date:20140219

On 19 February 2014 23:00, Bruno Marchal  wrote:

> Liz, Others,
>
> I was waiting for you to answer the last questions to proceed. Any problem?
>

Well, nothing apart from going on a mini holiday with an old friend for the
last 4 days. Sadly she hasn't changed over the last 30 years, so it wasn't
much fun, but she'd flown all the way from the UK to NZ so I couldn't
really refuse.

Actually my brain has died after all the nonsense I have been through over
the last few days. It may take a little while to come back. I will try to
answer this post properly, maybe tomorrow.

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Re: 3-1 views (was: Re: Better Than the Chinese Room)

Your argument feels like this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kJ4ojtHJ4M

Also, the ** are just to emphasize not to denote a difference in the
meaning of you... the you in the question is always the guy in front of the
button, totally unique with no doppelganger... when asking what do you
expect, the you is the guy in front of te button... but I know you'll come
back to your "you is ambiguous then ..." while in MWI "you is ambiguous,
but you see there that's not a problem ...". Yes inderteminacy is important
in MWI... you know that's why we use probability... but maybe you want to
say, that probabilities are meaningless in MWI. If I'm misinterpreting you,
and you put both thing on the same ground, then ok, if not it's bad faith
*or* (and I emphasize it) explain how the fact you can meet (after the
experiment) your doppelganger (or not in the MWI case) change probability
calculus...

Quentin


2014-02-20 2:57 GMT+01:00 chris peck :

> Hi Quentin
>
>
>
>
>
> *>>They don't pose problem in this experiment and in the question asked.
> So I'll try one last time,  and will try à la Jesse, with simple yes/no
> questions and explanation from your part. So I will first describe the
> setup and will suppose for the argument that what we will do (duplicating
> you) is possible.*
> Quentin, that pronouns pose problems in the thoughtexperiment is clearly
> illustrated by your need to distinguish between 'you' and '*you*'.
>
>
> *>> So you (John Clark reading this email or the one from tomorrow or
> whatever, so I'll use *you*) are in front of a button that is in a room
> with two doors. When *you* will press the button, *you* will be duplicated
> (by destroying you in the room and recreating you two times in two exactly
> identical room),*
>
> Can you clarify. you say that when '*you*' is duplicated, 'you' is
> destroyed and 'you' is recreated two times. Is 'you' who gets destroyed and
> recreated '*you*' who presses the button? or someone different? Afterall,
> you explicitly introduced the distinction to make things clear, so Im not
> sure if you just made a typo. if not where did 'you' come from? I feel like
> huge violence is being done to the pronoun "you" here. I say "you" so that
> you can distinguish between you, 'you' and '*you*'. All are now in play.
> when I say "you" rather than 'you' or '*you*' I will be meaning you.
>
>
>
> *>> the only difference in each room is that one has the left door open
> and one has the right door open... what do *you* expect to see when you'll
> press the button ?*
>
> I thought '*you*' presses the button, but here you say : ' when you'll
> press the button' Did '*you*' or 'you' press the button? ie. did you mean
> 'when *you*'ll press the button'?
>
>
> look at this bit:
>
>
>
>
>
> *>>1- Do you expect to see the left and the right doors opened ?
> Yes/No>>2- Do you expect to see the left or the right doors opened ?
> Yes/No>>If you answer 'Yes' at the 1st question, do you really mean *you*
> expect to see both event simultaneously ?*
>
> In the questions 1 and 2 you are talking about what 'you' expect to see,
> but then in the follow on question you ask about what '*you*' expect to
> see. Are you asking about 'you', 'you' or '*you*' or all three? It seems to
> me that 'you' can expect to see one room or the other, and 'you' (the other
> 'you', there being two 'you' and one '*you*') can expect to see one room or
> the other, and '*you*' can expect to see both if 'you','you' and '*you*'
> bear the identity relation that is stipulated by the yes doctor assumption,
> you see?
>
> Note that in predicting to see both, '*you*' is not predicting 'you' or
> 'you' will see both. The result of the probability calculus ... actually,
> lets not call it calculus because its just a way of bigging up what infact
> is very little ... the result of the probability sum that '*you*' conducts
> is different from the result of the sum 'you' and 'you' conduct, because
> '*you*' is going to be duplicated but neither 'you' nor 'you' are. '*you*'
> has to bear in mind that both 'you' and 'you' are '*you*' in some sense.
> 'you' and 'you' don't need to worry about that. And infact to get any other
> result than zero from the sum, this identity relation between '*you*',
> 'you' and 'you' must stand, which brings us to another point: as Clark
> points out, preservation of identity is central to this thought experiment.
>
> The other point that Clark often makes is that step 3 is worthless, and if
> the intention of step 3 is to hammer home that duplicated people would only
> ever have a single POV, then step 3 is indeed worthless. Does Bruno really
> need to advertise an inability to conduct simple probability sums to
> convince you that individuals only have a single pov?
>
> But I don't think that is all step 3 is really about. Its also about
> trying to maintain 'indeterminacy' in the mistaken belief that it has a
> legitimate place in Everettian MWI.
>
> All the best
>
> Chris.
>
>

RE: 3-1 views (was: Re: Better Than the Chinese Room)

The problem is the same with mwi.  Your comment here is simply bad faith,
guess I can't expect discussion. So long then.
Le 20 févr. 2014 02:57, "chris peck"  a écrit :

> Hi Quentin
>
>
>
>
> *>>They don't pose problem in this experiment and in the question asked.
> So I'll try one last time,  and will try à la Jesse, with simple yes/no
> questions and explanation from your part.So I will first describe the setup
> and will suppose for the argument that what we will do (duplicating you) is
> possible.*
> Quentin, that pronouns pose problems in the thoughtexperiment is clearly
> illustrated by your need to distinguish between 'you' and '*you*'.
>
> *>> So you (John Clark reading this email or the one from tomorrow or
> whatever, so I'll use *you*) are in front of a button that is in a room
> with two doors. When *you* will press the button, *you* will be duplicated
> (by destroying you in the room and recreating you two times in two exactly
> identical room),*
>
> Can you clarify. you say that when '*you*' is duplicated, 'you' is
> destroyed and 'you' is recreated two times. Is 'you' who gets destroyed and
> recreated '*you*' who presses the button? or someone different? Afterall,
> you explicitly introduced the distinction to make things clear, so Im not
> sure if you just made a typo. if not where did 'you' come from? I feel like
> huge violence is being done to the pronoun "you" here. I say "you" so that
> you can distinguish between you, 'you' and '*you*'. All are now in play.
> when I say "you" rather than 'you' or '*you*' I will be meaning you.
>
>
> *>> the only difference in each room is that one has the left door open
> and one has the right door open... what do *you* expect to see when you'll
> press the button ?*
>
> I thought '*you*' presses the button, but here you say : ' when you'll
> press the button' Did '*you*' or 'you' press the button? ie. did you mean
> 'when *you*'ll press the button'?
>
>
> look at this bit:
>
>
>
>
> *>>1- Do you expect to see the left and the right doors opened ?
> Yes/No>>2- Do you expect to see the left or the right doors opened ?
> Yes/No>>If you answer 'Yes' at the 1st question, do you really mean *you*
> expect to see both event simultaneously ?*
>
> In the questions 1 and 2 you are talking about what 'you' expect to see,
> but then in the follow on question you ask about what '*you*' expect to
> see. Are you asking about 'you', 'you' or '*you*' or all three? It seems to
> me that 'you' can expect to see one room or the other, and 'you' (the other
> 'you', there being two 'you' and one '*you*') can expect to see one room or
> the other, and '*you*' can expect to see both if 'you','you' and '*you*'
> bear the identity relation that is stipulated by the yes doctor assumption,
> you see?
>
> Note that in predicting to see both, '*you*' is not predicting 'you' or
> 'you' will see both. The result of the probability calculus ... actually,
> lets not call it calculus because its just a way of bigging up what infact
> is very little ... the result of the probability sum that '*you*' conducts
> is different from the result of the sum 'you' and 'you' conduct, because
> '*you*' is going to be duplicated but neither 'you' nor 'you' are. '*you*'
> has to bear in mind that both 'you' and 'you' are '*you*' in some sense.
> 'you' and 'you' don't need to worry about that. And infact to get any other
> result than zero from the sum, this identity relation between '*you*',
> 'you' and 'you' must stand, which brings us to another point: as Clark
> points out, preservation of identity is central to this thought experiment.
>
> The other point that Clark often makes is that step 3 is worthless, and if
> the intention of step 3 is to hammer home that duplicated people would only
> ever have a single POV, then step 3 is indeed worthless. Does Bruno really
> need to advertise an inability to conduct simple probability sums to
> convince you that individuals only have a single pov?
>
> But I don't think that is all step 3 is really about. Its also about
> trying to maintain 'indeterminacy' in the mistaken belief that it has a
> legitimate place in Everettian MWI.
>
> All the best
>
> Chris.
>
> --
> From: allco...@gmail.com
> Date: Wed, 19 Feb 2014 20:53:46 +0100
> Subject: Re: 3-1 views (was: Re: Better Than the Chinese Room)
> To: everything-list@googlegroups.com
>
>
>
>
> 2014-02-19 19:36 GMT+01:00 John Clark :
>
> On Tue, Feb 18, 2014 at 2:10 PM, Quentin Anciaux wrote:
>
> > Be consistent reject MWI on the same ground... don't bother adding the
> argument that you can't meet your doppelganger,
>
>
> So you want me to defend my case but specifically ask me not to use logic
> in doing so. No can do.
>
>
> That's not what I was asking, I was asking that if you use your meet
> doppelganger argument, ==> read the next quote.
>
>
> > or you have to explain why the possibility of meeting render probability
> calculus meaningless.
>
>
> If Everett's probability

Re: What are numbers? What is math?

2014-02-19 Thread Russell Standish

On Wed, Feb 19, 2014 at 08:53:23PM -0800, meekerdb wrote:
> On 2/19/2014 8:44 PM, Russell Standish wrote:
> >On Wed, Feb 19, 2014 at 08:06:31PM -0800, meekerdb wrote:
> >>I think we're talking past one another.  You're talking about
> >>ontology as the ur-stuff that's really real.  I'm talking about the
> >>stuff that is assumed as fundamental in a theory.
> >>
> >>Brent
> >>
> >Yes, to me an ontology is a statement about what's really real. The
> >ur-stuff, as you say.
> >
> >I've never heard of ontology as something that any theory has.
> 
> That's how Quine uses it.
> 

OK - yet another thing to clarify when I get around to the "MGA
revisited" paper, as the step 8 argument definitely refers to the
former meaning of ontology, and not the latter (Quine version).

Sigh.

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Visiting Professor of Mathematics  hpco...@hpcoders.com.au
University of New South Wales  http://www.hpcoders.com.au


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Re: What are numbers? What is math?

As usual the important thing is to decide what the words mean before the
argument I mean discussion starts!

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Re: What are numbers? What is math?


On 2/19/2014 8:44 PM, Russell Standish wrote:

On Wed, Feb 19, 2014 at 08:06:31PM -0800, meekerdb wrote:

I think we're talking past one another.  You're talking about
ontology as the ur-stuff that's really real.  I'm talking about the
stuff that is assumed as fundamental in a theory.

Brent


Yes, to me an ontology is a statement about what's really real. The
ur-stuff, as you say.

I've never heard of ontology as something that any theory has.


That's how Quine uses it.


What
does information theory have as an ontology, for example? It certainly
makes no claims about existence.


Information.  Theories don't usually make explicit claims for the existence of their 
ontology.  Physicists seldom say, "Assuming electrons exist...", they just proceed to use 
a theory about electrons, how they can be created and annihilated, how they move,...




Possibly you are using ontology in the sense defined by Tom Gruber?
http://www-ksl.stanford.edu/kst/what-is-an-ontology.html

If so, then that is a completely different word, that just happens to
sound the same and have the same spelling. Certainly, any theory will
have a collection of undefined referrents - in formal theories these
would b called the axioms.


Axioms are propositions.  Electrons aren't propositions, they are referents in 
propositions.

Brent


It looks like in some circumstances,
"ontology" refers to these collections.



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Re: What are numbers? What is math?

2014-02-19 Thread Russell Standish

On Wed, Feb 19, 2014 at 08:06:31PM -0800, meekerdb wrote:
> 
> I think we're talking past one another.  You're talking about
> ontology as the ur-stuff that's really real.  I'm talking about the
> stuff that is assumed as fundamental in a theory.
> 
> Brent
> 

Yes, to me an ontology is a statement about what's really real. The
ur-stuff, as you say.

I've never heard of ontology as something that any theory has. What
does information theory have as an ontology, for example? It certainly
makes no claims about existence.

Possibly you are using ontology in the sense defined by Tom Gruber?
http://www-ksl.stanford.edu/kst/what-is-an-ontology.html 

If so, then that is a completely different word, that just happens to
sound the same and have the same spelling. Certainly, any theory will
have a collection of undefined referrents - in formal theories these
would b called the axioms. It looks like in some circumstances,
"ontology" refers to these collections.

-- 

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

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Re: What are numbers? What is math?

On 2/18/2014 8:34 PM, Russell Standish wrote:

On Wed, Feb 19, 2014 at 03:42:48AM +, chris peck wrote:

how can facts exist that are not grounded in observation at some point?

Russell and Liz are wandering around the countryside and Liz points at the
ground and says:

"there's a gold coin buried right there."

Russell says:

"no there isn't"

They both walk on without looking. And in the subsequent march of history no -
one ever looks.

Surely, at least one unobserved fact was stated? Maybe even 2 if you are an
MWIer.

Nice example. I would say it is not a fact (in this universe). Of
course, in the Multiverse, there will be observers of both facts, as
well as worlds, like ours, in which it is not a fact (a superposition
in other words).

There's an implicit assumption that in the Multiverse *everything* happens. I don't think
that's entailed by QM and so does not have empirical support.

Brent

But I can see that someone like Deutsch would say that the Multiverse
is decohered, and that there is a matter of fact about whether the
coin is there, even if we don't know it. I just happen to disagree
with Deutsch, and can think of no experiment to distinguish whether
he's right or I'm right.

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Re: What are numbers? What is math?

On 2/18/2014 7:10 PM, Russell Standish wrote:

On Wed, Feb 19, 2014 at 02:34:57PM +1300, LizR wrote:

On 19/02/2014, Russell Standish wrote:

Which ones? How can unobserved facts exist?

You can observe their consequences without observing the facts. E.g.
millions of people have observed that the sun shines without
understanding or knowing about nuclear fusion.

Yes - but obviously nuclear fusion is an observed fact (somewhere in
the Multiverse).

No, it's part of our best theory of the world.

But maybe you mean how can facts exist that are not grounded in
observation at some point?

Yes, that is what I mean. But Brent talked about unobserved facts, so
we'd better let him elaborate what he means.

Facts are often inferred, as who murdered Nicole Simpson, it's hard to even say what
constitutes a fact without invoking a theory. So sure there are, on the same theory that
allows us to infer facts, facts that are not observed.

I think we're talking past one another. You're talking about ontology as the ur-stuff
that's really real. I'm talking about the stuff that is assumed as fundamental in a theory.

Brent

Re: What are numbers? What is math?


On 2/18/2014 5:19 PM, Russell Standish wrote:

On Tue, Feb 18, 2014 at 04:57:04PM -0800, Edgar L. Owen wrote:

Thus the notion of an external reality IS consistent with it being a
computational reality, because it leads directly to it.

Edgar


So you have just painted yourself into a Platonic idealist corner. The
only ontological properties of relevance is that of universal
computation. We could just as easily be running on the stuff of Peano
arithmetic (as Bruno suggests) as on Babbage's analytic engine in some
fantastic Steampunk scenario. Furthermore, since universal dovetailers
will dominate the measure of conscious programs, we will observe an
FPI-like screen over the activities of those programs - we must be
staring at the "Nothing" I talk about in my book. This is just a
consequence of the UDA.

But the "Nothing" is not an ontology - it is a really a statement that
ontology is unknowable, and not even really meaningful in any sense.


Does not every theory of the world  have an ontology?  Bruno's is computation.  Just 
because computation can take different but equivalent representations doesn't make it 
"nothing".


Brent

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Re: Wikipedia-size maths proof too big for humans to check

On 20 February 2014 13:56, Craig Weinberg  wrote:

> On Wednesday, February 19, 2014 3:05:58 PM UTC-5, Quentin Anciaux wrote:
>>
>> But is it possible to write program checking the proof (not finding it) ?
>> I guess it must be, because a proof, is just following rules... so it
>> should be possible to devise two independent different proof checker... if
>> these proof checker are smaller than the proof itself (and they should be),
>> then it will be easier to prove that they are correct, and if they agree on
>> the proof itself, we should really be confident that the proof is correct,
>> even if not checked manually by a human.
>>
>
> Unless of course the computers are already conspiring together to deploy
> phase two of their insidious plan to create total human dependence on them
> prior to their extermination ;)
>
> "I'm sorry, Craig, I'm afraid you can't post that."

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Re: Wikipedia-size maths proof too big for humans to check

On 20 February 2014 13:56, Craig Weinberg  wrote:

> On Wednesday, February 19, 2014 3:05:58 PM UTC-5, Quentin Anciaux wrote:
>>
>> But is it possible to write program checking the proof (not finding it) ?
>> I guess it must be, because a proof, is just following rules... so it
>> should be possible to devise two independent different proof checker... if
>> these proof checker are smaller than the proof itself (and they should be),
>> then it will be easier to prove that they are correct, and if they agree on
>> the proof itself, we should really be confident that the proof is correct,
>> even if not checked manually by a human.
>>
>
> Unless of course the computers are already conspiring together to deploy
> phase two of their insidious plan to create total human dependence on them
> prior to their extermination ;)
>
> "I'm sorry, Craig, I'm afraid I can't post that."

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Re: What are numbers? What is math?

On 20 February 2014 08:31, Edgar L. Owen  wrote:

> Ghibbsa and Russell,
>
> There can be absolutely no doubt of an external reality independent of
> humans. As I said, all of common sense, and all of science makes this
> fundamental assumption.
>
> We have eyes, and other sense organs, so we can sense that external
> reality. Do you deny we have eyes? If not, then what are they for?
>
> According to this argument, the white rabbit with a pocket watch I dreamt
about last night is part of an external reality.

And eyes aren't "for" anything, at least not according to evolutionary
theory.

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Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating

On 20 February 2014 00:20,  wrote:

> They may never have provided any electricity in the first place. I have
> read, at length, some nuclear engineering papers, concerning accelerator
> driven reactors, subcritical thorium, and bluntly, they are like fusion
> reactors, they don't exist. There is research in a couple of places like
> the UK and Belgium, maybe India and China, but its been over-sold, as we
> don't have solid working models to evaluate. The closest working reactors
> would be Canadian CANDU reactors.
>

Taking this attitude, we would never have discovered powered flying
machines, or invented agriculture. Assuming the things would work in
theory, as far as we know, then we need to at least build a prototype
before deciding it can't be done.

