Re: Bruno List continued
On 01 Oct 2011, at 21:05, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Oct 1, 10:13 am, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 01 Oct 2011, at 03:39, Craig Weinberg wrote: The singularity is all the matter that there is, was, and will be, but it has no exterior - no cracks made of space or time, it's all interiority. It's feelings, images, experiences, expectations, dreams, etc, and whatever countless other forms might exist in the cosmos. You can use arithmetic to render an impersonation of feeling, as you can write a song that feels arithmetic - but not all songs feel arithmetic. You can write a poem about a color or you can write an equation about visible electromagnetism, but neither completely describe either color or electromagnetism. I have no clue what you are taking about. That your conclusion makes some arithmetical being looking like impersonal zombie is just racism for me. I don't think that there are any arithmetical beings. In which theory? It's a fantasy, or really more of a presumption mistaking an narrow category of understanding with a cosmic primitive. You miss the incompleteness discoveries. To believe that arithmetic is narrow just tell me something about you, not about arithmetic. It means that you have a pregodelian conception of arithmetic. We know today that arithmetic is beyond any conceivable effective axiomatizations. So I see a sort of racism against machine or numbers, justified by unintelligible sentences. I know that's what you see. I think that it is the shadow of your own overconfidence in the theoretical-mechanistic perspective that you project onto me. You are the one developing a philosophy making human with prosthetic brain less human, if not zombie. This is the kind of strong metaphysical and aristotleian assumption which I am not sure to see the need for, beyond extrapolating from our direct experience. Is it better to extrapolate only from indirect experience? It is better to derive from clear assumptions. Clear assumptions can be the most misleading kind. But that is the goal. Celar assumption leads to clear misleading, which can then be corrected with respect to facts, or repeatable experiments. Unclear assumptions lead to arbitrariness, racism, etc. To me the goal is to reveal the truth, That is a personal goal. I don't think that truth can be revealed, only questioned. regardless of the nature of the assumptions which are required to get there. If you a priori prejudice the cosmos against figurative, multivalent phenomenology then you just confirm your own bias. I don't hide this, and it is part of the scientific (modest) method. I assume comp, and I derive consequences in that frame. Everyone is free to use this for or against some world view. I don't think there is a microcosmos illusion, unless you are talking about the current assumptions of the Standard Model as particles. That's not an illusion though, just a specialized interpretation that doesn't scale up to the macrocosm. As far as where sensorimotive phenomena comes from, it precedes causality. 'Comes from' is a sensorimotive proposition and not the other way around. The singularity functions inherently as supremacy of orientation, and sense and motive are energetic functions of the difference between it and it's existential annihilation through time and space. That does not help. That doesn't help me either. I mean: I don't understand. To much precise terms in a field where we question the meaning of even simpler terms. Specifically, like if you have any two atoms, something must have a sense of what is supposed to happen when they get close to each other. Iron atoms have a particular way of relating that's different from carbon atoms, and that relation can be quantified. That doesn't mean that the relation is nothing but a quantitative skeleton. There is an actual experience going on - an attraction, a repulsion, momentum, acceleration...various states of holding, releasing, or binding a 'charge'. What looks like a charge to us under a microscope is in fact a proto-feeling with an associated range of proto-motivations. Why? Because that's what we are made of. Why should I take your words for granted. ? (I let you know that one of my main motivation consists in explaining the physical, that is explaining it without using physical notions and assumptions. The same for consciousness). But what you are explaining it with is no more explainable than physical notions or assumptions. Why explain what is real in terms which are not real? You are just begging the question. You talk like if you knew what is real or not. Now it is the fact that all scientist agree with simple facts like 1+9=10, etc. Actually they are using such facts already in their theories. I just show that IF we are machine, THEN those elementary facts are enough to explain the less elementary one.
