Re: Sane2004 Step One
On 06 Sep 2012, at 20:44, meekerdb wrote: On 9/6/2012 11:01 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: Consciousness does not arise. It is not in space, nor in time. Its local content, obtained by differentiation, internally can refer to time and space, Even if it is not *in* spacetime, my consciousness seems to depend on some particular localized matter in spacetime. Seeming can be wrong. Only the content of consciousness depends on the particular matter localized in space-time. but that's particular content of an atemporal consciousness. An atemporal consciousness sounds like a contradiction in terms. I agree. I don't use that in the reasoning. It is a recent suggestion, corroborated by the salvia reports and experiences. I was used to agree with Brouwer that consciousness and subjective time are not separable, like the 1p logic examplifies (S4Grz is both a temporal logic, and the machine's 1p logic), but I am open to change my mind on this. We can hallucinate being conscious in a completely atemporal mode. I would not have believed this without living it, as it seems indeed to be a contradiction from the usual mundane state of consciousness. But it makes sense in arithmetic, or for the consciousness of the universal non Löbian machine. Apparently, subjective time might be a result of self-consciousness, and not just consciousness. This makes consciousness a bit more primitive than I thought indeed. If we rely on our intuitive introspection to know what consciousness is (as you often say) we can't then just throw away that insight and say consciousness is something else. Yes. That is why such an insight requires altered state of consciousness. I agree it is weird, but it makes sense if we agree to declare non Löbian machine already conscious. I have no certainty at all in this matter. The experiences have just added one more doubt, on the link between subjective time and consciousness. I would have thought that by losing Löbianity, you loose consciousness, but it seems that is not the case. We need more data and reports to better figure out what happens. 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: The All
On 06 Sep 2012, at 21:03, meekerdb wrote: On 9/6/2012 11:52 AM, Brian Tenneson wrote: A too much powerful God leads to inconsistency. What if reality does not always obey the laws of logic? What if reality is sometimes inconsistent? This is a confusion of levels. Logic is rules about truth preservation in declarative sentences. Not 'obeying the laws of logic' just means declaring inconsistent sentences. We try to avoid this because such utterances would have no determinate meaning. So a *descriptions* of reality may be inconsistent (and therefore useless) but reality is just whatever it is. It can't be inconsistent because it's not assertions. Right. A theory, or a set of beliefs, or a set of propositions can be inconsistent. To say that reality is inconsistent or that a model (in the logician's sense) is inconsistent does not make sense, unless you build a theory in which reality is itself only a set of beliefs close for some logic. Now, with comp the reality we can take is arithmetical truth, and even if seen as a set of sentences, I doubt this can be inconsistent. But if you start with a set ontology, then indeed, I can imagine inconsistencies, but that would not be an inconsistency in reality, but inconsistency in the idea that reality is the set theoretical assumption again, in that case. Paraconsistent logics, which admit local inconsistencies, make sense for the study of natural languages, but if we agree that reality itself is an inconsistent set of of beliefs, I'm afraid the entire idea of science would be jeopardized. Any refutation of any theory could be accounted by a statement like let us admit we are inconsistent. Once, I refute (= found an inconsistency) in the argument of someone pretending to show me a flaw in UDA, and eventually he told me that he accept being inconsistent, but then why should he not apply this to UDA itself? That just don't make sense, but of course, sense is no more relevant once you accept inconsistency. 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Sane2004 Step One
On 06 Sep 2012, at 21:25, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Thursday, September 6, 2012 2:02:02 PM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 05 Sep 2012, at 17:27, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Wednesday, September 5, 2012 10:50:02 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 05 Sep 2012, at 03:48, Craig Weinberg wrote: Taking another look at Sane2004. This isn't so much as a challenge to Bruno, just sharing my notes of why I disagree. Not sure how far I will get this time, but here are my objections to the first step and the stipulated assumptions of comp. I understand that the point is to accept the given definition of comp, and in that respect, I have no reason to doubt that Bruno has accomplished what he sets out to as far as making a good theory within comp, and if he has not, I wouldn't be qualified to comment on it anyhow. From my perspective however, this is all beside the point, since the only point that matters is the actual truth of what consciousness actually is, and what is it's actual relation to physics and information. Given the fragile and precious nature of our own survival, I think that implications for teleportation and AI simulation/personhood which are derived from pure theory rather than thorough consideration of realism would be reckless to say the least. Step one talks about teleportation in terms of being reconstructed with ambient organic materials. If comp were true though, no organic materials or reconstructions would be necessary. The scanning into a universal machine would be sufficient. That is step 6. I haven't even gotten to step 2 yet. I'm reading In the figure the teleported individual is represented by a black box. Its annihilation is represented by a white box appearing at the left of the arrow from 1. Taking this to the China Brain level, the universal machine could be a trillion people with notebooks, pencils, paper, and erasers, talking to each other over cell phones. This activity would have to collectively result in the teleported person now being conjured as if by incantation as a consequence of...what? The writing and erasing on paper? The calling and speaking on cell phones? Where does the experience of the now disembodied person come in? As you illustrate here, plausibly not on the physical means used by the brain. Step 8 shows that indeed the physical has nothing to do with consciousness, except as a content of consciousness. Keeping comp here, we associate consciousness with the logical abstract computations. So the person's consciousness arises spontaneously through the overall effort-ness behind the writing, erasing, and calling, or does it gradually constellate from lesser fragments of disconnected effort-ness? Consciousness does not arise. It is not in space, nor in time. Its local content, obtained by differentiation, internally can refer to time and space, but that's particular content of an atemporal consciousness. I would say (no need of this in UDA). If you exclude space and time, what kind of locality do you refer to? The computational locality used in the local universal system. In my example, a quintillion people call each other on the phone and write down numbers that they get from each other and perform arithmetic functions on them (which in turn may inform them on how to process subsequent arithmetic instructions, etc). Ok. So where does the interpretation of these trillion events per second come in? What knows what all of the computations add up to be? At what point does the 'local content' begin to itch and turn blue? Even if it could, why should it do such a thing? Because it concerns a machine looking at herself and its probable environment. Then the logic shows that it is unavoidable that the machine get non justifiable truth. You can see that informally with thought experiment, like in UDA, or formally in the logics of self- reference. Step one talks about annihilation as well, but it is not clear what role this actually plays in the process, except to make it seem more like teleportation and less like what it actually would be, which is duplication. If I scan an original document and email the scan, I have sent a duplicate, not teleported the original. Right. Classical teleportation = duplication + annihilation of the original. That's step 5, precisely. You understand the reasoning very well, but we know that the problem for you is in the assumption. Yes, the assumption seems to presume physicality to disprove physicality At some place, yes. In a reductio ad absurdum. and presume consciousness to explain consciousness. Yes. Like we presume (at some metalevel) anything we want to explain (from some other realm). It is not a lott, but science works that way. We don't know the public truth. We can only make clear our hypothesis and reason, and propose tests. Why not just recognize it
Re: Sane2004 Step One
On 07 Sep 2012, at 04:20, Stephen P. King wrote: On 9/6/2012 1:44 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 05 Sep 2012, at 08:38, Stephen P. King wrote: On 9/5/2012 2:03 AM, meekerdb wrote: On 9/4/2012 10:07 PM, Stephen P. King wrote: On 9/5/2012 12:38 AM, meekerdb wrote: On 9/4/2012 8:59 PM, Stephen P. King wrote: snip What is most interesting is that the QC can run an arbitrary number of classical computations, all at the same time. The CC can only barely compute the emulation of a single QC. You are talking about QC and CC as though they were material computers with finite resources. Once you've assumed material resources you've lost any non-circular possibility of explaining them. No, I am pointing out that real computations require real resources. Only when we ignore this fact we can get away with floating castles in midair. Brent just point out that arithmetic contains infinite resource. What do you mean by real computations? Do you mean physical computations? Why would they lack resources? Bruno Dear Bruno, I am talking about physical systems that have the capacity of carrying out in their dynamics the functions that implement the abstract computations that you are considering. The very thing that you claim is unnecessary. But you claim that too, as matter is not primitive. or you lost me again. I need matter to communicate with you, but that matter is explained in comp as a a persistent relational entity, so I don't see the problem. It is necessary in the sense that it is implied by the comp hypothesis, even constructively (making comp testable). It is even more stable and solid than anything we might extrapolate from observation, as we might be dreaming. Indeed it comes from the atemporal ultra-stable relations between numbers, that you recently mention as not created by man (I am very glad :). Bruno -- Onward! Stephen http://webpages.charter.net/stephenk1/Outlaw/Outlaw.html -- 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 . 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Where do numbers and geometry come from ?
On 06 Sep 2012, at 16:28, Brian Tenneson wrote: All numbers can be defined in terms of sets. The question becomes this: do sets have ontological primacy relative to mankind or are sets invented or created by mankind? I would say invented, as many different notion of sets can exist. You can take sets for the ontology, but it makes everything more complex, and possibly confusing. With comp the cardinal ontology is undecidable, and I think it is simpler to limit to the finite things. If you want set, with comp a good choice would be the hereditarily finite sets, but it is equivalent (for the computability and provability) with PA. A set seems to me to be a typical construction of the mind. Like physics, analysis, etc. But comp is consistent with set theory, a priori, so no real problems here. Bruno On Thu, Sep 6, 2012 at 5:11 AM, Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net wrote: Hi Stephen P. King Yes, of course, but I wanted a more obvious, dramatic example. The philosophy of mathematics says something like the numbers belong to a static or eternal world, change itself is a property of geometry. Numbers and geometry thus belong to the platonic world, which is forbidden or at least not consistent with the philosophy of materialism, IMHO. If numbers are platonic, I wonder what the presumably materialist Steven Hawkings has to say about their origin in his recent book on numbers. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/6/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Stephen P. King Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-06, 07:53:18 Subject: Re: Could we have invented the prime numbers ? Dear Roger, Could the mere possibility of being a number (without the specificity of which one) be considered to be there from the beginning? On 9/6/2012 7:47 AM, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Stathis Papaioannou If the prime numbers were there from the beginning, before man, then I think they were mind-created (platonic) not brain-created (human creations). Are the prime numbers an invention by man or one of man's discoveries ? I believe that the prime numbers are not a human invention, they were there from the beginning. Humans can discover them by brute calculation, but there is a pattern to them (except for 1, 3 and 5, spaced 6 apart, plus or minus one) Thus 2 3 5 7 11 13 17 19 23 29 31 37 41 43 47 53 59 61 67 71 etc. for n5, they can be placed +-1 on a grid with a spacing of 6 That spacing seems to me at least to be a priori, out of man's control. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/6/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Stathis Papaioannou Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-06, 01:24:31 Subject: Re: Sane2004 Step One On Thu, Sep 6, 2012 at 2:34 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: But you couldn't realise you felt different if the part of your brain responsible for realising were receiving exactly the same inputs from the rest of the brain. So you could feel different, or feel nothing, but maintain the delusional belief that nothing had changed. That's begging the question. You are assuming that the brain is a machine which produces consciousness. I think that the brain is the three dimensional shadow of many levels of experience and it produces nothing but neurochemistry and alterations in our ability to access an individual set of human experiences. The brain does not produce consciousness, it defines the form of many conscious relations. But you believe that the neurochemicals do things contrary to what chemists would predict, for example an ion channel opening or closing without any cause such as a change in transmembrane potential or ligand concentration. We've talked about this before and it just isn't consistent with any scientific evidence. You interpret the existence spontaneous neural activity as meaning that something magical like this happens, but it doesn't mean that at all. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- Onward! Stephen http://webpages.charter.net/stephenk1/Outlaw/Outlaw.html -- 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
Re: Why the Church-Turing thesis?
