Re: The MGA revisited

2015-04-06 Thread Russell Standish
On Tue, Apr 07, 2015 at 12:51:30PM +1000, Bruce Kellett wrote:
> 
> I think that Russell is right when he suggested that even by step
> seven your dovetailer has to be running in Platonia, not in a
> physical embodiment. This has to do with the fact that the
> dovetailer can never complete. It is running all possible programs
> and most of these will never complete. So you never complete and get
> back to running all the steps of early programs in the sequence. So
> you do not compute all possible instantiations of a conscious moment
> by any finite time in a physical universe. Or even in Platonia
> because the idea of a completed infinity of computations makes no
> sense.
> 
> So no conscious moment, even in with a dovetailer in Platonia, can
> ever be completely counterfactually correct, because there will
> always be related sequences of states that never get to be computed
> -- no completed infinities even in arithmetic.

Hi Bruce, that's not quite right. All computations eventually get
computed by the UD within a finite (but unbounded) number of
computational steps. Only in a non-robust ontology does this not happen.

Perhaps you could argue that the infinite sum over all computations
supporting a given observer moment will never complete in a finite
time, but I think that poses a problem for computing the measure
(already recognised as an open problem), rather than being an isue per
se with UDA 1-7.


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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)


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RE: Histones (proteins that form the scaffolding around which DNA wraps itself may also themselves be involved in heredity processes

2015-04-06 Thread 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List
 

From: everything-list@googlegroups.com 
[mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of LizR
Sent: Monday, April 06, 2015 9:19 PM
To: everything-list@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Histones (proteins that form the scaffolding around which DNA 
wraps itself may also themselves be involved in heredity processes

 

Anything in the egg cell, or donated at any point during gestation from the 
mother (in mammals, at least) can be passed on, I assume. (What about 
mitochondria?)

 

Mitochondria comes from mom; it is exclusively matrilineal

 

 

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Re: The MGA revisited

2015-04-06 Thread LizR
On 6 April 2015 at 08:10, meekerdb  wrote:

>  On 4/5/2015 9:12 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>
>  If you mean something else by physical, I have no idea what you mean.
>
>
>  It is what is studied by physics, mainly through empirical means: the
> measurable quantities in laboratories.
>
>  Aristotle (well mainly its followers) assume that the physical reality
> is irreducible, so that we have to assume primitively physical objects,
> like atoms, particles, 3d spaces, or today, strings for example. It makes
> physics the fundamental science (physicalism).
>
>  I was just saying that arithmetic is not a branch of physics, that
> numbers, sets, functions, are, by virtue of their definitions, not
> physical. More below.
>
>
> That's like saying electrons are not physical because they're defined by
> Dirac's equation.  "Physical" just means we can interact with it in our
> common, non-solipist world and reach intersubjective agreement about it.
> It's no more magic than supposing prime numbers exist because they're
> defined by axiom systems.
>

The difference is between "physical" and "primitively physical" - as I
would think Bruno knows?!

We all agree that the physical universe exists, the question of interest is
whether it's primitive, as opposed to being derived from something more
fundamental.

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Re: The Object

2015-04-06 Thread LizR
By the way, the phrase "above my paygrade" was invented by someone less
intelligent than you to keep you in your place, at least until they get
around to reintroducing full scale feudalism.

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Re: DNA Wormholes can cause cancer (what!?)

2015-04-06 Thread 'Roger' via Everything List
 

> *Subject:* Re: DNA Wormholes can cause cancer (what!?)
>
> Chris,
>

Hi.  It sounds like you might be in computing since you mentioned some 
terms like "reposited" (I've never heard of that in bio!)?  If so, you are 
very well educated in biology.  Nice job!  Your knowledge of the complexity 
of a cell and of things moving around via motor proteins and the 
cytoskeleton as opposed to diffusion only, etc. are real impressive.  Many 
of the computer and engineering guys I know seem to be allergic to biology 
knowledge.  Although, I admit I know almost nothing about computing either, 
except for stuff from a few simple classes in Pascal, Fortran, etc. a long, 
long time ago.

I'd never heard of that  model where they ran it backwards to find the 
genesis of life, but it sounds pretty neat.  I think it's certainly 
possible that life started in a far away stellar nursery and then came to 
Earth on a comet or something.  Although, I kind of liked that Star Trek 
(The Next Gen.) episode where some ancient race of bald people seeded lots 
of different oceans with their DNA and put a code in their that, once we 
decipher it, will play a video of the bald people talking to us.  I thought 
that was one of their best episodes.  But, the final question is still 
there.  How did the life originate where ever it came from?  I can't rule 
out anything, but I bet they'll be able to someday figure out a chemical 
mechanism for things to start replicating themselves.

One big advantage that computing and engineering have over drug 
discovery is that the scientist can design a system he or she wants to make 
when it's code or a chip or something.  But, because everything is so wet, 
bouncing around, cross-reacting and "squishy" in bio, it's hard to design 
things to work just the way you want them.  Cells are always mutating, 
proteins are always moving around and chemicals are always cross-reacting. 
 I think we'll eventually need to combine small mol. drugs and biological 
drugs with nanotechnological devices and tiny molecular computers to cure 
diseases.  

I checked out that article on microbes being passed from generation to 
generation.  It was very interesting; although, it kind of sounded like it 
was passed via an environmental route because the next generation of 
animals lived in the same environment as the previous generation, and the 
microbes are probably all over the environment in the form of feces, shed 
fur, surfaces, animals touching each other, etc.  I'd have to read more 
about it, but it sounded like not quite a direct mechanism of transmission.

One more pontification, and I promise I'll stop, but I think some of 
the physics guys could learn from biochemists because biochemists are 
always looking for mechanisms of action for how things work.  But, it seems 
like the physicists are more content to say something works and we have the 
math to describe it.  For instance, I don't think they really know even why 
positive and negative charges attract or two positive charges repel, do 
they?  I know there are fields of force, and exchange of photons (or other 
force particles for other forces), but how exactly does this lead to 
attraction or repulsion?  I admit I know very little about it, but this 
kind of thing frustrates me when reading popular physics articles.  In 
their defense, though, force particles are much smaller than proteins!

At least, Monday is over!  Have a good week.  

Roger 


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Re: Histones (proteins that form the scaffolding around which DNA wraps itself may also themselves be involved in heredity processes

2015-04-06 Thread LizR
Anything in the egg cell, or donated at any point during gestation from the
mother (in mammals, at least) can be passed on, I assume. (What about
mitochondria?)

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Re: Michael Graziano's theory of consciousness

2015-04-06 Thread Stathis Papaioannou
On 7 April 2015 at 11:58, John Clark  wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 6, 2015  Stathis Papaioannou  wrote:
>
>> > you feel that you are the same person from day to day and year to year,
>> > even if you know this is an illusion.
>
>
> How would things be different if this were not an illusion?

You are less the "same person" compared to your self from a year ago
than you are compared to a copy of you that might exist in the next
room. It's just that you don't encounter your previous selves.


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Re: The Object

2015-04-06 Thread LizR
That all sounds very plausible to me. (Although sadly my pay grade doesn't
match that fact.)

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Re: The MGA revisited

2015-04-06 Thread Bruce Kellett

Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 06 Apr 2015, at 13:25, Bruce Kellett wrote:

You want a dynamic like in physics, a function from time to space, but 
in computer science, and to understand the problem here, the dynamics 
are given by function from N to "mind states".


You need to give magical ability to a turing machine so that she can 
distinguish (by its consciousness, in a first person way) the difference 
between a physical emulation, and an arithmetical emulation. The 
physical will give rise to the right measure, but not by magic, only 
because the physical is run by the sum on all computations below its 
substitution level.


