Re: A remark on Richard's paper

[Bruno Marchal]

On 27 Aug 2012, at 06:34, Russell Standish wrote:


On Sat, Aug 25, 2012 at 06:00:26PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote:

No. That was what I told him. But he left the place, simply, without
further comment, and quite disrespectfully. Many people were shocked
by this behavior, but said nothing. I think Chalmers is in part
responsible for the spreading of defamation I am living across the
ocean, and why nobody dares to mention the first person
indeterminacy, or my name.

I am afraid he has just been brainwashed by the main victims of a
manipulative form of moral harrasment., as I described in the book
ordered by Grasset in 1998 (but never published).


Well hopefully, we will remedy that soon, in English at least
:). There's half a chapter left to translate, and once Kim has a
chance at proof reading it, we should be able to get you a draft.



Good news. Nice. Thanks for telling me.





He is quite
plausibly a member of the same sect which put fraternity above
facts. It is a form of hidden corporatism.

I'm afraid Chalmers might be just an opportunist.


Who isn't! This is not a serious charge.


He is clearly not
a serious scientist, but seems to be an expert in self-marketing.


Sadly, one has to be, to be noticed.


His fading qualia paper is not so bad, but is hardly original, and
lacks many references. The hard problem of consciousness is know by
all philosophers of mind since a long time as the mind-body problem,
and his formulation is physicalist and not general, also.



I had lunch with him in early 2006 in Canberra, and this was after I
had sent him a draft of my ToN book, so he is well acquainted with the
ideas of this list. My impression was that he has a fairly fixed world
view, a steely mind capable of finding flaws in presentations of your
argument, and a general intolerance for woolly arguments. This is not
a bad thing, but I wasn't quite prepared for it at the time. The
subject material in ToN is quite convoluted, and to run through one
strand of it with someone like him is likely to run against the ground
of some differing conception of other. Marcus Hutter seems to think he
might be more predisposed to these ideas though.

Nevertheless, I find it hard to believe that he might be spreading
malicious gossip about you.


?
I have never said that. I said that he has been perhaps *victim* of  
gossip, about my work or me.


All what I say is that he pretended that there is no first person  
indeterminacy. Like John Clark he confused probably 1-views and 3- 
views, but unlike John Clark he has some notoriety in philosophy of  
mind, and is supposed to get that fundamental difference.


Unlike John Clark, but like Bill Taylor, (as anyone can verify) he did  
not answer the question I asked to him, so there is just no hope. It  
is impossible to communicate with people willingly deaf.


Chalmers is just not a scientist, period.
And *my* most charitable explanation of his behavior, is that he has  
been probably brainwashed by my usual opponents (which have dismissed  
UDA as being too much simple to be accepted as a subject of a thesis,  
but did not read it). Actually some people confided me that this has  
been the case, in more than once circle.
And my opponents in Brussels are not opponents to my work, as they did  
not read it (a fact that I can prove, actually), but they oppose me  
because I am witness of something. I don't want to talk about that  
now, and its is quite out of the topic of this list.


I have only pseudo-problem with those who does not take time to study  
the work, not with those reading it. With those who read it, I have  
the typical usual problem on technical points, and most of the time,  
it is because they are not familiar with elementary logic or with QM  
or with cognitive science, and they help me to improve the pedagogy.


I think the seven first steps are OK now, and that the step 8 can  
still be improved, so, as you know, I am interested in continuing to  
discuss it. But there is no need to understand step 8, to understand  
that the first person indeterminacy already change the common  
aristotelian picture about the mind-body, or the first-third person  
relationship, I think. Indeterminacy, non-cloning, and non-locality  
already follow from uda1-7.


It seems crazy for me how many computationalist philosophers neglect  
computer sciences, but this is due to the arbitrary cut between  
science and philosophy. My luck was to decide at the start to become a  
mathematical logician to be sure to be mathematically correct, and  
have the genuine form of language to handle comp, but then  
philosophers roar like if science was preparing to invade their  
territory, like in stone age, apparently.



Bruno



For one thing, I've never heard him, or
anyone else for that matter, even talk about your ideas, aside from
participants these mailing lists. More than likely, he dismisses you
as a harmless crank, and doesn't think about you at all. For all I
know, he may h

Re: A remark on Richard's paper

[Russell Standish]

On Sat, Aug 25, 2012 at 06:00:26PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote:
> No. That was what I told him. But he left the place, simply, without
> further comment, and quite disrespectfully. Many people were shocked
> by this behavior, but said nothing. I think Chalmers is in part
> responsible for the spreading of defamation I am living across the
> ocean, and why nobody dares to mention the first person
> indeterminacy, or my name.
> 
> I am afraid he has just been brainwashed by the main victims of a
> manipulative form of moral harrasment., as I described in the book
> ordered by Grasset in 1998 (but never published). 

Well hopefully, we will remedy that soon, in English at least
:). There's half a chapter left to translate, and once Kim has a
chance at proof reading it, we should be able to get you a draft.

> He is quite
> plausibly a member of the same sect which put fraternity above
> facts. It is a form of hidden corporatism.
> 
> I'm afraid Chalmers might be just an opportunist. 

Who isn't! This is not a serious charge.

> He is clearly not
> a serious scientist, but seems to be an expert in self-marketing.

Sadly, one has to be, to be noticed. 

> His fading qualia paper is not so bad, but is hardly original, and
> lacks many references. The hard problem of consciousness is know by
> all philosophers of mind since a long time as the mind-body problem,
> and his formulation is physicalist and not general, also.
> 
> Bruno
> 
> 

I had lunch with him in early 2006 in Canberra, and this was after I
had sent him a draft of my ToN book, so he is well acquainted with the
ideas of this list. My impression was that he has a fairly fixed world
view, a steely mind capable of finding flaws in presentations of your
argument, and a general intolerance for woolly arguments. This is not
a bad thing, but I wasn't quite prepared for it at the time. The
subject material in ToN is quite convoluted, and to run through one
strand of it with someone like him is likely to run against the ground
of some differing conception of other. Marcus Hutter seems to think he
might be more predisposed to these ideas though.

Nevertheless, I find it hard to believe that he might be spreading
malicious gossip about you. For one thing, I've never heard him, or
anyone else for that matter, even talk about your ideas, aside from
participants these mailing lists. More than likely, he dismisses you
as a harmless crank, and doesn't think about you at all. For all I
know, he may have a similar impression of me :).

Cheers

-- 


Prof Russell Standish  Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
Principal, High Performance Coders
Visiting Professor of Mathematics  hpco...@hpcoders.com.au
University of New South Wales  http://www.hpcoders.com.au


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Re: A remark on Richard's paper

[Bruno Marchal]

On 24 Aug 2012, at 21:07, Jesse Mazer wrote:




On Fri, Aug 24, 2012 at 1:33 PM, Bruno Marchal   
wrote:
Chalmers followed my talk on the UD Argument at ASSC 4 and leaved  
the room at step 3, saying that there is no indeterminacy as he will  
feel to be at both places.


Do you have a link to the discussion, or was it not on a public  
discussion forum?


It was live.


I wonder if Chalmers might have just meant that he would *define*  
both copies as "himself" and thus say that "he" would be at both  
places, while at the same time agreeing with you that each copy at a  
different location would have its own distinct subjective experience  
(qualia) and that neither would have any conscious awareness of what  
the other copy was experiencing.


