date:20120721



Le 19-juil.-12, à 15:56, R AM a écrit :

On Thu, Jul 19, 2012 at 12:33 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be 
wrote:


Le 18-juil.-12, à 15:28, R AM a écrit :


On Wed, Jul 18, 2012 at 2:12 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be 
wrote:



I gave a definition of compatibilist free-will which is not without
coercion. I define free-will as the ability to make willing-full 
choice in
absence of complete information, and in the presence of the awareness 
of our
ignorance for some near future. I can practice that free-will even 
alone at

home, like when hesitating between coffee and tea.


Why not call it decision making? or will? why free-will? free from 
what?


Free from knowledge of the future, for example. But I don't like the 
free in free will. Free will, for some compatibilist, can mean 
genuine. It is an emphasis.





I guess you mean by metaphysical free-will the usual spurious 
definition

based on third person indeterminacy.


I think metaphysical free-will implies third person indeterminacy.


That is what I thought, but I have no idea of what that could mean. God 
does not play dice, or I prefer to be a plumber :)




 But
free-will is perceived by people as some sort of power to make
absolutely free decisions.


I believe that is the case, from the first person point of view. It is 
an absolute free decision, even if a God can predict it: I cannot. It 
is relative only from the third person perspective, but absolute from 
the first person pov, a bit like being unique.






It does not exist if we assume
computationalism. But a slight difference introduced in that 
definition
(replace the 3-indeterminacy by a weaker self-indeterminacy, based on 
Turing
and not on the first person indeterminacy) makes the notion full of 
sense,
and provable for all universal machine having enough cognitive 
abilities

(Löbian).


Indeterminacy is a consequence of metaphysical free-will,


Here I agree with John Clark. I have no idea of what can be 
indeterminacy in any third person way, even if comp is false.




but it's not
free-will in itself. Your first-person indeterminacy implies that all
possible decisions are made. I don't think this fits well with the
idea of metaphysical free-will.


In a sense, all decisions are made, but they are not first person 
decision. They are first person decision only from the point of view of 
a subject, who is internal to the structure, and so for him, it is a 
genuine personal decision. It is absolute and real, it is NOT an 
illusion. In the Outer God's eyes it is not a decision, as all 
arithmetical sentences are decided in his eyes, but the key point is 
that we are not the outer God. So our decision can be free and are no 
more an illusion than matter, consciousness and any sort of internal 
realities.


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: Unto Others (very interesting)



Le 19-juil.-12, à 06:47, meekerdb a écrit :


This may be of interest to those recently discussing free-riders.

 Brent

  Original Message 


Unto Others

BY MICHAEL SHERMER
It is the oldest and most universally recognized moral principle that  
was codified over two millennia ago by the Jewish sage Hillel the  
Elder: “Whatsoever thou wouldst that men should not do to thee, do not  
do that to them. This is the whole Law. The rest is only explanation.”



With comp this does not work. We are too much different, and we can  
never judge for another. The principle becomes: Don't do to others  
what others does not want to be done on them, unless you need to defend  
your life. Put in another way: respect the meaning of the word no  
when said by others.


Bruno



That explanation has been the subject of intense theological and  
philosophical disputation for millennia, and recently scientists are  
weighing in with naturalistic accounts of morality, such as the two  
books under review here.
Paul J. Zak is an economist and pioneer in the new science  of  
neuroeconomics who built his reputation on research that identified  
the hormone oxytocin as a biological proxy for trust.  As Zak  
documents, countries whose citizens trust one another have higher  
average GDPs, and trust is built through mutually-beneficial exchanges  
that result in higher levels of oxytocin as measured in blood draws of  
subjects in economic exchange games as well as real-world in  
situ encounters. The Moral Molecule is an engaging and enlightening  
popular account of Zak’s decade of intense research into how this  
molecule evolved for one purpose—pair bonding and attachment in social  
mammals—and was co-opted for trust between strangers.
The problem to be solved here is why strangers would be nice to one  
another. Evolutionary “selfish gene” theory well accounts for why we  
would be nice to our kin and kind—they share  our genes so being  
altruistic and moral has an evolutionary payoff  in our genes being  
indirectly propagated into future generations. The theory of kin  
selection explains how this works, and the theory of reciprocal  
altruism—I’ll scratch your back if you’ll scratch mine—goes a long way  
toward explaining why unrelated people in a social group would be kind  
to one another: my generosity to you today when my fortunes are sound  
will pay off  down the road when life is good to you and my luck has  
run out.  What Zak has so brilliantly done is to identify the precise  
biological pathways that explain the mechanics of how this system  
evolved and operates today.

