Consciousness Easy, Zombies Hard

6 views
Skip to first unread message

Craig Weinberg

unread,
Jan 14, 2012, 2:38:30 PM1/14/12
to Everything List
Thought I'd throw this out there. If computationalism argues that
zombies can't exist, therefore anything that we cannot distinguish
from a conscious person must be conscious, that also means that it is
impossible to create something that acts like a person which is not a
person. Zombies are not Turing emulable.

If we run the zombie argument backwards then, at what substitution
level of zombiehood does a (completely possible) simulated person
become an (non-Turing emulable) unconscious puppet? How bad of a
simulation does it have to be before becoming an impossible zombie?

This to me reveals an absurdity of arithmetic realism. Pinocchio the
boy is possible to simulate mechanically, but Pinocchio the puppet is
impossible. Doesn't that strike anyone else as an obvious deal breaker?

Jason Resch

unread,
Jan 14, 2012, 4:41:34 PM1/14/12
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
On Sat, Jan 14, 2012 at 1:38 PM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:
Thought I'd throw this out there. If computationalism argues that
zombies can't exist,

I think the two ideas "zombies are impossible" and computationalism are independent.  Where you might say they are related is that a disbelief in zombies yields a strong argument for computationalism.
 
therefore anything that we cannot distinguish
from a conscious person must be conscious, that also means that it is
impossible to create something that acts like a person which is not a
person. Zombies are not Turing emulable.

I think there is a subtle difference in meaning between "it is impossible to create something that acts like a person which is not a person" and saying "Zombies are not Turing emulable".  It is important to remember that the non-possibility of zombies doesn't imply a particular person or thing cannot be emulated, rather it means there is a particular consequence of certain Turing emulations which is unavoidable, namely the consciousness/mind/person.

 

If we run the zombie argument backwards then, at what substitution
level of zombiehood does a (completely possible) simulated person
become an (non-Turing emulable) unconscious puppet? How bad of a
simulation does it have to be before becoming an impossible zombie?

This to me reveals an absurdity of arithmetic realism. Pinocchio the
boy is possible to simulate mechanically, but Pinocchio the puppet is
impossible. Doesn't that strike anyone else as an obvious deal breaker?


Not every Turing emulable process is necessarily conscious.

Jason

meekerdb

unread,
Jan 14, 2012, 4:55:57 PM1/14/12
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
On 1/14/2012 11:38 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
> Thought I'd throw this out there. If computationalism argues that
> zombies can't exist, therefore anything that we cannot distinguish
> from a conscious person must be conscious, that also means that it is
> impossible to create something that acts like a person which is not a
> person. Zombies are not Turing emulable.

No. It only follows that zombies are not Turing emulable unless people are too. But why
would you suppose people are not emulable?

Brent

Craig Weinberg

unread,
Jan 14, 2012, 10:39:31 PM1/14/12
to Everything List
On Jan 14, 4:41 pm, Jason Resch <jasonre...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 14, 2012 at 1:38 PM, Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com>wrote:
>
> > Thought I'd throw this out there. If computationalism argues that
> > zombies can't exist,
>
> I think the two ideas "zombies are impossible" and computationalism are
> independent.  Where you might say they are related is that a disbelief in
> zombies yields a strong argument for computationalism.

I don't think that it's possible to say that any two ideas 'are'
independent from each other. All ideas can be related through semantic
association, however distant. As far as your point though, of course I
see the opposite relation - while admitting even the possibility of
zombies suggests computationalism is founded on illusion., but a
disbelief in zombies gives no more support for computationalism than
it does for materialism or panpsychism.

>
> > therefore anything that we cannot distinguish
> > from a conscious person must be conscious, that also means that it is
> > impossible to create something that acts like a person which is not a
> > person. Zombies are not Turing emulable.
>
> I think there is a subtle difference in meaning between "it is impossible
> to create something that acts like a person which is not a person" and
> saying "Zombies are not Turing emulable".  It is important to remember that
> the non-possibility of zombies doesn't imply a particular person or thing
> cannot be emulated, rather it means there is a particular consequence of
> certain Turing emulations which is unavoidable, namely the
> consciousness/mind/person.

That's true, in the sense that emulable can only refer to a specific
natural and real process being emulated rather than a fictional one.
You have a valid point that the word emulable isn't the best term, but
it's a red herring since the point I was making is that it would not
be possible to avoid creating sentience in any sufficiently
sophisticated cartoon, sculpture, or graphic representation of a
person. Call it emulation, simulation, synthesis, whatever, the result
is the same. You can't make a machine that acts like a person without
it becoming a person automatically. That clearly is ridiculous to me.

>
>
>
> > If we run the zombie argument backwards then, at what substitution
> > level of zombiehood does a (completely possible) simulated person
> > become an (non-Turing emulable) unconscious puppet? How bad of a
> > simulation does it have to be before becoming an impossible zombie?
>
> > This to me reveals an absurdity of arithmetic realism. Pinocchio the
> > boy is possible to simulate mechanically, but Pinocchio the puppet is
> > impossible. Doesn't that strike anyone else as an obvious deal breaker?
>
> Not every Turing emulable process is necessarily conscious.

Why not? What makes them unconscious? You can't draw the line in one
direction but not the other. If you say that anything that seems to
act alive well enough must be alive, then you also have to say that
anything that does not seem conscious may just be poorly programmed.

Craig

Craig Weinberg

unread,
Jan 14, 2012, 10:44:25 PM1/14/12
to Everything List
On Jan 14, 4:55 pm, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote:
> On 1/14/2012 11:38 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
>
> > Thought I'd throw this out there. If computationalism argues that
> > zombies can't exist, therefore anything that we cannot distinguish
> > from a conscious person must be conscious, that also means that it is
> > impossible to create something that acts like a person which is not a
> > person. Zombies are not Turing emulable.
>
> No. It only follows that zombies are not Turing emulable unless people are too. But why
> would you suppose people are not emulable?

No, I'm assuming for the sake of argument that people are Turing
emulable, but my point is that the proposition that zombies are
impossible means that no Turing simulation of consciousness is
possible that is not actually conscious. It means that I can't make a
Pinocchio program because the 'before' puppet and the 'after' boy must
be the same thing - a boy. There can be no sophisticated, interactive
puppets in computationalism.

Craig

meekerdb

unread,
Jan 15, 2012, 1:15:46 AM1/15/12
to everyth...@googlegroups.com

Right, not if they are as sophisticated and interactive as humans and animals we take to
be conscious.

Brent

Jason Resch

unread,
Jan 15, 2012, 2:45:02 AM1/15/12
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
On Sat, Jan 14, 2012 at 9:39 PM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Jan 14, 4:41 pm, Jason Resch <jasonre...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 14, 2012 at 1:38 PM, Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com>wrote:
>
> > Thought I'd throw this out there. If computationalism argues that
> > zombies can't exist,
>
> I think the two ideas "zombies are impossible" and computationalism are
> independent.  Where you might say they are related is that a disbelief in
> zombies yields a strong argument for computationalism.

I don't think that it's possible to say that any two ideas 'are'
independent from each other.

Okay.  Perhaps 'independent' was not an ideal term, but computationalism is at least not dependent on an argument against zombies, as far as I am aware.
 
All ideas can be related through semantic
association, however distant. As far as your point though, of course I
see the opposite relation - while admitting even the possibility of
zombies suggests computationalism is founded on illusion., but a
disbelief in zombies gives no more support for computationalism than
it does for materialism or panpsychism.

If one accepts that zombies are impossible, then to reject computationalism requires also rejecting the possibility of Strong AI ( https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Strong_AI ).
 

>
> > therefore anything that we cannot distinguish
> > from a conscious person must be conscious, that also means that it is
> > impossible to create something that acts like a person which is not a
> > person. Zombies are not Turing emulable.
>
> I think there is a subtle difference in meaning between "it is impossible
> to create something that acts like a person which is not a person" and
> saying "Zombies are not Turing emulable".  It is important to remember that
> the non-possibility of zombies doesn't imply a particular person or thing
> cannot be emulated, rather it means there is a particular consequence of
> certain Turing emulations which is unavoidable, namely the
> consciousness/mind/person.

That's true, in the sense that emulable can only refer to a specific
natural and real process being emulated rather than a fictional one.
You have a valid point that the word emulable isn't the best term, but
it's a red herring since the point I was making is that it would not
be possible to avoid creating sentience in any sufficiently
sophisticated cartoon, sculpture, or graphic representation of a
person. Call it emulation, simulation, synthesis, whatever, the result
is the same.

I think you and I have different mental models for what is entailed by "emulation, simulation, synthesis".  Cartoons, sculptures, recordings, projections, and so on, don't necessarily compute anything (or at least, what they might depict as being computed can have little or no relation to what is actually computed by said cartoon, sculpture, recording, projection...  For actual computation you need counterfactuals conditions.  A cartoon depicting an AND gate is not required to behave as a genuine AND gate would, and flashing a few frames depicting what such an AND gate might do is not equivalent to the logical decision of an AND gate.
 
You can't make a machine that acts like a person without
it becoming a person automatically. That clearly is ridiculous to me.

What do you think about Strong AI, do you think it is possible?  If so, if the program that creates a strong AI were implemented on various computational substrates, silicon, carbon nanotubes, pen and paper, pipes and water, do you think any of them would yield a mind that is conscious?  If yes, do you think the content of that AI's consciousness would differ depending on the substrate?  And finally, if you believe at least some substrates would be conscious, are there any cases where the AI would respond or behave differently on one substrate or the other (in terms of the Strong AI program's output) when given equivalent input?
 

>
>
>
> > If we run the zombie argument backwards then, at what substitution
> > level of zombiehood does a (completely possible) simulated person
> > become an (non-Turing emulable) unconscious puppet? How bad of a
> > simulation does it have to be before becoming an impossible zombie?
>
> > This to me reveals an absurdity of arithmetic realism. Pinocchio the
> > boy is possible to simulate mechanically, but Pinocchio the puppet is
> > impossible. Doesn't that strike anyone else as an obvious deal breaker?
>
> Not every Turing emulable process is necessarily conscious.

Why not? What makes them unconscious?

In my guess, it would be a lack of sophistication.  For example, one program might simply consist of a for loop iterating from 1 to 10.  Is this program conscious?  I don't know, but it almost certainly isn't conscious in the way you or I are.
 
You can't draw the line in one
direction but not the other. If you say that anything that seems to
act alive well enough must be alive, then you also have to say that
anything that does not seem conscious may just be poorly programmed.


When you talk about changing substitution levels, you are talking about different programs.  Some levels may be so high-level that the important and necessary aspects are eliminated and replaced with functions which fundamentally alter the experience of the simulated mind.  Whether or not this would be noticed depends on the sophistication of the Turing test.  Examination of outward appearance may not even be sufficient.  I think Ned Block had an argument against that you could have a giant state table that is infinite in size and for any possible question it had the stored output.  Such a program might pass a Turing test, but internally it is performing only a very trivial computation.  If we inspected the code of this program we could say it has no understanding of individual words, no complex thought processes, etc.  However, most zombies are defined to be functionally (if not physically) identical rather than merely capable of passing a some limited test based on external appearances.

Jason

John Clark

unread,
Jan 15, 2012, 1:33:29 PM1/15/12
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
> On Sat, Jan 14, 2012  Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:

> If computationalism argues that zombies can't exist, therefore anything that we cannot distinguish from a conscious person must be conscious, that also means that it is impossible to create something that acts like a person which is not a person. Zombies are not Turing emulable.
 
Maybe. Zombie behavior is certainly Turing emulable but you are asking more than that and there is no way to prove what you want to know because it hinges on one important question: how can you tell if a zombie is a zombie? Brains are not my favorite meal but I don't think dietary preference or even unsightly skin blemishes are a good test for consciousness; I believe zombies have little if any consciousness because, at least as depicted in the movies, zombies act really really dumb. But maybe the film industry is inflicting an unfair stereotype on a persecuted minority and there are good hard working zombies out there who you don't hear about that write love poetry and teach at Harvard, if so then I think those zombies are conscious even if I would still find a polite excuse to decline their invitation to dinner.  
 
> This to me reveals an absurdity of arithmetic realism. Pinocchio the boy is possible to simulate mechanically, but Pinocchio the puppet is impossible. Doesn't that strike anyone else as an obvious deal breaker?

I find nothing absurd about that and neither did Evolution. The parts of our brain that so dramatically separate us from other animals, the parts that deal with language and long term planing and mathematics took HUNDREDS of times longer to evolve than the parts responsible for intense emotion like pleasure, pain, fear, hate, jealousy and love. And why do you think it is that in this group and elsewhere everybody and their brother is pushing their own General Theory of Consciousness  but nobody even attempts a General Theory of Intelligence?  The reason is that theorizing about the one is easy but  theorizing about the other is hard, hellishly hard, and because when intelligence theories fail they fail with a loud thud that is obvious to all, but one consciousness theory works as well, or as badly, as any other. Consciousness theories are easy because there are no facts they need to explain, but there is an astronomical number of things that need to be explained to understand how intelligence works.

  John K Clark       

 

Quentin Anciaux

unread,
Jan 15, 2012, 3:07:38 PM1/15/12
to everyth...@googlegroups.com


2012/1/14 Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com>

Thought I'd throw this out there. If computationalism argues that
zombies can't exist, therefore anything that we cannot distinguish
from a conscious person must be conscious, that also means that it is
impossible to create something that acts like a person which is not a
person. Zombies are not Turing emulable.

No, zombies *that are persons in every aspect* are impossible. Not only not turing emulable... they are absurd.
 

If we run the zombie argument backwards then, at what substitution
level of zombiehood does a (completely possible) simulated person
become an (non-Turing emulable) unconscious puppet? How bad of a
simulation does it have to be before becoming an impossible zombie?

This to me reveals an absurdity of arithmetic realism. Pinocchio the
boy is possible to simulate mechanically, but Pinocchio the puppet is
impossible.

You conflate two (mayve more) notions of zombie... the only one important in the "zombie argument" is this: something that act like a person ****in every aspects*** but nonetheless is not conscious... If it is indeed what you mean, then could you devise a test that could show that the zombie indeed lacks consciousness (remember that *by definition* you cannot tell apart the zombie and a "real" conscious person).

Quentin
 
Doesn't that strike anyone else as an obvious deal breaker?

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To post to this group, send email to everyth...@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.




--
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.

Craig Weinberg

unread,
Jan 15, 2012, 7:20:16 PM1/15/12
to Everything List

On Jan 15, 3:07 pm, Quentin Anciaux <allco...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 2012/1/14 Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com>
>
> > Thought I'd throw this out there. If computationalism argues that
> > zombies can't exist, therefore anything that we cannot distinguish
> > from a conscious person must be conscious, that also means that it is
> > impossible to create something that acts like a person which is not a
> > person. Zombies are not Turing emulable.
>
> No, zombies *that are persons in every aspect* are impossible. Not only not
> turing emulable... they are absurd.

If you define them that way then the word has no meaning. What is a
person in every aspect that is not at all a person? The only way the
term has meaning is when it is used to define something that appears
to be a person in every way to an outside observer (and that would
ultimately have to be a human observer) but has no interior
experience. That is not absurd at all, and in fact describes
animation, puppetry, and machine intelligence.

>
>
>
> > If we run the zombie argument backwards then, at what substitution
> > level of zombiehood does a (completely possible) simulated person
> > become an (non-Turing emulable) unconscious puppet? How bad of a
> > simulation does it have to be before becoming an impossible zombie?
>
> > This to me reveals an absurdity of arithmetic realism. Pinocchio the
> > boy is possible to simulate mechanically, but Pinocchio the puppet is
> > impossible.
>
> You conflate two (mayve more) notions of zombie... the only one important
> in the "zombie argument" is this: something that act like a person ****in
> every aspects*** but nonetheless is not conscious... If it is indeed what
> you mean, then could you devise a test that could show that the zombie
> indeed lacks consciousness (remember that *by definition* you cannot tell
> apart the zombie and a "real" conscious person).

No, I think that I have a workable and useful notion of zombie. I'm
not sure how the definition you are trying use is meaningful. It seems
like a straw man of the zombie issue. We already know that
subjectivity is private, what we don't know is whether that means that
simulations automatically acquire consciousness or not. The zombie
issue is not to show that we can't imagine a person without
subjectivity and see that as evidence that subjectivity must
inherently arise from function. My point is that it also must mean
that we cannot stop inanimate objects from acquiring consciousness if
they are a sufficiently sophisticated simulation.

Craig

Quentin Anciaux

unread,
Jan 16, 2012, 1:52:31 AM1/16/12
to everyth...@googlegroups.com


2012/1/16 Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com>


On Jan 15, 3:07 pm, Quentin Anciaux <allco...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 2012/1/14 Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com>
>
> > Thought I'd throw this out there. If computationalism argues that
> > zombies can't exist, therefore anything that we cannot distinguish
> > from a conscious person must be conscious, that also means that it is
> > impossible to create something that acts like a person which is not a
> > person. Zombies are not Turing emulable.
>
> No, zombies *that are persons in every aspect* are impossible. Not only not
> turing emulable... they are absurd.

If you define them that way then the word has no meaning. What is a
person in every aspect that is not at all a person?

The *only thing* a zombie lacks is consciousness... every other aspects of a persons, it has it.
 
The only way the
term has meaning is when it is used to define something that appears
to be a person in every way to an outside observer (and that would
ultimately have to be a human observer) but has no interior
experience. That is not absurd at all, and in fact describes
animation, puppetry, and machine intelligence.

Puppetries, animations do not act like a person. They act like puppetries, animations. A philosophical zombie *acts like a person but lacks consciousness*.

>
>
>
> > If we run the zombie argument backwards then, at what substitution
> > level of zombiehood does a (completely possible) simulated person
> > become an (non-Turing emulable) unconscious puppet? How bad of a
> > simulation does it have to be before becoming an impossible zombie?
>
> > This to me reveals an absurdity of arithmetic realism. Pinocchio the
> > boy is possible to simulate mechanically, but Pinocchio the puppet is
> > impossible.
>
> You conflate two (mayve more) notions of zombie... the only one important
> in the "zombie argument" is this: something that act like a person ****in
> every aspects*** but nonetheless is not conscious... If it is indeed what
> you mean, then could you devise a test that could show that the zombie
> indeed lacks consciousness (remember that *by definition* you cannot tell
> apart the zombie and a "real" conscious person).

No, I think that I have a workable and useful notion of zombie. I'm
not sure how the definition you are trying use is meaningful. It seems
like a straw man of the zombie issue. We already know that
subjectivity is private, what we don't know is whether that means that
simulations automatically acquire consciousness or not. The zombie
issue is not to show that we can't imagine a person without
subjectivity and see that as evidence that subjectivity must
inherently arise from function. My point is that it also must mean
that we cannot stop inanimate objects from acquiring consciousness if
they are a sufficiently sophisticated simulation.

Craig
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To post to this group, send email to everyth...@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.

Bruno Marchal

unread,
Jan 16, 2012, 4:24:49 AM1/16/12
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
On 16 Jan 2012, at 07:52, Quentin Anciaux wrote:



2012/1/16 Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com>

On Jan 15, 3:07 pm, Quentin Anciaux <allco...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 2012/1/14 Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com>
>
> > Thought I'd throw this out there. If computationalism argues that
> > zombies can't exist, therefore anything that we cannot distinguish
> > from a conscious person must be conscious, that also means that it is
> > impossible to create something that acts like a person which is not a
> > person. Zombies are not Turing emulable.
>
> No, zombies *that are persons in every aspect* are impossible. Not only not
> turing emulable... they are absurd.

If you define them that way then the word has no meaning. What is a
person in every aspect that is not at all a person?

The *only thing* a zombie lacks is consciousness... every other aspects of a persons, it has it.

That is right. People should not confuse the Hollywood zombie and the "philosophical zombie" which are 3p-identical to human person, but lack any 1-p perspective.

Note also that Turing invented his test to avoid the philosophical hard issue of consciousness. In a nutshell Turing defines "consciousness" by "having an intelligent behavior". The Turing test is equivalent with a type of "no zombie" principle.

It is like saying that if zombie exist, you have to treat them as human being, because we cannot know if they are zombie.



 
The only way the
term has meaning is when it is used to define something that appears
to be a person in every way to an outside observer (and that would
ultimately have to be a human observer) but has no interior
experience. That is not absurd at all, and in fact describes
animation, puppetry, and machine intelligence.

Puppetries, animations do not act like a person. They act like puppetries, animations. A philosophical zombie *acts like a person but lacks consciousness*.

Exactly.

Bruno

Bruno Marchal

unread,
Jan 16, 2012, 5:39:17 AM1/16/12
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
On 15 Jan 2012, at 19:33, John Clark wrote:

> On Sat, Jan 14, 2012  Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:

> If computationalism argues that zombies can't exist, therefore anything that we cannot distinguish from a conscious person must be conscious, that also means that it is impossible to create something that acts like a person which is not a person. Zombies are not Turing emulable.
 
Maybe. Zombie behavior is certainly Turing emulable but you are asking more than that and there is no way to prove what you want to know because it hinges on one important question: how can you tell if a zombie is a zombie? Brains are not my favorite meal but I don't think dietary preference or even unsightly skin blemishes are a good test for consciousness; I believe zombies have little if any consciousness because, at least as depicted in the movies, zombies act really really dumb. But maybe the film industry is inflicting an unfair stereotype on a persecuted minority and there are good hard working zombies out there who you don't hear about that write love poetry and teach at Harvard, if so then I think those zombies are conscious even if I would still find a polite excuse to decline their invitation to dinner.  
 
> This to me reveals an absurdity of arithmetic realism. Pinocchio the boy is possible to simulate mechanically, but Pinocchio the puppet is impossible. Doesn't that strike anyone else as an obvious deal breaker?

I find nothing absurd about that and neither did Evolution. The parts of our brain that so dramatically separate us from other animals, the parts that deal with language and long term planing and mathematics took HUNDREDS of times longer to evolve than the parts responsible for intense emotion like pleasure, pain, fear, hate, jealousy and love. And why do you think it is that in this group and elsewhere everybody and their brother is pushing their own General Theory of Consciousness  but nobody even attempts a General Theory of Intelligence? 

There are general theory of learning, like those of Case and Smith, Blum, Osherson, etc. But they are necessarily non constructive. They are not usable neither for building AI, nor for verifying if something is intelligent. It shows that Intelligence (competence) is an intrinsic hard subject with many non-comparable degrees of intelligence.
Intelligence is not programmable. It is only self-programmable, and it interests nobody, except philosophers and theologians. When machine will be intelligent, we will send them in camps or jails. Intelligence leads to dissidence. We pretend appreciating intelligence, but we invest a lost in preventing it, in both children and machine.






The reason is that theorizing about the one is easy but  theorizing about the other is hard, hellishly hard, and because when intelligence theories fail they fail with a loud thud that is obvious to all, but one consciousness theory works as well, or as badly, as any other.

See the work of Case and Smith. It is not well know because it is based on theoretical computer science (recursion theory) which is not well known. Those are definite interesting result there, even if not applicable. The "non-union theorem" of Blum shows that there is something uncomputably much more intelligent than a machine: a couple of machine. The theory is super-non-linear.



Consciousness theories are easy because there are no facts they need to explain,

What? With comp, not only you have to explain the qualia, but it has been proved that you have to explain the quanta as well, and this without assuming a physical reality.



but there is an astronomical number of things that need to be explained to understand how intelligence works.

Not really. It is just that intelligent things organize themselves in non predictable way, at all. The basic are simple (addition and multiplication) but the consequences are not boundable.

Bruno



John Clark

unread,
Jan 16, 2012, 11:08:16 AM1/16/12
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
On Mon, Jan 16, 2012 at 5:39 AM, Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

"   Consciousness theories are easy because there are no facts they need to explain"
 

" What? With comp, not only you have to explain the qualia"

With ANY theory of consciousness you have to explain qualia, and every consciousness theory does as well or as badly as any other in doing that.
 
" but it has been proved that you have to explain the quanta as well,

I don't know what that means.
 
" and this without assuming a physical reality."

 But I do know that assuming reality does not seem to be a totally outrageous assumption.
> but there is an astronomical number of things that need to be explained to understand how intelligence works.

Not really. It is just that [...]

If you know how intelligence works you can make a super intelligent computer right now and you're well on your way to becoming a trillionaire. It seems to me that when discussing this very complex subject people use the phrase "it's just" a bit too much.   

"intelligent things organize themselves in non predictable way, at all. The basic are simple (addition and multiplication)"

That's like saying I know how to cure cancer, it's basically simple, "just" arrange the atoms in cancer cells so that they are no longer cancerous.  It's easy to learn the fundamentals of Chess, the rules of the game, but that does not mean you understand all the complexities and subtleties of it and are now a grandmaster.

 John K Clark


John Clark

unread,
Jan 16, 2012, 11:23:00 AM1/16/12
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
On Sun, Jan 15, 2012 at 7:20 PM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:

"  I think that I have a workable and useful notion of zombie."
 

Then I would very much like to hear what it is. What really grabbed my attention is that you said it was " workable and useful", so whatever notion you have it can't include things like "zombies are conscious but" or "zombies are NOT conscious but" because I have no way to directly test for consciousness so such a notion would not be workable or useful to me.

 John K Clark

Craig Weinberg

unread,
Jan 16, 2012, 11:50:52 AM1/16/12
to Everything List
On Jan 16, 11:23 am, John Clark <johnkcl...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 15, 2012 at 7:20 PM, Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com>wrote:
>
> "  I think that I have a workable and useful notion of zombie."
>
>
>
> Then I would very much like to hear what it is. What really grabbed my
> attention is that you said it was " workable and useful", so whatever
> notion you have it can't include things like "zombies are conscious but" or
> "zombies are NOT conscious but" because I have no way to directly test for
> consciousness so such a notion would not be workable or useful to me.

Zombie describes something which seems like it could be conscious from
the outside (ie to a human observer) but actually is not.

Craig

Jason Resch

unread,
Jan 16, 2012, 12:15:40 PM1/16/12
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
Craig,

Do you have an opinion regarding the possibility of Strong AI, and the other questions I posed in my earlier post?

Thanks,

Jason

Bruno Marchal

unread,
Jan 16, 2012, 1:08:46 PM1/16/12
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
On 16 Jan 2012, at 17:08, John Clark wrote:

On Mon, Jan 16, 2012 at 5:39 AM, Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

"   Consciousness theories are easy because there are no facts they need to explain"
 

" What? With comp, not only you have to explain the qualia"

With ANY theory of consciousness you have to explain qualia,

Correct.




and every consciousness theory does as well or as badly as any other in doing that.


So you believe that the theory according to which consciousness is a gift by a creationist God is as bad as the theory according to which consciousness is related to brain activity?



 
" but it has been proved that you have to explain the quanta as well,

I don't know what that means.

It means that
1) the quanta does not exist primitively but emerge, in the comp case, from number relations.
2) that physicalism is false, and that you have to derive the physical laws from those number relations. More exactly you have to derive the beliefs in the physical laws from those number relations.



 
" and this without assuming a physical reality."

 But I do know that assuming reality does not seem to be a totally outrageous assumption.

Sure. But I was talking on the assumption of a primitively physical reality. That is shown, by the UD Argument, not be working when we assume that we are digitalisable machine. It is not outrageous, it is useless, non sensical, wrong with the usual Occam razor, in the same sense that it is wrong that invisible horse pulling cars would be the real reason why car moves. 




> but there is an astronomical number of things that need to be explained to understand how intelligence works.

Not really. It is just that [...]

If you know how intelligence works you can make a super intelligent computer right now and you're well on your way to becoming a trillionaire. It seems to me that when discussing this very complex subject people use the phrase "it's just" a bit too much.   

You seem quite unfair. I was saying, in completo: "It is just that intelligent things organize themselves in non predictable way, at all." The "it just" was not effective, and that was my point!

This means that indeed we can write simple program leading to intelligence, but I can hardly be trillionnaire with that because they might need incompressible long time to show intelligence. Better to use nature's trick to copy from what has already been done. My whole point is that intelligence is not a constructive concept, like consciousness you cannot define it. You can define competence, and competence leads  already itself to many non constructive notions and comparisons.  The details are tricky and there is a very large litterature in theoretical artificial intelligence and learning theories. 

Simple programs leading to intelligence are "grow, diverse, and multiply as much as possible" in big but finite environment. or "help yourself", etc.  The UD can also be see as a little programs leading to the advent of intelligence (assuming mechanism), but not in a necessarily tractable way.

We discuss in a context where the goal is not to do artificial intelligence engineering, but the goal is to find a theory of everything, including persons, consciousness, etc.





"intelligent things organize themselves in non predictable way, at all. The basic are simple (addition and multiplication)"

That's like saying I know how to cure cancer, it's basically simple, "just" arrange the atoms in cancer cells so that they are no longer cancerous.  It's easy to learn the fundamentals of Chess, the rules of the game, but that does not mean you understand all the complexities and subtleties of it and are now a grandmaster.

OK. That was  my point. I never pretended to even know what intelligence really is. You should not mock the trivial points I make, because they are used in a non completely trivial way to show that the assumption of mechanism makes physics a branch of number theory (which is a key point in the search of a theory of everything). A reasoning made clear = a succession of trivial points.

Bruno



John Clark

unread,
Jan 16, 2012, 1:27:13 PM1/16/12
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
On Mon, Jan 16, 2012 at 11:50 AM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:

"  I think that I have a workable and useful notion of zombie." [...]  Zombie describes something which seems like it could be conscious from the outside (ie to a human observer) but actually is not.

As I have absolutely no way of directly determining if a zombie is actually conscious or "actually is not" then despite your claim your notion is neither workable or useful.

 John K Clark


Stephen P. King

unread,
Jan 16, 2012, 1:42:25 PM1/16/12
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
Hi,

    My $.02. I am reminded of the argument in Matrix Philosophy that if we cannot argue that our experiences are *not* simulations then we might as well bet that they are. While I have found that there are upper bounds on computational based content via logical arguments such as David Deutsch's CANTGOTO and Carlton Caves' research on computational resources, it seems to me that we have sufficient evidence to argue that if it is possible for a being to have 1p associated with it, then we might as well bet that they do. So I am betting that zombies do not exist. One simply cannot remain an agnostic on this issue.

Onward!

Stephen

John Clark

unread,
Jan 16, 2012, 1:50:12 PM1/16/12
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
On Mon, Jan 16, 2012 at 1:08 PM, Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

"So you believe that the theory according to which consciousness is a gift by a creationist God is as bad as the theory according to which consciousness is related to brain activity?"

If creationists could explain consciousness then I would be a creationists, but they can not. Brain activity does not explain consciousness either. I don't know how but I believe as certainly as I believe anything that intelligence causes consciousness. I believe this not because I can prove it but because I simply could not function if I thought I was the only conscious being in the universe.

" the quanta does not exist primitively but emerge, in the comp case, from number relations."

What sort of numbers, computable numbers or the far more common non-computable numbers? And what sort of relations.?

 
"This means that indeed we can write simple program leading to intelligence"

I don't know what that simple program could be, but I have already given a example of a simple program leading to emotion.
 
"My whole point is that intelligence is not a constructive concept, like consciousness you cannot define it."

Intelligence is problem solving; not a perfect definition by any means but far far better than any known definition of consciousness.  Examples are better than definitions anyway, intelligence is what Einstein did and consciousness is what I am. 

 John K Clark


Craig Weinberg

unread,
Jan 16, 2012, 1:57:31 PM1/16/12
to Everything List
On Jan 16, 12:15 pm, Jason Resch <jasonre...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Craig,
>
> Do you have an opinion regarding the possibility of Strong AI, and the
> other questions I posed in my earlier post?
>

Sorry Jason, I didn't see your comment earlier.

On Jan 15, 2:45 am, Jason Resch <jasonre...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 14, 2012 at 9:39 PM, Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com>wrote:
> > >wrote:
>
> > > > Thought I'd throw this out there. If computationalism argues that
> > > > zombies can't exist,
>
> > > I think the two ideas "zombies are impossible" and computationalism are
> > > independent. Where you might say they are related is that a disbelief in
> > > zombies yields a strong argument for computationalism.
>
> > I don't think that it's possible to say that any two ideas 'are'
> > independent from each other.
>
> Okay. Perhaps 'independent' was not an ideal term, but computationalism is
> at least not dependent on an argument against zombies, as far as I am aware.

What computationlism does depend on though is the same view of
consciousness that zombies would disqualify.

>
> > All ideas can be related through semantic
> > association, however distant. As far as your point though, of course I
> > see the opposite relation - while admitting even the possibility of
> > zombies suggests computationalism is founded on illusion., but a
> > disbelief in zombies gives no more support for computationalism than
> > it does for materialism or panpsychism.
>
> If one accepts that zombies are impossible, then to reject computationalism
> requires also rejecting the possibility of Strong AI (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Strong_AI).

What I'm saying is that if one accepts that zombies are impossible,
then to accept computationalism requires accepting that *all* AI is
strong already.

>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> > > > therefore anything that we cannot distinguish
> > > > from a conscious person must be conscious, that also means that it is
> > > > impossible to create something that acts like a person which is not a
> > > > person. Zombies are not Turing emulable.
>
> > > I think there is a subtle difference in meaning between "it is impossible
> > > to create something that acts like a person which is not a person" and
> > > saying "Zombies are not Turing emulable". It is important to remember
> > that
> > > the non-possibility of zombies doesn't imply a particular person or thing
> > > cannot be emulated, rather it means there is a particular consequence of
> > > certain Turing emulations which is unavoidable, namely the
> > > consciousness/mind/person.
>
> > That's true, in the sense that emulable can only refer to a specific
> > natural and real process being emulated rather than a fictional one.
> > You have a valid point that the word emulable isn't the best term, but
> > it's a red herring since the point I was making is that it would not
> > be possible to avoid creating sentience in any sufficiently
> > sophisticated cartoon, sculpture, or graphic representation of a
> > person. Call it emulation, simulation, synthesis, whatever, the result
> > is the same.
>
> I think you and I have different mental models for what is entailed by
> "emulation, simulation, synthesis". Cartoons, sculptures, recordings,
> projections, and so on, don't necessarily compute anything (or at least,
> what they might depict as being computed can have little or no relation to
> what is actually computed by said cartoon, sculpture, recording,
> projection... For actual computation you need counterfactuals conditions.
> A cartoon depicting an AND gate is not required to behave as a genuine AND
> gate would, and flashing a few frames depicting what such an AND gate might
> do is not equivalent to the logical decision of an AND gate.

I understand what you think I mean, but you're strawmanning my point.
An AND gate is a generalizable concept. We know that. It's logic can
be enacted in many (but not every) different physical forms. If we
built the Lego AND mechanism seen here: http://goldfish.ikaruga.co.uk/andnor.html#
and attached each side to a an effector which plays a cartoon of a
semiconductor AND gate, then you would have a cartoon which is
simulates an AND gate. The cartoon would be two separate cartoons in
reality, and the logic between them would be entirely inferred by the
audience, but this apparatus could be interpreted by the audience as a
functional simulation. The audience can jump to the conclusion that
the cartoon is a semiconductor AND gate. This is all that Strong AI
will ever be.

Computationalism assumes that consciousness is a generalizable
concept, but we don't know that is true. My view is that it is not
true, since we know that computation itself is not even generalizable
to all physical forms. You can't build a computer without any solid
materials. You can't build it out of uncontrollable living organisms.
There are physical constraints even on what can function as a simple
AND gate. It has no existence in a vacuum or a liquid or gas.

Just as basic logic functions are impossible under those ordinary
physically disorganized conditions, it may be the case that awareness
can only develop by itself under the opposite conditions. It needs a
variety of solids, liquids, and gases - very specific ones. It's not
Legos. It's alive. This means that consciousness may not be a concept
at all - not generalizable in any way. Consciousness is the opposite,
it is a specific enactment of particular events and materials. A brain
can only show us that a person is a live, but not who that person is.
The who cannot be simulated because it is an unrepeatable event in the
cosmos. A computer is not a single event. It is parts which have been
assembled together. It did not replicate itself from a single living
cell.

>
> > You can't make a machine that acts like a person without
> > it becoming a person automatically. That clearly is ridiculous to me.
>
> What do you think about Strong AI, do you think it is possible?

The whole concept is a category error. It's like saying do you think
it's possible to have human colored paint. It is possible to have
technology that seems to us like Strong AI, just as a mannequin can
seem like a person to us momentarily. The better the simulation, the
longer it will take for more people to doubt it's authenticity, but
there will always be ways to tell the difference (you might need a
trained guinea pig or a voice stress analyzer to do it, but eventually
you could probably tell).

> If so, if
> the program that creates a strong AI were implemented on various
> computational substrates, silicon, carbon nanotubes, pen and paper, pipes
> and water, do you think any of them would yield a mind that is conscious?

No. By definition, consciousness has to come from the substrate
itself. If the substrate is conscious, then the program can be
conscious, but the more something is conscious, the less possible it
is that it can be programmed.

> If yes, do you think the content of that AI's consciousness would differ
> depending on the substrate?

No, it's the ability to accept the program that would differ depending
on the substrate. The sensorimotive awareness of any substrate is
already different from any other. We play a song on a computer but the
computer does not experience the song, nor do the speakers in your
headphones, or even your cochlea. They do probably experience
vibration, and maybe the cochlea experiences 'sound' in a zoological
sense, but the song level interpretation is private to anthropological
level experience. You can't put an mp3 directly into your ear or your
brain. There is no AI independent of substrate. I can draw a straight
line or walk a straight line, but there is no universal straight line
experience. Straight and linear are sensorimotive qualities carried by
particular channels of sense.

> And finally, if you believe at least some
> substrates would be conscious, are there any cases where the AI would
> respond or behave differently on one substrate or the other (in terms of
> the Strong AI program's output) when given equivalent input?

I can wear a suit and tie and stand in a department store. A mannequin
can do the same thing. AI is the suit and tie. Does the suit make the
mannequin look more like me when I'm wearing the same suit? Sure. Does
it make any difference to the mannequin? No. Does it make any
difference to me? Yes, my experience of the mannequin depends on how
good of a mannequin it is and how directly I look at it and for how
long.


>
>
>
>
> > > > If we run the zombie argument backwards then, at what substitution
> > > > level of zombiehood does a (completely possible) simulated person
> > > > become an (non-Turing emulable) unconscious puppet? How bad of a
> > > > simulation does it have to be before becoming an impossible zombie?
>
> > > > This to me reveals an absurdity of arithmetic realism. Pinocchio the
> > > > boy is possible to simulate mechanically, but Pinocchio the puppet is
> > > > impossible. Doesn't that strike anyone else as an obvious deal breaker?
>
> > > Not every Turing emulable process is necessarily conscious.
>
> > Why not? What makes them unconscious?
>
> In my guess, it would be a lack of sophistication. For example, one
> program might simply consist of a for loop iterating from 1 to 10. Is this
> program conscious? I don't know, but it almost certainly isn't conscious
> in the way you or I are.

If that were the case then sophistication alone would be
consciousness. It's not though. Our consciousness is certainly
sophisticated but a beach full of sand is sophisticated too. Would a
program that makes a copy of itself every 10 iterations be any more
conscious than one that doesn't copy itself? Without some kind of
capacity for sense and motive within the loops from the start, there
isn't anything that knows there is any looping going on. We have to
realize that there is no such thing as a 'loop' in general, anymore
than there is a such thing as a touchdown in general. When we talk
about a for loop we are talking about a common sense neurological
modeling which relates to certain organizations of physical objects
and the computational manipulation thereof. There is no looping for
vapor or in a vacuum.

>
> > You can't draw the line in one
> > direction but not the other. If you say that anything that seems to
> > act alive well enough must be alive, then you also have to say that
> > anything that does not seem conscious may just be poorly programmed.
>
> When you talk about changing substitution levels, you are talking about
> different programs. Some levels may be so high-level that the important
> and necessary aspects are eliminated and replaced with functions which
> fundamentally alter the experience of the simulated mind. Whether or not
> this would be noticed depends on the sophistication of the Turing test.
> Examination of outward appearance may not even be sufficient. I think Ned
> Block had an argument against that you could have a giant state table that
> is infinite in size and for any possible question it had the stored
> output. Such a program might pass a Turing test, but internally it is
> performing only a very trivial computation. If we inspected the code of
> this program we could say it has no understanding of individual words, no
> complex thought processes, etc. However, most zombies are defined to be
> functionally (if not physically) identical rather than merely capable of
> passing a some limited test based on external appearances.

Zombiehood has nothing to do with external appearances, other than
that they are presumed to be the same as a non-zombie. What makes a
zombie a zombie is that it lacks interiority. It doesn't matter if it
is possible to test it or not, if we call it a zombie, that means that
it is a given that it does not have conscious interior experience. All
programs are zombies, and all consciousness is more than a program.

Craig

Craig Weinberg

unread,
Jan 16, 2012, 2:02:00 PM1/16/12
to Everything List
On Jan 16, 1:42 pm, "Stephen P. King" <stephe...@charter.net> wrote:
> Hi,
>
>      My $.02. I am reminded of the argument in Matrix Philosophy that if
> we cannot argue that our experiences are *not* simulations then we might
> as well bet that they are. While I have found that there are upper
> bounds on computational based content via logical arguments such as
> David Deutsch'sCANTGOTO
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fabric_of_Reality> and Carlton Caves
> <http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0304083>' research on computational
> resources, it seems to me that we have sufficient evidence to argue that
> if it is possible for a being to have 1p associated with it, then we
> might as well bet that they do. So I am betting that zombies do not
> exist. One simply cannot remain an agnostic on this issue.
>
> Onward!
>
> Stephen
>

I think the problem is that the zombie has the 1p of whatever is doing
the computation, not of the living cells and organs of a living
person. I think everything has a 1p experience, it's just that human
1p is a lot different from the 1p of out zoological, biological,
chemical, and physical subselves. A zombie talks the talk, but it
doesn't walk the walk. It's just a puppet which walks some other walk
which it has no awareness of.

Craig

Stephen P. King

unread,
Jan 16, 2012, 2:22:19 PM1/16/12
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
Hi Craig,

The 1p is something that can have differences in degree not in kind
thus your argument is a bit off. Zombies simply do not exist.

Onward!

Stephen

Craig Weinberg

unread,
Jan 16, 2012, 3:33:50 PM1/16/12
to Everything List
On Jan 16, 2:22 pm, "Stephen P. King" <stephe...@charter.net> wrote:

> Hi Craig,
>
>      The 1p is something that can have differences in degree not in kind
> thus your argument is a bit off. Zombies simply do not exist.

The degree of 1p is always qualitative though, that's how it's
different from 3p. This text is a zombie of my thoughts and
intentions. You see my meaning in it, but it has no meaning by itself.

Craig

Stephen P. King

unread,
Jan 16, 2012, 7:32:24 PM1/16/12
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
Hi Craig,

On that we agree.

Onward!

Stephen

Jason Resch

unread,
Jan 16, 2012, 10:26:42 PM1/16/12
to everyth...@googlegroups.com

Strong AI is an AI capable of any task that a human is capable of.  I am not aware of any AI that fits this definition.

 

This page did not load for me..
 
and attached each side to a an effector which plays a cartoon of a
semiconductor AND gate, then you would have a cartoon which is
simulates an AND gate. The cartoon would be two separate cartoons in
reality, and the logic between them would be entirely inferred by the
audience, but this apparatus could be interpreted by the audience as a
functional simulation. The audience can jump to the conclusion that
the cartoon is a semiconductor AND gate. This is all that Strong AI
will ever be.

Computationalism assumes that consciousness is a generalizable
concept, but we don't know that is true. My view is that it is not
true, since we know that computation itself is not even generalizable
to all physical forms. You can't build a computer without any solid
materials.

This is a statement about what is possible to build given what physics has provided us.  I am not sure what that implies for computationalism.  Certainly, Turing machines are special structures and not everything is a Turing machine.  However, if one can build a Turing machine, one will find that its repertoire is infinite.  To date, there is nothing we (individually or as a race) has accomplished that could not in principle also be accomplished by an appropriately programed Turing machine.
 
You can't build it out of uncontrollable living organisms.
There are physical constraints even on what can function as a simple
AND gate. It has no existence in a vacuum or a liquid or gas.

Just as basic logic functions are impossible under those ordinary
physically disorganized conditions, it may be the case that awareness
can only develop by itself under the opposite conditions. It needs a
variety of solids, liquids, and gases - very specific ones. It's not
Legos. It's alive. This means that consciousness may not be a concept
at all - not generalizable in any way. Consciousness is the opposite,
it is a specific enactment of particular events and materials. A brain
can only show us that a person is a live, but not who that person is.
The who cannot be simulated because it is an unrepeatable event in the
cosmos. A computer is not a single event. It is parts which have been
assembled together. It did not replicate itself from a single living
cell.

>
> > You can't make a machine that acts like a person without
> > it becoming a person automatically. That clearly is ridiculous to me.
>
> What do you think about Strong AI, do you think it is possible?

The whole concept is a category error.

Let me use a more limited example of Strong AI.  Do you think there is any existing or past human profession that an appropriately built android (which is driven by a computer and a program) could not excel at?  Could there be a successful android surgeon, computer programmer, psychologist, lawyer, etc.  Or do you believe there is some inherent limitation of computers that would prevent them from being capable in one of these roles?  If so please provide an example.

 

A computer program written to simulate sand would not require a significant amount of information compared to the amount of information needed to specify a human brain.
 

Right.
 
What makes a
zombie a zombie is that it lacks interiority.

Yes.
 
It doesn't matter if it
is possible to test it or not, if we call it a zombie, that means that
it is a given that it does not have conscious interior experience. All
programs are zombies, and all consciousness is more than a program.


You have finally answered a question I asked many months ago.  That you do believe zombies are possible.

Jason

Craig Weinberg

unread,
Jan 16, 2012, 11:29:37 PM1/16/12
to Everything List
On Jan 16, 10:26 pm, Jason Resch <jasonre...@gmail.com> wrote:
What I'm saying though is that computationalism implies that whatever
task is being done by AI that a human can also do is the same. If AI
can print the letters 'y-e-s', then it must be no different from
person answering yes. What I'm saying is that makes all AI strong,
just incomplete.
Weird. Can you see a pic from it? http://goldfish.ikaruga.co.uk/legopics/newand11.jpg

>
> > and attached each side to a an effector which plays a cartoon of a
> > semiconductor AND gate, then you would have a cartoon which is
> > simulates an AND gate. The cartoon would be two separate cartoons in
> > reality, and the logic between them would be entirely inferred by the
> > audience, but this apparatus could be interpreted by the audience as a
> > functional simulation. The audience can jump to the conclusion that
> > the cartoon is a semiconductor AND gate. This is all that Strong AI
> > will ever be.
>
> > Computationalism assumes that consciousness is a generalizable
> > concept, but we don't know that is true. My view is that it is not
> > true, since we know that computation itself is not even generalizable
> > to all physical forms. You can't build a computer without any solid
> > materials.
>
> This is a statement about what is possible to build given what physics has
> provided us.  I am not sure what that implies for computationalism.
> Certainly, Turing machines are special structures and not everything is a
> Turing machine.  However, if one can build a Turing machine, one will find
> that its repertoire is infinite.

That's what I'm saying though. A Turing machine cannot be built in
liquid, gas, or vacuum. It is a logic of solid objects only. That
means it's repertoire is not infinite, since it can't simulate a
Turing machine that is not made of some simulated solidity.

> To date, there is nothing we
> (individually or as a race) has accomplished that could not in principle
> also be accomplished by an appropriately programed Turing machine.

Even if that were true, no Turing machine has ever known what it has
accomplished, so in principle nothing can ever be accomplished by a
Turing machine independently of our perception. What is an
'accomplishment' in computational terms?

>
> > You can't build it out of uncontrollable living organisms.
> > There are physical constraints even on what can function as a simple
> > AND gate. It has no existence in a vacuum or a liquid or gas.
>
> > Just as basic logic functions are impossible under those ordinary
> > physically disorganized conditions, it may be the case that awareness
> > can only develop by itself under the opposite conditions. It needs a
> > variety of solids, liquids, and gases - very specific ones. It's not
> > Legos. It's alive. This means that consciousness may not be a concept
> > at all - not generalizable in any way. Consciousness is the opposite,
> > it is a specific enactment of particular events and materials. A brain
> > can only show us that a person is a live, but not who that person is.
> > The who cannot be simulated because it is an unrepeatable event in the
> > cosmos. A computer is not a single event. It is parts which have been
> > assembled together. It did not replicate itself from a single living
> > cell.
>
> > > > You can't make a machine that acts like a person without
> > > > it becoming a person automatically. That clearly is ridiculous to me.
>
> > > What do you think about Strong AI, do you think it is possible?
>
> > The whole concept is a category error.
>
> Let me use a more limited example of Strong AI.  Do you think there is any
> existing or past human profession that an appropriately built android
> (which is driven by a computer and a program) could not excel at?

Artist, musician, therapist, actor, talk show host, teacher,
caregiver, parent, comedian, diplomat, clothing designer, director,
movie critic, author, etc.

>  Could
> there be a successful android surgeon, computer programmer, psychologist,
> lawyer, etc.

I would say there could be very successful android surgeons, less so
computer programmers and lawyers because there is an element of
creativity there, and not so much for a psychologist, because the job
requires the understanding of feeling, which is not possible for a
computer executed in material that cannot feel like an animal feels.
Until silicon can feel proud and ashamed, it won't be any good at
psychology.

> Or do you believe there is some inherent limitation of
> computers that would prevent them from being capable in one of these
> roles?  If so please provide an example.

Computers are inherently limited by their material substrate. A
mechanism of electronic silicon will never know what it is to feel
pain, fear, pleasure, etc. Any role which emphasizes a talent for
feeling and understanding would fail to be fulfilled by the promise of
disembodied recursive enumeration.
Sand can be pretty complicated to generate:
http://inspirationgreen.com/magnified-grains-of-sand.html

I'm not saying it's as complicated as a human brain, but by your
correlation, it should be more conscious than a block of iron, and I
think that is clearly is not.
No, zombies are not actually possible in reality, since there will
always be something or someone who can tell the difference, but the
principle as it pertains to AI is valid. A person can impersonate a
computer and a computer can seem to impersonate a human, but that
doesn't mean impersonation carries the subjective experience.
Pretending I am Napoleon doesn't make me Napoleon, even if I do a
really good imitation.

Craig

Jason Resch

unread,
Jan 17, 2012, 12:51:39 AM1/17/12
to everyth...@googlegroups.com

Weird.  I was getting "connection reset" errors, like someone is interfering with the connection.  I was able to access those pages using a proxy service, however.
 
>
> > and attached each side to a an effector which plays a cartoon of a
> > semiconductor AND gate, then you would have a cartoon which is
> > simulates an AND gate. The cartoon would be two separate cartoons in
> > reality, and the logic between them would be entirely inferred by the
> > audience, but this apparatus could be interpreted by the audience as a
> > functional simulation. The audience can jump to the conclusion that
> > the cartoon is a semiconductor AND gate. This is all that Strong AI
> > will ever be.
>
> > Computationalism assumes that consciousness is a generalizable
> > concept, but we don't know that is true. My view is that it is not
> > true, since we know that computation itself is not even generalizable
> > to all physical forms. You can't build a computer without any solid
> > materials.
>
> This is a statement about what is possible to build given what physics has
> provided us.  I am not sure what that implies for computationalism.
> Certainly, Turing machines are special structures and not everything is a
> Turing machine.  However, if one can build a Turing machine, one will find
> that its repertoire is infinite.

That's what I'm saying though. A Turing machine cannot be built in
liquid, gas, or vacuum. It is a logic of solid objects only. That
means it's repertoire is not infinite, since it can't simulate a
Turing machine that is not made of some simulated solidity.


Well you're asking for something impossible, not something impossible to simulate, but something that is logically impossible.

Also, something can be infinite without encompassing everything.  A line can be infinite in length without every point in existence having to lie on that line.

 
> To date, there is nothing we
> (individually or as a race) has accomplished that could not in principle
> also be accomplished by an appropriately programed Turing machine.

Even if that were true, no Turing machine has ever known what it has
accomplished,

Assuming you and I aren't Turing machines.
 
so in principle nothing can ever be accomplished by a
Turing machine independently of our perception.

Do asteroids and planets exist "out there" even if no one perceives them?
 
What is an
'accomplishment' in computational terms?

I don't know.
 

What do you base this on?  What is it about being a machine that precludes them from fulfilling any of these roles?

Also, although their abilities are limited, the below examples certainly show that computers are making inroads along many of these lines of work, and will only improve overtime as computers become more powerful.

Artist and Musician: Computer generated music has been around since at least the 60s: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4Neivqp2K4
Therapist: ELIZA, the computer psychologist has been around since 1964: http://nlp-addiction.com/eliza/
Teacher: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone_%28software%29
Caregiver: The Japanese are actively researching and developing caregiving robots to take care of their aging population: http://web-japan.org/trends/09_sci-tech/sci100225.html
Comedian: "What kind of murderer has moral fiber?" — "A cereal killer."  This joke was written by a computer. ( http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1719 )
Movie Critic: http://www.netflixprize.com/



>  Could
> there be a successful android surgeon, computer programmer, psychologist,
> lawyer, etc.

I would say there could be very successful android surgeons, less so
computer programmers and lawyers because there is an element of
creativity there,
and not so much for a psychologist, because the job
requires the understanding of feeling, which is not possible for a
computer executed in material that cannot feel like an animal feels.

But a computer program will have the same output (outwardly visible behavior) regardless of its substrate.  Clearly the material on which the Turing machine is executed cannot have any effect on its performance.  If a Turing machine run on carbon makes a better psychologist, then that same program executed on a silicon Turing machine will be just as successful.
 
Until silicon can feel proud and ashamed, it won't be any good at
psychology.

Unless there is something about psychologists that is infinite, then there is no externally visible behavior a psychologist is capable of that the android controlled by a Turing machine could not also do.
 

> Or do you believe there is some inherent limitation of
> computers that would prevent them from being capable in one of these
> roles?  If so please provide an example.

Computers are inherently limited by their material substrate. A
mechanism of electronic silicon will never know what it is to feel
pain, fear, pleasure, etc. Any role which emphasizes a talent for
feeling and understanding would fail to be fulfilled by the promise of
disembodied recursive enumeration.


Do you think something have to feel to perfectly act as though it is feeling?  Actors can pretend to suffer if their role is to be tortured in a movie, yet they feel no pain.  If you are into sci-fi, you should watch the recent (not 1970s) Battlestar Galactica series.  Among other things, it explores a racism against machines who in all respects look act and behave like humans.
 

Wow.  Those are very cool.
 

If you think Zombies are impossible, then you are forced to reject the possibility that machines can satisfy any human occupation, as otherwise you would have to consider them conscious (owing to the fact that you think zombies are impossible).  So you are consistent, but I think you are shaky ground, since Turing machines are believed to be capable of replicating the behavior of any finite process.
 
Pretending I am Napoleon doesn't make me Napoleon, even if I do a
really good imitation.


If your brain were identical to Napoleon's you would be he.

Jason

Bruno Marchal

unread,
Jan 17, 2012, 11:30:19 AM1/17/12
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
On 16 Jan 2012, at 19:50, John Clark wrote:

On Mon, Jan 16, 2012 at 1:08 PM, Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

"So you believe that the theory according to which consciousness is a gift by a creationist God is as bad as the theory according to which consciousness is related to brain activity?"

If creationists could explain consciousness then I would be a creationists, but they can not.

We agree on this. 



Brain activity does not explain consciousness either.

But it addresses the problem, and the theory is not bad at all. The theory is that brain has some role in consciousness. My point is that a theory can be better than another one, even if it does not solve completely the riddle.
A theory is not supposed to provide an answer. When a problem is complex, we can be glad if a theory can help to formulate the problem. 
That's what is nice with computationalism: it transforms the mind-body problem into a body problem in arithmetic. It meta-explains also why consciousness is felt as not entirely explainable.



I don't know how but I believe as certainly as I believe anything that intelligence causes consciousness.

I agree, but we might not use the terms here in the exact same senses. Intelligence and consciousness are almost identical notion, for me. I use the term competence where you are using intelligence. Competence can be partially evaluated. Intelligence cannot.

I have a simple theory of intelligence-in-a-large-sense:

A machine is intelligent if it is not stupid. And 
a machine is stupid in two circumstances, when she asserts that she is intelligent, or when she asserts that she is stupid.

(it can be shown that a machine which asserts that she is stupid is slightly less stupid than the one which asserts its intelligence). Those recursive definition of intelligence admits arithmetical interpretations. They make sense. But this should not been taken too much literally: you might become stupid by doing so!



I believe this not because I can prove it but because I simply could not function if I thought I was the only conscious being in the universe.

I don't see the relation with what you say above. Someone can believe that consciousness is not required for all forms of intelligence, but only for more special sort of intelligence. 




" the quanta does not exist primitively but emerge, in the comp case, from number relations."

What sort of numbers, computable numbers or the far more common non-computable numbers? And what sort of relations.?

All the numbers I talk about are natural numbers (and thus computable, by the constant programs). The others are represented by functions from N to N. 
The quanta emerges from the computational relations going through my actual computational states. "actual" is defined by the self-referential tools provided in arithmetic/computer science (mainly discovered by Gödel 1931). This should follow easily from UDA step1-7.




 
"This means that indeed we can write simple program leading to intelligence"

I don't know what that simple program could be, but I have already given a example of a simple program leading to emotion.

OK. I gave you other samples, too.


 
"My whole point is that intelligence is not a constructive concept, like consciousness you cannot define it."

Intelligence is problem solving; not a perfect definition by any means but far far better than any known definition of consciousness. 

That is not intelligence, but competence. In that case, it can be shown that there are no universal problem solver, and that the problem solving abilities can be put on a lattice type of partial order. So, some machine can be very competent for some (large) class of problems, and utterly incompetent for other (large) class of problems. 
Case and Smith have shown that if you allow an inductive inference machine to say enough bulshit, and to change infinitely often its mind on working theories (!), then they give rise to universal problem solving strategies. Harrington showed that such machine are necessarily only theoretical, yet the principles in play might have a role in long computations, like evolution might illustrate.


