Re: Why I am I?
On 28 Jan 2010, at 20:27, RMahoney wrote: On Jan 8, 12:38 pm, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Welcome RMahoney, Nice thought experiments. But they need amnesia (like in going from you to Cruise). I tend to think like you that it may be the case that we are the same person (like those who result from a self- duplication, both refer as being the same person as the original, yet acknowledge their respective differentiation. Yes I think I understand what you mean by amnesia, you couldn't carry any rememberance of your old self when changing to Tom Cruise, but you would in the intermediary steps and gradually would lose the concept of your old self that is gradually replaced by Tom's self concept. OK. I think there is an agnosologic path from any person to any person, for example from you to a bacteria, or Peano Arithmetic, perhaps even the empty person. Agnosia is a term used for disease with deny, like people who become blind and pretend not having perceive any difference. Thing is, it is very similar to the process happening as we age. I began a journal when I was in my 20's, capturing my thoughts every time I visited this subject in my mind trips. So when I read a page from that journal today, I sometimes go wow, I was thinking that, then? I've obviously acquired a bit of amnesia. Yet I feel like I'm the same person because I've always had this body (although an aging body). What would it be like if everyone had default amnesia such that any thought older than 20 years is erased? So you wouldn't remember your earlier years but you were that person once. I could claim to have originated from Tom Cruise's childhood and it wouldn't make any difference. Sure. From a third person point of view identity is relative. But from a first person point of view it is a sort of absolute related to the way you have build your (current) self through your experiences and inheritage relatively to a normal set of computations. We are what we value, I would say, but this makes it a personal question. Note that the uda reasoning is made in a way which prevents the need for clarifying those considerations, albeit very interesting. Just like I don't believe it makes any difference to say why I am I? and not you?, as we are we, simultaneously, and we are they, all those who lived past lives, etc. ... and future lives, alternate lives, and states. OK, especially if you see that such a view prevent relativism. When the 'other' makes a mistake, in the past, or the present, (or the future!) the question is how could *I* be wrong, how could *I* have been wrong, how could *I* help for being less wrong. Such an attitude encourages the dialog and the appreciation of the other(s), despite (or thanks to) its relative unknown nature. Eventually this can help to develop some faith in the unknown, together with the lucidity on the hellish paths, which can then be seen as mostly the product of certainty idolatry, and security idolatry. It is a natural price of consciousness: by knowing they are universal, Lobian machine know that they can crash. And being never satisfied, they will complain for more memory space and time to their most probable local universal neighbors, up, for some, to their universal recognizance, and so quite happy to dispose of what 'God' (arithmetical truth) can offer them (and has already offer them). Knowing you are the other is a reason to embellish the relation with the many possible and probable universal neighbor(s). The computationalist good cannot make the bad disappears, but it may be able to confine it more and more in the phantasms and fantasies, or second order, virtual, dreamed realities. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Why I am I?
On Jan 8, 12:38 pm, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Welcome RMahoney, Nice thought experiments. But they need amnesia (like in going from you to Cruise). I tend to think like you that it may be the case that we are the same person (like those who result from a self- duplication, both refer as being the same person as the original, yet acknowledge their respective differentiation. Yes I think I understand what you mean by amnesia, you couldn't carry any rememberance of your old self when changing to Tom Cruise, but you would in the intermediary steps and gradually would lose the concept of your old self that is gradually replaced by Tom's self concept. Thing is, it is very similar to the process happening as we age. I began a journal when I was in my 20's, capturing my thoughts every time I visited this subject in my mind trips. So when I read a page from that journal today, I sometimes go wow, I was thinking that, then? I've obviously acquired a bit of amnesia. Yet I feel like I'm the same person because I've always had this body (although an aging body). What would it be like if everyone had default amnesia such that any thought older than 20 years is erased? So you wouldn't remember your earlier years but you were that person once. I could claim to have originated from Tom Cruise's childhood and it wouldn't make any difference. Just like I don't believe it makes any difference to say why I am I? and not you?, as we are we, simultaneously, and we are they, all those who lived past lives, etc. RMahoney -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Why I am I?
Welcome RMahoney, Nice thought experiments. But they need amnesia (like in going from you to Cruise). I tend to think like you that it may be the case that we are the same person (like those who result from a self- duplication, both refer as being the same person as the original, yet acknowledge their respective differentiation. It is certainly interesting, and it enlarges the spectrum of the immortality notions. May be scary too, when not familiarized with self-multiplication and self-transformation. Those notions are studied in theoretical computer science, so that they can be applied to make such reasoning precise. And the universal machine is well placed, by Church thesis, to play the role of the main heroin. I think. I am sure we will have opportunities to come back on those more advanced thought experiences, Bruno On 08 Jan 2010, at 01:59, RMahoney wrote: pretty cool thread (read most but skimmed thru some of it though). I've spent the past 35 or so years (i'm now 56) pondering the subject of why I am I and doing thought experiment after thought experiment with cloning, copies, changing I one particle at a time until I am you or someone else, and ultimately came to the conclusion as someone posted midway thru this thread of the concept of the universal person or universal soul... consciousness is basically universal, there is no priority of one bit of consciousness over the other. Within just my own life, the organism I was 35 years ago is not the organism I am today, I am only connected to that former organism by sequential events in time and space, threaded together. With an advanced technology I could become Tom Cruise by sequential changes particle by particle, memory by memory, thought by thought, until I became the currently existing Tom Cruise. Would my I which changed over the course of 35 years from my former I be any different than Tom Cruise's I that was changed over time (bit by bit) from my former I? Thought experiments like these made me realize we're all essentially the same universal concept, we're all just unique pieces of the whole of the everything. It's just really cool to find like thinking by a string search on the web, having done all this thinking in isolation and coming to the same conclusion as other minds have. What brought me to this site was a string search for everything possible exists, something I now believe and was just curious if there was any text on the web with the same line of thinking. It was my answer to the other question I've always had as to why does the universe exist at all? I came to my own conclusion that if anything exists (which apparently it does), then every possible event must exist, every possible outcome from one state to the other must exist, and if it existed once, nothing stops it from existing again, and actually, every possible event not only exists but has always existed and will always exist. Kind of expands the universe quite a bit, virtually infinite. There's not only me, but every possible outcome of my life. There's every possible outcome of my mom dad's reproduction, some of which produce me but nearly infinitely conditions that do not produce my starting organism. My dad wouldn't have existed, if it weren't for the lightning strike that killed his mom's first husband. So I'm here because I am just one of nearly infinite possibilities of consciousness. Disconcerting, at times, where I used to think, glad it's them and not me (like tortured terrorist victims), well, we're all the same basically, and while the whole of everything contains terrible things, including the very worst of possibilities, it also contains the very best as well. Having figured this much out to my satisfaction actually gives me a very contented, peaceful and secure feeling. - Roy -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com . For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Why I am I?
On Fri, Jan 08, 2010 at 07:38:21PM +0100, Bruno Marchal wrote: And the universal machine is well placed, by Church thesis, to play the role of the main heroin. I think. Could be a Freudian slip - do you mean heroine here, as opposed to heroin the drug? -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Mathematics UNSW SYDNEY 2052 hpco...@hpcoders.com.au Australiahttp://www.hpcoders.com.au -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Why I am I?
pretty cool thread (read most but skimmed thru some of it though). I've spent the past 35 or so years (i'm now 56) pondering the subject of why I am I and doing thought experiment after thought experiment with cloning, copies, changing I one particle at a time until I am you or someone else, and ultimately came to the conclusion as someone posted midway thru this thread of the concept of the universal person or universal soul... consciousness is basically universal, there is no priority of one bit of consciousness over the other. Within just my own life, the organism I was 35 years ago is not the organism I am today, I am only connected to that former organism by sequential events in time and space, threaded together. With an advanced technology I could become Tom Cruise by sequential changes particle by particle, memory by memory, thought by thought, until I became the currently existing Tom Cruise. Would my I which changed over the course of 35 years from my former I be any different than Tom Cruise's I that was changed over time (bit by bit) from my former I? Thought experiments like these made me realize we're all essentially the same universal concept, we're all just unique pieces of the whole of the everything. It's just really cool to find like thinking by a string search on the web, having done all this thinking in isolation and coming to the same conclusion as other minds have. What brought me to this site was a string search for everything possible exists, something I now believe and was just curious if there was any text on the web with the same line of thinking. It was my answer to the other question I've always had as to why does the universe exist at all? I came to my own conclusion that if anything exists (which apparently it does), then every possible event must exist, every possible outcome from one state to the other must exist, and if it existed once, nothing stops it from existing again, and actually, every possible event not only exists but has always existed and will always exist. Kind of expands the universe quite a bit, virtually infinite. There's not only me, but every possible outcome of my life. There's every possible outcome of my mom dad's reproduction, some of which produce me but nearly infinitely conditions that do not produce my starting organism. My dad wouldn't have existed, if it weren't for the lightning strike that killed his mom's first husband. So I'm here because I am just one of nearly infinite possibilities of consciousness. Disconcerting, at times, where I used to think, glad it's them and not me (like tortured terrorist victims), well, we're all the same basically, and while the whole of everything contains terrible things, including the very worst of possibilities, it also contains the very best as well. Having figured this much out to my satisfaction actually gives me a very contented, peaceful and secure feeling. - Roy -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Why I am I?
pretty cool thread (read most but skimmed thru some of it though). I've spent the past 35 or so years (i'm now 56) pondering the subject of why I am I and doing thought experiment after thought experiment with cloning, copies, changing I one particle at a time until I am you or someone else, and ultimately came to the conclusion as someone posted midway thru this thread of the concept of the universal person or universal soul... consciousness is basically universal, there is no priority of one bit of consciousness over the other. Within just my own life, the organism I was 35 years ago is not the organism I am today, I am only connected to that former organism by sequential events in time and space, threaded together. With an advanced technology I could become Tom Cruise by sequential changes particle by particle, memory by memory, thought by thought, until I became the currently existing Tom Cruise. Would my I which changed over the course of 35 years from my former I be any different than Tom Cruise's I that was changed over time (bit by bit) from my former I? Thought experiments like these made me realize we're all essentially the same universal concept, we're all just unique pieces of the whole of the everything. It's just really cool to find like thinking by a string search on the web, having done all this thinking in isolation and coming to the same conclusion as other minds have. What brought me to this site was a string search for everything possible exists, something I now believe and was just curious if there was any text on the web with the same line of thinking. It was my answer to the other question I've always had as to why does the universe exist at all? I came to my own conclusion that if anything exists (which apparently it does), then every possible event must exist, every possible outcome from one state to the other must exist, and if it existed once, nothing stops it from existing again, and actually, every possible event not only exists but has always existed and will always exist. Kind of expands the universe quite a bit, virtually infinite. There's not only me, but every possible outcome of my life. There's every possible outcome of my mom dad's reproduction, some of which produce me but nearly infinitely conditions that do not produce my starting organism. My dad wouldn't have existed, if it weren't for the lightning strike that killed his mom's first husband. So I'm here because I am just one of nearly infinite possibilities of consciousness. Disconcerting, at times, where I used to think, glad it's them and not me (like tortured terrorist victims), well, we're all the same basically, and while the whole of everything contains terrible things, including the very worst of possibilities, it also contains the very best as well. Having figured this much out to my satisfaction actually gives me a very contented, peaceful and secure feeling. RMahoney -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Why I am I?
Bruno Marchal wrote: On 30 Dec 2009, at 17:07, benjayk wrote: Bruno Marchal wrote: They are. Numbers are primitive. The variable x and y represents excusively those numbers. Finite pieces of computation are speical numbers, like prime numbers. To be a (finite piece of a) computation is a property of number, a relation which has to be defined in term of addition and multiplication of numbers. To be a computation are emergent property (emerging from addition and multiplication). Sorry, I just don't get it. Your theory necessarily presumes dreams before numbers, because for you numbers appear just in your dreams. Not at all. Comp presuppose some understanding of consciousness, but then, after the uda reasoning we can understand that for the ontology we need no mre than a theory like Robinson arithmetic. It does not presuppose dreams. Dreams will be defined in term of number relations (computations). I think you are confusing the level and the meta-level. Maxwell electromagnetism does not presuppose consciousness. And this has nothing to do that Maxwell presuppose consciousness in his colleagues when reading his paper, but that is an assumption at some metalevel, not in the theory. OK; but nevertheless your theory becomes wrong, if you try to act like the meta-level, the level the theory appears in, does not exist (like some materialists say) or relies on some objects in your theory. But if your saying numbers give rise to conciousness it seems to me your doing that, even if you don't mean it. Maybe it is just a semantic issue. For me it is undoubtable that the understanding of what numbers are (and I obviously can not make sense out of numbers without there being an understanding of it) can only come out of conciousness, so numbers explain (or give rise to) conciousness is simply not graspable for me. It seems like an empty statement unless you mean with conciousness conciousness as referred to in this theory, but this is not conciousness. It is the shadow of (or the pointer to) conciousness in this theory. Bruno Marchal wrote: Additionally, the notion of numbers relies on the notion of truth, Not at all. OK, I shouldn't have written notion. I rather meant numbers rely on there being an understanding of what is *what I mean* with the word truth or meaning or sense. Bruno Marchal wrote: which is a notion that fundamentally can't be defined, only known. This is not correct. Pean Arithmetic can define a notion of truth for any formula with a determinate length. Tarski theorem just forbid a general notion of truth to be defined in the theory, for formula with an finite but not fixed in advance length. This is why I wrote fundamentally. You can define truth in some context, but not truth itself. Every definition presumes that there is truth/meaning in what it defines. Bruno Marchal wrote: Without *experiencing* truth there is no sense to numbers. I think you are confusing third person numbers, and the human first person experience of numbers. I just don't get for whom there could be third person numbers? I think third person objects are just objects shareable by different first person viewpoints. But it always relies on there being a first person. You write that you don't want to eliminate the person, but isn't saying there are third person numbers apart from a first person (no human being but conciousness) exactly this? To whom could you explain it if not to a person that you already presume? Who could understand it? Bruno Marchal wrote: Arithmetical realism is the explicit assumption that truth of the form 17 is a prime number is not dependent of the existence of humans, or even of a physical universe. I basically agree. But I don't think that it is even possible to meaningfully propose that 17 is a prime number is independent of conciousness since you can't doubt (what I mean with the word) conciousness and thus for every concious being (that is, every entity that is capable of understanding something) everything is dependent on it. Bruno Marchal wrote: So there are numbers without there being dreaming/experiencing first. I guess you meant so there are no numbers But this is not the theory I propose. I take Arithmetic as starting point. Dreaming/experiencing will be a property of numbers. It is really NUMBER = CONSCIOUSNESS = MATTER (= HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS = HUMAN NUMBER) Right, I meant so there are no numbers The problem for me is that you (in my mind) can't take arithmetics as a starting point without taking you as a starting point. Of course you understand that, but then it is confusing (or dishonest, but I absolutely don't believe that of course;-)) to write NUMBER = CONSCIOUSNESS = MATTER because you can only mean MY UNDOUBTABLE CONCIOUSNSS = (since this is already clear on a meta-level apart from the theory it is, I think, unecessary to write it) NUMBERS = POINTER TO
Re: Why I am I?
On 30 Dec 2009, at 17:07, benjayk wrote: Bruno Marchal wrote: They are. Numbers are primitive. The variable x and y represents excusively those numbers. Finite pieces of computation are speical numbers, like prime numbers. To be a (finite piece of a) computation is a property of number, a relation which has to be defined in term of addition and multiplication of numbers. To be a computation are emergent property (emerging from addition and multiplication). Sorry, I just don't get it. Your theory necessarily presumes dreams before numbers, because for you numbers appear just in your dreams. Not at all. Comp presuppose some understanding of consciousness, but then, after the uda reasoning we can understand that for the ontology we need no mre than a theory like Robinson arithmetic. It does not presuppose dreams. Dreams will be defined in term of number relations (computations). I think you are confusing the level and the meta-level. Maxwell electromagnetism does not presuppose consciousness. And this has nothing to do that Maxwell presuppose consciousness in his colleagues when reading his paper, but that is an assumption at some metalevel, not in the theory. Additionally, the notion of numbers relies on the notion of truth, Not at all. which is a notion that fundamentally can't be defined, only known. This is not correct. Pean Arithmetic can define a notion of truth for any formula with a determinate length. Tarski theorem just forbid a general notion of truth to be defined in the theory, for formula with an finite but not fixed in advance length. Without *experiencing* truth there is no sense to numbers. I think you are confusing third person numbers, and the human first person experience of numbers. Arithmetical realism is the explicit assumption that truth of the form 17 is a prime number is not dependent of the existence of humans, or even of a physical universe. So there are numbers without there being dreaming/experiencing first. I guess you meant so there are no numbers But this is not the theory I propose. I take Arithmetic as starting point. Dreaming/experiencing will be a property of numbers. It is really NUMBER = CONSCIOUSNESS = MATTER (= HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS = HUMAN NUMBER) It seems to me that you call that primitive, which relies already on the truths (there are dreams/experiences) of which it gives emergence to. Do you see my problem with that? Not really. And it seems that your remark could apply to any theory. We have to agree on some starting point. The starting point I use is already used by almost all theories of nature and human. You are confusing, I think, a statement like 2+3 = 5, and I understand that 2+3 = 5. Those are very different. Bruno Marchal wrote: But since you don't only assume mechanism, but also conciousness (like all theories) Digitam mechanism (comp) assumes consciousness explicitly (cf the sense of the yes doctor). Most theories does not assume consciousness. The word does not appear in the description of the theories. I don't think it's necessary to write that you assume conciousness. All theories assume truth and still no one makes this implicit. By assumption, I mean the assumption present, concretely, in the theory. Not the meta-assumption needed to understand that humans can understand the theory. Because it is obivous; you simply can't deny there is truth or that you're conscious. Right. Well, actually you can deny it, but then it is clear for me that your use of the words conciousness or truth doesn't point to what I mean. Sure. And for mechanism, I assume that consciousness is invariant for some functional substitution. So I have to mention consciousness rather explicitly. That is normal: digital mechanism is a theory of consciousness, before being a theory of matter. Bruno Marchal wrote: and consensual reality (the dreams in which the representations of numbers appear), I don't see how it makes sense to put numbers before conciousness and (perceived) reality. Well, it is a bit like addition comes before being prime. You need addition in Robinson arithmetic to define what a prime number is. Then you need addition, and prime, before defining when a number represent a finite piece of computation. And you need that to eventually attach consciousness to computations. The before is logical, not temporal. I need someone making sense of addition in Robinson arithmetic before I (logically) can refer to addition in Robinson arithmetic (or if you want it this way I need the sense itself in 'addition in Robinson arithmetic' before I can refer to addition in Robinson arithmetic). It makes sense for me to say that we need numbers in order to link conciousness to numbers, but that is already obvious. But you need conciousness (the mysterious senser or sensing) in order to make
Re: Why I am I?
Bruno Marchal wrote: Bruno Marchal wrote: Bruno Marchal wrote: The theory explains what exists, and how the rest emerges from it. But then doesn't the rest exist, too? I just see a problem with claiming to explain what exists, when it is really not clear what existance could mean apart from the relatively meaningful, but vague, every day use. In that context existence is the same as in the expression it exists a number having this or that property. Among the property there will be property like relatively to that number this number observe this phenomenon. the rest belongs to the dream of numbers, and they do those dream because they describe computations. We assume mechanism, I recall. Okay, though I still think it's advisable to not use simply existence as a word a here, because it sounds too exclusive. What exists sounds like Everything that exists. And I find dreams of numbers sounds as if the dreams where less fundamental than the numbers. They are. Numbers are primitive. The variable x and y represents excusively those numbers. Finite pieces of computation are speical numbers, like prime numbers. To be a (finite piece of a) computation is a property of number, a relation which has to be defined in term of addition and multiplication of numbers. To be a computation are emergent property (emerging from addition and multiplication). Sorry, I just don't get it. Your theory necessarily presumes dreams before numbers, because for you numbers appear just in your dreams. Additionally, the notion of numbers relies on the notion of truth, which is a notion that fundamentally can't be defined, only known. Without *experiencing* truth there is no sense to numbers. So there are numbers without there being dreaming/experiencing first. It seems to me that you call that primitive, which relies already on the truths (there are dreams/experiences) of which it gives emergence to. Do you see my problem with that? Bruno Marchal wrote: But since you don't only assume mechanism, but also conciousness (like all theories) Digitam mechanism (comp) assumes consciousness explicitly (cf the sense of the yes doctor). Most theories does not assume consciousness. The word does not appear in the description of the theories. I don't think it's necessary to write that you assume conciousness. All theories assume truth and still no one makes this implicit. Because it is obivous; you simply can't deny there is truth or that you're concious. Well, actually you can deny it, but then it is clear for me that your use of the words conciousness or truth doesn't point to what I mean. Bruno Marchal wrote: and consensual reality (the dreams in which the representations of numbers appear), I don't see how it makes sense to put numbers before conciousness and (perceived) reality. Well, it is a bit like addition comes before being prime. You need addition in Robinson arithmetic to define what a prime number is. Then you need addition, and prime, before defining when a number represent a finite piece of computation. And you need that to eventually attach consciousness to computations. The before is logical, not temporal. I need someone making sense of addition in Robinson arithmetic before I (logically) can refer to addition in Robinson arithmetic (or if you want it this way I need the sense itself in 'addition in Robinson arithmetic' before I can refer to addition in Robinson arithmetic). It makes sense for me to say that we need numbers in order to link conciousness to numbers, but that is already obvious. But you need conciousness (the mysterious senser or sensing) in order to make sense of anything, including numbers. Numbers just come before any *notion* of conciousness that is reflected in the numbers, but they can't come before conciousness itself. Or at least I don't get what this could mean. Bruno Marchal wrote: But this is just insulting the machines, and nothing else. My point is not to insult machines. A machine is identified by what it does, because feelings can not be uniquely linked with a machine. Why? We can, for all practical purpose, attach a mind to a machine. What we cannot do is to attach a machine to a mind, but only an infinity of machine to a mind. How can we attach a mind to a machine? If you have the description of a machine, you know what it feels? You are a machine lover indeed ;). Bruno Marchal wrote: Conciousness is already attached to an infinity of machines and from our perspective we are at least conciousness; that which is always sure here and now. So every observer, just by virtue of observing *anything*, already feels the truth about an infinity of machines. But *are* we machines then? If we always are or could be infinitely many machines, if we always feel some truth about *every machine*, it is not a bit of an understatement to say we are a machine or even
Re: Why I am I?
On 28 Dec 2009, at 21:22, benjayk wrote: Bruno Marchal wrote: I have never claim it explains something fundamental, it explains a new problem, the problem of justifying how machine dreams glue enough to stabilize first person plural sharable observation. The theory explains what exists, and how the rest emerges from it Sounds pretty fundamental to me ;). I think your wording was just a bit absolute for me here, maybe you should be more careful there, maybe I just took you too serious. After all you're talking in the context of a theory, so I should take The theory explains what exists, and how the rest emerges from it. as The theory explains what exists as formalizable in the theory, and explains from it how there must be more than this, which trascends the formalities of this theory.. OK. Bruno Marchal wrote: Bruno Marchal wrote: The theory explains what exists, and how the rest emerges from it. But then doesn't the rest exist, too? I just see a problem with claiming to explain what exists, when it is really not clear what existance could mean apart from the relatively meaningful, but vague, every day use. In that context existence is the same as in the expression it exists a number having this or that property. Among the property there will be property like relatively to that number this number observe this phenomenon. the rest belongs to the dream of numbers, and they do those dream because they describe computations. We assume mechanism, I recall. Okay, though I still think it's advisable to not use simply existence as a word a here, because it sounds too exclusive. What exists sounds like Everything that exists. And I find dreams of numbers sounds as if the dreams where less fundamental than the numbers. They are. Numbers are primitive. The variable x and y represents excusively those numbers. Finite pieces of computation are speical numbers, like prime numbers. To be a (finite piece of a) computation is a property of number, a relation which has to be defined in term of addition and multiplication of numbers. To be a computation are emergent property (emerging from addition and multiplication). But since you don't only assume mechanism, but also conciousness (like all theories) Digitam mechanism (comp) assumes consciousness explicitly (cf the sense of the yes doctor). Most theories does not assume consciousness. The word does not appear in the description of the theories. and consensual reality (the dreams in which the representations of numbers appear), I don't see how it makes sense to put numbers before conciousness and (perceived) reality. Well, it is a bit like addition comes before being prime. You need addition in Robinson arithmetic to define what a prime number is. Then you need addition, and prime, before defining when a number represent a finite piece of computation. And you need that to eventually attach consciousness to computations. The before is logical, not temporal. Bruno Marchal wrote: Really we only discuss semantics here... I just find theory of everything sounds authorative, because it seems to claim there is nothing else to explain. Basically that is my only problem with a theory of everything - it is either a confusing name or disingenious, And what do you think about theology. The idea is to unify knowledge in a coherent realm, which does not eliminate the person nor the appearances, but help to figure them out. Not so good. Theology sounds too big. After all, there is no science or any other practice that does not study spirituality or god in some sense. By calling it theology it sounds like your theory is especially close to grasping god. But I don't think it's any good to ever invoke closeness to god in any theory. I would like theory of relationship of numbers and that which trascends them or something more precise and modest, without using everything or some appeal to god. That is a vocabulary problem. I like theology for three reasons: 1) comp is a belief in a form of possible technological reincarnation, leading to notions of afterlife, or after-annihilation. 2) the gap between G and G* provides a gap between science and theology-proper. 3) It necessitates an unprovable belief in the universal machine (the little god, Plotinus' man). This is Church thesis. This is made clear by the arithmetical interpretation of Plotinus. God (the ONE) = arithmetical truth, the NOUS = arithmetical provability, the third god (universal soul) = provability in company of truth, matter = ... etc. Bruno Marchal wrote: Bruno Marchal wrote: Bruno Marchal wrote: But elementary arithmetics does explain both consciousness, including its non definability That's funny, because this is little more than empty words for me. Read the papers. Or ask questions. I don't what conciousness
Re: Why I am I?
