Re: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/17/2012 2:37 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 17 Feb 2012, at 14:23, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/17/2012 4:48 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 16 Feb 2012, at 20:09, Stephen P. King wrote: Hi ACW, I understand the UDA, as I have read every one of Bruno's English papers and participated in these discussions, at least. You do not need to keep repeating the same lines. ;-) The point is that the doctor assumption already includes the existence of the equivalent machine and from there the argument follows. If you think such a doctor can never exist, yet that there still is an equivalent turing-emulable implementation that is possible *in principle*, I just direct you at www.paul-almond.com/ManyWorldsAssistedMindUploading.htm which merely requires a random oracle to get you there (which is given to you if MWI happens to be true). Does this in principle proof include the requirements of thermodynamics or is it a speculation based on a set of assumptions that might just seem plausible if we ignore physics? I like the idea of a random Oracles, but to use them is like using sequences of lottery winnings to code words that one wants to speak. The main problem is that one has no control at all over which numbers will pop up, so one has to substitute a scheme to select numbers after they have rolled into the basket. This entire idea can be rephrased in terms of how radio signals are embedded in noise and that a radio is a non-random Oracle. If such a substitution is not possible even in principle, then you consider UDA's first assumption as false and thus also COMP/CTM being false (neuroscience does suggest that it's not, but we don't know that, and probably never will 100%, unless we're willing to someday say yes to such a computationalist doctor and find out for ourselves). All of this substitution stuff is predicated upon the possibility that the brain can be emulated by a Universal Turing Machine. It would be helpful if we first established that a Turing Machine is capable of what we are assuming it do be able to do. I am pretty well convinced that it cannot based on all that I have studied of QM and its implications. For example, one has to consider the implications of the Kochen-Specker http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kochen-specker/ and Gleason http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qt-quantlog/#1 Theorems - since we hold mathematical theorems in such high regard! We don't assume physics. When you check the validity of a reasoning, it makes no sense to add new hypotheses in the premises. All talk of Copying has to assume a reality where decoherence has occurred sufficiently to allow the illusion of a classical world to obtain, or something equivalent... In Sane04 we see discussion that assume the physical world to be completely classical therefore it assumes a model of Reality that is not true. Absolutely not. Show me the paragraph on sane04 where classicality is assumed. You might say in the first six UDA steps, where we use the neuro-hypothesis, but this is for pedagogical reason, and that assumption is explicitly eliminated in the step seven. You forget that Quantum reality is Turing emulable. Dear Bruno, I agree with this but I would like to pull back a bit from the infinite limit without going to the ultrafinitist idea. What we observe must always be subject to the A or ~A rule or we could not have consistent plural 1p, but is this absolute? I am not sure what we observe should always be subject to A or ~A rule. I don't think that's true in QM, nor in COMP. Dear Bruno, Think about it, what would be the consequence of allowing A ^ ~A to occur in sharable 1p? If we start out with the assumption that all logics exist as possible and then consider which logics allow for sharable 1p, then only the logics that include the law of bivalence would have sharable 1p that have arbitrarily long continuations. We could get contradictions in the physics at least! This would disallow for any kind of derivation of physical laws. My thinking is motivated by J.A. Wheeler's comments, re: It from Bit and Law without Law. We are considering that our physical laws derive from the sharable aspects of first person content, after all... This is a natural implication of UDA, no? So either we are assuming that physical laws are given ab initio or that they emerge from sharable 1p. Either way, the logic of observables in any sharable 1p must be A or ~A. This is part of my reasoning that observer logic is restricted to Boolean algebras (or Boolean Free Algebras generally). My question is looking at how we extend the absolute space and time of Newton to the Relativistic case such that observers always see physical laws as invariant to their motions, for the COMP case this would be similar except that observer will see arithmetic rules as invariant with respect to their computations. (I am equating
Re: On Pre-existing Fields
On 17 Feb 2012, at 22:26, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/17/2012 2:24 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 17 Feb 2012, at 13:51, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/17/2012 4:19 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 16 Feb 2012, at 16:57, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/16/2012 4:49 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 15 Feb 2012, at 08:07, Stephen P. King wrote: By the way, Darwin's theory revolves around the notion of evolution, that simpler objects can evolve and change. Numbers, by definition, cannot change and thus cannot implement any form of change or evolution. So you assume a primitive time? No, there cannot be a primitive time because that would require a primitive measure and the same reasons that we cannot have primitive physical worlds nor primitive abstract entities would hold. We need to discuss how measures come to occur. First person indeterminacy. It is the classical boolean Gaussian measure on the set of relative computations, as seen by the machines (the as seen is made technically precise in AUDA). Dear Bruno, I had a tiny epiphany this morning as I read your remarks and I think that it is best that I surrender to you on my complaint that your result goes to far and is really a form of ideal monism and turn to discussions of the ideas of measures and interactions. My main motivation is to see how far Prof. Kitada and Pratt's ideas are compatible withyours. Could you elaborate a bit on Gaussian measures. They are unfamiliar to me. Once you accept P = 1/2 for the first person indeterminacy on a domain with two (and only two) relative reconstitutions, you can verify that the 2^n persons obtained after an iterated WM self- duplication can discover that they can be partitioned by the numbers of having gone in W (resp. M), and that those numbers are given by the binomial coefficients. The Gaussian distribution is obtained in the limit, by the law of big numbers. Surely you know this. In front of the UD, that Gaussian distribution becomes quantum like due to the constraints of self-reference, and of the appurtenance of the computational states to computations. Intuitively we can guess that the winning computations will exploit the random oracle given by the self-multiplication so that a notion of normal histories can develop. But comp+classical-theory of knowledge does not permit the use of such intuition, we have to retrieve this form the self-reference logic, so that we can distinguish the communicable and non communicable parts. The logic of measure one have been already retrieved, if we agree on the definition used in AUDA. Of course we can still speculate on what such a measure can look like. Dear Bruno, I will study more on the Gaussian measure (although it seems that you are using the Gaussian distribution idea...) no problem. Yes. It is the gaussian distribution, with Lebegues measure in the background, in the case of the ierated self-duplication. What I would like to know is how we go from a very large to infinite collection of distributive algebras to non-distributive orthocomplete lattices, for that is what you are implying. They are given by the logic of certain-observable, given by the S4grz1, X1* and Z1* hypostases. (The one corresponding to the arithmetical variants of self-reference Bp p, Bp Dt, Bp Dt p, with p Sigma_1, and B and D like in Gödel 1931. I can see ambiguously how this works given 1p indeterminacy, but it would be nice to have a local approximation of this mechanism. See the part II of sane04. 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: On Pre-existing Fields
Dear Stephen, On 18 Feb 2012, at 20:09, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/17/2012 2:37 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 17 Feb 2012, at 14:23, Stephen P. King wrote: I agree with this but I would like to pull back a bit from the infinite limit without going to the ultrafinitist idea. What we observe must always be subject to the A or ~A rule or we could not have consistent plural 1p, but is this absolute? I am not sure what we observe should always be subject to A or ~A rule. I don't think that's true in QM, nor in COMP. Dear Bruno, Think about it, what would be the consequence of allowing A ^ ~A to occur in sharable 1p? I thought we were discussing A V ~A. If we start out with the assumption that all logics exist as possible I have no referent for all logics. I can't assume this. and then consider which logics allow for sharable 1p, then only the logics that include the law of bivalence would have sharable 1p that have arbitrarily long continuations. ? We could get contradictions in the physics at least! This would disallow for any kind of derivation of physical laws. My thinking is motivated by J.A. Wheeler's comments, re: It from Bit and Law without Law. We are considering that our physical laws derive from the sharable aspects of first person content, after all... This is a natural implication of UDA, no? So either we are assuming that physical laws are given ab initio or that they emerge from sharable 1p. UDA shows them to have to emerge from sharable 1p. OK. Either way, the logic of observables in any sharable 1p must be A or ~A. ? This is part of my reasoning that observer logic is restricted to Boolean algebras (or Boolean Free Algebras generally). This refuted in the material hypostases. You might elaborate on the proof above, but the premise is fuzzy, for the experession all logics does not make sense for me. My question is looking at how we extend the absolute space and time of Newton to the Relativistic case such that observers always see physical laws as invariant to their motions, for the COMP case this would be similar except that observer will see arithmetic rules as invariant with respect to their computations. (I am equating computations with motions here.) OK. So do you understand my question about the Standard-ness of arithmetic models? I am assuming that each 1p continuation has to implement a model of arithmetic that would seem to be standard so that it always is countable and recursive, if only to allow for continuation. Is this OK so far? Not really, because the model of the intensional variants of the self- reference logics don't need to be defined in term of model of arithmetic. An 1p continuation does not necessarily corresponds to a standard/non-standard choice. I do not know where the arithmetic model would be implemented. What do mean by a model being implemented. Computations are implemented in the arithmetical true and provable (sigma_1) relations. Would it be in the Loebian Machine or a sublogic of it? In arithmetic. The idea is that every observer thinks that it's arithmetic is countable and recursive even though from the point of view of god (a 3p abstraction) every observers model is non-standard. Proof, or argument needed. The contrary occurs? For God everything is simple (arithmetical truth), but for the machine inside in the transfinite non computable unnameable mess. The alternate option to COMP being false is usually some form of infinitely complex matter and infinitely low subst. level. Either way, one option allows copying(COMP), even if at worst indirect or just accidentally correct, while the other just assumes that there is no subst. level. No, this is only the primitive matter assumption that you are presenting. I have been arguing that, among other things, the idea of primitive matter is nonsense. It might help if you wanted to discuss ideas and not straw men with me. This contradicts your refutation based on the need of having a physical reality to communicate about numbers. OK, I will try to not debate that but it goes completely against my intuition of what is required to solve the concurrency problem. Do you have any comment on the idea that the Tennenbaum theorem seems to indicate that standardness in the sense of the standard model of arithmetic might be an invariant for observers in the same way that the speed of light is an invariant of motions in physics? My motivation for this is that the identity - the center of one's sense of self being in the world - that the 1p captures is always excluded from one's experience. Could the finiteness of the integers result from the constant (that would make one's model of arithmetic non-standard) being hidden in that identity? This wording is terrible, but I need to write it for now and
Re: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/18/2012 11:09 AM, Stephen P. King wrote: Think about it, what would be the consequence of allowing A ^ ~A to occur in sharable 1p? If we start out with the assumption that all logics exist as possible and then consider which logics allow for sharable 1p, then only the logics that include the law of bivalence would have sharable 1p that have arbitrarily long continuations. We could get contradictions in the physics at least! No, that's confusing talk about physics from physics. There are para-consistent logics which permit (A and not-A) but block inference to every proposition (c.f. Graham Priest In Contradiction). Brent -- 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: On Pre-existing Fields
On 16 Feb 2012, at 18:58, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/16/2012 11:54 AM, acw wrote: On 2/16/2012 15:59, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/16/2012 6:57 AM, acw wrote: On 2/15/2012 07:07, Stephen P. King wrote: [SPK] Interesting. How then do we explain the fact that humans suffer all kinds of computational errors such as schizophrenia, dismorphia, etc. We intentionally lie... The list of computationally erroneous behavior of the brain is almost endless. How does this occur given COMP? But I digress. Explaining physical reality is to explain the properties that it has as opposed to those that it does not, UDA does not do that. It even presupposes things that are simply not possible in the physical world, such as teleportation and computations generating knowledge without the use of resources. Even a Reversible computer requires memory to compute and memory is a physical quantity. The notion of teleportation used in UDA is nothing magical or requiring new physics. The experiments in the UDA can be read as after someone said yes to the doctor and became a SIM(Substrate Independent Mind), thus after the substitution, they can know one of their godel numbers/programs (assuming correct observation). This essentially means that said program state can be transmitted and ran/instantiated anywhere you want and with any delay or order or form. A teleportation from A to B would merely require the SIM to stop itself in A, have another program transmit it to B(for example through the Internet or some other communication channel) and have someone run it in B, for example on a general purpose Turing-equivalent computer or more likely a special-purpose digital brain (for better performance within our physics) with access to an environment(or more, such as VRs). For all intents and purposes this isn't any different from me writing a program and you downloading it and running it on your own hardware. For UDA 1-5 this works trivially. For UDA 6, it also works, with changes in software. UDA 7 does make a stronger assumption: the sufficiently robust universe, however one doesn't really assume strong physical continuity by now (by 1-6), so I don't see UD even has to be coherently ran all at once and in a continuous manner (for example a running like that in Permutation City would work just well, in the dust). If you do consider some other 'everything' theories like Tegmark's or Schmidhuber, they also grant you an UD (and I would venture to say that your neutral Existence might also grant you such robust universes). UDA 8 you seem to disagree with, but I don't see what explanatory power could any primitively physical structure grant you: all possible digitalised observers and their continuations already have to be in the UD, thus you cannot use primitive physics for prediction. Thus the only claim that one could make for saving primitive physics would be that it allows for consciousness to manifest (for example by implementing the body). UDA 8 and MGA show that such a claim is specious and unnecessary. You seem to disagree with it, although its not clear to me as to why or how. You seem to claim that physical reality isn't primary (COMP agrees, it emerges from arithmetical/computational truth), although don't agree with the way it emerges in COMP or its nature(?)? Does that mean that you don't think that all possible observers are contained in the UD? To be frank, I'm still rather confused at what point your theory becomes incompatible or predicts different things than COMP (given the standard assumptions used in the UDA). Dear ACW, Please rethink exactly what teleportation requires to be possible. It is not any different from the ability to copy information. Yes, COMP assumes that there is a subst. level, which means that stuff below the subst. level may vary (or even look like noise, due to 1p-indeterminacy, we tend to think of this, in our universe, as the quantum foam and the like). A doctor (which is included in the assumption, but if it weren't...) only need be able to copy/emulate either exactly at the right subst. level or slightly below it (copying at a higher level may entail memory loss or functionality loss or worse). What this effectively means is that you don't need to be able to read the full quantum state (which is not possible), but just quasi-classical states, which we can do and which should be either at subst. level or below. (If the subst. level was below, COMP would be practically false, as we do assume that the observer's universal number is at least partially stable at the subst. level). No violation of the no-cloning theorem here. And aside from that we can copy/transmit quasi-classical information pretty well. Hi ACW, There is a problem with this way of thinking in that it assumes that all of the properties of objects are inherent in the objects themselves and have no relation or dependence on
Re: On Pre-existing Fields
On 16 Feb 2012, at 20:09, Stephen P. King wrote: Hi ACW, I understand the UDA, as I have read every one of Bruno's English papers and participated in these discussions, at least. You do not need to keep repeating the same lines. ;-) The point is that the doctor assumption already includes the existence of the equivalent machine and from there the argument follows. If you think such a doctor can never exist, yet that there still is an equivalent turing-emulable implementation that is possible *in principle*, I just direct you at www.paul-almond.com/ManyWorldsAssistedMindUploading.htm which merely requires a random oracle to get you there (which is given to you if MWI happens to be true). Does this in principle proof include the requirements of thermodynamics or is it a speculation based on a set of assumptions that might just seem plausible if we ignore physics? I like the idea of a random Oracles, but to use them is like using sequences of lottery winnings to code words that one wants to speak. The main problem is that one has no control at all over which numbers will pop up, so one has to substitute a scheme to select numbers after they have rolled into the basket. This entire idea can be rephrased in terms of how radio signals are embedded in noise and that a radio is a non-random Oracle. If such a substitution is not possible even in principle, then you consider UDA's first assumption as false and thus also COMP/CTM being false (neuroscience does suggest that it's not, but we don't know that, and probably never will 100%, unless we're willing to someday say yes to such a computationalist doctor and find out for ourselves). All of this substitution stuff is predicated upon the possibility that the brain can be emulated by a Universal Turing Machine. It would be helpful if we first established that a Turing Machine is capable of what we are assuming it do be able to do. I am pretty well convinced that it cannot based on all that I have studied of QM and its implications. For example, one has to consider the implications of the Kochen-Specker and Gleason Theorems - since we hold mathematical theorems in such high regard! We don't assume physics. When you check the validity of a reasoning, it makes no sense to add new hypotheses in the premises. All talk of Copying has to assume a reality where decoherence has occurred sufficiently to allow the illusion of a classical world to obtain, or something equivalent... In Sane04 we see discussion that assume the physical world to be completely classical therefore it assumes a model of Reality that is not true. Absolutely not. Show me the paragraph on sane04 where classicality is assumed. You might say in the first six UDA steps, where we use the neuro-hypothesis, but this is for pedagogical reason, and that assumption is explicitly eliminated in the step seven. You forget that Quantum reality is Turing emulable. The alternate option to COMP being false is usually some form of infinitely complex matter and infinitely low subst. level. Either way, one option allows copying(COMP), even if at worst indirect or just accidentally correct, while the other just assumes that there is no subst. level. No, this is only the primitive matter assumption that you are presenting. I have been arguing that, among other things, the idea of primitive matter is nonsense. It might help if you wanted to discuss ideas and not straw men with me. This contradicts your refutation based on the need of having a physical reality to communicate about numbers. 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: On Pre-existing Fields
On 16 Feb 2012, at 20:26, meekerdb wrote: On 2/16/2012 10:16 AM, acw wrote: On 2/16/2012 17:58, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/16/2012 11:54 AM, acw wrote: On 2/16/2012 15:59, Stephen P. King wrote: There is a problem with this way of thinking in that it assumes that all of the properties of objects are inherent in the objects themselves and have no relation or dependence on anything else. This is is wrong. We know from our study of QM and the experiments that have been done, that the properties of objects are definite because of interdependence and interconnections (via entanglement) between all things within our event horizon. You seem to be laboring under the classical Newtonian view. To have a consistent and real idea of teleportation one has to consider, for example, the requirements of quantum teleportation http://www.tech-faq.com/quantum-teleportation.html. The assumption in COMP is that a subst. level exists, it's the main assumption! What does that practically mean? That you can eventually implement the brain (or a partial version of it) in a (modified) TM-equivalent machine (by CTT). It does not deny the quantum reality, merely says that the brain's functionality required for consciousness is classical (and turing-emulable). But it assumes that the classical brain/TM interacts with a quantum world, so that one's state of consciousness can become entangled with Schrodinger's cat. So the external quantum world may still be essential. But QM is Turing emulable, so this would only make the level low without changing the comp reversal consequences. In fact I tend to think that if we extract QM from comp, exactly (with the same quantitative Heisenberg uncertainty), then we might argue that the Heisenberg uncertainty defined some 3-sharable common comp substitution level. More progress in AUDA is needed to analyse that notion of level (in AUDA we reason on machine being correct, by constriction, on their subst level). Mrs. Schrodinger: Irwin, what have to done to that cat? It looks half dead! Schrodinger: I don't know. Ask Wigner. Mrs. Schroedinger: That does not help Irwin, Wigner looks half saying the cat is dead. 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: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/17/2012 4:19 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 16 Feb 2012, at 16:57, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/16/2012 4:49 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 15 Feb 2012, at 08:07, Stephen P. King wrote: By the way, Darwin's theory revolves around the notion of evolution, that simpler objects can evolve and change. Numbers, by definition, cannot change and thus cannot implement any form of change or evolution. So you assume a primitive time? No, there cannot be a primitive time because that would require a primitive measure and the same reasons that we cannot have primitive physical worlds nor primitive abstract entities would hold. We need to discuss how measures come to occur. First person indeterminacy. It is the classical boolean Gaussian measure on the set of relative computations, as seen by the machines (the as seen is made technically precise in AUDA). Dear Bruno, I had a tiny epiphany this morning as I read your remarks and I think that it is best that I surrender to you on my complaint that your result goes to far and is really a form of ideal monism and turn to discussions of the ideas of measures and interactions. My main motivation is to see how far Prof. Kitada and Pratt's ideas are compatible with yours. Could you elaborate a bit on Gaussian measures. They are unfamiliar to me. 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.
Re: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/17/2012 4:48 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 16 Feb 2012, at 20:09, Stephen P. King wrote: Hi ACW, I understand the UDA, as I have read every one of Bruno's English papers and participated in these discussions, at least. You do not need to keep repeating the same lines. ;-) The point is that the doctor assumption already includes the existence of the equivalent machine and from there the argument follows. If you think such a doctor can never exist, yet that there still is an equivalent turing-emulable implementation that is possible *in principle*, I just direct you at www.paul-almond.com/ManyWorldsAssistedMindUploading.htm which merely requires a random oracle to get you there (which is given to you if MWI happens to be true). Does this in principle proof include the requirements of thermodynamics or is it a speculation based on a set of assumptions that might just seem plausible if we ignore physics? I like the idea of a random Oracles, but to use them is like using sequences of lottery winnings to code words that one wants to speak. The main problem is that one has no control at all over which numbers will pop up, so one has to substitute a scheme to select numbers after they have rolled into the basket. This entire idea can be rephrased in terms of how radio signals are embedded in noise and that a radio is a non-random Oracle. If such a substitution is not possible even in principle, then you consider UDA's first assumption as false and thus also COMP/CTM being false (neuroscience does suggest that it's not, but we don't know that, and probably never will 100%, unless we're willing to someday say yes to such a computationalist doctor and find out for ourselves). All of this substitution stuff is predicated upon the possibility that the brain can be emulated by a Universal Turing Machine. It would be helpful if we first established that a Turing Machine is capable of what we are assuming it do be able to do. I am pretty well convinced that it cannot based on all that I have studied of QM and its implications. For example, one has to consider the implications of the Kochen-Specker http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kochen-specker/ and Gleason http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qt-quantlog/#1 Theorems - since we hold mathematical theorems in such high regard! We don't assume physics. When you check the validity of a reasoning, it makes no sense to add new hypotheses in the premises. All talk of Copying has to assume a reality where decoherence has occurred sufficiently to allow the illusion of a classical world to obtain, or something equivalent... In Sane04 we see discussion that assume the physical world to be completely classical therefore it assumes a model of Reality that is not true. Absolutely not. Show me the paragraph on sane04 where classicality is assumed. You might say in the first six UDA steps, where we use the neuro-hypothesis, but this is for pedagogical reason, and that assumption is explicitly eliminated in the step seven. You forget that Quantum reality is Turing emulable. Dear Bruno, I agree with this but I would like to pull back a bit from the infinite limit without going to the ultrafinitist idea. What we observe must always be subject to the A or ~A rule or we could not have consistent plural 1p, but is this absolute? My question is looking at how we extend the absolute space and time of Newton to the Relativistic case such that observers always see physical laws as invariant to their motions, for the COMP case this would be similar except that observer will see arithmetic rules as invariant with respect to their computations. (I am equating computations with motions here.) The alternate option to COMP being false is usually some form of infinitely complex matter and infinitely low subst. level. Either way, one option allows copying(COMP), even if at worst indirect or just accidentally correct, while the other just assumes that there is no subst. level. No, this is only the primitive matter assumption that you are presenting. I have been arguing that, among other things, the idea of primitive matter is nonsense. It might help if you wanted to discuss ideas and not straw men with me. This contradicts your refutation based on the need of having a physical reality to communicate about numbers. OK, I will try to not debate that but it goes completely against my intuition of what is required to solve the concurrency problem. Do you have any comment on the idea that the Tennenbaum theorem seems to indicate that standardness in the sense of the standard model of arithmetic might be an invariant for observers in the same way that the speed of light is an invariant of motions in physics? My motivation for this is that the identity - the center of one's sense of self being in the world - that the 1p captures is always excluded from one's experience.
