COMP, MGA and Time
Hi Folks, I have been mulling over my conversations with Bruno, Joseph and ACW in the EVERYTHING list and have a question. In SANE04 we read the following: For any given precise running computation associated to some inner experience, you can modify the device in such a way that the amount of physical activity involved is arbitrarily low, and even null for dreaming experience which has no inputs and no outputs. Now, having suppressed that physical activity present in the running computation, the machine will only be accidentally correct. It will be correct only for that precise computation, with unchanged environment. If it is changed a little bit, it will make the machine running computation no more relatively correct. But then, Maudlin ingenuously showed that counterfactual correctness can be recovered, by adding non active devices which will be triggered only if some (counterfactual) change would appear in the environment. Now this shows that any inner experience can be associated with an arbitrary low (even null) physical activity, and this in keeping counterfactual correctness. And that is absurd with the conjunction of both comp and materialism. Setting aside the problem of concurrency for now, how is it that we are jumping over the difference between infinitely slow or even adiabatic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adiabatic_process physical process and null physical process? I may be not even wrong here, but in math isn't it true that there is a big difference between a quantity being arbitrarily small and a quantity being zero? I suspect that the folks in FOAR List that have been discussing information and entropy might have a thought on this. Onward! Stephen -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Free Floating entities
On Sat, Feb 11, 2012 at 4:31 PM, acw a...@lavabit.com wrote: On 2/10/2012 14:01, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/9/2012 3:40 PM, acw wrote: Another way to think of it would be in the terms of the Church Turing Thesis, where you expect that a computation (in the Turing sense) to have result and that result is independent of all your implementations, such a result not being changeable in any way or by anything - that's usually what I imagine by Platonia. It is a bit mystical, but I find it less mystical than requiring a magical physical substrate (even more after MGA) - to me the platonic implementation seems to be the simplest possible explanation. If you think it's a bad explanation that introduces some magic, I'll respond that the primitively physical version introduces even more magic. Making truth changeable or temporal seems to me to be a much stronger, much more magical than what I'm considering: that arithmetical sentences do have a truth value, regardless if we know it or not. [SPK] I am only asking that we put the abstract world of mathematics on an even footing with the physical world, I am _not_ asking for a primitive physical world. I will say again, just because a computation is independent for any particular implementation that I, you or any one else is capable of creating does not eliminate the necessity that somehow it must be implemented physically. Universality of computation is NOT the severing of computation from its physical implementability. This is not the same kind of claim as we see of the ultrafinitist and/or constructivist; it is just a realistic demand that ideas cannot be free floating entities. We cannot believe in free floating numbers any more than we can believe in disembodies spirits and ghosts. What is a non-primitive physical world, what is it based on? 'Existence'? What is that, sounds primitive to me. If we accept 'existence' as primitive, how does math and physical arise out of it? It seems so general to me that I can't imagine anything at all about it, to the point of being a God-like non-theory (although I can sympathize with it, just that it cannot be used as a theory because it's too general. We'll probably have to settle with something which we can discuss, such as a part of math.) Why is 'physical' implementation so important? Those free floating numbers could very well represent the structures that we and our universe happen to be and their truths may very well sometimes be this thing we call 'consciousness'. As for 'spirits' - how does this 'consciousness' thing know which body to follow and observe? How does it correlate that it must correlate to the physical states present in the brain? How does it know to appear in a robotic body or VR environment if someone decides to upload their mind (sometime in the far future)? What's this continuity of consciousness thing? Granted that some particular mathematical structure could represent the physical, I'm not sure it makes sense gran the physical any more meaning than that which we(our bodies) observe as being part of. Hi ACW, A non-primitive world would be a world that is defined by a set of communications between observers, however the observers are defined. The notion of a cyclical gossiping as used in graph theory gives a nice model of how this would work and it even shows a nice toy model of thermodynamic entropy. See #58 here http://books.google.com/**books?id=SbZKSZ-1qrwCpg=PA32** lpg=PA32dq=cyclical+**gossiping+graph+theorysource=** blots=NAvDjdj7u-sig=**kk03XrGRBzdVWI09bh_-yrACM64**hl=ensa=Xei=** jCI1T8TpM4O4tweVgMG_Agsqi=2**ved=0CC8Q6AEwAg#v=onepageqf=**falsehttp://books.google.com/books?id=SbZKSZ-1qrwCpg=PA32lpg=PA32dq=cyclical+gossiping+graph+theorysource=blots=NAvDjdj7u-sig=kk03XrGRBzdVWI09bh_-yrACM64hl=ensa=Xei=jCI1T8TpM4O4tweVgMG_Agsqi=2ved=0CC8Q6AEwAg#v=onepageqf=false for a statement of this idea. Also see http://mathworld.wolfram.com/**Gossiping.htmlhttp://mathworld.wolfram.com/Gossiping.html A model which allows communication might be nicer to look at, but I don't see why it's *required*. I also don't see how it predicts different things than a model which just has a 'shared computation'/'shared substrate' for each observer? Onward! Stephen RDR: Not sure if this is helpful, but a possible hypothetical communications model is the 3D 10^90 per cc set Calabi-Yau Compact Manifolds of string theory that are purported to control all physical interactions as they each contain the laws of physics; and collectively they may manifest consciousness as well as perhaps Platonia and cyclic gossiping as their variable properties across the universe may manifest a Peano arithmetic. Regarding communication each spherical element/manifold instantly maps all the other manifolds and all physical phenomena to its interior. http://vixra.org/abs/1101.0044 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
Re: Free Floating entities
On 2/13/2012 9:16 AM, Richard Ruquist wrote: RDR: Not sure if this is helpful, but a possible hypothetical communications model is the 3D 10^90 per cc set Calabi-Yau Compact Manifolds of string theory that are purported to control all physical interactions as they each contain the laws of physics; and collectively they may manifest consciousness as well as perhaps Platonia and cyclic gossiping as their variable properties across the universe may manifest a Peano arithmetic. Regarding communication each spherical element/manifold instantly maps all the other manifolds and all physical phenomena to its interior. http://vixra.org/abs/1101.0044 -- Hi Richard, I am highly skeptical of string theory because of its Landscape problem, the lack of observational evidence of super-partner particles, the fact that it is not back-ground independent and its underlying philosophical assumptions. All that aside, I will take a look at the referenced paper. Onward! Stephen -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: COMP theology
On 13 February 2012 01:18, Joseph Knight joseph.9...@gmail.com wrote: Yes it is, with the Movie Graph Argument. The MGA shows that assuming COMP, consciousness cannot be explained by appealing to any physical system. Not even a little. Whereas I would concur with this conclusion, I realise on reflection that I'm not sure exactly where it leaves us vis-a-vis the Movie-graph setup itself, or Maudlin's contraption, once the reversal of physics-mechanism is actually accepted. Clearly, we now have to regard these devices in their physical manifestation as aspects of a deeper computational reality with which our conscious state is currently related. But what are we now to make of the original proposal that they instantiate some computation that encapsulates an actual conscious state? After all, we don't regard them as primitively physical objects any longer, so we can't now apply the reductio arguments in quite the same way, can we? They're part of the general computational state of affairs, like everything else. Is it that they instantiate the wrong sort of computation for consciousness, because their physical behaviour is the result of accidentally contrived relations? IOW, they're not really UM's in any relevant sense. But then wouldn't the same argument for contrivance hold in the original case, and undermine the reductio? I'm puzzled. David On Sun, Feb 12, 2012 at 11:14 AM, Stephen P. King stephe...@charter.net wrote: On 2/11/2012 5:09 PM, Joseph Knight wrote: On Sat, Feb 11, 2012 at 11:41 AM, Stephen P. King stephe...@charter.net wrote: On 2/11/2012 6:29 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 11 Feb 2012, at 07:32, Stephen P. King wrote: Hi ACW, Thank you for the time and effort to write this up!!! On 2/9/2012 3:40 PM, acw wrote: Bruno has always said that COMP is a matter of theology (or religion), that is, the provably unprovable, and I agree with this. However, let's try and see why that is and why someone would take COMP as an assumption: - The main assumption of COMP is that you admit, at some level, a digital substitution, and the stronger assumption that if you were to implement/run such a Turing-emulable program, it would be conscious and you would have a continuation in it. Isn't that a strong theological assumption? [SPK] Yes, but it is the substitution of one configuration of stuff with another such that the functionality (that allows for the implementation/running of the Turing-emulable (Turing equivalence!)) program to remain invariant. One thing interesting to point out about this is that this substitution can be the replacement of completely different kinds of stuff, like carbon based stuff with silicon based stuff and does not require a continuous physical process of transformation in the sense of smoothly morphism the carbon stuff into silicon stuff at some primitive level. B/c of this it may seem to bypass the usual restrictions of physical laws, but does it really? What exactly is this physical stuff anyway? If we take a hint from the latest ideas in theoretical physics it seems that the stuff of the material world is more about properties that remain invariant under sets of symmetry transformations and less and less about anything like primitive substances. So in a sense, the physical world might be considered to be a wide assortment of bundles of invariants therefore it seems to me that to test COMP we need to see if those symmetry groups and invariants can be derived from some proposed underlying logical structure. This is what I am trying to do. I am really not arguing against COMP, I am arguing that COMP is incomplete as a theory as it does not yet show how the appearance of space, time and conservation laws emerges in a way that is invariant and not primitive. So you miss the UDA point. The UDA point is that if COMP is true, it has to be complete as a theory, independently of the fact that the shorter time to derive physics might be 10^1000 millenia. Comp explains, by the UDA, that whatever you add to comp, or to RA, or to the UD, cannot play any role in consciousness, including the feeling that the worlds obeys some role. So if comp is correct the las of physics have to be derived from arithmetic alone. Then AUDA makes a non trivial part of the derivation. We have already the symmetry of the core bottom physics, the quantum indeterminacy, non locality, non cloning. But this is just for illustrating the consistency: the UDA conclusion is that no matter what, the appearance of matter cannot use any supplementary assumption to comp and/or arithmetic. You can sum up the UD by comp is not completable. It is the Bell-von Neuman answer to Einstein, in your analogy below. Arithmetic is made conceptually complete. Whatever you add to it will prevent the comp solution of the mind-body problem, a bit like evruthing you add to the SWE will reintroduce the measurement problem in quantum physics. Comp
Re: Free Floating entities
On 2/13/2012 9:44 AM, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/13/2012 9:16 AM, Richard Ruquist wrote: RDR: Not sure if this is helpful, but a possible hypothetical communications model is the 3D 10^90 per cc set Calabi-Yau Compact Manifolds of string theory that are purported to control all physical interactions as they each contain the laws of physics; and collectively they may manifest consciousness as well as perhaps Platonia and cyclic gossiping as their variable properties across the universe may manifest a Peano arithmetic. Regarding communication each spherical element/manifold instantly maps all the other manifolds and all physical phenomena to its interior. http://vixra.org/abs/1101.0044 -- Hi Richard, I am highly skeptical of string theory because of its Landscape problem, the lack of observational evidence of super-partner particles, the fact that it is not back-ground independent and its underlying philosophical assumptions. All that aside, I will take a look at the referenced paper. Onward! Stephen Hi Richard, I like your paper! I would like to point out something. You quoted [Chalmers(1995)]: (1) Assume my reasoning powers are captured by some formal system F (to put this more briefly, I am F). Consider the class of statements I can know to be true, given this assumption. (2) Given that I know that I am F, I know that F is sound (as I know that I am sound). Indeed, I know that the larger system F' is sound, where F' is F supplemented by the further assumption I am F. (Supplementing a sound system with a true statement yields a sound system.) (3) So I know that G(F') is true, where this is the Gödel sentence of the system F'. (4) But F' could not see that G(F') is true (by Gödel's theorem). (5) By assumption, however, I am now effectively equivalent to F'. After all, I am F supplemented by the knowledge that I am F. (6) This is a contradiction, so the initial assumption must be false, and F must not have captured my powers of reasoning after all. (7) The conclusion generalizes: my reasoning powers cannot be captured by any formal system. This reminds me of problematic sentences in logic such as Stephen cannot know the truth value of this sentence. While I can only inconsistently speculated on the truth value of that sentence, you, not being Stephen, can consistently determine its truth value. I see this as arguing that truth values are quantities that are strictly local and not global. Since I am a HUGE fan of Leibniz, I like the Monad-like quality that you are considering with the concept of a CYCM, but wonder if the particular geometric properties are being arbitrarily selected. It seems to me that any monadic construction will do so long as it can support a self-referential logic, such as Peano Arithmetic. Additionally, how do we deal with the apparently bosonic property of minds given the very fermionic property of matter. Could supersymmetry really be a theory of the mind-body problem? Some people, like Matti Pitkanen, http://matpitka.blogspot.com/ think so and I sympathize with this view. But it still seems to assume too much. Maybe this is just the price of a theory. ;-) Onward! Stephen -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Non-Standard Arithmetic
Dear Bruno, What limits are there on what can constitute the constant that defines a particular model of a non-standard Arithmetic? Onward! Stephen -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: The free will function
On Feb 12, 8:09 pm, Stephen P. King stephe...@charter.net wrote: Hi Craig, Great post! Check this out!http://newempiricism.blogspot.com/2009/02/symbol-grounding-problem.html Onward! Stephen Thanks Stephen, That's a great one. It does a better job saying what I'm trying to say on this than I did. Craig -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: The free will function
