Re: A profound lack of profundity (and soon "the starting point")

[Bruno Marchal]

On 08 Sep 2017, at 21:15, John Clark wrote:

I wrote the following a few days ago but didn't send it because I  
intended to say more, but other things came up that seemed more  
important so this will just have to do.


I hope you are fine.




On Thu, Sep 7, 2017 at 4:56 AM, Bruno Marchal   
wrote:


​> ​when in still in Helsinki, can be sure that his first person  
experience will be of being in once city,


​Mr. His may have been absolutely sure​ ​but Mr. His was also  
absolutely incorrect​, that tends to happen a lot.


Not at all. Mr. His was sure that his first person experience will be  
of being in one city, then he pushed on the button, and both the  
copies claim, "yes that prediction was correct: when opening the door  
I made the experience of seeing only once city.





If Mr. His had been correct then after the duplication all the  
people who remember being Mr. His


Sorry, but that is the third person description of Mister His. The  
question was about what he expected to live. The result of the  
"opening the door" experience.






would be in only one city but clearly they are in two.


Obviously, but you are for the billions times deviating about the  
question. The question is "do you expect to get  soon a coffee in some  
city? and then which one do you expect. You, here and now, as a guy  
who will survive in two cities tomorrow. You will not expect the  
experience of being simultaneously in two city. With mechanism, you  
sill expect to live in once precise city, but you know well that yiou  
cannot write its name in the diary right now, as it will be refuted by  
one copy.










​> ​and that he cannot prdict which one.

​Which one? When the prediction was made there was only one.


One which admits he will survive in tow cities, in the third person  
(or first person plural) sense we sue since always.


Yes, the prediction is about what you will feel. And comp predicts  
"the guy will feel to be in one city, that he could not have predicted  
before"





Please explain exactly what that means,



It means that in Helsinki the guy is absolutely sure (modulo the  
hypostheses) that he will drink a coffee, in a precise city, that he  
recognize could not have been guessed in advance.







hell even approximately what it means would be a vast improvement.








​

 ​> ​"he" will very well know where "he" feel to be after pushing  
the button.



​After? ​Nobody can make a prediction AFTER pushing the  
button​​ because then its not a predicting its just reporting.


You play dumb or what. The prediction is made before, but the  
verification is the one made by each first person obtained. And both  
confirm: they got the cup of coffee in a precise city, and undrestand  
it would have been futile and wrong to have try to guess which one  
would be lived.








​And AFTER the button is pushed there are 2 people who go by the  
name "he" which causes endless confusion,


Here, you give credits to those who think you lie and try to  
deliberately be confusing. We have agreed since long that both are  
equal in being continuators of the H-guy. That is why the a good  
prediction is one verified by all or most personal diaries. "W v M"  
win everywhere, "W" and "M" win somewhere and lose somewhere, and "W &  
M" loses everywhere.


Which everyone can see by looking at the personal diaries.








​> ​the prediction is about his *future* first person experience.

​So you tell me did "his" end up in, one or two?


By the very description of the experience:  "his" end up in two, from  
the 3p view, and ends in one, from the 1p view.



 If it's one did it turn out to be Moscow or Washington?​



You asked this before. Please read what follow very carefully, because  
here you miss or hides something you have agreed on: both copies are  
the H-guy. So when I ask the H-guy in Washington, visiting after the  
experience, he tell me that he got W, and could have predict it with  
certainty, unlike the coffee. Same when I visit the H-Guy in Moscow,  
who remember also the question, and understand that he got a precise  
result.


Now you tell me that this means only the tautological "the M-man finds  
M", and the "W-man finds W", but the whole first person indeterminacy  
is that both are still the same H-guy, and that the H-guy was unable  
to predict which precise city he will feel to survive through in that  
experience.


The prediction is on the non tautological passage from the H-guy into  
a M-guy and W-guy. The third person "and" is made into a first person  
"or".







​>> ​that one and only one city the H-man sees is Helsinki. ​

​>​Not after pushing the button.

​IRRELEVANT! The question MUST be asked BEFORE pushing the button.


But that is the case. All along. Since always.





What exactly did the Helsinki Man fail to predict? ​


The name of the city that he will write in his personal diary soon.






​> ​The first person experiences available 

Re: Do Observer Moments form a Vecor Space?

[Brent Meeker]

On 9/9/2017 1:43 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote:


On 08 Sep 2017, at 22:38, Brent Meeker wrote:




On 9/8/2017 12:51 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
I think Brent's point, with which I agree BTW, is that an observer 
can only be defined in relation to an external world -- 
consciousness requires a world to be conscious of!


