Re: Mandela cult and mass media mythopoesis
The author of the essay say, definitively, yes. The original article is here: It is long but it is worth reading, to see how the myths of modernity generate violence by unrealistic expectations. http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/1575/full 2013/12/11, LizR lizj...@gmail.com: Is this particular one destructive? On 10 December 2013 22:12, Alberto G. Corona agocor...@gmail.com wrote: Mandela forgive me, but this is the consequence of an unordered mythopoesis: the mythopoesis of the unrestricted will, that Voegelin http://voegelinview.com/from-The-Collected-Works/equivalents-of-experience-and-symbolization-pt-3/Reality-as-Intelligibly-Ordered-The-Unsurpassable-Mythopoetic-Play.html studied. That happens when men worship men and construct a new cult: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/the-mandela-myth/ the Mythopoesis is the individual and collective process of spontaneous creation of myths, truths and values that are the ground for social cooperation (or cooperation for social destruction). It seems that the need of the media to praise the listener vices and hopes unrestricted by reality limits promotes this kind of destructive mythopoesis -- Alberto. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- Alberto. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can a grown man be an atheist ?
On Tue, Dec 10, 2013 at 9:45 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 12/10/2013 2:07 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Mon, Dec 9, 2013 at 8:02 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 12/9/2013 1:35 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 08 Dec 2013, at 22:53, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Sun, Dec 8, 2013 at 6:59 PM, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: Telmo Menezes you must also reject the MWI, because you live Who is you? Telmo's post was only 63 words long but the pronoun you was used 8 times, that's almost 13%. When it is necessary to hide behind personal pronouns when a philosophical idea regarding duplicating machines and personal identity is discussed it's clear that something is wrong. in the first person, Which first person? The first person of John Clark of one hour ago? The first person of John Clark standing left of the duplicating machine? The first person of John Clark standing right of the duplicating machine? You're avoiding my question. Why don't you also reject the MWI? I would like to know that too. Quentin has already asked this many times to John, and we got unclear answer. John invoked the fact that with comp the duplication are done only in one branch of the universe, but did not explain why would that change anything (without adding some non Turing emulable magic in some place). I think Quentin is right, and John C. just develop irrational rhetoric do avoid moving on in the argument, ... then he talk like if I was defining comp by its consequences, but this is another rhetorical trick, often used by those who want to mock the enterprise. It is interesting. I try to figure out what is really stucking him so much. i do the same with my students in math. Why some people avoid reason in some circumstance. Given that Quentin seems to qualify himself as atheist, it can't be simply Clark's atheism, isn't it? But then what? I think the sticking point, one which I also feel with some force, is the implicit assumption in the question, Where will you find yourself. that there is a unique you. Brent, Although naive, I find the following analogy useful: consider how computer operating systems create new processes. A common method, in UNIX operating systems is forking the current execution path. I will cut and paste the relevant parts from the man page on my computer: NAME fork -- create a new process DESCRIPTION Fork() causes creation of a new process. The new process (child process) is an exact copy of the calling process (parent process) except for the following: o The child process has a unique process ID. o The child process has a different parent process ID (i.e., the process ID of the parent process). [...] RETURN VALUES Upon successful completion, fork() returns a value of 0 to the child process and Fork() was called by the parent process; so it should return a value to the parent process, not the child process. Fork() is an instruction that is part of some program. This program is running in some process P1. When fork() is called, the operating system creates a new process P2 and copies both the program and the execution context of the program to P2. The execution context includes the instruction pointer, that indicates the current instruction being executed. After the copy, both P1 and P2 will point to the instruction after fork(), with the only difference that fork() will have returned different values to the parent and the child. It returns values on both processes, and the operating system intervenes here to make them different -- the OS acts as a duplication machine. returns the process ID of the child process to the parent process. [...] So let's say the original process A is forked at some point in time t, and process B is created. The only different things about A and B is a value called the process identifier (pid). This could be a very simple analogy for a person being in Moscow or Brussels. So let's say the process records its pid before the fork. After the fork, both processes are programmed to check their pid again and compare it with what was stored. For one you will get equal, for another you will get different. If you ask the program, before the fork, to predict if it will find itself in the state equal or unequal after the fork, the most correct program will assign p=.5 to each one of these outcomes. Any program that assigns a different p will be shown to be less correct by repeating this experiment a number of times. ?? What does the program refer to in ask the program? If you ask A to print out whether it's pid is equal to the pid recorded before the fork, A can always correctly print yes. Similarly B can always print no. So what does it mean to ask the program? You seem to have implicitly created two programs and there is no unique referent for the program. Both the
Re: How can a grown man be an atheist ?
On 10 Dec 2013, at 18:03, John Clark wrote: On Sun, Dec 8, 2013 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: You're avoiding my question. Why don't you also reject the MWI? If I am reluctant to answer your question it is because I've already done so many times in the past, but if you insist I will do so again. The Many World's Interpretation is about what can be expected to be seen, and although it may seem strange to us Everett's ideas are 100% logically self consistent. Bruno's proof is not about what will be seen but about a feeling of identity, about who you can expect to be; but you do not think you're the same person you were yesterday because yesterday you made a prediction about today that turned out to be correct, you think you're the same person you were yesterday for one reason and one reason only, you remember being Telmo Menezes yesterday. It's a good thing that's the way it works because I make incorrect predictions all the time and when I do I don't feel that I've entered oblivion, instead I feel like I am the same person I was before because I can still remember being the guy who made that prediction that turned out to be wrong. I don't feel like I'm dead, I just feel like the guy who made a crappy prediction. Bruno thinks you can trace personal identity from the present to the future, Then you can't say that you will survive anything. We die at each instant and comp is made trivial, and we can predict anything. Or you say no to the doctor. but that is like pushing on a string. You can only pull a string and you can only trace identity from the past to the present. A feeling of self has nothing to do with predictions, That's the point. successful ones or otherwise, and in fact you might not even have a future, but you certainly have a past. Which is refute at each second in any experimental procedure. If tomorrow somebody remembers being Telmo Menezes today then Telmo Menezes has a future, if not then Telmo Menezes has no future, and Quantum Mechanics or a understanding of Everett's Many Worlds is not needed for any of it. Period. However in a completely different unrelated matter, if you want to assign a probability that tomorrow a observer that can be interviewed by a third party will observe a electron move left or right then Quantum Mechanics will be needed. And some (including me) feel that Everett's interpretation is a convenient way to think about it, although there are other ways. Not in comp, and Everett has to be extended on the arithmetical reality. Bruno John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: The Yes-Doctor Experiment for real
On 10 Dec 2013, at 20:20, George wrote: Hi List I haven't contributed to this list for a while but I thought you might be interested in this article from the Science Daily on line magazine Neural Prosthesis Restores Behavior After Brain Injury Yes, things progress. Nice to hear of you George, best, Of course, we cannot test the first person experience of the rat. Even if the rat can talk, that would prove almost nothing, but the human will say yes to the doctor anyway, and without thinking to much on the theoretical consequences of the possible survival. To stop comp to be *applied*, we should have made glasses illegal long ago ... Then we can argue that molecular biology confirms the use of comp by biological system all the time. Bruno George Levy -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: A definition of human consciousness
On 10 Dec 2013, at 20:40, John Clark wrote: On Sun, Dec 8, 2013 at 3:26 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: This is exactly what UDA shows that comp *leads* to a reduction of the mind body problem into a body problem in arithmetic. I don't know what comp False. You know what it means. is or what relevance the Universal Dance Association has to all this but never mind, what problem in arithmetic explains life the universe and everything? Is it how much is 6*7 ? No, it is the comparison between the arithmetical quantization and the empiric one, which can help to confirms comp (+ classical theory of knowledge) or refute it. We don't need to try to define consciousness, I agree, examples are far more important than definitions. but to agree that consciousness is invariant for some transformation of the brains, Yes. and this eventually reduce physics to a measure problem Yes, if a measurement of a brain is made and information on the position and velocity of atoms is obtained another brain can be made with generic atoms that will produce a identical consciousness. Which by the way, illustrates that the conscious experience will not be able to localize its universal level implementing them, nor even decide if it is in arithmetic or in another physical system. You didn't convince any one you refuted the reasoning, given that each time you provided a counter-example it was shown to confuse the first and third person views For several years now Bruno Marchal has accused John Clark of that, but John Clark would maintain that there is not a single person on the face of the earth who is confused by the difference between the first person and the third person. Then provide the prediction algorithm, and if *you* don't confuse 1p and 3p, you can see that P = 1/2 is the best prediction available. Show one better if you can. You say that the use of the pronouns is defectuous, but I am the one insisting to keep clearly the distinction between pronouns referring to the first person and the third person view (as defined with the notion of personal diary). How the hell does a diary help in making a clear distinction? There are 7 billion first person views on this planet and everybody writes about I in their diary. The question is addressed to the Helsinki man, and you are right, both copies will write I in the diary. That is the point, and that is the reason of why both copies will acknowledge their inability to predict their next 1p experience in self-duplication experiment. You are in Helsinki, and by comp you know that you will survive one and entire in a unique city, and you know you can't know which one precisely. It will be one, and if you write W, the first person experience of the one in M will refute it. That's 6 uses of the personal pronoun you in just 50 words, 12%. And the entire purpose of the sentence was to cast light on the nature of you, It was not. Your rhetorical handwaving convinces only you, John. Try to convince someone else. If someone ever understood John C. point, please explain this to us. Bruno but I do admit that a proposition is far easier to prove if the very proposition can be used as a lemma in the proof itself. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can a grown man be an atheist ?