No. That was what I told him. But he left the place, simply, without  
further comment, and quite disrespectfully. Many people were shocked  
by this behavior, but said nothing. I think Chalmers is in part  
responsible for the spreading of defamation I am living across the  
ocean, and why nobody dares to mention the first person indeterminacy,  
or my name.


I am afraid he has just been brainwashed by the main victims of a  
manipulative form of moral harrasment., as I described in the book  
ordered by Grasset in 1998 (but never published). He is quite  
plausibly a member of the same sect which put fraternity above facts.  
It is a form of hidden corporatism.


I'm afraid Chalmers might be just an opportunist. He is clearly not a  
serious scientist, but seems to be an expert in self-marketing.
His fading qualia paper is not so bad, but is hardly original, and  
lacks many references. The hard problem of consciousness is know by  
all philosophers of mind since a long time as the mind-body problem,  
and his formulation is physicalist and not general, also.


Bruno







This made perhaps some sense in his dualist interpretation of  
Everett, (if *that* makes sense), but makes no sense at all in comp.  
I guess that like John Clark he confused the 1-view of the 1-view,  
with some 3-view on the 1-view.


I know only two people stopping at step 3. But if you know others,  
let me know. (I don't count the person who stop at step 3 because  
they have something else to do).


Bruno


On 24 Aug 2012, at 02:41, Richard Ruquist wrote:


Jesse,

This is what Chalmers says in the 95 paper you link about the  
second Penrose argument, the one in my paper:


" 3.5 As far as I can determine, this argument is free of the  
obvious flaws that plague other Gödelian arguments, such as Lucas's  
argument and Penrose's earlier arguments. If it is flawed, the  
flaws lie deeper. It is true that the argument has a feeling of  
achieving its conclusion as if by magic. One is tempted to say:  
"why couldn't F itself engage in just the same reasoning?". But  
although there are various directions in which one might try to  
attack the argument, no knockdown refutation immediately presents  
itself. For this reason, the argument is quite challenging.  
Compared to previous versions, this argument is much more worthy of  
attention from supporters of AI. "


Chalmers finally concludes that the flaw for Godel, which Penrose  
also assumed, is the assumption that we can know we are sound. So  
the other way around, if Godel is correct, so is the Penrose second  
argument, which Chalmers confirmed. However, Chalmers seems to be  
saying the Godel is incorrect, hardly a basis for my paper.


Personally, when I am sound, I know I am sound. When I am unsound I  
usually know that I am unsound. However, psychosis runs in my  
family, and many times I have watched a relative lapse into  
psychosis without him realizing it.


Besides I sent the paper to Chalmers and he had no problem with.  
But he did wish me luck getting it published. He knew something I  
had not yet learned.

Richard

On Thu, Aug 23, 2012 at 8:19 PM, Jesse Mazer   
wrote:
A quibble with the beginning of Richard's paper. On the first page  
it says:


'It is beyond the scope of this paper and admittedly beyond my  
understanding to delve into Gödelian logic, which seems to be self- 
referential proof by contradiction, except to mention that Penrose  
in Shadows of the Mind(1994), as confirmed by David Chalmers(1995),  
arrived at a seemingly valid 7 step proof that human “reasoning  
powers cannot be captured by any formal system”.'


If you actually read Chalmers' paper at http://web.archive.org/web/20090204164739/http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/v2/psyche-2-09-chalmers.html 
 he definitely does *not* "confirm" Penrose's argument! He says in  
the paper that Penrose has two basic arguments for his conclusions  
about consciousness, and at the end of the section titled "the  
first argument" he concludes that the first one fails:


"2.16 It is section 3.3 that carries the burden of this strand of  
Penrose's argument, but unfortunately it seems to be one of the  
least convincing sections in the book. By his assumption 

Re: A remark on Richard's paper

[Jesse Mazer]

On Fri, Aug 24, 2012 at 1:33 PM, Bruno Marchal  wrote:

> Chalmers followed my talk on the UD Argument at ASSC 4 and leaved the room
> at step 3, saying that there is no indeterminacy as he will feel to be at
> both places.
>

Do you have a link to the discussion, or was it not on a public discussion
forum? I wonder if Chalmers might have just meant that he would *define*
both copies as "himself" and thus say that "he" would be at both places,
while at the same time agreeing with you that each copy at a different
location would have its own distinct subjective experience (qualia) and
that neither would have any conscious awareness of what the other copy was
experiencing.


>
> This made perhaps some sense in his dualist interpretation of Everett, (if
> *that* makes sense), but makes no sense at all in comp. I guess that like
> John Clark he confused the 1-view of the 1-view, with some 3-view on the
> 1-view.
>
> I know only two people stopping at step 3. But if you know others, let me
> know. (I don't count the person who stop at step 3 because they have
> something else to do).
>
> Bruno
>
>
> On 24 Aug 2012, at 02:41, Richard Ruquist wrote:
>
> Jesse,
>
> This is what Chalmers says in the 95 paper you link about the second
> Penrose argument, the one in my paper:
>
> " 3.5 As far as I can determine, this argument is free of the obvious
> flaws that plague other Gödelian arguments, such as Lucas's argument and
> Penrose's earlier arguments. If it is flawed, the flaws lie deeper. It is
> true that the argument has a feeling of achieving its conclusion as if by
> magic. One is tempted to say: "why couldn't F itself engage in just the
> same reasoning?". But although there are various directions in which one
> might try to attack the argument, no knockdown refutation immediately
> presents itself. For this reason, the argument is quite challenging.
> Compared to previous versions, this argument is much more worthy of
> attention from supporters of AI. "
>
> Chalmers finally concludes that the flaw for Godel, which Penrose also
> assumed, is the assumption that we can know we are sound. So the other way
> around, if Godel is correct, so is the Penrose second argument, which
> Chalmers confirmed. However, Chalmers seems to be saying the Godel is
> incorrect, hardly a basis for my paper.
>
> Personally, when I am sound, I know I am sound. When I am unsound I
> usually know that I am unsound. However, psychosis runs in my family, and
> many times I have watched a relative lapse into psychosis without him
> realizing it.
>
> Besides I sent the paper to Chalmers and he had no problem with. But he
> did wish me luck getting it published. He knew something I had not yet
> learned.
> Richard
>
> On Thu, Aug 23, 2012 at 8:19 PM, Jesse Mazer  wrote:
>
>> A quibble with the beginning of Richard's paper. On the first page it
>> says:
>>
>> 'It is beyond the scope of this paper and admittedly beyond my
>> understanding to delve into Gödelian logic, which seems to be
>> self-referential proof by contradiction, except to mention that Penrose in
>> Shadows of the Mind(1994), as confirmed by David Chalmers(1995), arrived at
>> a seemingly valid 7 step proof that human “reasoning powers cannot be
>> captured by any formal system”.'
>>
>> If you actually read Chalmers' paper at
>> http://web.archive.org/web/20090204164739/http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/v2/psyche-2-09-chalmers.htmlhe
>>  definitely does *not* "confirm" Penrose's argument! He says in the paper
>> that Penrose has two basic arguments for his conclusions about
>> consciousness, and at the end of the section titled "the first argument" he
>> concludes that the first one fails:
>>
>> "2.16 It is section 3.3 that carries the burden of this strand of
>> Penrose's argument, but unfortunately it seems to be one of the least
>> convincing sections in the book. By his assumption that the relevant class
>> of computational systems are all straightforward axiom-and-rules system,
>> Penrose is not taking AI seriously, and certainly is not doing enough to
>> establish his conclusion that physics is uncomputable. I conclude that none
>> of Penrose's argument up to this point put a dent in the natural AI
>> position: that our reasoning powers may be captured by a sound formal
>> system F, where we cannot determine that F is sound."
>>
>> Then when dealing with Penrose's "second argument", he says that Penrose
>> draws the wrong conclusions; where Penrose concludes that our reasoning
>> cannot be the product of any formal system, Chalmers concludes that the
>> actual issue is that we cannot be 100% sure our reasoning is "sound" (which
>> I understand to mean we can never be 100% sure that we have not made a
>> false conclusion about whether all the propositions we have proved true or
>> false actually have that truth-value in "true arithmetic"):
>>
>> "3.12 We can see, then, that the assumption that we know we are sound
>> leads to a contradiction. One might try to pin the blame 

Re: A remark on Richard's paper

[Bruno Marchal]

On 24 Aug 2012, at 03:15, Richard Ruquist wrote:

My apologies. When Chalmers used the words "godelian argument" I  
thought he was referring to Godel. Now I can see I misread it.


