Think of the brain as one airport among many, the mind(s) as national air traffic.
Think of the brain as one airport among many, the mind(s) as national air traffic. Dr. Roger Clough NIST (ret.) 3/19/2013 Coincidences are God's way of remaining anonymous. - Albert Einstein -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis
On 18.03.2013 21:02 John Mikes said the following: friends: don't put so much brain-grease into Free Will, please! It is the religious mambo-jumbo put into the mind of the poor-believers in ancient times to make them responsible for deeds the powerful disliked - and consequently: make them punishable. I believe that it is more complicated. I am currently under influence of Sartre's I and the Other Hell is other people. In order to live in this world, I have to communicate with others and then, I guess, there is no way as to take them seriously. What would be your solution to this relationship in your agnosticism? Evgenii -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Losing Control
On 19.03.2013 02:05 Stathis Papaioannou said the following: On Tue, Mar 19, 2013 at 11:39 AM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: If you say that free will is compatible with determinism then you are an compatibilist, otherwise you are an incompatibilist. Why do you try to make the discussion difficult by refusing to agree on terminology? Because the terminology is ideologically loaded and makes the truth impossible to address, obviously. It's like you are demanding that I agree that electricity is either the work of God or the Devil. We need to agree on terminology if we're going to have a discussion at all. Have aliens visited the Earth? We need to agree that an alien is a being born on another planet. It doesn't mean we agree on the facts, but we need to at least speak the same language! Recently I have listened to a nice talk about the search of extraterrestrial intelligence http://embryogenesisexplained.com/2013/03/the-starivore-hypothesis.html The author has mentioned two fallacies (slides 6 and 7) Artificiality-of-the-gaps and Naturality-of-the-gaps Yet, I was unable to understand his difference between artificial and natural. This is another example when there is a long discussion without an agreement on the terminology. Evgenii -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Mind is a quantum computer
On 18.03.2013 19:39 Bruno Marchal said the following: Hi Roger, On 18 Mar 2013, at 12:48, Roger Clough wrote: Since mind is an MQS or Multiple Quantum Superposition, it can process information at the rate of a quantum computer. Since you seem to talk philosophy, let me translate what you say for our friends the scientists. If we assume that mind is a Multiple Quantum Superposition, and if we assume that mind can exploit those quantum superpositions to process information, then the mind can process information at the rate of a quantum computer. That implication seems to me quite reasonable. Test of the theory according to which a human mind is a Multiple Quantum Superposition: 1) show me a human as good as a quantum computer for finding a needle in a haystack. Could you show me a quantum computer that can do that? I guess that it exist only in dreams of theoreticians (on in that part of Platonia that the humankind cannot access). 2) Factorize 13195212121 Rain Man? Evgenii -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis
On 18 Mar 2013, at 21:02, John Mikes wrote: friends: don't put so much brain-grease into Free Will, please! It is the religious mambo-jumbo put into the mind of the poor- believers in ancient times to make them responsible for deeds the powerful disliked - and consequently: make them punishable. Then it became a 'human treasure': We are FREE to Will! (like a god) and now even smart, reasonable people like us spend centuries to discuss it. A decision is right when it goes smoothly with the given and continuing circumstances it has to fit into (Think of the mis - construed 'evolution': if it does not 'fit' the mutant perishes). We may (or may not) know about the given circumstances and for sure may have only desultory and unsafe notions about the 'coming' ones. Our evaluation (call it computing?) results in a decision (conscious or not) for our activity - OR just way of thinking. Reasonably we try to abide by those circumstances we know of and formulate (consciously, or not) our decision according to our best belief (maybe this is contrary to our interest?). Hence emerges FREE WILL. I am not faithful enough to believe in MY free will and go to hell by force of this misconception. I may make mistakes. I am not deterministically forced to comply with all facets of the infinite complexity - known, or unknown. I can revolt. Meaning: I can knowingly choose the wrong decision. Is that free will? Maybe. That's a matter of definition. It is a good definition, close to Standish right to do something stupid, or the christian's ability to do knowingly the bad. The point is that this can make sense in a dtermined reality, and that it has nothing to do with randomness. Bruno Regards John Mikes On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 12:25 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 15 Mar 2013, at 18:22, meekerdb wrote: On 3/15/2013 7:16 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: You're walking down a road and spot a fork in the road far ahead. You know of advantages and disadvantages to both paths so you arn't sure if you will go right or left, you haven't finished the calculation yet, you haven't decided yet. Once you get to the fork you find yourself on the left path and retroactively conclude that you must have decided to go left. Yes. That's what I mean by free will. Roughly speaking. Except that I decided consciously before acting. If not, it is like randomness, or unconscious decision, and that is not free will. Free-will is when I want to go the left, and decide accordingly to go to the left, and nobody coerce me to not go to the left. It is not much different than will + freedom. That seems to me just and explanation of a certain *feeling* of a feeling of freedom and of will. If you find yourself on the left path without having consciously thought I'll take the left. then you miss the feeling of will. But it may just be that your conscious thoughts are lagging a little. ? I agree but that makes free-will independent of the feeling. With my definition of free will, it is real,even if not felt, as the machine have the real possibility to hesitate between subgoals and make choice hesitantly, knowing partially the consequences. When you're playing a game, say tennis, and you hit the ball to the left you may have done so without conscious consideration yet it was just the right shot and so was what you willed to win which you realize on reflection. OK. Although I think that free-will is more typical for decision taking more time, and more self-controversial, like the decision to drink some beer before driving a plane with passengers ... You have a feeling of freedom so long as you are not coerced or limited by something you can consciously consider; that's essentially all the feeling of freedom is, not being able to think of anything that is restricting or coercing you from taking an action. Since you can't be directly aware of deterministic or random processes in your brain, whether they are random or deterministic has no bearing on the freedom+will feeling. I agree. But I think that free-will is more than a feeling. It is a real possibility of reflected choice. Indeed it has nothing to so with determinacy or randomness. Bruno Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything- l...@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an
Re: G.K. Chesterton on Materialism
On 18 Mar 2013, at 21:15, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Monday, March 18, 2013 11:33:17 AM UTC-4, John Clark wrote: G K Chesterton wrote: For we must remember that the materialist philosophy (whether true or not) is certainly much more limiting than any religion. That is absolutely true, there are more ways of being wrong than of being right, so if you don't care if your ideas are self consistent or not (for example if you don't care that X is not Y and X is not not Y) and if you don't care what words mean (for example if you don't care that if changing X always changes Y and changing Y always changes X that doesn't mean that X caused Y) then you have much more freedom over what you can believe than a logical man does. The man who thinks he is logical is often just stubborn. There are many things related to consciousness which can't be defined in the terms we have learned from manipulating public objects. No state of awareness is uniquely one thing and not another. All phenomenology is multivalent and impacted by intention and expectation. I can make sense on this. If you want all the parts of your belief system to fit together the range of things you can believe in is severely limited. And finding ways all the parts of the universe fit together in a self consistent way is hard, very hard, so often the logical man must just say I don't know I'm not certain, they religious man on the other hand is always certain but seldom correct. The logical man is a man whose religion is logic. Not that I'm opposed to logic, it just can't penetrate to the cause of awareness. Logic is always an a-posteriori analysis of a sensory-motor experience. I can agree with this. But no more if your replaced logical by Turing universal. Machines and numbers are beyond logic. That is the unexpected lesson of the 20th century math, and which makes comp consistent with experiences. there is a very special sense in which materialism has more restrictions than spiritualism… The Christian is quite free to believe that there is a considerable amount of settled order and inevitable development in the universe, but the materialist is not allowed to admit into his spotless machine the slightest speck of spiritualism or miracle. The Christian is not allowed to admit the slightest speck of doubt that a invisible man in the sky sent His son, who was also Him, to be tortured to death by humans even though he loved His son, who is also Him, very much because otherwise he could not forgive humans even though He is omnipotent. Even though He is omnipotent torturing His son, who is really Him, for the crime of eating a apple is the only way He could forgive the torturers. The Christian is not allowed to admit the slightest speck of doubt that it makes sense that if I'm mad at you and then you torture my son to death I will no longer be mad at you. No argument there. I only disagree with you on religion in the sense that I don't think the fictions which have been created are arbitrary. They reflect metaphorical illustrations about consciousness itself, and when taken figuratively all myths can reveal important insights. It's only when people take them literally that it causes problems, and as long as physics refuses to take consciousness seriously, people will continue to take religion literally. The materialist is sure that history has been simply and solely a chain of causation… I don't know when Chesterton wrote that but he lived until 1936 and by 1925 physicists, the ultimate materialists, did not believe that history or anything else was simply and solely a chain of causation; however it is unlikely that Chesterton ever knew this and like most self styled philosophers remained blissfully ignorant of all scientific and mathematical discoveries made during the last century or two. Are you referring here to the addition of randomness or probability to the chain of causation? Incidentally I found some more ideas of Chesterton. In 1290 Edward 1 expelled the Jews from England and Chesterton writes that Edward was a just and conscientious monarch and acted correctly because the Jews were as powerful as they are unpopular and the capitalists of their age so when Edward flung the alien financiers out of the land he acted as knight errant and was the tender father of his people. Even in 1920 Chesterton thought there was still a Jewish Problem in Europe. Hitler had his Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. Even anti-Semites can have valid insights. Correct. An example is Henry Ford. He was correct on health, oil and hemp, but close to the nazis about the Jews. Clark argument was of course invalid. Craig John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it,
Re: Mind is a quantum computer
On 19 Mar 2013, at 02:06, Russell Standish wrote: On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 07:39:44PM +0100, Bruno Marchal wrote: Hi Roger, On 18 Mar 2013, at 12:48, Roger Clough wrote: Since mind is an MQS or Multiple Quantum Superposition, it can process information at the rate of a quantum computer. Since you seem to talk philosophy, let me translate what you say for our friends the scientists. If we assume that mind is a Multiple Quantum Superposition, and if we assume that mind can exploit those quantum superpositions to process information, then the mind can process information at the rate of a quantum computer. That implication seems to me quite reasonable. Test of the theory according to which a human mind is a Multiple Quantum Superposition: 1) show me a human as good as a quantum computer for finding a needle in a haystack. 2) Factorize 13195212121 Demonstrating these sorts of exponential speedups only falsifies the proposition that a human mind is an ordinary classical computer (but not COMP). OK. It does not confirm in any way that a human mind operates as a quantum computer, since random oracles are another way of bridging computational complexity classes. But random oracle does not give the ability of a QC. Bruno We only need one idiot-savant to demonstrate this. By contrast, being unable to demonstrate this scaling means - well nothing at all, actually. -- 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 unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Mind is a quantum computer
