On 13 Feb 2012, at 16:24, David Nyman wrote:
On 13 February 2012 01:18, Joseph Knight <joseph.9...@gmail.com>
wrote:
Yes it is, with the Movie Graph Argument. The MGA shows that
assuming COMP,
consciousness cannot be explained by appealing to any physical
system. Not
even a little.
Whereas I would concur with this conclusion, I realise on reflection
that I'm not sure exactly where it leaves us vis-a-vis the Movie-graph
setup itself, or Maudlin's contraption, once the reversal of
physics-mechanism is actually accepted. Clearly, we now have to
regard these devices in their physical manifestation as aspects of a
deeper computational reality with which our conscious state is
currently related.
OK.
But what are we now to make of the original
proposal that they instantiate some computation that encapsulates an
actual conscious state? After all, we don't regard them as
"primitively physical" objects any longer, so we can't now apply the
reductio arguments in quite the same way, can we?
I don't see why. We did bet on a comp substitution level. The
"material aspect" of the device will have to be retrieved from the
infinitely many computations going through our current state, but such
a current state does still exist by the initial assumption.
They're part of the
general computational state of affairs, like everything else. Is it
that they instantiate the "wrong" sort of computation for
consciousness,
Not all. Such matter is just very stable, and is supposed to implement
the right computation (at the right level), if not, then we would not
accept the digital brain. Comp is neutral on the nature of matter.
because their physical behaviour is the result of
"accidentally" contrived relations?
I am not sure I see your problem. The physical behavior becomes very
well founded by a statistics on infinitely many computations, a
priori. The math might one day refute comp, by showing that there are
too much white rabbit, but this is not yet the case.
IOW, they're not really UM's in
any relevant sense.
?
There is UMs in two (related) sense. The UMs which are proved to exist
(in arithmetic), and then the "observable local UMs", who bodies
emerge from the competition between all UMs (in the preview sense)
below their substitution level.
But then wouldn't the same argument for
contrivance hold in the original case, and undermine the reductio?
Only in the case it appears that the comp matter is not stable enough
to provide stable computations, but the whole point has been to make
that very possibility testable.
I'm puzzled.
David, Tell me is I have succeed to clarify this.
Bruno
David
On Sun, Feb 12, 2012 at 11:14 AM, Stephen P. King <stephe...@charter.net
>
wrote:
On 2/11/2012 5:09 PM, Joseph Knight wrote:
On Sat, Feb 11, 2012 at 11:41 AM, Stephen P. King <stephe...@charter.net
>
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.
Think of this another way, we have a choice between belief
that "COMP
is true" or "COMP is false". 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.
[JK]
Yet ""COMP is true" AND "COMP is false"" is necessarily false.
Hi Joseph,
I agree, they are false as a proposition iff they are given in a
single proposition or evaluated as such, as your usage of "
bracketing
shows. This is one of the problems that I see in the COMP based
theory and
why one has to have something else in addition to propositions. This
'something else', I propose, is physical matter or a quantum logic
as
underlying structure. This latter possibility works because of the
non-distributive nature of its logic but it requires additional
structure to
derive the Born postulate.
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,
[JK]
How? Just because you bet on something doesn't make it a correct
bet. Just
because you hold two contradictory propositions to have equal
credence,
doesn't make them both correct. I don't see where this is coming
from.
[SPK]
One must have at least two different (orthogonal?)
alternatives and a
selection mechanism that can operate on all of them for a betting
scheme to
be possible.
Ok, but how is the "truth value dependent on the choice"?
but that would contradict COMP since built into it is the
postulate that
truth is independent of belief. 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?
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. 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. 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.
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. So in
effect you are denying the existence of the computer monitor with
which you
are reading this email, 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.
[JK]
The UDA only shows that they cannot be ontologically primitive, or
"fundamental".
[SPK]
I agree, but that restriction is not eliminative.
Yes it is, with the Movie Graph Argument. The MGA shows that
assuming COMP,
consciousness cannot be explained by appealing to any physical
system. Not
even a little.
What you need to understand is that what ever the UDA is defined
to be,
for it to be more than just a theoretical construct, it has to be
able to be
generated or implemented somehow,
otherwise it is much like a concept that cannot be communicated or
known.
Would it even be a concept?
?????
Consider an (unrealistically long) dream wherein the dreamer
observes
several violations of the real-life laws of physics (wrong proton
mass,
broken glasses reassembling themselves, whatever.). He then
reasonably
concludes that he is dreaming. In other words he reduces his
experience in
the dream to a "more fundamental" physical reality wherein he is
asleep, his
brain is in state X, and so on. He is therefore denying the
primitiveness of
his dream -- it is, in your terminology, an illusion.
[SPK]
This situation assumes that the content of the dream can be
known to
contain violations, e.g. that there is some other set of
experiences which
are a standard of correctness against which the content of the
dream can
deviate. If the Dreamer never experiences another world except for
that
"physics violating" version it would never know and would accept
it as
"real", in fact it would have no reason to consider that it might be
"unreal".
I agree.
[JK]
It seems to me that by your reasoning, the idea that the dreamer is
dreaming undermines the result itself, so that no one can ever
legitimately
say "I am dreaming". If I see a cup of coffee getting hotter on a
cold day,
or have conversations with long-dead relatives, I cannot say that
I am
dreaming, because if I am dreaming then there is no reason to take
my
reasoning seriously. (A lot of lucid dreamers would beg to differ!)
Is this a misrepresentation of your view? It is a somewhat subtle
issue.
[SPK]
No, you are making a good point. My comment in response is
that such a
situation requires the ability to distinguish alternatives as well
as the
possibility of "being in" or "finding oneself in" alternatives.
OK, but would you affirm or reject the statement "One cannot
legitimately
say 'I am dreaming'"? If you affirm it, you would be consistent
with what
you have said about the UDA, but I think you would be incorrect for
obvious
reasons. If you deny it then either you are being inconsistent or I
have
misunderstood you.
Comp covers this with the cut and paste idea and shows how 1p
indeterminism works. My only difficulty with COMP is the eliminatist
interpretation of it. One has to have real alternative states that
co-exist
at the level level even if they support propositions that are
mutually
contradictory.
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.
[JK]
How do you know this?
[SPK]
OK, lets reason our way through this. How exactly does one
Arithmetic
Truth act upon another such that there is a difference between a
pair of
non-interacting ATs and a pair of interacting ATs. To be
consistent, we
cannot project the ATs into and onto entities that have the per-
assumed
possibility of interaction or not, we have to take them as
primitive. Does
this construction even make sense? No! If we force it then we find
ourselves, as evaluators of those ATs, in a quandary much like
Descartes
with his version of dualism. How does the mental and material
interact? I
claim, with Vaughn Pratt, that they do not interact at all! A better
question, asked by Pratt, is how can a pair of minds or propositions
interact?
I'm afraid I don't understand what you're saying, but I will look
at Pratt's
stuff. Like I mentioned, I can't read them at full comprehension
just yet.
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.
[JK]
I agree, this would be very helpful. I wouldn't mind if it got a
little
technical, either.
[SPK]
I am hopeful that Bruno will see the benefit in writing this
description up.
Onward!
Stephen
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