date:20110812

On Aug 12, 4:21 am, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote:
 On 12/08/2011, at 1:06 AM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote:

  Sure, muscles will contract for any old material that can conduct an
  electric current. A muscle doesn't require a high level conversation
  with the brain's cells to react. We can move in our sleep when we
  aren't subjectively conscious of it.

 But can the muscles be made to contract through electrical stimulation in 
 such a way that you can have an intelligent conversation with them?

You might be able to have an intelligent conversation about glucose or
tensile strength electronically, but it need not have anything to do
with making them contract. Nervous tissue is a special case of
biological tissue in that it's purpose is to make it's own cellular
experience transparent in favor of refining and telling the stories of
other tissues and their stories of their environment. A muscle cell
isn't necessarily interested in or capable of non-muscular
conversation.

 In a normal person the brain does the complex calculations which
produce intelligible language from the vocal cords.

If my hypothesis is correct, the brain and the vocal chords work
together to some degree. It uses sensory feedback from the vocal
chords in real time to modulate it's motive efforts to speak.

Can the same calculations be done by computer stimulating the vocal
cords or is there something the computer just won't be able to do?

My guess is that a computer would have to be entrained to the real
life vocal chords of the particular person's body in order to get
close to perfect fluidity, and that may require 'cooperation' from the
nervous tissues related to the vocal chords. Absent those, the tissues
themselves would have to be hacked into with artificial neurology.

 If so, where will its language deficiencies be, and what is the
specific mathematical problem the brain can solve but the computer
can't? If the computer can't copy human behaviour due to lacking human
consciousness that is equivalent to saying that there are non-
computable mathematics in the brain.

To produce human speech, the computer need not have human
consciousness (awareness of the awarenesses of the human organism as a
whole), it just needs awareness of the larynx and the speech centers
of the brain.  If you want the computer to be able to understand the
meaning of what it's saying, then you are talking about replacing the
entire prefrontal cortex, in which case, it depends on what you
replace it with as to the extent to which it's understanding resembles
ours.

If you replace the neurological community which handles speech
articulation only, you might be able to do it well enough that we, the
user, can use it (probably would have to be entrained from the
cognitive side as well - the brain would have to discover the implant
and learn how to use it), but that doesn't mean that on the level of
the community of the brain and nervous system there is no difference.
That fact becomes monumentally important when you consider replacing
not just the neurology that you use but the neurology that you
actually identify with personally as you. Even with just the
artificial larynx driver, you may very well be able to tell the
difference in the sound of your own voice, and others may also. It may
feel different to speak, and some unanticipated differences such as
swallowing, clearing your throat, noticing a sore throat before it
gets serious, etc may arise.

Craig

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Re: Unconscious Components

On Aug 12, 5:01 am, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote:
 On 11 Aug 2011, at 14:16, Craig Weinberg wrote:

  On Aug 11, 1:14 am, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote:

  The conclusion is that such a device is
  impossible because it leads to conceptual difficulties.

  Consciousness itself leads to conceptual difficulties. Except for the
  fact that we cannot ignore that it is undeniable, we could never
  logically conceive of consciousness.

 Can we logically conceive a reality?

Sure, as long as it's a reality within our own perceptual relativity
frame of reference. The further our imaginary reality is from our own
PRIF, the less likely that it could reflect the concrete experiences
that would occur there if that reality were manifested physically.

 What can be shown is that each of two universal machines put in front  
 of each other can develop a true and incommunicable belief in a  
 reality. I think that's consciousness. It is an instinctive belief in  
 a reality. Self-consciousness is that same belief but with a belief in  
 a separation between the believer and the believed.

I think it depends on what the machines actually are physically as to
what they will be able to believe or develop. If you execute the
machine in silicon, you're going to have a polite glass sculpture of
belief, not a fierce, viscerally passionate belief. The math alone can
create a correspondence as-if it were true, but only the physics can
create the conditions of true through experience in spite of logic,
which is what gives the believer not only separation but something of
a trump-card privilege over the believed. In a contest of math v
physics, I think the physical can generate novelties in advance of
math, so that the arithmetic is an analytical afterthought. Physics
cannot be anticipated from the math alone, it can only be reverse
engineered from factual physical observations. Math can of course be
used to build on physics as well (nuclear fission, etc) but it still
requires a priori indexes of atomic behaviors which are independent
from pure arithmetic.

Craig

Craig

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Re: Unconscious Components

On Aug 12, 5:05 am, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote:
 On 11 Aug 2011, at 08:55, Stephen P. King wrote:

     What special sauce? Why is it ok to assume that consciousness is  
  something special that can only occur is special circumstances? Why  
  not consider that possibility that it is just as primitive as mass,  
  charge and spin?

 That would be a category mistake. Mass, charge and spin refer to  
 measurable observable, even apparently related by laws. Consciousness  
 is an attribute of person, which are higher order entity, in most  
 theories.

