On 5/3/2017 9:47 AM, David Nyman wrote:
On 2 May 2017 11:18 p.m., "Brent Meeker" <meeke...@verizon.net
<mailto:meeke...@verizon.net>> wrote:
On 5/2/2017 2:29 PM, David Nyman wrote:
On 2 May 2017 9:57 p.m., "Brent Meeker" <meeke...@verizon.net
<mailto:meeke...@verizon.net>> wrote:
On 5/2/2017 1:09 PM, David Nyman wrote:
On 2 May 2017 7:21 p.m., "Brent Meeker"
<meeke...@verizon.net <mailto:meeke...@verizon.net>> wrote:
On 5/2/2017 1:01 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
Your answer seems to be that physics can be an
illusion of digital thought, therefore primary physics
is otiose. But thought can't be a consequence of
physics because....well you just don't see how it
could be.
Not at all. It cannot be because you need to give a
role to the primary matter which is not emulable by the
UD, nor FPI-recoverable.
The obvious "role" is that some things exist and some
don't. I don't know anyone who calls this "primary
matter", but it's what is not UD emulable.
But what are your grounds for discriminating which things
exist and which don't?
Empiricism.
That's a slogan not an explanation.
That's right - you asked for grounds.
I think you could be more helpful than this.
If anything, it strikes me that the history of human enquiry
is rather conducive to the view that whatever limits we try
to impose on "what exists" are in all likelihood destined
soon to be surpassed.
Actually it has been the reverse. Relativity places a limit
on speed, quantum mechanics places a limit on measurements,
Goedel found a limit on proofs. Laplace was the last
physicist who thought we could predict everything. We
haven't been the center of the universe for a long time.
Very selective. What about the string landscape, eternal
inflation or for that matter the CUH? Maybe you'll say that these
are as yet unproven hypotheses, but are you willing to say in
principle​ they're barking up the wrong tree?
Except for eternal inflation, they aren't even developed enough to
be hypotheses. I'm willing to bet that they will imply limits on
what exists. Even CUH does that, it implies real numbers and
theories that assume them don't exist.
Sure, but my point is that all these ideas lead to a broader ontology
than you seemed to be suggesting: i.e the theoretical recipe for what
exists and what doesn't extends beyond the physics we observe locally.
But even comp doesn't claim that *everything* exists. In fact its
ontology is extremely restrictive.
In any case, I still don't see that you've made a convincing
argument for your "groundless" circular explanations.
It's not an argument - it's an observation that that's the
way explanations work.
Not all explanations. And in particular not ontological ones.
You mean the fundamental elements of a theory - whose existence
doesn't have an explanation. My idea of an explanation is one
that brings understanding - not just stops explaining.
So is mine. So is Bruno's. What's your point?
An explanation that reaches understanding must end with an ontology that
is already understood. Bruno accepts this. He thinks we understand
Peano arithmetic. I think we only understand it because we refer it to
experience with objects. But the broader point is that you can't just
pick some theory with an ontology and say this theory explains things.
The explanation is no good unless you already understand the theory's
ontology. So explanations of different things bottom out on different
ontologies for different people. This is why supernatural agents were
popular explanations up until a few hundred years ago; agents are
intuitively understood by people because, as social animals, evolution
provided us with intuitions about other people. So it was satisfying to
explain a storm as the cloud-god was angry. Now, some physicists would
say it is explained by the Navier-Stokes equation - but that wouldn't
really be right either. In fact NOAA explains it with some simplified
N-S plus some heuristics.
For example, based on your remarks above, you implicitly
exclude "non physical" computations from your ontology (not
forgetting what you said about ontology being theory
dependent).
Not at all. I've never tried to make my "virtuous circle of
explanation" exhaustive. I generally include "mathematics"
in it, but just as indicator for all kinds of abstract,
symbolic based systems.
A theory explicitly based on a computational ontology
includes both physical and non physical. Of course you could
go on to say that a physical computer could compute anything
computable; but in that case we find ourselves at step 7 of
the UDA and the putative physical machine then takes on the
aspect of Bruno's invisible horses. Unless you want to say
that the comp derivation of physics is thereby merely
contingently impossible.
My reservation about that argument is Bruno argues as if all
the UD has to do is reach some state and it will have
instantiated his (or someone's) consciousness. But then I
ask myself, "Consciousness of what?" He thinks the external
world is a kind of shared illusion of an equivalence class of
"consciousness" states. This is like the Boltzmann brain
paradox without the solipism. The reasonable way I can see
such an equivalence class having a non-zero measure is if the
physics is computed - not just the conscious perceptions of
physics. Then the physics and consciousness are not different
ontologically, they are just different ways of organizing the
states (like Bertrand Russell's neutral monism).
Is this really different from what comp implies? Surely the
computation of the physics and its appearance are indeed two
different views of the same thing - 3p and 1p plural? As we
appeared to have agreed​ earlier, at the point where physical
computation and the substantive perception (aka reality) with
which it is entangled emerge in tandem, virtuous explanatory
equilibrium has been attained. But the difference in views is the
key. The former (aka 3p or in my parlance the view from nowhere)
is the ontology and the latter the epistemology it implies.
But so far there is nothing in Bruno's theory that makes them "the
same thing" every 1p thread of experience could be unrelated to
every other - there would be no intersubjective agreement (or it
would be of measure zero). I think this is what he calls "the
white rabbit" problem.
But this doesn't answer my empirical tequila test. Bruno
replied that the (physical) tequila just interfered with the
(physical) perception. But in that case the tequila would
have no affect on mathematical reasoning - but it does.
You lost me.
Have a few shots and then find the square root of 69696 in your
head. According to Bruno our physical being is only a way of
interacting with other physical things (like tequila), but for
knowledge and beliefs about numbers the physical is otiose.
Nonsense. You appear not to grasp the point that if comp is correct
then the computational mechanisms dominating our experience (including
our experience of mathematics) must those of the physics we typically
observe.
Depends on what you mean by comp. You seem to engage in the same
equivocation as Bruno. On the one hand it means saying "yes" to the
doctor. On the other hand it means accepting his whole argument from
that purportedly proving that physics is otiose. So then the argument
refers to itself and says if physics is otiose then the physics we
observe must be that predicted by his theory. So which "comp is
correct" do you refer to?
Hence mathematical intuition or inference must be inextricably
entangled with its local physics (as neurocognition) else comp is
false. I think you systematically confuse Bruno's interview with the
machine with an unattained fully fledged theory appropriate to
creatures as psychologically complex as ourselves.
No. I don't accept his theory because it reduces to "If this theory is
correct then it must explain what we observe." To be "fully fledged"
one needs to show that it actually does explain what we observe, i.e.
that tequila interferes with mathematical reasoning. He passes this off
as just solving "the white rabbit" problem, as though it were a minor
point; but without solving that it's a theory that can explain anything,
and hence fails to explain at all. I'm not saying solving the white
rabbit problem is impossible - maybe it can be. Bruno's other claim is
that his theory models the relation of conscious thought and physics.
But this also seems dubious. It models a very idealized consciousness
of an omniscient mathematician who knows everything provable. That's
not much like any consciousness I've ever had - even after a whole
bottle of tequila.
Brent
At this stage what is demanded is that the toy model explicate
otherwise inexplicable features of its putatively vastly more
developed but (by assumption) analogous counterpart. And of course
that it not lead, even at such an early stage, to brute inconsistencies.
David
Brent
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