On Feb 12, 11:03 pm, Terren Suydam terren.suy...@gmail.com wrote: patterns that emerge from the way the world perturbs its boundaries Yes, or as I call it...sense. It need not be cognitive or higher animal, I think semantic grounding is innate in all material systems as experiential qualia. We get confused however, when we assume that low level physical processes can ground high level neurological symbols. They can store and retrieve them syntactically but it can't make human sense of them. Craig -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Free Floating entities
On 2/13/2012 7:26 AM, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/13/2012 9:44 AM, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/13/2012 9:16 AM, Richard Ruquist wrote: RDR: Not sure if this is helpful, but a possible hypothetical communications model is the 3D 10^90 per cc set Calabi-Yau Compact Manifolds of string theory that are purported to control all physical interactions as they each contain the laws of physics; and collectively they may manifest consciousness as well as perhaps Platonia and cyclic gossiping as their variable properties across the universe may manifest a Peano arithmetic. Regarding communication each spherical element/manifold instantly maps all the other manifolds and all physical phenomena to its interior. http://vixra.org/abs/1101.0044 -- Hi Richard, I am highly skeptical of string theory because of its Landscape problem, the lack of observational evidence of super-partner particles, the fact that it is not back-ground independent and its underlying philosophical assumptions. All that aside, I will take a look at the referenced paper. Onward! Stephen Hi Richard, I like your paper! I would like to point out something. You quoted [Chalmers(1995)]: (1) Assume my reasoning powers are captured by some formal system F (to put this more briefly, I am F). Consider the class of statements I can know to be true, given this assumption. (2) Given that I know that I am F, I know that F is sound (as I know that I am sound). But you don't know what F is, as a formal system. You've just ostensively identified it by pointing to yourself and naming it F. Brent Indeed, I know that the larger system F' is sound, where F' is F supplemented by the further assumption I am F. (Supplementing a sound system with a true statement yields a sound system.) (3) So I know that G(F') is true, where this is the Gödel sentence of the system F'. (4) But F' could not see that G(F') is true (by Gödel's theorem). (5) By assumption, however, I am now effectively equivalent to F'. After all, I am F supplemented by the knowledge that I am F. (6) This is a contradiction, so the initial assumption must be false, and F must not have captured my powers of reasoning after all. (7) The conclusion generalizes: my reasoning powers cannot be captured by any formal system. This reminds me of problematic sentences in logic such as Stephen cannot know the truth value of this sentence. While I can only inconsistently speculated on the truth value of that sentence, you, not being Stephen, can consistently determine its truth value. I see this as arguing that truth values are quantities that are strictly local and not global. Since I am a HUGE fan of Leibniz, I like the Monad-like quality that you are considering with the concept of a CYCM, but wonder if the particular geometric properties are being arbitrarily selected. It seems to me that any monadic construction will do so long as it can support a self-referential logic, such as Peano Arithmetic. Additionally, how do we deal with the apparently bosonic property of minds given the very fermionic property of matter. Could supersymmetry really be a theory of the mind-body problem? Some people, like Matti Pitkanen, http://matpitka.blogspot.com/ think so and I sympathize with this view. But it still seems to assume too much. Maybe this is just the price of a theory. ;-) Onward! Stephen No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com http://www.avg.com Version: 2012.0.1913 / Virus Database: 2112/4806 - Release Date: 02/12/12 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Free Floating entities
On 2/13/2012 11:48 AM, meekerdb wrote: On 2/13/2012 7:26 AM, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/13/2012 9:44 AM, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/13/2012 9:16 AM, Richard Ruquist wrote: RDR: Not sure if this is helpful, but a possible hypothetical communications model is the 3D 10^90 per cc set Calabi-Yau Compact Manifolds of string theory that are purported to control all physical interactions as they each contain the laws of physics; and collectively they may manifest consciousness as well as perhaps Platonia and cyclic gossiping as their variable properties across the universe may manifest a Peano arithmetic. Regarding communication each spherical element/manifold instantly maps all the other manifolds and all physical phenomena to its interior. http://vixra.org/abs/1101.0044 -- Hi Richard, I am highly skeptical of string theory because of its Landscape problem, the lack of observational evidence of super-partner particles, the fact that it is not back-ground independent and its underlying philosophical assumptions. All that aside, I will take a look at the referenced paper. Onward! Stephen Hi Richard, I like your paper! I would like to point out something. You quoted [Chalmers(1995)]: (1) Assume my reasoning powers are captured by some formal system F (to put this more briefly, I am F). Consider the class of statements I can know to be true, given this assumption. (2) Given that I know that I am F, I know that F is sound (as I know that I am sound). But you don't know what F is, as a formal system. You've just ostensively identified it by pointing to yourself and naming it F. Brent Hi Brent, OK, but let us take the assumption that the mathematical truth of a sentence is all that matters. Therefore my pointing at myself and stating the sentence I am F makes it so? Why do I need to explicitly know a particular example of the formal system F? Fiat existence! We! Onward! Stephen Indeed, I know that the larger system F' is sound, where F' is F supplemented by the further assumption I am F. (Supplementing a sound system with a true statement yields a sound system.) (3) So I know that G(F') is true, where this is the Gödel sentence of the system F'. (4) But F' could not see that G(F') is true (by Gödel's theorem). (5) By assumption, however, I am now effectively equivalent to F'. After all, I am F supplemented by the knowledge that I am F. (6) This is a contradiction, so the initial assumption must be false, and F must not have captured my powers of reasoning after all. (7) The conclusion generalizes: my reasoning powers cannot be captured by any formal system. This reminds me of problematic sentences in logic such as Stephen cannot know the truth value of this sentence. While I can only inconsistently speculated on the truth value of that sentence, you, not being Stephen, can consistently determine its truth value. I see this as arguing that truth values are quantities that are strictly local and not global. Since I am a HUGE fan of Leibniz, I like the Monad-like quality that you are considering with the concept of a CYCM, but wonder if the particular geometric properties are being arbitrarily selected. It seems to me that any monadic construction will do so long as it can support a self-referential logic, such as Peano Arithmetic. Additionally, how do we deal with the apparently bosonic property of minds given the very fermionic property of matter. Could supersymmetry really be a theory of the mind-body problem? Some people, like Matti Pitkanen, http://matpitka.blogspot.com/ think so and I sympathize with this view. But it still seems to assume too much. Maybe this is just the price of a theory. ;-) Onward! -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Free Floating entities
Stephan, Thank you for your support and kind words. Actually you may be the first learned person to actually read the paper. I sent it to Yau and to Chalmers, but I doubt that they got beyond the Abstract. Now I need to admit that I am neither expert in string theory or math logic. For example I am unable to argue pro or con regarding Chalmers conclusion. My only contribution is to suggest that the compact manifold of S-T Yau may be a basis for consciousness and perhaps much more, even SUSY. Richard On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 11:48 AM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 2/13/2012 7:26 AM, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/13/2012 9:44 AM, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/13/2012 9:16 AM, Richard Ruquist wrote: RDR: Not sure if this is helpful, but a possible hypothetical communications model is the 3D 10^90 per cc set Calabi-Yau Compact Manifolds of string theory that are purported to control all physical interactions as they each contain the laws of physics; and collectively they may manifest consciousness as well as perhaps Platonia and cyclic gossiping as their variable properties across the universe may manifest a Peano arithmetic. Regarding communication each spherical element/manifold instantly maps all the other manifolds and all physical phenomena to its interior. http://vixra.org/abs/1101.0044 -- Hi Richard, I am highly skeptical of string theory because of its Landscape problem, the lack of observational evidence of super-partner particles, the fact that it is not back-ground independent and its underlying philosophical assumptions. All that aside, I will take a look at the referenced paper. Onward! Stephen Hi Richard, I like your paper! I would like to point out something. You quoted [Chalmers(1995)]: (1) Assume my reasoning powers are captured by some formal system F (to put this more briefly, I am F). Consider the class of statements I can know to be true, given this assumption. (2) Given that I know that I am F, I know that F is sound (as I know that I am sound). But you don't know what F is, as a formal system. You've just ostensively identified it by pointing to yourself and naming it F. Brent Indeed, I know that the larger system F' is sound, where F' is F supplemented by the further assumption I am F. (Supplementing a sound system with a true statement yields a sound system.) (3) So I know that G(F') is true, where this is the Gödel sentence of the system F'. (4) But F' could not see that G(F') is true (by Gödel's theorem). (5) By assumption, however, I am now effectively equivalent to F'. After all, I am F supplemented by the knowledge that I am F. (6) This is a contradiction, so the initial assumption must be false, and F must not have captured my powers of reasoning after all. (7) The conclusion generalizes: my reasoning powers cannot be captured by any formal system. This reminds me of problematic sentences in logic such as Stephen cannot know the truth value of this sentence. While I can only inconsistently speculated on the truth value of that sentence, you, not being Stephen, can consistently determine its truth value. I see this as arguing that truth values are quantities that are strictly local and not global. Since I am a HUGE fan of Leibniz, I like the Monad-like quality that you are considering with the concept of a CYCM, but wonder if the particular geometric properties are being arbitrarily selected. It seems to me that any monadic construction will do so long as it can support a self-referential logic, such as Peano Arithmetic. Additionally, how do we deal with the apparently bosonic property of minds given the very fermionic property of matter. Could supersymmetry really be a theory of the mind-body problem? Some people, like Matti Pitkanen, http://matpitka.blogspot.com/think so and I sympathize with this view. But it still seems to assume too much. Maybe this is just the price of a theory. ;-) Onward! Stephen No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 2012.0.1913 / Virus Database: 2112/4806 - Release Date: 02/12/12 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post
Re: The free will function
On 2/13/2012 8:24 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Feb 12, 8:09 pm, Stephen P. Kingstephe...@charter.net wrote: Hi Craig, Great post! Check this out!http://newempiricism.blogspot.com/2009/02/symbol-grounding-problem.html Onward! Stephen Thanks Stephen, That's a great one. It does a better job saying what I'm trying to say on this than I did. Craig The symbol grounding problem does not seem to apply to us. Unlike a digital computer, we know what we are doing, for instance if I fill a hole by digging soil with a spade my mind contains the directedness of the loaded spade towards the hole as a real extension in time (see Time and conscious experience). It is this extension in time that allows me to know my own symbols. Harnad (1990) shows that symbols can be grounded by association with real objects in the world but this demonstration only means that we can construct machines that work, not that the machines have any internal conscious experience. It doesn't apply to us because we exist in an environment (where there are spades and soil). It doesn't apply to the Chinese room either, because there is a world outside the room in which Chinese is spoken and children are taught Chinese ostensively and by example. This goes to my point that, in spite of ones feeling of separation, consciousness exists relative to an environmental context. The successful substitution of a silicon based AI module for part (or even all) of a brain depends on its interaction with the environment. 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-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Free Floating entities
On 2/13/2012 8:54 AM, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/13/2012 11:48 AM, meekerdb wrote: On 2/13/2012 7:26 AM, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/13/2012 9:44 AM, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/13/2012 9:16 AM, Richard Ruquist wrote: RDR: Not sure if this is helpful, but a possible hypothetical communications model is the 3D 10^90 per cc set Calabi-Yau Compact Manifolds of string theory that are purported to control all physical interactions as they each contain the laws of physics; and collectively they may manifest consciousness as well as perhaps Platonia and cyclic gossiping as their variable properties across the universe may manifest a Peano arithmetic. Regarding communication each spherical element/manifold instantly maps all the other manifolds and all physical phenomena to its interior. http://vixra.org/abs/1101.0044 -- Hi Richard, I am highly skeptical of string theory because of its Landscape problem, the lack of observational evidence of super-partner particles, the fact that it is not back-ground independent and its underlying philosophical assumptions. All that aside, I will take a look at the referenced paper. Onward! Stephen Hi Richard, I like your paper! I would like to point out something. You quoted [Chalmers(1995)]: (1) Assume my reasoning powers are captured by some formal system F (to put this more briefly, I am F). Consider the class of statements I can know to be true, given this assumption. (2) Given that I know that I am F, I know that F is sound (as I know that I am sound). But you don't know what F is, as a formal system. You've just ostensively identified it by pointing to yourself and naming it F. Brent Hi Brent, OK, but let us take the assumption that the mathematical truth of a sentence is all that matters. Therefore my pointing at myself and stating the sentence I am F makes it so? Why do I need to explicitly know a particular example of the formal system F? Fiat existence! We! You need to know what F is in order to reach the contradiction is step (5). You don't have knowledge that I am F where F is a formal system. You only have knowledge that I have named myself 'F'. Brent Onward! Stephen Indeed, I know that the larger system F' is sound, where F' is F supplemented by the further assumption I am F. (Supplementing a sound system with a true statement yields a sound system.) (3) So I know that G(F') is true, where this is the Gödel sentence of the system F'. (4) But F' could not see that G(F') is true (by Gödel's theorem). (5) By assumption, however, I am now effectively equivalent to F'. After all, I am F supplemented by the knowledge that I am F. (6) This is a contradiction, so the initial assumption must be false, and F must not have captured my powers of reasoning after all. (7) The conclusion generalizes: my reasoning powers cannot be captured by any formal system. This reminds me of problematic sentences in logic such as Stephen cannot know the truth value of this sentence. While I can only inconsistently speculated on the truth value of that sentence, you, not being Stephen, can consistently determine its truth value. I see this as arguing that truth values are quantities that are strictly local and not global. Since I am a HUGE fan of Leibniz, I like the Monad-like quality that you are considering with the concept of a CYCM, but wonder if the particular geometric properties are being arbitrarily selected. It seems to me that any monadic construction will do so long as it can support a self-referential logic, such as Peano Arithmetic. Additionally, how do we deal with the apparently bosonic property of minds given the very fermionic property of matter. Could supersymmetry really be a theory of the mind-body problem? Some people, like Matti Pitkanen, http://matpitka.blogspot.com/ think so and I sympathize with this view. But it still seems to assume too much. Maybe this is just the price of a theory. ;-) Onward! No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com http://www.avg.com Version: 2012.0.1913 / Virus Database: 2112/4806 - Release Date: 02/12/12 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Free Floating entities