'Higher order' is conceptual. Consciousness can still be a primitive,
as it is observable, in exquisite detail and consistency to the
subject themselves. Whether the threshold for the observation of
consciousness occurs at the person level, or the organism, cell,
molecule, or atom does not impact it's irreducibility. Whatever the
level, it can be considered a primitive if it is not experienced at a
lower level, which unfortunately is not easy to confirm without doing
some wet work in the brain. Think of it like 'life' itself. Whether or
not a cell or organism is still alive is a primitive. If you zoom in
on the microcosm, that continuum of vitality blurs into molecular
function, but on the macro level, the observation of irrevocable death
is an ordinary and valid phenomenon.

Craig

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Re: bruno list


On 8/12/2011 2:00 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:


On 11 Aug 2011, at 19:24, meekerdb wrote:


On 8/11/2011 7:14 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:

In any case, I have made the thought experiment simpler by*assuming*
that the replacement component is mechanically equivalent to the
biological tissue. We can imagine that it is a black box animated by
God, who makes it tickle the surrounding neural tissue in exactly the
right way. I think installation of such a device would*necessarily*
preserve consciousness. What do you think?
   


Are you assuming that there is no consciousness in the black box?



The problem is there. In fine, if the brain works like a machine, 
consciousness is not related to its physical activity---which is a sub 
level notion, but to the mathematical relation defining the high level 
computation leading to the subject computational state.


A related problem:  is the back box supposed to be counterfactually 
correct or not, or is the black box accidentally correct for one 
execution. Answering that question in keeping the mechanist assumption 
leads to the in fine just above.


I think we are close to the question: does comp entails the 323 principle?


Right.  If you idealize the brain as a digital computer then it seems 
that register 323 is unnecessary.  But the brain, like every thing else, 
is a quantum object and it is characteristic of QM that possible 
interactions that don't occur make a difference.  Of course you may 
object that QM can be computed by a (classical) digital computer - but 
that's on true on in an Everttian interpretation.  The digital computer 
can't compute which interactions occur and which don't; that 
probabilistic.  All it can do is compute the probabilities for all the 
possible outcomes, *inculding* the 323 ones.




I don't insist on that, but it is a key to get the *necessary* 
ontological reduction to arithmetic (which does not entail an 
epistemological reduction).


I agree with what you say in another post: the term behavior is 
ambiguous. The notion of substitution level disambiguates a part of 
it, and the notion of counterfactuality disambiguates an orthogonal 
part of it.


Am I right in thinking that the counterfactuality includes *everything* 
that didn't happen?  I'm not sure that's a coherent concept.


Brent



Bruno

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/%7Emarchal/



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Re: Unconscious Components


On 11.08.2011 22:46 meekerdb said the following:

On 8/11/2011 1:04 PM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:


...


I would say now that consciousness is conscious perception. The
main problem in my view though is who follows the narrative. Does
your theory answer such a question?


I'd say You do, there's no separate person to follow it, it just


This the point that I do not understand. The question is here more what 
exactly is the observer in my body. Presumably it is the brain. Then it 
first constructs the world that I observe, than it observes the 
constructed world. It is completely unclear though, how it happens.



IS. On the other hand, in terms of engineering a robot, I'd put this
 narrative into long-term memory (disk?) in some kind of easily


It is not a big deal to save two two-dimensional images from retina. It 
should be possible even to construct from them a three-dimensional 
image. The question is what happens next? It is the same question, who 
gets this 3D-image.



searched database. Then when some problem came up that wasn't covered
by existing modules, the robot would search this database for
possible relevant situations in the past. So it would be part of the
learning algorithm.


Evgeny

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Re: Unconscious Components


On 12.08.2011 00:00 Craig Weinberg said the following:

On Aug 11, 4:04 pm, Evgenii Rudnyiuse...@rudnyi.ru  wrote:


I would say now that consciousness is conscious perception. The
main problem in my view though is who follows the narrative. Does
your theory answer such a question?


Just as an image is an agreement of regions of color and contrast,
consciousness is an agreement of regions of multi-sensory images


An agreement between what? What agrees with what and what consciousness 
makes to this end?



(both live and remembered). Who follows the narrative is the part of
the nervous system which perceives not sounds or colors, but
narratives and personalities. The cortex is a sense organ of meaning,
archetype, and symbol. It's an interior world though, not of discrete
objects in space but of entangled subjects in time. Experiential
phenomena which, like the great red spot on Jupiter, persists and
insists as a pattern. In the case of the self it is both a pattern
and a different pattern within it's own pattern recognition.


By the way, why you say that vision is a narrative in 2D? I feel
myself in 3D. Well, the time is also there, so even 4D.