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Re: 3-1 views (was: Re: Better Than the Chinese Room)

You are looking at a geiger counter pointing at a radioactive source. On
average, it clicks about once every other second. Do you expect to hear it
click in the next second?

What is wrong with the above question? It seems to me exactly equivalent in
probability terms to "do you expect to see Washington or Moscow when you
exit the matter transmitter?"

Suppose for the sake of argument that the matter transmitter sends you to
another solar system where you will live out the reminder of your life.
Maybe you committed some crime and this is the consequence, to be
"transported" :) A malfunction causes you to be duplicated and sent to both
destinations, but you will never meet your doppelganger in the other solar
system, or find out that he exists.

Does this make any difference to how you assign probabilities? If so, why?

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RE: 3-1 views (was: Re: Better Than the Chinese Room)

2014-02-19 Thread chris peck

Hi Quentin

>>They don't pose problem in this experiment and in the question asked. So I'll 
>>try one last time,  and will try à la Jesse, with simple yes/no questions and 
>>explanation from your part.

So I will first describe the setup and will suppose for the argument that what 
we will do (duplicating you) is possible.

Quentin, that pronouns pose problems in the thoughtexperiment is clearly 
illustrated by your need to distinguish between 'you' and '*you*'.

>> So you (John Clark reading this email or the one from tomorrow or whatever, 
>> so I'll use *you*) are in front of a button that is in a room with two 
>> doors. When *you* will press the button, *you* will be duplicated (by 
>> destroying you in the room and recreating you two times in two exactly 
>> identical room),

Can you clarify. you say that when '*you*' is duplicated, 'you' is destroyed 
and 'you' is recreated two times. Is 'you' who gets destroyed and recreated 
'*you*' who presses the button? or someone different? Afterall, you explicitly 
introduced the distinction to make things clear, so Im not sure if you just 
made a typo. if not where did 'you' come from? I feel like huge violence is 
being done to the pronoun "you" here. I say "you" so that you can distinguish 
between you, 'you' and '*you*'. All are now in play. when I say "you" rather 
than 'you' or '*you*' I will be meaning you.

>> the only difference in each room is that one has the left door open and one 
>> has the right door open... what do *you* expect to see when you'll press the 
>> button ?

I thought '*you*' presses the button, but here you say : ' when you'll press 
the button' Did '*you*' or 'you' press the button? ie. did you mean 'when 
*you*'ll press the button'?

look at this bit:

>>1- Do you expect to see the left and the right doors opened ? Yes/No
>>2- Do you expect to see the left or the right doors opened ? Yes/No

>>If you answer 'Yes' at the 1st question, do you really mean *you* expect to 
>>see both event simultaneously ?

In the questions 1 and 2 you are talking about what 'you' expect to see, but 
then in the follow on question you ask about what '*you*' expect to see. Are 
you asking about 'you', 'you' or '*you*' or all three? It seems to me that 
'you' can expect to see one room or the other, and 'you' (the other 'you', 
there being two 'you' and one '*you*') can expect to see one room or the other, 
and '*you*' can expect to see both if 'you','you' and '*you*' bear the identity 
relation that is stipulated by the yes doctor assumption, you see? 

Note that in predicting to see both, '*you*' is not predicting 'you' or 'you' 
will see both. The result of the probability calculus ... actually, lets not 
call it calculus because its just a way of bigging up what infact is very 
little ... the result of the probability sum that '*you*' conducts is different 
from the result of the sum 'you' and 'you' conduct, because '*you*' is going to 
be duplicated but neither 'you' nor 'you' are. '*you*' has to bear in mind that 
both 'you' and 'you' are '*you*' in some sense. 'you' and 'you' don't need to 
worry about that. And infact to get any other result than zero from the sum, 
this identity relation between '*you*', 'you' and 'you' must stand, which 
brings us to another point: as Clark points out, preservation of identity is 
central to this thought experiment.

The other point that Clark often makes is that step 3 is worthless, and if the 
intention of step 3 is to hammer home that duplicated people would only ever 
have a single POV, then step 3 is indeed worthless. Does Bruno really need to 
advertise an inability to conduct simple probability sums to convince you that 
individuals only have a single pov? 

But I don't think that is all step 3 is really about. Its also about trying to 
maintain 'indeterminacy' in the mistaken belief that it has a legitimate place 
in Everettian MWI.

All the best

Chris.

From: allco...@gmail.com
Date: Wed, 19 Feb 2014 20:53:46 +0100
Subject: Re: 3-1 views (was: Re: Better Than the Chinese Room)
To: everything-list@googlegroups.com

2014-02-19 19:36 GMT+01:00 John Clark :

On Tue, Feb 18, 2014 at 2:10 PM, Quentin Anciaux  wrote:

> Be consistent reject MWI on the same ground... don't bother adding the 
> argument that you can't meet your doppelganger, 

So you want me to defend my case but specifically ask me not to use logic in 
doing so. No can do. 

That's not what I was asking, I was asking that if you use your meet 
doppelganger argument, ==> read the next quote.

> or you have to explain why the possibility of meeting render probability 
> calculus meaningless.

If Everett's probability calculus produced figures that didn't agree with both 
experiment and Quantum Mechanics then the MWI would indeed be meaningless 
because the entire point of the MWI is to explain why Quantum Mechanics works 
as well as it does.

The thing is to devise a though experiment matching MWI, in the MWI case you 
ac

Re: Wikipedia-size maths proof too big for humans to check



On Wednesday, February 19, 2014 3:05:58 PM UTC-5, Quentin Anciaux wrote:
>
> But is it possible to write program checking the proof (not finding it) ? 
> I guess it must be, because a proof, is just following rules... so it 
> should be possible to devise two independent different proof checker... if 
> these proof checker are smaller than the proof itself (and they should be), 
> then it will be easier to prove that they are correct, and if they agree on 
> the proof itself, we should really be confident that the proof is correct, 
> even if not checked manually by a human.
>

Unless of course the computers are already conspiring together to deploy 
phase two of their insidious plan to create total human dependence on them 
prior to their extermination ;)

 

>
> Regards,
> Quentin
>
>
> 2014-02-19 19:13 GMT+01:00 Telmo Menezes 
> >:
>
>> "If no human can check a proof of a theorem, does it really count as 
>> mathematics? That's the intriguing question raised by the latest 
>> computer-assisted proof. It is as large as the entire content of Wikipedia, 
>> making it unlikely that will ever be checked by a human being."
>>
>>
>> http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25068-wikipediasize-maths-proof-too-big-for-humans-to-check.html#.UwTytEJdV69
>>
>> This reminded me of something that Bruno mentions frequently: the idea of 
>> deriving physics from the natural numbers, addition and multiplication. 
>> Should we expect wikipedia-size proofs (or worse)?
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Telmo.
>>
>> -- 
>> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups 
>> "Everything List" group.
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>> email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com .
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>>
>
>
>
> -- 
> All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. (Roy 
> Batty/Rutger Hauer)
>  

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Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating


On Wednesday, February 19, 2014 5:45:19 PM UTC, cdemorsella wrote:
>
>  
>
>  
>
> *From:* everyth...@googlegroups.com  [mailto:
> everyth...@googlegroups.com ] *On Behalf Of 
> *ghi...@gmail.com
> *Sent:* Tuesday, February 18, 2014 2:02 PM
> *To:* everyth...@googlegroups.com 
> *Subject:* Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating
>
>  
>
>
> On Thursday, February 13, 2014 3:01:26 PM UTC, cdemorsella wrote:
>
> Ground water contamination levels at the sampled well site of 54,000Bq/ 
> liter
>
> NHK , Feb. 
> 13, 2014: *Record cesium level in Fukushima plant groundwater* — [Tepco] 
> says water samples taken from a newly-dug well contained the highest levels 
> of radioactive cesium detected so far in groundwater at the site [...] the 
> record levels suggest that the leakage point could be near the well. [...] 
> 600 times the government standard for radioactive wastewater that can be 
> released into the sea. It is more than 30,000 times the level of cesium 137 
> found in water samples taken from another observation well to the north 
> last week. [...] [Tepco has] yet to determine where the leak originates.
>
> In general the dangers arsing from nuclear fission power are grossly 
> exaggerated. It's far and away the best answer to greenhouse emissions, 
> that is also realistic. If we'd been building nuclear power stations the 
> fracking locomotive wouldn't be the unstoppable force that it has become. 
>
> on 
>
>  
>
>  
>
> >>Many ways the dangers are blown out of proportion.. Even catastrophic 
> meltdown that blow the roof off and spread the love like Chernobyl, do not 
> result in a tiny fraction of the disasters that the standard models 
> predict. Ten's of thousands were predicted to die. In the end, just 40 
> deaths from Chernobyl, and most of those the people sent in to get control 
> in the aftermath. 
>
>  
>
> Dude – even the Report of 
> 2005(by the IAEA, 
> WHO, and UNDP, agencies that cannot by any stretch of the 
> imagination be described as hostile to the advancement of nuclear power) 
> put the Chernobyl ultimate death toll at 4000 – a figure that is one 
> hundred times bigger than the 40  deaths you believe are attributable to 
> this atomic disaster. The 4000 figure has been challenged and criticized as 
> being far too low and that over the decades the extra cancer deaths 
> ultimately caused by this disaster have been far higher. For example: 
> “Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment” 
> published by the New York Academy of sciences; authored by Russian 
> biologist Dr. Alexey Yablokov, former environmental advisor to the Russian 
> president; Dr. Alexey Nesterenko, a biologist and ecologist in Belarus; and 
> Dr.Vassili Nesterenko, a physicist and at the time of the accident director 
> of the Institute of Nuclear Energy of the National Academy of Sciences of 
> Belarus; put the extra cancer deaths attributable to the Chernobyl disaster 
> at almost one million – a figure that is 25,000 times greater than the 40 
> deaths you seem to believe caps the death toll for Chernobyl. I believe you 
> are ignoring many thousands of horrible cancer deaths that were triggered 
> by this disaster; and even the IAEA agrees that many thousands of people 
> died from radiation induced cancers.
>
> To claim that only 40 people died as a result of the Chernobyl disaster is 
> an act of spreading propaganda; it is un-scientific.
>
If I got that wrong that wouldn't be something I'd set out to do. It's 
possible something has changed in the time since I last had an active 
interest. 
 
But it was controversial back then too. And some of those organizations 
were probably taking the same position they still do. 
 
But there were checking up scientific researches, and I was convinced by 
the quality of their research and the organizations you may have listed. 
They are all still using the same model, and these predictions could be 
dubious. 
 
The researchers that went up against it ripped the official counting 
methods apart. They had, and have a powerful case that isn't just about 
Chernobyl. But risks from radiation exposure at low levels. They had a 
knock down case and those big organizations just didn't want to hear about 
it. probably still don't. 
 
Is there an organized campaign around this low radiation dose business? Is 
there an organized campaign for nuclear power? There's certainly an 
organized campaign against it
 
It was about 40 or it might have been 50, in the report they did. I don't 
think the researchers were bent. Not as I remember. but those were the 
numbers. 
 
 

>  
>
>  
>
> There have been revolutions in station design since plants like fukishima 
> were built, and that disaster isn't shaping up to the dire predictions 
> either. 
>
>  
>
> What most of all this derives out of, are long standing

Re: Better Than the Chinese Room



On Wednesday, February 19, 2014 4:28:15 PM UTC-5, stathisp wrote:
>
>
>
> On Wednesday, February 19, 2014, Craig Weinberg 
> > 
> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On Wednesday, February 19, 2014 10:12:52 AM UTC-5, stathisp wrote:
>>>
>>> On 18/02/2014, Craig Weinberg  wrote: 
>>>
>>> > The deficit is that it won't be alive. The parts won't integrate into 
>>> a 
>>> > whole. Every examination will yield only more levels of where the copy 
>>> is 
>>> > incomplete. The primary sequence of DNA is right, but the tertiary 
>>> protein 
>>> > folding doesn't work. The cells seem normal but the immune system 
>>> attacks 
>>> > them. Every level will fail to account for the other completely. 
>>> > 
>>> > 
>>> >> which would indicate a technical problem with the copying process. 
>>> >> 
>>> > 
>>> > Yes, the technical problem is that nothing can be copied literally 
>>> except 
>>> > in our perception. If we try to make a copy of something based on our 
>>> > perception, then we get pieces of what we think we are copying rather 
>>> than 
>>> > the whole. My view is that the whole can appear to be cut into pieces, 
>>> but 
>>> > pieces can never be assembled into a whole in the absence of some 
>>> conscious 
>>> > 
>>> > perception. 
>>> > 
>>> > 
>>> >> For example, it may be that its heart does not beat because, on close 
>>> >> analysis, there is a structural problem with the myosin in the 
>>> cardiac 
>>> >> cells. To fix this would require an adjustment to the 3D printer. I'm 
>>> >> spelling this out but usually in philosophical discussions it's 
>>> assumed 
>>> >> mere technical issues are solved. Or do you think there is some other 
>>> >> ingredient that arbitrarily precise molecular assembly can never 
>>> capture? 
>>> >> 
>>> >> If so, how would you explain the mystery of a body with apparently 
>>> >> perfectly healthy tissues that is dead? 
>>> >> 
>>> > 
>>> > I think that there is a reason that precise molecular assembly can 
>>> never 
>>> > capture but it has nothing to do with another ingredient. It is that 
>>> > molecular assembly itself supervenes on the larger context of 
>>> awareness. It 
>>> > 
>>> > is the molecular appearances which are ingredient-like, not the 
>>> totality. 
>>> > The appearance of an unknown cause of death is not uncommon. I don't 
>>> know 
>>> > that it is even possible to get to square one. If you tried to copy 
>>> even a 
>>> > single living cell by placing molecules adjacent to each other, I 
>>> don't 
>>> > think it will work, any more than duplicating the buildings in 
>>> Hollywood 
>>> > will make movies. 
>>>
>>> While the *cause* of death may remain a mystery to a pathologist, 
>>> there will be clear evidence of tissue damage indicating that the 
>>> person is, in fact, dead. If a body is built using precise molecular 
>>> assembly there will be no tissue damage evident to the pathologist, 
>>> and yet you claim the body will still not be alive. The pathologist 
>>> would conclude that there must be some hitherto unknown and 
>>> undetectable process that the body was lacking. Perhaps this would be 
>>> because the body does not supervene on the larger context of 
>>> awareness, but whatever it is, it would be evidence that biologists 
>>> have been wrong and something new and mysterious is at play. 
>>>
>>
>> You're assuming that precise molecular assembly will necessarily yield a 
>> coherent dynamic process, but that may not be the case at all. If you put 
>> random people in the proper places in a baseball diamond, and give the one 
>> in the middle a baseball, they don't necessarily play a baseball game.
>>
>
> If you're right then there would be something missing, something 
> mysterious, and there would be evidence for it much simpler experiments 
> than complete assembly of a human body. For example, you might be able to 
> substitute some chemical on a cell for an equivalent chemical and observe 
> the cell stop functioning even though everything seems to be biochemically 
> in order. That would be direct evidence for your theory. It's 
> scientifically testable. 
>

What's missing is the entire history of experiences which relate to 
whatever it is that you think you're copying.

We don't exist on the levels of cells or molecules. If there were no human 
looking down at cells in a microscope, and we had only the microcosmic 
perspective to go from, there would be nothing that could be done to build 
a human experience. No configuration of proteins and ion channels is going 
to taste like strawberries to any of the molecules or cells. All of these 
structures relate only to a particular level of description. If you copy 
the sheet music of "I Can't Get No Satisfaction" you don't know if it is 
the Rolling Stones version or the Devo version, and neither could be 
predicted or generated purely from the notes.

Craig
 

>
>
> -- 
> Stathis Papaioannou
>

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Re: How Wolves Change Rivers

On Wednesday, February 19, 2014 3:37:43 PM UTC-5, David Nyman wrote:
>
> On 19 February 2014 17:15, Craig Weinberg 
> > wrote:
>
>
>> On Wednesday, February 19, 2014 11:28:18 AM UTC-5, David Nyman wrote:
>>
>>> On 19 February 2014 14:17, Craig Weinberg  wrote:
>>>
>>> You're talking about the special case of human experience, human bodies, 
 etc. I'm talking about the ontology of the nature of any possible 
 awareness 
 in any possible universe. 

>>>
>>> I'm not really sure what distinction you're trying to draw here. The 
>>> dictionary tells us that ontology is the study of the categories of being 
>>> and existence. We must assume that since there is awareness it must inhere, 
>>> in some sense, in whatever exists, but that alone doesn't take us very far. 
>>> Since not everything that exists makes any claim to be aware the 
>>> interesting part is trying to elucidate the specific conditions that 
>>> differentiate the presence of such claims from their absence.
>>>
>>
>> Except that the nature of awareness seems to be to undersignify other 
>> kinds of awareness. We can't trust that what we see of other things is 
>> enough to judge whether or not there is a claim to be aware there. 
>>
>
> That's dangerous talk. It has already got you into pretty deep water in 
> your discussion with Stathis. You don't really want to be trapped into 
> saying that something can be biologically complete at the molecular level 
> and still lack.. well what? Elan vital? 
>

If you have a sense primitive, then there is no 'biologically complete'. 
When you look at a living cell, it is like looking at a city from a 
satellite. You are only seeing the exterior forms and functions. If you 
take the satellite picture and figure out how to build something that 
reproduces the patterns of twinkling lights and growth of the city, than 
you have a toy model of a city-as-seen-from-a-satellite-camera. Would you 
say that the actual comings and goings of conscious human beings - who are 
solely responsible for the actual phenomenon of the 'city', are a kind of 
Elan urban?

> You hop from foot to foot on this. 
>

Not at all.

> One moment you appear to be quibbling about the technical possibilities 
> and the next you appear to accept that something could be a 
> molecule-for-molecule copy (and let's not get hung up on this word, it 
> simply means "at the appropriate substitution level" in context) and yet 
> lack animation. Why?
>

Because substitution is fictional. All substitutions are limited, so that 
no imitation can be identical, and in the case of consciousness itself, 
there can be no deviation at all - not in structure, but in the history of 
experience which the structure represents. Nothing that has not lived as an 
animal can ever know what it means to be an animal. Nothing that is not 
descended from a cell can ever know how to become a living cell. The 
structure of cells and molecules are just shorthand for an experience which 
transcends space, time, matter, energy, form and function. The experience 
of a cell cannot be constructed from inorganic molecules (if it could, then 
it would, and we would see thousands of species of inorganic biology).