inconnu.jpg
Order the  hardcover from Amazon
Order the Kindle Edition
The Moral Molecule is  loaded with first-person accounts of how Zak  
got his data, starting with a wedding he attended in the English  
countryside to  draw the blood and measure the oxytocin levels of the  
bride, groom, and accompanying parents before and after the vows. The   
half-life of oxytocin is measured in minutes, so Zak had to draw  24  
blood samples in under ten minutes that then had to be frozen and  
shipped back to his lab for analysis, the results of which “could be  
mapped out like the solar system, with the bride as the  sun,” he  
vividly recalls. The bride’s oxytocin level shot up by 28 percent  
after vows were spoken, “and for each of the other people tested, the  
increase in oxytocin was in direct proportion to the likely intensity  
of emotional engagement in the event.” Bride’s mother: up 24 percent.  
Groom’s father: up 19 percent. The groom: up only 13 percent. Why? It  
turns out that testosterone interferes with the release of oxytocin,  
and Zak measured a 100 percent increase in the groom’s testosterone  
level after his vows were pronounced! How far will Zak go to get his  
data? In the western highlands of Papua New Guinea he set up a  
make-shift lab to draw the blood from tribal warriors before and after  
they performed a  ritual dance, discovering that the “band of  
brothers” phenomena has a molecular basis in oxytocin.
The Moral Molecule aims  to explain “the source of love and  
prosperity,” which Zak identifies in a causal chain from oxytocin to  
empathy to morality to trust to prosperity. Numerous experiments he  
has conducted in  this lab that are detailed in the book demonstrate  
that subjects who are cooperative and generous in a trust game have  
higher levels of oxytocin, and infusing subjects with oxytocin through  
a nose spray causes their generosity and cooperativeness to increase.  
Zak concludes his book with a thoughtful discussion of  how liberal  
democracies and free markets produce the types of  social systems that  
best enable people to interact in a way that puts them on the  
oxytocin-empathy-morality-trust-prosperity positive feedback loop.  
Every corporate CEO and congressman should read this book before  
making important decisions.
In Moral Origins: The Evolution of  Virtue,

Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead



Le 19-juil.-12, à 18:00, meekerdb a écrit :


 On 7/19/2012 6:13 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:


 Le 18-juil.-12, à 20:48, meekerdb a écrit :






 Then, by the most common definition of atheism, atheists are 
doubly believer as they verify, with B for believes: B~g and Bm.
 Science is or should be agnostic on both ~Bg and ~Bm (and ~B~g, 
and ~B~m).

 This is wrong in two ways, which you muddle by not defining God. 


 Sure. I do it on purpose, but atheists I met can agree, with some 
instanciations of God's meaning. But we are scientists, and we 
search explanation which should not depend on definition restricted 
by political power.


 I don't think the publishers of dictionaries are politicians.  They  
record usage and usage is important because it tells you what meaning 
will be given to your words.  If you don't care what meaning  will be 
conveyed then you can just write gibberish.


The usage can be perverted with respect to the original meaning. Our 
occidental dicionnaries reflect our cultural value, and in that the 
spiritual field, the field usage is political since a long time. But 
the questions remains, and it might be time to reintroduce argument 
free from authority if we want to progress. Only people defending those 
argument of authority (like fundamentalist christians and atheists) 
have a problem with the idea that theology can be done in the 
scientific semi-axiomatic way. The subject concerns afterlife, the 
nature of soul, the fundamental reality, etc. With comp you can test 
all current theologies by comparing them with the theology (truth) of 
the ideally self-referentially correct machine. The difference between 
G* and G completely justifies the use of that term.








 I could say that earth do not exist, if you take the definition of 
some community.



 Let g be the proposition that some god(s) exist and let G be the 
proposition that the god of theism (a creator who judges and wants 
to be worshipped) exists. 


 Why to restrict to such definition? Why, if not to keep the notion 
in the hand of those who sell feary tales to control people by fear 
(cf hell).


 I'm not restricting the definition.  Language is for communication 
and so words mean what most people think they mean


Not in science. It would be absurd to define earth by a flat surface 
supported by turtles. The words have indexical first person meaning, 
and in science we search for an account capable of capturing the most 
of the usual meaning, but in a way coherent with other known facts, or 
currently accepted theories.




and most people  think God means a being who created the universe, 
judges people,  and wants to be worshiped. 


A part of this might reflect some feature of God, and a part of this 
might be naive theorizing. I use theology in the sense of the 
neoplatonist theologians, which actually is rather close to Christian 
(European) theologians.




 I would be happy to have all those people change their mind and say 
that God doesn't exist and henceforth we just mean whatever is 
fundamental when we say God - but I don't have the power to change 
the meaning of words. I do have  the power to chose words that are not 
misleading though, or even to invent new ones if none exists.  You 
invent words like comp and  you use words like Turing machine that 
were invented for a new concept.  So I'm puzzled as to why you want to 
use a word like God that has so much irrelevant baggage - unless 
you're going for a Templeton.


I use One, usually. Or Outer God. Or Lord as used by Einstein. I 
use the word God in the same sense as all believer theologians, but I 
propose another theory. Actually, you might criticize my use of 
universe, physical, even machine, as in comp, those words do not 
relate to the naive popular sense of it.





Why does atheists, who does not believe in the God of the theist, 
want to keep that definition?


 Because they want to be able to say what it is they don't believe  
in. 


But all what they say is that they don't believe in fairy tales. And 
they miss the real debate among real theologians, which exists since 
the beginning. In Europa most christians does NOT believe in those 
fairy tale either. So, with your use of atheists, the Christians in 
Europa are sometimes more atheists than American atheists. Of course, 
they believe in God, but they take the fairy tales aspect of it as 
traditional folklore to build their identity on it, without believing 
literally in it. Many christians are buddhist, here, without any 
problem keeping their Christian faith. I think that literalist 
christians is an american exception.




