Re: Can the physical brain possibly store our memories ? No.
Bruno: thanks for the TITLE of your post including the * N O * . John Mikes (*Subject:* Re: Can the physical brain possibly store our memories ? No.) ) On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 5:34 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 22 Dec 2012, at 12:16, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Bruno Marchal 1) Your concept of relative bits probably deflates my proposed idea, but I don't understand what they are. Maybe you can give a brief explanation. The UDA in sane04 should be the explanation. Have you progress in it? Feel free to ask question. 2) Also, I am aware that due to networks, a brain can process an almost infinite amount of information. But presumably that estimate would not include a noise or entropy limitation. I imagine that this has been estimated, but not sure. Below our subst level there is a priori infinite noise/energy. yes we have to take that into account. The winner physics is probably the one which couple genuinely the computable and the non computable. Bruno [Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net] rclo...@verizon.net] 12/22/2012 Forever is a long time, especially near the end. -Woody Allen - Receiving the following content - *From:* Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be *Receiver:* everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com *Time:* 2012-12-21, 13:25:36 *Subject:* Re: Can the physical brain possibly store our memories ? No. On 20 Dec 2012, at 19:01, Roger Clough wrote: Hi A simpler way to make my point is the axiom that no information can be stand alone, it must have context to give it meaning. The information needs a universal machine to interpret it. Universal machines needs also a universal machine to be themselves interpreted. That is why we have to assume at least one universal machine. Then if you accept Church thesis, it is a long, tedious, and not so easy task to prove that the elementary arithmetic taught in school is Turing universal, so we can start from this well know one. But that context can not be stored alone, it in turn must have context. And so forth. Thus one bit of information cannot simply be physically stored, it would extend to take up the entire physical universe. I don't follow you here. Your argument above only shows that we cannot store the one bit of information + some interpreter of that bit, + the universal environment supporting that bit, etc. But we don't need bits, we need only relative bits, and this store easily in any universal machine's memory. But our brains do apparently store enormous amounts of information. The above argument suggests that the bulk of this must be stored Platonically (mentally). OK. Because our states makes sense only relatively to many other states, and all that fit in arithmetic. BTW, I conjecture that this fits also on the border of the Mandelbrot set, making it a nice picture of a compact universal dovetailing. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9G6uO7ZHtK8list=PL70D5F39E3EFE6136index=1 [Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net] rclo...@verizon.net] 12/20/2012 Forever is a long time, especially near the end. -Woody Allen - Receiving the following content - *From:* Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net *Receiver:* everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com *Time:* 2012-12-20, 12:40:21 *Subject:* Jason and the Dragon's Teeth Hi meekerdb How can you store info on a particle ? Let's make this as simple as possible and say that you decide to write some information on a piece of paper in the form of 1's and 0's. Is that really information ? No. Not unless you provide additional information such as a) a definition of what information is b) where the information is (address) c) could this just be junk ? d) how to read the 1's and 0's apart from the blank spaces e) what spurious info from the blank spaces means j) how to tell that spurious information from 1's and 0's. e) how to. For every step I add, hoping to clear up the issue once and for all, other problems come to life, as in the Greek myth of Jason and the Dragon's teeth: http://www.mythweb.com/heroes/jason/jason14.html The Dragon's Teeth Aeetes, it turns out, had got his hands on some dragon's teeth with unique agricultural properties. As soon as these hit the soil they began to sprout, which was good from the point of view of Jason accomplishing his task by nightfall, but bad in terms of the harvest. For each seed germinated into a fully-armed warrior, who popped up from the ground and joined the throng now menacing poor Jason. You need info to store and read info, and info on what that means, etc. about the warrior killling enemy, and for each enemy that n gtell info have an decoding aparatus. Suppose you decide to store information on a computer disk. You say 'all I have to do is put a + charge here and nothing there. I don't think it's that simple. [Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net +rclo
Re: Can the physical brain possibly store our memories ? No.