On 19 Mar 2013, at 10:48, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: On 18.03.2013 19:39 Bruno Marchal said the following: Hi Roger, On 18 Mar 2013, at 12:48, Roger Clough wrote: Since mind is an MQS or Multiple Quantum Superposition, it can process information at the rate of a quantum computer. Since you seem to talk philosophy, let me translate what you say for our friends the scientists. If we assume that mind is a Multiple Quantum Superposition, and if we assume that mind can exploit those quantum superpositions to process information, then the mind can process information at the rate of a quantum computer. That implication seems to me quite reasonable. Test of the theory according to which a human mind is a Multiple Quantum Superposition: 1) show me a human as good as a quantum computer for finding a needle in a haystack. Could you show me a quantum computer that can do that? I guess that it exist only in dreams of theoreticians (on in that part of Platonia that the humankind cannot access). That's an argument of the kind only bird can fly. I was alluding to a well now ability of QC. And to pretend that a brain/mind can do quantum computing would endow a brain/mind with this abilities. Grover L.K. Qunatum Mechanics helps in searching for a needle in an haystack. Physical Review Letters, 78: 325-328, 1997a. Quant-phys/ 9605043. The fact that QC does not yet exist does not invalidate the argument. Bruno 2) Factorize 13195212121 Rain Man? Evgenii -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: G.K. Chesterton on Materialism
On Monday, March 18, 2013 8:15:39 PM UTC, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Monday, March 18, 2013 11:33:17 AM UTC-4, John Clark wrote: G K Chesterton wrote: For we must remember that the materialist philosophy (whether true or not) is certainly much more limiting than any religion. That is absolutely true, there are more ways of being wrong than of being right, so if you don't care if your ideas are self consistent or not (for example if you don't care that X is not Y and X is not not Y) and if you don't care what words mean (for example if you don't care that if changing X always changes Y and changing Y always changes X that doesn't mean that X caused Y) then you have much more freedom over what you can believe than a logical man does. The man who thinks he is logical is often just stubborn. There are many things related to consciousness which can't be defined in the terms we have learned from manipulating public objects. No state of awareness is uniquely one thing and not another. All phenomenology is multivalent and impacted by intention and expectation. If you want all the parts of your belief system to fit together the range of things you can believe in is severely limited. And finding ways all the parts of the universe fit together in a self consistent way is hard, very hard, so often the logical man must just say I don't know I'm not certain, they religious man on the other hand is always certain but seldom correct. The logical man is a man whose religion is logic. Not that I'm opposed to logic, it just can't penetrate to the cause of awareness. Logic is always an a-posteriori analysis of a sensory-motor experience. there is a very special sense in which materialism has more restrictions than spiritualism… The Christian is quite free to believe that there is a considerable amount of settled order and inevitable development in the universe, but the materialist is not allowed to admit into his spotless machine the slightest speck of spiritualism or miracle. The Christian is not allowed to admit the slightest speck of doubt that a invisible man in the sky sent His son, who was also Him, to be tortured to death by humans even though he loved His son, who is also Him, very much because otherwise he could not forgive humans even though He is omnipotent. Even though He is omnipotent torturing His son, who is really Him, for the crime of eating a apple is the only way He could forgive the torturers. The Christian is not allowed to admit the slightest speck of doubt that it makes sense that if I'm mad at you and then you torture my son to death I will no longer be mad at you. No argument there. I only disagree with you on religion in the sense that I don't think the fictions which have been created are arbitrary. They reflect metaphorical illustrations about consciousness itself, and when taken figuratively all myths can reveal important insights. It's only when people take them literally that it causes problems, and as long as physics refuses to take consciousness seriously, people will continue to take religion literally. What do you think John 5:19 is trying to say about individual free will? It seems to me to be confirming what non-dual traditions also assert: That there is no independent self and thus no agent to exercise free will. They talk about the universal Self, the unicity of existence, which somehow manifests as our apparent, but illusory, individual selves. This universal Self is the only actual entity and it has no independent parts. Independence/multiplicity is merely a feature of the world of concepts, which is ultimately unreal (a product of the Fall?) Free will and determinism are both concepts - in actuality it all happens the way it happens, and God says it is good, etc... The materialist is sure that history has been simply and solely a chain of causation… I don't know when Chesterton wrote that but he lived until 1936 and by 1925 physicists, the ultimate materialists, did not believe that history or anything else was simply and solely a chain of causation; however it is unlikely that Chesterton ever knew this and like most self styled philosophers remained blissfully ignorant of all scientific and mathematical discoveries made during the last century or two. Are you referring here to the addition of randomness or probability to the chain of causation? Incidentally I found some more ideas of Chesterton. In 1290 Edward 1 expelled the Jews from England and Chesterton writes that Edward was a just and conscientious monarch and acted correctly because the Jews were as powerful as they are unpopular and the capitalists of their age so when Edward flung the alien financiers out of the land he acted as knight errant and was the tender father of his people. Even in 1920 Chesterton thought there was still a Jewish Problem in
Re: Mind is a quantum computer
On 19.03.2013 12:39 Bruno Marchal said the following: On 19 Mar 2013, at 10:48, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: On 18.03.2013 19:39 Bruno Marchal said the following: ... 1) show me a human as good as a quantum computer for finding a needle in a haystack. Could you show me a quantum computer that can do that? I guess that it exist only in dreams of theoreticians (on in that part of Platonia that the humankind cannot access). That's an argument of the kind only bird can fly. I was alluding to a well now ability of QC. And to pretend that a brain/mind can do quantum computing would endow a brain/mind with this abilities. Grover L.K. Qunatum Mechanics helps in searching for a needle in an haystack. Physical Review Letters, 78: 325-328, 1997a. Quant-phys/9605043. The fact that QC does not yet exist does not invalidate the argument. In my view, provided that there is no experimental proof, we remain in a realm of a metaphysical discussion. Is this what you mean by the argument? Evgenii -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Mind is a quantum computer
On 19 Mar 2013, at 15:27, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: On 19.03.2013 12:39 Bruno Marchal said the following: On 19 Mar 2013, at 10:48, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: On 18.03.2013 19:39 Bruno Marchal said the following: ... 1) show me a human as good as a quantum computer for finding a needle in a haystack. Could you show me a quantum computer that can do that? I guess that it exist only in dreams of theoreticians (on in that part of Platonia that the humankind cannot access). That's an argument of the kind only bird can fly. I was alluding to a well now ability of QC. And to pretend that a brain/mind can do quantum computing would endow a brain/mind with this abilities. Grover L.K. Qunatum Mechanics helps in searching for a needle in an haystack. Physical Review Letters, 78: 325-328, 1997a. Quant-phys/9605043. The fact that QC does not yet exist does not invalidate the argument. In my view, provided that there is no experimental proof, we remain in a realm of a metaphysical discussion. Is this what you mean by the argument? I think that you are confusing theoretical and metaphysical. I would avoid the term experimental proof as this does not make sense with the notion of proof most commonly referred in this list (valid theoretical deduction) Also, there are plenty of experimental confirmations of quantum computations. What does not yet exist is a general purpose quantum computer, but the reason why are obvious: it *is* technically challenging. Yet, since the work on quantum error correction, no one doubt in the field that quantum computer will appear. May be in ten years, may be in 100 years. I have already assisted to quite impressive experience is quantum data encryption and recovery. The number 15 has already be factorized through a quantum algorithm (Shor), etc. But again, that is beside the point I made. I was answering a post by Roger Clough which speculates about the fact that the human brain is a quantum computer. You should address your post to him, as this is rather speculative. Not only there are rather good argument why this is doubtful, but there are no evidence for this at all. Bruno Evgenii -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: G.K. Chesterton on Materialism
On Tuesday, March 19, 2013 6:55:30 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 18 Mar 2013, at 21:15, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Monday, March 18, 2013 11:33:17 AM UTC-4, John Clark wrote: G K Chesterton wrote: For we must remember that the materialist philosophy (whether true or not) is certainly much more limiting than any religion. That is absolutely true, there are more ways of being wrong than of being right, so if you don't care if your ideas are self consistent or not (for example if you don't care that X is not Y and X is not not Y) and if you don't care what words mean (for example if you don't care that if changing X always changes Y and changing Y always changes X that doesn't mean that X caused Y) then you have much more freedom over what you can believe than a logical man does. The man who thinks he is logical is often just stubborn. There are many things related to consciousness which can't be defined in the terms we have learned from manipulating public objects. No state of awareness is uniquely one thing and not another. All phenomenology is multivalent and impacted by intention and expectation. I can make sense on this. If you want all the parts of your belief system to fit together the range of things you can believe in is severely limited. And finding ways all the parts of the universe fit together in a self consistent way is hard, very hard, so often the logical man must just say I don't know I'm not certain, they religious man on the other hand is always certain but seldom correct. The logical man is a man whose religion is logic. Not that I'm opposed to logic, it just can't penetrate to the cause of awareness. Logic is always an a-posteriori analysis of a sensory-motor experience. I can agree with this. But no more if your replaced logical by Turing universal. Machines and numbers are beyond logic. That is the unexpected lesson of the 20th century math, and which makes comp consistent with experiences. I am happy to entertain the idea that Turing universal (hyperlogic? sense?) extends far beyond 'logic', even to a sublime degree, but what gives us a reason to see this plane of hyper-extension as the identical plane of subjective qualia? I don't see that Turing hyperlogic could or would evoke geometry, much less flavor, feelings, images, etc., and especially not realism. Instead, I see the extension of arithmetic truth as orthogonal to subjectivity - an invisible, intangible, web of infinitely narrow quantitative associations. Nested - sure, massively complex and multi-layered, veridical, predictive, bursting with proto-morphological wonders, definitely. What I don't see though is any aesthetic coherence. No room for experiential preference, embodiment, moral orientation, no presentation or presence of any kind. The mechanism of the Turing machine is arbitrarily conjured out of nothing - suddenly there is a phenomena which we know as 'read/write', and a local read/write head which interacts causally with this movable, controllable 'tape'. There is motion and control, continuity and memory, encoding schemas which bring arithmetic into local interaction somehow. The whole machine can be simulated on another machine only because the original machine includes this list of inherent capacities, which are to me, undoubtedly sensory-motor and pre-arithmetic. there is a very special sense in which materialism has more restrictions than spiritualism… The Christian is quite free to believe that there is a considerable amount of settled order and inevitable development in the universe, but the materialist is not allowed to admit into his spotless machine the slightest speck of spiritualism or miracle. The Christian is not allowed to admit the slightest speck of doubt that a invisible man in the sky sent His son, who was also Him, to be tortured to death by humans even though he loved His son, who is also Him, very much because otherwise he could not forgive humans even though He is omnipotent. Even though He is omnipotent torturing His son, who is really Him, for the crime of eating a apple is the only way He could forgive the torturers. The Christian is not allowed to admit the slightest speck of doubt that it makes sense that if I'm mad at you and then you torture my son to death I will no longer be mad at you. No argument there. I only disagree with you on religion in the sense that I don't think the fictions which have been created are arbitrary. They reflect metaphorical illustrations about consciousness itself, and when taken figuratively all myths can reveal important insights. It's only when people take them literally that it causes problems, and as long as physics refuses to take consciousness seriously, people will continue to take religion literally. The materialist is sure that history has been simply and solely a chain of
