Re: Theology or not theology (Re: COMP theology)
On 22 Mar 2012, at 21:31, John Clark wrote: On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: This illustrates the problem I have with your ideas, it's not your mathematics it's the assumption you make right at the start which is the foundation for everything else. Which assumption? Your assumption that if a identical copy of you is made everything may seen identical to a third party but to itself, to the copy and the original, they would somehow have different viewpoints even if everything they saw was the same and they remained identical. I don't make that assumption. I think that is just plain wrong. Like Brent told you, I agree with you. Lately you seem to be equivocating somewhat on this point and everybody has a right to change their mind, but if you do then you'll have to rewrite your proof from page 1 because that assumption was important. I never made that assumption. It is in your imagination. You really look like you want to see something invalid in the reasoning, and then you imagine assertion which does not exist (or show me where). Those admit precise and simple definition, related to the duplication and multiplication thought experience. First person = content of a diary bring in the duplication devices. OK, but the original and the copy will both write in their diaries I walked into the duplicating chamber, the machine was turned on and a copy of me appeared right in front of me face to face, You are still avoiding the WM duplication. You cannot invalidate an argument by changing the premise. the copy and the original agree on what occurred, so according to you the first person perspective, the one that both you and I believe is most important, is identical; so there is only one perspective, one consciousness. Sure. This does not invalidate the point I am making. It does not address the point at all. Third person = content of a diary of an external observers. OK, but the third person observer will write in his diary the original walked into the duplicating chamber, the machine was turned on and a copy of him appeared right in front of him face to face, the third person agrees on what happened with the first person, he agrees with both the copy and the original. Please come back to the reasoning. First person plural = content of the diaries of a collection of person duplicated together. I don't see the point of this one because according to you (and me too) if the viewpoint is identical then the consciousness of all of them is identical, so the word plural serves no purpose and just creates confusion. Come back to the reasoning. but you can't give a scrap of evidence that such differences actually exist, Just look at the content of the diaries. I did, if they say the same thing then their consciousness is identical from their viewpoint and my viewpoint and your viewpoint and the Easter Bunny's viewpoint and ANY viewpoint; and if the diaries are different then they are different people from ANY viewpoint. Come back to the reasoning. In the thought experiment I am using, the content of the diaries are equal up to some pages, and then they diverge. The experiencer tries to predict which branch they will live. It contains statements like I predict that I will feel to be in W or in M, I am in M, so I win, pr I predict that I will see Flying circus, but I see nothing recognizable, so I fail, etc. If the purpose of all this predict stuff is to find a clear continuous path that establishes what is meant by I You come back again on this !?! No, the point is not to establish what is meant by I. David, Quentin and others (including myself) have already explain this to you. You continue to avoid the points. Follow the reasoning and you will see the purpose. then it's like pushing on a string, you're doing it backwards, you've got to do it from the present to the past not from the present to the future. Looking back the Washington man remembers being the Helsinki man so they both are part of the same I, and the Moscow man remembers being the Helsinki man so they both are part of the same I, but the Moscow man does not remember being the Washington man so they are not part of the same I. Which is part of the explanation of the first person indeterminacy. Good. If the guy annihilated die, then he would say that P(M) = P(W) = 1/2, and there would be no 1-indeterminacy. Of course here I made a typo mistake (which you missed). Read P(W) = P(M) = 0, in case the guy dies. But as we both agree on comp, the guy does not die in that process. First of all you seem to make a distinction between dying and being annihilated that I do not understand, and second, if either of those things had happened to you you wouldn't be making any predictions, you wouldn't be saying anything at all. Like Brent said,
Re: Uncertainty
