meekerdb, ROGER: Hi meekerdb First, science can only work with quantity, not quality, so it only works with half a brain. MEEKERDB [actually it is BRUNO]: Bad decision. You are the one cutting the corpus callosum here. ROGER: You have to. Quantity is an objective measure, quality is a subjective measure. Apples and oranges. You are too much categorical. Qualities can have objective features too. Modal logic, and other non standard logic are invented for that purposes. Geometry and topology can have non quantitative features, also. Dear Bruno, This concept of objective property is just consistency of definition, nothing more! Secondly, meaning is not a scientific category. Model theory studies a form of meaning. If you decide that something is not scientific, you make it non scientific. If it is incapable of being falsified by physical evidence then it is nonscientific. So science can neither make nor understand meaningful statements. Logic has the same fatal problem. Only if you decide so. No, that would be true belief as Alberto discussed elsewhere. If one accepts as true some set of axioms then certain properties follow automatically. But if we look at theories in a meta way, we see that there are multiple possible axioms. For example, we have ZFC and ZF-C (with or without axiom of choice). These have very different models. BRUNO ?: Not at all. Logic handle both syntactical or digital transformations, and its dual the corresponding semantical adjoint transformation. There is proof theory and model theory. Meaning is handle by non syntactical mathematical structures. There are many branches in logic, and semantic, alias Model Theory, is one of them. ROGER: Those are all tools for working with objective data such as numbers or written words. Not at all. Model studies infinite structure, some of them have no syntactical or finite counterparts. You are ignoring the existence of finitistic and ultrafinitistic axioms! Maybe we need to revisit model theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_theory. Then what do you do with subjective data ? Obviously you must throw it out. On the contrary, even with just the UDA, consciousness is the basic notion at the base of the whole reasoning (which annoys of course those who want to keep it under the rug). You are either a bit unfair, or ignorant of the UDA. Its role consists in showing that the subjective data and the 3p stuff are not easily reconciled with comp, as we must explain the physical 3p, from coherence condition on the subjective experience related to computations. We need some reason to believe that just because I have a subjective experience of being in the world that this implies that this is possible for other entities. Chalmer's argues for panprotopsychism, the theory that everything has subjective experience and qualia, but does not seem to offer a hypothesis as to how. I offer (reasoning with Vaughan Pratt) a theory that psychism follows from Stone duality, but this limits subjectivity to the duality between Boolean algebras (up to isomorphism) and topological spaces (up to isomorphism). BRUNO To separate science from religion looks nice, but it consists in encouraging nonsense in religion, and in science eventually. ROGER: Religion deals mainly with subjective issues such as values. morality, salvation, forgiveness. These are inextended or nonphysical human/divine issues. Yes, but that does not mean we cannot handle them with the scientific method. If not you would not even been arguing. It is ironic that you are taking this side of the debate, Bruno! You, in your theory, have reduced to a epiphenomena the very thing that allows for falsification. The Bible was not written as a scientific textbook, but as a manual oof faith and moral practice. OK. Sam Harris makes a good argument for this. Science deals entirely with objective issues such as facts, quantity, numbers, physical data. If you decide so, but then religious people should stop doing factual claims, and stop proposing normatible behavior. Science can study its own limitations, and reveal what is beyond itself. Like in neoplatonism, science proposes a negative theology, protecting faith from blind faith, actually. I.e. true belief. I agree. BRUNO: Science cannot answer the religious question, nor even the human question, nor even the machine question, but it *can* reduce the nonsense. Bruno ROGER: You can try, which is what atheists do. No atheists have a blind faith in a primary universe. They are religious, despite they want not to be. A scientist aware of the mind-body problem can only be agnostic, and continue the research for more information. Atheists are Christian, as John Clark illustrates so
Re: questions on machines, belief, awareness, and knowledge
On 9/14/2012 4:20 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: Hi Brian, On 13 Sep 2012, at 22:04, Brian Tenneson wrote: Bruno, You use B as a predicate symbol for belief I think. I use for the modal unspecified box, in some context (in place of the more common []). Then I use it mainly for the box corresponding to Gödel's beweisbar (provability) arithmetical predicate (definable with the symbols E, A, , -, ~, s, 0 and parentheses. Thanks to the fact that Bp - p is not a theorem, it can plays the role of believability for the ideally correct machines. What are some properties of B and is there a predicate for knowing/being aware of that might lead to a definition for self-awareness? Yes, B and its variants: B_1 p == Bp p B_2 p = Bp Dt B_3 p = Bp Dt t, and others. btw, what is a machine and what types of machines are there? With comp we bet that we are, at some level, digital machine. The theory is one studied by logicians (Post, Church, Turing, etc.). Dear Bruno, Could you elaborate on what your definition of a digital machine is? Is it something that can be faithfully represented by a Boolean Algebra of some sort? Is there a generic description for a structure (in the math logic sense) to have a belief or to be aware; something like A |= I am the structure A ? Yes, by using the Dx = xx method, you can define a machine having its integral 3p plan available. This 3p plan would be like my internal model of my body that I have as part of my conscious awareness? But the 1p-self, given by Bp p, does not admit any name. It is the difference between I have two legs and I have a pain in a leg, even if a phantom one. G* proves them equivalent (for correct machines), but G cannot identify them, and they obeys different logic (G and S4Grz). This implies, to me, that the 1p-self cannot be defined by an equivalence class with a fixed equivalence relation. This is problematic if assumed to be true for all possible 1p-selfs. AFAIK, your definition would only apply to an machine that is unnameable infinite such as the totality of all that could exist, aka God or cosmic intelligence. It reminds me more of theAzathoth of H.P. Lovecraft's mythos http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azathoth. Finally, on a different note, if there is a structure for which all structures can be 1-1 injected into it, does that in itself imply a sort of ultimate structure perhaps what Max Tegmark views as the level IV multiverse? A 1-1 map is too cheap for that, and the set structure is a too much structural flattening. I agree, it is just a tautology. Comp used the simulation, notion, at a non specifiable level substitution. But does not address the computational resource requirement. :_( Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- Onward! Stephen http://webpages.charter.net/stephenk1/Outlaw/Outlaw.html -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Simple proof that our intelligence transcends that of computers
On 9/14/2012 4:27 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 13 Sep 2012, at 20:08, Stephen P. King wrote: On 9/13/2012 12:05 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 13 Sep 2012, at 13:55, Stephen P. King wrote: Hi benjayk, This is exactly what I have been complaining to Bruno about. He does not see several things that are problematic. 1) Godel numberings are not unique. Thus there is no a single abslute structure of relations, there is an infinity that cannot be reduced. On the contrary, I insist on this. That's part of the domain of the 1-indeterminacy, all working coding will do their work, if I dare to say. We already know this, and is part of the problem that we try to just formulate clearly. Dear Bruno, Oh, right, I missed that implication, but do you see my point as well? The diagonalization applies to everything, even your result. ? Dear Bruno, On the contrary, everything I say depends on the fact that diagonalization does not apply to computability. Then how do we explain Godel numbering schemes? The ability of one string of numbers to stand for some other is the essence of computational universality, no? The point that I am trying to emphasize is that we can never be at the ultimate level, I can' agree more, given that the ultimate level (the one we can mistake with primitive matter) consists in a sum on infinitely many computations (how ever we solve the measure problem). But this statement implies a contradiction that you do not address! To say that at some ultimate level there is something, even a sum on infinitely many computations is to simultaneously also claim, and nothing else. At the ultimate level the ability to distinguish X is true from X is false cannot exist. Thus we cannot make claims of some type of something, here computations, at the ultimate level and thus implying that there are no not-computations without explaining the means by which they are distinguished from each other. You seems to just saying that there is nothing except computations and offer no explanation as to how the computations are excluded from the non-computations at the ultimate level. You have to invoke a plurality of levels in order to have distinguishability, difference itself vanishes at the ultimate level. we can at best point at it and approximate/represent it. OK. It is the comp truncateness. Please elaborate! Any approximation will have dual aspects, one partly logical and abstract and the other concrete an physical. In our setting physical needs to be (re)defined. I agree. The reasoning for this is that meaningfulness is 3p, it is never just 1p (if we assumed that it was 1-p we would get a degeneracy condition and only have a bet of its truth and nowhere to cash in if it where true by many other 1-p's). The concept that some people have used for this is the notion of a witness in the sense that it is not sufficient for me to know that X is true, X must be true to at least two witnesses that are not under my control. This explanation is very crude still, my apologies. Yes, it is hard to make sense. Witnesses have to be, in some way, independent of influence or control; so how would you explain this in your thinking? For example, we claim that 1+1=2 because all possible examples of such are true and discount the false claims as improper coding or reference. This makes a witness something that has in its 1p a model of 1+1=2 and there are many different witnesses that are accessible to us that believe that 1+1=2. 2) the physical implementations of the representations cannot be abstracted away without making the entire result meaningless. This is correct for human perception, but with comp the physical implementations that you need at that level are explained by a non physical (and somehow deeper) phenomenon. Yes, but I am not considering human perception; I am assuming panprotopsychism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism#Dualism: everything is aware So you quit comp, here, right? Yes, but I am still trying to salvage comp as I do not see it as completely inconsistent with panprotopsychism. It is only your rejection of the necessity of physical implementations that causes the divorce, IMHO. and has a 1-p, my conjecture is that the UD rides on the unitary evolution of the QM system and thus each and every QM ssytem is an observer and has some level of awareness. It is for this reason that I am motivated to assume that the universe is quantum and that the classical picture is just an image that the universe generates via our interactions with each other. You abandon comp to come back to physicalism, but then you lost the comp explanation of both consciousness and matter. Comp gives both a conceptual explanation of the coupling matter/consciousness, and a way to test it from the solution of the measure problem (already mathematical for the
Re: Why the supreme monad is necessary in Leibniz's universe
On 13 Sep 2012, at 13:44, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Bruno Marchal SNIP BRUNO: Matter is what is not determined, and thus contingent indeed, at its very roots, like W and M in a self-duplication experiment, or like, plausibly when looking at a photon through a calcite crystal. ROGER: So Newton's Laws, such as F = ma, are not deterministic ? It means that F = ma, if correct, can only be an approximation of a deeper non deterministic process. Note that it is actually the case, as F=ma can be derived from the more fundamental schroedinger equation, which indeed give rise to a first person plural indeterminacy. ROGER: and in which men, so as not to be robots, BRUNO: You might try to be polite with the robots, and with your son in law, victim of pro-life doctors who gave him an artificial brain without its consent. He does not complain on the artificial brain, though, as he is glad to be alive. Do you think it is a (philosophical) zombie? Come on! He is a Lutheran. Obviously, if you decide that a machine cannot be a Lutheran, few machines will be ... ROGER: I may be wrong, but I don't see how an artifical brain can have any awareness or intelligence, for these require life-- real life. As you say, you might be wrong. Nobody understand how a machine, or a brain, can feel, but machine can already explain why they can know some true fact without being able to justify them---at all. With the good hypotheses, sometimes we can explain why there are things that we cannot explain. And you might be true, but your personal feeling cannot be used in this setting, as they can only look like prejudices, even if true. The best is to keep the mind open, to make clear assumptions and to reason, without ever pretending to know the public truth. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Why we debate religion: two completely different types of truth.