On 10 Dec 2013, at 20:03, meekerdb wrote: On 12/10/2013 12:40 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: Do you agree that in Helsinki we have: Probability(I will feel to be a unique guy in an unique city) = 1 (assuming comp and all the default assumptions) ? It has the same problem. It is just moved from you to I. Oh, I could have use you instead of I. My choice here was random. What does I refer to. To my future first person experience. I can say There will be a guy who finds hiself in a citybut is it I? It will be, from his point of view, as much I than in a simple digital brain substitution. Under the theory of souls it would make sense to ask, which duplicate will your soul go to. But under computationalism there is no answer be the duplication entails that there is no you, there are only computations that think you. The question is on that thinking. If you answer yes to the question above, and so Probability(I will feel to be a unique guy in an unique city) = 1, you know in advance that you will feel/ think to be unique in all possible future situations brought by the duplication. Given that both copies are produced, you know that both feels unique in one city. So both will get one bit of information, when looking where they feel to be, and that is another way to describe the first person indeterrminacy. Your point according to which that it is like there was a soul confirms my identification of the soul with the first person, and that fits nicely with theTheatetus' definition of the knower and Plotinus' definition of the soul (according to me, and Bréhier). Except that souls were, by definition, unique and could not be duplicated (like quantum states). And like comp states below our substitution level, and like souls in comp, from their points of view. Comp makes it impossible to duplicate a soul, from a soul point of view. You remains unique, from your point of view. the observer cannot be aware of the split, by its first person experience only. It needs 3p clues. Bruno Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Atheism is wish fulfillment
On 10 Dec 2013, at 20:08, meekerdb wrote: On 12/10/2013 12:49 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 09 Dec 2013, at 23:28, meekerdb wrote: On 12/9/2013 12:06 PM, Jason Resch wrote: On Mon, Dec 9, 2013 at 12:57 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 12/9/2013 12:44 AM, LizR wrote: On 9 December 2013 20:56, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 12/8/2013 4:36 PM, LizR wrote: On 9 December 2013 07:41, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, Dec 8, 2013 at 11:48 AM, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: Determinism is far from well established. It's a basic assumption in almost every scientific theory. In the most important theory in physics, Quantum Mechanics, no such assumption is made, and despite a century of trying no experiment has ever been performed that even hinted such a deterministic assumption should be added in. I believe the two-slit experiment hints that QM is deterministic by implying the existence of a multiverse. Wasn't it you, Liz, that pointed out this was circular. Everett assumes a multiverse in order to make QM determinsitic. I did say something like that, didn't I? [insert embarrassed emoticon here]. I think I was saying that it was too strong to say that QM follows the principle of determinism (or something like that) because it appears to be indeterminate and only becomes deterministic thanks to Everett. However, the two-slit experiment does suggest the multiverse as a valid explanation, in that any other explanation requires other principles to be violated (causality, locality...) I think I was attempting to position myself between John and Jason - to say that determinism is reasonably well established, but only as a result of a long and winding process of experiment, conjecture and so on. But it isn't. As Roland Omnes says, quantum mechanics is a probabilistic theory so it predicts probabilities - what did you expect? Among apostles of Everett there's a lot of trashing of Copenhagen. But Bohr's idea was that the classical world, where things happened and results were recorded, was *logically* prior to the quantum mechanics. QM was a way of making predictions about what could done and observed. Today what might be termed neo-Copenhagen is advocated by Chris Fuchs and maybe Scott Aronson. I highly recommend Scott's book Quantum Computing Since Democritus. It's kind of heavy going in the middle, but if you're just interested in the philosophical implications you can skip to the last chapters. Violation of Bell's inequality can be used to guarantee the randomness of numbers, http://arxiv.org/pdf/0911.3427v3.pdf , assuming only locality. Bell's theorm proves that local hidden variables are impossible which leaves only two remaining explanations that explain the EPR paradox: 1. Non-local, faster-than-light, relativity violating effects That's non-local hidden variable - which is exactly what a parallel universe is. What is non local here? A whole world is duplicated - including remote parts. This will include only apparent distant associations. Splitting or differentiation occurs at the speed of the interaction, which is light speed, or slower. The same occurs in the UD. Bruno Brent 2. Measurements have more than one outcome In light of Bell's theorem, either special relativity is false or many-world's is true. I agree with Jason. Bruno Jason -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com . Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com . Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything- l...@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving
Re: Bruno against Plato
On 10 Dec 2013, at 23:38, Alberto G. Corona wrote: Thanks for the clarification. You are welcome. But for what refer to the questions i asked, I find that my initial assumptions are broadly correct. I find the platonism of the UDA very different from the Platonism of Plato. It is more pythagorean, and it contains Plotinus correction of Aristotle theory of matter (as mainly an indeterminate). Yes, Platonism evolved a lot from Plato to Damascius, and made a big jump, through Church-Turing and Gödel. despite the merits that the hypothesis of mechanism may have to clarify other questions. The goal is to show that with computationalism, the mind-body problem is a problem in mathematical logic. Then we can see that the solution will satisfy more Plato than Naturalism. Physics become a branch of machine's theology or psychology ... Bruno 2013/12/10, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be: On 10 Dec 2013, at 12:15, Alberto G. Corona wrote: 2013/12/10 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be On 10 Dec 2013, at 10:40, Alberto G. Corona wrote: It seems to me that your invocation of platonism is wrong. For Plato the reality is a shadow of the perfect world of ideas, universals that we can remember by anamnesis. OK. But for you reality is a partial dream, Not at all. Only physical reality. And it is not one dream, it is what result from an infinity of dreams, by the FPI on arithmetic. (FPI = first person indeterminacy, *on* the complete UD emulation in arithmetic). but coherent or robust product of the aleatory Dovetailer Machine, + The FPI. and sometimes we have access to that nonsense by our dreams and hallucinations. By comp, and the FPI on all computations going through our comp state (which exists theoretically, as we work in the comp theory). So in fact the reality, as the the platonic realm is just the opposite of the one of the UDA: it is full of structure and perfect, while the UDA produces every kind of thing possible. Only computations. Computer science shows this to be a complex mathematical structure, structured differently from the different points of view of a machines, which themselves obeys the non trivial laws of self-reference. It is full of structure. Where that structure come from? They follow from the laws of addition and multiplication and logic, basically from: 0 ≠ s(x) s(x) = s(y) - x = y x+0 = x x+s(y) = s(x+y) x*0=0 x*s(y)=(x*y)+x The TOE has no other axioms. (Only definitions). Note that most scientific theories admit those axioms. I see all computatons possible coming from the UDA, You mean the UD (the universal dovetailer). UDA is for the UD Argument (UDA is only the name of a deductive argument based on the notion of Universal Dovetailing). some of them with structure, some of them do not. That is ambiguous. They all have some structure. But I am OK, as some have internal and external (to them, relatively) random data, also. It is isomorphic to some subset of the mathematical multiverse Too much fuzzy. It depends of your starting assumption. multiverse is usually used in the context of QM. But neither QM, nor ~QM is assumed in the UD Argument. The UD argument is deductive (not entirely in step 8 as it is intended to apply on 'reality' and use Occam razor). It shows that if you survive with a digital brain, then you survive in the infinitely many arithmetical brain, and physics, to remain a stable appearance has no choice to exploit an infinite self-multiplication. UDA reduces partially the mind-body problem (my job) to a body problem in arithmetic. It is a problem. Not a solution of a problem (except that in the arithmetical translation of the UDA (AUDA), we can already interview the universal machine (Löbian one) on that problem, and they tell us that Plato seems less foolish than Aristotle. or the boltzmann aleatory structures. Same remark. Keep in mind that if we accept the existence of a physical reality, we meta-reason to find the deepest laws of reality, and be open that physics might not be the fundamental theory. Or can be emulated by UDA. Yes. Note that the UD emulation is entirely deterministic (in the 3p), and hopefully partially deterministic in the 1p (plural) view. The only additional merit is the use of few initial assumptions. I think you miss the point. I am just saying that if comp is correct, then adding anything to those initial assumption is a redundant form of conceptual treachery. But to emulate everithing possible with few assumptions is not a merit IMHO. You do miss the point. With all my respect. The emulation is only a manner of formulating the problem precisely, that is, mathematically. I´m not trying to be harsh. No problem. I could look like a philosopher, defending some theory. But that's not what I do, and did. I am a logician, and computer scientist, explaining that if you say yes to the comp doctor, then (assuming you have
Re: Atheism is wish fulfillment
On 11 Dec 2013, at 02:23, LizR wrote: On 10 December 2013 09:06, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: Bell's theorm proves that local hidden variables are impossible which leaves only two remaining explanations that explain the EPR paradox: 1. Non-local, faster-than-light, relativity violating effects 2. Measurements have more than one outcome In light of Bell's theorem, either special relativity is false or many-world's is true. Bell realised there was a third explanation involving the relevant laws of physics operating in a time symmetric fashion. (Oddly this appears to be the hardest one for people to grasp, however.) But the many worlds don't disappear, unless you invoke a sort of quantum conspiracy, which might be true, but it begins to look like a super-selection of one branch among the many, and it has to use some special initial conditions. It works logically, if you add non-comp, as with comp, you get the many computations anyway, without quantum nor comp conspiracies or super-determinism. Bruno -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Atheism is wish fulfillment
On Wed, Dec 11, 2013 at 1:32 AM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 12/10/2013 10:47 PM, Jason Resch wrote: On Wed, Dec 11, 2013 at 12:19 AM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 12/10/2013 9:49 PM, Jason Resch wrote: On Tue, Dec 10, 2013 at 9:53 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 12/10/2013 5:23 PM, LizR wrote: On 10 December 2013 09:06, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: Bell's theorm proves that local hidden variables are impossible which leaves only two remaining explanations that explain the EPR paradox: 1. Non-local, faster-than-light, relativity violating effects 2. Measurements have more than one outcome In light of Bell's theorem, either special relativity is false or many-world's is true. Bell realised there was a third explanation involving the relevant laws of physics operating in a time symmetric fashion. (Oddly this appears to be the hardest one for people to grasp, however.) Yes, that idea has been popularized by Vic Stenger and by Cramer's transactional interpretation. Collapse is still fundamentally real in the transactional interpretation, it is just even less clear about when it occurs. The transactional interpretation is also non-local, non-deterministic, and postulates new things outside of standard QM. I think it's still local, no FTL except via zig-zags like Stenger's. This table should be updated in that case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretations_of_quantum_mechanics#Comparison_of_interpretations Hmm. I think the transactional waves are not FTL but in an EPR experiment would relay on backward-in-time signaling. Not sure why it says TIQ is explicitly non-local? I don't know enough about TIQM to say, but the wikipedia article on it also mentions in several places that it is explicitly non-local: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transactional_interpretation What are the zig-zags? By traveling back in time and then forward a particle can be at two spacelike separate events. Is it the Feynman Stueckelberg interpretation of antimatter? In that the positron and electron created in the decay of a particle can be envisioned as the same particle, with the positron travelling backwards in time. In the case of that anti-matter interpretation, neither is FTL. Why? Everett showed the Schrodinger equation is sufficient to explain all observations in QM. But it's non-local too. If spacelike measurement choices in are made in repeated EPR measurements the results can still show correlations violating Bell's inequality - in the same world. Can you explain the experimental setup where this happens? http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9810080 Isn't that the ordinary EPR paradox with Bell's extension to disprove local hidden variables? I don't see how this shows anything contrary to predictions of QM / Everett. As I mentioned earlier, Bell's Theorem only disproves local hidden variables. It leaves two possible alternatives: FTL/non-local influences and measurements with more than one outcome. When they measure the same attribute, the result is correlated as I described before, leading to two worlds. When they measure the uncorrelated observables, each is split separately when they make the measurement, and then the split spreads at light speed to the other, creating four superposed states. The Schrodinger equation has solutions in Hilbert space, which are not local in spacetime. Are you referring to momentum vs. position basis ( http://lesswrong.com/lw/pr/which_basis_is_more_fundamental/ ) or something else? No, just that a ray in Hilbert space, a state, corresponds to a solution of the SWE over configuration space (with boundary conditions) which in general is not localized in spacetime. Locality (as I've used the term) refers to the idea that things are only affected by their immediate environment. I think you are speaking of something else when you speak of being able to locate it somewhere in space-time. Is it just so people can sleep soundly at night believing the universe is small and that they are unique? There's also hyperdeterminism in which the experimenters only *thinks* the can make independent choices. t'Hooft tries to develop that viewpoint. Hyper-determinism sounds incompatible with normal determinism, as it seems to imply a the deterministic process of an operating mind is forced (against its will in some cases), to decide certain choices which would be determined by something operating external to that mind. I think I can use the pigeon hole principle to prove hyper-determinism is inconsistent with QM. Consider an observer whose mind is represented by a computer program running on a computer with a total memory capacity limited to N bits. Then have this observer make 2^n + 1 quantum measurements. If hyperdeterminism is true, and the results matches what the observer decided to choose, then the
Re: How can a grown man be an atheist ?
