Re: Olympia's Beautiful and Profound Mind
Dear Stephen, The Pratt quote below shows disdain for historical solutions to the mind-body problem, such as Descartes' theory that the two interact through the pineal gland, but goes on to say that this is no reason to throw out dualism altogether. Now, I have to admit, despite spending my adolescence in the thrall of logical positivism (I still think A.J. Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic is one of the great masterpieces of 20th century English nonfictional prose), that there is something irreducible about 1st person experience, forever beyond 3rd person verification or falsification; a blind man might learn everything about visual perception, but still have no idea what it is like to see. However, what reason is there to extrapolate from this that there must be some special explanation for the interaction between body and mind? What do you lose if you simply accept, as per Gilbert Ryle, that the mind is what the brain does? Otherwise, you could seek a special explanation for an electronic calculator's matter/mathematics dualism, or a falling stone's matter/energy dualism, or any number of similar examples. Occam's razor would suggest that such complications are unnecessary. --Stathis Papaioannou Dear Bruno, As for your showng of necessity of a 1st personviewpoint , I still do not understand your argument and that is a failure on my part. ;-) As to Pratt's ideas, let me quote directly from one of his papers: http://boole.stanford.edu/pub/ratmech.pdf Some of the questions however remain philosophically challenging even today. A central tenet of Cartesianism is mind-body dualism, the principle that mind and body are the two basic substances of which reality is constituted. Each can exist separately, body as realized in inanimate objects and lower forms of life, mind as realized in abstract concepts and mathematical certainties. According to Descartes the two come together only in humans, where they undergo causal interaction, the mind reflecting on sensory perceptions while orchestrating the physical motions of the limbs and other organs of the body. The crucial problem for the causal interaction theory of mind and body was its mechanism: how did it work? Descartes hypothesized the pineal gland, near the center of the brain, as the seat of causal interaction. The objection was raised that the mental and physical planes were of such a fundamentally dissimilar character as to preclude any ordinary notion of causal interaction. But the part about a separate yet joint reality of mind and body seemed less objectionable, and various commentators offered their own explanations for the undeniably strong correlations of mental and physical phenomena. Malebranche insisted that these were only correlations and not true interactions, whose appearance of interaction was arranged in every detail by God by divine intervention on every occasion of correlation, a theory that naturally enough came to be called occasionalism. Spinoza freed God from this demanding schedule by organizing the parallel behavior of mind and matter as a preordained apartheid emanating from God as the source of everything. Leibniz postulated monads, cosmic chronometers miraculously keeping perfect time with each other yet not interacting. These patently untestable answers only served to give dualism a bad name, and it gave way in due course to one or another form of monism: either mind or matter but not both as distinct real substances. Berkeley opined that matter did not exist and that the universe consisted solely of ideas. Hobbes ventured the opposite: mind did not exist except as an artifact of matter. Russell [Rus27] embraced neutral monism, which reconciled Berkeley's and Hobbes' viewpoints as compatible dual accounts of a common neutral Leibnizian monad. This much of the history of mind-body dualism will suffice as a convenient point of reference for the sequel. R. Watson's Britannica article [Wat86] is a conveniently accessible starting point for further reading. The thesis of this paper is that mind-body dualism can be made to work via a theory that we greatly prefer to its monist competitors. Reflecting an era of reduced expectations for the superiority of humans, we have implemented causal interaction not with the pineal gland but with machinery freely available to all classical entities, whether newt, pet rock, electron, or theorem (but not quantum mechanical wavefunction, which is sibling to if not an actual instance of our machinery). and We have advanced a mechanism for the causal interaction of mind and body, and argued that separate additional mechanisms for body-body and mind-mind interaction can be dispensed with; mind-body interaction is all that is needed. This is a very different outcome from that contemplated by 17th century Cartesianists, who took body-body and mind-mind interaction as given and who could find no satisfactory passage
What do you lose if you simply accept...