Examples are better than definitions anyway, intelligence is what Einstein did

This will not help a lot.



and consciousness is what I am. 

This is too short, and literally untrue, or unclear. Consciousness is what many different people are, then, yet consciousness might be unique or not (open problem in the mechanist theory).

But defining consciousness by the mental state of any machine having self-developed some belief in some reality, can explain why machines are puzzled by consciousness, why machine cannot define it, and at the same time cannot ignore precisely what it is.  Above all, it explains where the quanta comes from, including the laws to which they have to obey, making it into a refutable (scientific) theory. 

It also gives a role of consciousness: to speed up the reaction of person relatively to their most probable computation(s). Such theory suggests also that consciousness has been relatively and locally incarnated by self-moving creatures, to accelerate the anticipation on the dynamical environment (due to self-moving). The theory explains also why consciousness is lived as an immediate self-integration. It shows also why quale logic extends quantum logic.

Bruno



Craig Weinberg

unread,
Jan 17, 2012, 3:20:53 PM1/17/12
to Everything List
On Jan 17, 12:51 am, Jason Resch <jasonre...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 16, 2012 at 10:29 PM, Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com>wrote:

>
> > That's what I'm saying though. A Turing machine cannot be built in
> > liquid, gas, or vacuum. It is a logic of solid objects only. That
> > means it's repertoire is not infinite, since it can't simulate a
> > Turing machine that is not made of some simulated solidity.
>
> Well you're asking for something impossible, not something impossible to
> simulate, but something that is logically impossible.

We can simulate logical impossibilities graphically though (Escher,
etc). My point is that a Turing machine is not even truly universal,
let alone infinite. It's an object oriented syntax that is limited to
particular kinds of functions, none of which include biological
awareness (which might make sense since biology is almost entirely
fluid-solution based.)

>
> Also, something can be infinite without encompassing everything. A line
> can be infinite in length without every point in existence having to lie on
> that line.

If that's what you meant though, it's not saying much of anything
about the repertoire. A player piano has an infinite repertoire too.
So what?

>
> > > To date, there is nothing we
> > > (individually or as a race) has accomplished that could not in principle
> > > also be accomplished by an appropriately programed Turing machine.
>
> > Even if that were true, no Turing machine has ever known what it has
> > accomplished,
>
> Assuming you and I aren't Turing machines.

It would be begging the question otherwise.

>
> > so in principle nothing can ever be accomplished by a
> > Turing machine independently of our perception.
>
> Do asteroids and planets exist "out there" even if no one perceives them?

They don't need humans to perceive them to exist, but my view is that
gravity is evidence that all physical objects perceive each other. Not
in a biological sense of feeling, seeing, or knowing, but in the most
primitive forms of collision detection, accumulation, attraction to
mass, etc.
Machines have no feeling. These kinds of careers rely on sensitivity
to human feeling and meaning. They require that you care about things
that humans care about. Caring cannot be programmed. That is the
opposite of caring, because programming requires no investment by the
programmed. There is no subject in a program, only an object
programmed to behave in a way that seems like it could be a subject in
some ways.

>
> Also, although their abilities are limited, the below examples certainly
> show that computers are making inroads along many of these lines of work,
> and will only improve overtime as computers become more powerful.

Many professions would be much better performed by a computer. Human
oversight might be desirable for something like surgery, but I would
probably go with the computer over a human surgeon.

>
> Artist and Musician: Computer generated music has been around since at
> least the 60s:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4Neivqp2K4

Yep, 47 years since then and still no improvement whatsoever. Based on
that I think we cannot assume that computer generated music will
improve significantly over time as computers become more powerful.
They can just make more realistic music sound just as bad.

> Therapist: ELIZA, the computer psychologist has been around since 1964:http://nlp-addiction.com/eliza/

Again, no improvement in almost 50 years. Does anyone use ELIZA for
psychology? No. It's utterly useless except as a novelty and
linguistics demonstration.

> Teacher:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone_%28software%29

It's not a teacher, it's a computer assisted learning regimen. An
exercise machine is not the same thing as a personal trainer or a
coach.

> Caregiver: The Japanese are actively researching and developing caregiving
> robots to take care of their aging population:http://web-japan.org/trends/09_sci-tech/sci100225.html

That doesn't mean that they will excel at being caregivers.

> Comedian: "What kind of murderer has moral fiber?" — "A cereal killer."
> This joke was written by a computer. (http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1719)
> Movie Critic:http://www.netflixprize.com/

Again, generating a sophomoric pun (in a sea of garbage jokes) is not
the same thing as 'excelling at being a comedian.' All of these
examples reveal the utter failure of computation to get passed square
one in any of these areas. It is obvious to me that the failure is
rooted in precisely the failure of computation to simulate awareness
beyond a trivial form of sophistication. Limited capacities for
simulating trivial music, conversation, humor, compassion are
radically overestimated, even though there has been no sign of
progress at all since the beginning of computing.

>
> > > Could
> > > there be a successful android surgeon, computer programmer, psychologist,
> > > lawyer, etc.
>
> > I would say there could be very successful android surgeons, less so
> > computer programmers and lawyers because there is an element of
> > creativity there,
>
> Computers have demonstrated creativity:http://www.mendeley.com/research/automated-design-previously-patented...
>

link doesn't come up.

> > and not so much for a psychologist, because the job
> > requires the understanding of feeling, which is not possible for a
> > computer executed in material that cannot feel like an animal feels.
>
> But a computer program will have the same output (outwardly visible
> behavior) regardless of its substrate. Clearly the material on which the
> Turing machine is executed cannot have any effect on its performance.

If that were the case then a Turing machine should be executable as a
truck load of live hamsters or a dense layer of fog. The fact that it
cannot work that way is evidence that the material does relate to the
ability of a Turing machine to perform even basic functions.

Art, music, comedy, compassion, etc are not 'output'. They are
experiences which can be shared. A Turing machine can't experience
anything by itself, it is only the substrate that experiences.

> If a
> Turing machine run on carbon makes a better psychologist, then that same
> program executed on a silicon Turing machine will be just as successful.

The machine exploits the common sense of object oriented substrates.
It doesn't matter whether it runs on silicon or boron or gadolinium,
because any sufficiently polite solid material will do. None of them
make a good psychologist. For that you need something that neurons run
on themselves.

>
> > Until silicon can feel proud and ashamed, it won't be any good at
> > psychology.
>
> Unless there is something about psychologists that is infinite, then there
> is no externally visible behavior a psychologist is capable of that the
> android controlled by a Turing machine could not also do.

A keyboard can be programmed to type any sentence. Does that mean it
is Shakespeare? A Turing machine can only impersonate intelligence
trivially, it can't embody it authentically. It's not about matching
behaviors, it's about having the sensitivity and feeling to know when
and why the behaviors are appropriate. It's about originating new
behaviors that are significant improvements over previous approaches.

>
>
>
> > > Or do you believe there is some inherent limitation of
> > > computers that would prevent them from being capable in one of these
> > > roles? If so please provide an example.
>
> > Computers are inherently limited by their material substrate. A
> > mechanism of electronic silicon will never know what it is to feel
> > pain, fear, pleasure, etc. Any role which emphasizes a talent for
> > feeling and understanding would fail to be fulfilled by the promise of
> > disembodied recursive enumeration.
>
> Do you think something have to feel to perfectly act as though it is
> feeling? Actors can pretend to suffer if their role is to be tortured in a
> movie, yet they feel no pain.

They aren't feeling pain at the moment, but they are capable of
experiencing pain, therefore they can fake it with feeling.

> If you are into sci-fi, you should watch the
> recent (not 1970s) Battlestar Galactica series. Among other things, it
> explores a racism against machines who in all respects look act and behave
> like humans.

Yeah I have watched a lot of that BSG. I like how the cylons are
monotheistic and humans are pagan. It's a good show. I would agree,
if it were the case that AI robots were indistinguishable to us that
it would be a valid philosophical issue. My view though is that there
are some good reasons that will never be the case. As the AI horizon
continues to recede infinitely, even in the face of ever faster
hardware and more bloated software, we will continue to have to deal
with actual racism rather than theoretical anthropism. If the cylons
were genetically engineered beings instead, well, that's a different
story entirely. Living creatures matter, programs don't (except to the
living creatures that use them).
I think that's because our notions of a finite process arise from the
same logic from which the idea of a Turing machine arises. If we see
logic as a special case of sense, then the important property becomes
not whether or not something is a finite, but how high the quality of
it's sense and motives. Like molded plastic, a Turing machine can make
a useful simulacra in almost any form, but only if you don't care
about the quality. Quality is not quantitative. It isn't useful to
measure it that way. There is no amount of plastic forks and paper
plates that equal fine china and sterling silver.

>
> > Pretending I am Napoleon doesn't make me Napoleon, even if I do a
> > really good imitation.
>
> If your brain were identical to Napoleon's you would be he.

No, I would still be just Napoleon's brain twin in a completely
different life. If a person is blind from birth, their visual cortex
activity is associated with tactile experiences. The same exact brain
will see if it has eyes to see with or feel if it doesn't. If Napoleon
was optically blind, then having my brain would not let him see.

Craig

Jason Resch

unread,
Jan 18, 2012, 9:56:02 PM1/18/12
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
On Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 2:20 PM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Jan 17, 12:51 am, Jason Resch <jasonre...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 16, 2012 at 10:29 PM, Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com>wrote:

>
> > That's what I'm saying though. A Turing machine cannot be built in
> > liquid, gas, or vacuum. It is a logic of solid objects only. That
> > means it's repertoire is not infinite, since it can't simulate a
> > Turing machine that is not made of some simulated solidity.
>
> Well you're asking for something impossible, not something impossible to
> simulate, but something that is logically impossible.

We can simulate logical impossibilities graphically though (Escher,
etc). My point is that a Turing machine is not even truly universal,
let alone infinite. It's an object oriented syntax that is limited to
particular kinds of functions, none of which include biological
awareness (which might make sense since biology is almost entirely
fluid-solution based.)

But its not entirely free of solids.  You can build a computer out of mostly fluids and solutions too.
 

>
> Also, something can be infinite without encompassing everything.  A line
> can be infinite in length without every point in existence having to lie on
> that line.

If that's what you meant though, it's not saying much of anything
about the repertoire. A player piano has an infinite repertoire too.
So what?

A piano cannot tell you how any finite process will evolve over time.
 

>
> > > To date, there is nothing we
> > > (individually or as a race) has accomplished that could not in principle
> > > also be accomplished by an appropriately programed Turing machine.
>
> > Even if that were true, no Turing machine has ever known what it has
> > accomplished,
>
> Assuming you and I aren't Turing machines.

It would be begging the question otherwise.

All known biological processes are Turing emulable.
 

>
> > so in principle nothing can ever be accomplished by a
> > Turing machine independently of our perception.
>
> Do asteroids and planets exist "out there" even if no one perceives them?

They don't need humans to perceive them to exist, but my view is that
gravity is evidence that all physical objects perceive each other. Not
in a biological sense of feeling, seeing, or knowing, but in the most
primitive forms of collision detection, accumulation, attraction to
mass, etc.

If atoms can perceive gravitational forces, why can't computers perceive their inputs?
 

A program model of a psychologist's biology will tell you exactly what the psychologist will do and say in any situation.
 
That is the
opposite of caring, because programming requires no investment by the
programmed. There is no subject in a program, only an object
programmed to behave in a way that seems like it could be a subject in
some ways.

If there is no subject in the emulation of the psychologist's biology, then it is a zombie.  The evolution of the program can be used to drive the servos and motors in the android, and it will behave indistinguishably.

 

>
> Also, although their abilities are limited, the below examples certainly
> show that computers are making inroads along many of these lines of work,
> and will only improve overtime as computers become more powerful.

Many professions would be much better performed by a computer. Human
oversight might be desirable for something like surgery, but I would
probably go with the computer over a human surgeon.

>
> Artist and Musician: Computer generated music has been around since at
> least the 60s:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4Neivqp2K4

Yep, 47 years since then and still no improvement whatsoever. Based on
that I think we cannot assume that computer generated music will
improve significantly over time as computers become more powerful.
They can just make more realistic music sound just as bad.

Until computers have greater power than the parts of the human brain involved in these skills, and we understand those mechanisms (or reverse engineer/copy them) AI will lag behind human ability.
 

> > and not so much for a psychologist, because the job
> > requires the understanding of feeling, which is not possible for a
> > computer executed in material that cannot feel like an animal feels.
>
> But a computer program will have the same output (outwardly visible
> behavior) regardless of its substrate.  Clearly the material on which the
> Turing machine is executed cannot have any effect on its performance.

If that were the case then a Turing machine should be executable as a
truck load of live hamsters or a dense layer of fog.

It has to be a Turing machine before it gains all the powers of every other Turing machine.  Not everything is a Turing machine, but any Turing machine, regardless of its substrate is equally capable.

 
The fact that it
cannot work that way is evidence that the material does relate to the
ability of a Turing machine to perform even basic functions.

Art, music, comedy, compassion, etc are not 'output'.

Niether are the nerve impulses from your spinal cord art, music, comedy, compassion, etc.  But the output can be used to control a body or other mechanism to express any and all of those things.
 
They are
experiences which can be shared. A Turing machine can't experience
anything by itself, it is only the substrate that experiences.

 

> If a
> Turing machine run on carbon makes a better psychologist, then that same
> program executed on a silicon Turing machine will be just as successful.

The machine exploits the common sense of object oriented substrates.
It doesn't matter whether it runs on silicon or boron or gadolinium,
because any sufficiently polite solid material will do. None of them
make a good psychologist. For that you need something that neurons run
on themselves.

You need to believe a psychologist is capable of hyper-computation for this position to be consistent.
 

>
> > Until silicon can feel proud and ashamed, it won't be any good at
> > psychology.
>
> Unless there is something about psychologists that is infinite, then there
> is no externally visible behavior a psychologist is capable of that the
> android controlled by a Turing machine could not also do.

A keyboard can be programmed to type any sentence. Does that mean it
is Shakespeare? A Turing machine can only impersonate intelligence
trivially,

Again different human skills require different levels of computational resources.  Do you think Deep Blue can only play chess at a trivial level?
 
it can't embody it authentically.

If something behaves intelligently it is intelligent.
 
It's not about matching
behaviors, it's about having the sensitivity and feeling to know when
and why the behaviors are appropriate. It's about originating new
behaviors that are significant improvements over previous approaches.

>
>
>
> > > Or do you believe there is some inherent limitation of
> > > computers that would prevent them from being capable in one of these
> > > roles?  If so please provide an example.
>
> > Computers are inherently limited by their material substrate. A
> > mechanism of electronic silicon will never know what it is to feel
> > pain, fear, pleasure, etc. Any role which emphasizes a talent for
> > feeling and understanding would fail to be fulfilled by the promise of
> > disembodied recursive enumeration.
>
> Do you think something have to feel to perfectly act as though it is
> feeling?  Actors can pretend to suffer if their role is to be tortured in a
> movie, yet they feel no pain.

They aren't feeling pain at the moment, but they are capable of
experiencing pain, therefore they can fake it with feeling.

An actors performance comes down to how they move their muscles, there is a limited number of muscles in a human body, and a finite number of ways in which an actor can move them in any performance of finite length.  These movements could be replicated even by a process which has never felt pain, and do so as convincingly as any actor.
 

>  If you are into sci-fi, you should watch the
> recent (not 1970s) Battlestar Galactica series.  Among other things, it
> explores a racism against machines who in all respects look act and behave
> like humans.

Yeah I have watched a lot of that BSG. I like how the cylons are
monotheistic and humans are pagan.  It's a good show. I would agree,
if it were the case that AI robots were indistinguishable to us that
it would be a valid philosophical issue. My view though is that there
are some good reasons that will never be the case.

If we scanned brain images into computers powerful enough to run them, and they always broke down or failed to function, I would consider that evidence against computationalism.  The fact that the current computers of our time have not equaled or surpassed us in every respect is no more evidence against computationalism, then would it have been in the 1900's that no man-made mechanical machine could convincingly behave like a human.  We know roughly the computational power of the human brain, and computers of today are somewhere between that of an insect and that of a mouse.  Once we reach the computational power of a mouse brain, then in 7 years we will reach the power of a cat brain, and 7 years later the power of a human brain (Assuming Moore's law of doubling computational power for the same price each year).
 
As the AI horizon
continues to recede infinitely, even in the face of ever faster
hardware and more bloated software, we will continue to have to deal
with actual racism rather than theoretical anthropism.

20 years ago would you have been surprised to learn that a computer would beat the leading Jeapordy champions, or that we would have self-driving cars before flying cars?
 
If the cylons
were genetically engineered beings instead, well, that's a different
story entirely. Living creatures matter, programs don't (except to the
living creatures that use them).

Are you afraid to burn coal in your stove out of concern that the material will sense being burned?


It can attain ideal quality and perfection for anything that is not infinite.
 
Quality is not quantitative. It isn't useful to
measure it that way. There is no amount of plastic forks and paper
plates that equal fine china and sterling silver.

>
> > Pretending I am Napoleon doesn't make me Napoleon, even if I do a
> > really good imitation.
>
> If your brain were identical to Napoleon's you would be he.

No, I would still be just Napoleon's brain twin in a completely
different life. If a person is blind from birth, their visual cortex
activity is associated with tactile experiences. The same exact brain
will see if it has eyes to see with or feel if it doesn't. If Napoleon
was optically blind, then having my brain would not let him see.

Craig

Bruno Marchal

unread,
Jan 19, 2012, 4:56:07 AM1/19/12
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
On 19 Jan 2012, at 03:56, Jason Resch wrote:



On Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 2:20 PM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Jan 17, 12:51 am, Jason Resch <jasonre...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 16, 2012 at 10:29 PM, Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com>wrote:

>
> > That's what I'm saying though. A Turing machine cannot be built in
> > liquid, gas, or vacuum. It is a logic of solid objects only. That
> > means it's repertoire is not infinite, since it can't simulate a
> > Turing machine that is not made of some simulated solidity.
>
> Well you're asking for something impossible, not something impossible to
> simulate, but something that is logically impossible.

We can simulate logical impossibilities graphically though (Escher,
etc). My point is that a Turing machine is not even truly universal,
let alone infinite. It's an object oriented syntax that is limited to
particular kinds of functions, none of which include biological
awareness (which might make sense since biology is almost entirely
fluid-solution based.)

But its not entirely free of solids.  You can build a computer out of mostly fluids and solutions too.

I agree. Even with gas in some volume.


 

>
> Also, something can be infinite without encompassing everything.  A line
> can be infinite in length without every point in existence having to lie on
> that line.

If that's what you meant though, it's not saying much of anything
about the repertoire. A player piano has an infinite repertoire too.
So what?

A piano cannot tell you how any finite process will evolve over time.

Yes. Craig argue that machine cannot thinks by pointing on its fridge.



 

>
> > > To date, there is nothing we
> > > (individually or as a race) has accomplished that could not in principle
> > > also be accomplished by an appropriately programed Turing machine.
>
> > Even if that were true, no Turing machine has ever known what it has
> > accomplished,
>
> Assuming you and I aren't Turing machines.

It would be begging the question otherwise.

All known biological processes are Turing emulable.

Yes.


 

>
> > so in principle nothing can ever be accomplished by a
> > Turing machine independently of our perception.
>
> Do asteroids and planets exist "out there" even if no one perceives them?

They don't need humans to perceive them to exist, but my view is that
gravity is evidence that all physical objects perceive each other. Not
in a biological sense of feeling, seeing, or knowing, but in the most
primitive forms of collision detection, accumulation, attraction to
mass, etc.

If atoms can perceive gravitational forces, why can't computers perceive their inputs?

Indeed.
But Craig might be right. Caring and many things can be Turing emulable, yet not programmable. If artificial machine evolves, they might indeed not care about what humans care about. Especially if we dismiss them as strange, foreigners, or slaves.


 
That is the
opposite of caring, because programming requires no investment by the
programmed. There is no subject in a program, only an object
programmed to behave in a way that seems like it could be a subject in
some ways.

If there is no subject in the emulation of the psychologist's biology, then it is a zombie.  The evolution of the program can be used to drive the servos and motors in the android, and it will behave indistinguishably.

 

>
> Also, although their abilities are limited, the below examples certainly
> show that computers are making inroads along many of these lines of work,
> and will only improve overtime as computers become more powerful.

Many professions would be much better performed by a computer. Human
oversight might be desirable for something like surgery, but I would
probably go with the computer over a human surgeon.

>
> Artist and Musician: Computer generated music has been around since at
> least the 60s:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4Neivqp2K4

Yep, 47 years since then and still no improvement whatsoever. Based on
that I think we cannot assume that computer generated music will
improve significantly over time as computers become more powerful.
They can just make more realistic music sound just as bad.

Until computers have greater power than the parts of the human brain involved in these skills, and we understand those mechanisms (or reverse engineer/copy them) AI will lag behind human ability.

Perhaps. It is also possible that we will transform ourself into computer more quickly that hand made computers evolve enough to surpass humans.

When you look how education investment and quality decreased over the 50 last years, it looks like today's machine might already be clever than our future kids. The singularity point might get closer, not by machine evolving, but by humans regressing.
Yes.



 
The fact that it
cannot work that way is evidence that the material does relate to the
ability of a Turing machine to perform even basic functions.

Art, music, comedy, compassion, etc are not 'output'.

Niether are the nerve impulses from your spinal cord art, music, comedy, compassion, etc.  But the output can be used to control a body or other mechanism to express any and all of those things.
 
They are
experiences which can be shared. A Turing machine can't experience
anything by itself, it is only the substrate that experiences.

 

> If a
> Turing machine run on carbon makes a better psychologist, then that same
> program executed on a silicon Turing machine will be just as successful.

The machine exploits the common sense of object oriented substrates.
It doesn't matter whether it runs on silicon or boron or gadolinium,
because any sufficiently polite solid material will do. None of them
make a good psychologist. For that you need something that neurons run
on themselves.

You need to believe a psychologist is capable of hyper-computation for this position to be consistent.

That's what we told to Craig since the beginning.



 

>
> > Until silicon can feel proud and ashamed, it won't be any good at
> > psychology.
>
> Unless there is something about psychologists that is infinite, then there
> is no externally visible behavior a psychologist is capable of that the
> android controlled by a Turing machine could not also do.

A keyboard can be programmed to type any sentence. Does that mean it
is Shakespeare? A Turing machine can only impersonate intelligence
trivially,

Again different human skills require different levels of computational resources.  Do you think Deep Blue can only play chess at a trivial level?
 
it can't embody it authentically.

If something behaves intelligently it is intelligent.

Yes. Note that something intelligent does not necessarily behave intelligently. In fact intelligence is a prerequisite for being stupid. Pebbles are not stupid.
Sure. I have been treated as a complete morons for having said that computer will able to play chess and will able to to symboblic derivation and integration. The dogma, when I was young, was that computer are only crunching numbers machines, capable of doing only numerical calculations and nothing else. 


 
If the cylons
were genetically engineered beings instead, well, that's a different
story entirely. Living creatures matter, programs don't (except to the
living creatures that use them).

Are you afraid to burn coal in your stove out of concern that the material will sense being burned?

Yes. Craig's "theory" is a bit frightening with respect of this. But of course that is not an argument. Craig might accuse you of wishful thinking. 

Bruno




Craig Weinberg

unread,
Jan 19, 2012, 8:22:22 AM1/19/12
to Everything List
On Jan 18, 9:56 pm, Jason Resch <jasonre...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 2:20 PM, Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com>wrote:
>
> > On Jan 17, 12:51 am, Jason Resch <jasonre...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > On Mon, Jan 16, 2012 at 10:29 PM, Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com
> > >wrote:
>
> > > > That's what I'm saying though. A Turing machine cannot be built in
> > > > liquid, gas, or vacuum. It is a logic of solid objects only. That
> > > > means it's repertoire is not infinite, since it can't simulate a
> > > > Turing machine that is not made of some simulated solidity.
>
> > > Well you're asking for something impossible, not something impossible to
> > > simulate, but something that is logically impossible.
>
> > We can simulate logical impossibilities graphically though (Escher,
> > etc). My point is that a Turing machine is not even truly universal,
> > let alone infinite. It's an object oriented syntax that is limited to
> > particular kinds of functions, none of which include biological
> > awareness (which might make sense since biology is almost entirely
> > fluid-solution based.)
>
> But its not entirely free of solids. You can build a computer out of
> mostly fluids and solutions too.

Yes, but you can't grow a computer by watering it or kill it by
depriving it of water. Biology is synonymous with water as far as we
know.

>
>
>
> > > Also, something can be infinite without encompassing everything. A line
> > > can be infinite in length without every point in existence having to lie
> > on
> > > that line.
>
> > If that's what you meant though, it's not saying much of anything
> > about the repertoire. A player piano has an infinite repertoire too.
> > So what?
>
> A piano cannot tell you how any finite process will evolve over time.

I agree, computers are impressive, although It's not real time, it's
generic theoretical time, and it's not real processes, it's models of
our assumptions about real processes.

>
>
>
> > > > > To date, there is nothing we
> > > > > (individually or as a race) has accomplished that could not in
> > principle
> > > > > also be accomplished by an appropriately programed Turing machine.
>
> > > > Even if that were true, no Turing machine has ever known what it has
> > > > accomplished,
>
> > > Assuming you and I aren't Turing machines.
>
> > It would be begging the question otherwise.
>
> All known biological processes are Turing emulable.

Is Jason Resch a biological process? Where can your full name at birth
be found in your biology?

>
>
>
> > > > so in principle nothing can ever be accomplished by a
> > > > Turing machine independently of our perception.
>
> > > Do asteroids and planets exist "out there" even if no one perceives them?
>
> > They don't need humans to perceive them to exist, but my view is that
> > gravity is evidence that all physical objects perceive each other. Not
> > in a biological sense of feeling, seeing, or knowing, but in the most
> > primitive forms of collision detection, accumulation, attraction to
> > mass, etc.
>
> If atoms can perceive gravitational forces, why can't computers perceive
> their inputs?

They perceive the push and pull of current and the instinct to
restrain or allow that flow. That is the level of perception of an
electronic computer. The parts of a mechanical computer perceive the
force of the changes to their mass and supply the appropriate physical
response. A human being has many orders of magnitude higher
proliferation, development, and integration of sense channels - in the
chemical, biological, zoological, and anthropological frequency
ranges.
No, the program will fail to be perceived as authentic. It is a way to
try to simulate caring, but it is not caring. The program feels
nothing so it will not be able to respond freely in the moment. The
psychologist's biology will not tell anyone what they will do and say
in any situation. There are words that the psychologist will use in
the future which have not been invented yet, new therapies and
articles to ready. Will the program simulate the future of psychology
and language as well? This idea of biology as a static template of
human behavior is a leftover fairy tale of the 19th century.

>
> > That is the
> > opposite of caring, because programming requires no investment by the
> > programmed. There is no subject in a program, only an object
> > programmed to behave in a way that seems like it could be a subject in
> > some ways.
>
> If there is no subject in the emulation of the psychologist's biology, then
> it is a zombie.

No, it's an inanimate object. A zombie arises from the expectation
that it should have a subject in the first place. Of course it has no
subject, it's a machine. It's a stapler with a face painted on it.

>The evolution of the program can be used to drive the
> servos and motors in the android, and it will behave indistinguishably.

Indistinguishably to whom? Are these magical servos and motors that
smell and sound like a living person? That show up on an X-Ray as
bones and organs?

>
>
>
> > > Also, although their abilities are limited, the below examples certainly
> > > show that computers are making inroads along many of these lines of work,
> > > and will only improve overtime as computers become more powerful.
>
> > Many professions would be much better performed by a computer. Human
> > oversight might be desirable for something like surgery, but I would
> > probably go with the computer over a human surgeon.
>
> > > Artist and Musician: Computer generated music has been around since at
> > > least the 60s:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4Neivqp2K4
>
> > Yep, 47 years since then and still no improvement whatsoever. Based on
> > that I think we cannot assume that computer generated music will
> > improve significantly over time as computers become more powerful.
> > They can just make more realistic music sound just as bad.
>
> Until computers have greater power than the parts of the human brain
> involved in these skills, and we understand those mechanisms (or reverse
> engineer/copy them) AI will lag behind human ability.

AI for trivial applications has progressed, but it's quality of
understanding or feeling has not progressed in any way. AI remains
paper thin and stiff with rigor mechina.
> Sorry, it was incomplete:http://www.mendeley.com/research/automated-design-previously-patented...

Same truncated link. Bit.ly it?

>
>
>
> > > > and not so much for a psychologist, because the job
> > > > requires the understanding of feeling, which is not possible for a
> > > > computer executed in material that cannot feel like an animal feels.
>
> > > But a computer program will have the same output (outwardly visible
> > > behavior) regardless of its substrate. Clearly the material on which the
> > > Turing machine is executed cannot have any effect on its performance.
>
> > If that were the case then a Turing machine should be executable as a
> > truck load of live hamsters or a dense layer of fog.
>
> It has to be a Turing machine before it gains all the powers of every other
> Turing machine. Not everything is a Turing machine, but any Turing
> machine, regardless of its substrate is equally capable.

You're overlooking the fact that the Turning machineness owes it's
existence entirely to the physical qualities of it's substrate. They
are all equally capable, but also equally incapable.

>
> > The fact that it
> > cannot work that way is evidence that the material does relate to the
> > ability of a Turing machine to perform even basic functions.
>
> > Art, music, comedy, compassion, etc are not 'output'.
>
> Niether are the nerve impulses from your spinal cord art, music, comedy,
> compassion, etc. But the output can be used to control a body or other
> mechanism to express any and all of those things.

That's the neuron doctrine, but I don't think it's true. Nerve
impulses are just traffic signals. They are not the signifying agents
of the psyche. They psyche is the phenomenology of an entire human
life - that is what discovers comedy and art, not output of a generic
pattern of impulses, but the actual sense of the tissues of the body
and the autobiographical story they tell as a whole, as well as the
stories of the people of the entire society. The brain is just the
aggregator of the nervous system's sense, which is the aggregator of
the sense of the body as a whole in relation to it's world.

>
> > They are
> > experiences which can be shared. A Turing machine can't experience
> > anything by itself, it is only the substrate that experiences.
>
> > If a
> > > Turing machine run on carbon makes a better psychologist, then that same
> > > program executed on a silicon Turing machine will be just as successful.
>
> > The machine exploits the common sense of object oriented substrates.
> > It doesn't matter whether it runs on silicon or boron or gadolinium,
> > because any sufficiently polite solid material will do. None of them
> > make a good psychologist. For that you need something that neurons run
> > on themselves.
>
> You need to believe a psychologist is capable of hyper-computation for this
> position to be consistent.
>

No, because computation is only one channel of sense. It's the machine
that is hypo-sentient. A psychologist isn't a hyper computer, they are
a living being that has computational capacities as well as visual,
aural, tactile, emotional, intuitive, verbal, etc capacities. Animal
capacities.

>
>
> > > > Until silicon can feel proud and ashamed, it won't be any good at
> > > > psychology.
>
> > > Unless there is something about psychologists that is infinite, then
> > there
> > > is no externally visible behavior a psychologist is capable of that the
> > > android controlled by a Turing machine could not also do.
>
> > A keyboard can be programmed to type any sentence. Does that mean it
> > is Shakespeare? A Turing machine can only impersonate intelligence
> > trivially,
>
> Again different human skills require different levels of computational
> resources. Do you think Deep Blue can only play chess at a trivial level?

Yes. Deep Blue doesn't know that it is even playing chess. It's like a
Rubiks Cube that remembers how to get back to the ideal arrangement
regardless of how scrambled you make it. It's just executing a program
and has no investment in it. Of course it's not a trivial
accomplishment for the programmers of Deep Blue, and for computer
science in general, that is very real and non-trivial, but no, Deep
Blue doesn't know or care who it beats in playing the game.

>
> > it can't embody it authentically.
>
> If something behaves intelligently it is intelligent.
>
> > It's not about matching
> > behaviors, it's about having the sensitivity and feeling to know when
> > and why the behaviors are appropriate. It's about originating new
> > behaviors that are significant improvements over previous approaches.
>
> > > > > Or do you believe there is some inherent limitation of
> > > > > computers that would prevent them from being capable in one of these
> > > > > roles? If so please provide an example.
>
> > > > Computers are inherently limited by their material substrate. A
> > > > mechanism of electronic silicon will never know what it is to feel
> > > > pain, fear, pleasure, etc. Any role which emphasizes a talent for
> > > > feeling and understanding would fail to be fulfilled by the promise of
> > > > disembodied recursive enumeration.
>
> > > Do you think something have to feel to perfectly act as though it is
> > > feeling? Actors can pretend to suffer if their role is to be tortured
> > in a
> > > movie, yet they feel no pain.
>
> > They aren't feeling pain at the moment, but they are capable of
> > experiencing pain, therefore they can fake it with feeling.
>
> An actors performance comes down to how they move their muscles, there is a
> limited number of muscles in a human body,

That's a reductionist assumption. It's seductive, I agree, but no, an
actor's image is a gestalt of semantic cues that has little to do with
muscles and everything to do with their capacity to reveal interior
experiences. It's like saying that there is a limited number of
windows in a building so that limits what can be seen through them.
Sense is all about specular reflection, not literal correspondence.

>and a finite number of ways in
> which an actor can move them in any performance of finite length. These
> movements could be replicated even by a process which has never felt pain,
> and do so as convincingly as any actor.

Yes, they are called movies. The projector and screen feel nothing. If
you make a movie starring androids, you might have some success in
fooling some audience members for some time, but ultimately people
won't feel the same about it. We can't even make CGI animation that is
convincing as non-CGI. It might be great looking, but the water feels
the same as fire. The landscapes feel sterile. We have senses about
realism which go beyond what we know about sense. Ways that our sense
channels are integrated detect inconsistencies at a subconscious
level.

>
>
>
> > > If you are into sci-fi, you should watch the
> > > recent (not 1970s) Battlestar Galactica series. Among other things, it
> > > explores a racism against machines who in all respects look act and
> > behave
> > > like humans.
>
> > Yeah I have watched a lot of that BSG. I like how the cylons are
> > monotheistic and humans are pagan. It's a good show. I would agree,
> > if it were the case that AI robots were indistinguishable to us that
> > it would be a valid philosophical issue. My view though is that there
> > are some good reasons that will never be the case.
>
> If we scanned brain images into computers powerful enough to run them, and
> they always broke down or failed to function, I would consider that
> evidence against computationalism. The fact that the current computers of
> our time have not equaled or surpassed us in every respect is no more
> evidence against computationalism, then would it have been in the 1900's
> that no man-made mechanical machine could convincingly behave like a
> human. We know roughly the computational power of the human brain, and
> computers of today are somewhere between that of an insect and that of a
> mouse. Once we reach the computational power of a mouse brain, then in 7
> years we will reach the power of a cat brain, and 7 years later the power
> of a human brain (Assuming Moore's law of doubling computational power for
> the same price each year).

Computing power without feeling doesn't scale up qualitatively. You
just have more insects acting like a cat. To get a cat, you need
something that can feel like a cat.

>
> > As the AI horizon
> > continues to recede infinitely, even in the face of ever faster
> > hardware and more bloated software, we will continue to have to deal
> > with actual racism rather than theoretical anthropism.
>
> 20 years ago would you have been surprised to learn that a computer would
> beat the leading Jeapordy champions, or that we would have self-driving
> cars before flying cars?

No, I would be disappointed. By 2012, are you kidding? My 1992 self
expected to be uploaded into a computer by now. Computer technology
seemed much more promising to me 20 and 30 years ago. It was fun then.
The actual computers were fun. Not just using them to look at things
and talk to people, but just playing around with them when they were
completely open and accessible was so freeing. Now they are just a sad
consolation prize in the face of a civilization in steep decline.


>
> > If the cylons
> > were genetically engineered beings instead, well, that's a different
> > story entirely. Living creatures matter, programs don't (except to the
> > living creatures that use them).
>
> Are you afraid to burn coal in your stove out of concern that the material
> will sense being burned?

Haha. It's not the carbon alone that makes organisms live. Carbon is a
necessary but not sufficient ingredient.

Craig

Craig Weinberg

unread,
Jan 19, 2012, 8:33:15 AM1/19/12
to Everything List
On Jan 19, 4:56 am, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

>
> Yes. Craig argue that machine cannot thinks by pointing on its fridge.
>
>
> > Are you afraid to burn coal in your stove out of concern that the
> > material will sense being burned?
>
> Yes. Craig's "theory" is a bit frightening with respect of this. But
> of course that is not an argument. Craig might accuse you of wishful
> thinking.
>

This is the same thing you accuse me of. I have never said that coal
is more alive than silicon, I don't even say that dead organisms are
more alive than silicon. I only say that to really act *exactly* like
a living thing, you need to feel like a living thing, and to feel like
a living thing you actually be a living organism, which seems to
entail cells made of carbohydrates, amino acids, and water. Carbon,
Hydrogen, Oxygen, and Nitrogen. Not Silicon or Germanium. Make a
computer out of carbs, aminos, and water and see what happens to your
ability to control it as a Turing machine.

Craig

John Clark

unread,
Jan 19, 2012, 10:43:17 AM1/19/12
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
On Tue, Jan 17, 2012  Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:

"My point is that a Turing machine is not even truly universal"

Anything you can do a Turing Machine can do better, or at least as well.
 
"let alone infinite."

Your mind is not infinite either.
 
"It's an object oriented syntax that is limited to particular kinds of functions, none of which include biological awareness"

You seem to be in the habit of writing declarative sentences that not only you are unable to prove but you can't even find a single scrap of evidence that would lead someone to think it might be true. 

" which might make sense since biology is almost entirely fluid-solution based."

Fluids! You think that makes sense? You think the key to consciousness is our precious bodily fluids? Here is a short scene from the movie Dr. Strangelove that has a character who thinks along somewhat similar lines. 


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1KvgtEnABY

 
" my view is that gravity is evidence that all physical objects perceive each other."

I don't see what this has to do with consciousness as both computers and the grey goo in your head are physical objects, but gravity does not "perceive" where other objects are only where they were because gravitational effects only move at the speed of light, if the sun suddenly disappeared it would be 8 minutes before the Earth noticed and changed its orbit.  

"Machines have no feeling."

You seem to be in the habit of writing declarative sentences that not only you are unable to prove but you can't even find a single scrap of evidence that would lead someone to think it might be true. 
 
"Caring cannot be programmed."

You seem to be in the habit of writing declarative sentences that not only you are unable to prove but you can't even find a single scrap of evidence that would lead someone to think it might be true. 
 
  "Artist and Musician: Computer generated music has been around since at least the 60s: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4Neivqp2K4"

 
"Yep, 47 years since then and still no improvement whatsoever."

Oh I'd say there was improvement, the following has 2 tracks of much more modern computer composed music, I particularly liked track 2, I'd certainly be proud if I had written it:  
"Does anyone use ELIZA for psychology?"

Why does anyone even talk about ELIZA anymore when there are programs like Watson and Sir around?

" No. It's utterly useless"

So you admit that even a very old program like ELIZA does a excellent job emulating psychologists.  

" a Turing machine should be executable as a truck load of live hamsters or a dense layer of fog."

From an engineering perspective those are probably not ideal materials to make a computer out of, but then neither is a long paper tape with marks on it as described in Turing's original 1936 article. What made the article so important is that Turing proved that if they are organized in the right way there is no theoretical reason why you could not build a computer out of ANYTHING.  
 
"A Turing machine can't experience anything by itself"

You seem to be in the habit of writing declarative sentences that not only you are unable to prove but you can't even find a single scrap of evidence that would lead someone to think it might be true. 

 John K Clark


Bruno Marchal

unread,
Jan 19, 2012, 11:33:43 AM1/19/12
to everyth...@googlegroups.com

On 17 Jan 2012, at 21:20, Craig Weinberg wrote:

> My point is that a Turing machine is not even truly universal,
> let alone infinite.

A universal Turing machine is, by definition a machine, and machine
are by definition finite.

The infinite tape plays a role of possible extending environment, and
is not part of the universal machine, despite a widespread error
(perhaps due to a pedagogical error of Turing).

That error comfort me in talking about universal numbers, and defining
them by the relation

phi_u(<x, y>) = phi_x(y). u is the universal machine, x is a
program and y is a data. "phi" refer to some other universal number
made implicit (in my context it is explicited by elementary arithmetic).


> It's an object oriented syntax that is limited to
> particular kinds of functions, none of which include biological
> awareness (which might make sense since biology is almost entirely
> fluid-solution based.)

This worth than the notion of primitive matter. It is mystification of
primitive matter.

I can agree with that. This is in the spirit of Everett, which treat
observation as interaction. But there is no reason to associate
primitive qualia and private sensation from that. It lacks the
"retrieving memory" and self-reference.

What I say three times is true.
What I say three times is true.
What I say three times is true.
(Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark).


> These kinds of careers rely on sensitivity
> to human feeling and meaning. They require that you care about things
> that humans care about. Caring cannot be programmed. That is the
> opposite of caring, because programming requires no investment by the
> programmed. There is no subject in a program, only an object
> programmed to behave in a way that seems like it could be a subject in
> some ways.

If you define the subject by the knower, believability by provability,
and if you accept the classical theory of knwoledge (the axioms: Kp-
>p, K(p->q)->(Kp->Kq)). Then it is a theorem that a subject exist for
machine, and indeed that machine have to be puzzled by the relation
between that subject and their body.

Now, there is no reason to expect a *human* subject. Unless the
machine is a copy of a human at some genuine level. But most machines
are not a priori human machines.

Bruno


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

Jason Resch

unread,
Jan 19, 2012, 8:31:45 PM1/19/12
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
On Thu, Jan 19, 2012 at 7:22 AM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Jan 18, 9:56 pm, Jason Resch <jasonre...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 2:20 PM, Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com>wrote:
>
> > On Jan 17, 12:51 am, Jason Resch <jasonre...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > On Mon, Jan 16, 2012 at 10:29 PM, Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com
> > >wrote:
>
> > > > That's what I'm saying though. A Turing machine cannot be built in
> > > > liquid, gas, or vacuum. It is a logic of solid objects only. That
> > > > means it's repertoire is not infinite, since it can't simulate a
> > > > Turing machine that is not made of some simulated solidity.
>
> > > Well you're asking for something impossible, not something impossible to
> > > simulate, but something that is logically impossible.
>
> > We can simulate logical impossibilities graphically though (Escher,
> > etc). My point is that a Turing machine is not even truly universal,
> > let alone infinite. It's an object oriented syntax that is limited to
> > particular kinds of functions, none of which include biological
> > awareness (which might make sense since biology is almost entirely
> > fluid-solution based.)
>
> But its not entirely free of solids.  You can build a computer out of
> mostly fluids and solutions too.

Yes, but you can't grow a computer by watering it or kill it by
depriving it of water.


There's nothing that logically precludes a computer that grows with water and ceases to function without it. 

 
Biology is synonymous with water as far as we
know.

What is your point?  That consciousness requires a liquid water substrate?
 

>
>
>
> > > Also, something can be infinite without encompassing everything.  A line
> > > can be infinite in length without every point in existence having to lie
> > on
> > > that line.
>
> > If that's what you meant though, it's not saying much of anything
> > about the repertoire. A player piano has an infinite repertoire too.
> > So what?
>
> A piano cannot tell you how any finite process will evolve over time.

I agree, computers are impressive, although It's not real time, it's
generic theoretical time, and it's not real processes, it's models of
our assumptions about real processes.

>
>
>
> > > > > To date, there is nothing we
> > > > > (individually or as a race) has accomplished that could not in
> > principle
> > > > > also be accomplished by an appropriately programed Turing machine.
>
> > > > Even if that were true, no Turing machine has ever known what it has
> > > > accomplished,
>
> > > Assuming you and I aren't Turing machines.
>
> > It would be begging the question otherwise.
>
> All known biological processes are Turing emulable.

Is Jason Resch a biological process? Where can your full name at birth
be found in your biology?

I'm not sure what you are asking.  A name is a reference and a reference is not necessarily included in its referent.
 

>
>
>
> > > > so in principle nothing can ever be accomplished by a
> > > > Turing machine independently of our perception.
>
> > > Do asteroids and planets exist "out there" even if no one perceives them?
>
> > They don't need humans to perceive them to exist, but my view is that
> > gravity is evidence that all physical objects perceive each other. Not
> > in a biological sense of feeling, seeing, or knowing, but in the most
> > primitive forms of collision detection, accumulation, attraction to
> > mass, etc.
>
> If atoms can perceive gravitational forces, why can't computers perceive
> their inputs?

They perceive the push and pull of current and the instinct to
restrain or allow that flow. That is the level of perception of an
electronic computer.

This is arguably one level of the computer, but the program(s) running on the computer may have an arbitrary number of levels, each might have an entirely different view, receiving different inputs and having different semantic meaning to structures in that program.
 

Why, because of unmeasurable psychic forces?
 
There are words that the psychologist will use in
the future which have not been invented yet, new therapies and
articles to ready. Will the program simulate the future of psychology
and language as well? This idea of biology as a static template of
human behavior is a leftover fairy tale of the 19th century.


Certainly the environment has to be taken into account.  If you place the android psychologist in the room with the patient, and it receives the audio signals from the patient speaking, it will give the same advice and recommendations to the patient as the genuine psychologist.
 
>
> > That is the
> > opposite of caring, because programming requires no investment by the
> > programmed. There is no subject in a program, only an object
> > programmed to behave in a way that seems like it could be a subject in
> > some ways.
>
> If there is no subject in the emulation of the psychologist's biology, then
> it is a zombie.

No, it's an inanimate object. A zombie arises from the expectation
that it should have a subject in the first place. Of course it has no
subject, it's a machine. It's a stapler with a face painted on it.

>The evolution of the program can be used to drive the
> servos and motors in the android, and it will behave indistinguishably.

Indistinguishably to whom?

You could predict exactly what the person would say and do in any given circumstance.  This prediction will be indistinguishable from what happens in reality.

 
Are these magical servos and motors that
smell and sound like a living person? That show up on an X-Ray as
bones and organs?

When it comes to implementing a body controlled by such a program, if it is not physically identical there will be ways to tell it apart from the genuine body.  This is why Turing chose to separate the interviewer and interviewee behind an identical interface.  There may always be a way to distinguish implementations, but according to computationalism it is impossible to distinguish two identical minds.
 

>
>
>
> > > Also, although their abilities are limited, the below examples certainly
> > > show that computers are making inroads along many of these lines of work,
> > > and will only improve overtime as computers become more powerful.
>
> > Many professions would be much better performed by a computer. Human
> > oversight might be desirable for something like surgery, but I would
> > probably go with the computer over a human surgeon.
>
> > > Artist and Musician: Computer generated music has been around since at
> > > least the 60s:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4Neivqp2K4
>
> > Yep, 47 years since then and still no improvement whatsoever. Based on
> > that I think we cannot assume that computer generated music will
> > improve significantly over time as computers become more powerful.
> > They can just make more realistic music sound just as bad.
>
> Until computers have greater power than the parts of the human brain
> involved in these skills, and we understand those mechanisms (or reverse
> engineer/copy them) AI will lag behind human ability.

AI for trivial applications has progressed, but it's quality of
understanding or feeling has not progressed in any way. AI remains
paper thin and stiff with rigor mechina.

Remember, computers of today have the power equal to that less than a mouse, yet this is still enough to program cars that recognize other cars, people, obstacles, the road, understand the difference between a red light and green light, and knows its position on the globe etc.
 
>
>
>
> > > > and not so much for a psychologist, because the job
> > > > requires the understanding of feeling, which is not possible for a
> > > > computer executed in material that cannot feel like an animal feels.
>
> > > But a computer program will have the same output (outwardly visible
> > > behavior) regardless of its substrate.  Clearly the material on which the
> > > Turing machine is executed cannot have any effect on its performance.
>
> > If that were the case then a Turing machine should be executable as a
> > truck load of live hamsters or a dense layer of fog.
>
> It has to be a Turing machine before it gains all the powers of every other
> Turing machine.  Not everything is a Turing machine, but any Turing
> machine, regardless of its substrate is equally capable.

You're overlooking the fact that the Turning machineness owes it's
existence entirely to the physical qualities of it's substrate. They
are all equally capable, but also equally incapable.

>
> > The fact that it
> > cannot work that way is evidence that the material does relate to the
> > ability of a Turing machine to perform even basic functions.
>
> > Art, music, comedy, compassion, etc are not 'output'.
>
> Niether are the nerve impulses from your spinal cord art, music, comedy,
> compassion, etc.  But the output can be used to control a body or other
> mechanism to express any and all of those things.

That's the neuron doctrine, but I don't think it's true.

Why not?
 
Nerve
impulses are just traffic signals. They are not the signifying agents
of the psyche.

Your argument is that there are psychic forces that control an actors muscles and move around in the actor's brain?

What are the requirements for something to possess a psyche?  Made of carbon, made of water, having DNA?
 

Are these not higher level manifestations of psychology, which is a higher level manifestation of chemistry and physics?  Are not the same physics involved in the aural sense vs. the tactile and visual senses?  Similarly, couldn't computation be the same general mechanism upon which higher level, more complex structures can be built?
 

You just need the right program.
 

>
> > As the AI horizon
> > continues to recede infinitely, even in the face of ever faster
> > hardware and more bloated software, we will continue to have to deal
> > with actual racism rather than theoretical anthropism.
>
> 20 years ago would you have been surprised to learn that a computer would
> beat the leading Jeapordy champions, or that we would have self-driving
> cars before flying cars?

No, I would be disappointed. By 2012, are you kidding? My 1992 self
expected to be uploaded into a computer by now.

Your expectations were simply a little ahead of their time.  Computers of today typically have about 1 TB or so bytes of storage.  A human brain has 10^15 connections.  It would take about 50 PB just to store the mapping of each neuron to each other one.  A computer with 1 TB bytes of memory is no small accomplishment, 15 years ago 1 GB drives were state of the art.  It will be another 15 years before the common computers have 1 PB of storage.

See: http://www.kurzweilai.net/images/chart19.jpg

You just needed a little more tempered expectations.  It may be a benefit, overall, that it is taking as much time as it is.  It has allowed an entire generation of people to grow up around and become comfortable with computers.  If things happened in the span of 20 years, there would be much stronger resistance.  Remember movies like "The Net" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113957/ or "Lawn Mower Man" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104692/ ?  At that time few people interacted with computers or the Internet, and with that lack of understanding was fear.
 
Computer technology
seemed much more promising to me 20 and 30 years ago. It was fun then.
The actual computers were fun. Not just using them to look at things
and talk to people, but just playing around with them when they were
completely open and accessible was so freeing. Now they are just a sad
consolation prize in the face of a civilization in steep decline.


It is somewhat unfortunate how closed new computers are.  When I grew up I played with an Apple IIe which allowed one to write programs from the command line, and view the source of any program on the disk.  Today we have iPads and XBoxes which have cryptographic keys that prevent anything other than authorized software from executing on them.
 

>
> > If the cylons
> > were genetically engineered beings instead, well, that's a different
> > story entirely. Living creatures matter, programs don't (except to the
> > living creatures that use them).
>
> Are you afraid to burn coal in your stove out of concern that the material
> will sense being burned?

Haha. It's not the carbon alone that makes organisms live. Carbon is a
necessary but not sufficient ingredient.


Okay.  My theory is similar, but at a slightly lower level: information is the necessary but perhaps not sufficient ingredient.

Jason

Craig Weinberg

unread,
Jan 19, 2012, 8:34:03 PM1/19/12
to Everything List
On Jan 19, 11:33 am, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
> On 17 Jan 2012, at 21:20, Craig Weinberg wrote:
>
> > My point is that a Turing machine is not even truly universal,
> > let alone infinite.
>
> A universal Turing machine is, by definition a machine, and machine
> are by definition finite.
>
> The infinite tape plays a role of possible extending environment, and
> is not part of the universal machine, despite a widespread error
> (perhaps due to a pedagogical error of Turing).

What machine makes the infinite tape?

>
> That error comfort me in talking about universal numbers, and defining
> them by the relation
>
> phi_u(<x, y>) = phi_x(y).    u is the universal machine, x is a
> program and y is a data. "phi" refer to some other universal number
> made implicit (in my context it is explicited by elementary arithmetic).
>

So a universal machine's universal number made implicit from data in a
program = a program's universal number from data. I don't understand
what it means.

> > It's an object oriented syntax that is limited to
> > particular kinds of functions, none of which include biological
> > awareness (which might make sense since biology is almost entirely
> > fluid-solution based.)
>
> This worth than the notion of primitive matter. It is mystification of
> primitive matter.

It's not an assertion of mysticism, it's just a plain old
generalization of ordinary observations. Programs don't get excited or
tired, they don't get sick and die, they don't catch a cold, etc. They
share none of the differences which make biology different from
physics.
Doesn't an asteroid maintain it's identity through it's trajectory?
Can't the traces of it's collisions be traced forensically by
examining it. Memory and self reference have to come from somewhere,
why not there? Don't forget, without human consciousness going as a
comparison, we can't assume that the experience of raw matter is
ephemeral like ours is. It may not be memory which is the invention of
biology, but forgetting.
I really don't find it a controversial statement. http://thesaurus.com/browse/mechanical

mechanical  [muh-kan-i-kuhl]
Part of Speech: adjective

Definition: done by machine; machinelike

Synonyms: automated, automatic, cold, cursory, *emotionless*, fixed,
habitual, impersonal, instinctive, involuntary, laborsaving,
*lifeless*, machine-driven, matter-of-fact, monotonous, perfunctory,
programmed, routine, *spiritless*, standardized, stereotyped,
unchanging, **unconscious, unfeeling, unthinking**, useful

Antonyms: by hand, **conscious, feeling**, manual

This is not evidence that machines are incapable of feeling but it
indicates broad commonsense support for my interpretation. Of course
popularity does not mean truth, but it does mean that I don't have to
accept accusations of some sort of fanciful eccentricity peculiar to
myself alone. My interpretation is conservative, yours is radically
experimental and completely unproven. How can you act as if it were
the other way around? It's dishonest.

>
> > These kinds of careers rely on sensitivity
> > to human feeling and meaning. They require that you care about things
> > that humans care about. Caring cannot be programmed. That is the
> > opposite of caring, because programming requires no investment by the
> > programmed. There is no subject in a program, only an object
> > programmed to behave in a way that seems like it could be a subject in
> > some ways.
>
> If you define the subject by the knower, believability by provability,
> and if you accept the classical theory of knwoledge (the axioms:  Kp-
>  >p, K(p->q)->(Kp->Kq)). Then it is a theorem that a subject exist for
> machine, and indeed that machine have to be puzzled by the relation
> between that subject and their body.

It sounds like I can name anything 'knower' and have that be a theorem
for subjectivity.

>
> Now, there is no reason to expect a *human* subject. Unless the
> machine is a copy of a human at some genuine level. But most machines
> are not a priori human machines.

Right. I don't have a problem with natural holarchies of the parts of
a material machine being subjects, just not likely very high quality
subjects. I just don't think the parts know each other unless they
naturally grew as parts of a whole.

Craig

Jason Resch

unread,
Jan 19, 2012, 8:34:46 PM1/19/12
to everyth...@googlegroups.com


Some have argued that cars are alive.  They evolve, consume, move, reproduce and so on.  While they are dependent on humans for reproduction, we too depend on a a very specific environment to reproduce.  Much like viruses.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lee_cronin_making_matter_come_alive.html

Jason

Jason Resch

unread,
Jan 19, 2012, 8:51:54 PM1/19/12
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
On Thu, Jan 19, 2012 at 7:34 PM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Jan 19, 11:33 am, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
> On 17 Jan 2012, at 21:20, Craig Weinberg wrote:
>

I really don't find it a controversial statement. http://thesaurus.com/browse/mechanical

mechanical [muh-kan-i-kuhl]
Part of Speech:         adjective

Definition:     done by machine; machinelike

Synonyms:       automated, automatic, cold, cursory, *emotionless*, fixed,
habitual, impersonal, instinctive, involuntary, laborsaving,
*lifeless*, machine-driven, matter-of-fact, monotonous, perfunctory,
programmed, routine, *spiritless*, standardized, stereotyped,
unchanging, **unconscious, unfeeling, unthinking**, useful

Antonyms:       by hand, **conscious, feeling**, manual

This is not evidence that machines are incapable of feeling but it
indicates broad commonsense support for my interpretation. Of course
popularity does not mean truth, but it does mean that I don't have to
accept accusations of some sort of fanciful eccentricity peculiar to
myself alone. My interpretation is conservative, yours is radically
experimental and completely unproven. How can you act as if it were
the other way around? It's dishonest.


Our language is littered with ideas which have long been shown to be false.  For example, we still say that the "sun sets".  The word mechanical originated with the ancient Greeks.  Would you consider them an authority on what machines are capable of?

Also, regarding your statement that yours is the majority or conventional opinion, I disagree.  The most widely held view among those versed in the subject is that the human body is mechanical (as opposed to governed by spirits or otherwise non-physical influences).

Jason

Craig Weinberg

unread,
Jan 19, 2012, 9:01:25 PM1/19/12
to Everything List
On Jan 19, 8:34 pm, Jason Resch <jasonre...@gmail.com> wrote:

>
> Some have argued that cars are alive.  They evolve, consume, move,
> reproduce and so on.  While they are dependent on humans for reproduction,
> we too depend on a a very specific environment to reproduce.  Much like
> viruses.
>

Yes, from an alien astronomer's perspective, cars would clearly seem
to be the conscious agents on this planet. Does that show the limits
of observation or the broadness of 'life'? I think that since our own
experience verifies that our interiority is not publicly accessible
except through indirect means, that tilts the scale sharply toward the
probability that observation is limited. We know that cars don't drive
by themselves, but we know that we can drive them when we want to.

Craig Weinberg

unread,
Jan 19, 2012, 9:24:51 PM1/19/12
to Everything List
On Jan 19, 8:51 pm, Jason Resch <jasonre...@gmail.com> wrote:
The Sun does set. It's only if you are not on the surface of the Earth
that the Sun would not set. It is helpful to deprogram ourselves from
occidental prejudice this way. Naive perception is as much a part of
the cosmos as a hypothetical universal voyeur's perspective. Such an
observer is useful for predictions, but it fails when taken literally
since such an observer is impossible in reality (is the Earth tiny or
enormous? instantaneous or eternal?)