On 28 Aug 2012, at 21:57, benjayk wrote: It seems that the Church-Turing thesis, that states that an universal turing machine can compute everything that is intuitively computable, has near universal acceptance among computer scientists. Yes indeed. I think there are two strong arguments for this. The empirical one: all attempts to define the set of computable functions have led to the same class of functions, and this despite the quite independent path leading to the definitions (from Church lambda terms, Post production systems, von Neumann machine, billiard ball, combinators, cellular automata ... up to modular functor, quantum topologies, quantum computers, etc.). The conceptual one: the class of computable functions is closed for the most transcendental operation in math: diagonalization. This is not the case for the notions of definability, provability, cardinality, etc. I really wonder why this is so, given that there are simple cases where we can compute something that an abitrary turing machine can not compute using a notion of computation that is not extraordinary at all (and quite relevant in reality). For example, given you have a universal turing machine A that uses the alphabet {1,0} and a universal turing machine B that uses the alphabet {-1,0,1}. Now it is quite clear that the machine A cannot directly answer any questions that relates to -1. For example it cannot directly compute -1*-1=1. Machine A can only be used to use an encoded input value and encoded description of machine B, and give an output that is correct given the right decoding scheme. But for me this already makes clear that machine A is less computationally powerful than machine B. Church thesis concerns only the class of computable functions. The alphabet used by the Turing machine, having 1, 2, or enumerable alphabet does not change the class. If you dovetail on the works of 1 letter Turing machine, you will unavoidably emulate all Turing machines on all finite and enumerable letters alphabets. This can be proved. Nor does the number of tapes, and/or parallelism change that class. Of course, some machine can be very inefficient, but this, by definition, does not concern Church thesis. There was a thesis, often attributed to Cook (but I met him and he claims it is not his thesis), that all Turing machine can emulate themselves in polynomial time. This will plausibly be refuted by the existence of quantum computers (unless P = NP, or things like that). It is an open problem, but most scientists believe that in general a classical computer cannot emulate an arbitrary quantum computer in polynomial time. But I insist, quantum computer have not violated the Church Turing Post Markov thesis. Its input and output when emulating B do only make sense with respect to what the machine B does if we already know what machine B does, and if it is known how we chose to reflect this in the input of machine A (and the interpretation of its output). Otherwise we have no way of even saying whether it emulates something, or whether it is just doing a particular computation on the alphabet {1,0}. I realize that it all comes down to the notion of computation. But why do most choose to use such a weak notion of computation? How does machine B not compute something that A doesn't by any reasonable standard? Saying that A can compute what B computes is like saying that orange can express the same as the word apple, because we can encode the word apple as orange. It is true in a very limited sense, but it seems mad to treat it as the foundation of what it means for words to express something (and the same goes for computation). If we use such trivial notions of computation, why not say that the program return input emulates all turing-machines because given the right input it gives the right output (we just give it the solution as input). I get that we can simply use the Church-turing as the definition of computation means. But why is it (mostly) treated as being the one and only correct notion of computation (especially in a computer science context)? The only explanation I have is that it is dogma. To question it would change to much and would be too complicated and uncomfortable. It would make computation an irreducibly complex and relative notion or - heaven forbid - even an inherently subjective notion (computation from which perspective?). That was what everybody believed before the rise of the universal machine and lambda calculus. Gödel called the closure of the computable functions for diagonalization a miracle, and he took time before assessing it. See: DAVIS M., 1982, Why Gödel Didn't Have Church's Thesis, Information and Control 54,.pp. 3-24. 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
Re: The All
On 06.09.2012 21:03 meekerdb said the following: On 9/6/2012 11:52 AM, Brian Tenneson wrote: A too much powerful God leads to inconsistency. What if reality does not always obey the laws of logic? What if reality is sometimes inconsistent? This is a confusion of levels. Logic is rules about truth preservation in declarative sentences. Not 'obeying the laws of logic' just means declaring inconsistent sentences. We try to avoid this because such utterances would have no determinate meaning. So a *descriptions* of reality may be inconsistent (and therefore useless) but reality is just whatever it is. It can't be inconsistent because it's not assertions. Brent This could work provided we could separate the world into mental and physical states. The question remains though if under physicalism one says that mental states are actually physical states. Then I do not know how to employ such a consideration in this case. Evgenii -- 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: Why the Church-Turing thesis?
Bruno Marchal wrote: On 28 Aug 2012, at 21:57, benjayk wrote: It seems that the Church-Turing thesis, that states that an universal turing machine can compute everything that is intuitively computable, has near universal acceptance among computer scientists. Yes indeed. I think there are two strong arguments for this. The empirical one: all attempts to define the set of computable functions have led to the same class of functions, and this despite the quite independent path leading to the definitions (from Church lambda terms, Post production systems, von Neumann machine, billiard ball, combinators, cellular automata ... up to modular functor, quantum topologies, quantum computers, etc.). OK, now I understand it better. Apparently if we express a computation in terms of a computable function we can always arrive at the same computable function using a different computation of an abitrary turing universal machine. That seems right to me. But in this case I don't get why it is often claimed that CT thesis claims that all computations can be done by a universal turing machine, not merely that they lead to the same class of computable functions (if converted appriopiately). The latter is a far weaker statement, since computable functions abstract from many relevant things about the machine. And even this weaker statement doesn't seem true with regards to more powerful models like super-recursive functions, as computable functions just give finite results, while super-recursive machine can give infinite/unlimited results. Bruno Marchal wrote: The conceptual one: the class of computable functions is closed for the most transcendental operation in math: diagonalization. This is not the case for the notions of definability, provability, cardinality, etc. I don't really know what this means. Do you mean that there are just countable many computations? If yes, what has this do with whether all universal turing machines are equivalent? Bruno Marchal wrote: I really wonder why this is so, given that there are simple cases where we can compute something that an abitrary turing machine can not compute using a notion of computation that is not extraordinary at all (and quite relevant in reality). For example, given you have a universal turing machine A that uses the alphabet {1,0} and a universal turing machine B that uses the alphabet {-1,0,1}. Now it is quite clear that the machine A cannot directly answer any questions that relates to -1. For example it cannot directly compute -1*-1=1. Machine A can only be used to use an encoded input value and encoded description of machine B, and give an output that is correct given the right decoding scheme. But for me this already makes clear that machine A is less computationally powerful than machine B. Church thesis concerns only the class of computable functions. Hm, maybe the wikipedia article is a bad one, since it mentioned computable functions just as means of explaining it, not as part of its definition. Bruno Marchal wrote: The alphabet used by the Turing machine, having 1, 2, or enumerable alphabet does not change the class. If you dovetail on the works of 1 letter Turing machine, you will unavoidably emulate all Turing machines on all finite and enumerable letters alphabets. This can be proved. Nor does the number of tapes, and/or parallelism change that class. Of course, some machine can be very inefficient, but this, by definition, does not concern Church thesis. Even so, CT thesis makes a claim about the equivalence of machines, not of emulability. Why are two machines that can be used to emlate each other regarded to be equivalent? In my view, there is a big difference between computing the same and being able to emulate each other. Most importantly, emulation only makes sense relative to another machine that is being emulated, and a correct interpretation. benjayk -- View this message in context: http://old.nabble.com/Why-the-Church-Turing-thesis--tp34348236p34401986.html Sent from the Everything List mailing list archive at Nabble.com. -- 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.
The physical and the mental
Hi Evgenii Rudnyi Leibniz divides the world into physical and mental states, each a reflection of the other. The mental is mental and the physical is not an illusion. You canstill stub your toe on a rock. This philosophy is called Idealism. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottfried_Wilhelm_Leibniz Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/7/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Evgenii Rudnyi Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-07, 04:11:03 Subject: Re: The All On 06.09.2012 21:03 meekerdb said the following: On 9/6/2012 11:52 AM, Brian Tenneson wrote: A too much powerful God leads to inconsistency. What if reality does not always obey the laws of logic? What if reality is sometimes inconsistent? This is a confusion of levels. Logic is rules about truth preservation in declarative sentences. Not 'obeying the laws of logic' just means declaring inconsistent sentences. We try to avoid this because such utterances would have no determinate meaning. So a *descriptions* of reality may be inconsistent (and therefore useless) but reality is just whatever it is. It can't be inconsistent because it's not assertions. Brent This could work provided we could separate the world into mental and physical states. The question remains though if under physicalism one says that mental states are actually physical states. Then I do not know how to employ such a consideration in this case. Evgenii -- 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.
A leibnizian argument that necessary truths would seem to be a priori
Hi Brian Tenneson Whether or not sets were there (true) a priori is a subject of debate. You might want to see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_mathematics My own (uninformed) view is based on Leibnizian thinking. He lists two kinds oif logic, necessary or rational logic, which is always either true or false, and contingent logic, which can be true in some cases and no0t uin other ones. To this way of thinking, all neccessary (rational) truths since tyhey must always be either true or false, if true were always true and therefore necessary truths must be a priori. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/7/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Brian Tenneson Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-06, 11:31:35 Subject: Re: Re: Where do numbers and geometry come from ? Sure you can have sets without numbers. The popular set theory's development known as ZFC is not based on numbers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zermelo%E2%80%93Fraenkel_set_theory Numbers are defined in terms of sets. What that means is that all numbers are sets but not all sets are numbers. I do agree that numbers are not created by man but neither are sets. On Thu, Sep 6, 2012 at 8:19 AM, Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net wrote: Hi Brian Tenneson I'm just to establish the fact that numbers are a priori and so not created by man. Given that, it doesn't matter if sets are a priori or not. Presumably (I am not a mathematician) you cannot have sets without numbers, so the numbers rule. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/6/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Brian Tenneson Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-06, 10:28:51 Subject: Re: Where do numbers and geometry come from ? All numbers can be defined in terms of sets. The question becomes this: do sets have ontological primacy relative to mankind or are sets invented or created by mankind? On Thu, Sep 6, 2012 at 5:11 AM, Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net wrote: Hi Stephen P. King Yes, of course, but I wanted a more obvious, dramatic?xample. The philosophy of mathematics says something like the numbers belong to a static or eternal world, change?tself ?s a property of geometry. Numbers and geometry thus belong to the platonic world, which is forbidden or at least not consistent with the philosophy of materialism, IMHO. If numbers are platonic,? wonder what the presumably materialist Steven Hawkings has to say about their origin in his recent book on numbers. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/6/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Stephen P. King Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-06, 07:53:18 Subject: Re: Could we have invented the prime numbers ? Dear Roger, ? Could the mere possibility of being a number (without the specificity of which one) be considered to be there from the beginning? On 9/6/2012 7:47 AM, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Stathis Papaioannou If the prime numbers were there from the beginning, before man, then I think they were mind-created (platonic) not brain-created (human creations). Are the prime numbers an invention by man or one of man's discoveries ? I believe that the prime numbers are not a human invention, they were there from the beginning. Humans can discover them by brute calculation, but there is a pattern to them (except for 1, 3 and 5, spaced 6 apart, plus or minus one) Thus 2 3 5 7 11 13 17 19 23 29 31 37 41 43 47 53 59 61 67 71 etc. for n5, they can be placed +-1 on a grid with a spacing of 6 That spacing seems to me at least to be a priori, out of man's control. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/6/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Stathis Papaioannou Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-06, 01:24:31 Subject: Re: Sane2004 Step One On Thu, Sep 6, 2012 at 2:34 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: But you couldn't realise you felt different if the part of your brain responsible for realising were receiving exactly the same inputs from the rest of the brain. So you could feel different, or feel nothing, but maintain the delusional belief that nothing had changed. That's begging the question. You are assuming that the brain is a machine which produces consciousness. I think that the brain is the three dimensional shadow of many levels of experience and it produces nothing but neurochemistry and alterations in our ability to access an individual set of human experiences. The brain does not produce consciousness, it defines the form of many conscious relations. But you believe that the neurochemicals do
Rational vs experiential religion
Hi Bruno Marchal The rational view of God can be discussed logically and publicly, such as in the philosophy of religion. But according to Christian (especially Lutheran) tradition, that is only a description of God. There is also a Living God (also called the Word, or the Christ) that can only be experienced , this being a gift that only God can give one, through the gift of faith or trust. Here again we have the world split up into rational thought vs experience, which is not only true of religion, but of all man's life and understanding. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/7/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Bruno Marchal Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-06, 13:21:12 Subject: Re: Two reasons why computers IMHO cannot exhibit intelligence Hi Roger, I know, Roger. I was addressing John Clark, who confirmed my feeling that atheists are the number one defender of the Christian's conception of God. Your's is obviously closer to Plato and the general machine's theology. It is bit sad you don't listen to what the machines already can tell us. You can interpret the work of G?el, L?, ... Solovay, as a initial interview of the ideally correct self-referential machine. The modal logics G and G* axiomatize the propositional logics of such discourses. G* includes the machine's silence, which are rather important for the 'mystical' part of the universal machine. I will be direct. In your post you defend truth and vocabulary, where I prefer hypothesis, reasoning and testing. Especially in theology. Bruno On 05 Sep 2012, at 18:07, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Bruno Marchal I've been defending cosmic intelligence (CI) or Cosmic Mind, of Life , not the christian God, not the whole shebang, the Trinity. But actually I think they're probably all the same. CI was there before the world was created-- for sure, else the world could not have been created. But since CI created time and space the argument is irrevant. And I don't know what God can think, that much is Christian. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/5/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Bruno Marchal Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-05, 09:51:40 Subject: Re: Two reasons why computers IMHO cannot exhibit intelligence On 04 Sep 2012, at 18:42, John Clark wrote: On Tue, Sep 4, 2012 Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net wrote: God created the human race. And when God asks Himself the question Why have I always existed, why haven't I always not existed? what answer in his omniscience does He come up with? The neoplatonist conception of God does not allow It to ask such a question. Nor does Arithmetical Truth. God has no self-reference power at all, as this would make it inconsistent. Still defending the Christian God, aren't you? Bruno God is the uncreated infinite intelligence There was once a patent issued for a combination rat trap and potato peeler and people laugh about that, but using the exact same organ for both excretory and reproductive purposes does not seem very intelligent to me either, much less infinitely intelligent. And putting the blood vessels and nerves for the retina of the eye in front not in the back so the light must pass through them to get to the light sensitive cells also does not seem very smart; no engineer in his right mind would place the gears to move the film in a camera so that the light must pass through the gears before hitting the film. That's not the sort of thing you'd expect God to do, but it's exactly what you'd expect Evolution to do. John K Clark -- 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. 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Can experiences be teleported ?