Why? That seems magical thinking (in the frame of Digital 
Mechanism). You should explain what an external world is, and how it 
select the "real" computations. Are you sure we don't need blessed 
water?


An external world is what you and others with whom you communicate 
are conscious of.


Oh! Like God! In the church, when the quality of the sacred herb is 
good enough, in a finishing summer, in between the rain and the sun.


The image of Hubble can give that quasi divine feeling too. The recent 
image of Jupiter, taken by Juno, are fabulous.






It's what is not a dream (or a delusion).



What is not a dream are simple mathematical principle, whose truth 
emulate all dreams,


Is that a catechism?

Brent

and some cohere making place to long sharable histories, where she 
again incarnate itself and might even recognize itself and say hello 
to itself.


If an External World is defined by what we are not deluded too, then 
the reality might be a machine dreams structure, or more exactly its 
first person projection.


No problem with an external world or outer-god as long as it does not 
deny the inner god or first person.

And is not imposed as a dogma, and people can stay skeptical.

Bruno








Brent

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Re: Do Observer Moments form a Vecor Space?

[Bruno Marchal]

On 08 Sep 2017, at 22:38, Brent Meeker wrote:




On 9/8/2017 12:51 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
I think Brent's point, with which I agree BTW, is that an observer  
can only be defined in relation to an external world --  
consciousness requires a world to be conscious of!


Why? That seems magical thinking (in the frame of Digital  
Mechanism). You should explain what an external world is, and how  
it select the "real" computations. Are you sure we don't need  
blessed water?


An external world is what you and others with whom you communicate  
are conscious of.


Oh! Like God! In the church, when the quality of the sacred herb is  
good enough, in a finishing summer, in between the rain and the sun.


The image of Hubble can give that quasi divine feeling too. The recent  
image of Jupiter, taken by Juno, are fabulous.






It's what is not a dream (or a delusion).



What is not a dream are simple mathematical principle, whose truth  
emulate all dreams, and some cohere making place to long sharable  
histories, where she again incarnate itself and might even recognize  
itself and say hello to itself.


If an External World is defined by what we are not deluded too, then  
the reality might be a machine dreams structure, or more exactly its  
first person projection.


No problem with an external world or outer-god as long as it does not  
deny the inner god or first person.

And is not imposed as a dogma, and people can stay skeptical.

Bruno








Brent

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Re: Do Observer Moments form a Vecor Space?

[Bruno Marchal]

On 09 Sep 2017, at 01:23, Russell Standish wrote:


On Fri, Sep 08, 2017 at 09:48:10AM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote:


That is right, but fortunately, a computation, when executed, is not
a pile of states, is more like a precisely structured set of states.
We still cannot found the observer there, except for some of them,
but that is not important, because the observer itself can do that.
Bitstring are not enough, here I agree with you.


You have to keep in mind that my theory is a model - the bitstrings
are necessary, but not necessarily sufficient. They represent the data
interpreted by an observer. Something like a universal dovetailer
gives us the bitstrings by virtue of the Washington-Moscow thought  
experiment.


?

The iterated self-duplication gives all bitstrings.

The universal dovetailer, or the sigma_1 completeness, by the non  
triviality of what is a universal machine/number and what they can  
prove and bet on, we better hope not getting all bitstrings, which  
with mechanism with white noise.







My argument is that since the only thing we can discuss is appearances
(basically phenomenal physics), and appearances are observational
interpretation of the data, then taking an ensemble of all bitstrings
suffices for working out all that appears in a variety of ensemble  
theories.


It is the real number. The number line. Its first order theory is not  
Turing universal, and is indeed a decidable theory.


With the function sine, or the complex exponential, you get Turing  
universality again.


With mechanism, you can predict that a random oracle is called for  
when you observe "reality" below your substitution level, as you are  
confronted to the blurry sum on all computational histories going  
through your relative actual indexical state.






I well concede that a collection of bitstrings may not be sufficient  
to

explain consciousness itself. We're a long way from knowing what might
be sufficient.


I think a universal machinery is sufficient. That one reflect the  
whole "competition" in play to bring our continuations.


The elementary arithmetic is full of dreams, and some can cohere and  
be sharable in deep "many-users" video game. We are not in "one"  
simulation or emulation, we are, in the first person perspective  
(singular and plural) in infinity of simulation/emulation.


I put the "big" things like the induction axioms, the infinite sets,  
the reals, analysis, physics and (full higher order) theology in the  
phenomenology.