On Tue, Dec 10, 2013 at 6:03 PM, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, Dec 8, 2013 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: You're avoiding my question. Why don't you also reject the MWI? If I am reluctant to answer your question it is because I've already done so many times in the past, but if you insist I will do so again. The Many World's Interpretation is about what can be expected to be seen, and although it may seem strange to us Everett's ideas are 100% logically self consistent. Bruno's proof is not about what will be seen but about a feeling of identity, about who you can expect to be; but you do not think you're the same person you were yesterday because yesterday you made a prediction about today that turned out to be correct, you think you're the same person you were yesterday for one reason and one reason only, you remember being Telmo Menezes yesterday. It's a good thing that's the way it works because I make incorrect predictions all the time and when I do I don't feel that I've entered oblivion, instead I feel like I am the same person I was before because I can still remember being the guy who made that prediction that turned out to be wrong. I don't feel like I'm dead, I just feel like the guy who made a crappy prediction. Bruno thinks you can trace personal identity from the present to the future, but that is like pushing on a string. Everyone thinks this. In fact, most of our predictions about the future turn out to be correct. This is extremely important for survival. Homo sapiens occupies an evolutionary niche where our strength is precisely being good at predicting the future in sophisticated ways. We devote 20% of our energy budget to an organ that does mostly that. You can only pull a string and you can only trace identity from the past to the present. A feeling of self has nothing to do with predictions, successful ones or otherwise, and in fact you might not even have a future, but you certainly have a past. Bruno never claims that a feeling of self has something to do with predictions, this is your interpretation. If you insist on it, you have to be more precise. Where does Bruno claim this? He starts by assuming comp, and comp tells you that the feeling of self is related to computations (a possibility that you seem to be open to). Then he investigates the consequences of assuming comp. Here are things that we know by direct experience: 1) We always feel that we are a single person; 2) We feel that we have a past; 3) The future is uncertain, we don't know how some things will turn out. With the duplicator thought experiment, you assume comp and you assume the previous empirical observations. When someone comes out of the duplicator, we assume that they all still apply. Of course now, this will have to apply to two entities. Let's get rid of the personal pronouns. Person S is a scientist operating the duplicator the moment before time t. Person P is going through the duplicator at time t. Person S' is a scientist operating the duplicator the moment after time t. Persons B and M will come out of the duplicator. Person B will be in Brussels and person M will be in Moscow. So: - Both persons B and M remember being person P; - Person S' remembers being person S; - Person P bets on the existence of a direct experience in the future. Let's say person P bets on the existence of an experience of remembering being person P before t, and experiencing being in Brussels right after t and not being in Moscow right after t; - Person B experiences a correct prediction; - Person M experiences an incorrect prediction. - Person S' experiences a correct prediction about the outcome of the experience: person S' observes two identical entities, one in Brussels, one in Moscow (maybe through some webcam) Do you have a problem with any of this? Maybe you think it is trivial, but do you disagree? If tomorrow somebody remembers being Telmo Menezes today then Telmo Menezes has a future, if not then Telmo Menezes has no future, and Quantum Mechanics or a understanding of Everett's Many Worlds is not needed for any of it. Agreed, no problem. Period. However in a completely different unrelated matter, if you want to assign a probability that tomorrow a observer that can be interviewed by a third party will observe a electron move left or right then Quantum Mechanics will be needed. And some (including me) feel that Everett's interpretation is a convenient way to think about it, although there are other ways. Ok, but if you use Everett's interpretation to think about reality, then personal pronouns become ambiguous in the exact same way that you always point out. Under the MWI, observing the behaviour of an electron is equivalent to going through a duplicator, except that you don't get copies in the same world. But you still have someone saying: I saw the electron go left!, and you can always reply: Bullshit! what do you mean by 'you'?
Re: Bruno against Plato
Not a bad achievement. Instead, the hypothesis that the living beings compute in order to solve evolutionary pressures is closer to the Plato world of ideas, Or specifically, the Plato-Aristotle syntesis of Thomas Aquinas. and also closer to dig knowledge for living, that it , at last, the purpose of the philosophers of the antiquity. It can explain how the world of ideas is the result of the hardcoding, by natural selection. of key concepts and their relations in order to survive in society and nature. That go as deep as to define reality, the perception of space and time, that is, the entire soul, psyche or mind whatever you may call it. Lorentz explained how the Kantian a prioris, that embrace the platonic ideas or Aristotle categories, but also the mechanisms of the perceptions are shaped by natural selection. So matter becomes a phenomenon in the mind. and the kantian thing-in-itself becomes something whose only attribute is that produces coherent perceptions among many observers. It can be purely mathematical and nothing more, then. The cause-effect may be reversed, to say that the mind determines the coherence (That is, the mathematicity) of the external reality and also its evolutionary history in order to be coherent with its own coherence in time, since what is observed is correlation, not causality in one or other direction. It explains also how the aestetic appreciation of flowers and patterns of colors, and the horror to the serpents, the need to carry empty bags and boots (even in summertime) in women is linked to the ancestral need to locate patterns of edible vegetables in the wild, avoid serpents and carry the gathered vegetables home. 2013/12/11, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be: On 10 Dec 2013, at 23:38, Alberto G. Corona wrote: Thanks for the clarification. You are welcome. But for what refer to the questions i asked, I find that my initial assumptions are broadly correct. I find the platonism of the UDA very different from the Platonism of Plato. It is more pythagorean, and it contains Plotinus correction of Aristotle theory of matter (as mainly an indeterminate). Yes, Platonism evolved a lot from Plato to Damascius, and made a big jump, through Church-Turing and Gödel. despite the merits that the hypothesis of mechanism may have to clarify other questions. The goal is to show that with computationalism, the mind-body problem is a problem in mathematical logic. Then we can see that the solution will satisfy more Plato than Naturalism. Physics become a branch of machine's theology or psychology ... Bruno 2013/12/10, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be: On 10 Dec 2013, at 12:15, Alberto G. Corona wrote: 2013/12/10 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be On 10 Dec 2013, at 10:40, Alberto G. Corona wrote: It seems to me that your invocation of platonism is wrong. For Plato the reality is a shadow of the perfect world of ideas, universals that we can remember by anamnesis. OK. But for you reality is a partial dream, Not at all. Only physical reality. And it is not one dream, it is what result from an infinity of dreams, by the FPI on arithmetic. (FPI = first person indeterminacy, *on* the complete UD emulation in arithmetic). but coherent or robust product of the aleatory Dovetailer Machine, + The FPI. and sometimes we have access to that nonsense by our dreams and hallucinations. By comp, and the FPI on all computations going through our comp state (which exists theoretically, as we work in the comp theory). So in fact the reality, as the the platonic realm is just the opposite of the one of the UDA: it is full of structure and perfect, while the UDA produces every kind of thing possible. Only computations. Computer science shows this to be a complex mathematical structure, structured differently from the different points of view of a machines, which themselves obeys the non trivial laws of self-reference. It is full of structure. Where that structure come from? They follow from the laws of addition and multiplication and logic, basically from: 0 ≠ s(x) s(x) = s(y) - x = y x+0 = x x+s(y) = s(x+y) x*0=0 x*s(y)=(x*y)+x The TOE has no other axioms. (Only definitions). Note that most scientific theories admit those axioms. I see all computatons possible coming from the UDA, You mean the UD (the universal dovetailer). UDA is for the UD Argument (UDA is only the name of a deductive argument based on the notion of Universal Dovetailing). some of them with structure, some of them do not. That is ambiguous. They all have some structure. But I am OK, as some have internal and external (to them, relatively) random data, also. It is isomorphic to some subset of the mathematical multiverse Too much fuzzy. It depends of your starting assumption. multiverse is usually used in the context of QM. But neither QM, nor ~QM is assumed in the UD Argument. The UD argument is
MERRY CHRISTMAS !
MERRY CHRISTMAS ! USAF FLASH MOB at the National Air and Space Museum, Washington DC http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIoSga7tZPglist=UUKX86dJGhTOn8NtRUqnATFQ Dr. Roger B Clough NIST (ret.) [1/1/2000] See my Leibniz site at http://independent.academia.edu/RogerClough --- This email is free from viruses and malware because avast! Antivirus protection is active. http://www.avast.com -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Simulations back up theory thst Universe is a hologram
Simulations back up *theory* that Universe is a hologramhttps://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.nature.com/news/simulations-back-up-theory-that-universe-is-a-hologram-1.14328ct=gacd=MTczMjg0OTQyMjEzNjkyMjczMDgcad=CAEYAAusg=AFQjCNFX7DsTVuX6awgQtZQ3vRNhuhyrZQ Nature.com At a black hole, Albert Einstein's theory of gravity apparently clashes with *...* its entropy and other properties based on the predictions of *string theory* as well as *...* -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
That hateful subject, metaphysics
That hateful subject, metaphysics To deal with consciousness and experiences, which are mental, not physical, you have to go to that hateful subject, metaphysics, and only Leibniz has a good account of the perceiver, which is the experiencer not available to materialism. If you still believe there is a perceiver in materialism, could you tell us where it is ? It has to be at one place, as your experience and mine says that there is only one perceiver. Dr. Roger B Clough NIST (ret.) [1/1/2000] See my Leibniz site at http://independent.academia.edu/RogerClough --- This email is free from viruses and malware because avast! Antivirus protection is active. http://www.avast.com -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Bruno against Plato
http://nocorrecto.blogspot.com.es/2011/11/why-women-like-bags-and-shoes-but-only.html 2013/12/11, Alberto G. Corona agocor...@gmail.com: Not a bad achievement. Instead, the hypothesis that the living beings compute in order to solve evolutionary pressures is closer to the Plato world of ideas, Or specifically, the Plato-Aristotle syntesis of Thomas Aquinas. and also closer to dig knowledge for living, that it , at last, the purpose of the philosophers of the antiquity. It can explain how the world of ideas is the result of the hardcoding, by natural selection. of key concepts and their relations in order to survive in society and nature. That go as deep as to define reality, the perception of space and time, that is, the entire soul, psyche or mind whatever you may call it. Lorentz explained how the Kantian a prioris, that embrace the platonic ideas or Aristotle categories, but also the mechanisms of the perceptions are shaped by natural selection. So matter becomes a phenomenon in the mind. and the kantian thing-in-itself becomes something whose only attribute is that produces coherent perceptions among many observers. It can be purely mathematical and nothing more, then. The cause-effect may be reversed, to say that the mind determines the coherence (That is, the mathematicity) of the external reality and also its evolutionary history in order to be coherent with its own coherence in time, since what is observed is correlation, not causality in one or other direction. It explains also how the aestetic appreciation of flowers and patterns of colors, and the horror to the serpents, the need to carry empty bags and boots (even in summertime) in women is linked to the ancestral need to locate patterns of edible vegetables in the wild, avoid serpents and carry the gathered vegetables home. 2013/12/11, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be: On 10 Dec 2013, at 23:38, Alberto G. Corona wrote: Thanks for the clarification. You are welcome. But for what refer to the questions i asked, I find that my initial assumptions are broadly correct. I find the platonism of the UDA very different from the Platonism of Plato. It is more pythagorean, and it contains Plotinus correction of Aristotle theory of matter (as mainly an indeterminate). Yes, Platonism evolved a lot from Plato to Damascius, and made a big jump, through Church-Turing and Gödel. despite the merits that the hypothesis of mechanism may have to clarify other questions. The goal is to show that with computationalism, the mind-body problem is a problem in mathematical logic. Then we can see that the solution will satisfy more Plato than Naturalism. Physics become a branch of machine's theology or psychology ... Bruno 2013/12/10, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be: On 10 Dec 2013, at 12:15, Alberto G. Corona wrote: 2013/12/10 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be On 10 Dec 2013, at 10:40, Alberto G. Corona wrote: It seems to me that your invocation of platonism is wrong. For Plato the reality is a shadow of the perfect world of ideas, universals that we can remember by anamnesis. OK. But for you reality is a partial dream, Not at all. Only physical reality. And it is not one dream, it is what result from an infinity of dreams, by the FPI on arithmetic. (FPI = first person indeterminacy, *on* the complete UD emulation in arithmetic). but coherent or robust product of the aleatory Dovetailer Machine, + The FPI. and sometimes we have access to that nonsense by our dreams and hallucinations. By comp, and the FPI on all computations going through our comp state (which exists theoretically, as we work in the comp theory). So in fact the reality, as the the platonic realm is just the opposite of the one of the UDA: it is full of structure and perfect, while the UDA produces every kind of thing possible. Only computations. Computer science shows this to be a complex mathematical structure, structured differently from the different points of view of a machines, which themselves obeys the non trivial laws of self-reference. It is full of structure. Where that structure come from? They follow from the laws of addition and multiplication and logic, basically from: 0 ≠ s(x) s(x) = s(y) - x = y x+0 = x x+s(y) = s(x+y) x*0=0 x*s(y)=(x*y)+x The TOE has no other axioms. (Only definitions). Note that most scientific theories admit those axioms. I see all computatons possible coming from the UDA, You mean the UD (the universal dovetailer). UDA is for the UD Argument (UDA is only the name of a deductive argument based on the notion of Universal Dovetailing). some of them with structure, some of them do not. That is ambiguous. They all have some structure. But I am OK, as some have internal and external (to them, relatively) random data, also. It is isomorphic to some subset of the mathematical multiverse Too much fuzzy. It
