Re: Does the plants quantum computations?
Hi John, On 21 Feb 2010, at 22:11, John Mikes wrote: Bruno, interesting exchange with Stephen. I have a sideline-question: why do you 'refer-to' and repeatedly invoke into your ways of your advanced thinking the NAME (I did not say: concept) of GOD, a noumenon so many times and many occasions mistreated and misused over the millennia - throughout the entire history of mankind? So much baggage is attached to this noumenon that just mention it brings false ideas into most of the minds: positively and negatively. Sometimes pretty strong ones. I am not talking about 'The Old Man in the Nightgown or Allah, or Quetzalcoatl, or the Big Bear, or whatever comes to mind, I talk about the 'idea' of misuse and misidentifications for purposes unlimited, faith and hate, rules and sins, priests and money, power, killing etc. with the unlimited prejudice of unlimited kind. The overwhelming part of humanity is involved in such misconstrued vocabularies. It makes it very hard to stay scientific. The whole point consists in reintroducing the scientific attitude (that is modesty) in theology. And given that there has been a millennium of such study, I prefer to keep the usual vocabulary, if only just to be short. I made clear that I use the notion of God of Plato (truth, transcendent, etc.). It is just a bit better than Universe, ... Note that I have use God in quotes. Sometimes I use what is his name. It is the big unnameable ONE. If we use new terms, people may think it is something else, and they would not introduce the doubt in their (implicit or explicit) theology. If people use a term badly, the best way to help them is to use the same term correctly. If not they believe you are talking on something else, and continue they bad use of the notion behind the term. I guess in Europa, most theologians use the term correctly (except in Churches). I don't think you aspire for the title: The Priest of Arithmetix (or the Universal computer)? No. But I may vindicate the title of (neo-neo-platonist) theologian, or of computer scientist specialized in machine's theology. If theology does not come back in the sphere of the academic doubt, we will continue to err in that field. (Despite some academies can already act like pseudo-religious church, but nothing is perfect). PS. Upon your earlier remark if you accept an artificial brain from the Dr I frowned first on the artificial - is it restricted to man-made or comp-made? (in the latter case: does 'comp' include limitless potentials (limitless, indeed, including possible and impossible?) Then I formulated my negative response upon ANY human description of BRAIN - a construct, while I do not condone a structural (physics? or any other human idea) definition for the mentality - except for our limited capabilities to apply information. So I would not change my (unlimited?) 'mind' for a namable construct however extended. - JM This is probably confirming the fact that you are a self-referentially correct Löbian. None can understand the identity of their soul (Bp p) and their body (or belief on their body) described by Bp. So you are logically right. This is why I insisted that saying yes to the doctor needs an explicit act of faith. Comp *is* a scheme of religion. You have to make an illogical act, and nobody should force you to act in that way. It is a bit like the Gödel sentence: comp entails the non knowledge/ believability of comp. It is math, when you study a theology of a simpler (than you) machine. But you need *faith* to lift that theology on yourself. Correct machine will find as hard as ourself the possibility that they are machine (locally finitely describable). Bruno On 2/21/10, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Hi Stephen, On 20 Feb 2010, at 19:52, Stephen P. King wrote: Nature has repeatedly proven herself to be vastly more clever than we can imagine. Quantum coherence is used in photosynthesis by plants to increase the efficiency of photon energy capture by the use of structures that act to hold decoherence off just in the right place for long enough. I will leave it up to the experimentalists to explain the structures. There may be some new evidences. It is good to stay the most open minded possible. He pretends that his trivial model is exact enough to prove that there can be no exploitable coherence effects. I only claim that the brain is exploiting coherence effects at small scales that would allow for increased efficiencies. I am considering an idea different from that of Hameroff based on resonance damping. But Hameroff’s discussions minus the “Objective Reduction” stuff, IMO, is still valid. I can follow you. See:http://www.quantumconsciousness.org/pdfs/decoherence.pdf ** Thanks. Look interesting. *** From the evidence we have so far,
Re: On the computability of consciousness
On 22 February 2010 07:37, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: What do you mean by implicit here? What is implicit is that the subjectivity (1-p), to make sense, has to be referentially correct relatively to the most probable histories/consistent extensions. What I mean by implicit is already accounted for, at least according to the assumptions of the closed 3-p hypothesis, which of course is what I'm questioning. Then the incommunicable and private aspect of those knowledge and qualia is provided by the theory of knowledge and the quale logic, provided by the respective intensional variant of G and G*. The difference between G and G* (provable and true) is reflected in those intensional variant. Yes, but G and G*, and indeed all formally expressible logics, are themselves closed 3-p (i.e. objective) notions - i.e. they would exist and possess the same explanatory power in the absence of any accompanying *qualitative* component. This is just another way of gesturing towards the Really Hard Problem - that the qualitative component, per se, is seemingly redundant to the account if we assume we already have a closed, or sufficient, non-qualitative explanation. Consequently these logics AFAICS lead to the same paradoxical conclusions as the closed 3-p physical hypothesis - i.e. that the references to qualitative experiences - even those references we ourselves produce - would occur even in the absence of any such experiences. This would leave us in the position of doubting the basis even of our own statements that we are conscious! I want to seriously discuss the proposition that certain behaviours are actually contingent on qualitative experience, as distinguished from any accompanying 3-p phenomena. That is, for example, that my withdrawing my hand from the fire because it hurts indispensably requires the qualitative *experience* of pain to mediate between 1-p and 3-p narratives. This would of course mean in turn that the explanatory arc from stimulus, through cognitive processing, to response would be, without the qualitative component, in some way demonstrably incomplete as an explanation. ISTM that this would make it impossible to ignore the implication that the context in which we conceive 3-p processes to be situated (whether we are talking in terms of their physical or mathematical-logical expression) would itself be capable of taking on personal characteristics in apparent interaction with such processes. Something related to this, ISTM, is already implied in the background to 1-p indeterminacy, observer moments, the solipsism of the One etc, because all these notions implicitly contain the idea of some general context capable of embodying and individuating personal qualitative experience - given relevant 3-p-describable structure and function. But in order for that personhood not to be vacuous - i.e. redundant to the supposedly primary 3-p narrative - such personal qualitative states must be conceived as having consequences, otherwise inexplicable, in the 3-p domain, and not merely vice-versa. How to incorporate such consequences in the overall account is indeed a puzzle. Not only can't we prove it, but we couldn't, from a 3-p pov, even predict or in any way characterise such 1-p notions, if we didn't know from a 1-p perspective that they exist (or seem to know that they seem to exist). This is not true I think. Already with the uda duplication experience, you can see predict the difference, for example, the apparition of first person indeterminacy despite the determinacy in the 3d description. This is captured by the difference between (Bp and p) and Bp, and that difference is a consequence of incompleteness, when self-observing occurs. I don't deny what you're saying per se, but I'm commenting on this because it brings out, I hope, the distinction between purely formal descriptions of 1-p notions, and actual first-personal acquaintance with qualitative experience. It's the latter that I'm claiming is non-computable from any formal premise (which, as I think we'd both agree, is the essence of the HP). It's one thing to say that self-observing occurs, and quite another to actually experience self-observing. But beyond this, ISTM that we must also believe that the *experience* of self-observing entails consequences that the mere *description* of self-observing would not, to avoid the paradoxes contingent on the idea that qualitative experiences are somehow redundant or merely epiphenomenal. One of the places it leads (which ISTM some are anxious not to acknowledge)) is the kind of brute paradox I've referred to. So what I'm asking you is how is this different from a comp perspective? Can our 3-p references to 1-p phenomena escape paradox in the comp analysis? Yes, because we do accept the truth of elementary arithmetic. We can study the theology of simple (and thus *intuitively* correct) Löbian machine. We *know* in that setting that the machine will
RE: problem of size '10