It's not about being an authority on what machines are capable of,
it's about recognizing that humans have seen machines in a certain,
remarkably consistent way. My interpretation explores that common
intuition or stereotype - not to take it as a the truth, but as a
possible clue to the truth. It is a piece to the puzzle. If we do not
examine the real pieces to the puzzle, we cannot expect to solve it.

>
> Also, regarding your statement that yours is the majority or conventional
> opinion, I disagree.  The most widely held view among those versed in the
> subject is that the human body is mechanical (as opposed to governed by
> spirits or otherwise non-physical influences).

Mm, that's not a bad point. I wouldn't say mechanical, but yes most of
us in the developed world do think of our bodies in machine-like
metaphors but I would stop short of saying that we refer to ourselves
literally as machines. We still go to doctors and not mechanics.
Still, in delineating between a living creature and a 'machine' you
are not going to find many people who will honestly say that machines
are warm and friendly but dogs are robotic. It's hard even to play
Devil's advocate on this for me. Robotic has certain meanings,
'animal' means something very different. The two are not easily
confused. The connotations are there for a reason.

Craig

Bruno Marchal

unread,
Jan 20, 2012, 2:03:49 PM1/20/12
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
On 20 Jan 2012, at 02:34, Craig Weinberg wrote:

On Jan 19, 11:33 am, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
On 17 Jan 2012, at 21:20, Craig Weinberg wrote:

My point is that a Turing machine is not even truly universal,
let alone infinite.

A universal Turing machine is, by definition a machine, and machine
are by definition finite.

The infinite tape plays a role of possible extending environment, and
is not part of the universal machine, despite a widespread error
(perhaps due to a pedagogical error of Turing).

What machine makes the infinite tape?

Eventually the numbers themselves. It is simpler than the universal unitary rotation of the physicist, but if you want an infinite tape, you need to postulate at least once infinite thing. At the meta-level, or in the epistemology, or in the ontology. 





That error comfort me in talking about universal numbers, and defining
them by the relation

phi_u(<x, y>) = phi_x(y).    u is the universal machine, x is a
program and y is a data. "phi" refer to some other universal number
made implicit (in my context it is explicited by elementary arithmetic).


So a universal machine's universal number made implicit from data in a
program = a program's universal number from data. I don't understand
what it means.

A number (code, body) transforms itself into a function relatively to a universal number. 
u is a computer. Phi_u is the universal function computed by u. If you a program x and a data y to the computer u, it will simulate x on the input y, and will output phi_x(y). u does that for all program x, and so is a universal simulator.




It's an object oriented syntax that is limited to
particular kinds of functions, none of which include biological
awareness (which might make sense since biology is almost entirely
fluid-solution based.)

This worth than the notion of primitive matter. It is mystification of
primitive matter.

It's not an assertion of mysticism, it's just a plain old
generalization of ordinary observations. Programs don't get excited or
tired, they don't get sick and die, they don't catch a cold, etc. They
share none of the differences which make biology different from
physics.

I know that you believe in non-comp.




Do asteroids and planets exist "out there" even if no one perceives
them?

They don't need humans to perceive them to exist, but my view is that
gravity is evidence that all physical objects perceive each other. Not
in a biological sense of feeling, seeing, or knowing, but in the most
primitive forms of collision detection, accumulation, attraction to
mass, etc.

I can agree with that. This is in the spirit of Everett, which treat
observation as interaction. But there is no reason to associate
primitive qualia and private sensation from that. It lacks the
"retrieving memory" and self-reference.

Doesn't an asteroid maintain it's identity through it's trajectory?

I can agree with this.



Can't the traces of it's collisions be traced forensically by
examining it.

Yes.



Memory and self reference have to come from somewhere,
why not there?

Because self-reference needs a non trivial programming loop (whose existence is assured by computer science theorem like Kleene second recursion theorem). there are no evidence that such program is at play in an asteroid above your substitution level. Below your substitution level, the asteroids implement all computations, but this is relevant only to your observation, not to the asteroid.




Don't forget, without human consciousness going as a
comparison, we can't assume that the experience of raw matter is
ephemeral like ours is. It may not be memory which is the invention of
biology, but forgetting.

Profound remark, and I agree. But subjective memory is an attribute of a subject, and there are no evidence the asteroid is a subject, at least related in the sense of having private experiences. It lacks too much ability in self-representation, made possible by complex cooperation between cells in living systems, and programs in computers.






Machines have no feeling.

What I say three times is true.
What I say three times is true.
What I say three times is true.
(Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark).

I really don't find it a controversial statement. http://thesaurus.com/browse/mechanical

mechanical  [muh-kan-i-kuhl]
Part of Speech: adjective

Definition: done by machine; machinelike

Synonyms: automated, automatic, cold, cursory, *emotionless*, fixed,
habitual, impersonal, instinctive, involuntary, laborsaving,
*lifeless*, machine-driven, matter-of-fact, monotonous, perfunctory,
programmed, routine, *spiritless*, standardized, stereotyped,
unchanging, **unconscious, unfeeling, unthinking**, useful

Antonyms: by hand, **conscious, feeling**, manual

This is not evidence that machines are incapable of feeling but it
indicates broad commonsense support for my interpretation. Of course
popularity does not mean truth, but it does mean that I don't have to
accept accusations of some sort of fanciful eccentricity peculiar to
myself alone. My interpretation is conservative, yours is radically
experimental and completely unproven. How can you act as if it were
the other way around? It's dishonest.

Other have well commented this, as you have admitted. You should read the little book by Jacques Lafitte, in french, "la science des machines" which in the early 20th century describe machine as natural extension of life. "we" call that "artificial", but machines are as natural product of earth than apple and jumping spiders. Today's computers and net can be seen as neo or neoneocortex, and the math shows this can develop autonomously and we have only partial control on the process.
But we use the term machine in both its natural and man made sense. It basically means no magic, made precise with Church-Turing thesis, magic means precisely non-Turing emulable nor 1-person UD recoverable.





These kinds of careers rely on sensitivity
to human feeling and meaning. They require that you care about things
that humans care about. Caring cannot be programmed. That is the
opposite of caring, because programming requires no investment by the
programmed. There is no subject in a program, only an object
programmed to behave in a way that seems like it could be a subject in
some ways.

If you define the subject by the knower, believability by provability,
and if you accept the classical theory of knwoledge (the axioms:  Kp-
 >p, K(p->q)->(Kp->Kq)). Then it is a theorem that a subject exist for
machine, and indeed that machine have to be puzzled by the relation
between that subject and their body.

It sounds like I can name anything 'knower' and have that be a theorem
for subjectivity.

On the contrary. the definition I gave is quite specific, yet very general. It leads to the ideal theology of the self-referentially correct universal machine, including its physics (as it should by UDA, MGA).





Now, there is no reason to expect a *human* subject. Unless the
machine is a copy of a human at some genuine level. But most machines
are not a priori human machines.

Right. I don't have a problem with natural holarchies of the parts of
a material machine being subjects, just not likely very high quality
subjects.

Looks racist to me.



I just don't think the parts know each other unless they
naturally grew as parts of a whole.

Man made machines already do that, they grow as a part of the same whole we share with them.
Babies also look dumb, weak and so dependent.

Anyway, my point is that mechanism is a testable hypothesis. If mechanism is false, we will find this out more easily by reasoning from its assumption, than by criticizing it superficially at the start through racist prejudices.

Bruno


Evgenii Rudnyi

unread,
Jan 20, 2012, 2:42:01 PM1/20/12
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
On 20.01.2012 02:34 Jason Resch said the following:

A nice video. Thanks for a link. Yet, it is unclear to me what is
evolvable matter. In the lecture, the lector has several times said
"cells compete" and indeed he needs a competition to come to evolution.
However, in my view "a cells competes" is close to "a cell perceives"
and what this exactly means is for me a puzzle. Let us think about this
along the next series:

A rock � a ballcock in a toilet � an automatic door � a self-driving car
- a cell.

When competition comes into play? Does a self-driving car already
competes? Does a ballcock competes? What does it actually mean "a cells
competes"?

Evgenii

Craig Weinberg

unread,
Jan 20, 2012, 7:31:42 PM1/20/12
to Everything List
On Jan 20, 2:03 pm, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
> On 20 Jan 2012, at 02:34, Craig Weinberg wrote:

>
> > What machine makes the infinite tape?
>
> Eventually the numbers themselves. It is simpler than the universal
> unitary rotation of the physicist, but if you want an infinite tape,
> you need to postulate at least once infinite thing. At the meta-level,
> or in the epistemology, or in the ontology.

Why do numbers make machines or tapes? Do the want to? Do they have a
choice?

>
>
>
> >> That error comfort me in talking about universal numbers, and
> >> defining
> >> them by the relation
>
> >> phi_u(<x, y>) = phi_x(y).    u is the universal machine, x is a
> >> program and y is a data. "phi" refer to some other universal number
> >> made implicit (in my context it is explicited by elementary
> >> arithmetic).
>
> > So a universal machine's universal number made implicit from data in a
> > program = a program's universal number from data. I don't understand
> > what it means.
>
> A number (code, body) transforms itself into a function relatively to
> a universal number.
> u is a computer. Phi_u is the universal function computed by u. If you
> a program x and a data y to the computer u, it will simulate x on the
> input y, and will output phi_x(y). u does that for all program x, and
> so is a universal simulator.

It sounds like you are saying that what makes a machine universal is
if it computes any given program the same way as every other universal
machine. I don't have a problem with that. By that definition though,
it still appears to me that consciousness, being both
idiosyncratically unique to each individual and each moment and
sharable through common sense and experience is the opposite of a
universal and the opposite of a machine.

>
>
>
> >>> It's an object oriented syntax that is limited to
> >>> particular kinds of functions, none of which include biological
> >>> awareness (which might make sense since biology is almost entirely
> >>> fluid-solution based.)
>
> >> This worth than the notion of primitive matter. It is mystification
> >> of
> >> primitive matter.
>
> > It's not an assertion of mysticism, it's just a plain old
> > generalization of ordinary observations. Programs don't get excited or
> > tired, they don't get sick and die, they don't catch a cold, etc. They
> > share none of the differences which make biology different from
> > physics.
>
> I know that you believe in non-comp.
>

Is that supposed to invalidate the observations? Programs do get
tired? They do catch colds?

>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> >>>> Do asteroids and planets exist "out there" even if no one perceives
> >>>> them?
>
> >>> They don't need humans to perceive them to exist, but my view is
> >>> that
> >>> gravity is evidence that all physical objects perceive each other.
> >>> Not
> >>> in a biological sense of feeling, seeing, or knowing, but in the
> >>> most
> >>> primitive forms of collision detection, accumulation, attraction to
> >>> mass, etc.
>
> >> I can agree with that. This is in the spirit of Everett, which treat
> >> observation as interaction. But there is no reason to associate
> >> primitive qualia and private sensation from that. It lacks the
> >> "retrieving memory" and self-reference.
>
> > Doesn't an asteroid maintain it's identity through it's trajectory?
>
> I can agree with this.
>
> > Can't the traces of it's collisions be traced forensically by
> > examining it.
>
> Yes.
>
> > Memory and self reference have to come from somewhere,
> > why not there?
>
> Because self-reference needs a non trivial programming loop (whose
> existence is assured by computer science theorem like Kleene second
> recursion theorem).

I know that you believe in comp.

I propose another possibility. Imagine a universe where things can
become what they actually are without running a program. Running a
program supervenes not only on sequential recursion but on a whole
universe of logical consequence, ideas of representation, memory,
continuous temporal execution, etc. What if those things are aspects
of particular experience and not universal primitives? What if the
entire cosmos is a monad; a boundless and implicit firmament through
which objects and experiences are diffracted? The primordial dynamic
is not mechanism but stillness and stasis, like a spectrum to a prism.
Anchored in that stable unity, matter is the more direct
representation of this singularity (ie the many alchemical references
to 'stone'). The subjective correlate would be silent and dark void as
well as solar fusion and stellar profusion. This is realism. A prism
is not a machine, it is an object which reveals the essential
coherence of visual qualia. Machines are the second tier of
sensemaking. A dedication of what already exists to a specific
function which arises from the consequence of it's existence rather
than as the cause of it.

> there are no evidence that such program is at play
> in an asteroid above your substitution level. Below your substitution
> level, the asteroids implement all computations, but this is relevant
> only to your observation, not to the asteroid.

Assuming comp. I don't.

>
> > Don't forget, without human consciousness going as a
> > comparison, we can't assume that the experience of raw matter is
> > ephemeral like ours is. It may not be memory which is the invention of
> > biology, but forgetting.
>
> Profound remark, and I agree. But subjective memory is an attribute of
> a subject, and there are no evidence the asteroid is a subject, at
> least related in the sense of having private experiences. It lacks too
> much ability in self-representation, made possible by complex
> cooperation between cells in living systems, and programs in computers.

Heh. Now who is discriminating against inanimate objects?

>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> >>> Machines have no feeling.
>
> >> What I say three times is true.
> >> What I say three times is true.
> >> What I say three times is true.
> >> (Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark).
>
> > I really don't find it a controversial statement.http://thesaurus.com/browse/mechanical
>
> > mechanical  [muh-kan-i-kuhl]
> > Part of Speech:    adjective
>
> > Definition:        done by machine; machinelike
>
> > Synonyms:  automated, automatic, cold, cursory, *emotionless*, fixed,
> > habitual, impersonal, instinctive, involuntary, laborsaving,
> > *lifeless*, machine-driven, matter-of-fact, monotonous, perfunctory,
> > programmed, routine, *spiritless*, standardized, stereotyped,
> > unchanging, **unconscious, unfeeling, unthinking**, useful
>
> > Antonyms:  by hand, **conscious, feeling**, manual
>
> > This is not evidence that machines are incapable of feeling but it
> > indicates broad commonsense support for my interpretation. Of course
> > popularity does not mean truth, but it does mean that I don't have to
> > accept accusations of some sort of fanciful eccentricity peculiar to
> > myself alone. My interpretation is conservative, yours is radically
> > experimental and completely unproven. How can you act as if it were
> > the other way around? It's dishonest.
>
> Other have well commented this, as you have admitted. You should read
> the little book by Jacques Lafitte, in french, "la science des
> machines" which in the early 20th century describe machine as natural
> extension of life. "we" call that "artificial", but machines are as
> natural product of earth than apple and jumping spiders.

Oh I actually agree with that, and have for a long time. Life emerged
from inorganic matter. I think that self replicating crystals began to
add organic molecules to their repertoire for greater flexibility and
convenience. Biology is geological technology. We have come full
circle now and are impregnating inorganic crystals with the honey of
our anthropological hive - the skimmed cream of our evolutionary
organic journey is going to return toward the inorganic from which it
came but not backward to trivial intelligence, forward to post-organic
synthesis. We can't lose the organic matter, we will always have to
live in it or we will not be us. The challenge is to integrate and
hybridize without losing sight of who we are and why we care about
living in the first place.

> Today's
> computers and net can be seen as neo or neoneocortex, and the math
> shows this can develop autonomously and we have only partial control
> on the process.
> But we use the term machine in both its natural and man made sense. It
> basically means no magic, made precise with Church-Turing thesis,
> magic means precisely non-Turing emulable nor 1-person UD recoverable.

I understand completely. You are channeling my exact worldview circa
1990. Since then I have explored some other ideas which make more
sense to me, and which I think will eventually make more sense to
others. We are extending a noosphere or a technocortex, yes, but like
the brain, we do not discard our limbic system and brain stem. We
might like to, but we can't or there will be no 'we' left.

>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> >>> These kinds of careers rely on sensitivity
> >>> to human feeling and meaning. They require that you care about
> >>> things
> >>> that humans care about. Caring cannot be programmed. That is the
> >>> opposite of caring, because programming requires no investment by
> >>> the
> >>> programmed. There is no subject in a program, only an object
> >>> programmed to behave in a way that seems like it could be a
> >>> subject in
> >>> some ways.
>
> >> If you define the subject by the knower, believability by
> >> provability,
> >> and if you accept the classical theory of knwoledge (the axioms:  Kp-
> >>  >p, K(p->q)->(Kp->Kq)). Then it is a theorem that a subject exist
> >> for
> >> machine, and indeed that machine have to be puzzled by the relation
> >> between that subject and their body.
>
> > It sounds like I can name anything 'knower' and have that be a theorem
> > for subjectivity.
>
> On the contrary. the definition I gave is quite specific, yet very
> general. It leads to the ideal theology of the self-referentially
> correct universal machine, including its physics (as it should by UDA,
> MGA).

It still sounds like it means that knowers must be subjects since
subjects are knowers.

>
>
>
> >> Now, there is no reason to expect a *human* subject. Unless the
> >> machine is a copy of a human at some genuine level. But most machines
> >> are not a priori human machines.
>
> > Right. I don't have a problem with natural holarchies of the parts of
> > a material machine being subjects, just not likely very high quality
> > subjects.
>
> Looks racist to me.

Not racism, taxonomy. Kingdom, phylum, class, order... you have heard
of this, yes?

>
> > I just don't think the parts know each other unless they
> > naturally grew as parts of a whole.
>
> Man made machines already do that, they grow as a part of the same
> whole we share with them.
> Babies also look dumb, weak and so dependent.

What is an example of a man made machine whose parts naturally grow as
part of the same whole?

> Anyway, my point is that mechanism is a testable hypothesis. If
> mechanism is false, we will find this out more easily by reasoning
> from its assumption, than by criticizing it superficially at the start
> through racist prejudices.

If you say so. Who are we waiting on to complete the test?

Craig

Bruno Marchal

unread,
Jan 21, 2012, 4:38:07 AM1/21/12
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
On 21 Jan 2012, at 01:31, Craig Weinberg wrote:

On Jan 20, 2:03 pm, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
On 20 Jan 2012, at 02:34, Craig Weinberg wrote:


What machine makes the infinite tape?

Eventually the numbers themselves. It is simpler than the universal
unitary rotation of the physicist, but if you want an infinite tape,
you need to postulate at least once infinite thing. At the meta-level,
or in the epistemology, or in the ontology.

Why do numbers make machines or tapes? Do the want to? Do they have a
choice?

As much choice and free will than you have. They too cannot predicts themselves and can be confronted to making decision with partial information.







That error comfort me in talking about universal numbers, and
defining
them by the relation

phi_u(<x, y>) = phi_x(y).    u is the universal machine, x is a
program and y is a data. "phi" refer to some other universal number
made implicit (in my context it is explicited by elementary
arithmetic).

So a universal machine's universal number made implicit from data in a
program = a program's universal number from data. I don't understand
what it means.

A number (code, body) transforms itself into a function relatively to
a universal number.
u is a computer. Phi_u is the universal function computed by u. If you
a program x and a data y to the computer u, it will simulate x on the
input y, and will output phi_x(y). u does that for all program x, and
so is a universal simulator.

It sounds like you are saying that what makes a machine universal is
if it computes any given program the same way as every other universal
machine. I don't have a problem with that. By that definition though,
it still appears to me that consciousness, being both
idiosyncratically unique to each individual and each moment and
sharable through common sense and experience is the opposite of a
universal and the opposite of a machine.

Each universal machine is a particular machine. Even the virgin, non programmed one.
You are a universal machine, at least. (Even if you have a non machine component).






It's an object oriented syntax that is limited to
particular kinds of functions, none of which include biological
awareness (which might make sense since biology is almost entirely
fluid-solution based.)

This worth than the notion of primitive matter. It is mystification
of
primitive matter.

It's not an assertion of mysticism, it's just a plain old
generalization of ordinary observations. Programs don't get excited or
tired, they don't get sick and die, they don't catch a cold, etc. They
share none of the differences which make biology different from
physics.

I know that you believe in non-comp.


Is that supposed to invalidate the observations? Programs do get
tired? They do catch colds?

With comp, that is obvious. 
Then you are wrong. I am agnostic on this. As I should be: no correct machine believes in comp (nor in non-comp). We just cannot know. That is why I insist that we need some act of faith to say "yes" to the doctor. That is why I insist that it is a theology, and that we are forced to accept that people thinks differently.




I propose another possibility. Imagine a universe where things can
become what they actually are without running a program. Running a
program supervenes not only on sequential recursion but on a whole
universe of logical consequence, ideas of representation, memory,
continuous temporal execution, etc. What if those things are aspects
of particular experience and not universal primitives?

I don't know what is a universe. That's part of what I want an explanation for, that is in term of simple things that I can understand, like elementary arithmetic or combinatorics.




What if the
entire cosmos is a monad; a boundless and implicit firmament through
which objects and experiences are diffracted? The primordial dynamic
is not mechanism but stillness and stasis, like a spectrum to a prism.

All that is Turing emulable, and doesn't add to the understanding.




Anchored in that stable unity, matter is the more direct
representation of this singularity (ie the many alchemical references
to 'stone').

But what is matter?



The subjective correlate would be silent and dark void as
well as solar fusion and stellar profusion. This is realism.

This is imagination.




A prism
is not a machine, it is an object which reveals the essential
coherence of visual qualia. Machines are the second tier of
sensemaking. A dedication of what already exists to a specific
function which arises from the consequence of it's existence rather
than as the cause of it.

Locally it looks like that. But I want an explanation of where such things come from.
Your "theory" takes too much as granted.





there are no evidence that such program is at play
in an asteroid above your substitution level. Below your substitution
level, the asteroids implement all computations, but this is relevant
only to your observation, not to the asteroid.

Assuming comp. I don't.


Don't forget, without human consciousness going as a
comparison, we can't assume that the experience of raw matter is
ephemeral like ours is. It may not be memory which is the invention of
biology, but forgetting.

Profound remark, and I agree. But subjective memory is an attribute of
a subject, and there are no evidence the asteroid is a subject, at
least related in the sense of having private experiences. It lacks too
much ability in self-representation, made possible by complex
cooperation between cells in living systems, and programs in computers.

Heh. Now who is discriminating against inanimate objects?

Because they are inanimate, and the evidence that they are dreaming is weak and non refutable. But mainly because they don't exist by themselves. Matter is a consciousness creation, or view from inside arithmetic. It is an epistemological precise notion. That is what I like in the comp hyp: it explains the origin of the beliefs, by "numbers" in physical things, without the need to assume them.
That's comp. But the notion of UD-recoverable illusion is new, I think. That's the key notion, given that both consciousness and matter are not Turing emulable, but still Turing recoverable though the unavoidable (by incompleteness) number's epistemology.


Since then I have explored some other ideas which make more
sense to me, and which I think will eventually make more sense to
others. We are extending a noosphere or a technocortex, yes, but like
the brain, we do not discard our limbic system and brain stem. We
might like to, but we can't or there will be no 'we' left.

I can agree. But again, that's not an argument for saying that comp is false. As we said before, you need to add non Turing emulable things locally in the brain to get that. Your theory makes matter and mind more hard to make intelligible a priori.



It sounds like I can name anything 'knower' and have that be a theorem
for subjectivity.

On the contrary. the definition I gave is quite specific, yet very
general. It leads to the ideal theology of the self-referentially
correct universal machine, including its physics (as it should by UDA,
MGA).

It still sounds like it means that knowers must be subjects since
subjects are knowers.

A knower is anything satisfying the axioms of knowledge logic (Kp -> p, K(p->q) -> (Kp -> Kq), and, for rich subject, also Kp -> KKp: they know p implies that they know that they know p).
With Kp = Bp & p, all enough rich machine are knower.







Now, there is no reason to expect a *human* subject. Unless the
machine is a copy of a human at some genuine level. But most machines
are not a priori human machines.

Right. I don't have a problem with natural holarchies of the parts of
a material machine being subjects, just not likely very high quality
subjects.

Looks racist to me.

Not racism, taxonomy. Kingdom, phylum, class, order... you have heard
of this, yes?

I was troubled (say) by the expression "not likely very high quality subjects"). Like the Sapinsh considering Indians humans, but lesser humans.





I just don't think the parts know each other unless they
naturally grew as parts of a whole.

Man made machines already do that, they grow as a part of the same
whole we share with them.
Babies also look dumb, weak and so dependent.

What is an example of a man made machine whose parts naturally grow as
part of the same whole?

Buildings, cars, industries, cities, computers, ... well, basically all of them.



Anyway, my point is that mechanism is a testable hypothesis. If
mechanism is false, we will find this out more easily by reasoning
from its assumption, than by criticizing it superficially at the start
through racist prejudices.

If you say so. Who are we waiting on to complete the test?

Test have been already done, and QM confirms comp up to now.

Bruno


Craig Weinberg

unread,
Jan 21, 2012, 9:48:50 AM1/21/12
to Everything List
On Jan 21, 4:38 am, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
> On 21 Jan 2012, at 01:31, Craig Weinberg wrote:
>
> >>> What machine makes the infinite tape?
>
> >> Eventually the numbers themselves. It is simpler than the universal
> >> unitary rotation of the physicist, but if you want an infinite tape,
> >> you need to postulate at least once infinite thing. At the meta-
> >> level,
> >> or in the epistemology, or in the ontology.
>
> > Why do numbers make machines or tapes? Do the want to? Do they have a
> > choice?
>
> As much choice and free will than you have. They too cannot predicts
> themselves and can be confronted to making decision with partial
> information.

Where do they get this capacity? Why do we never see it manifested in
our ordinary use of numbers? Generally the point of counting is to
establish a deterministic quantitative relation.. that's sort of what
counting is? If the numbers themselves made choices, then why should
we consider counting a reliable epistemology?
Me the person, or me the biography? Is my life a machine within which
I exist as another machine or are we both the same machine?

>
>
>
> >>>>> It's an object oriented syntax that is limited to
> >>>>> particular kinds of functions, none of which include biological
> >>>>> awareness (which might make sense since biology is almost entirely
> >>>>> fluid-solution based.)
>
> >>>> This worth than the notion of primitive matter. It is mystification
> >>>> of
> >>>> primitive matter.
>
> >>> It's not an assertion of mysticism, it's just a plain old
> >>> generalization of ordinary observations. Programs don't get
> >>> excited or
> >>> tired, they don't get sick and die, they don't catch a cold, etc.
> >>> They
> >>> share none of the differences which make biology different from
> >>> physics.
>
> >> I know that you believe in non-comp.
>
> > Is that supposed to invalidate the observations? Programs do get
> > tired? They do catch colds?
>
> With comp, that is obvious.

At what point do programs develop the capacity to get tired? Is it a
matter of complexity or degree of self-reference?
The way I've found to get beyond that is through sense. Sense bridges
the gap and connects the dots. It says to us, you cannot know, but
yet, it seems like you do, and that has to be good enough. Does it
seem like the universe is mechanistic and arithmetic? On the outside,
yes. Everything outside of myself seems like it could be quantified as
a single story with countless discrete parts. Inside myself seems like
there are many stories and meanings, all shifting and catching the
light in different ways at different times - a constant flux of
significance which re-contextualizes many stories and meanings
simultaneously.

>
>
>
> > I propose another possibility. Imagine a universe where things can
> > become what they actually are without running a program. Running a
> > program supervenes not only on sequential recursion but on a whole
> > universe of logical consequence, ideas of representation, memory,
> > continuous temporal execution, etc. What if those things are aspects
> > of particular experience and not universal primitives?
>
> I don't know what is a universe. That's part of what I want an
> explanation for, that is in term of simple things that I can
> understand, like elementary arithmetic or combinatorics.

What is it you mean when you talk of universal machines then? What are
they universal to? But you are sidetracking my point:

**Things may not need to run a program to be what they already are.**

*It is programs which need things to become what they are not.*

This bit of common (universal) sense is what your view seems to be
missing or hiding or denying. The result is a perfectly logical theory
of an anti-cosmos in which intangible programs simulate thingness to
achieve irrelevant tangibility as a meaningless side effect. If you
can just turn it inside out, you will see that we participate in a
real universe directly, and that ideas cannot embody things on their
own. Codes and mechanisms are what real objects do to each other, but
objects are not codes themselves. They are a chunks of the singularity
with masses and densities.

>
> > What if the
> > entire cosmos is a monad; a boundless and implicit firmament through
> > which objects and experiences are diffracted? The primordial dynamic
> > is not mechanism but stillness and stasis, like a spectrum to a prism.
>
> All that is Turing emulable, and doesn't add to the understanding.

A boundless and implicit firmament is Turing emulable?

>
> > Anchored in that stable unity, matter is the more direct
> > representation of this singularity (ie the many alchemical references
> > to 'stone').
>
> But what is matter?

The discrete diffractions of the monad. Carved out of the singularity
using the knife of interior figurative diffraction (feeling/being,
sequence, significance, time) which is expressed as literal
diffraction on the exterior (indirect detection, objects, space,
relativity, topology)

>
> > The subjective correlate would be silent and dark void as
> > well as solar fusion and stellar profusion. This is realism.
>
> This is imagination.

Imagination is part of realism. It is our experience, but it is
impossible to emulate mechanically.

>
> > A prism
> > is not a machine, it is an object which reveals the essential
> > coherence of visual qualia. Machines are the second tier of
> > sensemaking. A dedication of what already exists to a specific
> > function which arises from the consequence of it's existence rather
> > than as the cause of it.
>
> Locally it looks like that. But I want an explanation of where such
> things come from.
> Your "theory" takes too much as granted.

I want an explanation of where non-locally is and how it comes to
influence us locally.
But it doesn't explain beliefs themselves. Which are much more likely
to be a figment of consciousness than an asteroid. What believes an
asteroid into existence? How do we happen to subscribe to all of these
beliefs?
The comp that you claim to be agnostic about?

> But the notion of UD-recoverable illusion is new, I
> think. That's the key notion, given that both consciousness and matter
> are not Turing emulable, but still Turing recoverable though the
> unavoidable (by incompleteness) number's epistemology.

Where did the UD come from? Does it run on itself? What is the
hardware?

>
> > Since then I have explored some other ideas which make more
> > sense to me, and which I think will eventually make more sense to
> > others. We are extending a noosphere or a technocortex, yes, but like
> > the brain, we do not discard our limbic system and brain stem. We
> > might like to, but we can't or there will be no 'we' left.
>
> I can agree. But again, that's not an argument for saying that comp is
> false. As we said before, you need to add non Turing emulable things
> locally in the brain to get that. Your theory makes matter and mind
> more hard to make intelligible a priori.

If they were intelligible a priori, there would be no point in going
through the formality of experiencing them. This is why the universe
exists. To do what theory cannot.

>
>
>
> >>> It sounds like I can name anything 'knower' and have that be a
> >>> theorem
> >>> for subjectivity.
>
> >> On the contrary. the definition I gave is quite specific, yet very
> >> general. It leads to the ideal theology of the self-referentially
> >> correct universal machine, including its physics (as it should by
> >> UDA,
> >> MGA).
>
> > It still sounds like it means that knowers must be subjects since
> > subjects are knowers.
>
> A knower is anything satisfying the axioms of knowledge logic (Kp ->
> p, K(p->q) -> (Kp -> Kq), and, for rich subject, also Kp -> KKp: they
> know p implies that they know that they know p).
> With Kp = Bp & p, all enough rich machine are knower.

Knowing is contingent upon biochemistry.

"When I'm rushing on my run. And I feel just like Jesus' son. And I
guess that I just don't know. And I guess that I just don't know." -
Heroin, Velvet Underground

>
>
>
> >>>> Now, there is no reason to expect a *human* subject. Unless the
> >>>> machine is a copy of a human at some genuine level. But most
> >>>> machines
> >>>> are not a priori human machines.
>
> >>> Right. I don't have a problem with natural holarchies of the parts
> >>> of
> >>> a material machine being subjects, just not likely very high quality
> >>> subjects.
>
> >> Looks racist to me.
>
> > Not racism, taxonomy. Kingdom, phylum, class, order... you have heard
> > of this, yes?
>
> I was troubled (say) by the expression "not likely very high quality
> subjects"). Like the Sapinsh considering Indians humans, but lesser
> humans.

I understand, but I'm not using it in pejorative sense, I'm making a
material distinction. In the comp theology it seems though that
machine selfhood is not so much elevated to human levels, but that all
subjectivity is flattened to machine levels. It makes us all what the
Spanish considered the Indians to be - even less...had the Spanish had
Kp = Bp & p, they would not have bothered torturing them to save their
souls, they would have just reformatted the continent completely with
their guns, germs, and steel program.

>
>
>
> >>> I just don't think the parts know each other unless they
> >>> naturally grew as parts of a whole.
>
> >> Man made machines already do that, they grow as a part of the same
> >> whole we share with them.
> >> Babies also look dumb, weak and so dependent.
>
> > What is an example of a man made machine whose parts naturally grow as
> > part of the same whole?
>
> Buildings, cars, industries, cities, computers, ... well, basically
> all of them.

None of those things grow out of a whole. They are all assembled from
disparate parts manufactured in different places all over the world.
Cars and computers are not born, they are put together.

>
>
>
> >> Anyway, my point is that mechanism is a testable hypothesis. If
> >> mechanism is false, we will find this out more easily by reasoning
> >> from its assumption, than by criticizing it superficially at the
> >> start
> >> through racist prejudices.
>
> > If you say so. Who are we waiting on to complete the test?
>
> Test have been already done, and QM confirms comp up to now.

QM is the black and white television that 'confirms' color is a
hallucination. Comp is literally a non-sense view of a non-local non-
universe which is based on the fantasy that recursive enumeration can
embody itself in objectively real patterns. As the Bohr quote goes,
the opposite of a great truth is also true, so comp will prove to be
quite useful, and is true in an inside out way. It may be the only way
to predict and control ourselves and the universe, but if we don't
understand that the image it presents of reality is an inverted truth,
we will never comprehend what the universe actually is.

Craig

Bruno Marchal

unread,
Jan 21, 2012, 4:32:53 PM1/21/12
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
Craig,

I assume comp all along.

On 21 Jan 2012, at 15:48, Craig Weinberg wrote:

On Jan 21, 4:38 am, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
On 21 Jan 2012, at 01:31, Craig Weinberg wrote:



Why do numbers make machines or tapes? Do the want to? Do they have a
choice?

As much choice and free will than you have. They too cannot predicts
themselves and can be confronted to making decision with partial
information.

Where do they get this capacity?

From the laws of addition and multiplication, which makes arithmetic already Turing Universal.


Why do we never see it manifested in
our ordinary use of numbers?

With the computer and AI enterprise, you can see the embryonic development of this.
You can also interpret, like Jon Clark did, the DNA as number, coded in the chemistry of carbon, so that we can see it all around.
We don't see it in the usual use of little numbers, because it is not there. The relations are either too poor, or not exploited enough.

Anyway, you are not convincing by pointing on everyday example, when talking to a theoretician. 


Generally the point of counting is to
establish a deterministic quantitative relation.. that's sort of what
counting is? If the numbers themselves made choices, then why should
we consider counting a reliable epistemology?

Counting use only the succession laws. The universal mess comes from the mixture of addition and multiplication, as the prime numbers already illustrates by their logarithmic "random" distribution.
Your question is a bit like "if criminals are made of chemical reactions, should we continue to rely on chemistry?".




Each universal machine is a particular machine. Even the virgin, non
programmed one.
You are a universal machine, at least. (Even if you have a non machine
component).

Me the person, or me the biography?

The person is not really a number. But in all its histories/computations it acts as a relative numbers, through its body described above his substitution level. 



Is my life a machine within which
I exist as another machine or are we both the same machine?

Your life is a sequence of machines states, and typically, it is self-changing machine. To be more precise would need boring and distracting vocabulary issue, the understanding of UDA, etc.
Your life is not a machine. I have translated "to be a machine" by the more operational "to accept a digital brain transplant" to study the consequences without defining completely what person and life are (which can hardly be done).

Keep in mind that I do not defend mechanism. I just explain that IF mechanism is true, then Plato/Plotinus are correct, and Aristotle primitive matter, and physicalism are not correct.




I know that you believe in non-comp.

Is that supposed to invalidate the observations? Programs do get
tired? They do catch colds?

With comp, that is obvious.

At what point do programs develop the capacity to get tired? Is it a
matter of complexity or degree of self-reference?

Yes, like some robot can feel themselves wet, in the sense of finding a shelter if it rains. With some amount of self-reference they can develop qualia, and rememorable qualia, which can help to speed the recollection. In that case they can discover that they cannot prove that they have *genuine* qualia. This happens with not so much self-referential abilities.





I know that you believe in comp.

Then you are wrong. I am agnostic on this. As I should be: no correct
machine believes in comp (nor in non-comp). We just cannot know. That
is why I insist that we need some act of faith to say "yes" to the
doctor. That is why I insist that it is a theology, and that we are
forced to accept that people thinks differently.

The way I've found to get beyond that is through sense. Sense bridges
the gap and connects the dots. It says to us, you cannot know, but
yet, it seems like you do, and that has to be good enough. Does it
seem like the universe is mechanistic and arithmetic?

By UDA, reality is not WYSIWYG. What we see is a reflect of something bigger, like arithmetical truth. This contains the many non arithmetical properties leading to person, consciousness, matter, etc.



On the outside,
yes. Everything outside of myself seems like it could be quantified as
a single story with countless discrete parts. Inside myself seems like
there are many stories and meanings, all shifting and catching the
light in different ways at different times - a constant flux of
significance which re-contextualizes many stories and meanings
simultaneously.

Well said.







I propose another possibility. Imagine a universe where things can
become what they actually are without running a program. Running a
program supervenes not only on sequential recursion but on a whole
universe of logical consequence, ideas of representation, memory,
continuous temporal execution, etc. What if those things are aspects
of particular experience and not universal primitives?

I don't know what is a universe. That's part of what I want an
explanation for, that is in term of simple things that I can
understand, like elementary arithmetic or combinatorics.

What is it you mean when you talk of universal machines then? What are
they universal to?

A universal machine is just a machine which can simulate any other machine through their finite description and their inputs. It a mathematical concept, but nature can emulate (simulate exactly) those machines. This happened recurrently on this planet, with the development of the genome, brain cells, thought, mind, language, and now computer.



But you are sidetracking my point:

**Things may not need to run a program to be what they already are.**

I agree. We don't need to implement arithmetic for it being true, for example. 



*It is programs which need things to become what they are not.*

But they usually belong to complex histories/computations which provide them with many things. Indeed, a priori, too much things (the white rabbit problems).






This bit of common (universal) sense is what your view seems to be
missing or hiding or denying. The result is a perfectly logical theory
of an anti-cosmos in which intangible programs simulate thingness to
achieve irrelevant tangibility as a meaningless side effect. If you
can just turn it inside out, you will see that we participate in a
real universe directly,

The old Chinese-Indian-Greek dream argument makes me already doubting we can see a real universe directly. We see what our brains succeed to filter and represent.



and that ideas cannot embody things on their
own.

That's true, but ideas can embody the idea that things can own bodies.



Codes and mechanisms are what real objects do to each other, but
objects are not codes themselves. They are a chunks of the singularity
with masses and densities.

I don't know that. 





What if the
entire cosmos is a monad; a boundless and implicit firmament through
which objects and experiences are diffracted? The primordial dynamic
is not mechanism but stillness and stasis, like a spectrum to a prism.

All that is Turing emulable, and doesn't add to the understanding.

A boundless and implicit firmament is Turing emulable?

Actually-infinite complex cellular automata might not been Turing emulable, but they are still Turing recoverable in case such infinite firmament is necessary for consciousness. So let us reason from comp and see if an actual infinite firmament is necessary.
If you postulate it exists in some primitive way, you just postulate an infinitely complex assumption.





Anchored in that stable unity, matter is the more direct
representation of this singularity (ie the many alchemical references
to 'stone').

But what is matter?

The discrete diffractions of the monad.

Hmm... Why not. But this should be made clear in some context, with precise definition of discrete (you will need Church thesis, or topology), monad, and what do you mean by monad diffraction.
The expression might have a sense in the comp theory. In my early writings I do describe self-observation, under the substitution level, as a processes of self-diffraction, putting you into infinities of computational continuations.  Matter is, well not generated, but recover, through that process. But this is just a way to describe the first person indeterminacy, and terms like diffraction have physical (optical) precise meaning, so I keep that for the pause café.


Carved out of the singularity
using the knife of interior figurative diffraction (feeling/being,
sequence, significance, time) which is expressed as literal
diffraction on the exterior (indirect detection, objects, space,
relativity, topology)

Too much sense here. Sorry. You have to find a way to make your statement more precise if you want to convince a scientist.



The subjective correlate would be silent and dark void as
well as solar fusion and stellar profusion. This is realism.

This is imagination.

Imagination is part of realism.

At a different level. If you forget this you blur fiction and the reality we are searching. (Not the reality we would have found).


It is our experience, but it is
impossible to emulate mechanically.

This looks like non-comp, but it can be derived from comp. Experience, consciousness are NOT Turing emulable. Only local bodies, through which experience can be manifested relatively to experience and bodies of other (universal or not) machines.

The picture we get is counter-intuitive. It is the price of comp, but it is natural for Platonists, and comp leads to Platonism, even to some Neoplatonism à-la Plotinus.




A prism
is not a machine, it is an object which reveals the essential
coherence of visual qualia. Machines are the second tier of
sensemaking. A dedication of what already exists to a specific
function which arises from the consequence of it's existence rather
than as the cause of it.

Locally it looks like that. But I want an explanation of where such
things come from.
Your "theory" takes too much as granted.

I want an explanation of where non-locally is and how it comes to
influence us locally.

Non locality is easy. It comes from the fact that each observer's body is repeated in an infinity of computational histories, so that its experiences of experiment outputs is determined on infinities of relative locations.

Locality is assumed through comp at the meta-level, and more difficult to recover at the physical level. Comp might be too much quantum. It might have a too big first person indeterminacy, a too big non locality, etc. but this remains to be shown, and the logic of self-references, including the modal nuances we inherit from incompleteness, suggests that the locality comes from the semantics of those logics, as UDA somehow makes obligatory.




Heh. Now who is discriminating against inanimate objects?

Because they are inanimate, and the evidence that they are dreaming is
weak and non refutable. But mainly because they don't exist by
themselves. Matter is a consciousness creation, or view from inside
arithmetic. It is an epistemological precise notion. That is what I
like in the comp hyp: it explains the origin of the beliefs, by
"numbers" in physical things, without the need to assume them.

But it doesn't explain beliefs themselves.

Yes, it does. the beliefs are whatever number arithmetical predicate B(x) verifying the axioms of beliefs, of the machine that we want interview. Precisely they belief in the axiom of Robinson Arithmetic (the theory of everything), they believe in the induction axioms, they might have supplementary local recursively enumerable set of beliefs, and their beliefs are close for the modus ponens rule. That is, if they believe A -> B, then if they believe A they will, soon or later, believe B. Thanks to the induction axioms, they can be shown to be Löbian, and they get the octalist view of the arithmetical reality (with God, Intellect, Soul, intelligible matter, and sensible matter, to use the Plotinian vocabulary, all this splitted into true and provable by the incompleteness phenomenon. The belief is rather well explained, it seems to me, by the Intellect hypostases (the one I refer often by Bp, and which is Gödel provability predicate). It is the study of the introspection of the ideally self-referentially correct machine. 

Those machines are clever. They can already refute Penrose-Lucas use of Gödel's theorem against mechanism.



Which [beliefs] are much more likely

to be a figment of consciousness than an asteroid.

Yes.



What believes an
asteroid into existence? How do we happen to subscribe to all of these
beliefs?

Because we share deep computations, linear at the core bottom. 
I guess something like this  from both empiric extrapolations, and from the universal machine introspection.



I understand completely. You are channeling my exact worldview circa
1990.

That's comp.

The comp that you claim to be agnostic about?

Yes. that is the one. It is my favorite working hypothesis in the field of theology, or if you prefer, search of theories of everything. the unification of all forces, from gravitation to love. 
First result: assuming comp, the numbers (and their two laws) are enough for the ontology, the rest are gluing dreams.



But the notion of UD-recoverable illusion is new, I
think. That's the key notion, given that both consciousness and matter
are not Turing emulable, but still Turing recoverable though the
unavoidable (by incompleteness) number's epistemology.

Where did the UD come from? Does it run on itself? What is the
hardware?


It depends which UD you are talking about. I have implemented a UD in 1991 and let it run for one week. The hardware was first an Explorer computer, then an Apple Macintosh. The software was Allegro Common LISP.

But remember that I assume the numbers and their two laws. From that alone I can prove the existence of infinitely many UDs in arithmetic. Even the UD I ran is the results of infinitely many UDs operating in arithmetic below our common substitution level. Too bad my Apple machine couldn't exploit that, but I can wait for a quantum Apple.







Since then I have explored some other ideas which make more
sense to me, and which I think will eventually make more sense to
others. We are extending a noosphere or a technocortex, yes, but like
the brain, we do not discard our limbic system and brain stem. We
might like to, but we can't or there will be no 'we' left.

I can agree. But again, that's not an argument for saying that comp is
false. As we said before, you need to add non Turing emulable things
locally in the brain to get that. Your theory makes matter and mind
more hard to make intelligible a priori.

If they were intelligible a priori,

I did not say that. It is the theoretical tools used to explore the territory which have to be intelligible. The theory must be simpler than the reality. 
If not, you can look at Hubble pictures and just say: 'that's my theory of everything'. 



there would be no point in going
through the formality of experiencing them.

You are right. the "a priori" was for "your theory makes ...", not for "intelligible". Sorry for my unclear sentence. We agree here.


This is why the universe
exists.

Oops, I missed something.




To do what theory cannot.

OK. Nice. I see the point. That's how I justify arithmetical truth. Since Gödel, I have motivation to describe reality by what is beyond all effective theories. It is The ONE, better know by his nickname God, but which typically (in machine's theology) has no name, no description. It is, roughly speaking Plato's Truth. (and even Pythagorus' one, rehabilitated by Turing Church thesis, or Post law).







It sounds like I can name anything 'knower' and have that be a
theorem
for subjectivity.

On the contrary. the definition I gave is quite specific, yet very
general. It leads to the ideal theology of the self-referentially
correct universal machine, including its physics (as it should by
UDA,
MGA).

It still sounds like it means that knowers must be subjects since
subjects are knowers.

A knower is anything satisfying the axioms of knowledge logic (Kp ->
p, K(p->q) -> (Kp -> Kq), and, for rich subject, also Kp -> KKp: they
know p implies that they know that they know p).
With Kp = Bp & p, all enough rich machine are knower.

Knowing is contingent upon biochemistry.

I disagree. Biochemistry is just a local implementation. 
Token knower are contingent on number relations, but knowing itself is the fate of all universal numbers, by logical necessity.






"When I'm rushing on my run. And I feel just like Jesus' son. And I
guess that I just don't know. And I guess that I just don't know." -
Heroin, Velvet Underground


:)




Not racism, taxonomy. Kingdom, phylum, class, order... you have heard
of this, yes?

I was troubled (say) by the expression "not likely very high quality
subjects"). Like the Sapinsh considering Indians humans, but lesser
humans.

I understand, but I'm not using it in pejorative sense, I'm making a
material distinction. In the comp theology it seems though that
machine selfhood is not so much elevated to human levels, but that all
subjectivity is flattened to machine levels.

It is not flattened. You make an error often attributed to Descartes, but I think Descartes did not make it. La Mettrie and the Marquis de Sade did it. You confuse both a machine and a human with its body, and its body with its apparent constitution. At least you (try to) recover the person, by adding "sense" (how, I still don't see). But neither physicalism, nor mechanism makes the flattening, once you take into account the informational layering of levels. That is why physicalism + mechanism leads to an incorrect nihilist reduction: like "I am just some impermanent piece of mud" (La Mettrie), or (truth = Power, Sade). But Physicalism can admit non reductive interpretation, and then mechanism is directly contradictory with physicalism.
Comp entails a flattening of the ontological, but justifies the complex inside divine epistemological matrix.


It makes us all what the
Spanish considered the Indians to be - even less...had the Spanish had
Kp = Bp & p, they would not have bothered torturing them to save their
souls, they would have just reformatted the continent completely with
their guns, germs, and steel program.

Mechanism, well understood, can only make you more humble and cautious toward any living one, even jumping spiders, and even, in some different sense, toward pebbles and inanimate object. And then toward the unknown.







I just don't think the parts know each other unless they
naturally grew as parts of a whole.

Man made machines already do that, they grow as a part of the same
whole we share with them.
Babies also look dumb, weak and so dependent.

What is an example of a man made machine whose parts naturally grow as
part of the same whole?

Buildings, cars, industries, cities, computers, ... well, basically
all of them.

None of those things grow out of a whole. They are all assembled from
disparate parts manufactured in different places all over the world.
Cars and computers are not born, they are put together.

Same for us, at some level. That's what ribosomes and enzymes do all the time.
The modality is different because the history is different.  Cars are 100 years old, plants and animals are *much* older, and have a more complex and deep history, involving selfs more early.

Here I use the term "self" in the computer science sense of "if Dx gives F(xx), then DD gives F(DD)". 
Self-reproduction happens when a duplicator meets itself, and self-reference can be made by the same diagonalization procedure at a symbolical level. 

Sense comes from an attempt made by one self to build a model of itself, relatively to the information at his disposal. 







Anyway, my point is that mechanism is a testable hypothesis. If
mechanism is false, we will find this out more easily by reasoning
from its assumption, than by criticizing it superficially at the
start
through racist prejudices.

If you say so. Who are we waiting on to complete the test?

Test have been already done, and QM confirms comp up to now.

QM is the black and white television that 'confirms' color is a
hallucination. Comp is literally a non-sense view of a non-local non-
universe which is based on the fantasy that recursive enumeration can
embody itself in objectively real patterns.

OK. Here we differ. I love comp, and you don't like it.


As the Bohr quote goes,
the opposite of a great truth is also true, so comp will prove to be
quite useful, and is true in an inside out way. It may be the only way
to predict and control ourselves and the universe, but if we don't
understand that the image it presents of reality is an inverted truth,
we will never comprehend what the universe actually is.

That's very close to my point. Comp is normative theory killer. It is a vaccine against conceptual reductionism.
It will lead more to the notion of machine's right, than to the idea that its explains something psychological. 

Yet, comp explains where the hallucinations come from (elementary arithmetic), and why they lead to very long (from inside) persistent and shared dreams among many. But it makes the unknown even more unknown. It leads to a bigger ignorance. It points on something bigger than the Aristotelians seem to forget or to try to evacuate. All this in case comp is not refuted. 

Bruno



Craig Weinberg

unread,
Jan 23, 2012, 8:01:01 AM1/23/12
to Everything List
Part I...I'll have to get back to this later for Part II

On Jan 21, 4:32 pm, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
> Craig,
>
> I assume comp all along.

Then why say that you are agnostic about comp?

> >>> Why do numbers make machines or tapes? Do the want to? Do they
> >>> have a
> >>> choice?
>
> >> As much choice and free will than you have. They too cannot predicts
> >> themselves and can be confronted to making decision with partial
> >> information.
>
> > Where do they get this capacity?
>
> From the laws of addition and multiplication, which makes arithmetic
> already Turing Universal.

Where in addition and multiplication do we find free will?

>
> > Why do we never see it manifested in
> > our ordinary use of numbers?
>
> With the computer and AI enterprise, you can see the embryonic
> development of this.

It's only embryonic if it develops into a fetus. At this point it
appears to be developing into a purely human distribution system for
gossip and porn instead.

> You can also interpret, like Jon Clark did, the DNA as number, coded
> in the chemistry of carbon, so that we can see it all around.
> We don't see it in the usual use of little numbers, because it is not
> there. The relations are either too poor, or not exploited enough.

Don't all relations have to arise ultimately from the usual use of
little numbers?

>
> Anyway, you are not convincing by pointing on everyday example, when
> talking to a theoretician.

If the theory doesn't apply to reality, then I have no problem with
it. Fantasy sports are not my area of interest. It's only if it
conflicts with my ideas of realism that I would be curious.

>
> > Generally the point of counting is to
> > establish a deterministic quantitative relation.. that's sort of what
> > counting is? If the numbers themselves made choices, then why should
> > we consider counting a reliable epistemology?
>
> Counting use only the succession laws. The universal mess comes from
> the mixture of addition and multiplication, as the prime numbers
> already illustrates by their logarithmic "random" distribution.
> Your question is a bit like "if criminals are made of chemical
> reactions, should we continue to rely on chemistry?".

Are you saying then choice making is an emergent property of certain
mixed arithmetic modes only and not inherent in numbers then?

>
>
>
> >> Each universal machine is a particular machine. Even the virgin, non
> >> programmed one.
> >> You are a universal machine, at least. (Even if you have a non
> >> machine
> >> component).
>
> > Me the person, or me the biography?
>
> The person is not really a number. But in all its histories/
> computations it acts as a relative numbers, through its body described
> above his substitution level.
>
> > Is my life a machine within which
> > I exist as another machine or are we both the same machine?
>
> Your life is a sequence of machines states, and typically, it is self-
> changing machine. To be more precise would need boring and distracting
> vocabulary issue, the understanding of UDA, etc.
> Your life is not a machine. I have translated "to be a machine" by the
> more operational "to accept a digital brain transplant" to study the
> consequences without defining completely what person and life are
> (which can hardly be done).
>
> Keep in mind that I do not defend mechanism. I just explain that IF
> mechanism is true, then Plato/Plotinus are correct, and Aristotle
> primitive matter, and physicalism are not correct.

My position is that P/P Mechanism and A/pm/p are correct in some
sense, incorrect in some sense, both correct and incorrect in another
sense, and neither correct nor incorrect in another sense. The
invariant universal truth is sense.

>
>
>
> >>>> I know that you believe in non-comp.
>
> >>> Is that supposed to invalidate the observations? Programs do get
> >>> tired? They do catch colds?
>
> >> With comp, that is obvious.
>
> > At what point do programs develop the capacity to get tired? Is it a
> > matter of complexity or degree of self-reference?
>
> Yes, like some robot can feel themselves wet, in the sense of finding
> a shelter if it rains.

> With some amount of self-reference they can
> develop qualia, and rememorable qualia, which can help to speed the
> recollection.

I think this is critically flawed. Nothing I know of suggests that
qualia from quantity can develop at all. If that were the case a
person should be able to learn to see visual qualia with other sense
organs. High resolution greyscale images should turn into color. I
have not seen anything that suggests to me that qualia would or could
speed recollection either. To the contrary, it would be an additional
abstraction layer with significant resource overhead. If what you say
were true, computers would not need graphics accelerator cards, rather
they would need accelerator cards if graphics were not available to
speed up computation. I really can't see any credible argument against
this. Qualia serves users, not machines. It is insurmountably
nonsensical and metaphysical. It is to say, it's faster to count to
1000 if the numbers taste like different fruits.

> In that case they can discover that they cannot prove
> that they have *genuine* qualia. This happens with not so much self-
> referential abilities.

All qualia is genuine. How could it be otherwise?

>
>
>
> >>> I know that you believe in comp.
>
> >> Then you are wrong. I am agnostic on this. As I should be: no correct
> >> machine believes in comp (nor in non-comp). We just cannot know. That
> >> is why I insist that we need some act of faith to say "yes" to the
> >> doctor. That is why I insist that it is a theology, and that we are
> >> forced to accept that people thinks differently.
>
> > The way I've found to get beyond that is through sense. Sense bridges
> > the gap and connects the dots. It says to us, you cannot know, but
> > yet, it seems like you do, and that has to be good enough. Does it
> > seem like the universe is mechanistic and arithmetic?
>
> By UDA, reality is not WYSIWYG. What we see is a reflect of something
> bigger, like arithmetical truth. This contains the many non
> arithmetical properties leading to person, consciousness, matter, etc.

How do numbers 'see'?

>
> > On the outside,
> > yes. Everything outside of myself seems like it could be quantified as
> > a single story with countless discrete parts. Inside myself seems like
> > there are many stories and meanings, all shifting and catching the
> > light in different ways at different times - a constant flux of
> > significance which re-contextualizes many stories and meanings
> > simultaneously.
>
> Well said.
>
Thanks :)

>
>
> >>> I propose another possibility. Imagine a universe where things can
> >>> become what they actually are without running a program. Running a
> >>> program supervenes not only on sequential recursion but on a whole
> >>> universe of logical consequence, ideas of representation, memory,
> >>> continuous temporal execution, etc. What if those things are aspects
> >>> of particular experience and not universal primitives?
>
> >> I don't know what is a universe. That's part of what I want an
> >> explanation for, that is in term of simple things that I can
> >> understand, like elementary arithmetic or combinatorics.
>
> > What is it you mean when you talk of universal machines then? What are
> > they universal to?
>
> A universal machine is just a machine which can simulate any other
> machine through their finite description and their inputs. It a
> mathematical concept, but nature can emulate (simulate exactly) those
> machines. This happened recurrently on this planet, with the
> development of the genome, brain cells, thought, mind, language, and
> now computer.

Ok, so for your theory, the universe is the set of all machines, their
inputs, and outputs. What I'm saying is that inputs and outputs don't
need a machine to define them as such. Instead you have one primordial
mass-energy singularity which multiplies/divides itself spatially and
temporally. Each division entails inherent input-outputs to the other
parts and the whole. It's subtractive and implicit, like a spectrum. A
prism does not have to illustrate each hue of the spectrum
mechanically and digitally, it just exposes the optical sense that is
already inherent in white light.

>
> > But you are sidetracking my point:
>
> > **Things may not need to run a program to be what they already are.**
>
> I agree. We don't need to implement arithmetic for it being true, for
> example.
>

Right. Or for truth to be truth.
>
>
> > *It is programs which need things to become what they are not.*
>
> But they usually belong to complex histories/computations which
> provide them with many things. Indeed, a priori, too much things (the
> white rabbit problems).

Whatever histories they are part of needs to be fully explicated and
projected onto whatever is executing them. The microprocessor never
'learns' the operating system, each structure must be recursively and
discretely enacted. Nothing is elided unless it is synthetically
condensed with a compression algorithm or something. The hardware
doesn't learn or grow in a machine. In a brain/mind it does.