Re: On Pre-existing Fields
On 16 Feb 2012, at 23:37, meekerdb wrote: On 2/16/2012 1:00 PM, acw wrote: On 2/16/2012 20:40, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/16/2012 2:32 PM, meekerdb wrote: On 2/16/2012 11:09 AM, Stephen P. King wrote: All of this substitution stuff is predicated upon the possibility that the brain can be emulated by a Universal Turing Machine. It would be helpful if we first established that a Turing Machine is capable of what we are assuming it do be able to do. I am pretty well convinced that it cannot based on all that I have studied of QM and its implications. This where the paradox of the philosophical zombie arises. It seems pretty certain that a TM, given the right program, can exhibit intelligence. So can we then deny that it is conscious based on unobservable quantum entanglements (i.e. those that make its computation classical)? Brent So is intelligence and consciousness, ala having 1p, qualia and all that subjective experience stuff, the same thing in your mind? Surely they must be related. If not, you do indeed get the p. zombie problem: someone who acts in all respects like a different person with (assumed) consciousness, indistinguishable in behavior, yet without consciousness. The question boils down to: let's say you knew some person well, they one day got a digital brain transplant, they still behave more or less as you remember them, do you think they are now without consciousness or merely that their consciousness is a bit changed due to different quantum entanglements? I think substituting for neurons or even groups of neurons in the human brain would preserve consciousness with perhaps minor changes. But when it comes to the question of whether an intelligent behaving robot is necessarily conscious, I'm not so sure. I think it would depend on the structure and programming. It would have *some kind* or consciousness, but it might be rather different from human consciousness. Note that Bruno answers the concern that interaction/entanglement with the environment by saying that the correct level of substitution may include arbitrarily large parts of the environment. I think this is problematic because the substitution (and the computation) are necessarily classical. I don't see why this would be a problem. Quantum computation is Turing emulable. So, if my state is my complete quantum state, then I am entangled with the whole universe, and this would only mean that the quantum dovetailer on the vacuum state wins the measure battle. This would be rather astonishing, but is not logically impossible. Now, if true, we have to show, once we assume comp, that such is the case. It would mean that the only semantics of the material hypostases (the modal logic of the family S4Grz1, X1*, Z1*) would contains the quantum computing machinery. That is not impossible. Note also that this would not prevent local duplication, à la yes doctor, providing some quantum swapping of the entanglement between me and the physical universe. 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: On Pre-existing Fields
On 17 Feb 2012, at 00:10, meekerdb wrote: On 2/16/2012 3:02 PM, acw wrote: On 2/16/2012 22:37, meekerdb wrote: On 2/16/2012 1:00 PM, acw wrote: On 2/16/2012 20:40, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/16/2012 2:32 PM, meekerdb wrote: On 2/16/2012 11:09 AM, Stephen P. King wrote: All of this substitution stuff is predicated upon the possibility that the brain can be emulated by a Universal Turing Machine. It would be helpful if we first established that a Turing Machine is capable of what we are assuming it do be able to do. I am pretty well convinced that it cannot based on all that I have studied of QM and its implications. This where the paradox of the philosophical zombie arises. It seems pretty certain that a TM, given the right program, can exhibit intelligence. So can we then deny that it is conscious based on unobservable quantum entanglements (i.e. those that make its computation classical)? Brent So is intelligence and consciousness, ala having 1p, qualia and all that subjective experience stuff, the same thing in your mind? Surely they must be related. If not, you do indeed get the p. zombie problem: someone who acts in all respects like a different person with (assumed) consciousness, indistinguishable in behavior, yet without consciousness. The question boils down to: let's say you knew some person well, they one day got a digital brain transplant, they still behave more or less as you remember them, do you think they are now without consciousness or merely that their consciousness is a bit changed due to different quantum entanglements? I think substituting for neurons or even groups of neurons in the human brain would preserve consciousness with perhaps minor changes. Probably, otherwise, the nature of consciousness is really fickle and doesn't match our introspection ( http://consc.net/papers/qualia.html ). But when it comes to the question of whether an intelligent behaving robot is necessarily conscious, I'm not so sure. I think it would depend on the structure and programming. It would have *some kind* or consciousness, but it might be rather different from human consciousness. It would depend on the cognitive architecture and structures involved. If the cognitive architecture is something really different from ours, it might be hard to fathom a guess. I can also imagine some optimizers which are capable of giving intelligent answers, but I have trouble attributing it any meaningful consciousness (for example an AI which just brute-forces the problem and performs no induction or anything similar to how we think), while I'd potentially attribute similar consciousness to ours to some neuromorphic AI, and something stranger/not directly comprehensible to me to an AI which is based on our high-level psychology, but different in most other ways in implementation. I suppose if/when we do crack the AGI problem, there will be a lot of interesting things to investigate about the nature of such foreign consciousness. Which is why I think we'll solve the artificial *intelligence* problems and we'll learn to create different intelligent and emotive behaviors, different personalities, and how they depend on architecture; Perhaps. and questions about 'consciousness' will become otiose. This does not follow from what you say above. On the contrary, if by chance or reason, we build intelligent machine, we will have new opportunities to study consciousness and its role in mind and matter. I don't think it would ever be nice that consciousness and first person become otiose. You could say that one day the machines will be able to do our jobs and the humans will become otiose. Forgetting person and consciousness for the right functionality is like a confusion of means and goal. 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: On Pre-existing Fields
On 17 Feb 2012, at 00:02, acw wrote: On 2/16/2012 22:37, meekerdb wrote: On 2/16/2012 1:00 PM, acw wrote: On 2/16/2012 20:40, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/16/2012 2:32 PM, meekerdb wrote: On 2/16/2012 11:09 AM, Stephen P. King wrote: All of this substitution stuff is predicated upon the possibility that the brain can be emulated by a Universal Turing Machine. It would be helpful if we first established that a Turing Machine is capable of what we are assuming it do be able to do. I am pretty well convinced that it cannot based on all that I have studied of QM and its implications. This where the paradox of the philosophical zombie arises. It seems pretty certain that a TM, given the right program, can exhibit intelligence. So can we then deny that it is conscious based on unobservable quantum entanglements (i.e. those that make its computation classical)? Brent So is intelligence and consciousness, ala having 1p, qualia and all that subjective experience stuff, the same thing in your mind? Surely they must be related. If not, you do indeed get the p. zombie problem: someone who acts in all respects like a different person with (assumed) consciousness, indistinguishable in behavior, yet without consciousness. The question boils down to: let's say you knew some person well, they one day got a digital brain transplant, they still behave more or less as you remember them, do you think they are now without consciousness or merely that their consciousness is a bit changed due to different quantum entanglements? I think substituting for neurons or even groups of neurons in the human brain would preserve consciousness with perhaps minor changes. Probably, otherwise, the nature of consciousness is really fickle and doesn't match our introspection ( http://consc.net/papers/qualia.html ). But when it comes to the question of whether an intelligent behaving robot is necessarily conscious, I'm not so sure. I think it would depend on the structure and programming. It would have *some kind* or consciousness, but it might be rather different from human consciousness. It would depend on the cognitive architecture and structures involved. If the cognitive architecture is something really different from ours, it might be hard to fathom a guess. I can also imagine some optimizers which are capable of giving intelligent answers, but I have trouble attributing it any meaningful consciousness (for example an AI which just brute-forces the problem and performs no induction or anything similar to how we think), while I'd potentially attribute similar consciousness to ours to some neuromorphic AI, and something stranger/not directly comprehensible to me to an AI which is based on our high-level psychology, but different in most other ways in implementation. I suppose if/when we do crack the AGI problem, there will be a lot of interesting things to investigate about the nature of such foreign consciousness. Note that Bruno answers the concern that interaction/entanglement with the environment by saying that the correct level of substitution may include arbitrarily large parts of the environment. I think this is problematic because the substitution (and the computation) are necessarily classical. In a way, that would keep some of COMP's conclusions still valid (weakening of the theory), but it's not very practical. I tend to instead think that machines implementing the observer below the substitution level can vary as much as they want as long as the observer is consistently implemented (a continuation where the observer isn't consistently implemented either no longer is a continuation of the observer or is a low-measure one, although some of these details do need to be worked out). One question that bothers me is if the observer is actually entangled quite a bit with these lower-level machines and if a digital substitution is performed at a higher level, the functionality may remain the same, but the measure/consistent extensions may get altered - better hope there's not too many white rabbits if the subst. level is too high, otherwise it would lead to unstable jumpy realities to SIMs. Interesting. I have to think more about how to answer this. It is related to the question will you say yes to the doctor in case the doctor believes that the level will not be right, and that, although you will survive, you will be changed (like doing some drugs) My own speculation (!) on the subst-level, is that the usual (first person plural) substitution level is rather low (perhaps the one defining the Heisenberg uncertainty relations), but that we have also a sort of person level of substitution, where we can survive, but that indeed, the reality might become more jumpy, and the consciousness can be of a different nature. But the evidence I have depend on the use of dissociative product, which are not (yet?) well seen those
Re: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/17/2012 1:48 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: You forget that Quantum reality is Turing emulable. A quantum computer can't compute a function that a TM can't. But when it comes to emulating reality, it seems there is a difference because quantum reality may be arbitrarily entangled (which is how decoherence produces quasi-classicality). So there are no strictly isolated subsystems in a quantum reality. Brent -- 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: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/17/2012 8:48 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: Note that Bruno answers the concern that interaction/entanglement with the environment by saying that the correct level of substitution may include arbitrarily large parts of the environment. I think this is problematic because the substitution (and the computation) are necessarily classical. I don't see why this would be a problem. Quantum computation is Turing emulable. So, if my state is my complete quantum state, then I am entangled with the whole universe, and this would only mean that the quantum dovetailer on the vacuum state wins the measure battle. This would be rather astonishing, but is not logically impossible. Now, if true, we have to show, once we assume comp, that such is the case. It would mean that the only semantics of the material hypostases (the modal logic of the family S4Grz1, X1*, Z1*) would contains the quantum computing machinery. That is not impossible. Note also that this would not prevent local duplication, à la yes doctor, providing some quantum swapping of the entanglement between me and the physical universe. Yes I understand that the substitution, even of a (quasi) classical device, can still be successful because it will be entangled too (in fact that's what makes it quasi-classical). I only think it is problematic in that it undermines the idea that mind and material, thought and physics, are different. If you have to either emulate, or use, a lot of the material world to instantitate consciousness then it is very much like recovering the view that consciousness supervenes on the material (even though the material is not fundamental). Brent -- 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: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/17/2012 9:09 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: This does not follow from what you say above. On the contrary, if by chance or reason, we build intelligent machine, we will have new opportunities to study consciousness and its role in mind and matter. I don't think it would ever be nice that consciousness and first person become otiose. You could say that one day the machines will be able to do our jobs and the humans will become otiose. And on other forums I do say that. :-) Brent Forgetting person and consciousness for the right functionality is like a confusion of means and goal. Bruno -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: On Pre-existing Fields
On 17 Feb 2012, at 13:51, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/17/2012 4:19 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 16 Feb 2012, at 16:57, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/16/2012 4:49 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 15 Feb 2012, at 08:07, Stephen P. King wrote: By the way, Darwin's theory revolves around the notion of evolution, that simpler objects can evolve and change. Numbers, by definition, cannot change and thus cannot implement any form of change or evolution. So you assume a primitive time? No, there cannot be a primitive time because that would require a primitive measure and the same reasons that we cannot have primitive physical worlds nor primitive abstract entities would hold. We need to discuss how measures come to occur. First person indeterminacy. It is the classical boolean Gaussian measure on the set of relative computations, as seen by the machines (the as seen is made technically precise in AUDA). Dear Bruno, I had a tiny epiphany this morning as I read your remarks and I think that it is best that I surrender to you on my complaint that your result goes to far and is really a form of ideal monism and turn to discussions of the ideas of measures and interactions. My main motivation is to see how far Prof. Kitada and Pratt's ideas are compatible with yours. Could you elaborate a bit on Gaussian measures. They are unfamiliar to me. Once you accept P = 1/2 for the first person indeterminacy on a domain with two (and only two) relative reconstitutions, you can verify that the 2^n persons obtained after an iterated WM self-duplication can discover that they can be partitioned by the numbers of having gone in W (resp. M), and that those numbers are given by the binomial coefficients. The Gaussian distribution is obtained in the limit, by the law of big numbers. Surely you know this. In front of the UD, that Gaussian distribution becomes quantum like due to the constraints of self-reference, and of the appurtenance of the computational states to computations. Intuitively we can guess that the winning computations will exploit the random oracle given by the self-multiplication so that a notion of normal histories can develop. But comp+classical-theory of knowledge does not permit the use of such intuition, we have to retrieve this form the self-reference logic, so that we can distinguish the communicable and non communicable parts. The logic of measure one have been already retrieved, if we agree on the definition used in AUDA. Of course we can still speculate on what such a measure can look like. 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: On Pre-existing Fields
On 17 Feb 2012, at 14:23, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/17/2012 4:48 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 16 Feb 2012, at 20:09, Stephen P. King wrote: Hi ACW, I understand the UDA, as I have read every one of Bruno's English papers and participated in these discussions, at least. You do not need to keep repeating the same lines. ;-) The point is that the doctor assumption already includes the existence of the equivalent machine and from there the argument follows. If you think such a doctor can never exist, yet that there still is an equivalent turing-emulable implementation that is possible *in principle*, I just direct you at www.paul-almond.com/ManyWorldsAssistedMindUploading.htm which merely requires a random oracle to get you there (which is given to you if MWI happens to be true). Does this in principle proof include the requirements of thermodynamics or is it a speculation based on a set of assumptions that might just seem plausible if we ignore physics? I like the idea of a random Oracles, but to use them is like using sequences of lottery winnings to code words that one wants to speak. The main problem is that one has no control at all over which numbers will pop up, so one has to substitute a scheme to select numbers after they have rolled into the basket. This entire idea can be rephrased in terms of how radio signals are embedded in noise and that a radio is a non-random Oracle. If such a substitution is not possible even in principle, then you consider UDA's first assumption as false and thus also COMP/ CTM being false (neuroscience does suggest that it's not, but we don't know that, and probably never will 100%, unless we're willing to someday say yes to such a computationalist doctor and find out for ourselves). All of this substitution stuff is predicated upon the possibility that the brain can be emulated by a Universal Turing Machine. It would be helpful if we first established that a Turing Machine is capable of what we are assuming it do be able to do. I am pretty well convinced that it cannot based on all that I have studied of QM and its implications. For example, one has to consider the implications of the Kochen-Specker and Gleason Theorems - since we hold mathematical theorems in such high regard! We don't assume physics. When you check the validity of a reasoning, it makes no sense to add new hypotheses in the premises. All talk of Copying has to assume a reality where decoherence has occurred sufficiently to allow the illusion of a classical world to obtain, or something equivalent... In Sane04 we see discussion that assume the physical world to be completely classical therefore it assumes a model of Reality that is not true. Absolutely not. Show me the paragraph on sane04 where classicality is assumed. You might say in the first six UDA steps, where we use the neuro-hypothesis, but this is for pedagogical reason, and that assumption is explicitly eliminated in the step seven. You forget that Quantum reality is Turing emulable. Dear Bruno, I agree with this but I would like to pull back a bit from the infinite limit without going to the ultrafinitist idea. What we observe must always be subject to the A or ~A rule or we could not have consistent plural 1p, but is this absolute? I am not sure what we observe should always be subject to A or ~A rule. I don't think that's true in QM, nor in COMP. My question is looking at how we extend the absolute space and time of Newton to the Relativistic case such that observers always see physical laws as invariant to their motions, for the COMP case this would be similar except that observer will see arithmetic rules as invariant with respect to their computations. (I am equating computations with motions here.) OK. The alternate option to COMP being false is usually some form of infinitely complex matter and infinitely low subst. level. Either way, one option allows copying(COMP), even if at worst indirect or just accidentally correct, while the other just assumes that there is no subst. level. No, this is only the primitive matter assumption that you are presenting. I have been arguing that, among other things, the idea of primitive matter is nonsense. It might help if you wanted to discuss ideas and not straw men withme. This contradicts your refutation based on the need of having a physical reality to communicate about numbers. OK, I will try to not debate that but it goes completely against my intuition of what is required to solve the concurrency problem. Do you have any comment on the idea that the Tennenbaum theorem seems to indicate that standardness in the sense of the standard model of arithmetic might be an invariant for observers in the same way that the speed of light is an invariant of
Re: On Pre-existing Fields
On 17 Feb 2012, at 19:13, meekerdb wrote: On 2/17/2012 1:48 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: You forget that Quantum reality is Turing emulable. A quantum computer can't compute a function that a TM can't. But when it comes to emulating reality, it seems there is a difference because quantum reality may be arbitrarily entangled (which is how decoherence produces quasi-classicality). So there are no strictly isolated subsystems in a quantum reality. OK, but still, a quantum computer can simulate any quantum reality (except infinite quantum Eve Garden, but classical computer cannot simulate infinite classical Eve garden too, so that does not count here). Now take a quantum computer simulating any quantum reality. Despite the fact that there are no strictly isolated subsystems in that quantum reality, it can be simulated by a classical computer. The classical subsystems of that classical computer (emulating the quantum machine) will just not be part of that quantum reality. 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: On Pre-existing Fields
On 17 Feb 2012, at 19:51, meekerdb wrote: On 2/17/2012 9:09 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: This does not follow from what you say above. On the contrary, if by chance or reason, we build intelligent machine, we will have new opportunities to study consciousness and its role in mind and matter. I don't think it would ever be nice that consciousness and first person become otiose. You could say that one day the machines will be able to do our jobs and the humans will become otiose. And on other forums I do say that. :-) And it makes you smile! :) Let us destroy completely the atmosphere of this planet, this will be excellent for the artificial reality and artificial body vendor business. I would prefer earth to become the home of the non-comp people, and their carbonic fetishes. A museum of the ancient life style. The comp people are those who will leave the planet and explore the galaxy, infinity and beyond :) 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: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/17/2012 2:24 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 17 Feb 2012, at 13:51, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/17/2012 4:19 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 16 Feb 2012, at 16:57, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/16/2012 4:49 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 15 Feb 2012, at 08:07, Stephen P. King wrote: By the way, Darwin's theory revolves around the notion of evolution, that simpler objects can evolve and change. Numbers, by definition, cannot change and thus cannot implement any form of change or evolution. So you assume a primitive time? No, there cannot be a primitive time because that would require a primitive measure and the same reasons that we cannot have primitive physical worlds nor primitive abstract entities would hold. We need to discuss how measures come to occur. First person indeterminacy. It is the classical boolean Gaussian measure on the set of relative computations, as seen by the machines (the as seen is made technically precise in AUDA). Dear Bruno, I had a tiny epiphany this morning as I read your remarks and I think that it is best that I surrender to you on my complaint that your result goes to far and is really a form of ideal monism and turn to discussions of the ideas of measures and interactions. My main motivation is to see how far Prof. Kitada and Pratt's ideas are compatible with yours. Could you elaborate a bit on Gaussian measures. They are unfamiliar to me. Once you accept P = 1/2 for the first person indeterminacy on a domain with two (and only two) relative reconstitutions, you can verify that the 2^n persons obtained after an iterated WM self-duplication can discover that they can be partitioned by the numbers of having gone in W (resp. M), and that those numbers are given by the binomial coefficients. The Gaussian distribution is obtained in the limit, by the law of big numbers. Surely you know this. In front of the UD, that Gaussian distribution becomes quantum like due to the constraints of self-reference, and of the appurtenance of the computational states to computations. Intuitively we can guess that the winning computations will exploit the random oracle given by the self-multiplication so that a notion of normal histories can develop. But comp+classical-theory of knowledge does not permit the use of such intuition, we have to retrieve this form the self-reference logic, so that we can distinguish the communicable and non communicable parts. The logic of measure one have been already retrieved, if we agree on the definition used in AUDA. Of course we can still speculate on what such a measure can look like. Dear Bruno, I will study more on the Gaussian measure (although it seems that you are using the Gaussian distribution idea...) no problem. What I would like to know is how we go from a very large to infinite collection of distributive algebras to non-distributive orthocomplete lattices, for that is what you are implying. I can see ambiguously how this works given 1p indeterminacy, but it would be nice to have a local approximation of this mechanism. 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.