I willl not reply to all parts of your post in detail, because I think we mainly discuss semantics on some specific issues. I feel we agree on most things either way, it seems pointless to get Bruno Marchal wrote: It's like a theory saying: There is something, but don't aks me what it is. You should study the theory, and makes specific remark. That would lead nowhere, since I don't have anything specific against the theory. It's just that I think claiming it to explain something fundamental is missleading; it makes one search fundamental truth where there is none. Because what is fundamental to everyone is his own experience. I agree. But then study the theory which explains why machine can already understand this, but that we have to explain physics from the number if we want to take the theory seriously. Bruno Marchal wrote: I have never claim it explains something fundamental, it explains a new problem, the problem of justifying how machine dreams glue enough to stabilize first person plural sharable observation. The theory explains what exists, and how the rest emerges from it Sounds pretty fundamental to me ;). I think your wording was just a bit absolute for me here, maybe you should be more careful there, maybe I just took you too serious. After all you're talking in the context of a theory, so I should take The theory explains what exists, and how the rest emerges from it. as The theory explains what exists as formalizable in the theory, and explains from it how there must be more than this, which trascends the formalities of this theory.. Bruno Marchal wrote: Bruno Marchal wrote: The theory explains what exists, and how the rest emerges from it. But then doesn't the rest exist, too? I just see a problem with claiming to explain what exists, when it is really not clear what existance could mean apart from the relatively meaningful, but vague, every day use. In that context existence is the same as in the expression it exists a number having this or that property. Among the property there will be property like relatively to that number this number observe this phenomenon. the rest belongs to the dream of numbers, and they do those dream because they describe computations. We assume mechanism, I recall. Okay, though I still think it's advisable to not use simply existence as a word a here, because it sounds too exclusive. What exists sounds like Everything that exists. And I find dreams of numbers sounds as if the dreams where less fundamental than the numbers. But since you don't only assume mechanism, but also conciousness (like all theories) and consensual reality (the dreams in which the representations of numbers appear), I don't see how it makes sense to put numbers before conciousness and (perceived) reality. Bruno Marchal wrote: Really we only discuss semantics here... I just find theory of everything sounds authorative, because it seems to claim there is nothing else to explain. Basically that is my only problem with a theory of everything - it is either a confusing name or disingenious, And what do you think about theology. The idea is to unify knowledge in a coherent realm, which does not eliminate the person nor the appearances, but help to figure them out. Not so good. Theology sounds too big. After all, there is no science or any other practice that does not study spirituality or god in some sense. By calling it theology it sounds like your theory is especially close to grasping god. But I don't think it's any good to ever invoke closeness to god in any theory. I would like theory of relationship of numbers and that which trascends them or something more precise and modest, without using everything or some appeal to god. Bruno Marchal wrote: Bruno Marchal wrote: Bruno Marchal wrote: But elementary arithmetics does explain both consciousness, including its non definability That's funny, because this is little more than empty words for me. Read the papers. Or ask questions. I don't what conciousness really is. I am sure you know very well what it is. Think of what is common in all subjective experiences. What is common in all subjective experience...? I don't really know. Something is, that is for sure, but I don't know what! Bruno Marchal wrote: So in order to to explain it to me, you would have to define it... Not at all. To make theories we need only to share some statements about something. We never define really the object of our thought and theories. I cannot define two you what is a line, bit we may agree that two points determines a unique line, for example. And reason from that. I cannot define to you consciousness, but we may agree on some statement on it, like conscious people cannot doubt here and now that they are conscious, for example. Okay, but then you don't explain what conciousness is, but
Re: Why I am I?
On 19 Dec 2009, at 16:13, benjayk wrote: Bruno Marchal wrote: Honestly I think you are a bit dishonest to yourself here, since you already presume the appearance of matter, I assume nowhere primitive matter. I do assume consensual reality. If not, I would not post message on a list. Well, that was my point. So indeed numbers don't make sense independent of that, because Bruno Marchal wrote: unless you can make theories about numbers without perceiving anything, which I doubt. Humans cannot do that, but this is independent which are simùpler concept. All scientists agrees on numbers, and to day we can explain in a precise sense why numbers is the least we have to assume. Bruno Marchal wrote: When you do abstract math you nevertheless work with matter, that is, word written on paper or on a computer screen. So either you can indeed make sense of a circular theory Indeed. That is the case. Circularity is fundamental. I will soon explain this through the second recursion theorem of Kleene. The whole AUDA things is based almost exclusively based on that handling of circularity, which makes the self-reference possible, for machine, and relatively to universal machine(s). So we seem to agree actually. Bruno Marchal wrote: Bruno Marchal wrote: Of course, the human conception of the numbers depends on the human conception of his neighborhood and life, but when searching a TOE we have to agree on the simplest objects (ontology) from which we derive the others (phenomenology). For me this is not meaningful. What kind of phenomology could be derived from the fundamental numbers? You may read Plotinus, for having an informal idea. The phenomenologies corresponds to the hypostases, + intelligible and sensible matter. from the numbers (+ comp) we can explain the non communicability of consciousness, its local undoubtability, how primitive matter emerges and leads to first plural quantum-like indeterminacies, etc. What I find difficult to grasp: If conciousness is non communicable how could we explai Bruno Marchal wrote: Basically just that they need to be phenomena and that they are not expressible in terms of something else. But this for me has little to do with what the phenomena *are*. I don't understand this. Well every strictly formal theory will just explain you phenomena formally. But since phenomena are something that trascends formalities, they fail to explain that which is fundamental to phenomena. Not at all. In a theory (perhaps formal) you can still attribute meaning to your terms, and accept that some rule of deduction preserves that meaning, then you can learn something new by deduction. You argument here is close to the error of saying that if neurons (artificial, or not) manipulates only other neurones, the meaning will escape them. This does not follow. Anything can be formalise, at some level of description, and indeed three of the arithmetical hypostases concern non formalizable by the machine form of knowledge by the machine. Only formalist philosopher copuld decide to not attribute meaning on the primitive terms, although he will attributes the usual meaning of the inference rules (which are at another level). Bruno Marchal wrote: It's like a theory saying: There is something, but don't aks me what it is. You should study the theory, and makes specific remark. That would lead nowhere, since I don't have anything specific against the theory. It's just that I think claiming it to explain something fundamental is missleading; it makes one search fundamental truth where there is none. Because what is fundamental to everyone is his own experience. I agree. But then study the theory which explains why machine can already understand this, but that we have to explain physics from the number if we want to take the theory seriously. I have never claim it explains something fundamental, it explains a new problem, the problem of justifying how machine dreams glue enough to stabilize first person plural sharable observation. I just formulate a problem (and show a solution, which is just to better illustrate the problem, and also that it would be premature to used UDA to abandon mechanism. And then there is that new pal: the universal machine, which is also a root of many problems. To understand UDA is really equal to underst(and that we don't and cannot really understand what numbers and machines are. But that we can learn think making us doubting some quasi dogma in the fundamental sciences. Bruno Marchal wrote: The theory explains what exists, and how the rest emerges from it. But then doesn't the rest exist, too? I just see a problem with claiming to explain what exists, when it is really not clear what existance could mean apart from the relatively meaningful, but vague, every day use. In that context
Re: Why I am I?
Bruno Marchal wrote: Honestly I think you are a bit dishonest to yourself here, since you already presume the appearance of matter, I assume nowhere primitive matter. I do assume consensual reality. If not, I would not post message on a list. Well, that was my point. So indeed numbers don't make sense independent of that, because Bruno Marchal wrote: unless you can make theories about numbers without perceiving anything, which I doubt. Humans cannot do that, but this is independent which are simùpler concept. All scientists agrees on numbers, and to day we can explain in a precise sense why numbers is the least we have to assume. Bruno Marchal wrote: When you do abstract math you nevertheless work with matter, that is, word written on paper or on a computer screen. So either you can indeed make sense of a circular theory Indeed. That is the case. Circularity is fundamental. I will soon explain this through the second recursion theorem of Kleene. The whole AUDA things is based almost exclusively based on that handling of circularity, which makes the self-reference possible, for machine, and relatively to universal machine(s). So we seem to agree actually. Bruno Marchal wrote: Bruno Marchal wrote: Of course, the human conception of the numbers depends on the human conception of his neighborhood and life, but when searching a TOE we have to agree on the simplest objects (ontology) from which we derive the others (phenomenology). For me this is not meaningful. What kind of phenomology could be derived from the fundamental numbers? You may read Plotinus, for having an informal idea. The phenomenologies corresponds to the hypostases, + intelligible and sensible matter. from the numbers (+ comp) we can explain the non communicability of consciousness, its local undoubtability, how primitive matter emerges and leads to first plural quantum-like indeterminacies, etc. What I find difficult to grasp: If conciousness is non communicable how could we explai Bruno Marchal wrote: Basically just that they need to be phenomena and that they are not expressible in terms of something else. But this for me has little to do with what the phenomena *are*. I don't understand this. Well every strictly formal theory will just explain you phenomena formally. But since phenomena are something that trascends formalities, they fail to explain that which is fundamental to phenomena. Bruno Marchal wrote: It's like a theory saying: There is something, but don't aks me what it is. You should study the theory, and makes specific remark. That would lead nowhere, since I don't have anything specific against the theory. It's just that I think claiming it to explain something fundamental is missleading; it makes one search fundamental truth where there is none. Because what is fundamental to everyone is his own experience. Bruno Marchal wrote: The theory explains what exists, and how the rest emerges from it. But then doesn't the rest exist, too? I just see a problem with claiming to explain what exists, when it is really not clear what existance could mean apart from the relatively meaningful, but vague, every day use. Bruno Marchal wrote: Searching it for me feels like searching something that is not there (it feels *bad*). You are right, in the sense that we already know there is no complete theory of what universal machines, or numbers, can do and not do. But that is the reason to become aware that about numbers and machine, we know nothing, and the hypothesis that we are machine, makes physics a concrete sum on all computations and this has observable consequences. We are just trying to understand what happens. don't confuse the search of a theory of everything, with any normative or authoritative theology. If you don't search for a theory of everything, you will adopt the current one. A brain is already a (failed) attempt toward a theory of everything. Searching *that* is what universal machines do. There is no problem with admitting that the word everything can have an evolving meaning in most terrestrial or effective context. I see where you coming from, but in effect a theory of everything is really just a theory of something then. The word everything itself has sort of a absolute connotation, because it doesn't say everything of *WHAT*? Relativizing it makes clear that the word everything is meaningless without context, though than it is just confusing to still use the word without context . Really we only discuss semantics here... I just find theory of everything sounds authorative, because it seems to claim there is nothing else to explain. Basically that is my only problem with a theory of everything - it is either a confusing name or disingenious, Bruno Marchal wrote: Bruno Marchal wrote: But elementary arithmetics does explain both consciousness,
Re: Why I am I?
But since practically anything can represent nearly anything else, it's ultimately all in the mind of the beholder. The representation must account for the observation. Hmmm? I'm not sure what you're saying here. How would the representation account for the observation? Do you mean that what is observed must account for the observation? If so, virtual realities and dreams would violate this rule, right? If not you can slip into solipsism. So all that is necessary to avoid solipsism is to append to any theory that seems open to the accusation of solipsism, ...and if I exist, it seems reasonable to assume that others do as well. Why would I be the only one? Viola! Solipsism avoided, right? I think you're rather too free with the term solipsism. So it occurs to me that in physicalism or in your proposal, our experience of the world is an internal aspect of consciousness. When I say, I know my brother, I'm not saying that I know how he really is. I'm saying that I know my internal model of my brother. There are many aspects of my brother's internal life and personality that I do not know. We build a model of the world, which is updated for us by our sensory processing apparatus, and this model is what we know...our own little virtual reality. We are all alone in our heads. Certainly if physicalism is correct. If you're correct, then we might could change this to: We are all alone in our algorithms, or something. Why do my conscious experiences have the particular contents that they do? Again, here we can explain why we cannot explain this. Like we can explain that no one can explain why it has been reconstituted in Washington and not in Moscow (or vice-versa). This is what we can call geography/history, by opposition to physics which studies laws (of the observable by universal machine). Laws are universal. In my youth I thought that physics was a sort of geography. Now I know that comp preserve a big body of physical laws. The multiverse is the same for all observers, (machine and non machine, really, except those 'quite close to the unique one) I would have thought that the apparent possibility of virtual realities, not to mention dreams and hallucinations, would indicate that you are mistaken on this point. If I can dream some of the time, why would there not be a set of conscious experiences somewhere in the infinity of relations between the numbers that constitute someone who lives in a dream that never ends? If I could write a computer simulation of a brain, and install it in a virtual reality to live out it's life in a virtual world that operates by a strange alternate set of laws, why would this set of experiences not also show up one of the programs generated by the universal dovetailer? Note that in either case, what is observed by that consciousness would probably not be sufficient to allow them to account for their observations. Again, I'd ask the same question for any other ontological theory. Why did the universe have the particular initial conditions and governing laws that it did, which lead to our present experiences? It just did. There's no explanation for that (again, at least none that doesn't depend on some other unexplained event). But, again, there seems to be no way to know for certain what *really* exists, a la Kant. If you believe that the primality of 17 does not depend on you, then you can explain why matter and consciousness is an unavoidable consequence of + and *. I would say that anyone who makes the same starting assumptions and follows the same rules of inference would conclude that 17 is prime. But the concepts of 17 and prime do not exist independently of context. I'll go with Meeker on this one: Mathematics is just precise expression and inference to avoid contradiction. I diagnostic you have still some some trouble grasping completely the 7th and 8th step of UDA, to be frank. It is OK, take it easy. Well, I think I grasp those points. I just don't think that they show that they are the source of conscious experience. Again, it seems very plausible that what I experience can be represented by physical objects (electrons moving through silicon and copper) or numbers. And by developing an algorithm that adjusts these representations in the right way you can ALSO represent how my experience changes over time. But I don't see WHY doing so would produce first person conscious experience. And so I reject it as an explanation for conscious experience. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Why I am I?
On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 5:17 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 09 Dec 2009, at 20:51, Rex Allen wrote: We see evolution...but it only exists in our minds, as a tool for our understanding. It's not something that exists in the world. Again, taking the physicalist view. We see space, time, and energy, but it only exists in our minds ... Actually, we don't see those things. Physicists share only number relations, and we lived uncommunicable qualia. So communication depends on common experiences. All fundamental concepts are ineffable, and unless both parties in the conversation have the same set of fundamental concepts, then nothing that derives from those building blocks can be discussed. So it's not the case that there's something special about the ineffability of qualia. What makes them ineffable is the fact that they are fundamental. They can't be expressed in terms of anything else. So, if you don't already have knowledge of them, gained from experience, then I can't communicate with you about them. For instance, my brother and I can use the fundamental concept of red in our conversations because we both know what red is. We both have experience of red. So when he talks about red sunsets, and red apples, and red cars, I have a good idea of what he means. We have yet to encounter difficulties due to a difference of understanding about red. However, I cannot communicate clearly with my color-blind cousin about red, because he has no experience of red. So I know that when we discuss red sunsets, we are not communicating with perfect mutual understanding. The limits of language in this regard has nothing to do with the nature of experience, or consciousness. The problem is that fundamental concepts can't be described in terms of other things...if they could be, then by definition they wouldn't be fundamental. Fundamental things can only be pointed at...and if you can't see what I'm pointing at, then we can't really talk about it. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Why I am I?
On 12 Dec 2009, at 19:11, benjayk wrote: Bruno Marchal wrote: On 10 Dec 2009, at 03:23, benjayk wrote: For me numbers don't make independent sense of the appearance (!) of matter, too. Since I cannot conceive of any meaning of the number 2 without reffering to some real (in the sense of every day usage) object. Then all physical theories are circular, and explains nothing. All theories in physics presuppose arithmetical truth (and even analytical truth, but this is just to simplify the derivations). Well every theory is circular in that there are always axiom(s) that are presumed to be true (and meaningful), and in that the theory is just correct if the reasoning is correct, which can never be proven. Basically it just comes down to whether you like or accept the reasoning and the axioms. Theories and science are just a tool. I agree. And then computer science, thanks to Kleene and others, managed very well the circularity. You may feel that some too circular theories don't explain anything, but you can only say they don't explain anything to you. I was using using circular in its sense of viciously circular. Honestly I think you are a bit dishonest to yourself here, since you already presume the appearance of matter, I assume nowhere primitive matter. I do assume consensual reality. If not, I would not post message on a list. unless you can make theories about numbers without perceiving anything, which I doubt. Humans cannot do that, but this is independent which are simùpler concept. All scientists agrees on numbers, and to day we can explain in a precise sense why numbers is the least we have to assume. When you do abstract math you nevertheless work with matter, that is, word written on paper or on a computer screen. So either you can indeed make sense of a circular theory Indeed. That is the case. Circularity is fundamental. I will soon explain this through the second recursion theorem of Kleene. The whole AUDA things is based almost exclusively based on that handling of circularity, which makes the self-reference possible, for machine, and relatively to universal machine(s). or you have to agree that no theory explains anything (or you manage to manipulate numbers without having the experience of perceiving matter). Or I missed your point. Explaining consists in reducing what I understand badly into what I have a better understanding. Also, my point in not a new theory, a new theorem. If we are machine, then matter becomes a complete mystery which has to be explained from the numbers (UDA). The theorem is in the has to. Then it happens to the derivation has been partially done (AUDA). Bruno Marchal wrote: Of course, the human conception of the numbers depends on the human conception of his neighborhood and life, but when searching a TOE we have to agree on the simplest objects (ontology) from which we derive the others (phenomenology). For me this is not meaningful. What kind of phenomology could be derived from the fundamental numbers? You may read Plotinus, for having an informal idea. The phenomenologies corresponds to the hypostases, + intelligible and sensible matter. from the numbers (+ comp) we can explain the non communicability of consciousness, its local undoubtability, how primitive matter emerges and leads to first plural quantum-like indeterminacies, etc. Basically just that they need to be phenomena and that they are not expressible in terms of something else. But this for me has little to do with what the phenomena *are*. I don't understand this. It's like a theory saying: There is something, but don't aks me what it is. You should study the theory, and makes specific remark. The theory explains what exists, and how the rest emerges from it. All this in a way which is sufficiently detailed as to be tested experimentally. Strictly speaking it is not my theory, it is the universal machines' theory. It is a theology because it makes clear the part of the phenomenology which is sharable, and the part which is unsharable, except by projections, betting, hoping, fearing, praying, etc. The trick is that a Löbian machine can study the theology of the correct machine without knowing if itself is correct, and so without knowing if the theology (toy theology if you want) apply to iself. And I don't see what's especially simple about numbers. For me they are more complex than many everyday objects, because they rely on dualistic notions like classical logic and an absolute inequality of something (1 is absolutely not 2). It requires the ability of distinguishing two things, indeed, and the ability to repeat action, like taking the successor. Empirically, this is grasped by children, and elementary arithmetic is virtually a subtheory of all scientific theories, and explictly so for theories which happens to be
Re: Why I am I?
On Sun, Dec 13, 2009 at 10:25 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Though in another way I think we already have a theory of everything a theory can explain *ultimately* (which is *not even remotely* close to everything, since the more you trascend a theory the bigger the possibilities get): The theory is that all theories are either contradictory or incomplete (we have to go beyond theories to access truth). I think Gödel already made the quest for the complete theory meaningless. Gödel showed that all theories on *numbers* are contradictory of incomplete. And it is a direct consequence of Church thesis. Once you grasp the concept of universal number or machine, you understand that truth, even on just machines and numbers, is not completely axiomatisable. But that is a reason to be humble in front of arithmetical truth. Not a reason to dismiss it. It kicks back a lot. Also, if you mention Gödel, it means you accept elementary arithmetic. My logical point is that if you believe you (can) surivive with a digital *body*, then elementary arithmetic has to be enough. WE have too extract the SWE, and other appearances from that. It is a point in (applied) logic, if you want. Bruno, I have had some difficulty in seeing how to get from the numbers and arithmetic to universal machines and programs such as the universal dovetailer. For example, the existence of the Java language doesn't directly imply all possible Java programs are being executed somewhere. Is there some example you can provide of how to get from numbers to the execution of programs? I've been thinking about it myself for a while and this is the closest I have gotten, is it along the right track? 1. If all natural numbers exist, then relations between those numbers exist (e.g. 5 is 3 more than 2) 2. There are an infinite number of ways to get from some number x to number y (e.g. if x is 2, and y is 5: y = x^2+1, y = x + 3, y = x * 3 - 1) are all valid relations between 2 and 5. 3. Every relation, may be applied recursively to generate an infinite sequence of numbers, the simplest relation: y=x+1, when applied recursively gives all the successors, others more complex ones might give the Fibonacci sequence, or run through states of the Game of Life. Is this enough? It seems like something is being added on top of the numbers, the relations themselves must be treated as independent entities, as well as recursively applied relations for every number. Is there a simpler or more obvious way the existence of numbers yields the dovetailer? Thanks, Jason -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Why I am I?
On 13 Dec 2009, at 16:40, Rex Allen wrote: I diagnostic you have still some some trouble grasping completely the 7th and 8th step of UDA, to be frank. It is OK, take it easy. Well, I think I grasp those points. I just don't think that they show that they are the source of conscious experience. Again, it seems very plausible that what I experience can be represented by physical objects (electrons moving through silicon and copper) or numbers. And by developing an algorithm that adjusts these representations in the right way you can ALSO represent how my experience changes over time. But I don't see WHY doing so would produce first person conscious experience. And so I reject it as an explanation for conscious experience. OK, you think that comp is false. I really don't know. From biology and quantum physics, and computer science, I would say that there are some clues that comp is true, but there are many remaining problems, and even clues that it may be false. All my point is that if we make the Digital Mechanist hypothesis (DM = comp), then the mind body problem is two times more difficult than materialist are thinking. Indeed with DM, we have to explain how matter arise from numbers, not just mind. Then computer science gives, by itself, through universal machine self- reference, a theory of mind, which explains rather well the difference between qualia and quanta. But this needs AUDA, and, although you don't need DM, you need an open mindness for the strong AI thesis, for the idea that a machine can think. This may be true, and yet comp is false. My goal was in showing that comp, which an hypothesis in philosophy of mind/theology, is refutable empirically, and thus is amenable to the scientific study. That's all. I dunno if comp is true or not. I don't even know if I should hope of fear it. It is too complex for that. What I do believe (prove), is that comp + weak materialism is inconsistent. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Why I am I?
On 13 Dec 2009, at 18:20, Jason Resch wrote: On Sun, Dec 13, 2009 at 10:25 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Though in another way I think we already have a theory of everything a theory can explain *ultimately* (which is *not even remotely* close to everything, since the more you trascend a theory the bigger the possibilities get): The theory is that all theories are either contradictory or incomplete (we have to go beyond theories to access truth). I think Gödel already made the quest for the complete theory meaningless. Gödel showed that all theories on *numbers* are contradictory of incomplete. And it is a direct consequence of Church thesis. Once you grasp the concept of universal number or machine, you understand that truth, even on just machines and numbers, is not completely axiomatisable. But that is a reason to be humble in front of arithmetical truth. Not a reason to dismiss it. It kicks back a lot. Also, if you mention Gödel, it means you accept elementary arithmetic. My logical point is that if you believe you (can) surivive with a digital *body*, then elementary arithmetic has to be enough. WE have too extract the SWE, and other appearances from that. It is a point in (applied) logic, if you want. Bruno, I have had some difficulty in seeing how to get from the numbers and arithmetic to universal machines and programs such as the universal dovetailer. For example, the existence of the Java language doesn't directly imply all possible Java programs are being executed somewhere. Is there some example you can provide of how to get from numbers to the execution of programs? I've been thinking about it myself for a while and this is the closest I have gotten, is it along the right track? 1. If all natural numbers exist, then relations between those numbers exist (e.g. 5 is 3 more than 2) 2. There are an infinite number of ways to get from some number x to number y (e.g. if x is 2, and y is 5: y = x^2+1, y = x + 3, y = x * 3 - 1) are all valid relations between 2 and 5. 3. Every relation, may be applied recursively to generate an infinite sequence of numbers, the simplest relation: y=x+1, when applied recursively gives all the successors, others more complex ones might give the Fibonacci sequence, or run through states of the Game of Life. Is this enough? It seems like something is being added on top of the numbers, the relations themselves must be treated as independent entities, as well as recursively applied relations for every number. Is there a simpler or more obvious way the existence of numbers yields the dovetailer? It is a long and tedious exercise to show that the computable relations can be represented in the form of arithmetical relations (provable in an already rather weak theory). I have defined computations by sequences of phi_i^s(n) for s = 0, 1, 3, 4, Those sequences can be represented in first order arithmetic, and the relevant one to describe the universal dovetailer can be represented as well and proved (by weak theories). Good question, though. I will think how to explain this more explicitly later, but not too much because it is usually longer than programing an operating system in language machine. A big part of that work is what Gödel did in his incompleteness proof: to represent metamathemetical notion in arithmetic. Like provability can be translated in arithmetic, concept like universal machine and computations can also be translated. this needs a rather long explanation, given that the machine (or elementary arithmetic) a priori knows nothing about those notions. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Why I am I?