Leibniz on sensory experience (my account)
Leibniz on sensory experience Leibniz maintained that all causation is mental. This appears to contradict sensory experiences such as being pricked by a pin, for the cause of the experience would seem to originate in the body with the prick. There are a number of resolutions to this apparent dilemma, my own being that the cause of the pain is not the sensory nerve signal itself, but the mental perception of the nerve signal, for the pain is felt mentally by the perceiver, although it may appear to come from the site of the pin prick. So the perceiver is the causal agent, not the body. This is not dissimilar to other bodily events such as the feeling of fear or other emotions. The actual feeling I believe is caused by the mental perception of the fear, which may originate in diffuse regions of the brain or other organs and be perceived from nerve signals from the brain or other bodily sites. Dr. Roger B Clough NIST (ret.) [1/1/2000] See my Leibniz site at http://independent.academia.edu/RogerClough --- This email is free from viruses and malware because avast! Antivirus protection is active. http://www.avast.com -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Bruno against Plato
Alberto, I agree with what you say below. In fact evolution needs arguably to presuppose computationalism. Computationalism explains that we have to extend the idea of evolution to the origin and development of the physical objects and laws, which will be used later by evolution. The laws of physics evolve through both a certain type of possible deep computations (cosmological history), and the FPI on all computations (comp-quantum computations). With comp, causality, responsibility, reason, are mind's higher cognitive notion to structure the information we get. It does not exist in the basic reality, which can be taken as only the numbers + the numbers law. Computationalism forces us to extend both Darwin, and the move begun by Galilee-Einstein-Everett-Rossler (and others). It gives something opposed strongly to anthropomorphism, but close to universal person-morphism. You still seem to assume (primitive) matter, but perhaps it is just because you are interested in the human history, and not really in the question why there is something instead of nothing. Bruno On 11 Dec 2013, at 11:46, Alberto G. Corona wrote: Not a bad achievement. Instead, the hypothesis that the living beings compute in order to solve evolutionary pressures is closer to the Plato world of ideas, Or specifically, the Plato-Aristotle syntesis of Thomas Aquinas. and also closer to dig knowledge for living, that it , at last, the purpose of the philosophers of the antiquity. It can explain how the world of ideas is the result of the hardcoding, by natural selection. of key concepts and their relations in order to survive in society and nature. That go as deep as to define reality, the perception of space and time, that is, the entire soul, psyche or mind whatever you may call it. Lorentz explained how the Kantian a prioris, that embrace the platonic ideas or Aristotle categories, but also the mechanisms of the perceptions are shaped by natural selection. So matter becomes a phenomenon in the mind. and the kantian thing-in-itself becomes something whose only attribute is that produces coherent perceptions among many observers. It can be purely mathematical and nothing more, then. The cause-effect may be reversed, to say that the mind determines the coherence (That is, the mathematicity) of the external reality and also its evolutionary history in order to be coherent with its own coherence in time, since what is observed is correlation, not causality in one or other direction. It explains also how the aestetic appreciation of flowers and patterns of colors, and the horror to the serpents, the need to carry empty bags and boots (even in summertime) in women is linked to the ancestral need to locate patterns of edible vegetables in the wild, avoid serpents and carry the gathered vegetables home. 2013/12/11, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be: On 10 Dec 2013, at 23:38, Alberto G. Corona wrote: Thanks for the clarification. You are welcome. But for what refer to the questions i asked, I find that my initial assumptions are broadly correct. I find the platonism of the UDA very different from the Platonism of Plato. It is more pythagorean, and it contains Plotinus correction of Aristotle theory of matter (as mainly an indeterminate). Yes, Platonism evolved a lot from Plato to Damascius, and made a big jump, through Church-Turing and Gödel. despite the merits that the hypothesis of mechanism may have to clarify other questions. The goal is to show that with computationalism, the mind-body problem is a problem in mathematical logic. Then we can see that the solution will satisfy more Plato than Naturalism. Physics become a branch of machine's theology or psychology ... Bruno 2013/12/10, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be: On 10 Dec 2013, at 12:15, Alberto G. Corona wrote: 2013/12/10 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be On 10 Dec 2013, at 10:40, Alberto G. Corona wrote: It seems to me that your invocation of platonism is wrong. For Plato the reality is a shadow of the perfect world of ideas, universals that we can remember by anamnesis. OK. But for you reality is a partial dream, Not at all. Only physical reality. And it is not one dream, it is what result from an infinity of dreams, by the FPI on arithmetic. (FPI = first person indeterminacy, *on* the complete UD emulation in arithmetic). but coherent or robust product of the aleatory Dovetailer Machine, + The FPI. and sometimes we have access to that nonsense by our dreams and hallucinations. By comp, and the FPI on all computations going through our comp state (which exists theoretically, as we work in the comp theory). So in fact the reality, as the the platonic realm is just the opposite of the one of the UDA: it is full of structure and perfect, while the UDA produces every kind of thing possible. Only computations. Computer science shows this to be a complex mathematical structure,
Re: The Yes-Doctor Experiment for real
Bruno: but the human will say yes to the doctor anyway, and without thinking to much on the theoretical consequences of the possible survival. Richard: I would always say no to the doctor because of the no-cloning theorem. I read your recent paper where you discuss how comp circumvents that theorem. But do not understand your argument. It is equivalent IMO to comp circumventing the uncertainty principle. Could you discuss this? Richard On Wed, Dec 11, 2013 at 3:55 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 10 Dec 2013, at 20:20, George wrote: Hi List I haven't contributed to this list for a while but I thought you might be interested in this article from the Science Dailyhttp://www.sciencedaily.com/on line magazine Neural Prosthesis Restores Behavior After Brain Injuryhttp://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/12/131209152259.htm Yes, things progress. Nice to hear of you George, best, Of course, we cannot test the first person experience of the rat. Even if the rat can talk, that would prove almost nothing, but the human will say yes to the doctor anyway, and without thinking to much on the theoretical consequences of the possible survival. To stop comp to be *applied*, we should have made glasses illegal long ago ... Then we can argue that molecular biology confirms the use of comp by biological system all the time. Bruno George Levy -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can a grown man be an atheist ?
On Wed, Dec 11, 2013 at 3:49 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Then you can't say that you will survive anything. We die at each instant OK, but then you can't say that survival is important, or that the word means much of anything at all. and comp is made trivial, 'Comp is not trivial, comp is a gibberish word made up by you that is almost as meaningless as free will. you can only trace identity from the past to the present. A feeling of self has nothing to do with predictions, That's the point. If that's the point then why do you keep emphasizing what the various copies will predict about their future and how accurate those predictions turn out to be? If tomorrow somebody remembers being Telmo Menezes today then Telmo Menezes has a future, if not then Telmo Menezes has no future, and Quantum Mechanics or a understanding of Everett's Many Worlds is not needed for any of it. Period. However in a completely different unrelated matter, if you want to assign a probability that tomorrow a observer that can be interviewed by a third party will observe a electron move left or right then Quantum Mechanics will be needed. And some (including me) feel that Everett's interpretation is a convenient way to think about it, although there are other ways. Not in comp Perhaps not but I honestly don't give a damn about comp. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can a grown man be an atheist ?
On Wed, Dec 11, 2013 at 5:40 AM, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.comwrote: We always feel that we are a single person Yes but the copy that walked out of the duplicating chamber with you (or perhaps you are the copy and he is the original, no way to tell and no reason to care) also feels like a single person, and the exact same single person that you do. We feel that we have a past; Yes, and the copy of you that was made 5 seconds ago vividly remembers when he was in kindergarten 20 years ago. if you use Everett's interpretation to think about reality, then personal pronouns become ambiguous in the exact same way that you always point out. No they do not. In Everett it's always obvious who I'm talking about when I use the personal pronoun you, it's the only other fellow in the room with me; but in Bruno's thought experiment there is a man standing to the right of the duplicating machine and a identical looking man standing to the left of the duplicating machine and they both have a equal right to use the grand title you. Under the MWI, observing the behaviour of an electron is equivalent to going through a duplicator, No it is not because in MWI the entire universe is duplicated including the observer so he never sees more than one electron so he can safely use the pronoun it; but with Bruno's duplicating chamber the observer is not duplicated only the electron is, so he sees 2 electrons, so to avoid ambiguity that solo observer would have to say it on the right or it on the left, just saying it won't do. Personal pronouns are part of language that evolved under a certain model of reality Yes, and the environment personal pronouns evolved in did NOT include duplicating chambers, if it had the rules of grammar regarding them would be very different from what they are now. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: A definition of human consciousness
On Tue, Dec 10, 2013 meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: But that's the beauty of consciousness theories, we can detect consciousness only in ourselves so there are no observed features that a consciousness theory must explain, Actually there are some observed features. A sharp blow to the head can create a gap in ones consciousness. A sharp blow to MY head can create a gap in MY consciousness, but all I know about you is that when I hit you on the head with a hammer you behaved in a less complex way for a while and then you made a sound with your mouth that sounded like I lost consciousness. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Atheism is wish fulfillment
On Sun, Dec 8, 2013 at 4:08 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Determinism is far from well established. It's a basic assumption in almost every scientific theory. In the most important theory in physics, Quantum Mechanics, no such assumption is made, and despite a century of trying no experiment has ever been performed that even hinted such a deterministic assumption should be added in. What? Everett = SWE. The wave evolves deterministically. Yes the Schrodinger Wave Equation (SWE) is deterministic but that doesn't matter because it describes nothing observable in the universe. To figure out if a electron will be at point X you've got to square the value of the SWE at point X , and then all you get is a probability not a certainty. To make matters worse the SWE uses imaginary numbers so 2 very different complex numbers provided by Schrodinger can produce identical probabilities after squaring. If 2 different things can produce identical results then things are not deterministic, and if those results are probabilities not certainties then things are even less deterministic. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Atheism is wish fulfillment
On Wed, Dec 11, 2013 at 11:58 AM, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, Dec 8, 2013 at 4:08 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Determinism is far from well established. It's a basic assumption in almost every scientific theory. In the most important theory in physics, Quantum Mechanics, no such assumption is made, and despite a century of trying no experiment has ever been performed that even hinted such a deterministic assumption should be added in. What? Everett = SWE. The wave evolves deterministically. Yes the Schrodinger Wave Equation (SWE) is deterministic but that doesn't matter because it describes nothing observable in the universe. To figure out if a electron will be at point X you've got to square the value of the SWE at point X , and then all you get is a probability not a certainty. You seem to have a blind spot for first person indeterminacy. Were you not the one to say everything is 100% certain in the case of the duplication experiment? Now you back-peddle to say there are indeed probabilities when observer states are duplicated in the Schrodinger equation?! Jason To make matters worse the SWE uses imaginary numbers so 2 very different complex numbers provided by Schrodinger can produce identical probabilities after squaring. If 2 different things can produce identical results then things are not deterministic, and if those results are probabilities not certainties then things are even less deterministic. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Mandela cult and mass media mythopoesis
On 12/11/2013 12:22 AM, Alberto G. Corona wrote: The author of the essay say, definitively, yes. The original article is here: It is long but it is worth reading, to see how the myths of modernity generate violence by unrealistic expectations. http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/1575/full True, secular values can turn a civilization inside out. In post-Christian Europe, entire nations have been plunged into endemic health, skyrocketing education and hopelessly low rates of violent crime. --- Austin Dacey, NY Times 3 Feb 2006 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can a grown man be an atheist ?
