Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
On Thu, Jun 25, 2015 at 4:17 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: The question is, in Helsinki, where do you expect to feel to be after pushing the button. I have repeat this many times. Yes, Bruno Marchal certainly has repeated this question many many times, and after each and every time John Clark has begged Bruno Marchal to stop using personal pronouns because in duplicating chamber thought experiments like this it is not at all clear what the personal pronoun you refers to. Except that we have given the precision needed. you refer to the guy who remember being John-Clark-in-Helsinki. OK fine, so the question is where will somebody who remembers being John-Clark-in-Helsinki be after pushing the button? Obviously there would be no reason to expect just one answer to that question anymore than you'd expect just one solution to a quadratic equation. Obviously the answer is Moscow AND Washington. in Helsinki you know with certainty (modulo the hypotheses) that you will see only one city after pushing the button. And round and round we go with those exact same goddamn idiotic personal pronouns! John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
On 24 Jun 2015, at 19:25, John Clark wrote: Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: The question is, in Helsinki, where do you expect to feel to be after pushing the button. I have repeat this many times. Yes, Bruno Marchal certainly has repeated this question many many times, and after each and every time John Clark has begged Bruno Marchal to stop using personal pronouns because in duplicating chamber thought experiments like this it is not at all clear what the personal pronoun you refers to. Except that we have given the precision needed. you refer to the guy who remember being John-Clark-in-Helsinki. In this case, it refer to you in Helsinki, and the question concerns which of the next guy the guy presently in Helsinki will feel to be. And Bruno Marchal has without exception always refused John Clark's simple request. No, I have given it, and so well that we do agree on this. Why? John Clark theorizes it's to hide sloppy thinking, at least John Clark can't think of another reason for not making such a change that though simple would expose many logical flaws and assumptions to the light of day. Without personal pronouns there would be no place for crap to hide. Pronouns are my expertise, and if you were really interested you would have study the small amount of computer science to see how the math part handle them. You can still ask, I teach this every year. But for UDA, you need only the precise and simple definition given, on which you have agreed, and just pursue the reasoning. For a mysterious reason, you seem unable to put yourself in the shoes of any of the recontituted person, as you still deny that in Helsinki you know with certainty (modulo the hypotheses) that you will see only one city after pushing the button. But you have not yet say what happens: you die? you feel to be in two cities at once? or what? Bruno John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
On 23 Jun 2015, at 02:02, John Clark wrote: On Mon, Jun 22, 2015 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: the question, contrary to what you say has been given precisely. We ask to the 1-you, about If you has been duplicated there is nothing 1 about it, There is 1 about all of them. there is no such thing as THE 1-you. And who is Bruno Marchal going to ask, the guy in Washington or the guy in Moscow? . Both. They both both confirm the P(coffee) = 1 made in Helsinki. They both confirm P(only one city) = 1 made in Helsinki. its unique 1-you If you has been duplicated explain why it is still unique. It *feels* unique, for the simple reason that each copies access only the diaries that the Helsinki guy took with him, and that in each city they don't feel what the doppelganger feels. It is unclear because *you* equivocate the 1 and 3 view only. John Clark has no idea what that means. You stay out of the boxes after the duplication, when you know that whatever you become among the W and M guys, you can only be one of them from the 1-view, and that the question is about that 1p experience, as see from the 1p view, and not some 3p external view. That's because you refuse to state what that mysterious question is. It is in the poists and in he paper, And Bruno Marchal *STILL* refuses to repeat that mysterious question here. The question is, in Helsinki, where do you expect to feel to be after pushing the button. I have repeat this many times. John Clark theorizes it's because it contains wall to wall personal pronouns and is about a thousand word longs with a question mark at the end; but of course John Clark can't be certain of this until John Clark actually sees the question. This looks like pathetic hand waving. and you are the only one having a problem, but I think you fake it. People often pretend to understand something when they really don't, but why would John Clark pretend not to understand something if John Clark really did understand it? Because all what is said is easily verifiable, once you stop equivocate the 1p views and the 3p views on the 1p views. It is the 1-you, about its unique future 1-you. Who's future 1-you is Bruno Marchal talking about? All of them, or better each of them. And why is its unique if you has been duplicated? Because each brain which have been reconstituted have only access to one copy. It is quite simple (as we assume comp John Clark don't assume comp or any of Bruno's baby talk. This says it all about your attitude. The question was asked of the man in Helsinki about what he will felt in the future. That question has the personal pronoun he in it so the answer depends on what he means: 1) If he means Bruno Marchal then he will experience Moscow AND Washington. This is utterly ridiculous, and refuted by the two Bruno Marchal. 2) If he means the man currently experiencing Helsinki then he will experience nothing because nobody will be experiencing Helsinki in the future.. This would change the notion of personal identity on which we have already agree for those thought experience. 3) If he means the man who remembers being the Helsinki man and now is experiencing Moscow then then he will see Moscow. So the guy who remember Helsinki knows that his prediction W M has been refuted. 4) If he means the man who remembers being the Helsinki man and now is experiencing Washington then then he will see Washington.. So the other guy who remember Helsinki knows that his prediction W M has been refuted. So Bruno, which one of these does he mean? First case, in the 1-you sense, about the 1-you sense. OK by he Bruno Marchal means the first case, the one Bruno Marchal called utterly ridiculous. But how could meaning 3 and 4 refute anything if that is not what Bruno Marchal meant by he? No, it is the first case, but in the 1-views, and both feel to be unique, and in Helsinki, that was predictible with probability one. When you say he will experience Moscow AND Washington, there is an ambiguity, as you forget to make precise if you ask if some person will experience Moscow AND Washington simultaneously as a person, or in parallel? So the answer is case 1), with the precision added that we asks about its possible experience. And in that case, as I say, we have P(I see only one city) = 1. Bruno John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: The question is, in Helsinki, where do you expect to feel to be after pushing the button. I have repeat this many times. Yes, Bruno Marchal certainly has repeated this question many many times, and after each and every time John Clark has begged Bruno Marchal to stop using personal pronouns because in duplicating chamber thought experiments like this it is not at all clear what the personal pronoun you refers to. And Bruno Marchal has without exception always refused John Clark's simple request. Why? John Clark theorizes it's to hide sloppy thinking, at least John Clark can't think of another reason for not making such a change that though simple would expose many logical flaws and assumptions to the light of day. Without personal pronouns there would be no place for crap to hide. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
On Mon, Jun 22, 2015 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: the question, contrary to what you say has been given precisely. We ask to the 1-you, about If you has been duplicated there is nothing 1 about it, there is no such thing as THE 1-you. And who is Bruno Marchal going to ask, the guy in Washington or the guy in Moscow? . its unique 1-you If you has been duplicated explain why it is still unique. It is unclear because *you* equivocate the 1 and 3 view only. John Clark has no idea what that means. That's because you refuse to state what that mysterious question is. It is in the poists and in he paper, And Bruno Marchal *STILL* refuses to repeat that mysterious question here. John Clark theorizes it's because it contains wall to wall personal pronouns and is about a thousand word longs with a question mark at the end; but of course John Clark can't be certain of this until John Clark actually sees the question. and you are the only one having a problem, but I think you fake it. People often pretend to understand something when they really don't, but why would John Clark pretend not to understand something if John Clark really did understand it? It is the 1-you, about its unique future 1-you. Who's future 1-you is Bruno Marchal talking about? And why is its unique if you has been duplicated? It is quite simple (as we assume comp John Clark don't assume comp or any of Bruno's baby talk. The question was asked of the man in Helsinki about what he will felt in the future. That question has the personal pronoun he in it so the answer depends on what he means: 1) If he means Bruno Marchal then he will experience Moscow AND Washington. This is utterly ridiculous, and refuted by the two Bruno Marchal. 2) If he means the man currently experiencing Helsinki then he will experience nothing because nobody will be experiencing Helsinki in the future.. This would change the notion of personal identity on which we have already agree for those thought experience. 3) If he means the man who remembers being the Helsinki man and now is experiencing Moscow then then he will see Moscow. So the guy who remember Helsinki knows that his prediction W M has been refuted. 4) If he means the man who remembers being the Helsinki man and now is experiencing Washington then then he will see Washington.. So the other guy who remember Helsinki knows that his prediction W M has been refuted. So Bruno, which one of these does he mean? First case, in the 1-you sense, about the 1-you sense. OK by he Bruno Marchal means the first case, the one Bruno Marchal called utterly ridiculous. But how could meaning 3 and 4 refute anything if that is not what Bruno Marchal meant by he? John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
On 21 Jun 2015, at 20:32, meekerdb wrote: On 6/21/2015 8:50 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 19 Jun 2015, at 23:32, meekerdb wrote: On 6/19/2015 10:57 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 19 Jun 2015, at 02:36, meekerdb wrote: On 6/18/2015 4:11 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote: meekerdb wrote: On 6/18/2015 1:10 PM, John Clark wrote: On Thu, Jun 18, 2015 at 1:51 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net This is gitting muddled. '2+2=4' is a tautology if the symbols are given their meaning by Peano's axioms or similar axiom set and rules of inference. If the symbols are interpreted as the size of specific physical sets, e.g. my example of fathers and sons, it's not a tautology. In an equation, ant equation, isn't a tautology then it isn't true. An equation is just a sentence. A tautology is a declarative sentence that's true in all possible worlds. 2+11=1 in worlds where addition is defined mod 12. That's why an equation alone can't be judged to be a tautology without the context of its interpretation. But your counterexamples are simply changing the meaning of the terms in the equation. I agree that a tautology is true in all possible worlds, because its truth depends only on the meaning of the terms involved. If the meaning is invariant, the truth value does not change. But this is not invariant under changes in meaning. 2+2=4 is a theorem in simple arithmetic, and a tautology because of the way we define the terms. In a successor definition of the integers: 1=s(0), 2=s(s(0)), 3=s(s(s(0))), 4=s(s(s(s(0, 2+2=4 can be proved as a theorem. But that relies on the above definitions of 2, 4 etc. In modular arithmetic, and with non-additive sets, these definitions do not apply. Note, however, that this interpretation of 'tautology' differs from the logical interpretation that Bruno refers to. Bruce I don't think it's different if you include the context. Then it becomes Given Peano's axioms 2+2=4. Isn't that the kind of logical tautology Bruno talks about? Within that meaning of terms it's a logical truism. I don't think it's necessary to restrict logic to just manipulating and, or, and not. Bruno introduces modalities and manipulates them as though they are true in all possible worlds. But is it logic that a world is not accessible from itself? As you say, it depends of the context. Yet, the arithmetical reality kicks backs and imposed a well defined modal logic when the modality is machine's believability(or assertability), for simple reasoning machine capable of reasoning on themselves, as is the case for PA and all its consistent effective extensions. But why should we think of modal logic and the measure of true? I still haven't heard why a world should not be accessible from itself. Logic is intended to formalize and thus avoid errors in inference, but it can't replace all reasoning. Don't confuse Logic, the science, with some of its application. Then in our case, computationalism ovites us to study machines and computations, which are not logical notions, but needs non logical assumption (like x + 0 = 0, or like Kxy = x). Then we study what those machine can really believe ratioanlly and non ratioannaly about themselves, and modal logic appears there by themselves, because provable/believable, knowable, observable simply *are* modalities. Sure. And implies is a inference, Implies entails inference, by the modus ponens; and inference entails implication, by the deduction theorem (which is not always true for modal logic, so we have to be cautious). but that doesn't mean material implication is the right formalization of it. It is usually, but not in all case. But this asks for some caution which have been taken. You've assumed that Kripke's formalization IS the modality. ? It is part of Solovay theorem that the provability logic admit a Kripke semantics. That is true for a large class of modal logic. It is enough they prove K and are closed for the necessitation rule (which is a form of self-awareness). You still haven't explained why the formalization denies that a world is accessible from itself. It is a consequence of Gödel's second theorem and kripke semantic. []p - p is not a theorem, indeed []f - f is true, but not provable, so by Kripke semantics there are some world not accessible by itself. I can come back on this (but this has already been explained in detail once). Arithmetical truth is a well defined notion in (second order) mathematics. It does not ask more than what is asked in analysis. But all first order or second order *theories*, effective enough that we can check the proofs, can only scratch that arithmetical reality, which is yet intuitively well defined. It is not Given Peano axioms 2+2=4. It is because we believe since Pythagorus, and probably before, that 2+2=4, that later we came up with
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
On 22 Jun 2015, at 01:50, John Clark wrote: On Sun, Jun 21, 2015 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: If Bruno Marchal abandoned personal pronouns then Bruno Marchal would be FORCED to keep those 1-3 person view distinction straight all along the thought experience, That does not follow. So even then Bruno Marchal would not be able to keep those 1-3 person view distinctions straight? and that is precisely why Bruno Marchal refuses to do it, Where? never make a comment like that, always quote. Huh? It would be rather difficult to provide a quote of what Bruno Marchal DIDN'T say. If Bruno Marchal has ever made a post on this subject that didn't contain wall to wall personal pronouns John Clark has not see it and would appreciate somebody re-posting it. Bruno Marchal just said all of them are you therefore it doesn't take a professional logician to figure out that you will see Moscow AND Washington. Brilliantly correct, for the 3p description of the experience attributed to 3p bodies. But as Kim pointed out, it does not take long to a child to understand that this was not what the question was about. If that is not the question you wanted answered then rephrase the question so it makes logical sense and ask it; Just read the posts, or the paper, as this has already been done many times. And yet Bruno Marchal is unwilling, or much more likely unable, to ask it just one time time. John Clark thinks it's because Bruno Marchal knows that personal pronouns would have to be used to cover up all the sloppy thinking. Everyone, but you, undresrand that assuming comp I don't assume comp. The question is about the first person experience The? There is no such thing are THE first person experience! Of course there is. Bullshit. There is A first person experience but there is no such thing as THE first person experience if the person has been duplicated. You push on a button, and you open a door, and you see a city. Who opens the door? Who sees a city? Bruno Marchal just can't do without that personal pronoun addiction, it's the best place to stash sloppy thinking. Using name like Bruno Marchal does not change anything, as bruno marchal has been duplicated. But the question, contrary to what you say has been given precisely. We ask to the 1-you, about its unique 1- you that we know he will live after pushing the button and opening the door. It is unclear because *you* equivocate the 1 and 3 view only. If things don't turn out as you expected does that make you feel like you've lost your identity? You evade the elementary question That's because you refuse to state what that mysterious question is. It is in the poists and in he paper, and you are the only one having a problem, but I think you fake it. You did say it was in one of the thousands of posts you've sent to the list over the years but I haven't found it yet. If I check 5 old posts a day I might be able to find it sometime before 2020. Then you have eyesight problem. Just look at the sane04 paper. children and layman understand more easily the indeterminacy I keep telling you, if you can't clearly and logically formulate that then question get that child to help you. See sane04 or any other text I wrote. Quote and tell me where to add the precision. so Bruno Marchal is conceding that according to that definition of the pronoun you will see Moscow AND Washington. You are a bit ambiguous on the views again. I'm ambiguous?!! All I want is a non-ambiguous definition of you such that it would be logical to tell the Helsinki Man you will only see one city. It is the 1-you, about its unique future 1-you. As he get two 3-you, the 1-you is indeterminate, and that is confirmed by both reconstitution. It is quite simple (as we assume comp, and do not pretend this is true or something). Are you going to tell me you already did this in one of your old posts that I somehow missed? Yes, although it seems useless. Note that I just did it again just above. by comp the *experience*remains singular. I don't care about comp or any of your baby talk. Your activity here refutes this. the question is about the future 1p experience Then the question is gibberish because there is no such thing as THE future 1p experience. That is refuted by *all* those doing the experiences. If *all* were having a 1p experience then there is no such thing as THE 1p experience. There each, for both reconstitution, and I allude to any of them. They are all unique. . The question was asked of the man in Helsinki about what he will felt in the future . ^ ^ That question has the personal pronoun he in it so the answer depends on what he means: 1) If he means Bruno Marchal then he will experience Moscow AND
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
On 20 Jun 2015, at 01:26, John Clark wrote: On Thu, Jun 18, 2015 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Bruno Marchal got the feeling that John Clark develops an allergy to pronouns. From Bruno Marchal's long time experience, the roots of the allergy is guessed to come from the inability to keep the 1-3 person view distinction all along the thought experience If Bruno Marchal abandoned personal pronouns then Bruno Marchal would be FORCED to keep those 1-3 person view distinction straight all along the thought experience, That does not follow. And then I do keep the distinction all along, that is why I talk of the *first person* indeterminacy. and that is precisely why Bruno Marchal refuses to do it, Where? never make a comment like that, always quote. I will pass those unproven statements. Bruno Marchal's entire theory would evaporate away in a puff of ridiculousness. Personal pronouns in philosophical proofs are like dividing by zero in mathematical proofs, both are great places to hide sloppy thinking. I need John Clark still answering this: does JC agree that in step 3 protocol, John Clark doesn't remember what the step 3 protocol is Oh, it is just what you pretend to not understand, and that we talk about since many years. but is quite certain it, like everything else in the proof, is not important. + the promise of giving coffee to both reconstitutions, the probability of the experience drinking coffee is one? Both? That's sounds rather dull, why not give give it to one but not the other? For the purpose of the reasoning. I ask John Clark in Helsinki, who already agreed that John Clark will survive (with comp and the default hypotheses), and I ask John Clark's expectation of drinking soon a cup of coffee. John Clark is 100% certain that John Clark will drink that coffee and John Clark is 100% certain that John Clark will not drink that coffee. And after the experiment is carried out the outcome will prove that John Clark was not only certain but correct too. Did you change the question? Are you making fun? Both receive coffee, but one will not drink it? prejudice on American or Russian coffee? Bruno Marchal just said all of them are you therefore it doesn't take a professional logician to figure out that you will see Moscow AND Washington. Brilliantly correct, for the 3p description of the experience attributed to 3p bodies. But as Kim pointed out, it does not take long to a child to understand that this was not what the question was about. If that is not the question you wanted answered then rephrase the question so it makes logical sense and ask it; Just read the posts, or the paper, as this has already been done many times. you're a logician so you should know how to do that, Yes, and the idea that somebody have problem with that are inventions, rumors, with one exceptions which happens to be the only having non legal value. So no worry about my ability to explain this. Step 7 and 8 are way subtler. AUDA is simple modulo the study of mathematical logic/computer science. and if not then get that child you were talking about to help you. I can't give an answer, not even a incorrect answer, to a incoherent question. You did agree that a person duplicated does not die in the duplication process, so it is natural to ask her what she expect. Everyone, but you, undresrand that assuming comp and the defaut hypothesis, she must expect to be in W or in M, but not in both, and indeed, when we do the experiment and asks them the confirmation, both confirmed that was correct. This is explained in the preceding post, and you don't quote the explanation. Your comments seems opportunist and motivated only by looking like winning the argument, and not trying to understand what someone explains. The question is about the first person experience The? There is no such thing are THE first person experience! Of course there is. You push on a button, and you open a door, and you see a city. That is true for both, but the cities are different, so from the 1p view, we have a well defined unique experience. We can't predict which one, but this does not change that it is well defined, in a domain of two. expected What on earth do expectations about the future have to do with the nature of personal identity? It is the eleventh time you talk like if we add a problem or interest, here, in the notion of personal identity, which by the way will soon be shown illusory. We mention expectation, because that is part on what we have to clarify in this context. The expectation as such will appear not important, but the fact that the expectation is invariant for a sequence of changes will be crucial to get the why and how of the reversal. If things don't turn out as you expected does that make you feel
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
