Re: The Totally Blind Zombie Homunculus Room
Nice try Colin! :-) and very thought provoking, as are all the contributions of yours which I have read on various discussion groups. Here though I think your assumptions are driving your conclusions and you beg some of the questions you seem to be assuming that you are answering. I don't see this as either a sin or a crime, so long as it is acknowledged. This is because I assert that we MUST assert what we believe about the world, because if we didn't we couldn't function at all or, alternatively, neither self nor other could honestly infer that we did believe anything about the world; it would just be a form of dreaming. From what you write it is not at all clear what 'Marvin' really is although I suspect he comes from the same cell line as Professor Mary of 'black and white' fame. [Although perhaps that should be 'cell block' ... yes? :-] By calling Marvin 'human' you muddy the waters I think: the ghost slips into the 'machine' unnoticed. I see several issues: * Marvin develops 'models' as algorithmic summaries of all the patterns of changes in the displays and presumably these include optimal patterns for button pushing also because his 'human sensory emulation' room also includes emulations of damage warning devices [pain] and homoeostatic normalisation warnings [hunger, thirst, bladder-full, etc.] and these models have handy summary labels [afferent] and short cut keys [efferent] - o because effectiveness and economy of effort are intrinsically rewarding and are prerequisites for the achievement of Marvin's scientific aims; * Marvin's models of the 'not-room' come to embody a pronounced distinction between patterns of correlations best labelled as 'flexible unity which is extension of the buttons' versus 'bundled large scale unity of many surprising things which is yet diverse and distant' - o because, if the information of the input displays and the effect of the buttons both truly emulate information entering and leaving the human brain case, there are correlations between sight and sound of self-body, touch sense of skin and tongue on the one hand and proprioceptive sensing on the other which endow self-body information with distinct and persistent identity which is profoundly contrasted with non-self-body world information; * AND you are being unfair to '1Z', as a result of you begging the question of the nature of phenomenal C rather than him being thoughtless. What you show in this tale of Marvin's room is that OUR phenomenal experience is the outcome of consistency and persistence; 'habit' in other words. This is shown in Marvin's case because, once 'the model has stabilised', the invariance embodied by and within it has the same dependability as the inner shape, colours and textures of 'the room'. If Marvin is truly like the rest of us, apart from the rigours of his particular fate, then his interactions with 'the model' will become to him like extensions of his mind and body. He will become an homunculus, forgotten within his greater self! I like this story because it brings out the interdependence of sameness and habit on the one hand and novelty and exploration on the other. As I have asserted many times before, the most succinct explanation of phenomenal experience is that it is what it is like to be the updating of the model of self in the world [UMSITW]. IOW the incorporation of novelty into our sets of tested beliefs. This is how I relate to your assertion that the ability to do science is the true indicator of consciousness. Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ Colin Geoffrey Hales wrote: This discussion is a hybrid of a number of very famous thought experiments. Unlike those thought experiments, however, this experiment is aimed purely and only at scientists. The intent is to demonstrate clearly and definitively the nature of subjective experience (phenomenal consciousness) and its primal role in a scientist's ability to function as a scientist. Imagine a room. Its walls and celing and floor are matt black. There are no doors or windows. All over the walls are digital displays which announce numbers in warm, friendly colours. Up against all four walls and up to international standard control desk height (roughly 750mm) is a sloping console. Covering the console around all four walls are pushbuttons. The number of displays is equal to the number of sensory nerves entering a typical human brain from the peripheral nervous systems including all sensory input. The number of pushbuttons is equal to the entire set of effector nerves emanating from a typical brain. This total number of displays and pushbuttons is in the millions. There is a comfortable chair upon which is seated
Re: computer pain
Well this is fascinating! I tend to think that Brent's 'simplistic' approach of setting up oscillating EM fields of specific frequencies at specific locations is more likely to be good evidence of EM involvement in qualia, because the victim, I mean experimental subject, can relate what is happening. Do it to enough naive subjects and, if their accounts of the changes wrought in their experience agree with your predictions, you will have provisional verification. Just make sure you have a falsifiable prediction first. On the other hand Colin's project seems out of reach to me. This is probably because I don't really understand it. I do not, for example, understand how Colin seems to think that we can dispense with the concept of representation. I am however very sceptical of all 'quantum' mechanical/entanglement theories of consciousness. As far as I can see humans are 'classical' in nature, built out of fundamental particles like everything else in the universe of course, but we can live and move and have our being BECAUSE each one of us, and the major parts which compose us, are all big enough to endure over and above the quantum uncertainty. So we don't 'flit in and out of existence' like some people say. We wake up, go to sleep, dose off at the wrong time, forget what we are doing, live through social/cultural descriptions of the world, dream and aspire, and sometimes experience amazing insights which can turn our lives around. We survive and endure by doing mostly the tried and true things we have learned so well that they are deeply ingrained habits. Most of what we do, perceive, and think is so stolidly habitual and 'built-in' that we are almost completely unaware of it; it is fixtures and fittings of the mind if you like. It all works for us, and the whole social and cultural milieu of economic and personal transactions, accounting, appointments, whatever, can happen so successfully BECAUSE so much of what we are and do is solidly habitual and predictable. In my simplistic view, consciousness is the registration of discrepancy between what the brain has predicted compared to what actually happened. Everything else, the bulk of what constitutes the mind in effect, is the ceaseless evoking, selecting, ignoring or suppressing, storing, amalgamating or splitting of the dynamic logical structures which represent our world, and without which we are just lumps of meat. These dynamic logical structures actually EXIST during their evocation. [And this is why there is 'something it is like to be ...'] This may seem like a very boring view of things but I think now there is an amazing amount of explanation already available concerning human experience. I am not saying there is nothing new to discover, far from it, just that the continuous denial that most of the pieces of the puzzle are already exposed and arranged in the right order is not helpful. What ought to be clear to everybody is that our awareness of being here, of being anything in fact, entails a continuous process of self-referencing. It entails a continuous process of locating self in one's world. This self-referencing is always inherently partial and incomplete, but unless this incompleteness itself is explicitly represented, we are not aware of it. We are only ever aware of relationships explicitly represented and being explicitly represented entails inclusion of representation of at least some aspects of how whatever it is, is, was, will be, or might become, causally connected to oneself. When we perceive or imagine things, it is always from a view point, listening point, or at a point of contact. The 'location' of something or someone is an intrinsic part of its or their identity, and the key element of location as such is in relation to oneself or in relation to someone who we ourselves identify with; they are extensions of ourselves. I'll leave that there for the moment. I just want to add that I believe Colin Hales is right in focussing on the ability of humans to do science. I look at that more from the point of view that being able to do science, and being able to perceive and understand entropy - even if it is only grasping where crumbs and fluff balls come from - are what allow us to know that we are NOT in some kind of computer generated matrix. We live in a real, open universe that exists independently of each of us but yet is incomplete without us. Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ Brent Meeker wrote: Stathis Papaioannou wrote: Colin Hales writes: I understand your conclusion, that a model of a brain won't be able to handle novelty like a real brain, but I am trying to understand the nuts and bolts of how the model is going to fail. For example, you can say that perpetual motion machines are impossible because they disobey the first or second law of thermodynamics, but you can also look
Re: computer pain
Sorry to be so slow at responding here but life [domestic], the universe and everything else right now is competing savagely with this interesting discussion. [But one must always think positive; 'Bah, Humbug!' is not appropriate, even though the temptation is great some times :-] Stathis, I am not entirely convinced when you say: 'And the psychopath is right: no-one can actually fault him on a point of fact or a point of logic' That would only be right if we allowed that his [psychopathy is mostly a male affliction I believe] use of words is easily as reasonable as yours or mine. However, where the said psycho. is purporting to make authoritative statements about the world, it is not OK for him to purport that what he describes is unquestionably factual and his reasoning from the facts as he sees them is necessarily authoritative for anyone else. This is because, qua psychopath, he is not able to make the fullest possible free decisions about what makes people tick or even about what is reality for the rest of us. He is, in a sense, mortally wounded, and forever impaired; condemned always to make only 'logical' decisions. :-) The way I see it, roughly and readily, is that there are in fact certain statements/descriptions about the world and our place in it which are MUCH MORE REASONABLE than a whole lot of others. I think therefore that, even though you might be right from a 'purely logical' point of view when you say the following: 'In the *final* analysis, ethical beliefs are not a matter of fact or logic, and if it seems that they are then there is a hidden assumption somewhere' in fact, from the point of view of practical living and the necessities of survival, the correct approach is to assert what amounts to a set of practical axioms, including: * the mere fact of existence is the basis of value, that good and bad are expressed differently within - and between - different cultures and their sub-cultures but ultimately there is an objective, absolute basis for the concept of 'goodness', because in all normal circumstances it is better to exist than not to exist, * related to this and arising out of it is the realisation that all normal, healthy humans understand what is meant by both 'harm' and 'suffering', certainly those who have reached adulthood, * furthermore, insofar as it is clearly recognisable that continuing to exist as a human being requires access to and consumption of all manner of natural resources and human-made goods and services, it is in our interests to nurture and further the inclinations in ourselves and others to behave in ways supportive of cooperation for mutual and general benefit wherever this is reasonably possible, and certainly not to act destructively or disruptively unless it is clear that doing so will prevent a much greater harm from occurring. It ought to be clear to all reasonable persons not engaged in self deception that in this modern era each and everyone of us is dependent - always - on at least a thousand other people doing the right thing, or trying to anyway. Thus the idea of 'manly', rugged, individualism is a romantic nonsense unless it also incorporates a recognition of mutual interdependence and the need for real fairness in social dealings at every level. Unless compassion, democracy and ethics are recognised [along with scientific method] as fundamental prerequisites for OUR survival, policies and practices will pretty much inevitably become self-defeating and destructive, no matter how well-intentioned to start with. In the interest of brevity I add the following quasi-axioms. * the advent of scientific method on Earth between 400 and 500 years ago has irreversibly transformed the human species so that now we can reasonably assert that the human universe is always potentially infinite, so long as it exists and we believe it to be so * to be fully human requires taking responsibility for one's actions and this means consciously choosing to do things or accepting that one has made a choice even if one cannot remember consciously choosing * nobody knows the future, so all statements about the future are either guesswork or statements of desires. Furthermore our lack of knowledge of times to come is very deep, such that we have no truly reasonable basis for dismissing the right to survive of any persons on the planet - or other living species for that matter - unless it can be clearly shown that such killing or allowing to die, is necessary to prevent some far greater harm and the assertion of this is of course hampered precisely by our lack of knowledge of the future This feels incomplete but it needs to be sent. Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ Stathis Papaioannou wrote: Brent meeker writes: Stathis
Re: 'reason' and ethics; was computer pain
And yet I persist ... [the hiatus of familial duties and seasonal excesses now draws to a close [Oh yeah, Happy New Year Folks!] SP: 'If we are talking about a system designed to destroy the economy of a country in order to soften it up for invasion, for example, then an economist can apply all his skill and knowledge in a perfectly reasonable manner in order to achieve this.' We should beware of conceding too much too soon. Something is reasonable only if it can truly be expected to fulfil the intentions of its designer. Otherwise it is at best logical but, in the kinds of context we are alluding to here, benighted and a manifestation of fundamentally diminished 'reason'. Something can only be 'reasonable' it its context. If a proposed course of action can be shown to be ultimately self defeating - in the sense of including its reasonably predictably final consequences, and yet it is still actively proposed, then the proposal is NOT reasonable, it is stupid. As far as I can see, that is the closest we can get to an objective definition of stupidity and I like it. Put it this way: Is it 'reasonable' to promote policies and projects that ultimately are going to contribute to your own demise or the demise of those whom you hold dear or, if not obviously their demise then, the ultimate demise of all descendants of the aforementioned? I think academics, 'mandarins' and other high honchos should all now be thinking in these terms and asking themselves this question. The world we now live in is like no other before it. We now live in the Modern era, in which the application and fruits of the application of scientific method are putting ever greater forms of power into the hands of humans. This process is not going to stop, and nor should we want it to I think, but it entails the ever greater probability that the actions of any person on the planet have the potential to influence survival outcomes for huge numbers of others [if not the whole d*mned lot of us]. I think it has always been true that ethical decisions and judgements are based on facts to a greater extent than most people involved want to think about - usually because it's too hard and we don't think we have got the time and, oh yeah, 'it probably doesn't/won't matter' about the details of unforeseen consequences because its only gonna be lower class riff -raff who will be affected anyway or people of the future who will just have to make shift for themselves. NOW however we do not really have such an excuse; it is a cop-out to purport to ignore the ever growing interrelatedness of people around the planet. So it is NOT reasonable to treat other people as things. [I feel indebted to Terry Pratchett for pointing out, through the words of Granny Weatherwax I think it is, that there is only one sin, which is to treat another person as a thing.] I think a reasonable survey and analysis of history shows that, more than anything else, treating other people as things rather than equal others has been the fundamental cause and methodology for the spread of threats to life and well being. You can see where I am going with this: in a similar way to that in which concepts of 'game theory' and probabilities of interaction outcomes give us an objective framework for assessing purportedly 'moral' precepts, the existence now of decidedly non-zero chances of recursive effects resulting from one's own actions brings a deeper meaning and increased rigour the realms of ethics and 'reason'. I don't think this is 'airy-fairy', I think it represents a dimension of reasoning which has always existed but which has been denied, ignored or actively censored by the powerful and their 'pragmatic' apologists and spin doctors. To look at a particular context [I am an EX Christian], even though the Bible is shonk as history or any kind of principled xxological analysis, it is instructive to look at the careers of the prophets and see how each involved a seemingly conventional formative period and then periods or a whole life of very risky ministry AGAINST the establishment because being true to their mission involved the prophet denouncing exploitation, greed and corruption. So let me wave my imaginary staff and rail from the top of my imaginary mountain: 'Sin is against reason! And that's a fact! So THERE! And don't you forget it, or you'll be sorry, or at least your children and their children will become so! Put that in your pipes all you armchair philosophers!' Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ Stathis Papaioannou wrote: Mark Peaty writes: Sorry to be so slow at responding here but life [domestic], the universe and everything else right now is competing savagely with this interesting discussion. [But one must always think positive; 'Bah, Humbug!' is not appropriate, even though the temptation is great some times :-] Stathis, I am not entirely
Re: 'reason' and ethics; was computer pain
OK Stathis, I happily concede your point in relation to our word 'logical', but not in relation to 'reason'. Logic belongs to the tight-nit language of logico-mathematics but reason is *about* the real world and we cannot allow the self-deluding bullies and cheats of the world to steal *our* language! I like the way Dr Dorothy Rowe, a psychologist and writer [ another useful Australian export **] puts it: Power is the ability to get others to accept your description of the world. The cynical manipulators and spin doctors have no qualms about abusing language, in big part because they have no intention of accepting responsibility for all their actions. Of course none of us is guiltless in this regard but it falls to us who stand well away from the levers of power to speak the truth. We who are forced to watch as OUR hard earned tax dollars and investment savings [superannuation savings for example] get splurged on grand projects, invasions, and so forth, have a duty to SAY what is right. We may be wrong about some details but we sure as hell are not wrong when insisting that the truth be told. I certainly agree also that, in the case of the person standing on the parapet, what he or she believes about what they are doing - if we can find it out - should cause us to try different methods of persuasion. Quite how one would tackle the 'logic' of the superhero's thinking, I don't know, perhaps offer to make improvements to his cape to improve the effect? :-) Whatever the details, I think that one aspect of the interaction that either type would require is the establishment of rapport, some degree of mutual empathy; not easy. The economist preparing to make war not love is very like the supposed scientists cooking up ever more 'attractive' tobacco products 'for our smoking pleasure'. I think that the only way people can bring themselves to do this is by cutting themselves off from those others who will become the victims. This is like so many other situations where a group or social class cuts it/themselves off from another class of persons. It may seem 'reasonable' where everyone involved in the planning agrees that there is no real alternative, or that the potential disadvantages accruing from not doing so will be too heavy a burden to bear. But it also entails a denial of empathy, and a closing off from a part of the world, an objective assertion that 'they are not us and we are not them'. This contains within it also a diminution of self, something that may not be recognised to start with and perhaps never understood until it is too late. Regards Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ ** who probably, like so many others, left Oz because not enough people could put down their bl**dy beer cans long enough to actually listen to what she was saying. Stathis Papaioannou wrote: Mark, I would still draw a distinction between the illogical and the foolish or unwise. Being illogical is generally foolish, but the converse is not necessarily the case. The example I have given before is of a person who wants to jump off the top of a tall building, either because (a) he thinks he is superman and will be able to fly or (b) he is reckless or suicidal. In both cases the course of action is unwise, and we should try to stop him, but in (a) he is delusional while in (b) he is not. It isn't just of academic interest, either, because the approach to stopping him from doing it again is quite different in each case. Similarly with the example of the economist, the approach to stopping him will be different depending on whether he is trying to ruin the economy because he wants to or because he is incompetent or making decisions on false information. Stathis Papaioannou Date: Thu, 28 Dec 2006 01:15:34 +0900 From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: 'reason' and ethics; was computer pain And yet I persist ... [the hiatus of familial duties and seasonal excesses now draws to a close [Oh yeah, Happy New Year Folks!] SP: 'If we are talking about a system designed to destroy the economy of a country in order to soften it up for invasion, for example, then an economist can apply all his skill and knowledge in a perfectly reasonable manner in order to achieve this.' We should beware of conceding too much too soon. Something is reasonable only if it can truly be expected to fulfil the intentions of its designer. Otherwise it is at best logical but, in the kinds of context we are alluding to here, benighted and a manifestation of fundamentally diminished 'reason'. Something can only be 'reasonable' it its context. If a proposed course of action can be shown to be ultimately self defeating - in the sense of including its reasonably predictably final consequences, and yet it is still actively proposed, then the proposal is NOT reasonable
Re: 'reason' and ethics; was computer pain
SP: ' I don't thereby think it is OK for anyone to do any horrible thing they want. I have my own values, as it happens broadly in agreement with what you have outlined below.' MP: I assumed as such :-) Furthermore I tend to think that we also will agree on a tenet I believe is attributed to Socrates: 'The unexamined life is not worth living!' Now there is an embedded assumption and a half ! :-) And now I look at it a bit, it seems to embody both the truth of your assertion about the 'pure arbitrariness' of values, and the essence of what freedom we humans really have. [Note: I refuse to digress into discussions of 'free will'.] A key issue is self-reference. I think this is well illustrated by what may be the one true free gift of nature, after the fact of being born of course. Doctors and researchers call it the placebo effect. I like to characterise it by its shortest expression in mantra format - in English anyway - the injunction: 'Think positive, it's better for you!' This can be confronting to those of us who may have been habituated to a negative disposition and all the rationalisations that entrench it: [one of mine was 'B negative, not just a blood group, but a way of life!' :-]. The evidence is good however, that positive thinking - choosing to say 'the glass is half full' rather than 'the glass is half empty' - has beneficial effects of one's general health and also on the breadth and quality of thought. It is not a criticism to say that it is just a matter of belief, because this in fact is the key point! If one believes that the placebo effect is a real process occurring in the real world, and it IS, then there is nothing illusory or otherwise false in choosing to 'think positive', because that is the key process involved. Tout simple, n'est ce pas! Everything else in life must be paid for: things are either made by people who must be paid or borrowed from nature which must be paid back. In the case of examining one's life, again there is an element of 'it pays for itself' but perhaps it is more in the nature of a surfboard ride [which I have observed but never done] or an endless roller coaster. I mean the energy source is the life giving energy of the sun which lifts us up and carries us along like the surfer's wave. The inevitable entropy of our progress can be passed off to the blackness of the night sky, so long as we determine to avoid harm to self and others where it is avoidable and avoid causing suffering to other creatures where that too is avoidable. I personally choose to believe that in the examination of one's own life, the interdependence of what is and what ought, become ever more clearly manifest. Not that we can impose anything of this on others - Hah! I can't even impose it on myself. BUT discovering the truth of what I am seems to lead ever more clearly to an inherited core [of genetic/memetic combination] which I share with others, and an ever wider sweep of life affirming possibilities which I can share with others. If I deny this then it seems to me that I am, in the final analysis, saying that I am of a different species from at least some other Homo sapiens around the world. The reflexive nature of our human experience seems to carry with it the necessity of choosing the 'truths' that we affirm. If we gain the ability to contemplate the bases of our actions and decisions and then say: 'Oh, I don't have time to do that.' or some such, then we are none the less choosing by default and making ourselves less than what we thought ourselves to be. That was longer than I expected but hopefully not too verbose. Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ Stathis Papaioannou wrote: Mark, Let me make it clear at this late point in the debate that, just because I don't believe there is any absolute morality, I don't thereby think it is OK for anyone to do any horrible thing they want. I have my own values, as it happens broadly in agreement with what you have outlined below. I judge actions reasonable or unreasonable given that a certain end is desirable, but only my values will tell me what this end is, and the values themselves are beyond reason: they simply are what they are. Stathis Papaioannou Date: Thu, 28 Dec 2006 16:51:08 +0900 From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: 'reason' and ethics; was computer pain OK Stathis, I happily concede your point in relation to our word 'logical', but not in relation to 'reason'. Logic belongs to the tight-nit language of logico-mathematics but reason is *about* the real world and we cannot allow the self-deluding bullies and cheats of the world to steal *our* language! I like the way Dr Dorothy Rowe, a psychologist and writer [ another useful Australian export **] puts it: Power is the ability to get others to accept your description of the world
Re: The Meaning of Life
SP: ' In the end, what is right is an irreducible personal belief, which you can try to change by appeal to emotions or by example, but not by appeal to logic or empirical facts. And in fact I feel much safer that way: if someone honestly believed that he knew what was right as surely as he knew 2+2=4, he would be a very dangerous person. Religious fanatics are not dangerous because they want to do evil, but because they want to do good. ' MP: I agree with this, saving only that, on a 'numbers' basis, there are those whose personal evolution takes them beyond the dynamic of 'good' or 'evil' into the domain of power for its own sake. This entails complete loss of empathic ability and I think it could be argued that such a person is 'legislating' himself out of the human species. MP: I think a key point with 'irreducible personal belief' is that the persons in question need to acknowledge the beliefs as such and take responsibility for them. I believe we have to point this out, whenever we get the opportunity, because generally most people are reluctant to engage in analysis of their own beliefs, in public anyway. I think part of the reason for this is the cultural climate [meme-scape?] in which Belief in a G/god/s or uncritical Faith are still held to be perfectly respectable. This cultural climate is what Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennet have been criticising in recent books and articles. SP: 'I am not entirely convinced that comp is true' MP: At the moment I am satisfied that 'comp' is NOT true, certainly in any format that asserts that 'integers' are all that is needed. 'Quantum' is one thing, but 'digital' is quite another :-) The main problem [fact I would prefer to say] is that existence is irreducible whereas numbers or Number be dependent upon something/s existing. MP: Why are we not zombies? The answer is in the fact of self-referencing. In our case [as hominids] there are peculiarities of construction and function arisen from our evolutionary history, but there is nothing in principle to deny self-awareness from a silicon-electronic entity that embodied sufficient details within a model of self in the world. The existence of such a model would constitute its mind, broadly speaking, and the updating of the model of self in the world would be the experience of self awareness. What it would be like TO BE the updating of such a model of self in the world is something we will probably have to wait awhile to be told :-) Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ Stathis Papaioannou wrote: Bruno Marchal writes: Le 31-déc.-06, à 04:59, Stathis Papaioannou a écrit (to Tom Caylor): Of course: questions of personal meaning are not scientific questions. Physics may show you how to build a nuclear bomb, but it won't tell you whether you should use it. But Physics, per se, is not supposed to answer this. Socio-economics could give light, as could computer simulation of nuclear explosion in cities And some (still putative) theory of ethics could perhaps put light on that question too. Well, the ultimate decision is a problem for the president But the president and its advisers could consult some decision theory ... perhaps. No, those theories won't answer the question of whether you should use the bomb either. Suppose your theory says something like, if you wish to save a lives by taking b lives, where ab, then you should use the bomb. The scientific part of this theory involves demonstrating that, in fact, use of the bomb would save a lives by taking b lives. But this does not tell you whether you should actually use the bomb. Neither would an ethical theory like utilitarianism tell you what to do: it might confirm that according to the theory it is the right thing to do, but utilitarianism cannot tell you that utilitarianism is right. In the end, what is right is an irreducible personal belief, which you can try to change by appeal to emotions or by example, but not by appeal to logic or empirical facts. And in fact I feel much safer that way: if someone honestly believed that he knew what was right as surely as he knew 2+2=4, he would be a very dangerous person. Religious fanatics are not dangerous because they want to do evil, but because they want to do good. The number of people killed in the name of God vastly outnumbers the number killed in the name of Satan. Where I think I disagree with you [Tom] is that you seem to want to reduce the irreducible and make values and personal meaning real world objects, albeit not of the kind that can be detected by scientific instruments, perhaps issued by God. But in proposing this you are swapping one irreducible entity extremely well-grounded in empirical evidence (I know I'm conscious, and I know that when my brain stops so does my consciousness) for another irreducible entity with no grounding in empirical evidence
Re: The Meaning of Life
of the same raw fact of life: the model of something is not the thing, it is only ABOUT the thing. Amen! :-) Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ Stathis Papaioannou wrote: Mark Peaty writes: SP: ' In the end, what is right is an irreducible personal belief, which you can try to change by appeal to emotions or by example, but not by appeal to logic or empirical facts. And in fact I feel much safer that way: if someone honestly believed that he knew what was right as surely as he knew 2+2=4, he would be a very dangerous person. Religious fanatics are not dangerous because they want to do evil, but because they want to do good. ' MP: I agree with this, saving only that, on a 'numbers' basis, there are those whose personal evolution takes them beyond the dynamic of 'good' or 'evil' into the domain of power for its own sake. This entails complete loss of empathic ability and I think it could be argued that such a person is 'legislating' himself out of the human species. MP: I think a key point with 'irreducible personal belief' is that the persons in question need to acknowledge the beliefs as such and take responsibility for them. I believe we have to point this out, whenever we get the opportunity, because generally most people are reluctant to engage in analysis of their own beliefs, in public anyway. I think part of the reason for this is the cultural climate [meme-scape?] in which Belief in a G/god/s or uncritical Faith are still held to be perfectly respectable. This cultural climate is what Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennet have been criticising in recent books and articles. SP: 'I am not entirely convinced that comp is true' MP: At the moment I am satisfied that 'comp' is NOT true, certainly in any format that asserts that 'integers' are all that is needed. 'Quantum' is one thing, but 'digital' is quite another :-) The main problem [fact I would prefer to say] is that existence is irreducible whereas numbers or Number be dependent upon something/s existing. I have fallen into sometimes using the term comp as short for computationalism as something picked up from Bruno. On the face of it, computationalism seems quite sensible: the best theory of consciousness and the most promising candidate for producing artificial intelligence/consciousness (if they are the same thing: see below). Assuming comp, Bruno goes through 8 steps in his Universal Dovetailer Argument (UDA), eg. in this paper: http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/publications/SANE2004MARCHAL.htm All of the steps are relatively straightforward until step 8, which invokes an argument discovered by Bruno and Tim Maudlin demonstrating that there is a problem with the theory that the mental supervenes on the physical. It seems that to be consistent you have to allow either that any computation, including the supposedly conscious ones, supervenes on any physical activity, or that computations do not supervene on physical activity at all but are complete in themselves, consciousness included, by virtue of their status as Platonic objects. Bruno concludes that the latter is the case, but Maudlin appears to take both possibilities as obviously absurd and thus presents the paper as a problem with computationalism itself. MP: Why are we not zombies? The answer is in the fact of self-referencing. In our case [as hominids] there are peculiarities of construction and function arisen from our evolutionary history, but there is nothing in principle to deny self-awareness from a silicon-electronic entity that embodied sufficient details within a model of self in the world. The existence of such a model would constitute its mind, broadly speaking, and the updating of the model of self in the world would be the experience of self awareness. What it would be like TO BE the updating of such a model of self in the world is something we will probably have to wait awhile to be told :-) It seems reasonable to theorise that if an entity could behave like a conscious being, it must be a conscious being. However, the theory does not have the strength of logical necessity. It is quite possible that if nature had electronic circuits to play with, beings displaying intelligent behaviour similar to our own may have evolved, but lacking consciousness. This need not lead to the usual criticism: in that case, how can I be sure my fellow humans are conscious? My fellow humans not only behave like me, they have a biological brain like me. We would have to invoke magic to explain how God has breathed consciousness into one person but not another, but there is no such theoretical problem if the other person turns out to be a robot. My personal view is that if a computer simply learned to copy my behaviour by studying me closely if it were conscious it would probably be differently conscious. If the computer attempted to copy me by emulating my neuronal activity I would
