On Monday, August 18, 2014 9:19:32 PM UTC+10, Bruno Marchal wrote: > > > On 17 Aug 2014, at 14:43, Pierz wrote: > > Thank you Bruno for your response. Honestly I don't know if I'd say yes to > the doctor. > > > Nor do I. > > Actually, even if comp is true, I might say "no", because I might not > trust the doctor's skill, or the choice of the level. > > > It's cowardly of me, but I think I'd like to see the device work on > someone else first. If they appear to be fine after the operation then I > guess I'll go under the knife - and have to swallow the logical > consequences whole! > > > Me too. > > > > > Your reply helps. I suppose what I feel is missing from the account is the > *necessity* of qualia, because it seems to me that everything that exists, > necessarily exists, and as it stands in the comp account, the necessity for > there to be an interior to mathematics remains mysterious. > > > All machines introspecting itself, in the standard sense of Gödel, or > Kleene, is bound up to develop discours about something unnameable which > transcend them. But when you study the mathematical sructure of that > transcendent reality, it fits with previous analysis of qualia and quanta. >
"Discourse", "unnameable", "transcendant": how the qualia sneak in even as we try to explain them! What I mean is, your formulation, the words you use, add a certain numinous quality to the description of what seem (to a non-mathematician) to be dry abstract numerical transformations. Do they truly develop a discourse about the transcendant? Or do they merely mechanically prove their inability to compute everything? Perhaps you see all this drama playing out in the maths not because it is there in the maths intrinsically, not because you are a machine, but because you are a man of imagination, seeing your own soul in the numbers the way early astrologers saw their soul in the stars. Maybe the fit with the analysis of qualia truly means that is where the qualia fit. To me it's more of a sketchy fit, suggestive perhaps, like the bear in the sky which I can see if I squint. But I can't argue the case until I understand the maths better. > > > > > My guess is that comp is wrong, but it may be that it is still a whole lot > more right than materialism. It may be wrong in the same way that general > relativity and QM are "wrong", i.e., correct, but to some limit. My next > step is to read the Amoeba's Secret and see if I can start to wrap my head > around the S4Grz and the []p & p - the maths is still largely a mystery to > me. > > > OK. It is also in the second part of the sane04 paper. > > > > > However I wanted to put some less argumentative and more curious questions > to you about the way you imagine the comp-driven universe to be (yes, > there's no universe, I know, but I lack words: this apparent "space" we > inhabit?). The question comes up in the comp account about the physical > explanation for the origin of the Löbian organism the self-consistency of > whose mind creates the appearance of matter (allegedly). Liz and Brent were > throwing around this "if a tree falls in the forest" question on the MGA > thread. The account whereby the observer arises out of the long, deep > history of matter sure looks convincing. What is the status of this > alternative origin story if the observer is actually grounded in Platonia? > I seem to recall you talking about the idea that the observer's self > consistency demands that it also find a consistent account of itself in the > "material hypostases". OK, I can go with that, but something here still > troubles me. We can't surely dismiss these origins as fictive any more than > we can dismiss the other observers we find in our environment as fictive. > How do you see the relationship between these accounts (the exterior > physical and the machine psychological)? It occurs to me that in some ways > the anthropic explanation of the fluky coincidences of the laws of nature > resembles the machine psychology account - in that the requirements of > existing as a complex self-aware machine in a sense "cause" the laws of the > universe to be what they are. The need for logical consistency constrains > the environment and its laws in very specific, complex ways. It's almost > strange that it's taken us so long to realize just how extraordinary it is > that the "laws" work, that they are capable of creating the complexity and > beauty we see. Only a huge, unfathomable amount of selective work could > lead to a structure like the calabi yau manifolds etc, with its > staggeringly elegant capacity to generate complexity from simplicity. So... > that work I describe would be the infinite computations in the UD, and just > as all the complexity in the UD is surrounded by a vastly greater region of > garbled junk, so the physical account relies on a similar surrounding > region of incoherence. Which makes me wonder: are the two accounts just > mirror