Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead

[Bruno Marchal]

Le 27-juil.-12, à 17:02, John Clark a écrit :


On Fri, Jul 27, 2012  Bruno Marchal  wrote:

> >> You just evade the definition of free will that I gave to you,

 >>You're going to need to be a lot more specific than that. I'd need 
to use scientific notation to count the number of definitions of the 
"free will" noise I've heard over the last few months, but every 
single one of them turns out to be just translations and paraphrasing 
of the original gibberish.


 > I gave one. You need only to look at it. It is a compatibilist one,

Yet again you talk about this marvelous strictly logical definition of 
Free Will that you had provided at some unspecified time in the past! 
The last time you made reference to this mythical definition (July 19) 
I said this:   


" 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" ?"


And you responded to my comment (on July 21) by admitting:

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


So until you have something new and much much much better stop saying 
I'm ignoring your marvelous new definition of the "Free Will" noise. 


Well, if that is not new, it is a reason more to admit the context 
makes sense. You goal does not seem in discussing ideas, but in mocking 
people. The onoly question is in solving problem. To say "free will" is 
noise just hides problems. You really talk like a pseudo-priest having 
answers to all questions.






 > and actually it is the same as the usual "gibberish"

Yes.

> exc ept that I substitute the absolute indeterminacy with the 
relative one.

 
So it's random.


It is not random at all in the third person perspective. It is 
relatively random in the first person perspective, like the first 
person indeterminacy, but for quite different reason.






 > Compatibilist don't oppose reason

I don't know if I'm a "Compatibilist" but I certainly don't oppose 
reason.


 > and (free) will.

Other than issues concerning noise pollution I don't oppose people 
making sounds with their mouth either.


 > it is debatable if 0 ≠ s(0) happens for a reason or not.

It is NOT debatable that  0 ≠ s(0) happens for a reason OR 0 ≠ s(0) 
happens for NO reason! If it is not gibberish (and it is not) then one 
of those two things is true even if we don't know which one.


> I take thing like consciousness and free will as first person data 
that we have to explain,


Consciousness is first person data but it may not have a explanation 
that would satisfy you;


But it has.




it could be a fundamental primitive,


Not with computationalism. But perhaps in a theory you might propose.



and after saying consciousness is the way data feels when it is being 
processed there may not be anything more to say on the subject.


This betrays you ignorance and lack of interest of the mind-body 
problem.






As to "free will" I have no opinion, first you're going to have to 
explain what those ASCII characters mean.


?
You just recall my definition, and you accept it makes sense. Like with 
the 1-indeterminacy, you keep acting irrationally.





> I don't see how you can accept will and not free-will.

I accept "will" because I know for a fact


You seem to know a lo of things 



that somethings I want to do and other things I do not. I neither 
accept nor reject "free will" because I don't know what those ASCII 
characters mean and despite your protests to the contrary it's now 
pretty clear to me that you don't either.


The ability to act in the state of being aware lacking complete 
information. The awareness of the spectrum of possibilities and the 
ability to decide despite incomplete information.





  >> All I'm saying is that our will is in the state it is in for a 
reason or it is not, and to claim otherwise is idiotic.


 > So we have the same religious devotion.

So let's see, you think that the belief " if X is not gibberish then 
either X is true or ~X is true" is religious


Sure. Cantor continuum is not gibberish, but I don't see why this 
wopuld imply that we can use the excluded middle on such hard set 
theoretical proposition. In my work I allow only the excluded middle 
principle on sigma_1 arithmetical proposition.  Set theoretical 
platonism is way stronger than arithmetical realism.




and you also think the belief  " The integer 1 is not equal to zero" 
is religious.


I don't see why.
1 ≠ 0 is not religious.
You are perhaps confusing "I will never prove that 1≠ 0", which needs 
faith and is religious, with "1≠0", which is a simple theorem in the 
usual little Robinson theory.




As I've said

Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead

[John Clark]

On Sat, Jul 28, 2012  Bruno Marchal  wrote:

> You goal does not seem in discussing ideas, but in mocking people.


That is not true, my goal has two parts:

1) Figuring out what you mean by "free will".
2) Figuring out if what you say about "free will" is true.

I have never completed the first goal, so it's a bit maddening when you
keep claiming over and over and over that sometime in the unspecified past
you provided a marvelous exact self consistent definition of "free will"
that makes everything clear and that for some unspecified reason, or
perhaps for no reason at all, I am ignoring it.

>The onoly question is in solving problem. To say "free will" is noise just
> hides problems.


Before I can solve a problem I need to know what the problem is and I
don't, and you don't know either.

> You really talk like a pseudo-priest having answers to all questions.


Wow, calling a guy who doesn't like religion religious! Never heard that
one before, at least not before the sixth grade.