Stephen, - especially to the 2nd part of your reply - I do not speak about a 'certain' uncertainty (i.e. 'quantum') I speak about the concept: uncertainty is inherent in whatever we think about, because in our 'model' of the knowable world there is only part of the total (see the historical additions and project such to the future) and we THINK about yesterday's knowable as all of them. Accordingly EVERYTHING is uncertain. Logic, too. Intercourse does not create babies: it gives a chance to a sperm and egg to find each other in a way to start a genome. You can do it in a test-tube. And - the babies are human beings, with (working?) complexity including mental aspects, (even in mentally impaired persons) which develops in the course of gestation - according to Princeton's Singer even later, after birth. So please, do not fall for the political haruspexs who cry 'murder' in case of an abortion, the murder is saved for killing persons, i.e. full complexities developed and evolved from the parasite-state (embryo - fetus) into a substantial HUMAN being. Now about identicity: If you look for it... there are similarities in many unexpected relations between off springs and ancestors, maybe not the total ones as e.g. a clone, but the identicity lives on in the genetic sequences. BTW: what do you mean by a mind - to deem it absolutely NEW? I agree with your rejecting 'randomness, or stochasticity' mainly on the basis of the above mentioned ignorance about the wholeness, but also on the basis that 'unatached' occurrences would make ANY ordered description futile. Russell replied to an earlier such remark of mine with the correction into (as I recall) conditional randomness. Which is not random in my view. John M On Thu, Mar 22, 2012 at 5:09 PM, Stephen P. King stephe...@charter.netwrote: On 3/22/2012 4:47 PM, meekerdb wrote: On 3/22/2012 1:31 PM, John Clark wrote: On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: This illustrates the problem I have with your ideas, it's not your mathematics it's the assumption you make right at the start which is the foundation for everything else. Which assumption? Your assumption that if a identical copy of you is made everything may seen identical to a third party but to itself, to the copy and the original, they would somehow have different viewpoints even if everything they saw was the same and they remained identical. I think that is just plain wrong. Lately you seem to be equivocating somewhat on this point and everybody has a right to change their mind, but if you do then you'll have to rewrite your proof from page 1 because that assumption was important. Those admit precise and simple definition, related to the duplication and multiplication thought experience. First person = content of a diary bring in the duplication devices. OK, but the original and the copy will both write in their diaries I walked into the duplicating chamber, the machine was turned on and a copy of me appeared right in front of me face to face, the copy and the original agree on what occurred, so according to you the first person perspective, the one that both you and I believe is most important, is identical; so there is only one perspective, one consciousness. I don't think Bruno disagreed with this. I know I didn't. The one consciousness only becomes two when there is something different - in the perception of the outside (Washington vs Moscow) or some random internal change. Your thought experiment shows that comp implies that persons bodies can be duplicated without duplicating their consciousness (at least for a moment or two). But as I said I don't see that this invalidates Bruno's argument which I take to be that quantum uncertainty can be modeled by uncertainty in personal identity. Hi Brent, Could you offer some sketch of how quantum uncertainty can be modeled by uncertainty in personal identity? The uncertainty of QM follows from the mathematical properties of canonical conjugates (roughly, there exists a Fourier transformation between them) and the general non-commutativity of observables (roughly, as they have complex number valued amplitudes). Quantum uncertainty is not just randomness or stochasticity, the evolution of QM systems is the template of a deterministic process. It is just that it is impossible to recover the information required to make a local prediction that makes it seem classically random (aka decoherence). I think that we are taking the branching tree analogy used by many to explain the many worlds interpretation way too literally here... We should disabuse ourselves of that concept. The uncertainty generated by the copy and paste operations of computation follows from the fissioning of the first person sense of self, so it is indeed generates a branching tree graph IFF we ignore cul-de-sacs and other delete operations, cycles and non-monotic relations. Additionally, we
Re: First person indeterminacy (Re: COMP theology)
Bruno: thanks for the considerate reply. Let me pick some of your sentences: *2^16 parallel universes needed to implement the quantum superposition** - used in Shor's quantum algorithm to find the prime factors of numbers*. I would not limit the numbers and fix the quality of future development. Nor do I take it for granted that today's logic in math (arithmetics) will hold. *I have few doubts that quantum computers will appear, but I am quite uncertain if it is for this century of for the next millennium *. Ihave more faith in 'the new': maybe that will be something better than today's uncertainty-riding quantum idea. John M On Thu, Mar 15, 2012 at 1:41 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 14 Mar 2012, at 21:41, John Mikes wrote: Brent and Bruno: you both have statements in this endless discussion about processing ideas of quantum computers. I would be happy to read about ONE that works, not a s a potentiality, but as a real tool, the function of which is understood and APPLIED. (Here, on Earth). It is an *immense* technical challenge. Up to now, a quantum circuit has only succeeded in showing that 15 is equal to 3*5, which might seems ridiculous for todays applied computing domains, but which is still an extraordinary technical prowess as it involves handling of the 2^16 parallel universes needed to implement the quantum superposition used in Shor's quantum algorithm to find the prime factors