Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 14 Jul 2012, at 15:37, Stephen P. King wrote: On 7/14/2012 4:26 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 13 Jul 2012, at 20:26, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: On 07.07.2012 19:40 John Clark said the following: On Sat, Jul 7, 2012 Evgenii Rudnyiuse...@rudnyi.ru wrote: ... An interesting question is however, where resulting visual mental concepts are located. I find it about as interesting as asking where big or the number eleven is located and shows the same profound misunderstanding of the situation on so many different levels that it's hard to know where to begin. The question where in physicalism numbers are located is also interesting indeed. If you know the answer, I would appreciate it. As I just said to Stephen, numbers are not located anywhere. They are not physical entities. Bruno With this claim it follows that numbers cannot have *any* properties that we associate with physical entities. This is a problem! Not if the physical appears to be a stable lawful collective hallucination of a class of universal numbers. But tell me how with a neutral monism, so neutral as to avoid any properties at all for the basic entity, you are not making worse that very problem for your approach. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 14 Jul 2012, at 18:21, John Clark wrote: On Sat, Jul 14, 2012 Evgenii Rudnyi use...@rudnyi.ru wrote: As far as I understand, theology is about beliefs Theology is about believing in something when there is absolutely no reason for doing so, it is called faith. Then the danger of cannabis belongs to faith, and I agree with you, the modern current health politics is theology. The definition you give of theology seems to me to be the definition given by the fear sellers and the bandits. I am not sure why you credit them on anything. On the contrary, I would even defined God/Religion by what you still believe in once you succeed in abandoning *all* argument from authority. With comp, I can argue that the inner God (alias the first person, the universal soul, Bp p, S4GRz1) can play that role for the ideally correct machine. Bruno Theologians say this is a wonderful virtue and I can understand perfectly why a human being would try to peddle faith as the highest virtue because if you were trying to push a idea that makes no sense faith turns a disadvantage into a advantage. But I'll be damned (literally) if I understand why a omnipotent omniscient being thinks faith is a good thing and even tries to trick us into believing He does not exist and will torture us for eternity if this omnipotent being succeeds in fooling us because we don't have enough faith. Could you offer some more meaningful picture on the relationship between mathematics and physics? You demand I give a SPATIAL relationship between consciousness and numbers and various adjectives like Evgenii Rudnyi, you wanted to know where they are located, where they existed in space. I thought I did a good job telling you exactly where the number eleven is located but perhaps I'm wrong and it's really just below yellow (not green) a little to the right of big above sweet and between fast and pneumatic. Let's get in the car and go there right now and see if its there. John K Clark -- 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 . http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 14 Jul 2012, at 15:47, Stephen P. King wrote: On 7/14/2012 4:46 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 14 Jul 2012, at 06:16, Stephen P. King wrote: On 7/13/2012 11:51 PM, meekerdb wrote: On 7/13/2012 7:31 PM, Stephen P. King wrote: Does unpredictability that you have mentioned in another message will help in this respect? If yes, how? If you're asking whether unpredictability eliminates responsibility, the answer is no. Brent Hi Brent, OK, so does the converse hold? Predictability eliminates responsibility? That sentence looks very wrong Right. Predictability is irrelevant to the social concept of responsibility. Brent -- OK, so what is relevant? What action is the determinant of a given quantity of responsibility? Knowledge? No, that can't be because that involves predictability. So, I am at a loose. Please enlighten me. Knowledge of our ignorance. Numbers intrinsic knowledge of their own relative ignorance. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ So then we can think of numbers as quantities of relative ignorance? Not at all. I was thinking of the numbers encoding persons relatively to universal numbers. Those numbers bears first person views and can acknowledge their ignorance. That is much better than the ghosts of departed quantities that Newton had! But how does this answer my question of responsibility? Because those numbers can hesitate and take decision acknowledging their ignorance, and develop a notion of responsibility. You are talking to a different question and assuming a measure exists where one cannot be defined. You jump from one subject to another. As I said to John Clark, the self-indetermination used in free will has nothing to do with the first person indeterminacy, which is related to the measure problem. The absence of a property is the complement of the property, no? In some context. This is where we cannot avoid some form of set theory and it is exactly where we get into trouble! There is no part of Cantor paradise we can really avoid when studying machine's psychology. Set theory, complex analysis, you name it. I don't see the problem you are alluding too, beyond the fact that comp is used here to formulate and make precise some problem indeed. bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 14 Jul 2012, at 18:48, Stephen P. King wrote: On 7/14/2012 5:52 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 14 Jul 2012, at 11:16, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: On 14.07.2012 11:00 Bruno Marchal said the following: On 14 Jul 2012, at 10:42, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: ... If to speak about your theorem, it is unclear to me, how the first person view accesses numbers and mathematical objects. Like a digital machine, which can access numbers encoded in their memory, through logical gates, and so one. More details are given currently on the FOAR list, but the idea is simple, with comp our bodies are statistical first person constructs related to infinities of number relations, so we access to them a bit like a fish can access water. The price of this is that we have to abandon physicalism eventually. I am not sure if I understand. I would like to have an explanation for a phenomenon, for example 1) I see a cat; 2) I see a piece of paper with 2 + 2 = 4. Yet, when you start explaining, the phenomenon seems to disappear. 