On 26 Dec 2012, at 19:26, John Clark wrote: On Sat, Dec 22, 2012 at 7:22 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: information is not abstract, it's physical and is deeply involved with both energy and entropy. You confuse some notion of physical information with the mathematical notion(s). I am not confused and it is a fact that thinking of information as something physical has over the last century proven itself to be remarkably fertile and has led to the discovery of new knowledge, while thinking of information as ethereal was found to be sterile and has led to nowhere and nothing. False. All the radio and tele-communication have come from the purely mathematical theory of Shannon. Only with quantum mechanics, some physicalists, like Landauer and Deutsch, explore the speculation that there might be a notion of physical information. But to define it they still rely on Shannon and Turing purely mathematical notions. Also, don't use ethereal for immaterial, especially after asking if natural numbers need a reason to exist(*). Bruno (*) On Sat, Dec 22, 2012 at 11:05 AM, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: Why do the natural numbers exist? A better question is do the natural numbers need a reason to exist? I don't know the answer to that but my hunch is no. John K Clark John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com . For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Can the physical brain possibly store our memories ? No.
On 22 Dec 2012, at 12:16, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Bruno Marchal 1) Your concept of relative bits probably deflates my proposed idea, but I don't understand what they are. Maybe you can give a brief explanation. The UDA in sane04 should be the explanation. Have you progress in it? Feel free to ask question. 2) Also, I am aware that due to networks, a brain can process an almost infinite amount of information. But presumably that estimate would not include a noise or entropy limitation. I imagine that this has been estimated, but not sure. Below our subst level there is a priori infinite noise/energy. yes we have to take that into account. The winner physics is probably the one which couple genuinely the computable and the non computable. Bruno [Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net] 12/22/2012 Forever is a long time, especially near the end. -Woody Allen - Receiving the following content - From: Bruno Marchal Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-12-21, 13:25:36 Subject: Re: Can the physical brain possibly store our memories ? No. On 20 Dec 2012, at 19:01, Roger Clough wrote: Hi A simpler way to make my point is the axiom that no information can be stand alone, it must have context to give it meaning. The information needs a universal machine to interpret it. Universal machines needs also a universal machine to be themselves interpreted. That is why we have to assume at least one universal machine. Then if you accept Church thesis, it is a long, tedious, and not so easy task to prove that the elementary arithmetic taught in school is Turing universal, so we can start from this well know one. But that context can not be stored alone, it in turn must have context. And so forth. Thus one bit of information cannot simply be physically stored, it would extend to take up the entire physical universe. I don't follow you here. Your argument above only shows that we cannot store the one bit of information + some interpreter of that bit, + the universal environment supporting that bit, etc. But we don't need bits, we need only relative bits, and this store easily in any universal machine's memory. But our brains do apparently store enormous amounts of information. The above argument suggests that the bulk of this must be stored Platonically (mentally). OK. Because our states makes sense only relatively to many other states, and all that fit in arithmetic. BTW, I conjecture that this fits also on the border of the Mandelbrot set, making it a nice picture of a compact universal dovetailing. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9G6uO7ZHtK8list=PL70D5F39E3EFE6136index=1 [Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net] 12/20/2012 Forever is a long time, especially near the end. -Woody Allen - Receiving the following content - From: Roger Clough Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-12-20, 12:40:21 Subject: Jason and the Dragon's Teeth Hi meekerdb How can you store info on a particle ? Let's make this as simple as possible and say that you decide to write some information on a piece of paper in the form of 1's and 0's. Is that really information ? No. Not unless you provide additional information such as a) a definition of what information is b) where the information is (address) c) could this just be junk ? d) how to read the 1's and 0's apart from the blank spaces e) what spurious info from the blank spaces means j) how to tell that spurious information from 1's and 0's. e) how to. For every step I add, hoping to clear up the issue once and for all, other problems come to life, as in the Greek myth of Jason and the Dragon's teeth: http://www.mythweb.com/heroes/jason/jason14.html The Dragon's Teeth Aeetes, it turns out, had got his hands on some dragon's teeth with unique agricultural properties. As soon as these hit the soil they began to sprout, which was good from the point of view of Jason accomplishing his task by nightfall, but bad in terms of the harvest. For each seed germinated into a fully-armed warrior, who popped up from the ground and joined the throng now menacing poor Jason. You need info to store and read info, and info on what that means, etc. about the warrior killling enemy, and for each enemy that n gtell info have an decoding aparatus. Suppose you decide to store information on a computer disk. You say 'all I have to do is put a + charge here and nothing there. I don't think it's that simple. [Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net] 12/20/2012 Forever is a long time, especially near the end. -Woody Allen - Receiving the following content - From: meekerdb Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-12-19, 17:10:58 Subject: Re: the only truth we can understand is a man-made object On 12/19/2012 11:58 AM, Richard Ruquist wrote: On Wed, Dec 19, 2012 at 2:30 PM, meekerdb wrote: On 12/19/2012 8:34 AM, Roger Clough wrote: Hi meekerdb and Stephen, If information is stored
Re: Can the physical brain possibly store our memories ? No.
