Re: Dreams and Machines
Marty, > >Be assured that I still fully intend to follow the logic > of UDA as far as I can. And I'm grateful for your frequent efforts > to suggest its meaning in words and to explain why words alone are > inadequate. I wonder if you could clarify your use of the term > "supervene" in the context below and elsewhere. The term comes from philosophy of mind. It designates usually the idea that consciousness is related to the physical activity of a brain. Consciousness is not necessarily seen as being produced than as being concomitant, so that supervenience can be used in both dualist and monist philosophies. But such supervenience needs weak materialism, i.e. the assumption that there is a physical activity, on which consciousness could supervene on. In french I used to say "vehiculated by" instead of "supervene on". Note also that the supervenience thesis is not obvious to picture in some many worlds theories. Is it one consciousnessone brain, one consciousness---an infinity of brains, or what ? tricky question. I call this notion of supervenience the physical supervenience, to distinguish it from what I call the computational supervenience. With the computational supervenience, consciousness is associated with all the computations going through a computational state. Those computational states, and the pieces of computations going through them are well defined mathematical objects, even arithmetical objects. So computational supervenience is mathematicalist, even arithmeticalist. You can see the UD Argument has an argument showing that comp, which in appearance needs weak materialism, implies the computational supervenience. > How can consciousness supervene on the mathematical computations > that produce that consciousness? Is this the ultimate in self- > referential authoring? How can consciousness supervene on the physical computations that produce that consciousness? The difficulty is the same, except that consciousness is typically not "material", and seems to be more "informational", if not "psychological", or even "spiritual". An entity is conscious when it believes in a reality. Then there is a ladder of higher consciousness and knowledge states, but their self- referential logics converge quickly. A theory as simple as Peano arithmetic, is already as introspective as any possible machine can be, and already very wise: she stays mute on the question "do you believe in a reality?", but Peano Arithmetic can already explain why it has to be so, if we provide the information that "she" is Peano Arithmetic (Peano's arithmetic version of the "yes doctor"). Peano Arithmetic is already a Löbian machine. Universal machine which believes in any Peano-like induction principle can "know", in a technical, but very weak sense, that they are universal, and when they know that they are Löbian. Peano induction is the principle that IF you have an infinity of dominoes ranged in a infinite row, then if the first fall, then all dominoes will fall. (or if you prefer: each domino will fall, soon or later). P(0) and for all n (P(n) -> P(n+1)) implies that for all n we have P(n). I stop because I get technical and we are in AUDA here ... we will come back on this. Hope this help, but ask any precision, or summary, of what has been said, or of what will be said. Best, Bruno > > - Original Message - > From: Bruno Marchal > To: everything-list@googlegroups.com > Sent: Friday, July 17, 2009 8:00 AM > Subject: Re: Dreams and Machines > > Hi David, > > I comment your post with an apology to Kim and Marty, then I make a > comment to Marty, and then I comment your (very nice) post. > > > Kim, Marty, I apologize for my bad sense of humor. Rereading some > post, I realize some nuance in the tone does not go through > mailings. Please indulge professional deformation of an old math > teacher ... > > On 17 Jul 2009, at 03:12, m.a. wrote: > >> >> David, >>I appreciated this post because I'm more interested in the >> philosophical implications (which I'm hoping to find at the end of >> Bruno's >> UDA bridge to Valhalla) of these goings-on ...than in the >> mathematical >> ones. Best, > > > Marty, I can understand you. At the same time, many discussion have > been more philosophical, and the problem here, is that without some > amount of math, and of computer science, things will look like a > crackpot-like thing. It is almost in the nature of the subject. Big > statements needs big arguments, and at least enough precise pointers > toward the real thing. > > You can have a still more passive understanding of the UDA, if you > understand the first sixth steps. Then for the seventh, it is enough > to believe in the existence of universal dovetailer (itself a quasi > direct consequence of the existence of a universal machine). > Then the 8th step alone can help you to
Re: Dreams and Machines