Re: Mind is a quantum computer
On Tue, Mar 19, 2013 at 2:06 AM, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 07:39:44PM +0100, Bruno Marchal wrote: Hi Roger, On 18 Mar 2013, at 12:48, Roger Clough wrote: Since mind is an MQS or Multiple Quantum Superposition, it can process information at the rate of a quantum computer. Since you seem to talk philosophy, let me translate what you say for our friends the scientists. If we assume that mind is a Multiple Quantum Superposition, and if we assume that mind can exploit those quantum superpositions to process information, then the mind can process information at the rate of a quantum computer. That implication seems to me quite reasonable. Test of the theory according to which a human mind is a Multiple Quantum Superposition: 1) show me a human as good as a quantum computer for finding a needle in a haystack. 2) Factorize 13195212121 Demonstrating these sorts of exponential speedups only falsifies the proposition that a human mind is an ordinary classical computer (but not COMP). It does not confirm in any way that a human mind operates as a quantum computer, since random oracles are another way of bridging computational complexity classes. We only need one idiot-savant to demonstrate this. By contrast, being unable to demonstrate this scaling means - well nothing at all, actually. I agree with Russell here. More generally, I always disliked these evaluations of the computational power of the human brain by the speed at which it can do arithmetics. It's quite possible that the brain is a computational beast, but the software it runs is specialised in other things: image pattern recognition, parsing semantic trees and so on. Arithmetics is a recent and unnatural activity for the brain, so it might very well have to be performed on top of inadequate and expensive pre-existing machinery. -- 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 unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Mind is a quantum computer
On 19 Mar 2013, at 16:52, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Tue, Mar 19, 2013 at 2:06 AM, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 07:39:44PM +0100, Bruno Marchal wrote: Hi Roger, On 18 Mar 2013, at 12:48, Roger Clough wrote: Since mind is an MQS or Multiple Quantum Superposition, it can process information at the rate of a quantum computer. Since you seem to talk philosophy, let me translate what you say for our friends the scientists. If we assume that mind is a Multiple Quantum Superposition, and if we assume that mind can exploit those quantum superpositions to process information, then the mind can process information at the rate of a quantum computer. That implication seems to me quite reasonable. Test of the theory according to which a human mind is a Multiple Quantum Superposition: 1) show me a human as good as a quantum computer for finding a needle in a haystack. 2) Factorize 13195212121 Demonstrating these sorts of exponential speedups only falsifies the proposition that a human mind is an ordinary classical computer (but not COMP). It does not confirm in any way that a human mind operates as a quantum computer, since random oracles are another way of bridging computational complexity classes. We only need one idiot-savant to demonstrate this. By contrast, being unable to demonstrate this scaling means - well nothing at all, actually. I agree with Russell here. More generally, I always disliked these evaluations of the computational power of the human brain by the speed at which it can do arithmetics. It's quite possible that the brain is a computational beast, but the software it runs is specialised in other things: image pattern recognition, parsing semantic trees and so on. Arithmetics is a recent and unnatural activity for the brain, so it might very well have to be performed on top of inadequate and expensive pre-existing machinery. But QC is not just a speed scaling of computation. It is a different way to do some computation, some of which are just impossible to do in real time by a classical computer. So here the speed is of conceptual importance. If my brain is a QC I can do a Fourier transform of the state of my infinitely many doppelgangers in some superposition states of myself, and this gives ways to confirm the quantum many-world in a less indirect way than by doing QM. My point to Russell was that a random oracle is less powerful than a quantum computer, even if the contrary is correct (a quantum computer can simulate a random oracle, in principle). My point to Roger was just that it is doubtful that the brain is a quantum computer, for theoretical and experimental reason. That would change nothing in UDA and AUDA. If the brain is a quantum computer, it would only mean something on the lowness of the comp substitution level, and a more complex back and forth between the Turing emulable and the first person indeterminacy (Turing recoverable from the indeterminacy on the whole UD*). Bruno -- 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 unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything- l...@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Losing Control
On Monday, March 18, 2013 9:05:13 PM UTC-4, stathisp wrote: On Tue, Mar 19, 2013 at 11:39 AM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comjavascript: wrote: If you say that free will is compatible with determinism then you are an compatibilist, otherwise you are an incompatibilist. Why do you try to make the discussion difficult by refusing to agree on terminology? Because the terminology is ideologically loaded and makes the truth impossible to address, obviously. It's like you are demanding that I agree that electricity is either the work of God or the Devil. We need to agree on terminology if we're going to have a discussion at all. Have aliens visited the Earth? We need to agree that an alien is a being born on another planet. It doesn't mean we agree on the facts, but we need to at least speak the same language! I'm not opposed to agreeing on terminology, but that means we both agree, not that I agree to your terms. It seems, again, that you believe it is a priori impossible for consciousness and determinism to co-exist. If we can't get beyond this then there is not much point in further debate. Determinism is what consciousness looks like from the crippled third person perspective. They coexist in the sense that the old woman and the young woman coexist in the famous ambiguous drawing. So, do you believe that it possible that an entity which is deterministic from a third person perspective could be conscious, or do you believe that an entity which is deterministic from a third person perspective could not possibly be conscious? Yes, I think all deterministic looking systems represent sensory-motor participation of some kind, but not necessarily on the level that we assume. What we see as a cloud may have sensory-motor participation as droplets of water molecules, and as a wisp in the atmosphere as a whole, but not at all as a coherent cloud that we perceive. The cloud is a human scale emblem, not the native entity. The native awareness may reside in a much faster or much slower frequency range or sample rate than our own, so there is little hope of our relating to it personally. It's like Flatland only with perceptual relativity rather than quant dimension. This is also why computers are not conscious. The native entity is microelectronic or geological, not mechanical. The machine as a whole is again an emblem, not an organic, self-invested whole. Craig -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: True?
On Friday, March 8, 2013 11:11:38 PM UTC-5, Stephen Paul King wrote: On 3/8/2013 11:08 PM, Stephen P. King wrote: Hi, Is the following a sound claim? ...scientifically meaningful propositions are questions about the past, the present, the future, or the eternal laws that: - might in principle be both false and true - admit a method, at least in principle, to evaluate their truth values. -- Is the following a sound claim? ...examples of propositions that don't belong to science because one of the disqualifying conditions below holds: - they're purely mathematical in character so they require no empirical input at all - they're statements about fictional objects such as Hamlet that can't be decided from the only available data, in this case the text of Hamlet (there's no real Hamlet offering additional data) - they depend on subjective opinions and preferences -- They sound ok to me. Subjective opinions should not be included when the topic of consideration is subjectivity itself, but they should be understood as expressions of subjective phenomena. Craig Onward! Stephen PS, I am quoting Sean Carroll http://preposterousuniverse.com/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: G.K. Chesterton on Materialism
On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 4:15 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote: The man who thinks he is logical is often just stubborn. If being ruled by your head rather than your gut or your crotch is stubborn then being stubborn is a virtue. There are many things related to consciousness [...] it's not just consciousness, there are many things related to EVERYTHING and if one wishes to fit all those parts of the jigsaw puzzle that is the universe together into a self consistent whole then logic is the only tool available; maybe it will turn out that logic is insufficient for that task but its all we've got and so we'll just have to do the best we can. The logical man is a man whose religion is logic. Wow, calling a guy know for disliking religion religious, never heard that one before, at least I never heard it before I was 12. Not that I'm opposed to logic Your posts tell a very different story. If it already supported what they wanted to believe nobody, absolutely nobody, would dispute the logical fact that if X is not not Y then X is Y. If it already supported what they wanted to believe nobody, absolutely nobody, would dispute the logical fact that if changing X always changes Y and changing Y always changes X then X and Y are intimately related. But if what you want to be true and what you logically know must be true come into conflict then logic is just going to have to go away and you are left with the pleasant but imbecilic idea that if you want something to be true hard enough you can make it be true. The materialist is sure that history has been simply and solely a chain of causation… I don't know when Chesterton wrote that but he lived until 1936 and by 1925 physicists, the ultimate materialists, did not believe that history or anything else was simply and solely a chain of causation; however it is unlikely that Chesterton ever knew this and like most self styled philosophers remained blissfully ignorant of all scientific and mathematical discoveries made during the last century or two. Are you referring here to the addition of randomness or probability to the chain of causation? No I am not. I'm referring to Quantum Mechanics, the TITANIC revolution in science that happened in the mid 1920's. In particular I'm referring to the discovery of the Schrodinger Wave equation and Heisenberg's equivalent matrix formulation. On reflection I shouldn't be surprised at your confusion, after all I just said that modern philosophers pay no attention to recent developments in science or mathematics; and by recent I mean stuff that happened in the last 200 years. Even anti-Semites can have valid insights. Yes but it does call into question ones claim to be a expert on morality, and morality is what G K Chesterton most liked to write about. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Mind is a quantum computer