OK. be careful. That is why we have always to separate clearly a "pure  
theory" from its application in some domain. But even such an  
application can be made as clean cut that the pure theory, if we  
follow the definition and translation rules. In cognitive science,  
being fuzzy on this can lead to infinite circular boring vocabulary  
discussion.
The "last application", to reality, is alway conjectural, in science  
we never know as such, or we never know for sure.


Bruno





On Thu, Aug 23, 2012 at 9:09 PM, Jesse Mazer   
wrote:



On Thu, Aug 23, 2012 at 8:41 PM, Richard Ruquist   
wrote:

Jesse,

This is what Chalmers says in the 95 paper you link about the second  
Penrose argument, the one in my paper:


" 3.5 As far as I can determine, this argument is free of the  
obvious flaws that plague other Gödelian arguments, such as Lucas's  
argument and Penrose's earlier arguments. If it is flawed, the flaws  
lie deeper. It is true that the argument has a feeling of achieving  
its conclusion as if by magic. One is tempted to say: "why couldn't  
F itself engage in just the same reasoning?". But although there are  
various directions in which one might try to attack the argument, no  
knockdown refutation immediately presents itself. For this reason,  
the argument is quite challenging. Compared to previous versions,  
this argument is much more worthy of attention from supporters of  
AI. "


Chalmers finally concludes that the flaw for Godel, which Penrose  
also assumed, is the assumption that we can know we are sound. So  
the other way around, if Godel is correct, so is the Penrose second  
argument, which Chalmers confirmed. However, Chalmers seems to be  
saying the Godel is incorrect, hardly a basis for my paper.


What do you mean "the flaw for Godel"? There is no doubt that  
Godel's mathematical proof is correct, and if you think Chalmers is  
suggesting any such doubt in his paper you are misreading him. The  
argument he's talking about is one specifically concerning human  
intelligence, which Godel's mathematical proof says nothing about  
(Godel did offer some brief comments about the implications of his  
mathematical proof for human intelligence, but they were very brief  
and somewhat ambiguous, see http://www.iep.utm.edu/lp-argue/#H4 ).  
And I already quoted his conclusions about the second argument,  
after the section you quote above: that although Chalmers agrees  
that Penrose's second argument does show that *either* our reasoning  
cannot be captured by a formal system *or* that we cannot be sure  
our reasoning is sound, Chalmers thinks Penrose is wrong to prefer  
the first option rather than the second.




Personally, when I am sound, I know I am sound. When I am unsound I  
usually know that I am unsound. However, psychosis runs in my  
family, and many times I have watched a relative lapse into  
psychosis without him realizing it.


Chalmers/Penrose aren't talking about "sound" in the ordinary  
colloquial sense of sanity or anything like that, they're talking  
about soundness in the sense of perfect mathematical certainty that  
there is absolutely no chance--not even a chance of 1 in  
10^10 or smaller, say--that they might have made an error in  
their judgement about the truth or falsity of some (potentially very  
complicated) proposition about arithmetic.




Besides I sent the paper to Chalmers and he had no problem with. But  
he did wish me luck getting it published. He knew something I had  
not yet learned.

Richard


Did Chalmers offer any detailed commentary suggesting he had read  
through the whole thing carefully? If not it's possible he skimmed  
it and missed that sentence, or just read the abstract and decided  
it didn't interest him, but sent the note out of politeness.


Jesse




On Thu, Aug 23, 2012 at 8:19 PM, Jesse Mazer   
wrote:
A quibble with the beginning of Richard's paper. On the first page  
it says:


'It is beyond the scope of this paper and admittedly beyond my  
understanding to delve into Gödelian logic, which seems to be self- 
referential proof by contradiction, except to mention that Penrose  
in Shadows of the Mind(1994), as confirmed by David Chalmers(1995),  
arrived at a seemingly valid 7 step proof that human “reasoning  
powers cannot be captured by any formal system”.'


If you actually read Chalmers' paper at http://web.archive.org/web/20090204164739/http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/v2/psyche-2-09-chalmers.html 
 he definitely does *not* "confirm" Penrose's argument! He says in  
the paper that Penrose has two basic arguments for his conclusions  
about consciousness, and at the end of the section titled "the first  
argument" he concludes that the first one fails:


"2.16 It is section 3.3 that carries the burden of this stran

Re: A remark on Richard's paper

[Bruno Marchal]

On 24 Aug 2012, at 03:09, Jesse Mazer wrote:

What do you mean "the flaw for Godel"? There is no doubt that  
Godel's mathematical proof is correct, and if you think Chalmers is  
suggesting any such doubt in his paper you are misreading him.



I guess so. Chalmers can't be that bad.

Did Chalmers offer any detailed commentary suggesting he had read  
through the whole thing carefully? If not it's possible he skimmed  
it and missed that sentence, or just read the abstract and decided  
it didn't interest him, but sent the note out of politeness.


That would be astonishing too.

Bruno


http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/



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Re: A remark on Richard's paper

[Bruno Marchal]

Chalmers followed my talk on the UD Argument at ASSC 4 and leaved the  
room at step 3, saying that there is no indeterminacy as he will feel  
to be at both places.


This made perhaps some sense in his dualist interpretation of Everett,  
(if *that* makes sense), but makes no sense at all in comp. I guess  
that like John Clark he confused the 1-view of the 1-view, with some 3- 
view on the 1-view.


I know only two people stopping at step 3. But if you know others, let  
me know. (I don't count the person who stop at step 3 because they  
have something else to do).


Bruno


On 24 Aug 2012, at 02:41, Richard Ruquist wrote:


Jesse,

This is what Chalmers says in the 95 paper you link about the second  
Penrose argument, the one in my paper:


" 3.5 As far as I can determine, this argument is free of the  
obvious flaws that plague other Gödelian arguments, such as Lucas's  
argument and Penrose's earlier arguments. If it is flawed, the flaws  
lie deeper. It is true that the argument has a feeling of achieving  
its conclusion as if by magic. One is tempted to say: "why couldn't  
F itself engage in just the same reasoning?". But although there are  
various directions in which one might try to attack the argument, no  
knockdown refutation immediately presents itself. For this reason,  
the argument is quite challenging. Compared to previous versions,  
this argument is much more worthy of attention from supporters of  
AI. "


Chalmers finally concludes that the flaw for Godel, which Penrose  
also assumed, is the assumption that we can know we are sound. So  
the other way around, if Godel is correct, so is the Penrose second  
argument, which Chalmers confirmed. However, Chalmers seems to be  
saying the Godel is incorrect, hardly a basis for my paper.