But all this is not needed to get the reversal in step seven. So I guess 
again that you are OK with step seven and see that if a primary physical 
universe exists and run the UD, then physics is reduced to arithmetic 
(seen from inside). Do you see that.


I understand what you are claiming, but I do not agree with it. The 
primary physical universe certainly exists, and it is not running your 
UD! I think we might notice if it were.


I think that Russell is right when he suggested that even by step seven 
your dovetailer has to be running in Platonia, not in a physical 
embodiment. This has to do with the fact that the dovetailer can never 
complete. It is running all possible programs and most of these will 
never complete. So you never complete and get back to running all the 
steps of early programs in the sequence. So you do not compute all 
possible instantiations of a conscious moment by any finite time in a 
physical universe. Or even in Platonia because the idea of a completed 
infinity of computations makes no sense.


So no conscious moment, even in with a dovetailer in Platonia, can ever 
be completely counterfactually correct, because there will always be 
related sequences of states that never get to be computed -- no 
completed infinities even in arithmetic.


Physics is not reduced to arithmetic seen from the inside because 
arithmetic is never completed by the dovetailer or anything else and 
there are no non-magical ways in which similar states that might give 
rise to ordered physical laws can ever be be related.


You only ever get out of a model like this what you put in. You have put 
in arithmetic, so that is what you get out. You will never get physics 
this way.


Bruce



With occam, a believer in comp can 
already stop here, and work on the measure problem.
But a phsysicalist can still conclude that there is a primary unique 
universe, and that it can't run the UD, nor any significant part.


The step 8 address this situation and shows precisely why invoking a 
primary physical universe makes it magical, with neuron needing 
prescience, and movie getting experiences, and indeed nothing getting 
all experiences.


It is good news, as it suggest we might understand the origin of the 
physical laws, from non physical things, the gluing properties of 
universal numbers' dreams.


Bruno








Bruce

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





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Re: The MGA revisited

2015-04-06 Thread Bruce Kellett

Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 06 Apr 2015, at 13:25, Bruce Kellett wrote:


Bruno Marchal wrote:

To be more precise, I should explain you how "computations" and 
"emulation" is defined in arithmetic, in term of the truth of 
elementary number theoretical relations. A computation will exist 
through the fact that it is true that some numbers divide some other 
numbers, and other facts like that. On the contrary, a description of 
a computation will be a number from which we can extract the 
description of a sequence of states, but that is different from the 
states existence being the result of a set of true relation.


So you can use these terms in that way. But that does not make 
'computation' a dynamical concept.


It is not a physical time related concept. But computer, or universal 
number (or universal combinators) needs only a discrete static "time": 
0, 1, 2, 3, ..


OK, but that is an ordering parameter and it does not make the 
computational dynamical rather than static.



There is no change or movement involved. Arithmetic is completely 
static, as are the relations between numbers.


Block universe are static too. It is the point of a relativity theory. 
Time and space comes from comparison between clock and meter, nothing 
can prevent the sigma_1 reality to emulates all those comparisons , and 
by assuming computationalism, of the conscious entities which make sense 
of the comparisons.


It is similar to the block universe view in that your internal ordering 
parameter is entirely static. But the analogy is not perfect for what 
you want to do with comp. The physical block universe is often referred 
to in terms of two separate points of view: the 'bird' view which is 
from the outside, from which (entirely metaphorical) view, the universe 
is static; and the 'frog' view from within, from which view the universe 
is dynamical. In this case the bird (block) view is completely 
equivalent to a recording of the experiences of the frog in real time. 
Because the time parameter is defined internally, the recording can be 
run as often as required by the bird, and the result (and conscious 
experiences of the frog) are identical every time.


The same thing would happen in the static view of the dovetailer with 
states ordered by the step number. The whole shebang would be no 
different from a recording of the same shebang -- in fact, it is a 
recording because it is static from the external view. The experience of 
time by the internal consciousness emulated is exactly the same for 
'reruns' of the same portion of the dovetailer's output by some external 
'bird' observer.


Now, as I understand it, you want to avoid this conclusion by appealing 
to the notion of counterfactual correctness. The particular sequence of 
states is not itself conscious because it is not counterfactually 
correct -- given a different environment, that sequence of states would 
give the same conscious experience, not some modified experience. It is 
just a recording, after all.


Your model then appeals to the idea of the infinite number of separate 
occasions that that same set of internal states occurs in the overall 
picture of the dovetailer, and you claim that, in some sense, the 
'actual' conscious experience is a 'sum' over these separate emulations, 
even though they be separated by many billions of computational steps of 
the dovetailer. I put words like 'actual' and 'sum' in scare quotes 
because I do not think these ideas make much sense.


You appeal to techniques like the Feynman sum over paths in QM to make 
sense of your model. But that analogy fails because the Feynman sum is 
merely a calculational technique -- it does not correspond to and actual 
sum of separate really existing things that nature somehow 'performs' to 
get a particle from A to B. It is a calculational heuristic, and like so 
much in quantum mechanics, reifying computational tricks leads to 
endless problems. For example, the Feynman diagrams as used in field 
theory are terms in a perturbation expansion, they do not have separate 
independent existence. It is only the sum that is physical, and that 
same result can be obtained by many other calculational techniques that 
never mention Feynman diagrams.


One problem that occurs to me is: "who does this sum over dovetailer 
states?" FPI would suggest that there is no such sum. The future of the 
'person' experiencing that conscious moment is indeterminate -- the 
person cannot predict the future in anything other than a probabilistic 
way. But that makes each conscious moment unique, and actually a static 
recording of itself -- just as in the block universe view of physics. 
Again, FPI of the dovetailer has nothing in common with indeterminacy in 
quantum mechanics. Mere external similarity does not imply equivalence.


Bruce

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Re: Michael Graziano's theory of consciousness

2015-04-06 Thread John Clark
On Mon, Apr 6, 2015  Stathis Papaioannou  wrote:

> you feel that you are the same person from day to day and year to year,
> even if you know this is an illusion.


How would things be different if this were not an illusion?

John K Clark

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Re: Michael Graziano's theory of consciousness

2015-04-06 Thread Stathis Papaioannou
On 7 April 2015 at 09:57, John Clark  wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 6, 2015  Telmo Menezes  wrote:
>
 >>> Assuming you're like me, you perceive yourself as a single entity
 >>> travelling through time in the forward direction.
>>>
>>>
>>> >> You? Mr. John Clark The Moscow Man will perceive a single entity, and
>>> >> Mr. John Clark the Washington Man will perceive a single entity, and Mr.
>>> >> John Clark The Helsinki Man will no longer perceive anything at all.
>>
>>
>> > You left out "traveling through time in a forward direction".
>
>
> Who is traveling through time in a forward direction, Mr. John Clark or Mr.
> John Clark The Helsinki Man?

Arguably there is no John Clark as a single entity persisting in time,
since even in a single world with no duplication, time travel or other
anomalies both your hardware and your software changes; for example,
you have very little in common with your one year old self.
Nevertheless, you feel that you are the same person from day to day
and year to year, even if you know this is an illusion.


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Re: Michael Graziano's theory of consciousness

2015-04-06 Thread John Clark
On Mon, Apr 6, 2015  Telmo Menezes  wrote:

>>> Assuming you're like me, you perceive yourself as a single entity
>>> travelling through time in the forward direction.
>>>
>>
>> >> You? Mr. John Clark The Moscow Man will perceive a single entity, and
>> Mr. John Clark the Washington Man will perceive a single entity, and Mr.
>> John Clark The Helsinki Man will no longer perceive anything at all.
>>
>
> > You left out "traveling through time in a forward direction".
>

Who is traveling through time in a forward direction, Mr. John Clark or Mr.
John Clark The Helsinki Man?