On 19.03.2013 16:38 Bruno Marchal said the following: On 19 Mar 2013, at 15:27, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: On 19.03.2013 12:39 Bruno Marchal said the following: On 19 Mar 2013, at 10:48, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: On 18.03.2013 19:39 Bruno Marchal said the following: ... 1) show me a human as good as a quantum computer for finding a needle in a haystack. Could you show me a quantum computer that can do that? I guess that it exist only in dreams of theoreticians (on in that part of Platonia that the humankind cannot access). That's an argument of the kind only bird can fly. I was alluding to a well now ability of QC. And to pretend that a brain/mind can do quantum computing would endow a brain/mind with this abilities. Grover L.K. Qunatum Mechanics helps in searching for a needle in an haystack. Physical Review Letters, 78: 325-328, 1997a. Quant-phys/9605043. The fact that QC does not yet exist does not invalidate the argument. In my view, provided that there is no experimental proof, we remain in a realm of a metaphysical discussion. Is this what you mean by the argument? I think that you are confusing theoretical and metaphysical. I would avoid the term experimental proof as this does not make sense with the notion of proof most commonly referred in this list (valid theoretical deduction) I would say that a valid theoretical deduction concerns logic only. Yet, not all valid logic propositions are related to the experienced world. In my view, if we remove empirical evidences from consideration then we land in a metaphysical realm. Also, there are plenty of experimental confirmations of quantum computations. What does not yet exist is a general purpose quantum computer, but the reason why are obvious: it *is* technically challenging. Yet, since the work on quantum error correction, no one doubt in the field that quantum computer will appear. May be in ten years, may be in 100 years. I have already assisted to quite impressive experience is quantum data encryption and recovery. The number 15 has already be factorized through a quantum algorithm (Shor), etc. I am personally not impressed by the logic that this will be made some time in the future. To this end, a statement in a form of a wager would be more meaningful. For example, I bet that in ten years ... As an example, I could point you to the Genome Wager between Lewis Wolpert and Rupert Sheldrake http://www.sheldrake.org/DC/controversies/genomewager.html Make your bet. In such a form this is closer to real science, that is, to a predictive statement. Evgenii -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Mind is a quantum computer
On Tue, Mar 19, 2013 at 5:05 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 19 Mar 2013, at 16:52, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Tue, Mar 19, 2013 at 2:06 AM, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 07:39:44PM +0100, Bruno Marchal wrote: Hi Roger, On 18 Mar 2013, at 12:48, Roger Clough wrote: Since mind is an MQS or Multiple Quantum Superposition, it can process information at the rate of a quantum computer. Since you seem to talk philosophy, let me translate what you say for our friends the scientists. If we assume that mind is a Multiple Quantum Superposition, and if we assume that mind can exploit those quantum superpositions to process information, then the mind can process information at the rate of a quantum computer. That implication seems to me quite reasonable. Test of the theory according to which a human mind is a Multiple Quantum Superposition: 1) show me a human as good as a quantum computer for finding a needle in a haystack. 2) Factorize 13195212121 Demonstrating these sorts of exponential speedups only falsifies the proposition that a human mind is an ordinary classical computer (but not COMP). It does not confirm in any way that a human mind operates as a quantum computer, since random oracles are another way of bridging computational complexity classes. We only need one idiot-savant to demonstrate this. By contrast, being unable to demonstrate this scaling means - well nothing at all, actually. I agree with Russell here. More generally, I always disliked these evaluations of the computational power of the human brain by the speed at which it can do arithmetics. It's quite possible that the brain is a computational beast, but the software it runs is specialised in other things: image pattern recognition, parsing semantic trees and so on. Arithmetics is a recent and unnatural activity for the brain, so it might very well have to be performed on top of inadequate and expensive pre-existing machinery. But QC is not just a speed scaling of computation. It is a different way to do some computation, some of which are just impossible to do in real time by a classical computer. Good point, I didn't mean to imply the contrary. So here the speed is of conceptual importance. If my brain is a QC I can do a Fourier transform of the state of my infinitely many doppelgangers in some superposition states of myself, and this gives ways to confirm the quantum many-world in a less indirect way than by doing QM. That would be a cool explanation for the feeling of deja-vu? My point to Russell was that a random oracle is less powerful than a quantum computer, even if the contrary is correct (a quantum computer can simulate a random oracle, in principle). My point to Roger was just that it is doubtful that the brain is a quantum computer, for theoretical and experimental reason. An hypothesis that fascinates me, though, is that it may have access to sources of quantum randomness. I believe that randomness is related to creativity. One of the things that always bothered me with Roger Penrose's argument is that he considers a theoretical classical computer, but real computers have random number generators* that exploit non Turing-emulable sources of randomness. This has non-trivial implications, and anyone who played with evolutionary computation / alife will probably agree. * even pseudo-number generators can be seeded by the clock time, for example That would change nothing in UDA and AUDA. If the brain is a quantum computer, it would only mean something on the lowness of the comp substitution level, and a more complex back and forth between the Turing emulable and the first person indeterminacy (Turing recoverable from the indeterminacy on the whole UD*). Sure, I did not assume that the brain as a QC would pose a problem to COMP. Bruno -- 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 unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to
Re: Mind is a quantum computer
On 19 Mar 2013, at 17:34, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Tue, Mar 19, 2013 at 5:05 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 19 Mar 2013, at 16:52, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Tue, Mar 19, 2013 at 2:06 AM, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 07:39:44PM +0100, Bruno Marchal wrote: Hi Roger, On 18 Mar 2013, at 12:48, Roger Clough wrote: Since mind is an MQS or Multiple Quantum Superposition, it can process information at the rate of a quantum computer. Since you seem to talk philosophy, let me translate what you say for our friends the scientists. If we assume that mind is a Multiple Quantum Superposition, and if we assume that mind can exploit those quantum superpositions to process information, then the mind can process information at the rate of a quantum computer. That implication seems to me quite reasonable. Test of the theory according to which a human mind is a Multiple Quantum Superposition: 1) show me a human as good as a quantum computer for finding a needle in a haystack. 2) Factorize 13195212121 Demonstrating these sorts of exponential speedups only falsifies the proposition that a human mind is an ordinary classical computer (but not COMP). It does not confirm in any way that a human mind operates as a quantum computer, since random oracles are another way of bridging computational complexity classes. We only need one idiot-savant to demonstrate this. By contrast, being unable to demonstrate this scaling means - well nothing at all, actually. I agree with Russell here. More generally, I always disliked these evaluations of the computational power of the human brain by the speed at which it can do arithmetics. It's quite possible that the brain is a computational beast, but the software it runs is specialised in other things: image pattern recognition, parsing semantic trees and so on. Arithmetics is a recent and unnatural activity for the brain, so it might very well have to be performed on top of inadequate and expensive pre-existing machinery. But QC is not just a speed scaling of computation. It is a different way to do some computation, some of which are just impossible to do in real time by a classical computer. Good point, I didn't mean to imply the contrary. OK. So here the speed is of conceptual importance. If my brain is a QC I can do a Fourier transform of the state of my infinitely many doppelgangers in some superposition states of myself, and this gives ways to confirm the quantum many-world in a less indirect way than by doing QM. That would be a cool explanation for the feeling of deja-vu? Cool, perhaps. Probable? I don't think so. There are classical explanation of that phenomenon. Which one is correct I don't know. My point to Russell was that a random oracle is less powerful than a quantum computer, even if the contrary is correct (a quantum computer can simulate a random oracle, in principle). My point to Roger was just that it is doubtful that the brain is a quantum computer, for theoretical and experimental reason. An hypothesis that fascinates me, though, is that it may have access to sources of quantum randomness. But we have access to the comp first indeterminacy, and comp explain why it has to be quantum, and have some equivalent of the randomization of phase, to eliminate the white rabbits. I believe that randomness is related to creativity. No, randomness has not the redundancy which is the mark of creativity. Post number (ith digit = 1 if phi_i(i) stops, and zero if not) is creative, in the sense of Emil Post, and corresponds to the Turing Universal. Algorithmic randomness (the most random thing we can conceive, like Chaitin's Omega, which is a compression of Post number, render it useless. randomness is useful, tough, for making the computation which can develop some relation with it, like the quantum, having a winning measure in the rize of the sharable physical laws. But still, I tend to bet that creativity, if he can exploit it, is still independent of it. One of the things that always bothered me with Roger Penrose's argument is that he considers a theoretical classical computer, but real computers have random number generators* that exploit non Turing-emulable sources of randomness. Rarely. Only A qubit, or a self-duplication, can give true randomness, but below my story in the building I work, they work precisely on how to make a qubit such that a measurement would be provably random, but even just that is technically quite challenging. This has non-trivial implications, and anyone who played with evolutionary computation / alife will probably agree. In the UD, we are, in principle dependent on *all* oracles, not just the random one. There are many oracles. I doubt that they play a role other than the halting oracle (time, somehow) and
Re: Mind is a quantum computer
Factorize 13195212121 Rain Man? Even Rain Man couldn't figure out that 2^57885161 -1 is a prime number as a conventional computer did about a month ago, the number has 17,425,170 digits. This is the sort of problem that quantum computers would be especially good at because it involves factoring numbers, so I don't see why a non quantum computer could so easily beat a human with a brain that could make quantum calculations. And to make a quantum computer you need to entangle particles, and nobody has proposed a plausible way that could be done in the hot noisy human brain. show me a human as good as a quantum computer for finding a needle in a haystack. A human with a magnet? John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: G.K. Chesterton on Materialism
On Tuesday, March 19, 2013 12:34:20 PM UTC-4, John Clark wrote: On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 4:15 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comjavascript: wrote: The man who thinks he is logical is often just stubborn. If being ruled by your head rather than your gut or your crotch is stubborn then being stubborn is a virtue. I prefer to rule all three to the extent that I can, but also to be open to what all three have to offer. There are many things related to consciousness [...] it's not just consciousness, there are many things related to EVERYTHING and if one wishes to fit all those parts of the jigsaw puzzle that is the universe together into a self consistent whole then logic is the only tool available; maybe it will turn out that logic is insufficient for that task but its all we've got and so we'll just have to do the best we can. It's not all we've got at all. We've got intuition, sensitivity, aesthetics, experience, practical or common sense... logic is very limited. We have a whole other hemisphere of the brain that is used, not just by us, but other animals as well. Logic is useless without the other faculties of reasoning and evaluating. The logical man is a man whose religion is logic. Wow, calling a guy know for disliking religion religious, never heard that one before, at least I never heard it before I was 12. That's because the man restricted to logic often sees his own sentimental attachments and confirmation bias as part of an objective truth, and all that conflicts with that is painted as religious. The irony needs to be pointed out again and again that this is in fact the very psychology which he objects to in religion. Not that I'm opposed to logic Your posts tell a very different story. If it already supported what they wanted to believe nobody, absolutely nobody, would dispute the logical fact that if X is not not Y then X is Y. X and Y are figures. They are imaginary. They have the qualities that you assign to them. We can just as easily define X and Y as a superposition of superposition and anti-superposition and you wouldn't bat an eye if it came from some theoretical physicist that managed to get a peer reviewed paper published. Your logic is prejudice. If it already supported what they wanted to believe nobody, absolutely nobody, would dispute the logical fact that if changing X always changes Y and changing Y always changes X then X and Y are intimately related. Intimate relation is not causality. The stock market has been famously been related to skirt lengths and other spandrel-type indicators. http://www.investopedia.com/articles/stocks/08/stock-market-indicators.asp But if what you want to be true and what you logically know must be true come into conflict then logic is just going to have to go away and you are left with the pleasant but imbecilic idea that if you want something to be true hard enough you can make it be true. Wanting something to be true has nothing to do with it. It's a matter of recognizing that logic is only one epistemological source - there are others, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. The materialist is sure that history has been simply and solely a chain of causation… I don't know when Chesterton wrote that but he lived until 1936 and by 1925 physicists, the ultimate materialists, did not believe that history or anything else was simply and solely a chain of causation; however it is unlikely that Chesterton ever knew this and like most self styled philosophers remained blissfully ignorant of all scientific and mathematical discoveries made during the last century or two. Are you referring here to the addition of randomness or probability to the chain of causation? No I am not. I'm referring to Quantum Mechanics, the TITANIC revolution in science that happened in the mid 1920's. In particular I'm referring to the discovery of the Schrodinger Wave equation and Heisenberg's equivalent matrix formulation. On reflection I shouldn't be surprised at your confusion, after all I just said that modern philosophers pay no attention to recent developments in science or mathematics; and by recent I mean stuff that happened in the last 200 years. Not to interrupt yet another irrelevant display of ad-hominem vanity, but what specifically does QM add to the chain of causation which does not fall under the category of randomness or probability? Smaller link in the chain? So what? Even anti-Semites can have valid insights. Yes but it does call into question ones claim to be a expert on morality, and morality is what G K Chesterton most liked to write about. It has been said that people often teach what they most need to learn. Craig John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from