On 19 Jun 2015, at 23:32, meekerdb wrote: On 6/19/2015 10:57 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 19 Jun 2015, at 02:36, meekerdb wrote: On 6/18/2015 4:11 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote: meekerdb wrote: On 6/18/2015 1:10 PM, John Clark wrote: On Thu, Jun 18, 2015 at 1:51 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net This is gitting muddled. '2+2=4' is a tautology if the symbols are given their meaning by Peano's axioms or similar axiom set and rules of inference. If the symbols are interpreted as the size of specific physical sets, e.g. my example of fathers and sons, it's not a tautology. In an equation, ant equation, isn't a tautology then it isn't true. An equation is just a sentence. A tautology is a declarative sentence that's true in all possible worlds. 2+11=1 in worlds where addition is defined mod 12. That's why an equation alone can't be judged to be a tautology without the context of its interpretation. But your counterexamples are simply changing the meaning of the terms in the equation. I agree that a tautology is true in all possible worlds, because its truth depends only on the meaning of the terms involved. If the meaning is invariant, the truth value does not change. But this is not invariant under changes in meaning. 2+2=4 is a theorem in simple arithmetic, and a tautology because of the way we define the terms. In a successor definition of the integers: 1=s(0), 2=s(s(0)), 3=s(s(s(0))), 4=s(s(s(s(0, 2+2=4 can be proved as a theorem. But that relies on the above definitions of 2, 4 etc. In modular arithmetic, and with non- additive sets, these definitions do not apply. Note, however, that this interpretation of 'tautology' differs from the logical interpretation that Bruno refers to. Bruce I don't think it's different if you include the context. Then it becomes Given Peano's axioms 2+2=4. Isn't that the kind of logical tautology Bruno talks about? Within that meaning of terms it's a logical truism. I don't think it's necessary to restrict logic to just manipulating and, or, and not. Bruno introduces modalities and manipulates them as though they are true in all possible worlds. But is it logic that a world is not accessible from itself? As you say, it depends of the context. Yet, the arithmetical reality kicks backs and imposed a well defined modal logic when the modality is machine's believability(or assertability), for simple reasoning machine capable of reasoning on themselves, as is the case for PA and all its consistent effective extensions. But why should we think of modal logic and the measure of true? I still haven't heard why a world should not be accessible from itself. Logic is intended to formalize and thus avoid errors in inference, but it can't replace all reasoning. Don't confuse Logic, the science, with some of its application. Then in our case, computationalism ovites us to study machines and computations, which are not logical notions, but needs non logical assumption (like x + 0 = 0, or like Kxy = x). Then we study what those machine can really believe ratioanlly and non ratioannaly about themselves, and modal logic appears there by themselves, because provable/believable, knowable, observable simply *are* modalities. Arithmetical truth is a well defined notion in (second order) mathematics. It does not ask more than what is asked in analysis. But all first order or second order *theories*, effective enough that we can check the proofs, can only scratch that arithmetical reality, which is yet intuitively well defined. It is not Given Peano axioms 2+2=4. It is because we believe since Pythagorus, and probably before, that 2+2=4, that later we came up with axiomatic theories capturing a drop in the ocean of truth. I didn't say that's why we believe 2+2=4; I said that's what makes it a tautology, i.e. when you include a context within which is provable. What about Riemann hypothesis, or even the (apparently solved) fermat theorem? Today, we might still believe that both are provable in PA. Would this made them into tautology? Would you say that it is a tautology that even numbers have 24 times (the number of its odd divisors) clothes and odd numbers have 8 times (the set of all its divisors) clothes (with the cloth of a natural number being a representation of the sum of four squared integers)? Well, as they involved non logical axioms, the expert in the field call them theorems. If the theory is reasonable enough, theorem-hood entails truth in all interpretations of the theory, which means that the statement is true independently of its many possible meanings/interpretations/ models. But we use the term valid for that weaker sense of truth. Once a theory get the sigma_1 complete complexity threshold, it becomes *essentially* undecidable. Not only it cannot prove all the truth (notably about itself),
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
On Sun, Jun 21, 2015 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: If Bruno Marchal abandoned personal pronouns then Bruno Marchal would be FORCED to keep those 1-3 person view distinction straight all along the thought experience, That does not follow. So even then Bruno Marchal would not be able to keep those 1-3 person view distinctions straight? and that is precisely why Bruno Marchal refuses to do it, Where? never make a comment like that, always quote. Huh? It would be rather difficult to provide a quote of what Bruno Marchal DIDN'T say. If Bruno Marchal has ever made a post on this subject that didn't contain wall to wall personal pronouns John Clark has not see it and would appreciate somebody re-posting it. Bruno Marchal just said all of them are you therefore it doesn't take a professional logician to figure out that you will see Moscow AND Washington. Brilliantly correct, for the 3p description of the experience attributed to 3p bodies. But as Kim pointed out, it does not take long to a child to understand that this was not what the question was about. If that is not the question you wanted answered then rephrase the question so it makes logical sense and ask it; Just read the posts, or the paper, as this has already been done many times. And yet Bruno Marchal is unwilling, or much more likely unable, to ask it just one time time. John Clark thinks it's because Bruno Marchal knows that personal pronouns would have to be used to cover up all the sloppy thinking. Everyone, but you, undresrand that assuming comp I don't assume comp. The question is about the first person experience The? There is no such thing are THE first person experience! Of course there is. Bullshit. There is A first person experience but there is no such thing as THE first person experience if the person has been duplicated. You push on a button, and you open a door, and you see a city. Who opens the door? Who sees a city? Bruno Marchal just can't do without that personal pronoun addiction, it's the best place to stash sloppy thinking. If things don't turn out as you expected does that make you feel like you've lost your identity? You evade the elementary question That's because you refuse to state what that mysterious question is. You did say it was in one of the thousands of posts you've sent to the list over the years but I haven't found it yet. If I check 5 old posts a day I might be able to find it sometime before 2020. children and layman understand more easily the indeterminacy I keep telling you, if you can't clearly and logically formulate that then question get that child to help you. so Bruno Marchal is conceding that according to that definition of the pronoun you will see Moscow AND Washington. You are a bit ambiguous on the views again. I'm ambiguous?!! All I want is a non-ambiguous definition of you such that it would be logical to tell the Helsinki Man you will only see one city. Are you going to tell me you already did this in one of your old posts that I somehow missed? by comp the *experience*remains singular. I don't care about comp or any of your baby talk. the question is about the future 1p experience Then the question is gibberish because there is no such thing as THE future 1p experience. That is refuted by *all* those doing the experiences. If *all* were having a 1p experience then there is no such thing as THE 1p experience. . The question was asked of the man in Helsinki about what he will felt in the future. ^^ That question has the personal pronoun he in it so the answer depends on what he means: 1) If he means Bruno Marchal then he will experience Moscow AND Washington. 2) If he means the man currently experiencing Helsinki then he will experience nothing because nobody will be experiencing Helsinki in the future.. 3) If he means the man who remembers being the Helsinki man and now is experiencing Moscow then then he will see Moscow. 4) If he means the man who remembers being the Helsinki man and now is experiencing Washington then then he will see Washington.. So Bruno, which one of these does he mean? There is no such thing as THE 1-you. It is THE 1-you of each reconstituted person? The Helsinki Man is reconstituted TWICE, so there is no such thing as THE future 1-view of the Helsinki Man. You confess all the time that you don't even know what comp is Nobody knows what comp is, least of all Bruno Marchal. or step 3 is, Oh I know what step 3 is, step 3 is crap. and that you have not read anything after step 3 If step 3 of a proof is crap only a fool would read step 4. I am not a fool. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
On 6/21/2015 8:50 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 19 Jun 2015, at 23:32, meekerdb wrote: On 6/19/2015 10:57 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 19 Jun 2015, at 02:36, meekerdb wrote: On 6/18/2015 4:11 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote: meekerdb wrote: On 6/18/2015 1:10 PM, John Clark wrote: On Thu, Jun 18, 2015 at 1:51 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net This is gitting muddled. '2+2=4' is a tautology if the symbols are given their meaning by Peano's axioms or similar axiom set and rules of inference. If the symbols are interpreted as the size of specific physical sets, e.g. my example of fathers and sons, it's not a tautology. In an equation, ant equation, isn't a tautology then it isn't true. An equation is just a sentence. A tautology is a declarative sentence that's true in all possible worlds. 2+11=1 in worlds where addition is defined mod 12. That's why an equation alone can't be judged to be a tautology without the context of its interpretation. But your counterexamples are simply changing the meaning of the terms in the equation. I agree that a tautology is true in all possible worlds, because its truth depends only on the meaning of the terms involved. If the meaning is invariant, the truth value does not change. But this is not invariant under changes in meaning. 2+2=4 is a theorem in simple arithmetic, and a tautology because of the way we define the terms. In a successor definition of the integers: 1=s(0), 2=s(s(0)), 3=s(s(s(0))), 4=s(s(s(s(0, 2+2=4 can be proved as a theorem. But that relies on the above definitions of 2, 4 etc. In modular arithmetic, and with non-additive sets, these definitions do not apply. Note, however, that this interpretation of 'tautology' differs from the logical interpretation that Bruno refers to. Bruce I don't think it's different if you include the context. Then it becomes Given Peano's axioms 2+2=4. Isn't that the kind of logical tautology Bruno talks about? Within that meaning of terms it's a logical truism. I don't think it's necessary to restrict logic to just manipulating and, or, and not. Bruno introduces modalities and manipulates them as though they are true in all possible worlds. But is it logic that a world is not accessible from itself? As you say, it depends of the context. Yet, the arithmetical reality kicks backs and imposed a well defined modal logic when the modality is machine's believability(or assertability), for simple reasoning machine capable of reasoning on themselves, as is the case for PA and all its consistent effective extensions. But why should we think of modal logic and the measure of true? I still haven't heard why a world should not be accessible from itself. Logic is intended to formalize and thus avoid errors in inference, but it can't replace all reasoning. Don't confuse Logic, the science, with some of its application. Then in our case, computationalism ovites us to study machines and computations, which are not logical notions, but needs non logical assumption (like x + 0 = 0, or like Kxy = x). Then we study what those machine can really believe ratioanlly and non ratioannaly about themselves, and modal logic appears there by themselves, because provable/believable, knowable, observable simply *are* modalities. Sure. And implies is a inference, but that doesn't mean material implication is the right formalization of it. You've assumed that Kripke's formalization IS the modality. You still haven't explained why the formalization denies that a world is accessible from itself. Arithmetical truth is a well defined notion in (second order) mathematics. It does not ask more than what is asked in analysis. But all first order or second order *theories*, effective enough that we can check the proofs, can only scratch that arithmetical reality, which is yet intuitively well defined. It is not Given Peano axioms 2+2=4. It is because we believe since Pythagorus, and probably before, that 2+2=4, that later we came up with axiomatic theories capturing a drop in the ocean of truth. I didn't say that's why we believe 2+2=4; I said that's what makes it a tautology, i.e. when you include a context within which is provable. What about Riemann hypothesis, or even the (apparently solved) fermat theorem? Today, we might still believe that both are provable in PA. Would this made them into tautology? Would you say that it is a tautology that even numbers have 24 times (the number of its odd divisors) clothes and odd numbers have 8 times (the set of all its divisors) clothes (with the cloth of a natural number being a representation of the sum of four squared integers)? Well, as they involved non logical axioms, the expert in the field call them theorems. Every sentence of the form axioms imply theorem using rules of inference is a tautology. If the theory is reasonable enough, theorem-hood entails truth in all
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
On Thu, Jun 18, 2015 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Bruno Marchal got the feeling that John Clark develops an allergy to pronouns. From Bruno Marchal's long time experience, the roots of the allergy is guessed to come from the inability to keep the 1-3 person view distinction all along the thought experience If Bruno Marchal abandoned personal pronouns then Bruno Marchal would be FORCED to keep those 1-3 person view distinction straight all along the thought experience, and that is precisely why Bruno Marchal refuses to do it, Bruno Marchal's entire theory would evaporate away in a puff of ridiculousness. Personal pronouns in philosophical proofs are like dividing by zero in mathematical proofs, both are great places to hide sloppy thinking. I need John Clark still answering this: does JC agree that in step 3 protocol, John Clark doesn't remember what the step 3 protocol is but is quite certain it, like everything else in the proof, is not important. + the promise of giving coffee to both reconstitutions, the probability of the experience drinking coffee is one? Both? That's sounds rather dull, why not give give it to one but not the other? I ask John Clark in Helsinki, who already agreed that John Clark will survive (with comp and the default hypotheses), and I ask John Clark's expectation of drinking soon a cup of coffee. John Clark is 100% certain that John Clark will drink that coffee and John Clark is 100% certain that John Clark will not drink that coffee. And after the experiment is carried out the outcome will prove that John Clark was not only certain but correct too. Bruno Marchal just said all of them are you therefore it doesn't take a professional logician to figure out that you will see Moscow AND Washington. Brilliantly correct, for the 3p description of the experience attributed to 3p bodies. But as Kim pointed out, it does not take long to a child to understand that this was not what the question was about. If that is not the question you wanted answered then rephrase the question so it makes logical sense and ask it; you're a logician so you should know how to do that, and if not then get that child you were talking about to help you. I can't give an answer, not even a incorrect answer, to a incoherent question. The question is about the first person experience The? There is no such thing are THE first person experience! expected What on earth do expectations about the future have to do with the nature of personal identity? If things don't turn out as you expected does that make you feel like you've lost your identity? The question was what city will you see ?, to answer that question it is necessary to know what the word you We need only to agree on the approximate meaning which is enough to pursue the reasoning. And we have agreed to define the 3p you by your body ^^^ Hmm.. you has the body owned by you and it's true I do agree that You is you regardless of the definition of you. And this is a fine example of a tautology that like all tautologies is true but unlike some this one is silly and useless too. If Bruno Marchal dislikes that conclusion and wants to say you will see only one city then it would be necessary to change the definition of you from the guy who remembers being in Helsinki to something else. On the contrary, we can just keep that definition. Computationalism predicts that both will remember to be the guy in Helsinki Good, so Bruno Marchal is conceding that according to that definition of the pronoun you will see Moscow AND Washington. So both who have the memory of Helsinki understand what I meant by you (John Clark) will be in one city. What the hell?! If you has been duplicated then it would be IMPOSSIBLE for you to see only one city. Despite what your third grade teacher may have said if matter duplicating machines exist then the the word you is plural not singular. the question is about the future 1p experience Then the question is gibberish because there is no such thing as THE future 1p experience. and by comp, we know that I know nothing from comp. as each of them cannot feel to see both W and M simultaneously, So what? Suzzy had 2 apples and gave one to Tommy and one to Johnny, so who received an apple from Suzzy? Hmm... let me think. Tommy and Johnny? But there was 2 apples and yet both Tommy and Johnny agree they have only one apple! I believe this thought experiment is just as paradoxical as your thought experiment. Not very. That's enough to understand that in helsinki, knowing that you will survive and ^^^ Yep, personal pronouns can cover up a huge amount of sloppy thinking. Comp gives a precise answer That's cute, but to tell the truth I don't care what comp gives because I'm not interested in your baby-talk. In AUDA [...] And I''m not interested in your alphabet soup
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
On 6/19/2015 10:57 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 19 Jun 2015, at 02:36, meekerdb wrote: On 6/18/2015 4:11 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote: meekerdb wrote: On 6/18/2015 1:10 PM, John Clark wrote: On Thu, Jun 18, 2015 at 1:51 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net This is gitting muddled. '2+2=4' is a tautology if the symbols are given their meaning by Peano's axioms or similar axiom set and rules of inference. If the symbols are interpreted as the size of specific physical sets, e.g. my example of fathers and sons, it's not a tautology. In an equation, ant equation, isn't a tautology then it isn't true. An equation is just a sentence. A tautology is a declarative sentence that's true in all possible worlds. 2+11=1 in worlds where addition is defined mod 12. That's why an equation alone can't be judged to be a tautology without the context of its interpretation. But your counterexamples are simply changing the meaning of the terms in the equation. I agree that a tautology is true in all possible worlds, because its truth depends only on the meaning of the terms involved. If the meaning is invariant, the truth value does not change. But this is not invariant under changes in meaning. 2+2=4 is a theorem in simple arithmetic, and a tautology because of the way we define the terms. In a successor definition of the integers: 1=s(0), 2=s(s(0)), 3=s(s(s(0))), 4=s(s(s(s(0, 2+2=4 can be proved as a theorem. But that relies on the above definitions of 2, 4 etc. In modular arithmetic, and with non-additive sets, these definitions do not apply. Note, however, that this interpretation of 'tautology' differs from the logical interpretation that Bruno refers to. Bruce I don't think it's different if you include the context. Then it becomes Given Peano's axioms 2+2=4. Isn't that the kind of logical tautology Bruno talks about? Within that meaning of terms it's a logical truism. I don't think it's necessary to restrict logic to just manipulating and, or, and not. Bruno introduces modalities and manipulates them as though they are true in all possible worlds. But is it logic that a world is not accessible from itself? As you say, it depends of the context. Yet, the arithmetical reality kicks backs and imposed a well defined modal logic when the modality is machine's believability(or assertability), for simple reasoning machine capable of reasoning on themselves, as is the case for PA and all its consistent effective extensions. But why should we think of modal logic and the measure of true? I still haven't heard why a world should not be accessible from itself. Logic is intended to formalize and thus avoid errors in inference, but it can't replace all reasoning. Arithmetical truth is a well defined notion in (second order) mathematics. It does not ask more than what is asked in analysis. But all first order or second order *theories*, effective enough that we can check the proofs, can only scratch that arithmetical reality, which is yet intuitively well defined. It is not Given Peano axioms 2+2=4. It is because we believe since Pythagorus, and probably before, that 2+2=4, that later we came up with axiomatic theories capturing a drop in the ocean of truth. I didn't say that's why we believe 2+2=4; I said that's what makes it a tautology, i.e. when you include a context within which is provable. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
On 18 Jun 2015, at 19:07, John Clark wrote: Before responding to Bruno Marchal's post John Clark would like to say that it's amazing how much sloppy thinking and elementary logical errors can be swept under the rug by the simplest shortest words like you and I; Promising introduction. I am not quite sure why suddenly you avoid the pronouns. You might develop a pronophobia. therefore John Clark requests that when Bruno Marchal rebuts this post Bruno Marchal does not use these personal pronouns. Bruno Marchal got the feeling that John Clark develops an allergy to pronouns. From Bruno Marchal's long time experience, the roots of the allergy is guessed to come from the inability to keep the 1-3 person view distinction all along the thought experience. Let us see. I mean let Bruno Marchal and any other possible reader of this list see. John Clark understands that this can lead to prose that sounds a bit awkward because the English language was never designed for this sort of thing, but making the effort can really clarify ones thinking. And no cheating by talking about THE future 1p as if it were singular and not plural. I need John Clark still answering this: does JC agree that in step 3 protocol, + the promise of giving coffee to both reconstitutions, the probability of the experience drinking coffee is one? I gave the criteria of confirmation, which are the statements written in the personal diaries, which are duplicated in the 3p view. I ask John Clark in Helsinki, who already agreed that John Clark will survive (with comp and the default hypotheses), and I ask John Clark's expectation of drinking soon a cup of coffee. On Thu, Jun 18, 2015 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: We're talking about multiple (probably infinite) copying and branching, so who the hell is you? All of them are you, I agree, and so the conclusion is logically inescapable, you will see Moscow AND Washington. In the 3-1 view. In any view! The question was what city will you see ?, to answer that question it is necessary to know what the word you We need only to agree on the approximate meaning which is enough to pursue the reasoning. And we have agreed to define the 3p you by your body, or its 3p description/implementation, and the 1p view by the guy who got the memories corresponding on its accessible and memorized sequence of experience, itself approximated, for the purpose of this reasoning, to the content of the diary, that the tele-travelers take with him in the reading-destruction boxes. means and Bruno Marchal just said all of them are you therefore it doesn't take a professional logician to figure out that you will see Moscow AND Washington. Brilliantly correct, for the 3p description of the experience attributed to 3p bodies. But as Kim pointed out, it does not take long to a child to understand that this was not what the question was about. The question is about the first person experience expected as a being doing some experience and surviving it. In that case, BOTH will agree that, indeed, although in the 3-1 view they have been reconstitituted in both city, they do feel to be in only one city. In the diary, the reconstituters wrote W (resp. M), not W M which is the 3_1 view, and not the 1-view. As I said, you sto the thought experience (which asks you to describes the 1-view) in the middle of the experience. But computationalism provides the simplest explanation of the difference between the 1p discourse, and its undeterminacies, and the 3p determinist description. If Bruno Marchal dislikes that conclusion and wants to say you will see only one city then it would be necessary to change the definition of you from the guy who remembers being in Helsinki to something else. On the contrary, we can just keep that definition. Computationalism predicts that both will remember to be the guy in Helsinki and both will agree to be in front of a unique city. So both who have the memory of Helsinki understand what I meant by you (John Clark) will be in one city. Both John Clark (the guy who remember Helsinki) agree that they are in front of one city. That prediction on the 1p experience if correct, for both of them. John Clark can't imagine what that new definition of you that would be but is willing to listen. So we did not need to change it. We need only to listen to all John Clarks relevant for the problem. But, of course, it is obvious that after the duplication, each reconstitution will feel to be only one of the reconstitutions That is irrelevant to answering the question what city will you see? . Yes, it is, given that the question is about the future 1p experience, and by comp, we know that from the 1p experience view the person does not feel being splitted at all. She feels to be a particular person with an history (WWMWMMMWW...M)