On Tue, Dec 8, 2009 at 2:28 PM, Brent Meeker meeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: Rex Allen wrote: I'm thinking of something similar to the symbol grounding problem: The Symbol Grounding Problem is related to the problem of how words (symbols) get their meanings, and hence to the problem of what meaning itself really is. The problem of meaning is in turn related to the problem of consciousness, or how it is that mental states are meaningful. According to a widely held theory of cognition, computationalism, cognition (i.e., thinking) is just a form of computation. But computation in turn is just formal symbol manipulation: symbols are manipulated according to rules that are based on the symbols' shapes, not their meanings. How are those symbols (e.g., the words in our heads) connected to the things they refer to? This question seems like a conundrum generated by abstracting symbols out their context of communication and action and then being surprised that you can't say what they communicate or what action they will elicit. So the quote mentions the words in our heads, but let's also include the images in my head. Or more generally yet, the thoughts in my head which are about things out in the world. You make the point that these taking these out of the context of communication and action is what generates the conundrum. But with respect to consciousness it's not clear to me that context should matter. So let's go to a Boltzmann Brain scenario. In far distant future, the de Sitter radiation being emitted from the cosmological horizon just happens to come together in a extremely improbable but not impossible configuration that is functionally isomorphic to a computer containing the simulation of a brain, plus a set of lookup tables (keyed by time slice) storing 70 years worth of sensory data. The lookup tables don't contain a virtual world, instead (by complete chance) the tables contain values that match the output that a computer simulation of a virtual world WOULD produce if such an environmental simulation were executed in tandem with the simulated brain. So. Extremely unlikely. But not obviously impossible. Which means that given enough time, it's probably inevitable. So would this physical system experience consciousness? Would the person being simulated have meaningful thoughts, even though it existed outside of any meaningful context? Evolution isn't a fundamental law, right? There is no evolution field or particle. Evolution doesn't select anything. Evolution has no causal power. It's true it's a description and as such has no causal power - but neither do any of the laws of physics. I guess the question is do the laws of physics as currently formulated *approximate* something that actually exists out in the world? In the case of a universe where there really is no reason for the distribution of matter and events in 4-D space-time, then the laws of physics are indeed JUST a description of the way things seem to us as conscious observers. They are not an approximation of anything that actually exists, and so in that case I agree that they have no causal power. Again, assuming reductive physicalism, the initial state of the universe and the fundamental laws of physics (which may or may not have some sort of random aspect) completely determines what animals we observe in the present. If there is some randomness, then the initial state + laws of physics do NOT completely determine the present. Let's say that I have some quantum dice and I say, if the numbers rolled add to an odd value I will do A, but if they add to even value I will do B. In this case, whether I do A or B is completely determined by the random outcome of the quantum dice, right? Well...that random outcome plus whatever caused me to entrust my fate to those dice in the first place. So randomness is fundamental...it doesn't reduce to anything else. So I don't think that I've gone wrong by saying that if the physical laws have a random aspect, then they (plus the initial state of the universe) completely determine what happens. More philosophical scientists don't assume their theories indicate what's really real. I wonder why all scientists don't avoid such an assumption? It seems to me that Kant makes a good argument that we probably can't know anything about the underlying nature of reality. It seems to hold up pretty well even after 200+ years. What we know are phenomena, with knowledge of the underlying noumena being beyond our reach. Quoting (http://www.philosophypages.com/hy/5g.htm): Having seen Kant's transcendental deduction of the categories as pure concepts of the understanding applicable a priori to every possible experience, we might naturally wish to ask the further question whether these regulative principles are really true. Are there substances? Does every event have a cause? Do all things interact? Given that we must suppose them in order to have any
Re: Why I am I?
Bruno Marchal wrote: On 10 Dec 2009, at 03:23, benjayk wrote: For me numbers don't make independent sense of the appearance (!) of matter, too. Since I cannot conceive of any meaning of the number 2 without reffering to some real (in the sense of every day usage) object. Then all physical theories are circular, and explains nothing. All theories in physics presuppose arithmetical truth (and even analytical truth, but this is just to simplify the derivations). Well every theory is circular in that there are always axiom(s) that are presumed to be true (and meaningful), and in that the theory is just correct if the reasoning is correct, which can never be proven. Basically it just comes down to whether you like or accept the reasoning and the axioms. Theories and science are just a tool. You may feel that some too circular theories don't explain anything, but you can only say they don't explain anything to you. Honestly I think you are a bit dishonest to yourself here, since you already presume the appearance of matter, unless you can make theories about numbers without perceiving anything, which I doubt. When you do abstract math you nevertheless work with matter, that is, word written on paper or on a computer screen. So either you can indeed make sense of a circular theory or you have to agree that no theory explains anything (or you manage to manipulate numbers without having the experience of perceiving matter). Or I missed your point. Bruno Marchal wrote: Of course, the human conception of the numbers depends on the human conception of his neighborhood and life, but when searching a TOE we have to agree on the simplest objects (ontology) from which we derive the others (phenomenology). For me this is not meaningful. What kind of phenomology could be derived from the fundamental numbers? Basically just that they need to be phenomena and that they are not expressible in terms of something else. But this for me has little to do with what the phenomena *are*. It's like a theory saying: There is something, but don't aks me what it is. And I don't see what's especially simple about numbers. For me they are more complex than many everyday objects, because they rely on dualistic notions like classical logic and an absolute inequality of something (1 is absolutely not 2). Indeed the theory of natural numbers may be the simplest formal system, but I am reluctant to see formal systems as real objects. Bruno Marchal wrote: So numbers don't give rise to arithmetical truth, You need addition, multiplication and classical logic. But this only works because you presume it leads to some kind of truth and that addition and multiplication are meaningful (you presume classical logic). So if anything numbers give rise to an expression of truth in terms of your systematization of it. Not too suprising. This only works if you like numbers especially much and they help you understand truth. One could as well deny that addition is meaningful without context (eg because two rainddrops melt into one: 1+1=1)... Bruno Marchal wrote: but truth gives rise to (expresses as) numbers. Which truth. What do you mean by 'truth' here? I don't know (well I do know in some ways, but expressing them adequatly would probably be impossible). What is arithmetical truth? According to tarski you can't tell me, either. Bruno Marchal wrote: Maybe what really exists is not a meaningful thing to ask in first place, because if something really exists, it certainly cannot be expressed with words. Why? This is like asserting there is no TOE, before searching. I cannot search a theory of everything, because it is a meaningless notion for me. Searching it for me feels like searching something that is not there (it feels *bad*). Though in another way I think we already have a theory of everything a theory can explain *ultimately* (which is *not even remotely* close to everything, since the more you trascend a theory the bigger the possibilities get): The theory is that all theories are either contradictory or incomplete (we have to go beyond theories to access truth). I think Gödel already made the quest for the complete theory meaningless. Bruno Marchal wrote: But elementary arithmetics does explain both consciousness, including its non definability That's funny, because this is little more than empty words for me. If your theory explains something, it needs an definition of it, or it only explains that it doesn't explain that which it doesn't defines, except *that*. Bruno Marchal wrote: , and matter, including both its computational and non computational aspects. For me matter is explained by the fact that it is touchable, seeable, and so forth. Elementary arithmetics cannot do that. So no, it doesn't explain matter for me. Maybe it does explain that you cannot reduce experience of matter and maybe it can explain measurable features about it; I don't
Re: Why I am I?
On 11 Dec 2009, at 02:40, Jason Resch wrote: On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 4:17 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: But if numbers can just exist, and matter can just exist, then why can't conscious experiences just exist? Numbers can just exist, and this is the last unsolvable mystery. Yet we can explain (assuming comp) why this mystery is absolutely unsolvable. It is not possible to explain numbers without assuming numbers (or combinators, etc.) Matter cannot exists primitively, but can exist as appearance for some numbers, and those appearance obeys laws, reducible to the math of universal numbers. Consciousness also, but is more fundamental than matter: NUMBER = CONSCIOUSNESS = MATTER, is the probable causal (in some precise number theoretical sense) relation. (probably even NUMBER = CONSCIOUSNESS = MATTER = HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS = HUMAN NUMBERS). Here the last two steps would explain why we don't accept easily (intuitively) the origin). That is interesting, why would you say NUMBER = CONCIOUSNESS = MATTER is more probable than NUMBER = MATTER = CONSCIOUSNESS? Is it related to Boltzmann's theory of independent brains being more probable than whole universes? It follows from UDA, but is even clearer in AUDA, or in Plotinus where matter is the last thing emanating from the ONE, almost despite its will. Matter is almost described as what even God cannot control. Bit frightening given that matter = evil, in the mindset of the antic platonician. But matter is never created by the Universal Dovetailer. If your current mental state can be described by the digital information S, what you can can call matter is the result of 2^aleph_zero infinite computations which completes below your level of substitution. A priori, some equivalence relation can lower that number. Of course this is still an open problem. It may be possible that this magma of computations appears to be emulable itself (which is not very plausible, but not yet discarded). This would mean that a special particular universal dovetailing would win on all the others (quantum universal dovetailing?). Also, pure number theory seems to have some strange relation with theoretical physics, so it may be true that physics is deeper, and that again some number relations would described the winning dovetailing. This is speculation. A priori matter is just a first person (plural) view of the infinitely many computations which appears, by UDA, in the bottom, or in anything isolated from me (like already in quantum mechanics). To your second point, about NUMBER = CONSCIOUSNESS = MATTER = HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS = HUMAN NUMBERS, what is the purpose/role of the consciousness step prior to matter? How does consciousness support matter that supports human consciousness? Consciousness is the normal state of the universal person or löbian machine, as captured for example by the 8 hypostases. It is a mathematical fixed point of some universal transformation. It exists independently of time, matter, and those things. Matter, if you want, is a collective creation of all Löbian machines. Humans are Löbians (in the optimist hypothesis), but it seems they have entangled themselves in very long and deep histories, which add many colors to the consciousness experience. We are relatively big and relatively rare, but globally we are a continuum, as far as we multiplies (apparently in different dimensions). (I use the rule Y = II, that is bifurcation of the future multiplies the past). Unfortunately this is intuitive, and far from being translated in the AUDA part. This seems to involved knots, braids, Temperley algebra, and may be related to natural graded Kripke structures related to Z1 and Z1* (the seventh and eigth arithmetical hypostases). Why do my conscious experiences have the particular contents that they do? Again, here we can explain why we cannot explain this. Like we can explain that no one can explain why it has been reconstituted in Washington and not in Moscow (or vice-versa). This is what we can call geography/history, by opposition to physics which studies laws (of the observable by universal machine). Laws are universal. In my youth I thought that physics was a sort of geography. Now I know that comp preserve a big body of physical laws. The multiverse is the same for all observers, (machine and non machine, really, except those 'quite close to the unique one) That is very interesting, what do you mean by those close to the unique one? Would these be observers which appear early on in the Dovetailer Algorithm? By the unique one I was referring to God, or to the ONE of Plotinus. I still have no clue if there is a sense to look at this as if it was a person or a thing. For a simple lobian machine like Peano Arithmetic, the ONE is arithmetical truth. This is an object without any name for the
Re: Why I am I?
On 09 Dec 2009, at 20:51, Rex Allen wrote: On Tue, Dec 8, 2009 at 2:28 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 08 Dec 2009, at 09:50, Rex Allen wrote: In such a reality, things just are what they are. If you find some explanations good and others bad, that's just the epiphenominal residue of more fundamental physical processes which are themselves unconcerned with such things. Having predictive theories was no doubt selected by evolution - as well as a psychological to see meaning in things. Evolution isn't a fundamental law, right? There is no evolution field or particle. Evolution doesn't select anything. Evolution has no causal power. Of course it has! It is like with the numbers or the combinators, once the initial rule of the game is above the universal number/machine treshold, you get a creative bomb. This generates new and new things, none having their behavior ever completely unifiable in any theory. In the physicalist view, evolution is an emergent law, right? I will say yes, for the sake of the argument. But I tend to consider evolution as a mathematical phenomenon, described in part by genetical algorithmic, and I would distinguish evolution-the math, and its particular manifestation relatively to us (our computational histories/history). The second is only a more instantiated version of the first. It emerges out of the local interactions of fundamental entities, and none of these local interactions have anything to do with evolution. OK, but remember that I am arguing that the fundamental entities of physics are not fundamental at all. They are themselves complex object which have evolved, although in this case the evolution is not at all a physical process, but a purely arithmetical one. This is OK. if you want to keep a physicalist stance, just consider that with the computationalist hypothesis, the elementary particles are just numbers, and their interaction are given by addition and multiplication. (You can take the combinators S and K, and the operations Kxy = y; Sxyz = xz(yz), if you don't like numbers, ...). But evolution doesn't ADD anything to those local interactions...it can be completely reduced to them. You can say so. But again, with such phrasing, the emergence of the physical world can be said to have also not add anything too. We see evolution...but it only exists in our minds, as a tool for our understanding. It's not something that exists in the world. Again, taking the physicalist view. We see space, time, and energy, but it only exists in our minds ... Actually, we don't see those things. Physicists share only number relations, and we lived uncommunicable qualia. So, to rely on Davies for articulation purposes again: Darwinism provides a novel form of causation inasmuch as the causal chain runs counter to the normal descriptive sequence. Chronologically, what happens is that first a mutation is caused by a local physical interaction, e.g. the impact of a cosmic ray at a specific location with an atom in a DNA molecule. Later, possibly many years later, the environment ‘selects’ the mutant by permitting the organism to reproduce more efficiently. In terms of physics, selection involves vast numbers of local forces acting over long periods of time, the net result of which is to bring about a long-term change in the genome of the organism’s lineage. It is the original atomic event in combination with the subsequent complicated events that together give a full causative account of the evolutionary story. Yet biologists would be hard-pressed to tell this story in those local physical terms. Instead, natural selection is described as having causal powers, even though it is causatively neutral – a sieve. OK, but, assuming comp, if UDA is correct, you can extend this remark to the hole physical reality. To say that a proton attracts an electron is a metaphor to describe interference between infinities of computations, themselves being metaphor for describing purely number theoretical relations. Again, assuming reductive physicalism, the initial state of the universe and the fundamental laws of physics (which may or may not have some sort of random aspect) completely determines what animals we observe in the present. Evolution is just a useful fictional narrative that helps us think about what we observe. A description of what we observe, not an explanation for it. And why not add, in that case, ... like time, space, universe, laws are also convenient fiction for describing what we observe? So I'm certainly fine with taking a Kantian view of time and space, and even the appearance of causality, as being aspects of our experience of the world...and not things that exist outside of our experience of them. And since we use our perceptions to build our mental image of the universe, then this mental image also has nothing to do
Re: Why I am I?
On 10 Dec 2009, at 03:23, benjayk wrote: For me numbers don't make independent sense of the appearance (!) of matter, too. Since I cannot conceive of any meaning of the number 2 without reffering to some real (in the sense of every day usage) object. Then all physical theories are circular, and explains nothing. All theories in physics presuppose arithmetical truth (and even analytical truth, but this is just to simplify the derivations). I am aware that Hartree Field pretends otherwise, but he is using the numbers implicitly. Of course, the human conception of the numbers depends on the human conception of his neighborhood and life, but when searching a TOE we have to agree on the simplest objects (ontology) from which we derive the others (phenomenology). So numbers don't give rise to arithmetical truth, You need addition, multiplication and classical logic. but truth gives rise to (expresses as) numbers. Which truth. What do you mean by 'truth' here? Maybe what really exists is not a meaningful thing to ask in first place, because if something really exists, it certainly cannot be expressed with words. Why? This is like asserting there is no TOE, before searching. But elementary arithmetics does explain both consciousness, including its non definability, and matter, including both its computational and non computational aspects. If you have a better explanation, I can listen, but why not study the existing explanation? So why aks a question that can't be answered with words at all? It is up to you to show the question cannot answered at all, and for this you need a theory. Probably we generally should take words less serious (especially with regards to fundamental questions) and expect no satisfying answers from them. This is giving up research. Of course, you can always do that. Nevertheless, to invoke a vague theory or philosophy to dismiss automatically the theories bring by others will not help to progress. This is what is done by most confessional religion since the scientific attitude has been abandoned in theology/fundamental research. Bruno Marchal. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Why I am I?
On 10 Dec 2009, at 03:23, benjayk wrote: For me numbers don't make independent sense of the appearance (!) of matter, too. Since I cannot conceive of any meaning of the number 2 without reffering to some real (in the sense of every day usage) object. So I find it unconvincing that conciousness arises out of numbers, since it is inconceivable for me what numbers mean independent of me or even the world I perceive. Let me try a second reply (hopefully better). Actually I confess having not taking into account enough your (!) between appearance and matter. The game here consists in trying to understand, as far as possible, the riddle of the appearance (!) of matter and the mystery of consciousness. Those terms are complex, we can hardly define them, but we may agree on some proposition, perhaps just for the sake of reasoning. I think many agrees on the fact that none of us can doubt, here and now, its own consciousness. It is an example, albeit very personal, of true statement, even if it seems non expressible and non communicable (too bad, for that truth?(*)) And then, if only because it will make it possible to reason, some of us accept the intuitive idea that my consciousness could be preserved though digital encoding, annihilation and digital reconstruction (comp). Then, reasoning leads to a fundamental conceptual simplification of the possible TOE. In a nutshell, and roughly speaking the intended TOE where - last century: SWE + Wave-reduction+unintelligible theory of mind. But in 1957, Everett proposes a better theory which is just SWE + comp. Known as Many World interpretation of quantum mechanics. (But it is not an interpretation of QM, it is simply another theory. The one you get when you drop the wave collapse in old QM). But then your servitor showed, that unless we drop indeed the reality/ notions of first person, and consciousness, and mind, etc. then, in case the SWE is indeed correct, it has to be derived from only comp. Like the collapse is derived from SWE. Note that I am not pretending having the truth here. Comp may be false, and a collapse of the wave is not an entirely crackpot idea, if only people could develop a clear theory of that. All what I say, is that taking comp seriously, we can indeed explain the appearances of the collapse in the memories of the average machine, like Everett showed, but we have to derive the SWE from comp alone (UDA). And we get that price: the difference between the communicable truth and truth, as a root for the subjective undoubtable qualia. But comp is not a trivial theory. To make the digitalness precise and general you need Church thesis, and you get the whole of the mathematical computer science and its embedding in mathematical logic, but also number theory, finite set theories, cartesian closed categories, I mean a vast range of mathematical discoveries which shed light on something new: *that* universal machine (and sub-universal little cousins). New, except that we are willing to bet nature already did it, through the brain, in the consensual reality sense. Indeed, that is comp, with a very large sense for brain. If only, the comp hyp makes COMPuter science two times more interesting, especially through mathematical logic which can describe, for simple lobian machine, the difference between the many modalities and their difference between truth, and the machine accessibility to those truth. With, or wihout comp, relative numbers (machine) develop rich and complex theologies. The soul is a number which moves itself, said Xenocratus (and Pythagorus). We may have to abandon Aristotelian theology for neoneoneo phytagorean Platonist like theology (quite transformed through Gödel, Mandelbrot, Post, Turing, ...). Here is the (an) ontic part of reality; numbers with addition and multiplication. All the dreams are there, and coherent dreams cohere. By numbers I mean 0, and its successors s(0), s(s(0)), etc. The laws are: For all x: x + 0 = x For all x and for all y: x + s(y) = s(x + y) For all x: x * 0 = 0 For all x and for all y: x * s(y) = (x * y) + x Let me solve the exercise. Proving that 2 + 2 = 4, that is s(s(0)) + s(s(0)) = s(s(s(s(0. Use repetitively the second axiom For all x and for all y: x + s(y) = s(x + y). Substituting x by s(s(0)), and y by s(0) in the second axiom gives s(s(0)) + s(s(0) = s(s(s(0)) + s(0)). This s(s(s(0)) + s(0)) is really s( s(s(0)) + s(0) ). We have reduced the problem to to the problem of s(s(0) +s(0). Keep in mind not to forget the s ( ) above. (***!!!***) By the second axiom again: s(s(0) + s(0) is, with x = s(s(0)) and y = 0: s( s(s(0)) + 0). But by the *first* axiom (with x = s(s(0))), s(s(0)) + 0 = s(s(0)). So s( s(s(0)) + 0) = s(s(s(0))). (substitution of identical). Keeping in mind the s (cf (***!!!***)). , this gives s(s(s(s(0. Et voilà. If you can find a simpler
Re: Why I am I?
On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 4:17 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: But if numbers can just exist, and matter can just exist, then why can't conscious experiences just exist? Numbers can just exist, and this is the last unsolvable mystery. Yet we can explain (assuming comp) why this mystery is absolutely unsolvable. It is not possible to explain numbers without assuming numbers (or combinators, etc.) Matter cannot exists primitively, but can exist as appearance for some numbers, and those appearance obeys laws, reducible to the math of universal numbers. Consciousness also, but is more fundamental than matter: NUMBER = CONSCIOUSNESS = MATTER, is the probable causal (in some precise number theoretical sense) relation. (probably even NUMBER = CONSCIOUSNESS = MATTER = HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS = HUMAN NUMBERS). Here the last two steps would explain why we don't accept easily (intuitively) the origin). That is interesting, why would you say NUMBER = CONCIOUSNESS = MATTER is more probable than NUMBER = MATTER = CONSCIOUSNESS? Is it related to Boltzmann's theory of independent brains being more probable than whole universes? To your second point, about NUMBER = CONSCIOUSNESS = MATTER = HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS = HUMAN NUMBERS, what is the purpose/role of the consciousness step prior to matter? How does consciousness support matter that supports human consciousness? Why do my conscious experiences have the particular contents that they do? Again, here we can explain why we cannot explain this. Like we can explain that no one can explain why it has been reconstituted in Washington and not in Moscow (or vice-versa). This is what we can call geography/history, by opposition to physics which studies laws (of the observable by universal machine). Laws are universal. In my youth I thought that physics was a sort of geography. Now I know that comp preserve a big body of physical laws. The multiverse is the same for all observers, (machine and non machine, really, except those 'quite close to the unique one) That is very interesting, what do you mean by those close to the unique one? Would these be observers which appear early on in the Dovetailer Algorithm? Jason -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Why I am I?
Brent Meeker-2 wrote: benjayk wrote: Rex Allen wrote: Where could the explanation begin? I'd say there is no explanation. It just is what it is. As Brent said...it's descriptions all the way down. I wouldn't neccesarily disagree, though only if you mean verbal or formal explanation. In a sense our life and our experiences are explanations of something, don't you think so? It is true though, that our lifes (all the content of conciousness and the way it evolves) itself then can have no complete explanation. So what life wants to explain then? I think it seeks to explain that it *needs* no explanation beyond itself, because it is good and nobody *absolutely* needs an explanation for what is good. If it is good enough, you will except it without explanation - because this is the ultimate explanation. Who could ever disagree with The world is perfect, it is just here to experience ever increasing joy and learn something exciting about ourselves? when it really comes down to it? So how could it be a wrong explanation for anyone? I see no way. Well if you were dying of AIDS, your husband had his hands hacked off by militias, and your child was starving to death you might see a way. In this case I probably wouldn't believe that the world is perfect. Nevertheless it may be the case that the things I perceive as bad are ulitmately not bad at all, even to the contrary. Certainly it is very unpleasant to have AIDS, but both having AIDS and dying may be a good tool for your own development and thus a tool for the good. As I wrote before I had times that I had the thought I was destined to be in hell (on a N2O trip) and I was quite depressive for a few years in my life... I certainly didn't believe that the world was very good then. But in retrospection I have to disagree (even though I still am very far from feeling this at all times). All the bad feelings passed and were relatively meaningless, so how could I complain? Probably perfect is the wrong word, because it may suggest that there is nothing bad about it. Obviously there is. But I really think that there is nothing *ultimately* bad about it, because every bad things wants to get rid of itself. So I find it plausible bad things are impermanent and thus are just a tool to get us to the good. They are bad, but they are good too. And the good prevails, I think, as it is potentially eternal. What I really wanted to express, and it probably didn't get across, is that reality could be perfect in the sense it is ultimately better than all your expectations and imaginations and thus ultimately there is simply no reason to say: I don't want 'truth' or reality to exists and THAT may be the ultimate reason. It is the argument that swallows all counterarguments by sheer goodness. If reality wouldn't be that way all beings would want to try to escape reality/truth, not only temporarily, but forever. But then how could it be called reality or the truth? If every one tried to escape truth ultimately, the consensus truth would start to be not the real truth... But then what could define the real truth? How could subjective truth and objective truth diverge without making truth meaningless? Brent Meeker-2 wrote: I agree here. But I would add that conciousness can conceivably make independent sense for me, while numbers or matter can't. For me numbers don't make independent sense of the appearance (!) of matter, too. Since I cannot conceive of any meaning of the number 2 without reffering to some real (in the sense of every day usage) object. But can you conceive of a meaning for 10 930 702 499? Yes, for example in the context of computer files the number could mean so many of 'bytes' that I should consider moving the file to my external drive, in order to save space, except the file is important. It is true that the number 14 233 744 161 could have the same meaning, so for me this number has no special meaning. But I didn't say every number has to have a special meaning (for me) in any context. Brent Meeker-2 wrote: Maybe what really exists is not a meaningful thing to ask in first place, because if something really exists, it certainly cannot be expressed with words. So why aks a question that can't be answered with words at all? But we can ask for true descriptions about it. Isn't it true that you are reading a computer screen? Of course we can't be sure about this, but we don't have to give up betting on it. I completely agree! We can indeed ask for true (or at least practical) descriptions of something, no matter whether it REALLY REALLY exist. I think my computer screen does really exist, but not in the ultimate sense of really really existing (that is independently of everything else), which I was referring to. After all I could destroy my screen and than it would not exist so much. Personally I am sure that my computer screen exists, because I see it, I am just not
Re: Why I am I?