Date: Sat, 13 Feb 2010 10:48:28 -0800 From: jackmal...@yahoo.com Subject: Re: problem of size '10 To: everything-list@googlegroups.com --- On Fri, 2/12/10, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Jack Mallah wrote: --- On Thu, 2/11/10, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be MGA is more general (and older). The only way to escape the conclusion would be to attribute consciousness to a movie of a computation That's not true. For partial replacement scenarios, where part of a brain has counterfactuals and the rest doesn't, see my partial brain paper: http://cogprints.org/6321/ It is not a question of true or false, but of presenting a valid or non valid deduction. What is false is your statement that The only way to escape the conclusion would be to attribute consciousness to a movie of a computation. So your argument is not valid. I don't see anything in your comment or links which prevents the conclusions of being reached from the assumptions. If you think so, tell me at which step, and provide a justification. Bruno, I don't intend to be drawn into a detailed discussion of your arguments at this time. The key idea though is that a movie could replace a computer brain. The strongest argument for that is that you could gradually replace the components of the computer (which have the standard counterfactual (if-then) functioning) with components that only play out a pre-recorded script or which behave correctly by luck. You could then invoke the 'fading qualia' argument (qualia could plausibly not vanish either suddenly or by gradually fading as the replacement proceeds) to argue that this makes no difference to the consciousness. My partial brain paper shows that the 'fading qualia' argument is invalid. Hi Jack, to me the idea that counterfactuals would be essential to defining what counts as an implementation has always seemed counterintuitive for reasons separate from the Olympia or movie-graph argument. The thought-experiment I'd like to consider is one where some device is implanted in my brain that passively monitors the activity of a large group of neurons, and only if it finds them firing in some precise prespecified sequence does it activate and stimulate my brain in some way, causing a change in brain activity; otherwise it remains causally inert (I suppose because of the butterfly effect, the mere presence of the device would eventually affect my brain activity, but we can imagine replacing the device with a subroutine in a deterministic program simulating my brain in a deterministic virtual environment, with the subroutine only being activated and influencing the simulation if certain simulated neurons fire in a precise sequence). According to the counterfactual definition of implementations, would the mere presence of this device change my qualia from what they'd be if it wasn't present, even if the neurons required to activate it never actually fire in the correct sequence and the device remains completely inert? That would seem to divorce qualia from behavior in a pretty significant way... If you have time, perhaps you could take a look at my post at http://www.mail-archive.com/everything-list@googlegroups.com/msg16244.html where I discussed a vague idea for how one might define isomorphic causal structures that could be used to address the implementation problem, in a way that wouldn't depend on counterfactuals at all (there was some additional discussion in the followup posts on that thread, linked at the bottom of that mail-archive.com page). The basic idea was to treat the physical world as a formal axiomatic system, the axioms being laws of physics and initial conditions, the theorems being statements about physical events at later points in spacetime; then causal structure could be defined in terms of the patterns of logical relations between theorems, like given the axioms along with theorems A and B, we can derive theorem C. Since all theorems concern events that actually did happen, counterfactuals would not be involved, but we could still perhaps avoid the type of problem Chalmers discussed where a rock can be viewed as implementing any possible computation. If you do have time to look over the idea and you see some obvious problems with it, let me know... Jesse -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@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: problem of size '10
Jesse Mazer wrote: Date: Sat, 13 Feb 2010 10:48:28 -0800 From: jackmal...@yahoo.com Subject: Re: problem of size '10 To: everything-list@googlegroups.com --- On Fri, 2/12/10, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Jack Mallah wrote: --- On Thu, 2/11/10, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be MGA is more general (and older). The only way to escape the conclusion would be to attribute consciousness to a movie of a computation That's not true. For partial replacement scenarios, where part of a brain has counterfactuals and the rest doesn't, see my partial brain paper: http://cogprints.org/6321/ It is not a question of true or false, but of presenting a valid or non valid deduction. What is false is your statement that The only way to escape the conclusion would be to attribute consciousness to a movie of a computation. So your argument is not valid. I don't see anything in your comment or links which prevents the conclusions of being reached from the assumptions. If you think so, tell me at which step, and provide a justification. Bruno, I don't intend to be drawn into a detailed discussion of your arguments at this time. The key idea though is that a movie could replace a computer brain. The strongest argument for that is that you could gradually replace the components of the computer (which have the standard counterfactual (if-then) functioning) with components that only play out a pre-recorded script or which behave correctly by luck. You could then invoke the 'fading qualia' argument (qualia could plausibly not vanish either suddenly or by gradually fading as the replacement proceeds) to argue that this makes no difference to the consciousness. My partial brain paper shows that the 'fading qualia' argument is invalid. Hi Jack, to me the idea that counterfactuals would be essential to defining what counts as an implementation has always seemed counterintuitive for reasons separate from the Olympia or movie-graph argument. The thought-experiment I'd like to consider is one where some device is implanted in my brain that passively monitors the activity of a large group of neurons, and only if it finds them firing in some precise prespecified sequence does it activate and stimulate my brain in some way, causing a change in brain activity; otherwise it remains causally inert (I suppose because of the butterfly effect, the mere presence of the device would eventually affect my brain activity, but we can imagine replacing the device with a subroutine in a deterministic program simulating my brain in a deterministic virtual environment, with the subroutine only being activated and influencing the simulation if certain simulated neurons fire in a precise sequence). It seems that these thought experiments inevitably lead to considering a digital simulation of the brain in a virtual environment. This is usually brushed over as an inessential aspect, but I'm coming to the opinion that it is essential. Once you have encapsulated the whole thought experiment in a closed virtual environment in a digital computer you have the paradox of the rock that computes everything. How we know what is being computed in this virtual environment? Ordinarily the answer to this is that we wrote the program and so we provide the interpretation of the calculation *in this world*. But it seems that in these thought experiments we are implicitly supposing that the simulation is inherently providing it's own interpretation. Maybe, so; but I see no reason to have confidence that this inherent interpretation is either unique or has anything to do with the interpretation we intended. I suspect that this simulated consciousness is only consciousness *in our external interpretation*. Brent According to the counterfactual definition of implementations, would the mere presence of this device change my qualia from what they'd be if it wasn't present, even if the neurons required to activate it never actually fire in the correct sequence and the device remains completely inert? That would seem to divorce qualia from behavior in a pretty significant way... If you have time, perhaps you could take a look at my post at http://www.mail-archive.com/everything-list@googlegroups.com/msg16244.html where I discussed a vague idea for how one might define isomorphic causal structures that could be used to address the implementation problem, in a way that wouldn't depend on counterfactuals at all (there was some additional discussion in the followup posts on that thread, linked at the bottom of that mail-archive.com page). The basic idea was to treat the physical world as a formal axiomatic system, the axioms being laws of physics and initial conditions, the theorems being statements about physical events at later points in spacetime; then causal structure could be defined in terms of the patterns of logical relations between theorems, like
RE: problem of size '10
Date: Mon, 22 Feb 2010 08:42:17 -0800 From: meeke...@dslextreme.com To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: problem of size '10 Jesse Mazer wrote: Date: Sat, 13 Feb 2010 10:48:28 -0800 From: jackmal...@yahoo.com Subject: Re: problem of size '10 To: everything-list@googlegroups.com --- On Fri, 2/12/10, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Jack Mallah wrote: --- On Thu, 2/11/10, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be MGA is more general (and older). The only way to escape the conclusion would be to attribute consciousness to a movie of a computation That's not true. For partial replacement scenarios, where part of a brain has counterfactuals and the rest doesn't, see my partial brain paper: http://cogprints.org/6321/ It is not a question of true or false, but of presenting a valid or non valid deduction. What is false is your statement that The only way to escape the conclusion would be to attribute consciousness to a movie of a computation. So your argument is not valid. I don't see anything in your comment or links which prevents the conclusions of being reached from the assumptions. If you think so, tell me at which step, and provide a justification. Bruno, I don't intend to be drawn into a detailed discussion of your arguments at this time. The key idea though is that a movie could replace a computer brain. The strongest argument for that is that you could gradually replace the components of the computer (which have the standard counterfactual (if-then) functioning) with components that only play out a pre-recorded script or which behave correctly by luck. You could then invoke the 'fading qualia' argument (qualia could plausibly not vanish either suddenly or by gradually fading as the replacement proceeds) to argue that this makes no difference to the consciousness. My partial brain paper shows that the 'fading qualia' argument is invalid. Hi Jack, to me the idea that counterfactuals would be essential to defining what counts as an implementation has always seemed counterintuitive for reasons separate from the Olympia or movie-graph argument. The thought-experiment I'd like to consider is one where some device is implanted in my brain that passively monitors the activity of a large group of neurons, and only if it finds them firing in some precise prespecified sequence does it activate and stimulate my brain in some way, causing a change in brain activity; otherwise it remains causally inert (I suppose because of the butterfly effect, the mere presence of the device would eventually affect my brain activity, but we can imagine replacing the device with a subroutine in a deterministic program simulating my brain in a deterministic virtual environment, with the subroutine only being activated and influencing the simulation if certain simulated neurons fire in a precise sequence). It seems that these thought experiments inevitably lead to considering a digital simulation of the brain in a virtual environment. This is usually brushed over as an inessential aspect, but I'm coming to the opinion that it is essential. Once you have encapsulated the whole thought experiment in a closed virtual environment in a digital computer you have the paradox of the rock that computes everything. How we know what is being computed in this virtual environment? Ordinarily the answer to this is that we wrote the program and so we provide the interpretation of the calculation *in this world*. But it seems that in these thought experiments we are implicitly supposing that the simulation is inherently providing it's own interpretation. Maybe, so; but I see no reason to have confidence that this inherent interpretation is either unique or has anything to do with the interpretation we intended. I suspect that this simulated consciousness is only consciousness *in our external interpretation*. Brent In that case, aren't you saying that there is no objective answer to whether a particular physical process counts as an implementation of a given computation, and that absolutely any process can be seen as implementing any computation if outside observers choose to interpret it that way? That's basically the conclusion Chalmers was trying to avoid in his Does a Rock Implement Every Finite-State Automaton paper at http://consc.net/papers/rock.html which discussed the implementation problem. One possible answer to this problem is that implementations *are* totally subjective, but this would seem to rule out the possibility of there ever being any sort of objective measure on computations (unless you imagine some privileged observers who are themselves *not* identified with computations and whose interpretations are the only ones that 'count') which makes it hard to solve things like the
