On 30 Aug 2012, at 20:09, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Thursday, August 30, 2012 1:11:55 PM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 29 Aug 2012, at 20:09, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Wednesday, August 29, 2012 1:22:38 PM UTC-4, William R. Buckley
wrote:
Cells are indeed controlled by software (as represented in wetware
form – i.e. DNA).
It isn't really clear exactly what controls what in a living cell.
I can say that cars are controlled by traffic signals, clocks, and
calendars.
To whatever we ascribe control, we only open up another level of
unexplained control beneath it. What makes DNA readable to a
ribosome? What makes anything readable to anything?
Encoding and decoding, or application and abstraction, or addition
and multiplication, ...
My problem is that this implies that a pile of marbles know how many
marbles they are.
Not necessarily. A n-piles of marbles can emulate a m-pile of marbles.
I could rig up a machine that weighs red marbles and then releases
an equal weight of white marbles from a chute. Assuming calibrated
marbles, there would be the same number, but no enumeration of the
marbles has taken place. Nothing has been decoded, abstracted, or
read, it's only a simple lever that opens a chute until the pan
underneath it gets heavy enough to close the chute. There is no
possibility of understanding at all, just a mindless enactment of
behaviors. No mind, just machine.
To be viable, comp has to explain why these words don't speak English.
It is hard to follow your logic. Like someone told to you, a silicon
robot could make the equivalent argument: explain me how a carbon
based set of molecules can write english poems ...
Sense is irreducible.
From the first person perspective. Yes. For machine's too.
No software can control anything, even itself, unless something has
the power to make sense of it as software and the power to execute
that sense within itself as causally efficacious motive.
This seems to me like justifying the persistence of the physical
laws by invoking God. It is too quick gap filling for me, and does
not explain anything, as relying on fuzzy vague use of words. I
might find sense there, but in the context of criticizing mechanism,
I find that suspicious, to be frank.
I'm only explaining what comp overlooks. It presumes the possibility
of computation without any explanation or understanding of what i/o
is.
?
Why does anything need to leave Platonia?
OK. (comp entails indeed that we have never leave Platonia, but again,
this beg the question: why do you think anything has even leave
Platonia? Physics is just Platonia seen from inside, from some angle/
pov).
How does encoding come to be a possibility
Because it exists provably once you assume addition and
multiplication, already assumed by all scientists.
and why should it be useful in any way (given a universal language
of arithmetic truth).
?
Why should it be useful?
Are babies useful? Are the ring of Saturn useful?
Comp doesn't account for realism, only a toy model of realism which
is then passed off as genuine by lack of counterfactual proof - but
proof defined only by the narrow confines of the toy model itself.
It is the blind man proving that nobody can see by demanding that
sight be put into the terms of blindness.
You don't give a clue why it would be like that, except building on
the gap between 1 and 3 view, but my point is that universal machine
or numbers are already astonished by such gap. They can only say that
they live it without being able to justify it, nor even to define
precisely what their 1-view can be, until they bet on mechanism, and
understand (already) why it has to be like that.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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