On 19 May 2017 9:00 p.m., "Brent Meeker" <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote:
On 5/19/2017 8:45 AM, John Clark wrote: On Thu, May 18, 2017 spudboy100 via Everything List < everything-list@googlegroups.com> wrote: > > So which is the Boss, John, Mathematics, somehow at the 'base; of the > universe, or is physics the top dog from the 1st split second? One of René Magritte's most famous paintings is called "Ceci n'est pas une pipe", in English that means " this is not a pipe". http://i3.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/facebook/000/022/133/ the-treachery-of-images-this-is-not-a-pipe-1948(2).jpg This is how Magritte explained his painting: * " The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it's just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture 'This is a pipe', I'd have been lying! " * Mathematics is a representation of something it is not the thing itself. Physics is the thing itself. Bruno's a Platonist. That means that conscious thoughts are what we have immediate access to and the physical world is an inference from perceptions (which are thoughts). We take the physical world to be real insofar as our inference has point-of-view-invariance so that others agree with us about perceptions. Bruno observes that consciousness is associated with and dependent on brains, which are part of the inferred physical world. He supposes this is because brains realize certain computations and he hypothesizes that conscious thoughts correspond to certain computations. But computation is an abstraction; given Church-Turing it exists in the sense that arithmetic exists. So among all possible computations, there must be the computations that constitute our conscious thoughts and the inferences of a physical world to which those thoughts seem to refer... but not really. Not really? AFAICT this is a distinction made by you and you alone. It's certainly not one that would make any sense in the computationalist framework. "Seem to refer" as opposed to "refer" is not a distinction that can make a difference in this context. Look, the "physical world" as observed or inferred is inescapably viewpoint dependent, albeit with point-of-view invariance as you say. This is surely unavoidable whatever theory of mind is favoured. The abstract component of physics is by contrast unavailable to observation. Its purpose is to provide an extrinsically-defined mathematical schema for organising, explicating and predicting the observables. Insofar as this schema is computable it may be "reified", as you put it, as an "actualised" computational system or structure. This is true, and to the same extent, whether one chooses to begin from the point of departure of physics or that of the CTM. In either case a computational schema encompassing all possible physical transitions must be assumed to exist in the relevant sense for the theory to be capable of doing its work. And up to the point that the comp theory has been shown to lead to contradiction or other definitive error, it can be assumed that such a schema lies equally within its scope as within that of physics tout court. This is at least conceptually justified by the starting assumption of the computational plenitude implied in the foundational premises of the theory. It would surely be excessively naive however to equate existence in this sense or context with "reification" since after all it is the discoverable nature of thingness itself we want to explain. Explanatory mathematical schemas aren't things (I wouldn't have thought that Tegmark conceives the CUH in that way). Rather existence is granted in an explanatory sense to whatever we will not seek to explain but will instead form our inferential base, or IOW the ontological component of the theory in which we are reasoning. David It's the "not really" where I part company with his speculations. That inferred physical world is just as computed as Max Tegmark's and is just as necessary for consciousness as brains and skulls and planets are. So, for me, the question is whether something is gained by this reification of computation. Bruno says it provides the relation between mind and body. But that's more a promise than a fact. It provides some classification of thoughts of an ideal thinker who doesn't even think about anything except arithmetic. "Body" isn't in the theory except as a promise that it must be there if the theory is to explain everything. Brent "Plato says we should seek reality in our thoughts rather than watching shadows on the cave wall. But all human advancement has come from studying those shadows." --- Sean Carroll -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
