Re: Unexpected Hanging
On Tue, Sep 17, 2013 at 7:11 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 17 Sep 2013, at 11:49, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Mon, Sep 16, 2013 at 2:35 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 15 Sep 2013, at 10:37, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Sun, Sep 15, 2013 at 9:54 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 14 Sep 2013, at 04:25, Craig Weinberg wrote: snip With computationalism, it is more easy and clear. What exists, at the ontological level, is what make true a sentence like ExP(x). So number exists, once we assume arithmetic or combinators ..., because they make true Ex(x = x). And then (and only then), we can define different notions of epistemological existence, and they will be as many notion of existence as we have modalities (notably those coming from incompleteness, as they are unavoidable. They will make true proposition with the shape [] Ex [] P(x), or [] Ex [] P(x), etc... Ok, nice. I'm slowly getting used to modal logic. It's a weird thing to learn because it seems to require removing things from your thought process rather than adding them (at least for me). It's hard because it's simple. That's the idea of math and logic. It is abstraction. it simplifies, indeed. So we will get notions of psychological existence, physical existence, etc. Ok, but what is the computational substrate? *any* first order logical specification of *any* turing universal system will do. I suggest a very tiny part of arithmetic, but the S and K combinators will do as well, or the Unitary group, etc. There is still a dissatisfaction in having to just accept it. I guess one can go back to the idea of God, in a way. God created 0, and its successors, and then said to them add, and multiply. Ok. I'm agnostic, so I don't cringe at this sort of statement. I guess I'm also an atheist, because I reject the idea of anthropomorphised gods, but that's irrelevant here. My dissatisfaction with this is empirical: god has been used so many times to cover up for our lack of knowledge that, when confronted with current lack of knowledge and one hears the word god one tends to become suspicious. On the other hand, if there is something fundamental we provably can't know, I guess it's fair enough to call that thing god. But I think we should be extra-extra-careful before making that move. All the rest is what emerge from a universal matrix of cohering Computations/dreams (1-computations, 3-computation) provably existing as a consequence of the addition and multiplication laws. If you can believe that 17 is prime, independently of you, then you can understand, that, if you assume computationalism, arithmetic, as seen from different internal self-referential view, contains such universal matrix, or the universal dovetailing or any sigma_1 complete set of number, or a Post creative set, a universal purpose computer, reflecting itself. Arithmetic provides the block-mindscape. The existence and unicity of a block multiverse emerging from it is basically unsolved, nor even yet made enough precise. It's just what is. But then this is an ontological statement. Does this substrate exist? You can not use the previous reasoning to support its existence, or can you? I can't. I only justify why machines develop such beliefs, even for good (relatively correct for they local purpose in their probable history) reason. Just that the physical reality is not the fundamental reality. The physical reality is a complex self-referential sum made by a universal machine/number, and selected or varied through first person (sometimes plural) experiences. There is no substrate (in that picture). Just dreams, or limit on computations, probably related to (Turing) Universal group, braids, as the empirical evidences suggest, but that is what we must recover from the machine looking inside (in different ways corresponding to the intensional variants, the arithmetical hypostases). Even events seen in dreams get some notion of existence, for example. That's nice. I even have problems with statements like batman doesn't exist. Really? I will send you a video! Doesn't he, in some sense? Certainly, in many sense. He has real cousins, like jetman: http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=BEv=x2sT9KoII_M A batman with a french accent! Coincidence? And certainly not, in some common sense. Here, with comp, it is easy at the start, only 0, s(0), s(s(0), ... exist. The rest will come from the many relationships the number inherits from the + and * laws. (+ the comp invariance of consciousness manifestation and experience for the digital substitution at some level). That gives the relative perceptions, the dreams, the beliefs, and (but only God knows), the truth. If we don't recover common sense existence, we fail. But unless comp is false, why should it contradicts common sense? Thanks to Everett we do have evidence of sharable
Implicate order
I've just been reading a book that I procured at a school fete called Science, Order and Creativity, by David Bohm and David Peat. I had read Wholeness and the implicate order in my youth, which on the whole was confusing and unsatisfying. In many ways, this book is too. Yet, I can't quite shake the feeling when reading that there must be some connection between Bohm's implicate order and Hofstaedter's strange loops, and so that he might be onto something important for an understanding of creativity and consciousness. But his books leave me unsatisfied and hungry. For one thing, there is too little contact with the mathematics of QM. Does anyone know of a good introduction to Bohm's ideas? It's clear I'm not going to get it from Bohm himself. Cheers -- 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 unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Unexpected Hanging
On 17 Sep 2013, at 19:11, meekerdb wrote: On 9/17/2013 1:13 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 16 Sep 2013, at 19:54, meekerdb wrote: On 9/16/2013 5:35 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: With computationalism, it is more easy and clear. What exists, at the ontological level, is what make true a sentence like ExP(x). So number exists, once we assume arithmetic or combinators ..., because they make true Ex(x = x). But this notion of 'exists' as 'satisfying a propositional function' is completely different from kicks back when I kick it existence. Why? It kicks back too, like in credit carts. My credit card is made of plastic - and all the processes that depend on it's number are realized in stuff that kicks back too. But that will do in the relevant way thanks to the abstract truth that factorizing large number takes time. The plastic of the card plays only a role of support. And with comp it kicks back in making you dreaming of things kicking back, sometimes in persistent way. You say number exists, once we assume arithmetic; which is about as useful as hobbits exist once we assume middle Earth. Not at all. Arithmetic asks for very few rather clear assumptions, and it explains a lot, as all physical theories assumes it. Arithmetic is a model of countable objects, but it's not that clear that every number has a successor correctly models countable objects. ? Then with comp we need, nor can use anything more. Hobbits and middle Earth assumes many things and explain nothing. I suspect you are a little bit disingenuous, isn't it? I naturally took an extreme example to make my point. I do that often too, but here it weakened your point. Everyone (except Sunday philosopher) agree on 0, and its successor. That is typically not the case for Hobbits and Middle Earth. Bruno Brent Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 2013.0.3408 / Virus Database: 3222/6672 - Release Date: 09/16/13 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything- l...@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How PIP solves the hard problem of consciousness