The negative numbers, the rationals, the reals, the complex numbers,  
the octonions, and the ordinals, and the cardinals, are the  
(necessary) imaginary friends of the universal natural number.


We could start from Z, 0, 1, +, *, note. Once you have universal  
machinery, the physical reality are like the border of river, except  
here the water is played by the flux of first person experience.


There are Turing universal groups (like the unitary group) but we  
cant' postulate them, we have to extract them from the machine  
introspection if we want exploit the G/G* to keep into account between  
the rationally believable, the knowable, the observable, the sensible.







It is enough to use the fact that elementary arithmetic is a "great
programmer". If someone believe that 2+2=4 independently of himself
or of a universe, then, the whole dovetailing is there too. But with
the reals or the bitstring, we get too much things, without enough
structure. You (Russell) are right that the observer recognize its
own computation(s), but you still need the computations for this.



It is fairly uncontroversial to assume that universal computation is
necessary for consciousness, since we humans are capable of that. But
it may not be sufficient.


That is what I thought sometime ago. I thought that full consciousness  
require turing completeness + the provable turing completeness (by the  
entity in question). But I begin to think that somehow I was wrong.  
Consciousness is in turing universality already, I guess as a highly  
dissociative state, and from there, the axiom of induction does not  
apply.







We have zilch evidence of the
latter. Computationalism is the position that it is both necessary and
sufficient, of course.


I am not sure. If computationalism is true, it can be false too. We  
can test it, modulo "bad luck oracle" or "Bostrom type of emulation,  
by "malevolent" normal entities. We cannot be emulated in one  
computer, as once we are emulated at the correct level, we are in all  
emulations. (By the first person indeterminacy on all emulation (whose  
existence is a theorem already in Robinson arithmetic.


Computationalism assume a form of self-consistency which cannot be  
proved, and in particular, we can't known our substitution level (but  
we can bet on one).


I don't know if computationalism is true. I do think the evidences (by  
Gödel, and QM) are in its favor.


The great Goddess created 0 and its transitive 

Re: Do Observer Moments form a Vecor Space?

[Bruno Marchal]

On 09 Sep 2017, at 01:30, Bruce Kellett wrote:


On 8/09/2017 5:51 pm, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 08 Sep 2017, at 09:08, Bruce Kellett wrote:

I think Brent's point, with which I agree BTW, is that an observer  
can only be defined in relation to an external world --  
consciousness requires a world to be conscious of!


Why? That seems magical thinking (in the frame of Digital  
Mechanism). You should explain what an external world is, and how  
it select the "real" computations. Are you sure we don't need  
blessed water?


Sarcasm is a poor substitute for an argument..


Apology if it looked like sarcasme, but it is was intent to illustrate  
the vacuity of explaining something by introducing a miracle, or any  
ontological commitment to block a reasoning which does not do it.


If you do metaphysics or theology seriously, you should not talk like  
if you knew the answer.





The external world is that which you are conscious of.


OK, but by the (antique) dream argument, or by the virtual multi-user  
game, you can't distinguish "conscious of a relative universal number"  
with "conscious of the bottom physical reality".


But then my whole point is that we can test for the bottom (and thank  
to QM it fits, both intuitively (many "worlds") and formally (quantum  
logics)).





And it does not have to select the "real" computations, they select  
themselves: the "real" computations are the ones that are conscious.


In some case. But you are right at the meta-level, and that is why we  
get a first person knower when we attach the belief with the truth, by  
definition, like you do here. It is an excellent intuition, but with  
(classical, indexical) mechanism this gives the nuances p, Bp & p, and  
Bp & Dt & p.


The nuance came from the machine inability to prove the existence of  
an "external world", and the fact she "experience" an external world  
(which is another universal machines, and sometimes collection of  
universal machine/number share deep histories making them relatively  
rare with respect to a random oracle.




Just as the relevent bitstrings in the plenum are the ones that are  
conscious -- no one has to search through the pile to find them.



?

To drive a bike, you don't need to study the gyroscope mechanics. To  
understand the bike, you need it.


It is the same with consciousness. You said many right things, and the  
points is that you can make them precise, in the theory of mind of the  
(universal Turing) machine(. With mechanism, below your substitution  
level infinitely many UM compete. Above your substitution level a  
finite number of universal machines "competes", from bacteria to your  
family, friends and colleagues, and much more.


Ontological dualism does not work. Monism asks to either reduce the  
mind to the body, or the body to the mind, or the mind-body illusion/ 
experience to something else.


