Re: Dreamless Sleep?

[Brent Meeker]

On 12/17/2017 9:03 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:

On Fri, Dec 8, 2017 at 7:53 PM, Brent Meeker  wrote:


On 12/8/2017 2:24 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:

On Thu, Dec 7, 2017 at 10:47 PM, Brent Meeker 
wrote:


On 12/7/2017 1:01 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:

On Wed, Dec 6, 2017 at 11:50 PM, Brent Meeker 
wrote:


On 12/6/2017 1:46 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

I suspect that this is perhaps why Brent want to refer to the
environment
for relating consciousness to the machine, and in Artificial
Intelligence,
some people defend the idea that (mundane) consciousness occur only
when
the
environment contradicts a little bit the quasi automatic persistent
inference we do all the time.


That's Jeff Hawkins model of consciousness: one becomes conscious of
something when all lower, more specialized levels of the brain have
found
it
not to match their predictions.

In that sort of model, how does matter "know" that it is being used to
run a forecasting algorithm? Surely it doesn't right?


?? Why surely.  It seems you're rejecting the idea that a physical system
can be conscious just out of prejudice.

Not at all. I remain agnostic on materialism vs. idealism. Maybe I am
even a strong agnostic: I suspect that the answer to this question
cannot be known.

Assuming materialism, consciousness must indeed be a property or
something that emerges from the interaction of fundamental particles,
the same way that, say, life does. Ok. All that I am saying is that
nobody has proposed any explanation of consciousness under this
assumption that I would call a theory. The above is not a theory, in
the same way that the Christian God is not a theory: it proposes to
explain a simple thing by appealing to a pre-existing more complex
thing -- in this case claiming that the act of forecasting at a very
high level somehow leads to consciousness, but without proposing any
first principles. It's a magical step.


What would a satisfactory (to you) first principle look like.

I cannot imagine one -- and this fuels my intuition that consciousness
is more fundamental than matter,


It fuels my intuition that it is a "wrong question".


and that emergentism is a dead-end.
But of course, my lack of imagination is not an argument. It could be
that I am too dumb/ignorant/crazy to come up with a good emergentist
theory. What I can -- and do -- is listen to any idea that comes up
and have an open mind. If you have one, I will gladly listen.


If we
consider the analogy of life, in the early 1900's when it was considered as
a chemical process all that could be said about it was that it involved
using energy to construct carbon based compounds and at a high level this
led to reproduction and natural selection and the origin of species.  Now,
we have greatly elaborated on the molecular chemistry and can modify and
even created DNA and RNA molecules that realize "life".  Where did we get
past the "magical step"?  Or are you still waiting for "the atom of life" to
be discovered?

Here there is no magical step. Life can be understood all the way down
to basic chemistry. Ok, we don't have all the details, but we are not
missing anything fundamental. I am not waiting for the atoms of life
because I already know what they are. You just described them above.
Can you do that for consciousness?


Maybe not yet, but I can imagine what they might be: self-awareness, 
construction of narratives about one's experiences, modeling other minds,...




What makes the hard problem hard is that it relates to a qualitatively
different phenomena than anything else that we try to understand. Life
can be talked about purely in the third person, but consciousness is
first person by definition.


So we are told.  But what if someone could look at a recorded MRI of you 
brain and tell you what you were thinking?





My view is that this sort of emergentism always smuggles a subtle but
important switcheroo at some point: moving from epistemology to
ontology.

For me, emergence is an epistemic tool. It is not possible for a human
to understand hyper-complex systems by considering all the variables
at the same time. We wouldn't be able to understand the human body
purely at the molecular level. So we create simplifying abstractions.
These abstractions have names such as "cells", "tissues", "organs",
"disease", etc etc. A Jupiter Brain might not need these tools. If
it's mind is orders of magnitude more complex than the human body,
then it could apprehend the entire thing at the molecular level, and
one could even say that this would lead to a higher level of
understanding than what we could hope for with our little monkey
brains.


In a sense, this would violate the very meaning of "understanding". If you
look at a website discussing the recent triumph of AlphaZero over Stockfish
in chess, there are arguments over whether the programs "understand" chess
or are they just very good at playing it.  Those that claim the programs

Re: Dreamless Sleep?

[Brent Meeker]

On 12/17/2017 8:46 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:

I guess you also know my position about this.
You are taking an a priori position of what consciousness is, and how
it fits reality and just running with it. It is irrelevant here if the
human-level AI already exists or not. Knowing how to make something
happen is not the same thing of understanding how it works.


But we never understand how anything works by your measure.  We 
understand more.  First, we learned how to make concrete.  Then we 
learned the chemistry of making and using cement and how it formed 
concrete.  Then we learned the molecular dynamics of that chemistry.  
Recently we learned that sea water in place of fresh water makes 
concrete last much longer.  But do we understand how those atoms do 
that?  Maybe we will someday.  But then someone will say, yes but you 
don't know how quantum field theory works...you just know how to use it.


Brent

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Re: Consistency of Postulates of QM

[Brent Meeker]

On 12/17/2017 8:06 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:


On 15 Dec 2017, at 22:19, Brent Meeker wrote:




On 12/15/2017 9:24 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
that the statistics of the observable, in arithmetic from inside, 
have to "interfere" to make Digital Mechanism making sense in 
cognitive science, so MW-appearances is not bizarre at all: it has 
to be like that. Eventually, the "negative amplitude of probability" 
comes from the self-referential constraints (the logic of []p & <>p 
on p sigma_1, for those who have studied a little bit).


Can you explicate this.


Usually, notions like necessity, certainty, probability 1, etc. are 
assumed to obey []p -> p. This implies also []~p -> ~p, and thus p -> 
<>p, and so, if we have []p -> p, we have [] -> <>p (in classical 
normal modal logics).