On 12/11/2013 12:23 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Tue, Dec 10, 2013 at 9:45 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 12/10/2013 2:07 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Mon, Dec 9, 2013 at 8:02 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 12/9/2013 1:35 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 08 Dec 2013, at 22:53, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Sun, Dec 8, 2013 at 6:59 PM, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: Telmo Menezes you must also reject the MWI, because you live Who is you? Telmo's post was only 63 words long but the pronoun you was used 8 times, that's almost 13%. When it is necessary to hide behind personal pronouns when a philosophical idea regarding duplicating machines and personal identity is discussed it's clear that something is wrong. in the first person, Which first person? The first person of John Clark of one hour ago? The first person of John Clark standing left of the duplicating machine? The first person of John Clark standing right of the duplicating machine? You're avoiding my question. Why don't you also reject the MWI? I would like to know that too. Quentin has already asked this many times to John, and we got unclear answer. John invoked the fact that with comp the duplication are done only in one branch of the universe, but did not explain why would that change anything (without adding some non Turing emulable magic in some place). I think Quentin is right, and John C. just develop irrational rhetoric do avoid moving on in the argument, ... then he talk like if I was defining comp by its consequences, but this is another rhetorical trick, often used by those who want to mock the enterprise. It is interesting. I try to figure out what is really stucking him so much. i do the same with my students in math. Why some people avoid reason in some circumstance. Given that Quentin seems to qualify himself as atheist, it can't be simply Clark's atheism, isn't it? But then what? I think the sticking point, one which I also feel with some force, is the implicit assumption in the question, Where will you find yourself. that there is a unique you. Brent, Although naive, I find the following analogy useful: consider how computer operating systems create new processes. A common method, in UNIX operating systems is forking the current execution path. I will cut and paste the relevant parts from the man page on my computer: NAME fork -- create a new process DESCRIPTION Fork() causes creation of a new process. The new process (child process) is an exact copy of the calling process (parent process) except for the following: o The child process has a unique process ID. o The child process has a different parent process ID (i.e., the process ID of the parent process). [...] RETURN VALUES Upon successful completion, fork() returns a value of 0 to the child process and Fork() was called by the parent process; so it should return a value to the parent process, not the child process. Fork() is an instruction that is part of some program. This program is running in some process P1. When fork() is called, the operating system creates a new process P2 and copies both the program and the execution context of the program to P2. The execution context includes the instruction pointer, that indicates the current instruction being executed. After the copy, both P1 and P2 will point to the instruction after fork(), with the only difference that fork() will have returned different values to the parent and the child. It returns values on both processes, and the operating system intervenes here to make them different -- the OS acts as a duplication machine. returns the process ID of the child process to the parent process. [...] So let's say the original process A is forked at some point in time t, and process B is created. The only different things about A and B is a value called the process identifier (pid). This could be a very simple analogy for a person being in Moscow or Brussels. So let's say the process records its pid before the fork. After the fork, both processes are programmed to check their pid again and compare it with what was stored. For one you will get equal, for another you will get different. If you ask the program, before the fork, to predict if it will find itself in the state equal or unequal after the fork, the most correct program will assign p=.5 to each one of these outcomes. Any program that assigns a different p will be shown to be less correct by repeating this experiment a number of times. ?? What does the program refer to in ask the program? If you ask A to print out whether it's pid is equal to the pid recorded before the fork, A can always correctly print yes. Similarly B can always print no. So what does it mean to ask the program? You seem to have implicitly created two programs and there is no unique referent for the program. Both the parent and the copy
Re: The Yes-Doctor Experiment for real
On 12/11/2013 12:55 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 10 Dec 2013, at 20:20, George wrote: Hi List I haven't contributed to this list for a while but I thought you might be interested in this article from theScience Daily http://www.sciencedaily.com/ on line magazine Neural Prosthesis Restores Behavior After Brain Injury http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/12/131209152259.htm Yes, things progress. Nice to hear of you George, best, Of course, we cannot test the first person experience of the rat. Even if the rat can talk, that would prove almost nothing, but the human will say yes to the doctor anyway, and without thinking to much on the theoretical consequences of the possible survival. But this brings up a difficulty I see in comp. We know that if the level of substitution is quantal, then we can't clone the state of the part being replaced (and in the UD model this corresponds to not knowing all the threads of computation through the state). This wouldn't deter people from saying yes to the doctor. But it implies that there will the a qualitative difference in consciousness, a jump, perhaps like a memory gap and temporary disorientation due to concussion or drugs. But then why doesn't some improbable quantum fluctuation prevent the part replacement and provide a more continuous path of consciousness, in analogy to quantum immortality? Brent To stop comp to be *applied*, we should have made glasses illegal long ago ... Then we can argue that molecular biology confirms the use of comp by biological system all the time. Bruno George Levy -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com mailto:everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/%7Emarchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Atheism is wish fulfillment
On 12/11/2013 1:13 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 10 Dec 2013, at 20:08, meekerdb wrote: On 12/10/2013 12:49 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 09 Dec 2013, at 23:28, meekerdb wrote: On 12/9/2013 12:06 PM, Jason Resch wrote: On Mon, Dec 9, 2013 at 12:57 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 12/9/2013 12:44 AM, LizR wrote: On 9 December 2013 20:56, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 12/8/2013 4:36 PM, LizR wrote: On 9 December 2013 07:41, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com mailto:johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, Dec 8, 2013 at 11:48 AM, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com mailto:jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: Determinism is far from well established. It's a basic assumption in almost every scientific theory. In the most important theory in physics, Quantum Mechanics, no such assumption is made, and despite a century of trying no experiment has ever been performed that even hinted such a deterministic assumption should be added in. I believe the two-slit experiment hints that QM is deterministic by implying the existence of a multiverse. Wasn't it you, Liz, that pointed out this was circular. Everett assumes a multiverse in order to make QM determinsitic. I did say something like that, didn't I? [insert embarrassed emoticon here]. I think I was saying that it was too strong to say that QM follows the principle of determinism (or something like that) because it appears to be indeterminate and only becomes deterministic thanks to Everett. However, the two-slit experiment does /suggest/ the multiverse as a valid explanation, in that any other explanation requires other principles to be violated (causality, locality...) I think I was attempting to position myself between John and Jason - to say that determinism is reasonably well established, but only as a result of a long and winding process of experiment, conjecture and so on. But it isn't. As Roland Omnes says, quantum mechanics is a probabilistic theory so it predicts probabilities - what did you expect? Among apostles of Everett there's a lot of trashing of Copenhagen. But Bohr's idea was that the classical world, where things happened and results were recorded, was *logically* prior to the quantum mechanics. QM was a way of making predictions about what could done and observed. Today what might be termed neo-Copenhagen is advocated by Chris Fuchs and maybe Scott Aronson. I highly recommend Scott's book Quantum Computing Since Democritus. It's kind of heavy going in the middle, but if you're just interested in the philosophical implications you can skip to the last chapters. Violation of Bell's inequality can be used to guarantee the randomness of numbers, http://arxiv.org/pdf/0911.3427v3.pdf, assuming only locality. Bell's theorm proves that local hidden variables are impossible which leaves only two remaining explanations that explain the EPR paradox: 1. Non-local, faster-than-light, relativity violating effects That's non-local hidden variable - which is exactly what a parallel universe is. What is non local here? A whole world is duplicated - including remote parts. This will include only apparent distant associations. Splitting or differentiation occurs at the speed of the interaction, which is light speed, or slower. The same occurs in the UD. But it is distant associations that make violation of Bell's inequality a non-local phenomenon. One may say decoherence propagates via interactions within the forward light cone, but the source can be a set of spacelike events (e.g. corresponding to different measurement choices at opposite ends of an EPR experiment). Whether the same occurs in the UD is just a hope, unless you've been able to derive spacetime from the UD process. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: A definition of human consciousness
Brent: *W h a t* consciousness? would you please describe your take (observing the caveat of Liz)? Whatever I could deduce from different peoples' (authors') mumblings (the contents?) boiled down in my 'generealization' to *RESPONSE TO RELATIONS *- no animal (human?) connotation, thinking, or feeling. They all fell out. With no indication of *H O W ? * *JM* On Tue, Dec 10, 2013 at 11:34 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 12/10/2013 7:42 PM, LizR wrote: On 11 December 2013 10:24, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 12/10/2013 11:54 AM, John Clark wrote: On Sun, Dec 8, 2013 at 7:33 PM, LizR lizj...@gmail.com wrote: One needs a rigorous definition of what consciousness is, to start with, Examples are usually preferable to definitions. and then a theory that explains all its observed features, and makes testable predictions. But that's the beauty of consciousness theories, we can detect consciousness only in ourselves so there are no observed features that a consciousness theory must explain, Actually there are some observed features. A sharp blow to the head can create a gap in ones consciousness. Imbibing various substances that can cross the blood/brain barrier have somewhat predictable effects. Localized electrical stimulation of the brain produces repeatable effects, both in consciousness and somatic. If you're assuming there is more to consciousness than the sum of our thoughts, experiences, memories, etc - then this *may* be a description of features of the contents of consciousness, rather than of the thing itself. ?? Are you speculating that there are parts of consciousness we're not conscious of? Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: The Yes-Doctor Experiment for real
*Yes - to the doctor?* I was always kept aback from agreeing, because I still believe to have included M O R E in my mind (brainfunctions, as you say) then whatever that good doctor and his device may supply. So I consider a mechanical substitution to the 'living' (what is it?) capabilities a reduction in qualia and quanta. Unless the doctor is an infinite universal machine...(still to have to meet one...) JM On Wed, Dec 11, 2013 at 3:10 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 12/11/2013 12:55 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 10 Dec 2013, at 20:20, George wrote: Hi List I haven't contributed to this list for a while but I thought you might be interested in this article from the Science Dailyhttp://www.sciencedaily.com/on line magazine Neural Prosthesis Restores Behavior After Brain Injuryhttp://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/12/131209152259.htm Yes, things progress. Nice to hear of you George, best, Of course, we cannot test the first person experience of the rat. Even if the rat can talk, that would prove almost nothing, but the human will say yes to the doctor anyway, and without thinking to much on the theoretical consequences of the possible survival. But this brings up a difficulty I see in comp. We know that if the level of substitution is quantal, then we can't clone the state of the part being replaced (and in the UD model this corresponds to not knowing all the threads of computation through the state). This wouldn't deter people from saying yes to the doctor. But it implies that there will the a qualitative difference in consciousness, a jump, perhaps like a memory gap and temporary disorientation due to concussion or drugs. But then why doesn't some improbable quantum fluctuation prevent the part replacement and provide a more continuous path of consciousness, in analogy to quantum immortality? Brent To stop comp to be *applied*, we should have made glasses illegal long ago ... Then we can argue that molecular biology confirms the use of comp by biological system all the time. Bruno George Levy -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Atheism is wish fulfillment