1) I see a cat. This is explained by the fact that your current computational state belongs to an infinity of computations making you singling out some stable patterns that you recognize, by access to your previous experience as being cat. The qualia itself is explained by the fact that when you refer to the cat, you are really referring to yourself (with the implicit hope that it corresponds to some relatively independent pattern), and the math shows that such a self-reference involves some true but non rationally communicable feature. The math explained why, if this justification is correct, machines/numbers will not be entirely satisfied by it, for the first person is not a machine from its own first person view. Hi Bruno, No, the reverse is the case. The belongs to an infinity of computations making you singling out some stable patterns requires the prior existence of the you to select it. With comp, you, the dreamer's bodies, and its soul, already exist (in different modal sense) in arithmetic. Provably so, even in Robinson arithmetic, for the 3-view. The observer (you here) effectively is the measure via a self- selection rule. This makes no sense. I cannot discount my own existence given the immediate fact that I am experiencing myself as existing. You cannot discount the first person experience. But comp does not discount it. It explains how it arises from the ability of numbers to observe themselves and extrapolate, etc. Descartes' Cognito ergo Sum is a pointed statement of this unassailable fact. We cannot put the observer on a level that is emerging from the computations if the observer is the one that is selecting the class of computations that are generating said observer. ? You refute Darwin too? A possible escape from this is to allow for non-well founded sets and such things as non-principle ultrafilters, but I don't know your stand on their existence. Good tools. Our observation of the cat is a symmetric (within bounds) relationship, otherwise we fall into solipsism. ? My claim is that the same thing follows for mathematical entities. We cannot claim that mathematical (or any other abstract entity!) is such that we (the observers and understanders thereof) are emerging from them. Prove that claim. Then by UDA, you refute comp. This would require that the independence is not and cannot be an unbridgeable gap at all, but a analytic continuum connecting the particular instance of a physical system with the knowledge and meaning of the abstraction. Maths do not refer explicitly to the physical media that they are represented upon by patterns, but this does not allow us to imagine them as completely independent and thus severable from the physical instances. So many implicit assumption. You seem again to assume the physical. Even Plato's idea of the Forms as casting shadows on the wall of the cave tacitly assumes continuity between the Forms and what we the ideas in our individual minds. If I am not mistaken the idea of conic sections where used to argue the idea. Shadow or projections cannot be severed from the object casting them! Which can be N, +, *. 2) The same with 2+2=4 written on some paper. It is also a stable pattern in the computations going through your state. Here you might just refer to what you have learned in school, and you might considered that the truth referred by that sentence on a paper is more stable than a cat, but the conscious perception of cat or ink on paper admits the same explanation: some universal number reflect a pattern belonging to almost all computations going through your state. You have to take the first person indeterminacy into account, and keep in mind that your immediate future is determined by an infinity of computations/universal number, going through your actual
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 14 Jul 2012, at 18:21, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: On 14.07.2012 11:52 Bruno Marchal said the following: On 14 Jul 2012, at 11:16, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: On 14.07.2012 11:00 Bruno Marchal said the following: On 14 Jul 2012, at 10:42, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: ... If to speak about your theorem, it is unclear to me, how the first person view accesses numbers and mathematical objects. Like a digital machine, which can access numbers encoded in their memory, through logical gates, and so one. More details are given currently on the FOAR list, but the idea is simple, with comp our bodies are statistical first person constructs related to infinities of number relations, so we access to them a bit like a fish can access water. The price of this is that we have to abandon physicalism eventually. I am not sure if I understand. I would like to have an explanation for a phenomenon, for example 1) I see a cat; 2) I see a piece of paper with 2 + 2 = 4. Yet, when you start explaining, the phenomenon seems to disappear. 