RE: problem of size '10
Jesse, how do you access the everything list? I ask because I have not recieved my own posts in my inbox, nor have others such as Bruno replied. I use yahoo email. I may need to use a different method to prevent my posts from getting lost. They do seem to show up on Google groups though. There was never a problem until recently, so I'll see if this one works. --- On Mon, 2/22/10, Jesse Mazer laserma...@hotmail.com wrote: Hi Jack, to me the idea that counterfactuals would be essential to defining what counts as an implementation has always seemed counterintuitive for reasons separate from the Olympia or movie-graph argument. The thought-experiment I'd like to consider is one where some device is implanted in my brain that passively monitors the activity of a large group of neurons, and only if it finds them firing in some precise prespecified sequence does it activate and stimulate my brain in some way, causing a change in brain activity; otherwise it remains causally inert According to the counterfactual definition of implementations, would the mere presence of this device change my qualia from what they'd be if it wasn't present, even if the neurons required to activate it never actually fire in the correct sequence and the device remains completely inert? That would seem to divorce qualia from behavior in a pretty significant way... The link between qualia and computations is, of course, hard to know anything about. But it seems to me quite likely that qualia would be insensitive to the sort of changes in computations that you are talking about. Such modified computations could give rise to the same (or nearly the same) set of qualia for the 'inert device' runs as unmodified ones would have. I am not saying that this must always be the case, since if you take it too far you could run into Maudlin-type problems, but in many cases it would make sense. If you have time, perhaps you could take a look at my post http://www.mail-archive.com/everything-list@googlegroups.com/msg16244.html where I discussed a vague idea for how one might define isomorphic causal structures that could be used to address the implementation problem, in a way that wouldn't depend on counterfactuals at all You do need counterfactuals to define implementations. Consider the computation c(t+1) = a(t) AND b(t), where a,b,c, are bits. Suppose that a(t),b(t),and c(t) are all true. Without counterfactuals, how would you distinguish the above from another computation such as c(t+1) = a(t)? Even worse, suppose that c(t+1) is true no matter what. a(t) and b(t) happen to be true. Is the above computation implemented? This gets even worse when you allow time-dependent mappings, which make a lot of intuitive sense in many practical cases. Now c=1 can mean c is true at time t+1, but so can c=0 under a different mapping. All of these problems go away when you require correct counterfactual behavior. You might wonder about time dependent mappings. If a(t)=1, b(t)=1, and c(t+1) = 0, can that implement the computation, considering a,b as true and c=0 as c is true? Only if c(t+1) _would have been 1_ (thus, c is false) if a(t) or b(t) had been zero. Clearly, due to the various and time-dependent mappings, there are a lot of computations that end up equivalent. But the point is that real distinctions remain. No matter what mappings you choose, as long as counterfactual behaviors are required, there is NO mapping that would make a AND b equivalent to a XOR b. If you drop the counterfactual requirement, that is no longer the case. --- On Mon, 2/22/10, Brent Meeker meeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: It seems that these thought experiments inevitably lead to considering a digital simulation of the brain in a virtual environment. This is usually brushed over as an inessential aspect, but I'm coming to the opinion that it is essential. It's not essential, just convenient for thought experiments. Once you have encapsulated the whole thought experiment in a closed virtual environment in a digital computer you have the paradox of the rock that computes everything. No. Input/output is not the solution for that; restrictions on mappings is. See my MCI paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/0709.0544 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@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: problem of size '10
Jesse Mazer wrote: Date: Mon, 22 Feb 2010 08:42:17 -0800 From: meeke...@dslextreme.com To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: problem of size '10 Jesse Mazer wrote: Date: Sat, 13 Feb 2010 10:48:28 -0800 From: jackmal...@yahoo.com Subject: Re: problem of size '10 To: everything-list@googlegroups.com --- On Fri, 2/12/10, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Jack Mallah wrote: --- On Thu, 2/11/10, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be MGA is more general (and older). The only way to escape the conclusion would be to attribute consciousness to a movie of a computation That's not true. For partial replacement scenarios, where part of a brain has counterfactuals and the rest doesn't, see my partial brain paper: http://cogprints.org/6321/ It is not a question of true or false, but of presenting a valid or non valid deduction. What is false is your statement that The only way to escape the conclusion would be to attribute consciousness to a movie of a computation. So your argument is not valid. I don't see anything in your comment or links which prevents the conclusions of being reached from the assumptions. If you think so, tell me at which step, and provide a justification. Bruno, I don't intend to be drawn into a detailed discussion of your arguments at this time. The key idea though is that a movie could replace a computer brain. The strongest argument for that is that you could gradually replace the components of the computer (which have the standard counterfactual (if-then) functioning) with components that only play out a pre-recorded script or which behave correctly by luck. You could then invoke the 'fading qualia' argument (qualia could plausibly not vanish either suddenly or by gradually fading as the replacement proceeds) to argue that this makes no difference to the consciousness. My partial brain paper shows that the 'fading qualia' argument is invalid. Hi Jack, to me the idea that counterfactuals would be essential to defining what counts as an implementation has always seemed counterintuitive for reasons separate from the Olympia or movie-graph argument. The thought-experiment I'd like to consider is one where some device is implanted in my brain that passively monitors the activity of a large group of neurons, and only if it finds them firing in some precise prespecified sequence does it activate and stimulate my brain in some way, causing a change in brain activity; otherwise it remains causally inert (I suppose because of the butterfly effect, the mere presence of the device would eventually affect my brain activity, but we can imagine replacing the device with a subroutine in a deterministic program simulating my brain in a deterministic virtual environment, with the subroutine only being activated and influencing the simulation if certain simulated neurons fire in a precise sequence). It seems that these thought experiments inevitably lead to considering a digital simulation of the brain in a virtual environment. This is usually brushed over as an inessential aspect, but I'm coming to the opinion that it is essential. Once you have encapsulated the whole thought experiment in a closed virtual environment in a digital computer you have the paradox of the rock that computes everything. How we know what is being computed in this virtual environment? Ordinarily the answer to this is that we wrote the program and so we provide the interpretation of the calculation *in this world*. But it seems that in these thought experiments we are implicitly supposing that the simulation is inherently providing it's own interpretation. Maybe, so; but I see no reason to have confidence that this inherent interpretation is either unique or has anything to do with the interpretation we intended. I suspect that this simulated consciousness is only consciousness *in our external interpretation*. Brent In that case, aren't you saying that there is no objective answer to whether a particular physical process counts as an implementation of a given computation, and that absolutely any process can be seen as implementing any computation if outside observers choose to interpret it that way? That's basically the conclusion Chalmers was trying to avoid in his Does a Rock Implement Every Finite-State Automaton paper at http://consc.net/papers/rock.html which discussed the implementation problem. One possible answer to this problem is that implementations *are* totally subjective, but this would seem to rule out the possibility of there ever being any sort of objective measure on computations (unless you imagine some privileged observers who are themselves *not* identified with computations and whose interpretations are the only ones that 'count') which makes it hard to solve things like the white rabbit problem
[Fwd: The Brain's Dark Energy Scien amer]