Dear Stathis, In a phrase, I would loose choice. What you are asking me is to give up any hope of understanding how my sense of being-in-the-world is related to any other phenomena in the world of experience and instead to just blindly believe some claim. Are we so frustrated that we will accept authority as a proof of our beliefs? I hope not! Pratt's disdain follows from the obvious failures of other models. It does not take a logician or mathematician or philosopher of unbelievable IQ to see that the models of monism that have been advanced have a fatal flaw: the inability to proof the necessity of epiphenomena. Maybe Bruno's theory will solve this, I hold out hope that it does; but meanwhile, why can't we consider and debate alternatives that offer a view ranging explanations and unifying threads, such as Pratt's Chu space idea? Kindest regards, Stephen - Original Message - From: Stathis Papaioannou [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: everything-list@eskimo.com Sent: Monday, May 16, 2005 2:36 AM Subject: Re: Olympia's Beautiful and Profound Mind Dear Stephen, The Pratt quote below shows disdain for historical solutions to the mind-body problem, such as Descartes' theory that the two interact through the pineal gland, but goes on to say that this is no reason to throw out dualism altogether. Now, I have to admit, despite spending my adolescence in the thrall of logical positivism (I still think A.J. Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic is one of the great masterpieces of 20th century English nonfictional prose), that there is something irreducible about 1st person experience, forever beyond 3rd person verification or falsification; a blind man might learn everything about visual perception, but still have no idea what it is like to see. However, what reason is there to extrapolate from this that there must be some special explanation for the interaction between body and mind? What do you lose if you simply accept, as per Gilbert Ryle, that the mind is what the brain does? Otherwise, you could seek a special explanation for an electronic calculator's matter/mathematics dualism, or a falling stone's matter/energy dualism, or any number of similar examples. Occam's razor would suggest that such complications are unnecessary. --Stathis Papaioannou
Re: Tipler Weighs In
Lee Corbin points to Tipler's March 2005 paper The Structure of the World From Pure Numbers: http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/0034-4885/68/4/R04 I tried to read this paper, but it was 60 pages long and extremely technical, mostly over my head. The gist of it was an updating of Tipler's Omega Point theory, advanced in his book, The Physics of Immortality. Basically the OP theory predicts, based on the assumption that the laws of physics we know today are roughly correct, that the universe must re-collapse in a special way that can't really happen naturally, hence Tipler deduces that intelligent life will survive through and guide the ultimate collapse, during which time the information content of the universe will go to infinity. The new paper proposes an updated cosmological model that includes a number of new ideas. One is that the fundamental laws of physics for the universe are infinitely complex. This is where his title comes from; he assumes that the universe is based on the mathematics of the continuum, i.e. the real numbers. In fact Tipler argues that the universe must have infinitely complex laws, basing this surprising conclusion on the Lowenheim-Skolem paradox, which says that any set of finite axioms can be fit to a mathematical object that is only countable in size. Hence technically we can't really describe the real numbers without an infinite number of axioms, and therefore if the universe is truly based on the reals, it must have laws of infinite complexity. (Otherwise the laws would equally well describe a universe based only on the integers.) Another idea Tipler proposes is that under the MWI, different universes in the multiverse will expand to different maximum sizes R before re-collapsing. The probability measure however works out to be higher with larger R, hence for any finite R the probability is 1 (i.e. certain) that our universe will be bigger than that. This is his solution to why the universe appears to be flat - it's finite in size but very very big. Although Tipler wants the laws to be infinitely complex, the physical information content of the universe should be zero, he argues, at the time of the Big Bang (this is due to the Beckenstein Bound). That means among other things there are no particles back then, and so he proposes a special field called an SU(2) gauge field which creates particles as the universe expands. He is able to sort of show that it would preferentially create matter instead of antimatter, and also that this field would be responsible for the cosmological constant which is being observed, aka negative energy. In order for the universe to re-collapse as Tipler insists it must, due to his Omega Point theory, the CC must reverse sign eventually. Tipler suggests that this will happen because life will choose to do so, and that somehow people will find a way to reverse the particle-creation effect, catalyzing the destruction of particles in such a way as to reverse the CC and cause the universe to begin to re-collapse. Yes, he's definitely full of wild ideas here. Another idea is that particle masses should not have specific, arbitrary values as most physicists believe, but rather they should take on a full range of values, from 0 to positive infinity, over the history of the universe. There is some slight observational evidence for a time-based change in the fine structure constant alpha, and Tipler points to that to buttress his theory - however the actual measured value is inconsistent with other aspects, so he has to assume that the measurements are mistaken! Another testable idea is that the cosmic microwave background radiation is not the cooled-down EM radiation from the big bang, but instead is the remnants of that SU(2) field which was responsible for particle creation. He shows that such a field would look superficially like cooled down photons, but it really is not. In particular, the photons in this special field would only interact with left handed electrons, not right handed ones. This would cause the photons to have less interaction with matter in a way which should be measurable. He uses this to solve the current puzzle of high energy cosmic rays: such rays should not exist due to interaction with microwave background photons. Tipler's alternative does not interact so well and so it would at least help to explain the problem. Overall it is quite a mixed bag of exotic ideas that I don't think physicists are going to find very convincing. The idea of infinitely complex natural laws is going to be particularly off-putting, I would imagine. However the idea that the cosmic microwave background interacts differently with matter than ordinary photons is an interesting one and might be worth investigating. It doesn't have that much connection to the rest of his theory, though. Hal Finney
RE: What do you lose if you simply accept...