Hi Bruno Marchal Eventually you will have to answer the question of what is teleportable. I have no doubt that someday matter can be transported, even information. Even energy. But the more important question to me is whether or not experiences (the stuff of life or consciousness) can be transported. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/7/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Bruno Marchal Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-06, 13:44:55 Subject: Re: Sane2004 Step One On 05 Sep 2012, at 08:38, Stephen P. King wrote: On 9/5/2012 2:03 AM, meekerdb wrote: On 9/4/2012 10:07 PM, Stephen P. King wrote: On 9/5/2012 12:38 AM, meekerdb wrote: On 9/4/2012 8:59 PM, Stephen P. King wrote: Notice that both the duplication and the teleportation, as discussed, assume that the information content is exactly copyable. Not exactly. Only sufficiently accurately to maintain your consciousness. If the copy is not exact then functional equivalence is not exact either and this is fatal for the model. Then you should mourn the Stephen P. King of and hour ago. He's been fatally changed. Never, I am not the impermanent image on the world stage. I am the fire that casts the images. This is not qubits that are involved... The point here is that this comp model assume that Reality is, at is ground level, classical. It doesn't assume that. A fully quantum computation can be performed on a classical, i.e. Turing, computer. Bruno would just say it just takes a lower level of substitution. Yes, a classical computer can emulate a finite quantum computation given sufficient resources. This is not the same thing as the EPR effect that I am considering. The idea that I am considering is more like this: Consider the visible physical universe. We know from observation that not only is it open on one end and that it's expansion is accelerating. People want to put this off on some Dark Energy. I think that it is something else, driving it. Consider a classical computer that needs to emulate a quantum computation. It has to have even increasing resources to keep up with the QC if the QC is modeling an expanding universe. It we take Bruno's AR literally, where are these resources coming from? They are computations. They exist in Platonia. He's trying to explain matter, so he can't very well assume material resources. The world is made out of arithmetic, an infinite resource. Sure, but the explanation of the idea requires matter to be communicated. A slight oversight perhaps. But there is matter, in the comp theory. That is all what UDA explains, and what the Z and X logics axiomatizes. Let's turn the tables and make Reality Quantum in its essence. The classical computation may just be something that the QC is running. There's not difference as computations. You are correct but only in the absence of considerations of inputs and outputs and their concurrency. Abstract theory leaves out the obvious, but when it pretends to toss out the obvious, that is going to far. Matter is not obvious. What is most interesting is that the QC can run an arbitrary number of classical computations, all at the same time. The CC can only barely compute the emulation of a single QC. You are talking about QC and CC as though they were material computers with finite resources. Once you've assumed material resources you've lost any non-circular possibility of explaining them. No, I am pointing out that real computations require real resources. Only when we ignore this fact we can get away with floating castles in midair. Brent just point out that arithmetic contains infinite resource. What do you mean by real computations? Do you mean physical computations? Why would they lack resources? Bruno What if we have an infinite and eternal QC running infinitely many finite CCs and each of these CC's is trying to emulate a single QC. Map this idea out and look at the nice self-referential loop that this defines! You're confused. Maybe. I can handle being wrong. I learn from mistakes. Brent -- -- Onward! Stephen http://webpages.charter.net/stephenk1/Outlaw/Outlaw.html -- 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. 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
Re: Why the Church-Turing thesis?
Jason Resch-2 wrote: On Thu, Sep 6, 2012 at 12:47 PM, benjayk benjamin.jaku...@googlemail.comwrote: Jason Resch-2 wrote: On Tue, Aug 28, 2012 at 2:57 PM, benjayk benjamin.jaku...@googlemail.comwrote: It seems that the Church-Turing thesis, that states that an universal turing machine can compute everything that is intuitively computable, has near universal acceptance among computer scientists. I really wonder why this is so, given that there are simple cases where we can compute something that an abitrary turing machine can not compute using a notion of computation that is not extraordinary at all (and quite relevant in reality). For example, given you have a universal turing machine A that uses the alphabet {1,0} and a universal turing machine B that uses the alphabet {-1,0,1}. Now it is quite clear that the machine A cannot directly answer any questions that relates to -1. I see this at all being the case at all. What is the symbol for -1 supposed to look like? Do you agree that a turing machine that used A, B, and C as symbols could work the same as one that used -1, 0, and 1? Well, the symbol for -1 could be -1? To answer your latter question, no, not necessarily. I don't take the symbols not to be mere symbols, but to contain meaning (which they do), and so it matters what symbols the machine use, because that changes the meaning of its computation. Often times the meaning of the symbols also constrain the possible relations (for example -1 * -1 normally needs to be 1, while A * A could be A, B or C). CT thesis wants to abstract from things like meaning, but I don't really see the great value in acting like this is necessarily the correct theoretical way of thinking about computations. It is only valuable as one possible, very strongly abstracted, limited and representational model of computation with respect to emulability. Jason Resch-2 wrote: Everything is a representation, but what is important is that the Turing machine preserves the relationships. E.g., if ABBBABAA is greater than AAABBAAB then 01110100 is greater than 00011001, and all the other properties can hold, irrespective of what symbols are used. The problem is that relationships don't make sense apart from symbols. We can theoretically express the natural numbers using an infinite numbers of unique symbols for both numbers and operations (like A or B or C or X for 10, ´ or ? or [ or ° for +), but in this case it won't be clear that we are expresing natural numbers at all (without a lengthy explanation of what the symbols mean). Or if we are using binary numbers to express the natural numbers, it will also be not very clear that we mean numbers, because often binary expressions mean something entirely else. If we then add 1 to this number it will not be clear that we actually added one, or if we just flipped a bit. I admit that for numbers this is not so relevant because number relations can be quite clearly expressed using numerous symbols (they have very few and simple relations), but it is much more relevant for more complex relations. Jason Resch-2 wrote: For example it cannot directly compute -1*-1=1. Machine A can only be used to use an encoded input value and encoded description of machine B, and give an output that is correct given the right decoding scheme. 1's or 0's, X's or O's, what the symbols are don't have any bearing on what they can compute. That's just an assertion of the belief I am trying to question here. In reality, it *does* matter which symbols/things we use to compute. A computer that only uses one symbol (for example a computer that adds using marbles) would be pretty useless. It does matter in many different ways: Speed of computations, effciency of computation, amount of memory, efficiency of memory, ease of programming, size of programs, ease of interpreting the result, amount of layers of programming to interpret the result and to program efficiently, ease of introspecting into the state of a computer... Practically they might matter but not theoretically. In the right theoretical model, it does matter. I am precisely doubting the value of adhering to our simplistic theoretical model of computation as the essence of what computation means. Jason Resch-2 wrote: Why would we abstract from all that and then reduce computation to our one very abstract and imcomplete model of computation? If we do this we could as well abstract from the process of computation and say every string can be used to emulate any machine, because if you know what program it expresses, you know what it would compute (if correctly interpreted). There's no fundamental difference. Strings need to be interpreted to make sense as a program, and a turing machine without negative numbers needs to be interpreted to make sense as a program computing the result of an equation using negative numbers. I agree,
Re: being conscious in a completely atemporal mode
On 9/7/2012 2:41 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: It is a recent suggestion, corroborated by the salvia reports and experiences. I was used to agree with Brouwer that consciousness and subjective time are not separable, like the 1p logic examplifies (S4Grz is both a temporal logic, and the machine's 1p logic), but I am open to change my mind on this. We can hallucinate being conscious in a completely atemporal mode. I would not have believed this without living it, as it seems indeed to be a contradiction from the usual mundane state of consciousness. But it makes sense in arithmetic, or for the consciousness of the universal non Löbian machine. Apparently, subjective time might be a result of self-consciousness, and not just consciousness. This makes consciousness a bit more primitive than I thought indeed. Dear Bruno, Could you explain a bit more what the experience of being conscious in a completely atemporal mode was like? Where you aware of any kind of change in your environment? Was one's internal narrative (of external events) silent? I have always suspected that subjective time might be a result of self-consciousness but have not had any way of discussing the idea coherently. If we stipulate that subjective time is a form of noticing that one is noticing changes (a second order aspect) in one's environment, then this would fall into being a result of self-consciousness (which is obviously a second order effect at least to me). I have debated this idea before on this List with Russell Standish but we didn't seem to reach any definite conclusion. -- Onward! Stephen http://webpages.charter.net/stephenk1/Outlaw/Outlaw.html -- 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.
Life forces, intentions, goals and final ends as opposed to mechanics
An intention is a desire in the form of thought, so is nonphysical, as are all of the processes of mind. In Leibniz's philosophy, intentions are essentially what L calls appetites in monads. They are goal-directed, following what Aristotle called end causation, which are potential, pulling forces,characteristic of life, rather than the effective, acting or pushing forces characteristic of mechanics. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/7/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: meekerdb Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-06, 11:38:19 Subject: Re: Sane2004 Step One On 9/5/2012 11:18 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: Intention is not magic and doesn't need hypothetical permission to exist. If your words are random ricochets of quantum radioactive decay or thermodynamic anomalies, then they are meaningless noise. You can't account for them because any accounting you can produce with your fingertips is only the random twitchings of your nervous system. Your view that denies the very reality of intention that you employ to state your denial. The fact that you deny that it does shows me that you are only capable of framing the question in the one way that it can never be answered. Your view is to say, I choose to deny my ability to choose. No, that is a misconception. Simply because there is some randomness at a molecular level doesn't make the whole process noise. Or looked at another way the structure of you brain amplifies and shapes the noise and combines it with perception to produce your actions in a way that we recognize as constituting your consistent character. Brent -- 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.