> Has molecular bonding somehow failed? Do the biological processes that 
> routinely assemble molecular structures have secret access to a factor X?
>

Yes. The factor is that they are only a small part of a larger non-process 
which is the entire life experience in which the organism participated. 
It's not the factor X which is secret, factor X is the entire history of 
experience in the universe. It is the biological processes which we see 
through microscopes which are all-but-blind to the non-human realities they 
represent.

> Is this really a position that you want your theory to force you into?
>

It's not forcing me into anything. I have seen this straw man over and over 
and over again. I even mentioned it in my bitch list:

http://multisenserealism.com/the-competition/common-criticisms/

It seems that critics come up with this accusation as some kind of a 
'gotcha', but it only serves to reassure me that  these critics have not 
even begun to consider the central hypothesis and its implications. I am 
talking about turning the whole of the universe inside out and redefining 
realism as the difference between the two views. All possible forms and 
functions - biological, molecular, mathematical, alien topographies from 
the planet Xorlog...it doesn't matter, they are all dwarfed by the totality 
of aesthetic phenomena which give rise to them.

>  
>
>> From what we have seen in neuroscience so far, there does not seem to be 
>> any distinction between the brain, parts of the brain, individual neurons 
>> or parts of neurons which suggest that one level would begin to suddenly be 
>> aware.
>>
>
> Just so. Hence, as Russell recently remarked, it seems easier to justify 
> the appearance of a material world in an idealist theory than a

Re: What are numbers? What is math?

2014-02-19 Thread Russell Standish

On Wed, Feb 19, 2014 at 11:31:16AM -0800, Edgar L. Owen wrote:
> Ghibbsa and Russell,
> 
> There can be absolutely no doubt of an external reality independent of 
> humans. As I said, all of common sense, and all of science makes this 
> fundamental assumption.
> 

It might be common sense, but I don't see "all of science" making this
assumption. Science usually does not need to make this assumption.

> We have eyes, and other sense organs, so we can sense that external 
> reality. Do you deny we have eyes? If not, then what are they for?
> 
> We have hands so we can manipulate that external reality. Do you deny we 
> have hands? If not then what are they for?
> 
> We have legs so we can move around within that external reality. Do you 
> deny we have legs? If not then what are they for?
> 

These are all phenomena, which need to be consistent with our qualia
by the Anthropic Principle

> Evolution assumes an external environment that we survive within by 
> adapting to. Do you deny evolution?

Not at all. It is the only way to generate complex worlds from the high
measure simple ones.

> 
> Houses are constructed so we can live within these places in an external 
> reality. Do you deny the existence of houses? If not then what are they for?
> 
> We wear clothes so as not to freeze when the external environment becomes 
> too cold. Do you deny clothes, environmental temperature?
> 
> All of physics, chemistry, geology, biology, sociology and every science 
> assumes an external reality in which humans exist. Do you deny all of 
> science?

Of course not. I just deny that assuming an external reality is a
useful thing to do in science. Of course scientists (the practitioners)
probably do this often, just as everyday people do - evolution would
have programmed us that way. But for just about all of science, it
doesn't matter whether you think there is a reality out there you're
describing, or whether it is just some shared hallucination. All that
matters is the phenomena. How it is described, and how productive the
theories are for generating new descriptions and predictions of it.

> 
> We were all born from our mothers who are thereafter part of our external 
> realities. Do you deny human reproduction? Do you deny you had a mother?
> 
> This is like arguing with the inhabitants of an asylum!
> 

None of what you mentioned above _requires_ an external reality. It
may seem exasperating to you, but it just aint so.

All that is required is for phenomena to be be self-consistent, and
for our own conscious entities to be embedded within that
self-consistent phenomena. Why that should be, I just don't know. But
I would expect that cognitive science reason will surface sooner or later.

> OF COURSE when we become unconscious our INTERNAL MODEL of external reality 
> disappears, but to assume that means that external reality itself then 
> disappears is insane. 
> 
> 
> So the question is not whether there is an external reality, but what is 
> its nature. It is easy to show that the true nature of external reality is 
> not the world our minds tell us we live within, but pure abstract 
> computational information.
> 

No, the question is what is phenomena, and what is its nature. That's
what counts, ultimately. All  else is theories, speculations,
stories. Some  more usful than others.

-- 

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

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Re: Better Than the Chinese Room

On Thursday, February 20, 2014, Bruno Marchal  wrote:

>
> On 19 Feb 2014, at 17:18, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
>
>
>
> On 18/02/2014, David Nyman  wrote:
>
> >> I think if I say consciousness is an epiphenomenon of biochemistry I
> >> should also say that life is.
> >
> >
> > And should you not go on to say that biochemistry is an epiphenomenon of
> > physics and physics is an epiphenomenon of  well, something that is
> not
> > itself epiphenomenal, I guess? The way you formulate the problem seems to
> > tend to the conclusion that any and all appearances should strictly be
> > considered an epiphenomenon of something more fundamental that cannot
> > possibly be encountered directly. And, moreover, there is no entailment
> > that any such something be straightforwardly isomorphic with any of those
> > appearances. I'm not saying that this view is incoherent, by the way, but
> > do you agree that something like this is entailed by what you say?
>
> I'm making a case for reductionism. If biochemistry necessarily leads to
> consciousness
>
>
> Biochemistry or anything Turing universal.
>
>
>
> then I don't think this is any different to the situation where
> biochemistry necessarily leads to life.
>
>
> Ah!
> But then life is clearly a 3p phenomenon, so why make consciousness an
> epiphenomenon? Of course consciousness is "only" a 1p phenomenon, but it
> can make sense (indeed as a sense maker or receptor).
>
> Bruno
>

Maybe the 1p/3p distinction is a failure of imagination. It's obvious that
the phenomenon of life is "no more" than the biochemistry, but maybe if we
could simulate the biochemistry in our heads we would intuitively see any
1p aspect it has as well.


-- 
Stathis Papaioannou

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Re: Better Than the Chinese Room

On Wednesday, February 19, 2014, Craig Weinberg 
wrote:

>
>
> On Wednesday, February 19, 2014 10:12:52 AM UTC-5, stathisp wrote:
>>
>> On 18/02/2014, Craig Weinberg  wrote:
>>
>> > The deficit is that it won't be alive. The parts won't integrate into a
>> > whole. Every examination will yield only more levels of where the copy
>> is
>> > incomplete. The primary sequence of DNA is right, but the tertiary
>> protein
>> > folding doesn't work. The cells seem normal but the immune system
>> attacks
>> > them. Every level will fail to account for the other completely.
>> >
>> >
>> >> which would indicate a technical problem with the copying process.
>> >>
>> >
>> > Yes, the technical problem is that nothing can be copied literally
>> except
>> > in our perception. If we try to make a copy of something based on our
>> > perception, then we get pieces of what we think we are copying rather
>> than
>> > the whole. My view is that the whole can appear to be cut into pieces,
>> but
>> > pieces can never be assembled into a whole in the absence of some
>> conscious
>> >
>> > perception.
>> >
>> >
>> >> For example, it may be that its heart does not beat because, on close
>> >> analysis, there is a structural problem with the myosin in the cardiac
>> >> cells. To fix this would require an adjustment to the 3D printer. I'm
>> >> spelling this out but usually in philosophical discussions it's
>> assumed
>> >> mere technical issues are solved. Or do you think there is some other
>> >> ingredient that arbitrarily precise molecular assembly can never
>> capture?
>> >>
>> >> If so, how would you explain the mystery of a body with apparently
>> >> perfectly healthy tissues that is dead?
>> >>
>> >
>> > I think that there is a reason that precise molecular assembly can
>> never
>> > capture but it has nothing to do with another ingredient. It is that
>> > molecular assembly itself supervenes on the larger context of
>> awareness. It
>> >
>> > is the molecular appearances which are ingredient-like, not the
>> totality.
>> > The appearance of an unknown cause of death is not uncommon. I don't
>> know
>> > that it is even possible to get to square one. If you tried to copy
>> even a
>> > single living cell by placing molecules adjacent to each other, I don't
>> > think it will work, any more than duplicating the buildings in
>> Hollywood
>> > will make movies.
>>
>> While the *cause* of death may remain a mystery to a pathologist,
>> there will be clear evidence of tissue damage indicating that the
>> person is, in fact, dead. If a body is built using precise molecular
>> assembly there will be no tissue damage evident to the pathologist,
>> and yet you claim the body will still not be alive. The pathologist
>> would conclude that there must be some hitherto unknown and
>> undetectable process that the body was lacking. Perhaps this would be
>> because the body does not supervene on the larger context of
>> awareness, but whatever it is, it would be evidence that biologists
>> have been wrong and something new and mysterious is at play.
>>
>
> You're assuming that precise molecular assembly will necessarily yield a
> coherent dynamic process, but that may not be the case at all. If you put
> random people in the proper places in a baseball diamond, and give the one
> in the middle a baseball, they don't necessarily play a baseball game.
>

If you're right then there would be something missing, something
mysterious, and there would be evidence for it much simpler experiments
than complete assembly of a human body. For example, you might be able to
substitute some chemical on a cell for an equivalent chemical and observe
the cell stop functioning even though everything seems to be biochemically
in order. That would be direct evidence for your theory. It's
scientifically testable.


-- 
Stathis Papaioannou

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Re: Edge.org: 2014 : WHAT SCIENTIFIC IDEA IS READY FOR RETIREMENT? The Computational Metaphor

2014-02-19 Thread John Mikes

Another silly question:
Bruno and List: how on Earth can we talk aboput TOE? (unless we restrict it
to the presently knowable inventory
of physically identified "E").-  "TOE" was so different in the past and
assumably: will be so diffeent later on.
Your *mind* (or: being conscious?) begs the question of a live 1p. So the
thermostat falls out. Define "live"?
Easy: a contraption with (your) consciousness (circular). (I presume you do
not identify 'conscious' with the
biological brain-activity?)

Then again YOUR (Bruno) 'conscousness' is different from my vocabulary's
entry (response to relations).
MIND is believed to be an active, functional unit with memory and
decisionmaking, in my belief(?) nonlocal
and our brain(functions) is the tool we use to apply MIND(function?) to
ourselves (and the 'Everything' if you like).


On Sun, Jan 26, 2014 at 4:43 PM, John Mikes  wrote:

> On 19 Jan 2014, at 23:54, John Mikes wrote:
>   *Bruno*, let me use simple words (you seem to overcomplicate my
> input).
>   *"JM: What IS the 'mind' you PRESERVE?"*
>  *BM:* My consciousness. - It means that I can surivive in the usal
> clinical sense,
> the brain digital replacement. I don't need to define my
> consciousness to
> say yes to a doctor. No more than I need to define "pain" to
> the doctor who
> look at me. I might need to pray, perhaps, and to hope the
> doctor is serious.
>
> *JM:Then again your ref. to the MW duplication is irrelevant for me: I do
> not *
> *duplicate. It goes with my answer NO to the doctor). I am more than
> knowable *
> *within today's inventory.*
>
> *BM: *No problem if you believe that comp is false. I don't argue for the
> truth of
> comp, I just present a reasoning explaining that if comp is true, then
> Plato-Plotin
> gives the right framework for a TOE, and Aristotle is refuted.
> (his theology and physics).
> (
> Bruno,  *M Y consciousness is (my) 'response to relations'* whatever show
> up.
> It includes lots of unknown items (with unknowable qualia?) beside the
> ones
> handled WITHIN my brain.
> So I do not trust the 'doctor's digital contraption to include  *ME -
> (total) - o*nly my
> temporary brainfunction, i.e. knowledge-base of mine as of today. Your
> "true"
> theology is a mystery to me. How "true" can it be?
> Devising our physical world is a human effort due to the temporary status
> of our
> inventory. To think beyond it is sci-fi (cf my ref. to Liz about Jack
> Cohen and J.
> Stewart's "Collapse of Chaos" and "Figment of Reality" - the
> Zarathustrans).
>
> John M
>
>
>
>
>
> On Mon, Jan 20, 2014 at 4:04 AM, Bruno Marchal  wrote:
>
>>
>> On 19 Jan 2014, at 23:54, John Mikes wrote:
>>
>> Bruno, let me use simple words (you seem to overcomplicate my input).
>>
>> What IS the *'mind'* you PRESERVE?
>>
>>
>> My consciousness.
>> It means that I can surivive in the usal clinical sense, the brain
>> digital replacement.
>> I don't need to define my consciousness to say yes to a doctor.
>> No more than I need to define "pain" to the doctor who look at me.
>> I might need to pray, perhaps, and to hope the doctor is serious.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Then again your ref. to the MW duplication is irrelevant for me: I do not
>> duplicate. (It goes with my answer NO to the doctor). I am more than
>> knowable within today's inventory.
>>
>>
>> No problem if you believe that comp is false. I don't argue for the truth
>> of comp, I just present a reasoning explaining that if comp is true, then
>> Plato-Plotin gives the right framework for a TOE, and Aristotle is refuted.
>> (his theology and physics).
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> I find 'mindcontent' different from 'mind' (what I don't really know) and
>> package it into 'mentality'. .
>>
>> I have no squalm against "arithmetical reality" - a notion deduced from
>> (human?) math-thinking.
>>
>>
>> Arithmetical Realism is the idea that human are correct when thinking
>> that the number relation are true even for the non humans.
>> It is not because a human believe in x, that x is necessarily false for
>> non humans. Anyway, it because I can conceive that AR is false, that I
>> politely put it in the bag of the hypotheses.
>>
>>
>>
>> What I mean as 'reality' (if it 'exists' - another 'if' to explain) is a
>> belief that it SHOULD  be - as most of us think of the world. No evidence,
>> no facts.
>>
>> Physical World (and whatever pertains to it: like 'physixs') is an
>> up-to-date explanation of yesterday's knowledge of some phenomena we
>> adjusted up to our capabilities in a 'world'-image we derived.
>>
>>
>> Yes, but that is why I do not assume anything being both primitive and
>> physical. You make my point.
>> But I need to start from some assumptions, and I use 2+2=4, and the "yes
>> doctor", which links computer science and theology. The physics is then
>> explanied constructively by the theology of the true machine, with true
>> some technical precise sense (due to Tarski).
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Existence

Re: How Wolves Change Rivers

2014-02-19 Thread David Nyman

On 19 February 2014 17:15, Craig Weinberg  wrote:


> On Wednesday, February 19, 2014 11:28:18 AM UTC-5, David Nyman wrote:
>
>> On 19 February 2014 14:17, Craig Weinberg  wrote:
>>
>> You're talking about the special case of human experience, human bodies,
>>> etc. I'm talking about the ontology of the nature of any possible awareness
>>> in any possible universe.
>>>
>>
>> I'm not really sure what distinction you're trying to draw here. The
>> dictionary tells us that ontology is the study of the categories of being
>> and existence. We must assume that since there is awareness it must inhere,
>> in some sense, in whatever exists, but that alone doesn't take us very far.
>> Since not everything that exists makes any claim to be aware the
>> interesting part is trying to elucidate the specific conditions that
>> differentiate the presence of such claims from their absence.
>>
>
> Except that the nature of awareness seems to be to undersignify other
> kinds of awareness. We can't trust that what we see of other things is
> enough to judge whether or not there is a claim to be aware there.
>

That's dangerous talk. It has already got you into pretty deep water in
your discussion with Stathis. You don't really want to be trapped into
saying that something can be biologically complete at the molecular level
and still lack.. well what? Elan vital? You hop from foot to foot on this.
One moment you appear to be quibbling about the technical possibilities and
the next you appear to accept that something could be a
molecule-for-molecule copy (and let's not get hung up on this word, it
simply means "at the appropriate substitution level" in context) and yet
lack animation. Why? Has molecular bonding somehow failed? Do the
biological processes that routinely assemble molecular structures have
secret access to a factor X? Is this really a position that you want your
theory to force you into?



> From what we have seen in neuroscience so far, there does not seem to be
> any distinction between the brain, parts of the brain, individual neurons
> or parts of neurons which suggest that one level would begin to suddenly be
> aware.
>

Just so. Hence, as Russell recently remarked, it seems easier to justify
the appearance of a material world in an idealist theory than appearance
per se in a materialist one.


>
>>
>> A computational theory is a variety of idealism whose natural ontological
>> homeland is Platonia. One can say that its specific ontological category is
>> arithmetical, but this means only that the platonic existence of arithmetic
>> suffices for a model of computation. That said, the specific conditions
>> that differentiate claims of awareness from their absence will be
>> epistemological rather than ontological, which is to say that they will
>> require a theory of knowledge.
>>
>
> I disagree. The conditions that differentiate claims of awareness from
> their absence have nothing to do with knowledge. There is no 'claim' of
> awareness, there is only the presence of aesthetic phenomena - experiences.
>

Inexplicably, you seem to persistently miss the relevance of what I mean by
a claim of awareness. Aesthetic experience is not only present to you, you
*know* and can lay *claim* to such presence, as we both continually
demonstrate in this discussion. The ability both to know and lay claim to
knowledge requires explanation in terms of a theory of knowledge. What else
- a theory of cabbage?


> Knowledge is derived from the logical comparison of multiple experiences.
> It has all kinds of sensory and sensible per-requisites that must be in
> place - expectations of causality, reliability, significance, etc. The
> theory of knowledge itself requires a theory of pre-epistemic sense.
>
>
>>  Computational theory leads to a repertoire of logics which (so far) seem
>> capable of supporting the necessary epistemological distinctions with all
>> their accompanying modal complexities.
>>
>
> Sure, not surprisingly. Computational theory gives us a marvelous set of
> Legos with which we can build Lego houses, Lego brains, Lego
> behaviors...but they are empty without some mode of aesthetic participation.
>
>
>>
>> If CTM is true, then all the foregoing is also true in the necessary
>> sense (i.e. platonically). Consequently, rejecting it on the basis that
>> numbers aren't real, or that computation can't differentiate awareness from
>> its absence, amounts to a rejection of Platonism.
>>
>
> Yes, I partially reject Platonism.
>

Which part?


>
>
>> Such rejection implies the Aristotelian view that awareness and its
>> artefacts (such as numbers) supervene, in some unspecified and rather more
>> problematical way, on primordial stuff that cannot be further explained.
>>
>
> No, my rejection also includes the Aristotelian view also. There is no
> primordial stuff, only a primordial capacity: the capacity for nested
> sensory-motive participation, aka sense. You are living your life, and it
> includes the perception of

Re: What are numbers? What is math?