2009/7/17 Bruno Marchal : > You are correct about truth and provability. You may have insisted a bit > more on the first person/third person important , and still unsolved, to be > sure, relationship, and the first person indeterminacy which follows. You > certainly motivate me to explain better AUDA and its relation with UDA. > I am glad that Marty enjoy your post. At the same time, the point of my work > did consist in making this utterly clear (if not shocking for those > Aristotelian fundamentalist). Clarity in an hot field has to be technical or > it looks too much provocative. > Thanks for this very clear post. You have a good intuition of the ultimate > consequences of the comp hyp, I think. Bruno, many thanks for your helpful commentary on my post - many of your points are well taken and will help me amplify and clarify my views. I'm just off for a long weekend in Oxford, but I'll muse further and try to respond on some of your points on my return mid-week. David > Hi David, > I comment your post with an apology to Kim and Marty, then I make a comment > to Marty, and then I comment your (very nice) post. > > Kim, Marty, I apologize for my bad sense of humor. Rereading some post, I > realize some nuance in the tone does not go through mailings. Please indulge > professional deformation of an old math teacher ... > On 17 Jul 2009, at 03:12, m.a. wrote: > > David, > I appreciated this post because I'm more interested in the > philosophical implications (which I'm hoping to find at the end of Bruno's > UDA bridge to Valhalla) of these goings-on ...than in the mathematical > ones. Best, > > > Marty, I can understand you. At the same time, many discussion have been > more philosophical, and the problem here, is that without some amount of > math, and of computer science, things will look like a crackpot-like thing. > It is almost in the nature of the subject. Big statements needs big > arguments, and at least enough precise pointers toward the real thing. > You can have a still more passive understanding of the UDA, if you > understand the first sixth steps. Then for the seventh, it is enough to > believe in the existence of universal dovetailer (itself a quasi direct > consequence of the existence of a universal machine). > Then the 8th step alone can help you to have an idea why the Universal > dovetailer is immaterial, so that physics has to be reduced to math and > "machine psuchology/theology". > But then, I will not been able to answer some remark which have been done by > Stathis, Russell, Brent and some others, and which are relalted to the > difference between a computation (be it mathematical or physical) and a > description of a computation (be it mathematical or physical), and this is > the key for understanding that when we assume brain are digitalizable, > eventually we have to abandon the idea that consciousness supervene on > physical computations, and to accept that it supervenes on mathematical > computations. > You know, the discovery of the universal machine is the real (creative) bomb > here. I could say that "nature" has never stopped to invent it and reinvent > it, like with the apparition of brain, of life and the possible other many > big bangs. > Then, it is hard to explain, without learning a bit on numbers, functions, > sets and mathematical structures, that arithmetic, simple elementary > arithmetic, already describes that universal thing which can't help itself > to reinvent hitself again and again and again, and this in an atemporal, > aspatial frames. > Sri Aurobindo made once a nice summary: > What, you ask, was the beginning of it all? > And it is this ... > Existence that multiplied itself > For sheer delight of being > And plunged into numberless trillions of forms > So that it might > Find > Itself > Innumerably > > > > > - Original Message - > From: "David Nyman" > To: > Sent: Thursday, July 16, 2009 8:38 PM > Subject: Dreams and Machines > > > > With Bruno and his mighty handful engaged in the undodgeable (though > constantly dodged) task > > Well said! > > > of working towards an elementary grasp of the > technical underpinnings of COMP, and patently lacking the fortitude of > these valorous Stakhanovites, I have been spending my time lurking, > reading and musing. My philosophical position on possible relations > between computation and mind has long (well before this list) been > that it would indeed require something like Bruno's reversal of the > 'normal' relationship between computation and physics, so that mind > could emerge in some at least comprehensible manner; certainly not - > per impossibile - in the ghostly shrouds of the 'deus ex machina' of > 'computational materialism'. Consequently, parallel to the strenuous > effort ongoing in the other thread, I have been wrapping my mind more > loosely around 'interpretations of COMP-mechanics' in order to attempt > a better personal grasp of what it might mean as a metaphysics. As
Re: Dreams and Machines