of numbers. The amazing thing is that all the arguments of unfeasibility of quantum computers have been overcome by quantum software, like the quantum error corrections, and the topological fault tolerant quantum machinery. I have few doubts that quantum computers will appear, but I am quite uncertain if it is for this century of for the next millennium. But bigger quantum circuits will emerge this century, and quantum cryptographic technic might already exist, but that's a military secret, and a banker secret :). There is also some prospect to discover quantum machinery operating in nature. I read some times ago, that a super-heavy object has been discovered which structure seemed to have to be unstable for much physicists and some have elaborated models in which quarks are exploiting a quantum-computational game to attain stability. And then, to make happy Stephen, the not very plausible yet not entirely excluded despite what Tegmark argues possibility that life exploits quantum algorithm. See for example the two following papers referred to in my today's mail: 1) Clark, K.B. (2010). Bose-Einstein condensates form in heuristics learned by ciliates deciding to signal 'social' commitments. BioSystems, 99(3), 167-178. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19883726 2) Clark, K.B. (2010). Arrhenius-kinetics evidence for quantum tunneling in microbial social decision rates. Communicative Integtrative Biology, 3(6), 540-544. http://www.landesbioscience.com/journals/cib/article/12842 I am skeptical to be franc. Not too much time to dig on this for now. The second is freely available. if someone want to comment on it, please do. Bruno On Mon, Mar 12, 2012 at 10:51 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 3/12/2012 7:16 PM, Stephen P. King wrote: On 3/12/2012 10:00 PM, meekerdb wrote: On 3/11/2012 11:41 PM, Stephen P. King wrote: An Evil Wizard could pop into my vicinity and banish me to the Nether plane! A magical act, if real and just part of a story, is an event that violates some conservation law. I don't see what else would constitute magic... My point is that Harry Potterisms would introduce cul-de-sacs that would totally screw up the statistics and measures, so they have to be banished. Because otherwise things would be screwed up? Chain-wise consistency and concurrency rules would prevent these pathologies, but to get them we have to consider multiple and disjoint observers and not just shared 1p as such implicitly assume an absolute frame of reference. Basically we need both conservation laws and general covariance. Do we obtain that naturally from COMP? That's an open question. You seem to be begging the question: We need regularity, otherwise things wouldn't be regular. No, you are dodging the real question: How is the measure defined? The obvious way is that all non-self-contradictory events are equally likely. But that's hypothesized, not defined. I'm not sure why you are asking how it's defined. The usual definition is an assignment of a number in [0,1] to every member of a Borel set such that they satisfies Kolmogorov's axioms. If it is imposed by fiat, say so and defend the claim. Why is it so hard to get you to consider multiple observers and consider the question as to how exactly do they interact? Al of the discussion that I have seen so far considers a single observer and abstractions about other people. The most I am getting is the word
Determinism in the case of bifurcations and symmetry breaking
In physics there are bifurcations and symmetry breaking. What happens then if I solve some transient problem for a system where a bifurcation or symmetry breaking happens. How the choice will be made? Evgenii -- 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: Theology or not theology (Re: COMP theology)
On Mar 23, 1:08 am, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 3/22/2012 9:49 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Mar 22, 8:28 pm, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 3/22/2012 4:24 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Mar 22, 6:09 pm, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 3/22/2012 2:53 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Mar 22, 4:58 pm, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net wrote: Then you agree with me: AI cannot make sense out of its world without converting or sampling it digitally. That which it fails to digitize is lost. Sure. What you don't see you don't see - which is almost all of the EM spectrum. Of course Bruno's theory is that it's all digital, but we're within the digits and cannot capture more than a measure zero. Yes, human beings can't detect everything either, but my point was that we know for certain that everything in an AI's world has to be modeled digitally, therefore a digital brain creates a digital world within it. I'm not sure that's so. All of our physical models of the world are based on continua. Continua can be described and reasoned about by a digital system and continuous models can be computed to arbitrarily high precision (which is what we actually do in science and engineering). That's because the world that they are modeling is actually not digital, Unsupported assertion. If the world is digital already, then why would you need to model it? Does a digital computer need a continua to open a digital file? but the model itself still is. No. So far as I know, no one has come up with a digital model of physics that isn't empirically falsified - and it isn't for want of trying. All the models are continuous and based on real numbers. It