Vision is really pseudo 3D if you think about it. It's just two 2D
images that you read as a single 3D text - which is why perspective


I agree that my retina obtains two two-dimensional images. I do not see 
them however. I experience a 3D world that is constructed by my brain 
and it happens unconsciously. I cannot influence this, I cannot actually 
even experience 2D images. If I see a picture for example, my brain 
still constructs some 3D world that then I experience. Hence, I do not 
know what you experience, but I live in a 3D world, not in pseudo 3D world.



and trompe l'oeil can fool our perception. Our tactile sense would
be more of a 3D sense I think. All sense occurs in the context of
time by definition, since sense the experience of change or
difference in a physical phenomenon (experience is the interiority of
energy).

Craig



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Re: Unconscious Components


On 8/12/2011 11:00 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:

On 11.08.2011 22:46 meekerdb said the following:

On 8/11/2011 1:04 PM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:


...


I would say now that consciousness is conscious perception. The
main problem in my view though is who follows the narrative. Does
your theory answer such a question?


I'd say You do, there's no separate person to follow it, it just


This the point that I do not understand. The question is here more 
what exactly is the observer in my body. Presumably it is the brain. 
Then it first constructs the world that I observe, than it observes 
the constructed world. It is completely unclear though, how it happens.



IS. On the other hand, in terms of engineering a robot, I'd put this
 narrative into long-term memory (disk?) in some kind of easily


It is not a big deal to save two two-dimensional images from retina. 
It should be possible even to construct from them a three-dimensional 
image. The question is what happens next? It is the same question, who 
gets this 3D-image.


You robot do.  It gets tagged with some notes, timestamped, and stuck in 
the database for further reference and adjustment of learning 
algorithms.  That's it.  There's no homunculus who watches it in the 
Cartesian theater.  That it is referenced and used in your cogitation to 
influence your speech and other actions is what constitutes your being 
conscious of it.


Brent




searched database. Then when some problem came up that wasn't covered
by existing modules, the robot would search this database for
possible relevant situations in the past. So it would be part of the
learning algorithm.


Evgeny



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Re: Unconscious Components

On Aug 12, 2:00 pm, Evgenii Rudnyi use...@rudnyi.ru wrote:

 This the point that I do not understand. The question is here more what
 exactly is the observer in my body. Presumably it is the brain. Then it
 first constructs the world that I observe, than it observes the
 constructed world. It is completely unclear though, how it happens.

If you consider that the world, the body, and the brain all might have
an interior topology, then it's not so mysterious. The self is what
the interior of the brain feels like, a person is what the self feels
inside of a body, and a lifetime is what the inside of the world feels
like to a person. Within a lifetime, other lifetimes and perceptual
frames of references are contacted indirectly as exterior phenomena,
having discrete objective characteristics. The interior topology is an
ontological set complement. It does not operate by the conventions of
existence, it operates through the sensorimotive-semantic
entanglements of insistence.

Craig

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Re: Unconscious Components


On 12.08.2011 20:40 meekerdb said the following:

On 8/12/2011 11:00 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:

On 11.08.2011 22:46 meekerdb said the following:

On 8/11/2011 1:04 PM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:


...


I would say now that consciousness is conscious perception.
The main problem in my view though is who follows the
narrative. Does your theory answer such a question?


I'd say You do, there's no separate person to follow it, it
just


This the point that I do not understand. The question is here more
 what exactly is the observer in my body. Presumably it is the
brain. Then it first constructs the world that I observe, than it
observes the constructed world. It is completely unclear though,
how it happens.


IS. On the other hand, in terms of engineering a robot, I'd put
this narrative into long-term memory (disk?) in some kind of
easily


It is not a big deal to save two two-dimensional images from
retina. It should be possible even to construct from them a
three-dimensional image. The question is what happens next? It is
the same question, who gets this 3D-image.


You robot do. It gets tagged with some notes, timestamped, and stuck
in the database for further reference and adjustment of learning
algorithms. That's it. There's no homunculus who watches it in the
Cartesian theater. That it is referenced and used in your cogitation
to influence your speech and other actions is what constitutes your
being conscious of it.


A quote from Jeffrey Gray (p. 110, it is just one of hypotheses in the 
book, this time on the verge of dualism)


(1) the unconscious brain constructs a display in a medium, that of 
conscious perception, fundamentally different from its usual medium of 
electrochemical activity in and between nerve cells;

(2) it inspects the conscious constructed display;
(3) it uses the results of the display to change the working of its 
usual electrochemical medium.


Is this close to what you have said?

Evgenii

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Re: Unconscious Components


On 12.08.2011 20:47 Craig Weinberg said the following:

On Aug 12, 2:00 pm, Evgenii Rudnyiuse...@rudnyi.ru  wrote:


This the point that I do not understand. The question is here more
what exactly is the observer in my body. Presumably it is the
brain. Then it first constructs the world that I observe, than it
observes the constructed world. It is completely unclear though,
how it happens.


If you consider that the world, the body, and the brain all might
have an interior topology, then it's not so mysterious. The self is
what the interior of the brain feels like, a person is what the self
feels inside of a body, and a lifetime is what the inside of the
world feels like to a person. Within a lifetime, other lifetimes and
perceptual frames of references are contacted indirectly as exterior
phenomena, having discrete objective characteristics. The interior
topology is an ontological set complement. It does not operate by the
conventions of existence, it operates through the
sensorimotive-semantic entanglements of insistence.


