On 31 Aug 2012, at 17:12, Roger Clough wrote:
Hi Bruno Marchal
Are you saying that comp creates and controls all by means of some
kind of code
in some Pythagorean realm, where all is numbers ? That everything is
computable ?
Comp is a theory. It does nothing. You grasp it, or you don't, and
this independently of being true or false, like any theory. The theory
assume that the brain is emulable by a computer, and is natural as it
is hard to find something not emulable by a computer without using
special mathematical tools.
So ontologically, eventually the natural numbers can be an acceptable
universal realm, and in that sense, yes, all is numbers + the laws of
addition and multiplication.
But this does not entails that everything is computable, on the
contrary, it is shown that the computable is rather exceptional, and
even consciousness and matter appears to be non computable, because
they arise from a phenomenon (first person indeterminacy) related to
the fact that no machine can be know which machine she is, and still
less which computations supports her, and those are infinitely
distributed in arithmetic.
In Leibniz, brute matter indeed exists just as in a text on
solid state physics. And you can stub your toe on a rock.
Like in comp. yet they do not exist ontologically. They exist
epistemologically. Physics beomes literally a branch of numbers's
biology or psychology or theology.
But this is referred to by L as the phenomenal world.
So it is like in comp.
To L, the rock also exists in the world of ideas as a monad.
Monads as ideas are more basic than matter, which
according to L, can be infinitely divided.
So to L, the ideal is "real".
Like in comp.
I personally would use the uncertainty principle to
rank ideas as real as opposed to particles.
That might be quick. Anyway, with comp QM is NOT part of the
hypothesis. It should be part of the conclusion, and that is what
makes comp testable.
Leibniz refers to our everyday world as containing
"well-established phenomena".
I agree. I have no problem with Leibniz, I only find him hard to read.
But I have studied the Platonists and the neoplatonists, (and Chinese
and Indians thinkers) and comp asks for some backtracking to them. I
tend to consider Plotinus as the most modern guy on the planet, and I
appreciate the neoplatonists as they do not oppose the mystical
inquiry to rationalism. They remain cold in hot water!
Bruno
Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net
8/31/2012
Leibniz would say, "If there's no God, we'd have to invent him
so that everything could function."
----- Receiving the following content -----
From: Bruno Marchal
Receiver: everything-list
Time: 2012-08-31, 10:27:35
Subject: Re: Two reasons why computers IMHO cannot exhibit
intelligence
On 31 Aug 2012, at 14:08, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Friday, August 31, 2012 4:47:30 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote:
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 ...
By your logic, I would have to explain how Bugs Bunny can't become
a person too.
It can. In some universal environment, it is quite possible that
bugs bunny like beings become persons.
As far as we know, we can't survive on any food that isn't carbon
based. As far as we know, all living organisms need water to survive.
On our planet, but you extrapolate too much.
Why should this be the case in a comp universe?
Open and hard problem, but a priori, life can takes different forms.
I think that the problem is that you don't take your own view that
physical matter is not primitive seriously. Like you, I see matter
not as a stuff that independently exists, but as a projection of
the exterior side of bodies making sense of each other - or the
sense of selves making an exterior side of body sense to face each
other. From that perspective it isn't the carbon that is
meaningful, the carbon (H2O, sugars, amino acids, lipids really),
the carbon is just the symptom, the shadow. Carbon is the command
line 'OPEN BIOAVAILABILITY DICTIONARY" which gives the thing access
to the palette of histories associated with living organisms rather
than astrophysical or geological events.
This is not inconsistent with comp, but I don't find this plausible.
In fact I believe that all civilisation in our physical universe end
up into a giant topological computing machinery (a quark star, whose
stability depends on sophisticated error tolerant sort of quantum
computation) virtualising their past and future. Carbon might be
just a step in life development. We might already be virtual and
living in such a "star". But more deeply, we are already all in
arithmetic.
Bruno
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.
?
How does the programming get in the program?
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).
By "Seen from inside" you evoke a Non-Platonia. Why does Platonia
need a Physics view? Why should that possibility even present
itself in a Platonic universe?
How does encoding come to be a possibility
Because it exists provably once you assume addition and
multiplication, already assumed by all scientists.
If I begin with numbers and then add and multiply them together to
get other numbers, where does the decoding come in? At what point
do they suddenly turn into letters and colors and shapes and
people? Why would they do that from an arithmetic perspective? We
are not tempted to do this in a computer. We don't think 'maybe
this program will run faster if we play it a happy song through
tiny speakers in the microprocessor'. Even plants have been shown
to benefit from being interacted with positively, but have
computations shown any such thing? Has any computer program shown
any non-programmatic environmental awareness at all?
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?
No. They aren't. That's my point. Those things would never arise
from number crunching alone. Numbers begat only more numbers. If
you apply numbers to forms, then you get interesting forms. If you
apply interesting colors, sounds, etc. But numbers will never
discover these things. We discover them. Real things discover
numbers, not the other way around.
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.
Why do you think that I don't have a clue about epistemology but
you claim to speak for the feelings and experiences of universal
machines? Justification is a 3p epistemology. 1p doesn't need to
prove itself in 3p because they are orthogonal to each other. 1p
would need proof that it needs proof for itself. It is a given. You
have to start somewhere - the cosmos has to have some point of
orientation, and 1p is the name we can call that.
Craig
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
Groups "Everything List" group.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/everything-list/-/bcygv7dpgXMJ
.
To post to this group, send email to everything-
l...@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
.
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
--
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
.
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
--
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.