images somehow? Are the garbled, dead, sterile, incoherent universes > the reflection of those infinite sterile computations? Is there an observer > of these dead regions? Or are the observers like fleeting Boltzmann brain > or quantum fuzz in the void: incoherent, fleeting, barely aware, but just > there enough? I hope I make sense... > > > The anthropic account might "explain" the particularity of geography, > perhaps trivially (we are made of carbon, so there must be a carbon > producing machinery in the neighborhood, ...). This can use Bayes, and > "ASSA (absolute self sampling assumption). The physical *laws* should be > extracted from the measure on all computations going through my state, and > should be normally the same for all universal machine. > Hmm, you make a distinction here that to my mind is at odds with current cosmological thinking. Anthropic reasoning is trivial but can still lead to rather startling conclusions. As Tegmark has pointed out, it might have been used to predict the existence of other solar systems, because the distance of our planet from the sun must be highly "tuned" to stop us burning or freezing. So without the assumption of specialness, we'd have to predict other planets and suns to remove the coincidence. This reasoning seems unavoidable in relation to the apparently remarkable tuning of physical laws to permit life. There must be other physics, and lots of them, to explain the coincidence. So geography *is* the laws, at least to down to the level of the constants that can vary (the "brute facts" of our standard model). So the thing is, how will I know what belongs to the laws and what to geography? There may be observers in other universes with other sets of physical constants and therefore different laws. I suppose you can always slip through the net by saying that the real laws are the deeper ones that explain the different sets of constants. But that recourse does make you susceptible to the charge that any set of laws whatsoever that we happen to discover will be OK with comp, because whatever they are, that must be what the measure of computations going through my state predicts! And also it might not be tenable because it makes the laws so remote from the observer as it were. I mean, if the laws derive from all the computations that pass through a particular conscious state, can those laws really reside outside not only of the observer's apparent universe, but of their multiverse? That would lead to an awfully low substitution level wouldn't it? Because to simulate the observer completely, you'd have to simulate right back to the sum of all multiverses of this type (I think). Perhaps then comp does have a quite concrete prediction: that this specific set of physical constants is the only one in which life can exist. Although admittedly it's a pretty hard prediction to test. > Then the arithmetical realism suggests the existence of approximation of > physical realities, without observers. The falling leaf will make a sound > (a 3p wave), but of course, without observers, there will be no perception > or qualia actualized there. Those realities can even have the correct > relative measure, which means here that if it was the case an observer > would be there, it would be stably there from his first person points of > view. A bit when sending a man on Mars. He can believe that what he see > existed there before he walk and see it on Mars, a priori. > > OK that may be true, but without an observer, nothing will exist to select out that computation from the chaotic infinities. I don't know how you can say that the leaf meaningfully exists, because other computational threads will destroy the leaf instantly, do every conceivable thing to it, and then who can say there's a leaf? Without an observer's measure it has no stability and can only be projected artificially into the computations by some observer who already has the concept of a leaf. Frankly I'm surprised to hear you argue this. > > > > > Now a second thing. Comp suggests, or predicts, Many Worlds, and says > physics arises from the measure of the observer computations. But string > theory suggests many physics(es!). So this is intriguing. Are we humans > (and other animals in this multiverse) bound to one set of physics as it > were, while perhaps other (more complex?) observers occupy a world with > different laws? > > > Normally, no. The physical laws are ... laws, with comp, and so are the > same for all observers (universal machine). > > Yet as I said, there are different geographies, and it gets hard to distinguish conditions from laws. > But we do get arithmetical quantization in more than one hypostases ([]p & > p, []p & <>p, []p & <>p & p, with p sigma_1 and see at the G* level). > > So, we might still get more than one physical realm. Maybe the physics > coming from []p & p is the physics of heaven, but I am not sure of that. > > > > > > Because