On 12/11/2013 2:07 AM, Jason Resch wrote: On Wed, Dec 11, 2013 at 1:32 AM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 12/10/2013 10:47 PM, Jason Resch wrote: On Wed, Dec 11, 2013 at 12:19 AM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 12/10/2013 9:49 PM, Jason Resch wrote: On Tue, Dec 10, 2013 at 9:53 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 12/10/2013 5:23 PM, LizR wrote: On 10 December 2013 09:06, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com mailto:jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: Bell's theorm proves that local hidden variables are impossible which leaves only two remaining explanations that explain the EPR paradox: 1. Non-local, faster-than-light, relativity violating effects 2. Measurements have more than one outcome In light of Bell's theorem, either special relativity is false or many-world's is true. Bell realised there was a third explanation involving the relevant laws of physics operating in a time symmetric fashion. (Oddly this appears to be the hardest one for people to grasp, however.) Yes, that idea has been popularized by Vic Stenger and by Cramer's transactional interpretation. Collapse is still fundamentally real in the transactional interpretation, it is just even less clear about when it occurs. The transactional interpretation is also non-local, non-deterministic, and postulates new things outside of standard QM. I think it's still local, no FTL except via zig-zags like Stenger's. This table should be updated in that case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretations_of_quantum_mechanics#Comparison_of_interpretations Hmm. I think the transactional waves are not FTL but in an EPR experiment would relay on backward-in-time signaling. Not sure why it says TIQ is explicitly non-local? I don't know enough about TIQM to say, but the wikipedia article on it also mentions in several places that it is explicitly non-local: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transactional_interpretation What are the zig-zags? By traveling back in time and then forward a particle can be at two spacelike separate events. Is it the Feynman Stueckelberg interpretation of antimatter? In that the positron and electron created in the decay of a particle can be envisioned as the same particle, with the positron travelling backwards in time. In the case of that anti-matter interpretation, neither is FTL. Right. So it's local in the sense of slower than light, although it effectively implements a non-local hidden variable. Why? Everett showed the Schrodinger equation is sufficient to explain all observations in QM. But it's non-local too. If spacelike measurement choices in are made in repeated EPR measurements the results can still show correlations violating Bell's inequality - in the same world. Can you explain the experimental setup where this happens? http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9810080 Isn't that the ordinary EPR paradox with Bell's extension to disprove local hidden variables? I don't see how this shows anything contrary to predictions of QM / Everett. As I mentioned earlier, Bell's Theorem only disproves local hidden variables. It leaves two possible alternatives: FTL/non-local influences and measurements with more than one outcome. When they measure the same attribute, the result is correlated as I described before, leading to two worlds. When they measure the uncorrelated observables, each is split separately when they make the measurement, and then the split spreads at light speed to the other, creating four superposed states. But the measurements with more than one outcome turn out to be more correlated than allowed by classical mechanics. So the four outcomes are not equally probable, in spite of the symmetry of the experiment. That's why it implies non-locality in any hidden variable model. I don't see that multiple worlds makes the non-locality go away, it just seems to rephrase it in terms of some worlds interfering more than others. The Schrodinger equation has solutions in Hilbert space, which are not local in spacetime. Are you referring to momentum vs. position basis ( http://lesswrong.com/lw/pr/which_basis_is_more_fundamental/ ) or something else? No, just that a ray in Hilbert space, a state, corresponds to a solution of the SWE over configuration space (with boundary conditions) which in general is not localized in spacetime. Locality (as I've used the term) refers to the idea that things are only affected by their immediate environment. I
Re: Atheism is wish fulfillment
On 12/11/2013 1:26 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 11 Dec 2013, at 02:23, LizR wrote: On 10 December 2013 09:06, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com mailto:jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: Bell's theorm proves that local hidden variables are impossible which leaves only two remaining explanations that explain the EPR paradox: 1. Non-local, faster-than-light, relativity violating effects 2. Measurements have more than one outcome In light of Bell's theorem, either special relativity is false or many-world's is true. Bell realised there was a third explanation involving the relevant laws of physics operating in a time symmetric fashion. (Oddly this appears to be the hardest one for people to grasp, however.) But the many worlds don't disappear, unless you invoke a sort of quantum conspiracy, which might be true, The conspiracy would be some future boundary condition. Note that if the universe is finite then there are only finitely many possible future states, which implies that there is a smallest non-zero probability. This would imply that the action of decoherence will make the off diagonal terms of an einselected density matrix exactly zero - which is like a real collapse or epistemically a simple probability prediction. Of course it appears that the universe, even the observable universe, is not finite - although it is finite at any epoch. Brent but it begins to look like a super-selection of one branch among the many, and it has to use some special initial conditions. It works logically, if you add non-comp, as with comp, you get the many computations anyway, without quantum nor comp conspiracies or super-determinism. Bruno -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com mailto:everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/%7Emarchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: A definition of human consciousness
On 11 December 2013 17:34, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 12/10/2013 7:42 PM, LizR wrote: On 11 December 2013 10:24, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 12/10/2013 11:54 AM, John Clark wrote: On Sun, Dec 8, 2013 at 7:33 PM, LizR lizj...@gmail.com wrote: One needs a rigorous definition of what consciousness is, to start with, Examples are usually preferable to definitions. and then a theory that explains all its observed features, and makes testable predictions. But that's the beauty of consciousness theories, we can detect consciousness only in ourselves so there are no observed features that a consciousness theory must explain, Actually there are some observed features. A sharp blow to the head can create a gap in ones consciousness. Imbibing various substances that can cross the blood/brain barrier have somewhat predictable effects. Localized electrical stimulation of the brain produces repeatable effects, both in consciousness and somatic. If you're assuming there is more to consciousness than the sum of our thoughts, experiences, memories, etc - then this *may* be a description of features of the contents of consciousness, rather than of the thing itself. ?? Are you speculating that there are parts of consciousness we're not conscious of? Not exactly. Consciousness has been *defined* as a bundle of sensory impressions - I think this was originally David Hume - but it has also been defined as something else, which I guess would be called the having of those experiences. If one defines consciousness as the sum of one's sense impressions and so on, then the things you mention above affect consciousness; if not, they affect the contents of consciousness, but in the latter case the only way that consciousness itself is affected is that it is either present, or not. Of course I may be following in the long philosophical tradition of splitting hairs here. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: The Yes-Doctor Experiment for real
ISTM that Yes Doctor sums up comp. If a digital brain made below my substitution level *can* substitute for my organic one, then I literally have a 50% chance of waking up as the digital version. However if the Subst Level is quantum, no cloning stops it being actually possible. Although in this case the universe itself is happy to do it all the time, forking everything continually; maybe one could use the MWI to design a suitable - if slightly less elegant - thought experiment (e.g. Helsinki man goes into a sealed room where hs is rendered unconscious, then according to a quantum result, he is taken to either Moscow or Washington...) On 12 December 2013 09:35, John Mikes jami...@gmail.com wrote: *Yes - to the doctor?* I was always kept aback from agreeing, because I still believe to have included M O R E in my mind (brainfunctions, as you say) then whatever that good doctor and his device may supply. So I consider a mechanical substitution to the 'living' (what is it?) capabilities a reduction in qualia and quanta. Unless the doctor is an infinite universal machine...(still to have to meet one...) JM On Wed, Dec 11, 2013 at 3:10 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 12/11/2013 12:55 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 10 Dec 2013, at 20:20, George wrote: Hi List I haven't contributed to this list for a while but I thought you might be interested in this article from the Science Dailyhttp://www.sciencedaily.com/on line magazine Neural Prosthesis Restores Behavior After Brain Injuryhttp://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/12/131209152259.htm Yes, things progress. Nice to hear of you George, best, Of course, we cannot test the first person experience of the rat. Even if the rat can talk, that would prove almost nothing, but the human will say yes to the doctor anyway, and without thinking to much on the theoretical consequences of the possible survival. But this brings up a difficulty I see in comp. We know that if the level of substitution is quantal, then we can't clone the state of the part being replaced (and in the UD model this corresponds to not knowing all the threads of computation through the state). This wouldn't deter people from saying yes to the doctor. But it implies that there will the a qualitative difference in consciousness, a jump, perhaps like a memory gap and temporary disorientation due to concussion or drugs. But then why doesn't some improbable quantum fluctuation prevent the part replacement and provide a more continuous path of consciousness, in analogy to quantum immortality? Brent To stop comp to be *applied*, we should have made glasses illegal long ago ... Then we can argue that molecular biology confirms the use of comp by biological system all the time. Bruno George Levy -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at
Re: Atheism is wish fulfillment
On 11 December 2013 22:26, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 11 Dec 2013, at 02:23, LizR wrote: On 10 December 2013 09:06, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: Bell's theorm proves that local hidden variables are impossible which leaves only two remaining explanations that explain the EPR paradox: 1. Non-local, faster-than-light, relativity violating effects 2. Measurements have more than one outcome In light of Bell's theorem, either special relativity is false or many-world's is true. Bell realised there was a third explanation involving the relevant laws of physics operating in a time symmetric fashion. (Oddly this appears to be the hardest one for people to grasp, however.) But the many worlds don't disappear, unless you invoke a sort of quantum conspiracy, which might be true, but it begins to look like a super-selection of one branch among the many, and it has to use some special initial conditions. It works logically, if you add non-comp, as with comp, you get the many computations anyway, without quantum nor comp conspiracies or super-determinism. I'm not sure if this is intended to do away with the MWI, but it *is* the simplest explanation for EPR. I would imagine it complements the MWI rather than being a rival theory. As someone pointed out further down this topic, it's sort-of analogous to Feynman's explanation of antimatter as matter travelling backwards in time. Since matter doesn't actually travel through time in any direction this is a slightly fanciful notion, but it's useful for envisioning that at the subatomic level processes can occur equally in either time direction. I already explained somewhere (perhaps on FOAR) that most of the processes we think of as time-directed are due to boundary conditions, mainly the fact that the universe is expanding (for example the appearance of nucleons from quark soup, the appearance of atoms from plasma, and so on). The only subatomic process that is known to violate this principle is kaon decay; whether that is enough to be responsible for the entropy gradient is an open question, but seems unlikely compared to the overwhelming (one might say elephantine-in-the-room) existence of cosmological expansion. Since one should favour the simplest expanation that handles all the facts, time symmetry should be considered as a possible explanation for EPR. (But as entropic creatures we have a huge built-in bias against seeing that this is even possible.) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Mandela cult and mass media mythopoesis
Whit episodic periods of massacres, genocides and other massive crimes, he would have added. I recommend you to add this to your mantra. these little inconveniences are what I was talking about in the last paragrah. But this is not the main point.. I recommend to read the article, that is the key for what I was trying to show about mythopoesis, that is one aspect of human nature and reality that the science is not willing to accept as subject of study. 2013/12/11, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net: On 12/11/2013 12:22 AM, Alberto G. Corona wrote: The author of the essay say, definitively, yes. The original article is here: It is long but it is worth reading, to see how the myths of modernity generate violence by unrealistic expectations. http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/1575/full True, secular values can turn a civilization inside out. In post-Christian Europe, entire nations have been plunged into endemic health, skyrocketing education and hopelessly low rates of violent crime. --- Austin Dacey, NY Times 3 Feb 2006 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- Alberto. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: A definition of human consciousness
On 12/11/2013 12:56 PM, LizR wrote: On 11 December 2013 17:34, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 12/10/2013 7:42 PM, LizR wrote: On 11 December 2013 10:24, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 12/10/2013 11:54 AM, John Clark wrote: On Sun, Dec 8, 2013 at 7:33 PM, LizR lizj...@gmail.com mailto:lizj...@gmail.com wrote: One needs a rigorous definition of what consciousness is, to start with, Examples are usually preferable to definitions. and then a theory that explains all its observed features, and makes testable predictions. But that's the beauty of consciousness theories, we can detect consciousness only in ourselves so there are no observed features that a consciousness theory must explain, Actually there are some observed features. A sharp blow to the head can create a gap in ones consciousness. Imbibing various substances that can cross the blood/brain barrier have somewhat predictable effects. Localized electrical stimulation of the brain produces repeatable effects, both in consciousness and somatic. If you're assuming there is more to consciousness than the sum of our thoughts, experiences, memories, etc - then this /may/ be a description of features of the contents of consciousness, rather than of the thing itself. ?? Are you speculating that there are parts of consciousness we're not conscious of? Not exactly. Consciousness has been /defined/ as a bundle of sensory impressions - I think this was originally David Hume - but it has also been defined as something else, which I guess would be called the having of those experiences. If one defines consciousness as the sum of one's sense impressions and so on, then the things you mention above affect consciousness; if not, they affect the contents of consciousness, but in the latter case the only way that consciousness itself is affected is that it is either present, or not. Of course I may be following in the long philosophical tradition of splitting hairs here. OK. That's reifying the set of experiences into a kind of vessel that holds the experiences. That seems like a mistake to me. Didn't Hume also say that however he tried he could not have an experience that had no content? Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: The Yes-Doctor Experiment for real
On 12/11/2013 1:18 PM, LizR wrote: ISTM that Yes Doctor sums up comp. If a digital brain made below my substitution level /can/ substitute for my organic one, then I literally have a 50% chance of waking up as the digital version. However if the Subst Level is quantum, no cloning stops it being actually possible. But I don't think substitution level is sharply defined. You brain must be mostly classical (otherwise it would be evolutionarily useless) and so one might well say yes to the doctor, while realizing that the immediate state of your brain at the micro-level would not be duplicated. But this would be no worse than losing the state under anesthetic - which I hope the doctor was going to use anyway. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: A definition of human consciousness
On 12/11/2013 9:26 AM, John Clark wrote: On Tue, Dec 10, 2013 meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: But that's the beauty of consciousness theories, we can detect consciousness only in ourselves so there are no observed features that a consciousness theory must explain, Actually there are some observed features. A sharp blow to the head can create a gap in ones consciousness. A sharp blow to MY head can create a gap in MY consciousness, Right. That's your observation. but all I know about you is that when I hit you on the head with a hammer you behaved in a less complex way for a while and then you made a sound with your mouth that sounded like I lost consciousness. And you will probably believe me because of our similarity and your observation above. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Mandela cult and mass media mythopoesis