On Tue, Dec 8, 2009 at 2:28 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 08 Dec 2009, at 09:50, Rex Allen wrote: In such a reality, things just are what they are. If you find some explanations good and others bad, that's just the epiphenominal residue of more fundamental physical processes which are themselves unconcerned with such things. Having predictive theories was no doubt selected by evolution - as well as a psychological to see meaning in things. Evolution isn't a fundamental law, right? There is no evolution field or particle. Evolution doesn't select anything. Evolution has no causal power. Of course it has! It is like with the numbers or the combinators, once the initial rule of the game is above the universal number/machine treshold, you get a creative bomb. This generates new and new things, none having their behavior ever completely unifiable in any theory. In the physicalist view, evolution is an emergent law, right? It emerges out of the local interactions of fundamental entities, and none of these local interactions have anything to do with evolution. But evolution doesn't ADD anything to those local interactions...it can be completely reduced to them. We see evolution...but it only exists in our minds, as a tool for our understanding. It's not something that exists in the world. Again, taking the physicalist view. So, to rely on Davies for articulation purposes again: Darwinism provides a novel form of causation inasmuch as the causal chain runs counter to the normal descriptive sequence. Chronologically, what happens is that first a mutation is caused by a local physical interaction, e.g. the impact of a cosmic ray at a specific location with an atom in a DNA molecule. Later, possibly many years later, the environment ‘selects’ the mutant by permitting the organism to reproduce more efficiently. In terms of physics, selection involves vast numbers of local forces acting over long periods of time, the net result of which is to bring about a long-term change in the genome of the organism’s lineage. It is the original atomic event in combination with the subsequent complicated events that together give a full causative account of the evolutionary story. Yet biologists would be hard-pressed to tell this story in those local physical terms. Instead, natural selection is described as having causal powers, even though it is causatively neutral – a sieve. Again, assuming reductive physicalism, the initial state of the universe and the fundamental laws of physics (which may or may not have some sort of random aspect) completely determines what animals we observe in the present. Evolution is just a useful fictional narrative that helps us think about what we observe. A description of what we observe, not an explanation for it. And why not add, in that case, ... like time, space, universe, laws are also convenient fiction for describing what we observe? So I'm certainly fine with taking a Kantian view of time and space, and even the appearance of causality, as being aspects of our experience of the world...and not things that exist outside of our experience of them. And since we use our perceptions to build our mental image of the universe, then this mental image also has nothing to do with what exists. Where could the explanation begin? I'd say there is no explanation. It just is what it is. As Brent said...it's descriptions all the way down. Which is not that radical a claim, I think. Computationalism even in it's physical (non-Bruno) version implies the same thing. We could be in a simulation or some sort of virtual reality, and it would be impossible to detect. ? If computationalism is true its physicalist version entails 0 = 1. I guess by non-Bruno you mean false. I wasn't saying that the physicalist version is preferable to your version. I do not hold the physicalist position myself. But since it seems to be the predominant view, I tend to use it as my reference point, as a base-line. But, while physicalist computationalism seems to have some strange implications (movie graph argument/Maudlin/Dust Theory/etc.), it COULD be the case, right? Matter could be required as a substrate for consciousness generating computations. Maybe reality just is that way. But I think you and Kant are right...there's no way to know. Even in theory. have you some doubt about the validity of the UDA? Let me know, to see what needs to be still clarified. My only doubt about UDA is that it seems to make the same assumption as physicalism...that consciousness can't be fundamental. That something else must underlie it, and cause it. But if numbers can just exist, and matter can just exist, then why can't conscious experiences just exist? We can see matter as able to represent the contents of our conscious experience...e.g., these electrons represent my neural structure. We can see numbers as representing the same types of
Re: Why I am I?
Rex Allen wrote: Where could the explanation begin? I'd say there is no explanation. It just is what it is. As Brent said...it's descriptions all the way down. I wouldn't neccesarily disagree, though only if you mean verbal or formal explanation. In a sense our life and our experiences are explanations of something, don't you think so? It is true though, that our lifes (all the content of conciousness and the way it evolves) itself then can have no complete explanation. So what life wants to explain then? I think it seeks to explain that it *needs* no explanation beyond itself, because it is good and nobody *absolutely* needs an explanation for what is good. If it is good enough, you will except it without explanation - because this is the ultimate explanation. Who could ever disagree with The world is perfect, it is just here to experience ever increasing joy and learn something exciting about ourselves? when it really comes down to it? So how could it be a wrong explanation for anyone? I see no way. Though I certainly see it as too good to be true sometimes, but maybe it's just part of the game? It's the subgame what is good is likely too be true, too - there is nothing akward about this even intellectually!. Rex Allen wrote: have you some doubt about the validity of the UDA? Let me know, to see what needs to be still clarified. My only doubt about UDA is that it seems to make the same assumption as physicalism...that consciousness can't be fundamental. That something else must underlie it, and cause it. But if numbers can just exist, and matter can just exist, then why can't conscious experiences just exist? I agree here. But I would add that conciousness can conceivably make independent sense for me, while numbers or matter can't. For me numbers don't make independent sense of the appearance (!) of matter, too. Since I cannot conceive of any meaning of the number 2 without reffering to some real (in the sense of every day usage) object. So I find it unconvincing that conciousness arises out of numbers, since it is inconceivable for me what numbers mean independent of me or even the world I perceive. I think everything becomes much clearer if we postulate arithmetical truth is simply the truth, and so in effect numbers are just reflections of parts of this unnameable and untouchable truth (which comes before numbers), which may be conciousness together with its infinitely infinitely ... ... infinite possible content. So numbers don't give rise to arithmetical truth, but truth gives rise to (expresses as) numbers. Though ulitmately this may be a matter of perspective ;)... It's just that the second perspective is more meaningful to me. Rex Allen wrote: But, again, there seems to be no way to know for certain what *really* exists, a la Kant. Maybe what really exists is not a meaningful thing to ask in first place, because if something really exists, it certainly cannot be expressed with words. So why aks a question that can't be answered with words at all? Probably we generally should take words less serious (especially with regards to fundamental questions) and expect no satisfying answers from them. -- View this message in context: http://old.nabble.com/Why-I-am-I--tp26616194p26721201.html Sent from the Everything List mailing list archive at Nabble.com. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Why I am I?
benjayk wrote: Rex Allen wrote: Where could the explanation begin? I'd say there is no explanation. It just is what it is. As Brent said...it's descriptions all the way down. I wouldn't neccesarily disagree, though only if you mean verbal or formal explanation. In a sense our life and our experiences are explanations of something, don't you think so? It is true though, that our lifes (all the content of conciousness and the way it evolves) itself then can have no complete explanation. So what life wants to explain then? I think it seeks to explain that it *needs* no explanation beyond itself, because it is good and nobody *absolutely* needs an explanation for what is good. If it is good enough, you will except it without explanation - because this is the ultimate explanation. Who could ever disagree with The world is perfect, it is just here to experience ever increasing joy and learn something exciting about ourselves? when it really comes down to it? So how could it be a wrong explanation for anyone? I see no way. Well if you were dying of AIDS, your husband had his hands hacked off by militias, and your child was starving to death you might see a way. Though I certainly see it as too good to be true sometimes, but maybe it's just part of the game? It's the subgame what is good is likely too be true, too - there is nothing akward about this even intellectually!. Rex Allen wrote: have you some doubt about the validity of the UDA? Let me know, to see what needs to be still clarified. My only doubt about UDA is that it seems to make the same assumption as physicalism...that consciousness can't be fundamental. That something else must underlie it, and cause it. But if numbers can just exist, and matter can just exist, then why can't conscious experiences just exist? I agree here. But I would add that conciousness can conceivably make independent sense for me, while numbers or matter can't. For me numbers don't make independent sense of the appearance (!) of matter, too. Since I cannot conceive of any meaning of the number 2 without reffering to some real (in the sense of every day usage) object. But can you conceive of a meaning for 10930702499? So I find it unconvincing that conciousness arises out of numbers, since it is inconceivable for me what numbers mean independent of me or even the world I perceive. I think everything becomes much clearer if we postulate arithmetical truth is simply the truth, and so in effect numbers are just reflections of parts of this unnameable and untouchable truth (which comes before numbers), which may be conciousness together with its infinitely infinitely ... ... infinite possible content. So numbers don't give rise to arithmetical truth, but truth gives rise to (expresses as) numbers. Though ulitmately this may be a matter of perspective ;)... It's just that the second perspective is more meaningful to me. Rex Allen wrote: But, again, there seems to be no way to know for certain what *really* exists, a la Kant. Maybe what really exists is not a meaningful thing to ask in first place, because if something really exists, it certainly cannot be expressed with words. So why aks a question that can't be answered with words at all? But we can ask for true descriptions about it. Isn't it true that you are reading a computer screen? Of course we can't be sure about this, but we don't have to give up betting on it. Probably we generally should take words less serious (especially with regards to fundamental questions) and expect no satisfying answers from them. What do you propose - that we remain silent as mystics? Or do think mathematical words are different and we should take 2 and successor more seriously than chair and dog? Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Why I am I?
On Sun, Dec 6, 2009 at 11:34 PM, Brent Meeker meeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: Rex Allen wrote: So my point is that: in a reductionist theory which implies a physicalist reality with no downwards causation, What defines upwards and downwards. Why would downwards causation make any difference? Upwards from fundamental entities and laws. Downwards from things that are composed of fundamental entities and from emergent laws. So if everything reduces to fundamental entities and their causal relations, then there is no downwards causation. To quote*** (see below) Paul Davies, from his paper The Physics of Downward Causation: As physicists have probed ever deeper into the microscopic realm of matter so, to use Steven Weinberg’s evocative phrase (Weinberg, 1992), ‘the arrows of explanation point downward.’ That is, we frequently account for a phenomenon by appealing to the properties of the next level down. In this way the behaviour of gases are explained by molecules, the properties of molecules are explained by atoms, which in turn are explained by nuclei and electrons. This downward path extends, it is supposed, as far as the bottom-level entities, be they strings or some other exotica. If downwards causation IS possible, then behaviors can emerge which aren't reducible to the fundamental entities and their causal relations. Consciousness might be an example of this. So quoting Davies again: Whilst the foregoing is not contentious, differences arise concerning whether the reductionist account of nature is merely a fruitful methodology, or whether it is the whole story. Many physicists are self-confessed out-and-out reductionists. They believe that once the final buildings blocks of matter and the rules that govern them have been identified, then all of nature will, in effect, have been explained. Obviously such a final theory would not in practice provide a very useful account of much that we observe in the world. A final reductionist theory would not, for instance, explain the origin of life, or have much to say about the nature of consciousness. But the committed reductionist believes such inadequacies are mere technicalities, and that the fundamental core of explanation is captured – completely - by the reductionist theory. *** Note that I'm just quoting those passages to save time in articulating the points myself. I'm not invoking him as an authority, or necessarily saying I agree with anything else he says in his paper. nothing means anything. You mean things don't stand as symbols for something else? That reminds me of George Carlin's quip, If we're here to care for other people, what are those other people here for? My point would be, how does meaning reduce to fundamental entities like quarks and electrons (or fields, or strings, or whatever). Things only have the appearance of meaning. The above words have the appearance of meaning to me - and so they do have meaning to me. I don't know what else I could ask for? I would ask for an understanding of how it is that they have meaning to you. You seem to take this for granted. I'm thinking of something similar to the symbol grounding problem: The Symbol Grounding Problem is related to the problem of how words (symbols) get their meanings, and hence to the problem of what meaning itself really is. The problem of meaning is in turn related to the problem of consciousness, or how it is that mental states are meaningful. According to a widely held theory of cognition, computationalism, cognition (i.e., thinking) is just a form of computation. But computation in turn is just formal symbol manipulation: symbols are manipulated according to rules that are based on the symbols' shapes, not their meanings. How are those symbols (e.g., the words in our heads) connected to the things they refer to? In such a reality, things just are what they are. If you find some explanations good and others bad, that's just the epiphenominal residue of more fundamental physical processes which are themselves unconcerned with such things. Having predictive theories was no doubt selected by evolution - as well as a psychological to see meaning in things. Evolution isn't a fundamental law, right? There is no evolution field or particle. Evolution doesn't select anything. Evolution has no causal power. Again, assuming reductive physicalism, the initial state of the universe and the fundamental laws of physics (which may or may not have some sort of random aspect) completely determines what animals we observe in the present. Evolution is just a useful fictional narrative that helps us think about what we observe. A description of what we observe, not an explanation for it. So I think this was a good example of how you muddy the water with misleading language. In such a reality if you predict an event that comes to pass, both your prediction AND the event were inevitable from the first instant of the universe, implicit in
Re: Why I am I?
Rex Allen wrote: On Sun, Dec 6, 2009 at 11:34 PM, Brent Meeker meeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: Rex Allen wrote: So my point is that: in a reductionist theory which implies a physicalist reality with no downwards causation, What defines upwards and downwards. Why would downwards causation make any difference? Upwards from fundamental entities and laws. Downwards from things that are composed of fundamental entities and from emergent laws. Doesn't emergent sort of cancel out downwards? So if everything reduces to fundamental entities and their causal relations, then there is no downwards causation. To quote*** (see below) Paul Davies, from his paper The Physics of Downward Causation: As physicists have probed ever deeper into the microscopic realm of matter so, to use Steven Weinberg’s evocative phrase (Weinberg, 1992), ‘the arrows of explanation point downward.’ That is, we frequently account for a phenomenon by appealing to the properties of the next level down. In this way the behaviour of gases are explained by molecules, the properties of molecules are explained by atoms, which in turn are explained by nuclei and electrons. This downward path extends, it is supposed, as far as the bottom-level entities, be they strings or some other exotica. If downwards causation IS possible, then behaviors can emerge which aren't reducible to the fundamental entities and their causal relations. Consciousness might be an example of this. Of course levels of description, e.g. animals/biochemistry/physics, are used because it's inconvenient to translate across levels and is usually not necessary in terms of taking action. But I see no problem with saying, for example, a scary story caused an increase in his adrenaline. The same events generally have descriptions at many different levels so there is a network of relations that can be sliced different ways to facilitate our limited comprehension. So quoting Davies again: Whilst the foregoing is not contentious, differences arise concerning whether the reductionist account of nature is merely a fruitful methodology, or whether it is the whole story. Many physicists are self-confessed out-and-out reductionists. They believe that once the final buildings blocks of matter and the rules that govern them have been identified, then all of nature will, in effect, have been explained. Obviously such a final theory would not in practice provide a very useful account of much that we observe in the world. A final reductionist theory would not, for instance, explain the origin of life, or have much to say about the nature of consciousness. But the committed reductionist believes such inadequacies are mere technicalities, and that the fundamental core of explanation is captured – completely - by the reductionist theory. *** Note that I'm just quoting those passages to save time in articulating the points myself. I'm not invoking him as an authority, or necessarily saying I agree with anything else he says in his paper. nothing means anything. You mean things don't stand as symbols for something else? That reminds me of George Carlin's quip, If we're here to care for other people, what are those other people here for? My point would be, how does meaning reduce to fundamental entities like quarks and electrons (or fields, or strings, or whatever). I'd say it's property of certain groups of elementary particles to react to information in certain ways. A simple example would be my thermostat which we might describe as wanting to maintain the temperature at 18degC. It would be very difficult but possible to translate this anthropomorphized description into QFT. Things only have the appearance of meaning. The above words have the appearance of meaning to me - and so they do have meaning to me. I don't know what else I could ask for? I would ask for an understanding of how it is that they have meaning to you. You seem to take this for granted. Far from taking it for granted, I experience it directly. I'm thinking of something similar to the symbol grounding problem: The Symbol Grounding Problem is related to the problem of how words (symbols) get their meanings, and hence to the problem of what meaning itself really is. The problem of meaning is in turn related to the problem of consciousness, or how it is that mental states are meaningful. According to a widely held theory of cognition, computationalism, cognition (i.e., thinking) is just a form of computation. But computation in turn is just formal symbol manipulation: symbols are manipulated according to rules that are based on the symbols' shapes, not their meanings. How are those symbols (e.g., the words in our heads) connected to the things they refer to? This question seems like a conundrum generated by abstracting symbols out their context of
Re: Why I am I?
On 08 Dec 2009, at 09:50, Rex Allen wrote: On Sun, Dec 6, 2009 at 11:34 PM, Brent Meeker meeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: Rex Allen wrote: So my point is that: in a reductionist theory which implies a physicalist reality with no downwards causation, What defines upwards and downwards. Why would downwards causation make any difference? Upwards from fundamental entities and laws. Downwards from things that are composed of fundamental entities and from emergent laws. So if everything reduces to fundamental entities and their causal relations, then there is no downwards causation. To quote*** (see below) Paul Davies, from his paper The Physics of Downward Causation: As physicists have probed ever deeper into the microscopic realm of matter so, to use Steven Weinberg’s evocative phrase (Weinberg, 1992), ‘the arrows of explanation point downward.’ That is, we frequently account for a phenomenon by appealing to the properties of the next level down. In this way the behaviour of gases are explained by molecules, the properties of molecules are explained by atoms, which in turn are explained by nuclei and electrons. This downward path extends, it is supposed, as far as the bottom-level entities, be they strings or some other exotica. If downwards causation IS possible, then behaviors can emerge which aren't reducible to the fundamental entities and their causal relations. Consciousness might be an example of this. So quoting Davies again: Whilst the foregoing is not contentious, differences arise concerning whether the reductionist account of nature is merely a fruitful methodology, or whether it is the whole story. Many physicists are self-confessed out-and-out reductionists. They believe that once the final buildings blocks of matter and the rules that govern them have been identified, then all of nature will, in effect, have been explained. Obviously such a final theory would not in practice provide a very useful account of much that we observe in the world. A final reductionist theory would not, for instance, explain the origin of life, or have much to say about the nature of consciousness. But the committed reductionist believes such inadequacies are mere technicalities, and that the fundamental core of explanation is captured – completely - by the reductionist theory. *** Note that I'm just quoting those passages to save time in articulating the points myself. I'm not invoking him as an authority, or necessarily saying I agree with anything else he says in his paper. nothing means anything. You mean things don't stand as symbols for something else? That reminds me of George Carlin's quip, If we're here to care for other people, what are those other people here for? My point would be, how does meaning reduce to fundamental entities like quarks and electrons (or fields, or strings, or whatever). Things only have the appearance of meaning. The above words have the appearance of meaning to me - and so they do have meaning to me. I don't know what else I could ask for? I would ask for an understanding of how it is that they have meaning to you. You seem to take this for granted. I'm thinking of something similar to the symbol grounding problem: The Symbol Grounding Problem is related to the problem of how words (symbols) get their meanings, and hence to the problem of what meaning itself really is. The problem of meaning is in turn related to the problem of consciousness, or how it is that mental states are meaningful. According to a widely held theory of cognition, computationalism, cognition (i.e., thinking) is just a form of computation. But computation in turn is just formal symbol manipulation: symbols are manipulated according to rules that are based on the symbols' shapes, not their meanings. But is it not the same for the reductionist physics above? What is the meaning of exchanging a gluon? How are those symbols (e.g., the words in our heads) connected to the things they refer to? Well, because it makes the relative (and statistical) difference between to eat and to be eaten. In such a reality, things just are what they are. If you find some explanations good and others bad, that's just the epiphenominal residue of more fundamental physical processes which are themselves unconcerned with such things. Having predictive theories was no doubt selected by evolution - as well as a psychological to see meaning in things. Evolution isn't a fundamental law, right? There is no evolution field or particle. Evolution doesn't select anything. Evolution has no causal power. Of course it has! It is like with the numbers or the combinators, once the initial rule of the game is above the universal number/machine treshold, you get a creative bomb. This generates new and new things, none having their behavior ever completely unifiable in any theory. Again, assuming reductive
Re: Why I am I?
On 06 Dec 2009, at 05:07, benjayk wrote: Bruno Marchal wrote: It is actually an art to find the dosage and the timing so that you understand better some, well, let us say statements you get there. One is just impossible to memorize, or you stay there, and a copy is send here. This is a copy effect experimented by a reasonable proportion of users. This is confusing me. When you say a copy is send it sounds like the copy is not the real thing. How can you distinguish copy and original? The copy probably won't say it is just a copy (as opposed to the original). You are right. It is even a key point in most thought experiments we discussed here. But we do suppose there that the copy are perfect, (a notion which makes sense with the computationalist hyp.). And what do you mean by stay there? Forever? Why should you stay there (can you choose)? And where is there? Is it forgetfulness oder remembrance? It is very difficult to describe any first person experience. We cannot even describe normal state of consciousness, so it is even harder to describe altered state of consciousness. Roughly speaking, such salvia copy-experiences I am describing, which occur clearly about a hundred times (among about 600 hundred hits) could be described in the following way, but I know it is quite paradoxal. I have to separate the first half of the experience from the second half, because they are strictly disconnected. First half: I am bruno marchal and I decide to smoke some salvia. After the hit I find myself in paradise. I am rather happy and, only for that reason, I want to stay there, and I insist for staying there. Some entity tells me that I can indeed stay there, and that they will send back on earth some copy to finish my job (but also to keep salvia legal!). I say OK, and I am witness of the beginning of the copy process ... Second half: ... I am. I am in paradise since infinity. I enjoy the being state, but there there is no past, and no future. I have no memory, but still a sort of personality. Suddenly I get memories and I think oh no, not again, because at that moment I have the feeling that something happens, which has already happened a lot of times. The memories get more and more precise, and at some point I accept them, but does not recognize them as personal memories, then I got the last memories which are I want to stay in paradise, and I understand that I am a copy send to earth to finish his job. I find myself on earth, but during some hours, I have still the memory of having always lived there, and almost got the feeling that the smoking of salvia made me going from paradise to earth. The first time I did that type of salvia experience, I kept during three days the strong feeling of being completely refresh or reborn, like if I was just on earth since some days. Everything looked as completely new. I did not feel any memory as being personal, and that has been indeed very useful useful for doing some annoying job, and taking annoying decisions, I have to make. That feeling faded away the fourth day after the experience. This staying there thought is chasing me on many of my psychedlic experience. I find it very scary, often it really hinders me to enjoy the experience, because the thought but I don't want to leave 'my reality' forever comes and makes me unable to relax. I did experience such things as well, but only with weed, in my youth, or with mushrooms (recently). In that case you feel a distinctively different sort of consciousness, and you may panic with the idea of staying in that stage. But with salvia it is different. You can sometimes feel like if the normal state of consciousness' is the altered state you want to avoid. Some people lives a similar experience except that, instead of feeling like being in paradise, they feel like being in hell. They live the memory retrieval and the coming back with a huge relief and they got the feeling they were dead, and got another chance ... Some even conclude they have to change their life in some way if they want to avoid ending there. I tried salvia several times, too. I got some weird effects, like thinking I die in every instant because I identified with a moment (scary, but somehow funny in retrospection). That happens sometimes, as you can see on erowid or on salvianet reports. Or remembering something exhilarating, but being unable to express it or store it in my memory completely (I tend to think it's just the realization that there are no bad problems, A general message is that there are no problem as far as you are clean with your own conscience. Apparently the plant is allergic to people lying to themselves. It is one of the most bizarre aspect of the salvia experience, it has a moral dimension. The more peaceful you are with yourself, the more divine you feel the bliss. It is very
Re: Why I am I?