1) I see a cat. This is explained by the fact that your current computational state belongs to an infinity of computations making you singling out some stable patterns that you recognize, by access to your previous experience as being cat. The qualia itself is explained by the fact that when you refer to the cat, you are really referring to yourself (with the implicit hope that it corresponds to some relatively independent pattern), and the math shows that such a self-reference involves some true but non rationally communicable feature. The math explained why, if this justification is correct, machines/numbers will not be entirely satisfied by it, for the first person is not a machine from its own first person view. 2) The same with 2+2=4 written on some paper. It is also a stable pattern in the computations going through your state. Here you might just refer to what you have learned in school, and you might considered that the truth referred by that sentence on a paper is more stable than a cat, but the conscious perception of cat or ink on paper admits the same explanation: some universal number reflect a pattern belonging to almost all computations going through your state. You have to take the first person indeterminacy into account, and keep in mind that your immediate future is determined by an infinity of computations/universal number, going through your actual state. For example, all the Heisenberg matrices computing the state of the galaxy at some description level for some amount of steps. They all provably exist independently of us in a tiny part of elementary arithmetic, and admit at least as many variants as there are possible electron location in their energy level orbitals. I cannot be sure if this helps you as it relies to some familiarity with the first person indeterminacy and the fact that our comp states are distributed in an infinity of distinct, from a third person pov, computations (existing in arithmetic). Bruno, Thank you for the answer. I am definitely far away from to comprehend it, You can ask any question on any step. UDA1-8 does not require more than a passive understanding of elementary computer science (universal machines, computers). but it looks like that your motive is also close to the Game of Life. What difference do you see in this respect? With comp, after UDA, and supposing it is 100% valid, the choice of the universal system for the ontology is arbitrary. The laws of physics and the laws of mind are independent of it. So it is better to use one which is far from looking physical so that when we derive physics we diminish the possible confusions of level. The game of life already used a two dimensional grid, and has a notion of physical interaction build it, so I prefer to use the numbers. But the GOL is quite OK in principle. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On Sun, Jul 15, 2012 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Theology is about believing in something when there is absolutely bsolutely no reason for doing so, it is called faith. Then the danger of cannabis belongs to faith, Yes, absolutely. The definition you give of theology seems to me to be the definition given by the fear sellers and the bandits. I don't know what that means. I am not sure why you credit them on anything. Nor that. On the contrary, I would even defined God/Religion by what you still believe in once you succeed in abandoning *all* argument from authority. So 2+2 = 4 is God/Religion. Face it, you throw around the words God, Religion and Theology all the time but without any clear non-contradictory definition of any of them, nor can you come up with a example that is not completly ridiculous. The closest you have come is that when arguing with a atheist like me theology is a convenient insult you can throw if the atheist says something you disagree with. And calling someone that you know doesn't like religion religious is not exactly a new putdown, I believe I first heard it around 1964. With comp, I can argue that the inner God (alias the first person, the universal soul, Bp p, S4GRz1) can play that role for the ideally correct machine. And in spite of your frequent use of the word, or more likely because of it, I am no longer even clear about what exactly your homegrown term comp is supposed to mean. John K Clark -- 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: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 7/15/2012 9:21 PM, Stephen P. King wrote: Interesting. So the unitary evolution of the SWF or state vector is not continuous over its spectrum or what ever it is called ... the cover or span of the basis? It's continuous, but decoherence picks out different subspaces which are almost perfectly orthogonal and correspond to different classical events. There's a different you in each of these subspaces corresponding to seeing Schrodinger's cat alive or dead. Hi Brent, Does not seem as if decoherence is a bit too clever by half? I am very interested in this process that we are calling decoherence. Where does it get this ability to pick out different subspaces which are almost perfectly orthogonal? It's a consequence of the interaction Hamiltonian between a measuring device and the environment (which may just be part of the measuring device). Observable states that commute with this Hamiltonian will be stable and constitute a record. So the stable subspaces are the eigenspaces of this interaction Hamiltonian. But you're right that is only a partial solution to the measurement problem. That's because the division into systems - thing measured, measurement instrument (or observer), and environment - is a choice we make in our description. And the operation of tracing (averaging) over the unknown environment modes is a mathematical operation we perform in our description - not a physical process. The cross terms in the reduced density matrix average to zero so then the matrix just has normal probability measures along its diagonal. I was operating under the belief that all of the vectors (in the Hilbert space involved) are strictly orthogonal and are so perpetually. No. They are no more necessarily orthogonal than vectors you might draw on a plane. Presumably the state of the universe/multiverse as a whole is a single ray in the Hilbert space of the universe/multiverse. But the application of the theory is always to subspaces describing different things as the-thing-measured, the measuring-apparatus, etc. and Hilbert spaces constructed as tensor products of these. Schlosshauer explains this better and at greater length than I can. Brent Where do these subspaces come from? Are they defined by subsets of the state vectors (or eigenvectors)? How is the diffeomorphism invariance (that the unitary