On 2/13/2012 12:01 PM, Richard Ruquist wrote: Stephen, Thank you for your support and kind words. Actually you may be the first learned person to actually read the paper. I sent it to Yau and to Chalmers, but I doubt that they got beyond the Abstract. Now I need to admit that I am neither expert in string theory or math logic. For example I am unable to argue pro or con regarding Chalmers conclusion. My only contribution is to suggest that the compact manifold of S-T Yau may be a basis for consciousness and perhaps much more, even SUSY. Richard Hi Richard, LOL, I am just an anti-mendacious amateur. :-) I suggest that you study more about the requirements of the S-T Yau compact manifold and what they imply. This article http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/substance/ is a good start. Onward! Stephen -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: COMP, MGA and Time
I think you should probably read Maudlin's paperhttp://www.finney.org/~hal/maudlin.pdffor specifics. I don't think thermodynamics will have much to do with the conclusions, whatever they may be (and I don't think it's obvious what *exactly *Maudlin showed). On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 7:21 AM, Stephen P. King stephe...@charter.netwrote: Hi Folks, I have been mulling over my conversations with Bruno, Joseph and ACW in the EVERYTHING list and have a question. In SANE04 we read the following: For any given precise running computation associated to some inner experience, you can modify the device in such a way that the amount of physical activity involved is arbitrarily low, and even null for dreaming experience which has no inputs and no outputs. Now, having suppressed that physical activity present in the running computation, the machine will only be accidentally correct. It will be correct only for that precise computation, with unchanged environment. If it is changed a little bit, it will make the machine running computation no more relatively correct. But then, Maudlin ingenuously showed that counterfactual correctness can be recovered, by adding non active devices which will be triggered only if some (counterfactual) change would appear in the environment. Now this shows that any inner experience can be associated with an arbitrary low (even null) physical activity, and this in keeping counterfactual correctness. And that is absurd with the conjunction of both comp and materialism. Setting aside the problem of concurrency for now, how is it that we are jumping over the difference between infinitely slow or even adiabatichttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adiabatic_process physical process and null physical process? I may be not even wrong here, but in math isn't it true that there is a big difference between a quantity being arbitrarily small and a quantity being zero? I suspect that the folks in FOAR List that have been discussing information and entropy might have a thought on this. Onward! Stephen -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- Joseph Knight -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: The free will function
On 2/13/2012 12:05 PM, meekerdb wrote: On 2/13/2012 8:24 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Feb 12, 8:09 pm, Stephen P. Kingstephe...@charter.net wrote: Hi Craig, Great post! Check this out!http://newempiricism.blogspot.com/2009/02/symbol-grounding-problem.html Onward! Stephen Thanks Stephen, That's a great one. It does a better job saying what I'm trying to say on this than I did. Craig The symbol grounding problem does not seem to apply to us. Unlike a digital computer, we know what we are doing, for instance if I fill a hole by digging soil with a spade my mind contains the directedness of the loaded spade towards the hole as a real extension in time (see Time and conscious experience). It is this extension in time that allows me to know my own symbols. Harnad (1990) shows that symbols can be grounded by association with real objects in the world but this demonstration only means that we can construct machines that work, not that the machines have any internal conscious experience. It doesn't apply to us because we exist in an environment (where there are spades and soil). It doesn't apply to the Chinese room either, because there is a world outside the room in which Chinese is spoken and children are taught Chinese ostensively and by example. This goes to my point that, in spite of ones feeling of separation, consciousness exists relative to an environmental context. The successful substitution of a silicon based AI module for part (or even all) of a brain depends on its interaction with the environment. Brent -- Hi Brent, Your point does not counter Craig's point at all. It actually supports it! To actually implement digital substitution, we would have to not only match the functionally of the module internally but also match the interactions of that module with the environment. Silicon does not have the same chemical properties as carbon In effect, digital substitution requires that the laws of physics be alterable for the transformations implicit in functional equivalence. Digital substitution is not a local symmetry. Onward! Stephen -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Free Floating entities
On 2/13/2012 12:09 PM, meekerdb wrote: On 2/13/2012 8:54 AM, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/13/2012 11:48 AM, meekerdb wrote: On 2/13/2012 7:26 AM, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/13/2012 9:44 AM, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/13/2012 9:16 AM, Richard Ruquist wrote: RDR: Not sure if this is helpful, but a possible hypothetical communications model is the 3D 10^90 per cc set Calabi-Yau Compact Manifolds of string theory that are purported to control all physical interactions as they each contain the laws of physics; and collectively they may manifest consciousness as well as perhaps Platonia and cyclic gossiping as their variable properties across the universe may manifest a Peano arithmetic. Regarding communication each spherical element/manifold instantly maps all the other manifolds and all physical phenomena to its interior. http://vixra.org/abs/1101.0044 -- Hi Richard, I am highly skeptical of string theory because of its Landscape problem, the lack of observational evidence of super-partner particles, the fact that it is not back-ground independent and its underlying philosophical assumptions. All that aside, I will take a look at the referenced paper. Onward! Stephen Hi Richard, I like your paper! I would like to point out something. You quoted [Chalmers(1995)]: (1) Assume my reasoning powers are captured by some formal system F (to put this more briefly, I am F). Consider the class of statements I can know to be true, given this assumption. (2) Given that I know that I am F, I know that F is sound (as I know that I am sound). But you don't know what F is, as a formal system. You've just ostensively identified it by pointing to yourself and naming it F. Brent Hi Brent, OK, but let us take the assumption that the mathematical truth of a sentence is all that matters. Therefore my pointing at myself and stating the sentence I am F makes it so? Why do I need to explicitly know a particular example of the formal system F? Fiat existence! We! You need to know what F is in order to reach the contradiction is step (5). You don't have knowledge that I am F where F is a formal system. You only have knowledge that I have named myself 'F'. Brent Hi Brent, What?! Truth is not 3p? Surely you jest! Onward! Stephen -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: The free will function
On 2/13/2012 9:17 AM, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/13/2012 12:05 PM, meekerdb wrote: On 2/13/2012 8:24 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Feb 12, 8:09 pm, Stephen P. Kingstephe...@charter.net wrote: Hi Craig, Great post! Check this out!http://newempiricism.blogspot.com/2009/02/symbol-grounding-problem.html Onward! Stephen Thanks Stephen, That's a great one. It does a better job saying what I'm trying to say on this than I did. Craig The symbol grounding problem does not seem to apply to us. Unlike a digital computer, we know what we are doing, for instance if I fill a hole by digging soil with a spade my mind contains the directedness of the loaded spade towards the hole as a real extension in time (see Time and conscious experience). It is this extension in time that allows me to know my own symbols. Harnad (1990) shows that symbols can be grounded by association with real objects in the world but this demonstration only means that we can construct machines that work, not that the machines have any internal conscious experience. It doesn't apply to us because we exist in an environment (where there are spades and soil). It doesn't apply to the Chinese room either, because there is a world outside the room in which Chinese is spoken and children are taught Chinese ostensively and by example. This goes to my point that, in spite of ones feeling of separation, consciousness exists relative to an environmental context. The successful substitution of a silicon based AI module for part (or even all) of a brain depends on its interaction with the environment. Brent -- Hi Brent, Your point does not counter Craig's point at all. It actually supports it! To actually implement digital substitution, we would have to not only match the functionally of the module internally but also match the interactions of that module with the environment. I'm aware of that. It doesn't follow though that you must match every interaction (e.g. cross-section for cosmic gamma rays) or that every match is equally important. I've already speculated that a silicon based substitute might produce subtle or occasional differences in conscious thoughts. Craig however denies that a silicon based brain can be conscious at all. Brent Silicon does not have the same chemical properties as carbon In effect, digital substitution requires that the laws of physics be alterable for the transformations implicit in functional equivalence. Digital substitution is not a local symmetry. Onward! Stephen No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com http://www.avg.com Version: 2012.0.1913 / Virus Database: 2112/4806 - Release Date: 02/12/12 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Free Floating entities
On 2/13/2012 9:18 AM, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/13/2012 12:09 PM, meekerdb wrote: On 2/13/2012 8:54 AM, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/13/2012 11:48 AM, meekerdb wrote: On 2/13/2012 7:26 AM, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/13/2012 9:44 AM, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/13/2012 9:16 AM, Richard Ruquist wrote: RDR: Not sure if this is helpful, but a possible hypothetical communications model is the 3D 10^90 per cc set Calabi-Yau Compact Manifolds of string theory that are purported to control all physical interactions as they each contain the laws of physics; and collectively they may manifest consciousness as well as perhaps Platonia and cyclic gossiping as their variable properties across the universe may manifest a Peano arithmetic. Regarding communication each spherical element/manifold instantly maps all the other manifolds and all physical phenomena to its interior. http://vixra.org/abs/1101.0044 -- Hi Richard, I am highly skeptical of string theory because of its Landscape problem, the lack of observational evidence of super-partner particles, the fact that it is not back-ground independent and its underlying philosophical assumptions. All that aside, I will take a look at the referenced paper. Onward! Stephen Hi Richard, I like your paper! I would like to point out something. You quoted [Chalmers(1995)]: (1) Assume my reasoning powers are captured by some formal system F (to put this more briefly, I am F). Consider the class of statements I can know to be true, given this assumption. (2) Given that I know that I am F, I know that F is sound (as I know that I am sound). But you don't know what F is, as a formal system. You've just ostensively identified it by pointing to yourself and naming it F. Brent Hi Brent, OK, but let us take the assumption that the mathematical truth of a sentence is all that matters. Therefore my pointing at myself and stating the sentence I am F makes it so? Why do I need to explicitly know a particular example of the formal system F? Fiat existence! We! You need to know what F is in order to reach the contradiction is step (5). You don't have knowledge that I am F where F is a formal system. You only have knowledge that I have named myself 'F'. Brent Hi Brent, What?! Truth is not 3p? Surely you jest! Truth and knowledge are not the same thing. I don't see the relevance of your remark. 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-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: COMP, MGA and Time
On 2/13/2012 12:11 PM, Joseph Knight wrote: I think you should probably read Maudlin's paper http://www.finney.org/%7Ehal/maudlin.pdf for specifics. I don't think thermodynamics will have much to do with the conclusions, whatever they may be (and I don't think it's obvious what /exactly /Maudlin showed). Hi Joseph, Thank you for the new link to Maudlin''s paper. I was having a hard time finding my copy... As to your comment: Would you consider exactly what a computational structure means in a universe that allows for perpetual motion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_motion? (We are going to run a reductio argument http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum...) One thing that I see is that in such a universe we would have a huge White Rabbit problem because all brains in it would only be those of the Boltzmann type http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain. There could not be any invariant form of sequencing that we could run a UD on. How so? Becasue in a universe without thermodynamics there is no such a thing as a sequence of events that is invariant with respect to transitions from one observer to another, i.e. there would be no such thing as time definable in a 'dimensional' sense. All sequences would be at best Markov http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markov_property. With such a restriction to Markov processes, how to you define a UD? Without a UD, how do we get COMP to work? Onward! Stephen On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 7:21 AM, Stephen P. King stephe...@charter.net mailto:stephe...@charter.net wrote: Hi Folks, I have been mulling over my conversations with Bruno, Joseph and ACW in the EVERYTHING list and have a question. In SANE04 we read the following: For any given precise running computation associated to some inner experience, you can modify the device in such a way that the amount of physical activity involved is arbitrarily low, and even null for dreaming experience which has no inputs and no outputs. Now, having suppressed that physical activity present in the running computation, the machine will only be accidentally correct. It will be correct only for that precise computation, with unchanged environment. If it is changed a little bit, it will make the machine running computation no more relatively correct. But then, Maudlin ingenuously showed that counterfactual correctness can be recovered, by adding non active devices which will be triggered only if some (counterfactual) change would appear in the environment. Now this shows that any inner experience can be associated with an arbitrary low (even null) physical activity, and this in keeping counterfactual correctness. And that is absurd with the conjunction of both comp and materialism. Setting aside the problem of concurrency for now, how is it that we are jumping over the difference between infinitely slow or even adiabatic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adiabatic_process physical process and null physical process? I may be not even wrong here, but in math isn't it true that there is a big difference between a quantity being arbitrarily small and a quantity being zero? I suspect that the folks in FOAR List that have been discussing information and entropy might have a thought on this. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: The free will function