Re: Interesting paper on consciousness, computation and MWI
On 01 Oct 2011, at 22:23, meekerdb wrote: On 10/1/2011 8:15 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 01 Oct 2011, at 09:31, Russell Standish wrote: On Thu, Sep 22, 2011 at 07:02:28PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: OK. But note that in this case you are using the notion of 3-OM (or computational state), not Bostrom notion of 1-OM (or my notion of first person state). The 3-OM are countable, but the 1-OMs are not. Could you explain more why you think this? AFAICT, Bostrom makes no mention of the cardinality of his OMs. I don't think that Bostrom mentions the cardinality of his OMs, indeed. I don't think that he clearly distinguish the 1-OMs and the 3-OMs either. By 3-OM I refer to the computational state per se, as defined relatively to the UD deployment (UD*). Those are clearly infinite and countable, even recursively countable. The 1-OMs, for any person, are not recursively countable, indeed by an application of a theorem of Rice, they are not even 3- recognizable. Or more simply because you cannot know your substitution level. In front of some portion of UD*, you cannot recognize your 1-OMs in general. You cannot say I am here, and there, etc. But they are (non constructively) well defined. God can know that you are here, and there, ... Wouldn't that require that all the infinite UD calculations be completed before all the you could be indentified? The infinite UD calculations are just number relations, which are out of space and time. And the measure on the 1-OMs should be defined on those unrecognizable 1-OMs. Are the 1-OMs countable? In the quote above, I say that they are not countable. What I meant by this is related to the measure problem, which cannot be made on the states themselves, but, I think, on the computational histories going through them, and, actually, on *all* computational histories going through them. This includes the dummy histories which duplicate you iteratively through some processes similar to the infinite iteration of the WM self-duplication. Even if you don't interact with the output (here: W or M) or the iteration, such computations multiplies in the non- countable infinity. (I am using implictly the fist person indeterminacy, of course). Those computation will have the shape: you M you M you W you M You W You W You W You M ad infinitum This gives a white noise, which is not necessarily available to you, but it still multiplies (in the most possible dumb way) your computational histories. Such infinite computations, which are somehow dovetailing on the reals (infinite sequence of W and M) have a higher measure than any finite computations and so are good candidates for the winning computations. Note that such an infinite background noise, although not directly accessible through your 1-OMs, should be experimentally detectable when you look at yourselves+neighborhood below the substitution level, and indeed QM confirms this by the many (up + down) superposition states of the particles states in the (assumed to be infinite) multi-universes. But aside from the quantum level, doesn't the measure problem have the same drawback and Boltzman's brains. Shouldn't I find myself in a world where everyone is Brent Meeker? Well, if you prove this, then you refute comp (and most of its super- Turing weakenings). The big difference between Boltzman brains and UD*, is that the first are not well defined and depends on physical assumption, the second is well defined and depends only of the addition and multiplication laws of non negative integers. Bruno This might be also confirmed by some possible semantics for the logic of the first person points of view (the quantified logic qS4Grz1, qX1* have, I think, non countable important models). 3-OMs are relatively simple objects, but 1-OMs are more sophisticated, and are defined together with the set of all computations going through their correspondent states. To be sure, I am not entirely persuaded that Bostrom's 1-OMs makes sense with digital mechanism, and usually I prefer to use the label of first person experiences/histories. With the rule Y = II, that is: a bifurcation of a computations entails a doubling of the measure even on its past (in the UD steps sense), this makes clear that we have a continuum of infinite histories. Again, this is made more complex when we take amnesia and fusion of histories) into consideration. I hope this helps a bit. In my opinion, only further progress on the hypostases modal logics will make it possible to isolate a reasonable definition of 1-OMs, which obviously is a quite intricate notion. Bruno -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South
BOI Chapter 8 vs Schmidhuber
In David Deutsch's Beginning of Infinity chapter 8, he criticises Schmidhuber's Great Programmer idea by saying that it is giving up on explanation in science, as the hardware on which the Great Program runs is unknowable. David, why do you say that? Surely, the question of what hardware is implementing the Great Simulators simply becomes uninteresting, much like the medieval arguments about the number of angels dancing on the head of a pin. It is unknowable, and it doesn't matter, as any universal machine will do. The second question I have to David is why you say The whole point of universality is lost if one conceives of computation as being somehow prior to the physical world.? I do appreciate that mathematically, hypercomputers exist, an example being the infinity hotel example you give in your book. So a consequence of something like Schmidhuber's theory is that hypercomputers can never exist in our physical world. I suppose you would say that if physics were generated by machine, why the class of Turing universal machine, and not some hyper-(hyper-) machine? Whereas in a physics-first scenario, physics can only support Turing computation. Surely though, we can reverse the question in the physics-first case - why can't physics support hypercomputation? Cheers I'm copying this to the everything-list, as people there are interested in this topic too. -- 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.
