Re: Gödel's Philosophy

[Bruno Marchal]

On 12 Sep 2015, at 23:48, Jason Resch wrote:




On Fri, Sep 11, 2015 at 1:12 PM, Bruno Marchal   
wrote:


On 11 Sep 2015, at 04:08, Jason Resch wrote:

I interpreted the higher beings in the sense of "multiple  
realizability", as Turing wrote in his 1950 paper,


"The fact that Babbage's Analytical Engine was to be entirely  
mechanical will help us to rid ourselves of a superstition.  
Importance is often attached to the fact that modern digital  
computers are electrical, and that the nervous system also is  
electrical. Since Babbage's machine was not electrical, and since  
all digital computers are in a sense equivalent, we see that this  
use of electricity cannot be of theoretical importance. Of course  
electricity usually comes in where fast signalling is concerned, so  
that it is not surprising that we find it in both these  
connections. In the nervous system chemical phenomena are at least  
as important as electrical. In certain computers the storage system  
is mainly acoustic. The feature of using electricity is thus seen  
to be only a very superficial similarity. If we wish to find such  
similarities we should took rather for mathematical analogies of  
function."


I am not sure at all of your interpretation Jason. Logicians like  
Gödel and Turing would not use "higher" in such a sense. And I am  
not sure Gödel talked about the 1950 paper, as Gödel was a tiny bit  
anti-mechanist, I do think that by "higher" he meant "divine", in  
the theological realm, or belonging to a large, perhaps very large,  
cardinal.


Note that the multiple realisability entails directly that not only  
electricity is superficial, but given that the computation can be  
realized in and by any Turing universal system, the physicalness is  
itself superficial. A tiny part of elementary arithmetic is Turing  
universal.







So aliens or beings on other worlds, or in other universes, need  
not be made of the same particles, or same elements/chemicals as  
we, if it is the functions/patterns/mathematical relations that  
determine consciousness.


Interesting but I am not sure if that was what Gödel thought about.

(But I confess I have not yet read the entire work of Gödel, I still  
miss probably some of the unpublished writings)




I am not certain either. It was conjecture on my part. Another  
possible interpretation: God-like intelligences may converge on the  
same set of beliefs/actions/personalities, etc. as with increasing  
intelligence becomes decreased probability of making mistakes.   
Therefore matters of disagreement between any two entities converges  
toward zero as intelligence increases.


Then it looks like humans are less intelligent than animals. Should  
not the possibility of doing mistake grows with intelligence? Is not  
intelligence an opening to the change of mind? That is also the  
experience of having been mistaken or deluded or failed and of  
possibly still being mistaken and probably being mistaken in the  
(hopefully consistent and sound) extensions.


For the Gods, I don't know. I model the Gods by non recursively  
enumerable sets of true arithmetical sentences. Some such sets can be  
defined in arithmetic, and some needs analysis or second order logic.  
With computationalisme they can have role as oracle, but I doubt that  
this is the case "on the terrestrial plane". Near death or through  
brain perturbation, or by doing mathematics, we can develop a  
familiarity with them, a bit like we can be familiar with the  
Cantorian infinities. Despite their high level of non computability,  
machines like PA or ZF, and us,  can with still prove many things  
about them.





Then we might conclude "divine beings" would all behave/believe/ 
operate the same way, have the same ethics, etc.


That is platonism. With computationalism, I think that something like  
that might be true but non justifiable, and when justified it re- 
enlarges the spectrum of the differences. It is basically why souls  
fall, and multiply, and why theology contains a theological trap  
(which incarnates itself in the institutionalization of moral rules).  
No problem with laws, but there is a problem with morality and  
spirituality: it can never be imposed or normalize in any way.
Maybe I can say this: the day we have all the same ethics is the day  
we are all the same person. (I am not sure, neither that this is true,  
nor that this is communicable, nor perhaps trivial).


Bruno



Jason






I read the formal rights in the same way you did, that ethics/ 
politics is an objective, rather than subjective science.