On 06 Dec 2009, at 05:21, Johnathan Corgan wrote: On Sat, Dec 5, 2009 at 2:27 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: All of this indicates that salvinorin A has potent but short-lived effects on the brain systems involved in memory, identity, body image and perception of time and space (along with a host of other effects not discussed here). Regardless of one's view on the use of these substances to alter one's cognition, it seems there is a great opportunity to study these effects to zero in on how these brain systems are related to our subjective experience of reality. Very difficult task, but very interesting, and probably parts of the experience/experiments needed to build an artificial brain. A double-blind study protocol to test for particular effects would be difficult to design, no doubt. I don't understand your reference to the need for an artificial brain. Some people can say yes to the doctor, not for a complete artificial brain, but for a part of the brain. Taking a drug, or a psycho-active substance is already an act of that type. Some molecules build by some plants (in general to attract or manipulate insects by acting on their brains or nervous system) can already be considered as artificial subpart of your brain (at the molecular level). The use of more and more specific agonist molecules for the brain molecules, is a way to learn about the brain, and how good can some new molecules can be to do some job in the brain. People will not necessarily ever say really yes to a doctor, but they will be propose evolving artificial part of the brain. Well, what I say, is that the self-brain-study, through entheogen, may accelerate the development of artificial brain parts. However, it would still be possible to carry out experimentation to correlate subjective reports of these altered 1-pov percepts with 3-pov data obtained by FMRI, EEG, etc. Exactly. We may never understand the whole human brain, but we can find those correlation by self-testing. Unfortunately, current laws in the U.S. restrict experimentation of this type to therapeutic applications. It is possible to test to see whether MDMA is a successful treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, but not, say only to find out the dose/response curve for its psychedelic properties. This is weird. What is a psychedelic properties? It is vague term. I think that studies of that kind have been made on some meditation technics. Absent those types of studies, it would still be enormously educational for someone to conduct a meta-analysis of the many thousands of first-hand written and recorded reports of Salvia Divinorum use. While far from being a random sample, at least one would have a better map of the territory to guide further research. Yes. It is very informative on the consciousness phenomenon. It is fun too. I have a read a lot also of all the possible diaries of dreams, and I have written and studied my own dreams. I am no more, because it asks for work, a good lucid dreamer, but I have practice and develop technics at times, and the tools (mainly coffee!) to practice lucidity the night. Nowadays I use calea zacatechichi or salvia, which have some interesting impact on dreams (also on the non REM dreams, hypnagogic images, etc. Conscience et mécanisme contains a chapter on dreams, I tend to follow Hobson, and Dement, LaBerge, and Jouvet. In the REM dream, we are awake, hallucinated and paralysed. The cerebral stem plays a key role. Well, if we define a drug by something harmful and addictive, then salvia is not known to be a drug today, because there are no evidence it is harmful nor evidence it is addictive. Indeed, animal studies to date have shown that salvinorin A administration reduces the levels of dopamine in the portions of the brain associated with addiction and craving, which is exactly opposite the effects of strongly addictive and euphoriant drugs like cocaine and methamphetamine. Whether this is true in human brains remains to be seen (and difficult to study due to reasons above). In any case, this discussion is probably more relevant in other forums. I brought it up only because we frequently discuss consciousness, memory and identity, and lo and behold there is a drug which has radical effects on the subjective experience of all three, and a body of written reports to examine. Not only it is relevant, but it is at the cross of many levels of description of the data which we have to take into account if we want to progress on the everything riddle. The relation between a Brain and a Reality is akin to the relation between a Theory/Machine and a Model, in logic, and to the relation between an equation and its solution, in algebra. The common point is a Galois connection which entails something like, roughly speaking, that to a self-perburtation of the brain, or the theory/machine, or
Re: Why I am I?
Are you physicalist? I just don't know. All my everyday experience points towards physicalism: I'm a brain, embodied in a physical body, embedded in a physical environment and evolved via several billion year selection process. All the constituents of my mind could be explained in the evolutionary terms as devices that promoted the survival of my ancestor's genes. From the other hand, all the scientific knowledge imo points towards some kind of digital physics. For example, it's much much easier to just accept modern high-energy physics as a elaborate pure mathematical theory than try to understand it in the everyday terms of material world. Have you read Everett? There are already physicists who describe reality as a flux of information which differentiate in many histories, sometimes recombining by amnesia, etc. You may read the book by Russell Standish theory of Nothing. The book Mind's I, ed. by Hofstadter and Dennett is a good introduction to computationalism. Stathis mentioned Parfit's reasons and persons recently on the FOR list, where we discuss on similar many-reality conception of reality. I would recommend it too. In particular you may read David Deutsch's book the fabric of Reality. Gunther Greindl has put some more advanced references on the web page of the list. Are you aware of computer science and mathematical logic? You could be interested by my own contribution, which I explain on this list, see http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/publications/SANE2004MARCHALAbstract.html I didn't read Everett and Deutsch but I'm aware of MWI. I skimmed over Theory of Nothing some time ago and, to be honest, I didn't like to, partially due to Quantum Immortality thing - it was my first encounter with the subject and it seemed like a worst kind of unscientific wishful thinking. But maybe I should give it another, this time more serious try. I'll make an attempt to follow your UDA steps and can accept comp as a _hypothesis_, but now I'm highly skeptical about computationalism as a valid theory of consciousness. Every time I think about it I come to the simulated thunderstorm is NOT a real thunderstorm argument (I don't know the other name, for the first time I read about in some interview with Searle). It's easy for me to accept the possibility of conscious robot (I'm such a robot) but it's hard to accept the possibility of conscious pure (as in CS i.e. without side effects) computer program, as computationalism implies (if I understand it right). -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Why I am I?
Dear Bruno, on diverse lists (I cannot call them 'science-branches' since lately most domains are discussed in considering aspects of several of such on the diverse discussion-lists)- CONCEPTS (I wish I knew a better word) appear by different content. If somebody has the time and feels like (knows how to) do it, a brief reconsiderational ID listing would help us outsiders to reconfirm what WE mean by *Comp* - (computing, computer-universal or not,) The application of (=your relevance of) the *Church* thesis *Universa*l machine - BTW: machine, or God, as in (our) theology *White rabbit*, (and I don't even dare write:) *numbers,* - and in not much than 1-2 lines(!!!) ea: *UD, UDA, AUDA*, with: hints to YES *to the doctor*, and *maybe some more* - * which the 'old listers' apply here with ease (yet *maybe(!)* in their modified i.e. personalised taste?) - newcomers. however, usually first misinterpret into 'other' *vernaculars*. (It is my several decade long research experience to sit down once in a while and recap (recoop?) the terms used in the daily efforts. They change by the *(ab?)*use and re-realizing their original content may push the research effort ahead from a stagnant hole it falls into inevitably during most routine thinking. - In doing so, almost all the time there occurred an AHA. One cannot do it privately and alone. We cannot slip out from our skin. I did it with someone knowledgeable in the broader field (maybe even a fresh graduate?) or on a public lecture, where questions and opposite opinions could be expected. Best for the hooiday season: this may be a present for Chirstmas. On St. Nicholas Day John Mikes On Sat, Dec 5, 2009 at 4:15 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 05 Dec 2009, at 21:00, Rex Allen wrote: On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 10:35 PM, Brent Meeker meeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: Rex Allen wrote: What is your alternative to the everything universal acid? That things just are the way they are (uniquely), and there's ultimately no explanation for that. Right? Exactly so. It's just happened that way and Everything happens and so this happens too. are both equally useless. Progress is only made when we can explain why this rather than that. So, we have our observations, and we want to explain them, so we need some context to place them in. So we postulate the existence of an external universe. But then we want to explain what we see in this external universe, and the only option is to postulate the existence of a multiverse. Nothing can be explained in terms of only itself. To explain it, you have to place it in the context of something larger. Otherwise, no explanation is possible, you just have to say, this is the way it is because that's the way it is. Right? Basically there's only two way the process can end. Two possible answers to the question of Why is the universe this way instead of some other way?: 1) Because things just are the way they are, and there's no further explanation possible. 2) Because EVERYTHING happens, and so this was inevitable in that larger context of everything. What other option is there, do you think? Well in this list we follow the option 2. (As its name indicates). To progress we need to make the everything idea more precise. Most naive everything idea are either trivial and non informative, or can be shown inconsistent. QM is an amazing everything theory, astoundingly accurate. Yet it is based on comp (or variety of comp), which means that if you take serioulsy the first person experiences into consideration, then you have to derive the Schroedinger waves from a deeper purely arithmetical derivation. But with the computable, something happens: the discovery of the universal machine (accepting Church's thesis). This makes enough to confront all universal machine, actually the Löbian one will even understand why, with a consciousness/reality problem, or first-person/third person relation problem, and that the Löbian machine can develop the means to explore the many gaps which exists there. So we can take our observations of the world around us and construct a narrative that is consistent with what we see...a narrative that involves big bangs and electrons. But what caused the big bang? Why do electrons have the particular properties that they have? If you propose a particular cause for these things, what caused that cause? How is that better than a narrative that allows for everything? They would seem to have equal explanatory power. Which is to say: zero. We have much evidence about the big bang and some theories as to how it may have happened which are testable. So the existence of a big bang event certainly seems consistent with our observations. But so does the idea of a Boltzmann style statistical fluctuation from thermal equilibrium. Or the idea that this
Re: Why I am I?
On Sun, Dec 6, 2009 at 1:35 PM, soulcatcher☠ soulcatche...@gmail.comwrote: Are you physicalist? I just don't know. All my everyday experience points towards physicalism: I'm a brain, embodied in a physical body, embedded in a physical environment and evolved via several billion year selection process. All the constituents of my mind could be explained in the evolutionary terms as devices that promoted the survival of my ancestor's genes. From the other hand, all the scientific knowledge imo points towards some kind of digital physics. For example, it's much much easier to just accept modern high-energy physics as a elaborate pure mathematical theory than try to understand it in the everyday terms of material world. Have you read Everett? There are already physicists who describe reality as a flux of information which differentiate in many histories, sometimes recombining by amnesia, etc. You may read the book by Russell Standish theory of Nothing. The book Mind's I, ed. by Hofstadter and Dennett is a good introduction to computationalism. Stathis mentioned Parfit's reasons and persons recently on the FOR list, where we discuss on similar many-reality conception of reality. I would recommend it too. In particular you may read David Deutsch's book the fabric of Reality. Gunther Greindl has put some more advanced references on the web page of the list. Are you aware of computer science and mathematical logic? You could be interested by my own contribution, which I explain on this list, see http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/publications/SANE2004MARCHALAbstract.html I didn't read Everett and Deutsch but I'm aware of MWI. I skimmed over Theory of Nothing some time ago and, to be honest, I didn't like to, partially due to Quantum Immortality thing - it was my first encounter with the subject and it seemed like a worst kind of unscientific wishful thinking. But maybe I should give it another, this time more serious try. I'll make an attempt to follow your UDA steps and can accept comp as a _hypothesis_, but now I'm highly skeptical about computationalism as a valid theory of consciousness. Every time I think about it I come to the simulated thunderstorm is NOT a real thunderstorm argument (I don't know the other name, for the first time I read about in some interview with Searle). It's easy for me to accept the possibility of conscious robot (I'm such a robot) but it's hard to accept the possibility of conscious pure (as in CS i.e. without side effects) computer program, as computationalism implies (if I understand it right). If you can accept the possibility of a conscious robot, whose senses are hooked up to video cameras, microphones, etc. would you say the robot would still be conscious if one were too hook up the video and audio inputs of the robot to the output of a virtual environment (think video game)? Now what if both the robot's software and environment rendering software ran within the same computer? Jason -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Why I am I?
Rex, or Brent? (I am mixed up between th (-)s and the unmarked text. No signature. I rather paste my cpmment to the end of this posting, since it pertains to the last par.-s. John M On Sat, Dec 5, 2009 at 3:00 PM, Rex Allen rexallen...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 10:35 PM, Brent Meeker meeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: Rex Allen wrote: What is your alternative to the everything universal acid? That things just are the way they are (uniquely), and there's ultimately no explanation for that. Right? Exactly so. It's just happened that way and Everything happens and so this happens too. are both equally useless. Progress is only made when we can explain why this rather than that. So, we have our observations, and we want to explain them, so we need some context to place them in. So we postulate the existence of an external universe. But then we want to explain what we see in this external universe, and the only option is to postulate the existence of a multiverse. Nothing can be explained in terms of only itself. To explain it, you have to place it in the context of something larger. Otherwise, no explanation is possible, you just have to say, this is the way it is because that's the way it is. Right? Basically there's only two way the process can end. Two possible answers to the question of Why is the universe this way instead of some other way?: 1) Because things just are the way they are, and there's no further explanation possible. 2) Because EVERYTHING happens, and so this was inevitable in that larger context of everything. What other option is there, do you think? So we can take our observations of the world around us and construct a narrative that is consistent with what we see...a narrative that involves big bangs and electrons. But what caused the big bang? Why do electrons have the particular properties that they have? If you propose a particular cause for these things, what caused that cause? How is that better than a narrative that allows for everything? They would seem to have equal explanatory power. Which is to say: zero. We have much evidence about the big bang and some theories as to how it may have happened which are testable. So the existence of a big bang event certainly seems consistent with our observations. But so does the idea of a Boltzmann style statistical fluctuation from thermal equilibrium. Or the idea that this is just the dream of the infinitude of relations between numbers. We construct narratives that are consistent with our observations, but these narratives are about our observations, not about what really exists. You seem to have jumped to some unfounded ontological conclusions. You can talk about big bangs if that helps you think about your observations, helps you identify patterns in what you experience. But, that's as far as it can reasonably go, right? At the end of the day, we're always right back at where we started...with our observations...with our subjective conscious experience. JM: I went one little step further and talked about a 'reversed' logic: Conventional science (as it developed over the millennia) constructed the 'axioms' as the conditions necessary to make the theoreticals VALID. I did not condone the idea of the Big Bang according to the conventionals (including the several variants available) and wrote (my) narrative in a different view (no conventionals). (For those who have a taste for oddities: Karl Jaspers Forum - TA 62 (MIK) of 2003. ) Once we enter the conventional figments of (reductionistic) sciences (ontology) we can only devise variants WITHIN. All, where the formulated 'axioms' help. And that pertains also to 2 + 2 = 4, where it may be 22 as well. Or: in Bruno's longer version: (2,(0),) + (2, (0),) = 2020 as well. Bruno, please excuse if I goofed your formula). Just in another way of axioms-formulation, while as II + II is always . Axiom or not. JM -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Why I am I?
Bruno Marchal wrote: And what do you mean by stay there? Forever? Why should you stay there (can you choose)? And where is there? Is it forgetfulness oder remembrance? It is very difficult to describe any first person experience. We cannot even describe normal state of consciousness, so it is even harder to describe altered state of consciousness. That's certainly true. Words can never convery an experience, they can only link the experience and known experiences. But sometimes even this is difficult. The difference between looking at a plain wall with my normal state of consciousness and on shrooms is somehow pretty small, yet very big. It looks the same, only more clear, crisp, real and incomparably more beatiful... But many people simply won't get how a wall could look more real, especially when you cloud your mind with drugs - they will say I just imagined it or I was too wasted, which is totally ridiculous to me. Bruno Marchal wrote: Second half: ... I am. I am in paradise since infinity. I enjoy the being state, but there there is no past, and no future. But in retrospection, isn't this wrong? Because you are in the future now, aren't you? Or maybe you never really leave this place? So you are still there... After all, you are always in the present, now matter what happens. And in some way you are in paradise, since even if you experience something bad, at least it admits that it is bad and wants to go, so it is meaningless compared to infinite possibilities of constant or growing well-being. Maybe if you can take this knowledge with you (even though it seems impossible; maybe it is possible partially?), nirvana (The word seems to fit what you experienced) and samsara begin to appear as what they really are, the same (according to Mahāyāna Buddhism). Is this what being (or becoming?) enlightened is about? Somehow I can't believe reality could be so dual: That there is this place, and our totally different place, that are disconnected. Bruno Marchal wrote: I have no memory, but still a sort of personality. Suddenly I get memories and I think oh no, not again, because at that moment I have the feeling that something happens, which has already happened a lot of times. It's funny, I get that feeling sometimes on shrooms, though not at returning, but at the beginning of going to this place of oneness. Like I remember that I begin to arrive at home, at the place I really belong. At first I feel really comforted, but then fear (and/or aversion) starts to set in. I actually feel like having been there somehow, but not in this life, or not completely or not yet? It is so familiar, yet I don't think I really was there. Bruno Marchal wrote: The memories get more and more precise, and at some point I accept them, but does not recognize them as personal memories, then I got the last memories which are I want to stay in paradise, and I understand that I am a copy send to earth to finish his job. I find myself on earth, but during some hours, I have still the memory of having always lived there, and almost got the feeling that the smoking of salvia made me going from paradise to earth. Maybe it's just a illusion that you leave paradise? Maybe earth is a part of paradise. Bruno Marchal wrote: The first time I did that type of salvia experience, I kept during three days the strong feeling of being completely refresh or reborn, like if I was just on earth since some days. Everything looked as completely new. I did not feel any memory as being personal, and that has been indeed very useful useful for doing some annoying job, and taking annoying decisions, I have to make. That feeling faded away the fourth day after the experience. I think I know what you mean. Though for me it just lasts seconds or minutes. When I'm on shrooms (and it happened on salvia + weed, too) sometimes I feel like being able to view the world like being reborn. Bruno Marchal wrote: Some people lives a similar experience except that, instead of feeling like being in paradise, they feel like being in hell. I think that's what I experienced on N2O. All meaning started to disintegrate. All I could think about was: What is the worst experience you could possibly imagine. As far as I remember I literally repeated this sentence in my mind over and over (in german though). And I felt ever more shallow and useless and imprisoned. There was no path left except the path of self-destruction. I simply seemed unable to remember anything positve. At one moment I believed I'm the only person doomed to hell. Probably this was the worst moment in my life. Sometimes I think or hope it is the worst moment you can have. At least I can't think of a worse thought than being the only person going to eternal hell. But then I realized I'm am NOT that and I felt immensely relieved... Maybe what I realized was: I am not nobody as I thought before - 'only nobody'
Re: Why I am I?
I mark my small part below with brackets [ ]. John Mikes wrote: Rex, or Brent? (I am mixed up between th (-)s and the unmarked text. No signature. I rather paste my cpmment to the end of this posting, since it pertains to the last par.-s. John M On Sat, Dec 5, 2009 at 3:00 PM, Rex Allen rexallen...@gmail.com mailto:rexallen...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 10:35 PM, Brent Meeker meeke...@dslextreme.com mailto:meeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: Rex Allen wrote: What is your alternative to the everything universal acid? That things just are the way they are (uniquely), and there's ultimately no explanation for that. Right? Exactly so. It's just happened that way and Everything happens and so this happens too. are both equally useless. Progress is only made when we can explain why this rather than that. So, we have our observations, and we want to explain them, so we need some context to place them in. So we postulate the existence of an external universe. But then we want to explain what we see in this external universe, and the only option is to postulate the existence of a multiverse. Nothing can be explained in terms of only itself. To explain it, you have to place it in the context of something larger. Otherwise, no explanation is possible, you just have to say, this is the way it is because that's the way it is. Right? Basically there's only two way the process can end. Two possible answers to the question of Why is the universe this way instead of some other way?: 1) Because things just are the way they are, and there's no further explanation possible. 2) Because EVERYTHING happens, and so this was inevitable in that larger context of everything. What other option is there, do you think? So we can take our observations of the world around us and construct a narrative that is consistent with what we see...a narrative that involves big bangs and electrons. But what caused the big bang? Why do electrons have the particular properties that they have? If you propose a particular cause for these things, what caused that cause? How is that better than a narrative that allows for everything? They would seem to have equal explanatory power. Which is to say: zero. [Brent We have much evidence about the big bang and some theories as to how it may have happened which are testable.] So the existence of a big bang event certainly seems consistent with our observations. But so does the idea of a Boltzmann style statistical fluctuation from thermal equilibrium. Or the idea that this is just the dream of the infinitude of relations between numbers. We construct narratives that are consistent with our observations, but these narratives are about our observations, not about what really exists. You seem to have jumped to some unfounded ontological conclusions. You can talk about big bangs if that helps you think about your observations, helps you identify patterns in what you experience. But, that's as far as it can reasonably go, right? At the end of the day, we're always right back at where we started...with our observations...with our subjective conscious experience. JM: I went one little step further and talked about a 'reversed' logic: Conventional science (as it developed over the millennia) constructed the 'axioms' as the conditions necessary to make the theoreticals VALID. This seems like an abuse of terminology. Science doesn't deal in axioms. Axioms are statements accepted for purposes of mathematical inference. They are part of mathematics, not science. Similary, valid refers to a truth preserving sequence of inferences; a mathematical rather than scientific term. Of course science uses mathematics because mathematical description is a way of avoiding self-contradiction. But economists, surveyors, programmers, and just about everybody else also use mathematics. I did not condone the idea of the Big Bang according to the conventionals (including the several variants available) and wrote (my) narrative in a different view (no conventionals). (For those who have a taste for oddities: Karl Jaspers Forum - TA 62 (MIK) of 2003. ) Once we enter the conventional figments of (reductionistic) sciences (ontology) we can only devise variants WITHIN. I don't understand this. I think science is necessarily reductionist in it's methodology simply because we can't understand everything at once and we can't experiment on everything at once. But science also synthesizes so the reduction is only methodological. Brent All, where the formulated 'axioms' help. And that pertains also to 2 + 2 = 4, where it may be 22 as
Re: Why I am I?
On Sat, Dec 5, 2009 at 5:22 PM, Brent Meeker meeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: Rex Allen wrote: On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 10:35 PM, Brent Meeker meeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: Rex Allen wrote: What is your alternative to the everything universal acid? That things just are the way they are (uniquely), and there's ultimately no explanation for that. Right? Exactly so. It's just happened that way and Everything happens and so this happens too. are both equally useless. Progress is only made when we can explain why this rather than that. So, we have our observations, and we want to explain them, so we need some context to place them in. So we postulate the existence of an external universe. But then we want to explain what we see in this external universe, and the only option is to postulate the existence of a multiverse. Nothing can be explained in terms of only itself. To explain it, you have to place it in the context of something larger. Otherwise, no explanation is possible, you just have to say, this is the way it is because that's the way it is. Right? Basically there's only two way the process can end. Two possible answers to the question of Why is the universe this way instead of some other way?: 1) Because things just are the way they are, and there's no further explanation possible. 2) Because EVERYTHING happens, and so this was inevitable in that larger context of everything. What other option is there, do you think? Look at what we actually take to be explanations. For example, inflation is taken to be an explanation for the homogeneity of the CMB, for the flatness of space, for the absence of magnetic monopoles. Why? First, because it replaces these seemingly disparate observed facts with a single theory that is consistent with our other theories. Second, and more importantly, it predicted higher order correlations in the CMB which were then observed. So we are still faced with explaining the inflation; which some people might explain as, That's just the way it is. and others might explain,Out of all possible universes some must inflate, but neither of those predicts anything or leads to any experiment. A real explanation would be one describing an inflaton field and predicting its experimental manifestation. So the option is don't adopt non-explanations and simply admit that there are things we don't know and that's why we do research. Theories need to be consilient and specific and testable and predict something we didn't already know, but turns out to be true. That's the gold standard. So I agree that in some sense the two options you present above seem to be the only possible ultimate statements, sort of like the schoolmen who proved that God did it was the ultimate answer everything. But, I don't think ultimate statements are worth much because they are like junk food explanations - no nutritional value. Brent Well, I would say that your explanations provide the illusion of nutritional value, but in fact are also junk food. It seems to me that your example isn't an explanation, but a narrative that just describes a plausible scenario consistent with what we observe. The difference between explanation and description is maybe a subtle difference, but it seems like an important one when thinking about metaphysics and ontology. I think there is a problem when you try to find a place for yourself inside your own narrative. When you try to explain your experience of observing, in addition to WHAT you observe. Assuming physicalism and barring downwards causation, *within that framework* what does it mean to claim that you understand something, that you have explained something, or that you have predicted something? Within the framework of bottom-up physicalism, what does it even mean to say that you exist...since you are (apparently) not a fundamental entity and so don't appear on any inventory of the contents of such a universe. Electrons: check. Quarks: check. Brent Meekers: Nope, none of those...only electrons and quarks (and other fundamental entities). But even if you exist within such a system, and are fully accounted for by the system, then your experiences are a kind of epiphenomenal residue of the fundamental processes of the system. You don't have a handle on the universe...the universe has a handle on you. You are run through your paces by your constituent molecules, experiencing whatever their configuration entails in each given moment. But why would this experience necessarily be of what actually exists? Returning to the earlier point, what are observations? How are they accounted for in a physicalist ontology? Why do some configurations of matter and energy have conscious subjective experiences, when there is nothing in our conception of matter, energy, OR configurations which would lead one to conclude (before the fact) that by arranging them in particular ways one could create
Re: Why I am I?