On 13 Sep 2012, at 13:44, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Bruno Marchal SNIP BRUNO: I mainly agree [that there are two types of truth, one ruling the objective world, the other, being subjective, ruling the subjective world]. But then why coming with factual assertion, about a Jesus guy. I can accept the parabolas, but I can't take a witnessing of 500 persons, in the writing of a quite biased guy (Paul), from a reasonable perspective, as an argument, and it all make dubious any assertion you can add. ROGER: This won't convince you, but the Bible should be read as a little child (in trust and faith), so questioning the number 500 just doesn't happen... and if you read the creation story as a bedtime story, all you can say is WOW! I try to read the Bible that way. Some baby birds consider that their parents are the first moving object they identify at birds. I think that the humans consider as sacred the first book they heard about. Bad habits. And no luck for me perhaps, as I have got an atheist education, and my first book was Alice in Wonderland, and it has been my bible for long ... Luckily my parents have wisely evolve to agnosticism. BRUNO: Your theory above is better, though, and close to the universal machine's own theory, actually. Science is only a modest and interrogative inquiry. It is rooted in the doubt, and ask only question. Theories have all interrogation mark. It is the separation between science and theology that makes people believing that science = truth, when the truth is that science = doubt, but with a willingness to make the assumptions as clear as it is needed to be sharable, and questioned. ROGER: Objective truth, not subjective truths such as morals. Subjective truth cannot be objective, but they still can be object of objective sharable theory. BRUNO: You say Religious truth is only certain too an individual and cannot be shared, but note that is the case also for consciousness, and all hallucinated states. If you cannot share, don't try, perhaps. ROGER: Agreed. But scientific truth (like religious truth) must be accepted to be useful or meaningful, and acceptance is a value or a subjective judgment (which cannot be shared). OK. That's why both statements machine can think, and machine cannot think are not scientific, nor is the yes doctor. But we can still derived validly other statements from there. The choice of a (scientific) theory is not an entirely scientific activity. Science is not normative, making it less inhuman that many institutionalized religion. Bruno SNIP, END -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com . For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: The poverty of computers
On Fri, Sep 14, 2012 at 4:40 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Theology is a science. It's a very strange science, it's a science that does not use the scientific method and, not surprisingly, a science that has discovered absolutely positively nothing about the nature of the universe despite working on the problem for thousands of years. However I will admit that theology's rate of success is every bit as good as that other science, astrology. Aristotle hypothesis of the existence of a primary universe Face reality and get with the program, Aristotle didn't know his ass from a hole in the ground. Plato's questions are at the origin of science. And neither did Plato. Aristotle is one of the first very big scientists. To be wrong is the natural fate of all serious scientists. Yes all the great scientists were wrong about something, but unlike them Aristotle was not just wrong he was also certain; he was so certain that men have more teeth than women he didn't bother to look into his wife's mouth. Even 2500 years ago that was lousy science. Again atheism goes hand in hand with the fundamentalist christians and muslims. [...] I don't buy your religion, John. The taunt that atheism is a religion didn't impress me when I first heard it at the age of 12 and it doesn't impress me today. The physical science is a product of a theology. Yes, chemistry is the product of alchemy and astronomy is the product of astrology, but our knowledge has improved over the centuries and we no longer need such crap. if you have never seen a physics paper even attempt to do something then its probably not very important because they've attempted some pretty wacky things. ? Which word didn't you understand? John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Re: Re: The poverty of computers
On Fri, Sep 14, 2012 Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net wrote: Faith is to me at least a virtue since it is associated with hope and love. Faith is believing in something when there is absolutely no reason for doing so; an optimist with faith would believe in things that fill him with hope and love, and a pessimist with faith would believe in things that fill him with despair and hate. Both are idiots. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: The poverty of computers
On 9/14/2012 4:40 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 12 Sep 2012, at 18:47, John Clark wrote: On Wed, Sep 12, 2012 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be mailto:marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: makes a bridge between two fields, What two fields? The study of the notion of truth, (epistemology, philosophy, metaphysics, it is interdisciplinary) and theology. Translation from the original bafflegab: The truth is important. And already behave like the notion of God, or what is the more common about it in many traditions. Dear Bruno, A have to side a bit with John here as the truthfulness of a concept is different from the meaningfulness. There is a context requirement. For the former case of Truth it is in all worlds and for the latter it is in all accessible worlds. And by the way, there is no field of theology, it has nothing intelligent to say because it has not discovered any facts. Theology is a science. Not so much. It must make contact with physical falsifiability in some sense of an accessible world, but not independent of that conditional. Theology is meta-physics, literally, before physics, as its considerations are such that all else, including physics, supervenes upon its truth. We can only reason a posteriori for theologies to justify them. Aristotle hypothesis of the existence of a primary universe has been refuted, so we can progress in it. The physical science is a product of a theology. This is the key ideas where we have a disagreement. Aristotle was just being consistent with the basic and fundamental requirement that the physical world acts (or even *is*) the pattern of invariances between *many* 1p points of view and thus acts as a medium of information exchange. If you remove the stipulation of such a pattern of invariances betwen many then the ability to communicate vanishes. Plato's questions are at the origin of science. But Plato lived 2500 years ago and we are no longer at the origin of science, it's time to move on. Not at all. Theology has been stolen by politics, 1500 years ago, we have to backtrack if we want to be rational on that issue. I agree. Orwell's book 1984 illustrates this fact very well; if one can control the language and ideas of a population (and hence its theology) then you can control (to some degree) the thoughts of the population. It is no use to say more if you don't have read it, and don't want to get informed. I didn't say I haven't read Plato, I said I knew more philosophy than he did, a lot more. You know a lot of things, but knowing is not a valid argument in science. I agree. Making you defending Aristotle theology, confusing it with the physical science. There is no doubt that somebody around here is confused because I have said more than once that Aristotle was the worst physicist who ever lived. Even his reputation as a great logician is overstated, he used some very intricate pure logic and concluded with certainty that women MUST have fewer teeth than men. They don't. Aristotle had a wife, he could have counted her teeth at any time but never bothered to because like most philosophers he already knew the truth, or thought he did. Aristotle is one of the first very big scientists. To be wrong is the natural fate of all serious scientists. If one is unwilling to be wrong, then one cannot be correct. He was wrong not just on physics, he was wrong on theology (at least with respect to comp).. He did not understand the concept of universality and thus didn't know about 1-indeterminism. I am sure that if we could go back and talk to him he could be pursuaded to understand and agree somewhat with us, but we have to also consider that the reality that he knew was different from ours today. Beware of chronocentrism! But physics is allowed in academy, so we can correct his physics. Let no one that does not understand geometry enter here! Unfortunately his theology is not allowed in academy, so if you say that it is incorrect you are mocked in the academy, and ignored, of course, from the churches. Result: we can't progress. Academy is always in danger of becoming merely a bastion for orthodoxy and thus a blinkering of the genuine search for Truth. Again atheism goes hand in hand with the fundamentalist christians and muslims. They both defend, in their own ways, the idea that Aristotle theology has to remain unchanged. I don't buy your religion, John. And I do not either. I see all belief systems as having some kernel of Truth that can be informative in our Quest. I have never seen a paper in physics assuming a primitive physical reality, still less a paper showing how to test such idea. I have no idea what you mean We understand that because you have stopped the thinking at step 3. but I will say this, if you have never seen a physics
Re: If I ever doubt that there is a God,
On 9/14/2012 6:09 AM, Roger Clough wrote: Hi John Clark Generating sets gets you nowhere unless you can also generate intelligence. Hi Roger, I agree. Defining differences without the means to comprehend those differences is purely mechanical and not-intelligent. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/14/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: John Clark Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-13, 16:26:42 Subject: Re: If I ever doubt that there is a God, On Tue, Sep 11, 2012 at 5:20 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: Statistically, shouldn't we see this simple 1K sequence frequently in nature? I mean precisely. Shouldn't there be hundreds of species of beetle that have patterns on their backs which are derived exclusively from the Mandelbot set. There's nothing special about the Mandelbrot Set, it's just the first example found where huge complexity can be generated from very little. And if you want to see what can be done with a 400 meg file just look in a mirror, that's about the size of the human genome; you could burn the entire thing onto a CD and still have room for 100 pop songs from iTunes. ? John K Clark ? ? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- Onward! Stephen http://webpages.charter.net/stephenk1/Outlaw/Outlaw.html -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: imaginary numbers in comp
On 9/14/2012 6:14 AM, Roger Clough wrote: Hi John Clark Right. The problem with the Chinese Room argument is that there is no way to generate a reasonable answer. Hi Roger, The Chinese room argument is flawed becuase it does not consider the distinction of levels of meaningfulness. 9/14/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - *From:* John Clark mailto:johnkcl...@gmail.com *Receiver:* everything-list mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com *Time:* 2012-09-13, 15:58:20 *Subject:* Re: imaginary numbers in comp On Thu, Sep 13, 2012 at 1:38 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com mailto:whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: This is the symbol grounding problem pointed out by Searle's Chinese Room I've said it before I'll say it again,? Searle's Chinese Room is the single stupidest thought experiment ever devised by the mind of man. Of course even the best of us can have a brain fart from time to time, but Searle baked this turd pie decades ago and apparently he still thinks its quite clever, and thus I can only conclude that John Searle is as dumb as his room.? ? John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- Onward! Stephen http://webpages.charter.net/stephenk1/Outlaw/Outlaw.html -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: On marrying a talking doll
On 14 Sep 2012, at 13:57, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Bruno Marchal My judgment was overly harsh if they transplanted something living along with the computer transplant or partial transplant. But it doesn't look too promising that the result would even be alive. I don't know why you keep imputing racism on me just because I realistically allow that there can be differences in people. For one thing, I'm no way as smart as you are. I don't know that, and it is not an argument. I agree that racism is harsh but how to call a judgment on a human, based on the aspect of its contingent body. My questioning is theoretical. No worry, artificial brain are not for tomorrow, although it might go quickly soon enough, and human survives already with many prostheses. The brain is without doubt very complex, but why would it be impossible that it is a machine. Even creationist insist that nature looks like the result of an intelligent *design*, and describes part of molecular biology in mechanist terms. And mechanism goes in your direction, if my body is a machine, my first person I is not, as it is something associated with infinities of complex number relations, and it exists only in Platonia, in a non extended realization. Bruno Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/14/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Bruno Marchal Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-14, 06:46:21 Subject: Re: On marrying a talking doll On 13 Sep 2012, at 13:53, Roger Clough wrote: Again, if my daughter is human, why would she want to marry a robot ? She wants a talking doll I suppose. Probably needs a shrink. No. She just want to marry Jim. It is nice guy. She is glad that he survived the brain transplant. She does not consider him as a robot, but as a fully human being, just with new clothes. If you believe this is impossible, it means either that you believe that Jim's mind, cannot be Turing emulable, which is a metaphysical stance, and you can't impose it to your daughter, or that he is a zombie. From her point of view, you behave like a racist, which judge people from the character of their body, and throw their souls and subjectivity in the trash. You are the one telling your daughter that Jim is nothing but a bunch of metallic and silicon. She *knows* Jim, and recognize him through the transformation. You can't know that she is wrong, do you? Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com . For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com . For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: imaginary numbers in comp
On 9/14/2012 6:25 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 13 Sep 2012, at 22:08, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Thursday, September 13, 2012 3:58:21 PM UTC-4, John Clark wrote: On Thu, Sep 13, 2012 at 1:38 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.com javascript: wrote: This is the symbol grounding problem pointed out by Searle's Chinese Room I've said it before I'll say it again, Searle's Chinese Room is the single stupidest thought experiment ever devised by the mind of man. Of course even the best of us can have a brain fart from time to time, but Searle baked this turd pie decades ago and apparently he still thinks its quite clever, and thus I can only conclude that John Searle is as dumb as his room. The only way that you can think that it's stupid is if you don't understand it. It's the same thing as Leibniz Mill. His particulars may be a bit more elaborate than they need to be, but the point he makes is the same that has been made before by many others: The map is not the territory. The menu is not the meal. To my mind, the fact that you have particular animus toward the Chinese Room can only be because on some level you know that it is a relatively simple way of proving something that you are in deep denial about. Why else would it bother you in particular? Are there other philosophical arguments that bother you like this? I am with Clark on this, Craig. Searle either begs the question or confuses a program with the machine running the program. Dennett and Hofstadter explains this already very well in Mind's I. It is the same error as believing that RA can think like PA when emulating PA. But when RA emulates PA, it is like when I emulate another program, or Einstein's brain, I don't become that other program, nor do I become Einstein, in such case. It is again a confusion of level. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/%7Emarchal/ Dear Bruno, I agree with you. What you are pointing out is that one needs a discordant system to distinguish the levels that are involved. More often than not we run into problems because a pair of different levels are considered to be the same level by the person that does not understand the difference. This is called flattening. -- Onward! Stephen http://webpages.charter.net/stephenk1/Outlaw/Outlaw.html -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: imaginary numbers in comp
On 9/14/2012 6:38 AM, Roger Clough wrote: Hi John Clark The difference is that a computer has no intelligence, cannot deal with qualia, and is not alive. Dear Roger, You are assuming ab initio that a computer has no capacity whatsoever of reflecting upon its computations and to possible be able to report on its meditation. You might say that you are intelligent exactly because you assume that you have this capacity. My brain has all of these features in spades. ibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: John Clark Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-13, 13:15:54 Subject: Re: imaginary numbers in comp On Thu, Sep 13, 2012 at 12:11 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: I reject comp, because it cannot access feelings or qualities And you have deduced this by using the nothing but fallacy: even the largest computer is nothing but a collection of on and off switches. Never mind that your brain is nothing but a collection of molecules rigorously obeying the laws of physics. ? John K Clark ? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- Onward! Stephen http://webpages.charter.net/stephenk1/Outlaw/Outlaw.html -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Simple proof that our intelligence transcends that of computers
