Re: A summary I just wrote for my blog
Not too much here that would raise hackles on the everything-list, but (IMHO) for the first sentence-- Perhaps it's time I had another go at explaining all that weird stuff I believe in and why. The word believe can mean many things but in my parlance it means to attach a very high confidence to a proposition. I believe that eating satiates my hunger, that the Pacific Ocean lies a few miles to my west, that if I sit in a chair I will not fall through it to the ground, etc. I also from time to time *entertain* notions similar to the ones you've written about, and admit the possibility of some, but I don't believe any of it with anything like the confidence with which I believe that water will freeze at -10°C. I suspect the same is true for you too. Or is it really the case that in the few years since you've read those stories you have really thought things through to the point where you believe it? -Pete --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: adult vs. child
As the observer you know all this information, and you look at the clock and see that it is 5:00 PM. What can you conclude from this and what should you expect? To me, it seems that you must conclude that you are currently either A1 or A2, and that in one minute you will be B, with 100% certainty. Would you say something else? I think if the observer knows everything I know, they can't conclude anything more or less than I can. Namely, that at 5:00 there are two computers running simulations, and in one minute there will be one computer running a simulation. I don't see how the observer asking Which one am I? is in any sense asking for more information. The problem is the word I - what does it refer to? Both computers MA1 and MA2 simulate an observer asking Which one am I. We know everything that happens - and when you've explained everything that happens, you've explained everything. (Dennett again) --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: Movie graph and computational supervenience
What is wrong? In my opinion, it is that you are thinking that anything at all exists in addition to or supervening on the gates, or the movie, or the functions. I think you have a picture in your mind like this: let's say there are two side-by-side computers, and let's say the one on the left is running a fully conscious simulation of your experiences at age 10, and the one on the right is calculating planetary orbits or digits of pi; and in your picture the one on the left, in addition to the computations, also has an faint invisible blue glow associated with it, that is the consciousness. I think that there is no blue glow - there is only the computations. That goes for a physical implementation of a computer, or a stack of Game of Life counters, or whatever else. Consciousness is not something else. Well, I'm getting ahead of myself - what I mean to say is that there are many philosophical approaches to consciousness, championed by philosophers such as Dan Dennett, under which nothing is wrong. And if you do believe in something else or supervenience, why should it be a priori any more absurd to say consciousness supervenes on a movie than on a bunch of atoms? Regards Pete On Jan 28, 2009, at 9:33 AM, Quentin Anciaux wrote: Hi, I was thinking about the movie graph and its conclusions. It concludes that it is absurd for the connsciousness to supervene on the movie hence physical supervenience is false. But if I simulate the graph with a program, and having for exemple each gates represented by a function like out = f(in) each functions of the simulated graph is in a library which is loaded dynamically. I can record a run and then on new run I can selectively replace each libraries/functions by another one with the same function contract but which instead of computing the out value, it takes the value from the record. I can do it like in the movie graph for each gates/functions. Then it seems that means in the end the consciousness has to supervene on the record... then it is the same conclusion than for physical supervenience. What is wrong ? Regards, Quentin --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: against UD+ASSA, part 1
Since barring global disaster there will be massively more observers in the future, why did you find yourself born so early? Surely your probability of being born in the future (where there are far more observers) was much much higher than your chances of being born so early among a far smaller pool of observers? Isn't there a major problem here with the word you here? To whom or what is it referring? If it is asking Why did you, Brent, a man born in the 20th century, find yourself born in the 20th century?, then the answer is obvious; it's like asking why is twelve twelve, and not a thousand. You're not picking a number randomly when you ask Why is twelve twelve? - you're picking twelve. The target of your question (Brent) indeed lives at a time with a relatively small number of observers - if you want to talk about how things are in the future, maybe you should ask someone in the future... smime.p7s Description: S/MIME cryptographic signature
Re: Penrose and algorithms
You could look up Murmurs in the Cathedral, Daniel Dennett's review of Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind, in the Times literary supplement (and maybe online somewhere?) Here's an excerpt from a review of the review: -- However, Penrose's main thesis, for which all this scientific exposition is mere supporting argument, is that algorithmic computers cannot ever be intelligent, because our mathematical insights are fundamentally non-algorithmic. Dennett is having none of it, and succinctly points out the underlying fallacy, that, even if there could not be an algorithm for a particular behaviour, there could still be an algorithm that was very very good (if not perfect) at that behaviour: Dennett The following argument, then, in simply fallacious: X is superbly capable of achieving checkmate. There is no (practical) algorithm guaranteed to achieve checkmate, therefore X does not owe its power to achieve checkmate to an algorithm. So even if mathematicians are superb recognizers of mathematical truth, and even if there is no algorithm, practical or otherwise, for recognizing mathematical truth, it does not follow that the power of mathematicians to recognize mathematical truth is not entirely explicable in terms of their brains executing an algorithm. Not an algorithm for intuiting mathematical truth - we can suppose that Penrose has proved that there could be no such thing. What would the algorithm be for, then? Most plausibly it would be an algorithm - one of very many - for trying to stay alive, an algorithm that, by an extraordinarily convoluted and indirect generation of byproducts, happened to be a superb (but not foolproof) recognizer of friends, enemies, food, shelter, harbingers of spring, good arguments - and mathematical truths. /Dennett it is disconcerting that he does not even address the issue, and often writes as if an algorithm could have only the powers it could be proven mathematically to have in the worst case. On Jun 9, 2007, at 4:03 AM, chris peck wrote: Hello The time has come again when I need to seek advice from the everything-list and its contributors. Penrose I believe has argued that the inability to algorithmically solve the halting problem but the ability of humans, or at least Kurt Godel, to understand that formal systems are incomplete together demonstrate that human reason is not algorithmic in nature - and therefore that the AI project is fundamentally flawed. What is the general consensus here on that score. I know that there are many perspectives here including those who agree with Penrose. Are there any decent threads I could look at that deal with this issue? All the best Chris. _ PC Magazine's 2007 editors' choice for best Web mail--award-winning Windows Live Hotmail. http://imagine-windowslive.com/hotmail/?locale=en- usocid=TXT_TAGHM_migration_HM_mini_pcmag_0507 --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: Asifism