On 2/13/2012 12:29 PM, meekerdb wrote: On 2/13/2012 9:17 AM, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/13/2012 12:05 PM, meekerdb wrote: On 2/13/2012 8:24 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Feb 12, 8:09 pm, Stephen P. Kingstephe...@charter.net wrote: Hi Craig, Great post! Check this out!http://newempiricism.blogspot.com/2009/02/symbol-grounding-problem.html Onward! Stephen Thanks Stephen, That's a great one. It does a better job saying what I'm trying to say on this than I did. Craig The symbol grounding problem does not seem to apply to us. Unlike a digital computer, we know what we are doing, for instance if I fill a hole by digging soil with a spade my mind contains the directedness of the loaded spade towards the hole as a real extension in time (see Time and conscious experience). It is this extension in time that allows me to know my own symbols. Harnad (1990) shows that symbols can be grounded by association with real objects in the world but this demonstration only means that we can construct machines that work, not that the machines have any internal conscious experience. It doesn't apply to us because we exist in an environment (where there are spades and soil). It doesn't apply to the Chinese room either, because there is a world outside the room in which Chinese is spoken and children are taught Chinese ostensively and by example. This goes to my point that, in spite of ones feeling of separation, consciousness exists relative to an environmental context. The successful substitution of a silicon based AI module for part (or even all) of a brain depends on its interaction with the environment. Brent -- Hi Brent, Your point does not counter Craig's point at all. It actually supports it! To actually implement digital substitution, we would have to not only match the functionally of the module internally but also match the interactions of that module with the environment. I'm aware of that. It doesn't follow though that you must match every interaction (e.g. cross-section for cosmic gamma rays) or that every match is equally important. I've already speculated that a silicon based substitute might produce subtle or occasional differences in conscious thoughts. Craig however denies that a silicon based brain can be conscious at all. Brent Silicon does not have the same chemical properties as carbon In effect, digital substitution requires that the laws of physics be alterable for the transformations implicit in functional equivalence. Digital substitution is not a local symmetry. Onward! Hi, BTW, Craig is in the room... let him speak for himself. Onward! Stephen -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Intelligence and consciousness
On Feb 12, 12:34 am, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Feb 10, 2012 Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: I think you are radically overestimating the size of the book and the importance of the size to the experiment. ELIZA was about 20Kb. TO HELL WITH ELIZA That prehistoric program is NOT intelligent! What makes you sure it isn't intelligent but that other programs are? What is the point of a though experiment that gives stupid useless answers to questions? If you haven't read it already, this link from Stephen may do a better job than I have of explaining my position: http://newempiricism.blogspot.com/2009/02/symbol-grounding-problem.html If it's a thousand times better than ELIZA, then you've got a 20 Mb rule book. For heavens sake, if a 20 Mb look-up table was sufficient we would have had AI decades ago. Sufficient for what? 20mb of conversational Chinese might be enough to pass a Turing Test for a moderate amount of time. It's completely subjective. Since you can't do so let me make the best case for the Chinese Room from your point of view and the most difficult case to defend from mine. Let's say you're right and the size of the lookup table is not important so we won't worry that it's larger than the observable universe, and let's say time is not a issue either so we won't worry that it operates a billion trillion times slower than our mind, and let's say the Chinese Room doesn't do ELIZA style bullshit but can engage in a brilliant and interesting (if you are very very very patient) conversation with you in Chinese or any other language about anything. And lets have the little man not only be ignorant of Chinese but be retarded and thus not understand anything in any language, he can only look at input symbols and then look at the huge lookup table till he finds similar squiggles and the appropriate response to those squiggles which he then outputs. The man has no idea what's going on, he just looks at input squiggles and matches them up with output squiggles, but from outside the room it's very different. Yes You ask the room to produce a quantum theory of gravity and it does so, you ask it to output a new poem that a considerable fraction of the human race would consider to be very beautiful and it does so, you ask it to output a original fantasy children's novel that will be more popular than Harry Potter and it does so. No. The thought experiment is not about simulating omniscience. If you ask the room to produce anything outside of casual conversation, it would politely decline. The room certainly behaves intelligently but the man was not conscious of any of the answers produced, as I've said the man doesn't have a clue what's going on, so does this disprove my assertion that intelligent behavior implies consciousness? Yes. Nothing in the room is conscious, nor is the room itself, or the building, city or planet conscious of the conversation. No it does not, or at least it probably does not, this is why. That reference book that contains everything that can be said about anything that can be asked in a finite time would be large, astronomical would be far far too weak a word to describe it, Where are you getting that from? I haven't read anything about the Chinese Room being defined as having superhuman intelligence. All it has to do is make convincing Chinese conversation for a while. but it would not be infinitely large so it remains a legitimate thought experiment. However that astounding lookup table came from somewhere, whoever or whatever made it had to be very intelligent indeed and also I believe conscious, and so the brilliance of the actions of the Chinese Room does indeed imply consciousness. Of course. Programs indeed reflect the intelligence and consciousness of their programmers to an intelligent and conscious audience, but not to the program itself. If the programmer and audience is dead, there is no intelligence or consciousness at all. I think you are trying to sneak out of this now by strawmanning my position. You make it sound as if I claimed that CDs could not be used to play music because CDs are not musicians. My position has always been that people can use inanimate media to access subjective content by sense, yours has been that if inanimate machines behave intelligently then they themselves must be conscious and intelligent. Now you are backing off of that and saying that anything that ever had anything to do with consciousness can be said to be conscious. You may say that even if I'm right about that then a computer doing smart things would just imply the consciousness of the people who made the computer. But here is where the analogy breaks down, real computers don't work like the Chinese Room does, they don't have anything remotely like that astounding lookup table; the godlike thing that made the Chinese Room knows exactly what that room will do in
Re: The free will function
On Feb 13, 12:29 pm, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: I'm aware of that. It doesn't follow though that you must match every interaction (e.g. cross-section for cosmic gamma rays) or that every match is equally important. I've already speculated that a silicon based substitute might produce subtle or occasional differences in conscious thoughts. Craig however denies that a silicon based brain can be conscious at all. No, I think that silicon is already 'conscious', only to a very limited extent (detection-reaction). My view is that it cannot be scaled up mechanically to become human consciousness. If you can make a silicon based cell that lives and breathes, then we very well might be able to make a conscious brain out of that...but we probably won't be able to control it any better than we can control an animal. Our definition of consciousness is entirely human. If we talk about something being conscious, we are really talking about it being human. All I'm saying is that we cannot discount the possibility that there is a good reason why humans are only made of DNA and not sand. Craig -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: The free will function
On 2/13/2012 10:39 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Feb 13, 12:29 pm, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net wrote: I'm aware of that. It doesn't follow though that you must match every interaction (e.g. cross-section for cosmic gamma rays) or that every match is equally important. I've already speculated that a silicon based substitute might produce subtle or occasional differences in conscious thoughts. Craig however denies that a silicon based brain can be conscious at all. No, I think that silicon is already 'conscious', only to a very limited extent (detection-reaction). My view is that it cannot be scaled up mechanically to become human consciousness. If you can make a silicon based cell that lives and breathes, What does live and breathes mean? A silicon based neuron wouldn't reproduce...but neither do biological neurons. A biological neuron metabolizes...but so would a silicon based neuron. So you're just speculating that there are some essential functions of biological based neurons that can't be realized by silicon based neurons. then we very well might be able to make a conscious brain out of that...but we probably won't be able to control it any better than we can control an animal. Our definition of consciousness is entirely human. If we talk about something being conscious, we are really talking about it being human. That's begging the question. All I'm saying is that we cannot discount the possibility that there is a good reason why humans are only made of DNA and not sand. You've been asserting that it's the case...not just cautioning about possibilities. So let's hear one of those 'good reasons'; one that is not just a speculative possibility. 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-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: The free will function
On Feb 13, 12:05 pm, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: It doesn't apply to us because we exist in an environment (where there are spades and soil). It doesn't apply to the Chinese room either, because there is a world outside the room in which Chinese is spoken and children are taught Chinese ostensively and by example. You know there is a world outside the room, but the room doesn't. The room doesn't know anything. This goes to my point that, in spite of ones feeling of separation, consciousness exists relative to an environmental context. The successful substitution of a silicon based AI module for part (or even all) of a brain depends on its interaction with the environment. If it's only a part of the brain, then a silicon module could act as a prosthetic. The more of the brain you replace though, the less is left to make use of anything. The problem with talking about 'context' and 'interaction' as entities divorced from any concrete orientation is the same issue brought up with the symbol grounding problem. There is no 'there' there. Environments and interactions are conceptual generalizations. They have no interiority, no perspective or orientation. Craig -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: The free will function
On 2/13/2012 11:36 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Feb 13, 12:05 pm, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net wrote: It doesn't apply to us because we exist in an environment (where there are spades and soil). It doesn't apply to the Chinese room either, because there is a world outside the room in which Chinese is spoken and children are taught Chinese ostensively and by example. You know there is a world outside the room, but the room doesn't. The room doesn't know anything. So you say. This goes to my point that, in spite of ones feeling of separation, consciousness exists relative to an environmental context. The successful substitution of a silicon based AI module for part (or even all) of a brain depends on its interaction with the environment. If it's only a part of the brain, then a silicon module could act as a prosthetic. The more of the brain you replace though, the less is left to make use of anything. The problem with talking about 'context' and 'interaction' as entities divorced from any concrete orientation is the same issue brought up with the symbol grounding problem. There is no 'there' there. Environments and interactions are conceptual generalizations. They have no interiority, no perspective or orientation. But they have ground. 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-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: The free will function
