On 16 Feb 2014, at 15:32, David Nyman wrote:
On 16 February 2014 09:39, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
If the foregoing is to make any sense, we are forced to the view
that all references to such dramatis personae are, in the end,
merely a manner of speaking, and that consequently *all* such gross
or macroscopic references are, strictly speaking, epistemological
(i.e. they are all internal references to epiphenomena of some
fully-reduced physical ontology).
You might be on the track of some contradiction here. It looks like
all "references" becomes meaningless, including the reference on the
physics on which consciousness would be an epiphenomenon on.
Well, I guess one would have to say that all references (including
references to internal representations of "physics") are only
*internally* meaningful.
Yes. Like with comp's reversal consequence. (Through the conversation
with Quentin, I think I will have to explain better a part of step
seven, which might add light, or perhaps obscurity, on this thread).
This is a problematical for someone believing both that there is a
moon, and that it makes sense to refer to it, for example by pointing
a finger to the moon.
From "thought cannot act on matter" we arrive at "thought cannot
refer to matter", and well, this is almost the consequence of step 8,
as it says that the notion of matter has nothing to do with a material
reality. Then we can still refer to the moon, but we know it is a sort
of collective lawful "hallucination", or more exactly a mean on a set
of 3p well defined computation.
The whole schema - "physics" included - would then have to be
considered an epiphenomenon of some inaccessible ur-physics.
Exactly.
I'm not sure that it's exactly a contradiction just because of that,
though, as in practice any putative ontological base - numbers
included - must be inaccessible in this sense, except to theory.
It illustrates, perhaps better than step 8, the difficulty of wanting
a primitive matter having a primitive ontological reality capable of
singularizing a conscious person capable to refer to it.
I have to think more about this.
However, one distinction between arithmetic / computation as an
ontology, and some kind of putative ur-physics, is that it is more
difficult to discern any principled motivation whatsoever to derive
"reference" in a primitive physics. A typical response to this
reference problem is to justify CTM by smuggling an ad hoc notion of
computation into physics.
Yes. That is why at first sight I took the discovery of the quantum
universal machine as a blow for comp. I thought that the quantum
formalism provided a notion of physical computability, but it brought
only a notion of physical computation, which is not excluded with
computationalism (it is a sort of direct exploitation of the
statistical nature of the computations below our substitution level).
It is ad hoc in the sense that "physical computation" is still no
more than primitive physics, so now computation itself becomes an
epiphenomenon of physics and consciousness therefore an
epiphenomenon of an epiphenomenon. If not a blatant contradiction,
this strikes me as quite close to a reductio.
It makes arithmetic an epiphenomenon of physics, and it makes physics
an epiphenomenon of physics.
Computation (as emulated in arithmetic) on the other hand offers, at
least, a principled system of internally-recursive self-reference
that could motivate the layers of connectivity between the
ontological base and the level of indexical "physical reality".
With a big price of "reducing" physics to a "unique" calculus of self-
reference on the consistent, and/or "true", or both extensions.
This makes sense only if the arithmetical or quasi-arithmetical []p &
p, []p & <>t, (and []p & p & <>t) obeys knowledge and probability
logic respectively, and that is the case when p is restricted on
sigma_1 sentences (which emulates UD*).
Bruno
David
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