On Tue, Apr 16, 2019, at 03:44, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List wrote:
> You seem to make self-reference into something esoteric. Every Mars Rover
> knows where it is, the state of its batteries, its instruments, its
> communications link, what time it is, what its mission plan is.
I don't agree that the Mars Rover checking "it's own" battery levels is an
example of what is meant by self-reference in this type of discussion. The
entity "Mars Rover" exists in your mind and mine, but there is no "Mars Rover
mind" where it also exists. The entity "Telmo" exists in your mind and mine,
and I happen to be an entity "Telmo" in whose mind the entity "Telmo" also
exists. This is real self-reference.
Or, allow me to invent a programming language where something like this could
me made more explicit. Let's say that, in this language, you can define a
program P like this:
program P:
x = 1
if x == 1:
print('My variable x s holding the value 1')
The above is the weak form of self-reference that you allude to. It would be
like me measuring my arm and noting the result. Oh, my arm is x cm long. But
let me show what could me meant instead by real self-reference:
program P:
if length(P) > 1000:
print('I am a complicated program')
else:
print('I am a simple program')
Do you accept there is a fundamental difference here?
Telmo
>
> Whether it is "formalizable" or not would seem to depend on choosing the
> right formalization to describe what engineers already create.
>
> Brent
>
>
> On 4/15/2019 11:28 AM, za_wishy via Everything List wrote:
>> Hmm... the thing is that what I'm arguing for in the book is that
>> self-reference is unformalizable, so there can be no mathematics of
>> self-reference. More than this, self-reference is not some concept in a
>> theory, but it is us, each and everyone of us is a form of manifestation of
>> self-reference. Self-reference is an eternal logical structure that
>> eternally looks-back-at-itself. And this looking-back-at-itself
>> automatically generates a subjective ontology, an "I am". In other words,
>> the very definition of the concept of "existence" is the
>> looking-back-at-itself of self-reference. So, existence can only be
>> subjective, so all that can exists is consciousness. I talk in the book how
>> the looking-back-at-itself implies 3 properties: identity (self-reference is
>> itself, x=x), inclusion (self-reference is included in itself, x<x) and
>> transcendence (self-reference is more than itself, x>x). And all these
>> apparently contradictory properties are happening all at the same time. So,
>> x=x, x<x, x>x all at the same time. But there is no actual contradiction
>> here, because self-reference is unformalizable. The reason why I get to such
>> weird conclusions is explored throughout the book where a phenomenological
>> analysis of consciousness is done and it is shown how it is structured on an
>> emergent holarchy of levels, a holarchy meaning that a higher level includes
>> the lower levels, and I conclude that this can only happen if there is an
>> entity called "self-reference" which has the above mentioned properties. So
>> as you can see, there pretty much cannot be a mathematics of self-reference.
>>
>> I will also present about self-reference at The Science of Consciousness
>> conference this year at Interlaken, Switzerland, so if you are there we can
>> talk more about these issues.
>>
>> On Thursday, 11 April 2019 02:55:55 UTC+3, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>>> Hi Cosmin,
>>>
>>> It seems your conclusion fits well with the conclusion already given by the
>>> universal machine (the Gödel-Löbian one which are those who already knows
>>> that they are Turing universal, like ZF, PA, or the combinators + some
>>> induction principle).
>>>
>>> Self-reference is capital indeed, but you seem to miss the mathematical
>>> theory of self-reference, brought by the work of Gödel and Löb, and Solovay
>>> ultimate formalisation of it at the first order logic level. You cite
>>> Penrose, which is deadly wrong on this.
>>>
>>> In fact incompleteness is a chance for mechanism, as it provides almost
>>> directly a theory of consciousness, if you are willing to agree that
>>> consciousness is true, indubitable, immediately knowable, non provable and
>>> non definable, as each Löbian machine is confronted to such proposition all
>>> the “time”. But this enforces also, as I have shown, that the whole of
>>> physics has to be justified by some of the modes of self-reference, making
>>> physics into a subbranch of elementary arithmetic. This works in the sense
>>> that at the three places where physics should appear we get a quantum
>>> logic, and this with the advantage of a transparent clear-cut between the
>>> qualia (not sharable) and the quanta (sharable in the first person plural
>>> sense).
>>>
>>> You seem to have a good (I mean correct with respect to Mechanism) insight
>>> on consciousness, but you seem to have wrong information on the theory of
>>> the digital machines/numbers and the role of Gödel. Gödel’s theorem is
>>> really a chance for the Mechanist theory, as it explains that the digital
>>> machine are non predictable, full of non communicable subjective knowledge
>>> and beliefs, and capable of defeating all reductionist theory that we can
>>> made of them. Indeed, they are literally universal dissident, and they are
>>> born with a conflict between 8 modes of self-apprehension. In my last
>>> paper(*) I argue that they can be enlightened, and this shows also that
>>> enlightenment and blasphemy are very close, and that religion leads easily
>>> to a theological trap making the machine inconsistent, except by staying
>>> mute, or referring to Mechanism (which is itself highly unprovable by the
>>> consistent machine).
>>>
>>> Bruno
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>>
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