Re: The Unreality of Time
Evgenii : I thank you for your questions, since It helps me to re-examine and clarify my position. 2012/7/29 Evgenii Rudnyi use...@rudnyi.ru On 29.07.2012 11:28 Alberto G. Corona said the following: These psycho-philosophical arguments like the one of John Ellis are what in evolutionary Psychology is called an explanation based on proximate causes. I guess that science is based on observation and hence it might be good to define what observation is. To this end, past, present and future seems to be quite a crucial concept. First a scientist plans an experiment. Hence at the beginning the experiment is in the future. Then the scientist performs the experiment and eventually the experiment is in the past. The notion of past and present is not only crucial for science, but for human life. The consciousness of time appears as a consequence of two things: Lack of information and the hability that humans have of learning from experience. Plants and most of the animals have innate set of behaviours or at most, a short learning program that fixes behaviour after the young age. But humans modify their behaviour depending on the past, but not only the past but depending on the ordering of events in the past: In an experiment , as in a love affair or in a battle, the lessons learned depends in the order of the events. If we had not that ability to learn from experience and thus, the need to remember sequences of events, then our philosophers would not have the cognitive capacity to philosophize about time, nor the scientists would perform experiments. Instead, ultimate causes are the physical causes that generate, by natural selection, a mind with such concepts and such phenomenology that is capable of such reasoning. I take evolutionary reasoning because evolution is the only way to link both kinds of philosophical and physical explanations. The first is more important in practical terms, because our phenomenology defines what IS real. Period. But only ultimate causes can illuminate and explain them. Recently I have written about Grand Design by Hawking. It seems that according to you, the M-theory could be an ultimate cause. Yet, it does not contain the A-series based on past, present and future. One will find there at best the B-series only. It is unclear to me how the M-theory could describe a scientist planning and performing an experiment. I said at the end that the ultimate causes can be the consequences of the existence of the Mind. Of course the M theory is not a theory of everything, It may be mathematical manifold in which our bodies and the substrate of our minds live. but the world of the mind is different form the phisico-mathematical world. In a timeful way of thinking It can be said that the mind evolved (along time) by natural selection to permit its owm survival and reproduction, but it also can be said that the mind, or our shared minds, made of communicable concepts, make possible the existence of the mathematical substrate in which we live. [Our phenomenology conform a common, communicable reality among us because it is the product of a common mind, that is a product of a common brain architecture, that is a result of a common brain development program that is a result of a common genetic inheritance] Let me ask Max Velmans' question again. According to neuroscience, all conscious experience including visual is in the brain. Hence, according to the ultimate causes, is the brain in the world or the world in the brain? What would you say? Again, this question is quite important, as we have to define what observation is. Does for example observation happens in the brain The activity of the brain is the mind and the mind is a separate world that includes all that can be perceived. What is outside of the mind may just plain mathematics. What we call phisical world is in reality set of phenomenons perceived by the mind. Observations happen in the mind. We can repeat and verify experiments because we live in the same mathematical reality outside of the mind, and because our minds have similar architecture and experience, so we have the same language, interests, experimental machines, procedures, so, as Eric Voegelin said, we live in a shared social mind. However, The COMP hypothesis it is possible to parsimoniously substitute every component of the brain by a silicon analogue without the mind being aware of the change. this , for me, makes the question were our minds come from a mistery An example of ultimate causes may be the theory of Relativity, statistical mechanics, the fact that we live in a four dimensional universe and our 4d life lines go along a maximum gradient of entropy, and the desplacement along these lines is called time, that is local to each line. Another ultimate cause is the nature of natural selection, how and why a certain aggregate of matter can maintain its internal entropy in his path trough a line
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
Le 28-juil.-12, à 18:46, John Clark a écrit : On Sat, Jul 28, 2012 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be 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. Free-will is an informal term use in many informal setting. religious people defined it often by the ability to choose consciously between doing bad things or not, and people from the law can invoke it as a general precondition for making sense of the responsibility idea. In cognitive science we can at least approximate it in different ways, and basically, with computationalism it is the ability to make choice in absence of complete information, and knowledge of that incomplete feature. The Free prefix is just an emphasis, and I don't take it too much seriously. It can be mean things like absence of coercion. 2) Figuring out if what you say about free will is true. We cannot know truth, but can propose hypotheses and definition, and then reason from there. 