With mechanism, you have to assume a universal machinery. It happens  
that very elementary arithmetic is Turing complete. Any universal  
number can be used to defined all the other, but it is angle with  
already they own particularity, yet the core theology and the core  
physics are the same "in the first person limit in arithmetic" for all  
universal numbers.


Bruno






Bruce

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Fwd: Is math real?

[David Nyman]

On 7 September 2017 at 10:03, Bruno Marchal  wrote:

>
> On 06 Sep 2017, at 19:45, Brent Meeker wrote:
>
>
>
> On 9/6/2017 7:35 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>
> Some physicists can be immaterialist, but still believe that the
> fundamental reality is physical, a bit like Tegmark who remains (despite he
> is willing to think differently) open to the idea that the physical reality
> is a special mathematical structure among all mathematical structures, for
> example. That is problematical for pure mathematical reason: the notion of
> all mathematical structures do not make much mathematical sense, but it is
> of course problematic also with Mechanism, where the physical reality
> becomes the border of the whole "computable mathematics" (which is very
> tiny, as it is the tiny sigma_1 part of arithmetic).
>
>
> I think Tegmark has changed his opinion and now only champions all
> *computable* universes.
>
>
> Yes. The problem now, is that there are no computable physical universes.
> Here he miss the first person indeterminacy in arithmetic. He miss that any
> universal machine looking below its substitution level is confronted to its
> infinity of implementations in arithmetic. In fact, he remains somehow
> physicalist, and does not seem aware of the computationalist mind-body
> problem.
>

​Yes, it's quite surprising how elusive this absence of universes seems to
be in the context of mechanism. Old presuppositions seemingly die very
hard. Another elusive point is what Chalmers is getting at with what he
calls the Paradox of Phenomenal Judgement​. This is the problem of how what
one might call an 'extensional infrastructure' and any corresponding
phenomenal reality are seemingly able to 'refer' to each other. It's a big
fly in the ointment of physicalist theories of mind like panpsychism,
although it seems to be exceedingly difficult to point this out to
panpsychists in my experience. For example, if we consider a movie being
rendered on an LCD screen, nobody imagines that either the pixels
comprising the screen, or the action of the movie tracked or carried by
those pixels, either do, or in any way need to, refer to each other. They
are, in a sense, mutual epiphenomena. However, my own utterances or
judgements - standing in a general way for the 'extensional infrastructure'
of my perceptions - and those perceptions themselves, do indeed seem to
need to cross-refer. It's this cross-reference that is alluded to in Bp and
p.

I've been thinking about how this might play out very generally in terms of
the coincidence or intersection of action and perception as generalisations
of B and p. As you say, we assume at the outset a knower in the guise of
the universal or generic machine (i.e. a number playing the role of
'processor' with respect to another number). The computational duals
enacted by such machines are then projected to be elaborated to the point
where they are tracking or carrying the state changes of an extensional
infrastructure equivalent to a brain, at whatever level turns out to be
necessary for its stable emergence. When I say 'equivalent to' I mean that
this is what will appear, from the phenomenal point-of-view of a knower, to
be a brain. Such state changes must, by assumption in some general but
relevant sense, be equivalent to what you call beliefs, or what Dennett
calls judgements, about perception. As in when I utter something like "I
see a red apple", or for that matter "I feel strongly about the current
state of American politics".

At this point, in order for us to persevere with the schema, we grant that
the p, heretofore provisionally referred to as true or real by Bp in these
cases, is that selfsame phenomenal reality referred to by 'and p'. In doing
this, we also grant retrospective validity, or redemption, to the entire
Wittgenstein ladder of logical paraphernalia, emulated in computation, that
we had been ascending for just this purpose.

The question arises as to the 'substitution level' for all this. All
universal machines, and consequently all potential knowers, are formally
equivalent. Consequently we cannot know which of an infinity of such
machines is immediately associated with any given moment of our phenomenal
reality. However, the 'yes doctor' assumption is that at some level the
computations that track or carry the formal equivalent of a brain must be
substitutable by a suitable digital prosthesis, at least in principle. At
the very least, we must assume that an atom-for-atom substitution of a
physical brain, as presumably occurs naturally through time, would preserve
phenomenal reality without significant error.

The question also arises as to the possibility of a tractable 'search
function' for anything corresponding to the above states of affairs within
the Babel-like infinities of the computational plenum. No such function can
be both tractable and extrinsic. We are relying here on filtration by
internal self-identification; this is (obviously, I would