Re: Can mind be a computation if physics is fundamental?
2009/8/1 John Mikes jami...@gmail.com: Hi John Actually, I posted the diatribe just before setting off on the seven-hour drive to the Scottish hills. It's raining just at the moment so I'm taking the opportunity to thank you for your post and for your concern for my welfare, but this is positively the last you'll hear from me till our return! Best David David, I thought you are facing the Scottish mountains for a relaxation and instead here is a long - enjoyable- tirade about ideas which I try to put below into a shorthand form by my vocabulary. But first a plea to Mrs. N: 'please, do keep David away from te computer for the time of the Scottish tourism, as he suggested it, to get him a good mountaineering relaxation what we all would luv if we just can afford it' and now back to David: causal accounts are model-based originating choices in a view reduced into the figment of a 'physical world' i.e. in a conventional science lingo, so ingeniously formed over the millennia. It is our perceived reality, with math, based on the most pervasive (dominating?) principle, called physics, all - in the ongoing HUMAN ways of our thinking. Everything exists what we 'think of' in our MIND (nonexistent? no way, we think of that, too). There is nosuch thing as a '3rd pers.explanation, it is a 1st pers. idea, interpreted by all the 3rd persons into their own (1st pers) mindset(?). Ontology is today's explanation of today's epistemic inventory. A nice, reductionist philosophy. Not applicable for tomorrow's discoveries. A 'physical realist' is a conventional scientist within the given figments. This list tries to overstep such 'human' limitations - falling repeatedly back into the faithful application of it. As Brent asked: Is the physics account of life incomplete or wrong? Do you consider life to have been eliminated? eliminated WHAT? I spent some braingrease to find out what many (some?) of us agree upon as 'life' - no success. YET it does exist even in Brent's mind (who is a very advanced thinking list-member). (Robert Rosen identified life as his 'MR' (Metabolism and Repair) based on his (mathematical) biology ways. I may extend the domain into 'ideation' and 'not-so-bio' domains, even into the stupidly named in-animates). Our millennia-evolved human (reductionistic - conventional) views are based on timely evolving observational skills what we call physical - worldview, science, explanatory base etc. So no wonder if everything is touching it. It is not 'more real' than anything we could sweat out for explaining the unexplainable. It all undergoes (ontological etc.) changes as epistemy grows. I don't want to touch here the chicken-egg topic of numbers, yet this, too, is a HUMAN dilemma between Bruno and friends vs. David Bohm. And we are figments within the totality, not the original creators. We don't 'see' too far. Somebody asked me: How do we learn something that is aboslutely 'N E W' ? I had no answer. I tried: by playing with unrelated relationships - which is only manipulting the existent. Even Star Trek relied on modified knowables as novelty, the absolute new is not available to us - unless already having been hinted in some corner of the totality as a 'findable' relation. The quality from quantity Leninian principle may give a clue to it, if a large enough background can be checked (cf. Bruno's words to get to anything by using enough many numbers for it). Still such cop-outs include my usual retort: applying the somehow Finally: COMP and reality? not this embryonic binary algorithm based (physical) contraption, not even an advanced fantasy kind of similar deficiencies can approach what we cannot: the unfathomable 'reality' of them all. It is not a 'higher inventory', it (if there is such an 'it' - I did not say: exists) is beyond anything we can imagine humanly. We can speculate about reality's 'human' type aspects of partial hints we can humanly approach and make a pars pro toto dream of it - we are wrong for sure. Have a healthy mountain-climb in Scottland John M On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 5:39 PM, David Nyman david.ny...@gmail.com wrote: I note that the recent posts by Peter Jones - aka the mysterious 1Z, and the originator of the curiously useful 'real in the sense I am real' or RITSIAR - occurred shortly after my taking his name in vain. Hmm... Anyway, this signalled the resumption of a long-running debate about the validity of causal accounts of the first person based on a functional or computational rationale. I'm going to make an attempt to annihilate this intuition in this thread, and hope to encourage feedback specifically on this issue. You will recall that this is at the heart of Bruno's requirement to base COMP - i.e. the explicitly computational account of mind - on the the number realm, with physics derived as an emergent from this. Step 8 of the UDA addresses these issues in a very
Re: The seven step series
I am in a good mood and a bit picky :-) Do you know how many entries
google gave me upon entering
Theaetetical -marchal -bruno
Well 144?
Good way to find my papers on that. The pages refer quickly to this
list or the FOR list.
I am sorry for the delay, I've just got back from my vacation.
Hmm. The above written search should not return any references to your
papers/letters as the minus sign in front of your name asks for an
exclusion.
