On 18 Sep 2013, at 05:03, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Sunday, September 15, 2013 3:54:24 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote:
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.
I don't see any realism in assuming anything that is disconnected
from all forms of phenomenology. How would such a thing be part of a
universe?
That depends what you mean by "universe".
By definition, realism assumes something which can be disconnected
from phenomenology, but which can be connected to it for some occasion.
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.
I agree that arithmetic is independent of us as human beings, but I
see nothing to suggest that it is independent of all experience.
I can agree with this, if you include some God experience, for
example. But I don't really need this.
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.
Of course, but far away galaxies do depend on the sensitivity of the
matter of the Hubble, or other galaxies, or our eyeball and brain,
to 'exist' in some particular form. Otherwise what is the difference
between a galaxy existing and not existing?
For a physical object like a galaxy, you have many situations:
It exists in our branch of the multiverse, and is accessible to our
measuring instruments.
It exists in our branch of the multiverse, but is not accessible to
our measuring instruments (for some reason)
It exists in another term of the universal superposition (a
physicalist would still call it physical)
It exists as a solution of a diophantine equation, but appears in no
term of "our" multiverse (that is doubtful if our multiverse is really
the state of the quantum void, but it can make sense logically).
It does not exist at all, because the galaxy would contains impossible
objects,
etc.
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.
Those are abstractions though, not mechanisms.You could say
'tenacity' and 'ingenuity' too, but that doesn't put 'orange' in a
digital sequence.
Self-referential mechanism exist tough.
Orange is in some digital sequence relative to some universal machine
(Keep in mind that my answer assume computationalism).
the first in technically manageable, the second is not. But we have
both once we assume the independent truth of arithmetical relations.
Independent of what though?
Independent of humans and of all universal machines more generally.
That implies that there exists something outside of arithmetic
relations, but then claims them at the same time. It's stage magic.
I don't see this. Arithmetical truth can be independent of what the
insider arithmetical beings conceive.
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.
But by saying that you put yourself above what you claim. You say
"numbers feel they are not numbers", and "we are all numbers", but
then "I understand that all numbers are wrong, and that insight
makes me more than an ordinary deluded number". Apparently not all
numbers feel this.
Some 'number' (the person which is supported by that number relatively
to some universal history) can get right, other can be wrong. That
happens. It just means that some number can understand that some
feeling might be wrong.
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.
Then why have I gone the other way? I used to believe as you do when
I was young, but now I understand exactly why that cannot be true.
What you feel can play some rôle for your research, but what will
count is what you can communicate to others.
You fail to communicate to others what that cannot be true, if only
because you refer to your feelings.
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.
ok. What makes it mechanist though if only the narrow extremes make
sense as mechanical?
It is an admittedly strange aspect of computationalism. If my body/
brain is Turing emulable, then my first person is not. I sum it up
often by: if 3-I is a machine, then 1-I is not a machine. But
"God" (truth) "knows" better, and can explain why, after all, the 1-I
is supported by machines, but the machine cannot, and that explains
the necessary machine's delusion on this.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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