On 17 Sep 2013, at 19:17, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Tuesday, September 17, 2013 12:40:27 PM UTC-4, freqflyer07281972 wrote: Thanks Craig, you've articulated quite well a number of difficulties in approaching the hard problem, IMHO. I was reading this article in the SEP and thought of your approach: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nishida-kitaro/ Thanks, cool Look especially under his glossing of the idea of 'pure experience.' It reminds me of your MR/PIP and seems quite congenial to it. Whaddaya think? Yes, I agree his 'pure experience' matches my 'sense' in a lot of the important ways. I use the opposite assumption about it being 'MU' or 'nothing'. It is tempting to conceive of the limitation of our local experience and propose 'nothing' beyond it, but I think that it works much better when we invert it and suppose that beyond local experience is 'everythingness' and 'eternity'. I particularly recognize Pure experience launches the dynamic process of reality that differentiates into subjective and objective phenomena on their way to a higher unity, and the recapture of our unitary foundation is what Nishida means by the Good. This is the same as my model, although I would say that the differentiation first diverges from pure experience to subjective qualia, where objective qualia emerge from the public intersubjectivity (quanta). His concept of higher unity is Good while mine would see good as only a particular measure of subjective 'likeness' and the actual higher unity I see as Significance...the reconciliation of diffracted sense as it is separated from the entropy of scaled distance and time. Thanks, Craig On Monday, September 16, 2013 1:35:27 PM UTC-4, Craig Weinberg wrote: The Hard Problem of consciousness asks why there is a gap between our explanation of matter, or biology, or neurology, and our experience in the first place. What is it there which even suggests to us that there should be a gap, and why should there be a such thing as experience to stand apart from the functions of that which we can explain. Materialism only miniaturizes the gap and relies on a machina ex deus (intentionally reversed deus ex machina) of ‘complexity’ to save the day. An interesting question would be, why does dualism seem to be easier to overlook when we are imagining the body of a neuron, or a collection of molecules? I submit that it is because miniaturization and complexity challenge the limitations of our cognitive ability, we find it easy to conflate that sort of quantitative incomprehensibility with the other incomprehensibility being considered, namely aesthetic* awareness. What consciousness does with phenomena which pertain to a distantly scaled perceptual frame is to under-signify it. It becomes less important, less real, less worthy of attention. Idealism only fictionalizes the gap. I argue that idealism makes more sense on its face than materialism for addressing the Hard Problem, since material would have no plausible excuse for becoming aware or being entitled to access an unacknowledged a priori possibility of awareness. Idealism however, fails at commanding the respect of a sophisticated perspective since it relies on naive denial of objectivity. Why so many molecules? Why so many terrible and tragic experiences? Why so much enduring of suffering and injustice? The thought of an afterlife is too seductive of a way to wish this all away. The concept of maya, that the world is a veil of illusion is too facile to satisfy our scientific curiosity. Dualism multiplies the gap. Acknowledging the gap is a good first step, but without a bridge, the gap is diagonalized and stuck in infinite regress. In order for experience to connect in some way with physics, some kind of homunculus is invoked, some third force or function interceding on behalf of the two incommensurable substances. The third force requires a fourth and fifth force on either side, and so forth, as in a Zeno paradox. Each homunculus has its own Explanatory Gap. Dual Aspect Monism retreats from the gap. The concept of material and experience being two aspects of a continuous whole is the best one so far – getting very close. The only problem is that it does not explain what this monism is, or where the aspects come from. It rightfully honors the importance of opposites and duality, but it does not question what they actually are. Laws? Information? Panpsychism toys with the gap.Depending on what kind of panpsychism is employed, it can miniaturize, multiply, or retreat from the gap. At least it is committing to closing the gap in a way which does not take human exceptionalism for granted, but it still does not attempt to integrate qualia itself with quanta in a detailed way. Tononi’s IIT might be an exception in that it is detailed, but only from the quantitative end. The hard problem,
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On 17 Sep 2013, at 19:39, John Clark wrote: On Mon, Sep 16, 2013 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: So you are suggesting that a thing like broken glass is made of numbers I was just saying that things are not made up of things. A broken glass is NOT made of number. That has no meaning at all. What happens is that addition and multiplication of natural numbers emulate dreams, which might be dream of a broken glass. OK. How is that any different from saying broken glass is made of numbers? It would be like saying that the relation between matter and energy (E = mc^2) is made of ink or of pixels. don't tell me there is no such thing as a thing, that's just more gibberish. It is a matter of tedious, and not so simple, exercise to see that the computations exist in some definite sense when we postulate arithmetic. (This is done in good textbook, and very well done in Epstein Carnielli, but also in Boolos Jeffrey). Physical things then appears as stable percept And concerning broken glass I said in my September 11 post It must have stable properties of some sort or I wouldn't be able to identify it as a thing. I agree. But a computation can provide stable things for another computations or subcomputations. Then arithmetical truth is rather stable itself. by persons living those dreams. OK. Therefore the physical universe and the physical things in it exist. That makes sense. Just that such an existence is a first person plural construction. This exists for all universal system which can run different computations in parallel, and makes them interact. Make up your mind! First you say everything is the process of natural numbers in relative computations and then you say digital machines, which are defined in term of number relations are an exception to this because what they do is not a process. The sum of number relations is not a process?? None of this makes any sense to me. Some number relation defines some machines, or some programs, which are static entities. *Other number relations, involving the preceding one, defines computations, or processes, Name a number relation that does not involve a computation or some other process! It is difference between a number j used as a name for a program, like in the arithmetical relation phi_j(k) = r, and a number coding a computation, that is some sequence like phi_j(k)^1, phi_j(k)^2, phi_j(k)^3, phi_j(k)^4, phi_j(k)^5, phi_j(k)^6, phi_j(k)^7, ... Here phi_i is an enumeration of the partial computable functions, k is a natural number input, and ^s means the sth step of the computation. A machine, in that setting is basically one number, relative to some universal number. Relative? A relation needs at least 2 things, Yes. The two things are 1) the number playing the role of the machine (the j in phi_j(k)), and 2) the universal system (seen as a number, unless we start in the basic system assumed, like arithmetic, or the combinators) which computes phi_j(k). You can look at the Matiyasevitch book for a nice implementation of arbitrary Turing machine *and* their computations (seen as something very dynamic) in the terms of Diophantine equations (since as very static). That can help. Providing examples is very long and technical, alas, but we will come back on this most probably. and some sort of computation with them. Absolutely, Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Unexpected Hanging