On Jun 1, 2007, at 6:53 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: I assure you, at least one entity in the universe is conscious: me. If evolution could have made me a zombie, it would have. Therefore, it seems reasonable to assume that evolution couldn't help but grant me consciousness as a side-effect or epiphenomenon, the real prize being intelligent behaviour. snip I'm with Dennett too, and I'll bring up the point he made about this epiphenomenon view of consciousness that keeps cropping up. The point is that whatever consciousness is, it cannot be epiphenomenal in the philosophical sense of having no physical effects. I'll put it this way: your hands and fingers are physical objects. When they move, that is a physical event. Whatever causes them to move, is also a physical event. When you type the words I am conscious, that is also a physical event. If you think that your consciousness is epiphenomenal, you must believe that your being conscious has nothing whatever to do with your typing the words I am conscious. It's just a coincidence! The same goes for whatever makes you say I am conscious. If you really think consciousness is epiphenomenal, you must endorse something like this: I know I'm conscious (for whatever reason). And, for some totally unrelated reasons having nothing whatever to do with the fact that I'm conscious, I also say that I'm conscious. --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: UDA revisited and then some
A definitive treatment of this problem is Daniel Dennett's story Where am I? http://www.newbanner.com/SecHumSCM/WhereAmI.html On Dec 6, 2006, at 4:06 PM, Brent Meeker wrote: Quentin Anciaux wrote: Le Mercredi 6 Décembre 2006 19:35, Brent Meeker a écrit : Quentin Anciaux wrote: ... Another thing that puzzles me is that consciousness should be generated by physical (and chemicals which is also physical) activities of the brain, yet I feel my consciousness (in fact me) is located in the upper front of my skull... Why then neurons located in the back of my brain do not generate conscious feeling ? And if they do participate, why am I located in the front of my brain ? Why this location ? Why only a tiny part of the brain feels conscious activities ? Because you're not an ancient Greek. They felt their consciousness was located in their stomach. Brent Meeker While I'm not, the questionning was serious... While I've never ask where other people feels they were... I'm there (in upper front of the brain)... Is my feelings not in accordance with yours ? Quenton It might be because we're so visual and hence locate ourself at the viewpoint of our vision (but that wouldn't explain the Greeks). Or it might be because we've been taught that consciousness is done by the brain. Brent Meeker --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: Fermi's Paradox
On Jul 6, 2006, at 10:56 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:Destroying your species runs counter to evolution. I'll rephrase that: everything that happens in nature is by definition in accordance with evolution, but those species that destroy themselves will die out, while those species that don't destroy themselves will thrive. Therefore, there will be selection for the species that don't destroy themselves, and eventually those species will come to predominate. When you think about it, the theory of evolution is essentially a tautology: those species which succeed, succeed. Stathis PapaioannouAs a biologist I can't let this go - this is a common misunderstanding of the theory of evolution. It contains a lot more than just "those species which succeed, succeed". From EvoWiki:"Grabbing one statement out of the whole evolution argument and calling it a tautology is like looking at a mathematical proof where the statement (a+b)*c = (a*c) + (b*c) is used, then denouncing the whole proof on the basis that (a+b)*c = (a*c) + (b*c) is a tautology. Tautologies are true. Therefore one can draw true conclusions from them. What is wrong with that?" --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: Mathematics: Is it really what you think it is?
Hi Marc -- it's interesting to wonder about what it would be like to directly perceive mathematics -- but we also have to acknowledge when we ask the question, what are the philosophical assumptions we're smuggling along. For instance, the human brain is not capable of direct perception of tables, either. What raises a flag for me in your question is the following apparent dichotomy: 1) The human brain is not capable of direct perception of mathematical entities 2) We could imagine some super-intelligence that possessed this ability . . . It seems what you're encouraging us to do is this: think about of what it's like when we see a table, and then say to ourselves something like the following sentence: It would be like that, but with *math*. But what makes us think we can imagine this situation coherently? Light from a table excites our photoreceptors in a well- understood way - how could an equation do that? I have always thought it strange how McGinn and others eagerly apply cognitive closure to some of the very areas where we have made recent amazing progress in understanding! In the case of math, what exactly is it that motivates your intuition that there might be something more that we're missing? And is it something that would not apply trivially to any other thing (i.e. - I can look at a rock on the ground, and say to myself, There's something else about this rock that I'm not sensing - but I could imagine a superintelligence who could perceive what I'm missing. My ability to say this sentence to myself doesn't demonstrate anything interesting about the rock.) Best regards Pete On Jan 27, 2006, at 1:08 AM, Marc Geddes wrote: Open question here: What is mathematics? ;) A series of intuitions I've been having have started to suggest to me that mathematics may not at all be what we think it is! The idea of 'cognitive closure' (Colin McGinn) looms large here. The human brain is not capable of direct perception of mathematical entities. We cannot 'see' mathematics directly in the same way we 'see' a table for instance. This of course may not say much about the nature of mathematics, but more about the limitations of the human brain. Suppose then, that some variant of platonism is true and mathematical entities exist 'out there' and there is *in principle* a modality ( a method of sensory perception like hearing, sight, taste) for direct perception of mathematics. We could imagine some super-intelligence that possessed this ability to directly perceive mathematics. What would this super- intelligence 'see' ? Perhaps there's something of enormous importance about the nature of mathematics that every one has over-looked so far, something that would be obvious to the super-intelligence with the mathematical modality? Are we all over-looking some incredible truths here? Again, McGinn's idea of cognitive closure is that the human brain may be 'cognitively closed' with respect to some truths because the physical equipment is not up to the job - like the way a dog cannot learn Chinese for instance. For one thing: Are platonic mathematical entities really static and timeless like platonist philosophers say? What if platonic mathematical entities can 'change state' somehow ? What if they're dynamic? And what if the *movement* of platonic mathematics entities *are* Qualia (conscious experiences). Are there any mathematical truths which may be time indexed (time dependent)? Or are all mathematical truths really fixed? The Platonists says that mathematics under-pins reality, but what is the *relationship* between mathematical, mental (teleological) and physical properties? How do mental (teleological/volitional) and physical properties *emerge* from mathematics? That's what every one is missing and what has not been explained. So... think on my questions. Is there something HUGE we all missing as regards the nature of mathematics? Is mathematics really what you think it is? ;) -- Till shade is gone, till water is gone, into the shadow with teeth bared, screaming defiance with the last breath, to spit in Sightblinder's eye on the last day smime.p7s Description: S/MIME cryptographic signature
Re: More than one kind of 'causality'?