Re: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/17/2012 12:07 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 17 Feb 2012, at 19:13, meekerdb wrote: On 2/17/2012 1:48 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: You forget that Quantum reality is Turing emulable. A quantum computer can't compute a function that a TM can't. But when it comes to emulating reality, it seems there is a difference because quantum reality may be arbitrarily entangled (which is how decoherence produces quasi-classicality). So there are no strictly isolated subsystems in a quantum reality. OK, but still, a quantum computer can simulate any quantum reality (except infinite quantum Eve Garden, but classical computer cannot simulate infinite classical Eve garden too, so that does not count here). But it may count in that the universe is infinite and the classical arises because of event horizons. Brent Now take a quantum computer simulating any quantum reality. Despite the fact that there are no strictly isolated subsystems in that quantum reality, it can be simulated by a classical computer. The classical subsystems of that classical computer (emulating the quantum machine) will just not be part of that quantum reality. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/%7Emarchal/ No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com http://www.avg.com Version: 2012.0.1913 / Virus Database: 2112/4815 - Release Date: 02/17/12 -- 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. -- 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: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/17/2012 12:25 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 17 Feb 2012, at 19:51, meekerdb wrote: On 2/17/2012 9:09 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: This does not follow from what you say above. On the contrary, if by chance or reason, we build intelligent machine, we will have new opportunities to study consciousness and its role in mind and matter. I don't think it would ever be nice that consciousness and first person become otiose. You could say that one day the machines will be able to do our jobs and the humans will become otiose. And on other forums I do say that. :-) And it makes you smile! :) Let us destroy completely the atmosphere of this planet, this will be excellent for the artificial reality and artificial body vendor business. I would prefer earth to become the home of the non-comp people, and their carbonic fetishes. A museum of the ancient life style. The comp people are those who will leave the planet and explore the galaxy, infinity and beyond :) Right. I hope that we are just a step in an evolution that can spread beyond Earth - but leaving Earth for us and our fellow carbon based life forms. Brent 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: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/15/2012 07:07, Stephen P. King wrote: [SPK] Interesting. How then do we explain the fact that humans suffer all kinds of computational errors such as schizophrenia, dismorphia, etc. We intentionally lie... The list of computationally erroneous behavior of the brain is almost endless. How does this occur given COMP? But I digress. Explaining physical reality is to explain the properties that it has as opposed to those that it does not, UDA does not do that. It even presupposes things that are simply not possible in the physical world, such as teleportation and computations generating knowledge without the use of resources. Even a Reversible computer requires memory to compute and memory is a physical quantity. The notion of teleportation used in UDA is nothing magical or requiring new physics. The experiments in the UDA can be read as after someone said yes to the doctor and became a SIM(Substrate Independent Mind), thus after the substitution, they can know one of their godel numbers/programs (assuming correct observation). This essentially means that said program state can be transmitted and ran/instantiated anywhere you want and with any delay or order or form. A teleportation from A to B would merely require the SIM to stop itself in A, have another program transmit it to B(for example through the Internet or some other communication channel) and have someone run it in B, for example on a general purpose Turing-equivalent computer or more likely a special-purpose digital brain (for better performance within our physics) with access to an environment(or more, such as VRs). For all intents and purposes this isn't any different from me writing a program and you downloading it and running it on your own hardware. For UDA 1-5 this works trivially. For UDA 6, it also works, with changes in software. UDA 7 does make a stronger assumption: the sufficiently robust universe, however one doesn't really assume strong physical continuity by now (by 1-6), so I don't see UD even has to be coherently ran all at once and in a continuous manner (for example a running like that in Permutation City would work just well, in the dust). If you do consider some other 'everything' theories like Tegmark's or Schmidhuber, they also grant you an UD (and I would venture to say that your neutral Existence might also grant you such robust universes). UDA 8 you seem to disagree with, but I don't see what explanatory power could any primitively physical structure grant you: all possible digitalised observers and their continuations already have to be in the UD, thus you cannot use primitive physics for prediction. Thus the only claim that one could make for saving primitive physics would be that it allows for consciousness to manifest (for example by implementing the body). UDA 8 and MGA show that such a claim is specious and unnecessary. You seem to disagree with it, although its not clear to me as to why or how. You seem to claim that physical reality isn't primary (COMP agrees, it emerges from arithmetical/computational truth), although don't agree with the way it emerges in COMP or its nature(?)? Does that mean that you don't think that all possible observers are contained in the UD? To be frank, I'm still rather confused at what point your theory becomes incompatible or predicts different things than COMP (given the standard assumptions used in the UDA). -- 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: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/16/2012 6:57 AM, acw wrote: On 2/15/2012 07:07, Stephen P. King wrote: [SPK] Interesting. How then do we explain the fact that humans suffer all kinds of computational errors such as schizophrenia, dismorphia, etc. We intentionally lie... The list of computationally erroneous behavior of the brain is almost endless. How does this occur given COMP? But I digress. Explaining physical reality is to explain the properties that it has as opposed to those that it does not, UDA does not do that. It even presupposes things that are simply not possible in the physical world, such as teleportation and computations generating knowledge without the use of resources. Even a Reversible computer requires memory to compute and memory is a physical quantity. The notion of teleportation used in UDA is nothing magical or requiring new physics. The experiments in the UDA can be read as after someone said yes to the doctor and became a SIM(Substrate Independent Mind), thus after the substitution, they can know one of their godel numbers/programs (assuming correct observation). This essentially means that said program state can be transmitted and ran/instantiated anywhere you want and with any delay or order or form. A teleportation from A to B would merely require the SIM to stop itself in A, have another program transmit it to B(for example through the Internet or some other communication channel) and have someone run it in B, for example on a general purpose Turing-equivalent computer or more likely a special-purpose digital brain (for better performance within our physics) with access to an environment(or more, such as VRs). For all intents and purposes this isn't any different from me writing a program and you downloading it and running it on your own hardware. For UDA 1-5 this works trivially. For UDA 6, it also works, with changes in software. UDA 7 does make a stronger assumption: the sufficiently robust universe, however one doesn't really assume strong physical continuity by now (by 1-6), so I don't see UD even has to be coherently ran all at once and in a continuous manner (for example a running like that in Permutation City would work just well, in the dust). If you do consider some other 'everything' theories like Tegmark's or Schmidhuber, they also grant you an UD (and I would venture to say that your neutral Existence might also grant you such robust universes). UDA 8 you seem to disagree with, but I don't see what explanatory power could any primitively physical structure grant you: all possible digitalised observers and their continuations already have to be in the UD, thus you cannot use primitive physics for prediction. Thus the only claim that one could make for saving primitive physics would be that it allows for consciousness to manifest (for example by implementing the body). UDA 8 and MGA show that such a claim is specious and unnecessary. You seem to disagree with it, although its not clear to me as to why or how. You seem to claim that physical reality isn't primary (COMP agrees, it emerges from arithmetical/computational truth), although don't agree with the way it emerges in COMP or its nature(?)? Does that mean that you don't think that all possible observers are contained in the UD? To be frank, I'm still rather confused at what point your theory becomes incompatible or predicts different things than COMP (given the standard assumptions used in the UDA). Dear ACW, Please rethink exactly what teleportation requires to be possible. It is not any different from the ability to copy information. 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.
Re: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/16/2012 15:59, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/16/2012 6:57 AM, acw wrote: On 2/15/2012 07:07, Stephen P. King wrote: [SPK] Interesting. How then do we explain the fact that humans suffer all kinds of computational errors such as schizophrenia, dismorphia, etc. We intentionally lie... The list of computationally erroneous behavior of the brain is almost endless. How does this occur given COMP? But I digress. Explaining physical reality is to explain the properties that it has as opposed to those that it does not, UDA does not do that. It even presupposes things that are simply not possible in the physical world, such as teleportation and computations generating knowledge without the use of resources. Even a Reversible computer requires memory to compute and memory is a physical quantity. The notion of teleportation used in UDA is nothing magical or requiring new physics. The experiments in the UDA can be read as after someone said yes to the doctor and became a SIM(Substrate Independent Mind), thus after the substitution, they can know one of their godel numbers/programs (assuming correct observation). This essentially means that said program state can be transmitted and ran/instantiated anywhere you want and with any delay or order or form. A teleportation from A to B would merely require the SIM to stop itself in A, have another program transmit it to B(for example through the Internet or some other communication channel) and have someone run it in B, for example on a general purpose Turing-equivalent computer or more likely a special-purpose digital brain (for better performance within our physics) with access to an environment(or more, such as VRs). For all intents and purposes this isn't any different from me writing a program and you downloading it and running it on your own hardware. For UDA 1-5 this works trivially. For UDA 6, it also works, with changes in software. UDA 7 does make a stronger assumption: the sufficiently robust universe, however one doesn't really assume strong physical continuity by now (by 1-6), so I don't see UD even has to be coherently ran all at once and in a continuous manner (for example a running like that in Permutation City would work just well, in the dust). If you do consider some other 'everything' theories like Tegmark's or Schmidhuber, they also grant you an UD (and I would venture to say that your neutral Existence might also grant you such robust universes). UDA 8 you seem to disagree with, but I don't see what explanatory power could any primitively physical structure grant you: all possible digitalised observers and their continuations already have to be in the UD, thus you cannot use primitive physics for prediction. Thus the only claim that one could make for saving primitive physics would be that it allows for consciousness to manifest (for example by implementing the body). UDA 8 and MGA show that such a claim is specious and unnecessary. You seem to disagree with it, although its not clear to me as to why or how. You seem to claim that physical reality isn't primary (COMP agrees, it emerges from arithmetical/computational truth), although don't agree with the way it emerges in COMP or its nature(?)? Does that mean that you don't think that all possible observers are contained in the UD? To be frank, I'm still rather confused at what point your theory becomes incompatible or predicts different things than COMP (given the standard assumptions used in the UDA). Dear ACW, Please rethink exactly what teleportation requires to be possible. It is not any different from the ability to copy information. Yes, COMP assumes that there is a subst. level, which means that stuff below the subst. level may vary (or even look like noise, due to 1p-indeterminacy, we tend to think of this, in our universe, as the quantum foam and the like). A doctor (which is included in the assumption, but if it weren't...) only need be able to copy/emulate either exactly at the right subst. level or slightly below it (copying at a higher level may entail memory loss or functionality loss or worse). What this effectively means is that you don't need to be able to read the full quantum state (which is not possible), but just quasi-classical states, which we can do and which should be either at subst. level or below. (If the subst. level was below, COMP would be practically false, as we do assume that the observer's universal number is at least partially stable at the subst. level). No violation of the no-cloning theorem here. And aside from that we can copy/transmit quasi-classical information pretty well. 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
Re: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/16/2012 11:54 AM, acw wrote: On 2/16/2012 15:59, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/16/2012 6:57 AM, acw wrote: On 2/15/2012 07:07, Stephen P. King wrote: [SPK] Interesting. How then do we explain the fact that humans suffer all kinds of computational errors such as schizophrenia, dismorphia, etc. We intentionally lie... The list of computationally erroneous behavior of the brain is almost endless. How does this occur given COMP? But I digress. Explaining physical reality is to explain the properties that it has as opposed to those that it does not, UDA does not do that. It even presupposes things that are simply not possible in the physical world, such as teleportation and computations generating knowledge without the use of resources. Even a Reversible computer requires memory to compute and memory is a physical quantity. The notion of teleportation used in UDA is nothing magical or requiring new physics. The experiments in the UDA can be read as after someone said yes to the doctor and became a SIM(Substrate Independent Mind), thus after the substitution, they can know one of their godel numbers/programs (assuming correct observation). This essentially means that said program state can be transmitted and ran/instantiated anywhere you want and with any delay or order or form. A teleportation from A to B would merely require the SIM to stop itself in A, have another program transmit it to B(for example through the Internet or some other communication channel) and have someone run it in B, for example on a general purpose Turing-equivalent computer or more likely a special-purpose digital brain (for better performance within our physics) with access to an environment(or more, such as VRs). For all intents and purposes this isn't any different from me writing a program and you downloading it and running it on your own hardware. For UDA 1-5 this works trivially. For UDA 6, it also works, with changes in software. UDA 7 does make a stronger assumption: the sufficiently robust universe, however one doesn't really assume strong physical continuity by now (by 1-6), so I don't see UD even has to be coherently ran all at once and in a continuous manner (for example a running like that in Permutation City would work just well, in the dust). If you do consider some other 'everything' theories like Tegmark's or Schmidhuber, they also grant you an UD (and I would venture to say that your neutral Existence might also grant you such robust universes). UDA 8 you seem to disagree with, but I don't see what explanatory power could any primitively physical structure grant you: all possible digitalised observers and their continuations already have to be in the UD, thus you cannot use primitive physics for prediction. Thus the only claim that one could make for saving primitive physics would be that it allows for consciousness to manifest (for example by implementing the body). UDA 8 and MGA show that such a claim is specious and unnecessary. You seem to disagree with it, although its not clear to me as to why or how. You seem to claim that physical reality isn't primary (COMP agrees, it emerges from arithmetical/computational truth), although don't agree with the way it emerges in COMP or its nature(?)? Does that mean that you don't think that all possible observers are contained in the UD? To be frank, I'm still rather confused at what point your theory becomes incompatible or predicts different things than COMP (given the standard assumptions used in the UDA). Dear ACW, Please rethink exactly what teleportation requires to be possible. It is not any different from the ability to copy information. Yes, COMP assumes that there is a subst. level, which means that stuff below the subst. level may vary (or even look like noise, due to 1p-indeterminacy, we tend to think of this, in our universe, as the quantum foam and the like). A doctor (which is included in the assumption, but if it weren't...) only need be able to copy/emulate either exactly at the right subst. level or slightly below it (copying at a higher level may entail memory loss or functionality loss or worse). What this effectively means is that you don't need to be able to read the full quantum state (which is not possible), but just quasi-classical states, which we can do and which should be either at subst. level or below. (If the subst. level was below, COMP would be practically false, as we do assume that the observer's universal number is at least partially stable at the subst. level). No violation of the no-cloning theorem here. And aside from that we can copy/transmit quasi-classical information pretty well. Hi ACW, There is a problem with this way of thinking in that it assumes that all of the properties of objects are inherent in the objects themselves and have no relation or dependence on anything else. This is is wrong. We know from our study of QM and the experiments that have been done, that the properties of
Re: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/16/2012 17:58, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/16/2012 11:54 AM, acw wrote: On 2/16/2012 15:59, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/16/2012 6:57 AM, acw wrote: On 2/15/2012 07:07, Stephen P. King wrote: [SPK] Interesting. How then do we explain the fact that humans suffer all kinds of computational errors such as schizophrenia, dismorphia, etc. We intentionally lie... The list of computationally erroneous behavior of the brain is almost endless. How does this occur given COMP? But I digress. Explaining physical reality is to explain the properties that it has as opposed to those that it does not, UDA does not do that. It even presupposes things that are simply not possible in the physical world, such as teleportation and computations generating knowledge without the use of resources. Even a Reversible computer requires memory to compute and memory is a physical quantity. The notion of teleportation used in UDA is nothing magical or requiring new physics. The experiments in the UDA can be read as after someone said yes to the doctor and became a SIM(Substrate Independent Mind), thus after the substitution, they can know one of their godel numbers/programs (assuming correct observation). This essentially means that said program state can be transmitted and ran/instantiated anywhere you want and with any delay or order or form. A teleportation from A to B would merely require the SIM to stop itself in A, have another program transmit it to B(for example through the Internet or some other communication channel) and have someone run it in B, for example on a general purpose Turing-equivalent computer or more likely a special-purpose digital brain (for better performance within our physics) with access to an environment(or more, such as VRs). For all intents and purposes this isn't any different from me writing a program and you downloading it and running it on your own hardware. For UDA 1-5 this works trivially. For UDA 6, it also works, with changes in software. UDA 7 does make a stronger assumption: the sufficiently robust universe, however one doesn't really assume strong physical continuity by now (by 1-6), so I don't see UD even has to be coherently ran all at once and in a continuous manner (for example a running like that in Permutation City would work just well, in the dust). If you do consider some other 'everything' theories like Tegmark's or Schmidhuber, they also grant you an UD (and I would venture to say that your neutral Existence might also grant you such robust universes). UDA 8 you seem to disagree with, but I don't see what explanatory power could any primitively physical structure grant you: all possible digitalised observers and their continuations already have to be in the UD, thus you cannot use primitive physics for prediction. Thus the only claim that one could make for saving primitive physics would be that it allows for consciousness to manifest (for example by implementing the body). UDA 8 and MGA show that such a claim is specious and unnecessary. You seem to disagree with it, although its not clear to me as to why or how. You seem to claim that physical reality isn't primary (COMP agrees, it emerges from arithmetical/computational truth), although don't agree with the way it emerges in COMP or its nature(?)? Does that mean that you don't think that all possible observers are contained in the UD? To be frank, I'm still rather confused at what point your theory becomes incompatible or predicts different things than COMP (given the standard assumptions used in the UDA). Dear ACW, Please rethink exactly what teleportation requires to be possible. It is not any different from the ability to copy information. Yes, COMP assumes that there is a subst. level, which means that stuff below the subst. level may vary (or even look like noise, due to 1p-indeterminacy, we tend to think of this, in our universe, as the quantum foam and the like). A doctor (which is included in the assumption, but if it weren't...) only need be able to copy/emulate either exactly at the right subst. level or slightly below it (copying at a higher level may entail memory loss or functionality loss or worse). What this effectively means is that you don't need to be able to read the full quantum state (which is not possible), but just quasi-classical states, which we can do and which should be either at subst. level or below. (If the subst. level was below, COMP would be practically false, as we do assume that the observer's universal number is at least partially stable at the subst. level). No violation of the no-cloning theorem here. And aside from that we can copy/transmit quasi-classical information pretty well. Hi ACW, There is a problem with this way of thinking in that it assumes that all of the properties of objects are inherent in the objects themselves and have no relation or dependence on anything else. This is is wrong. We know from our study of QM and the experiments that have been done, that
Re: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/16/2012 1:16 PM, acw wrote: On 2/16/2012 17:58, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/16/2012 11:54 AM, acw wrote: On 2/16/2012 15:59, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/16/2012 6:57 AM, acw wrote: On 2/15/2012 07:07, Stephen P. King wrote: [SPK] Interesting. How then do we explain the fact that humans suffer all kinds of computational errors such as schizophrenia, dismorphia, etc. We intentionally lie... The list of computationally erroneous behavior of the brain is almost endless. How does this occur given COMP? But I digress. Explaining physical reality is to explain the properties that it has as opposed to those that it does not, UDA does not do that. It even presupposes things that are simply not possible in the physical world, such as teleportation and computations generating knowledge without the use of resources. Even a Reversible computer requires memory to compute and memory is a physical quantity. The notion of teleportation used in UDA is nothing magical or requiring new physics. The experiments in the UDA can be read as after someone said yes to the doctor and became a SIM(Substrate Independent Mind), thus after the substitution, they can know one of their godel numbers/programs (assuming correct observation). This essentially means that said program state can be transmitted and ran/instantiated anywhere you want and with any delay or order or form. A teleportation from A to B would merely require the SIM to stop itself in A, have another program transmit it to B(for example through the Internet or some other communication channel) and have someone run it in B, for example on a general purpose Turing-equivalent computer or more likely a special-purpose digital brain (for better performance within our physics) with access to an environment(or more, such as VRs). For all intents and purposes this isn't any different from me writing a program and you downloading it and running it on your own hardware. For UDA 1-5 this works trivially. For UDA 6, it also works, with changes in software. UDA 7 does make a stronger assumption: the sufficiently robust universe, however one doesn't really assume strong physical continuity by now (by 1-6), so I don't see UD even has to be coherently ran all at once and in a continuous manner (for example a running like that in Permutation City would work just well, in the dust). If you do consider some other 'everything' theories like Tegmark's or Schmidhuber, they also grant you an UD (and I would venture to say that your neutral Existence might also grant you such robust universes). UDA 8 you seem to disagree with, but I don't see what explanatory power could any primitively physical structure grant you: all possible digitalised observers and their continuations already have to be in the UD, thus you cannot use primitive physics for prediction. Thus the only claim that one could make for saving primitive physics would be that it allows for consciousness to manifest (for example by implementing the body). UDA 8 and MGA show that such a claim is specious and unnecessary. You seem to disagree with it, although its not clear to me as to why or how. You seem to claim that physical reality isn't primary (COMP agrees, it emerges from arithmetical/computational truth), although don't agree with the way it emerges in COMP or its nature(?)? Does that mean that you don't think that all possible observers are contained in the UD? To be frank, I'm still rather confused at what point your theory becomes incompatible or predicts different things than COMP (given the standard assumptions used in the UDA). Dear ACW, Please rethink exactly what teleportation requires to be possible. It is not any different from the ability to copy information. Yes, COMP assumes that there is a subst. level, which means that stuff below the subst. level may vary (or even look like noise, due to 1p-indeterminacy, we tend to think of this, in our universe, as the quantum foam and the like). A doctor (which is included in the assumption, but if it weren't...) only need be able to copy/emulate either exactly at the right subst. level or slightly below it (copying at a higher level may entail memory loss or functionality loss or worse). What this effectively means is that you don't need to be able to read the full quantum state (which is not possible), but just quasi-classical states, which we can do and which should be either at subst. level or below. (If the subst. level was below, COMP would be practically false, as we do assume that the observer's universal number is at least partially stable at the subst. level). No violation of the no-cloning theorem here. And aside from that we can copy/transmit quasi-classical information pretty well. Hi ACW, There is a problem with this way of thinking in that it assumes that all of the properties of objects are inherent in the objects themselves and have no relation or dependence on anything else. This is is wrong. We know from our study of QM
Re: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/16/2012 9:58 AM, Stephen P. King wrote: Hi ACW, There is a problem with this way of thinking in that it assumes that all of the properties of objects are inherent in the objects themselves and have no relation or dependence on anything else. This is is wrong. We know from our study of QM and the experiments that have been done, that the properties of objects are definite because of interdependence and interconnections (via entanglement) between all things within our event horizon. You seem to be laboring under the classical Newtonian view. To have a consistent and real idea of teleportation one has to consider, for example, the requirements of quantum teleportation http://www.tech-faq.com/quantum-teleportation.html. It is things like that that are preventing COMP from being a realistic explanatory theory. :-( I like COMP and UDA because I see them as ideas that have errors can be corrected. This is not to say that my own ideas are not error filled! We are all, including me, finite and fallible. Onward! Stephen That's essentially just saying 'No' to the doctor. Since the doctor can only substitute stuff that is functionally equivalent at a classical level you won't say 'Yes' if you think the quantum entangled states of the stuff he's replacing are essential. Note however that the replacement WILL have quantum entanglements; just not the same ones. So you might say 'Yes', accepting that your consciousness will be different in some way and yet still avoid being a p-zombie. Brent -- 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: On Pre-existing Fields
