Hi Bruno, I am a little tired and testy so please forgive me if I am curt and rushed in my response. I have time now to write so I will, but be warned...
From: Bruno Marchal Sent: Friday, January 28, 2011 11:03 AM To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: A comment on Maudlin's paper “Computation and Consciousness” Dear Stephen, On 28 Jan 2011, at 01:13, Stephen Paul King wrote: Dear Bruno, Interleaving. From: Bruno Marchal Sent: Thursday, January 27, 2011 1:23 PM To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: A comment on Mauldin's paper “Computation and Consciousness” On 25 Jan 2011, at 15:47, Stephen Paul King wrote: SPK: The supervenience thesis is separate from the Turing thesis and Mauldin does a good job in distinguishing them. [BM] Just to be clear, what Maudlin call "supervenience thesis" is what I called "physical supervenience thesis", to distinguish it from the computationalist supervenience thesis. The computationalist supervenience thesis is basically what remains when we keep comp, and understand that the Phys. Sup. thesis has to go away in the comp frame. [SPK] My claim is that we can push physical supervenience far into the background but in the cases where interaction between entities occurs it cannot be eliminated entirely. My proposal is that for interactions we must have both MEC and MAT, as MEC or MAT taken alone provide insufficient support for supervenience. This is what I see Maudlin’s argument proving. *** SPK: The problem that I see is in the properties of physicality that are assumed in Mauldin’s argument. It is one thing to not be dependent on what particular physical structure a computation can be run on (assuming a realistic supervenience), it is another thing entirely to say that a Turing machine can be “run” without the existence of any physical hardware at all. [BM] Well, in the branch ~MEC v ~MAT, Maudlin seems to prefer MAT, so he seems with you on this, I think. [SPK] No, I am claiming that for interactions between entities (and the models thereof) we must have MEC and MAT. In situations, like in most of your theory, interactions are not a factor thus your thesis follows smoothly in that frame. This is why I constantly ding you for being solipsistic. I would hope that you would do the same for me if I where equivalently in error. One must be able to defend one’s beliefs. Judge and prepare to be judged. *** [BM] The work has been done. It is up to you to tell me where is the error, which has to exist if you want have, like many, both MEC and MAT. I insist that I have no theory. I just show that MEC implies a reduction of the mind body problem to a body problem. You cannot use the fact that the body problem is not yet solved as a critic of the argument. And then the arithmetization of the argument provides enough evidence that a good arithmetical tensor product can exist, so solipsism is also not proved from MEC. But ~MAT is proved from MEC. I cannot sum up a long argument in each paragraph, so I refer you to the explanation that I have already given. Either you take the argument into account, or you refute it or at least explain why you are not convinced, in the course of the argument. Each time someone explain me why h/she is not convinced, if patient enough, come to understand he/she can no more say yes to a doctor without adding some magic in either consciousness or matter. [SPK] This is only an avoidance of the problem by the claim that it does not exist, begging the question. I am asking questions about interactions, if you want to insist that only bodies (as immaterial numbers!) exist so be it. I will keep asking how it is that their static relations generate the appearance of multiple mutually irreducible 1-p. We each share a common universe of experience and we, not being solipsist, believe that that universe that we can agree and bet on seems to involve interactions between what seems to be necessarily independent entities. I want to understand how you think that your argument can explain this appearance? I accept your premise for the sake of the discussion and to try to understand your argument that proposes the reduction of the mind-body problem to a body problem, but this tells me nothing about how the resulting bodies (plural!) interact with each other. Maybe I need to go through my argument that the mere existence of a set of all possible representations of interactions between bodies is insufficient to derive the appearance that I have as 1-p. I will be doing this in the course to the conversation with Travis, if he is willing. It has to do with the Concurrence problem and the NP-Complete problems that are involved in any model of interactions between separable entities that are not synchronous. snip [BM]OK. And the problem with the word physical is that it means different things in different settings. The main confusion is between fundamentally physical, or material, with a conception of primary matter, or it means "related to this or that physical theory" based on abstract mathematical relations. [SPK] OK, let us focus carefully on this problem! We have no evidence for and plenty of sound arguments against the idea that existence at its primitive level (assuming a well founded ontology) is material, pace Garrett, but that does not equal a proof of any sort that MAT does not exist. [BM] Sure. That is why I provide a proof, or an argument. [SPK] OK, did you notice