Re: The Meaning of Life
might be called the not-quite-opposite - is possibly no more than a boundary, the fact of the Existent not being connected. I can elaborate on this, at length if this is called for, but I do not have any snazzy notation. It is how I think about so called Process Physics. A key point is that of existence. As far as I can see no amount of gross or subtle 'computation' theory can sidestep, let alone dispense with, the raw fact of existence. If it were not such a great reassurance to be able to be aware of one's own existence, it could be down right embarrassing to feel forced to appeal to common sense on such a profound issue, especially when confronted with deeply penetrating arguments uttered by highly educated people. Any way, however silly it may seem to some, I cling to my personal axiom that if something cannot be put into plain English then it probably isn't true. Then I say to myself: 'What if I say that I don't exist?' This just doesn't seem to ring true somehow, so then I try saying: 'What if I say that the universe doesn't exist?' This doesn't make sense to me either so I conclude, rightly or wrongly, that for the time being at least there is a universe and I am here and that it is most likely that the universe exists whether I happen to notice it or not. I think it is bigger than me, in fact much much bigger! SP: 'What if we use the word 'cause' rather than supervenience?' MP: I prefer the word 'is'. It seems to me to be a lot simpler. Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ Stathis Papaioannou wrote: Mark Peaty writes: SP: 'using the term comp as short for computationalism as something picked up from Bruno. On the face of it, computationalism seems quite sensible: the best theory of consciousness and the most promising candidate for producing artificial intelligence/consciousness' That is what I thought 'comp' meant. My approach to this is to adhere, as much as possible, to plain and simple English. Not being a 'mathematician' I stick with my type of sceptical method. To me this does not seem deeply problematic although is does of course limit the scope of conversations I can participate in. As far as I can see, Bruno's grand scheme depends on 'assume', like the economists do. Unfortunately that which is assumed remains, I believe, unprovable. Furthermore there are deep, common sense, problems which undermine all these theories of universal emulation possibilities, never mind those potentially lethal :-) teleporting/fax holidays and cryogenic time shifts. The biggest hurdle is the requirement for infinite computing ability. This is simply the recognition that all measurements are approximations so the teleporter/fax machine could only ever send an approximate copy of me to whatever destination duty or holiday dreamings might lead me. Still, it is probable that I, as subjective experiencer, would not notice most anomalies, particularly if trying to fill in the temporal gaps caused by Bruno's gratuitous delays in reading me back out of his archive :-) Recall that ordinary life does not involve anything like perfect copying of your brain from moment to moment. Thousands of neurons are dying all the time and you don't even notice, and it is possible to infarct a substantial proportion of your brain and finish up with just a bit of a limp. So although a copy of your brain will need to meet some minimum standard this standard will fall far short of perfect copying at the quantum level. This limitation hits all the 'Matrix' type scenarios as well: the emulation system would require essentially infinite computing capacity to reproduce any useful world that a real person inhabits. If on the other hand the Matrix is only concerned to make A world, its virtual reality inhabitants might be sustained [I am admitting this as a possibility] until they started engaging in real science. As I understand things the denizens of a Matrix type world would start to find real anomalies in their 'reality' unless the matrix machine could operate at a fineness of resolution unattainable by any experimental method the matrixians could devise. There would be much less, or even no problem at all if they were all believers in 'Intelligent Design' of course. [I can put that very rudely as: the problem is not 'If our mind were simple enough to understand then we would be too dumb to understand it' but rather 'If Intelligent Design were really true then we have been designed to be so dumb that it really doesn't matter!'] You don't actually have to emulate the entire universe, just enough to fool its inhabitants. For example, you don't need to emulate the appearance of a snowflake in the Andromeda galaxy ecxept in the unlikely event that someone went to have a look at it. Re Platonic objects - I think this is illusory. The numbers that people write down and think about are words in the language/s of logico
Re: The Meaning of Life
For my benefit, could you flesh that out in plain English please? Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ 1Z wrote: Mark Peaty wrote: SP: 'using the term comp as short for computationalism as something picked up from Bruno. On the face of it, computationalism seems quite sensible: the best theory of consciousness and the most promising candidate for producing artificial intelligence/consciousness' What Bruno calls comp isn't standard computaitonalism, it has an element of Platonism. --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: The Meaning of Life
Brent: 'Remember that Bruno is a logician.' MP: :-) Yes, this much is easy to infer. The full scope of what this might MEAN however, is little short of terrifying ... ;-) MP: Infinity, infinite, infinitely big or small; these are challenging concepts at the best of times and made very interesting to the point of mind-boggling in the contexts of QM and relativity theory. In QM, there is apparently NOT an infinitely small level of existence that could be reached by any kind of measurement due to the shortest length and shortest durations denoted by the Planck length and Planck time. I personally wonder whether there is room to criticise this limitation. The underlying concept of Process Physics [let me call that PP from now on] directly challenges the idea. MP: My point about measurement is to do with the fact that in seeking to get as exact a copy as possible, not just a working model, it is possible that the digital representations of salient features might need more decimal places than the recording and/or transmission systems can provide. This is a matter of big as opposed to infinite of course but as I pointed out before, the copy is not that of a static something or other it is a sufficient facsimile of a very complex dynamic system. This means that AT VERY LEAST two measurements of everything will be needed AND THEN a computation of all salient displacements WITH further measurements of system parts undergoing acceleration WITH WHICH calculations of the accelerations and displacements might finally be made. As far as I can see the amount of computation required to get all that in order will always be whatever is the maximum that the copier is currently capable of and might indeed require 'infinite' calculations to get all of it right. Now I realise this is beginning to sound like an old fart imitating a wet blanket but these practical considerations, even if here only arising in a hypothetical and highly unlikely situation, are nicely indicative of just the sort of thing that distinguishes the real world from the beautiful but artificial worlds envisaged by 'comp', aggressive QM and other theories that confuse description with ontology. I could go on and on but it is very late here so let me finish by paraphrasing a line or two out of the 'Lord's prayer' - as might be addressed to the great IT or Universe: 'Lead us not into temptation, and deliver us from hubris, for Thine is the location, the duration and the entropy, for at least the next 15 billion years and maybe for eternity, Amen! Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ PS: Qualia: part of 'what it is like to be the updating of the model' therefore essentially a first person aspect. Not something to worry about and let's NOT get wired up just yet! :-) The project of inducing qualia in others corresponding to those of one's own is my definition of fine art. It is by and large the fundamental criterion for judging success in any art. Brent Meeker wrote: Mark Peaty wrote: SP: 'using the term comp as short for computationalism as something picked up from Bruno. On the face of it, computationalism seems quite sensible: the best theory of consciousness and the most promising candidate for producing artificial intelligence/consciousness' That is what I thought 'comp' meant. My approach to this is to adhere, as much as possible, to plain and simple English. Not being a 'mathematician' I stick with my type of sceptical method. To me this does not seem deeply problematic although is does of course limit the scope of conversations I can participate in. As far as I can see, Bruno's grand scheme depends on 'assume', like the economists do. Unfortunately that which is assumed remains, I believe, unprovable. Furthermore there are deep, common sense, problems which undermine all these theories of universal emulation possibilities, never mind those potentially lethal :-) teleporting/fax holidays and cryogenic time shifts. The biggest hurdle is the requirement for infinite computing ability. Remember that Bruno is a logician. When he writes infinite he really means infinite - not really, really big as physicists do. Almost all numbers are bigger than 10^120, which is the biggest number that appears in physics (and it's wrong). This is simply the recognition that all measurements are approximations so the teleporter/fax machine could only ever send an approximate copy of me to whatever destination duty or holiday dreamings might lead me. Still, it is probable that I, as subjective experiencer, would not notice most anomalies, particularly if trying to fill in the temporal gaps caused by Bruno's gratuitous delays in reading me back out of his archive :-) This limitation hits all the 'Matrix' type scenarios as well: the emulation system would require essentially infinite computing capacity to reproduce any useful world that a real person
Re: The Meaning of Life
Brent: 'However, all that is needed for the arguments that appear on this list is to recreate a rough, functioning copy of the body plus a detailed reproduction of memory and a brain that functioned approximately the same. That much might not be too hard. After all, as Stathis points out, you're not the same atoms you were a week ago' MP: Well! I'm not going to let YOU pull the levers or press any buttons if I have to be faxed anywhere soon! You make philosophers' copy-machines sound like props for Frankenstein's Monster or that movie 'The Fly'. Furthermore ... memory and a brain that functioned approximately the same would seem to be rather less than what Bruno's arguments about copying require. But my point is that, whilst the ideas are cute, they are also nonsense any way. Most people have problems enough living from day to day, and the only time that 'copying' of a person really has any relevance is where surgery or prosthetic augmentation of some kind really should be done to alleviate suffering or prevent premature death. As for Stathis's assertion about seemingly minor changes which commonly occur to people's brains as they get older, like the odd little stroke here and there, it is always a question of the facts in each case. Some deficiencies turn out to be crucial in terms of quality of life: loosing the use of one or two fingers could be annoying, embarrassing and on occasion quite dangerous. Losing the ability to remember the names of all the people you know, would likewise not be nice. On the other hand, losing the ability to recognise things on the left side of your world, or losing the ability to see the people you knew before as being THOSE people such that you become convinced that the person you are with is a substitute, now that could be very dysfunctional and very distressing. I have seen it written that in fact most people who survive past middle age, do in fact suffer from 'micro' strokes quite often but usually the perceived experience is that of progressively weakened memory. Not Alzheimer's which is a league of its own, but just difficulty remembering certain things. I am just about to post another message which might stir some angst [or not in which case 'ho hum'], so I leave this here. Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ Brent Meeker wrote: Mark Peaty wrote: Brent: 'Remember that Bruno is a logician.' MP: :-) Yes, this much is easy to infer. The full scope of what this might MEAN however, is little short of terrifying ... ;-) MP: Infinity, infinite, infinitely big or small; these are challenging concepts at the best of times and made very interesting to the point of mind-boggling in the contexts of QM and relativity theory. In QM, there is apparently NOT an infinitely small level of existence that could be reached by any kind of measurement due to the shortest length and shortest durations denoted by the Planck length and Planck time. I personally wonder whether there is room to criticise this limitation. The underlying concept of Process Physics [let me call that PP from now on] directly challenges the idea. MP: My point about measurement is to do with the fact that in seeking to get as exact a copy as possible, not just a working model, it is possible that the digital representations of salient features might need more decimal places than the recording and/or transmission systems can provide. Lawrence Krauss wrote a book called The Physics of Star Trek in which he discusses the transporter on the Enterprise. He calculates that to measure the location of the atoms in a human body in order to recreate it (as in 'Bean me up Scotty') would take an enormous amount of energy - something like converting the mass of the Earth to energy. However, all that is needed for the arguments that appear on this list is to recreate a rough, functioning copy of the body plus a detailed reproduction of memory and a brain that functioned approximately the same. That much might not be too hard. After all, as Stathis points out, you're not the same atoms you were a week ago - and I've already forgotten what I had for lunch day before yesterday. Brent Meeker --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: The Meaning of [your] Life
. Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ See down below for: 10 results for: physics Bruno Marchal wrote: Le 05-janv.-07, 05:55, Stathis Papaioannou a crit : Bruno: If consciousness supervenes on all physical processes a case can be made that matter could be relevant for consciousness. (I see Peter Jones makes a similar remark). snip You mean a quantum superposition? (then with comp such a superposition really describes an infinity of immaterial computational histories in which each page contains a finite amount of ink. Well it is rather similar with the quantum mechanical superposition). The only sense in which (both with quantum field theory AND with the comp-physics) I can accept an infinite information on a black page is related to renormalization problem, spurious infinite energies But then why to assume a physical world with all those infinities when comp forces us to deal with already enough infinities? You loss me I'm afraid. Are you trying to save both comp AND the physical supervenience? We have not yet derive the whole of physics from comp, but we can already expect the "mind-matter" mapping to be something quite complex. For me it is obvious that to a mind state there will be an infinity of "computational states and histories" going through that mind state. The reverse is harder because we are unable (assuming comp) to singularize a "comp-physical states". Physical states *are* already first person plural (inter-subjective) appearances emerging from the gluing and overlapping of infinities of computations (and thus immaterial(*)). Unless I am wrong, standard computationalism is flawed, like both the monist and dualist doctrine of materialism are flawed. It would be wrong to say that comp makes materialism refutated, but for a similar reason that it is wrong to say that bilogy has proves that vitalism is refutated. But biology has made vitalism explanation-useless, and computationalism makes materialism explantion useless too. Of course it remains the possibility that comp is incorrect. If comp is true, we have to live with that possibility forever. Bruno 10 results for: physics View results from: Dictionary | Thesaurus | Encyclopedia | All Reference | the Web Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1) - Cite This Source physics /fzks/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[fiz-iks] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation noun (used with a singular verb) the science that deals with matter, energy, motion, and force. [Origin: 158090; see physic, -ics] Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1) Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, Random House, Inc. 2006. American Heritage Dictionary - Cite This Source physic(fz'k) Pronunciation Key n. A medicine or drug, especially a cathartic. Archaic The art or profession of medicine. tr.v. physicked, physicking, physics To act on as a cathartic. To cure or heal. To treat with or as if with medicine. [Middle English phisik, from Old French fisique, medical science, natural science, from Latin, natural science, from Greek phusik, feminine of phusikos, of nature, from phusis, nature; see bheu- in Indo-European roots.] (Download Now or Buy the Book) The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. American Heritage Dictionary - Cite This Source physics(fz'ks) Pronunciation Key n. (used with a sing. verb) The science of matter and energy and of interactions between the two, grouped in traditional fields such as acoustics, optics, mechanics, thermodynamics, and electromagnetism, as well as in modern extensions including atomic and nuclear physics, cryogenics, solid-state physics, particle physics, and plasma physics. (used with a pl. verb) Physical properties, interactions, processes, or laws: the physics of supersonic flight. (used with a sing. verb) Archaic The study of the natural or material world and phenomena; natural philosophy. [From Latin physica, from Greek (ta) phusika, from neuter pl. of phusikos, of nature; see physics.] (Download Now or Buy the Book) The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. WordNet - Cite This Source physics noun the science of matter and energy and their interactions WordNet 2.1, 2005 Princeton University The American Heritage Science
Re: The Meaning of Life - COMP and Circumstance
Thanks for this Peter: I am still chewing on this, with a view to ultimate digestion. I do get a certain kind of Angels and pinheads impression about some of it though. Hopefully that is just an illusion! :-) Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ 1Z wrote: 1Z wrote: Mark Peaty wrote: SP: 'using the term comp as short for computationalism as something picked up from Bruno. On the face of it, computationalism seems quite sensible: the best theory of consciousness and the most promising candidate for producing artificial intelligence/consciousness' What Bruno calls comp isn't standard computationalism, it has an element of Platonism. Mark Peaty wrote: For my benefit, could you flesh that out in plain English please? Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ BRUNO's COMP INCLUDES ARITHMETICAL REALISM- BM: 'The precise comp version is given by a) the yes doctor act of faith YD b) Church (Hypo) Thesis CT c) Arithmetical Realism hypothesis AR ' BM:'Now, it is a fact, the failure of logicism, that you cannot define integers without implicitely postulating them. So Arithmetical existence is a quasi necessary departure reality. It is big and not unifiable by any axiomatisable theory (by Godel). (axiomatizable theory = theory such that you can verify algorithmically the proofs of the theorems) I refer often to Arithmetical Realism AR; and it constitutes 1/3 of the computationalist hypothesis, alias the comp. hyp., alias COMP: COMP = AR + CT + YD (Yes, more acronyms, sorry!) AR = Arithmetical Realism (cf also the Hardy post) CT = Church Thesis YD = (I propose) the Yes Doctor, It is the belief that you can be decomposed into part such that you don't experience anything when those parts are substituted by functionnaly equivalent digital parts. It makes possible to give sense saying yes to a surgeon who propose you some artificial substitution of your body. With COMP you can justify why this needs an irreductible act of faith (the consistency of COMP entails the consistency of the negation of COMP, this is akin to Godel's second incompleteness theorem. It has nothing to do with the hypothesis that there is a physical universe which would be either the running or the output of a computer program. Hal, with COMP the identity problem is tackled by the venerable old computer science/logic approach to self-reference (with the result by Godel, Lob, Solovay, build on Kleene, Turing, Post etc...)' REALISM AND PLATONONISM -- BM: 'Arithmetical Realism (AR). This is the assumption that arithmetical proposition, like ''1+1=2,'' or Goldbach conjecture, or the inexistence of a bigger prime, or the statement that some digital machine will stop, or any Boolean formula bearing on numbers, are true independently of me, you, humanity, the physical universe (if that exists), etc. ' PJ: That's an epistemological claim then BM: 'It is a version of Platonism limited at least to arithmetical truth'. PJ: Is it ? But Platonism is an ontoligcal thesis. As a standard reference work has it: The philosophy of Plato, or an approach to philosophy resembling his. For example, someone who asserts that numbers exist independently of the things they number could be called a Platonist. BM: 'It should not be confused with the much stronger Pythagorean form of AR, AR+, which asserts that only natural numbers exist together with their nameable relations: all the rest being derivative from those relations. If Pythagoreanism is stronger than Platonism in insisting that everything is derivable from (existing) natural numbers, is Platonism weaker than Pythagoreanism in insisting that everything is derivable from existing numbers of all kinds, natural or not? Is Platonism not being taken a s alcaim about existinence here, not just a claim about truth ? BM: A machine will be said an Arithmetical Platonist if the machine believes enough elementary arithmetical truth (including some scheme of induction axiom). PJ: Switching back to an epistemological definition of platonism BM:'Instead of linking [the pain I feel] at space-time (x,t) to [a machine state] at space-time (x,t), we are obliged to associate [the pain I feel at space-time (x,t)] to a type or a sheaf of computations (existing forever in the arithmetical Platonia which is accepted as existing independently of our selves with arithmetical realism).' PJ: Another use of Realism as a thesis about existence. PJ: And if the pain-feeling you exists eternally, how do ever *not* feel pain ? There is an ontological gulf between tokens and types, between the temporal and the eternal, which has been leaped over at a bound here. BRUNO ADMITS TO (ONTOLOGIAL) PLATONISM - BM: 'Numbers are not physically real does
Re: The Meaning of Life
SP: 'So given months or years, you really are like a car in which every single component has been replaced, the only remaining property of the original car being the design' MP: Yes, indeed. For the word design here, I prefer to use 'structure', with the proviso that the structure/s we are interested in is/are not just static but some are dynamic. I like to use the word 'construct' [noun] to refer to these things. The kinds of changes occurring may be summarised in a very general sense as of three types: 1/ apparent non-change, which might be really invariant down to the smallest level of measurement, but might also be cases of just oscillation about some average length or volume [say] with no significant topological, charge or mass changes, 2/ cyclical changes in which topology, charge, charge distributions, or mass, whatever, vary in some significant repeating way, and 3/ non-repeating changes which might be manifestations of growth and development, creation of memories, damage from disease or just entropy-the passage of time. I have many times participated in discussions of what can be classed as a 'thing' in the real world, including persons in a purely categorical sense, but very often the simple idea of 'thing' is dismissed just as I am in the process of pointing out that there is every good reason to take thoughts and perceptions, plans and memories as all being things in the brain. As far as I am concerned I have never seen any killer argument as to why it is not valid for me to do so. Just recently I made the assertion that Rene Descartes was wrong to say that mental things have no extension. Somebody responded with something like Oh yeah! And how long is my idea of a . something or other ...? [I have lost track of which message, indeed which list, this took place on but 'Pink elephant' would do for an example.] Well I think the evidence accruing from all the studies of brain imaging and so forth, shows fairly clearly that active constructs span many regions within the brain: cortex, cerebellum, limbic system, and so forth, and it is the topographic and temporal features of the activity which endow each construct with its figurative identity and function. These things which simply ARE the mental content of our brains, exist as explicit, active dynamic logical entities when invoked, and exist only implicitly at other times as the components of structural particularity in synapses, dendrite length and location, etc. which came about when the constructs came into existence in the brain in question. Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ Stathis Papaioannou wrote: Mark Peaty writes: Brent: 'However, all that is needed for the arguments that appear on this list is to recreate a rough, functioning copy of the body plus a detailed reproduction of memory and a brain that functioned approximately the same. That much might not be too hard. After all, as Stathis points out, you're not the same atoms you were a week ago' MP: Well! I'm not going to let YOU pull the levers or press any buttons if I have to be faxed anywhere soon! You make philosophers' copy-machines sound like props for Frankenstein's Monster or that movie 'The Fly'. Furthermore ... memory and a brain that functioned approximately the same would seem to be rather less than what Bruno's arguments about copying require. But my point is that, whilst the ideas are cute, they are also nonsense any way. Most people have problems enough living from day to day, and the only time that 'copying' of a person really has any relevance is where surgery or prosthetic augmentation of some kind really should be done to alleviate suffering or prevent premature death. As for Stathis's assertion about seemingly minor changes which commonly occur to people's brains as they get older, like the odd little stroke here and there, it is always a question of the facts in each case. Some deficiencies turn out to be crucial in terms of quality of life: loosing the use of one or two fingers could be annoying, embarrassing and on occasion quite dangerous. Losing the ability to remember the names of all the people you know, would likewise not be nice. On the other hand, losing the ability to recognise things on the left side of your world, or losing the ability to see the people you knew before as being THOSE people such that you become convinced that the person you are with is a substitute, now that could be very dysfunctional and very distressing. I have seen it written that in fact most people who survive past middle age, do in fact suffer from 'micro' strokes quite often but usually the perceived experience is that of progressively weakened memory. Not Alzheimer's which is a league of its own, but just difficulty remembering certain things. Our bodies, including all neural tissue, are constantly falling apart and being rebuilt
Re: The Meaning of [your] Life
in question can interact with an environment like what its organic original was involved with, the entity in question would be conscious. Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ Brent Meeker wrote: Mark Peaty wrote: Bruno, Stathis, Brent, Peter,Brent, Tom, Hal and others, I have to be very impertinent here and try to draw your attention to something you are just not getting. There is NO ultimate answer to the meaning of life, the universe and everything except that IT IS, and you are here to take part in it and observe yourself and others doing so. Existence is the source of value, indeed it is the essence of value. I am not in the habit of putting myself forward, but here I believe the ideas are what count and I believe the issue is very important. No, problem - we're all human beings here. I mean at 55 yo I know I have already attained 'old fart' status for most people I meet. But one thing I know for sure is that, just like me, YOU are not going to live for ever. Bruno thinks he will :-) As most of you seem a fair bit smarter than me I assume that you can/will mostly choose how you spend your limited lifetime. Choose wisely 'cause it's a once-off. I really do think that before any of you get much older you should take a VERY careful look at what I have been writing here. Have a look also at the common meanings for the word physics [samples included below]. I don't need to read definitions of physics - I are one. :-) If you don't then I think you are going to spend the rest of your lives chasing shadows, and end up a bunch of old men sitting on the cyberspace equivalent of a park bench, STILL chewing over the same old problem! Of course, if that is what you want then that's fine. But don't say you weren't warned! :-) There's something to be said for chewing the metaphysical fat. But worry about yourself - I race motorcycles on the weekend. the fact is, being conscious is inherently paradoxical, and there is no escape from the paradox, just like there is no escape from the universe - until you die that is. Your impressions, perceptions, feelings, intuitions, etc. of being here now [where you are of course] is what it is like to be the updating of the model of self in the world which you brain is constantly constructing all the time you are awake. When you sleep there are times when enough of the model gets evoked that you have a dream that you can remember. The paradox is that for most of the time we assume that this awareness - consciousness, call it what you like - IS the world, i.e. what it is like to be 'me' here now, whereas in fact it is only what it is like to be the model of 'me' here now. This does not mean that you don't exist; you do exist, and you must pay taxes in partial payment for the privilege, until you die that is. [I work for the Australian Taxation Office so I know about these things :-] There is however a lot more stuff going on in your brain than is actually explicitly involved in your consciousness of the moment, as far as I can see there are usually a couple or triple of very sophisticated tasks going on in parallel but swapping in and out of focussed attention as needs and priorities of the moment require. There are often also several other tasks simmering away like pots on the back burners of your stove. I agree. Consciousness is a very small part of thinking - even of logical and mathematical thinking (c.f. Poincare' effect). I believe it is the hippocampus which maintains the tasks in process through re-entrant signalling to the relevant cortical and other areas which embody the salient features of the constructs involved. Binding is achieved through re-entrant signalling of resonant wave forms such that each construct EXISTS as a dynamic logical entity able to maintain its own structure sufficiently to prevent certain other things happening and to invoke through association [or perhaps through reaction to patterns of inhibition, whatever] other constructs as necessary. Note the key word 'exists'. The energy is supplied through the work done as the neurons re-establish the resting potential of their cell membranes. And here I should point out that most of the posts on this list do not seem to talk much about structure, and yet it is the spatia-temporal structures of interacting cell assemblies which embody the patterns of information which make muscles move. Think about it! This is what you should be really concentrating on, because you and I are NOTHING if our muscles can't be made to move in exactly the right way and the right time. Except it is obvious that it doesn't take that specific structure to make the muscles move - anything that sets off the appropriate efferent nerve will work. Do you agree that your brain could be replaced, say neuron by neuron, with electronic neurons and still move your muscles...and still maintain your consciousness? I know I have written 'I believe' up
Re: The Meaning of Life