2012/2/16 Stephen P. King stephe...@charter.net On 2/16/2012 1:16 PM, acw wrote: On 2/16/2012 17:58, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/16/2012 11:54 AM, acw wrote: On 2/16/2012 15:59, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/16/2012 6:57 AM, acw wrote: On 2/15/2012 07:07, Stephen P. King wrote: [SPK] Interesting. How then do we explain the fact that humans suffer all kinds of computational errors such as schizophrenia, dismorphia, etc. We intentionally lie... The list of computationally erroneous behavior of the brain is almost endless. How does this occur given COMP? But I digress. Explaining physical reality is to explain the properties that it has as opposed to those that it does not, UDA does not do that. It even presupposes things that are simply not possible in the physical world, such as teleportation and computations generating knowledge without the use of resources. Even a Reversible computer requires memory to compute and memory is a physical quantity. The notion of teleportation used in UDA is nothing magical or requiring new physics. The experiments in the UDA can be read as after someone said yes to the doctor and became a SIM(Substrate Independent Mind), thus after the substitution, they can know one of their godel numbers/programs (assuming correct observation). This essentially means that said program state can be transmitted and ran/instantiated anywhere you want and with any delay or order or form. A teleportation from A to B would merely require the SIM to stop itself in A, have another program transmit it to B(for example through the Internet or some other communication channel) and have someone run it in B, for example on a general purpose Turing-equivalent computer or more likely a special-purpose digital brain (for better performance within our physics) with access to an environment(or more, such as VRs). For all intents and purposes this isn't any different from me writing a program and you downloading it and running it on your own hardware. For UDA 1-5 this works trivially. For UDA 6, it also works, with changes in software. UDA 7 does make a stronger assumption: the sufficiently robust universe, however one doesn't really assume strong physical continuity by now (by 1-6), so I don't see UD even has to be coherently ran all at once and in a continuous manner (for example a running like that in Permutation City would work just well, in the dust). If you do consider some other 'everything' theories like Tegmark's or Schmidhuber, they also grant you an UD (and I would venture to say that your neutral Existence might also grant you such robust universes). UDA 8 you seem to disagree with, but I don't see what explanatory power could any primitively physical structure grant you: all possible digitalised observers and their continuations already have to be in the UD, thus you cannot use primitive physics for prediction. Thus the only claim that one could make for saving primitive physics would be that it allows for consciousness to manifest (for example by implementing the body). UDA 8 and MGA show that such a claim is specious and unnecessary. You seem to disagree with it, although its not clear to me as to why or how. You seem to claim that physical reality isn't primary (COMP agrees, it emerges from arithmetical/computational truth), although don't agree with the way it emerges in COMP or its nature(?)? Does that mean that you don't think that all possible observers are contained in the UD? To be frank, I'm still rather confused at what point your theory becomes incompatible or predicts different things than COMP (given the standard assumptions used in the UDA). Dear ACW, Please rethink exactly what teleportation requires to be possible. It is not any different from the ability to copy information. Yes, COMP assumes that there is a subst. level, which means that stuff below the subst. level may vary (or even look like noise, due to 1p-indeterminacy, we tend to think of this, in our universe, as the quantum foam and the like). A doctor (which is included in the assumption, but if it weren't...) only need be able to copy/emulate either exactly at the right subst. level or slightly below it (copying at a higher level may entail memory loss or functionality loss or worse). What this effectively means is that you don't need to be able to read the full quantum state (which is not possible), but just quasi-classical states, which we can do and which should be either at subst. level or below. (If the subst. level was below, COMP would be practically false, as we do assume that the observer's universal number is at least partially stable at the subst. level). No violation of the no-cloning theorem here. And aside from that we can copy/transmit quasi-classical information pretty well. Hi ACW, There is a problem with this way of thinking in that it assumes that all of the properties of objects are inherent in the
Re: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/16/2012 10:16 AM, acw wrote: On 2/16/2012 17:58, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/16/2012 11:54 AM, acw wrote: On 2/16/2012 15:59, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/16/2012 6:57 AM, acw wrote: On 2/15/2012 07:07, Stephen P. King wrote: [SPK] Interesting. How then do we explain the fact that humans suffer all kinds of computational errors such as schizophrenia, dismorphia, etc. We intentionally lie... The list of computationally erroneous behavior of the brain is almost endless. How does this occur given COMP? But I digress. Explaining physical reality is to explain the properties that it has as opposed to those that it does not, UDA does not do that. It even presupposes things that are simply not possible in the physical world, such as teleportation and computations generating knowledge without the use of resources. Even a Reversible computer requires memory to compute and memory is a physical quantity. The notion of teleportation used in UDA is nothing magical or requiring new physics. The experiments in the UDA can be read as after someone said yes to the doctor and became a SIM(Substrate Independent Mind), thus after the substitution, they can know one of their godel numbers/programs (assuming correct observation). This essentially means that said program state can be transmitted and ran/instantiated anywhere you want and with any delay or order or form. A teleportation from A to B would merely require the SIM to stop itself in A, have another program transmit it to B(for example through the Internet or some other communication channel) and have someone run it in B, for example on a general purpose Turing-equivalent computer or more likely a special-purpose digital brain (for better performance within our physics) with access to an environment(or more, such as VRs). For all intents and purposes this isn't any different from me writing a program and you downloading it and running it on your own hardware. For UDA 1-5 this works trivially. For UDA 6, it also works, with changes in software. UDA 7 does make a stronger assumption: the sufficiently robust universe, however one doesn't really assume strong physical continuity by now (by 1-6), so I don't see UD even has to be coherently ran all at once and in a continuous manner (for example a running like that in Permutation City would work just well, in the dust). If you do consider some other 'everything' theories like Tegmark's or Schmidhuber, they also grant you an UD (and I would venture to say that your neutral Existence might also grant you such robust universes). UDA 8 you seem to disagree with, but I don't see what explanatory power could any primitively physical structure grant you: all possible digitalised observers and their continuations already have to be in the UD, thus you cannot use primitive physics for prediction. Thus the only claim that one could make for saving primitive physics would be that it allows for consciousness to manifest (for example by implementing the body). UDA 8 and MGA show that such a claim is specious and unnecessary. You seem to disagree with it, although its not clear to me as to why or how. You seem to claim that physical reality isn't primary (COMP agrees, it emerges from arithmetical/computational truth), although don't agree with the way it emerges in COMP or its nature(?)? Does that mean that you don't think that all possible observers are contained in the UD? To be frank, I'm still rather confused at what point your theory becomes incompatible or predicts different things than COMP (given the standard assumptions used in the UDA). Dear ACW, Please rethink exactly what teleportation requires to be possible. It is not any different from the ability to copy information. Yes, COMP assumes that there is a subst. level, which means that stuff below the subst. level may vary (or even look like noise, due to 1p-indeterminacy, we tend to think of this, in our universe, as the quantum foam and the like). A doctor (which is included in the assumption, but if it weren't...) only need be able to copy/emulate either exactly at the right subst. level or slightly below it (copying at a higher level may entail memory loss or functionality loss or worse). What this effectively means is that you don't need to be able to read the full quantum state (which is not possible), but just quasi-classical states, which we can do and which should be either at subst. level or below. (If the subst. level was below, COMP would be practically false, as we do assume that the observer's universal number is at least partially stable at the subst. level). No violation of the no-cloning theorem here. And aside from that we can copy/transmit quasi-classical information pretty well. Hi ACW, There is a problem with this way of thinking in that it assumes that all of the properties of objects are inherent in the objects themselves and have no relation or dependence on anything else. This is is wrong. We know from our study of QM and the
Re: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/16/2012 11:09 AM, Stephen P. King wrote: All of this substitution stuff is predicated upon the possibility that the brain can be emulated by a Universal Turing Machine. It would be helpful if we first established that a Turing Machine is capable of what we are assuming it do be able to do. I am pretty well convinced that it cannot based on all that I have studied of QM and its implications. This where the paradox of the philosophical zombie arises. It seems pretty certain that a TM, given the right program, can exhibit intelligence. So can we then deny that it is conscious based on unobservable quantum entanglements (i.e. those that make its computation classical)? Brent -- 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: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/16/2012 11:15 AM, Quentin Anciaux wrote: All of this substitution stuff is predicated upon the possibility that the brain can be emulated by a Universal Turing Machine. It would be helpful if we first established that a Turing Machine is capable of what we are assuming it do be able to do. I am pretty well convinced that it cannot Well at least, you state now that you think comp is simply false... so it's just trolling about it, when you just reject the premices... It's not trolling when Stephen believes it and is willing to argue rationally for it. Brent -- 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: On Pre-existing Fields
2012/2/16 meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net On 2/16/2012 11:15 AM, Quentin Anciaux wrote: All of this substitution stuff is predicated upon the possibility that the brain can be emulated by a Universal Turing Machine. It would be helpful if we first established that a Turing Machine is capable of what we are assuming it do be able to do. I am pretty well convinced that it cannot Well at least, you state now that you think comp is simply false... so it's just trolling about it, when you just reject the premices... It's not trolling when Stephen believes it and is willing to argue rationally for it. It is trolling when you ask computationalism to be something else as computationalism (the view that the human mind is an information processing system, can be run on a UTM). He simply reject the premices, so there no point to argue to the conclusion of the UD argument when you stop at step 0... If you reject from the start, the logical conclusion is that you reject all the step, no point to argue on step 7, when you stop on step 0. Quentin Brent -- 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. -- All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. -- 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: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/16/2012 11:38 AM, Quentin Anciaux wrote: 2012/2/16 meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net On 2/16/2012 11:15 AM, Quentin Anciaux wrote: All of this substitution stuff is predicated upon the possibility that the brain can be emulated by a Universal Turing Machine. It would be helpful if we first established that a Turing Machine is capable of what we are assuming it do be able to do. I am pretty well convinced that it cannot Well at least, you state now that you think comp is simply false... so it's just trolling about it, when you just reject the premices... It's not trolling when Stephen believes it and is willing to argue rationally for it. It is trolling when you ask computationalism to be something else as computationalism (the view that the human mind is an information processing system, can be run on a UTM). He simply reject the premices, so there no point to argue to the conclusion of the UD argument when you stop at step 0... If you reject from the start, the logical conclusion is that you reject all the step, no point to argue on step 7, when you stop on step 0. I don't agree. You may find an error in an inference and that's useful, whether you agree with the premises or not. A discussion list isn't about people arriving at a decision. I find Craig to be more troll-like because his arguments are such scatter-gun analogies - but I think he's sincere and not a troll. Brent -- 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: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/16/2012 19:09, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/16/2012 1:16 PM, acw wrote: On 2/16/2012 17:58, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/16/2012 11:54 AM, acw wrote: On 2/16/2012 15:59, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/16/2012 6:57 AM, acw wrote: On 2/15/2012 07:07, Stephen P. King wrote: [SPK] Interesting. How then do we explain the fact that humans suffer all kinds of computational errors such as schizophrenia, dismorphia, etc. We intentionally lie... The list of computationally erroneous behavior of the brain is almost endless. How does this occur given COMP? But I digress. Explaining physical reality is to explain the properties that it has as opposed to those that it does not, UDA does not do that. It even presupposes things that are simply not possible in the physical world, such as teleportation and computations generating knowledge without the use of resources. Even a Reversible computer requires memory to compute and memory is a physical quantity. The notion of teleportation used in UDA is nothing magical or requiring new physics. The experiments in the UDA can be read as after someone said yes to the doctor and became a SIM(Substrate Independent Mind), thus after the substitution, they can know one of their godel numbers/programs (assuming correct observation). This essentially means that said program state can be transmitted and ran/instantiated anywhere you want and with any delay or order or form. A teleportation from A to B would merely require the SIM to stop itself in A, have another program transmit it to B(for example through the Internet or some other communication channel) and have someone run it in B, for example on a general purpose Turing-equivalent computer or more likely a special-purpose digital brain (for better performance within our physics) with access to an environment(or more, such as VRs). For all intents and purposes this isn't any different from me writing a program and you downloading it and running it on your own hardware. For UDA 1-5 this works trivially. For UDA 6, it also works, with changes in software. UDA 7 does make a stronger assumption: the sufficiently robust universe, however one doesn't really assume strong physical continuity by now (by 1-6), so I don't see UD even has to be coherently ran all at once and in a continuous manner (for example a running like that in Permutation City would work just well, in the dust). If you do consider some other 'everything' theories like Tegmark's or Schmidhuber, they also grant you an UD (and I would venture to say that your neutral Existence might also grant you such robust universes). UDA 8 you seem to disagree with, but I don't see what explanatory power could any primitively physical structure grant you: all possible digitalised observers and their continuations already have to be in the UD, thus you cannot use primitive physics for prediction. Thus the only claim that one could make for saving primitive physics would be that it allows for consciousness to manifest (for example by implementing the body). UDA 8 and MGA show that such a claim is specious and unnecessary. You seem to disagree with it, although its not clear to me as to why or how. You seem to claim that physical reality isn't primary (COMP agrees, it emerges from arithmetical/computational truth), although don't agree with the way it emerges in COMP or its nature(?)? Does that mean that you don't think that all possible observers are contained in the UD? To be frank, I'm still rather confused at what point your theory becomes incompatible or predicts different things than COMP (given the standard assumptions used in the UDA). Dear ACW, Please rethink exactly what teleportation requires to be possible. It is not any different from the ability to copy information. Yes, COMP assumes that there is a subst. level, which means that stuff below the subst. level may vary (or even look like noise, due to 1p-indeterminacy, we tend to think of this, in our universe, as the quantum foam and the like). A doctor (which is included in the assumption, but if it weren't...) only need be able to copy/emulate either exactly at the right subst. level or slightly below it (copying at a higher level may entail memory loss or functionality loss or worse). What this effectively means is that you don't need to be able to read the full quantum state (which is not possible), but just quasi-classical states, which we can do and which should be either at subst. level or below. (If the subst. level was below, COMP would be practically false, as we do assume that the observer's universal number is at least partially stable at the subst. level). No violation of the no-cloning theorem here. And aside from that we can copy/transmit quasi-classical information pretty well. Hi ACW, There is a problem with this way of thinking in that it assumes that all of the properties of objects are inherent in the objects themselves and have no relation or dependence on anything else. This is is wrong.
Re: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/16/2012 19:26, meekerdb wrote: On 2/16/2012 10:16 AM, acw wrote: On 2/16/2012 17:58, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/16/2012 11:54 AM, acw wrote: On 2/16/2012 15:59, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/16/2012 6:57 AM, acw wrote: On 2/15/2012 07:07, Stephen P. King wrote: [SPK] Interesting. How then do we explain the fact that humans suffer all kinds of computational errors such as schizophrenia, dismorphia, etc. We intentionally lie... The list of computationally erroneous behavior of the brain is almost endless. How does this occur given COMP? But I digress. Explaining physical reality is to explain the properties that it has as opposed to those that it does not, UDA does not do that. It even presupposes things that are simply not possible in the physical world, such as teleportation and computations generating knowledge without the use of resources. Even a Reversible computer requires memory to compute and memory is a physical quantity. The notion of teleportation used in UDA is nothing magical or requiring new physics. The experiments in the UDA can be read as after someone said yes to the doctor and became a SIM(Substrate Independent Mind), thus after the substitution, they can know one of their godel numbers/programs (assuming correct observation). This essentially means that said program state can be transmitted and ran/instantiated anywhere you want and with any delay or order or form. A teleportation from A to B would merely require the SIM to stop itself in A, have another program transmit it to B(for example through the Internet or some other communication channel) and have someone run it in B, for example on a general purpose Turing-equivalent computer or more likely a special-purpose digital brain (for better performance within our physics) with access to an environment(or more, such as VRs). For all intents and purposes this isn't any different from me writing a program and you downloading it and running it on your own hardware. For UDA 1-5 this works trivially. For UDA 6, it also works, with changes in software. UDA 7 does make a stronger assumption: the sufficiently robust universe, however one doesn't really assume strong physical continuity by now (by 1-6), so I don't see UD even has to be coherently ran all at once and in a continuous manner (for example a running like that in Permutation City would work just well, in the dust). If you do consider some other 'everything' theories like Tegmark's or Schmidhuber, they also grant you an UD (and I would venture to say that your neutral Existence might also grant you such robust universes). UDA 8 you seem to disagree with, but I don't see what explanatory power could any primitively physical structure grant you: all possible digitalised observers and their continuations already have to be in the UD, thus you cannot use primitive physics for prediction. Thus the only claim that one could make for saving primitive physics would be that it allows for consciousness to manifest (for example by implementing the body). UDA 8 and MGA show that such a claim is specious and unnecessary. You seem to disagree with it, although its not clear to me as to why or how. You seem to claim that physical reality isn't primary (COMP agrees, it emerges from arithmetical/computational truth), although don't agree with the way it emerges in COMP or its nature(?)? Does that mean that you don't think that all possible observers are contained in the UD? To be frank, I'm still rather confused at what point your theory becomes incompatible or predicts different things than COMP (given the standard assumptions used in the UDA). Dear ACW, Please rethink exactly what teleportation requires to be possible. It is not any different from the ability to copy information. Yes, COMP assumes that there is a subst. level, which means that stuff below the subst. level may vary (or even look like noise, due to 1p-indeterminacy, we tend to think of this, in our universe, as the quantum foam and the like). A doctor (which is included in the assumption, but if it weren't...) only need be able to copy/emulate either exactly at the right subst. level or slightly below it (copying at a higher level may entail memory loss or functionality loss or worse). What this effectively means is that you don't need to be able to read the full quantum state (which is not possible), but just quasi-classical states, which we can do and which should be either at subst. level or below. (If the subst. level was below, COMP would be practically false, as we do assume that the observer's universal number is at least partially stable at the subst. level). No violation of the no-cloning theorem here. And aside from that we can copy/transmit quasi-classical information pretty well. Hi ACW, There is a problem with this way of thinking in that it assumes that all of the properties of objects are inherent in the objects themselves and have no relation or dependence on anything else. This is is wrong. We
Re: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/16/2012 2:13 PM, meekerdb wrote: On 2/16/2012 9:58 AM, Stephen P. King wrote: Hi ACW, There is a problem with this way of thinking in that it assumes that all of the properties of objects are inherent in the objects themselves and have no relation or dependence on anything else. This is is wrong. We know from our study of QM and the experiments that have been done, that the properties of objects are definite because of interdependence and interconnections (via entanglement) between all things within our event horizon. You seem to be laboring under the classical Newtonian view. To have a consistent and real idea of teleportation one has to consider, for example, the requirements of quantum teleportation http://www.tech-faq.com/quantum-teleportation.html. It is things like that that are preventing COMP from being a realistic explanatory theory. :-( I like COMP and UDA because I see them as ideas that have errors can be corrected. This is not to say that my own ideas are not error filled! We are all, including me, finite and fallible. Onward! Stephen That's essentially just saying 'No' to the doctor. Since the doctor can only substitute stuff that is functionally equivalent at a classical level you won't say 'Yes' if you think the quantum entangled states of the stuff he's replacing are essential. Note however that the replacement WILL have quantum entanglements; just not the same ones. So you might say 'Yes', accepting that your consciousness will be different in some way and yet still avoid being a p-zombie. Brent Hi Brent, Please read what you just wrote and then what I wrote to ACW again and think about it. Is there a difference between theory - as in what we believe to be the case - and facts - that which *we* have no choice but to agree is true, in your mind? I am telling you that experiential evidence exists, and the mathematical theorems as well,that contradicts all this nonsense about classical teleportation and it is as if I am writing random strings of symbols. How about you do some research of your own and stop regurgitating other people's words? 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.
Re: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/16/2012 2:32 PM, meekerdb wrote: On 2/16/2012 11:09 AM, Stephen P. King wrote: All of this substitution stuff is predicated upon the possibility that the brain can be emulated by a Universal Turing Machine. It would be helpful if we first established that a Turing Machine is capable of what we are assuming it do be able to do. I am pretty well convinced that it cannot based on all that I have studied of QM and its implications. This where the paradox of the philosophical zombie arises. It seems pretty certain that a TM, given the right program, can exhibit intelligence. So can we then deny that it is conscious based on unobservable quantum entanglements (i.e. those that make its computation classical)? Brent So is intelligence and consciousness, ala having 1p, qualia and all that subjective experience stuff, the same thing in your mind? 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.
Re: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/16/2012 2:34 PM, meekerdb wrote: On 2/16/2012 11:15 AM, Quentin Anciaux wrote: All of this substitution stuff is predicated upon the possibility that the brain can be emulated by a Universal Turing Machine. It would be helpful if we first established that a Turing Machine is capable of what we are assuming it do be able to do. I am pretty well convinced that it cannot Well at least, you state now that you think comp is simply false... so it's just trolling about it, when you just reject the premices... It's not trolling when Stephen believes it and is willing to argue rationally for it. Brent Hi Brent, If I am unwilling to defend what I think that I believe, how could I ever find errors in them and correct them? Thank you Brent for pointing this out. ;-) This is not an exercise to get attention for me. 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.
Re: On Pre-existing Fields
2012/2/16 meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net On 2/16/2012 11:38 AM, Quentin Anciaux wrote: 2012/2/16 meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net On 2/16/2012 11:15 AM, Quentin Anciaux wrote: All of this substitution stuff is predicated upon the possibility that the brain can be emulated by a Universal Turing Machine. It would be helpful if we first established that a Turing Machine is capable of what we are assuming it do be able to do. I am pretty well convinced that it cannot Well at least, you state now that you think comp is simply false... so it's just trolling about it, when you just reject the premices... It's not trolling when Stephen believes it and is willing to argue rationally for it. It is trolling when you ask computationalism to be something else as computationalism (the view that the human mind is an information processing system, can be run on a UTM). He simply reject the premices, so there no point to argue to the conclusion of the UD argument when you stop at step 0... If you reject from the start, the logical conclusion is that you reject all the step, no point to argue on step 7, when you stop on step 0. I don't agree. You may find an error in an inference and that's useful, whether you agree with the premises or not. Sure... but the argument of Stephen about physical world is the rejection of step 0 and not an error in the inference. That's why I call that a troll. A discussion list isn't about people arriving at a decision. I agree. I find Craig to be more troll-like because his arguments are such scatter-gun analogies - but I think he's sincere and not a troll. Brent -- 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. -- All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. -- 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: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/16/2012 20:40, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/16/2012 2:32 PM, meekerdb wrote: On 2/16/2012 11:09 AM, Stephen P. King wrote: All of this substitution stuff is predicated upon the possibility that the brain can be emulated by a Universal Turing Machine. It would be helpful if we first established that a Turing Machine is capable of what we are assuming it do be able to do. I am pretty well convinced that it cannot based on all that I have studied of QM and its implications. This where the paradox of the philosophical zombie arises. It seems pretty certain that a TM, given the right program, can exhibit intelligence. So can we then deny that it is conscious based on unobservable quantum entanglements (i.e. those that make its computation classical)? Brent So is intelligence and consciousness, ala having 1p, qualia and all that subjective experience stuff, the same thing in your mind? Surely they must be related. If not, you do indeed get the p. zombie problem: someone who acts in all respects like a different person with (assumed) consciousness, indistinguishable in behavior, yet without consciousness. The question boils down to: let's say you knew some person well, they one day got a digital brain transplant, they still behave more or less as you remember them, do you think they are now without consciousness or merely that their consciousness is a bit changed due to different quantum entanglements? 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.
Re: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/16/2012 1:00 PM, acw wrote: On 2/16/2012 20:40, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/16/2012 2:32 PM, meekerdb wrote: On 2/16/2012 11:09 AM, Stephen P. King wrote: All of this substitution stuff is predicated upon the possibility that the brain can be emulated by a Universal Turing Machine. It would be helpful if we first established that a Turing Machine is capable of what we are assuming it do be able to do. I am pretty well convinced that it cannot based on all that I have studied of QM and its implications. This where the paradox of the philosophical zombie arises. It seems pretty certain that a TM, given the right program, can exhibit intelligence. So can we then deny that it is conscious based on unobservable quantum entanglements (i.e. those that make its computation classical)? Brent So is intelligence and consciousness, ala having 1p, qualia and all that subjective experience stuff, the same thing in your mind? Surely they must be related. If not, you do indeed get the p. zombie problem: someone who acts in all respects like a different person with (assumed) consciousness, indistinguishable in behavior, yet without consciousness. The question boils down to: let's say you knew some person well, they one day got a digital brain transplant, they still behave more or less as you remember them, do you think they are now without consciousness or merely that their consciousness is a bit changed due to different quantum entanglements? I think substituting for neurons or even groups of neurons in the human brain would preserve consciousness with perhaps minor changes. But when it comes to the question of whether an intelligent behaving robot is necessarily conscious, I'm not so sure. I think it would depend on the structure and programming. It would have *some kind* or consciousness, but it might be rather different from human consciousness. Note that Bruno answers the concern that interaction/entanglement with the environment by saying that the correct level of substitution may include arbitrarily large parts of the environment. I think this is problematic because the substitution (and the computation) are necessarily classical. Brent 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.