If you don't believe in fairies at the bottom of the garden does that 
mean you must change the definition of fairies so it applies to 
something you do believe in?  Do you criticize  a-fairiests because 
they use the definition of fairies in order to  say they don't believe 
in them?


But fairies are different from the concept of theology, which are

Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead



Le 19-juil.-12, à 18:56, John Clark a écrit :


On Thu, Jul 19, 2012  Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote:


Complete information is NEVER available,


That is false. usually we make choice with (relative) complete 
information. I want tea, and I do have tea, I know the price, etc.




but there is ALWAYS enough information to make a choice OR there is 
not enough information to make a choice;


OK.


so we end up making no choice at all or we make a choice based on 
nothing, in other words at random.


I don't believe we can make choice at random. Very often, when people 
hesitate, I suggest to make a choice with a coin or dice. usually 
people hate to do that, and if we do it, hesitate even more after the 
dice has rolled.




 
The following is not deep but it is true: You are aware that sometimes 
you are not aware of the cause of your action and you are also aware 
that you don't know what the result of a calculation is until you have 
finished the calculation. Is this pap the marvelous new definition of 
the free will noise that you claimed you had yesterday, the one you 
said that many of us have given new precise, and compatibilist, 
definition of ?


It is close. It has been defended by Popper, I.J. Good and some others, 
and it suits well mechanism.






The hesitation is needed to finish the calculation or needed to see 
which number the ball on the roulette wheel will fall on; random 
number generators just like computers do not work at infinite speed. 
Is this sorry shit a example of the new precise understanding of the 
free will noise that yesterday you claimed many on this list had?


It is close, but to make it more precise we would have to dwelve deeper 
in the logic of self-reference.






 Yes it is premature to say, but it's not just limited to the free 
will noise, in general before we say we do or do not have something it 
might be helpful to know what the hell we're talking about.


OK.

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: Contra Step 8 of UDA



Le 19-juil.-12, à 21:46, Stephen P. King a écrit :


Dear Bruno,

     I need to slow down and just address this question of your as  it 
seems to be the point where we disconnect from understanding each 
other.


 On 7/19/2012 10:22 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

At this stage I will ask you to define physical.


     The physical is the represented as the sum of incontrovertible 
facts that mutually communicating observers have in common. It is  
those facts that cannot be denied without introducing contradictions, 
thus such things as hallucinations and mirages are excluded.


?
We can accept the physical facts, without accepting the idea that 
physics is the fundamental science, or that primary aristotelian matter 
makes sense (which is not the case in the comp theory).




 I guess that this definition might seem tautological, but it seems to 
me to be the explanation that has the longest reach  in its power to 
explain what is meant by the word. Additionally, physical refers to 
objects of the word that have the qualities of persistence in type 
and location.
     One might notice that if one only considers a single observer 
then the notion of the physical that would be associated with that 
singular observer becomes degenerate. Maybe this explains how it is  
that you come to the conclusion of UDA step 8, that, as you wrote in 
SANE 04 ...not only physics has been epistemologically reduced to 
machine psychology, but that “matter” has been ontologically reduced 
to “mind” where mind is defined as the object study of fundamental 
machine psychology. The idea that matter is ontologically reduced 
to mind is true but but only for the singular mind.


Again, if you prove this you just refute comp (or you make comp into 
solipsim, which is about the same for me).




One must reach outside of this singularity to escape the automatic 
solipsism that is induced.


No worry, given that the preliminary results justify we will find 
quantum physics including a first person plural view of physical 
reality.
Logically, solipism is still a possible drawback of comp, but this has 
to be shown. You do not invalidate an argument by speculating on future 
drawback of a theory.





Andrew Soltau's work, IMHO, is an exploration of this escape.

     What I have been proposing is that the illustration in your 
SANE04 paper Physical stuff - 1 map that you have is the dual  of a 
1 - Physical Stuff map as per the Stone Duality. The duals both 
emerge simultaneously from a neutral primitive: Nothingness as per 
Russell Standish's definition. The ambiguous statement of this 
emergence is: Everything emerges from Nothing as Dual aspects.


This is too much vague and wordy. Some interpretations of those words 
can fit very well the comp theory, and others might contradict it/ You 
might elaborate on this. The term nothing is very ambiguous on this. 
The duality you mention is already recovered in the arithmetical points 
of view. You still avoid the argument per se, also.


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



Le 19-juil.-12, à 22:30, John Clark a écrit :

On Thu, Jul 19, 2012 at 8:51 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be 
wrote:



Maybe that's what the smarter ones think privately but that is most 
certainly NOT what they preach to their congregation on Sunday, if 
they even hinted at such a thing they'd be excommunicated and would no 
longer be catholic theologians.


Hmm... That does not happen, for it would make disappear Catholicism in 
Europa. But that happens for the intellectual. My favorite catholic 
theologians has eventually been excommunicated indeed, and got 
professional problems, but only for his writing, and that is a constant 
in the history of the catholic Church. Why do you defend them? Why does 
atheists always defend the most conservative position in religion? It 
looks like defending something stupid just to be able to say I don't 
believe in it.