Re: BOI Chapter 8 vs Schmidhuber
Hi Russell, On 02 Oct 2011, at 11:37, Russell Standish wrote: In David Deutsch's Beginning of Infinity chapter 8, he criticises Schmidhuber's Great Programmer idea by saying that it is giving up on explanation in science, Actually I did address this point on the FOR list years ago. Somehow, I share David's critics on Schmidhuber's idea of a great programmer when seen as an *explanation* (of everything). My (older, btw) publications makes this point clear. The Universal Dovetailer (which can be seen as an effective and precise version of the great programmer, and which is a tiny part of elementary arithmetical truth) makes it possible to *formulate* (not solve!) the mind body problem mathematically, but Schmidhuber use it as an explanation gap. He missed the fact that if we are machine we cannot know in which computations we are and we have to recover the physical laws, not from one computation but from an internal (self-referential) statistics on infinities of computations, and that statistics has to be recovered entirely from the self-reference ability of machine. The consequence is that, a priori, the laws of physical cannot be digital, the physical reality cannot be Turing emulable, nor can consciousness. Both matter and mind becomes global feature of the fabric of reality. Mechanism (I am a machine) entails that the everything which is not me, cannot be a machine (like arithmeyical truth cannot be emulated by any machines). In fact mechanism is incompatible with digital physics. Mechanism (I am a machine) entails that the everything which is not me, cannot be a machine (like arithmetical truth cannot be emulated by any machines). In fact mechanism is incompatible with digital physics. But this was an answer to David's remark that the great programmers explains too much, and so don't explain anything. In fact it explains nothing, but its effective version makes it possible to formulate the mind body problem, and to solve it both conceptually, and technically (but this leads to mathematical open problems, some of which have been solved since). as the hardware on which the Great Program runs is unknowable. Of course the contrary is true. If we are machine, we know (up to some recursive equivalence) what runs us, and where the possible hardware come from. Any first order specification of any universal machine or theory will do the job. I use elementary arithmetic because we are all familiar with it. The laws of physics cannot depend on that choice. David, why do you say that? Surely, the question of what hardware is implementing the Great Simulators simply becomes uninteresting, much like the medieval arguments about the number of angels dancing on the head of a pin. It is unknowable, and it doesn't matter, as any universal machine will do. I disagree with this. The notion of primitive hardware is precisely shown to be meaningless. The laws of physics are shown to be machine independent. Eventually the initial universal system plays the role of a coordinate system, and the laws of physics does not depend on it. The second question I have to David is why you say The whole point of universality is lost if one conceives of computation as being somehow prior to the physical world.? Good question. I am interested in what David can say about this. The notion of universality has been discovered by mathematician, and is indeed a provably arithmetical property of numbers, relatively to numbers. I do appreciate that mathematically, hypercomputers exist, an example being the infinity hotel example you give in your book. I will have to read that. In fact I think that hypercomputation is a red herring. Basically our reality must seem hypercomputed (and even worst that that) once we are digital machine. The analytical (which is above the arithmetical, which is itself above the computable (sigma_1 arithmetical), and the physical are internal aspect of the computable, once we assume that we (not the universe) are Turing emulable. So a consequence of something like Schmidhuber's theory is that hypercomputers can never exist in our physical world. The opposite conclusion than mechanism. But digital physics entails mechanism, and mechanism entails the falsity of digital physics. This means that digital physics is a contradictory notion. I suppose you would say that if physics were generated by machine, why the class of Turing universal machine, and not some hyper-(hyper-) machine? Whereas in a physics-first scenario, physics can only support Turing computation. If I (whatever I am) is a machine, then the universe (whatever responsible for me to exist) cannot be a machine, nor explicitly generated by a machine (but it can be, and need to be *apparent* to machines points of view). This follows from the Universal Dovetailer Argument (and I wait some replies on it on the FOR list).