> It is not random at all in the third person perspective.
>

Fine. In this context I don't know what  "the third person perspective"
means but that is information I don't need to have to be able to say, "if
its not random, that is to say if it didn't happen for no reason then it
must have happened for a reason and if it happened for a reason then it's
deterministic".

> It is relatively random in the first person perspective, like the first
> person indeterminacy,


So all you're saying is that in this thing you like to call "first person
indeterminacy" the outcome of the simple multiplication problem 74* 836 is
indeterminate until you finish the calculation. Well it's not deep but at
least its true that you don't know what the result of a calculation will be
until you finish the calculation.

 >> As to "free will" I have no opinion, first you're going to have to
>> explain what those ASCII characters mean.
>>
>
> > ?
>

I don't understand your question so can provide no answer.


> > You just recall my definition, and you accept it makes sense.


Good God not that again! Stop with this mysterious marvelous strictly
logical definition of Free Will that you claim to have provided at some
unspecified time in the past, it's really getting old. Until you have
something new and much much much better stop saying I'm ignoring your
marvelous new definition of the "Free Will" noise.

>> I accept "will" because I know for a fact that somethings I want to do
>> and other things I do not.
>
>
> > You seem to know a lo of things
>

I know what I want but I don't know what something that didn't happen for a
reason AND didn't happen for no reason means, and I don't know what the
"free will" noise means let alone if its true that people have it. And you
don't know either.

  >>I neither accept nor reject "free will" because I don't know what those
>> ASCII characters mean and despite your protests to the contrary it's now
>> pretty clear to me that you don't either.
>>
>
> > The ability to act in the state of being aware lacking complete
> information.


A computer can be programed with knowledge of induction, statistics, and
heuristic rules of thumb and act without complete information and produce
good (although not perfect) results. So according to your definition even
today computers like Watson and Siri have free will, although at their
deepest level they are deterministic and operate by very simple rules
involving just 0 and 1.

> Cantor continuum is not gibberish


I assume you mean the continuum hypothesis, if so then I agree it's not
gibberish to say there exists a set that has a cardinality larger than the
integers but smaller than the real numbers, in fact it might even be true.
The reason I know it's not gibberish is that such a set either exists or it
does not.

>  but I don't see why this wopuld imply that we can use the excluded
> middle on such hard set theoretical proposition.


So you think you can bring clarity to the confusing imprecise vague
mishmash of things called "philosophy" by introducing something, like free
will, that doesn't exist AND doesn't not exist. I really don't think that
will bring illumination.

 > You are perhaps confusing "I will never prove that 1≠ 0", which needs
> faith and is religious, with "1≠0", which is a simple theorem


I well understand the difference, but your meaning of "religious" seems to
cover a awful lot of ground, including "I will never be able to stop loving
pizza".

 >>As I've said before for something to be meaningful you need contrast, so
>> please provide me with an example of something that is NOT religious.
>>
>
>0 ≠ 1.


But you don't believe in the law of the excluded middle so if "0 ≠ 1" is
untrue that does not mean that that 0=1, so I don't know what 0 ≠ 1 means.
And yet even though its meaning is far from clear you still believe that 0
≠ 1, so you must be religious, in fact you must be the Pope of the 0 ≠ 1
church, or at least a Cardinal.

 John K Clark

-- 
You rece

Re: On the assumption of the Plurality of Numbers

[Stephen P. King]

On 7/28/2012 9:35 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:


This is a "degeneracy" problem, everything looks, acts and even is
one and the same thing, so how is there any differentiation that
allows a plurality to obtain?


0 ≠ s(0) ≠ s(s(0)) ≠ 



I need to explain myself on this claim for the sake of others that 
might be confused and yet open to understanding.


The non-equivalence that Bruno points out here with "0 ≠ s(0) ≠ 
s(s(0)) ≠  " is correct, but that correctness changes when we 
introduce Godel Numbering. Godel numbering is the coding of statements 
about numbers as numbers and so has the effect of making the " ≠ " 
ambiguous and thus making the non-equivalence of numbers degenerate. 
Once we introduce the idea that numbers can code for other numbers then 
it follows that numbers are no longer uniquely different from each 
other. Therefore the plurality of numbers with regard to their ability 
to define multiple unique quantities vanishes.

QED


--
Onward!

Stephen

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

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The Unreality of Time

[Evgenii Rudnyi]

John Ellis McTaggart
The Unreality of Time
Mind: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy 17 (1908): 456-473

I have learned about the McTaggart's A- and B-series from John Yates.

http://www.ifsgoa.com/

Now I have found the original paper by McTaggart in Internet:

http://www.ditext.com/mctaggart/time.html

In the paper, the author proves that time is unreal. He first introduces 
the A-series that contain past, present, and future and then shows that 
this idea is self-contradictory.


I should say that the paper is popular nowadays as well, Google Scholar 
shows about 700 citations.