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
On 18 Jun 2015, at 22:45, John Mikes wrote: Bruno wrote: Do you assume a physical reality, or are you agnostic on this question? I do believe in a natural or physical reality, but I am agnostic if it needs to be assume and thus involved primitive element, or if what we take as a physical universe is a (collective) experience of numbers that we can derive from arithmetic (as it seems to be necessarily the case once we bet that brains are Turing emulable (I am agnostic on this, but not on the fact that if the brain is Turing emulable then the physical is an emergent pattern in the mind of the (relative) numbers). Hard to follow the summersaults of your concepts. I was waiting for some 'mathematical' reality as well. To LIVE in this universe I have to accept some scientific conclusions of the little info we so far absorbed (observed?) from a wider infinite Nature. That does not mean I ASSUME. I may use it. Turing - as I think - was a human person so T-emulable is human conclusion. It is a human theory. That does not make it necessarily wrong. That's why we can be agnostic on this, and try to derive the consequence and compare with the rest of our beliefs. Again you seem to have circumwent the 'physical experience that we can derive from arithmetic vs. arithmetic, for which we learned a lot from Nature. I don't think arithmetic just jumped out from the human mind as Pallas Athene from the head of Zeuss. In full armor. Integers, Primes or else. We know a nice history how zero was invented and so on after the Romans with their decimal(pentagonal?) system. Invented or discovered? I don't think human can invent zero. They can learn it from nature, but I doubt that nature would even exist without the number zero making some sense. Our agnosticism may be different (I stress the so far unknown and maybe even unknowable infinite complexity of the Entirety as potentially influencing our (known/knowable) world as the basis of MY agnosticism. Beyond that I try to comply with the World as we humans may know it by now). We never know as such, except opur consciousness, which is not on the public domain. But it happens that some belief can be true. Today, we accumalate evidence that nature is not fundamentally real, and that the nature that we see arise from dreams statistics. That might be false, or true, but that is enough to remain agnostic on naturalism and physicalism. The least I try to do is to illustrate that we don't know what is the case. Bruno JM On Thu, Jun 18, 2015 at 3:59 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 17 Jun 2015, at 22:11, John Mikes wrote: Bruno: to describe what OTHERS did does not mean (in my vocabulary) that I KNOW (agree?) the same domain as it was handled. I 'know' (or may know) the efforts to derive science by human scientists. Does NATURE have regularities indeed? or our scientific observation assigns returning facets and calls them regularities as long as they are not contradicted? OK, maybe I should use EVENTS instead of regularities. And please do not make me a Straw-Man by repeating what I wrote. Your sentence: Humans *might have learned a lot in mathematics by looking at nature, but this does not prove that nature precedes logically mathematics. I have not included logically and may write: Q.e.D. Do you assume a physical reality, or are you agnostic on this question? I do believe in a natural or physical reality, but I am agnostic if it needs to be assume and thus involved primitive element, or if what we take as a physical universe is a (collective) experience of numbers that we can derive from arithmetic (as it seems to be necessarily the case once we bet that brains are Turing emulable (I am agnostic on this, but not on the fact that if the brain is Turing emulable then the physical is an emergent pattern in the mind of the (relative) numbers). Bruno On Wed, Jun 17, 2015 at 10:45 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 15 Jun 2015, at 21:53, John Mikes wrote: Brent concluded ingeniously: They have a theory for why THIS might be so no matter what THIS is. You just have to find the right mathematics to describe it and miracle of miracles the mathematics is obeyed! Brent May I step a bit further: by careful observations humanity (or some 'higher' cooperating intellect maybe?) derived the connotions we call 'theories', math, even axioms to make them fit. Then we fall on our backside by admiration that they fit. Don't forget the historic buildup of our 'science' etc, stepwise, as we increased the observational treasure-chest of Nature. So Nature does not obey mathematics, mathematics has been derived in ways to follow the observed regularities of Nature. I thought that you were agnostic, but here you talk like if you *knew* something, which I don't. Even assuming Nature, the question remains: why does
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
On Thu, Jun 18, 2015 at 4:45 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: An equation is just a sentence. Yes, and in the sentence 2+2=4 let's list what the symbols mean: The symbol 2 means the successor of 1. The symbol + means and The symbol = means is. The symbol 4 means the successor of 3 A tautology is a declarative sentence that's true in all possible worlds. All tautologies are true but not all are useful. Tautologies say that something is something else expressed in a different way; if the difference in expression is very small or zero then the tautology is silly and useless, but if the difference in expression is enormous then the tautology can be profound and very useful indeed in advancing our understanding of how the world works. 2+11=1 in worlds where addition is defined mod 12. That's why an equation alone can't be judged to be a tautology without the context of its interpretation. That's still a tautology, all you've done is change the meaning of the + symbol. Tautologies have a bad reputation and I'm not sure why, yes some of them are trivial but others can be revolutionary allowing us to look at things in a different way, but silly or profound there is one virtue all tautologies have, they're all true. John K Clark Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
On 19 Jun 2015, at 02:36, meekerdb wrote: On 6/18/2015 4:11 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote: meekerdb wrote: On 6/18/2015 1:10 PM, John Clark wrote: On Thu, Jun 18, 2015 at 1:51 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net This is gitting muddled. '2+2=4' is a tautology if the symbols are given their meaning by Peano's axioms or similar axiom set and rules of inference. If the symbols are interpreted as the size of specific physical sets, e.g. my example of fathers and sons, it's not a tautology. In an equation, ant equation, isn't a tautology then it isn't true. An equation is just a sentence. A tautology is a declarative sentence that's true in all possible worlds. 2+11=1 in worlds where addition is defined mod 12. That's why an equation alone can't be judged to be a tautology without the context of its interpretation. But your counterexamples are simply changing the meaning of the terms in the equation. I agree that a tautology is true in all possible worlds, because its truth depends only on the meaning of the terms involved. If the meaning is invariant, the truth value does not change. But this is not invariant under changes in meaning. 2+2=4 is a theorem in simple arithmetic, and a tautology because of the way we define the terms. In a successor definition of the integers: 1=s(0), 2=s(s(0)), 3=s(s(s(0))), 4=s(s(s(s(0, 2+2=4 can be proved as a theorem. But that relies on the above definitions of 2, 4 etc. In modular arithmetic, and with non- additive sets, these definitions do not apply. Note, however, that this interpretation of 'tautology' differs from the logical interpretation that Bruno refers to. Bruce I don't think it's different if you include the context. Then it becomes Given Peano's axioms 2+2=4. Isn't that the kind of logical tautology Bruno talks about? Within that meaning of terms it's a logical truism. I don't think it's necessary to restrict logic to just manipulating and, or, and not. Bruno introduces modalities and manipulates them as though they are true in all possible worlds. But is it logic that a world is not accessible from itself? As you say, it depends of the context. Yet, the arithmetical reality kicks backs and imposed a well defined modal logic when the modality is machine's believability(or assertability), for simple reasoning machine capable of reasoning on themselves, as is the case for PA and all its consistent effective extensions. Arithmetical truth is a well defined notion in (second order) mathematics. It does not ask more than what is asked in analysis. But all first order or second order *theories*, effective enough that we can check the proofs, can only scratch that arithmetical reality, which is yet intuitively well defined. It is not Given Peano axioms 2+2=4. It is because we believe since Pythagorus, and probably before, that 2+2=4, that later we came up with axiomatic theories capturing a drop in the ocean of truth. Peano arithmetic here is only an example of sound and correct Löbian machine. The truth of 2+2=4 does not depend of the truth of if this or that machine believes it or not. Yet with comp, the proposition the machine x believes y becomes theorem of sigma_1 complete machine. It is an ideal case, amenable, by comp, to mathematics. That ideal case leads to an already very subtle theology, with some canonical struggle between the different views the self can take. The machine's soul is bipolar at the start, well octopolar. Although PA only scratches the arithmetical reality, PA is already quite clever and self-aware about its own abilities. Bruno Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
On Wed, Jun 17, 2015 Bruce Kellett bhkell...@optusnet.com.au wrote: '2+2=4' is a tautology by virtue of the meanings of the terms involved. Yes, and E=MC^2 is a tautology too as is every correct mathematical equation. For this reason 2+2=5 is NOT a tautology. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
Before responding to Bruno Marchal's post John Clark would like to say that it's amazing how much sloppy thinking and elementary logical errors can be swept under the rug by the simplest shortest words like you and I; therefore John Clark requests that when Bruno Marchal rebuts this post Bruno Marchal does not use these personal pronouns. John Clark understands that this can lead to prose that sounds a bit awkward because the English language was never designed for this sort of thing, but making the effort can really clarify ones thinking. And no cheating by talking about THE future 1p as if it were singular and not plural. On Thu, Jun 18, 2015 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: We're talking about multiple (probably infinite) copying and branching, so who the hell is you? All of them are you, I agree, and so the conclusion is logically inescapable, you will see Moscow AND Washington. In the 3-1 view. In any view! The question was what city will you see ?, to answer that question it is necessary to know what the word you means and Bruno Marchal just said all of them are you therefore it doesn't take a professional logician to figure out that you will see Moscow AND Washington. If Bruno Marchal dislikes that conclusion and wants to say you will see only one city then it would be necessary to change the definition of you from the guy who remembers being in Helsinki to something else. John Clark can't imagine what that new definition of you that would be but is willing to listen. But, of course, it is obvious that after the duplication, each reconstitution will feel to be only one of the reconstitutions That is irrelevant to answering the question what city will you see? . as each of them cannot feel to see both W and M simultaneously, So what? Suzzy had 2 apples and gave one to Tommy and one to Johnny, so who received an apple from Suzzy? Would you really expect that only one boy's name would be the correct answer to that question? After the duplication there are two; logically incompatible, 1p perspectives. How on earth is that logically incompatible?? In a world with matter duplicating machines the word you is PLURAL so it would be expected that there would be more than one 1p perspective. If there was only one 1p perspective THEN there would have been a logical incompatibility. I see only W and I see only M. Yes, and that proves that you saw W AND M. If in Helsinki you predict I will see both W and M, BOTH reconstituted persons will have to write I was wrong: I definitely see only one city. If the word I is just an abbreviation for Bruno Marchal in the above then the replacement could be made and there would be no change to the meaning of the sentence, but instead it takes on an entirely different flavor and there would be absolutely no reason for either the Moscow Man or the Washington Man to say Bruno Marchal was wrong or Bruno Marchal sees only one city. Thus the word I must be carrying a lot of hidden assumptions and excess baggage that the word Bruno Marchal does not. As John Clark said, in philosophy the shortest words can cause the most confusion because they're so common they're used automatically without thinking. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
On 6/18/2015 4:11 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote: meekerdb wrote: On 6/18/2015 1:10 PM, John Clark wrote: On Thu, Jun 18, 2015 at 1:51 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net This is gitting muddled. '2+2=4' is a tautology if the symbols are given their meaning by Peano's axioms or similar axiom set and rules of inference. If the symbols are interpreted as the size of specific physical sets, e.g. my example of fathers and sons, it's not a tautology. In an equation, ant equation, isn't a tautology then it isn't true. An equation is just a sentence. A tautology is a declarative sentence that's true in all possible worlds. 2+11=1 in worlds where addition is defined mod 12. That's why an equation alone can't be judged to be a tautology without the context of its interpretation. But your counterexamples are simply changing the meaning of the terms in the equation. I agree that a tautology is true in all possible worlds, because its truth depends only on the meaning of the terms involved. If the meaning is invariant, the truth value does not change. But this is not invariant under changes in meaning. 2+2=4 is a theorem in simple arithmetic, and a tautology because of the way we define the terms. In a successor definition of the integers: 1=s(0), 2=s(s(0)), 3=s(s(s(0))), 4=s(s(s(s(0, 2+2=4 can be proved as a theorem. But that relies on the above definitions of 2, 4 etc. In modular arithmetic, and with non-additive sets, these definitions do not apply. Note, however, that this interpretation of 'tautology' differs from the logical interpretation that Bruno refers to. Bruce I don't think it's different if you include the context. Then it becomes Given Peano's axioms 2+2=4. Isn't that the kind of logical tautology Bruno talks about? Within that meaning of terms it's a logical truism. I don't think it's necessary to restrict logic to just manipulating and, or, and not. Bruno introduces modalities and manipulates them as though they are true in all possible worlds. But is it logic that a world is not accessible from itself? Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
On 6/18/2015 10:07 AM, John Clark wrote: If in Helsinki you predict I will see both W and M, BOTH reconstituted persons will have to write I was wrong: I definitely see only one city. If the word I is just an abbreviation for Bruno Marchal in the above then the replacement could be made and there would be no change to the meaning of the sentence, but instead it takes on an entirely different flavor and there would be absolutely no reason for either the Moscow Man or the Washington Man to say Bruno Marchal was wrong or Bruno Marchal sees only one city. Thus the word I must be carrying a lot of hidden assumptions and excess baggage that the word Bruno Marchal does not. It does. I is indicial and in a world with duplicated proper nouns is not equivalent to a proper noun. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
On 6/18/2015 8:35 AM, John Clark wrote: On Wed, Jun 17, 2015 Bruce Kellett bhkell...@optusnet.com.au mailto:bhkell...@optusnet.com.au wrote: '2+2=4' is a tautology by virtue of the meanings of the terms involved. Yes, and E=MC^2 is a tautology too as is every correct mathematical equation. For this reason 2+2=5 is NOT a tautology. This is gitting muddled. '2+2=4' is a tautology if the symbols are given their meaning by Peano's axioms or similar axiom set and rules of inference. If the symbols are interpreted as the size of specific physical sets, e.g. my example of fathers and sons, it's not a tautology. Similarly, in it's usual interpretation as referring to measurable physical quantities, E=mc^2 is not a tautology. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
On Thu, Jun 18, 2015 at 1:51 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: This is gitting muddled. '2+2=4' is a tautology if the symbols are given their meaning by Peano's axioms or similar axiom set and rules of inference. If the symbols are interpreted as the size of specific physical sets, e.g. my example of fathers and sons, it's not a tautology. In an equation, ant equation, isn't a tautology then it isn't true. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
On 6/18/2015 1:10 PM, John Clark wrote: On Thu, Jun 18, 2015 at 1:51 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: This is gitting muddled. '2+2=4' is a tautology if the symbols are given their meaning by Peano's axioms or similar axiom set and rules of inference. If the symbols are interpreted as the size of specific physical sets, e.g. my example of fathers and sons, it's not a tautology. In an equation, ant equation, isn't a tautology then it isn't true. An equation is just a sentence. A tautology is a declarative sentence that's true in all possible worlds. 2+11=1 in worlds where addition is defined mod 12. That's why an equation alone can't be judged to be a tautology without the context of its interpretation. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
Bruno wrote: Do you assume a physical reality, or are you agnostic on this question? I do believe in a natural or physical reality, but I am agnostic if it needs to be assume and thus involved primitive element, or if what we take as a physical universe is a (collective) experience of numbers that we can derive from arithmetic (as it seems to be necessarily the case once we bet that brains are Turing emulable (I am agnostic on this, but not on the fact that if the brain is Turing emulable then the physical is an emergent pattern in the mind of the (relative) numbers). Hard to follow the summersaults of your concepts. I was waiting for some 'mathematical' reality as well. To LIVE in this universe I have to accept some scientific conclusions of the little info we so far absorbed (observed?) from a wider infinite Nature. That does not mean I ASSUME. I may use it. Turing - as I think - was a human person so T-emulable is human conclusion. Again you seem to have circumwent the 'physical experience that we can derive from arithmetic vs. arithmetic, for which we learned a lot from Nature. I don't think arithmetic just jumped out from the human mind as Pallas Athene from the head of Zeuss. In full armor. Integers, Primes or else. We know a nice history how zero was invented and so on after the Romans with their decimal(pentagonal?) system. Our agnosticism may be different (I stress the so far unknown and maybe even unknowable infinite complexity of the Entirety as potentially influencing our (known/knowable) world as the basis of MY agnosticism. Beyond that I try to comply with the World as we humans may know it by now). JM On Thu, Jun 18, 2015 at 3:59 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 17 Jun 2015, at 22:11, John Mikes wrote: Bruno: to describe what OTHERS did does not mean (in my vocabulary) that I KNOW (agree?) the same domain as it was handled. I 'know' (or may know) the efforts to derive science by human scientists. Does NATURE have regularities indeed? or our scientific observation assigns returning facets and calls them regularities as long as they are not contradicted? OK, maybe I should use EVENTS instead of regularities. And please do not make me a Straw-Man by repeating what I wrote. Your sentence: *Humans *might have learned a lot in mathematics by looking at nature, but this does not prove that nature precedes logically mathematics.* I have not included logically and may write: Q.e.D. Do you assume a physical reality, or are you agnostic on this question? I do believe in a natural or physical reality, but I am agnostic if it needs to be assume and thus involved primitive element, or if what we take as a physical universe is a (collective) experience of numbers that we can derive from arithmetic (as it seems to be necessarily the case once we bet that brains are Turing emulable (I am agnostic on this, but not on the fact that if the brain is Turing emulable then the physical is an emergent pattern in the mind of the (relative) numbers). Bruno On Wed, Jun 17, 2015 at 10:45 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 15 Jun 2015, at 21:53, John Mikes wrote: Brent concluded ingeniously: *They have a theory for why THIS might be so no matter what THIS is. You just have to find the right mathematics to describe it and miracle of miracles the mathematics is obeyed!Brent* May I step a bit further: by careful observations humanity (or some 'higher' cooperating intellect maybe?) derived the connotions we call 'theories', math, even axioms to make them fit. Then we fall on our backside by admiration that they fit. Don't forget the historic buildup of our 'science' etc, stepwise, as we increased the observational treasure-chest of Nature. So Nature does not obey mathematics, mathematics has been derived in ways to follow the observed regularities of Nature. I thought that you were agnostic, but here you talk like if you *knew* something, which I don't. Even assuming Nature, the question remains: why does it have regularities? Why does it look like it obeys mathematics? To say we derive mathematics from nature does not really address the question. *Humans *might have learned a lot in mathematics by looking at nature, but this does not prove that nature precedes logically mathematics. I have given argument that the contrary might have happened: nature might belong to the imagination of the Löbian machines or numbers. We know that such imagination is lawful, and obeys strict constraints. Bruno JM On Mon, Jun 15, 2015 at 2:45 AM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 6/14/2015 2:49 PM, LizR wrote: On 15 June 2015 at 08:22, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: I'm not saying it's ineffective. I'm saying it's not a mystery why it's effective. Because the universe appears to operate on principles that map very well onto some parts of maths, I think that's an illusion of selective attention.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
meekerdb wrote: On 6/18/2015 1:10 PM, John Clark wrote: On Thu, Jun 18, 2015 at 1:51 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net This is gitting muddled. '2+2=4' is a tautology if the symbols are given their meaning by Peano's axioms or similar axiom set and rules of inference. If the symbols are interpreted as the size of specific physical sets, e.g. my example of fathers and sons, it's not a tautology. In an equation, ant equation, isn't a tautology then it isn't true. An equation is just a sentence. A tautology is a declarative sentence that's true in all possible worlds. 2+11=1 in worlds where addition is defined mod 12. That's why an equation alone can't be judged to be a tautology without the context of its interpretation. But your counterexamples are simply changing the meaning of the terms in the equation. I agree that a tautology is true in all possible worlds, because its truth depends only on the meaning of the terms involved. If the meaning is invariant, the truth value does not change. But this is not invariant under changes in meaning. 2+2=4 is a theorem in simple arithmetic, and a tautology because of the way we define the terms. In a successor definition of the integers: 1=s(0), 2=s(s(0)), 3=s(s(s(0))), 4=s(s(s(s(0, 2+2=4 can be proved as a theorem. But that relies on the above definitions of 2, 4 etc. In modular arithmetic, and with non-additive sets, these definitions do not apply. Note, however, that this interpretation of 'tautology' differs from the logical interpretation that Bruno refers to. Bruce -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
