Re: Where Math and Logic are Insufficient
On 07/12/2008, at 4:29 PM, Brent Meeker wrote: (The Court Jester wrote): What you cannot say is what is determining the order in the chaos once it arrives. That's closer to what I mean. 2 men start to dig a hole. They are instructed to make it reach a depth of 5 feet. One of them murders the other with his shovel. Nobody predicted that would happen. >>> How do you know that? Maybe it was quite predictable. >>> >> >> >> Except nobody did predict it. That's my point. It was perfectly >> obvious why only after the event. Police checks, medical checks etc. >> revealed the pattern that pointed to the causation. Before the event, >> this information was available too. Nobody saw anything tending or >> pending in the information beforehand. >> > > Some people saw it. For example W saw a report titled "Bin Laden to > strike in U.S." An FBI agent was told that some middle eastern guy > was > taking lessons in flying an airliner but wasn't interested in learning > to land it. I'd say that in this case the difficulty is that while > the > relevant information was available, so was irrelevant information and > the irrelevant information was so much greater it swamped the > relevant. Yessir!. So - we are surely in agreement that we MUST get some technique happening for looking at information with more effective starting concepts! If we just say - "give me all the data and I'll sort through it" we've got ten years of bloody work ahead of us. Meanwhile, the terrorists have struck and we haven't even left the starting gate. That's what I mean by "the evolving and accelerating universe". In fact, the guy who murdered his co-worker with the shovel was a fundamentalist Islamic. His co-worker said to him as they dug the trench "did you hear about that guy who stuck a copy of the Koran down a toilet in the USA and filmed it to post on YouTube? What a lark" "ALLAHU AKHBAR" - DOING!! (with the shovel) The police knew this guy attended a dodgy, fundamentalist Madrassah when he was a kid, and even that he had pinups of Bin Laden in his bedroom. But then - so what? Lots of Islamics have pinups of Bin Laden in their bedroom.are they all murderers? The problem is that information arrives PIECE by PIECE - one item at a time. Even if it arrives as a tsunami of data on your computer, you can only successfully review it piece by piece (if you appreciate the limitations of how the brain works) and you are doing your job properly. The temptation to shove it all into some "wonder (Microsoft?) application" which will sort through all of it and find the patterns, becomes overwhelming, once the data reaches a critical volume. I mean - fuck!!! - what were computers invented for?? One can only make the optimum use of the AVAILABLE information at any one moment. You have a massive problem here where you are drowning in the available information - as the 9/11 observers were. There are TRILLIONS of web pages floating around in cyberspace. Which are the good ones and which are the dodgy ones? How can you tell? Do you actually have the TIME to sort through all this shit, dear Brent? Your boss wants an outcome and a decision by YESTERDAY > >> Schoolteachers have to do "Risk assessments" to evaluate the >> possibility of harm to students on excursion. Studies have shown that >> risk assessments do nothing to reduce the incidence of accidents or >> misadventure. > Of course predictions an analyses, however accurate, are useless if no > one acts on them. If the schoolteacher notes that sunburn is a likely > hazard but she doesn't bring any sunblock is it an accident? Yes, where the teacher was instructed to fill out a risk assessment accurately and that was the end of the matter (it usually is). NOBODY told her she actually had to READ the bloody Risk Assessment and ACT on what it suggests. Teachers aren't taught to THINK for themselves or to "join up the dots". They merely do what they are told in their Diploma of Education which is usually taught by over-superannuated academics with no experience of life or teaching ability themselves, lecturing off yellowing handwritten notes they slung together in the 1960s. They then pass this servile, dickhead mentality on to the kids they teach. And the world goes down the toiletbut I can see from later on that you probably agree with me on this! > I'm very > familiar with risk assessments and how worthless they are. I work at a > major missile test range where risk assessments are required for every > test. I love people who get down and get their hands dirty - you are my hero Brent (truly - no condescension implied here) > The main reason they are worthless is that they *necessarily* > include only risks we've thought of. EXACTLY dear boy! So - how can we do the "quantum leap " (love that term) in our thinking and simulate alte
Re: MGA 3
On 07 Dec 2008, at 06:19, Abram Demski wrote:
>
> Bruno,
>
> Yes, I think there is a big difference between making an argument more
> detailed and making it more understandable. They can go together or be
> opposed. So a version of the argument targeted at my complaint might
> not be good at all pedagogically...
>
>> I would be pleased if you can give me a version of MAT or MEC to
>> which
>> the argument does not apply. For example, the argument applies to
>> most
>> transfinite variant of MEC. It does not apply when some "magic" is
>> introduced in MAT, and MAT is hard to define in a way to exclude that
>> magic. If you can help, I thank you in advance.
>
> My particular brand of "magic" appears to be a requirement of
> counterfactual/causal structure that reflects the
> counterfactual/causal structure of (abstract) computation.
Sometimes I think I should first explain what a "computation" is. I
take it in the sense of theoretical computer science, a computation is
always define relatively to a universal computation from outside, and
an infinity of universal computations from inside. This asks for a bit
of computer science. But there is not really "abstract computation",
there are always relative computation (both with comp and Everett QM).