On Sat, Dec 22, 2012 at 11:05 AM, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.comwrote: Why do the natural numbers exist? A better question is do the natural numbers need a reason to exist? I don't know the answer to that but my hunch is no. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Can the physical brain possibly store our memories ? No.
On Sat, Dec 22, 2012 at 7:22 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: information is not abstract, it's physical and is deeply involved with both energy and entropy. You confuse some notion of physical information with the mathematical notion(s). I am not confused and it is a fact that thinking of information as something physical has over the last century proven itself to be remarkably fertile and has led to the discovery of new knowledge, while thinking of information as ethereal was found to be sterile and has led to nowhere and nothing. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Can the physical brain possibly store our memories ? No.
On 22 Dec 2012, at 11:58, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Bruno Marchal Thanks very much. Then could we not simply continue your train of thought to say that 1) all universal Turing machines require an extraneous UTM to interpret them, etc. etc. etc. That's why we have to assume at least one. But it happen that elementary arithmetic, in which we already believe, can do the work. That is why assume you believe and still remember that 0+1 = 1, etc. 2) this would extend the number of material parts needed (to process code) to infinity, requiring more matter than is present in the entire universe. Not at all. We don't have to assume any matter nor universe. It is redundant and leads to suprious difficulties, not just in the mind- body problem. 3) Which is impossible, but yet we are able to think. Therefore the above material limit does not pertain to mind. There is no matter. Only appearance of matter is stable dreams. 4) Thus mind does not depend on matter. Indeed. Human mind depend on apparent matter locally, but the whole of matter is a construct of the number's mind distributed in a complex way in arithmetic. The weakness of my argument would seem to be that any calculation --if we accept that each step or bit is context-dependent, and that context- dependent, etc. etc. -- would seem to be ultimately noncomputable. But computers can still do accurate calulations. You are partially correct. It is true that for all self-aware being supported by a computations, there is an unavoidable noise due to the first person equivalent computation occuring below the self-aware entity comp substitution level. This we can measure, and that is what makes comp testable indeed. The mandelbrot sets are beautiful, but any infinite series as in chaos theory is no less miraculous appearing. I'm perhaps looking for one with limits. I think the mandelbort set is universal for chaos and perhaps computation. Of course it would not be the only one. Bruno [Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net] 12/22/2012 Forever is a long time, especially near the end. -Woody Allen - Receiving the following content - From: Bruno Marchal Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-12-21, 13:25:36 Subject: Re: Can the physical brain possibly store our memories ? No. On 20 Dec 2012, at 19:01, Roger Clough wrote: Hi A simpler way to make my point is the axiom that no information can be stand alone, it must have context to give it meaning. The information needs a universal machine to interpret it. Universal machines needs also a universal machine to be themselves interpreted. That is why we have to assume at least one universal machine. Then if you accept Church thesis, it is a long, tedious, and not so easy task to prove that the elementary arithmetic taught in school is Turing universal, so we can start from this well know one. But that context can not be stored alone, it in turn must have context. And so forth. Thus one bit of information cannot simply be physically stored, it would extend to take up the entire physical universe. I don't follow you here. Your argument above only shows that we cannot store the one bit of information + some interpreter of that bit, + the universal environment supporting that bit, etc. But we don't need bits, we need only relative bits, and this store easily in any universal machine's memory. But our brains do apparently store enormous amounts of information. The above argument suggests that the bulk of this must be stored Platonically (mentally). OK. Because our states makes sense only relatively to many other states, and all that fit in arithmetic. BTW, I conjecture that this fits also on the border of the Mandelbrot set, making it a nice picture of a compact universal dovetailing. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9G6uO7ZHtK8list=PL70D5F39E3EFE6136index=1 [Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net] 12/20/2012 Forever is a long time, especially near the end. -Woody Allen - Receiving the following content - From: Roger Clough Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-12-20, 12:40:21 Subject: Jason and the Dragon's Teeth Hi meekerdb How can you store info on a particle ? Let's make this as simple as possible and say that you decide to write some information on a piece of paper in the form of 1's and 0's. Is that really information ? No. Not unless you provide additional information such as a) a definition of what information is b) where the information is (address) c) could this just be junk ? d) how to read the 1's and 0's apart from the blank spaces e) what spurious info from the blank spaces means j) how to tell that spurious information from 1's and 0's. e) how to. For every step I add, hoping to clear up the issue once and for all, other problems come to life, as in the Greek myth of Jason and the Dragon's teeth: http://www.mythweb.com/heroes/jason/jason14.html The Dragon's
Re: Re: Can the physical brain possibly store our memories ? No.
Hi Bruno Marchal Thanks very much. Then could we not simply continue your train of thought to say that 1) all universal Turing machines require an extraneous UTM to interpret them, etc. etc. etc. 2) this would extend the number of material parts needed (to process code) to infinity, requiring more matter than is present in the entire universe. 3) Which is impossible, but yet we are able to think. Therefore the above material limit does not pertain to mind. 4) Thus mind does not depend on matter. The weakness of my argument would seem to be that any calculation --if we accept that each step or bit is context-dependent, and that context- dependent, etc. etc. -- would seem to be ultimately noncomputable. But computers can still do accurate calulations. The mandelbrot sets are beautiful, but any infinite series as in chaos theory is no less miraculous appearing. I'm perhaps looking for one with limits. [Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net] 12/22/2012 Forever is a long time, especially near the end. -Woody Allen - Receiving the following content - From: Bruno Marchal Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-12-21, 13:25:36 Subject: Re: Can the physical brain possibly store our memories ? No. On 20 Dec 2012, at 19:01, Roger Clough wrote: Hi A simpler way to make my point is the axiom that no information can be stand alone, it must have context to give it meaning. The information needs a universal machine to interpret it. Universal machines needs also a universal machine to be themselves interpreted. That is why we have to assume at least one universal machine. Then if you accept Church thesis, it is a long, tedious, and not so easy task to prove that the elementary arithmetic taught in school is Turing universal, so we can start from this well know one. But that context can not be stored alone, it in turn must have context. And so forth. Thus one bit of information cannot simply be physically stored, it would extend to take up the entire physical universe. I don't follow you here. Your argument above only shows that we cannot store the one bit of information + some interpreter of that bit, + the universal environment supporting that bit, etc. But we don't need bits, we need only relative bits, and this store easily in any universal machine's memory. But our brains do apparently store enormous amounts of information. The above argument suggests that the bulk of this must be stored Platonically (mentally). OK. Because our states makes sense only relatively to many other states, and all that fit in arithmetic. BTW, I conjecture that this fits also on the border of the Mandelbrot set, making it a nice picture of a compact universal dovetailing. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9G6uO7ZHtK8list=PL70D5F39E3EFE6136index=1 [Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net] 12/20/2012 Forever is a long time, especially near the end. -Woody Allen - Receiving the following content - From: Roger Clough Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-12-20, 12:40:21 Subject: Jason and the Dragon's Teeth Hi meekerdb How can you store info on a particle ? Let's make this as simple as possible and say that you decide to write some information on a piece of paper in the form of 1's and 0's. Is that really information ? No. Not unless you provide additional information such as a) a definition of what information is b) where the information is (address) c) could this just be junk ? d) how to read the 1's and 0's apart from the blank spaces e) what spurious info from the blank spaces means j) how to tell that spurious information from 1's and 0's. e) how to. For every step I add, hoping to clear up the issue once and for all, other problems come to life, as in the Greek myth of Jason and the Dragon's teeth: http://www.mythweb.com/heroes/jason/jason14.html The Dragon's Teeth Aeetes, it turns out, had got his hands on some dragon's teeth with unique agricultural properties. As soon as these hit the