On 28 Oct 2014, at 03:10, John Clark wrote:
On Mon, Oct 27, 2014 at 6:38 AM, LizR <lizj...@gmail.com> wrote:
> So far the only real (non-sarcastic, non-insult-based) objection
I've heard comes down to a semantic quibble to do with redefining
our concept of an individual person.
The entire point of Bruno's "proof" and all of his bizarre thought
experiments is to examine and get rid of that "semantic quibble",
and yet from page 1 Bruno acts as if the concept of personal
identity was already crystal clear even though in his thought
experiments such things were stretched about as far as they could
go. In such circumstances using person pronouns with abandon as
Bruno does without giving them a second thought is just ridiculous.
>This is exactly the same redefinition that was brought up by
Everett in 1957.
No it is not for 3 reasons:
1) Everett was trying to explain the strange observations of the
Quantum world in a logically cohesive way and to show why Quantum
Mechanics was able to make good prediction about future physical
events. Everett said nothing about personal identity or
consciousness because he didn't need to, and that is the HUGE
advantage Many Worlds has over other Quantum interpretations and is
the only reason I'm a fan of the MWI. In the other Quantum
Interpretations consciousness soon enters the picture, that would be
OK if they could explain consciousness but they can't. Everett can't
explain consciousness either but he doesn't need to because
consciousness has nothing to do with his theory.
2) Like Everett Bruno is also interested in prediction but he seems
to think that good predictions are the key to personal identity, and
that's just nuts. The sense of self depends on the past not the
future.
3) With Everett the meaning of the personal pronoun "he" is always
obvious, it is the only person that we can observe using the laws of
physics that fits the description of Bruno Marchal, but in a world
with matter duplicating machines there are 2 (or more) people who
fit that description, and so the word "he" conveys zero information.
You are making the use of "he" ambiguous, by avoiding the precision I
gave in term of memory in and outside the teleportation box. Onece you
keep the 1p/3p distinction in mind there is no ambiguities at all. The
notion of personality is not involved in the reasoning. Yes, I like to
talk on this too, but it is another topic, and it has nothing to so
with the result described in the sane04 paper.
> a physicist who believes the MWI to be correct will come to the
same conclusions about indeterminacy that someone using Bruno's
matter transmitter would
Obviously, but a person wouldn't need to believe in the MWI or even
be a physicist to know that what is observed when a door is open a
door is uncertain.
?
> both comp and Everett allow for the possibility that from the
third person viewpoint the duplication could be observed
If you say so, but I'm not a bit interested in "comp" and except for
a few member of this list I don't think anybody on the planet is
either.
Comp is a short expression used for "computationalism". The precise
version I am studying is logically weaker than most of those you can
find in the literature. (Except for the behaviourist/ instrumentalist /
positivist approach, which are usually abandonned today).
So the consequences of that weaker version applies to all other
versions, and it makes some of them epistemologically inconsistent
(and indeed some conclude that consciousness is an illusion, those are
the eliminativists, and seems to me just continuing the Aristotelian
tradition of putting the mind under the rug).
Computationalism, contrary to what some strong atheists desire,
eliminates the notion of primary matter, or physicalism. The physical
reality has to be derived from a statistics on all computations. That
is the result of the UDA, and I have never had any problem with this,
with few exceptions, by people like you who repeat that they have find
a flaw, but never published it, or even send it to me, except you, but
as people can witness, the argument is nothing but playing with words.
precisely, invoking an ambiguity, and avoiding the disambiguation.
BTW, we have agrred on the personal identity issue, actually, and in
that model, the step 3 still follow, and you did aknowledge, but still
criticizing the enterprise: the argument was of the type my two years
old niece can do that, but then OK, let us move to step 4.
> And of course, making up silly versions of Bruno's acronyms
I didn't make a single one up, they were what Wikipedia or Google
though they most likely meant.
Argument per authority. As Kim said, the step 3 is understood easily
by young people.
For example, Wikipedia lists 27 possible means of "comp"
I told you that comp is a precise generalization of the term used by
the others (awre of not of the admittedly startling consequence, even
unswalloable by people having never heard about Everett and the
conceptual problem of both matter and consciousness).
You have accepted the step 0 and 1 of the Universal Dovetailer
Argument (the first part of sane04, one halve of my PhD). So by
definition, you are computationalist. You accept comp.
Personally it is only my working hypothesis. I don't defend any ideas.
I am a logician, and my expertise is in the consistency or
inconsistency of set of beliefs or proposition.
Bruno
and not one of them has anything to do with intelligence or
consciousness or personal identity, and only one had anything to do
with computers, " a class of Usenet groups devoted to computers and
related technology".
John K Clark
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