The paper is relatively short (about 8500 words) and it is nice. I like it.

Evgenii



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Re: The Unreality of Time

[Stephen P. King]

On 7/28/2012 4:23 PM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:

John Ellis McTaggart
The Unreality of Time
Mind: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy 17 (1908): 456-473

I have learned about the McTaggart's A- and B-series from John Yates.

http://www.ifsgoa.com/

Now I have found the original paper by McTaggart in Internet:

http://www.ditext.com/mctaggart/time.html

In the paper, the author proves that time is unreal. He first 
introduces the A-series that contain past, present, and future and 
then shows that this idea is self-contradictory.


I should say that the paper is popular nowadays as well, Google 
Scholar shows about 700 citations.


The paper is relatively short (about 8500 words) and it is nice. I 
like it.


Evgenii




Dear Evgenii,

Never would I cast aspersions upon McTaggart, but what he actually 
proved was not the "unreality of time"; for Reality is what which is 
incontrovertible to all intercommunicating observers. What McTaggart 
proved was the non-existance of an observational stance that might allow 
all moments of time to be apprehended simultaneously. His work can be 
seen as a reiteration of the truth that Einstein was able to show us 
with his General theory of Relativity.



--
Onward!

Stephen

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


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Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead

[meekerdb]

On 7/28/2012 9:46 AM, John Clark wrote:


> It is relatively random in the first person perspective, like the first 
person
indeterminacy, 



So all you're saying is that in this thing you like to call "first person indeterminacy" 
the outcome of the simple multiplication problem 74* 836 is indeterminate until you 
finish the calculation. Well it's not deep but at least its true that you don't know 
what the result of a calculation will be until you finish the calculation.


Is it just the uncertainty due to computational time (which is what I.J. Good seems to 
mean) in consciousness, or is it uncertainty due to unconscious processes which may spring 
into consciousness and change your (conscious) mind about which action to take?  When 
Bruno talks about 3p certainty, I assume he refers to a comprehensive knowledge of the 
physical state, including the low level brain processes; so that in principle the 
subconscious as well as conscious conclusions could be predicted from the 3p point of view.


Brent

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Remarks on an idea on First-Order Logical Duality

[Stephen P. King]

Dear Bruno,

From http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/awodey/preprints/fold.pdf
First-Order Logical Duality
we read:
"In the propositional case, one passes from a propositional theory to a 
Boolean algebra by

constructing the Lindenbaum-Tarski algebra of the theory, a construction
which identifies provably equivalent formulas (and orders them by provable
implication). Thus any two complete theories, for instance, are 
'algebraically

equivalent' in the sense of having isomorphic Lindenbaum-Tarski algebras.
The situation is precisely analogous to a presentation of an algebra
by generators and relations: a logical theory corresponds to such a 
presentation,
and two theories are equivalent if they present 'the same' -- i.e. 
isomorphic --

algebras."

The construction of the Lindenbaum-Tarski algebra is implemented by

1) identification of provably equivalent formulas
and
2) ordering them by provable implication

1) might be equivalent to your sheaf of infinities of computations 
(but requires a bisimilarity measure) and 2) seems contrary to the 
Universal Dovetailer ordering idea as it implies tight sequential 
strings (buttightness  
might be recovered by Godel Numbering but not uniquely for infinitely 
long strings). But there is a question regarding the /constructability/ 
of the Lindenbaum-Tarski algebra itself!


Does it require Boolean Satisfiability 
 for an 
arbitrary propositional theory to allow the construction? It surely 
seems to! But is there a unique sieve or filter for the ordering of 
implication? How do we define invariance of meaning under 
transformations of language? Two propositional theories in different 
languages would have differing implication diagrams 
 , 
so how is bisimulation between them defined? There has to be a 
transformation that generates a diffeomorphism between them.


--
Onward!

Stephen

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

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Re: The Unreality of Time

[Evgenii Rudnyi]

On 28.07.2012 23:43 Stephen P. King said the following:

On 7/28/2012 4:23 PM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:

...

Now I have found the original paper by McTaggart in Internet:

http://www.ditext.com/mctaggart/time.html


...




Dear Evgenii,

Never would I cast aspersions upon McTaggart, but what he actually
proved was not the "unreality of time"; for Reality is what which is
 incontrovertible to all intercommunicating observers. What McTaggart
 proved was the non-existance of an observational stance that might
allow all moments of time to be apprehended simultaneously. His work
can be seen as a reiteration of the truth that Einstein was able to
show us with his General theory of Relativity.




Stephen,

I do not see how Einstein could describe the transition from being to 
becoming. Einstein's four-dimensional timespace does not have changes. 
This is the reason why Popper has called him once as four-dimensional 
Parmenides.


In Einstein's general theory of relativity, one could after all 
introduce the B-series. Yet, the A-series are not there.


Evgenii

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