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. I don't think that's quite an equivalent question, because the answer is simply because it is necessarily true. I think that's a different observation (and question) than Pearce's free lunch (or observation that the sum of everything is equivalent to nothing). Jonathan Colvin 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: What do you lose if you simply accept...
Stathis: I agree with Lee's and Jonathan's comments, except that I think there is something unusual about first person experience/ qualia/ consciousness in that there is an aspect that cannot be communicated unless you experience it (a blind man cannot know what it is like to see, no matter how much he learns about the process of vision). Let me use the analogy of billiard balls and Newtonian mechanics. Everything that billiard balls do by themselves and with each other can be fully explained by the laws of physics. Moreover, it can all be modelled by a computer program. But in addition, there is the state of being-a-billiard-ball, which is something very strange and cannot be communicated to non-billiard balls, because it makes absolutely no difference to what is observed about them. It is not clear if this aspect of billiard ball experience is duplicated by the computer program, precisely because it makes no observable difference: you have to be the simulated billiard ball to know. But is this state of being a billiard ball any different than simple existence? What in particular is unusual about first person qualia? We might simply say that a *description* of a billiard ball is not the same as *a billiard ball* (a description of a billiard ball can not bruise me like a real one can); in the same way, a description of a mind is not the same as a mind; but what is unusual about that? It is not strange to differentiate between a real object and a description of such, so I don't see that there is anything any more unusual about first person experience. Is it any stranger that a blind man can not see, than that a description of a billiard ball's properties (weight, diameter, colour etc) can not bruise me? Jonathan Colvin You don't need to postulate a special mechanism whereby mind interacts with matter. The laws of physics explain the workings of the brain, and conscious experience is just the strange, irreducible effect of this as seen from the inside. --Stathis Papaioannou 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 _ REALESTATE: biggest buy/rent/share listings http://ninemsn.realestate.com.au
Re: What do you lose if you simply accept...
Le 17-mai-05, à 09:06, Stathis Papaioannou a écrit : I agree with Lee's and Jonathan's comments, except that I think there is something unusual about first person experience/ qualia/ consciousness in that there is an aspect that cannot be communicated unless you experience it (a blind man cannot know what it is like to see, no matter how much he learns about the process of vision). Let me use the analogy of billiard balls and Newtonian mechanics. Everything that billiard balls do by themselves and with each other can be fully explained by the laws of physics. Moreover, it can all be modelled by a computer program. But in addition, there is the state of being-a-billiard-ball, which is something very strange and cannot be communicated to non-billiard balls, because it makes absolutely no difference to what is observed about them. It is not clear if this aspect of billiard ball experience is duplicated by the computer program, precisely because it makes no observable difference: you have to be the simulated billiard ball to know. Before someone says that billiard balls are not complex enough to have an internal life, I would point out that neither is there any way to deduce a priori that humans have conscious experiences. You have to actually be a human to know this. You don't need to postulate a special mechanism whereby mind interacts with matter. The laws of physics explain the workings of the brain, and conscious experience is just the strange, irreducible effect of this as seen from the inside. I agree. Let me make a little try to explain briefly why I think that, although the first person cannot be reduced to any pure third person notion, yet, it is possible to explain in a third person way why the first person exists and why it cannot be reduced to any pure third person way. I will consider a machine M. The machine is supposed to be a sort of mathematician, or a theorem proving machine in arithmetic. I suppose the machine is sound: this means that if the machine proves some proposition p, then p is true. I will also suppose that the machine is programmed so as to assert all the propositions she can prove, in some order. So one day she proves 1+1=2. Another day she proves 17 is prime, and so on. So I will use M proves and M can prove equivalently. As everyone knows or should know since Goedel 1931, it is possible to represent the *provability by the machine M* in the language of the machine (here the language is first order arithmetic, but the detail are irrelevant in this short explanation). I will write