Then provability, and even more "formal provability" was considered as 
as *the* closer notion to knowledge we could hope for, 


Something a mathematician or logician might dream, but not a mistake any 
physicist would ever make. Knowledge is correspondence with reality, not 
deducibility from axioms.


and so it came as a shock that no ("rich enough") theory can prove its 
own consistency. This means for example that neither ZF nor PA can 
prove ~[]f, that is []f -> f, 


This seems to me incorrectly rely on []f->f  being equivalent to 
~f->~[]f and ~f=t.  I know that is standard first order logic, but in 
this case we're talking about the whole infinite set of expressible 
propositions.  It's not so clear to me that you can rely on the law of 
the excluded middle over this set.


and so such machine cannot prove generally []p ->, and provability, 
for them, cannot works as a predicate for knowledge, and is at most a 
(hopefully correct) belief.


Now, this makes also possible to retrieve a classical notion of 
knowledge, by defining, for all arithmetical proposition p, the 
knowledge of p by []p & true(p).


I'm not impressed.

Unfortunately, we cannot define true(p) in arithmetic (Tarski), nor 
can we define knowledge at all (Thomason, Scott-Montague). But for 
eaxh arithmetical p, we can still mimic knowledge by []p & p, 


Since you can't define knowledge, how can you say you can mimic it?

for each p, and this lead to a way to associate canonically a knower 
to the machine-prover. It obeys to a knowledge logic (with []p -> p 
becoming trivial). That logic is captured soundly and completely by 
the logic S4Grz (already described in many posts).


Similarly, the logic G of arithmetical self-reference cannot be a 
logic of probability one, due to the fact that []p does not imply <>p 
(which would again contradict incompleteness). It entails in the 
Kripke semantics that each world can access to a cult-de-sac world in 
which []p is always true, despite there is no worlds accessible to 
verify such facts. 


But why should we accept that as a good model of inference?  It does not 
make intuitive sense to say []p is true in some world where p is neither 
true nor even possible.  What would be an example of such a world given 
a proposition like "7 is prime."?


We get a logic of probability by ensuring that "we are not in a 
cul-de-sac world", 


But isn't that equivalent to saying "anything is possible"?

which is the main default assumption need in probability calculus. In 
that case, you can justify, for example, that when you are duplicated 
in Washington and Moscow, the probability of getting a cup of coffee 
is one, when the protocol ensure the offering of coffee at both place: 
[]p in that case means "p is true in all accessible words, and there 
is at least one".


So, by incompleteness, [] & <>t provides a "probability one" notion, 
not reducible to simple provability ([]p).


Then, by step 8, we are in arithmetic (in the model of arithmetic, 
"model" in the logician's sense), and we translate computationalism by 
restricting the accessible "p" to the leaves of the universal 
dovetailing. By Gödel+Church-Turing-Kleene we can represent those 
"leaves" by the semi-computable predicates: the sigma_1 sentences. 
When we do this, we have to add the axiom "p->[]p" to G. This gives G1 
(and G1*). It is enough thanks to a proof by Visser. For the logic of 
the nuances brought by incompleteness, like []p & p, and []p & <>t, it 
gives the logic S4Grz1 and the logic Z1*. Then, we can extract an 
arithmetical interpretation of intuitionist logic from S4 (in a usual 
well known way), and, a bit less well known, we can extract a minimal 
quantum logic from B, and then from Z1* which is very close to B, 
using a "reverse" Goldblatt transform (as Goldblatt showed how the 
modal logic B (main axioms []p -> p, p -> []<>p, and NOT= []p -> 
[][]p) is a modal version of minimal quantum logic.


 I don't see that you have explicated negative amplitude of probability:

/*"Eventually, the "negative amplitude of probability" comes from the 
self-referential constraints (the logic of []p & <>p on p sigma_1, for 
those who have studied a 

Re: Consistency of Postulates of QM

[Brent Meeker]

On 12/17/2017 7:32 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

  But in fact the box is not isolated.


Oh? Just isolate the whole universe. That should be easy.




The box too is interacting with the environment.  So it's like the 
Zeno effect.  Although there is a probability at each impact of 
producing a coherent tails component, those components don't sum to a 
finite component over a finite number of impacts.


The Zeno effect makes you "staying statistically" in the universe, 
like the non-isolation of the box makes you impossible to have access 
to the universe where the coin felt on the opposite side, but without 
collapse, the superposition can simply never disappear.


I can never disappear, but it cannot reach a significant probability for 
tails in several ages of the universe.


Brent

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Re: Consistency of Postulates of QM

[agrayson2000]

On Sunday, December 17, 2017 at 10:28:17 PM UTC, agrays...@gmail.com wrote:

>
> On Sunday, December 17, 2017 at 3:26:05 PM UTC, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>>
>>
>> On 15 Dec 2017, at 23:54, agrays...@gmail.com wrote:
>>
>> On Friday, December 15, 2017 at 5:24:39 PM UTC, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> On 14 Dec 2017, at 03:01, agrays...@gmail.com wrote:
>>>
>>> On Thursday, December 14, 2017 at 1:41:37 AM UTC, Brent wrote:
>>>

 On 12/13/2017 5:24 PM, agrays...@gmail.com wrote:

 On Wednesday, December 13, 2017 at 10:44:14 PM UTC, Brent wrote:

>
> On 12/13/2017 2:20 PM, agrays...@gmail.com wrote:
>
> On Wednesday, December 13, 2017 at 9:15:36 PM UTC, Brent wrote: 
>>
>>
>>
>> On 12/13/2017 2:45 AM, agrays...@gmail.com wrote:
>>
>> * BUT for a nucleus of a radioactive element, the nucleus is never 
>> Decayed and Undecayed SIMULTANEOUSLY.*
>>
>> Sure it is.  It's in a coherent superposition of those states until 
>> it interacts with the environment.
>>
>> Brent
>>
>
> * That's the conventional QM wisdom and the cause of the paradox of a 
> cat Alive and Dead simultaneously. As I explained, the fallacy is rooted 
> in 
> an unjustified generalization of the double slit experiment where the 
> probability waves do, in fact, exist simultaneously.  What waves do you 
> claim are interacting for the radioactive nucleus to produce coherence? 
> Tell me about them. I am from Missouri. AG*
>
>
> You seem to think that coherence requires two different waves.  This 
> is the wrong way to look at it.  In Young's slits experiment there is 
> only 
> one wave, which goes through both slits and interferes with itself.  
>


 *That's exactly how I see it! Interference requires two waves which 
 interact with each other. *


 *NO.  This is false! * *There are not two waves.*  You can write it as 
 two parts, just as you can write a description of an ocean wave as the 
 part 
 on your left and the part on your right.  But so long as they are 
 coherent, 
 maintaining a fixed phase relation, they are one wave.

>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> *You're splitting hairs, engaging in sophism. For the single wave going 
>>> through both slits, Feynman calculates the norm squared of | A + B |, where 
>>> A and B denote the waveS going through left and right slits respectively. 
>>> Both are obviously identical, with the result of coherent interference. 
>>> From this analysis we get the interpretation that the the system is 
>>> simultaneously in all states of a superposition. AGNoteworthy is that fact 
>>> that if you reference "coherence" on Wiki, the description always invokes 
>>> multiple waves of the same frequency. If you want to assert coherence 
>>> without multiple waves, and NOT using the double slit result, you have some 
>>> heavy lifting to do. AG*
>>>


 *This is exactly what we see in Young's slits experiments. AG  *

> And unstable nucleus has a probability amplitude that includes a 
> "decayed" part and a "not decayed" part.  It's a tunneling problem.
>

 *I don't doubt the existence of amplitudes. What I do doubt. and in 
 fact deny, is interference between two waves that don't exist 
 simultaneously. *


 You keep referring to two waves. * There are not two waves.  *There's 
 only one wave which interferes with itself.  It is typically written as 
 |not-decayed> + |decayed>, but that's just a choice of basis.  It could as 
 well be written |unstable nucleus>.

>>>
>>> *OK, unstable nucleus. Makes no difference to what I am arguing; namely, 
>>> that coherence requires more than one wave, simultaneously, which is what 
>>> double slit SHOWS, even though the experiment obviously starts out with one 
>>> wave. AG* 
>>>

 *If there's no interference, then the cat cannot be Alive and Dead 
 simultaneously. Tunneling can exist, but still, no simultaneous 
 interacting, interfering waves. Is there any advantage to believing in two 
 waves which don't exist simultaneous, can interfere with each other? AG*


 You are confused.

>>>
>>> You're the one with a cat which Alive and Dead simultaneously for the 
>>> very short time until decoherence occurs. So it is arguable who is really 
>>> confused. AG 
>>>
>>> I agree with Brent. It is elementary quantum mechanics.
>>>
>>> *I seriously doubt you have a clue what we're discussing. If you take 
>>> the time to read any definition of 'coherence', you will see it involves 
>>> two or more interfering waves.*
>>>
>> You can use two, or one wave. All you need is to gives them a similar 
>> phase, and it is easy to use only one wave, like the one going through two 
>> slit when sending, even one, photon.
>>  
>>
> You have an elaborate theory of the universe based on arithmetic but have 
> 

Re: Equivalence Principle and Einstein Field Equations

[agrayson2000]

On Sunday, December 17, 2017 at 12:21:27 AM UTC, Brent wrote:
>
>
>
> On 12/16/2017 2:59 PM, agrays...@gmail.com  wrote:
>
> There's a problem applying SR in this situation because neither the ground 
> or orbiting clock is an inertial frame.AG
>
>
> An orbiting clock is in an inertial frame.  An inertial frame is just one 
> in which no forces are acting (and gravity is not a force) so that it moves 
> with constant momentum along a geodesic.  Although it's convenient for 
> engineering calculations, from a fundamental veiwpoint there is no separate 
> special relativity and general relativity and no separate clock 
> corrections.  General relativity is just special relativity in curved 
> spacetime.  So clocks measure the 4-space interval along their path - 
> whether that path is geodesic (i.e. inertial) or accelerated.
>

*Interesting way to look at it. So free falling in a gravity field is an 
extension of SR. But the thing I find puzzling is that in GR the curvature 
of space-time is caused by the presence of mass, yet I can draw the path of 
an accelerated body as necessarily a curve in a space-time diagram. I am 
having trouble resolving these different sources of curvature. AG*

>
> Brent
>

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Re: Consistency of Postulates of QM

[agrayson2000]

On Sunday, December 17, 2017 at 3:26:05 PM UTC, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>
>
> On 15 Dec 2017, at 23:54, agrays...@gmail.com  wrote:
>
>
>
> On Friday, December 15, 2017 at 5:24:39 PM UTC, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>>
>>
>> On 14 Dec 2017, at 03:01, agrays...@gmail.com wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> On Thursday, December 14, 2017 at 1:41:37 AM UTC, Brent wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On 12/13/2017 5:24 PM, agrays...@gmail.com wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Wednesday, December 13, 2017 at 10:44:14 PM UTC, Brent wrote: 



 On 12/13/2017 2:20 PM, agrays...@gmail.com wrote:



 On Wednesday, December 13, 2017 at 9:15:36 PM UTC, Brent wrote: 
>
>
>
> On 12/13/2017 2:45 AM, agrays...@gmail.com wrote:
>
> * BUT for a nucleus of a radioactive element, the nucleus is never 
> Decayed and Undecayed SIMULTANEOUSLY.*
>
> Sure it is.  It's in a coherent superposition of those states until it 
> interacts with the environment.
>
> Brent
>

 * That's the conventional QM wisdom and the cause of the paradox of a 
 cat Alive and Dead simultaneously. As I explained, the fallacy is rooted 
 in 
 an unjustified generalization of the double slit experiment where the 
 probability waves do, in fact, exist simultaneously.  What waves do you 
 claim are interacting for the radioactive nucleus to produce coherence? 
 Tell me about them. I am from Missouri. AG*


 You seem to think that coherence requires two different waves.  This is 
 the wrong way to look at it.  In Young's slits experiment there is only 
 one 
 wave, which goes through both slits and interferes with itself.  

>>>
>>>
>>> *That's exactly how I see it! Interference requires two waves which 
>>> interact with each other. *
>>>
>>>
>>> *NO.  This is false! * *There are not two waves.*  You can write it as 
>>> two parts, just as you can write a description of an ocean wave as the part 
>>> on your left and the part on your right.  But so long as they are coherent, 
>>> maintaining a fixed phase relation, they are one wave.
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> *You're splitting hairs, engaging in sophism. For the single wave going 
>> through both slits, Feynman calculates the norm squared of | A + B |, where 
>> A and B denote the waveS going through left and right slits respectively. 
>> Both are obviously identical, with the result of coherent interference. 
>> From this analysis we get the interpretation that the the system is 
>> simultaneously in all states of a superposition. AGNoteworthy is that fact 
>> that if you reference "coherence" on Wiki, the description always invokes 
>> multiple waves of the same frequency. If you want to assert coherence 
>> without multiple waves, and NOT using the double slit result, you have some 
>> heavy lifting to do. AG*
>>
>>>
>>>
>>> *This is exactly what we see in Young's slits experiments. AG  *
>>>
 And unstable nucleus has a probability amplitude that includes a 
 "decayed" part and a "not decayed" part.  It's a tunneling problem.

>>>
>>> *I don't doubt the existence of amplitudes. What I do doubt. and in fact 
>>> deny, is interference between two waves that don't exist simultaneously. *
>>>
>>>
>>> You keep referring to two waves. * There are not two waves.  *There's 
>>> only one wave which interferes with itself.  It is typically written as 
>>> |not-decayed> + |decayed>, but that's just a choice of basis.  It could as 
>>> well be written |unstable nucleus>.
>>>
>>
>> *OK, unstable nucleus. Makes no difference to what I am arguing; namely, 
>> that coherence requires more than one wave, simultaneously, which is what 
>> double slit slows, even though the experiment obviously starts out with one 
>> wave. AG* 
>>
>>>
>>> *If there's no interference, then the cat cannot be Alive and Dead 
>>> simultaneously. Tunneling can exist, but still, no simultaneous 
>>> interacting, interfering waves. Is there any advantage to believing in two 
>>> waves which don't exist simultaneous, can interfere with each other? AG*
>>>
>>>
>>> You are confused.
>>>
>>
>> You're the one with a cat which Alive and Dead simultaneously for the 
>> very short time until decoherence occurs. So it is arguable who is really 
>> confused. AG 
>>
>>
>>
>> I agree with Brent. It is elementary quantum mechanics. 
>>
>
>
> *I seriously doubt you have a clue what we're discussing. If you take the 
> time to read any definition of 'coherence', you will see it involves two or 
> more interfering waves.*
>
>
>
>
>
>
> You can use two, or one wave. All you need is to gives them a similar 
> phase, and it is easy to use only one wave, like the one going through two 
> slit when sending, even one, photon.
>

 
You have an elaborate theory of the universe based on arithmetic but have 
difficulty counting to two. A single wave cannot exhibit interference. You 
need TWO waves! In double slit experiment, the slits split the original 
wave into TWO waves 

Re: Schrodinger's cat problem; proposed solution

[Bruno Marchal]

On 16 Dec 2017, at 13:47, Lawrence Crowell wrote:


On Friday, December 15, 2017 at 1:17:09 PM UTC-6, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 15 Dec 2017, at 06:20, Brent Meeker wrote:




On 12/14/2017 6:27 PM, Jason Resch wrote:
I don't see how Wigner's friend presents a problem for Copenhagen.  
According to the CI, the wf collapses when the system measured,  
which is when the box is opened. What am I missing? The issue of  
the cat's memory is a different matter, problematic IMO. AG



The problem is according to the CI, an isolated system evolves  
according to the Shrodinger equation, and therefore does not  
collapse.  But it also says observation causes collapse.


That is not CI.  CI always supposed there is a classical realm in  
which measurements and observations were made by classical  
devices.  Wigner toyed with the idea that consciousness was  
required, but that was never Bohr's idea of CI.  In a sense,  
decoherence filled in CI by providing the mechanism of collapse.


I would say that decoherence explains the illusion of a collapse in  
the mind of the machine keeping a diary of the results of  
measurement. Decoherence is relative entanglement, and the tracing- 
out by the relative observers.


The decoherence theory explains that the universe differentiation is  
quite speedy, and why macroscopic coherence is hard to be  
maintained, although possible for some material, and quantum  
topology promises theoretically possible "solid" qubit, etc. Like  
you said; it is only a matter or isolation. Now, the lack of  
isolation makes coherence easy lost, but that means only the quasi- 
irreversible lack of interference with some terms of the universal  
wave, not their genuine disappearance, which would contradict  
linearity, unitarity, well, the SWE-or DIRAC-or Feynman.