The rational must be a priori and the contingent (factual) must be a posteriori
According to my argument below, all rational truths must be a priori and all contingent truths (facts) have to be a posteriori. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/7/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Roger Clough Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-07, 06:51:10 Subject: A leibnizian argument that necessary truths would seem to be a priori Hi Brian Tenneson Whether or not sets were there (true) a priori is a subject of debate. You might want to see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_mathematics My own (uninformed) view is based on Leibnizian thinking. He lists two kinds oif logic, necessary or rational logic, which is always either true or false, and contingent logic, which can be true in some cases and no0t uin other ones. To this way of thinking, all neccessary (rational) truths since tyhey must always be either true or false, if true were always true and therefore necessary truths must be a priori. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/7/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Brian Tenneson Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-06, 11:31:35 Subject: Re: Re: Where do numbers and geometry come from ? Sure you can have sets without numbers. The popular set theory's development known as ZFC is not based on numbers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zermelo%E2%80%93Fraenkel_set_theory Numbers are defined in terms of sets. What that means is that all numbers are sets but not all sets are numbers. I do agree that numbers are not created by man but neither are sets. On Thu, Sep 6, 2012 at 8:19 AM, Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net wrote: Hi Brian Tenneson I'm just to establish the fact that numbers are a priori and so not created by man. Given that, it doesn't matter if sets are a priori or not. Presumably (I am not a mathematician) you cannot have sets without numbers, so the numbers rule. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/6/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Brian Tenneson Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-06, 10:28:51 Subject: Re: Where do numbers and geometry come from ? All numbers can be defined in terms of sets. The question becomes this: do sets have ontological primacy relative to mankind or are sets invented or created by mankind? On Thu, Sep 6, 2012 at 5:11 AM, Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net wrote: Hi Stephen P. King Yes, of course, but I wanted a more obvious, dramatic?xample. The philosophy of mathematics says something like the numbers belong to a static or eternal world, change?tself ?s a property of geometry. Numbers and geometry thus belong to the platonic world, which is forbidden or at least not consistent with the philosophy of materialism, IMHO. If numbers are platonic,? wonder what the presumably materialist Steven Hawkings has to say about their origin in his recent book on numbers. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/6/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Stephen P. King Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-06, 07:53:18 Subject: Re: Could we have invented the prime numbers ? Dear Roger, ? Could the mere possibility of being a number (without the specificity of which one) be considered to be there from the beginning? On 9/6/2012 7:47 AM, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Stathis Papaioannou If the prime numbers were there from the beginning, before man, then I think they were mind-created (platonic) not brain-created (human creations). Are the prime numbers an invention by man or one of man's discoveries ? I believe that the prime numbers are not a human invention, they were there from the beginning. Humans can discover them by brute calculation, but there is a pattern to them (except for 1, 3 and 5, spaced 6 apart, plus or minus one) Thus 2 3 5 7 11 13 17 19 23 29 31 37 41 43 47 53 59 61 67 71 etc. for n5, they can be placed +-1 on a grid with a spacing of 6 That spacing seems to me at least to be a priori, out of man's control. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/6/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Stathis Papaioannou Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-06, 01:24:31 Subject: Re: Sane2004 Step One On Thu, Sep 6, 2012 at 2:34 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: But you couldn't realise you felt different if the part of your brain responsible for realising were receiving exactly the same inputs from the rest of the brain. So you could feel different, or feel nothing, but maintain the delusional belief that
Re: The All
On 9/7/2012 4:11 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: On 06.09.2012 21:03 meekerdb said the following: On 9/6/2012 11:52 AM, Brian Tenneson wrote: A too much powerful God leads to inconsistency. What if reality does not always obey the laws of logic? What if reality is sometimes inconsistent? This is a confusion of levels. Logic is rules about truth preservation in declarative sentences. Not 'obeying the laws of logic' just means declaring inconsistent sentences. We try to avoid this because such utterances would have no determinate meaning. So a *descriptions* of reality may be inconsistent (and therefore useless) but reality is just whatever it is. It can't be inconsistent because it's not assertions. Brent This could work provided we could separate the world into mental and physical states. The question remains though if under physicalism one says that mental states are actually physical states. Then I do not know how to employ such a consideration in this case. Evgenii Dear Evgenii, What do you imagine would be the consequence of what may be a pair of sets of mental states and physical states for one entity does not match up exactly or even at all with a pair of mental and physical states for another? -- Onward! Stephen http://webpages.charter.net/stephenk1/Outlaw/Outlaw.html -- 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: The Unprivacy of Information
Hi Craig Weinberg Although I don't follow Dawking's views on life and God, I think his idea of semes, which are like genes but ideas instead, is a very good one. If the logic follows through, then man is the semes' way of propagating itself through society. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/7/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Craig Weinberg Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-06, 13:39:10 Subject: The Unprivacy of Information (reposting from my blog) If I? right, then the slogan ?nformation wants to be free? is not just an intuition about social policy, but rather an insight into the ontological roots of information itself. To be more precise, it isn? that information wants to be free, it is that it can? want to be anything, and that ownership itself is predicated on want and familiarity. Information, by contrast, is the exact opposite of want and familiarity, it is the empty and generic syntax of strangers talking to strangers about anything. I propose that information or data is inherently public such that it lacks the possibility of privacy. Information cannot be secret, it can only be kept a secret through voluntary participation in extra-informational social contracts. It is only the access to information that we can control - the i/o, we cannot become information or live in information or as information.* Information spreads only as controlled changes in matter, not independently in space or non-space vacuum. Information is how stuff seems to other stuff. Computation exploits the universality of how many kinds of stuff make sense in the same basic ways. It is to make modular or ?igital? collections of objectified changes which can be inscribed on any sufficiently controllable substance. Not live hamsters or fog. They make terrible computers. To copyright information or to encrypt it is to discourage unauthorized control of information access. This underscores the fact that information control supervenes on (requires) capacities of perception and intent rather than the capacities of information itself. We have to be shamed or frightened or tempted into agreeing to treat information as proprietary on behalf of the proprietor? interests.We can? train information not to talk to strangers. The data itself doesn? care if you publish it to the world or take credit for writing Shakespeare? entire catalog. This is not merely a strange property of information, this is the defining property of information in direct contradistinction to both experience and matter. I maintain however, that this doesn? indicate that information is a neutral monism (singular ground of being from which matter, energy, and awareness emerge), but rather it is the neutral nihilism - the shadow, if you will, of sensorimotive participation divisible by spacetime. It? a protocol that bridges the gaps between participants (selves, monads, agents, experiences), but it is not itself a participant. This is important because if we don? understand this (and we are nowhere near understanding this yet), then we will proceed to exterminate our quality of life to a hybrid of Frankenstein neuro-materialism and HAL cyberfunction-idealism. To understand why information is really not consciousness but the evacuated forms of consciousness, consider that matter is proprietary relative to the body and experience is proprietary relative to the self, but information is proprietary to nothing. Information, if it did exist, would be nothing but the essence of a-proprietary manifestation. It has no dimension of subjectivity (privacy, ownership, selfhood) at all. It is qualitatively flat. Information as a word is a mis-attribution of what is actually, ontologically, ?ormations to be interpreted? as code, to be unpacked, reconstituted, and reconstituted as a private experience. *Who and what we are is sensorimotive matter (or materialized participation if you prefer?here are a lot of fancy ways to describe it: Meta-juxtaposing afferent-efferent phenomenal realism, or private algebraic/public-geometric phenomenal realism, orthogonally involuted experiential syzygy, etc.) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/everything-list/-/bymuNo_xJ2QJ. 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
Re: Why the Church-Turing thesis?
On 9/7/2012 6:24 AM, benjayk wrote: Why are two machines that can be used to emlate each other regarded to be equivalent? In my view, there is a big difference between computing the same and being able to emulate each other. Most importantly, emulation only makes sense relative to another machine that is being emulated, and a correct interpretation. Dear benjayk, This is what is discussed under the header of Bisimilarity and bisimulation equivalence iff simulation = emulation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisimulation a bisimulation is a binary relation between state transition systems, associating systems which behave in the same way in the sense that one system simulates the other and vice-versa. My own use of the term seeks a more generalized version that does not assume that the relation is necessarily binary nor strictly monotonic. The key is that a pair of machines can have an image of each other and that they are capable of acting on that image. -- Onward! Stephen http://webpages.charter.net/stephenk1/Outlaw/Outlaw.html -- 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.
Leibniz's universes as perceived
Hi Stephen P. King There is only one physical world, but only the supreme monad (supremem in the mental world) sees all and sees all as it it is, clearly and wholly. The individual point of view of the phjysical world that each monad indirectly perceives is called the phenomenological world. We (as monads) all see the physical world and the mental world indirectly (because they have no windows) as perceptions. Monads have no windows but their perceptions are constantly and instantaneously being updated by the supreme monad according to their individual points of view and individual abilities. All perceptions of the monads are at best somewhat distorted and at least the world appears to physical bodies as if the body is mostly sleep and drunk. Animals and vegetables can also perceive distorted feelings. Humans can perceive , in addition, intellectual portions of the rest of infinite set of monads, each partial and somewhat distorted. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/7/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Stephen P. King Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-07, 07:43:42 Subject: Re: The All On 9/7/2012 4:11 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: On 06.09.2012 21:03 meekerdb said the following: On 9/6/2012 11:52 AM, Brian Tenneson wrote: A too much powerful God leads to inconsistency. What if reality does not always obey the laws of logic? What if reality is sometimes inconsistent? This is a confusion of levels. Logic is rules about truth preservation in declarative sentences. Not 'obeying the laws of logic' just means declaring inconsistent sentences. We try to avoid this because such utterances would have no determinate meaning. So a *descriptions* of reality may be inconsistent (and therefore useless) but reality is just whatever it is. It can't be inconsistent because it's not assertions. Brent This could work provided we could separate the world into mental and physical states. The question remains though if under physicalism one says that mental states are actually physical states. Then I do not know how to employ such a consideration in this case. Evgenii Dear Evgenii, What do you imagine would be the consequence of what may be a pair of sets of mental states and physical states for one entity does not match up exactly or even at all with a pair of mental and physical states for another? -- Onward! Stephen http://webpages.charter.net/stephenk1/Outlaw/Outlaw.html -- 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: Re: Why a bacterium has more intelligence than a computer
Hi Stephen P. King I think of the brain as a running sensor of the static platonic world. Sort of like looking out of the car window as you speed along. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/7/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Stephen P. King Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-06, 20:25:27 Subject: Re: Why a bacterium has more intelligence than a computer On 9/6/2012 7:59 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Thursday, September 6, 2012 7:37:38 PM UTC-4, Stephen Paul King wrote: On 9/5/2012 11:50 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Wednesday, September 5, 2012 6:38:07 AM UTC-4, rclough wrote: Hi Stephen P. King No, the stuff in our skulls is alive, has intelligence, and a 1p. Computers don't and can't. Big sdifference. Hi Roger, ??? Please leave magic out of this, as any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. The trouble is that the stuff in our skulls does not appear to be that much different from a bunch of diodes and transistors. ??? Our brains obey the very same physical laws! What makes the brain special? I suspect that the brain uses quantum entanglement effects to both synchronize and update sense content in ways that cannot obtain from purely classical physical methods. Our mechanical machines lack the ability to report on their 1p content thus we are using their disability to argue against their possible abilities. A computer that could both generate an internal self-model and report on it would lead us to very different conclusions! I think you are both right. Computers qua computers don't feel anything because they aren't anything. The physical material that you are using to execute computations on does however have experiences - just not experiences that we associated with our own. There is a concrete experience associated with the production of these pixels on your screen - many experiences on many levels, of molecules that make up the wires etc., but those experiences don't seem to lead to anything we would consider significant. It's pretty straightforward to me. A stuffed animal that looks like a bear is not a bear. A picture of a person is not a person, even if it is a fancy interactive picture. Craig -- Hi Craig, I think that the difference that makes a difference here is the identity that emerges between matching of the experience *of* object and experience *by* object. Ranulph Glanville has, with others in the Cybernetics community, written masterfully on this in his Same is Different paper. Hi Stephen, How does the of/by distinction compare with map-territory and use-mention distinctions? Craig Hi Craig, Consider the difference/similarity of self-observation and other-observation. I will try to post more on this soon. -- Onward! Stephen http://webpages.charter.net/stephenk1/Outlaw/Outlaw.html -- 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: Re: The universe as a collection of an infinite number of pointscalled monads
Hi Stephen P. King I solved this problem my own way by simply asssuming that the universe from the beginning and before, as well as now and forever, exists as an infinite collection of points (monads). So no problem with the creation of new things. In principle they always were and simply grow or unfold when the time calls for it, then roll or fold up or whatever at the end of their useful lives. In this veiw of reality, all of reality always consists in monadic space as an overlapping infinite set of points. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/7/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Stephen P. King Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-06, 19:47:06 Subject: Re: The universe as a collection of an infinite number of pointscalled monads On 9/5/2012 12:57 PM, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Bruno Marchal You raise an interesting point If all of the monads had to be existing at the beginning of the universe, what if I build a new computer ? Dear Roger, The point is that the physical stuff is NOT ontologically primitive. It emerges from harmonies of agreement between the monads. These harmonies have labellings in terms of time and location but only as relata of the monads. The monads are eternal, but their perceptions are finite and contingent on each other. This idea rehabilitates the Pre-established Harmony by showing that the pre-established portion of the concept is both unnecessary and problematic. God's creative act is an eternal process, not a special event that occurs only once as we could think of it. It occurs only once for God, surely, but God has no time, nor space, nor any particular properties of its own. The monads *are* the agents of creation in the sense that they generate definiteness of properties. I believe Leibniz's discussion of plants and seeds would relate to that. In the case of plants, each has a monad that started out as a miniscule seed (all enwrapped in itself) that then opens up, develops and grows. There are seeds within seeds within seeds etc. I will at this point claim with some uncertainty that computers are somehow like that, making up compound monads which when pulled apart and separated similarly have a monad. These would be bare naked monads, with little intelligence or much awareness, but being half-asleep and as if drugged out. I believe there are and infitie number of monads in the universe, since these take up no space and each is a point representing a piece of reality. So the universe to begin with and even now had to be a collection of an inifinite number of discrete points or monads. To continue, if the machine is attached to a monad, God can perceive it. A machine however would only have a bare naked monad. It seems I may h Could you complete your sentence? Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/5/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. -- Onward! Stephen http://webpages.charter.net/stephenk1/Outlaw/Outlaw.html -- 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.