Bp for BEW(GN(p)), which is the representation of M proves p in the language of the machine. BEW(GN(p)), means really there is a number which codes a proof of the formula itself coded by GN(p). GN(p) is for the Godel number of p, which is the traditional encoding of p in arithmetic. BEW is for beweisbar: provable in German. It has been proved by Hilbert, Bernays and Loeb that such a machine verifies the following condition, for any p representing an arithmetical proposition: 1) If M proves p then M proves Bp (sort of introspective ability: if the machine can prove p, the machine can prove that the machine can prove p) 2) M proves (Bp B(p-q)) - Bq (the machine can prove that if she proves p and if she proves p-q, then she will proves p). This means that the machine can prove that she follows the modus ponens inference rule (which is part of arithmetic). It is a second introspective ability. 3) The machine M proves 1), i.e. M proves Bp - BBp. i.e. the machine proves that if she proves p, then she can prove that she can prove p. If the machine is sound, the machine is necessarily consistent. That means the machine will not prove 1 + 1 = 3, or any false arithmetical statement. To make things easier, I suppose there is a constant false in the machine language, written f. I could have use the proposition 1+1=3 instead, but f is shorter. So M is consistent is equivalent as saying that (NOT Bf) is true about M, i.e. when B is the provability of the machine (as I will no more repeat). Goedel second incompleteness theorem asserts that if M is consistent then M cannot prove M is consistent. This can be translate in the language of M: (NOT Bf) - (NOT B (NOT Bf)). We have two things: (NOT Bf) - (NOT B (NOT Bf)) is true *about* the machine, but we have also that the machine is able to prove it about itself: that (NOT Bf) - (NOT B (NOT Bf)) is can be proved by the machine. Of course from this you know that (NOT Bf) is true about the machine, but that the machine cannot prove it. I hope you are able to verify if a proposition of classical propositional logic is a tautology or not. In particular NOT A is has the same truth value that A - f. In particular consistency (NOT Bf) is equivalent to (Bf - f). So if he machine is sound, and thus consistent, (Bf - f) is true about the machine, but cannot be proved by the machine. We see
Re: What do you lose if you simply accept...
Le 17-mai-05, à 09:56, Jonathan Colvin a écrit : Is it any stranger that a blind man can not see, than that a description of a billiard ball's properties (weight, diameter, colour etc) can not bruise me? It is different with comp. because a description of you + a description of billiard ball, done at some right level, can bruise you. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
RE: What do you lose if you simply accept...
Jonathan, Your post suggests to me a neat way to define what is special about first person experience: it is the gap in information between what can be known from a description of an object and what can be known from being the object itself. This is a personal thing, but I think it is at least a little surprising that there should be such a gap, and would never have guessed had I not been conscious myself. I don't think it is a good idea to simply ignore this gap, but on the other hand, I don't think there is any need to postulate mind/body dualism and try to explain how the two interact. Aside from this one difference I have focussed on, first person experience is just something that occurs in the normal course of events in the physical universe. --Stathis Papaioannou Stathis: I agree with Lee's and Jonathan's comments, except that I think there is something unusual about first person experience/ qualia/ consciousness in that there is an aspect that cannot be communicated unless you experience it (a blind man cannot know what it is like to see, no matter how much he learns about the process of vision). Let me use the analogy of billiard balls and Newtonian mechanics. Everything that billiard balls do by themselves and with each other can be fully explained by the laws of physics. Moreover, it can all be modelled by a computer program. But in addition, there is the state of being-a-billiard-ball, which is something very strange and cannot be communicated to non-billiard balls, because it makes absolutely no difference to what is observed about them. It is not clear if this aspect of billiard ball experience is duplicated by the computer program, precisely because it makes no observable difference: you have to be the simulated billiard ball to know. But is this state of being a billiard ball any different than simple existence? What in particular is unusual about first person qualia? We might simply say that a *description* of a billiard ball is not the same as *a billiard ball* (a description of a billiard ball can not bruise me like a real one can); in the same way, a description of a mind is not the same as a mind; but what is unusual about that? It is not strange to differentiate between a real object and a description of such, so I don't see that there is anything any more unusual about first person experience. Is it any stranger that a blind man can not see, than that a description of a billiard ball's properties (weight, diameter, colour etc) can not bruise me? Jonathan Colvin You don't need to postulate a special mechanism whereby mind interacts with matter. The laws of physics explain the workings of the brain, and conscious experience is just the strange, irreducible effect of this as seen from the inside. --Stathis Papaioannou _ Are you right for each other? Find out with our Love Calculator: http://fun.mobiledownloads.com.au/191191/index.wl?page=templategroupName=funstuff