it seems we have only one of two options. Either the other > possible physics are all sterile, or there is something about the types of > mathematical structures that we are that keeps us bound to this particular > set of observer states, not letting us "slip over" into universes with > different laws? > > > The laws will always assured the existence of computations in which you > survive, and have that quantum MW aspects, but in some consciousness state > we might live some "phase transition" between different physical realms. > Obviously, we cannot get a physical reality in which there is no observers > at all. Eventually that will depend of what is in the core set of laws. > > > > > > Might we not be capable of a kind of mathematical state change that would > see us metamorphose, wake up in a world with different laws? Might death > and birth not be such state changes? > > > Death might be like ging from []p & <>p to []p & p, but I am not sure. I > am open to what you say, but I can't derived this from the universal > machine interview, yet. > > OK > > > > > > (This last suggestion no doubt getting too mystical for many whose > self-appointed job it is to crush any idea that smacks of the Big Guy > Upstairs who we've had so much trouble with in the past, but you're not > afraid of the G-word it seems, so I ask anyway (not that survival of death > has to bring God with it, but some people are sensitive about these > things.)) > > My own pet idea at the moment is a simple rule that seems at the least > strongly suggested by scientific experience to date and to me just > intuitively compelling. It is simply that there are no brute facts. > > > OK. Although with comp, I think we can without fear put the elementary > arithmetical truth in brute fact. "24 is not prime" is a sort of brute fact > to me. > Not to me. I probably need to clarify what I mean by this idea. "24 is not prime" is not a brute fact because it is a truth that arises from and within the entire interconnected logical/numerical of number. It's a truth in no way independent from every other mathematical truth, and in fact you have to swallow all the truth whole because each part of it necessitates the whole. You can prove and explain the statement in an infinite number of ways. But in say string theory, the fact that "space has 11 dimensions" is "just so", take it or leave it. You can justify believing it by virtue of what it explains, but nothing explains it. Nothing against string theory of course, but I contrast that situation with your example. > > Then the raw consciousness here and now seems to me to be a first person > sort of brute fact. > > More so, yes. Descartes' conclusion. I should have qualified my statement by saying that no brute facts exist except for everything! I mean that there is one brute fact, infinity itself, the great It, Being, God or whatever. And the first person moment is our little piece of that brute fact. But there is nothing specific we can ever identify, nothing finite, that is not really defined by its relations with everything else. That's what QM tells us - a particle can't even exist in one place without exploring every other position in spatial infinity - the part is defined by the whole and implies the whole. > > > > > Or another way of saying this is that there are no "hard" ontological > boundaries, no places where that which exists nakedly abuts non-existence, > in the way that a brute fact is encased as it were in a boundary of > nothingness beyond which one cannot travel. So far, wherever we look we > find that apparently hard boundaries are illusions. Every apparently closed > system turns out to be incomplete (yes Gödel again), to be contained as a > special case within some more encompassing whole. > > > But those closed systems are the theories, or machines, brains, observer. > They are incomplete with respect to arithmetical truth, and "reality". By > definition "reality" or "god" provides the "hard ontological boundaries". > With comp, arithmetical truth is enough for the 3p reality. This, from > inside, will indeed escape all possible 3p boundaries. > > Aha, so maybe we agree. > > > > I believe this is true infinitely and in all "directions". > > > That is correct for the internal view in arithmetic, which contains the > physical and mental realm. > > > > And so when people pin their hopes on string theory as a Final > Explanation, I don't believe it, just as I don't believe the spatial > dimensions will stop at the current count of 11. They can't, if my idea is > correct, because that 11th dimension would be a hard boundary. The flower > of knowledge will keep opening and opening. > > > This is an open problem to me. Gödel's incompleteness might still not be > applicable to the physical realm, as infinities crops up there. Possible, > but we do not yet know that (even in the comp frame). > > You have the disadvantage of rigour here :) I