Rex Allen wrote: On Sat, Dec 5, 2009 at 5:22 PM, Brent Meeker meeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: Rex Allen wrote: On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 10:35 PM, Brent Meeker meeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: Rex Allen wrote: What is your alternative to the everything universal acid? That things just are the way they are (uniquely), and there's ultimately no explanation for that. Right? Exactly so. It's just happened that way and Everything happens and so this happens too. are both equally useless. Progress is only made when we can explain why this rather than that. So, we have our observations, and we want to explain them, so we need some context to place them in. So we postulate the existence of an external universe. But then we want to explain what we see in this external universe, and the only option is to postulate the existence of a multiverse. Nothing can be explained in terms of only itself. To explain it, you have to place it in the context of something larger. Otherwise, no explanation is possible, you just have to say, this is the way it is because that's the way it is. Right? Basically there's only two way the process can end. Two possible answers to the question of Why is the universe this way instead of some other way?: 1) Because things just are the way they are, and there's no further explanation possible. 2) Because EVERYTHING happens, and so this was inevitable in that larger context of everything. What other option is there, do you think? Look at what we actually take to be explanations. For example, inflation is taken to be an explanation for the homogeneity of the CMB, for the flatness of space, for the absence of magnetic monopoles. Why? First, because it replaces these seemingly disparate observed facts with a single theory that is consistent with our other theories. Second, and more importantly, it predicted higher order correlations in the CMB which were then observed. So we are still faced with explaining the inflation; which some people might explain as, That's just the way it is. and others might explain,Out of all possible universes some must inflate, but neither of those predicts anything or leads to any experiment. A real explanation would be one describing an inflaton field and predicting its experimental manifestation. So the option is don't adopt non-explanations and simply admit that there are things we don't know and that's why we do research. Theories need to be consilient and specific and testable and predict something we didn't already know, but turns out to be true. That's the gold standard. So I agree that in some sense the two options you present above seem to be the only possible ultimate statements, sort of like the schoolmen who proved that God did it was the ultimate answer everything. But, I don't think ultimate statements are worth much because they are like junk food explanations - no nutritional value. Brent Well, I would say that your explanations provide the illusion of nutritional value, but in fact are also junk food. It seems to me that your example isn't an explanation, but a narrative that just describes a plausible scenario consistent with what we observe. The difference between explanation and description is maybe a subtle difference, but it seems like an important one when thinking about metaphysics and ontology. I think there is a problem when you try to find a place for yourself inside your own narrative. When you try to explain your experience of observing, in addition to WHAT you observe. Assuming physicalism and barring downwards causation, *within that framework* what does it mean to claim that you understand something, that you have explained something, or that you have predicted something? Within the framework of bottom-up physicalism, what does it even mean to say that you exist...since you are (apparently) not a fundamental entity and so don't appear on any inventory of the contents of such a universe. Electrons: check. Quarks: check. Brent Meekers: Nope, none of those...only electrons and quarks (and other fundamental entities). But even if you exist within such a system, and are fully accounted for by the system, then your experiences are a kind of epiphenomenal residue of the fundamental processes of the system. You don't have a handle on the universe...the universe has a handle on you. You are run through your paces by your constituent molecules, experiencing whatever their configuration entails in each given moment. But why would this experience necessarily be of what actually exists? Returning to the earlier point, what are observations? How are they accounted for in a physicalist ontology? Why do some configurations of matter and energy have conscious subjective experiences, when there is nothing in our conception of matter, energy, OR configurations which
Re: Why I am I?
On Sun, Dec 6, 2009 at 8:09 PM, Brent Meeker meeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: You seem to be reading a lot into my post. Ha! Ya, once I got going I figured I'd just throw everything in there and see if any of it elicited any interesting feedback. I never said that consciousness is an illusion. In fact I didn't say anything about consciousness at all. My post was about what makes an explanation a good one and that being ultimate is historically not one of them. So my point is that: in a reductionist theory which implies a physicalist reality with no downwards causation, nothing means anything. Things only have the appearance of meaning. In such a reality, things just are what they are. If you find some explanations good and others bad, that's just the epiphenominal residue of more fundamental physical processes which are themselves unconcerned with such things. In such a reality if you predict an event that comes to pass, both your prediction AND the event were inevitable from the first instant of the universe, implicit in it's initial state plus the laws of physics. Looked at in a block-universe format: the first instant, you making the prediction, and the predicted event all coexist simultaneously. In this view, while your prediction was accurate, there's no reason for that...it's just the way things are in that block of reality. Scientific theories only describe this fact, they don't explain it. So what science deals in is descriptions. Not explanations. The feeling that something has been explained is an aspect of consciousness, not an aspect of reality (at least not reality as posited by physicalism). I don't think that this is usually made clear. And it seems like a subtle but important distinction, philosophically. So I take your point about the schoolmen. There aren't many practical applications for the idea that things just are the way they are. But still it's an interesting piece of information, if true. But if physicalism is correct, then how useful are your explanations really? You *feel* as though it's useful to know about inflation and the CMB, but underneath your feelings, your constituent quarks and electrons are playing out the parts that were set for them by the initial state of the universe plus the laws that govern it's evolution. Maybe that initial state and the particular governing laws were set according to the rules of some larger multiverse...or maybe they just are what they are, for no reason. How about this: Science is about observations. Philosophy is about clarity. I just want to be clear about the implications of the various narratives that are consistent with what we observe. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Why I am I?
Rex Allen wrote: On Sun, Dec 6, 2009 at 8:09 PM, Brent Meeker meeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: You seem to be reading a lot into my post. Ha! Ya, once I got going I figured I'd just throw everything in there and see if any of it elicited any interesting feedback. I never said that consciousness is an illusion. In fact I didn't say anything about consciousness at all. My post was about what makes an explanation a good one and that being "ultimate" is historically not one of them. So my point is that: in a reductionist theory which implies a physicalist reality with no downwards causation, What defines "upwards" and "downwards". Why would "downwards" causation make any difference? nothing means anything. You mean things don't stand as symbols for something else? That reminds me of George Carlin's quip, "If we're here to care for other people, what are those other people here for?" Things only have the "appearance" of meaning. The above words have the appearance of meaning to me - and so they do have meaning to me. I don't know what else I could ask for? In such a reality, things just are what they are. If you find some explanations "good" and others "bad", that's just the epiphenominal residue of more fundamental physical processes which are themselves unconcerned with such things. Having predictive theories was no doubt selected by evolution - as well as a psychological to see meaning in things. In such a reality if you predict an event that comes to pass, both your prediction AND the event were inevitable from the first instant of the universe, implicit in it's initial state plus the laws of physics. That's one theory, formerly more popular than now. Looked at in a block-universe format: the first instant, you making the prediction, and the predicted event all coexist simultaneously. In this view, while your prediction was accurate, there's no reason for that...it's just the way things are in that block of reality. Scientific theories only describe this fact, they don't explain it. So what science deals in is descriptions. Not explanations. The feeling that something has been explained is an aspect of consciousness, not an aspect of reality (at least not reality as posited by physicalism). But then you need to ask yourself what does constitute an explanation? If you dismiss scientific models that show you how to make choices and manipulate the world and allow you to predict events, what is it you're looking for? What's your definition of "explanation"? Can you give an example of a good explanation? Does it have to be teleological? ultimate? holistic? I don't think that this is usually made clear. And it seems like a subtle but important distinction, philosophically. So I take your point about the schoolmen. There aren't many practical applications for the idea that "things just are the way they are". But still it's an interesting piece of information, if true. But if physicalism is correct, then how useful are your "explanations" really? You *feel* as though it's useful to know about inflation and the CMB, but underneath your feelings, your constituent quarks and electrons are playing out the parts that were set for them by the initial state of the universe plus the laws that govern it's evolution. Well I haven't used quark theory, but my "explanations" have helped me design a very fast ramjet. I'd feel a little uncertain about flying in an airliner designed by people who thought aerodynamics didn't explain anything. Maybe that initial state and the particular governing laws were set according to the rules of some larger multiverse...or maybe they just are what they are, for no reason. How about this: "Science is about observations. Philosophy is about clarity." I'd say science is about making models that predict what is observed and not the contrary. Since you rambled about consciousness I'll share my speculation about it. I think people resort to "philosophical" explanations when they don't have scientific ones and when scientific ones are found they stop worrying about the philosophical questions. At one time people worried about vitality, the life-force, elan vitale, that animated things. But as more and more was learned about molecular biology, DNA, metabolism, evolution, etc, people stopped worrying about "life". They didn't explain it. They only described it and how it worked (in great detail). The DNA isn't alive, none of the molecules are alive and yet there is no elan vitale either. The old questions about life just seem ill posed. Not answered, yet irrelevant. I think the same thing will happen to "consciousness" that happened to "life". We will learn to describe consciousness by causal models, we'll predict the effect of salvia and mushrooms on different people's consciousness. We'll build robots which appear to be conscious. We'll add electronics to brains
Re: Why I am I?
I admire this list. Somebody asks a silly question and 'we' write hourlong wisdom(s) upon it. After my deep liking of Stathis's what difference does it make? (or something to that meaning) - my question went a step deeped: *for: How do I know I am I? - (rather:* How (Why?) do I think I am I?) I ask: DO I? (then comes Stathis). * Bruno's 'firmly knowable' *arithmetic truth *is a true exception: WE (=the ways humans think) made up what we call 'arithmetic' - the way that WE may accept it as 'truth'. (I am still with David Bohm's numbers are human invention - did not read acceptable (for me) arguments on the numbers-originated everything - in the wider sense. But this is not this thread). John Mikes PS now - it seems - I joined the choir. JM On Sat, Dec 5, 2009 at 9:07 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 05 Dec 2009, at 01:30, Brent Meeker wrote: It is also infinitely ignorant and so long as it remains that way it's nothing to me. We are all infinitely ignorant (if only with respect to arithmetical truth). The universal machine or numbers are not nothing. This is just another form of the everything universal acid. Just postulate an everything and then we know the something we're interested in must be in there somewhere. The everything of comp is just elementary arithmetic. It predicts the existence of a a level (of isolation or independence, really) such that many computations interferes, as QM confirms (retrospectively). It predicts symmetry and a quantum logic of conditionals, etc. And a cute arithmetical, and testable, interpretation of Phytagoras-Plato-Plotinus, + a vast range of mystics and free thinkers. I ditinctly and clearly not follow Tegmark or Bayesian Anthropism on this point. The physical *laws* have a reason, and we can find them from the digital hypothesis. Frankly, Monsieur est difficile ;-) It is not necessary for the reasoning, but there are sequence of thought experiences which can help you to figure out what is it like losing all memories. I wasn't talking about losing all memories, but about not having memory, i.e. not only losing old memories, but also not forming any new memories. A computer without memory can't compute. The computer, or the relative universal machine (relative to another probable universal machine) makes only higher the relative probabilty that the internal consciousness flux will makes itself manifest relatively to that probable universal machine/number. It makes possible for a universal machine to say hello to itself, or to another universal machine. Some would say that the point consists in losing, for a short period, that human kind of consciousness. But without memory how would one know it had been lost or not? That is again the point. There we don't know that. But with salvia divinorum, when you control well the dosage and timing, or smoke only the leaves, you don't need to do the amnesia, you can just dissociate that universal you from your contingent terrestrial you, like taking a big distance from the contingencies. It is a desappropriation. To judge the presence of consciousness is difficult. Recently, in France, after having been considered as being in a unconscious comatose state for 23 years, a woman, with the help of her family, has succeed to convince its doctors that she was as conscious than you and me. She was just highly paralyzed. You mean Rom Houben (a man)? http://article.wn.com/view/2009/11/25/Is_coma_man_Rom_Houben_REALLY_talking_Mystery_as_critics_sla/ Well, not really. It was a french woman. In Belgium they have considered her as fully conscious, and it has been confirmed in the USA. I heard this on a radio, and a friend confirms. I will try to find the information. In any case I allude to the case, by decision, where the consciousness is not considered as controversial. Like the Ingberg case in France. Usually, it means, I think, that the patient can communicate through different speech therapists. From the video, I would say Houben seems fully conscious to me. Experts are casting doubt on claims that a man http://everyman.com/ who doctors had believed was in a 23-year coma is truly conscious and communicating on his own. Belgian Rom Houben communicates with the help http://aidagencies.com/ of a speech therapist who moves his finger letter http://letters.com/ by letter along a touch-screen keyboard. But yesterday experts slammed the method as 'Ouija board communication', saying it had been 'completely discredited'. Just because there has once been a mistake doesn't prove it is difficult to get right - only that it is difficult to always be right. Sure. It raises many interesting questions. Bruno Marchal http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to
RE: Why I am I?
From: John Mikes [mailto:jami...@gmail.com] Sent: Saturday, December 05, 2009 10:00 AM To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: Why I am I? I admire this list. Somebody asks a silly question and 'we' write hourlong wisdom(s) upon it. After my deep liking of Stathis's what difference does it make? (or something to that meaning) - my question went a step deeped: for: How do I know I am I? - (rather: How (Why?) do I think I am I?) I ask: DO I? (then comes Stathis). * Bruno's 'firmly knowable' arithmetic truth is a true exception: WE (=the ways humans think) made up what we call 'arithmetic' - the way that WE may accept it as 'truth'. (I am still with David Bohm's numbers are human invention - did not read acceptable (for me) arguments on the numbers-originated everything - in the wider sense. But this is not this thread). John Mikes PS now - it seems - I joined the choir. JM All. . . Good quote on hourlong wisdoms. But it's also starting to look like a lead-in to a documentary on pop songs with a philosophic bent. The who am I thing probably applies to a good number of teen songs today, and to a few of them back in the 70's. Matter of fact, there seems to be a 30-40-year cycle to who am I? and philosophycentered songs, with a few of them turning up in the thirties. What a difference a day makes, night and day, Days of Future Passed, etc. and etc. No WONDER John joined the choir. Heh. R. Miller On Sat, Dec 5, 2009 at 9:07 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 05 Dec 2009, at 01:30, Brent Meeker wrote: It is also infinitely ignorant and so long as it remains that way it's nothing to me. We are all infinitely ignorant (if only with respect to arithmetical truth). The universal machine or numbers are not nothing. This is just another form of the everything universal acid. Just postulate an everything and then we know the something we're interested in must be in there somewhere. The everything of comp is just elementary arithmetic. It predicts the existence of a a level (of isolation or independence, really) such that many computations interferes, as QM confirms (retrospectively). It predicts symmetry and a quantum logic of conditionals, etc. And a cute arithmetical, and testable, interpretation of Phytagoras-Plato-Plotinus, + a vast range of mystics and free thinkers. I ditinctly and clearly not follow Tegmark or Bayesian Anthropism on this point. The physical *laws* have a reason, and we can find them from the digital hypothesis. Frankly, Monsieur est difficile ;-) It is not necessary for the reasoning, but there are sequence of thought experiences which can help you to figure out what is it like losing all memories. I wasn't talking about losing all memories, but about not having memory, i.e. not only losing old memories, but also not forming any new memories. A computer without memory can't compute. The computer, or the relative universal machine (relative to another probable universal machine) makes only higher the relative probabilty that the internal consciousness flux will makes itself manifest relatively to that probable universal machine/number. It makes possible for a universal machine to say hello to itself, or to another universal machine. Some would say that the point consists in losing, for a short period, that human kind of consciousness. But without memory how would one know it had been lost or not? That is again the point. There we don't know that. But with salvia divinorum, when you control well the dosage and timing, or smoke only the leaves, you don't need to do the amnesia, you can just dissociate that universal you from your contingent terrestrial you, like taking a big distance from the contingencies. It is a desappropriation. To judge the presence of consciousness is difficult. Recently, in France, after having been considered as being in a unconscious comatose state for 23 years, a woman, with the help of her family, has succeed to convince its doctors that she was as conscious than you and me. She was just highly paralyzed. You mean Rom Houben (a man)? http://article.wn.com/view/2009/11/25/Is_coma_man_Rom_Houben_REALLY_talking_ Mystery_as_critics_sla/ Well, not really. It was a french woman. In Belgium they have considered her as fully conscious, and it has been confirmed in the USA. I heard this on a radio, and a friend confirms. I will try to find the information. In any case I allude to the case, by decision, where the consciousness is not considered as controversial. Like the Ingberg case in France. Usually, it means, I think, that the patient can communicate through different speech therapists. From the video, I would say Houben seems fully conscious to me. Experts are casting doubt on claims that a man http://everyman.com/ who doctors
Re: Why I am I?
On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 10:35 PM, Brent Meeker meeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: Rex Allen wrote: What is your alternative to the everything universal acid? That things just are the way they are (uniquely), and there's ultimately no explanation for that. Right? Exactly so. It's just happened that way and Everything happens and so this happens too. are both equally useless. Progress is only made when we can explain why this rather than that. So, we have our observations, and we want to explain them, so we need some context to place them in. So we postulate the existence of an external universe. But then we want to explain what we see in this external universe, and the only option is to postulate the existence of a multiverse. Nothing can be explained in terms of only itself. To explain it, you have to place it in the context of something larger. Otherwise, no explanation is possible, you just have to say, this is the way it is because that's the way it is. Right? Basically there's only two way the process can end. Two possible answers to the question of Why is the universe this way instead of some other way?: 1) Because things just are the way they are, and there's no further explanation possible. 2) Because EVERYTHING happens, and so this was inevitable in that larger context of everything. What other option is there, do you think? So we can take our observations of the world around us and construct a narrative that is consistent with what we see...a narrative that involves big bangs and electrons. But what caused the big bang? Why do electrons have the particular properties that they have? If you propose a particular cause for these things, what caused that cause? How is that better than a narrative that allows for everything? They would seem to have equal explanatory power. Which is to say: zero. We have much evidence about the big bang and some theories as to how it may have happened which are testable. So the existence of a big bang event certainly seems consistent with our observations. But so does the idea of a Boltzmann style statistical fluctuation from thermal equilibrium. Or the idea that this is just the dream of the infinitude of relations between numbers. We construct narratives that are consistent with our observations, but these narratives are about our observations, not about what really exists. You seem to have jumped to some unfounded ontological conclusions. You can talk about big bangs if that helps you think about your observations, helps you identify patterns in what you experience. But, that's as far as it can reasonably go, right? At the end of the day, we're always right back at where we started...with our observations...with our subjective conscious experience. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Why I am I?
On 05 Dec 2009, at 21:00, Rex Allen wrote: On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 10:35 PM, Brent Meeker meeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: Rex Allen wrote: What is your alternative to the everything universal acid? That things just are the way they are (uniquely), and there's ultimately no explanation for that. Right? Exactly so. It's just happened that way and Everything happens and so this happens too. are both equally useless. Progress is only made when we can explain why this rather than that. So, we have our observations, and we want to explain them, so we need some context to place them in. So we postulate the existence of an external universe. But then we want to explain what we see in this external universe, and the only option is to postulate the existence of a multiverse. Nothing can be explained in terms of only itself. To explain it, you have to place it in the context of something larger. Otherwise, no explanation is possible, you just have to say, this is the way it is because that's the way it is. Right? Basically there's only two way the process can end. Two possible answers to the question of Why is the universe this way instead of some other way?: 1) Because things just are the way they are, and there's no further explanation possible. 2) Because EVERYTHING happens, and so this was inevitable in that larger context of everything. What other option is there, do you think? Well in this list we follow the option 2. (As its name indicates). To progress we need to make the everything idea more precise. Most naive everything idea are either trivial and non informative, or can be shown inconsistent. QM is an amazing everything theory, astoundingly accurate. Yet it is based on comp (or variety of comp), which means that if you take serioulsy the first person experiences into consideration, then you have to derive the Schroedinger waves from a deeper purely arithmetical derivation. But with the computable, something happens: the discovery of the universal machine (accepting Church's thesis). This makes enough to confront all universal machine, actually the Löbian one will even understand why, with a consciousness/reality problem, or first-person/third person relation problem, and that the Löbian machine can develop the means to explore the many gaps which exists there. So we can take our observations of the world around us and construct a narrative that is consistent with what we see...a narrative that involves big bangs and electrons. But what caused the big bang? Why do electrons have the particular properties that they have? If you propose a particular cause for these things, what caused that cause? How is that better than a narrative that allows for everything? They would seem to have equal explanatory power. Which is to say: zero. We have much evidence about the big bang and some theories as to how it may have happened which are testable. So the existence of a big bang event certainly seems consistent with our observations. But so does the idea of a Boltzmann style statistical fluctuation from thermal equilibrium. Or the idea that this is just the dream of the infinitude of relations between numbers. We construct narratives that are consistent with our observations, but these narratives are about our observations, not about what really exists. You seem to have jumped to some unfounded ontological conclusions. You can talk about big bangs if that helps you think about your observations, helps you identify patterns in what you experience. But, that's as far as it can reasonably go, right? At the end of the day, we're always right back at where we started...with our observations...with our subjective conscious experience. I think we have made progress. We know (assuming digital mechanism) that we know nothing about the consequence of addition and multiplication, but that we can explore, and that it is divided into sharable and non sharable parts. We may correct a widespread error: the sharable part is the objective and doubtable part, the non sharable part is the subjective and undoubtable part. We have a theology. A greek one, by which I mean, that is the bad news for some, we have to do mathematics. And nobody ask you to believe it, unless you decide to say yes to some doctor and believe that 2 + 2 = 4. You can call it a toy theology, given that it is the theology of an ideally relatively self-referentially correct Löbian machine. It exists as a branch of math, and it applies to us if comp is true and as far as we are correct ourselves, which we can never known. But we can bet on levels, like nature apparently already did, and prey or hope or something like that. The quest of truth will continue. If comp is true reality is beyond fictions. For the best or the worth, this depends *partially* on us. Who us? Us the universal machines. The motto: be
Re: Why I am I?
Rex Allen wrote: On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 10:35 PM, Brent Meeker meeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: Rex Allen wrote: What is your alternative to the everything universal acid? That things just are the way they are (uniquely), and there's ultimately no explanation for that. Right? Exactly so. It's just happened that way and Everything happens and so this happens too. are both equally useless. Progress is only made when we can explain why this rather than that. So, we have our observations, and we want to explain them, so we need some context to place them in. So we postulate the existence of an external universe. But then we want to explain what we see in this external universe, and the only option is to postulate the existence of a multiverse. Nothing can be explained in terms of only itself. To explain it, you have to place it in the context of something larger. Otherwise, no explanation is possible, you just have to say, this is the way it is because that's the way it is. Right? Basically there's only two way the process can end. Two possible answers to the question of Why is the universe this way instead of some other way?: 1) Because things just are the way they are, and there's no further explanation possible. 2) Because EVERYTHING happens, and so this was inevitable in that larger context of everything. What other option is there, do you think? Look at what we actually take to be explanations. For example, inflation is taken to be an explanation for the homogeneity of the CMB, for the flatness of space, for the absence of magnetic monopoles. Why? First, because it replaces these seemingly disparate observed facts with a single theory that is consistent with our other theories. Second, and more importantly, it predicted higher order correlations in the CMB which were then observed. So we are still faced with explaining the inflation; which some people might explain as, That's just the way it is. and others might explain,Out of all possible universes some must inflate, but neither of those predicts anything or leads to any experiment. A real explanation would be one describing an inflaton field and predicting its experimental manifestation. So the option is don't adopt non-explanations and simply admit that there are things we don't know and that's why we do research. Theories need to be consilient and specific and testable and predict something we didn't already know, but turns out to be true. That's the gold standard. So I agree that in some sense the two options you present above seem to be the only possible ultimate statements, sort of like the schoolmen who proved that God did it was the ultimate answer everything. But, I don't think ultimate statements are worth much because they are like junk food explanations - no nutritional value. Brent So we can take our observations of the world around us and construct a narrative that is consistent with what we see...a narrative that involves big bangs and electrons. But what caused the big bang? Why do electrons have the particular properties that they have? If you propose a particular cause for these things, what caused that cause? How is that better than a narrative that allows for everything? They would seem to have equal explanatory power. Which is to say: zero. We have much evidence about the big bang and some theories as to how it may have happened which are testable. So the existence of a big bang event certainly seems consistent with our observations. But so does the idea of a Boltzmann style statistical fluctuation from thermal equilibrium. Or the idea that this is just the dream of the infinitude of relations between numbers. We construct narratives that are consistent with our observations, but these narratives are about our observations, not about what really exists. You seem to have jumped to some unfounded ontological conclusions. You can talk about big bangs if that helps you think about your observations, helps you identify patterns in what you experience. But, that's as far as it can reasonably go, right? At the end of the day, we're always right back at where we started...with our observations...with our subjective conscious experience. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options,
Re: Why I am I?