Dear Stephen, I have to confess that the mathematical intricacies of Chu spaces are quite beyond me. However, this passage appears at the introduction to the cited article: We propose to reduce complex mind-body interaction to the elementary interactions of their constituents. Events of the body interact with states of the mind. This interaction has two dual forms. A physical event a in the body A impresses its occurrence on a mental state x of the mind X, written a=|x. Dually, in state x the mind infers the prior occurrence of event a, written x |= a. Tell me if I have completely misconstrued it, but it seems that this is still discussing how the two entities (mind and body) are interacting, and differs only in detail from the 17th century solutions. *Why* do you need to prove the necessity of epiphenomena, and *how* is such a proof providing any more information than the simple observation that the epiphenomena exist? You could go mad seeing dualism everywhere. If I wave my hand in a circular pattern, we have (a) the physical action of moving my hand in a circular pattern, and (b) the circular pattern. Arguably, these are two completely different things. One is an event in the physical world, and the other is a theoretical or mathematical abstraction. How is it that these two completely different entities interact? How can you prove that the physical action of moving my hand in a particular way necessitates the epiphenomenon of the circular pattern? And if you manage to explain that one, how can you explain the experience of being-a-circular-pattern from the inside, or, conversely, the non-experience of being-a-circular-pattern from the inside, whichever is the case? There comes a point where theory and explanation makes us more confused and no more informed than we were before. --Stathis In a phrase, I would loose choice. What you are asking me is to give up any hope of understanding how my sense of being-in-the-world is related to any other phenomena in the world of experience and instead to just blindly believe some claim. Are we so frustrated that we will accept authority as a proof of our beliefs? I hope not! Pratt's disdain follows from the obvious failures of other models. It does not take a logician or mathematician or philosopher of unbelievable IQ to see that the models of monism that have been advanced have a fatal flaw: the inability to proof the necessity of epiphenomena. Maybe Bruno's theory will solve this, I hold out hope that it does; but meanwhile, why can't we consider and debate alternatives that offer a view ranging explanations and unifying threads, such as Pratt's Chu space idea? Kindest regards, Stephen - Original Message - From: Stathis Papaioannou [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: everything-list@eskimo.com Sent: Monday, May 16, 2005 2:36 AM Subject: Re: Olympia's Beautiful and Profound Mind Dear Stephen, The Pratt quote below shows disdain for historical solutions to the mind-body problem, such as Descartes' theory that the two interact through the pineal gland, but goes on to say that this is no reason to throw out dualism altogether. Now, I have to admit, despite spending my adolescence in the thrall of logical positivism (I still think A.J. Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic is one of the great masterpieces of 20th century English nonfictional prose), that there is something irreducible about 1st person experience, forever beyond 3rd person verification or falsification; a blind man might learn everything about visual perception, but still have no idea what it is like to see. However, what reason is there to extrapolate from this that there must be some special explanation for the interaction between body and mind? What do you lose if you simply accept, as per Gilbert Ryle, that the mind is what the brain does? Otherwise, you could seek a special explanation for an electronic calculator's matter/mathematics dualism, or a falling stone's matter/energy dualism, or any number of similar examples. Occam's razor would suggest that such complications are unnecessary. --Stathis Papaioannou _ SEEK: Over 80,000 jobs across all industries at Australia's #1 job site. http://ninemsn.seek.com.au?hotmail
Re: Tipler Weighs In
Hal, Thanks for an illuminating explanation of Tipler's paper. I wonder if you and/or any other members on this list have an opinion about the validity of an article at http://www.hedweb.com/nihilism/nihilfil.htm This is a discussion of WHY DOES ANYTHING EXIST? (The author is apparently a David Pearce. There are many with that name and I am unable to determine which one.) His conclusion is that . . . the summed membership of the uncountably large set of positive and negative numbers, and every more fancy and elaborate pair of positive and negative real and imaginary etc terms, trivially and exactly cancels out to/adds up to 0. . . . Net energy etc of Multiverse = 0 = all possible outcomes. . . if, in all, there is 0, i.e no (net) properties whatsoever, then there just isn't anything substantive which needs explaining. (Please go to the URL to avoid misinterpretations which I may have introduced by my editing.) Norman Samish - Original Message - From: Hal Finney [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: everything-list@eskimo.com; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, May 16, 2005 5:16 PM Subject: Re: Tipler Weighs In Lee Corbin points to Tipler's March 2005 paper The Structure of the World From Pure Numbers: http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/0034-4885/68/4/R04 I tried to read this paper, but it was 60 pages long and extremely technical, mostly over my head. The gist of it was an updating of Tipler's Omega Point theory, advanced in his book, The Physics of Immortality. Basically the OP theory predicts, based on the assumption that the laws of physics we know today are roughly correct, that the universe must re-collapse in a special way that can't really happen naturally, hence Tipler deduces that intelligent life will survive through and guide the ultimate collapse, during which time the information content of the universe will go to infinity. The new paper proposes an updated cosmological model that includes a number of new ideas. One is that the fundamental laws of physics for the universe are infinitely complex. This is where his title comes from; he assumes that the universe is based on the mathematics of the continuum, i.e. the real numbers. In fact Tipler argues that the universe must have infinitely complex laws, basing this surprising conclusion on the Lowenheim-Skolem paradox, which says that any set of finite axioms can be fit to a mathematical object that is only countable in size. Hence technically we can't really describe the real numbers without an infinite number of axioms, and therefore if the universe is truly based on the reals, it must have laws of infinite complexity. (Otherwise the laws would equally well describe a universe based only on the integers.) Another idea Tipler proposes is that under the MWI, different universes in the multiverse will expand to different maximum sizes R before re-collapsing. The probability measure however works out to be higher with larger R, hence for any finite R the probability is 1 (i.e. certain) that our universe will be bigger than that. This is his solution to why the universe appears to be flat - it's finite in size but very very big. Although Tipler wants the laws to be infinitely complex, the physical information content of the universe should be zero, he argues, at the time of the Big Bang (this is due to the Beckenstein Bound). That means among other things there are no particles back then, and so he proposes a special field called an SU(2) gauge field which creates particles as the universe expands. He is able to sort of show that it would preferentially create matter instead of antimatter, and also that this field would be responsible for the cosmological constant (CC) which is being observed, aka negative energy. In order for the universe to re-collapse as Tipler insists it must, due to his Omega Point theory, the CC must reverse sign eventually. Tipler suggests that this will happen because life will choose to do so, and that somehow people will find a way to reverse the particle-creation effect, catalyzing the destruction of particles in such a way as to reverse the CC and cause the universe to begin to re-collapse. Yes, he's definitely full of wild ideas here. Another idea is that particle masses should not have specific, arbitrary values as most physicists believe, but rather they should take on a full range of values, from 0 to positive infinity, over the history of the universe. There is some slight observational evidence for a time-based change in the fine structure constant alpha, and Tipler points to that to buttress his theory - however the actual measured value is inconsistent with other aspects, so he has to assume that the measurements are mistaken! Another testable idea is that the cosmic microwave background radiation is not the cooled-down EM radiation from the big bang, but instead is the remnants of that SU(2) field which was responsible for particle creation. He shows that such a field would look
Measure, and Time
Brian wrote [Peter] And if Platonia exists, it already contains every string that could be output by the UD -- so what do you need a UD for? [Lee] It'll probably be retorted that it all has to do with measure, but there are lots of machines (I mean TMs) in Platonia, and lots and lots of them are a lot shorter (and so by any measure more plentiful) than the old UD. That's true, there are lots of shorter programs than the dovetailer. But how many of those short programs support conscious observers? Let's suppose you wanted to write a program that supports a conscious observer. It's going to be a very long, complicated program right? Very informationally complex. Well, I'm lazy. I would just write a program that generated all possible programs then ran them. I would then know that on some subset of those programs I've got conscious observers. My program is considerably simpler than your program for generating a conscious observer, it just takes a lot longer to run. Okay, thanks for that idea. But there is still the problem of measure to you, no? (I know Bruno has other ideas, and has explained them, and I think that there are a lot of ways people have spoken of regarding how to assign measure. Where are you?) That is, the UD will devote less than 1/10^10^10^10 of its resources to running the first conscious observer