On Sep 19, 2005, at 1:00 AM, Marc Geddes wrote: Here's a speculation: The model I'm working with for my theory seems to suggest 3 different fundamental kinds of 'cause and effect'. The first is physical causality - motion of physical objects through space. The second is mental causality - agents making choices which effect agents The third is what I call 'Multiverse causality', a sort of highly abtsract 'causality' close to the notion of logical consistency/ consilience - that which ensures that knowledge has a certain ordered 'structure' to it . Anyone have any thoughts on this? Here's my thought -- isn't it the case that we know enough about how brains work today that, at the very least, it is a huge overstatement to refer to the first two types as different fundamental kinds? In other words, I will claim that type 2 is actually nothing more than a subset of type 1, occurring in particular circumstances. What evidence goes against this view? -Pete
Re: The Time Deniers and the idea of time as a dimension
On Jul 6, 2005, at 10:37 AM, Stephen Paul King wrote:PC:But isn't the use of time as the dimension along which things vary (or are 'processed') a somewhat arbitrary choice?[SPK] Please notice that the identification of "time" with a "dimension" involves the identification with each moment in time with some positive Real number. Thus the entire set of moments is identified with R^+. The problem with this identification is that the notion of a well ordering, an a priori aspect of the Real numbers, is not necessarily a priori for moments of time. AFAIK, the paradoxical nature of McTaggart's A and B series follows from a neglect of this issue.PC:I think Natural numbers suffice here, but I may be wrong (my background is molecular biology, not math). SPK: Time, from what I have studied so far, involves two distinct notions: a "measure of change" and an "order of succession". The idea that it is merely a dimension and related to the dimensions of "space", as considered and promulgated by Minkowski, requires the assumption of classical physics and strict local realism. We know (I would hope!) that the former assumption is flawed, but the second is still being debated.I recognize that time is different than space. But it strikes me as at least problematic that time must be assumed to have properties which space does not in order for consciousness to exist. To me, consciousness is nothing special - just one kind of pattern (one that supports robust predictions from the intentional stance) among many. I think that pattern can exist in a natural number. The intentional stance (a philosophical view of Daniel Dennett) is key to my views here, so I'll have to expound on it later. [SPK] Please notice in your example that the automata had to be implemented by some process in order to render the results. The resulting "checker board" like picture is a result of the process, it can not be said to have one pattern or some other prior to and absent the computational process. Where would a SAS "fit" into the automata? What would its Observer Moments include?You have a good point here; in the example as I gave it, a temporal process comes first, the result of which is then instantiated in a 3d-structure at a single time. But I think it would be possible to surmount this objection with the use of a lookup table. You could have a lookup table large enough to calculate the next N steps all at once, for any N - and then it's a matter of setting N large enough to calculate a block of the automaton that *would have* sufficed to produce a noticeable length of experience by the SAS, had the process been calculated for one step at a time. Of course, now you can ask where the the lookup table came from -- and it looks like it must have been generated by a temporal process...Well at any rate, I am trying to glean some conclusions from the existence of the stack after it has been created by whatever process - after all, if a simple algorithmic process is capable of generating it, it already exists in Platonia, at very high measure. This example assumes a strong Platonism for its conclusions - but I think it does go some way toward approaching the problem of how the real numbers (or in this case, I think, even the natural numbers) can give rise to observers, time, consciousness, etc. Some of those numbers can be interpreted as a Game of Life containing one or more SASs (and I'll assume the question of where the SAS fits into it answered already, by the fact that UTMs can be impemented in the Game of Life, and these UTMs must include ones that can pass the Turing Test. Many references exist for this claim which you will find if you google ["game of life" "turing machine"]).Best regardsPete
Re: The Time Deniers
On Jul 6, 2005, at 9:08 AM, Stephen Paul King wrote: There is a huge difference in kind between existing and emulating. Existing is atemporal by definition since existence can not depend on any other property. Emulations involve some notion of a process and such are temporal. The idea that a process, of any kind, can occur requires some measure of both transitivity and duration. The mere *existence* of a process only speaks to its potential for occurrence. Kindest regards, Stephen But isn't the use of time as the dimension along which things vary (or are 'processed') a somewhat arbitrary choice? I've wrote to the list before about a Game of Life simulation in which, instead of running the states of the automaton forward in time, erasing the previous state with the subsequent state, you simply place the subsequent state on top of the previous state (i.e., you have black disks for live cells, and white disks for dead cells, and you pile them up as you go..). If the automaton includes an SAS, would you say its experiences are instantiated only at the moment of laying down the disks, or are they instantiated permanently? Here the state of the system varies with the Z coordinate, rather than the time coordinate - but is this relevant? And if so, why?
Re: Duplicates Are Selves
On Jul 4, 2005, at 8:11 AM, Lee Corbin wrote:You think that person A ought (in the ethical sense) to have a strong desire for the future existence of person B - no less, in fact, than for the future existence of person A. You imply this when you say the subject is selfish. I see your point, that normally we have a strong desire for the future existence of -- the person who will wake up in our bed tomorrow. Hmm? You are still seeing that I'm making an *ethical* statementhere somehow? Well, I suppose that in some sense highly selfishbehavior could conceivably be described as ethical in some sense,but it's sure confusing.The statement of what a person should or shouldn't do falls under the domain of ethics. When you say"definitely in the case of very close copies, to beconsistent one should to the greatest degree he canextend the boundary to include close duplicates."You're making a normative statement. I was arguing that one's intuitions will likely pull the other way. You may say that "your duplicate is you", but it is undeniable that there are two organisms present, and an organism normally acts in such a way to prevent damage to its body, and as you say, these instincts are forged by evolution. These instincts form the basis of our ethical intuitions. Your wish for "consistency" would seem to be in opposition to how most people's instincts would lead them to behave. What would the Lee who stands to receive $5 in my experiment say to the Lee who is observing in a remote room, pondering which choice to make? "Please kill yourself so that I might live; after all, I'll have $5 more than you and so will be slightly better off. But, if you do decide to kill me instead, I won't mind so much, since $5 isn't really that much money." ? Can we really imagine people saying these things without previously carrying out some intense philosophical gymnastics?I don't know; I think Stathis has a good point that this duplication isn't really possible so all the conclusions we're drawing from it might be suspect - and entities that are duplicatable might have vastly different intuitions about what is moral and what is not.