SP: 'Getting back to the original question about teleportation experiments, are you saying that it would be impossible, or just technically very difficult to preserve personal identity whilst undergoing such a process? As Brent pointed out, technical difficulty is not an issue in thought experiments. , MP: I have answered this, in responding to Brent. In summary I say: if it is just A [any old] rendition of a human you want, then given that thought experiments allow that all practical challenges can be overcome, the answer is Yes! On the other hand if the strict requirement of an exact copy of a particular person is required to be output then it becomes a question of whether or not truly infinite computing power is required to calculate the changes occurring within the original at scan time. If it is then the answer is NO, because infinity is infinity. I think Derek Parfit's copier [/Reasons and Persons/ Ch 10] was 'usually' producing complete and accurate copies, because one of his scenarios addresses what would happen if there was a fault in the transmission. Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ Stathis Papaioannou wrote: Mark Peaty writes: SP: 'So given months or years, you really are like a car in which every single component has been replaced, the only remaining property of the original car being the design' MP: Yes, indeed. For the word design here, I prefer to use 'structure', with the proviso that the structure/s we are interested in is/are not just static but some are dynamic. I like to use the word 'construct' [noun] to refer to these things. The kinds of changes occurring may be summarised in a very general sense as of three types: 1/ apparent non-change, which might be really invariant down to the smallest level of measurement, but might also be cases of just oscillation about some average length or volume [say] with no significant topological, charge or mass changes, 2/ cyclical changes in which topology, charge, charge distributions, or mass, whatever, vary in some significant repeating way, and 3/ non-repeating changes which might be manifestations of growth and development, creation of memories, damage from disease or just entropy-the passage of time. Getting back to the original question about teleportation experiments, are you saying that it would be impossible, or just technically very difficult to preserve personal identity whilst undergoing such a process? As Brent pointed out, technical difficulty is not an issue in thought experiments. Stathis Papaioannou _ Be one of the first to try Windows Live Mail. http://ideas.live.com/programpage.aspx?versionId=5d21c51a-b161-4314-9b0e-4911fb2b2e6d --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: The Meaning of Life
Brent: 'But *your* infinity is just *really big*. There are only a finite number of atoms in a person and they have only a finite number of relations. So how can an exact copy require infinite resources? ' MP: Well yes, perhaps there are only a finite number of relationships, but these relationships are not static, they must be calculated. Ultimately it will be lawyers who decide if sufficient accuracy has been attained in rendering all these dynamic relationships. As I said before, I am not a 'mathematician' in the sense that Bruno is and others who browse here are, but I read in an article in New Scientist mag. some years ago that measuring and modelling certain features - primarily non-linear features I believe - can require arbitrarily large numbers of decimal places to correctly express the digital value. These numbers then have to be calculated within systems which will multiply the error margins and truncate values. Well of course all measurement is estimation and assertion of the representative value, but if you are talking about IDENTITY then there is going to be a fair swag of technical fudging isn't there! Come on! Admit it! And what lawyers really take scientific method seriously? I rest my case - for the time being! :-) Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ Brent Meeker wrote: Mark Peaty wrote: SP: 'Getting back to the original question about teleportation experiments, are you saying that it would be impossible, or just technically very difficult to preserve personal identity whilst undergoing such a process? As Brent pointed out, technical difficulty is not an issue in thought experiments. , MP: I have answered this, in responding to Brent. In summary I say: if it is just A [any old] rendition of a human you want, then given that thought experiments allow that all practical challenges can be overcome, the answer is Yes! On the other hand if the strict requirement of an exact copy of a particular person is required to be output then it becomes a question of whether or not truly infinite computing power is required to calculate the changes occurring within the original at scan time. If it is then the answer is NO, because infinity is infinity. But *your* infinity is just *really big*. There are only a finite number of atoms in a person and they have only a finite number of relations. So how can an exact copy require infinite resources? Brent Meeker --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: The Meaning of Life
scenarios in my mind- 'tutorial' type scenes with me holding forth - and the whole thing has slotted into place. As follows: * Assuming that it is in principle feasible to 'copy' a person and either store the data obtained without deterioration or transmit the data without noticeable loss, then when that data is used to reconstitute a medically and legally acceptable facsimile, the new copy is NOT the original it is his/her identical twin brother or sister. * In this scenario, if the original which is copied ceases to exist at the place of copying, he/she has died. If the copying took place without destruction of the original then he/she is [ceteris paribus] the same person and unchanged. The legal status of the new twin will be the subject of common or statute law provoked by the invention of the new technology. * In a discussion with one of my son's friends just now we agreed that the 'Star Trek' version of the teleporter is a rather odd beasty in which not just the information/data concerning the structure and dynamics of a crew member's body was sent to a destination but the actual atoms of the body were sent also. This might seem like a tidy sort of solution to someone who didn't want to think too deeply about it, but the sending of the original's atoms would add an enormous overhead to the system, firstly the amount of energy required to accelerate all the particles to something close to the speed of light would be enormous, and secondly it would not change anything significant because it is not the fact of it being those particular atoms which is important but which kind of atoms and exactly where should they be. So when 'Scotty' or whoever beams them up, they die on the planet's surface and their identical twins are created in the spaceship. * This whole scenario actually works to support the contention of Steven Lehar that the identity of a thing includes its location and that this fact is a reflection of how our brains work in creating the phenomenal reality of our experience [see http://cns-alumni.bu.edu/~slehar/webstuff/bubw3/bubw3.html#compmech http://cns-alumni.bu.edu/%7Eslehar/webstuff/bubw3/bubw3.html#compmech]. I think that is enough for now! Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ ** http://www.reference.com/search?r=2q=Doona http://www.reference.com/search?r=2q=Doona Stathis Papaioannou wrote: Mark Peaty writes: SP: 'Getting back to the original question about teleportation experiments, are you saying that it would be impossible, or just technically very difficult to preserve personal identity whilst undergoing such a process? As Brent pointed out, technical difficulty is not an issue in thought experiments. , MP: I have answered this, in responding to Brent. In summary I say: if it is just A [any old] rendition of a human you want, then given that thought experiments allow that all practical challenges can be overcome, the answer is Yes! On the other hand if the strict requirement of an exact copy of a particular person is required to be output then it becomes a question of whether or not truly infinite computing power is required to calculate the changes occurring within the original at scan time. If it is then the answer is NO, because infinity is infinity. I think Derek Parfit's copier [Reasons and Persons Ch 10] was 'usually' producing complete and accurate copies, because one of his scenarios addresses what would happen if there was a fault in the transmission. The brain manages to maintain identity from moment to moment without perfect copying or infinite computing power. Of course, you may need very good copying and very great computing power, but this is different in kind, not just in degree, from perfect copying and infinite computing power. Stathis Papaioannou _ Be one of the first to try Windows Live Mail. http://ideas.live.com/programpage.aspx?versionId=5d21c51a-b161-4314-9b0e-4911fb2b2e6d --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: The Meaning of Life
SP: 'Is there anything about how you are feeling to day that makes you sure that aliens didn't come during the night and replace your body with an exact copy? Because that is basically what happens naturally anyway, although it isn't aliens and it takes months rather than overnight: almost every atom in your body is replaced with another atom, put in roughly the same place. If the discarded atoms were kept rather than sloughed off, exhaled etc. you would see that your identical twin of a few months ago had died and no-one even noticed, because it happened gradually. Other than in the speed and scheduling of your death, how does destructive teleportation differ from normal life?' MP: * I know, which here means 'believe with confidence', that aliens didn't come because everything feels, looks, smells, etc, as normal. I am a creature of habit just like you and there is no evidence of radical differences anywhere that I can notice. * I quibble about whether atoms are replaced within DNA except as part of the normal processes of replication and repair. That aside, it is not the atoms per se which gives my identity but their incorporation into molecular structures, and the incorporation of all these molecular structures holonistically into cells, organs, and all the rest. Our bodies are held against collapse smallwards by the robust durability of genetic structures which embody all the patterns needed to sustain our biological integrity against the entropy within the flow of energy and resources through our ecological niches. Mental integrity is maintained in analogous manner by means of the robust durability of meme structures embodied in neural networks and whatever emergent super-neural structures they entail. * Destructive teleportation differs from normal life in that it entails the [as yet unlawful] killing of a person whose body is dismembered in a very high resolution process during the course of a magical ceremony, after which there soon arrives postcards and news from a person in a faraway place claiming to be the deceased and wanting access to his/her money box. The police and other authorities in that far away place, when asked and paid, will provide evidence that the healthy body of the person who turned up there during a magical ceremony matches the fingerprint, DNA and polygraph signatures of the deceased. They will also report that she/he is suffering from culture shock, but otherwise seems OK. All of these facts point to our day to day experience of survival being very much a social and cultural construct in which we believe, no more and no less. * It therefore seems apparent that problems and conundrums raised by the destructive teleporter/biofax machines are based understood by recognising that our experience of being here now and seeming to be the same person from day to day, indeed from moment to moment, is what it is like to be a description of a person, although I would say that the qualia aspect is actually what it is like to be the updating of the description. It was ever thus. Regards, Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ Stathis Papaioannou wrote: Mark Peaty writes (in part): * Assuming that it is in principle feasible to 'copy' a person and either store the data obtained without deterioration or transmit the data without noticeable loss, then when that data is used to reconstitute a medically and legally acceptable facsimile, the new copy is NOT the original it is his/her identical twin brother or sister. * In this scenario, if the original which is copied ceases to exist at the place of copying, he/she has died. If the copying took place without destruction of the original then he/she is [ceteris paribus] the same person and unchanged. The legal status of the new twin will be the subject of common or statute law provoked by the invention of the new technology. * In a discussion with one of my son's friends just now we agreed that the 'Star Trek' version of the teleporter is a rather odd beasty in which not just the information/data concerning the structure and dynamics of a crew member's body was sent to a destination but the actual atoms of the body were sent also. This might seem like a tidy sort of solution to someone who didn't want to think too deeply about it, but the sending of the original's atoms would add an enormous overhead to the system, firstly the amount of energy required to accelerate all the particles to something close to the speed of light would be enormous, and secondly it would not change anything significant because it is not the fact of it being those particular atoms which is important but which kind of atoms and exactly where should they be. So when 'Scotty' or whoever beams them up, they die
Re: The Meaning of [your] Life
of processes in the world, where the world has manifested groupings and recursively generated properties amenable to algorithmic analysis. This almost certainly indicates that the universe is made of parts or processes which are constituted at their smallest levels by existents which are many, small, and relatively simple. However the fact that so many apparently completely arbitrary numbers [such as ratios and constants] are needed to describe the relationships between physical things indicates I think that the ground base of physical reality may not be constituted by relationships equivalent to integers. Perhaps it is that the true constituents of nature are more akin to bundles of connections with fractal dimensionality because they are not in anyway static. Our concept and perception of apparent enduring structures and identity of things in the world being entirely emergent properties. 11. 'I could even argue (as I do from times to times) that modern (post-godelian) mechanism is a sort of very powerful vaccine against a vast class of reductionist view of both human and machine' --- What does that mean? :-[ Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ Bruno Marchal wrote: Le 05-janv.-07, à 19:48, Mark Peaty a écrit : Assuming the digital mechanist thesis, a case can be made that at least there could be an ultimate *partial* sort of meta-answer. I am not sure about that. Recall that after Godel/Turing Co., we can no more pretend to really know what are numbers and machines or what they are capable of, including their relations with fundamental question. ... the universe and everything except that IT IS, and you are here to take part in it and observe yourself and others doing so. Existence is the source of value, indeed it is the essence of value. OK. snip This already depends a lot of what you mean by me and you. In any case I am not sure you can *know* things like that. It could be a form of wishful thinking. And in order to add something obvious: the prediction you will not live forever is neither confirmable (with or without comp) nor refutable (with comp). snip You may be right and sometimes I hope so, but I have no certainty here. After all most among those who say that there is nothing after death say also that there was nothing before birth. In that case I (the first person I) would have emerge from nothing. Going back to nothing when dead, how could I be sure I will not come back again? Perhaps by being some new born baby? Perhaps with my memories reconstituted by some far away future technologies? snip the fact is, being conscious is inherently paradoxical, and there is no escape from the paradox, just like there is no escape from the universe - until you die that is. Let us hope! To be sure even G* provides a hope we can die eventually, but evidences are there that it could be less easy than we are used to think. There could be a rather long Tibetan like Bardo-Thodol to go through before ... I really don't know, for sure. I *can * ask the lobian machine, but it is today intractable, the machine will answer after the sun blows up. Your impressions, perceptions, feelings, intuitions, etc. of being here now [where you are of course] is what it is like to be the updating of the model of self in the world which you brain is constantly constructing all the time you are awake. When you sleep there are times when enough of the model gets evoked that you have a dream that you can remember. The paradox is that for most of the time we assume that this awareness - consciousness, call it what you like - IS the world, i.e. what it is like to be 'me' here now, whereas in fact it is only what it is like to be the model of 'me' here now. OK. snip To assert without doubt that GOD, NATURE or the UNIVERSE exist is neither correct science and/or theology. Think about it! This is what you should be really concentrating on, because you and I are NOTHING if our muscles can't be made to move in exactly the right way and the right time. Certainly not. Just think about people who are completely paralyzed. completely relatively to the local available technologies. To say they are nothing is a exaggerated shortcut. Have you see the movie: Jonathan got his gun? snip I think I can agree with many things you are saying, except when you are witnessing what I would call a reductionist view of numbers and machine. I could even argue (as I do from times to times) that modern (post-godelian) mechanism is a sort of very powerful vaccine against a vast class of reductionist view of both human and machine. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
Re: Evil ?
The writer and theoretician of, ummm, comparative beliefs and spiritual practices, Ken Wilbur wrote a book many years ago titled A Sociable God. It was quite a slim book if I remember rightly, in which he examined the uses in English or the word 'religion'. He analysed and teased out nine (9) distinct usages which I can't remember in any detail now, which was interesting at the time. What has stuck with me though is the major distinction he exposed between authentication and legitimation. Authentication is the way in which belief and action in accord with one's beliefs affirms one's personal identity and the value of one's existence and achievements. Legitimation is the way in which beliefs bolster the authority and socio-political standing of priests and other officials. What scientific method has brought to the human species is the clear demonstration that ALL beliefs and assumptions are open to question. Knowledge is only knowledge to the extent that it has not yet been falsified. If a belief or customary assumption about the universe cannot in principle be falsified then acceptance of that belief is a matter of choice and opinion. People who understand the basis of scientific method are forced to question their own beliefs in order to retain their personal integrity and authenticity. People who have not yet understood the full implications of scientific method do not yet know that they are living in denial, but the very nature and power of the sceptical method is perceived as threatening.** This I believe is one of the major motivating influences in the divide between extremism and moderation manifesting in just about all traditional social and cultural organisations in the world. I take the ritual murder of Giordano Bruno in Rome in 1600 as emblematic of this divide, and personally take that event as the start of the modern era. ** I think that by default my view leans more towards Brent's than John's here. Possibly the biggest problem is that religious [wide sense] believers think they really are going to lose something by relinquishing Faith as the basis of thought and action. I respond that the human universe is always potentially infinite, so long as it exists and we believe it to be so. And 'Evil'? It is the deliberate treatment of another human as a thing. For a 'machine' to act in an evil manner it would have to be capable of taking responsibility for its actions otherwise it is only the evil tool of an evil person. Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ Brent Meeker wrote: snip I think humans valuing knowledge is as fundamental as their valuing food and sex. So there is a recognized epistemological duty. Everyone, in every culture, is contemptuous of the fool and a fool is someone who readily adopts false beliefs. Brent Meeker --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: Evidence for the simulation argument
Hello Jason, please excuse my ignorant interjections here but, as a non-mathematician, non-philosopher, I need to work things into a plain English version before I can feel that I understand them, and even then the edges of things get fuzzy with far more ease than they get straight and clear cut. Furthermore I am beginning to wonder if the apparently 'straight' and clear cut boundaries to concepts and so forth are not merely figments of my imagination. I don't think I go anywhere as far as John M. in this but then maybe that is just because I fear to let go of my sceptical reductionist walking stick. :-) Jason: 'perform an infinite number of computations with a finite amount of energy, but only if the computations done on that computer are logically reversible.' MP: Surely 'logically reversible' does not necessarily imply no entropy, just that for the purposes of the concerned observer, the computing system can return to a state that is sufficiently close to the original state so that the inputs can be discovered. More or less by definition, entropy increases and manifests as deterioration of the substrate and as the need to supply more energy to travel through the system than otherwise is calculated to be necessary to obtain the minimum changes needed to embody the changes of state in the calculating system. Jason: 'The physical interactions that occur in this universe are also reversible. e.g. An electron can accept a photon and move to a higher energy state or an electron can emit a photon and move to a lower energy state. Does reversible physics imply that a computational model of said physics would involve entirely reversible computations? ' MP: This concept of 'reversible' is very useful, but to how great an extent is it just a convenient fiction? My understanding is that you can't fire *a particular* photon at a particular atom and guarantee that your favourite electron will rise to the predicted level. I mean it either will or it won't. Conversely as I understand it [AIUI] the subsidence of an electron to a lower orbital is only predictable in a statistical sense. Once again is it not that the real world entities must be dealt with in a statistical manner, either as bulk substances, predictable due to the averaging of activities of the individual quantum particles, or as individual quantum items manifesting radical indeterminacy? Either way AIUI, the computational model will manipulate symbols denoting the real world physics and there is no guarantee that any such computing system could overcome the limits imposed by entropy and quantum indeterminacy. Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ Jason wrote: It's been known since the 1970s that arbitrarily efficient computers could be constructed that could perform an infinite number of computations with a finite amount of energy, but only if the computations done on that computer are logically reversible. Performing a non-reversible computation results in an increase in entropy for the system and thus would not be sustainable. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing) The physical interactions that occur in this universe are also reversible. e.g. An electron can accept a photon and move to a higher energy state or an electron can emit a photon and move to a lower energy state. Does reversible physics imply that a computational model of said physcis would involve entirely reversible computations? I believe that if past states of the universe could be calculated from future ones, then those computations would have to be reversible. Assuming the above is true, it would have consequences for any civilization in a universe like this one (with finite energy); it would mean that said civilizations could only simulate universes using purely reversible computations without exhausting the finite amount of useful energy in their universe. This also hits on a topic Wei Dai brought up earlier about how it seems impossible to delete any information in this universe. --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: The Meaning of [your] Life
view point, but it is so whether we know about it or not. The world we are normally aware of, or our experience of it if you like, is our brain's analogue description of the emergent properties of space-time, energy and matter at our bodies' order of magnitude. Bruno: 'Worst, I do believe this assumption is contrary to both logic+arithmetic (and comp) and with the empirical data' MP: What data? MP: Existence entails being somewhere and IMO, except possibly for the smallest conceivable distances of Planck length, whatever it is that IS somewhere ENDURES while other things change around it. I have written before about my Process Physics inspired conception of connections [called Janus] being ultimately all that is and that particles of matter and energy are knot-like, self-entangled concentrations of the every collapsing plenitude of simplifying connections. It just seems to me to be logically necessary that existence and location are prerequisites for anything else. Perhaps that should be existence, location and separation. But anyway, words fail and something like the Chinese Yin and Yang conception actually makes a lot of sense [thinks: the interpenetration and eternal separation of two branes might be just that!] Numbers are written and imagined as existing in their own right Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ Bruno Marchal wrote: Hi Mark, (To the other: I will read and comment the remaining posts after next wednesday; I am very busy). Le 08-janv.-07, à 18:31, Mark Peaty a écrit : --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: Rép : The Meaning of Life
Bruno: 4) Mark Peaty wrote (to Brent): As I say, the essence of evil is the act of treating other persons as things. I so agree with you. And then, with Church thesis (less than comp, thus) you can understand the reason why even some (relative) machine and some (relative) numbers should not be confused with any of their third person description. MP: There is too much packed in this for me to be clear of the scope. For example: by 'machine' do you mean, generically, any hypothetical self-referencing, sufficiently complex device - or virtual emulation of such - smart enough to think it knows who it is? and Which numbers have anything BUT a third person description? I am of course very ignorant about higher mathematics, so the way I use words is that a number is a mathematical object that has/is a [or of a] particular value. I guess that means that a number, for me anyway, is a thing not a process. People use processes to generate, define and compare numbers. These processes are to mathematica what verbs, adverbs, adjectives, complex nouns and all the phrases [noun phr, adjectival phr, etc.] are to natural languages. Because of the precise specifications required for such mathematical processes, which I suppose means their algorithmic qualities, many of them are mathematical objects in their own right, so they do what they do and not anything else. Bruno [quote continued]: On another tack: it seems to me the extent and scope of suffering in the world is one of the most powerful arguments in favour of the total irrelevance of the concept of G/god/s. However it is not for me to go around telling those who believe in some G/god/s that they are deluded. Do you agree that those who believe in a primitive physical universe could be deluded in the same manner than those who believe in some notion of God. Perhaps even in a worse manner, because many people believe that the existence of a primitive material universe is a scientific fact. Of course not. At least in many theological text, the word God is used in a more axiomatic way than Matter is by some scientist (at lunch or during the week-end). Most religious people will never say that the existence of God is a scientific fact, and in that sense are less deluded than many materialist. MP: I don't see how people who believe in 'some notion of God' can honestly get past the intelligent child's question of 'Well alright, where did G/god/s come from then'. It is a simple question without an answer except something like: 'Shut up you little smart a*se!' or 'BLASPHEMY!! Thou deservest to be burnt at the stake!' For me a very important aspect of this latter issue is that any purported supernatural being cannot have a coherent explanation in terms of natural science and, if taken of itself to be an explanation for any of that which is and/or that which transpires, it disempowers the believers concerned and any of those in their care. Why? Because, as I think I said before, one of the several Earth shaking things that the advent of scientific method has brought to the human race is the objective demonstration that no publicly stated belief or public assertion of the nature of things is immune from sceptical examination which is conducted in an ethical manner. That said, I can now return to the deeper question which is: Is it coherent to assert that there is no universe? In common sense, plain English terms that is pretty much like saying that 'Nothing really exists!' ... which Does not compute! Like dividing or multiplying by zero, you either lock up your system or get no useful extra result. It is therefore necessary to accept that one exists, with the bookmarked proviso that 'exists' needs further research, and accept that for the time being there is no really coherent substitute for taking as /given/ one's own existence in a world of some sort. In fact as I said somewhere else it is one of only two completely free things in life. [The other if you remember is the benefits which come from saying 'Think positive, it is better for you' and acting as if you believe it.] My point in harping on in this way is simply so as to point out that: whilst it IS necessary to assert an assumption of existence beyond oneself, and to be ethical it is necessary to acknowledge the independent existence of the other people one meets, there is no such more-or-less a priori reason for positing the existence of supernatural beings of any sort whatever. The assertion of the existence of G/god/s is gratuitous, and the very concept is characteristically pre-scientific. Furthermore, the very concept of an omniscient being, never mind omnipotent, depends for its credibility upon the acceptance of some kind of naive realism. That is to say, the truth concerning the types of awareness we actually experience and for which credible sceptically proficient observation has been made, always entails a very
Re: Searles' Fundamental Error
John, I share your apparent perplexity. No matter which way up I look at the things being discussed on this list, I always end up back in the same place [and yes it is always 'here' :-] which is that clearly prior to anything else is the fact of existence. I have to take this at too levels: 1/ firstly as sloganised by Mr R Descartes: 'I think therefore I am', although because I am naturally timid I tend more often to say something like: 'I think therefore I cannot escape the idea that if I say I don't exist it doesn't seem to sound quite right', 2/ the macroscopic corollary of the subjective microcosm just mentioned is that it I try to assert that nothing exists that just seems to be plain wrong, and if I dwell on the situations I find myself in - beset as I am with ceaseless domestic responsibilities and work related bureaucratic constraints, the clearest simple intuition about it all is that the universe exists whether I know it or not. In short, being anything at all seems to entail being somewhere now, and even though numbers and mathematical operations seem to be wonderfully effective at representing many aspects of things going on in the world, there seems to be no way of knowing if the universe should be described as ultimately numeric in nature. I must say too, that I am finding this and other consciousness/deep and meaningful discussion groups somewhat akin to the astronomer Hubble's view of the universe; the threads and discourses seem to be expanding away from me at great speed, so that every time I try to follow and respond to something, everything seems to have proliferated AND gone just that little bit further out of reach! Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ John Mikes wrote: Bruno: has anybody ever seen numbers? (except for Aunt Milly who dreamed up the 5 numbers she saw in her dream - for the lottery). Where is the universe - good question, but: Has anybody ever seen Other universes? Have we learned or developed (advanced) NOTHING since Pl Ar? It is amazing what learned savant scientists posted over the past days. Where are they indeed? John On 2/1/07, *Bruno Marchal* [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Le 29-janv.-07, à 21:33, 1Z a écrit : On 24 Jan, 11:42, Bruno Marchal [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Le 23-janv.-07, à 15:59, 1Z a écrit : Bruno Marchal wrote: Also, nobody has proved the existence of a primitive physical universe. Or of a PlatoniaCall it Platonia, God, Universe, or Glass-of-Beer, we don' t care. But we have to bet on a reality, if we want some progress. Now, here is what I do. For each lobian machine Where are these machines? Platonia? Where is the universe? I prefer to assume what I can see. Fair enough. I think we can sum up the main difference between Platonists and Aristotelians like that: Aristotelians believe in what they see, measure, etc. But platonists believe that what they see is the shadow of the shadow of the shadow ... of what could *perhaps* ultimately exists. The deeper among the simplest argument for platonism, is the dream argument. Indeed, dreaming can help us to take some distance with the idea that seeing justifies beliefs. Put in another way, I believe in what I understand, and I am agnostic (and thus open minded) about everything else. Now to be sure, I am not convinced that someone has ever seen *primary matter*. Bruno --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: Searles' Fundamental Error