is just that all the calculations and measurements are digital, i.e. based on integers. That's what I'm saying. A model = calculations and measurements. That's what I mean by the modelling itself. If I write a book about physics, the book can be written in English but not speculating that physics itself is an English phenomenon. If there is a machine intelligence in there, we know that it must live in the world that we give it to sample digitally, whether or not it can produce output which we interpret non-digitally. It's back to symbol grounding again. What difference does it make to symbolic grounding whether the symbol refers to a continuum or an integer field? I never said that those were the two choices, you are the one who introduced continuity. Both analog and digital are methods of abstracting. I'm not talking about one kind of model versus another, I'm talking about concrete presentation versus abstract representation. My position is that our experience in the world is no model at all (although modeling is certainly part of it). Our experience is not a total experience of THE universe, but it is a total experience of OUR world (perceptual inertial framework), which includes the understanding that there is a difference and the tools to actually extend our world further into rest of the universe. The machine's world is not similarly open to expansion. It does not have the tools to extend its sense. You could connect a camera to Deep Blue through a printer port in it would never in a trillion years figure out how to use it. I have a digital CD playing on a digital receiver. The acoustic drivers are digital too. The music is not digital. Another unsupported assertion. How would you know? If music were digital you wouldn't need to hear it. You could look at a picture of the data and get the same experience. Some people claimed that digital audio sounded different - but double blind tests showed they were mistaken. That may be true, and that's not what I was talking about, but also I don't think that any kind of objective test like that prove that anyone is 'mistaken' about how something feels. It may be that doing a double blind test creates a placebo effect when subjectivity is being tested. And it might be you're blowing smoke because you don't like the facts. Possible, but it's also because in my understanding, subjectivity works in exactly that way. Just as the double slit test does unexpected things to light, we cannot assume that our subtle awareness can be manipulated on demand. That assumption itself is a cognitive bias which may very well contaminate the data. It seems to me that digital audio is colder, clearer, with more brittle and shallow percussion and more sibilance than analog. It's hard to say because I'm not comparing apples to apples, but I'm not sure that the experiment you are talking about did either. I don't know what assumptions they made. Also why does everyone seem to make the same exact mistake about how digital sounds to them? Why no people who insist that digital is more expressive and poetic? The CD, the receiver,
Re: Uncertainty
On 3/23/2012 11:47 AM, John Mikes wrote: Stephen, - especially to the 2nd part of your reply - I do not speak about a 'certain' uncertainty (i.e. 'quantum') I speak about the concept: uncertainty is inherent in whatever we think about, because in our 'model' of the knowable world there is only part of the total (see the historical additions and project such to the future) and we THINK about yesterday's knowable as all of them. Accordingly EVERYTHING is uncertain. Logic, too. Intercourse does not create babies: it gives a chance to a sperm and egg to find each other in a way to start a genome. You can do it in a test-tube. And - the babies are human beings, with (working?) complexity including mental aspects, (even in mentally impaired persons) which develops in the course of gestation - according to Princeton's Singer even later, after birth. So please, do not fall for the political haruspexs who cry 'murder' in case of an abortion, the murder is saved for killing persons, i.e. full complexities developed and evolved from the parasite-state (embryo - fetus) into a substantial HUMAN being. Now about identicity: If you look for it... there are similarities in many unexpected relations between off springs and ancestors, maybe not the total ones as e.g. a clone, but the identicity lives on in the genetic sequences. BTW: what do you mean by a mind - to deem it absolutely NEW? I agree with your rejecting 'randomness, or stochasticity' mainly on the basis of the above mentioned ignorance about the wholeness, but also on the basis that 'unatached' occurrences would make ANY ordered description futile. Russell replied to an earlier such remark of mine with the correction into (as I recall) conditional randomness. Which is not random in my view. John M Dear John, As to uncertainty, it seems to be a quisicrystal-coated beastie for there are far to many models of it and probabilities in general. I long for the day when a bright young mind figures of the path to unify the best of these models and gives us a clear principle with which to reject the nonsensical ones. The one that I like is Shun'ichi Amari http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shun%27ichi_Amari's information geometry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Geometry idea merely because it appeals to my visual type thinking. Fear not for I was only considering the unassisted version of procreation as a default that is independent of the technologies of the time and place... As I see it personhood is a function and not a thing so I have a well reasoned (IMHO) aversion to the caterwaulings of those that would merely appeal to emotion for as a justification of a claim. Emotional revulsion is never proof to the contrary or impossibility. Onward! Stephen On Thu, Mar 22, 2012 at 5:09 PM, Stephen P. King stephe...