Re: Duplicates Are Selves
On Jul 3, 2005, at 12:56 PM, Jonathan Colvin wrote:Hal Finey wrote: If imperfect or diverged copies are to be considered as lesser-degree selves, is there an absolute rule which applies, an objective reality which governs the extent to which two different individuals are the same "self", or is it ultimately a matter of taste and opinion for the individuals involved to make the determination? Is this something that reasonable people can disagree on, or is there an objective truth about it that they should ultimately come to agreement on if they work at it long enough? The former. Remember: "There's no arguing about taste".I agree. And also remember (from David Hume), "In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remark’d, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary ways of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surpriz’d to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, ’tis necessary that it shou’d be observ’d and explain’d; and at the same time that a reason should be given; for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it."In other words -- no matter what you think about your degree of identity to a person, or how many facts you know about the situation you're in, those facts alone can't tell you how you should act.As to whether duplicates are the same "self", I think this is, again, a place where "I" leads us astray. Take this situation: I will create an exact duplicate of you. For one 24-hour period you will, from a remote location, experience the duplicate living your life (via some closed-circuit camera and virtual reality goggles, or something). I will then give you the option of either (1) killing yourself (painlessly, instantly) and giving the duplicate 5 dollars, or (2) pushing a button that makes the duplicate vanish, and you go back to your old life as if nothing happened. Lee would choose option (1), I take it, because he sees this situation as "I get 5 dollars". I think this interpretation, using "I", has an unnecessary complication to it. What I think Lee is really saying (in third person terms) is, "Person A ought to terminate person A's life, because person A desires the existence of (person B + 5 dollars) more strongly than he desires the existence of (person A)." Now we can see that by calling them both "I" or "Lee" or "self", Lee is merely providing an ethical justification to his choice, not making a metaphysical statement about personal identities. In other words, it is because he extends the "normal" desire of self-preservation to the duplicate, that he would accept certain choices. Whether this is in fact correct is not a scientific question but one for philosophical ethics (and a very interesting one).Pete Carlton
Re: Duplicates Are Selves
Pete: I think this interpretation, using I, has an unnecessary complication to it. What I think Lee is really saying (in third person terms) is, Person A ought to terminate person A's life, because person A desires the existence of (person B + 5 dollars) more strongly than he desires the existence of (person A). Lee: NOT AT ALL. It is axiomatic in these discussions that the subject is as *selfish* as can be imagined. I don't believe that any ought has slipped in here (though thanks for the warning from Hume). Perhaps I *ought* to sacrifice myself to save 1000 Australians, but, if I am to act selfishly, then I *ought* not in order to maximize my own benefit. But my use of the word ought in this last sentence is not the moral ought. It means what one would expect, e.g., you ought to go outside if you want some sun. I was using ought in the same sense too (rationally consistent with a given desire). Given that person A has the desires that he does, he ought to accept choice (1). I'm not saying whether person A ought (in the ethical sense) to have those desires or not, but given that he prefers (person B + 5 dollars) to (person A), and believes that by accepting choice (1) his preference will be realized, it is rational for him to behave by accepting choice (1). You think that person A ought (in the ethical sense) to have a strong desire for the future existence of person B - no less, in fact, than for the future existence of person A. You imply this when you say the subject is selfish. I see your point, that normally we have a strong desire for the future existence of -- the person who will wake up in our bed tomorrow. But I don't think it's clear whether you can extend the common notion of acting selfishly into the situation with duplicates, and whether you should or not is something the Hume quote is relevant to. In other words, it is a fact that there are two identical people - or, to be even clearer, two identical organisms (A and B). Does this fact impinge on A's behavior with respect to B, and if so, why? If A hesitates to accept death or torture to the benefit of B, isn't that a good case for re-evaluating A's desires for B? (Interestingly, clones in the animal kingdom sacrifice themselves for each other all the time - some worker bees and fire ants, for instance. At the gene's-eye view, a gene is sacrificing some copies of itself in order that a greater number of copies may get made down the line. Even without clones, there is kin selection, in which organisms behave altruistically towards close relatives, and this has a similar gene's-eye view explanation. Genes certainly cause behavior consistent with Lee's approach to personal identity, and it is in a strong sense selfish behavior.) Pete
Re: More is Better (anesthetic)
The discussion about whether it would be okay to use anesthetic that worked only by removing memories is missing one important piece: that the effects of pain are not just floating "experiences" perceived by the "mind", but have very real effects on the body - high stress levels, release of stress hormones, behavioral trauma, etc. Before stating whether you'd be willing to undergo torture followed by memory loss, it also has to be specified what the long term effects of repeated stress would be. If it's stipulated in the thought experiment that there would be -no- lasting effects at all; i.e., no way in principle that you or someone else could tell after the torture that you'd been tortured as opposed to merely sedated, then it doesn't look like such a bad deal.On Jul 1, 2005, at 10:52 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:I have not undergone conscious sedation myself, but I have administered the anaesthetic (midazolam, diazepam, propofol, fentanyl) for hundreds of gastroscopies and colonoscopies. Sometimes the patients are more or less fast asleep for the whole experience. Other times, they seem to be fully awake, talking to you with only a slight slurring of their voice, as if they have had a few beers. In fact, benzodiazepines are not that dissimilar to alcohol pharmacologically, and patients who go into delirium tremens from alcohol withdrawl are treated with large doses of diazepam. (It is ironic that any adult can buy as much alcoholic beverages as he wants, but for diazepam, which basically has all the effects of alcohol but is much safer, a prescription is needed.) The dose of the anaesthetic agent in conscious sedation is titrated according to how the patient responds: if he is very anxious the anaesthetist might give more midazolam, which is primarily given for its anxiolytic effect rather to induce amnesia, while if he is complaining of pain more fentanyl is given. Not everyone has complete amnesia for the procedure afterwards, but even if amnesia were guaranteed, certainly no doctor would deliberately allow a patient to suffer just because he won't remember it. The only situation I can think of where midazolam might be used primarily for its amnestic effect is with young children (you squirt it up their nose!) who need to have a series of unpleasant treatments, and would become very distressed each time if they could remember the details of their last experience.--Stathis Papaioannou
Re: Dualism and the DA
(Sorry for the delay; I like to spend several hours writing here but I have had meetings to attend etc..)On Jun 22, 2005, at 4:19 AM, Brent Meeker wrote:There are two *physical* issues here.1) The simplest one is that if you agree with the comp indeterminacy(or similar) you get an explanation of the quantum indeterminacywithout the collapse of the wave packet. This is mainly Everettcontribution. I do see how comp / "first-person" indeterminacy can account for, or can be equivalent to, quantum indeterminacy. In other words, asking "Why am I the one in Washington instead of Moscow" is like asking "Why am I the one who sees the cat is still alive", etc. But my point is that we don't need to postulate "primitive" first-person phenomena like observer moments to account for the larger 3rd person fact, which is just that there will exist people who are going to ask these questions. I'd rather postulate classes of third-person phenomena (such as those that fall into Dennett's 'intentional stance') that are able to explain the *apparent* first-person phenomena such as the absence of white rabbits. That way Leibniz's principle of sufficient reason remains intact: it isn't the case that "There's no sufficient reason why I find myself in Moscow"; rather, there *is* a reason why there's one person in Moscow, and one in Washington, and they're both asking certain questions that contain the word "I".2) The less trivial one, perhaps, is that if you agree with the compindeterminacy you get an a priori explosion of the number ofappearances of first person white rabbitsI don't see that either. The SWE doesn't predict that *everything* (which iswhat I presume you to mean by "white rabbits") will happen. If it did it wouldbe useless.-or (if I understand correctly) it doesn't predict that everything will happen to the same extent. But, anyway, I agree that the white rabbit problem is real, although I see it as a third person problem rather than an (intrinsically) first person problem. and the only way to solvethis, assuming the SWE is correct, must consist in justifying the SWEfrom the comp indeterminacy bearing But the "indeterminancy" of comp arises from equivocation about "I" as Petenoted. It assumes first that there is an "I" dependent on physical structureand then sees a problem in determining where the "I" goes when the structure isduplicated.Right - I think that the "physical structure" (which I'm happy to equate with mathematical structure, or a program, etc.) is all there is - and once you've explained that, you've explained everything. The "I" that comes out of it is a very useful pattern to us but it isn't something further, something primitive. The best example I can think of where the "first person as primitive" reasoning takes us into weird territory, is the talk of "observer moments". I think that taking these as primitive leads us into error; in particular the idea that there's a definite answer to the question "what observer moment am I now experiencing?".Best regards Pete Carlton
