Re: Are all terrorrists Muslim? Not even close!
On 2 April 2015 at 19:40, Telmo Menezes wrote: > On Thu, Apr 2, 2015 at 12:19 AM, LizR wrote: > >> On 1 April 2015 at 20:50, Telmo Menezes wrote: >> >>> On Wed, Apr 1, 2015 at 1:40 AM, LizR wrote: >>> I hope that isn't an April Fool! Well, this isn't rocket science... In 2013, it was more likely Americans would be killed by a toddler than > a terrorist. In that year, three Americans were killed in the Boston > Marathon bombing, while toddlers killed five, all by accidentally shooting > a gun. Because all those guns make you safer... >>> >>> Guns can be very dangerous, but like drugs there is no way to stop >>> people from obtaining them. It's already possible to 3D print one, and this >>> technology will only improve from now on. >>> >>> So how does every other country in the world manage to have less guns >> per person than the USA? Magic? >> > > Independently of Brent's remarks, with which I agree, my point is that > even if forbidding people from owning guns works -- and I'm sure it works > to some degree at the moment -- such restrictions become increasingly > ineffective as technology progresses. > Who suggested banning guns? Are guns banned in, say, New Zealand? No. Yet there are less per head, and less injuries and deaths caused by them, probably because Kiwis own guns only for the reasons one might expect - hunting, for example - rather than whatever reason it is Americans do (it looks from the outside like a sort of national fetish, a theory that the glamourisation of violence in many American TV shows and movies would seem to support). So, anyway, any comments that address the actual situation? > > Home 3D-printed guns are at the prototype level at the moment. Both the > designs and 3D printing technology will keep improving and becoming > cheaper. People are already experimenting with 3D printing ammunition. > The technology to make atomic bombs in your basement exists. So, should that be made illegal? What do you think? > > The trouble with trying to solve problems by restricting access to > technology (in this case firearms) is that, as technology progresses, the > laws have to become increasingly repressive to keep up. Preventing people > from owning guns will soon devolve into a multi-prong approach where you > have to restrict access to information on the Internet (if that is even > possible), regulate the sale and ownership of 3D printers, worry about the > availability of the common components that go into gunpowder, etc. For any > difficulty you pose, there will be eventually a technological solution, and > the only possible response from the regulatory mindset is to forbid more > things, until we need permission to do almost anything. > Now that we've got the straw men out of the way, I find my question still stands. So, why *does *the USA have so many firearms per head compared to anywhere else in the world, even a few was zones? And why does it have the highest rate of firearm related deaths and injuries per head in the first world, and close to the highest in the world (outside war zones) ? Once you've answered that, then we can argue about whether there's any reason to fix the situation, and if so how to go about it. But so far, the cart is before the horse. > > The real problem we have to solve is this: how to attain a society where > we can trust each other? > Stop glamourising violence, perhaps? As an exercise you could try watching some NZ films (say) that involve violence, e.g. "Black Sheep". Now try watching some US film that involves violence (too numerous to mention). See which one makes it look horrible and painful and nasty, and which makes it look kind of cool and sexy. Just a symptom, of course, not a cause. > Repressive regulation goes in the opposite direction and it misses the > point. Brazil is on the lower end of the scale in your map, yet is has much > more gun violence per capita than the US, which shows us that lowering the > number of guns per capita is not guaranteed to solve anything. > You think that Europe has repressive regulations as far as guns are concerned? Can you find any Europeans who agree with you (apart from the odd psycho-killer?) So far the only counter examples have involved India and Brazil. But restricting things to western democracies - Europe and America and Australasia, say - still shows up the same disparity. (It isn't too surprising that people in Brazil and India have different problems to people in the 'west', after all.) Oh, wait, I forgot Switzerland. But since I haven't yet been told if the map is wrong on that front, or if Swiss households have a lot more people in than American ones (or if Brent was mistaken, perish the thought) I can't really comment on that. > > > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to
Re: The MGA revisited
On 01 Apr 2015, at 21:18, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On Wednesday, 1 April 2015, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 31 Mar 2015, at 17:48, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On Wednesday, April 1, 2015, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 30 Mar 2015, at 22:28, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On Tuesday, March 31, 2015, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 30 Mar 2015, at 10:06, LizR wrote: On 30 March 2015 at 19:26, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: Fading qualia in the setting of normal behaviour, if logically possible, would destroy the common idea of consciousness that we have. It would mean, for example, that you could have gone blind last week but not realise it. You would look at a painting, describe the painting, have an emotional response to the painting - but lack any visual experience of the painting. If that is possible, what meaning is left to attribute to the word "qualia"? Well, it would mean that comp is false, because the electronic replacements are not generating any conscious experience despite having their I/O matched to the rest of the brain. Yes, there would be p-zombies. Behaving like conscious person, but without any private knowledge, qualia, sensation or consciousness. And there would also be the possibility of partial p-zombies, which would mean that private knowledge, qualia, sensation and consciousness make no subjective difference, or equivalently that they don't exist. Yes, and this eventually show that we can believe in non- computationalism if we are ready to believe in zombies, and partial zombies. Bruno Did you survive with the artificial brain? "Oh, yes, no doubt about that, I feel no difference ... cling ... Oh, yes, no doubt about that, I feel no difference ... cling ... Oh, yes, no doubt about that, I feel no difference ... cling ... Oh, yes, no doubt about that, I feel no difference ... cling ... Oh, yes, no doubt about that, I feel no difference ... cling ... Oh, yes, no doubt about that, I feel no difference ... cling ... Oh, yes, no doubt about that, I feel no difference ... cling ... Oh, yes, no doubt about that, I feel no difference ... cling ... Oh, yes, no doubt about that, I feel no difference ... cling ... Oh, yes, no doubt about that, I feel no difference ... cling ... Oh, yes, no doubt about that, I feel no difference ... cling ... Oh, yes, no doubt about that, I feel no difference ... cling ... Oh, yes, no doubt about that, I feel no difference ... cling ... A partial zombie would mean that you do feel different but you don't notice that you feel different. This applies not only to a difference you might conceivably not notice, like colour reversal, but to a gross sensory or cognitive deficit, such as going completely blind or losing the ability to understand language. It seems to me that if you allow that such things can happen without you or anyone else noticing then the whole idea of consciousness is spurious. I think we agree on this. I have to think more if that can lead to a proof of computationalism, due to possible agnosologia (if that term is correct). I can imagine someone feeling less conscious, but losing all memories of having been more conscious, so that he does not feel the difference (like people becoming blind, but not noticing it). I am just the advocate of the devil, here. Anosognosia is the inability to recognise when you have an illness or a disability, usually in the context of neurological or psychiatric disorders. This differs from being a zombie in that behaviour is affected: if the patient suffers from cortical blindness with anosognosia, they are unable to recognise what is in front of them and walk into things. In addition, they not only have the deficit of lacking qualia, they have a specific delusional belief which cannot be shifted despite any evidence they might be presented with. You are right about anosognosia. But my point is that anosognosia might make conceivable partial zombiness, and thus comp or your functionalism false. Again, I agree that it would make consciousness spurious, but that is something to be expected from a computationalist believing in primitive matter. I just try to put myself in the mind of those people believing in both matter and mechanism. Bruno -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, sen
Re: The MGA revisited
On 01 Apr 2015, at 21:30, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On Wednesday, April 1, 2015, LizR wrote: On 1 April 2015 at 22:18, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 01 Apr 2015, at 02:05, LizR wrote: Well, no, there is no TOE that describes all features of the physical universe yet. But if comp is true, there is. If comp is true, the theory with the axioms Kxy = x + Sxyz = xy(zy), or elementary arithmetic HAVE TO describe all feature of the physical universe. If not comp is false. With comp, we cannot add anything to elementary arithmetic or to any sigma-1 complete set. That is the point of the reasoning. That we don't succeed, or have not yet extracted it is another point. The TOE is there. All the physical (but non geographical, nor historical) feature of physics must be explained by elementary arithmetic, or computationalism is false. That follows from the UDA. OK, but as you say - if comp is true. And I'm not saying you need to prove it's true because I know that's impossible. But as far as I know, no one has yet derived a convincing amount of physics from comp, so we don't yet have convincing evidence that it may well be true, if you see what I mean. (I think Bruce says the same thing in a post i'm about to read!) I don't think it's impossible to prove comp true. If comp were not true then it would be possible to make partial zombies. If partial zombies are possible then there would be no difference between you having qualia or lacking qualia, which is equivalent to saying consciousness does not exist; not just that it is epiphenomenal but that it isn't there at all. So if consciousness exists, comp must be true. That reasoning might asses that comp or your functionalism is provable, but comp, as I defined it, use Church-thesis (if only to get a universal dovetailer), and this gives one way to refute comp: to find a function that human can compute, but no computer could. It is hard to imagine, but it is logically possible (that is why attempt to refute CT continue to be made). Then as I said, anosognosia might make conceivable partial zombiness, making consciousness "non-existing", I could agree with this, but the partial zombie might not agree in the sense that it would say: no, my consciousness has not changed (despite some god could say, yes, the volume of its consciousness has drop 1/2, but he can't see that as he is amnesic of its precedent volume of consciousness. Again, this is close to non-sense to me, and eventually I might think that (comp v functionalism) is provable. Interesting point. I will dig on this ... hoping to find sometime. I have to go. Note that (comp v functionalism(yours) = functionalism(yours). It is not Putnam functionalism (which is comp, even with some "high" level substitution level). You seem going to change my mind on something about comp/functionalism. Bruno -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: The MGA revisited