soil they began to sprout, which was good from the point of view of Jason accomplishing his task by nightfall, but bad in terms of the harvest. For each seed germinated into a fully-armed warrior, who popped up from the ground and joined the throng now menacing poor Jason. You need info to store and read info, and info on what that means, etc. about the warrior killling enemy, and for each enemy that n gtell info have an decoding aparatus. Suppose you decide to store information on a computer disk. You say 'all I have to do is put a + charge here and nothing there. I don't think it's that simple. [Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net] 12/20/2012 Forever is a long time, especially near the end. -Woody Allen - Receiving the following content - From: meekerdb Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-12-19, 17:10:58 Subject: Re: the only truth we can understand is a man-made object On 12/19/2012
Re: Re: Can the physical brain possibly store our memories ? No.
Hi Bruno Marchal 1) Your concept of relative bits probably deflates my proposed idea, but I don't understand what they are. Maybe you can give a brief explanation. 2) Also, I am aware that due to networks, a brain can process an almost infinite amount of information. But presumably that estimate would not include a noise or entropy limitation. I imagine that this has been estimated, but not sure. [Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net] 12/22/2012 Forever is a long time, especially near the end. -Woody Allen - Receiving the following content - From: Bruno Marchal Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-12-21, 13:25:36 Subject: Re: Can the physical brain possibly store our memories ? No. On 20 Dec 2012, at 19:01, Roger Clough wrote: Hi A simpler way to make my point is the axiom that no information can be stand alone, it must have context to give it meaning. The information needs a universal machine to interpret it. Universal machines needs also a universal machine to be themselves interpreted. That is why we have to assume at least one universal machine. Then if you accept Church thesis, it is a long, tedious, and not so easy task to prove that the elementary arithmetic taught in school is Turing universal, so we can start from this well know one. But that context can not be stored alone, it in turn must have context. And so forth. Thus one bit of information cannot simply be physically stored, it would extend to take up the entire physical universe. I don't follow you here. Your argument above only shows that we cannot store the one bit of information + some interpreter of that bit, + the universal environment supporting that bit, etc. But we don't need bits, we need only relative bits, and this store easily in any universal machine's memory. But our brains do apparently store enormous amounts of information. The above argument suggests that the bulk of this must be stored Platonically (mentally). OK. Because our states makes sense only relatively to many other states, and all that fit in arithmetic. BTW, I conjecture that this fits also on the border of the Mandelbrot set, making it a nice picture of a compact universal dovetailing. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9G6uO7ZHtK8list=PL70D5F39E3EFE6136index=1 [Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net] 12/20/2012 Forever is a long time, especially near the end. -Woody Allen - Receiving the following content - From: Roger Clough Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-12-20, 12:40:21 Subject: Jason and the Dragon's Teeth Hi meekerdb How can you store info on a particle ? Let's make this as simple as possible and say that you decide to write some information on a piece of paper in the form of 1's and 0's. Is that really information ? No. Not unless you provide additional information such as a) a definition of what information is b) where the information is (address) c) could this just be junk ? d) how to read the 1's and 0's apart from the blank spaces e) what spurious info from the blank spaces means j) how to tell that spurious information from 1's and 0's. e) how to. For every step I add, hoping to clear up the issue once and for all, other problems come to life, as in the Greek myth of Jason and the Dragon's teeth: http://www.mythweb.com/heroes/jason/jason14.html The Dragon's Teeth Aeetes, it turns out, had got his hands on some dragon's teeth with unique agricultural properties. As soon as these hit the soil they began to sprout, which was good from the point of view of Jason accomplishing his task by nightfall, but bad in terms of the harvest. For each seed germinated into a fully-armed warrior, who popped up from the ground and joined the throng now menacing poor Jason. You need info to store and read info, and info on what that means, etc. about the warrior killling enemy, and for each enemy that n gtell info have an decoding aparatus. Suppose you decide to store information on a computer disk. You say 'all I have to do