Fw: WHY DOES ANYTHING EXIST
Hi Jonathan, You say that Because it is necessarily true is the answer to Why does the integer series -100 to +100 exist? However, you seem to say that this is NOT the answer to Why does anything exist? In this latter case, you seem to say the question is meaningless because the sum of everything is equivalent to nothing. I'm afraid I don't understand why this makes it meaningless. To me, an example of a meaningless question is one which cannot possibly have an answer, such as standing on the North pole and asking Which way is North? I agree that comparing anything to an integer series that sums to zero is not quite the same, since anything covers so much more than an integer series. However, it seems to me that the same answer ought to apply to both cases. Can you prove that there is no possible answer to WDAE? Such a proof would, indeed, make the question meaningless. Thanks for your assistance. Norman ~~ - Original Message - From: Jonathan Colvin [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: everything-list@eskimo.com Sent: Tuesday, May 17, 2005 12:39 AM Subject: 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. I don't think that's quite an equivalent question, because the answer is simply because it is necessarily true. I think that's a different observation (and question) than Pearce's free lunch (or observation that the sum of everything is equivalent to nothing). Jonathan Colvin 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: WHY DOES ANYTHING EXIST
Norman: You say that Because it is necessarily true is the answer to Why does the integer series -100 to +100 exist? However, you seem to say that this is NOT the answer to Why does anything exist? In this latter case, you seem to say the question is meaningless because the sum of everything is equivalent to nothing. Quentin: I think it is meaningless because the question is Why is there something/anything instead of nothing ?. The answer as given by jonathan is that something/anything and nothing are the same... So if there are the same object, the question is meaningless. Exactly. I should add, I don't agree with Pearce's free lunch theory, because I don't see that it is particularly important or relevant that the sum of everything adds to zero (if indeed it does). Jonathan Colvin
RE: What do you lose if you simply accept...
Stathis: Your post suggests to me a neat way to define what is special about first person experience: it is the gap in information between what can be known from a description of an object and what can be known from being the object itself. But how can being an object provide any extra information? I don't see that information or knowledge has much to do with it. How can being an apple provide any extra information about the apple? Obviously there is a difference between *an apple* and *a description of an apple*, in the same way there is a difference between *a person* and *a description of a person*, but the difference is one of physical existence, not information. Jonathan Colvin
Re: a description of you + a description of billiard ball can bruise you?
Dear Bruno, Your claim reminds me of the scene in the movie Matrix: Reloaded where Neo deactivates some Sentinels all the while believing that he is Unplugged. This leads to speculations about matrix in a matrix, etc. http://www.thematrix101.com/reloaded/meaning.php#mwam There is still one question that needs to be answered: what is it that gives rise to the differentiation necessary for one description to bruise (or cause any kind of change) in another description if we disallow for some thing that acts as an interface between the two. What forms the interface in your theory? http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/quant-ph/pdf/0001/0001064.pdf Stephen - Original Message - From: Bruno Marchal [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Jonathan Colvin [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: everything-list@eskimo.com Sent: Tuesday, May 17, 2005 5:56 AM Subject: Re: What do you lose if you simply accept... Le 17-mai-05, à 09:56, Jonathan Colvin a écrit : Is it any stranger that a blind man can not see, than that a description of a billiard ball's properties (weight, diameter, colour etc) can not bruise me? It is different with comp. because a description of you + a description of billiard ball, done at some right level, can bruise you. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
RE: a description of you + a description of billiard ball can bruise you?