As long thought, consciousness is only a small part of what the brain does - maybe even only a small part of "thinking". Brent Original Message The Brain's Dark Energy ( Preview ) Brain regions active when our minds wander may hold a key to understanding neurological disorders and even consciousness itself Key Concepts Neuroscientists have long thought that the brain’s circuits are turned off when a person is at rest. Imaging experiments, however, have shown that there is a persistent level of background activity. This default mode, as it is called, may be critical in planning future actions. Miswiring of brain regions involved in the default mode may lead to disorders ranging from Alzheimer’s to schizophrenia. Imagine you are almost dozing in a lounge chair outside, with a magazine on your lap. Suddenly, a fly lands on your arm. You grab the magazine and swat at the insect. What was going on in your brain after the fly landed? And what was going on just before? Many neuroscientists have long assumed that much of the neural activity inside your head when at rest matches your subdued, somnolent mood. In this view, the activity in the resting brain represents nothing more than random noise, akin to the snowy pattern on the television screen when a station is not broadcasting. Then, when the fly alights on your forearm, the brain focuses on the conscious task of squashing the bug. But recent analysis produced by neuroimaging technologies has revealed something quite remarkable: a great deal of meaningful activity is occurring in the brain when a person is sitting back and doing nothing at all. It turns out that when your mind is at rest—when you are daydreaming quietly in a chair, say, asleep in a bed or anesthetized for surgery—dispersed brain areas are chattering away to one another. And the energy consumed by this ever active messaging, known as the brain’s default mode, is about 20 times that used by the brain when it responds consciously to a pesky fly or another outside stimulus. Indeed, most things we do consciously, be it sitting down to eat dinner or making a speech, mark a departure from the baseline activity of the brain default mode. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-brains-dark-energy -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@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: Many-worlds vs. Many-Minds
On Feb 22, 8:12 pm, rmiller rmil...@legis.com wrote: From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-l...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Jason Resch Sent: Sunday, February 21, 2010 11:38 PM To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: Many-worlds vs. Many-Minds Certainly there's a substructure that involves time. Cramer's Transactional theory includes particles that travel from the future to the past, and there are a few things about quantum mechanics-the Delayed Choice Experiment comes to mind-that suggests the future may influence the past-or some version of it. German physicist Helmut Schmidt once decided to (effectively) expand Bohr's Copenhagen theorem to real-life experiments. As a result, he was able to show with scientific probability (p 0.05) that a group of students can change the past. It's commonly known as the retrocausality experiments and he took a lot of heat for them. In 1995 I asked him what he thought the results meant: Did causality run in reverse, or was it a matter of a group of 25 students choosing the universe they wanted to be in? His answer: probably the latter. But if you're a fan of Richard Feinman, you may conclude that this is evidence that causality does indeed run in reverse---you can affect the past (or a version of it.) Once Cramer gets his laser experiment to work, we'll be that much closer to knowing the answer. Huw Price suggests that our view of causality is strongly influenced by the way we're embedded / oriented in space-time. He points out in Time's Arrow and Archimedes' Point that the laws of physics are almost entirely time-symmetric, with the result that (for example) you can't tell which way up a Feynman diagram is - either time-orientation is equally valid. If we accept what the laws of physics appear to say, that nature is for the most part indifferent to the direction of time, this implies that quite a few things are a lot less strange than we think. Delayed-choice and ERP experiments become trivial to explain, for example, once we stop thinking of the particles involved as similar to macroscopic objects with a clear arrow of time, and assume their state is equally constrained by past and future boundary conditions (e.g. the emitter and detector). This view is similar to Cramer's Transactional Interpretation and Wheeler-Feynman Absorber Theory, but makes them both look unnecessarily complicated, since it doesn't require any new physics, it merely suggests we take the existing physics at face value (as Hugh Everett III once did, with similarly interesting results). Price's view allows us to focus on the real mystery of time, which is not why it appears to flow in one direction, but why the region of space-time near the Big Bang was in a state of very low entropy. I have a suspicion that the answer is something to do with the shape of space-time (but I haven't yet been able to get my head around how this connects with breaking eggs and melting ice...) Admittedly that only pushes the why back a step but that is still progress: rather than attempting to explain a non-existent preference for one time direction that we thought was embedded somehow in the laws of physics, we now need to explain why the universe has a particular boundary condition. (Possibly Tegmark's MUH comes in here?) Helmut Schmidt's experiments appear to (purportedly) involve psychokinesis; I have a feeling that I've read various attempts to debunk these claims in the Skeptical Enquirer but unfortunately my subscription lapsed some years ago, and I can't recall the details. It does sound like an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence to back it up. The website I looked at was a mass of statistics that I didn't really follow, unfortunately. As for the role of consciousness in all of this, I believe some answers have already been found-back in 1978 when Stanford Clinical Psychologist Ernest R. Hilgard discovered the Hidden Observer phenomenon. Seems there's an executive function in each of us that comes to the fore only under extremely deep (60+) hypnosis. His book on the subject, Divided Consciousness is fascinating reading. Someone familiar with Many Worlds theory will come away with the impression that there evolved as a mechanism to keep track of the local many-world space we inhabit. This is a facinating idea, although Hidden Observer theory is still contraversial (since the experiments involved deep hypnosis, presumably the results may have been the result of suggestion by the experimenters?). Apparently the Stoic philosopher Epictetus believed that the hidden observer (or Daemon) had foreknowledge of the person's fate, an idea which if true would fit in well with retrocausality (but tend to discredit the MWI, since the latter states that the person has many fates!) Charles -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send
Re: Does the plants quantum computations?
Bruno, thanks for the 'vocal' approval of my (logical) position. I could not think of more satisfaction. John M On 2/22/10, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Hi John, On 21 Feb 2010, at 22:11, John Mikes wrote: Bruno, interesting exchange with Stephen. I have a sideline-question: why do you 'refer-to' and repeatedly invoke into your ways of your advanced thinking the NAME (I did not say: concept) of GOD, a noumenon so many times and many occasions mistreated and misused over the millennia - throughout the entire history of mankind? So much baggage is attached to this noumenon that just mention it brings false ideas into most of the minds: positively and negatively. Sometimes pretty strong ones. I am not talking about 'The Old Man in the Nightgown or Allah, or Quetzalcoatl, or the Big Bear, or whatever comes to mind, I talk about the 'idea' of misuse and misidentifications for purposes unlimited, faith and hate, rules and sins, priests and money, power, killing etc. with the unlimited prejudice of unlimited kind. The overwhelming part of humanity is involved in such misconstrued vocabularies. It makes it very hard to stay scientific. The whole point consists in reintroducing the scientific attitude (that is modesty) in theology. And given that there has been a millennium of such study, I prefer to keep the usual vocabulary, if only just to be short. I made clear that I use the notion of God of Plato (truth, transcendent, etc.). It is just a bit better than Universe, ... Note that I have use God in quotes. Sometimes I use what is his name. It is the big unnameable ONE. If we use new terms, people may think it is something else, and they would not introduce the doubt in their (implicit or explicit) theology. If people use a term badly, the best way to help them is to use the same term correctly. If not they believe you are talking on something else, and continue they bad use of the notion behind the term. I guess in Europa, most theologians use the term correctly (except in Churches). I don't think you aspire for the title: The *Priest* of *Arithmetix* (or the *Universal computer*)? No. But I may vindicate the title of (neo-neo-platonist) theologian, or of computer scientist specialized in machine's theology. If theology does not come back in the sphere of the academic doubt, we will continue to err in that field. (Despite some academies can already act like pseudo-religious church, but nothing is perfect). PS. Upon your earlier remark if you accept an artificial brain from the Dr I frowned first on the artificial - is it restricted to man-made or comp-made? (in the latter case: does 'comp' include limitless potentials (limitless, indeed, including possible and impossible?) Then I formulated my negative response upon ANY human description of BRAIN - a construct, while I do not condone a structural (physics? or any other human idea) definition for the mentality - except for our limited capabilities to apply information. So I would not change my (unlimited?) 'mind' for a namable construct however extended. - JM This is probably confirming the fact that you are a self-referentially correct Löbian. None can understand the identity of their soul (Bp p) and their body (or belief on their body) described by Bp. So you are logically right. This is why I insisted that saying yes to the doctor needs an explicit act of faith. Comp *is* a scheme of religion. You have to make an illogical act, and nobody should force you to act in that way. It is a bit like the Gödel sentence: comp entails the non knowledge/believability of comp. It is math, when you study a theology of a simpler (than you) machine. But you need *faith* to lift that theology on yourself. Correct machine will find as hard as ourself the possibility that they are machine (locally finitely describable). Bruno On 2/21/10, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Hi Stephen, On 20 Feb 2010, at 19:52, Stephen P. King wrote: Nature has repeatedly proven herself to be vastly more clever than we can imagine. Quantum coherence is used in photosynthesis by plants to increase the efficiency of photon energy capture by the use of structures that act to hold decoherence off just in the right place for long enough. I will leave it up to the experimentalists to explain the structures. There may be some new evidences. It is good to stay the most open minded possible. He pretends that his trivial model is exact enough to prove that there can be no exploitable coherence effects. I only claim that the brain is exploiting coherence effects at small scales that would allow for increased efficiencies. I am considering an idea different from that of Hameroff based on resonance damping. But Hameroff’s discussions minus the “Objective Reduction” stuff, IMO, is still valid. I can follow you.
