Re: Maudlin & How many times does COMP have to be false before its false?
Hi Bruno, I have been pondering this issue a bit and I am intrigued about how you regard the problem space we inhabit. When you say things like ... "Are you aware that If comp is true, that is if I am a machine ..." I cannot fathom how you ever get to this point. This is a presupposition that arises somehow in the lexicon you have established within your overall framework of thinking. Let me have a stab at how my view and yours correlate. In my view A) There is a natural world. We, Turing machines dogs, computers are all being 'computed' by it. This is a set of unknown naturally occurring symbols The natural 'symbols' interact naturally. This is 'natural computation'. NOT like desktop computing. Universe U ensues. Scientist S is being computed within U Scientist S can observe U from within. U makes use of fundamental properties of the symbols to enable observation, from within. Call this principle P-O B) This is a symbolic description of U created by S from within U S can concoct a description of the natural symbols in (A) It need not be unique, many (B) correspond to one (A) S can never know if it's completely done. S can never know the real nature of the sybols in (A) Descriptions (B), with P-O, explains observation and the observer S C) There is a _second_ description It is also concocted by S These are the normal empirical laws we all know so well It describes how the U appears to S from inside It need not be unique, many (C) correspond to one (A) No (C) ever explains observation. In this framework (i) a computer running description/rules (B) is not the natural world. (ii) a computer running description/rules (C) is not the natural world. (iii) a computer running descriptions (B) or (C) is 'artificially computing' (iv) (C) is physics that present day scientists construct (v) (B) is physics of a natural world prior to an observer. (vi) (A) is 'NATURALLY computing' in the sense that it is literally 'computing' scientist S. = OK. These options are the logically justifiable position we can take when we are, as we are, inside U trying to work U out from within, using an observation faculty provided by U as part of (A). Empirical evidence justifying (C) is normal overvation (contents of one or more observer-agreed conscious experisnces). Empirical evidence justifying (B) is implicit in the existence of an observer concocting a set (C). You can't be confused about an bservation unless there is an observer to be confused. = All that said.now You mention "digital physics". You say "Are you aware that If COMP is true, that is if I am a machine ..." In terms of my frameworkyou are speaking of ...what? (1) A 'Turing machine (digital computer)' inside U running (B) descriptions? (2) The natural computation itself, of kind (A)? I suspect (3) Some kind of magical 'computer' in idea-space computing us as (A)? i.e. A 'virtual machine' that 'acts as if' it generates an arbitrary number of different U? The COMP I talk about having refuted is in (i) or (ii) above. I suspect this is not the COMP you are speaking of... As far as I can tell we're not even on the same page. Maybe others here are in a similar position and don't know it. I hope you can help. cheers colin hales NOTE: When I say I want to build an artificial general intelligence, I say I can build, within (A), using chunks of (A), an inorganic observer of kind S, say S', that will also be able to observe and concoct (B) and (C). S' will NOT be 'artificially computing' rules (B) or (C)! There will be some symbolic manipulation in the hardware, but this is not S', it merely drives some of the S' hardware, like the rules that drive synaptic plasticity. Background housekeeping. In that event, in my framework, the natural world (A) will be 'computing' S' too. The properties of (A) called P-O above, that make S observe also operate within S'. The explanation of HOW observation happens is in P-O as it is configured in (B). -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: A comment on Mauldin's paper “Computation and Consciousness”