And a disbelief in a omniscient omnipotent being is all I mean when I 
say I'm a atheist.


Theologians are thus atheists.




You have no definition of the word God


I have no definition of reality, universe, consciousness, points, 
lines, spaces,  I only use semi-axiomatic definition, which is the 
way of theoretical science.




and so anything, science, mathematics, philosophy, standup comedy, 
every human activity becomes a religion.


Indeed. All machines, corrects and rich enough (with respect to 
cognitive ability), develop mystical abilities, that is the ability to 
discover truth about themselves that thy cannot justify rationally. 
Universal (Löbian) machine are indeed theological. But this does not 
lake theology trivial, as the math shows that some theologians were 
correct (compared with comp), like Plotinus and the neoplatonists, and 
some are incorrect.





This is nuts, if you want to say truth say truth


Truth theory are not theologies, even if we can build relations once we 
accept some postulate (like comp).
Mathematical truth theory is a very complex and hot field. There are 
few agreements, except on arithmetical truth, where the theory of 
Tarski is quite enough.



if you want to say unknown say unknown and leave the word God for 
the times you want to talk about a omnipotent omniscient being who 
created the universe.


This is not the conception of God for many traditions. Why do you want 
to protect so much those who have completely perverse the field?







I understand will, you take actions to make some things more likely to 
happen and others less likely. But why does this trivial observation 
deserve the billions of words written about it?


Because we work on the hard problem of relating mind and matter, soul 
and person, afterlife and possible ultimate reality. It is the common 
craving of the people discussing on this list. We search a theory of 
everything, or just, before theorizing, a realm of everything. What do 
we have to posutlate minimally to expalin mind, matter and God. Note 
that neither mind, nor matter, nor God are primitive in comp. They are 
explained, if you accept some (larger, but common) sense of those 
words. And comp explains very well why machines tends naturally to 
pervert the name and use of God, and explain how to avoid the 
theological trap.










The world is full of fools but fools of that particular type are far 
too rare to worry about.


   I have a really radical idea, if you want to talk about truth 
why not use the word (drum roll please) truth?  


Don't be ridiculous. No word in the English language carries more 
baggage or has more idiotic associations than God, if a scientist 
wants to be misunderstood he couldn't do better than use that word.  


Not if he works in a semi-axiomatic way.
Note also that in all my publications, I do not use the word God. I 
use it only because someone use it here, and by definition, the God I 
talk about is the arithmetical truth when intuited but NOT NAMED by the 
machine. The theory work well, and if you have a better one, let me 
know.







Godel didn't say a machine can't prove anything, he said it can't 
prove everything.



I don't see why you say this. I have never said that machine can't 
prove anything.






Nobody except you knows what a Löbian machine is, even mighty Google 
doesn't know. Did Löb know?


Löb died some years ago. I have explained what are Löbian machine, 
which is an expression which convey the same as the longer expression 
machine or theory which has sufficiently provabiloity abilities. I 
gave many examples, like PA, ZF, or any first order sepcification of a 
universal system + some induction axioms applicable to the basic term 
objects of their languages.





Definitions should come first or a proof is incomprehensible.


They came first.


A mathematical proof usually starts with Let X be this and that , 
and then we find some interesting principle that X has, in the same 
way we should first define God and then examine what properties can 
and can not be derived from it,


That's what I

Re: Contra Step 8 of UDA


Hi Stephen,

I appreciate very much Louis Kauffman, including that paper. But I 
don't see your point. Nothing there seems to cast any problem for comp 
or its consequences.


Why not read the MGA threads directly, and address the points 
specifically?


Bruno


Le 20-juil.-12, à 05:34, Stephen P. King a écrit :


Hi Bruno and Friends,

Perhaps this attached paper by Louis H.  Kauffman will be a bit 
enlightening as to what I have been trying to explain. He calls it 
non-duality, I call it duality. The difference is just a matter of how 
one thinks of it.


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.


Laws of Form and the Logic of Non-Duality.pdf

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: Contra Step 8 of UDA (errata)



Le 20-juil.-12, à 20:02, meekerdb a écrit :


 On 7/20/2012 8:40 AM, Stephen P. King wrote:

 Hi Jason,

     The problem that I see with this definition is that it makes 
existence contingent and not necessary. The contingency (or 
dependence in the weaker case) on the capacity of having objective 
properties that could be studied by independent entities, and the 
independent entities would come to the same conclusions about that 
thing would make observers prior to existence and that works if we 
are considering non-well founded system, but not for the canonical 
case. Existence must be prior to everything, literally, and thus 
cannot be contingent on anything, including observers and/or their 
capacities.
 You're trying to define 'exists' as (logically?) prior to knowledge.  
I think this is backwards. First we perceive things, then we form 
theories about them. 


This is close to Berkeley idealism. I guess you are not literal, for 
you will have a problem to approach sensations and perceptions in the 
third person theoretical deductive way.




 This includes the theory that other people exist.  We find we agree 
with other people about perceptions.  This leads to a theory of an 
external, objective world to explain the agreement.  We have developed 
different theories about this objective world over the centuries with 
successively greater scope, accuracy, and predictive power.  But  each 
new theory has had a very different ontology: from demons and 
demiurges, rigid bodies, corpuscles, atoms, fields, strings, 
computations,...  What is preserved are the perceptions, i.e. the 
observations, on which we agree.  So each theory tells us what, 
according to that theory 'exists' as most basic, but it is really the 
observations that are basic. 