On 17 Jun 2015, at 22:11, John Mikes wrote: Bruno: to describe what OTHERS did does not mean (in my vocabulary) that I KNOW (agree?) the same domain as it was handled. I 'know' (or may know) the efforts to derive science by human scientists. Does NATURE have regularities indeed? or our scientific observation assigns returning facets and calls them regularities as long as they are not contradicted? OK, maybe I should use EVENTS instead of regularities. And please do not make me a Straw-Man by repeating what I wrote. Your sentence: Humans *might have learned a lot in mathematics by looking at nature, but this does not prove that nature precedes logically mathematics. I have not included logically and may write: Q.e.D. Do you assume a physical reality, or are you agnostic on this question? I do believe in a natural or physical reality, but I am agnostic if it needs to be assume and thus involved primitive element, or if what we take as a physical universe is a (collective) experience of numbers that we can derive from arithmetic (as it seems to be necessarily the case once we bet that brains are Turing emulable (I am agnostic on this, but not on the fact that if the brain is Turing emulable then the physical is an emergent pattern in the mind of the (relative) numbers). Bruno On Wed, Jun 17, 2015 at 10:45 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 15 Jun 2015, at 21:53, John Mikes wrote: Brent concluded ingeniously: They have a theory for why THIS might be so no matter what THIS is. You just have to find the right mathematics to describe it and miracle of miracles the mathematics is obeyed! Brent May I step a bit further: by careful observations humanity (or some 'higher' cooperating intellect maybe?) derived the connotions we call 'theories', math, even axioms to make them fit. Then we fall on our backside by admiration that they fit. Don't forget the historic buildup of our 'science' etc, stepwise, as we increased the observational treasure-chest of Nature. So Nature does not obey mathematics, mathematics has been derived in ways to follow the observed regularities of Nature. I thought that you were agnostic, but here you talk like if you *knew* something, which I don't. Even assuming Nature, the question remains: why does it have regularities? Why does it look like it obeys mathematics? To say we derive mathematics from nature does not really address the question. *Humans *might have learned a lot in mathematics by looking at nature, but this does not prove that nature precedes logically mathematics. I have given argument that the contrary might have happened: nature might belong to the imagination of the Löbian machines or numbers. We know that such imagination is lawful, and obeys strict constraints. Bruno JM On Mon, Jun 15, 2015 at 2:45 AM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 6/14/2015 2:49 PM, LizR wrote: On 15 June 2015 at 08:22, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: I'm not saying it's ineffective. I'm saying it's not a mystery why it's effective. Because the universe appears to operate on principles that map very well onto some parts of maths, I think that's an illusion of selective attention. Remember how Kepler thought the size of the planetary orbits were determined by nesting the five Platonic solids. An impressive example of the effective of mathematics - except it turned out there weren't just five planets. Now we regard the orbits as historical accidents and predicted by any mathematics. Instead we point to fact that they obey Newton's law of universal gravitation to great accuracy. Another impressive example of the effectiveness of mathematics...except it's slight wrong and Einstein's spacetime model works better. and may even map exactly (we have no reason to think not - every improvement in measurement so far indicates this, Except when they don't. but there will always of course be room for doubt - just room that's been getting steadily smaller over the last few centuries). But you haven't said why it does so. I may not agree with Bruno or Max Tegmark, but at least they have a theory for why this They have a theory for why THIS might be so no matter what THIS is. You just have to find the right mathematics to describe it and miracle of miracles the mathematics is obeyed! Brent might be so, and I haven't seen any definitive demonstration of mistakes in their theories as yet (there are lots of suggestions that may become definitive with more work, of course). So far, your answer to the question of the unreasonable effectiveness of maths is basically It works that way because it works that way, I can't explain it - but trust me, it isn't worth explaining. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
On 17 Jun 2015, at 18:26, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On Thursday, June 18, 2015, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Jun 16, 2015 Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: You are the person reading this sentence OK, but then it would be meaningless to talk about what you will do tomorrow because you will not be reading that sentence tomorrow. So if Stathis Papaioannou wants to talk about the future Stathis Papaioannou if going to need a better definition of continuity; John Clark thinks a good one would be the person (or people) who remember reading that sentence right then, and in Many Worlds that would be lots and lots of people. There is an illusion that I am a unique individual persisting through time, How would things be different if it were not an illusion? It's silly to try to explain consciousness by saying it's another subjective thing like illusion unless it can be objectively explained how that illusion is generated; I think the key to it is memory, if Stathis Papaioannou of today remembers being Stathis Papaioannou yesterday then Stathis Papaioannou of today gives Stathis Papaioannou yesterday the title I. even if I know that there will be multiple versions of me in future. I hope that I will become one of the versions with good experiences rather than bad experiences. But that implies that only one of those versions deserves the title of I, and that is untrue. And that's why it's an illusion. Yes, that's exactly the point. Bruno -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
On 18 Jun 2015, at 01:39, Bruce Kellett wrote: Bruno Marchal wrote: On 13 Jun 2015, at 03:29, Bruce Kellett wrote: LizR wrote: On 12 June 2015 at 17:40, Bruce Kellett bhkell...@optusnet.com.au mailto:bhkell...@optusnet.com.au Arithmetic is, after all, only an axiomatic system. We can make up an indefinite number of axiomatic systems whose theorems are every bit as 'independent of us' as those of arithmetic. Are these also to be accepted as 'really real!'? Standard arithmetic is only important to us because it is useful in the physical world. It is invented, not fundamental. So you say, and you may be right. Or you may not. The question is whether 2+2=4 independently of human beings (and aliens who may have invented, or discovered as the case may be, arithmetic). It may well be independent of humans or other (alien) beings, but it has no meaning until you have defined what the symbols '2','4','+', and '=' mean. Then it is a tautology. I can be OK, but logicians (pure or applied) reserve tautology for the purely logical formula (like: (p q)-q, or A(t) - ExA(x)). That is the logicians' understanding of 'tautology': a compound proposition that is true for all truth-possibilities of its components by virtue of its logical form. A more common understanding of 'tautology' is: a proposition that is true because of the meaning of the terms involved. For example, a brother is a male sibling. In the case of '2+2=4', this is not a compound proposition that is true for all truth-possibilities of its components, because '2' and '4' do not stand for propositions that can take on truth values -- we can not say that '2' is 'true', or that '2' is false. So this cannot be a logical tautology. However, we have to assign a meaning to the symbol '2', or to the word 'two', and so on for '4', '+', and '='. Once we have assigned these meanings, then the proposition is true by virtue of those assigned meanings. The tautological nature of '2+2=4' has nothing to do with the logical structure of the proposition -- it is entirely due to the meanings of the terms involved. Thus, while what you say about logic, and the axiomatic basis of arithmetic, may be all very well, it has absolutely nothing to do with my assertion that '2+2=4' is a tautology by virtue of the meanings of the terms involved. Yes, that's what I was saying. You are using the term tautology in a sense which has nothing to do with the usual technical sense. Now, 2+2 = 4 is a theorem of most first order arithmetical theory, like RA and PA, and it is, for that reason, true in all models (interpretation) of those theories, and in that sense it is still a sort of tautology, like all theorems in first order logic.In that sense, 2+2=4 does not depend on the meaning of 2, + and 4 or equal. We can derive it from the axioms of predicate calculus and arithmetic. (True in all models = true independently of the meaning). Bruno Bruce In propositional logic, worlds can be defined by the assignment or truth value (true, false), and a tautology is something true in all worlds. Then we can add non-logical axioms, introducing some functional constant, like 0 + x = x.. We cannot define what are numbers, but we can agree on some axioms. In mathematics the word number has obviously many different, yet related, meaning. In high school we learn that there the natural numbers, and that from them, by (computable) equivalence class we get the integers, and the rational numbers. Using topology (limit) we get the real number, and that all this extends in the plane (complex numbers), then in the fourth dimension (the quaternion, so useful to handle relative 3d rotations, and then in the eight dimension: the octonion). Set theorist have then axioms leading to the transfinite numbers, and then the logicians (but in fact everyone including nature) have used the intensional properties of natural number, where not only 17 is prime, but 17 get properties like being the code for some other numbers. Depending on which numbers we want to talk about, we use this or that theory. I use the natural numbers, and it is only asked if you agree with the following axioms. For all numbers x and y we assume 0 ≠ s(x) s(x) = s(y) - x = y x = 0 v Ey(x = s(y)) x+0 = x x+s(y) = s(x+y) x*0=0 x*s(y)=(x*y)+x That is Robinson Arithmetic. It is basically Peano Arithmetic without the induction axioms. Then, the easy, but still quite tedious thing consists in defining, in that theory the observers. I define the observers, roughly, by Peano arithmetic. That is, a believer in the axiom above, who believes also the infinitely many induction axioms: (F(0) Ax(F(x) - F(s(x))) - AxF(x), with F(x) being a formula in the arithmetical language (with 0, s, +, *), and the logical symbols as said above. This can be done by the Gödel technic of arithmetization of meta- arithmetic.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
On 17 Jun 2015, at 17:56, John Clark wrote: On Tue, Jun 16, 2015 Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: You are the person reading this sentence OK, but then it would be meaningless to talk about what you will do tomorrow because you will not be reading that sentence tomorrow. So if Stathis Papaioannou wants to talk about the future Stathis Papaioannou if going to need a better definition of continuity; John Clark thinks a good one would be the person (or people) who remember reading that sentence right then, and in Many Worlds that would be lots and lots of people. There is an illusion that I am a unique individual persisting through time, How would things be different if it were not an illusion? It's silly to try to explain consciousness by saying it's another subjective thing like illusion unless it can be objectively explained how that illusion is generated; I think the key to it is memory, if Stathis Papaioannou of today remembers being Stathis Papaioannou yesterday then Stathis Papaioannou of today gives Stathis Papaioannou yesterday the title I. even if I know that there will be multiple versions of me in future. I hope that I will become one of the versions with good experiences rather than bad experiences. But that implies that only one of those versions deserves the title of I, and that is untrue. That is right, but it is easy to understand that (assuming computationalism in cognitive science) both reconstituted persons will feel like I applies to only one of them. That explains why we can call personal identity an illusion, a bit like Everett can explain the reality of the illusion of the collapse, without having any physical collapse. Those things are first person phenomenological experiences. Bruno John K Clark You can tell me not to have the illusion. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
On 17 Jun 2015, at 18:14, John Clark wrote: On Wed, Jun 17, 2015 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: We're talking about multiple (probably infinite) copying and branching, so who the hell is you? All of them are you, I agree, and so the conclusion is logically inescapable, you will see Moscow AND Washington. In the 3-1 view. An external (to the teleportation device) observer can see that. But, of course, it is obvious that after the duplication, each reconstitution will feel to be only one of the reconstitutions, as each of them cannot feel to see both W and M simultaneously, and so BOTH will agree that it looks like a collapse from Moscow and Washington to either Moscow or Washington. but all of them will feel to be only one of them Yes, but given the definition of the personal pronoun you given above that we both agree on, that in no way changes the fact that you will see Moscow AND Washington. How a logician could deny that mystifies me. I have never deny that, as this is the correct 3-1 view. But it is as simple as as possible that all the correct 1-views, after the duplication, will involve only seeing one city, and thus will feel like if a collapse occurred, when in this classical case we know that none occurs, by construction. from the 1p perspective There is no such thing as the 1p perspective, there is only a 1p perspective; Not at all. After the duplication there are two; logically incompatible, 1p perspectives. I see only W and I see only M. there is no one true perspective, one is as legitimate as another. Exactly, that is why we have to take all of them into account, and that is why we get that First Person Indeterminacy. If in Helsinki you predict I will see both W and M, BOTH reconstituted persons will have to write I was wrong: I definitely see only one city. Bruno John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
Bruno: to describe what OTHERS did does not mean (in my vocabulary) that I KNOW (agree?) the same domain as it was handled. I 'know' (or may know) the efforts to derive science by human scientists. Does NATURE have regularities indeed? or our scientific observation assigns returning facets and calls them regularities as long as they are not contradicted? OK, maybe I should use EVENTS instead of regularities. And please do not make me a Straw-Man by repeating what I wrote. Your sentence: *Humans *might have learned a lot in mathematics by looking at nature, but this does not prove that nature precedes logically mathematics.* I have not included logically and may write: Q.e.D. On Wed, Jun 17, 2015 at 10:45 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 15 Jun 2015, at 21:53, John Mikes wrote: Brent concluded ingeniously: *They have a theory for why THIS might be so no matter what THIS is. You just have to find the right mathematics to describe it and miracle of miracles the mathematics is obeyed!Brent* May I step a bit further: by careful observations humanity (or some 'higher' cooperating intellect maybe?) derived the connotions we call 'theories', math, even axioms to make them fit. Then we fall on our backside by admiration that they fit. Don't forget the historic buildup of our 'science' etc, stepwise, as we increased the observational treasure-chest of Nature. So Nature does not obey mathematics, mathematics has been derived in ways to follow the observed regularities of Nature. I thought that you were agnostic, but here you talk like if you *knew* something, which I don't. Even assuming Nature, the question remains: why does it have regularities? Why does it look like it obeys mathematics? To say we derive mathematics from nature does not really address the question. *Humans *might have learned a lot in mathematics by looking at nature, but this does not prove that nature precedes logically mathematics. I have given argument that the contrary might have happened: nature might belong to the imagination of the Löbian machines or numbers. We know that such imagination is lawful, and obeys strict constraints. Bruno JM On Mon, Jun 15, 2015 at 2:45 AM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 6/14/2015 2:49 PM, LizR wrote: On 15 June 2015 at 08:22, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: I'm not saying it's ineffective. I'm saying it's not a mystery why it's effective. Because the universe appears to operate on principles that map very well onto some parts of maths, I think that's an illusion of selective attention. Remember how Kepler thought the size of the planetary orbits were determined by nesting the five Platonic solids. An impressive example of the effective of mathematics - except it turned out there weren't just five planets. Now we regard the orbits as historical accidents and predicted by any mathematics. Instead we point to fact that they obey Newton's law of universal gravitation to great accuracy. Another impressive example of the effectiveness of mathematics...except it's slight wrong and Einstein's spacetime model works better. and may even map exactly (we have no reason to think not - every improvement in measurement so far indicates this, Except when they don't. but there will always of course be room for doubt - just room that's been getting steadily smaller over the last few centuries). But you haven't said why it does so. I may not agree with Bruno or Max Tegmark, but at least they have a theory for why this They have a theory for why THIS might be so no matter what THIS is. You just have to find the right mathematics to describe it and miracle of miracles the mathematics is obeyed! Brent *might* be so, and I haven't seen any definitive demonstration of mistakes in their theories as yet (there are lots of suggestions that may become definitive with more work, of course). So far, your answer to the question of the unreasonable effectiveness of maths is basically It works that way because it works that way, I can't explain it - but trust me, it isn't worth explaining. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
Bruno Marchal wrote: On 13 Jun 2015, at 03:29, Bruce Kellett wrote: LizR wrote: On 12 June 2015 at 17:40, Bruce Kellett bhkell...@optusnet.com.au mailto:bhkell...@optusnet.com.au Arithmetic is, after all, only an axiomatic system. We can make up an indefinite number of axiomatic systems whose theorems are every bit as 'independent of us' as those of arithmetic. Are these also to be accepted as 'really real!'? Standard arithmetic is only important to us because it is useful in the physical world. It is invented, not fundamental. So you say, and you may be right. Or you may not. The question is whether 2+2=4 independently of human beings (and aliens who may have invented, or discovered as the case may be, arithmetic). It may well be independent of humans or other (alien) beings, but it has no meaning until you have defined what the symbols '2','4','+', and '=' mean. Then it is a tautology. I can be OK, but logicians (pure or applied) reserve tautology for the purely logical formula (like: (p q)-q, or A(t) - ExA(x)). That is the logicians' understanding of 'tautology': a compound proposition that is true for all truth-possibilities of its components by virtue of its logical form. A more common understanding of 'tautology' is: a proposition that is true because of the meaning of the terms involved. For example, a brother is a male sibling. In the case of '2+2=4', this is not a compound proposition that is true for all truth-possibilities of its components, because '2' and '4' do not stand for propositions that can take on truth values -- we can not say that '2' is 'true', or that '2' is false. So this cannot be a logical tautology. However, we have to assign a meaning to the symbol '2', or to the word 'two', and so on for '4', '+', and '='. Once we have assigned these meanings, then the proposition is true by virtue of those assigned meanings. The tautological nature of '2+2=4' has nothing to do with the logical structure of the proposition -- it is entirely due to the meanings of the terms involved. Thus, while what you say about logic, and the axiomatic basis of arithmetic, may be all very well, it has absolutely nothing to do with my assertion that '2+2=4' is a tautology by virtue of the meanings of the terms involved. Bruce In propositional logic, worlds can be defined by the assignment or truth value (true, false), and a tautology is something true in all worlds. Then we can add non-logical axioms, introducing some functional constant, like 0 + x = x.. We cannot define what are numbers, but we can agree on some axioms. In mathematics the word number has obviously many different, yet related, meaning. In high school we learn that there the natural numbers, and that from them, by (computable) equivalence class we get the integers, and the rational numbers. Using topology (limit) we get the real number, and that all this extends in the plane (complex numbers), then in the fourth dimension (the quaternion, so useful to handle relative 3d rotations, and then in the eight dimension: the octonion). Set theorist have then axioms leading to the transfinite numbers, and then the logicians (but in fact everyone including nature) have used the intensional properties of natural number, where not only 17 is prime, but 17 get properties like being the code for some other numbers. Depending on which numbers we want to talk about, we use this or that theory. I use the natural numbers, and it is only asked if you agree with the following axioms. For all numbers x and y we assume 0 ≠ s(x) s(x) = s(y) - x = y x = 0 v Ey(x = s(y)) x+0 = x x+s(y) = s(x+y) x*0=0 x*s(y)=(x*y)+x That is Robinson Arithmetic. It is basically Peano Arithmetic without the induction axioms. Then, the easy, but still quite tedious thing consists in defining, in that theory the observers. I define the observers, roughly, by Peano arithmetic. That is, a believer in the axiom above, who believes also the infinitely many induction axioms: (F(0) Ax(F(x) - F(s(x))) - AxF(x), with F(x) being a formula in the arithmetical language (with 0, s, +, *), and the logical symbols as said above. This can be done by the Gödel technic of arithmetization of meta-arithmetic. First order logic have rather clear mathematical semantic, and they inherit from calssical propositional calculus the notion of completeness, so a theorem is true in all models (mathematical structure satisfying formula) and what is true in all models is a theorem in the theory. Now, it is the PA (emulated by the ontogical RA) that I interview about how they see and make sense of what is there. Since Gödel 1931 a lot of progress have been made, so that it is relatively easy to get the formulation of the problem, notably in the form of intensional variants of Gödel beweisbar predicate, which incarnate the explanation of the functioning of PA in the language that PA can understand.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
On 16 Jun 2015, at 18:26, John Clark wrote: On Tue, Jun 16, 2015, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: The many worlds as an ensemble are determinate, but which world you will end up in is not. Forget you, which world ANYTHING ends up in is not deterministic. To be deterministic branch X and everything in it, conscious or not, must always move into branch Y and only branch Y, but in many worlds branch X could evolve into branch Y AND branch Z; not only that but branch A could also evolve into branch Y just like branch X even though it is different from branch X. Conscious beings are no different from non-conscious things in that respect, they move from branch to branch in the same way. Subjectively (from the 1p perspective) There is no such thing as the 1p perspective, there is only a 1p perspective. One perspective is as legitimate as another. you end up in one world, while objectively (from the 3p perspective) you end up in all. We're talking about multiple (probably infinite) copying and branching, so who the hell is you? All of them are you, but all of them will feel to be only one of them from the 1p perspective, which explains the indeterminacy, despite the 3p determinacy. Bruno John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