Note that the kind of entanglement you're talking about is the same as randomness. Bohm's version of QM makes this explicit. There's a deterministic wave function of the universe so that everything effects everything else instantaneously (which is why there's no good Bohmian version of QFT) and quantum randomness is just a consequence of our ignorance of the complete wave function. But Tegmark's paper shows that quantum effects must be very small and the brain is essentially classical - which makes sense from an evolutionary viewpoint. You want your brain to be classical, except for a very rare randomness to avoid the problem of Buridan's ass - and you don't even need brain randomness for that, there's plenty of randomness in the environment. Brent On 1/31/2011 6:27 PM, Stephen Paul King wrote: Hi David, You just happened to mention the 800kg Gorilla in the room! While we can rattle off a sophisticated narrative about decoherence effects and quote from some Tegmark paper, the fact remains that entanglement is real and while we can argue that its effects could be minimized, we cannot prove that it is irrelevant to supervenience. This is a game-changer for physical supervenience arguments. But the problem is much worse! It is becoming harder to how up Tegmark's prohibition on quantum effects. Just recently an article appeared in some peer-reviewed journal discussing how entangled states are present for macroscopically significant periods of time in the eyes of birds. Don't they have a higher average body temperature than humans? -Original Message- From: David Shipman Sent: Monday, January 31, 2011 7:41 PM To: Everything List Subject: Re: A comment on Mauldin's paper “Computation and Consciousness” On Jan 30, 4:13 pm, 1Z wrote: On Jan 25, 9:04 am, "Stephen Paul King" wrote: > Dear Bruno and Friends, While we are considering the idea of “causal efficacy” here and not hidden variable theories, the fact that it has been experimentally verified that Nature violates the principle Locality. Therefore the assumption of local efficacy that Mauldin is using for the supervenience thesis is not realistic and thus presents a flaw in his argument. Local supervenience doesn't have to be argued from fundamental physics. It can be argued from neurology. Mental states arent affected by what goes on outside the head unless information is conveyed by the sense This isn't true, is it? So we have two particles (A and B) that are entangled. Entanglement is never destroyed, it is only obscured by subsequent interactions with the environment. Particle A goes zooming off into outer space. 10 years later, Particle B becomes incorporated into my brain. The next day, an alien scientist measures the entangled property on Particle A. This will have an immediate non-local effect on Particle B won't it? And since B's state has been altered, and it is part of my brain, then my brain state has been altered as well, hasn't it? Maybe only a tiny amount, obscured by the many environmental interactions that the two particles have been subjected to since the initial entanglement, but in a way that is real and at least conceivably significant. And if that is true, then to the extent that mental states supervene on brain states, my mental state would also have been altered by non- local effects. Or is that wrong? Regards, David -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: A comment on Mauldin's paper “Computation and Consciousness”
Hi David, You just happened to mention the 800kg Gorilla in the room! While we can rattle off a sophisticated narrative about decoherence effects and quote from some Tegmark paper, the fact remains that entanglement is real and while we can argue that its effects could be minimized, we cannot prove that it is irrelevant to supervenience. This is a game-changer for physical supervenience arguments. But the problem is much worse! It is becoming harder to how up Tegmark's prohibition on quantum effects. Just recently an article appeared in some peer-reviewed journal discussing how entangled states are present for macroscopically significant periods of time in the eyes of birds. Don't they have a higher average body temperature than humans? -Original Message- From: David Shipman Sent: Monday, January 31, 2011 7:41 PM To: Everything List Subject: Re: A comment on Mauldin's paper “Computation and Consciousness” On Jan 30, 4:13 pm, 1Z wrote: On Jan 25, 9:04 am, "Stephen Paul King" wrote: > Dear Bruno and Friends, While we are considering the idea of “causal efficacy” here and not hidden variable theories, the fact that it has been experimentally verified that Nature violates the principle Locality. Therefore the assumption of local efficacy that Mauldin is using for the supervenience thesis is not realistic and thus presents a flaw in his argument. Local supervenience doesn't have to be argued from fundamental physics. It can be argued from neurology. Mental states arent affected by what goes on outside the head unless information is conveyed by the sense This isn't true, is it? So we have two particles (A and B) that are entangled. Entanglement is never destroyed, it is only obscured by subsequent interactions with the environment. Particle A goes zooming off into outer space. 10 years later, Particle B becomes incorporated into my brain. The next day, an alien scientist measures the entangled property on Particle A. This will have an immediate non-local effect on Particle B won't it? And since B's state has been altered, and it is part of my brain, then my brain state has been altered as well, hasn't it? Maybe only a tiny amount, obscured by the many environmental interactions that the two particles have been subjected to since the initial entanglement, but in a way that is real and at least conceivably significant. And if that is true, then to the extent that mental states supervene on brain states, my mental state would also have been altered by non- local effects. Or is that wrong? Regards, David -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: A comment on Mauldin's paper “Computation and Consciousness”
