On 3/7/07, Stathis Papaioannou <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
This is so if there is a real physical world as distinct from the mathematical plenitude.
Do you have any particular reason(s) for believing in a mathematical plenitude? If so, I would much appreciate an explanation of these reasons or citation of one or more papers that do so (other than the historical/traditional arguments for Platonism/idealism, with which I am familiar). Your claims are interesting, but I don't see the point in getting into too much debate about the consequences of living in a mathematical universe sans physical reality without some reasons to consider it a "live option".
If there is no such separate physical world, then it isn't possible for something to be blessed with this quality of existence, because everything that is logically consistent exists.
Everything that is logically consistent? What about logically paraconsistent universes? What about relevant logics? What about fuzzy-logical consistent universes? What about any other non-classical logics? They're all maths, yet they are for the most part inconsistent with one another. The plenitude might contain all of these possibilities, but then we cannot claim the mathematical plenitude *in toto* as consistent. Perhaps the plenitude is better defined otherwise. All possible worlds/universes that are internally consistent with at least one mathematical formalism, but not necessarily with one another. We can sum up such a reality by... well... "Everything and Anything", then, and don't really need to truss it up / attempt to legitimize it by calling it mathematical, as opposed to linguistic or conceptual or chaotic/purely-random.
The difficult answer is to try to define some measure on the mathematical structures in the Plenitude and show that orderly universes like ours thereby emerge.
Why do you think this is difficult? Orderly universes like ours are very clearly contained in a world of all possible mathematical structures. Perhaps you meant something else, something more anthropically flavored. Clarification appreciated.
See this paper for an example of this sort of reasoning: http://parallel.hpc.unsw.edu.au/rks/docs/occam/
Thanks for the link. I'll read this tonight.
> >Egan). The usual counterargument is that in order to map a computation onto > >an arbitrary physical process, the mapping function must contain the > >computation already, but this is only significant for an external observer. > >The inhabitants of a virtual environment will not suddenly cease being > >conscious if all the manuals showing how an external observer might > >interpret what is going on in the computation are lost; it matters only > >that > >there is some such possible interpretation.
No, no, no. It is the *act* of interpretation, coupled with the arbitrary physical process, that gives rise to the relevantly implemented computation. You can't remove the interpreter and still have the arb.phys.proc. be conscious (or computing algebra problems, or whatever).
Moreover, it is possible to map > >many computations to the one physical process. In the limiting case, a > >single state, perhaps the null state, can be mapped onto all computations.
When, and only when, coupled with a sufficiently complex computational agent interpreting the state as such. Maybe folks overlook this because of their default/implicit assumption/perspective is that interpreters aren't (or aren't implementing) computational processes? Maybe. Can't think of why else this error is so common.
If you found such an alien computer, it would be impossible to determine what it was thinking about without extra information, like trying to determine what an alien string of symbols means.
Not impossible at all (we *can* determine what alien strings of symbols mean -- cf. the field of cryptography). But the situation is somewhat analogous, puzzling out what the alien computer did would be somewhat like deciphering an alien love letter, say.
There is, of course, the originally intended meaning, but once we remove the constraint of environmental interaction,
You didn't remove the constraint of environmental interaction, you just changed the environment.
what is there left for the computer itself, or for an external observer, to distinguish between the original meaning and every other possible meaning it may have had?
When you changed the environment from "someplace much like the places humans in 2007 consider 'coal mines'" to "a virtual world that, when interacted with via appropriate mediation, seems just like those places deemed 'coal mines'", you added different interpretive / interface mechanisms to the coal-mining robot. That's why the computer itself is distinguishable as having the original meaning instead of all other meanings. Consider a variation of your argument. You could build a computer that interacts with a coal mine, and which looks like it's mining coal, but which in actuality is taking the inputs and outputs in that environment and calculating answers to Diophantine equations with them. By looking at the inner workings of the computer and its interface with its environment, we could possibly determine what it was really doing when it appeared to be mining coal. But until we do so, appearances can be deceiving. So the problem you seem to believe exists for computational agents existing in non-traditional environments (what are currently called virtual or digital environments by some) also exists for what you call "environment" (e.g., the coal mine, and the rest of the Earth, too). Sooo... yeah... your problem is both meaningless (in much the way that the problem "TRUE OR FALSE: The king of France is bald." is meaningless when there is no king of France, because some of its terms, like environment, are based on false assumptions / ungrounded distinctions / nonexistent differences), and universally (non-)applicable, because it arises even for the environments with which you contrast computers (e.g., the coal mine).
The problem is with the physical supervenience thesis that usually goes together with computationalism. If we consider that mind is generated by computation on an abstract machine,
Yikes, but it isn't. Nothing's generated on an abstract machine. "Abstract machine" is another way of saying "schematic" or "formalism". Until it is implemented/built, nothing is generated by it. But I can see how you would come to this conclusion about physical supervenience and computationalism if you believe Searle/Putnam/Schutz/Bringsjord/Maudlin/et al. were right. But they weren't and aren't. (Unless of course this *is* the mathematical plenitude, and thus there are infinitely many worlds in which they are right, and infinitely many worlds in which they are wrong, and there is no answer relative to the plenitude as a whole regarding the nature of consciousness...) Ahem. -- Jeff Medina ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=11983