Personally, when I am sound, I know I am sound. When I am unsound I  
usually know that I am unsound. However, psychosis runs in my  
family, and many times I have watched a relative lapse into  
psychosis without him realizing it.


Besides I sent the paper to Chalmers and he had no problem with. But  
he did wish me luck getting it published. He knew something I had  
not yet learned.

Richard

On Thu, Aug 23, 2012 at 8:19 PM, Jesse Mazer   
wrote:
A quibble with the beginning of Richard's paper. On the first page  
it says:


'It is beyond the scope of this paper and admittedly beyond my  
understanding to delve into Gödelian logic, which seems to be self- 
referential proof by contradiction, except to mention that Penrose  
in Shadows of the Mind(1994), as confirmed by David Chalmers(1995),  
arrived at a seemingly valid 7 step proof that human “reasoning  
powers cannot be captured by any formal system”.'


If you actually read Chalmers' paper at http://web.archive.org/web/20090204164739/http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/v2/psyche-2-09-chalmers.html 
 he definitely does *not* "confirm" Penrose's argument! He says in  
the paper that Penrose has two basic arguments for his conclusions  
about consciousness, and at the end of the section titled "the first  
argument" he concludes that the first one fails:


"2.16 It is section 3.3 that carries the burden of this strand of  
Penrose's argument, but unfortunately it seems to be one of the  
least convincing sections in the book. By his assumption that the  
relevant class of computational systems are all straightforward  
axiom-and-rules system, Penrose is not taking AI seriously, and  
certainly is not doing enough to establish his conclusion that  
physics is uncomputable. I conclude that none of Penrose's argument  
up to this point put a dent in the natural AI position: that our  
reasoning powers may be captured by a sound formal system F, where  
we cannot determine that F is sound."


Then when dealing with Penrose's "second argument", he says that  
Penrose draws the wrong conclusions; where Penrose concludes that  
our reasoning cannot be the product of any formal system, Chalmers  
concludes that the actual issue is that we cannot be 100% sure our  
reasoning is "sound" (which I understand to mean we can never be  
100% sure that we have not made a false conclusion about whether all  
the propositions we have proved true or false actually have that  
truth-value in "true arithmetic"):


"3.12 We can see, then, that the assumption that we know we are  
sound leads to a contradiction. One might try to pin the blame on  
one of the other assumptions, but all these seem quite  
straightforward. Indeed, these include the sort of implicit  
assumptions that Penrose appeals to in his arguments all the time.  
Indeed, one could make the case that all of premises (1)-(4) are  
implicitly appealed to in Penrose's main argument. For the purposes  
of the argument against Penrose, it does not really matter which we  
blame for the contradiction, but I think it is fairly clear that it  
is the assumption that the system knows that it is sound that causes  
most of the damage. It is this assumption, then

Re: A remark on Richard's paper

[Stephen P. King]

On 8/23/2012 11:00 PM, Richard Ruquist wrote:



On Thu, Aug 23, 2012 at 9:44 PM, Stephen P. King 
mailto:stephe...@charter.net>> wrote:


On 8/23/2012 8:07 PM, Richard Ruquist wrote:

Stephan,

Thanks for the compliment.
I finally got someone with smarts to read it other than Chalmers
and S_T Yau.


Dear Richard,

You are most welcome. I have learned to value the ideas of
other people, simply because one can never know what one has
missed in thinking about something. ;-)




Time inflates along with 3 dimensions in the big bang.
Leaving 6 dimensions behind to compactify or curl up
into tiny balls 1000 planck lengths across each with 500 holes.

So each 6-d ball is a fixed structure and 10^90/cc of them fill
the universe.
Hardly a single structure.


But isn't the entire 10d structure a "single" object". It
could embedded into a 11+ dimensional space and moved and rotated
about, no?


Not according to Yau" 
http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Calabi-Yau_manifold#Calabi-Yau_manifolds_in_string_theory


Dear Richard,

Please let me cut and paste the relevant paragraph from that article:

"They require in particular that the theory takes place in a 
10-dimensional space-time. To make contact with our 4-dimensional world, 
it is expected that the 10-dimensional space-time of string theory is 
locally the product M4×X of a 4-dimensional Minkowski space M3,1 with a 
6-dimensional space X . The 6-dimensional space X would be tiny, which 
would explain why it has not been detected so far at the existing 
experimental energy levels. Each choice of the internal space X leads to 
a different effective theory on the 4-dimensional Minkowski space M3,1 , 
which should be the theory describing our world."


The M4 is what is commonly referred to as "space-time" in physics. 
The X is a manifold that is fibered onto each and every point of M4 
using the fiber bundle method - standard differential topology stuff. 
The product of M4 and X is itself a topological space that can be 
embedded into a higher dimensional space and is subject to 
transformations on its own. This embedding is not assumed in string 
theory but it is mathematically possible (i.e. there does exist a 10d 
subspace of a 11d space that is identical to M4xX). Because of this my 
claim above stands.
Prof. Kitada considered a kind product space-time as a different 
but equivalent possibility in his work and after some discussions agreed 
with me that this was problematic as it makes the problem of time 
impossible to solve. I will not do into the details of the reasoning 
here as it is long, but please re-think this. This paper discusses Prof. 
Kitada's reasoning: http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/gr-qc/9708055






Well I really cannot say how time works. Don't know if it is
linear,or nonlinear,
if it inflates or deflates. Most of string theory appears to
threat time as part of a 4-D background spacetime. The paper has
little to do with time. Perhaps it is required for Pratt theory?


I have thought about time a lot. It is the focus of my
research, but I have had to deal with many related issues (such as
the mind-body problem) to find a solution.

Pratt's theory gives us a way to think about time as a
sequential ordering of events (consistent with Leibniz's ideas).
Pratt's "residuation" process can even be thought of as a
generator of temporal sequences (for each and every observer). I
have found a way to model residuation using the idea of
bisimulation which is an equivalence relation between computations
and some Category theory. Time is thus understood as a local and
first person process that can, via concurrency, become objective
(3p via consensus of all bisimulating monads) and thus leading to
the appearance of a dimension (since the sequencings allow for
mapping to the positive Real Line in the continuum limit). One
thing must be understood: to properly understand Pratt's theory we
have to adopt a Heraclitian paradigm


where becoming (as opposed to Being) is fundamental.


By your method, can you understand why in the GR analysis of a black 
hole, the time dimension turns into the radial space dimension inside 
the event horizon. That would seem to give time some credence as a 
dimension.