On 01 Apr 2015, at 21:51, meekerdb wrote: On 4/1/2015 2:18 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: Well, no, there is no TOE that describes all features of the physical universe yet. But if comp is true, there is. If comp is true, the theory with the axioms Kxy = x + Sxyz = xy(zy), or elementary arithmetic HAVE TO describe all feature of the physical universe. If not comp is false. But that's like saying if Catholicism is true then there is a God who's omniscient. You should be more cautious about the modus tollens: "There is no TOE hence comp is false." No problem. There is an infinite scheme of TOEs (when we assume comp). I have given three in my recent preceding posts. Combinators, RA and a system of Diophantine equations. If you find something not explainable in one of them, then comp is refuted. That would be the case for "classical comp" (that is comp + Theaetetus) if you find a quantum tautology not provided by Z1*, S4Grz1, or X1*). It would not be a problem for me if comp is refuted. Bruno Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: The MGA revisited
On 02 Apr 2015, at 00:29, Russell Standish wrote: On Wed, Apr 01, 2015 at 01:50:51PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: OK, but so you agree that MGA shows that if comp is true, matter is of no use, unless we admit that a complex experience like a human dream can supervene on a very simple trivial activity. Then the MGA intuition pump seems to work well enough, imo. Bruno You have just conceded my point. Then the MGA is not a logical proof (as you have sometimes claimed, and Quentin claimed even more forcefully), but rather an argument by incredulity, or an intuition pump as Daniel Dennett puts it. Nothing wrong with that of course, we just need to know what has actually been achieved. Not really, I have always taken for granted that we cannot prove something about "reality", so it was clear for me that MGA use Occam, and can only weaken the use of Occam, not that it proves something about "reality". I agree that I should have expanded on this more in the Lille thesis (the only point where I agree with Delahaye). As a proof, MGA proves (informally) something like comp implies non matter or movie can vehiculate any experience. Which is close to a proof that comp implies no-matter to me. But you and Delahaye are right, I should be clearer on this. Point well taken (but already conceded a long time ago, it seems to me). Bruno -- 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 Latest project: The Amoeba's Secret (http://www.hpcoders.com.au/AmoebasSecret.html) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: The MGA revisited
On 02 Apr 2015, at 03:12, LizR wrote: Yes lots of people have said something like that (including me) but the time aspect is addressed in Bruno's argument. (Come to think of it you more or less addressed it yourself by commenting about block universes. A computation can run in a block universe, after all, in the important sense - having different states at different times.) I think some notion of successor relations is all that's needed, or something like that - I'm sure Bruno will explain. Russell is right on this, I omit or abstract away from the fact that the audience might think "proof abaout reality", which does not exist. PGC is right too, as not only movie would be able to think, but special relativity would false (by the stroboscope), movie would think all thinking simultaneously, and we might say yes to a doctor putting the movie of a mosquito brain in place of your brain. The problem is that this is logically not refutable, and so we have to be clearer on that. MGA is for people cutting air, and as I said once: the problem is that cutting air is not a boundable activity. as we cannot prove our consistency, the ultimate cutting air person can always say: may be you have just prove that 0 = 1 ... Bruno -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: The MGA revisited
On 02 Apr 2015, at 04:08, Bruce Kellett wrote: Bruno Marchal wrote: On 01 Apr 2015, at 03:58, Bruce Kellett wrote: The digital simulation of brain functions is achieved on a physical computer after all, which is a physical object itself -- simulating (primitive) physical processes. Assuming a physical object, which I do not (nor do I assume they don't exist). Comp, the hypothesis is nutral on what exist, except for what is needed to have a UTM, so it assumes one UTM, if you want, but not necessarily a physical UTM. You said somewhere that a computation is dynamical, not static, Yes. That is important. But the notion of time needed is only some morphism in N. Compuational steps, which can be define in arithmetic in the relative way. (This has been done with the first intensional variant of provability by Rosser). which is why you rejected the notion that Champernow's number contains all possible computations and hence is a dovetailer: "(0,1234567891011 ..) does not emulate anything, despite describing (in some ways) all computations." It describes the computations, but does not emulate them, contrary to arithmetic. That diophantine polynomial describes all computations is very easy to prove. That they emulate all UTMs took 50 years of hard work, and was thought y many being obviously impossible. Emulation is a dynamical process in time. I wonder where you get a time variable for your UTM. By a variable on the computational steps. It has nothing to do with a physical time a priori. All that you say about the UTM and the dovetailer appears to assume an instantiation in some temporal structure. Not at all. I do not see time as a parameter in arithmetic! In other words, your dovetailer has to be running on a physical UTM. Nope. You claim above that it does not have to be physical. I would like you to point me to a non-physical Turing machine that actually runs programs. I.e., not just a description of a Turing machine. You need to understand the difference between syntax and semantic in arithmetic. I will come back on this later. It is not easy to explain as people already confuse easily the number 0 and the symbol 0. I have downloaded your SANE04 paper and will work through it in time. OK. That is rather wise if you want criticize it. A first glance suggests that I will have objections at very many points. I wold be very happy to hear them. Bruno Bruce -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: The MGA revisited
On 02 Apr 2015, at 05:34, Russell Standish wrote: On Thu, Apr 02, 2015 at 02:48:47AM +0200, Platonist Guitar Cowboy wrote: I still don't see what MGA "pumps intuitively and incorrectly", as you seem to assume that MGA is "bad" intuition pump, rather than "good" one that facilitates seeing something tricky. You've not shown that consciousness supervenes on broken gates, you don't treat movies like conscious entities, and haven't pointed towards a recording that is obviously or demonstrably conscious. It is one thing to argue intuitively that playing Casablanca does not instantiate Humphrey Bogart's consciousness. That I would happily agree with. It only involves a few 100KB per second. It is another thing to argue that a precise recording of the firings of every neuron in someone's brain similarly doesn't instantiate consciousness (at around 10^11 neurons per typical human brain, this would be something of the order of 10^16 bytes per second). This is the sort of recording being used in Maudlin's thought experiment/MGA. And obviously, according to COMP, a huge lookup table encoding the machine's output for every possible input for a machine implementing a conscious moment (which is just another type of recording, albeit a very complex one that would exceed the Seth LLoyd bound for the universe) must be conscious. Note this latter type of device was used in Searles Chinese Room argument, and I think needs to be answered the same way Dennett answers the Chinese Room argument. At some point on the complexity scale, recordings go from being not conscious to conscious. Where do you draw the line? I'm afraid intuition does not help much in this matter, which is why I say it is a weakness of the MGA. The intuition pump is that the recording does not contain any computation, which is embarassing for a theory of mind requiring a computation. With stroboscope like argument, such a computation is not even well defined, nor is the time at which the movie is executed. As for the looking-table, it need to be infinite if it implements a universal machine. Consciousness, with comp, can be given to whatever brought that looking table into existence. More on this mater, surely. The problem for the materialist is that he has no material definition of computation. It is always an act of faith in some primitive matter, and then an exploitation of the mathematical notion of computation, and of the fact that "matter" seems ... Turing universal. Again, it gives magical abilities to Turing machine, and entails the existence of infinitely many zombies in arithmetic. More on this, as I write very quickly (soory for possible typo) as I have to go now. Bruno Cheers -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au Latest project: The Amoeba's Secret (http://www.hpcoders.com.au/AmoebasSecret.html) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: The MGA revisited