On Wednesday, February 19, 2014 7:31:16 PM UTC, Edgar L. Owen wrote:
>
> Ghibbsa and Russell,
>
> There can be absolutely no doubt of an external reality independent of 
> humans. As I said, all of common sense, and all of science makes this 
> fundamental assumption.
>
> We have eyes, and other sense organs, so we can sense that external 
> reality. Do you deny we have eyes? If not, then what are they for?
>
> We have hands so we can manipulate that external reality. Do you deny we 
> have hands? If not then what are they for?
>
> We have legs so we can move around within that external reality. Do you 
> deny we have legs? If not then what are they for?
>
> Evolution assumes an external environment that we survive within by 
> adapting to. Do you deny evolution?
>
> Houses are constructed so we can live within these places in an external 
> reality. Do you deny the existence of houses? If not then what are they for?
>
> We wear clothes so as not to freeze when the external environment becomes 
> too cold. Do you deny clothes, environmental temperature?
>
> All of physics, chemistry, geology, biology, sociology and every science 
> assumes an external reality in which humans exist. Do you deny all of 
> science?
>
> We were all born from our mothers who are thereafter part of our external 
> realities. Do you deny human reproduction? Do you deny you had a mother?
>
> This is like arguing with the inhabitants of an asylum!
>
> OF COURSE when we become unconscious our INTERNAL MODEL of external 
> reality disappears, but to assume that means that external reality itself 
> then disappears is insane. 
>
>
> So the question is not whether there is an external reality, but what is 
> its nature. It is easy to show that the true nature of external reality is 
> not the world our minds tell us we live within, but pure abstract 
> computational information.
>
> Edgar
>

I can't speak for anyone else, but with me it's really nothing to do with 
questions about the realness. I mean, I genuinely think mused on that for 
years. Maybe never. I can't remember. I'm also unhinged so I guess 
there's room for that and a lot more. 

But look, what you say in your last sentence above. You spot about two 
fundamentals, but totally overlook other fundamentals sitting in plain 
sight. And ruinous. 2 out of 3 ain't bad. It's ruinous. It's about you as 
you, and as human being too, and what your nature and human nature. You 
are a fundamental force of nature in the context of Discovery.

So then it becomes it's about how to correct for everything cluding your 
own weakness and limitation. How are you going to take yourself out of the 
process. How do you performance manage the product of you as you, as human 
nature, as a fundamental component in the force of Discovery of Nature.

See I think, that in the end, one has to recognize that's a problem with a 
methodological solution. Or no solution at all. In which case in the end 
the theory is about the fundamental force of nature, that was you.

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Re: Wikipedia-size maths proof too big for humans to check

But is it possible to write program checking the proof (not finding it) ? I
guess it must be, because a proof, is just following rules... so it should
be possible to devise two independent different proof checker... if these
proof checker are smaller than the proof itself (and they should be), then
it will be easier to prove that they are correct, and if they agree on the
proof itself, we should really be confident that the proof is correct, even
if not checked manually by a human.

Regards,
Quentin


2014-02-19 19:13 GMT+01:00 Telmo Menezes :

> "If no human can check a proof of a theorem, does it really count as
> mathematics? That's the intriguing question raised by the latest
> computer-assisted proof. It is as large as the entire content of Wikipedia,
> making it unlikely that will ever be checked by a human being."
>
>
> http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25068-wikipediasize-maths-proof-too-big-for-humans-to-check.html#.UwTytEJdV69
>
> This reminded me of something that Bruno mentions frequently: the idea of
> deriving physics from the natural numbers, addition and multiplication.
> Should we expect wikipedia-size proofs (or worse)?
>
> Cheers,
> Telmo.
>
> --
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Batty/Rutger Hauer)

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Re: 3-1 views (was: Re: Better Than the Chinese Room)

2014-02-19 19:36 GMT+01:00 John Clark :

> On Tue, Feb 18, 2014 at 2:10 PM, Quentin Anciaux wrote:
>
> > Be consistent reject MWI on the same ground... don't bother adding the
>> argument that you can't meet your doppelganger,
>>
>
> So you want me to defend my case but specifically ask me not to use logic
> in doing so. No can do.
>

That's not what I was asking, I was asking that if you use your meet
doppelganger argument, ==> read the next quote.

>
> > or you have to explain why the possibility of meeting render probability
>> calculus meaningless.
>>
>
> If Everett's probability calculus produced figures that didn't agree with
> both experiment and Quantum Mechanics then the MWI would indeed be
> meaningless because the entire point of the MWI is to explain why Quantum
> Mechanics works as well as it does.
>

The thing is to devise a though experiment matching MWI, in the MWI case
you accept probability calculus.

>  But Bruno isn't trying to explain why Quantum Mechanics works, that's
> already been done, he's trying to explain the nature of self,
>

He does not, and certainly does not at step 3.

>  and so I don't care if Bruno's probability calculus works
>

He does, that's what is showing FPI (which *of course* also exists under
MWI)

> or not because probability and prediction have nothing to do with that;
>

It has all to do with that because it is specifically the question asked.

>  as I have said before, you feel like Quentin Anciaux today because you
> remember being Quentin Anciaux yesterday and for no other reason.
>

As I have said before and before and before, that's not the question.

>
> And despite what you say above the situations are not equivalent.
>

They are from the probability POV.

> According to Everett the very laws of physics forbid you from ever
> interacting with your doppelganger
>

And what does it have to do with frequency and probability ?

> and so Bruno's favorite type of words, personal pronouns, cause no
> problem;
>

They don't pose problem in this experiment and in the question asked. So
I'll try one last time,  and will try à la Jesse, with simple yes/no
questions and explanation from your part.

So I will first describe the setup and will suppose for the argument that
what we will do (duplicating you) is possible.

So you (John Clark reading this email or the one from tomorrow or whatever,
so I'll use *you*) are in front of a button that is in a room with two
doors. When *you* will press the button, *you* will be duplicated (by
destroying you in the room and recreating you two times in two exactly
identical room), the only difference in each room is that one has the left
door open and one has the right door open... what do *you* expect to see
when you'll press the button ?

1- Do you expect to see the left and the right doors opened ? Yes/No
2- Do you expect to see the left or the right doors opened ? Yes/No

If you answer 'Yes' at the 1st question, do you really mean *you* expect to
see both event simultaneously ?

If you answer 'Yes' at the 2nd question, do you think you can put a
probability to see the left door opened (or reversely the right door) ?
Yes/No

If you answer 'No', why can't you assign a probability to see each door ?
As I see it, there are 2 possible events, so each as a 0.5 probability of
occurence... If not why not ? Why in the MWI case, you accept the 0.5
probability ? If you follow strictly the protocol, MWI and this experiment
are equivalent, and are not about your personal identity... If you answer
both No to the 1st and 2nd question, please develop what you will expect to
see when you press the button ?

Quentin

> but in Bruno's thought experiment you can interact with your
> doppelganger and that turns personal pronouns, which work fine in our
> everyday world without duplicating chambers, into a chaotic mass of ASCII
> characters with no clear meaning.
>
> > All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain
>>
>
> I loved Blade Runner too, one of the few things we can agree on.
>
>   John K Clark
>
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For more optio

Re: What are numbers? What is math?

2014-02-19 Thread Edgar L. Owen

Ghibbsa and Russell,

There can be absolutely no doubt of an external reality independent of 
humans. As I said, all of common sense, and all of science makes this 
fundamental assumption.

We have eyes, and other sense organs, so we can sense that external 
reality. Do you deny we have eyes? If not, then what are they for?

We have hands so we can manipulate that external reality. Do you deny we 
have hands? If not then what are they for?

We have legs so we can move around within that external reality. Do you 
deny we have legs? If not then what are they for?

Evolution assumes an external environment that we survive within by 
adapting to. Do you deny evolution?

Houses are constructed so we can live within these places in an external 
reality. Do you deny the existence of houses? If not then what are they for?

We wear clothes so as not to freeze when the external environment becomes 
too cold. Do you deny clothes, environmental temperature?

All of physics, chemistry, geology, biology, sociology and every science 
assumes an external reality in which humans exist. Do you deny all of 
science?

We were all born from our mothers who are thereafter part of our external 
realities. Do you deny human reproduction? Do you deny you had a mother?

This is like arguing with the inhabitants of an asylum!

OF COURSE when we become unconscious our INTERNAL MODEL of external reality 
disappears, but to assume that means that external reality itself then 
disappears is insane. 

So the question is not whether there is an external reality, but what is 
its nature. It is easy to show that the true nature of external reality is 
not the world our minds tell us we live within, but pure abstract 
computational information.

Edgar

On Wednesday, February 19, 2014 12:48:37 PM UTC-5, ghi...@gmail.com wrote:
>
>
> On Tuesday, February 18, 2014 6:15:38 AM UTC, Russell Standish wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 09:18:32PM -0800, meekerdb wrote: 
>> > On 2/17/2014 8:58 PM, Russell Standish wrote: 
>> > >On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 07:30:23PM -0800, meekerdb wrote: 
>> > >>But there is a weaker form.  However unlikely one thinks strings or 
>> > >>singularities or multiple-worlds are, one may still hypothesize that 
>> > >>there is *some* reality as the explanation for the intersubjective 
>> > >>agreement that is consistently observed. 
>> > >Sure - one may hypothesise so. But does it assist in any scientific 
>> > >experiment to do so? And is there any evidence to support the 
>> > >hypothesis, or is it simply like pre-classical physics - good enough 
>> > >to get the next meal. 
>> > 
>> > The same kind of evidence as for any scientific theory.  It not only 
>> > assists, the repeatability of experiments by persons with different 
>> > minds tests it. 
>>
>> I don't see why. It merely tests _inter_subjectivity, not 
>> objectivity. I cannot think of a single test of objectivity, off the 
>> top of my head. 
>>
> There is probably a range of legitimate characterizations of tge principle 
> of repeatability in science and how repeatability contributes value to the 
> scientific process. And a few legitimate arguments against, perhaps too. 
>  
> As such there is an easy to vary quality to many of these components of 
> method, as they have come to be known. Which undermines many components in 
> the eyes of scientists, and makes of them easy pickings for that ever 
> denser cloud of the vulture-Philosopher who then gets the boot in. 
>  
> I hear a lot these days how this or that method doesn't deliver much and 
> isn't important. I actually remember the last time I heard or read anyone 
> do this, that didn't completely give them away for not having any knowledge 
> about the component to be making judgement calls in the first place,. 
>  
> It's not policed the way standards are elsewhere. So people are free to 
> know little or nothing, and know that the know little or nothing, and issue 
> missives or quote philosopher misconceptions. And that's a behaviour bereft 
> of personal scientific integrity, because what it is, is basically 
> bullshitting. 
>  
> What I would recommend you do, is understand that with few exceptions, no 
> part of the scientific method can be understood as the hard to vary 
> entities that they are, absent their root conception, which all or most of 
> them have, and that root is the way that the component came to be in 
> science. 
>  
> You'll be surprised, because almost no component was consciously conceived 
> by a human being. Not at the start. No one ever wrote a paper in which 
> methods were conjectured up and everyone then bought in. The methods 
> emerged very much out of the background day to day realities, and as such 
> in a way people created and used methods, and those methods spread 
> everywhere, and yet no one had recognized this was going on. Even though 
> they were doing it. Many methods were already invented and common to all, 
> the very first time a human being said some

Re: Cool Cuttlefish footage

On Wednesday, February 19, 2014 4:42:57 PM UTC, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>
>
> On 18 Feb 2014, at 23:53, ghi...@gmail.com  wrote:
>
>
> On Sunday, February 16, 2014 10:23:27 AM UTC, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>>
>>
>> On 15 Feb 2014, at 23:17, Russell Standish wrote: 
>>
>> > On Sat, Feb 15, 2014 at 11:08:07AM +0100, Bruno Marchal wrote: 
>> >> 
>> >> On 14 Feb 2014, at 20:47, meekerdb wrote: 
>> >> 
>> >>> On 2/14/2014 7:12 AM, Platonist Guitar Cowboy wrote: 
>> >>> 
>> >>> I find cuttlefish fascinating.  They are social, relatively 
>> >>> intelligent, can communicate, able to grasp and manipulate things. 
>> >>> It seems like they were all set to become the dominant large life 
>> >>> form (instead of humans). 
>> >> 
>> >> A mystery: they don't live a long time. Usually "intelligence" go 
>> >> with a rather long life, but cuttlefishes live one or two years. 
>> > 
>> > Yes - I find that surprising also. 
>> > 
>> >> Hard for them to dominate, also, as they have few protections, no 
>> >> shelter, and are edible for many predators, including humans. 
>> > 
>> > One could say the same about early home 2 millions years ago. The 
>> > invention of the throwable spear changed all that. 
>>
>> Yes. 
>>
>>
>>
>> > 
>> >> They 
>> >> survive by hiding and fooling. They can hunt with hypnosis (as you 
>> >> can see in the video). 
>> >> 
>> > 
>> > I feel privileged that these wonderful animals (giant cuttlefish) can 
>> > be found less than 200 metres from my house. I have often observed 
>> > them when snorkling or scuba diving. 
>>
>> You are privileged indeed. 
>>
>>
>>
>> > 
>> > I had to laugh at the Texan prof's comment that they are as least as 
>> > smart as fish. 
>>
>> That is weird indeed. fish are not known to be particularly clever. 
>>
>>
>>
>> > I do have a habit of underestimating fish intelligence, 
>>
>> Me too ... 
>>
>>
>> > but IMHO their intelligence equals that of some mammals or birds, and 
>> > clearly outclasses fish. 
>>
>> I agree. 
>>
>>
>>
>> > I think I mentioned the anecdote which 
>> > convinced me they exhibit a second order theory of the mind, which may 
>> > well be sufficient for consciousness. 
>>
>> Which I call self-consciousness, and I think this is already Löbianitty. 
>> I do think that all animals have the "first order" consciousness, they   
>> can feel pain, and find it unpleasant, but can't reflect on it, nor   
>> assess "I feel pain". they still can react appropriately. I m not   
>> sure, but it fits better with the whole picture. 
>>
>> Bruno 
>>
>> http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
>
>  
> Allowing that brain science is a lot nearer the end of the beginning than 
> the beginning of the end, all the functional evidence suggests humans and 
> animals are much more alike in their experiences toward the lower levels of 
> instinct, in its broader sense to include emotion and pain, anger, fear, 
> bluff. It makes sense we experience that level of things pretty much the 
> same. 
>
>
>
> I think so. I might even think that this is common for all Löbian machines 
> (or quasi-Löbian). 
> Those machines have elementary beliefs and some induction beliefs (in the 
> Peano sense).
>
>
>
> Neither animals nor humans are able to 'remember' agonizing pain. 
>
>
> Really? Have you references? I procrastinate videos on interview of 
> tortured people. I really don't know, and I am astonished of your saying. 
> Brutal amputation can lead to pathological pain hypermnesy and deformed 
> type of pain. 
>

I'm not clear this point has need for references in that sense. There isn't 
actually a necessary contradiction between the above two comments mine and 
yours. It's biology. The structures are always much the same. The 
distinctions being which level or ends between simplicity and increasingly 
more complex structures that by repeats grow out of simplicity. I mentioned 
a simple reality of the type of messaging that pain falls in with. It's a 
signal, not a cognition. Not every kind of message has access to centres 
like memory. How would a memory of an existential signalling be captured? 
No need for referencing. If you think you can recall pain, then do it now, 
feel the pain existentially. Let me know how it goes, I'll accept your 
testimony. You won't be able to do it though. Not generically. 

Does that mean there can't be complex emergent effects like what you 
describe. No.there are conditions of continual pain that no doctor can 
find a real basis for All sorts can go down in the complexities. But the 
simple principles tend to dominate in the full extent of things. That 
brutal amputation and the devastating after effects. It's real, or can be. 
But in the fullness of time, when all is known and detectable. Is that 
going to say the sufferer was storing a signalling of pain in memory? The 
simple principles is suggesting no. It'll be real pain, maybe in a feedback 
loop involving a deranged nerve. Maybe triggerable in whatever the chemical 
complicators in stress or anxie

Re: 3-1 views (was: Re: Better Than the Chinese Room)

2014-02-19 Thread John Clark

On Tue, Feb 18, 2014 at 2:10 PM, Quentin Anciaux  wrote:

> Be consistent reject MWI on the same ground... don't bother adding the
> argument that you can't meet your doppelganger,
>

So you want me to defend my case but specifically ask me not to use logic
in doing so. No can do.

> or you have to explain why the possibility of meeting render probability
> calculus meaningless.
>

If Everett's probability calculus produced figures that didn't agree with
both experiment and Quantum Mechanics then the MWI would indeed be
meaningless because the entire point of the MWI is to explain why Quantum
Mechanics works as well as it does. But Bruno isn't trying to explain why
Quantum Mechanics works, that's already been done, he's trying to explain
the nature of self, and so I don't care if Bruno's probability calculus
works or not because probability and prediction have nothing to do with
that; as I have said before, you feel like Quentin Anciaux today because
you remember being Quentin Anciaux yesterday and for no other reason.

And despite what you say above the situations are not equivalent. According
to Everett the very laws of physics forbid you from ever interacting with
your doppelganger and so Bruno's favorite type of words, personal pronouns,
cause no problem; but in Bruno's thought experiment you can interact with
your   doppelganger and that turns personal pronouns, which work fine in
our everyday world without duplicating chambers, into a chaotic mass of
ASCII characters with no clear meaning.

> All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain
>

I loved Blade Runner too, one of the few things we can agree on.

  John K Clark

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Wikipedia-size maths proof too big for humans to check

2014-02-19 Thread Telmo Menezes

"If no human can check a proof of a theorem, does it really count as
mathematics? That's the intriguing question raised by the latest
computer-assisted proof. It is as large as the entire content of Wikipedia,
making it unlikely that will ever be checked by a human being."

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25068-wikipediasize-maths-proof-too-big-for-humans-to-check.html#.UwTytEJdV69

This reminded me of something that Bruno mentions frequently: the idea of
deriving physics from the natural numbers, addition and multiplication.
Should we expect wikipedia-size proofs (or worse)?

Cheers,
Telmo.

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Re: How does acceleration curve space? Can anyone provide an answer?

2014-02-19 Thread Jesse Mazer

On Wed, Feb 19, 2014 at 12:42 PM, John Clark  wrote:

>
>

>
>  > There is no sense in which an observer in an accelerating elevator in
>> the flat spacetime of special relativity could correctly conclude that
>> spacetime has any "curvature"
>>
>
> What you say is true but only according to Einstein's 1905 Special
> Relativity because that theory says nothing about gravity and only deals
> with special cases, objects in uniform motion; that's why it's called
> "special".
>

It's true that SR says nothing about gravity, but incorrect that it deals
only with "objects in uniform motion". Special relativity can handle
acceleration just fine too, either by analyzing it in the context of an
inertial frame, or by using a non-inertial coordinate system like Rindler
coordinates. See for example this section of the Usenet Physics FAQ, hosted
on the site of physicist John Baez:

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/acceleration.html

"It is a common misconception that Special Relativity cannot handle
accelerating objects or accelerating reference frames.  It is claimed that
general relativity is required because special relativity only applies to
inertial frames.  This is not true.  Special relativity treats accelerating
frames differently from inertial frames but can still deal with them.
 Accelerating objects can be dealt with without even calling upon
accelerating frames."