Re: Bruno List continued
On Oct 1, 8:52 pm, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, Oct 2, 2011 at 5:35 AM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: I'm afraid the analogies you use don't help, at least for me. Does an ion channel ever open in the absence of an observable cause? It's a simple yes/no question. Whether consciousness is associated, supervenient, linked, provided by God or whatever is a separate question. Observable by who? Observable by a third party. Yes. If you only look at the ion channels of a neuron in someone's amygdala without knowing what you are looking at or what the subject is thinking about, then you are not going to know that the voltage is changing because they are thinking of hitting a straight flush on the river after going 'all in'. If you trace it back further, you will see earlier voltage changes or depolarizations in cognitive areas, and then in the audio sensory areas of the brain if the suggestion came as a verbal instruction from a researcher. None of those changes in different regions of the brain mean anything though except in reference to the back end semantic understanding. Craig Craig -- 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: Bruno List continued
On Oct 2, 5:01 am, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 01 Oct 2011, at 21:05, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Oct 1, 10:13 am, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 01 Oct 2011, at 03:39, Craig Weinberg wrote: The singularity is all the matter that there is, was, and will be, but it has no exterior - no cracks made of space or time, it's all interiority. It's feelings, images, experiences, expectations, dreams, etc, and whatever countless other forms might exist in the cosmos. You can use arithmetic to render an impersonation of feeling, as you can write a song that feels arithmetic - but not all songs feel arithmetic. You can write a poem about a color or you can write an equation about visible electromagnetism, but neither completely describe either color or electromagnetism. I have no clue what you are taking about. That your conclusion makes some arithmetical being looking like impersonal zombie is just racism for me. I don't think that there are any arithmetical beings. In which theory? In reality. It's a fantasy, or really more of a presumption mistaking an narrow category of understanding with a cosmic primitive. You miss the incompleteness discoveries. To believe that arithmetic is narrow just tell me something about you, not about arithmetic. It means that you have a pregodelian conception of arithmetic. We know today that arithmetic is beyond any conceivable effective axiomatizations. I don't disagree with arithmetic being exactly what you say it is, only that it cannot be realized except through sensorimotive experience. Without that actualization - to be computed neurologically or digitally in semiconductors, analogously in beer bottles, etc, then there is only the idea of the existence of arithmetic, which also is a sensorimotive experience or nothing at all. There is no arithmetic 'out there', it's only inside of matter. So yes, arithmetic extends to the inconceivable and nonaxiomatizable but the sensorimotive gestalts underlying arithmetic are much more inconceivable and nonaxiomatizable. A greater infinity. So I see a sort of racism against machine or numbers, justified by unintelligible sentences. I know that's what you see. I think that it is the shadow of your own overconfidence in the theoretical-mechanistic perspective that you project onto me. You are the one developing a philosophy making human with prosthetic brain less human, if not zombie. I'm not against a prosthetic brain, I just think that it's going to have to be made of some kind of cells that live and die, which may mean that it has to be organic, which may mean that it has to be based on nucleic acids. Your theory would conclude that we should see naturally evolved brains made out of a variety of materials not based on living cells if we look long enough. I don't think that is necessarily the case. This is the kind of strong metaphysical and aristotleian assumption which I am not sure to see the need for, beyond extrapolating from our direct experience. Is it better to extrapolate only from indirect experience? It is better to derive from clear assumptions. Clear assumptions can be the most misleading kind. But that is the goal. Celar assumption leads to clear misleading, which can then be corrected with respect to facts, or repeatable experiments. Unclear assumptions lead to arbitrariness, racism, etc. To me the goal is to reveal the truth, That is a personal goal. I don't think that truth can be revealed, only questioned. How can you question it if it is not revealed? regardless of the nature of the assumptions which are required to get there. If you a priori prejudice the cosmos against figurative, multivalent phenomenology then you just confirm your own bias. I don't hide this, and it is part of the scientific (modest) method. I assume comp, and I derive consequences in that frame. Everyone is free to use this for or against some world view. It's a good method for so many things, but not everything, and I'm only interested in solving everything. I don't think there is a microcosmos illusion, unless you are talking about the current assumptions of the Standard Model as particles. That's not an illusion though, just a specialized interpretation that doesn't scale up to the macrocosm. As far as where sensorimotive phenomena comes from, it precedes causality. 'Comes from' is a sensorimotive proposition and not the other way around. The singularity functions inherently as supremacy of orientation, and sense and motive are energetic functions of the difference between it and it's existential annihilation through time and space. That does not help. That doesn't help me either. I mean: I don't understand. To much precise terms in a field where we question the meaning of even simpler terms. I have precise terms because I have a precise understanding of
Re: Bruno List continued
On Sun, Oct 2, 2011 at 10:58 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: On Oct 1, 8:52 pm, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, Oct 2, 2011 at 5:35 AM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: I'm afraid the analogies you use don't help, at least for me. Does an ion channel ever open in the absence of an observable cause? It's a simple yes/no question. Whether consciousness is associated, supervenient, linked, provided by God or whatever is a separate question. Observable by who? Observable by a third party. Yes. If you only look at the ion channels of a neuron in someone's amygdala without knowing what you are looking at or what the subject is thinking about, then you are not going to know that the voltage is changing because they are thinking of hitting a straight flush on the river after going 'all in'. If you trace it back further, you will see earlier voltage changes or depolarizations in cognitive areas, and then in the audio sensory areas of the brain if the suggestion came as a verbal instruction from a researcher. None of those changes in different regions of the brain mean anything though except in reference to the back end semantic understanding. So you do believe that ion channels will open without an observable cause, since thoughts are not an observable cause. A neuroscientist would see neurons firing apparently for no reason, violating physical laws. -- 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.
