On 3/23/2015 10:31 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote:
meekerdb wrote:
On 3/23/2015 10:05 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote:
Russell Standish wrote:
On Tue, Mar 24, 2015 at 02:17:40PM +1100, Bruce Kellett wrote:
If you take the block universe model seriously then we are nothing
more than conscious recordings!
Fair point!
I don't know what MGA stands for, or what it means, so I can't
comment on that.
Ha - it's in the title of this thread!
I can enter a thread without knowing what the title means!
It's Bruno Marchal's "Movie Graph Argument" (I would probably have
translated it as "Filmed Graph Argument", but MGA seems to have
stuck. Also known as "Step 8" of the UDA. It purports to show that
materialism and mechanism (aka computationalism) are fundamentally
incompatible. It is closely related to Tim Maudlin's Olimpia argument.
I wrote a preprint which is available from
http://www.hpcoders.com.au/blog/?p=73 if you're interested in knowing
a bit more, or at least is a source of references, if you think I'm
too turgid.
Thanks. I downloaded your short paper. I can see why the extended argument on the
everything list have failed to move me. The gaps in your argument are rather evident.
You state that if computationalism is valid, then all possible experiences are
instantiated by the dovetailer. But nowhere do you define what is a possible
experience. It seems to depend on the fact that the dovetailer runs all possible
computer programs. In that case, it runs a program in which in the next instance I
become lighter than air and can float around the room!
In fact, I can write computer programs where the laws of physics change from instant
to instant. Why do we not experience these things?
Aye, there's the rub. Bruno claims that such capricious sequences of experience must
have small measure. But I think the "must" means "so that my theory will hold water."
Anyway he admits it's an open problem to show that the UD doesn't just produce
experiential confetti.
So why do we waste time on such an incomplete theory?
Note that this is the "everything-list", so it attracts people whose idea of a TOE is to
start with the assumption that everything (in some sense) happens and try to extract the
observed world from that. Also it seems that combining the cosmological multiverse and
Everett's multiple worlds, as discussed by Carroll and others has the same problem.
Without somehow deriving or postulating Born's rule these ideas also threaten to just
produce noise. So if Bruno has solution in Platonia, it would be interesting.
ISTM that the problem might go away in a continuum form of computationalism in which
digital computation is just an approximation. But computation and a continuum analog of
the UD aren't well defined.
Brent
I would say that rather than such random sequences of experiences having small measure,
they must dominate. We need the glue of laws to hold our sequence of experiences
together -- and these laws can only come from experience. It is clear that
computationalism fails and that physicalism, with its given laws, wins the day.
Bruce
Brent
ISTM that you are simply assuming that 'possible' means 'possible within the bounds of
the physical laws that govern the world we live in.' I think you might see the problem
with such an assumption.
Bruce
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