On 25 Jun 2012, at 18:24, John Clark wrote:
On Sun, Jun 24, 2012 Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
> The first person indeterminacy is a fact, with respect to comp.
First person indeterminacy is a fact with respect to ANYTHING,
sometimes you don't know what you're going to do till you do it. I
find your theoretical prediction of this less than impressive.
The question is do you agree with it, or not. So that we can move to
step 4.
> And then if I luckily succeed in computing the electron mass
9.10938291×10-31kg, Brent will tell me that we already knew that,
and ask for something else.
Don't be ridiculous! If you can produce the value of 9.10938291×10^
-31kg from nothing but pure numbers you would be universally hailed
as the greatest logician or mathematician or physicist (there would
no longer be any difference between the three professions) who ever
lived. Philosophical theories are a dime a dozen but theories that
can produce numbers are not, and theories where the numbers match
the numbers obtained from experiment are even less common. If you
want your ideas to go mainstream there is just no alternative,
you've got to find a way for those ideas to churn out numbers,
numbers that can be tested.
You ignore that we can test inequalities, even without probability. I
do produce the description of the devices so that we can test the
hypotheses. All you have to do is proceed in the argument, even if you
need this to understand that it is more modest than you extrapolate.
Please do the reasoning, before extrapolating on assertions I do not
provide.
> You need also to be interested in consciousness, and capable of
distinguishing first and third person points of view
I'm interested in consciousness but I am not capable of always
making the distinction between the first and third person points of
view, but you have admitted you can't do it either. On March 27
2012 I said:
"Give me a example of 2 conscious beings that are identical by what
you call "3-view" but NOT identical by what you call "1-view", show
they deserve different names, do that and I might get a idea what
you're talking about; but don't give me that diaries business, if
the diaries are different a third party can see that just as well as
the individuals who wrote them. Just one clear non mystical example
where objectively 2 things are identical but subjectively they are
not, that's all I ask and I don't think it's a unreasonable request
as your proof depends on there being such a difference."
You responded to my request with:
"You ask me something impossible"
I agree it is impossible. I can conceive of 2 conscious minds being
identical from the 1- view but not from the 3-view, for example a
mind generated from a biological brain and a uploaded mind generated
from a computer, in which case there really wouldn't be two minds
but only one. However 2 minds identical from the 3- view but not
from the 1-view makes no sense.
We agree on that indeed. And ?
For the reasoning, we don't have to attribute two first person povs to
one 3-viewed machine, but to attribute one first person povs to two
different 3-viewed machine, and eventually number relations.
It looks like you want me to believe that the relation of mind and
machine is one-one, by telling me to give an example of 2 different
minds for one machine, which we agree is impossible, but this does not
mean that we cannot attach one mind to two different machines, or to
two identical (similar at the subst. level) machine put in different
environment, like Sidney and Beijing, for example.
It is crucially important, because machine cannot know in which
computations there are among the infinities which exists in the
solution of a universal diophantine equation, and in a sense, she
belongs to all those computations that she cannot distinguishes. That
makes a big infinity.
I am not solving a problem, I am reducing a "philosophical" problem to
a mathematical problem, assuming comp.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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