The poverty of computers
Hi Stephen P. King No, machines, even computers, IMHO in practice have no intellectual or feeling facilities, are no more than dumb rocks. So there is no more communication with God possible than there would be with an abacus. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/7/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Stephen P. King Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-06, 19:39:10 Subject: Re: The All On 9/5/2012 12:14 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote: Hi Roger, On 05 Sep 2012, at 17:23, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Bruno Marchal No, the supreme Monad can see everything even though the monads have no windows. Also the closeness to God issue depends on your clarity of vision and feeling. And perhaps appetites. So everybody's different. I agree. But my point was that everybody includes possibly machines, and that we are not supposed to dictate God which creatures he can look through. Bruno Hi Bruno, I agree with you here 100%! -- Onward! Stephen http://webpages.charter.net/stephenk1/Outlaw/Outlaw.html -- 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: Re: Leibniz on heaven, hell, and zombies (?)
Hi Stathis Papaioannou Thanks for the correction. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/7/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Stathis Papaioannou Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-06, 23:04:34 Subject: Re: Leibniz on heaven, hell, and zombies (?) On Thu, Sep 6, 2012 at 10:55 PM, Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net wrote: Hi Stathis Papaioannou A fun question. I assume that zombies are the dead brought back to life somehow. That monads cannot be created or destroyed Is a peculiar feature of Leibniz's metaphysics that would enable the resurrection of zombies. Leibniz believed that even when we die, our monad will still be attached to a dead and rotting corpse, since monads cannot be created or destroyed and must always be attached to bodies. Heaven then at first seems problematic, but that may be the reason for the Bible's doctrine of the resurrection of the dead, during which we will be given spiffy new (younger probably) bodies. Presumably those sent to hell would remain rotting bodies. It seems reasonable to assume that the witches or voodoo used to bring the zombies back from a dead state would have imperfect abilities so that the dead would then be brought back perhaps to a state reasembing a nightmare in which they are made to believe that they must eat human flesh So there you are. The zombies should be killable a second time like the first. To answer you second question, I don't believe we are zombies because our intellect seems not to be in a dream state and also that we don't crave human flesh. A philosophical zombie is a being that acts as if it's conscious but isn't really: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie -- Stathis Papaioannou -- 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.
This is a world only of facts.
Hi Brian Tenneson According to Leibniz, there are two kinds of logic, the logic of necessity or rational logic, and the logic of contingency or of facts. Reality is contingent, to use Leibniz's idea. Things may be true sometimes and at some places, but never everywhere, at all times. It's an a posteriori world, a world of facts only. Eternal or necessary or rational truths are always either true or false. So they are a priori. It's a world of a posteriori facts , not a priori eternal truths. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/7/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Brian Tenneson Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-06, 14:52:44 Subject: Re: The All A too much powerful God leads to inconsistency.? What if reality does not always obey the laws of logic?? What if reality is sometimes inconsistent? -- 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: Re: Two reasons why computers IMHO cannot exhibit intelligence
Hi Bruno Marchal Any time I use the word God, I always mean IMHO God. I am actually thinking instead of Cosmic Intelligence or Cosmnic Mind. I try not to use that word (God) but sometimes forget. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/7/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Bruno Marchal Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-06, 14:06:49 Subject: Re: Two reasons why computers IMHO cannot exhibit intelligence On 05 Sep 2012, at 17:34, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Bruno Marchal God also created time, and anyway eternity is timeless, not sure if spacless. I can accept this as a rough sum up of some theory (= hypothesis; + consequences), not as an explanation per se. As an explanation, it is equivalent with don't ask for more understanding, and you fall in the authoritative trap. Bruno Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/5/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Bruno Marchal Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-05, 09:51:40 Subject: Re: Two reasons why computers IMHO cannot exhibit intelligence On 04 Sep 2012, at 18:42, John Clark wrote: On Tue, Sep 4, 2012 Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net wrote: God created the human race. And when God asks Himself the question Why have I always existed, why haven't I always not existed? what answer in his omniscience does He come up with? The neoplatonist conception of God does not allow It to ask such a question. Nor does Arithmetical Truth. God has no self-reference power at all, as this would make it inconsistent. Still defending the Christian God, aren't you? Bruno God is the uncreated infinite intelligence There was once a patent issued for a combination rat trap and potato peeler and people laugh about that, but using the exact same organ for both excretory and reproductive purposes does not seem very intelligent to me either, much less infinitely intelligent. And putting the blood vessels and nerves for the retina of the eye in front not in the back so the light must pass through them to get to the light sensitive cells also does not seem very smart; no engineer in his right mind would place the gears to move the film in a camera so that the light must pass through the gears before hitting the film. That's not the sort of thing you'd expect God to do, but it's exactly what you'd expect Evolution to do. John K Clark -- 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. 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Racism ? How's that implied ?
Hi Bruno Marchal Racism ? How's that implied ? But I do agree that perception and Cs are not understandable with materialistic concepts at least as they are commonly used. Instead they are what the mind can sense, as a sixth sense. The mind is similar to driving a car through Platoville and watching the static events in passing. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/7/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Bruno Marchal Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-06, 14:12:37 Subject: Re: Sane2004 Step One On 05 Sep 2012, at 18:12, Roger Clough wrote: I don't think that life or mind or intelligence can be teleported. Especially since nobody knows what they are. I also don't believe that you can download the contents of somebody's brain. This is just restating that you don't believe in comp. OK, develop your theory, and predict something testable, and we will better understand what you mean. If not it looks just like a form of racism based on magic. Bruno Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/5/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Bruno Marchal Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-05, 11:04:53 Subject: Re: Sane2004 Step One On 05 Sep 2012, at 06:14, meekerdb wrote: On 9/4/2012 7:19 PM, Russell Standish wrote: On Tue, Sep 04, 2012 at 06:48:58PM -0700, Craig Weinberg wrote: I have problems with all three of the comp assumptions: *yes, doctor*: This is really the sleight of hand that props up the entire thought experiment. If you agree that you are nothing but your brain function and that your brain function can be replaced by the functioning of non-brain devices, then you have already agreed that human individuality is a universal commodity. Calling it a sleight of hand is a bit rough. It is the meat of the comp assumption, and spelling it out this way makes it very explicit. Either you agree you can be copied (without feeling a thing), or you don't. If you do, you must face up to the consequences of the argument, if you don't, then you do not accept computationalism, and the consequences of the UDA do not apply to your worldview. I suppose I can be copied. But does it follow that I am just the computations in my brain. It seems likely that I also require an outside environment/world with which I interact in order to remain conscious. Bruno passes this off by saying it's just a matter of the level of substitution, perhaps your local environment or even the whole galaxy must be replaced by a digital representation in order to maintain your consciousness unchanged. But this bothers me. Suppose it is the whole galaxy, or the whole observed universe. Does it really mean anything then to say your brain has been replaced ALONG WITH EVERYTHING ELSE? It's just the assertion that everything is computable. That's a good argument for saying that the level of substitution is not that low. But the reasoning would still go through, and we would lead to a unique computable universe. That is the only way to make a digital physics consistent (as I forget to say sometimes). Then you get a more complex other mind problem, and something like David Nyman- Hoyle beam would be needed, and would need to be separate from the physical reality, making the big physical whole incomplete, etc. yes this bothers me too. Needless to say, I tend to believe that if comp is true, the level is much higher. *Church thesis*: Views computation in isolation, irrespective of resources, supervenience on object-formed computing elements, etc. This is a theoretical theory of computation, completely divorced from realism from the start. What is it that does the computing? How and why does data enter or exit a computation? It is necessarily an abstract mathematical thesis. The latter two questions simply are relevant. *Arithmetical Realism*: The idea that truth values are self justifying independently of subjectivity or physics is literally a shot in the dark. Like yes, doctor, this is really swallowing the cow whole from the beginning and saying that the internal consistency of arithmetic constitutes universal supremacy without any real indication of that. AR is not just about internal consistency of mathematics, it is an ontological commitment about the natural numbers. Whatever primitive reality is, AR implies that the primitive reality models the natural numbers. ISTM that Bruno rejects any reality behind the natural numbers (or other system of computation). If often argues that the natural numbers exist, because they satisfy true propositions: There exists a prime number between 1 and 3, therefore 2 exists. This assumes a Platonist view of mathematical objects, which Peter D. Jones has
Re: Re: Where do numbers and geometry come from ?