Re: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/16/2012 22:37, meekerdb wrote: On 2/16/2012 1:00 PM, acw wrote: On 2/16/2012 20:40, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/16/2012 2:32 PM, meekerdb wrote: On 2/16/2012 11:09 AM, Stephen P. King wrote: All of this substitution stuff is predicated upon the possibility that the brain can be emulated by a Universal Turing Machine. It would be helpful if we first established that a Turing Machine is capable of what we are assuming it do be able to do. I am pretty well convinced that it cannot based on all that I have studied of QM and its implications. This where the paradox of the philosophical zombie arises. It seems pretty certain that a TM, given the right program, can exhibit intelligence. So can we then deny that it is conscious based on unobservable quantum entanglements (i.e. those that make its computation classical)? Brent So is intelligence and consciousness, ala having 1p, qualia and all that subjective experience stuff, the same thing in your mind? Surely they must be related. If not, you do indeed get the p. zombie problem: someone who acts in all respects like a different person with (assumed) consciousness, indistinguishable in behavior, yet without consciousness. The question boils down to: let's say you knew some person well, they one day got a digital brain transplant, they still behave more or less as you remember them, do you think they are now without consciousness or merely that their consciousness is a bit changed due to different quantum entanglements? I think substituting for neurons or even groups of neurons in the human brain would preserve consciousness with perhaps minor changes. Probably, otherwise, the nature of consciousness is really fickle and doesn't match our introspection ( http://consc.net/papers/qualia.html ). But when it comes to the question of whether an intelligent behaving robot is necessarily conscious, I'm not so sure. I think it would depend on the structure and programming. It would have *some kind* or consciousness, but it might be rather different from human consciousness. It would depend on the cognitive architecture and structures involved. If the cognitive architecture is something really different from ours, it might be hard to fathom a guess. I can also imagine some optimizers which are capable of giving intelligent answers, but I have trouble attributing it any meaningful consciousness (for example an AI which just brute-forces the problem and performs no induction or anything similar to how we think), while I'd potentially attribute similar consciousness to ours to some neuromorphic AI, and something stranger/not directly comprehensible to me to an AI which is based on our high-level psychology, but different in most other ways in implementation. I suppose if/when we do crack the AGI problem, there will be a lot of interesting things to investigate about the nature of such foreign consciousness. Note that Bruno answers the concern that interaction/entanglement with the environment by saying that the correct level of substitution may include arbitrarily large parts of the environment. I think this is problematic because the substitution (and the computation) are necessarily classical. In a way, that would keep some of COMP's conclusions still valid (weakening of the theory), but it's not very practical. I tend to instead think that machines implementing the observer below the substitution level can vary as much as they want as long as the observer is consistently implemented (a continuation where the observer isn't consistently implemented either no longer is a continuation of the observer or is a low-measure one, although some of these details do need to be worked out). One question that bothers me is if the observer is actually entangled quite a bit with these lower-level machines and if a digital substitution is performed at a higher level, the functionality may remain the same, but the measure/consistent extensions may get altered - better hope there's not too many white rabbits if the subst. level is too high, otherwise it would lead to unstable jumpy realities to SIMs. Brent 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.
Re: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/16/2012 3:02 PM, acw wrote: On 2/16/2012 22:37, meekerdb wrote: On 2/16/2012 1:00 PM, acw wrote: On 2/16/2012 20:40, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/16/2012 2:32 PM, meekerdb wrote: On 2/16/2012 11:09 AM, Stephen P. King wrote: All of this substitution stuff is predicated upon the possibility that the brain can be emulated by a Universal Turing Machine. It would be helpful if we first established that a Turing Machine is capable of what we are assuming it do be able to do. I am pretty well convinced that it cannot based on all that I have studied of QM and its implications. This where the paradox of the philosophical zombie arises. It seems pretty certain that a TM, given the right program, can exhibit intelligence. So can we then deny that it is conscious based on unobservable quantum entanglements (i.e. those that make its computation classical)? Brent So is intelligence and consciousness, ala having 1p, qualia and all that subjective experience stuff, the same thing in your mind? Surely they must be related. If not, you do indeed get the p. zombie problem: someone who acts in all respects like a different person with (assumed) consciousness, indistinguishable in behavior, yet without consciousness. The question boils down to: let's say you knew some person well, they one day got a digital brain transplant, they still behave more or less as you remember them, do you think they are now without consciousness or merely that their consciousness is a bit changed due to different quantum entanglements? I think substituting for neurons or even groups of neurons in the human brain would preserve consciousness with perhaps minor changes. Probably, otherwise, the nature of consciousness is really fickle and doesn't match our introspection ( http://consc.net/papers/qualia.html ). But when it comes to the question of whether an intelligent behaving robot is necessarily conscious, I'm not so sure. I think it would depend on the structure and programming. It would have *some kind* or consciousness, but it might be rather different from human consciousness. It would depend on the cognitive architecture and structures involved. If the cognitive architecture is something really different from ours, it might be hard to fathom a guess. I can also imagine some optimizers which are capable of giving intelligent answers, but I have trouble attributing it any meaningful consciousness (for example an AI which just brute-forces the problem and performs no induction or anything similar to how we think), while I'd potentially attribute similar consciousness to ours to some neuromorphic AI, and something stranger/not directly comprehensible to me to an AI which is based on our high-level psychology, but different in most other ways in implementation. I suppose if/when we do crack the AGI problem, there will be a lot of interesting things to investigate about the nature of such foreign consciousness. Which is why I think we'll solve the artificial *intelligence* problems and we'll learn to create different intelligent and emotive behaviors, different personalities, and how they depend on architecture; and questions about 'consciousness' will become otiose. Brent Note that Bruno answers the concern that interaction/entanglement with the environment by saying that the correct level of substitution may include arbitrarily large parts of the environment. I think this is problematic because the substitution (and the computation) are necessarily classical. In a way, that would keep some of COMP's conclusions still valid (weakening of the theory), but it's not very practical. I tend to instead think that machines implementing the observer below the substitution level can vary as much as they want as long as the observer is consistently implemented (a continuation where the observer isn't consistently implemented either no longer is a continuation of the observer or is a low-measure one, although some of these details do need to be worked out). One question that bothers me is if the observer is actually entangled quite a bit with these lower-level machines and if a digital substitution is performed at a higher level, the functionality may remain the same, but the measure/consistent extensions may get altered - better hope there's not too many white rabbits if the subst. level is too high, otherwise it would lead to unstable jumpy realities to SIMs. Brent 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.
Re: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/16/2012 12:36 PM, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/16/2012 2:13 PM, meekerdb wrote: On 2/16/2012 9:58 AM, Stephen P. King wrote: Hi ACW, There is a problem with this way of thinking in that it assumes that all of the properties of objects are inherent in the objects themselves and have no relation or dependence on anything else. This is is wrong. We know from our study of QM and the experiments that have been done, that the properties of objects are definite because of interdependence and interconnections (via entanglement) between all things within our event horizon. You seem to be laboring under the classical Newtonian view. To have a consistent and real idea of teleportation one has to consider, for example, the requirements of quantum teleportation http://www.tech-faq.com/quantum-teleportation.html. It is things like that that are preventing COMP from being a realistic explanatory theory. :-( I like COMP and UDA because I see them as ideas that have errors can be corrected. This is not to say that my own ideas are not error filled! We are all, including me, finite and fallible. Onward! Stephen That's essentially just saying 'No' to the doctor. Since the doctor can only substitute stuff that is functionally equivalent at a classical level you won't say 'Yes' if you think the quantum entangled states of the stuff he's replacing are essential. Note however that the replacement WILL have quantum entanglements; just not the same ones. So you might say 'Yes', accepting that your consciousness will be different in some way and yet still avoid being a p-zombie. Brent Hi Brent, Please read what you just wrote and then what I wrote to ACW again and think about it. Is there a difference between theory - as in what we believe to be the case - and facts - that which *we* have no choice but to agree is true, in your mind? Sure. Theories are stories we invent to explain facts. I am telling you that experiential evidence exists, What is it? and the mathematical theorems as well, I'm aware of the QM no-cloning theorem, but it doesn't apply to classical teleportation. Lawrence Krause, in The Physics of Star Trek, estimates that the energy required to determine the state of each atom in a human body is so enormous (like a supernova) that it could never be implemented. However, mapping the neural network of a brain is a far smaller problem. Brent that contradicts all this nonsense about classical teleportation and it is as if I am writing random strings of symbols. How about you do some research of your own and stop regurgitating other people's words? Onward! Stephen No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com http://www.avg.com Version: 2012.0.1913 / Virus Database: 2112/4813 - Release Date: 02/16/12 -- 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. -- 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: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/16/2012 12:40 PM, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/16/2012 2:32 PM, meekerdb wrote: On 2/16/2012 11:09 AM, Stephen P. King wrote: All of this substitution stuff is predicated upon the possibility that the brain can be emulated by a Universal Turing Machine. It would be helpful if we first established that a Turing Machine is capable of what we are assuming it do be able to do. I am pretty well convinced that it cannot based on all that I have studied of QM and its implications. This where the paradox of the philosophical zombie arises. It seems pretty certain that a TM, given the right program, can exhibit intelligence. So can we then deny that it is conscious based on unobservable quantum entanglements (i.e. those that make its computation classical)? Brent So is intelligence and consciousness, ala having 1p, qualia and all that subjective experience stuff, the same thing in your mind? I doubt that they are the same. I think that there may ways of implementing intelligence, which can be measured by behavior, that are radically different from human. I speculate that such an intelligence would be conscious in some sense, but it might be so different from human that it would hard to infer that it existed. Brent -- 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: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/16/2012 4:00 PM, acw wrote: On 2/16/2012 20:40, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/16/2012 2:32 PM, meekerdb wrote: On 2/16/2012 11:09 AM, Stephen P. King wrote: All of this substitution stuff is predicated upon the possibility that the brain can be emulated by a Universal Turing Machine. It would be helpful if we first established that a Turing Machine is capable of what we are assuming it do be able to do. I am pretty well convinced that it cannot based on all that I have studied of QM and its implications. This where the paradox of the philosophical zombie arises. It seems pretty certain that a TM, given the right program, can exhibit intelligence. So can we then deny that it is conscious based on unobservable quantum entanglements (i.e. those that make its computation classical)? Brent So is intelligence and consciousness, ala having 1p, qualia and all that subjective experience stuff, the same thing in your mind? Surely they must be related. If not, you do indeed get the p. zombie problem: someone who acts in all respects like a different person with (assumed) consciousness, indistinguishable in behavior, yet without consciousness. The question boils down to: let's say you knew some person well, they one day got a digital brain transplant, they still behave more or less as you remember them, do you think they are now without consciousness or merely that their consciousness is a bit changed due to different quantum entanglements? Hi ACW, Craig is making a good argument about this very issue. But I will not speak for him. My issue here is that it seems that you do not appreciate what is actually necessary to do a digital substitution. While whether or not the brain has quantum stuff going on can be put aside, the entire universe is quantum mechanical and not classical therefore any operation that we imagine doing has to be consistent with the strictures of QM or it is a fantasy. Classical teleportation is, like classical substitution, simply a pipe dream. 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.
Re: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/16/2012 4:49 PM, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/16/2012 4:00 PM, acw wrote: On 2/16/2012 20:40, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/16/2012 2:32 PM, meekerdb wrote: On 2/16/2012 11:09 AM, Stephen P. King wrote: All of this substitution stuff is predicated upon the possibility that the brain can be emulated by a Universal Turing Machine. It would be helpful if we first established that a Turing Machine is capable of what we are assuming it do be able to do. I am pretty well convinced that it cannot based on all that I have studied of QM and its implications. This where the paradox of the philosophical zombie arises. It seems pretty certain that a TM, given the right program, can exhibit intelligence. So can we then deny that it is conscious based on unobservable quantum entanglements (i.e. those that make its computation classical)? Brent So is intelligence and consciousness, ala having 1p, qualia and all that subjective experience stuff, the same thing in your mind? Surely they must be related. If not, you do indeed get the p. zombie problem: someone who acts in all respects like a different person with (assumed) consciousness, indistinguishable in behavior, yet without consciousness. The question boils down to: let's say you knew some person well, they one day got a digital brain transplant, they still behave more or less as you remember them, do you think they are now without consciousness or merely that their consciousness is a bit changed due to different quantum entanglements? Hi ACW, Craig is making a good argument about this very issue. But I will not speak for him. My issue here is that it seems that you do not appreciate what is actually necessary to do a digital substitution. While whether or not the brain has quantum stuff going on can be put aside, the entire universe is quantum mechanical and not classical therefore any operation that we imagine doing has to be consistent with the strictures of QM or it is a fantasy. But QM is consistent with some things (almost all big things) being almost exactly classical. There is no reason to think our brains depend on non-classical processes to perform computations (metabolism - yes, computation - no). Certainly it would be a severe evolutionary disadvantage if there were more than a just a little randomness in the function of a brain. Classical teleportation is, like classical substitution, simply a pipe dream. Makes no sense!? Being classical is exactly what allows teleportation and functional substitution. Brent 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.
Re: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/16/2012 6:32 PM, meekerdb wrote: On 2/16/2012 12:36 PM, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/16/2012 2:13 PM, meekerdb wrote: On 2/16/2012 9:58 AM, Stephen P. King wrote: Hi ACW, There is a problem with this way of thinking in that it assumes that all of the properties of objects are inherent in the objects themselves and have no relation or dependence on anything else. This is is wrong. We know from our study of QM and the experiments that have been done, that the properties of objects are definite because of interdependence and interconnections (via entanglement) between all things within our event horizon. You seem to be laboring under the classical Newtonian view. To have a consistent and real idea of teleportation one has to consider, for example, the requirements of quantum teleportation http://www.tech-faq.com/quantum-teleportation.html. It is things like that that are preventing COMP from being a realistic explanatory theory. :-( I like COMP and UDA because I see them as ideas that have errors can be corrected. This is not to say that my own ideas are not error filled! We are all, including me, finite and fallible. Onward! Stephen That's essentially just saying 'No' to the doctor. Since the doctor can only substitute stuff that is functionally equivalent at a classical level you won't say 'Yes' if you think the quantum entangled states of the stuff he's replacing are essential. Note however that the replacement WILL have quantum entanglements; just not the same ones. So you might say 'Yes', accepting that your consciousness will be different in some way and yet still avoid being a p-zombie. Brent Hi Brent, Please read what you just wrote and then what I wrote to ACW again and think about it. Is there a difference between theory - as in what we believe to be the case - and facts - that which *we* have no choice but to agree is true, in your mind? Sure. Theories are stories we invent to explain facts. Hi Brent, And we should never mistake those stories to be anything other than stories that we invent to explain fact. I am telling you that experiential evidence exists, What is it? Try this http://physics.aps.org/articles/v2/32 and this http://www.sciencemag.org/content/315/5814/966.short and this http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/Issues/2007/May/PhotosynthesisWorksQuantumComputing.asp and the mathematical theorems as well, I'm aware of the QM no-cloning theorem, but it doesn't apply to classical teleportation. Lawrence Krause, in The Physics of Star Trek, estimates that the energy required to determine the state of each atom in a human body is so enormous (like a supernova) that it could never be implemented. However, mapping the neural network of a brain is a far smaller problem. So Kraus' argument does itself show at least one aspect of how classical teleportation is problematic. I rest my case. Additionally, in consideration of the mapping the neural network idea, how exactly are you going to overcome the fact that the more precisely you measure the positions of every atom in a brain the less information you can gather of their momenta? if we are going to implement a simulation of a brain that allows for continuation then we had better be able to map both the position and the momentum data down to the substitution level. The problem is that the substitution level is molecular in scale, we know this because chemical neutransmiters play a vital role in brain behavior. The fact that a tiny amount of LSD will totally change your state of mind is sufficient proof of this. You see this is the kind of problems that get completely glossed over in UDA. Many of you balk that I am making a big deal about physics, but without physics we would simply not be here to have this conversation. 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.
Re: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/16/2012 5:45 PM, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/16/2012 6:32 PM, meekerdb wrote: On 2/16/2012 12:36 PM, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/16/2012 2:13 PM, meekerdb wrote: On 2/16/2012 9:58 AM, Stephen P. King wrote: Hi ACW, There is a problem with this way of thinking in that it assumes that all of the properties of objects are inherent in the objects themselves and have no relation or dependence on anything else. This is is wrong. We know from our study of QM and the experiments that have been done, that the properties of objects are definite because of interdependence and interconnections (via entanglement) between all things within our event horizon. You seem to be laboring under the classical Newtonian view. To have a consistent and real idea of teleportation one has to consider, for example, the requirements of quantum teleportation http://www.tech-faq.com/quantum-teleportation.html. It is things like that that are preventing COMP from being a realistic explanatory theory. :-( I like COMP and UDA because I see them as ideas that have errors can be corrected. This is not to say that my own ideas are not error filled! We are all, including me, finite and fallible. Onward! Stephen That's essentially just saying 'No' to the doctor. Since the doctor can only substitute stuff that is functionally equivalent at a classical level you won't say 'Yes' if you think the quantum entangled states of the stuff he's replacing are essential. Note however that the replacement WILL have quantum entanglements; just not the same ones. So you might say 'Yes', accepting that your consciousness will be different in some way and yet still avoid being a p-zombie. Brent Hi Brent, Please read what you just wrote and then what I wrote to ACW again and think about it. Is there a difference between theory - as in what we believe to be the case - and facts - that which *we* have no choice but to agree is true, in your mind? Sure. Theories are stories we invent to explain facts. Hi Brent, And we should never mistake those stories to be anything other than stories that we invent to explain fact. I am telling you that experiential evidence exists, What is it? Try this http://physics.aps.org/articles/v2/32 and this http://www.sciencemag.org/content/315/5814/966.short and this http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/Issues/2007/May/PhotosynthesisWorksQuantumComputing.asp and the mathematical theorems as well, I'm aware of the QM no-cloning theorem, but it doesn't apply to classical teleportation. Lawrence Krause, in The Physics of Star Trek, estimates that the energy required to determine the state of each atom in a human body is so enormous (like a supernova) that it could never be implemented. However, mapping the neural network of a brain is a far smaller problem. So Kraus' argument does itself show at least one aspect of how classical teleportation is problematic. I rest my case. But his teleportation, which is based on transmitting the position of every atom in a human body is far more than required for Bruno's argument which only requires transporting the brain's functional structure. The position of atoms in your body change continuously with no influence on your consciousness. Additionally, in consideration of the mapping the neural network idea, how exactly are you going to overcome the fact that the more precisely you measure the positions of every atom in a brain the less information you can gather of their momenta? Irrelevant. Computation takes place at the classical level, so you only need classical level information. if we are going to implement a simulation of a brain that allows for continuation then we had better be able to map both the position and the momentum data down to the substitution level. The problem is that the substitution level is molecular in scale, we know this because chemical neutransmiters play a vital role in brain behavior. That doesn't follow. The neurotransmitters are released in quantities such that their diffusion is well modeled classically. In any case their function is to excite the synapse, which could be done electrically by an artificial neuron. There is nothing to indicate that the substitution level must be at the molecule level, much less at the quantum state of molecules. You are no doubt right that any mapping/reproduction would introduce a discontinuity in the stream of consciousness; but this isn't an important objection since a hard blow to the head or some anesthetic does the same thing. The fact that a tiny amount of LSD will totally change your state of mind is sufficient proof of this. The amount isn't that 'tiny' in terms of the number of molecules. You see this is the kind of problems that get completely glossed over in UDA. Many of you balk that I am making a big deal about physics, but without physics we would simply not be here to have this
Re: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/16/2012 7:58 PM, meekerdb wrote: But QM is consistent with some things (almost all big things) being almost exactly classical. There is no reason to think our brains depend on non-classical processes to perform computations (metabolism - yes, computation - no). Certainly it would be a severe evolutionary disadvantage if there were more than a just a little randomness in the function of a brain. Hi Brent, Almost is does not equal is. Sure, if we are considering objects that have huge masses and thus have aCompton wavelength http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compton_wavelength that is almost beyond the range of our ability to measure it, when we can get away with thinking of them as almost exactly classicaland thus FAPP is ok to say that they are classical. But we are not talking about Jupiter (the planet), we are talking about the human brain and digital substitution of its computational function. The human brain is not an homogenous mass (pace Tegmark), it has lots and lots of very fine structure, structure that is well within the range of having a large enough Compton wavelength to make a difference what makes a difference about quantum stuff. Classical teleportation is, like classical substitution, simply a pipe dream. Makes no sense!? Being classical is exactly what allows teleportation and functional substitution. Does computational universality only works for objects that have a Compton wavelength that is tiny? That is what you are in effect asking us to believe. 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.
Re: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/16/2012 8:58 PM, meekerdb wrote: So Kraus' argument does itself show at least one aspect of how classical teleportation is problematic. I rest my case. But his teleportation, which is based on transmitting the position of every atom in a human body is far more than required for Bruno's argument which only requires transporting the brain's functional structure. The position of atoms in your body change continuously with no influence on your consciousness. Hi Brent, And where is the reference to an article discussing the experiment that shows that this claim is true? Have you considered that our conscious experience might be a tiny sliver of what is going on in our heads, which includes all those atoms changing their positions (with how much momentum? we can determine that using thermodynamics and temperature arguments for a statistical average, OK)? So all we need is semi-exact position data and a statistical upper and lower bound of their momenta and we can reproduce a brain? Go ahead, give it a whirl. ;-) Additionally, in consideration of the mapping the neural network idea, how exactly are you going to overcome the fact that the more precisely you measure the positions of every atom in a brain the less information you can gather of their momenta? Irrelevant. Computation takes place at the classical level, so you only need classical level information. Umm,OK. What if the classical is only the Boolean representable part of the Universe? I am taking this line of reasoning in a different direction not to obfuscate your point but to try to get you to better understand what I am trying to explain. My conjecture is that what we call conscious experience is restricted to being Boolean representable and it is this restriction that is the source of the appearance that our world is classical. We just happen to be somewhat justified in our belief that all that exists are Integers because we cannot observe the true nature of reality - which is a constant and total state of superposition. Additionally there are some interesting and obsure reasons that come from linear algebras that disallow for certain operations to occur if the vector spaces of linear algebras is allowed to be of infinite dimensionality. (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1zzRX9bnGsfeature=share for more details) if we are going to implement a simulation of a brain that allows for continuation then we had better be able to map both the position and the momentum data down to the substitution level. The problem is that the substitution level is molecular in scale, we know this because chemical neutransmiters play a vital role in brain behavior. That doesn't follow. The neurotransmitters are released in quantities such that their diffusion is well modeled classically. In any case their function is to excite the synapse, which could be done electrically by an artificial neuron. There is nothing to indicate that the substitution level must be at the molecule level, much less at the quantum state of molecules. You are no doubt right that any mapping/reproduction would introduce a discontinuity in the stream of consciousness; but this isn't an important objection since a hard blow to the head or some anesthetic does the same thing. I am only considerign situations where reasonable quantities of missing time and other disorientation are allowable in the continuations. I have no unreasonable expectations here, I hope. It is just that we have only started to understand how our 3.5 lb of grey matter generates our illusion of consciousness so I don't think that reckless speculations are advisable. Maybe I am being too timid, that quite possible The fact that a tiny amount of LSD will totally change your state of mind is sufficient proof of this. The amount isn't that 'tiny' in terms of the number of molecules. My point is that the level of substitution has to be at the molecular level. Does QM stuff not matter at that level? You see this is the kind of problems that get completely glossed over in UDA. Many of you balk that I am making a big deal about physics, but without physics we would simply not be here to have this conversation. As a physicist I'm happy to discuss the physics. Brent Awesome! I am ready to learn. ;-) I am a student after all, just a bit of a smart ass, but that is just defensive coloring. 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.
