subject:"Re\: Ontological Problems of COMP"

Re: Ontological Problems of COMP

2012-02-09 Thread Stephen P. King


On 2/9/2012 3:40 PM, acw wrote:

On 2/8/2012 06:29, Stephen P. King wrote:

Hi ACW,

I apologize for the length of this post, but I think that if I snipped
text that context would be lost that is necessary. Let us slow down a
bit. I think we are decohering a bit. ;-)

I should probably apologize as well, my answer is quite long and took 
a while to write.


snip

Hi ACW,

I think we are making progress here. I am learning a lot from it. I 
will write up a response in detail asap. Meanwhile, could you take a 
look at this paper: http://boole.stanford.edu/pub/ratmech.pdf It is the 
basis of my dualism hypothesis.


Onward!

Stephen

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Crux of the Mind-Body problem (was Re: Ontological Problems of COMP)

2012-02-09 Thread Bruno Marchal


Craig,

Sorry, I answered a paragraph to quickly. You raised a key question  
which is at the crux of the mind-body problem, and its comp  
reformulation.


On 09 Feb 2012, at 10:49, Bruno Marchal wrote:



On 07 Feb 2012, at 23:05, Craig Weinberg wrote:
I think that the 1p-sense that the machine has is unrelated to  
the 3p-

mechanism.


It is related to an infinity of 3p local representations.


What makes it anything other than that?


Nothing.


That "nothing" is not correct.
A better answer is computer science and truth.

I might say comp, by definition. But I guess you are arguing against  
comp, so I have to explain more.


But for this you have to be able to assume comp, if only temporarily.

With comp, we are duplicable. I can be "cut" in Brussels, and pasted  
in two places, W and M, says. In that simple local case, we get the  
two 3p local representations of 3-me (my body at the right comp  
level): one is W and one in M.
The one in M will observe his environment, and conclude that he feels,  
subjectively, to be in M, and not to be in W. (And similarly for the  
one in W). OK?


Now, even without using comp, nor even strong AI, but just the much  
weaker behavioral-comp (which allows zombie and accept that machines  
can at least imitate humans behavior), you should be able to  
understand the explanations that the zombie in M (say) will give to  
your question, and which is that computer science will make one  
machine (betting on comp and surviving or pretending surviving) that  
she knows the difference between the objective collection of 3-me in M  
and 3-me in W, and what she personally feel when looking where she is.


This is a point which, I think, has already been made by Gunderson,  
which is the fact that men, or machines, when individuated are  
individuals, and that it entails a natural asymmetry between your body  
and the body of others. For example you can see the back of the neck  
of anybody else more directly than yours. That kind of obvious truth  
is truth for the machine as for the man. A machine can understand that  
an objective description of the existing 3ps will not allow a  
selection of one particular 1ps. So what can do that? The machine can  
understand the zombie machine in M, who will just say that she looked  
around and recognize M, making her understand the difference between  
her 1p and the "objective" 3p.


Formally, this will be the difference between the Gödel Bp, which  
asserts only that the machine (conceive in a 3p body or code, or  
number) believes (asserts) p, and (Bp & p) the machine believes p, and  
"God agree" (say), I mean "p is true".


You are saying that all the 3ps together cannot create the sense. I am  
saying that we can interview the individuated machines, and that for  
them a sort of miracle occurs, they know perfectly well the difference  
between them and the others. And they can make that difference  
relative to their probable computations.


In that context, you can describe a "free-will" choice, as of form of  
self-killing, for example by duplicating you in W and M, but  
annihilating you in W, or in M, according to your will before. Or in  
deciding to not reconstitute yourself in some place. A free-choice is  
a form of premeditated suicide. A local pruning of possibilities.


The distinction between 1p and collection of 3p will be natural for  
the machine points of view, and is indeed a difference of points of  
view.


Bruno








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



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Re: Ontological Problems of COMP

2012-02-07 Thread Craig Weinberg

On Feb 7, 6:06 am, Bruno Marchal  wrote:
> On 07 Feb 2012, at 00:23, Craig Weinberg wrote:
>
> >>> I'm not lowering subst level at all, I'm saying that subst level
> >>> is an
> >>> indexical.
>
> >> ?
>
> > That's what you aren't getting about my position. Substitution level
> > is not a scalar variable.
>
> ?

There is no fixed level at which a plastic plant cannot be
distinguished from a real plant. A person looking through binoculars
is on one level, an ant that crawls on it is on another, a molecule
within it is on another. There is no such thing as substitution level,
and there is no such thing as substitution in an absolute sense. There
is only relativistic imitation - which is subjective and indexical -
not scalar.

>
>
>
> > All of the quant descriptions in the universe
> > do not add up to a single experienced quality.
>
>  You don't know that. Is it an axiom?
>
> >>> I don't know it, but I clearly understand why it is the case.
>
> >> That's not an argument.
>
> > Then you disqualify the possibility of understanding and force a 3p
> > supervenience to all 1p experiences.
>
> I was saying, at the meta level, that you cannot refer to your own
> understanding of your own "argument" to convey it.

You can when the argument is about subjectivity. I get a vote, non-
subjects don't.

>
>
>
> > Quantites are only
> > quantities.
>
>  No. All universal numbers can interpret a number as a function on
>  quantities, or as properties on quantities, which are not
>  quantities
>  themselves.
>
> >>> Then what are they?
>
> >> Functions, relations, properties, modalities, qualities, etc.
>
> > Quantitative relations, quantitative properties, logical
> > (quantitative) modalities, quantitative qualities.
>
> What are the quantities that you associate to modalities?

The only modalities you refer to are those associated with
quantitative representation.

>
>
>
>  I take this as another axiom. You postulate the existence of
>  something
>  vague. I think that something like that might make sense perhaps,
>  but
>  as I see it it would be a consequence of the comp meta-axiom.
>
> >>> That just gives a name to comp's lack of explanatory power. I can
> >>> call
> >>> comp a consequence of the ecumenical meta-axiom.
>
> >> comp *is* the meta-axiom. It is an axiom bearing on your own
> >> consciousness property (of being invariant for some substitution at
> >> some level).
>
> > Then I can call the ecumenical a meta-meta axiom.
>
> Then you lost me, and it looks like you just want have an answer.

You are saying that anything that comp can't explain can still be
explained by comp. I'm saying that anyone can say that. Churches,
governments, corporations, courts.

>
>
>
>  On the contrary. The semantics of machines explodes in the
>  infinities.
>
> >>> Explodes into what? What does it signify other than itself?
>
> >> Explodes into the number of possible different interpretation of
> >> itself, which might impact on different decisions and futures, from
> >> the machine's point of view.
>
> > They all only signify different permutations of the emptiness of the
> > machine. It doesn't signify anything, it's syntax only.
>
> It is typically not syntax. Semantics of even simple machine are given
> by infinite objects.

There are no semantic objects in reality, only semantic subjects that
can seem objectified subjectively.

>
>
>
> > It's circular reasoning to say that physical underpinnings have no
> > effect on our phenomenology when you are working from a theory
> > which
> > presupposes that phenomenology is detectable only by quantitative
> > measurement in the first place. In our actual experience, we know
> > that
> > in fact all phenomenological systems without exception exist as a
> > function of physical systems -
>
>  We don't know that.
>
> >>> Are you talking about ghosts or NDEs? Even so, those phenomena are
> >>> always experienced by a person with a body.
>
> >> I was not talking on NDE, but on the fact that primitive matter does
> >> not exist.
>
> > Primitive or not, all phenomenological systems that we have observed
> > are associated with persons or animals who have bodies.
>
> But that's what comp can explain without assuming materially primitive
> bodies.
> And given that we don't know what materially primitive bodies can be,
> comp solves a problem here.

I don't see any advantage that computational primitives bring to the
table over material primitives. To the contrary, it makes sense that
material should precipitate computational properties through mechanism
while disembodied mechanism shows no sign of logically precipitating
matter.

>
>
>
>  Nor am I sure what it means exactly. Define "physical".
>
> >>> Phenomena whose properties include mass, density, volume and
> >>> interact
> >>> effectively with other phenomena bearing those properties.
>
> >> Define mass, density, volume, and interactio

Re: Ontological Problems of COMP

2012-02-07 Thread meekerdb


On 2/7/2012 3:56 AM, acw wrote:
Well, Copenhagen doesn't even describe an underlying model, it's just a predictive 
model, a "don't ask what's going on" model, thus while it will give you correct results, 
it won't tell you what's really going on.


That assumes that something is 'really going on'.  If you take an instrumentalist view 
(c.f. Asher Peres or Leslie Ballentine) then all that's 'going on' is that your 
information changes and hence you change your model.


Brent

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Re: Ontological Problems of COMP

2012-02-07 Thread acw


On 2/7/2012 06:15, Stephen P. King wrote:

On 2/6/2012 6:50 PM, acw wrote:

On 2/6/2012 06:25, Stephen P. King wrote:

Hi ACW,

On 2/4/2012 1:53 PM, acw wrote:

snip

Before reading the UDA, I used to think that something like Tegmark's
solution would be general enough and sufficient, but now I think 'just
arithmetic' (or combinators, or lambda calculus, or ...) or is
sufficient. Why? By the Church-Turing Thesis, these systems posses the
same computability power, that is, they all can run the UD.


I agree with this line of reasoning, but I see no upper bound on
mathematics since I take Cantor's results as "real". There is not upper
bound on the cardinality of Mathematics. I see this as an implication of
the old dictum "Nature explores all possibilities."


The question is if transfinite extensions are considered as part of
the foundation, what different consequences will follow for COMP or
the new theory?

[SPK]
I am not sure, but they seem to be necessary for completeness.

Maybe, although it's also questionable if it makes that much sense to 
put it in the ontology if it won't have any discernible effect on the 
experienced sense data or measure.

Now, if we do admit a digital substitution, all that we can experience
is already contained within the UD, including the worlds where we find
a physical world with us having a physical body/brain (which exist
computationally, but let us not forget that random oracle that comes
with 1p indeterminacy).


Not quite, admitting digital substitution does not necessarily admit to
pre-specifiability as is assumed in the definition of the algorithms of
Universal Turing machines,  it
just assumes that we can substitute functionally equivalent components.

What do you mean by ``pre-specifiability''? Care to elaborate?


The algorithm is a finite and specifiable list of computational steps or
states. It only makes sense that the algorithm exists at least
simultaneous or prior to its implementation by a physical system. It
cannot come into existence after the implementation.

It comes into the existence after the implementation? While I can see 
how some UD runs a copy of itself as well, I'm not entirely I see the 
problem here with what I said. Unless, your issue is along the lines of 
1p experience actually being some truth being temporally "created" or 
merely what happens when some particular computations happens within 
some timeframe, as opposed to existing platonically -  I'm not sure I 
can completely agree with this opinion although I've shared it a long 
time ago, currently I prefer to think consciousness could work in 
situations like this: consider a SIM(substrate independent mind), 
consider computing parts of its mind in temporally disconnected or 
random order (include some VR(Virtual Reality) environment with it, so 
it's mostly self-contained, although it could get some input/sense-data 
from the world doing the computation), possibly also implement spatial 
or algorithmic disconnects, possibly even add some homomorphic 
encryption such that no outside observer could understand the 
computations that are actually happening (yet all the computations are 
happening) - if COMP is correct, that SIM should be conscious, and this 
consciousness won't be spatially or temporally connected, yet the SIM 
will experience continuity! In a way, consciousness is like that inner 
interpreter. In a more extreme form, you could consider someone running 
some computation of a self-contained OS+VR+SIM(s) machine and stopping 
computing that machine, and it should still have continuations, be it in 
the UD or anywhere those future computations may be found (be they 
physically or platonically), and possibly externally acausal (if 
considering physics or MGA-like thought experiments), but internally 
causal and continuous (from 1p(s)). Maybe my thought experiment is a bit 
extreme, although I can't see any obvious refutation of it within the 
context of COMP(well, some simulations may be very low measure or 
unstable, compared to those which allow for more easier/cheaper locally 
stable 1p indeterminacy, but this is a fixable problem by adding access 
to undefined functionality/random oracles).

Functional equivalence does not free us from the prison of the flesh, it
merely frees us from the prison of just one particular body. ;-)

I'm not so sure to term ``body'' is as meaningful if we consider the
extremes which seem possible in COMP.


My point about the "flesh" is that functional equivalence allows for
computational universality but does not eliminate the necessity of the
physical. My primary contention is that computation is a process that
requires resources and is not just sum platonic free lunch.

What is the limit on those resources? What if the machine is always 
finite, but unbounded in the limit (although the limit is never reached 
for any observer)? If the physical always has some specific finite upper 
bound, how do you ju

Re: Ontological Problems of COMP

2012-02-07 Thread acw


On 2/7/2012 06:11, meekerdb wrote:

On 2/6/2012 9:55 PM, acw wrote:

On 2/7/2012 05:08, meekerdb wrote:

On 2/6/2012 5:37 PM, acw wrote:

On 2/7/2012 00:28, meekerdb wrote:

On 2/6/2012 3:50 PM, acw wrote:

I'm not so sure to term ``body'' is as meaningful if we consider the
extremes which seem possible in COMP. After a digital substitution, a
body could very well be some software running somewhere, on any kind
of substrate, with an arbitrary time-frame/ordering (as long as 1p
coherent), it could even run directly on some abstract machine which
is not part of our universe (such as some machine emulating another
machine which is contained in the UD) - the only thing that the mind
would have in common is that some program is being instantiated
somewhere, somehow. In this more extreme form, I'm not sure I can see
any difference between a substrate that has the label 'physical' and
some UD running in abstract Platonia. If you can show why the
'physical' version would be required or how can someone even tell the
difference between someone living in a 'physical' world vs someone
living in a purely mathematical (Platonic) world which sees the world
from within said structure in Platonia and calls it 'physical'. It
seems that 'physical' is very much what we call the structure in
which
we exist, but that's indexical, and if you claim that only one such
structure exists (such as this universe), then you think COMP is
false
(that is, no digital substitution exists) or that arithmetic is
inconsistent (which we cannot really know, but we can hope)?


Physics is already extremely abstract and mathematical, so it is
really
not a big step to suppose that the fundamental ontology is mathematics
or computation as Bruno, Tegmark, and others have speculated. The big
step is between supposing that somethings happen and some don't versus
everything (in some sense) happens. To say there must be substrate,
some
'ur-stuff', is really just to say that some things have existence (the
ur-stuff) and some don't.