On 2 April 2015 at 08:30, meekerdb wrote: > On 4/1/2015 12:30 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: >> >> I don't think it's impossible to prove comp true. If comp were not true >> then it would be possible to make partial zombies. > > > I think that's the inference we're arguing. It's certainly not obvious to > me. It's not obvious that comp can be proved or it's not obvious that if comp were false it would be possible to make partial zombies? >> If partial zombies are possible then there would be no difference between >> you having qualia or lacking qualia, > > > There would be no 3p observable difference in other people. Just showing > that a partial zombie is possible doesn't show that you are one. A partial zombie would not only show no 3p difference, it would also show no 1p difference. There is no conceptual problem with that in a zombie, but there is in a partial zombie, which by definition has normal feelings and cognition except for its zombified aspect. A person who is otherwise normal immediately knows if he loses a significant aspect of his consciousness, such as his vision or his ability to understand language. Sometimes if neurological damage is severe enough it can damage cognitive ability and the subject develops the delusional belief, anosognosia, that he is normal despite all evidence to the contrary, but that does not invalidate the argument. >> which is equivalent to saying consciousness does not exist; > > > I think it is equivalent to the idea that some (humans) have souls and some > (animals) don't. I don't believe that, but it's logically possible. I think you are not making the distinction between a zombie and a partial zombie. A zombie is not obviously absurd, a partial zombie is. >> not just that it is epiphenomenal but that it isn't there at all. > > > Maybe it isn't. I only know about my own. > > Brent > >> So if consciousness exists, comp must be true. > > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: The MGA revisited
On 2 April 2015 at 18:26, Bruno Marchal wrote: > Anosognosia is the inability to recognise when you have an illness or a > disability, usually in the context of neurological or psychiatric > disorders. This differs from being a zombie in that behaviour is affected: > if the patient suffers from cortical blindness with anosognosia, they are > unable to recognise what is in front of them and walk into things. In > addition, they not only have the deficit of lacking qualia, they have a > specific delusional belief which cannot be shifted despite any evidence they > might be presented with. > > > You are right about anosognosia. But my point is that anosognosia might make > conceivable partial zombiness, and thus comp or your functionalism false. > Again, I agree that it would make consciousness spurious, but that is > something to be expected from a computationalist believing in primitive > matter. I just try to put myself in the mind of those people believing in > both matter and mechanism. Anosognosia involves an additional cognitive deficit which makes the patient deny that he has a problem despite all evidence presented to him. If you damage enough of the brain, it's not surprising that generalised problems in thinking arise. But the case to consider is a person who has a cicumscribed deficit, say in some sensory modality, without a problem in thinking. That such a person might not notice that he has for example gone blind seems absurd. It could mean that you went blind yesterday, although you can still think and hear and feel, but you haven't noticed it, and you still enjoyed looking at the painting on your office wall this morning. If that is possible, then what is the difference between having visual qualia and not having them? To make it more concrete, if the doctor offered me an artificial brain which would leave me blind but with the guarantee that it would *seem* to me that I was seeing everything exactly the same as now, what reason would there be for me to choose the more expensive model which would allow me to *really* see everything the same as now? -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: The MGA revisited
Bruno Marchal wrote: On 02 Apr 2015, at 04:08, Bruce Kellett wrote: Emulation is a dynamical process in time. I wonder where you get a time variable for your UTM. By a variable on the computational steps. It has nothing to do with a physical time a priori. What variable? A simple numbering of steps? But that will not work, or at least, you have hidden an assumption of an external time in your notation. "At the end of step 27, move to step 28." That contains an implicit notion of time -- 'ending' and 'moving' are temporal concepts. I do not see that you can remove all traces of the idea of an external temporal parameter. Otherwise the machine could just halt arbitrarily at some point and never know that it had halted. I think you ned to flesh your ideas here out a great deal more. Bruce -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: The MGA revisited
On 2 April 2015 at 18:37, Bruno Marchal wrote: > I don't think it's impossible to prove comp true. If comp were not true then > it would be possible to make partial zombies. If partial zombies are > possible then there would be no difference between you having qualia or > lacking qualia, which is equivalent to saying consciousness does not exist; > not just that it is epiphenomenal but that it isn't there at all. So if > consciousness exists, comp must be true. > > > That reasoning might asses that comp or your functionalism is provable, but > comp, as I defined it, use Church-thesis (if only to get a universal > dovetailer), and this gives one way to refute comp: to find a function that > human can compute, but no computer could. It is hard to imagine, but it is > logically possible (that is why attempt to refute CT continue to be made). If the brain utilises non-computable functions then CT is false and it will not be possible replace part of the brain with a computer, so comp is false. However, what you call "my" fuctionalism is a superset of comp, and it may still be possible to replace part of the brain with a device incorporating a hypercomputer, or even a magical device animated by God, and preserve consciousness. It is my contention that the only requirement is that this device replicates the I/O behaviour of the part of the brain that it replaces, and any associated consciousness will follow necessarily. > Then as I said, anosognosia might make conceivable partial zombiness, making > consciousness "non-existing", I could agree with this, but the partial > zombie might not agree in the sense that it would say: no, my consciousness > has not changed (despite some god could say, yes, the volume of its > consciousness has drop 1/2, but he can't see that as he is amnesic of its > precedent volume of consciousness. Again, this is close to non-sense to me, > and eventually I might think that (comp v functionalism) is provable. > Interesting point. I will dig on this ... hoping to find sometime. I have to > go. Note that (comp v functionalism(yours) = functionalism(yours). It is not > Putnam functionalism (which is comp, even with some "high" level > substitution level). > You seem going to change my mind on something about comp/functionalism. > > Bruno > > > > > -- > Stathis Papaioannou > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > > > http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ > > > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Are all terrorrists Muslim? Not even close!
Race is not religion for it is their religion that is the instigator, specifically, theirs. Pedigree's are for dogs. -Original Message- From: 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List To: everything-list Sent: Wed, Apr 1, 2015 8:06 pm Subject: Re: Are all terrorrists Muslim? Not even close! From: spudboy100 via Everything List To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Wednesday, April 1, 2015 4:40 PM Subject: Re: Are all terrorrists Muslim? Not even close! In his long rambling manifesto he spoke -- much like you do in fact Mitch, of a clash of civilizations, and he saw himself as a defender of a Christian, Aryan Norway, being overrun by brown people. I am just going by his own stated motives, not your reinterpretation of what they must have been. The actual crime stats speak of a different story most terrorist attacks, by far-- in terms of numbers of incidences, but also in terms of overall damage, injury and death, in the US and in the EU are not being perpetrated by Islamicists, but by other kinds of extremists, including many various separatist movements. Hindus and Buddhists and Jews and Christians as well are committing acts of terror; however in the Western press these rarely get reported as such; most often the reports speak of a disturbed or deranged person, with no mention of the fact that their derangement was centered in their Christian (Nationalist) or other beliefs. If you added up all the people who died as a result of terrorist acts over the last 50 years do you think it would even come close to the number of just Americans who get violently murdered each and every single year? In the year 2013 you were more likely to die as the result of being man slaughtered by a toddler with a gun in this country than you were likely to get murdered by a terrorist. I am trying to put all this brouhaha into some kind of perspective. It is so far down the stack of imminent threats this world actually faces; kind of makes you wonder why it gets so much attention and is presented as being our most pressing problem. What's the agenda? And whose agenda is it? We have here a case of selective memory. Brevik was indeed a Nazi (no surprise there) but you do notice that all his victims were Norwegian socialists? His motive was revenge against his fellow countrymen, not Muslims living in Norway, which he could have easily attacked. It's impossible to truly see Brevik as a church goer, even in the Nazi WW2 German Lutheran style. You forget the Islamist attacks in Madrid 2004 which killed 191 and the subway attack in London which killed, and 52 dead in the London tube attacks. If Hindus were committing mass murder all over the world, we'd be talking about them instead of believers in Muhammad. It's purely practical to focus on the Islamists and there's no easy resolution to this war (which it is). I can bring up the London beheading, and hundreds of other jihad attack. In the 70's I could have pointed out the IRA, Red Army Fraction, Bader Meinhoff types, or the Chilean military bombing in DC. The Islamists are super well funded and are motivated by a promise of eternity. -Original Message- From: 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List To: everything-list Sent: Wed, Apr 1, 2015 1:20 pm Subject: RE: Are all terrorrists Muslim? Not even close! From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Alberto G. Corona Sent: Wednesday, April 01, 2015 1:53 AM To: everything-list Subject: Re: Are all terrorrists Muslim? Not even close! All these movements are in the orbit of Cuba and Venezuela as well as with ties with islamism. The basque terrorists in the 70s trained together with the Palestinian terrorists LPO (in the valley of the Becca) and with argelian communists. Please be informed. Was the right-wing Christian fanatic Norwegian terrorist Anders who mass murdered (77 people injuring hundreds more) scores of Norwegians in a car bomb, followed by a cold blooded execution style gunning down of unarmed teenagers in 2011, and who acted in the name of his Christian supremacist ideology also --- covertly somehow also an Islamic terrorist?