Bruno, Be assured that I still fully intend to follow the logic of UDA as far as I can. And I'm grateful for your frequent efforts to suggest its meaning in words and to explain why words alone are inadequate. I wonder if you could clarify your use of the term "supervene" in the context below and elsewhere. How can consciousness supervene on the mathematical computations that produce that consciousness? Is this the ultimate in self-referential authoring? Best wishes, marty a. - Original Message - From: Bruno Marchal To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Friday, July 17, 2009 8:00 AM Subject: Re: Dreams and Machines Hi David, I comment your post with an apology to Kim and Marty, then I make a comment to Marty, and then I comment your (very nice) post. Kim, Marty, I apologize for my bad sense of humor. Rereading some post, I realize some nuance in the tone does not go through mailings. Please indulge professional deformation of an old math teacher ... On 17 Jul 2009, at 03:12, m.a. wrote: David, I appreciated this post because I'm more interested in the philosophical implications (which I'm hoping to find at the end of Bruno's UDA bridge to Valhalla) of these goings-on ...than in the mathematical ones. Best, Marty, I can understand you. At the same time, many discussion have been more philosophical, and the problem here, is that without some amount of math, and of computer science, things will look like a crackpot-like thing. It is almost in the nature of the subject. Big statements needs big arguments, and at least enough precise pointers toward the real thing. You can have a still more passive understanding of the UDA, if you understand the first sixth steps. Then for the seventh, it is enough to believe in the existence of universal dovetailer (itself a quasi direct consequence of the existence of a universal machine). Then the 8th step alone can help you to have an idea why the Universal dovetailer is immaterial, so that physics has to be reduced to math and "machine psuchology/theology". But then, I will not been able to answer some remark which have been done by Stathis, Russell, Brent and some others, and which are relalted to the difference between a computation (be it mathematical or physical) and a description of a computation (be it mathematical or physical), and this is the key for understanding that when we assume brain are digitalizable, eventually we have to abandon the idea that consciousness supervene on physical computations, and to accept that it supervenes on mathematical computations. You know, the discovery of the universal machine is the real (creative) bomb here. I could say that "nature" has never stopped to invent it and reinvent it, like with the apparition of brain, of life and the possible other many big bangs. Then, it is hard to explain, without learning a bit on numbers, functions, sets and mathematical structures, that arithmetic, simple elementary arithmetic, already describes that universal thing which can't help itself to reinvent hitself again and again and again, and this in an atemporal, aspatial frames. Sri Aurobindo made once a nice summary: What, you ask, was the beginning of it all? And it is this ... Existence that multiplied itself For sheer delight of being And plunged into numberless trillions of forms So that it might Find Itself Innumerably - Original Message - From: "David Nyman" To: Sent: Thursday, July 16, 2009 8:38 PM Subject: Dreams and Machines With Bruno and his mighty handful engaged in the undodgeable (though constantly dodged) task Well said! of working towards an elementary grasp of the technical underpinnings of COMP, and patently lacking the fortitude of these valorous Stakhanovites, I have been spending my time lurking, reading and musing. My philosophical position on possible relations between computation and mind has long (well before this list) been that it would indeed require something like Bruno's reversal of the 'normal' relationship between computation and physics, so that mind could emerge in some at least comprehensible manner; certainly not - per impossibile - in the ghostly shrouds of the 'deus ex machina' of 'computational materialism'. Consequently, parallel to the strenuous effort ongoing in the other thread, I have been wrapping my mind more loosely around 'interpretations of COMP-mechanics' in order to attempt a better pers
Re: Dreams and Machines
Hi David, I comment your post with an apology to Kim and Marty, then I make a comment to Marty, and then I comment your (very nice) post. Kim, Marty, I apologize for my bad sense of humor. Rereading some post, I realize some nuance in the tone does not go through mailings. Please indulge professional deformation of an old math teacher ... On 17 Jul 2009, at 03:12, m.a. wrote: > > David, >I appreciated this post because I'm more interested in the > philosophical implications (which I'm hoping to find at the end of > Bruno's > UDA bridge to Valhalla) of these goings-on ...than in the > mathematical > ones. Best, Marty, I can understand you. At the same time, many discussion have been more philosophical, and the problem here, is that without some amount of math, and of computer science, things will look like a crackpot-like thing. It is almost in the nature of the subject. Big statements needs big arguments, and at least enough precise pointers toward the real thing. You can have a still more passive understanding of the UDA, if you understand the