On Thu, Sep 13, 2012 at 7:55 AM, Stephen P. King stephe...@charter.netwrote: Godel numberings are not unique. True, there are a infinite number of ways you could do Godel numbering. Thus there is no a single abslute structure of relations, there is an infinity And you can use any one of those Godel numbering schemes to show that there is not a single one of those infinite number of structural relationships that are powerful enough to do arithmetic and be consistent and complete. The hope is that the scheme mathematicians are using is consistent but incomplete, if it's inconsistent that would be a disaster. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: On marrying a talking doll
On 9/14/2012 6:46 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 13 Sep 2012, at 13:53, Roger Clough wrote: Again, if my daughter is human, why would she want to marry a robot ? She wants a talking doll I suppose. Probably needs a shrink. No. She just want to marry Jim. It is nice guy. She is glad that he survived the brain transplant. She does not consider him as a robot, but as a fully human being, just with new clothes. If you believe this is impossible, it means either that you believe that Jim's mind, cannot be Turing emulable, which is a metaphysical stance, and you can't impose it to your daughter, or that he is a zombie. From her point of view, you behave like a racist, which judge people from the character of their body, and throw their souls and subjectivity in the trash. You are the one telling your daughter that Jim is nothing but a bunch of metallic and silicon. She *knows* Jim, and recognize him through the transformation. You can't know that she is wrong, do you? Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ Dear Bruno and Roger, I am with Bruno here. What we are is not just the body. -- Onward! Stephen http://webpages.charter.net/stephenk1/Outlaw/Outlaw.html -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Zombieopolis Thought Experiment
On 9/14/2012 7:05 AM, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Craig Weinberg His very first sentence is wrong. Conscious experience is an expression of nonphysical mind, although it may deal with physical topics. It is widely accepted that conscious experience has a physical basis. Dear Roger, No, you misunderstand his argument. If Conscious experience is an expression of nonphysical mind in a strict nothing but sense then consciousness would be completely solipsistic and incapable of even comprehending that it is not all that exists. It is because consciousness is contained to be Boolean representable (and thus finite!) that it can bet on its incompleteness and thus go beyond itself, escaping its solipsism. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/14/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Craig Weinberg Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-13, 15:03:13 Subject: Zombieopolis Thought Experiment If anyone is not familiar with David Chalmers Absent Qualia, Fading Qualia, Dancing Qualia You should have a look at it first. This thought experiment is intended to generalize principles common to both computationalism and functionalism so that the often confusing objections surrounding their assumptions can be revealed. Say that we have the technology to scan the city of New York by means of releasing 100,000 specially fitted cats into the streets, which will return to the laboratory in a week's time with a fantastically large amount of data about what the cats see and feel, smell and taste, hear, their positions and movements relative to each other, etc. We now set about computing algorithms to simulate the functions of Brooklyn such that we can tear down Brooklyn completely and replace it with a simulation which causes cats released into the simulated environment to behave in the same way as they would have according to the history of their initial release. Indeed, cats in Manhattan travel to and from Brooklyn as usual. Perhaps to get this right, we had to take all of Brooklyn and grind it up in a giant blender until it becomes a paste of liquified corpses, garbage, concrete, wood, and glass, and then use this substrate to mold into objects that can be moved around remotely to suit the expectations of the cats. Armed with the confidence of the feline thumbs-up, we go ahead and replace Manhattan and the other boroughs in the same way, effectively turning a city of millions into a cat-friendly cemetery. While the experiment is not a PR success (Luddites and Fundamentalists complain loudly about a genocide), our cats assure us that all is well and the experiment is a great success. Craig -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/everything-list/-/5BbVwrPfmSoJ. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- Onward! Stephen http://webpages.charter.net/stephenk1/Outlaw/Outlaw.html -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: imaginary numbers in comp
On Thu, Sept 13, 2012 Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: The menu is not the meal. In other words X is not X and that is perfectly true, use and mention are indeed not the same, but they are closely related. To my mind, the fact that you have particular animus toward the Chinese Room can only be because on some level you know that it is a relatively simple way of proving something that you are in deep denial about. Why else would it bother you in particular? Searle's Chinese Room bothers me because it is so fabulously DUMB! What makes it so idiotic is its conclusion: The funny little man doesn't understand anything therefore the entire Chinese Room doesn't understand anything. Dumb dumb dumb. Searle doesn't even attempt to explain why if there is understanding anywhere it must be centered on the silly little man, apparently he's such a crumby philosopher it never even occurred to him that he's assuming the very thing he's trying to prove!! Even Aristotle never did anything that stupid. You could easily get rid of the little man altogether and replace him with a 1950's punch card sorting machine, it would be slow but mush faster than the man and produce fewer errors, and in such a situation I would agree that the punch card machine was not conscious, and I would also agree that a very very small part of a system, any system, does not have all the properties of the entire system. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Needed: A calculus of pleasure and pain.
On 9/14/2012 8:07 AM, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Craig Weinberg Fortunately or unfortunately, capitalism is Darwinism, pure and simple. So it can prepare for a better future, although it can be painful at present. My own take on this is that there needs to be a calculus of pleasure and pain. Jeremy Bentham suggested perhaps an impfect one. In lieu of that, I am all for food stamps and safety nets. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net mailto:rclo...@verizon.net Dear Roger, I completely disagree. Darwinism does not consider valuations beyond the concept of relative fitness. Capitalism is a theory of valuation and exchange between entities. It does include concept that are analogous to those in darwinism, just as the fitness of a trader to make multiple trades, and so I can see some analogy between them, but to claim equivalence is simply false. IMHO, Food stamps and safety nets encourage risky behavior that is better if suppressed for the general welfare of the population, thus I am against them in principle. Why work to sustain my physical existence with my own toil if I can depend on the coercive taxation on others to sustain me? -- Onward! Stephen http://webpages.charter.net/stephenk1/Outlaw/Outlaw.html -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: science only works with half a brain
On Fri, Sep 14, 2012 at 8:32 AM, Stephen P. King stephe...@charter.netwrote: I contend that universality is the independence of computations to any particular machine but there must be at least one physical system that can implement a given computation for that computation to be knowable. This is just a accessibility question, in the Kripke sense of accessible worldshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility_relation . Stephen, Could you provide a definition of what you mean by 'physical system'? Do you think it is possible, even in theory, for entities to distinguish whether they are in a physical system or a mathematical one? If so, what difference would they test to make that distinction? Thanks, Jason -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: science only works with half a brain
On 9/14/2012 8:14 AM, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Bruno Marchal Objective things are things that can be measured (are extended) and so are quantitative. Numbers can apply. Science applies. Computers can deal with them. Subjective things are inextended and so cannot be measured directly, at least, nor dealt with by computers at least directly. I think a more practical division would be the body/mind split. Perhaps set theory might work, I don't understand it. Dear Roger, You are assuming an exclusively materialist stance or paradigm in your comment. Bruno's ideas are against the very idea. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/14/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Bruno Marchal Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-14, 04:09:27 Subject: Re: science only works with half a brain On 13 Sep 2012, at 13:17, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Bruno Marchal and meekerdb, ROGER: Hi meekerdb First, science can only work with quantity, not quality, so it only works with half a brain. MEEKERDB [actually it is BRUNO]: Bad decision. You are the one cutting the corpus callosum here. ROGER: You have to. Quantity is an objective measure, quality is a subjective measure. Apples and oranges. You are too much categorical. Qualities can have objective features too. Modal logic, and other non standard logic are invented for that purposes. Geometry and topology can have non quantitative features, also. Secondly, meaning is not a scientific category. Model theory studies a form of meaning. If you decide that something is not scientific, you make it non scientific. So science can neither make nor understand meaningful statements. Logic has the same fatal problem. Only if you decide so. BRUNO ?: Not at all. Logic handle both syntactical or digital transformations, and its dual the corresponding semantical adjoint transformation. There is proof theory and model theory. Meaning is handle by non syntactical mathematical structures. There are many branches in logic, and semantic, alias Model Theory, is one of them. ROGER: Those are all tools for working with objective data such as numbers or written words. Not at all. Model studies infinite structure, some of them have no syntactical or finite counterparts. Then what do you do with subjective data ? Obviously you must throw it out. On the contrary, even with just the UDA, consciousness is the basic notion at the base of the whole reasoning (which annoys of course those who want to keep it under the rug). You are either a bit unfair, or ignorant of the UDA. Its role consists in showing that the subjective data and the 3p stuff are not easily reconciled with comp, as we must explain the physical 3p, from coherence condition on the subjective experience related to computations. BRUNO To separate science from religion looks nice, but it consists in encouraging nonsense in religion, and in science eventually. ROGER: Religion deals mainly with subjective issues such as values. morality, salvation, forgiveness. These are inextended or nonphysical human/divine issues. Yes, but that does not mean we cannot handle them with the scientific method. If not you would not even been arguing. The Bible was not written as a scientific textbook, but as a manual oof faith and moral practice. OK. Science deals entirely with objective issues such as facts, quantity, numbers, physical data. If you decide so, but then religious people should stop doing factual claims, and stop proposing normatible behavior. Science can study its own limitations, and reveal what is beyond itself. Like in neoplatonism, science proposes a negative theology, protecting faith from blind faith, actually. BRUNO: Science cannot answer the religious question, nor even the human question, nor even the machine question, but it *can* reduce the nonsense. Bruno ROGER: You can try, which is what atheists do. No atheists have a blind faith in a primary universe. They are religious, despite they want not to be. A scientist aware of the mind- body problem can only be agnostic, and continue the research for more information. Atheists are Christian, as John Clark illustrates so well. As I say, there are a few errors in facts in the Bible. Yes, like PI = 3. But physics and chemistry have no capabability of dealing with meaning, value, morality, salvation, etc. OK. Like electronics cannot explain the Deep Blue chess strategy. But computer science explains Deep Blue strategy, and it explains already why there is something like meaning, value, morality, salvation. Computer science deals with immaterial entity, developing discourse on many non material things, including knowledge, meaning, etc. As I said, you are the one defending a reductionist conception of machine, confusing them with nothing but their appearances. Bruno Roger Clough,
Re: Qualitative calculations with binary numbers
On 9/14/2012 8:40 AM, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Bruno Marchal IMHO in Platonia (the Eternal) all logical statements must always be either true or false forever. However, in this everyday world, where time is a factor, such necessary logical statements become contingent, and may only sometimes be true. And possibly not everywhere. The I Ching provides a numerical way of combining, separating, and systematically manipulating qualitative situations, since these have visually been associated to trigrams of binary numbers. For example 111 or all yang lines is male and yang-ish. 000 is female and having softer heavier female qualitites. Then combining and reading down from left to right, 00 is female 11 is male. 111000 or male over female is stagnation while 000111 with female over male, is bliss. Which is what womens' lib teaches. There's so much more to such manipulations that it would take a book to show them all. Dear Roger, On this claim I agree with you 100%. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/14/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Bruno Marchal Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-14, 03:38:43 Subject: Re: Simple proof that our intelligence transcends that of computers On 30 Aug 2012, at 04:40, Terren Suydam wrote: hmmm, my interpretation is that in platonia, all computations, all the potential infinities of computations, have the same ontological status. Meaning, there's nothing meaningful that can be said with regard to any particular state of the UD - one can imagine that all computations have been performed in a timeless way. OK. And not only they all exist, (in the same sense as all prime numbers exist), but they all exist with a particular weighted redundancy, independent of the choice of the U in the UD. If so, it follows that the state that corresponds to my mind at this moment has an infinite number of instantiations in the UD (regardless of some arbitrary current state of the UD). In fact this is the only way I can make sense of the reversal, where physics emerges from the infinite computations going through my state. That's correct. Otherwise, I think the physics that emerges would depend in a contigent way on the particulars of how the UD unfolds. Yes. Whether the infinities involved with my current state are of the same ordinality as the infinitie of all computations, I'm not sure. But I think if it was a lesser infinity, so that the probability of my state being instantiated did approach zero in the limit, then my interpretation above would imply that the probability of my existence is actually zero. Which is a contradiction. This does not necessarily follows. We can be relatively rare. To exists more than an instant, we need only to have enough normal computations going through or state, but the initial state can be absolutely rare. The same might be true for the origin of life. Logically, as I am agnostic on this, to be sure. Bruno Terren On Wed, Aug 29, 2012 at 4:41 PM, meekerdb wrote: But there are no infinities at any give state - only potential infinities. Of course that also implies that you are never complete, since at any given state in the UD there still remain infinitely many computations that will, in later steps, go through the states instantiating you. Brent On 8/29/2012 9:04 AM, Terren Suydam wrote: It may not even be zero in the limit, since there's an infinity of computations that generate my state. I suppose it comes down to the ordinality of the infinities involved. Terren Not zero, only zero in the limit of completing the infinite computations. So at any stage short the infinite completion the probability of you is very small, but non-zero. But we already knew that. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com . To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything- l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com . For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message
Re: The poverty of computers
On Fri, Sep 14, 2012 at 11:43 AM, Stephen P. King stephe...@charter.netwrote: A have to side a bit with John here as the truthfulness of a concept is different from the meaningfulness. Yes they are different. 2+2=5 is meaningful but not truthful. 2+2=4 is meaningful and truthful. Man has qewhrwv or Man has free will is not meaningful and therefore is neither truthful nor untruthful, it is noise. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: the nothing but fallacy.