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. I never said that such a definition makes everything clear, nor do I have said it was marvelous, nor even self-consistent. I did say that you ignore it, for reason which eludes me, but which I guess is a lack of interest in the corresponding mundane notions, which is the object of many studies, books, debate, etc. 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 just seem to be unaware of all the questions in the foundation of the cognitive science. May be you could read tthe book by Micahel Tye: eight problems on consciousness. Free will is one of them. It is clear and quite readable. Of course the author is not aware that comp is incompatible with physicalism. 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. If you don't believe in some fundamental reality, then we are just wasting time when discussing with you, given that this list is devoted in the search of a theory of everything. If you believe in some fundamental reality, then you are religious in the larger (non necessarily christian) sense that I have already given. In the fundamental science, those who pretend not doing religion are the most religious, but probably they are not aware of this. Are you aware that the belief in a primitive physical reality is religious? Physicalism *is* religious (theological, metaphysical, partially irrational, ...)? 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. See Quentin's answer. 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. Not at all. I said the contrary. The first person indeterminacy has nothing to do with free will. In Conscience et Mécanisme I even use it to explain that free will has nothing to do with absolute determinacy or indeterminacy. But the Turing notion of uncomputability can be used in this case, as I did (after Good and Popper, and others to be sure). Free-will, or will, is acknowledged *relative* self-indeterminacy. 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. In the human fundamental sense, most of the time we don't have definition, but still can have a good personal understanding of them. That is part of the difficulty of the subject. We can't define consciousness, but we can agree that we are all conscious, and that we can't define it, nor prove it to someone else, etc. You miss the semi-axiomatic method. You just recall my definition, and you accept it makes sense. Good God not that again! Stop with this mysterious marvelous
Re: On the assumption of the Plurality of Numbers
Le 28-juil.-12, à 20:37, Stephen P. King a écrit : 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 ? (it is just a translation. Why would a translation make a statement 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 ? 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: Remarks on an idea on First-Order Logical Duality
Computations are not proof. There are similarities, and there are a lot of interesting relationships between the two concepts, but we cannot use proof theory for computation theory What goes to Another intriging duality : The Curry-Howard isomorphism between computer programs and mathematical proofs. It seems that both have the same structure after all. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curry%E2%80%93Howard_correspondence And, as the Stephen mentioned paper makes use of Category theory and Topos Theory (That is a variation of CT) to discover the duality , The curry howard isomorphism can be reshaped in terms of category theory. What all these dualities say is that math structures can be expressed as particular cases of a few, more encompassing categories. And 2) since the human mind arrange his knowledge in categories, according with the Phillips paper I mention a few posts ago, this bring light about the nature of reality . No only the phisical world is mathematical, but this mathematical world has a few patterns after all. That economy may say something about the reality, that for me is related with the process of discovery both conscious and mechanical discovery: the natural evolution has discovered the mathematical essence of reality and organized the brain in categories. And scientist create hypotheses by applying their categorical intuitions to new fields of knowledge, for example to discover new mathematical structures or new relations between existing structures. At the same time, if the mathematical reality is not so simple, it would have been not discoverable in the first place, and it would not exist. 2012/7/30 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be Le 29-juil.-12, à 07:34, Stephen P. King a écrit : Dear Bruno, From http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/**user/awodey/preprints/fold.pdfhttp://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 Computations are not proof. There are similarities, and there are a lot of interesting relationships between the two concepts, but we cannot use proof theory for computation theory. (but requires a bisimilarity measure) and 2) seems contrary to the Universal Dovetailer ordering idea as it implies tight sequential strings (but tightness 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! This is needed for special application of the Lindenbaum-Tarski algebra. Does it require Boolean Satisfiability for an arbitrary propositional theory to allow the construction? Not in general. Boolean satisfiability concerns only classical logic, but none of the hypostases, except the arithmetical truth, do correspond (internally) to a classical logic. Bruno 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. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~**marchal/ 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.**comeverything-list@googlegroups.com . To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscribe@ **googlegroups.com everything-list%2bunsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/** group/everything-list?hl=enhttp://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For