Given that it works as supposed google then gives only 1 hit in my
location (Sweden). That hit is a translation of the word Theaetetical
into some eastern characters. Thus, I end up with zero meaningful hits
and a feeling that you might be the only one using this word.
That makes me insists a little bit more (in a very polite way) that,
occasionally, your work is
difficult to read unless one is willing to undertake long
discussions, clarifications and position adjustments.
I am writing this in a reference to your complains that sometimes you
have troubles to get enough relevant feedback to your work.
I let those interested to meditate on two questions (N is {0, 1, 2, 3,
4, ...}):
1) What is common between the set of all subsets of a set with n
elements, and the set of all finite sequences of 0 and 1 of length
n.
2) What is common between the set of all subsets of N, and the set of
all infinite sequences of 0 and 1.
Just some (finite and infinite) bread for surviving the day :)
I am going to catch up with the thread ...
Cheers,
mirek
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universal quantum TM
There has been progress in the direction of finding fully universal quantum Turing machine. Construction of a universal quantum computer Antonio A. Lagana, M. A. Lohe, and Lorenz von Smekal Physical Review A 79, 052322 (2009) (11 pages) http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevA.79.052322 I'll read it and we can discuss then. Regards, mirek --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ 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: Dreaming On
On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 3:21 PM, Bruno Marchalmarc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Rex proposes something like: CONSCIOUSNESS = ? It is radical, and it is difficult to say if it explains anything. I suspect the goal could be personal enlightnment instead of a search in a communicable theory which should or could explain the observable and non observable (but feelable, like pain) phenomena. AND On Sat, Aug 1, 2009 at 2:19 AM, Brent Meekermeeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: The only thing we have direct access to is our conscious experience. Trying to explain the existence of this conscious experience in terms of what is experienced inevitably leads to vicious circularity. If you explain the existence of a pain in your tooth by a cavity the experience may lead to a dentist - and less pain in your experience. I am proposing, I suppose: CONSCIOUSNESS = EVERYTHING ELSE So obviously it seems useful to postulate the existence of things like quarks and electrons, which we then use to make predictions about what will happen if we do this, that, or the other. However, I think there is good reason to believe that this only holds true in our own relatively well-behaved part of what is actually a vast experiential wilderness. Any proposal that has our consciousness as being caused, whatever the causal mechanism, is open to the possibility that we are caused to experience something that is not reflective of the reality that produced the experience. Dreams, delusions, hallucinations, brains-in-vats, and computer simulations of brains all offer real or conceivable examples of scenarios where what is experienced might lead one astray in trying to determine the underlying nature of things. If our conscious experience is caused, then for all we know we're giant amorphous blobs floating in 12 dimensional space, but with just the right internal causal structure to produce the conscious experience of being humans in 3-dimensional space. Or we could be Boltzmann Brains, produced by the random fluctuations of particles in just the right way to produce the illusion of our current experiences. Given enough time, exactly our experience would be produced, regardless of the underlying physics of the Boltzmann Universe that we actually inhabit, just through a brute random search of the space of possibilities, combination and recombination of all possible configurations. OR (per Bruno) we could be mathematical algorithms existing only in some immaterial platonic sense. Or identical experiences, plus all variations, of being Brent or Bruno might be caused by each of the above mechanisms at different times and in different places. An infinite number of universes, or a universe of infinite size, or with an infinite amount of time, or a quantum mechanical multiverse with infinite branches, or a platonic Plenitude containing all possible mathematical/algorithmic structures, would all seem to be possibilities, and not even mutually exclusive ones. BUT, I don't think so. All causal explanations for consciousness (even Bruno's) ultimately rely on fiat assertions that this causes conscious experience, without providing any convincing explanation for why this should be. It's not so much causation as correlation, as far as I can see. As I mentioned, I'm sure that the brain can be viewed as representing the contents of my experience. And I'm sure that a computer program could also be written that would represent the contents of my conscious experience and whose representational state would evolve as the program ran so that it continued to match what I experience over time. But this would not mean that the program was conscious, or that my brain is conscious. The living brain and the executing computer program both just represent the contents of my conscious experience, in the same way that a map represents the actual terrain. However, I question the need to push the explanation down to a separate layer. So we are at the top of your ontological stack, I assume. And we look below us to see what supports us. But then we have to look below that level to see what supports it, and below that level to see what supports it, and so on. Infinite regress. Turtles all the way down. But instead why not look at our own experience, which is the only thing we know directly, as the foundation of the ontological stack. Everything that exists rests on the foundation of our conscious experience? In this view, the stack goes up for as far as our intellect can reach. And as our intellectual capacity expands, the our view of the existential landscape above us also expands. This, I think, makes more sense. --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ 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,