Re: David Eagleman on CHOICE
On Sun, Oct 2, 2011 at 3:01 AM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: It's a strange, almost paradoxical result but I think observer moments can be sub-conscious. If we say the minimum duration of a conscious moment is 100ms then 99ms and the remaining 1ms of this can occur at different times, perhaps billions of years of real time apart, perhaps simultaneously or in the reverse order. You would have the experience provided only that the full 100ms even if broken up into infinitesimal intervals occurs somewhere, sometime. That sounds like a temporal homunculus. :-) Note that on a nanosecond scale there is no state of the brain. Relativity applies to brains too and so the time order of events on opposite sides of your head only defined to within about a nanosecond. The brain is limited for technical reasons, relativity being the least of them. It isn't possible to stop it for a microsecond and restart it at exactly the same state. With a computer you can do this although you are limited to discrete digital states: you can't save the state as logic circuits are transitioning from 1 to 0. But this doesn't change the argument that, to the extent that the physics allows it, the machine states may be arbitrarily divided. It then becomes a matter of definition whether we say the conscious states can also be arbitrarily divided. If stream of consciousness A-B-C supervenes on machine state a-b-c where A-B, B-C, A-B-C, but not A, B or C alone are of sufficient duration to count as consciousness should we say the observer moments are A-B, B-C and A-B-C, or should we say that the observer moments are A, B, C? I think it's simpler to say that the atomic observer moments are A, B, C even though individually they lack content. -- 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.
Re: David Eagleman on CHOICE
On Sun, Oct 2, 2011 at 4:16 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: It's a strange, almost paradoxical result but I think observer moments can be sub-conscious. If we say the minimum duration of a conscious moment is 100ms then 99ms and the remaining 1ms of this can occur at different times, perhaps billions of years of real time apart, perhaps simultaneously or in the reverse order. You would have the experience provided only that the full 100ms even if broken up into infinitesimal intervals occurs somewhere, sometime. I think that you are crossing the limit of your pedagogical use of the physical supervenience thesis. You might be led to a direct contradiction, which might lead to a new proof of its inconsistency. Consciousness cannot be associated with any particular implementation (physical or not) of a computation. It is related to an infinity of computations, structured by the self (or possible self-reference). Nevertheless, you talk about swapping your brain for a suitably designed computer and consciousness surviving teleportation and pauses/restarts of the computer. As a starting point, these ideas assume the physical supervenience thesis. -- 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.