On 17 Sep 2013, at 19:46, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Tuesday, September 17, 2013 6:07:23 AM UTC-4, telmo_menezes wrote: On Mon, Sep 16, 2013 at 7:47 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.com wrote: On Saturday, September 14, 2013 5:53:01 AM UTC-4, telmo_menezes wrote: On Fri, Sep 13, 2013 at 12:06 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.com wrote: On Friday, September 13, 2013 5:31:40 AM UTC-4, telmo_menezes wrote: On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 5:47 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.com wrote: Which reasoning is clearly false? Here's what I'm thinking: 1) The conclusion I won't be surprised to be hanged Friday if I am not hanged by Thursday creates another proposition to be surprised about. By leaving the condition of 'surprise' open ended, it could include being surprised that the judge lied, or any number of other soft contingencies that could render an 'unexpected' outcome. Ok but that's not the setup. The judge did not lie and there are no soft contingencies. The surprise is purely from not having been sure the day of the execution was the one when somebody knocked at the door at noon. Even if you allow for some soft contingencies, I believe the paradox still holds. I don't understand why it's a paradox and not just contradiction. If I say 'you're going to die this week and it's going to be a surprise when', that is already a contradiction. Ok, after a good amount of thought, I have come to agree with this. The judge lied. You convinced me! :) Ah cool! Thanks for posting the problem also, it helped me resurrect some lost mathematical-logical ability. (with due credit to Alberto and Brent, who also helped convince me). A more honest statement would be you're going to die this week and it will probably be a surprise when, or, you'll probably die this week and it will be a surprise if you do. My thought process involves reducing the thing to a game. There are 5 turns in the game, and the attacker has to choose one of those turns to press a button. The defender also has a button, and its goal is to predict the action of the attacker. If both press the button. the defender wins. If only the attacker pressers the button, the attacker wins. Otherwise the game continues. The system is automated so that the attacker button is automatically pressed. Now the attacker (judge) is making the claim that he can always win this game. He cannot, there is no conceivable algorithm that guarantees this. Playing multiple instances of the game, I would guess the optimal strategy for the attacker is to chose a random turn, including the last. This will offer 20% of the games to the defender, but there's nothing better one can do. I read your post and now I think I understand you positions better. Nice. I am not convinced, but I will grant you that they are not easily attackable. On the other hand, this could be because they are equivalent to Carl Sagan's invisible dragon in the garage or, as Popper would put it, unfalsifiable. Do you care about falsifiability? Falsifiability is nice - especially in public-facing physics, but since falsification itself is a sensory experience, we should not insist on the same kind of falsifiability for private physics that we have in public physics. Alright. Personal or 1p experiences are probably outside the realm of phenomena that can be investigated under Popperian science. I think this is something that many of us can agree with, independently of accepting/rejecting comp, for example. I think this is also what characterises hard-core positivists: they either find 1p reality irrelevant or even reject its existence. Which makes sense, since from that kind of fundamentalist 3p perspective, we can only take consciousness for granted. From there, we can either admit or deny that we are taking it for granted, and if we admit it, then we would want to minimize the significance of that. If so, can you conceive of some experiment to test what you're proposing? There may not be a test, so much as accumulating a body of understanding by correlating uses of information and qualities of sensation. It's more at the hypothesis stage than the testing stage. The symbol grounding problem haunted me before I had a name for it. It's a very intuitive problem indeed. I tend to believe that the answer will actually look something like an Escher painting. Assuming that neuroscience is enough, one can imagine the coevolution of neural firing patterns with environmental conditions. This can lead to neural firing patterns that correlate with higher abstractions -- the symbols. Why not? Still there's the hard problem. Why would neural firing patterns have a smell? I don't know! But I think the mystery is not so much how symbols appear or why they appear. Computers can do
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On 18 Sep 2013, at 04:12, chris peck wrote: Hi John Exactly, Newton and Darwin and Einstein didn't need Popper to tell them how to get knowledge out of nature, and absolutely no change in how science was done happened in 1934, the year Popper's book was published. None whatsoever. Newton and Darwin would have had problems if they had of needed Popper given they worked before he was even born. Sometimes I read your posts and just think your belching wind. Popper was not trying to explain to people like Einstein how to 'get knowledge out of nature'. You're basing your entire argument on a straw man. In fact, he used Einstein as a paradigm example of how to conduct science properly. But what of Adler, Freud or Marx? All these people claimed their theories to be scientific too and earnt a whole lot of credit for that, but where they scientific? Their theories could be contrasted with Einstein's in so far as where Einstein derived 'bold and risky' observational predictions which could be falsified; neither Freud, Adler nor Marx did. You say that this demarcation principle has had no influence in science. Within Psychology however, for better or worse, Psychoanalysis is now perceived as a faintly absurd artifact of history. No one gets hot under the collar about penis envy anymore. Why? Because psychoanalysis doesn't make falsifiable predictions. There has been a cognitive and neuro-scientific 'revolution' which has striven hard to base psychology on more empirically falsifiable foundations. In physics there is a debate about whether string theory (or string theory if you must shake your rattle, John) deserves all the funding it receives. What is at the core of the debate?: Does it matter that it fails to make falsifiable predictions? Should other theories (quantum loop gravity) which potentially offer more scope for falsifiability receive a greater proportion of the available resources. Go back a hundred years or so and no-one gave a toss about any of that, so has Popper and the movement he spearheaded had an effect? Of course it has. Its pompous boneheaded bullshit to suggest otherwise. If we agree, with Popper, that a theory needs to be falsifiable to be interesting, then Popper's theory is interesting, because, strictly speaking, it has been refuted, by John Case and Ngo-Manguelle: CASE J. NGO-MANGUELLE S., 1979, Refinements of inductive inference by Popperian machines. Tech. Rep., Dept. of Computer Science, State Univ. of New- York, Buffalo. By accepting that an inductive inference machine proposes, from time to time, unfalsifiable theories, you enlarge non trivially the class of phenomena that the machine can recognize, and build correct theories about. Note the (slight) paradox here. Bruno Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2013 13:39:10 -0400 Subject: Re: What gives philosophers a bad name? From: johnkcl...