just guess. Can you explain why infinities are a problem for Gödel's incompleteness? > > > > And so I also do not believe in the boundary of death, the ultimate brute > fact. So - maybe I won't say yes to the doctor but yes to Doctor Death > instead, preferring to embrace the transformation than to perpetuate the > machine in its current form. > > > That's a position close to the comp enlightenment of the universal machine > :) > > Once you have the cognitive ability to consciously say yes to a comp > doctor, by virtue of comp (and not by virtue of added magic like god and/or > primitive matter), then you have the cognitive ability to know, assuming > comp, that as far as immortality is the "goal", the digital brain is not > needed. With an artificial brain, you will just extend artificially the > samsara, and miss the nirvana, to speak in buddhist terms. > > Right! > People will undergo brain transplant, not for being immortal, but for > keeping high the probability to see the next soccer cup, or the > grand-grand-children getting married ... Buddhist would call this > attachment, as their goal is to cut the cycle of lives. > > Ha ha yes! The younger one is, the more curious about the next world cup, but I hope to be more curious about the great mystery of death than any of that by the time I get to facing my own end. A friend of mine was talking to me yesterday about meditating and watching his thoughts die, how they protested and tried to hold on before fading away into the void, and how he would simply watch them go. And I said, "yes and one day you will watch and let die the great thought that was you and your life". So it is. > Bruno > > > > > > On Sunday, August 10, 2014 4:01:00 AM UTC+10, Bruno Marchal wrote: >> >> >> On 09 Aug 2014, at 05:34, Pierz wrote: >> >> In "The Conscious Mind", Chalmers bases his claim that materialism has >> failed to provide an explanation for consciousness on a distinction between >> 'logical' and 'natural' supervenience, where logical supervenience simply >> means that if A supervenes on B, then B logically and necessarily entails >> A. Because we can logically conceive of a (philosophical) zombie, then it >> seems that consciousness cannot *logically* supervene on the physical. >> There is simply nothing in the physical description that entails or even >> *suggests* the arising of subjective experiences in any system, >> biological or otherwise. This is a well-trodden path of argumentation that >> I'm sure we're all familiar with. However, since it does appear that, >> empirically, consciousness supervenes on physical processes, then this >> supervenience must be "natural" rather than logical. It must arise due to >> some natural law that demands it does. So far so good, though what we end >> up with in Chalmers' book - "property dualism" - hardly seems like the >> nourishing meal a phenomenologically inclined philosopher might have hoped >> for. Bruno's version of comp seems like more nourishing fare than the the >> watery gruel of property dualism, but Chalmers' formulation of logical >> supervenience got me thinking again about the grit in the ointment of comp >> that I've never quite been able to get comfortable with. This is only >> another way of formulating an objection that I've raised before, but >> perhaps it encapsulates the issue neatly. We can really only say we've >> "explained" something when explicated the relationships between the higher >> order explanandum and some ontologically prior basis, demonstrating how the >> latter necessarily entails the former. Alternatively we might postulate >> some new "brute fact", some hitherto unknown principle, law or entity which >> we accept because it does such a good job of uniting disparate, previously >> unexplained observations. >> >> Now the UDA does a good job of making the case that if we accept the >> premise of comp (supervenience on computational states), then materialism >> can be seen to dissolve into "machine psychology" as Bruno puts it, or to >> emerge from arithmetic. But the problem here is that we can no more see >> mathematical functions as necessarily entailing subjective experience as we >> can see physical entities as doing so. It is perfectly possible to imagine >> computations occurring in the complete absence of consciousness, and in >> fact nearly everybody imagines precisely this. I would say that it is an >> undeniable fact that no mathematical function can be said to* logically >> entail *some correlated conscious state. Rather, we must postulate some >> kind of law or principle which claims that it is just so that mathematical >> functions, or certain classes thereof, co-occur with or are somehow >> synonymous with, conscious experiences. In other words, we are still forced >> back on a kind of natural supervenience. But the problem here is that, >> whereas with matter we may be able to invoke some kind of ontological >> 'magic' that "puts the fire into the equations" to quote Hawking, with pure >> mathematics it is hard to see how there can be any such natural law that is >> distinct from pure logic itself. >> >> Now when I've put this objection to Bruno in the past in slightly >> different words, claiming that it is hard to see any way to reconcile the >> language of mathematics with the language of qualia, Bruno has invoked >> Gödel to claim that mathematics is more than mere formalism, that it >> embodies a transcendent Truth >> >> >> >> Well, that's Gödel's discovery, with "transcendent is defined by >> "satisfied by the model (N, +, *) but non provable by the machine concerned. >> >> That entails that the following logic, although being the meat-logic of >> the set set of arithmetical beliefs, obeys completely different logics: >> >> []p >> []p & p >> []p & <>t >> []p & <>t & p >> >> And more: Gödel's incompleteness split in two, three of those logics >> ([]p, []p & <>t , []p & <>t & p). One part (derived from G) describes what >> the machines can prove on this modality/person-point-of-view, and one >> derived from G* (representable in G) describes what is true about those >> modalities, including the laws that the machine cannot proves, but still >> can guess or intuit, or observe ...). >> >> >> >> >> >> that is beyond that which can be captured in any mathematical >> formulation. At least, that is the best summary I can make of my >> understanding of his reply. He also claims to have discovered the >> 'placeholder' for qualia within the mathematics of Löbian machines: the gap >> between statements which the machine knows to be true and those which the >> machine knows to be true and can prove to be so. It's a fascinating >> argument, but it seems at the very least incomplete. The fact that a >> machine making self-referentially correct statements will be able to assert >> some (true) things without being able to prove them does not compel me in >> any way to believe that such a machine will have a conscious experience of >> some particular phenomenal quality. >> >> >> But nothing can do that. You ask for too much. We *assume* comp all >> along, even if in the math part, we do it only at the meta-level, to ease >> our comprehension. In he math part, you can forget consciousness, and only >> talk in terms of beliefs, knowledge, etc. Those are defined precisely, >> either directly in arithmetic, or in terms of arithmetical notions (set of >> numbers). >> >> >> >> >> It may be true that correct statements about qualia are correct >> statements which can't be proven, but this does not mean that statements >> about qualia are statements about unprovable mathematical propositions. >> >> >> Careful. I don't say this. >> All you need is the classical (analytical) most common axioms for >> knowledge, or knowability: >> >> (Knowable p) -> p >> Knowable (p -> q) ->. [Knowable (p) -> knowable (q)] >> >> and for the richer introspective form: >> >> knowable(p) ->. knowable(knowable(p)). >> >> I study very special machine, who have simple correct arithmetical >> beliefs. Then, applying theaetetus definition (knowing p = justifying p, >> with p true) gives a logic obeying the standard theory of knowledge, and >> you can use it to talk with the machine, noitably on the difference between >> 3p and 1p, etc. >> >> >> >> >> >> I might claim that Chaitin's constant is 0.994754987543925216... and it >> might just happen that I'm right, through divine inspiration, but Chaitin's >> constant is not a quale of mine. Bruno can point to this space in his >> formalism to say "that's where the qualia fit", but there is a similar leap >> of faith involved to actually put them there as we make when attributing >> qualia to emergence from neurology. >> >> >> It is the same as attributing consciousness to any other one person than >> oneself. You need just to accept the axiomatic definition beliefs, >> knwoledge, etc. It fits, like we fits between us right now, despite this >> never prove anything. But this we know, we assume comp, and neither in the >> UDA, nor in the AUDA, we pretend having provided a proof that comp is true, >> or that the classical theory of knowledge is true. the nice thing is that >> we show them empirically refutable, as their restriction to the sigma_1 UD >> must give the logic of the observable. And unfortunately it fits, so >> *classical* comp is confirmed (not proved), and not yet refuted. >> >> >> >> >> Gödel's theorem might show that mathematics is more than mere formalism, >> but it does not allow us to make the leap to mathematics being more than >> abstract relationships between numbers. There will always be some true, >> unprovable statement in any set of axioms, but this statement will still be >> about numbers, not about feelings. >> >> >> But then with comp, your own statement should be seen as a statement >> about some (very) complex number. All statements in physics are