Jason


On Thu, Sep 10, 2015 at 8:40 PM, Pierz  wrote:
OK, I think it's 100%. I'm just not sure what it means that the  
higher beings are connected by analogy not composition, and "formal  
rights comprise a real science" (unless he means there is something  
objectively knowable about ethics). That said, the higher beings  
thing sounds 

Re: Gödel's Philosophy

[Bruno Marchal]

On 12 Sep 2015, at 18:13, spudboy100 via Everything List wrote:

Clifford Pickover (mathematical biologist) once did an interview  
with Godel, and a few weeks later, had a dream in which he and Godel  
were playing chess, and in the dream Godel swept his arm across the  
chessboard knocking all the pieces over. Pickover said he woke up an  
noted the time. Later that morning he said he was informed of  
Godel's passing, which happened to be the same time as his dream.  
Godel also believed in an afterlife (crazy?) but only if the  
universe rotated. It does not appear to rotate.


I hear that for the first time, what is the reference for "Godel also  
believed in an afterlife (crazy?) but only if the universe rotated. It  
does not appear to rotate.",


I was aware that Gödel was open to the possibility of after-life, but  
more related to non-mechanism than to mechanism. And if what you say  
is true, it illustrates that Gödel was still Aristotelian., and still  
believing in the mind-brain identity thesis (which break up both with  
computationalism or with QM-without-collapse (I think).


And, BTW, once we assume mechanism, I don't see how we can avoid  
afterlife, and indeed afterlives. The problem is more in the fact that  
that there are too many, of many different sorts. Not that I believe  
this, or not: it is just a simple consequence of computationalisme, or  
classical indexical computationalism (to distinguish the  
theo(techno)logical thesis from the metaphorical use).


Bruno






-Original Message-
From: John Clark 
To: everything-list 
Sent: Fri, Sep 11, 2015 3:56 pm
Subject: Re: Gödel's Philosophy


On Thu, Sep 10, 2015 , Pierz  wrote:

​> ​ It's amazing to me that a man of Gödel's brilliance could  
take the drivel of the ontological argument seriously. Did I miss  
something about that specious piece of sophistry?

Godel
​ wrote his ​ ontological ​ stuff in his ​ later years when  
he went off the rails ​,​ ​but​  fortunately even at his  
worst he retained enough sanity to know he should not publish the  
thing ​, that came after his death​ . ​I think ​ Godel  
was   ​the​   ​greatest ​ logician ​of all time but he had  
some very illogical ideas.  Godel  was always a very odd man and he  
got odder as he got older ​ especially after his best friend,  
Albert Einstein, died in 1955 ​ . He sealed his windows shut  
because he thought night air was deadly ​ except on t he coldest  
days of winter ​when​  he thought somebody ​would  try to  
murder hi ​m​ with poison gas, ​ and​  ​ he wore ​ 
a ​  heavy woolen coat on the hottest day ​ of summer​ ​ 
, ​ Godel believed in ghosts ​ ​ and for unknown reasons he  
insisted on putting lots of cheap plastic flamingos on his front  
lawn. ​Godel disliked talking to people but if he had to he  
insisted they do it on the telephone even if they were just a few  
feet away. ​Godel  ended up starving himself to death, he refused  
to eat because he thought unnamed sinister forces were trying to  
poison him. The great logician weighed 65 pounds when he died in  
1978 from, according to the ​official ​ death certificate, ​ 
"​ lack of food brought on by paranoia ​"​ .

​  John K Clark​






Other than that I'm in 87.5% agreement with him...

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



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Re: Gödel's Philosophy

[Bruno Marchal]

On 12 Sep 2015, at 19:21, John Clark wrote:



On Sat, Sep 12, 2015  spudboy100 via Everything List  wrote:


​> ​Clifford Pickover (mathematical biologist) once did an  
interview with Godel, and a few weeks later, had a dream in which he  
and Godel were playing chess, and in the dream Godel swept his arm  
across the chessboard knocking all the pieces over. Pickover said he  
woke up an noted the time. Later that morning he said he was  
informed of Godel's passing, which happened to be the same time as  
his dream. Godel also believed in an afterlife (crazy?) but only if  
the universe rotated. It does not appear to rotate.