Re: Contra Step 8 of UDA
On 30 July 2012 13:11, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: If we are removing ourselves from the object of our study we must remove all things that are implied. It is the observer that acts, not the object alone. All of the properties, such as reflexivity, transitivity, symmetry, do freeze and cease to be anything active. You come back with your solipsist anthropomorphic conception of the arithmetical truth. It does not work with comp at the start. This seems moot to me. Could you be more precise about why we might be justified in thinking of arithmetical truth as eternal but nonetheless subject to change? David -- 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: Remarks on an idea on First-Order Logical Duality
On 7/30/2012 9:34 AM, Alberto G. Corona wrote: Computations are not proof. There are similarities, and there are a lot of interesting relationships between the two concepts, but we cannot use proof theory for computation theory What goes to Another intriging duality : The Curry-Howard isomorphism between computer programs and mathematical proofs. It seems that both have the same structure after all. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curry%E2%80%93Howard_correspondence And, as the Stephen mentioned paper makes use of Category theory and Topos Theory (That is a variation of CT) to discover the duality , The curry howard isomorphism can be reshaped in terms of category theory. What all these dualities say is that math structures can be expressed as particular cases of a few, more encompassing categories. And 2) since the human mind arrange his knowledge in categories, according with the Phillips paper I mention a few posts ago, this bring light about the nature of reality . No only the phisical world is mathematical, but this mathematical world has a few patterns after all. That economy may say something about the reality, that for me is related with the process of discovery both conscious and mechanical discovery: the natural evolution has discovered the mathematical essence of reality and organized the brain in categories. And scientist create hypotheses by applying their categorical intuitions to new fields of knowledge, for example to discover new mathematical structures or new relations between existing structures. At the same time, if the mathematical reality is not so simple, it would have been not discoverable in the first place, and it would not exist. Dear Alberto, You are pointing out exactly the relation that I was trying to explain. Thank you for pointing this out. 2012/7/30 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be mailto:marc...@ulb.ac.be Le 29-juil.-12, à 07:34, Stephen P. King a écrit : 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 Computations are not proof. There are similarities, and there are a lot of interesting relationships between the two concepts, but we cannot use proof theory for computation theory. (but requires a bisimilarity measure) and 2) seems contrary to the Universal Dovetailer ordering idea as it implies tight sequential strings (but tightness 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! This is needed for special application of the Lindenbaum-Tarski algebra. Does it require Boolean Satisfiability for an arbitrary propositional theory to allow the construction? Not in general. Boolean satisfiability concerns only classical logic, but none of the hypostases, except the arithmetical truth, do correspond (internally) to a classical logic. Bruno 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. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/%7Emarchal/ -- 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
Re: Contra Step 8 of UDA
On 7/30/2012 10:20 AM, David Nyman wrote: On 30 July 2012 13:11, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be mailto:marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: If we are removing ourselves from the object of our study we must remove all things that are implied. It is the observer that acts, not the object alone. All of the properties, such as reflexivity, transitivity, symmetry, do freeze and cease to be anything active. You come back with your solipsist anthropomorphic conception of the arithmetical truth. It does not work with comp at the start. This seems moot to me. Could you be more precise about why we might be justified in thinking of arithmetical truth as eternal but nonetheless subject to change? David Dear David, Thank you for highlighting this question. We need to understand how Bruno explains Becoming. -- 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: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On Mon, Jul 30, 2012 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: religious people defined it [free will] often by the ability to choose consciously And those very same religious people define consciousness as the ability to have free will, and around and around we go. and people from the law can invoke it as a general precondition for making sense of the responsibility idea. That is precisely what it does NOT do and is why the free will noise turns the idea of responsibility, which is needed for any society to work, into ridiculous self contradictory idiocy. The Free prefix is just an emphasis, and I don't take it too much seriously. You say that but I don't believe it and I don't think even you really believe it, otherwise you'd just say will means you want to do some things and don't want to do other things and we'd move on and talk about other things, but you can't seem to do that and keep inserting more bafflegab into the free will idea and not the will idea. It can be mean things like absence of coercion. In other words I can't do everything I want to do. I don't need a philosopher to figure that