Bruno's claim is a straightforward consequence of Strong AI; that a simulated mind would behave in an identical way to a real one, and would experience the same qualia. There's no special interface required here; the simulated mind and the simulated billiard ball are in the same world, ie. at the same level of simulation. As far as the simulated person is concerned, the billiard ball is real. Of course, the simulation can also contain a simulation of the billiard ball (2nd level simulation), which will equally be unable to bruise the simulated person, and so on ad infinitum. If we take Bostrom's simulation argument seriously, we all exist in some Nth level simulation, while our simulated billiard ball exists at the (N+1)th level. Jonathan Colvin Stephen: Your claim reminds me of the scene in the movie Matrix: Reloaded where Neo deactivates some Sentinels all the while believing that he is Unplugged. This leads to speculations about matrix in a matrix, etc. http://www.thematrix101.com/reloaded/meaning.php#mwam There is still one question that needs to be answered: what is it that gives rise to the differentiation necessary for one description to bruise (or cause any kind of change) in another description if we disallow for some thing that acts as an interface between the two. What forms the interface in your theory? http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/quant-ph/pdf/0001/0001064.pdf Stephen - Original Message - From: Bruno Marchal [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Jonathan Colvin [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: everything-list@eskimo.com Sent: Tuesday, May 17, 2005 5:56 AM Subject: Re: What do you lose if you simply accept... Le 17-mai-05, à 09:56, Jonathan Colvin a écrit : Is it any stranger that a blind man can not see, than that a description of a billiard ball's properties (weight, diameter, colour etc) can not bruise me? It is different with comp. because a description of you + a description of billiard ball, done at some right level, can bruise you. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Re: WHY DOES ANYTHING EXIST
Norman, wonder if your opinion will be that no opinion is possible? not on this list! Sufficiently sophisticated minds can formulate opinions to ANY question (situation problem). First: the WHY I enjoyed the URL, with its contemporary Q-science based views. Of course in English there is no difference between 'why' as for what purpose and 'why' by what reason. Other languages are more specific. Then the 'constants', the eucharist of physicists. They are scale-related results of a model view observed by instruments constructed for such use and calculated as 'equational' with other models (limited cuts of potential impredicativities). The huge model has been brought into an admirable balance and its nth level (backwards) fundaments are sacrosanct. Constants, axioms, givens, rates, equations etc. are all in untouchable quantized unification with artifacts like energy, mass, photon, quark, whatever. Who would dare to question the cloths of the emperor? Yes, the 'traditional cosmolgy' narrative is on shaky grounds. I made up another narrative, in which THIS universe (and innumerable other different ones) start on a humanly followable reasonable basis, putting the non-information based origination (instead of a creation or a Q-fluctuation) one step further back, in my unidentified (mostly!) Plenitude in which the 'invariant dynamic symmetrical everything' must produce also assymetrical nods within the total invariance. These are considered universes and dissipate as they formed. Not by the inside vue and not for us, where we 'see' our space-time physical system as small and huge, shorttime and longterm. The rest depends on the elements of the universe-originating nod, the composition of the assymmetry, potentially unlimitedly different for every universe. Nice narrative, no math. Such universes are (again: from the insider vue) endogenously active in their motions during that timelessness(!) until they re-evaporate into the Plenitude. No 'why' for cause, no 'why' for purpose. Your par: 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. seems congruent with my idea in more than one sense. No question: no answer. Opinion we may have. John Mikes - Original Message - From: Norman Samish [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: everything-list@eskimo.com Sent: Tuesday, May 17, 2005 12:56 AM Subject: 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 ~`
Re: a description of you + a description of billiard ball can bruise you?
