Re: Numbers, Machine and Father Ted
Le 27-oct.-06, à 13:04, Quentin Anciaux a écrit : Hi Stathis, Le Vendredi 27 Octobre 2006 12:16, Stathis Papaioannou a écrit : Here is another thought experiment. You are watching an object moving against a stationary background at a velocity of 10 m/s. Suddenly, the object seems to instantly jump 10 metres in the direction of motion, and then continues as before at 10 m/s. You are informed that one of the following three events has taken place: (a) your consciousness was suspended for 1 second, as in an absence seizure; (b) you were scanned, annihilated, and a perfect copy created in your place 1 second later; (c) nothing unusual happened to you, but the object you were watching was instantly teleported 10 metres in the direction of motion. Would you be able to guess which of the three events took place? Stathis Papaioannou The problem with these kind of thoughts experiments is that we don't know how consciousness works, we don't know if we can make a perfect copy, we can't know (currently) if such a copy would be conscious as we don't know how conscious experience arise. That is why we are proposing theories. It seems to me that the computationalist hypothesis entails the answer no to Stathis question. Are you OK with this? (Of course, other hypotheses (like some weakening of comp for example) could also lead to the answer no. Taking the premises of the problem you gave, it is impossible to give a (right) answer (if there is one...). You presupose too much on what is consciousness and how it works (not that it is a bad thing, but I think these examples won't convince someone who have not the same view on you about what is consciousness and how it works). I think that the point of Stathis was illustrating comp or some weakening of it. Is there someone in the list who find simultaneously both comp *and* a yes answer to Stathis' question plausible? Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: Numbers, Machine and Father Ted
Le 27-oct.-06, à 15:58, 1Z a écrit : If numbers aren't real at all they cannot generate reality (ITSIAR). You beg the question. Numbers are not physically real does not entails that numbers don't exist at all, unless you define real by physical real. The question you should ask is: are number sufficiently real to explain why some of them believes in a physical reality. My answer, which I agree need some amount of work to get through, is yes. Existing in the standard mathematical meaning of existence is enough to explain why a stable and lawful illusion of physical reality exists, again in that mathematical sense. Recall that the UDA explains why, assuming comp, a turing machine cannot distinguish the physical, virtual and arithmetical aspect of any reality. Perhaps one day we will find a way to make those distinction. My work proposes a transparently clear way to observe that distinction if it exists, but then that would be a refutation of (standard) comp. Alternatively, such a hypothesis may be shown to be redundant or incoherent. Not really. It is SWE which should be made redundant. Peter, as we've agreed, materialism is also metaphysics, and as a route to 'ultimate reality' via a physics of observables, is vulnerable to 'reification'. Might it not be premature to finalise precisely what it is that physical theory decribes that might actually be RITSIAR? I have answered these questions before: but 1. Contingent existence. 2. The ability to causally interact 3. A primary substance which endures through change ( explaining dynamic, non-BU time) 4. Optionally, the ability to explain phenomenal consiousness in a basically non-mathematical way.(Property dualism) The AUDA hypostases explains this, including 4. Wait a bit perhaps, or read my papers. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: Numbers, Machine and Father Ted
Le 27-oct.-06, à 16:06, 1Z a écrit : Principally I mean in the physical universe, or in Plato's heaven. Bruno always sounds like a Platonist, but he keeps denying he is one. Quite the contrary. I vindicate that I am even a plotinist, or a neoplatonist if you prefer. I just don't share your naive view of platonia, so I avoid that term with you. In any case such a terminological debate is entirely useless. Tom Caylor has provided enough good answer on that point: to ask where the UD lives is a category error. Numbers, prgram and mathematical structure does not lives in any place except metaphorically. Actually physicist borrowed the notion of space to mathematician to get some sharable notion of where and when, but of course those spaces cannot be ascribed to a place themselves, or, again only in some metaphorical sense, like saying that such space lives in the category of sets, or in a model of ZF, etc. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: Numbers, Machine and Father Ted