They are always concrete relatively to the universal machine which
execute them. The starting point in no important (for our fundamental
concerns), you can take number with addition and multiplication, or
lambda terms with abstraction and application.
> Stathis has
> pointed out some possible ways to show such ideas incoherent (which I
> am not completely skeptical of, despite my arguments).
I appreciate.
> Since this type
> of theory is the type that matches my personal intuition, MGA will
> feel empty to me until such alternatives are explicitly dealt a
> killing blow (after which the rest is obvious, since I intuitively
> feel the contradiction in versions of COMP+MAT that don't require
> counterfactuals).
Understanding UD(1...7) could perhaps help you to figure out what
happens when we abandon the physical supervenience thesis, and embrace
what remains, if keeping comp, that is the comp supervenience. It will
explain how the physical laws have to emerge and why we believe (quasi-
correctly) in brains.
>
>
> Of course, as you say, you'd be in a hard spot if you were required to
> deal with every various intuition that anybody had... but, for what
> it's worth, that is mine.
I respect your intuition and appreciate the kind attitude. My feeling
is that if front of very hard problems we have to be open to the fact
that we could be surprised and that truth could be counterintuitive.
The incompleteness phenomena, from Godel and Lob, are surprising and
counterintuitive, and in the empirical world the SWE, whatever
interpretation we find more plausible, is always rather
counterintuitive too.
I interpret the "self-referentially correct scientist M" by the logic
of Godel's provability predicates beweisbar_M. But the intuitive
knower, the first person, is modelled (or defined) by the Theatetus
trick: the machine M knows p in case "beweisbar_M('p') and p".
Although extensionally equivalent, their are intensionally different.
They prove the same arithmetical propositions, but they obey different
logics. This is enough for showing that the first person associated
with the self-referentially correct scientist will already disbelieve
the comp hypothesis or find it very doubtful. We are near a paradox:
the correct machine cannot know or believe their are machine. No doubt
comp will appear counterintuitive for them. I know it is a sort of
trap/ the solution consists in admitting that comp needs a strong act
of faith, and I try to put light on the consequences for a machine,
when she makes the bet.
The best reference on the self-reference logics are
Boolos, G. (1979). The unprovability of consistency. Cambridge
University Press, London.
Boolos, G. (1993). The Logic of Provability. Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge.
Smoryński, P. (1985). Self-Reference and Modal Logic. Springer Verlag,
New York.
Smullyan, R. (1987). Forever Undecided. Knopf, New York.
The last one is a recreative book, not so simple, and rather quick in
the "heart of the matter" chapter. Smullyan wrote many lovely books,
recreative and technical on that theme.
The bible, imo, is Martin Davis book "The undecidable" which contains
some of the original papers by Gödel, Church, Kleene, Post and indeed
the most key starting points of the parts of theoretical computer
science we are confonted to. It has been reedited by Dover.
Bruno
Other references here:
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/lillethesis/these/node79.html#SECTION00130
>
> --Abram
>
> On Sat, Dec 6, 2008 at 9:32 AM, Bruno Marchal <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> wrote:
>>
>>
>> Le 05-déc.-08, à 22:11, Abram Demski a écrit :
>>
>>>
>>> Br
Re: MGA 3
On Fri, Dec 05, 2008 at 10:06:30AM +0100, Bruno Marchal wrote: > > > Perhaps, but the whole point is that remains to be justify. It is > *the* problem. If we assume comp, then we have to justify this. No > doubt little programs play a key role, but the bigger one too, unless > some destructive probability phenomenon occur. Now, interviewing the > universal machine gives indeed a shadow of explanation of why such > destructive phenomenon do occur indeed from the first person (plural) > points of view of self-observing machine. > I mainly agree with what you "want", but we have to explain it. > > Bruno > Destructive phenomena do occur. To see this, realise that an infinite set of histories will correspond to a given logical statement. Two inconsistent statements can be combined disjunctively (A or B), and their conjunction is false. Such a disjunction corresponds to the union of the two sets of histories consistent with each statement. The intersection of these sets of histories is, of course, empty. So the measure of the histories consistent with A or B is now just given by the sum of the measures of the two individual statements. Since the information is given by the negative logarithm of these measures, we see that the information of A or B is less than that of either A or B taken separately. Information has been destroyed by taking the inconsistent statements together. It is this "triangle inequality" nature of information that gives rise to the vector space structure in quantum mechanics. -- A/Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Mathematics UNSW SYDNEY 2052 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Australiahttp://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 [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: MGA 3