@gmail.com To: everything-list@googlegroups.com On Mon, Sep 16, 2013 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: So you are suggesting that a thing like broken glass is made of numbers I was just saying that things are not made up of things. A broken glass is NOT made of number. That has no meaning at all. What happens is that addition and multiplication of natural numbers emulate dreams, which might be dream of a broken glass. OK. How is that any different from saying broken glass is made of numbers? don't tell me there is no such thing as a thing, that's just more gibberish. It is a matter of tedious, and not so simple, exercise to see that the computations exist in some definite sense when we postulate arithmetic. (This is done in good textbook, and very well done in Epstein Carnielli, but also in Boolos Jeffrey). Physical things then appears as stable percept And concerning broken glass I said in my September 11 post It must have stable properties of some sort or I wouldn't be able to identify it as a thing. by persons living those dreams. OK. Therefore the physical universe and the physical things in it exist. Make up your mind! First you say everything is the process of natural numbers in relative computations and then you say digital machines, which are defined in term of number relations are an exception to this because what they do is not a process. The sum of number relations is not a process?? None of this makes any sense to me. Some number relation defines some machines, or some programs, which are static entities. *Other number relations, involving the preceding one, defines computations, or processes, Name a number relation that does not involve a computation or some other process! A machine, in that setting is basically one number, relative to some universal number. Relative? A relation needs at least 2 things, and some sort of computation with them. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are
Re: Unexpected Hanging
On 18 Sep 2013, at 05:03, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Sunday, September 15, 2013 3:54:24 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 14 Sep 2013, at 04:25, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Friday, September 13, 2013 9:42:54 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 12 Sep 2013, at 18:22, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Thursday, September 12, 2013 11:56:12 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 12 Sep 2013, at 11:33, Telmo Menezes wrote: Time for some philosophy then :) Here's a paradox that's making me lose sleep: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unexpected_hanging_paradox Probably many of you already know about it. What mostly bothers me is the epistemological crisis that this introduces. I cannot find a problem with the reasoning, but it's clearly false. So I know that I don't know why this reasoning is false. Now, how can I know if there are other types of reasoning that I don't even know that I don't know that they are correct? Smullyan argues, in Forever Undecided, rather convincingly, that it is the Epimenides paradox in disguise, It's the symbol grounding problem too. From a purely quantitative perspective, a truth can only satisfy some condition. The expectation of truth being true is not a condition of arithmetic truth, it is a boundary condition that belongs to sense. i think you mix first person truth, that we can sometimes apprehend (like knowing that we are conscious here and now), and third person truth, which does not depend of any entity *sensing* them. How do you justify the assumption of entities that do not depend on any phenomenological participation though? That is called realism. I guess you know I am realist about facts like 14 is not prime and the like. We have discussed already on that, and I think, agree that we disagree on that. I don't see any realism in assuming anything that is disconnected from all forms of phenomenology. How would such a thing be part of a universe? That depends what you mean by universe. By definition, realism assumes something which can be disconnected from phenomenology, but which can be connected to it for some occasion. Certainly there are truths which are independent of *our* sensing as individuals, or as human beings, or as fleshy objects or temporal spans of felt experience, but how can we know, or rather why should we jump to conclusions that there are things that simply 'are' independently of a sensed experience (note I omit 'entity', since it is not clear that an experience must be felt by a particular being (it could be felt by a class of beings, an era of being, or an eternity of being). Third person truth is not anchored in the firmament of fact, it is simply a lowest common denominator of sensitivity among all participants. I am OK with this, but as I defined entities from what I am realist about, I prefer to make it simple and refer to an arithmetic independent of us. I agree that arithmetic is independent of us as human beings, but I see nothing to suggest that it is independent of all experience. I can agree with this, if you include some God experience, for example. But I don't really need this. If third person truth were sense independent, what would be the point of having sense actually experienced? The presence of far away galaxies does not depend on us (human beings), but we still need sense (Hubble) to acknowledge their existence. Of course, but far away galaxies do depend on the sensitivity of the matter of the Hubble, or other galaxies, or our eyeball and brain, to 'exist' in some particular form. Otherwise what is the difference between a galaxy existing and not existing? For a physical object like a galaxy, you have many situations: It exists in our branch of the multiverse, and is accessible to our measuring instruments. It exists in our branch of the multiverse, but is not accessible to our measuring instruments (for some reason) It exists in another term of the universal superposition (a physicalist would still call it physical) It exists as a solution of a diophantine equation, but appears in no term of our multiverse (that is doubtful if our multiverse is really the state of the quantum void, but it can make sense logically). It does not exist at all, because the galaxy would contains impossible objects, etc. How would it create sensation mechanically, and how would whatever is used to attach first person phenomena to third person phenomena be itself attached to either one? Through two things: self-reference and truth. Those are abstractions though, not mechanisms.You could say 'tenacity' and 'ingenuity' too, but that doesn't put 'orange' in a digital sequence. Self-referential mechanism exist tough. Orange is in some digital sequence relative to some universal machine (Keep in mind that my answer assume computationalism). the first in technically manageable, the second
Re: Unexpected Hanging
On 18 Sep 2013, at 11:43, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Tue, Sep 17, 2013 at 7:11 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 17 Sep 2013, at 11:49, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Mon, Sep 16, 2013 at 2:35 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 15 Sep 2013, at 10:37, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Sun, Sep 15, 2013 at 9:54 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 14 Sep 2013, at 04:25, Craig Weinberg wrote: snip With computationalism, it is more easy and clear. What exists, at the ontological level, is what make true a sentence like ExP(x). So number exists, once we assume arithmetic or combinators ..., because they make true Ex(x = x). And then (and only then), we can define different notions of epistemological existence, and they will be as many notion of existence as we have modalities (notably those coming from incompleteness, as they are unavoidable. They will make true proposition with the shape [] Ex [] P(x), or [] Ex [] P(x), etc... Ok, nice. I'm slowly getting used to modal logic. It's a weird thing to learn because it seems to require removing things from your thought process rather than adding them (at least for me). It's hard because it's simple. That's the idea of math and logic. It is abstraction. it simplifies, indeed. So we will get notions of psychological existence, physical existence, etc. Ok, but what is the computational substrate? *any* first order logical specification of *any* turing universal system will do. I suggest a very tiny part of arithmetic, but the S and K combinators will do as well, or the Unitary group, etc. There is still a dissatisfaction in having to just accept it. I guess one can go back to the idea of God, in a way. God created 0, and its successors, and then said to them add, and multiply. Ok. I'm agnostic, so I don't cringe at this sort of statement. I guess I'm also an atheist, because