out and doesn't deserve the many many millions of words they have written about free will? I never said that such a definition makes everything clear, nor do I have said it was marvelous, nor even self-consistent. I did say that you ignore it, for reason which eludes me, I don't ignore it, in fact in post after post after post I have asked you, almost begged you, to tell me even approximately if that's the best you can do, what it is; but for reasons which eludes me you will not do so. The first person indeterminacy has nothing to do with free will. I don't know what first person indeterminacy is but I know that your above statement is true because nothing has anything to do with free will. In Conscience et Mécanisme I even use it to explain that free will has nothing to do with absolute determinacy or indeterminacy. In other words free will has nothing to do with things that happen for a reason and free will has nothing to do with things that do not happen for a reason. I agree, and that means that free will is something that doesn't do anything, so free will does have one property, infinite dullness. In the human fundamental sense, most of the time we don't have definition, That is very true. Except for mathematics and formal logic precise definitions are usually not very important because we have something better, examples. If you can't provide a definition then give me a set containing examples of things that have free will and a set containing examples of things that don't have free will; and be consistent about it, explain why elements like Bruno Marchal and John K Clark belong in the same set but elements like Cuckoo Clocks and Roulette Wheels belong in the other set. Free-will, or will, is acknowledged *relative* self-indeterminacy. Now that's better, much better. I have said many times there are only 2 definitions of free will that are not gibberish: 1) Free Will is a noise made by the mouth. 2) Free Will is the inability to always predict ones actions even in a unchanging environment. We can't define consciousness, but We all have a EXCELLENT example of such a thing. You cannot say I don't know what is free-will, yet I do criticize the definition you give. There are only 2 reasons for criticizing a definition about anything: 1) It is unclear. 2) It is inconsistent. Every definition of Free Will I have ever heard in my life, except for the two mentioned previously, fail for one or both of these reasons. You come back on the inconsistent definition of free will, that we both agree make no sense. So why do you reject the one I gave Oh no not again! I'd sure like to know what this marvelous definition of free will that you keep saying you made sometime ago could be! You keep talking about it but I don't know what it is, it is starting to take on mythic qualities, like Unicorns or Hobbits. I gave a definition. Maybe you did during the age of Middle Earth but I think its time to repeat it. you reject it As long as its clear and self consistent only a idiot rejects definitions. I am not a idiot. The fact that I can always draw conclusions from your many definitions that you find emotionally unappealing does not make them illogical. I was just saying that I am not applying the excluded middle outside comp and arithmetic. [...] I don't believe in the law of the excluded middle when applied on arbitrary set notions So if I tell you the perfectly true statement I was hit by lightning at noon and you believe me completely you could nevertheless deduce that I might not have been hit by lightning at noon because X being true does not imply that ~X is false. I really don't think that's a good way to figure out how the world works. it's hard enough already. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the
A online book that might help
Dear Bruno, You might find this online available book An Outline of Ergodic Theory by Steven Arthur Kalikow math.unc.edu/Faculty/petersen/erg3.doc math.unc.edu/Faculty/petersen/erg3.docto possible address the measure problem. -- 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: The Unreality of Time
On 7/30/2012 2:19 AM, Alberto G. Corona wrote: The Boltzman brains , according with what i have read, are completely different beasts. Boltzman pressuposes, that , since no random arrangement of matter is statistically impossible, and Boltzman demonstrated it in certain conditions (ergodic conditions) , with enough time, some arrangements of matter would simulate minds, or even worlds and civilizations. But 15.000 Million years, that is the age of the universe is not enough. Boltzman was considering the question of how the universe came to be in its state of low entropy. I could be due to a random fluctuation. And it was more probable that the random fluctuation simply produced the universe as we see than a fluctuation that produced a big bang universe which then evolved into what we see. And extending this line of thought further, a fluctuation that merely created a brain along with the illusion of this universe was still more probable (i.e. less improbable). Sean Carroll has a good discussion of this and why this argument does not hold for a multiverse, in his book From Infinity to Here. Brent The Boltzman mechanism lies in random events. the process of natural selection instead select random events and create designs more fast. Seen from a mathematical four dimensional perspective,, or better, in what the phisicist call a phase space, adaptations may be seen as attractors in a chaotic evolution. boltzman evolutions are pure chaotic. -- 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 7/30/2012 4:01 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: Le 28-juil.