is put a + charge here and nothing there. I don't think it's that simple. [Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net] 12/20/2012 Forever is a long time, especially near the end. -Woody Allen - Receiving the following content - From: meekerdb Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-12-19, 17:10:58 Subject: Re: the only truth we can understand is a man-made object On 12/19/2012 11:58 AM, Richard Ruquist wrote: On Wed, Dec 19, 2012 at 2:30 PM, meekerdb wrote: On 12/19/2012 8:34 AM, Roger Clough wrote: Hi meekerdb and Stephen, If information is stored in quantum form, I can't see why the number of particles in the universe can be a limiting fsactor. Information has to be instantiated in matter (unless you're a Platonist like Bruno). No particles, no excited field modes - no information. Also there are ways of storing information holographically, so size gets
Re: Can the physical brain possibly store our memories ? No.
On 21 Dec 2012, at 22:17, John Clark wrote: On Thu, Dec 20, 2012 at 1:01 PM, Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net wrote: The infinite set of natural numbers is not stored on anything, Which causes no problem because there is not a infinite number of anything in the observable universe, probably not even points in space. Perhaps, we don't know. It causes no problem because natural numbers does not have to be stored a priori. Only when universal machine want to use them. no information can be stand alone, it must have context to give it meaning. I think that's true because information is not abstract, it's physical and is deeply involved with both energy and entropy. You confuse some notion of physical information with the mathematical notion(s). But that context can not be stored alone, it in turn must have context. No because matter and energy are generic. In any context the 2 electrons in a helium atom always have opposite spin. Thus one bit of information cannot simply be physically stored, Quiet, keep your voice down! If anybody hears you it will destroy the multi-trillion dollar computer industry and put millions of people out of work. But our brains do apparently store enormous amounts of information. And so the silly game of trying to inflate our ego by convincing ourselves that we are special and inherently superior to machines continues. If we are machine we must explain the existence of physical information from the mathematical information available to the universal machine in arithmetic. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Can the physical brain possibly store our memories ? No.
Hi Bruno, On Thu, Dec 20, 2012 at 1:01 PM, Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net wrote: The infinite set of natural numbers is not stored on anything, Which causes no problem because there is not a infinite number of anything in the observable universe, probably not even points in space. Perhaps, we don't know. It causes no problem because natural numbers does not have to be stored a priori. Only when universal machine want to use them. Why do the natural numbers exist? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Can the physical brain possibly store our memories ? No.
On 20 Dec 2012, at 19:01, Roger Clough wrote: Hi A simpler way to make my point is the axiom that no information can be stand alone, it must have context to give it meaning. The information needs a universal machine to interpret it. Universal machines needs also a universal machine to be themselves interpreted. That is why we have to assume at least one universal machine. Then if you accept Church thesis, it is a long, tedious, and not so easy task to prove that the elementary arithmetic taught in school is Turing universal, so we can start from this well know one. But that context can not be stored alone, it in turn must have context. And so forth. Thus one bit of information cannot simply be physically stored, it would extend to take up the entire physical universe. I don't follow you here. Your argument above only shows that we cannot store the one bit of information + some interpreter of that bit, + the universal environment supporting that bit, etc. But we don't need bits, we need only relative bits, and this store easily in any universal machine's memory. But our brains do apparently store enormous amounts of information. The above argument suggests that the bulk of this must be stored Platonically (mentally). OK. Because our states makes sense only relatively to many other states, and all that fit in arithmetic. BTW, I conjecture that this fits also on the border of the Mandelbrot set, making it a nice picture of a compact universal dovetailing. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9G6uO7ZHtK8list=PL70D5F39E3EFE6136index=1 [Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net] 12/20/2012 Forever is a long time, especially near the end. -Woody Allen - Receiving the following content - From: Roger Clough Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-12-20, 12:40:21 Subject: Jason and the Dragon's Teeth Hi meekerdb How can you store info on a particle ? Let's make this as simple as possible and say that you decide to write some information on a piece of paper in the form of 1's and 0's. Is that really information ? No. Not unless you provide additional information such as a) a definition of what information is b) where the information is (address) c) could this just be junk ? d) how to read the 1's and 0's apart from the blank spaces e) what spurious info from the blank spaces means j) how to tell that spurious information from 1's and 0's. e) how to. For every step I add, hoping to clear up the issue once and for all, other problems come to life, as in the Greek myth of Jason and the Dragon's teeth: http://www.mythweb.com/heroes/jason/jason14.html The Dragon's Teeth Aeetes, it turns out, had got his hands on some dragon's teeth with unique agricultural properties. As soon as these hit the soil they began to sprout, which was good from the point of view of Jason accomplishing his task by nightfall, but bad in terms of the harvest. For each seed germinated into a fully-armed warrior, who popped up from the ground and joined the throng now menacing poor Jason. You need info to store and read info, and info on what that means, etc. about the warrior killling enemy, and for each enemy that n gtell info have an decoding aparatus. Suppose you decide to store information on a computer disk. You say 'all I have to do is put a + charge here and nothing there. I don't think it's that simple. [Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net] 12/20/2012 Forever is a long time, especially near the end. -Woody Allen - Receiving the following content - From: meekerdb Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-12-19, 17:10:58 Subject: Re: the only truth we can understand is a man-made object On 12/19/2012 11:58 AM, Richard Ruquist wrote: On Wed, Dec 19, 2012 at 2:30 PM, meekerdb wrote: On 12/19/2012 8:34 AM, Roger Clough wrote: Hi meekerdb and Stephen, If information is stored in quantum form, I can't see why the number of particles in the universe can be a limiting fsactor. Information has to be instantiated in matter (unless you're a Platonist like Bruno). No particles, no excited field modes - no information. Also there are ways of storing information holographically, so size gets a bit ambiguous. The holographic principle says that the information that can be instantiated in spherical must be less than the area of the bounding surface in Planck units. So there's a definite bound. If we looks at the average information density in the universe (which is dominated by low energy photons from the CMB) and ask at what radius does the spherical volume times the density equal the holographic limit for that volume based on the surface area we find it is on the order of the Hubble radius, i.e. the radius at which things are receding at light speed. This suggests the expansion rate of the universe and and gravity are entropic phenomena. Brent Brent, Perhaps you or somebody can help me out. I always believed that
Re: Can the physical brain possibly store our memories ? No.
On Thu, Dec 20, 2012 at 1:01 PM, Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net wrote: The infinite set of natural numbers is not stored on anything, Which causes no problem because there is not a infinite number of anything in the observable universe, probably not even points in space. no information can be stand alone, it must have context to give it meaning. I think that's true because information is not abstract, it's physical and is deeply involved with both energy and entropy. But that context can not be stored alone, it in turn must have context. No because matter and energy are generic. In any context the 2 electrons in a helium atom always have opposite spin. Thus one bit of information cannot simply be physically stored, Quiet, keep your voice down! If anybody hears you it will destroy the multi-trillion dollar computer industry and put millions of people out of work. But our brains do apparently store enormous amounts of information. And so the silly game of trying to inflate our ego by convincing ourselves that we are special and inherently superior to machines continues. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Can the physical brain possibly store our memories ? No.
On 12/20/2012 1:01 PM, Roger Clough wrote: Hi A simpler way to make my point is the axiom that no information can be stand alone, it must have context to give it meaning. But that context can not be stored alone, it in turn must have context. And so forth. Thus one bit of information cannot simply be physically stored, it would extend to take up the entire physical universe. But our brains do apparently store enormous amounts of information. The above argument suggests that the bulk of this must be stored Platonically (mentally). Hi Roger, Well said! -- Onward! Stephen -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