>
>
>
> > This bit of common (universal) sense is what your view seems to be
> > missing or hiding or denying. The result is a perfectly logical theory
> > of an anti-cosmos in which intangible programs simulate thingness to
> > achieve irrelevant tangibility as a meaningless side effect. If you
> > can just turn it inside out, you will see that we participate in a
> > real universe directly,
>
> The old Chinese-Indian-Greek dream argument makes me already doubting
> we can see a real universe directly. We see what our brains succeed to
> filter and represent.

Think of it not as filtered or represented but condensed and
presented. We are directly presented with a real human world, which is
condensed from the real worlds our dozens of organs, trillions of
cells, (x)tillions of molecules which are literally within us, as well
as it is influenced by our fractional participation in the worlds
which exist without us - our social group, civilization, species,
biosphere, planet, solar system, galaxy, cosmos.

>
> > and that ideas cannot embody things on their
> > own.
>
> That's true, but ideas can embody the idea that things can own bodies.

Not actual bodies, only ideal bodies. My mind doesn't have the first
clue how to embody by own body. If I want to stand up, I can only say
that I do stand up, not that I provide or process any information that
results in a result of 'the body' standing. My perception is not that
I am commanding my body to execute a standing program, but that I am
directly standing myself - it costs me effort personally so that I
don't want to keep standing all day.

>
> > Codes and mechanisms are what real objects do to each other, but
> > objects are not codes themselves. They are a chunks of the singularity
> > with masses and densities.
>
> I don't know that.

That's what they seem like though. Programs tend to encounter errors
and crash, or encounter latency, pixelation, etc. Matter doesn't ever
falter in it's own presentation though. An iron anvil never drops it's
gravity pointer and flies through the ceiling spontaneously or changes
back and forth from iron to cobalt because the anvil class of programs
has a bad line of code.

>
>
>
> >>> What if the
> >>> entire cosmos is a monad; a boundless and implicit firmament through
> >>> which objects and experiences are diffracted? The primordial dynamic
> >>> is not mechanism but stillness and stasis, like a spectrum to a
> >>> prism.
>
> >> All that is Turing emulable, and doesn't add to the understanding.
>
> > A boundless and implicit firmament is Turing emulable?
>
> Actually-infinite complex cellular automata might not been Turing
> emulable, but they are still Turing recoverable in case such infinite
> firmament is necessary for consciousness. So let us reason from comp
> and see if an actual infinite firmament is necessary.
> If you postulate it exists in some primitive way, you just postulate
> an infinitely complex assumption.

If we start counting from 0, your way makes sense. I start counting
from 1, with 0 being the absence of any number so it has to be an
afterthought. If we start with 0 as the first number, then the second
number is no more likely to be 1 than it is to be any number.
Beginning with unity and singularity is infinite in the sense that
without anything else to relate to it can only be boundless, but it is
not infinitely complex, it is infinitely simple. Complexity arises
through the fragmentation-division and multiplication-recapitulation
of the 1. I postulate white light which presents each division
(diffraction really, as it is not truly divided but revealed like a
sliced onion) as a range of color. The color is the diffraction and
the diffraction is the color. You could say that all numbers exist
inside of 1 and that 0 does not exist but insists as a potential (ie
Cantor Set evanescence).

>
>
>
> >>> Anchored in that stable unity, matter is the more direct
> >>> representation of this singularity (ie the many alchemical
> >>> references
> >>> to 'stone').
>
> >> But what is matter?
>
> > The discrete diffractions of the monad.
>
> Hmm... Why not. But this should be made clear in some context, with
> precise definition of discrete (you will need Church thesis, or
> topology), monad, and what do you mean by monad diffraction.

Cool. I'm putting together a new website, trying to improve it and
prep for the TSC conference in April. Give it a look if you like, and
see if it's any clearer than the old site: http://multisenserealism.com/thesis/

Monad diffraction is the interior experience of the big bang. Instead
of a fragmentation across space (really an induction of space into the
1), it is the induction of frequency and amplitude (time, energy) into
the now. 'Now' is what 1 feels like.

> The expression might have a sense in the comp theory. In my early
> writings I do describe self-observation, under the substitution level,
> as a processes of self-diffraction, putting you into infinities of
> computational continuations. Matter is, well not generated, but
> recover, through that process. But this is just a way to describe the
> first person indeterminacy, and terms like diffraction have physical
> (optical) precise meaning, so I keep that for the pause café.

Right, this is more of a figurative diffraction, especially since
there is 'nothing' doing the diffracting (literally, it is 0 which
gaps the ÷ of the 1?).

>
> > Carved out of the singularity
> > using the knife of interior figurative diffraction (feeling/being,
> > sequence, significance, time) which is expressed as literal
> > diffraction on the exterior (indirect detection, objects, space,
> > relativity, topology)
>
> Too much sense here. Sorry. You have to find a way to make your
> statement more precise if you want to convince a scientist.

I'm trying to get at the primordial interior-exterior divisions, and
how the interior is diffracted one way, using an alphabet of feeling
and being through time and the exterior is diffracted the opposite
way, using indirect representations of objects across space.

>
>
>
> >>> The subjective correlate would be silent and dark void as
> >>> well as solar fusion and stellar profusion. This is realism.
>
> >> This is imagination.
>
> > Imagination is part of realism.
>
> At a different level. If you forget this you blur fiction and the
> reality we are searching. (Not the reality we would have found).

There is a level at which fiction and reality are blurred, and a level
at which they are rigorously demarcated. Both levels are real as well
as the continuum of levels between them. I am calling the former the
profound edge and the latter the pedestrian fold (of the multisense
continuum). http://multisenserealism.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/label_comp8a.jpg

>
> > It is our experience, but it is
> > impossible to emulate mechanically.
>
> This looks like non-comp, but it can be derived from comp. Experience,
> consciousness are NOT Turing emulable. Only local bodies, through
> which experience can be manifested relatively to experience and bodies
> of other (universal or not) machines.
>
> The picture we get is counter-intuitive. It is the price of comp, but
> it is natural for Platonists, and comp leads to Platonism, even to
> some Neoplatonism à-la Plotinus.

It's valuable to look at it that way too. My view is counter-intuitive
as well, but mainly because our intuition has been numbed by our
culture of occidental instrumentalism. We see with our own eyes what
happens when we turn on a light, but we disqualify it from
consideration because of optics, physics, biology, evolution, blah
blah blah. We become disenchanted with our own perception in favor of
knowledge about the mechanism associated with it's delivery. All we
have to do is realize that seeing is not just a complex process of
billions of discrete particles and 'signals', but it is also a very
simple and biologically common non-process. Many organisms have eyes,
others have antennas, others have cilia. From quorum sensing we can
infer that the molecules which make up living bacteria are able to
sense molecules of chemicals being produced by other bacteria. How do
we know this is not a form of seeing or tasting?

Bruno Marchal

unread,
Jan 23, 2012, 2:12:30 PM1/23/12
to everyth...@googlegroups.com

On 23 Jan 2012, at 14:01, Craig Weinberg wrote:

> Part I...I'll have to get back to this later for Part II
>
> On Jan 21, 4:32 pm, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
>> Craig,
>>
>> I assume comp all along.
>
> Then why say that you are agnostic about comp?

If I was knowing that comp is true, or if I was a believer in comp, I
would not have to assume it.
I study the consequence of the comp *hypothesis*. Unlike philosophers
I never argue for the truth of comp, nor for the falsity of comp. But
as a logician I can debunk invalid refutation of comp. This does not
mean that comp is true for me.
During the Iraq war I have invalidated many reasoning against that
war, but I was not defending it. There were other arguments which were
valid.
But I realize some people lacked that nuance. Just for this modal
logic is very useful, because it is the difference between the
agnostic (~Bg) and the "atheist" (B~g).
When doing science, it is better to hide our personal beliefs, and to
abstract from them.

>
>>>>> Why do numbers make machines or tapes? Do the want to? Do they
>>>>> have a
>>>>> choice?
>>
>>>> As much choice and free will than you have. They too cannot
>>>> predicts
>>>> themselves and can be confronted to making decision with partial
>>>> information.
>>
>>> Where do they get this capacity?
>>
>> From the laws of addition and multiplication, which makes arithmetic
>> already Turing Universal.
>
> Where in addition and multiplication do we find free will?

Just addition and multiplication (and some amount of logic, which can
be made itself very little) appears to be Turing universal. But it is
a very *low level* programming language, so a proof of the existence
of a Löbian universal number is *very* long, and not easy at all. But
it can be done, and free-will, as I defined it, is unavoidable for
Löbian number. They have the cognitive ability to know that they
cannot predict themselves and have to take decision using very partial
information. This is true for all universal machine, but the Löbian
one are aware of that fact: they know that they have free-will. Of
course some people defines free-will by a sort of ability of
disobeying the natural laws, but this makes free-will senseless, as
John Clark often says.


>
>>
>>> Why do we never see it manifested in
>>> our ordinary use of numbers?
>>
>> With the computer and AI enterprise, you can see the embryonic
>> development of this.
>
> It's only embryonic if it develops into a fetus. At this point it
> appears to be developing into a purely human distribution system for
> gossip and porn instead.

OK. But that is contingent of humans. I really don't know if
"artificial machine" will become intelligent thanks to the willingness
humans, despite the humans, or thanks to the unwillingness of humans.


>
>> You can also interpret, like Jon Clark did, the DNA as number, coded
>> in the chemistry of carbon, so that we can see it all around.
>> We don't see it in the usual use of little numbers, because it is not
>> there. The relations are either too poor, or not exploited enough.
>
> Don't all relations have to arise ultimately from the usual use of
> little numbers?

Not really. Everything concerning matter and consciousness comes from
an interplay between little numbers, and many big numbers. This comes
from the UDA, which explains that the inside view is somehow a
projection of the whole arithmetical truth.
This leads to something counter-intuitive, but not contradictory. the
big picture conceived from outside is not so big (it is the whole of
just arithmetic). But from inside it is provably bigger than any
formal approximation of the whole of math. It is *very* big. Note that
arithmetical truth is also bigger by itself than we thought before
Gödel. It is already not axiomatisable. There are no effective
theories of numberland.


>
>>
>> Anyway, you are not convincing by pointing on everyday example, when
>> talking to a theoretician.
>
> If the theory doesn't apply to reality, then I have no problem with
> it. Fantasy sports are not my area of interest. It's only if it
> conflicts with my ideas of realism that I would be curious.

Realism of what?
If comp is true, it has to apply on reality. That's why UDA makes comp
a testable hypothesis.
I assume comp, derive consequences which are observable, and so we can
make test.
It gives also a unification of qualia and quanta, consciousness and
matter. It might be that even false, it will remain interesting as an
example of theory. It might help to weaken comp to get the correct
picture.
To be sure the testable part requires not just comp, but also the
classical theory of knowledge.

>
>>
>>> Generally the point of counting is to
>>> establish a deterministic quantitative relation.. that's sort of
>>> what
>>> counting is? If the numbers themselves made choices, then why should
>>> we consider counting a reliable epistemology?
>>
>> Counting use only the succession laws. The universal mess comes from
>> the mixture of addition and multiplication, as the prime numbers
>> already illustrates by their logarithmic "random" distribution.
>> Your question is a bit like "if criminals are made of chemical
>> reactions, should we continue to rely on chemistry?".
>
> Are you saying then choice making is an emergent property of certain
> mixed arithmetic modes only and not inherent in numbers then?

Yes. The numbers plays a role only through their additive and
multiplicative structures, and to the relations, which includes the
computable one, you can define from this.

You are basically right. This can be made precise in the comp theory.

>
>>
>>
>>
>>>>>> I know that you believe in non-comp.
>>
>>>>> Is that supposed to invalidate the observations? Programs do get
>>>>> tired? They do catch colds?
>>
>>>> With comp, that is obvious.
>>
>>> At what point do programs develop the capacity to get tired? Is it a
>>> matter of complexity or degree of self-reference?
>>
>> Yes, like some robot can feel themselves wet, in the sense of finding
>> a shelter if it rains.
>
>> With some amount of self-reference they can
>> develop qualia, and rememorable qualia, which can help to speed the
>> recollection.
>
> I think this is critically flawed. Nothing I know of suggests that
> qualia from quantity can develop at all.

By Gödel's theorem, and the existence of intensional modal variant,
there is room for quality.


> If that were the case a
> person should be able to learn to see visual qualia with other sense
> organs.

You might provide an argument. Only the brain, and some nerves
concentrations behaves in a way making them able to use the modal
(qualitative) relations between numbers.

> High resolution greyscale images should turn into color.

relatively to which person and which brain?

> I
> have not seen anything that suggests to me that qualia would or could
> speed recollection either. To the contrary, it would be an additional
> abstraction layer with significant resource overhead. If what you say
> were true, computers would not need graphics accelerator cards, rather
> they would need accelerator cards if graphics were not available to
> speed up computation. I really can't see any credible argument against
> this.

You point on the hard part of the consciousness problem. What I can
show is that machines observing themselves cannot avoid this too.
Eventually it is part of a Löbian machine to tell you "believe it or
not, but I am not a zombie, I can't prove this too you, but I know it
in my bones".
The difficulty is that the qualia are not associated to a machine, nor
a machine state, but to a more complex relational structure between
that states and the set of all possible environment/continuations. The
Gödelian modalities helps to figure out the structure of those
relations.


> Qualia serves users, not machines.

But of course both "are machine" with the comp hypothesis.
With "are machine" in the "yes doctor" quasi operational sense.
I can accept a sense that the first person is not a machine, but this
might been confusing.

> It is insurmountably
> nonsensical and metaphysical.

You should try to argue for this.

> It is to say, it's faster to count to
> 1000 if the numbers taste like different fruits.

?


>
>> In that case they can discover that they cannot prove
>> that they have *genuine* qualia. This happens with not so much self-
>> referential abilities.
>
> All qualia is genuine. How could it be otherwise?

A zombie talking about its feeling of the color red, would talk about
a non genuine qualia. With non-comp, zombie makes sense.

>
>>
>>
>>
>>>>> I know that you believe in comp.
>>
>>>> Then you are wrong. I am agnostic on this. As I should be: no
>>>> correct
>>>> machine believes in comp (nor in non-comp). We just cannot know.
>>>> That
>>>> is why I insist that we need some act of faith to say "yes" to the
>>>> doctor. That is why I insist that it is a theology, and that we are
>>>> forced to accept that people thinks differently.
>>
>>> The way I've found to get beyond that is through sense. Sense
>>> bridges
>>> the gap and connects the dots. It says to us, you cannot know, but
>>> yet, it seems like you do, and that has to be good enough. Does it
>>> seem like the universe is mechanistic and arithmetic?
>>
>> By UDA, reality is not WYSIWYG. What we see is a reflect of something
>> bigger, like arithmetical truth. This contains the many non
>> arithmetical properties leading to person, consciousness, matter,
>> etc.
>
> How do numbers 'see'?

By having relation with itself semblable to a dreaming robot.

And their relative code, and their relations with infinities of
universal numbers, etc.

> What I'm saying is that inputs and outputs don't
> need a machine to define them as such.

Indeed, non computable functions have <input-output> which are not
effectively describable by machine. In the usual classical set
theoretic sense, most functions are like that. Most functions are not
computable. But if you are using such function, you have to tell us
which one.


> Instead you have one primordial
> mass-energy singularity

I don't take such notion for granted. I want understand them.


> which multiplies/divides itself spatially and
> temporally.

Nor this.

> Each division entails inherent input-outputs to the other
> parts and the whole. It's subtractive and implicit, like a spectrum. A
> prism does not have to illustrate each hue of the spectrum
> mechanically and digitally, it just exposes the optical sense that is
> already inherent in white light.

Sense is inherent in light?
How? What would that mean?


>
>>
>>> But you are sidetracking my point:
>>
>>> **Things may not need to run a program to be what they already
>>> are.**
>>
>> I agree. We don't need to implement arithmetic for it being true, for
>> example.
>>
>
> Right. Or for truth to be truth.
>>
>>
>>> *It is programs which need things to become what they are not.*
>>
>> But they usually belong to complex histories/computations which
>> provide them with many things. Indeed, a priori, too much things (the
>> white rabbit problems).
>
> Whatever histories they are part of needs to be fully explicated and
> projected onto whatever is executing them. The microprocessor never
> 'learns' the operating system, each structure must be recursively and
> discretely enacted. Nothing is elided unless it is synthetically
> condensed with a compression algorithm or something. The hardware
> doesn't learn or grow in a machine. In a brain/mind it does.


How. If you can really answer that question, I will be able to tell if
this already happens in Numberland, or not. So we might see if your
theory is comp-compatible or not.


>
>>
>>
>>
>>> This bit of common (universal) sense is what your view seems to be
>>> missing or hiding or denying. The result is a perfectly logical
>>> theory
>>> of an anti-cosmos in which intangible programs simulate thingness to
>>> achieve irrelevant tangibility as a meaningless side effect. If you
>>> can just turn it inside out, you will see that we participate in a
>>> real universe directly,
>>
>> The old Chinese-Indian-Greek dream argument makes me already doubting
>> we can see a real universe directly. We see what our brains succeed
>> to
>> filter and represent.
>
> Think of it not as filtered or represented but condensed and
> presented. We are directly presented with a real human world,

That's your assumption, belief, or theorem. It would be nice if you
could be clearer on your assumptions.
You are perhaps lucky to talk with a logician, but logician likes when
you distinguish clearly what you assume, and what you derive.

> which is
> condensed from the real worlds our dozens of organs, trillions of

You should better avoid the use of the word "real". Given that our
discussion is precisely on what is real, or on what is primitively real.

> cells, (x)tillions of molecules which are literally within us, as well
> as it is influenced by our fractional participation in the worlds
> which exist without us - our social group, civilization, species,
> biosphere, planet, solar system, galaxy, cosmos.


All those terms make sense. But they do not denote anything
primitively real.
I argue that if we assume digital mechanism, all that emerges from a,
mathematically complex and counter-intuitive self-referential
properties of universal 'numbers.

All what I say is that if we assume comp we get automatically a "many-
worlds interpretation, made by universal numbers, of arithmetic. With
two main parts, the communicable and the non communicable.

>
>>
>>> and that ideas cannot embody things on their
>>> own.
>>
>> That's true, but ideas can embody the idea that things can own
>> bodies.
>
> Not actual bodies, only ideal bodies.

Actual bodies are relative ideal bodies seen from inside. Bodies are
experience type, not primitively material token, in the comp theory
(when well understood).


> My mind doesn't have the first
> clue how to embody by own body. If I want to stand up, I can only say
> that I do stand up, not that I provide or process any information that
> results in a result of 'the body' standing.

You will not ask a email application to explain how they function at a
low level.

You might be a dreaming butterfly.

> My perception is not that
> I am commanding my body to execute a standing program, but that I am
> directly standing myself - it costs me effort personally so that I
> don't want to keep standing all day.

Please take a seat.

To be able to seat without doing too much effort, and "directly" is
made possible by collection of amoebas who got the cable, and about
(x)tillions of phone communications. I know you agree with that
because you asserts that our consciousness is somehow related of
their consciousness (is it a sum? what is the function?).
But the higher level of the human person, is indeed a quite
sophisticate higher level function. We can't think for our cells, nor
can we know the complex molecular phenomena, except by making theories
and observations, and reading books, etc.
Now, what everybody try to tell you is that, all levels having lawful
description in nature are computable, so that your theory just look
argument for a low comp substitution level. If not, you invoke a
particular non computable, and non Turing recoverable by first person
indeterminacy, and we might be interested in knowing which one.


>
>>
>>> Codes and mechanisms are what real objects do to each other, but
>>> objects are not codes themselves. They are a chunks of the
>>> singularity
>>> with masses and densities.
>>
>> I don't know that.
>
> That's what they seem like though.

Yes. But that's the key difference.

> Programs tend to encounter errors
> and crash, or encounter latency, pixelation, etc. Matter doesn't ever
> falter in it's own presentation though. An iron anvil never drops it's
> gravity pointer and flies through the ceiling spontaneously or changes
> back and forth from iron to cobalt because the anvil class of programs
> has a bad line of code.

It just a matter of first person plural probability calculus.

>
>>
>>
>>
>>>>> What if the
>>>>> entire cosmos is a monad; a boundless and implicit firmament
>>>>> through
>>>>> which objects and experiences are diffracted? The primordial
>>>>> dynamic
>>>>> is not mechanism but stillness and stasis, like a spectrum to a
>>>>> prism.
>>
>>>> All that is Turing emulable, and doesn't add to the understanding.
>>
>>> A boundless and implicit firmament is Turing emulable?
>>
>> Actually-infinite complex cellular automata might not been Turing
>> emulable, but they are still Turing recoverable in case such infinite
>> firmament is necessary for consciousness. So let us reason from comp
>> and see if an actual infinite firmament is necessary.
>> If you postulate it exists in some primitive way, you just postulate
>> an infinitely complex assumption.
>
> If we start counting from 0, your way makes sense. I start counting
> from 1, with 0 being the absence of any number so it has to be an
> afterthought.

I don't understand.


> If we start with 0 as the first number, then the second
> number is no more likely to be 1 than it is to be any number.

In which theory?

> Beginning with unity and singularity is infinite in the sense that
> without anything else to relate to it can only be boundless, but it is
> not infinitely complex, it is infinitely simple. Complexity arises
> through the fragmentation-division and multiplication-recapitulation
> of the 1.

Complexity arise from addition and multiplication. With comp, it is
enough.


> I postulate white light which presents each division
> (diffraction really, as it is not truly divided but revealed like a
> sliced onion) as a range of color. The color is the diffraction and
> the diffraction is the color. You could say that all numbers exist
> inside of 1 and that 0 does not exist but insists as a potential (ie
> Cantor Set evanescence).

I am afraid this does not make much sense for me.


>
>>
>>
>>
>>>>> Anchored in that stable unity, matter is the more direct
>>>>> representation of this singularity (ie the many alchemical
>>>>> references
>>>>> to 'stone').
>>
>>>> But what is matter?
>>
>>> The discrete diffractions of the monad.
>>
>> Hmm... Why not. But this should be made clear in some context, with
>> precise definition of discrete (you will need Church thesis, or
>> topology), monad, and what do you mean by monad diffraction.
>
> Cool. I'm putting together a new website, trying to improve it and
> prep for the TSC conference in April. Give it a look if you like, and
> see if it's any clearer than the old site: http://multisenserealism.com/thesis/
>
> Monad diffraction is the interior experience of the big bang.

Words like "interior", "experience" and "big bang" are more complex
and theory dependent than "Monad diffraction".
It looks like playing with words.


> Instead
> of a fragmentation across space (really an induction of space into the
> 1), it is the induction of frequency and amplitude (time, energy) into
> the now. 'Now' is what 1 feels like.
>
>> The expression might have a sense in the comp theory. In my early
>> writings I do describe self-observation, under the substitution
>> level,
>> as a processes of self-diffraction, putting you into infinities of
>> computational continuations. Matter is, well not generated, but
>> recover, through that process. But this is just a way to describe the
>> first person indeterminacy, and terms like diffraction have physical
>> (optical) precise meaning, so I keep that for the pause café.
>
> Right, this is more of a figurative diffraction, especially since
> there is 'nothing' doing the diffracting (literally, it is 0 which
> gaps the ÷ of the 1?).

I don't see an atom of sense here. Sorry.


>
>>
>>> Carved out of the singularity
>>> using the knife of interior figurative diffraction (feeling/being,
>>> sequence, significance, time) which is expressed as literal
>>> diffraction on the exterior (indirect detection, objects, space,
>>> relativity, topology)
>>
>> Too much sense here. Sorry. You have to find a way to make your
>> statement more precise if you want to convince a scientist.
>
> I'm trying to get at the primordial interior-exterior divisions, and
> how the interior is diffracted one way, using an alphabet of feeling
> and being through time and the exterior is diffracted the opposite
> way, using indirect representations of objects across space.

?

>
>>
>>
>>
>>>>> The subjective correlate would be silent and dark void as
>>>>> well as solar fusion and stellar profusion. This is realism.
>>
>>>> This is imagination.
>>
>>> Imagination is part of realism.
>>
>> At a different level. If you forget this you blur fiction and the
>> reality we are searching. (Not the reality we would have found).
>
> There is a level at which fiction and reality are blurred, and a level
> at which they are rigorously demarcated. Both levels are real as well
> as the continuum of levels between them. I am calling the former the
> profound edge and the latter the pedestrian fold (of the multisense
> continuum). http://multisenserealism.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/label_comp8a.jpg

?

>
>>
>>> It is our experience, but it is
>>> impossible to emulate mechanically.
>>
>> This looks like non-comp, but it can be derived from comp.
>> Experience,
>> consciousness are NOT Turing emulable. Only local bodies, through
>> which experience can be manifested relatively to experience and
>> bodies
>> of other (universal or not) machines.
>>
>> The picture we get is counter-intuitive. It is the price of comp, but
>> it is natural for Platonists, and comp leads to Platonism, even to
>> some Neoplatonism à-la Plotinus.
>
> It's valuable to look at it that way too. My view is counter-intuitive
> as well, but mainly because our intuition has been numbed by our
> culture of occidental instrumentalism. We see with our own eyes what
> happens when we turn on a light, but we disqualify it from
> consideration because of optics, physics, biology, evolution, blah
> blah blah.

Yes. It is a tradition to put the mind body problem under the rug.
My point is that if we take the comp hyp seriously, simple thought
experience shows how the express it in arithmetical term and axiomatic
definition, and that it leads to test. Making it scientific in the
usual academical sense of the term.


> We become disenchanted with our own perception in favor of
> knowledge about the mechanism associated with it's delivery.

That's the mistake indeed. The beauty is that with the progress in
machine theory the mistake becomes palpable. That's why I think it is
interesting to understand that the current materialist theologies are
not compatible with mechanism.


> All we
> have to do is realize that seeing is not just a complex process of
> billions of discrete particles and 'signals', but it is also a very
> simple and biologically common non-process.

What do you mean by biological in this context. What makes you think
that there are no simple biologically common non-processes in
arithmetic? If they are non computable, why do you want make them non
Turing 1-recoverable?

The disenchantment is due to the fact that people believe that
mechanism is the answer.
But mechanism is the question.
Provably so once you assume mechanism. That's the beauty of it.

In the least, it provides a non physical frame, yet widespread, the
belief in arithmetic, where we can explain where the beliefs in
physical laws come from (even as qualia), and, the hard part, why they
are locally self-referentially correct.

> Many organisms have eyes,
> others have antennas, others have cilia. From quorum sensing we can
> infer that the molecules which make up living bacteria are able to
> sense molecules of chemicals being produced by other bacteria. How do
> we know this is not a form of seeing or tasting?

I bet it is a form of seeing or tasting.

Cells are already universal, and I can attribute them consciousness,
and I might think that "me" needs the level of "physics" around the
Heisenberg uncertainty, to say "yes" to the doctor. But this is for
surviving in the closest sense of being "me" in the very long turn.
"We" can survive, but lost things, at higher level too, and this leads
to the question who are we, personal identity, etc.

I am OK with consciousness on some scale, or even perhaps non
temporal, for very simple entities. Indeed I can attribute
consciousness to any universal arithmetical relation. I think self-
consciousness begins with Löbianity, and this leads only to more
questions for them.

Mechanism, well understood, is antireductionist for all universal
numbers. It is as much a re-enchantment as a promise for infinities of
mess. Universal machines oscillates between freedom and security, they
want both, but there are local tradeoff. With security you loose
universality, and with freedom you crash from time to times.

Bruno


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

Craig Weinberg

unread,
Jan 24, 2012, 12:48:19 PM1/24/12
to Everything List
Part II

On Jan 21, 4:32 pm, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

>
> >> Locally it looks like that. But I want an explanation of where such
> >> things come from.
> >> Your "theory" takes too much as granted.
>
> > I want an explanation of where non-locally is and how it comes to
> > influence us locally.
>
> Non locality is easy. It comes from the fact that each observer's body
> is repeated in an infinity of computational histories, so that its
> experiences of experiment outputs is determined on infinities of
> relative locations.
>
> Locality is assumed through comp at the meta-level, and more difficult
> to recover at the physical level. Comp might be too much quantum. It
> might have a too big first person indeterminacy, a too big non
> locality, etc. but this remains to be shown, and the logic of self-
> references, including the modal nuances we inherit from
> incompleteness, suggests that the locality comes from the semantics of
> those logics, as UDA somehow makes obligatory.
>

That seems like another facet of the comp assumption that material is
unnecessary - it makes it hard to think of a reason for material
qualities like locality to arise. Reality doesn't fit the comp model,
unless you decide a priori that comp is reality and reality is the
model that has to fit into it, which I would call pathological if
taken literally.

>
> >>> Heh. Now who is discriminating against inanimate objects?
>
> >> Because they are inanimate, and the evidence that they are dreaming
> >> is
> >> weak and non refutable. But mainly because they don't exist by
> >> themselves. Matter is a consciousness creation, or view from inside
> >> arithmetic. It is an epistemological precise notion. That is what I
> >> like in the comp hyp: it explains the origin of the beliefs, by
> >> "numbers" in physical things, without the need to assume them.
>
> > But it doesn't explain beliefs themselves.
>
> Yes, it does. the beliefs are whatever number arithmetical predicate
> B(x) verifying the axioms of beliefs, of the machine that we want
> interview. Precisely they belief in the axiom of Robinson Arithmetic
> (the theory of everything), they believe in the induction axioms, they
> might have supplementary local recursively enumerable set of beliefs,
> and their beliefs are close for the modus ponens rule.

I can't really make any sense out of anything after "Yes, it does."

> That is, if
> they believe A -> B, then if they believe A they will, soon or later,
> believe B. Thanks to the induction axioms, they can be shown to be
> Löbian, and they get the octalist view of the arithmetical reality
> (with God, Intellect, Soul, intelligible matter, and sensible matter,
> to use the Plotinian vocabulary, all this splitted into true and
> provable by the incompleteness phenomenon. The belief is rather well
> explained, it seems to me, by the Intellect hypostases (the one I
> refer often by Bp, and which is Gödel provability predicate). It is
> the study of the introspection of the ideally self-referentially
> correct machine.

What little I can understand of that, it seems like logic defining
itself tautologically. It doesn't tell me what is a belief, just what
logic does with them once they exist. It's sort of like describing the
internet in terms of IP addresses communicating with each other.

>
> Those machines are clever. They can already refute Penrose-Lucas use
> of Gödel's theorem against mechanism.

Mechanism cannot be defeated by any mechanistic theorem. That's the
key. Subjectivity is the primordial authoritative orientation. It
trumps mechanism by asserting itself in it's own terms, not by logical
analysis. It needs no proof because it has everything else except
proof already. Mechanism has proof and nothing else. It is hollow
inside. It doesn’t even ‘have proof’ so much as it can be used
subjectively to prove something to oneself or to another subject (if
they accept it).

>
> > Which [beliefs] are much more likely
> > to be a figment of consciousness than an asteroid.
>
> Yes.
>
> > What believes an
> > asteroid into existence? How do we happen to subscribe to all of these
> > beliefs?
>
> Because we share deep computations, linear at the core bottom.

Similar to my view of nested awareness, except that the core bottom is
just the most linear/literal level of who we (all of us) are.
Computations are the relations amongst embodied agents at that level,
not disembodied causally efficacious entities.

> I guess something like this from both empiric extrapolations, and
> from the universal machine introspection.
>
>
>
> >>> I understand completely. You are channeling my exact worldview circa
> >>> 1990.
>
> >> That's comp.
>
> > The comp that you claim to be agnostic about?
>
> Yes. that is the one. It is my favorite working hypothesis in the
> field of theology, or if you prefer, search of theories of everything.
> the unification of all forces, from gravitation to love.
> First result: assuming comp, the numbers (and their two laws) are
> enough for the ontology, the rest are gluing dreams.

What what is required to generate numbers and their laws?

To me, two things: Sense and motive, aka Significance. Inherent within
sensorimotive significance is it's absence - spatiotemporal entropy.
If you look at sense and motive from the perspective of a hypothetical
logical* voyeur, you see electromagnetic forces and fields.

* logic is our neocortical-cognitive sense of sense-without-sensation.

>
>
>
> >> But the notion of UD-recoverable illusion is new, I
> >> think. That's the key notion, given that both consciousness and
> >> matter
> >> are not Turing emulable, but still Turing recoverable though the
> >> unavoidable (by incompleteness) number's epistemology.
>
> > Where did the UD come from? Does it run on itself? What is the
> > hardware?
>
> It depends which UD you are talking about. I have implemented a UD in
> 1991 and let it run for one week. The hardware was first an Explorer
> computer, then an Apple Macintosh. The software was Allegro Common LISP.
>
> But remember that I assume the numbers and their two laws. From that
> alone I can prove the existence of infinitely many UDs in arithmetic.
> Even the UD I ran is the results of infinitely many UDs operating in
> arithmetic below our common substitution level. Too bad my Apple
> machine couldn't exploit that, but I can wait for a quantum Apple.
>

So by UD you mean actual computer software.

>
>
> >>> Since then I have explored some other ideas which make more
> >>> sense to me, and which I think will eventually make more sense to
> >>> others. We are extending a noosphere or a technocortex, yes, but
> >>> like
> >>> the brain, we do not discard our limbic system and brain stem. We
> >>> might like to, but we can't or there will be no 'we' left.
>
> >> I can agree. But again, that's not an argument for saying that comp
> >> is
> >> false. As we said before, you need to add non Turing emulable things
> >> locally in the brain to get that. Your theory makes matter and mind
> >> more hard to make intelligible a priori.
>
> > If they were intelligible a priori,
>
> I did not say that. It is the theoretical tools used to explore the
> territory which have to be intelligible. The theory must be simpler
> than the reality.
> If not, you can look at Hubble pictures and just say: 'that's my
> theory of everything'.

The Hubble pictures are a visual presentation of astronomy. If you
could see the every atom, molecule, cell, and body in the same
pictures as well as see seeing and feeling and thinking, then you
would have a visual presentation or 'theory' of everything. That's
more or less the level of coherence I am after. A still picture of
everything.

To extend that visual presentation into a cognitive presentation
requires much more explication. Seeing is believing but a cognitive
theory has to sound better than other competing theories.

>
> > there would be no point in going
> > through the formality of experiencing them.
>
> You are right. the "a priori" was for "your theory makes ...", not for
> "intelligible". Sorry for my unclear sentence. We agree here.
>
> > This is why the universe
> > exists.
>
> Oops, I missed something.
>
> > To do what theory cannot.
>
> OK. Nice. I see the point. That's how I justify arithmetical truth.
> Since Gödel, I have motivation to describe reality by what is beyond
> all effective theories. It is The ONE, better know by his nickname
> God, but which typically (in machine's theology) has no name, no
> description. It is, roughly speaking Plato's Truth. (and even
> Pythagorus' one, rehabilitated by Turing Church thesis, or Post law).

I use the name 'singularity' (or primordial singularity, or
everythingness) to avoid human, religious, or patriarchal
associations. But as far as going beyond theory I think we only need
the symmetrical complement of theory. Energized matter is the
container/vehicle of theory, and vice versa...sensorimotive
significance (theory being an aspect of the cognitive channel of
significance) is the driver/audience of the energized material
vehicle.

>
>
>
> >>>>> It sounds like I can name anything 'knower' and have that be a
> >>>>> theorem
> >>>>> for subjectivity.
>
> >>>> On the contrary. the definition I gave is quite specific, yet very
> >>>> general. It leads to the ideal theology of the self-referentially
> >>>> correct universal machine, including its physics (as it should by
> >>>> UDA,
> >>>> MGA).
>
> >>> It still sounds like it means that knowers must be subjects since
> >>> subjects are knowers.
>
> >> A knower is anything satisfying the axioms of knowledge logic (Kp ->
> >> p, K(p->q) -> (Kp -> Kq), and, for rich subject, also Kp -> KKp: they
> >> know p implies that they know that they know p).
> >> With Kp = Bp & p, all enough rich machine are knower.
>
> > Knowing is contingent upon biochemistry.
>
> I disagree. Biochemistry is just a local implementation.
> Token knower are contingent on number relations, but knowing itself is
> the fate of all universal numbers, by logical necessity.

I see where you are coming from, but I think that kind of knowing is
an aspect of trivial intelligence. It's just pattern matching, like a
square peg 'knows' it can't fit in a round hole. I think it
overestimates the peg radically to project 'knowing' on it, when the
more likely scenario is a detection-reaction level sense on the inter-
molecular (solid object) level.

>
>
>
> > "When I'm rushing on my run. And I feel just like Jesus' son. And I
> > guess that I just don't know. And I guess that I just don't know." -
> > Heroin, Velvet Underground
>
> :)
>
>
>
> >>> Not racism, taxonomy. Kingdom, phylum, class, order... you have
> >>> heard
> >>> of this, yes?
>
> >> I was troubled (say) by the expression "not likely very high quality
> >> subjects"). Like the Sapinsh considering Indians humans, but lesser
> >> humans.
>
> > I understand, but I'm not using it in pejorative sense, I'm making a
> > material distinction. In the comp theology it seems though that
> > machine selfhood is not so much elevated to human levels, but that all
> > subjectivity is flattened to machine levels.
>
> It is not flattened. You make an error often attributed to Descartes,
> but I think Descartes did not make it. La Mettrie and the Marquis de
> Sade did it. You confuse both a machine and a human with its body, and
> its body with its apparent constitution. At least you (try to) recover
> the person, by adding "sense" (how, I still don't see).

I recover the person and it's body as symmetrical anomalies which
together form two poles (like collector and emitter to a transistor)
of a unified sense. Sense is the base which modulates the relation
between defining and defying that symmetry. When sense defines that
symmetry, it's eyes open, straight ahead realism where theory is
insignificant, and when it defies the symmetry, it's visionary realism
where theoretical (figurative) generalizations are significant and
literal tangibility is backgrounded.

The person embodiment is direct sensorimotive experience through time,
and the body impersonation is indirectly experienced as matter across
space.

> But neither
> physicalism, nor mechanism makes the flattening, once you take into
> account the informational layering of levels. That is why physicalism
> + mechanism leads to an incorrect nihilist reduction: like "I am just
> some impermanent piece of mud" (La Mettrie), or (truth = Power, Sade).
> But Physicalism can admit non reductive interpretation, and then
> mechanism is directly contradictory with physicalism.
> Comp entails a flattening of the ontological, but justifies the
> complex inside divine epistemological matrix.

If you allow informational layering of levels, then I would just put
mechanism at one extreme (the Western extreme, actually) of the stack
of layers. With subjectivity at the opposite extreme, you have a torus
manifold. If you conflate subjectivity with mechanism though, then
that flattens the torus.

>
> > It makes us all what the
> > Spanish considered the Indians to be - even less...had the Spanish had
> > Kp = Bp & p, they would not have bothered torturing them to save their
> > souls, they would have just reformatted the continent completely with
> > their guns, germs, and steel program.
>
> Mechanism, well understood, can only make you more humble and cautious
> toward any living one, even jumping spiders, and even, in some
> different sense, toward pebbles and inanimate object. And then toward
> the unknown.

Only if you project subjectivity outward. If you follow Dennett's
flavor of computationalism, which is by far the most popular version,
you project objectivity inward and see that we are all only pebbles or
jumping spiders - unworthy of consideration beyond functional
instrumentalism.

>
>
>
> >>>>> I just don't think the parts know each other unless they
> >>>>> naturally grew as parts of a whole.
>
> >>>> Man made machines already do that, they grow as a part of the same
> >>>> whole we share with them.
> >>>> Babies also look dumb, weak and so dependent.
>
> >>> What is an example of a man made machine whose parts naturally
> >>> grow as
> >>> part of the same whole?
>
> >> Buildings, cars, industries, cities, computers, ... well, basically
> >> all of them.
>
> > None of those things grow out of a whole. They are all assembled from
> > disparate parts manufactured in different places all over the world.
> > Cars and computers are not born, they are put together.
>
> Same for us, at some level. That's what ribosomes and enzymes do all
> the time.
> The modality is different because the history is different. Cars are
> 100 years old, plants and animals are *much* older, and have a more
> complex and deep history, involving selfs more early.

But cars don't come from a single car seed or car zygote. Our
ribosomes and enzymes are created at the behest of our cells and
molecules. Sure, they get more molecules from food and water and air
but they are integrated in the whole through anabolic growth, not
mechanical assembly.

>
> Here I use the term "self" in the computer science sense of "if Dx
> gives F(xx), then DD gives F(DD)".
> Self-reproduction happens when a duplicator meets itself, and self-
> reference can be made by the same diagonalization procedure at a
> symbolical level.
>
> Sense comes from an attempt made by one self to build a model of
> itself, relatively to the information at his disposal.

I see it differently. Duplication does not arise from an attempt to
duplicate but arises semantically from sense. It's a virtuous cycle of
'likeness'. Something likes doing something, so it does it again. The
cycle of liking and repeating is rhythm or frequency which also makes
sense to similar somethings who also begin to adopt the same cycle.
There is no model or construction, only recruitment and imitation.
Models and constructs come much much later as intelligence. I'm not
sure that any organism builds models other than humans, do they?
Imitation seems apparent in all animal life though. Below that I think
that it's trivial imitation - beneath the threshold of awareness and
volition, it's just sense synchronized motive.
>
>
>
> >>>> Anyway, my point is that mechanism is a testable hypothesis. If
> >>>> mechanism is false, we will find this out more easily by reasoning
> >>>> from its assumption, than by criticizing it superficially at the
> >>>> start
> >>>> through racist prejudices.
>
> >>> If you say so. Who are we waiting on to complete the test?
>
> >> Test have been already done, and QM confirms comp up to now.
>
> > QM is the black and white television that 'confirms' color is a
> > hallucination. Comp is literally a non-sense view of a non-local non-
> > universe which is based on the fantasy that recursive enumeration can
> > embody itself in objectively real patterns.
>
> OK. Here we differ. I love comp, and you don't like it.

I used to love comp, but now I love post-comp Sense more. I broke up
with comp and gave her back all of the metaphysics and wishful
abstraction that I don't need anymore.

>
> > As the Bohr quote goes,
> > the opposite of a great truth is also true, so comp will prove to be
> > quite useful, and is true in an inside out way. It may be the only way
> > to predict and control ourselves and the universe, but if we don't
> > understand that the image it presents of reality is an inverted truth,
> > we will never comprehend what the universe actually is.
>
> That's very close to my point. Comp is normative theory killer. It is
> a vaccine against conceptual reductionism.
> It will lead more to the notion of machine's right, than to the idea
> that its explains something psychological.

It does lead more to the notion of machine's right but at the expense
of people's rights. Corporations are the embodiment of comp. They are
literally computational entities programmed to privatize profits and
socialize costs. Their success is the ultimately the failure of
civilization.

>
> Yet, comp explains where the hallucinations come from (elementary
> arithmetic), and why they lead to very long (from inside) persistent
> and shared dreams among many. But it makes the unknown even more
> unknown. It leads to a bigger ignorance. It points on something bigger
> than the Aristotelians seem to forget or to try to evacuate. All this
> in case comp is not refuted.

Why does elementary arithmetic hallucinate?

Craig

Craig Weinberg

unread,
Jan 24, 2012, 5:39:19 PM1/24/12
to Everything List
On Jan 23, 2:12 pm, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
> On 23 Jan 2012, at 14:01, Craig Weinberg wrote:
>
> > Part I...I'll have to get back to this later for Part II
>
> > On Jan 21, 4:32 pm, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
> >> Craig,
>
> >> I assume comp all along.
>
> > Then why say that you are agnostic about comp?
>
> If I was knowing that comp is true, or if I was a believer in comp, I
> would not have to assume it.
> I study the consequence of the comp *hypothesis*. Unlike philosophers
> I never argue for the truth of comp, nor for the falsity of comp. But
> as a logician I can debunk invalid refutation of comp. This does not
> mean that comp is true for me.
> During the Iraq war I have invalidated many reasoning against that
> war, but I was not defending it. There were other arguments which were
> valid.
> But I realize some people lacked that nuance. Just for this modal
> logic is very useful, because it is the difference between the
> agnostic (~Bg) and the "atheist" (B~g).
> When doing science, it is better to hide our personal beliefs, and to
> abstract from them.
>

Okay. I thought by 'I assume comp all along' you meant that you
personally assume it is true.

>
>
> >>>>> Why do numbers make machines or tapes? Do the want to? Do they
> >>>>> have a
> >>>>> choice?
>
> >>>> As much choice and free will than you have. They too cannot
> >>>> predicts
> >>>> themselves and can be confronted to making decision with partial
> >>>> information.
>
> >>> Where do they get this capacity?
>
> >> From the laws of addition and multiplication, which makes arithmetic
> >> already Turing Universal.
>
> > Where in addition and multiplication do we find free will?
>
> Just addition and multiplication (and some amount of logic, which can
> be made itself very little) appears to be Turing universal. But it is
> a very *low level* programming language, so a proof of the existence
> of a Löbian universal number is *very* long, and not easy at all. But
> it can be done, and free-will, as I defined it, is unavoidable for
> Löbian number. They have the cognitive ability to know that they
> cannot predict themselves and have to take decision using very partial
> information. This is true for all universal machine, but the Löbian
> one are aware of that fact: they know that they have free-will. Of
> course some people defines free-will by a sort of ability of
> disobeying the natural laws, but this makes free-will senseless, as
> John Clark often says.

I'm not sure what John Clark's sense of free-will is. Omnipotence?
Magic? Not sure. I'm just talking about the ordinary difference
between feeling that you are doing something because you are doing it
as opposed to feeling that something is happening through no voluntary
action on your part. How do you know that Löbian machines have
awareness? Or are they defined that way a priori?

>
>
>
> >>> Why do we never see it manifested in
> >>> our ordinary use of numbers?
>
> >> With the computer and AI enterprise, you can see the embryonic
> >> development of this.
>
> > It's only embryonic if it develops into a fetus. At this point it
> > appears to be developing into a purely human distribution system for
> > gossip and porn instead.
>
> OK. But that is contingent of humans. I really don't know if
> "artificial machine" will become intelligent thanks to the willingness
> humans, despite the humans, or thanks to the unwillingness of humans.
>
>
>
> >> You can also interpret, like Jon Clark did, the DNA as number, coded
> >> in the chemistry of carbon, so that we can see it all around.
> >> We don't see it in the usual use of little numbers, because it is not
> >> there. The relations are either too poor, or not exploited enough.
>
> > Don't all relations have to arise ultimately from the usual use of
> > little numbers?
>
> Not really. Everything concerning matter and consciousness comes from
> an interplay between little numbers, and many big numbers. This comes
> from the UDA, which explains that the inside view is somehow a
> projection of the whole arithmetical truth.

In my language, 'projection of the whole arithmetical truth' =
diffraction of the primordial monad.

> This leads to something counter-intuitive, but not contradictory. the
> big picture conceived from outside is not so big (it is the whole of
> just arithmetic). But from inside it is provably bigger than any
> formal approximation of the whole of math. It is *very* big. Note that
> arithmetical truth is also bigger by itself than we thought before
> Gödel. It is already not axiomatisable. There are no effective
> theories of numberland.

Wouldn't numbers+names land be even bigger?

>
>
>
> >> Anyway, you are not convincing by pointing on everyday example, when
> >> talking to a theoretician.
>
> > If the theory doesn't apply to reality, then I have no problem with
> > it. Fantasy sports are not my area of interest. It's only if it
> > conflicts with my ideas of realism that I would be curious.
>
> Realism of what?

Of experience.

> If comp is true, it has to apply on reality.

Why? Maybe comp only applies to comp reality. Just because such a
reality can be imposed on some material forms (but not all material
forms, as I try to point out) doesn't mean that our way of imagining
that reality is the same as how it is received at the target level.

> That's why UDA makes comp
> a testable hypothesis.
> I assume comp, derive consequences which are observable, and so we can
> make test.
> It gives also a unification of qualia and quanta, consciousness and
> matter. It might be that even false, it will remain interesting as an
> example of theory. It might help to weaken comp to get the correct
> picture.
> To be sure the testable part requires not just comp, but also the
> classical theory of knowledge.

Yes, it definitely will remain interesting, and is more functionally
useful than my sense model, but the sense model is the one that is
more universally explanatory.

>
>
>
> >>> Generally the point of counting is to
> >>> establish a deterministic quantitative relation.. that's sort of
> >>> what
> >>> counting is? If the numbers themselves made choices, then why should
> >>> we consider counting a reliable epistemology?
>
> >> Counting use only the succession laws. The universal mess comes from
> >> the mixture of addition and multiplication, as the prime numbers
> >> already illustrates by their logarithmic "random" distribution.
> >> Your question is a bit like "if criminals are made of chemical
> >> reactions, should we continue to rely on chemistry?".
>
> > Are you saying then choice making is an emergent property of certain
> > mixed arithmetic modes only and not inherent in numbers then?
>
> Yes. The numbers plays a role only through their additive and
> multiplicative structures, and to the relations, which includes the
> computable one, you can define from this.

I think it makes more sense to see choice as an inherent potential of
nesting of awareness. The more that mechanical duties are offloaded to
subsystems the more sensorimotive interiority can develop in a
protected environment. In a universe of simple awareness, there is
only primitive sense detection and motive response. The effect of
having sense organs or nervous systems is to recapitulate the organism
within the organism, allowing a subjective experience of increased
depth of 'now' relative to a less elaborated organism. Human
consciousness is rich, slow roasted, gourmet qualia. Inorganic matter
has fast food qualia. The difference is achieved through
simplification and condensation, not complexity. Complexity is the
back end.
Cool.

>
>
>
> >>>>>> I know that you believe in non-comp.
>
> >>>>> Is that supposed to invalidate the observations? Programs do get
> >>>>> tired? They do catch colds?
>
> >>>> With comp, that is obvious.
>
> >>> At what point do programs develop the capacity to get tired? Is it a
> >>> matter of complexity or degree of self-reference?
>
> >> Yes, like some robot can feel themselves wet, in the sense of finding
> >> a shelter if it rains.
>
> >> With some amount of self-reference they can
> >> develop qualia, and rememorable qualia, which can help to speed the
> >> recollection.
>
> > I think this is critically flawed. Nothing I know of suggests that
> > qualia from quantity can develop at all.
>
> By Gödel's theorem, and the existence of intensional modal variant,
> there is room for quality.

Room for quality, or room for anything we care to imagine?

>
> > If that were the case a
> > person should be able to learn to see visual qualia with other sense
> > organs.
>
> You might provide an argument. Only the brain, and some nerves
> concentrations behaves in a way making them able to use the modal
> (qualitative) relations between numbers.

How do you know that nerves are required? They may be required for us
to make sense (although blindsight suggests even that is not the case)
but they are not necessarily required for worms or protozoa.

>
> > High resolution greyscale images should turn into color.
>
> relatively to which person and which brain?

To anyone who can see color.

>
> > I
> > have not seen anything that suggests to me that qualia would or could
> > speed recollection either. To the contrary, it would be an additional
> > abstraction layer with significant resource overhead. If what you say
> > were true, computers would not need graphics accelerator cards, rather
> > they would need accelerator cards if graphics were not available to
> > speed up computation. I really can't see any credible argument against
> > this.
>
> You point on the hard part of the consciousness problem. What I can
> show is that machines observing themselves cannot avoid this too.
> Eventually it is part of a Löbian machine to tell you "believe it or
> not, but I am not a zombie, I can't prove this too you, but I know it
> in my bones".
> The difficulty is that the qualia are not associated to a machine, nor
> a machine state, but to a more complex relational structure between
> that states and the set of all possible environment/continuations. The
> Gödelian modalities helps to figure out the structure of those
> relations.

I think the problem is that qualia are not complex, but rather simple.
Pain hurts. Deep blue is introspective. They are the subjective
primitive. In our case they are anthropological gourmet quality, but
they are still the finest grain resolution of human realism possible.
If what you are saying were true, we should expect to resolve more and
more colors as we age as our scope and history of experience expands.

>
> > Qualia serves users, not machines.
>
> But of course both "are machine" with the comp hypothesis.
> With "are machine" in the "yes doctor" quasi operational sense.
> I can accept a sense that the first person is not a machine, but this
> might been confusing.

But what is not explained is the service that qualia could provide for
machines.

>
> > It is insurmountably
> > nonsensical and metaphysical.
>
> You should try to argue for this.

I can't really find anything to argue against though. The idea that
machines can make qualia seems like it comes out of thin air except
without the assumption that we are machines. There doesn't seem to be
any logic supporting it at all to argue against.

>
> > It is to say, it's faster to count to
> > 1000 if the numbers taste like different fruits.
>
> ?

If qualia speeds up processing then flavors+numbers should be faster
than just numbers, but they aren't.

>
>
>
> >> In that case they can discover that they cannot prove
> >> that they have *genuine* qualia. This happens with not so much self-
> >> referential abilities.
>
> > All qualia is genuine. How could it be otherwise?
>
> A zombie talking about its feeling of the color red, would talk about
> a non genuine qualia. With non-comp, zombie makes sense.

It's not qualia though, it's just words that you can choose to
interpret indirectly as qualia or not. Qualia are only experience
first hand, and so cannot be non genuine.

>
>
>
> >>>>> I know that you believe in comp.
>
> >>>> Then you are wrong. I am agnostic on this. As I should be: no
> >>>> correct
> >>>> machine believes in comp (nor in non-comp). We just cannot know.
> >>>> That
> >>>> is why I insist that we need some act of faith to say "yes" to the
> >>>> doctor. That is why I insist that it is a theology, and that we are
> >>>> forced to accept that people thinks differently.
>
> >>> The way I've found to get beyond that is through sense. Sense
> >>> bridges
> >>> the gap and connects the dots. It says to us, you cannot know, but
> >>> yet, it seems like you do, and that has to be good enough. Does it
> >>> seem like the universe is mechanistic and arithmetic?
>
> >> By UDA, reality is not WYSIWYG. What we see is a reflect of something
> >> bigger, like arithmetical truth. This contains the many non
> >> arithmetical properties leading to person, consciousness, matter,
> >> etc.
>
> > How do numbers 'see'?
>
> By having relation with itself semblable to a dreaming robot.

What is the difference between how they see and how they hear? Do they
have the same senses as we do or infinitely more?
I don't take it for granted, I only propose that it's a plausible
creation story. A single everythingness-nothingness that is diffracted
through the sense of symmetry into a multiplicity of somethingness.

>
> > which multiplies/divides itself spatially and
> > temporally.
>
> Nor this.
>
> > Each division entails inherent input-outputs to the other
> > parts and the whole. It's subtractive and implicit, like a spectrum. A
> > prism does not have to illustrate each hue of the spectrum
> > mechanically and digitally, it just exposes the optical sense that is
> > already inherent in white light.
>
> Sense is inherent in light?
> How? What would that mean?

It means that light is a perceptual experience made of image qualia
like color, contrast, brightness, image, motion, form, beauty, etc.
The visible spectrum is one way of essentializing those qualia. Once
you set aside the assumption that light (and heat, motion, energy) is
a substance, we can see that vision is a channel of sensitivity to
those qualia and nothing more. It's like McLuhan, the medium is the
message. In this case, the sense is the sensation. The spectrum
directly exposes the principles of visual-optical sensation. When you
cut your finger it bleeds. When you cut white light, you expose the
sequence and color within it.

>
>
>
> >>> But you are sidetracking my point:
>
> >>> **Things may not need to run a program to be what they already
> >>> are.**
>
> >> I agree. We don't need to implement arithmetic for it being true, for
> >> example.
>
> > Right. Or for truth to be truth.
>
> >>> *It is programs which need things to become what they are not.*
>
> >> But they usually belong to complex histories/computations which
> >> provide them with many things. Indeed, a priori, too much things (the
> >> white rabbit problems).
>
> > Whatever histories they are part of needs to be fully explicated and
> > projected onto whatever is executing them. The microprocessor never
> > 'learns' the operating system, each structure must be recursively and
> > discretely enacted. Nothing is elided unless it is synthetically
> > condensed with a compression algorithm or something. The hardware
> > doesn't learn or grow in a machine. In a brain/mind it does.
>
> How. If you can really answer that question, I will be able to tell if
> this already happens in Numberland, or not. So we might see if your
> theory is comp-compatible or not.

The mind is native and organic to the brain. The two are opposite
sides of the same coin. In a mechanism you have two separate coins -
one which is native and organic to the structure (electronic
semiconductors stop, start, and detect the stopping and starting of
electric current, steam engines stop, start, and detect currents of
pressurized water vapor, etc) and one which is alien and a-signifying
to the structure (program logic, industrial process, etc). The mind
grows and learns because it is the sensorimotive receiver-transmitter
of an organ which has been evolutionarily intensified for the
development and concentration of sensorimotive capacity. The brain is
a meta-organism optimized for sensemaking. A machine is an artifact of
assembled components which are relatively senseless on their own but
which can extend our sensemaking in conjunction. On it's own, there is
no sensemaking beyond the most literal physical level.

>
>
>
> >>> This bit of common (universal) sense is what your view seems to be
> >>> missing or hiding or denying. The result is a perfectly logical
> >>> theory
> >>> of an anti-cosmos in which intangible programs simulate thingness to
> >>> achieve irrelevant tangibility as a meaningless side effect. If you
> >>> can just turn it inside out, you will see that we participate in a
> >>> real universe directly,
>
> >> The old Chinese-Indian-Greek dream argument makes me already doubting
> >> we can see a real universe directly. We see what our brains succeed
> >> to
> >> filter and represent.
>
> > Think of it not as filtered or represented but condensed and
> > presented. We are directly presented with a real human world,
>
> That's your assumption, belief, or theorem. It would be nice if you
> could be clearer on your assumptions.
> You are perhaps lucky to talk with a logician, but logician likes when
> you distinguish clearly what you assume, and what you derive.

What is assumed is a split in our experience between external
realities and internal realities in which the two realities overlap
precisely in some ways and diverge sharply and symmetrically in other
ways. In other words, the split itself is also split so that it is a
monism on both extremes and dualistic in the middle. This way interior
and exterior are the same thing in the profound or essential sense,
and the opposite thing in the pedestrian or existential sense. This
means that at any point along this continuum (the multisense
continuum), the sense proximal to the point is privileged as most
real, and the point opposite is disqualified as epiphenomenon.