Re: The MGA revisited
On 02 Apr 2015, at 14:00, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On 2 April 2015 at 18:26, Bruno Marchal wrote: Anosognosia is the inability to recognise when you have an illness or a disability, usually in the context of neurological or psychiatric disorders. This differs from being a zombie in that behaviour is affected: if the patient suffers from cortical blindness with anosognosia, they are unable to recognise what is in front of them and walk into things. In addition, they not only have the deficit of lacking qualia, they have a specific delusional belief which cannot be shifted despite any evidence they might be presented with. You are right about anosognosia. But my point is that anosognosia might make conceivable partial zombiness, and thus comp or your functionalism false. Again, I agree that it would make consciousness spurious, but that is something to be expected from a computationalist believing in primitive matter. I just try to put myself in the mind of those people believing in both matter and mechanism. Anosognosia involves an additional cognitive deficit which makes the patient deny that he has a problem despite all evidence presented to him. Yes. If you damage enough of the brain, it's not surprising that generalised problems in thinking arise. But the case to consider is a person who has a cicumscribed deficit, say in some sensory modality, without a problem in thinking. That such a person might not notice that he has for example gone blind seems absurd. It could mean that you went blind yesterday, although you can still think and hear and feel, but you haven't noticed it, and you still enjoyed looking at the painting on your office wall this morning. If that is possible, then what is the difference between having visual qualia and not having them? To make it more concrete, if the doctor offered me an artificial brain which would leave me blind but with the guarantee that it would *seem* to me that I was seeing everything exactly the same as now, what reason would there be for me to choose the more expensive model which would allow me to *really* see everything the same as now? It is just that I can logically conceive this (still playing the devil advocate role): The doctor assures me that my behavior will not change, but that my qualia and consciousness intensity will diminish of one halve, but he add that this change is anosognosic so that I will not feel any difference ... until I can afford the better artificial brain. So I say "yes" to him, and indeed I feel completely happy with the new brain ... until I get enough money for the new brain, which the doctor told me, will make my volume of consciousness back to normal (of course I have no idea at all what that could mean). But once I got the new brain, I realize then that indeed, I was less conscious than before the first brain operation, and that now, I feel like that again. Some type of dreams make me thing that such an experience might not be as senseless as ti might seem, and this means that the weird anosognosia condition might, perhaps, give sense to some notion of partial zombiness. Some people in this list defend the idea of "volume or degree of consciousness", and if there is anosognosia on such a volume or intensity, it might gives some sense to some notion of partial zombiness, it seems to me (currently). Bruno -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: The MGA revisited
On 02 Apr 2015, at 15:04, Bruce Kellett wrote: Bruno Marchal wrote: On 02 Apr 2015, at 04:08, Bruce Kellett wrote: Emulation is a dynamical process in time. I wonder where you get a time variable for your UTM. By a variable on the computational steps. It has nothing to do with a physical time a priori. What variable? A simple numbering of steps? But that will not work, or at least, you have hidden an assumption of an external time in your notation. The external time is given by the universal machine running the computation. It can be the basic level (elementary arithmetic, or the universal dovetailer), or it can be some other universal layer, running on some other universal layer, running on some other running on the basic level. At the basic level, we have the block mindscape, like the UD* (the infinite "cone" of all computations). "At the end of step 27, move to step 28." That contains an implicit notion of time -- 'ending' and 'moving' are temporal concepts. I do not see that you can remove all traces of the idea of an external temporal parameter. Otherwise the machine could just halt arbitrarily at some point and never know that it had halted. I think you ned to flesh your ideas here out a great deal more. Well, this is a forum, and I explain things already explained with all details in much longer text (which sometime does not help, because busy people tend to skip even more the long texts nowadays). Let me try to help a bit though. Fix some universal programming language, like Fortran, say. Enumerate all programs computing function with 1 argument, p_0, p_1, p_2, Let us denote by [p_i(j)^k] the kième step of the execution of the ième program on argument j, by the universal dovetailer (which dovetails then on all such [p_i(j)^k] . Then we can define, indeed already in Robinson arithmetic, a computation by a sequence of such steps, when i and j are fixed. So a computation is given by the sequence [p_456(666)^0] [p_456(666)^1] [p_456(666)^2] [p_456(666)^3] [p_456(666)^4] etc. This sequence is a subsequence of the general universal dovetailing, which dovetails on all [p_i(j)^k]. It is a computation, only in virtue of the universal dovetailing, and the universal dovetailing can be defined in arithmetic. I can translate the proposition "the UD access to [p_345(898786)^89]" entirely in term of arithmetic, using only the notion of addition, multiplication, successor (of natural numbers) and 0, and predicate logic. The only external time used is the ordering of the natural number, which is easily translated in arithmetic: x < y means Ez(x + z) = y). OK? Bruno Bruce -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: The MGA revisited
On 02 Apr 2015, at 14:25, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On 2 April 2015 at 18:37, Bruno Marchal wrote: I don't think it's impossible to prove comp true. If comp were not true then it would be possible to make partial zombies. If partial zombies are possible then there would be no difference between you having qualia or lacking qualia, which is equivalent to saying consciousness does not exist; not just that it is epiphenomenal but that it isn't there at all. So if consciousness exists, comp must be true. That reasoning might asses that comp or your functionalism is provable, but comp, as I defined it, use Church-thesis (if only to get a universal dovetailer), and this gives one way to refute comp: to find a function that human can compute, but no computer could. It is hard to imagine, but it is logically possible (that is why attempt to refute CT continue to be made). If the brain utilises non-computable functions then CT is false I guess you mean non-computable by a computer. But computable by a human. and it will not be possible replace part of the brain with a computer, so comp is false. Yes. That's was my point. However, what you call "my" fuctionalism is a superset of comp, and it may still be possible to replace part of the brain with a device incorporating a hypercomputer, or even a magical device animated by God, and preserve consciousness. ... making your functionalism trivial, if you excuse the straightness. It is my contention that the only requirement is that this device replicates the I/O behaviour of the part of the brain that it replaces, and any associated consciousness will follow necessarily. OK. I think you get close to "prove" the half of comp "yes doctor", as everybody agrees that we cannot prove Church thesis. (which does not mean we cannot give very powerful evidences for it). Then the proof of "yes doctor" use the fact that partial zombiness makes no sense, but I think that anosognosia can be used, notably if we believe in things like a "consciousness volume" (on which the anosognosia would bear on). The point is logical. Like in MGA, once we argue on reality, we can only present evidences, no proofs. The LHC has not prove the existence of the Higgs boson, nor does Mars Rover and its image prove the existence of Mars, or Apollo 9 the existence of the moon. They just give strong evidence. It would be on that strong sense of "proof" that my critics would bear on. A bit like Russell's critics on the MGA. Bruno Then as I said, anosognosia might make conceivable partial zombiness, making consciousness "non-existing", I could agree with this, but the partial zombie might not agree in the sense that it would say: no, my consciousness has not changed (despite some god could say, yes, the volume of its consciousness has drop 1/2, but he can't see that as he is amnesic of its precedent volume of consciousness. Again, this is close to non- sense to me, and eventually I might think that (comp v functionalism) is provable. Interesting point. I will dig on this ... hoping to find sometime. I have to go. Note that (comp v functionalism(yours) = functionalism(yours). It is not Putnam functionalism (which is comp, even with some "high" level substitution level). You seem going to change my mind on something about comp/ functionalism. Bruno -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything- l...@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything- l...@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop re
Re: The MGA revisited
