On 30 Sep 2014, at 02:19, Russell Standish wrote:
On Mon, Sep 29, 2014 at 06:45:51PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 29 Sep 2014, at 02:22, Russell Standish wrote:
I introduced the term "urstuff" as a way of referring to what is
ontologically real. "primitive urstuff" is a tautology, of course,
as
urstuff is primitive by definition.
Urstuff could be matter, or it could be a platonic system like the
integers. Since we can never know what it is, we should
Wittgensteinly
shut our traps about it, but since we don't seem to be able to do
that, we need a label to talk about it.
But stuff is so much connotated to matter. Matter seems even more
abstract than stuff. Some people makes the error that physics
Only in my grandmother's English.
Grandmothers are often well inspired.
She would say stuff is material - ie
specifically the fabric that you make clothes, or curtains out of. But
already by my generation, "stuff" is roughly synonymous with
"things".
But this is not astonishing, as we are in the aristotlian era, so most
people already believe that reality is made of things and that things
are stuffy. But this is what is needed to be changed in case we are
willing to take computationalism seriously.
Don't mind too much, it is vocabulary and it does not matter (note the
pun).
A thing needn't be material. My son's generation, would
probably use the word "junk" in the same way.
becomes arithmetic, which is against comp, where physics is a
modality of observation (the FPI bet "one" obeys the quantum logic
S4Grz1, or Z1*).
Again, this is just vocabulary, but to say that numbers are stuff
seems to me to easily lead to the error of confusing math and
physics (which some people do when using comp naively).
I don't think so. But in any case, I'm using a new word "urstuff",
which is definitely not my grandmother's "stuff".
But in ZF we call ure-elements what some people add to not working in
pure set theory, where all sets are made only of pure sets, starting
from the empty set { }, and closing this with union, parts, etc.
I think that insisting that number are not physical, not stuffy, not
material, we are closer to your "nothing" intuition, given this
makes clear that there is nothing physical, except in the internal
self-emerging semantic in arithmetic, on arithmetic.
In English, "stuffy" refers to a personality type - someone who is
rigid and formal might be called "stuffy". You're the only person I
know of using it as an adjective meaning "made of matter".
You do have an important point that the ontological number base is not
the same as the empirical world, a distinction captured by Kant's
noumenon-phenomenon dichotomy.
This one is more akin to the 3p / 1p distinction, imo.
With the FPI discovery, you can
demonstrate this quite formally. But to insist that number aren't
physical up front probably doesn't help, as most people don't have a
good idea what physical is to start with.
It is the difference between what is taught in a course of math
(numbers, sets, lines, curves, all sort of spaces, ...)
and a course of physics (energy, particles, physical space, time,
experimental forces, planets, black holes, sound waves, ...).
Math can be argued to be obtained by introspection, and not
necessitating experimental verification, physics, even when deduced
from math + philosophy, like with comp, is always in need of
experimental validation.
With your reversal result,
and insisting that physical means what is observed as phenomena, you
can then conclude that the arithmetical reality is not phenomena.
OK.
Comp does not allow infinity in its basic ontology. All of 0, 1, 2,
3, ... are finite. [0, 1, 2, 3, ...} is already in the mind of some
machines, like ZF. It shorten the proofs, and enlighten the picture
from inside. Comp, as Judson Webb analyse it, is a finitism.
is Norm Wildberger an utltrafinitist in math? He look like a
materialist, and ultrafinitist in physics, but normally that is what
the MGA shows it can't really work (unless adding the "magic
"needed). That magic is more than non Turing emulable, it is also
not FPI recoverable. I have no idea what that could be except as
something incomprehensible (primitive matter) introduced to make
something else (machine's mind) incomprehensible.
I haven't chatted with Norm personally about this - his views have
evolved considerably in the years since I was regularly in the
department. All I know is what he presented in that seminar, and also
what was written in that New Scientist article.
ISTM that that the MGA presents choices:
1) COMP is false
2) Physical supervenience is false (that's hard to square with
evidence)
3) We live in a robust reality (such as AR)
4) Some recordings are conscious
4) -> 1) in the sense that if some recordings are conscious, we have
to admit that consciousness is not necessarily the result of a
computation, and we can no more sure that we survive the digital brain
transplant in virtue of preserving a computation.
~ 3) -> 1), as comp assume AR (arithmetical realism) making us "living
in" a "robust reality" (although personally I use robustness only for
the putative concrete physical reality).
And indeed, comp (~ 1)) implies 2). Which I agree is counterintuitive,
but less so if we understand that it is not the brain which produces
consciousness, but the consciousness which select (in the FPI sense)
the infinitely many computations going through the consciousness
state. But of course, that is counterintuitive, although not so for a
quantum many-worlders which has something already a bit similar.
Now when speaking about option 4, it should be noted that a detailed
recording of the neuronal states of the human brain would be around a
petabyte per second. Whilst I could be quite confident that none of
the DVDs I have lying around here might be conscious when played back,
I would hesitate to rule out an exabyte-sized recording as being
conscious, particularly on a hi resolution display device that uses
all those bits. Presumably it will be hard to distinguish physically
between the replayed recording and the real thing. Intuition pumps
can fail.
A recording does not compute. It only describes a computation (which
exist in the arithmetical reality in infinitely many exemplars). To
have a computation you need a universal number or system, and a
program implemented relatively to that universal system. The recording
does not implement a program, but it mimics what a program has already
done, a bit like a man in a movie.
Bruno
Cheers
--
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Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
Principal, High Performance Coders
Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au
University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au
Latest project: The Amoeba's Secret
(http://www.hpcoders.com.au/AmoebasSecret.html)
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