Re: Dualism and the DA
On Jun 20, 2005, at 10:44 AM, Hal Finney wrote:Pete Carlton writes: snip-- we don't need to posit any kind of dualism to paper over it, we just have to revise our concept of "I". Hal Finney wrote:Copies seem a little more problematic. We're pretty cavalier aboutcreating and destroying them in our thought experiments, but the socialimplications of copies are enormous and I suspect that people's viewsabout the nature of copying would not be as simple as we sometimes assume.I doubt that many people would be indifferent between the choice ofhaving a 50-50 chance of being teleported to Moscow or Washington, vshaving copies made which wake up in both cities. The practical effectswould be enormously different. And as I wrote before, I suspect thatthese practical differences are not to be swept under the rug, but pointto fundamental metaphysical differences between the two situations.I think the practical differences are large, as you say, but I disagree that it points to a fundamental metaphysical difference. I think what appears to be a metaphysical difference is just the breakdown of our folk concept of "I". Imagine a primitive person who didn't understand the physics of fire, seeing two candles lit from a single one, then the first one extinguished - they may be tempted to conclude that the first flame has now become two flames. Well, this is no problem because flames never say things like "I would like to keep burning" or "I wonder what my next experience would be". We, however, do say these things. But does this bit of behavior (including the neural activity that causes it) make us different in a relevant way? And if so, how?This breakdown of "I" is very interesting. Since there's lots of talk about torture here, let's take this extremely simple example: Smith is going to torture someone, one hour from now. You may try to take steps to prevent it. How much effort you are willing to put in depends, among other things, on the identity of the person Smith is going to torture. In particular, you will be very highly motivated if that person is you; or rather, the person you will be one hour from now. The reason for the high motivation is that you have strong desires for that person to continue their life unabated, and those desires hinge on the outcome of the torture. But my point is that your strong desires for your own survival are just a special case of desires for a given person's survival - in other words, you are already taking a third-person point of view to your (future) self. You know that if the person is killed during torture, they will not continue their life; if they survive it, their life will still be negatively impacted, and your desires for the person's future are thwarted.Now, if you introduce copies to this scenario, it does not seem to me that anything changes fundamentally. Your choice on what kind of scenario to accept will still hinge on your desires for the future of any persons involved. The desires themselves may be very complicated, and in fact will depend on lots of hitherto unspecified details such as the legal status, ownership rights, etc., of copies. Of course one copy will say "I pushed the button and then I got tortured", and the other copy will say "I pushed the button and woke up on the beach" - which is exactly what we would expect these two people to say. And they're both right, insofar as they're giving an accurate report of their memories. What is the metaphysical issue here?
Re: Dualism and the DA
On Jun 17, 2005, at 10:17 PM, Russell Standish wrote:snipI still find it hard to understand this argument. The question "Whatis it like to be a bat?" still has meaning, but is probablyunanswerable (although Dennett, I notice considers it answerable,contra Nagel!)Dennett considers it answerable, but he thinks the answer is probably "Nothing at all".That is, it isn't "like" anything at all to be a bat, because bats can do all the tasks they need to do to get by without it being "like" anything at all for them.I still think the confusion over personal identity is due to the misplaced importance we're putting on the concept of "I". Here's what Bruno said later:"Note that here we can understand why the question "why I am the one in W" or "why I am the one in M" are 100% meaningless. This does not entail that the question where will I be in the next duplication is meaningless."I think the second question, "where will I be in the next duplication", is also meaningless. I think that if you know all the 3rd-person facts before you step into the duplicator - that there will be two doubles made of you in two different places, and both doubles wil be psychologically identical at the time of their creation such that each will say they are you - then you know everything there is to know. There is no further question of "which one will I be"? This is simply a situation which pushes the folk concept of "I" past its breaking point; we don't need to posit any kind of dualism to paper over it, we just have to revise our concept of "I".
Re: Dualism and the DA
On Jun 17, 2005, at 10:24 AM, Hal Finney wrote: Does it make sense for Jobs to say, who would I have been if that had happened? Yes, it makes sense, but only because we know that the phrase Who would I have been, uttered by Steve Jobs, is just a convenient way for expressing a third-person proposition, What would have happened to Steve Jobs if Which in turn is also a short way of asking about the whole world, i.e., What would the world have been like if Steve Jobs had been adopted by someone else. The part of the world that's the main target of this question is the part that wears turtlenecks, makes Apple computers and calls itself Steve - so here it just gets replaced by I. But logically, by asking who would I have been, Steve's not inquiring into anything that a third-person observer could not also inquire into. The apparent problems can be solved by translating these questions into third-person terms. for example, So yes, if you can imagine what it would have been like to eat something else for breakfast, then you should be able to imagine what it would have been like to be born as someone else. For breakfast: what would have happened to the world (especially the Steve Jobs part of the world) if Steve Jobs had had something else for breakfast? For birth: what would the world be like if Steve Jobs hadn't been born, but his biological parents had had some other child? There's no sense in asking what if I was born as someone else, no more than there is asking what would Steve Jobs be like if Steve Jobs had never been born? But there is sense in asking what would be different about the world. The problems here all come from overzealous emphasis on the first person perspective. In other words, I think the mistake is made by asking the question what would it have been like, instead of the question what would the world have been like. The thing that the it refers to (a first- person perspective, presumably) is not a thing that exists in the world framed by the question.
Re: Another tedious hypothetical
On Jun 5, 2005, at 11:14 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote:I would say 0: 0. All a Coincidence (I don't see *big* coincidences) and then 5.I'm agnostic about what you talk about. I love the book by Suzanne Blackmore "In search of the light" because it shows parapsychology can be done seriously, but then the evidence are until today rather negative. "Drinking coffee in the morning" is sufficiently miraculous for me now. With comp, evidence of precognition could be evidence for the very low-levelness of the substitution level.I'm with Bruno (both on option "0" and on coffee).You might like to read Richard Dawkins's book "Unweaving the Rainbow", especially the chapter "Unweaving the Uncanny". It contains a thorough demolishing of the human intuition to put importance on seeming coincidences such as your Heinlein story. You are very willing to say "Even if we didn't go to a phonebook and look up the relative number of "Silards" or "Lenzes" vs the more common names, it's fairly obvious that the probabilities of this being a chance occurrence are on the order of one in tens of millions." It's precisely this "obviousness", and the number (tens of millions) that you are failing to account for in any way.You also haven't been too precise about the population of events that you would also have accepted to be a coincidence. You take the name "Lenz" to be significant because the bomb involved a lens -- so you would also presumably have accepted the names "Baum" (bomb), Beryl, Berle, ". "Silard" and "Szilard" are very similar, but I am willing to bet that "Schiller" or "Stiller" or "Sellars" would also have tripped your coincidenceometer. You mention "Korzybski" presumably because you see a resemblance to "Kistiakowski"; you probably would have also accepted Kieslowski, Kowaleski, Kowalowski, Krzyzanowski, Kuczynski, or indeed any other Polish surname. You would probably not have accepted "Franklin" - but then you might have been able to find some other aspect of the bomb project that involved a Frank, or a Lynn, or something taking place in Frankfurt.. and so on.The point is, there are enough stories published in any year that it would be a trivial matter to find a few superficial resemblances between any event and a story that came before it.