I reject the idea of anthropomorphised gods, but that's irrelevant here. My dissatisfaction with this is empirical: god has been used so many times to cover up for our lack of knowledge that, when confronted with current lack of knowledge and one hears the word god one tends to become suspicious. On the other hand, if there is something fundamental we provably can't know, I guess it's fair enough to call that thing god. But I think we should be extra-extra-careful before making that move. I am agnostic too. But, like for consciousness, we can agree on some proposition about those notion, and reason from there. As you know I use god in a very large sense, and then, with comp and the classical theory of knowledge, god or divine means mainly true, or related to true, with in mind the idea that truth is not something definable, although we can agree on many truth. All the rest is what emerge from a universal matrix of cohering Computations/dreams (1-computations, 3-computation) provably existing as a consequence of the addition and multiplication laws. If you can believe that 17 is prime, independently of you, then you can understand, that, if you assume computationalism, arithmetic, as seen from different internal self-referential view, contains such universal matrix, or the universal dovetailing or any sigma_1 complete set of number, or a Post creative set, a universal purpose computer, reflecting itself. Arithmetic provides the block-mindscape. The existence and unicity of a block multiverse emerging from it is basically unsolved, nor even yet made enough precise. It's just what is. But then this is an ontological statement. Does this substrate exist? You can not use the previous reasoning to support its existence, or can you? I can't. I only justify why machines develop such beliefs, even for good (relatively correct for they local purpose in their probable history) reason. Just that the physical reality is not the fundamental reality. The physical reality is a complex self-referential sum made by a universal machine/number, and selected or varied through first person (sometimes plural) experiences. There is no substrate (in that picture). Just dreams, or limit on computations, probably related to (Turing) Universal group, braids, as the empirical evidences suggest, but that is what we must recover from the machine looking inside (in different ways corresponding to the intensional variants, the arithmetical hypostases). Even events seen in dreams get some notion of existence, for example. That's nice. I even have problems with statements like batman doesn't exist. Really? I will send you a video! Doesn't he, in some sense? Certainly, in many sense. He has real cousins, like jetman: http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=BEv=x2sT9KoII_M A batman with a french accent! Coincidence? Europa is full of thinks. Dracula has also many cousins ... Are there any coincidence? Well, they are all relative too.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
--- Original Message --- From: Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be Sent: 19 September 2013 12:08 AM To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: What gives philosophers a bad name? On 18 Sep 2013, at 04:12, chris peck wrote: Hi John Exactly, Newton and Darwin and Einstein didn't need Popper to tell them how to get knowledge out of nature, and absolutely no change in how science was done happened in 1934, the year Popper's book was published. None whatsoever. Newton and Darwin would have had problems if they had of needed Popper given they worked before he was even born. Sometimes I read your posts and just think your belching wind. Popper was not trying to explain to people like Einstein how to 'get knowledge out of nature'. You're basing your entire argument on a straw man. In fact, he used Einstein as a paradigm example of how to conduct science properly. But what of Adler, Freud or Marx? All these people claimed their theories to be scientific too and earnt a whole lot of credit for that, but where they scientific? Their theories could be contrasted with Einstein's in so far as where Einstein derived 'bold and risky' observational predictions which could be falsified; neither Freud, Adler nor Marx did. You say that this demarcation principle has had no influence in science. Within Psychology however, for better or worse, Psychoanalysis is now perceived as a faintly absurd artifact of history. No one gets hot under the collar about penis envy anymore. Why? Because psychoanalysis doesn't make falsifiable predictions. There has been a cognitive and neuro-scientific 'revolution' which has striven hard to base psychology on more empirically falsifiable foundations. In physics there is a debate about whether string theory (or string theory if you must shake your rattle, John) deserves all the funding it receives. What is at the core of the debate?: Does it matter that it fails to make falsifiable predictions? Should other theories (quantum loop gravity) which potentially offer more scope for falsifiability receive a greater proportion of the available resources. Go back a hundred years or so and no-one gave a toss about any of that, so has Popper and the movement he spearheaded had an effect? Of course it has. Its pompous boneheaded bullshit to suggest otherwise. If we agree, with Popper, that a theory needs to be falsifiable to be interesting, then Popper's theory is interesting, because, strictly speaking, it has been refuted, by John Case and Ngo-Manguelle: CASE J. NGO-MANGUELLE S., 1979, Refinements of inductive inference by Popperian machines. Tech. Rep., Dept. of Computer Science, State Univ. of New- York, Buffalo. By accepting that an inductive inference machine proposes, from time to time, unfalsifiable theories, you enlarge non trivially the class of phenomena that the machine can recognize, and build correct theories about. Note the (slight) paradox here. Bruno Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2013 13:39:10 -0400 Subject: Re: What gives philosophers a bad name? From: johnkcl...@gmail.com To: everything-list@googlegroups.com On Mon, Sep 16, 2013 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: So you are suggesting that a thing like broken glass is made of numbers I was just saying that things are not made up of things. A broken glass is NOT made of number. That has no meaning at all. What happens is that addition and multiplication of natural numbers emulate dreams, which might be dream of a broken glass. OK. How is that any different from saying broken glass is made of numbers? don't tell me there is no such thing as a thing, that's just more gibberish. It is a matter of tedious, and not so simple, exercise to see that the computations exist in some definite sense when we postulate arithmetic. (This is done in good textbook, and very well done in Epstein Carnielli, but also in Boolos Jeffrey). Physical things then appears as stable percept And concerning broken glass I said in my September 11 post It must have stable properties of some sort or I wouldn't be able to identify it as a thing. by persons living those dreams. OK. Therefore the physical universe and the physical things in it exist. Make up your mind! First you say everything is the process of natural numbers in relative computations and then you say digital machines, which are defined in term of number relations are an exception to this because what they do is not a process. The sum of number relations is not a process?? None of this makes any sense to me. Some number relation defines some machines, or some programs, which are static entities. *Other number relations, involving the preceding one, defines computations, or processes, Name a number relation that does not involve a computation or some other process! A machine, in that setting is basically one number, relative to some universal number. Relative? A relation needs at
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