Re: Mind is a quantum computer
On 19 Mar 2013, at 17:34, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: On 19.03.2013 16:38 Bruno Marchal said the following: On 19 Mar 2013, at 15:27, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: On 19.03.2013 12:39 Bruno Marchal said the following: On 19 Mar 2013, at 10:48, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: On 18.03.2013 19:39 Bruno Marchal said the following: ... 1) show me a human as good as a quantum computer for finding a needle in a haystack. Could you show me a quantum computer that can do that? I guess that it exist only in dreams of theoreticians (on in that part of Platonia that the humankind cannot access). That's an argument of the kind only bird can fly. I was alluding to a well now ability of QC. And to pretend that a brain/mind can do quantum computing would endow a brain/mind with this abilities. Grover L.K. Qunatum Mechanics helps in searching for a needle in an haystack. Physical Review Letters, 78: 325-328, 1997a. Quant-phys/9605043. The fact that QC does not yet exist does not invalidate the argument. In my view, provided that there is no experimental proof, we remain in a realm of a metaphysical discussion. Is this what you mean by the argument? I think that you are confusing theoretical and metaphysical. I would avoid the term experimental proof as this does not make sense with the notion of proof most commonly referred in this list (valid theoretical deduction) I would say that a valid theoretical deduction concerns logic only. Not at all. You can reason validly in *all* domains. Only in the hot domain, people forgets logic and use emotion instead. Arithmetic is far beyond logic. That's a consequence of incompleteness. We cannot capture the whole arithmetical truth in one formal system. We are warned for an infinity of surprises. But we can still make assumption and reason from there. This is true for any domain. Yet, not all valid logic propositions are related to the experienced world. You are a bit imprecise. The purely logical propositions (intuitionist or classical) are related to you trivially, I would say. You are using them all the time, when doing shopping, work, driving a car, etc. At some level they are true *about* you. But then pure logic alone is not rich. We always needs axioms, to talk about something, like strings, numbers, combinators, dreaming machines, or gods, goddesses and whatever. In my view, if we remove empirical evidences from consideration then we land in a metaphysical realm. It when we assume a reality beyond the empirical evidence, that we do theology or metaphysics. Logical thought, which does not mean purely logical thought, are a mean to reason in the most independent way of ontological commitment (be it matter, gods, numbers, or whatever. Here rigor is the key of free thought. The validity of a reasoning guarantied its independence from interpretations. That happens with first order logic, and that's why I study machine's talking first order predicate calculus. But they talk of many things. Also, there are plenty of experimental confirmations of quantum computations. What does not yet exist is a general purpose quantum computer, but the reason why are obvious: it *is* technically challenging. Yet, since the work on quantum error correction, no one doubt in the field that quantum computer will appear. May be in ten years, may be in 100 years. I have already assisted to quite impressive experience is quantum data encryption and recovery. The number 15 has already be factorized through a quantum algorithm (Shor), etc. I am personally not impressed by the logic that this will be made some time in the future. To this end, a statement in a form of a wager would be more meaningful. For example, I bet that in ten years ... Too much difficult. As an example, I could point you to the Genome Wager between Lewis Wolpert and Rupert Sheldrake http://www.sheldrake.org/DC/controversies/genomewager.html Make your bet. In such a form this is closer to real science, that is, to a predictive statement. That bet is far too vague for me. Define abnormalities. I bet that in 2029, they will not been able to judge the case, and will continue to disagree. I can bet that full simulation of higher mammals brain, ---glial, neuronal cells + some bacteries, at the molecular level, close to the Heisenberg uncertainty level,--- will be done this or the next century. Bruno Evgenii -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because
Re: True?
No. What means truth value of something? in which range of phenomena? in all phenomena applicable? how you can test all phenomena applicable to a theory? you can't. The only thing that you can do is to test a particular prediction that the theory predict that may never happen (Popperian falsability) Feyerabend demosntrated that not even that is possible, or at least unique, since the perceptions or facts must be interpreted according with the theory. there is no fact that is theory-free. A fact pressuposes a theory. So a theory and their perceptions are a closed set, that may be autocoherent. So there may be different theories for the same phenomena, each one with their interpreted facts, that may have some kind of morphism between them. That is evidently and pefectly exemplified now in some dualities of string theories, or between newtonian and relativistic mechanics, or in a certain way, between heliocentrism and geocentrisme. where agreeement between phenomena and ptolemaic theory, in the case of heliocentrism, is maintained at the cost of a more complicated theory. Then, to escape the Feyerabend trap, there is necessary additional criteria, such is the economy of axioms or the Occam Razor as criteria for theory acceptance. Fortunately it works, because it seems that we live in a simple, mathematical universe, which is amazing per se. About opinions: But all that one may know, even the facts, are subjective perceptions. But opinions are about internal subjective perceptions, That there are no scientific theory about some subjective perceptions (some internal ones) does not say that these subjective perceptions can never be objects of scientific study. Simply it means that at this historical moment there is no methods (or there is resistance to them, since the rejection of common sense) that would make them testable and scientific. 2013/3/19 Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com On Friday, March 8, 2013 11:11:38 PM UTC-5, Stephen Paul King wrote: On 3/8/2013 11:08 PM, Stephen P. King wrote: Hi, Is the following a sound claim? ...scientifically meaningful propositions are questions about the past, the present, the future, or the eternal laws that: - might in principle be both false and true - admit a method, at least in principle, to evaluate their truth values. -- Is the following a sound claim? ...examples of propositions that don't belong to science because one of the disqualifying conditions below holds: - they're purely mathematical in character so they require no empirical input at all - they're statements about fictional objects such as Hamlet that can't be decided from the only available data, in this case the text of Hamlet (there's no real Hamlet offering additional data) - they depend on subjective opinions and preferences -- They sound ok to me. Subjective opinions should not be included when the topic of consideration is subjectivity itself, but they should be understood as expressions of subjective phenomena. Craig Onward! Stephen PS, I am quoting Sean Carroll http://preposterousuniverse.com/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- Alberto. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: G.K. Chesterton on Materialism
On Tue, Mar 19, 2013 at 1:13 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote: Intimate relation is not causality. The stock market has been famously been related to skirt lengths If when skirt lengths changed there was ALWAYS a change in the stock market in the same direction, and when the stock market changed there was ALWAYS a change in skirt lengths that preceded it then its true, changing the length of skirts DOES cause a change in the stock market; and if humans don't understand how a connection between the two could possibly work that's just too bad, it wouldn't make it any less true. And if all of that were true then dress designers would be the richest people the world has ever seen. They're not. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: True?
On 19.03.2013 18:37 Alberto G. Corona said the following: No. ... Then, to escape the Feyerabend trap, there is necessary additional criteria, such is the economy of axioms or the Occam Razor as criteria for theory acceptance. Fortunately it works, because it seems that we live in a simple, mathematical universe, which is amazing per se. I have listened recently to a lecture by Maarten Hoenen about the philosophy of Occam. Hence the question. What does it mean when you use Occam's name? Do you share any of his philosophical/theological positions? Or in your paragraph his name is just an empty token? Evgenii -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Mind is a quantum computer
On 19 Mar 2013, at 18:13, John Clark wrote: Factorize 13195212121 Rain Man? Even Rain Man couldn't figure out that 2^57885161 -1 is a prime number as a conventional computer did about a month ago, the number has 17,425,170 digits. This is the sort of problem that quantum computers would be especially good at because it involves factoring numbers, so I don't see why a non quantum computer could so easily beat a human with a brain that could make quantum calculations. And to make a quantum computer you need to entangle particles, and nobody has proposed a plausible way that could be done in the hot noisy human brain. OK. show me a human as good as a quantum computer for finding a needle in a haystack. A human with a magnet? Lol. Of course the needle in the haystack is the name, in computer science, of the problem of finding a data in large database without structure. It is a bit more like searching a lighter in a woman bag :) Of course the magnet illustrates that some instantiation of the problem can admit efficacious solution. But what if the needle is in plastic? Perhaps centrifugation will do. Bruno John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Mind is a quantum computer
On 19 Mar 2013, at 18:35, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 19 Mar 2013, at 17:34, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: snip (see the preview post) As an example, I could point you to the Genome Wager between Lewis Wolpert and Rupert Sheldrake http://www.sheldrake.org/DC/controversies/genomewager.html Make your bet. In such a form this is closer to real science, that is, to a predictive statement. That bet is far too vague for me. Define abnormalities. I bet that in 2029, they will not been able to judge the case, and will continue to disagree. I can bet that full simulation of higher mammals brain, ---glial, neuronal cells + some bacteries, at the molecular level, close to the Heisenberg uncertainty level,--- will be done this or the next century. And I am not betting that we will be able to simulate the folding of all proteins, but we will use the shape we already know. Many steps of the chemical metabolism will be simulated very roughly, in the (eternal) beginning. It might be an ethical problem, of doing this on animals. They did not say yes to the doctor, but we will do it anyway, and comp will be a practice before people begin to think on the theological implications, I'm afraid. Most humans will choose the level available in their time. It is a field where our terrestrial grand-children will never cease to progress. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: True?