RE: problem of size '10
Date: Mon, 22 Feb 2010 11:41:38 -0800 From: jackmal...@yahoo.com Subject: RE: problem of size '10 To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Jesse, how do you access the everything list? I ask because I have not recieved my own posts in my inbox, nor have others such as Bruno replied. I use yahoo email. I may need to use a different method to prevent my posts from getting lost. They do seem to show up on Google groups though. There was never a problem until recently, so I'll see if this one works. I just get the messages in my email--if you want to give a link to one of the emails that didn't show up in your inbox, either from google groups or from http://www.mail-archive.com/everything-list@googlegroups.com/maillist.html , then I can check if that email showed up in my own inbox, since I haven't deleted any of the everything-list emails for a few days. --- On Mon, 2/22/10, Jesse Mazer laserma...@hotmail.com wrote: Hi Jack, to me the idea that counterfactuals would be essential to defining what counts as an implementation has always seemed counterintuitive for reasons separate from the Olympia or movie-graph argument. The thought-experiment I'd like to consider is one where some device is implanted in my brain that passively monitors the activity of a large group of neurons, and only if it finds them firing in some precise prespecified sequence does it activate and stimulate my brain in some way, causing a change in brain activity; otherwise it remains causally inert According to the counterfactual definition of implementations, would the mere presence of this device change my qualia from what they'd be if it wasn't present, even if the neurons required to activate it never actually fire in the correct sequence and the device remains completely inert? That would seem to divorce qualia from behavior in a pretty significant way... The link between qualia and computations is, of course, hard to know anything about. But it seems to me quite likely that qualia would be insensitive to the sort of changes in computations that you are talking about. Such modified computations could give rise to the same (or nearly the same) set of qualia for the 'inert device' runs as unmodified ones would have. I am not saying that this must always be the case, since if you take it too far you could run into Maudlin-type problems, but in many cases it would make sense. OK, so you're suggesting there may not be a one-to-one relationship between distinct observer-moments in the sense of distinct qualia, and distinct computations defined in terms of counterfactuals? Distinct computations might be associated with identical qualia, in other words? What about the reverse--might a single computation be associated with multiple distinct observer-moments with different qualia? If you have time, perhaps you could take a look at my post http://www.mail-archive.com/everything-list@googlegroups.com/msg16244.html where I discussed a vague idea for how one might define isomorphic causal structures that could be used to address the implementation problem, in a way that wouldn't depend on counterfactuals at all You do need counterfactuals to define implementations. Consider the computation c(t+1) = a(t) AND b(t), where a,b,c, are bits. Suppose that a(t),b(t),and c(t) are all true. Without counterfactuals, how would you distinguish the above from another computation such as c(t+1) = a(t)? Even worse, suppose that c(t+1) is true no matter what. a(t) and b(t) happen to be true. Is the above computation implemented? You say Suppose that a(t),b(t),and c(t) are all true, but that's not enough information--the notion of causal structure I was describing involved not just the truth or falsity of propositions, but also the logical relationships between these propositions given the axioms of the system. For example, if we are looking at three propositions A, B, and C in the context of an axiomatic system, we can ask whether or not the axioms (which might represent the laws of physics, or the internal rules of a turing machine) along with propositions A and B (which could represent specific physical facts such as initial conditions, or facts about particular cells on the turing machine's tape at a particular time) can together be used to prove C, or whether they are insufficient to prove C. The causal structure for a given set of propositions could then be defined in terms of all possible combinations of logical implications for those propositions, like this: 1. Axioms + A imply B: true or false?2. Axioms + A imply C: true or false?3. Axioms + B imply A: true or false?4. Axioms + B imply C: true or false?5. Axioms + C imply A: true or false?6. Axioms + C imply B: true or false?7. Axioms + A + B imply C: true or false?8. Axioms + A + C imply B: true or false?9. Axioms + B + C imply A: true or false? For example, one
RE: Many-worlds vs. Many-Minds
-Original Message- From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-l...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Charles Sent: Monday, February 22, 2010 2:20 PM To: Everything List Subject: Re: Many-worlds vs. Many-Minds On Feb 22, 8:12 pm, rmiller rmil...@legis.com wrote: From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-l...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Jason Resch Sent: Sunday, February 21, 2010 11:38 PM To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: Many-worlds vs. Many-Minds Huw Price suggests that our view of causality is strongly influenced by the way we're embedded / oriented in space-time. He points out in Time's Arrow and Archimedes' Point that the laws of physics are almost entirely time-symmetric, with the result that (for example) you can't tell which way up a Feynman diagram is - either time-orientation is equally valid. Perhaps, but it seems to me that thermodynamics and entropy are the critical factors. If we accept what the laws of physics appear to say, that nature is for the most part indifferent to the direction of time, this implies that quite a few things are a lot less strange than we think. Delayed-choice and ERP experiments become trivial to explain, for example, once we stop thinking of the particles involved as similar to macroscopic objects with a clear arrow of time, and assume their state is equally constrained by past and future boundary conditions (e.g. the emitter and detector). This view is similar to Cramer's Transactional Interpretation and Wheeler-Feynman Absorber Theory, but makes them both look unnecessarily complicated, since it doesn't require any new physics, it merely suggests we take the existing physics at face value (as Hugh Everett III once did, with similarly interesting results). Agree in part. It seems as though the same processes that result in the laws of thermodynamics/entropy may operate similarly across MW. Price's view allows us to focus on the real mystery of time, which is not why it appears to flow in one direction, but why the region of space-time near the Big Bang was in a state of very low entropy. I have a suspicion that the answer is something to do with the shape of space-time (but I haven't yet been able to get my head around how this connects with breaking eggs and melting ice...) Admittedly that only pushes the why back a step but that is still progress: rather than attempting to explain a non-existent preference for one time direction that we thought was embedded somehow in the laws of physics, we now need to explain why the universe has a particular boundary condition. (Possibly Tegmark's MUH comes in here?) Max Tegmark is one of the big names in this--for good reason. But the guys who may have first opened the hatch were Univ. of Ariz astronomer Bill Tifft http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_G._Tifft who discovered evidence for redshift quantization, and Helsinki physicist Ari Lehto who first proposed the concept of 3D time. I think we'll look back on their work as seminal and as far-reaching as the Hunter College guy who (in 1972) first proposed that Big Bang started from a vacuum fluctuation zero event. Helmut Schmidt's experiments appear to (purportedly) involve psychokinesis; I have a feeling that I've read various attempts to debunk these claims in the Skeptical Enquirer but unfortunately my subscription lapsed some years ago, and I can't recall the details. Schmidt took a lot of heat for his tendency to frame the experiment in the worst possible terms. But unlike many others, his experiments can--and have-- been replicated. Problem is, no one is sure what it means to influence the outcome of an experiment after the fact. It does sound like an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence to back it up. The website I looked at was a mass of statistics that I didn't really follow, unfortunately. My own rules of thumb: 1. Follow Fischer: if it's p0.05 (chance of random is 1 in 20) then it's good. And. 2. Avoid meta-analysis. As for the role of consciousness in all of this, I believe some answers have already been found-back in 1978 when Stanford Clinical Psychologist Ernest R. Hilgard discovered the Hidden Observer phenomenon. Seems there's an executive function in each of us that comes to the fore only under extremely deep (60+) hypnosis. His book on the subject, Divided Consciousness is fascinating reading. Someone familiar with Many Worlds theory will come away with the impression that there evolved as a mechanism to keep track of the local many-world space we inhabit. This is a facinating idea, although Hidden Observer theory is still contraversial (since the experiments involved deep hypnosis, presumably the results may have been the result of suggestion by the experimenters?). There's always that possibility, but much of this apparently has been double-blinded. If you can find a Finnish translator, I suggest you look into the work by the (rather
Re: Many-worlds vs. Many-Minds
On Feb 23, 6:08 pm, rmiller rmil...@legis.com wrote: Huw Price suggests that our view of causality is strongly influenced by the way we're embedded / oriented in space-time. He points out in Time's Arrow and Archimedes' Point that the laws of physics are almost entirely time-symmetric, with the result that (for example) you can't tell which way up a Feynman diagram is - either time-orientation is equally valid. Perhaps, but it seems to me that thermodynamics and entropy are the critical factors. Needless to say, Price devotes a lot of space to these topics. The crucial point about the 2nd law (2L) is that it is based on time- symmetric molecular collisions (these were considered time symmetric at the time the 2L was forumated, using Newtonian mechanics, but can be equally well seen as time-symmetric if you map the paths of the quarks etc with, for example, Feynman diagrams). There was quite a bit of argument at the time about how Boltzmann obtained a time-asymmetric result using time-symmetric laws, and the place this was smuggled in was eventually found to be the assumption that the velocities of molecules were uncorrelated prior to collision, but were correlated afterwards. But if we are assuming that collision are time symmetric, this is a false assumption - there is no more a priori reason to assume the velocities were correlated after a collision than that they were before it. Hence, the 2L assumes the very time assymmetyr that it purports to show, and in reality only pushes the problem back to why molecular velocities are correlated in one time direction, but not the other one - and that can be traced back, through the intervening processes, to the Big Bang, or at least very close to it. If we accept what the laws of physics appear to say, that nature is for the most part indifferent to the direction of time, this implies that quite a few things are a lot less strange than we think. Delayed-choice and ERP experiments become trivial to explain, for example, once we stop thinking of the particles involved as similar to macroscopic objects with a clear arrow of time, and assume