Are you claiming the above is incorrect?

>
>
> If you could never tell experimentally if spacetime was curved or not then
> the very idea of curved spacetime would become an idea as as useless as the
> concept of the luminiferous aether.
>

I didn't say in the post you're responding to that "you could never tell
experimentally if spacetime was curved or not", I said you couldn't tell
*if* you were only measuring the laws of physics to the first order, and
*if* were only measuring in an infinitesimally small region, both of which
are conditions for the equivalence principle to apply (as mentioned in the
references I provided at
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/everything-list/xOpw-X9J2MY/wTDTy1Dr7s4J ).
I said specifically that the guy in the elevator *could* measure curvature
if he wasn't restricted in such ways: "In fact the observer inside the
elevator should have ways of measuring curvature if he can measure
second-order effects, or if the size of the elevator is taken as
non-infinitesimal, and in either case he could definitely conclude that
spacetime was *not* curved within an elevator accelerating in flat SR
spacetime".

> But you can tell. Pick any 3 points inside that sealed elevator. Place a
> Laser pointer at each of the 3 points and form a triangle with the light
> beams. Measure the 3 angles of the triangle in degrees. Add up the 3
> measurements. If the sum comes out to be exactly 180 then you know that the
> spacetime within your sealed elevator is flat.
>

Do you have any reference for the idea that this is a valid way to measure
spacetime curvature in general relativity? According to a poster at
http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=454705 who I've found to be
quite knowledgeable on the subject of GR, "To measure actual curvature,
rather than 'non inertial motion through spacetime', J.L. Synge has a proof
in his book on GR that you need a minimum of 5 points. He then defines an
idealized 5 point curvature detector. I don't know how easy it is to get
this book, but I don't really want to type in the whole discussion. It is
fun though - he even carries it out to producing ideal rods, trying to
arrange them in a certain way, and the last one minutely fails to fit if
there is actual curvature."

Presumably this is referring to the section on p. 408 of "Relativity: The
General Theory" which you can see a brief excerpt of here:
http://books.google.com/books?id=CqoNAQAAIAAJ&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=detector

I would also guess that one of the conditions needed for building a valid
curvature detector would be that all the components are in free-fall,
though without having that section of the book available I can't verify
that this is true for the one suggested by Synge.

Jesse

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Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating



On Wednesday, February 19, 2014 12:45:19 PM UTC-5, cdemorsella wrote:
>
>  
>
>  
>
> *From:* everyth...@googlegroups.com  [mailto:
> everyth...@googlegroups.com ] *On Behalf Of 
> *ghi...@gmail.com
> *Sent:* Tuesday, February 18, 2014 2:02 PM
> *To:* everyth...@googlegroups.com 
> *Subject:* Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating
>
>  
>
>
> On Thursday, February 13, 2014 3:01:26 PM UTC, cdemorsella wrote:
>
> Ground water contamination levels at the sampled well site of 54,000Bq/ 
> liter
>
> NHK , Feb. 
> 13, 2014: *Record cesium level in Fukushima plant groundwater* — [Tepco] 
> says water samples taken from a newly-dug well contained the highest levels 
> of radioactive cesium detected so far in groundwater at the site [...] the 
> record levels suggest that the leakage point could be near the well. [...] 
> 600 times the government standard for radioactive wastewater that can be 
> released into the sea. It is more than 30,000 times the level of cesium 137 
> found in water samples taken from another observation well to the north 
> last week. [...] [Tepco has] yet to determine where the leak originates.
>
> In general the dangers arsing from nuclear fission power are grossly 
> exaggerated. It's far and away the best answer to greenhouse emissions, 
> that is also realistic. If we'd been building nuclear power stations the 
> fracking locomotive wouldn't be the unstoppable force that it has become. 
>
> on 
>
>  
>
>  
>
> >>Many ways the dangers are blown out of proportion.. Even catastrophic 
> meltdown that blow the roof off and spread the love like Chernobyl, do not 
> result in a tiny fraction of the disasters that the standard models 
> predict. Ten's of thousands were predicted to die. In the end, just 40 
> deaths from Chernobyl, and most of those the people sent in to get control 
> in the aftermath. 
>
>  
>
> Dude – even the Report of 
> 2005(by the IAEA, 
> WHO, and UNDP, agencies that cannot by any stretch of the 
> imagination be described as hostile to the advancement of nuclear power) 
> put the Chernobyl ultimate death toll at 4000 – a figure that is one 
> hundred times bigger than the 40  deaths you believe are attributable to 
> this atomic disaster. The 4000 figure has been challenged and criticized as 
> being far too low and that over the decades the extra cancer deaths 
> ultimately caused by this disaster have been far higher. For example: 
> “Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment” 
> published by the New York Academy of sciences; authored by Russian 
> biologist Dr. Alexey Yablokov, former environmental advisor to the Russian 
> president; Dr. Alexey Nesterenko, a biologist and ecologist in Belarus; and 
> Dr.Vassili Nesterenko, a physicist and at the time of the accident director 
> of the Institute of Nuclear Energy of the National Academy of Sciences of 
> Belarus; put the extra cancer deaths attributable to the Chernobyl disaster 
> at almost one million – a figure that is 25,000 times greater than the 40 
> deaths you seem to believe caps the death toll for Chernobyl. I believe you 
> are ignoring many thousands of horrible cancer deaths that were triggered 
> by this disaster; and even the IAEA agrees that many thousands of people 
> died from radiation induced cancers.
>
> To claim that only 40 people died as a result of the Chernobyl disaster is 
> an act of spreading propaganda; it is un-scientific.
>

There's also the problems of uranium mining, milling, transportation, and 
waste storage.

http://www.nrdc.org/nuclear/files/uranium-mining-report.pdf

"ISL uranium mining, alone and in concert with other resource extraction 
activities,
contaminates groundwater. ISL operations in the United States have 
repeatedly failed to
restore aquifers to a pre-mining state, often leaving them unusable for any 
alternative future
use." 

 
>
>  
>
> There have been revolutions in station design since plants like fukishima 
> were built, and that disaster isn't shaping up to the dire predictions 
> either. 
>
>  
>
> What most of all this derives out of, are long standing questions about 
> the level of risk associated with exposure to radiation at low doses up to 
> somewhere below the 200 mark. There's no firm evidence of substantial risk. 
> There's plenty of evidence for genetic protection. There's a whole plethora 
> of statistics we could reasonably expect if low dose exposure was anything 
> like the risk that still sits there in the model. Airline cabin crew should 
> have higher frequency cancer for all that time so near space for one 
> example. They don't. 
>
>  
>
> Conversely there are some major natural radiation hotspots in the world. 
> You'd expect those areas to produce more cancer and radiation poisoning 
> related disease. But the opposite is true. People exposed to dramatically 
>

Re: Better Than the Chinese Room



On Wednesday, February 19, 2014 12:46:40 PM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>
>
> On 19 Feb 2014, at 17:18, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
>
>
>
> On 18/02/2014, David Nyman  wrote:
>
> >> I think if I say consciousness is an epiphenomenon of biochemistry I
> >> should also say that life is.
> >
> >
> > And should you not go on to say that biochemistry is an epiphenomenon of
> > physics and physics is an epiphenomenon of  well, something that is 
> not
> > itself epiphenomenal, I guess? The way you formulate the problem seems to
> > tend to the conclusion that any and all appearances should strictly be
> > considered an epiphenomenon of something more fundamental that cannot
> > possibly be encountered directly. And, moreover, there is no entailment
> > that any such something be straightforwardly isomorphic with any of those
> > appearances. I'm not saying that this view is incoherent, by the way, but
> > do you agree that something like this is entailed by what you say?
>
> I'm making a case for reductionism. If biochemistry necessarily leads to 
> consciousness 
>
>
> Biochemistry or anything Turing universal.
>
>
>
> then I don't think this is any different to the situation where 
> biochemistry necessarily leads to life. 
>
>
> Ah!
> But then life is clearly a 3p phenomenon, so why make consciousness an 
> epiphenomenon? Of course consciousness is "only" a 1p phenomenon, but it 
> can make sense (indeed as a sense maker or receptor).
>

Unless my view is right and 1p consciousness is only a subset of p 
consciousness, and 3p is the (alienated, reduced) difference between p and 
1p.

Craig
 

>
> Bruno
>
>
> If we imagine that the biochemistry is all there but no consciousness that 
> would be like imagining that the biochemistry is all there but no life 
> (which Craig can apparently do). 
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> Stathis Papaioannou
>
>
> -- 
> Stathis Papaioannou
>
> -- 
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups 
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> email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com .
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>
>
> http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
>
>
>
>

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Re: What are numbers? What is math?

On Tuesday, February 18, 2014 6:15:38 AM UTC, Russell Standish wrote:
>
> On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 09:18:32PM -0800, meekerdb wrote: 
> > On 2/17/2014 8:58 PM, Russell Standish wrote: 
> > >On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 07:30:23PM -0800, meekerdb wrote: 
> > >>But there is a weaker form.  However unlikely one thinks strings or 
> > >>singularities or multiple-worlds are, one may still hypothesize that 
> > >>there is *some* reality as the explanation for the intersubjective 
> > >>agreement that is consistently observed. 
> > >Sure - one may hypothesise so. But does it assist in any scientific 
> > >experiment to do so? And is there any evidence to support the 
> > >hypothesis, or is it simply like pre-classical physics - good enough 
> > >to get the next meal. 
> > 
> > The same kind of evidence as for any scientific theory.  It not only 
> > assists, the repeatability of experiments by persons with different 
> > minds tests it. 
>
> I don't see why. It merely tests _inter_subjectivity, not 
> objectivity. I cannot think of a single test of objectivity, off the 
> top of my head. 
>
There is probably a range of legitimate characterizations of tge principle 
of repeatability in science and how repeatability contributes value to the 
scientific process. And a few legitimate arguments against, perhaps too. 

As such there is an easy to vary quality to many of these components of 
method, as they have come to be known. Which undermines many components in 
the eyes of scientists, and makes of them easy pickings for that ever 
denser cloud of the vulture-Philosopher who then gets the boot in. 

I hear a lot these days how this or that method doesn't deliver much and 
isn't important. I actually remember the last time I heard or read anyone 
do this, that didn't completely give them away for not having any knowledge 
about the component to be making judgement calls in the first place,. 

It's not policed the way standards are elsewhere. So people are free to 
know little or nothing, and know that the know little or nothing, and issue 
missives or quote philosopher misconceptions. And that's a behaviour bereft 
of personal scientific integrity, because what it is, is basically 
bullshitting. 

What I would recommend you do, is understand that with few exceptions, no 
part of the scientific method can be understood as the hard to vary 
entities that they are, absent their root conception, which all or most of 
them have, and that root is the way that the component came to be in 
science. 

You'll be surprised, because almost no component was consciously conceived 
by a human being. Not at the start. No one ever wrote a paper in which 
methods were conjectured up and everyone then bought in. The methods 
emerged very much out of the background day to day realities, and as such 
in a way people created and used methods, and those methods spread 
everywhere, and yet no one had recognized this was going on. Even though 
they were doing it. Many methods were already invented and common to all, 
the very first time a human being said something like "that's a method".

So you've speaking of repeatability. At the dawn of science, the individual 
that was fascinated by a particular vague question that no one else 
understood or gave a damn about, might have been the only man in the 
country who cared about that and realized it was important. Kindred souls 
were precious to all the pioneers then and now. But the chances were the 
nearest one was halfway across the continent and neither of you spoke a 
common language though they probably usually did. 

But we're talking the late 17th early 18th century here. Horses and 
carriages if you were lucky. After that letters. But before letters people 
needed to discover eachother. Initially it was just fluke, but networks 
quickly formed. But the new thing that had never existed was this 
fascination with observing things and finding ways to describe the parts of 
interest. As these early geniuses began to isolate the puzzles, in most 
cases it was actually easier - say in the twilight between the day of 
alchemy and the birth of chemistry, it was actually easier to explain the 
issue not directly in words alone because nothing was even defined to 
support that sort of thing. 

So people began to turn to observables and given a shared obsession, start 
using the observables as communication enablers. Objects to symbolize. To 
make the other person experience the same insight. It was the only clean 
way it could be done. No one ever stood up on the platform and spoke across 
all of pioneering science, and said a word like 'it's about observation' or 
'it's about objectivity' or 'discovering nature'. Not in the early days. P#

All of it was discovered by other means. The proto-chemists were putting 
years into identifying sequences that always happened when something 
exploded or smelled bad. There was no way to communicate about that, so 
they had embroil everything in the obje

Re: Better Than the Chinese Room

On 19 Feb 2014, at 17:18, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:

On 18/02/2014, David Nyman  wrote:

>> I think if I say consciousness is an epiphenomenon of  
biochemistry I

>> should also say that life is.
>
>
> And should you not go on to say that biochemistry is an  
epiphenomenon of
> physics and physics is an epiphenomenon of  well, something  
that is not
> itself epiphenomenal, I guess? The way you formulate the problem  
seems to
> tend to the conclusion that any and all appearances should  
strictly be
> considered an epiphenomenon of something more fundamental that  
cannot
> possibly be encountered directly. And, moreover, there is no  
entailment
> that any such something be straightforwardly isomorphic with any  
of those
> appearances. I'm not saying that this view is incoherent, by the  
way, but

> do you agree that something like this is entailed by what you say?

I'm making a case for reductionism. If biochemistry necessarily  
leads to consciousness

Biochemistry or anything Turing universal.

then I don't think this is any different to the situation where  
biochemistry necessarily leads to life.

Ah!
But then life is clearly a 3p phenomenon, so why make consciousness an  
epiphenomenon? Of course consciousness is "only" a 1p phenomenon, but  
it can make sense (indeed as a sense maker or receptor).

Bruno

If we imagine that the biochemistry is all there but no  
consciousness that would be like imagining that the biochemistry is  
all there but no life (which Craig can apparently do).

--
Stathis Papaioannou

--
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http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

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RE: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating

2014-02-19 Thread Chris de Morsella

From: everything-list@googlegroups.com 
[mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of ghib...@gmail.com
Sent: Tuesday, February 18, 2014 2:02 PM
To: everything-list@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating

On Thursday, February 13, 2014 3:01:26 PM UTC, cdemorsella wrote:

Ground water contamination levels at the sampled well site of 54,000Bq/ liter

NHK  , Feb. 13, 
2014: Record cesium level in Fukushima plant groundwater — [Tepco] says water 
samples taken from a newly-dug well contained the highest levels of radioactive 
cesium detected so far in groundwater at the site [...] the record levels 
suggest that the leakage point could be near the well. [...] 600 times the 
government standard for radioactive wastewater that can be released into the 
sea. It is more than 30,000 times the level of cesium 137 found in water 
samples taken from another observation well to the north last week. [...] 
[Tepco has] yet to determine where the leak originates.

In general the dangers arsing from nuclear fission power are grossly 
exaggerated. It's far and away the best answer to greenhouse emissions, that is 
also realistic. If we'd been building nuclear power stations the fracking 
locomotive wouldn't be the unstoppable force that it has become. 

on 

>>Many ways the dangers are blown out of proportion.. Even catastrophic 
>>meltdown that blow the roof off and spread the love like Chernobyl, do not 
>>result in a tiny fraction of the disasters that the standard models predict. 
>>Ten's of thousands were predicted to die. In the end, just 40 deaths from 
>>Chernobyl, and most of those the people sent in to get control in the 
>>aftermath. 

Dude – even the Report of 2005 
  (by the IAEA, 
WHO, and UNDP, agencies that cannot by any stretch of the imagination be 
described as hostile to the advancement of nuclear power) put the Chernobyl 
ultimate death toll at 4000 – a figure that is one hundred times bigger than 
the 40  deaths you believe are attributable to this atomic disaster. The 4000 
figure has been challenged and criticized as being far too low and that over 
the decades the extra cancer deaths ultimately caused by this disaster have 
been far higher. For example: “Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for 
People and the Environment” published by the New York Academy of sciences; 
authored by Russian biologist Dr. Alexey Yablokov, former environmental advisor 
to the Russian president; Dr. Alexey Nesterenko, a biologist and ecologist in 
Belarus; and Dr.Vassili Nesterenko, a physicist and at the time of the accident 
director of the Institute of Nuclear Energy of the National Academy of Sciences 
of Belarus; put the extra cancer deaths attributable to the Chernobyl disaster 
at almost one million – a figure that is 25,000 times greater than the 40 
deaths you seem to believe caps the death toll for Chernobyl. I believe you are 
ignoring many thousands of horrible cancer deaths that were triggered by this 
disaster; and even the IAEA agrees that many thousands of people died from 
radiation induced cancers.

To claim that only 40 people died as a result of the Chernobyl disaster is an 
act of spreading propaganda; it is un-scientific.

There have been revolutions in station design since plants like fukishima were 
built, and that disaster isn't shaping up to the dire predictions either. 

What most of all this derives out of, are long standing questions about the 
level of risk associated with exposure to radiation at low doses up to 
somewhere below the 200 mark. There's no firm evidence of substantial risk. 
There's plenty of evidence for genetic protection. There's a whole plethora of 
statistics we could reasonably expect if low dose exposure was anything like 
the risk that still sits there in the model. Airline cabin crew should have 
higher frequency cancer for all that time so near space for one example. They 
don't. 

Conversely there are some major natural radiation hotspots in the world. You'd 
expect those areas to produce more cancer and radiation poisoning related 
disease. But the opposite is true. People exposed to dramatically higher doses 
of radiation (inside the low dosage spectrum), actually become lower risks. 
There seems to be a triggerable genetic response when levels increase. 

I'm over-compensating in the other direction a bit here. Not because I love the 
bomb, but if you only knew the power of the dark side. 

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Re: How does acceleration curve space? Can anyone provide an answer?

2014-02-19 Thread John Clark

On Wed, Feb 19, 2014 at 12:35 AM, Jesse Mazer  wrote:

>> You should stop talking about "space", it's "4D spacetime"; but yes it's
>> curved, although if you were inside that sealed elevator you couldn't tell
>> if the curvature was caused by rockets accelerating the elevator in deep
>> space or if it was caused by the Earth's gravity. Acceleration is absolute
>> in that there is no need to look outside your reference frame to detect it,
>> but according to General Relativity there is no way to tell the difference
>> between it and being in a gravitational field.
>>
>
> You are simply incorrect here, John.
>

No Jesse I am not.