on the list of *all* TMs. On the other hand, I could believe that the rarity of a program DEVOTED TO RUNNING ME or (more regrettably, some other conscious entity) might be less than that. I.e., maybe only one in 10^^3. But more sensibly: d'you think that Schmidhuber or anyone has made a very good case why the UD would give me more runtime (i.e. observer-moments) than a specialized devoted program (which must also exist in Platonia)? So it takes much less information to compute everything than it does to compute one particular universe. I'm guessing the UD in its most compact form is the simplest program for computing a conscious observer! (know of any others?). And it is simpler than most of those bitstrings appearing in its computational history. Yes. [Lee] Well, I think that David Deutsch's version includes all our latest and best physical theories, which still includes the Schrödinger equation and other time-based foundations. I'm guessing that the universes (I mean *slices*) are real; that is, have a higher ontological status than completely unrelated snapshots. But that would be just a guess. As for me, the whole multiverse as well as any slice strongly exhibits a dependence on time. I might be misunderstanding, but neither the multiverse as a whole nor any slice of it is time-dependent. The laws of physics link snapshots of places with higher time clock readings with those with lower readings. I think that in FoR, slices *are* spacetimes, and are objectively linked together just as the pieces in a crossword puzzle are even though it's still in the can. Thus the linkage is dictated by the laws of physics. And almost all of those have this little parameter t in them. It seems to me that this might afford time a special role. But I'm still busy re-reading the chapter on Time; I know that I once agreed with every word, and thought that I understood it. But I'm a lot less sure now. Lee
Re: What do you lose if you simply accept...
Dear Stathis, Thank you for reading the paper in its entirety. Pratt's idea is very subtle but the difference between the form of dualism that he is explaining is very different from Descartes'. Pratt is considering Mind and body as process, not substance. It is the difference between a Being based paradigm and a Becoming based paradigm. Please continue and take a look at some of the other papers (http://chu.stanford.edu/ ) and notice how Category theory is being used, notice the contravariant morphisms, notice how non-well founded logic is being used. BTW, non-well founded logics handle the circularity that you appear to protest. This circularity is also a key feature that has to been explained in models of consciousness because, at a minimum, we have to explain self-awareness! Pratt doesn't seem to have address the key notion of forgetfulness in the previously referenced paper, which is necessary to deal with irreversibility, but I am sure that that will be dealt with soon enough. The interaction between the hand and the abstraction in your example [or better the information representing the physical hand] is obvious. It is not an interaction, it is an identity in the same way that there is an identification beween a physical object and the class of representations that it can have, be they bitstrings or whatever! Interactions, as Pratt explains, need to be explained between the bodies and between the minds. How is it that my mind can interact with yours, or to put it into COMP terms, how does one bitstring interact with another without some physical instantiation? The interaction problem becomes even more pronounced when we start thinking about QM systems! If you look at the formalism carefully, it is obvious that QM systems are separate from each other in such a way that even the notion of substance exchange between them will simply not work. QM systems are exactly like Leibniz' monads: windowless. Given this fact how do we propose to explain interactions in general and communication between observers in particular? We can not have theories of our universe of experience that only include a single observer! I know well about particle physics theories talking about vector bosons being exchanged but if you look carefully at the QM system involved, the vector bosons are part of the single QM system being considered and not a separate system. There are technical nuances involved here to be sure, but these ideas are not being advanced without careful consideration. I understand all too well the importance of Occam's Razor. ;-) Kindest regards, Stephen - Original Message - From: Stathis Papaioannou [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: everything-list@eskimo.com Sent: Monday, May 16, 2005 9:07 PM Subject: RE: What do you lose if you simply accept... Dear Stephen, I have to confess that the mathematical intricacies of Chu spaces are quite beyond me. However, this passage appears at the introduction to the cited article: We propose to reduce complex mind-body interaction to the elementary interactions of their constituents. Events of the body interact with states of the mind. This interaction has two dual forms. A physical event a in the body A impresses its occurrence on a mental state x of the mind X, written a=|x. Dually, in state x the mind infers the prior occurrence of event