Bruno

You wrote a part on this with respect to Godel's theorem a few weeks  
ago, which I lost in the huge sea of posts on this thread. I was  
going to respond but lost the post.


Quantum mechanics is independent of measurement.


OK.



Quantum amplitudes evolve by unitarity or Schrodinger type of  
evolution and this is perfectly deterministic.


OK.


Once one throws a measurement or decoherence into picture things  
become less clear.



Decoherence is only relative entanglement. It is explicitly how  
Everett explains the "illusion of collapse" in the mind of the  
observer-machine.
Things become less clear, but only because it is psychologically hard  
to apply QM to oneself, as it involves our counterparts.







We might then invoke Kant's noumena and phenomena as a way of  
thinking about this. Decoherence is just a way of looking at what  
happens to a quantum wave that is disturbed by the environment,  
which can include a laboratory measurement.


Even Bohr admitted, in his reply to EPR, that such a disturbance  
cannot be entirely mechanical. I don't think there are disturbance,  
only entanglement. The laws of big numbers justifies the appearance of  
irreversibility and collapse, but that never happens. Eventually, the  
wave itself arises from number's incompleteness self-reflected (you  
need yo study my papers to get this).







Given that an optical photon is about .1eV in energy a 100 light  
source produces then around 10^{22} photons every second, which in  
the Fermi golden rule are emitted by spontaneous emission and thus  
their wave functions are decoherent. This is a numerically massive  
process in the universe at large. We have these various  
interpretations of what happens with these decoherent events, which  
are described phenomenologically. These various interpretations are  
putative noumena for the processes of decoherence or measurement.


I do not assume a physical universe. It can't work with any reasonable  
solution of the computationalist mind-body problem. I assume  
mechanism, and enough of arithmetic to define what are the universal  
turing machines.






If we think of a measurement as a large system with many quantum  
states, say a mole ~ 6x10^{23} of states, that couples to a system  
with a small number of states. In a measurement the large number of  
states produce a classical(like) outcome for the occurrence of the  
small number of states. The process appears to involve a type of  
self reference as well as the necessity for einselected quantum  
states (Zurek etc) that define a classically stable needle state and  
its outcome.


I am OK with Zurek (and he cited Everett for the basic idea).



The process appears to require that states involved with the needle  
state encode quantum numbers as Godel numbers, which in general  
leads to a breakdown of computability.



That would be interesting. Mechanism, paradoxically enough, entails a  
breakdown of computability for two among five nuances of the 3p  
machine provability.


Mechanism implies that "we live in arithmetic", and since Gödel we  
know that most of arithmetic breakdown computability. Most attribute  
of 

Re: Dreamless Sleep?

[Telmo Menezes]

On Fri, Dec 8, 2017 at 7:53 PM, Brent Meeker  wrote:
>
>
> On 12/8/2017 2:24 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, Dec 7, 2017 at 10:47 PM, Brent Meeker 
>> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> On 12/7/2017 1:01 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:

 On Wed, Dec 6, 2017 at 11:50 PM, Brent Meeker 
 wrote:
>
>
> On 12/6/2017 1:46 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>>
>> I suspect that this is perhaps why Brent want to refer to the
>> environment
>> for relating consciousness to the machine, and in Artificial
>> Intelligence,
>> some people defend the idea that (mundane) consciousness occur only
>> when
>> the
>> environment contradicts a little bit the quasi automatic persistent
>> inference we do all the time.
>
>
> That's Jeff Hawkins model of consciousness: one becomes conscious of
> something when all lower, more specialized levels of the brain have
> found
> it
> not to match their predictions.

 In that sort of model, how does matter "know" that it is being used to
 run a forecasting algorithm? Surely it doesn't right?
>>>
>>>
>>> ?? Why surely.  It seems you're rejecting the idea that a physical system
>>> can be conscious just out of prejudice.
>>
>> Not at all. I remain agnostic on materialism vs. idealism. Maybe I am
>> even a strong agnostic: I suspect that the answer to this question
>> cannot be known.
>>
>> Assuming materialism, consciousness must indeed be a property or
>> something that emerges from the interaction of fundamental particles,
>> the same way that, say, life does. Ok. All that I am saying is that
>> nobody has proposed any explanation of consciousness under this
>> assumption that I would call a theory. The above is not a theory, in
>> the same way that the Christian God is not a theory: it proposes to
>> explain a simple thing by appealing to a pre-existing more complex
>> thing -- in this case claiming that the act of forecasting at a very
>> high level somehow leads to consciousness, but without proposing any
>> first principles. It's a magical step.
>
>
> What would a satisfactory (to you) first principle look like.

I cannot imagine one -- and this fuels my intuition that consciousness
is more fundamental than matter, and that emergentism is a dead-end.
But of course, my lack of imagination is not an argument. It could be
that I am too dumb/ignorant/crazy to come up with a good emergentist
theory. What I can -- and do -- is listen to any idea that comes up
and have an open mind. If you have one, I will gladly listen.

> If we
> consider the analogy of life, in the early 1900's when it was considered as
> a chemical process all that could be said about it was that it involved
> using energy to construct carbon based compounds and at a high level this
> led to reproduction and natural selection and the origin of species.  Now,
> we have greatly elaborated on the molecular chemistry and can modify and
> even created DNA and RNA molecules that realize "life".  Where did we get
> past the "magical step"?  Or are you still waiting for "the atom of life" to
> be discovered?

Here there is no magical step. Life can be understood all the way down
to basic chemistry. Ok, we don't have all the details, but we are not
missing anything fundamental. I am not waiting for the atoms of life
because I already know what they are. You just described them above.
Can you do that for consciousness?

What makes the hard problem hard is that it relates to a qualitatively
different phenomena than anything else that we try to understand. Life
can be talked about purely in the third person, but consciousness is
first person by definition.