Re: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/16/2012 7:55 PM, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/16/2012 7:58 PM, meekerdb wrote: But QM is consistent with some things (almost all big things) being almost exactly classical. There is no reason to think our brains depend on non-classical processes to perform computations (metabolism - yes, computation - no). Certainly it would be a severe evolutionary disadvantage if there were more than a just a little randomness in the function of a brain. Hi Brent, Almost is does not equal is. Sure, if we are considering objects that have huge masses and thus have aCompton wavelength http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compton_wavelength that is almost beyond the range of our ability to measure it, when we can get away with thinking of them as almost exactly classicaland thus FAPP is ok to say that they are classical. But we are not talking about Jupiter (the planet), we are talking about the human brain and digital substitution of its computational function. We're talking about sodium and potassium ions diffusing through channels. Their compton wavelength is around 1e-15m which is plenty small already. But you have to compare that to something relevant. The human brain is not an homogenous mass (pace Tegmark), it has lots and lots of very fine structure, structure that is well within the range of having a large enough Compton wavelength to make a difference what makes a difference about quantum stuff. It's not the compton wavelength relative to some measurment we make that is relevant, it's the action of the process relative to h. It is Tegmark who has calculated the action of ions in the firing of a neuron and shown that the decoherence time for various neuronal processes are all many orders of magnitude shorter than the neuron firing intervals, arXiv:quant-ph/9907009v2 Classical teleportation is, like classical substitution, simply a pipe dream. Makes no sense!? Being classical is exactly what allows teleportation and functional substitution. Does computational universality only works for objects that have a Compton wavelength that is tiny? That is what you are in effect asking us to believe. It can only be implemented by physical devices that are deterministic, since otherwise the device won't compute the intended algorithm. Brain processes may be random to some extent, but it must be small in order for brains to be useful organs to enhance survival and reproduction. Brent Onward! Stephen No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com http://www.avg.com Version: 2012.0.1913 / Virus Database: 2112/4814 - Release Date: 02/16/12 -- 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. -- 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: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/17/2012 1:53 AM, meekerdb wrote: On 2/16/2012 8:20 PM, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/16/2012 8:58 PM, meekerdb wrote: So Kraus' argument does itself show at least one aspect of how classical teleportation is problematic. I rest my case. But his teleportation, which is based on transmitting the position of every atom in a human body is far more than required for Bruno's argument which only requires transporting the brain's functional structure. The position of atoms in your body change continuously with no influence on your consciousness. Hi Brent, And where is the reference to an article discussing the experiment that shows that this claim is true? Have you considered that our conscious experience might be a tiny sliver of what is going on in our heads, which includes all those atoms changing their positions (with how much momentum? we can determine that using thermodynamics and temperature arguments for a statistical average, OK)? So all we need is semi-exact position data and a statistical upper and lower bound of their momenta and we can reproduce a brain? Go ahead, give it a whirl. ;-) Additionally, in consideration of the mapping the neural network idea, how exactly are you going to overcome the fact that the more precisely you measure the positions of every atom in a brain the less information you can gather of their momenta? Irrelevant. Computation takes place at the classical level, so you only need classical level information. Umm,OK. What if the classical is only the Boolean representable part of the Universe? I am taking this line of reasoning in a different direction not to obfuscate your point but to try to get you to better understand what I am trying to explain. My conjecture is that what we call conscious experience is restricted to being Boolean representable and it is this restriction that is the source of the appearance that our world is classical. I don't know what Boolean representable means. True/false? Hi Brent, Representable by a list of True or False questions. We just happen to be somewhat justified in our belief that all that exists are Integers because we cannot observe the true nature of reality - which is a constant and total state of superposition. Sounds like you're taking a theory (QM) to be *the true story of reality* -- something you cautioned against. I think that there is enough experimental evidence that QM is about as close as we can get to true story while still remaining fallible. ;-) So we are quibbling about the classical limit? Additionally there are some interesting and obsure reasons that come from linear algebras that disallow for certain operations to occur if the vector spaces of linear algebras is allowed to be of infinite dimensionality. (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1zzRX9bnGsfeature=share for more details) if we are going to implement a simulation of a brain that allows for continuation then we had better be able to map both the position and the momentum data down to the substitution level. The problem is that the substitution level is molecular in scale, we know this because chemical neutransmiters play a vital role in brain behavior. That doesn't follow. The neurotransmitters are released in quantities such that their diffusion is well modeled classically. In any case their function is to excite the synapse, which could be done electrically by an artificial neuron. There is nothing to indicate that the substitution level must be at the molecule level, much less at the quantum state of molecules. You are no doubt right that any mapping/reproduction would introduce a discontinuity in the stream of consciousness; but this isn't an important objection since a hard blow to the head or some anesthetic does the same thing. I am only considerign situations where reasonable quantities of missing time and other disorientation are allowable in the continuations. I have no unreasonable expectations here, I hope. It is just that we have only started to understand how our 3.5 lb of grey matter generates our illusion of consciousness so I don't think that reckless speculations are advisable. Maybe I am being too timid, that quite possible The fact that a tiny amount of LSD will totally change your state of mind is sufficient proof of this. The amount isn't that 'tiny' in terms of the number of molecules. My point is that the level of substitution has to be at the molecular level. But it doesn't. Ordinary metabolism changes the molecules over a period of days; so it must be the structure, which is consistent, not the molecules which change. So how does this matter, the stability of at the molecular level is in the order of days and neuron firing rates are very small fractions of that... Of course it is the relative invariance of structure... Onward! Stephen Does QM stuff not matter at that
Re: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/14/2012 13:45, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/14/2012 5:13 AM, acw wrote: How does the existence on an entity determine its properties? Please answer this question. What do soundness and consistency even mean when there does not exist an unassailable way of defining what they are? Look carefully at what is required for a proof, don't ignore the need to be able to communicate the proof. Soundness and consistency have precise definitions. If you want an absolute definition of consistency, it could be seen as a particular machine never halting. Due to circularity of any such definitions, one has to take some notion of abstract computation fundamental (for example through arithmetic or combinators or ...) Dear ACW, I do like this definition of consistency as an (abstract) machine that never halts (its computation of itself). I like it a lot! We can use the language of hypersets http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-well-founded_set_theory to get consistent definitions in spite of the circularity. Ben Goertzel wrote a very nice paper that outlines the idea: goertzel.org/consciousness/consciousness_paper.pdf Ben Goertzel is one smart dude! Using hypersets to talk about such self-similar concepts sounds fine. That's a pretty interesting paper. I've read some of Ben Geortzel's other work before (mostly in the field of AGI), his ideas and work are quite interesting. Getting back to my basic question: How is it that the mere existence of an entity gives it a definition? The usual notion of a definition of a word is what is found to the right of a word listed in a dictionary, but are we going beyond that notion? If something does have existence, I will tend to assume it also has a consistent definition (even if we're not aware of it yet), although some things might either be undefinable in simpler terms (for example arithmetic) or they might require stronger theories than themselves to define them (such as arithmetical truth). The dictionary meaning of the word is too narrow, a better way of thinking about it is to think about what 'is' means. More precise definitions of the concept of definition can be given in more precise languages than English (such as programming languages), but that might be again too restrictive. How come that one definition and not some other or even a class of definitions? There may be many equivalent definitions, possibly even an infinity of them. Am I incorrect in thinking that definitions are a set of relations that are built up by observers though the process of observation of the world and communicating with each other about the possible content of their individual observations? You're not incorrect, but that's just the act of inferring or inducing a definition. However, something can have existence and should also have a proper definition (in some language) even if you haven't reached it. Someone does some reasoning and gives some pattern some name. I claim that the pattern's existence is independent of that person giving it a name. A person might not be able to properly communicate the pattern to others without introducing the pattern to others, but the pattern exists - their own bodies, world, knowledge, ... are such patterns. This is, after all, how dictionaries are formed (modulo the printing process, etc.)... When I am thinking of the existence of an entity, I am not considering that it is observed or that observation or measurement by an automated system occurred or anything else that might yield a definite count of what the properties of an entity are; I am just considering its existence per se. So I guess that I am not being clear... Okay. How does the mere existence of an entity act in any way as an observation of itself? Why that question? B/c it seems to me that that is what is required to have a consistent notion of an entity having properties merely by existing. So maybe you are thinking of what a hyperset is without realizing it! Hmm, you're right! Hypersets and hyperset-like concepts are quite common, especially in knowledge-representation. 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.
Re: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/14/2012 05:57, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/13/2012 11:18 PM, acw wrote: On 2/14/2012 02:55, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/13/2012 5:27 PM, acw wrote: [SPK] There is a problem with this though b/c it assumes that the field is pre-existing; it is the same as the block universe idea that Andrew Soltau and others are wrestling with. Why is a pre-existing field so troublesome? Seems like a similar problem as the one you have with Platonia. For any system featuring time or change, you can find a meta-system in which you can describe that system timelessly (and you have to, if one is to talk about time and change at all). Dear Kermit, OK, I will try to explain this in detail and check my math. I am good with pictures, even N-dimensional ones, but not symbols, equations and words... Think of a collection of different objects. Now think of how many ways that they can be arranged or partitioned up. For N objects, I believe that there are at least N! numbers of ways that they can be arranged. Now think of an Electromagnetic Field as we do in classical physics. At each point in space, it has a vector and a scalar value representing its magnetic and electric potentials. How many ways can this field be configured in terms of the possible values of the potentials at each point? At least 1x2x3x...xM ways, where M is the number of points of space. Let's add a dimension of time so that we have a 3,1 dimensional field configuration. How many different ways can this be configured? Well, that depends. We known that in Nature there is something called the Least Action Principle that basically states that what ever happens in a situation it is the one that minimizes the action. Water flows down hill for this reason, among other things... But it is still at least M! number of possible configurations. How do we compute what the minimum action configuration of the electromagnetic fields distributed across space-time? It is an optimization problem of figuring out which is the least action configured field given a choice of all possible field configurations. This computational problem is known to be NP-Complete and as such requires a quantity of resources to run the computation that increases as a non-polynomial power of the number of possible choices, so the number is, I think, 2^M! . The easiest to understand example of this kind of problem is the Traveling Salesman problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem: Given a list of cities and their pairwise distances, the task is to find the shortest possible route that visits each city exactly once. The number of possible routes that the salesman can take increases exponentially with the number of cities, there for the number of possible distances that have to be compared to each other to find the shortest route increases at least exponentially. So for a computer running a program to find the solution it takes exponentially more resources of memory and time (in computational steps) or some combination of the two. Yet the problem is decidable in finite amount of steps, even if that amount may be very large indeed. It would be unfeasible for someone with bounded resources, but not a problem for any abstract TM or a physical system (are they one and the same, at least locally?). Hi ACW, WARNING WARNING WARNING DANGER DANGER! Overload is Eminent! OK, please help me understand how we can speak of computations for situations where I have just laid out how computations can't exist. Computations can be encoded in Peano Arithmetic and many others timeless theories just as well. I'm not entirely sure I see what your proof is. Although if you deny any form of Platonia or Plentitude and any form of *primitive* physical reality, I'm not entirely sure what you're left with to represent computations. You'll have to present an understandable theory which is not primitively physical, nor platonic. Currently I only consider the timeless platonic versions as primitive physics: 1) doesn't make too much sense, especially since we're always talking about it only through math, thus it can just be 'math' 2) UDA+MGA show that it's superfluous if we do happen to admit a digital substitution. Adding 3p time does not fix the issue (as shown in my earlier thought experiment), and 1p time is too subjective to grant it continuity over too large intervals (we cannot guarantee continuity each time short term memory is cleared). If we take CTT at face value, then it requires some form of implementation. Implementation in arithmetic seems sufficient to me. Some kind of machine must be run. It's run by some sentences being either true or false. Are you sure that you are not substituting your ability to imagine the solution of a computation as an intuitive proof that computations exist as purely abstract entities, independent from all things physical? If COMP, they have to. Without COMP, but assuming a 3p, it's not hard to again get a similar result if one
Re: On Pre-existing Fields
On 14 Feb 2012, at 03:55, Stephen P. King wrote: The idea of a measure that Bruno talks about is just another way of talking about this same kind of optimization problem without tipping his hand that it implicitly requires a computation to be performed to find it. Because UDA+MGA shows that even if a real primary physical universe exists, it cannot explain anything related to what I can feel to observe from my 1p view. Obviously, the appearance of a universe makes it natural to believe that a simple explanation is that such a universe exists, but this has been shown to not work at all, once we assume we are Turing emulable. So f you are right, then there must be flaw in UDA+MGA, but each time we ask you to point where it is, you come up with philosophical reason to discard comp (without always saying it). I do not blame him as this problem has been glossed over for hundred of years in math and thus we have to play with nonsense like the Axiom of Choice (or Zorn's Lemma) to prove that a solution exists, never-mind trying to actually find the solution. This so called 'proof come at a very steep price, it allows for all kinds of paradox. This is unclear. Comp is axiom-of-choice independent. Even arithmetical truth is entirely axiom of choice independent. ZF and ZF + AC proves exactly the same arithmetical truth. A possible solution to this problem, proposed by many even back as far as Heraclitus, is to avoid the requirement of a solution at the beginning. Just let the universe compute its least action configuration as it evolves in time, This does not work, unless you define the physical reality by arithmetic, but this would be confusing. It seems clearer and cleare that your existence axiom is the postulate that there is a physical primary reality. But then comp is wrong. At least Craig is coherent on this. he want some primitive matter, and he abandons comp. His theory is still unclear, but the overall shape make sense, despite it explains nothing (given that he assume also a primitive sense, and a primitive symmetry). Bruno but to accept this possibility we have to overturn many preciously held, but wrong, ideas and replace them with better ideas. 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 . 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: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/14/2012 5:13 AM, acw wrote: How does the existence on an entity determine its properties? Please answer this question. What do soundness and consistency even mean when there does not exist an unassailable way of defining what they are? Look carefully at what is required for a proof, don't ignore the need to be able to communicate the proof. Soundness and consistency have precise definitions. If you want an absolute definition of consistency, it could be seen as a particular machine never halting. Due to circularity of any such definitions, one has to take some notion of abstract computation fundamental (for example through arithmetic or combinators or ...) Dear ACW, I do like this definition of consistency as an (abstract) machine that never halts (its computation of itself). I like it a lot! We can use the language of hypersets http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-well-founded_set_theory to get consistent definitions in spite of the circularity. Ben Goertzel wrote a very nice paper that outlines the idea: goertzel.org/consciousness/consciousness_paper.pdf Ben Goertzel is one smart dude! Getting back to my basic question: How is it that the mere existence of an entity gives it a definition? The usual notion of a definition of a word is what is found to the right of a word listed in a dictionary, but are we going beyond that notion? How come that one definition and not some other or even a class of definitions? Am I incorrect in thinking that definitions are a set of relations that are built up by observers though the process of observation of the world and communicating with each other about the possible content of their individual observations? This is, after all, how dictionaries are formed (modulo the printing process, etc.)... When I am thinking of the existence of an entity, I am not considering that it is observed or that observation or measurement by an automated system occurred or anything else that might yield a definite count of what the properties of an entity are; I am just considering its existence per se. So I guess that I am not being clear... How does the mere existence of an entity act in any way as an observation of itself? Why that question? B/c it seems to me that that is what is required to have a consistent notion of an entity having properties merely by existing. So maybe you are thinking of what a hyperset is without realizing it! 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.
Re: On Pre-existing Fields
On 14 Feb 2012, at 06:57, Stephen P. King wrote: acw: Yet the problem is decidable in finite amount of steps, even if that amount may be very large indeed. It would be unfeasible for someone with bounded resources, but not a problem for any abstract TM or a physical system (are they one and the same, at least locally?). Hi ACW, WARNING WARNING WARNING DANGER DANGER! Overload is Eminent! OK, please help me understand how we can speak of computations for situations where I have just laid out how computations can't exist. In which theory? The concept of existence is theory dependent. If we take CTT at face value, then it requires some form of implementation. Some kind of machine must be run. Are you sure that you are not substituting your ability to imagine the solution of a computation as an intuitive proof that computations exist as purely abstract entities, independent from all things physical? My difficulty may just be a simple failure of imagination but how can it make any sense to believe in something in whose very definition is the requirement that it cannot be known or imagined? If we assume this: Ax ~(0 = s(x)) (For all number x the successor of x is different from zero). AxAy ~(x = y) - ~(s(x) = s(y))(different numbers have different successors) Ax x + 0 = x (0 adds nothing) AxAy x + s(y) = s(x + y) ( meaning x + (y +1) = (x + y) +1) Ax x *0 = 0 AxAy x*s(y) = x*y + x Then we can define computations and we can prove them to exist. It is not more difficult that to prove the existence of an even number, or of a prime number. It is just much more longer, but conceptually without any new difficulty. Knowing and imagining are, at least, computations running in our brain hardware. If your brained stopped, the knowing, imagining and even dreaming that is you continues? Not relatively to those sharing the reality where your brain stop. But from your own point of view, it will continue. So you do believe in disembodies spirits, No. If your brain stop here and now, from your point of view, it continue in the most normal near computational histories. In those histories you will still feel as locally and relatively embodied. Globally you are not, even in this local reality, given that there a re no bodies at all. Bodies are appearances. you are just not calling them that. I apologize, but this is a bit hard to take. The inconsistency that runs rampant here is making me a bit depressed. You have to find the inconsistency. Now, given all of that, in the concept of Platonia we have the idea of ideal forms, be they the Good, or some particular infinite string of numbers. How exactly are they determined to be the best possible by some standard. Whatever the standard, all that matters is that there are multiple possible options of The Forms with the stipulation that it is the best or most consistent or whatever. It is still an optimization problem with N variables that are required to be compared to each other according to some standard. Therefore, in most cases there is an Np-complete problem to be solved. How can it be computed if it has to exist as perfect from the beginning? The problem is that you're considering a from the beginning at all, as in, you're imagining math as existing in time. Instead of thinking it along the lines of specific Forms, try thinking of a limited version along the lines of: is this problem decidable in a finite amount of steps, no matter how large, as in: if a true solution exists, it's there. And what exactly partitions it away from all the other true solutions? This idea seems to only work if there is One True Theory of Mathematics Not at all. Comp needs only one true conception of arithmetic. The evidence is that it exists, even if we cannot define it in arithmetic. We need the intuition to understand the difference between finite and non finite. But we know that that is not the case, there are many different Arithmetics. How exactly do you know that yours is the true standard one? It does not matter as long as we reason in first order logic, or if we are enough cautious with higher logic. The consequence are the same in all models, standard or non standard. IF PA proves S, S is true in all models of arithmetic, and we don't need more than that. I'm not entirely sure if we can include uncomputable values there, such as if a specific program halts or not, but I'm leaning towards that it might be possible. OK, there is no beginning. Recursively enumerable functions exist eternally. OK. Why not Little Ponies? My daughters tells me all about How Princess Celestia rules the sky... This entire theory reminds me of the elaborated Pascal's Gamble... How do we know that our god is the true god? OK. So we Bet on Bpp. OK... Then what? How do I know what Bpp means? Because for all
Re: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/14/2012 8:39 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 14 Feb 2012, at 03:55, Stephen P. King wrote: The idea of a measure that Bruno talks about is just another way of talking about this same kind of optimization problem without tipping his hand that it implicitly requires a computation to be performed to find it. Because UDA+MGA shows that even if a real primary physical universe exists, it cannot explain anything related to what I can feel to observe from my 1p view. Obviously, the appearance of a universe makes it natural to believe that a simple explanation is that such a universe exists, but this has been shown to not work at all, once we assume we are Turing emulable. So f you are right, then there must be flaw in UDA+MGA, but each time we ask you to point where it is, you come up with philosophical reason to discard comp (without always saying it). Hi Bruno, The flaw is the entire structure of UDA+MGA, it assumes the existence of the very thing that is claims cannot exist. It is a theory that predicts that it cannot exist. How? By supposedly proving that the physical world does not exist. Why is that a problem? Because without a physical world, it is impossible for that theory to have any properties. You want to get around this problem by postulating that the entities of UDA+MGA can and does have a particular set of properties merely because they exist. OK, but how does the existence of an entity define its properties? I do not blame him as this problem has been glossed over for hundred of years in math and thus we have to play with nonsense like the Axiom of Choice (or Zorn's Lemma) to prove that a solution exists, never-mind trying to actually find the solution. This so called 'proof come at a very steep price, it allows for all kinds of paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banach-Tarski_paradox. This is unclear. Comp is axiom-of-choice independent. Even arithmetical truth is entirely axiom of choice independent. ZF and ZF + AC proves exactly the same arithmetical truth. COMP is Axiom of Choice independent ... Does this means that COMP is independent of any particular version of AC or does it means that the truth of a statement is just the existence of the statement as an abstract entity in an isolated way? I am just trying to be consistent with what I understand of UDA+MGA. UDA+MGA, as far as I can tell, proposes that the physical world does not have an existence independent of our experiences and since our experiences can be represented exactly as relations between numbers, that all that exists is numbers. Correct? If this is correct, then my questions turn on what exactly are numbers and how do they acquire properties. 1 is a 1, a 2 is a 2, and 3 is a 3. But what is it that defines what a 1 or a 2 or a 3 is? We could think of this as a set of different patterns of pixels on our computer monitors, of marks on paper, or a chalkboard, or apples, bananas, or trees. But this avoids the question of what is it that ultimately gives 1 its one-ness?. Alternatively, we can think of these symbols as physical representations of sets or classes of objects, but then we have to define what that means. The easiest way to do that is to point at objects in the world and make noises with our mouth or, if we are mute, to make signs with our hands and/or grimaces with our faces. Obviously, all of this is taking a 3p or objective point of view of objects, symbols, etc. but as we know, this is a conceit as we can only guess and bet that what we observe is real in that it is not just a figment of our imagination that vanishes when we stop thinking of it. I am being intentionally absurd to illustrate a problem that I see. If we are going to claim that the physical world does not exist then we have to be consistent with that claim and cannot use any concepts that assumes the properties of a physical world. My claim is that UDA+MGA violates this requirement by using concepts that only have a meaning because of their relation to physical processes and yet claiming that those very processes do not exist. A possible solution to this problem, proposed by many even back as far as Heraclitus, is to avoid the requirement of a solution at the beginning. Just let the universe compute its least action configuration as it evolves in time, This does not work, unless you define the physical reality by arithmetic, but this would be confusing. It seems clearer and cleare that your existence axiom is the postulate that there is a physical primary reality. But then comp is wrong. What I see as wrong about COMP is how you are interpreting it. You are taking its implied meaning too far. I claim that there is a limit on its soundness as a theory or explanation of ontological nature, a soundness that vanishes when it is taken to imply that its communicability becomes impossible - a situation which inevitably occurs when one
Re: On Pre-existing Fields
On Tue, Feb 14, 2012 at 8:53 AM, Stephen P. King stephe...@charter.netwrote: On 2/14/2012 8:39 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 14 Feb 2012, at 03:55, Stephen P. King wrote: The idea of a measure that Bruno talks about is just another way of talking about this same kind of optimization problem without tipping his hand that it implicitly requires a computation to be performed to find it. Because UDA+MGA shows that even if a real primary physical universe exists, it cannot explain anything related to what I can feel to observe from my 1p view. Obviously, the appearance of a universe makes it natural to believe that a simple explanation is that such a universe exists, but this has been shown to not work at all, once we assume we are Turing emulable. So f you are right, then there must be flaw in UDA+MGA, but each time we ask you to point where it is, you come up with philosophical reason to discard comp (without always saying it). Hi Bruno, The flaw is the entire structure of UDA+MGA, it assumes the existence of the very thing that is claims cannot exist. It is a theory that predicts that it cannot exist. How? By supposedly proving that the physical world does not exist. How many times do we have to tell you that's not true? Why is that a problem? Because without a physical world, it is impossible for that theory to have any properties. You want to get around this problem by postulating that the entities of UDA+MGA can and does have a particular set of properties merely because they exist. OK, but how does the existence of an entity define its properties? I do not blame him as this problem has been glossed over for hundred of years in math and thus we have to play with nonsense like the Axiom of Choice (or Zorn's Lemma) to prove that a solution exists, never-mind trying to actually find the solution. This so called 'proof come at a very steep price, it allows for all kinds of paradoxhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banach-Tarski_paradox . This is unclear. Comp is axiom-of-choice independent. Even arithmetical truth is entirely axiom of choice independent. ZF and ZF + AC proves exactly the same arithmetical truth. COMP is Axiom of Choice independent ... Does this means that COMP is independent of any particular version of AC or does it means that the truth of a statement is just the existence of the statement as an abstract entity in an isolated way? I am just trying to be consistent with what I understand of UDA+MGA. UDA+MGA, as far as I can tell, proposes that the physical world does not have an existence independent of our experiences and since our experiences can be represented exactly as relations between numbers, that all that exists is numbers. Correct? If this is correct, then my questions turn on what exactly are numbers and how do they acquire properties. 1 is a 1, a 2 is a 2, and 3 is a 3. But what is it that defines what a 1 or a 2 or a 3 is? We could think of this as a set of different patterns of pixels on our computer monitors, of marks on paper, or a chalkboard, or apples, bananas, or trees. But this avoids the question of what is it that ultimately gives 1 its one-ness?. Alternatively, we can think of these symbols as physical representations of sets or classes of objects, but then we have to define what that means. The easiest way to do that is to point at objects in the world and make noises with our mouth or, if we are mute, to make signs with our hands and/or grimaces with our faces. Obviously, all of this is taking a 3p or objective point of view of objects, symbols, etc. but as we know, this is a conceit as we can only guess and bet that what we observe is real in that it is not just a figment of our imagination that vanishes when we stop thinking of it. I am being intentionally absurd to illustrate a problem that I see. If we are going to claim that the physical world does not exist then we have to be consistent with that claim and cannot use any concepts that assumes the properties of a physical world. My claim is that UDA+MGA violates this requirement by using concepts that only have a meaning because of their relation to physical processes and yet claiming that those very processes do not exist. A possible solution to this problem, proposed by many even back as far as Heraclitus, is to avoid the requirement of a solution at the beginning. Just let the universe compute its least action configuration as it evolves in time, This does not work, unless you define the physical reality by arithmetic, but this would be confusing. It seems clearer and cleare that your existence axiom is the postulate that there is a physical primary reality. But then comp is wrong. What I see as wrong about COMP is how you are interpreting it. You are taking its implied meaning too far. I claim that there is a limit on its soundness as a theory or explanation of ontological