On Feb 13, 2:04 pm, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 2/13/2012 10:39 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Feb 13, 12:29 pm, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net wrote: I'm aware of that. It doesn't follow though that you must match every interaction (e.g. cross-section for cosmic gamma rays) or that every match is equally important. I've already speculated that a silicon based substitute might produce subtle or occasional differences in conscious thoughts. Craig however denies that a silicon based brain can be conscious at all. No, I think that silicon is already 'conscious', only to a very limited extent (detection-reaction). My view is that it cannot be scaled up mechanically to become human consciousness. If you can make a silicon based cell that lives and breathes, What does live and breathes mean? Literally that. It lives the life of a cell. It has cellular respiration which cannot be suspended for long without killing the cell. It has to be able to experience mortality first hand. A silicon based neuron wouldn't reproduce...but neither do biological neurons. A biological neuron metabolizes...but so would a silicon based neuron. But the silicon based neuron doesn't die when it's metabolism is interrupted, and the silicon based neuron is not produced by silicon stem cells. It may be important for consciousness that all processes are derived organically from a single dividing cell. So you're just speculating that there are some essential functions of biological based neurons that can't be realized by silicon based neurons. Essential to human consciousness, yes. Just as there are some essential functions of DNA that can't be realized by silicon based molecules for creating biological cells. then we very well might be able to make a conscious brain out of that...but we probably won't be able to control it any better than we can control an animal. Our definition of consciousness is entirely human. If we talk about something being conscious, we are really talking about it being human. That's begging the question. No, I'm talking about how we conceive of consciousness, not the possibility of it existing outside of humans. I'm making a distinction between consciousness and something like height. We know what height is and we can be sure that it can be generalized to any solid object. In that case, it would be begging the question to say that human height can only come from humans. I'm not saying that though. I'm saying that without human consciousness as an example, we don't know what we are talking about if we try to define it. It's not a matter of saying only humans can be conscious like a human, it's a matter of realizing that they are one and the same thing as far as we know for sure. All I'm saying is that we cannot discount the possibility that there is a good reason why humans are only made of DNA and not sand. You've been asserting that it's the case...not just cautioning about possibilities. So let's hear one of those 'good reasons'; one that is not just a speculative possibility. How do you go from me saying 'we cannot discount the possibility...' to demanding an answer that is not a speculative possibility? If I say we cannot discount the possibility that cigarettes cause cancer, does that mean that you can demand that I produce the precise mechanism by which they cause cancer or else it invalidates the possibility that it does? Craig -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: COMP theology
On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 9:24 AM, David Nyman da...@davidnyman.com wrote: On 13 February 2012 01:18, Joseph Knight joseph.9...@gmail.com wrote: Yes it is, with the Movie Graph Argument. The MGA shows that assuming COMP, consciousness cannot be explained by appealing to any physical system. Not even a little. Whereas I would concur with this conclusion, I realise on reflection that I'm not sure exactly where it leaves us vis-a-vis the Movie-graph setup itself, or Maudlin's contraption, once the reversal of physics-mechanism is actually accepted. Clearly, we now have to regard these devices in their physical manifestation as aspects of a deeper computational reality with which our conscious state is currently related. But what are we now to make of the original proposal that they instantiate some computation that encapsulates an actual conscious state? After all, we don't regard them as primitively physical objects any longer, so we can't now apply the reductio arguments in quite the same way, can we? They're part of the general computational state of affairs, like everything else. Is it that they instantiate the wrong sort of computation for consciousness, because their physical behaviour is the result of accidentally contrived relations? IOW, they're not really UM's in any relevant sense. But then wouldn't the same argument for contrivance hold in the original case, and undermine the reductio? I'm puzzled. That makes two of us. You may recall the lengthy post I made a couple of months ago questioning the validity of the MGA. I now accept its validity but still find myself pondering how *weird *it is. I'm going to think about your post a little more before I respond completely. David -- Joseph Knight -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: COMP, MGA and Time
On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 11:47 AM, Stephen P. King stephe...@charter.netwrote: On 2/13/2012 12:11 PM, Joseph Knight wrote: I think you should probably read Maudlin's paperhttp://www.finney.org/%7Ehal/maudlin.pdffor specifics. I don't think thermodynamics will have much to do with the conclusions, whatever they may be (and I don't think it's obvious what *exactly *Maudlin showed). Hi Joseph, Thank you for the new link to Maudlin''s paper. I was having a hard time finding my copy... As to your comment: Would you consider exactly what a computational structure means in a universe that allows for perpetual motion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_motion? You should be aware that our universe allows for perpetual motion. (We are going to run a reductio argumenthttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum ...) One thing that I see is that in such a universe we would have a huge White Rabbit problem because all brains in it would only be those of the Boltzmann type http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain. There could not be any invariant form of sequencing that we could run a UD on. How so? Becasue in a universe without thermodynamics A Big universe with thermodynamics will still admit perpetual motion machines (in fact, our Universe is such a universe). Are you aware that, in the 19th century, classical thermodynamics was transformed into a statistical theory? You made a huge (and incorrect) leap from admits a perpetual motion machine to no thermodynamics. If you can have Boltzmann Brains you can have Universal Dovetailers run for arbitrary (even infinite) amounts of time. At any rate, the notion of a sufficiently robust universe is a provisional premise that is dropped later in the UDA, so it's not important. there is no such a thing as a sequence of events that is invariant with respect to transitions from one observer to another, i.e. there would be no such thing as time definable in a 'dimensional' sense. All sequences would be at best Markov http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markov_property. With such a restriction to Markov processes, how to you define a UD? Without a UD, how do we get COMP to work? Onward! Stephen On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 7:21 AM, Stephen P. King stephe...@charter.netwrote: Hi Folks, I have been mulling over my conversations with Bruno, Joseph and ACW in the EVERYTHING list and have a question. In SANE04 we read the following: For any given precise running computation associated to some inner experience, you can modify the device in such a way that the amount of physical activity involved is arbitrarily low, and even null for dreaming experience which has no inputs and no outputs. Now, having suppressed that physical activity present in the running computation, the machine will only be accidentally correct. It will be correct only for that precise computation, with unchanged environment. If it is changed a little bit, it will make the machine running computation no more relatively correct. But then, Maudlin ingenuously showed that counterfactual correctness can be recovered, by adding non active devices which will be triggered only if some (counterfactual) change would appear in the environment. Now this shows that any inner experience can be associated with an arbitrary low (even null) physical activity, and this in keeping counterfactual correctness. And that is absurd with the conjunction of both comp and materialism. Setting aside the problem of concurrency for now, how is it that we are jumping over the difference between infinitely slow or even adiabatic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adiabatic_process physical process and null physical process? I may be not even wrong here, but in math isn't it true that there is a big difference between a quantity being arbitrarily small and a quantity being zero? I suspect that the folks in FOAR List that have been discussing information and entropy might have a thought on this. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- Joseph Knight -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: The free will function
On 2/13/2012 12:14 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Feb 13, 2:04 pm, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 2/13/2012 10:39 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Feb 13, 12:29 pm, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.netwrote: I'm aware of that. It doesn't follow though that you must match every interaction (e.g. cross-section for cosmic gamma rays) or that every match is equally important. I've already speculated that a silicon based substitute might produce subtle or occasional differences in conscious thoughts. Craig however denies that a silicon based brain can be conscious at all. No, I think that silicon is already 'conscious', only to a very limited extent (detection-reaction). My view is that it cannot be scaled up mechanically to become human consciousness. If you can make a silicon based cell that lives and breathes, What does live and breathes mean? Literally that. It lives the life of a cell. It has cellular respiration which cannot be suspended for long without killing the cell. It has to be able to experience mortality first hand. A silicon based neuron wouldn't reproduce...but neither do biological neurons. A biological neuron metabolizes...but so would a silicon based neuron. But the silicon based neuron doesn't die when it's metabolism is interrupted, and the silicon based neuron is not produced by silicon stem cells. It may be important for consciousness that all processes are derived organically from a single dividing cell. So you're just speculating that there are some essential functions of biological based neurons that can't be realized by silicon based neurons. Essential to human consciousness, yes. Just as there are some essential functions of DNA that can't be realized by silicon based molecules for creating biological cells. then we very well might be able to make a conscious brain out of that...but we probably won't be able to control it any better than we can control an animal. Our definition of consciousness is entirely human. If we talk about something being conscious, we are really talking about it being human. That's begging the question. No, I'm talking about how we conceive of consciousness, not the possibility of it existing outside of humans. I'm making a distinction between consciousness and something like height. We know what height is and we can be sure that it can be generalized to any solid object. In that case, it would be begging the question to say that human height can only come from humans. I'm not saying that though. I'm saying that without human consciousness as an example, we don't know what we are talking about if we try to define it. It's not a matter of saying only humans can be conscious like a human, it's a matter of realizing that they are one and the same thing as far as we know for sure. All I'm saying is that we cannot discount the possibility that there is a good reason why humans are only made of DNA and not sand. Well humans aren't made of DNA, and there are good reasons they are made of carbon compounds (mostly) instead of silicon ones. But the question is about consciousness, not evolution. You've been asserting that it's the case...not just cautioning about possibilities. So let's hear one of those 'good reasons'; one that is not just a speculative possibility. How do you go from me saying 'we cannot discount the possibility...' to demanding an answer that is not a speculative possibility? If I say we cannot discount the possibility that cigarettes cause cancer, does that mean that you can demand that I produce the precise mechanism by which they cause cancer or else it invalidates the possibility that it does? Yes, you were circumspect in that response. But referred to what you've said in other posts. That's because awareness is not mechanical. That's what makes a machine a machine, a lack of capacity to transcend recursive behavior or deviate from universal behavior. A silicon semiconductor does have an experience, just not the incomprehensible human experience that we superimpose on it's nature. No amount of gear motives scale up to opinions. There is no 'they' to a gear, because humans have cast them mechanically in molds to act as gears for our sense/motives. Innately they are not gears, but metal molecules in solid form. Their sense/motive is to respond to temperature, force, acceleration, etc in a relatively uniform fashion which does not scale up to being a living organism. So do I now take it you have abandoned these bold assertions and no concede that maybe a silicon or mechanical brain could instantiate human-like consciousness and that's a reasonable research goal and you were just cautioning against assuming the outcome? 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-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For
Re: COMP, MGA and Time
On 2/13/2012 3:43 PM, Joseph Knight wrote: On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 11:47 AM, Stephen P. King stephe...@charter.net mailto:stephe...@charter.net wrote: On 2/13/2012 12:11 PM, Joseph Knight wrote: I think you should probably read Maudlin's paper http://www.finney.org/%7Ehal/maudlin.pdf for specifics. I don't think thermodynamics will have much to do with the conclusions, whatever they may be (and I don't think it's obvious what /exactly /Maudlin showed). Hi Joseph, Thank you for the new link to Maudlin''s paper. I was having a hard time finding my copy... As to your comment: Would you consider exactly what a computational structure means in a universe that allows for perpetual motion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_motion? You should be aware that our universe allows for perpetual motion. (We are going to run a reductio argument http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum...) One thing that I see is that in such a universe we would have a huge White Rabbit problem because all brains in it would only be those of the Boltzmann type http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain. There could not be any invariant form of sequencing that we could run a UD on. How so? Becasue in a universe without thermodynamics A Big universe with thermodynamics will still admit perpetual motion machines (in fact, our Universe is such a universe). Are you aware that, in the 19th century, classical thermodynamics was transformed into a statistical theory? You made a huge (and incorrect) leap from admits a perpetual motion machine to no thermodynamics. Hi Joseph, Yes, you are correct, but notice that we can have perpetual motion in the sense of closed-time-like loops in GR but we can never extract more energy from them than it takes to construct the mechanism to interface with the devious little bastards! If you can have Boltzmann Brains you can have Universal Dovetailers run for arbitrary (even infinite) amounts of time. No, that would violate the definition of Boltzmann brains as they can only be connected and chained up into a UD after the fact of their actualization. Otherwise we are in a situation where noise is indistinguishable from a signal as the minds implemented by such Boltzmann brains. Think about it, Boltzmann brains are stochastic and to define a continuation of them we have to simultaneously embed at least two into a preorder to get a sequence for a UD. One cannot claim to operate on an entity before it even exists. At any rate, the notion of a sufficiently robust universe is a provisional premise that is dropped later in the UDA, so it's not important. That is a red Herring. One can always set the bar of what a measurement is so that it is too high to overcome by current means. This is a fallacy that is prevalent all over the place in physics, sadly. :-( Onward! Stephen there is no such a thing as a sequence of events that is invariant with respect to transitions from one observer to another, i.e. there would be no such thing as time definable in a 'dimensional' sense. All sequences would be at best Markov http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markov_property. With such a restriction to Markov processes, how to you define a UD? Without a UD, how do we get COMP to work? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Truth values as dynamics?
