On 17 Mar 2012, at 15:56, Stanley N Salthe wrote:
Bruno -- As an idealist, I think you have it all backward!
I am not an idealist. Just a logician and an inquirer. I show that if
you believe in a sufficient amount of arithmetic, and in the
assumption that your (generalized) brain(*) is Turing emulable, then
it follows that the mind body problem is two times more difficult to
solve: not only you need some theory of mind, but you have to derive
the beliefs in matter from it.
I don't pretend this is obvious. The key notion is the notion of 1-
indeterminacy, which makes machines unable to know which universal
machine computes them among an infinity of machines.
I have no clue about the truth. I assume mechanism, that is: the
invariance of my consciousness through the digital functional
substitution of my parts at some description level. I show that it
needs some revision in ... theology (to be short).
It makes mechanism also scientifically testable, by deriving physics
from machine't theology (the argument shows that physics is uniquely
defined), and compare with nature.
(*) The generalized brain is the portion of the physical universe that
you have to emulate to get the existence of your consciousness
relatively perpetuated. It exists by the comp assumption.
I would argue that cardinal numbers are the most 'crisp' entities
that we know, and this disqualifies them or being primeval.
It is not just the number, but their additive and multiplicative
structure. It is Turing complete. In fact any first order logical
specification of a Turing complete structure will do.
Consciousness and matter does not depend on the choice of the initial
universal system in the theory. I use numbers only because most
people are familiar with them.
That is, I think it makes sense to see all developments as
beginning relatively vaguely and then becoming more definite over
time. So, then, it will have taken these numbers a very long period
of evolution (passing through the 'real' stage) to have become as
definite as they are now. Or, even if cardinal numbers became quite
crisp at the time, say, of the origin of chemistry, that too will
have been a long way from primeval.
I can explain why numbers are confronted to the continuum, indeed also
the physical.
The problem is that it is a long reasoning.
I don't want to impose anything, and certainly not the truth of
mechanism, just the point that mechanism and materialism are not
compatible, and if we bet on mechanism, the mind-body problem is
transformed into a precise, but complex, problem in machine's
theology, itself branch of number theory and metamathematics.
I am not sure that anything I say should change your interest or that
it would contradict most posts here. What I am saying concerns the
fundamental matter. There, in soccer game language, I would sum by
Aristotle 0, Plato 1. But it is not the last match, and it changes
only the global picture.
I share many intuitions here, and with INBIOSA, even if I start from
what might seems a bit revulsing to many: discrete integers and number-
crunching machines, but by taking into account the 1-view/3-view
distinction, that we can partially formalise for machine, we can
understand that we might have just been guilty of having developed a
reductionist conception of numbers and machines.
Arithmetic is not just full of life. Angels, goddesses, and other
oracles are also at play :)
Bruno
On Sat, Mar 17, 2012 at 4:38 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be
wrote:
On 16 Mar 2012, at 18:43, Guy A Hoelzer wrote:
Greetings All,
While I like to think that I am not limited to reductionistic
thinking, I find it difficult to understand any perspective on
information that is not limited to physical manifestation. I would
appreciate further justification for a non-physicalist perspective
on information. How can something exist in the absence of physical
manifestation?
If you are realist about elementary arithmetic, that is if you agree
that elementary arithmetical proposition like 17 is prime are true
independently of you, then, by arithmetic's Turing universality, you
can show that the numbers exchange information relatively to
universal numbers, which are playing the role of relative
interpreters.
I am not interested in a metaphysical perspective here, which
might have heuristic value even if it is not 'real'. The issue of
'content' and 'meaning' strikes me as entirely physical, so
mentioning those issues doesn't help me understand what non-
physical information might be. I would say that if information is
physically manifested by contrasts (gradients, negentropy, …), then
content or meaning refers to the internal dynamics of complex
systems induced by interaction between the system and the
physically manifested information. If there is no affect on
internal dynamics, then the system