It would be interesting to see how do you know this. Some revelation or 
something else?


Evgenii
http://blog.rudnyi.ru

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Re: Why is there something rather than nothing?

2011-08-12 Thread John Mikes

Dear Pilar,

as your fellow Not-English-Mothertongue guy. I point to the*incompleteness
* in this language:* Nothing  -  EXISTS not.* It isn't. But it is bad
English to write:
* Why 'is-not' nothing?* so we have a discussion point. In my
(non-IndoEuropean) mothertongue the question is exactly formulated in the
'wrong(?)' way.
*(Miert nincs semmi?*)

I see you take it for granted that the Universe was born. Was it indeed?
Maybe OUR universe was, but I speak about the World (Multiverse, none of
them necessarily identical in any sense) in which we inhabit a pretty simple
one with 'the' physical system we have.

Our limited imagination can work only with 'somethings', *nothing* has no
meaning (if it includes such meaning - it would negate its true meaning -
G) E.g. 'Physically' it cannot be bordered  - or I ask: is such border
inside the nothing (when it is nothing), or outside (when it does not belong
(in)to it)?

~2 decades ago I wrote a little silly 'ode' to 'Somethingness starting with
the BLANK:
*And there was 'NOTHING at all.* (I don't recall the rhythmic words
anymore)* And when this nothingness 'realized it's nothingness then it
changed into a 'somethingness' - as *
*indeed it's nothingness. And the World was shaped in the course of such
build-up*...

I don't think 'nothing'  is a 'poosible state' - I don't mix it up with
'zero' or 'null', just think about the meaningless meaning of it. No this,
no that - MAYBE. I would not 'negate' ideas (states, as you call them) we
don't know about. And we have lots beyond our knowledge.

Best regards
John M

On Thu, Aug 11, 2011 at 7:34 PM, RMahoney rmaho...@poteau.com wrote:


 On Aug 11, 3:48 pm, Pilar Morales pilarmorales...@gmail.com wrote:
  ... To truly define non-existence, you would have to define a set of all
  that it is not: no time, no matter, no energy, no ideas, no mathematical
  constructs, and no each of the etcs to infinity.

 So out of nothing the universe of everything is born.

 In the beginning there was nothing. But what is nothing. The lack of
 an infinite number of potential somethings. So nothing is just one of
 an infinite number of possible states. All possible states exist
 because they are possible. It has all always been here and will
 always be here, all possible states, all possible events.

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Re: Unconscious Components

On Aug 12, 3:41 pm, Evgenii Rudnyi use...@rudnyi.ru wrote:

 It would be interesting to see how do you know this. Some revelation or
 something else?

I don't know it, I just think that it could be the case. If you can
fully and finally reject the proposition that your own experiences
could be metaphysical, then you are left with describing what
experience is in objective terms as a phenomena. Since we find
ourselves perceiving the world from the interior of a body, then it's
not all that outrageous to hypothesize that this interior-exterior
relationship between being a body and an experiencer of bodies might
not be a unique invention in the universe, and that the many and
fundamentally significant diametrically complimentary qualities of
subjective phenomena compared to objective might not be a meaningless
coincidence.

Craig

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Re: Unconscious Components


On 8/12/2011 12:37 PM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:

On 12.08.2011 20:40 meekerdb said the following:

On 8/12/2011 11:00 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:

On 11.08.2011 22:46 meekerdb said the following:

On 8/11/2011 1:04 PM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:


...


I would say now that consciousness is conscious perception.
The main problem in my view though is who follows the
narrative. Does your theory answer such a question?


I'd say You do, there's no separate person to follow it, it
just


This the point that I do not understand. The question is here more
 what exactly is the observer in my body. Presumably it is the
brain. Then it first constructs the world that I observe, than it
observes the constructed world. It is completely unclear though,
how it happens.


IS. On the other hand, in terms of engineering a robot, I'd put
this narrative into long-term memory (disk?) in some kind of
easily


It is not a big deal to save two two-dimensional images from
retina. It should be possible even to construct from them a
three-dimensional image. The question is what happens next? It is
the same question, who gets this 3D-image.


You robot do. It gets tagged with some notes, timestamped, and stuck
in the database for further reference and adjustment of learning
algorithms. That's it. There's no homunculus who watches it in the
Cartesian theater. That it is referenced and used in your cogitation
to influence your speech and other actions is what constitutes your
being conscious of it.


A quote from Jeffrey Gray (p. 110, it is just one of hypotheses in the 
book, this time on the verge of dualism)


(1) the unconscious brain constructs a display in a medium, that of 
conscious perception, fundamentally different from its usual medium of 
electrochemical activity in and between nerve cells;


I don't know what this means.  I might agree with it as a metaphor, but 
I have no idea what the medium of conscious perception refers to.  It 
seems to assume what it purports to explain.