>>
>> My view is that this sort of emergentism always smuggles a subtle but
>> important switcheroo at some point: moving from epistemology to
>> ontology.
>>
>> For me, emergence is an epistemic tool. It is not possible for a human
>> to understand hyper-complex systems by considering all the variables
>> at the same time. We wouldn't be able to understand the human body
>> purely at the molecular level. So we create simplifying abstractions.
>> These abstractions have names such as "cells", "tissues", "organs",
>> "disease", etc etc. A Jupiter Brain might not need these tools. If
>> it's mind is orders of magnitude more complex than the human body,
>> then it could apprehend the entire thing at the molecular level, and
>> one could even say that this would lead to a higher level of
>> understanding than what we could hope for with our little monkey
>> brains.
>
>
> In a sense, this would violate the very meaning of "understanding". If you
> look at a website discussing the recent triumph of AlphaZero over Stockfish
> in chess, there are arguments over whether the programs "understand" chess
> or are they just very good at playing it.  Those that claim the programs
> don't understand chess mean that the programs just consult lots of 

Re: Dreamless Sleep?

[Telmo Menezes]

On Fri, Dec 8, 2017 at 7:30 PM, Brent Meeker  wrote:
>
>
> On 12/8/2017 2:09 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, Dec 7, 2017 at 4:08 PM, Bruno Marchal  wrote:
>>>
>>> On 07 Dec 2017, at 10:01, Telmo Menezes wrote:
>>>
 On Wed, Dec 6, 2017 at 11:50 PM, Brent Meeker 
 wrote:
>
>
>
> On 12/6/2017 1:46 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>>
>>
>> I suspect that this is perhaps why Brent want to refer to the
>> environment
>> for relating consciousness to the machine, and in Artificial
>> Intelligence,
>> some people defend the idea that (mundane) consciousness occur only
>> when
>> the
>> environment contradicts a little bit the quasi automatic persistent
>> inference we do all the time.
>
>
>
> That's Jeff Hawkins model of consciousness: one becomes conscious of
> something when all lower, more specialized levels of the brain have
> found
> it
> not to match their predictions.


 In that sort of model, how does matter "know" that it is being used to
 run a forecasting algorithm? Surely it doesn't right?
>>>
>>>
>>> Imagine a society which builds some objects. When everything go well, the
>>> boss can sleep in his office. But then there is some accident or
>>> something
>>> unusual. That is the time to wake up the boss. In this analogy,
>>> consciousness is played by the (incorrigible) boss.
>>>
>>>
>>>
 The only way this could work is if the forecasting algorithm and the
 cascading effects of failing predictions have the side effect of
 creating the "right" sort of interactions at a lower level that
 trigger consciousness.
>>>
>>>
>>> After a moment of panic, the sub-entities dare to awake the ultimate
>>> judge:
>>> the one capable of "going out of the box" to take a (perhaps risky)
>>> decision
>>> in absence of complete information, and to take on its shoulder the
>>> responsibility.
>>>
>>>
>>>
 Then I want to know what these interactions
 are, and what if the "atom" of consciousness, what is the first
 principle. Without this, I would say that such hypothesis are not even
 wrong.
>>>
>>>
>>> The sub-unities have specialized task, and does not need evolved
>>> forecasting
>>> ability. You can think them as ants, when they do their usual jobs
>>> triggered
>>> by the local pheromones left by their close neighbors. But if the nest is
>>> attacked, or if some important food is missing, some species will needs
>>> some
>>> order of the queen (ike to fight or to move away. Some societies can
>>> delegate most of the power to the sub-unities, but in complex unknown
>>> situation, if they have to make important decision, they will need a
>>> centralization of the power, which can act much more quickly to convince
>>> the
>>> whole society of some unusual option, like running away, closing the
>>> doors,
>>> fighting the enemy, etc. That will happen when *many* ants complain on
>>> something.
>>>
>>> In this case, the role of consciousness is focusing the attention on what
>>> is
>>> important (with respect to survival), and to speed-up planning, decision,
>>> etc.
>>>
>>> I am not sure this answer the question (we are in the "easy" part of the
>>> problem here).
>>>
>>> But you will help me by telling me what is missing. I am not sure we need
>>> to
>>> dig on the difficult part of the consciousness problem here, which is
>>> handed
>>> at a different level, and concerned with the fact that the boss/queen is
>>> confined in his office/chamber and can never be sure if the ants panic is
>>> genuine, or an illusion, and still decide ...
>>
>> Yes, I agree with this model and what you say. I am just criticizing
>> the "trick" of confusing the several meanings of consciousness.
>> I would say that here we are in the realm of intelligence / learning.
>> This is about attention, and how attention is directed. Several AI
>> models already work like this. When an artificial neural network fails
>> a prediction, this triggers a cascade of changes. It wakes up the
>> boss, as you say.
>>
>> In short, I feel that some scientists tend to propose an answer to the
>> easy problem and that try to smuggle it as a solution for the hard
>> problem, by relying on the overloading of terms.
>
>
> Progress is made by solving the problems you can.

Sure. And it is also true that progress is not made by pretending to
have solved problems that were not solved.

> But as you know I think
> "the hard problem" will go away when the "easy problem" is solved.  When we
> can produce AI's that are creative, humorous, compassionate, imaginative,
> etc  and adjust those attributes and understand how they are
> implemented...the "hard problem" will be seen as the wrong question.
>
> Instead AI engineers will ask, "Well, how much consciousness do you want?
> We recommend more subconscious competence for that task,"

I guess you also know my 

Re: Consistency of Postulates of QM

[Bruno Marchal]

On 15 Dec 2017, at 22:19, Brent Meeker wrote:




On 12/15/2017 9:24 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
that the statistics of the observable, in arithmetic from inside,  
have to "interfere" to make Digital Mechanism making sense in  
cognitive science, so MW-appearances is not bizarre at all: it has  
to be like that. Eventually, the "negative amplitude of  
probability" comes from the self-referential constraints (the logic  
of []p & <>p on p sigma_1, for those who have studied a little bit).