On 15 Jun 2015, at 21:53, John Mikes wrote: Brent concluded ingeniously: They have a theory for why THIS might be so no matter what THIS is. You just have to find the right mathematics to describe it and miracle of miracles the mathematics is obeyed! Brent May I step a bit further: by careful observations humanity (or some 'higher' cooperating intellect maybe?) derived the connotions we call 'theories', math, even axioms to make them fit. Then we fall on our backside by admiration that they fit. Don't forget the historic buildup of our 'science' etc, stepwise, as we increased the observational treasure-chest of Nature. So Nature does not obey mathematics, mathematics has been derived in ways to follow the observed regularities of Nature. I thought that you were agnostic, but here you talk like if you *knew* something, which I don't. Even assuming Nature, the question remains: why does it have regularities? Why does it look like it obeys mathematics? To say we derive mathematics from nature does not really address the question. *Humans *might have learned a lot in mathematics by looking at nature, but this does not prove that nature precedes logically mathematics. I have given argument that the contrary might have happened: nature might belong to the imagination of the Löbian machines or numbers. We know that such imagination is lawful, and obeys strict constraints. Bruno JM On Mon, Jun 15, 2015 at 2:45 AM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 6/14/2015 2:49 PM, LizR wrote: On 15 June 2015 at 08:22, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: I'm not saying it's ineffective. I'm saying it's not a mystery why it's effective. Because the universe appears to operate on principles that map very well onto some parts of maths, I think that's an illusion of selective attention. Remember how Kepler thought the size of the planetary orbits were determined by nesting the five Platonic solids. An impressive example of the effective of mathematics - except it turned out there weren't just five planets. Now we regard the orbits as historical accidents and predicted by any mathematics. Instead we point to fact that they obey Newton's law of universal gravitation to great accuracy. Another impressive example of the effectiveness of mathematics...except it's slight wrong and Einstein's spacetime model works better. and may even map exactly (we have no reason to think not - every improvement in measurement so far indicates this, Except when they don't. but there will always of course be room for doubt - just room that's been getting steadily smaller over the last few centuries). But you haven't said why it does so. I may not agree with Bruno or Max Tegmark, but at least they have a theory for why this They have a theory for why THIS might be so no matter what THIS is. You just have to find the right mathematics to describe it and miracle of miracles the mathematics is obeyed! Brent might be so, and I haven't seen any definitive demonstration of mistakes in their theories as yet (there are lots of suggestions that may become definitive with more work, of course). So far, your answer to the question of the unreasonable effectiveness of maths is basically It works that way because it works that way, I can't explain it - but trust me, it isn't worth explaining. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything- l...@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
On Thursday, June 18, 2015, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Jun 16, 2015 Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','stath...@gmail.com'); wrote: You are the person reading this sentence OK, but then it would be meaningless to talk about what you will do tomorrow because you will not be reading that sentence tomorrow. So if Stathis Papaioannou wants to talk about the future Stathis Papaioannou if going to need a better definition of continuity; John Clark thinks a good one would be the person (or people) who remember reading that sentence right then, and in Many Worlds that would be lots and lots of people. There is an illusion that I am a unique individual persisting through time, How would things be different if it were not an illusion? It's silly to try to explain consciousness by saying it's another subjective thing like illusion unless it can be objectively explained how that illusion is generated; I think the key to it is memory, if Stathis Papaioannou of today remembers being Stathis Papaioannou yesterday then Stathis Papaioannou of today gives Stathis Papaioannou yesterday the title I. even if I know that there will be multiple versions of me in future. I hope that I will become one of the versions with good experiences rather than bad experiences. But that implies that only one of those versions deserves the title of I, and that is untrue. And that's why it's an illusion. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
On 13 Jun 2015, at 03:29, Bruce Kellett wrote: LizR wrote: On 12 June 2015 at 17:40, Bruce Kellett bhkell...@optusnet.com.au Arithmetic is, after all, only an axiomatic system. We can make up an indefinite number of axiomatic systems whose theorems are every bit as 'independent of us' as those of arithmetic. Are these also to be accepted as 'really real!'? Standard arithmetic is only important to us because it is useful in the physical world. It is invented, not fundamental. So you say, and you may be right. Or you may not. The question is whether 2+2=4 independently of human beings (and aliens who may have invented, or discovered as the case may be, arithmetic). It may well be independent of humans or other (alien) beings, but it has no meaning until you have defined what the symbols '2','4','+', and '=' mean. Then it is a tautology. I can be OK, but logicians (pure or applied) reserve tautology for the purely logical formula (like: (p q)-q, or A(t) - ExA(x)). In propositional logic, worlds can be defined by the assignment or truth value (true, false), and a tautology is something true in all worlds. Then we can add non-logical axioms, introducing some functional constant, like 0 + x = x.. We cannot define what are numbers, but we can agree on some axioms. In mathematics the word number has obviously many different, yet related, meaning. In high school we learn that there the natural numbers, and that from them, by (computable) equivalence class we get the integers, and the rational numbers. Using topology (limit) we get the real number, and that all this extends in the plane (complex numbers), then in the fourth dimension (the quaternion, so useful to handle relative 3d rotations, and then in the eight dimension: the octonion). Set theorist have then axioms leading to the transfinite numbers, and then the logicians (but in fact everyone including nature) have used the intensional properties of natural number, where not only 17 is prime, but 17 get properties like being the code for some other numbers. Depending on which numbers we want to talk about, we use this or that theory. I use the natural numbers, and it is only asked if you agree with the following axioms. For all numbers x and y we assume 0 ≠ s(x) s(x) = s(y) - x = y x = 0 v Ey(x = s(y)) x+0 = x x+s(y) = s(x+y) x*0=0 x*s(y)=(x*y)+x That is Robinson Arithmetic. It is basically Peano Arithmetic without the induction axioms. Then, the easy, but still quite tedious thing consists in defining, in that theory the observers. I define the observers, roughly, by Peano arithmetic. That is, a believer in the axiom above, who believes also the infinitely many induction axioms: (F(0) Ax(F(x) - F(s(x))) - AxF(x), with F(x) being a formula in the arithmetical language (with 0, s, +, *), and the logical symbols as said above. This can be done by the Gödel technic of arithmetization of meta- arithmetic. First order logic have rather clear mathematical semantic, and they inherit from calssical propositional calculus the notion of completeness, so a theorem is true in all models (mathematical structure satisfying formula) and what is true in all models is a theorem in the theory. Now, it is the PA (emulated by the ontogical RA) that I interview about how they see and make sense of what is there. Since Gödel 1931 a lot of progress have been made, so that it is relatively easy to get the formulation of the problem, notably in the form of intensional variants of Gödel beweisbar predicate, which incarnate the explanation of the functioning of PA in the language that PA can understand. By a theorem of Solovay, the propositional logic of correct platonists machine is axiomatized by a modal logic G, for the part provable by the machine, and by G*, for the true part, which by incompleteness extends properly the provable part. Incompleteness also provides sense to the distinction between provable(2+2=5) and provable(2+2=5) 2 + 2 = 5, and other nuances making us able to ask the main question, and to isolate the proximity spaces and the orthogonal realities to see if we got eventually the measure needed for computationalism making sense. Not unlike some parts of physics we are confronted to infinities, perhaps too many, but that remains to be seen, and the first simple discovery shows some sign of the existence of a measure, in the form of three quantizations of the sigma_1 arithmetical formula. Bruno Bruce -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
On Tue, Jun 16, 2015 Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: You are the person reading this sentence OK, but then it would be meaningless to talk about what you will do tomorrow because you will not be reading that sentence tomorrow. So if Stathis Papaioannou wants to talk about the future Stathis Papaioannou if going to need a better definition of continuity; John Clark thinks a good one would be the person (or people) who remember reading that sentence right then, and in Many Worlds that would be lots and lots of people. There is an illusion that I am a unique individual persisting through time, How would things be different if it were not an illusion? It's silly to try to explain consciousness by saying it's another subjective thing like illusion unless it can be objectively explained how that illusion is generated; I think the key to it is memory, if Stathis Papaioannou of today remembers being Stathis Papaioannou yesterday then Stathis Papaioannou of today gives Stathis Papaioannou yesterday the title I. even if I know that there will be multiple versions of me in future. I hope that I will become one of the versions with good experiences rather than bad experiences. But that implies that only one of those versions deserves the title of I, and that is untrue. John K Clark You can tell me not to have the illusion. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
On Wed, Jun 17, 2015 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: We're talking about multiple (probably infinite) copying and branching, so who the hell is you? All of them are you, I agree, and so the conclusion is logically inescapable, you will see Moscow AND Washington. but all of them will feel to be only one of them Yes, but given the definition of the personal pronoun you given above that we both agree on, that in no way changes the fact that you will see Moscow AND Washington. How a logician could deny that mystifies me. from the 1p perspective There is no such thing as the 1p perspective, there is only a 1p perspective; there is no one true perspective, one is as legitimate as another. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
On Tue, Jun 16, 2015, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: The many worlds as an ensemble are determinate, but which world you will end up in is not. Forget you, which world ANYTHING ends up in is not deterministic. To be deterministic branch X and everything in it, conscious or not, must always move into branch Y and only branch Y, but in many worlds branch X could evolve into branch Y AND branch Z; not only that but branch A could also evolve into branch Y just like branch X even though it is different from branch X. Conscious beings are no different from non-conscious things in that respect, they move from branch to branch in the same way. Subjectively (from the 1p perspective) There is no such thing as the 1p perspective, there is only a 1p perspective. One perspective is as legitimate as another. you end up in one world, while objectively (from the 3p perspective) you end up in all. We're talking about multiple (probably infinite) copying and branching, so who the hell is you? John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
On Wednesday, June 17, 2015, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Jun 16, 2015, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','stath...@gmail.com'); wrote: The many worlds as an ensemble are determinate, but which world you will end up in is not. Forget you, which world ANYTHING ends up in is not deterministic. To be deterministic branch X and everything in it, conscious or not, must always move into branch Y and only branch Y, but in many worlds branch X could evolve into branch Y AND branch Z; not only that but branch A could also evolve into branch Y just like branch X even though it is different from branch X. Conscious beings are no different from non-conscious things in that respect, they move from branch to branch in the same way. Subjectively (from the 1p perspective) There is no such thing as the 1p perspective, there is only a 1p perspective. One perspective is as legitimate as another. you end up in one world, while objectively (from the 3p perspective) you end up in all. We're talking about multiple (probably infinite) copying and branching, so who the hell is you? You are the person reading this sentence, even though it is addressed to multiple individuals on the list. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
On Wednesday, June 17, 2015, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Jun 16, 2015 Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','stath...@gmail.com'); wrote: We're talking about multiple (probably infinite) copying and branching, so who the hell is you? You are the person reading this sentence OK, but then it would be meaningless to talk about what you will do tomorrow because you will not be reading that sentence tomorrow. So if Stathis Papaioannou wants to talk about the future Stathis Papaioannou if going to need a better definition of continuity; John Clark thinks a good one would be the person (or people) who remember reading that sentence right then, and in Many Worlds that would be lots and lots of people. There is an illusion that I am a unique individual persisting through time, even if I know that there will be multiple versions of me in future. I hope that I will become one of the versions with good experiences rather than bad experiences. You can tell me not to have the illusion. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
On Tue, Jun 16, 2015 Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: We're talking about multiple (probably infinite) copying and branching, so who the hell is you? You are the person reading this sentence OK, but then it would be meaningless to talk about what you will do tomorrow because you will not be reading that sentence tomorrow. So if Stathis Papaioannou wants to talk about the future Stathis Papaioannou if going to need a better definition of continuity; John Clark thinks a good one would be the person (or people) who remember reading that sentence right then, and in Many Worlds that would be lots and lots of people. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
On 16 June 2015 at 12:17, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Jun 15, 2015 Bruce Kellett bhkell...@optusnet.com.au wrote: The Schroedinger equation is perfectly computable. Yes but that fact does us no good because Schrodinger's Wave Equation doesn't describe anything observable, to get that you must square the amplitude of the equation at a point and even then it will only give you the probability you will observe the particle at that point. The many worlds of MWI are computable I'm not sure what you mean by that. Schrodinger's Wave Equation has i (the square root of -1) in it and i does strange things, like i^2=i^6 =-1 and i^4=i^100=1. So that means you can't compute which one unique branch of the multiverse that our universe will change with time into because there is no such one unique branch. And for the same reason you can't compute the one unique branch of the multiverse that our universe has changes with time from. we have 1p inderminacy, To be deterministic things would need to evolve into one and only one thing, but Schrodinger says that's not what happens. And a person is no different from a non-person in that respect and consciousness has nothing to do with it, NOTHING evolves into one and only one thing. So forget 1p , things are just indeterminate period. John K Clark The many worlds as an ensemble are determinate, but which world you will end up in is not. This is because you feel that you end up in only one world even though copies of you end up in multiple worlds. Subjectively (from the 1p perspective) you end up in one world, while objectively (from the 3p perspective) you end up in all. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
On 15 Jun 2015, at 05:08, Bruce Kellett wrote: LizR wrote: On 15 June 2015 at 14:19, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au mailto:li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: It is plausible that regularities are a required feature of conscious existence This seems very likely, but it does assume something like a string landscape in which some regions don't contain regularities. Or to put it another way, regions in which maths doesn't work. This seems to be out-Tegmarking Tegmark, who assumes that at least maths is (meta-) universal. At this stage, it's no worse than assuming meaning generation is a necessary feature of existence, and that this can only take place by compression of regularities, which is the Solomonoff type answer... That would require a source of such regularities, surely? But that would seem to lead straight back to requiring that maths works. However, neither does Bruno's theory does not offer any explanation for the 'uniformity of nature'. I do much worst. I show that if we assume the brain to be Turing emulable forces us to derive the uniformity of nature from the uniformity of arithmetic, in some limiting sense (by the FPI, that is the ignorance on which infinities of Universal numbers support us). I explain the problem. I agree that the proble is so huge that it can look like a refuctation of comp, and that is why I translate the problem in the lnguage of a machine, and study what is the machine's answer, and it shows that the technical constraints of incompleteness solve the problem at the propositional level, so well, physics does not disappear, and comp is still consistent. But the problem remains of course, and it is not a problem, it is a sequence of problems for all computationalist theologians of the future. He has to appeal to religion to magic away the 'white rabbits'. Of course not. That is very unfair, as the very idea is to not use magic at any point, just elementary arithmetic. remember that there is not one thing I say, which is not provable in RA, PA or ZF. According to Bruno's account, the physical world is not even Turing emulable I did not say that. The physical world can be Turing emulable, and that would be the case if my generalized brain is the entire physical universe. But this is an extreme case, and a priori, the physical world is not entirely Turing emulable. -- which one would think would be a requirement for regularities that could be described by physical laws. (If the physical laws are not computable, in what sense could one describe them as laws?) I will have to go, but computable = sigma_1. many lawful relation in arithmetic are not computable, they are just more complex. I can give examples later, but, well, You need to study what is computable (in the mathematical Church Turing sense. mathematics, even just arithmetic, is mostly inhabited by non computable relations. Intuitionist throw them away, but never completely, because they don't want loosing completely the Turing completeness of their theories. The universal numbers are the main roots of all the non computability occurring in arithmetic. Recursion theory, computability theory, is notably the study of the degree of non-computability, or unsolvability. It is not just chaos, the complex non computable things have a lot of order too. Then you have the statistics, which can also manage some non computable predictions in highly structured way, and QM illustrates this (with or without collapse). Bruno Bruce -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
On 15 Jun 2015, at 02:40, John Clark wrote: On 6/13/2015 LizR wrote: None of this explain why it works so well Mathematics is a language that can always describe regularities and it can do so more tersely than any other language; and if the laws of physics didn't have regularities they wouldn't be laws. But a language does not create the thing it describes. Mathematics use a mathematical language, but add assumptions, which are about structure that mathematicians believes in, independently that logicians makes the theories formal or not. The idea that the mathematical reality is only language looks like the conventionalist position, which does not work. We study structures, and through the theorizing, they kick back, and indeed most of the time we are surprised by what is found. The debate persists above arithmetic, but as far as the arithmetical truth is concerned, most mathematician agree it constitute a well defined reality. The real (non semantic) trouble begins in analysis and set theories. Nobody would say that a fact like all non negative integers can be equal to the sum of four squared integers has been decided by convention. The same with Riemann hypothesis: either all interesting zero are on the critical line, or not. We just don't know the answer today, although many would say that we do know the answer, but are just unable to find a sharable communicable justification of it. Mathematician succeed in finding proof a long time after their intuit its existence. Bruno John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
On 14 Jun 2015, at 21:48, meekerdb wrote: On 6/14/2015 9:23 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: Arithmetic is full of life, ... and taxes and death. But it needs interpretation to be full of death and taxes. Otherwise it is just abstract relations. Yes. But the one doing the interpretation are the universal (Löbian) entity. They build model satisfying their beliefs. Now, with computationalism, there indeed a truncation made for our own self-description (if not, the doctor can't do its job), and that entails that many notions cannot be entirely translated into text, except if based on some intuition that the machine can develop through examples. Numbers are already of that kind. That's exactly why it is so useful; the same relations hold under many different interpretations. In algebra, yes. That is why they got the universal problem (not in the Turing sense), and the adjointness which occurs everywhere in math. But in arithmetic and computer science, we have also sort of token- like ultra-concrete objects, like we thought of the (standard) natural numbers, and machines. I recently asked on a mathematicians forum for a definition of mathematics. The common ones were the study of relations and the study of patterns. No problem with this. Except that this is very general, and even without comp, might still encompass human and alien psychology, biology, conditional theologies, etc. The term mathematics has no mathematical definition, and what it encompass will depend on the philosophical, metaphysical or theological hypotheses. Bruno Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
Brent concluded ingeniously: *They have a theory for why THIS might be so no matter what THIS is. You just have to find the right mathematics to describe it and miracle of miracles the mathematics is obeyed!Brent* May I step a bit further: by careful observations humanity (or some 'higher' cooperating intellect maybe?) derived the connotions we call 'theories', math, even axioms to make them fit. Then we fall on our backside by admiration that they fit. Don't forget the historic buildup of our 'science' etc, stepwise, as we increased the observational treasure-chest of Nature. So Nature does not obey mathematics, mathematics has been derived in ways to follow the observed regularities of Nature. JM On Mon, Jun 15, 2015 at 2:45 AM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 6/14/2015 2:49 PM, LizR wrote: On 15 June 2015 at 08:22, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: I'm not saying it's ineffective. I'm saying it's not a mystery why it's effective. Because the universe appears to operate on principles that map very well onto some parts of maths, I think that's an illusion of selective attention. Remember how Kepler thought the size of the planetary orbits were determined by nesting the five Platonic solids. An impressive example of the effective of mathematics - except it turned out there weren't just five planets. Now we regard the orbits as historical accidents and predicted by any mathematics. Instead we point to fact that they obey Newton's law of universal gravitation to great accuracy. Another impressive example of the effectiveness of mathematics...except it's slight wrong and Einstein's spacetime model works better. and may even map exactly (we have no reason to think not - every improvement in measurement so far indicates this, Except when they don't. but there will always of course be room for doubt - just room that's been getting steadily smaller over the last few centuries). But you haven't said why it does so. I may not agree with Bruno or Max Tegmark, but at least they have a theory for why this They have a theory for why THIS might be so no matter what THIS is. You just have to find the right mathematics to describe it and miracle of miracles the mathematics is obeyed! Brent *might* be so, and I haven't seen any definitive demonstration of mistakes in their theories as yet (there are lots of suggestions that may become definitive with more work, of course). So far, your answer to the question of the unreasonable effectiveness of maths is basically It works that way because it works that way, I can't explain it - but trust me, it isn't worth explaining. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
On Mon, Jun 15, 2015 Bruce Kellett bhkell...@optusnet.com.au wrote: The Schroedinger equation is perfectly computable. Yes but that fact does us no good because Schrodinger's Wave Equation doesn't describe anything observable, to get that you must square the amplitude of the equation at a point and even then it will only give you the probability you will observe the particle at that point. The many worlds of MWI are computable I'm not sure what you mean by that. Schrodinger's Wave Equation has i (the square root of -1) in it and i does strange things, like i^2=i^6 =-1 and i^4=i^100=1. So that means you can't compute which one unique branch of the multiverse that our universe will change with time into because there is no such one unique branch. And for the same reason you can't compute the one unique branch of the multiverse that our universe has changes with time from. we have 1p inderminacy, To be deterministic things would need to evolve into one and only one thing, but Schrodinger says that's not what happens. And a person is no different from a non-person in that respect and consciousness has nothing to do with it, NOTHING evolves into one and only one thing. So forget 1p , things are just indeterminate period. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