Hi Bruno We don't have to accept Popper's demarcation principle in order to understand that it has genuinely been influential or that Popper's arguments are used within scientific circles. I haven't read the paper you mention but many people have taken falsificationism to task. Kuhn; Lakatos; Feyerabend to name just a few. Hilary Putnam's 'On the corroboration of Theories' is also I think a good refutation which argues that strictly speaking no hypotheses are falsifiable. But then the point is that they take Popper's ideas as a starting point from which to build more sophisticated descriptions of science. I think Popper is often misconstrued though. I don't think he meant to argue that unfalsifiable theories had no place. His admiration for Darwinism and to a lesser extent Marxist Economics is informative here. He thought both to be valuable whilst also thinking both contained unfalsifiable elements. But it is a matter of degree. Theories that currently make falsifiable predictions are more interesting from an experimental perspective. All else being equal they have a greater claim for time in the lab and a greater claim on resources generally I would have thought...thus the current criticism of String Theory. All the best --- Original Message --- From: Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be Sent: 19 September 2013 12:08 AM To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: What gives philosophers a bad name? On 18 Sep 2013, at 04:12, chris peck wrote: Hi John Exactly, Newton and Darwin and Einstein didn't need Popper to tell them how to get knowledge out of nature, and absolutely no change in how science was done happened in 1934, the year Popper's book was published. None whatsoever. Newton and Darwin would have had problems if they had of needed Popper given they worked before he was even born. Sometimes I read your posts and just think your belching wind. Popper was not trying to explain to people like Einstein how to 'get knowledge out of nature'. You're basing your entire argument on a straw man. In fact, he used Einstein as a paradigm example of how to conduct science properly. But what of Adler, Freud or Marx? All these people claimed their theories to be scientific too and earnt a whole lot of credit for that, but where they scientific? Their theories could be contrasted with Einstein's in so far as where Einstein derived 'bold and risky' observational predictions which could be falsified; neither Freud, Adler nor Marx did. You say that this demarcation principle has had no influence in science. Within Psychology however, for better or worse, Psychoanalysis is now perceived as a faintly absurd artifact of history. No one gets hot under the collar about penis envy anymore. Why? Because psychoanalysis doesn't make falsifiable predictions. There has been a cognitive and neuro-scientific 'revolution' which has striven hard to base psychology on more empirically falsifiable foundations. In physics there is a debate about whether string theory (or string theory if you must shake your rattle, John) deserves all the funding it receives. What is at the core of the debate?: Does it matter that it fails to make falsifiable predictions? Should other theories (quantum loop gravity) which potentially offer more scope for falsifiability receive a greater proportion of the available resources. Go back a hundred years or so and no-one gave a toss about any of that, so has Popper and the movement he spearheaded had an effect? Of course it has. Its pompous boneheaded bullshit to suggest otherwise. If we agree, with Popper, that a theory needs to be falsifiable to be interesting, then Popper's theory is interesting, because, strictly speaking, it has been refuted, by John Case and Ngo-Manguelle: CASE J. NGO-MANGUELLE S., 1979, Refinements of inductive inference by Popperian machines. Tech. Rep., Dept. of Computer Science, State Univ. of New- York, Buffalo. By accepting that an inductive inference machine proposes, from time to time, unfalsifiable theories, you enlarge non trivially the class of phenomena that the machine can recognize, and build correct theories about. Note the (slight) paradox here. Bruno Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2013 13:39:10 -0400 Subject: Re: What gives philosophers a bad name? From: johnkcl...@gmail.com To: everything-list@googlegroups.com On Mon, Sep 16, 2013 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: So you are suggesting that a thing like broken glass is made of numbers I was just saying that things are not made up of things. A broken glass is NOT made of number. That has no meaning at all. What happens is that addition and multiplication of natural numbers emulate dreams, which might be dream of a broken glass. OK. How is that any different from saying broken glass is made of numbers? don't tell me there is no such thing as a thing, that's just more gibberish. It is a matter of tedious, and not so
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On Tue, Sep 17, 2013 at 10:12 PM, chris peck chris_peck...@hotmail.comwrote: You say that this demarcation principle has had no influence in science. Within Psychology however, for better or worse, Psychoanalysis is now perceived as a faintly absurd artifact of history. No one gets hot under the collar about penis envy anymore. Why? Because psychoanalysis doesn't make falsifiable predictions. There has been a cognitive and neuro-scientific 'revolution' which has striven hard to base psychology on more empirically falsifiable foundation It doesn't take a genius to realize that if a idea isn't getting anywhere, that is to say if it doesn't produce new interesting ideas, your time would be better spent doing something else. Are you trying to tell me with a straight face that without Popper people in 2013 wouldn't have been able to figure out that the study of penis envy wasn't a good use of your time? In physics there is a debate about whether string theory (or string theory if you must shake your rattle, John) deserves all the funding it receives. What is at the core of the debate?: Does it matter that it fails to make falsifiable predictions? Obviously it matters! Although most physicists have not read Popper and may not even have heard of him, all of them agree that it matters that string theory has not made any testable predictions, but everybody also agrees that it is a work in progress; after all, Einstein's theory of gravitation didn't make testable predictions either when it was only half finished and he was still struggling with it. The big question is whether string theory will ever be able to make testable predictions, and Popper is of absolutely no help whatsoever in answering that question. None zero zilch goose egg. Should other theories (quantum loop gravity) which potentially offer more scope for falsifiability receive a greater proportion of the available resources. So far quantum loop gravity is no better at making testable predictions than string theory is. Which theory will history say was more productive? Perhaps strings will lead to something, perhaps loops will, perhaps both will, perhaps neither will. I don't know, you don't know, and Popper most certainly does not know. Go back a hundred years or so and no-one gave a toss about any of that Bullshit. There was both good science and pseudoscience a hundred years ago and there is both good science and pseudoscience today. Popper changed nothing. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On Wed, Sep 18, 2013 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Name a number relation that does not involve a computation or some other process! It is difference between a number j used as a name for a program, like in the arithmetical relation phi_j(k) = r, A arithmetical relation is a process. and a number coding a computation A computation is a process. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Unexpected Hanging
If someone told me that I was going to be hung, I can assure you I would be expecting it every day. I wouldn't bother with any logical analysis. (The unexpected exam, on the other hand...) On Thursday, 12 September 2013 21:33:24 UTC+12, telmo_menezes wrote: Time for some philosophy then :) Here's a paradox that's making me lose sleep: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unexpected_hanging_paradox Probably many of you already know about it. What mostly bothers me is the epistemological crisis that this introduces. I cannot find a problem with the reasoning, but it's clearly false. So I know that I don't know why this reasoning is false. Now, how can I know if there are other types of reasoning that I don't even know that I don't know that they are correct? Cheers, Telmo. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Unexpected Hanging