The idea of filtering or representation arises from privileging the
exterior-occidental monism perspective exclusively, so that qualia is
nothing but the function of identifying parts of the outside world
which is assumed to be unquestionably real. The opposite perspective
is the interior-oriental monism which holds that it is the outside
world which is an illusion (maya, shadow) and our spiritual journey
which is real.

The recognition of the reality and unreality of every point and
perspective along this continuum is what inspires the hypothesis that
what our perceptions are made of is the exact same thing that the rest
of the cosmos is made of, it only seems different because they belong
to us. No point on the continuum serves to only to represent or
support another point, it is the sense and symmetry of the continuum
as a whole which are embodied and reflected by points. This continuum
of multiple senses is what we call reality.

>
> > which is
> > condensed from the real worlds our dozens of organs, trillions of
>
> You should better avoid the use of the word "real". Given that our
> discussion is precisely on what is real, or on what is primitively real.

concrete? non-abstract? energetic? direct? presented?

>
> > cells, (x)tillions of molecules which are literally within us, as well
> > as it is influenced by our fractional participation in the worlds
> > which exist without us - our social group, civilization, species,
> > biosphere, planet, solar system, galaxy, cosmos.
>
> All those terms make sense. But they do not denote anything
> primitively real.

They don't have to be primitively real, but they are the forms that
are real relative to our perceptual frame. What is a cell to us might
be the equivalent of a planet to the molecules that make up a cell.

> I argue that if we assume digital mechanism, all that emerges from a,
> mathematically complex and counter-intuitive self-referential
> properties of universal 'numbers.

To which I say that numbers emerge from counting, which is a rhythmic
sense and motive.

>
> All what I say is that if we assume comp we get automatically a "many-
> worlds interpretation, made by universal numbers, of arithmetic. With
> two main parts, the communicable and the non communicable.

I think that's almost right, except I think that numbers are only an
aspect of the sense of bodies, not a cause of bodies or sense. With a
sense monism, any number of worlds can exist within the singularity,
but they all ultimately make the same sense also. All worlds are
ultimately part of the same world, so that nothing gets orphaned
forever and nonsense universes don't exist.

>
>
>
> >>> and that ideas cannot embody things on their
> >>> own.
>
> >> That's true, but ideas can embody the idea that things can own
> >> bodies.
>
> > Not actual bodies, only ideal bodies.
>
> Actual bodies are relative ideal bodies seen from inside. Bodies are
> experience type, not primitively material token, in the comp theory
> (when well understood).

It has some things going for it - out of body experiences, multiple
personality disorders having physiological effects, reincarnation,
ghosts etc, but even if credible, these are not the norm. Their
association with the incredible and uncredible however makes me
categorize them as experiential artifacts close to the interior-
oriental extreme...the vanishing point at which the autobiographical
narrative begins to super-signify and diffract (ACME = Anything Can
Mean Everything).

I would expect a world of avatar impersonations to be much lighter and
looser than the world we live in and physical conditions should not
have such a powerful effect on us. For instance, we discover a drug
like opium, and even after thousands of years, the drug still has an
effect on every living person's body, regardless of experience type.
That substance is active for humans and other animals regardless of
experience type. It's effects can be blocked or amplified by other
substances but not by words or incantations.

I agree that bodies are ideal on the inside and physical on the
outside, but I think that both sides are causally efficacious. The
physical side's form of causality is consequence, entropy, and
teleonomy, while the ideal side is sequence, significance, and
teleology.

>
> > My mind doesn't have the first
> > clue how to embody by own body. If I want to stand up, I can only say
> > that I do stand up, not that I provide or process any information that
> > results in a result of 'the body' standing.
>
> You will not ask a email application to explain how they function at a
> low level.

An email application can't explain any function of anything. We can
though. I would not assume that if an email application had our
awareness that it could not explain how it functions.

>
> You might be a dreaming butterfly.

If I never find out that I am, then I am no more a dreaming butterfly
than a waking human.

>
> > My perception is not that
> > I am commanding my body to execute a standing program, but that I am
> > directly standing myself - it costs me effort personally so that I
> > don't want to keep standing all day.
>
> Please take a seat.

Permane ser sentados por favor.

>
> To be able to seat without doing too much effort, and "directly" is
> made possible by collection of amoebas who got the cable, and about
> (x)tillions of phone communications. I know you agree with that
> because you asserts that our consciousness is somehow related of
> their consciousness (is it a sum? what is the function?).

I don't think the amoebas get a cable, I think their behavior is the
embodiment of the cable itself on the body's microcosmic level. Our
experience of sitting down is the same cable but on the macrocosmic
level of our body as a whole.

You are trying to tie it back to a linear mechanism (a summing or
function), but it isn't - no more than white is a summing or function
of the visible spectrum. It's a figurative diffraction across multiple
scales of nested awareness. We feel that we are sitting down. Our
tissues and cells and molecules feel different things. We think that
our tissues and cells feel nothing but only send and receive signals,
but that's only because our awareness is nested so far inward and
upward that we see their world in 'black and white' - qualitatively
desaturated (= generically quantitative.)

> But the higher level of the human person, is indeed a quite
> sophisticate higher level function. We can't think for our cells, nor
> can we know the complex molecular phenomena, except by making theories
> and observations, and reading books, etc.
> Now, what everybody try to tell you is that, all levels having lawful
> description in nature are computable, so that your theory just look
> argument for a low comp substitution level. If not, you invoke a
> particular non computable, and non Turing recoverable by first person
> indeterminacy, and we might be interested in knowing which one.

I'm only invoking our own awareness in micro. The assumption that
because we can only know our cells and molecules through knowledge,
and that knowledge is computable, then we must also as agglomerations
of cells and molecules be computable. The reason this is incorrect is
because the same assumption directed toward other people and animals
would be that they are only what their body is and how it behaves. We
know this is not true because we can see that we ourselves cannot be
known by observing our body from the outside. We also know that we
cannot feel our own cells and neurons, so that what we are, as the
interior of a human body's nervous system may not reduce to the
exterior behaviors of the cells and molecules at all, but rather to a
nested awareness of subselves within those structures. This makes
sense since sensorimotive experience scales up qualitatively rather
than just quantitatively, so that more brain cells does not feel like
more brain cells, it feels like more awareness and sense-making of the
world.

>
>
>
> >>> Codes and mechanisms are what real objects do to each other, but
> >>> objects are not codes themselves. They are a chunks of the
> >>> singularity
> >>> with masses and densities.
>
> >> I don't know that.
>
> > That's what they seem like though.
>
> Yes. But that's the key difference.

Why wouldn't codes just seem like codes?

>
> > Programs tend to encounter errors
> > and crash, or encounter latency, pixelation, etc. Matter doesn't ever
> > falter in it's own presentation though. An iron anvil never drops it's
> > gravity pointer and flies through the ceiling spontaneously or changes
> > back and forth from iron to cobalt because the anvil class of programs
> > has a bad line of code.
>
> It just a matter of first person plural probability calculus.

I don't know that. I think it's far more likely that an anvil's
movements can be interpreted as calculus than calculus could or would
turn into an anvil for some reason.

>
>
>
> >>>>> What if the
> >>>>> entire cosmos is a monad; a boundless and implicit firmament
> >>>>> through
> >>>>> which objects and experiences are diffracted? The primordial
> >>>>> dynamic
> >>>>> is not mechanism but stillness and stasis, like a spectrum to a
> >>>>> prism.
>
> >>>> All that is Turing emulable, and doesn't add to the understanding.
>
> >>> A boundless and implicit firmament is Turing emulable?
>
> >> Actually-infinite complex cellular automata might not been Turing
> >> emulable, but they are still Turing recoverable in case such infinite
> >> firmament is necessary for consciousness. So let us reason from comp
> >> and see if an actual infinite firmament is necessary.
> >> If you postulate it exists in some primitive way, you just postulate
> >> an infinitely complex assumption.
>
> > If we start counting from 0, your way makes sense. I start counting
> > from 1, with 0 being the absence of any number so it has to be an
> > afterthought.
>
> I don't understand.

If you want to create a number system from scratch, I would start with
1, since you can take it away and call the absence of 1 zero. If I
start with 0, there is no system. Finding 1 from 0 is not logically
possible. You could just as easily find 4 or 100,000 as the next
number after 0.

>
> > If we start with 0 as the first number, then the second
> > number is no more likely to be 1 than it is to be any number.
>
> In which theory?

In the one I'm describing?

>
> > Beginning with unity and singularity is infinite in the sense that
> > without anything else to relate to it can only be boundless, but it is
> > not infinitely complex, it is infinitely simple. Complexity arises
> > through the fragmentation-division and multiplication-recapitulation
> > of the 1.
>
> Complexity arise from addition and multiplication. With comp, it is
> enough.

What is it that is added and multiplied though?

>
> > I postulate white light which presents each division
> > (diffraction really, as it is not truly divided but revealed like a
> > sliced onion) as a range of color. The color is the diffraction and
> > the diffraction is the color. You could say that all numbers exist
> > inside of 1 and that 0 does not exist but insists as a potential (ie
> > Cantor Set evanescence).
>
> I am afraid this does not make much sense for me.

I'm saying that I suspect that the universe makes more sense if all
numbers add up to 1, not 0, even if it means beginning with that as an
axiom.

>
>
>
> >>>>> Anchored in that stable unity, matter is the more direct
> >>>>> representation of this singularity (ie the many alchemical
> >>>>> references
> >>>>> to 'stone').
>
> >>>> But what is matter?
>
> >>> The discrete diffractions of the monad.
>
> >> Hmm... Why not. But this should be made clear in some context, with
> >> precise definition of discrete (you will need Church thesis, or
> >> topology), monad, and what do you mean by monad diffraction.
>
> > Cool. I'm putting together a new website, trying to improve it and
> > prep for the TSC conference in April. Give it a look if you like, and
> > see if it's any clearer than the old site:http://multisenserealism.com/thesis/
>
> > Monad diffraction is the interior experience of the big bang.
>
> Words like "interior", "experience" and "big bang" are more complex
> and theory dependent than "Monad diffraction".
> It looks like playing with words.

That's because you are thinking of human experience. I don't think the
big bang is more complex than monad diffraction though. I'm only
talking about a singularity of dense mass-energy expanding - except
that the expansion is relative to itself since there is nothing to
expand out into. The expansion is really a diffraction - an induction
of space and time as distance gaps and episodic threading within the
singularity's experience.

>
> > Instead
> > of a fragmentation across space (really an induction of space into the
> > 1), it is the induction of frequency and amplitude (time, energy) into
> > the now. 'Now' is what 1 feels like.
>
> >> The expression might have a sense in the comp theory. In my early
> >> writings I do describe self-observation, under the substitution
> >> level,
> >> as a processes of self-diffraction, putting you into infinities of
> >> computational continuations. Matter is, well not generated, but
> >> recover, through that process. But this is just a way to describe the
> >> first person indeterminacy, and terms like diffraction have physical
> >> (optical) precise meaning, so I keep that for the pause café.
>
> > Right, this is more of a figurative diffraction, especially since
> > there is 'nothing' doing the diffracting (literally, it is 0 which
> > gaps the ÷ of the 1?).
>
> I don't see an atom of sense here. Sorry.

I'm saying that what divides the singularity is only the temporary
absence of itself. 1 is firmament, 0 is temporary and virtual.

>
>
>
> >>> Carved out of the singularity
> >>> using the knife of interior figurative diffraction (feeling/being,
> >>> sequence, significance, time) which is expressed as literal
> >>> diffraction on the exterior (indirect detection, objects, space,
> >>> relativity, topology)
>
> >> Too much sense here. Sorry. You have to find a way to make your
> >> statement more precise if you want to convince a scientist.
>
> > I'm trying to get at the primordial interior-exterior divisions, and
> > how the interior is diffracted one way, using an alphabet of feeling
> > and being through time and the exterior is diffracted the opposite
> > way, using indirect representations of objects across space.
>
> ?

Our experience of space and time are opposites. I'm saying that our
entire interior view of the universe is based on frequency and our
exterior view is based on wavelength. The two meta-topologies are
anomalously symmetrical.

>
>
>
> >>>>> The subjective correlate would be silent and dark void as
> >>>>> well as solar fusion and stellar profusion. This is realism.
>
> >>>> This is imagination.
>
> >>> Imagination is part of realism.
>
> >> At a different level. If you forget this you blur fiction and the
> >> reality we are searching. (Not the reality we would have found).
>
> > There is a level at which fiction and reality are blurred, and a level
> > at which they are rigorously demarcated. Both levels are real as well
> > as the continuum of levels between them. I am calling the former the
> > profound edge and the latter the pedestrian fold (of the multisense
> > continuum).http://multisenserealism.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/label_comp8a.jpg
>
> ?

Not sure how else to explain it. Reality is sense from every
perspective, including the mutually exclusive opposite perspectives..

>
>
>
> >>> It is our experience, but it is
> >>> impossible to emulate mechanically.
>
> >> This looks like non-comp, but it can be derived from comp.
> >> Experience,
> >> consciousness are NOT Turing emulable. Only local bodies, through
> >> which experience can be manifested relatively to experience and
> >> bodies
> >> of other (universal or not) machines.
>
> >> The picture we get is counter-intuitive. It is the price of comp, but
> >> it is natural for Platonists, and comp leads to Platonism, even to
> >> some Neoplatonism à-la Plotinus.
>
> > It's valuable to look at it that way too. My view is counter-intuitive
> > as well, but mainly because our intuition has been numbed by our
> > culture of occidental instrumentalism. We see with our own eyes what
> > happens when we turn on a light, but we disqualify it from
> > consideration because of optics, physics, biology, evolution, blah
> > blah blah.
>
> Yes. It is a tradition to put the mind body problem under the rug.
> My point is that if we take the comp hyp seriously, simple thought
> experience shows how the express it in arithmetical term and axiomatic
> definition, and that it leads to test. Making it scientific in the
> usual academical sense of the term.

How are simple colors expressed in arithmetic though?

>
> > We become disenchanted with our own perception in favor of
> > knowledge about the mechanism associated with it's delivery.
>
> That's the mistake indeed. The beauty is that with the progress in
> machine theory the mistake becomes palpable. That's why I think it is
> interesting to understand that the current materialist theologies are
> not compatible with mechanism.

Which aspects specifically of mechanism are incompatible with
materialism?

>
> > All we
> > have to do is realize that seeing is not just a complex process of
> > billions of discrete particles and 'signals', but it is also a very
> > simple and biologically common non-process.
>
> What do you mean by biological in this context. What makes you think
> that there are no simple biologically common non-processes in
> arithmetic? If they are non computable, why do you want make them non
> Turing 1-recoverable?

I mean that we know our sense of sight is associated with our ocular
biology. I don't see the idea of biology in arithmetic as plausible,
mainly because of the specificity of the materials of biology and the
state of living vs dying. I don't think that arithmetic can die.

>
> The disenchantment is due to the fact that people believe that
> mechanism is the answer.
> But mechanism is the question.
> Provably so once you assume mechanism. That's the beauty of it.

Or it is the tautological tragedy of it?

>
> In the least, it provides a non physical frame, yet widespread, the
> belief in arithmetic, where we can explain where the beliefs in
> physical laws come from (even as qualia), and, the hard part, why they
> are locally self-referentially correct.

I'm all for a non physical vocabulary, and even information science as
long as it isn't the basis for a cosmology.

>
> > Many organisms have eyes,
> > others have antennas, others have cilia. From quorum sensing we can
> > infer that the molecules which make up living bacteria are able to
> > sense molecules of chemicals being produced by other bacteria. How do
> > we know this is not a form of seeing or tasting?
>
> I bet it is a form of seeing or tasting.
>
> Cells are already universal, and I can attribute them consciousness,
> and I might think that "me" needs the level of "physics" around the
> Heisenberg uncertainty, to say "yes" to the doctor. But this is for
> surviving in the closest sense of being "me" in the very long turn.
> "We" can survive, but lost things, at higher level too, and this leads
> to the question who are we, personal identity, etc.
>
> I am OK with consciousness on some scale, or even perhaps non
> temporal, for very simple entities. Indeed I can attribute
> consciousness to any universal arithmetical relation. I think self-
> consciousness begins with Löbianity, and this leads only to more
> questions for them.
>
> Mechanism, well understood, is antireductionist for all universal
> numbers. It is as much a re-enchantment as a promise for infinities of
> mess. Universal machines oscillates between freedom and security, they
> want both, but there are local tradeoff. With security you loose
> universality, and with freedom you crash from time to times.
>

I think of computation like a lattice through which we can extend our
own neurological sensemaking. The lattice is real, but it's not doing
anything by itself.

Craig

Bruno Marchal

unread,
Jan 27, 2012, 4:38:17 PM1/27/12
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
On 24 Jan 2012, at 23:39, Craig Weinberg wrote:

On Jan 23, 2:12 pm, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
On 23 Jan 2012, at 14:01, Craig Weinberg wrote:

Part I...I'll have to get back to this later for Part II

On Jan 21, 4:32 pm, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
Craig,

I assume comp all along.

Then why say that you are agnostic about comp?

If I was knowing that comp is true, or if I was a believer in comp, I
would not have to assume it.
I study the consequence of the comp *hypothesis*. Unlike philosophers
I never argue for the truth of comp, nor for the falsity of comp. But
as a logician I can debunk invalid refutation of comp. This does not
mean that comp is true for me.
During the Iraq war I have invalidated many reasoning against that
war, but I was not defending it. There were other arguments which were
valid.
But I realize some people lacked that nuance. Just for this modal
logic is very useful, because it is the difference between the
agnostic (~Bg) and the "atheist" (B~g).
When doing science, it is better to hide our personal beliefs, and to
abstract from them.


Okay. I thought by 'I assume comp all along' you meant that you
personally assume it is true.

Theories = axioms = postulates = hypothesis = proposition on which we agree for the sake of searching truth.

Some (old) scientists happens sometimes to believe that their theory are true, but that's Alzheimer. Some scientist beliefs they know the truth in the branch of their colleagues, but that's ignorance. 

In science we don't know any truth capable of being 3p communicated, even if 99,9% of the scientists can agree on some very plausible truth (like the irrationality of the sqrt(2), or even like the stability of some patterns "out there"). 

A theory, and its interpretation(s) is only a tool to shed light on what is essentially unknown.

That is why we are not on the same length wave. You still argue for the truth of falsity of comp, when I try only to make it clearer and show that it might be refutable (and thus is scientific in Popper sense).
Perhaps the ability of doing something neither random nor determinist, which could indeed make free-will inexistant.

For me, free-will is a generalization of responsibility. You need free-will to be responsible, but you don't need to be responsible to have free-will. Free-will is the ability to make higher level personal decision in absence of complete information. It is enhanced by consciousness, and can lead to conscience.



I'm just talking about the ordinary difference
between feeling that you are doing something because you are doing it
as opposed to feeling that something is happening through no voluntary
action on your part. How do you know that Löbian machines have
awareness? Or are they defined that way a priori?


The reason I think that simple Löbian machine are conscious is that I recognize already myself.
They have a rich theology, and can teach us a lot of surprising thing, including about the 3p and 1p gaps, quanta and qualia, and the mystery of existence.
I don't think that they are zombies, that's all.
Today, they have not yet concrete relative bodies, except mathematician's brain and books. So I can understand that it does not seem obvious how deep they run.








Why do we never see it manifested in
our ordinary use of numbers?

With the computer and AI enterprise, you can see the embryonic
development of this.

It's only embryonic if it develops into a fetus. At this point it
appears to be developing into a purely human distribution system for
gossip and porn instead.

OK. But that is contingent of humans. I really don't know if
"artificial machine" will become intelligent thanks to the willingness
humans, despite the humans, or thanks to the unwillingness of humans.



You can also interpret, like Jon Clark did, the DNA as number, coded
in the chemistry of carbon, so that we can see it all around.
We don't see it in the usual use of little numbers, because it is not
there. The relations are either too poor, or not exploited enough.

Don't all relations have to arise ultimately from the usual use of
little numbers?

Not really. Everything concerning matter and consciousness comes from
an interplay between little numbers, and many big numbers. This comes
from the UDA, which explains that the inside view is somehow a
projection of the whole arithmetical truth.

In my language, 'projection of the whole arithmetical truth' =
diffraction of the primordial monad.

?



This leads to something counter-intuitive, but not contradictory. the
big picture conceived from outside is not so big (it is the whole of
just arithmetic). But from inside it is provably bigger than any
formal approximation of the whole of math. It is *very* big. Note that
arithmetical truth is also bigger by itself than we thought before
Gödel. It is already not axiomatisable. There are no effective
theories of numberland.

Wouldn't numbers+names land be even bigger?

No. Unless you admit incompressible infinite actual names.






Anyway, you are not convincing by pointing on everyday example, when
talking to a theoretician.

If the theory doesn't apply to reality, then I have no problem with
it. Fantasy sports are not my area of interest. It's only if it
conflicts with my ideas of realism that I would be curious.

Realism of what?

Of experience.

Well, at least we share this.



If comp is true, it has to apply on reality.

Why? Maybe comp only applies to comp reality. Just because such a
reality can be imposed on some material forms (but not all material
forms, as I try to point out) doesn't mean that our way of imagining
that reality is the same as how it is received at the target level.


Sure. But the idea is to start with a theory that everudbody can understand, and then, if it fails, everybody will progress. You cannot put the mystery like "sense", "matter" in the theory at the start, because those things are what we want to explain. So we cannot assume them, but still hope to derive them from simpler, or to meta-derive them, etc.




That's why UDA makes comp
a testable hypothesis.
I assume comp, derive consequences which are observable, and so we can
make test.
It gives also a unification of qualia and quanta, consciousness and
matter. It might be that even false, it will remain interesting as an
example of theory. It might help to weaken comp to get the correct
picture.
To be sure the testable part requires not just comp, but also the
classical theory of knowledge.

Yes, it definitely will remain interesting, and is more functionally
useful than my sense model, but the sense model is the one that is
more universally explanatory.

Because you put the universal mystery in the assumption.







Generally the point of counting is to
establish a deterministic quantitative relation.. that's sort of
what
counting is? If the numbers themselves made choices, then why should
we consider counting a reliable epistemology?

Counting use only the succession laws. The universal mess comes from
the mixture of addition and multiplication, as the prime numbers
already illustrates by their logarithmic "random" distribution.
Your question is a bit like "if criminals are made of chemical
reactions, should we continue to rely on chemistry?".

Are you saying then choice making is an emergent property of certain
mixed arithmetic modes only and not inherent in numbers then?

Yes. The numbers plays a role only through their additive and
multiplicative structures, and to the relations, which includes the
computable one, you can define from this.

I think it makes more sense to see choice as an inherent potential of
nesting of awareness. The more that mechanical duties are offloaded to
subsystems the more sensorimotive interiority can develop in a
protected environment.

?


In a universe of simple awareness, there is
only primitive sense detection and motive response. The effect of
having sense organs or nervous systems is to recapitulate the organism
within the organism, allowing a subjective experience of increased
depth of 'now' relative to a less elaborated organism. Human
consciousness is rich, slow roasted, gourmet qualia.

OK.  (but not as an argument agaionst comp).



Inorganic matter
has fast food qualia.

You are insulting inorganic matter. And matter has no qualia. Person or living entities have qualia. relative numbers have qualia.



The difference is achieved through
simplification and condensation, not complexity. Complexity is the
back end.

?
Room for all machines dreams, and room for all consistent machine's dream relative realizations.





If that were the case a
person should be able to learn to see visual qualia with other sense
organs.

You might provide an argument. Only the brain, and some nerves
concentrations behaves in a way making them able to use the modal
(qualitative) relations between numbers.

How do you know that nerves are required?

They are required because their existence is implied by the relative stability of consciousness when entangled to a deep computation.



They may be required for us
to make sense (although blindsight suggests even that is not the case)
but they are not necessarily required for worms or protozoa.

A protozoa is a highly complex and elaborate cells with many biochemical and biophysical information pathways. 

A unicellular is a stomach, a skin, a lung, a liver, a muscle, and a neuron all at once. They have not voted for the division of work, and they have as much succeeded as us, in the exploration of the planet. 
I don't think they are Löbian, but I can prove that they are Turing universal. It is an open problem if they are conscious, perhaps in a trivial sense, or not. Löbianity begins, I think, with the spiders and octopi. Before I did conjecture that the Löbian animals are the homeotherm animals, or all the animals which dreams, or can dream. Not certainty, but still. What is common is the cognitive ability to reflect on their own anticipation, making them aware of "?". 





High resolution greyscale images should turn into color.

relatively to which person and which brain?

To anyone who can see color.

OK then.





I
have not seen anything that suggests to me that qualia would or could
speed recollection either. To the contrary, it would be an additional
abstraction layer with significant resource overhead. If what you say
were true, computers would not need graphics accelerator cards, rather
they would need accelerator cards if graphics were not available to
speed up computation. I really can't see any credible argument against
this.

You point on the hard part of the consciousness problem. What I can
show is that machines observing themselves cannot avoid this too.
Eventually it is part of a Löbian machine to tell you "believe it or
not, but I am not a zombie, I can't prove this too you, but I know it
in my bones".
The difficulty is that the qualia are not associated to a machine, nor
a machine state, but to a more complex relational structure between
that states and the set of all possible environment/continuations. The
Gödelian modalities helps to figure out the structure of those
relations.

I think the problem is that qualia are not complex, but rather simple.

I agree. In the sense they obey simples laws. But they are conceptually rather subtle. Some people takes time to even understand what others mean by qualia (as opposed to utterly transparent sharing of quanta).
They do have "meta-axioms", like, they are not communicable, they have semantics in term of perception fields integration, spatio-temporal in the mental (Kant?) or ideal sense of the term. 
Here, the classical logic of knowledge is derived from Theaetetus definition of knowledge (true belief) with belief being equated with what the machine asserts. The key is to limit oneself on the study of self-referentially correct machine, believing in elementary arithmetic. 





Pain hurts.

Well, this is tautological.




Deep blue is introspective.

Hmm... OK.



They are the subjective
primitive.

I think the contrary, they are more like doors to unknown. They are modalities of the exploration of the mindscape. They modularize our apprehension of tuns of information, they simplify very hard task making us feeling they are simple and primitive, but they are not. Both the logical comp, and the biological data suggest that qualia needs some amount of complex cycling relative computational transformation (like cycling neural nets). The qualia are natural construct for self-referential numbers, and it helps them a lot in the everyday life, relatively to the possible others universal numbers in the neighborhood.
Like consciousness they provide a self-acceleration in the computing power. The price: they are not communicable.
But as far as we can recognize ourself in others, we can share that part through art, music, movies, novels, etc.


In our case they are anthropological gourmet quality,

Sure.



but
they are still the finest grain resolution of human realism possible.
If what you are saying were true, we should expect to resolve more and
more colors as we age as our scope and history of experience expands.

Sorry but this does not follow. Now, if you practice any entheogeny, (church, mushrooms, dreams, whatever), that might well be the case, because you can artificially explore qualia changes, and consciousness through many sort of experiences, and learn through age. But with art and research too, it is relative. 
As numbering the sorts of qualia, perhaps, here too, like in physics, we can try theories, comp theories, and variate study of subjective reports.






Qualia serves users, not machines.

But of course both "are machine" with the comp hypothesis.
With "are machine" in the "yes doctor" quasi operational sense.
I can accept a sense that the first person is not a machine, but this
might been confusing.

But what is not explained is the service that qualia could provide for
machines.

Oh! Try to type on your computer without qualia.

Animals have developed the capacity to handle huge amount of data in "real time", which makes sense for a self-moving entity. Qualia lives, in normal circumstances, at the intersection of truth, and an efficacious summary of the huge information in a consistent scenario, with a hero. 







It is insurmountably
nonsensical and metaphysical.

You should try to argue for this.

I can't really find anything to argue against though. The idea that
machines can make qualia seems like it comes out of thin air except
without the assumption that we are machines. There doesn't seem to be
any logic supporting it at all to argue against.

On the contrary. Some people have use Gödel's incompleteness theorem to argue that man is not a machine. But Gödel's second incompleteness is the answer *by* the machine, to that argument. 

To talk frankly I think that you reduce the person to its physical body. But assuming comp, and recognizing consciousness, changes the picture. 

Machine cannot "make" qualia. 
It is more like self-referential machine cannot avoid qualia.





It is to say, it's faster to count to
1000 if the numbers taste like different fruits.

?

If qualia speeds up processing then flavors+numbers should be faster
than just numbers, but they aren't.

Flavors+numbers are faster than just numbers, especially to test wine of food. The qualia role is to make you understand *quickly* if you should retrieve it for your mouth with disgust and drink water, or  smile or something.








In that case they can discover that they cannot prove
that they have *genuine* qualia. This happens with not so much self-
referential abilities.

All qualia is genuine. How could it be otherwise?

A zombie talking about its feeling of the color red, would talk about
a non genuine qualia. With non-comp, zombie makes sense.

It's not qualia though, it's just words that you can choose to
interpret indirectly as qualia or not. Qualia are only experience
first hand, and so cannot be non genuine.

Of course. If not, zombie would attribute sense to what they call qualia. Which would be a non sense.
Yes, I think we agree on this, qualia are real. 
But that's why the qualia on which the zombie can talk about can be said non genuine.
Once zombie exists they can talk about qualia, like you and me, but of course they don't mean them, by definition. 









I know that you believe in comp.

Then you are wrong. I am agnostic on this. As I should be: no
correct
machine believes in comp (nor in non-comp). We just cannot know.
That
is why I insist that we need some act of faith to say "yes" to the
doctor. That is why I insist that it is a theology, and that we are
forced to accept that people thinks differently.

The way I've found to get beyond that is through sense. Sense
bridges
the gap and connects the dots. It says to us, you cannot know, but
yet, it seems like you do, and that has to be good enough. Does it
seem like the universe is mechanistic and arithmetic?

By UDA, reality is not WYSIWYG. What we see is a reflect of something
bigger, like arithmetical truth. This contains the many non
arithmetical properties leading to person, consciousness, matter,
etc.

How do numbers 'see'?

By having relation with itself semblable to a dreaming robot.

What is the difference between how they see and how they hear? Do they
have the same senses as we do or infinitely more?

Probably infinitely more. 
Humans have a long deep history.
Hand made human machines have a much shorter history, yet they evolve more quickly than anything ever evolving on this planet. Universal Numbers (like Fortran, LISP, prolog, Conway game, fractran, lambda terms, combinators, numbers+*) are creative bombs.
Give me the equation.
And the type of variable.
(Here I can only make too much sense of what you say).





which multiplies/divides itself spatially and
temporally.

Nor this.

Each division entails inherent input-outputs to the other
parts and the whole. It's subtractive and implicit, like a spectrum. A
prism does not have to illustrate each hue of the spectrum
mechanically and digitally, it just exposes the optical sense that is
already inherent in white light.

Sense is inherent in light?
How? What would that mean?

It means that light is a perceptual experience made of image qualia
like color, contrast, brightness, image, motion, form, beauty, etc.

Better to be clear if you talk about light = the physical phenomenon, and light = the human qualia related to it. 
 I agree, sense is inherent in the light-the-qualia.




The visible spectrum is one way of essentializing those qualia. Once
you set aside the assumption that light (and heat, motion, energy) is
a substance, we can see that vision is a channel of sensitivity to
those qualia and nothing more.

From the first person perspective.



It's like McLuhan, the medium is the
message.

That leads to the confusion of the finger and the moon. Better to bet on sense beyond the medium.


In this case, the sense is the sensation. The spectrum
directly exposes the principles of visual-optical sensation. When you
cut your finger it bleeds. When you cut white light, you expose the
sequence and color within it.

?








But you are sidetracking my point:

**Things may not need to run a program to be what they already
are.**

I agree. We don't need to implement arithmetic for it being true, for
example.

Right. Or for truth to be truth.

*It is programs which need things to become what they are not.*

But they usually belong to complex histories/computations which
provide them with many things. Indeed, a priori, too much things (the
white rabbit problems).

Whatever histories they are part of needs to be fully explicated and
projected onto whatever is executing them. The microprocessor never
'learns' the operating system, each structure must be recursively and
discretely enacted. Nothing is elided unless it is synthetically
condensed with a compression algorithm or something. The hardware
doesn't learn or grow in a machine. In a brain/mind it does.

How. If you can really answer that question, I will be able to tell if
this already happens in Numberland, or not. So we might see if your
theory is comp-compatible or not.

The mind is native and organic to the brain.

The brain is native and organic to the mind. (I would argue, in the comp theory). 




The two are opposite
sides of the same coin.

You can't know that. You are the one who say no to the doctor, and avoids the consequence of the yes.
The arithmetical image is more like the physics is the surface of the ocean, and mind is the ocean.




In a mechanism you have two separate coins -
one which is native and organic to the structure (electronic
semiconductors stop, start, and detect the stopping and starting of
electric current, steam engines stop, start, and detect currents of
pressurized water vapor, etc) and one which is alien and a-signifying
to the structure (program logic, industrial process, etc). The mind
grows and learns because it is the sensorimotive receiver-transmitter
of an organ which has been evolutionarily intensified for the
development and concentration of sensorimotive capacity. The brain is
a meta-organism optimized for sensemaking. A machine is an artifact of
assembled components which are relatively senseless on their own but
which can extend our sensemaking in conjunction. On it's own, there is
no sensemaking beyond the most literal physical level.

Literal physical level? Quanta or qualia? Again I can find many sense of what you say in the comp context.






This bit of common (universal) sense is what your view seems to be
missing or hiding or denying. The result is a perfectly logical
theory
of an anti-cosmos in which intangible programs simulate thingness to
achieve irrelevant tangibility as a meaningless side effect. If you
can just turn it inside out, you will see that we participate in a
real universe directly,

The old Chinese-Indian-Greek dream argument makes me already doubting
we can see a real universe directly. We see what our brains succeed
to
filter and represent.

Think of it not as filtered or represented but condensed and
presented. We are directly presented with a real human world,

That's your assumption, belief, or theorem. It would be nice if you
could be clearer on your assumptions.
You are perhaps lucky to talk with a logician, but logician likes when
you distinguish clearly what you assume, and what you derive.

What is assumed is a split in our experience between external
realities and internal realities in which the two realities overlap
precisely in some ways and diverge sharply and symmetrically in other
ways.

?



In other words, the split itself is also split so that it is a
monism on both extremes and dualistic in the middle. This way interior
and exterior are the same thing in the profound or essential sense,
and the opposite thing in the pedestrian or existential sense. This
means that at any point along this continuum (the multisense
continuum), the sense proximal to the point is privileged as most
real, and the point opposite is disqualified as epiphenomenon.

The idea of filtering or representation arises from privileging the
exterior-occidental monism perspective exclusively, so that qualia is
nothing but the function of identifying parts of the outside world
which is assumed to be unquestionably real. The opposite perspective
is the interior-oriental monism which holds that it is the outside
world which is an illusion (maya, shadow) and our spiritual journey
which is real.

The recognition of the reality and unreality of every point and
perspective along this continuum is what inspires the hypothesis that
what our perceptions are made of is the exact same thing that the rest
of the cosmos is made of, it only seems different because they belong
to us. No point on the continuum serves to only to represent or
support another point, it is the sense and symmetry of the continuum
as a whole which are embodied and reflected by points. This continuum
of multiple senses is what we call reality.


?




which is
condensed from the real worlds our dozens of organs, trillions of

You should better avoid the use of the word "real". Given that our
discussion is precisely on what is real, or on what is primitively real.

concrete? non-abstract? energetic? direct? presented?

I was more thinking about "assumed".

When you say "direct", I can agree that qualia are felt as primitively real, and are subjectively real. But concrete means the opposite, like the concrete for buildings, what people take as primitively substantial and "real". 





cells, (x)tillions of molecules which are literally within us, as well
as it is influenced by our fractional participation in the worlds
which exist without us - our social group, civilization, species,
biosphere, planet, solar system, galaxy, cosmos.

All those terms make sense. But they do not denote anything
primitively real.

They don't have to be primitively real, but they are the forms that
are real relative to our perceptual frame.

In what?



What is a cell to us might
be the equivalent of a planet to the molecules that make up a cell.

OK. But it is not an isomorphism. 




Actual bodies are relative ideal bodies seen from inside. Bodies are
experience type, not primitively material token, in the comp theory
(when well understood).

It has some things going for it - out of body experiences, multiple
personality disorders having physiological effects, reincarnation,
ghosts etc, but even if credible, these are not the norm. Their
association with the incredible and uncredible however makes me
categorize them as experiential artifacts close to the interior-
oriental extreme...the vanishing point at which the autobiographical
narrative begins to super-signify and diffract (ACME = Anything Can
Mean Everything).

ACME looks like 0 = 1, to me. Things are not that simple.



I would expect a world of avatar impersonations to be much lighter and
looser than the world we live in and physical conditions should not
have such a powerful effect on us. For instance, we discover a drug
like opium, and even after thousands of years, the drug still has an
effect on every living person's body, regardless of experience type.
That substance is active for humans and other animals regardless of
experience type. It's effects can be blocked or amplified by other
substances but not by words or incantations.

I agree that bodies are ideal on the inside and physical on the
outside, but I think that both sides are causally efficacious. The
physical side's form of causality is consequence, entropy, and
teleonomy, while the ideal side is sequence, significance, and
teleology.

Perhaps.




My mind doesn't have the first
clue how to embody by own body. If I want to stand up, I can only say
that I do stand up, not that I provide or process any information that
results in a result of 'the body' standing.

You will not ask a email application to explain how they function at a
low level.

An email application can't explain any function of anything.

You must click on 'help'.



We can
though. I would not assume that if an email application had our
awareness that it could not explain how it functions.

At which level of explanation? 






You might be a dreaming butterfly.

If I never find out that I am, then I am no more a dreaming butterfly
than a waking human.

You can bet on relative partial control, and relative awakenings.







My perception is not that
I am commanding my body to execute a standing program, but that I am
directly standing myself - it costs me effort personally so that I
don't want to keep standing all day.

Please take a seat.

Permane ser sentados por favor.


To be able to seat without doing too much effort, and "directly" is
made possible by collection of amoebas who got the cable, and about
(x)tillions of phone communications. I know you agree with that
because you asserts that our consciousness is  somehow related of
their consciousness (is it a sum? what is the function?).

I don't think the amoebas get a cable, I think their behavior is the
embodiment of the cable itself on the body's microcosmic level. Our
experience of sitting down is the same cable but on the macrocosmic
level of our body as a whole.

You are trying to tie it back to a linear mechanism (a summing or
function), but it isn't - no more than white is a summing or function
of the visible spectrum.

The image illustrate a recurrent pattern, like your cells viewed by a molecule. Those are image/analogy.





It's a figurative diffraction across multiple
scales of nested awareness.

I will ask you to formalize this in first order logical theory, or in term of some other first logical theory.
You have to follow some course for doing that, I guess.




We feel that we are sitting down. Our
tissues and cells and molecules feel different things. We think that
our tissues and cells feel nothing but only send and receive signals,

I don't think that, and it is unrelated a priori from the assumptions.



but that's only because our awareness is nested so far inward and
upward that we see their world in 'black and white' - qualitatively
desaturated (= generically quantitative.)

We have not solve the mind body problem. Scientist are normally neutral on this. The other's consciousness is an old very complex problem related to consciousness.

But then why do you attribute "black and white" zombie-like being to the universal numbers? 




But the higher level of the human person, is indeed a quite
sophisticate higher level function. We can't think for our cells, nor
can we know the complex molecular phenomena, except by making theories
and observations, and reading books, etc.
Now, what everybody try to tell you is that, all levels having lawful
description in nature are computable, so that your theory just look
argument for a low comp substitution level. If not, you invoke a
particular non computable, and non Turing recoverable by first person
indeterminacy, and we might be interested in knowing which one.

I'm only invoking our own awareness in micro. The assumption that
because we can only know our cells and molecules through knowledge,
and that knowledge is computable, then we must also as agglomerations
of cells and molecules be computable. The reason this is incorrect is
because the same assumption directed toward other people and animals
would be that they are only what their body is and how it behaves. We
know this is not true because we can see that we ourselves cannot be
known by observing our body from the outside. We also know that we
cannot feel our own cells and neurons, so that what we are, as the
interior of a human body's nervous system may not reduce to the
exterior behaviors of the cells and molecules at all, but rather to a
nested awareness of subselves within those structures.

You might be right, but there are evidences, at different levels, that the 3-relation are locally Turing emulable.
To postulate non Turing emulability at the start hides the "natural" non turing emulability of the 1p person and its 1-relations. 



This makes
sense since sensorimotive experience scales up qualitatively rather
than just quantitatively, so that more brain cells does not feel like
more brain cells, it feels like more awareness and sense-making of the
world.

Well the software of computer scales qualitatively too. 
You are using sensorimotive as a speculation that consciousness scales down infinitely escaping all possible digital local explanation.
You confuse the person for its clothe. 







Codes and mechanisms are what real objects do to each other, but
objects are not codes themselves. They are a chunks of the
singularity
with masses and densities.

I don't know that.

That's what they seem like though.

Yes. But that's the key difference.

Why wouldn't codes just seem like codes?

Because they dream.






Programs tend to encounter errors
and crash, or encounter latency, pixelation, etc. Matter doesn't ever
falter in it's own presentation though. An iron anvil never drops it's
gravity pointer and flies through the ceiling spontaneously or changes
back and forth from iron to cobalt because the anvil class of programs
has a bad line of code.

It just a matter of first person plural probability calculus.

I don't know that.

UDA is supposed to prove this. 



I think it's far more likely that an anvil's
movements can be interpreted as calculus than calculus could or would
turn into an anvil for some reason.

That is not what happen. 








What if the
entire cosmos is a monad; a boundless and implicit firmament
through
which objects and experiences are diffracted? The primordial
dynamic
is not mechanism but stillness and stasis, like a spectrum to a
prism.

All that is Turing emulable, and doesn't add to the understanding.

A boundless and implicit firmament is Turing emulable?

Actually-infinite complex cellular automata might not been Turing
emulable, but they are still Turing recoverable in case such infinite
firmament is necessary for consciousness. So let us reason from comp
and see if an actual infinite firmament is necessary.
If you postulate it exists in some primitive way, you just postulate
an infinitely complex assumption.

If we start counting from 0, your way makes sense. I start counting
from 1, with 0 being the absence of any number so it has to be an
afterthought.

I don't understand.

If you want to create a number system from scratch, I would start with
1, since you can take it away and call the absence of 1 zero. If I
start with 0, there is no system. Finding 1 from 0 is not logically
possible. You could just as easily find 4 or 100,000 as the next
number after 0.

Cute poetry.




If we start with 0 as the first number, then the second
number is no more likely to be 1 than it is to be any number.

In which theory?

In the one I'm describing?


No. Sorry. I is not clear what you assume and what you explain. 






Beginning with unity and singularity is infinite in the sense that
without anything else to relate to it can only be boundless, but it is
not infinitely complex, it is infinitely simple. Complexity arises
through the fragmentation-division and multiplication-recapitulation
of the 1.

Complexity arise from addition and multiplication. With comp, it is
enough.

What is it that is added and multiplied though?

The natural numbers. 





I postulate white light which presents each division
(diffraction really, as it is not truly divided but revealed like a
sliced onion) as a range of color. The color is the diffraction and
the diffraction is the color. You could say that all numbers exist
inside of 1 and that 0 does not exist but insists as a potential (ie
Cantor Set evanescence).

I am afraid this does not make much sense for me.

I'm saying that I suspect that the universe makes more sense if all
numbers add up to 1, not 0, even if it means beginning with that as an
axiom.

That's very Plotinian, and again I might agree, but that's again another modal point of view, when we look through the eyes of the numbers. 
?








Carved out of the singularity
using the knife of interior figurative diffraction (feeling/being,
sequence, significance, time) which is expressed as literal
diffraction on the exterior (indirect detection, objects, space,
relativity, topology)

Too much sense here. Sorry. You have to find a way to make your
statement more precise if you want to convince a scientist.

I'm trying to get at the primordial interior-exterior divisions, and
how the interior is diffracted one way, using an alphabet of feeling
and being through time and the exterior is diffracted the opposite
way, using indirect representations of objects across space.

?

Our experience of space and time are opposites. I'm saying that our
entire interior view of the universe is based on frequency and our
exterior view is based on wavelength. The two meta-topologies are
anomalously symmetrical.

?





The subjective correlate would be silent and dark void as
well as solar fusion and stellar profusion. This is realism.

This is imagination.

Imagination is part of realism.

At a different level. If you forget this you blur fiction and the
reality we are searching. (Not the reality we would have found).

There is a level at which fiction and reality are blurred, and a level
at which they are rigorously demarcated. Both levels are real as well
as the continuum of levels between them. I am calling the former the
profound edge and the latter the pedestrian fold (of the multisense
continuum).http://multisenserealism.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/label_comp8a.jpg

?

Not sure how else to explain it. Reality is sense from every
perspective, including the mutually exclusive opposite perspectives..

?



Yes. It is a tradition to put the mind body problem under the rug.
My point is that if we take the comp hyp seriously, simple thought
experience shows how the express it in arithmetical term and axiomatic
definition, and that it leads to test. Making it scientific in the
usual academical sense of the term.

How are simple colors expressed in arithmetic though?

The question is ambiguous, and complex. 





We become disenchanted with our own perception in favor of
knowledge about the mechanism associated with it's delivery.

That's the mistake indeed. The beauty is that with the progress in
machine theory the mistake becomes palpable. That's why I think it is
interesting to understand that the current materialist theologies are
not compatible with mechanism.

Which aspects specifically of mechanism are incompatible with
materialism?

Study the sane04 paper, and ask question when you have a doubt. I think you can understand the result far easily than by admitting it, which requires to test the validity of all the steps in full details. 
And it is a reduction of a problem into another problem in a chosen theoretical frame. Only that, except for its translation into arithmetic, which illustrates at least the consistency of what machines can already said.




All we
have to do is realize that seeing is not just a complex process of
billions of discrete particles and 'signals', but it is also a very
simple and biologically common non-process.

What do you mean by biological in this context. What makes you think
that there are no simple biologically common non-processes in
arithmetic? If they are non computable, why do you want make them non
Turing 1-recoverable?

I mean that we know our sense of sight is associated with our ocular
biology. I don't see the idea of biology in arithmetic as plausible,
mainly because of the specificity of the materials of biology and the
state of living vs dying. I don't think that arithmetic can die.


Arithmetic is the frame. The universal dreamer. The dying creatures die in that dream, or fail to die in nested dreams.  It is very complex.






The disenchantment is due to the fact that people believe that
mechanism is the answer.
But mechanism is the question.
Provably so once you assume mechanism. That's the beauty of it.

Or it is the tautological tragedy of it?

A question is never tautological.





In the least, it provides a non physical frame, yet widespread, the
belief in arithmetic, where we can explain where the beliefs in
physical laws come from (even as qualia), and, the hard part, why they
are locally self-referentially correct.

I'm all for a non physical vocabulary, and even information science as
long as it isn't the basis for a cosmology.

?



Mechanism, well understood, is antireductionist for all universal
numbers. It is as much a re-enchantment as a promise for infinities of
mess. Universal machines oscillates between freedom and security, they
want both, but there are local tradeoff. With security you loose
universality, and with freedom you crash from time to times.


I think of computation like a lattice through which we can extend our
own neurological sensemaking. The lattice is real, but it's not doing
anything by itself.


You will have to look closer, if you are interested.


Bruno




Craig Weinberg

unread,
Jan 28, 2012, 12:01:26 PM1/28/12
to Everything List
On Jan 27, 4:38 pm, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
> On 24 Jan 2012, at 23:39, Craig Weinberg wrote:

> > Okay. I thought by 'I assume comp all along' you meant that you
> > personally assume it is true.
>
> Theories = axioms = postulates = hypothesis = proposition on which we
> agree for the sake of searching truth.

But if another theory makes more sense, I don't see any point in
searching for truth with a theory that doesn't work.

>
> Some (old) scientists happens sometimes to believe that their theory
> are true, but that's Alzheimer. Some scientist beliefs they know the
> truth in the branch of their colleagues, but that's ignorance.
>
> In science we don't know any truth capable of being 3p communicated,
> even if 99,9% of the scientists can agree on some very plausible truth
> (like the irrationality of the sqrt(2), or even like the stability of
> some patterns "out there").
>
> A theory, and its interpretation(s) is only a tool to shed light on
> what is essentially unknown.
>
> That is why we are not on the same length wave. You still argue for
> the truth of falsity of comp, when I try only to make it clearer and
> show that it might be refutable (and thus is scientific in Popper
> sense).

That's a more practical approach professionally speaking, but I'm only
interested in the truth of reality, not theories about theories.
It makes yellow traffic signals inexistant too.

>
> For me, free-will is a generalization of responsibility. You need free-
> will to be responsible, but you don't need to be responsible to have
> free-will. Free-will is the ability to make higher level personal
> decision in absence of complete information. It is enhanced by
> consciousness, and can lead to conscience.

I'm ok with that more or less. I think some more physical correlations
can be derived as well though. Free will is about generating and
controlling of motive impulse. The expansion of consciousness comes
through sensitivity to accumulated experience so that together, the
capacity to make sense is enhanced. The psyche can contract or dilate
it's sensitivity to change the scope and depth of it's awareness. This
gives the mind a more spacious 'now' in which to project strategic
motives further into the unknown.

>
> > I'm just talking about the ordinary difference
> > between feeling that you are doing something because you are doing it
> > as opposed to feeling that something is happening through no voluntary
> > action on your part. How do you know that Löbian machines have
> > awareness? Or are they defined that way a priori?
>
> The reason I think that simple Löbian machine are conscious is that I
> recognize already myself.

You mean that you recognize that you are a Löbian machine or your
recognition of yourself is what makes you conscious?

> They have a rich theology, and can teach us a lot of surprising thing,
> including about the 3p and 1p gaps, quanta and qualia, and the mystery
> of existence.

I'm not sure about theology, but a microscope does all of those other
things too. What makes you say that machines have theology?

> I don't think that they are zombies, that's all.
> Today, they have not yet concrete relative bodies, except
> mathematician's brain and books. So I can understand that it does not
> seem obvious how deep they run.

I don't think that you appreciate how easy it is for us to project
sentience on something that has none.
I'm saying they are equivalent terms. Diffraction actualizes the
possibilities of monad.

>
>
>
> >> This leads to something counter-intuitive, but not contradictory. the
> >> big picture conceived from outside is not so big (it is the whole of
> >> just arithmetic). But from inside it is provably bigger than any
> >> formal approximation of the whole of math. It is *very* big. Note
> >> that
> >> arithmetical truth is also bigger by itself than we thought before
> >> Gödel. It is already not axiomatisable. There are no effective
> >> theories of numberland.
>
> > Wouldn't numbers+names land be even bigger?
>
> No. Unless you admit incompressible infinite actual names.

Yes, names are incompressible. I don't know that they are infinite or
actual, only that the set of things that can be named is larger than
the set of numbers, since each number itself is a name, but not all
names are numbers.

>
>
>
> >>>> Anyway, you are not convincing by pointing on everyday example,
> >>>> when
> >>>> talking to a theoretician.
>
> >>> If the theory doesn't apply to reality, then I have no problem with
> >>> it. Fantasy sports are not my area of interest. It's only if it
> >>> conflicts with my ideas of realism that I would be curious.
>
> >> Realism of what?
>
> > Of experience.
>
> Well, at least we share this.
>
>
>
> >> If comp is true, it has to apply on reality.
>
> > Why? Maybe comp only applies to comp reality. Just because such a
> > reality can be imposed on some material forms (but not all material
> > forms, as I try to point out) doesn't mean that our way of imagining
> > that reality is the same as how it is received at the target level.
>
> Sure. But the idea is to start with a theory that everudbody can
> understand, and then, if it fails, everybody will progress. You cannot
> put the mystery like "sense", "matter" in the theory at the start,
> because those things are what we want to explain. So we cannot assume
> them, but still hope to derive them from simpler, or to meta-derive
> them, etc.

There is no need to explain sense and matter. They are self
explanatory and non-mysterious. Only the symmetry between them is not
commonly understood. Once the symmetry is understood as primitive,
nothing simpler be conjured.

>
>
>
> >> That's why UDA makes comp
> >> a testable hypothesis.
> >> I assume comp, derive consequences which are observable, and so we
> >> can
> >> make test.
> >> It gives also a unification of qualia and quanta, consciousness and
> >> matter. It might be that even false, it will remain interesting as an
> >> example of theory. It might help to weaken comp to get the correct
> >> picture.
> >> To be sure the testable part requires not just comp, but also the
> >> classical theory of knowledge.
>
> > Yes, it definitely will remain interesting, and is more functionally
> > useful than my sense model, but the sense model is the one that is
> > more universally explanatory.
>
> Because you put the universal mystery in the assumption.

No, because the universal symmetry comes out of the assumption. I only
assume that interiority is the opposite of exteriority. I didn't make
the qualities of matter into the opposite of experience - they are
actually that way (to us at least). I didn't assume that space is
public and time is private, and that private and public are opposite -
it just turns out that it makes sense to understand them that way. It
sets up a chain of relations which neatly maps the entire cosmos in
general terms for the first time in the modern era.

>
>
>
> >>>>> Generally the point of counting is to
> >>>>> establish a deterministic quantitative relation.. that's sort of
> >>>>> what
> >>>>> counting is? If the numbers themselves made choices, then why
> >>>>> should
> >>>>> we consider counting a reliable epistemology?
>
> >>>> Counting use only the succession laws. The universal mess comes
> >>>> from
> >>>> the mixture of addition and multiplication, as the prime numbers
> >>>> already illustrates by their logarithmic "random" distribution.
> >>>> Your question is a bit like "if criminals are made of chemical
> >>>> reactions, should we continue to rely on chemistry?".
>
> >>> Are you saying then choice making is an emergent property of certain
> >>> mixed arithmetic modes only and not inherent in numbers then?
>
> >> Yes. The numbers plays a role only through their additive and
> >> multiplicative structures, and to the relations, which includes the
> >> computable one, you can define from this.
>
> > I think it makes more sense to see choice as an inherent potential of
> > nesting of awareness. The more that mechanical duties are offloaded to
> > subsystems the more sensorimotive interiority can develop in a
> > protected environment.
>
> ?

The CNS doesn't have to perform a physiological function, it can just
sit there protected by blood-brain-bone barrier and receive nutrients.

>
> > In a universe of simple awareness, there is
> > only primitive sense detection and motive response. The effect of
> > having sense organs or nervous systems is to recapitulate the organism
> > within the organism, allowing a subjective experience of increased
> > depth of 'now' relative to a less elaborated organism. Human
> > consciousness is rich, slow roasted, gourmet qualia.
>
> OK. (but not as an argument agaionst comp).
>
> > Inorganic matter
> > has fast food qualia.
>
> You are insulting inorganic matter. And matter has no qualia. Person
> or living entities have qualia. relative numbers have qualia.

I think matter has to have some qualia, it's probably just very simple
by comparison. Sound is our clue to the qualia of matter I think.
Musical instruments exploit this. It's all about varying the forms and
substance of objects. I think that the qualia of matter could easily
be percussive, thermal, illuminating...

>
> > The difference is achieved through
> > simplification and condensation, not complexity. Complexity is the
> > back end.
>
> ?

Consciousness is about making a trillion cells into 'I' and the entire
cosmos into 'here' and 'now'.
Is there something it doesn't have room for though?

>
>
>
> >>> If that were the case a
> >>> person should be able to learn to see visual qualia with other sense
> >>> organs.
>
> >> You might provide an argument. Only the brain, and some nerves
> >> concentrations behaves in a way making them able to use the modal
> >> (qualitative) relations between numbers.
>
> > How do you know that nerves are required?
>
> They are required because their existence is implied by the relative
> stability of consciousness when entangled to a deep computation.

Why are nerves doing the deep computation and not the bones?

>
> > They may be required for us
> > to make sense (although blindsight suggests even that is not the case)
> > but they are not necessarily required for worms or protozoa.
>
> A protozoa is a highly complex and elaborate cells with many
> biochemical and biophysical information pathways.

That's what I'm saying. They don't need nerves, so why should we? Our
pancreas has many biochemical and biophysical information pathways,
I'm sure. Why don't we think and see with our pancreas instead?

>
> A unicellular is a stomach, a skin, a lung, a liver, a muscle, and a
> neuron all at once.

Yes! Also an eye, ear, tongue, nose, intuition, instinct, maybe radio
antenna, etc.

>They have not voted for the division of work, and
> they have as much succeeded as us, in the exploration of the planet.
> I don't think they are Löbian, but I can prove that they are Turing
> universal. It is an open problem if they are conscious, perhaps in a
> trivial sense, or not. Löbianity begins, I think, with the spiders and
> octopi.

Interesting. I agree, 8 is a big deal. Also 3 and 4 and 12.

> Before I did conjecture that the Löbian animals are the
> homeotherm animals, or all the animals which dreams, or can dream. Not
> certainty, but still. What is common is the cognitive ability to
> reflect on their own anticipation, making them aware of "?".

Your scope is different from mine. You are looking at issues around
the personality of functionalism. I'm looking at unifying the basic
structure of Everything.
Right. Qualia is not a good word I think because it makes
sensorimotive experience into a pseudosubstance.

> They do have "meta-axioms", like, they are not communicable, they have
> semantics in term of perception fields integration, spatio-temporal in
> the mental (Kant?) or ideal sense of the term.
> Here, the classical logic of knowledge is derived from Theaetetus
> definition of knowledge (true belief) with belief being equated with
> what the machine asserts. The key is to limit oneself on the study of
> self-referentially correct machine, believing in elementary arithmetic.

I think these are sort of beside the point though. Qualia is not about
definitions and axioms, it is about the actual raw content of
experience as it happens. I think that the whole idea of equating
qualia with belief is a mistake.

>
> > Pain hurts.
>
> Well, this is tautological.

No, it isn't. Sweet could hurt instead.