On Jan 30, 4:13 pm, 1Z wrote: > On Jan 25, 9:04 am, "Stephen Paul King" wrote: >> > > Dear Bruno and Friends, >> >> While we are considering the idea of “causal efficacy” >> here and not hidden variable theories, the fact that it >> has been experimentally verified that Nature violates >> the principle Locality. Therefore the assumption of >> local efficacy that Mauldin is using for the supervenience >> thesis is not realistic and thus presents a flaw in his >> argument. > > Local supervenience doesn't have to be argued from > fundamental physics. It can be argued from neurology. > > Mental states arent affected by what goes on outside > the head unless information is conveyed by the sense This isn't true, is it? So we have two particles (A and B) that are entangled. Entanglement is never destroyed, it is only obscured by subsequent interactions with the environment. Particle A goes zooming off into outer space. 10 years later, Particle B becomes incorporated into my brain. The next day, an alien scientist measures the entangled property on Particle A. This will have an immediate non-local effect on Particle B won't it? And since B's state has been altered, and it is part of my brain, then my brain state has been altered as well, hasn't it? Maybe only a tiny amount, obscured by the many environmental interactions that the two particles have been subjected to since the initial entanglement, but in a way that is real and at least conceivably significant. And if that is true, then to the extent that mental states supervene on brain states, my mental state would also have been altered by non- local effects. Or is that wrong? Regards, David -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Observers and Church/Turing
Hi Russell, No problem at all - I myself confess to having skimmed papers in the past, perhaps even in the last 5 minutes... That I took a bit of umbrage just shows that I haven't yet transcended into a being of pure thought :-) Let me address your 3rd paragraph first. Consider the statements: "3 is a prime number" and "4 is a prime number". Both of these are well formed (as opposed to, say, "=3==prime4!=!"), but the first is true and the second is false. To be slightly pedantic, I would count over the first statement (that is, in the process of counting all information structures) and not the second. Note that the first statement can be rephrased in an infinite number of different ways, "2+1 is a prime number", "the square root of 9 is not composite" and so forth. However, we should not count over all of these individually, but rather just the invariant information that is preserved from translation to translation (This is the meta-lesson borrowed from Faddeev and Popov). Consider then "4 is a prime number" - which we can perhaps rephrase as "the square root of 16 is a prime number". In this case we are now carefully translating a false statement - but as it is false there is no longer any invariant core that must be preserved - it would be fine to also say "the square root of 17 is a prime number" or any other random nonsense... "There is no there there", so to speak. The same goes for all of the completely random sequences - there seems to be a huge number of them at first, but none of them actually encode anything nontrivial. When I choose to only count over the nontrivial structures - that which is invariant upon translation - they all disappear in a puff of smoke. Or rather (being a bit more careful), there really never was anything there in the first place: the appearance that the random structures carry a lot of information (due to their incompressibility) was always an illusion. Thus, when I propose only counting over the gauge invariant stuff, it is not that I am skipping over "a bunch of other stuff" because "I don't want to deal with it right now" - I really am only counting over the real stuff. Let me give an example that I thought about including in the paper. Say ETs show up one day - the solution to the Fermi paradox is just that they like to take long naps. As a present they offer us the choice of 2 USB drives. USB A) contains a large number of mathematical theorems - some that we have derived, others that we haven't (perhaps including an amazing solution of