(2) it inspects the conscious constructed display;


This has the brain inspecting itself.  Again it seems metaphorical.  It 
might be a metaphor for my AI robot tagging stuff it puts in its database.


(3) it uses the results of the display to change the working of its 
usual electrochemical medium.


Is this close to what you have said?


Maybe.

Brent



Evgenii



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Re: Why is there something rather than nothing?


What is there?  Everything! So what isn't there?  Nothing!
 --- Norm Levitt, after Quine


On 8/12/2011 1:02 PM, John Mikes wrote:

Dear Pilar,

as your fellow Not-English-Mothertongue guy. I point to the* 
incompleteness* in this language:*/ Nothing  - _EXISTS_ not./* It 
isn't. But it is bad English to write:
_ Why 'is-not' nothing?_ so we have a discussion point. In my 
(non-IndoEuropean) mothertongue the question is exactly formulated in 
the 'wrong(?)' way.

_(Miert nincs semmi?_)

I see you take it for granted that the Universe was born. Was it 
indeed? Maybe OUR universe was, but I speak about the World 
(Multiverse, none of them necessarily identical in any sense) in which 
we inhabit a pretty simple one with 'the' physical system we have.


Our limited imagination can work only with 'somethings', *nothing* has 
no meaning (if it includes such meaning - it would negate its true 
meaning - G) E.g. 'Physically' it cannot be bordered  - or I ask: is 
such border inside the nothing (when it is nothing), or outside (when 
it does not belong (in)to it)?


~2 decades ago I wrote a little silly 'ode' to 'Somethingness 
starting with the BLANK:
/And there was 'NOTHING at all./ (I don't recall the rhythmic words 
anymore)/ And when this nothingness 'realized it's nothingness then it 
changed into a 'somethingness' - as /
/indeed it's nothingness. And the World was shaped in the course of 
such build-up/...


I don't think 'nothing'  is a 'poosible state' - I don't mix it up 
with 'zero' or 'null', just think about the meaningless meaning of it. 
No this, no that - MAYBE. I would not 'negate' ideas (states, as you 
call them) we don't know about. And we have lots beyond our knowledge.


Best regards
John M


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Re: Why is there something rather than nothing?

2011-08-12 Thread Pilar Morales

Dear John, thank you for the feedback. My comments below..

On Fri, Aug 12, 2011 at 4:02 PM, John Mikes jami...@gmail.com wrote:

 Dear Pilar,

 as your fellow Not-English-Mothertongue guy. I point to the*incompleteness
 * in this language:* Nothing  -  EXISTS not.* It isn't. But it is bad
 English to write:
 * Why 'is-not' nothing?* so we have a discussion point. In my
 (non-IndoEuropean) mothertongue the question is exactly formulated in the
 'wrong(?)' way.
 *(Miert nincs semmi?*)


I felt that zero as a concept would take care of that. In fact, zero wasn't
part of the numeral system until very late in the game. I'm sure it took a
lot of discussion to make it real, and its acceptance has revolutionized
math.



 I see you take it for granted that the Universe was born. Was it indeed?
 Maybe OUR universe was, but I speak about the World (Multiverse, none of
 them necessarily identical in any sense) in which we inhabit a pretty simple
 one with 'the' physical system we have.


John, I personally don't believe there was a begining with nothing before
it. Information is not created or destroyed, just transformed. The Universe
is being born every day in a way.




 Our limited imagination can work only with 'somethings', *nothing* has no
 meaning (if it includes such meaning - it would negate its true meaning -
 G) E.g. 'Physically' it cannot be bordered  - or I ask: is such border
 inside the nothing (when it is nothing), or outside (when it does not belong
 (in)to it)?


Yes, I understand. However, if you consider the EM Spectrum, what we can see
(light) and what we can hear (sound) are very narrow ranges. There's a whole
lot that our senses don't pick up, so we have to invent tools to extend our
senses in order to know what else is there, where there was nothing
before.

If you consider also that our bodies are 99% empty space: you may call that
space nothing, only until our human drive and capacity develops the tools,
the sensors, the receptors to detect, measure, and observe what this empty
space is made of and how it behaves. That nothing may be called God, or the
Quantum Vacuum, or anything that sounds metaphysical until measured or
observed or nobel-prized.





 ~2 decades ago I wrote a little silly 'ode' to 'Somethingness starting
 with the BLANK:
 *And there was 'NOTHING at all.* (I don't recall the rhythmic words
 anymore)* And when this nothingness 'realized it's nothingness then it
 changed into a 'somethingness' - as *
 *indeed it's nothingness. And the World was shaped in the course of such
 build-up*...

 I don't think 'nothing'  is a 'poosible state' - I don't mix it up with
 'zero' or 'null', just think about the meaningless meaning of it. No this,
 no that - MAYBE. I would not 'negate' ideas (states, as you call them) we
 don't know about. And we have lots beyond our knowledge.