Brent



What do you mean by 'ur-stuff'? Some structure which is more
privileged than others with 'existence'?


Not structure, just 'existence'.


As in, more general than 'structure'? I'm a bit confused about this.

In my opinion, the claim that some things (for example, some
computations) don't happen is incredibly strong. It makes sense for
someone who has only lived in one universe to say that any other
universe doesn't exist because his classical rationality (such as
Russell's teapot, the requirement for a burden of proof) says that we
can't really claim existence for things we don't have direct evidence
for. On the other hand, Occam's razor makes us favor the simplest
possible theories. A theory which explicitly has to deny some
structures or computations from existing is much more complex and
stronger (and thus will be favored less by Occam or its
formalizations).


But Occam's razor is just a rule-of-thumb. A Russell Standish points
out, in the simplest possible theory nothing exists.



Yet something does exist, thus any theory will have to be a
'something'. Some theories (such as Platonia) do give an easy solution
to the 'why'. Occam's razor may be a rule of the thumb, but doesn't
mean it's not valid, it can also be formalized (although, I won't
insist on it, because most formalizations will instantly bias the
winner to some 'everything' theory - for example if the formalization
is towards computable stuff, the bias is toward the UD). Either way,
even ignoring the explicitly stated Occam's razor, when we'll consider
some theory for the physics of our local universe, we'll inevitably
wonder why these particular laws and the typical answers tend to be
either "all possibilities, we're just one of them" or "don't ask" or
"divine magic". You can guess which answer I prefer.

COMP as derived from UDA/MGA already places great constraints on what
the ontology has to be given the assumption that our brains do admit a
digital substitution and such an act is survivable.


Does it? I thought it entailed infinitely many different universes with
physics limited only by the constraint that they be locally computable.



To me it seems that it says that you don't need anything more than the
UD (or arithmetical truth or ...). Even if there was something more, a
Turing-emulable body will never be able to find out. Although, I guess
that's a core part of this debate - would some transfinite stuff in
the ontology be able to affect the measure or continuations of a
machine/brain (assuming COMP)?

Any theory which claims the UD's existence, but limits the laws of
physics to only a single instance of some string theory, with only one
history and one universe and so on is incredibly strong/very complex,
thus shouldn't be favored (by Occam). It also leads to many other
questions such as: why this mathematical structure is granted
existence, but the others are not? and the conflict between mechanism
and materialism as shown in the MGA. To m

Re: Ontological Problems of COMP

2012-02-07 Thread Bruno Marchal



On 07 Feb 2012, at 00:23, Craig Weinberg wrote:


On Feb 6, 10:37 am, Bruno Marchal  wrote:

On 05 Feb 2012, at 20:10, Craig Weinberg wrote:

I'm not lowering subst level at all, I'm saying that subst level  
is an

indexical.


?


That's what you aren't getting about my position. Substitution level
is not a scalar variable.


?








All of the quant descriptions in the universe
do not add up to a single experienced quality.



You don't know that. Is it an axiom?



I don't know it, but I clearly understand why it is the case.


That's not an argument.


Then you disqualify the possibility of understanding and force a 3p
supervenience to all 1p experiences.


I was saying, at the meta level, that you cannot refer to your own  
understanding of your own "argument" to convey it.









Quantites are only
quantities.



No. All universal numbers can interpret a number as a function on
quantities, or as properties on quantities, which are not  
quantities

themselves.



Then what are they?


Functions, relations, properties, modalities, qualities, etc.


Quantitative relations, quantitative properties, logical
(quantitative) modalities, quantitative qualities.


What are the quantities that you associate to modalities?










I take this as another axiom. You postulate the existence of
something
vague. I think that something like that might make sense perhaps,  
but

as I see it it would be a consequence of the comp meta-axiom.


That just gives a name to comp's lack of explanatory power. I can  
call

comp a consequence of the ecumenical meta-axiom.


comp *is* the meta-axiom. It is an axiom bearing on your own
consciousness property (of being invariant for some substitution at
some level).


Then I can call the ecumenical a meta-meta axiom.


Then you lost me, and it looks like you just want have an answer.









On the contrary. The semantics of machines explodes in the
infinities.



Explodes into what? What does it signify other than itself?


Explodes into the number of possible different interpretation of
itself, which might impact on different decisions and futures, from
the machine's point of view.


They all only signify different permutations of the emptiness of the
machine. It doesn't signify anything, it's syntax only.


It is typically not syntax. Semantics of even simple machine are given  
by infinite objects.










It's circular reasoning to say that physical underpinnings have no
effect on our phenomenology when you are working from a theory  
which

presupposes that phenomenology is detectable only by quantitative
measurement in the first place. In our actual experience, we know
that
in fact all phenomenological systems without exception exist as a
function of physical systems -



We don't know that.



Are you talking about ghosts or NDEs? Even so, those phenomena are
always experienced by a person with a body.


I was not talking on NDE, but on the fact that primitive matter does
not exist.


Primitive or not, all phenomenological systems that we have observed
are associated with persons or animals who have bodies.



But that's what comp can explain without assuming materially primitive  
bodies.
And given that we don't know what materially primitive bodies can be,  
comp solves a problem here.











Nor am I sure what it means exactly. Define "physical".


Phenomena whose properties include mass, density, volume and  
interact

effectively with other phenomena bearing those properties.


Define mass, density, volume, and interaction.


I don't do definitions. The standard usage of these terms is adequate.


In fundamental inquiry, standard usage can't help. especially  
discussing comp, given that the standard usage is based on billions  
years of evolution and 1500 years of Aristotelianism.
Again, the standard usage might make sense if you were able to say  
what you assume and what you derive.










Here, in AUDA terms, you might be confusing the "intelligible",  
with

the "intelligible matter"
(Bp with Bp & Dt). [] p with [] p & <> t.



I'm really not confused at all. You keep accusing me of that but I'm
very clear on my distinctions.


You are not. And you are not well place to judge this.


You are saying that your opinions about me are facts.


I am saying that *anyone* who argue cannot refer to his own  
understanding, or his own clarity.
You could as well say, like in the "hunting of the snark": "If you  
were clever, and if I got the time, I could make it all clear to you,  
but given that you are dumb, it is not worth the try". This is fun,  
but not an argument.







Fortunately I
have other people who are familiar with my ideas who don't share your
facts.


This is not an argument. Many people have been convinced by fake  
argument (on the jews, on cannabis, on terrorism, etc.). Humans are  
terribly prone to believe what other people make them wanting to  
believe.












virtual servers do not fly off into the
data center on their own

Re: Ontological Problems of COMP

2012-02-07 Thread Bruno Marchal



On 07 Feb 2012, at 07:11, meekerdb wrote:


On 2/6/2012 9:55 PM, acw wrote:

On 2/7/2012 05:08, meekerdb wrote:




while the other gives you a simple view, but it also tells you that  
there's more than you can see. Some people seem bothered about this  
'more' part, especially if it's not obviously accessible (although  
I'd debate this being the case with COMP).


I'm not bothered, but neither am I convinced.  The branches of the  
MWI are not obviously accessible and in fact they are not accessible  
at all.  I wouldn't say that rules them out - but it doesn't count  
in their favor.


The branches comes from the superposition, and their linear contagion  
which is unavoidable if we postulate that QM applies to the physical  
in general. So the branches are not accessible through interaction,  
but they are still accessible through the interferences, and  
extrapolating QM on the observers. To avoid the parallel branches we  
must add something to QM (like the collapse), and this can be made  
only by assuming that something (measuring apparatus, macro-object,  
consciousness?) does not obey to QM.
With comp, things are even more simple (conceptually): the (finite  
pieces of) parallel computations exist like prime number or total  
computable functions exist, in a weak common sense of mathematical  
existence, and the statistical interferences comes from the first  
person indeterminacy, and the shapes it has to take with the self- 
referential correctness constraints.


Bruno


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



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Re: Ontological Problems of COMP

2012-02-07 Thread Bruno Marchal



On 06 Feb 2012, at 19:34, meekerdb wrote:


On 2/6/2012 1:50 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:



On 05 Feb 2012, at 21:32, meekerdb wrote:


On 2/5/2012 8:19 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:


No. All universal numbers can interpret a number as a function on  
quantities, or as properties on quantities, which are not  
quantities themselves. Universal numbers can also transform, or  
interpret numbers as transformation of transformation, properties  
of properties, up in the constructive transfinite, etc.
When the quantities can add and multiply, soon their attributes  
are beyond all quantities, and Löbian quantities are arguably  
already knowing that about themselves.


I don't understand this.  Maybe I don't know what universal number  
is.  I thought it was a number whose representation in digits was  
such that every number appeared in the representation.  But I  
don't understand how such number does things: transform,  
interpret,...


Let phi_i be an enumeration of the (partial and total) computable  
functions from N to N.

Let  be a bijection from NXN to N.

A universal number u is a number u such that, for all x and y, we  
have phi_u() = phi_x(y).
The equality means that the LHS and RHS are either both defined and  
equal, or both undefined.


Thanks.  So it is not literally that the number does things, it just  
picks out the function that is universal for a given bijection and a  
given enumeration of the functions.


You are right. Technically we could bypass the bijection, and use only  
function with one argument, but this leads to the combinators (or  
numbers with some other operations). But a number per se do nothing.  
It needs a universal numbers to be interpreted, or ... the fixed  
universal base and in that case the * and + laws are enough, so that  
the choice of the universal (Sigma_1 complete) initial system endows  
the numbers with a "natural operational interpretation" by that  
universal basic system. From inside, the numbers will still not know  
the difference between a base (UD-like) computations, and any higher  
level one (and for the physics he has to take them all into account).


Bruno


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



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Re: Ontological Problems of COMP

2012-02-06 Thread meekerdb


On 2/6/2012 9:55 PM, acw wrote:

On 2/7/2012 05:08, meekerdb wrote:

On 2/6/2012 5:37 PM, acw wrote:

On 2/7/2012 00:28, meekerdb wrote:

On 2/6/2012 3:50 PM, acw wrote:

I'm not so sure to term ``body'' is as meaningful if we consider the
extremes which seem possible in COMP. After a digital substitution, a
body could very well be some software running somewhere, on any kind
of substrate, with an arbitrary time-frame/ordering (as long as 1p
coherent), it could even run directly on some abstract machine which
is not part of our universe (such as some machine emulating another
machine which is contained in the UD) - the only thing that the mind
would have in common is that some program is being instantiated
somewhere, somehow. In this more extreme form, I'm not sure I can see
any difference between a substrate that has the label 'physical' and
some UD running in abstract Platonia. If you can show why the
'physical' version would be required or how can someone even tell the
difference between someone living in a 'physical' world vs someone
living in a purely mathematical (Platonic) world which sees the world
from within said structure in Platonia and calls it 'physical'. It
seems that 'physical' is very much what we call the structure in which
we exist, but that's indexical, and if you claim that only one such
structure exists (such as this universe), then you think COMP is false
(that is, no digital substitution exists) or that arithmetic is
inconsistent (which we cannot really know, but we can hope)?


Physics is already extremely abstract and mathematical, so it is really
not a big step to suppose that the fundamental ontology is mathematics
or computation as Bruno, Tegmark, and others have speculated. The big
step is between supposing that somethings happen and some don't versus
everything (in some sense) happens. To say there must be substrate, some
'ur-stuff', is really just to say that some things have existence (the
ur-stuff) and some don't.

Brent



What do you mean by 'ur-stuff'? Some structure which is more
privileged than others with 'existence'?


Not structure, just 'existence'.


As in, more general than 'structure'? I'm a bit confused about this.

In my opinion, the claim that some things (for example, some
computations) don't happen is incredibly strong. It makes sense for
someone who has only lived in one universe to say that any other
universe doesn't exist because his classical rationality (such as
Russell's teapot, the requirement for a burden of proof) says that we
can't really claim existence for things we don't have direct evidence
for. On the other hand, Occam's razor makes us favor the simplest
possible theories. A theory which explicitly has to deny some
structures or computations from existing is much more complex and
stronger (and thus will be favored less by Occam or its formalizations).


But Occam's razor is just a rule-of-thumb. A Russell Standish points
out, in the simplest possible theory nothing exists.


Yet something does exist, thus any theory will have to be a 'something'. Some theories 
(such as Platonia) do give an easy solution to the 'why'. Occam's razor may be a rule of 
the thumb, but doesn't mean it's not valid, it can also be formalized (although, I won't 
insist on it, because most formalizations will instantly bias the winner to some 
'everything' theory - for example if the formalization is towards computable stuff, the 
bias is toward the UD). Either way, even ignoring the explicitly stated Occam's razor, 
when we'll consider some theory for the physics of our local universe, we'll inevitably 
wonder why these particular laws and the typical answers tend to be either "all 
possibilities, we're just one of them" or "don't ask" or "divine magic". You can guess 
which answer I prefer.

COMP as derived from UDA/MGA already places great constraints on what
the ontology has to be given the assumption that our brains do admit a
digital substitution and such an act is survivable.


Does it? I thought it entailed infinitely many different universes with
physics limited only by the constraint that they be locally computable.


To me it seems that it says that you don't need anything more than the UD (or 
arithmetical truth or ...). Even if there was something more, a Turing-emulable body 
will never be able to find out. Although, I guess that's a core part of this debate - 
would some transfinite stuff in the ontology be able to affect the measure or 
continuations of a machine/brain (assuming COMP)?

Any theory which claims the UD's existence, but limits the laws of
physics to only a single instance of some string theory, with only one
history and one universe and so on is incredibly strong/very complex,
thus shouldn't be favored (by Occam). It also leads to many other
questions such as: why this mathematical structure is granted
existence, but the others are not? and the conflict between mechanism
and materialism as shown in the MGA. To me it seems like privilegi

Re: Ontological Problems of COMP

2012-02-06 Thread acw


On 2/7/2012 05:08, meekerdb wrote:

On 2/6/2012 5:37 PM, acw wrote:

On 2/7/2012 00:28, meekerdb wrote:

On 2/6/2012 3:50 PM, acw wrote:

I'm not so sure to term ``body'' is as meaningful if we consider the
extremes which seem possible in COMP. After a digital substitution, a
body could very well be some software running somewhere, on any kind
of substrate, with an arbitrary time-frame/ordering (as long as 1p
coherent), it could even run directly on some abstract machine which
is not part of our universe (such as some machine emulating another
machine which is contained in the UD) - the only thing that the mind
would have in common is that some program is being instantiated
somewhere, somehow. In this more extreme form, I'm not sure I can see
any difference between a substrate that has the label 'physical' and
some UD running in abstract Platonia. If you can show why the
'physical' version would be required or how can someone even tell the
difference between someone living in a 'physical' world vs someone
living in a purely mathematical (Platonic) world which sees the world
from within said structure in Platonia and calls it 'physical'. It
seems that 'physical' is very much what we call the structure in which
we exist, but that's indexical, and if you claim that only one such
structure exists (such as this universe), then you think COMP is false
(that is, no digital substitution exists) or that arithmetic is
inconsistent (which we cannot really know, but we can hope)?