first sixth steps. Then for the seventh, it is enough to believe in the existence of universal dovetailer (itself a quasi direct consequence of the existence of a universal machine). Then the 8th step alone can help you to have an idea why the Universal dovetailer is immaterial, so that physics has to be reduced to math and "machine psuchology/theology". But then, I will not been able to answer some remark which have been done by Stathis, Russell, Brent and some others, and which are relalted to the difference between a computation (be it mathematical or physical) and a description of a computation (be it mathematical or physical), and this is the key for understanding that when we assume brain are digitalizable, eventually we have to abandon the idea that consciousness supervene on physical computations, and to accept that it supervenes on mathematical computations. You know, the discovery of the universal machine is the real (creative) bomb here. I could say that "nature" has never stopped to invent it and reinvent it, like with the apparition of brain, of life and the possible other many big bangs. Then, it is hard to explain, without learning a bit on numbers, functions, sets and mathematical structures, that arithmetic, simple elementary arithmetic, already describes that universal thing which can't help itself to reinvent hitself again and again and again, and this in an atemporal, aspatial frames. Sri Aurobindo made once a nice summary: What, you ask, was the beginning of it all? And it is this ... Existence that multiplied itself For sheer delight of being And plunged into numberless trillions of forms So that it might Find Itself Innumerably > > > > - Original Message - > From: "David Nyman" > To: > Sent: Thursday, July 16, 2009 8:38 PM > Subject: Dreams and Machines > > > > With Bruno and his mighty handful engaged in the undodgeable (though > constantly dodged) task Well said! > of working towards an elementary grasp of the > technical underpinnings of COMP, and patently lacking the fortitude of > these valorous Stakhanovites, I have been spending my time lurking, > reading and musing. My philosophical position on possible relations > between computation and mind has long (well before this list) been > that it would indeed require something like Bruno's reversal of the > 'normal' relationship between computation and physics, so that mind > could emerge in some at least comprehensible manner; certainly not - > per impossibile - in the ghostly shrouds of the 'deus ex machina' of > 'computational materialism'. Consequently, parallel to the strenuous > effort ongoing in the other thread, I have been wrapping my mind more > loosely around 'interpretations of COMP-mechanics' in order to attempt > a better personal grasp of what it might mean as a metaphysics. As > always, I need help, so here goes for starters. This points to another problem I have. The UDA, and probably even more the AUDA, has deeply changed my "philosophy", up to a point where I think that philosophy and metaphysics can be handled with the doubting attitude of the (ideal) scientist, and that this attitude is a vaccine against the most inhuman aspect of "human science". But then I have reason to suggest that everything becomes far more clearer if we drop the expression "fundamental science", philosophy", "metaphysics" (unless we use them in their original greek senses) and come back to the expression "theology". If you want, assuming comp, metaphysics becomes a theology, with its communicable and non communicable parts. Assuming comp we can already listen to the course on machine theology provided by the machines. But then I know that I look over-provocative. At the same time, I feel that this is important, because, I don't see how we could ever win the war against author
Re: Dreams and Machines
On 17 July, 08:08, Rex Allen wrote: > But taking a more platonic view, abstract concepts also exist. And if > this is so, could we not just as well say that our conscious > subjective experience is formed from particular configurations of > these platonically existing abstract concepts? > > In this view, these abstract concepts stand in specific relations to > one another, like symbols on a map, representing the layout (the > landscape) of a particular moment of consciousness. > > And such subjective conscious experiences would include (but are not > limited to) those that lead us to mistakenly infer the actual > existence of an external world whose fundamental constituents are > electrons and atoms and photons and all the rest. Yes, just so. This is more or less what I was trying to convey in my sally on 'what is real? (in the sense that I am real)'. Finally - 'in some sense' - we needs must ground any such discourse about the number realm in 'my-existence-in-the-world': i.e. no longer 'abstracted', but centred on the self. Consequently any attempt at a non-dual account must be reflexive or self-referential - i.e. "I am the singular mysterious qualitative referent of this abstracted set of entities and their relations". I suppose this 'embedded' account - the