> > many worlds or duplicating machines you have to specify which "Telmo
> Menezes" or which "you" in the exact same way.
>

No it is not exactly the same way. With copying machines John Clark can see
6.02 *10^23 Telmo Menezes running around and has no idea which one is Mr.
You, but in Many Worlds it is dictated by the laws of physics that John
Clark can see only one Telmo Menezes, and human language need not be made
more precise than the laws of physics.


> > Bruno does this with the concept of diary -- which can be a brain state.
>

What good does that do? We're in Moscow now and John Clark The Moscow Man
didn't write that diary, John Clark The Helsinki Man did and John Clark
Helsinki Man no longer exists.


> >>The position of their brains is unimportant because until the door is
>> opened both are still identical to the Helsinki Man.
>>
>
> > They are important if we are discussing the implications of
> computationalism (the belief that you mind can be replaced with some
> computation,
>

Baloney. If consciousness even has a position it's the place a mind is
thinking about or the place where its sense organs are; a mind might not
even know or care where the computations are taking place.


> > So you undoubtedly agree that step 3 is correct.
>

In science it's better to be wrong than meaningless and step 3 is so
infested with ambiguous personal pronouns that it is meaningless. So I
neither agree nor disagree with step 3 just as I don't agree or disagree
with a burp or the phrase "free will"; all three have zero informational
content. They don't have enough meat on the bone to even be wrong.

Well OK maybe I went a little too far with that, a burp may contain some
information about the nature of human digestion.

> The duplicator uncertainty is perhaps more remarkable, because different
> worlds exist as first person perspectives,
>

If the one and only thing that can turn the Helsinki Man into the Moscow
man is the sight of Moscow then I don't have the least bit uncertainty in
predicting that the guy that will see Moscow will turn out to be the Moscow
Man, nor do I find that fact remarkable. I find it a tautology


> > while a third person perspective contains the two copies.
>

 Well what else did you expect to happen?

  John K Clark

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Re: Life in the Islamic State for women

2015-04-06 Thread John Mikes
Samiya, you sweetly fell into the trap of my polite sentence *(...smarter
than me*).
I did not mention "absolute" smart. And: I did not ask 'where God came
from' - although in an eaarlier post I raised the question 'where (from
what system) did the mentioned 'God' come from?

A ask, however, Bruno for some explanation he may have about the term "God'
he uses exrtensively and intensively - dispite of his many times claimed
agnosticism.
I referred to some 'alien(?) wisdom to re-evaluate out terms -anyway with
the criticism that those (new) terms may fit into an alien (not our) system
better.

Scriptures (all of them, from the pre-Hebrew ones to the most recent ones)
are HUMANLY written (published?) and some (e.g. the Quran) only in ONE
*human* language, even prohibiting a translation). If, indeed, based on
'Godly' instructions,
some 'mortals' (conveying the instructions) should have gotten some
believable proof of the 'source' and understanding about the instructed
texts. Should we beleieve that after completing any of those 'Scriptures'
such influence stopped short and no correction occurred ever since? Those
writing clerks should have exercised a super-human precision and
understanding indeed, with a clear view of the Supernatural Mind suggesting
the texts.

*Most* (religious/political - they mix frequently) Scriptures comfort
sadistic human pleasures, even prescribe such for 'violations' against
their rules. Even the one  considered among the 'meekest' (e.g. Hindy) burn
widows at the funeral of the deceased husband etc.

I feel it hard to believe (agnosticism?) that in ancient times humanity was
that much smarter than after millenia of development into more advanced
thinking techiques.
Unless your (and Bruno's) Supernatural is indeed "supernatural", what
should be substantiated at least.

Regards

On Mon, Apr 6, 2015 at 2:09 AM, Samiya Illias 
wrote:

> John,
> How is it possible to find someone absolutely 'smarter' when each one
> knows/understands something more about something than others, and is less
> informed about something than someone else?
> The scriptures seem to be the only source of 'smarter than human' wisdom.
> A critical yet humble study of ancient wisdom, doubting human
> (mis)interpretations and (mis)applications, but having faith in the
> timelessness of the message(s), searching in the original sources, and
> sifting wisdom from it all, may just be what we need. Its always been with
> us, perhaps we are just too arrogant/ignorant to use it, and thus wander
> aimlessly, searching in vain?!
> Whenever we see a building or any other object of human technology, we
> assume that someone conceived, designed and then built it, and that it
> needs to be maintained, or it ends up as a ruin. We cannot imagine that it
> just 'appeared on its own'. We even wonder about the purpose or utility of
> it. Yet, the idea of a God [Conceiver, Designer, Creator and Sustainer of
> the Heavens and Earth] keeps getting rejected, as well as the Scriptures
> [User Manual]. Why? Simply because we ask where God came from? Isn't that
> ignorance leading to arrogance? A vicious circle of arrogance -> rejection
> -> innovation -> experimentation -> failure -> suffering -> humility ->
> resilience -> rebuilding -> arrogance -> ...
> We are all in the same boat [Earth], sailing the same sea [Cosmos] and the
> welfare of the boat and its passengers [everyone and everything on planet
> Earth] is our collective responsibility and in our interest. We have to
> help each other understand that, if the journey is to be pleasant and
> worthwhile!
> Samiya
>
>
>
> On Mon, Apr 6, 2015 at 12:11 AM, John Mikes  wrote:
>
>> *Brent:*
>> *your line *
>> *"Communism is not a terrible idea - it works fine for families."  *
>> *i*s a cop-out. The discussion is not about some closely related
>> peoples' lives, it is about a worldwide socio-economic political system -
>> and you know it.
>>
>> I never dreamed of wealthy people giving up their wealth. Not to general
>> welfare, not to any other worthy goal. A NEW SYSTEM has to be established,
>> definitely on NEW TERMS, the question is:   W H O  can make it and  W H O
>>  can estblish it?
>> Not anyone from our rotten slave-driving capital/politico establishment.
>> What if 'people' cannot be pesuaded to 'vote' against their interest? if
>> those millions turn out to be worthless? if - horribile dictu - VOTERS
>> start to  *T H I N K  ? *
>> *For starters: * when there will be a "NON" vote? (better:  NO WAY
>> vote).
>> I entertained the stupid idea as well to the arrival of powerful aliens
>>  with more wisdom than Earthlings and install a new way of thinking. The
>> result was:
>> that could be no better than the present one, implementing new, but not
>> becessarily better patterns (for us). We could corrupt those ideas in no
>> time.
>> Or: those would be useless under our circumstances.
>> Hence my search for someone smarter than me.
>>
>> On Sat, Apr 4, 2015 at 4:15 PM, meekerdb  wro

Re: The MGA revisited

2015-04-06 Thread Bruno Marchal


On 06 Apr 2015, at 13:25, Bruce Kellett wrote:


Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 06 Apr 2015, at 07:02, Bruce Kellett wrote:

Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 05 Apr 2015, at 01:19, Russell Standish wrote:


Then what is your definition of a recording? In my eyes, UD* is a
recording, particularly a finite portion of it, such as the first
10,000 steps of the first 10,000 programs.
You confuse description of computations, which exists in the  
"movies" obtained by filming the boolean graph, and the  
computations themselves, with involves semantic, that is a  
reality (be it the static standard model of Peano Arithmetic) or  
a physical reality.


Where is the dynamics necessary for computations themselves (as  
opposed to descriptions of computations) in the static standard  
model of Peano Arithmetic? I know where the dynamics reside in  
physical reality.
In the truth of the elementary relations which implements a  
relation between some universal Turing system (universal number)  
and the program that is implemented.