that I am arguing for then below here about existence? Do you understand the ideas that I am trying to express? Please recall that existence, per say, is not a “property” that an entity can *have*. Existence is only supervening upon its possible forms of expression not on the chance that such are observed as there will always exist entities that are not yet within the class of entities that the UD has already dovetailed upon. This follows from the fact that the UD must run eternally (per UDA) and all of the proofs of Gödel's incompleteness.) What I am arguing for is that we need a finite form of MAT for our models to be sound. We can show that this finite form of MAT is degenerate and can even vanish in some limit (such as in a Russellian neutral monism where the differences between mind and body vanish because the ability to distinguish between them vanishes), but necessary at our level of expressiveness it is nonetheless. *** SPK: We also had a recent paper that discusses how “information is converted into free energy” by a Maxwell Demon-type feedback system. It seems to me that there is a lot of confusion about what relationship there is between information and matter, so my inquisitiveness could be seen as an attempt to make sense of this mess. [BM] And the word "matter" is similarly ambiguous, and never defined, except by Aristotle which provides the "& Dp" idea, implicitly used by the Platonist Plotinus to define matter in the way used by the self-observing machine. Matter is what is indeterminate, and oppose to intelligibility (Bp). It is of the type ~Bp, that is D#. This is coherent with the idea that a physics is, before all thing, a probability or plausibility calculus. Cf also Timaeus (Plato) bastard calculus, and the Kripke semantics of "Dp" in modal logics: Dp = it exists a world satisfying p. [SPK] A very good point, Bruno. But I think that you would agree that Dp is trivial if by itself given, as I explained above, that existence is necessary possibility. We need more than Dp in our semantics! We need a local1-p necessary definiteness of properties even if that definiteness vanishes in 3-p. I take quantum mechanics as screaming this message over and over but like the cries of Cassandra it falls upon dead ears. Most people, including most philosophers, do not explicitly talk about questions of the the reality or non-reality of the immediate content of “being in the world”. Descartes did in his Meditations and came to the conclusion that a dualism was needed. Regretfully his proposal had a fatal flaw because (for one thing) he used the Humean notion of causality (including the principle of locality – as did Maudlin!), but this failure by Descartes does not necessitate the unsoundness of all forms of dualism. Pratt has sketched out a form of dualism that works! I am just trying to expand on his idea. But my hardest challenge is getting my fellow philosophers to stop being crypto-solipsists! Our modelizations must include some form of interactions between many minds. Interactions between minds and bodies is easy, interactions between minds is hard! *** [BM] People interact when they are multiplied collectively. There are plenty such interactive computations in arithmetic. The problem which remains consist to show that such collective computations win the "measure battle". To postulate physics or quantum computation at the start is a conceptual treachery once we assume comp, and it prevents the simultaneous derivation of quanta and qualia. The 8 hypostases gives a phenomenology of many forms of dualism. [SPK] (Screaming and ranting is heard in the background.) Have you noticed that I am proposing a way to model a competition between computations as a way to solve the measure problem? SPK: One idea that could be proposed is that information is a relationship in a triple such that a difference exists between two that makes a difference for the third. I am sure that this can be put into more formal terms. Turing Machines aside, we are not really getting to the problem until we have a good set of tools with which to examine the question of how to determine the substitution level of a given system and even if substitution is possible. [BM] Here I disagree 100%. It is proved that if we are machine, then we cannot define and prove what is our substitution level. No machine can ever know which machine she is. This is what I have called the Benacerraf principle in older post (and my theses). For any machine defined as such in a 3-way, the substitution level is built in the plan of the machine, by definition. [SPK] Your disagreement is with a straw man, Bruno, not with my argument here, although I did use poor wording there. I was considering the physical aspect of substitution, as in the for example case of replacing biological neurons with silicon chips. Please remember that you are a monist and I am not, so our definitions differ in subtle ways. Your idea of Machine is purely ideal. For me machine has dual aspects, physical and informational. In my thoughts, a machine can have physical substitutability with another machine under bisimilarity, where the substitution maintains the invariance of the informational structure (a Complete Atomic Boolean Algebra for the classical case of Chu2). We can copy physical states up to the quantum limit, but we cannot copy the information that is relevant to determining the quantum states of those machines