On 2/12/2012 15:48, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/11/2012 5:15 PM, acw wrote: On 2/11/2012 05:49, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/9/2012 3:40 PM, acw wrote: I think the idea of Platonia is closer to the fact that if a sentence has a truth-value, it will have that truth value, regardless if you know it or not. Sure, but it is not just you to whom a given sentence may have the same exact truth value. This is like Einstein arguing with Bohr with the quip: The moon is still there when I do not see it. My reply to Einstein would be: Sir, you are not the only observer of the moon! We have to look at the situation from the point of view of many observers or, in this case, truth detectors, that can interact and communicate consistently with each other. We cannot think is just solipsistic terms. Sure, but what if nobody is looking at the moon? Or instead of moon, pick something even less likely to be observed. To put it differently, Riemann hypothesis or Goldbach's conjecture truth-value should not depend on the observers thinking of it - they may eventually discover it, and such a discovery would depend on many computational consequences, of which the observers may not be aware of yet, but doesn't mean that those consequences don't exist - when the computation is locally performed, it will always give the same result which could be said to exist timelessly. [SPK] My point is that any one or thing that could be affected by the truth value of the moon has X, Y, Z properties will, in effect, be an observer of the moon since it is has a definite set of properties as knowledge. The key here is causal efficacy, if a different state of affairs would result if some part of the world is changed then the conditions of that part of the world are observed. The same thing holds for the truth value Riemann hypothesis or Goldbach's conjecture, since there would be different worlds for each of their truth values. My point is that while the truth value or reality of the moon does not depend on the observation by any _one_ observer, it does depend for its definiteness on the possibility that it could be observed by some observer. It is the possibility that makes the difference. A object that cannot be observer by any means, including these arcane versions that I just laid out, cannot be said to have a definite set of properties or truth value, to say the opposite is equivalent to making a truth claim about a mathematical object for whom no set of equations or representation can be made. You're conjecturing here that there were worlds where Riemann hypothesis or Goldbach's conjecture have different truth values. I don't think arithmetical truths which happen to have proofs have indexical truth values, this is due to CTT. Although most physical truths are indexical (or depend on the axioms chosen). We could limit ourselves to decidable arithmetical truths only, but you'd bump into the problem of consistency of arithmetic or the halting problem. It makes no sense to me that a machine which is defined to either halt or not halt would not do either. We might not know if a machine halts or not, but that doesn't mean that if when ran in any possible world it would behave differently. Arithmetical truth should be the same in all possible worlds. An observer can find out a truth value, but it cannot alter it, unless it is an indexical (context-dependent truth, such as what time it is now or where do you live). Of course, we cannot talk about the truth value of undefined stuff, that would be non-sense. However, we can talk about the truth value of what cannot be observed - this machine never halts is only true if no observation of the machine halting can ever be made, in virtue of how the machine is defined, yet someone could use various meta-reasoning to reach the conclusion that the machine will never halt (consistency of arithmetic is very much similar to the halting problem - it's only consistent if a machine which enumerates proofs never finds a proof of 0=1; of course, this is not provable within arithmetic itself, thus it's a provably unprovable statement for any consistent machine, thus can only be a matter of theology as Bruno calls it). Hi ACW, I am considering that the truth value is a function of the theory with which a proposition is evaluated. In other words, meaningfulness, including truth value, is contextual while existence is absolute. Of course it's a function of the theory. Although, I do think some theories like arithmetic, computability and first-order logic are so general and infectious that they can be found in literally any non-trivial theory. That is, one cannot really escape their consequences. At that point, one might as well consider them absolute. That said, an axiom that says you're now in structure X and state Y would be very much contextual. Hi ACW, I was considering something like a field of propositions what say I am now in structure X_i, state Y_j and an internal model Z_k and a truth value
Re: The Anthropic Trilemma - Less Wrong
On 2/12/2012 17:29, Stephen P. King wrote: Hi Folks, I would like to bring the following to your attention. I think that we do need to revisit this problem. http://lesswrong.com/lw/19d/the_anthropic_trilemma/ The Anthropic Trilemma http://lesswrong.com/lw/19d/the_anthropic_trilemma/ 21Eliezer_Yudkowsky http://lesswrong.com/user/Eliezer_Yudkowsky/27 September 2009 01:47AM Speaking of problems I don't know how to solve, here's one that's been gnawing at me for years. The operation of splitting a subjective worldline seems obvious enough - the skeptical initiate can consider the Ebborians http://lesswrong.com/lw/ps/where_physics_meets_experience/, creatures whose brains come in flat sheets and who can symmetrically divide down their thickness. The more sophisticated need merely consider a sentient computer program: stop, copy, paste, start, and what was one person has now continued on in two places. If one of your future selves will see red, and one of your future selves will see green, then (it seems) you should /anticipate/ seeing red or green when you wake up with 50% probability. That is, it's a known fact that different versions of you will see red, or alternatively green, and you should weight the two anticipated possibilities equally. (Consider what happens when you're flipping a quantum coin: half your measure will continue into either branch, and subjective probability will follow quantum measure for unknown reasons http://lesswrong.com/lw/py/the_born_probabilities/.) But if I make two copies of the same computer program, is there twice as much experience, or only the same experience? Does someone who runs redundantly on three processors, get three times as much weight as someone who runs on one processor? Let's suppose that three copies get three times as much experience. (If not, then, in a Big universe, large enough that at least one copy of anything exists /somewhere,/ you run into the Boltzmann Brain problem http://lesswrong.com/lw/17d/forcing_anthropics_boltzmann_brains/.) Just as computer programs or brains can split, they ought to be able to merge. If we imagine a version of the Ebborian species that computes digitally, so that the brains remain synchronized so long as they go on getting the same sensory inputs, then we ought to be able to put two brains back together along the thickness, after dividing them. In the case of computer programs, we should be able to perform an operation where we compare each two bits in the program, and if they are the same, copy them, and if they are different, delete the whole program. (This seems to establish an equal causal dependency of the final program on the two original programs that went into it. E.g., if you test the causal dependency via counterfactuals, then disturbing any bit of the two originals, results in the final program being completely different (namely deleted).) So here's a simple algorithm for winning the lottery: Buy a ticket. Suspend your computer program just before the lottery drawing - which should of course be a quantum lottery, so that every ticket wins somewhere. Program your computational environment to, if you win, make a trillion copies of yourself, and wake them up for ten seconds, long enough to experience winning the lottery. Then suspend the programs, merge them again, and start the result. If you don't win the lottery, then just wake up automatically. The odds of winning the lottery are ordinarily a billion to one. But now the branch in which you /win /has your measure, your amount of experience, /temporarily/ multiplied by a trillion. So with the brief expenditure of a little extra computing power, you can subjectively win the lottery - be reasonably sure that when next you open your eyes, you will see a computer screen flashing You won! As for what happens ten seconds after that, you have no way of knowing how many processors you run on, so you shouldn't feel a thing. Now you could just bite this bullet. You could say, Sounds to me like it should work fine. You could say, There's no reason why you /shouldn't /be able to exert anthropic psychic powers. You could say, I have no problem with the idea that no one else could see you exerting your anthropic psychic powers, and I have no problem with the idea that different people can send different portions of their subjective futures into different realities. I find myself somewhat reluctant to bite that bullet, personally. Nick Bostrom, when I proposed this problem to him, offered that you should anticipate winning the lottery after five seconds, but anticipate losing the lottery after fifteen seconds. To bite this bullet, you have to throw away the idea that your joint subjective probabilities are the product of your conditional subjective probabilities. If you win the lottery, the subjective probability of having still won the lottery, ten seconds later, is ~1. And if you lose the lottery, the subjective probability of having lost the lottery, ten
Re: The free will function
On Feb 13, 3:51 pm, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: Well humans aren't made of DNA, and there are good reasons they are made of carbon compounds (mostly) instead of silicon ones. But the question is about consciousness, not evolution. I'm using DNA as an example that physical properties are influential for the possibilities of life, not just abstract functions. Consciousness is, as far as we know, limited to things made through the activities of DNA. I am saying we can't assume that there is no reason for that to be the case. You've been asserting that it's the case...not just cautioning about possibilities. So let's hear one of those 'good reasons'; one that is not just a speculative possibility. How do you go from me saying 'we cannot discount the possibility...' to demanding an answer that is not a speculative possibility? If I say we cannot discount the possibility that cigarettes cause cancer, does that mean that you can demand that I produce the precise mechanism by which they cause cancer or else it invalidates the possibility that it does? Yes, you were circumspect in that response. But referred to what you've said in other posts. I don't see anything wrong with speculating on the possibilities. That's because awareness is not mechanical. That's what makes a machine a machine, a lack of capacity to transcend recursive behavior or deviate from universal behavior. A silicon semiconductor does have an experience, just not the incomprehensible human experience that we superimpose on it's nature. No amount of gear motives scale up to opinions. There is no 'they' to a gear, because humans have cast them mechanically in molds to act as gears for our sense/motives. Innately they are not gears, but metal molecules in solid form. Their sense/motive is to respond to temperature, force, acceleration, etc in a relatively uniform fashion which does not scale up to being a living organism. So do I now take it you have abandoned these bold assertions No, not at all. It is clear to me that there are different sense making capacities associated with different levels of physical substance and relation. It is not all interchangeable, although there are many functions which can be imitated successfully. There is room for many different ways of doing the same thing and many different things that can be done in the same way. Consciousness overlaps with the body in some ways and it diverges in other ways. They are independent, they overlap, they influence each other, and they are in another sense, inseparable. No amount of steel gears is going to ever add up to a chicken. Only a chicken made of chicken cells is a chicken and has chicken consciousness. and no concede that maybe a silicon or mechanical brain could instantiate human-like consciousness and that's a reasonable research goal and you were just cautioning against assuming the outcome? It's a reasonable research goal because of the collateral knowledge that will come out of it, but no, I think in reality this goal will always be a pipe dream of alchemical proportions. Mortality is a fundamental experience of all life. As long as a brain is based on time-reversible, non-mortal mechanisms, it can never feel what any living thing can feel. Not that time irreversibility and mortality are the only criteria - but I suspect that they are part of the minimum requirements involved in stepping up from the molecular to the cellular level of sense making. Craig -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/13/2012 5:27 PM, acw wrote: [SPK] There is a problem with this though b/c it assumes that the field is pre-existing; it is the same as the block universe idea that Andrew Soltau and others are wrestling with. Why is a pre-existing field so troublesome? Seems like a similar problem as the one you have with Platonia. For any system featuring time or change, you can find a meta-system in which you can describe that system timelessly (and you have to, if one is to talk about time and change at all). Dear Kermit, OK, I will try to explain this in detail and check my math. I am good with pictures, even N-dimensional ones, but not symbols, equations and words... Think of a collection of different objects. Now think of how many ways that they can be arranged or partitioned up. For N objects, I believe that there are at least N! numbers of ways that they can be arranged. Now think of an Electromagnetic Field as we do in classical physics. At each point in space, it has a vector and a scalar value representing its magnetic and electric potentials. How many ways can this field be configured in terms of the possible values of the potentials at each point? At least 1x2x3x...xM ways, where M is the number of points of space. Let's add a dimension of time so that we have a 3,1 dimensional field configuration. How many different ways can this be configured? Well, that depends. We known that in Nature there is something called the Least Action Principle that basically states that what ever happens in a situation it is the one that minimizes the action. Water flows down hill for this reason, among other things... But it is still at least M! number of possible configurations. How do we compute what the minimum action configuration of the electromagnetic fields distributed across space-time? It is an optimization problem of figuring out which is the least action configured field given a choice of all possible field configurations. This computational problem is known to be NP-Complete and as such requires a quantity of resources to run the computation that increases as a non-polynomial power of the number of possible choices, so the number is, I think, 2^M! . The easiest to understand example of this kind of problem is the Traveling Salesman problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem: Given a list of cities and their pairwise distances, the task is to find the shortest possible route that visits each city exactly once. The number of possible routes that the salesman can take increases exponentially with the number of cities, there for the number of possible distances that have to be compared to each other to find the shortest route increases at least exponentially. So for a computer running a program to find the solution it takes exponentially more resources of memory and time (in computational steps) or some combination of the two. Now, given all of that, in the concept of Platonia we have the idea of ideal forms, be they the Good, or some particular infinite string of numbers. How exactly are they determined to be the best possible by some standard. Whatever the standard, all that matters is that there are multiple possible options of The Forms with the stipulation that it is the best or most consistent or whatever. It is still an optimization problem with N variables that are required to be compared to each other according to some standard. Therefore, in most cases there is an Np-complete problem to be solved. How can it be computed if it has to exist as perfect from the beginning? I figured this out when I was trying to wrap my head around Leindniz' idea of a Pre-Established Harmony. It was supposed to have been created by God to synchronize all of the Monads with each other so that they appeared to interact with each other without actually having to exchange substances - which was forbidden to happen as Monads have no windows. For God to have created such a PEH, it would have to solve an NP-Complete problem on the configuration space of all possible worlds. If the number of possible worlds is infinite then the computation will require infinite computational resources. Given that God has to have the solution before the Universe is created, It cannot use the time component of God's Ultimate Digital computer. Since there is no space full of distinguishable stuff, there isn't any memory resources either for the computation. So guess what? The PEH cannot be computed and thus the universe cannot be created with a PEH as Leibniz proposed. The idea of a measure that Bruno talks about is just another way of talking about this same kind of optimization problem without tipping his hand that it implicitly requires a computation to be performed to find it. I do not blame him as this problem has been glossed over for hundred of years in math and thus we have to play with nonsense like the Axiom of