OK. And it is here that conventional physics has a problem, for to 
relate observations with perceptions they rely on the physical 
supervenience thesis, which does no more work when comp is assumed.



 They don't precede observers chronologically, but the theory tells us 
what happens beyond the  range of observation and so what the world 
was like before there were observers.


OK, then.

Bruno




 Brent
 Epistemology precedes ontology. 


 --
 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

2012-07-21 Thread John Clark

On Sat, Jul 21, 2012  Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote:

 so we end up making no choice at all or we make a choice based on
 nothing, in other words at random.


  I don't believe we can make choice at random.


Fine, I don't think that's true but as far as this discussion goes it
wouldn't matter if it was. If the choice was not random then it happened
for a reason and was deterministic; and the free will noise is just as
meaningless as it would be if choices were random.


  Very often, when people hesitate, I suggest to make a choice with a coin
 or dice. usually people hate to do that,


And yet very often people have great difficulty explaining, even to
themselves, why they made the choice they did; so either there was no
reason for the choice or there was but the conscious mind does not know
what it was, those are the only two possibilities and neither elevates the
free will noise even one Planck Length above pure gibberish.

 The following is not deep but it is true: You are aware that sometimes
 you are not aware of the cause of your action and you are also aware that
 you don't know what the result of a calculation is until you have finished
 the calculation. Is this pap the marvelous new definition of the free will
 noise that you claimed you had yesterday, the one you said that many of us
 have given new precise, and compatibilist, definition of ?


  It is close. It has been defended by Popper, I.J. Good and some others,
 and it suits well mechanism.


This needs to be defended?? I admit that tautologies have the virtue of
being true but I would have thought it would be embarrassing for two grown
men, let alone two famous philosophers, to think that this childish
observation deserves the millions of words they have churned out about it
which all boils down to we don't know what we don't know.

  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

2012-07-21 Thread John Clark

On Sat, Jul 21, 2012  Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote:

 My favorite catholic theologians has eventually been excommunicated
 indeed, and got professional problems,


And so they are no longer catholic theologians, they should be proud of
their excommunication and shout from the rooftops Good riddance to bad
rubbish!.

**  Why do you defend them? Why does atheists always defend the most
 conservative position in religion? It looks like defending something stupid
 just to be able to say I don't believe in it.


I think the ultimate nightmare would be to be tortured to give information
that you simply did not have, that's what would happen to me if the Gestapo
demanded I explain what you were talking about in the above.

  And a disbelief in a omniscient omnipotent being is all I mean when I
 say I'm a atheist.


  Theologians are thus atheists.


And so if you tell me Bob is a theologian I know absolutely posatively
nothing about Bob because now the word Theologian has joined atheist,
theist, God and of course free will as words that mean absolutely
positively nothing.

  and so anything, science, mathematics, philosophy, standup comedy,
 every human activity becomes a religion.


  Indeed.


And so if you tell me X is a religion you have told me nothing about X
because meaning needs contrast and everything is a religion is equivalent
to nothing is a religion  and religion has now joined theologian
atheist, theist, God and  free will as words that mean precisely
nothing. At this rate of word extinction soon we'll have nothing but grunts
to communicate with.

  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: Unto Others (very interesting)


On 7/21/2012 5:57 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:



Le 19-juil.-12, à 06:47, meekerdb a écrit :

This may be of interest to those recently discussing free-riders.

Brent

 Original Message 


Unto Others



BY MICHAEL SHERMER


It is the oldest and most universally recognized moral principle
that was codified over two millennia ago by the Jewish sage Hillel
the Elder: “Whatsoever thou wouldst that men should not do to
thee, do not do that to them. This is the whole Law. The rest is
only explanation.”



With comp this does not work. We are too much different, and we can 
never judge for another. The principle becomes: Don't do to others 
what others does not want to be done on them, unless you need to 
defend your life. Put in another way: respect the meaning of the word 
no when said by others.


Bruno



Hi Bruno,

I disagree. You are over thinking the meaning of this. It is just 
the tit-for-tat strategy. Do not do to others what you would not have 
them do to you. It assumes sanity on your part, but it does not tell you 
what to do in a elaborative sense. One is supposed to use one's reason 
and not depend on some a priori rules.





That explanation has been the subject of intense theological and
philosophical disputation for millennia, and recently scientists
are weighing in with naturalistic accounts of morality, such as
the two books under review here.


Paul J. Zak is an economist and pioneer in the new science of
neuroeconomics who built his reputation on research that
identified the hormone oxytocin as a biological proxy for trust.
As Zak documents, countries whose citizens trust one another have
higher average GDPs, and trust is built through
mutually-beneficial exchanges that result in higher levels of
oxytocin as measured in blood draws of subjects in economic
exchange games as well as real-world /in situ/ encounters. /The
Moral Molecule/ is an engaging and enlightening popular account of
Zak’s decade of intense research into how this molecule evolved
for one purpose—pair bonding and attachment in social mammals—and
was co-opted for trust between strangers.