their state is equally constrained by past and future boundary conditions (e.g. the emitter and detector). This view is similar to Cramer's Transactional Interpretation and Wheeler-Feynman Absorber Theory, but makes them both look unnecessarily complicated, since it doesn't require any new physics, it merely suggests we take the existing physics at face value (as Hugh Everett III once did, with similarly interesting results). Agree in part. It seems as though the same processes that result in the laws of thermodynamics/entropy may operate similarly across MW. Time-symmetry does appear to make a lot of quantum weirdness as less weird. To take the ERP experiment, there is no need to assume any action at a distance or FTL effects if we allow the state of the measuring apparatus to contribute to the state of the emitter. (Also, if we aren't going to accept time symmetry, there is an explanatory burden as to why the apparent time-symmetry isn't real.) Price's view allows us to focus on the real mystery of time, which is not why it appears to flow in one direction, but why the region of space-time near the Big Bang was in a state of very low entropy. I have a suspicion that the answer is something to do with the shape of space-time (but I haven't yet been able to get my head around how this connects with breaking eggs and melting ice...) Admittedly that only pushes the why back a step but that is still progress: rather than attempting to explain a non-existent preference for one time direction that we thought was embedded somehow in the laws of physics, we now need to explain why the universe has a particular boundary condition. (Possibly Tegmark's MUH comes in here?) Max Tegmark is one of the big names in this--for good reason. But the guys who may have first opened the hatch were Univ. of Ariz astronomer Bill Tifft http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_G._Tifft who discovered evidence for redshift quantization, and Helsinki physicist Ari Lehto who first proposed the concept of 3D time. I think we'll look back on their work as seminal and as far-reaching as the Hunter College guy who (in 1972) first proposed that Big Bang started from a vacuum fluctuation zero event. Thanks, that sounds like some fascinating stuff which I will look into as soon as I have time! Helmut Schmidt's experiments appear to (purportedly) involve psychokinesis; I have a feeling that I've read various attempts to debunk these claims in the Skeptical Enquirer but unfortunately my subscription lapsed some years ago, and I can't recall the details. Schmidt took a lot of heat for his tendency to frame the experiment in the worst possible terms. But unlike many others, his experiments can--and have-- been replicated. Problem is, no one is sure what it means to influence the outcome of an experiment after the
Re: On the computability of consciousness
On Sun, Feb 21, 2010 at 8:50 PM, David Nyman david.ny...@gmail.com wrote: On 21 February 2010 23:25, Rex Allen rexallen...@gmail.com wrote: So we know 1-p directly, while we only infer the existence of 3-p. However, you seem to start from the assumption that 1-p is in the weaker subordinate position of needing to be explained in terms of 3-p, while 3-p is implicitly taken to be unproblematic, fundamental, and needing no explanation. You're right that I'm starting from this assumption, but only because it is indeed the default assumption in the sciences, and indeed in the general consciousness, and my intention was to illustrate some of the consequences of this assumption that are often waved away or simply not acknowledged. So let's assume that an independently existing material world exists and fully explains what we observe and also THAT we observe. If this reality is deterministic, then what we experience is strictly a result of the world's initial conditions and the laws that govern it's change over time. Which means that what we can know about reality is also strictly a result of the initial conditions and causal laws, since we only learn about the world through our experiences. What would explain the all-important initial conditions and causal laws? Nothing, right? They just would be whatever they were, for no reason. If they had a reason, that reason would be part of the material world, not something separate from and preceding it. In this case there would be no reason to believe that what we experienced revealed anything about the *true* underlying causal structure. It could be like a dream or The Matrix, where what is experienced is completely different than the cause of the experience. Even if what we experienced did reflect the true underlying nature of what caused the experience...what would the significance of this be, really? The future is set, all we do is wait for it to be revealed to our experience. An indeterministic physical world is no more helpful. Here, we would seem to have a range of scenarios. At one end is pure indeterminism...where there is absolutely no connection between one instant and the next. Things just happen, randomly, for no reason. No events are causally connected in any way. If transitions between particular arrangements of matter is what gives rise to conscious experience, then given enough random events every possible experience would eventually seem to be generated. However, if any of these experiences revealed anything about the true nature of reality, this would be purely coincidental. At the other end of the range is a nearly deterministic system where only on very rare occasions or in specific circumstances would the orderly sequence of cause and effect give way to some sort of tightly constrained but completely unpredictable indeterministic state change...which would then alter in an orderly way the subsequent deterministic behavior of the physical world as the consequences of this random event spread out in a ripple of cause-and-effect. So our experiences would be completely determined by the initial state of the world, plus the causal laws with their tolerance for occasional randomness, PLUS the history of actual random state changes. This doesn't seem to provide any improvement over the purely deterministic option. Each random occurrence is just another brute fact, like the initial state or the particular causal laws that govern the evolution of the system (allowing for occasional random events). The random occurrences don't add anything, and actually could be just taken as special cases of the causal laws. This, ISTM, is a paradoxical, or at the very least an extremely puzzling, state of affairs, and it was to promote discussion of these specific problems that I started the thread. Is it a paradox, or a reductio ad absurdum against the idea that our perceptions are caused by an independently existing external reality? What does introducing an independently existing physical world buy us? So we have our orderly conscious experiences and we want to explain them. To do this, we need some context to place these experiences in. So we postulate the existence of an orderly external universe that “causes” our experiences. But then we have to explain what caused this orderly external universe, and also the particular initial conditions and causal laws that result in what we observe. So this is basically Kant's first antinomy of pure reason. Either there is a first cause, which itself is uncaused, OR there is an infinite chain of prior causes stretching infinitely far into the past. But why this particular infinite chain as opposed to some other? In fact, why our particular infinite chain of prior causes or first cause instead of Nothing existing at all? It seems that either way (infinite chain or first cause), at the end you are left with only one reasonable conclusion: There is no reason that things are this way. They
RE: Many-worlds vs. Many-Minds
Date: Mon, 22 Feb 2010 21:42:54 -0800 Subject: Re: Many-worlds vs. Many-Minds From: charlesrobertgood...@gmail.com To: everything-list@googlegroups.com On Feb 23, 6:08 pm, rmiller rmil...@legis.com wrote: If we accept what the laws of physics appear to say, that nature is for the most part indifferent to the direction of time, this implies that quite a few things are a lot less strange than we think. Delayed-choice and ERP experiments become trivial to explain, for example, once we stop thinking of the particles involved as similar to macroscopic objects with a clear arrow of time, and assume their state is equally constrained by past and future boundary conditions (e.g. the emitter and detector). This view is similar to Cramer's Transactional Interpretation and Wheeler-Feynman Absorber Theory, but makes them both look unnecessarily complicated, since it doesn't require any new physics, it merely suggests we take the existing physics at face value (as Hugh Everett III once did, with similarly interesting results). Agree in part. It seems as though the same processes that result in the laws of thermodynamics/entropy may operate similarly across MW. Time-symmetry does appear to make a lot of quantum weirdness as less weird. To take the ERP experiment, there is no need to assume any action at a distance or FTL effects if we allow the state of the measuring apparatus to contribute to the state of the emitter. (Also, if we aren't going to accept time symmetry, there is an explanatory burden as to why the apparent time-symmetry isn't real.) Having read the book a while ago, my memory is that Price offered this idea as a conceptual argument for how one *might* explain things using the EPR experiment, but I don't think he ever would have said that this idea makes delayed-choice and EPR trivial to explain--to really explain them, you'd have to provide a quantitative theory showing the precise connection between these ideas about causality and the results of those experiments, and Price didn't have one. He suggested that it might be fruitful to look for a hidden-variables theory where things that happen to particles at later times can affect the values of hidden variables at earlier times (in contrast to Cramer's transactional interpretation which is *not* a hidden-variables theory as I understand it), but he didn't have a detailed theory of this kind to offer. Such a theory would also have to explain why we are not able to use things like the delayed choice quantum eraser to actually send information backwards in time--for example, we can't look at the screen behind a double-slit and determine whether the which-path information for the particles that hit the screen will in the future be erased or preserved (see the last two paragraphs of the section 'The experiment' at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_choice_quantum_eraser#The_experiment for a summary of why this doesn't work). Another thing to keep in mind is that Newtonian laws dealing with things like gravity and elastic collisions are time-symmetric too, as are Maxwell's laws of classical electromagnetism, but you don't see anything analogous to the EPR experiment or the delayed choice experiment in classical physics (including relativity without quantum theory). So merely pointing to the time-symmetry of QM doesn't in itself explain much about these phenomena. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@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: Many-worlds vs. Many-Minds