On 9/14/2012 12:18 AM, Alberto G. Corona wrote: Every belief system has a core and a set of pseudo logic, which is a mix of pseudo arguments ad authoritas that justify their beliefs. Positivsts have Phisics as its core, defence shield. From this, almost everything else is derived. Because the law of angular momentum is true and is science, then science is true, and science is teach in universities, ergo everything teached in buildings next to the physics department is science, therefore is Truth. Physics use computers and publish in peer reviewed magazines, ergo long term Weather models are science, ergo global warming is Truth. Cultural determinism is Truth, because the sociology department is next to the physics department. All the truths of history, psychology, ethics and philosophy are the ones of the books that I read, because they are written by scientists that work in universities and are friends of physicists that have Nobel prizes. If that's your belief system you've certainly exemplified the use of psuedo logic, not to mention flat out falsehoods. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: victims of faith
On 9/14/2012 9:04 AM, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Alberto G. Corona That's why I stick to orthodoxy and the creeds. Hard to go wrong that way. Hi Roger, But you do so at the real risk of ossification. You stop asking questions, thinking that I know all that can be known. This becomes fear of the unknown. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net mailto:rclo...@verizon.net 9/14/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - *From:* Alberto G. Corona mailto:agocor...@gmail.com *Receiver:* everything-list mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com *Time:* 2012-09-14, 07:27:26 *Subject:* Re: Re: victims of faith Roger: right But there are two types of people: the ones that know that believe, that know that they are unfounded and the others that believe that known, who don磘 know that they are unfounded 2012/9/14 Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net mailto:%20rclo...@verizon.net: Hi Alberto G. Corona All religious beliefs are at the bottom unfounded. So is the fact that you are real unfounded. All scientific theories moreover are founded on assumptions, which by definition are unfounded. Need I go on ? Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net mailto:%20rclo...@verizon.net 9/14/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Alberto G. Corona Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-13, 14:45:42 Subject: Re: victims of faith 2012/9/13 Stathis Papaioannou : On Wed, Sep 12, 2012 at 8:22 PM, Alberto G. Corona wrote: There is no difference at all between religious mitifications and other mitifucatuons . See form, example the paper about Darwin that I posted. religion is a label that appears when the mith is old enough it has enough believers and the object of mitification is far away in time. People are reluctant to admit that they have unfounded beliefs. Specially if they have been educated in the belief that any belief is bad and into the belied that they have no beliefs. But to have a commong ground of beliefs is a prerequisite for individual and social life. I think that my theory of social capital, mytopoesis and belief and the assimilaion of good and truth is sound in evolutuionary terms, and provides a factual/operation definition of Truth in the world of the mind, which is the only world accesible to us. If I tell you that a spirit appeared to me last night and told me that you should give me all your money or else the world will be destroyed, what will you say to me? That it's as true as any other myth, understandable in evolutionary terms, on a par with scientific fact? Or will you just say, without thinking too hard, that it's bullshit? I suppose that you mean that there are histories that everyone would identify as bullshit. Well, this changes nothing. A myth by definition is something believed by a group of people in the past. Most of them as intelligent or more that you and me . You and me believe in things that will be myths tomorrow. Most of them created by scientists. The mith of antropogenic global warming, the myth of cultural determinism for example.. There are many things that were scientific in the past race studies for example. Now there are gender studies... they were, and they are scientific and bullshit at the same time. I hope that this is clarifying. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- Onward! Stephen http://webpages.charter.net/stephenk1/Outlaw/Outlaw.html -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Zombieopolis Thought Experiment
On Thursday, September 13, 2012 8:01:59 PM UTC-4, stathisp wrote: On Fri, Sep 14, 2012 at 5:03 AM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comjavascript: wrote: If anyone is not familiar with David Chalmers Absent Qualia, Fading Qualia, Dancing Qualia You should have a look at it first. This thought experiment is intended to generalize principles common to both computationalism and functionalism so that the often confusing objections surrounding their assumptions can be revealed. Say that we have the technology to scan the city of New York by means of releasing 100,000 specially fitted cats into the streets, which will return to the laboratory in a week's time with a fantastically large amount of data about what the cats see and feel, smell and taste, hear, their positions and movements relative to each other, etc. We now set about computing algorithms to simulate the functions of Brooklyn such that we can tear down Brooklyn completely and replace it with a simulation which causes cats released into the simulated environment to behave in the same way as they would have according to the history of their initial release. Indeed, cats in Manhattan travel to and from Brooklyn as usual. Perhaps to get this right, we had to take all of Brooklyn and grind it up in a giant blender until it becomes a paste of liquified corpses, garbage, concrete, wood, and glass, and then use this substrate to mold into objects that can be moved around remotely to suit the expectations of the cats. Armed with the confidence of the feline thumbs-up, we go ahead and replace Manhattan and the other boroughs in the same way, effectively turning a city of millions into a cat-friendly cemetery. While the experiment is not a PR success (Luddites and Fundamentalists complain loudly about a genocide), our cats assure us that all is well and the experiment is a great success. Craig, this post of yours just shows me that you don't understand the paper at all. If I am wrong, perhaps you could summarise it. I suspect that the part you don't understand is what it means to make a functional replacement of a neuron, which means replicating just the third party observable behaviour. I'm not sure if you don't understand third party observable behaviour or if you do understand but think it's impossible to replicate it. Perhaps you could clarify by explaining what you think third party observable behaviour actually means. What you think third party observable behavior means is the set of all properties which are externally discoverable. I am saying that is a projection of naive realism, and that in reality, there is no such set, and that in fact the process of discovery of any properties supervenes on the properties of all participants and the methods of their interaction. My point of using cats in this thought experiment is to specifically point out our naivete in assuming that instruments which extend our perception in only the most deterministic and easy to control ways are sufficient to define a 'third person'. If we look at the brain with a microscope, we see those parts of the brain that microscopes can see. If we look at New York with a swarm of cats, then we see the parts of New York that cats can see. This is the point of the thought experiment. The limitations of all forms of measurement and perception preclude all possibility of there ever being a such thing as an exhaustively complete set of third person behaviors of any system. What is it that you don't think I understand? Craig -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/everything-list/-/mciUNZIehAQJ. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Why the supreme monad is necessary in Leibniz's universe
On 9/14/2012 11:04 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 13 Sep 2012, at 13:44, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Bruno Marchal SNIP BRUNO: Matter is what is not determined, and thus contingent indeed, at its very roots, like W and M in a self-duplication experiment, or like, plausibly when looking at a photon through a calcite crystal. ROGER: So Newton's Laws, such as F = ma, are not deterministic ? It means that F = ma, if correct, can only be an approximation of a deeper non deterministic process. Hi Bruno, What does this mean? If we assume a stochastic process, like Markov or Weiner, then we can only do so in a framework that allows for an ordering of the events to be defined. Strict indeterminacy is a self-contradictory concept. Note that it is actually the case, as F=ma can be derived from the more fundamental schroedinger equation, which indeed give rise to a first person plural indeterminacy. I wish that you would explain how this is the case. Your explanation in terms of cut and paste operations assumes a unifying framework of a single word that has the room for he multiple copies. You seem to ignore this necessity in your step 8. ROGER: and in which men, so as not to be robots, BRUNO: You might try to be polite with the robots, and with your son in law, victim of pro-life doctors who gave him an artificial brain without its consent. He does not complain on the artificial brain, though, as he is glad to be alive. Do you think it is a (philosophical) zombie? Come on! He is a Lutheran. Obviously, if you decide that a machine cannot be a Lutheran, few machines will be ... ROGER: I may be wrong, but I don't see how an artifical brain can have any awareness or intelligence, for these require life-- real life. As you say, you might be wrong. I agree with Bruno. So long as the person with the artificial brain can behave and respond to interviews the same way as a real person what is the difference that makes a difference? Nobody understand how a machine, or a brain, can feel, but machine can already explain why they can know some true fact without being able to justify them---at all. With the good hypotheses, sometimes we can explain why there are things that we cannot explain. Please understand, Bruno, that you are tacitly assuming a common framework or schemata what allows the comparison of a machine that can explain ... and a machine that cannot explain This is the mistake that you and Maudlin commit in the MGA argument. Contrafactuals depend on just their possibility to act for their capacity, not on their actual state of affairs. And you might be true, but your personal feeling cannot be used in this setting, as they can only look like prejudices, even if true. The best is to keep the mind open, to make clear assumptions and to reason, without ever pretending to know the public truth. I agree. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- Onward! Stephen http://webpages.charter.net/stephenk1/Outlaw/Outlaw.html -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: victims of faith
On 9/14/2012 6:10 AM, Stephen P. King wrote: The evidence has strong indications of being manipulated for the purpose of a political agenda. It is certainly cherry-picked by minions of the fossil fuel industry. The way that the sensors are distributed and their data is weighed is the subject of a lot of controversy Which has been addressed by direct comparison of different sensors. Of course the fossil fuel industry doesn't have to prove anything, they just create fake controversy and take advantage of the provisional nature of all science. We do not have models that are accurate enough to even accurately retrodict the variation in temperatures so why are we trusting them in their predictions?. Because whatever other factors there are it is straightforward to predict that increasing atmospheric CO2 will increase temperatures, something already calculated by Arrhenius in 1890. Burning fossil fuel releases CO2 into the atmosphere. The concentration of CO2 is increasing proportionately. Measured temperatures are increasing. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Qualitative calculations with binary numbers