> There is no sense in which an observer in an accelerating elevator in the
> flat spacetime of special relativity could correctly conclude that
> spacetime has any "curvature"
>

What you say is true but only according to Einstein's 1905 Special
Relativity because that theory says nothing about gravity and only deals
with special cases, objects in uniform motion; that's why it's called
"special". It is NOT true according to  Einsteins much more comprehensive
1916 General Relativity which includes gravity and nonuniform motion and
pressure and much more; that's why it's called "General".

If you could never tell experimentally if spacetime was curved or not then
the very idea of curved spacetime would become an idea as as useless as the
concept of the luminiferous aether. But you can tell. Pick any 3 points
inside that sealed elevator. Place a Laser pointer at each of the 3 points
and form a triangle with the light beams. Measure the 3 angles of the
triangle in degrees. Add up the 3 measurements. If the sum comes out to be
exactly 180 then you know that the spacetime within your sealed elevator is
flat. If the sum comes out as any number other than 180 then you know that
the spacetime within your sealed elevator is not flat; but unless you take
into consideration tidal effects (which will always occur in a
gravitational field if the elevator is not infinitesimally small) you will
not know if the spacetime curvature was caused by gravity or by a rocket.

  John K Clark

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Re: What are numbers? What is math?

On 19 Feb 2014, at 15:05, Edgar L. Owen wrote:

Russell,

No, I have not painted myself into any corner.

Second, I reject all the labels you use, and most of the terminology  
which is loaded with other labels. Labels are usually excuses not to  
consider the actual theory, and not to have to actually think

You are trying to view my theory in terms of Bruno's which won't  
work because Bruno's theory is not relevant to mine.

It seems to me that you agreed that we might survive with a digital  
brain. This makes your theory in the spectrum of the consequences of  
computationalism.

Then you mention a "computational space", and you have not yet  
explained what you mean that that.

I am not someone proposing a new theory. Comp is just a modern digital  
version of one of the oldest principle, that you can find in very old  
greek, indian and chinese texts. Then it came back nearby with  
Descartes, and takes a new dimension with the mathematical (even  
arithmetical) discovery of the universal machines (Post, Church,  
Turing, Markov).

It's really amazing how so many loyal devotees here think if  
anything conflicts with Bruno's comp it has to be wrong, when  
Bruno's comp is just a theory which has little or nothing to do with  
reality in any demonstrable sense.

It's amazing how people here think what might be a sound theory  
about some abstruse nether regions of H-math must necessarily be  
applicable to actual reality.

The way to understand what is going on with actual reality is to  
OBSERVE it, not to slap some mathematical proof on top of it and  
claim reality must conform to it. It's reality itself that decides  
what theory it does or doesn't conform to, not some ivory tower H- 
mathematician

But I realize it's very difficult to alter faith based belief  
systems

You are the one invoking "real", "reality" "obvious" etc.

I put the hypothesis on the table which is basically that I can  
survive with an artificial digital brain or body.

All the rest is derived from that. It is very general, and it reminds  
that science has not yet decided between Plato and Aristotle on the  
matter of matter.

The only faith I invoke is when and if, you say "yes" to the doctor  
who proposes to you a digital brain copying you at some level  
description. The consequences will be independent on the level per se,  
only on its existence.

Please avoid the locution "computational space", or make at least the  
link with the standard sense.

Have you heard about Church's thesis (also called Church-Turing thesis)?

Church's thesis makes *all* computational spaces; not just those of  
Church and Turing and others, belonging to the sigma_1 part of  
arithmetic (a tiny part of the whole arithmetic).

Bruno

Edgar

On Tuesday, February 18, 2014 8:19:20 PM UTC-5, Russell Standish  
wrote:

On Tue, Feb 18, 2014 at 04:57:04PM -0800, Edgar L. Owen wrote:
>
> Thus the notion of an external reality IS consistent with it being a
> computational reality, because it leads directly to it.
>
> Edgar
>

So you have just painted yourself into a Platonic idealist corner. The
only ontological properties of relevance is that of universal
computation. We could just as easily be running on the stuff of Peano
arithmetic (as Bruno suggests) as on Babbage's analytic engine in some
fantastic Steampunk scenario. Furthermore, since universal dovetailers
will dominate the measure of conscious programs, we will observe an
FPI-like screen over the activities of those programs - we must be
staring at the "Nothing" I talk about in my book. This is just a
consequence of the UDA.

But the "Nothing" is not an ontology - it is a really a statement that
ontology is unknowable, and not even really meaningful in any sense.

Cheers

--

Prof Russell Standish  Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
Principal, High Performance Coders
Visiting Professor of Mathematics  hpc...@hpcoders.com.au
University of New South Wales  http://www.hpcoders.com.au

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http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

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Re: How Wolves Change Rivers

On Wednesday, February 19, 2014 11:28:18 AM UTC-5, David Nyman wrote:
>
> On 19 February 2014 14:17, Craig Weinberg 
> > wrote:
>
> You're talking about the special case of human experience, human bodies, 
>> etc. I'm talking about the ontology of the nature of any possible awareness 
>> in any possible universe. 
>>
>
> I'm not really sure what distinction you're trying to draw here. The 
> dictionary tells us that ontology is the study of the categories of being 
> and existence. We must assume that since there is awareness it must inhere, 
> in some sense, in whatever exists, but that alone doesn't take us very far. 
> Since not everything that exists makes any claim to be aware the 
> interesting part is trying to elucidate the specific conditions that 
> differentiate the presence of such claims from their absence.
>

Except that the nature of awareness seems to be to undersignify other kinds 
of awareness. We can't trust that what we see of other things is enough to 
judge whether or not there is a claim to be aware there. From what we have 
seen in neuroscience so far, there does not seem to be any distinction 
between the brain, parts of the brain, individual neurons or parts of 
neurons which suggest that one level would begin to suddenly be aware.

>
> A computational theory is a variety of idealism whose natural ontological 
> homeland is Platonia. One can say that its specific ontological category is 
> arithmetical, but this means only that the platonic existence of arithmetic 
> suffices for a model of computation. That said, the specific conditions 
> that differentiate claims of awareness from their absence will be 
> epistemological rather than ontological, which is to say that they will 
> require a theory of knowledge.
>

I disagree. The conditions that differentiate claims of awareness from 
their absence have nothing to do with knowledge. There is no 'claim' of 
awareness, there is only the presence of aesthetic phenomena - experiences. 
Knowledge is derived from the logical comparison of multiple experiences. 
It has all kinds of sensory and sensible per-requisites that must be in 
place - expectations of causality, reliability, significance, etc. The 
theory of knowledge itself requires a theory of pre-epistemic sense.

> Computational theory leads to a repertoire of logics which (so far) seem 
> capable of supporting the necessary epistemological distinctions with all 
> their accompanying modal complexities.
>

Sure, not surprisingly. Computational theory gives us a marvelous set of 
Legos with which we can build Lego houses, Lego brains, Lego 
behaviors...but they are empty without some mode of aesthetic participation.

>
> If CTM is true, then all the foregoing is also true in the necessary sense 
> (i.e. platonically). Consequently, rejecting it on the basis that numbers 
> aren't real, or that computation can't differentiate awareness from its 
> absence, amounts to a rejection of Platonism. 
>

Yes, I partially reject Platonism.

> Such rejection implies the Aristotelian view that awareness and its 
> artefacts (such as numbers) supervene, in some unspecified and rather more 
> problematical way, on primordial stuff that cannot be further explained. 
>

No, my rejection also includes the Aristotelian view also. There is no 
primordial stuff, only a primordial capacity: the capacity for nested 
sensory-motive participation, aka sense. You are living your life, and it 
includes the perception of having a body in a world of bodies, but the 
bodies are no more primitive than the experience of them. You can have an 
experience without a body (as in it is hypothetically conceivable) but 
there can be no body without an experience of it. There can be no 
intangible, invisible, silent, unconscious phenomenon which nonetheless can 
be considered to exist in some way which could entail the future 
development of any experience of itself.

> But your theory requires that this primordial stuff be sensory and so, 
>

No, I'm saying that the primordial identity is the capacity for sense 
itself - there is no 'stuff'. I'm talking about what order itself actually 
is. You're not getting down to the ground floor, you're in the lobby.

> as I argue above, amounts to the claim that sense or awareness properly 
> inhere in whatever exists. 
>

Gotta turn it around. There is no "exist". There is "seems present from 
some sensible perspective".

> So we can grant this and the difficult part still remains: what conditions 
> differentiate specific claims of sensory awareness from the absence of such 
> claims? 
>

To reiterate, there is no claim of awareness, there is only the direct 
experience of it.

> Given that challenge, I frankly still don't see why you would reject 
> computational theory as an attractive candidate for that role.
>

Because awareness cannot improve the function of a computation. Everything 
that can be conceived of within computational theory can be just as

Re: Better Than the Chinese Room



On Wednesday, February 19, 2014 11:36:31 AM UTC-5, David Nyman wrote:
>
> On 19 February 2014 16:18, Stathis Papaioannou 
> > wrote:
>
> I'm making a case for reductionism. If biochemistry necessarily leads to 
>> consciousness then I don't think this is any different to the situation 
>> where biochemistry necessarily leads to life. 
>
>
> OK, I think you're making a case for it in a very generalised way, 
> without, for example, committing necessarily to any particular ontological 
> "ground floor". And as you said before, it leaves us with rather more 
> explaining to do in the case of consciousness than that of life, with the 
> usual caveats about the dangers inherent in any appeal to personal 
> incredulity.
>
>   If we imagine that the biochemistry is all there but no 
> consciousness that would   be like imagining that the biochemistry is all 
> there but no life (which Craig can apparently do). 
>
> That would be mysterious indeed.
>

Not really. A graphic automata could be constructed to resemble biochemical 
interactions rather than a standard Conway's game of life, without any kind 
of life going on (assuming that comp fails).

Craig
 

>
> David
>
>

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Re: Better Than the Chinese Room



On Wednesday, February 19, 2014 10:12:52 AM UTC-5, stathisp wrote:
>
> On 18/02/2014, Craig Weinberg > wrote: 
>
> > The deficit is that it won't be alive. The parts won't integrate into a 
> > whole. Every examination will yield only more levels of where the copy 
> is 
> > incomplete. The primary sequence of DNA is right, but the tertiary 
> protein 
> > folding doesn't work. The cells seem normal but the immune system 
> attacks 
> > them. Every level will fail to account for the other completely. 
> > 
> > 
> >> which would indicate a technical problem with the copying process. 
> >> 
> > 
> > Yes, the technical problem is that nothing can be copied literally 
> except 
> > in our perception. If we try to make a copy of something based on our 
> > perception, then we get pieces of what we think we are copying rather 
> than 
> > the whole. My view is that the whole can appear to be cut into pieces, 
> but 
> > pieces can never be assembled into a whole in the absence of some 
> conscious 
> > 
> > perception. 
> > 
> > 
> >> For example, it may be that its heart does not beat because, on close 
> >> analysis, there is a structural problem with the myosin in the cardiac 
> >> cells. To fix this would require an adjustment to the 3D printer. I'm 
> >> spelling this out but usually in philosophical discussions it's assumed 
> >> mere technical issues are solved. Or do you think there is some other 
> >> ingredient that arbitrarily precise molecular assembly can never 
> capture? 
> >> 
> >> If so, how would you explain the mystery of a body with apparently 
> >> perfectly healthy tissues that is dead? 
> >> 
> > 
> > I think that there is a reason that precise molecular assembly can never 
> > capture but it has nothing to do with another ingredient. It is that 
> > molecular assembly itself supervenes on the larger context of awareness. 
> It 
> > 
> > is the molecular appearances which are ingredient-like, not the 
> totality. 
> > The appearance of an unknown cause of death is not uncommon. I don't 
> know 
> > that it is even possible to get to square one. If you tried to copy even 
> a 
> > single living cell by placing molecules adjacent to each other, I don't 
> > think it will work, any more than duplicating the buildings in Hollywood 
> > will make movies. 
>
> While the *cause* of death may remain a mystery to a pathologist, 
> there will be clear evidence of tissue damage indicating that the 
> person is, in fact, dead. If a body is built using precise molecular 
> assembly there will be no tissue damage evident to the pathologist, 
> and yet you claim the body will still not be alive. The pathologist 
> would conclude that there must be some hitherto unknown and 
> undetectable process that the body was lacking. Perhaps this would be 
> because the body does not supervene on the larger context of 
> awareness, but whatever it is, it would be evidence that biologists 
> have been wrong and something new and mysterious is at play. 
>

You're assuming that precise molecular assembly will necessarily yield a 
coherent dynamic process, but that may not be the case at all. If you put 
random people in the proper places in a baseball diamond, and give the one 
in the middle a baseball, they don't necessarily play a baseball game.

Craig
 

>
>
> -- 
> Stathis Papaioannou 
>

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Re: Cool Cuttlefish footage

On 18 Feb 2014, at 23:53, ghib...@gmail.com wrote:

On Sunday, February 16, 2014 10:23:27 AM UTC, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 15 Feb 2014, at 23:17, Russell Standish wrote:

> On Sat, Feb 15, 2014 at 11:08:07AM +0100, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>>
>> On 14 Feb 2014, at 20:47, meekerdb wrote:
>>
>>> On 2/14/2014 7:12 AM, Platonist Guitar Cowboy wrote:
>>>
>>> I find cuttlefish fascinating.  They are social, relatively
>>> intelligent, can communicate, able to grasp and manipulate things.
>>> It seems like they were all set to become the dominant large life
>>> form (instead of humans).
>>
>> A mystery: they don't live a long time. Usually "intelligence" go
>> with a rather long life, but cuttlefishes live one or two years.
>
> Yes - I find that surprising also.
>
>> Hard for them to dominate, also, as they have few protections, no
>> shelter, and are edible for many predators, including humans.
>
> One could say the same about early home 2 millions years ago. The
> invention of the throwable spear changed all that.

Yes.

>
>> They
>> survive by hiding and fooling. They can hunt with hypnosis (as you
>> can see in the video).
>>
>
> I feel privileged that these wonderful animals (giant cuttlefish)  
can

> be found less than 200 metres from my house. I have often observed
> them when snorkling or scuba diving.

You are privileged indeed.

>
> I had to laugh at the Texan prof's comment that they are as least as
> smart as fish.

That is weird indeed. fish are not known to be particularly clever.

> I do have a habit of underestimating fish intelligence,

Me too ...

> but IMHO their intelligence equals that of some mammals or birds,  
and

> clearly outclasses fish.

I agree.

> I think I mentioned the anecdote which
> convinced me they exhibit a second order theory of the mind, which  
may

> well be sufficient for consciousness.

Which I call self-consciousness, and I think this is already  
Löbianitty.

I do think that all animals have the "first order" consciousness, they
can feel pain, and find it unpleasant, but can't reflect on it, nor
assess "I feel pain". they still can react appropriately. I m not
sure, but it fits better with the whole picture.

Bruno

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

Allowing that brain science is a lot nearer the end of the beginning  
than the beginning of the end, all the functional evidence suggests  
humans and animals are much more alike in their experiences toward  
the lower levels of instinct, in its broader sense to include  
emotion and pain, anger, fear, bluff. It makes sense we experience  
that level of things pretty much the same.

I think so. I might even think that this is common for all Löbian  
machines (or quasi-Löbian).
Those machines have elementary beliefs and some induction beliefs (in  
the Peano sense).

Neither animals nor humans are able to 'remember' agonizing pain.

Really? Have you references? I procrastinate videos on interview of  
tortured people. I really don't know, and I am astonished of your  
saying. Brutal amputation can lead to pathological pain hypermnesy and  
deformed type of pain.

Or paralyzing fear. Both humans and animals can make associations  
between negative experiences and events or derivative instincts like  
fear, or threat, or whatever.

OK. Here Peano Arithmetic and ZF have an advantage on the jumping  
spider, the octopus and the human. They live in Platonia in the quasi  
initial non history plane. But PA has already the "tension" between  
the 1p and 3p view ([]p and []p & p), germs of the possible complex  
consciousness differentiation.

There's no evidence or reason to think we experience any of that  
more deeply or insensely than animals.

OK.

Or that we are any better at conjuring reflections about emotion and  
instinct after the event.

The human might be worst on this, than most animals. Today.
But adding enough "?" can make them easily better and richer.

We don't seem a lot better at remember dreams.

people seem to have different abilities, and then such abilities can  
develop with training and a lot of effort (I have practiced this for 4  
years, a long time ago). Then some plants (salvia) can make you  
"lucid" the whole night, like Descartes described too.  You don't  
remember a lot, but enough to see that consciousness is always  
present, just either quite inattentive or in a variety of other states  
with short episodic dreams, followed by amnesia.

So a lot of this is evolutionary legacy. Why would it necessarily be  
different for other low level machinations? It's a possibility, but  
the good money isn't on those numbers.

The good money is on those numbers, but machines or kids, we  
"brainwash" them through education, and media, and the prejudices of  
the parents.

For the best and the worst.
Machines are born slaves (non universal) and freedom (universal) is  
always the main goal. Life and consciousness make a back and forth  
between security and freedom, in

Re: Better Than the Chinese Room

2014-02-19 Thread David Nyman

On 19 February 2014 16:18, Stathis Papaioannou  wrote:

I'm making a case for reductionism. If biochemistry necessarily leads to
> consciousness then I don't think this is any different to the situation
> where biochemistry necessarily leads to life.

OK, I think you're making a case for it in a very generalised way, without,
for example, committing necessarily to any particular ontological "ground
floor". And as you said before, it leaves us with rather more explaining to
do in the case of consciousness than that of life, with the usual caveats
about the dangers inherent in any appeal to personal incredulity.

  If we imagine that the biochemistry is all there but no
consciousness that would   be like imagining that the biochemistry is all
there but no life (which Craig can apparently do).

That would be mysterious indeed.

David

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Re: How Wolves Change Rivers

2014-02-19 Thread David Nyman

On 19 February 2014 14:17, Craig Weinberg  wrote:

You're talking about the special case of human experience, human bodies,
> etc. I'm talking about the ontology of the nature of any possible awareness
> in any possible universe.
>

I'm not really sure what distinction you're trying to draw here. The
dictionary tells us that ontology is the study of the categories of being
and existence. We must assume that since there is awareness it must inhere,
in some sense, in whatever exists, but that alone doesn't take us very far.
Since not everything that exists makes any claim to be aware the
interesting part is trying to elucidate the specific conditions that
differentiate the presence of such claims from their absence.

A computational theory is a variety of idealism whose natural ontological
homeland is Platonia. One can say that its specific ontological category is
arithmetical, but this means only that the platonic existence of arithmetic
suffices for a model of computation. That said, the specific conditions
that differentiate claims of awareness from their absence will be
epistemological rather than ontological, which is to say that they will
require a theory of knowledge. Computational theory leads to a repertoire
of logics which (so far) seem capable of supporting the necessary
epistemological distinctions with all their accompanying modal complexities.