Sure, I am familiar with this transformation (it is a fun exercise 
to map out the vectors of flows through event horizons that take this 
into account, it yields a pattern that looks exactly like the field 
lines of an electrical charge!) but the entire definition of the black 
hole assumes from the onset the dimensional representation of time. I 
don't disagree with the math as it is only a representation of an idea 
(made precisely and consistently), I am just asking you to

Re: A remark on Richard's paper

[Richard Ruquist]

On Thu, Aug 23, 2012 at 9:44 PM, Stephen P. King wrote:

>  On 8/23/2012 8:07 PM, Richard Ruquist wrote:
>
> Stephan,
>
>  Thanks for the compliment.
> I finally got someone with smarts to read it other than Chalmers and S_T
> Yau.
>
>
> Dear Richard,
>
> You are most welcome. I have learned to value the ideas of other
> people, simply because one can never know what one has missed in thinking
> about something. ;-)
>
>
>
>  Time inflates along with 3 dimensions in the big bang.
> Leaving 6 dimensions behind to compactify or curl up
> into tiny balls 1000 planck lengths across each with 500 holes.
>
>  So each 6-d ball is a fixed structure and 10^90/cc of them fill the
> universe.
> Hardly a single structure.
>
>
> But isn't the entire 10d structure a "single" object". It could
> embedded into a 11+ dimensional space and moved and rotated about, no?
>

Not according to Yau"
http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Calabi-Yau_manifold#Calabi-Yau_manifolds_in_string_theory

>
>
>  Well I really cannot say how time works. Don't know if it is linear,or
> nonlinear,
> if it inflates or deflates. Most of string theory appears to threat time
> as part of a 4-D background spacetime. The paper has little to do with
> time. Perhaps it is required for Pratt theory?
>
>
> I have thought about time a lot. It is the focus of my research, but I
> have had to deal with many related issues (such as the mind-body problem)
> to find a solution.
>
> Pratt's theory gives us a way to think about time as a sequential
> ordering of events (consistent with Leibniz's ideas). Pratt's "residuation"
> process can even be thought of as a generator of temporal sequences (for
> each and every observer). I have found a way to model residuation using the
> idea of bisimulation which is an equivalence relation between computations
> and some Category theory. Time is thus understood as a local and first
> person process that can, via concurrency, become objective (3p via
> consensus of all bisimulating monads) and thus leading to the appearance of
> a dimension (since the sequencings allow for mapping to the positive Real
> Line in the continuum limit). One thing must be understood: to properly
> understand Pratt's theory we have to adopt a Heraclitian 
> paradigmwhere
>  becoming (as opposed to Being) is fundamental.
>

By your method, can you understand why in the GR analysis of a black hole,
the time dimension turns into the radial space dimension inside the event
horizon. That would seem to give time some credence as a dimension.

>
> The reasoning about time that I used was mostly developed by Prof.
> Hitoshi Kitada and discussed in his many papers:
> http://www.metasciences.ac/Articles/works.html
>
>
>
>  Richard
>
> On Thu, Aug 23, 2012 at 6:38 PM, Stephen P. King wrote:
>
>>  Dear Richard,
>>
>> Your paper  is very
>> interesting. It reminds me a lot of Stephen Wolfram's cellular automaton
>> theory. I only have one big problem with it. The 10d manifold would be a
>> single fixed structure that, while conceivably capable of running the
>> computations and/or implementing the Peano arithmetic, has a problem with
>> the role of time in it. You might have a solution to this problem that I
>> see that I did not deduce as I read your paper. How do you define time for
>> your model?
>>
>
>
> --
> Onward!
>
> Stephen
>
> "Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed."
> ~ Francis Bacon
>
>  --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
> "Everything List" group.
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Re: A remark on Richard's paper

[Stephen P. King]

Dear Jesse,

Thank you for this very nice remark. I will have to think about it 
and read your reference.



On 8/23/2012 8:19 PM, Jesse Mazer wrote:
A quibble with the beginning of Richard's paper. On the first page it 
says:


'It is beyond the scope of this paper and admittedly beyond my 
understanding to delve into Gödelian logic, which seems to be 
self-referential proof by contradiction, except to mention that 
Penrose in Shadows of the Mind(1994), as confirmed by David 
Chalmers(1995), arrived at a seemingly valid 7 step proof that human 
“reasoning powers cannot be captured by any formal system”.'


If you actually read Chalmers' paper at 
http://web.archive.org/web/20090204164739/http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/v2/psyche-2-09-chalmers.html 
he definitely does *not* "confirm" Penrose's argument! He says in the 
paper that Penrose has two basic arguments for his conclusions about 
consciousness, and at the end of the section titled "the first 
argument" he concludes that the first one fails:


"2.16 It is section 3.3 that carries the burden of this strand of 
Penrose's argument, but unfortunately it seems to be one of the least 
convincing sections in the book. By his assumption that the relevant 
class of computational systems are all straightforward axiom-and-rules 
system, Penrose is not taking AI seriously, and certainly is not doing 
enough to establish his conclusion that physics is uncomputable. I 
conclude that none of Penrose's argument up to this point put a dent 
in the natural AI position: that our reasoning powers may be captured 
by a sound formal system F, where we cannot determine that F is sound."


Then when dealing with Penrose's "second argument", he says that 
Penrose draws the wrong conclusions; where Penrose concludes that our 
reasoning cannot be the product of any formal system, Chalmers 
concludes that the actual issue is that we cannot be 100% sure our 
reasoning is "sound" (which I understand to mean we can never be 100% 
sure that we have not made a false conclusion about whether all the 
propositions we have proved true or false actually have that 
truth-value in "true arithmetic"):


"3.12 We can see, then, that the assumption that we know we are sound 
leads to a contradiction. One might try to pin the blame on one of the 
other assumptions, but all these seem quite straightforward. Indeed, 
these include the sort of implicit assumptions that Penrose appeals to 
in his arguments all the time. Indeed, one could make the case that 
all of premises (1)-(4) are implicitly appealed to in Penrose's main 
argument. For the purposes of the argument against Penrose, it does 
not really matter which we blame for the contradiction, but I think it 
is fairly clear that it is the assumption that the system knows that 
it is sound that causes most of the damage. It is this assumption, 
then, that should be withdrawn.


"3.13 Penrose has therefore pointed to a false culprit. When the 
contradiction is reached, he pins the blame on the assumption that our 
reasoning powers are captured by a formal system F. But the argument 
above shows that this assumption is inessential in reaching the 
contradiction: A similar contradiction, via a not dissimilar sort of 
argument, can be reached even in the absence of that assumption. It 
follows that the responsibility for the contradiction lies elsewhere 
than in the assumption of computability. It is the assumption about 
knowledge of soundness that should be withdrawn.


"3.14 Still, Penrose's argument has succeeded in clarifying some 
issues. In a sense, it shows where the deepest flaw in Gödelian 
arguments lies. One might have thought that the deepest flaw lay in 
the unjustified claim that one can see the soundness of certain formal 
systems that underlie our own reasoning. But in fact, if the above 
analysis is correct, the deepest flaw lies in the assumption that we 
know that we are sound. All Gödelian arguments appeal to this premise 
somewhere, but in fact the premise generates a contradiction. Perhaps 
we are sound, but we cannot know unassailably that we are sound."


So it seems Chalmers would have no problem with the "natural AI" 
position he discussed earlier, that our reasoning could be adequately 
captured by a computer simulation that did not come to its top-level 
conclusions about mathematics via a strict axiom/proof method 
involving the mathematical questions themselves, but rather by some 
underlying fallible structure like a neural network. The bottom-level 
behavior of the simulated neurons themselves would be deducible given 
the initial state of the system using the axiom/proof method, but that 
doesn't mean the system as a whole might not make errors in 
mathematical calculations; see Douglas Hofstadter's discussion of this 
issue starting on p. 571 of "Godel Escher Bach", the section titled 
"Irrational and Rational Can Coexist on Different Levels", where he 
writes:


"Another way to gain perspective on this is

Re: A remark on Richard's paper

[Stephen P. King]

On 8/23/2012 8:07 PM, Richard Ruquist wrote:

Stephan,

Thanks for the compliment.
I finally got someone with smarts to read it other than Chalmers and 
S_T Yau.