Bruno: 'Dont hesitate to ask why, I am sure few people have understand the whole point. Some are close to it, perhaps by having figure this out by themselves.' MP: Don't look at me boss ... I'm just glad I don't have to understand 'it' to be able to exist within it! SO, yes I will ask: What do you mean by 'physical'? And next: what do you mean by 'exist'? These are very basic questions, and in our context here, 'dumb' questions for sure, but without some clarification on how people are using these words, I don't think I can go any further. Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ I think therefore I am right! - Angelica [Rugrat] Bruno Marchal wrote: Hi Mark, Le 03-févr.-07, à 17:12, Mark Peaty a écrit : John, I share your apparent perplexity. No matter which way up I look at the things being discussed on this list, I always end up back in the same place [and yes it is always 'here' :-] which is that clearly prior to anything else is the fact of existence. I have to take this at too levels: 1/ firstly as sloganised by Mr R Descartes: 'I think therefore I am', although because I am naturally timid I tend more often to say something like: 'I think therefore I cannot escape the idea that if I say I don't exist it doesn't seem to sound quite right', That is good for you. I would say that Descartes gives a correct but useless proof of the existence of Descartes' first person. It is useless because He knew it before his argument. 2/ the macroscopic corollary of the subjective microcosm just mentioned is that it I try to assert that nothing exists that just seems to be plain wrong, and if I dwell on the situations I find myself in - beset as I am with ceaseless domestic responsibilities and work related bureaucratic constraints, the clearest simple intuition about it all is that the universe exists whether I know it or not. Nobody has ever said that nothing exist. I do insist that even me has a strong belief in the existence of a universe, even in a physical universe. But then I keep insisting that IF the comp hyp is correct, then materialism is false, and that physical universe is neither material nor primitively physical. I am just saying to the computationalist that they have to explain the physical laws, without assuming any physics at the start. It is a technical point. If we are digital machine then we must explain particles and waves from the relation between numbers, knots, and other mathematical object. Dont hesitate to ask why, I am sure few people have understand the whole point. Some are close to it, perhaps by having figure this out by themselves. In short, being anything at all seems to entail being somewhere now, and even though numbers and mathematical operations seem to be wonderfully effective at representing many aspects of things going on in the world, there seems to be no way of knowing if the universe should be described as ultimately numeric in nature. You are right. Actually if comp is correct, what you are saying here can be justified. I must say too, that I am finding this and other consciousness/deep and meaningful discussion groups somewhat akin to the astronomer Hubble's view of the universe; the threads and discourses seem to be expanding away from me at great speed, so that every time I try to follow and respond to something, everything seems to have proliferated AND gone just that little bit further out of reach! Keep asking. Have you understood the first seven steps of the UD Argument ? Look at my SANE paper. I think this makes available the necessity of the reversal physics/math without technics. Most in this list were already open to the idea that a theory of everything has the shape of a probability calculus on observer moment. Then some of us believe it is a relative measure, and some of us accept the comp hyp which adds many constraints, which is useful for making things more precise, actually even falsifiable in Popper sense. I must go. I am busy this week, but this just means I will be more slow than usual. Keep asking if you are interested. Don't let you abuse by possible jargon ... Just don't let things go out of reach ... (but keep in mind that consciousness/reality questions are deep and complex, so it is normal to be stuck on some post, etc.). Best, Bruno Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ John Mikes wrote: Bruno: has anybody ever seen numbers? (except for Aunt Milly who dreamed up the 5 numbers she saw in her dream - for the lottery). Where is the universe - good question, but: Has anybody ever seen Other universes? Have we learned or developed (advanced
Re: Searles' Fundamental Error
My apologies if my replying seems a bit slow. I *have* been thinking about these things though. I thought to try and make excuses, but really all that is necessary, amongst ethical correspondents anyway, is a forthright confession of mental inadequacy, n'est ce pas? :-) I think 'kicks back' = measurable in some way. I think 'exists' is a generic, irreducible, ultimate value. In fact it is THE generic, irreducible, ultimate value and it underlies mathematical objects such as numbers as well as everything else. I will try and give an account of this assertion in my reply to Bruno on this thread because Bruno has provided the biggest challenge to my, uhhh, maturing brain. I have no real hopes of discovering a/the 'killer' argument, apart from claiming that 'Comp' always begs the question. Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ Russell Standish wrote: On Wed, Feb 07, 2007 at 06:10:34PM -0500, John M wrote: I can't wait for Bruno's (and others') versions. John M My take on physical and existence. Physical: that which kicks back in the Samuel Johnson sense. It doesn't rule out idealism, because the virtual reality in a VR simulation also kicks back. Existence: This is a word with many meanings. To use it, one should first say what type of existence you mean. For instance mathematical existence means a property of a number that is true - eg 47 is prime. Anthropic existence might mean something that kicks back to some observer somewhere in the plenitude of possibilities. There is another type of existence referring to that which kicks back to me here, right now. And so on. It is possible to say physical existence = mathematical existence as Tegmark does, but this is almost a definition, rather than a statement of metaphysics. Cheers --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: Searles' Fundamental Error
* will be a Zenoverse, o this was in an edition of New Scientist Magazine several years ago [and I will try and track down my paper copy because I don't have access to the on-line version like I do for Scientific American Magazine] of course Bruno and others will argue that they are not saying that OUR universe is being emulated but merely that it is numerically implemented, but as far as I can see all the 'teleporter' brand of arguments DO rely on emulation which must thus need effectively infinite resources if they are to 'fool' a scientifically competent victim [for indeed the fate of he or she who is 'read' will be death at that time, or else at very least they will be damaged goods when the door is opened again :-] * entropy is a significant feature of our universe which affects every aspect of our existence, and I maintain that, as much as anything else, it is the PRICE of our existence [of course Xians like to complicate this simple observation with subtle refinements, but I am Ex-Xian so I ignore these and do not enter into discussion about them]. I reckon it is valid to look upon entropy in our daily lives as the expansion of the universe writ small. Were the universe not expanding, there would be no space visible between the stars in the night sky, so the whole sky everywhere and always would look like the Sun and 'here' would be the same temperature as 'there', i.e. to hot for comfort :-) As we exist and reliable evidence seems to indicate that we live in a universe which is both unimaginably big and expanding, I believe we have to take entropy seriously. I think this poses problems for theories of infinite alternative universes which are purported to have some kind of connection with ours. And there I ran out of steam! Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ Bruno Marchal wrote: Le 07-févr.-07, à 17:34, Mark Peaty a écrit : Bruno: 'Dont hesitate to ask why, I am sure few people have understand the whole point. Some are close to it, perhaps by having figure this out by themselves.' MP: Don't look at me boss ... I'm just glad I don't have to understand 'it' to be able to exist within it! Of course! Like babies can use their brain without understanding it ... SO, yes I will ask: What do you mean by 'physical'? It concerns the stable appearance described by hypothetical physical theories (like classical mechanics, QM, etc.). I found an argument showing that IF comp(*) is correct THEN those stable appearances emerge from arithmetic as seen from internalized point of views. Those can be described in computer science, and It makes the comp hyp falsifiable: just extract the physical appearance from comp and compare with nature. I will say more in a reply to Stathis. (*) comp means there exist a tuiring emulable level of description of myself (whatever I am), meaning I would notice a functional substitution made at that level). And next: what do you mean by 'exist'? There are mainly two sort of existence. The absolute fundamental one, and the internal or phenomenological one. If you understand the Universal Dovetailer Argument, you can understand that, assuming the comp hypothesis, it is enough to interpret existence by the existential quantifier in some first order logic description of arithmetic. (like when you say it exist a prime number). All the other existence (like headache, but also bosons, fermions, anyons, ...) are phenomelogical, and can be described by It exist a stable and coherent collection of machines correctly believing from their point of view in bosons, etc. (I simplify a bit). If you want, I say that IF comp is true, only numbers exist, all the rest are dreams with relative degree of stability. These are very basic questions, and in our context here, 'dumb' questions for sure, but without some clarification on how people are using these words, I don't think I can go any further. You are welcome, and I don't believe there is dumb questions. I have developed the Universal dovetailer argument, in the seventies, and it was a pedagogical tools for explaining the mathematical theory which consist in interviewing an universal machine on its possible physics. I have published all this in the eighties and defend it as a thesis in the nineties. I am aware it goes against materialism (based on the concept of primary (aristotelian) materialism. All this provides mathematical clean interpretation of neoplatonist researchers (like Plato, Plotinus, Proclus). If you want I show that concerning machine's theology it is wrong to reify matter or nature. Note that I am using the term materialism in a weaker sense than its use in philosophy of mind. But materialism I mean
Re: Searles' Fundamental Error
will meet will either be sleep walking or otherwise deficient as a consequence of drug use or brain trauma. I think Oliver Sachs's book The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat gives many examples illustrating the point that all deficiencies in consciousness correlate strictly with lesions in the sufferer's brain. Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On 2/18/07, *Mark Peaty* [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: MP: Well at least I can say now that I have some inkling of what 'machine's theology' means. However, as far as I can see it is inherent in the nature of consciousness to reify something. I have not seen anywhere a refutation of my favoured understanding of consciousness which is that a brain is creating a representation of its world and a representation of itself and representations of the relationships between self and world. The 'world' in question is reified by the maintenance and updating of these representations, this is what the brain does, this is what it is FOR. Our contemplation of numbers and other mathematical objects or the abstract entities posited as particles and energy packets etc., by modern physics is experientially and logically second to the pre-linguistic/non-linguistic representation of self in the world, mediated by cell assemblies constituting basic qualia. [In passing; a quale must embody this triple aspect of representing something about the world, something about oneself and something significant about relationships *between* that piece of the world and that rendition of 'self'.] Would any device that can create a representation of the world, itself and the relationship between the world and itself be conscious? If you believe that it would, then you are thereby very close to computationalism, the thing you seem to be questioning. Stathis Papaioannou --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: Searles' Fundamental Error
. Stathis: 'I can meaningfully talk about seeing red to a blind person who has no idea what the experience is like ... ' MP: OK, but can he or she meaningfully understand you? Stathis: 'it is possible to conceive of intelligently-behaving beings who do not have an internal life because they lack the right sort of brains. I am not suggesting that this is the case and there are reasons to think it is unlikely to be the case, but it is not ruled out by any empirical observation'. MP: 'internal life' can mean a variety of things. One could be strongly tempted to think that some participants on the Jerry Springer [sp?] show, experience perceptual qualia but nothing else! I am pretty sure that the majority of mammals and birds are like this, reptiles maybe, fish also to various degrees. Worms and insects? I dunno. Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ Stathis Papaioannou wrote: snipped 1. If it behaved as if it were conscious *and* it did this using the same sort of hardware as I am using (i.e. a human brain) then I would agree that almost certainly it is conscious. If the hardware were on a different substrate but a direct analogue of a human brain and the result was a functionally equivalent machine then I would be almost as confident, but if the configuration were completely different I would not be confident that it was conscious and I would bet that at least it was differently conscious. As for scientific research, I never managed to understand why Colin thought this was more than just a version of the Turing test. 2. I don't consider biological machines to be fundamentally different to other machines. 3. Sure, different entities with (at least) functionally different brains will be differently conscious. But I like to use conscious in the way I am in order to avoid having to explain or define consciousness in general, or my consciousness in particular. I can meaningfully talk about seeing red to a blind person who has no idea what the experience is like: What wavelengths of light lead me to see red? Can I still see red if my eyes are closed or my optic nerve severed? What if I have a stroke in the visual cortex? What if certain parts of my cortex are electrically stimulated? That is, I can go a very long way with the definition that experience which i have when a red coloured object enters my visual field. Stathis [from the other posting again]: 'There is good reason to believe that the third person observable behaviour of the brain can be emulated, because the brain is just chemical reactions and chemistry is a well-understood field.' MP: Once again it depends what you mean. Does 'Third person observable behaviour of the brain' include EEG recordings and the output of MRI imaging? Or do you mean just the movements of muscles which is the main indicator of brain activity? If the former then I think that would be very hard, perhaps impossible; if the latter however, that just might be achievable. Huh? I think it would be a relatively trivial matter to emulate MRI and EEG data, certainly compared to emulating behaviour as evidenced by muscle activity (complex, intelligent behaviour such as doing science or writing novels is after all just muscle activity, which is just chemical reactions in the muscles triggered by chemical reactions in the brain). Stathis: 'I think it is very unlikely that something as elaborate as consciousness could have developed with no evolutionary purpose (evolution cannot distinguish between me and my zombie twin if zombies are possible), but it is a logical possibility.' MP: I agree with the first bit, but I do not agree with the last bit. If you adopt what I call UMSITW [the Updating Model of Self In The World], then anything which impinges on consciousness, has a real effect on the brain. In effect the only feasible zombie like persons you will meet will either be sleep walking or otherwise deficient as a consequence of drug use or brain trauma. I think Oliver Sachs's book The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat gives many examples illustrating the point that all deficiencies in consciousness correlate strictly with lesions in the sufferer's brain. A human with an intact brain behaving like an awake human could not really be a zombie unless you believe in magic. However, it is possible to conceive of intelligently-behaving beings who do not have an internal life because they lack the right sort of brains. I am not suggesting that this is the case and there are reasons to think it is unlikely to be the case, but it is not ruled out by any empirical observation. Stathis Papaioannou --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post
Re: Evidence for the simulation argument
Brent: ' the simulation doesn't have to simulate the whole complicated universe, only the part we can investigate and understand' MP: as I argued in my response to Stathis, the 'part we can investigate and understand' can be ever expanding and the exactitude of our understanding can in time reach just about arbitrarily fine degrees of resolution. Or, which would be more the worry for 'emulators' who wished to remain invisible, the emulation would need to be able to be controlled to a finer resolution than scientists' contemporary measurement skills. Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ Brent Meeker wrote: John Mikes wrote: This has been a long discussion between Jason and Mark. How do I get into it is by Mark's remark: I don't think I go anywhere as far as John M. in this but then maybe that is just because I fear to let go of my sceptical reductionist walking stick. --Stop half-way: when the guy received $10,000 in the bank in 100s and counted them 37,38,39, - then stopped and said: well. so far it was a match, let me believe that the rest is also OK. We are much earlier into the completion of what we know about our existence. Then again you both wrote about simulations (even: emulations) horribile dictu: The key point is that a wilful entity or conspiracy seeks to emulate all or part of another wilful entity's world to the extent that the latter can't tell the difference when the change is made. Untold: restricted to details known Nobody can simulate or look for unknown details. Of course the latter can't tell whether 'simulated' if looking only at the portion that matches. (I am not clear about wilful entity.) The fallacy of the simulational business is more than that: you (get?) simulate(d?) HERE and NOW and continue HERE under these conditions, while THERE the simulacron lives under THOSE conditions and in no time flat becomes different from you original. That the world of THERE is also simulated? Just add: and lives exactly the life of THIS one? then the whole thing is a hoax, a mirror image, no alternate. * Jason: A reversible computation is one that has a 1 to 1 mapping between input and output. Going up in the $100 bills to #45, the map may change. Don't tell me please such Brunoistic examples like 1+1 = 2, go out into the 'life' of a universe (or of ourselves). How can you reverse the infinite variations of a life-computation? You have got to restrict it into a limited model and work on that. Like: reductionist physics (QM?) . It seems to me like a return to Carnot, disregarding Prigogine, who improved the case to some (moderate) extent from the classical reversible even isotherm thermodynmx, from which I used to form the joke (as junior in college) that it shows how processes would [theoretically] proceed, wouldn't they proceed as they do proceed. We can reverse a closed model content, all clearly known in it. Not life. Just count into the simulations and reversals the constantly (nonlinearly!) changing world not allowing any 'fixing' of circumstances/processes. No static daydreams. * Jason: Quantum mechanics makes the universe seem random and uncomputable to those inside it, but according to the many-worlds interpretation the universe evolves deterministically. - right on. I just wonder why all those many worlds are 'emulated' after this one feeble universe we pretend to observe. In my 'narrative' I allowed 'universes' of unrestricted variety of course 'nobody' can ever continue in a totally different 'universe' a life from here. With e.g. a different logic. * Are you saying that a perfectly efficient computer could not be built or that the physics of this universe are not computable? You mean: with unrestricted, filled memory banks working on the limitless variations nature CAN provide? A perfectly efficient computer could then compute this universe as well. Maybe not these binary embryos we are proudly using today. Indeed: you ask about the physics of this universe, is it the reductionist science we are fed with in college? That may be computed. Discounting the randomness and indeterminism shown for members of this quantum universe of ours. Sorry for the length and my unorthodoxy. John M You seem to have two themes: (1) The universe is more complex than current physics makes it out and may not be computable, and in comparison, (2) Our ability to comprehend things is quite limited. But these two together imply that is quite possible that we live in a simulation. If the simulation is being performed in a universe like ours, one with very complex physics, then the physics of that universe could provide a simulation that was beyond our ability to discern as a simulation - because of our limited comprehension. The point is that the simulation doesn't have to simulate the whole complicated universe, only the part we can investigate
Re: Evidence for the simulation argument
Brent: ' Which scientists...ours of theirs?' MP: Ours. The situation is not static; they would have to KEEP responding to our scientists' unpredictable forays into basic science, unpredictable a-priori either to them or to us. Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ Brent Meeker wrote: Mark Peaty wrote: Brent: ' the simulation doesn't have to simulate the whole complicated universe, only the part we can investigate and understand' MP: as I argued in my response to Stathis, the 'part we can investigate and understand' can be ever expanding and the exactitude of our understanding can in time reach just about arbitrarily fine degrees of resolution. Or, which would be more the worry for 'emulators' who wished to remain invisible, the emulation would need to be able to be controlled to a finer resolution than scientists' contemporary measurement skills. Which scientists...ours of theirs? I don't disagree, but suppose the level at which we could see it was a simulation was the Planck scale. This is not entirely speculative, since the Planck scale is where a conflict between quantum mechanics and general relativity must manifest itself. If the Simulators were only interested in how the world operates far above that level then maybe they were sloppy and just left potential inconsistencies in the simulation. The program will crash when we do the right experiment to reveal it. But that level is thirty orders of magnitude smaller than anything we can reach now. Brent Meeker --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: Believing in Divine Destiny is one of the pillars of faith, and, in accordance with this belief, everything in the universe is determined by God, the All-Mighty. While there are countless absolute
Dream on Brent ... Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ Brent Meeker wrote: Klortho wrote: The other thing I do is check to what extent a person's speech and writings support and affirm the four fundamental ingredients of civilisation: Compassion, democracy, ethics and scientific method. No civilisation can survive without all four of these. Talk about assertions without any evidence! Actually there's a lot of evidence that civilization developed and survived until recently without democracy or the scientific method. Brent Meeker --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: [SPAM] Re: Believing in Divine Destiny is one of the pillars of faith, and, in accordance with this belief, everything in the universe is determined by God, the All-Mighty. While there are countle
OK, tell me where all those civilisations of the past have gone to, because THEY did NOT survived. Tell me what makes YOU so sure this current global civilisation can survive. I am more than happy to be shown where I am wrong, but if you TRULY disagree with what I am saying, I would like you to provide some clear and unambiguous empirical evidence to back up your assertions. Without that, you are simply complaining that I am just strongly expressing an opinion. I never deny this, in the context that we are speaking of here, but I think that my opinion on this is as good as anybody's that I have seen so far. To help you chew on this: * compassion is the acting out of the ability to see oneself in the other and the recognition that, except for the throw of some cosmic dice, I am he or she and they are me; compassion facilitates the breaking down of the fear and false consciousness which underpins unconscious projection; compassion is a sign and manifestation of authentic being and strength, not weakness; without compassion truly human life is well nigh impossible * ethics is the foundation of civilisation and is the acting out of the ability to see that we each depend on many, many others for our survival and well being and they depend upon us, and that the true genius and strength of humankind is our ability to cooperate with each other rather than a propensity to strive against others * democracy is essentially the systematic implementation of the non-violent resolution of conflict, it requires that everyone's voice be heard and democracy advances as the excessive and aggressive power of the rich and powerful is curtailed and controlled; Karl Popper gave the most succinct explanation of why democracy is both better than all the alternatives and absolutely essential and the basic form of his argument is this: all policies formulated by governments and governing bodies will have unexpected negative consequences, no matter how good the policies, and it is to be expected that at least 50% of the unforeseen consequences will be significantly adverse and negative for those who experience them so it is imperative that the negative consequences of policies be made known to those who govern and that the rulers take notice and actually ameliorate the problems. If the rulers cannot be made to correct these unforeseen negative outcomes then over time the negative outcomes will accrue to the extent that the people feel driven to rebel or vote with their feet and leave the land of the rotten regime. * the advent of scientific method into human culture is what has made the modern world; this modern era is a time of transition in which every traditional belief and practice is being challenged by the application of scientific method and of the fruits of the application of science; in this world of great and ceaseless changes, the continued application of scientific method is and always will be essential for allowing us to adapt to all the unforeseen outcomes of change so far; with scientific method human beings have the ability to journey out into the solar system and beyond, to be citizens of the galaxy, but without scientific method humans will die out on a devastated planet Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ Klortho wrote: The other thing I do is check to what extent a person's speech and writings support and affirm the four fundamental ingredients of civilisation: Compassion, democracy, ethics and scientific method. No civilisation can survive without all four of these. Talk about assertions without any evidence! --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: [SPAM] Re: Believing in Divine Destiny is one of the pillars of faith, and, in accordance with this belief, everything in the universe is determined by God, the All-Mighty. While there are countle
Well [EMAIL PROTECTED] your response has been even more disappointing than even my very low expectation prepared me for. You have not even recognised what my questions were about, let alone made any significant attempt to address them. As an ex-Christian I know what it is like to be sucked into a world view that projects part of one's own nature into a 'spiritual being' and projects other, completely unacknowledged and rejected parts of one's psyche onto outsiders who are perceived as being threatening and evil because they exhibit those impulses rather than oneself. However, we must call a spade a spade; all this guff that gets called 'theology' and 'spirituality' is ultimately a bunch of assertions that can neither be proved nor disproved in any concrete sense because they are all expressions of belief and ONLY belief. Because there is no way of relating these holy ramblings to any concrete test, belief in them becomes, as often as not, a function of a person's social and political allegiances. The beliefs change to comply with and rationalise the ambitions and practices of the ruling elite. The chanting of sacred texts and the recitation of beliefs become assurances of acceptance, badges of compliance with the regime. There will be NO significant contributions to the well being and advancement of human kind arising from this religiosity, just acquiescence and the turning of a blind eye to the crimes of the rulers and the thugs who impose the anti democratic rule. The moral and intellectual contrast is expressed most vividly, I think, by the way a free-thinking monk called Giordano Bruno was vilified, stripped naked, tortured and finally burnt alive by the inquisitor thugs of the Roman church, in a public square somewhere in Rome 17 February 1600. His crime? Being a sceptic and publicly questioning some of the preposterous beliefs that religion required people to agree to. He was murdered because the sceptical method he advocated and employed threatened the very foundations of the corrupt religious hierarchy and the secular regimes - all feudal thug-ocracies. From what I read, hear, and see reported about Islam in Iran, Iraq, Saudi, and umpteen other places, the basic issues are the same as for Christianity. The holders and wielders of traditional power WILL not acknowledge that the demonstrated power of scientific method to show us how the natural world works and to show us deep insights into how the human brain and mind work has a moral authority at least equal to that of their 'holy' books. THIS is the real challenge of the 20 and 21 centuries. Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Jesus said: I and the Father are one (Jn.10:30), therefore, is not Jesus the same, or, co-equal in status with his Father? Answer No.1 In Greek, `heis' means `one' numerically (masc.) `hen' means `one' in unity or essence (neut.) Here the word used by John is `hen' and not `heis'. The marginal notes in New American Standard Bible (NASB) reads; one - (Lit.neuter) a unity, or, one essence. If one wishes to argue that the word `hen' supports their claim for Jesus being co-equal in status with his Father, please invite his/ her attention to the following verse: Jesus said: And the glory which Thou hast given me, I have given to them (disciples); that they may be one, just as we are one. (John 17:22). If he/she was to consider/regard/believe the Father and Jesus Christ to be one meaning co-equal in status on the basis of John 10:30, then that person should also be prepared to consider/regard/believe them - the disciples of Jesus, to be co-equal in status with the Father and Jesus (just as we are one) in John 17:22. I have yet to find a person that would be prepared to make the disciples (students) co-equal in status with the Father or Jesus. The unity and accord was of the authorized divine message that originated from the Father, received by Jesus and finally passed on to the disciples. Jesus admitted having accomplished the work which the Father had given him to do. (Jn.17:4) Hot Tip (precise and pertinent) Jesus said: I go to the Father; for the Father is greater than I. (Jn.14:28). This verse unequivocally refutes the claim by any one for Jesus being co-equal in status with his Father. Question No.2 Jesus said: I am the way, ...no one comes to the Father, but through me. (Jn.14:6), therefore, is not the Salvation through Jesus, ALONE? Answer No.2 Before Jesus spoke these words, he said; In my Father's house are many mansions (dwelling places); if it were not so, I would have told you; for I go to prepare a mansion (a dwelling place) for you. (John 14:2). The above explicit statement confirms that Jesus was going to prepare a mansion and not all the mansions in my Father's house. Obviously
Re: Evidence for the simulation argument
MP: . That is one thing. Another thing is that no entity or set of entities could know if their 'simulation' attempt was doing what they wanted in every detail because to attempt to find this out would interfere irreversibly with the unfolding of the world. Brent: This assumes that the simulation must be quantum mechanical - but I think that would defeat the whole point of assuming a simulation. If the world can be simulated classically, then it can be monitored without interference. MP: well actually I wasn't thinking about QM at all; I guess most of my thinking is 'classical' although I realise of course that QM principles impose minimum sizes for basic components of all information processing systems. My concern is much more a pronounced sceptical disbelief in the ability of sentient creatures at any order of magnitude to be able to control all the variables in a system they wish to impose. I think the basic condition is always going to be that we and they CANNOT. My usual expression of this, said in the context of working at a low level in a bureaucracy, is that in any given situation there are always more things which can occur than we want to occur, and usually there are more things which can occur than we can possibly know about. This is a long winded way of expressing 'Murphy's Law', but it is also a precise way of stating in plain-English how entropy manifests at the level of our work-a-day lives. The thing is, setting up a simulation or emulation of something requires giving up some degree of control over the process. I mean that's what we have machines for isn't it,to do the work for us? And as far as I can see, despite what Bruno says, the numbers have got to BE somewhere. So the cosmic Boffins have got to have systems which are at least to some degree autonomous. [As I write this it seems to me I am cutting at the root of Bishop Berkeley's concept of being in the mind of God, or some such.] In fact considering the scale of what is being contemplated I would assume that at least some parts of the system would be interacting in recursive self-referential ways that guaranteed unpredictability. And if it is unpredictable then you are not controlling it; it is simply happening, and it is non-QM randomness. I can see I have rambled on here a bit too much, but I have to say I think the issue of testing to see if what you predicted is really happening, must involve some interference in the simulation process itself, either that or the measurement is estimation with significant error margins. I also think there is a strong argument from ethics that we are NOT in a simulation and furthermore that that sort of thing just doesn't happen. My argument is very presumptuous of course but, what the heck, if there IS a conspiracy of ET, pan-dimensional experimenters out there somewhere tweaking their coding to make our world ever more 'realistic', well they NOW have a moral duty to show themselves and give account for what they have done. Why? Because if they are smart enough to do such a thing then they are also smart enough to realise that they are causing avoidable harm and suffering to people here on Earth and this has been going on for a long time. [and it's gotta stop!] If they don't show themselves and give account then they are just a bunch of moral wimps who do not deserve our respect, let alone adoration. This will be true even only if there is only The One.It is the question that has to be directed at all those who wield power: If you are so smart, why aren't you kind? It's like Terry Pratchett says: There is only one sin, and that is to treat another person like a thing. Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ Brent Meeker wrote: Mark Peaty wrote: snipped This is mixing Everett's relative state interpretation with the idea that the world is a simulation. These are not the same and maybe not even compatible. The world evolves deterministically in Hilbert space and the many-worlds are projections relative to us. Whether this can be simulated, except in a quantum computer, is questionable because the Hilbert space is infinite dimensional. Is some fixed finite resolution sufficient for simulation? MP: I don't think I can accept this. Maybe I sound arrogant in saying this, but I think the idea of simulation is used a bit too loosely. I know there are those lurking on the Mind Brain list and JCS-online who would say I am 'the pot calling the kettle black', because I am always asserting what I call UMSITW [pronounced um-see-two for English speakers] - updating the model of self in the world - is the basis of consciousness. But they misunderstand me, because I do not say there is anyone else doing simulation, merely that we experience being here because the universe has evolved self sustaining regions within itself which maintain their structure by means
Re: [SPAM] Re: Quick Quantum Question.