The problem to be solved here is why strangers would be nice to
one another. Evolutionary “selfish gene” theory well accounts for
why we would be nice to our kin and kind—they share our genes so
being altruistic and moral has an evolutionary payoff in our genes
being indirectly propagated into future generations. The theory of
kin selection explains how this works, and the theory of
reciprocal altruism—I’ll scratch your back if you’ll scratch
mine—goes a long way toward explaining why unrelated people in a
social group would be kind to one another: my generosity to you
today when my fortunes are sound will pay off down the road when
life is good to you and my luck has run out. What Zak has so
brilliantly done is to identify the precise biological pathways
that explain the mechanics of how this system evolved and operates
today.


inconnu.jpg
Order the hardcover from Amazon
Order the Kindle Edition
/The Moral Molecule/ is loaded with first-person accounts of how
Zak got his data, starting with a wedding he attended in the
English countryside to draw the blood and measure the oxytocin
levels of the bride, groom, and accompanying parents before and
after the vows. The half-life of oxytocin is measured in minutes,
so Zak had to draw 24 blood samples in under ten minutes that then
had to be frozen and shipped back to his lab for analysis, the
results of which “could be mapped out like the solar system, with
the bride as the sun,” he vividly recalls. The bride’s oxytocin
level shot up by 28 percent after vows were spoken, “and for each
of the other people tested, the increase in oxytocin was in direct
proportion to the likely intensity of emotional engagement in the
event.” Bride’s mother: up 24 percent. Groom’s father: up 19
percent. The groom: up only 13 percent. Why? It turns out that
testosterone interferes with the release of oxytocin, and Zak
measured a 100 percent increase in the groom’s testosterone level
after his vows were pronounced! How far will Zak go to get his
data? In the western highlands of Papua New Guinea he set up a
make-shift lab to draw the blood from tribal warriors before and
after they performed a ritual dance, discovering that the “band of
brothers” phenomena has a molecular basis in oxytocin.


/The Moral Molecule/ aims to explain “the source of love and
prosperity,” which Zak identifies in a causal chain from oxytocin
to empathy to morality to trust to prosperity. Numerous
experiments he has conducted in this lab that are detailed in the
book demonstrate that subjects who are cooperative and generous in
a trust game have

Re: Contra Step 8 of UDA


On 7/21/2012 6:58 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:



Le 19-juil.-12, à 21:46, Stephen P. King a écrit :

Dear Bruno,

I need to slow down and just address this question of your as
it seems to be the point where we disconnect from understanding
each other.

On 7/19/2012 10:22 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

At this stage I will ask you to define physical.


The physical is the represented as the sum of incontrovertible
facts that mutually communicating observers have in common. It is
those facts that cannot be denied without introducing
contradictions, thus such things as hallucinations and mirages
are excluded.


?
We can accept the physical facts, without accepting the idea that 
physics is the fundamental science, or that primary aristotelian 
matter makes sense (which is not the case in the comp theory).


Dear Bruno,

Could you explain what you mean by this in other words? What 
exactly is meant by primary aristotelian matter? Are you thinking of 
substance as philosophers use the term? There is a very nice article 
on this idea here http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/substance/.


There could be said to be two rather different ways of characterizing 
the philosophical concept of/substance/. The first is the more generic. 
The philosophical term ‘substance’ corresponds to the Greek/ousia/, 
which means ‘being’, transmitted via the Latin/substantia/, which means 
‘something that stands under or grounds things’. According to the 
generic sense, therefore, the substances in a given philosophical system 
are those things which, according to that system, are the foundational 
or fundamental entities of reality. Thus, for an atomist, atoms are the 
substances, for they are the basic things from which everything is 
constructed. In David Hume's system, impressions and ideas are the 
substances, for the same reason. In a slightly different way, Forms are 
Plato's substances, for everything derives its existence from Forms. In 
this sense of ‘substance’ any realist philosophical system acknowledges 
the existence of substances. Probably the only theories which do not 
would be those forms of logical positivism or pragmatism which treat 
ontology as a matter of convention. According to such theories, there 
are no real facts about what is ontologically basic, and so nothing is 
objectively substance.


The second use of the concept is more specific. According to this, 
substances are a particular kind of basic entity, and some philosophical 
theories acknowledge them and others do not. On this use, Hume's 
impressions and ideas are not substances, even though they are the 
building blocks of—what constitutes ‘being’ for—his world. According to 
this usage, it is a live issue whether the fundamental entities are 
substances or something else, such as events, or properties located at 
space-times. This conception of substance derives from the intuitive 
notion of individual/thing/or/object/, which contrast mainly with 
properties and events. The issue is how we are to understand the notion 
of an object, and whether, in the light of the correct understanding, it 
remains a basic notion, or one that must be characterized in more 
fundamental terms. Whether, for example, an object can be thought of as 
nothing more than a bundle of properties, or a series of events.






I guess that this definition might seem tautological, but it seems
to me to be the explanation that has the longest reach in its
power to explain what is meant by the word. Additionally, physical
refers to objects of the word that have the qualities of
persistence in type and location.
One might notice that if one only considers a single observer
then the notion of the physical that would be associated with that
singular observer becomes degenerate. Maybe this explains how it
is that you come to the conclusion of UDA step 8, that, as you
wrote in SANE 04 ...not only physics has been
/epistemologically/ reduced to machine psychology, but that
“matter” has been /ontologically/ reduced to “mind” where mind is
defined as the object study of fundamental machine psychology.
The idea that matter is ontologically reduced to mind is true
but but only for the singular mind.