Re: Bruno List continued
On Oct 2, 9:28 am, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: So you do believe that ion channels will open without an observable cause, since thoughts are not an observable cause. A neuroscientist would see neurons firing apparently for no reason, violating physical laws. Thoughts are observable to the thinker. No physical laws are violated. When a person thinks of gambling, the associated neurons fire for that reason. The firings have a proximate cause - changes in voltage or polarity, etc, but those phenomena also are activated because the person who they are part of thinks of gambling. Both the thought and the mechanism are part of the same thing, a thing which has it's only existence as the dualistic relation between the two. If you stimulate the amygdala in a gambler directly with electromagnetically charged instruments, then they will likely be reminded of the feeling of gambling. If you stimulate the area in someone who has never gambled, the would be reminded instead of the feeling of jumping across a creek or lying to their teacher or something. It is bi-directional. I don't understand why that would be such a difficult concept to consider. I can put a magnet onto the screen of a CRT and cause it to change colors, or rub my eyes with my hands to see colors and patterns but that doesn't mean that they have to be manually manipulated that way to function. Craig -- 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: David Eagleman on CHOICE
On 10/2/2011 7:13 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On Sun, Oct 2, 2011 at 3:01 AM, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net wrote: It's a strange, almost paradoxical result but I think observer moments can be sub-conscious. If we say the minimum duration of a conscious moment is 100ms then 99ms and the remaining 1ms of this can occur at different times, perhaps billions of years of real time apart, perhaps simultaneously or in the reverse order. You would have the experience provided only that the full 100ms even if broken up into infinitesimal intervals occurs somewhere, sometime. That sounds like a temporal homunculus. :-) Note that on a nanosecond scale there is no state of the brain. Relativity applies to brains too and so the time order of events on opposite sides of your head only defined to within about a nanosecond. The brain is limited for technical reasons, relativity being the least of them. Sure. Action potentials are only few hundred meters/sec. It isn't possible to stop it for a microsecond and restart it at exactly the same state. With a computer you can do this although you are limited to discrete digital states: you can't save the state as logic circuits are transitioning from 1 to 0. But you can do it, and in fact it's implicit in a Turing machine, i.e. an abstract computation. So I'm wondering what consequences this has for Bruno's idea that you are a bundle of computations that are passing through your current state? The computational states are sharp, discrete things. The brains states are fuzzy distributed things. But this doesn't change the argument that, to the extent that the physics allows it, the machine states may be arbitrarily divided. It then becomes a matter of definition whether we say the conscious states can also be arbitrarily divided. If stream of consciousness A-B-C supervenes on machine state a-b-c where A-B, B-C, A-B-C, but not A, B or C alone are of sufficient duration to count as consciousness should we say the observer moments are A-B, B-C and A-B-C, or should we say that the observer moments are A, B, C? I think it's simpler to say that the atomic observer moments are A, B, C even though individually they lack content. I think we've discussed this before. It you define them as A, B, C then the lack of content means they don't have inherent order; where as AB, BC, CD,... do have inherent order because they overlap. I don't think this affects the argument except to note that OMs are not the same as computational states. 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: Bruno List continued
On 10/2/2011 10:14 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Oct 2, 9:28 am, Stathis Papaioannoustath...@gmail.com wrote: So you do believe that ion channels will open without an observable cause, since thoughts are not an observable cause. A neuroscientist would see neurons firing apparently for no reason, violating physical laws. Thoughts are observable to the thinker. No physical laws are violated. When a person thinks of gambling, the associated neurons fire for that reason. The firings have a proximate cause - changes in voltage or polarity, etc, but those phenomena also are activated because the person who they are part of thinks of gambling. Both the thought and the mechanism are part of the same thing, a thing which has it's only existence as the dualistic relation between the two. If they are part of the same thing, then it is presumptuous to say one causes the other. One might at well say the neurons firing caused the thought of gambling - and in fact that is what Stathis is saying and for the very good reason that a little electrical stimulation, that has no thought or sensorimotive correlate, can cause both neurons firing AND their correlated thoughts. But thoughts cannot cause the electrical stimulator to fire. So it is *not* bidirectional. Brent If you stimulate the amygdala in a gambler directly with electromagnetically charged instruments, then they will likely be reminded of the feeling of gambling. If you stimulate the area in someone who has never gambled, the would be reminded instead of the feeling of jumping across a creek or lying to their teacher or something. It is bi-directional. I don't understand why that would be such a difficult concept to consider. I can put a magnet onto the screen of a CRT and cause it to change colors, or rub my eyes with my hands to see colors and patterns but that doesn't mean that they have to be manually manipulated that way to function. Craig -- 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: Bruno List continued