The late Chris Lofting turned I Ching into a science and even was able to derive Quantum Mechanics from it, at least what he considered to be QM. http://www.emotionaliching.com/myweb/newindex.html On Fri, Sep 14, 2012 at 12:42 PM, Stephen P. King stephe...@charter.net wrote: On 9/14/2012 8:40 AM, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Bruno Marchal IMHO in Platonia (the Eternal) all logical statements must always be either true or false forever. However, in this everyday world, where time is a factor, such necessary logical statements become contingent, and may only sometimes be true. And possibly not everywhere. The I Ching provides a numerical way of combining, separating, and systematically manipulating qualitative situations, since these have visually been associated to trigrams of binary numbers. For example 111 or all yang lines is male and yang-ish. 000 is female and having softer heavier female qualitites. Then combining and reading down from left to right, 00 is female 11 is male. 111000 or male over female is stagnation while 000111 with female over male, is bliss. Which is what womens' lib teaches. There's so much more to such manipulations that it would take a book to show them all. Dear Roger, On this claim I agree with you 100%. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/14/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Bruno Marchal Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-14, 03:38:43 Subject: Re: Simple proof that our intelligence transcends that of computers On 30 Aug 2012, at 04:40, Terren Suydam wrote: hmmm, my interpretation is that in platonia, all computations, all the potential infinities of computations, have the same ontological status. Meaning, there's nothing meaningful that can be said with regard to any particular state of the UD - one can imagine that all computations have been performed in a timeless way. OK. And not only they all exist, (in the same sense as all prime numbers exist), but they all exist with a particular weighted redundancy, independent of the choice of the U in the UD. If so, it follows that the state that corresponds to my mind at this moment has an infinite number of instantiations in the UD (regardless of some arbitrary current state of the UD). In fact this is the only way I can make sense of the reversal, where physics emerges from the infinite computations going through my state. That's correct. Otherwise, I think the physics that emerges would depend in a contigent way on the particulars of how the UD unfolds. Yes. Whether the infinities involved with my current state are of the same ordinality as the infinitie of all computations, I'm not sure. But I think if it was a lesser infinity, so that the probability of my state being instantiated did approach zero in the limit, then my interpretation above would imply that the probability of my existence is actually zero. Which is a contradiction. This does not necessarily follows. We can be relatively rare. To exists more than an instant, we need only to have enough normal computations going through or state, but the initial state can be absolutely rare. The same might be true for the origin of life. Logically, as I am agnostic on this, to be sure. Bruno Terren On Wed, Aug 29, 2012 at 4:41 PM, meekerdb wrote: But there are no infinities at any give state - only potential infinities. Of course that also implies that you are never complete, since at any given state in the UD there still remain infinitely many computations that will, in later steps, go through the states instantiating you. Brent On 8/29/2012 9:04 AM, Terren Suydam wrote: It may not even be zero in the limit, since there's an infinity of computations that generate my state. I suppose it comes down to the ordinality of the infinities involved. Terren Not zero, only zero in the limit of completing the infinite computations. So at any stage short the infinite completion the probability of you is very small, but non-zero. But we already knew that. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com . To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything- l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are
Re: Simple proof that our intelligence transcends that of computers
On 9/14/2012 11:53 AM, John Clark wrote: On Thu, Sep 13, 2012 at 7:55 AM, Stephen P. King stephe...@charter.net mailto:stephe...@charter.net wrote: Godel numberings are not unique. True, there are a infinite number of ways you could do Godel numbering. Hi John, Yes, but my point here is that this is the same thing as having an infinite number of names for one and the same thing. This makes it impossible to be absolutely sure of what John Clark or Stephen P. King is. Thus there is no a single abslute structure of relations, there is an infinity And you can use any one of those Godel numbering schemes to show that there is not a single one of those infinite number of structural relationships that are powerful enough to do arithmetic and be consistent and complete. The hope is that the scheme mathematicians are using is consistent but incomplete, if it's inconsistent that would be a disaster. Mathematicians get around this problem by defining a unique naming scheme. My point is that this cannot be done at a meta-theoretical level when we have to include a multiplicity of names for the same of multiple entities that are evaluating models of the mathematical scheme. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- Onward! Stephen http://webpages.charter.net/stephenk1/Outlaw/Outlaw.html -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: science only works with half a brain
On 9/14/2012 12:36 PM, Jason Resch wrote: On Fri, Sep 14, 2012 at 8:32 AM, Stephen P. King stephe...@charter.net mailto:stephe...@charter.net wrote: I contend that universality is the independence of computations to any particular machine but there must be at least one physical system that can implement a given computation for that computation to be knowable. This is just a accessibility question, in the Kripke sense of accessible worlds http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility_relation. Stephen, Could you provide a definition of what you mean by 'physical system'? Hi Jason, Sure! A physical system is a scheme of invariant relata that has some non-invertible dynamic that can be functionally equivalent to some computation. Do you think it is possible, even in theory, for entities to distinguish whether they are in a physical system or a mathematical one? Not if we remove the means to distinguish self from not-self. If so, what difference would they test to make that distinction? Physical systems have the capacity to be located. This is a difference over and beyond the internal distinctions of things. I am trying to point out that one cannot just assume that other minds exist to solve the other minds problem. One has to have a sufficient reason to assume that I am not just the sum of things that I can imagine. Thanks, Jason -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- Onward! Stephen http://webpages.charter.net/stephenk1/Outlaw/Outlaw.html -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: science only works with half a brain
On 14 Sep 2012, at 14:14, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Bruno Marchal Objective things are things that can be measured (are extended) and so are quantitative. Numbers can apply. Science applies. Computers can deal with them. Subjective things are inextended and so cannot be measured directly, at least, nor dealt with by computers at least directly. I think a more practical division would be the body/mind split. Perhaps set theory might work, I don't understand it. Set are useful for the math, but we need much less for the ontology. Non negative integers are enough. With comp you can define the mind by the laws of though and laws of mind of the machines, basically given by George Boole (the laws of thought) and George Boolos (the unprovability of consistency, 1979, or the logic of provability 1993). George Boolos' book contains a chapter on the Bp p solipsistic thinker. I will say a truism. If you want learn about comp, take a look at computer science. It is enough surprising to be cautious with negative judgment about machines. Bruno Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/14/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Bruno Marchal Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-14, 04:09:27 Subject: Re: science only works with half a brain On 13 Sep 2012, at 13:17, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Bruno Marchal and meekerdb, ROGER: Hi meekerdb First, science can only work with quantity, not quality, so it only works with half a brain. MEEKERDB [actually it is BRUNO]: Bad decision. You are the one cutting the corpus callosum here. ROGER: You have to. Quantity is an objective measure, quality is a subjective measure. Apples and oranges. You are too much categorical. Qualities can have objective features too. Modal logic, and other non standard logic are invented for that purposes. Geometry and topology can have non quantitative features, also. Secondly, meaning is not a scientific category. Model theory studies a form of meaning. If you decide that something is not scientific, you make it non scientific. So science can neither make nor understand meaningful statements. Logic has the same fatal problem. Only if you decide so. BRUNO ?: Not at all. Logic handle both syntactical or digital transformations, and its dual the corresponding semantical adjoint transformation. There is proof theory and model theory. Meaning is handle by non syntactical mathematical structures. There are many branches in logic, and semantic, alias Model Theory, is one of them. ROGER: Those are all tools for working with objective data such as numbers or written words. Not at all. Model studies infinite structure, some of them have no syntactical or finite counterparts. Then what do you do with subjective data ? Obviously you must throw it out. On the contrary, even with just the UDA, consciousness is the basic notion at the base of the whole reasoning (which annoys of course those who want to keep it under the rug). You are either a bit unfair, or ignorant of the UDA. Its role consists in showing that the subjective data and the 3p stuff are not easily reconciled with comp, as we must explain the physical 3p, from coherence condition on the subjective experience related to computations. BRUNO To separate science from religion looks nice, but it consists in encouraging nonsense in religion, and in science eventually. ROGER: Religion deals mainly with subjective issues such as values. morality, salvation, forgiveness. These are inextended or nonphysical human/divine issues. Yes, but that does not mean we cannot handle them with the scientific method. If not you would not even been arguing. The Bible was not written as a scientific textbook, but as a manual oof faith and moral practice. OK. Science deals entirely with objective issues such as facts, quantity, numbers, physical data. If you decide so, but then religious people should stop doing factual claims, and stop proposing normatible behavior. Science can study its own limitations, and reveal what is beyond itself. Like in neoplatonism, science proposes a negative theology, protecting faith from blind faith, actually. BRUNO: Science cannot answer the religious question, nor even the human question, nor even the machine question, but it *can* reduce the nonsense. Bruno ROGER: You can try, which is what atheists do. No atheists have a blind faith in a primary universe. They are religious, despite they want not to be. A scientist aware of the mind- body problem can only be agnostic, and continue the research for more information. Atheists are Christian, as John Clark illustrates so well. As I say, there are a few errors in facts in the Bible. Yes, like PI = 3. But physics and chemistry have no capabability of dealing with meaning, value, morality, salvation, etc. OK. Like
Re: The poverty of computers
On 9/14/2012 12:42 PM, John Clark wrote: On Fri, Sep 14, 2012 at 11:43 AM, Stephen P. King stephe...@charter.net mailto:stephe...@charter.net wrote: A have to side a bit with John here as the truthfulness of a concept is different from the meaningfulness. Yes they are different. 2+2=5 is meaningful but not truthful. 2+2=4 is meaningful and truthful. Man has qewhrwv or Man has free will is not meaningful and therefore is neither truthful nor untruthful, it is noise. John K Clark -- Dear John, You are contradicting yourself! If Man has qewhrwv or Man has free will is not meaningful and therefore is neither truthful nor untruthful, it is noise. is true then 2+2=5 is meaningful but not truthful. 2+2=4 is meaningful and truthful. is not true, because the particular combination of symbols 2+2=5 could mean the same thing to XFR as 2+2=4 means to you. There is no unique meaning to a set of symbols. -- Onward! Stephen http://webpages.charter.net/stephenk1/Outlaw/Outlaw.html -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Needed: A calculus of pleasure and pain.