On 02 Apr 2015, at 08:13, Russell Standish wrote: On Thu, Apr 02, 2015 at 07:07:09AM +0200, Platonist Guitar Cowboy wrote: Which assumes perhaps too strong a form of functionalism and/or digitalism that runs into its own contradiction with 1p consciousness? As pointed out in earlier post: With that move, it is no longer relevant to distinguish recording from person who has 1p experience, zombie question is nonsense, no indexical property, there is correct substitution level, all possible 1p consciousness of all persons supervenes on the recording (everything digital) *or* none at all since recording has no CC and other such funky consequences I can't recall. How is this avoided if everything is one bland sauce of digital? It is not at all obvious that counterfactual correctness (CC) is required for a computation to be conscious. Bruno usually argues that feature is a red herring. I do that in some place, but this is really what Maudlin showed, when keeping materialism and computationalism + the idea that something inactive in a brain during a specific computation would not change the specific consciousness if it were removed. I do that to get the absurdity. But I keep comp, and counterfactual correctness is a bit of the "essence" of what a computation is. It is what make absurd the idea that a movie could be conscious: it does not enact a computation. It does not need a universal machine to be enactedn unlike any computation. The same movie could correspond to different computations, if we change the universal machine which did that movie, and build an ad hoc different one. If it is, then non-CC recordings are not conscious, and the MGA goes through in the small (non-robust) universe case. But recordings can also be counterfactually correct in principle by adding the inactive Klara? Then we are again back to Maudlin's point. neurons must know which neurons did not trigger them. They need some telepathy. (in the form of a huge lookup table, for example, in Searles's Chinese Room), or in the form of a precise specification of the quantum wave function, or of a finite chunk of the UD* trace. You mean description of them, or they actualization or realization by some reality (arithmetical or physical). You might be slipping from the computation to its description. Bruno Modulo the no-cloning theorem, or the Seth Lloyd limit which would prevent such a recording existing in our current universe. Thanks for pushing the question though Russell, as my earlier posts were perhaps less clear on this. I guess you're coming from some ground I can't parse or have missed reading and you have my apology here if so. But zombies can be tricky bastards :-) Where do you draw the line? I'm afraid intuition does not help much in this matter, which is why I say it is a weakness of the MGA. There must be something more to it than just complexity or even Turing universality. Bruno says human-like consciousness requires Lobianity. But I think that's asking for more than just awarenss; it's asking for self-awarness. Which with comp assumptions/environment includes the properties that come with that kind of self-awareness, e.g. incompleteness, machine's silence etc. PGC If I were building a Mars Rover and gave it the ability to learn from its experience by reviewing its memory of events and projecting hypothetical futures, I would be concerned that I had created a sentient being that would forsee its own end. So I would be sure to avoid putting its indefinite survival into its value system. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything- l...@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- 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 Latest project: The Amoeba's Secret (http://www.hpcoders.com.au/AmoebasSecret.html) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/o
Re: Michael Graziano's theory of consciousness
On 02 Apr 2015, at 00:18, John Clark wrote: On Wed, Apr 1, 2015 Bruno Marchal wrote: >>> You talk like if there was an insuperable difficulty brought by the duplication. >> Engineering difficulties only, scientific breakthroughs would not be required to make a matter duplicating machine; however when such machines become commonplace the English language, and especially the way it uses personal pronouns, will need a major overhaul. > Not really. Yes really, all it would take to duplicate me is put generic atoms into the correct spacial relationship, that's the reason I spent $80,000, it is my hope that freezing my brain at liquid nitrogen temperatures will not erase too much of that positional information, and maybe just maybe someday somebody might make use of it. I know my frozen brain will retain more information than if it was eaten by worms or burned up in a crematorium, but whether it will contain enough information to get the job done I don't know. It may be a long shot but it's the only shot I've got. I salute your courageous comp-practice. I wish you good fortune. If the nirtogen can erase some of your prejudice, that would be even better. But the "not really" was about the major overhaul of personal pronoun use. > The 1p 3p distinction is enough for the validaity of the thought experience, A thought experiment is not needed to realize there is a difference between "I" and "you". It ias moe about the difference between the 3-you and the 1-you. Like, the 3-you are in both M and W, but the 1-you are in only M or W. And other than show that The Moscow Man aka the man who sees Moscow will turn out to be the man who sees Moscow aka The Moscow Man I can't figure out what you think you've proven. A non quantum first person indeterminacy. The step 4 asks if such indeterminacy is the same if we add different delays of reconstitution in the reconstitution in M and W. > and the Theaetetus' definition of knowledge I don't think that those working on cutting edge scientific problems in 2015 will be helped much by reading a book written in 369 BC by an author who thought the Earth was the center of the universe and the 7 planets ( Mercury Venus Mars Jupiter Saturn, the Sun and the Moon) were fixed to 7 crystal spheres and the rest of the universe, the stars, was pasted on the inside of a 8th sphere. ? Clearly you have not read the Theaetetus, as it does not mention astronomy. But it is a key text in epistemology, and its ideas are still debated. Then Socrates refute them, but we have to wait the discovery of incompleteness to refute Socrates refutation. This ancestor worship of the ancient Greeks is getting to be silly. Sure. Worship is silly in all cases. But reading a text is not worship. Presence of errors in some subject matter does not entail the absence of some genuine insight on some other subject matter, especially in theology were we have replaced the greek reasoning and scientific methodology by the argument per-authority. We have progressed in physics, but regress in metaphysics and theology. I would say. By criticizing the coming back of seriousness in theology, you side with the fundamentalist who are opposed to such coming back, for obvious reason. Bruno John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: SETI breakthrough: Project Durin Succeeds!
Succeed in what? in getting funds from some public institution, I suppose. Never saw something more absurd. In Cuba there are some universitary research on the power of the pyramids. I think that they may have some success in getting funds for these spheres. 2015-04-02 0:02 GMT+02:00 meekerdb : > > > This news has gotten remarkably little coverage. So for those who > have not heard: > > Project Ozma failed. Project Durin succeeded. It turned out SETI > (the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence) was looking in the > wrong direction all along. It was looking up when it should have > been looking down. > > Evolution works much the same everywhere in the universe. It > selects for different attributes in different environments, but > one commonality is that it never selects for extreme patience. > > How long would anyone keep transmitting a few gigawatts at a silent > planet? A decade? A century? A millennium? The one serious human > attempt to send such a message (the Arecibo message) lasted less than > three minutes, and was never repeated. > > If the phone doesn't answer, you leave a message. > > As Fermi pointed out decades ago, there's nothing special about the > present age. A solar system which is just a little older, or in which > evolution happened just a little more quickly, would result in a race > millions of years ahead of us. If they sent signals to Earth, they'd > get no reply. If they visited Earth, they'd find nothing more > advanced than dinosaurs, or perhaps blue-green algae. And they > certainly could have visited Earth. Even at the speed of our current > spacecraft, it's possible to reach every part of the galaxy on a > geological time scale. > > That is why Ayeph Dee, professor of exobiology at Frank Drake University, > had his students come up with a way to leave a message on an Earthlike > planet that would be detectable and readable for hundreds of millions > of years. > > They came up with the idea of buried hollow titanium spheres, a few > meters in diameter, containing tuning forks. Over the course of ages > some would come to the surface and be weathered to dust, and others > would be be subducted to depths at which temperature and pressure > would destroy them. But if there were enough of them, and if they > were carefully placed, some would survive for hundreds of millions > of years at relatively shallow depths, embedded in bedrock. > > Project Durin, named for the ruler of Tolkien's fictional underground > land of Moria, consists of a grid of ten thousand broad-spectrum > microphones embedded in the bedrock of the Canadian Shield. > Recordings are made available to the SETIunderground@Home distributed > computing project, whose software turns the array into an acoustic > version of a passive phased array radar. It searches the bedrock > for narrow-band point sources of acoustic energy from tuning forks > excited by natural seismic activity. > > Such a source was found, approximately 41 kilometers deep, with a > strong high-Q (~100) resonance at about 14 Hz. This is consistent > with a tuning fork inside a hollow sphere, possibly made of titanium > or tungsten, and possibly filled with oil. There were also several > seconds of broad-spectrum noise, which could be from multiple smaller > tuning forks inside the same sphere. Dee conjectured that such a set > of tuning forks could be used to encode a message, based on their > relative frequencies and their relative locations within the sphere. > > Unfortunately, we don't yet have the technology to excavate anything > at that depth. (The deepest borehole ever drilled is just 12 > kilometers.) This also means that the rock surrounding the sphere > hasn't been analyzed, so we have no idea of its age, except that it's > certainly Precambrian, probably at least a billion years old, and > possibly two or three times that age. > > It's believed that it was originally buried at a shallow depth. It's > not known whether this was on land or under an ocean, or whether the > builders were from our solar system or not. (Venus and Mars may have > been much more hospitable to life eons ago.) It's even possible that > it was constructed by an indigenous terrestrial sapient race, though > it's hard to imagine it would have left no signs of its existence that > we would have noticed by now. > > The planned next step is to detonate several embedded explosives, one > at a time, in various locations, as a form of active sonar, to more > closely locate the sphere. Once that is done, a large number of > larger explosives (about 100 of approximately one ton each) will be > detonated almost simultaneously, such that their shock waves will > reach the sphere simultaneously from multiple directions, to excite > a strong and sharp resonance of all the tuning forks. > > Searches for additional spheres elsewhere on Earth are encouraged. > > Project Durin is always open to suggestions. > > > > -- > You received this message becau
Re: Are all terrorrists Muslim? Not even close!