On 6/14/2015 8:08 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote: LizR wrote: On 15 June 2015 at 14:19, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au mailto:li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: It is plausible that regularities are a required feature of conscious existence This seems very likely, but it does assume something like a string landscape in which some regions don't contain regularities. Or to put it another way, regions in which maths doesn't work. This seems to be out-Tegmarking Tegmark, who assumes that at least maths is (meta-) universal. At this stage, it's no worse than assuming meaning generation is a necessary feature of existence, and that this can only take place by compression of regularities, which is the Solomonoff type answer... That would require a source of such regularities, surely? But that would seem to lead straight back to requiring that maths works. However, neither does Bruno's theory does not offer any explanation for the 'uniformity of nature'. He has to appeal to religion to magic away the 'white rabbits'. According to Bruno's account, the physical world is not even Turing emulable -- which one would think would be a requirement for regularities that could be described by physical laws. (If the physical laws are not computable, in what sense could one describe them as laws?) The randomness of QM is not computable. Bruno's idea is like MIW, indefinitely many worlds are computed/emulated in parallel and in the Born rule proportion. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
meekerdb wrote: On 6/14/2015 8:08 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote: LizR wrote: On 15 June 2015 at 14:19, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au mailto:li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: It is plausible that regularities are a required feature of conscious existence This seems very likely, but it does assume something like a string landscape in which some regions don't contain regularities. Or to put it another way, regions in which maths doesn't work. This seems to be out-Tegmarking Tegmark, who assumes that at least maths is (meta-) universal. At this stage, it's no worse than assuming meaning generation is a necessary feature of existence, and that this can only take place by compression of regularities, which is the Solomonoff type answer... That would require a source of such regularities, surely? But that would seem to lead straight back to requiring that maths works. However, neither does Bruno's theory does not offer any explanation for the 'uniformity of nature'. He has to appeal to religion to magic away the 'white rabbits'. According to Bruno's account, the physical world is not even Turing emulable -- which one would think would be a requirement for regularities that could be described by physical laws. (If the physical laws are not computable, in what sense could one describe them as laws?) The randomness of QM is not computable. Bruno's idea is like MIW, indefinitely many worlds are computed/emulated in parallel and in the Born rule proportion. The Schroedinger equation is perfectly computable. The many worlds of MWI are computable -- we have 1p inderminacy, but we have been assured that that is all part of the dovetailer -- totally computable. Bruce -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
On 6/15/2015 12:40 AM, Bruce Kellett wrote: meekerdb wrote: On 6/14/2015 8:08 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote: LizR wrote: On 15 June 2015 at 14:19, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au mailto:li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: It is plausible that regularities are a required feature of conscious existence This seems very likely, but it does assume something like a string landscape in which some regions don't contain regularities. Or to put it another way, regions in which maths doesn't work. This seems to be out-Tegmarking Tegmark, who assumes that at least maths is (meta-) universal. At this stage, it's no worse than assuming meaning generation is a necessary feature of existence, and that this can only take place by compression of regularities, which is the Solomonoff type answer... That would require a source of such regularities, surely? But that would seem to lead straight back to requiring that maths works. However, neither does Bruno's theory does not offer any explanation for the 'uniformity of nature'. He has to appeal to religion to magic away the 'white rabbits'. According to Bruno's account, the physical world is not even Turing emulable -- which one would think would be a requirement for regularities that could be described by physical laws. (If the physical laws are not computable, in what sense could one describe them as laws?) The randomness of QM is not computable. Bruno's idea is like MIW, indefinitely many worlds are computed/emulated in parallel and in the Born rule proportion. The Schroedinger equation is perfectly computable. The many worlds of MWI are computable -- we have 1p inderminacy, but we have been assured that that is all part of the dovetailer -- totally computable. If you have a countable infinity of worlds, then they, as a totality they are not computable. That's what the UDA does. It never stops so it produces an countable infinity of worlds - at least that's how I understand Bruno's idea. So it fits with the Multiple Independent Worlds model. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
On 6/14/2015 2:49 PM, LizR wrote: On 15 June 2015 at 08:22, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: I'm not saying it's ineffective. I'm saying it's not a mystery why it's effective. Because the universe appears to operate on principles that map very well onto some parts of maths, I think that's an illusion of selective attention. Remember how Kepler thought the size of the planetary orbits were determined by nesting the five Platonic solids. An impressive example of the effective of mathematics - except it turned out there weren't just five planets. Now we regard the orbits as historical accidents and predicted by any mathematics. Instead we point to fact that they obey Newton's law of universal gravitation to great accuracy. Another impressive example of the effectiveness of mathematics...except it's slight wrong and Einstein's spacetime model works better. and may even map exactly (we have no reason to think not - every improvement in measurement so far indicates this, Except when they don't. but there will always of course be room for doubt - just room that's been getting steadily smaller over the last few centuries). But you haven't said why it does so. I may not agree with Bruno or Max Tegmark, but at least they have a theory for why this They have a theory for why THIS might be so no matter what THIS is. You just have to find the right mathematics to describe it and miracle of miracles the mathematics is obeyed! Brent /might/ be so, and I haven't seen any definitive demonstration of mistakes in their theories as yet (there are lots of suggestions that may become definitive with more work, of course). So far, your answer to the question of the unreasonable effectiveness of maths is basically It works that way because it works that way, I can't explain it - but trust me, it isn't worth explaining. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com mailto:everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
On 13 Jun 2015, at 06:40, meekerdb wrote: On 6/12/2015 6:29 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote: LizR wrote: On 12 June 2015 at 17:40, Bruce Kellett bhkell...@optusnet.com.au Arithmetic is, after all, only an axiomatic system. We can make up an indefinite number of axiomatic systems whose theorems are every bit as 'independent of us' as those of arithmetic. Are these also to be accepted as 'really real!'? Standard arithmetic is only important to us because it is useful in the physical world. It is invented, not fundamental. So you say, and you may be right. Or you may not. The question is whether 2+2=4 independently of human beings (and aliens who may have invented, or discovered as the case may be, arithmetic). It may well be independent of humans or other (alien) beings, but it has no meaning until you have defined what the symbols '2','4','+', and '=' mean. Then it is a tautology. Bruce It is commonly thought to be discovered and so to be ought there independent of human beings or any cognition. But when considered more carefully what was discovered is that one can group pairs to things together (at least in imagination) and have four things. So two fathers grouped with two sons is four people. Except when it's three people. So we said OK we'll *define* units to be things that obey the rules that 2+2=4. Then we discovered that these rules implied a lot of things we hadn't thought of. But they aren't out there, they're in our language. An expression in a language is grammatically correct, or not. Here we do have a semantic, a notion of truth. That the arithmetical truth is not tautological is reflected in the fact that we need non logical axiom (like x + 0 = x) and this is amplified by the fact that most arithmetical truth are not provable by any theory, despite we do have the intuition that it is either true or false (an intuition that we lack for richer theory having axiom of infinity). Bruno Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
On 13 Jun 2015, at 06:51, Bruce Kellett wrote: meekerdb wrote: On 6/12/2015 6:29 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote: LizR wrote: On 12 June 2015 at 17:40, Bruce Kellett bhkell...@optusnet.com.au Arithmetic is, after all, only an axiomatic system. We can make up an indefinite number of axiomatic systems whose theorems are every bit as 'independent of us' as those of arithmetic. Are these also to be accepted as 'really real!'? Standard arithmetic is only important to us because it is useful in the physical world. It is invented, not fundamental. So you say, and you may be right. Or you may not. The question is whether 2+2=4 independently of human beings (and aliens who may have invented, or discovered as the case may be, arithmetic). It may well be independent of humans or other (alien) beings, but it has no meaning until you have defined what the symbols '2','4','+', and '=' mean. Then it is a tautology. Bruce It is commonly thought to be discovered and so to be ought there independent of human beings or any cognition. But when considered more carefully what was discovered is that one can group pairs to things together (at least in imagination) and have four things. So two fathers grouped with two sons is four people. Except when it's three people. So we said OK we'll *define* units to be things that obey the rules that 2+2=4. Then we discovered that these rules implied a lot of things we hadn't thought of. But they aren't out there, they're in our language. Brent I agree. But I think that the attraction of Platonism lies in the fact that if you abstract the notion of 'twoness' from all groups of two things, such as fathers, sons, pebbles, and so on, then you get an underlying perfect form that is independent of imperfections: such as the possibility that two fathers plus two sons might be only three people (or even only two people); or the unpleasant fact that two drops of water plus two drops of water might make only one drop of water. Platonism is a search for an escape from the 'ugliness' of reality. Maybe this can make sense for the original platonism, but the reason why platonism comes back is that with Gödel, we know that the ugly beast (the universal machine) exists in Platonia, and put there a mess without bounds. Arithmetic is full of life, ... and taxes and death. Indeed, you are supposed to understand that we are in Platonia. No escape is possible. I don't insist on this, but computationalism has a lot of terrifying thinking aspects too, ... but then science is not wishful thinking. Let us just push the logic up to see where we are led to. Bruno Bruce -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
On Friday, June 12, 2015 at 9:52:05 PM UTC-7, Bruce wrote: meekerdb wrote: On 6/12/2015 6:29 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote: LizR wrote: On 12 June 2015 at 17:40, Bruce Kellett bhke...@optusnet.com.au javascript: Arithmetic is, after all, only an axiomatic system. We can make up an indefinite number of axiomatic systems whose theorems are every bit as 'independent of us' as those of arithmetic. Are these also to be accepted as 'really real!'? Standard arithmetic is only important to us because it is useful in the physical world. It is invented, not fundamental. So you say, and you may be right. Or you may not. The question is whether 2+2=4 independently of human beings (and aliens who may have invented, or discovered as the case may be, arithmetic). It may well be independent of humans or other (alien) beings, but it has no meaning until you have defined what the symbols '2','4','+', and '=' mean. Then it is a tautology. Bruce It is commonly thought to be discovered and so to be ought there independent of human beings or any cognition. But when considered more carefully what was discovered is that one can group pairs to things together (at least in imagination) and have four things. So two fathers grouped with two sons is four people. Except when it's three people. So we said OK we'll *define* units to be things that obey the rules that 2+2=4. Then we discovered that these rules implied a lot of things we hadn't thought of. But they aren't out there, they're in our language. Brent I agree. But I think that the attraction of Platonism lies in the fact that if you abstract the notion of 'twoness' from all groups of two things, such as fathers, sons, pebbles, and so on, then you get an underlying perfect form that is independent of imperfections: such as the possibility that two fathers plus two sons might be only three people (or even only two people); or the unpleasant fact that two drops of water plus two drops of water might make only one drop of water. Platonism is a search for an escape from the 'ugliness' of reality. Bruce Another POV: Other than two-ness, etc. as in quantities, consider sequence position such as first-ness, second-ness, third-ness etc. These refer to a state/condition as to that specific relational position in order sequence. E.g. Every horse race jockey and those who bet money on them fully realize that there is a different instantiated feeling or experience of that of the position of 1st-ness as opposed to that of 4th-ness at the race finish line. These are very real to both the bettor and jockey for either positive or negative (ugliness) view of reality. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
On 6/14/2015 9:23 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: Arithmetic is full of life, ... and taxes and death. But it needs interpretation to be full of death and taxes. Otherwise it is just abstract relations. That's exactly why it is so useful; the same relations hold under many different interpretations. I recently asked on a mathematicians forum for a definition of mathematics. The common ones were the study of relations and the study of patterns. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
On 6/14/2015 12:45 PM, LizR wrote: On 14 June 2015 at 16:40, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 6/13/2015 9:18 PM, LizR wrote: None of this explain why it works so well anyway. I don't understand why the effectiveness of mathematics is considered problematic. First, we, creatures who evolved in this world, invented it to be useful. We invented counting and arithmetic to be used in describing and predicting things. And I've given examples where the rules of arithmetic don't work. So the second point is that we only apply them where they are effective. Where they are not effective we say that's a misapplication and we try to add rules to avoid those misapplications. Don't work in what sense? Don't apply to the universe, or are not self-consistent? In the sense that we have to be careful how we interpret and apply them and make approximations and simplifications and THEN they work. We invented it to be useful is not true, Sure we did. Some AND it's a non-argument. We invented religion to be useful, and lots of other things, but we didn't invent maths, we observed the regularities (e.g. conservation of number of things) But first we (or more likely evolution) invented the notion of individual things being members of classes, so that it was useful to count them and manipulate the numbers instead of trying to think about the individuals. If you've ever taught a little child numbers (and I assume you have since you're a mother) you know you must start by showing them very similar things. If you show them a car, an apple, and four people and ask them How many are they. you may well get Four. instead of Six. and codified them. But we did more than codify them. We made up theories about them. Nobody can have observed that EVERY number has a successor. We invented that because it's simple and it makes it easier to reason about some things. So it was something about the world that we discovered, and it works. I'm not making any metaphysical claims about it, but I don't understand why you feel this need to hand-wave the effectiveness away. It's just there (so far) -- and to quite a lot of decimal places. I'm not saying it's ineffective. I'm saying it's not a mystery why it's effective. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
On 14 June 2015 at 16:40, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 6/13/2015 9:18 PM, LizR wrote: None of this explain why it works so well anyway. I don't understand why the effectiveness of mathematics is considered problematic. First, we, creatures who evolved in this world, invented it to be useful. We invented counting and arithmetic to be used in describing and predicting things. And I've given examples where the rules of arithmetic don't work. So the second point is that we only apply them where they are effective. Where they are not effective we say that's a misapplication and we try to add rules to avoid those misapplications. Don't work in what sense? Don't apply to the universe, or are not self-consistent? We invented it to be useful is not true, AND it's a non-argument. We invented religion to be useful, and lots of other things, but we didn't invent maths, we observed the regularities (e.g. conservation of number of things) and codified them. So it was something about the world that we discovered, and it works. I'm not making any metaphysical claims about it, but I don't understand why you feel this need to hand-wave the effectiveness away. It's just there (so far) -- and to quite a lot of decimal places. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
My apologies. You also say something that boils down to THIS is how we discovered maths in the first place (abstracted from objects etc) ... THEREFORE we invented it. On which basis we invented gravity etc. What we invent is a description. (Of gravity, maths, etc.) That doesn't mean our description is free-floating with nothing being described. In the cases of gravity, maths etc there are good reasons to think otherwise. On 15 June 2015 at 09:49, LizR lizj...@gmail.com wrote: On 15 June 2015 at 08:22, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: I'm not saying it's ineffective. I'm saying it's not a mystery why it's effective. Because the universe appears to operate on principles that map very well onto some parts of maths, and may even map exactly (we have no reason to think not - every improvement in measurement so far indicates this, but there will always of course be room for doubt - just room that's been getting steadily smaller over the last few centuries). But you haven't said why it does so. I may not agree with Bruno or Max Tegmark, but at least they have a theory for why this *might* be so, and I haven't seen any definitive demonstration of mistakes in their theories as yet (there are lots of suggestions that may become definitive with more work, of course). So far, your answer to the question of the unreasonable effectiveness of maths is basically It works that way because it works that way, I can't explain it - but trust me, it isn't worth explaining. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
On 15 June 2015 at 08:22, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: I'm not saying it's ineffective. I'm saying it's not a mystery why it's effective. Because the universe appears to operate on principles that map very well onto some parts of maths, and may even map exactly (we have no reason to think not - every improvement in measurement so far indicates this, but there will always of course be room for doubt - just room that's been getting steadily smaller over the last few centuries). But you haven't said why it does so. I may not agree with Bruno or Max Tegmark, but at least they have a theory for why this *might* be so, and I haven't seen any definitive demonstration of mistakes in their theories as yet (there are lots of suggestions that may become definitive with more work, of course). So far, your answer to the question of the unreasonable effectiveness of maths is basically It works that way because it works that way, I can't explain it - but trust me, it isn't worth explaining. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
On 15 June 2015 at 11:13, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: On Mon, Jun 15, 2015 at 10:49:40AM +1200, LizR wrote: On 15 June 2015 at 10:41, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: To summarise, there appears to be two quite distinct questions here: a) Given there are regularities in Nature, why is our mathematics so effective. As Brent says, this is not surprising - evolution would see to it that we would choose a mathematical system out of the many possible that would be effective. That isn't surprising, of course - but I assume Brent wasn't being quite *that* disingenuous. What is surprising (if anything at all is) is that our world is amenable to description by maths. More of a genuine misunderstanding rather than disingenuity, I would say... I expect so, but Brent does seem to veer between brilliant insights and pointless comments, so I feel I have to stay on my toes and object vigorously to the silly bits, while gasping in awe at the rest. (That's probably not a bad thing, actually.) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
On 6/13/2015 LizR wrote: None of this explain why it works so well Mathematics is a language that can always describe regularities and it can do so more tersely than any other language; and if the laws of physics didn't have regularities they wouldn't be laws. But a language does not create the thing it describes. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
LizR wrote: On 15 June 2015 at 10:41, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au mailto:li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: To summarise, there appears to be two quite distinct questions here: a) Given there are regularities in Nature, why is our mathematics so effective. As Brent says, this is not surprising - evolution would see to it that we would choose a mathematical system out of the many possible that would be effective. That isn't surprising, of course - but I assume Brent wasn't being quite /that/ disingenuous. What is surprising (if anything at all is) is that our world is amenable to description by maths. That isn't particularly surprising either. The anthropic answer is that if there weren't such regularities, we wouldn't be here to ask questions about them. This answer has force if you assume some form of plenum -- everything that can exist does exist in some universe. It also follows from some more recent speculative cosmological and string landscape ideas. But these ideas really do not require that mathematics, per se, be at the basis of anything. Whether an anthropic answer will satisfy everyone is, however, another question Bruce -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
To summarise, there appears to be two quite distinct questions here: a) Given there are regularities in Nature, why is our mathematics so effective. As Brent says, this is not surprising - evolution would see to it that we would choose a mathematical system out of the many possible that would be effective. b) Why are there regularities in Nature describable by maths in the first place? This is the core of Wigner's question IMHO, and what Liz was referring to. To that end, the various proposals by Tegmark, Marchal, Solomonoff and so on are candidate answers - I won't describe my preferred solution here, as that should be well known by now. 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 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
On 15 June 2015 at 10:41, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: To summarise, there appears to be two quite distinct questions here: a) Given there are regularities in Nature, why is our mathematics so effective. As Brent says, this is not surprising - evolution would see to it that we would choose a mathematical system out of the many possible that would be effective. That isn't surprising, of course - but I assume Brent wasn't being quite *that* disingenuous. What is surprising (if anything at all is) is that our world is amenable to description by maths. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