1Z wrote: Peter, when you said that the physical might be 'relations all the way down', and I asked you what would you find if you went 'all the way down', you replied 'primary matter'. IOW, you posit primary matter as a 'bare substrate' to which are attached whatever properties theory or experiment may suggest. Consequently, isn't it the case that you are defining this 'bare substrate' (which by posit has no properties of its own) as whatever-it-is that is RITSIAR (i.e. you might say that it's what exists)? RITSIAR is supposed to be a free variable. Thus RITSIAR = material existence is a substantive, non-tautologous claim, as is RITSIAR = Platonic existence (Compare with I in I am in Sussex and I am in Sierra Leone So, that's a 'yes' for primary matter = RITSIAR 1. And another 'yes' for AUDA = RITSIAR 2. You want to call RITSIAR 2 Platonic reality (and can call witnesses to attest to this usage). Bruno doesn't seem to want to call it Platonic (he seems to rely on different witnesses) but he's clear it's not RITSIAR 1. RITSIAR 1 is 'where the matter is'. RITSIAR 2 is 'where the numbers are'. Such ontic claims merely serve to ground the hierarchy of predicative recursion: 'I am in Sussex' is predicated on 'I' and 'Sussex' pre-existing at some prior level, etc, etc, etc. Name your turtle. Can't we just get on with investigating what either theory explains or predicts, and stop arguing over words - isn't this why no agreement is ever reached on this? David David Nyman wrote: 1Z wrote: Where are these machines? Where the numbers are. Which is...? Presumably the answer is not on blackboards or in the minds of mathematicians. Apparently its not a magical realm either. Peter, when you said that the physical might be 'relations all the way down', and I asked you what would you find if you went 'all the way down', you replied 'primary matter'. IOW, you posit primary matter as a 'bare substrate' to which are attached whatever properties theory or experiment may suggest. Consequently, isn't it the case that you are defining this 'bare substrate' (which by posit has no properties of its own) as whatever-it-is that is RITSIAR (i.e. you might say that it's what exists)? RITSIAR is supposed to be a free variable. Thus RITSIAR = material existence is a substantive, non-tautologous claim, as is RITSIAR = Platonic existence (Compare with I in I am in Sussex and I am in Sierra Leone --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
RE: Numbers, Machine and Father Ted
David Nyman writes: I think we're in agreement, Stathis, but I'm trying to focus on a problem, and what I think is a non-trivial aspect of evolved brain functionality that would be required to overcome it. Of course, I agree with you that each aspect of the experience '.falls perfectly into position in each case by virtue of its content alone' - it's precisely what I've been arguing. But there's a subtler point here also, I think, that leads to the problem. Let's take the 'cat sat on the mat': now 'cat' starts at t1 and 'mat' ends at t2. Let's subdivide t1t2 into occasions o1-o1000, and let teleportation occur between each. Each occasion o1-o1000 is as informationally closed as OMt1t2 (the 'teleportation' is of course inserted precisely to make this point), but now it has become implausible to believe that any individual occasion, say o492, is of sufficient extent to recover any coherent component whatsoever of the conscious thought 'the cat sat on the mat'. And yet, we know that we *are* in fact able to routinely recover such components, corresponding loosely to a 'specious present' of some 1.5 seconds extent. Now comes the problem: how do we account for our manifest ability to do this without invoking some form of illicit 'continuity' between informationally separated occasions of arbitrarily fine granularity? No individual occasion apparently contains all the necessary information, and it seems that we almost can't stop ourselves imaginatively invoking some sort of continuity over multiple occasions, in order that coherent experiences can somehow be recovered by summing over the sequence. I think, if true, this would be a real problem in reconciling our experience with the facts, and I think therefore that it requires a real solution (actually an aspect of Barbour's time capsule theory which I'm extrapolating a bit further). Simply, if what I'm arguing is valid, it must follow that my assumption about individual occasions 'not containing the necessary information' *must be wrong*. Consequently, sufficient information to recover 'speciously present' dynamic experiences *must* in fact be *simultaneously* represented by the brain - be present on one occasion - and that this simultaneous 'dynamic' presentation must be the engine that renders both the duration and the dynamism of the experience. And, to complete the (evolutionary) circularity, this would be precisely *why* the brain would possess this capability - because without it, extended, dynamic environmental presentations would simply be *unavailable* to the organism. Does this make sense? I think I see what you mean, but it's as much a problem for the intact and normally functioning brain as it is for teleportation experiments, isn't it? For that matter, it's as much a problem for a computer that gets teleported around in the course of its calculations. If the teleportation time slices are of femtosecond duration, then there is nothing within a particular slice to mark it as part of the calculation 5464*2342. Yet a computer strobing in and out of existence like this, technical problems aside, will still come up with the right answer. Indeed, if the computer only materialised in the final femtosecond it would have the right answer and if a log were kept, evidence of how it arrived at the answer. Do you believe that there must be some super-computation information in each femtosecond slice that binds them all together? Stathis Papaioannou _ Be one of the first to try Windows Live Mail. http://ideas.live.com/programpage.aspx?versionId=5d21c51a-b161-4314-9b0e-4911fb2b2e6d --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