a, written x |= a. Tell me if I have completely misconstrued it, but it seems that this is still discussing how the two entities (mind and body) are interacting, and differs only in detail from the 17th century solutions. *Why* do you need to prove the necessity of epiphenomena, and *how* is such a proof providing any more information than the simple observation that the epiphenomena exist? You could go mad seeing dualism everywhere. If I wave my hand in a circular pattern, we have (a) the physical action of moving my hand in a circular pattern, and (b) the circular pattern. Arguably, these are two completely different things. One is an event in the physical world, and the other is a theoretical or mathematical abstraction. How is it that these two completely different entities interact? How can you prove that the physical action of moving my hand in a particular way necessitates the epiphenomenon of the circular pattern? And if you manage to explain that one, how can you explain the experience of being-a-circular-pattern from the inside, or, conversely, the non-experience of being-a-circular-pattern from the inside, whichever is the case? There comes a point where theory and explanation makes us more confused and no more informed than we were before. --Stathis
Re: Tipler Weighs In
Dear Stephen, Pearce spends considerable time in his thesis discussing the harm that Brave New World has done to Utopian causes. I rather suspect that Huxley would not have been disapproving, given his libertarian sympathies and fondness for hallucinogens in his later work. Orwell is completely different; there's nothing even superficially pleasant about his dystopian vision. The others I would have to look up; do you mean Frank Dune Herbert or another Frank Herbert? Pearce's thesis is freely available on his website, and it really is very well written, addressing just about every possible objection before you think of it. --Stathis Hi Stathis, Nice review! I wonder about Pierce, has he read Huxley or Orwell? He and all should read the advice of Eric Hoffer, Frank Herbert and others, warning us of the dangers of trying to push utopias. More modern treatments include Philip Ball's Critical Mass. Stephen - Original Message - From: Stathis Papaioannou [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; everything-list@eskimo.com Sent: Monday, May 16, 2005 10:57 PM Subject: Re: Tipler Weighs In David Pearce is a British philosopher with Utilitarian leanings, and his extensive HedWeb site has been around for many years. His main thesis is contained in a book-length article called The Hedonistic Imperative, in which he argues that the aim of civilization should be the ultimate elimination of all suffering in sentient life. He proposes that this be done not primarily through traditional methods, such as banning animal cruelty (although he has much to say about that as well), but by directly accessing and altering the neural mechanisms responsible for suffering, through pharmacological and neurological means initially, and eventually through genetic engineering so that no organism is physically capable of experiencing suffering. Pearce's thesis does not really address the next stage after neuroengineering often discussed on this list, namely living as uploaded minds on a computer network. The interesting question arises of how we would (or should) spend our time in this state. It would be a simple matter of programming to eliminate suffering and spend eternity (or however long it lasts) in a state of heavenly bliss. The obvious response to such a proposal is that perpetual bliss would be boring, and leave no room for motivation, curiosity, progress, etc. But boredom is just another adverse experience which could be simply eliminated if you have access to the source code. And if you think about it, even such tasks as participating in discussions such as the present one are only really motivated by anticipation of the complex pleasure gained from it; if you could get the same effect or better, directly, with no adverse consequences, why would you waste your time doing it the hard way? --Stathis Papaioannou _ SEEK: Over 80,000 jobs across all industries at Australia's #1 job site. http://ninemsn.seek.com.au?hotmail
WHY DOES ANYTHING EXIST
Stathis, Thanks for your identification of David Pearce - I see he was co-founder (with Nick Bostrom) of the World Transhumanist Association. I have a lot of respect for Bostrom's views. However, it's Pearce's viewpoint about WHY DOES ANYTHING EXIST that I'm interested in. This viewpoint is expressed at http://www.hedweb.com/nihilism/nihilfil.htm His conclusion seems to be that everything in the multiverse adds up to zero, so there are no loose ends that need explaining. Even if true, this doesn't answer the WHY question, however. If you or others have opinions on WHY, I'd like to hear them. I wonder if your opinion will be that no opinion is possible? Norman Samish ~` - Original Message - From: Stathis Papaioannou [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; everything-list@eskimo.com; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, May 16, 2005 9:28 PM Subject: Re: Tipler Weighs In Dear Stephen, Pearce spends considerable time in his thesis discussing the harm that Brave New World has done to Utopian