On 24 May 2017, at 13:56, David Nyman wrote:
Let me know if anything is still unclear.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: David Nyman <da...@davidnyman.com>
Date: 20 May 2017 at 01:30
Subject: Re: Movie argument
To: everything-list <everything-list@googlegroups.com>
On 19 May 2017 at 21:00, 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.
I am open that Plato is right, in theology. In mathematics, I am not
that "platonist", I just keep calm when I see that we tell the kids
that 2+2=4.
The point is that "Mathematics is a representation of something it is
not the thing itself. Physics is the thing itself" is the Aristotelian
theological credo. It makes no sense with Mechanism.
(I comment Brent, I think here, and you, David, below)
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.
It's the "not really" where I part company with his speculations.
I prefer t say that I assume. I don't speculate that Mechanism is
true. I assume Mechanism is true, for the sake of showing it testable.
That inferred physical world is just as computed as Max Tegmark's
If that was the case, there would be no white rabbit problem. The
problem of mechanism, is that our first person conscious thought are
associate to a statistics on infinitely many computations, and that is
NOT computable per se, and it is part of the job to explain why the
physical laws seem so much computable. To invoke one computation, like
in "digital physics", is still a manner of doing physics, and putting
the mind-body problem (the mechanist one, now) under the rug.
Brent forget the first person indeterminacy problem here.
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.
Not at all. I show that there is a problem. First, there is no
reification of computation. They are unavoidably executed by the
arithmetical reality. We can't brush that away, because Mechanism
requires that arithmetical reality to just define what a computation
is. Then, below our substitution level, we have infinities of
computation at play, and we *have to* justifies the laws of physics
from that statistics (structured by the points of view).
It provides some classification of thoughts of an ideal thinker who
doesn't even think about anything except arithmetic.
Assuming mechanism, he thinks "Gosh, if mechanism is true, where does
this appeararance of material reality comes from?".
I really think you continue to miss something crucial here.
Brent miss the problem. he thinks I come up with some bizarre new
theory, when I just show that an antic honorable theory, Mechanism, in
the digital version, leads to a big problem: we *have to* explain the
physical appearances from a statistics on first person (plural) views
emulated infinitely often in arithmetic.
I show a problem, then I illustrate the beginning of the solution that
the universal Löbian number find by themselves, and I show it is quite
similar to the (neo)platonist one.
The thinker (which is admittedly a toy version at this stage) isn't
merely thinking "about" arithmetic. It's thinking about (or more
accurately perceiving) *arithmetical truth*.
Well he perceive the limiting result of the 1p indeterminacy: the
physical reality. It can infer something bigger than the arithmetical
truth. It is the Skolem-like paradox: the arithmetical truth, seen
from inside, can seen bigger than the arithmetical truth. Already qG*
is bigger than God V.
I would not say that we perceive arithmetical truth. We intuit it from
pour lives and thought. It is just vocabulary, but I prefer to keep
perception for the physical and the geographical reality. perception
is when we open the reconstitution box, and see that we are in
Washington and not in Moscow. It is discrimination of results of
experience.
Brent was just oblivious of the 1p indeterminacy problem rised once we
assume Mechanism. Then the arithmetical hypostases, which existence
are enforced by incompleteness shows that ... Mechanism is not (yet)
refuted, and that QM becomes an ally of mechanism, given that we get
already a quantum logic for the measure on all computations.
So what's the difference? Well, 2+2=4 is a tautology of arithmetic;
IOW it merely expresses something that is formally necessitated in
the very definition of the terms. What does it then add to say that
it is true that 2+2=4? Well, we test the truth of this assertion by
perceiving that it corresponds with the (perceptual) facts. For
example, as you often like to say, we can simply see that two
objects plus two more objects is indeed equal to four objects. Now,
this idea of truth as correspondence with the facts has no direct
parallel in physics, computation per se, or any other purely
formally-defined procedural specification. For these latter, it is
sufficient that there is such a procedure and that it is followed.