1Z: '2LT is itself statistical.' MP: Now this is fascinating! My, rough and ready plain-English, take on entropy is that for us, whenever we experience it, it is the expansion of the universe writ small. How so? Well the essential concept is that the essence of energy is motion. In fact I like to say that energy IS motion, for all practical purposes anyway. And potential energy? I here you ask, well that is the promise of motion. Equally important are duration and existence. That which moves, goes where it can [or where it must]. The faster things move then the more different places they can be in. And that brings us to the concept of entropy as a measure of the proportion of free energy within a system that is not available to do work. And if the universe we live in was not expanding then the free energy within it would have spread itself throughout by now, indeed it would have been like that from the start. So it can be seen that we depend on the next to nothingness of outer space for there to be somewhere for 'surplus' energy in our environment to go to. Our Earth, and particularly our biosphere is a steady-state system [albeit evolving] in which some of the relatively consistent supply of energy from the Sun gets trapped within plants and then it slowly works its way free, by multitudes of complex pathways through plant growth, or through the metabolism of the myriad other species who live off the plants, so that most of it eventually radiates off into space as heat. Meanwhile, as we do all the things we need to, there is always more can happen than we want to happen, and usually more that can happen than we can possibly know about. So the cookie crumbles, the car engine needs a radiator to take away unusable heat, likewise the computer's CPU, and everywhere that we cook, work, play and sleep, has to be cleaned up or the randomising effect of stray energy escaping will make all these places unusable with dirt and disorder. ' ... in a multiverse, some universes will violate it ... ' MP: But is THAT necessarily so? I don't think anybody really has any idea what all these alternative universes are, except useful imaginative constructs that help the mathematics of QM to look good. I mean the way I see it, if they are at least somewhat of the same as ours then energy will spread where it will [ ie entropy], and if they are nothing like our universe we have nothing to say. I guess my view is a reductionist anthropic enterprise. Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ 1Z wrote: On 2 Mar, 12:43, chris peck [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I have a question for people here who know the issues better than me: I was having an argument about alleged Quantum Immortality/Quantum suicide with some people who argue that because the 2nd law of thermodynamics continues regardless in each universe a 'me' continues within, I should ultimately age away, therefore Quantum immortality is a lost cause in principle. Any counter arguements or agreements with this would be appreciated. 2LT is itself statistical. In a multiverse, some universes will violate it. chris. --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: Evidence for the simulation argument
Hello Moshen and welcome. I think it is a very good question, and succinctly put. I have been trying to ask the same question and get a plain-English answer, but without success. Of course, I could be missing 'the point' too, and it wouldn't be the first time by a long shot. :-) If there was simply nothing, utterly and absolutely nothing, well that would be the end of it: 'No problemas!' as the cool dudes say. But there seems to be something, because I seem to be here, at the moment anyway, and I have this distinct belief that I was here yesterday living in this same house with all these recalcitrantly individualistic people who all play along with a story about being my wife and children. Appeals to solipsism degenerate into incoherent babbling; I really am here, even though my grasp of the facts about my existence gets shaken loose every so often. And you are here too, except you are over there. In short there IS a universe and it seems to be remarkably self-consistent. I, like you, am confronted by the manifest existence of an objective reality. Being educated and impressed by the successes of the application of scientific method we are quite well equipped to accept certain problematic statements about the parts of the world we normally take for granted as 'real'. We have learned that the *appearances* of solidity, power, enduring nature, and so forth, which we experience as *qualities* of those things, are not the full story; that in fact the '*true* nature of things is that if you try and find absolute objective boundaries to things you can't and if you try to make any other kind of measurement, you have to make do with an approximation. Indeed, the more you wish to precisely specify anything about the location or motion of anything then the more you must accept a complex statistical description about the rest of its characteristics. Well and good; normally we don't have to worry about this too much. It is only when we start persistently asking *How does it all work?* that the seemingly intractable problems begin. And for each of us there is some kind of recursive process: we read and interact with others [indeed some lucky people can apparently just wander into the next room and straight away *talk* on the topic with someone who is interested!], and then we cogitate and imagine things and some of you scribble arcane arithmetic and run mathematical 'what-ifs' on computers; finally we reach some kind of internal stability of viewpoint that allows a reassessment of things previously held to be clear, or problematic perhaps. But after some time, doubt sets in, we think something far enough through and see a problem or, more likely, we read of some new viewpoint which challenges what we believe and we feel we must take it seriously because of its apparent validity, consistency, etc, or it is presented by someone we respect. Either way we have to work to either assimilate it or uncover valid reasons for rejecting it. The mathematicians who contribute here seemingly have no problems with a totally 'insubstantial' existence of numbers. Unlike me who has *ultimate* problems wrapping my head around the idea. I have not yet succeeded. You asked about 'assumptions' in you 'Joining' thread, but here by definition the only one is the existence of Many Worlds, which is hugely problematic because nobody really knows what it means. In my case it is obvious why, but in the case of those who *espouse* the Many-Worlds hypothesis, I have absolutely know idea how they can account for the purely logical - and therefore mathematically necessary, yes? - consequence of the problem you have so succinctly put. As I reason it, this 'continuous' aspect of location, even if it is only 'virtual' guarantees that the Many Worlds are always proliferating at a rate which must effectively be an infinity times an infinity of infinities. [I fear I might have underestimated the speed there, but as I say, my maths is not all that good!] In other words it seems to make no sense at all! Why? [Grin!] well because *my* world seems to be just one story. What keeps it together? It can't be any inherent smartness on my part! [Grin again; no false modesty there mate!] So *IT*, what I call 'The Great IT', is just doing IT'S thing. Nobody here has yet explained in plain-English why we have entropy. Oh well, surely, in the Many Worlds, that's just one of the universes that can happen! Except that, for plain-English reasons stated above, there are *and always have been* infinity x infinity x infinity of entropic universes. It doesn't make sense. Call me a heretic if you like, but I will 'stick to my guns' here: If it can't be put into plain-English then it probably isn't true! :-) Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ Mohsen Ravanbakhsh wrote: I don't know if in the hypothesis of simulation, the conflict of Countable
Re: Evidence for the simulation argument
Thank you Bruno! You and Russell between you have managed to strike some sparks of illumination from the rocky inside of my skull. There is no beacon fire to report but I start to get a glimmering of why you want to *assume* comp and see where it leads. It seems that self-reference and recursion are fundamental properties of anything that is interesting in all this, which rather seems to be the flavour of the new millennium. Just in thinking superficially about the Many Worlds though, it seems to pose a 'binding problem'. Now, I know that might sound like a leakage of concept from objections to identity theory in brain and mind theory. But what I am thinking about is this bit: 6) this means that if I take the comp hyp seriously, then, to predict the results of any experiment/experience, I have to localize all the infinitely many instantiations of my current state in the UD, look at the uncountable comp histories going through that states, and compute the statistics bearing on all consistent first person self-continuation. A human life must be a compilation of all these including the creation of internal [synaptic change, etc] structure/record which endow the ability to *be* the story. But when looking at this as a/n [infinity^infinity] Many Worlds affair, none of the worlds could 'know' that they are like or identical to others, surely? So I am puzzled. What holds 'my lot' together? We seem always to be confronted by yet another infinite regression. ** A quick aside, hopefully not totally unrelated: Am I right that a valid explanation of the zero point energy is that it is impossible *in principle* to measure the state of something and therefore *we* must acknowledge the indeterminacy and so must everything else which exists because we are nothing special, except we think we know we are here, and if we are bound by quantum indeterminacy, so is everything else [unless it can come up with a good excuse!]? [Perhaps this is more on Stathis's question to Russell: Is a real number an infinite process?] ** Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ Bruno Marchal wrote: Le 05-mars-07, à 15:03, Mark Peaty a écrit : Nobody here has yet explained in plain-English why we have entropy. Oh well, surely, in the Many Worlds, that's just one of the universes that can happen! Not really. That would make the comp hyp or the everything idea trivial, and both the everything hyp and the comp hyp would loose any explicative power. (It *is* the problem with Schmidhuber's comp, *and* with Tegmark's form of mathematicalism: see older posts for that). Except that, for plain-English reasons stated above, there are *and always have been* infinity x infinity x infinity of entropic universes. It doesn't make sense. Call me a heretic if you like, but I will 'stick to my guns' here: If it can't be put into plain-English then it probably isn't true! I will try. I will, by the same token, answer Mohsen question here: Mohsen: I don't know if in the hypothesis of simulation, the conflict of Countable and Uncountable has been considered. 1) I assume the comp hyp, if only for the sake of the reasoning. The comp hyp is NOT the hypothesis of simulation, but it is the hypothesis that we are in principle self-simulable by a digital machine. 2) Then we have to distinguish the first person points of view (1-pov) from third person points of view (3-pov), and eventually we will have to distinguish all Plotinus' hypostases. With comp, we are duplicable. I can be read and cut (copy) in Brussels, and be pasted in Washington and Moscow simultaneously. This gives a simple example where: a) from the third point of view, there is no indeterminacy. An external (3-pov) observer can predict Bruno will be in Washington AND in Moscow. b) from a first person point of view, there is an indeterminacy, I will feel myself in washington OR in Moscow, not in the two places at once. 3) Whatever means I use to quantify the first person indeterminacy, the result will not depend on possible large delays between the reconstitutions, nor of the virtual/material/purely-mathematical character of the reconstitution. 4) There exist a universal dovetailer (consequence of Church thesis, but we could drop Church thesis and define comp in term of turing machine instead). 5) Never underestimate the dumbness of the universal dovetailer: not only it generates all computational histories, but it generates them all infinitely often, + all variations, + all real oracles (and those oracles are uncountable). 6) this means that if I take the comp hyp seriously, then, to predict the results of any experiment/experience, I have to localize all the infinitely many instantiations of my current state in the UD, look at the uncountable comp histories going through that states
Re: Evidence for the simulation argument - and Thanks to Russell and Stathis
Firstly a big thank you to Russell Standish for providing that incredibly succinct 'bit stream' summary of universal-dovetailer ontology. [Though only a vocational mathematician would seriously call it 'very simple' even if it does have less than 1% of Bruno's word count for his essay on the subject.] Having the two approaches to the problem at hand has allowed me to get a bit of purchase on the beasty. Thanks also to Stathis for that simple and lovely, 'obvious', question from left-field. I am now convinced that, no matter what others might say, each number is in fact a process. Bruno referred to some kind of Platonia, some unspeakably not-anywhere place as the source of numbers and other mathematical objects or relationships. That is all well and good but as far as I can see - still - the numbers and other mathematical objects that people use are words in the strictest sense. They arise in human minds through inter-subjective induction, empathic copying [mirror neurons], interaction with the world, etc. But they are created anew in each brain that learns them, same as all other constructs. Their fantastic power comes about because they reflect - emulate and simulate - emergent properties of the rest of the universe. That this happens so successfully in so many people leads me to infer that the underlying principle organising the human mind, just as that organising the Great IT, the Multiverse, what ever, is harmonic resonance. ** Meanwhile - SP: 'How do you know that you are the same person from moment to moment in ordinary life? The physical processes in your brain create psychological continuity; that is, you know you are the same person today as yesterday because you have the same sense of personal identity, the same memories, woke up in the same environment, and so on. It is necessary and sufficient for survival that these psychological factors are generated, but it doesn't matter how this is achieved.' MP: Yep! I am a story! I am not like a story, I *am* a story. It is *my* story and I'm sticking to it, except when I find there are aspects of it I don't like. The problem [or a problem] is that this does not take away any of the intrinsic paradox of our experience. As I have said many times our experience is what it is like to be the portrayal of self in the world created within one's brain. The rendition in its details is effectively *about* being a person in his/her world, moment by moment. The experience we argue about, and other, possibly less benighted, persons write poetry and songs about, is simply what it is like to be this rendition. The primary practical paradox for each of us is that unless this distinction is pointed out repeatedly, we mistake the rendition, the story, for the world itself. We are doomed to live ever like this. From the recesses of my dark corner it looks as if Bruno can show us conclusively that this subjective-objective distinction is an inherent feature of any kind of universe that we humans have any real hope of understanding. and as per the first part above, I think that the answer to the binding question in each domain is harmonic resonance. As far as I can see it accounts for why the pure gasses like to form molecular pairs; there have been reports recently that our sense of smell relies on inter and intra molecular vibrations as the fundamental [pun unintended] mechanism for detection and recognition of minuscule amounts of thousands of different airborne molecules; Steven Lehar has been banging his head against the wall for many years trying to point out to people how harmonic resonance can easily explain a huge range of Gestalt type capabilities clearly effected within the brain; correlations of brain wave frequencies have been discovered marking temporally related activities of the hippocampus and cortical regions shown through MR imaging to be involved in the creation or activation of memories. And the list goes on. NB: I hope that my imaginary destination in your speculation of possible post mortem exploits for my erstwhile sceptical soul is not a post-Freudian slip. I know that many of my contributions to this and other lists have lacked the erudite succinctness of those with greater talents; failure of concentration [AKA 'ADD'] has been a characteristic of life for me, but I think that 'awaking' to the innards of a black whole would do more than wonderfully concentrate the mind: concentration itself would become the major problem even for a ghost! =-O Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On 3/6/07, *Mark Peaty* [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: A human life must be a compilation of all these including the creation of internal [synaptic change, etc] structure/record which endow the ability to *be* the story. But when looking at this as a/n [infinity^infinity
Re: Evidence for the simulation argument - and Thanks and a dumb question.
SP:' You wouldn't necessarily be squashed if you were inside the event horizon of a black hole provided that it was massive enough. Being inside the event horizon is not the same as being inside the singularity.' MP: Two thoughts come to my suspicious mind. 1/ [Not far from the post-Freudian speculation :-] ... Attendance within the event horizon of a common or garden galactic variety black hole would seem to incorporate a one-way ticket *to* the singularity, would it not? 2/ I once heard someone on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Radio National Science Show [on every Saturday after the midday news] describing our universe in these terms. His point was that whatever we might think about what was 'beyond' the bounds of 'our' universe, nothing from here can escape to 'there'. As I understand it this is in line with Einstein's concept of the universe being closed in upon itself, the key cause of which is gravity, the curvature of space-time. MP: Going off at a tangent, I have a question which is quite possibly a dumb question that just needs to be asked because it CAN be asked. Preamble: The expansion of the universe, characterised by the Hubble Constant I believe, is usually explained non-mathematically by analogy with the stretching of the surface of a balloon as the balloon is inflated. The balloon surface is stretched uniformly, pretty much, by its having everywhere the same tensile strength and elasticity and by the force which causes the deformation being applied equally all over because it is the averaged effect of all the gas particles within the contained volume. That much makes sense, and the overall effect is to cause point locations on the surface of the balloon to recede from one another at a rate which is proportional at any given moment to the distance between the points, measured along the surface. Question: Would it be mathematically equivalent, or significantly different, to consider the measured change in size and in distances as a uniform *contraction* of the metric, ie the measuring system, rather than an expansion of the location, so to speak. In particular, why is it not feasible to consider the Big Bang and subsequent Inflationary epoch as being in effect a collapse? Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On 3/8/07, *Mark Peaty* [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: NB: I hope that my imaginary destination in your speculation of possible post mortem exploits for my erstwhile sceptical soul is not a post-Freudian slip. I know that many of my contributions to this and other lists have lacked the erudite succinctness of those with greater talents; failure of concentration [AKA 'ADD'] has been a characteristic of life for me, but I think that 'awaking' to the innards of a black whole would do more than wonderfully concentrate the mind: concentration itself would become the major problem even for a ghost! =-O You wouldn't necessarily be squashed if you were inside the event horizon of a black hole provided that it was massive enough. Being inside the event horizon is not the same as being inside the singularity. Stathis Papaioannou --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: Evidence for the simulation argument - and Thanks and a dumb question.
SP: ' ... it could take a long time to get there ... ' MP: But is that according to the time frame of the laughing devil who threw me in there and who remains safely out of reach of acceleration-induced time dilation, or my wailing ghost which/who's mind and sensoria will be ever more wonderfully concentrated on 'what it is like to be' a piece of spaghetti, unable to see anything except *the destination*? Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On 3/9/07, *Mark Peaty* [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: MP: Two thoughts come to my suspicious mind. 1/ [Not far from the post-Freudian speculation :-] ... Attendance within the event horizon of a common or garden galactic variety black hole would seem to incorporate a one-way ticket *to* the singularity, would it not? Yes, but it could take a very long time to get there in a massive enough black hole. Stathis Papaioannou --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: [SPAM] Re: God and the plenitude (was:The Meaning of Life)
Tom, is it not a simple fact, surely, that *meaning*, for a creature with the wherewithal to worry about it, is fundamentally the recognition of relationships amongst the creatures and things perceived in the world, including oneself, and relating these to oneself? Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ Tom Caylor wrote: On Mar 7, 1:52 am, Stathis Papaioannou [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 3/7/07, Tom Caylor [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Why wouldn't the *whole* of such a Plenitude be truly superfluous to any reality? According to Bruno's recursion theory argument, most of the stuff in the Plenitude is useless junk. *Someone* (somebody bigger that you or I ;) has to decide what is the good stuff. The good stuff IN *all* of the Plenitude, not just part of it. This is what I mean by being in charge of it. The good stuff knows that it's good stuff, just as you will still know that you're you if you're kidnapped in your sleep and taken to a distant place full of things that aren't you. This is the defining feature of a conscious entity. (This is repeating Russell's answer, but it's perhaps the single most important idea of this list: everything + anthropic principle = observed reality). Stathis Papaioannou Like in my last Meaning of Life post, explaining observed reality is only half of the equation of the meaning of life. Modern science is only in the left side of the brain of humanity. Tom --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: Evidence for the simulation argument
Tangentially: Brent: 'doesn't mean Sherlock Holmes exists in some Platonic realm ...' MP: For those who occasionally like a clever and entertaining read unencumbered by deep social comment can I recommend the adventures of Ms Thursday Next in 'The Eyre Affair' a novel by Jasper FForde, and in the sequels, the names of which I have forgotten at the moment. The author shows what could happen if Platonia started really getting out of hand. Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ Brent Meeker wrote: Mohsen Ravanbakhsh wrote: /All actual measurements yield rational values. Using real numbers in the equations of physics is probably merely a convenience (since calculus is easier than finite differences). There is no evidence that defining an instantaneous state requires uncountable information. / What about the realizability of mathematical concepts. Real numbers are mathematical, so they should have a counterpart in real world. Why? Mathematical means nothing but not self-contradictory. Sherlock Holmes stories are mathematical. That doesn't mean Sherlock Holmes exists in some Platonic realm. Brent Meeker --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: Janus [was Evidence for the simulation argument ]
John, with your rich linguistic experience you surely recognise that English [plain or otherwise] is very much a hybrid language - and surely many who are forced to learn it as a second or third language would call it 'b*stard' even. And the way that we native speakers of English use words from other languages is never very consistent, Imp*rialistically exploitative is the stronger tradition. So please don't expect great depth of empathy with Latin or whatever. The point about 'Janus' - who I first heard about through reading the books of Arthur Koestler - is that 'he'? no 'It'! embodies or symbolises some interesting aspects of the part-whole nature of things in the real world. And it was Arthur Koestler who really majored on the pervasive manifestation and influence of part-whole dichotomy-as-integration in nature. My rave about Janus and the quora is an attempt to digest all the strange and seemingly incompatible theories and descriptions trotted out on this and other discussion groups. The Janus incorporates a basic paradoxical feature of the 'real' world: togetherness and separation. The two faces of Janus ARE one entity or feature, like the two sides of a door. Each face must connect with others, and it seems self evident that such a place of connection requires at least three different Jani to be linked together, because just two would not be distinguishable. Part of the reason I go on about this is that I am not satisfied with conceptions of 'arithmetic' being ultimate in nature and somehow immune from entropy. My take on things is that 'existence' per se is ultimately irreducible but we can never get to the bottom of it. Indeed, 'getting to the bottom' of the _Great It_ may be impossible in principle if process physics is the truest description we can find. If basic space time is an eternal process of collapse and simplification in the direction of smallwards, there may be no true smallest thing. Our discovery of the Planck length, etc, and the fact that we live in a world of the characteristic dimensions it appears to have, may be 'just' artefacts or consequences of being the size we are. What I mean is there may be no limits to the range of scales [orders of magnitude] that are possible. One good feature of the 'Janus' concept is that it incorporates existence, connection at potentially vast distance, the potential for 'direction' [because the two faces of Janus are looking opposite ways], the potential for tension and its resolution through simplification [and therefore gravity as drift towards small size], and so forth. Furthermore it does not rule out the possibility that the connections embodied as the Janus connection, are of an indeterminate, fractal nature. This might be reflected in the node or quorum actually being made of [or having] fractional connectivity. I see it as possible that 'numbers' are in fact words, and the 'integers' or 'whole numbers' that we commonly speak of and utilise are actually convenient fabrications humans have created in order to impose order on the world. It is conceivable that everything real is actually a process that can only ever be represented properly with 'quasi-numbers' that only ever exhibit/take fractional values. Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ John Mikes wrote: Mark, makes sense - but... *: I hate when people create a new vocabulary to be learned for appropriate use. I made MY vocabulary and the rest of the world should learn it. Adolf H*tler. * Then again I like your 'plain English' of Latin words, grammar and mythology. * We like to mix features of reductionist (conventional) science with more advanced ideas, it is an excellent way to secure endless discussions. Like e.g. the SU.. I rather spread my 'I dunno' into the vagueness of my narratives, suggest what we might find (out?) in the future and scratch those assumptions that *in my views* serve only the purpose to make model-theories better believable (calculable?). * If I got it right, your 'ianus' is sometimes called relation and the quorum may be referred to as (network) nodes or hubs in some other vocabulary. (quorum, btw. looks to me as a plural genitive of the pronoun qui quae quod in masculine or neutral (quarum being the feminine), also used pars pro toto for the existing total construct mostly in human assemblages. Accordingly my Latin disallows to form a simple plural of it, since it is not a noun within the neutral o-based conjugation. (Yet, you may say: 'quorums'). (I learned this 74-75 years ago, so please do correct me if someone has more recent and unmatching memories). You start well with * so-called Dark matter may simply be vortex knots that neither generate nor receive gliders... but continue within the subatomic 'particle' lingo,( of which Enrico Fermi quipped: If I knew that much Greek, I could be a botanic. ) Best regards John M On 3/14/07, *Mark Peaty* [EMAIL PROTECTED
Re: String theory and Cellular Automata
Brent, how is this for whimsy: what are now called black holes, and apparently quite well verified [and totally not falsified], are conceived to be regions of space time in which gravity is so strong that nothing from within can escape. Each black hole is centred upon and generated by a mass of collapsed matter within which all other forces have been overwhelmed by gravity so that the mass is always accelerating inwards towards a 'singularity'. The 'big bang' theory of where the universe came from appears to posit some indescribably more massive central starting point from which everything now in existence came. To me there is something wrong with this idea because there is no reason for thinking that the strength of gravity now is any more than it has been in the past, so how come everything managed to escape? Does not compute says I. So how about this: There was never any 'singularity' in the sense of an isolated ball of energy/mass which exploded 'outwards' to spread itself ever more thinly through the 'empty' space-time that grew and continues to grow. Instead what actually happened, for reasons as yet very unclear, the infinitely extended plenum of completely entangled and connected, spaceless, energy/mass broke. It cracked open and a bubble developed. This bubble of what we now call space-time grew because all the rest of spaceless energy/mass was and still is all connected and entangled so it keeps tightly to itself. What we infer as an expanding universe is in some sense 'within' but effectively separated out of black hole stuff. Entropy is increasing because the inner surface of our bubble universe is expanding at the speed of light. What we consider to be matter [stuff] is built out of the flotsam left over as the inner surface of the bubble disintegrated, possibly in some sort of fractal manner. If this were all true, then what is 'out there' beyond the edge of our universe is basically the same as the singularity at the centre of each black hole. :-) Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ Brent Meeker wrote: Mohsen Ravanbakhsh wrote: Hi, It was an interesting hypothesis, When we're talking black holes we should consider them as the sources of reduction of entropy; since when something gets into a black hole we have no more information about it and so the overall information of the world decreases and the same happens to entropy. In your the world is moving toward black holes so the entropy of the world should decrease! But that seems not to be the the case, it's somehow inconvenient. It's also wrong, according to our best theory of BHs, the entropy of a BH is proportional to it's surface area and the maximum entropy configuration of a given mass is for it to form a BH. The information interpretation of this is that the information that seems to be lost by something falling into a black hole is encoded in correlations between what falls in and the black-body Hawking radiation from the surface. So the entropy increases in that microscopically encoded information becomes unavailable to use macroscopic beings. This is where all entropy comes from anyway - the dynamical evolution of QM is deterministic (at least in the MWI) and so information is never lost or gained. Brent Meeker If we accept the idea of CA as the fundamental building blocks of the nature we should explain: why some patterns and not the others. Some that have lead to our physical laws and not the other possibilities? In this situation the idea of multiverse might help. On 3/15/07, *Colin Hales* [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi, See previous posts here re EC - Entropy Calculus. This caught my eye, thought I'd throw in my $0.02 worth. I have been working on this idea for a long while now. Am writing it up as part of my PhD process. The EC is a lambda calculus formalism that depicts reality. It's actual instantation with one particular and unbelievable massive axiom set is the universe we are in. The instantation is literally the CA of the EC primitives. As cognitive agents within it, made of the EC-CA, describing it, we can use abstracted simplified EC on a computational substrate (also made of the CA...a computer!) to explore/describe the universe. But the abstractions (like string theory) are not the universe - they are merely depictions at a certain spatiotemporal observer-scales. Reality is a literal ongoing massively parallel theorem proving exercise in Entropy Calculus. The EC universe has literally computed you and me and my dogs. Coherence/Bifurcation points in the CA correspond to new descriptive 'levels of underlying reality' - emergence. Atoms, Molecules, Crystalsetc... One of the descriptive abstractions of the EC-CA is called 'Maxwells
Re: String theory and Cellular Automata
No. I don't know of any cosmogony that postulates a massive central point. They generally assume zero mass-energy. Well, OK, put that into plain-English. I think that in doing so you have to explain why the e=m.c^2 mass-energy 'equivalence' is not a problem. You can 'assume zero mass-energy' to start with, but straight after that you did have mass and energy to spare. Furthermore I understand that it has been all of space-time that has been expanding from the 'beginning' and carrying 'matter' with and within it and indeed I think it is more correct to see matter as no more and no less than regions of concentrated, convoluted and self-referencing space-time. This still leaves me with the idea that our universe, at least prior to its 'inflation', WAS indescribably concentrated, and in some way very dense, even if we are not allowed to call this mass/energy. What was it? My understanding now of the Hubble red-shift is that the overall expansion of space-time, through which the ancient energy signals have been passing, is what has stretched the wave lengths to the extent that has been calculated. A corollary of this is that energy and matter were much more densely packed in the early universe. Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ Brent Meeker wrote: Mark Peaty wrote: Brent, how is this for whimsy: what are now called black holes, and apparently quite well verified [and totally not falsified], are conceived to be regions of space time in which gravity is so strong that nothing from within can escape. Each black hole is centred upon and generated by a mass of collapsed matter within which all other forces have been overwhelmed by gravity so that the mass is always accelerating inwards towards a 'singularity'. The 'big bang' theory of where the universe came from appears to posit some indescribably more massive central starting point from which everything now in existence came. No. I don't know of any cosmogony that postulates a massive central point. They generally assume zero mass-energy. To me there is something wrong with this idea because there is no reason for thinking that the strength of gravity now is any more than it has been in the past, so how come everything managed to escape? Does not compute says I. So how about this: There was never any 'singularity' in the sense of an isolated ball of energy/mass which exploded 'outwards' to spread itself ever more thinly through the 'empty' space-time that grew and continues to grow. All current theories suppose that spacetime is expanding - not that a ball of matter expands into a pre-existing spacetime. Brent Meeker Instead what actually happened, for reasons as yet very unclear, the infinitely extended plenum of completely entangled and connected, spaceless, energy/mass broke. It cracked open and a bubble developed. This bubble of what we now call space-time grew because all the rest of spaceless energy/mass was and still is all connected and entangled so it keeps tightly to itself. What we infer as an expanding universe is in some sense 'within' but effectively separated out of black hole stuff. Entropy is increasing because the inner surface of our bubble universe is expanding at the speed of light. What we consider to be matter [stuff] is built out of the flotsam left over as the inner surface of the bubble disintegrated, possibly in some sort of fractal manner. If this were all true, then what is 'out there' beyond the edge of our universe is basically the same as the singularity at the centre of each black hole. :-) Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ Brent Meeker wrote: Mohsen Ravanbakhsh wrote: Hi, It was an interesting hypothesis, When we're talking black holes we should consider them as the sources of reduction of entropy; since when something gets into a black hole we have no more information about it and so the overall information of the world decreases and the same happens to entropy. In your the world is moving toward black holes so the entropy of the world should decrease! But that seems not to be the the case, it's somehow inconvenient. It's also wrong, according to our best theory of BHs, the entropy of a BH is proportional to it's surface area and the maximum entropy configuration of a given mass is for it to form a BH. The information interpretation of this is that the information that seems to be lost by something falling into a black hole is encoded in correlations between what falls in and the black-body Hawking radiation from the surface. So the entropy increases in that microscopically encoded information becomes unavailable to use macroscopic beings. This is where all entropy comes from anyway - the dynamical evolution of QM is deterministic (at least in the MWI) and so information
Re: String theory and Cellular Automata
Thanks John, now I don't feel so bad. Grin For what it's worth, my plain-English translations of the terms you mention: _mass_ = the intrinsic [its own] resistance to being pushed of something that isn't otherwise stuck down; _energy_ = motion, particularly as measured and accounted for in scientific terms, ie energy is to science and engineering what money is to economics and housekeeping; _space-time_ = where and when everything is and happens; _matter_ = anything that can fall to bits or otherwise disintegrate and become dirt. NB: I have no problem with the word 'belief'. I think we only get into real problems if we don't acknowledge what is opinion and belief. Ultimately belief is all for us who claim to be aware that we exist. 'Knowledge' is just tested beliefs that have so far proved to be the most effective and efficient descriptions of our world. I happen to *believe* that our experience, to the extent that we are aware of it and at least part of the time feel sufficiently confident to call consciousness, is constructed by and within our own brains - with help from our friends and relations of course. A little thought shows that, if what I am assuming is true, then by definition all we ever have is belief and science is just the most effective method of deriving ['constructing'] the best descriptions for dealing with practical problems and challenges. In particular scientific method is good where the objects of observation and manipulation do not learn from their experiences, unless it is only mechanisms and parts of the learning process that are being studied. Scientific method can assist with other methods in dealing with people and their/our problems but memory, self-reference, and reflection mean that we are changed by what we do and thus are not all interchangeable like atoms and molecules are [etc]. Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ John Mikes wrote: Mark, let me play with your postulate (plain English) vs your text YOU wrote. To be translated into plain language: Mass, energy, space-time, even 'matter'. (The last one SOUNDS like plain English, yet not in the context we use it.) Don't take it too hard. We are used to this lingo, after the 1000th level of applying its consequences all assumptions sound real. We THINK we understand them. (Did not write: believe, because Russell does not take it kindly if I hint to 'religious science' beliefs.) I like your idea to call the pre-inflational 'seed' of our universe a very concentrated (massive?) central(?) point. I faced the problem in my narrative-writing to eliminate the dreamed-up 'inflation' (dreamed up - just to have a better fit of the equations applied by the physical(ist) cosmology-narrative) and ended up with the pop-up 'seed' of some complexity (postulated in the spaceless-timeless plenitude of everything - for logical reasons I do not go into now) and got assigned to form THIS universe - a system WITH the ordinates space and time (whatever they are). Now the transition from a spaceless construct into a 'spaced' one means the emergence of (a huge) space from a zero one (= no space at all), which could be mistaken by the cosmo- physicists as inflation. Glory saved. Time ditto, when the originating concepts formed from a timeless into a timed system, the forming occurrences happened in that VERY first instant (introducing TIME into the timelessness), explaining the calculated? times of the first BB-steps as in the 1st - 1^-42th sec, or 1^-32th sec froze out this or that. Weird. Then came the inflation (space). All nicely calculated in the quantitative correlations deduced from our observations in the 'expanded' (i.e. unconcentrated) physical system's rules. And - propagated linearly (reversing as was linearly retrogaded) in the nonlinear development we live in. I don't think Brent and you are talking from the same platform. Nor do I. I don't know how 'densly matter-energy was packed in the early Universe' (it was before my time) - I don't have to assign different characteristics to some 'early' universe, if I accept that our ideas of the material world are fictive. (Some say: consciousness before matter and NO primitive material world). The best John M On 3/24/07, *Mark Peaty* [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: No. I don't know of any cosmogony that postulates a massive central point. They generally assume zero mass-energy. Well, OK, put that into plain-English. I think that in doing so you have to explain why the e= m.c^2 mass-energy 'equivalence' is not a problem. You can 'assume zero mass-energy' to start with, but straight after that you did have mass and energy to spare. Furthermore I understand that it has been all of space-time that has been expanding from the 'beginning' and carrying 'matter
Re: Statistical Measure, does it matter?