Re: The Anthropic Trilemma - Less Wrong
On 2/13/2012 5:54 PM, acw wrote: On 2/12/2012 17:29, Stephen P. King wrote: Hi Folks, I would like to bring the following to your attention. I think that we do need to revisit this problem. http://lesswrong.com/lw/19d/the_anthropic_trilemma/ The Anthropic Trilemma http://lesswrong.com/lw/19d/the_anthropic_trilemma/ snip I gave a tentative (and likely wrong) possible solution to it in another thread. The trillema is much lessened if one considers a relative measure on histories (chains of OMs) and their length. That is, if a branch has more OMs, it should be more likely. The first horn doesn't apply because you'd have to keep the copies running indefinitely (merging won't work). The second horn, I'm not so sure if it's avoided: COMP-immortality implies potentially infinite histories (although mergers may make them finite), which makes formalizing my idea not trivial. The third horn only applies to ASSA, not RSSA (implicit in COMP). The fourth horn is acceptable to me, we can't really deny Boltzmann brains, but they shouldn't be that important as the experience isn't spatially located anyway(MGA). The white rabbit problem is more of a worry in COMP than this horn. The fifth horn is interesting, but also the most difficult to solve: it would require deriving local physics from COMP. My solution doesn't really solve the first horn though, it just makes it more difficult: if you do happen to make 3^^^3 copies of yourself in the future and they live very different and long lives, that might make it more likely that you end up with a continuation in such a future, however making copies and merging them shortly afterwards won't work. Hi ACW, This solution only will work for finite and very special versions of infinite sets. For the infinities like that of the Integers, it will not work because any proper subset of the infinite set is identical to the complete set as we can demonstrated with a one-to-one map between the odd integers and the integers. Given that the number of computations that a universal TM can run is at least the countable infinity of the integers, we cannot use a comparison procedure to define the measure. (Maybe this is one of the reasons many very smart people have tried, unsuccessfully, to ban infinite sets...) Onward! Stephen -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/14/2012 02:55, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/13/2012 5:27 PM, acw wrote: [SPK] There is a problem with this though b/c it assumes that the field is pre-existing; it is the same as the block universe idea that Andrew Soltau and others are wrestling with. Why is a pre-existing field so troublesome? Seems like a similar problem as the one you have with Platonia. For any system featuring time or change, you can find a meta-system in which you can describe that system timelessly (and you have to, if one is to talk about time and change at all). Dear Kermit, OK, I will try to explain this in detail and check my math. I am good with pictures, even N-dimensional ones, but not symbols, equations and words... Think of a collection of different objects. Now think of how many ways that they can be arranged or partitioned up. For N objects, I believe that there are at least N! numbers of ways that they can be arranged. Now think of an Electromagnetic Field as we do in classical physics. At each point in space, it has a vector and a scalar value representing its magnetic and electric potentials. How many ways can this field be configured in terms of the possible values of the potentials at each point? At least 1x2x3x...xM ways, where M is the number of points of space. Let's add a dimension of time so that we have a 3,1 dimensional field configuration. How many different ways can this be configured? Well, that depends. We known that in Nature there is something called the Least Action Principle that basically states that what ever happens in a situation it is the one that minimizes the action. Water flows down hill for this reason, among other things... But it is still at least M! number of possible configurations. How do we compute what the minimum action configuration of the electromagnetic fields distributed across space-time? It is an optimization problem of figuring out which is the least action configured field given a choice of all possible field configurations. This computational problem is known to be NP-Complete and as such requires a quantity of resources to run the computation that increases as a non-polynomial power of the number of possible choices, so the number is, I think, 2^M! . The easiest to understand example of this kind of problem is the Traveling Salesman problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem: Given a list of cities and their pairwise distances, the task is to find the shortest possible route that visits each city exactly once. The number of possible routes that the salesman can take increases exponentially with the number of cities, there for the number of possible distances that have to be compared to each other to find the shortest route increases at least exponentially. So for a computer running a program to find the solution it takes exponentially more resources of memory and time (in computational steps) or some combination of the two. Yet the problem is decidable in finite amount of steps, even if that amount may be very large indeed. It would be unfeasible for someone with bounded resources, but not a problem for any abstract TM or a physical system (are they one and the same, at least locally?). Now, given all of that, in the concept of Platonia we have the idea of ideal forms, be they the Good, or some particular infinite string of numbers. How exactly are they determined to be the best possible by some standard. Whatever the standard, all that matters is that there are multiple possible options of The Forms with the stipulation that it is the best or most consistent or whatever. It is still an optimization problem with N variables that are required to be compared to each other according to some standard. Therefore, in most cases there is an Np-complete problem to be solved. How can it be computed if it has to exist as perfect from the beginning? The problem is that you're considering a from the beginning at all, as in, you're imagining math as existing in time. Instead of thinking it along the lines of specific Forms, try thinking of a limited version along the lines of: is this problem decidable in a finite amount of steps, no matter how large, as in: if a true solution exists, it's there. I'm not entirely sure if we can include uncomputable values there, such as if a specific program halts or not, but I'm leaning towards that it might be possible. I figured this out when I was trying to wrap my head around Leindniz' idea of a Pre-Established Harmony. It was supposed to have been created by God to synchronize all of the Monads with each other so that they appeared to interact with each other without actually having to exchange substances - which was forbidden to happen as Monads have no windows. For God to have created such a PEH, it would have to solve an NP-Complete problem on the configuration space of all possible worlds. Try all possible solutions for a problem, ignore invalid ones. If the number of possible worlds is
Re: On Pre-existing Fields
Lots of interesting ideas going about. It sounds like you're pondering how many elements are in the set of all world-lines consistent with the true laws of physics (e.g., possibly, the least action principle). (Incidentally, that set oddly enough is timeless yet the bundles of world-lines that comprise our selves evidently perceive change.) Proof by throwing in an axiom isn't very satisfying but I would like to say that Banach-Tarski is no more strange than Gabriel's Horn or Cantor's hierarchy of infinities. Strangeness is of course a matter of opinion and mine is that the existence of nonmeasurable sets is not a heavy price to pay for that poof (a proof by throwing in an axiom). Cheers On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 6:55 PM, Stephen P. King stephe...@charter.netwrote: On 2/13/2012 5:27 PM, acw wrote: [SPK] There is a problem with this though b/c it assumes that the field is pre-existing; it is the same as the block universe idea that Andrew Soltau and others are wrestling with. Why is a pre-existing field so troublesome? Seems like a similar problem as the one you have with Platonia. For any system featuring time or change, you can find a meta-system in which you can describe that system timelessly (and you have to, if one is to talk about time and change at all). Dear Kermit, OK, I will try to explain this in detail and check my math. I am good with pictures, even N-dimensional ones, but not symbols, equations and words... Think of a collection of different objects. Now think of how many ways that they can be arranged or partitioned up. For N objects, I believe that there are at least N! numbers of ways that they can be arranged. Now think of an Electromagnetic Field as we do in classical physics. At each point in space, it has a vector and a scalar value representing its magnetic and electric potentials. How many ways can this field be configured in terms of the possible values of the potentials at each point? At least 1x2x3x...xM ways, where M is the number of points of space. Let's add a dimension of time so that we have a 3,1 dimensional field configuration. How many different ways can this be configured? Well, that depends. We known that in Nature there is something called the Least Action Principle that basically states that what ever happens in a situation it is the one that minimizes the action. Water flows down hill for this reason, among other things... But it is still at least M! number of possible configurations. How do we compute what the minimum action configuration of the electromagnetic fields distributed across space-time? It is an optimization problem of figuring out which is the least action configured field given a choice of all possible field configurations. This computational problem is known to be NP-Complete and as such requires a quantity of resources to run the computation that increases as a non-polynomial power of the number of possible choices, so the number is, I think, 2^M! . The easiest to understand example of this kind of problem is the Traveling Salesman problemhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem: Given a list of cities and their pairwise distances, the task is to find the shortest possible route that visits each city exactly once. The number of possible routes that the salesman can take increases exponentially with the number of cities, there for the number of possible distances that have to be compared to each other to find the shortest route increases at least exponentially. So for a computer running a program to find the solution it takes exponentially more resources of memory and time (in computational steps) or some combination of the two. Now, given all of that, in the concept of Platonia we have the idea of ideal forms, be they the Good, or some particular infinite string of numbers. How exactly are they determined to be the best possible by some standard. Whatever the standard, all that matters is that there are multiple possible options of The Forms with the stipulation that it is the best or most consistent or whatever. It is still an optimization problem with N variables that are required to be compared to each other according to some standard. Therefore, in most cases there is an Np-complete problem to be solved. How can it be computed if it has to exist as perfect from the beginning? I figured this out when I was trying to wrap my head around Leindniz' idea of a Pre-Established Harmony. It was supposed to have been created by God to synchronize all of the Monads with each other so that they appeared to interact with each other without actually having to exchange substances - which was forbidden to happen as Monads have no windows. For God to have created such a PEH, it would have to solve an NP-Complete problem on the configuration space of all possible worlds. If the number of possible worlds is infinite then the computation will
Re: The Anthropic Trilemma - Less Wrong
On 2/14/2012 03:00, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/13/2012 5:54 PM, acw wrote: On 2/12/2012 17:29, Stephen P. King wrote: Hi Folks, I would like to bring the following to your attention. I think that we do need to revisit this problem. http://lesswrong.com/lw/19d/the_anthropic_trilemma/ The Anthropic Trilemma http://lesswrong.com/lw/19d/the_anthropic_trilemma/ snip I gave a tentative (and likely wrong) possible solution to it in another thread. The trillema is much lessened if one considers a relative measure on histories (chains of OMs) and their length. That is, if a branch has more OMs, it should be more likely. The first horn doesn't apply because you'd have to keep the copies running indefinitely (merging won't work). The second horn, I'm not so sure if it's avoided: COMP-immortality implies potentially infinite histories (although mergers may make them finite), which makes formalizing my idea not trivial. The third horn only applies to ASSA, not RSSA (implicit in COMP). The fourth horn is acceptable to me, we can't really deny Boltzmann brains, but they shouldn't be that important as the experience isn't spatially located anyway(MGA). The white rabbit problem is more of a worry in COMP than this horn. The fifth horn is interesting, but also the most difficult to solve: it would require deriving local physics from COMP. My solution doesn't really solve the first horn though, it just makes it more difficult: if you do happen to make 3^^^3 copies of yourself in the future and they live very different and long lives, that might make it more likely that you end up with a continuation in such a future, however making copies and merging them shortly afterwards won't work. Hi ACW, This solution only will work for finite and very special versions of infinite sets. For the infinities like that of the Integers, it will not work because any proper subset of the infinite set is identical to the complete set as we can demonstrated with a one-to-one map between the odd integers and the integers. Hence why it's a measure, not a sets cardinality. Although, you're right, it's not obvious to me how this can be solved in a satisfactory manner with infinite non-merging histories. One could give up on finding a computable measure and just consider each history as it is, without trying to quantify directly over all histories. Such a measure would be most likely uncomputable, although it'd still be better than nothing. It's not obvious that some histories wouldn't be finite if one considers their mergers with other histories (consider the case of humans which have finite brains and memories, eventually a loop/merge would exist if they don't self-modify somehow, simply because of finite amount of memory, even in the case of a SIM which never dies or deteriorates due to biological issues). Given that the number of computations that a universal TM can run is at least the countable infinity of the integers, we cannot use a comparison procedure to define the measure. (Maybe this is one of the reasons many very smart people have tried, unsuccessfully, to ban infinite sets...) Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately?), one cannot avoid the countable infinity of naturals. Onward! Stephen -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: The free will function