On Mon, Jun 15, 2015 at 10:49:40AM +1200, LizR wrote: On 15 June 2015 at 10:41, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: To summarise, there appears to be two quite distinct questions here: a) Given there are regularities in Nature, why is our mathematics so effective. As Brent says, this is not surprising - evolution would see to it that we would choose a mathematical system out of the many possible that would be effective. That isn't surprising, of course - but I assume Brent wasn't being quite *that* disingenuous. What is surprising (if anything at all is) is that our world is amenable to description by maths. More of a genuine misunderstanding rather than disingenuity, I would say... -- 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 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
On 15 June 2015 at 14:19, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: It is plausible that regularities are a required feature of conscious existence This seems very likely, but it does assume something like a string landscape in which some regions don't contain regularities. Or to put it another way, regions in which maths doesn't work. This seems to be out-Tegmarking Tegmark, who assumes that at least maths is (meta-) universal. At this stage, it's no worse than assuming meaning generation is a necessary feature of existence, and that this can only take place by compression of regularities, which is the Solomonoff type answer... That would require a source of such regularities, surely? But that would seem to lead straight back to requiring that maths works. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
On Mon, Jun 15, 2015 at 09:35:47AM +1000, Bruce Kellett wrote: LizR wrote: On 15 June 2015 at 10:41, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au mailto:li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: To summarise, there appears to be two quite distinct questions here: a) Given there are regularities in Nature, why is our mathematics so effective. As Brent says, this is not surprising - evolution would see to it that we would choose a mathematical system out of the many possible that would be effective. That isn't surprising, of course - but I assume Brent wasn't being quite /that/ disingenuous. What is surprising (if anything at all is) is that our world is amenable to description by maths. That isn't particularly surprising either. The anthropic answer is that if there weren't such regularities, we wouldn't be here to ask questions about them. This answer has force if you assume some form of plenum -- everything that can exist does exist in some universe. It also follows from some more recent speculative cosmological and string landscape ideas. But these ideas really do not require that mathematics, per se, be at the basis of anything. Whether an anthropic answer will satisfy everyone is, however, another question It is plausible that regularities are a required feature of conscious existence, of course, but it does smack of a post-hoc justification. At this stage, it's no worse than assuming meaning generation is a necessary feature of existence, and that this can only take place by compression of regularities, which is the Solomonoff type answer... 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 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
On 15 June 2015 at 12:40, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On 6/13/2015 LizR wrote: None of this explain why it works so well Mathematics is a language it is? Are you saying that (a) there exists, out there, a language called maths which just happens to be great for describing reality, and which we have discovered, or (b) that we invented a language that doesn't actually refer to anything, yet it still just happens to be great for describing reality? Personally I'd say (c) we invented a language to describe something that is not itself a language, and that something happen to be great for describing reality. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
LizR wrote: On 15 June 2015 at 14:19, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au mailto:li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: It is plausible that regularities are a required feature of conscious existence This seems very likely, but it does assume something like a string landscape in which some regions don't contain regularities. Or to put it another way, regions in which maths doesn't work. This seems to be out-Tegmarking Tegmark, who assumes that at least maths is (meta-) universal. At this stage, it's no worse than assuming meaning generation is a necessary feature of existence, and that this can only take place by compression of regularities, which is the Solomonoff type answer... That would require a source of such regularities, surely? But that would seem to lead straight back to requiring that maths works. However, neither does Bruno's theory does not offer any explanation for the 'uniformity of nature'. He has to appeal to religion to magic away the 'white rabbits'. According to Bruno's account, the physical world is not even Turing emulable -- which one would think would be a requirement for regularities that could be described by physical laws. (If the physical laws are not computable, in what sense could one describe them as laws?) Bruce -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
The answer inspires me to ask, anything surprising or interesting in the patterns? The answer is no, but I needed to ask, despite this. Nothing of meaning to anyone, save, the math heads, who uncover relations and patterns. -Original Message- From: meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Sun, Jun 14, 2015 3:48 pm Subject: Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal On 6/14/2015 9:23 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: Arithmetic is full of life, ... and taxes and death. But it needs interpretation to be full of death and taxes. Otherwise it is just abstract relations. That's exactly why it is so useful; the same relations hold under many different interpretations. I recently asked on a mathematicians forum for a definition of mathematics. The common ones were the study of relations and the study of patterns. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
On 6/13/2015 9:18 PM, LizR wrote: None of this explain why it works so well anyway. I don't understand why the effectiveness of mathematics is considered problematic. First, we, creatures who evolved in this world, invented it to be useful. We invented counting and arithmetic to be used in describing and predicting things. And I've given examples where the rules of arithmetic don't work. So the second point is that we only apply them where they are effective. Where they are not effective we say that's a misapplication and we try to add rules to avoid those misapplications. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
None of this explain why it works so well anyway. On 14 June 2015 at 07:42, John Mikes jami...@gmail.com wrote: Brent concluded: *2+2=4. Then we discovered that these rules implied a lot of things we hadn't thought of. But they aren't out there, they're in our language.* This is 'MY' agnosticism talking: why do you think all the novelties are in our language, not out there? Our mind (whatever it may be) is receoptive to new input from 'out there' i.e. so far unknown content-items(for us) in the infinite Entirety. Once we start talking/thinking about them, they become OUR concepts (lesser- or better defined). Applied in ways how our human capabilities can do it. Then we beacome proud of it. JM On Sat, Jun 13, 2015 at 12:40 AM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 6/12/2015 6:29 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote: LizR wrote: On 12 June 2015 at 17:40, Bruce Kellett bhkell...@optusnet.com.au Arithmetic is, after all, only an axiomatic system. We can make up an indefinite number of axiomatic systems whose theorems are every bit as 'independent of us' as those of arithmetic. Are these also to be accepted as 'really real!'? Standard arithmetic is only important to us because it is useful in the physical world. It is invented, not fundamental. So you say, and you may be right. Or you may not. The question is whether 2+2=4 independently of human beings (and aliens who may have invented, or discovered as the case may be, arithmetic). It may well be independent of humans or other (alien) beings, but it has no meaning until you have defined what the symbols '2','4','+', and '=' mean. Then it is a tautology. Bruce It is commonly thought to be discovered and so to be ought there independent of human beings or any cognition. But when considered more carefully what was discovered is that one can group pairs to things together (at least in imagination) and have four things. So two fathers grouped with two sons is four people. Except when it's three people. So we said OK we'll *define* units to be things that obey the rules that 2+2=4. Then we discovered that these rules implied a lot of things we hadn't thought of. But they aren't out there, they're in our language. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
Brent concluded: *2+2=4. Then we discovered that these rules implied a lot of things we hadn't thought of. But they aren't out there, they're in our language.* This is 'MY' agnosticism talking: why do you think all the novelties are in our language, not out there? Our mind (whatever it may be) is receoptive to new input from 'out there' i.e. so far unknown content-items(for us) in the infinite Entirety. Once we start talking/thinking about them, they become OUR concepts (lesser- or better defined). Applied in ways how our human capabilities can do it. Then we beacome proud of it. JM On Sat, Jun 13, 2015 at 12:40 AM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 6/12/2015 6:29 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote: LizR wrote: On 12 June 2015 at 17:40, Bruce Kellett bhkell...@optusnet.com.au Arithmetic is, after all, only an axiomatic system. We can make up an indefinite number of axiomatic systems whose theorems are every bit as 'independent of us' as those of arithmetic. Are these also to be accepted as 'really real!'? Standard arithmetic is only important to us because it is useful in the physical world. It is invented, not fundamental. So you say, and you may be right. Or you may not. The question is whether 2+2=4 independently of human beings (and aliens who may have invented, or discovered as the case may be, arithmetic). It may well be independent of humans or other (alien) beings, but it has no meaning until you have defined what the symbols '2','4','+', and '=' mean. Then it is a tautology. Bruce It is commonly thought to be discovered and so to be ought there independent of human beings or any cognition. But when considered more carefully what was discovered is that one can group pairs to things together (at least in imagination) and have four things. So two fathers grouped with two sons is four people. Except when it's three people. So we said OK we'll *define* units to be things that obey the rules that 2+2=4. Then we discovered that these rules implied a lot of things we hadn't thought of. But they aren't out there, they're in our language. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
Russell Standish wrote: On Fri, Jun 12, 2015 at 03:40:48PM +1000, Bruce Kellett wrote: This is a false distinction. Arithmetical 'truth' is no more fundamental or final than physical truth. Arithmetic is, after all, only an axiomatic system. We can make up an indefinite number of axiomatic systems whose theorems are every bit as 'independent of us' as those of arithmetic. Are these also to be accepted as 'really real!'? Standard arithmetic is only important to us because it is useful in the physical world. It is invented, not fundamental. Yes - but comp actually doesn't depend on standard arithmetic either. What it depends on is the Church-Turing thesis to define what is meant by computation. Standard arithmetic is convenient, as it contains CT-thesis universal computers within it, but not essential. Any other ontology supporting the CT-thesis will do. The assumption of CT-thesis is not trivial, however. As David Deutsch would point out, one could assume the Hilbert Hotel, and get a form of hypercomputation. DD argues that lack of hypercomputers around us is evidence that physical reality cannot support more powerful computational models that the Turing one, but a more neutral way of putting it is to say that ontology (which may or may not be physical) cannot support more powerful models, effectively demarcating parts of Platonia. That is an interesting observation. One formulation of the CT thesis is that a Turing machine can do any calculation that can be done with pencil and paper. This relates Turing computations quite strongly to what is possible in the physical world. Deutsch's observation about hypercomputation is interesting here -- apart from some speculative possibilities in rotating black holes, hypercomputation is not possible in this physical universe. So is comp actually delineated by the physical world? And not as /a priori/ as might otherwise have been thought? The physical world determines comp, and not the reverse? Bruce -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
On Fri, Jun 12, 2015 at 03:40:48PM +1000, Bruce Kellett wrote: This is a false distinction. Arithmetical 'truth' is no more fundamental or final than physical truth. Arithmetic is, after all, only an axiomatic system. We can make up an indefinite number of axiomatic systems whose theorems are every bit as 'independent of us' as those of arithmetic. Are these also to be accepted as 'really real!'? Standard arithmetic is only important to us because it is useful in the physical world. It is invented, not fundamental. Yes - but comp actually doesn't depend on standard arithmetic either. What it depends on is the Church-Turing thesis to define what is meant by computation. Standard arithmetic is convenient, as it contains CT-thesis universal computers within it, but not essential. Any other ontology supporting the CT-thesis will do. The assumption of CT-thesis is not trivial, however. As David Deutsch would point out, one could assume the Hilbert Hotel, and get a form of hypercomputation. DD argues that lack of hypercomputers around us is evidence that physical reality cannot support more powerful computational models that the Turing one, but a more neutral way of putting it is to say that ontology (which may or may not be physical) cannot support more powerful models, effectively demarcating parts of Platonia. -- 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 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
On 6/12/2015 6:29 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote: LizR wrote: On 12 June 2015 at 17:40, Bruce Kellett bhkell...@optusnet.com.au Arithmetic is, after all, only an axiomatic system. We can make up an indefinite number of axiomatic systems whose theorems are every bit as 'independent of us' as those of arithmetic. Are these also to be accepted as 'really real!'? Standard arithmetic is only important to us because it is useful in the physical world. It is invented, not fundamental. So you say, and you may be right. Or you may not. The question is whether 2+2=4 independently of human beings (and aliens who may have invented, or discovered as the case may be, arithmetic). It may well be independent of humans or other (alien) beings, but it has no meaning until you have defined what the symbols '2','4','+', and '=' mean. Then it is a tautology. Bruce It is commonly thought to be discovered and so to be ought there independent of human beings or any cognition. But when considered more carefully what was discovered is that one can group pairs to things together (at least in imagination) and have four things. So two fathers grouped with two sons is four people. Except when it's three people. So we said OK we'll *define* units to be things that obey the rules that 2+2=4. Then we discovered that these rules implied a lot of things we hadn't thought of. But they aren't out there, they're in our language. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
meekerdb wrote: On 6/12/2015 6:29 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote: LizR wrote: On 12 June 2015 at 17:40, Bruce Kellett bhkell...@optusnet.com.au Arithmetic is, after all, only an axiomatic system. We can make up an indefinite number of axiomatic systems whose theorems are every bit as 'independent of us' as those of arithmetic. Are these also to be accepted as 'really real!'? Standard arithmetic is only important to us because it is useful in the physical world. It is invented, not fundamental. So you say, and you may be right. Or you may not. The question is whether 2+2=4 independently of human beings (and aliens who may have invented, or discovered as the case may be, arithmetic). It may well be independent of humans or other (alien) beings, but it has no meaning until you have defined what the symbols '2','4','+', and '=' mean. Then it is a tautology. Bruce It is commonly thought to be discovered and so to be ought there independent of human beings or any cognition. But when considered more carefully what was discovered is that one can group pairs to things together (at least in imagination) and have four things. So two fathers grouped with two sons is four people. Except when it's three people. So we said OK we'll *define* units to be things that obey the rules that 2+2=4. Then we discovered that these rules implied a lot of things we hadn't thought of. But they aren't out there, they're in our language. Brent I agree. But I think that the attraction of Platonism lies in the fact that if you abstract the notion of 'twoness' from all groups of two things, such as fathers, sons, pebbles, and so on, then you get an underlying perfect form that is independent of imperfections: such as the possibility that two fathers plus two sons might be only three people (or even only two people); or the unpleasant fact that two drops of water plus two drops of water might make only one drop of water. Platonism is a search for an escape from the 'ugliness' of reality. Bruce -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
LizR wrote: On 12 June 2015 at 17:40, Bruce Kellett bhkell...@optusnet.com.au Arithmetic is, after all, only an axiomatic system. We can make up an indefinite number of axiomatic systems whose theorems are every bit as 'independent of us' as those of arithmetic. Are these also to be accepted as 'really real!'? Standard arithmetic is only important to us because it is useful in the physical world. It is invented, not fundamental. So you say, and you may be right. Or you may not. The question is whether 2+2=4 independently of human beings (and aliens who may have invented, or discovered as the case may be, arithmetic). It may well be independent of humans or other (alien) beings, but it has no meaning until you have defined what the symbols '2','4','+', and '=' mean. Then it is a tautology. Bruce -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
On 12 June 2015 at 17:40, Bruce Kellett bhkell...@optusnet.com.au wrote: LizR wrote: You also say that 1p phenomena - in a physical theory - have to be eliminated (as per Dennett) or elevated to something we could call supernatural (for the sake of argument - in any case, something not covered by the underlying physics). But the alternative is apparently that subjective phenomena exist inside assumed-to-be-real arithmetic, and the (appearance of a) physical world somehow emerges from that. Both of these are problematic. The first seems plausible to me (in the elimiativist mode), but implausible in that it reifies matter and doesn't have an ontological status that could be called final, but merely one that is contingent (i.e. we're here because we're here because...) while arithmetical truth, if there is such a thing, does. This is a false distinction. Arithmetical 'truth' is no more fundamental or final than physical truth. I'm glad you have access to a metaphysical oracle which tells you these things. The rest of us have to remain agnostic, (which is why I said if there is such a thing). Arithmetic is, after all, only an axiomatic system. We can make up an indefinite number of axiomatic systems whose theorems are every bit as 'independent of us' as those of arithmetic. Are these also to be accepted as 'really real!'? Standard arithmetic is only important to us because it is useful in the physical world. It is invented, not fundamental. So you say, and you may be right. Or you may not. The question is whether 2+2=4 independently of human beings (and aliens who may have invented, or discovered as the case may be, arithmetic). Bruce -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
On 11 Jun 2015, at 20:50, meekerdb wrote: On 6/11/2015 6:58 AM, David Nyman wrote: Recent discussions on the purported 'reversal' of the relation between 'machine psychology' and physics seem to be running, as ever, into the sand over disagreements on the meaning and significance of rather complex arguments like the MGA. I'd like to try another tack. The computational theory of mind (CTM) asserts, in effect, that all experience is a simulation - i.e. is the net effect of some form of computational activity. Bruno's starting assumption, at the beginning of the UDA, is that a 'computation' be understood, conventionally, as any sequence of physical actions whose net effect adequately approximates that computation. This is essentially what I understand to be the standard physical notion of computation. One of its consequences, noted in step 7 of the UDA, is that a physical computer capable of instantiating the trace of a universal dovetailer (UD) would thereby simulate all possible experiences. If a computer running such a program were indeed to exist, it would be impossible to distinguish whether any given experience was a consequence of its activity or that of some other 'primitive' (i.e. non-simulated) physical system. Indeed, the quasi- fractal, super-redundancy of the trace of the UD would render it overwhelmingly improbable that the origin of any given experience lay outside of its domain. Of course, such a notion can be attacked by denying that any actual physical universe in which we are situated is sufficiently robust (i.e. extensive in space and time) to support the running of such a computer, or even if it were so robust, that any such device must necessarily be found in it. However, even at this point in the argument it may be a little disturbing to realise that we might escape the 'reversal' only by appealing to what might appear to be contingent, rather than essential, considerations. In order to torpedo these final objections, Bruno deploys the MGA, which is intended to show that any brute equivalence between net physical activity and computation, accepted previously, is in fact unsound. However, the issue of what the MGA does or does not demonstrate seems to open up a never-ending conversational can of worms. Perhaps there are simpler arguments that can be accepted, or at least that might lead to a clearer form of disagreement. My suggestion would be to re-examine the notion of computation itself as a foundation for a theory of mind. ISTM that as long as we restrict discussion to third-person (3p) notions, there is no unusual difficulty, in principle, in justifying an equivalence between some psychological state and the action of some physical system, understood as approximating a computation. This is the sort of thing we mean (or at least is implied) when we say that human psychology supervenes on the activity of the brain. According to the tried and tested principles of physical reduction (which essentially boil down to 'no strongly emergent phenomena') a psychological state supervening on the physical activity of the brain (at whatever level) should be understood as being nothing over and above the combined effects of more fundamental physical events and relations that underlie it. In other words, both 'psychology' and 'computation' should here be understood as composite terms that subsume a great mass of reducible sub- concepts, 'all the way down' to whatever level of physics we consider, for present purposes, as 'given'. None of this, as said before, occasions any special difficulty in explaining correlations between such concepts as psychology and computation, as long as it is realised that any new effects 'emerging' from the underlying physical sub-strata are ultimately to be understood as merely composites of more fundamental events and relations. If none of the foregoing presents any special theoretical difficulty so long as we restrict our arguments to the familiar 3p mode of discussion, the same can't be said of its application to first personal (1p) concepts. This is the point, I feel, where sheep and goats begin to shuffle apart (sheepishly or goatishly) in the matter of theories of mind. What too often gets lost in our discussions, ISTM, is the essential distinction between any third- person account of the first-person (e.g. as I am now doing in these paragraphs) and the 1p phenomenon itself. Whereas the former can be understood without special theoretical difficulties as a weakly emergent (i.e. composite) effect, the latter cannot, at least not without implicitly dismissing its status as an independently real phenomenon, in the manner of the Graziano theory recently discussed. It's perhaps not so surprising that this distinction is elusive, as there is no other circumstance, AFAIK, in which this consideration arises. Putatively
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