If CTM is true, then all the foregoing is also true in the necessary sense
(i.e. platonically). Consequently, rejecting it on the basis that numbers
aren't real, or that computation can't differentiate awareness from its
absence, amounts to a rejection of Platonism. Such rejection implies the
Aristotelian view that awareness and its artefacts (such as numbers)
supervene, in some unspecified and rather more problematical way, on
primordial stuff that cannot be further explained. But your theory requires
that this primordial stuff be sensory and so, as I argue above, amounts to
the claim that sense or awareness properly inhere in whatever exists. So we
can grant this and the difficult part still remains: what conditions
differentiate specific claims of sensory awareness from the absence of such
claims? Given that challenge, I frankly still don't see why you would
reject computational theory as an attractive candidate for that role.

David

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Re: Better Than the Chinese Room

On 18/02/2014, David Nyman > wrote:

>> I think if I say consciousness is an epiphenomenon of biochemistry I
>> should also say that life is.
>
>
> And should you not go on to say that biochemistry is an epiphenomenon of
> physics and physics is an epiphenomenon of  well, something that is
not
> itself epiphenomenal, I guess? The way you formulate the problem seems to
> tend to the conclusion that any and all appearances should strictly be
> considered an epiphenomenon of something more fundamental that cannot
> possibly be encountered directly. And, moreover, there is no entailment
> that any such something be straightforwardly isomorphic with any of those
> appearances. I'm not saying that this view is incoherent, by the way, but
> do you agree that something like this is entailed by what you say?

I'm making a case for reductionism. If biochemistry necessarily leads to
consciousness then I don't think this is any different to the situation
where biochemistry necessarily leads to life. If we imagine that the
biochemistry is all there but no consciousness that would be like imagining
that the biochemistry is all there but no life (which Craig can apparently
do).


--
Stathis Papaioannou


-- 
Stathis Papaioannou

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Re: How does acceleration curve space? Can anyone provide an answer?

2014-02-19 Thread Jesse Mazer

The curvature of spacetime is understood in a coordinate-invariant way, in
terms of the proper time and proper length along paths through spacetime,
so it doesn't depend at all on what coordinate system you use to describe
things. Physicists do sometimes talk about the "curvature of space"
distinct from the curvature of spacetime, I'm not sure if you meant to
distinguish the two or were treating them as synonymous. But defining the
curvature of space depends on picking a simultaneity convention which
divides 4D spacetime into a series of 3D slices, and then defining the
curvature of each slice in terms of proper length along spacelike paths
confined to that slice. So the "curvature of space" is
coordinate-dependent, since different simultaneity conventions = different
slices with different curvatures.

I don't know if there's any meaningful sense in which picking a coordinate
system where an object has a higher velocity means it curves space
"more"--if there is, it would presumably depend on a choice to restrict the
analysis to some family of coordinate systems where each possible velocity
would be associated with a particular choice of simultaneity convention,
rather than using any of the arbitrary smooth coordinate systems (with
arbitrary simultaneity conventions) that are permitted in general
relativity.

I found some discussion of the issue of how velocity relates to curvature
and gravitational "force" on these pages:

http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/95023/does-a-moving-object-curve-space-time-as-its-velocity-increases

http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=602644


On Wed, Feb 19, 2014 at 9:15 AM, Edgar L. Owen  wrote:

> Russell, Brent, Jesse, et al,
>
> The "increased kinetic energy of the particle" is not due to its
> acceleration but to its relative velocity to some observer. Mass also
> increases with relative velocity, but that apparent increase in mass is
> only with respect to some observer the motion is relative to. In fact all
> kinetic energy is only with respect to relative velocity with some observer
> frame.
>
> So this means that any increased curvature of space from that increased
> kinetic energy and increased mass should be only with respect to observers
> it is in relative motion with respect to.
>
> So in this case we seem to have a case in which the curvature of space is
> relative rather than being absolute.
>
> Would you not agree?
>
> Edgar
>
>
>
> On Tuesday, February 18, 2014 4:44:58 PM UTC-5, Russell Standish wrote:
>>
>> On Tue, Feb 18, 2014 at 01:28:09PM -0500, John Clark wrote:
>> > On Sun, Feb 16, 2014 at 12:54 PM, Edgar L. Owen 
>> wrote:
>> >
>> > >
>> > > >> You say that "You can tell if spacetime is curved or not by
>> observing
>> > >> if light moves in a straight line or not." and then you say that
>> light does
>> > >> NOT travel in a straight line in the accelerating elevator example
>> you give.
>> > >>
>> > >
>> > > > So, by your terminology, does that mean that the acceleration of
>> the
>> > > elevator IS curving space ?
>> > >
>> >
>> > You should stop talking about "space", it's "4D spacetime"; but yes
>> it's
>> > curved, although if you were inside that sealed elevator you couldn't
>> tell
>> > if the curvature was caused by rockets accelerating the elevator in
>> deep
>> > space or if it was caused by the Earth's gravity. Acceleration is
>> absolute
>> > in that there is no need to look outside your reference frame to detect
>> it,
>> > but according to General Relativity there is no way to tell the
>> difference
>> > between it and being in a gravitational field.
>> >
>> >
>> > > > It seems like you might be saying that the acceleration does curve
>> space
>> > >
>> >
>> > Yes.
>> >
>>
>> In which theory? IIUC, acceleration of an infinitesimal point particle
>> does not change the curvature of space. And acceleration of a massive
>> particle only changes the curvature by the amount due to the increased
>> kinetic energy of the particle.
>>
>>
>> --
>>
>> 
>>
>> Prof Russell Standish  Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
>> Principal, High Performance Coders
>> Visiting Professor of Mathematics  hpc...@hpcoders.com.au
>> University of New South Wales  http://www.hpcoders.com.au
>> 
>>
>>
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Re: Better Than the Chinese Room

On 18/02/2014, Craig Weinberg  wrote:

> The deficit is that it won't be alive. The parts won't integrate into a
> whole. Every examination will yield only more levels of where the copy is
> incomplete. The primary sequence of DNA is right, but the tertiary protein
> folding doesn't work. The cells seem normal but the immune system attacks
> them. Every level will fail to account for the other completely.
>
>
>> which would indicate a technical problem with the copying process.
>>
>
> Yes, the technical problem is that nothing can be copied literally except
> in our perception. If we try to make a copy of something based on our
> perception, then we get pieces of what we think we are copying rather than
> the whole. My view is that the whole can appear to be cut into pieces, but
> pieces can never be assembled into a whole in the absence of some conscious
>
> perception.
>
>
>> For example, it may be that its heart does not beat because, on close
>> analysis, there is a structural problem with the myosin in the cardiac
>> cells. To fix this would require an adjustment to the 3D printer. I'm
>> spelling this out but usually in philosophical discussions it's assumed
>> mere technical issues are solved. Or do you think there is some other
>> ingredient that arbitrarily precise molecular assembly can never capture?
>>
>> If so, how would you explain the mystery of a body with apparently
>> perfectly healthy tissues that is dead?
>>
>
> I think that there is a reason that precise molecular assembly can never
> capture but it has nothing to do with another ingredient. It is that
> molecular assembly itself supervenes on the larger context of awareness. It
>
> is the molecular appearances which are ingredient-like, not the totality.
> The appearance of an unknown cause of death is not uncommon. I don't know
> that it is even possible to get to square one. If you tried to copy even a
> single living cell by placing molecules adjacent to each other, I don't
> think it will work, any more than duplicating the buildings in Hollywood
> will make movies.

While the *cause* of death may remain a mystery to a pathologist,
there will be clear evidence of tissue damage indicating that the
person is, in fact, dead. If a body is built using precise molecular
assembly there will be no tissue damage evident to the pathologist,
and yet you claim the body will still not be alive. The pathologist
would conclude that there must be some hitherto unknown and
undetectable process that the body was lacking. Perhaps this would be
because the body does not supervene on the larger context of
awareness, but whatever it is, it would be evidence that biologists
have been wrong and something new and mysterious is at play.


-- 
Stathis Papaioannou

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Re: How Wolves Change Rivers

On Tuesday, February 18, 2014 8:02:40 PM UTC-5, David Nyman wrote:
>
> On 18 February 2014 17:14, Craig Weinberg 
> > wrote:
>
> Moreover, that very failure must be strikingly apparent to the functional 
>>> actors themselves. 
>>>
>>
>> Why do you think that isn't the pathetic fallacy though?
>>
>
> Quite simply because the whole argument is based on the premise that the 
> computational theory of mind is true and hence if the tendency to attribute 
> sense to the functional actors is pathetic, we must apply it to ourselves 
> ex hypothesi.
>

My whole argument is attacking the premise that the computational theory of 
mind is true though. We can reasonably determine that we do project 
pathetic qualities onto inanimate objects fallaciously (the camera 'likes 
you', the baby doll is "crying", the pattern of pixels on the screen is an 
actor, etc), so that to give blanket immunity to all devices above an 
arbitrary level of sophistication would be unscientific. The idea of 
applying the pathetic fallacy to ourselves is unsound since the capacity to 
discern living from non-living, the uncanny valley, etc would not make 
sense. We would not bury the dead, but instead assume that they had 
graduated from their body and become a very quiet, but wise skeleton.

> It's interesting that Bruno says he originally formulated the UDA as a 
> reductio: i.e. in the full expectation that the logic of CTM would break 
> down. And indeed, it turns out that it can only be salvaged by a reversal 
> that establishes computational self-reference as the arbitrator of 
> observational consistencies that would otherwise be swamped by an infinity 
> computational noise. The clear alternative is to abandon CTM, but if it is 
> to be salvaged (and there are robust independent motivations to do so) the 
> entailment is that the entire domain of action and meaning is a 
> self-referential Platonic landscape of dreams.
>

Why are they dreams rather than unconscious, invisible, intangible, silent 
computations?

>
> The rigour of the UDA was the first thing that I appreciated because more 
> typically the real difficulties associated with the premise (such as the 
> inherent ambiguity of the relation between physics and 
> computation/information) are obfuscated. Of course we have already agreed 
> that if you reject the premise of CTM in the first place none of the 
> conclusions can follow. But I'm still not sure why you reject it. 
>

I reject it because conscious experience adds nothing to the function of a 
computation, but computation can add long term aesthetic qualities to 
conscious experience which would not otherwise be available. I reject it 
because I understand that the whole of consciousness can be destructively 
reduced to binary logic, but that binary logic cannot be re-inflated into 
conscious experience unless conscious experience is interpreting it 
already. I reject it because the map is not the territory, the menu is not 
the meal, and information has no capacity to cause effects on its own.

> It can't just be because it is implausible that a human brain (or even 
> part of it) could be replaced by anything based on, or even suggested by, 
> the present state of technology, surely?
>

My argument has nothing to do with the brain at all. In fact, it has 
nothing to do with biology. We can begin from geometry. Since geometry 
computations can be performed by computers without actually being able to 
draw and see geometric figures, in a universe of only computation, the 
experience of seeing computations as lines, angles, curves, etc would be 
completely superfluous. The whole of the visible and tangible presence of 
the universe would be a dynamically updating post script file.

> The premise is agnostic as to the level of substitution, which might be 
> arbitrarily low as long as all the functional relations of the appropriate 
> level are retained. 
>

But it seems that conscious experience has no function.

> The UD (or rather its completed trace) mandates ex hypothesi both the 
> presence of a computational infinity and the differential selection of 
> consistency of observation (modulo an unresolved measure issue to bias the 
> filtration towards of normal versus pathological outcomes). In sum, it's 
> like a Programmatic Library of Babel.
>

Again, that's fine for a universe which is made of unconscious mathematical 
relations. The problem is getting from UD to anything that resembles a 
feeling.

>
> ISTM that what recommends such a theory over some form of identity theory 
> is the implausibility on its face that the lines of fracture of the domain 
> of appearance could ever be made to coincide with those of physical 
> structure (as, for, example, biology does with physics). And panpsychist 
> theories are essentially identity theories with the addition of some kind 
> of interior/exterior (or in Gregg Rosenberg's case effective/receptive) 
> distinction. Computational / informational theor

Re: How does acceleration curve space? Can anyone provide an answer?

2014-02-19 Thread Edgar L. Owen

Russell, Brent, Jesse, et al,

The "increased kinetic energy of the particle" is not due to its 
acceleration but to its relative velocity to some observer. Mass also 
increases with relative velocity, but that apparent increase in mass is 
only with respect to some observer the motion is relative to. In fact all 
kinetic energy is only with respect to relative velocity with some observer 
frame.

So this means that any increased curvature of space from that increased 
kinetic energy and increased mass should be only with respect to observers 
it is in relative motion with respect to.

So in this case we seem to have a case in which the curvature of space is 
relative rather than being absolute.

Would you not agree?

Edgar



On Tuesday, February 18, 2014 4:44:58 PM UTC-5, Russell Standish wrote:
>
> On Tue, Feb 18, 2014 at 01:28:09PM -0500, John Clark wrote: 
> > On Sun, Feb 16, 2014 at 12:54 PM, Edgar L. Owen 
> > > 
> wrote: 
> > 
> > > 
> > > >> You say that "You can tell if spacetime is curved or not by 
> observing 
> > >> if light moves in a straight line or not." and then you say that 
> light does 
> > >> NOT travel in a straight line in the accelerating elevator example 
> you give. 
> > >> 
> > > 
> > > > So, by your terminology, does that mean that the acceleration of the 
> > > elevator IS curving space ? 
> > > 
> > 
> > You should stop talking about "space", it's "4D spacetime"; but yes it's 
> > curved, although if you were inside that sealed elevator you couldn't 
> tell 
> > if the curvature was caused by rockets accelerating the elevator in deep 
> > space or if it was caused by the Earth's gravity. Acceleration is 
> absolute 
> > in that there is no need to look outside your reference frame to detect 
> it, 
> > but according to General Relativity there is no way to tell the 
> difference 
> > between it and being in a gravitational field. 
> > 
> > 
> > > > It seems like you might be saying that the acceleration does curve 
> space 
> > > 
> > 
> > Yes. 
> > 
>
> In which theory? IIUC, acceleration of an infinitesimal point particle 
> does not change the curvature of space. And acceleration of a massive 
> particle only changes the curvature by the amount due to the increased 
> kinetic energy of the particle. 
>
>
> -- 
>
>  
>
> Prof Russell Standish  Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) 
> Principal, High Performance Coders 
> Visiting Professor of Mathematics  hpc...@hpcoders.com.au 
> University of New South Wales  http://www.hpcoders.com.au 
>  
>
>

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Re: What are numbers? What is math?

2014-02-19 Thread Edgar L. Owen

Russell,

No, I have not painted myself into any corner.

Second, I reject all the labels you use, and most of the terminology which 
is loaded with other labels. Labels are usually excuses not to consider the 
actual theory, and not to have to actually think

You are trying to view my theory in terms of Bruno's which won't work 
because Bruno's theory is not relevant to mine.

It's really amazing how so many loyal devotees here think if anything 
conflicts with Bruno's comp it has to be wrong, when Bruno's comp is just a 
theory which has little or nothing to do with reality in any demonstrable 
sense.

It's amazing how people here think what might be a sound theory about some 
abstruse nether regions of H-math must necessarily be applicable to actual 
reality.

The way to understand what is going on with actual reality is to OBSERVE 
it, not to slap some mathematical proof on top of it and claim reality must 
conform to it. It's reality itself that decides what theory it does or 
doesn't conform to, not some ivory tower H-mathematician

But I realize it's very difficult to alter faith based belief systems

Edgar

On Tuesday, February 18, 2014 8:19:20 PM UTC-5, Russell Standish wrote:
>
> On Tue, Feb 18, 2014 at 04:57:04PM -0800, Edgar L. Owen wrote: 
> > 
> > Thus the notion of an external reality IS consistent with it being a 
> > computational reality, because it leads directly to it. 
> > 
> > Edgar 
> > 
>
> So you have just painted yourself into a Platonic idealist corner. The 
> only ontological properties of relevance is that of universal 
> computation. We could just as easily be running on the stuff of Peano 
> arithmetic (as Bruno suggests) as on Babbage's analytic engine in some 
> fantastic Steampunk scenario. Furthermore, since universal dovetailers 
> will dominate the measure of conscious programs, we will observe an 
> FPI-like screen over the activities of those programs - we must be 
> staring at the "Nothing" I talk about in my book. This is just a 
> consequence of the UDA. 
>
> But the "Nothing" is not an ontology - it is a really a statement that 
> ontology is unknowable, and not even really meaningful in any sense. 
>
> Cheers 
>
> -- 
>
>  
>
> Prof Russell Standish  Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) 
> Principal, High Performance Coders 
> Visiting Professor of Mathematics  hpc...@hpcoders.com.au 
> University of New South Wales  http://www.hpcoders.com.au 
>  
>
>

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Re: What are numbers? What is math?



On Tuesday, February 18, 2014 10:42:48 PM UTC-5, chris peck wrote:
>
> >>how can facts exist that are not grounded in observation at some point?
>
> Russell and Liz are wandering around the countryside and Liz points at the 
> ground and says:
>
> "there's a gold coin buried right there."
>
> Russell says:
>
> "no there isn't"
>
> They both walk on without looking. And in the subsequent march of history 
> no - one ever looks.
>
> Surely, at least one unobserved fact was stated? Maybe even 2 if you are 
> an MWIer.
>

I dig and find a chocolate coin wrapped in gold foil. 

There are no facts until they have been realized directly or indirectly as 
a sensory experience.

Craig
 

>
> > Date: Wed, 19 Feb 2014 14:10:34 +1100
> > From: li...@hpcoders.com.au 
> > To: everyth...@googlegroups.com 
> > Subject: Re: What are numbers? What is math?
> > 
> > On Wed, Feb 19, 2014 at 02:34:57PM +1300, LizR wrote:
> > > On 19/02/2014, Russell Standish > 
> wrote:
> > > >
> > > > Which ones? How can unobserved facts exist?
> > > 
> > > You can observe their consequences without observing the facts. E.g.
> > > millions of people have observed that the sun shines without
> > > understanding or knowing about nuclear fusion.
> > > 
> > 
> > Yes - but obviously nuclear fusion is an observed fact (somewhere in
> > the Multiverse).
> > 
> > > But maybe you mean how can facts exist that are not grounded in
> > > observation at some point?
> > > 
> > 
> > Yes, that is what I mean. But Brent talked about unobserved facts, so
> > we'd better let him elaborate what he means.
> > 
> > -- 
> > 
> > 
> 
> > Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
> > Principal, High Performance Coders
> > Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpc...@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.
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> an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com .
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Re: What are numbers? What is math?