Physics is already extremely abstract and mathematical, so it is really
not a big step to suppose that the fundamental ontology is mathematics
or computation as Bruno, Tegmark, and others have speculated. The big
step is between supposing that somethings happen and some don't versus
everything (in some sense) happens. To say there must be substrate, some
'ur-stuff', is really just to say that some things have existence (the
ur-stuff) and some don't.

Brent



What do you mean by 'ur-stuff'? Some structure which is more
privileged than others with 'existence'?


Not structure, just 'existence'.


As in, more general than 'structure'? I'm a bit confused about this.

In my opinion, the claim that some things (for example, some
computations) don't happen is incredibly strong. It makes sense for
someone who has only lived in one universe to say that any other
universe doesn't exist because his classical rationality (such as
Russell's teapot, the requirement for a burden of proof) says that we
can't really claim existence for things we don't have direct evidence
for. On the other hand, Occam's razor makes us favor the simplest
possible theories. A theory which explicitly has to deny some
structures or computations from existing is much more complex and
stronger (and thus will be favored less by Occam or its formalizations).


But Occam's razor is just a rule-of-thumb. A Russell Standish points
out, in the simplest possible theory nothing exists.


Yet something does exist, thus any theory will have to be a 'something'. 
Some theories (such as Platonia) do give an easy solution to the 'why'. 
Occam's razor may be a rule of the thumb, but doesn't mean it's not 
valid, it can also be formalized (although, I won't insist on it, 
because most formalizations will instantly bias the winner to some 
'everything' theory - for example if the formalization is towards 
computable stuff, the bias is toward the UD). Either way, even ignoring 
the explicitly stated Occam's razor, when we'll consider some theory for 
the physics of our local universe, we'll inevitably wonder why these 
particular laws and the typical answers tend to be either "all 
possibilities, we're just one of them" or "don't ask" or "divine magic". 
You can guess which answer I prefer.

COMP as derived from UDA/MGA already places great constraints on what
the ontology has to be given the assumption that our brains do admit a
digital substitution and such an act is survivable.


Does it? I thought it entailed infinitely many different universes with
physics limited only by the constraint that they be locally computable.


To me it seems that it says that you don't need anything more than the 
UD (or arithmetical truth or ...). Even if there was something more, a 
Turing-emulable body will never be able to find out. Although, I guess 
that's a core part of this debate - would some transfinite stuff in the 
ontology be able to affect the measure or continuations of a 
machine/brain (assuming COMP)?

Any theory which claims the UD's existence, but limits the laws of
physics to only a single instance of some string theory, with only one
history and one universe and so on is incredibly strong/very complex,
thus shouldn't be favored (by Occam). It also leads to many other
questions such as: why this mathematical structure is granted
existence, but the others are not? and the conflict between mechanism
and materialism as shown in the MGA. To me it seems like privileging
the indexicals, which seems

Re: Ontological Problems of COMP

2012-02-06 Thread meekerdb

On 2/6/2012 5:37 PM, acw wrote:

On 2/7/2012 00:28, meekerdb wrote:

On 2/6/2012 3:50 PM, acw wrote:

I'm not so sure to term ``body'' is as meaningful if we consider the
extremes which seem possible in COMP. After a digital substitution, a
body could very well be some software running somewhere, on any kind
of substrate, with an arbitrary time-frame/ordering (as long as 1p
coherent), it could even run directly on some abstract machine which
is not part of our universe (such as some machine emulating another
machine which is contained in the UD) - the only thing that the mind
would have in common is that some program is being instantiated
somewhere, somehow. In this more extreme form, I'm not sure I can see
any difference between a substrate that has the label 'physical' and
some UD running in abstract Platonia. If you can show why the
'physical' version would be required or how can someone even tell the
difference between someone living in a 'physical' world vs someone
living in a purely mathematical (Platonic) world which sees the world
from within said structure in Platonia and calls it 'physical'. It
seems that 'physical' is very much what we call the structure in which
we exist, but that's indexical, and if you claim that only one such
structure exists (such as this universe), then you think COMP is false
(that is, no digital substitution exists) or that arithmetic is
inconsistent (which we cannot really know, but we can hope)?

Physics is already extremely abstract and mathematical, so it is really
not a big step to suppose that the fundamental ontology is mathematics
or computation as Bruno, Tegmark, and others have speculated. The big
step is between supposing that somethings happen and some don't versus
everything (in some sense) happens. To say there must be substrate, some
'ur-stuff', is really just to say that some things have existence (the
ur-stuff) and some don't.

Brent

What do you mean by 'ur-stuff'? Some structure which is more privileged than others with
'existence'?

Not structure, just 'existence'.

In my opinion, the claim that some things (for example, some computations) don't happen
is incredibly strong. It makes sense for someone who has only lived in one universe to
say that any other universe doesn't exist because his classical rationality (such as
Russell's teapot, the requirement for a burden of proof) says that we can't really claim
existence for things we don't have direct evidence for. On the other hand, Occam's razor
makes us favor the simplest possible theories. A theory which explicitly has to deny
some structures or computations from existing is much more complex and stronger (and
thus will be favored less by Occam or its formalizations).

But Occam's razor is just a rule-of-thumb. A Russell Standish points out, in the simplest
possible theory nothing exists.

COMP as derived from UDA/MGA already places great constraints on what the ontology has
to be given the assumption that our brains do admit a digital substitution and such an
act is survivable.

Does it? I thought it entailed infinitely many different universes with physics limited
only by the constraint that they be locally computable.

Any theory which claims the UD's existence, but limits the laws of physics to only a
single instance of some string theory, with only one history and one universe and so on
is incredibly strong/very complex, thus shouldn't be favored (by Occam). It also leads
to many other questions such as: why this mathematical structure is granted existence,
but the others are not? and the conflict between mechanism and materialism as shown in
the MGA. To me it seems like privileging the indexicals, which seems like a popular
conservative materialist position, although I do wonder why it is that popular - it just
favors one "magic" over the other (this structure, my structure is "special", all the
others aren't), thus I'm not so sure it's the most rational choice possible, despite
that being its aim.

Except it favors the 'magic' we see and use over 'magic' that is inaccessible.

Brent

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Re: Ontological Problems of COMP

2012-02-06 Thread acw


On 2/7/2012 00:28, meekerdb wrote:

On 2/6/2012 3:50 PM, acw wrote:

I'm not so sure to term ``body'' is as meaningful if we consider the
extremes which seem possible in COMP. After a digital substitution, a
body could very well be some software running somewhere, on any kind
of substrate, with an arbitrary time-frame/ordering (as long as 1p
coherent), it could even run directly on some abstract machine which
is not part of our universe (such as some machine emulating another
machine which is contained in the UD) - the only thing that the mind
would have in common is that some program is being instantiated
somewhere, somehow. In this more extreme form, I'm not sure I can see
any difference between a substrate that has the label 'physical' and
some UD running in abstract Platonia. If you can show why the
'physical' version would be required or how can someone even tell the
difference between someone living in a 'physical' world vs someone
living in a purely mathematical (Platonic) world which sees the world
from within said structure in Platonia and calls it 'physical'. It
seems that 'physical' is very much what we call the structure in which
we exist, but that's indexical, and if you claim that only one such
structure exists (such as this universe), then you think COMP is false
(that is, no digital substitution exists) or that arithmetic is
inconsistent (which we cannot really know, but we can hope)?


Physics is already extremely abstract and mathematical, so it is really
not a big step to suppose that the fundamental ontology is mathematics
or computation as Bruno, Tegmark, and others have speculated. The big
step is between supposing that somethings happen and some don't versus
everything (in some sense) happens. To say there must be substrate, some
'ur-stuff', is really just to say that some things have existence (the
ur-stuff) and some don't.

Brent



What do you mean by 'ur-stuff'? Some structure which is more privileged 
than others with 'existence'?
In my opinion, the claim that some things (for example, some 
computations) don't happen is incredibly strong. It makes sense for 
someone who has only lived in one universe to say that any other 
universe doesn't exist because his classical rationality (such as 
Russell's teapot, the requirement for a burden of proof) says that we 
can't really claim existence for things we don't have direct evidence 
for. On the other hand, Occam's razor makes us favor the simplest 
possible theories. A theory which explicitly has to deny some structures 
or computations from existing is much more complex and stronger (and 
thus will be favored less by Occam or its formalizations). COMP as 
derived from UDA/MGA already places great constraints on what the 
ontology has to be given the assumption that our brains do admit a 
digital substitution and such an act is survivable. Any theory which 
claims the UD's existence, but limits the laws of physics to only a 
single instance of some string theory, with only one history and one 
universe and so on is incredibly strong/very complex, thus shouldn't be 
favored (by Occam). It also leads to many other questions such as: why 
this mathematical structure is granted existence, but the others are 
not? and the conflict between mechanism and materialism as shown in the 
MGA. To me it seems like privileging the indexicals, which seems like a 
popular conservative materialist position, although I do wonder why it 
is that popular - it just favors one "magic" over the other (this 
structure, my structure is "special", all the others aren't), thus I'm 
not so sure it's the most rational choice possible, despite that being 
its aim.


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Re: Ontological Problems of COMP

2012-02-06 Thread meekerdb

On 2/6/2012 3:50 PM, acw wrote:
I'm not so sure to term ``body'' is as meaningful if we consider the extremes which seem
possible in COMP. After a digital substitution, a body could very well be some software
running somewhere, on any kind of substrate, with an arbitrary time-frame/ordering (as
long as 1p coherent), it could even run directly on some abstract machine which is not
part of our universe (such as some machine emulating another machine which is contained
in the UD) - the only thing that the mind would have in common is that some program is
being instantiated somewhere, somehow. In this more extreme form, I'm not sure I can see
any difference between a substrate that has the label 'physical' and some UD running in
abstract Platonia. If you can show why the 'physical' version would be required or how
can someone even tell the difference between someone living in a 'physical' world vs
someone living in a purely mathematical (Platonic) world which sees the world from
within said structure in Platonia and calls it 'physical'. It seems that 'physical' is
very much what we call the structure in which we exist, but that's indexical, and if you
claim that only one such structure exists (such as this universe), then you think COMP
is false (that is, no digital substitution exists) or that arithmetic is inconsistent
(which we cannot really know, but we can hope)?

Physics is already extremely abstract and mathematical, so it is really not a big step to
suppose that the fundamental ontology is mathematics or computation as Bruno, Tegmark, and
others have speculated. The big step is between supposing that somethings happen and some
don't versus everything (in some sense) happens. To say there must be substrate, some
'ur-stuff', is really just to say that some things have existence (the ur-stuff) and some
don't.

Brent

Re: Ontological Problems of COMP

2012-02-06 Thread acw


On 2/6/2012 06:25, Stephen P. King wrote:

Hi ACW,

On 2/4/2012 1:53 PM, acw wrote:


One can wonder what is the most "general" theory that we can postulate
to explain our existence. Tegmark postulates all of consistent
mathematics, whatever that is, but is 'all of consistent mathematics'
consistent in itself?


I have read several papers that argue strongly that it cannot be! For
instance see: http://arxiv.org/abs/0904.0342 The fact that there are set
theories that use axioms that are completely opposite each other is
another strong indication of this.

It's what I was suspecting as well. I'll have to read that paper when 
time allows.

Schmidhuber postulates something much less, just the UD, but strangely
forgets the first-person or the what the implementation substrate of
that UD would be (and resorts to a Great Programmer to hand-wave it
away).


I wonder why Schmidhuber held back? Did he fear ridicule?

I have no idea why, although it might indeed be a touchy topic as we can 
see in the long discussions on this mailing list.

Before reading the UDA, I used to think that something like Tegmark's
solution would be general enough and sufficient, but now I think 'just
arithmetic' (or combinators, or lambda calculus, or ...) or is
sufficient. Why? By the Church-Turing Thesis, these systems posses the
same computability power, that is, they all can run the UD.


I agree with this line of reasoning, but I see no upper bound on
mathematics since I take Cantor's results as "real". There is not upper
bound on the cardinality of Mathematics. I see this as an implication of
the old dictum "Nature explores all possibilities."

The question is if transfinite extensions are considered as part of the 
foundation, what different consequences will follow for COMP or the new 
theory?

Now, if we do admit a digital substitution, all that we can experience
is already contained within the UD, including the worlds where we find
a physical world with us having a physical body/brain (which exist
computationally, but let us not forget that random oracle that comes
with 1p indeterminacy).


Not quite, admitting digital substitution does not necessarily admit to
pre-specifiability as is assumed in the definition of the algorithms of
Universal Turing machines,  it
just assumes that we can substitute functionally equivalent components.

What do you mean by ``pre-specifiability''? Care to elaborate?

Functional equivalence does not free us from the prison of the flesh, it
merely frees us from the prison of just one particular body. ;-)
I'm not so sure to term ``body'' is as meaningful if we consider the 
extremes which seem possible in COMP. After a digital substitution, a 
body could very well be some software running somewhere, on any kind of 
substrate, with an arbitrary time-frame/ordering (as long as 1p 
coherent), it could even run directly on some abstract machine which is 
not part of our universe (such as some machine emulating another machine 
which is contained in the UD) - the only thing that the mind would have 
in common is that some program is being instantiated somewhere, somehow. 
In this more extreme form, I'm not sure I can see any difference between 
a substrate that has the label 'physical' and some UD running in 
abstract Platonia. If you can show why the 'physical' version would be 
required or how can someone even tell the difference between someone 
living in a 'physical' world vs someone living in a purely mathematical 
(Platonic) world which sees the world from within said structure in 
Platonia and calls it 'physical'. It seems that 'physical' is very much 
what we call the structure in which we exist, but that's indexical, and 
if you claim that only one such structure exists (such as this 
universe), then you think COMP is false (that is, no digital 
substitution exists) or that arithmetic is inconsistent (which we cannot 
really know, but we can hope)?
If there's any difference between a physical and non-physical 
implementation in the context of COMP, I'd like to know what it is and 
what effect it has.