Hi Bruno Marchal What is always either true or false cannot have been invented, only discovered. Necessary or rational truths are such. Contingent truths are not. Rational or necessary truths are therefore a prioi and can only be discovered. Contingent truths or facts are therefore a posteriori and can only be invented. I suppose that knowing which type is at hand is the crucial problem. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/7/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Bruno Marchal Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-07, 03:21:21 Subject: Re: Where do numbers and geometry come from ? On 06 Sep 2012, at 16:28, Brian Tenneson wrote: All numbers can be defined in terms of sets. The question becomes this: do sets have ontological primacy relative to mankind or are sets invented or created by mankind? I would say invented, as many different notion of sets can exist. You can take sets for the ontology, but it makes everything more complex, and possibly confusing. With comp the cardinal ontology is undecidable, and I think it is simpler to limit to the finite things. If you want set, with comp a good choice would be the hereditarily finite sets, but it is equivalent (for the computability and provability) with PA. A set seems to me to be a typical construction of the mind. Like physics, analysis, etc. But comp is consistent with set theory, a priori, so no real problems here. Bruno On Thu, Sep 6, 2012 at 5:11 AM, Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net wrote: Hi Stephen P. King Yes, of course, but I wanted a more obvious, dramatic example. The philosophy of mathematics says something like the numbers belong to a static or eternal world, change itself is a property of geometry. Numbers and geometry thus belong to the platonic world, which is forbidden or at least not consistent with the philosophy of materialism, IMHO. If numbers are platonic, I wonder what the presumably materialist Steven Hawkings has to say about their origin in his recent book on numbers. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/6/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Stephen P. King Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-06, 07:53:18 Subject: Re: Could we have invented the prime numbers ? Dear Roger, Could the mere possibility of being a number (without the specificity of which one) be considered to be there from the beginning? On 9/6/2012 7:47 AM, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Stathis Papaioannou If the prime numbers were there from the beginning, before man, then I think they were mind-created (platonic) not brain-created (human creations). Are the prime numbers an invention by man or one of man's discoveries ? I believe that the prime numbers are not a human invention, they were there from the beginning. Humans can discover them by brute calculation, but there is a pattern to them (except for 1, 3 and 5, spaced 6 apart, plus or minus one) Thus 2 3 5 7 11 13 17 19 23 29 31 37 41 43 47 53 59 61 67 71 etc. for n5, they can be placed +-1 on a grid with a spacing of 6 That spacing seems to me at least to be a priori, out of man's control. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/6/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Stathis Papaioannou Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-06, 01:24:31 Subject: Re: Sane2004 Step One On Thu, Sep 6, 2012 at 2:34 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: But you couldn't realise you felt different if the part of your brain responsible for realising were receiving exactly the same inputs from the rest of the brain. So you could feel different, or feel nothing, but maintain the delusional belief that nothing had changed. That's begging the question. You are assuming that the brain is a machine which produces consciousness. I think that the brain is the three dimensional shadow of many levels of experience and it produces nothing but neurochemistry and alterations in our ability to access an individual set of human experiences. The brain does not produce consciousness, it defines the form of many conscious relations. But you believe that the neurochemicals do things contrary to what chemists would predict, for example an ion channel opening or closing without any cause such as a change in transmembrane potential or ligand concentration. We've talked about this before and it just isn't consistent with any scientific evidence. You interpret the existence spontaneous neural activity as meaning that something magical like this happens, but it doesn't mean that at all. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- Onward! Stephen http://webpages.charter.net/stephenk1/Outlaw/Outlaw.html -- You received this
Re: Re: Two reasons why computers IMHO cannot exhibit intelligence
Hi Bruno Marchal What is UD ? Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/7/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Bruno Marchal Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-06, 15:56:55 Subject: Re: Two reasons why computers IMHO cannot exhibit intelligence On 06 Sep 2012, at 13:31, benjayk wrote: Quantum effects beyond individual brains (suggested by psi) can't be computed as well: No matter what I compute in my brain, this doesn't entangle it with other brains since computation is classical. The UD emulates all quantum computer, as they do not violate Church Thesis. A computational description of the brain is just a relative, approximate description, nothing more. It doesn't actually reflect what the brain is or what it does. The bet the computationalists do, is that nature has already build an emulator, through the brain, and that's why a computer might be able to emulate its programming, by nature, evolution, etc. And we can copy it without understanding, like a virus can copy a file without understanding of its content. Molecular biology is already digital relatively to chemistry. Don't take this as argument for comp, but as showing your argument against is not valid. 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Where do numbers and geometry come from ?
On 9/7/2012 7:21 AM, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Stephen P. King I believe that what is necessarily true (rationally true) had to be always true and thus a priori. Dear Roger, But this is just a matter of definition. It remains to be explained how the necessity is achived and how it is so in the many possible worlds. Man may think he created numbers or whatever, but whatever was there before man (to allow physics etc. to happen) something else had to create.Man simply discovered numbers. Certainly we can agree that we have a common concept of numbers but they are not concrete entities that we can locate in our space and time and do not have any other properties such as mass, charge, spin, duration. Therefore we have to not use the same terminology and common sense with numbers as we do with ordinary objects of the world. One of my motivations as a student of philosophy, is to explore multiple ways to bring the common sense in alignment with the requirements of abstractions, like numbers and to look forward from this alignment to see what might be indicated or predicted. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net mailto:rclo...@verizon.net 9/7/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - *From:* Stephen P. King mailto:stephe...@charter.net *Receiver:* everything-list mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com *Time:* 2012-09-06, 11:35:56 *Subject:* Re: Where do numbers and geometry come from ? Dear Roger, Why is it that people persist in even suggesting that numbers are created by man? Why the anthropocentric bias? Pink Ponies might have actually crated them, or Polka-dotted Unicorns! The idea is just silly! The point is that properties do not occur at the whim of any one thing, never have and never will. -- Onward! Stephen http://webpages.charter.net/stephenk1/Outlaw/Outlaw.html -- 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.
Brains and time, subjectivity vs objectivity
Theres is some duplication in the propositions below which I have not bothered to clear up, sorry. 1) Mind, being inextended, is outside of the brain, which is extended. Mind (shared and the general, Platonia) is the subjective realm. Brain (personal, private, the particular, materialistic) is in the objective realm. 2) So Mind is beyond spacetime (Platonic) , but each brain is in spacetime (materialistic), and only brains can access the Platonic*. 3) Brains are in time, as are all materialistic things, including computers. Mind is timeless*. 4) Objective time is in spacetime, so can be measured. 5) Subjective time is outside of spacetime, so only sensible by the brain. * So I think of our brains as racing through Mind in an auto while looking at the passing landscape of Mind. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/7/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Craig Weinberg Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-06, 15:25:14 Subject: Re: Sane2004 Step One On Thursday, September 6, 2012 2:02:02 PM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 05 Sep 2012, at 17:27, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Wednesday, September 5, 2012 10:50:02 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 05 Sep 2012, at 03:48, Craig Weinberg wrote: Taking another look at Sane2004. This isn't so much as a challenge to Bruno, just sharing my notes of why I disagree. Not sure how far I will get this time, but here are my objections to the first step and the stipulated assumptions of comp. I understand that the point is to accept the given definition of comp, and in that respect, I have no reason to doubt that Bruno has accomplished what he sets out to as far as making a good theory within comp, and if he has not, I wouldn't be qualified to comment on it anyhow. From my perspective however, this is all beside the point, since the only point that matters is the actual truth of what consciousness actually is, and what is it's actual relation to physics and information. Given the fragile and precious nature of our own survival, I think that implications for teleportation and AI simulation/personhood which are derived from pure theory rather than thorough consideration of realism would be reckless to say the least. Step one talks about teleportation in terms of being reconstructed with ambient organic materials. If comp were true though, no organic materials or reconstructions would be necessary. The scanning into a universal machine would be sufficient. That is step 6. I haven't even gotten to step 2 yet. I'm reading In the figure the teleported individual is represented by a black box. Its annihilation is represented by a white box appearing at the left of the arrow from 1. Taking this to the China Brain level, the universal machine could be a trillion people with notebooks, pencils, paper, and erasers, talking to each other over cell phones. This activity would have to collectively result in the teleported person now being conjured as if by incantation as a consequence of...what? The writing and erasing on paper? The calling and speaking on cell phones? Where does the experience of the now disembodied person come in? As you illustrate here, plausibly not on the physical means used by the brain. Step 8 shows that indeed the physical has nothing to do with consciousness, except as a content of consciousness. Keeping comp here, we associate consciousness with the logical abstract computations. So the person's consciousness arises spontaneously through the overall effort-ness behind the writing, erasing, and calling, or does it gradually constellate from lesser fragments of disconnected effort-ness? Consciousness does not arise. It is not in space, nor in time. Its local content, obtained by differentiation, internally can refer to time and space, but that's particular content of an atemporal consciousness. I would say (no need of this in UDA). If you exclude space and time, what kind of locality do you refer to? In my example, a quintillion people call each other on the phone and write down numbers that they get from each other and perform arithmetic functions on them (which in turn may inform them on how to process subsequent arithmetic instructions, etc). Ok. So where does the interpretation of these trillion events per second come in? What knows what all of the computations add up to be? At what point does the 'local content' begin to itch and turn blue? Even if it could, why should it do such a thing? Step one talks about annihilation as well, but it is not clear what role this actually plays in the process, except to make it seem more like teleportation and less like what it actually would be, which is duplication. If I scan an original document and email the scan, I have sent a duplicate, not teleported the original. Right. Classical teleportation
Re: Why a bacterium has more intelligence than a computer
On 9/7/2012 8:26 AM, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Stephen P. King I think of the brain as a running sensor of the static platonic world. Sort of like looking out of the car window as you speed along. Hi Roger, How would this be different, from the point of view of the driver, if it is the Car that is standing still and Platoville is being continuously created around it? There is no detectable difference *unless* there are second order changes. An example of the latter is the feeling you have when you press the gas pedal hard and release the break pedal, Or release the gas pedal and press the break pedal hard. Platonia (or COsmic Intelligence) does not consider any kind of change within it, not even zeroth order, thus cannot be considered as an irreducible source of all things. It is a nice metaphor that simply should never be taken literally unless doing so will never emit or imply a contradiction. -- Onward! Stephen http://webpages.charter.net/stephenk1/Outlaw/Outlaw.html -- 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.
A Sherlock Holmes computer
There is a quote by Sherlock Holmes that suggests a way to possibly filter out solid truth from a comp (?) List all of the possibilities or possible solutions. Then remove all from that list that are impossible (now or ever, I would add). Whatever is left over is the (rational or necesssary) truth. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/7/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Craig Weinberg Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-06, 19:59:11 Subject: Re: Why a bacterium has more intelligence than a computer On Thursday, September 6, 2012 7:37:38 PM UTC-4, Stephen Paul King wrote: On 9/5/2012 11:50 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Wednesday, September 5, 2012 6:38:07 AM UTC-4, rclough wrote: Hi Stephen P. King No, the stuff in our skulls is alive, has intelligence, and a 1p. Computers don't and can't. Big sdifference. Hi Roger, ??? Please leave magic out of this, as any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. The trouble is that the stuff in our skulls does not appear to be that much different from a bunch of diodes and transistors. ??? Our brains obey the very same physical laws! What makes the brain special? I suspect that the brain uses quantum entanglement effects to both synchronize and update sense content in ways that cannot obtain from purely classical physical methods. Our mechanical machines lack the ability to report on their 1p content thus we are using their disability to argue against their possible abilities. A computer that could both generate an internal self-model and report on it would lead us to very different conclusions! I think you are both right. Computers qua computers don't feel anything because they aren't anything. The physical material that you are using to execute computations on does however have experiences - just not experiences that we associated with our own. There is a concrete experience associated with the production of these pixels on your screen - many experiences on many levels, of molecules that make up the wires etc., but those experiences don't seem to lead to anything we would consider significant. It's pretty straightforward to me. A stuffed animal that looks like a bear is not a bear. A picture of a person is not a person, even if it is a fancy interactive picture. Craig -- Hi Craig, I think that the difference that makes a difference here is the identity that emerges between matching of the experience *of* object and experience *by* object. Ranulph Glanville has, with others in the Cybernetics community, written masterfully on this in his Same is Different paper. Hi Stephen, How does the of/by distinction compare with map-territory and use-mention distinctions? Craig -- Onward! Stephen http://webpages.charter.net/stephenk1/Outlaw/Outlaw.html -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/everything-list/-/LAHBiforecoJ. 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: Sane2004 Step One