the Collatz conjecture). For concreteness say that all the thereoms are less than N bits long as the USB drive has some finite capacity. In contrast, USB B) contains all possible statements that are N bits long or less. One should therefore choose B) because it has everything on A), plus a lot more stuff! But of course by "filling in the gaps" we have not only not added any more information, but have also erased the information that was on A): the entire content of B) can be compactified to the program: "print all sequences N bits long or less". The nontrivial information thus forms a sparse subset of all sequences. The sparseness can be seen through combinatorics. Take some very complex nontrivial structure which is composed of many interacting parts: say, a long mathematical theorem, or a biological creature like a frog. Go in and corrupt one of the many interacting parts - now the whole thing doesn't work. Go and randomly change something else instead, and again the structure no longer works: there are many more ways to be wrong than to be right (with complete randomness emerging in the limit of everything being scrambled). Note that it is a bit more subtle than this however - for instance in the case of the frog, small changes in its genotype (and thus in its phenotype) can slightly improve or decrease its fitness (depending on the environment). There is thus still a degree of randomness remaining, as there must be for entities created through iterative trial and error: the boundary between the sparse subset of nontrivial structures and the rest of sequence space is therefore somewhat blurry. However, even if we add a very fat "blurry buffer zone" the nontrivial structures still comprise a tiny subset of statement space - although they dominate the counting after a gauge choice is made (which removes the redundant and random). Does that make sense? > > Sorry about that, but its a sad fact of life that if I don't get the > general gist of a paper by the time the introduction is over, or get > it wrong, I am unlikely to delve into the technical details unless a) > I'm especially interested (as in I need the results for something I'm > doing), or b) I'm reviewing the paper. > > I guess I don't see why there's a problem to solve in why we observe > ourselves as being observers. It kind of follows as a truism. However, > there is a problem of why we observe ourselves at all, as opposed to
Re: Observers and Church/Turing
On 31 Jan 2011, at 12:44, Andrew Soltau wrote: On 27/01/11 17:44, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 25 Jan 2011, at 18:24, Andrew Soltau wrote: On 24/01/11 21:35, Bruno Marchal wrote: Thanks for all this. I will do some reading and then go through the points again. And get back to you. You are welcome. Ask any question. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ I have been trying to decipher your response to > However, structures of information are instantiated in the physical. OK, but this cannot work if DM is correct, by MGA. That's the whole point. There is no "physical reality" available. It is not obvious to understand this. The UDA+MGA explains this, and the AUDA (the Löbian interview, or Abstract Universal Dovetailer Argument) provides a path to extract physics, and the logic explains why the theory splits into quanta and qualia. Quanta appear as sharable qualia. I have read your paper The Origin of Physical Laws and Sensations, but am still at a loss. I confess I find the blizzard of acronyms difficult to follow. (In particular it would help me greatly if we referred to the Computationalist Theory of Mind as CTM, as do wikipedia and Standford philosophy website, rather than COMP) Comp is just an abbreviation of computationalism. It is synonymous with CTM, DM (digital mechanism), or simply here Mechanism, MEC, ...) etc. I change the wording when people add special meaning to the term. Sometimes comp means the precise theory "yes doctor + Church thesis", but it can indeed be shown equivalent with CTM. Some people use CTM having in mind the idea that the computation has to be physically instantiated, but then it is the point of the paper to show this does not work. Also "yes doctor" is really the assertion of the existence of a level where I am Turing emulable. Quickly we can understand that such a level cannot be found by any machine, but they can bet on them. It does not matter that you need to emulate the entire galactic quantum field to get your experience. In that sense comp is much weaker than the implicit intent of most version of CTM, closer to high level and neurophilosophy. eg Is DU the same as UD? Or is DU the infinte trace of the universal dovetailer, as seems to be suggested by diagram 7? UD is the english for the french DU. Sorry for that typo. I use UD* for the infinite trace of the