evolution is equivalent to!) get preserved in this process? How does tracing out eliminate things? -- 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: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 7/16/2012 1:56 PM, meekerdb wrote: On 7/15/2012 9:21 PM, Stephen P. King wrote: Interesting. So the unitary evolution of the SWF or state vector is not continuous over its spectrum or what ever it is called ... the cover or span of the basis? It's continuous, but decoherence picks out different subspaces which are almost perfectly orthogonal and correspond to different classical events. There's a different you in each of these subspaces corresponding to seeing Schrodinger's cat alive or dead. Hi Brent, Does not seem as if decoherence is a bit too clever by half? I am very interested in this process that we are calling decoherence. Where does it get this ability to pick out different subspaces which are almost perfectly orthogonal? It's a consequence of the interaction Hamiltonian between a measuring device and the environment (which may just be part of the measuring device). Observable states that commute with this Hamiltonian will be stable and constitute a record. So the stable subspaces are the eigenspaces of this interaction Hamiltonian. But you're right that is only a partial solution to the measurement problem. That's because the division into systems - thing measured, measurement instrument (or observer), and environment - is a choice we make in our description. And the operation of tracing (averaging) over the unknown environment modes is a mathematical operation we perform in our description - not a physical process. The cross terms in the reduced density matrix average to zero so then the matrix just has normal probability measures along its diagonal. Hi Brent, What I am interested in, among other things, is to drill down into this environment notion. So far it seems to be a repackaged version of the heat reservoir http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_reservoir of old Clausius http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics#Clausius_statement and Boltzmann days. It is its infinity that troubles me; It is an effectively infinite pool of thermal energy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_energyat a given, constanttemperature http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature. The temperature of the reservoir does not change irrespective of whetherheat http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heatis added or extracted.. Is there a finite version that we could consider that if taken to an infinite limit will give us the same nice ideal concept but that in a large but finite case does not allow us to get away with tracing out and other cheats that we do with StatMec http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_thermodynamics. I think that if we stop thinking of the environment as a ideal entity and instead model it as a large but finite collection of systems - like oscillators - that do indeed absorb the phase relations such that we end up with systems with mixed states. The point is that we never should start of thinking of pure systems that are completely cut off from each other and thus have no possibility of representing interacting systems (there do not exist interaction Hamiltonians for such!), we start off our models assuming that all the systems are in mixed states and identify them in terms of things like centers of mass, etc. The only real pure state system is the observable universe itself (if it is actually closed!). I am trying to link this back to the math, but I need to lay out some of my thinking in informal terms... I was operating under the belief that all of the vectors (in the Hilbert space involved) are strictly orthogonal and are so perpetually. No. They are no more necessarily orthogonal than vectors you might draw on a plane. Presumably the state of the universe/multiverse as a whole is a single ray in the Hilbert space of the universe/multiverse. But the application of the theory is always to subspaces describing different things as the-thing-measured, the measuring-apparatus, etc. and Hilbert spaces constructed as tensor products of these. OK, gotcha. It is the basis that is made up of strictly orthogonal vectors. One problem that I have noticed is that Hilbert spaces are too simple for the kinds of questions that I am asking. They only allow a very limited kind of functions and assume ZF type set theory. I cannot see how to fit Streams http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nonwellfounded-set-theory/#1.1.1 into them. :_( Schlosshauer explains this better and at greater length than I can. I have printed that paper out and am carrying it around re-reading it. It is quite good. I agree. Brent Where do these subspaces come from? Are they defined by subsets of the state vectors (or eigenvectors)? How is the diffeomorphism invariance (that the unitary evolution is equivalent to!) get preserved in this process? How does tracing out eliminate things? -- Onward! Stephen Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. ~ Francis Bacon -- You received this message because
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 15.07.2012 16:50 Bruno Marchal said the following: On 14 Jul 2012, at 18:21, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: ... but it looks like that your motive is also close to the Game of Life. What difference do you see in this respect? With comp, after UDA, and supposing it is 100% valid, the choice of the universal system for the ontology is arbitrary. The laws of physics and the laws of mind are independent of it. So it is better to use one which is far from looking physical so that when we derive physics we diminish the possible confusions of level. The game of life already used a two dimensional grid, and has a notion of physical interaction build it, so I prefer to use the numbers. But the GOL is quite OK in principle. That is my problem. I do not understand how it would be possible to play chess in the Game of Life. Evgenii -- 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.