That 'truth' is static. The implementation of a program might be  
dynamic, but that is because it is implemented on a physical  
computer that has a physical clock cycle.



No, it is dynamic in virtue of a universal machine running it step by  
step. The physical clock cycle is used in physical implementation, but  
other can use computable injection in N.







I remind you that 'dynamic' means "of or relating to force  
producing motion" or "active, potent, energetic, forceful;  
characterized by action or change." In other words, the opposite  
of static.
That is a physicalist account of dynamics. It could be the correct  
one---I don't know. But even if is the correct one, you have to  
agree that a diophantine approximation of, let us say the evolution  
of the milky way  + andromeda can exists (unless you presuppose at  
the start that the Milky Way + andromeda use non computable  
functions).


I don't know that is uses functions at all. Even the three-body  
problem in Newtonian gravitational dynamics does not have a general  
closed form solution.


Which is a symptom that its set of rational approximations might be  
Turing universal.
But the inverse is easier to prove: a Turing universal machine can  
emulate all rational approximations of the three-body problem.







It is not a 'function' in any standard sense. The system can only be  
approximated by perturbation theory, and the calculations are  
different for every set of starting values. There is not a  
'function' to be evaluated over some input domain.


?
What is the set of staring values, if not the domain of inputs?




So your type of dynamics would exist somewhere in the dynamics of  
some game-of-life pattern, and would appear in the running of a  
game-of-life


"Running" a game-of-life? Any dynamics there comes from the running  
-- the clock cycles of the computer on which it is run. It is not  
intrinsic.


I am sorry but you are wrong on this. Computations can be defined in  
the arithmetical language. It is not intrinsic, but it is intrinsic  
relatively to a universal number, or to the system assumed at the base  
(arithmetic, or combinators, etc).






pattern emulating the universal dovetailer, which run all game-of- 
life pattern. Then it would exist in the block-description of the  
dynamics (digital, discrete) of the universal game of life patter,  
that you can see as a static infinite cone of some sort. In that  
case, your acceptance of a block universe, and the way to recover  
the dynamics internally would work for that pattern.


No, it doesn't work like that. The block universe idea arises from  
special relativity theory -- the fact that Lorentz transformations  
alter the way in which space and time are interrelated. There is no  
universal 'time' parameter in that picture, only a local variable  
't' that depends on the frame of reference.


But that will occur for all emulation of evolving interacting set of  
universal machine. The UD is intensionally universal: sigma_1  
arithmetic emulate all computable processes, indeed, even with  
oracles. Different notion of times can be defined from inside, in a  
relative way. Lorentz invariance is a particular case, and it is not  
excluded nor directly relevant with the fact that arithmetic emulates  
all computable dynamics.
If you accept computationalism, you can understand that a machine  
emulated cannot feel the difference if the is emulate by a physical u,  
or an arithmetical u. Yet the point is that by observation they might  
find evidence that comp is false, because below its computationalist  
substitution level, the math has to be a sum on all computations (and  
in that sense QM confirms computationalism).




The useful dynamical concepts in relativity are the Lorentz  
invariants -- quantities that do not depend on the way you slice up  
separate time and space variables. Time is part of a coordinate  
system, and you do not have a space-ti

Re: Life in the Islamic State for women

2015-04-06 Thread Telmo Menezes
On Sun, Apr 5, 2015 at 9:45 PM, meekerdb  wrote:

>
>
> It was a totalitarian government, like within a single corporation.
> Nothing at all like Marx imagined.  Where Marx's idea has been realized is
> in the Amana colonies in the US and the kibbutz in Israel.  So why didn't
> they devolve into totalitarian states?
>

My bet would be size. I have no doubt that communism works at the tribal
level. We are evolved for it to work at that scale.


>   Why aren't corporations as oppressive as the GDR?  I'd say it has little
> to do with their economics.  It's because people can stay or leave.
>

I agree, but isn't this just the fundamental idea of capitalism? If you can
go somewhere else, this means that businesses have to compete and the
competition drives progress. Of course, in crony capitalism, one can use
capital to interfere with the regulatory bodies with the goal of
artificially restricting competition. In real capitalism this remains a
problem, because the wealthiest businesses can make their adversaries go
bankrupt by selling at a loss for long enough. But this strategy is less
stable: the monopoly can always be challenged in the future.


>
>
>   Still, many citizens of the GDR risked their lives to get to the other
> side. There were never attempts in the opposite direction. This is an
> almost perfect experiment because both groups had the same cultural
> background, ethnicity, language, etc.
>
>
>>   John Locke thought owning land was an oxymoron...you could only "own"
>> the temporary use of land.  Didn't matter for hunter-gatherers, but it was
>> problem that had to be solved for agricultural society.
>>
>
>  John Locke won, at least in Europe.
>
>
> He didn't have to win in England; the land already belonged to the crown
> in principle.  The exceptions were called "free holds".  Even today much of
> England is nominally the crown's and is occupied on 100yr leases.
>
>   The property taxes are so high that you don't really feel that you own
> land or property. You lease it, and the government will take it away if you
> are no longer willing or capable of paying said tax.
>
>
>>
>> That now a lot the world's GDP comes from capital has created the same
>> kinds of questions about ownership of capital.  Given that r>g in Piketty's
>> analysis, is it a good idea to allow the Koch brothers to inherit a billion
>> dollar business (that their father built by drilling for Stalin).
>>
>
>  The question is if there is a better alternative. My country did exactly
> that in 1974 -- nationalize big factories.
>
>
> Where did I say anything about nationalizing??  It think the Koch brothers
> inheritance should have been taxed at a much higher marginal rate and I
> think property, beyond homesteads, should be taxed whether it is investment
> capital or land or machinery.
>

It's hard to disagree that the world would be better if the Koch brothers
had to pay a hefty inheritance tax. In fact, inheritance tax might be the
most ethically justifiable. Taxation of investment capital or means of
production seems more of a mixed bag, because it also makes it harder for
businesses to survive, pursue large longer-term projects, etc. In the end
the cost is transferred to the buyer anyway, so why not just have sales tax
instead? It also incentivizes the wealthier to allocate more resources to
business ventures and less to hedonism.


>
>
>   After 6 months almost none were left. I grew up in front of the ruins
> of a previously thriving flour mill. The currently richest guy in the
> country was a chemical engineer at one of these factories. He bought it
> back from the government for almost nothing when it was about to collapse
> and grew it back to a thriving business. Now he owns a multinational retail
> chain, which no longer pays taxes in my country because we moved the HQ
> elsewhere after a law was passed to increase taxes on capital gains. My
> point being: wealth inequality is a real problem but I believe all attempts
> to fix it so far have been worse.
>
>  At the risk of being repetitive, I believe that withdrawing the power of
> nations to print money out of thin air and determine interest rates would
> reduce inequality.
>
>
> I don't see how that would address the problem at all.  The problem is
> that capital (money, machinery, land,...) can be used to earn more
> capital.  And ownership of that capital can be passed on.  So it's an
> unstable system.  As my grandfather used to say, "The richer get richer and
> the poor get poorer."  There are some countervailing factors: economic
> mobility of individuals, dispersion of inheritance to multiple heirs, loss
> of wealth through war or mismanagement,...  But on average they are
> overwhelmed.
>

Indexing currency to a limited resource would stop the central bank ->
normal bank -> rich investor supply of credit. Notice that anytime the
central bank prints money, it is in fact uniformly extracting
resource-buying power for all of the existing money and centralizi

Re: Michael Graziano's theory of consciousness

2015-04-06 Thread Telmo Menezes
On Sat, Apr 4, 2015 at 11:04 PM, John Clark  wrote:

> On Sat, Apr 4, 2015  Telmo Menezes  wrote:
>
> > If you take the MWI seriously, then you are open to the possibility that
>> you are constantly being duplicated
>>
>
> If the MWI is true then it's not a possibility it's a certainty
>
>
>> > Assuming you're like me, you perceive yourself as a single entity
>> travelling through time in the forward direction.
>>
>
> You?
> Mr. John Clark The Moscow Man will perceive a single entity, and Mr. John
> Clark the Washington Man will perceive a single entity, and Mr. John Clark
> The Helsinki Man will no longer perceive anything at all.
>

You left out "traveling through time in a forward direction". I leave it as
an exercise to the reader to figure out why. Hint: it has something to do
in betting on what happens next.