On Friday, September 14, 2012 12:33:45 PM UTC-4, Stephen Paul King wrote: On 9/14/2012 8:07 AM, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Craig Weinberg Fortunately or unfortunately, capitalism is Darwinism, pure and simple. So it can prepare for a better future, although it can be painful at present. My own take on this is that there needs to be a calculus of pleasure and pain. Jeremy Bentham suggested perhaps an impfect one. In lieu of that, I am all for food stamps and safety nets. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net javascript: Dear Roger, I completely disagree. Darwinism does not consider valuations beyond the concept of relative fitness. Capitalism is a theory of valuation and exchange between entities. It does include concept that are analogous to those in darwinism, just as the fitness of a trader to make multiple trades, and so I can see some analogy between them, but to claim equivalence is simply false. Yes! People conflate Social Darwinism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism) with Darwin's evolution. The idea of 'survival of the fittest' is also (see the Wiki) a misinterpretation. Evolution is just a blind statistical filtering of organisms which happen to survive in any given niche. Being fit has nothing whatsoever with being aggressive, greedy, or selfish, and indeed most species on Earth seem much more relaxed and gentle than human beings most of the time. IMHO, Food stamps and safety nets encourage risky behavior that is better if suppressed for the general welfare of the population, thus I am against them in principle. Why work to sustain my physical existence with my own toil if I can depend on the coercive taxation on others to sustain me? Eh, I would rather increase that stuff by 10 times than five one more dollar to subsidize corporations. The amount of money set aside for that stuff is tiny compared to everything else. It can certainly be a disincentive for people to look for work, but I think we need to confront the reality that the US doesn't really need very many people to work anymore. Most of what the US does is own things. That doesn't require a large workforce. Without manufacturing or a growing middle class, there really isn't much demand for more undereducated, unhealthy, unrealistically ambitious American workers. Craig -- Onward! Stephen http://webpages.charter.net/stephenk1/Outlaw/Outlaw.html -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/everything-list/-/fXX6Zmxk7_MJ. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Needed: A calculus of pleasure and pain.
Most people prefer working to looking for work. On Fri, Sep 14, 2012 at 1:50 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: On Friday, September 14, 2012 12:33:45 PM UTC-4, Stephen Paul King wrote: On 9/14/2012 8:07 AM, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Craig Weinberg Fortunately or unfortunately, capitalism is Darwinism, pure and simple. So it can prepare for a better future, although it can be painful at present. My own take on this is that there needs to be a calculus of pleasure and pain. Jeremy Bentham suggested perhaps an impfect one. In lieu of that, I am all for food stamps and safety nets. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net Dear Roger, I completely disagree. Darwinism does not consider valuations beyond the concept of relative fitness. Capitalism is a theory of valuation and exchange between entities. It does include concept that are analogous to those in darwinism, just as the fitness of a trader to make multiple trades, and so I can see some analogy between them, but to claim equivalence is simply false. Yes! People conflate Social Darwinism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism) with Darwin's evolution. The idea of 'survival of the fittest' is also (see the Wiki) a misinterpretation. Evolution is just a blind statistical filtering of organisms which happen to survive in any given niche. Being fit has nothing whatsoever with being aggressive, greedy, or selfish, and indeed most species on Earth seem much more relaxed and gentle than human beings most of the time. IMHO, Food stamps and safety nets encourage risky behavior that is better if suppressed for the general welfare of the population, thus I am against them in principle. Why work to sustain my physical existence with my own toil if I can depend on the coercive taxation on others to sustain me? Eh, I would rather increase that stuff by 10 times than five one more dollar to subsidize corporations. The amount of money set aside for that stuff is tiny compared to everything else. It can certainly be a disincentive for people to look for work, but I think we need to confront the reality that the US doesn't really need very many people to work anymore. Most of what the US does is own things. That doesn't require a large workforce. Without manufacturing or a growing middle class, there really isn't much demand for more undereducated, unhealthy, unrealistically ambitious American workers. Craig -- Onward! Stephen http://webpages.charter.net/stephenk1/Outlaw/Outlaw.html -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/everything-list/-/fXX6Zmxk7_MJ. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: victims of faith
On 9/14/2012 1:10 PM, meekerdb wrote: On 9/14/2012 6:10 AM, Stephen P. King wrote: The evidence has strong indications of being manipulated for the purpose of a political agenda. It is certainly cherry-picked by minions of the fossil fuel industry. I would agree with you if the fossil fuel industry was the only party guilty of cherry picking! You can read for yourself in the Climate-gate email dump many examples of discussions of cherry-picking by climate alarmists. I like Richard Muller's ongoing commentaries http://muller.lbl.gov/ on the entire issue because I have a close personal friend that knows him personally. It is clear that there is global warming, but its cause is not completely clear. We can only offer conjectures and to jump to the comclusion that humans are causing it are premature. I think that we should keep science seperate from state policy unless there is clear and incontrovertible evidence. Too many do-gooders have influenced state policy and to the eventual harm of mass numbers of humans, example the banning of DDT because of the emotional appeal of a book. It can be proven that this ban has causes hundred of thousands of humans to die needlessly to malaria. The way that the sensors are distributed and their data is weighed is the subject of a lot of controversy Which has been addressed by direct comparison of different sensors. Of course the fossil fuel industry doesn't have to prove anything, they just create fake controversy and take advantage of the provisional nature of all science. I am no desire to be an apologist for any industry. I am interested in the purity of science. We do not have models that are accurate enough to even accurately retrodict the variation in temperatures so why are we trusting them in their predictions?. Because whatever other factors there are it is straightforward to predict that increasing atmospheric CO2 will increase temperatures, something already calculated by Arrhenius in 1890. Burning fossil fuel releases CO2 into the atmosphere. The concentration of CO2 is increasing proportionately. Measured temperatures are increasing. All I will say is that our climate is not so simple that we can generate a faithful model based on what you wrote here alone. Complex systems cannot be expected to have simple models. Brent -- Onward! Stephen http://webpages.charter.net/stephenk1/Outlaw/Outlaw.html -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: imaginary numbers in comp
On Fri, Sep 14, 2012 at 11:25 AM, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Sept 13, 2012 Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: The menu is not the meal. In other words X is not X and that is perfectly true, use and mention are indeed not the same, but they are closely related. To my mind, the fact that you have particular animus toward the Chinese Room can only be because on some level you know that it is a relatively simple way of proving something that you are in deep denial about. Why else would it bother you in particular? Searle's Chinese Room bothers me because it is so fabulously DUMB! What makes it so idiotic is its conclusion: The funny little man doesn't understand anything therefore the entire Chinese Room doesn't understand anything. Dumb dumb dumb. Searle doesn't even attempt to explain why if there is understanding anywhere it must be centered on the silly little man, apparently he's such a crumby philosopher it never even occurred to him that he's assuming the very thing he's trying to prove!! Even Aristotle never did anything that stupid. You could easily get rid of the little man altogether and replace him with a 1950's punch card sorting machine, it would be slow but mush faster than the man and produce fewer errors, and in such a situation I would agree that the punch card machine was not conscious, and I would also agree that a very very small part of a system, any system, does not have all the properties of the entire system. Exactly. It is no different than concluding that brains cannot understand anything because inter-atomic forces do not understand anything. Jason -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Simple proof that our intelligence transcends that of computers
On 14 Sep 2012, at 16:00, Stephen P. King wrote: On 9/14/2012 4:27 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 13 Sep 2012, at 20:08, Stephen P. King wrote: On 9/13/2012 12:05 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 13 Sep 2012, at 13:55, Stephen P. King wrote: Hi benjayk, This is exactly what I have been complaining to Bruno about. He does not see several things that are problematic. 1) Godel numberings are not unique. Thus there is no a single abslute structure of relations, there is an infinity that cannot be reduced. On the contrary, I insist on this. That's part of the domain of the 1-indeterminacy, all working coding will do their work, if I dare to say. We already know this, and is part of the problem that we try to just formulate clearly. Dear Bruno, Oh, right, I missed that implication, but do you see my point as well? The diagonalization applies to everything, even your result. ? Dear Bruno, On the contrary, everything I say depends on the fact that diagonalization does not apply to computability. Then how do we explain Godel numbering schemes? The ability of one string of numbers to stand for some other is the essence of computational universality, no? I will explain this on FOAR, soon or later, as I have promised. I have already explain this two or three times here. All the magic is there: we can enumerate the computable function, yet we can't diagonalize against them, as the result does not lead to a contradiction, but to a non stopping program. Universality requires just to accept that we have non stopping programs, and no theories to predict in advance which one stop or not. The point that I am trying to emphasize is that we can never be at the ultimate level, I can' agree more, given that the ultimate level (the one we can mistake with primitive matter) consists in a sum on infinitely many computations (how ever we solve the measure problem). But this statement implies a contradiction that you do not address! To say that at some ultimate level there is something, even a sum on infinitely many computations is to simultaneously also claim, and nothing else. This does not follow. At the ultimate level the ability to distinguish X is true from X is false cannot exist. ? There is no ultimate level. It was a manner of speaking. Thus we cannot make claims of some type of something, here computations, at the ultimate level and thus implying that there are no not-computations without explaining the means by which they are distinguished from each other. You seems to just saying that there is nothing except computations and offer no explanation as to how the computations are excluded from the non-computations at the ultimate level. There are not. The UD dovetails on the oracle too, from the 1p. You have to invoke a plurality of levels in order to have distinguishability, difference itself vanishes at the ultimate level. ? we can at best point at it and approximate/represent it. OK. It is the comp truncateness. Please elaborate! The finite description of your brain that the doctor put in his data folder. Any approximation will have dual aspects, one partly logical and abstract and the other concrete an physical. In our setting physical needs to be (re)defined. I agree. The reasoning for this is that meaningfulness is 3p, it is never just 1p (if we assumed that it was 1-p we would get a degeneracy condition and only have a bet of its truth and nowhere to cash in if it where true by many other 1-p's). The concept that some people have used for this is the notion of a witness in the sense that it is not sufficient for me to know that X is true, X must be true to at least two witnesses that are not under my control. This explanation is very crude still, my apologies. Yes, it is hard to make sense. Witnesses have to be, in some way, independent of influence or control; so how would you explain this in your thinking? For example, we claim that 1+1=2 because all possible examples of such are true No. Some claims this because they got the idea in: x + 0 = x x + s(y) = s(x + y) x *0 = 0 x*s(y) = x*y + x and discount the false claims as improper coding or reference. This makes a witness something that has in its 1p a model of 1+1=2 and there are many different witnesses that are accessible to us that believe that 1+1=2. The reason why believe this are personal, and does not influence the reasoning. 2) the physical implementations of the representations cannot be abstracted away without making the entire result meaningless. This is correct for human perception, but with comp the physical implementations that you need at that level are explained by a non physical (and somehow deeper) phenomenon. Yes, but I am not considering human perception; I am assuming
Re: science only works with half a brain