@charter.net mailto:stephe...@charter.net wrote: On 3/22/2012 4:47 PM, meekerdb wrote: On 3/22/2012 1:31 PM, John Clark wrote: On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be mailto:marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: This illustrates the problem I have with your ideas, it's not your mathematics it's the assumption you make right at the start which is the foundation for everything else. Which assumption? Your assumption that if a identical copy of you is made everything may seen identical to a third party but to itself, to the copy and the original, they would somehow have different viewpoints even if everything they saw was the same and they remained identical. I think that is just plain wrong. Lately you seem to be equivocating somewhat on this point and everybody has a right to change their mind, but if you do then you'll have to rewrite your proof from page 1 because that assumption was important. Those admit precise and simple definition, related to the duplication and multiplication thought experience. First person = content of a diary bring in the duplication devices. OK, but the original and the copy will both write in their diaries I walked into the duplicating chamber, the machine was turned on and a copy of me appeared right in front of me face to face, the copy and the original agree on what occurred, so according to you the first person perspective, the one that both you and I believe is most important, is identical; so there is only one perspective, one consciousness. I don't think Bruno disagreed with this. I know I didn't. The one consciousness only becomes two when there is something different - in the perception of the outside (Washington vs Moscow) or some random internal change. Your thought experiment shows that comp implies that persons bodies can be duplicated without duplicating their consciousness (at least for a moment or two). But as I said I don't see that this
Re: First person indeterminacy (Re: COMP theology)
On 3/23/2012 12:34 PM, John Mikes wrote: Bruno: thanks for the considerate reply. Let me pick some of your sentences: /2^16 parallel universes needed to implement the quantum superposition// - used in Shor's quantum algorithm to find the prime factors of numbers/. I would not limit the numbers and fix the quality of future development. Nor do I take it for granted that today's logic in math (arithmetics) will hold. Hi John, Did you note that nowhere was it mentioned in Bruno's comment that the 2^16 unverses had an upper limit of the time that it would take to perform the implementation! This is the escape clause for his claim. What is interesting about this multiple parallel universe idea is that it seems to me that we could make the time and qubit limit of any _one_ typical universe could be made arbitrarily small by putting a large quantum computer on a very fast star-ship and travelling at velocities that approach c. Since the Q-computer on the Enterprise would have an arbitrarily long time to implement its side of the Qubit's unitary evolution as some from an observer that is watchign the Enterprise on its long range scanners. The neat thing is that for Spock the computation would output its answer in no time at all IF and Only IF it was able to remain coupled to all those other parallel universes. This scenario, set on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, seems likely until you look into what acceleration does to quantum entanglement.it is well known that any acceleration spoils entanglement in an interesting way. I apologize for my wandering off topic but I strange idea occurred to me as I was reading your post... Onward! Stephen /I have few doubts that quantum computers will appear, but I am quite uncertain if it is for this century of for the next millennium/. Ihave more faith in 'the new': maybe that will be something better than today's uncertainty-riding quantum idea. John M On Thu, Mar 15, 2012 at 1:41 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be mailto:marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 14 Mar 2012, at 21:41, John Mikes wrote: Brent and Bruno: you both have statements in this endless discussion about processing ideas of quantum computers. I would be happy to read about ONE that works, not a s a potentiality, but as a real tool, the function of which is understood and APPLIED. (Here, on Earth). It is an *immense* technical challenge. Up to now, a quantum circuit has only succeeded in showing that 15 is equal to 3*5, which might seems ridiculous for todays applied computing domains, but which is still an extraordinary technical prowess as it involves handling of the 2^16 parallel universes needed to implement the quantum superposition used in Shor's quantum algorithm to find the prime factors of numbers. The amazing thing is that all the arguments of unfeasibility of quantum computers have been overcome by quantum software, like the quantum error corrections, and the topological fault tolerant quantum machinery. I have few doubts that quantum computers will appear, but I am quite uncertain if it is for this century of for the next millennium. But bigger quantum circuits will emerge this century, and quantum cryptographic technic might already exist, but that's a military secret, and a banker secret :). There is also some prospect to discover quantum machinery operating in nature. I read some times ago, that a super-heavy object has been discovered which structure seemed to have to be unstable for much physicists and some have elaborated models in which quarks are exploiting a quantum-computational game to attain stability. And then, to make happy Stephen, the not very plausible yet not entirely excluded despite what Tegmark argues possibility that life exploits quantum algorithm. See for example the two following papers referred to in my today's mail: 1) Clark, K.B. (2010). Bose-Einstein condensates form in heuristics learned by ciliates deciding to signal 'social' commitments. BioSystems, 99(3), 167-178. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19883726 2) Clark, K.B. (2010). Arrhenius-kinetics evidence for quantum tunneling in microbial social decision rates. Communicative Integtrative Biology, 3(6), 540-544. http://www.landesbioscience.com/journals/cib/article/12842 I am skeptical to be franc. Not too much time to dig on this for now. The second is freely available. if someone want to comment on it, please do. Bruno On Mon, Mar 12, 2012 at 10:51 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 3/12/2012 7:16 PM, Stephen P. King wrote: On 3/12/2012 10:00 PM, meekerdb wrote: On 3/11/2012 11:41 PM, Stephen P. King wrote: An Evil Wizard could pop into my vicinity and banish
Re: Determinism in the case of bifurcations and symmetry breaking
On 3/23/2012 3:08 PM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: In physics there are bifurcations and symmetry breaking. What happens then if I solve some transient problem for a system where a bifurcation or symmetry breaking happens. How the choice will be made? Evgenii Hi! We would use statistics to model such a scenario or, if able to access infinite computational power, we would compute faithful simulations of the solutions and see which best matches the environmental requirements of the universes from which those bifurcations or any other form of symmetry breaking occurs. Given infinite computational powers there is no such thing as randomness in a 3-p sense. This is known as omniscience. We have seen it before... One thing that most models of statistic fail to sample is the environment in which a stochastic event occurs, thus they integrate over them and smears out the very facts that might otherwise inform us of exactly how and why a choice was made. Onward! -- 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: Theology or not theology (Re: COMP theology)
From a 3rd POV, there is no indeterminacy, we know there will be two you after the duplication. From your 1st POV, even if you know it, you'll (both you) still feel singular, and the you who was asked before the experience what he expect to feel after the duplication was unable to predict which one of the WM guy it will be, yet each one is only one. If MWI is true, that happens every time the you/environment differentiates. So while you insist it is gibberish to ask the guy before the experience what he will feel, then in that condition every time you ask a question about a future event about yourself, it is gibberish. You keep asking who is this you... it is the usual you, as the one you use in your everyday gibberish question about yourself if MWI is true. (youhou \o/) Quentin 2012/3/23 John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com On Fri, Mar 23, 2012 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: You are still avoiding the WM duplication. There is no spliting in Many Worlds unless something is different, if 2 universes are identical then they have merged and there is now only one universe. the copy and the original agree on what occurred, so according to you the first person perspective, the one that both you and I believe is most important, is identical; so there is only one perspective, one consciousness. Sure. This does not invalidate the point I am making. It does not address the point at all. Then what the hell IS the point you are making? Please come back to the reasoning. [...] Come back to the reasoning. [...] Come back to the reasoning. Is that the best retort you could come up with? Show me some reasoning and I'll come back to it. In the thought experiment I am using, the content of the diaries are equal up to some pages, and then they diverge. And when the diaries diverge the person will too and become 2, both are the original person and neither is each other. The experiencer tries to predict which branch they will live. If the experiencer believes that when something is duplicated it remains singular then any prediction made regarding it will be gibberish. You continue to avoid the points. It's rather easy to avoid your points as you have NOT mentioned a single one, you just tell me to follow these wonderful but phantom points. Follow the reasoning and you will see the purpose. Dear god we're back to that again! First of all you seem to make a distinction between dying and being annihilated that I do not understand, and second, if either of those things had happened to you you wouldn't be making any predictions, you wouldn't be saying anything at all. Like Brent said, the difference is between annihilation and no reconstitution (= dying), and annihilation + reconstitution (= teleportation, or duplication, etc.). The fact of the matter is that the Bruno Marchal of noon yesterday has not been duplicated or teleported or reconstituted, the Bruno Marchal of right now remembers being him but he is different and