also just >> statement about numbers and numbers relations. >> >> I guess you are not aware of the crucial distinction between extensional >> mathematics, and intensional mathematics, which take into account the body >> of the sentences/machines making sentences, with notion of (self) reference. >> >> >> >> >> >> If we start to say mathematics is more than that, we are making a >> metaphysical, and indeed mystical claim, and I believe we have also >> expanded mathematics to become something else, something that we can no >> longer truly claim to be maths as that is usually understood. >> >> >> Indeed. I do not hide this. It is a key point. Comp entails it belongs to >> arithmetic, up to a theological act of faith; when saying "yes" to the >> doctor. You put your life in a number on that occasion. That is why I >> insist it is theology. Then in AUDA, we get what was needed: machine >> looking inward *are* confronted with many sort and types of non justifiable >> (by them) truth, about them. >> >> >> >> >> Now of course the "gap" between the maths and the qualia (I don't like >> the obfuscating and often confused language of Craig's posts, but I think >> "Gödel of the gaps" is a pretty good turn of phrase, if indeed he is >> pointing to the same thing as me) is actually imported into comp with the >> initial assumption of qualia supervening on computational states. That >> postulate is of course unexplained, mystifying and, when taken to its >> logical end as Bruno has done, mystical. >> >> >> But you do it when you bet on comp and say "yes" to the doctor. Then with >> Gödel we get that a machine can guess a reality (<>t, by Gödel completeness >> theorem it is equivalent, with model playing the role of reality), and >> justifies, as we do, that if that reality exists, it can't be proved: <>t >> -> ~[]<>t. >> We can also define the mystic part of the machine by all the intensional >> variant (see above) of G* minus G. >> >> >> >> But when all is said and done, we're still left with it as a "brute >> fact", if anything more naked than it was at the beginning of the argument. >> More naked because it is even less clear how we are going to get a natural >> law to bridge the gap between the putative ontological basis of >> consciousness and consciousness itself when that basis is pure mathematics. >> >> >> Pure arithmetic. Even pure sigma_1 arithmetic (the UD*). We get it >> because the comp act of faith, connect consciousness, or its invariance, to >> computer science theoretical notions. >> >> It is a fact that computer science is embedded faithfully in the >> arithmetical truth. No theories at all unifies that. >> >> >> >> >> After all, what is mathematics? If it includes all consciousness, is >> inseparable from it, if it encompasses love, pain, the smell of rain, and >> everything else it is possible to experience, then we are really talking >> about the mind as a whole, and the claim of a reduction to arithmetic >> starts to look at the very least misleading. Arithmetic is just the sugar >> coating that gives the rationalist a better chance of swallowing the >> psychedelic pill. >> >> >> >> Mathematics does not include consciousness. It is that once a number is >> Turing universal, or sigma_1 complete, its view of arithmetic is provably >> beyond mathematics. >> >> Mathematics (we need only arithmetic) is only the 3p view "outer view", >> but theaetetus applied to provability leads to first person view much >> richer than arithmetic. >> >> Understanding comp is understanding that we are, even just for >> arithmetic, confronted with the Unknown. It leads to coming back to the >> scientific attitude in theology, and perhaps the human sciences and affairs. >> >> I just derive consequences for an assumption, which link consciousness >> and first person to 3p number-object that we can put on a disk for awhile, >> and I have never hide the theological aspect of it. In fact, it is part of >> comp to admit it is a theology. We can just hope for it, or fear it, and >> perhaps refute it, thanks to the level of rigor and precision it permits. >> >> Bruno >> >> >> >> >> >> >> -- >> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups >> "Everything List" group. >> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an >> email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com. >> To post to this group, send email to everyth...@googlegroups.com. >> Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. >> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. >> >> >> http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ >> >> >> >> > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com <javascript:>. > To post to this group, send email to everyth...@googlegroups.com > <javascript:>. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > > > http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ > > > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