On Fri, Sep 14, 2012 at 12:43 PM, Stephen P. King stephe...@charter.netwrote: On 9/14/2012 12:36 PM, Jason Resch wrote: On Fri, Sep 14, 2012 at 8:32 AM, Stephen P. King stephe...@charter.netwrote: I contend that universality is the independence of computations to any particular machine but there must be at least one physical system that can implement a given computation for that computation to be knowable. This is just a accessibility question, in the Kripke sense of accessible worldshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility_relation . Stephen, Could you provide a definition of what you mean by 'physical system'? Hi Jason, Sure! A physical system is a scheme of invariant relata I had to look up the definition of relata, and found: plural of relatum, and relatum = one of the objects between which a relation is said to hold So is it an accurate translation of invariant relata a set of fixed relations that exist between objects? that has some non-invertible dynamic I am not sure what you mean by non-invertible dynamic. As the dynamics of our universe appear to be invertible, I assume you mean something else, right? that can be functionally equivalent to some computation. I think I understand what you mean here. Do you think it is possible, even in theory, for entities to distinguish whether they are in a physical system or a mathematical one? Not if we remove the means to distinguish self from not-self. I don't know why or how we could do this, or even fully understand what you mean by it. In any case, I asked if there is a way to make this distinction even in theory. So in theory, we don't have to remove the means to distinguish self from not-self, correct? In that case, how would we make the distinction between physical universe and mathematical universe? If so, what difference would they test to make that distinction? Physical systems have the capacity to be located. Where is our universe located? What could its location be relative to? This is a difference over and beyond the internal distinctions of things. Things can be located (relative to each other) in a mathematical universe too. I am trying to point out that one cannot just assume that other minds exist to solve the other minds problem. What problems arise if there is one mind or many? One has to have a sufficient reason to assume that I am not just the sum of things that I can imagine. I don't think this goes against what Bruno's UDA suggests. It is wrong, I think, to interpret the UDA as implying we are a bunch of computational Boltzmann brains existing independently in the UD. Instead, there may be an infinite number of universes (not what Bruno typically means by universe) which are mutually isolated and possibly digital or computational. Observers may exist (in effect, as sub-programs) within these universes and interact with each other. The trouble begins when any observer tries to determine which of these universes they exist in. In effect, there may be an infinite number, and it is impossible to ever lock down which one it is. Each measurement an observer performs changes the answer to that question. Jason -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: science only works with half a brain
On 14 Sep 2012, at 15:32, Stephen P. King wrote: On 9/14/2012 4:09 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 13 Sep 2012, at 13:17, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Bruno Marchal and meekerdb, ROGER: Hi meekerdb First, science can only work with quantity, not quality, so it only works with half a brain. MEEKERDB [actually it is BRUNO]: Bad decision. You are the one cutting the corpus callosum here. ROGER: You have to. Quantity is an objective measure, quality is a subjective measure. Apples and oranges. You are too much categorical. Qualities can have objective features too. Modal logic, and other non standard logic are invented for that purposes. Geometry and topology can have non quantitative features, also. Dear Bruno, This concept of objective property is just consistency of definition, nothing more! Secondly, meaning is not a scientific category. Model theory studies a form of meaning. If you decide that something is not scientific, you make it non scientific. If it is incapable of being falsified by physical evidence then it is nonscientific. I agree. So science can neither make nor understand meaningful statements. Logic has the same fatal problem. Only if you decide so. No, that would be true belief as Alberto discussed elsewhere. If one accepts as true some set of axioms then certain properties follow automatically. But if we look at theories in a meta way, we see that there are multiple possible axioms. For example, we have ZFC and ZF-C (with or without axiom of choice). These have very different models. And the fatal problem is? BRUNO ?: Not at all. Logic handle both syntactical or digital transformations, and its dual the corresponding semantical adjoint transformation. There is proof theory and model theory. Meaning is handle by non syntactical mathematical structures. There are many branches in logic, and semantic, alias Model Theory, is one of them. ROGER: Those are all tools for working with objective data such as numbers or written words. Not at all. Model studies infinite structure, some of them have no syntactical or finite counterparts. You are ignoring the existence of finitistic and ultrafinitistic axioms! Maybe we need to revisit model theory. No. Comp is finitistic. And of course not ultra-finitistic. Then what do you do with subjective data ? Obviously you must throw it out. On the contrary, even with just the UDA, consciousness is the basic notion at the base of the whole reasoning (which annoys of course those who want to keep it under the rug). You are either a bit unfair, or ignorant of the UDA. Its role consists in showing that the subjective data and the 3p stuff are not easily reconciled with comp, as we must explain the physical 3p, from coherence condition on the subjective experience related to computations. We need some reason to believe that just because I have a subjective experience of being in the world that this implies that this is possible for other entities. Chalmer's argues for panprotopsychism, the theory that everything has subjective experience and qualia, Every thing? I thought we are searching the things. but does not seem to offer a hypothesis as to how. I offer (reasoning with Vaughan Pratt) a theory that psychism follows from Stone duality, but this limits subjectivity to the duality between Boolean algebras (up to isomorphism) and topological spaces (up to isomorphism). An that might be coherent with comp. You study Pratt, so it is your work to do that. I gave you hints. BRUNO To separate science from religion looks nice, but it consists in encouraging nonsense in religion, and in science eventually. ROGER: Religion deals mainly with subjective issues such as values. morality, salvation, forgiveness. These are inextended or nonphysical human/divine issues. Yes, but that does not mean we cannot handle them with the scientific method. If not you would not even been arguing. It is ironic that you are taking this side of the debate, Bruno! You, in your theory, have reduced to a epiphenomena the very thing that allows for falsification. Here you miss the entire point. I show comp testable, on the contrary. And partially tested. The Bible was not written as a scientific textbook, but as a manual oof faith and moral practice. OK. Sam Harris makes a good argument for this. Science deals entirely with objective issues such as facts, quantity, numbers, physical data. If you decide so, but then religious people should stop doing factual claims, and stop proposing normatible behavior. Science can study its own limitations, and reveal what is beyond itself. Like in neoplatonism, science proposes a negative theology, protecting faith from blind faith, actually. I.e. true belief. I agree. BRUNO: Science cannot answer the religious
Re: questions on machines, belief, awareness, and knowledge
On 14 Sep 2012, at 15:41, Stephen P. King wrote: On 9/14/2012 4:20 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: Hi Brian, On 13 Sep 2012, at 22:04, Brian Tenneson wrote: Bruno, You use B as a predicate symbol for belief I think. I use for the modal unspecified box, in some context (in place of the more common []). Then I use it mainly for the box corresponding to Gödel's beweisbar (provability) arithmetical predicate (definable with the symbols E, A, , -, ~, s, 0 and parentheses. Thanks to the fact that Bp - p is not a theorem, it can plays the role of believability for the ideally correct machines. What are some properties of B and is there a predicate for knowing/ being aware of that might lead to a definition for self-awareness? Yes, B and its variants: B_1 p == Bp p B_2 p = Bp Dt B_3 p = Bp Dt t, and others. btw, what is a machine and what types of machines are there? With comp we bet that we are, at some level, digital machine. The theory is one studied by logicians (Post, Church, Turing, etc.). Dear Bruno, Could you elaborate on what your definition of a digital machine is? Anything Turing emulable. Is it something that can be faithfully represented by a Boolean Algebra of some sort? Anything can be represented by Boolean algebra of some sort, even the quantum logic, despite not being embeddable in Boolean logic. Is there a generic description for a structure (in the math logic sense) to have a belief or to be aware; something like A |= I am the structure A ? Yes, by using the Dx = xx method, you can define a machine having its integral 3p plan available. This 3p plan would be like my internal model of my body that I have as part of my conscious awareness? Yes, you can say that. But the 1p-self, given by Bp p, does not admit any name. It is the difference between I have two legs and I have a pain in a leg, even if a phantom one. G* proves them equivalent (for correct machines), but G cannot identify them, and they obeys different logic (G and S4Grz). This implies, to me, that the 1p-self cannot be defined by an equivalence class with a fixed equivalence relation. This is problematic if assumed to be true for all possible 1p-selfs. AFAIK, your definition would only apply to an machine that is unnameable infinite such as the totality of all that could exist, aka God or cosmic intelligence. It reminds me more of the Azathoth of H.P. Lovecraft's mythos. Proof? Finally, on a different note, if there is a structure for which all structures can be 1-1 injected into it, does that in itself imply a sort of ultimate structure perhaps what Max Tegmark views as the level IV multiverse? A 1-1 map is too cheap for that, and the set structure is a too much structural flattening. I agree, it is just a tautology. Comp used the simulation, notion, at a non specifiable level substitution. But does not address the computational resource requirement. :_( It does not solve it, but it address it, like it address all of physics. I give the tools so that you can ask your question directly to the machine. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: victims of faith
On 9/14/2012 11:10 AM, Stephen P. King wrote: On 9/14/2012 1:10 PM, meekerdb wrote: On 9/14/2012 6:10 AM, Stephen P. King wrote: The evidence has strong indications of being manipulated for the purpose of a political agenda. It is certainly cherry-picked by minions of the fossil fuel industry. I would agree with you if the fossil fuel industry was the only party guilty of cherry picking! You can read for yourself in the Climate-gate email dump many examples of discussions of cherry-picking by climate alarmists. You've been misled by GW deniers. There's no evidence in the emails of cherry picking - as has been confirmed by several independent review committees. I like Richard Muller's ongoing commentaries http://muller.lbl.gov/ on the entire issue because I have a close personal friend that knows him personally. It is clear that there is global warming, but its cause is not completely clear. Cause is seldom a single thing; what's important is which factors are within our control. Muller is one of the founders of BerkleyEarth. He was critical of the data that showed global warming, but after leading an extensive re-evaluation of all the data using comprehensive statistics the group concluded: Berkeley Earth has just released analysis of land-surface temperature records going back 250 years, about 100 years further than previous studies. The analysis shows that global warming is real, and the best explanation of the temperature trend is a combination of volcanoes and CO2. And there's no real debate about where the CO2 comes from. It's easy to calculate how much is produced by burning fossil fuel. We can only offer conjectures and to jump to the comclusion that humans are causing it are premature. I think that we should keep science seperate from state policy unless there is clear and incontrovertible evidence. Too many do-gooders have influenced state policy and to the eventual harm of mass numbers of humans, example the banning of DDT because of the emotional appeal of a book. It can be proven that this ban has causes hundred of thousands of humans to die needlessly to malaria. The way that the sensors are distributed and their data is weighed is the subject of a lot of controversy Which has been addressed by direct comparison of different sensors. Of course the fossil fuel industry doesn't have to prove anything, they just create fake controversy and take advantage of the provisional nature of all science. I am no desire to be an apologist for any industry. I am interested in the purity of science. We do not have models that are accurate enough to even accurately retrodict the variation in temperatures so why are we trusting them in their predictions?. Because whatever other factors there are it is straightforward to predict that increasing atmospheric CO2 will increase temperatures, something already calculated by Arrhenius in 1890. Burning fossil fuel releases CO2 into the atmosphere. The concentration of CO2 is increasing proportionately. Measured temperatures are increasing. All I will say is that our climate is not so simple that we can generate a faithful model based on what you wrote here alone. Complex systems cannot be expected to have simple models. Of course not. Just the CO2 added would produce only a 0.8C temperature rise. The problem is there are several positive feed backs: water vapor, methane emission, reduced albedo,... If you want to wait till we have a perfect model, you are essentially deciding it's not a problem. It's not a scientific problem. Science can always wait. Science never needs to make a decision and it's theories are always provisional. Life however requires decisions; which means decisions based on imperfect information. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Re: Re: The poverty of computers
On Friday, September 14, 2012 7:10:17 AM UTC-4, rclough wrote: Hi Craig Weinberg Faith can be expressed as a belief, but faith itself is inner trust, confidence, etc. Faith Noun: 1. Complete trust or confidence in someone or something. 2. Strong belief in God or in the doctrines of a religion, based on spiritual apprehension rather than proof. Can't exactly the same thing be said of belief? be·lief Noun: 1. An *acceptance* that a statement is true or that something exists. 2. Something one accepts as true or real; a firmly held opinion or * conviction*. Craig Roger Clough, rcl...@verizon.net javascript: 9/14/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - *From:* Craig Weinberg javascript: *Receiver:* everything-list javascript: *Time:* 2012-09-13, 13:21:50 *Subject:* Re: Re: The poverty of computers On Thursday, September 13, 2012 8:43:39 AM UTC-4, rclough wrote: Hi Bruno Marchal The shared part of religion (or science) is called belief(s). They are exclusively in the fom of words. For example words from the Bible, and the Creeds. The personal or private part of religion is called faith. It is not belief, for it is wordless, is more like trust or motivation. Religion trusts its creeds, science trust the laws of physics etc. It sounds like you are talking about the particular forms of religion though. In some other traditions, faith can be the public proclamation in words and belief is the privately expressed as wordless. Craig -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/everything-list/-/mUtjBvMhl8sJ. To post to this group, send email to everyth...@googlegroups.comjavascript: . To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com javascript:. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/everything-list/-/Qe9BSYnICrAJ. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Re: the nothing but fallacy.