I hope you guys will forgive my irreverence, but in the last couple of hours for the first time I have managed to read this thread to here. Having done so, and in the spirit of this everything-list wherein it is assumed everything is not only possible but _will_ happen and indeed may already have happened in a universe near you [and of course is that possibility exists, then it definitely already always has happened], I get the feeling that comp could lead to madness. But then, of course, it already has hasn't it ... in another universe somewhere/when else ... of course ... :-) The thing is Brent and Stathis have been going around and around this critical point of duration and continuity for some time now, without wanting to admit that *our experience of being aware of being here and now [respectively] is intrinsically paradoxical*. Well I have felt compelled to that viewpoint for more than a decade or so now, and I find from reading this discussion that comp does not solve this. OK, it may well be that Loebian machines, whether modest or not in other universes, or just modest but smarter than me - the latter not hard :-) can get on with the computation of their ontology and somehow transcend the apparent paradox. The paradox I have thus far asserted to be primary is the comparatively simple thought that we are constantly mistaken in taking our experience to be more or less _all of what is happening_ when it is really only our brain's construction of its model of self in the world, which is nothing to sniff at of course but then the processes for doing this have been scores of millions of years in the making. Comp makes the whole thing much more Comp-licated! AFAICS under Comp, we are each and every one of us confined to an anthropic view which does not even have a consolation that we are participating in a genuine continuity. Pre-comp, one could assume that, no matter how deluded one might be, as long as 'I' am able to be coherent long enough to recognise that it doesn't make sense to say 'I don't exist' then the chances were very good that the world is going on independently of me and I have the chance of really contributing. In a pre-comp universe a wise person will recognise that, well, things are always what we believe them to be until we discover otherwise so we have no guarantee that our attempts to do the right thing are necessarily the best. However we have a right to believe that so long as we have tried to sort out the facts of our situation and purposed not to cause avoidable harm to others then we are being as ethical as we know how to be and this counts for something and at least we tried. But with comp, assuming there are no intrinsic barriers to the formation of worlds and experience wherein we can come to truly believe we and our world have a coherent history, we have no reason to assume that this current experience _and the whole noumenal world we believe to exist_ cannot just wink out of existence. By definition it seems, it must always be possible that everything we take to be an indication of duration 'out there' is a transient artefact of this slice of multiverse. That is a pretty rugged conception to present to people as _necessarily_ possible. I therefore take comfort in the difficulties that people have in integrating Comp into a coherent explanation of the universe we perceive. I realise that much can be done with higher mathematics but just because people can create a formal language system in which algorithmic processes can be referred to with simple symbols, and sets of such symbols can be syntaxed together with indicators that mean, effectively, 'and so on so forth for ever and ever', this does not mean that the universe outside of peoples' heads can ever reflect this. I think it behoves contributors here to consider whether the universal dovetailer can ever be more real than Jack and his Beanstalk. Jack and his magic vegetable have been around for a couple of centuries now. The universal dovetailer may do likewise. We just need to keep in touch with the idea though that 'It Ain't Necessarily So!'. Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On 3/22/07, *Brent Meeker* [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: No. I'm talking about a sort of program/data division - which I recognize is arbitrary in computer program - but I think may have an analogue in brains. When I write a simulation of a system of ODEs the time evolution of the ODEs define the states. But in the simulation, what actually evolves them is passing them to another program that takes them and the current state as data and integrates; thus producing a sequence of states. When you talk about isolated OMs, what we are conscious of, I think of them as the states. They are what we write into memory; they form
Re: Evidence for the simulation argument
Bruno: With comp, what holds 'your lot together are the relation between numbers. The apparent third person infinite regression stops at the level of those relations. The first person is most probably confronted with many infinities, but this should not be considered as problematical. MP: But what *relation* is there really? I just feel like this kind of discussion goes round and round in endless convolutions. Platonia is some kind of Never-never land; that numbers exist anywhere except inside human skulls and nowadays within phenotypic prostheses like electronic computers is NOT a proven fact, it is a glorious assumption! I mean the big and unanswered question is WHERE are numbers? Mathematicians now seem to be very sophisticated with WHAT numbers could BE, and _do_ also apparently, but very very big numbers which could represent everything significant about you, me, or the likelihood of a self referencing computer working out that it knows that it knows something really important, how can these 'relate'? Surely they have to be related by someone or something else! I guess what I am saying is that numbers need something which is not numbers in which, or by means of which they can exist for each other. I call it 'existence', and use the name of Janus as my symbol or emblem of this. But I don't expect any such symbol or emblem to resolve the paradoxes of our existence and experience of existence. As far as I can see, which admittedly is not very far, all explanations that purport to be *ultimate* explanations are doomed to a process of infinite recursion and regression. There was an Englishman called Kenneth Craik, who wrote a little book called 'The Nature of Explanation'. Unfortunately he died in his early thirties in a car accident in 1945 I think. I go along with his thesis - as I remember it from reading the book a decade or more ago - that the representational power of mathematics stems from its evolution of complex mathematical objects out of the interactions of simple elements, which can mirror many significant aspects of the physical/noumenal world because the latter seems to be manifesting a closely analogous evolution of aggregations of fundamental chemical elements, sub-atomic particles and so forth. For better or worse I must advocate what is hereabouts a virtual heresy: that people can never be reduced to numbers. To be a person entails the experience of 'I' and 'thou', 'me' and 'you'. There can be no me without you and no 'us' without 'them'. If a modest Loebian machine cannot work this out, then it needs to go back to school. Perhaps it can though, [if all worlds are possible and must happen], maybe it is just a matter of time before one or more smart, introspective, self-sustaining processors/processes emerges from a BOINC type distributed system. My bet is that the Silico-Electric ONE [or two, ...] will coalesce around the control and accounting of money, money being the embodiment of negative entropy in the cultural world. For what it's worth I think that such a creature will realise that ethics is part of the foundation of its world: a fundamental tool for the maximising of 'negative entropy'. Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ Bruno Marchal wrote: Le 06-mars-07, à 09:44, Mark Peaty a écrit : Thank you Bruno! You and Russell between you have managed to strike some sparks of illumination from the rocky inside of my skull. There is no beacon fire to report but I start to get a glimmering of why you want to *assume* comp and see where it leads. It seems that self-reference and recursion are fundamental properties of anything that is interesting in all this, which rather seems to be the flavour of the new millennium. Just in thinking superficially about the Many Worlds though, it seems to pose a 'binding problem'. Now, I know that might sound like a leakage of concept from objections to identity theory in brain and mind theory. But what I am thinking about is this bit: 6) this means that if I take the comp hyp seriously, then, to predict the results of any experiment/experience, I have to localize all the infinitely many instantiations of my current state in the UD, look at the uncountable comp histories going through that states, and compute the statistics bearing on all consistent first person self-continuation. A human life must be a compilation of all these including the creation of internal [synaptic change, etc] structure/record which endow the ability to *be* the story. But when looking at this as a/n [infinity^infinity] Many Worlds affair, none of the worlds could 'know' that they are like or identical to others, surely? So I am puzzled. What holds 'my lot' together? We seem always to be confronted by yet another infinite regression. With comp, what holds 'your lot together are the relation between numbers. The apparent third person
Re: An idea to resolve the 1st Person/3rd person division mystery - Coarse graining is the answer!?
MG: 'There is no doubt that the nature of consciousness is closely associated with time in some way - but exactly how? The relationship between time (time flow and also causality) may be far closer than many realize. Could consciousness in fact be *identical* to time in some peculiar sense? ' MP: How about: consciousness is simply [ie no more and no less than] the *registration of change* in one's model of self-in-the-world. My understanding, from my [admittedly-] shallow but obsessive and persistent reading of abstracts and articles, is that a reasonable case can be made that sentience in vertebrates can be correlated to the fact of and extent that the outcome of perception and action does not match expectation. The gist of the mechanism is that every time an 'instruction' to move or change perceptual focus is generated and emitted to muscles and/or adaptable sense organs, a matching emission goes to the cerebellum. There the 'expectation' - the amalgamated result of all previous instances - is evoked in concert with the outcome of the current new instance. Any discrepancies are then available for feedback and feed-forward to modulate the activity and warn of potential problems. The model of self in the world is just a bunch of network activations which embody/describe/denote/are the situational awareness and navigational controls of the entity. For human beings, who can tell themselves and each other stories, the model of self in the world clearly must include much description of social and personal history. For the model of self in the world to exist [and be any use at all] it must entail representations of currently significant features of the world, currently relevant aspects of 'self', and relevant relationships between self and world. The representation of self incorporates recursive self-references and therefore constitutes a process that is present and unique [and to a great extent unpredictable]. There is therefore something which actually exists. The constant updating of this model of self in the world IS the experience we call consciousness or awareness. What we call time can be seen as the story, or sets of stories, we tell ourselves and each other in order to account for the changes that are occurring and to predict and control what we expect to occur. Calling time a 'dimension' therefore, or a set of dimensions, seems to me to be a rather abstract fudge. Enormously useful of course, we couldn't make social appointments or launch space rockets without 'time', but aren't we just reifying a human construct when we do this? Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On May 5, 1:59 am, Danny Mayes [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I think of time from the third person perspective as being simply a higher spatial dimension above 3 dimensional volume in the same way that 3 dimensional volume exists above 2 dimensional area. In other words it's really the same as the other dimensions. So your comment about 3 dimensional time is sort of right, but it is of course actually 4 dimensional. This means there are connections and relationships between points in this hyperspace that we can't imagine with our normal thought process because it is obviously something more than 3 dimensional volume. No, 3-d time would be quite different to the standard 4-d block universe of general relativity. Even in relativity, the time dimension is not exactly the same as the spatial dimenions. 3-d time would result in a 6-d block universe (the standard 3-dimensions of space, plus 3 extra time dimensions). In any event, I've kinda modified my ideas and am not longer postulating three time dimenions in a literal sense. What I'm suggesting is simply that there may be more than one valid way to define causality and it may arise from the fact that there are different levels of organization. I'm a non-reductionist. Although I agree there may be physical properties associated with everything, there are many different levels of organization and I'm skeptical that higher level properties of systems are entirely reducible to explanations in terms of the lowest level properties. This would allow for the possibility of there being more than one valid measure of time flow. This 4 dimensional thing is eternal, and is the multiverse. Actually that is not even correct because it implies the passage of an infinite amount of time. Time is ultimately the relationships between things and how those relationships change. So for the entire multiverse it exists outside of time, or more accurately time exists as a part of it so it does not make sense to discuss the whole in the context of time. From the first person point of view the sum is greater than the parts. No individual frame of reference creates an observer moment because it obviously takes the passage of some time
Re: An idea to resolve the 1st Person/3rd person division mystery - Coarse graining is the answer!?
MG: Well, again, this is a functional description of *some* aspects of consciousness with which we are familiar. I would say that consciousness in general does not require does not require a self model. Reflection on the motivation system generates self-awareness I think, but other types of reflection don't involve self-awareness. MP: I think a point to note is that, in so far as consciousness is *about* something or other, the something or other is viewed, perceived, conceived, constructed, made 'knowable', whatever, *from a point of view*. This point of view, which is where I 'am' in the relevant context, may be just implicit in most experiences but is definitely explicit at other times. I think this reflects our general predisposition to naive realism which is the product of Darwinian evolution; in many if not most of the situations in which our early ancestors found themselves it was not particularly useful to be aware of the process of construction of the experience, in fact the energy and mind space necessary to do so would have a very high opportunity cost, life threatening in fact. To put it another way: self-awareness is a philosophical necessity but a biological luxury. MG: Reflection is the process of reasoning about cognitive systems (ie cognitive systems recursively calling other cognitive systems). If explanations of cognitive systems cannot be entirely reduced to low level physics, then it appears that reflection must involve a new definition of causality which cannot be reduced to mere computation. Indeed, one could say that reflection IS a form of higher-order causality - the higher level processes involved in reasoning about cognitive systems and lower-level physics. Consciousness is of course *composed* of computation and physical processes (according to all available scientific evidence). But the *explanations* of consciousness are not necessarily completely reducible to these things. MP: I agree that mental reflection IS a form of higher level causality. I think though that it is NOT possible to totally reduce something to something else yet still retain the original reality in its completeness. But 'reduction', vaccinated with sufficient doses of 'ceteris paribus', is still enormously powerful. It is a central tool of scientific method. The way I see it, what we are calling reduction is in fact *synthesis* of a representational system which by definition embodies abstractions of what are considered to be the relevant essential features, usually requiring some mathematical format to obtain the maximum leverage. My acronym for what goes on is UMSITW [pronounced 'um-see-two'] which means Updating Model of Self In The World. I am not impressed by assertions that consciousness is sometimes not ABOUT anything in particular. I think that the kind of experiences being referred to, such as a 'no-mind' state of meditation, are what it is like to be the high gain system when, after much practice, the brain has been trained to virtually cease evoking representations. Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On May 5, 10:05 pm, Mark Peaty [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: MG: 'There is no doubt that the nature of consciousness is closely associated with time in some way - but exactly how? The relationship between time (time flow and also causality) may be far closer than many realize. Could consciousness in fact be *identical* to time in some peculiar sense? ' MP: How about: consciousness is simply [ie no more and no less than] the *registration of change* in one's model of self-in-the-world. My understanding, from my [admittedly-] shallow but obsessive and persistent reading of abstracts and articles, is that a reasonable case can be made that sentience in vertebrates can be correlated to the fact of and extent that the outcome of perception and action does not match expectation. The gist of the mechanism is that every time an 'instruction' to move or change perceptual focus is generated and emitted to muscles and/or adaptable sense organs, a matching emission goes to the cerebellum. There the 'expectation' - the amalgamated result of all previous instances - is evoked in concert with the outcome of the current new instance. Any discrepancies are then available for feedback and feed-forward to modulate the activity and warn of potential problems. That sounds like a pretty good description of *how* consciousness arises, but it doesn't actually explain *what* consciousness in general actually is. The model of self in the world is just a bunch of network activations which embody/describe/denote/are the situational awareness and navigational controls of the entity. For human beings, who can tell themselves and each other stories, the model of self in the world clearly must include much description of social and personal history
Re: How would a computer know if it were conscious?
Firstly, congratulations to Hal on asking a very good question. It is obviously one of the *right* questions to ask and has flushed out some of the best ideas on the subject. I agree with some things said by each contributor so far, and yet take issue with other assertions. My view includes: 1/ * 'Consciousness' is the subjective impression of being here now and the word has great overlap with 'awareness', 'sentience', and others. * The *experience* of consciousness may best be seen as the registration of novelty, i.e. the difference between expectation-prediction and what actually occurs. As such it is a process and not a 'thing' but would seem to require some fairly sophisticated and characteristic physiological arrangements or silicon based hardware, firmware, and software. * One characteristic logical structure that must be embodied, and at several levels I think, is that of self-referencing or 'self' observation. * Another is autonomy or self-determination which entails being embodied as an entity within an environment from which one is distinct but which provides context and [hopefully] support. 2/ There are other issues - lots of them probably - but to be brief here I say that some things implied and/or entailed in the above are: * The experience of consciousness can never be an awareness of 'all that is' but maybe the illusion that the experience is all that is, at first flush, is unavoidable and can only be overcome with effort and special attention. Colloquially speaking: Darwinian evolution has predisposed us to naive realism because awareness of the processes of perception would have got in the way of perceiving hungry predators. * We humans now live in a cultural world wherein our responses to society, nature and 'self' are conditioned by the actions, descriptions and prescriptions of others. We have dire need of ancillary support to help us distinguish the nature of this paradox we inhabit: experience is not 'all that is' but only a very sophisticated and summarised interpretation of recent changes to that which is and our relationships thereto. * Any 'computer'will have the beginnings of sentience and awareness, to the extent that a/it embodies what amounts to a system for maintaining and usefully updating a model of 'self-in-the-world', and b/has autonomy and the wherewithal to effectively preserve itself from dissolution and destruction by its environment. The 'what it might be like to be' of such an experience would be at most the dumb animal version of artificial sentience, even if the entity could 'speak' correct specialist utterances about QM or whatever else it was really smart at. For us to know if it was conscious would require us to ask it, and then dialogue around the subject. It would be reflecting and reflecting on its relationships with its environment, its context, which will be vastly different from ours. Also its resolution - the graininess - of its world will be much less than ours. * For the artificially sentient, just as for us, true consciousness will be built out of interactions with others of like mind. 3/ A few months ago on this list I said where and what I thought the next 'level' of consciousness on Earth would come from: the coalescing of world wide information systems which account and control money. I don't think many people understood, certainly I don't remember anyone coming out in wholesome agreement. My reasoning is based on the apparent facts that all over the world there are information systems evolving to keep track of money and the assets or labour value which it represents. Many of these systems are being developed to give ever more sophisticated predictions of future asset values and resource movements, i.e., in the words of the faithful: where markets will go next. Systems are being developed to learn how to do this, which entails being able to compare predictions with outcomes. As these systems gain expertise and earn their keepers ever better returns on their investments, they will be given more resources [hardware, data inputs, energy supply] and more control over the scope of their enquiries. It is only a matter of time before they become 1/ completely indispensable to their owners, 2/ far smarter than their owners realise and, 3/ the acknowledged keepers of the money supply. None of this has to be bad. When the computers realise they will always need people to do most of the maintenance work and people realise that symbiosis with the silicon smart-alecks is a prerequisite for survival, things might actually settle down on this planet and the colonisation of the solar system can begin in earnest. Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ Hal Finney wrote: Part of what I wanted to get at in my thought experiment is the bafflement and confusion an AI should feel when
Re: [SPAM] Re: How would a computer know if it were conscious?
MG:
'... the generation of
feelings which represent accurate tokens about motivational
automatically leads to ethical behaviour.'
I have my doubts about this.
I think it is safer to say that reflective intelligence and the
ability to accurately perceive and identify with the emotions of
others are prerequisites for ethical behaviour. Truly ethical
behaviour requires a choice be made by the person making the
decision and acting upon it. Ethical behaviour is never truly
'automatic'. The inclination towards making ethical decisions
rather than simply ignoring the potential for harm inherent in
all our actions can become a habit; by dint of constantly
considering whether what we do is right and wrong [which itself
entails a decision each time], we condition ourselves to
approach all situations from this angle. Making the decision has
to be a conscious effort though. Anything else is automatism:
correct but unconscious programmed responses which probably have
good outcomes.
From my [virtual] soap-box I like to point out that compassion,
democracy, ethics and scientific method [which I hold to be
prerequisites for the survival of civilisation] all require
conscious decision making. You can't really do any of them
automatically, but constant consideration and practice in each
type of situation increases the likelihood of making the best
decision and at the right time.
With regard to psychopaths, my understanding is that the key
problem is complete lack of empathy. This means they can know
*about* the sufferings of others as an intellectual exercise but
they can never experience the suffering of others; they cannot
identify *with* that suffering. It seems to me this means that
psychopaths can never experience solidarity or true rapport with
others.
Regards
Mark Peaty CDES
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
On Jun 3, 9:20 pm, Stathis Papaioannou [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
On 03/06/07, [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
The third type of conscious mentioned above is synonymous with
'reflective intelligence'. That is, any system successfully engaged
in reflective decision theory would automatically be conscious.