On 19 Mar 2013, at 18:37, Alberto G. Corona wrote: No. What means truth value of something? in which range of phenomena? in all phenomena applicable? how you can test all phenomena applicable to a theory? That's what the theory is all about, if done honestly. you can't. of course we can. We do that since centuries, with some rigor in some filed, and less so in other field, for reason of hotness and personal fears. The only thing that you can do is to test a particular prediction that the theory predict that may never happen (Popperian falsability) OK. Feyerabend demosntrated that not even that is possible, or at least unique, since the perceptions or facts must be interpreted according with the theory. there is no fact that is theory-free. A fact pressuposes a theory. So a theory and their perceptions are a closed set, that may be autocoherent. OK. But note that you need arithmetic or Turing equivalent to make that precise. So there may be different theories for the same phenomena, each one with their interpreted facts, that may have some kind of morphism between them. That is evidently and pefectly exemplified now in some dualities of string theories, or between newtonian and relativistic mechanics, or in a certain way, between heliocentrism and geocentrisme. where agreeement between phenomena and ptolemaic theory, in the case of heliocentrism, is maintained at the cost of a more complicated theory. And in computer science, where you can see all first order specification of any Turing universal system as a theory (of everything). Then, to escape the Feyerabend trap, there is necessary additional criteria, such is the economy of axioms or the Occam Razor as criteria for theory acceptance. Fortunately it works, because it seems that we live in a simple, mathematical universe, which is amazing per se. Locally, but then comp explains the remative importance of the little numbers, and the less little numbers, ... About opinions: But all that one may know, even the facts, are subjective perceptions. But opinions are about internal subjective perceptions, That there are no scientific theory about some subjective perceptions (some internal ones) does not say that these subjective perceptions can never be objects of scientific study. Totally agree. Simply it means that at this historical moment there is no methods (or there is resistance to them, since the rejection of common sense) that would make them testable and scientific. Well, with comp there is. See my url for links, but that is what I explain here. The discovery of the universal numbers/machines makes that possible. We can derive physics from computer science + some modal logic of knowledge, and compare with the facts. Bruno 2013/3/19 Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com On Friday, March 8, 2013 11:11:38 PM UTC-5, Stephen Paul King wrote: On 3/8/2013 11:08 PM, Stephen P. King wrote: Hi, Is the following a sound claim? ...scientifically meaningful propositions are questions about the past, the present, the future, or the eternal laws that: might in principle be both false and true admit a method, at least in principle, to evaluate their truth values. -- Is the following a sound claim? ...examples of propositions that don't belong to science because one of the disqualifying conditions below holds: they're purely mathematical in character so they require no empirical input at all they're statements about fictional objects such as Hamlet that can't be decided from the only available data, in this case the text of Hamlet (there's no real Hamlet offering additional data) they depend on subjective opinions and preferences -- They sound ok to me. Subjective opinions should not be included when the topic of consideration is subjectivity itself, but they should be understood as expressions of subjective phenomena. Craig Onward! Stephen PS, I am quoting Sean Carroll -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- Alberto. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: G.K. Chesterton on Materialism
On Tuesday, March 19, 2013 1:38:21 PM UTC-4, John Clark wrote: On Tue, Mar 19, 2013 at 1:13 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comjavascript: wrote: Intimate relation is not causality. The stock market has been famously been related to skirt lengths If when skirt lengths changed there was ALWAYS a change in the stock market in the same direction, and when the stock market changed there was ALWAYS a change in skirt lengths that preceded it then its true, changing the length of skirts DOES cause a change in the stock market; and if humans don't understand how a connection between the two could possibly work that's just too bad, it wouldn't make it any less true. And if all of that were true then dress designers would be the richest people the world has ever seen. They're not. I already went through this with you with the vanilla ice cream example. Correlation, even 100% correlation, does not equal causation. Two unrelated systems can both be related to a third, and I think that must be the case with neurological activity and subjective experience, where the third and fundamental system is sensory-motor capacity, or sense, from which the private and public subsystems are derived. Craig John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: G.K. Chesterton on Materialism
On 19.03.2013 19:17 Craig Weinberg said the following: On Tuesday, March 19, 2013 1:38:21 PM UTC-4, John Clark wrote: On Tue, Mar 19, 2013 at 1:13 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comjavascript: wrote: Intimate relation is not causality. The stock market has been famously been related to skirt lengths If when skirt lengths changed there was ALWAYS a change in the stock market in the same direction, and when the stock market changed there was ALWAYS a change in skirt lengths that preceded it then its true, changing the length of skirts DOES cause a change in the stock market; and if humans don't understand how a connection between the two could possibly work that's just too bad, it wouldn't make it any less true. And if all of that were true then dress designers would be the richest people the world has ever seen. They're not. I already went through this with you with the vanilla ice cream example. Correlation, even 100% correlation, does not equal causation. Two unrelated systems can both be related to a third, and I think that must be the case with neurological activity and subjective experience, where the third and fundamental system is sensory-motor capacity, or sense, from which the private and public subsystems are derived. In a way everything is just regularities. For example a good short talk in this respect Where do the Laws of Nature Come From? (Bas van Fraassen) http://www.closertotruth.com/video-profile/Where-do-the-Laws-of-Nature-Come-From-Bas-van-Fraassen-/1372 Evgenii -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: G.K. Chesterton on Materialism
On Tuesday, March 19, 2013 2:24:40 PM UTC-4, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: On 19.03.2013 19:17 Craig Weinberg said the following: On Tuesday, March 19, 2013 1:38:21 PM UTC-4, John Clark wrote: On Tue, Mar 19, 2013 at 1:13 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comjavascript: wrote: Intimate relation is not causality. The stock market has been famously been related to skirt lengths If when skirt lengths changed there was ALWAYS a change in the stock market in the same direction, and when the stock market changed there was ALWAYS a change in skirt lengths that preceded it then its true, changing the length of skirts DOES cause a change in the stock market; and if humans don't understand how a connection between the two could possibly work that's just too bad, it wouldn't make it any less true. And if all of that were true then dress designers would be the richest people the world has ever seen. They're not. I already went through this with you with the vanilla ice cream example. Correlation, even 100% correlation, does not equal causation. Two unrelated systems can both be related to a third, and I think that must be the case with neurological activity and subjective experience, where the third and fundamental system is sensory-motor capacity, or sense, from which the private and public subsystems are derived. In a way everything is just regularities. For example a good short talk in this respect Where do the Laws of Nature Come From? (Bas van Fraassen) http://www.closertotruth.com/video-profile/Where-do-the-Laws-of-Nature-Come-From-Bas-van-Fraassen-/1372 Nice. I agree with everything they are saying (well, mainly because it agrees with what I have been saying...especially about symmetry :) Thanks, Craig Evgenii -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Losing Control
On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 3:11 AM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: We need to agree on terminology if we're going to have a discussion at all. Have aliens visited the Earth? We need to agree that an alien is a being born on another planet. It doesn't mean we agree on the facts, but we need to at least speak the same language! I'm not opposed to agreeing on terminology, but that means we both agree, not that I agree to your terms. I'll agree on your terms, but you have to make it explicit. So, do you believe that it possible that an entity which is deterministic from a third person perspective could be conscious, or do you believe that an entity which is deterministic from a third person perspective could not possibly be conscious? Yes, I think all deterministic looking systems represent sensory-motor participation of some kind, but not necessarily on the level that we assume. What we see as a cloud may have sensory-motor participation as droplets of water molecules, and as a wisp in the atmosphere as a whole, but not at all as a coherent cloud that we perceive. The cloud is a human scale emblem, not the native entity. The native awareness may reside in a much faster or much slower frequency range or sample rate than our own, so there is little hope of our relating to it personally. It's like Flatland only with perceptual relativity rather than quant dimension. I'm not completely sure but I think you've just said the brain could be deterministic and still be conscious. This is also why computers are not conscious. The native entity is microelectronic or geological, not mechanical. The machine as a whole is again an emblem, not an organic, self-invested whole. I don't understand what you think the fundamental difference is between a brain, a cloud and a computer. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Mind is a quantum computer
On Tue, Mar 19, 2013 at 05:05:25PM +0100, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 19 Mar 2013, at 16:52, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Tue, Mar 19, 2013 at 2:06 AM, Russell Standish as a quantum computer, since random oracles are another way of bridging computational complexity classes. My point to Russell was that a random oracle is less powerful than a quantum computer, even if the contrary is correct (a quantum computer can simulate a random oracle, in principle). To be fair, I never claimed that random oracle computers are indistingushable from quantum computers. My point was a nod to the NP=P result in computers with random oracles, an article you pointed me to. In fact any model of computation that provides a way of computing something that is physically impossible with the universes resources for classical computing would provide a means of explaining that result (assuming it ever arises). We don't know that quantum computing and random oracles exhaust the possibiltiies. My point to Roger was just that it is doubtful that the brain is a quantum computer, for theoretical and experimental reason. Yes,of course. Sufficiently doubtful that it would be a career limiting move to go hunting for prodgies who can perform these arithmetical operations faster than the fastest possible classical computer. -- 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 unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Losing Control
On Tuesday, March 19, 2013 5:37:34 PM UTC-4, stathisp wrote: On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 3:11 AM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comjavascript: wrote: We need to agree on terminology if we're going to have a discussion at all. Have aliens visited the Earth? We need to agree that an alien is a being born on another planet. It doesn't mean we agree on the facts, but we need to at least speak the same language! I'm not opposed to agreeing on terminology, but that means we both agree, not that I agree to your terms. I'll agree on your terms, but you have to make it explicit. My terms are: Super-Personal Intentional (Intuition) | | | unintentional (determinism) +-- unintentional (random) | | | Sub-Personal Intentional (Instinct) + = Free will = Personal Intentional (Voluntary Preference) The x axis = Impersonal So, do you believe that it possible that an entity which is deterministic from a third person perspective could be conscious, or do you believe that an entity which is deterministic from a third person perspective could not possibly be conscious? Yes, I think all deterministic looking systems represent sensory-motor participation of some kind, but not necessarily on the level that we assume. What we see as a cloud may have sensory-motor participation as droplets of water molecules, and as a wisp in the atmosphere as a whole, but not at all as a coherent cloud that we perceive. The cloud is a human scale emblem, not the native entity. The native awareness may reside in a much faster or much slower frequency range or sample rate than our own, so there is little hope of our relating to it personally. It's like Flatland only with perceptual relativity rather than quant dimension. I'm not completely sure but I think you've just said the brain could be deterministic and still be conscious. What looks deterministic is not conscious, but what is consciousness can have be represented publicly by activity which looks deterministic to us. Nothing is actually, cosmically deterministic, only habitual. This is also why computers are not conscious. The native entity is microelectronic or geological, not mechanical. The machine as a whole is again an emblem, not an organic, self-invested whole. I don't understand what you think the fundamental difference is between a brain, a cloud and a computer. A brain is part of an animal's body, which is the public representation of an animal's lifetime. It is composed of cells which are the public representation of microbiological experiences. A cloud is part of an atmosphere, which is the public representation of some scale of experience - could be geological, galactic, molecular...who knows. A computer is an assembly of objects being employed by a foreign agency for its own motives. The objects each have their own history and nature, so that they relate to each other on a very limited and lowest common denominator range of coherence. It is a room full or blind people who don't speak the same language, jostling each other around rhythmically because that's all they can do. The brain and body are a four billion year old highly integrated civilization with thousands of specific common histories. The cloud is more like farmland, passively cycling through organic phases. Craig -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Losing Control
On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 9:01 AM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: I'll agree on your terms, but you have to make it explicit. My terms are: Super-Personal Intentional (Intuition) | | | unintentional (determinism) +-- unintentional (random) | | | Sub-Personal Intentional (Instinct) + = Free will = Personal Intentional (Voluntary Preference) The x axis = Impersonal I don't think these are definitions, they are arguments. A definition of intentional in the common sense does not normally include neither determined nor random. You should start with the normal definition then show that it could be neither determined nor random. It is a serious problem in a debate if someone surreptitiously puts their conclusion into the definition of the terms. So, do you believe that it possible that an entity which is deterministic from a third person perspective could be conscious, or do you believe that an entity which is deterministic from a third person perspective could not possibly be conscious? Yes, I think all deterministic looking systems represent sensory-motor participation of some kind, but not necessarily on the level that we assume. What we see as a cloud may have sensory-motor participation as droplets of water molecules, and as a wisp in the atmosphere as a whole, but not at all as a coherent cloud that we perceive. The cloud is a human scale emblem, not the native entity. The native awareness may reside in a much faster or much slower frequency range or sample rate than our own, so there is little hope of our relating to it personally. It's like Flatland only with perceptual relativity rather than quant dimension. I'm not completely sure but I think you've just said the brain could be deterministic and still be conscious. What looks deterministic is not conscious, but what is consciousness can have be represented publicly by activity which looks deterministic to us. Nothing is actually, cosmically deterministic, only habitual. If something conscious can look deterministic in every empirical test then that's as good as saying that the brain could be deterministic. A computer is deterministic in every empirical test but you could also say without fear of contradiction that it is not actually, cosmically deterministic, only habitual. This is also why computers are not conscious. The native entity is microelectronic or geological, not mechanical. The machine as a whole is again an emblem, not an organic, self-invested whole. I don't understand what you think the fundamental difference is between a brain, a cloud and a computer. A brain is part of an animal's body, which is the public representation of an animal's lifetime. It is composed of cells which are the public representation of microbiological experiences. A cloud is part of an atmosphere, which is the public representation of some scale of experience - could be geological, galactic, molecular...who knows. A computer is an assembly of objects being employed by a foreign agency for its own motives. The objects each have their own history and nature, so that they relate to each other on a very limited and lowest common denominator range of coherence. It is a room full or blind people who don't speak the same language, jostling each other around rhythmically because that's all they can do. The brain and body are a four billion year old highly integrated civilization with thousands of specific common histories. The cloud is more like farmland, passively cycling through organic phases. I don't see the relevance of history here. How would it make any difference to me if the atoms in my body were put there yesterday by a fantastically improbably whirlwind? I'd still feel basically the same, though I might have some issues if I learned of my true origin. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
A philosopher making the Duplication argument
http://www.closertotruth.com/video-profile/What-is-the-Nature-of-Personal-Identity-Peter-van-Inwagen-/176 -- Onward! Stephen -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: True?