​Godel discovered in 1949 that if the universe rotated then  
according to ​​Einstein's General Theory of relativity closed  
timelike curves would exist, in other words time machines would  
exist and it would be arbitrary to give one event the "cause" label  
and another event ​the "effect" label, you could switch the labels  
if you wanted; but if the universe does not rotate, and apparently  
it doesn't, then Godel's discovery is of little importance.



Gödel was a logician. he constructed a model of the theory GR, just to  
show a counter-example to some proposition by Einstein.


That pure GR leads to close time circle is of some conceptual  
importance, especially that you don't need to rotate the universe, it  
is enough to rotate a massive cylinder in the universe, and I am not  
sure that some black hole collision are unable to create mini close  
time loops.


We never knows the truth, but it is always interesting to have a good  
idea of what our theories make necessary and what they make possible.


Bruno





  John K Clark







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Re: Gödel's Philosophy

[John Clark]

On Sun, Sep 13, 2015  Bruno Marchal  wrote:

​> ​
> Gödel was a logician. he constructed a model of the theory GR, just to
> show a counter-example to some proposition by Einstein.
> ​ ​
>

​Godel showed that if the universe were different from the way it is then a
time machine would be possible, but it the universe were different from the
way it is perpetual motion machines would be possible too. ​


> ​> ​
> That pure GR leads to close time circle is of some conceptual importance,
> especially that you don't need to rotate the universe, it is enough to
> rotate a massive cylinder in the universe,
>

Tipler
​(not Godel) ​
found a solution in General Relativity that show
​ed
 that an *infinitely *long, extremely dense cylinder made of Neutronium
(the stuff of Neutron Stars) and spinning at almost the speed of light
would be able to tip a light cone enough to act as a time machine and allow
you to visit the past, but there are two very important problems
​:​

1) Nobody knows if a cylinder of finite length would also work, the math is
too difficult to figure out.

2) The very rapid rotation would cause the cylinder to fly apart. This is
much more than just an Engineering difficulty, no known force in Physics
would be strong enough to hold the cylinder together, not even the strong
nuclear force. So for this to work new Physics would need to be found,
which is just another way of saying that as far as we know now it
​ is​
impossible.

  John K Clark

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Re: Cryonics in the NYT

[Evgenii Rudnyi]

Neuroscience as a new messiah. People's belief in an afterlife will never 
go away. Especially in our enlightenment age.

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Cryonics in the NYT

[John Clark]

The following article was on the front page of today's New York Times


In the moments just before Kim Suozzi died of cancer at age 23, it fell
to her boyfriend, Josh Schisler, to follow through with the plan to freeze
her brain. As her pulse monitor sounded its alarm and her breath grew
ragged, he fumbled for his phone. Fighting the emotion that threatened to
paralyze him, he alerted the cryonics team waiting nearby and called
the hospice nurses to come pronounce her dead. Any delay would
jeopardize the chance to maybe, someday, resurrect her mind.

It was impossible to know on that cloudless Arizona morning in January 2013
which fragments of Kim’s identity might survive, if any. Would she remember
their first, fumbling kiss in his dorm room five years earlier? Their
private jokes and dumb arguments? The seizure, the surgery, the fancy
neuroscience fellowship she had to turn down? More than memories, Josh,
then 24, wished for the crude procedure to salvage whatever synapses gave
rise to her dry, generous humor, compelled her to greet every cat she saw
with a high-pitched “helllooo,” and inspired her to write him poems. They
knew how strange it sounded, the hope that Kim’s brain could be preserved
in subzero storage so that decades or centuries from now, if science
advanced, her billions of interconnected neurons could be scanned, analyzed
and converted into computer code that mimicked how they once worked.