Can you explicate this.


Usually, notions like necessity, certainty, probability 1, etc. are  
assumed to obey []p -> p. This implies also []~p -> ~p, and thus p ->  
<>p, and so, if we have []p -> p, we have [] -> <>p (in classical  
normal modal logics).


Then provability, and even more "formal provability" was considered as  
as *the* closer notion to knowledge we could hope for, and so it came  
as a shock that no ("rich enough") theory can prove its own  
consistency. This means for example that neither ZF nor PA can prove  
~[]f, that is []f -> f, and so such machine cannot prove generally []p  
->, and provability, for them, cannot works as a predicate for  
knowledge, and is at most a (hopefully correct) belief.


Now, this makes also possible to retrieve a classical notion of  
knowledge, by defining, for all arithmetical proposition p, the  
knowledge of p by []p & true(p).
Unfortunately, we cannot define true(p) in arithmetic (Tarski), nor  
can we define knowledge at all (Thomason, Scott-Montague). But for  
eaxh arithmetical p, we can still mimic knowledge by []p & p, for each  
p, and this lead to a way to associate canonically a knower to the  
machine-prover. It obeys to a knowledge logic (with []p -> p becoming  
trivial). That logic is captured soundly and completely by the logic  
S4Grz (already described in many posts).


Similarly, the logic G of arithmetical self-reference cannot be a  
logic of probability one, due to the fact that []p does not imply <>p  
(which would again contradict incompleteness). It entails in the  
Kripke semantics that each world can access to a cult-de-sac world in  
which []p is always true, despite there is no worlds accessible to  
verify such facts. We get a logic of probability by ensuring that "we  
are not in a cul-de-sac world", which is the main default assumption  
need in probability calculus. In that case, you can justify, for  
example, that when you are duplicated in Washington and Moscow, the  
probability of getting a cup of coffee is one, when the protocol  
ensure the offering of coffee at both place: []p in that case means "p  
is true in all accessible words, and there is at least one".


So, by incompleteness, [] & <>t provides a "probability one" notion,  
not reducible to simple provability ([]p).


Then, by step 8, we are in arithmetic (in the model of arithmetic,  
"model" in the logician's sense), and we translate computationalism by  
restricting the accessible "p" to the leaves of the universal  
dovetailing. By Gödel+Church-Turing-Kleene we can represent those  
"leaves" by the semi-computable predicates: the sigma_1 sentences.  
When we do this, we have to add the axiom "p->[]p" to G. This gives G1  
(and G1*). It is enough thanks to a proof by Visser. For the logic of  
the nuances brought by incompleteness, like []p & p, and []p & <>t, it  
gives the logic S4Grz1 and the logic Z1*. Then, we can extract an  
arithmetical interpretation of intuitionist logic from S4 (in a usual  
well known way), and, a bit less well known, we can extract a minimal  
quantum logic from B, and then from Z1* which is very close to B,  
using a "reverse" Goldblatt transform (as Goldblatt showed how the  
modal logic B (main axioms []p -> p, p -> []<>p, and NOT= []p -> [] 
[]p) is a modal version of minimal quantum logic.


Note that here "[] and "<>" are arithmetical predicate. We do not  
assume more than Q, and use only internal interpretabilities of the  
observer-machines.
This is explained in most of my papers, but the details are in the  
long french text "Conscience et Mécanisme".


Bruno











Brent

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Re: Consistency of Postulates of QM

[Bruno Marchal]

On 15 Dec 2017, at 22:18, Brent Meeker wrote:




On 12/15/2017 9:06 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:


On 13 Dec 2017, at 22:23, Brent Meeker wrote:




On 12/13/2017 3:15 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
The coin does not start in a state of the kind  {|heads> + | 
tails>}, but it starts with a state of having mulitiple positions  
and multiple momenta, spreaded in the multiverse according to the  
Heisenberg Uncertainty. The tiny difference in the position can  
lead to different bouncing in the box, and so, by shaking it a  
long time enough, I don’t see why we could avoid a superposition  
of head and tails eventually.


Decoherence is waaay faster than the time for the coin to cross  
the box from one impact to another, so I don't see how a  
superposition could develop from shaking the box.



But you just said:

<<

On 13 Dec 2017, at 22:15, Brent Meeker wrote:




On 12/13/2017 2:45 AM, agrayson2...@gmail.com wrote:
BUT for a nucleus of a radioactive element, the nucleus is never  
Decayed and Undecayed SIMULTANEOUSLY.


Sure it is.  It's in a coherent superposition of those states  
until it interacts with the environment.


>>

That is true FAPP, but in the MW, there is no collapse of the wave,  
and the coherent superposition does not disappear, it just spead on  
the environment itself, making the people belonging to those  
environment perceiving something like a collapse,  or like a divine  
choice (where of course a mechanist knows that it could be nothing  
more than a first person comp indeterminacy).


In the 3p view of the universal wave (or just the global one  
involving the coin and the shaker of the coin), the superposition  
is spreaded,


What superposition?  In the shaken coin in a box, the coin starts in  
a known state, e.g. heads,


Not really. The coin starts with the position in the superposition  
state here-1 + here-2 + here-3 allowed by our unsharp knowledge of its  
momentum (the coin is supposed to be almost still at the start).





and the question is whether the shaking puts it into a superposition  
|heads>+|tails> or whether the evolution of its state is classical.   
I think it is a question of time and amplification of quantum  
effects at each impact with the walls of the box.