On 12/11/2013 1:32 PM, Alberto G. Corona wrote: Whit episodic periods of massacres, genocides and other massive crimes, he would have added. I recommend you to add this to your mantra. Yes, religious wars and genocides based on theology. That's why Dacey referred to post-Christian europe. these little inconveniences are what I was talking about in the last paragrah. But this is not the main point.. I recommend to read the article, that is the key for what I was trying to show about mythopoesis, that is one aspect of human nature and reality that the science is not willing to accept as subject of study. 2013/12/11, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net: On 12/11/2013 12:22 AM, Alberto G. Corona wrote: The author of the essay say, definitively, yes. The original article is here: It is long but it is worth reading, to see how the myths of modernity generate violence by unrealistic expectations. http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/1575/full An interesting article, rather like Christopher Hitchens debunking Mother Teresa - but less damning. Brent True, secular values can turn a civilization inside out. In post-Christian Europe, entire nations have been plunged into endemic health, skyrocketing education and hopelessly low rates of violent crime. --- Austin Dacey, NY Times 3 Feb 2006 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Mandela cult and mass media mythopoesis
On 12 December 2013 08:47, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: True, secular values can turn a civilization inside out. In post-Christian Europe, entire nations have been plunged into endemic health, skyrocketing education and hopelessly low rates of violent crime. --- Austin Dacey, NY Times 3 Feb 2006 Great quote! I will add it to my collection forthwith. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Mandela cult and mass media mythopoesis
On 12 December 2013 11:49, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 12/11/2013 1:32 PM, Alberto G. Corona wrote: Whit episodic periods of massacres, genocides and other massive crimes, he would have added. I recommend you to add this to your mantra. Yes, religious wars and genocides based on theology. That's why Dacey referred to post-Christian europe. I think it's fair to describe both Nazism and Stalinism as forms of theology (with my usual apologies to Godwin's law). Or at least as secular ideologies which hooked into much of the usual underpinning of religions (leader worship and a coming golden age, for example). -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Mandela cult and mass media mythopoesis
On 12/11/2013 4:14 PM, LizR wrote: On 12 December 2013 11:49, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 12/11/2013 1:32 PM, Alberto G. Corona wrote: Whit episodic periods of massacres, genocides and other massive crimes, he would have added. I recommend you to add this to your mantra. Yes, religious wars and genocides based on theology. That's why Dacey referred to post-Christian europe. I think it's fair to describe both Nazism and Stalinism as forms of theology (with my usual apologies to Godwin's law). Or at least as secular ideologies which hooked into much of the usual underpinning of religions (leader worship and a coming golden age, for example). They were theologies in Bruno's sense of addressing the fundamental questions about how to live and how to order society. The Wermacht belt buckles had Gott Mit Uns embossed on them and Hitler wrapped his policies in Christianity: The party as such represents the point of view of a positive Christianity without binding itself to any one particular confession. Adolf Hitler, in the Nazi manifesto: łWe were convinced that the people need and require this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out.˛ ---Adolf Hitler, in a speech in Berlin on 24 Oct. 1933 We tolerate no one in our ranks who attacks the ideas of Christianity, in fact our movement is Christian. ---Adolf Hitler, in a speech in Passau, 27 October 1928, Bundesarchiv Berlin-Zehlendorf, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Galląs The Holy Reich] Christ was the greatest early fighter in the battle against the world enemy -- the Jews. The work that Christ started but did not finish, I, Adolf Hitler, will conclude. --- The Book of Political Quotes, London: Angus Robertson Publishers, 1982, p. 195) The Pope recognized Adolf's birthday every year and prayed for him. He was never excommunicated, but Goebbels was - for marrying a jew. Stalin seems less mystic and ideological. He studied in a seminary but I don't know whether he ever took either Christianity or Marxism as more than tools of power. Brent What shall we do with...the Jews?...set fire to their synagogues or schools and bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn, so that no man will ever again see a stone or cinder of them. ---Martin Luther -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: The Yes-Doctor Experiment for real
On 12 December 2013 11:25, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 12/11/2013 1:18 PM, LizR wrote: ISTM that Yes Doctor sums up comp. If a digital brain made below my substitution level *can* substitute for my organic one, then I literally have a 50% chance of waking up as the digital version. However if the Subst Level is quantum, no cloning stops it being actually possible. But I don't think substitution level is sharply defined. You brain must be mostly classical (otherwise it would be evolutionarily useless) and so one might well say yes to the doctor, while realizing that the immediate state of your brain at the micro-level would not be duplicated. But this would be no worse than losing the state under anesthetic - which I hope the doctor was going to use anyway. It depends what is the important level for maintaining selfhood. It seems reasonable to assume that the self remains the same when the brain is duplicated at the quantum level (if one believes the MWI this is happening all the time). It's possible that the self is retained during duplication at higher levels, but it isn't guaranteed. If my brain was duplicated at, say, the cellular level, I might simply die, and someone who thinks she's me would be created. (Or then again, that might be happening all the time anyway.) These are the sort of consideration that make me think that if you say yes to the Doctor, you've already effectively swallowed all the implcations of comp. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: A definition of human consciousness
On 12 December 2013 11:20, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 12/11/2013 12:56 PM, LizR wrote: Not exactly. Consciousness has been *defined* as a bundle of sensory impressions - I think this was originally David Hume - but it has also been defined as something else, which I guess would be called the having of those experiences. If one defines consciousness as the sum of one's sense impressions and so on, then the things you mention above affect consciousness; if not, they affect the contents of consciousness, but in the latter case the only way that consciousness itself is affected is that it is either present, or not. Of course I may be following in the long philosophical tradition of splitting hairs here. OK. That's reifying the set of experiences into a kind of vessel that holds the experiences. That seems like a mistake to me. Didn't Hume also say that however he tried he could not have an experience that had no content? Yes. I'm not saying this is a correct definition (you will recall that I was very hesitant in my phraseology) - but it does appear to be a widely held (mis?) conception that consciousness is not just a bundle of sensations. I think one has to at least allow that the sensations are analysed, that there is something involved in thinking about them, and that perhaps that something isn't part of the Humean bundle. Also, the experiences hang together in various ways - the flash of lightning I experienced was the same violet colour as previous ones I've seen, or at least my memory thereof, and it was, like them, followed by a roll of thunder. This correlation could well be explained simply by regularities in the nature of the world, however (I think Hume said something similar), but it could point to something which is organising the sensations - maybe a virtual reality renderer in the brain. Either I have some point to make, or maybe I just need more coffee... -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Mandela cult and mass media mythopoesis
On 12 December 2013 13:28, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: The party as such represents the point of view of a positive Christianity without binding itself to any one particular confession. Adolf Hitler, in the Nazi manifesto: Wow, some very nice quotes there, I didn't realise Nazism was so explicitly Christian (I knew about Gott Mit Uns but that was about it). Stalin seems less mystic and ideological. He studied in a seminary but I don't know whether he ever took either Christianity or Marxism as more than tools of power. I am tempted to say he made a religion of paranoia. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can a grown man be an atheist ?
On 12 December 2013 08:57, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: I don't disagree with any of that. But by providing a with an id prior to the fork and then testing after the fork you are effectively modeling a soul that is not duplicated but rather belongs to one of the copies and not the other; and the soul always goes to Moscow. But it is pretty much what I suggested to John; that he should consider a repeated sequence of teleportations and what conclusion John_n might draw. You aren't duplicating the processes if they end up with different IDs, unless the ID is external - Helsinki man had a red hat, which was teleported to Moscow OK, but for some reason turned green when it was sent to Washington. I suspect that a garden of forking processes might well be copied in both instantiations, perhaps saved to disc and recovered later, or moved around in the computer's memory, regardless of the ID attached to them. So the ID wouldn't really tell you which was the original anyway. Indeed in a digital world the concept could be considered meaningless. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Simulations back up theory thst Universe is a hologram
I can never work out where this hologram is. (Or is there no is for it to be at?) On 12 December 2013 00:27, Samiya Illias samiyaill...@gmail.com wrote: Simulations back up *theory* that Universe is a hologramhttps://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.nature.com/news/simulations-back-up-theory-that-universe-is-a-hologram-1.14328ct=gacd=MTczMjg0OTQyMjEzNjkyMjczMDgcad=CAEYAAusg=AFQjCNFX7DsTVuX6awgQtZQ3vRNhuhyrZQ Nature.com At a black hole, Albert Einstein's theory of gravity apparently clashes with *...* its entropy and other properties based on the predictions of *string theory* as well as *...* -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Atheism is wish fulfillment
On Wed, Dec 11, 2013 at 2:39 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 12/11/2013 2:07 AM, Jason Resch wrote: On Wed, Dec 11, 2013 at 1:32 AM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 12/10/2013 10:47 PM, Jason Resch wrote: On Wed, Dec 11, 2013 at 12:19 AM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 12/10/2013 9:49 PM, Jason Resch wrote: On Tue, Dec 10, 2013 at 9:53 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 12/10/2013 5:23 PM, LizR wrote: On 10 December 2013 09:06, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: Bell's theorm proves that local hidden variables are impossible which leaves only two remaining explanations that explain the EPR paradox: 1. Non-local, faster-than-light, relativity violating effects 2. Measurements have more than one outcome In light of Bell's theorem, either special relativity is false or many-world's is true. Bell realised there was a third explanation involving the relevant laws of physics operating in a time symmetric fashion. (Oddly this appears to be the hardest one for people to grasp, however.) Yes, that idea has been popularized by Vic Stenger and by Cramer's transactional interpretation. Collapse is still fundamentally real in the transactional interpretation, it is just even less clear about when it occurs. The transactional interpretation is also non-local, non-deterministic, and postulates new things outside of standard QM. I think it's still local, no FTL except via zig-zags like Stenger's. This table should be updated in that case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretations_of_quantum_mechanics#Comparison_of_interpretations Hmm. I think the transactional waves are not FTL but in an EPR experiment would relay on backward-in-time signaling. Not sure why it says TIQ is explicitly non-local? I don't know enough about TIQM to say, but the wikipedia article on it also mentions in several places that it is explicitly non-local: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transactional_interpretation What are the zig-zags? By traveling back in time and then forward a particle can be at two spacelike separate events. Is it the Feynman Stueckelberg interpretation of antimatter? In that the positron and electron created in the decay of a particle can be envisioned as the same particle, with the positron travelling backwards in time. In the case of that anti-matter interpretation, neither is FTL. Right. So it's local in the sense of slower than light, although it effectively implements a non-local hidden variable. That is a rather neat trick. I like it. However, I still find MWI more plausible for the other reasons I provided. Why? Everett showed the Schrodinger equation is sufficient to explain all observations in QM. But it's non-local too. If spacelike measurement choices in are made in repeated EPR measurements the results can still show correlations violating Bell's inequality - in the same world. Can you explain the experimental setup where this happens? http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9810080 Isn't that the ordinary EPR paradox with Bell's extension to disprove local hidden variables? I don't see how this shows anything contrary to predictions of QM / Everett. As I mentioned earlier, Bell's Theorem only disproves local hidden variables. It leaves two possible alternatives: FTL/non-local influences and measurements with more than one outcome. When they measure the same attribute, the result is correlated as I described before, leading to two worlds. When they measure the uncorrelated observables, each is split separately when they make the measurement, and then the split spreads at light speed to the other, creating four superposed states. But the measurements with more than one outcome turn out to be more correlated than allowed by classical mechanics. Bell's inequality doesn't apply when more than one outcome is possible. You can treat them as non-hidden, (since they are in the equation) correlated, multi-valued variables. Bell's inequality cannot be addressed with local (non-interacting) single-outcome variables, because once you measure one, to agree with QM it must instantly affect the other to explain the outcome of the remote measurement. If you assume there cannot be this action at a distance, and that there are hidden deterministic state tables that define the outcome of the measurement, this is what Bell's inequality shows cannot be made to agree with QM. In QM, when you send the two entangled photons to two remote polarization filters, which are offset by 30 degrees, you will find that they agree 75% of the time. Which is exactly the result you get whenever you send light of a known polarization through a filter offset at 30 degrees from that base: 75% of the light makes it through. That the light that makes it through is cos(d)^2 where d is the difference in angle, is itself not a violation of Bell's
Re: That hateful subject, metaphysics
I wanna get metaphysicsal. On 12 December 2013 00:37, Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net wrote: That hateful subject, metaphysics To deal with consciousness and experiences, which are mental, not physical, you have to go to that hateful subject, metaphysics, and only Leibniz has a good account of the perceiver, which is the experiencer not available to materialism. If you still believe there is a perceiver in materialism, could you tell us where it is ? It has to be at one place, as your experience and mine says that there is only one perceiver. Dr. Roger B Clough NIST (ret.) [1/1/2000] See my Leibniz site at http://independent.academia.edu/RogerClough -- http://www.avast.com/ This email is free from viruses and malware because avast! Antivirushttp://www.avast.com/protection is active. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can a grown man be an atheist ?