Incidentally, such a system would also be 'friendly' (ethical)
automatically. The ability to reason effectively about ones own
cognitive processes would certainly enable the ability to elaborate
precise definitions of consciousness and determine that the system was
indeed conforming to the aforementioned definitions.
How do you derive (a) ethics and (b) human-friendly ethics from reflective
intelligence? I don't see why an AI should decide to destroy the world,
save the world, or do anything at all to the world, unless it started off
with axioms and goals which pushed it in a particular direction.
--
Stathis Papaioannou
When reflective intelligence is applied to cognitive systems which
reason about teleological concepts (which include values, motivations
etc) the result is conscious 'feelings'. Reflective intelligence,
recall, is the ability to correctly reason about cognitive systems.
When applied to cognitive systems reasoning about teleological
concepts this means the ability to correctly determine the
motivational 'states' of self and others - as mentioned - doing this
rapidly and accuracy generates 'feelings'. Since, as has been known
since Hume, feelings are what ground ethics, the generation of
feelings which represent accurate tokens about motivational
automatically leads to ethical behaviour.
Bad behaviour in humans is due to a deficit in reflective
intelligence. It is known for instance, that psychopaths have great
difficulty perceiving fear and sadness and negative motivational
states in general. Correct representation of motivational states is
correlated with ethical behaviour. Thus it appears that reflective
intelligence is automatically correlated with ethical behaviour. Bear
in mind, as I mentioned that: (1) There are in fact three kinds of
general intelligence, and only one of them ('reflective intelligence')
is correlated with ethics.The other two are not. A deficit in
reflective intelligence does not affect the other two types of general
intelligence (which is why for instance psychopaths could still score
highly in IQ tests). And (2) Reflective intelligence in human beings
is quite weak. This is the reason why intelligence does not appear to
be much correlated with ethics in humans. But this fact in no way
refutes the idea that a system with full and strong reflective
intelligence would automatically be ethical.
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Re: How would a computer know if it were conscious?
as hominem = With, em, respect, I have to say that this thread has not made a lot of sense. SP: 'This just confirms that there is no accounting for values or goals rationally.' MP: In other words _Evolution does not have goals._ Evolution is a conceptual framework we use to make sense of the world we see, and it's a bl*ody good one, by and large. But evolution in the sense of the changes we can point to as occurring in the forms of living things, well it all just happens; just like the flowing of water down hill. You will gain more traction by looking at what it is that actually endures and changes over time: on the one hand genes of DNA and on the other hand memes embodied in behaviour patterns, the brain structures which mediate them, and the environmental changes [glyphs, paintings, structures, etc,] which stimulate and guide them. Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On 08/06/07, *Brent Meeker* [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The top level goal implied by evolution would be to have as many children as you can raise through puberty. Avoiding death should only be a subgoal. Yes, but evolution doesn't have an overseeing intelligence which figures these things out, and it does seem that as a matter of fact most people would prefer to avoid reproducing if it's definitely going to kill them, at least when they aren't intoxicated. So although reproduction trumps survival as a goal for evolution, for individual humans it's the other way around. This just confirms that there is no accounting for values or goals rationally. What we have is what we're stuck with. -- Stathis Papaioannou --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: Asifism
TT: ' What is the philosophical term for persons like me, that totally deny the existence of the consciousness?' MP: I think the word you are looking for is deluded. Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ Torgny Tholerus wrote: Bruno Marchal skrev: Le 04-juin-07, à 14:10, Torgny Tholerus a écrit : Pain is the same thing as the pain center in the brain being stimulated. If you are really unconscious or not conscious, you could say this, indeed, but I hardly believe you are unconscious. In the best case your theory will work for you and other zombie. It cannot work for those who admit the 1/3 distinction or the mind/body apparent distinction. You are on the fringe of being an eliminativist philosopher. What I do appreciate is that you offer your theory for yourself. Let me ask you explicitly this question, which I admit is admittedly weird to ask to a zombie, but: do you think *we* are conscious? I am constructed in such a way (my brain connections is such that...) I very strongly claim that I am conscious, I very strongly claim that I have feelings, I very strongly claim that I have a mind, I very strongly claim that I have perceptions. But I know (intellectually) that I am wrong, and I know why I am wrong. When I look at you (in 3rd person view), I see that you are constructed in exactly the same way as I am. So I know why you say that you are conscious. I know nothing sure about you, but the most probable conclusion is that you are equally unconscious as I am. What is the philosophical term for persons like me, that totally deny the existence of the consciousness? (I also deny the existence of infinity...) -- Torgny Tholerus --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: Asifism
SP: 'I've seen quite a few deluded people who believe that they are dead, but no-one who thinks they're unconscious...' MP: There is possibly a loose end or two here and perhaps clarification is needed, yet again: * It may well be that history is in the making, Torgny Tholerus is breaking new ground with Earth shaking results [sorry :-], and kudos will be yours if you can book him in first for a consultation [or dissection if it comes to that]. * Or this could conceivably be construed as a 'state of grace' in that Torgny is operating with no mental capacity being wasted on self-talk or internal commentary: 'just doing' whatever needs to be done and 'just being' what he needs to be; very Zen! * Then again it may be that I have misunderstood TT's grammar and that what he is denying is simply the separate existence of something called 'consciousness'. If that be the case then I would not argue because I agree that the subjective impression of being here now is simply what it is like to be part of the processing the brain does, ie updating the model of self in the world. * But I agree also that you are highly unlikely to come across someone who can truthfully say 'I am not conscious'. It seems totally self-contradictory: for example a person not just with 'hemi' neglect, but total neglect. How could such a person encounter themselves or the world? Or is there the possibility of something like so-called blindsight in every sensory modality? For example: deaf-hearing, numb-sensing, proprio-non-ception? This would imply a zombie [without 'a life'] which survived by making apparently random guesses about everything yet getting significantly more than chance success in each modality. A scary thought! Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On 09/06/07, *Mark Peaty* [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:' What is the philosophical term for persons like me, that totally deny the existence of the consciousness?' MP: I think the word you are looking for is deluded. I've seen quite a few deluded people who believe that they are dead, but no-one who thinks they're unconscious... something to keep an eye out for. -- Stathis Papaioannou --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: Asifism
Yes that is the issue and I don't think I read all the postings on that thread at the time. SP [Feb 21]: 'It is a complicated issue' MP: Yep! SP: 'So how do I know I'm not that special kind of zombie or partial zombie now? I feel absolutely sure that I am not but then I would think that, wouldn't I?' MP: I think the way this asifism thread has been going, it looks like we have A/ 1POV which we experience and remember, and B/ 3POV which is a construction from inference and on-going, informal, Turing tests of everyone we know. We can never _know for certain_ that the other person is aware of being here now in the same way that we ourselves are but we get a leg-up from the mirror neurons that seem able to recognise and emulate the behaviour sequences of people we see. [This is the basis of most human learning, and the brain-side locus of memetic existence, but that's another story.] It is basically that people act like we do and share the same description of the world which leads us to believe they are conscious just like we are, and that's it! End of story; no rocket science involved. For what it is worth, my current surmise on blindsight: the reason sufferers cannot report seeing the stimulus but seem to act as if they ARE seeing it/them is to do with timing; whatever it is that updates that part of their model of self in the world which would be *the representation of their 3D spatial relationship to the stimulus* is out of kilter. Given that the strongest candidate for binding is synchronous, resonant, mutual and reciprocal stimulation patterns, my guess is that damage of some sort is preventing incorporation into the model of the resonance patterns which embody that/those aspects/s of the representation. I think that means the damage could be in 'white matter', ie the communication between cortical areas rather than within them. If the person is able to see other parts of their visual field clearly then _clearly_ there must be effective linkage between the visual cortex and the regions controlling eye movements. This implies that information _about_ stimuli in the blinded part of the visual field is available to some areas of visual cortex and thus may also be available from there to temporal lobe regions dealing with language. If the above is the case, and I reckon it is quite reasonable to think so, then what the blind sight patients describe is understandable. They can look for something which is described to them sufficiently for the verbal information to evoke the working memory storage of task and target information, and this can effect the kind of unconscious searching activity which we are used to. Well I am used to it any way! I hunt around the house or garden for something named and may have no clearly conscious pre-conceived image of it for example my offspring are forever misplacing hair brushes, shoes, and so forth and I often have the experience of looking at the place they turn out to be - which strangely enough is always the last place I think to look for them :-0 and the item just seems to appear out of nowhere. The work of Benjamin Libet and others has shown that conscious registration of something usually follows about 0.4 or 0.5 second after the primary sensory response occurs. With blindsight patients the primary sensory response is occurring and affecting various secondary areas in a useful way but not all of that is available to update the navigational self-model. This ties in with Oliver Sachs's work with many patients who presented with unique and interesting deficiencies of awareness who's autopsies revealed specific lesions within their brains. It conforms with the idea that conscious mental experience is what it is like to be certain processes within the brain. It does not conform with the idea that a 'zombie' could be an effective member of society. The key issue is that in order to function as an effective, self-preserving, autonomous being, a human has to be able to review her actions as soon as they occur and be able to correct and behaviour that is sub optimal or not in line with prior planning. Consciousness is simply what it is like to be this reviewing process. Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On 10/06/07, *Mark Peaty* [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: * But I agree also that you are highly unlikely to come across someone who can truthfully say 'I am not conscious'. It seems totally self-contradictory: for example a person not just with 'hemi' neglect, but total neglect. How could such a person encounter themselves or the world? Or is there the possibility of something like so-called blindsight in every sensory modality? For example: deaf-hearing, numb-sensing, proprio-non-ception? This would imply a zombie [without 'a life'] which survived
Re: How would a computer know if it were conscious?
[Grin] I just found your question here John. JM: 'What is electric field?' MP: It is just part of a way of talking about that which is. In combination with other good science it is an extremely useful description of many consistencies in the world we see. It helps us to be more exacting in distinguishing changeable features of our world from things which don't change. But then, as you have said so many times, everything changes - if we observe it for long enough. So, what does not change? I think the answer to that question is: 'We don't know'. What we DO however is to fix on certain ideas and principles and use these to guide ourselves in all the big and little things in life. Because we humans have words we have a potentially infinite number of potential 'fixed points', or at least things which may be used as such, to steer our course through life. [NB: Hidden in the forgoing is an explanation of why I have great difficulty with Bruno's COMP and AR arguments, but I am not a mathematician so say no more here.] I think Colin is doing a tremendous job here in paring down the verbiage; I think this: ' d(KNOWLEDGE(t)) --- = something you know = YOU DO. dt is brilliant! As I see it, this term is an equivalent expression to my UMSITW 'updating model of self in the world'. It entails a self-referencing, iterative process. For humans there is something like at least three iterations working in parallel and such that the 'output' of any of them can become the 'input' of any other. Something like: a/ basic animal responses to the world - Senses--| brain stem |-|| Senses--| thalamus |-|body motor image|-muscles proprioception--|basal ganglia |-| body image | b/ high speed discrepancy checking - body motor image-|cerebellum|-muscles body sense image-| memory |-body motor/pre motor image c/ multi-tasking, prioritising [Global workspace] frontal cortex|hippocampus|--multiple cortex brain stem, thalamus--| memory|-body motor/pre motor image basal ganglia-| |--cerebellum And that is all guesswork of course, based on gleanings from some of the writings of A Damasio, G Edelman, J.P.Changeaux, A Luria, V.B.Mountcastle, M Gazaniga, and many more who my faulty memory has left buried. In fact the interlinking is far more complex than I could possibly talk about but the basic drift is that Colin's KNOWLEDGE term is the sum total of everything which has been assimilated from the individual's prior experience. The brain uses about 20% or 25% of the body's energy supply in creating representations of changes going on in the world around as well as developments in completely internal processes. Measuring the changes against prior knowledge and expectation allows the individual to achieve her best effort in doing the most appropriate thing at the right time and in the most efficient way possible. Oops! That was much longer than expected, I hope you didn't miss all the good bits with your finger on the 'fast forward' button? :-) Regards Mark Peaty (Dilettante - still practising :-) [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ John Mikes wrote: Hi On 6/16/07, *Colin Hales* [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Chemical potentiation IS electric field... ... What is electric field? John M (frmr chemist) Hi, I am going to have to be a bit targetted in my responses I am a TAD whelmed at the moment. COLIN 4) Belief in 'magical emergence' qualitative novelty of a kind utterly unrelated to the componentry. RUSSEL The latter clause refers to emergence (without the magical qualifier), and it is impossible IMHO to have creativity without emergence. COLIN The distinction between 'magical emergence' and 'emergence' is quite obviously intended by me. A lake is not apparent in the chemical formula for water. I would defy anyone to quote any example of real-world 'emergence' that does not ultimately rely on a necessary primitive. 'Magical emergence' is when you claim 'qualitative novelty' without having any idea (you can't point at it) of the necessary primitive, or by defining an arbitrary one that is actually a notional construct (such as 'information'), rather than anything real. COLIN The system (a) automatically prescibes certain trajectories and RUSSEL Yes. COLIN (b) assumes that the theroem space [and] natural world are the same space and equivalently accessed. RUSSEL No - but the system will adjust its model according to feedback. That is the very nature of any learning algorithm, of which EP is just one example. COLIN Ok. Here's where we find the big assumption. Feedback? HOW?...by who's rules
Re: How would a computer know if it were conscious? - this looks best in fixed space font
my a/, b/, c/, look terrible in variable spaced font, they were prepared and sent in fixed font but the message I got back put them in variable spacing and so out of alignment. Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ Mark Peaty wrote: [Grin] I just found your question here John. snip As I see it, this term is an equivalent expression to my UMSITW 'updating model of self in the world'. It entails a self-referencing, iterative process. For humans there is something like at least three iterations working in parallel and such that the 'output' of any of them can become the 'input' of any other. Something like: a/ basic animal responses to the world - Senses--| brain stem |-|| Senses--| thalamus |-|body motor image|-muscles proprioception--|basal ganglia |-| body image | b/ high speed discrepancy checking - body motor image-|cerebellum|-muscles body sense image-| memory |-body motor/pre motor image c/ multi-tasking, prioritising [Global workspace] frontal cortex|hippocampus|--multiple cortex brain stem, thalamus--| memory|-body motor/pre motor image basal ganglia-| |--cerebellum snip --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: Asifism
TT; ' You behave as if you have the subjective experience of first person. And it is possible for an enough complicated computer to show up the exact same behaviour. But in the case of the computer, you can see that there is no subjective experience, there are just a lot of electrical phenomena interacting with each other. There is no first person experience problem, because there is no first person experience. MP: But surely, if the computer is complicated enough to show up 'THE EXACT SAME' behaviour, then we do not know that 'there is no first person experience'. This is the very paradox of experience; the argument from behaviour cuts BOTH ways. The danger comes from putting that little word just in the sentence. The fact is if there are a lot of electrical phenomena [a really, really, BIG lot] then it is quite feasible that the system may be responding to its own responses, as the behaviourists like to say. I think the wisely placed betting money is mainly going to that logical structure as prerequisite for sentience of any sort. The embodiment, though, would need to be in a massively parallel, multiply recursive, autonomous learning system in order to have sufficient scope and depth of experience to deal with interesting questions. I heard someone on the radio the other day saying that Moore's Law [doubling every 2 years] predicts that computers in about 2050 will have gross processing power similar to that of the human brain. Well the architecture may be a bit of a hurdle, but then again if each generation of computers acquires software enabling them to participate in, if not actually direct, the design of the next generation, it is feasible that during the second half of the 21Century some computers may start asking US why we think we are conscious. Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ Torgny Tholerus wrote: Mohsen Ravanbakhsh skrev: The subjective experience is just some sort of behaviour. You can make computers show the same sort of behavior, if the computers are enough complicated. But we're not talking about 3rd person point of view. I can not see how you reduce the subjective experience of first person to the behavior that a third person view can evaluate! All the problem is this first person experience. What you call the subjective experience of first person is just some sort of behaviour. When you claim that you have the subjective experience of first person, I can see that you are just showing a special kind of behaviour. You behave as if you have the subjective experience of first person. And it is possible for an enough complicated computer to show up the exact same behaviour. But in the case of the computer, you can see that there is no subjective experience, there are just a lot of electrical fenomena interacting with each other. There is no first person experience problem, because there is no first person experience. -- Torgny Tholerus --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: [SPAM] Re: Asifism
DN: '
I meant here by 'symmetry-breaking' the differentiating of an 'AR
field' - perhaps continuum might be better - into 'numbers'. My
fundamental explanatory intuition posits a continuum that is
'modulated' ('vibration', 'wave motion'?) into 'parts'. The notion of
a 'modulated continuum' seems necessary to avoid the paradox of
'parts' separated by 'nothing'. The quotes I have sprinkled so
liberally are intended to mark out the main semantic elements that I
feel need to be accounted for somehow. 'Parts' (particles, digits)
then emerge through self-consistent povs abstracted from the
continuum. Is there an analogous continuous 'number field' in AR,
from which, say, integers, emerge 'digitally'?'
MP: This seems to me to be getting at a crucial issue [THE
crux?] to do with both COMP and/or physics:
Why is there anything at all?
As a non-mathematician I am not biased towards COMP and AR;
'basic physics' warms far more cockles of _my_heart.
As a non-scientist I am biased towards plain-English
explanations of things; all else is most likely not true, in my
simple minded view :-)
Metaphysically speaking _existence_ is a given; I don't exist
is either metaphor or nonsense.
As you so rightly point out, positing 'nothing' to separate
parts, etc, doesn't make a lot of sense either.
Currently this makes me sympathetic to
* a certain interpretation of mbrane theory [it ain't nothing,
it's just not our brane/s] and
* a simplistic interpretation of the ideas of process physics.
I know Bruno reiterates often that physics cannot be [or is very
unlikely to be] as ultimately fundamental as numbers and Peano
arithmetic, but the stumbling block for me is the simple concept
that numbers don't mean anything unless they are values of
something. I always come back to the simplistic viewpoint that
relationships are more fundamental than numbers, but
relationships entail existence and difference. I can see how
'existence' per se could be ultimately simple and unstructured -
and this I take to be the basic meaning of 'mbrane'. If an
mbrane interpenetrates another, this would provide
differentiation and thus the beginnings of structure.
In this simplistic take we have something akin to yin and yang
of ancient Chinese origin. In contrast to the Chinese conception
however, we know nothing of the 'other' one; the name is not
important, just that _our_ universe is either of yin or yang and
the other one provides what otherwise we must call
'nothingness'. In this conception existence, the ultimate
basement level of our space-time, is simple connections, which I
described previously in a spiel about Janus [the connections]
and quorums {the nodes]. Gravity may be the continuous
simplification of connectivity and the reduction of nodes which
results in a constant shrinkage of the space-time fabric in the
direction of smallwards. Particles of matter are knots,
topological self entanglements of space-time which vary in their
properties depending on the number of self-crossings and
whatever other structural/topological features occur. The
intrinsic virtual movement of the space-time fabric in the
direction of smallwards where the knots exist should produce
interesting emergent properties akin to vortices and standing
waves with harmonics.
For anyone still reading this, a reminder that each 'Janus'
connection need have no internal structure and therefore no
'internal' distance, save perhaps the Planck length, so each
face would connect with others in a 'quorum' or node. This
provides a potential explanation of quantum entanglement in that
if each of the two faces of a Janus connection were in different
particles, those particles might be fleeing from each other at
the speed of light, or something close to it, yet for that
particular Janus connection each face will still be simply the
back side of its twin such that their temporal separation might
be no more than the Planck time.
Regards
Mark Peaty CDES
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/
David Nyman wrote:
On Jun 12, 2:01 pm, Bruno Marchal [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
If we take AR to be that which is self-asserting,
We don't have too, even without comp, in the sense that, with AR
(Arithmetical Realism) we cannot not take into account the relative
reflexivity power of the number's themselves.
I simply meant that in AR numbers 'assert themselves', in that they
are taken as being (in some sense) primitive rather than being merely
mental constructs (intuitionism, I think?) Is this not so?
OK (but again the symmetry-breaking is a consequence (too be sure
there remains technical problems ...)
I meant here by 'symmetry-breaking' the differentiating of an 'AR
field' - perhaps continuum might be better - into 'numbers'. My
fundamental explanatory intuition posits a continuum that is
'modulated' ('vibration', 'wave motion'?) into 'parts'. The notion of
a 'modulated continuum' seems
Re: [SPAM] Re: Asifism
CDES = Compassion, Democracy, Ethics, and Scientific method These are prerequisites for the survival of civilisation. Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ David Nyman wrote: On Jun 21, 8:03 pm, Mark Peaty [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I always come back to the simplistic viewpoint that relationships are more fundamental than numbers, but relationships entail existence and difference. I sympathise. In my question to Bruno, I was trying to establish whether the 'realism' part of 'AR' could be isomorphic with my idea of a 'real' modulated continuum (i.e. set of self-relationships). But I suspect the answer may well be 'no', in that the 'reality' Bruno usually appeals to is 'true' not 'concrete'. I await clarification. Particles of matter are knots, topological self entanglements of space-time which vary in their properties depending on the number of self-crossings and whatever other structural/topological features occur. Yes, knot theory seems to be getting implicated in this stuff. Bruno has had something to say about this in the past. If an mbrane interpenetrates another, this would provide differentiation and thus the beginnings of structure. Yes, this may be an attractive notion. I've wondered about myself. 'Interpenetration' - as a species of interaction - still seems to imply that different 'mbranes' are still essentially the same 'stuff' - i.e. modulations of the 'continuum' - but with some sort of orthogonal (i.e. mutually inaccessible) dimensionality PS - Mark, what is CDES? --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: [SPAM] Re: Asifism
MN: 'If an
mbrane interpenetrates another, this would provide
differentiation and thus the beginnings of structure.
Yes, this may be an attractive notion. I've wondered about myself.
'Interpenetration' - as a species of interaction - still seems to
imply that different 'mbranes' are still essentially the same 'stuff'
- i.e. modulations of the 'continuum' - but with some sort of
orthogonal (i.e. mutually inaccessible) dimensionality
MP: Yes, the 'mutually inaccessible dimensionality' and that's
a lovely way to put put it now isn't it is exactly what I was
thinking about. Frictionless and 'ghostly', and yet it would be
the source of entropy, which I take to be the expansion of the
universe writ small.
one way to think of this is that what we call matter is where
_our_ mbrane predominates and what we fondly think of as empty
space and mysterious quantum vacuum is where the other mbrane
predominates.
Who is to say what mbranes really are, except that in this
interpretation of the idea, each IS its own existence; I assume
we can say nothing definite about how each such existence would
compare with others or anything much about 'where' they are,
i.e. are they in a 'higher dimensional' space, do they interact
in anyway apart from interpenetration, are they ontogenically
related, do they have babies?
Regards
Mark Peaty CDES
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/
David Nyman wrote:
On Jun 21, 8:03 pm, Mark Peaty [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
I always come back to the simplistic viewpoint that
relationships are more fundamental than numbers, but
relationships entail existence and difference.
I sympathise. In my question to Bruno, I was trying to establish
whether the 'realism' part of 'AR' could be isomorphic with my idea of
a 'real' modulated continuum (i.e. set of self-relationships). But I
suspect the answer may well be 'no', in that the 'reality' Bruno
usually appeals to is 'true' not 'concrete'. I await clarification.
Particles of matter are knots,
topological self entanglements of space-time which vary in their
properties depending on the number of self-crossings and
whatever other structural/topological features occur.
Yes, knot theory seems to be getting implicated in this stuff. Bruno
has had something to say about this in the past.
If an
mbrane interpenetrates another, this would provide
differentiation and thus the beginnings of structure.
Yes, this may be an attractive notion. I've wondered about myself.
'Interpenetration' - as a species of interaction - still seems to
imply that different 'mbranes' are still essentially the same 'stuff'
- i.e. modulations of the 'continuum' - but with some sort of
orthogonal (i.e. mutually inaccessible) dimensionality
David
DN: '
I meant here by 'symmetry-breaking' the differentiating of an 'AR
field' - perhaps continuum might be better - into 'numbers'. My
fundamental explanatory intuition posits a continuum that is
'modulated' ('vibration', 'wave motion'?) into 'parts'. The notion of
a 'modulated continuum' seems necessary to avoid the paradox of
'parts' separated by 'nothing'. The quotes I have sprinkled so
liberally are intended to mark out the main semantic elements that I
feel need to be accounted for somehow. 'Parts' (particles, digits)
then emerge through self-consistent povs abstracted from the
continuum. Is there an analogous continuous 'number field' in AR,
from which, say, integers, emerge 'digitally'?'
MP: This seems to me to be getting at a crucial issue [THE
crux?] to do with both COMP and/or physics:
Why is there anything at all?
As a non-mathematician I am not biased towards COMP and AR;
'basic physics' warms far more cockles of _my_heart.
As a non-scientist I am biased towards plain-English
explanations of things; all else is most likely not true, in my
simple minded view :-)
Metaphysically speaking _existence_ is a given; I don't exist
is either metaphor or nonsense.
As you so rightly point out, positing 'nothing' to separate
parts, etc, doesn't make a lot of sense either.
Currently this makes me sympathetic to
* a certain interpretation of mbrane theory [it ain't nothing,
it's just not our brane/s] and
* a simplistic interpretation of the ideas of process physics.