Re: Another tedious hypothetical
Jesse has it right on here, and one can go even further in this vein. You are impressed by the relationship between one particular story and one particular event - but you hand-picked both the story and the event for discussion here because of their superficial similarities. You challenged me to find another example of a story with the same resemblances that the Heinlein story has to the atomic bomb project. But resemblances between any written story and any similar event that happens after the story's publication would be in the same class.I'm not saying that the resemblances between the story and the bomb are trivial - they do make an impression. It also makes an impression when someone dreams of a relative dying and the next day they receive news that that relative did in fact die that night; or when you're in a foreign city and you look up the number of the taxi company and it turns out to be your home phone number, or when exactly 100 years separate (1) the election to Congress (2) the election to the presidency (3) the birth of the assassins of and (4) the birth of the successors of John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln.These coincidences all make an impression on one. But nothing special needs to be invoked to explain the occurrence of these events -- what needs to be explained is the facet of human psychology that makes people think something strange is going on when in fact nothing is. Many people have taken stabs at it, and evolutionary explanations seem to work well -- seriously, you should get the Dawkins book and read the chapter to see where we're coming from; Carl Sagan also addressed this issue very well.--Also, you still have not explained how you get 1 in 10e-9.
Re: Free Will Theorem
On Apr 11, 2005, at 11:11 PM, Russell Standish wrote: I'm dealing with these questions in an artificial life system - Tierra to be precise. I have compared the original Tierra code, with one in which the random no. generator is replaced with a true random no. generator called HAVEGE, and another simulation in which the RNG is replaced with a cryptographically secure RNG called ISAAC. The results to date (and this _is_ work in progress) is that there is a distinct difference between the original Tierra PRNG, and the other two generators, but that there is little difference between HAVEGE and ISAAC. This seems to indicate that algorithmic randomness can be good enough to fool learning algorithms. That's a very interesting experiment -- you might be interested to know that Dennett (again, in Elbow Room) predicted something similar; that for all the cases where randomness impacts an organism's choices, true randomness would be practically indistinguishable from sufficiently unpredictable pseudorandomness. I'm glad you're doing these experiments. How does your true random number generator work? Do you have preliminary results posted somewhere? Anyway, I think that the important question of free will is not Could I have done otherwise than I did in >this exact circumstance, but this: Am I so constituted that I will act the way I did in circumstances >relevantly like this, but will be able to change my behavior in the way I want to when circumstances change?. In other words -- we really don't care whether or not we'd do the same thing over and over again if circumstances were exactly the same. That kind of free will, what you would get from indeterminism, is not at all what people care about when they think about whether they have free will or not. What we care about is whether we have self-control. You said The whole debate you quote from Dennett seems quaint and out of date... , but I think it's very useful (and actually it was from the Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, not from Dennett). There's been a lot of definitional hair-splitting here about just what free will is and isn't; I propose to approach the question in a different way: What do you personally care about? Does it matter to you whether the universe is deterministic or not? Would it matter to you if you realized someone was using subliminal advertising on you to make you buy things? (I'm not suggesting that what we want to be the case has any influence on what is the case; I'm just trying to get at what people mean when they say free will.) Well, it looks like there are as many definitions of free will as there are people taking part in the debate -- which is precisely why we need to talk about it, and why it's a good idea be familiar with at least the high points of the past 2500 years of philosophical literature on the subject, in order to avoid making the same mistakes that other brilliant minds have made. Pete
John Conway, Free Will Theorem
Greetings, I recently attended a talk here in Berkeley, California given by John Conway (of 'Game of Life' fame), in which he discussed some of his results with Simon Kochen, extending the Kochen-Specker paradox. He presents this as the Free Will Theorem, saying basically that particles must have as much free will as the experimenters who are deciding which directions to measure the |spin| of a spin-1 particle in. --I would replace his words free will with indeterminacy, but there is still an interesting paradox lurking there. A good online writeup is here: http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~jas/one/freewill-theorem.html I wrote up my brief take on it, necessarily from a more philosophical angle, here: http://homepage.mac.com/pmcarlton/iblog/C1074759898/E263558720/ index.html and here: http://homepage.mac.com/pmcarlton/iblog/C1074759898/E688049825/ index.html. I have the intuition that a multiverse approach very readily dissolves his mystery, but am not quite sure how to formally work it out. I thought some people on this list might be interested, or have a ready answer in hand - in particular, I'd like to know if this 'paradox' really is a paradox in one or more of the multiverse conceptions discussed here. thanks and best regards, Pete
Re: An All/Nothing multiverse model
As usual when I ask a question like this, if the answer is available in a text on logic or elsewhere, please just tell me where to look. ..I'm also interested in the implicit use of time, or sequence, in many of the ideas discussed here. For instance you might say that some of your Somethings are 'bitstrings' that could make up one of Bruno's or Jürgen's worlds/observers. Part of our idea of a string is the convention that one element comes first, then the second, then the third, et cetera. However, the information that accounts for that convention is not contained in the string itself. 'Taking' a Something as a bitstring involves some degree of external convention. So my question is, what do you mean when you say a universe that has a sequence of successive states that follow a set of fixed rules? What could make one state give rise to the next state?Citing causality just gives a name the problem; it doesn't explain it. And I don't think introducing a Turing machine helps with this basic problem, since in any automaton you have rules that say e.g. state X at time T begets state Y at time T+1, again placing a convention of sequence (time, here) external to the system itself. This question doesn't engage with your schema head-on; it's more of a side detour I've thought of asking about many times on the list; I thought it might get explained at some point. Well, now I'm asking. Best regards Pete On Dec 17, 2004, at 6:48 PM, Hal Ruhl wrote: snip My interest was to have a dynamic which did not impose any residual information on the All. My current view is that each state of that dynamic has to be completely independent of the current state. The way I describe this is to say that the dynamic is inconsistent. It helps this idea if there are kernels that are pairwise inconsistent. I think that is straight forward enough. If there are kernels that are self inconsistent then all the better. Why should they be selected out? Can any of this exclude a universe that has a sequence of successive states that follow a set of fixed rules? I think that one must insist that the inconsistency permeate every corner of the dynamic i.e. some level of external noise impressed on all state sequences. As to does mathematics contain information, mathematics has the potential to erect boundaries so by my definition it is information. It also seems possible that there is room for what might be called bifurcated boundaries - inconsistencies. Hal
Re: An All/Nothing multiverse model
I am not quite sure how justification (5) is meant to hang on this structure. Where does the idea of asking questions come from? Why is the Nothing supposed to be the kind of thing that should asked questions in the first place? Why is the fact that Nothing can't answer a question any more important from the fact that, e.g., a rock can't answer a question? Do you mean something like: if you want to know some fact about the Nothing, you can't examine the Nothing to find your answer, since it's not there? I also don't understand why the Nothing should be the kind of thing that penetrates boundaries, attempts to complete itself, etc. It seems that your Nothing gets up to quite a lot of action considering that it's Nothing. Are these actions metaphors for something else, and if so, what? On Nov 13, 2004, at 6:03 PM, Hal Ruhl wrote: I would appreciate comments on the following. Proposal: The Existence of our and other universes and their dynamics are the result of unavoidable definition and logical incompleteness. Justification: 1) Given definitions 1, 2, and 3: 2) These definitions are interdependent because you can not have one without the whole set. 3) Notice that Defining is the same as establishing a boundary between what a thing is and what it is not. This defines a second thing: the is not. A thing can not be defined in isolation. 4) These definitions are unavoidable because at least one of the [All, Nothing] pair must exist. Since they form an [is, is not] pair they bootstrap each other into existence. 5) The Nothing has a logical problem: since it is empty of concept it can not answer any meaningful question about itself including the unavoidable one of its own stability. 6) To answer this unavoidable question the Nothing must at some point penetrate the boundary between itself and the All in an attempt to complete itself. This could be viewed as a spontaneous symmetry breaking. 7) However, the boundary is permanent as required by the definitions and a Nothing remains. 8) Thus the penetration process repeats in an always was and always will be manner. 8) The boundary penetration produces a shock wave [a boundary] that moves into the All as the old example of Nothing tries to complete itself. This divides the All into two evolving Somethings - evolving multiverses. Notice that half the multiverses are contracting - loosing concepts. 9) Notice that the All also has a logical problem. Looking at the same meaningful question of its own stability it contains all possible answers because just one would constitute a selection i.e. net internal information which is not an aspect of the complete conceptual ensemble content of the All. Thus the All is internally inconsistent. 10) Thus the motion of a shock wave boundary in the All must be consistent with this inconsistency - That is the motion is at least partly random. 11) Some of these evolving Somethings - multiverses will admit being modeled as a computer computation but with true noise - definition 5. Definitions: 1) The All: The complete conceptual ensemble (including the concept of itself). Some concepts and collections of concepts may or may not have a separate physical reality. 2) The Nothing: That which is empty of all concepts. 3) The Everything: That which contains the All and separates it from the Nothing. Thus it also contains the Nothing. 4 A Something: A division of the All into two subparts. 5) True noise: The random content of the evolution of the Somethings introduces random information into each component of a multiverse from a source external to that component. Hal
Ambjørn et al.