That was my first reaction when I read the article, but then I thought about
the possibility of the Universe being binary-like. A computer needs the
off state, it needs the zeroes. Zero is information: not that, you're
right: not physical, not form.

All the Best,
Pilar



 Best regards
 John M


 On Thu, Aug 11, 2011 at 7:34 PM, RMahoney rmaho...@poteau.com wrote:


 On Aug 11, 3:48 pm, Pilar Morales pilarmorales...@gmail.com wrote:
  ... To truly define non-existence, you would have to define a set of all
  that it is not: no time, no matter, no energy, no ideas, no mathematical
  constructs, and no each of the etcs to infinity.



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Re: Why is there something rather than nothing?


On 8/12/2011 2:08 PM, Pilar Morales wrote:


I see you take it for granted that the Universe was born. Was it
indeed? Maybe OUR universe was, but I speak about the World
(Multiverse, none of them necessarily identical in any sense) in
which we inhabit a pretty simple one with 'the' physical system we
have.

John, I personally don't believe there was a begining with nothing 
before it. Information is not created or destroyed, just transformed. 
The Universe is being born every day in a way.


Since in QM information can be negative, it may be the universe not only 
has zero energy it also has zero information (in fact that would seem 
implicit in the idea that everything happens).


Brent
The universe is just nothing, rearranged.
--- Yonatan Fishman

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Re: Why is there something rather than nothing?

2011-08-12 Thread Pilar Morales

Brent,
Is it possible that zero could have negative charge, positive charge, and
neutral charge?

Which reminds me, why is it that the photon doesn't have an anti-particle
other than itself? It makes no sense to me that Bosons for the most part
don't have antimatter equivalents. I would think that the antiparticle of a
photon has got to be magnetic in essence. If the word wasn't taken already,
I would say that the antiparticle of a photon is a graviton or a magnetron,
which to me, gravitation and magnetism are manifestations of the same force,
just different reactions to interactions. And at the risk of sounding (even
more) crazy, I would say that the photon and its anti-particle are entangled
at the essential connection point that bridges between matter and that
hidden world. Something that makes planets levitate as a magnet levitates a
rotating magnet, that carries light, that in every closed system creates an
attracting and repulsive force. It is that something that tips over when it
collects enough mass and makes it collapse. Not the Higgs.

I'm sure there's someone out there who has thought of this and has the math
to back it up!!

On Fri, Aug 12, 2011 at 5:13 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote:

 **
 On 8/12/2011 2:08 PM, Pilar Morales wrote:

  I see you take it for granted that the Universe was born. Was it
 indeed? Maybe OUR universe was, but I speak about the World (Multiverse,
 none of them necessarily identical in any sense) in which we inhabit a
 pretty simple one with 'the' physical system we have.


 John, I personally don't believe there was a begining with nothing before
 it. Information is not created or destroyed, just transformed. The Universe
 is being born every day in a way.


 Since in QM information can be negative, it may be the universe not only
 has zero energy it also has zero information (in fact that would seem
 implicit in the idea that everything happens).

 Brent
 The universe is just nothing, rearranged.
 --- Yonatan Fishman

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Re: Blueprint of existence


On 8/12/2011 4:33 PM, Pilar Morales wrote:
I was following the conversation on consciousness and life and was 
trying to find out if there's a relationship between the number of 
Bosons and Fermions in living organisms (as units and as parts of 
larger more complex organisms) versus their ratio in inanimate 
objects. I do believe there's something there but can't find any info 
to back it up.


I don' t think there's any significance to the ratio.  For one thing 
it's not clear how to count them.  A C12 nucleus is a boson, but a C13 
nucleus is a fermion - but they are both made of quarks which are 
fermions.  If you consider the numbers in the universe I think photons 
from the CMB far out number fermions (at least the ones we know about).


Brent

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Re: Why is there something rather than nothing?

On Aug 12, 8:28 pm, Pilar Morales pilarmorales...@gmail.com wrote:

gravitation and magnetism are manifestations of the same force,
 just different reactions to interactions.

I think that is the case also. To me it seems possible that gravity,
like time, is not a true primitive phenomenon, but actually how the
epiphenomenon of entropy relativistically distorting electromagnetic
interactions related to density, scale, and distance between objects.

 Something that makes planets levitate as a magnet levitates a
 rotating magnet, that carries light, that in every closed system creates an
 attracting and repulsive force. It is that something that tips over when it
 collects enough mass and makes it collapse. Not the Higgs.

I suspect that photons, and probably many other Standard Model
particles, do not physically exist. Like 'gravity', they are logical
inferences based upon our lack of first hand interaction with
phenomena on the microcosmic scale.  I hypothesize a mutual
telesemantic quorum sensing phenomenology which is an interior/
exterior, input/output system instead of a model of passive
bombardment by dumb light projectiles, with all appearances of
particle or wave behavior being a function of the interactions within
the matter that makes up our physical measuring instruments. In short,
'light' is our experience of visual perception and photons are a
mathematical narrative applied to secondhand atomic perception.