has memories that other version did not have; so if you insist that the Helsinki man is dead then to be consistent you must say that Bruno Marchal of noon yesterday is dead, and if you insist that the Helsinki man has been annihilated then to be consistent you must say that Bruno Marchal of noon yesterday has been annihilated. Are you certain you really want to do this? Please, answer my post of the 19 mars, I don't know what 19 mars is and I thought I'd responded to all your posts but if I missed one where you made everything clear (I'm not holding my breath) then please resend it. Things are rather simple. Yes, but not simple in a good way. You pretend that there is no 1-indeterminacy. I insist that indeterminacy exists in every one of the many thought experiments proposed by members of this list during the last month, but you pretend to have discovered a brand new form of it never known before. I see no evidence you have done anything of the sort. Then you have to explain to us how you predict the movie that you will remember having seen when the movie-multiplication experience is completed. Bruno Marchal has asked this many times but despite many requests for clarification of who you is such a explanation, that would establish a new sort indeterminacy, has not been received. and you seem to accept that 1-indeterminacy in some post, and then just dismiss it as trivial. I accept 1-indeterminacy because as described by you it is identical to the indeterminacy in physics and mathematics that we've known about for a very long time, and I dismiss it as trivial for exactly the same reason. I want something new. Are you under influence? Yes, of logic. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this
Re: Theology or not theology (Re: COMP theology)
On 3/23/2012 3:44 PM, Joseph Knight wrote: On Thu, Mar 22, 2012 at 6:40 AM, Stephen P. King stephe...@charter.net mailto:stephe...@charter.net wrote: On 3/21/2012 8:16 PM, Joseph Knight wrote: On Tue, Mar 20, 2012 at 10:25 AM, Stephen P. King stephe...@charter.net mailto:stephe...@charter.net wrote: Dear Joseph, How do numbers implement that necessary capacity to define each other and themselves? What kind of relational structure is necessary? From what I can tell, it looks like a net of Indra where every jewel, here a number, reflects all others. This is a non-well founded structure. You'll have to be more explicit than this if I am to make any sense of it. Dear Joseph, I first must say that I appreciate very much this exchange as it forces me to better refine my wordings and explanations. In the passage above I was trying to get at something that I see in the implied structure of numbers, given Bruno's amazing ideas. Remember, I think in pictures, so the relations between numbers - with their Goedelizations and Loeb references - is to me a network where any one entity - here an integer - is defined by and related to all others. It looks like the structure of an infinite Webster Dictionary! What I also see is that the links are not of a constant length - some connections between numbers are tiny - like the link between prime pairs - while others are infinitely long. What I am trying to point out is that this structure, is very much_unlike_ the structure that we think of when we just consider the number line where such a line is made up only of integers - 0, 1, 2, 3, ... This is all nice, but I can't understand it unless you give make this more formal/precise. Do you only think in words? I'm just curious... I will try harder to sketch the idea in words for you. Think of how Goedelizations and Goedel numbers work as a visual picture, perhaps as a poitrait by Matisse or Dali. We have a string of numbers that represents another set of numbers *and* some arithmetic operation on those numbers. Any such Goedel number is thus the equivalent to a handle on the space of numbers (which is, by definition, a one dimensional manifold http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curve#Topology, also see 1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evenly_spaced_integer_topology and 2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_sets#Topological_spaces), therefore if it is possible to have an infinity of goedel numbers in the integers then the resulting manifold would an infinity of handles (disjoint manifolds) on it. How many unique paths would exist on such a manifold? What is the average length of a path? (Please recall the fact that a handle can have any size iff it is simply connected and analytic) There is no such an average for the only faithful sample of the set of possible lengths of paths is the set itself (infinite sets are isomorphic to any of their proper subsets). Remember that we can also have goedel numbers operating on (mapping into) dovetailed strings of goedel numbers and goedel numbers can have arbitrarily long number string lengths.. This makes the dimension of this manifold to be infinite because of the disjointness of the handles that are induced by the Goedelizing, thus making it (modulo the requirements of spaces to exist) an infinite space. It is only if the requirements of a space http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_%28mathematics%29 not being met that this would not occur. Given that a geodelization introduces arithmetic into the set of numbers then is automatically qualifies a goedelized number line to be the dual of a space (via the Stone representation theorem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_representation_theorem). QED. The visual mode and the symbol mode of languages seem to have