On 3/19/2013 10:37 AM, Alberto G. Corona wrote: No. What means truth value of something? in which range of phenomena? in all phenomena applicable? how you can test all phenomena applicable to a theory? you can't. The only thing that you can do is to test a particular prediction that the theory predict that may never happen (Popperian falsability) Feyerabend demosntrated that not even that is possible, or at least unique, since the perceptions or facts must be interpreted according with the theory. there is no fact that is theory-free. A fact pressuposes a theory. So a theory and their perceptions are a closed set, that may be autocoherent. So there may be different theories for the same phenomena, each one with their interpreted facts, that may have some kind of morphism between them. That is evidently and pefectly exemplified now in some dualities of string theories, or between newtonian and relativistic mechanics, or in a certain way, between heliocentrism and geocentrisme. where agreeement between phenomena and ptolemaic theory, in the case of heliocentrism, is maintained at the cost of a more complicated theory. Then, to escape the Feyerabend trap, there is necessary additional criteria, such is the economy of axioms or the Occam Razor as criteria for theory acceptance. Fortunately it works, because it seems that we live in a simple, mathematical universe, which is amazing per se. Of course it works in the sense that the selected theory will save the facts, because you only consider theories that are not contradicted by the facts - and if you are fortunate enough to have more than one, then you consider Occams razor and esthetic criteria. But you don't have to throw out all but one. You use esthetic criteria just to decide which theory is most likely to lead further. A theory suggests new tests and more comprehensive theories, so in general all of them: string-theory, loop-quantum-gravity, causal sets, are pursued by different people. It is neither necessary or desirable to choose one and nominate it THE TRUTH. Brent About opinions: But all that one may know, even the facts, are subjective perceptions. But opinions are about internal subjective perceptions, That there are no scientific theory about some subjective perceptions (some internal ones) does not say that these subjective perceptions can never be objects of scientific study. Simply it means that at this historical moment there is no methods (or there is resistance to them, since the rejection of common sense) that would make them testable and scientific. 2013/3/19 Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com mailto:whatsons...@gmail.com On Friday, March 8, 2013 11:11:38 PM UTC-5, Stephen Paul King wrote: On 3/8/2013 11:08 PM, Stephen P. King wrote: Hi, Is the following a sound claim? ...scientifically meaningful propositions are questions about the past, the present, the future, or the eternal laws that: * might in principle be both false and true * admit a method, at least in principle, to evaluate their truth values. -- Is the following a sound claim? ...examples of propositions that don't belong to science because one of the disqualifying conditions below holds: * they're purely mathematical in character so they require no empirical input at all * they're statements about fictional objects such as Hamlet that can't be decided from the only available data, in this case the text of Hamlet (there's no real Hamlet offering additional data) * they depend on subjective opinions and preferences -- They sound ok to me. Subjective opinions should not be included when the topic of consideration is subjectivity itself, but they should be understood as expressions of subjective phenomena. Craig Onward! Stephen PS, I am quotingSean Carroll http://preposterousuniverse.com/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com mailto:everything-list%2bunsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- Alberto. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at
Re: Mind is a quantum computer
On 3/19/2013 11:00 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 19 Mar 2013, at 18:35, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 19 Mar 2013, at 17:34, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: snip (see the preview post) As an example, I could point you to the Genome Wager between Lewis Wolpert and Rupert Sheldrake http://www.sheldrake.org/DC/controversies/genomewager.html Make your bet. In such a form this is closer to real science, that is, to a predictive statement. That bet is far too vague for me. Define abnormalities. I bet that in 2029, they will not been able to judge the case, and will continue to disagree. I can bet that full simulation of higher mammals brain, ---glial, neuronal cells + some bacteries, at the molecular level, close to the Heisenberg uncertainty level,--- will be done this or the next century. And I am not betting that we will be able to simulate the folding of all proteins, but we will use the shape we already know. Many steps of the chemical metabolism will be simulated very roughly, in the (eternal) beginning. It might be an ethical problem, of doing this on animals. They did not say yes to the doctor, but we will do it anyway, and comp will be a practice before people begin to think on the theological implications, I'm afraid. Most humans will choose the level available in their time. It is a field where our terrestrial grand-children will never cease to progress. I think it likely that the first applications will be providing soldiers with augmented senses and communication. Just as AI research has been funded by the military. Threats of war are often used to justify bypassing ethical considerations and rushing into ill considered projects. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Losing Control
On Tuesday, March 19, 2013 6:19:22 PM UTC-4, stathisp wrote: On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 9:01 AM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comjavascript: wrote: I'll agree on your terms, but you have to make it explicit. My terms are: Super-Personal Intentional (Intuition) | | | unintentional (determinism) +-- unintentional (random) | | | Sub-Personal Intentional (Instinct) + = Free will = Personal Intentional (Voluntary Preference) The x axis = Impersonal I don't think these are definitions, they are arguments. A definition of intentional in the common sense does not normally include neither determined nor random. Whose definition are you claiming doesn't include that? Why is that arbitrary and unsupported assertion not an 'argument' but my thorough diagram is less than a 'definition'? You should start with the normal definition Fuck that, and fuck normal. then show that it could be neither determined nor random. It is a serious problem in a debate if someone surreptitiously puts their conclusion into the definition of the terms. It is not a problem. All definitions are terms reflecting conclusions. You don't have to agree with my terms, but there is no basis to assert that there is some objective normalcy which they fail to fulfill. My terms are a plausible definition of the actual phenomena we are discussing, and that is the only consideration that I intend to recognize. So, do you believe that it possible that an entity which is deterministic from a third person perspective could be conscious, or do you believe that an entity which is deterministic from a third person perspective could not possibly be conscious? Yes, I think all deterministic looking systems represent sensory-motor participation of some kind, but not necessarily on the level that we assume. What we see as a cloud may have sensory-motor participation as droplets of water molecules, and as a wisp in the atmosphere as a whole, but not at all as a coherent cloud that we perceive. The cloud is a human scale emblem, not the native entity. The native awareness may reside in a much faster or much slower frequency range or sample rate than our own, so there is little hope of our relating to it personally. It's like Flatland only with perceptual relativity rather than quant dimension. I'm not completely sure but I think you've just said the brain could be deterministic and still be conscious. What looks deterministic is not conscious, but what is consciousness can have be represented publicly by activity which looks deterministic to us. Nothing is actually, cosmically deterministic, only habitual. If something conscious can look deterministic in every empirical test then that's as good as saying that the brain could be deterministic. No, because empirical tests are third person and consciousness is not. A computer is deterministic in every empirical test but you could also say without fear of contradiction that it is not actually, cosmically deterministic, only habitual. It could be in theory, but in fact, computers prove to be less than sentient in every way. This is also why computers are not conscious. The native entity is microelectronic or geological, not mechanical. The machine as a whole is again an emblem, not an organic, self-invested whole. I don't understand what you think the fundamental difference is between a brain, a cloud and a computer. A brain is part of an animal's body, which is the public representation of an animal's lifetime. It is composed of cells which are the public representation of microbiological experiences. A cloud is part of an atmosphere, which is the public representation of some scale of experience - could be geological, galactic, molecular...who knows. A computer is an assembly of objects being employed by a foreign agency for its own motives. The objects each have their own history and nature, so that they relate to each other on a very limited and lowest common denominator range of coherence. It is a room full or blind people who don't speak the same language, jostling each other around rhythmically because that's all they can do. The brain and body are a four billion year old highly integrated civilization with thousands of specific common histories. The cloud is more
Re: True?