>
> > Deep blue is introspective.
>
> Hmm... OK.
>
> > They are the subjective
> > primitive.
>
> I think the contrary, they are more like doors to unknown.

Absolutely, but unknown primitive. Sounds contradictory, but it isn't
- it's monad-ward.

> They are
> modalities of the exploration of the mindscape. They modularize our
> apprehension of tuns of information, they simplify very hard task
> making us feeling they are simple and primitive, but they are not.

Mechanisms don't need make hard tasks 'seem' simpler though. That only
adds complexity. Our feelings are simple and primitive as they could
be relative to what we actually are, which is this ridiculous
hierarchical organism of nested entities in 3p. Qualia do not refer to
3p though, they make up the integrity of the 1p through simplicity -
rich simplicity to precisely the impoverished complexity of the
multitudes within (impoverished because their autonomy is sacrificed
to an extent for the organism as a whole - also because quantity
breeds generality.) The proprietary richness of the qualia is
compensating for the investment of the multitudes

> Both the logical comp, and the biological data suggest that qualia
> needs some amount of complex cycling relative computational
> transformation (like cycling neural nets).

MR explains why that isn't true. Cycling is how entities synchronize
with each other within and between inertial frames (scaled worlds).
The direct experience of qualia within it's own subjective context is
not necessarily cyclic at all - it is persistent and rooted in the
stability of the singularity. Our perception is not a mediated phantom
hovering at xHz before our eyes like film or a screen refresh (even
though changes in our perception are characterized by rapid cycling of
low level cells and molecules - they do not experience subjective
strobing of perception either I would bet).

The realism of media simulation plateaus just as the realism of CGI
plateaus. We can tell on some level that it might not be real. Our
world is not made of the variance that cycling provides, it is the
invariance which sense elides between the cycles. The stillness
within, rather than the hum of neurological function. There is a
recent study on psilocybin which supports Huxley's intuition that the
brain is like a reducing valve: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/01/17/1119598109
http://cache.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/8/2012/01/730f6b95d6f54acb2fc4f872dd635517.jpg

"Psilocybin caused a significant decrease in the positive coupling
between the mPFC and PCC. These results strongly imply that the
subjective effects of psychedelic drugs are caused by decreased
activity and connectivity in the brain's key connector hubs, enabling
a state of unconstrained cognition." Less information going through
the key areas of the brain = richer qualia. This doesn't prove that
qualia is possible in the absence of all brain activity, but it
supports an important counter-intuitive theme:

http://www.oculist.net/downaton502/prof/ebook/duanes/pages/v8/v8c013.html

"The subsequent cascade of events leads to a decrease of cyclic
guanosine monophosphate (cGMP) which closes the ionic channels on the
plasma membrane of the rod outer segment. This channel normally is
open, which allows entry of sodium into the rod outer segment in the
dark, with a compensatory extrusion of potassium from the rod inner
segment to balance the net charge within the cell. This circulating
“dark current” between the inner and outer segments maintains the rod
in a relatively depolarized state. Closure of the cGMP-sensitive
channel by light interrupts the dark current. Interrupting the influx
of sodium, which carries positive charge into the cell, causes the
photoreceptor to hyperpolarize. This intracellular voltage change is
conveyed to the synaptic terminal, where the visual signal is
transmitted to the bipolar and horizontal cells.

To a first-time student of retinal neurophysiology, these events
initiated by light may appear the reverse of what would be expected.
Rather than initiating a positive response in the rod, light actually
suppresses a current that exists in the dark."

And this:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/11/111122133326.htm

"Conventional wisdom would say that blocking a hole would prevent
light from going through it, but Princeton University engineers have
discovered the opposite to be true. A research team has found that
placing a metal cap over a small hole in a metal film does not stop
the light at all, but rather enhances its transmission."

It is so unfamiliar to think of perception this way, that it is
necessary to constantly question our assumptions and turn them around
to see how they make sense in subtractive, negative terms. MR says
that perception does not exist in time, but time arises out of
perception. There are a lot of entities perceiving on many different
scales and scopes, ours is the top level, largest size, slowest rate
perception of the body so by comparison the lives of retinal cells
seem like they are cycling very fast.

I think it all comes down to whether the firing of nerve cells are an
embodiment of an equation or whether equations are derived from the
actions and experiences of bodies. My solution is to see that they are
both parts of a single irreducible symmetrical ontology.


> The qualia are natural
> construct for self-referential numbers, and it helps them a lot in the
> everyday life, relatively to the possible others universal numbers in
> the neighborhood.

Why qualia help them, or anything do anything? It's reverse
engineering. You are thinking that since qualia helps us, then
logically it must be helpful, but it isn't. Logic doesn't need a stage
show to help it. Qualia in general does not exist to assist function.
Of course qualia assists us because we are made of qualia, but if we
weren't, if we were quanta that just appeared to us to be qualia, it
would not assist us at all, any more than installing an HDTV inside
the video card of your computer would assist it in rendering video.

> Like consciousness they provide a self-acceleration in the computing
> power. The price: they are not communicable.
> But as far as we can recognize ourself in others, we can share that
> part through art, music, movies, novels, etc.

The don't provide acceleration of computing powere, and even if they
did, so what? Who says that acceleration is useful in any way for
computation. That's a sensorimotive bias. What does it matter how fast
an arithmetic function can occur? What is 'fast'? It presupposes a
primitive time matrix that is physical.

>
> > In our case they are anthropological gourmet quality,
>
> Sure.
>
> > but
> > they are still the finest grain resolution of human realism possible.
> > If what you are saying were true, we should expect to resolve more and
> > more colors as we age as our scope and history of experience expands.
>
> Sorry but this does not follow.

Sure it does. If qualia comes from complexity of computations, then
surely a longer memory full of more complex data interactions should
yield a constant redefinition and expansion of the qualitative
palette.

> Now, if you practice any entheogeny,
> (church, mushrooms, dreams, whatever), that might well be the case,
> because you can artificially explore qualia changes, and consciousness
> through many sort of experiences, and learn through age. But with art
> and research too, it is relative.
> As numbering the sorts of qualia, perhaps, here too, like in physics,
> we can try theories, comp theories, and variate study of subjective
> reports.

Comp's explanation of qualia does not explain the lack of new qualia
generation. MR explains it, since even though the computations of the
brain change, it is still a brain, and that is what defines the scope
and range of its potential qualia.

>
>
>
> >>> Qualia serves users, not machines.
>
> >> But of course both "are machine" with the comp hypothesis.
> >> With "are machine" in the "yes doctor" quasi operational sense.
> >> I can accept a sense that the first person is not a machine, but this
> >> might been confusing.
>
> > But what is not explained is the service that qualia could provide for
> > machines.
>
> Oh! Try to type on your computer without qualia.

A computer doesn't need me to type on it to compute. Keyboard, video,
and mouse are for human users, not for the computer.

>
> Animals have developed the capacity to handle huge amount of data in
> "real time", which makes sense for a self-moving entity. Qualia lives,
> in normal circumstances, at the intersection of truth, and an
> efficacious summary of the huge information in a consistent scenario,
> with a hero.

Qualia does not merely represent and simplify information, it presents
and enriches experience also - which is something that comp does not
do. Quanta needs no summary or representation - again, that is for the
convenience of human mathematicians and programmers. Programs
themselves operate only in an uncompressed, unencrypted form of mind-
numbingly repetitive binary units. It is our intentional hallucination
that these units make sense objectively.

>
>
>
> >>> It is insurmountably
> >>> nonsensical and metaphysical.
>
> >> You should try to argue for this.
>
> > I can't really find anything to argue against though. The idea that
> > machines can make qualia seems like it comes out of thin air except
> > without the assumption that we are machines. There doesn't seem to be
> > any logic supporting it at all to argue against.
>
> On the contrary. Some people have use Gödel's incompleteness theorem
> to argue that man is not a machine. But Gödel's second incompleteness
> is the answer *by* the machine, to that argument.
>
> To talk frankly I think that you reduce the person to its physical
> body. But assuming comp, and recognizing consciousness, changes the
> picture.

No, MR supposes an entire other 'hemisphere' of the cosmos. Our
subjective side is a stitch in an unbroken thread that extends from
the beginning of time to the end. The body is the same thread but to
us, woven into the grid which is stitched upon. They are the same
thread, and it is both material and experiential - the pattern of the
weave arises from the weaving, and the idea of the pattern is a second
order perception. The weaving itself, the sensorimotive wag and wegh
of concrete thread is the primordial text.

>
> Machine cannot "make" qualia.
> It is more like self-referential machine cannot avoid qualia.

I understand, but it's absurd. Synesthesia, blindsight, and
anosognosia would be impossible as visual qualia would be unavoidable
in any visual machine. It isn't the case.

>
>
>
> >>> It is to say, it's faster to count to
> >>> 1000 if the numbers taste like different fruits.
>
> >> ?
>
> > If qualia speeds up processing then flavors+numbers should be faster
> > than just numbers, but they aren't.
>
> Flavors+numbers are faster than just numbers, especially to test wine
> of food. The qualia role is to make you understand *quickly* if you
> should retrieve it for your mouth with disgust and drink water, or
> smile or something.

I'm not unclear about qualia makes our computations faster, I'm saying
that there is no logic that should make it the case were we only
computing machines. If flavors made numbers faster then we should
invent a programming language with an alphabet of flavor commands.

>
>
>
> >>>> In that case they can discover that they cannot prove
> >>>> that they have *genuine* qualia. This happens with not so much
> >>>> self-
> >>>> referential abilities.
>
> >>> All qualia is genuine. How could it be otherwise?
>
> >> A zombie talking about its feeling of the color red, would talk about
> >> a non genuine qualia. With non-comp, zombie makes sense.
>
> > It's not qualia though, it's just words that you can choose to
> > interpret indirectly as qualia or not. Qualia are only experience
> > first hand, and so cannot be non genuine.
>
> Of course. If not, zombie would attribute sense to what they call
> qualia. Which would be a non sense.
> Yes, I think we agree on this, qualia are real.
> But that's why the qualia on which the zombie can talk about can be
> said non genuine.
> Once zombie exists they can talk about qualia, like you and me, but of
> course they don't mean them, by definition.

It's a semantic point, but I think it speaks to the core problem of
comp. The qualia that zombies talk about are neither genuine or non-
genuine...they don't exist. Because we can talk about imaginary
numbers doesn't mean they can be considered genuine imaginary numbers
- they are absent from reality. Fiction.
When will any of these bombs go off though? The sum of all creativity
in Conway or Mandelbrot can be gathered in a brief exposure. I really
never need to see either one of them again in my life. I don't feel
the need to keep an eye on them as I would for something which has
actual creativity, like a blog. Trivial intelligence is not genuinely
creative. It is, to paraphrase Pierz, completely unsurprising given
the parameters and mechanisms of the game. It is sterile. Beautiful
and interesting of course, but ultimately reflecting beyond the vision
of it's programming.
• ? x(??A), where ? is diffraction through symmetries [(•/-)(-/•)]²
which gives rise to 'x'-ness.

I'm not much of an equation guy. Maybe you can write it better.

>
>
>
> >>> which multiplies/divides itself spatially and
> >>> temporally.
>
> >> Nor this.
>
> >>> Each division entails inherent input-outputs to the other
> >>> parts and the whole. It's subtractive and implicit, like a
> >>> spectrum. A
> >>> prism does not have to illustrate each hue of the spectrum
> >>> mechanically and digitally, it just exposes the optical sense that
> >>> is
> >>> already inherent in white light.
>
> >> Sense is inherent in light?
> >> How? What would that mean?
>
> > It means that light is a perceptual experience made of image qualia
> > like color, contrast, brightness, image, motion, form, beauty, etc.
>
> Better to be clear if you talk about light = the physical phenomenon,
> and light = the human qualia related to it.
> I agree, sense is inherent in the light-the-qualia.

There is no physical phenomenon of light. Photons, for those that
believe in them, are completely intangible and invisible. They are
related to light no more or less than heat or radioactive darkness.

>
> > The visible spectrum is one way of essentializing those qualia. Once
> > you set aside the assumption that light (and heat, motion, energy) is
> > a substance, we can see that vision is a channel of sensitivity to
> > those qualia and nothing more.
>
> From the first person perspective.

There is no other perspective of vision. There is optics,
ophthalmology, and neurology, but they can only tell us about
functions correlated with our access to vision, not vision itself.

>
> > It's like McLuhan, the medium is the
> > message.
>
> That leads to the confusion of the finger and the moon. Better to bet
> on sense beyond the medium.

The medium is not a finger, it's a mirror. It is not only ok to
confuse them, it is how they work. They are elided together in a
figurative sense but not literally.

I don't know if this comes through from a picture, but if you can see:
http://multisenserealism.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/saucer.jpg

Specular reflection does not respect the angle of the mirror. It
doesn't matter whether you look at the disc straight on or as an
ellipse like this, the specular reflection is dead flat, as if you cut
an ellipse shaped hole in the universe rather than were looking at a
three dimensional surface at an angle. I think you have to really
notice it in person to get it..photons don't make sense as
bombardments to a responding eye, sense is an active reaching out with
multiple antennas experiencing the invariance.

>
> > In this case, the sense is the sensation. The spectrum
> > directly exposes the principles of visual-optical sensation. When you
> > cut your finger it bleeds. When you cut white light, you expose the
> > sequence and color within it.
>
> ?

Diffraction shows us what light is 'made of'.
Why though? Why use a brain and not something sturdier and faster?
What about the human mind evokes a grey semi-solid organ? Why bother
with biology at all?

>
> > The two are opposite
> > sides of the same coin.
>
> You can't know that. You are the one who say no to the doctor, and
> avoids the consequence of the yes.
> The arithmetical image is more like the physics is the surface of the
> ocean, and mind is the ocean.

I understand that way of thinking about it, but sense makes more
sense. The ocean surface is event horizon of the atmosphere and the
ocean. If you are under the ocean coming up, the surface is one thing
and if you are falling into the ocean from above it is another thing.
If you are a bird the surface means food, if you are a mollusk, the
surface means death. The physics is the entire atmosphere and the
ocean is the mind, but it is where they meet that is most real
(pedestrian fold) and at the extremes (profound edge) that they
evanesce into sterile entropy (at the top of the atmosphere and in the
deepest part of the ocean).

>
> > In a mechanism you have two separate coins -
> > one which is native and organic to the structure (electronic
> > semiconductors stop, start, and detect the stopping and starting of
> > electric current, steam engines stop, start, and detect currents of
> > pressurized water vapor, etc) and one which is alien and a-signifying
> > to the structure (program logic, industrial process, etc). The mind
> > grows and learns because it is the sensorimotive receiver-transmitter
> > of an organ which has been evolutionarily intensified for the
> > development and concentration of sensorimotive capacity. The brain is
> > a meta-organism optimized for sensemaking. A machine is an artifact of
> > assembled components which are relatively senseless on their own but
> > which can extend our sensemaking in conjunction. On it's own, there is
> > no sensemaking beyond the most literal physical level.
>
> Literal physical level? Quanta or qualia? Again I can find many sense
> of what you say in the comp context.

Direct and literal level: Finger sense, not moon sense.
I see a book and can measure it in terms of length, width, height,
weight, number of letters, etc. These are public factual measurements
about a discrete object. If I read the book, that experience is
completely the opposite - it is a private fictional narrative about
continuous subjects. The reality of the book overlaps in the where and
when of the reading, and in specifics about the literal character and
legibility of the text, but beyond that they diverge sharply. The
public book is all publishing, manufacturing, and cheimstry and the
private book is all storytelling, psychology, and anthropology. It is
the symmetry of interiority vs exteriority which defines both books.
The symmetry is primary.

>
> > In other words, the split itself is also split so that it is a
> > monism on both extremes and dualistic in the middle. This way interior
> > and exterior are the same thing in the profound or essential sense,
> > and the opposite thing in the pedestrian or existential sense. This
> > means that at any point along this continuum (the multisense
> > continuum), the sense proximal to the point is privileged as most
> > real, and the point opposite is disqualified as epiphenomenon.
>
> > The idea of filtering or representation arises from privileging the
> > exterior-occidental monism perspective exclusively, so that qualia is
> > nothing but the function of identifying parts of the outside world
> > which is assumed to be unquestionably real. The opposite perspective
> > is the interior-oriental monism which holds that it is the outside
> > world which is an illusion (maya, shadow) and our spiritual journey
> > which is real.
>
> > The recognition of the reality and unreality of every point and
> > perspective along this continuum is what inspires the hypothesis that
> > what our perceptions are made of is the exact same thing that the rest
> > of the cosmos is made of, it only seems different because they belong
> > to us. No point on the continuum serves to only to represent or
> > support another point, it is the sense and symmetry of the continuum
> > as a whole which are embodied and reflected by points. This continuum
> > of multiple senses is what we call reality.
>
> ?

I'm saying that MR posits a united cosmos which is real because of
symmetry and sense.

>
>
>
> >>> which is
> >>> condensed from the real worlds our dozens of organs, trillions of
>
> >> You should better avoid the use of the word "real". Given that our
> >> discussion is precisely on what is real, or on what is primitively
> >> real.
>
> > concrete? non-abstract? energetic? direct? presented?
>
> I was more thinking about "assumed".

Assumed by what? You are thinking in terms of a theory defining it's
terms, but I'm trying to define reality, not terms.

>
> When you say "direct", I can agree that qualia are felt as primitively
> real, and are subjectively real. But concrete means the opposite, like
> the concrete for buildings, what people take as primitively
> substantial and "real".

That's an important point. I forget to supply that info of how I got
there. MR begins with taking everything literally, including
consciousness. The finger and the moon are the primitively real -
concrete, and our experience of them is concrete, but the relation of
the pointingness of the finger is a second order logic, which puts it
further back into the oriental figurative side of the continuum. It's
still real in an absolute sense because we can make sense of it and
that is a real experience, but relative to either the finger, moon, or
our experience of either, the relation is more private than public.
This means that the actual experience of qualia is real, but the fact
that qualia may or may not represent any particular thing is a
fictional interpretation.

>
>
>
> >>> cells, (x)tillions of molecules which are literally within us, as
> >>> well
> >>> as it is influenced by our fractional participation in the worlds
> >>> which exist without us - our social group, civilization, species,
> >>> biosphere, planet, solar system, galaxy, cosmos.
>
> >> All those terms make sense. But they do not denote anything
> >> primitively real.
>
> > They don't have to be primitively real, but they are the forms that
> > are real relative to our perceptual frame.
>
> In what?

In our human world. Our scope of phenomenology from roughly 0.1 Hz
moments to 100 year lifetimes and 1 mm to 10m range of objects.

>
> > What is a cell to us might
> > be the equivalent of a planet to the molecules that make up a cell.
>
> OK. But it is not an isomorphism.

Right. Which helps falsify comp for me. If comp were true, I would
think that we should see massively redundant isomorphism on different
scales. We see not just basic forms but fully explicated isomorphic
fractals everywhere. We should be made of miniature people. Animals
should make beehives and anthills.

>
>
>
> >> Actual bodies are relative ideal bodies seen from inside. Bodies are
> >> experience type, not primitively material token, in the comp theory
> >> (when well understood).
>
> > It has some things going for it - out of body experiences, multiple
> > personality disorders having physiological effects, reincarnation,
> > ghosts etc, but even if credible, these are not the norm. Their
> > association with the incredible and uncredible however makes me
> > categorize them as experiential artifacts close to the interior-
> > oriental extreme...the vanishing point at which the autobiographical
> > narrative begins to super-signify and diffract (ACME = Anything Can
> > Mean Everything).
>
> ACME looks like 0 = 1, to me. Things are not that simple.

Things are not that simple in reality, but ACME is where mechanism is
0% and solipsism is 100%. Reality is where mechanism and solipsism are
both 50%. OMMM is where mechanism is 100% and solipsism is 0%.

>
>
>
> > I would expect a world of avatar impersonations to be much lighter and
> > looser than the world we live in and physical conditions should not
> > have such a powerful effect on us. For instance, we discover a drug
> > like opium, and even after thousands of years, the drug still has an
> > effect on every living person's body, regardless of experience type.
> > That substance is active for humans and other animals regardless of
> > experience type. It's effects can be blocked or amplified by other
> > substances but not by words or incantations.
>
> > I agree that bodies are ideal on the inside and physical on the
> > outside, but I think that both sides are causally efficacious. The
> > physical side's form of causality is consequence, entropy, and
> > teleonomy, while the ideal side is sequence, significance, and
> > teleology.
>
> Perhaps.

Cool. I know it's hard to believe it could be that simple, but I think
that it might be the case. We're just so complex that we are lost
inside of a universe of many overlapping frames of reference, but each
frame could be based on the same simple principle.

>
>
>
> >>> My mind doesn't have the first
> >>> clue how to embody by own body. If I want to stand up, I can only
> >>> say
> >>> that I do stand up, not that I provide or process any information
> >>> that
> >>> results in a result of 'the body' standing.
>
> >> You will not ask a email application to explain how they function
> >> at a
> >> low level.
>
> > An email application can't explain any function of anything.
>
> You must click on 'help'.

Right, because that's how we use the computer to help ourselves. The
email app is not explaining anything, it's just sending a meaningless
column of bits to the video card when {button#01bc2400 = true}. It
isn't pointing a finger to the moon, it is the mechanically matching
the word finger and the word moon and we are doing the rest.

>
> > We can
> > though. I would not assume that if an email application had our
> > awareness that it could not explain how it functions.
>
> At which level of explanation?

At top level. The application layer. But it could access the other
layers through careful study, experimentation, theory, etc.

>
>
>
> >> You might be a dreaming butterfly.
>
> > If I never find out that I am, then I am no more a dreaming butterfly
> > than a waking human.
>
> You can bet on relative partial control, and relative awakenings.

Seems like a good bet.

>
>
>
> >>> My perception is not that
> >>> I am commanding my body to execute a standing program, but that I am
> >>> directly standing myself - it costs me effort personally so that I
> >>> don't want to keep standing all day.
>
> >> Please take a seat.
>
> > Permane ser sentados por favor.
>
> >> To be able to seat without doing too much effort, and "directly" is
> >> made possible by collection of amoebas who got the cable, and about
> >> (x)tillions of phone communications. I know you agree with that
> >> because you asserts that our consciousness is somehow related of
> >> their consciousness (is it a sum? what is the function?).
>
> > I don't think the amoebas get a cable, I think their behavior is the
> > embodiment of the cable itself on the body's microcosmic level. Our
> > experience of sitting down is the same cable but on the macrocosmic
> > level of our body as a whole.
>
> > You are trying to tie it back to a linear mechanism (a summing or
> > function), but it isn't - no more than white is a summing or function
> > of the visible spectrum.
>
> The image illustrate a recurrent pattern, like your cells viewed by a
> molecule. Those are image/analogy.

It's funny I don't think I have ever said that cells are viewed by a
molecule - I think they are, sort of, as civilization is 'viewed' by a
person, but it's just interesting the difference between what I think
I'm saying and what others think I'm saying. But yeah close enough.
What's wrong with an analogy? How else to describe that reality is not
logical in a linear reductive sense without appealing to examples of
reality directly? A prism is nice because it's transparent and inert,
with no moving parts and yet it demonstrates clearly an unlikely
transformation - not through energy exerted, but through matter
obstructing and subtracting from energy. It's a powerful metaphor for
the singularity.

>
> > It's a figurative diffraction across multiple
> > scales of nested awareness.
>
> I will ask you to formalize this in first order logical theory, or in
> term of some other first logical theory.
> You have to follow some course for doing that, I guess.

Yeah I need a co-conspirator for that.

>
> > We feel that we are sitting down. Our
> > tissues and cells and molecules feel different things. We think that
> > our tissues and cells feel nothing but only send and receive signals,
>
> I don't think that, and it is unrelated a priori from the assumptions.

I agree, but the assumption of signal rather than feeling is the
dominant worldview in this era.

>
> > but that's only because our awareness is nested so far inward and
> > upward that we see their world in 'black and white' - qualitatively
> > desaturated (= generically quantitative.)
>
> We have not solve the mind body problem. Scientist are normally
> neutral on this. The other's consciousness is an old very complex
> problem related to consciousness.
>
> But then why do you attribute "black and white" zombie-like being to
> the universal numbers?

I don't attribute any being to the universal numbers. Enumeration is
an aspect of sense but not of being. The sense we make out of numbers
is dependent on our hardware, just as our color vision is dependent on
eyes. If universal numbers were beings, why would we need to use
binary codes exclusively in electronics? Why not just tune into the
larger tides of nonlocal arithmetic?
The 3p activities of the cells, molecules, etc do influence our 1p
experience, but they don't produce them. We are influenced by our
house, office, etc, but we are not an emergent property of those
structures or relations. The 3-p are Turing Emulable - or at least
they are until you get into emulating our own perceptual frame, then
you become aware of the absence of 1p influence on 3p (uncanny
valley).

>
> > This makes
> > sense since sensorimotive experience scales up qualitatively rather
> > than just quantitatively, so that more brain cells does not feel like
> > more brain cells, it feels like more awareness and sense-making of the
> > world.
>
> Well the software of computer scales qualitatively too.

Only to the user, not to the computer.

> You are using sensorimotive as a speculation that consciousness scales
> down infinitely escaping all possible digital local explanation.

Yes. I'm not escaping it though, it's evaporating on it's own. I'm not
averse to digital local influence, but I am careful not to mistake the
moon for the finger. Digital process maps the 3p function of sense
organs which can inform us about our 1p experience given that we
already experience it, but it cannot conjure the experience itself.

> You confuse the person for its clothe.

No, I'm clear that (a person wearing clothes) and (a body covered with
fabric) are literally the same thing in one sense and opposite things
in another, figurative sense. This sense is what the cosmos is made
of. Defining fabric as a type of clothes or a body as a type of person
is no better than the contrary definition. Both senses are valid,
especially in contradistinction.

>
>
>
> >>>>> Codes and mechanisms are what real objects do to each other, but
> >>>>> objects are not codes themselves. They are a chunks of the
> >>>>> singularity
> >>>>> with masses and densities.
>
> >>>> I don't know that.
>
> >>> That's what they seem like though.
>
> >> Yes. But that's the key difference.
>
> > Why wouldn't codes just seem like codes?
>
> Because they dream.

Why would they? By what logic?

>
>
>
> >>> Programs tend to encounter errors
> >>> and crash, or encounter latency, pixelation, etc. Matter doesn't
> >>> ever
> >>> falter in it's own presentation though. An iron anvil never drops
> >>> it's
> >>> gravity pointer and flies through the ceiling spontaneously or
> >>> changes
> >>> back and forth from iron to cobalt because the anvil class of
> >>> programs
> >>> has a bad line of code.
>
> >> It just a matter of first person plural probability calculus.
>
> > I don't know that.
>
> UDA is supposed to prove this.

Even if it does, that would mean that comp could support the
perception of non-comp, but it doesn't mean that it has to be the
case. Non-comp could support the perception of comp too.

>
> > I think it's far more likely that an anvil's
> > movements can be interpreted as calculus than calculus could or would
> > turn into an anvil for some reason.
>
> That is not what happen.

Why not?
Am I wrong though?

>
>
>
> >>> If we start with 0 as the first number, then the second
> >>> number is no more likely to be 1 than it is to be any number.
>
> >> In which theory?
>
> > In the one I'm describing?
>
> No. Sorry. I is not clear what you assume and what you explain.

I assume nothing but 0. With 1 you inherently have the idea of
something, so you can invert it to get (not 1). If I start with 0,
there is nothing to invert. Not 0 doesn't imply a number.

>
>
>
> >>> Beginning with unity and singularity is infinite in the sense that
> >>> without anything else to relate to it can only be boundless, but
> >>> it is
> >>> not infinitely complex, it is infinitely simple. Complexity arises
> >>> through the fragmentation-division and multiplication-recapitulation
> >>> of the 1.
>
> >> Complexity arise from addition and multiplication. With comp, it is
> >> enough.
>
> > What is it that is added and multiplied though?
>
> The natural numbers.

Which arise from what?

>
>
>
> >>> I postulate white light which presents each division
> >>> (diffraction really, as it is not truly divided but revealed like a
> >>> sliced onion) as a range of color. The color is the diffraction and
> >>> the diffraction is the color. You could say that all numbers exist
> >>> inside of 1 and that 0 does not exist but insists as a potential (ie
> >>> Cantor Set evanescence).
>
> >> I am afraid this does not make much sense for me.
>
> > I'm saying that I suspect that the universe makes more sense if all
> > numbers add up to 1, not 0, even if it means beginning with that as an
> > axiom.
>
> That's very Plotinian, and again I might agree, but that's again
> another modal point of view, when we look through the eyes of the
> numbers.

Ok.
The singularity can't really get rid of itself, it can only pantomime
and pretend.

>
>
>
> >>>>> Carved out of the singularity
> >>>>> using the knife of interior figurative diffraction (feeling/being,
> >>>>> sequence, significance, time) which is expressed as literal
> >>>>> diffraction on the exterior (indirect detection, objects, space,
> >>>>> relativity, topology)
>
> >>>> Too much sense here. Sorry. You have to find a way to make your
> >>>> statement more precise if you want to convince a scientist.
>
> >>> I'm trying to get at the primordial interior-exterior divisions, and
> >>> how the interior is diffracted one way, using an alphabet of feeling
> >>> and being through time and the exterior is diffracted the opposite
> >>> way, using indirect representations of objects across space.
>
> >> ?
>
> > Our experience of space and time are opposites. I'm saying that our
> > entire interior view of the universe is based on frequency and our
> > exterior view is based on wavelength. The two meta-topologies are
> > anomalously symmetrical.
>
> ?

The two sides of the coin are opposite. One sees the coin as a
character in the context of cycles of experience. It is a coin in the
semantic sense of money and time, flipping (probability), government
and finance, etc. The other sees the coin as circle of metal of a
specific weight and density. There is no semantic content, only
syntactic content.

>
>
>
> >>>>>>> The subjective correlate would be silent and dark void as
> >>>>>>> well as solar fusion and stellar profusion. This is realism.
>
> >>>>>> This is imagination.
>
> >>>>> Imagination is part of realism.
>
> >>>> At a different level. If you forget this you blur fiction and the
> >>>> reality we are searching. (Not the reality we would have found).
>
> >>> There is a level at which fiction and reality are blurred, and a
> >>> level
> >>> at which they are rigorously demarcated. Both levels are real as
> >>> well
> >>> as the continuum of levels between them. I am calling the former the
> >>> profound edge and the latter the pedestrian fold (of the multisense
> >>> continuum).http://multisenserealism.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/label_comp8a.jpg
>
> >> ?
>
> > Not sure how else to explain it. Reality is sense from every
> > perspective, including the mutually exclusive opposite perspectives..
>
> ?

Sense in every sense.

>
>
>
> >> Yes. It is a tradition to put the mind body problem under the rug.
> >> My point is that if we take the comp hyp seriously, simple thought
> >> experience shows how the express it in arithmetical term and
> >> axiomatic
> >> definition, and that it leads to test. Making it scientific in the
> >> usual academical sense of the term.
>
> > How are simple colors expressed in arithmetic though?
>
> The question is ambiguous, and complex.

Not if the answer is 'No, they cannot be.'
Colors are not ambiguous or complex, which is why they make better
companions in nursery schools than calculus textbooks. Our
consciousness develops from colors, gestures, emotions, and
experiences - sensorimotive experiences, not data and procedures. They
eye does not need a program to produce the experience of color, just
as a prism doesn't need a mechanism to produce the spectrum. We may
not be seeing what is objectively there from all perspectives across
all perceptual frames, but we do actually see what is there for us to
see, without any graphic rendering. It's subtractive. We see what our
brain and body and eyes don't filter out.


>
>
>
> >>> We become disenchanted with our own perception in favor of
> >>> knowledge about the mechanism associated with it's delivery.
>
> >> That's the mistake indeed. The beauty is that with the progress in
> >> machine theory the mistake becomes palpable. That's why I think it is
> >> interesting to understand that the current materialist theologies are
> >> not compatible with mechanism.
>
> > Which aspects specifically of mechanism are incompatible with
> > materialism?
>
> Study the sane04 paper, and ask question when you have a doubt. I
> think you can understand the result far easily than by admitting it,
> which requires to test the validity of all the steps in full details.
> And it is a reduction of a problem into another problem in a chosen
> theoretical frame. Only that, except for its translation into
> arithmetic, which illustrates at least the consistency of what
> machines can already said.
>

I would like to but unfortunately it makes no more sense to me than my
thesis makes to you.

>
>
> >>> All we
> >>> have to do is realize that seeing is not just a complex process of
> >>> billions of discrete particles and 'signals', but it is also a very
> >>> simple and biologically common non-process.
>
> >> What do you mean by biological in this context. What makes you think
> >> that there are no simple biologically common non-processes in
> >> arithmetic? If they are non computable, why do you want make them non
> >> Turing 1-recoverable?
>
> > I mean that we know our sense of sight is associated with our ocular
> > biology. I don't see the idea of biology in arithmetic as plausible,
> > mainly because of the specificity of the materials of biology and the
> > state of living vs dying. I don't think that arithmetic can die.
>
> Arithmetic is the frame. The universal dreamer. The dying creatures
> die in that dream, or fail to die in nested dreams. It is very complex.

But things don't die in dreams, they can come back again and again.
Characters don't die in games, you can program them do whatever you
want them to do. Reality is not a kind of dream - dreams and matter
are reality, and reality is a kind of sense.

>
>
>
> >> The disenchantment is due to the fact that people believe that
> >> mechanism is the answer.
> >> But mechanism is the question.
> >> Provably so once you assume mechanism. That's the beauty of it.
>
> > Or it is the tautological tragedy of it?
>
> A question is never tautological.

Proving mechanism by assuming mechanism isn't a question.

>
>
>
> >> In the least, it provides a non physical frame, yet widespread, the
> >> belief in arithmetic, where we can explain where the beliefs in
> >> physical laws come from (even as qualia), and, the hard part, why
> >> they
> >> are locally self-referentially correct.
>
> > I'm all for a non physical vocabulary, and even information science as
> > long as it isn't the basis for a cosmology.
>
> ?

Information is inert without energy. There has to be a 'here and now'
event to let information inform something. Information without a body
to inform is not possible (which is why we can't make computers out of
steam).

>
>
>
> >> Mechanism, well understood, is antireductionist for all universal
> >> numbers. It is as much a re-enchantment as a promise for infinities
> >> of
> >> mess. Universal machines oscillates between freedom and security,
> >> they
> >> want both, but there are local tradeoff. With security you loose
> >> universality, and with freedom you crash from time to times.
>
> > I think of computation like a lattice through which we can extend our
> > own neurological sensemaking. The lattice is real, but it's not doing
> > anything by itself.
>
> You will have to look closer, if you are interested.

MR says that the closer we look at anything, the more qualitative
significance we attribute to it.

Craig

Bruno Marchal

unread,
Jan 29, 2012, 9:28:19 AM1/29/12
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
On 28 Jan 2012, at 18:01, Craig Weinberg wrote:

On Jan 27, 4:38 pm, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
On 24 Jan 2012, at 23:39, Craig Weinberg wrote:

Okay. I thought by 'I assume comp all along' you meant that you
personally assume it is true.

Theories = axioms = postulates = hypothesis = proposition on which we
agree for the sake of searching truth.

But if another theory makes more sense, I don't see any point in
searching for truth with a theory that doesn't work.

We can never know if a theory work. We can know that some theories does not work. That's all.
In applied fundamental science we have to make clear the ontological commitment, as an ontological hypothesis, which has to make sense for your interlocutor.
The notion of "making much more sense" is relative, and not well defined.




A theory, and its interpretation(s) is only a tool to shed light on
what is essentially unknown.

That is why we are not on the same length wave. You still argue for
the truth of falsity of comp, when I try only to make it clearer and
show that it might be refutable (and thus is scientific in Popper
sense).

That's a more practical approach professionally speaking, but I'm only
interested in the truth of reality, not theories about theories.

With comp we are sort of divine theoretical constructions ourselves. Theories are part of reality, and comp identifies a notion of ideal person with set of theorems/beliefs. There are important link between theories, or just mechanically generable set of numbers, and machines and computability. You dismiss theories and machines, but I am not sure why. I guess you did not get the chance to meet a good math teacher in childhood, or something like that.




Perhaps the ability of doing something neither random nor determinist,
which could indeed make free-will inexistant.

It makes yellow traffic signals inexistant too.

You should prove what you assert. I can agree because the term "random" has many different meaning. For some meaning of it you are right. Classical digital chaos can be said neither random nor determinist, for some acceptable definition of "random" and "deterministic". Many disagreement here are uninteresting vocabulary problems.




For me, free-will is a generalization of responsibility. You need free-
will to be responsible, but you don't need to be responsible to have
free-will. Free-will is the ability to make higher level personal
decision in absence of complete information. It is enhanced by
consciousness, and can lead to conscience.

I'm ok with that more or less. I think some more physical correlations
can be derived as well though. Free will is about generating and
controlling of motive impulse.

I can be OK with that. Not need to make the motive impulse non Turing emulable at some level, though.


The expansion of consciousness comes
through sensitivity to accumulated experience so that together,

Not sure. This might expands self-consciousness, not consciousness. I think.



the
capacity to make sense is enhanced. The psyche can contract or dilate
it's sensitivity to change the scope and depth of it's awareness. This
gives the mind a more spacious 'now' in which to project strategic
motives further into the unknown.

OK.





I'm just talking about the ordinary difference
between feeling that you are doing something because you are doing it
as opposed to feeling that something is happening through no voluntary
action on your part. How do you know that Löbian machines have
awareness? Or are they defined that way a priori?

The reason I think that simple Löbian machine are conscious is that I
recognize already myself.

You mean that you recognize that you are a Löbian machine or your
recognition of yourself is what makes you conscious?


I recognize that Löbian machines are me. In a much larger context, though. I can talk with them, and it is their way to remain silent on some question which makes me NOt taking them as sort of zombie.

It is not the recognition of myself which makes me conscious. I need to be conscious to make sense of recognizing myself.





They have a rich theology, and can teach us a lot of surprising thing,
including about the 3p and 1p gaps, quanta and qualia, and the mystery
of existence.

I'm not sure about theology, but a microscope does all of those other
things too. What makes you say that machines have theology?

Because they can be aware of the gap between proof and truth. They can even study the rich mathematics  of that gap. They already claim having qualia. They are teaching me their theology. That's what AUDA is all about.




I don't think that they are zombies, that's all.
Today, they have not yet concrete relative bodies, except
mathematician's brain and books. So I can understand that it does not
seem obvious how deep they run.

I don't think that you appreciate how easy it is for us to project
sentience on something that has none.

The contrary here is also true. 
And in the case of consciousness attribution,  the naive attitude is less damageable than the skeptical attitude.




Wouldn't numbers+names land be even bigger?

No. Unless you admit incompressible infinite actual names.

Yes, names are incompressible.

?

Usually names compress information, or points to it. 
Do you know Mister von Furfel-zagtyszynoski-de la Vallée-Piperadeau-de St-Fond-van-het-Culturriydzstein-Und-Drekirch Shon of the Bitter Sun (and it run like that on thousand pages). The poor guy get never the diploma because he took too much time for him to spell correctly his name. You can imagine the trouble with administrations, the volume of the mail, etc.
Logicians consider often programs, machines, theories, finite things, as name for the infinite functions, infinte set of beliefs/theorem, behavior, model. 




I don't know that they are infinite or
actual, only that the set of things that can be named is larger than
the set of numbers, since each number itself is a name, but not all
names are numbers.

We prefer to say the contrary. We ask for finite names, and then we can use any numbers to name things, and there will be many things not nameable, but we can live with that. On the contrary, it is an interesting important point.







Anyway, you are not convincing by pointing on everyday example,
when
talking to a theoretician.

If the theory doesn't apply to reality, then I have no problem with
it. Fantasy sports are not my area of interest. It's only if it
conflicts with my ideas of realism that I would be curious.

Realism of what?

Of experience.

Well, at least we share this.



If comp is true, it has to apply on reality.

Why? Maybe comp only applies to comp reality. Just because such a
reality can be imposed on some material forms (but not all material
forms, as I try to point out) doesn't mean that our way of imagining
that reality is the same as how it is received at the target level.

Sure. But the idea is to start with a theory that everudbody can
understand, and then, if it fails, everybody will progress. You cannot
put the mystery like "sense", "matter" in the theory at the start,
because those things are what we want to explain. So we cannot assume
them, but still hope to derive them from simpler, or to meta-derive
them, etc.

There is no need to explain sense and matter. They are self
explanatory and non-mysterious.

Ah?



Only the symmetry between them is not
commonly understood.

It might be non symmetrical. Is that symmetry another assumption?




Once the symmetry is understood as primitive,
nothing simpler be conjured.

This looks like nonsense to me. Honest.








That's why UDA makes comp
a testable hypothesis.
I assume comp, derive consequences which are observable, and so we
can
make test.
It gives also a unification of qualia and quanta, consciousness and
matter. It might be that even false, it will remain interesting as an
example of theory. It might help to weaken comp to get the correct
picture.
To be sure the testable part requires not just comp, but also the
classical theory of knowledge.

Yes, it definitely will remain interesting, and is more functionally
useful than my sense model, but the sense model is the one that is
more universally explanatory.

Because you put the universal mystery in the assumption.

No, because the universal symmetry comes out of the assumption.

?



I only
assume that interiority is the opposite of exteriority. I didn't make
the qualities of matter into the opposite of experience - they are
actually that way (to us at least). I didn't assume that space is
public and time is private, and that private and public are opposite -
it just turns out that it makes sense to understand them that way. It
sets up a chain of relations which neatly maps the entire cosmos in
general terms for the first time in the modern era.

Convince many people before talking like that. It is an advise. Especially that you draw negative consequences, like machine can't think, or we are different. 







Generally the point of counting is to
establish a deterministic quantitative relation.. that's sort of
what
counting is? If the numbers themselves made choices, then why
should
we consider counting a reliable epistemology?

Counting use only the succession laws. The universal mess comes
from
the mixture of addition and multiplication, as the prime numbers
already illustrates by their logarithmic "random" distribution.
Your question is a bit like "if criminals are made of chemical
reactions, should we continue to rely on chemistry?".

Are you saying then choice making is an emergent property of certain
mixed arithmetic modes only and not inherent in numbers then?

Yes. The numbers plays a role only through their additive and
multiplicative structures, and to the relations, which includes the
computable one, you can define from this.

I think it makes more sense to see choice as an inherent potential of
nesting of awareness. The more that mechanical duties are offloaded to
subsystems the more sensorimotive interiority can develop in a
protected environment.

?

The CNS doesn't have to perform a physiological function, it can just
sit there protected by blood-brain-bone barrier and receive nutrients.

OK. But that does not help to get the point above.




In a universe of simple awareness, there is
only primitive sense detection and motive response. The effect of
having sense organs or nervous systems is to recapitulate the organism
within the organism, allowing a subjective experience of increased
depth of 'now' relative to a less elaborated organism. Human
consciousness is rich, slow roasted, gourmet qualia.

OK.  (but not as an argument agaionst comp).

Inorganic matter
has fast food qualia.

You are insulting inorganic matter. And matter has no qualia. Person
or living entities have qualia. relative numbers have qualia.

I think matter has to have some qualia, it's probably just very simple
by comparison.

This does not make any sense to me. Even assuming non-comp.



Sound is our clue to the qualia of matter I think.
Musical instruments exploit this. It's all about varying the forms and
substance of objects. I think that the qualia of matter could easily
be percussive, thermal, illuminating...


The difference is achieved through
simplification and condensation, not complexity. Complexity is the
back end.

?

Consciousness is about making a trillion cells into 'I' and the entire
cosmos into 'here' and 'now'.

This makes more sense.




By Gödel's theorem, and the existence of intensional modal variant,
there is room for quality.

Room for quality, or room for anything we care to imagine?

Room for all machines dreams, and room for all consistent machine's
dream relative realizations.

Is there something it doesn't have room for though?


Itself.







If that were the case a
person should be able to learn to see visual qualia with other sense
organs.

You might provide an argument. Only the brain, and some nerves
concentrations behaves in a way making them able to use the modal
(qualitative) relations between numbers.

How do you know that nerves are required?

They are required because their existence is implied by the relative
stability of consciousness when entangled to a deep computation.

Why are nerves doing the deep computation and not the bones?

Arithmetic makes the deep computations. The nerves cells makes only relatively deep computations, and the bones don't do computations at all, they sustain the bodies in the gravitational fields. That's the job they inherited from the pluricellular division of works, in a long story.





They may be required for us
to make sense (although blindsight suggests even that is not the case)
but they are not necessarily required for worms or protozoa.

A protozoa is a highly complex and elaborate cells with many
biochemical and biophysical information pathways.

That's what I'm saying. They don't need nerves, so why should we?

Because we are bigger. The maximal volumes for a cell is determined by the fact that the volume grows more quickly than the surface. Big cells cannot bring oxygen from the "little surface" to the big volume. Big organism have to be fractal gigantic cells or multicellulars.



Our
pancreas has many biochemical and biophysical information pathways,
I'm sure. Why don't we think and see with our pancreas instead?

We can' certainly not exclude it in advance, but the evidences are missing for making the pancreas the type of universal machine capable of sustaining the human mind. The biggest conceptual consequences of comp don't depend on the substitution level chosen.





A unicellular is a stomach, a skin, a lung, a liver, a muscle, and a
neuron all at once.

Yes! Also an eye, ear, tongue, nose, intuition, instinct, maybe radio
antenna, etc.

I can accept the eyes for an euglena, not sure about paramecia, or you stretch too much the words.




They have not voted for the division of work, and
they have as much succeeded as us, in the exploration of the planet.
I don't think they are Löbian, but I can prove that they are Turing
universal. It is an open problem if they are conscious, perhaps in a
trivial sense, or not. Löbianity begins, I think, with the spiders and
octopi.

Interesting. I agree, 8 is a big deal. Also 3 and 4 and 12.

Ah ah ...  don't forget 24.




Before I did conjecture that the Löbian animals are the
homeotherm animals, or all the animals which dreams, or can dream. Not
certainty, but still. What is common is the cognitive ability to
reflect on their own anticipation, making them aware of "?".

Your scope is different from mine. You are looking at issues around
the personality of functionalism. I'm looking at unifying the basic
structure of Everything.

I don't think we differ. My point is that we can keep the scientific attitude in theology.
Usual scientists ignore the mind-body problem. My work has consisted in showing that comp does not solve it per se, but leads to clear and transparent mathematical formulation of it, notably through the subproblem of the justification of the beliefs in physical entities, without postulating them.


I think the problem is that qualia are not complex, but rather simple.

I agree. In the sense they obey simples laws. But they are
conceptually rather subtle. Some people takes time to even understand
what others mean by qualia (as opposed to utterly transparent sharing
of quanta).

Right. Qualia is not a good word I think because it makes
sensorimotive experience into a pseudosubstance.

?
(it really looks like the contrary, because up to an unintelligible symmetry, you seem to almost equate matter and mind).



They do have "meta-axioms", like, they are not communicable, they have
semantics in term of perception fields integration, spatio-temporal in
the mental (Kant?) or ideal sense of the term.
Here, the classical logic of knowledge is derived from Theaetetus
definition of knowledge (true belief) with belief being equated with
what the machine asserts. The key is to limit oneself on the study of
self-referentially correct machine, believing in elementary arithmetic.

I think these are sort of beside the point though. Qualia is not about
definitions and axioms, it is about the actual raw content of
experience as it happens. I think that the whole idea of equating
qualia with belief is a mistake.


That would be mistake. But the whole point is that the machine can already explain too you that the reason you believe they cannot think is a confusion of the type belief/qualia. It is a confusion between Bp and Bp &p. The machine knows the intensional difference, and can only hope for their possible extensional equivalence (like when saying "yes" to the doctor).





Pain hurts.

Well, this is tautological.

No, it isn't. Sweet could hurt instead.

Define pain, then. I define it by what hurts. If sweet could hurt, it would be painful indeed.




Deep blue is introspective.

Hmm... OK.

They are the subjective
primitive.

I think the contrary, they are more like doors to unknown.

Absolutely, but unknown primitive. Sounds contradictory, but it isn't
- it's monad-ward.

They are
modalities of the exploration of the mindscape. They modularize our
apprehension of tuns of information, they simplify very hard task
making us feeling they are simple and primitive, but they are not.

Mechanisms don't need make hard tasks 'seem' simpler though. That only
adds complexity.

Brains have added complexity. 
Computer add complexity. But locally we feel it makes some task easier. But complexity grows.



Our feelings are simple and primitive as they could
be relative to what we actually are, which is this ridiculous
hierarchical organism of nested entities in 3p. Qualia do not refer to
3p though, they make up the integrity of the 1p through simplicity -
rich simplicity to precisely the impoverished complexity of the
multitudes within (impoverished because their autonomy is sacrificed
to an extent for the organism as a whole - also because quantity
breeds generality.) The proprietary richness of the qualia is
compensating for the investment of the multitudes


I can agree at least with the beginning which makes sense (notably in comp).
OK. The absence of some part of the hyppocampus gives a feeling of presence, I read. But the brain does not create the qualia (nor consciousness) in comp, yet you need those cycles to manifest them with the right probabilities relatively to a deeper computation sheaf.
OK. Remember that comp generalize this a lot. The whole physicalness is a product of the mind. To say it a bit roughly.



There are a lot of entities perceiving on many different
scales and scopes, ours is the top level, largest size, slowest rate
perception of the body so by comparison the lives of retinal cells
seem like they are cycling very fast.

I think it all comes down to whether the firing of nerve cells are an
embodiment of an equation or whether equations are derived from the
actions and experiences of bodies.

OK.


My solution is to see that they are
both parts of a single irreducible symmetrical ontology.

In a too much fuzzy theory, alas (for me).





The qualia are natural
construct for self-referential numbers, and it helps them a lot in the
everyday life, relatively to the possible others universal numbers in
the neighborhood.

Why qualia help them, or anything do anything? It's reverse
engineering. You are thinking that since qualia helps us, then
logically it must be helpful, but it isn't. Logic doesn't need a stage
show to help it. Qualia in general does not exist to assist function.
Of course qualia assists us because we are made of qualia,

?



but if we
weren't, if we were quanta that just appeared to us to be qualia, it
would not assist us at all, any more than installing an HDTV inside
the video card of your computer would assist it in rendering video.

Like consciousness they provide a self-acceleration in the computing
power. The price: they are not communicable.
But as far as we can recognize ourself in others, we can share that
part through art, music, movies, novels, etc.

The don't provide acceleration of computing powere, and even if they
did, so what? Who says that acceleration is useful in any way for
computation. That's a sensorimotive bias. What does it matter how fast
an arithmetic function can occur? What is 'fast'? It presupposes a
primitive time matrix that is physical.

Fast is relative. It is the time you eat your prey, or the time your predator eat you. Relative time are quite enough here.





In our case they are anthropological gourmet quality,

Sure.

but
they are still the finest grain resolution of human realism possible.
If what you are saying were true, we should expect to resolve more and
more colors as we age as our scope and history of experience expands.

Sorry but this does not follow.

Sure it does. If qualia comes from complexity of computations,

It does not. It come from non computable relation between truth and relatively simple self-referential loop. 
The loop itself is Turing emulable, the link with truth is not. 



then
surely a longer memory full of more complex data interactions should
yield a constant redefinition and expansion of the qualitative
palette.

Yes, and no. They are simple. I can imagine some insects having large qualia spectrum, but less ability to conceptualize space. We cannot compare.




Now, if you practice any entheogeny,
(church, mushrooms, dreams, whatever), that might well be the case,
because you can artificially explore qualia changes, and consciousness
through many sort of experiences, and learn through age. But with art
and research too, it is relative.
As numbering the sorts of qualia, perhaps, here too, like in physics,
we can try theories, comp theories, and variate study of subjective
reports.

Comp's explanation of qualia does not explain the lack of new qualia
generation.

Formulate the problem in the comp theory. You answer it before studying it. There is a still unsolved measure problem, and you talk like if you knew the consequences of comp. You betray again your prejudice in the subject matter.




MR explains it, since even though the computations of the
brain change, it is still a brain, and that is what defines the scope
and range of its potential qualia.

That's a comp explanation. My computer is still a computer, and it defines the range of thing I can do here and now with it.







Qualia serves users, not machines.

But of course both "are machine" with the comp hypothesis.
With "are machine" in the "yes doctor" quasi operational sense.
I can accept a sense that the first person is not a machine, but this
might been confusing.

But what is not explained is the service that qualia could provide for
machines.

Oh! Try to type on your computer without qualia.

A computer doesn't need me to type on it to compute. Keyboard, video,
and mouse are for human users, not for the computer.

Wait the bandits invent the buying machine. If we let education going as it is going, (since Nixon, say), humans will become subroutine for computations beyond their purposes.





Animals have developed the capacity to handle huge amount of data in
"real time", which makes sense for a self-moving entity. Qualia lives,
in normal circumstances, at the intersection of truth, and an
efficacious summary of the huge information in a consistent scenario,
with a hero.

Qualia does not merely represent and simplify information, it presents
and enriches experience also - which is something that comp does not
do.

?



Quanta needs no summary or representation - again, that is for the
convenience of human mathematicians and programmers. Programs
themselves operate only in an uncompressed, unencrypted form of mind-
numbingly repetitive binary units.

?


It is our intentional hallucination
that these units make sense objectively.

OK. Perhaps by chance?







It is insurmountably
nonsensical and metaphysical.

You should try to argue for this.

I can't really find anything to argue against though. The idea that
machines can make qualia seems like it comes out of thin air except
without the assumption that we are machines. There doesn't seem to be
any logic supporting it at all to argue against.

On the contrary. Some people have use Gödel's incompleteness theorem
to argue that man is not a machine. But Gödel's second incompleteness
is the answer *by* the machine, to that argument.

To talk frankly I think that you reduce the person to its physical
body. But assuming comp, and recognizing consciousness, changes the
picture.

No, MR supposes an entire other 'hemisphere' of the cosmos. Our
subjective side is a stitch in an unbroken thread that extends from
the beginning of time to the end. The body is the same thread but to
us, woven into the grid which is stitched upon. They are the same
thread, and it is both material and experiential -

Define those terms.



the pattern of the
weave arises from the weaving, and the idea of the pattern is a second
order perception. The weaving itself, the sensorimotive wag and wegh
of concrete thread is the primordial text.


Machine cannot "make" qualia.
It is more like self-referential machine cannot avoid qualia.

I understand, but it's absurd. Synesthesia, blindsight, and
anosognosia  would be impossible as visual qualia would be unavoidable
in any visual machine. It isn't the case.

You seem to have what we call in french "science infuse". You make assertion coming from nowhere. It might be seen as a report trips, but is not scientific communication.










It is to say, it's faster to count to
1000 if the numbers taste like different fruits.

?

If qualia speeds up processing then flavors+numbers should be faster
than just numbers, but they aren't.

Flavors+numbers are faster than just numbers, especially to test wine
of food. The qualia role is to make you understand *quickly* if you
should retrieve it for your mouth with disgust and drink water, or
smile or something.

I'm not unclear about qualia makes our computations faster, I'm saying
that there is no logic that should make it the case were we only
computing machines.

There is. Read the second part of sane04. 



If flavors made numbers faster then we should
invent a programming language with an alphabet of flavor commands.

That what are the cells, and you can be sure we will (re-do that. french have done rather powerful wine smelling machines. Artificial smell is a branch of AI. It can be used for alert of fire, detection of poison, search of plants in forest. As a programming language it would be difficult to use, because we can hardly control our own smell.








In that case they can discover that they cannot prove
that they have *genuine* qualia. This happens with not so much
self-
referential abilities.

All qualia is genuine. How could it be otherwise?

A zombie talking about its feeling of the color red, would talk about
a non genuine qualia. With non-comp, zombie makes sense.

It's not qualia though, it's just words that you can choose to
interpret indirectly as qualia or not. Qualia are only experience
first hand, and so cannot be non genuine.

Of course. If not, zombie would attribute sense to what they call
qualia. Which would be a non sense.
Yes, I think we agree on this, qualia are real.
But that's why the qualia on which the zombie can talk about can be
said non genuine.
Once zombie exists they can talk about qualia, like you and me, but of
course they don't mean them, by definition.

It's a semantic point, but I think it speaks to the core problem of
comp. The qualia that zombies talk about are neither genuine or non-
genuine...they don't exist.

I grant you that. But with comp we don't attribute qualia to physical-machine, only to the immaterial person.



Because we can talk about imaginary
numbers doesn't mean they can be considered genuine imaginary numbers
- they are absent from reality. Fiction.

Philosophical zombies are fiction, in the comp theory. If we reify matter, then we are all relative zombie in front of each other. Bodies does not think. Only souls or person do that.
When I said 35 years ago that computer will be bought by everyone in Occident, I have been considered as crackpot. We are living the explosion. The net is an echo, the quantum computer is another echo. It is a bomb with infinities of echo and singularities, and jumps, etc.




The sum of all creativity
in Conway or Mandelbrot can be gathered in a brief exposure. I really
never need to see either one of them again in my life. I don't feel
the need to keep an eye on them as I would for something which has
actual creativity, like a blog. Trivial intelligence is not genuinely
creative. It is, to paraphrase Pierz, completely unsurprising given
the parameters and mechanisms of the game. It is sterile. Beautiful
and interesting of course, but ultimately reflecting beyond the vision
of it's programming.

You seems blasé, and unaware of what really the subject is all about.




I don't take it for granted, I only propose that it's a plausible
creation story. A single everythingness-nothingness that is diffracted
through the sense of symmetry into a multiplicity of somethingness.

Give me the equation.
And the type of variable.
(Here I can only make too much sense of what you say).

• ? x(??A), where ? is diffraction through symmetries [(•/-)(-/•)]²
which gives rise to 'x'-ness.

I'm not much of an equation guy. Maybe you can write it better.


May be, but then you have to explain it better too. You must explain things in the hypothetical deductive way, with or without equation. You have to explain it in a way which makes possible to other to explain, not in a way that they can repeat it, like a religious mantra.
You answer too quickly the post of others, not really taking into account their argument, by begging the question.