UD. MGA is the movie graph argument (same consequences as Maudlin's argument). UDA = Universal Dovetailer Argument. In sane04 I add the MGA as a last step of UDA. But in all other publications I put the MGA, before UDA. UDA and MGA were originally introduced to remind people that science has not yet decided between Plato and Aristotle, and to provide motivation for mathematical definition of belief, knowledge, observation and feeling in the case of ideally correct universal (Löbian) machine. A Löbian machine is a universal machine with proving abilities, and "knowing" in a technical sense that she is universal. My work is a work on Gödel's theorem (and Löb, Solovay, Kleene, etc.) in relation with physics, reality, dreams, etc. By Aristotle, I mean (to simplify) the idea that physical reality is primary, or that physics is the fundamental science. By Plato, I mean (to simplify again) the idea that physical reality is the border, or the shadow, or the projection, or the creation, of a non physical vaster reality (be it mathematical, theological, computer science theoretical, arithmetical ...). MEC makes it arithmetical, because it becomes absolutely undecidable. It makes it also theological when listening to what the machine say and stay mute about, or say with interrogation mark. Obviously it is trivial to show that the physical universe is redundant, It is not trivial. It took me 30 years to make about ten person understanding the entire thing. It is the whole point of the proof. It shows the falsity of physicalism. I have come on this list to explain that Tegmark's idea that the physical universe is a mathematical object among others cannot work, assuming CTM, due to the first person indeterminacy. I think that you are still using the identity thesis in the philosophy of mind. Tegmark is still guilty, if you want, of a form of physicalism, by assuming that the physical universe might be a mathematical structure among another. Physical is undefined, and mechanism, when taken enough seriously, leads to the idea that the coupling consciousness/realities is a purely arithmetical phenomenon. The only way to show that the physical universe is redundant consists in showing how the physical laws appear to be believed in absence of physical universe(s). This makes physics no more a fundamental science, but a science which has to be explained from another science. With MEC it can be shown that the other science is arithmetic, or any first order logical specification of a unive
Re: Observers and Church/Turing
On 27/01/11 17:44, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 25 Jan 2011, at 18:24, Andrew Soltau wrote: On 24/01/11 21:35, Bruno Marchal wrote: Thanks for all this. I will do some reading and then go through the points again. And get back to you. You are welcome. Ask any question. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ I have been trying to decipher your response to > However, structures of information are instantiated in the physical. OK, but this cannot work if DM is correct, by MGA. That's the whole point. There is no "physical reality" available. It is not obvious to understand this. The UDA+MGA explains this, and the AUDA (the Löbian interview, or Abstract Universal Dovetailer Argument) provides a path to extract physics, and the logic explains why the theory splits into quanta and qualia. Quanta appear as sharable qualia. I have read your paper The Origin of Physical Laws and Sensations, but am still at a loss. I confess I find the blizzard of acronyms difficult to follow. (In particular it would help me greatly if we referred to the Computationalist Theory of Mind as CTM, as do wikipedia and Standford philosophy website, rather than COMP) eg Is DU the same as UD? Or is DU the infinte trace of the universal dovetailer, as seems to be suggested by diagram 7? Obviously it is trivial to show that the physical universe is redundant, but the move to show that it is disproven I do not follow. Essentially, I do not follow your argument that "I. The Universal Dovetailer Argument shows why comp necessarily *forces* a reversal between physics and machine psychology" You quote Maudlin's “Computation and Consciousness,” The Journal of Philosophy, pp 407-432, as having more complete arguments. However, on page 25 he states "Olympia has shown us at least that some other level beside the computational must be sought." and "Our Olympia demonstrates that running a particular program cannot be a sufficient condition for having any form of mentality" The main point of his complex examples seems to be that the same output supervenes on two very different mechanisms, but this does not force a reversal. Could you tell me the central piece of the logic as you see it in simple terms. Andrew -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