-Original Message- From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-l...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Charles Sent: Monday, February 22, 2010 11:43 PM To: Everything List Subject: Re: Many-worlds vs. Many-Minds Good point, but among the many fates there is always the optimal path. Perhaps evolution resulted in a mechanism able to visualize all of the possible (MW) paths and choose the most advantageous one? There's certainly enough evidence to suggest that in moments of crisis, some of us are afforded advice from an elevated perspective. Maybe what some describe as guardian angels are merely our hidden observers, directing us in a path through the multiworlds? Unfortunately, given the walls between physics, philosophy and psychology--it's unlikely that we're going to see any unifying theories any time soon. This is something I'd really like to believe! (I'm trying to write a story which is based on this sort of premise, as it happens :-) A colleague of mine in a previous job believed he'd had experiences that illustrated this principle, and he certainly sounded convincing, although only anecdotal of course. I certainly think we still have a lot to learn about the mind and consciousness (always assuming it's possible to do so). I think there is the possibility that one can experimentally test whether consciousness includes links between the real world and the possible parallel ones: set up a double-blind experiment where 100 subjects are given 5 tries to predict the appearance of any of 20 possible figures. However, the machine is rigged to show only (say) ten--the rest are actually impossible to show (and there's no repeat.) Run the test, then score how many predicted the possible figures vs how many predicted those figures that weren't possible. The hypothesis: the predicted possible: scores will dominate over the impossible ones--thus suggesting that knowledge a knowledge of worlds where the potential objects showed up on the screen. RM -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@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. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@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: On the computability of consciousness
On Sun, Feb 21, 2010 at 9:52 PM, Brent Meeker meeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: Rex Allen wrote: On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 1:07 PM, David Nyman david.ny...@gmail.com wrote: The only rationale for adducing the additional existence of any 1-p experience in a 3-p world is the raw fact that we possess it (or seem to, according to some). We can't compute the existence of any 1-p experiential component of a 3-p process on purely 3-p grounds. It seems to me that what we know is our subjective conscious experience. From this, we infer the existence of ourselves as individuals who persist through time, as well as the independent existence of an external world that in some way causes our conscious experience. I think it's fruitless to argue about which is fundamental. How are you defining fruitless? What sort of fruit are you after? And why? I agree that the discussion isn't likely to lead to better ramjets, or cures for terrible diseases, BUT...those aren't my goals. Why would they be? To paraphrase Hume, reason is the slave of the passions. But what explains the passions? Obviously we have direct 1-p experience; but also that there are differences between persons. So I only know my own experiences. I infer the existence of experiences which aren't mine. I have the experience of interacting with others who seem conscious, but this happens in my dreams as well, where presumably those dream-people have no experiences of their own. However, my experiences certainly exist. And even if they are fundamental and uncaused, why would they be the only ones? So if we concentrate on the intersubjective agreement between different 1-p reports we find that we can make some successful predictive models of that 3-p world. What does the experience of making and verifying predictions mean in a deterministic world? What does it mean in a random world? (see my previous email to David) Why would the world be the kind of place where we have the ability to build predictive models, and where these models would actually be successful? At one time there was an assumption that the 3-p world could be modeled as a lot of agents, i.e. beings with 1-p experiences. But that turned out be an impediment and it worked better to model the 3-p world as impersonal and mathematical. So naturally one attractive strategy is to keep pushing what has worked in the past. Regardless of the true nature of reality, taking what has seemed to worked in the past as a guide seems like as good a strategy as any other. There's no reason not to try taking 1-p experiences as the basis of your ontology, the positivists tried to put physics on that basis, but so far it seems the way to make progress has been to treat 1-p as basic but fallible and quickly move to an external reality that is more consistent. I certainly agree that using 3-p as a calculational device seems to be the way to proceed when having experiences of designing ramjets or trying to start uncooperative cars. BUT. SO. HOWEVER... Either conscious experience is caused, or it's not. If it's caused, then either determinism is true, or it's not. It seems possible to grasp the implications of all 3 resulting scenarios...and to me they all lead to the same ultimate conclusion. There is no reason for the way things are. They just are this way. You can describe the way things are (or seem to be) within the world, and you can use these descriptions to construct plausible narratives about how things within the world seem to be related to to each other. But there is no explanation for the world's (apparent) existence or why it is the way it is. Which to me actually seems like the answer. The answer is: there is no answer. BUT...no one else seems to agree, so maybe I'm missing something. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@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: On the computability of consciousness
Rex Allen wrote: On Sun, Feb 21, 2010 at 8:50 PM, David Nyman david.ny...@gmail.com wrote: On 21 February 2010 23:25, Rex Allen rexallen...@gmail.com wrote: So we know 1-p directly, while we only infer the existence of 3-p. However, you seem to start from the assumption that 1-p is in the weaker subordinate position of needing to be explained in terms of 3-p, while 3-p is implicitly taken to be unproblematic, fundamental, and needing no explanation. You're right that I'm starting from this assumption, but only because it is indeed the default assumption in the sciences, and indeed in the general consciousness, and my intention was to illustrate some of the consequences of this assumption that are often waved away or simply not acknowledged. So let's assume that an independently existing material world exists and fully explains what we observe and also THAT we observe. If this reality is deterministic, then what we experience is strictly a result of the world's initial conditions and the laws that govern it's change over time. Which means that what we can know about reality is also strictly a result of the initial conditions and causal laws, since we only learn about the world through our experiences. What would explain the all-important initial conditions and causal laws? Nothing, right? They just would be whatever they were, for no reason. If they had a reason, that reason would be part of the material world, not something separate from and preceding it. In this case there would be no reason to believe that what we experienced revealed anything about the *true* underlying causal structure. It could be like a dream or The Matrix, where what is experienced is completely different than the cause of the experience. Even if what we experienced did reflect the true underlying nature of what caused the experience...what would the significance of this be, really? The future is set, all we do is wait for it to be revealed to our experience. An indeterministic physical world is no more helpful. Here, we would seem to have a range of scenarios. At one end is pure indeterminism...where there is absolutely no connection between one instant and the next. Things just happen, randomly, for no reason. No events are causally connected in any way. If transitions between particular arrangements of matter is what gives rise to conscious experience, then given enough random events every possible experience would eventually seem to be generated. However, if any of these experiences revealed anything about the true nature of reality, this would be purely coincidental. At the other end of the range is a nearly deterministic system where only on very rare occasions or in specific circumstances would the orderly sequence of cause and effect give way to some sort of tightly constrained but completely unpredictable indeterministic state change...which would then alter in an orderly way the subsequent deterministic behavior of the physical world as the consequences of this random event spread out in a ripple of cause-and-effect. So our experiences would be completely determined by the initial state of the world, plus the causal laws with their tolerance for occasional randomness, PLUS the history of actual random state changes. This doesn't seem to provide any improvement over the purely deterministic option. Each random occurrence is just another brute fact, like the initial state or the particular causal laws that govern the evolution of the system (allowing for occasional random events). The random occurrences don't add anything, and actually could be just taken as special cases of the causal laws. This, ISTM, is a paradoxical, or at the very least an extremely puzzling, state of affairs, and it was to promote discussion of these specific problems that I started the thread. Is it a paradox, or a reductio ad absurdum against the idea that our perceptions are caused by an independently existing external reality? What does introducing an independently existing physical world buy us? So we have our orderly conscious experiences and we want to explain them. To do this, we need some context to place these experiences in. So we postulate the existence of an orderly external universe that “causes” our experiences. But then we have to explain what caused this orderly external universe, and also the particular initial conditions and causal laws that result in what we observe. So this is basically Kant's first antinomy of pure reason. Either there is a first cause, which itself is uncaused, OR there is an infinite chain of prior causes stretching infinitely far into the past. But why this particular infinite chain as opposed to some other? In fact, why our particular infinite chain of prior causes or first cause instead of Nothing existing at all? It seems that either way (infinite chain or first cause), at the end you are left with only one reasonable conclusion: There is no
Re: Many-worlds vs. Many-Minds
On Feb 23, 7:13 pm, Jesse Mazer laserma...@hotmail.com wrote: Having read the book a while ago, my memory is that Price offered this idea as a conceptual argument for how one *might* explain things using the EPR experiment, but I don't think he ever would have said that this idea makes delayed-choice and EPR trivial to explain--to really explain them, you'd have to provide a quantitative theory showing the precise connection between these ideas about causality and the results of those experiments, and Price didn't have one. it's true that Price is not a physicist, so he has to rely on others to provide a theoretical underpinning, or not as the case may be. if understand him correctly, and I'm quite willing to admit that I may have failed to do so, his suggestion is that the physical theory already exists, and is the standard formulation of quantum mechanics. My use of trivial was only intended to indicate that using his approach allows these phenomena to be explained using standard quantum theory, while most other explanations require some sort of extra input - faster than light signalling, and so on. (I believe the MWI doesn't require any extras to explain EPR?) When you mention hidden variables, I assume you mean that particles are in a definite state at a given time, rather than undecided until measured ? If so, then I believe that is (supposedly) an outcome of Price's approach, assuming I've understood him correctly. I don't think there is a problem explaining why you can't send information back in time. Surely to obtain a useful back-in-time signal from the system would require some form of amplification that would also have to operate backwards in time? But Price is only suggesting that time- symmetry is significant within a given quantum interaction; it can't be ampified. Another thing to keep in mind is that Newtonian laws dealing with things like gravity and elastic collisions are time-symmetric too, as are Maxwell's laws of classical electromagnetism, but you don't see anything analogous to the EPR experiment or the delayed choice experiment in classical physics (including relativity without quantum theory). So merely pointing to the time-symmetry of QM doesn't in itself explain much about these phenomena. I wouldn't say that Price is merely pointing to the time-symmetry. He is suggesting that, given the time symmetry that most physicists agree exists, then there are certain outcomes we should expect in systems where the information content is very limited, i.e. to quantum states, and that these seem to match those we observe (e.g. Bell's inequality, etc). Having read any number of very complex attempts to explain why there is an arrow of time given the apparent indifference of most physical laws, this seems to me to be a line of enquiry that is at least worth pursuing. Charles -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@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: On the computability of consciousness