On 3/19/2013 6:29 PM, meekerdb wrote: Of course it works in the sense that the selected theory will save the facts, because you only consider theories that are not contradicted by the facts - and if you are fortunate enough to have more than one, then you consider Occams razor and esthetic criteria. But you don't have to throw out all but one. You use esthetic criteria just to decide which theory is most likely to lead further. A theory suggests new tests and more comprehensive theories, so in general all of them: string-theory, loop-quantum-gravity, causal sets, are pursued by different people. It is neither necessary or desirable to choose one and nominate it THE TRUTH. Brent Amen! -- Onward! Stephen -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Losing Control
On 3/19/2013 3:19 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 9:01 AM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: I'll agree on your terms, but you have to make it explicit. My terms are: Super-Personal Intentional (Intuition) | | | unintentional (determinism) +-- unintentional (random) | | | Sub-Personal Intentional (Instinct) + = Free will = Personal Intentional (Voluntary Preference) The x axis = Impersonal I don't think these are definitions, they are arguments. A definition of intentional in the common sense does not normally include neither determined nor random. You should start with the normal definition then show that it could be neither determined nor random. It is a serious problem in a debate if someone surreptitiously puts their conclusion into the definition of the terms. As a diagram of different action it implies there are, in each quadrant, actions that are both Intentional and unintentional. As I said there's no point in arguing with someone who contradicts himself. Brent So, do you believe that it possible that an entity which is deterministic from a third person perspective could be conscious, or do you believe that an entity which is deterministic from a third person perspective could not possibly be conscious? Yes, I think all deterministic looking systems represent sensory-motor participation of some kind, but not necessarily on the level that we assume. What we see as a cloud may have sensory-motor participation as droplets of water molecules, and as a wisp in the atmosphere as a whole, but not at all as a coherent cloud that we perceive. The cloud is a human scale emblem, not the native entity. The native awareness may reside in a much faster or much slower frequency range or sample rate than our own, so there is little hope of our relating to it personally. It's like Flatland only with perceptual relativity rather than quant dimension. I'm not completely sure but I think you've just said the brain could be deterministic and still be conscious. What looks deterministic is not conscious, but what is consciousness can have be represented publicly by activity which looks deterministic to us. Nothing is actually, cosmically deterministic, only habitual. If something conscious can look deterministic in every empirical test then that's as good as saying that the brain could be deterministic. A computer is deterministic in every empirical test but you could also say without fear of contradiction that it is not actually, cosmically deterministic, only habitual. This is also why computers are not conscious. The native entity is microelectronic or geological, not mechanical. The machine as a whole is again an emblem, not an organic, self-invested whole. I don't understand what you think the fundamental difference is between a brain, a cloud and a computer. A brain is part of an animal's body, which is the public representation of an animal's lifetime. It is composed of cells which are the public representation of microbiological experiences. A cloud is part of an atmosphere, which is the public representation of some scale of experience - could be geological, galactic, molecular...who knows. A computer is an assembly of objects being employed by a foreign agency for its own motives. The objects each have their own history and nature, so that they relate to each other on a very limited and lowest common denominator range of coherence. It is a room full or blind people who don't speak the same language, jostling each other around rhythmically because that's all they can do. The brain and body are a four billion year old highly integrated civilization with thousands of specific common histories. The cloud is more like farmland, passively cycling through organic phases. I don't see the relevance of history here. How would it make any difference to me if the atoms in my body were put there yesterday by a fantastically improbably whirlwind? I'd still feel basically the same, though I might have some issues if I learned of my true origin. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Losing Control
On Tuesday, March 19, 2013 7:14:14 PM UTC-4, Brent wrote: On 3/19/2013 3:19 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 9:01 AM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comjavascript: wrote: I'll agree on your terms, but you have to make it explicit. My terms are: Super-Personal Intentional (Intuition) | | | unintentional (determinism) +-- unintentional (random) | | | Sub-Personal Intentional (Instinct) + = Free will = Personal Intentional (Voluntary Preference) The x axis = Impersonal I don't think these are definitions, they are arguments. A definition of intentional in the common sense does not normally include neither determined nor random. You should start with the normal definition then show that it could be neither determined nor random. It is a serious problem in a debate if someone surreptitiously puts their conclusion into the definition of the terms. As a diagram of different action it implies there are, in each quadrant, actions that are both Intentional and unintentional. As I said there's no point in arguing with someone who contradicts himself. All actions that we take are both intentional and unintentional to different degrees. Obviously. We can have a instinct which is highly intentional but influenced by physiological conditions which are unintentional. We can have a personal preference which is intentional but rooted in an arbitrary whim. Human intention is a multilayered, multi-level quality, not a binary distinction. Craig Brent So, do you believe that it possible that an entity which is deterministic from a third person perspective could be conscious, or do you believe that an entity which is deterministic from a third person perspective could not possibly be conscious? Yes, I think all deterministic looking systems represent sensory-motor participation of some kind, but not necessarily on the level that we assume. What we see as a cloud may have sensory-motor participation as droplets of water molecules, and as a wisp in the atmosphere as a whole, but not at all as a coherent cloud that we perceive. The cloud is a human scale emblem, not the native entity. The native awareness may reside in a much faster or much slower frequency range or sample rate than our own, so there is little hope of our relating to it personally. It's like Flatland only with perceptual relativity rather than quant dimension. I'm not completely sure but I think you've just said the brain could be deterministic and still be conscious. What looks deterministic is not conscious, but what is consciousness can have be represented publicly by activity which looks deterministic to us. Nothing is actually, cosmically deterministic, only habitual. If something conscious can look deterministic in every empirical test then that's as good as saying that the brain could be deterministic. A computer is deterministic in every empirical test but you could also say without fear of contradiction that it is not actually, cosmically deterministic, only habitual. This is also why computers are not conscious. The native entity is microelectronic or geological, not mechanical. The machine as a whole is again an emblem, not an organic, self-invested whole. I don't understand what you think the fundamental difference is between a brain, a cloud and a computer. A brain is part of an animal's body, which is the public representation of an animal's lifetime. It is composed of cells which are the public representation of microbiological experiences. A cloud is part of an atmosphere, which is the public representation of some scale of experience - could be geological, galactic, molecular...who knows. A computer is an assembly of objects being employed by a foreign agency for its own motives. The objects each have their own history and nature, so that they relate to each other on a very limited and lowest common denominator range of coherence. It is a room full or blind people who don't speak the same language, jostling each other around rhythmically because that's all they can do. The brain and body are a four billion year old highly integrated civilization with thousands of specific common histories. The cloud is more like farmland, passively cycling through organic phases. I don't see the relevance of history
Re: Losing Control
On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 10:01 AM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: On Tuesday, March 19, 2013 6:19:22 PM UTC-4, stathisp wrote: On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 9:01 AM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.com wrote: I'll agree on your terms, but you have to make it explicit. My terms are: Super-Personal Intentional (Intuition) | | | unintentional (determinism) +-- unintentional (random) | | | Sub-Personal Intentional (Instinct) + = Free will = Personal Intentional (Voluntary Preference) The x axis = Impersonal I don't think these are definitions, they are arguments. A definition of intentional in the common sense does not normally include neither determined nor random. Whose definition are you claiming doesn't include that? Why is that arbitrary and unsupported assertion not an 'argument' but my thorough diagram is less than a 'definition'? You should start with the normal definition Fuck that, and fuck normal. then show that it could be neither determined nor random. It is a serious problem in a debate if someone surreptitiously puts their conclusion into the definition of the terms. It is not a problem. All definitions are terms reflecting conclusions. You don't have to agree with my terms, but there is no basis to assert that there is some objective normalcy which they fail to fulfill. My terms are a plausible definition of the actual phenomena we are discussing, and that is the only consideration that I intend to recognize. All I am saying is that you should start with something that is not already loaded with your conclusion, then reach your conclusion through argument. If I intend to do something I do it because I want to do it. On the face of it, I could want to do it and do it whether my brain is determined or random. You can make the case that this is impossible, but you have to actually make the case, not sneak it into the definition. What looks deterministic is not conscious, but what is consciousness can have be represented publicly by activity which looks deterministic to us. Nothing is actually, cosmically deterministic, only habitual. If something conscious can look deterministic in every empirical test then that's as good as saying that the brain could be deterministic. No, because empirical tests are third person and consciousness is not. We are talking about third person observable determinism only. The brain could be third person observable deterministic and still conscious. A computer is deterministic in every empirical test but you could also say without fear of contradiction that it is not actually, cosmically deterministic, only habitual. It could be in theory, but in fact, computers prove to be less than sentient in every way. Perhaps they are as a matter of fact, but not as a theoretical requirement, that is the point. I don't see the relevance of history here. How would it make any difference to me if the atoms in my body were put there yesterday by a fantastically improbably whirlwind? Because the atoms are only tokens of a history. It's like if you dropped a bunch of infants into New York City. Even if they had adult bodies, without the history of their experience, they have no way to integrate their perceptions. I'd still feel basically the same, though I might have some issues if I learned of my true origin. That's because you think that the universe is a place filled with objects, but I don't think that is possible. Objects are amputated experiences. So you claim that if the hydrogen atoms in my body were replaced with other hydrogen atoms I would stop being conscious? -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Losing Control
On Tuesday, March 19, 2013 8:09:47 PM UTC-4, stathisp wrote: On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 10:01 AM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comjavascript: wrote: On Tuesday, March 19, 2013 6:19:22 PM UTC-4, stathisp wrote: On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 9:01 AM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.com wrote: I'll agree on your terms, but you have to make it explicit. My terms are: Super-Personal Intentional (Intuition) | | | unintentional (determinism) +-- unintentional (random) | | | Sub-Personal Intentional (Instinct) + = Free will = Personal Intentional (Voluntary Preference) The x axis = Impersonal I don't think these are definitions, they are arguments. A definition of intentional in the common sense does not normally include neither determined nor random. Whose definition are you claiming doesn't include that? Why is that arbitrary and unsupported assertion not an 'argument' but my thorough diagram is less than a 'definition'? You should start with the normal definition Fuck that, and fuck normal. then show that it could be neither determined nor random. It is a serious problem in a debate if someone surreptitiously puts their conclusion into the definition of the terms. It is not a problem. All definitions are terms reflecting conclusions. You don't have to agree with my terms, but there is no basis to assert that there is some objective normalcy which they fail to fulfill. My terms are a plausible definition of the actual phenomena we are discussing, and that is the only consideration that I intend to recognize. All I am saying is that you should start with something that is not already loaded with your conclusion, then reach your conclusion through argument. If I intend to do something I do it because I want to do it. On the face of it, I could want to do it and do it whether my brain is determined or random. You can make the case that this is impossible, but you have to actually make the case, not sneak it into the definition. I'm not trying to sneak anything into the definition. The case that I make is that while it could be locally true that a given person could theoretically want something intentionally even if their brain were completely driven by unintentional influences, it doesn't make sense that there could be any such thing as 'intentional' if the entire universe were driven exclusively by unintentional influences. It is like saying that a dog could think that it is a cat if cats exist, but if you define the universe as having no cats, then there can be no such thing as cat-anything. No thoughts about cats, no cat-like feelings, no pictures of cats, etc. In an unintentional universe, intention is inconceivable in every way. What looks deterministic is not conscious, but what is consciousness can have be represented publicly by activity which looks deterministic to us. Nothing is actually, cosmically deterministic, only habitual. If something conscious can look deterministic in every empirical test then that's as good as saying that the brain could be deterministic. No, because empirical tests are third person and consciousness is not. We are talking about third person observable determinism only. Who is? The brain could be third person observable deterministic and still conscious. The third person view always seems unintentional (deterministic-random). That goes along with it being a public body in space. You can't see intentions from third person. A computer is deterministic in every empirical test but you could also say without fear of contradiction that it is not actually, cosmically deterministic, only habitual. It could be in theory, but in fact, computers prove to be less than sentient in every way. Perhaps they are as a matter of fact, but not as a theoretical requirement, that is the point. But the fact has to be understood before a theory can be worthwhile. I have a theory which explains the fact and it leads me to say that no assembled machine can ever have an experience which is more than the sum of its parts. I don't see the relevance of history here. How would it make any difference to me if the atoms in my body were put there yesterday by a fantastically improbably whirlwind? Because the atoms are only tokens of a history. It's like if you dropped a bunch
Re: G.K. Chesterton on Materialism
On Tue, Mar 19, 2013 at 2:17 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote: Correlation, even 100% correlation, does not equal causation. BULLSHIT! If when X is changed there is ALWAYS a change in Y in the same direction, and when Y changes you can ALWAYS find a change in X that preceded it, then X causes Y. IT'S WHAT THE WORD CAUSES MEANS! Two unrelated systems can both be related to a third, If they are both related to the same thing then they are not unrelated. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.