On Thu, Apr 2, 2015 at 9:13 AM, LizR wrote: > On 2 April 2015 at 19:40, Telmo Menezes wrote: > >> On Thu, Apr 2, 2015 at 12:19 AM, LizR wrote: >> >>> On 1 April 2015 at 20:50, Telmo Menezes wrote: >>> On Wed, Apr 1, 2015 at 1:40 AM, LizR wrote: > I hope that isn't an April Fool! > > Well, this isn't rocket science... > > In 2013, it was more likely Americans would be killed by a toddler >> than a terrorist. In that year, three Americans were killed in the Boston >> Marathon bombing, while toddlers killed five, all by accidentally >> shooting >> a gun. > > > Because all those guns make you safer... > Guns can be very dangerous, but like drugs there is no way to stop people from obtaining them. It's already possible to 3D print one, and this technology will only improve from now on. So how does every other country in the world manage to have less guns >>> per person than the USA? Magic? >>> >> >> Independently of Brent's remarks, with which I agree, my point is that >> even if forbidding people from owning guns works -- and I'm sure it works >> to some degree at the moment -- such restrictions become increasingly >> ineffective as technology progresses. >> > > Who suggested banning guns? > Sorry, I assumed you were arguing my point that "there is no way to stop people from obtaining them". There are societies where people have a less desire to own guns, but I don't think there is any simple answer as to why. > Are guns banned in, say, New Zealand? No. Yet there are less per head, and > less injuries and deaths caused by them, probably because Kiwis own guns > only for the reasons one might expect - hunting, for example - rather than > whatever reason it is Americans do (it looks from the outside like a sort > of national fetish, a theory that the glamourisation of violence in many > American TV shows and movies would seem to support). > This is another tough question. My guess is that puritanical values and a repressive stance on sexuality have something to do with it, and we also see high levels of violence in other societies that are (even more, of course) sexually repressive. But my guess is as good as yours. > > > So, anyway, any comments that address the actual situation? > Yes, serious social science. Really trying to figure out why so many kids in America want to start a rampage at their schools. Being willing to accept the real answers to this question instead of avoiding the parts of the answer that might be less palatable. > >> Home 3D-printed guns are at the prototype level at the moment. Both the >> designs and 3D printing technology will keep improving and becoming >> cheaper. People are already experimenting with 3D printing ammunition. >> > > The technology to make atomic bombs in your basement exists. So, should > that be made illegal? What do you think? > Like all other things, one day technology will have advanced so much that making them illegal is irrelevant. Hopefully by then we figure out how to be nice to each other -- or we finally discover the solution to the Fermi Paradox. > >> The trouble with trying to solve problems by restricting access to >> technology (in this case firearms) is that, as technology progresses, the >> laws have to become increasingly repressive to keep up. Preventing people >> from owning guns will soon devolve into a multi-prong approach where you >> have to restrict access to information on the Internet (if that is even >> possible), regulate the sale and ownership of 3D printers, worry about the >> availability of the common components that go into gunpowder, etc. For any >> difficulty you pose, there will be eventually a technological solution, and >> the only possible response from the regulatory mindset is to forbid more >> things, until we need permission to do almost anything. >> > > Now that we've got the straw men out of the way, I find my question still > stands. So, why *does *the USA have so many firearms per head compared to > anywhere else in the world, even a few was zones? And why does it have the > highest rate of firearm related deaths and injuries per head in the first > world, and close to the highest in the world (outside war zones) ? > Ok, but this is a slightly difference perspective to assuming that the other countries are actively doing something that works in preventing firearm violence. It could be simply because of easy access to firearms but there is a lot of empirical data that casts doubt on this hypothesis -- at least on the hypothesis that this is the unique or main factor. I would look into protestant puritanism and its many ramifications in what society values, what it's like to grow up with puritanism (especially if you don't fit the mold) and so on. If this turns out to be right, I would also be very weary of directly attacking organised religion. This usually results in another, even more nasty organized religion
Re: Lovely Einstein Quote
Jason, If I stomp on your foot, it is you who will feel the pain not I, nor, will your poor toes pain be distributed amongst 7 billion others, just you. When we can grow meats without the animal we'll stop slaughtering animals for example. Sometimes compassion must be bracketed by what we are capable of doing at the time. Mayhap, in some future day, somebody will use their time machine to travel back to 1347 with a cure for the black plague, but that day is not today. -Original Message- From: Jason Resch To: Everything List Sent: Wed, Apr 1, 2015 8:31 pm Subject: Lovely Einstein Quote "A human being is part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. The true value of a human being is determined by the measure and the sense in which they have obtained liberation from the self. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive." (Albert Einstein, 1954) I didn't know until today he also believed the egoist self was a delusion. Jason -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Life in the Islamic State for women
My guess, Professor Standish, from what I have seen and heard from academics is something of a sympathy for Islamist behavior, For example, the need to explain away Jihad actions, is always cast as possible retaliation for what the US has done or Australia, Israel, Canada, France, New South Wales, whomever the viewed 'occupier-war monger' is. This is the usual 'distancing' language employed. A person may not kneel to Mecca along with the Uma, 5 times a day, but if they both have the same enemies, ideology does makes strange bedfellows, so to speak. This is what I oppose, and consider to be self-destructive to our respective, nation states. Despite my emails, I generally am at least, somewhat intellectual, and nothing of a Luddite, but sort of view the 800 lb. (or kg.) simian in the room, as radical Islam, and not Jimmy Christian, not Vijaya the Magnificent, not Bubba Buddha, Kung Fu Tze, or his smarter, brother, Don Dao. It's the blokes who say the shahaada, first thing in the a.m. that are costing lives now. So, if this is true, what to do? One thing would be for academics to step forward in favor of human rights in the Dar es Salaam, the House of Peace, aka, the Muslim World. Sort of a massive global project. This would be good. But to restate - nobody I know is a jihadist or islamist apologist, not even the muslims I know. -Original Message- From: Russell Standish To: everything-list Sent: Wed, Apr 1, 2015 9:38 pm Subject: Re: Life in the Islamic State for women On Tue, Mar 31, 2015 at 09:27:16AM -0400, spudboy100 via Everything List wrote: > Russell, > > > This is because academics, worldwide, tend toward the left, and they tend to it like a religion, but its more an ideology. An ideology being a faith movement. In the US, the academics (nominally all leftists) lean strongly in favor of islamists, worldwide. This could, in part, be that the Saudis (America's best friend!) have thrown their money around to greedy pols. I could send you news reports of the welcoming embrace, and statements of the islamists, but if you're a convinced leftist, you won't budge a millimeter-to quote old, adolf. I have the sales capabilities of maggot and thus, will never be able to sell stocks and bonds or widgets. The people that do like your current Rightist guy, in Australia, are likely not in academia. In the US, this is called flyover country. Your clique are academics, thus everyone you know bends left, and the rest are seen as ignorant rubes. I mean, somebody elected elected Tom Abbot, correct? > The general election was more of a protest vote against the previous government, which had become so odious (whether real or perceived), that the majority decided to go with Tony Abbott's lot. Tony Abbott's personal popularity has never been above about 30%, well below the the opposition leader as preferred prime minister. But personal popularity often doesn't have much to do with it, unlike a presidential system, I guess. Yes - someone elected Tony Abbott. The Liberal party of Australia elected him, by one vote over his rival Malcolm Turnbull (a far more popular leader). Since gaining government, Tony Abbott's popularity has sunk dramatically, so much so that the Liberal Party recently voted on a spill motion, which Tony narrowly won (ie was not spilled). We live in interesting times indeed. Yes academic people do tend to be "centralist", or "progressive", which in the current state of politics lies somewhat left of the Labor party, the traditional "leftist" party in Australia. But I mix with a variety of people, not just academics, but most tend to be fairly well educated nevertheless. I would say all of them are left of Tony Abbott, however, even though they may be natural Liberal Party supporters. But to restate - nobody I know is a jihadist or islamist apologist, not even the muslims I know. -- 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 Latest project: The Amoeba's Secret (http://www.hpcoders.com.au/AmoebasSecret.html) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an
Re: Michael Graziano's theory of consciousness
On Thu, Apr 2, 2015 Bruno Marchal wrote: >> A thought experiment is not needed to realize there is a difference >> between "I" and "you". > > > > It ias moe about the difference between the 3-you > In other words "he". > > and the 1-you. > In other words "I". > > Like, the 3-you are in both M and W, but the 1-you are in only M or W. > It would be wise if Bruno Marchal were less preoccupied with putting numerals before "you" and gave a little more thought about what that personal pronoun is supposed to mean. Does "you" mean John Clark the Moscow Man or does "you" just mean John Clark? It makes a difference, a very very big difference, and that's why John Clark says that the English language will need a major overhaul when matter duplicating machines become common (and that will be about an hour after they become technologically possible). >> And other than show that The Moscow Man aka the man who sees Moscow will >> turn out to be the man who sees Moscow aka The Moscow Man I can't figure >> out what you think you've proven. > > > > A non quantum first person indeterminacy. The step 4 asks if such > indeterminacy is the same if we add different delays of reconstitution in > the reconstitution in M and W. > And that's exactly why I haven't read step 4. Before I worry about if "such indeterminacy" changes under various conditions I need to know what the hell sort of indeterminacy you're talking about, and despite reading your stuff for years you still haven't been able to make that clear. John K Clark > > > > > > and the Theaetetus' definition of knowledge > > > I don't think that those working on cutting edge scientific problems in > 2015 will be helped much by reading a book written in 369 BC by an author > who thought the Earth was the center of the universe and the 7 planets ( > Mercury Venus Mars Jupiter Saturn, the Sun and the Moon) were fixed to 7 > crystal spheres and the rest of the universe, the stars, was pasted on the > inside of a 8th sphere. > > > ? > ! > Clearly you have not read the Theaetetus, > Nor do I intend to. > > as it does not mention astronomy. > But Plato, the author of Theaetetus mention astronomy Timaeus and it the Republic and he advocates a cosmological theory that has been obsolete for 2000 years, even Ptolemy with his epicycles was better. Do you really think that scientists working on string theory would be helped by reading such crap? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: The MGA revisited
