On 4/25/2017 10:19 AM, David Nyman wrote:
On 25 Apr 2017 5:15 a.m., "Brent Meeker" <meeke...@verizon.net <mailto:meeke...@verizon.net>> wrote:On 4/24/2017 10:02 AM, David Nyman wrote:On 24 Apr 2017 7:32 a.m., "Brent Meeker" <meeke...@verizon.net <mailto:meeke...@verizon.net>> wrote: I don't think there's any question that non-physical things exist, like chess and insurance and computations. The question was whether the assumption that computations can instantiate a mind, i.e. the possibility of a conscious robot, entails a contradiction of something. The "something" having to do with physics, is part of what I would like eulicidated. Bruno says it reverses the relationship of physics and psychology...but that's more of a polemic slogan than entailment of a contradiction. I don't think so. Here's the way I see it. Let's say we accept as a hypothesis a computational ontology. Since this requires no more than the natural numbers with + and * this amounts to an ontology of arithmetic. Platonism be damned, our interest at this point is merely in seeing where the hypothesis can take us. So, computationalism leads us to the extension of the UD, which in turn gives us the digital machine, aka the fully fungible universal computational device. The reversal then is between role of the "psychology" of that universal machine and the subset of the trace of the UD assumed to implement physics.The UD doesn't have a "psychology". Bruno talks about the "beliefs" of a universal theorem prover in arithmetic...but that's not a UD. And was is "the trace of the UD". To talk of taking a "subset of the trace" sounds to me like handing waving: We'll make a machine that writes all possible sentences and then there's a subset that describes the world.The former is now required to play the role of filter or selector on behalf of the latter; it's what distinguishes​ it from the much more general computational background. Of course that "filtration", by assumption, essentially equates to the extremely high probability of that very subset being required to support its own self-selection.Are you saying this "subset of the trace" must have a high probability of existing, or it has, by some measure, a high probability relative to other stuff not in the trace. If the latter, and if the measure can be defined, that would be an interesting result; but when I've asked about this in the past Bruno has just said it's a hoped for result. I understand that Bruno wants to take thoughts as fundamental and the wants to identify thoughts with provable or computable propositions in arithmetic. He thinks that the modality of "provable" is somehow a good model of "believes" or "thinks". But even if that were true (I don't think it is) it fails to account for the physical world which one thinks about and acts in.IOW it's selection by observation, with the part of "universal point of view" falling to the suitably programmed digital machine. It from bit really, but without the prior commitment to physics as the unexplained (aka primitive) assumption. OK?You don't seem to have even mentioned a contradiction.As far as the contradiction is concerned, I think you've found it for yourself. You've said many times that the number 2 has no independent existence but must depend on there being 2 things. IOW, you take the view that numbers are inferred only secondarily from objects which, broadly, is the intuitionist position on mathematics. Fine, if so for numbers, then equally so for computation. If computation is at root an inference from the relations between objects, and at the same time one holds that consciousness supervenes on those inferred relations, then one has reasoned oneself around in a circle, and not a virtuous one at that. Is it really intelligible to say that your mind supervenes on a set of secondary relations that are themselves nothing other than a product of its own powers of inference?
But on that account they are not "nothing other than" - the are /*instantiated*/ computational relations.
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