When I have tried to inquire about what evidence we have that photons
physically exist, or even what that would mean given the lack of
physically tangible characteristics, I generally am referred to the
photoelectric effect or other theoretical frameworks in which a
particulate entity could be assumed, or else I'm met with agreement
that yes, photons are actually quantum events having a wavelike or
particle like pattern of occurrence. In either case I think that the
idea of electromagnetic quorum sensing is a more plausible theory with
more explanatory power.

Craig

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Re: Why is there something rather than nothing?


On 8/12/2011 5:28 PM, Pilar Morales wrote:

Brent,
Is it possible that zero could have negative charge, positive charge, 
and neutral charge?


Zero is the cardinality of the empty set.  It's not part of the physical 
world.


Which reminds me, why is it that the photon doesn't have an 
anti-particle other than itself? It makes no sense to me that Bosons 
for the most part don't have antimatter equivalents.


They all have anti-particles.  It's just that for the uncharged ones may 
be their own anti-particle.


I would think that the antiparticle of a photon has got to be magnetic 
in essence.


Photons don't carry charge.  If they did they'd interact with other 
photons and we wouldn't be able to see anything.


If the word wasn't taken already, I would say that the antiparticle of 
a photon is a graviton


The graviton (if it exists) is a spin 2 particle.

or a magnetron, which to me, gravitation and magnetism are 
manifestations of the same force, just different reactions to 
interactions.


Andre Sakharov wrote a famous paper that suggests gravity is an emergent 
curvature of spacetime from the vacuum fluctuations of quantum fields, 
including the EM field


 http://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/~akempf/sakharov.pdf

The idea is popular again because black hole thermodynamics implies 
gravity could be an entropic force.


http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/gr-qc/pdf/0204/0204062v1.pdf

And at the risk of sounding (even more) crazy, I would say that the 
photon and its anti-particle are entangled at the essential connection 
point that bridges between matter and that hidden world. Something 
that makes planets levitate as a magnet levitates a rotating magnet, 
that carries light, that in every closed system creates an attracting 
and repulsive force. It is that something that tips over when it 
collects enough mass and makes it collapse. Not the Higgs.
I'm sure there's someone out there who has thought of this and has the 
math to back it up!!


Somebody may have thought of it, but nobody's been able to back it up.

Brent
My brother rose thru his gravity, while contrariwise I sank due
to my levity.
 --- Mark Twain

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Re: Why is there something rather than nothing?

On Aug 12, 9:55 pm, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote:

 Photons don't carry charge.  If they did they'd interact with other
 photons and we wouldn't be able to see anything.

Would you say that what we see is photons? Even in our dreams?

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Should Math Be Taught in School


Are you the kind of person who knows math?

http://videosift.com/video/Miss-USA-2011-Should-Math-Be-Taught-In-Schools

Brent

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Re: bruno list

2011-08-12 Thread Stathis Papaioannou

On Fri, Aug 12, 2011 at 3:22 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote:

 John Searle claims to be a physicalist but he believes that if
 part of your brain is replaced by a functionally identical computer
 chip your behaviour will remain the same but your consciousness will
 fade away. Incidentally, Searle accepts that there is no problem in
 principle with making such a zombie chip. However, this is not
 possible under a physicalist theory as defined above. If the computer
 chip has the same I/O behaviour as the volume of tissue it replaces,
 the brain that does the noticing

 And what part would that be?  The homunculus in the Cartesian theater.  I
 don't think functionalism entails that there is some noticing neuron in
 the brain.  If functionalism is correct, noticing must be distributed.

Noticing is distributed, but the parts of the brain are
interconnected. Visual perception occurs in the visual cortex, then
the information may be sent to the limbic system causing an emotional
reaction to what is seen and the language centre allowing you to
describe what you see, and on to the motor cortex leading to muscle
contraction in the limbs. If something changes in your visual cortex
then all these other areas in the brain receive different inputs, and
so produce different outputs. You feel different and you behave
differently, and that constitutes noticing that there has been a
change.

If your visual cortex is replaced by an electronic device that
produces the appropriate outputs at its borders, the rest of your
brain will respond normally. You will watch a film, understand the
story and be able to describe it afterwards, have the appropriate
emotional responses, and so on. In other words as far as the qualia in
the rest of your brain go there is no difference. Now, is it possible
that your actual visual qualia have disappeared and you just can't
notice? If you think this is possible, how can you be sure that didn't
go blind last Tuesday and just haven't noticed? If you are actually
blind in this strange way what have you lost?

 cannot tell that anything has
 changed. Only if consciousness is disconnected from brain activity,
 due for example to an immaterial soul, could the subject notice a
 change even though his brain is responding normally. The conclusion is
 that IF the replacement is functionally identical THEN the
 consciousness is also preserved,

 But the question is what functionally identical means.  Can it mean only
 the same input/output or must it be similar inside at some lower level.  If
 you specify the same input/output for all possible input sequences,
 including environmental ones, then I agree that your argument goes
 through.  But failing that, it seems to me the consciousness that is within
 or due to the AI hemisphere can be different AND noticed in that hemisphere.