Dear Richard,

You are most welcome. I have learned to value the ideas of other 
people, simply because one can never know what one has missed in 
thinking about something. ;-)




Time inflates along with 3 dimensions in the big bang.
Leaving 6 dimensions behind to compactify or curl up
into tiny balls 1000 planck lengths across each with 500 holes.

So each 6-d ball is a fixed structure and 10^90/cc of them fill the 
universe.

Hardly a single structure.


But isn't the entire 10d structure a "single" object". It could 
embedded into a 11+ dimensional space and moved and rotated about, no?




Well I really cannot say how time works. Don't know if it is linear,or 
nonlinear,
if it inflates or deflates. Most of string theory appears to threat 
time as part of a 4-D background spacetime. The paper has little to do 
with time. Perhaps it is required for Pratt theory?


I have thought about time a lot. It is the focus of my research, 
but I have had to deal with many related issues (such as the mind-body 
problem) to find a solution.


Pratt's theory gives us a way to think about time as a sequential 
ordering of events (consistent with Leibniz's ideas). Pratt's 
"residuation" process can even be thought of as a generator of temporal 
sequences (for each and every observer). I have found a way to model 
residuation using the idea of bisimulation which is an equivalence 
relation between computations and some Category theory. Time is thus 
understood as a local and first person process that can, via 
concurrency, become objective (3p via consensus of all bisimulating 
monads) and thus leading to the appearance of a dimension (since the 
sequencings allow for mapping to the positive Real Line in the continuum 
limit). One thing must be understood: to properly understand Pratt's 
theory we have to adopt a Heraclitian paradigm 
 
where becoming (as opposed to Being) is fundamental.
The reasoning about time that I used was mostly developed by Prof. 
Hitoshi Kitada and discussed in his many papers: 
http://www.metasciences.ac/Articles/works.html




Richard

On Thu, Aug 23, 2012 at 6:38 PM, Stephen P. King 
mailto:stephe...@charter.net>> wrote:


Dear Richard,

Your paper  is very
interesting. It reminds me a lot of Stephen Wolfram's cellular
automaton theory. I only have one big problem with it. The 10d
manifold would be a single fixed structure that, while conceivably
capable of running the computations and/or implementing the Peano
arithmetic, has a problem with the role of time in it. You might
have a solution to this problem that I see that I did not deduce
as I read your paper. How do you define time for your model?




--
Onward!

Stephen

"Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed."
~ Francis Bacon

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Re: A remark on Richard's paper

[Richard Ruquist]

My apologies. When Chalmers used the words "godelian argument" I thought he
was referring to Godel. Now I can see I misread it.

On Thu, Aug 23, 2012 at 9:09 PM, Jesse Mazer  wrote:

>
>
> On Thu, Aug 23, 2012 at 8:41 PM, Richard Ruquist wrote:
>
>> Jesse,
>>
>> This is what Chalmers says in the 95 paper you link about the second
>> Penrose argument, the one in my paper:
>>
>> " 3.5 As far as I can determine, this argument is free of the obvious
>> flaws that plague other Gödelian arguments, such as Lucas's argument and
>> Penrose's earlier arguments. If it is flawed, the flaws lie deeper. It is
>> true that the argument has a feeling of achieving its conclusion as if by
>> magic. One is tempted to say: "why couldn't F itself engage in just the
>> same reasoning?". But although there are various directions in which one
>> might try to attack the argument, no knockdown refutation immediately
>> presents itself. For this reason, the argument is quite challenging.
>> Compared to previous versions, this argument is much more worthy of
>> attention from supporters of AI. "
>>
>> Chalmers finally concludes that the flaw for Godel, which Penrose also
>> assumed, is the assumption that we can know we are sound. So the other way
>> around, if Godel is correct, so is the Penrose second argument, which
>> Chalmers confirmed. However, Chalmers seems to be saying the Godel is
>> incorrect, hardly a basis for my paper.
>>
>
> What do you mean "the flaw for Godel"? There is no doubt that Godel's
> mathematical proof is correct, and if you think Chalmers is suggesting any
> such doubt in his paper you are misreading him. The argument he's talking
> about is one specifically concerning human intelligence, which Godel's
> mathematical proof says nothing about (Godel did offer some brief comments
> about the implications of his mathematical proof for human intelligence,
> but they were very brief and somewhat ambiguous, see
> http://www.iep.utm.edu/lp-argue/#H4 ). And I already quoted his
> conclusions about the second argument, after the section you quote above:
> that although Chalmers agrees that Penrose's second argument does show that
> *either* our reasoning cannot be captured by a formal system *or* that we
> cannot be sure our reasoning is sound, Chalmers thinks Penrose is wrong to
> prefer the first option rather than the second.
>
>
>
>>
>> Personally, when I am sound, I know I am sound. When I am unsound I
>> usually know that I am unsound. However, psychosis runs in my family, and
>> many times I have watched a relative lapse into psychosis without him
>> realizing it.
>>
>
> Chalmers/Penrose aren't talking about "sound" in the ordinary colloquial
> sense of sanity or anything like that, they're talking about soundness in
> the sense of perfect mathematical certainty that there is absolutely no
> chance--not even a chance of 1 in 10^10 or smaller, say--that they
> might have made an error in their judgement about the truth or falsity of
> some (potentially very complicated) proposition about arithmetic.
>
>
>
>> Besides I sent the paper to Chalmers and he had no problem with. But he
>> did wish me luck getting it published. He knew something I had not yet
>> learned.
>> Richard
>>
>
>
> Did Chalmers offer any detailed commentary suggesting he had read through
> the whole thing carefully? If not it's possible he skimmed it and missed
> that sentence, or just read the abstract and decided it didn't interest
> him, but sent the note out of politeness.
>
> Jesse
>
>
>
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Aug 23, 2012 at 8:19 PM, Jesse Mazer wrote:
>>
>>> A quibble with the beginning of Richard's paper. On the first page it
>>> says:
>>>
>>> 'It is beyond the scope of this paper and admittedly beyond my
>>> understanding to delve into Gödelian logic, which seems to be
>>> self-referential proof by contradiction, except to mention that Penrose in
>>> Shadows of the Mind(1994), as confirmed by David Chalmers(1995), arrived at
>>> a seemingly valid 7 step proof that human “reasoning powers cannot be
>>> captured by any formal system”.'
>>>
>>> If you actually read Chalmers' paper at
>>> http://web.archive.org/web/20090204164739/http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/v2/psyche-2-09-chalmers.htmlhe
>>>  definitely does *not* "confirm" Penrose's argument! He says in the paper
>>> that Penrose has two basic arguments for his conclusions about
>>> consciousness, and at the end of the section titled "the first argument" he
>>> concludes that the first one fails:
>>>
>>> "2.16 It is section 3.3 that carries the burden of this strand of
>>> Penrose's argument, but unfortunately it seems to be one of the least
>>> convincing sections in the book. By his assumption that the relevant class
>>> of computational systems are all straightforward axiom-and-rules system,
>>> Penrose is not taking AI seriously, and certainly is not doing enough to
>>> establish his conclusion that physics is uncomputable. I conclude that none
>>> of Penrose's argument up to 

Re: A remark on Richard's paper

[Jesse Mazer]

On Thu, Aug 23, 2012 at 8:41 PM, Richard Ruquist  wrote:

> Jesse,
>
> This is what Chalmers says in the 95 paper you link about the second
> Penrose argument, the one in my paper:
>
> " 3.5 As far as I can determine, this argument is free of the obvious
> flaws that plague other Gödelian arguments, such as Lucas's argument and
> Penrose's earlier arguments. If it is flawed, the flaws lie deeper. It is
> true that the argument has a feeling of achieving its conclusion as if by
> magic. One is tempted to say: "why couldn't F itself engage in just the
> same reasoning?". But although there are various directions in which one
> might try to attack the argument, no knockdown refutation immediately
> presents itself. For this reason, the argument is quite challenging.
> Compared to previous versions, this argument is much more worthy of
> attention from supporters of AI. "
>
> Chalmers finally concludes that the flaw for Godel, which Penrose also
> assumed, is the assumption that we can know we are sound. So the other way
> around, if Godel is correct, so is the Penrose second argument, which
> Chalmers confirmed. However, Chalmers seems to be saying the Godel is
> incorrect, hardly a basis for my paper.
>

What do you mean "the flaw for Godel"? There is no doubt that Godel's
mathematical proof is correct, and if you think Chalmers is suggesting any
such doubt in his paper you are misreading him. The argument he's talking
about is one specifically concerning human intelligence, which Godel's
mathematical proof says nothing about (Godel did offer some brief comments
about the implications of his mathematical proof for human intelligence,
but they were very brief and somewhat ambiguous, see
http://www.iep.utm.edu/lp-argue/#H4 ). And I already quoted his conclusions
about the second argument, after the section you quote above: that although
Chalmers agrees that Penrose's second argument does show that *either* our
reasoning cannot be captured by a formal system *or* that we cannot be sure
our reasoning is sound, Chalmers thinks Penrose is wrong to prefer the
first option rather than the second.



>
> Personally, when I am sound, I know I am sound. When I am unsound I
> usually know that I am unsound. However, psychosis runs in my family, and
> many times I have watched a relative lapse into psychosis without him
> realizing it.
>

Chalmers/Penrose aren't talking about "sound" in the ordinary colloquial
sense of sanity or anything like that, they're talking about soundness in
the sense of perfect mathematical certainty that there is absolutely no
chance--not even a chance of 1 in 10^10 or smaller, say--that they
might have made an error in their judgement about the truth or falsity of
some (potentially very complicated) proposition about arithmetic.



> Besides I sent the paper to Chalmers and he had no problem with. But he
> did wish me luck getting it published. He knew something I had not yet
> learned.
> Richard
>


Did Chalmers offer any detailed commentary suggesting he had read through
the whole thing carefully? If not it's possible he skimmed it and missed
that sentence, or just read the abstract and decided it didn't interest
him, but sent the note out of politeness.

Jesse



>
>
> On Thu, Aug 23, 2012 at 8:19 PM, Jesse Mazer  wrote:
>
>> A quibble with the beginning of Richard's paper. On the first page it
>> says:
>>
>> 'It is beyond the scope of this paper and admittedly beyond my
>> understanding to delve into Gödelian logic, which seems to be
>> self-referential proof by contradiction, except to mention that Penrose in
>> Shadows of the Mind(1994), as confirmed by David Chalmers(1995), arrived at
>> a seemingly valid 7 step proof that human “reasoning powers cannot be
>> captured by any formal system”.'
>>
>> If you actually read Chalmers' paper at
>> http://web.archive.org/web/20090204164739/http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/v2/psyche-2-09-chalmers.htmlhe
>>  definitely does *not* "confirm" Penrose's argument! He says in the paper
>> that Penrose has two basic arguments for his conclusions about
>> consciousness, and at the end of the section titled "the first argument" he
>> concludes that the first one fails:
>>
>> "2.16 It is section 3.3 that carries the burden of this strand of
>> Penrose's argument, but unfortunately it seems to be one of the least
>> convincing sections in the book. By his assumption that the relevant class
>> of computational systems are all straightforward axiom-and-rules system,
>> Penrose is not taking AI seriously, and certainly is not doing enough to
>> establish his conclusion that physics is uncomputable. I conclude that none
>> of Penrose's argument up to this point put a dent in the natural AI
>> position: that our reasoning powers may be captured by a sound formal
>> system F, where we cannot determine that F is sound."
>>
>> Then when dealing with Penrose's "second argument", he says that Penrose
>> draws the wrong conclusions; where Penrose concludes that o

Re: A remark on Richard's paper

[Richard Ruquist]

Jesse,

This is what Chalmers says in the 95 paper you link about the second
Penrose argument, the one in my paper:

" 3.5 As far as I can determine, this argument is free of the obvious flaws
that plague other Gödelian arguments, such as Lucas's argument and
Penrose's earlier arguments. If it is flawed, the flaws lie deeper. It is
true that the argument has a feeling of achieving its conclusion as if by
magic. One is tempted to say: "why couldn't F itself engage in just the
same reasoning?". But although there are various directions in which one
might try to attack the argument, no knockdown refutation immediately
presents itself. For this reason, the argument is quite challenging.
Compared to previous versions, this argument is much more worthy of
attention from supporters of AI. "

Chalmers finally concludes that the flaw for Godel, which Penrose also
assumed, is the assumption that we can know we are sound. So the other way
around, if Godel is correct, so is the Penrose second argument, which
Chalmers confirmed. However, Chalmers seems to be saying the Godel is
incorrect, hardly a basis for my paper.

Personally, when I am sound, I know I am sound. When I am unsound I usually
know that I am unsound. However, psychosis runs in my family, and many
times I have watched a relative lapse into psychosis without him realizing
it.

Besides I sent the paper to Chalmers and he had no problem with. But he did
wish me luck getting it published. He knew something I had not yet learned.
Richard

On Thu, Aug 23, 2012 at 8:19 PM, Jesse Mazer  wrote:

> A quibble with the beginning of Richard's paper. On the first page it says:
>
> 'It is beyond the scope of this paper and admittedly beyond my
> understanding to delve into Gödelian logic, which seems to be
> self-referential proof by contradiction, except to mention that Penrose in
> Shadows of the Mind(1994), as confirmed by David Chalmers(1995), arrived at
> a seemingly valid 7 step proof that human “reasoning powers cannot be
> captured by any formal system”.'
>
> If you actually read Chalmers' paper at
> http://web.archive.org/web/20090204164739/http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/v2/psyche-2-09-chalmers.htmlhe
>  definitely does *not* "confirm" Penrose's argument! He says in the paper
> that Penrose has two basic arguments for his conclusions about
> consciousness, and at the end of the section titled "the first argument" he
> concludes that the first one fails:
>
> "2.16 It is section 3.3 that carries the burden of this strand of
> Penrose's argument, but unfortunately it seems to be one of the least
> convincing sections in the book. By his assumption that the relevant class
> of computational systems are all straightforward axiom-and-rules system,
> Penrose is not taking AI seriously, and certainly is not doing enough to
> establish his conclusion that physics is uncomputable. I conclude that none
> of Penrose's argument up to this point put a dent in the natural AI
> position: that our reasoning powers may be captured by a sound formal
> system F, where we cannot determine that F is sound."
>
> Then when dealing with Penrose's "second argument", he says that Penrose
> draws the wrong conclusions; where Penrose concludes that our reasoning
> cannot be the product of any formal system, Chalmers concludes that the
> actual issue is that we cannot be 100% sure our reasoning is "sound" (which
> I understand to mean we can never be 100% sure that we have not made a
> false conclusion about whether all the propositions we have proved true or
> false actually have that truth-value in "true arithmetic"):
>
> "3.12 We can see, then, that the assumption that we know we are sound
> leads to a contradiction. One might try to pin the blame on one of the
> other assumptions, but all these seem quite straightforward. Indeed, these
> include the sort of implicit assumptions that Penrose appeals to in his
> arguments all the time. Indeed, one could make the case that all of
> premises (1)-(4) are implicitly appealed to in Penrose's main argument. For
> the purposes of the argument against Penrose, it does not really matter
> which we blame for the contradiction, but I think it is fairly clear that
> it is the assumption that the system knows that it is sound that causes
> most of the damage. It is this assumption, then, that should be withdrawn.
>
> "3.13 Penrose has therefore pointed to a false culprit. When the
> contradiction is reached, he pins the blame on the assumption that our
> reasoning powers are captured by a formal system F. But the argument above
> shows that this assumption is inessential in reaching the contradiction: A
> similar contradiction, via a not dissimilar sort of argument, can be
> reached even in the absence of that assumption. It follows that the
> responsibility for the contradiction lies elsewhere than in the assumption
> of computability. It is the assumption about knowledge of soundness that
> should be withdrawn.
>
> "3.14 Still, Penrose's argument h