On 12 Jun 2015, at 08:13, Russell Standish wrote: On Fri, Jun 12, 2015 at 03:40:48PM +1000, Bruce Kellett wrote: This is a false distinction. Arithmetical 'truth' is no more fundamental or final than physical truth. Arithmetic is, after all, only an axiomatic system. We can make up an indefinite number of axiomatic systems whose theorems are every bit as 'independent of us' as those of arithmetic. Are these also to be accepted as 'really real!'? Standard arithmetic is only important to us because it is useful in the physical world. It is invented, not fundamental. Yes - but comp actually doesn't depend on standard arithmetic either. What it depends on is the Church-Turing thesis to define what is meant by computation. Standard arithmetic is convenient, as it contains CT-thesis universal computers within it, but not essential. Any other ontology supporting the CT-thesis will do. The assumption of CT-thesis is not trivial, however. As David Deutsch would point out, one could assume the Hilbert Hotel, and get a form of hypercomputation. DD argues that lack of hypercomputers around us is evidence that physical reality cannot support more powerful computational models that the Turing one, but a more neutral way of putting it is to say that ontology (which may or may not be physical) cannot support more powerful models, effectively demarcating parts of Platonia. Yes. It is the precise demarcation, in the arithmetical platonia, between the sigma_1 reality, and the pi_i and sigma_i more complex, non computable (but still well definite arithmetically) realities. Bruno -- 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 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
On 12 Jun 2015, at 07:40, Bruce Kellett wrote: LizR wrote: You also say that 1p phenomena - in a physical theory - have to be eliminated (as per Dennett) or elevated to something we could call supernatural (for the sake of argument - in any case, something not covered by the underlying physics). But the alternative is apparently that subjective phenomena exist inside assumed-to-be- real arithmetic, and the (appearance of a) physical world somehow emerges from that. Both of these are problematic. The first seems plausible to me (in the elimiativist mode), but implausible in that it reifies matter and doesn't have an ontological status that could be called final, but merely one that is contingent (i.e. we're here because we're here because...) while arithmetical truth, if there is such a thing, does. This is a false distinction. Arithmetical 'truth' is no more fundamental or final than physical truth. Arithmetic is, after all, only an axiomatic system. Sorry, but here you show that you have no knowledge of modern mathematical logic. Arithmetical truth, or reality, is subsumed in the usual structure (N, 0, +, *). Since Gödel we know that this is not a computable reality, and indeed that it escapes *all* effective theories. An axiomatic system, like RA, or PA, or ZF, can only scratch on the surface of the arithmetical reality. What is true, is that with comp, everything is determined by the much more tiny sigma_1 arithmetical truth, which is the arithmetical UD. From inside, the phenomenological is richer, and cannot be bounded in non computable complexity. Most machine's predicate are not computable. We can make up an indefinite number of axiomatic systems whose theorems are every bit as 'independent of us' as those of arithmetic. Once you assume one universal system, you get all the other for free. from now one I assume only the combinators K and S, and their combinations. That will help for the physical derivation. Are these also to be accepted as 'really real!'? Once one is real, all the other are real too. The robinson arithmetical axioms becomes theorem in combinatory algebra. Standard arithmetic is only important to us because it is useful in the physical world. It is invented, not fundamental. Amen. Bruno Bruce -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
On 12 Jun 2015, at 07:24, Bruce Kellett wrote: David Nyman wrote: Recent discussions on the purported 'reversal' of the relation between 'machine psychology' and physics seem to be running, as ever, into the sand over disagreements on the meaning and significance of rather complex arguments like the MGA. I'd like to try another tack. It is useful to have a different perspective. You have helped clarify some of the issues, for me at least. The computational theory of mind (CTM) asserts, in effect, that all experience is a simulation - i.e. is the net effect of some form of computational activity. Bruno's starting assumption, at the beginning of the UDA, is that a 'computation' be understood, conventionally, as any sequence of physical actions whose net effect adequately approximates that computation. This is essentially what I understand to be the standard physical notion of computation. One of its consequences, noted in step 7 of the UDA, is that a physical computer capable of instantiating the trace of a universal dovetailer (UD) would thereby simulate all possible experiences. If a computer running such a program were indeed to exist, it would be impossible to distinguish whether any given experience was a consequence of its activity or that of some other 'primitive' (i.e. non-simulated) physical system. Indeed, the quasi- fractal, super-redundancy of the trace of the UD would render it overwhelmingly improbable that the origin of any given experience lay outside of its domain. Of course, such a notion can be attacked by denying that any actual physical universe in which we are situated is sufficiently robust (i.e. extensive in space and time) to support the running of such a computer, or even if it were so robust, that any such device must necessarily be found in it. However, even at this point in the argument it may be a little disturbing to realise that we might escape the 'reversal' only by appealing to what might appear to be contingent, rather than essential, considerations. In order to torpedo these final objections, Bruno deploys the MGA, which is intended to show that any brute equivalence between net physical activity and computation, accepted previously, is in fact unsound. However, the issue of what the MGA does or does not demonstrate seems to open up a never-ending conversational can of worms. Perhaps there are simpler arguments that can be accepted, or at least that might lead to a clearer form of disagreement. The MGA fails because it is a thought experiment that seeks to establish a metaphysical result, namely, that there is no role for 'primitive' materialism. However, if the argument were valid, it would only establish some sort of dualism between consciousness and brain activity, whether the brain were physical or not. Because it is undoubtedly the case that consciousness does supervene on brain activity -- the experimental evidence for this is overwhelming. There are evidence that consciousness can be associated to brain activity, but some would say that there are evidence that consciousness does not need anything non computable in the brain, and there is no evidence that the consciousness does not supervene on the infinity of brain in arithmetic: on the contrary, even physicists are brought to the idea that our consciousness might depend on those infinities, like with Everett. We would not say yes to a doctor, if we did not believe in some local physical supervenience thesis. The reasoning just show tools to evaluate the clues that the physical itself emerges from coherence conditions in number (or combinators, ...) relations. One can't remove the brain (or some substituted physical equivalent) and still have consciousness. Remove where? If your brain is remove here, but not there, you will still not know that your brain has been removed. It is important to distinguish the first person view and the third person view. My suggestion would be to re-examine the notion of computation itself as a foundation for a theory of mind. ISTM that as long as we restrict discussion to third-person (3p) notions, there is no unusual difficulty, in principle, in justifying an equivalence between some psychological state and the action of some physical system, understood as approximating a computation. This is the sort of thing we mean (or at least is implied) when we say that human psychology supervenes on the activity of the brain. According to the tried and tested principles of physical reduction (which essentially boil down to 'no strongly emergent phenomena') a psychological state supervening on the physical activity of the brain (at whatever level) should be understood as being nothing over and above the combined effects of more fundamental physical events and relations that underlie it. In other words, both 'psychology' and 'computation'
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
On 6/11/2015 6:58 AM, David Nyman wrote: Recent discussions on the purported 'reversal' of the relation between 'machine psychology' and physics seem to be running, as ever, into the sand over disagreements on the meaning and significance of rather complex arguments like the MGA. I'd like to try another tack. The computational theory of mind (CTM) asserts, in effect, that all experience is a simulation - i.e. is the net effect of some form of computational activity. Bruno's starting assumption, at the beginning of the UDA, is that a 'computation' be understood, conventionally, as any sequence of physical actions whose net effect adequately approximates that computation. This is essentially what I understand to be the standard physical notion of computation. One of its consequences, noted in step 7 of the UDA, is that a physical computer capable of instantiating the trace of a universal dovetailer (UD) would thereby simulate all possible experiences. If a computer running such a program were indeed to exist, it would be impossible to distinguish whether any given experience was a consequence of its activity or that of some other 'primitive' (i.e. non-simulated) physical system. Indeed, the quasi-fractal, super-redundancy of the trace of the UD would render it overwhelmingly improbable that the origin of any given experience lay outside of its domain. Of course, such a notion can be attacked by denying that any actual physical universe in which we are situated is sufficiently robust (i.e. extensive in space and time) to support the running of such a computer, or even if it were so robust, that any such device must necessarily be found in it. However, even at this point in the argument it may be a little disturbing to realise that we might escape the 'reversal' only by appealing to what might appear to be contingent, rather than essential, considerations. In order to torpedo these final objections, Bruno deploys the MGA, which is intended to show that any brute equivalence between net physical activity and computation, accepted previously, is in fact unsound. However, the issue of what the MGA does or does not demonstrate seems to open up a never-ending conversational can of worms. Perhaps there are simpler arguments that can be accepted, or at least that might lead to a clearer form of disagreement. My suggestion would be to re-examine the notion of computation itself as a foundation for a theory of mind. ISTM that as long as we restrict discussion to third-person (3p) notions, there is no unusual difficulty, in principle, in justifying an equivalence between some psychological state and the action of some physical system, understood as approximating a computation. This is the sort of thing we mean (or at least is implied) when we say that human psychology supervenes on the activity of the brain. According to the tried and tested principles of physical reduction (which essentially boil down to 'no strongly emergent phenomena') a psychological state supervening on the physical activity of the brain (at whatever level) should be understood as being nothing over and above the combined effects of more fundamental physical events and relations that underlie it. In other words, both 'psychology' and 'computation' should here be understood as composite terms that subsume a great mass of reducible sub-concepts, 'all the way down' to whatever level of physics we consider, for present purposes, as 'given'. None of this, as said before, occasions any special difficulty in explaining correlations between such concepts as psychology and computation, as long as it is realised that any new effects 'emerging' from the underlying physical sub-strata are ultimately to be understood as merely composites of more fundamental events and relations. If none of the foregoing presents any special theoretical difficulty so long as we restrict our arguments to the familiar 3p mode of discussion, the same can't be said of its application to first personal (1p) concepts. This is the point, I feel, where sheep and goats begin to shuffle apart (sheepishly or goatishly) in the matter of theories of mind. What too often gets lost in our discussions, ISTM, is the essential distinction between any third-person account of the first-person (e.g. as I am now doing in these paragraphs) and the 1p phenomenon itself. Whereas the former can be understood without special theoretical difficulties as a weakly emergent (i.e. composite) effect, the latter cannot, at least not without implicitly dismissing its status as an independently real phenomenon, in the manner of the Graziano theory recently discussed. It's perhaps not so surprising that this distinction is elusive, as there is no other circumstance, AFAIK, in which this consideration arises. Putatively parallel examples of emergence, such as the 'liquidity' of water, aren't directly comparable, because no other phenomenon demands that
A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
Recent discussions on the purported 'reversal' of the relation between 'machine psychology' and physics seem to be running, as ever, into the sand over disagreements on the meaning and significance of rather complex arguments like the MGA. I'd like to try another tack. The computational theory of mind (CTM) asserts, in effect, that all experience is a simulation - i.e. is the net effect of some form of computational activity. Bruno's starting assumption, at the beginning of the UDA, is that a 'computation' be understood, conventionally, as any sequence of physical actions whose net effect adequately approximates that computation. This is essentially what I understand to be the standard physical notion of computation. One of its consequences, noted in step 7 of the UDA, is that a physical computer capable of instantiating the trace of a universal dovetailer (UD) would thereby simulate all possible experiences. If a computer running such a program were indeed to exist, it would be impossible to distinguish whether any given experience was a consequence of its activity or that of some other 'primitive' (i.e. non-simulated) physical system. Indeed, the quasi-fractal, super-redundancy of the trace of the UD would render it overwhelmingly improbable that the origin of any given experience lay outside of its domain. Of course, such a notion can be attacked by denying that any actual physical universe in which we are situated is sufficiently robust (i.e. extensive in space and time) to support the running of such a computer, or even if it were so robust, that any such device must necessarily be found in it. However, even at this point in the argument it may be a little disturbing to realise that we might escape the 'reversal' only by appealing to what might appear to be contingent, rather than essential, considerations. In order to torpedo these final objections, Bruno deploys the MGA, which is intended to show that any brute equivalence between net physical activity and computation, accepted previously, is in fact unsound. However, the issue of what the MGA does or does not demonstrate seems to open up a never-ending conversational can of worms. Perhaps there are simpler arguments that can be accepted, or at least that might lead to a clearer form of disagreement. My suggestion would be to re-examine the notion of computation itself as a foundation for a theory of mind. ISTM that as long as we restrict discussion to third-person (3p) notions, there is no unusual difficulty, in principle, in justifying an equivalence between some psychological state and the action of some physical system, understood as approximating a computation. This is the sort of thing we mean (or at least is implied) when we say that human psychology supervenes on the activity of the brain. According to the tried and tested principles of physical reduction (which essentially boil down to 'no strongly emergent phenomena') a psychological state supervening on the physical activity of the brain (at whatever level) should be understood as being nothing over and above the combined effects of more fundamental physical events and relations that underlie it. In other words, both 'psychology' and 'computation' should here be understood as composite terms that subsume a great mass of reducible sub-concepts, 'all the way down' to whatever level of physics we consider, for present purposes, as 'given'. None of this, as said before, occasions any special difficulty in explaining correlations between such concepts as psychology and computation, as long as it is realised that any new effects 'emerging' from the underlying physical sub-strata are ultimately to be understood as merely composites of more fundamental events and relations. If none of the foregoing presents any special theoretical difficulty so long as we restrict our arguments to the familiar 3p mode of discussion, the same can't be said of its application to first personal (1p) concepts. This is the point, I feel, where sheep and goats begin to shuffle apart (sheepishly or goatishly) in the matter of theories of mind. What too often gets lost in our discussions, ISTM, is the essential distinction between any third-person account of the first-person (e.g. as I am now doing in these paragraphs) and the 1p phenomenon itself. Whereas the former can be understood without special theoretical difficulties as a weakly emergent (i.e. composite) effect, the latter cannot, at least not without implicitly dismissing its status as an independently real phenomenon, in the manner of the Graziano theory recently discussed. It's perhaps not so surprising that this distinction is elusive, as there is no other circumstance, AFAIK, in which this consideration arises. Putatively parallel examples of emergence, such as the 'liquidity' of water, aren't directly comparable, because no other phenomenon demands that we 'stand in its place', as distinct from being characterised at second or third hand. Because our
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
Nice summary, though I'm not sure how it's (somewhat) different. Maybe I just missed the point. It looks like it's akin to Maudlin - along the lines of I can explain *your* conscious behaviour using a theory that boils down to what atoms do, but I can't explain *my* subjective experiences that way. I think in the last para you're saying there can't be a substitution level anywhere above the fundamental physics? That is, you say a computation cannot be accepted ... in the form of its physical approximations. If so, that is certainly something that worries me about this whole idea - I've never been happy with the idea that I would exist inside an AI that approximated my brain at (say) the level of cells, even if that could be shown to mimic the computations supposedly going on in my brain. I think at best it would be someone who thought she was me. (Although of course the same may be true of me!) You also say that 1p phenomena - in a physical theory - have to be eliminated (as per Dennett) or elevated to something we could call supernatural (for the sake of argument - in any case, something not covered by the underlying physics). But the alternative is apparently that subjective phenomena exist inside assumed-to-be-real arithmetic, and the (appearance of a) physical world somehow emerges from that. Both of these are problematic. The first seems plausible to me (in the elimiativist mode), but implausible in that it reifies matter and doesn't have an ontological status that could be called final, but merely one that is contingent (i.e. we're here because we're here because...) while arithmetical truth, if there is such a thing, does. Can you explain to a bear of little brain why your approach is somewhat different ? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
David Nyman wrote: Recent discussions on the purported 'reversal' of the relation between 'machine psychology' and physics seem to be running, as ever, into the sand over disagreements on the meaning and significance of rather complex arguments like the MGA. I'd like to try another tack. It is useful to have a different perspective. You have helped clarify some of the issues, for me at least. The computational theory of mind (CTM) asserts, in effect, that all experience is a simulation - i.e. is the net effect of some form of computational activity. Bruno's starting assumption, at the beginning of the UDA, is that a 'computation' be understood, conventionally, as any sequence of physical actions whose net effect adequately approximates that computation. This is essentially what I understand to be the standard physical notion of computation. One of its consequences, noted in step 7 of the UDA, is that a physical computer capable of instantiating the trace of a universal dovetailer (UD) would thereby simulate all possible experiences. If a computer running such a program were indeed to exist, it would be impossible to distinguish whether any given experience was a consequence of its activity or that of some other 'primitive' (i.e. non-simulated) physical system. Indeed, the quasi-fractal, super-redundancy of the trace of the UD would render it overwhelmingly improbable that the origin of any given experience lay outside of its domain. Of course, such a notion can be attacked by denying that any actual physical universe in which we are situated is sufficiently robust (i.e. extensive in space and time) to support the running of such a computer, or even if it were so robust, that any such device must necessarily be found in it. However, even at this point in the argument it may be a little disturbing to realise that we might escape the 'reversal' only by appealing to what might appear to be contingent, rather than essential, considerations. In order to torpedo these final objections, Bruno deploys the MGA, which is intended to show that any brute equivalence between net physical activity and computation, accepted previously, is in fact unsound. However, the issue of what the MGA does or does not demonstrate seems to open up a never-ending conversational can of worms. Perhaps there are simpler arguments that can be accepted, or at least that might lead to a clearer form of disagreement. The MGA fails because it is a thought experiment that seeks to establish a metaphysical result, namely, that there is no role for 'primitive' materialism. However, if the argument were valid, it would only establish some sort of dualism between consciousness and brain activity, whether the brain were physical or not. Because it is undoubtedly the case that consciousness does supervene on brain activity -- the experimental evidence for this is overwhelming. One can't remove the brain (or some substituted physical equivalent) and still have consciousness. My suggestion would be to re-examine the notion of computation itself as a foundation for a theory of mind. ISTM that as long as we restrict discussion to third-person (3p) notions, there is no unusual difficulty, in principle, in justifying an equivalence between some psychological state and the action of some physical system, understood as approximating a computation. This is the sort of thing we mean (or at least is implied) when we say that human psychology supervenes on the activity of the brain. According to the tried and tested principles of physical reduction (which essentially boil down to 'no strongly emergent phenomena') a psychological state supervening on the physical activity of the brain (at whatever level) should be understood as being nothing over and above the combined effects of more fundamental physical events and relations that underlie it. In other words, both 'psychology' and 'computation' should here be understood as composite terms that subsume a great mass of reducible sub-concepts, 'all the way down' to whatever level of physics we consider, for present purposes, as 'given'. None of this, as said before, occasions any special difficulty in explaining correlations between such concepts as psychology and computation, as long as it is realised that any new effects 'emerging' from the underlying physical sub-strata are ultimately to be understood as merely composites of more fundamental events and relations. This seems to be a reasonable account. If none of the foregoing presents any special theoretical difficulty so long as we restrict our arguments to the familiar 3p mode of discussion, the same can't be said of its application to first personal (1p) concepts. This is the point, I feel, where sheep and goats begin to shuffle apart (sheepishly or goatishly) in the matter of theories of mind. What too often gets lost in our discussions, ISTM, is the essential distinction between
Re: A (somewhat) different angle on the reversal
LizR wrote: You also say that 1p phenomena - in a physical theory - have to be eliminated (as per Dennett) or elevated to something we could call supernatural (for the sake of argument - in any case, something not covered by the underlying physics). But the alternative is apparently that subjective phenomena exist inside assumed-to-be-real arithmetic, and the (appearance of a) physical world somehow emerges from that. Both of these are problematic. The first seems plausible to me (in the elimiativist mode), but implausible in that it reifies matter and doesn't have an ontological status that could be called final, but merely one that is contingent (i.e. we're here because we're here because...) while arithmetical truth, if there is such a thing, does. This is a false distinction. Arithmetical 'truth' is no more fundamental or final than physical truth. Arithmetic is, after all, only an axiomatic system. We can make up an indefinite number of axiomatic systems whose theorems are every bit as 'independent of us' as those of arithmetic. Are these also to be accepted as 'really real!'? Standard arithmetic is only important to us because it is useful in the physical world. It is invented, not fundamental. Bruce -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