Rex Allen wrote: On Sun, Feb 21, 2010 at 9:52 PM, Brent Meeker meeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: Rex Allen wrote: On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 1:07 PM, David Nyman david.ny...@gmail.com wrote: The only rationale for adducing the additional existence of any 1-p experience in a 3-p world is the raw fact that we possess it (or seem to, according to some). We can't compute the existence of any 1-p experiential component of a 3-p process on purely 3-p grounds. It seems to me that what we know is our subjective conscious experience. From this, we infer the existence of ourselves as individuals who persist through time, as well as the independent existence of an external world that in some way causes our conscious experience. I think it's fruitless to argue about which is fundamental. How are you defining fruitless? What sort of fruit are you after? And why? I agree that the discussion isn't likely to lead to better ramjets, or cures for terrible diseases, BUT...those aren't my goals. Why would they be? To paraphrase Hume, reason is the slave of the passions. But what explains the passions? Evolution. Obviously we have direct 1-p experience; but also that there are differences between persons. So I only know my own experiences. I infer the existence of experiences which aren't mine. I have the experience of interacting with others who seem conscious, but this happens in my dreams as well, where presumably those dream-people have no experiences of their own. However, my experiences certainly exist. And even if they are fundamental and uncaused, why would they be the only ones? So if we concentrate on the intersubjective agreement between different 1-p reports we find that we can make some successful predictive models of that 3-p world. What does the experience of making and verifying predictions mean in a deterministic world? What does it mean in a random world? (see my previous email to David) Why would the world be the kind of place where we have the ability to build predictive models, and where these models would actually be successful? At one time there was an assumption that the 3-p world could be modeled as a lot of agents, i.e. beings with 1-p experiences. But that turned out be an impediment and it worked better to model the 3-p world as impersonal and mathematical. So naturally one attractive strategy is to keep pushing what has worked in the past. Regardless of the true nature of reality, taking what has seemed to worked in the past as a guide seems like as good a strategy as any other. There's no reason not to try taking 1-p experiences as the basis of your ontology, the positivists tried to put physics on that basis, but so far it seems the way to make progress has been to treat 1-p as basic but fallible and quickly move to an external reality that is more consistent. I certainly agree that using 3-p as a calculational device seems to be the way to proceed when having experiences of designing ramjets or trying to start uncooperative cars. BUT. SO. HOWEVER... Either conscious experience is caused, or it's not. If it's caused, then either determinism is true, or it's not. What does caused mean? One of Aristotles four causes? all of them? It seems possible to grasp the implications of all 3 resulting scenarios...and to me they all lead to the same ultimate conclusion. There is no reason for the way things are. They just are this way. You can describe the way things are (or seem to be) within the world, and you can use these descriptions to construct plausible narratives about how things within the world seem to be related to to each other. But there is no explanation for the world's (apparent) existence or why it is the way it is. You don't know that there's no explanation - only that we don't have one (at least one that satisfies you). Which to me actually seems like the answer. The answer is: there is no answer. BUT...no one else seems to agree, so maybe I'm missing something. That there may be unanswerable questions (which seems almost certain) doesn't imply that there are no more answerable questions. If we discover that string theory provides an integrated model of QM and GR we will have answered an interesting question, even if it's not the answer to everything. I might again point to the virtues of circular explanations - if they are wide enough to take everything in. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@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: Many-worlds vs. Many-Minds
On Feb 23, 7:57 pm, Brent Meeker meeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: Retro causation solves the EPR problem (i.e. provides a local explanation of the correlations without hidden variables). See Vic Stenger's book Timeless Quantum in which he uses this kind of explanation to good effect. The problem is that some things, like the radiation arrow of time and inverse beta decay seem hard to fit in. Price has done extensive work on the radiation arrow, but I haven't read it for a while and can't recall offhand what conclusions he reaches. Is inverse beta decay an example of T-symmetry breaking, like neutral kaon decay (IIRC) ? If so, it won't fit into his scheme! Charles -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@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: Many-worlds vs. Many-Minds
Jesse Mazer wrote: Date: Mon, 22 Feb 2010 21:42:54 -0800 Subject: Re: Many-worlds vs. Many-Minds From: charlesrobertgood...@gmail.com To: everything-list@googlegroups.com On Feb 23, 6:08 pm, rmiller rmil...@legis.com wrote: If we accept what the laws of physics appear to say, that nature is for the most part indifferent to the direction of time, this implies that quite a few things are a lot less strange than we think. Delayed-choice and ERP experiments become trivial to explain, for example, once we stop thinking of the particles involved as similar to macroscopic objects with a clear arrow of time, and assume their state is equally constrained by past and future boundary conditions (e.g. the emitter and detector). This view is similar to Cramer's Transactional Interpretation and Wheeler-Feynman Absorber Theory, but makes them both look unnecessarily complicated, since it doesn't require any new physics, it merely suggests we take the existing physics at face value (as Hugh Everett III once did, with similarly interesting results). Agree in part. It seems as though the same processes that result in the laws of thermodynamics/entropy may operate similarly across MW. Time-symmetry does appear to make a lot of quantum weirdness as less weird. To take the ERP experiment, there is no need to assume any action at a distance or FTL effects if we allow the state of the measuring apparatus to contribute to the state of the emitter. (Also, if we aren't going to accept time symmetry, there is an explanatory burden as to why the apparent time-symmetry isn't real.) Having read the book a while ago, my memory is that Price offered this idea as a conceptual argument for how one *might* explain things using the EPR experiment, but I don't think he ever would have said that this idea makes delayed-choice and EPR trivial to explain--to really explain them, you'd have to provide a quantitative theory showing the precise connection between these ideas about causality and the results of those experiments, and Price didn't have one. He suggested that it might be fruitful to look for a hidden-variables theory where things that happen to particles at later times can affect the values of hidden variables at earlier times (in contrast to Cramer's transactional interpretation which is *not* a hidden-variables theory as I understand it), but he didn't have a detailed theory of this kind to offer. Retro causation solves the EPR problem (i.e. provides a local explanation of the correlations without hidden variables). See Vic Stenger's book Timeless Quantum in which he uses this kind of explanation to good effect. The problem is that some things, like the radiation arrow of time and inverse beta decay seem hard to fit in. Brent Such a theory would also have to explain why we are not able to use things like the delayed choice quantum eraser to actually send information backwards in time--for example, we can't look at the screen behind a double-slit and determine whether the which-path information for the particles that hit the screen will in the future be erased or preserved (see the last two paragraphs of the section 'The experiment' at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_choice_quantum_eraser#The_experiment for a summary of why this doesn't work). Another thing to keep in mind is that Newtonian laws dealing with things like gravity and elastic collisions are time-symmetric too, as are Maxwell's laws of classical electromagnetism, but you don't see anything analogous to the EPR experiment or the delayed choice experiment in classical physics (including relativity without quantum theory). So merely pointing to the time-symmetry of QM doesn't in itself explain much about these phenomena. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@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. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@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: Many-worlds vs. Many-Minds
Charles wrote: On Feb 23, 7:57 pm, Brent Meeker meeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: Retro causation solves the EPR problem (i.e. provides a local explanation of the correlations without hidden variables). See Vic Stenger's book Timeless Quantum in which he uses this kind of explanation to good effect. The problem is that some things, like the radiation arrow of time and inverse beta decay seem hard to fit in. Price has done extensive work on the radiation arrow, but I haven't read it for a while and can't recall offhand what conclusions he reaches. Is inverse beta decay an example of T-symmetry breaking, like neutral kaon decay (IIRC) ? If so, it won't fit into his scheme! Charles No, it's an anti-neutrino and an electron colliding with a proton to produce a neutron (the inverse of beta decay). But an electron approaching a proton interacts via the EM field and a photon will be emitted - yet, in the beta decay no photon need be absorbed. I think it's an example of the radiation arrow of time making a time-reversed process impossible - or maybe just vanishingly improbable. Bruce Kellet has written a paper about these problems, see pp 35. http://members.optusnet.com.au/bhkellett/radasymmetry.pdf Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@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.