Dear Johathan, I am trying to address the point of how we consider the interactions and communications between minds, simulated or otherwise. I do not, question the idea that simulated minds would be indistinguishable from real minds, especially from a 1st person view. I am asking about how such minds can interact such that notions of cause and effect and, say, signal to noise ratios are coherent notions. Additionally, I still would like to understand how we can continue to wonder about computations without ever considering the costs in resources associated. We can not tacitly assume abstract perpetual motion machines to power our abstract machines, or can we? Stephen - Original Message - From: Jonathan Colvin [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: everything-list@eskimo.com Sent: Tuesday, May 17, 2005 5:33 PM Subject: RE: a description of you + a description of billiard ball can bruise you? Bruno's claim is a straightforward consequence of Strong AI; that a simulated mind would behave in an identical way to a real one, and would experience the same qualia. There's no special interface required here; the simulated mind and the simulated billiard ball are in the same world, ie. at the same level of simulation. As far as the simulated person is concerned, the billiard ball is real. Of course, the simulation can also contain a simulation of the billiard ball (2nd level simulation), which will equally be unable to bruise the simulated person, and so on ad infinitum. If we take Bostrom's simulation argument seriously, we all exist in some Nth level simulation, while our simulated billiard ball exists at the (N+1)th level. Jonathan Colvin
RE: What do you lose if you simply accept...
Jonathan contrasts descriptions and what the descriptions describe: Stathis: Your post suggests to me a neat way to define what is special about first person experience: it is the gap in information between what can be known from a description of an object and what can be known from being the object itself. But how can being an object provide any extra information? I don't see that information or knowledge has much to do with it. How can being an apple provide any extra information about the apple? Let's remember some naive answers here. First, for a fixed physical object, there exist infinitely many descriptions. It's a common belief that beyond a certain amount of accuracy, differences don't really matter. For example, one ought to be quite happy to teleport even if there is one atomic error for every 10^20 atoms. Second, a common interpretation of QM asserts that beyond a certain accuracy, there is *no* additional information to be had whatsoever. That is, that there exists some finite bit string that contains *all* an object's information (cf. Bekenstein bound). Still, the naive answer is that a description (or even a set of descriptions) of a physical object is different from the physical object itself: a physical object is a process, and a set of descriptions is merely a set of bits frozen in time (and here we are back again, you know where). However, I hold with these naive answers, as do a lot of people. And so therefore I proceed to answer the above question thusly: Being an apple provides *no* information beyond that which would be provided by a sufficiently rich description. Even if an emulation of a person appreciating the sublime, or agonizing to a truly horrific extent, or whateverno information obtains anywhere that is not in principle available to the experimenters, i.e., available from the third-person. You could make the experimenter *hurt*, and then say, now you know what it feels like, and given today's techniques, that might very well be true. But this is only a limitation on what is known and knowable today; it says nothing about what might be knowable about a human subject of 20th century complexity to entities living a thousand years from now. (We ignore the possible effects on the experimenter's value system, or possible effects on his incentives: we are just talking about information as bit-strings, here.) Obviously there is a difference between *an apple* and *a description of an apple*, in the same way there is a difference between *a person* and *a description of a person*, but the difference is one of physical existence, not information. Yeah, that's the way it seems to me too. Lee
RE: What do you lose if you simply accept...
Stathis wrote [Here is] a neat way to define what is special about first person experience: it is the gap in information between what can be known from a description of an object and what can be known from being the object itself. This is a personal thing, but I think it is at least a little surprising that there should be such a gap, and would never have guessed had I not been conscious myself. Had you not been conscious yourself? Do you think that this is at all possible? That sufficiently complex entities capable of making their way in the world ought to be conscious seems very natural to me, for some reason. When I examine the animal world, for instance, and see small creatures chasing one another, I would expect them to be making maps of their environment; I would expect them to have feelings; and I would expect at some level of development that their maps would include a bit of self-reference. (Just a tad, for the *lower* life forms.) Perhaps I am hard-wired to project my own thoughts and feelings onto others, including animals. Solipsism *really* seems unscientific somehow. I myself have likes and dislikes, and so why shouldn't everyone and everything else? I don't think it is a good idea to simply ignore this gap, Well, I'd agree to call it a *difference*: as I said in another post, the way some of us see it is that there isn't an information gap. but on the other hand, I don't think there is any need to postulate mind/body dualism and try to explain how the two interact. Well, I think that everyone here agrees with that. But of course, you are thinking about the resurgence of dualism. I probably agree with you. Aside from this one difference I have focused on, first person experience is just something that occurs in the normal course of events in the physical universe. Well said. I would like to quote that. I do also read that to include consciousness, as I'm sure you meant. I would also read it to include all the gaps. Lee