causes. I rather suspect that Huxley would not have been disapproving, given his libertarian sympathies and fondness for hallucinogens in his later work. Orwell is completely different; there's nothing even superficially pleasant about his dystopian vision. The others I would have to look up; do you mean Frank Dune Herbert or another Frank Herbert? Pearce's thesis is freely available on his website, and it really is very well written, addressing just about every possible objection before you think of it. --Stathis Hi Stathis, Nice review! I wonder about Pierce, has he read Huxley or Orwell? He and all should read the advice of Eric Hoffer, Frank Herbert and others, warning us of the dangers of trying to push utopias. More modern treatments include Philip Ball's Critical Mass. Stephen - Original Message - From: Stathis Papaioannou [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; everything-list@eskimo.com Sent: Monday, May 16, 2005 10:57 PM Subject: Re: Tipler Weighs In David Pearce is a British philosopher with Utilitarian leanings, and his extensive HedWeb site has been around for many years. His main thesis is contained in a book-length article called The Hedonistic Imperative, in which he argues that the aim of civilization should be the ultimate elimination of all suffering in sentient life. He proposes that this be done not primarily through traditional methods, such as banning animal cruelty (although he has much to say about that as well), but by directly accessing and altering the neural mechanisms responsible for suffering, through pharmacological and neurological means initially, and eventually through genetic engineering so that no organism is physically capable of experiencing suffering. Pearce's thesis does not really address the next stage after neuroengineering often discussed on this list, namely living as uploaded minds on a computer network. The interesting question arises of how we would (or should) spend our time in this state. It would be a simple matter of programming to eliminate suffering and spend eternity (or however long it lasts) in a state of heavenly bliss. The obvious response to such a proposal is that perpetual bliss would be boring, and leave no room for motivation, curiosity, progress, etc. But boredom is just another adverse experience which could be simply eliminated if you have access to the source code. And if you think about it, even such tasks as participating in discussions such as the present one are only really motivated by anticipation of the complex pleasure gained from it; if you could get the same effect or better, directly, with no adverse consequences, why would you waste your time doing it the hard way? --Stathis Papaioannou
Wikipedia: depository for defining our concepts?
Dear list members, I have found that the Wikipedia encyclopedia (composed and edited by the public) can be a great source of linked information regarding the topic of our discussion and can be used by beginners in our list to become familiar with the topics that we discuss. I suppose that if our group generates new ideas, we could simply add them up to Wikipedia and add the appropriate links to and from related topics. Internal Links found in Wikipedia <> Many-worlds interpretation Consciousness Quantum mind quantum suicide modal realism possible worlds multiverse quantum decoherence multiple histories many-minds interpretation quantum immortality holomovement AND MUCH MUCH MORE Some external Links found in Wikipedia On Many-Minds Interpretations of Quantum Theory Against Many-Worlds Interpretations(http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9703089) Everett's Relative-State Formulation of Quantum Mechanics(http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-everett/) Michael Price's Everett FAQ(http://www.hedweb.com/manworld.htm) Max Tegmark's web page(http://www.hep.upenn.edu/~max/everett.html) Many Worlds Parallel Universes(http://timetravelportal.com/viewtopic.php?t=288) Many Worlds is a "lost cause"(http://www.mth.kcl.ac.uk/~streater/lostcauses.html#XII) according to R. F. Streater AND MUCH MUCH MORE George
RE: WHY DOES ANYTHING EXIST
Norman wrote: Thanks for your identification of David Pearce - I see he was co-founder (with Nick Bostrom) of the World Transhumanist Association. I have a lot of respect for Bostrom's views. However, it's Pearce's viewpoint about WHY DOES ANYTHING EXIST that I'm interested in. This viewpoint is expressed at http://www.hedweb.com/nihilism/nihilfil.htm His conclusion seems to be that everything in the multiverse adds up to zero, so there are no loose ends that need explaining. Even if true, this doesn't answer the WHY question, however. If you or others have opinions on WHY, I'd like to hear them. I wonder if your opinion will be that no opinion is possible? Pearce is a little tongue-in-cheek here, I think, but surely Pearce does answer the *big* why question (why is there something rather than nothing?). O is nothing, so if everything adds up to zero, something and nothing are equivalent, and the big why question is rendered meaningless. All other why questions (as in, why this rather than that?) are answered by the standard UE (ultimate ensemble), which Pearce seems to assume. Jonathan Colvin
RE: What do you lose if you simply accept...