On 9/18/2013 5:21 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: I naturally took an extreme example to make my point. I do that often too, but here it weakened your point. Everyone (except Sunday philosopher) agree on 0, and its successor. Also some serious mathematicians are finitists. The Meaning of Pure Mathematics Author(s): Jan MycielskiSource: Journal of Philosophical Logic, Vol. 18, No. 3 (Aug., 1989), pp. 315-320Published by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30227216 . Locally Finite Theories Author(s): Jan MycielskiSource: The Journal of Symbolic Logic, Vol. 51, No. 1 (Mar., 1986), pp. 59-62Published by: Association for Symbolic LogicStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2273942 . Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Unexpected Hanging
On Wed, Sep 18, 2013 at 6:13 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 18 Sep 2013, at 11:43, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Tue, Sep 17, 2013 at 7:11 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 17 Sep 2013, at 11:49, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Mon, Sep 16, 2013 at 2:35 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 15 Sep 2013, at 10:37, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Sun, Sep 15, 2013 at 9:54 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 14 Sep 2013, at 04:25, Craig Weinberg wrote: snip With computationalism, it is more easy and clear. What exists, at the ontological level, is what make true a sentence like ExP(x). So number exists, once we assume arithmetic or combinators ..., because they make true Ex(x = x). And then (and only then), we can define different notions of epistemological existence, and they will be as many notion of existence as we have modalities (notably those coming from incompleteness, as they are unavoidable. They will make true proposition with the shape [] Ex [] P(x), or [] Ex [] P(x), etc... Ok, nice. I'm slowly getting used to modal logic. It's a weird thing to learn because it seems to require removing things from your thought process rather than adding them (at least for me). It's hard because it's simple. That's the idea of math and logic. It is abstraction. it simplifies, indeed. So we will get notions of psychological existence, physical existence, etc. Ok, but what is the computational substrate? *any* first order logical specification of *any* turing universal system will do. I suggest a very tiny part of arithmetic, but the S and K combinators will do as well, or the Unitary group, etc. There is still a dissatisfaction in having to just accept it. I guess one can go back to the idea of God, in a way. God created 0, and its successors, and then said to them add, and multiply. Ok. I'm agnostic, so I don't cringe at this sort of statement. I guess I'm also an atheist, because I reject the idea of anthropomorphised gods, but that's irrelevant here. My dissatisfaction with this is empirical: god has been used so many times to cover up for our lack of knowledge that, when confronted with current lack of knowledge and one hears the word god one tends to become suspicious. On the other hand, if there is something fundamental we provably can't know, I guess it's fair enough to call that thing god. But I think we should be extra-extra-careful before making that move. I am agnostic too. But, like for consciousness, we can agree on some proposition about those notion, and reason from there. As you know I use god in a very large sense, and then, with comp and the classical theory of knowledge, god or divine means mainly true, or related to true, with in mind the idea that truth is not something definable, although we can agree on many truth. All the rest is what emerge from a universal matrix of cohering Computations/dreams (1-computations, 3-computation) provably existing as a consequence of the addition and multiplication laws. If you can believe that 17 is prime, independently of you, then you can understand, that, if you assume computationalism, arithmetic, as seen from different internal self-referential view, contains such universal matrix, or the universal dovetailing or any sigma_1 complete set of number, or a Post creative set, a universal purpose computer, reflecting itself. Arithmetic provides the block-mindscape. The existence and unicity of a block multiverse emerging from it is basically unsolved, nor even yet made enough precise. It's just what is. But then this is an ontological statement. Does this substrate exist? You can not use the previous reasoning to support its existence, or can you? I can't. I only justify why machines develop such beliefs, even for good (relatively correct for they local purpose in their probable history) reason. Just that the physical reality is not the fundamental reality. The physical reality is a complex self-referential sum made by a universal machine/number, and selected or varied through first person (sometimes plural) experiences. There is no substrate (in that picture). Just dreams, or limit on computations, probably related to (Turing) Universal group, braids, as the empirical evidences suggest, but that is what we must recover from the machine looking inside (in different ways corresponding to the intensional variants, the arithmetical hypostases). Even events seen in dreams get some notion of existence, for example. That's nice. I even have problems with statements like batman doesn't exist. Really? I will send you a video! Doesn't he, in some sense? Certainly, in many sense. He has real cousins, like jetman: http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=BEv=x2sT9KoII_M A batman with a french accent! Coincidence? Europa is full of thinks. Dracula has also
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On 9/18/2013 10:24 AM, John Clark wrote: Should other theories (quantum loop gravity) which potentially offer more scope for falsifiability receive a greater proportion of the available resources. So far quantum loop gravity is no better at making testable predictions than string theory is. Actually I think LQG predicts that there should be some dispersion for very energetic photons. A prediction that seems to have be falsified by the simultaneous arrival of different energy gamma rays from very distant supernova. The result indicates spacetime is smooth down to 0.002 of the Planck length. http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.5191v2 Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How PIP solves the hard problem of consciousness
On Wednesday, September 18, 2013 8:26:35 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 17 Sep 2013, at 19:17, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Tuesday, September 17, 2013 12:40:27 PM UTC-4, freqflyer07281972 wrote: Thanks Craig, you've articulated quite well a number of difficulties in approaching the hard problem, IMHO. I was reading this article in the SEP and thought of your approach: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nishida-kitaro/ Thanks, cool Look especially under his glossing of the idea of 'pure experience.' It reminds me of your MR/PIP and seems quite congenial to it. Whaddaya think? Yes, I agree his 'pure experience' matches my 'sense' in a lot of the important ways. I use the opposite assumption about it being 'MU' or 'nothing'. It is tempting to conceive of the limitation of our local experience and propose 'nothing' beyond it, but I think that it works much better when we invert it and suppose that beyond local experience is 'everythingness' and 'eternity'. I particularly recognize Pure experience launches the dynamic process of reality that differentiates into subjective and objective phenomena on their way to a higher unity, and the recapture of our unitary foundation is what Nishida means by the Good. This is the same as my model, although I would say that the differentiation first diverges