>
> And John Clark is really starting to hate personal pronouns, as a exercise
> try writing a paragraph or at least a sentence without using any, it will
> do Telmo Menezes good.
>

"Assuming you're like me" means exactly the same as "Assuming John Clark is
like Telmo Menezes". No ambiguity was added or removed. I really don't
understand your noun fetish. If many worlds or duplicating machines you
have to specify which "Telmo Menezes" or which "you" in the exact same way.
Bruno does this with the concept of diary -- which can be a brain state.


>
>  >> subjectively there is only one Stathis Papaioannou because they are
>>> identical.
>>>
>>
>> > Subjectively from whose perspective?
>>
>
> From the only one that matters, from Stathis Papaioannou's perspective.
> Two identical Stathis Papaioannous running in parallel is subjectively
> identical to one.
>

Perfect.


>
>>
>> >>  After the doors are opened they no longer are identical because they
>> see different things; one sees Moscow and becomes Mr. Stathis Papaioannou
>> The Moscow Man, and the other sees Washington and becomes Mr. Stathis
>> Papaioannou The Washington Man.
>
>
>> > But before the doors are opened and after the duplication, you can ask
>> them through the intercom to guess where they are.
>>
>
> The position of their brains is unimportant because until the door is
> opened both are still identical to the Helsinki Man.
>

They are important if we are discussing the implications of
computationalism (the belief that you mind can be replaced with some
computation, or saying yes to the doctor) to materialism (the belief that
matter is the fundamental substance of reality, the brute fact).


> A much better question is to ask them to guess what will happen when the
> door opens. Both know with 100% certainty that photons will impinge on them
> and will change them, but they are uncertain if the photons will come from
> Moscow or from Washington.
>

So you undoubtedly agree that step 3 is correct.


> But this is just the classical old fashioned sort uncertainty that is due
> to simple lack of information, it's not inherent uncertainty of the Quantum
> Mechanical sort.
>

The MWI also kills that distinction. Lack of information is always lack of
information about in which world you are.


>
> Monty Hall always had the information about which door the car was behind,
> and the person on the other end of that intercom knows which parallel copy
> of Telmo Menezes will see photons coming from Moscow and turn into the
> Moscow Man and which will see photons coming from Washington and turn into
> the Moscow Man. But the information on if that atom of Carbon 14 will decay
> in the next hour is not just unknown the information does not exist, it's
> inherently uncertain.
>

Unless you accept the MWI, in which there are worlds for which the car is
behind each door. The duplicator uncertainty is perhaps more remarkable,
because different worlds exist as first person perspectives, while a third
person perspective contains the two copies.

But the level of intellectual excitement is irrelevant to the correctness
of step 3, which I believe you admitted to be correct with your above
statement. The "much better question" you propose is precisely what is
proposed in step 3.

Telmo.


>
>   John K Clark
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>> If they are forced to make a bet, you will find that they tend to be
>> right 1/2 of the time.
>>
>
> But the probability is about if the protons that come through that open
> door will come from Moscow, in which Mr. Telmo Menezes
>
>  you will change
>
>
>
>
>
>
>>
>> This is all you're being asked to agree with. I can predict with 100%
>> certainty that it doesn't matter though, because
>>
>
>
>> you made your mind before giving the idea a chance.
>>
>> Telmo.
>>
>>
>>>
>>>   John K Clark
>>>

>>>  --
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>>> Visit 

Re: Fast moves for nuclear development in Siberia

2015-04-06 Thread John Clark
On Mon, Apr 6, 2015 , meekerdb  wrote:


> > In general you can't assume that it takes one critical mass to make a
> bomb.
>

You do unless you're very sophisticated, otherwise it will likely take you
more than one critical mass to make a bomb, for example the critical mass
of U235 is 114 pounds but the Hiroshima bomb had 141 pounds of it. If you
can implode the fissile U235 or Plutonium metal and compress it to
arbitrary density then you can make the critical mass arbitrarily small,
but that takes great sophistication far beyond the reach of a terrorist.
And even the most sophisticated bomb makers in the world on both sides of
the iron curtain found that making U233 bombs to be so hard it just wasn't
worth bothering with.


> > the fissionable material is surrounded by other materials to act as
> neutron reflectors so the fissionable mass can be considerably smaller that
> the critical mass.   That's the technology that went into the design of
> nuclear artillery shells.
>

All nuclear bombs use neutron reflectors. What makes nuclear artillery
shells unusual is that they used the gun method to achieve criticality and
that was only tried twice, the Hiroshima bomb and one test of a nuclear
artillery shell in the 1950s. The gun method is simple but is very
inefficient and wasteful of super expensive U235. In the Hiroshima bomb
only 1.5% of the 141 pounds of U235 actually split, 98.5% was harmlessly
blasted away before it could fission because of pre-detonation, modern
bombs use up nearly 100% of their U235 or Plutonium. Because of
inefficiency the gun method can't achieve high enough temperatures to serve
as the ignition for a H-bomb, and because of this pre-detonation problem
the gun method won't work at all for Plutonium, much less for U233. All
modern nuclear bombs use the implosion method.

  John K Clark

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Re: The Object

2015-04-06 Thread spudboy100 via Everything List
Yes, this discussion is, as the saying goes, "above my pay grade" but I do it 
to please (neurobiologically) my amygdala, and satisfy my cerebrum. Since I am 
stealing and modifying Eric Steinhart's theories on the Universe(s), 
consciousness, Leibniz, existence, and all the rest,  I would say that God, as 
Mind, evolved from the simplest possible mind (arithmetic??) and spawned more 
and greater versions of himself/herself, all the while carrying along the 
previous iterations, as what physician called a veriform appendix to refer to, 
the simpler versions being a look-up table. I make these imbecilic statements 
because I suspect they are fact. Steinhart has speculated that each subsequent 
God/Mind has a universe within it. Where he gets this, I don't remember, but I 
somehow, like it. To paraphrase the old American rock song, "Be true to your 
God, just like you would to your girl!"  


Steinhart uses his background in computer science to formulate his philosophy, 
since more and more, as physicists, astronomers, and mathematicians, start 
identifying analogies in nature, that we discover in computer science. He is 
big on Plato and Plotinus, as well as our old friend Nietszche, John Leslie, 
Liebniz again, etc. So your Platonic otherworld is, a subset of a big computer 
system. Where'd it come from? It evolved. How'd it evolve? Probably a program. 
Who programmed these sets to evolve? I don't know. Steinhart can sometimes 
espouse some kind of mathematical polytheism. I am not sure that I do.


