On 03 May 2017, at 23:46, Brent Meeker wrote:
On 5/3/2017 1:48 PM, David Nyman wrote:
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.
That's not it.. the thing is if *mind* is a computational object,
then physics must be explained through computation, computations
are not physical object... If physicalness is primary, then there
aren't any computation, computations in a physically primary
reality are only a "human view" on what is really going on.
This an extreme reductionist view, i.e. if X is the fundamental
ontology then only X exists. But that leads to nonsense: "If the
standard model is fundamental ontology then football doesn't
exist." And it has the same affect of Bruno's theory: "If the
basic ontology is computations then neither physics nor football
exist."
It's not nonsense it's just the unvarnished consequence of the
assumptions. If the basic ontology is computation then both
physics and football are shared epistemological constructions
supervening on computation. Otherwise there's just computation and
none the worse for that. But in any case I've been trying to
persuade you to accept that football, for example, must be such a
construction even on a purely physical basis.
Where I balk is at the "must". It's "must if Bruno's theory is
right", but that's the question. If you interpret "exist" to apply
only to the elements of the fundamental ontology, then in
computationalism all that exists are the natural numbers, +, and *
-- consciousness is as emergent as football. But semantics aside, a
theory needs to predict things. What does Bruno's theory predict
about consciousness:
Your beliefs are closed under logical inference,
That is the case only for the ideally correct machine that we need to
extract physics. As a theory of human's belief, or any concrete
agent's belief, it is not reasonable. But theology and physics is not
human psychology, nor AI.
The prediction of comp? There is a physical reality, structured
quantum logically by a statistics on many interfering computation and
their internal povs.
i.e. everything that follows from and subset of your beliefs is also
believed. Is that true?...I doubt it.
Your thinking about arithmetic is unaffected by tequila?...not for me.
My looking at the sky is also affected by tequila, but that does not
mean that the sky is a product of my brain.
This strikes me as so obvious as to brook little argument. Physics
doesn't need any notion of football to evolve through the states of
what someone, somehow will interpret as the World Cup. However I
think you fudge it by your excessively loose (in my view)
acceptance of what supposedly "exists". This is what allows you to
dodge the otherwise compelling conclusions of a rigorous argument.
Rigor doesn't make an argument compelling. What I find compelling
is confirmation of a surprising prediction.
I come from molecular biology, and I have used a lot quantum mechanics
without taking seriously the wave. I studied QM in the already old
books in french by Louis de Broglie, including his book on the
measurement problem, where he defended his pilot wave and hidden
variable theory, and i thought for a long time, that the quantum
superposition never lasted more than a nanosecond. It is only later
that a guy I trusted for his seriousness in physics keep insisting
that an electron can exist in a superposition on long distance and
time, and he gave me a copy of the EPR paper, and it is Bohr
deceptively inaccurate answer which will introduced me to the problem,
and to the awareness it was serious.
At that time, I thought already that mechanism entails the many
computations, and I knew that the white rabbit could dissolve only by
adding computations/histories, and so I thought that "nature" was
contradicting mechanism, as we did not have any evidence for "parallel
world". yet, the same guy will give me a little article, by DeWitt, on
Everett. I will almost immediately go to London, and buy the Graham-
DeWitt book on the quantum many-worlds, and realized at that moment
that QM confirms the most disturbing aspect of computationalism.
Since then, I am not sure about any theory explaining why a physical
reality is apparent, and obeys a quantum logic of alternate histories.
Like with Gödel's theorem, eventually I realized that QM is the best
possible confirmation of computationalism, until now. With Gödel's
theorem, we get also the distinction between quanta and qualia, where
physicalist just continue to put the qualia and consciousness under
the rug.
Until digital mechanism is refuted, I would say that it is the only
theory which predict the appearance of matter, its "many-world" and
quantum aspect, and this without eliminating the first person view
(even giving to it a key role).
And this is not a critics of physics, as I used physics to measure the
degree of plausibility of Mechanism. But it is a critics of all
materialist theologies, the monist one and the dualist one alike. It
is certainly a critics on physicalism, that's right.
Bruno
Brent
"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct,
not tried it."
--Don Knuth
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