It can be noticed separately in that hemisphere but if it is not
communicated it will be a separate consciousness. If my liver suddenly
gained self-awareness that would not necessarily mean that I (the
person generated by my brain) would share in it or vice versa.

 Your argument seems to assume that consciousness is localized and must be
 outside the AI part, but that would lead to philosophical zombies when you
 replaced the whole brain and there was no outside.

No, because the argument shows that the replaced part must contribute
normally to the consciousness of the whole, due to the conceptual
difficulty with partial zombies - being blind without knowing you are
blind.


-- 
Stathis Papaioannou

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Re: bruno list

On Aug 12, 11:18 pm, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote:

 Noticing is distributed, but the parts of the brain are
 interconnected. Visual perception occurs in the visual cortex, then
 the information may be sent to the limbic system causing an emotional
 reaction to what is seen and the language centre allowing you to
 describe what you see, and on to the motor cortex leading to muscle
 contraction in the limbs.

But what is the 'information'? Does the limbic system see? Does it
have an emotional reaction or do 'we' metaphysically conjure an
emotional reaction from it's 'information'?

Craig

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Re: Why is there something rather than nothing?

2011-08-12 Thread Pilar Morales

On Fri, Aug 12, 2011 at 9:55 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote:

On 8/12/2011 5:28 PM, Pilar Morales wrote:

or a magnetron, which to me, gravitation and magnetism are manifestations
of the same force, just different reactions to interactions.

Andre Sakharov wrote a famous paper that suggests gravity is an emergent
curvature of spacetime from the vacuum fluctuations of quantum fields,
including the EM field

That makes more sense to me. The fundamental unit of magnetism is (has to
be) spacetime itself, time being the most important differentiator. I think
there's a problem when we give the speed of 300Kk/s to the particle of light
versus giving it to the field in which it travels. The specific frequency of
that field has a sign posted: Speed Limit X, so it makes sense to me that
the fields are of greater importance since everything, every particle, is in
constant movement. It is the field that makes it move.

Like a leaf carried by the current of a river, it is the current that
carries it; or a sailboat when it catches the current of the wind. Nothing
can travel faster than the particular current without additional energy, but
the speed of the particles depends on their mass, their charge, and the
size/speed or frequency of the current in which it wants to travel. This
would fit perfectly with conservation of energy. It would be another quality
of the spacetime field that puts pressure on the particles that makes them
experience entropy, like water pressure.

Or maybe not. Thanks for the link, it's in my queue now :)

http://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/~**akempf/sakharov.pdfhttp://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/~akempf/sakharov.pdf

The idea is popular again because black hole thermodynamics implies gravity
could be an entropic force.

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/gr-**qc/pdf/0204/0204062v1.pdfhttp://arxiv.org/PS_cache/gr-qc/pdf/0204/0204062v1.pdf

Brent
My brother rose thru his gravity, while contrariwise I sank due
to my levity.
--- Mark Twain

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Re: Why is there something rather than nothing?


On 8/12/2011 7:01 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:

On Aug 12, 9:55 pm, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net  wrote:

   

Photons don't carry charge.  If they did they'd interact with other
photons and we wouldn't be able to see anything.
 

Would you say that what we see is photons? Even in our dreams?

   

No.

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Re: Why is there something rather than nothing?

On Aug 13, 12:26 am, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote:
 On 8/12/2011 7:01 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Aug 12, 9:55 pm, 
 meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net  wrote:

  Photons don't carry charge.  If they did they'd interact with other
  photons and we wouldn't be able to see anything.

  Would you say that what we see is photons? Even in our dreams?

 No.

You see where I'm going with this... if we don't see photons, how do
we know whether it would matter if the interact with other photons.
Why do they seem to be able to interact with our rod and cone cells?

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Re: bruno list


On 8/12/2011 8:18 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:

It can be noticed separately in that hemisphere but if it is not
communicated it will be a separate consciousness.
   


I think we have almost converged to agreement here. If the AI part 
communicates to the brain hemisphere just as the brain part it replaced 
then it will be instantiating the same consciousness, part of which is 
residing in or supervening on the AI part.  Consciousness depends only 
on the AI emulating brain stuff at the interface.


But now consider the AI part divided in two parts, an internal part D 
that has no interface outside of the AI and E the complement of D in 
AI.  Then we replace D with a different D'.  What will be required that 
the part of consciousness supervening on AI is unchanged is that D' 
provides the same input/ouput as D did.  So no matter where we put the 
cut between two parts the input/output across this cut must be the same 
- otherwise consciousness will be changed.  This implies that all the 
functional structure must be maintained.


I'm not sure I believe that, but it seems to follow from the kind of 
strict functionalism that says 'yes' to the doctor.


Brent

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Re: Why is there something rather than nothing?