> On 3 Apr 2015, at 12:26 am, Bruno Marchal wrote: > > >> On 02 Apr 2015, at 14:00, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: >> >>> On 2 April 2015 at 18:26, Bruno Marchal wrote: >>> >>> Anosognosia is the inability to recognise when you have an illness or a >>> disability, usually in the context of neurological or psychiatric >>> disorders. This differs from being a zombie in that behaviour is affected: >>> if the patient suffers from cortical blindness with anosognosia, they are >>> unable to recognise what is in front of them and walk into things. In >>> addition, they not only have the deficit of lacking qualia, they have a >>> specific delusional belief which cannot be shifted despite any evidence they >>> might be presented with. >>> >>> >>> You are right about anosognosia. But my point is that anosognosia might make >>> conceivable partial zombiness, and thus comp or your functionalism false. >>> Again, I agree that it would make consciousness spurious, but that is >>> something to be expected from a computationalist believing in primitive >>> matter. I just try to put myself in the mind of those people believing in >>> both matter and mechanism. >> >> Anosognosia involves an additional cognitive deficit which makes the >> patient deny that he has a problem despite all evidence presented to >> him. > > Yes. > > >> If you damage enough of the brain, it's not surprising that >> generalised problems in thinking arise. But the case to consider is a >> person who has a cicumscribed deficit, say in some sensory modality, >> without a problem in thinking. That such a person might not notice >> that he has for example gone blind seems absurd. It could mean that >> you went blind yesterday, although you can still think and hear and >> feel, but you haven't noticed it, and you still enjoyed looking at the >> painting on your office wall this morning. If that is possible, then >> what is the difference between having visual qualia and not having >> them? To make it more concrete, if the doctor offered me an artificial >> brain which would leave me blind but with the guarantee that it would >> *seem* to me that I was seeing everything exactly the same as now, >> what reason would there be for me to choose the more expensive model >> which would allow me to *really* see everything the same as now? > > It is just that I can logically conceive this (still playing the devil > advocate role): > The doctor assures me that my behavior will not change, but that my qualia > and consciousness intensity will diminish of one halve, but he add that this > change is anosognosic so that I will not feel any difference ... until I can > afford the better artificial brain. So I say "yes" to him, and indeed I feel > completely happy with the new brain ... until I get enough money for the new > brain, which the doctor told me, will make my volume of consciousness back to > normal (of course I have no idea at all what that could mean). But once I got > the new brain, I realize then that indeed, I was less conscious than before > the first brain operation, and that now, I feel like that again. But you would not notice such a difference when you got the new brain, since the outputs are exactly the same. You could set it up in a try-before-you-buy test so that the cheaper and the more expensive visual cortex can be switched in and out of circuit and you would find that both are just the same. If there is a difference in your qualia not only is it impossible for an external observer to notice, it is also impossible for you, the experiencer, to notice. I don't think the word "qualia" can retain meaning under this sort of assault. > Some type of dreams make me thing that such an experience might not be as > senseless as ti might seem, and this means that the weird anosognosia > condition might, perhaps, give sense to some notion of partial zombiness. > > Some people in this list defend the idea of "volume or degree of > consciousness", and if there is anosognosia on such a volume or intensity, it > might gives some sense to some notion of partial zombiness, it seems to me > (currently). I think anosognosia is a red herring. You might not notice something because the change is too subtle, because you forgot what it was like before, or because (as in anosognosia) your ability to reason is impaired. But the thought experiment is done under ideal circumstances, where the change is large and your ability to think and remember is intact. If you can't notice a change in qualia under such circumstances then I would say that under any reasonable definition of the term there *IS* no change in qualia. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this gr
Re: The MGA revisited
On Thu, Apr 02, 2015 at 05:10:37PM +1000, Bruce Kellett wrote: > > Why are the limitations due to the size and/or age of our present > universe relevant if the computation is carried out in Platonia -- > on a non-physical UTM? > > If the computations are carried out on a real physical UTM then > consciousness supervenes on the physical universe after all! > The whole point of the MGA is to try and close off a gap in the argument if you assume that ontological reality is less than Platonia. In such a non-robust universe setting, physical limits are quite relevant. If we have a robust ontology (ie the full Platonia), then the MGA is not needed, the first 7 steps of the UDA suffice for Bruno's point. Moreover, I would argue that the MGA doesn't even work, as recordings can be fully counterfactually correct. -- 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 Latest project: The Amoeba's Secret (http://www.hpcoders.com.au/AmoebasSecret.html) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: The MGA revisited
On 3 April 2015 at 01:06, Bruno Marchal wrote: >> However, what you call "my" fuctionalism is a superset >> of comp, and it may still be possible to replace part of the brain >> with a device incorporating a hypercomputer, or even a magical device >> animated by God, and preserve consciousness. > > > ... making your functionalism trivial, if you excuse the straightness. It is not trivial because it makes this (if I may say so) rather profound claim: that it is impossible even for God to make a device that reproduces the observable function of the brain without also reproducing any associated consciousness. Roger Penrose proposes that the brain utilises non-computable physics and that therefore it is not possible to reproduce either the observable function of the brain or its consciousness using a digital computer. This is logically consistent, even if there is no actual evidence for it. John Searle, on the other hand, believes that it is possible to reproduce the observable function of the brain but that this would not necessarily reproduce consciousness. Given that consciousness actually exists, which entails that there is a difference between being conscious and not being conscious, this is not logically consistent because it would lead to partial zombies. >> It is my contention that >> the only requirement is that this device replicates the I/O behaviour >> of the part of the brain that it replaces, and any associated >> consciousness will follow necessarily. > > > OK. > > I think you get close to "prove" the half of comp "yes doctor", as everybody > agrees that we cannot prove Church thesis. (which does not mean we cannot > give very powerful evidences for it). > > Then the proof of "yes doctor" use the fact that partial zombiness makes no > sense, but I think that anosognosia can be used, notably if we believe in > things like a "consciousness volume" (on which the anosognosia would bear > on). I don't see how that could make sense. It is sufficient to consider not special cases where the change is small or memory and cognition are deficient, but a general case where the change in consciousness is extreme and the person's cognition is intact. If you claim that it is possible to radically change the "consciousness volume" without someone noticing then I think that is tantamount to claiming that consciousness does not exist. > The point is logical. Like in MGA, once we argue on reality, we can only > present evidences, no proofs. The LHC has not prove the existence of the > Higgs boson, nor does Mars Rover and its image prove the existence of Mars, > or Apollo 9 the existence of the moon. They just give strong evidence. > > It would be on that strong sense of "proof" that my critics would bear on. A > bit like Russell's critics on the MGA. I think the argument I present does not depend on any fact about the world (although going from the general case of what I call functionalism to what Putnam called machine-state functionalism and you call comp does depend on the physical CT being true). It depends on a very basic operational definition of consciouness: that you know it if you are conscious and you realise if there is a large enough change in your consciousness. If you don't accept this operational definition then I can find no meaning in the word "consciousness". -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Life in the Islamic State for women
On 2 April 2015 at 15:18, John Clark wrote: > On Wed, Apr 1, 2015 LizR wrote: > > >> >> In practice Communism was evil but in theory it was just stupid >>> >>> > Almost as stupid as capitalism, >> > > The defining characteristic of stupid is that stupid doesn't work, so > regardless of what you may personally think of capitalism's ethics (and > there is no disputing matters of taste) the fact remains that if capitalism > was stupider than communism then it wouldn't have won the 40 year long face > to face confrontation with it. > It didn't. Communism hasn't been tried except at the tribal/village level (you're getting confused because some people called themselves communist). My point is that capitalism is in the process of destroying the world, so it hasn't "won" anything and may well lose the entire human experiment thanks to the greed of a few short sighted individuals. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: The MGA revisited
