> On 17 Apr 2019, at 08:08, Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.net> wrote:
>
>
>
> On Wed, Apr 17, 2019, at 05:03, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List wrote:
>>
>>
>> On 4/16/2019 6:10 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> 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?
>>
>> I take your point. But I think the difference is only one of degree. In my
>> example the Rover knows where it is, lat and long and topology. That
>> entails having a model of the world, admittedly simple, in which the Rover
>> is represented by itself.
>>
>> I would also say that I think far too much importance is attached to
>> self-reference. It's just a part of intelligence to run "simulations" in
>> trying to foresee the consequences of potential actions. The simulation
>> must generally include the actor at some level. It's not some mysterious
>> property raising up a ghost in the machine.
>
> With self-reference comes also self-modification. The self-replicators of
> nature that slowly adapt and complexify, the brain "rewiring itself"...
> Things get both weird and generative. I suspect that it goes to the core of
> what human intelligence is, and what computer intelligence is not (yet). But
> if you say that self-reference has not magic property that explains
> consciousness, I agree with you.
You need some magic, but the magic of the truth of “2+3=5” is enough.
>
> On consciousness I have nothing interesting to say (no jokes about ever
> having had, please :). I think that:
>
> consciousness = existence
Hmm… That looks like God made it. Or like “it is”.
Are you OK with the ideas that from the point of view of a conscious entity,
consciousness is something:
Immediately knowable, and indubitable, (in case the machine can reason)
Non definable, and non provable to any other machine.
Then the mathematical theory of self-reference explains why machine will
conclude that they are conscious, in that sense. They will know that they know
something that they cannot doubt, yet cannot prove to us, or to anyone. And
they can understand that they can test mechanism by observation.
>
> Existence entails self-referential machines, self-referential evolutionary
> processes, the whole shebang. But not the other way around.
Existence of the natural numbers + the laws of addition and multiplication does
that, and also justify what you don’t get any of that with any weaker theory,
having less axioms, than Robinson Arithmetic.
We have to assume numbers if we want just define precisely what a machine is,
but we cannot assume a physical universe: that is the price, we have to derive
it from arithmetic “seen from inside”.
Bruno
>
> Telmo.
>
>>
>> Brent
>>
>>
>>>
>>> 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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