But Kim’s terminal prognosis came at the start of a global push
to understand the brain. And some of the tools and techniques emerging from
neuroscience laboratories were beginning to bear some resemblance to those
long envisioned in futurist fantasies.

or one thing, neuroscientists were starting to map the connections between
individual neurons believed to encode many aspects of memory and
identity. The research, limited so far to small bits of dead animal brain,
had the usual goals of advancing knowledge and improving human health.
Still, it was driving interest in what would be a critical first step to
create any simulation of an individual mind: preserving that pattern of
connections in an entire brain after death.

“I can see within, say, 40 years that we would have a method to generate
a digital replica of a person’s mind,” said Winfried Denk, a director at
the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology in Germany, who has invented
one of several mapping techniques. “It’s not my primary motivation, but it
is a logical outgrowth of our work.”

Other neuroscientists do not take that idea seriously, given the great
gaps in knowledge about the workings of the brain. “We are nowhere close
to brain emulation given our current level of understanding,” said
Cori Bargmann, a neuroscientist at Rockefeller University in New York and
one of the architects of the Obama administration’s initiative seeking a
$4.5 billion investment in brain research over the next decade. Will it
ever be possible?” she asked. “I don’t know. But this isn’t 50 years away.”

There would not, Kim and Josh well understood, be any quick reunion. But so
long as there was a chance, even a small or distant one, they thought it
was worth trying to preserve her brain. Might her actual brain be repaired
so she could “wake up” one day, the dominant dream of cryonics for the last
half-century? She did not rule it out. But they also imagined a different
outcome, that she might rejoin the world in an artificial body or a
computer-simulated environment, or perhaps both, feeling and sensing
through a silicon chip rather than a brain.

“I just think it’s worth trying to preserve Kim,” Josh said. For a brief
period three years ago, the young couple became a minor social media
sensation as they went to the online forum Reddit to solicit donations to
pay for her cryonic storage and Kim posted video blogs about her
condition. And she agreed to let a Times reporter speak to her family and
friends and chart her remaining months and her bid for another chance at
life, with one restriction: “I don’t want you to think I have any idea what
the future will be like,” she wrote in a text message. “So I mean, don’t
portray it like I know.”

In a culture that places a premium on the graceful acceptance of death,
the couple faced a wave of hostility, tempered by sympathy for Kim’s
desire, as she explained it, “not to miss it all.” Family members and
strangers alike told them they were wasting Kim’s precious remaining time
on a pipe dream. Kim herself would allow only that “if it does happen to
work, it would be incredible.” “Dying,” her father admonished gently, “is a
part of life.” Yet as the brain preservation research that was just
starting as Kim’s life was ending begins to bear fruit, the questions the
couple faced may ultimately confront more of us with implications that
could be preposterously profound.

The mapping technique pioneered by Dr. Denk and others involves scanning
brains in impossibly thin sheets with an electron microscope. Stacked
together on a 

Re: Gödel's Philosophy

[Brent Meeker]

On 9/13/2015 9:18 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:


On 12 Sep 2015, at 23:48, Jason Resch wrote:




On Fri, Sep 11, 2015 at 1:12 PM, Bruno Marchal > wrote:




On 11 Sep 2015, at 04:08, Jason Resch wrote:




So aliens or beings on other worlds, or in other universes, need
not be made of the same particles, or same elements/chemicals as
we, if it is the functions/patterns/mathematical relations that
determine consciousness.


Interesting but I am not sure if that was what Gödel thought about.

(But I confess I have not yet read the entire work of Gödel, I
still miss probably some of the unpublished writings)



I am not certain either. It was conjecture on my part. Another 
possible interpretation: God-like intelligences may converge on the 
same set of beliefs/actions/personalities, etc. as with increasing 
intelligence becomes decreased probability of making mistakes.  
Therefore matters of disagreement between any two entities converges 
toward zero as intelligence increases.


Then it looks like humans are less intelligent than animals. Should 
not the possibility of doing mistake grows with intelligence? Is not 
intelligence an opening to the change of mind? That is also the 
experience of having been mistaken or deluded or failed and of 
possibly still being mistaken and probably being mistaken in the 
(hopefully consistent and sound) extensions.


So the omniscient Gods of monotheism are even less intelligent.

Brent

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