Lee corbin wrote: Pratt's disdain follows from the obvious failures of other models. It does not take a logician or mathematician or philosopher of unbelievable IQ to see that the models of monism that have been advanced have a fatal flaw: the inability to prove the necessity of epiphenomena. Maybe Bruno's theory will solve this, I hold out hope that it does; but meanwhile, why can't we consider and debate alternatives that offer a view ranging explanations and unifying threads, such as Pratt's Chu space idea? I just have to say that I have utterly no sense that anything here needs explanation. I have to agree. Perhaps it is because I'm a Denett devotee, brainwashed into a full denial of qualia/dualism, but I've yet to see any coherent argument as to what there is anything about consciousness that needs explaining. The only importance I see for consciousness is its role in self-selection per Bostrom. Jonathan Colvin
Re: WHY DOES ANYTHING EXIST
Hi Jonathan, You say that if something and nothing are equivalent, then the big WHY question is rendered meaningless. But isn't the big WHY question equivalent to asking WHY does the integer series -100 to +100 exist? Even though the sum of the integer series is zero, that doesn't render the question meaningless. Norman - Original Message - From: Jonathan Colvin [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: everything-list@eskimo.com Sent: Monday, May 16, 2005 10:20 PM Subject: RE: WHY DOES ANYTHING EXIST Norman wrote: Thanks for your identification of David Pearce - I see he was co-founder (with Nick Bostrom) of the World Transhumanist Association. I have a lot of respect for Bostrom's views. However, it's Pearce's viewpoint about WHY DOES ANYTHING EXIST that I'm interested in. This viewpoint is expressed at http://www.hedweb.com/nihilism/nihilfil.htm His conclusion seems to be that everything in the multiverse adds up to zero, so there are no loose ends that need explaining. Even if true, this doesn't answer the WHY question, however. If you or others have opinions on WHY, I'd like to hear them. I wonder if your opinion will be that no opinion is possible? Pearce is a little tongue-in-cheek here, I think, but surely Pearce does answer the *big* why question (why is there something rather than nothing?). O is nothing, so if everything adds up to zero, something and nothing are equivalent, and the big why question is rendered meaningless. All other why questions (as in, why this rather than that?) are answered by the standard UE (ultimate ensemble), which Pearce seems to assume. Jonathan Colvin
Re: Tipler Weighs In
Dear Stathis, - Original Message - From: Stathis Papaioannou [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; everything-list@eskimo.com; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, May 17, 2005 12:28 AM Subject: Re: Tipler Weighs In Dear Stephen, Pearce spends considerable time in his thesis discussing the harm that Brave New World has done to Utopian causes. I rather suspect that Huxley would not have been disapproving, given his libertarian sympathies and fondness for hallucinogens in his later work. Orwell is completely different; there's nothing even superficially pleasant about his dystopian vision. The others I would have to look up; do you mean Frank Dune Herbert or another Frank Herbert? Frank Dune Herbert, particularly, The Maker of Dune: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0425058344/qid=1116308591/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl14/002-5151334-9004020?v=glances=booksn=507846 Pearce's thesis is freely available on his website, and it really is very well written, addressing just about every possible objection before you think of it. Excellent, I will look for it. Stephen --Stathis