Yes.


If the box+coin is isolated there is some time that would be  
sufficient to produce a superposition.


Nice, so we do agree on this. That is what I was trying to explain (to  
Bruce and Grayson).




  But in fact the box is not isolated.


Oh? Just isolate the whole universe. That should be easy.




The box too is interacting with the environment.  So it's like the  
Zeno effect.  Although there is a probability at each impact of  
producing a coherent tails component, those components don't sum to  
a finite component over a finite number of impacts.


The Zeno effect makes you "staying statistically" in the universe,  
like the non-isolation of the box makes you impossible to have access  
to the universe where the coin felt on the opposite side, but without  
collapse, the superposition can simply never disappear.


Bruno





Brent

indeed very quickly to all the material objects interacting with  
the coin, already inside the box. The decoherence time is only the  
time the universe differentiatesn and indeed, it does that very  
quickly, but this does not change the fact that the differentiation  
is not enough big to lead to full quasi orthogonal tail + head  
state after shaking the device (box + coin) long enough.


Bruno








Brent

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Re: Consistency of Postulates of QM

[Bruno Marchal]

On 15 Dec 2017, at 23:54, agrayson2...@gmail.com wrote:




On Friday, December 15, 2017 at 5:24:39 PM UTC, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 14 Dec 2017, at 03:01, agrays...@gmail.com wrote:




On Thursday, December 14, 2017 at 1:41:37 AM UTC, Brent wrote:


On 12/13/2017 5:24 PM, agrays...@gmail.com wrote:



On Wednesday, December 13, 2017 at 10:44:14 PM UTC, Brent wrote:


On 12/13/2017 2:20 PM, agrays...@gmail.com wrote:



On Wednesday, December 13, 2017 at 9:15:36 PM UTC, Brent wrote:


On 12/13/2017 2:45 AM, agrays...@gmail.com wrote:
BUT for a nucleus of a radioactive element, the nucleus is never  
Decayed and Undecayed SIMULTANEOUSLY.
Sure it is.  It's in a coherent superposition of those states  
until it interacts with the environment.


Brent

That's the conventional QM wisdom and the cause of the paradox of  
a cat Alive and Dead simultaneously. As I explained, the fallacy  
is rooted in an unjustified generalization of the double slit  
experiment where the probability waves do, in fact, exist  
simultaneously.  What waves do you claim are interacting for the  
radioactive nucleus to produce coherence? Tell me about them. I  
am from Missouri. AG


You seem to think that coherence requires two different waves.   
This is the wrong way to look at it.  In Young's slits experiment  
there is only one wave, which goes through both slits and  
interferes with itself.


That's exactly how I see it! Interference requires two waves which  
interact with each other.


NO.  This is false!  There are not two waves.  You can write it as  
two parts, just as you can write a description of an ocean wave as  
the part on your left and the part on your right.  But so long as  
they are coherent, maintaining a fixed phase relation, they are one  
wave.


You're splitting hairs, engaging in sophism. For the single wave  
going through both slits, Feynman calculates the norm squared of |  
A + B |, where A and B denote the waveS going through left and  
right slits respectively. Both are obviously identical, with the  
result of coherent interference. From this analysis we get the  
interpretation that the the system is simultaneously in all states  
of a superposition. AG


Noteworthy is that fact that if you reference "coherence" on Wiki,  
the description always invokes multiple waves of the same  
frequency. If you want to assert coherence without multiple waves,  
and NOT using the double slit result, you have some heavy lifting  
to do. AG



This is exactly what we see in Young's slits experiments. AG

And unstable nucleus has a probability amplitude that includes a  
"decayed" part and a "not decayed" part.  It's a tunneling problem.


I don't doubt the existence of amplitudes. What I do doubt. and in  
fact deny, is interference between two waves that don't exist  
simultaneously.


You keep referring to two waves.  There are not two waves.  There's  
only one wave which interferes with itself.  It is typically  
written as |not-decayed> + |decayed>, but that's just a choice of  
basis.  It could as well be written |unstable nucleus>.


OK, unstable nucleus. Makes no difference to what I am arguing;  
namely, that coherence requires more than one wave, simultaneously,  
which is what double slit slows, even though the experiment  
obviously starts out with one wave. AG


If there's no interference, then the cat cannot be Alive and Dead  
simultaneously. Tunneling can exist, but still, no simultaneous  
interacting, interfering waves. Is there any advantage to  
believing in two waves which don't exist simultaneous, can  
interfere with each other? AG


You are confused.

You're the one with a cat which Alive and Dead simultaneously for  
the very short time until decoherence occurs. So it is arguable who  
is really confused. AG



I agree with Brent. It is elementary quantum mechanics.


I seriously doubt you have a clue what we're discussing. If you take  
the time to read any definition of 'coherence', you will see it  
involves two or more interfering waves.






You can use two, or one wave. All you need is to gives them a similar  
phase, and it is easy to use only one wave, like the one going through  
two slit when sending, even one, photon.





Don't take my word. Check for yourself.


I did.



Moreover, I don't doubt that nuclear decay is a tunneling problem,  
with probability amplitudes that agree with experiments and allow  
nuclear weapons to function as advertised -- as you write,  
"elementary quantum mechanics".


That is why I prefer to recast the "schroedinger cat" with an  
amplifucation of the spin up+down state, instead of nuclear decay.  
That is what Bohm did. The up+down state is invariant with time, and  
made the thought experiment easir. No need to invoke quantum  
tunneling. The point is that the superposition never disappear if  
there is no collapse, and that the observer get themselves into a  
superposition. They cannot notice it by "Elementary Mechanist Theory  
of