Re: On Pre-existing Fields
2012/2/14 Stephen P. King stephe...@charter.net On 2/14/2012 8:39 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 14 Feb 2012, at 03:55, Stephen P. King wrote: The idea of a measure that Bruno talks about is just another way of talking about this same kind of optimization problem without tipping his hand that it implicitly requires a computation to be performed to find it. Because UDA+MGA shows that even if a real primary physical universe exists, it cannot explain anything related to what I can feel to observe from my 1p view. Obviously, the appearance of a universe makes it natural to believe that a simple explanation is that such a universe exists, but this has been shown to not work at all, once we assume we are Turing emulable. So f you are right, then there must be flaw in UDA+MGA, but each time we ask you to point where it is, you come up with philosophical reason to discard comp (without always saying it). Hi Bruno, The flaw is the entire structure of UDA+MGA, it assumes the existence of the very thing that is claims cannot exist. It is a theory that predicts that it cannot exist. How? By supposedly proving that the physical world does not exist. It does not prove that the physical world does not exist... it proves that a *primitive* material world is irrelevant to predict your next moment, the current physics of the world. Whether there is a primitive material world or not cannot change your expectation of your next moment, rendering this primitive material world devoid of explanatory power. Why is that a problem? Because without a physical world, it is impossible for that theory to have any properties. You want to get around this problem by postulating that the entities of UDA+MGA can and does have a particular set of properties merely because they exist. OK, but how does the existence of an entity define its properties? I do not blame him as this problem has been glossed over for hundred of years in math and thus we have to play with nonsense like the Axiom of Choice (or Zorn's Lemma) to prove that a solution exists, never-mind trying to actually find the solution. This so called 'proof come at a very steep price, it allows for all kinds of paradoxhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banach-Tarski_paradox . This is unclear. Comp is axiom-of-choice independent. Even arithmetical truth is entirely axiom of choice independent. ZF and ZF + AC proves exactly the same arithmetical truth. COMP is Axiom of Choice independent ... Does this means that COMP is independent of any particular version of AC or does it means that the truth of a statement is just the existence of the statement as an abstract entity in an isolated way? I am just trying to be consistent with what I understand of UDA+MGA. UDA+MGA, as far as I can tell, proposes that the physical world does not have an existence independent of our experiences and since our experiences can be represented exactly as relations between numbers, that all that exists is numbers. Correct? If this is correct, then my questions turn on what exactly are numbers and how do they acquire properties. 1 is a 1, a 2 is a 2, and 3 is a 3. But what is it that defines what a 1 or a 2 or a 3 is? We could think of this as a set of different patterns of pixels on our computer monitors, of marks on paper, or a chalkboard, or apples, bananas, or trees. But this avoids the question of what is it that ultimately gives 1 its one-ness?. Alternatively, we can think of these symbols as physical representations of sets or classes of objects, but then we have to define what that means. The easiest way to do that is to point at objects in the world and make noises with our mouth or, if we are mute, to make signs with our hands and/or grimaces with our faces. Obviously, all of this is taking a 3p or objective point of view of objects, symbols, etc. but as we know, this is a conceit as we can only guess and bet that what we observe is real in that it is not just a figment of our imagination that vanishes when we stop thinking of it. I am being intentionally absurd to illustrate a problem that I see. If we are going to claim that the physical world does not exist then we have to be consistent with that claim and cannot use any concepts that assumes the properties of a physical world. My claim is that UDA+MGA violates this requirement by using concepts that only have a meaning because of their relation to physical processes and yet claiming that those very processes do not exist. A possible solution to this problem, proposed by many even back as far as Heraclitus, is to avoid the requirement of a solution at the beginning. Just let the universe compute its least action configuration as it evolves in time, This does not work, unless you define the physical reality by arithmetic, but this would be confusing. It seems clearer and cleare that your existence axiom is the postulate that
Re: On Pre-existing Fields
On Tue, Feb 14, 2012 at 10:36 AM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.comwrote: 2012/2/14 Stephen P. King stephe...@charter.net On 2/14/2012 8:39 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 14 Feb 2012, at 03:55, Stephen P. King wrote: The idea of a measure that Bruno talks about is just another way of talking about this same kind of optimization problem without tipping his hand that it implicitly requires a computation to be performed to find it. Because UDA+MGA shows that even if a real primary physical universe exists, it cannot explain anything related to what I can feel to observe from my 1p view. Obviously, the appearance of a universe makes it natural to believe that a simple explanation is that such a universe exists, but this has been shown to not work at all, once we assume we are Turing emulable. So f you are right, then there must be flaw in UDA+MGA, but each time we ask you to point where it is, you come up with philosophical reason to discard comp (without always saying it). Hi Bruno, The flaw is the entire structure of UDA+MGA, it assumes the existence of the very thing that is claims cannot exist. It is a theory that predicts that it cannot exist. How? By supposedly proving that the physical world does not exist. It does not prove that the physical world does not exist... it proves that a *primitive* material world is irrelevant to predict your next moment, the current physics of the world. Whether there is a primitive material world or not cannot change your expectation of your next moment, rendering this primitive material world devoid of explanatory power. Quentin, This reminds me of the GHZM quantum experiment which seems to suggest that a pre-existing reality does not exist at least according to Lubos Motl. Is that anything like what you mean? Richard 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. -- All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. -- 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. -- 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: On Pre-existing Fields
Hi Stephen, On 14 Feb 2012, at 15:53, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/14/2012 8:39 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 14 Feb 2012, at 03:55, Stephen P. King wrote: The idea of a measure that Bruno talks about is just another way of talking about this same kind of optimization problem without tipping his hand that it implicitly requires a computation to be performed to find it. Because UDA+MGA shows that even if a real primary physical universe exists, it cannot explain anything related to what I can feel to observe from my 1p view. Obviously, the appearance of a universe makes it natural to believe that a simple explanation is that such a universe exists, but this has been shown to not work at all, once we assume we are Turing emulable. So f you are right, then there must be flaw in UDA+MGA, but each time we ask you to point where it is, you come up with philosophical reason to discard comp (without always saying it). Hi Bruno, The flaw is the entire structure of UDA+MGA, it assumes the existence of the very thing that is claims cannot exist. It is a theory that predicts that it cannot exist. How? By supposedly proving that the physical world does not exist. Why is that a problem? Because without a physical world, it is impossible for that theory to have any properties. You want to get around this problem by postulating that the entities of UDA+MGA can and does have a particular set of properties merely because they exist. OK, but how does the existence of an entity define its properties? See Quentin's answer. To insist on this: comp does not say that the physical reality does not exist. It says that the physical reality is not a primary notion. You could as well say that Darwin has shown that higher mammals don't exist, because he provided an explanation of their appearance from simpler objects. I do not blame him as this problem has been glossed over for hundred of years in math and thus we have to play with nonsense like the Axiom of Choice (or Zorn's Lemma) to prove that a solution exists, never-mind trying to actually find the solution. This so called 'proof come at a very steep price, it allows for all kinds of paradox. This is unclear. Comp is axiom-of-choice independent. Even arithmetical truth is entirely axiom of choice independent. ZF and ZF + AC proves exactly the same arithmetical truth. COMP is Axiom of Choice independent ... Does this means that COMP is independent of any particular version of AC or does it means that the truth of a statement is just the existence of the statement as an abstract entity in an isolated way? It means that the first order arithmetical proposition are the same in the model of set theories with AC than with set theories without AC, or with ~AC. I am just trying to be consistent with what I understand of UDA+MGA. UDA+MGA, as far as I can tell, proposes that the physical world does not have an existence independent of our experiences and since our experiences can be represented exactly as relations between numbers, that all that exists is numbers. Correct? Not entirely. The physical reality is explained by numbers' dream coherence, and that is independent of our *experience* of it. So, in a sense, physical reality is independent of us. But it is still dependent on all universal numbers and the entire arithmetical truth. Also, our experience cannot be represented by number relations, by number relations. I mean, for numbers, their experience are not number relations. Only at the meta)level, having bet on comp, we can say that the number experiences are partially axiomatized by relation between computations and truth, but keep in mind that arithmetical truth itself cannot be represented by a number relation. (Cf Tarski, Kaplan Montague, etc.). If this is correct, then my questions turn on what exactly are numbers and how do they acquire properties. 1 is a 1, a 2 is a 2, and 3 is a 3. But what is it that defines what a 1 or a 2 or a 3 is? To reason, we don't have to know what we are talking about. We just need to agree on axioms. I gave you the axioms. We could think of this as a set of different patterns of pixels on our computer monitors, of marks on paper, or a chalkboard, or apples, bananas, or trees. But this avoids the question of what is it that ultimately gives 1 its one-ness?. With the axiom given, it can be proved that Ex((x = s(0) Ay((y = s(0)) - y = x)). Alternatively, we can think of these symbols as physical representations of sets or classes of objects, but then we have to define what that means. The easiest way to do that is to point at objects in the world and make noises with our mouth or, if we are mute, to make signs with our hands and/or grimaces with our faces. I think we can use first order logic. It evacuates the metaphysical baggage, to use Brian Tenneson expression.
Re: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/14/2012 7:49 AM, Richard Ruquist wrote: On Tue, Feb 14, 2012 at 10:36 AM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.com mailto:allco...@gmail.com wrote: 2012/2/14 Stephen P. King stephe...@charter.net mailto:stephe...@charter.net On 2/14/2012 8:39 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 14 Feb 2012, at 03:55, Stephen P. King wrote: The idea of a measure that Bruno talks about is just another way of talking about this same kind of optimization problem without tipping his hand that it implicitly requires a computation to be performed to find it. Because UDA+MGA shows that even if a real primary physical universe exists, it cannot explain anything related to what I can feel to observe from my 1p view. Obviously, the appearance of a universe makes it natural to believe that a simple explanation is that such a universe exists, but this has been shown to not work at all, once we assume we are Turing emulable. So f you are right, then there must be flaw in UDA+MGA, but each time we ask you to point where it is, you come up with philosophical reason to discard comp (without always saying it). Hi Bruno, The flaw is the entire structure of UDA+MGA, it assumes the existence of the very thing that is claims cannot exist. It is a theory that predicts that it cannot exist. How? By supposedly proving that the physical world does not exist. It does not prove that the physical world does not exist... it proves that a *primitive* material world is irrelevant to predict your next moment, the current physics of the world. Whether there is a primitive material world or not cannot change your expectation of your next moment, rendering this primitive material world devoid of explanatory power. Quentin, This reminds me of the GHZM quantum experiment which seems to suggest that a pre-existing reality does not exist at least according to Lubos Motl. Is that anything like what you mean? Richard It's not really that a primitive physical world would be devoid of explanatory power. After all it is the implicit working assumption of almost all scientists. What it primitively explains is that some things exist (are primitive and physical) and other things don't. On this list, the working hypothesis is that 'everything' (in some sense) exists and so there is no explantory function for primitive physics. The fact that it seems impossible to explain qualia in terms of physics also argues against taking physics as primitive. Brent -- 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: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/14/2012 10:25 AM, Joseph Knight wrote: [SPK] The flaw is the entire structure of UDA+MGA, it assumes the existence of the very thing that is claims cannot exist. It is a theory that predicts that it cannot exist. How? By supposedly proving that the physical world does not exist. How many times do we have to tell you that's not true? Hi Joseph, Please be specific. What is not true about the sentence I wrote above? In SANE04, pg. 10-11, I read: 8) Yes, but what if we don't grant a concrete robust physical universe? Up to this stage, w_e can still escape the conclusion of the seven preceding reasoning steps, by postulating that a ''physical universe'' really ''exists'' and is too little in the sense of not being able to generate the entire UD*, nor any reasonable portions of it, so that our usual physical predictions would be safe from any interference with its UD-generated ''little'' computational histories. Such a move can be considered as being ad hoc and disgraceful. _It can also be quite weakened by some acceptation of some conceptual version of Ockham's Razor, and obviously that move is without purpose for those who are willing to accept comp+ (in which case the UDA just show the necessity of the detour in psychology, and the general shape of physics as averages on consistent 1-histories). But logically, there is still a place for both physicalism and comp, once we made that move. Actually the 8th present step will explain that such a move is nevertheless without purpose._This will make the notion of concrete and existing universe completely devoid of any explicative power._ _It will follow that a much weaker and usual form of Ockham's razor can be used to conclude that not only physics has been epistemologically reduced to machine psychology, but that ''matter'' has been ontologically reduced to ''mind'' where mind is defined as the object study of fundamental machine psychology. _All that by assuming comp, I insist. The reason is that comp forbids to associate inner experiences with the physical processing related to the computations corresponding (with comp) to those experiences. The physical ''supervenience thesis'' of the materialist philosophers of mind cannot be maintained, and inner experiences can only be associated with type of computation. Instead of linking [the pain I feel] at space-time (x,t) to [a machine state] at space-time (x,t), we are obliged to associate [the pain I feel at space-time (x,t)] to a type or a sheaf of computations (existing forever in the arithmetical Platonia which is accepted as existing independently of our selves with arithmetical realism). If this is not a statement that the physical world does not exist and, instead, that all that exists is abstract machine, I will eat my hat. I have repeatedly tried to see if the reasoning of Bruno et al allows for us to decouple the existence of an entity from its properties but I have been repeatedly rebuffed for such a thought, therefore the elimination of the properties of the physical world demands the elimination of the existence of the physical world. My claim is that we can recover appearances by decoupling existence from property definiteness, but that idea is either not being understood or is being rejected out of hand. 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.
Re: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/14/2012 10:36 AM, Quentin Anciaux wrote: The flaw is the entire structure of UDA+MGA, it assumes the existence of the very thing that is claims cannot exist. It is a theory that predicts that it cannot exist. How? By supposedly proving that the physical world does not exist. It does not prove that the physical world does not exist... it proves that a *primitive* material world is irrelevant to predict your next moment, the current physics of the world. Whether there is a primitive material world or not cannot change your expectation of your next moment, rendering this primitive material world devoid of explanatory power. HI Quentin, What is the difference? Please see my last post to ACW with the subject header Re: On Pre-existing Fields 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.
Re: On Pre-existing Fields
2012/2/14 Stephen P. King stephe...@charter.net On 2/14/2012 10:25 AM, Joseph Knight wrote: [SPK] The flaw is the entire structure of UDA+MGA, it assumes the existence of the very thing that is claims cannot exist. It is a theory that predicts that it cannot exist. How? By supposedly proving that the physical world does not exist. How many times do we have to tell you that's not true? Hi Joseph, Please be specific. What is not true about the sentence I wrote above? In SANE04, pg. 10-11, I read: 8) Yes, but what if we don’t grant a concrete robust physical universe? Up to this stage, w*e can still escape the conclusion of the seven preceding reasoning steps, by postulating that a ‘‘physical universe’’ really ‘‘exists’’ * He talks about a primary physical universe... an ontological physical universe, just below he uses the word concrete showing that really was what he meant... hence your statement is false, because he does not say the physical universe does not exist... and just using your eyes shows that such a statement is absurd. *and is too little in the sense of not being able to generate the entire UD*, nor any reasonable portions of it, so that our usual physical predictions would be safe from any interference with its UD-generated ‘‘little’’ computational histories. Such a move can be considered as being ad hoc and disgraceful. *It can also be quite weakened by some acceptation of some conceptual version of Ockham’s Razor, and obviously that move is without purpose for those who are willing to accept comp+ (in which case the UDA just show the necessity of the detour in psychology, and the general shape of physics as averages on consistent 1-histories). But logically, there is still a place for both physicalism and comp, once we made that move. Actually the 8th present step will explain that such a move is nevertheless without purpose.* This will make the notion of concrete and existing universe completely devoid of any explicative power.* * It will follow that a much weaker and usual form of Ockham’s razor can be used to conclude that not only physics has been epistemologically reduced to machine psychology, but that ‘‘matter’’ has been ontologically reduced to ‘‘mind’’ where mind is defined as the object study of fundamental machine psychology. *All that by assuming comp, I insist. The reason is that comp forbids to associate inner experiences with the physical processing related to the computations corresponding (with comp) to those experiences. The physical ‘‘supervenience thesis’’ of the materialist philosophers of mind cannot be maintained, and inner experiences can only be associated with type of computation. Instead of linking [the pain I feel] at space-time (x,t) to [a machine state] at space-time (x,t), we are obliged to associate [the pain I feel at space-time (x,t)] to a type or a sheaf of computations (existing forever in the arithmetical Platonia which is accepted as existing independently of our selves with arithmetical realism). If this is not a statement that the physical world does not exist and, instead, that all that exists is abstract machine, I will eat my hat. I have repeatedly tried to see if the reasoning of Bruno et al allows for us to decouple the existence of an entity from its properties but I have been repeatedly rebuffed for such a thought, therefore the elimination of the properties of the physical world demands the elimination of the existence of the physical world. My claim is that we can recover appearances by decoupling existence from property definiteness, but that idea is either not being understood or is being rejected out of hand. 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. -- All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. -- 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: On Pre-existing Fields
2012/2/14 Stephen P. King stephe...@charter.net On 2/14/2012 10:36 AM, Quentin Anciaux wrote: The flaw is the entire structure of UDA+MGA, it assumes the existence of the very thing that is claims cannot exist. It is a theory that predicts that it cannot exist. How? By supposedly proving that the physical world does not exist. It does not prove that the physical world does not exist... it proves that a *primitive* material world is irrelevant to predict your next moment, the current physics of the world. Whether there is a primitive material world or not cannot change your expectation of your next moment, rendering this primitive material world devoid of explanatory power. HI Quentin, What is the difference? Please see my last post to ACW with the subject header Re: On Pre-existing Fields The difference is that it is not primary... the physical universe emerge from computations. It should be an invariant in relative deep computation giving rise to consciousness. Numbers-Computations-consciousness universe 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. -- All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. -- 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: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/14/2012 11:31 AM, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/14/2012 10:25 AM, Joseph Knight wrote: [SPK] The flaw is the entire structure of UDA+MGA, it assumes the existence of the very thing that is claims cannot exist. It is a theory that predicts that it cannot exist. How? By supposedly proving that the physical world does not exist. How many times do we have to tell you that's not true? Hi Joseph, Please be specific. What is not true about the sentence I wrote above? In SANE04, pg. 10-11, I read: 8) Yes, but what if we don't grant a concrete robust physical universe? Up to this stage, w_e can still escape the conclusion of the seven preceding reasoning steps, by postulating that a ''physical universe'' really ''exists'' and is too little in the sense of not being able to generate the entire UD*, nor any reasonable portions of it, so that our usual physical predictions would be safe from any interference with its UD-generated ''little'' computational histories. Such a move can be considered as being ad hoc and disgraceful. _It can also be quite weakened by some acceptation of some conceptual version of Ockham's Razor, and obviously that move is without purpose for those who are willing to accept comp+ (in which case the UDA just show the necessity of the detour in psychology, and the general shape of physics as averages on consistent 1-histories). But logically, there is still a place for both physicalism and comp, once we made that move. Actually the 8th present step will explain that such a move is nevertheless without purpose._This will make the notion of concrete and existing universe completely devoid of any explicative power._ _It will follow that a much weaker and usual form of Ockham's razor can be used to conclude that not only physics has been epistemologically reduced to machine psychology, but that ''matter'' has been ontologically reduced to ''mind'' where mind is defined as the object study of fundamental machine psychology. _All that by assuming comp, I insist. The reason is that comp forbids to associate inner experiences with the physical processing related to the computations corresponding (with comp) to those experiences. The physical ''supervenience thesis'' of the materialist philosophers of mind cannot be maintained, and inner experiences can only be associated with type of computation. Instead of linking [the pain I feel] at space-time (x,t) to [a machine state] at space-time (x,t), we are obliged to associate [the pain I feel at space-time (x,t)] to a type or a sheaf of computations (existing forever in the arithmetical Platonia which is accepted as existing independently of our selves with arithmetical realism). If this is not a statement that the physical world does not exist and, instead, that all that exists is abstract machine, I will eat my hat. I have repeatedly tried to see if the reasoning of Bruno et al allows for us to decouple the existence of an entity from its properties but I have been repeatedly rebuffed for such a thought, therefore the elimination of the properties of the physical world demands the elimination of the existence of the physical world. My understanding is that the properties of the physical world are inferred from our subjective experiences that have a consistency (which Vic Stenger calls point-of-view-invariance) which allows us to model them as being out there, i.e. objective. Bruno's theory is that this subset of subjective experiences is generated by all possible computations. Hence the material world model is derivative from computation and is not primitive or fundamental. This however may suffer from a white-rabbit problem since it seems likely that many sets of subjective experiences will correspond to models of Alice-in-wonderland worlds. Incidentally, I think that human-like consciousness can only exist within the context of a physical world model. So the physical world is not optional, even if it isn't fundamental. Brent My claim is that we can recover appearances by decoupling existence from property definiteness, but that idea is either not being understood or is being rejected out of hand. Onward! Stephen No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com http://www.avg.com Version: 2012.0.1913 / Virus Database: 2112/4809 - Release Date: 02/14/12 -- 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. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To
Re: On Pre-existing Fields
On Tue, Feb 14, 2012 at 1:31 PM, Stephen P. King stephe...@charter.netwrote: On 2/14/2012 10:25 AM, Joseph Knight wrote: [SPK] The flaw is the entire structure of UDA+MGA, it assumes the existence of the very thing that is claims cannot exist. It is a theory that predicts that it cannot exist. How? By supposedly proving that the physical world does not exist. How many times do we have to tell you that's not true? Hi Joseph, Please be specific. What is not true about the sentence I wrote above? In SANE04, pg. 10-11, I read: 8) Yes, but what if we don’t grant a concrete robust physical universe? Up to this stage, w*e can still escape the conclusion of the seven preceding reasoning steps, by postulating that a ‘‘physical universe’’ really ‘‘exists’’ and is too little in the sense of not being able to generate the entire UD*, nor any reasonable portions of it, so that our usual physical predictions would be safe from any interference with its UD-generated ‘‘little’’ computational histories. Such a move can be considered as being ad hoc and disgraceful. *It can also be quite weakened by some acceptation of some conceptual version of Ockham’s Razor, and obviously that move is without purpose for those who are willing to accept comp+ (in which case the UDA just show the necessity of the detour in psychology, and the general shape of physics as averages on consistent 1-histories). But logically, there is still a place for both physicalism and comp, once we made that move. Actually the 8th present step will explain that such a move is nevertheless without purpose.* This will make the notion of concrete and existing universe completely devoid of any explicative power.* * It will follow that a much weaker and usual form of Ockham’s razor can be used to conclude that not only physics has been epistemologically reduced to machine psychology, but that ‘‘matter’’ has been ontologically reduced to ‘‘mind’’ where mind is defined as the object study of fundamental machine psychology. *All that by assuming comp, I insist. The reason is that comp forbids to associate inner experiences with the physical processing related to the computations corresponding (with comp) to those experiences. The physical ‘‘supervenience thesis’’ of the materialist philosophers of mind cannot be maintained, and inner experiences can only be associated with type of computation. Instead of linking [the pain I feel] at space-time (x,t) to [a machine state] at space-time (x,t), we are obliged to associate [the pain I feel at space-time (x,t)] to a type or a sheaf of computations (existing forever in the arithmetical Platonia which is accepted as existing independently of our selves with arithmetical realism). If this is not a statement that the physical world does not exist and, instead, that all that exists is abstract machine, I will eat my hat. I have repeatedly tried to see if the reasoning of Bruno et al allows for us to decouple the existence of an entity from its properties but I have been repeatedly rebuffed for such a thought, therefore the elimination of the properties of the physical world demands the elimination of the existence of the physical world. My claim is that we can recover appearances by decoupling existence from property definiteness, but that idea is either not being understood or is being rejected out of hand. What Quentin said. If* *anyone actually denied the existence of a physical reality in any sense, that would indeed be grounds not just for correcting them, but for ignoring them entirely. Is your post some kind of meta-level commentary on the need for precise language?? 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. -- Joseph Knight -- 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: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/14/2012 2:38 PM, Quentin Anciaux wrote: 2012/2/14 Stephen P. King stephe...@charter.net mailto:stephe...@charter.net On 2/14/2012 10:36 AM, Quentin Anciaux wrote: The flaw is the entire structure of UDA+MGA, it assumes the existence of the very thing that is claims cannot exist. It is a theory that predicts that it cannot exist. How? By supposedly proving that the physical world does not exist. It does not prove that the physical world does not exist... it proves that a *primitive* material world is irrelevant to predict your next moment, the current physics of the world. Whether there is a primitive material world or not cannot change your expectation of your next moment, rendering this primitive material world devoid of explanatory power. HI Quentin, What is the difference? Please see my last post to ACW with the subject header Re: On Pre-existing Fields The difference is that it is not primary... the physical universe emerge from computations. It should be an invariant in relative deep computation giving rise to consciousness. Numbers-Computations-consciousness universe Hi Quentin, No, numbers cannot have definite properties absent consciousness, therefore one cannot derive consciousness from mere numbers. A more correct diagram would be: Numbers - Computations ^ | | v Consciousness - universes 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.