Of possible general interest - J. Ambjørn J. Jurkiewicz and R. Loll (also a writeup in Nature news, at http://www.nature.com/news/2004/041004/full/041004-17.html) Emergence of a 4D World from Causal Quantum Gravity http://dx.doi.org/10.1103%2FPhysRevLett.93.131301
of general interest
On www.edge.org, an exchange between Lee Smolin and Leonard Susskind on the anthropic principle. http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/smolin_susskind04/smolin_susskind.html
Re: More on qualia of consciousness and occam's razor
On Feb 3, 2004, at 3:19 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: I am using terms like information loosely when discussing subjective experience precisely because I cannot think of a way to formalise it. Perhaps its defining characteristic is that it cannot be formalised. One can imagine that if we made contact with an extraterrestrial civilization, however alien it is, we could eventually exchange information about the natural sciences, mathematics, history, anything objective. It would effectively involve finding an algorithm to convert from one formal system to another, or one natural language to another. But although the aliens may be able to explain how their physiology has evolved so that gamma rays which are an odd multiple of a certain wavelength cause them to feel a pleasant sensation while even multiple rays cause them to feel a completely different, unpleasant sensation, we as humans would have absolutely no idea what these sensations are like to experience. But even this goes way out in front of what we can possibly know. You say we have no idea what these feelings are like to experience--but why should we assume we even are entitled to ask this question? To borrow a bit from Wittgenstein -- imagine you have completely translated these aliens' language, and they tell you that each of them has a box with something inside it. Although they talk a lot in rather vague terms about what's in their box, they insist you can't really know what is inside it. Now what is the logical conclusion here: a) There may or may not be something in the box. b) There's definitely something in the box, and I have absolutely no idea what it is. What on earth could possibly make someone conclude (b) here? It's not logical at all. Yet this is what people conclude when they bend over backwards talking about qualia and how ineffable they are. Earlier you say: I'll grant you that the subjective experience of red etc cannot be derived from a theory of physics. But this statement just assumes one philosophical position about mind, and there are many out there. So, in addition to the empirical data, there is this extra bit of information, neither contained in the data nor able to be derived from it using the laws of physics: what it actually feels like to be the one experiencing the subjective sensation. If someone can think of a better way to describe it than extra bit of information or can come up with a way to formalise it, I would be happy to hear about it. A better way to describe what, exactly? What it actually feels like? But why do you first commit yourself to the view that this question makes any sense? I suppose there will still be some who insist that if you know all about the physiology etc. behind the alien response to gamma rays, then you know all there is to know. I think this response is analogous to the shut up and calculate attitude to the interpretation of quantum mechanics. Yes, I am one of these people. You say if you know all about, and you must be taken seriously here: you would really have to know >all about it. But if you did, you would be able to entirely trace the causal pathway from the receipt of the gamma rays, to whatever internal responses go on inside the alien's body, to the subsequent report of I feel that pleasant, odd-multiple feeling. Let's say you had that entire explanation written out. And subjective experience doesn't appear anywhere on this list. So what reason on earth do you have to assert that it exists? Of course subjective experience exists in a way -- but it's just a way of talking about things. It isn't a primitive. When I see red, I have a subjective experience of red, sure -- but all this means is just that my brain has responded to a certain stimulus in the way it normally does. Stathis Papaioannou
Re: Determinism
Hello, On Jan 15, 2004, at 7:25 PM, Doug Porpora wrote: snip Well, only if reductionism succeeds. If reductionism fails, then, unlike universes, which, on my reading of Tegmark, are discrete and countable, thoughts are not only infinite but uncountably infinite. In that case, thoughts -- and persons -- comprise an even larger infinity than universes. And -- although this is another argument -- at least a part of the universe would not behave deterministically. I don't see how reductionism fails entails thoughts are uncountably infinite. Is it because you are identifying thoughts with sentences and sentences are infinite? But not every sentence is a thought. Most sentences are not thinkable or believable. I'm not sure sentences are uncountably infinite, either. (Here I'm interpreting your reductionism fails as eliminative materialism and identity theory are false, which I tend to agree with; I notice you didn't mention functionalism however.) If you tend to resist what I am suggesting, consider three things: 1. How do you even individuate thoughts so as to count them or correlate them with physical states? Is the belief that Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn the same as or different from the belief that Samuel Clemens wrote Huckleberry Finn? Would that be one physical state you would seek to correlate with it or two? There are lots of well-discussed conceptual problems here. To start off with, why should we commit ourselves to talking about beliefs as individuable entities in the first place? I prefer Dennett's intentional stance theory of beliefs - beliefs are abstract things we posit that explain or predict behavior. To relate this to Tegmark/Schmidhuber, look at it like this: The physical (or Platonic/mathematical, it really doesn't matter) stuff is there; it's the underlying reality. If sub-sections of the stuff (i.e., us) see patterns in it and talk about these patterns as individuals and beliefs, that's our business. It doesn't have any bearing on the nature of the underlying stuff. It's not a terribly important result that we can imagine infinite numbers of patterns (such as beliefs) -- after all, you can imagine an uncountably infinite number of strings composed of just 0 and 1. John, I am not sure I understand everything you said. One thing I would say along lines I think you suggest: Determinism suggests a closed system. If you don't have a closed system, you don't get deterministic predictiveness. Human thought is both holistic and unclosable. Those features do not preclude mental causality, but they do preclude deterministic, causal laws. Could you explain what you mean here by holistic and unclosable? -- Pete Carlton
Re: Quantum accident survivor