On 04 Dec 2009, at 20:47, Johnathan Corgan wrote: On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 10:15 AM, Brent Meeker meeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: I thought it was impossible to live that and to be able to come back from such an experience, but it happens that with salvia divinorum, some subject can live the experience of quasi-total amnesia, where not only you forget which human you are, but you can forget what a human is, what time is, what space is, and yet, retrospectively, after coming back, you realize that despite having forgot everything, you were still conscious, and you were still considering you as a living entity of some sort. I've not had that experience, but I might try it. I think though that even in such a state one must have some short-term (~second) memory to have a human kind of consciousness. Obviously you now have memories of what it was like. I have known people with severe Alzheimer's disease who seemed merely reactive and apparently had no memory, even short term. I don't think they were as conscious as my dog or the fish in my pond. Experience reports of Salvia Divinorum (or salvinorin A, it's chief psychoactive compound) use in the literature contain many common themes related to memory deficits, and represent a fascinating uncontrolled study in the phenomenology of consciousness. There are of course many concurrent effects (visual and auditory hallucinations, somatic sensations, distortions of body image, etc.) shared with other hallucinogens, but the impact on memory seems unique. At typical dose levels resulting from smoking the plant leaves or fortified extracts of the plant leaves, many users later report that they had forgotten they had taken a drug, and were confused (and often terrified) about why they were experiencing what they were. This is reported as a sudden onset phenomena, not a gradual one, and is often compared to the feeling of waking up in a strange place with no memory of how one got there. This suggests that one action of the drug is to disrupt the last few minutes of episodic memory formation. However, these same reports also state that as the effect of the drug began to peak and then wear off, usually in a matter of a few minutes, the users suddenly recalled the events leading up to their intoxicated state. This then suggests that, at these doses, the drug only disrupts access to recent episodic memory, but the memory is still formed for later recall. This is different from the form of permanent memory loss that occurs in head injury cases where the victim cannot ever recall the moments leading up to, say, a vehicle collision. At higher doses, a common theme is that (along with the prior episodic amnestic effects) the user reports having forgotten key fundamental concepts like what being human is or what space is. This sort of semantic memory loss is difficult to imagine, but it is fascinating that even under such extreme conditions, the user is experiencing a stream-of-consciousness that can later be recalled. Less frequently, reports at higher doses describe feeling like all of my prior reality was a joke being played on me, and I was experiencing the REAL reality, and everything that happened before was just a construction or movie set. There is also an incredible reverse tolerance effect. Now, I get that game over effect each time, even with a very small pinch of leaves. To get the same teaching you need less and less and less. Three times, I get what I call (in my diaries or in some forums) total recall just by smelling the leaves. Most users experiment this. The plant is also self-regulating. You really have to wait for the good timing, or you find the gates closed there. Some users go on to report even more bizarre cases where they report having lived another lifetime somewhere else, and are shocked and dismayed when the drug begins to wear off that it was all a dream, and that this reality is the real one. This sounds like a more extreme version of our normal REM sleep, where when dreaming, one doesn't usually realize one is dreaming, but sorts things out upon awakening. Indeed. Some (all?) experiences are a bit like waking up. But there is a double amnesia, you forget here there. And you forget there here. It is actually an art to find the dosage and the timing so that you understand better some, well, let us say statements you get there. One is just impossible to memorize, or you stay there, and a copy is send here. This is a copy effect experimented by a reasonable proportion of users. i am talking of report of experiences, not of the interpretation of them in some theory. Compounding these impacts on memory are reports of changes in body image and identity. One recurring theme (that is shared with other hallucinogens) is the feeling of merging with objects in one's visual field. I have never lived this. But this
Re: Why I am I?
Bruno Marchal wrote: It is actually an art to find the dosage and the timing so that you understand better some, well, let us say statements you get there. One is just impossible to memorize, or you stay there, and a copy is send here. This is a copy effect experimented by a reasonable proportion of users. This is confusing me. When you say a copy is send it sounds like the copy is not the real thing. How can you distinguish copy and original? The copy probably won't say it is just a copy (as opposed to the original). And what do you mean by stay there? Forever? Why should you stay there (can you choose)? And where is there? Is it forgetfulness oder remembrance? This staying there thought is chasing me on many of my psychedlic experience. I find it very scary, often it really hinders me to enjoy the experience, because the thought but I don't want to leave 'my reality' forever comes and makes me unable to relax. I tried salvia several times, too. I got some weird effects, like thinking I die in every instant because I identified with a moment (scary, but somehow funny in retrospection). Or remembering something exhilarating, but being unable to express it or store it in my memory completely (I tend to think it's just the realization that there are no bad problems, contrary to what I felt on a N2O trip, that life consists only of problems - not enjoyable playful ones but rather endless forced labour). But I never felt like being a copy or having a choice of staying in salvia land. -- View this message in context: http://old.nabble.com/Why-I-am-I--tp26616194p26662101.html Sent from the Everything List mailing list archive at Nabble.com. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Why I am I?
On Sat, Dec 5, 2009 at 2:27 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: All of this indicates that salvinorin A has potent but short-lived effects on the brain systems involved in memory, identity, body image and perception of time and space (along with a host of other effects not discussed here). Regardless of one's view on the use of these substances to alter one's cognition, it seems there is a great opportunity to study these effects to zero in on how these brain systems are related to our subjective experience of reality. Very difficult task, but very interesting, and probably parts of the experience/experiments needed to build an artificial brain. A double-blind study protocol to test for particular effects would be difficult to design, no doubt. I don't understand your reference to the need for an artificial brain. However, it would still be possible to carry out experimentation to correlate subjective reports of these altered 1-pov percepts with 3-pov data obtained by FMRI, EEG, etc. Unfortunately, current laws in the U.S. restrict experimentation of this type to therapeutic applications. It is possible to test to see whether MDMA is a successful treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, but not, say only to find out the dose/response curve for its psychedelic properties. Absent those types of studies, it would still be enormously educational for someone to conduct a meta-analysis of the many thousands of first-hand written and recorded reports of Salvia Divinorum use. While far from being a random sample, at least one would have a better map of the territory to guide further research. Well, if we define a drug by something harmful and addictive, then salvia is not known to be a drug today, because there are no evidence it is harmful nor evidence it is addictive. Indeed, animal studies to date have shown that salvinorin A administration reduces the levels of dopamine in the portions of the brain associated with addiction and craving, which is exactly opposite the effects of strongly addictive and euphoriant drugs like cocaine and methamphetamine. Whether this is true in human brains remains to be seen (and difficult to study due to reasons above). In any case, this discussion is probably more relevant in other forums. I brought it up only because we frequently discuss consciousness, memory and identity, and lo and behold there is a drug which has radical effects on the subjective experience of all three, and a body of written reports to examine. Johnathan Corgan -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Why I am I?
On 03 Dec 2009, at 23:12, Brent Meeker wrote: Exactly. It is the magical I that is swapped. That I is magical. It is like swapping both the mind (or 1-I) and the body (or 3-I). Eventually this is the reason why absolute sample of the observer moment does not work, and we need relative self self-sampling. Which neither with QM (without collapse) or just digital mechanism is obvious to derive. The mind can swap its body for brain or another ?? You mean or brain? Yes, I meant a mind (a first person, a soul; or the (Bp p) of some Lobian program) can swap its body or brain for another body or brain. Sorry. , or survive through a digital back-up. Rigt? This mean the notion of I still make sense. But it doesn't make sense to swap two minds and their bodies (i.e. perspectives). That's just interchanging positions and isn't generally thought to affect who is who - although read Stanislau Lem's The Star Diaries. And if you suppose the mind is embodied in the brain or digital machine then swapping minds with Stathis implies swapping the essential aspects of the brain or machine. Yes. As usual with mechanism, you can identify, in a first approximation, the mind with the (running) software. It is the same with a computer. You can swap the physical hard disk, but if you want your computer to keep its mind, you have to reinstall its software, and its initial configuration, with all the data. Both the 1-I, and the 3-I makes sense, it is the link between them which is magical, and made harder to figure out than people usually believe, like with the identity thesis, physical supervenience, etc. Now, when you see that people have some difficulty to understand thought experience without amnesia, thought experience with amnesia are perhaps premature. I am not sure. It depends on your familiarity with such kind of thought. I'm not sure what thought experience with amnesia is, but taken rigorously it sounds impossible. I was alluding to some discussions we had when discussing the movie the prestige, or when discussing the Saibal Mitra backtracking. The question is this, and is addressed to the people who already accept an artificial brain in the usual conditions which are supposed to be perfect (right substitution level, competent doctor): would you still say yes to the doctor if he tells you that, after the reconstitution of your brain, you will lose the memory of one day, or of one week, or one year, or of your entire life, etc. By thought experience with amnesia, I meant a thought experience which involves a partial or a total amnesia. Not only this is possible, but this happens in real life rather often, for example in car accidents, or in war head injuries. Some drug (for example salvia divinorum) can generate severe (but temporary) amnesia, and can help to make real some of those thought experiences. Those thought experiences are not needed to understand that the physical reality and physical sensations emerge from numbers addition and multiplication, for example, but may be useful to tackle the identity problem why I am I, who am I really?, etc. (cf soulcatcher☠ question) In general I try to avoid them. When we discussed the prestige movie, we talk about this. I said, in a conversation with Quentin Anciaux, that IF you believe that you can survive with a total amnesia, THEN you are expanding a lot the variety of the possible form of the computationalist immortality. If you make the experience of remembering having been nothing less and nothing more than a universal (Löbian) machine, you can know (or imagine) that you are already immortal. You can live the experience of being the static consciousness, out of time and space, of the universal (digital) person, and intuit that time and space are a construction of your mind. Some slow sleep (non REM) dream state can lead to similar experiences, and I suspect that Plato, Plotinus, Kant and Descartes (and probably many others) lived things like that. I thought it was impossible to live that and to be able to come back from such an experience, but it happens that with salvia divinorum, some subject can live the experience of quasi-total amnesia, where not only you forget which human you are, but you can forget what a human is, what time is, what space is, and yet, retrospectively, after coming back, you realize that despite having forgot everything, you were still conscious, and you were still considering you as a living entity of some sort. Some people are terrified by such experience, other enjoy it or find it interesting. It helps indeed to realize the contingent nature of particular memories and the illusion of identity. I don't recommend it, unless it is legal in your state and you are pretty curious on the functioning of the brain, and the nature of your identity. People who don't like metaphysical
Re: Why I am I?
Bruno Marchal wrote: On 03 Dec 2009, at 23:12, Brent Meeker wrote: Exactly. It is the magical "I" that is swapped. That "I" is magical. It is like swapping both the mind (or 1-I) and the body (or 3-I). Eventually this is the reason why absolute sample of the observer moment does not work, and we need relative self self-sampling. Which neither with QM (without collapse) or just digital mechanism is obvious to derive. The mind can swap its body for brain or another ?? You mean "or brain"? Yes, I meant "a mind" (a first person, a soul; or the "(Bp p) of some Lobian program") can swap its body or brain for another body or brain. Sorry. , or survive through a digital back-up. Rigt? This mean the notion of "I" still make sense. But it doesn't make sense to swap two minds and their bodies (i.e. perspectives). That's just interchanging positions and isn't generally thought to affect who is who - although read Stanislau Lem's "The Star Diaries". And if you suppose the mind is embodied in the brain or digital machine then swapping minds with Stathis implies swapping the essential aspects of the brain or machine. Yes. As usual with mechanism, you can identify, in a first approximation, the mind with the (running) software. It is the same with a computer. You can swap the physical hard disk, but if you want your "computer" to "keep its mind", you have to reinstall its software, and its initial configuration, with all the data. Both the 1-I, and the 3-I makes sense, it is the link between them which is "magical", and made harder to figure out than people usually believe, like with the identity thesis, physical supervenience, etc. Now, when you see that people have some difficulty to understand thought experience without amnesia, thought experience with amnesia are perhaps premature. I am not sure. It depends on your familiarity with such kind of thought. I'm not sure what "thought experience with amnesia" is, but taken rigorously it sounds impossible. I was alluding to some discussions we had when discussing the movie "the prestige", or when discussing the Saibal Mitra backtracking. The question is this, and is addressed to the people who already accept an artificial brain in the usual conditions which are supposed to be perfect (right substitution level, competent doctor): would you still say yes to the doctor if he tells you that, after the reconstitution of your brain, you will lose the memory of one day, or of one week, or one year, or of your entire life, etc. By thought experience with amnesia, I meant a thought experience which involves a partial or a total amnesia. Not only this is possible, but this happens in "real life" rather often, for example in car accidents, or in war head injuries. Some drug (for example salvia divinorum) can generate severe (but temporary) amnesia, and can help to make "real" some of those thought experiences. Those thought experiences are not needed to understand that the physical reality and physical sensations emerge from numbers addition and multiplication, for example, but may be useful to tackle the identity problem "why I am I", "who am I really?", etc. (cf soulcatcher☠ question) In general I try to avoid them. When we discussed the prestige movie, we talk about this. I said, in a conversation with Quentin Anciaux, that IF you believe that you can survive with a "total amnesia", THEN you are expanding a lot the variety of the possible form of the computationalist immortality. That's what I meant by impossible. If there is no memory at all, then I don't see how the construct we refer to as "you" can even be identified. If you make the experience of remembering having been nothing less and nothing more than a universal (Löbian) machine, you can know (or imagine) that you are already immortal. You can live the experience of being the static consciousness, out of time and space, of the universal (digital) person, and intuit that time and space are a construction of your mind. Some "slow sleep" (non REM) dream state can lead to similar experiences, and I suspect that Plato, Plotinus, Kant and Descartes (and probably many others) lived things like that. I thought it was impossible to live that and to be able to come back from such an experience, but it happens that with salvia divinorum, some subject can live the experience of quasi-total amnesia, where not only you forget which human you are, but you can forget what a human is, what time is, what space is, and yet, retrospectively, after coming back, you realize that despite having forgot everything, you were still conscious, and you were still
Re: Why I am I?
On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 10:15 AM, Brent Meeker meeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: I thought it was impossible to live that and to be able to come back from such an experience, but it happens that with salvia divinorum, some subject can live the experience of quasi-total amnesia, where not only you forget which human you are, but you can forget what a human is, what time is, what space is, and yet, retrospectively, after coming back, you realize that despite having forgot everything, you were still conscious, and you were still considering you as a living entity of some sort. I've not had that experience, but I might try it. I think though that even in such a state one must have some short-term (~second) memory to have a human kind of consciousness. Obviously you now have memories of what it was like. I have known people with severe Alzheimer's disease who seemed merely reactive and apparently had no memory, even short term. I don't think they were as conscious as my dog or the fish in my pond. Experience reports of Salvia Divinorum (or salvinorin A, it's chief psychoactive compound) use in the literature contain many common themes related to memory deficits, and represent a fascinating uncontrolled study in the phenomenology of consciousness. There are of course many concurrent effects (visual and auditory hallucinations, somatic sensations, distortions of body image, etc.) shared with other hallucinogens, but the impact on memory seems unique. At typical dose levels resulting from smoking the plant leaves or fortified extracts of the plant leaves, many users later report that they had forgotten they had taken a drug, and were confused (and often terrified) about why they were experiencing what they were. This is reported as a sudden onset phenomena, not a gradual one, and is often compared to the feeling of waking up in a strange place with no memory of how one got there. This suggests that one action of the drug is to disrupt the last few minutes of episodic memory formation. However, these same reports also state that as the effect of the drug began to peak and then wear off, usually in a matter of a few minutes, the users suddenly recalled the events leading up to their intoxicated state. This then suggests that, at these doses, the drug only disrupts access to recent episodic memory, but the memory is still formed for later recall. This is different from the form of permanent memory loss that occurs in head injury cases where the victim cannot ever recall the moments leading up to, say, a vehicle collision. At higher doses, a common theme is that (along with the prior episodic amnestic effects) the user reports having forgotten key fundamental concepts like what being human is or what space is. This sort of semantic memory loss is difficult to imagine, but it is fascinating that even under such extreme conditions, the user is experiencing a stream-of-consciousness that can later be recalled. Less frequently, reports at higher doses describe feeling like all of my prior reality was a joke being played on me, and I was experiencing the REAL reality, and everything that happened before was just a construction or movie set. Some users go on to report even more bizarre cases where they report having lived another lifetime somewhere else, and are shocked and dismayed when the drug begins to wear off that it was all a dream, and that this reality is the real one. This sounds like a more extreme version of our normal REM sleep, where when dreaming, one doesn't usually realize one is dreaming, but sorts things out upon awakening. Compounding these impacts on memory are reports of changes in body image and identity. One recurring theme (that is shared with other hallucinogens) is the feeling of merging with objects in one's visual field. This is reported as both incorporating the physical object into one's body image and changing one's perspective to be that of the object. In one case, a user reported that I actually KNEW what it was like to be a swing set, to live every day in the playground and be happy when children were using me, and sad when the park was closed. Another unique aspect of the effects of salvinorin A is its extremely short-lived activity. Most reports seem to indicate that the smoked form of the drug wears off in as little as 10-15 minutes, completely returning the user to baseline in less than a half-hour. All of this indicates that salvinorin A has potent but short-lived effects on the brain systems involved in memory, identity, body image and perception of time and space (along with a host of other effects not discussed here). Regardless of one's view on the use of these substances to alter one's cognition, it seems there is a great opportunity to study these effects to zero in on how these brain systems are related to our subjective experience of reality. Johnathan Corgan -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
Re: Why I am I?
On 04 Dec 2009, at 19:15, Brent Meeker wrote: Bruno Marchal wrote: Those thought experiences are not needed to understand that the physical reality and physical sensations emerge from numbers addition and multiplication, for example, but may be useful to tackle the identity problem why I am I, who am I really?, etc. (cf soulcatcher☠ question) In general I try to avoid them. When we discussed the prestige movie, we talk about this. I said, in a conversation with Quentin Anciaux, that IF you believe that you can survive with a total amnesia, THEN you are expanding a lot the variety of the possible form of the computationalist immortality. That's what I meant by impossible. If there is no memory at all, then I don't see how the construct we refer to as you can even be identified. The universal person. The virgin universal purpose computer, any interpreter. Today, unfortunately, when you buy a computer, it is already full of software which hides its universality. A universal machine is not a trivial object. Babbage did already see that it can eat its own tail. Imagine sort of universal baby. It knows nothing, but can do everything (doable). It is infinitely intelligent and creative at the start. The hard things is to keep it that way. It is not necessary for the reasoning, but there are sequence of thought experiences which can help you to figure out what is it like losing all memories. You are still someone because the 8 hypostases still exists, They hacve a first person point of view, and notions of observations, and even more, they are unobstructed by the non monotonical layers of logics that we need to survive when entangled in deep computational histories. This makes the disentanglement between laws and contingencies far more complex in practice. Some believe in a singularity point where machine will be more clever than man. I think that that event has already occurred. When you program a computer its souls may only fall, unless you manage it to stay universal. If you make the experience of remembering having been nothing less and nothing more than a universal (Löbian) machine, you can know (or imagine) that you are already immortal. You can live the experience of being the static consciousness, out of time and space, of the universal (digital) person, and intuit that time and space are a construction of your mind. Some slow sleep (non REM) dream state can lead to similar experiences, and I suspect that Plato, Plotinus, Kant and Descartes (and probably many others) lived things like that. I thought it was impossible to live that and to be able to come back from such an experience, but it happens that with salvia divinorum, some subject can live the experience of quasi-total amnesia, where not only you forget which human you are, but you can forget what a human is, what time is, what space is, and yet, retrospectively, after coming back, you realize that despite having forgot everything, you were still conscious, and you were still considering you as a living entity of some sort. I've not had that experience, but I might try it. I think though that even in such a state one must have some short-term (~second) memory to have a human kind of consciousness. Some would say that the point consists in losing, for a short period, that human kind of consciousness. With comp I argue that matter has to be the border of the mind, but nobody should take seriously the idea that it is the border of the human mind. That would be an anthropomorphic error. It is the geometry of the ignorance of all universal machine. The 'quest of truth' motor. I interview the Löbian one only because they are more self-aware (they opinions obeys Bp - BBp) making them much more chatty. Obviously you now have memories of what it was like. I have known people with severe Alzheimer's disease who seemed merely reactive and apparently had no memory, even short term. I don't think they were as conscious as my dog or the fish in my pond. To judge the presence of consciousness is difficult. Recently, in France, after having been considered as being in a unconscious comatose state for 23 years, a woman, with the help of her family, has succeed to convince its doctors that she was as conscious than you and me. She was just highly paralyzed. In a injured brain, pathologies can spread on many levels, and it is wise to say we can't even imagine how some pathologies are lived by the person. Experimenting with some psycho-active substance can put some light here, and raise some doubts there. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
Re: Why I am I?
Bruno Marchal wrote: On 04 Dec 2009, at 19:15, Brent Meeker wrote: Bruno Marchal wrote: Those thought experiences are not needed to understand that the physical reality and physical sensations emerge from numbers addition and multiplication, for example, but may be useful to tackle the identity problem why I am I, who am I really?, etc. (cf soulcatcher☠ question) In general I try to avoid them. When we discussed the prestige movie, we talk about this. I said, in a conversation with Quentin Anciaux, that IF you believe that you can survive with a total amnesia, THEN you are expanding a lot the variety of the possible form of the computationalist immortality. That's what I meant by impossible. If there is no memory at all, then I don't see how the construct we refer to as you can even be identified. The universal person. The virgin universal purpose computer, any interpreter. Today, unfortunately, when you buy a computer, it is already full of software which hides its universality. A universal machine is not a trivial object. Babbage did already see that it can eat its own tail. Imagine sort of universal baby. It knows nothing, but can do everything (doable). It is infinitely intelligent and creative at the start. The hard things is to keep it that way. It is also infinitely ignorant and so long as it remains that way it's nothing to me. This is just another form of the everything universal acid. Just postulate an everything and then we know the something we're interested in must be in there somewhere. It is not necessary for the reasoning, but there are sequence of thought experiences which can help you to figure out what is it like losing all memories. I wasn't talking about losing all memories, but about not having memory, i.e. not only losing old memories, but also not forming any new memories. A computer without memory can't compute. You are still someone because the 8 hypostases still exists, They hacve a first person point of view, and notions of observations, and even more, they are unobstructed by the non monotonical layers of logics that we need to survive when entangled in deep computational histories. This makes the disentanglement between laws and contingencies far more complex in practice. Some believe in a singularity point where machine will be more clever than man. I think that that event has already occurred. When you program a computer its souls may only fall, unless you manage it to stay universal. If you make the experience of remembering having been nothing less and nothing more than a universal (Löbian) machine, you can know (or imagine) that you are already immortal. You can live the experience of being the static consciousness, out of time and space, of the universal (digital) person, and intuit that time and space are a construction of your mind. Some slow sleep (non REM) dream state can lead to similar experiences, and I suspect that Plato, Plotinus, Kant and Descartes (and probably many others) lived things like that. I thought it was impossible to live that and to be able to come back from such an experience, but it happens that with salvia divinorum, some subject can live the experience of quasi-total amnesia, where not only you forget which human you are, but you can forget what a human is, what time is, what space is, and yet, retrospectively, after coming back, you realize that despite having forgot everything, you were still conscious, and you were still considering you as a living entity of some sort. I've not had that experience, but I might try it. I think though that even in such a state one must have some short-term (~second) memory to have a human kind of consciousness. Some would say that the point consists in losing, for a short period, that human kind of consciousness. But without memory how would one know it had been lost or not? With comp I argue that matter has to be the border of the mind, but nobody should take seriously the idea that it is the border of the human mind. That would be an anthropomorphic error. It is the geometry of the ignorance of all universal machine. The 'quest of truth' motor. I interview the Löbian one only because they are more self-aware (they opinions obeys Bp - BBp) making them much more chatty. Obviously you now have memories of what it was like. I have known people with severe Alzheimer's disease who seemed merely reactive and apparently had no memory, even short term. I don't think they were as conscious as my dog or the fish in my pond. To judge the presence of consciousness is difficult. Recently, in France, after having been considered as being in a unconscious comatose state for 23 years, a woman, with the help of her family, has succeed to convince its
Re: Why I am I?
On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 7:30 PM, Brent Meeker meeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: Bruno Marchal wrote: On 04 Dec 2009, at 19:15, Brent Meeker wrote: Bruno Marchal wrote: Those thought experiences are not needed to understand that the physical reality and physical sensations emerge from numbers addition and multiplication, for example, but may be useful to tackle the identity problem why I am I, who am I really?, etc. (cf soulcatcher☠ question) In general I try to avoid them. When we discussed the prestige movie, we talk about this. I said, in a conversation with Quentin Anciaux, that IF you believe that you can survive with a total amnesia, THEN you are expanding a lot the variety of the possible form of the computationalist immortality. That's what I meant by impossible. If there is no memory at all, then I don't see how the construct we refer to as you can even be identified. The universal person. The virgin universal purpose computer, any interpreter. Today, unfortunately, when you buy a computer, it is already full of software which hides its universality. A universal machine is not a trivial object. Babbage did already see that it can eat its own tail. Imagine sort of universal baby. It knows nothing, but can do everything (doable). It is infinitely intelligent and creative at the start. The hard things is to keep it that way. It is also infinitely ignorant and so long as it remains that way it's nothing to me. This is just another form of the everything universal acid. Just postulate an everything and then we know the something we're interested in must be in there somewhere. What is your alternative to the everything universal acid? That things just are the way they are (uniquely), and there's ultimately no explanation for that. Right? So we can take our observations of the world around us and construct a narrative that is consistent with what we see...a narrative that involves big bangs and electrons. But what caused the big bang? Why do electrons have the particular properties that they have? If you propose a particular cause for these things, what caused that cause? How is that better than a narrative that allows for everything? They would seem to have equal explanatory power. Which is to say: zero. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Why I am I?