Re: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/14/2012 2:47 PM, meekerdb wrote: My understanding is that the properties of the physical world are inferred from our subjective experiences that have a consistency (which Vic Stenger calls point-of-view-invariance) which allows us to model them as being out there, i.e. objective. Bruno's theory is that this subset of subjective experiences is generated by all possible computations. Hence the material world model is derivative from computation and is not primitive or fundamental. This however may suffer from a white-rabbit problem since it seems likely that many sets of subjective experiences will correspond to models of Alice-in-wonderland worlds. Incidentally, I think that human-like consciousness can only exist within the context of a physical world model. _So the physical world is not optional, even if it isn't fundamental._ Hi Brent, I think that we agree 100% here! 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.
Re: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/13/2012 5:27 PM, acw wrote: [SPK] There is a problem with this though b/c it assumes that the field is pre-existing; it is the same as the block universe idea that Andrew Soltau and others are wrestling with. Why is a pre-existing field so troublesome? Seems like a similar problem as the one you have with Platonia. For any system featuring time or change, you can find a meta-system in which you can describe that system timelessly (and you have to, if one is to talk about time and change at all). Dear Kermit, OK, I will try to explain this in detail and check my math. I am good with pictures, even N-dimensional ones, but not symbols, equations and words... Think of a collection of different objects. Now think of how many ways that they can be arranged or partitioned up. For N objects, I believe that there are at least N! numbers of ways that they can be arranged. Now think of an Electromagnetic Field as we do in classical physics. At each point in space, it has a vector and a scalar value representing its magnetic and electric potentials. How many ways can this field be configured in terms of the possible values of the potentials at each point? At least 1x2x3x...xM ways, where M is the number of points of space. Let's add a dimension of time so that we have a 3,1 dimensional field configuration. How many different ways can this be configured? Well, that depends. We known that in Nature there is something called the Least Action Principle that basically states that what ever happens in a situation it is the one that minimizes the action. Water flows down hill for this reason, among other things... But it is still at least M! number of possible configurations. How do we compute what the minimum action configuration of the electromagnetic fields distributed across space-time? It is an optimization problem of figuring out which is the least action configured field given a choice of all possible field configurations. This computational problem is known to be NP-Complete and as such requires a quantity of resources to run the computation that increases as a non-polynomial power of the number of possible choices, so the number is, I think, 2^M! . The easiest to understand example of this kind of problem is the Traveling Salesman problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem: Given a list of cities and their pairwise distances, the task is to find the shortest possible route that visits each city exactly once. The number of possible routes that the salesman can take increases exponentially with the number of cities, there for the number of possible distances that have to be compared to each other to find the shortest route increases at least exponentially. So for a computer running a program to find the solution it takes exponentially more resources of memory and time (in computational steps) or some combination of the two. Now, given all of that, in the concept of Platonia we have the idea of ideal forms, be they the Good, or some particular infinite string of numbers. How exactly are they determined to be the best possible by some standard. Whatever the standard, all that matters is that there are multiple possible options of The Forms with the stipulation that it is the best or most consistent or whatever. It is still an optimization problem with N variables that are required to be compared to each other according to some standard. Therefore, in most cases there is an Np-complete problem to be solved. How can it be computed if it has to exist as perfect from the beginning? I figured this out when I was trying to wrap my head around Leindniz' idea of a Pre-Established Harmony. It was supposed to have been created by God to synchronize all of the Monads with each other so that they appeared to interact with each other without actually having to exchange substances - which was forbidden to happen as Monads have no windows. For God to have created such a PEH, it would have to solve an NP-Complete problem on the configuration space of all possible worlds. If the number of possible worlds is infinite then the computation will require infinite computational resources. Given that God has to have the solution before the Universe is created, It cannot use the time component of God's Ultimate Digital computer. Since there is no space full of distinguishable stuff, there isn't any memory resources either for the computation. So guess what? The PEH cannot be computed and thus the universe cannot be created with a PEH as Leibniz proposed. The idea of a measure that Bruno talks about is just another way of talking about this same kind of optimization problem without tipping his hand that it implicitly requires a computation to be performed to find it. I do not blame him as this problem has been glossed over for hundred of years in math and thus we have to play with nonsense like the Axiom of
Re: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/14/2012 02:55, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/13/2012 5:27 PM, acw wrote: [SPK] There is a problem with this though b/c it assumes that the field is pre-existing; it is the same as the block universe idea that Andrew Soltau and others are wrestling with. Why is a pre-existing field so troublesome? Seems like a similar problem as the one you have with Platonia. For any system featuring time or change, you can find a meta-system in which you can describe that system timelessly (and you have to, if one is to talk about time and change at all). Dear Kermit, OK, I will try to explain this in detail and check my math. I am good with pictures, even N-dimensional ones, but not symbols, equations and words... Think of a collection of different objects. Now think of how many ways that they can be arranged or partitioned up. For N objects, I believe that there are at least N! numbers of ways that they can be arranged. Now think of an Electromagnetic Field as we do in classical physics. At each point in space, it has a vector and a scalar value representing its magnetic and electric potentials. How many ways can this field be configured in terms of the possible values of the potentials at each point? At least 1x2x3x...xM ways, where M is the number of points of space. Let's add a dimension of time so that we have a 3,1 dimensional field configuration. How many different ways can this be configured? Well, that depends. We known that in Nature there is something called the Least Action Principle that basically states that what ever happens in a situation it is the one that minimizes the action. Water flows down hill for this reason, among other things... But it is still at least M! number of possible configurations. How do we compute what the minimum action configuration of the electromagnetic fields distributed across space-time? It is an optimization problem of figuring out which is the least action configured field given a choice of all possible field configurations. This computational problem is known to be NP-Complete and as such requires a quantity of resources to run the computation that increases as a non-polynomial power of the number of possible choices, so the number is, I think, 2^M! . The easiest to understand example of this kind of problem is the Traveling Salesman problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem: Given a list of cities and their pairwise distances, the task is to find the shortest possible route that visits each city exactly once. The number of possible routes that the salesman can take increases exponentially with the number of cities, there for the number of possible distances that have to be compared to each other to find the shortest route increases at least exponentially. So for a computer running a program to find the solution it takes exponentially more resources of memory and time (in computational steps) or some combination of the two. Yet the problem is decidable in finite amount of steps, even if that amount may be very large indeed. It would be unfeasible for someone with bounded resources, but not a problem for any abstract TM or a physical system (are they one and the same, at least locally?). Now, given all of that, in the concept of Platonia we have the idea of ideal forms, be they the Good, or some particular infinite string of numbers. How exactly are they determined to be the best possible by some standard. Whatever the standard, all that matters is that there are multiple possible options of The Forms with the stipulation that it is the best or most consistent or whatever. It is still an optimization problem with N variables that are required to be compared to each other according to some standard. Therefore, in most cases there is an Np-complete problem to be solved. How can it be computed if it has to exist as perfect from the beginning? The problem is that you're considering a from the beginning at all, as in, you're imagining math as existing in time. Instead of thinking it along the lines of specific Forms, try thinking of a limited version along the lines of: is this problem decidable in a finite amount of steps, no matter how large, as in: if a true solution exists, it's there. I'm not entirely sure if we can include uncomputable values there, such as if a specific program halts or not, but I'm leaning towards that it might be possible. I figured this out when I was trying to wrap my head around Leindniz' idea of a Pre-Established Harmony. It was supposed to have been created by God to synchronize all of the Monads with each other so that they appeared to interact with each other without actually having to exchange substances - which was forbidden to happen as Monads have no windows. For God to have created such a PEH, it would have to solve an NP-Complete problem on the configuration space of all possible worlds. Try all possible solutions for a problem, ignore invalid ones. If the number of possible worlds is
Re: On Pre-existing Fields
Lots of interesting ideas going about. It sounds like you're pondering how many elements are in the set of all world-lines consistent with the true laws of physics (e.g., possibly, the least action principle). (Incidentally, that set oddly enough is timeless yet the bundles of world-lines that comprise our selves evidently perceive change.) Proof by throwing in an axiom isn't very satisfying but I would like to say that Banach-Tarski is no more strange than Gabriel's Horn or Cantor's hierarchy of infinities. Strangeness is of course a matter of opinion and mine is that the existence of nonmeasurable sets is not a heavy price to pay for that poof (a proof by throwing in an axiom). Cheers On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 6:55 PM, Stephen P. King stephe...@charter.netwrote: On 2/13/2012 5:27 PM, acw wrote: [SPK] There is a problem with this though b/c it assumes that the field is pre-existing; it is the same as the block universe idea that Andrew Soltau and others are wrestling with. Why is a pre-existing field so troublesome? Seems like a similar problem as the one you have with Platonia. For any system featuring time or change, you can find a meta-system in which you can describe that system timelessly (and you have to, if one is to talk about time and change at all). Dear Kermit, OK, I will try to explain this in detail and check my math. I am good with pictures, even N-dimensional ones, but not symbols, equations and words... Think of a collection of different objects. Now think of how many ways that they can be arranged or partitioned up. For N objects, I believe that there are at least N! numbers of ways that they can be arranged. Now think of an Electromagnetic Field as we do in classical physics. At each point in space, it has a vector and a scalar value representing its magnetic and electric potentials. How many ways can this field be configured in terms of the possible values of the potentials at each point? At least 1x2x3x...xM ways, where M is the number of points of space. Let's add a dimension of time so that we have a 3,1 dimensional field configuration. How many different ways can this be configured? Well, that depends. We known that in Nature there is something called the Least Action Principle that basically states that what ever happens in a situation it is the one that minimizes the action. Water flows down hill for this reason, among other things... But it is still at least M! number of possible configurations. How do we compute what the minimum action configuration of the electromagnetic fields distributed across space-time? It is an optimization problem of figuring out which is the least action configured field given a choice of all possible field configurations. This computational problem is known to be NP-Complete and as such requires a quantity of resources to run the computation that increases as a non-polynomial power of the number of possible choices, so the number is, I think, 2^M! . The easiest to understand example of this kind of problem is the Traveling Salesman problemhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem: Given a list of cities and their pairwise distances, the task is to find the shortest possible route that visits each city exactly once. The number of possible routes that the salesman can take increases exponentially with the number of cities, there for the number of possible distances that have to be compared to each other to find the shortest route increases at least exponentially. So for a computer running a program to find the solution it takes exponentially more resources of memory and time (in computational steps) or some combination of the two. Now, given all of that, in the concept of Platonia we have the idea of ideal forms, be they the Good, or some particular infinite string of numbers. How exactly are they determined to be the best possible by some standard. Whatever the standard, all that matters is that there are multiple possible options of The Forms with the stipulation that it is the best or most consistent or whatever. It is still an optimization problem with N variables that are required to be compared to each other according to some standard. Therefore, in most cases there is an Np-complete problem to be solved. How can it be computed if it has to exist as perfect from the beginning? I figured this out when I was trying to wrap my head around Leindniz' idea of a Pre-Established Harmony. It was supposed to have been created by God to synchronize all of the Monads with each other so that they appeared to interact with each other without actually having to exchange substances - which was forbidden to happen as Monads have no windows. For God to have created such a PEH, it would have to solve an NP-Complete problem on the configuration space of all possible worlds. If the number of possible worlds is infinite then the computation will
Re: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/13/2012 11:18 PM, acw wrote: On 2/14/2012 02:55, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/13/2012 5:27 PM, acw wrote: [SPK] There is a problem with this though b/c it assumes that the field is pre-existing; it is the same as the block universe idea that Andrew Soltau and others are wrestling with. Why is a pre-existing field so troublesome? Seems like a similar problem as the one you have with Platonia. For any system featuring time or change, you can find a meta-system in which you can describe that system timelessly (and you have to, if one is to talk about time and change at all). Dear Kermit, OK, I will try to explain this in detail and check my math. I am good with pictures, even N-dimensional ones, but not symbols, equations and words... Think of a collection of different objects. Now think of how many ways that they can be arranged or partitioned up. For N objects, I believe that there are at least N! numbers of ways that they can be arranged. Now think of an Electromagnetic Field as we do in classical physics. At each point in space, it has a vector and a scalar value representing its magnetic and electric potentials. How many ways can this field be configured in terms of the possible values of the potentials at each point? At least 1x2x3x...xM ways, where M is the number of points of space. Let's add a dimension of time so that we have a 3,1 dimensional field configuration. How many different ways can this be configured? Well, that depends. We known that in Nature there is something called the Least Action Principle that basically states that what ever happens in a situation it is the one that minimizes the action. Water flows down hill for this reason, among other things... But it is still at least M! number of possible configurations. How do we compute what the minimum action configuration of the electromagnetic fields distributed across space-time? It is an optimization problem of figuring out which is the least action configured field given a choice of all possible field configurations. This computational problem is known to be NP-Complete and as such requires a quantity of resources to run the computation that increases as a non-polynomial power of the number of possible choices, so the number is, I think, 2^M! . The easiest to understand example of this kind of problem is the Traveling Salesman problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem: Given a list of cities and their pairwise distances, the task is to find the shortest possible route that visits each city exactly once. The number of possible routes that the salesman can take increases exponentially with the number of cities, there for the number of possible distances that have to be compared to each other to find the shortest route increases at least exponentially. So for a computer running a program to find the solution it takes exponentially more resources of memory and time (in computational steps) or some combination of the two. Yet the problem is decidable in finite amount of steps, even if that amount may be very large indeed. It would be unfeasible for someone with bounded resources, but not a problem for any abstract TM or a physical system (are they one and the same, at least locally?). Hi ACW, WARNING WARNING WARNING DANGER DANGER! Overload is Eminent! OK, please help me understand how we can speak of computations for situations where I have just laid out how computations can't exist. If we take CTT at face value, then it requires some form of implementation. Some kind of machine must be run. Are you sure that you are not substituting your ability to imagine the solution of a computation as an intuitive proof that computations exist as purely abstract entities, independent from all things physical? My difficulty may just be a simple failure of imagination but how can it make any sense to believe in something in whose very definition is the requirement that it cannot be known or imagined? Knowing and imagining are, at least, computations running in our brain hardware. If your brained stopped, the knowing, imagining and even dreaming that is you continues? So you do believe in disembodies spirits, you are just not calling them that. I apologize, but this is a bit hard to take. The inconsistency that runs rampant here is making me a bit depressed. Now, given all of that, in the concept of Platonia we have the idea of ideal forms, be they the Good, or some particular infinite string of numbers. How exactly are they determined to be the best possible by some standard. Whatever the standard, all that matters is that there are multiple possible options of The Forms with the stipulation that it is the best or most consistent or whatever. It is still an optimization problem with N variables that are required to be compared to each other according to some standard. Therefore, in most cases there is an Np-complete problem to be solved. How can it be computed if it has to
Re: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/13/2012 6:55 PM, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/13/2012 5:27 PM, acw wrote: [SPK] There is a problem with this though b/c it assumes that the field is pre-existing; it is the same as the block universe idea that Andrew Soltau and others are wrestling with. Why is a pre-existing field so troublesome? Seems like a similar problem as the one you have with Platonia. For any system featuring time or change, you can find a meta-system in which you can describe that system timelessly (and you have to, if one is to talk about time and change at all). Dear Kermit, OK, I will try to explain this in detail and check my math. I am good with pictures, even N-dimensional ones, but not symbols, equations and words... Think of a collection of different objects. Now think of how many ways that they can be arranged or partitioned up. For N objects, I believe that there are at least N! numbers of ways that they can be arranged. Now think of an Electromagnetic Field as we do in classical physics. At each point in space, it has a vector and a scalar value representing its magnetic and electric potentials. The EM field is a second order anti-symmetric tensor, F_mu_nu, so it has six independent components. How many ways can this field be configured in terms of the possible values of the potentials at each point? In classical physics it has uncountably many values at each point. In QFT with boundary conditions it may be limited. At least 1x2x3x...xM ways, where M is the number of points of space. An uncountable infinity. Let's add a dimension of time so that we have a 3,1 dimensional field configuration. The dimensions of space are not the same as the possible values of fields at a point, nor are they the number of points of space. How many different ways can this be configured? Uncountably many ways. Well, that depends. We known that in Nature there is something called the Least Action Principle that basically states that what ever happens in a situation it is the one that minimizes the action. Water flows down hill for this reason, among other things... But it is still at least M! number of possible configurations. The least action principle applied to the EM field in free space gives you Maxwell's equations for EM waves which have uncountably many possible solutions. In order to get definite solutions though you need boundary conditions. How do we compute what the minimum action configuration of the electromagnetic fields distributed across space-time? It is an optimization problem of figuring out which is the least action configured field given a choice of all possible field configurations. This computational problem is known to be NP-Complete and as such requires a quantity of resources to run the computation that increases as a non-polynomial power of the number of possible choices, so the number is, I think, 2^M! . All this discussion of computational resources is irrelevant since you've postulated a system with uncountably many possible solutions, and you've not specified any boundary conditions so they just correspond to all possible photons. The easiest to understand example of this kind of problem is the Traveling Salesman problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem: Given a list of cities and their pairwise distances, the task is to find the shortest possible route that visits each city exactly once. The number of possible routes that the salesman can take increases exponentially with the number of cities, there for the number of possible distances that have to be compared to each other to find the shortest route increases at least exponentially. So for a computer running a program to find the solution it takes exponentially more resources of memory and time (in computational steps) or some combination of the two. Now, given all of that, in the concept of Platonia we have the idea of ideal forms, be they the Good, or some particular infinite string of numbers. How exactly are they determined to be the best possible by some standard. Whatever the standard, all that matters is that there are multiple possible options of The Forms with the stipulation that it is the best or most consistent or whatever. It is still an optimization problem with N variables that are required to be compared to each other according to some standard. Therefore, in most cases there is an Np-complete problem to be solved. How can it be computed if it has to exist as perfect from the beginning? I figured this out when I was trying to wrap my head around Leindniz' idea of a Pre-Established Harmony. It was supposed to have been created by God to synchronize all of the Monads with each other so that they appeared to interact with each other without actually having to exchange substances - which was forbidden to happen as Monads have no windows. For God to have created such a PEH, it would have to solve an