This idea goes back to my claim that the "Pre-established harmony
" idea of Leibniz
is false because it requires the computation of an infinite NP-Complete
problem to occur in zero steps. As we know, given even infinite
resources a UTM must take at least one computational step to solve such
a NP-Complete problem. My solution to this dilemma is to have an
eternally running process at some primitive level. Bruno seems to
identify this with the UD, but I claim that he goes too far and
eliminates the "becoming" nature of the process.

I think the idea of Platonia is closer to the fact that if a sentence 
has a truth-value, it will have that truth value, regardless if you know 
it or not. In essence, Platonia might very well contain Chaitin's 
constant of some machine, even if we cannot know it (although we can

Re: Ontological Problems of COMP

2012-02-06 Thread Craig Weinberg

On Feb 6, 10:37 am, Bruno Marchal  wrote:
> On 05 Feb 2012, at 20:10, Craig Weinberg wrote:
>
> > I'm not lowering subst level at all, I'm saying that subst level is an
> > indexical.
>
> ?

That's what you aren't getting about my position. Substitution level
is not a scalar variable.

>
>
>
> >>> All of the quant descriptions in the universe
> >>> do not add up to a single experienced quality.
>
> >> You don't know that. Is it an axiom?
>
> > I don't know it, but I clearly understand why it is the case.
>
> That's not an argument.

Then you disqualify the possibility of understanding and force a 3p
supervenience to all 1p experiences.

>
>
>
> >>> Quantites are only
> >>> quantities.
>
> >> No. All universal numbers can interpret a number as a function on
> >> quantities, or as properties on quantities, which are not quantities
> >> themselves.
>
> > Then what are they?
>
> Functions, relations, properties, modalities, qualities, etc.

Quantitative relations, quantitative properties, logical
(quantitative) modalities, quantitative qualities.

>
>
>
> >> I take this as another axiom. You postulate the existence of
> >> something
> >> vague. I think that something like that might make sense perhaps, but
> >> as I see it it would be a consequence of the comp meta-axiom.
>
> > That just gives a name to comp's lack of explanatory power. I can call
> > comp a consequence of the ecumenical meta-axiom.
>
> comp *is* the meta-axiom. It is an axiom bearing on your own
> consciousness property (of being invariant for some substitution at
> some level).

Then I can call the ecumenical a meta-meta axiom.

>
>
>
> >> On the contrary. The semantics of machines explodes in the
> >> infinities.
>
> > Explodes into what? What does it signify other than itself?
>
> Explodes into the number of possible different interpretation of
> itself, which might impact on different decisions and futures, from
> the machine's point of view.

They all only signify different permutations of the emptiness of the
machine. It doesn't signify anything, it's syntax only.

>
>
>
> >>> It's circular reasoning to say that physical underpinnings have no
> >>> effect on our phenomenology when you are working from a theory which
> >>> presupposes that phenomenology is detectable only by quantitative
> >>> measurement in the first place. In our actual experience, we know
> >>> that
> >>> in fact all phenomenological systems without exception exist as a
> >>> function of physical systems -
>
> >> We don't know that.
>
> > Are you talking about ghosts or NDEs? Even so, those phenomena are
> > always experienced by a person with a body.
>
> I was not talking on NDE, but on the fact that primitive matter does
> not exist.

Primitive or not, all phenomenological systems that we have observed
are associated with persons or animals who have bodies.

>
>
>
> >> Nor am I sure what it means exactly. Define "physical".
>
> > Phenomena whose properties include mass, density, volume and interact
> > effectively with other phenomena bearing those properties.
>
> Define mass, density, volume, and interaction.

I don't do definitions. The standard usage of these terms is adequate.

>
>
>
> >> Here, in AUDA terms, you might be confusing the "intelligible", with
> >> the "intelligible matter"
> >> (Bp with Bp & Dt). [] p with [] p & <> t.
>
> > I'm really not confused at all. You keep accusing me of that but I'm
> > very clear on my distinctions.
>
> You are not. And you are not well place to judge this.

You are saying that your opinions about me are facts. Fortunately I
have other people who are familiar with my ideas who don't share your
facts.

>
>
>
> >>> virtual servers do not fly off into the
> >>> data center on their own virtual power grid - they are still only a
> >>> complicated event of electrified semiconductors. Unplug the hardware
> >>> node and all of the operating systems, be they first order
> >>> software or
> >>> second order virtual hardware or still only software, 100% dependent
> >>> on the physical resources. It is generators burning diesel fuel
> >>> fifty
> >>> miles away that literally pushes the entire computation - not
> >>> arithmetic.
>
> >> At first sight.
>
> > What happens at second sight?
>
> You realize that this might be the other way round. It is in the comp
> theory. Cf UDA.

What does it mean to be the other way around? That power companies are
dependent on data centers?

>
>
>
> >>> Arithmetic has 0% independence of physical systems *as a
> >>> whole* even though computations can be understood *figuratively* as
> >>> being independent of any particular physical structure.
>
> >> Why figuratively? The computable functions from N to N have been
> >> discovered in math. It happens that we are surrounded by local
> >> physical approximation of universal system, from gas in complex
> >> volume, to bacteria genome, subset of human languages, brains, higher
> >> animals and man made computers.
> >> You can postulate or assume some uni

Re: Ontological Problems of COMP

2012-02-06 Thread meekerdb

On 2/6/2012 1:50 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 05 Feb 2012, at 21:32, meekerdb wrote:

On 2/5/2012 8:19 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
No. All universal numbers can interpret a number as a function on quantities, or as
properties on quantities, which are not quantities themselves. Universal numbers can
also transform, or interpret numbers as transformation of transformation, properties
of properties, up in the constructive transfinite, etc.
When the quantities can add and multiply, soon their attributes are beyond all
quantities, and Löbian quantities are arguably already knowing that about themselves.

I don't understand this. Maybe I don't know what universal number is. I thought it
was a number whose representation in digits was such that every number appeared in the
representation. But I don't understand how such number does things: transform,
interpret,...

Let phi_i be an enumeration of the (partial and total) computable functions
from N to N.
Let be a bijection from NXN to N.

A universal number u is a number u such that, for all x and y, we have phi_u() =
phi_x(y).
The equality means that the LHS and RHS are either both defined and equal, or both
undefined.

Thanks. So it is not literally that the number does things, it just picks out the
function that is universal for a given bijection and a given enumeration of the functions.

Brent

u, applied on x and y simulate the machine x on the input y. u is called the computer, x
the program (the machine to be emulated), and y is the datum/data. u interpret x as a
machine, and it simulates x behavior on the input y.

You can see it as the number-code of a universal machine or programming language
interpreter.

u depends on the choice of the bijection and of the phi_i base, but if you choose (N, +,
*) as a universal system, you can make it intrinsic, and for any bijection, you will
have different but equivalent universal numbers. This is not a problem because we have
to consider *all* universal numbers to retrieve the physics and psychology of machines
(this will include all such bijection).

Bruno

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

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Re: Ontological Problems of COMP

2012-02-06 Thread Bruno Marchal



On 05 Feb 2012, at 21:32, meekerdb wrote:


On 2/5/2012 8:19 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:


No. All universal numbers can interpret a number as a function on  
quantities, or as properties on quantities, which are not  
quantities themselves. Universal numbers can also transform, or  
interpret numbers as transformation of transformation, properties  
of properties, up in the constructive transfinite, etc.
When the quantities can add and multiply, soon their attributes are  
beyond all quantities, and Löbian quantities are arguably already  
knowing that about themselves.


I don't understand this.  Maybe I don't know what universal number  
is.  I thought it was a number whose representation in digits was  
such that every number appeared in the representation.  But I don't  
understand how such number does things: transform, interpret,...


Let phi_i be an enumeration of the (partial and total) computable  
functions from N to N.

Let  be a bijection from NXN to N.

A universal number u is a number u such that, for all x and y, we have  
phi_u() = phi_x(y).
The equality means that the LHS and RHS are either both defined and  
equal, or both undefined.


u, applied on x and y simulate the machine x on the input y. u is  
called the computer, x the program (the machine to be emulated), and y  
is the datum/data. u interpret x as a machine, and it simulates x  
behavior on the input y.


You can see it as the number-code of a universal machine or  
programming language interpreter.


u depends on the choice of the bijection and of the phi_i base, but if  
you choose (N, +, *) as a universal system, you can make it intrinsic,  
and for any bijection, you will have different but equivalent  
universal numbers. This is not a problem because we have to consider  
*all* universal numbers to retrieve the physics and psychology of  
machines (this will include all such bijection).


Bruno


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



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Re: Ontological Problems of COMP

2012-02-05 Thread Stephen P. King


Hi ACW,

On 2/4/2012 1:53 PM, acw wrote:


One can wonder what is the most "general" theory that we can postulate 
to explain our existence. Tegmark postulates all of consistent 
mathematics, whatever that is, but is 'all of consistent mathematics' 
consistent in itself? 


I have read several papers that argue strongly that it cannot be! 
For instance see: http://arxiv.org/abs/0904.0342 The fact that there are 
set theories that use axioms that are completely opposite each other is 
another strong indication of this.


Schmidhuber postulates something much less, just the UD, but strangely 
forgets the first-person or the what the implementation substrate of 
that UD would be (and resorts to a Great Programmer to hand-wave it 
away).


I wonder why Schmidhuber held back? Did he fear ridicule?

Before reading the UDA, I used to think that something like Tegmark's 
solution would be general enough and sufficient, but now I think 'just 
arithmetic' (or combinators, or lambda calculus, or ...) or  is 
sufficient. Why? By the Church-Turing Thesis, these systems posses the 
same computability power, that is, they all can run the UD.


I agree with this line of reasoning, but I see no upper bound on 
mathematics since I take Cantor's results as "real". There is not upper 
bound on the cardinality of Mathematics. I see this as an implication of 
the old dictum "Nature explores all possibilities."


Now, if we do admit a digital substitution, all that we can experience 
is already contained within the UD, including the worlds where we find 
a physical world with us having a physical body/brain (which exist 
computationally, but let us not forget that random oracle that comes 
with 1p indeterminacy).


Not quite, admitting digital substitution does not necessarily 
admit to pre-specifiability as is assumed in the definition of the 
algorithms of Universal Turing machines, 
 it just assumes that we can 
substitute functionally equivalent components. Functional equivalence 
does not free us from the prison of the flesh, it merely frees us from 
the prison of just one particular body. ;-)
This idea goes back to my claim that the "Pre-established harmony 
" idea of Leibniz 
is false because it requires the computation of an infinite NP-Complete 
problem to occur in zero steps. As we know, given even infinite 
resources a UTM must take at least one computational step to solve such 
a NP-Complete problem. My solution to this dilemma is to have an 
eternally running process at some primitive level. Bruno seems to 
identify this with the UD, but I claim that he goes too far and 
eliminates the "becoming" nature of the process.


If we are machines, then we can only experience finite amount of 
information given some finite interval of time, some of this 
information may be incompressible, due to 1p indeterminacy, thus we 
could experience "reals" in the limit, despite there only being finite 
computations at any given time. This essentially means that any 
mathematical object which can be described in Tegmark's "Ultimate 
Ensemble" and that can contain us, is already part of the 1p 
experiences of those existing within the UD and we can look at 1p 
experiences, as well as the UD* trace as being part of the greater 
"arithmetical" truth (or any other theory with equivalent 
computational power, by the Church-Turing Thesis).


Umm, we have to show that the finiteness of machines is necessary 
from first principles, we cannot just assume that it is so. I agree that 
the "arithmetical truth" of the UD may be enough to "force" the 1p to 
have content, but we still need to account for the appearance of 
interactions or histories of interactions (ala Julian Barbour'sTime 
Capsule  idea). There 
reaches a point, even if it is in the limit of infinitely many, that we 
cannot put off the concurrency problem, we have to deal with 
interactions. An option is to take the "running of the UD" as a 
primitive kind of dynamic that at our local 1p emerges as time and 
notions of forces, fields, etc. emerge from the algebras of interactions 
between the many distinct 1p.




This is why I think "arithmetic" is as good as any for a neutral 
foundation, and we cannot really distinguish (from the inside) between 
these foundations by the CTT.


This does not address the neutrality problem though. How can the 
foundation be neutral if it is biased toward a particular structure, 
even if it is as elegant as arithmetic? My point is that whatever 
foundation we take, within our ontological theories, it must be neutral 
with respect to a basis, reference frame, grammar or any other structure 
that would break its perfect symmetry. Nature does not respect any 
privileged framing what so ever and thus there cannot be a privileged 
observational stance. This stance toward neutrality may s

Re: Ontological Problems of COMP

2012-02-05 Thread Stephen P. King


On 2/5/2012 2:09 AM, Russell Standish wrote:

On Sat, Feb 04, 2012 at 01:22:10PM +0100, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 03 Feb 2012, at 23:24, Stephen P. King wrote:

I am not missing a thing, Bruno. You are missing something
that is obvious to the rest of us.

If someone else can confirm this, and put some light on what Stephen
is saying, I would be pleased.


Having had some skype discussions with Stephen, I believe Stephen is
referring to "that which breathes fire into the equations", as Hawking
puts it.


Hi Russell,

Thank you for these remarks!


We all agree that COMP does not posit any particular "fire breather" -
any entity capable of universal computation will do. Bruno selects
Peano arithmetic as a sufficient system (PA supports universal
computation), for pedagogical reasons, although he'd really rather use
combinators, which would also suit the purpose, but are less known.


Yes, "no particular "fire breather"". My claim is that while that 
claim is true, we simply cannot remove the need for the in principle 
existence of a "fire breather", to use the analogy. Universality removes 
the restriction of computation as an abstract process but it does not 
eliminate the need for some form of physical implementation albeit not 
limited to an "actual physical thing". Any form of physical 
implementation will do. So we can talk about a pair of  logical theories 
"interviewing" each other in a coherent fashion but only when those 
logical theories are implemented on a common concrete substrate. 
Entities in Platonia cannot have conversations. There is no "fermionic" 
aspect in Platonia.



Stephen is objecting that such abstract systems are, well, too
abstract. He'd prefer something more concrete - whatever "concrete"
might actually be.