On 02 Dec 2009, at 14:16, soulcatcher☠ wrote: Hi all, every time I read about the anthropic reasoning in physics I can't help asking the more general question: Why I am I, not somebody else? Why I see through _this_ eyes, am confined to _this_ brain, was born in _this_ year, etc? This question seems to me of the same importance as the question why we live in _this_ universe, with _this_ physical laws?. Moreover, I have a deep feeling that both questions ultimately should have the same answer - I really don't see a difference between why my universe is this, not that and why me body/brain is this, not that questions ... So. what do you think - why you is _you_, not me or Elvis Presley or whatever? I agree with most answer already given. Consider the duplication Washington/Moscow. You are read (scanned) in Brussels, then annihilated, and reconstituted in both Moscow and Washington. Assuming we are digital machine makes that experiment possible in principle. But neither the you in Moscow, nor the you in Washington can understand why they are finding themselves in M or in W. From outside we can understand why the question is meaningless, and yet why the question has some meaning from the first person perspective. That reasoning shows that the computationalist hypothesis entails the existence of question like that, and that identity may be third person relative, despite being first person absolute. Jason Resch wrote: Another more interesting question: How do you know you aren't also perceiving those other people's perspectives too? Obviously no individual brain remembers the thoughts or experiences of the others because there are no neural connections between them (like split brain patients who develop two egos) but just because you don't remember experiencing something doesn't mean you didn't experience it. This raises the question of how many first person exists. I like the idea that the answer is one. We may be all the universal person appearing and reappearing like if we were already duplicated many times, which makes sense given that we come from the same amoeba. We are like a god who lost himself in his creation. I do think that we can learn to recognize ourself. This can help to develop an altruism based on some divine selfishness. I will not arm some other because I know it is really me, only put in some other context. Computer science can help to make this clearer. Some drug can help to find such relativity of the ego more palatable. soulcatcher☠ wrote: On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 3:55 AM, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: If you were Elvis and Elvis were you, what difference would that make to anything? That would make a huge difference for me and Elvis - my (and his) subjective experiences would be very different. I don't think it would. If Elvis wake up with both your body and memories, he will do what you are doing, without noticing *any* difference. To have access to such subjective difference you have to talk together, and the differences are relative, even if they seem (and are) absolute from your first person perspective. You may freely consider that such switches occur all the time. What makes you feeling that you are you and not someone else is the private experience of recollecting and unifying your connected memory. soulcatcher☠ wrote: I always thought that my consciousness (and qualia, 1-st person experience) is by definition the perspective that I'm not only having right now but knowing that I'm having it (here I strongly agree with Damasio that consciousness is not separable from the knowing about the feeling). Therefore, by definition, I'm not perceiving those other people's perspectives - because If I perceived them, I would have known that, these perspectives would be not their but my perspective - but they are not. Moreover, this is the only thing that I'm sure about - cause my perspective is the one and the only perspective I know. Bruno Marchal said (and I really love this quote): Any content of consciousness can be an illusion. Consciousness itself cannot, because without consciousness there is no more illusion at all. In the other words, I can say that my 1-st person perspective cannot be an illusion and, as the other people's perspectives aren't part of it, I'm sure that I'm not perceiving them... Thanks for the quote. About quote, I like very much this one from Sri Aurobindo: What, you ask, was the beginning of it all? And it is this ... Existence that multiplied itself For sheer delight of being And plunged into numberless trillions of forms So that it might Find Itself Innumerably I think that knowledge is true belief (like Theaetetus), and this, when you do the math does indeed explain why knowledge obeys a different logic than belief. May be you should not ask the question why I am I?, because, assuming comp at least, there is no
Re: Why I am I?
x This raises the question of how many first person exists. I like the idea that the answer is one. We may be all the universal person appearing and reappearing like if we were already duplicated many times, which makes sense given that we come from the same amoeba. We are like a god who lost himself in his creation. I like this answer though it kinda scares me) Anyway, every time i think about the me/others asymmetry, I'm coming to the same conclusion - maybe there is only one person and asymmetry becomes a convenient symmetry ... Ok, thank you all for answers, they definitely gave me some food for thoughts, and let me rephrase my question more 'rigorously'. == Lets consider two hard questions - why do we live in THIS universe? (1) and why am I me? (2). (1) . Why do we live in THIS universe? Here we got: - string theory and anthropic reasoning present us with a landscape of 10^(10^N) universes that we can choose from. - we've got some strong constraints on the result of the choice. The choice can be random (or defined by some probability distribution on the set of all possible universes), but we should live in the universe compatible with our existence. Conclusion: we can't answer 'hard' question 'Why physical laws are described by string (M, F, whatever) theory, but we can at least ask more 'soft' question - 'Why from the set of all possible universes described by theory T the chosen one is this one. And this question sounds scientific and it seems that it should be answered before we can answer thr hard one. (2). Why am I me? Here we got nothing (?): - what is a landscape here, a set of all possible mes? All the people? All the people that ever lived and will ever live? All the animals? All the conscious entities? And here we stuck cause we don't know excatly what entity is conscious and what is not. Or, maybe the set contains only ONE element (only one 1st person exists ...) and there is no choice at all? - what are constraints? What machine can 'host' me (conscious entity) ? Sorry if my questions are naive, I'm new to all this stuff. Maybe we should have a FAQ or wiki with naive but popular questions (what is consciousness? what is information? is computation sufficient for consciousness? What is the difference between reality and simulation?) that are asked again and again by everyone who's starting to think about TOE ... -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Why I am I?
2009/12/3 soulcatcher☠ soulcatche...@gmail.com: On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 3:55 AM, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: If you were Elvis and Elvis were you, what difference would that make to anything? That would make a huge difference for me and Elvis - my (and his) subjective experiences would be very different. And, as these experiences are by definition private and ineffable (is it right?), that would make no difference for anything but me and Elvis. Sorry, maybe I just don't understand your question ... OK, let's leave Elvis out of it since he is dead. Suppose you and I switch places. What would change? To find out, I'll just wave my hands in a special magical way and - poof! - it's done. You now have my mind and body, while I have your mind and body. So really it isn't the original me writing this, it is the original you, who only thinks he is the original me since he has my mind and body; and over there it isn't the original you reading this, but the original me who only thinks he is the original you. Do you see the problem in the above exchange? It assumes there is some metaphysical me and you that can be conceptualised as flitting about from one body and mind to another. But such a notion seems to me absurd, meaningless, worse than wrong. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Why I am I?
Apparently it did not work. I am bruno marchal now! Please swish again! :) No! I am Bruno Marchal! Pliz get me out of here :) Do you see the problem in the above exchange? It assumes there is some metaphysical me and you that can be conceptualised as flitting about from one body and mind to another. But such a notion seems to me absurd, meaningless, worse than wrong. OK, I see your point. My answer implied the existence of an immaterial agent that could be somehow embedded and reincarnated in different brains and I accept that this is wrong. But now I am almost completely lost - what do we mean by switching, if we got nothing to switch? Do you trying to make me see that the question about switching has no sense? Does it implies that what I am me? is incorrect and shouldn't be asked too? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Why I am I?
On 03 Dec 2009, at 12:12, soulcatcher☠ wrote: x This raises the question of how many first person exists. I like the idea that the answer is one. We may be all the universal person appearing and reappearing like if we were already duplicated many times, which makes sense given that we come from the same amoeba. We are like a god who lost himself in his creation. I like this answer though it kinda scares me) Anyway, every time i think about the me/others asymmetry, I'm coming to the same conclusion - maybe there is only one person and asymmetry becomes a convenient symmetry ... Ok, thank you all for answers, they definitely gave me some food for thoughts, and let me rephrase my question more 'rigorously'. == Lets consider two hard questions - why do we live in THIS universe? (1) and why am I me? (2). (1) . Why do we live in THIS universe? The notion of THIS universe, or even THIS body makes no sense (assuming digital mechanism). It is just that some computations exist arithmetically. The idea that such computations, which we bet we share, defined eventually some unique multiverse or universe is open. But it can define unique physical laws Here we got: - string theory and anthropic reasoning present us with a landscape of 10^(10^N) universes that we can choose from. - we've got some strong constraints on the result of the choice. The choice can be random (or defined by some probability distribution on the set of all possible universes), but we should live in the universe compatible with our existence. The problem is why string theory? Are you physicalist? If I am correct, physicalism is incompatible with digital mechanism. Mechanists have to extract the laws of physics from the laws of computations, in the mathematical sense of Post, Turing, Church, Kleene, Markov. Conclusion: we can't answer 'hard' question 'Why physical laws are described by string (M, F, whatever) theory, Wrong. We can already explain why the laws of physics have to be non boolean, non intuitionist, verify abstract symmetries (in the case we accept Theatetus theories of sensation/belief/knowledge, and their arithmetical interpretation). If we are digital machine, then the extraction of physics from number is an exercise in mathematical logic and computer science. Apparently. but we can at least ask more 'soft' question - 'Why from the set of all possible universes described by theory T the chosen one is this one. Have you read Everett? There are already physicists who describe reality as a flux of information which differentiate in many histories, sometimes recombining by amnesia, etc. And this question sounds scientific and it seems that it should be answered before we can answer thr hard one. I think it is the contrary. We can explain where the physical laws come from. We cannot explain the geography, nor any contingencies, like I am I and You are You. (2). Why am I me? Here we got nothing (?): - what is a landscape here, a set of all possible mes? All the people? All the people that ever lived and will ever live? All the animals? All the conscious entities? And here we stuck cause we don't know excatly what entity is conscious and what is not. Or, maybe the set contains only ONE element (only one 1st person exists ...) and there is no choice at all? - what are constraints? What machine can 'host' me (conscious entity) ? If you are willing to assume digital mechanism, the simplest explanation is this one. There is only the number zero, and its successors, and the usual laws of addition and multiplication. This defines a complex web of relations between all possible universal machine. Those machine can eventually understand and predict that they cannot know which universal machine they are, and that below their computationalist level of substitution, there is in a precise mathematical sense, a sort of competition between all universal machines. The elementary arithmetic we learn in high school is enough complex to support a natural very complex video game. A sort of natural matrix, which has a very big redundancy giving sense, hopefully, to relatively stable histories. It can be a bit of scary, but we are already multiplied, in some sense, and differentiate through a *partial* control relatively to our most probable local universal computation type. Sorry if my questions are naive, I'm new to all this stuff. Maybe we should have a FAQ or wiki with naive but popular questions (what is consciousness? what is information? is computation sufficient for consciousness? What is the difference between reality and simulation?) that are asked again and again by everyone who's starting to think about TOE ... If the mechanist hypothesis is true, it can explain why we cannot know that truth. In particular science will never say that comp is true. But we may
Re: Why I am I?
soulcatcher wrote: On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 4:59 AM, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: Hi soulcatcher, Good question, it is something I thought about too, then I realized I am me because it was this brain in my skull asking that question. I created the attached image to help illustrate my point. If each person asks that question "why am I me?" another way of phrasing their question is "Why am I seeing the universe from this perspective and not someone else's?" If you follow the thought bubbles in the picture you see it leads to a head which is connected to a specific pair of eyes, it would only be natural that the individual isolated brains only remember seeing from one person's perspective, and just as natural for them to be curious about that fact. However when looked at from this perspective the answer seems quite obvious. It's definitely not obvious for me ) If I understand you right, you're trying to answer the question from 3-d person view, but I really don't see how subjective 1-st person experience could emerge from (or be reduced to) 3-d person description of this experience. I'm comfortable with the thought that other people aren't zombies and ask the same questions as I do, but I still don't understand why I'm having this 1-st person experience but not that. Another more interesting question: How do you know you aren't also perceiving those other people's perspectives too? Obviously no individual brain remembers the thoughts or experiences of the others because there are no neural connections between them (like split brain patients who develop two egos) but just because you don't remember experiencing something doesn't mean you didn't experience it. I always thought that my consciousness (and qualia, 1-st person experience) is by definition the perspective that I'm not only having right now but knowing that I'm having it (here I strongly agree with Damasio that consciousness is not separable from the knowing about the feeling). Therefore, by definition, I'm not perceiving those other people's perspectives - because If I perceived them, I would have known that, these perspectives would be not their but my perspective - but they are not. Moreover, this is the only thing that I'm sure about - cause my perspective is the one and the only perspective I know. Bruno Marchal said (and I really love this quote): "Any content of consciousness can be an illusion. Consciousness itself cannot, because without consciousness there is no more illusion at all. " In the other words, I can say that my 1-st person perspective cannot be an illusion and, as the other people's perspectives aren't part of it, I'm sure that I'm not perceiving them... The "illusion" is not the perspective; it's the "I". Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Why I am I?
soulcatcher wrote: Lets consider two "hard" questions - "why do we live in THIS universe?" (1) and "why am I me?" (2). (1) . Why do we live in THIS universe? Here we got: - string theory and anthropic reasoning present us with a landscape of 10^(10^N) universes that we can choose from. - we've got some strong constraints on the result of the choice. The choice can be random (or defined by some probability distribution on the set of all possible universes), but we should live in the universe compatible with our existence. Conclusion: we can't answer 'hard' question 'Why physical laws are described by string (M, F, whatever) theory, but we can at least ask more 'soft' question - 'Why from the set of all possible universes described by theory T the chosen one is this one". And this question sounds scientific and it seems that it should be answered before we can answer thr hard one. (2). Why am I me? Here we got nothing (?): - what is a "landscape" here, a set of all possible mes? All the people? All the people that ever lived and will ever live? All the animals? All the conscious entities? And here we stuck cause we don't know excatly what entity is conscious and what is not. Or, maybe the set contains only ONE element (only one 1st person exists ...) and there is no choice at all? - what are constraints? What machine can 'host' me (conscious entity) ? Sorry, I forgot the questions themselves: 1. Can we temporarily substitute the 'hard' question "why am I me?" by the more 'soft' one, like the question of choice in some 'level 3 tegmarkian multiverse' of all possible mes ? 2. Can we reduce "why am I me?" to the question of choice on the some set? 3. What is the 'hardest' question that is still scientific? In other words, that is the most rigorous reformulation of "why I am me?" that could be asked and maybe even answered by modern science in the nearest future? Science advances in small steps that often depend on technology. I think the next 'hard' question that has some chance of being answered is, what information processes are necessary and sufficient to produce human-like conscious behavior. Brent One cannot guess the real difficulties of a problem before having solved it." --- Carl Ludwig Siegel -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Why I am I?
Stathis Papaioannou wrote: 2009/12/3 soulcatcher☠ soulcatche...@gmail.com: On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 3:55 AM, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: If you were Elvis and Elvis were you, what difference would that make to anything? That would make a huge difference for me and Elvis - my (and his) subjective experiences would be very different. And, as these experiences are by definition "private and ineffable" (is it right?), that would make no difference for anything but me and Elvis. Sorry, maybe I just don't understand your question ... OK, let's leave Elvis out of it since he is dead. Suppose you and I switch places. What would change? To find out, I'll just wave my hands in a special magical way and - poof! - it's done. You now have my mind and body, while I have your mind and body. So really it isn't the original me writing this, it is the original you, who only thinks he is the original me since he has my mind and body; and over there it isn't the original you reading this, but the original me who only thinks he is the original you. Do you see the problem in the above exchange? It assumes there is some metaphysical "me" and "you" that can be conceptualised as flitting about from one body and mind to another. But such a notion seems to me absurd, meaningless, worse than wrong. Exactly. It is the magical "I" that is swapped. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Why I am I?
On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 1:53 PM, Brent Meeker meeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: Science advances in small steps that often depend on technology. I think the next 'hard' question that has some chance of being answered is, what information processes are necessary and sufficient to produce human-like conscious behavior. Does the word conscious really fit there? So there is the question of how to implement a physical system that can be interpreted as producing human-like behavior. And then there is the further question of whether the production of this behavior is accompanied by consciousness. I can configure physical systems in such a way that to me it represents something. For instance I can write software to run on a physical computer that produces outputs that to me represent game characters or something. With sufficiently clever software, I may interpret the outputs of the computer to be behavior that is more or less human-like. But my interpretation may be doing all the work here. I may be deluding myself into believing that there is consciousness associated with the actions of the physical system I call a computer...when in fact there is no such thing there. The appearance of conscious behavior in the computer could be an illusion. Probably it would be. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Why I am I?
Rex Allen wrote: On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 1:53 PM, Brent Meeker meeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: Science advances in small steps that often depend on technology. I think the next 'hard' question that has some chance of being answered is, what information processes are necessary and sufficient to produce human-like conscious behavior. Does the word conscious really fit there? So there is the question of how to implement a physical system that can be interpreted as producing human-like behavior. And then there is the further question of whether the production of this behavior is accompanied by consciousness. I can configure physical systems in such a way that to me it represents something. For instance I can write software to run on a physical computer that produces outputs that to me represent game characters or something. With sufficiently clever software, I may interpret the outputs of the computer to be behavior that is more or less human-like. But my interpretation may be doing all the work here. I may be deluding myself into believing that there is consciousness associated with the actions of the physical system I call a computer...when in fact there is no such thing there. The appearance of conscious behavior in the computer could be an illusion. Probably it would be. It could be that other people are not conscious too. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Why I am I?
On 03 Dec 2009, at 19:56, Brent Meeker wrote: Stathis Papaioannou wrote: 2009/12/3 soulcatcher☠ soulcatche...@gmail.com: On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 3:55 AM, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: If you were Elvis and Elvis were you, what difference would that make to anything? That would make a huge difference for me and Elvis - my (and his) subjective experiences would be very different. And, as these experiences are by definition private and ineffable (is it right?), that would make no difference for anything but me and Elvis. Sorry, maybe I just don't understand your question ... OK, let's leave Elvis out of it since he is dead. Suppose you and I switch places. What would change? To find out, I'll just wave my hands in a special magical way and - poof! - it's done. You now have my mind and body, while I have your mind and body. So really it isn't the original me writing this, it is the original you, who only thinks he is the original me since he has my mind and body; and over there it isn't the original you reading this, but the original me who only thinks he is the original you. Do you see the problem in the above exchange? It assumes there is some metaphysical me and you that can be conceptualised as flitting about from one body and mind to another. But such a notion seems to me absurd, meaningless, worse than wrong. Exactly. It is the magical I that is swapped. That I is magical. It is like swapping both the mind (or 1-I) and the body (or 3-I). Eventually this is the reason why absolute sample of the observer moment does not work, and we need relative self self-sampling. Which neither with QM (without collapse) or just digital mechanism is obvious to derive. The mind can swap its body for brain or another, or survive through a digital back-up. Rigt? This mean the notion of I still make sense. Both the 1-I, and the 3- I makes sense, it is the link between them which is magical, and made harder to figure out than people usually believe, like with the identity thesis, physical supervenience, etc. Now, when you see that people have some difficulty to understand thought experience without amnesia, thought experience with amnesia are perhaps premature. I am not sure. It depends on your familiarity with such kind of thought. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Why I am I?
Bruno Marchal wrote: On 03 Dec 2009, at 19:56, Brent Meeker wrote: Stathis Papaioannou wrote: 2009/12/3 soulcatcher☠ soulcatche...@gmail.com: On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 3:55 AM, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: If you were Elvis and Elvis were you, what difference would that make to anything? That would make a huge difference for me and Elvis - my (and his) subjective experiences would be very different. And, as these experiences are by definition "private and ineffable" (is it right?), that would make no difference for anything but me and Elvis. Sorry, maybe I just don't understand your question ... OK, let's leave Elvis out of it since he is dead. Suppose you and I switch places. What would change? To find out, I'll just wave my hands in a special magical way and - poof! - it's done. You now have my mind and body, while I have your mind and body. So really it isn't the original me writing this, it is the original you, who only thinks he is the original me since he has my mind and body; and over there it isn't the original you reading this, but the original me who only thinks he is the original you. Do you see the problem in the above exchange? It assumes there is some metaphysical "me" and "you" that can be conceptualised as flitting about from one body and mind to another. But such a notion seems to me absurd, meaningless, worse than wrong. Exactly. It is the magical "I" that is swapped. That "I" is magical. It is like swapping both the mind (or 1-I) and the body (or 3-I). Eventually this is the reason why absolute sample of the observer moment does not work, and we need relative self self-sampling. Which neither with QM (without collapse) or just digital mechanism is obvious to derive. The mind can swap its body for brain or another ?? You mean "or brain"? , or survive through a digital back-up. Rigt? This mean the notion of "I" still make sense. But it doesn't make sense to swap two minds and their bodies (i.e. perspectives). That's just interchanging positions and isn't generally thought to affect who is who - although read Stanislau Lem's "The Star Diaries". And if you suppose the mind is embodied in the brain or digital machine then swapping minds with Stathis implies swapping the essential aspects of the brain or machine. Both the 1-I, and the 3-I makes sense, it is the link between them which is "magical", and made harder to figure out than people usually believe, like with the identity thesis, physical supervenience, etc. Now, when you see that people have some difficulty to understand thought experience without amnesia, thought experience with amnesia are perhaps premature. I am not sure. It depends on your familiarity with such kind of thought. I'm not sure what "thought experience with amnesia" is, but taken rigorously it sounds impossible. Brent Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Why I am I?
2009/12/3 soulcatcher☠ soulcatche...@gmail.com: Hi all, every time I read about the anthropic reasoning in physics I can't help asking the more general question: Why I am I, not somebody else? Why I see through _this_ eyes, am confined to _this_ brain, was born in _this_ year, etc? This question seems to me of the same importance as the question why we live in _this_ universe, with _this_ physical laws?. Moreover, I have a deep feeling that both questions ultimately should have the same answer - I really don't see a difference between why my universe is this, not that and why me body/brain is this, not that questions ... So. what do you think - why you is _you_, not me or Elvis Presley or whatever? If you were Elvis and Elvis were you, what difference would that make to anything? -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Why I am I?
soulcatcher-2 wrote: Hi all, every time I read about the anthropic reasoning in physics I can't help asking the more general question: Why I am I, not somebody else? Why I see through _this_ eyes, am confined to _this_ brain, was born in _this_ year, etc? This question seems to me of the same importance as the question why we live in _this_ universe, with _this_ physical laws?. Moreover, I have a deep feeling that both questions ultimately should have the same answer - I really don't see a difference between why my universe is this, not that and why me body/brain is this, not that questions ... So. what do you think - why you is _you_, not me or Elvis Presley or whatever? Hi soulcatcher-2, maybe there is no communicable reason for you being you - words and concepts can only point to the reason, not be the reason. You are you, because you are free to be you. And freedom is wonderful, isn't it - so why should anybody ask for a reason that is more graspable (except because of the bad habit of craving to explanations of the mind/intellect). Can there be a better, more convincing reason for you than the opportunity for endless love, fun and development (all of which do not take place in the intellect)? I thought about a reason for me (being me and still changing) really hard and I found that searching an explanation in the mind will lead you nowhere (except to deeply depressive thoughts); though i still try it all too often. Satisfying explanations can only be found in your heart. Sorry, if this doesn't satisfy you right now... ;) Benny -- View this message in context: http://old.nabble.com/Why-I-am-I--tp26616194p26620609.html Sent from the Everything List mailing list archive at Nabble.com. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Why I am I?
On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 4:59 AM, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: Hi soulcatcher, Good question, it is something I thought about too, then I realized I am me because it was this brain in my skull asking that question. I created the attached image to help illustrate my point. If each person asks that question why am I me? another way of phrasing their question is Why am I seeing the universe from this perspective and not someone else's? If you follow the thought bubbles in the picture you see it leads to a head which is connected to a specific pair of eyes, it would only be natural that the individual isolated brains only remember seeing from one person's perspective, and just as natural for them to be curious about that fact. However when looked at from this perspective the answer seems quite obvious. It's definitely not obvious for me ) If I understand you right, you're trying to answer the question from 3-d person view, but I really don't see how subjective 1-st person experience could emerge from (or be reduced to) 3-d person description of this experience. I'm comfortable with the thought that other people aren't zombies and ask the same questions as I do, but I still don't understand why I'm having this 1-st person experience but not that. Another more interesting question: How do you know you aren't also perceiving those other people's perspectives too? Obviously no individual brain remembers the thoughts or experiences of the others because there are no neural connections between them (like split brain patients who develop two egos) but just because you don't remember experiencing something doesn't mean you didn't experience it. I always thought that my consciousness (and qualia, 1-st person experience) is by definition the perspective that I'm not only having right now but knowing that I'm having it (here I strongly agree with Damasio that consciousness is not separable from the knowing about the feeling). Therefore, by definition, I'm not perceiving those other people's perspectives - because If I perceived them, I would have known that, these perspectives would be not their but my perspective - but they are not. Moreover, this is the only thing that I'm sure about - cause my perspective is the one and the only perspective I know. Bruno Marchal said (and I really love this quote): Any content of consciousness can be an illusion. Consciousness itself cannot, because without consciousness there is no more illusion at all. In the other words, I can say that my 1-st person perspective cannot be an illusion and, as the other people's perspectives aren't part of it, I'm sure that I'm not perceiving them... -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