Hi, Doesn't this part: In a materialistic framework, ' I ' am a bunch of atoms. These atoms happen to constitute a system that has self-referential qualities that we call consciousness. If it happened that these atoms temporarily (like in a coma or anesthesy) or permanently (death) lose this quality, so will ' I '. Contradict this part: It is not useful to talk about 1st person experiences in 3rd person terms, since when we do that we lose the very thing that we want to study. Since surely one can describe a bunch of atoms with self-referential qualities in wholly objective, i.e. 1st person, terms? But I'm getting ahead of myself here.. I think we actually agree on 99% of this issue. I think the only place we disagree is on some very subtle issues regarding how one can refer to I. Let me then explicitly state that I am a materialist and a functionalist with regard to consciousness. Let me stress this point: *I am, for all practical purposes, one and only one specific configuration of atoms in a specific universe. I could never say that ' I ' is ALL the copies, since I NEVER experience what the other copies experience. Here I think you're making an assumption. You are certainly not ALL the copies, but then it doesn't follow that you are only 1. You could be a fuzzy set of copies that have experiences so similar that they cannot be told apart. That is, they cannot be told apart yet. Unnoticeable differences eventually can percolate up and make a noticeable difference, or they can be made noticeable by making more sensitive observations. Yes, I am making an assumption, and working through it. The assumption is that there is nothing external to the physical body to account for consciousness. I totally agree with this assumption. It's the one and only one part that I disagree with, to this extent: You may, if you wish, decide to refer to one and only one universe and to the Eric within that universe. That is, you can stipulate that the Eric you are referring to is a completely specified entity. But to do so meaningfully, you would need to take some sort of god-like view of the plenitude, and *actually specify* the Eric you're talking about. Otherwise how do you know what you are referring to? Just saying I or one and only one does not do the job. (Like Wittgenstein's man who says I know how tall I am! and proves it by putting his hand on top of his head.) Let's say that you were able to completely specify one Eric, by giving a (possibly infinitely) long description. Let's call the entity you have thus specified Eric01. Our point of difference seems to be this: You believe that when Eric01 says I, he is referring precisely to Eric01. I believe that when Eric01 says I, he is referring to the entire ensemble of Erics who are identical to Eric01 in all the ways Eric01 is capable of detecting. Because each member of this ensemble is also saying I, and meaning the same thing by it. Now you would say that since each completely specified Eric is in fact different, each one has a different consciousness. Here is where our disagreement about _reference_ is relevant to QTI. I definitely agree with you that if you mean to completely specify one Eric when you say I, then it is almost certain that that Eric will die in one of these dangerous situations. But let's now specify TWO Erics: Eric01 and Eric02. They are indistinguishable from each other, and indeed their universes are identical, save for a tiny fluctuation which will miraculously save Eric02's life tomorrow, but doom Eric01. If Eric01 and Eric02 mean the same thing when they refer to I the instant before the death-event, then that I is going to survive, even though Eric01 does not. If they refer to different things, then there is no question of I surviving; it is simply the case that Eric01 dies and Eric02 lives. Let me stress that I do not think anything like Eric01 and Eric02 'share' a 'consciousness' that reaches between their universes. It's simply that if there is no way for Eric01 to know that he is Eric01 rather than Eric02, then there is no difference between them with respect to their consciousness. A particular atom interacts with the atoms or other particles in its universe only (interference is not interaction). Therefore a set of atoms do the same. All experience comes from the interactons that take place in a particular universe. There are certainly a set of universes so similar that cannot be told apart. But after any event (like a particle's interaction with another, or someone's death at a larger scale) these universes have decohered enough so that you cannot equalize them anymore. Yes, they have decohered with respect to some events. But if this no cul-de-sac conjecture holds, then there must be some events that still can happen, with respect to which some set of universes has not yet decohered, that would lead at least one member of an I-continuum away from the
Re: Quantum accident survivor
of Erics who have a living continuation after event X) which has at least one member. then you will not experience yourself dying. I think this is how materialism can accomodate QTI. I do think a better attack on QTI is that the final part of the above assumption (the last set has at least one member) isn't well-argued for. Even if these Eric-sets are infinite there may not be an Eric who survives, say, the sun exploding; just as the infinite set of composite numbers doesn't contain any primes. But if we decide to accept a dualistic framework QTI would probably be the least probable scenario. We could as well say that the next experience would be of many other kinds: in other bodies, reincarnation, or any transcedental experience like going to heaven - there is no reason to decide between these. I think this reduces to the white rabbit problem again. The next experience could *always* be of many other kinds, whether we've just had a dangerous event or not. I think it is an interesting question though, for surviving a fall from a cliff, say, certainly seems like a white rabbit event. Perhaps one would conjecture that under QTI, white rabbit events that allow incredible survival must still be as mediocre as possible. For instance, QTI poses a difficulty for the dualist: at each moment, if QTI and is true, an infinity of 'souls' is merging into one single body, since this body is dying at an infinity of other universes. How does this square with the common definition of a 'soul' as an immaterial *individuality*? I think this is the least of dualism's problems..=) Best regards, Pete -- Pete Carlton, Ph. D. [EMAIL PROTECTED] Life Sciences Division Lawrence Berkeley National Lab Berkeley, CA USA
Re: 2C Mary
On Tuesday, June 3, 2003, at 03:17 PM, Colin Hales wrote: Re the latter thought: Can I suggest reading a pile of Daniel Dennett? The 'representationalist' or its extremum: the eliminativist end of consciousness is, as are all other philosophical positions as far as I can tell, both right and wrong. Hmm.. I've read a few piles of Dennett myself, so I wonder what your take is on the essays Instead of Qualia and Quining Qualia.. I believe Dennett makes a good case that before you seek confirmation for your favorite theory behind qualia, you first ought to argue that the very idea of qualia is something worth taking seriously. Also.. you say that there are 3 things in 2C Mary's brain..the two points and their distance..well, why not every subdivision of that distance too? Or every set of subdivisions? You ask: What argument removes that third 'thing' from Mary as an (cognitive) entity occupying our universe? I find I can no longer dismiss this third thing. I have an argument: no 'things' in this sense can be cited as playing any informative, explanatory roles in Mary's behavior. In any case one ought to have arguments for including entities in theories, not against. (..sorry to occupy everything-list with this, but I'd be interested in continuing somewhere else. One day I'd like to have the time to discuss how consciousness relates to the computationalist TOE views presented here (especially Bruno's and Juergen's) though..)