-12, à 18:46, John Clark a écrit : On Sat, Jul 28, 2012 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be 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. Free-will is an informal term use in many informal setting. religious people defined it often by the ability to choose consciously between doing bad things or not, and people from the law can invoke it as a general precondition for making sense of the responsibility idea. In cognitive science we can at least approximate it in different ways, and basically, with computationalism it is the ability to make choice in absence of complete information, and knowledge of that incomplete feature. I'm not clear on why you emphasize incomplete information? What would constitute complete information? and why how would that obviate 'free will'. Is it coercive? The Free prefix is just an emphasis, and I don't take it too much seriously. It can be mean things like absence of coercion. 2) Figuring out if what you say about free will is true. We cannot know truth, but can propose hypotheses and definition, and then reason from there. 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. I never said that such a definition makes everything clear, nor do I have said it was marvelous, nor even self-consistent. I did say that you ignore it, for reason which eludes me, but which I guess is a lack of interest in the corresponding mundane notions, which is the object of many studies, books, debate, etc. 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 just seem to be unaware of all the questions in the foundation of the cognitive science. May be you could read tthe book by Micahel Tye: eight problems on consciousness. I don't find any link to either the book or the author. Can you point to a source? Free will is one of them. It is clear and quite readable. Of course the author is not aware that comp is incompatible with physicalism. 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. If you don't believe in some fundamental reality, then we are just wasting time when discussing with you, given that this list is devoted in the search of a theory of everything. If you believe in some fundamental reality, then you are religious in the larger (non necessarily christian) sense that I have already given. In the fundamental science, those who pretend not doing religion are the most religious, but probably they are not aware of this. I'd say that you are more wedded to the words 'religion' and 'God' than the concepts which they formerly denoted. :-) Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: The Unreality of Time
On 30.07.2012 11:19 Alberto G. Corona said the following: Evgenii : I thank you for your questions, since It helps me to re-examine and clarify my position. 2012/7/29 Evgenii Rudnyiuse...@rudnyi.ru On 29.07.2012 11:28 Alberto G. Corona said the following: These psycho-philosophical arguments like the one of John Ellis are what in evolutionary Psychology is called an explanation based on proximate causes. I guess that science is based on observation and hence it might be good to define what observation is. To this end, past, present and future seems to be quite a crucial concept. First a scientist plans an experiment. Hence at the beginning the experiment is in the future. Then the scientist performs the experiment and eventually the experiment is in the past. The notion of past and present is not only crucial for science, but for human life. The consciousness of time appears as a consequence of two things: Lack of information and the hability that humans have of learning from experience. Plants and most of the animals have innate set of behaviours or at most, a short learning program that fixes behaviour after the young age. But humans modify their behaviour depending on the past, but not only the past but depending on the ordering of events in the past: In an experiment , as in a love affair or in a battle, the lessons learned depends in the order of the events. If we had not that ability to learn from experience and thus, the need to remember sequences of events, then our philosophers would not have the cognitive capacity to philosophize about time, nor the scientists would perform experiments. This is a position of common sense. Yet, to move forward it is necessary to take decisions on how it could be possible to gain knowledge in such a way to be sure that the knowledge is the truth (if this is possible at all). Instead, ultimate causes are the physical causes that generate, by natural selection, a mind with such concepts and such phenomenology that is capable of such reasoning. I take evolutionary reasoning because evolution is the only way to link both kinds of philosophical and physical explanations. The first is more important in practical terms, because our phenomenology defines what IS real. Period. But only ultimate causes can illuminate and explain them. Recently I have written about Grand Design by Hawking. It seems that according to you, the M-theory could be an ultimate cause. Yet, it does not contain the A-series based on past, present and future. One will find there at best the B-series only. It is unclear to me how the M-theory could describe a scientist planning and performing an experiment. I said at the end that the ultimate causes can be the consequences of the existence of the Mind. Of course the M theory is not a theory of everything, It may be mathematical manifold in which our bodies and the substrate of our minds live. but the world of the mind is different form the phisico-mathematical world. In a timeful way of thinking It can be said that the mind evolved (along time) by natural selection to permit its owm survival and reproduction, but it also can be said that the mind, or our shared minds, made of communicable concepts, make possible the existence of the mathematical substrate in which we live. What do you mean by the world of the mind is different form the phisico-mathematical world? Is this as by Descartes res cogitans vs. res extensa? [Our phenomenology conform a common, communicable reality among us because it is the product of a common mind, that is