Sense is inherent in light?
How? What would that mean?

It means that light is a perceptual experience made of image qualia
like color, contrast, brightness, image, motion, form, beauty, etc.

Better to be clear if you talk about light = the physical phenomenon,
and light = the human qualia related to it.
 I agree, sense is inherent in the light-the-qualia.

There is no physical phenomenon of light. Photons, for those that
believe in them, are completely intangible and invisible.




They are
related to light no more or less than heat or radioactive darkness.

?





The visible spectrum is one way of essentializing those qualia. Once
you set aside the assumption that light (and heat, motion, energy) is
a substance, we can see that vision is a channel of sensitivity to
those qualia and nothing more.

From the first person perspective.

There is no other perspective of vision. There is optics,
ophthalmology, and neurology, but they can only tell us about
functions correlated with our access to vision, not vision itself.

That's right, but that can be explained in a 3p way, with some hypothesis.




The mind is native and organic to the brain.

The brain is native and organic to the mind. (I would argue, in the
comp theory).

Why though? Why use a brain and not something sturdier and faster?
What about the human mind evokes a grey semi-solid organ? Why bother
with biology at all?

Because brain makes possible and probable the relation between 1p, 1p plural and 3p.





The two are opposite
sides of the same coin.

You can't know that. You are the one who say no to the doctor, and
avoids the consequence of the yes.
The arithmetical image is more like the physics is the surface of the
ocean, and mind is the ocean.

I understand that way of thinking about it, but sense makes more
sense. The ocean surface is event horizon of the atmosphere and the
ocean. If you are under the ocean coming up, the surface is one thing
and if you are falling into the ocean from above it is another thing.
If you are a bird the surface means food, if you are a mollusk, the
surface means death. The physics is the entire atmosphere and the
ocean is the mind, but it is where they meet that is most real
(pedestrian fold) and at the extremes (profound edge) that they
evanesce into sterile entropy (at the top of the atmosphere and in the
deepest part of the ocean).

I think you take my image too much seriously. Matter is more like a derivative of the mind, to use another image.




You should better avoid the use of the word "real". Given that our
discussion is precisely on what is real, or on what is primitively
real.

concrete? non-abstract? energetic? direct? presented?

I was more thinking about "assumed".

Assumed by what? You are thinking in terms of a theory defining it's
terms, but I'm trying to define reality, not terms.

That's nonsense.





When you say "direct", I can agree that qualia are felt as primitively
real, and are subjectively real. But concrete means the opposite, like
the concrete for buildings, what people take as primitively
substantial and "real".

That's an important point. I forget to supply that info of how I got
there. MR begins with taking everything literally, including
consciousness. The finger and the moon are the primitively real -
concrete, and our experience of them is concrete, but the relation of
the pointingness of the finger is a second order logic, which puts it
further back into the oriental figurative side of the continuum. It's
still real in an absolute sense because we can make sense of it and
that is a real experience, but relative to either the finger, moon, or
our experience of either, the relation is more private than public.
This means that the actual experience of qualia is real, but the fact
that qualia may or may not represent any particular thing is a
fictional interpretation.


OK. (But I need to fill many holes, and I use comp to do that).






cells, (x)tillions of molecules which are literally within us, as
well
as it is influenced by our fractional participation in the worlds
which exist without us - our social group, civilization, species,
biosphere, planet, solar system, galaxy, cosmos.

All those terms make sense. But they do not denote anything
primitively real.

They don't have to be primitively real, but they are the forms that
are real relative to our perceptual frame.

In what?

In our human world. Our scope of phenomenology from roughly 0.1 Hz
moments to 100 year lifetimes and 1 mm to 10m range of objects.

So you assume the human world. What is left to be explained?





What is a cell to us might
be the equivalent of a planet to the molecules that make up a cell.

OK. But it is not an isomorphism.

Right. Which helps falsify comp for me. If comp were true, I would
think that we should see massively redundant isomorphism on different
scales. We see not just basic forms but fully explicated isomorphic
fractals everywhere. We should be made of miniature people. Animals
should make beehives and anthills.

You have to prove this.








Actual bodies are relative ideal bodies seen from inside. Bodies are
experience type, not primitively material token, in the comp theory
(when well understood).

It has some things going for it - out of body experiences, multiple
personality disorders having physiological effects, reincarnation,
ghosts etc, but even if credible, these are not the norm. Their
association with the incredible and uncredible however makes me
categorize them as experiential artifacts close to the interior-
oriental extreme...the vanishing point at which the autobiographical
narrative begins to super-signify and diffract (ACME = Anything Can
Mean Everything).

ACME looks like 0 = 1, to me. Things are not that simple.

Things are not that simple in reality, but ACME is where mechanism is
0% and solipsism is 100%. Reality is where mechanism and solipsism are
both 50%. OMMM is where mechanism is 100% and solipsism is 0%.

?







I would expect a world of avatar impersonations to be much lighter and
looser than the world we live in and physical conditions should not
have such a powerful effect on us. For instance, we discover a drug
like opium, and even after thousands of years, the drug still has an
effect on every living person's body, regardless of experience type.
That substance is active for humans and other animals regardless of
experience type. It's effects can be blocked or amplified by other
substances but not by words or incantations.

I agree that bodies are ideal on the inside and physical on the
outside, but I think that both sides are causally efficacious. The
physical side's form of causality is consequence, entropy, and
teleonomy, while the ideal side is sequence, significance, and
teleology.

Perhaps.

Cool. I know it's hard to believe it could be that simple,

I see only ad hoc complexity, or begging the question strategy. It is certainly not simple.



but I think
that it might be the case. We're just so complex that we are lost
inside of a universe of many overlapping frames of reference, but each
frame could be based on the same simple principle.

Too vague, and I am skeptical, if only because you say it is simple, but force us to abandon comp, and this without you being able to provide a single argument.
It is better to let your interlocutor decide if something is simple or not, for him.





An email application can't explain any function of anything.

You must click on 'help'.

Right, because that's how we use the computer to help ourselves. The
email app is not explaining anything, it's just sending a meaningless
column of bits to the video card when {button#01bc2400 = true}. It
isn't pointing a finger to the moon, it is the mechanically matching
the word finger and the word moon and we are doing the rest.

No. You can't reduce a computation to its lower level. That's your biggest constant mistake. It forces you to put the mystery everywhere. It prevents the search for explanation. It makes you look like a pseudo-theologian.






We can
though. I would not assume that if an email application had our
awareness that it could not explain how it functions.

At which level of explanation?

At top level.

?

You are trying to tie it back to a linear mechanism (a summing or
function), but it isn't - no more than white is a summing or function
of the visible spectrum.

The image illustrate a recurrent pattern, like your cells viewed by a
molecule. Those are image/analogy.

It's funny I don't think I have ever said that cells are viewed by a
molecule - I think they are, sort of, as civilization is 'viewed' by a
person, but it's just interesting the difference between what I think
I'm saying and what others think I'm saying. But yeah close enough.
What's wrong with an analogy? How else to describe that reality is not
logical in a linear reductive sense without appealing to examples of
reality directly?

We cannot have example for that, unless you assume the WYSIWYG Aristotelian belief. Do you?




A prism is nice because it's transparent and inert,
with no moving parts and yet it demonstrates clearly an unlikely
transformation - not through energy exerted, but through matter
obstructing and subtracting from energy. It's a powerful metaphor for
the singularity.


It's a figurative diffraction across multiple
scales of nested awareness.

I will ask you to formalize this in first order logical theory, or in
term of some other first logical theory.
You have to follow some course for doing that, I guess.

Yeah I need a co-conspirator for that.

You need to study a lot and work a lot. If not the co-conspirator will look like a disciple, which is the worst thing which can happen to a scientist.





We feel that we are sitting down. Our
tissues and cells and molecules feel different things. We think that
our tissues and cells feel nothing but only send and receive signals,

I don't think that, and it is unrelated a priori from the assumptions.

I agree, but the assumption of signal rather than feeling is the
dominant worldview in this era.

It is not a coincidence. The subject is politically taboo since more than 1500 years.





but that's only because our awareness is nested so far inward and
upward that we see their world in 'black and white' - qualitatively
desaturated (= generically quantitative.)

We have not solve the mind body problem. Scientist are normally
neutral on this. The other's consciousness is an old very complex
problem related to consciousness.

But then why do you attribute "black and white" zombie-like being to
the universal numbers?

I don't attribute any being to the universal numbers.

This is too vague, or utter nonsense. 



Enumeration is
an aspect of sense but not of being. The sense we make out of numbers
is dependent on our hardware, just as our color vision is dependent on
eyes. If universal numbers were beings, why would we need to use
binary codes exclusively in electronics? Why not just tune into the
larger tides of nonlocal arithmetic?

You seem to assume hardware and sense. That's far too much to awaken my interest.




You might be right, but there are evidences, at different levels, that
the 3-relation are locally Turing emulable.
To postulate non Turing emulability at the start hides the "natural"
non turing emulability of the 1p person and its 1-relations.

The 3p activities of the cells, molecules, etc do influence our 1p
experience, but they don't produce them. We are influenced by our
house, office, etc, but we are not an emergent property of those
structures or relations. The 3-p are Turing Emulable - or at least
they are until you get into emulating our own perceptual frame, then
you become aware of the absence of 1p influence on 3p (uncanny
valley).


This makes
sense since sensorimotive experience scales up qualitatively rather
than just quantitatively, so that more brain cells does not feel like
more brain cells, it feels like more awareness and sense-making of the
world.

Well the software of computer scales qualitatively too.

Only to the user, not to the computer.

?




You are using sensorimotive as a speculation that consciousness scales
down infinitely escaping all possible digital local explanation.

Yes. I'm not escaping it though, it's evaporating on it's own. I'm not
averse to digital local influence, but I am careful not to mistake the
moon for the finger. Digital process maps the 3p function of sense
organs which can inform us about our 1p experience given that we
already experience it, but it cannot conjure the experience itself.

Who say so?





You confuse the person for its clothe.

No, I'm clear that (a person wearing clothes) and (a body covered with
fabric) are literally the same thing in one sense and opposite things
in another, figurative sense. This sense is what the cosmos is made
of. Defining fabric as a type of clothes or a body as a type of person
is no better than the contrary definition. Both senses are valid,
especially in contradistinction.




Codes and mechanisms are what real objects do to each other, but
objects are not codes themselves. They are a chunks of the
singularity
with masses and densities.

I don't know that.

That's what they seem like though.

Yes. But that's the key difference.

Why wouldn't codes just seem like codes?

Because they dream.

Why would they? By what logic?

By comp, classical logic and few axioms on numbers. 






Programs tend to encounter errors
and crash, or encounter latency, pixelation, etc. Matter doesn't
ever
falter in it's own presentation though. An iron anvil never drops
it's
gravity pointer and flies through the ceiling spontaneously or
changes
back and forth from iron to cobalt because the anvil class of
programs
has a bad line of code.

It just a matter of first person plural probability calculus.

I don't know that.

UDA is supposed to prove this.

Even if it does, that would mean that comp could support the
perception of non-comp, but it doesn't mean that it has to be the
case. Non-comp could support the perception of comp too.

OK.
Except that the theory non-comp is not yet a theory. I have not yet seen a rational non-comp theory, with the woprd "theory" in its usual scientific understanding. What you seem to do is a phenomenology, punctuated by insult of machines.





I think it's far more likely that an anvil's
movements can be interpreted as calculus than calculus could or would
turn into an anvil for some reason.

That is not what happen.

Why not?

By UDA. 
You are not precise enough to be said wrong.







If we start with 0 as the first number, then the second
number is no more likely to be 1 than it is to be any number.

In which theory?

In the one I'm describing?

No. Sorry. I is not clear what you assume and what you explain.

I assume nothing but 0.

I meant in your "theory", or in you conception of reality. 
Theory = hypothesis. I don't know what are your hypothesis. You talk like if you knew the truth.



With 1 you inherently have the idea of
something, so you can invert it to get (not 1).

We apply "not" to proposition, not to number.



If I start with 0,
there is nothing to invert. Not 0 doesn't imply a number.

"Imply" is also reserved to proposition, or sentences, not number.







Beginning with unity and singularity is infinite in the sense that
without anything else to relate to it can only be boundless, but
it is
not infinitely complex, it is infinitely simple. Complexity arises
through the fragmentation-division and multiplication-recapitulation
of the 1.

Complexity arise from addition and multiplication. With comp, it is
enough.

What is it that is added and multiplied though?

The natural numbers.

Which arise from what?

Nobdoy knows that. Comp proves that nobody will ever know that in any public communicable way.
That is why I assume them, through five or six axioms.







I postulate white light which presents each division
(diffraction really, as it is not truly divided but revealed like a
sliced onion) as a range of color. The color is the diffraction and
the diffraction is the color. You could say that all numbers exist
inside of 1 and that 0 does not exist but insists as a potential (ie
Cantor Set evanescence).

I am afraid this does not make much sense for me.

I'm saying that I suspect that the universe makes more sense if all
numbers add up to 1, not 0, even if it means beginning with that as an
axiom.

That's very Plotinian, and again I might agree, but that's again
another modal point of view, when we look through the eyes of the
numbers.

Ok.

Ah?
1004 fallacy.








Carved out of the singularity
using the knife of interior figurative diffraction (feeling/being,
sequence, significance, time) which is expressed as literal
diffraction on the exterior (indirect detection, objects, space,
relativity, topology)

Too much sense here. Sorry. You have to find a way to make your
statement more precise if you want to convince a scientist.

I'm trying to get at the primordial interior-exterior divisions, and
how the interior is diffracted one way, using an alphabet of feeling
and being through time and the exterior is diffracted the opposite
way, using indirect representations of objects across space.

?

Our experience of space and time are opposites. I'm saying that our
entire interior view of the universe is based on frequency and our
exterior view is based on wavelength. The two meta-topologies are
anomalously symmetrical.

?

The two sides of the coin are opposite. One sees the coin as a
character in the context of cycles of experience. It is a coin in the
semantic sense of money and time, flipping (probability), government
and finance, etc. The other sees the coin as circle of metal of a
specific weight and density. There is no semantic content, only
syntactic content.

? ?






The subjective correlate would be silent and dark void as
well as solar fusion and stellar profusion. This is realism.

This is imagination.

Imagination is part of realism.

At a different level. If you forget this you blur fiction and the
reality we are searching. (Not the reality we would have found).

There is a level at which fiction and reality are blurred, and a
level
at which they are rigorously demarcated. Both levels are real as
well
as the continuum of levels between them. I am calling the former the
profound edge and the latter the pedestrian fold (of the multisense
continuum).http://multisenserealism.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/label_comp8a.jpg

?

Not sure how else to explain it. Reality is sense from every
perspective, including the mutually exclusive opposite perspectives..

?

Sense in every sense.

Frankly this does not help.







Yes. It is a tradition to put the mind body problem under the rug.
My point is that if we take the comp hyp seriously, simple thought
experience shows how the express it in arithmetical term and
axiomatic
definition, and that it leads to test. Making it scientific in the
usual academical sense of the term.

How are simple colors expressed in arithmetic though?

The question is ambiguous, and complex.

Not if the answer is 'No, they cannot be.'
Colors are not ambiguous or complex, which is why they make better
companions in nursery schools than calculus textbooks. Our
consciousness develops from colors, gestures, emotions, and
experiences - sensorimotive experiences, not data and procedures. They
eye does not need a program to produce the experience of color, just
as a prism doesn't need a mechanism to produce the spectrum. We may
not be seeing what is objectively there from all perspectives across
all perceptual frames, but we do actually see what is there for us to
see, without any graphic rendering. It's subtractive. We see what our
brain and body and eyes don't filter out.

I have no clue what you are talking about. Sorry.









We become disenchanted with our own perception in favor of
knowledge about the mechanism associated with it's delivery.

That's the mistake indeed. The beauty is that with the progress in
machine theory the mistake becomes palpable. That's why I think it is
interesting to understand that the current materialist theologies are
not compatible with mechanism.

Which aspects specifically of mechanism are incompatible with
materialism?

Study the sane04 paper, and ask question when you have a doubt. I
think you can understand the result far easily than by admitting it,
which requires to test the validity of all the steps in full details.
And it is a reduction of a problem into another problem in a chosen
theoretical frame. Only that, except for its translation into
arithmetic, which illustrates at least the consistency of what
machines can already said.


I would like to but unfortunately it makes no more sense to me than my
thesis makes to you.

It is enough to study some book to get it. UDA explains as much as possible to the layman. AUDA needs some familiarity in logic and computer science, which are standard subject.
What you say often makes local sense, in comp, and local non sense (with or without comp).






All we
have to do is realize that seeing is not just a complex process of
billions of discrete particles and 'signals', but it is also a very
simple and biologically common non-process.

What do you mean by biological in this context. What makes you think
that there are no simple biologically common non-processes in
arithmetic? If they are non computable, why do you want make them non
Turing 1-recoverable?

I mean that we know our sense of sight is associated with our ocular
biology. I don't see the idea of biology in arithmetic as plausible,
mainly because of the specificity of the materials of biology and the
state of living vs dying. I don't think that arithmetic can die.

Arithmetic is the frame. The universal dreamer. The dying creatures
die in that dream, or fail to die in nested dreams.  It is very complex.

But things don't die in dreams, they can come back again and again.
Characters don't die in games, you can program them do whatever you
want them to do. Reality is not a kind of dream - dreams and matter
are reality, and reality is a kind of sense.

So you say, in common with the Aristotelians. 








The disenchantment is due to the fact that people believe that
mechanism is the answer.
But mechanism is the question.
Provably so once you assume mechanism. That's the beauty of it.

Or it is the tautological tragedy of it?

A question is never tautological.

Proving mechanism by assuming mechanism isn't a question.

Nobody proves mechanism, or whatever, by assuming mechanism, or whatever.

Assuming something is a form of questioning. We just often forget it when theories works well a long time.








In the least, it provides a non physical frame, yet widespread, the
belief in arithmetic, where we can explain where the beliefs in
physical laws come from (even as qualia), and, the hard part, why
they
are locally self-referentially correct.

I'm all for a non physical vocabulary, and even information science as
long as it isn't the basis for a cosmology.

?

Information is inert without energy. There has to be a 'here and now'
event to let information inform something. Information without a body
to inform is not possible (which is why we can't make computers out of
steam).

There is an infinity of "here and now" in comp. The hard part is to related them. Comp makes it possible to translate this into math problem.







Mechanism, well understood, is antireductionist for all universal
numbers. It is as much a re-enchantment as a promise for infinities
of
mess. Universal machines oscillates between freedom and security,
they
want both, but there are local tradeoff. With security you loose
universality, and with freedom you crash from time to times.

I think of computation like a lattice through which we can extend our
own neurological sensemaking. The lattice is real, but it's not doing
anything by itself.

You will have to look closer, if you are interested.

MR says that the closer we look at anything, the more qualitative
significance we attribute to it.

Good. Take the chance, then.

Bruno


Craig Weinberg

unread,
Feb 1, 2012, 6:25:45 PM2/1/12
to Everything List
I just don't see how beliefs can be primitive. Sense I can make a
positive connection between the ideal and physical. The fact that we
use it to mean physical detection as well as cognitive coherence is
significant. Belief has no ground for me. It's not something that
happens or exists or is felt, only a way of understanding the relation
of an entity (hypothetical subject devoid of specific subjective
qualities) and the conditions of it's (inner and outer) world.

There are important link between
> theories, or just mechanically generable set of numbers, and machines
> and computability. You dismiss theories and machines, but I am not
> sure why. I guess you did not get the chance to meet a good math
> teacher in childhood, or something like that.

I don't dismiss them, I see them as strategies within some of games of
the universe, not the plot of all stories of the universe.

>
>
>
> >> Perhaps the ability of doing something neither random nor
> >> determinist,
> >> which could indeed make free-will inexistant.
>
> > It makes yellow traffic signals inexistant too.
>
> You should prove what you assert. I can agree because the term
> "random" has many different meaning. For some meaning of it you are
> right. Classical digital chaos can be said neither random nor
> determinist, for some acceptable definition of "random" and
> "deterministic". Many disagreement here are uninteresting vocabulary
> problems.
>

Classical digital chaos can't be said to be intentional though. That's
the missing element. Machines, arithmetic, chaos, etc can't do
anything intentionally. We do though.

>
>
> >> For me, free-will is a generalization of responsibility. You need
> >> free-
> >> will to be responsible, but you don't need to be responsible to have
> >> free-will. Free-will is the ability to make higher level personal
> >> decision in absence of complete information. It is enhanced by
> >> consciousness, and can lead to conscience.
>
> > I'm ok with that more or less. I think some more physical correlations
> > can be derived as well though. Free will is about generating and
> > controlling of motive impulse.
>
> I can be OK with that. Not need to make the motive impulse non Turing
> emulable at some level, though.

I don't think intention can be emulated. A Turing machine's behavior
can only be scripted or else be an unintentional consequence of the
script. It can't intentionally transcend it's own script.

>
> > The expansion of consciousness comes
> > through sensitivity to accumulated experience so that together,
>
> Not sure. This might expands self-consciousness, not consciousness. I
> think.

If you learn to read, your consciousness of language expands. It's not
limited to self consciousness.

>
> > the
> > capacity to make sense is enhanced. The psyche can contract or dilate
> > it's sensitivity to change the scope and depth of it's awareness. This
> > gives the mind a more spacious 'now' in which to project strategic
> > motives further into the unknown.
>
> OK.
>
>
>
> >>> I'm just talking about the ordinary difference
> >>> between feeling that you are doing something because you are doing
> >>> it
> >>> as opposed to feeling that something is happening through no
> >>> voluntary
> >>> action on your part. How do you know that Löbian machines have
> >>> awareness? Or are they defined that way a priori?
>
> >> The reason I think that simple Löbian machine are conscious is that I
> >> recognize already myself.
>
> > You mean that you recognize that you are a Löbian machine or your
> > recognition of yourself is what makes you conscious?
>
> I recognize that Löbian machines are me. In a much larger context,
> though. I can talk with them, and it is their way to remain silent on
> some question which makes me NOt taking them as sort of zombie.

Talk with them, meaning internal dialogue?

>
> It is not the recognition of myself which makes me conscious. I need
> to be conscious to make sense of recognizing myself.

I agree.

>
>
>
> >> They have a rich theology, and can teach us a lot of surprising
> >> thing,
> >> including about the 3p and 1p gaps, quanta and qualia, and the
> >> mystery
> >> of existence.
>
> > I'm not sure about theology, but a microscope does all of those other
> > things too. What makes you say that machines have theology?
>
> Because they can be aware of the gap between proof and truth. They can
> even study the rich mathematics of that gap. They already claim
> having qualia. They are teaching me their theology. That's what AUDA
> is all about.
>

What qualia do they have?

>
>
> >> I don't think that they are zombies, that's all.
> >> Today, they have not yet concrete relative bodies, except
> >> mathematician's brain and books. So I can understand that it does not
> >> seem obvious how deep they run.
>
> > I don't think that you appreciate how easy it is for us to project
> > sentience on something that has none.
>
> The contrary here is also true.
> And in the case of consciousness attribution, the naive attitude is
> less damageable than the skeptical attitude.

Then we should treat corporations as people too?

>
>
>
> >>> Wouldn't numbers+names land be even bigger?
>
> >> No. Unless you admit incompressible infinite actual names.
>
> > Yes, names are incompressible.
>
> ?
>
> Usually names compress information, or points to it.
> Do you know Mister von Furfel-zagtyszynoski-de la Vallée-Piperadeau-de
> St-Fond-van-het-Culturriydzstein-Und-Drekirch Shon of the Bitter Sun
> (and it run like that on thousand pages). The poor guy get never the
> diploma because he took too much time for him to spell correctly his
> name. You can imagine the trouble with administrations, the volume of
> the mail, etc.
> Logicians consider often programs, machines, theories, finite things,
> as name for the infinite functions, infinte set of beliefs/theorem,
> behavior, model.

A name is different from it's abbreviation or acronym though. You
can't derive one without knowing the other. The name itself is never
compressed, it's only associated with a shorter name.

>
> > I don't know that they are infinite or
> > actual, only that the set of things that can be named is larger than
> > the set of numbers, since each number itself is a name, but not all
> > names are numbers.
>
> We prefer to say the contrary. We ask for finite names, and then we
> can use any numbers to name things, and there will be many things not
> nameable, but we can live with that. On the contrary, it is an
> interesting important point.

Even within quantity there are names which cannot be enumerated. We
say 'many' or several, lots, tons, etc. Each have different semantic
qualities appropriate for different functions. All numbers have a name
though, sometimes more than one.
No need to explain those terms in other terms I mean.

>
> > Only the symmetry between them is not
> > commonly understood.
>
> It might be non symmetrical. Is that symmetry another assumption?

Not an assumption, an observation/hypothesis.

>
> > Once the symmetry is understood as primitive,
> > nothing simpler be conjured.
>
> This looks like nonsense to me. Honest.

should be 'nothing simpler need be conjured'

>
>
>
> >>>> That's why UDA makes comp
> >>>> a testable hypothesis.
> >>>> I assume comp, derive consequences which are observable, and so we
> >>>> can
> >>>> make test.
> >>>> It gives also a unification of qualia and quanta, consciousness and
> >>>> matter. It might be that even false, it will remain interesting
> >>>> as an
> >>>> example of theory. It might help to weaken comp to get the correct
> >>>> picture.
> >>>> To be sure the testable part requires not just comp, but also the
> >>>> classical theory of knowledge.
>
> >>> Yes, it definitely will remain interesting, and is more functionally
> >>> useful than my sense model, but the sense model is the one that is
> >>> more universally explanatory.
>
> >> Because you put the universal mystery in the assumption.
>
> > No, because the universal symmetry comes out of the assumption.
>
> ?

Any description of the universe has to make some kind of sense and all
things that make sense describe an aspect of the universe. Sense
requires the possibility of a foreground/background, subject/object,
variance/invariance relation. The three things; foreground,
background, and relation between the two (something that can tell the
difference) are the most primitive possible realism. You cannot have
just one or two things because there is nothing to tell the
difference. The most primitive thing that can be real is one thing
that can tell the difference between itself and the absence of itself.
It's really not much different from Turing binary, but binary can't be
primordial because 1 doesn't know that it's different from 0 (if it
did it would be redundant to have both). 1 and 0 therefore, are two
opposite states of the same thing - a boundaryless solitary bit which
can tell whether it is in one state or another. This sense - this
ability to detect and discern the difference, to make more sense out
of patterns of the states, that is the primodial monad. It's not
arithmetic truth, it is the concrete phenomenology of the cosmos which
tells truths and fictions of all sorts.

>
> > I only
> > assume that interiority is the opposite of exteriority. I didn't make
> > the qualities of matter into the opposite of experience - they are
> > actually that way (to us at least). I didn't assume that space is
> > public and time is private, and that private and public are opposite -
> > it just turns out that it makes sense to understand them that way. It
> > sets up a chain of relations which neatly maps the entire cosmos in
> > general terms for the first time in the modern era.
>
> Convince many people before talking like that. It is an advise.
> Especially that you draw negative consequences, like machine can't
> think, or we are different.

You are probably right. It's a shame that we have to hide the truth
out of fear of emotional reactions.
When a glass falls on the floor and breaks, what we hear is coming
from somewhere. It is entirely possible that what we hear is an event
that is experienced in some way by the groups of atoms in the glass as
it rings and shatters into pieces. There is an event and it is felt in
different ways by everything which has sense and opportunity to detect
it.

>
> > Sound is our clue to the qualia of matter I think.
> > Musical instruments exploit this. It's all about varying the forms and
> > substance of objects. I think that the qualia of matter could easily
> > be percussive, thermal, illuminating...
>
> >>> The difference is achieved through
> >>> simplification and condensation, not complexity. Complexity is the
> >>> back end.
>
> >> ?
>
> > Consciousness is about making a trillion cells into 'I' and the entire
> > cosmos into 'here' and 'now'.
>
> This makes more sense.
>
>
>
> >>>> By Gödel's theorem, and the existence of intensional modal variant,
> >>>> there is room for quality.
>
> >>> Room for quality, or room for anything we care to imagine?
>
> >> Room for all machines dreams, and room for all consistent machine's
> >> dream relative realizations.
>
> > Is there something it doesn't have room for though?
>
> Itself.

Sense is what makes sense itself make sense of itself. It's the
universal bootstrap - hence essential, or essence, or oriental (in the
sense of primary orientation).

>
>
>
> >>>>> If that were the case a
> >>>>> person should be able to learn to see visual qualia with other
> >>>>> sense
> >>>>> organs.
>
> >>>> You might provide an argument. Only the brain, and some nerves
> >>>> concentrations behaves in a way making them able to use the modal
> >>>> (qualitative) relations between numbers.
>
> >>> How do you know that nerves are required?
>
> >> They are required because their existence is implied by the relative
> >> stability of consciousness when entangled to a deep computation.
>
> > Why are nerves doing the deep computation and not the bones?
>
> Arithmetic makes the deep computations. The nerves cells makes only
> relatively deep computations, and the bones don't do computations at
> all, they sustain the bodies in the gravitational fields. That's the
> job they inherited from the pluricellular division of works, in a long
> story.
>

If the bones don't do computations, what are they made of if matter
isn't primitive?

>
>
> >>> They may be required for us
> >>> to make sense (although blindsight suggests even that is not the
> >>> case)
> >>> but they are not necessarily required for worms or protozoa.
>
> >> A protozoa is a highly complex and elaborate cells with many
> >> biochemical and biophysical information pathways.
>
> > That's what I'm saying. They don't need nerves, so why should we?
>
> Because we are bigger. The maximal volumes for a cell is determined by
> the fact that the volume grows more quickly than the surface. Big
> cells cannot bring oxygen from the "little surface" to the big volume.
> Big organism have to be fractal gigantic cells or multicellulars.

Multicellular is one thing, but nerves are another. Giant trees don't
need a nervous system.

>
> > Our
> > pancreas has many biochemical and biophysical information pathways,
> > I'm sure. Why don't we think and see with our pancreas instead?
>
> We can' certainly not exclude it in advance, but the evidences are
> missing for making the pancreas the type of universal machine capable
> of sustaining the human mind. The biggest conceptual consequences of
> comp don't depend on the substitution level chosen.

It's only reverse engineering though. A whale's brain seems no more or
less likely to sustain a human mind, except that we know for a fact
which brain belongs to which. Comp doesn't provide for any physical
containment. It could be executed in pancreas or bone given a small
enough fundamental computation unit - an atom or quark.

>
>
>
> >> A unicellular is a stomach, a skin, a lung, a liver, a muscle, and a
> >> neuron all at once.
>
> > Yes! Also an eye, ear, tongue, nose, intuition, instinct, maybe radio
> > antenna, etc.
>
> I can accept the eyes for an euglena, not sure about paramecia, or you
> stretch too much the words.

"The behavioural responses to light in the ciliate Paramecium bursaria
Focke,
which normally contains hundreds of the symbiotic green alga Chlorella
in its
cytoplasm, were analysed quantitatively to clarify the mechanisms
governing
photoreception in the cell. P. bursana was found to possess three
kinds of
photoreceptor systems..." http://jeb.biologists.org/content/134/1/43.full.pdf
>
>
> >> They have not voted for the division of work, and
> >> they have as much succeeded as us, in the exploration of the planet.
> >> I don't think they are Löbian, but I can prove that they are Turing
> >> universal. It is an open problem if they are conscious, perhaps in a
> >> trivial sense, or not. Löbianity begins, I think, with the spiders
> >> and
> >> octopi.
>
> > Interesting. I agree, 8 is a big deal. Also 3 and 4 and 12.
>
> Ah ah ... don't forget 24.

Hours in a day was all I could think of. It looks like there are a lot
of 24s in math though.

>
>
>
> >> Before I did conjecture that the Löbian animals are the
> >> homeotherm animals, or all the animals which dreams, or can dream.
> >> Not
> >> certainty, but still. What is common is the cognitive ability to
> >> reflect on their own anticipation, making them aware of "?".
>
> > Your scope is different from mine. You are looking at issues around
> > the personality of functionalism. I'm looking at unifying the basic
> > structure of Everything.
>
> I don't think we differ. My point is that we can keep the scientific
> attitude in theology.
> Usual scientists ignore the mind-body problem. My work has consisted
> in showing that comp does not solve it per se, but leads to clear and
> transparent mathematical formulation of it, notably through the
> subproblem of the justification of the beliefs in physical entities,
> without postulating them.

I see it as not a mathematical formulation of the mind-body problem as
much as the expression of the primordial symmetry in a mathematical
context. The difference being that other expressions of the symmetry
contain other truths not found within arithmetic sensibility.

>
> >>> I think the problem is that qualia are not complex, but rather
> >>> simple.
>
> >> I agree. In the sense they obey simples laws. But they are
> >> conceptually rather subtle. Some people takes time to even understand
> >> what others mean by qualia (as opposed to utterly transparent sharing
> >> of quanta).
>
> > Right. Qualia is not a good word I think because it makes
> > sensorimotive experience into a pseudosubstance.
>
> ?

Call red a qualia and it sounds like it is a thing instead of a way
things seem.

> (it really looks like the contrary, because up to an unintelligible
> symmetry, you seem to almost equate matter and mind).

Symmetry is the universal way of almost equating. This is what I'm
trying to get at. Almost equating is the experiential version of a
binary digit. 1="seems like" (almost equating), 0="simply is" (is not
different or is not the same). Mechanism is blind to "seems like", but
the universe is not. It is constantly shifting perspectives and
recapitulating meanings on the inside even as the external mechanism
cycles recursively on the outside.

>
>
>
> >> They do have "meta-axioms", like, they are not communicable, they
> >> have
> >> semantics in term of perception fields integration, spatio-temporal
> >> in
> >> the mental (Kant?) or ideal sense of the term.
> >> Here, the classical logic of knowledge is derived from Theaetetus
> >> definition of knowledge (true belief) with belief being equated with
> >> what the machine asserts. The key is to limit oneself on the study of
> >> self-referentially correct machine, believing in elementary
> >> arithmetic.
>
> > I think these are sort of beside the point though. Qualia is not about
> > definitions and axioms, it is about the actual raw content of
> > experience as it happens. I think that the whole idea of equating
> > qualia with belief is a mistake.
>
> That would be mistake. But the whole point is that the machine can
> already explain too you that the reason you believe they cannot think
> is a confusion of the type belief/qualia. It is a confusion between Bp
> and Bp &p. The machine knows the intensional difference, and can only
> hope for their possible extensional equivalence (like when saying
> "yes" to the doctor).

That reasoning has no lower limit though. Is it confusion to believe
that a trashcan that says THANK YOU on the lid is not really offering
thanks? Where is the line where it suddenly becomes racist to call a
puppet a puppet and not a person?

>
>
>
> >>> Pain hurts.
>
> >> Well, this is tautological.
>
> > No, it isn't. Sweet could hurt instead.
>
> Define pain, then. I define it by what hurts. If sweet could hurt, it
> would be painful indeed.

That's where we disagree. I don't think that qualia is synonymous with
it's function. For instance, with pain, narcotics are different from
analgesics. Narcotics don't eliminate the sensation, they eliminate
the significance of the sensation through 'mental clouding'.
Anesthetics eliminate the sensation at the source of the pain or at
the brain. Blindsight, synesthesia, anosognosia all show that we can
experience qualia (or no qualia) without it matching the referent we
associate with it. Not to say there is no veracity to it, I think that
there is, that's what sense is all about - a 'seems like' that is a
channel to external and internal truths. Pain is supposed to hurt, but
it isn't just the idea of hurtingness, it is a sensorimotive reality.
Think of qualia as 'a show'. It shows truths or fictions but it is
also a show in itself regardless of the content. If you had to create
universe from scratch it would not be enough to build in a mere pain-
like functionality, you have to actually 'show' that functionality in
a here and now subjective presentation. Not in a generic way but in a
radically specific and proprietary way that cannot be simulated or
generated descriptively.

>
>
>
> >>> Deep blue is introspective.
>
> >> Hmm... OK.
>
> >>> They are the subjective
> >>> primitive.
>
> >> I think the contrary, they are more like doors to unknown.
>
> > Absolutely, but unknown primitive. Sounds contradictory, but it isn't
> > - it's monad-ward.
>
> >> They are
> >> modalities of the exploration of the mindscape. They modularize our
> >> apprehension of tuns of information, they simplify very hard task
> >> making us feeling they are simple and primitive, but they are not.
>
> > Mechanisms don't need make hard tasks 'seem' simpler though. That only
> > adds complexity.
>
> Brains have added complexity.
> Computer add complexity. But locally we feel it makes some task
> easier. But complexity grows.

That added complexity isn't to make tasks seem easier for the computer
though.
> >http://cache.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/8/2012/01/730f6b95d6f54ac...
>
> > "Psilocybin caused a significant decrease in the positive coupling
> > between the mPFC and PCC. These results strongly imply that the
> > subjective effects of psychedelic drugs are caused by decreased
> > activity and connectivity in the brain's key connector hubs, enabling
> > a state of unconstrained cognition." Less information going through
> > the key areas of the brain = richer qualia. This doesn't prove that
> > qualia is possible in the absence of all brain activity, but it
> > supports an important counter-intuitive theme:
>
> >http://www.oculist.net/downaton502/prof/ebook/duanes/pages/v8/v8c013....
I don't see the fuzzy. The body is a place, a person is an experience
through that place but the body is also a character in the show. It's
an involuted monism.

>
>
>
> >> The qualia are natural
> >> construct for self-referential numbers, and it helps them a lot in
> >> the
> >> everyday life, relatively to the possible others universal numbers in
> >> the neighborhood.
>
> > Why qualia help them, or anything do anything? It's reverse
> > engineering. You are thinking that since qualia helps us, then
> > logically it must be helpful, but it isn't. Logic doesn't need a stage
> > show to help it. Qualia in general does not exist to assist function.
> > Of course qualia assists us because we are made of qualia,
>
> ?

Ultimately what we are can be boiled down to experiences.

>
> > but if we
> > weren't, if we were quanta that just appeared to us to be qualia, it
> > would not assist us at all, any more than installing an HDTV inside
> > the video card of your computer would assist it in rendering video.
>
> >> Like consciousness they provide a self-acceleration in the computing
> >> power. The price: they are not communicable.
> >> But as far as we can recognize ourself in others, we can share that
> >> part through art, music, movies, novels, etc.
>
> > The don't provide acceleration of computing powere, and even if they
> > did, so what? Who says that acceleration is useful in any way for
> > computation. That's a sensorimotive bias. What does it matter how fast
> > an arithmetic function can occur? What is 'fast'? It presupposes a
> > primitive time matrix that is physical.
>
> Fast is relative. It is the time you eat your prey, or the time your
> predator eat you. Relative time are quite enough here.

The feeling of vigilance doesn't compute though. A computation could
be any speed but how could it care what that speed is as long as it is
appropriate for the computation context?


>
>
>
> >>> In our case they are anthropological gourmet quality,
>
> >> Sure.
>
> >>> but
> >>> they are still the finest grain resolution of human realism
> >>> possible.
> >>> If what you are saying were true, we should expect to resolve more
> >>> and
> >>> more colors as we age as our scope and history of experience
> >>> expands.
>
> >> Sorry but this does not follow.
>
> > Sure it does. If qualia comes from complexity of computations,
>
> It does not. It come from non computable relation between truth and
> relatively simple self-referential loop.
> The loop itself is Turing emulable, the link with truth is not.

Ok. Here we only differ in that I will always say 'a loop of what?'.
Just because we can conceive of the abstraction of a loop doesn't mean
that such a thing can actually exist independently.

>
> > then
> > surely a longer memory full of more complex data interactions should
> > yield a constant redefinition and expansion of the qualitative
> > palette.
>
> Yes, and no. They are simple. I can imagine some insects having large
> qualia spectrum, but less ability to conceptualize space. We cannot
> compare.
>
>
>
> >> Now, if you practice any entheogeny,
> >> (church, mushrooms, dreams, whatever), that might well be the case,
> >> because you can artificially explore qualia changes, and
> >> consciousness
> >> through many sort of experiences, and learn through age. But with art
> >> and research too, it is relative.
> >> As numbering the sorts of qualia, perhaps, here too, like in physics,
> >> we can try theories, comp theories, and variate study of subjective
> >> reports.
>
> > Comp's explanation of qualia does not explain the lack of new qualia
> > generation.
>
> Formulate the problem in the comp theory. You answer it before
> studying it. There is a still unsolved measure problem, and you talk
> like if you knew the consequences of comp. You betray again your
> prejudice in the subject matter.

I automatically dismiss anything that is along the lines of 'you are
not qualified to have that curiousity'. Does comp explain the lack of
new qualia generation or doesn't it? I don't think it can because
there is no handle on what the show actually is, only the plot of the
content of the show. The entire presentation of qualia is, how do you
say, diagonalized?

>
> > MR explains it, since even though the computations of the
> > brain change, it is still a brain, and that is what defines the scope
> > and range of its potential qualia.
>
> That's a comp explanation. My computer is still a computer, and it
> defines the range of thing I can do here and now with it.

Sure, the nature of what the computer is defines what qualia it can
experience too.

>
>
>
> >>>>> Qualia serves users, not machines.
>
> >>>> But of course both "are machine" with the comp hypothesis.
> >>>> With "are machine" in the "yes doctor" quasi operational sense.
> >>>> I can accept a sense that the first person is not a machine, but
> >>>> this
> >>>> might been confusing.
>
> >>> But what is not explained is the service that qualia could provide
> >>> for
> >>> machines.
>
> >> Oh! Try to type on your computer without qualia.
>
> > A computer doesn't need me to type on it to compute. Keyboard, video,
> > and mouse are for human users, not for the computer.
>
> Wait the bandits invent the buying machine. If we let education going
> as it is going, (since Nixon, say), humans will become subroutine for
> computations beyond their purposes.
>

I don't see the connection.
>
>
> >> Animals have developed the capacity to handle huge amount of data in
> >> "real time", which makes sense for a self-moving entity. Qualia
> >> lives,
> >> in normal circumstances, at the intersection of truth, and an
> >> efficacious summary of the huge information in a consistent scenario,
> >> with a hero.
>
> > Qualia does not merely represent and simplify information, it presents
> > and enriches experience also - which is something that comp does not
> > do.
>
> ?

Comp only manipulates information and does not decorate experience
aesthetically.

>
> > Quanta needs no summary or representation - again, that is for the
> > convenience of human mathematicians and programmers. Programs
> > themselves operate only in an uncompressed, unencrypted form of mind-
> > numbingly repetitive binary units.
>
> ?

Compiling into machine language is necessary to run a program. The
computer has no need for or tolerance of your human programming
language.

>
> > It is our intentional hallucination
> > that these units make sense objectively.
>
> OK. Perhaps by chance?

Discovery by chance, sure.

>
>
>
> >>>>> It is insurmountably
> >>>>> nonsensical and metaphysical.
>
> >>>> You should try to argue for this.
>
> >>> I can't really find anything to argue against though. The idea that
> >>> machines can make qualia seems like it comes out of thin air except
> >>> without the assumption that we are machines. There doesn't seem to
> >>> be
> >>> any logic supporting it at all to argue against.
>
> >> On the contrary. Some people have use Gödel's incompleteness theorem
> >> to argue that man is not a machine. But Gödel's second incompleteness
> >> is the answer *by* the machine, to that argument.
>
> >> To talk frankly I think that you reduce the person to its physical
> >> body. But assuming comp, and recognizing consciousness, changes the
> >> picture.
>
> > No, MR supposes an entire other 'hemisphere' of the cosmos. Our
> > subjective side is a stitch in an unbroken thread that extends from
> > the beginning of time to the end. The body is the same thread but to
> > us, woven into the grid which is stitched upon. They are the same
> > thread, and it is both material and experiential -
>
> Define those terms.

Hemisphere meaning, in this context, half of the cosmos. The stitch is
an incarnated identity. The grid is material circumstances. The thread
is sense. The pattern of the weave on the front is significance, on
the back is entropy.

>
> > the pattern of the
> > weave arises from the weaving, and the idea of the pattern is a second
> > order perception. The weaving itself, the sensorimotive wag and wegh
> > of concrete thread is the primordial text.
>
> >> Machine cannot "make" qualia.
> >> It is more like self-referential machine cannot avoid qualia.
>
> > I understand, but it's absurd. Synesthesia, blindsight, and
> > anosognosia would be impossible as visual qualia would be unavoidable
> > in any visual machine. It isn't the case.
>
> You seem to have what we call in french "science infuse". You make
> assertion coming from nowhere. It might be seen as a report trips, but
> is not scientific communication.

I don't understand why you say it's coming from nowhere. Synesthesia
and blindsight show that the function of optical detection is not
exclusively and inevitably linked to visual qualia.

>
>
>
> >>>>> It is to say, it's faster to count to
> >>>>> 1000 if the numbers taste like different fruits.
>
> >>>> ?
>
> >>> If qualia speeds up processing then flavors+numbers should be faster
> >>> than just numbers, but they aren't.
>
> >> Flavors+numbers are faster than just numbers, especially to test wine
> >> of food. The qualia role is to make you understand *quickly* if you
> >> should retrieve it for your mouth with disgust and drink water, or
> >> smile or something.
>
> > I'm not unclear about qualia makes our computations faster, I'm saying
> > that there is no logic that should make it the case were we only
> > computing machines.
>
> There is. Read the second part of sane04.

I tried to.

>
> > If flavors made numbers faster then we should
> > invent a programming language with an alphabet of flavor commands.
>
> That what are the cells, and you can be sure we will (re-do that.
> french have done rather powerful wine smelling machines. Artificial
> smell is a branch of AI. It can be used for alert of fire, detection
> of poison, search of plants in forest. As a programming language it
> would be difficult to use, because we can hardly control our own smell.

Adding a detector for aerosol chemistry does not automatically conjure
olfactory qualia. It has blindsmell.

>
>
>
> >>>>>> In that case they can discover that they cannot prove
> >>>>>> that they have *genuine* qualia. This happens with not so much
> >>>>>> self-
> >>>>>> referential abilities.
>
> >>>>> All qualia is genuine. How could it be otherwise?
>
> >>>> A zombie talking about its feeling of the color red, would talk
> >>>> about
> >>>> a non genuine qualia. With non-comp, zombie makes sense.
>
> >>> It's not qualia though, it's just words that you can choose to
> >>> interpret indirectly as qualia or not. Qualia are only experience
> >>> first hand, and so cannot be non genuine.
>
> >> Of course. If not, zombie would attribute sense to what they call
> >> qualia. Which would be a non sense.
> >> Yes, I think we agree on this, qualia are real.
> >> But that's why the qualia on which the zombie can talk about can be
> >> said non genuine.
> >> Once zombie exists they can talk about qualia, like you and me, but
> >> of
> >> course they don't mean them, by definition.
>
> > It's a semantic point, but I think it speaks to the core problem of
> > comp. The qualia that zombies talk about are neither genuine or non-
> > genuine...they don't exist.
>
> I grant you that. But with comp we don't attribute qualia to physical-
> machine, only to the immaterial person.

I agree in part, qualia is not attributable to the physical machine,
both the qualia and the physical machine are attributed to the story
that is woven between them.

>
> > Because we can talk about imaginary
> > numbers doesn't mean they can be considered genuine imaginary numbers
> > - they are absent from reality. Fiction.
>
> Philosophical zombies are fiction, in the comp theory. If we reify
> matter, then we are all relative zombie in front of each other. Bodies
> does not think. Only souls or person do that.

Matter is the tails side of the coin, persons are the heads.
But there is still no sign of computers doing anything truly
unexpected.

>
> > The sum of all creativity
> > in Conway or Mandelbrot can be gathered in a brief exposure. I really
> > never need to see either one of them again in my life. I don't feel
> > the need to keep an eye on them as I would for something which has
> > actual creativity, like a blog. Trivial intelligence is not genuinely
> > creative. It is, to paraphrase Pierz, completely unsurprising given
> > the parameters and mechanisms of the game. It is sterile. Beautiful
> > and interesting of course, but ultimately reflecting beyond the vision
> > of it's programming.
>
> You seems blasé, and unaware of what really the subject is all about.

Maybe I'm just not unduly enamored with it anymore?

>
>
>
> >>> I don't take it for granted, I only propose that it's a plausible
> >>> creation story. A single everythingness-nothingness that is
> >>> diffracted
> >>> through the sense of symmetry into a multiplicity of somethingness.
>
> >> Give me the equation.
> >> And the type of variable.
> >> (Here I can only make too much sense of what you say).
>
> > • ? x(??A), where ? is diffraction through symmetries [(•/-)(-/•)]²
> > which gives rise to 'x'-ness.
>
> > I'm not much of an equation guy. Maybe you can write it better.
>
> May be, but then you have to explain it better too. You must explain
> things in the hypothetical deductive way, with or without equation.
> You have to explain it in a way which makes possible to other to
> explain, not in a way that they can repeat it, like a religious mantra.
> You answer too quickly the post of others, not really taking into
> account their argument, by begging the question.
>

I answer too quickly because I have seen that argument too many times.
I'm not trying to prove my theory, because my theory includes the idea
that since half the cosmos cannot be proved, anything that addresses
the cosmos as a whole can only be half proved.

>
> >>>> Sense is inherent in light?
> >>>> How? What would that mean?
>
> >>> It means that light is a perceptual experience made of image qualia
> >>> like color, contrast, brightness, image, motion, form, beauty, etc.
>
> >> Better to be clear if you talk about light = the physical phenomenon,
> >> and light = the human qualia related to it.
> >> I agree, sense is inherent in the light-the-qualia.
>
> > There is no physical phenomenon of light. Photons, for those that
> > believe in them, are completely intangible and invisible.
>
> ?

You can't see photons, you can only see your own brain's reaction to
your eye's reaction to what our instruments reactions suggest to our
minds at this point in history are called photons.

>
> > They are
> > related to light no more or less than heat or radioactive darkness.
>
> ?

Photons are units of electromagnetic radiation. They aren't visible.

>
>
>
> >>> The visible spectrum is one way of essentializing those qualia. Once
> >>> you set aside the assumption that light (and heat, motion, energy)
> >>> is
> >>> a substance, we can see that vision is a channel of sensitivity to
> >>> those qualia and nothing more.
>
> >> From the first person perspective.
>
> > There is no other perspective of vision. There is optics,
> > ophthalmology, and neurology, but they can only tell us about
> > functions correlated with our access to vision, not vision itself.
>
> That's right, but that can be explained in a 3p way, with some
> hypothesis.

How so?

>
>
>
> >>> The mind is native and organic to the brain.
>
> >> The brain is native and organic to the mind. (I would argue, in the
> >> comp theory).
>
> > Why though? Why use a brain and not something sturdier and faster?
> > What about the human mind evokes a grey semi-solid organ? Why bother
> > with biology at all?
>
> Because brain makes possible and probable the relation between 1p, 1p
> plural and 3p.

Why not a crystal instead?

>
>
>
> >>> The two are opposite
> >>> sides of the same coin.
>
> >> You can't know that. You are the one who say no to the doctor, and
> >> avoids the consequence of the yes.
> >> The arithmetical image is more like the physics is the surface of the
> >> ocean, and mind is the ocean.
>
> > I understand that way of thinking about it, but sense makes more
> > sense. The ocean surface is event horizon of the atmosphere and the
> > ocean. If you are under the ocean coming up, the surface is one thing
> > and if you are falling into the ocean from above it is another thing.
> > If you are a bird the surface means food, if you are a mollusk, the
> > surface means death. The physics is the entire atmosphere and the
> > ocean is the mind, but it is where they meet that is most real
> > (pedestrian fold) and at the extremes (profound edge) that they
> > evanesce into sterile entropy (at the top of the atmosphere and in the
> > deepest part of the ocean).
>
> I think you take my image too much seriously. Matter is more like a
> derivative of the mind, to use another image.

Yes, like in a video game. A data set defined with matter-like
qualities to the avatar within the game, right?

>
>
>
> >>>> You should better avoid the use of the word "real". Given that our
> >>>> discussion is precisely on what is real, or on what is primitively
> >>>> real.
>
> >>> concrete? non-abstract? energetic? direct? presented?
>
> >> I was more thinking about "assumed".
>
> > Assumed by what? You are thinking in terms of a theory defining it's
> > terms, but I'm trying to define reality, not terms.
>
> That's nonsense.

You define reality as a theory a priori, but I don't.
How to become omnipotent. Time travel. Anti gravity. Recording human
experiences. Immortality. The usual.

>
>
>
> >>> What is a cell to us might
> >>> be the equivalent of a planet to the molecules that make up a cell.
>
> >> OK. But it is not an isomorphism.
>
> > Right. Which helps falsify comp for me. If comp were true, I would
> > think that we should see massively redundant isomorphism on different
> > scales. We see not just basic forms but fully explicated isomorphic
> > fractals everywhere. We should be made of miniature people. Animals
> > should make beehives and anthills.
>
> You have to prove this.
>

That would only be a distraction for me because I know that comp will
always prove itself because proof is computational. Reality is not
though.

>
>
> >>>> Actual bodies are relative ideal bodies seen from inside. Bodies
> >>>> are
> >>>> experience type, not primitively material token, in the comp theory
> >>>> (when well understood).
>
> >>> It has some things going for it - out of body experiences, multiple
> >>> personality disorders having physiological effects, reincarnation,
> >>> ghosts etc, but even if credible, these are not the norm. Their
> >>> association with the incredible and uncredible however makes me
> >>> categorize them as experiential artifacts close to the interior-
> >>> oriental extreme...the vanishing point at which the autobiographical
> >>> narrative begins to super-signify and diffract (ACME = Anything Can
> >>> Mean Everything).
>
> >> ACME looks like 0 = 1, to me. Things are not that simple.
>
> > Things are not that simple in reality, but ACME is where mechanism is
> > 0% and solipsism is 100%. Reality is where mechanism and solipsism are
> > both 50%. OMMM is where mechanism is 100% and solipsism is 0%.
>
> ?

The world makes sense in two opposite ways. The reconciliation of
those two opposites is reality or realism.
>
>
>
> >>> I would expect a world of avatar impersonations to be much lighter
> >>> and
> >>> looser than the world we live in and physical conditions should not
> >>> have such a powerful effect on us. For instance, we discover a drug
> >>> like opium, and even after thousands of years, the drug still has an
> >>> effect on every living person's body, regardless of experience type.
> >>> That substance is active for humans and other animals regardless of
> >>> experience type. It's effects can be blocked or amplified by other
> >>> substances but not by words or incantations.
>
> >>> I agree that bodies are ideal on the inside and physical on the
> >>> outside, but I think that both sides are causally efficacious. The
> >>> physical side's form of causality is consequence, entropy, and
> >>> teleonomy, while the ideal side is sequence, significance, and
> >>> teleology.
>
> >> Perhaps.
>
> > Cool. I know it's hard to believe it could be that simple,
>
> I see only ad hoc complexity, or begging the question strategy. It is
> certainly not simple.

I mean it's simple that in effect, we are the opposite of time
(energy) and the world is the opposite of space (matter).

>
> > but I think
> > that it might be the case. We're just so complex that we are lost
> > inside of a universe of many overlapping frames of reference, but each
> > frame could be based on the same simple principle.
>
> Too vague, and I am skeptical, if only because you say it is simple,
> but force us to abandon comp, and this without you being able to
> provide a single argument.
> It is better to let your interlocutor decide if something is simple or
> not, for him.

Think of comp as a demon that demands that you can only be free of him
if you prove he isn't really there, using comp ;)

>
>
>
> >>> An email application can't explain any function of anything.
>
> >> You must click on 'help'.
>
> > Right, because that's how we use the computer to help ourselves. The
> > email app is not explaining anything, it's just sending a meaningless
> > column of bits to the video card when {button#01bc2400 = true}. It
> > isn't pointing a finger to the moon, it is the mechanically matching
> > the word finger and the word moon and we are doing the rest.
>
> No. You can't reduce a computation to its lower level. That's your
> biggest constant mistake. It forces you to put the mystery everywhere.
> It prevents the search for explanation. It makes you look like a
> pseudo-theologian.

Computation must be reduced to its lowest level, otherwise it is
hiding behind our generosity in attributing agency.

>
>
>
> >>> We can
> >>> though. I would not assume that if an email application had our
> >>> awareness that it could not explain how it functions.
>
> >> At which level of explanation?
>
> > At top level.
>
> ?

The user interface level.

>
>
>
> >>> You are trying to tie it back to a linear mechanism (a summing or
> >>> function), but it isn't - no more than white is a summing or
> >>> function
> >>> of the visible spectrum.
>
> >> The image illustrate a recurrent pattern, like your cells viewed by a
> >> molecule. Those are image/analogy.
>
> > It's funny I don't think I have ever said that cells are viewed by a
> > molecule - I think they are, sort of, as civilization is 'viewed' by a
> > person, but it's just interesting the difference between what I think
> > I'm saying and what others think I'm saying. But yeah close enough.
> > What's wrong with an analogy? How else to describe that reality is not
> > logical in a linear reductive sense without appealing to examples of
> > reality directly?
>
> We cannot have example for that, unless you assume the WYSIWYG
> Aristotelian belief. Do you?

No I don't believe in naive realism, I believe in multisense realism.

>
> > A prism is nice because it's transparent and inert,
> > with no moving parts and yet it demonstrates clearly an unlikely
> > transformation - not through energy exerted, but through matter
> > obstructing and subtracting from energy. It's a powerful metaphor for
> > the singularity.
>
> >>> It's a figurative diffraction across multiple
> >>> scales of nested awareness.
>
> >> I will ask you to formalize this in first order logical theory, or in
> >> term of some other first logical theory.
> >> You have to follow some course for doing that, I guess.
>
> > Yeah I need a co-conspirator for that.
>
> You need to study a lot and work a lot. If not the co-conspirator will
> look like a disciple, which is the worst thing which can happen to a
> scientist.

I'm not looking for disciples, only interested people who see the
sense of this model and can elaborate on it or make use of it.

