On 11 Feb 2012, at 18:41, Stephen P. King wrote:
On 2/11/2012 6:29 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 11 Feb 2012, at 07:32, Stephen P. King wrote:
Hi ACW,
Thank you for the time and effort to write this up!!!
On 2/9/2012 3:40 PM, acw wrote:
Bruno has always said that COMP is a matter of theology (or
religion), that is, the provably unprovable, and I agree with
this. However, let's try and see why that is and why someone
would take COMP as an assumption:
- The main assumption of COMP is that you admit, at some level, a
digital substitution, and the stronger assumption that if you
were to implement/run such a Turing-emulable program, it would be
conscious and you would have a continuation in it. Isn't that a
strong theological assumption?
[SPK]
Yes, but it is the "substitution" of one configuration of
"stuff" with another such that the functionality (that allows for
the implementation/running of the Turing-emulable (Turing
equivalence!)) program to remain invariant. One thing interesting
to point out about this is that this substitution can be the
replacement of completely different kinds of stuff, like carbon
based stuff with silicon based stuff and does not require a
continuous physical process of transformation in the sense of
smoothly morphism the carbon stuff into silicon stuff at some
primitive level. B/c of this it may seem to bypass the usual
restrictions of physical laws, but does it really?
What exactly is this "physical stuff" anyway? If we take a
hint from the latest ideas in theoretical physics it seems that
the "stuff" of the material world is more about properties that
remain invariant under sets of symmetry transformations and less
and less about anything like "primitive" substances. So in a
sense, the physical world might be considered to be a wide
assortment of bundles of invariants therefore it seems to me that
to test COMP we need to see if those symmetry groups and
invariants can be derived from some proposed underlying logical
structure. This is what I am trying to do. I am really not arguing
against COMP, I am arguing that COMP is incomplete as a theory as
it does not yet show how the appearance of space, time and
conservation laws emerges in a way that is invariant and not
primitive.
So you miss the UDA point. The UDA point is that if COMP is true,
it has to be complete as a theory, independently of the fact that
the shorter time to derive physics might be 10^1000 millenia. Comp
explains, by the UDA, that whatever you add to comp, or to RA, or
to the UD, cannot play any role in consciousness, including the
feeling that the worlds obeys some role. So if comp is correct the
las of physics have to be derived from arithmetic alone. Then AUDA
makes a non trivial part of the derivation. We have already the
symmetry of the core bottom physics, the quantum indeterminacy, non
locality, non cloning. But this is just for illustrating the
consistency: the UDA conclusion is that no matter what, the
appearance of matter cannot use any supplementary assumption to
comp and/or arithmetic. You can sum up the UD by "comp is not
completable". It is the Bell-von Neuman answer to Einstein, in your
analogy below. Arithmetic is made conceptually complete. Whatever
you add to it will prevent the comp solution of the mind-body
problem, a bit like evruthing you add to the SWE will reintroduce
the measurement problem in quantum physics. Comp and arithmetic are
conceptually complete, but of epistemologically highly incomplete
and uncompletable.
Also, once you agree that stuff is not primitive, you have to
define it from your primitive terms, which I don't see possible
given that your primitive is the word "existence" which is not
defined, nor even a theory.
Hi Bruno,
You are still not addressing my questions and what I see as a
problem. The speed issue and completeness is not just addressing
from an internal perspective since we have to have invariance over
many different internal perspectives and these can vary over speed
and complexity. This is illustrated by the discussion of how "stuff"
can vary while preserving the functionality. The 'theory' of
existence follows naturally from neutral monism, you just need spend
the effort to understand it.
But I have not yet seen the theory. "Existence" is a word. A theory,
when presented, is a set of axioms and inference rules.
Think of this another way, we have a choice between belief that
"COMP is true" or "COMP is false".
Assuming classical logic applies at the metalevel, and this is not
obvious to me.
In order to have a coherent notion of a bet, both "COMP is True" and
"COMP is false" have to exist side by side as equivalently possible.
To bet on comp would be an error like Pascal gambit. You can only
evaluate the theory by yourself, trusting the doctor, and makes some
bet in case it is the only hope possible. There is no more reason to
believe that comp and non-comp are equivalently possible, than to
believe that Santa Klaus or non Santa Klaus are equivalently possible.
If we consider that they only can have this "side by side
equivalence" in the mind, then we obtain the situation that their
truth value is dependent on the choice,
?
but that would contradict COMP since built into it is the postulate
that truth is independent of belief.
Truth of elementary (first order) arithmetical proposition. Only.
We have to look at COMP from the point of view of many minds and not
just one, but so far you have stoically resisted doing this. Why?
I have never resisted that. The many mind are in the material
hypostases. Many minds appears in the UDA through the collective
duplication of populations of individuals.
The appearance of matter, in the UDA explanation, comes from the many
minds/many dreams, so it is hard to say that I resist to that.
OTOH, I am not arguing for any kind of return to naive realism or
that the physical world is the totality of existence. I do know
that I am just a curious amateur, so I welcome any critique that
might help me learn.
Comp like QM does not admit supplementary axioms, or variables, to
reinstall a physical realism.
This makes no sense to me. QM disallows for any particular
realism in the sense of property definiteness prior to observation.
That's only partially true in Everett. There is a local realism, which
is local, determinist and even clonable.
We do not need to go through all of the no-hidden-variable theorems
again, I hope! In fact, the logic of QM is proven to not be
faithfully capture in any one form of Boolean representation because
it is only representable as an Orthocomplete Lattice.
Yes. that's the part of physics already derived from comp.