Bruno Marchal wrote: On 02 Apr 2015, at 15:04, Bruce Kellett wrote: Bruno Marchal wrote: On 02 Apr 2015, at 04:08, Bruce Kellett wrote: Emulation is a dynamical process in time. I wonder where you get a time variable for your UTM. By a variable on the computational steps. It has nothing to do with a physical time a priori. What variable? A simple numbering of steps? But that will not work, or at least, you have hidden an assumption of an external time in your notation. The external time is given by the universal machine running the computation. It can be the basic level (elementary arithmetic, or the universal dovetailer), or it can be some other universal layer, running on some other universal layer, running on some other running on the basic level. At the basic level, we have the block mindscape, like the UD* (the infinite "cone" of all computations). This does not do the work you require of it. See below. "At the end of step 27, move to step 28." That contains an implicit notion of time -- 'ending' and 'moving' are temporal concepts. I do not see that you can remove all traces of the idea of an external temporal parameter. Otherwise the machine could just halt arbitrarily at some point and never know that it had halted. I think you ned to flesh your ideas here out a great deal more. Well, this is a forum, and I explain things already explained with all details in much longer text (which sometime does not help, because busy people tend to skip even more the long texts nowadays). Let me try to help a bit though. Fix some universal programming language, like Fortran, say. Enumerate all programs computing function with 1 argument, p_0, p_1, p_2, Let us denote by [p_i(j)^k] the kième step of the execution of the ième program on argument j, by the universal dovetailer (which dovetails then on all such [p_i(j)^k] . Then we can define, indeed already in Robinson arithmetic, a computation by a sequence of such steps, when i and j are fixed. So a computation is given by the sequence [p_456(666)^0] [p_456(666)^1] [p_456(666)^2] [p_456(666)^3] [p_456(666)^4] etc. This sequence is a subsequence of the general universal dovetailing, which dovetails on all [p_i(j)^k]. It is a computation, only in virtue of the universal dovetailing, and the universal dovetailing can be defined in arithmetic. I can translate the proposition "the UD access to [p_345(898786)^89]" entirely in term of arithmetic, using only the notion of addition, multiplication, successor (of natural numbers) and 0, and predicate logic. The only external time used is the ordering of the natural number, which is easily translated in arithmetic: x < y means Ez(x + z) = y). OK? I got this much from reading your paper and other things you have said. But this, at best, provides and ordering (indexing if you like) on the computational steps. It does not provide a time parameter. In fact, it is entirely static, and you get no more than some ordering imposed on sequences that can be found in any normal number. Let me be more specific in my criticism. In step 7 of your argument you introduce the dovetailer. But you then say "Suppose now, for the sake of argument, that out concrete and 'physical' universe is a sufficiently robust expanding universe so that a 'concrete' UD can run forever..." Why do you need infinite time in an expanding universe to run the dovetailer if it is not a physical machine? You put the words 'physical' and 'concrete' in scare quotes, but that is merely a device to mislead -- you actually are talking about the everyday physical, concrete universe that we all know and love. There is no Platonia here, or else why worry about time limitations and require an infinite expanding universe in order to get all your computations in? In step 8 you introduce the idea that the 'physical universe' really 'exists' and is too small, in the sense of not being able to generate the entire UD*, nor any reasonable portions of it. You call this move /ad hoc/ and *disgraceful*, but that is again just a rhetorical trick to divert attention from the fact that you really are talking about a physical computer running in our physical universe. In which case, at any finite time from the beginning of the universe the dovetailer will, in general, not have generated any sequence of computations that would correspond to us or anything else. Far from being a disgracefully /ad hoc/ manoeuvre, this actually undoes your whole enterprise. The only reason that the dovetailer might have to worry about time limitations is if it is actually a physical computer. Physical computers have to contend with such things as physical laws, the finite speed of light, the properties of materials, the generation of heat (entropy) and the need to remove that heat to a safe distance before everything melts down. If your computer is not a physical device, then it has none of these limit
Re: The MGA revisited
On Thu, Apr 02, 2015 at 10:30:04AM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: > > The intuition pump is that the recording does not contain any > computation, which is embarassing for a theory of mind requiring a > computation. With stroboscope like argument, such a computation is > not even well defined, nor is the time at which the movie is > executed. You may well be right, my point only was that the intuition pump fails at the realistic levels of complexity of the recordings involved. I think Bruce appreciates this at least. > As for the looking-table, it need to be infinite if it > implements a universal machine. Not for implementing a finite subsequence of a computation as discussed in the MGA. Let us say we're interested in a 10 second sequence of observer moments. Running a program emulating that sequence might involve the machine passing through some 10^15 32 bit states (say - I'm just plucking figures from where the sun don't shine here). Then to add in the counterfactual nature of this, we would just need to create a lookup table with 32 ^ (10 ^ 15) entries in it. Rather large, agreed, but last time I looked, a lot less than infinite. -- 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 Latest project: The Amoeba's Secret (http://www.hpcoders.com.au/AmoebasSecret.html) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Lovely Einstein Quote
Well, you just have to kill them humanely, and I promise to take off my heels before I stomp your foot. (Or become vegetarian...) On 3 April 2015 at 05:27, spudboy100 via Everything List < everything-list@googlegroups.com> wrote: > Jason, If I stomp on your foot, it is you who will feel the pain not I, > nor, will your poor toes pain be distributed amongst 7 billion others, just > you. When we can grow meats without the animal we'll stop slaughtering > animals for example. Sometimes compassion must be bracketed by what we are > capable of doing at the time. Mayhap, in some future day, somebody will use > their time machine to travel back to 1347 with a cure for the black plague, > but that day is not today. > > > -Original Message- > From: Jason Resch > To: Everything List > Sent: Wed, Apr 1, 2015 8:31 pm > Subject: Lovely Einstein Quote > > "A human being is part of the whole called by us universe, a part > limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and > feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of > consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to > our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our > task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of > compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its > beauty. The true value of a human being is determined by the measure and > the sense in which they have obtained liberation from the self. We shall > require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive." > (Albert Einstein, 1954) > > > > I didn't know until today he also believed the egoist self was a > delusion. > > Jason > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Lovely Einstein Quote
Temple Grandin could help out. On 3 April 2015 at 16:58, LizR wrote: > Well, you just have to kill them humanely, and I promise to take off my > heels before I stomp your foot. > > (Or become vegetarian...) > > On 3 April 2015 at 05:27, spudboy100 via Everything List < > everything-list@googlegroups.com> wrote: > >> Jason, If I stomp on your foot, it is you who will feel the pain not I, >> nor, will your poor toes pain be distributed amongst 7 billion others, just >> you. When we can grow meats without the animal we'll stop slaughtering >> animals for example. Sometimes compassion must be bracketed by what we are >> capable of doing at the time. Mayhap, in some future day, somebody will use >> their time machine to travel back to 1347 with a cure for the black plague, >> but that day is not today. >> >> >> -Original Message- >> From: Jason Resch >> To: Everything List >> Sent: Wed, Apr 1, 2015 8:31 pm >> Subject: Lovely Einstein Quote >> >> "A human being is part of the whole called by us universe, a part >> limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and >> feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of >> consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to >> our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our >> task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of >> compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its >> beauty. The true value of a human being is determined by the measure and >> the sense in which they have obtained liberation from the self. We shall >> require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive." >> (Albert Einstein, 1954) >> >> >> >> I didn't know until today he also believed the egoist self was a >> delusion. >> >> Jason >> -- >> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups >> "Everything List" group. >> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an >> email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. >> To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. >> Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. >> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. >> >> -- >> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups >> "Everything List" group. >> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an >> email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. >> To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. >> Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. >> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. >> > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: The MGA revisited
On 4/2/2015 4:33 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On 2 April 2015 at 08:30, meekerdb wrote: >On 4/1/2015 12:30 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: >> >>I don't think it's impossible to prove comp true. If comp were not true >>then it would be possible to make partial zombies. > > >I think that's the inference we're arguing. It's certainly not obvious to >me. It's not obvious that comp can be proved or it's not obvious that if comp were false it would be possible to make partial zombies? >>If partial zombies are possible then there would be no difference between >>you having qualia or lacking qualia, > > >There would be no 3p observable difference in other people. Just showing >that a partial zombie is possible doesn't show that you are one. A partial zombie would not only show no 3p difference, it would also show no 1p difference. There is no conceptual problem with that in a zombie, but there is in a partial zombie, which by definition has normal feelings and cognition except for its zombified aspect. A person who is otherwise normal immediately knows if he loses a significant aspect of his consciousness, such as his vision or his ability to understand language. Sometimes if neurological damage is severe enough it can damage cognitive ability and the subject develops the delusional belief, anosognosia, that he is normal despite all evidence to the contrary, but that does not invalidate the argument. >>which is equivalent to saying consciousness does not exist; > > >I think it is equivalent to the idea that some (humans) have souls and some >(animals) don't. I don't believe that, but it's logically possible. I think you are not making the distinction between a zombie and a partial zombie. A zombie is not obviously absurd, a partial zombie is. Suppose the were a race of people who experienced the qualia of liver function. That doesn't seem absurd to me. So neither does it seem absurd that I'm a partial zombie relative them. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: The MGA revisited
On 3 April 2015 at 17:30, meekerdb wrote: > Suppose the were a race of people who experienced the qualia of liver > function. That doesn't seem absurd to me. So neither does it seem absurd > that I'm a partial zombie relative them. What is absurd is that you have qualia, lose them, but there is no subjective or objective evidence that they have gone. What sense could be given to the word "qualia" in that case? -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