There is no further entailment of truth or falsity that can have any
bearing on the outcome. On the other hand the notion of truth
parallels precisely that characteristic of perception fixed on by
many thinkers on the subject, perhaps most notably Descartes who
correctly intuited that the one thing in his experience that could
not coherently be doubted was that it was true. To be unambiguous,
that primary truth is not of course proof against delusion; as
Descarte also correctly inferred, his true experience could
nonetheless have been imposed on him by a malignant demon. In that
case, however, it would still of course have been the canvas on
which the delusory perceptions were truthfully painted.
But what's the relevance of such a notion of simple arithmetical
truths to perceptions such as our own? Well, if thought and
perception, by assumption in the computationalist framework, are to
be considered a consequence of computation,
Perception is as much the result of computation (of my brain) than the
result of the outcome of the self-localization after the general "WM-
duplication", the one which multiplies you by infinity in arithmetic,
which is not computable, because it relies on infinities of
computations, and the logic of the material self-reference (with the
Bp & Dt (& p)).
which itself devolves upon arithmetical relations, then the truths
of perception must in some relevant sense be generalisations of the
truths of arithmetic. As Bruno says, perception becomes a view from
the "inside" of arithmetic,
Yes. It is somehow the view on the non computable part of arithmetic
by the locally computable part. Keep in mind that most truth in
arithmetic are not computable.
where that elusive internal space (which we seek in vain in
extrinsically-completed models such as physics tout court)
Here we might differ, and you might be more mechanist than me (!). We
could have used a notion of physical truth, instead of arithmetical
truth. What the UDA shows is that this requires to abandon mechanism.
But if we get evidence that consciousness reduces the wave, or that QM
is false, then we might reasonably consider that a physical reality
exists ontologically, and well, in that case we must find a non
computationalist theory of mind, which of course, in that case, will
rely on the physical notion of truth. It is an open problem if we can
use or not the same hypostases with non-arithmetical modal boxes. G
and G* remains correct for a vast class of non mechanical entities.
is equated with the truths, as distinct from the formal procedures,
of arithmetic. The strength of the logical models that Bruno
utilises in the machine interviews is then that they can be
characterised in this sense as "accessing truths". However, their
purely extrinsic formulation is in the relevant sense "incomplete"
in this regard. Their completion in that same sense is to be found
in the conjunction of an extrinsic formulation with an intrinsic
(reflexive) logic that is comprehensible only in terms of what the
subject thus modelled perceives to be true, i.e to correspond with
its perceptually-available "facts". The consequence is then that
consciousness is equated in this view with whatever is perceptually
true, in the first instance, for a given subject.
I mainly agree. I would use "intuit" for the Bp & p, and "perceive"
with the Bp & Dt (& p). But that is an old bad habit, perhaps, as I
thought that Bp & p collapse on p sigma. But that is not the case, and
Plotinus was right (!), the soul (Bp & p) has already a intuition/
perception of the physical reality).
Here we have the problem that we get three quantum logics, and thus
three physics. Normally Bp & p, with p sigma, is "heaven physics", and
Bp & Dt (& p), p sigma, is terrestrial physics. Normally Bp & Dt gives
the quanta, and Bp & Dt & p gives the qualia, but it is slightly more
complex than that, for technical reason.
Now, toy model or not, ISTM that there is surely something in the
foregoing that offers certain relevant conceptual footholds that are
unavailable in alternative schemas. It's also something that can in
principle be examined and tested rigorously even though it is at
present largely neglected and at a very early stage of development.
At least it seems to offer a way of avoiding the equally unpalatable
polarities I mentioned before - of brute identity theory on the one
hand, or the fruitless search for some "internal" state of matter on
the other. Either of these alternatives has struck me for a long
time as falling into the category of "not even wrong".
OK. I agree, but I think that Brent's main mistake is that he is
oblivious that I show the existence of a problem with Mechanism, and
show that the problem can be translated in arithmetic, and that it
leads up to now to a theology, testable by the constraints it put on
the core of physics (indeed, we do get a quantum-like logic). I show
that Gödel's theorem is not only a chance for mechanism by justifying
the existence of the knower (Bp a p), but Gödel's theorem justifies
the existence of the matter appearances as well, when p is sigma, and
when we add the "probability" clause: that is the "Dt".
bruno
David
"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
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