Benefits? It provides for a certitude of an afterlife, though his Revision 
theory of Resurrection, is all about improved universes with improved 
clones.Clones are likely via Everett's MWI, and Lewis's Modal realism. Not 
interesting for me. His Promotion theory solves this but using the under-floor 
of reality as computation,programs, axioms, arithmetic,processes. Information 
gets transferred to a better environment via pipelines, and Promoted. What 
makes these other universes better? Well, the operating system of these other 
domains have more evolved minds running the place, plus, depending on how time 
works, our ancestors and our descendents. Input-Processing-Output. Pipelines 
move our old minds into, wherever?


Problems? It could all be useless dreck, and it's a complex and nuanced view. 
It is logical, but rational? It sort of works for me and all I am doing is 
modifying such thinking, on the fly, as we say in the states. 



-Original Message-
From: Bruno Marchal 
To: everything-list 
Sent: Mon, Apr 6, 2015 5:18 am
Subject: Re: The Object


 
 
  
On 04 Apr 2015, at 19:04, spudboy100 via Everything List wrote:  
  
  
   My view is that rather than being a simulation, our universe and an 
infinitude of others,are programs that yields physical universes, as a 
programmatic process.   
  
   
  
  
?  
  
That seems contradictory. Being a simulation means being brought by a program 
implemented in some universal number relation (physically realized or not, at 
first).  
  
   
  
  
   
  
  
  
   The underlying software and hardware are more real than the reality we 
sense,   
  
   
  
  
OK, so we can take the simplest one: elementary arithmetic, for example.   
  
   
  
  
   
  
  
  
   but our lives are very real.   
  
   
  
  
In the case above, our lives are very epistemologically, or phenomenologically 
real.  
  
   
  
  
   
  
  
  
   Underneath everything is organized data, programs, processes, and pipelines 
to other universes (or parts of a greater very big universe).   
  
   
  
  
This is like using a God in an explanation. Why to introduce a universe to make 
programs and program execution, when we know that already exists once we assume 
elementary arithmetic? (with some measure that we can test so that we can test 
the hypothesis).  
  
   
  
  
   
  
  
   
  
  
  
   So theoretically, humans and galaxies and bacteria, get promoted (as in 
software) to other places. I am stealing from Eric Steinhart's Promotion 
hypothesis, to suit my own pitiful intellect, and emotions. 
  
  
   
  
  
It is OK, but you don't need universes, still less other bigger universe. The 
whole of real math and physics use a tiny amount of arithmetical truth. Only 
logicians, category theorists and theologian needs sometimes to refer to the 
big one, the whole of the arithmetical reality, that we cannot even define from 
inside. That is *very* big.   
  
   
  
  
Bruno  
  
   
  
  
   
  
  
   
  
  
   
  
  
  

 
 
-Original Message- 
 From: Bruno Marchal < marc...@ulb.ac.be> 
 To: everything-list < everything-list@googlegroups.com> 
 Sent: Sat, Apr 4, 2015 11:10 am 
 Subject: Re: The Object 
  
  
   
 Nice! Quite Platonist! "We never invent anything---we always only discover." 
would assess a platonist.
 
  
 
 
 Bruno 
 
  
 
 
  
 

Re: The MGA revisited

2015-04-06 Thread Bruce Kellett

Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 06 Apr 2015, at 07:02, Bruce Kellett wrote:


Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 05 Apr 2015, at 01:19, Russell Standish wrote:


Then what is your definition of a recording? In my eyes, UD* is a
recording, particularly a finite portion of it, such as the first
10,000 steps of the first 10,000 programs.
You confuse description of computations, which exists in the "movies" 
obtained by filming the boolean graph, and the computations 
themselves, with involves semantic, that is a reality (be it the 
static standard model of Peano Arithmetic) or a physical reality.


Where is the dynamics necessary for computations themselves (as 
opposed to descriptions of computations) in the static standard model 
of Peano Arithmetic? I know where the dynamics reside in physical 
reality.


In the truth of the elementary relations which implements a relation 
between some universal Turing system (universal number) and the program 
that is implemented.


That 'truth' is static. The implementation of a program might be 
dynamic, but that is because it is implemented on a physical computer 
that has a physical clock cycle.


I remind you that 'dynamic' means "of or relating to force producing 
motion" or "active, potent, energetic, forceful; characterized by 
action or change." In other words, the opposite of static.


That is a physicalist account of dynamics. It could be the correct 
one---I don't know. But even if is the correct one, you have to agree 
that a diophantine approximation of, let us say the evolution of the 
milky way  + andromeda can exists (unless you presuppose at the start 
that the Milky Way + andromeda use non computable functions).


I don't know that is uses functions at all. Even the three-body problem 
in Newtonian gravitational dynamics does not have a general closed form 
solution. It is not a 'function' in any standard sense. The system can 
only be approximated by perturbation theory, and the calculations are 
different for every set of starting values. There is not a 'function' to 
be evaluated over some input domain.


So your 
type of dynamics would exist somewhere in the dynamics of some 
game-of-life pattern, and would appear in the running of a game-of-life


"Running" a game-of-life? Any dynamics there comes from the running -- 
the clock cycles of the computer on which it is run. It is not intrinsic.


pattern emulating the universal dovetailer, which run all game-of-life 
pattern. Then it would exist in the block-description of the dynamics 
(digital, discrete) of the universal game of life patter, that you can 
see as a static infinite cone of some sort. In that case, your 
acceptance of a block universe, and the way to recover the dynamics 
internally would work for that pattern.


No, it doesn't work like that. The block universe idea arises from 
special relativity theory -- the fact that Lorentz transformations alter 
the way in which space and time are interrelated. There is no universal 
'time' parameter in that picture, only a local variable 't' that depends 
on the frame of reference. The useful dynamical concepts in relativity 
are the Lorentz invariants -- quantities that do not depend on the way 
you slice up separate time and space variables. Time is part of a 
coordinate system, and you do not have a space-time model that can be 
spanned by a coordinate system.


The FPI makes this a bit more complex, because from the point of view of 
the self-aware entities emulated in the universal pattern, their "real 
future" is not really defined by some location in the pattern, but from 
all their infinitely many locations in that pattern.


That is, again, an entirely static concept. You have not introduced any 
time parameter.



To be more precise, I should explain you how "computations" and 
"emulation" is defined in arithmetic, in term of the truth of elementary 
number theoretical relations. A computation will exist through the fact 
that it is true that some numbers divide some other numbers, and other 
facts like that. On the contrary, a description of a computation will be 
a number from which we can extract the description of a sequence of 
states, but that is different from the states existence being the result 
of a set of true relation.


So you can use these terms in that way. But that does not make 
'computation' a dynamical concept. There is no change or movement 
involved. Arithmetic is completely static, as are the relations between 
numbers.



It is very much like the difference between the Gödel number of the 
sentence "3 divides 6", and the true fact that the number 3 divides 6. 
The first one is a number, and needs some encoding; the second is a 
truth involving the number 3 and 6, and which does not needs any 
encoding to be true (only to be communicated).


'Communicated'? A transition from a state of not knowing to a state of 
knowing? But that is a temporal concept, and you have no time variable 
in your model. The truth that 6 is divisible 

Re: Fast moves for nuclear development in Siberia

2015-04-06 Thread spudboy100 via Everything List
Agreed.