a product of a common brain architecture, that is a result of a common brain development program that is a result of a common genetic inheritance] Let me ask Max Velmans' question again. According to neuroscience, all conscious experience including visual is in the brain. Hence, according to the ultimate causes, is the brain in the world or the world in the brain? What would you say? Again, this question is quite important, as we have to define what observation is. Does for example observation happens in the brain The activity of the brain is the mind and the mind is a separate world that includes all that can be perceived. What is outside of the mind may just plain mathematics. What we call phisical world is in reality set of phenomenons perceived by the mind. Observations happen in the mind. We can repeat and verify experiments because we live in the same mathematical reality outside of the mind, and because our minds have similar architecture and experience, so we have the same language, interests, experimental machines, procedures, so, as Eric Voegelin said, we live in a shared social mind. I am not sure if I understand. How do you connect these two assumptions: What we call phisical world is in reality set of phenomenons perceived by the mind. because we live in the same mathematical reality outside of the mind Do you mean that the world outside of the
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 7/30/2012 10:42 AM, John Clark wrote: The Free prefix is just an emphasis, and I don't take it too much seriously. You say that but I don't believe it and I don't think even you really believe it, otherwise you'd just say will means you want to do some things and don't want to do other things and we'd move on and talk about other things, but you can't seem to do that and keep inserting more bafflegab into the free will idea and not the will idea. So you understand 'will'. Do you also understand 'coercion'? 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: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On Mon, Jul 30, 2012 at 11:08:29AM -0700, meekerdb wrote: On 7/30/2012 4:01 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: Free-will is an informal term use in many informal setting. religious people defined it often by the ability to choose consciously between doing bad things or not, and people from the law can invoke it as a general precondition for making sense of the responsibility idea. In cognitive science we can at least approximate it in different ways, and basically, with computationalism it is the ability to make choice in absence of complete information, and knowledge of that incomplete feature. I'm not clear on why you emphasize incomplete information? What would constitute complete information? and why how would that obviate 'free will'. Is it coercive? With complete information, a totally rational being makes optimal choices, and has no free will, but always beats an irrational being. Conversely, with incomplete information, a rational being will make a wrong choice, or simply fail to make a choice at all, and so is usually beaten by an irrational being. This is where the idea that free will is the capability to act irrationally (or as I put it do something stupid) comes from. There are definite evolutionary advantages to acting irrationally some of the time (though not all the time :). -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- 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 7/30/2012 4:05 PM, Russell Standish wrote: On Mon, Jul 30, 2012 at 11:08:29AM -0700, meekerdb wrote: On 7/30/2012 4:01 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: Free-will is an informal term use in many informal setting. religious people defined it often by the ability to choose consciously between doing bad things or not, and people from the law can invoke it as a general precondition for making sense of the responsibility idea. In cognitive science we can at least approximate it in different ways, and basically, with computationalism it is the ability to make choice in absence of complete information, and knowledge of that incomplete feature. I'm not clear on why you emphasize incomplete information? What would constitute complete information? and why how would that obviate 'free will'. Is it coercive? With complete information, a totally rational being makes optimal choices, and has no free will, but always beats an irrational being. You didn't explain what constitutes complete information. One can always make good choices *relative* to one's information. And one's information is never complete. All I can think of is something like postulating a deterministic universe and then complete information is all the information within your past light cone. Would this also include knowledge of your own brain state? - which of course might allow the prediction that you would make a certain decision. Also it's unclear what 'optimal' means for a choice. Suppose you make the best choice of what to order for diner - does that mean you must have consider the effect on grain prices next year and on your health in twenty years? Isn't 'best' just relative to whatever goal you choose, and there need not be anything rational in the choice of goal. Conversely, with incomplete information, a rational being will make a wrong choice, or simply fail to make a choice at all, and so is usually beaten by an irrational being. I don't see that this follows at all. This is where the idea that free will is the capability to act irrationally (or as I put it do something stupid) comes from. There are definite evolutionary advantages to acting irrationally some of the time (though not all the time :). There are certainly advantages to sometimes acting randomly - but that's rational. Brent Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them. --- David Hume -- 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.