On Sat, Dec 06, 2008 at 03:32:53PM +0100, Bruno Marchal wrote: > > I would be pleased if you can give me a version of MAT or MEC to which > the argument does not apply. For example, the argument applies to most > transfinite variant of MEC. It does not apply when some "magic" is > introduced in MAT, and MAT is hard to define in a way to exclude that > magic. If you can help, I thank you in advance. > > Bruno > Michael Lockwood distinguishes between materialism (consciousness supervenes on the physical world) and physicalism (the physical world suffices to explain everything). The difference between the two is that in physicalism, consciousness (indeed any emergent phenomenon) is mere epiphenomena, a computational convenience, but not necessary for explanation, whereas in non-physicalist materialism, there are emergent phenomena that are not explainable in terms of the underlying physics, even though supervenience holds. This has been argued in the famous paper by Philip Anderson. One very obvious distinction between the two positions is that strong emergence is possible in materialism, but strictly forbidden by physicalism. An example I give of strong emergence in my book is the strong anthropic principle. So - I'm convinced your argument works to show the contradiction between COMP and physicalism, but not so the more general materialism. I think you have confirmed this in some of your previous responses to me in this thread. Which is just as well. AFAICT, supervenience is the only thing preventing the Occam catastrophe. We don't live in a magical world, because such a world (assuming COMP) would have so many contradictory statements that we'd disappear in a puff of destructive logic! (reference to my previous posting about destructive phenomena). -- A/Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Mathematics UNSW SYDNEY 2052 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Australiahttp://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 [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: Consciousness and free will
I don't know about Bruno, but I'm just referring to the ordinary person's attempts to improve his life in such categories as: love, health, creative fulfillment, prosperity, wisdom and so forth.m.a. - Original Message - From: John Mikes To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Saturday, December 06, 2008 9:30 AM Subject: Re: Consciousness and free will m.a. and Bruno: "BETTER OUTCOME"??? better for whom? better than what? Judging human? JohnM On Sat, Dec 6, 2008 at 8:45 AM, Bruno Marchal <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Le 05-déc.-08, à 14:26, M.A. a écrit : > Bruno, > Is it possible that as all my copies strive towards better > outcomes, the entire group advances? Yes (assuming QM), thanks to the notion of normality made possible by the QM statistics. Hopefully so with the comp hyp, but strictly speaking this is not yet proved. > If the worst are always proportionately opposite to the best, and the > best keep improving themselves, don't they pull the worst up with > them? Just a hopeful thought. But with that notion of normality, the worst should not be proportionately opposite to the best. If you decide to improve yourself, all your "you" will improve, except the unlucky one who will get some "white rabbits" on their way. Here, both comp and QM, is like classical statistic, and roughly speaking you can expect all outcomes to be possible, but with *highly* different proportion. If you decide to do a cup of coffee, in almost all histories you will drink coffee, they will be just a "little infinity" or little measure of worlds where the coffee will taste like tea, or where the boiling water will freeze. I tend to think that the ethics behind QM and comp are the same usual ethics of the non eliminativist materialist, except that with comp, such ethics can be grounded on a sort of general "modesty" principle. (They will be opportunity to come back on that modesty issue). A priori, the comp theory of Good/Bad is NOT like in Plotinus theory. Plotinus believed that if someone do something BAD, the same amount of BAD will occur to him, soon or later. He gives a curious example which is no doubt a bit shocking to our ears: he says that if a man rapes a woman then ... he will be reincarnated into a woman and be raped by a man! I think there is something true in that comment, but not if taken literally. With comp, I can speculate on common laws for heat, love and money: they could obey to similar global conservation principle together with local creation rule. But frankly this *is* speculation, and the main ethics will remain "respect the others and yourself" or things like that. Bruno > > >> - Original Message - >> From: Bruno Marchal >> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >> Sent: Friday, December 05, 2008 3:44 AM >> Subject: Re: Consciousness and free will >> >> >> On 04 Dec 2008, at 00:29, M.A. wrote: >> >>> >>> Hi Bruno, >>> I'm quoting your response to an older post because I >>> have a residual question. If "I" improve my ability to select the >>> best future outcomes, don't "I" also choose the worst ones according >>> to MWI and the rule of sum-over-histories? I seem to be competing >>> against myself. M.A. >> >> Assuming just Everett QM, there is a notion of normality and >> classicality which can be derived from the quantum evolution. This is >> expalined by david Deutsch, but also the "decoherence theory". So, >> when you take a (classical) decision you will act accordingly in the >> vast majority of your histories, and very few version of you will >> accidentally be doing the opposite. >> Taking into account the comp. Hyp. such "decoherence" has to be >> refined a priori, and this leads to a gallery of open problems. >> Both with QM without collapse, and with comp, such normality is hard >> to justified from the first person views when we are "near death". >> This leads to even more complex questions. I can only say that I >> don't know what happens, but I do expect, some probable "jump", >> guided by some theoretical computer science intuition. Some >> backtracking of experience, and renormalization of probabilities >> could also occur. >> Many-histories is not "all histories", or it is "all histories" but >> with different relative weight. We can't use MW for escaping our >> "responsibilities", I think. >> >> >> Bruno >> >>> >>> >>> At some point I could "defined" consciousness as the state of >>> (instinctively at first) betting on a history. This will speed >>> up yourself relatively to your current stories, and make greater >>> the set of your possible continuation. A