Re: A remark on Richard's paper

[Jesse Mazer]

A quibble with the beginning of Richard's paper. On the first page it says:

'It is beyond the scope of this paper and admittedly beyond my
understanding to delve into Gödelian logic, which seems to be
self-referential proof by contradiction, except to mention that Penrose in
Shadows of the Mind(1994), as confirmed by David Chalmers(1995), arrived at
a seemingly valid 7 step proof that human “reasoning powers cannot be
captured by any formal system”.'

If you actually read Chalmers' paper at
http://web.archive.org/web/20090204164739/http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/v2/psyche-2-09-chalmers.htmlhe
definitely does *not* "confirm" Penrose's argument! He says in the
paper
that Penrose has two basic arguments for his conclusions about
consciousness, and at the end of the section titled "the first argument" he
concludes that the first one fails:

"2.16 It is section 3.3 that carries the burden of this strand of Penrose's
argument, but unfortunately it seems to be one of the least convincing
sections in the book. By his assumption that the relevant class of
computational systems are all straightforward axiom-and-rules system,
Penrose is not taking AI seriously, and certainly is not doing enough to
establish his conclusion that physics is uncomputable. I conclude that none
of Penrose's argument up to this point put a dent in the natural AI
position: that our reasoning powers may be captured by a sound formal
system F, where we cannot determine that F is sound."

Then when dealing with Penrose's "second argument", he says that Penrose
draws the wrong conclusions; where Penrose concludes that our reasoning
cannot be the product of any formal system, Chalmers concludes that the
actual issue is that we cannot be 100% sure our reasoning is "sound" (which
I understand to mean we can never be 100% sure that we have not made a
false conclusion about whether all the propositions we have proved true or
false actually have that truth-value in "true arithmetic"):

"3.12 We can see, then, that the assumption that we know we are sound leads
to a contradiction. One might try to pin the blame on one of the other
assumptions, but all these seem quite straightforward. Indeed, these
include the sort of implicit assumptions that Penrose appeals to in his
arguments all the time. Indeed, one could make the case that all of
premises (1)-(4) are implicitly appealed to in Penrose's main argument. For
the purposes of the argument against Penrose, it does not really matter
which we blame for the contradiction, but I think it is fairly clear that
it is the assumption that the system knows that it is sound that causes
most of the damage. It is this assumption, then, that should be withdrawn.

"3.13 Penrose has therefore pointed to a false culprit. When the
contradiction is reached, he pins the blame on the assumption that our
reasoning powers are captured by a formal system F. But the argument above
shows that this assumption is inessential in reaching the contradiction: A
similar contradiction, via a not dissimilar sort of argument, can be
reached even in the absence of that assumption. It follows that the
responsibility for the contradiction lies elsewhere than in the assumption
of computability. It is the assumption about knowledge of soundness that
should be withdrawn.

"3.14 Still, Penrose's argument has succeeded in clarifying some issues. In
a sense, it shows where the deepest flaw in Gödelian arguments lies. One
might have thought that the deepest flaw lay in the unjustified claim that
one can see the soundness of certain formal systems that underlie our own
reasoning. But in fact, if the above analysis is correct, the deepest flaw
lies in the assumption that we know that we are sound. All Gödelian
arguments appeal to this premise somewhere, but in fact the premise
generates a contradiction. Perhaps we are sound, but we cannot know
unassailably that we are sound."

So it seems Chalmers would have no problem with the "natural AI" position
he discussed earlier, that our reasoning could be adequately captured by a
computer simulation that did not come to its top-level conclusions about
mathematics via a strict axiom/proof method involving the mathematical
questions themselves, but rather by some underlying fallible structure like
a neural network. The bottom-level behavior of the simulated neurons
themselves would be deducible given the initial state of the system using
the axiom/proof method, but that doesn't mean the system as a whole might
not make errors in mathematical calculations; see Douglas Hofstadter's
discussion of this issue starting on p. 571 of "Godel Escher Bach", the
section titled "Irrational and Rational Can Coexist on Different Levels",
where he writes:

"Another way to gain perspective on this is to remember that a brain, too,
is a collection of faultlessly functioning element-neurons. Whenever a
neuron's threshold is surpassed by the sum of the incoming signals,
BANG!-it fires. It never happens that a neuron forgets its

Re: A remark on Richard's paper

[Richard Ruquist]

Stephan,

Thanks for the compliment.
I finally got someone with smarts to read it other than Chalmers and S_T
Yau.

Time inflates along with 3 dimensions in the big bang.
Leaving 6 dimensions behind to compactify or curl up
into tiny balls 1000 planck lengths across each with 500 holes.

So each 6-d ball is a fixed structure and 10^90/cc of them fill the
universe.
Hardly a single structure.

Well I really cannot say how time works. Don't know if it is linear,or
nonlinear,
if it inflates or deflates. Most of string theory appears to threat time as
part of a 4-D background spacetime. The paper has little to do with time.
Perhaps it is required for Pratt theory?

Richard

On Thu, Aug 23, 2012 at 6:38 PM, Stephen P. King wrote:

>  Dear Richard,
>
> Your paper  is very
> interesting. It reminds me a lot of Stephen Wolfram's cellular automaton
> theory. I only have one big problem with it. The 10d manifold would be a
> single fixed structure that, while conceivably capable of running the
> computations and/or implementing the Peano arithmetic, has a problem with
> the role of time in it. You might have a solution to this problem that I
> see that I did not deduce as I read your paper. How do you define time for
> your model?
>
> --
> Onward!
>
> Stephen
>
> "Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed."
> ~ Francis Bacon
>
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Re: A remark on Richard's paper

[Stephen P. King]

Dear Richard,

Your paper  is very 
interesting. It reminds me a lot of Stephen Wolfram's cellular automaton 
theory. I only have one big problem with it. The 10d manifold would be a 
single fixed structure that, while conceivably capable of running the 
computations and/or implementing the Peano arithmetic, has a problem 
with the role of time in it. You might have a solution to this problem 
that I see that I did not deduce as I read your paper. How do you define 
time for your model?


--
Onward!

Stephen

"Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed."
~ Francis Bacon

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