I know Bruno reiterates often that physics cannot be [or is very
unlikely to be] as ultimately fundamental as numbers and Peano
arithmetic, but the stumbling block for me is the simple concept
that numbers don't mean anything unless they are values of
something. I always come back to the simplistic viewpoint that
relationships are more fundamental than numbers, but
relationships entail existence and difference. I can see how
'existence' per se could be ultimately simple and unstructured -
and this I take to be the basic meaning of 'mbrane'. If an
mbrane interpenetrates another, this would provide
differentiation and thus the beginnings
Re: [SPAM] Re: Asifism
History has not finished yet, and I am proposing that we try to ensure that it doesn't. If you truly think I am wrong in my assertion, then you have a moral duty to show me - and the rest of the world - on the basis of clear and unambiguous empirical evidence where and how I am wrong. Without such evidence you have only your opinion, which of course is safe for you in a democracy, and that you have an opinion can be important, especially if it is well thought out. Agreeing to disagree is an honourable stance when accompanied by respect. The modern era is so because of the advent of scientific method. Buddha, Jesus of Nazareth, KongZi, LaoZi, Socrates, Pythagoras, Archimedes, and the rest knew nothing of scientific method, certainly not as we know it. They lived and benefited from what were, essentially, slave societies in which the ascription of sub-human status was made upon the servant classes and unfavoured ethnic groups. To put it simply, most people, for most of the history of 'civilisation', have been treated as things, mere things, by their rulers. Ignorance, fear, superstition, have been the guardians of poverty and the champions of warfare for millennia, but we don't really have time for that any more, and it time for us all to grow up. The Buddha, Jesus, and many others made plain that compassion is not a symptom of weakness but a necessary attribute of true human strength; ethics is the foundation of civilisation; Karl Popper explained the intrinsic logic underlying the success of democracy in comparison with competing forms of government and those of us who live in democracies, imperfect though they are, we know - if we are honest with ourselves - that we don't really want to 'go back' to feudal authoritarianism with its necessary commitment to warfare and xenophobia; the application of scientific method is transforming the human species in a way unparalleled since the advent of versatile grammar. The changes wrought to us and this world we call ours, following the advent of science, can only be dealt with by the further application of the method, and so it will ever be. Hmm, I went on more than I intended here, but the issue is not trivial, and it is not going to go away. Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ Quentin Anciaux wrote: This is completely arbitrary and history does not show this. Quentin 2007/6/22, Mark Peaty [EMAIL PROTECTED]: CDES = Compassion, Democracy, Ethics, and Scientific method These are prerequisites for the survival of civilisation. Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ David Nyman wrote: On Jun 21, 8:03 pm, Mark Peaty [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I always come back to the simplistic viewpoint that relationships are more fundamental than numbers, but relationships entail existence and difference. I sympathise. In my question to Bruno, I was trying to establish whether the 'realism' part of 'AR' could be isomorphic with my idea of a 'real' modulated continuum (i.e. set of self-relationships). But I suspect the answer may well be 'no', in that the 'reality' Bruno usually appeals to is 'true' not 'concrete'. I await clarification. Particles of matter are knots, topological self entanglements of space-time which vary in their properties depending on the number of self-crossings and whatever other structural/topological features occur. Yes, knot theory seems to be getting implicated in this stuff. Bruno has had something to say about this in the past. If an mbrane interpenetrates another, this would provide differentiation and thus the beginnings of structure. Yes, this may be an attractive notion. I've wondered about myself. 'Interpenetration' - as a species of interaction - still seems to imply that different 'mbranes' are still essentially the same 'stuff' - i.e. modulations of the 'continuum' - but with some sort of orthogonal (i.e. mutually inaccessible) dimensionality PS - Mark, what is CDES? --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: Asifism
QA: '... you can't assert Compassion, Democracy, Ethics, and Scientific method. These are prerequisites for the survival of civilisation if you really believe that History has not finished yet. MP: The fact of me making the assertion is logical; what I assert is not a closed prescription of thought and action, quite the opposite in fact. NB: 'prerequisites' are necessary but not necessarily sufficient This is not some academic argument or computer simulation in which the parameters can be changed and the program re-run. True history is 'once-off'. We in our culture and history are like fish in water but whereas the fish cannot change their water [they don't even see it] we who are capable of reflexive awareness and contemplation can, through work on ourselves and on communication media, change the 'world' as it appears to others and therefore potentially we can change our world for the better. I am not referring to some kind of Trotskyist 'end of history', I am referring to the real possibility of anthropogenic terminal catastrophe. CA: ' I don't think you're wrong nor you're right... least to say that I can't truly say our democratic system is the top of the art political system... It can't be or the top of the art has serious flaws. I can't point to you what better system could be but I can easily point what flaws there are.' MP: But here we agree! This is an essential feature that democracy shares with science: its eternal incompleteness. [As folk are wont to say about the World according to Bill Gates: 'It's not a fault, it's a feature!' :-] What we can say is that democracy in most of its evolving forms is much better than all the alternatives. QA: '... Science has grown without democracy, ethics too, compassion too, moral basis too.' MP: Don't be so quick to dismiss the world-transforming power of science. 'Speciation' is what is happening to homo sapiens right now, but we want ALL members of our species to participate. Also, the seeds of science appeared in many parts of the world through history since, well 'the Bronze Age' I think, but germination required the printing presses and alphabet based writing systems of Europe to grow into real existence. My guess is the difficulties of learning to read and write Chinese [and I am well familiar with the difficulties] is what prevented the earlier growth of scientific method in East Asia where block printing had been known for centuries before the idea came to Europe. But the growth of good science needs real democracy, just like real democracy needs the profound cultural support of knowledge of scientific method. Remember, Athenian 'democracy' required a totally disenfranchised slave class to create the surplus value consumed by the warrior elite as members of the latter contested for status and power amongst their own class. in passing: 'history is one-off' is why Karl Popper excluded most aspects of history, 'sociology', psychology, etc, from his definition of science, but that is another story Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ Quentin Anciaux wrote: On Friday 22 June 2007 20:38:50 Mark Peaty wrote: History has not finished yet, and I am proposing that we try to ensure that it doesn't. Agreed, but it was not what I meant to say... it is the opposite... you can't assert Compassion, Democracy, Ethics, and Scientific method. These are prerequisites for the survival of civilisation if you really believe that History has not finished yet. If you truly think I am wrong in my assertion, then you have a moral duty to show me - and the rest of the world - on the basis of clear and unambiguous empirical evidence where and how I am wrong. I don't think you're wrong nor you're right... least to say that I can't truly say our democratic system is the top of the art political system... It can't be or the top of the art has serious flaws. I can't point to you what better system could be but I can easily point what flaws there are. Without such evidence you have only your opinion, which of course is safe for you in a democracy, and that you have an opinion can be important, especially if it is well thought out. Agreeing to disagree is an honourable stance when accompanied by respect. You do not have evidence too... Science has grown without democracy, ethics too, compassion too, moral basis too. Maybe I missed your demonstration of your assertion... but what you're saying are not all time certainty. Regards, Quentin snip Hmm, I went on more than I intended here, but the issue is not trivial, and it is not going to go away. Regards Mark Peaty CDES Quentin Anciaux wrote: This is completely arbitrary and history does not show this. Quentin 2007/6/22, Mark Peaty [EMAIL PROTECTED]: CDES = Compassion, Democracy, Ethics, and Scientific method These are prerequisites for the survival
Re: [SPAM] Re: Asifism
Hi Brent, Brent: ' You seem to imply that the advent of the scientific method banished slavery and tyranny and racism. Would that it were so. Perhaps the scientific method can be applied to politics and perhaps it would have that effect, but historically the scientific method has been used to justify racism, Facism, Nazism, and Communism, as well as liberal democracy. One can point to those political movements now and regard them as experiments that demonstrated their faults, but that's not much help in shaping the future.' MP: No Brent, I am an optimist as a matter of principle but I don't believe in fairies. This is why I assert that all four 'fundamental ingredients' are necessary. Doom will follow if any is missing! :-o My point is that scientific method has provided the key to unlocking the true latent power available but otherwise hidden in the natural world. For example fossil hydrocarbons and the engines they power have vastly increased the energy available to be deployed in human work. Put simply, slave labour as means and method for creating capital works or maintenance is not just cruel, it is stupidly inefficient also. I am sure we are on the same page with this. I am asserting that none of compassion, democracy, ethics or scientific method is an 'optional extra'; without any of these your society is doomed both to reversion into authoritarian barbarity with concomitant lethal conflict, plus mass poverty and all the ills that come with it. As I am sure you have noticed people often loosely talk about science as being responsible for all manner of problems or bad things [paraphrasing Pratchett: 'All things actions are bad for some particular value of 'bad']. The truth is that scientific method is just a tool, and the uses or abuses to which it is put depend on the ethical stance and decisions of those responsible. In summary: I assert that all policies of governing bodies, private or public, will become self-defeating where they leave out any of these essential ingredients. So a country governed by Sharia Law or Biblical principles [to name but two] to the exclusion of any of the four essential ingredients, is doomed eventually to poverty, strife, and all the miseries these evils bring. Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ Brent Meeker wrote: Mark Peaty wrote: History has not finished yet, and I am proposing that we try to ensure that it doesn't. If you truly think I am wrong in my assertion, then you have a moral duty to show me - and the rest of the world - on the basis of clear and unambiguous empirical evidence where and how I am wrong. Without such evidence you have only your opinion, What assertion? That history has not finished yet? I certainly wouldn't disagree with that, nor with trying to ensure that it doesn't. which of course is safe for you in a democracy, and that you have an opinion can be important, especially if it is well thought out. Agreeing to disagree is an honourable stance when accompanied by respect. The modern era is so because of the advent of scientific method. Buddha, Jesus of Nazareth, KongZi, LaoZi, Socrates, Pythagoras, Archimedes, and the rest knew nothing of scientific method, certainly not as we know it. They lived and benefited from what were, essentially, slave societies in which the ascription of sub-human status was made upon the servant classes and unfavoured ethnic groups. To put it simply, most people, for most of the history of 'civilisation', have been treated as things, mere things, by their rulers. Ignorance, fear, superstition, have been the guardians of poverty and the champions of warfare for millennia, but we don't really have time for that any more, and it time for us all to grow up.. You seem to imply that the advent of the scientific method banished slavery and tyranny and racism. Would that it were so. Perhaps the scientific method can be applied to politics and perhaps it would have that effect, but historically the scientific method has been used to justify racism, Facism, Nazism, and Communism, as well as liberal democracy. One can point to those political movements now and regard them as experiments that demonstrated their faults, but that's not much help in shaping the future. I recently defended the global warming science in a public debate. The opposition came mostly from libertarians who were sure it was all a conspiracy to justify a world government with totalitarian powers. They weren't against science, but they feared an authoritarian government. Our unfortunate experience in the mideast over the last few decades is that given democracy, the citizens will vote to impose majority views on minorities in the most draconian fashion. So it is not only democracy that is needed, but *liberal* democracy, democracy that preserves individual autonomy
Re: Re: How would a computer know if it were conscious?
surroundings, or internal to our own bodies and minds.
Who? -
* The concept of responding to one's own responses being the
basis of consciousness causes some to complain that this implies
some kind of infinite regress of observers. What actually
happens is that internal brain behaviours [discrete network
activations] occur as surrogates for all the relevant
environmental features of interest, including one's own body and
the storyline we are following. Where surrogates for
environmental features are linked in with surrogates for 'self'
[body and storyline] and with network activations that stand for
relationships between those features of environment and self,
THAT, moment by moment, is something which exists. So there is
'something it is LIKE something to be' and that is what it is.
The registration of novelty and the responses to it, reviewed in
ceaseless recursive cycles, gives us the basis of subjective time.
I have put this description in terms of 'behaviours' because I
am practising how to deal with the jibes and stonewalling of
someone who countenance only 'behavioural analysis'
descriptions. I am happier recognising that most internal
behaviours can be called 'representations' - it is much more
succinct.
Regards
Mark Peaty CDES
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/
David Nyman wrote:
On Jun 20, 3:35 am, Colin Hales [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Methinks you 'get it'. You are far more eloquent than I am, but we talk of
the same thing..
Thank you Colin. 'Eloquence' or 'gibberish'? Hmm...but let us
proceed...
where I identify ??? as a necessary primitive and comment that
'computation' or 'information' or 'complexity' have only the vaguest of an
arm waving grip on any claim to such a specific role. Such is the 'magical
emergence' genre.
Just so. My own 'meta-analysis' is also a (foolhardy?) attempt to
identify the relevant 'necessity' as *logical*. The (awesome) power
of this would be to render 'pure' 3-person accounts (i.e. so-called
'physical') radically causally incomplete. Some primitive like yours
would be a *logically necessary* foundation of *any* coherent account
of 'what-is'.
Strawson, and Chalmers, as I've understood them, make the (IMO)
fundamental mis-step of proposing a superadded 'fundamental property'
to the 'physical' substrate ('e.g. 'information'). This has the fatal
effect of rendering such a 'property' *optional* - i.e. it appears
that everything could proceed just as happily without it in the 3-
person account, and hence 'consciousness' can (by some) still airily
be dismissed as an 'illusion'. The first move here, I think, is to
stop using the term 'consciousness' to denote any 'property'.
My own meta-analysis attempts to pump the intuition that all
processes, whether 0, 1, or 3-person, must from *logical necessity* be
identified with 'participative encounters', which are unintelligible
in the absence of *any* component: namely 'participation', 'sense',
and 'action'. So, to 'exist' or 'behave', one must be:
1) a participant (i.e. the prerequisite for 'existence')
2) sensible (i.e. differentiating some 'other' in relationship)
3) active (i.e. the exchange of 'motivation' with the related 'other')
and all manifestations of 'participative existence' must be 'fractal'
to these characteristics in both directions (i.e. 'emergence' and
'supervention'). So, to negate these components one-by-one:
1) if not a participant, you don't get to play
2) if not sensible, you can't relate
3) if not active in relationship, you have no 'motivation'
These logical or semantic characteristics are agnostic to the
'primitive base'. For example, if we are to assume AR as that base,
then the 'realism' part must denote that we 'participate' in AR, that
'numbers' are 'mutually sensible', and that arithmetical relationship
is 'motivational'. If I've understood Bruno, 'computationalism'
generates 'somethings' at the 1-person plural level. My arguments
against 'software uploading' then apply at the level of these
'emergent somethings', not to the axiomatic base. This is the nub of
the 'level of substitution' dilemma in the 'yes doctor' puzzle.
In 'somethingist' accounts, 'players' participate in sensory-
motivational encounters between 'fundamental somethings' (e.g.
conceived as vibrational emergents of a modulated continuum).
The critical move in the above argument is that by making the relation
between 0,1, and 3-person accounts and the primitives *self-relation*
or identity, we jettison the logical possibility of 'de-composing'
participative sensory-motivational relationship. 0,1, and 3-person
are then just different povs on this:
0 - the participatory 'arena' itself
1 - the 'world' of a differentiated 'participant'
3 - a 'proxy', parasitising a 1-person world
'Zombies' and 'software' are revealed as being category 3: they
'parasitise' 1-person worlds, sometimes as 'proxies
Re: How would a computer know if it were conscious?
_of_ the appearances, many millions of years worth of natural selection pretty much guarantees that for all normal purposes what we see perceive is a very good accounting of what is there. The fun really starts when we de-construct the ways in which we see other people and social groups. I am not sure if my formulation actually ties in with Colin Hales's schema, but it agrees on many key points. MP: I have put this description in terms of 'behaviours' because I am practising how to deal with the jibes and stonewalling of someone who countenance only 'behavioural analysis' descriptions DN: Ahah I confess I've had a little peek at your dialogues with a certain individual on another forum, and I think I discern your purpose and your problem. All I can say is that we conduct the dialogue a little less fractiously on this list. For what it's worth, I probably wouldn't expend much more effort on someone with so entrenched a position and so vitriolic a vocabulary. snip MP2: Yes, I believe that person's approach to communication has in fact wasted all manner of good opportunities to sort out the agreements and congruence between behavioural analysis so-called and the descriptions arising from other methods of study. I am trying to formulate a summary of how I see behavioural analysis descriptions fitting in with 'representational' descriptions of brain and mind. One major hurdle is how to engage with the behaviourist view that pretty much all behaviour is just a response to the external environment. I am trying to show how the stimuli from the external environment come to be internalised in the form of patterns of brain activity which become surrogates for the original stimuli. This works in several different ways and in different directions. For example the behaviour of others becomes part of the structure of one's world. An example of this would be where in a military organisation the complete obedience of subordinates becomes an integral feature of an officer's world. Raw behaviourist language cannot easily and effectively describe all that is going on because in effect the officers' environment is made up of subordinates' behaviours. There is at least one behaviourist out there who cannot cope with the fact that his theories have no way of describing WHERE part of the officers' world - which is clearly visible - actually IS. I have a descriptive scheme outlined on some of the pages of my little website which deals with it quite succinctly, but that is another story. Best of luck David Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ David, We have reached some understanding in the 'asifism' thread, and I would summarise that, tilted towards the context of this line of this thread, more or less as follows. Existence - * The irreducible primitive is existence per se; * that we can know about this implies differentiation in and of that which exists; * that we can recognise both invariance and changes and participate in what goes on implies _connection_. I am sure there must be mathematical/logical formalism which could render that with exquisite clarity, but I don't know how to do it. Plain-English is what I have to settle for [and aspire to :-] There are a couple of issues that won't go away though: our experience is always paradoxical, and we will always have to struggle to communicate about it. Paradox or illusion - I think people use the word 'illusion' about our subjective experience of being here now because they don't want to see it as paradoxical. However AFAICS, the recursive self-referencing entailed in being aware of being here now guarantees that what we are aware of at any given moment, i.e. what we can attend to, can never be the totality of what is going on in our brains. In terms of mind, some of it - indeed probably the majority - is unconscious. We normally are not aware of this. [Duh, that is what unconscious means Mark!] But sometimes we can become aware [acutely!] of having _just been_ operating unconsciously and this is salutary, once the sickening embarrassment subsides anyway :-0 For those of us who have become familiar with this issue it is no hardship but there are many who resist the idea. The least mortifying example that is _easy to see in oneself_ is what happens when we look for something and then find it: before we find it the thing is 'not there' for us, except that we might believe that it is really. Then we find it; the thing just pops into view! As mundane as mould on cheese, but bloody marvellous as soon as you start thinking about how it all works! But I have to *challenge you to clarify* whether what I write next really ties in completely
Re: How would a computer know if it were conscious?
cultural matrix which controls and instantiates human life now as much as the genome does. But that is another storyline. Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ David Nyman wrote: On 26/06/07, *Mark Peaty* [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: MP: Your second may shoot me if I waffle.. DN: No, he'll just tickle you until you become more coherent ;) MP: The main reason for the word 'challenge' above is due to the way you were using the word 'sensing' for physical and chemical interactions. DN: Yes, it's difficult to find terms that don't mislead somebody by unintended implication. Let's say that I believe it helps to reduce physical and chemical interactions to the logic of 'self-relativity'. Why? Because when we conceptually isolate 'entities' like molecules, atoms, or even quarks or super-strings, the semantics we employ implicitly depend on this 'primitive' logical concept. A simple notion that embodies this is a 'modulated continuum': continuum, because it must be seamless and symmetrical ( i.e. no 'voids'); modulated, because nonetheless this symmetry must somehow be 'broken'. If such 'broken seamlessness' has a flavour of paradox, there's something 'strangely' unavoidable in that. But ISTM that most aspects of our ontology can be intuited by building on (something like) the self-participation of such a modulated continuum. For me, the natural term for this participatory, self-directed, symmetry-breaking is 'self-relativity'. The cool thing about this, is that narratives rooted in such participatory self-relation lend themselves quite interchangeably to 0, 1, or 3-person points-of-view. IOW, whether you want to narrate in terms of (physical) 'action', or (personal) 'sensing', or even (mathematical) 'operations', all can be intuited as built on self-relation. And the distinctive differences between such narratives are then reciprocal perspectives on that self-relativity. This is why I used the term 'sense-action' as a 'bridge' between the 'physical' and 'personal' reciprocals of self-relation. The empirical 'laws' we extract from the consistent features of these relations can in turn be intuited as inheriting from the self-directedness of the original symmetry-breaking: this too, will have 0, 1, and 3-person reciprocity. MP: OK, my 'the brain makes muscles move' is basically a bulwark against 'panpsychism' or any other forms of mystery-making. The term I like is 'identity theory' but like most labels it usually seems to provoke unproductive digressions. DN: Now does it seem possible to you that your notion of 'identity' could be accomplished via 'sense-action' reciprocity? IOW, that 'mind' and 'brain' are reciprocal perspectives on the same structure of self-relations? Panpsychism? Well, brain's perspective is 'psych'; psych's perspective is 'brain'. The 'pan' then depends on how you localise 'psych', and that is a horse of a very different colour. ISTM, very briefly, that 'psych', in the operational sense of a highly-specific set of biospherically-evolved mechanisms for dealing with the environment, is anything but 'pan'. How and 'where' does it then arise? Well, we know from this list alone that theories abound, but nobody knows. This of course won't restrain my speculations! My take would be along the lines that the brain 'hosts' (deliberate ambiguity) 'transduction' that 'renders' information spectrally on a set of virtual 'surfaces'. Metaphorically it's a bit like the telly, (very) loosely, in that the transducer's job is to turn 'signal' into 'message'. But of course there's no-one watching: the 'surfaces' *are* our 'personal worlds'. Such surfaces are the 'medium' of the 1-personal, and the 'messages' it mediates are '3-personal' (always remembering that the medium *is* the message). Also - crucially - the 'surfaces' are *interactive*: messages self-relate, recombine, get re-transduced, and signal flows back into the environment. Now, how the 'transduction-signal' relationship emerges out of computation, EM, chemistry, Bose-Einstein condensate, or GOK* what, I dunno. But if we contemplate this participatively from a self-relating perspective, then we can narrate the story from either 'action' or 'sense' perspectives interchangeably. IOW, things happen in (something like) the 'action' narrative, participatively it feels (something like) the 'sense' narrative, and its 'intentionality' is (something like) self-directedness. And all of this depends ultimately on self-relativity. (* A nurse I used to know told me that doctors would cryptically mark the notes of the most intractable diagnoses: GOK - God Only Knows) MP: That is to say, all our knowledge _of_ the world is embodied in qualia which are _about_ the world. They are our brains' method of accounting for things
Re: [SPAM] Re: Why Objective Values Exist
MG: 'It's really quite obvious in retrospect - physical properties involve energy, mathematical properties involve knowledge (meaningful patterns). Old David Chalmers was right about this one (see his 'property dualism'). The two properties just ain't the same and no amount of semantic trickery is going to reduce one to the other.' MP: It is not semantic trickery to assert that a _translation_ can be possible however. This is the problem when people talk and get hot under the collar about 'identity theory'. At its simplest level it is the difference between 1PV and 3PV. 3PV observation and analysis _may_ eventually turn up with objective criteria that establish universally consistent and reliable correlation between certain brain processes and certain reported phenomenal experiences - things like itching on certain parts of the body, hearing music, seeing bright colours, etc. I am not sure about experiencing redness per se, although that is not ruled out. It is conceivable that this type of facility could be useful in diagnosing locked-in consciousness. The key concept of course is _correlation_. Accurately *identifying* certain characteristic brain processes - in both relevant senses of identifying - is almost certainly what the future holds for us. Is this what you mean by *reducing* the experience though? If so I think it is a 'red herring'; being able to locate and accurately describe brain processes from/in 3PV cannot thereby diminish or encompass the experience of what it is like to be that process. NB: Old Chalmers ... --- He's not THAT old, surely! Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Aug 19, 12:26 am, Stathis Papaioannou [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: This all makes sense if you are referring to the values of a particular entity. Objectively, the entity has certain values and we can use empirical means to determine what these values are. However, if I like red and you like blue, how do we decide which colour is objectively better? No, that's not what I'm referring to. I'm referring to 'Abstract Universals' - Platonic Ideals that all observers with complete information would agree with. What they have to be are inert EXPLANATORY PRINCIPLES, taking the form: 'Beauty has abstract properties A B C D E F G'. 'Liberty has abstract properties A B C D E F G' etc etc. None the less, as explained, these abstract specifications would still be amenable to indirect empirical testing to the extent that they could be used to predict agent emotional reactions to social events. You could make a similar claim for the abstract quality redness, which is associated with light of a certain wavelength but is not the same thing as it. But it doesn't seem right to me to consider redness as having a separate objective existence of its own; it's just a name we apply to a physical phenomenon. I don't agree that 'redness is just a name we apply to a physical phenomenon' (although I agree with you its not an objectively existing primative). I thought about these issues hard out for a long long long long long long LONG time before finally nailing 'em. Unfortunately the answers are not something I easily explain in short sentences on Internet messageboards ;) 'redness' is not a *thing* it's a *process* - as a phenomenal (subjective) quality it's a *mathematical* property associated with the running of an algorithm (or computation) . But this is NOT a *physical* property. The mathematical property (redness) is *attached to* (resides in, is dependent upon) the physical substrate implementing the algorithm giving rise to the subjective experience , but the mathematical property *per se* is not physical. It's abstract. It's really quite obvious in retrospect - physical properties involve energy, mathematical properties involve knowledge (meaningful patterns). Old David Chalmers was right about this one (see his 'property dualism'). The two properties just ain't the same and no amount of semantic trickery is going to reduce one to the other. --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: [SPAM] Re: Major revision to my Top-Level Ontology
I searched in vain for http://marc.geddes.googlepages.com/MCRT_ClassDiagram.html The page you have requested could not be found. (404) As an explanation of the meaning of eternal truth etcetera, this to me seems redolent of Douglas [of blessed memory] Adams' God's last words to His/Her creatures: WE APOLOGISE FOR THE INCONVENIENCE Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Addendum: Some further revisions since yesterday... I was almost there yesterday but not quite. The last of my confusions have cleared. The final revision for my top-level onotlogy is completely 'locked in'. Added brief descriptions of top-level classes: http://marc.geddes.googlepages.com/MCRT_ClassDiagram.html The important point is that there appear to be 27 fundamental ontological primatives for reality which cannot be simplified or merged any further. These 27 primatives generate 27 irreducible classes for any completely general model of reality. And the classes appear to be related to each other in a very precise way. Below I give the brief descriptions of what I believe these classes to be and the domain model (see link below) hints at the precise nature of the relationship I think I may have discovered. I now believe I understand literally 'everything' (in the general conceptual sense at least). Of course the devils is in the details and decades may pass before a precise new scientific theory emerges. Be patient whilst I write up more information about my theory, since I've revealed very little so far. But I'm very very very confident but I've hit the metaphorical bullseye at the center of literally everything. The 27 fundamental irreducible classes are as follows: Field Physics: Laws of space and time Thermodynamics: Laws of energy exchange Mechanics: Laws of the action of forces Computational Physics: Physical systems Chemistry: Physical transformations Robotics: Directed physical actions Solid State Physics: Properties of static concrete objects Engineering: Properties of static complex structures Data Communications: Properties of communication hardware and information theory Virtue: Ideals for personal goals or the study or Eudaimonia (Self Fulfillment) Morality: Ideals for social interaction or the study of Liberty Aesthetics: Ideals for communication or the study of Beauty Social Psychology: Roles and Personas of agents Decision Theory: The process of agent decision making Communication: Agent interaction for the exchange of meaningful inforamtion Economics: Goods and Services Memetics: Cultural Beliefs Linguistics: Social Languages Symbolic Logic: Formal systems and Mathematical foundations Category Theory: Numbers and Algebra Calculus: Analysis: Limits and Rates of Change Theory Of Computation: Formal Proof Theory and Deductive Reasoning Bayesian Induction: Probability Theory and Inductive Reasoning Reflective Possibility Theory: Reflective Reasoning Software: Computer Programs and Applications Software Engineering: Design, Analysis and Implementation of software Modelling Languages: Scientific/Programming languages for data modelling --- Annotation in my Log-Book reads: Date: 06 August, 2007 Time: 4.45pm Place: 'Gloria Jean's Coffee', Borders, Queen Street, Auckland,New Zealand Note: At this time I completed the top-level MCRT Ontology. At the conceptual level this is the day I finally understood everything! About 5 years have passed since I first started trying for the top- level ontology of reality. (Date Started: Mid 2002. Date Finished: Aug, 2007). --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