-Original Message-
From: 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List 
To: everything-list 
Sent: Sun, Apr 5, 2015 9:37 pm
Subject: RE: Fast moves for nuclear development in Siberia


 
  
 
  
 
  
From: everything-list@googlegroups.com 
[mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] 
Sent: Sunday, April 05, 2015 2:05 PM
To: everything-list@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Fast moves for nuclear development in Siberia
  
 
  
Really, it's an interesting piece of tech, but it just seems too clumsy and too 
costly. Please note that I love this kind of tech, if for no other reason in 
that the promise of fusion just keeps on receding into the future. We can talk 
of everything from tokamaks, to inertial confinement, to colliding beam fusion, 
to muon catalysis, and so forth. With fission, it's the same thing, with gas 
cooled reactors, betavoltaics, pwr's, bwr's, mini-reactor's, CANDU reactors. 
Here, also, the proper engineering, costs, and safety, as well as waste 
disposal just keep fading back into dreamland. I love this stuff, being a nerd, 
and all, but I can no longer listen to the blissful b.s. proffered by newsies, 
and academics, alike. What's holding back solar is one great flaw, storage. You 
cannot run a modern large city on solar during cold nights and cloudy days, so 
storage has to be demonstrated over solar cell efficiency. Barring the 
development of solar storage, there's natural gas (methane) and coal. Right 
now, despite solar enthusiast's claims, gas turbines are beating all other 
energy sources down. Some are sure that shale gas is just another economic 
bubble, and it may be, but there is the use of gas hydrates on the horizon, not 
economically, but in 20 + years, or longer, than yes. This is the future, 
unless we get some fixes in for fission, fusion, solar, geothermal, or anything 
else. 
  
The rapid spread of all electric vehicles and plugin hybrids is also a build 
out of a distributed electric energy storage network that will provide 
significant peak load capacity or the much easier to provision dribbles of 
energy (relative to peak load demand) that are needed in the middle of the 
night when the sun isn’t shining (but the wind generally is blowing). The 
problem is solving itself; it is not insurmountable; spinup reserves of nimble 
medium scale gas turbines could fill the rare gaps.
  
 
  



  
   
-Original Message-
From: meekerdb 
To: everything-list 
Sent: Sun, Apr 5, 2015 4:39 pm
Subject: Re: Fast moves for nuclear development in Siberia
   

On 4/5/2015 11:09 AM, 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List wrote:

> Actually

compared with the Uranium fuel cycle the Thorium fuel cycle is neutron poor, a

 

> LFTR produces enough neutrons to burn up 100% of the Thorium but there isn't

a lot of 

> wiggle room, however this is an advantage not a disadvantage. If

somebody tried to 

> secretly siphon off some of the U233 produced in a reactor

to make a bomb the reactor 

> would simply stop and it would be hard to keep

that secret, also fewer neutrons means 

> less damage to the equipment, you

already don't have to worry about the most important 

> maintenance problem

that a conventional reactor has, cracks in the solid fuel rods 

> caused by

neutrons, because a LFTR has no solid fuel rods, it's fuel is a liquid and you

 

> can't crack a liquid.

 

The reason LFTRs have been touted as proliferation

resistant is that the U233 is mixed 

with U232 which makes its use in a weapons

almost impossible.  But the proliferation 

problem for a LFTR is that

Proactinium can be chemically remove from the cycle, which 

prevents the

accumulation of U232.  Then the U233 can be siphoned off and used.  A 2GW 

LFTR

is expected to produce about 60Kg of excess U233 per year; enough for 7 to 8

nuclear 

weapons.  So the proliferation resistance is

exaggerated.

 

Brent

 

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Re: Fast moves for nuclear development in Siberia

2015-04-06 Thread spudboy100 via Everything List
Brent,


Fear of a nuclear accident, in the 80's Chernobyl, and in 2011, Fukushima. In 
Germany, the government shutdown uranium, and bought tons and tons, of cheap US 
bituminous and anthracite, to burn in their old, power plants. Merkel started 
last year, to re-light the atom plants once again, after pumping tons of 
pollutant in the air.  I am not opposed to u235 plants or thorium 232-u233 
plants, but the rest of the world seems to be. Your rationalism is far better 
then the feelings of joe six pack, but that is that. 



-Original Message-
From: meekerdb 
To: everything-list 
Sent: Sun, Apr 5, 2015 5:37 pm
Subject: Re: Fast moves for nuclear development in Siberia


  
On 4/5/2015 2:05 PM, spudboy100 via Everything List wrote:  
  
  
  Really, it's an interesting piece of tech, but it just seems too clumsy and 
too costly. 
  
  
  There are 442 nuclear power reactors in operation.  France gets most of it's 
electrical power from nukes.  If nuclear power plants had been discovered 
first, would anybody even consider building a coal fired plant? 
  
 Brent 
  
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Re: The Object

2015-04-06 Thread Bruno Marchal


On 04 Apr 2015, at 19:04, spudboy100 via Everything List wrote:

My view is that rather than being a simulation, our universe and an  
infinitude of others,are programs that yields physical universes, as  
a programmatic process.


?
That seems contradictory. Being a simulation means being brought by a  
program implemented in some universal number relation (physically  
realized or not, at first).




The underlying software and hardware are more real than the reality  
we sense,


OK, so we can take the simplest one: elementary arithmetic, for example.




but our lives are very real.


In the case above, our lives are very epistemologically, or  
phenomenologically real.




Underneath everything is organized data, programs, processes, and  
pipelines to other universes (or parts of a greater very big  
universe).


This is like using a God in an explanation. Why to introduce a  
universe to make programs and program execution, when we know that  
already exists once we assume elementary arithmetic? (with some  
measure that we can test so that we can test the hypothesis).





So theoretically, humans and galaxies and bacteria, get promoted (as  
in software) to other places. I am stealing from Eric Steinhart's  
Promotion hypothesis, to suit my own pitiful intellect, and emotions.


It is OK, but you don't need universes, still less other bigger  
universe. The whole of real math and physics use a tiny amount of  
arithmetical truth. Only logicians, category theorists and theologian  
needs sometimes to refer to the big one, the whole of the arithmetical  
reality, that we cannot even define from inside. That is *very* big.


Bruno








-Original Message-
From: Bruno Marchal 
To: everything-list 
Sent: Sat, Apr 4, 2015 11:10 am
Subject: Re: The Object

Nice! Quite Platonist! "We never invent anything---we always only  
discover." would assess a platonist.


Bruno


On 07 Jan 2015, at 23:54, Jason Resch wrote:

From Douglas Jone's short story (  http://frombob.to/you/ 
aconvers.html ):



But suppose it were possible to create physical universes like yours  
within an appropriately specified computational universe. What could  
you say about the origin of the universe then?
Very little, actually. Why? Because all general-purpose computers  
are equivalent. If it is possible to perform this "computation"  
within any one computational universe, then there are an infinite  
number of computational universes in which this "computation" is  
performed. If you were to try to follow the chain of causality back  
past the origin of your physical universe, you would find an  
infinite number of causes.
These are all deep, deep questions. We have been thinking about  
them, and doing experiments, for a very long time. Our  
mathematicians have proven certain things... I’m sorry, I have to be  
very careful about what I say here. There is the very real  
possibility of inducing cardiac arrest in certain people if I say  
too much. So let me say some vague things:
There exists an object, a mathematical object, which has certain  
properties. For reasons that should be obvious, there is no general  
agreement on what the best name for this object is, so for the sake  
of convenience, let’s just call it The Object.
Your world, that is, the entire universe that you can observe, is an  
infinitesimal part of that Object. And so is mine. And so is every  
universe that can possibly exist. And everything else that can  
exist, whether or not you would call it a universe. All of  
Mathematics is inside that Object. And the various parts of that  
Object are somehow connected together.
We expend a considerable amount of effort attempting to deduce the  
properties of that Object. In a sense, we are Exploring it.
As I said before, we are Explorers, and we are exploring Everything.  
And exploring the nature of the connections between the various  
parts of The Object is the most fundamental kind of exploration  
there is. And some of the most interesting kinds of connections are  
related to Consciousness.
The Object is Eternal. It exists outside of time. It has no  
beginning and no end; it simply Is.
It contains many universes that have a property called Time, and you  
live in one of them, and so do I. But these universes are Eternal  
too. The Time within them is visible only from a particular point of  
view.
Whenever we speak of creating a computational universe, or of  
creating a physical universe, or of creating anything, we are not  
really speaking of creation; we are really speaking of making a  
connection. Making a connection between different parts of The Object.
The parts are already there. They have always been there. And we  
don’t really make the connection; the connection was always there  
too. We just discover what is already there. In other words, we just  
become aware of it.
So whenever we think we’re creating something, this is just a vanity  
of the ego, which exists within Time. Ev