On 9/7/2012 3:09 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 06 Sep 2012, at 21:25, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Thursday, September 6, 2012 2:02:02 PM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 05 Sep 2012, at 17:27, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Wednesday, September 5, 2012 10:50:02 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 05 Sep 2012, at 03:48, Craig Weinberg wrote: Taking another look at Sane2004. This isn't so much as a challenge to Bruno, just sharing my notes of why I disagree. Not sure how far I will get this time, but here are my objections to the first step and the stipulated assumptions of comp. I understand that the point is to accept the given definition of comp, and in that respect, I have no reason to doubt that Bruno has accomplished what he sets out to as far as making a good theory within comp, and if he has not, I wouldn't be qualified to comment on it anyhow. From my perspective however, this is all beside the point, since the only point that matters is the actual truth of what consciousness actually is, and what is it's actual relation to physics and information. Given the fragile and precious nature of our own survival, I think that implications for teleportation and AI simulation/personhood which are derived from pure theory rather than thorough consideration of realism would be reckless to say the least. *Step one* talks about teleportation in terms of being reconstructed with ambient organic materials. If comp were true though, no organic materials or reconstructions would be necessary. The scanning into a universal machine would be sufficient. That is step 6. I haven't even gotten to step 2 yet. I'm reading In the figure the teleported individual is represented by a black box. Its annihilation is represented by a white box appearing at the left of the arrow from 1. Taking this to the China Brain level, the universal machine could be a trillion people with notebooks, pencils, paper, and erasers, talking to each other over cell phones. This activity would have to collectively result in the teleported person now being conjured as if by incantation as a consequence of...what? The writing and erasing on paper? The calling and speaking on cell phones? Where does the experience of the now disembodied person come in? As you illustrate here, plausibly not on the physical means used by the brain. Step 8 shows that indeed the physical has nothing to do with consciousness, except as a content of consciousness. Keeping comp here, we associate consciousness with the logical abstract computations. So the person's consciousness arises spontaneously through the overall effort-ness behind the writing, erasing, and calling, or does it gradually constellate from lesser fragments of disconnected effort-ness? Consciousness does not arise. It is not in space, nor in time. Its local content, obtained by differentiation, internally can refer to time and space, but that's particular content of an atemporal consciousness. I would say (no need of this in UDA). If you exclude space and time, what kind of locality do you refer to? The computational locality used in the local universal system. Dear Bruno, Could you elaborate a bit more on this remark? How do you define a local universal system? What is local for you? In my example, a quintillion people call each other on the phone and write down numbers that they get from each other and perform arithmetic functions on them (which in turn may inform them on how to process subsequent arithmetic instructions, etc). Ok. So where does the interpretation of these trillion events per second come in? What knows what all of the computations add up to be? At what point does the 'local content' begin to itch and turn blue? Even if it could, why should it do such a thing? Because it concerns a machine looking at herself and its probable environment. As I think of it, a machine cannot literally look at herself; it can only look at an image of herself and that image could be subject to errors. This allows me to relate an image that a machine might have of itself with the image the machine might have of another machine and thus I found the concept of bisimulation. Additionally, we can define cases where the image and the machine itself are identical in every possible way and thus are one and the same thing (via principle of identity of indiscernibles). It seems to me that most of our disagreements flow from your assumption that the image of a machine and the machine are strictly isomorphic, while I assume such only in certain special cases. Then the logic shows that it is
Re: The poverty of computers
Hi Roger, Brains some years ago had no intellectual or feeling facilities too. It came by evolution. Roberto Szabo 2012/9/7 Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net Hi Stephen P. King No, machines, even computers, IMHO in practice have no intellectual or feeling facilities, are no more than dumb rocks. So there is no more communication with God possible than there would be with an abacus. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/7/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - *From:* Stephen P. King stephe...@charter.net *Receiver:* everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com *Time:* 2012-09-06, 19:39:10 *Subject:* Re: The All On 9/5/2012 12:14 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote: Hi Roger, On 05 Sep 2012, at 17:23, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Bruno Marchal No, the supreme Monad can see everything even though the monads have no windows. Also the closeness to God issue depends on your clarity of vision and feeling. And perhaps appetites. So everybody's different. I agree. But my point was that everybody includes possibly machines, and that we are not supposed to dictate God which creatures he can look through. Bruno Hi Bruno, I agree with you here 100%! -- Onward! Stephen http://webpages.charter.net/stephenk1/Outlaw/Outlaw.html -- 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: The universe as a collection of an infinite number of pointscalledmonads
On 9/7/2012 10:43 AM, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Stephen P. King As I see it, if there is an infinite collection of (monadic) points, all future things foreseen (as in pre-established harmony) then nothing new can ever be created or destroyed, things (including thoughts and people) just blossom like plants from seeds and eventually die, but always in the same monad. Hi Roger, Here is the problem: a point has no extension therefore it cannot code anything other than its presence or non-presence by its absence. To think of all future things foreseen (as in pre-established harmony) there must be a capacity of each and every monad to have an image of some sort of things, future, past, present, distant, close, whatever. It must have the equivalent of potentially infinite memory. This cannot occur for a point. Therefore, a monad cannot be defined as a point, but it can be similar to a point in having no exterior extensions; it only has internal aspects. All considerations of things exterior to a monad are merely defined in terms of relations within, between and among its internal aspects. Notice that the phrase pre-established harmony just popped naturally into my mind when I visualized the points as overlaid. Studying Leibniz is like that, it is so logical that it will allow you to explore without a guide. It seems likely that you are merely parroting words without fully comprehending their use or meaning. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net mailto:rclo...@verizon.net 9/7/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - *From:* Stephen P. King mailto:stephe...@charter.net *Receiver:* everything-list mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com *Time:* 2012-09-07, 10:22:37 *Subject:* Re: The universe as a collection of an infinite number of pointscalledmonads On 9/7/2012 8:32 AM, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Stephen P. King I solved this problem my own way by simply asssuming that the universe from the beginning and before, as well as now and forever, exists as an infinite collection of points (monads). Hi Roger, I agree with this. So no problem with the creation of new things. No, novelty is not a priori definable, by its very definition it cannot be considered to be given from the beginning! OTOH, we could stipulate that novelty is a concept that only individual monads that are not identical to each other can have, then novelty and creation of new things in general can be seen in a logically consistent fashion as local transient aspects and not pre-ordained or essence. In principle they always were and simply grow or unfold when the time calls for it, then roll or fold up or whatever at the end of their useful lives. Surely! In this veiw of reality, all of reality always consists in monadic space as an overlapping infinite set of points. No, that is a contradiction of terms. Monads cannot be defined as an overlapping infinite set of points because points by definition have no extension and therefore can never overlap with each other. There is no such thing as a monadic space which might act as a container of multiple and distinct monads. Monads, as L defined them, cannot act or exist in that manner. Frankly, L's speculations about the exterior aspects of Monads, found later on in his Monadology, papers, may be the consequence of drinking too much wine as they are completely inconsistent with his careful initial definitions of monads. We are all finite and fallible, even geniuses like Leibniz. :-( -- Onward! Stephen http://webpages.charter.net/stephenk1/Outlaw/Outlaw.html -- 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. -- Onward! Stephen http://webpages.charter.net/stephenk1/Outlaw/Outlaw.html -- 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: Sane2004 Step One
On 9/7/2012 2:41 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 06 Sep 2012, at 20:44, meekerdb wrote: On 9/6/2012 11:01 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: Consciousness does not arise. It is not in space, nor in time. Its local content, obtained by differentiation, internally can refer to time and space, Even if it is not *in* spacetime, my consciousness seems to depend on some particular localized matter in spacetime. Seeming can be wrong. Only the content of consciousness depends on the particular matter localized in space-time. Dear Bruno, Only the content of consciousness depends on the particular matter localized in space-time. AMAZING! Could you consider that this statement is exactly what I have been trying to get you to discuss with me all this time? -- Onward! Stephen http://webpages.charter.net/stephenk1/Outlaw/Outlaw.html -- 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: The poverty of computers
On Fri, Sep 7 2012, Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net wrote: machines, even computers, IMHO in practice have no intellectual or feeling facilities, are no more than dumb rocks. Computers may or may not have feelings but that is of no concern to us, if they don't it's their problem not ours; however those dumb rocks can and do outsmart us on a regular basis and the list of things they are superior at gets longer every day. The very title of this thread just screams whistling past the graveyard. So there is no more communication with God possible than there would be with an abacus. Now that I agree with 100%, computers are no better at talking to God than a abacus is. John K Clark -- 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: The All
On 07.09.2012 13:43 Stephen P. King said the following: On 9/7/2012 4:11 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: On 06.09.2012 21:03 meekerdb said the following: On 9/6/2012 11:52 AM, Brian Tenneson wrote: A too much powerful God leads to inconsistency. What if reality does not always obey the laws of logic? What if reality is sometimes inconsistent? This is a confusion of levels. Logic is rules about truth preservation in declarative sentences. Not 'obeying the laws of logic' just means declaring inconsistent sentences. We try to avoid this because such utterances would have no determinate meaning. So a *descriptions* of reality may be inconsistent (and therefore useless) but reality is just whatever it is. It can't be inconsistent because it's not assertions. Brent This could work provided we could separate the world into mental and physical states. The question remains though if under physicalism one says that mental states are actually physical states. Then I do not know how to employ such a consideration in this case. Evgenii Dear Evgenii, What do you imagine would be the consequence of what may be a pair of sets of mental states and physical states for one entity does not match up exactly or even at all with a pair of mental and physical states for another? This was a question. I have no idea how to answer it. Evgenii -- 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: The All
On 9/7/2012 1:11 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: On 06.09.2012 21:03 meekerdb said the following: On 9/6/2012 11:52 AM, Brian Tenneson wrote: A too much powerful God leads to inconsistency. What if reality does not always obey the laws of logic? What if reality is sometimes inconsistent? This is a confusion of levels. Logic is rules about truth preservation in declarative sentences. Not 'obeying the laws of logic' just means declaring inconsistent sentences. We try to avoid this because such utterances would have no determinate meaning. So a *descriptions* of reality may be inconsistent (and therefore useless) but reality is just whatever it is. It can't be inconsistent because it's not assertions. Brent This could work provided we could separate the world into mental and physical states. The question remains though if under physicalism one says that mental states are actually physical states. Then I do not know how to employ such a consideration in this case. I don't see the problem? Are you saying that two statements cannot be contradictory because they are both part of reality (which would not depend on them being physical)? Brent -- 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: There is no such thing as cause and effect
Brent, I believe there is a difference between (adj) 'fair' or 'unjust' and the (noun) 'fairness', or 'consciousness'. While the nouns (IMO) are not adequately identified the adverbs refer to the applied system of correspondence. E.g.: Fair to the unjust system. (I don't think we may use the opposite: unjust to a 'fair' system in our discussion). As I tried to explain in another post: the 'rich' consume MORE of the country-supplied services than the not-so-rich and pay less taxes (unfair and unjust). Certain big corporations also pay 'less' than the system would require (*in all fairness* - proverbially said) ordinarily. Semantix, OOH! John M On Tue, Sep 4, 2012 at 4:18 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 9/4/2012 1:12 PM, John Mikes wrote: ** It is a 'trap' to falsify the adequate taxing of the 'rich' as a *leftist attempt to distributing richness*. It does not include more than a requirement for THEM to pay their FAIR share - maybe more than the not-so-rich layers (e.g. higher use of transportation, foreign connections, financial means, etc. - all costing money to the country) in spite of their lower share in the present unjust taxation-scheme. ... And PLEASE, Brent, do not even utter in econo-political discussion the word *FAIRNESS!* So is it OK if I use FAIR and unjust? Brent -- 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: Two reasons why computers IMHO cannot exhibit intelligence
On Tue, Sep 4, 2012 at 1:10 PM, William R. Buckley bill.buck...@gmail.comwrote: While at any moment the tape may be finite, that it can at need grow is the fundamental notion of infinite. No, the fundamental notion of the infinite is that you can make a one to one correspondence with a proper subset of itself. The net result of Turing’s specification is that the tape is infinite If the machine comes to a halt then a finite amount of tape is sufficient to get its work done, if it does not halt then even a infinite amount of tape would not be sufficient. Turing proved that there is no general way to tell in advance one case from the other. John K Clark -- 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: Two reasons why computers IMHO cannot exhibit intelligence