On Fri, Sep 14, 2012 at 6:55 AM, Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net wrote: You're a slow learner. Maybe, but I'm smarter than the people in the Bible. As Bertrand Russell said So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence. Bible stories are generally based on true happenings. Do you believe that the stories in Mother Goose are generally based on true happenings too? I know there are no reasons to believe either one but faith don't need no education, or reasons. Science deals with facts, religion deals with values. Values? One of the best ways to become a atheist is to actually read the Bible, so let's go directly to the source and read some quotations from the Bible and see some of those wonderful values that it teaches: Take all the heads of the people and hang them up before the Lord against the sun. Numbers 25:4 The LORD slew all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both the firstborn of man, and the firstborn of beast. Exodus 13:15 Prepare slaughter for his children for the iniquity of their fathers. Isaiah 14:21 And the priest shall dip his finger in some of the blood, and sprinkle it seven times before the LORD. Leviticus 4:17 And ye shall eat the flesh of your sons, and the flesh of your daughters shall ye eat. Leviticus 26:29 Thou shalt surely smite the inhabitants of that city with the edge of the sword, destroying it utterly, and all that is therein, and the cattle thereof, with the edge of the sword. Deuteronomy 13:15 Thus saith the LORD of hosts ... go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass. 1 Samuel 15:2-3 Behold now, I have two daughters which have not known man; let me, I pray you, bring them out unto you, an do ye to them as is good in your eyes. Genesis 19:8 And seest among the captives a beautiful woman, and hast a desire unto her Thou shalt go in unto her. Deuteronomy 21:11-13 The LORD thy God hath chosen thee to be a special people unto himself, above all people that are upon the face of the earth. Deuteronomy 7:6 I will also send wild beasts among you, which shall rob you of your children. Leviticus 26:22 And I will cause them to eat the flesh of their sons and the flesh of their daughters, and they shall eat every one the flesh of his friend. Jeremiah 19:9 For every one that curseth his father or his mother shall be surely put to death. Leviticus 20:9 The Lord is a man of War. Exodus 15:3 Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.” Psalms 137:9 People lamented because the Lord had smitten many people in a great slaughter. 1Samuel 6:19 Smite through the loins of them that rise against him...that they rise not again. Deuteronomy 33:11 And thou shalt eat the fruit of thine own body, the flesh of thy sons and of thy daughters, which the Lord thy God hath given thee. Deuteronomy 28:53 John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: US elections
Russell: wise words with one flaw: the US doesnot CHOOSE, people are 'trapped into' especially now that ANY group can spend ANY sum to influence a choosing. People are susceptible to persuasion - (true or false ones) and the White House is fo sale. I participated over the past 80 years in many elections, before 1970 in Hungary (pre-nazi, nazi, commi) then in the US (capialistic aristo-democratic, whatever) and appreciate your words deeply. I wish you could ask for clearing the list from faith-related distractions as well (although there is a lot of 'faith' called scientific idea) - except of cours those that I harbor G. Regards John Mikes On Tue, Sep 11, 2012 at 9:32 PM, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.auwrote: I know this might be an impossible dream, but could we keep the list clear of parochial US election discussion, as it is clearly off-topic. Who the US chooses as their president has a significant impact on our country, but there's bugger all I can do to influence that result anyway, so I may as well find out who won after Americans have voted. Cheers -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: If I ever doubt that there is a God,
On Thu, Sep 13, 2012 at 4:52 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote: the human genome is at least 700Mb, but yeah it's not a lot. Let's see, the human genome is about 3 billion base pairs long, there are 4 bases so each base can represent 2 bits and there are 8 bits per byte. That comes out to 750 meg, so you're right and I was wrong when I said 400 meg. Maybe there wouldn't be much room to put pop songs onto a CD after the human genome was on it after all. You can look at what this means in at least two ways though: 1) Simple rules generate enormous complexity in the universe. or 2) Rules are just a tiny part of what the universe is about - it's what executes the rules that matters Both are true because some of the rules, probably most of them, are rules about what rules to activate and what rules to turn off. and experiences. Those are memories, 750 meg will only get you as you were the day you were born. Calculating the memory capacity of the brain is more difficult but we can find a upper limit assuming, as seems very likely, that memory works by Long Term Potentiation (LTP). There are about 10^11 neurons in the brain and each neuron has about 10^4 synapses. I have not seen any evidence that LTP can store more than one bit so that gives us a figure of 10^15 bits or about 10^14 bytes of storage memory capacity for the human brain. A 3*10^12 byte hard drive cost about $150 and you'd need about 33 of them to get up to 10^14 and that would cost you about $5000, but the price is dropping like a rock and next year it will be less than half that. And this figure of 10^14 is almost certainly a considerable overestimate, I don't know the true figure but it must be less than that. In the January 28 1994 issue of Science Dan Madison and Erin Schuman found that LTP spreads out over a large area so you have lots of copies of the same thing. so I would say that it really is a view which tainted with reductionist ideology. Tainted? Without reductionist ideology we still be swinging in the trees and wouldn't even have stone tools. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: US elections
I have to say that it's interesting to see how nobody seems to agree on everything here (on the everything list) but I find that everyone that I disagree with most in one area, I seem agree with them most in another. Or others who I disagree with slightly on everything but in unique balance. Some kind of Myers-Briggs type complementarity at work. Craig On Friday, September 14, 2012 3:51:29 PM UTC-4, JohnM wrote: Russell: wise words with one flaw: the US doesnot CHOOSE, people are 'trapped into' especially now that ANY group can spend ANY sum to influence a choosing. People are susceptible to persuasion - (true or false ones) and the White House is fo sale. I participated over the past 80 years in many elections, before 1970 in Hungary (pre-nazi, nazi, commi) then in the US (capialistic aristo-democratic, whatever) and appreciate your words deeply. I wish you could ask for clearing the list from faith-related distractions as well (although there is a lot of 'faith' called scientific idea) - except of cours those that I harbor G. Regards John Mikes On Tue, Sep 11, 2012 at 9:32 PM, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.aujavascript: wrote: I know this might be an impossible dream, but could we keep the list clear of parochial US election discussion, as it is clearly off-topic. Who the US chooses as their president has a significant impact on our country, but there's bugger all I can do to influence that result anyway, so I may as well find out who won after Americans have voted. Cheers -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpc...@hpcoders.com.aujavascript: University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everyth...@googlegroups.comjavascript: . To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com javascript:. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/everything-list/-/KdrDWyvBigAJ. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: If I ever doubt that there is a God,
On Friday, September 14, 2012 4:28:13 PM UTC-4, John Clark wrote: On Thu, Sep 13, 2012 at 4:52 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comjavascript: wrote: the human genome is at least 700Mb, but yeah it's not a lot. Let's see, the human genome is about 3 billion base pairs long, there are 4 bases so each base can represent 2 bits and there are 8 bits per byte. That comes out to 750 meg, so you're right and I was wrong when I said 400 meg. Maybe there wouldn't be much room to put pop songs onto a CD after the human genome was on it after all. You can look at what this means in at least two ways though: 1) Simple rules generate enormous complexity in the universe. or 2) Rules are just a tiny part of what the universe is about - it's what executes the rules that matters Both are true because some of the rules, probably most of them, are rules about what rules to activate and what rules to turn off. and experiences. Those are memories, 750 meg will only get you as you were the day you were born. Calculating the memory capacity of the brain is more difficult but we can find a upper limit assuming, as seems very likely, that memory works by Long Term Potentiation (LTP). There are about 10^11 neurons in the brain and each neuron has about 10^4 synapses. I have not seen any evidence that LTP can store more than one bit so that gives us a figure of 10^15 bits or about 10^14 bytes of storage memory capacity for the human brain. A 3*10^12 byte hard drive cost about $150 and you'd need about 33 of them to get up to 10^14 and that would cost you about $5000, but the price is dropping like a rock and next year it will be less than half that. And this figure of 10^14 is almost certainly a considerable overestimate, I don't know the true figure but it must be less than that. In the January 28 1994 issue of Science Dan Madison and Erin Schuman found that LTP spreads out over a large area so you have lots of copies of the same thing. Memories of what though? We use storage in a computer to access a sensory experience for ourselves, typically an optical or acoustically triggered experience.The experience is the reality, while the organization we utilize to access that reality is the vehicle. In the past you said that the Chinese Room fails because the book would have to be infinite size. I don't know if that is your only objection, but to me it's clear that the size that the rule book would have to be would be directly proportional to the length of the conversation and the desired likelihood of passing the Turing test. Imagine instead that I am being held prisoner by a goon from the Chinese mafia. With a gun to my head, he instructs me to call his boss and say (something something something in Chinese). I do this and the boss tells me to tell the thug (something something something in Chinese). If I knew Chinese, I might avoid getting shot in the head, but since the fact that I can pass data from the thug to the boss and back does not imbue me with telepathic insight. Searle goes one further and makes the boss a book, such that there is no second person on the other end. I think that this successfully models the disconnect between syntactic and semantic layers which computation presents, since the book, regardless of how well crafted and extensive, is completely passive and inert to queries against it. It's a database. The authors of the database have no telepathic insight that their work is being used as an oracle, I have none of the semantic insight of the authors understanding of Chinese, and the outsiders have no insight into my lack of understanding. This illustrates how intelligence can be trivially simulated to any degree of precision. I'm liking it more and more. so I would say that it really is a view which tainted with reductionist ideology. Tainted? Without reductionist ideology we still be swinging in the trees and wouldn't even have stone tools. The skills of reductive analysis are productive, ideology is not. Skepticism without curiosity would have us still in the trees. Craig John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/everything-list/-/HI6qAsFrmSkJ. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Needed: A calculus of pleasure and pain.
On 9/14/2012 1:50 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Friday, September 14, 2012 12:33:45 PM UTC-4, Stephen Paul King wrote: On 9/14/2012 8:07 AM, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Craig Weinberg Fortunately or unfortunately, capitalism is Darwinism, pure and simple. So it can prepare for a better future, although it can be painful at present. My own take on this is that there needs to be a calculus of pleasure and pain. Jeremy Bentham suggested perhaps an impfect one. In lieu of that, I am all for food stamps and safety nets. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net javascript: Dear Roger, I completely disagree. Darwinism does not consider valuations beyond the concept of relative fitness. Capitalism is a theory of valuation and exchange between entities. It does include concept that are analogous to those in darwinism, just as the fitness of a trader to make multiple trades, and so I can see some analogy between them, but to claim equivalence is simply false. Yes! People conflate Social Darwinism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism) with Darwin's evolution. The idea of 'survival of the fittest' is also (see the Wiki) a misinterpretation. Evolution is just a blind statistical filtering of organisms which happen to survive in any given niche. Being fit has nothing whatsoever with being aggressive, greedy, or selfish, and indeed most species on Earth seem much more relaxed and gentle than human beings most of the time. IMHO, Food stamps and safety nets encourage risky behavior that is better if suppressed for the general welfare of the population, thus I am against them in principle. Why work to sustain my physical existence with my own toil if I can depend on the coercive taxation on others to sustain me? Eh, I would rather increase that stuff by 10 times than five one more dollar to subsidize corporations. The amount of money set aside for that stuff is tiny compared to everything else. It can certainly be a disincentive for people to look for work, but I think we need to confront the reality that the US doesn't really need very many people to work anymore. Most of what the US does is own things. That doesn't require a large workforce. Without manufacturing or a growing middle class, there really isn't much demand for more undereducated, unhealthy, unrealistically ambitious American workers. Craig Amen! -- Onward! Stephen http://webpages.charter.net/stephenk1/Outlaw/Outlaw.html -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
