On 9/26/2014 1:14 AM, Russell Standish wrote:
On Fri, Sep 26, 2014 at 03:17:07AM +0200, Platonist Guitar Cowboy wrote:
On Fri, Sep 26, 2014 at 1:03 AM, Russell Standish <li...@hpcoders.com.au>
wrote:
Well done for being obtuse! The platonically malleable urstuff is
usually taken to be integer arithmetic, although any system capable of
universal computation will do, such as Bruno's combinators
example.
You appear to be making the dog chase its tail.
?
But conscious does not supervene on that, for the reasons
given in my paper, but rather on sheaves of computations that make it
up, by assumption of COMP.
Not in your sense of requiring physical, concrete realizations: why do we
need those?
We don't, if by "concrete" you mean what Bruno means by it.
What are they and how do we avoid attributing originality to
all your doppelgangers distributed in UD if such is given?
originality?
It also must supervene on the emergent
phenomenal physics that arises. That is a raw empirical fact that no
pussy-footing around can eliminate.
The MGA demonstrates the
fundamental contradiction between COMP and physical supervenience in a
non-robust universe, consequently the only way to save COMP is for the
universe to be robust.
You pretend that this is common sense. That's much less clear to me.
This stuff is far from common sense. It is a simple matter of logic, however.
If you accept the empirical fact of physical supervenience (as I do,
and indeed also have arguments for why it must be so - see the Occam
Catastrophe discussion in my book), then the fact that the MGA forces
a contradiction between physical supervenience and computational
supervenience in a non-robust universe really just says there is a
choice: either we live in a robust universe, or computationalism is
false. The fact that we additionally observe quantum phenomena really
supports the idea we live in a robust universe. In a non-robust
universe, quantum phenomena is just weird.
Additionally, in a robust universe, the Church-Turing thesis tells us
that physics we supervene on must be emergent from the properties of
universal systems (Bruno's reversal result). Thus the matter we supervene
on cannot be "primitive". The primitive urstuff is something else
entirely - the arithmetic of integers, perhaps, as Bruno suggests -
but not matter as we know it.
I think I agree with you (see further query's below). But it's not entirely clear why
matter cannot be primitive. It's not clear because "matter" isn't defined (as Bruno likes
to point out when criticizing what he calls "Aristotelianism"). I think your point is
that naively conceived matter isn't complex enough to avoid the reductio's like the MGA.
But at PGC intuites quantum "matter" may well be. Lots of physicists have already
observed that the "matter" they talk about has become so abstract it's hard to say how it
differs from mathematical objects.
You may think robust universes are baroque, but I don't. Infinite,
symmetrical ensembles of universes are simpler from an information
theoretic perspective than specific finite instances. This is
ultimately the strongest argument in favour of platonism.
But there is a sense that nature doesn't have to play by our
rules. Maybe we really do live in a non-robust universe. If so, we
cannot have our COMP and eat it.
I don't see how stating that UD (straight, not shaken or stirred with
Quantum computer material stuff actualizing) is too cumbersome to realize
physically wherever it is that we are,
ie assuming non-robustness (which IMHO is virtually equivalent to
assuming ultrafinitism - like Norm Wildberger's position).
gives you convincing leverage
concerning consciousness relating to experiential outcome of some A/B
experiment, as the relation of selection is invariant for delays and
locations of reconstitution.
It demonstrates an inconsistency between physical supervenience and
computational supervenience, notably that physical supervenience
entails that certain very simple computations, such as the replaying
of a recording, will be conscious.
This only works in a non-robust universe, however, a point that is
often overlooked in treatments of this.
So are you agreeing with my point that the world (being quantum) is so complex that to
take all the counterfactuals into account in the MGA requires creating a whole simulated
universe in which the "playback" occurs, thus vitiating the reductio?
Brent
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