Again, if you prove this you just refute comp (or you make comp into 
solipsim, which is about the same for me).


It is well known that computer science's abstraction of computation 
applies to closed systems only. It therefore does not allow for any 
notion of interaction between multiple but different computers. This 
makes bisimilarity as an exact equivalence, etc. I am not even trying to 
refute comp. I am merely trying to explain that is cannot do what you 
think it can. You are glossing over the need to explain interactions. 
Peter Wegner http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Wegner's research 
http://www.cs.brown.edu/%7Epw/ is all about this problem and possible

Re: Contra Step 8 of UDA


On 7/21/2012 1:45 PM, John Clark wrote:

 On 7/15/2012 11:14 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

 your [SPK] argument above cannot work. For in Darwin the
observer emerges from computations too, even is physical.


On Wed, Jul 18, 2012 at 3:05 PM, Stephen P. King 
stephe...@charter.net mailto:stephe...@charter.net wrote:


 You are still thinking in reductionist and well-founded terms,


That is to Bruno's credit because that is a mode of thinking that has 
worked extraordinarily well over the last few thousand years and even 
better over the last few hundred years when the Scientific Method was 
invented and that way of thinking emphasized even more. We need more 
of that not less!


 assuming a primitive entity that builds up to the more complex.


Well that's exactly what Darwin was talking about, and he explained 
the mechanism by which that could happen and that is why some 
(including me) say he had the single best idea any human being ever 
had. And if Darwin was right and if you know for a fact that there is 
at least one conscious observer in the Universe then you know that 
physical processes can produce consciousness and consciousness can 
change physical things.


 John K Clark



You you are arguing that there is nothing new to learn. Why do you 
bother participating here? What role are you playing?


--
Onward!

Stephen

Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.
~ Francis Bacon

--
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: Unto Others (very interesting)


On 7/21/2012 2:57 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:



Le 19-juil.-12, à 06:47, meekerdb a écrit :

This may be of interest to those recently discussing free-riders.

Brent

 Original Message 


Unto Others



BY MICHAEL SHERMER


It is the oldest and most universally recognized moral principle that was 
codified
over two millennia ago by the Jewish sage Hillel the Elder: “Whatsoever 
thou wouldst
that men should not do to thee, do not do that to them. This is the whole 
Law. The
rest is only explanation.”



With comp this does not work. We are too much different, and we can never judge for 
another. The principle becomes: Don't do to others what others does not want to be done 
on them, unless you need to defend your life. Put in another way: respect the meaning 
of the word no when said by others.


But often the others are unknown persons, and even if known it may be impractical to 
poll them.


--
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 7/21/2012 3:40 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

Le 19-juil.-12, à 18:00, meekerdb a écrit :

On 7/19/2012 6:13 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

Le 18-juil.-12, à 20:48, meekerdb a écrit :

Then, by the most common definition of atheism, atheists are
doubly
believer as they verify, with B for believes: B~g and Bm.
Science is or should be agnostic on both ~Bg and ~Bm (and ~B~g,
and ~B~m).

This is wrong in two ways, which you muddle by not defining God.

Sure. I do it on purpose, but atheists I met can agree, with some
instanciations
of God's meaning. But we are scientists, and we search explanation
which
should not depend on definition restricted by political power.

I don't think the publishers of dictionaries are politicians. They record
usage and
usage is important because it tells you what meaning will be given to your words.
If you don't care what meaning will be conveyed then you can just write gibberish.

The usage can be perverted with respect to the original meaning.

You are inconsistent. When I used agnostic in it's original sense, you objected that I
should conform to the current usage:

Brent: Agnostic means inability to know. It is the position of those who claim that it
is impossible to know whether God exists or not.

Bruno: I disagree with this. You are right, historically, but it is not the sense commonly
used today.

Our occidental dicionnaries reflect our cultural value, and in that the spiritual field,
the field usage is political since a long time. But the questions remains, and it might
be time to reintroduce argument free from authority if we want to progress. Only people
defending those argument of authority (like fundamentalist christians and atheists)

Who speaks with authority for atheists?

have a problem with the idea that theology can be done in the scientific semi-axiomatic
way.

No, it is people who hear theology in the sense it has been used for the last thousand
years.

The subject concerns afterlife, the nature of soul, the fundamental reality, etc.

Where etc. includes a powerful, judgmental god person.

With comp you can test all current theologies by comparing them with the theology (truth)

Theology doesn't mean truth in any interpretation. That's why I suggested
aletheology and I can only infer that you reject it because you want the baggage that
goes with theos.

of the ideally self-referentially correct machine. The difference between G* and G
completely justifies the use of that term.

I could say that earth do not exist, if you take the definition of some
community.

Let g be the proposition that some god(s) exist and let G be the
proposition
that the god of theism (a creator who judges and wants to be
worshipped)
exists.

Why to restrict to such definition? Why, if not to keep the notion in
the hand
of those who sell feary tales to control people by fear (cf hell).