Liz, In forking MWI worlds, your ID is constantly changing as it depends on various quantum states. Your detailed nature is never duplicated. Every fork is a change from your previous state. If comp supports MWI, why should your ID ever stay the same since you are constantly forking with or without the doctor. Rich On Wed, Dec 11, 2013 at 10:52 PM, LizR lizj...@gmail.com wrote: On 12 December 2013 08:57, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: I don't disagree with any of that. But by providing a with an id prior to the fork and then testing after the fork you are effectively modeling a soul that is not duplicated but rather belongs to one of the copies and not the other; and the soul always goes to Moscow. But it is pretty much what I suggested to John; that he should consider a repeated sequence of teleportations and what conclusion John_n might draw. You aren't duplicating the processes if they end up with different IDs, unless the ID is external - Helsinki man had a red hat, which was teleported to Moscow OK, but for some reason turned green when it was sent to Washington. I suspect that a garden of forking processes might well be copied in both instantiations, perhaps saved to disc and recovered later, or moved around in the computer's memory, regardless of the ID attached to them. So the ID wouldn't really tell you which was the original anyway. Indeed in a digital world the concept could be considered meaningless. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: The Yes-Doctor Experiment for real
On 12 December 2013 11:53, LizR lizj...@gmail.com wrote: On 12 December 2013 11:25, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 12/11/2013 1:18 PM, LizR wrote: ISTM that Yes Doctor sums up comp. If a digital brain made below my substitution level can substitute for my organic one, then I literally have a 50% chance of waking up as the digital version. However if the Subst Level is quantum, no cloning stops it being actually possible. But I don't think substitution level is sharply defined. You brain must be mostly classical (otherwise it would be evolutionarily useless) and so one might well say yes to the doctor, while realizing that the immediate state of your brain at the micro-level would not be duplicated. But this would be no worse than losing the state under anesthetic - which I hope the doctor was going to use anyway. It depends what is the important level for maintaining selfhood. It seems reasonable to assume that the self remains the same when the brain is duplicated at the quantum level (if one believes the MWI this is happening all the time). It's possible that the self is retained during duplication at higher levels, but it isn't guaranteed. If my brain was duplicated at, say, the cellular level, I might simply die, and someone who thinks she's me would be created. (Or then again, that might be happening all the time anyway.) These are the sort of consideration that make me think that if you say yes to the Doctor, you've already effectively swallowed all the implcations of comp. The required substitution level cannot be the quantum level since we know that people can survive with their cognitive faculties intact even with gross brain changes, such as after a stroke or head injury. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can a grown man be an atheist ?
On Sun, Dec 8, 2013 at 10:24 AM, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, Dec 7, 2013 at 3:51 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Comp is the belief (hope, assumption, theory) that you can survive when saying yes to a doctor who proposed to you a digital computer brain transplant. If that were all comp meant I would have no problem with it, but I know from bitter experience that comp also includes all sorts of other things (many contradictory) and it includes all the bogus conclusions from your pronoun rich erroneous proof. You entirely agreed with the essential point and conclusion of step 3 when I formulated it without using pronouns (in terms of an AI in a duplicated computer program). Why are you behaving as if that never happened? Jason -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can a grown man be an atheist ?
On Wed, Dec 11, 2013 at 1:57 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 12/11/2013 12:23 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Tue, Dec 10, 2013 at 9:45 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 12/10/2013 2:07 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Mon, Dec 9, 2013 at 8:02 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 12/9/2013 1:35 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 08 Dec 2013, at 22:53, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Sun, Dec 8, 2013 at 6:59 PM, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: Telmo Menezes you must also reject the MWI, because you live Who is you? Telmo's post was only 63 words long but the pronoun you was used 8 times, that's almost 13%. When it is necessary to hide behind personal pronouns when a philosophical idea regarding duplicating machines and personal identity is discussed it's clear that something is wrong. in the first person, Which first person? The first person of John Clark of one hour ago? The first person of John Clark standing left of the duplicating machine? The first person of John Clark standing right of the duplicating machine? You're avoiding my question. Why don't you also reject the MWI? I would like to know that too. Quentin has already asked this many times to John, and we got unclear answer. John invoked the fact that with comp the duplication are done only in one branch of the universe, but did not explain why would that change anything (without adding some non Turing emulable magic in some place). I think Quentin is right, and John C. just develop irrational rhetoric do avoid moving on in the argument, ... then he talk like if I was defining comp by its consequences, but this is another rhetorical trick, often used by those who want to mock the enterprise. It is interesting. I try to figure out what is really stucking him so much. i do the same with my students in math. Why some people avoid reason in some circumstance. Given that Quentin seems to qualify himself as atheist, it can't be simply Clark's atheism, isn't it? But then what? I think the sticking point, one which I also feel with some force, is the implicit assumption in the question, Where will you find yourself. that there is a unique you. Brent, Although naive, I find the following analogy useful: consider how computer operating systems create new processes. A common method, in UNIX operating systems is forking the current execution path. I will cut and paste the relevant parts from the man page on my computer: NAME fork -- create a new process DESCRIPTION Fork() causes creation of a new process. The new process (child process) is an exact copy of the calling process (parent process) except for the following: o The child process has a unique process ID. o The child process has a different parent process ID (i.e., the process ID of the parent process). [...] RETURN VALUES Upon successful completion, fork() returns a value of 0 to the child process and Fork() was called by the parent process; so it should return a value to the parent process, not the child process. Fork() is an instruction that is part of some program. This program is running in some process P1. When fork() is called, the operating system creates a new process P2 and copies both the program and the execution context of the program to P2. The execution context includes the instruction pointer, that indicates the current instruction being executed. After the copy, both P1 and P2 will point to the instruction after fork(), with the only difference that fork() will have returned different values to the parent and the child. It returns values on both processes, and the operating system intervenes here to make them different -- the OS acts as a duplication machine. returns the process ID of the child process to the parent process. [...] So let's say the original process A is forked at some point in time t, and process B is created. The only different things about A and B is a value called the process identifier (pid). This could be a very simple analogy for a person being in Moscow or Brussels. So let's say the process records its pid before the fork. After the fork, both processes are programmed to check their pid again and compare it with what was stored. For one you will get equal, for another you will get different. If you ask the program, before the fork, to predict if it will find itself in the state equal or unequal after the fork, the most correct program will assign p=.5 to each one of these outcomes. Any program that assigns a different p will be shown to be less correct by repeating this experiment a number of times. ?? What does the program refer to in ask the program? If you ask A to print out whether it's pid is equal to the pid recorded before the fork, A can always correctly print yes. Similarly B can always print no.
Re: Santa Klaus does exist!
Thanks Bruno. As I understand it step 8's movie-graph argument is making a point similar to the implementation problem chalmers discusses in the paper at http://consc.net/papers/rock.html -- basically the problem is that there seems to be no good way to decide whether a given physical system implements a given abstract computation (Chalmers proposes his own rules for deciding this, but they seem a bit ad hoc to me, depending on dividing a physical system into distinct spatial regions). Anyway, even though I tend to agree with you about rejecting the idea of what you call real ontological primitive matter, it seems to me this argument goes too far, because it could easily be modified into an argument that there's no good way to decide whether one abstract computation (including the universal dovetailer) implements another computation as some sort of subroutine of the first one. Consider your movie-graph experiment, where you have a lab with a computer made of optical gates. What if, instead of a real physical lab, we imagine a program A that is running an incredibly complex simulation of the same sort of lab, down to the level of individual atoms and photons and such? And within this simulated lab is the same type of computer made of simulated optical gates, which are supposed to run some simpler program B (we could imagine B is some very simple program, say a 1D cellular automaton consisting of a small number of cells, or we could imagine B as something complicated enough to include a conscious observer, like a large simulated neural network, but still much simpler than the atom-level simulation of the lab). If the notion of one program implementing another as a subroutine has any meaning, then shouldn't this be a case where program A implements program B? But if the simulated lab has a simulated movie projector of the type you describe, then simulated experimenters in the lab could run the experiment you describe of knocking out logic gates and replacing them with a movie of the same gates projected from above, which provide the needed triggers to the remaining light-sensitive gates. If more and more gates are knocked out until all that's left is a simulated movie being projected on an empty table, is there still any meaningful sense that program A is implementing program B? Personally, I lean towards the idea that since any running of a Turing machine can be represented as a set of logically interconnected propositions in an axiomatic system, to say that program A implements program B can mean that you can map some subset of the propositions about program A to all the propositions about program B, such that all the same logical relationships between the propositions still apply. And if the physical world follows universal physical laws, then the set of all physical truths about events in spacetime and the causal relationships between them should in principle be representable as a huge set of propositions about events, and propositions about universal laws, with logical relationships between them--in that case physical implementation could be defined in exactly the same way as I suggest defining program A's implementation of program B above. This is the idea I discussed with you a few years ago in the post at http://www.mail-archive.com/everything-list@googlegroups.com/msg16244.htmland some of the follow-ups--I used the word causal structure there for this notion of isomorphisms in relations between propositions, although I think logical structure might be better since this could apply to collections of propositions in any axiomatic system, including arithmetic, where we don't normally think of the relationships between propositions as causal ones. Jesse On Tue, Dec 10, 2013 at 4:06 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 09 Dec 2013, at 23:03, Jesse Mazer wrote: I don't have institutional access but I was able to read it online, That was what Elsevier (Santa) promised. though not to download it as a PDF Pfftt Santa looks like being a bit shabby those days ... (I just copy-and-pasted all the text for future reference instead). It's great to see each step of the argument laid out in greater detail than I've seen on the list (admittedly I don't consistently read all the posts here)--I still have doubts about step 8, the film-graph argument, hopefully will have time to write up my response soon. Thanks. We can come back on step 8 anytime. It shows that any supplementary assumptions we could add to (Robinson, no induction axioms) Arithmetic will not change anything about the belief we can have on matter, making primitive matter into ether or phlogiston. Step 8 just reduces the amount of occam razor that we should need in step 7, in case we want to stop the argument at that step. Step 8 is not so useful in this list, because most people here are 'everythingers', and so find quite doubtful the idea that we would live in a unique little physical universe,