Not quite so, I claim that however abstract an entity is, it will 
always have a concrete dual however ephemeral that level of abstraction. 
I prefer to not fall into the trap of reducing that which cannot be 
captured by our abstract representations intoepiphenomena 
 and thereby undermine 
the entire edifice of mathematical integrity. What good is it to claim 
that our mental life is a causally ineffective "illusion" and yet has 
the power to discover all of the wonders of mathematical properties, for 
instance. To do so is to only sweep the hard parts of the mind-body 
problem into a far distant corner. We can push the hard problem out to 
infinity but it is still there.
My point is that some form of dualism is inevitable. Platonism is 
ultimately dualistic because it has to include the ability of entities 
to percieve the properties of mathematical object, aka The Forms. Unless 
we posit our existence to be at the same level as the Forms, how can we 
explain the effect that the Forms have on our individual and finite 
minds? To do this would be to obviate the entire point of the Forms 
being "perfect". To be consistent with the requirements of Ideal Monism, 
we cannot even consider any notion of implementation of it, this 
includes the ability to make sounds about it or make marks on our papers 
about it or type out email postings, etc. Ideal Monism is a theory of 
free floating casually ineffective ideas that, like pure photons, can 
never touch each other.



It is true, I understand, that the UDA (and AUDA) does
not eliminate the possibility of a "concrete physical
underpinning".


And that is the ground upon which I am making my claim. All I am 
asking for is the mere "possibility of a "concrete physical 
underpinning"". That is sufficient for the duality to flow. The duality 
that I am considering is just an extension of the Stone duality, where 
instead of fixed and static "snap shots" of Boolean Algebras dual to 
fields of sets (such as topological profinite spaces), we are 
considering the "movie" version of this. That way we can include notions 
of evolution and, possibly, novelty as Vaughan Pratt pointed out in his 
ground breaking paper .



  It is just that such a concrete physical underpinning has
no measurable, or detectable effect on our phenomonology other than
that due to its capability of universal computation.


I disagree. The concrete physical underpinning *does* have a local 
(not global) effect on how one computation can interface with another, 
which is important in discussions of "interviews". By considering only 
the global aspects we are completely neglecting problems such as 
concurrency . 
The problem that I have with the Platonic interpretation is that it 
tacitly assumes a single absolute space (ala Newton) in and on which 
computations, as in the UD and UD*, and since there is an implied 
infinite speed of connections on such a space, the notion of time 
vanishes. The problem is that we cannot handle questions about multiple 
finite non-anthropomorphic observers in

Re: Ontological Problems of COMP

2012-02-05 Thread meekerdb


On 2/5/2012 8:19 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
No. All universal numbers can interpret a number as a function on quantities, or as 
properties on quantities, which are not quantities themselves. Universal numbers can 
also transform, or interpret numbers as transformation of transformation, properties of 
properties, up in the constructive transfinite, etc.
When the quantities can add and multiply, soon their attributes are beyond all 
quantities, and Löbian quantities are arguably already knowing that about themselves. 


I don't understand this.  Maybe I don't know what universal number is.  I thought it was a 
number whose representation in digits was such that every number appeared in the 
representation.  But I don't understand how such number does things: transform, interpret,...


Brent

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Re: Ontological Problems of COMP

2012-02-05 Thread Craig Weinberg

On Feb 5, 11:19 am, Bruno Marchal  wrote:
> I hope Russell will indulge my comment on that first paragraph.
>
> On 05 Feb 2012, at 15:41, Craig Weinberg wrote:
>
> > On Feb 5, 2:09 am, Russell Standish  wrote:
>
> >> Stephen is objecting that such abstract systems are, well, too
> >> abstract. He'd prefer something more concrete - whatever "concrete"
> >> might actually be.
>
> > Here is another way to look at that sentence:
> > "Stephen is objecting that such non-concrete systems are, well, not
> > concrete. He'd prefer something more actual - whatever "actual" might
> > concretely be.
>
> > It's hard for me to take seriously the idea of failing to grasp the
> > meaning of 'concrete' in the same breath that uses the word actual and
> > abstract.
>
> They are indexicals. Those things are obvious for 1-person, but of
> course, less obvious when you work in some (any) 3p-theory. You are
> the one making them infinitely complex, by lowering the subst level in
> the infinite.

I'm not lowering subst level at all, I'm saying that subst level is an
indexical.

> But they are simple indeed, and can be handled from the simple
> diagonalization (if Dx gives xx, then DD gives DD. Also with D'x =
> F(xx), for any F. D'D' will gives F(D'D')).
>
> > Talking about a mountain is not a mountain.
>
> Right.
>
> > The menu does
> > not taste like the meal.
>
> Rarely.
> It might smell like the meal, in bad restaurant, though.

heh

>
> > All of the quant descriptions in the universe
> > do not add up to a single experienced quality.
>
> You don't know that. Is it an axiom?

I don't know it, but I clearly understand why it is the case.

>
> > Quantites are only
> > quantities.
>
> No. All universal numbers can interpret a number as a function on
> quantities, or as properties on quantities, which are not quantities
> themselves.

Then what are they?

> Universal numbers can also transform, or interpret numbers
> as transformation of transformation, properties of properties, up in
> the constructive transfinite, etc.
> When the quantities can add and multiply, soon their attributes are
> beyond all quantities, and Löbian quantities are arguably already
> knowing that about themselves.
>
> > They don't scale up into anything else without something
> > that is capable of experiencing the low level granular quantities as a
> > completely novel level of continuous qualities.
>
> I take this as another axiom. You postulate the existence of something
> vague. I think that something like that might make sense perhaps, but
> as I see it it would be a consequence of the comp meta-axiom.

That just gives a name to comp's lack of explanatory power. I can call
comp a consequence of the ecumenical meta-axiom.

>
> > Digital computing
> > cannot do that.
>
> I think that this intuition is grounded by the fact that digital
> computing *can* do that, but cannot, indeed, justify that they can do
> that.
> So, this is just an *easy* insult on digital computing. You might as
> well say to your brother that he is stupid.
>
> > Any kind of semantic scaling in a digital computation
> > can only wind up as being more or less a-signifying generic digits.
>
> On the contrary. The semantics of machines explodes in the infinities.

Explodes into what? What does it signify other than itself?

> They can be aware of their ignorance, and conceive transcendent
> realities.
> Of course, it is not the machine's who think, but abstract and
> relatively concrete person, or more generally living ideas, in
> relatively concrete realities, with their sharable and non sharable
> parts.
>
>
>
> >> It is true, I understand, that the UDA (and AUDA) does
> >> not eliminate the possibility of a "concrete physical
> >> underpinning". It is just that such a concrete physical
> >> underpinning has
> >> no measurable, or detectable effect on our phenomonology other than
> >> that due to its capability of universal computation.
>
> > It's circular reasoning to say that physical underpinnings have no
> > effect on our phenomenology when you are working from a theory which
> > presupposes that phenomenology is detectable only by quantitative
> > measurement in the first place. In our actual experience, we know that
> > in fact all phenomenological systems without exception exist as a
> > function of physical systems -
>
> We don't know that.

Are you talking about ghosts or NDEs? Even so, those phenomena are
always experienced by a person with a body.

> Nor am I sure what it means exactly. Define "physical".

Phenomena whose properties include mass, density, volume and interact
effectively with other phenomena bearing those properties.

>
> Here, in AUDA terms, you might be confusing the "intelligible", with
> the "intelligible matter"
> (Bp with Bp & Dt). [] p with [] p & <> t.

I'm really not confused at all. You keep accusing me of that but I'm
very clear on my distinctions.

>
> > virtual servers do not fly off into the
> > data center on their own virtual power grid - t

Re: Ontological Problems of COMP

2012-02-05 Thread Bruno Marchal


I hope Russell will indulge my comment on that first paragraph.

On 05 Feb 2012, at 15:41, Craig Weinberg wrote:


On Feb 5, 2:09 am, Russell Standish  wrote:


Stephen is objecting that such abstract systems are, well, too
abstract. He'd prefer something more concrete - whatever "concrete"
might actually be.


Here is another way to look at that sentence:
"Stephen is objecting that such non-concrete systems are, well, not
concrete. He'd prefer something more actual - whatever "actual" might
concretely be.

It's hard for me to take seriously the idea of failing to grasp the
meaning of 'concrete' in the same breath that uses the word actual and
abstract.



They are indexicals. Those things are obvious for 1-person, but of  
course, less obvious when you work in some (any) 3p-theory. You are  
the one making them infinitely complex, by lowering the subst level in  
the infinite.
But they are simple indeed, and can be handled from the simple  
diagonalization (if Dx gives xx, then DD gives DD. Also with D'x =  
F(xx), for any F. D'D' will gives F(D'D')).





Talking about a mountain is not a mountain.


Right.





The menu does
not taste like the meal.


Rarely.
It might smell like the meal, in bad restaurant, though.




All of the quant descriptions in the universe
do not add up to a single experienced quality.


You don't know that. Is it an axiom?




Quantites are only
quantities.


No. All universal numbers can interpret a number as a function on  
quantities, or as properties on quantities, which are not quantities  
themselves. Universal numbers can also transform, or interpret numbers  
as transformation of transformation, properties of properties, up in  
the constructive transfinite, etc.
When the quantities can add and multiply, soon their attributes are  
beyond all quantities, and Löbian quantities are arguably already  
knowing that about themselves.






They don't scale up into anything else without something
that is capable of experiencing the low level granular quantities as a
completely novel level of continuous qualities.


I take this as another axiom. You postulate the existence of something  
vague. I think that something like that might make sense perhaps, but  
as I see it it would be a consequence of the comp meta-axiom.





Digital computing
cannot do that.



I think that this intuition is grounded by the fact that digital  
computing *can* do that, but cannot, indeed, justify that they can do  
that.
So, this is just an *easy* insult on digital computing. You might as  
well say to your brother that he is stupid.






Any kind of semantic scaling in a digital computation
can only wind up as being more or less a-signifying generic digits.


On the contrary. The semantics of machines explodes in the infinities.  
They can be aware of their ignorance, and conceive transcendent  
realities.
Of course, it is not the machine's who think, but abstract and  
relatively concrete person, or more generally living ideas, in  
relatively concrete realities, with their sharable and non sharable  
parts.









It is true, I understand, that the UDA (and AUDA) does
not eliminate the possibility of a "concrete physical
underpinning". It is just that such a concrete physical  
underpinning has

no measurable, or detectable effect on our phenomonology other than
that due to its capability of universal computation.


It's circular reasoning to say that physical underpinnings have no
effect on our phenomenology when you are working from a theory which
presupposes that phenomenology is detectable only by quantitative
measurement in the first place. In our actual experience, we know that
in fact all phenomenological systems without exception exist as a
function of physical systems -


We don't know that.
Nor am I sure what it means exactly. Define "physical".

Here, in AUDA terms, you might be confusing the "intelligible", with  
the "intelligible matter"

(Bp with Bp & Dt). [] p with [] p & <> t.





virtual servers do not fly off into the
data center on their own virtual power grid - they are still only a
complicated event of electrified semiconductors. Unplug the hardware
node and all of the operating systems, be they first order software or
second order virtual hardware or still only software, 100% dependent
on the physical resources. It is generators burning diesel fuel fifty
miles away that literally pushes the entire computation - not
arithmetic.


At first sight.





Arithmetic has 0% independence of physical systems *as a
whole* even though computations can be understood *figuratively* as
being independent of any particular physical structure.


Why figuratively? The computable functions from N to N have been  
discovered in math. It happens that we are surrounded by local  
physical approximation of universal system, from gas in complex  
volume, to bacteria genome, subset of human languages, brains, higher  
animals and man made computers.
You can postulate or assume some univers

Re: Ontological Problems of COMP

2012-02-05 Thread Craig Weinberg

On Feb 5, 2:09 am, Russell Standish  wrote:

> Stephen is objecting that such abstract systems are, well, too
> abstract. He'd prefer something more concrete - whatever "concrete"
> might actually be.

Here is another way to look at that sentence:
"Stephen is objecting that such non-concrete systems are, well, not
concrete. He'd prefer something more actual - whatever "actual" might
concretely be.

It's hard for me to take seriously the idea of failing to grasp the
meaning of 'concrete' in the same breath that uses the word actual and
abstract. Talking about a mountain is not a mountain. The menu does
not taste like the meal. All of the quant descriptions in the universe
do not add up to a single experienced quality. Quantites are only
quantities. They don't scale up into anything else without something
that is capable of experiencing the low level granular quantities as a
completely novel level of continuous qualities. Digital computing
cannot do that. Any kind of semantic scaling in a digital computation
can only wind up as being more or less a-signifying generic digits.

> It is true, I understand, that the UDA (and AUDA) does
> not eliminate the possibility of a "concrete physical
> underpinning". It is just that such a concrete physical underpinning has
> no measurable, or detectable effect on our phenomonology other than
> that due to its capability of universal computation.

It's circular reasoning to say that physical underpinnings have no
effect on our phenomenology when you are working from a theory which
presupposes that phenomenology is detectable only by quantitative
measurement in the first place. In our actual experience, we know that
in fact all phenomenological systems without exception exist as a
function of physical systems - virtual servers do not fly off into the
data center on their own virtual power grid - they are still only a
complicated event of electrified semiconductors. Unplug the hardware
node and all of the operating systems, be they first order software or
second order virtual hardware or still only software, 100% dependent
on the physical resources. It is generators burning diesel fuel fifty
miles away that literally pushes the entire computation - not
arithmetic. Arithmetic has 0% independence of physical systems *as a
whole* even though computations can be understood *figuratively* as
being independent of any particular physical structure.

All computation can be impacted by changes to it's physical
underpinning. Devices which are damaged or have low power supply, or
brains which have physiological irregularities produce changes to
their phenomenology independent of program logic. The physical
topology, the materials and events that effect them can drive
phenomenology as well.

>
> Which is why I'd like to remind people of Witgenstein's comment: Whereof
> one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

A great quote, but I do not think Wittgenstein intended it to be used
to silence speculation. Unfortunately I have only ever seen it used to
serve that function. What he refers to is the limitation of language
to express the sense that language makes to the listener (http://
www.teleologie.org/OT/deboard/2117.html). That meaning is reversed
when used as an admonition, so that the meaning becomes something like
"It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to open
your mouth and remove all doubt".

Craig

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Re: Ontological Problems of COMP

2012-02-05 Thread Bruno Marchal

On 04 Feb 2012, at 21:11, meekerdb wrote:

On 2/4/2012 10:53 AM, acw wrote:

One can wonder what is the most "general" theory that we can
postulate to explain our existence. Tegmark postulates all of
consistent mathematics, whatever that is, but is 'all of consistent
mathematics' consistent in itself?

Tegmark has realized the problem with "all consistent mathematics"
and more recently has considered only Turing computable universes.