unknowable ground of our being - could be thought of, if only poetically, as the true, ontic, or implicit 'language of the dreaming machines', towards which any explicit version can gesture only partially and indicatively. David > On Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 8:38 PM, David Nyman wrote: > > In COMP, the 'mechanism and language of dreams' is > > posited to be those elements of the number realm and its operators > > that are deemed necessary to instantiate a 'universal TM' (i.e. one > > that - assuming CT to be true - is capable of computing any computable > > function). > > So it occurs to me to ask: do abstract concepts other than numbers > also exist in a platonic sense? > > What about "red", for example? Does the concept of red exist in a way > that is similar to the concept of "3"? > > So if I write a computer program that deals with colors, red might be > represented by the hex number 0xff00. The hex number itself is > represented in memory by a sequence of 32 bits. Each bit is > physically represented by some electrons and atoms in a microchip > being in some specific state. > > But ultimately what is being represented is the idea of "red". So in > this particular example, does this not make "red" a more fundamental > concept than the number that is used to represent it in the computer > program? Is not "red" the MOST fundamental concept in this scenario? > > So the typical materialist view is that we are in some way made from > atoms, though they don't usually go so far as to say that we ARE those > atoms. Rather we are the information that is stored by virtue of the > atoms being in a particular configuration. The "actually existing" > atoms of our body form a vessel for our information, and thus for our > consciousness. But in their view, we exist only because the atoms > exist. When the vessel is destroyed, so are we. The atoms are > fundamental, our consciousness is derivative. > > But taking a more platonic view, abstract concepts also exist. And if > this is so, could we not just as well say that our conscious > subjective experience is formed from particular configurations of > these platonically existing abstract concepts? > > In this view, these abstract concepts stand in specific relations to > one another, like symbols on a map, representing the layout (the > landscape) of a particular moment of consciousness. > > And such subjective conscious experiences would include (but are not > limited to) those that lead us to mistakenly infer the actual > existence of an external world whose fundamental constituents are > electrons and atoms and photons and all the rest. --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: Dreams and Machines
On Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 8:38 PM, David Nyman wrote: > In COMP, the 'mechanism and language of dreams' is > posited to be those elements of the number realm and its operators > that are deemed necessary to instantiate a 'universal TM' (i.e. one > that - assuming CT to be true - is capable of computing any computable > function). So it occurs to me to ask: do abstract concepts other than numbers also exist in a platonic sense? What about "red", for example? Does the concept of red exist in a way that is similar to the concept of "3"? So if I write a computer program that deals with colors, red might be represented by the hex number 0xff00. The hex number itself is represented in memory by a sequence of 32 bits. Each bit is physically represented by some electrons and atoms in a microchip being in some specific state. But ultimately what is being represented is the idea of "red". So in this particular example, does this not make "red" a more fundamental concept than the number that is used to represent it in the computer program? Is not "red" the MOST fundamental concept in this scenario? So the typical materialist view is that we are in some way made from atoms, though they don't usually go so far as to say that we ARE those atoms. Rather we are the information that is stored by virtue of the atoms being in a particular configuration. The "actually existing" atoms of our body form a vessel for our information, and thus for our consciousness. But in their view, we exist only because the atoms exist. When the vessel is destroyed, so are we. The atoms are fundamental, our consciousness is derivative. But taking a more platonic view, abstract concepts also exist. And if this is so, could we not just as well say that our conscious subjective experience is formed from particular configurations of these platonically existing abstract concepts? In this view, these abstract concepts stand in specific relations to one another, like symbols on a map, representing the layout (the landscape) of a particular moment of consciousness. And such subjective conscious experiences would include (but are not limited to) those that lead us to mistakenly infer the actual existence of an external world whose fundamental constituents are electrons and atoms and photons and all the rest. --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