because of the non-commutativity of canonical conjugates. There is a difference between information and knowledge, between what is computable by UTM and what is not. I do not see how my claim is not inconsistent with the Benacerraf principle: (http://www.mail-archive.com/everything-list@googlegroups.com/msg08199.html “if I am a machine I will never KNOWN which one.”; by my reasoning this follows from the “no outside observers” idea of van Fraassen. If there does not exist a third such that the state of that third is capable of being altered by a difference between a pair of states of knowledge, then there is no information difference in content (this is, by the way, the definition of bisimilarity!). Knowledge is like second order information.This is exactly the situation where my proposed duality vanishes! In the zero information state, there is no differences that could make a difference (per definition!). I assume that I am a machine that requires some form of physical instantiation to preserve my sense of identity, my awareness of being in the world, but I cannot know or gain information of which ideal machine I am. Questions like “which physical implementation is “me”?” is similarly unknowable from 3-p because there does not exist a non-trivial 3-p that is a unique bijection of some 1-p. There are *many* possible 3-p that can be extended from a single 1-p. Your teleportation argument in UDA show this very well. This claim seems to imply that we cannot gain knowledge of “what it is like be be a bat” without actually being some kind of bat and is falsifiable in that sense. My wording may be ill-formed here, but I am betting that I am correct. <wlEmoticon-smile[1].png> So where is our disagreement? *** [BM] That you seem not to see that MEC => ~MAT without singling out what is wrong in the argument. Of course you can add a notion of primitive matter as epiphenomenon, but that contradicts the weakest form of OCCAM, if only because we have no means at all to *interact* with such matter. So why to reintroduce it. [SPK] MERDE! Bruno! Can you read what I wrote previously? OK, let me calm down.... Is your argument completely independent of Maudlin’s? If so, then I need to re-read your papers and posts again. So far you are only adding lots of sophisticated detail to the Movie graph argument, which I pointed out has a problem. It assumes the classical principle of locality and ignores the reality of the relativity of simultaneity. We have an overabundance of evidence contradicting the idea that our common world and the objects within it obey the principle of locality when it comes to their properties and evolutions and the experimental evidence for General Relativity is accurate to many many orders of magnitude, thus if we are going to make claims that the physical world does not exist based on arguments that are straw men because they are based on assumption in contradiction to experimentally established facts, we are arguing in bad faith. On the other hand, it is not necessarily a violation of OCCAM to introduce entities that can be shown to be logically necessary. I am just proposing that a weak form of MAT is OK, and that your (and Maudlin’s) argument that MEC => ~MAT is unrealistic in that it is based on constraints that are too strong. Adding a notion of primitive matter as an epiphenomenon is the last thing that I would propose because it only adds to the problem we are trying to solve. An epiphenomena is by definition not causally effective, and so is irrelevant to issues of computational supervenience. It does not help us at all to find a solution to the interaction problem (whether it is between bodies or minds). As Pratt wrote in http://chu.stanford.edu/guide.html#ratmech: “We apply Cartesian logic to reject not only divine intervention, preordained synchronization, and the eventual mass retreat to monism, but also an assumption Descartes himself somehow neglected to reject, that causal interaction within these planes is an easier problem than between.” I am having a very hard time not seeing your proposal as a secular form of Divine intervention! I would be a lot more sanguine to your argument if you could show how the divine existence of AR supervenes sufficiently to explain the interactions between concurrent objects. How does the mere existence of relationships between numbers provide sufficient structure to supervene all of the additional structures that we need to define the 1-p of many minds? While we can point to Goedelian diagonalizations as ansatz arguments, we forget that we can only do this because we have matter to write down our symbolic representations of the strings of numbers. Without the support of matter, there is no transitionally invariant structure to act as “tape” for our proposed Universal Dovetailing machine because there is no transition to be invariant to! If there is no time or matter, then there is no memory for our processors to read and write from and to. Therefore, we must have at some level a physical material world. That does not mean that this physical material would is not degenerate and that it vanishes in some limit, it just means that for the sake of the case of interactions of individual minds, however it is that one wants to define their supervenience, we need something that it is like to be a physical material world. . Onward! Stephen -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.