An OL is similar but not surjective to an infinite number of Boolean
Algebras and there does not exist a way to pick out one of them in
an a priori way. There is also the isomorphism between any
dualization of a finite vector space and between Hilbert spaces of
the same # of dimension that shows this same property.
OTOH, we can use the SSA idea to pick out a Boolean algebra by
identifying some sub-lattice of the OL, but this only works if we
have many observers, each with a set of local observables so that
the collection acts like the questioners in a Surprise 20 Questions
game.
No problem for comp here.
I think it is, but at the same time, it has solid consequences
and a belief in it can be justified for a number of reasons:
a) Fading qualia thought experiment, which shows that
consciousness is utterly fickle if it doesn't follow a principle
of functional / organizational invariance. Most of our sense data
tends to point that such a principle makes sense. Avoiding it
means consciousness does not correspond to brain states and p.
zombies.
Certainly! We need a precise explanation for psycho-physical
parallelism.
But there is no psycho-physical parallelism. The metaphysical
physical *is* an illusion, naïve or not. The physical itself is
arithmetical truth see from the observable point of view (suggested
to be handled by the logics of observation Bp & Dt (& p), at the G
and G* levels).
But cannot you see that this claim that "there is no psycho-
physical parallelism" completely undermines the entire result? An
illusion cannot act as a coherent substrate upon which
representations can be implemented.
In which theory. You should prove this.
So in effect you are denying the existence of the computer monitor
with which you are reading this email,
Why should I do that? You jump too hastily.
And you are supposed to do the same with your more constricted form of
neutral monism, which still remains just one word for me.
I don't deny anything physical. I deny the possibility that we have
bioth comp and something primitively physical. In the precise sense
that physics has to be reduced to number's theology, like biology can
be reduced to chemistry.
and the whiteboards upon which you write your symbolic systems of
equations and your eyes that read this and everything else that acts
as a relatively stable substrate upon which one arithmetic truth can
be compared to another.
Arithmetic is simpler to understand than any theory of any pice of
matter. You seem to reintroduce primary physics, which contradict your
neutral monism. Is your Existence the existence of the physical?
The physical cannot be just the arithmetic truth for such is
singular, it has to be at least the comparison between a pair of
arithmetic truths and for this to be possible there has to be a
relatively stable substrate. There is no escape from this necessity.
Where does that substrate comes from? is it assumed or derived in your
"theory"? What is it?
Comp eliminate physical substrates. You need just to agree that 0+x =
x, o*x = 0, and a few other formula.
My tentative explanation is that at our level a form of dualism
holds. A dualism quite unlike that of Descartes, since instead of
"separate substances", it is proposed that the logical and the
physical are two distinct aspect of reality that follow on equal
yet anti-parallel tracks. As Vaughan Pratt explains in his papers,
the logical processes and the physical processes have dynamics
that have arrows that point in opposite directions. Schematically
and crudely we can show a quasi-category theory diagram of this
duality:
---- > X -----> Y ----->
| |
<----- A <------B <-----
I am OK with this. This is already derivable from the many dualisms
contained in the octalist machines points of view, notably between
"intelligible" (Bp) and (matter intelligible Bp & Dt). It does
reverse the arrow in a way akin to Pratt. It is not a parallelism,
or anti-parallelism, though, for the 1p and 3p are not symmetrical.
Then the qualia, and the first person plural quanta, are given by
the machine's semantics for the logic obeyed by Bp & Dt & p.
The diagram is strictly 3p. It would be helpful if you wrote up
an informal article on the octolism. It is very difficult to
comprehend it from just your discussion of the hypostases.
See my Plotinus paper(*). Or read the second part of sane04(**). I
have already provided many explanations, so you can also look in the
archives, on AUDA, "interview" perhaps, etc. Ask any (enough precise)
question.
(*) http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/publications/CiE2007/SIENA.pdf
(**) http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/publications/SANE2004MARCHALAbstract.html
I have no idea what your neutral monism refer too, except a sort of
vague God-like notion of Existence, but that's not a (scientific)
theory, yet. And, by UDA, whatever it adds to comp and arithmetic
has to refute the comp physics, or comp itself. Craig is, at least,
coherent on this: he abandon comp, to save an unintelligible notion
of matter and mind (alas).
Read the discussion of neutral monism by Bertrand Russell and
others.
I love BR, but his philosophy of math and physics is obsolete. It is
pre-Godelian, and pre-UDA, if I can say.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/neutral-monism/ is a good overview
(even though the pluralism of neutral entities assumption is
problematic as Spinoza understood). It would be helpful to you and
the rest of us if you spent some time refreshing your understanding
of what theology is by comparing the many theologies that already
exist or by learning from the wisdom of those that have done such
studies. I hope that Bertrand Russell is someone that you can
respect as I respect your skills and understanding of modal logics.
I am NOT a modal logician. Just an expert in self and selves. it is
just that Solovay axiomatizes the selves propositional logic soundly
and completely by the very particular modal logic G and G*. It is not
a chapter of modal logic (or a tiny one which most modal logicians are
usually not so much interested). It is a chapter on entities,
including machines, self-reference. Comp makes it the main tool to
proceed and derive theology and physics.
Theology (of machine) is used in the sense of Plato, that is of study
of the Truth (about a machine). Strong LUMs can study the theology of
simpler LUMs, mathematically. Then lift them at their risk and perils,
because they cannot know if it applies to them (they don't know if
they are correct)).
I have a high esteem for Bertrand Russell. I read the entirety of its
work (except Principia Mathematica, of course). But we have progressed
since, if only through the discovery of the UMs and LUMs.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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