On 14 Sep 2013, at 04:25, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Friday, September 13, 2013 9:42:54 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 12 Sep 2013, at 18:22, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Thursday, September 12, 2013 11:56:12 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal
wrote:
On 12 Sep 2013, at 11:33, Telmo Menezes wrote:
> Time for some philosophy then :)
>
> Here's a paradox that's making me lose sleep:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unexpected_hanging_paradox
>
> Probably many of you already know about it.
>
> What mostly bothers me is the epistemological crisis that this
> introduces. I cannot find a problem with the reasoning, but it's
> clearly false. So I know that I don't know why this reasoning is
> false. Now, how can I know if there are other types of reasoning
that
> I don't even know that I don't know that they are correct?
Smullyan argues, in Forever Undecided, rather convincingly, that it
is
the Epimenides paradox in disguise,
It's the symbol grounding problem too. From a purely quantitative
perspective, a truth can only satisfy some condition. The
expectation of truth being true is not a condition of arithmetic
truth, it is a boundary condition that belongs to sense.
i think you mix first person truth, that we can sometimes apprehend
(like knowing that we are conscious here and now), and third person
truth, which does not depend of any entity *sensing* them.
How do you justify the assumption of entities that do not depend on
any phenomenological participation though?
That is called "realism". I guess you know I am realist about facts
like "14 is not prime" and the like. We have discussed already on
that, and I think, agree that we disagree on that.
Certainly there are truths which are independent of *our* sensing as
individuals, or as human beings, or as fleshy objects or temporal
spans of felt experience, but how can we know, or rather why should
we jump to conclusions that there are things that simply 'are'
independently of a sensed experience (note I omit 'entity', since it
is not clear that an experience must be felt by a particular being
(it could be felt by a class of beings, an era of being, or an
eternity of being). Third person truth is not anchored in the
firmament of fact, it is simply a lowest common denominator of
sensitivity among all participants.
I am OK with this, but as I defined entities from what I am realist
about, I prefer to make it simple and refer to an arithmetic
independent of us.
If third person truth were sense independent, what would be the
point of having sense actually experienced?
The presence of far away galaxies does not depend on us (human
beings), but we still need sense (Hubble) to acknowledge their
existence.
How would it create sensation mechanically, and how would whatever
is used to attach first person phenomena to third person phenomena
be itself attached to either one?
Through two things: self-reference and truth. the first in technically
manageable, the second is not. But we have both once we assume the
independent truth of arithmetical relations.
Computers cannot lie intentionally,
Hmm... That is your usual anti-mechanist propaganda.
It's not too late to discover a new perspective...
http://multisenserealism.com/2013/09/12/why-computers-cant-lie-and-dont-know-your-name/
they can only report a local truth which is misinterpreted as being
false in some sense that is not local to the computation.
For the same reason, computers cannot intend to tell the truth
either. As in the Chinese Room - the output of a program is not
known by the program to be true, it simply is a report of the truth
of some internal process.
You confuse a person, and a program or body responsible for that
person being able to communicate with you (that might explain why
you believe a computer cannot think. Of course when we say "a
computer can think", with comp we mean only that a computer can have
an activity making it possible for a person to think relatively to
some universal number/machine.
My intuition is to support the use of 'personal' to describe private
physics, but the word person seems too loaded to me. I am ok with
everything that I see around me now being 'personal' in some sense,
but I do not see that every line and curve, every sparkle and shadow
arc is a 'person' or collection of persons. Also I think that the
universal number has no reason to feel, but a universal feeling has
every reason to count.
I know that is what you feel. I have explained why numbers feels this
to, as the truth here has to be logically counter-intuitive. Young
machines have hard to believe that they are machines, and eventually
this asks for a strong philosophical, even theological, bet. That is
why "mechanist proselytism" is forbidden.
The interesting part is that besides being true locally, the
computer's report is also true arithmetically, which is to say that
it is true two ways (or senses):
1) the most specific/proprietary sense which is unique, private,
instantaneous and local
2) the most universal/generic sense which is promiscuous, public,
eternal, and omni-local
The computer's report is, however not true in any sense in between,
i.e. in any sense which relates specifically to real experienced
events in space time.
Real events in spacetime (which occur orthogonally through mass-
energy, or rather mass-energy is the orthogonal cross section of
events) are:
3) semi-unique, semi-private, semi-spatiotemporal, semi-local, semi-
specific, semi-universal.
I am quite skeptical about "real events in spacetime". I can ascribe
a local sense to that, but not an absolute one. I don't buy even
weak materialism. It contradicts most things I find much more
plausible (consciousness, persons, souls, dreams, monism, ...).
I'm trying to make an informal reference without getting too deeply
into what is meant by real. I agree that spacetime is not absolute -
it is the polar opposite. Spacetime is the conditional, the local.
OK
Still though, the point I'm making is that computation is ultra-
local and ultra-nonlocal, but rather than assuming that it includes
every shade in between, I think all signs point to the contrary.
Quantum jumps, and what it is jumping across is 'reality' -
accumulated experiences...every shade in between. Digital vs analog
is a good analog for the real thing, which would be more like digital
+analog vs {the superpositioned/proto-divergence of all experiences}.
OK. That fits mechanist theology.
Bruno
Thanks,
Craig
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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