a strange conjugacy Numbers as Bruno is considering them, I contend, has a structure that mathematicians denote as non-well founded in the sense that there is no basic building block out of which this structure is constructed unless we force it into a very tight straight jacket. One example of just a constraint occurs when we think of numbers as von Neumann numerals http://bmanolov.free.fr/von-neumann-integer.php or something like: s, s(), s(()), s((())), ... - where s is the null set which we can define in terms of Spencer-Brown's laws of form as the Double Cross (see http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/ff/Laws_of_Form_-_double_cross.gif), my point being that we only obtain a 'well-founded' version when we impose a constraint of the natural' structure. Well, of course. To talk about well-foundedness you need a class and a relation, not just a class. It doesn't make sense to say numbers are non-wellfounded. They are non-well founded if they are
Re: Fwd: Theology or not theology (Re: COMP theology)
On 3/23/2012 6:47 PM, Joseph Knight wrote: -- Forwarded message -- From: *Joseph Knight* joseph.9...@gmail.com mailto:joseph.9...@gmail.com Date: Fri, Mar 23, 2012 at 5:45 PM Subject: Re: Theology or not theology (Re: COMP theology) To: Joseph Knight joseph.9...@gmail.com mailto:joseph.9...@gmail.com Sorry Stephen, I had not finished my reply to your message when I accidently hit Send (and then got swept away to do other things). Here's the rest of my response. On Mar 23, 2012, at 2:44 PM, Joseph Knight joseph.9...@gmail.com mailto:joseph.9...@gmail.com wrote: A pre-ordained harmony is, by definition, a global regime. I am quite happy with the fact that you point out here, that arithmetical truth is independent of a particular instantiation. I am arguing against independence _of all instantiations_, I know. But I think that the fact that arithmetical truth is independent of _particular instantiations_ already implies that the truth 1+1=2, say, exists independently of _all instantiations_ (here instantiation means physical instantiation, as I'm sure you mean as well.) In other words, it exists Platonically. OK, but it seems to me that making this jump from independent of any particular to independent of all particulars is a leap too far as it is, as the religious would say, an act of blind faith. I think the opposite is true: it's a bizarre and unjustified belief to think that there is nothing more than particulars. Dear Joseph, Let us reason a bit about this belief. I think that it is very much justified simply because if one cannot name an object then statements about its truth or existence cannot be communicated. If a true statement about something cannot be communicated, is it really a truth? I assume, perhaps wrongly, that if an object can be named than it is, by definition, a particular. Therefore, by Bpp - p, believing in a statement and that statement is true obliges me to only believe in particulars. Now your comment might be restated as it is bizarre and unjustified to think that existence (or there is nothing more) is nothing more than that which can be named. Would you still believe the statement? I am merely trying to be consistent with Bruno's thesis. snip You refer to Pratt's work. It seems like an interesting metaphor, but I don't see how it solves the problem. Could you be more explicit? The rational mechanics paper takes, IMO, some odd and unjustified leaps when it comes to his definitions. (An example: he says that the categories SET and SET^OP represent respectively the physical and the mental. How???) Did you read the entire paper? He does explain this on page 4 for example using functions and antifunctions... The key is to not think of bodies and minds as things but as processes. Pratt is considering a process dualism, not a substance dualism as he points out that the notion of substance is the fatal flaw of Descartes' program. I was originally looking at Leibniz' Monadology in my study of the mind body problem and found a similar solution, but such required a rehabilitation of Leibniz' pre-established harmony concept. (Basically, we would replace his idea of a global fiat regime of synchronizations between the monads with a ongoing process idea using concepts from quantum game theory. I have found similar ideas in the work of Lee Smolin, Stuart Kaufmann http://www.amazon.com/At-Home-Universe-Self-Organization-Complexity/dp/0195111303/ref=sr_1_1?s=booksie=UTF8qid=1332256837sr=1-1 and David Deutsch. But that is not sufficient to make it true. It is just a crazy idea at this point.) Yes, I understand what the constructs are, and I see how Pratt is making an interesting analogy, but I don't see the justification for his conclusions about the mind-body problem. But I haven't finished grokking the article. It took me close to 6 years of autodidactic study to make sense of Pratt's work and I must say that reading the other papers on theChu Guide http://chu.stanford.edu/guide.html helped a lot. I know that it is too much to ask for you to invest this much effort into an idea that is by my admission crazy but I invite you to anyway. Thanks for the link; I'll continue looking into it. Awesome! I hope that it is at least mildly entertaining. Onward! Stephen -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at
Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not
On Mar 14, 2:52 pm, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: Remind me again what is the argument for why anyone would mind having their liberty taken away? 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.