On Wed, Sep 5, 2012 at 9:51 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: when God asks Himself the question Why have I always existed, why haven't I always not existed? what answer in his omniscience does He come up with? The neoplatonist conception of God does not allow It to ask such a question. Interesting, so I was mistaken in thinking that God can do anything and in fact the neoplatonists can order God around; but if God has been instructed not to worry His little head over such questions then He really doesn't have much to do. Apparently God (or rather the neoplatonist) have given control of the Universe over to Physics; and having never had anything to do I guess God just does what He always does and watches TV and eats potato chips all day. God is a pretty dull unimportant fellow, I can't understand why philosophers are so obsessed with such a nonentity. Still defending the Christian God, aren't you? Yes absolutely, I'm defending the four year old kid's concept of Santa Claus too because I think it might be useful if the words God and Santa Claus mean something, otherwise when I say I don't believe in either it would not convey any information to anyone about what I believe or don't believe. John K Clark -- 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: Two reasons why computers IMHO cannot exhibit intelligence
On Thu, Sep 6, 2012 at 1:21 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: I was addressing John Clark, who confirmed my feeling that atheists are the number one defender of the Christian's conception of God. OK I see the error of my ways and now believe that God exists. Incidentally when I went out to my car today I found that I that a flat God, so I jacked up the car, got a spare God out of my trunk and took the punctured God off the axle and put on the spare God. I think the old God has a nail in it so I'm going to take it to the God repair shop to see if they can remove it and put a patch on the old God so I'll still have a spare God. John K Clark -- 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: Two reasons why computers IMHO cannot exhibit intelligence
On 9/7/2012 4:10 PM, John Clark wrote: On Thu, Sep 6, 2012 at 1:21 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be mailto:marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: I was addressing John Clark, who confirmed my feeling that atheists are the number one defender of the Christian's conception of God. OK I see the error of my ways and now believe that God exists. Incidentally when I went out to my car today I found that I that a flat God, so I jacked up the car, got a spare God out of my trunk and took the punctured God off the axle and put on the spare God. I think the old God has a nail in it so I'm going to take it to the God repair shop to see if they can remove it and put a patch on the old God so I'll still have a spare God. John K Clark Hi John, It must be fun to be you! ;-) What would we do without your sharp wit, the world would be a boring place. :_( -- Onward! Stephen http://webpages.charter.net/stephenk1/Outlaw/Outlaw.html -- 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: The All
On 9/7/2012 2:03 PM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: On 07.09.2012 13:43 Stephen P. King said the following: On 9/7/2012 4:11 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: On 06.09.2012 21:03 meekerdb said the following: On 9/6/2012 11:52 AM, Brian Tenneson wrote: A too much powerful God leads to inconsistency. What if reality does not always obey the laws of logic? What if reality is sometimes inconsistent? This is a confusion of levels. Logic is rules about truth preservation in declarative sentences. Not 'obeying the laws of logic' just means declaring inconsistent sentences. We try to avoid this because such utterances would have no determinate meaning. So a *descriptions* of reality may be inconsistent (and therefore useless) but reality is just whatever it is. It can't be inconsistent because it's not assertions. Brent This could work provided we could separate the world into mental and physical states. The question remains though if under physicalism one says that mental states are actually physical states. Then I do not know how to employ such a consideration in this case. Evgenii Dear Evgenii, What do you imagine would be the consequence of what may be a pair of sets of mental states and physical states for one entity does not match up exactly or even at all with a pair of mental and physical states for another? This was a question. I have no idea how to answer it. Evgenii Hi Evgenii, Consider the mental image that a person suffering from anorexia has of themselves. It is distorted and false. How does this happen? Consider the Placebo effect and its complement, the Nocebo effect. Are they not examples of mental states acting on physical states? How does this happen if the mental states are just illusions (ala materialism) or the physical states are just illusions (ala Immaterialism)? Somehow they must be correlated with each other in some way and which ever way that is it is one that is not always a one to one and onto map. -- Onward! Stephen http://webpages.charter.net/stephenk1/Outlaw/Outlaw.html -- 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: prime numbers etc
Touche. But I don't believe (in?) it - I am agnostic. Nonbeliever. (SONG: I lost my turf in San Francisco) J On Thu, Sep 6, 2012 at 10:36 PM, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.comwrote: On Fri, Sep 7, 2012 at 8:07 AM, John Mikes jami...@gmail.com wrote: Stathis wrote (to Craig): But you believe that the neurochemicals do things contrary to what chemists would predict, for example an ion channel opening or closing without any cause such as a change in transmembrane potential or ligand concentration. We've talked about this before and it just isn't consistent with any scientific evidence. You interpret the existence spontaneous neural activity as meaning that something magical like this happens, but it doesn't mean that at all. Stathis, you know ... whatever we state as 'knowledge about mind etc.' is an explanation for the little we think we learned - with lots we have no idea about. Like: chemicals ... potentials ... scientific evidence ... even cause (meaning the part we alredy know about) and mauch much more. It is your turf, you must know about more we don't know only think we do. It's your turf too - you're a chemist. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- 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: Re: The All
On Fri, Sep 7, 2012 at 8:12 AM, Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net wrote: Hi Bruno Marchal IMHO computers cannot think, although they can appear to think. If they could think, they should be able to b) construct a language that only another computer can understand. In a sense, this is what happens every time your web browser talks to another secure server. The two computers, on the fly, invent an encoding which only they can understand. This is what makes the connection secure. No one can pick your credit card numbers out on their way to amazon because your computer is speaking a language that only one other computer in the whole world (the one at amazon) is able to understand. Jason -- 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.
Computing with water droplets
An amusing example of computation --- http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/09/120907082027.htm Towards Computing With Water Droplets: Superhydrophobic Droplet Logic ScienceDaily (Sep. 7, 2012) ? Researchers in Aalto University have developed a new concept for computing, using water droplets as bits of digital information. This was enabled by the discovery that upon collision with each other on a highly water-repellent surface, two water droplets rebound like billiard balls. http://www.geekosystem.com/water-drop-computing/ [an ad-heavy page, but includes a decent video of a 1-bit counter] Brent -- 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: The poverty of computers
On Fri, Sep 7, 2012 at 12:12 PM, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Sep 7 2012, Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net wrote: machines, even computers, IMHO in practice have no intellectual or feeling facilities, are no more than dumb rocks. Computers may or may not have feelings but that is of no concern to us, if they don't it's their problem not ours; however those dumb rocks can and do outsmart us on a regular basis and the list of things they are superior at gets longer every day. The very title of this thread just screams whistling past the graveyard. So there is no more communication with God possible than there would be with an abacus. Now that I agree with 100%, computers are no better at talking to God than a abacus is. John K Clark John, Bruno makes a valid point, that you attack only the weakest, most ill conceived, notion(s) of God. Perhaps you have never bothered to investigate deeply the true claims of various religions. If you haven't you might easily have missed some of the deeper meanings of God, which are quite different than what you might believe listening only to the most vocal (fundamentalist or literalist sects). Many, perhaps even a majority, of modern religions define God as the self-existent, self-sufficient, immutable, infinite absolute truth, and the foremost reason and/or cause for all of existence. I included some examples below: Judaism: God is an absolute one indivisible incomparable being who is the ultimate cause of all existence. The name YHWH literally means The self-existent One (from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_in_Judaism ) The first sentence of the book Genesis begins: The primary cause caused to be. (from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_nihilo#History_of_the_idea_of_creatio_ex_nihilo) Christianity: The book of John begins: In the beginning was the λόγος, and the λόγος was with God, and the λόγος was God. λόγος or logos, is the root word from which we get logic, as well as the -logy suffix as in biology, geology, etc. It has connotations of reason, principles, logic, with no perfect translation to English. In Latin bibles it was translated verba, and when translated to English became word. Philo of Alexandria, a Jewish of the first-century, taught that the logos was both the agent of creation and the agent through which the human mind can apprehend and comprehend God. To all of us who hold the Christian belief that God is truth, anything that is true is a fact about God, and mathematics is a branch of theology. -- Hilda Phoebe Hudson Geometry existed before the creation; is co-eternal with the mind of God; is God himself -- Johannes Kepler Islam: Among the names of God given in the Koran: Al-Haqq, meaning: The Truth, The Real Al-Wāhid, meaning: The One, The Unique As-Samad, meaning: The Eternal, The Absolute, The Self-Sufficient Al-Bāqīy, meaning: The Immutable, The Infinite, The Everlasting (from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_God_in_Islam#List_of_99_Names_of_God_as_found_in_the_Qur.27an) Sikhism: The root mantra in Sikhism reads: There is one creator, whose name is truth, creative being, without fear, without hate, timeless whose spirit is throughout the universe, beyond the cycle of death and rebirth, self-existent, by the grace of the guru, God is made known to humanity. (from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sikh_beliefs ) Hinduism: Brahman, the supreme God, is is seen as the infinite, self-existent, omnipresent and transcendent reality which is the divine ground for all that exists. In the Bhagavad Gita, “You are the Supreme Brahman, the ultimate abode, the purest, the Absolute Truth. You are the eternal, transcendental, original Person, the unborn, the greatest.” In the Sri Brahma-samhita, “I worship Govinda, the foremost Lord, whose radiance is the source of the singular Brahman mentioned in the Upanishads, being distinct from the infinity of glories of the material universe appears as the indivisible, infinite, limitless, truth. “I would say with those who say ‘God is Love’, God is Love. But deep down in me I used to say that though God may be Love, God is Truth above all. If it is possible for the human tongue to give the fullest description of God, I have come to the conclusion that God is Truth.” He continued, “Then there is another thing in Hindu philosophy, namely, God alone is and nothing else exists, and the same truth you see emphasized and exemplified in the kalma of Islam. And there you find it clearly stated that God alone is, and nothing else exists. In fact, the Sanskrit word for truth is a word which literally means that which exists, sat. For these and many other reasons, I have come to the conclusion that the definition – Truth is God – gives me the greatest satisfaction. -- Mohandas Gandhi Buddhism: There is the concept of the “All-Creating King”, who declares of itself: everything is Me, the All-Creating
Re: The poverty of computers
On 9/7/2012 8:43 PM, Jason Resch wrote: Platonism (or mathematical realism) is the majority viewpoint of modern mathematicians. In a survey of mathematicians I know it is an even division. Of course they are all methodological Platonists, but not necessarily philosophical ones. Computationalism (or functionalism) is the majority viewpoint of cognitive scientists and philosophers of mind. Thus the scientific consensus is that infinite (mathematical) truth Except mathematical truth is just a marker, T, whose value is preserved by the rules of logic. Whether a proposition that has T corresponds with any fact is another question. is the self-existent cause and reason for our existence. That is very far from a scientific consensus. I'd say majority the opinion among scientists who are philosophically inclined is that mathematics and logic are languages in which we create models that represent what we think about reality. This explains why there can be contradictory mathematical models and even mutually inconsistent sets of axioms and rules of inference. Few people today have realized that this is inevitable conclusion of these two commonly held beliefs. Not only that a few people have rejected it. Brent -- 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: The poverty of computers
Brent, Thanks for your reply. On Fri, Sep 7, 2012 at 11:19 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 9/7/2012 8:43 PM, Jason Resch wrote: Platonism (or mathematical realism) is the majority viewpoint of modern mathematicians. In a survey of mathematicians I know it is an even division. Of course they are all methodological Platonists, but not necessarily philosophical ones. That is interesting. Among the non-platonists, what schools of thought did you find most popular? Computationalism (or functionalism) is the majority viewpoint of cognitive scientists and philosophers of mind. Thus the scientific consensus is that infinite (mathematical) truth Except mathematical truth is just a marker, T, whose value is preserved by the rules of logic. Whether a proposition that has T corresponds with any fact is another question. Functionalism maintains that so long as the same relations are preserved, whether they be relations between neurons, silicon circuits, ping pong balls, objects in other possible universes, objects in a mathematical structure, or the integers themselves, the same brain state will result. If one subscribes to Platonism, then there exist mathematical objects that possess the same relations that exist in our brains, and if one subscribes to functionalism, these platonic instances of our brains would not be zombies but fully conscious. is the self-existent cause and reason for our existence. That is very far from a scientific consensus. I agree, few realize it. Not many mathematicians are also philosophers of mind, but does it not follow from platonism+functionalism? I'd say majority the opinion among scientists who are philosophically inclined is that mathematics and logic are languages in which we create models that represent what we think about reality. Perhaps, but this wouldn't be platonism, Many scientists probably are unaware that that formalism failed and that mathematical truth transcends any description, which is why it is better to look at the consensus of domain experts. A biologist probably isn't the best person to ask about whether there is one universe or many. This explains why there can be contradictory mathematical models and even mutually inconsistent sets of axioms and rules of inference. This is no different than the existence of contradictory and inconsistent physical theories. We arrive at better axiomatic systems for explaining truth about the numbers in the same way we arrive at better physical theories for explaining truth of the natural world. Some turn out to be more powerful, explain more, etc, and we stick with them until a better one comes along. Few people today have realized that this is inevitable conclusion of these two commonly held beliefs. Not only that a few people have rejected it. Sure, many people reject Bruno's UDA, but has anyone shown the error in its reasoning? Jason -- 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.