Re: The MGA revisited

2015-04-06 Thread Bruno Marchal


On 06 Apr 2015, at 07:02, Bruce Kellett wrote:


Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 05 Apr 2015, at 01:19, Russell Standish wrote:


Then what is your definition of a recording? In my eyes, UD* is a
recording, particularly a finite portion of it, such as the first
10,000 steps of the first 10,000 programs.
You confuse description of computations, which exists in the  
"movies" obtained by filming the boolean graph, and the  
computations themselves, with involves semantic, that is a reality  
(be it the static standard model of Peano Arithmetic) or a physical  
reality.


Where is the dynamics necessary for computations themselves (as  
opposed to descriptions of computations) in the static standard  
model of Peano Arithmetic? I know where the dynamics reside in  
physical reality.


In the truth of the elementary relations which implements a relation  
between some universal Turing system (universal number) and the  
program that is implemented.





I remind you that 'dynamic' means "of or relating to force producing  
motion" or "active, potent, energetic, forceful; characterized by  
action or change." In other words, the opposite of static.


That is a physicalist account of dynamics. It could be the correct  
one---I don't know. But even if is the correct one, you have to agree  
that a diophantine approximation of, let us say the evolution of the  
milky way  + andromeda can exists (unless you presuppose at the start  
that the Milky Way + andromeda use non computable functions). So your  
type of dynamics would exist somewhere in the dynamics of some game-of- 
life pattern, and would appear in the running of a game-of-life  
pattern emulating the universal dovetailer, which run all game-of-life  
pattern. Then it would exist in the block-description of the dynamics  
(digital, discrete) of the universal game of life patter, that you can  
see as a static infinite cone of some sort. In that case, your  
acceptance of a block universe, and the way to recover the dynamics  
internally would work for that pattern.


The FPI makes this a bit more complex, because from the point of view  
of the self-aware entities emulated in the universal pattern, their  
"real future" is not really defined by some location in the pattern,  
but from all their infinitely many locations in that pattern.


To be more precise, I should explain you how "computations" and  
"emulation" is defined in arithmetic, in term of the truth of  
elementary number theoretical relations. A computation will exist  
through the fact that it is true that some numbers divide some other  
numbers, and other facts like that. On the contrary, a description of  
a computation will be a number from which we can extract the  
description of a sequence of states, but that is different from the  
states existence being the result of a set of true relation.


It is very much like the difference between the Gödel number of the  
sentence "3 divides 6", and the true fact that the number 3 divides 6.  
The first one is a number, and needs some encoding; the second is a  
truth involving the number 3 and 6, and which does not needs any  
encoding to be true (only to be communicated).


Bruno






Bruce

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



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Re: Life in the Islamic State for women

2015-04-06 Thread Bruno Marchal


On 06 Apr 2015, at 08:09, Samiya Illias wrote:


John,
How is it possible to find someone absolutely 'smarter' when each  
one knows/understands something more about something than others,  
and is less informed about something than someone else?
The scriptures seem to be the only source of 'smarter than human'  
wisdom. A critical yet humble study of ancient wisdom, doubting  
human (mis)interpretations and (mis)applications, but having faith  
in the timelessness of the message(s), searching in the original  
sources, and sifting wisdom from it all, may just be what we need.  
Its always been with us, perhaps we are just too arrogant/ignorant  
to use it, and thus wander aimlessly, searching in vain?!


It is because the message has always been with us that we need to  
search inward, and to be skeptical for text and people pretending to  
know the answer. If you trust the source inside you, it will talk to  
you. If you trust the talk of any others, it will leave you.




Whenever we see a building or any other object of human technology,  
we assume that someone conceived, designed and then built it, and  
that it needs to be maintained, or it ends up as a ruin. We cannot  
imagine that it just 'appeared on its own'.


Today we know that simple relation (like z_n = (z^(n-1)^2 + c)) can  
lead to highly complex structure.




We even wonder about the purpose or utility of it. Yet, the idea of  
a God [Conceiver, Designer, Creator and Sustainer of the Heavens and  
Earth] keeps getting rejected, as well as the Scriptures [User  
Manual]. Why?


I reject, not God, but the idea of using God to justify anything. Even  
if true, it cannot be used in an explanation, as it reduce a complex  
problem into a more complex problem. The human designing a building is  
more complex than the building. A priori God is more complex than the  
creation. Invoking God in an explantion is bad science, as it stops  
the inquiry. It is like the élan vitale of some ancient biologiste.


Then "user manual" can be inspiring and helpful, but none has the  
right to say that a manual is more authentical than others. That leads  
to useless conflicts, which again hide the real question. We need to  
be humble, and to say that a text is authentical against other texts  
is immodesty.





Simply because we ask where God came from? Isn't that ignorance  
leading to arrogance?


We might need to go toward God, and then we might understand  
something, but we can't use God as the explanation itself, because  
that is a mockery of an explanation. "God made it" can only be a  
poetical way to say I don't know. Yet, when people take scripture  
literally, it is transformed into "shut up and obey", and that leads  
to the criminal use of religion, genocide, etc.


On the contrary, accepting that a sacred text is a human text, pale  
recovering of a plausible mystical experience by a human, we allow  
ourselves to comment it, criticized it, and through sequence of  
comments we can progress, and get possibly closer to the original  
experience.




A vicious circle of arrogance -> rejection -> innovation ->  
experimentation -> failure -> suffering -> humility -> resilience ->  
rebuilding -> arrogance -> ...
We are all in the same boat [Earth], sailing the same sea [Cosmos]  
and the welfare of the boat and its passengers [everyone and  
everything on planet Earth] is our collective responsibility and in  
our interest. We have to help each other understand that, if the  
journey is to be pleasant and worthwhile!


I agree with this, but Earth and Cosmos are still images, and might be  
less real than Boat and Sea :)


Bruno





Samiya



On Mon, Apr 6, 2015 at 12:11 AM, John Mikes  wrote:
Brent:
your line
"Communism is not a terrible idea - it works fine for families."
is a cop-out. The discussion is not about some closely related  
peoples' lives, it is about a worldwide socio-economic political  
system - and you know it.


I never dreamed of wealthy people giving up their wealth. Not to  
general welfare, not to any other worthy goal. A NEW SYSTEM has to  
be established, definitely on NEW TERMS, the question is:   W H O   
can make it and  W H O  can estblish it?
Not anyone from our rotten slave-driving capital/politico  
establishment.
What if 'people' cannot be pesuaded to 'vote' against their  
interest? if those millions turn out to be worthless? if - horribile  
dictu - VOTERS start to  T H I N K  ?
For starters:  when there will be a "NON" vote? (better:  NO WAY  
vote).
I entertained the stupid idea as well to the arrival of powerful  
aliens  with more wisdom than Earthlings and install a new way of  
thinking. The result was:
that could be no better than the present one, implementing new, but  
not becessarily better patterns (for us). We could corrupt those  
ideas in no time.

Or: those would be useless under our circumstances.
Hence my search for someone smarter than me.

On Sat, Apr 4, 2015 at 4:15 PM, meekerdb  wrote