Computable universe => comp, but
comp implies a priori non computable universe
so: computable universe can't work.
Tegmark is still failing to see the comp first person indeterminacy,
I'm afraid.

This does not prevent the possibility that some particular universal
dovetailer wins the "measure battle" in the limit. Yet, to solve the
mind-body problem, even if that is the case, we have to derive it from
*any* universal dovetailing, or universal system base. Indeed, we
might have to derive it from the arithmetical quantization BDp, in the
"material hypostases". They are already independent of the choice of
particular implementations.

Bruno

Brent

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Re: Ontological Problems of COMP

2012-02-04 Thread Russell Standish

On Sat, Feb 04, 2012 at 01:22:10PM +0100, Bruno Marchal wrote:
> 
> On 03 Feb 2012, at 23:24, Stephen P. King wrote:
> >
> >I am not missing a thing, Bruno. You are missing something
> >that is obvious to the rest of us.
> 
> If someone else can confirm this, and put some light on what Stephen
> is saying, I would be pleased.
> 

Having had some skype discussions with Stephen, I believe Stephen is
referring to "that which breathes fire into the equations", as Hawking
puts it.

We all agree that COMP does not posit any particular "fire breather" -
any entity capable of universal computation will do. Bruno selects
Peano arithmetic as a sufficient system (PA supports universal
computation), for pedagogical reasons, although he'd really rather use
combinators, which would also suit the purpose, but are less known.

Stephen is objecting that such abstract systems are, well, too
abstract. He'd prefer something more concrete - whatever "concrete"
might actually be. It is true, I understand, that the UDA (and AUDA) does
not eliminate the possibility of a "concrete physical
underpinning". It is just that such a concrete physical underpinning has
no measurable, or detectable effect on our phenomonology other than
that due to its capability of universal computation.

Which is why I'd like to remind people of Witgenstein's comment: Whereof
one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

Cheers
-- 

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

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Re: Ontological Problems of COMP

2012-02-04 Thread Stephen P. King


On 2/4/2012 10:56 PM, Richard Ruquist wrote:
Regarding the issue of instantiation, the recent GHZM quantum 
experiments may be relevant as they imply a lack of a pre-existing 
reality.
Here is a rather long and technical argument that there is no 
pre-existing reality.

http://motls.blogspot.com/2011/12/ghzm-experiment-and-indefensible.html#more
I provide below the first and last paragraphs in this argument. The 
last paragraph explains what he means by pre-existing reality. In it 
he negates MWI, all hidden variables theories and even classical physics.

Richard Ruquist
-
Lubos Motl:
I want to go through the GHZM experiment again and somewhat carefully 
(and in latex) and discuss the insanity of the assumptions about the 
laws of Nature that are forced upon you if you want to believe in 
"realism", i.e. the idea that the results of experiments (including 
those at the microscopic level) reflect a pre-existing reality.
What I finally want to emphasize is that all this redundant and 
"objectively real but totally unobservable" superstructure â€“ from 
many worlds to extra invisible Bohmian positions of particles (which 
can't help in the case of spin or particle production, anyway) or 
other hidden variables to GRW collapses prescribed from above â€“ is 
only being invented because certain people behave as bigots who are 
unable to admit that the physics research in the 20th century has 
irreversibly falsified all intrinsically classical models of the 
reality. All the new "fanciful stuff" with tons of choices and 
processes (superluminal communication, preferred frames, collapses, 
the length scale to which the GRW collapses shrink the wave function, 
the frequency of such flashes etc.) that can never be observed and 
with the infinite amount of fine-tuning and obfuscation that is needed 
for it to fake the real, relativistic quantum world (to guarantee that 
none of the new predictions is really observed) is only being proposed 
because some people's bigotry has no limits. Their dogmas about 
"realism" are more important for them than /any/ amount of empirical 
evidence, more important for them than everything that science has 
actually found.



Hi Richard,

Thank you for posting this. I am a *huge* fan of Lubos, well except 
for his fanatical belief in SUSY... My take on this article is a 
reasoning from physics that backs up, in a sense, Bruno's claim that the 
physical world is not primitive. But it is not just a dream of 
primitively existing numbers either. Somehow the UD must be physically 
implemented, so instead of trying to figure out how the "pre-ordained 
harmony" of the Platonic UD is set up, why not just let the UD run 
eternally, eventually there will be strings in the dovetailing that are 
exact virtual reality computations of each and every one of our 1p. So 
instead of a ab initio special blue print of our universe, we might 
consider all possible physical worlds obtaining as per Lubos' 
discussion  and running some version of a UD. The trick is figuring out 
the finite bounds on the 1p of observers. My conjecture is that the 1p 
content of observers is restricted to being representable by Boolean 
algebras, but I have to prove this somehow. :-)


Onward!

Stephen

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Re: Ontological Problems of COMP

2012-02-04 Thread meekerdb

It is the same epistemic and instrumental interpretation which is explained better and at
length by Asher Peres in his excellent text

http://www.fisica.net/quantica/Peres%20-%20Quantum%20Theory%20Concepts%20and%20Methods.pdf

which is available free online.

Brent

On 2/4/2012 7:56 PM, Richard Ruquist wrote:
Regarding the issue of instantiation, the recent GHZM quantum experiments may be
relevant as they imply a lack of a pre-existing reality.

Here is a rather long and technical argument that there is no pre-existing
reality.
http://motls.blogspot.com/2011/12/ghzm-experiment-and-indefensible.html#more
I provide below the first and last paragraphs in this argument. The last paragraph
explains what he means by pre-existing reality. In it he negates MWI, all hidden
variables theories and even classical physics.

Richard Ruquist
-
Lubos Motl:
I want to go through the GHZM experiment again and somewhat carefully (and in latex) and
discuss the insanity of the assumptions about the laws of Nature that are forced upon
you if you want to believe in "realism", i.e. the idea that the results of experiments
(including those at the microscopic level) reflect a pre-existing reality.
What I finally want to emphasize is that all this redundant and "objectively real but
totally unobservable" superstructure â€“ from many worlds to extra invisible Bohmian
positions of particles (which can't help in the case of spin or particle production,
anyway) or other hidden variables to GRW collapses prescribed from above â€“ is only
being invented because certain people behave as bigots who are unable to admit that the
physics research in the 20th century has irreversibly falsified all intrinsically
classical models of the reality. All the new "fanciful stuff" with tons of choices and
processes (superluminal communication, preferred frames, collapses, the length scale to
which the GRW collapses shrink the wave function, the frequency of such flashes etc.)
that can never be observed and with the infinite amount of fine-tuning and obfuscation
that is needed for it to fake the real, relativistic quantum world (to guarantee that
none of the new predictions is really observed) is only being proposed because some
people's bigotry has no limits. Their dogmas about "realism" are more important for them
than /any/ amount of empirical evidence, more important for them than everything that
science has actually found.

On Sat, Feb 4, 2012 at 9:38 AM, Stephen P. King > wrote:

On 2/4/2012 8:58 AM, David Nyman wrote:

On 4 February 2012 12:22, Bruno Marchalmailto:marc...@ulb.ac.be>> wrote:

No, I am not. I bet that comp is TRUE, but I don't see COMP as
requiring
that the physical world is supervening on numbers (up to
isomorphisms) as
primitives.

So you have to explicitly show what is not valid in the UDA1-8. You
miss
something, let us try to find out what.

I am not missing a thing, Bruno. You are missing something that
is
obvious to the rest of us.

If someone else can confirm this, and put some light on what
Stephen is
saying, I would be pleased.

Bruno, I used to think that you were indeed missing "something that is
obvious to the rest of us". I don't think so any longer, because I
understand now that you are presenting a theory and your arguments
consequently derive strictly from the axioms and assumptions of that
theory. I don't pretend to understand all aspects of that theory of
course, but through discussion and the contrast of ideas I have come a
bit closer than when I started.

I don't know if it will help at all for me to state here my
understanding of what might motivate the theory in the first place,
but I'll try. Firstly, as you have so often said, the
informational/computational theory of mind (CTM) is more or less the
default assumption in science. Indeed this conclusion seems almost
unavoidable given that brain research seems to imply, more or less
unambiguously, the correlation of mental states with relations,
rather than relata. However, CTM in its uncritically-assumed form
continues to be combined with the additional assumption of an
Aristotelian primitively-physical state of affairs. This leads
directly either to denialism of the first-person, or alternatively to
some ill-defined species of property dualism. These consequences by
themselves might well lead us to reject such primitive-physicalism as
incoherent, even without an explicit reductio ad absurdum of the
unambiguous association of conscious states with "physical
computation". Either way, in order to retain CTM, one is led to
contemplate some form of neutral

Re: Ontological Problems of COMP

2012-02-04 Thread Richard Ruquist

Regarding the issue of instantiation, the recent GHZM quantum experiments
may be relevant as they imply a lack of a pre-existing reality.

Here is a rather long and technical argument that there is no pre-existing
reality.
http://motls.blogspot.com/2011/12/ghzm-experiment-and-indefensible.html#more

I provide below the first and last paragraphs in this argument. The last
paragraph explains what he means by pre-existing reality. In it he negates
MWI, all hidden variables theories and even classical physics.
Richard Ruquist
-
  Lubos Motl:
 I want to go through the GHZM experiment again and somewhat carefully (and
in latex) and discuss the insanity of the assumptions about the laws of
Nature that are forced upon you if you want to believe in "realism", i.e.
the idea that the results of experiments (including those at the
microscopic level) reflect a pre-existing reality.
What I finally want to emphasize is that all this redundant and
"objectively real but totally unobservable" superstructure â€“ from many
worlds to extra invisible Bohmian positions of particles (which can't help
in the case of spin or particle production, anyway) or other hidden
variables to GRW collapses prescribed from above â€“ is only being invented
because certain people behave as bigots who are unable to admit that the
physics research in the 20th century has irreversibly falsified all
intrinsically classical models of the reality. All the new "fanciful stuff"
with tons of choices and processes (superluminal communication, preferred
frames, collapses, the length scale to which the GRW collapses shrink the
wave function, the frequency of such flashes etc.) that can never be
observed and with the infinite amount of fine-tuning and obfuscation that
is needed for it to fake the real, relativistic quantum world (to guarantee
that none of the new predictions is really observed) is only being proposed
because some people's bigotry has no limits. Their dogmas about "realism"
are more important for them than *any* amount of empirical evidence, more
important for them than everything that science has actually found.

On Sat, Feb 4, 2012 at 9:38 AM, Stephen P. King wrote:

> On 2/4/2012 8:58 AM, David Nyman wrote:
>
>> On 4 February 2012 12:22, Bruno Marchal  wrote:
>>
>>  No, I am not. I bet that comp is TRUE, but I don't see COMP as requiring
>>> that the physical world is supervening on numbers (up to isomorphisms) as
>>> primitives.
>>>
>>>
>>> So you have to explicitly show what is not valid in the UDA1-8. You miss
>>> something, let us try to find out what.
>>>
>>>
>>> I am not missing a thing, Bruno. You are missing something that is
>>> obvious to the rest of us.
>>>
>>>
>>> If someone else can confirm this, and put some light on what Stephen is
>>> saying, I would be pleased.
>>>
>> Bruno, I used to think that you were indeed missing "something that is
>> obvious to the rest of us".  I don't think so any longer, because I
>> understand now that you are presenting a theory and your arguments
>> consequently derive strictly from the axioms and assumptions of that
>> theory.  I don't pretend to understand all aspects of that theory of
>> course, but through discussion and the contrast of ideas I have come a
>> bit closer than when I started.
>>
>> I don't know if it will help at all for me to state here my
>> understanding of what might motivate the theory in the first place,
>> but I'll try.  Firstly, as you have so often said, the
>> informational/computational theory of mind (CTM) is more or less the
>> default assumption in science.  Indeed this conclusion seems almost
>> unavoidable given that brain research seems to imply, more or less
>> unambiguously, the correlation of  mental states with relations,
>> rather than relata.  However, CTM in its uncritically-assumed form
>> continues to be combined with the additional assumption of an
>> Aristotelian primitively-physical state of affairs.  This leads
>> directly either to denialism of the first-person, or alternatively to
>> some ill-defined species of property dualism.  These consequences by
>> themselves might well lead us to reject such primitive-physicalism as
>> incoherent, even without an explicit reductio ad absurdum of the
>> unambiguous association of conscious states with "physical
>> computation".  Either way, in order to retain CTM, one is led to
>> contemplate some form of neutral monism.
>>
>> The question of what form such a "neutral" theory should take now
>> arises.  Since the theory is explicitly *computational*, the axioms
>> and assumptions of such a theory should obviously be restricted to the
>> absolute minimum necessary to construct a "computational universe" (in
>> the traditional sense of "universe") or rather to indicate how such a
>> universe would necessarily construct itself, given those axioms and
>> assumptions.  The basic assumption is of a first-order combinatorial
>> system, of which numbers are the most widely-unde

Re: Ontological Problems of COMP

2012-02-04 Thread meekerdb


On 2/4/2012 10:53 AM, acw wrote:
One can wonder what is the most "general" theory that we can postulate to explain our 
existence. Tegmark postulates all of consistent mathematics, whatever that is, but is 
'all of consistent mathematics' consistent in itself? 


Tegmark has realized the problem with "all consistent mathematics" and more recently has 
considered only Turing computable universes.


Brent

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Re: Ontological Problems of COMP

2012-02-04 Thread acw


On 2/4/2012 14:38, Stephen P. King wrote:

On 2/4/2012 8:58 AM, David Nyman wrote:

On 4 February 2012 12:22, Bruno Marchal wrote:


No, I am not. I bet that comp is TRUE, but I don't see COMP as requiring
that the physical world is supervening on numbers (up to
isomorphisms) as
primitives.


So you have to explicitly show what is not valid in the UDA1-8. You miss
something, let us try to find out what.


I am not missing a thing, Bruno. You are missing something that is
obvious to the rest of us.


If someone else can confirm this, and put some light on what Stephen is
saying, I would be pleased.

Bruno, I used to think that you were indeed missing "something that is
obvious to the rest of us". I don't think so any longer, because I
understand now that you are presenting a theory and your arguments
consequently derive strictly from the axioms and assumptions of that
theory. I don't pretend to understand all aspects of that theory of
course, but through discussion and the contrast of ideas I have come a
bit closer than when I started.