from pure experience to subjective qualia, where objective qualia emerge from the public intersubjectivity (quanta). His concept of higher unity is Good while mine would see good as only a particular measure of subjective 'likeness' and the actual higher unity I see as Significance...the reconciliation of diffracted sense as it is separated from the entropy of scaled distance and time. Thanks, Craig On Monday, September 16, 2013 1:35:27 PM UTC-4, Craig Weinberg wrote: The Hard Problem of consciousness asks why there is a gap between our explanation of matter, or biology, or neurology, and our experience in the first place. What is it there which even suggests to us that there should be a gap, and why should there be a such thing as experience to stand apart from the functions of that which we can explain. *Materialism only miniaturizes the gap* and relies on a machina ex deus (intentionally reversed deus ex machina) of ‘complexity’ to save the day. An interesting question would be, why does dualism seem to be easier to overlook when we are imagining the body of a neuron, or a collection of molecules? I submit that it is because miniaturization and complexity challenge the limitations of our cognitive ability, we find it easy to conflate that sort of quantitative incomprehensibility with the other incomprehensibility being considered, namely aesthetic* awareness. What consciousness does with phenomena which pertain to a distantly scaled perceptual frame is to under-signify it. It becomes less important, less real, less worthy of attention. *Idealism only fictionalizes the gap*. I argue that idealism makes more sense on its face than materialism for addressing the Hard Problem, since material would have no plausible excuse for becoming aware or being entitled to access an unacknowledged a priori possibility of awareness. Idealism however, fails at commanding the respect of a sophisticated perspective since it relies on naive denial of objectivity. Why so many molecules? Why so many terrible and tragic experiences? Why so much enduring of suffering and injustice? The thought of an afterlife is too seductive of a way to wish this all away. The concept of maya, that the world is a veil of illusion is too facile to satisfy our scientific curiosity. *Dualism multiplies the gap*. Acknowledging the gap is a good first step, but without a bridge, the gap is diagonalized and stuck in infinite regress. In order for experience to connect in some way with physics, some kind of homunculus is invoked, some third force or function interceding on behalf of the two incommensurable substances. The third force requires a fourth and fifth force on either side, and so forth, as in a Zeno paradox. Each homunculus has its own Explanatory Gap. *Dual Aspect Monism retreats from the gap*. The concept of material and experience being two aspects of a continuous whole is the best one so far – getting very close. The only problem is that it does not explain what this monism is, or where the aspects come from. It rightfully honors the importance of opposites and duality, but it does not question what they actually are. Laws? Information? *Panpsychism toys with the gap*.Depending on what kind of panpsychism is employed, it can miniaturize, multiply, or retreat from the gap. At least it is committing to closing the gap in a way which does not take human exceptionalism for granted, but it still does not attempt to integrate qualia itself with quanta in a detailed way. Tononi’s IIT might be an
Re: Unexpected Hanging
On Wednesday, September 18, 2013 9:14:21 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 17 Sep 2013, at 19:46, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Tuesday, September 17, 2013 6:07:23 AM UTC-4, telmo_menezes wrote: On Mon, Sep 16, 2013 at 7:47 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.com wrote: On Saturday, September 14, 2013 5:53:01 AM UTC-4, telmo_menezes wrote: On Fri, Sep 13, 2013 at 12:06 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.com wrote: On Friday, September 13, 2013 5:31:40 AM UTC-4, telmo_menezes wrote: On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 5:47 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.com wrote: Which reasoning is clearly false? Here's what I'm thinking: 1) The conclusion I won't be surprised to be hanged Friday if I am not hanged by Thursday creates another proposition to be surprised about. By leaving the condition of 'surprise' open ended, it could include being surprised that the judge lied, or any number of other soft contingencies that could render an 'unexpected' outcome. Ok but that's not the setup. The judge did not lie and there are no soft contingencies. The surprise is purely from not having been sure the day of the execution was the one when somebody knocked at the door at noon. Even if you allow for some soft contingencies, I believe the paradox still holds. I don't understand why it's a paradox and not just contradiction. If I say 'you're going to die this week and it's going to be a surprise when', that is already a contradiction. Ok, after a good amount of thought, I have come to agree with this. The judge lied. You convinced me! :) Ah cool! Thanks for posting the problem also, it helped me resurrect some lost mathematical-logical ability. (with due credit to Alberto and Brent, who also helped convince me). A more honest statement would be you're going to die this week and it will probably be a surprise when, or, you'll probably die this week and it will be a surprise if you do. My thought process involves reducing the thing to a game. There are 5 turns in the game, and the attacker has to choose one of those turns to press a button. The defender also has a button, and its goal is to predict the action of the attacker. If both press the button. the defender wins. If only the attacker pressers the button, the attacker wins. Otherwise the game continues. The system is automated so that the attacker button is automatically pressed. Now the attacker (judge) is making the claim that he can always win this game. He cannot, there is no conceivable algorithm that guarantees this. Playing multiple instances of the game, I would guess the optimal strategy for the attacker is to chose a random turn, including the last. This will offer 20% of the games to the defender, but there's nothing better one can do. I read your post and now I think I understand you positions better. Nice. I am not convinced, but I will grant you that they are not easily attackable. On the other hand, this could be because they are equivalent to Carl Sagan's invisible dragon in the garage or, as Popper would put it, unfalsifiable. Do you care about falsifiability? Falsifiability is nice - especially in public-facing physics, but since falsification itself is a sensory experience, we should not insist on the same kind of falsifiability for private physics that we have in public physics. Alright. Personal or 1p experiences are probably outside the realm of phenomena that can be investigated under Popperian science. I think this is something that many of us can agree with, independently of accepting/rejecting comp, for example. I think this is also what characterises hard-core positivists: they either find 1p reality irrelevant or even reject its existence. Which makes sense, since from that kind of fundamentalist 3p perspective, we can only take consciousness for granted. From there, we can either admit or deny that we are taking it for granted, and if we admit it, then we would want to minimize the significance of that. If so, can you conceive of some experiment to test what you're proposing? There may not be a test, so much as accumulating a body of understanding by correlating uses of information and qualities of sensation. It's more at the hypothesis stage than the testing stage. The symbol grounding problem haunted me before I had a name for it. It's a very intuitive problem indeed. I tend to believe that the answer will actually look something like an Escher painting. Assuming that neuroscience is enough, one can imagine the coevolution of neural firing patterns with environmental conditions. This can lead to neural firing patterns that correlate with higher