On Oct 2, 7:00 pm, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 10/2/2011 10:14 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Oct 2, 9:28 am, Stathis Papaioannoustath...@gmail.com wrote: So you do believe that ion channels will open without an observable cause, since thoughts are not an observable cause. A neuroscientist would see neurons firing apparently for no reason, violating physical laws. Thoughts are observable to the thinker. No physical laws are violated. When a person thinks of gambling, the associated neurons fire for that reason. The firings have a proximate cause - changes in voltage or polarity, etc, but those phenomena also are activated because the person who they are part of thinks of gambling. Both the thought and the mechanism are part of the same thing, a thing which has it's only existence as the dualistic relation between the two. If they are part of the same thing, then it is presumptuous to say one causes the other. One might at well say the neurons firing caused the thought of gambling - and in fact that is what Stathis is saying and for the very good reason that a little electrical stimulation, that has no thought or sensorimotive correlate, can cause both neurons firing AND their correlated thoughts. But thoughts cannot cause the electrical stimulator to fire. So it is *not* bidirectional. What do you mean? Thoughts *do* cause an electrical detector to fire. That's what an MRI shows. You could use any kind of electrical probe or sensor instead as long as it is sufficiently sensitive to detect the ordinary firing of a neuron. That's how it's possible to have thought-driven computers. http://www.pcworld.com/article/129889/scientists_show_thoughtcontrolled_computer_at_cebit.html Craig -- 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: BOI Chapter 8 vs Schmidhuber
On Sun, Oct 02, 2011 at 01:42:19PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: Hi Russell, On 02 Oct 2011, at 11:37, Russell Standish wrote: In David Deutsch's Beginning of Infinity chapter 8, he criticises Schmidhuber's Great Programmer idea by saying that it is giving up on explanation in science, Actually I did address this point on the FOR list years ago. Somehow, I share David's critics on Schmidhuber's idea of a great programmer when seen as an *explanation* (of everything). My (older, btw) publications makes this point clear. The Universal Dovetailer (which can be seen as an effective and precise version of the great programmer, and which is a tiny part of elementary arithmetical truth) makes it possible to *formulate* (not solve!) the mind body problem mathematically, but Schmidhuber use it as an explanation gap. He missed the fact that if we are machine we cannot know in which computations we are and we have to recover the physical laws, not from one computation but from an internal (self-referential) statistics on infinities of computations, and that statistics has to be recovered entirely from the self-reference ability of machine. Sure - Schmidhuber, with his speed prior, assumed that the specific implementation of the universal reference machine has physical consequences, but we, thanks to your work, know better. David's criticism was quite specific - because the specific implementation of the UTM doesn't have any physical consequences, therefore one is somehow giving up on obtaining the ulimate explanation. My response was that surely the question becomes uninteresting (David's terminology) - or even meaningless (as you state below). ... snip ... But this was an answer to David's remark that the great programmers explains too much, and so don't explain anything. I'm aware of this criticism, which applies to ensemble theories in general. IMHO, the only way to address that critique is with some sort of observer-relative anthropic selection - but that is a whole other topic! as the hardware on which the Great Program runs is unknowable. Of course the contrary is true. If we are machine, we know (up to some recursive equivalence) what runs us, and where the possible hardware come from. Any first order specification of any universal machine or theory will do the job. I use elementary arithmetic because we are all familiar with it. The laws of physics cannot depend on that choice. We're actually saying the same thing here. David, why do you say that? Surely, the question of what hardware is implementing the Great Simulators simply becomes uninteresting, much like the medieval arguments about the number of angels dancing on the head of a pin. It is unknowable, and it doesn't matter, as any universal machine will do. I disagree with this. The notion of primitive hardware is precisely shown to be meaningless. The laws of physics are shown to be machine independent. Eventually the initial universal system plays the role of a coordinate system, and the laws of physics does not depend on it. Isn't this stating the above in a stronger form? Meaningless, rather than unknowable? -- 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.
Re: [foar] BOI Chapter 8 vs Schmidhuber
You could simply point to Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem which kind of mandates that not everything in a universe is explicable from *within* that universe. This is not to give up on explanation. This *is* the explanation. It is neither good nor bad as an explanation - but it does require an 'act of faith'. As Bruno Marchal says, there are realities we can never prove, merely bet on. These things tend to end up being classified as 'religion' but, bless me, that's the value of religion! It allows us to have a point of view on things we can never prove in this life. Doesn't have to be organised, public religion - PERSONAL religion is the only authentic religion. Religion is simply what you happen to *believe*. David clearly adheres to a religion of Optimism as he calls it. That's fine; I admire this gigantic optimism of his and Popper's, it's very inspiring and will yet give birth to a great many new insights and discoveries. Just occasionally, one's personal religion does something positive for the world like that. Organised religion isn't really religion after all - it's a club with rules and creeds and punishments if you fall foul of the regulations. That's politics. Yoga is the science of the East and Science is the Yoga of the West - Someone or Other. Kim Jones On 02/10/2011, at 8:37 PM, Russell Standish wrote: In David Deutsch's Beginning of Infinity chapter 8, he criticises Schmidhuber's Great Programmer idea by saying that it is giving up on explanation in science, as the hardware on which the Great Program runs is unknowable. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Fabric of Alternate Reality group. To post to this group, send email to f...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to foar+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/foar?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.