On Sun, Feb 12, 2012 at 7:56 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote: We've only changed the name from God's Will to evolution/mechanism/probability A good theory explains how something simple can produce something more complex and is very explicit about the details. A bad theory describes how something more complex can produce something less complex and waves its metaphorical hands around about the details. Darwin explained how something as simple as natural selection and random mutation can produced ever more complex varieties of life and he went into details; that's why many say that Charles Darwin had the single best idea that any human being ever had and I agree with them. The God hypothesis explains how something infinity complex (God) produced something finitely complex (you and me) and gives no details about how He did it except that He (God has a sex apparently) did it all in 6 days and the process of making finite stuff was exhausting for this infinite being and He needed to rest for a day. The discovery in the 1950's about how DNA can not only duplicates itself but contains the program that tells cellular machinery how to assemble enormously complex proteins confirms the idea that a living cell is a purely mechanical factory. Which would have solved the problem, except that we don't experience ourselves as enormously complex proteins. Exactly, we don't experience the world as proteins so I don't understand why only they and not transistors can be at the root of experience when we don't experience them. We don't experience the world as neurons either and would not even be conscious of them unless we read about them in a book, so I don't understand why only neurons and not microprocessors can be at the root of experience when we don't experience them. Therefore the key thing must be what those proteins and neurons and transistors and microprocessors do rather than what they are, and there can be things other than proteins and neurons that can do those things. We are not directly conscious of atoms or proteins or neurons, we are conscious at the level of symbols, and computers can manipulate symbols just fine, if they could not nobody would even bother to make computers. We don't experience the world as irrelevant spectators to a purely mechanical process. True, because we don't know what we will do until we do it, just as we don't know what the result of a calculation will be until we have finished calculating it. The complete failure of mechanism to generate any possible explanation for consciousness or experience If mechanism can't explain it then non-mechanism can't explain it either, a free floating glow is not a explanation. And a paucity of explanations for consciousness has not prevented human beings from making judgments about what is conscious and what is not, humans have been doing it for many thousands of years and they do it by using the only tool they had for such things, determining if the thing in question behaved intelligently or not. If the discovery of DNA explained the existence of the feeling and awareness of life, then we would not be having this conversation, DNA was discovered in 1869 but in the 1950's it was discovered how DNA could make things that DID have the feeling and awareness of life, things like you and me. And there was nothing mystical about this construction process, it was purely mechanical. And after these things got made no new laws of physics were needed to explain their operation, in every brain ever examined all that is seen is very very complex electro-chemistry; and all that machinery is hidden from consciousness because as I've said it operates at the symbol level not the chemistry level. I agree completely when you said we don't experience ourselves as enormously complex proteins, so protein is not essential for experience. Invoking vitalism or religion to characterize my views is a similar low stooping resort. [...] It is exactly what it seems to be. Experience, feeling...private, signifying sensorimotive events. [...] It is a description of the cosmos precisely as we experience it, nothing more and nothing less. So your revolutionary new theory is that experience is experience and feelings are feelings and sensorimotive is a fine sounding word that tends to impress the rubes. Well there is not much in your theory to disagree with, but I don't see how you go from there to the inability of computers to do what brains can do because they are not squishy squashy and don't smell bad. What does that have to do with imprisonment? Does North Korea intend to rehabilitate the software? Yes it does, North Korea insists that programs it does not like be rewritten. Does it employ behavior modification You bet! Programs behave very differently after North Korea is through with them. It's real arithmetic to us, but not to the computer. So arithmetic is subjective it's nature changes according to who looks at
Re: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/13/2012 11:18 PM, acw wrote: On 2/14/2012 02:55, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/13/2012 5:27 PM, acw wrote: [SPK] There is a problem with this though b/c it assumes that the field is pre-existing; it is the same as the block universe idea that Andrew Soltau and others are wrestling with. Why is a pre-existing field so troublesome? Seems like a similar problem as the one you have with Platonia. For any system featuring time or change, you can find a meta-system in which you can describe that system timelessly (and you have to, if one is to talk about time and change at all). Dear Kermit, OK, I will try to explain this in detail and check my math. I am good with pictures, even N-dimensional ones, but not symbols, equations and words... Think of a collection of different objects. Now think of how many ways that they can be arranged or partitioned up. For N objects, I believe that there are at least N! numbers of ways that they can be arranged. Now think of an Electromagnetic Field as we do in classical physics. At each point in space, it has a vector and a scalar value representing its magnetic and electric potentials. How many ways can this field be configured in terms of the possible values of the potentials at each point? At least 1x2x3x...xM ways, where M is the number of points of space. Let's add a dimension of time so that we have a 3,1 dimensional field configuration. How many different ways can this be configured? Well, that depends. We known that in Nature there is something called the Least Action Principle that basically states that what ever happens in a situation it is the one that minimizes the action. Water flows down hill for this reason, among other things... But it is still at least M! number of possible configurations. How do we compute what the minimum action configuration of the electromagnetic fields distributed across space-time? It is an optimization problem of figuring out which is the least action configured field given a choice of all possible field configurations. This computational problem is known to be NP-Complete and as such requires a quantity of resources to run the computation that increases as a non-polynomial power of the number of possible choices, so the number is, I think, 2^M! . The easiest to understand example of this kind of problem is the Traveling Salesman problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem: Given a list of cities and their pairwise distances, the task is to find the shortest possible route that visits each city exactly once. The number of possible routes that the salesman can take increases exponentially with the number of cities, there for the number of possible distances that have to be compared to each other to find the shortest route increases at least exponentially. So for a computer running a program to find the solution it takes exponentially more resources of memory and time (in computational steps) or some combination of the two. Yet the problem is decidable in finite amount of steps, even if that amount may be very large indeed. It would be unfeasible for someone with bounded resources, but not a problem for any abstract TM or a physical system (are they one and the same, at least locally?). Hi ACW, WARNING WARNING WARNING DANGER DANGER! Overload is Eminent! OK, please help me understand how we can speak of computations for situations where I have just laid out how computations can't exist. If we take CTT at face value, then it requires some form of implementation. Some kind of machine must be run. Are you sure that you are not substituting your ability to imagine the solution of a computation as an intuitive proof that computations exist as purely abstract entities, independent from all things physical? My difficulty may just be a simple failure of imagination but how can it make any sense to believe in something in whose very definition is the requirement that it cannot be known or imagined? Knowing and imagining are, at least, computations running in our brain hardware. If your brained stopped, the knowing, imagining and even dreaming that is you continues? So you do believe in disembodies spirits, you are just not calling them that. I apologize, but this is a bit hard to take. The inconsistency that runs rampant here is making me a bit depressed. Now, given all of that, in the concept of Platonia we have the idea of ideal forms, be they the Good, or some particular infinite string of numbers. How exactly are they determined to be the best possible by some standard. Whatever the standard, all that matters is that there are multiple possible options of The Forms with the stipulation that it is the best or most consistent or whatever. It is still an optimization problem with N variables that are required to be compared to each other according to some standard. Therefore, in most cases there is an Np-complete problem to be solved. How can it be computed if it has to
Re: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/13/2012 6:55 PM, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/13/2012 5:27 PM, acw wrote: [SPK] There is a problem with this though b/c it assumes that the field is pre-existing; it is the same as the block universe idea that Andrew Soltau and others are wrestling with. Why is a pre-existing field so troublesome? Seems like a similar problem as the one you have with Platonia. For any system featuring time or change, you can find a meta-system in which you can describe that system timelessly (and you have to, if one is to talk about time and change at all). Dear Kermit, OK, I will try to explain this in detail and check my math. I am good with pictures, even N-dimensional ones, but not symbols, equations and words... Think of a collection of different objects. Now think of how many ways that they can be arranged or partitioned up. For N objects, I believe that there are at least N! numbers of ways that they can be arranged. Now think of an Electromagnetic Field as we do in classical physics. At each point in space, it has a vector and a scalar value representing its magnetic and electric potentials. The EM field is a second order anti-symmetric tensor, F_mu_nu, so it has six independent components. How many ways can this field be configured in terms of the possible values of the potentials at each point? In classical physics it has uncountably many values at each point. In QFT with boundary conditions it may be limited. At least 1x2x3x...xM ways, where M is the number of points of space. An uncountable infinity. Let's add a dimension of time so that we have a 3,1 dimensional field configuration. The dimensions of space are not the same as the possible values of fields at a point, nor are they the number of points of space. How many different ways can this be configured? Uncountably many ways. Well, that depends. We known that in Nature there is something called the Least Action Principle that basically states that what ever happens in a situation it is the one that minimizes the action. Water flows down hill for this reason, among other things... But it is still at least M! number of possible configurations. The least action principle applied to the EM field in free space gives you Maxwell's equations for EM waves which have uncountably many possible solutions. In order to get definite solutions though you need boundary conditions. How do we compute what the minimum action configuration of the electromagnetic fields distributed across space-time? It is an optimization problem of figuring out which is the least action configured field given a choice of all possible field configurations. This computational problem is known to be NP-Complete and as such requires a quantity of resources to run the computation that increases as a non-polynomial power of the number of possible choices, so the number is, I think, 2^M! . All this discussion of computational resources is irrelevant since you've postulated a system with uncountably many possible solutions, and you've not specified any boundary conditions so they just correspond to all possible photons. The easiest to understand example of this kind of problem is the Traveling Salesman problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem: Given a list of cities and their pairwise distances, the task is to find the shortest possible route that visits each city exactly once. The number of possible routes that the salesman can take increases exponentially with the number of cities, there for the number of possible distances that have to be compared to each other to find the shortest route increases at least exponentially. So for a computer running a program to find the solution it takes exponentially more resources of memory and time (in computational steps) or some combination of the two. Now, given all of that, in the concept of Platonia we have the idea of ideal forms, be they the Good, or some particular infinite string of numbers. How exactly are they determined to be the best possible by some standard. Whatever the standard, all that matters is that there are multiple possible options of The Forms with the stipulation that it is the best or most consistent or whatever. It is still an optimization problem with N variables that are required to be compared to each other according to some standard. Therefore, in most cases there is an Np-complete problem to be solved. How can it be computed if it has to exist as perfect from the beginning? I figured this out when I was trying to wrap my head around Leindniz' idea of a Pre-Established Harmony. It was supposed to have been created by God to synchronize all of the Monads with each other so that they appeared to interact with each other without actually having to exchange substances - which was forbidden to happen as Monads have no windows. For God to have created such a PEH, it would have to solve an