I don't know if it will help at all for me to state here my
understanding of what might motivate the theory in the first place,
but I'll try. Firstly, as you have so often said, the
informational/computational theory of mind (CTM) is more or less the
default assumption in science. Indeed this conclusion seems almost
unavoidable given that brain research seems to imply, more or less
unambiguously, the correlation of mental states with relations,
rather than relata. However, CTM in its uncritically-assumed form
continues to be combined with the additional assumption of an
Aristotelian primitively-physical state of affairs. This leads
directly either to denialism of the first-person, or alternatively to
some ill-defined species of property dualism. These consequences by
themselves might well lead us to reject such primitive-physicalism as
incoherent, even without an explicit reductio ad absurdum of the
unambiguous association of conscious states with "physical
computation". Either way, in order to retain CTM, one is led to
contemplate some form of neutral monism.

The question of what form such a "neutral" theory should take now
arises. Since the theory is explicitly *computational*, the axioms
and assumptions of such a theory should obviously be restricted to the
absolute minimum necessary to construct a "computational universe" (in
the traditional sense of "universe") or rather to indicate how such a
universe would necessarily construct itself, given those axioms and
assumptions. The basic assumption is of a first-order combinatorial
system, of which numbers are the most widely-understood example.
Given the arithmetical nature of such a universe, construction and
differentiability of composite entities must necessarily derive from
arithmetical assumptions, which permits the natural emergence of
higher-order structural integration via the internal logic of the
system. Of particular note is the emergence in this way of
self-referential entities, which form the logical basis of
person-hood.

Since the reality of first-person localisation is not denied in this
theory (indeed the theory positively seeks to rationalise it), the
system is not posited as having merely third-personal status, but as
possessing a first-person self-referential point-of-view which is
associated with consciousness. Perhaps it is this aspect of the
theory which is the most tricky, as it cuts across a variety of
different intuitions about consciousness and its relation to the
phenomena it reveals. For rather than positing a primitively-physical
universe which "instantiates" conscious states, the theory must
reverse the relation and posit conscious states that "instantiate"
physical phenomena. In so doing, it exposes itself to empirical
refutation, since those phenomena must be, at least, consistent with
ordinary observation (although they also predict, in the limit,
observations of high improbability).

It is this last issue of instantiation which seems to be one of main
bones of contention between Stephen and yourself, though I'm not sure
why this is the case. From my own perspective, unsophisticated though
it may be, it seems reasonable that the emergence of "truly physical"
phenomena should indeed be the result of "personal instantiation" in
the conjunction of consciousness and computation. After all, when do
questions as to what is "truly physical" emerge, other than in the
context of what is "truly experiential"? The rest is calculation.

David



Dear David,

Does my claim that our primitive ground must be neutral with respect to
any properties make any sense? It like the zero of arithmetic from which
we can extricate any set of positive and negative quantities in pairs
such that their sum is equal to zero. What I see in Bruno's
interpretation of COMP is that it permits for the primitive to have a
set of properties (numbers and + and *) to the exclusion of its
complementary opposites. Since this is a

Re: Ontological Problems of COMP

2012-02-04 Thread Stephen P. King


On 2/4/2012 11:14 AM, David Nyman wrote:

On 4 February 2012 15:44, Stephen P. King  wrote:


Is it inappropriate to use the "One" in an axiomatic form as part of a
theory, not that I am proposing the concept just that as a theory standing
on its own? It makes sense to me as it leads inevitably to ontological
implications that both firm up the theory of Neutral monism (as per Bertrand
Russell) and allow for the dualism (per Vaughan Pratt) that I am
researching.

I'm not sure, to tell you the truth.  I must say that my intuition of
the centrality of "oneness" - what I've sometimes called the solipsism
of the One - is at the heart of my recent discussions with Bruno
around the general topic of "why am I me and not you?".  But at the
same time, precisely as a result of those very conversations, I'm less
sure that anything directly communicable follows from that intuition,
unless it be a sharing of the intuition itself.  Is a common intuition
an axiom?  What is deducible from it, other than a vague sense that
somehow "whatever I am most primitively" will always find some
uniquely present conscious expression?  If you can indeed employ the
axiomatic method to put more detailed flesh on these bones, it would
be most helpful.

David



Hi David,

My problem is that axiomatic renderings of theories or ideas in 
general are almost impossible because of my memory and output dyslexia. 
I simply do not think that way. :-( Let me think on this a bit more and 
see what I can come up with.


Onward!

Stephen

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Re: Ontological Problems of COMP

2012-02-04 Thread David Nyman

On 4 February 2012 15:44, Stephen P. King  wrote:

> Is it inappropriate to use the "One" in an axiomatic form as part of a
> theory, not that I am proposing the concept just that as a theory standing
> on its own? It makes sense to me as it leads inevitably to ontological
> implications that both firm up the theory of Neutral monism (as per Bertrand
> Russell) and allow for the dualism (per Vaughan Pratt) that I am
> researching.

I'm not sure, to tell you the truth.  I must say that my intuition of
the centrality of "oneness" - what I've sometimes called the solipsism
of the One - is at the heart of my recent discussions with Bruno
around the general topic of "why am I me and not you?".  But at the
same time, precisely as a result of those very conversations, I'm less
sure that anything directly communicable follows from that intuition,
unless it be a sharing of the intuition itself.  Is a common intuition
an axiom?  What is deducible from it, other than a vague sense that
somehow "whatever I am most primitively" will always find some
uniquely present conscious expression?  If you can indeed employ the
axiomatic method to put more detailed flesh on these bones, it would
be most helpful.

David


> On 2/4/2012 10:05 AM, David Nyman wrote:
>>
>> On 4 February 2012 14:38, Stephen P. King  wrote:
>>
>>> Does my claim that our primitive ground must be neutral with respect to
>>> any properties make any sense? It like the zero of arithmetic from which
>>> we
>>> can extricate any set of positive and negative quantities in pairs such
>>> that
>>> their sum is equal to zero. What I see in Bruno's interpretation of COMP
>>> is
>>> that it permits for the primitive to have a set of properties (numbers
>>> and +
>>> and *) to the exclusion of its complementary opposites. Since this is a
>>> violation of neutrality, thus I see a fatal flaw in Bruno's Ideal monist
>>> interpretation.
>>
>> I think it may make some intuitive sense, but I don't quite see what
>> role it could play in a theory, in the technical sense Bruno proposes.
>>  For example, Bruno sometimes refers to the metaphor of the One - from
>> Plotinus.  Sometimes in my mind's eye I think of the symmetry of the
>> One as somehow breaking into an infinity of "computational"
>> self-relations, individuated instances of consciousness then emerging
>> from that complexity as spatio-temporally-distinguishable aspects of
>> the differentiated self-intimacy thus engendered.  The seamless
>> symmetry of the One - the solus ipse, if you like - might indeed serve
>> here as a sort of primitive neutral background, any further properties
>> emerging only as a consequence of the subsequent breaking of that
>> primal symmetry.
>
>
> Hi David,
>
>    This concept, as you explain it ,is exactly what I have in mind even to
> the part about the (unnameable! cardinality of) "infinity of "computational"
> self-relations" each potentially generating the "individuated instances of
> consciousness" as per Bruno's Loebian "Machine" idea. My claim is that this
> "primitive neutral background" of the "One" is infinitely deeper even than
> the (N, +, *) of Bruno as its symmetry must be perfect and thus neutral even
> with respect to (N, +, *).
>
>
>>
>> But this is merely an intuitive attempt to grasp the ungraspable, not
>> a theory, in the sense of something that has any practical
>> consequences (nothing being so practical as a good theory).  I'd
>> certainly be interested if you have anything more substantial to
>> propose.
>>
>    Is it inappropriate to use the "One" in an axiomatic form as part of a
> theory, not that I am proposing the concept just that as a theory standing
> on its own? It makes sense to me as it leads inevitably to ontological
> implications that both firm up the theory of Neutral monism (as per Bertrand
> Russell) and allow for the dualism (per Vaughan Pratt) that I am
> researching. The theory that I am considering is a hybrid of many concepts
> from many other people, and Bruno Marchal result is a big part of it as his
> result shows how consciousness can emerge from computations on the Mind side
> of the duality. My own contribution to the theory, explaining how
> interactions between "minds" occurs, is just a tiny piece of it.
>
>
>
> Onward!
>
> Stephen
>
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Re: Ontological Problems of COMP

2012-02-04 Thread Stephen P. King


On 2/4/2012 10:05 AM, David Nyman wrote:

On 4 February 2012 14:38, Stephen P. King  wrote:


Does my claim that our primitive ground must be neutral with respect to
any properties make any sense? It like the zero of arithmetic from which we
can extricate any set of positive and negative quantities in pairs such that
their sum is equal to zero. What I see in Bruno's interpretation of COMP is
that it permits for the primitive to have a set of properties (numbers and +
and *) to the exclusion of its complementary opposites. Since this is a
violation of neutrality, thus I see a fatal flaw in Bruno's Ideal monist
interpretation.

I think it may make some intuitive sense, but I don't quite see what
role it could play in a theory, in the technical sense Bruno proposes.
  For example, Bruno sometimes refers to the metaphor of the One - from
Plotinus.  Sometimes in my mind's eye I think of the symmetry of the
One as somehow breaking into an infinity of "computational"
self-relations, individuated instances of consciousness then emerging
from that complexity as spatio-temporally-distinguishable aspects of
the differentiated self-intimacy thus engendered.  The seamless
symmetry of the One - the solus ipse, if you like - might indeed serve
here as a sort of primitive neutral background, any further properties
emerging only as a consequence of the subsequent breaking of that
primal symmetry.


Hi David,

This concept, as you explain it ,is exactly what I have in mind 
even to the part about the (unnameable! cardinality of) "infinity of 
"computational" self-relations" each potentially generating the 
"individuated instances of consciousness" as per Bruno's Loebian 
"Machine" idea. My claim is that this "primitive neutral background" of 
the "One" is infinitely deeper even than the (N, +, *) of Bruno as its 
symmetry must be perfect and thus neutral even with respect to (N, +, *).




But this is merely an intuitive attempt to grasp the ungraspable, not
a theory, in the sense of something that has any practical
consequences (nothing being so practical as a good theory).  I'd
certainly be interested if you have anything more substantial to
propose.

Is it inappropriate to use the "One" in an axiomatic form as part 
of a theory, not that I am proposing the concept just that as a theory 
standing on its own? It makes sense to me as it leads inevitably to 
ontological implications that both firm up the theory of Neutral monism 
(as per Bertrand Russell) and allow for the dualism (per Vaughan Pratt) 
that I am researching. The theory that I am considering is a hybrid of 
many concepts from many other people, and Bruno Marchal result is a big 
part of it as his result shows how consciousness can emerge from 
computations on the Mind side of the duality. My own contribution to the 
theory, explaining how interactions between "minds" occurs, is just a 
tiny piece of it.



Onward!

Stephen

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Re: Ontological Problems of COMP

2012-02-04 Thread David Nyman

On 4 February 2012 14:38, Stephen P. King  wrote:

> Does my claim that our primitive ground must be neutral with respect to
> any properties make any sense? It like the zero of arithmetic from which we
> can extricate any set of positive and negative quantities in pairs such that
> their sum is equal to zero. What I see in Bruno's interpretation of COMP is
> that it permits for the primitive to have a set of properties (numbers and +
> and *) to the exclusion of its complementary opposites. Since this is a
> violation of neutrality, thus I see a fatal flaw in Bruno's Ideal monist
> interpretation.

I think it may make some intuitive sense, but I don't quite see what
role it could play in a theory, in the technical sense Bruno proposes.
 For example, Bruno sometimes refers to the metaphor of the One - from
Plotinus.  Sometimes in my mind's eye I think of the symmetry of the
One as somehow breaking into an infinity of "computational"
self-relations, individuated instances of consciousness then emerging
from that complexity as spatio-temporally-distinguishable aspects of
the differentiated self-intimacy thus engendered.  The seamless
symmetry of the One - the solus ipse, if you like - might indeed serve
here as a sort of primitive neutral background, any further properties
emerging only as a consequence of the subsequent breaking of that
primal symmetry.

But this is merely an intuitive attempt to grasp the ungraspable, not
a theory, in the sense of something that has any practical
consequences (nothing being so practical as a good theory).  I'd
certainly be interested if you have anything more substantial to
propose.

David


> On 2/4/2012 8:58 AM, David Nyman wrote:
>>
>> On 4 February 2012 12:22, Bruno Marchal  wrote:
>>
>>> No, I am not. I bet that comp is TRUE, but I don't see COMP as requiring
>>> that the physical world is supervening on numbers (up to isomorphisms) as
>>> primitives.
>>>
>>>
>>> So you have to explicitly show what is not valid in the UDA1-8. You miss
>>> something, let us try to find out what.
>>>
>>>
>>>     I am not missing a thing, Bruno. You are missing something that is
>>> obvious to the rest of us.
>>>
>>>
>>> If someone else can confirm this, and put some light on what Stephen is
>>> saying, I would be pleased.
>>
>> Bruno, I used to think that you were indeed missing "something that is
>> obvious to the rest of us".  I don't think so any longer, because I
>> understand now that you are presenting a theory and your arguments
>> consequently derive strictly from the axioms and assumptions of that
>> theory.  I don't pretend to understand all aspects of that theory of
>> course, but through discussion and the contrast of ideas I have come a
>> bit closer than when I started.
>>
>> I don't know if it will help at all for me to state here my
>> understanding of what might motivate the theory in the first place,
>> but I'll try.  Firstly, as you have so often said, the
>> informational/computational theory of mind (CTM) is more or less the
>> default assumption in science.  Indeed this conclusion seems almost
>> unavoidable given that brain research seems to imply, more or less
>> unambiguously, the correlation of  mental states with relations,
>> rather than relata.  However, CTM in its uncritically-assumed form
>> continues to be combined with the additional assumption of an
>> Aristotelian primitively-physical state of affairs.  This leads
>> directly either to denialism of the first-person, or alternatively to
>> some ill-defined species of property dualism.  These consequences by
>> themselves might well lead us to reject such primitive-physicalism as
>> incoherent, even without an explicit reductio ad absurdum of the
>> unambiguous association of conscious states with "physical
>> computation".  Either way, in order to retain CTM, one is led to
>> contemplate some form of neutral monism.
>>
>> The question of what form such a "neutral" theory should take now
>> arises.  Since the theory is explicitly *computational*, the axioms
>> and assumptions of such a theory should obviously be restricted to the
>> absolute minimum necessary to construct a "computational universe" (in
>> the traditional sense of "universe") or rather to indicate how such a
>> universe would necessarily construct itself, given those axioms and
>> assumptions.  The basic assumption is of a first-order combinatorial
>> system, of which numbers are the most widely-understood example.
>> Given the arithmetical nature of such a universe, construction and
>> differentiability of composite entities must necessarily derive from
>> arithmetical assumptions, which permits the natural emergence of
>> higher-order structural integration via the internal logic of the
>> system.  Of particular note is the emergence in this way of
>> self-referential entities, which form the logical basis of
>> person-hood.
>>
>> Since the reality of first-person localisation is not denied in this
>> theory (indeed the theory positivel

Re: Ontological Problems of COMP

2012-02-04 Thread Stephen P. King


On 2/4/2012 8:58 AM, David Nyman wrote:

On 4 February 2012 12:22, Bruno Marchal  wrote:


No, I am not. I bet that comp is TRUE, but I don't see COMP as requiring
that the physical world is supervening on numbers (up to isomorphisms) as
primitives.