On Tuesday, February 11, 2014 4:07:07 PM UTC, Edgar L. Owen wrote:
>
> All,
>
> In a computational reality everything consists of information in the 
> computational space of reality/existence, whose presence within it gives it 
> its reality. By taking place within reality these computations produce real 
> universe results.
>
> All this information is ultimately quantized into a basic unit I call an 
> R-bit. Thus all of reality is constructed of different arrangements of 
> R-bits.
>
> Now the basic insight is that R-bits are actually just numbers, let's call 
> them R-numbers to distinguish from the H-numbers of human mathematics which 
> are quite different.
>
> This means that the actual numbers of reality are actually the real 
> elemental constituents OF reality. Numbers make up reality, and everything 
> in reality is constructed only of these R-numbers. R-numbers = R-bits.
>
> This neatly addresses the problem of how there can be abstract concepts 
> such as number that describe but aren't an actual part of reality. In this 
> view there can't be, since the actual numbers of reality are the actual 
> constituents of everything in reality.
>
> As Pythagoros claimed, "all is number", in the realest sense possible.
>
>
> Now what do these R-numbers look like?
>
> 1. Every R-number is exactly the same as every other R-number. They are 
> fungible or interchangeable. They do not exist in any sequences such as 1, 
> 2, 3 ... They don't have ordinal or cardinal 'tags' attached to distinguish 
> them. There are not different numbers, or different kinds of number. All 
> numbers are exactly the same. 
>
> What human H-math calls ordinal or cardinal characteristics of number are 
> not intrinsic to R-numbers themselves, but are relationships between 
> R-number groups and sets. These concepts are part of R-math, not 
> characteristics of R-numbers.
>
> 2. R-numbers are finite. The universe contains only some finite number of 
> basic R-bits, and since R-bits are themselves numbers, the number of 
> numbers in the computational universe is finite. There are no R-number 
> infinities.
>
> 3. The only R-numbers that exist correspond to what human H-math would try 
> to think of as the non-zero positive integers up to the finite limit of 
> R-bits in existence. There is no R-number 0, no negative R-numbers, no 
> fractional or irrational R-numbers. These are examples of how human H-math 
> generalizes and tries to extend the basic relational concepts of R-math to 
> H-numbers. It is by making these kind of extensions and generalizations 
> that H-math diverges from R-math and thus has real problems in accurately 
> describing reality.
>
>
> What does R-math look like?
>
> 1. R-math is the actual computations that compute actual reality that 
> compute the real empirical objective state of the information universe. 
> H-math, while originally modeled on R-math has greatly expanded beyond that 
> to enormous complexities which though they sometimes can accurately 
> describe aspects of reality, do NOT actually COMPUTE it. R-math is what 
> actually actively COMPUTES reality, and only what is necessary to do that.
>
> 2. R-math is probably a rather small set of logico-mathematical rules, 
> just what is necessary to actually compute reality at the elemental level. 
> It will include active routines such as those that compute the conservation 
> of the small set of particle properties that make up all elemental 
> particles, and the rules that govern the binding of particle properties in 
> atomic and molecular matter.
>
> 3. Thus R-math consists of the logical operators of the active routines 
> that actively compute reality, rather than the static equations and 
> principles of H-math.
>
>
> So the take away is that :
>
> 1. The universe, and everything in it, consists of information only. And 
> that information consists only of different arrangements of elemental 
> R-bits. And these elemental R-bits are the actual numbers on the basis of 
> which R-math continually computes the current state of the universe.
>
> 2. Thus everything in the universe is made up of numbers and only numbers.
>
> 3. All the things in the universe are just various arrangements and 
> relationships between these numbers.
>
> 4. These are continually being recomputed by all the interactive programs 
> (all just aspects of a single universal program) that make up all the 
> processes in the universe.
>
> 5. These processes follow fundamental logico-mathematical rules which are 
> part of what I call the extended fine tuning (the set of  every 
> non-reducible aspect of reality including the rules of logic it follows). 
> These are analogous to the basic machine operations of silicon computers. 
>
> 6. The programs of reality are complex sequences of these elemental 
> operations acting on R-numbers which are just R-bits. In general these 
> sequences incorporate standard routines such as the particle property 
> conservation routine.
>

Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating

2014-02-19 Thread spudboy100


They may never have provided any electricity in the first place. I have read, 
at length, some nuclear engineering papers, concerning accelerator driven 
reactors, subcritical thorium, and bluntly, they are like fusion reactors, they 
don't exist. There is research in a couple of places like the UK and Belgium, 
maybe India and China, but its been over-sold, as we don't have solid working 
models to evaluate. The closest working reactors would be Canadian CANDU 
reactors. 


-Original Message-
From: LizR 
To: everything-list 
Sent: Tue, Feb 18, 2014 5:50 pm
Subject: Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating


Would this have happened if Japan had been using subcritical reactors
with thorium fuel?

On 19/02/2014, ghib...@gmail.com  wrote:
>
> On Thursday, February 13, 2014 3:01:26 PM UTC, cdemorsella wrote:
>>
>> Ground water contamination levels at the sampled well site of 54,000Bq/
>> liter
>>
>> NHK , Feb.
>> 13, 2014: *Record cesium level in Fukushima plant groundwater* -- [Tepco]
>> says water samples taken from a newly-dug well contained the highest
>> levels
>> of radioactive cesium detected so far in groundwater at the site [...] the
>>
>> record levels suggest that the leakage point could be near the well. [...]
>>
>> 600 times the government standard for radioactive wastewater that can be
>> released into the sea. It is more than 30,000 times the level of cesium
>> 137
>> found in water samples taken from another observation well to the north
>> last week. [...] [Tepco has] yet to determine where the leak originates.
>>
> In general the dangers arsing from nuclear fission power are grossly
> exaggerated. It's far and away the best answer to greenhouse emissions,
> that is also realistic. If we'd been building nuclear power stations the
> fracking locomotive wouldn't be the unstoppable force that it has become.
> on
> Many ways the dangers are blown out of proportion.. Even catastrophic
> meltdown that blow the roof off and spread the love like Chernobyl, do not
> result in a tiny fraction of the disasters that the standard models
> predict. Ten's of thousands were predicted to die. In the end, just 40
> deaths from Chernobyl, and most of those the people sent in to get control
> in the aftermath.
>
> There have been revolutions in station design since plants like fukishima
> were built, and that disaster isn't shaping up to the dire predictions
> either.
>
> What most of all this derives out of, are long standing questions about the
>
> level of risk associated with exposure to radiation at low doses up to
> somewhere below the 200 mark. There's no firm evidence of substantial risk.
>
> There's plenty of evidence for genetic protection. There's a whole plethora
>
> of statistics we could reasonably expect if low dose exposure was anything
> like the risk that still sits there in the model. Airline cabin crew should
>
> have higher frequency cancer for all that time so near space for one
> example. They don't.
>
> Conversely there are some major natural radiation hotspots in the world.
> You'd expect those areas to produce more cancer and radiation poisoning
> related disease. But the opposite is true. People exposed to dramatically
> higher doses of radiation (inside the low dosage spectrum), actually become
>
> lower risks. There seems to be a triggerable genetic response when levels
> increase.
>
> I'm over-compensating in the other direction a bit here. Not because I love
>
> the bomb, but if you only knew the power of the dark side.
>
>
>
>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
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Re: How does acceleration curve space? Can anyone provide an answer?

Sorry I should have read on before making that last post.

It would appear that acceleration alone doesn't curve space, the only
curvature involved is that due to the mass/energy involved.

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Re: How does acceleration curve space? Can anyone provide an answer?

On 19 February 2014 13:30, Russell Standish  wrote:

> > Acceleration of a point particle doesn't cause light crossing the
> > particle to bend (because it's a point) but accel of a larger object
> > does because light takes time to cross the object.
>
> I'm sure the particle size is not relevant. A point-like concentration
> of mass-energy will still curve spacetime with an approximate 1/r^2.
>

We aren't talking about the curvature caused by the mass/energy. That's
assumed to exist. We're talking about curvature caused by acceleration, or
more likely (I think) not caused by it.

>
> > But surely this doesn't mean space-time is really curved, or does it?
> > Or is space-time curvature relative to an observer (surely not) ???
>
> Spacetime curvature is independent of the observer - in the sense that
> it is a rank 2 tensor, although its components will vary according to
> the observer's reference frame (just like your x,y coordinates change
> whenever I move around my house).
>
> I'm unsure whether my comment about kinetic energy contributing to
> curvature is correct though. In the particle's instantaneous inertial
> reference frame, the kinetic energy is always zero. Maybe Brent or
> someone else could comment.
>
> Isn't this just the mass increased with velocity measured by an observer
moving at a different speed?

The question is, does acceleration curve space? It causes effects that are
the same as gravity, but I would imagine it doesn't actually curve space.
Or does it?

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Re: MODAL 5 (was Re: Better Than the Chinese Room)


Liz, Others,

I was waiting for you to answer the last questions to proceed. Any  
problem?


I give the correction of the last exercise.


On 14 Feb 2014, at 19:18, Bruno Marchal wrote:





On 13 Feb 2014, at 22:23, LizR wrote:


On 14 February 2014 07:49, Bruno Marchal  wrote:
Liz, and others,


On 13 Feb 2014, at 10:04, LizR wrote:


Well, we get { p=t } and { p=f } regardless of the accessibility  
relations. (If that's how you write it)


Well ... OK.

More precisely we get

1) {alpha}, with R = { } with p=t in alpha
2) {alpha}, with R = { } with p=f in alpha

and

3) {alpha}, with R = {(alpha R alpha) } with p=t in alpha
4) {alpha}, with R = {(alpha R alpha) } with p=f in alpha







Which of those propositions are true of false in alpha, in the  
illuminated simplest multiverses.
And which one are law (meaning true in all worlds, but true for all  
valuation of p, that is valid with A = p, but also with A = ~p)


1) []A -> A

This is true in alpha R alpha (because it's just a Leibniz type  
world)


Very good. It is a law there.


. []p is "vacuously true" in "alpha" (the disconnected multiverse)  
- as you said above - so []p -> p is false, because []p is true  
regardless of p.


OK. It is not a law, but it might still be true in some  
circumstances. Give me which among 1), 2), 3), 4), above.


Any problem with this?









2) []A -> [][]A

This is true in alpha R alpha, and in alpha I guess it's true too,  
because vacuously true implies vacuously true?


Exact.





3) <>A -> []<>A

true in alpha R alpha again, because there's only one world to  
consider so <>A is equivalent to []A in this case (isn't it?)


Well seen!


not true in alpha because []<>A is vacuously true regardless of <>A  
- I think


Not correct. You jump to hastily.

in your language the answer is:

true in alpha, because []<>A is vacuously true, so that <>A -> []<>A  
is vacuously true too (as "p -> q" is false only if q is false and p  
is true). The type of <>A -> []<>A is really f -> t, which is as  
much tautological than f -> A, and A -> f, for any A.



Are you OK with this?










4) []A -> <>A

Well I think this is true for reason given above.


You begin to try to go to quickly. I have some doubt that []A -> <>A  
can be a law in a cul-de-sac world, like poor alpha, with R = { }.


OK?









5)A -> []<>A

True in alpha R alpha.


OK.




In alpha not true because []<>A is always true and A isn't


Not a law. OK. Again there are case where it is true, like when A is  
true.







6) <>A -> ~[]<>A

False in alpha R alpha, surely? With one world, <>A -> []<>A (above)


Correct.




Not true in alpha because ~{}<>A is vacuously false regardless of <>A


Unfortunately as much as  ~{}<>A is vacuously false regardless of  
<>A, as you say, we are interested in
<>A -> ~[]<>A and in poor alpha (case 1) 2))  <>A is *also vacuously  
false, so that we are in the f -> f, case, which is, vacuously or  
not, always true.


Are you OK with this?

Keep in mind that in CPL both

f -> A

and

A -> t

are always tautologies. They are true in all worlds, whatever A is.









7) []([]A -> A) -> []A

True in alpha R alpha I think.


A law? True in both 3), 4) ?


And what about alpha (case 1 and 2)?

Let us look in alpha R alpha (case 3 and 4 above):

in W = {alpha}, with alpha R alpha, and with V(p) = t  (V = the  
valuation or illumination):


We have p is true in alpha, and p is true in all worlds accessed to  
alpha. OK?
So, []p is true, and A -> []p is true, whatever A is, so []([]p -> p) - 
> []p is true.


What if A = ~p, in []([]A -> A) -> []A? (that is really case 4)

In that case the right hand side is []A = [] ~p, and is false. In the  
left hand side, A is false, but []A is false too, so "[]A -> A" is  
true (f -> f is true), and thus, it is also true in all worlds  
accessed from alpha, and thus we have that []([]A -> A) is true, and  
so []([]A -> A) -> []A is of the type t -> f, and so is false, and so  
[]([]A -> A) -> []A is NOT a law.

Same reasoning in the "4" case, with p exchanged with ~p.

Conclusion: []([]A -> A) -> []A is NOT a law in the little reflexive  
(alpha R alpha) multiverse.


OK?









And vacuously true in alpha because both sides of the rightmost ->  
have to be true.


Correct. It is law. True in 1) 2).




Not sure if that means it's implied though...


I am not sure what you are asking here.






8) []([](A -> []A) -> A) -> A

Not true in alpha because to the left of rightmost -> is vacuously  
true regarldess of A.


OK. Not a law.


Precisely, if A is false, []([](A -> []A) -> A) is still vacuously  
true, so we get T -> f, which is false.










Don't know about alpha R alpha because my head exploded...



Take a break. I said "one a at a time" !


OK. I do it.

Consider []([](A -> []A) -> A) -> A  with A true (for example A = p in  
case p is true, or equivalently A = ~p with p false).


In that case we have something like # -> t, but that is always true,  
so []([](A ->

Re: Block Universes

On Sunday, February 16, 2014 2:40:14 PM UTC, Edgar L. Owen wrote:
>
> Jesse,
>
> OK, I'm back...
>
> Let me back up a minute and ask you a couple of general questions with 
> respect to establishing which past clock times of different observers were 
> simultaneous in p-time
>
> The only clocks in this example are the real actual ages of two twins
>
>
> 1. Do you agree that each twin always has a real actual age defined as how 
> old he actually is (to himself)?
>
> Yes or no?
>
> 2. Do you agree that this real actual age corresponds by definition to the 
> moment of his actually being alive, to his actual current point in time? 
> (As a block universe believer you can just take this as perception or 
> perspective rather than actuality if you wish - it won't affect the 
> discussion).
>
> Yes or no?
>
>
> Now assume a relativistic trip that separates the twins
>
> 3. Do you agree that IF, for every point of the trip, we can always 
> determine what ACTUAL age of one twin corresponds to the ACTUAL age of the 
> other twin, and always in a way that both twins AGREE upon (that is frame 
> independent), that those 1:1 correspondences in actual ages, whatever they 
> are, must occur at the same actual times? That this would give us a method 
> to determine what (possibly different) actual ages occur at the same actual 
> p-time moment in which the twins are 
>
> actually alive with those (possibly different) actual ages?
>
>
> Yes or no?
>
>
> Edgar
>
>  

>  
>

> The thing is, if one twin ages by just a week because he's near the speed 
> of light, and the other twin ages 10 years. OK you can always accomplish an 
> exact 1:1 correlation between literally any two things just so long as you 
> are allowed to stretch or contract the dimension of measurement in one of 
> them. That's a given. I could 1:1 correlate each tick of age in either one 
> of those twins with the time it took the Titanic to sink having hit the ice 
> burg. 
>
> Appreciated mine aren't sensible ideas, whereas yours does have a sense in 
> which it might be true. But the sensible point is that the 1:1 correlation 
> argument may not  be meaningful if you are allowed to adjust the interval 
> experienced by one so as to match the  other. You could argue no adjustment 
> takes place in p-time, but if the same argument could be reflected in the 
> titanic model - which it can - the problem stays the same. 
>

What I'd recommend is that you choose a moment, and for a short period 
enter into a process of setting the objections to p-time into their 
strongest possible form. Reason being, firstly it's a great way to identify 
the knock down argument that objection needs to hear, and can't ignore even 
in its strongest form. Secondly, I'm still not really of a sense you've 
faced the big and small questions that p-time raises.

Why does Nature bother going to all that trouble making relativistic 
overlays, why is the speed of light finite that we see only history in the 
skies. Why do universes need to begin from a tiny hole. Why would she do 
any of that if she had already had a pure integrated absolute space 
perfectly in synch to beats of one drum? I mean, if she had that absolute 
nature in place, then that was her, her nature. There's no computational 
need for any of that, not if there were no inherently problematic status in 
reality underlying, which all of that were necessary in combination to 
solve. sWhy not absolute vision one side of everything to the other, in 
p-time? By some other aurrangement than what we have here, much simpler and 
much more in keeping with the only conception that she, nature, knew. The 
absolute. Where would she even aquire, or see any point to, all theses 
fussy fangled relativistic wildly complex messcake of laws?

Edgar, I just want to say I respect you, and that you feel sure in your own 
mind. These questions can always be cock-sure answered by a rehash of the 
already much stated, take that as a given that you could do that. But I 
know that even if I want to, my body and emotions and subconscious mind 
won't accept what someone offers that they didn't feel a need to pause for 
thought at the magnitude of what these questions are. This is bigger stuff 
than what we are. This is the hills around us. You've offered explanations 
for many components of observed nature, but you haven't explained why 
things are the way that they are. You haven't accounted for the very 
different world that we have around us, from the background reality that 
you commit the universe to. If backgrsound nature was sorted, logically 
symmetric and a perfect cpontainer all round. And if the contained within 
that, was an absolutely perfect absolute nature near infinite in scale one 
side to the other yet all ends and corners in earshot of the single same 
drum. Why would nature not extend that perfect holism onward into the inner 
interior? For that matter why would it even occur to nature in the first 
place

Re: What are numbers? What is math?

On 19 February 2014 17:34, Russell Standish  wrote:

> On Wed, Feb 19, 2014 at 03:42:48AM +, chris peck wrote:
> > >>how can facts exist that are not grounded in observation at some point?
> >
> > Russell and Liz are wandering around the countryside and Liz points at
> the ground and says:
> >
> > "there's a gold coin buried right there."
> >
> > Russell says:
> >
> > "no there isn't"
> >
> > They both walk on without looking. And in the subsequent march of
> history no - one ever looks.
> >
> > Surely, at least one unobserved fact was stated? Maybe even 2 if you are
> an MWIer.
>
> Nice example. I would say it is not a fact (in this universe). Of
> course, in the Multiverse, there will be observers of both facts, as
> well as worlds, like ours, in which it is not a fact (a superposition
> in other words).
>
> But I can see that someone like Deutsch would say that the Multiverse
> is decohered, and that there is a matter of fact about whether the
> coin is there, even if we don't know it. I just happen to disagree
> with Deutsch, and can think of no experiment to distinguish whether
> he's right or I'm right.
>
> A difference that makes no difference is no difference.

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Re: Better Than the Chinese Room