I'm not restricting the definition. Language is for communication and so
words mean
what most people think they mean

Not in science. It would be absurd to define earth by a flat surface supported
by turtles.

But we all agree on what flat and turtle mean, so that when we deny this we know what
we're talking about. You would have use redefine flat to curved and turtle to mean
geodesic.

The words have indexical first person meaning, and in science we search for an account
capable of capturing the most of the usual meaning, but in a way coherent with other
known facts, or currently accepted theories.

and most people think God means a being who created the universe, judges
people,
and wants to be worshiped.

A part of this might reflect some feature of God, and a part of this might be naive
theorizing. I use theology in the sense of the neoplatonist theologians, which
actually is rather close to Christian (European) theologians.

Can you cite publications by such theologians? Swinburne? Polkinghorne?

I would be happy to have all those people change their mind and say that
God doesn't
exist and henceforth we just mean whatever is fundamental when we say God
- but I
don't have the power to change the meaning of words. I do have the power to
chose
words that are not misleading though, or even to invent new ones if none exists.
You invent words like comp and you use words like Turing machine that were

invented for a new concept. So I'm puzzled as to why you want to use a
word like
God that has so much irrelevant baggage - unless you're going for a
Templeton.

I use One, usually. Or Outer God. Or Lord as used by Einstein. I use the word God in
the same sense as all believer theologians,

No you don't. All Christian theologians believe in the Trinity and in a judgemental,
creator God who especially loves

Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead

On 7/21/2012 4:27 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

Le 19-juil.-12, à 22:30, John Clark a écrit :

On Thu, Jul 19, 2012 at 8:51 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote:

Maybe that's what the smarter ones think privately but that is most certainly NOT what
they preach to their congregation on Sunday, if they even hinted at such a thing they'd
be excommunicated and would no longer be catholic theologians.

Hmm... That does not happen, for it would make disappear Catholicism in Europa. But that
happens for the intellectual. My favorite catholic theologians has eventually been
excommunicated indeed, and got professional problems, but only for his writing, and that
is a constant in the history of the catholic Church. Why do you defend them? Why does
atheists always defend the most conservative position in religion?

Because it is the politically powerful position and therefore the one most important to
discredit and resist. No one cares what Sufi or Rastafarian theology is in Europe because
they exercise no power.

It looks like defending something stupid just to be able to say I don't believe in
it.

Not defending - just not redefining. It looks better than using a word that appears to
endorse the politically powerful while claiming to reform them.

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: Contra Step 8 of UDA (errata)


On 7/21/2012 5:12 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
OK. And it is here that conventional physics has a problem, for to relate observations 
with perceptions they rely on the physical supervenience thesis, which does no more work 
when comp is assumed. 


It is only a problem in that the explanation is incomplete.  Physics takes the perception 
as given and doesn't (yet) try to explain how this perception is realized by the physics 
of a brain - or even whether it can be.  It just takes the perceptions as data.


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: Unto Others (very interesting)


On 7/21/2012 3:58 PM, meekerdb wrote:

On 7/21/2012 2:57 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:



Le 19-juil.-12, à 06:47, meekerdb a écrit :

This may be of interest to those recently discussing free-riders.

Brent

 Original Message 


Unto Others



BY MICHAEL SHERMER


It is the oldest and most universally recognized moral principle
that was codified over two millennia ago by the Jewish sage
Hillel the Elder: “Whatsoever thou wouldst that men should not do
to thee, do not do that to them. This is the whole Law. The rest
is only explanation.”



With comp this does not work. We are too much different, and we can 
never judge for another. The principle becomes: Don't do to others 
what others does not want to be done on them, unless you need to 
defend your life. Put in another way: respect the meaning of the 
word no when said by others.


But often the others are unknown persons, and even if known it may 
be impractical to poll them.

--
The others need only be models, imaginary people. It is one's own 
measure of good that is needed to determine one's own behavior.


--
Onward!

Stephen

Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.
~ Francis Bacon

--
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: Unto Others (very interesting)


On 7/21/2012 7:08 PM, Stephen P. King wrote:

On 7/21/2012 3:58 PM, meekerdb wrote:

On 7/21/2012 2:57 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:



Le 19-juil.-12, à 06:47, meekerdb a écrit :

This may be of interest to those recently discussing free-riders.

Brent

 Original Message 


Unto Others



BY MICHAEL SHERMER


It is the oldest and most universally recognized moral principle that was 
codified
over two millennia ago by the Jewish sage Hillel the Elder: “Whatsoever thou
wouldst that men should not do to thee, do not do that to them. This is the 
whole
Law. The rest is only explanation.”



With comp this does not work. We are too much different, and we can never judge for 
another. The principle becomes: Don't do to others what others does not want to be 
done on them, unless you need to defend your life. Put in another way: respect the 
meaning of the word no when said by others.


But often the others are unknown persons, and even if known it may be impractical to 
poll them.

--
The others need only be models, imaginary people. It is one's own measure of good that 
is needed to determine one's own behavior.


Yeah, that's how the Inquisition justified torturing people to save their souls, since by 
their own measure of good they knew that was more important that mere pain in this life.


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: Unto Others (very interesting)