So you have to explicitly show what is not valid in the UDA1-8. You miss
something, let us try to find out what.


 I am not missing a thing, Bruno. You are missing something that is
obvious to the rest of us.


If someone else can confirm this, and put some light on what Stephen is
saying, I would be pleased.

Bruno, I used to think that you were indeed missing "something that is
obvious to the rest of us".  I don't think so any longer, because I
understand now that you are presenting a theory and your arguments
consequently derive strictly from the axioms and assumptions of that
theory.  I don't pretend to understand all aspects of that theory of
course, but through discussion and the contrast of ideas I have come a
bit closer than when I started.

I don't know if it will help at all for me to state here my
understanding of what might motivate the theory in the first place,
but I'll try.  Firstly, as you have so often said, the
informational/computational theory of mind (CTM) is more or less the
default assumption in science.  Indeed this conclusion seems almost
unavoidable given that brain research seems to imply, more or less
unambiguously, the correlation of  mental states with relations,
rather than relata.  However, CTM in its uncritically-assumed form
continues to be combined with the additional assumption of an
Aristotelian primitively-physical state of affairs.  This leads
directly either to denialism of the first-person, or alternatively to
some ill-defined species of property dualism.  These consequences by
themselves might well lead us to reject such primitive-physicalism as
incoherent, even without an explicit reductio ad absurdum of the
unambiguous association of conscious states with "physical
computation".  Either way, in order to retain CTM, one is led to
contemplate some form of neutral monism.

The question of what form such a "neutral" theory should take now
arises.  Since the theory is explicitly *computational*, the axioms
and assumptions of such a theory should obviously be restricted to the
absolute minimum necessary to construct a "computational universe" (in
the traditional sense of "universe") or rather to indicate how such a
universe would necessarily construct itself, given those axioms and
assumptions.  The basic assumption is of a first-order combinatorial
system, of which numbers are the most widely-understood example.
Given the arithmetical nature of such a universe, construction and
differentiability of composite entities must necessarily derive from
arithmetical assumptions, which permits the natural emergence of
higher-order structural integration via the internal logic of the
system.  Of particular note is the emergence in this way of
self-referential entities, which form the logical basis of
person-hood.

Since the reality of first-person localisation is not denied in this
theory (indeed the theory positively seeks to rationalise it), the
system is not posited as having merely third-personal status, but as
possessing a first-person self-referential point-of-view which is
associated with consciousness.  Perhaps it is this aspect of the
theory which is the most tricky, as it cuts across a variety of
different intuitions about consciousness and its relation to the
phenomena it reveals.  For rather than positing a primitively-physical
universe which "instantiates" conscious states, the theory must
reverse the relation and posit conscious states that "instantiate"
physical phenomena.  In so doing, it exposes itself to empirical
refutation, since those phenomena must be, at least, consistent with
ordinary observation (although they also predict, in the limit,
observations of  high improbability).

It is this last issue of instantiation which seems to be one of main
bones of contention between Stephen and yourself, though I'm not sure
why this is the case.  From my own perspective, unsophisticated though
it may be, it seems reasonable that the emergence of "truly physical"
phenomena should indeed be the result of "personal instantiation" in
the conjunction of consciousness and computation.  After all, when do
questions as to what is "truly physical" emerge, other than in the
context of what is "truly experiential"?  The rest is calculation.

David



Dear David,

Does my claim that our primitive ground must be neutral with 
respect to any properties make any sense? It like the zero of arithmetic 
from which we can extricate any set of positive and negative quantities 
in pairs such that their sum is equal to zero. What I see in Bruno's 
interpretation of COMP is that it permits for the primitive to have a 
set of properties (numbers and + and *) to the exclusion of its 
complementary opposites. Since this is a violatio

Re: Ontological Problems of COMP

2012-02-04 Thread David Nyman

On 4 February 2012 12:22, Bruno Marchal  wrote:

> No, I am not. I bet that comp is TRUE, but I don't see COMP as requiring
> that the physical world is supervening on numbers (up to isomorphisms) as
> primitives.
>
>
> So you have to explicitly show what is not valid in the UDA1-8. You miss
> something, let us try to find out what.
>
>
>     I am not missing a thing, Bruno. You are missing something that is
> obvious to the rest of us.
>
>
> If someone else can confirm this, and put some light on what Stephen is
> saying, I would be pleased.

Bruno, I used to think that you were indeed missing "something that is
obvious to the rest of us".  I don't think so any longer, because I
understand now that you are presenting a theory and your arguments
consequently derive strictly from the axioms and assumptions of that
theory.  I don't pretend to understand all aspects of that theory of
course, but through discussion and the contrast of ideas I have come a
bit closer than when I started.

I don't know if it will help at all for me to state here my
understanding of what might motivate the theory in the first place,
but I'll try.  Firstly, as you have so often said, the
informational/computational theory of mind (CTM) is more or less the
default assumption in science.  Indeed this conclusion seems almost
unavoidable given that brain research seems to imply, more or less
unambiguously, the correlation of  mental states with relations,
rather than relata.  However, CTM in its uncritically-assumed form
continues to be combined with the additional assumption of an
Aristotelian primitively-physical state of affairs.  This leads
directly either to denialism of the first-person, or alternatively to
some ill-defined species of property dualism.  These consequences by
themselves might well lead us to reject such primitive-physicalism as
incoherent, even without an explicit reductio ad absurdum of the
unambiguous association of conscious states with "physical
computation".  Either way, in order to retain CTM, one is led to
contemplate some form of neutral monism.

The question of what form such a "neutral" theory should take now
arises.  Since the theory is explicitly *computational*, the axioms
and assumptions of such a theory should obviously be restricted to the
absolute minimum necessary to construct a "computational universe" (in
the traditional sense of "universe") or rather to indicate how such a
universe would necessarily construct itself, given those axioms and
assumptions.  The basic assumption is of a first-order combinatorial
system, of which numbers are the most widely-understood example.
Given the arithmetical nature of such a universe, construction and
differentiability of composite entities must necessarily derive from
arithmetical assumptions, which permits the natural emergence of
higher-order structural integration via the internal logic of the
system.  Of particular note is the emergence in this way of
self-referential entities, which form the logical basis of
person-hood.

Since the reality of first-person localisation is not denied in this
theory (indeed the theory positively seeks to rationalise it), the
system is not posited as having merely third-personal status, but as
possessing a first-person self-referential point-of-view which is
associated with consciousness.  Perhaps it is this aspect of the
theory which is the most tricky, as it cuts across a variety of
different intuitions about consciousness and its relation to the
phenomena it reveals.  For rather than positing a primitively-physical
universe which "instantiates" conscious states, the theory must
reverse the relation and posit conscious states that "instantiate"
physical phenomena.  In so doing, it exposes itself to empirical
refutation, since those phenomena must be, at least, consistent with
ordinary observation (although they also predict, in the limit,
observations of  high improbability).

It is this last issue of instantiation which seems to be one of main
bones of contention between Stephen and yourself, though I'm not sure
why this is the case.  From my own perspective, unsophisticated though
it may be, it seems reasonable that the emergence of "truly physical"
phenomena should indeed be the result of "personal instantiation" in
the conjunction of consciousness and computation.  After all, when do
questions as to what is "truly physical" emerge, other than in the
context of what is "truly experiential"?  The rest is calculation.

David

>
> On 03 Feb 2012, at 23:24, Stephen P. King wrote:
>
>
>
>     You might protest and say that numbers are universal and that you are
> considering the function that numbers and that the + and * laws perform is
> "neutral" in the sense of Neutral monism, but that claim also fails for the
> very same reason as I have outlined. We simply cannot have "specification of
> properties" and ontological neutrality at the same level. One is the
> exclusion of the other.
>
>
> In that case your notion of "e

Re: Ontological Problems of COMP

2012-02-04 Thread Stephen P. King


On 2/4/2012 7:22 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:


On 03 Feb 2012, at 23:24, Stephen P. King wrote:



You might protest and say that numbers are universal and that you 
are considering the function that numbers and that the + and * laws 
perform is "neutral" in the sense of Neutral monism, but that claim 
also fails for the very same reason as I have outlined. We simply 
cannot have "specification of properties" and ontological neutrality 
at the same level. One is the exclusion of the other.


In that case your notion of "existence" is so neutral that you can't 
derive, in the usual sense, anything from it. You don't present a 
theory, but are using a God-gap type of explanation, and this to 
pretend a reasoning is invalid, without providing any clue where, 
except attributing me a metaphysical belief in numbers, where I only 
assume to grasp them in high school and every day life.

You cannot refute a reasoning with philosophical ideology.


As to set theory, we should discuss that seperately, since I am 
confused as to how you think of set theory. For example, are you 
considering that there exist many different self-consistent set 
theories that differ in their choice of axioms?


Is that a rethorical trick? You are repeating the reason why I avoid 
set theories. That problem does not exist on the integers. I assume 
the numbers, because everyone agree on them, and nobody can derive the 
axioms from conceptually less rich theory.


snip

Hi Bruno,

I have spent a long time studying your work and reasoning through 
it so that I have a good idea what it concerns and implies. I just wish 
that you would spent a tiny fraction of that trying to comprehend my 
critique. You do not even seem to try to understand the idea that I am 
considering. You really should read up on Bertrand Russell's neutral 
monism. I have no more time to spend on trying to explain it to you. 
Good luck.


Onward!

Stephen

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Re: Ontological Problems of COMP (was Superfluous Qualia Challenge For Comp)

2012-02-02 Thread Stephen P. King


On 2/2/2012 1:07 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote:


On 01 Feb 2012, at 21:48, Stephen P. King wrote:


On 2/1/2012 3:06 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote:




I don't get it.


Many people have discussed this idea that Existence, in-itself, 
is primitive and neutral (has no properties or divisions). It is not 
original with me. For example, Bertrand Russell's discussion of 
neutral monism and Russell Standish's ToN explain it well.


There might exist phenomenological hermeneutic of the monist kind, but 
this, once we chose to do science, is a private affair, which can 
inspire but cannot be communicated.


Hi Bruno,

I do not understand what "phenomenological hermeneutic of the 
monist kind" is.


So by a neutral monist theory, its is meant a theory which does not 
assume mind, nor matter, and explain them from something else. That 
something else needs to be able to be described in first order logic, 
at least. It should have terms for the existing objects, and axioms 
for the laws to which those objects obey. Without those two 
components, we can do nothing.


Neutral monism does not assume that mind or matter have primitive 
existence. Neutral monism considers that both Mind and Matter emerge 
from a common neutral ground that is, in-itself, neither. My proposed 
dualism becomes neutral monism in the limit of lower levels of entities 
(assuming well foundedness 
). This is different 
from "material monism" that assumes that the material physical would is 
primitive, or "ideal monism" that assumes that Mind is primitive. Your 
ideas seems to be a form of Ideal Monism.













What I ask is a scientific theory, by which I mean a first order 
logical theory about what you assume to exist, and then theorems 
justifying the other form that "existence" can take.


All that does not contradict itself and is thus necessarily 
possible exists, thus I claim that existence is necessary possibility.


That's an old idea in philosophy. It is the indexical idea that 
existence is consistence seen from inside. In first order logic it 
makes a lot of sense, given that consistence is equivalent with the 
existence of a model.
And in AUDA, the necessity of the possibility of p, BDp, is the 
consequence of sigma_1 truth, and its leads to an arithmetical 
quantization. Here Bp is for (Bew(p) & Diamond("1=1")), and Dp is 
(Diamond(p) v Bew(f) 'relative consistency)). p is sigma_1.


Once you are using notion of necessity or possibility, being precise 
forces you to suggest in which modal logic you are working, and how 
you justify it. There are infinities of modal logics.
UDA justifies the use of the self-reference modal logic, and their 
variants. Gödel's results (and Löb's one, and Solovay) don't let 
many possible choice for the ideally correct machines. The variant 
described above are the one needed to find the correct physic 
(correct with respect to comp, if you get UDA).


I don't know if comp is true or not, but comp makes theoretical 
computer science a lantern to find the key. It allows a mathematical 
formulation of many subproblems of the (comp) mind body problem.




[SPK]
On these particulars we can agree. Our only disagreement is that 
you seem to consider that Arithmetic is at the same level as bare 
Existence and I see bare existence as neutral and that both logics 
(including arithmetic) and physicality are non-primitive.

[BM]
Then tell me what you mean by "Existence", and show me how you derive 
logics, arithmetic and physicality from that.
Unfortunately, people mature enough in logic know that you can't do 
that. No formal arithmetic can be deduced from anything less than itself.


[SPK]
It is a basic axiom of ontology, but not the only one. It is a 
necessary but not sufficient part of any ontology. I do not understand 
how the idea that I am discussing is confusing to you! Existence (noun) 
exists (verb). I am not claiming that it alone is stipulated. What does 
the word "exist", as in "A number exists" mean? What does the word 
"existence" in the following sentence "the existence of numbers in 
independent of any particular person or persons knowledge of them" mean? 
Am I being unclear?



Our beliefs in the natural numbers is authentically mysterious. But 
with comp we can, and we must, explain everything from them. And it 
works, because arithmetic emulate the ... self-referential resonance 
of numbers, which appears to be very rich and full of surprise.

[SPK]
I reject that our belief in numbers is "mysterious" as we can 
easily match up one set of objects with another set of different 
objects. We can observe physical objects, we can distinguish between 
them as they are present in differing locations or, if present in the 
same location, are located at differing times. Objects can have a wide 
variety of properties that our observations can determine. This is 
kindergarten material, Bruno, why are we tripping all over it as if

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