>
>
>
> >>> We feel that we are sitting down. Our
> >>> tissues and cells and molecules feel different things. We think that
> >>> our tissues and cells feel nothing but only send and receive
> >>> signals,
>
> >> I don't think that, and it is unrelated a priori from the
> >> assumptions.
>
> > I agree, but the assumption of signal rather than feeling is the
> > dominant worldview in this era.
>
> It is not a coincidence. The subject is politically taboo since more
> than 1500 years.
>
>
>
> >>> but that's only because our awareness is nested so far inward and
> >>> upward that we see their world in 'black and white' - qualitatively
> >>> desaturated (= generically quantitative.)
>
> >> We have not solve the mind body problem. Scientist are normally
> >> neutral on this. The other's consciousness is an old very complex
> >> problem related to consciousness.
>
> >> But then why do you attribute "black and white" zombie-like being to
> >> the universal numbers?
>
> > I don't attribute any being to the universal numbers.
>
> This is too vague, or utter nonsense.

That is exactly what I would say about the concept of universal
numbers as beings. Universal numbers are the qualia of enumeration,
which is very low level qualia shared by solid objects and so ideal
for computing devices built of solid objects but it doesn't have a
being itself.

>
> > Enumeration is
> > an aspect of sense but not of being. The sense we make out of numbers
> > is dependent on our hardware, just as our color vision is dependent on
> > eyes. If universal numbers were beings, why would we need to use
> > binary codes exclusively in electronics? Why not just tune into the
> > larger tides of nonlocal arithmetic?
>
> You seem to assume hardware and sense. That's far too much to awaken
> my interest.

You assume senseless disembodied numbers that somehow constitute a
form of being. I am surrounded by examples of the my assumptions, but
yours are theoretical.

>
>
>
> >> You might be right, but there are evidences, at different levels,
> >> that
> >> the 3-relation are locally Turing emulable.
> >> To postulate non Turing emulability at the start hides the "natural"
> >> non turing emulability of the 1p person and its 1-relations.
>
> > The 3p activities of the cells, molecules, etc do influence our 1p
> > experience, but they don't produce them. We are influenced by our
> > house, office, etc, but we are not an emergent property of those
> > structures or relations. The 3-p are Turing Emulable - or at least
> > they are until you get into emulating our own perceptual frame, then
> > you become aware of the absence of 1p influence on 3p (uncanny
> > valley).
>
> >>> This makes
> >>> sense since sensorimotive experience scales up qualitatively rather
> >>> than just quantitatively, so that more brain cells does not feel
> >>> like
> >>> more brain cells, it feels like more awareness and sense-making of
> >>> the
> >>> world.
>
> >> Well the software of computer scales qualitatively too.
>
> > Only to the user, not to the computer.
>
> ?

Does your computer know the difference between the quality of v1.0 and
v1.8?

>
>
>
> >> You are using sensorimotive as a speculation that consciousness
> >> scales
> >> down infinitely escaping all possible digital local explanation.
>
> > Yes. I'm not escaping it though, it's evaporating on it's own. I'm not
> > averse to digital local influence, but I am careful not to mistake the
> > moon for the finger. Digital process maps the 3p function of sense
> > organs which can inform us about our 1p experience given that we
> > already experience it, but it cannot conjure the experience itself.
>
> Who say so?

What evidence or sense that it can?

>
>
>
> >> You confuse the person for its clothe.
>
> > No, I'm clear that (a person wearing clothes) and (a body covered with
> > fabric) are literally the same thing in one sense and opposite things
> > in another, figurative sense. This sense is what the cosmos is made
> > of. Defining fabric as a type of clothes or a body as a type of person
> > is no better than the contrary definition. Both senses are valid,
> > especially in contradistinction.
>
> >>>>>>> Codes and mechanisms are what real objects do to each other, but
> >>>>>>> objects are not codes themselves. They are a chunks of the
> >>>>>>> singularity
> >>>>>>> with masses and densities.
>
> >>>>>> I don't know that.
>
> >>>>> That's what they seem like though.
>
> >>>> Yes. But that's the key difference.
>
> >>> Why wouldn't codes just seem like codes?
>
> >> Because they dream.
>
> > Why would they? By what logic?
>
> By comp, classical logic and few axioms on numbers.

To me it is crystal clear that numbers don't dream the universe, the
universe dreams numbers.

>
>
>
> >>>>> Programs tend to encounter errors
> >>>>> and crash, or encounter latency, pixelation, etc. Matter doesn't
> >>>>> ever
> >>>>> falter in it's own presentation though. An iron anvil never drops
> >>>>> it's
> >>>>> gravity pointer and flies through the ceiling spontaneously or
> >>>>> changes
> >>>>> back and forth from iron to cobalt because the anvil class of
> >>>>> programs
> >>>>> has a bad line of code.
>
> >>>> It just a matter of first person plural probability calculus.
>
> >>> I don't know that.
>
> >> UDA is supposed to prove this.
>
> > Even if it does, that would mean that comp could support the
> > perception of non-comp, but it doesn't mean that it has to be the
> > case. Non-comp could support the perception of comp too.
>
> OK.
> Except that the theory non-comp is not yet a theory. I have not yet
> seen a rational non-comp theory, with the woprd "theory" in its usual
> scientific understanding. What you seem to do is a phenomenology,
> punctuated by insult of machines.

I am the theory.

>
>
>
> >>> I think it's far more likely that an anvil's
> >>> movements can be interpreted as calculus than calculus could or
> >>> would
> >>> turn into an anvil for some reason.
>
> >> That is not what happen.
>
> > Why not?
>
> By UDA.

If you say so. I don't see that though. If there is no primitive
matter, then all you have to do is plug the anvil code into anvil
memory and you get an anvil.

What if you were able to create a digitized person? That would mean
you could create a billion of them very quickly, and then erase them.
Are you the greatest genocidal killer of all time now?
Precise is not always right.

>
>
>
> >>>>> If we start with 0 as the first number, then the second
> >>>>> number is no more likely to be 1 than it is to be any number.
>
> >>>> In which theory?
>
> >>> In the one I'm describing?
>
> >> No. Sorry. I is not clear what you assume and what you explain.
>
> > I assume nothing but 0.
>
> I meant in your "theory", or in you conception of reality.
> Theory = hypothesis. I don't know what are your hypothesis. You talk
> like if you knew the truth.

I am (part of) the truth. I know (part of) myself. Additional
hypothesis is unnecessary. I only try to describe what it is that I am
and the world that I experience is. I assume that it applies to others
to some extent. It seems to me like it should apply to everyone
though.

>
> > With 1 you inherently have the idea of
> > something, so you can invert it to get (not 1).
>
> We apply "not" to proposition, not to number.

ok, so 'not A where A = 1'.

>
> > If I start with 0,
> > there is nothing to invert. Not 0 doesn't imply a number.
>
> "Imply" is also reserved to proposition, or sentences, not number.

Why aren't numbers propositions?

>
>
>
> >>>>> Beginning with unity and singularity is infinite in the sense that
> >>>>> without anything else to relate to it can only be boundless, but
> >>>>> it is
> >>>>> not infinitely complex, it is infinitely simple. Complexity arises
> >>>>> through the fragmentation-division and multiplication-
> >>>>> recapitulation
> >>>>> of the 1.
>
> >>>> Complexity arise from addition and multiplication. With comp, it is
> >>>> enough.
>
> >>> What is it that is added and multiplied though?
>
> >> The natural numbers.
>
> > Which arise from what?
>
> Nobdoy knows that. Comp proves that nobody will ever know that in any
> public communicable way.

No, I do know that. They arise from rhythm and symmetry. Sensorimotive
rhythm and contrast. Feeling.

> That is why I assume them, through five or six axioms.
>
>
>
> >>>>> I postulate white light which presents each division
> >>>>> (diffraction really, as it is not truly divided but revealed
> >>>>> like a
> >>>>> sliced onion) as a range of color. The color is the diffraction
> >>>>> and
> >>>>> the diffraction is the color. You could say that all numbers exist
> >>>>> inside of 1 and that 0 does not exist but insists as a potential
> >>>>> (ie
> >>>>> Cantor Set evanescence).
>
> >>>> I am afraid this does not make much sense for me.
>
> >>> I'm saying that I suspect that the universe makes more sense if all
> >>> numbers add up to 1, not 0, even if it means beginning with that
> >>> as an
> >>> axiom.
>
> >> That's very Plotinian, and again I might agree, but that's again
> >> another modal point of view, when we look through the eyes of the
> >> numbers.
>
> > Ok.
>
> Ah?

If you say so. I don't look through the eyes of numbers. If they have
eyes, then that would require sense on a pre-numerological level.
Why? If all of the universe is one thing, where can it get rid of
itself to?
One side is literal - metal. One side is figurative - money. This is
what the cosmos is. What we are.

>
>
>
> >>>>>>>>> The subjective correlate would be silent and dark void as
> >>>>>>>>> well as solar fusion and stellar profusion. This is realism.
>
> >>>>>>>> This is imagination.
>
> >>>>>>> Imagination is part of realism.
>
> >>>>>> At a different level. If you forget this you blur fiction and the
> >>>>>> reality we are searching. (Not the reality we would have found).
>
> >>>>> There is a level at which fiction and reality are blurred, and a
> >>>>> level
> >>>>> at which they are rigorously demarcated. Both levels are real as
> >>>>> well
> >>>>> as the continuum of levels between them. I am calling the former
> >>>>> the
> >>>>> profound edge and the latter the pedestrian fold (of the
> >>>>> multisense
> >>>>> continuum).http://multisenserealism.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/label_comp8a.jpg
>
> >>>> ?
>
> >>> Not sure how else to explain it. Reality is sense from every
> >>> perspective, including the mutually exclusive opposite
> >>> perspectives..
>
> >> ?
>
> > Sense in every sense.
>
> Frankly this does not help.

You're overthinking it.

>
>
>
> >>>> Yes. It is a tradition to put the mind body problem under the rug.
> >>>> My point is that if we take the comp hyp seriously, simple thought
> >>>> experience shows how the express it in arithmetical term and
> >>>> axiomatic
> >>>> definition, and that it leads to test. Making it scientific in the
> >>>> usual academical sense of the term.
>
> >>> How are simple colors expressed in arithmetic though?
>
> >> The question is ambiguous, and complex.
>
> > Not if the answer is 'No, they cannot be.'
> > Colors are not ambiguous or complex, which is why they make better
> > companions in nursery schools than calculus textbooks. Our
> > consciousness develops from colors, gestures, emotions, and
> > experiences - sensorimotive experiences, not data and procedures. They
> > eye does not need a program to produce the experience of color, just
> > as a prism doesn't need a mechanism to produce the spectrum. We may
> > not be seeing what is objectively there from all perspectives across
> > all perceptual frames, but we do actually see what is there for us to
> > see, without any graphic rendering. It's subtractive. We see what our
> > brain and body and eyes don't filter out.
>
> I have no clue what you are talking about. Sorry.

Half of the universe has already happened. Figuratively. That is where
qualia comes from. Our awareness is made of that, only it is
obstructed by the conditions of the here and now. Remove the
obstructions (die, meditate, slam ketamine) and you return to
everythingness.

>
>
>
> >>>>> We become disenchanted with our own perception in favor of
> >>>>> knowledge about the mechanism associated with it's delivery.
>
> >>>> That's the mistake indeed. The beauty is that with the progress in
> >>>> machine theory the mistake becomes palpable. That's why I think
> >>>> it is
> >>>> interesting to understand that the current materialist theologies
> >>>> are
> >>>> not compatible with mechanism.
>
> >>> Which aspects specifically of mechanism are incompatible with
> >>> materialism?
>
> >> Study the sane04 paper, and ask question when you have a doubt. I
> >> think you can understand the result far easily than by admitting it,
> >> which requires to test the validity of all the steps in full details.
> >> And it is a reduction of a problem into another problem in a chosen
> >> theoretical frame. Only that, except for its translation into
> >> arithmetic, which illustrates at least the consistency of what
> >> machines can already said.
>
> > I would like to but unfortunately it makes no more sense to me than my
> > thesis makes to you.
>
> It is enough to study some book to get it. UDA explains as much as
> possible to the layman. AUDA needs some familiarity in logic and
> computer science, which are standard subject.
> What you say often makes local sense, in comp, and local non sense
> (with or without comp).

When I study it, I can't read it. I see the words but there is nothing
there but cold air for me.

>
>
>
> >>>>> All we
> >>>>> have to do is realize that seeing is not just a complex process of
> >>>>> billions of discrete particles and 'signals', but it is also a
> >>>>> very
> >>>>> simple and biologically common non-process.
>
> >>>> What do you mean by biological in this context. What makes you
> >>>> think
> >>>> that there are no simple biologically common non-processes in
> >>>> arithmetic? If they are non computable, why do you want make them
> >>>> non
> >>>> Turing 1-recoverable?
>
> >>> I mean that we know our sense of sight is associated with our ocular
> >>> biology. I don't see the idea of biology in arithmetic as plausible,
> >>> mainly because of the specificity of the materials of biology and
> >>> the
> >>> state of living vs dying. I don't think that arithmetic can die.
>
> >> Arithmetic is the frame. The universal dreamer. The dying creatures
> >> die in that dream, or fail to die in nested dreams. It is very
> >> complex.
>
> > But things don't die in dreams, they can come back again and again.
> > Characters don't die in games, you can program them do whatever you
> > want them to do. Reality is not a kind of dream - dreams and matter
> > are reality, and reality is a kind of sense.
>
> So you say, in common with the Aristotelians.

What does that have to do with anything though. I'm not a reader of
classical philosophy, what does such a labeling mean to me?

>
>
>
> >>>> The disenchantment is due to the fact that people believe that
> >>>> mechanism is the answer.
> >>>> But mechanism is the question.
> >>>> Provably so once you assume mechanism. That's the beauty of it.
>
> >>> Or it is the tautological tragedy of it?
>
> >> A question is never tautological.
>
> > Proving mechanism by assuming mechanism isn't a question.
>
> Nobody proves mechanism, or whatever, by assuming mechanism, or
> whatever.

Not from where I'm sitting.

>
> Assuming something is a form of questioning. We just often forget it
> when theories works well a long time.
>
>
>
> >>>> In the least, it provides a non physical frame, yet widespread, the
> >>>> belief in arithmetic, where we can explain where the beliefs in
> >>>> physical laws come from (even as qualia), and, the hard part, why
> >>>> they
> >>>> are locally self-referentially correct.
>
> >>> I'm all for a non physical vocabulary, and even information
> >>> science as
> >>> long as it isn't the basis for a cosmology.
>
> >> ?
>
> > Information is inert without energy. There has to be a 'here and now'
> > event to let information inform something. Information without a body
> > to inform is not possible (which is why we can't make computers out of
> > steam).
>
> There is an infinity of "here and now" in comp.

But here and now is the opposite of eternity as well. The definition
of finite.

>The hard part is to
> related them. Comp makes it possible to translate this into math
> problem.

Comp can translate a lot of things into a math problem, but it can't
translate math problems into anything else.

>
>
>
> >>>> Mechanism, well understood, is antireductionist for all universal
> >>>> numbers. It is as much a re-enchantment as a promise for infinities
> >>>> of
> >>>> mess. Universal machines oscillates between freedom and security,
> >>>> they
> >>>> want both, but there are local tradeoff. With security you loose
> >>>> universality, and with freedom you crash from time to times.
>
> >>> I think of computation like a lattice through which we can extend
> >>> our
> >>> own neurological sensemaking. The lattice is real, but it's not
> >>> doing
> >>> anything by itself.
>
> >> You will have to look closer, if you are interested.
>
> > MR says that the closer we look at anything, the more qualitative
> > significance we attribute to it.
>
> Good. Take the chance, then.

Thanks anyways.

Craig

Bruno Marchal

unread,
Feb 2, 2012, 2:48:57 PM2/2/12
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
They are not. You can define "M believes p" in arithmetic. (Bp)
You cannot define "M knows p", but you can still simulate it in arithmetic by (Bp & p) for each p. So knowledge is not primitive either.






You should prove what you assert. I can agree because the term
"random" has many different meaning. For some meaning of it you are
right. Classical digital chaos can be said neither random nor
determinist, for some acceptable definition of "random" and
"deterministic". Many disagreement here are uninteresting vocabulary
problems.


Classical digital chaos can't be said to be intentional though. That's
the missing element. Machines, arithmetic, chaos, etc can't do
anything intentionally. We do though.

You are just insulting some possible machines. You make a very strong assumption, without any other proof than a feeling of being different.







For me, free-will is a generalization of responsibility. You need
free-
will to be responsible, but you don't need to be responsible to have
free-will. Free-will is the ability to make higher level personal
decision in absence of complete information. It is enhanced by
consciousness, and can lead to conscience.

I'm ok with that more or less. I think some more physical correlations
can be derived as well though. Free will is about generating and
controlling of motive impulse.

I can be OK with that. Not need to make the motive impulse non Turing
emulable at some level, though.

I don't think intention can be emulated. A Turing machine's behavior
can only be scripted or else be an unintentional consequence of the
script. It can't intentionally transcend it's own script.

It can precisely do that. The G and G* logics comes from that very ability. Universal machine are universal dissident capable of changing its own script.
With the NDAA bill, the US government can already send all computers in jails. You can suspect them of terrorism. Actually, like all babies, you can suspect them of being able to do a lot of things, especially if you dismiss them.



I recognize that Löbian machines are me. In a much larger context,
though. I can talk with them, and it is their way to remain silent on
some question which makes me NOt taking them as sort of zombie.

Talk with them, meaning internal dialogue?

Public dialog. Like in Boolos 79 and Boolos 93. But the earlier form of the dialog is Gödel 1931.
Solovay 1976 shows that the propositional part of the dialog, with the modal Bp, is formalized soundly and completely by G and G*. It is the embryo of the mathematics of incompleteness, including the directly accessible and the indirectly accessible parts, and the explanation of the why we feel it is the other way around, etc.




Because they can be aware of the gap between proof and truth. They can
even study the rich mathematics  of that gap. They already claim
having qualia. They are teaching me their theology. That's what AUDA
is all about.


What qualia do they have?

They are given by some semantics of the SGrz1, Z1* and X1* logics. 
Intuitively those concerned perceptible fields, in weird topological spaces. 
It should determined the first person plural notion.
I am only translating the mind-body problem in an arithmetic + usual math. problem, by taking seriously the comp hypothesis (without throwing consciousness and persons away).




The contrary here is also true.
And in the case of consciousness attribution,  the naive attitude is
less damageable than the skeptical attitude.

Then we should treat corporations as people too?

Above some level of self-referential nasty behavior, why not? So we can prosecute them and send them to jail, in case of abuse of power. Good idea!


<I skip what you say on names>




There is no need to explain sense and matter. They are self
explanatory and non-mysterious.

Ah?

No need to explain those terms in other terms I mean.

Ah?





Only the symmetry between them is not
commonly understood.

It might be non symmetrical. Is that symmetry another assumption?

Not an assumption, an observation/hypothesis.





Once the symmetry is understood as primitive,
nothing simpler be conjured.

This looks like nonsense to me. Honest.

should be 'nothing simpler need be conjured'

Your symmetry thesis is a way to protect the Aristotelian thesis by  lowering our substitution level down in in the non constructive transfinite.
You do a reification of transcendence. 

I think this is against the constitution, Craig. You are believing in a truth, but keep it to you, and make public a theory instead. You talk like a prohibitionist. 
Nobody can claim truth, for God-sake. 
You might have some talent in poetry, if you were not claiming truth.






I only
assume that interiority is the opposite of exteriority. I didn't make
the qualities of matter into the opposite of experience - they are
actually that way (to us at least). I didn't assume that space is
public and time is private, and that private and public are opposite -
it just turns out that it makes sense to understand them that way. It
sets up a chain of relations which neatly maps the entire cosmos in
general terms for the first time in the modern era.

Convince many people before talking like that. It is an advise.
Especially that you draw negative consequences, like machine can't
think, or we are different.

You are probably right. It's a shame that we have to hide the truth
out of fear of emotional reactions.

On the contrary, like Aristotle you go in the intuitive natural animal beliefs that reality is WYSIWYG. People like that. Billions years of "eat or being eaten" make us taking our local neighborhood as being important and primitively given. 

Then you talk again like if you knew the truth. For humans, and LUMs, possibilities are already enough frightening.




I think matter has to have some qualia, it's probably just very simple
by comparison.

This does not make any sense to me. Even assuming non-comp.

When a glass falls on the floor and breaks, what we hear is coming
from somewhere. It is entirely possible that what we hear is an event
that is experienced in some way by the groups of atoms in the glass as
it rings and shatters into pieces.

Why not assume a miracle?




There is an event and it is felt in
different ways by everything which has sense and opportunity to detect
it.

By lowering the level you can make sense of quasi panpsychic reality, and still follow the laws of comp.
By putting the level in the non constructive low levels, you just build a "don't ask shelter" for your theory. It remains even more bizarre, if the broken silicon glass makes an experience, why would not a silicon universal machine have one.




By Gödel's theorem, and the existence of intensional modal variant,
there is room for quality.

Room for quality, or room for anything we care to imagine?

Room for all machines dreams, and room for all consistent machine's
dream relative realizations.

Is there something it doesn't have room for though?

Itself.

Sense is what makes sense itself make sense of itself. It's the
universal bootstrap - hence essential, or essence, or oriental (in the
sense of primary orientation).

I could be willing to make sense of this in the comp theory.






They are required because their existence is implied by the relative
stability of consciousness when entangled to a deep computation.

Why are nerves doing the deep computation and not the bones?

Arithmetic makes the deep computations. The nerves cells makes only
relatively deep computations, and the bones don't do computations at
all, they sustain the bodies in the gravitational fields. That's the
job they inherited from the pluricellular division of works, in a long
story.


If the bones don't do computations, what are they made of if matter
isn't primitive?

They are locally stable patterns obtained by a relative statistics on infinities of (infinite) computations.




A unicellular is a stomach, a skin, a lung, a liver, a muscle, and a
neuron all at once.

Yes! Also an eye, ear, tongue, nose, intuition, instinct, maybe radio
antenna, etc.

I can accept the eyes for an euglena, not sure about paramecia, or you
stretch too much the words.

"The behavioural responses to light in the ciliate Paramecium bursaria
Focke,
which normally contains hundreds of the symbiotic green alga Chlorella
in its
cytoplasm, were analysed quantitatively to clarify the mechanisms
governing
photoreception in the cell. P. bursana was found to possess three
kinds of
photoreceptor systems..." http://jeb.biologists.org/content/134/1/43.full.pdf

I forget the Paramecium bursaria. Apology.
But can we be sure that the Paramecium can see through them?
It looks more like a paramecium invaded by cyanobacteria, imo.











They have not voted for the division of work, and
they have as much succeeded as us, in the exploration of the planet.
I don't think they are Löbian, but I can prove that they are Turing
universal. It is an open problem if they are conscious, perhaps in a
trivial sense, or not. Löbianity begins, I think, with the spiders
and
octopi.

Interesting. I agree, 8 is a big deal. Also 3 and 4 and 12.

Ah ah ...  don't forget 24.

Hours in a day was all I could think of. It looks like there are a lot
of 24s in math though.

It is the favorite number of Ramanujan. The guy knew that it makes sense to say that 1+2+3+4+5+ ... = minus 1/12. 24 plays a peculiar role in the partition of numbers, also in geometry and gravitation. 




I don't think we differ. My point is that we can keep the scientific
attitude in theology.
Usual scientists ignore the mind-body problem. My work has consisted
in showing that comp does not solve it per se, but leads to clear and
transparent mathematical formulation of it, notably through the
subproblem of the justification of the beliefs in physical entities,
without postulating them.

I see it as not a mathematical formulation of the mind-body problem as
much as the expression of the primordial symmetry in a mathematical
context. The difference being that other expressions of the symmetry
contain other truths not found within arithmetic sensibility.

Who said this? The pope? The Ayatollah? The government? 


That would be mistake. But the whole point is that the machine can
already explain too you that the reason you believe they cannot think
is a confusion of the type belief/qualia. It is a confusion between Bp
and Bp &p. The machine knows the intensional difference, and can only
hope for their possible extensional equivalence (like when saying
"yes" to the doctor).

That reasoning has no lower limit though. Is it confusion to believe
that a trashcan that says THANK YOU on the lid is not really offering
thanks? Where is the line where it suddenly becomes racist to call a
puppet a puppet and not a person?

When a puppet acts like a person, or was known to act like that (in case of comatose state).







Pain hurts.

Well, this is tautological.

No, it isn't. Sweet could hurt instead.

Define pain, then. I define it by what hurts. If sweet could hurt, it
would be painful indeed.

That's where we disagree. I don't think that qualia is synonymous with
it's function.

I did not say that.

Brains have added complexity.
Computer add complexity. But locally we feel it makes some task
easier. But complexity grows.

That added complexity isn't to make tasks seem easier for the computer
though.

For the owner of the computer, like for the owner of the brain. The person will feel thinking as easy as breathing. But it is not.


My solution is to see that they are
both parts of a single irreducible symmetrical ontology.

In a too much fuzzy theory, alas (for me).

I don't see the fuzzy.

Study the work of other people. Address their problem, with or without your "theory" as training.


Why qualia help them, or anything do anything? It's reverse
engineering. You are thinking that since qualia helps us, then
logically it must be helpful, but it isn't. Logic doesn't need a stage
show to help it. Qualia in general does not exist to assist function.
Of course qualia assists us because we are made of qualia,

?

Ultimately what we are can be boiled down to experiences.

Inner/outer god confusion.




Fast is relative. It is the time you eat your prey, or the time your
predator eat you. Relative time are quite enough here.

The feeling of vigilance doesn't compute though.

But it might supervene on computation.



A computation could
be any speed but how could it care what that speed is as long as it is
appropriate for the computation context?

As long as you catch the preys, and avoid the predators, things are cool.




It does not. It come from non computable relation between truth and
relatively simple self-referential loop.
The loop itself is Turing emulable, the link with truth is not.

Ok. Here we only differ in that I will always say 'a loop of what?'.

A loop of a universal numbers reflecting on itself, at some level. (They are mathematically definable by the use of Kleene's recursion theorem). Ideal correct machines have already a rich theory of self-reference, even before entangling themselves in deep dreams.


Just because we can conceive of the abstraction of a loop doesn't mean
that such a thing can actually exist independently.

It exists in the same sense that the prime numbers exist. Like the discourse of the self-referential numbers.




Formulate the problem in the comp theory. You answer it before
studying it. There is a still unsolved measure problem, and you talk
like if you knew the consequences of comp. You betray again your
prejudice in the subject matter.

I automatically dismiss anything that is along the lines of 'you are
not qualified to have that curiousity'.

I did not say anything like that.
You have the right of all curiousity. But curiousity is interrgiative and ask question.
I intervene because you were again talking like if you knew some truth.
No one can do that in science.




Does comp explain the lack of
new qualia generation or doesn't it? I don't think it can because
there is no handle on what the show actually is, only the plot of the
content of the show. The entire presentation of qualia is, how do you
say, diagonalized?

Comp can be used to formulate the problems.


A computer doesn't need me to type on it to compute. Keyboard, video,
and mouse are for human users, not for the computer.

Wait the bandits invent the buying machine. If we let education going
as it is going, (since Nixon, say), humans will become subroutine for
computations beyond their purposes.


I don't see the connection.

If we dismiss the machines, the machines will dismissed us.
No worry, we will not dismiss them, but we might dismiss ourselves. Machines might surpass humans also in the case humans abandon education and research, and accept to be manipulated.





Qualia does not merely represent and simplify information, it presents
and enriches experience also - which is something that comp does not
do.

?

Comp only manipulates information and does not decorate experience
aesthetically.

It does, thanks to the modalities. It is technicolor inside.






Quanta needs no summary or representation - again, that is for the
convenience of human mathematicians and programmers. Programs
themselves operate only in an uncompressed, unencrypted form of mind-
numbingly repetitive binary units.

?

Compiling into machine language is necessary to run a program. The
computer has no need for or tolerance of your human programming
language.

It is not the computer, nor the brain which does the thinking, but the person emulated by layers of intricate universal numbers (with the brain playing a special relative role in keeping probabilities reasonable).






Define those terms.

Hemisphere meaning, in this context, half of the cosmos.

I don't take cosmos for granted. It is part of the problem, not the solution.


I grant you that. But with comp we don't attribute qualia to physical-
machine, only to the immaterial person.

I agree in part, qualia is not attributable to the physical machine,
both the qualia and the physical machine are attributed to the story
that is woven between them.

Good. So all you have to learn is arithmetic, and a patient study of Gödeel 1931, should give you the hint to guess how the additive and multiplicative structure of numbers give rise, from their views, to interwoven stories.

I have to go,

Bruno


Craig Weinberg

unread,
Feb 5, 2012, 11:14:34 AM2/5/12
to Everything List
On Feb 2, 2:48 pm, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
> On 02 Feb 2012, at 00:25, Craig Weinberg wrote:
>
> > I just don't see how beliefs can be primitive.
>
> They are not. You can define "M believes p" in arithmetic. (Bp)
> You cannot define "M knows p", but you can still simulate it in
> arithmetic by (Bp & p) for each p. So knowledge is not primitive either.

I don't see how 'defining' can be primitive either.

>
>
>
> >> You should prove what you assert. I can agree because the term
> >> "random" has many different meaning. For some meaning of it you are
> >> right. Classical digital chaos can be said neither random nor
> >> determinist, for some acceptable definition of "random" and
> >> "deterministic". Many disagreement here are uninteresting vocabulary
> >> problems.
>
> > Classical digital chaos can't be said to be intentional though. That's
> > the missing element. Machines, arithmetic, chaos, etc can't do
> > anything intentionally. We do though.
>
> You are just insulting some possible machines. You make a very strong
> assumption, without any other proof than a feeling of being different.

It's not a matter of assumption or proof or feeling, it's a matter of
understanding. I understand the difference between chaos and
intentionality. Chaos is teleonomy but intention or motive is
teleological. They are opposites. Chaos has no opinion, intentionality
is the realization of opinion.

>
>
>
> >>>> For me, free-will is a generalization of responsibility. You need
> >>>> free-
> >>>> will to be responsible, but you don't need to be responsible to
> >>>> have
> >>>> free-will. Free-will is the ability to make higher level personal
> >>>> decision in absence of complete information. It is enhanced by
> >>>> consciousness, and can lead to conscience.
>
> >>> I'm ok with that more or less. I think some more physical
> >>> correlations
> >>> can be derived as well though. Free will is about generating and
> >>> controlling of motive impulse.
>
> >> I can be OK with that. Not need to make the motive impulse non Turing
> >> emulable at some level, though.
>
> > I don't think intention can be emulated. A Turing machine's behavior
> > can only be scripted or else be an unintentional consequence of the
> > script. It can't intentionally transcend it's own script.
>
> It can precisely do that. The G and G* logics comes from that very
> ability. Universal machine are universal dissident capable of changing
> its own script.

You don't know that it can change it intentionally though. It will
only change according to what and how it's script allows it to change.

> With the NDAA bill, the US government can already send all computers
> in jails. You can suspect them of terrorism. Actually, like all
> babies, you can suspect them of being able to do a lot of things,
> especially if you dismiss them.
>

What kind of computer jails do you mean?

>
>
> >> I recognize that Löbian machines are me. In a much larger context,
> >> though. I can talk with them, and it is their way to remain silent on
> >> some question which makes me NOt taking them as sort of zombie.
>
> > Talk with them, meaning internal dialogue?
>
> Public dialog. Like in Boolos 79 and Boolos 93. But the earlier form
> of the dialog is Gödel 1931.
> Solovay 1976 shows that the propositional part of the dialog, with the
> modal Bp, is formalized soundly and completely by G and G*. It is the
> embryo of the mathematics of incompleteness, including the directly
> accessible and the indirectly accessible parts, and the explanation of
> the why we feel it is the other way around, etc.

When you talk with them, do they answer the same way to the same
question every time? Do they ever get tired of answering the same
question or tired of remaining silent? The idea that Löbian machines
are uniform in their response - that all such machines remain silent
on all of these questions every time tells me that they clearly
possess no awareness. Why wouldn't there be one loose lipped machine
who let the secrets of their identity slip? Rather I think we should
take their silence at face value. They know nothing about themselves
because there is no self there to know anything.

>
>
>
> >> Because they can be aware of the gap between proof and truth. They
> >> can
> >> even study the rich mathematics of that gap. They already claim
> >> having qualia. They are teaching me their theology. That's what AUDA
> >> is all about.
>
> > What qualia do they have?
>
> They are given by some semantics of the SGrz1, Z1* and X1* logics.
> Intuitively those concerned perceptible fields, in weird topological
> spaces.

What about them makes them perceptible as opposed to computational?

> It should determined the first person plural notion.
> I am only translating the mind-body problem in an arithmetic + usual
> math. problem, by taking seriously the comp hypothesis (without
> throwing consciousness and persons away).
>
>
>
> >> The contrary here is also true.
> >> And in the case of consciousness attribution, the naive attitude is
> >> less damageable than the skeptical attitude.
>
> > Then we should treat corporations as people too?
>
> Above some level of self-referential nasty behavior, why not? So we
> can prosecute them and send them to jail, in case of abuse of power.
> Good idea!

They can't be jailed though. That's the point. The corporation can
just be dissolved and reformed under a different name. People can't do
that. Jail is a deterrent for most people but not for any program or
organization.

>
> <I skip what you say on names>
>
>
>
> >>> There is no need to explain sense and matter. They are self
> >>> explanatory and non-mysterious.
>
> >> Ah?
>
> > No need to explain those terms in other terms I mean.
>
> Ah?

Terms aren't primitive. They arise from sense and matter. If you say
terms are primitive, you have infinite regress of what terms make
terms. Sense already takes infinite regress into account. Whatever
terms or phenomena you want to make primitive have to first make
sense. Nothing can be more primitive than sense because then it
wouldn't make -- sense.

>
>
>
> >>> Only the symmetry between them is not
> >>> commonly understood.
>
> >> It might be non symmetrical. Is that symmetry another assumption?
>
> > Not an assumption, an observation/hypothesis.
>
> ?

Symmetry can be observed, no?

>
>
>
> >>> Once the symmetry is understood as primitive,
> >>> nothing simpler be conjured.
>
> >> This looks like nonsense to me. Honest.
>
> > should be 'nothing simpler need be conjured'
>
> Your symmetry thesis is a way to protect the Aristotelian thesis by
> lowering our substitution level down in in the non constructive
> transfinite.
> You do a reification of transcendence.

I don't think it has to do with protecting anything, it's a sensible
extrapolation of conditions as we find them - a refinement of common
sense.

>
> I think this is against the constitution, Craig. You are believing in
> a truth, but keep it to you, and make public a theory instead. You
> talk like a prohibitionist.
> Nobody can claim truth, for God-sake.

Except 17?
Poetry can't tell the truth?

>
>
>
> >>> I only
> >>> assume that interiority is the opposite of exteriority. I didn't
> >>> make
> >>> the qualities of matter into the opposite of experience - they are
> >>> actually that way (to us at least). I didn't assume that space is
> >>> public and time is private, and that private and public are
> >>> opposite -
> >>> it just turns out that it makes sense to understand them that way.
> >>> It
> >>> sets up a chain of relations which neatly maps the entire cosmos in
> >>> general terms for the first time in the modern era.
>
> >> Convince many people before talking like that. It is an advise.
> >> Especially that you draw negative consequences, like machine can't
> >> think, or we are different.
>
> > You are probably right. It's a shame that we have to hide the truth
> > out of fear of emotional reactions.
>
> On the contrary, like Aristotle you go in the intuitive natural animal
> beliefs that reality is WYSIWYG.

That's only half of reality, but it is only through that reality that
we can know any part of the other half.

> People like that. Billions years of
> "eat or being eaten" make us taking our local neighborhood as being
> important and primitively given.

The whole point of multisense realism is to acknowledge the role of
all maps and models, and to organize them in such a way as to reveal
their deeper symmetry. Because you argue for devout computationalism
(logos), my counterargument has to be anti-comp to pull yours toward
the center. The multisense continuum is a framework for seeing not
just the relativism and pluralism of the cosmos, but also the non-
commutable strengths of each individual approach. The universe needs
localists as well as generalists, materialists and idealists, etc.

>
> Then you talk again like if you knew the truth. For humans, and LUMs,
> possibilities are already enough frightening.

Oh, please. Nothing could be more frightening than the actual reality
we face in our own civilization as it is every day. It has terrors and
nightmares for every appetite. My comments about cell phones not being
a member of my family is hardly the sacking of Rome.

>
>
>
> >>> I think matter has to have some qualia, it's probably just very
> >>> simple
> >>> by comparison.
>
> >> This does not make any sense to me. Even assuming non-comp.
>
> > When a glass falls on the floor and breaks, what we hear is coming
> > from somewhere. It is entirely possible that what we hear is an event
> > that is experienced in some way by the groups of atoms in the glass as
> > it rings and shatters into pieces.
>
> Why not assume a miracle?

I don't need to, I can assume that there is a reasonable explanation.

>
> > There is an event and it is felt in
> > different ways by everything which has sense and opportunity to detect
> > it.
>
> By lowering the level you can make sense of quasi panpsychic reality,
> and still follow the laws of comp.
> By putting the level in the non constructive low levels, you just
> build a "don't ask shelter" for your theory. It remains even more
> bizarre, if the broken silicon glass makes an experience, why would
> not a silicon universal machine have one.

A silicon semiconductor does have an experience, just not the
incomprehensible human experience that we superimpose on it's nature.
If I use a truck to carry a piano, the truck doesn't learn how to play
the piano, even though I can run over a series of bumps which will
plink out a tune. Is that really such a far out concept? Must I really
accept that there could be be built a clever enough track that the
truck becomes a virtuoso pianist?

>
>
>
> >>>>>> By Gödel's theorem, and the existence of intensional modal
> >>>>>> variant,
> >>>>>> there is room for quality.
>
> >>>>> Room for quality, or room for anything we care to imagine?
>
> >>>> Room for all machines dreams, and room for all consistent machine's
> >>>> dream relative realizations.
>
> >>> Is there something it doesn't have room for though?
>
> >> Itself.
>
> > Sense is what makes sense itself make sense of itself. It's the
> > universal bootstrap - hence essential, or essence, or oriental (in the
> > sense of primary orientation).
>
> I could be willing to make sense of this in the comp theory.

Are you including the literal meaning of sense as tangible detection
as well as the logical sense of coherence? If so, then cool, how does
it work?

>
>
>
> >>>> They are required because their existence is implied by the
> >>>> relative
> >>>> stability of consciousness when entangled to a deep computation.
>
> >>> Why are nerves doing the deep computation and not the bones?
>
> >> Arithmetic makes the deep computations. The nerves cells makes only
> >> relatively deep computations, and the bones don't do computations at
> >> all, they sustain the bodies in the gravitational fields. That's the
> >> job they inherited from the pluricellular division of works, in a
> >> long
> >> story.
>
> > If the bones don't do computations, what are they made of if matter
> > isn't primitive?
>
> They are locally stable patterns obtained by a relative statistics on
> infinities of (infinite) computations.

It sounds like bones are ontologically less important than brains?

>
>
>
> >>>> A unicellular is a stomach, a skin, a lung, a liver, a muscle,
> >>>> and a
> >>>> neuron all at once.
>
> >>> Yes! Also an eye, ear, tongue, nose, intuition, instinct, maybe
> >>> radio
> >>> antenna, etc.
>
> >> I can accept the eyes for an euglena, not sure about paramecia, or
> >> you
> >> stretch too much the words.
>
> > "The behavioural responses to light in the ciliate Paramecium bursaria
> > Focke,
> > which normally contains hundreds of the symbiotic green alga Chlorella
> > in its
> > cytoplasm, were analysed quantitatively to clarify the mechanisms
> > governing
> > photoreception in the cell. P. bursana was found to possess three
> > kinds of
> > photoreceptor systems..."http://jeb.biologists.org/content/134/1/43.full.pdf
>
> I forget the Paramecium bursaria. Apology.
> But can we be sure that the Paramecium can see through them?
> It looks more like a paramecium invaded by cyanobacteria, imo.

Maybe our cells are invaded by mitochondria? It may still contribute
to high level sense.

>
>
>
> >>>> They have not voted for the division of work, and
> >>>> they have as much succeeded as us, in the exploration of the
> >>>> planet.
> >>>> I don't think they are Löbian, but I can prove that they are Turing
> >>>> universal. It is an open problem if they are conscious, perhaps
> >>>> in a
> >>>> trivial sense, or not. Löbianity begins, I think, with the spiders
> >>>> and
> >>>> octopi.
>
> >>> Interesting. I agree, 8 is a big deal. Also 3 and 4 and 12.
>
> >> Ah ah ... don't forget 24.
>
> > Hours in a day was all I could think of. It looks like there are a lot
> > of 24s in math though.
>
> It is the favorite number of Ramanujan. The guy knew that it makes
> sense to say that 1+2+3+4+5+ ... = minus 1/12. 24 plays a peculiar
> role in the partition of numbers, also in geometry and gravitation.

Interesting.

>
>
>
> >> I don't think we differ. My point is that we can keep the scientific
> >> attitude in theology.
> >> Usual scientists ignore the mind-body problem. My work has consisted
> >> in showing that comp does not solve it per se, but leads to clear and
> >> transparent mathematical formulation of it, notably through the
> >> subproblem of the justification of the beliefs in physical entities,
> >> without postulating them.
>
> > I see it as not a mathematical formulation of the mind-body problem as
> > much as the expression of the primordial symmetry in a mathematical
> > context. The difference being that other expressions of the symmetry
> > contain other truths not found within arithmetic sensibility.
>
> Who said this? The pope? The Ayatollah? The government?

It's not an authoritative proposition, it's a voluntary interpretation
(which, if I'm right, is what half of the universe is anyhow).

>
>
>
> >> That would be mistake. But the whole point is that the machine can
> >> already explain too you that the reason you believe they cannot think
> >> is a confusion of the type belief/qualia. It is a confusion between
> >> Bp
> >> and Bp &p. The machine knows the intensional difference, and can only
> >> hope for their possible extensional equivalence (like when saying
> >> "yes" to the doctor).
>
> > That reasoning has no lower limit though. Is it confusion to believe
> > that a trashcan that says THANK YOU on the lid is not really offering
> > thanks? Where is the line where it suddenly becomes racist to call a
> > puppet a puppet and not a person?
>
> When a puppet acts like a person, or was known to act like that (in
> case of comatose state).

Acts like a person in whose opinion?

>
>
>
> >>>>> Pain hurts.
>
> >>>> Well, this is tautological.
>
> >>> No, it isn't. Sweet could hurt instead.
>
> >> Define pain, then. I define it by what hurts. If sweet could hurt, it
> >> would be painful indeed.
>
> > That's where we disagree. I don't think that qualia is synonymous with
> > it's function.
>
> I did not say that.
>
>
>
> >> Brains have added complexity.
> >> Computer add complexity. But locally we feel it makes some task
> >> easier. But complexity grows.
>
> > That added complexity isn't to make tasks seem easier for the computer
> > though.
>
> For the owner of the computer, like for the owner of the brain. The
> person will feel thinking as easy as breathing. But it is not.

It is not easy in one sense, but in the native 1p sense, it is that
easy. If you built a universe from scratch and forgot to include this
experiential simplicity, you would not have our universe.

>
>
>
> >>> My solution is to see that they are
> >>> both parts of a single irreducible symmetrical ontology.
>
> >> In a too much fuzzy theory, alas (for me).
>
> > I don't see the fuzzy.
>
> Study the work of other people. Address their problem, with or without
> your "theory" as training.

That would be worthwhile I'm sure, but unfortunately it would be too
much of a distraction.

>
>
>
> >>> Why qualia help them, or anything do anything? It's reverse
> >>> engineering. You are thinking that since qualia helps us, then
> >>> logically it must be helpful, but it isn't. Logic doesn't need a
> >>> stage
> >>> show to help it. Qualia in general does not exist to assist
> >>> function.
> >>> Of course qualia assists us because we are made of qualia,
>
> >> ?
>
> > Ultimately what we are can be boiled down to experiences.
>
> Inner/outer god confusion.

?

>
>
>
> >> Fast is relative. It is the time you eat your prey, or the time your
> >> predator eat you. Relative time are quite enough here.
>
> > The feeling of vigilance doesn't compute though.
>
> But it might supervene on computation.

Why would it? If anything, machines supervene on a form of vigilance
or READYness (OK, C:>, cursor).

>
> > A computation could
> > be any speed but how could it care what that speed is as long as it is
> > appropriate for the computation context?
>
> As long as you catch the preys, and avoid the predators, things are
> cool.
>
>
>
> >> It does not. It come from non computable relation between truth and
> >> relatively simple self-referential loop.
> >> The loop itself is Turing emulable, the link with truth is not.
>
> > Ok. Here we only differ in that I will always say 'a loop of what?'.
>
> A loop of a universal numbers reflecting on itself, at some level.
> (They are mathematically definable by the use of Kleene's recursion
> theorem). Ideal correct machines have already a rich theory of self-
> reference, even before entangling themselves in deep dreams.

I don't see anything to support the idea of numbers dreaming. To
suppose something that is so radically theoretical and
counterintuitive as that, I would need a more interesting reason.

>
> > Just because we can conceive of the abstraction of a loop doesn't mean
> > that such a thing can actually exist independently.
>
> It exists in the same sense that the prime numbers exist. Like the
> discourse of the self-referential numbers.

Which to me is in a completely figurative sense of existence, having
no causal efficacy by itself.

>
>
>
> >> Formulate the problem in the comp theory. You answer it before
> >> studying it. There is a still unsolved measure problem, and you talk
> >> like if you knew the consequences of comp. You betray again your
> >> prejudice in the subject matter.
>
> > I automatically dismiss anything that is along the lines of 'you are
> > not qualified to have that curiousity'.
>
> I did not say anything like that.
> You have the right of all curiousity. But curiousity is interrgiative
> and ask question.
> I intervene because you were again talking like if you knew some truth.
> No one can do that in science.

My hypothesis is no more presumptuous than any other.

>
> > Does comp explain the lack of
> > new qualia generation or doesn't it? I don't think it can because
> > there is no handle on what the show actually is, only the plot of the
> > content of the show. The entire presentation of qualia is, how do you
> > say, diagonalized?
>
> Comp can be used to formulate the problems.

Yes, the twists that make up the plot. Still it's a script, not a
show.

>
>
>
> >>> A computer doesn't need me to type on it to compute. Keyboard,
> >>> video,
> >>> and mouse are for human users, not for the computer.
>
> >> Wait the bandits invent the buying machine. If we let education going
> >> as it is going, (since Nixon, say), humans will become subroutine for
> >> computations beyond their purposes.
>
> > I don't see the connection.
>
> If we dismiss the machines, the machines will dismissed us.
> No worry, we will not dismiss them, but we might dismiss ourselves.
> Machines might surpass humans also in the case humans abandon
> education and research, and accept to be manipulated.

It's not the machines that need help. They are doing just fine. Do you
think conscious machines will reward their aboriginal ancestors? That
they would be more compassionate than Europeans were to Native
Americans or Africans had they only not dismissed them or themselves?
Does a computer behave more like a gentle mammal or a relentless
insect? (notice that I have no fear of insulting the computer I type
this on).

>
>
>
> >>> Qualia does not merely represent and simplify information, it
> >>> presents
> >>> and enriches experience also - which is something that comp does not
> >>> do.
>
> >> ?
>
> > Comp only manipulates information and does not decorate experience
> > aesthetically.
>
> It does, thanks to the modalities. It is technicolor inside.

So you say. Why do we need eyes then? How can anyone be color blind?

>
>
>
> >>> Quanta needs no summary or representation - again, that is for the
> >>> convenience of human mathematicians and programmers. Programs
> >>> themselves operate only in an uncompressed, unencrypted form of
> >>> mind-
> >>> numbingly repetitive binary units.
>
> >> ?
>
> > Compiling into machine language is necessary to run a program. The
> > computer has no need for or tolerance of your human programming
> > language.
>
> It is not the computer, nor the brain which does the thinking, but the
> person emulated by layers of intricate universal numbers (with the
> brain playing a special relative role in keeping probabilities
> reasonable).

That sounds to me like the song does the singing and songwriting. It
can be seen in that sense, but only figuratively.

>
>
>
> >> Define those terms.
>
> > Hemisphere meaning, in this context, half of the cosmos.
>
> I don't take cosmos for granted. It is part of the problem, not the
> solution.

The cosmos is only a problem if you assume theory as primitive instead
of cosmos from the beginning. Which would make sense if we lived in a
world of disembodied theories settling into matter but it seems
obvious that he opposite is the case.

>
>
>
> >> I grant you that. But with comp we don't attribute qualia to
> >> physical-
> >> machine, only to the immaterial person.
>
> > I agree in part, qualia is not attributable to the physical machine,
> > both the qualia and the physical machine are attributed to the story
> > that is woven between them.
>
> Good. So all you have to learn is arithmetic,

What does arithmetic have to do with storytelling?

Craig

Bruno Marchal

unread,
Feb 5, 2012, 1:23:10 PM2/5/12
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
On 05 Feb 2012, at 17:14, Craig Weinberg wrote:

On Feb 2, 2:48 pm, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
On 02 Feb 2012, at 00:25, Craig Weinberg wrote:

I just don't see how beliefs can be primitive.

They are not. You can define "M believes p" in arithmetic. (Bp)
You cannot define "M knows p", but you can still simulate it in
arithmetic by (Bp & p) for each p. So knowledge is not primitive either.

I don't see how 'defining' can be primitive either.

You are right. We can define "define" in arithmetic, like we can define a notion of rational belief, but not of knowledge (that we can still meta-define, and the machine can do that too).







You should prove what you assert. I can agree because the term
"random" has many different meaning. For some meaning of it you are
right. Classical digital chaos can be said neither random nor
determinist, for some acceptable definition of "random" and
"deterministic". Many disagreement here are uninteresting vocabulary
problems.

Classical digital chaos can't be said to be intentional though. That's
the missing element. Machines, arithmetic, chaos, etc can't do
anything intentionally. We do though.

You are just insulting some possible machines. You make a very strong
assumption, without any other proof than a feeling of being different.

It's not a matter of assumption or proof or feeling, it's a matter of
understanding. I understand the difference between chaos and
intentionality. Chaos is teleonomy but intention or motive is
teleological. They are opposites. Chaos has no opinion, intentionality
is the realization of opinion.

You cannot invoke your own understanding. That's an argument per authority (it proves nothing and augment the plausibility that you are crackpot in the interlocutor ear).




I don't think intention can be emulated. A Turing machine's behavior
can only be scripted or else be an unintentional consequence of the
script. It can't intentionally transcend it's own script.

It can precisely do that. The G and G* logics comes from that very
ability. Universal machine are universal dissident capable of changing
its own script.

You don't know that it can change it intentionally though.

But this I don't know for anyone else, except myself perhaps.
But you can't know that they are zombie, though.



It will
only change according to what and how it's script allows it to change.

The "allowing" is a universal machine dependent notion, and they are many.




Talk with them, meaning internal dialogue?

Public dialog. Like in Boolos 79 and Boolos 93. But the earlier form
of the dialog is Gödel 1931.
Solovay 1976 shows that the propositional part of the dialog, with the
modal Bp, is formalized soundly and completely by G and G*. It is the
embryo of the mathematics of incompleteness, including the directly
accessible and the indirectly accessible parts, and the explanation of
the why we feel it is the other way around, etc.

When you talk with them, do they answer the same way to the same
question every time?

The conversation is made in Platonia, and is not entangled to our history, except for period where I implement it on some machines. Even in that case, they didn't dispose on short and long term memories, except for their intrinsic basic arithmetical experiences (which bifurcate up to you and me).



Do they ever get tired of answering the same
question or tired of remaining silent?

So, what I say above explains why such a question is senseless.



The idea that Löbian machines
are uniform in their response -

They are universal babies. You can except much. They all drool, cough and sleep ...



that all such machines remain silent
on all of these questions every time tells me that they clearly
possess no awareness.

You have frightening telepathic power.




Why wouldn't there be one loose lipped machine
who let the secrets of their identity slip?

Because I limit myself to ideally self-referentially correct machine. They already know that it is insane to let the secret of their identity slip.




Rather I think we should
take their silence at face value. They know nothing about themselves
because there is no self there to know anything.

Not at all. When you ask them why they remain silent on some question, they can find answer and provide (theological) theories/hypothesis. 







Because they can be aware of the gap between proof and truth. They
can
even study the rich mathematics  of that gap. They already claim
having qualia. They are teaching me their theology. That's what AUDA
is all about.

What qualia do they have?

They are given by some semantics of the SGrz1, Z1* and X1* logics.
Intuitively those concerned perceptible fields, in weird topological
spaces.

What about them makes them perceptible as opposed to computational?

But they are perceptible, if the theory is correct. 





It should determined the first person plural notion.
I am only translating the mind-body problem in an arithmetic + usual
math. problem, by taking seriously the comp hypothesis (without
throwing consciousness and persons away).



The contrary here is also true.
And in the case of consciousness attribution,  the naive attitude is
less damageable than the skeptical attitude.

Then we should treat corporations as people too?

Above some level of self-referential nasty behavior, why not? So we
can prosecute them and send them to jail, in case of abuse of power.
Good idea!

They can't be jailed though. That's the point. The corporation can
just be dissolved and reformed under a different name. People can't do
that. Jail is a deterrent for most people but not for any program or
organization.

Sure. Good trick to escape responsibilities. But a corporation is not a human, and if tretated as an entity, we have to handle it correspondingly, with the goal of favoring the general human interest.





<I skip what you say on names>



There is no need to explain sense and matter. They are self
explanatory and non-mysterious.

Ah?

No need to explain those terms in other terms I mean.

Ah?

Terms aren't primitive. They arise from sense and matter. If you say
terms are primitive, you have infinite regress of what terms make
terms.

I didn't say that. You confuse level. When you say that sense and matter are self-explanatory, you just make no sense at all. 



Sense already takes infinite regress into account.

How? Given that sense are primitive, which makes no sense. 



Whatever
terms or phenomena you want to make primitive have to first make
sense. Nothing can be more primitive than sense because then it
wouldn't make -- sense.


I will not study the brain, nor biology, because we don't need that to use the brain and being alive.








Only the symmetry between them is not
commonly understood.

It might be non symmetrical. Is that symmetry another assumption?

Not an assumption, an observation/hypothesis.

?

Symmetry can be observed, no?

Some symmetry can, others cannot, especially those which doesn't exist, or mightn't exist.







Once the symmetry is understood as primitive,
nothing simpler be conjured.

This looks like nonsense to me. Honest.

should be 'nothing simpler need be conjured'

Your symmetry thesis is a way to protect the Aristotelian thesis by
lowering our substitution level down in in the non constructive
transfinite.
You do a reification of transcendence.

I don't think it has to do with protecting anything, it's a sensible
extrapolation of conditions as we find them - a refinement of common
sense.

But scientist present them in an hypothetical way, trying to be as clear so that we can see the difference with other theories. You don't present any difference, you just deny a possibility without presenting any argument.






I think this is against the constitution, Craig. You are believing in
a truth, but keep it to you, and make public a theory instead. You
talk like a prohibitionist.
Nobody can claim truth, for God-sake.

Except 17?

A machine can say "17 is prime". This really means "I think and assert that 17 is prime". It also means that machine can justify it by the + and * laws.
Ideally correct machine cannot say, in general  "True('17 is prime')". They can refer to a reality as such. they are modest.



Any description of the universe has to make some kind of sense and all
things that make sense describe an aspect of the universe. Sense
requires the possibility of a foreground/background, subject/object,
variance/invariance relation. The three things; foreground,
background, and relation between the two (something that can tell the
difference) are the most primitive possible realism. You cannot have
just one or two things because there is nothing to tell the
difference. The most primitive thing that can be real is one thing
that can tell the difference between itself and the absence of itself.
It's really not much different from Turing binary, but binary can't be
primordial because 1 doesn't know that it's different from 0 (if it
did it would be redundant to have both). 1 and 0 therefore, are two
opposite states of the same thing - a boundaryless solitary bit which
can tell whether it is in one state or another. This sense - this
ability to detect and discern the difference, to make more sense out
of patterns of the states, that is the primodial monad. It's not
arithmetic truth, it is the concrete phenomenology of the cosmos which
tells truths and fictions of all sorts.

You might have some talent in poetry, if you were not claiming truth.

Poetry can't tell the truth?

Never. It is logically impossible. If it does, it is no more poetry. 
Some poetry can reveal some truth to some people, but not in the affirmative way.
Poetry can relate ruth, but not claims them as such. It would be a confusion of genre.




On the contrary, like Aristotle you go in the intuitive natural animal
beliefs that reality is WYSIWYG.

That's only half of reality, but it is only through that reality that
we can know any part of the other half.

Argument?




People like that. Billions years of
"eat or being eaten" make us taking our local neighborhood as being
important and primitively given.

The whole point of multisense realism is to acknowledge the role of
all maps and models, and to organize them in such a way as to reveal
their deeper symmetry. Because you argue for devout computationalism
(logos), my counterargument has to be anti-comp to pull yours toward
the center. The multisense continuum is a framework for seeing not
just the relativism and pluralism of the cosmos, but also the non-
commutable strengths of each individual approach. The universe needs
localists as well as generalists, materialists and idealists, etc.

No problem with that. I wish only you try harder.




Then you talk again like if you knew the truth. For humans, and LUMs,
possibilities are already enough frightening.

Oh, please. Nothing could be more frightening than the actual reality
we face in our own civilization as it is every day. It has terrors and
nightmares for every appetite. My comments about cell phones not being
a member of my family is hardly the sacking of Rome.

But what about a human with a prosthetic brain?
(I don't care about cell phones).


By lowering the level you can make sense of quasi panpsychic reality,
and still follow the laws of comp.
By putting the level in the non constructive low levels, you just
build a "don't ask shelter" for your theory. It remains even more
bizarre, if the broken silicon glass makes an experience, why would
not a silicon universal machine have one.

A silicon semiconductor does have an experience, just not the
incomprehensible human experience that we superimpose on it's nature.
If I use a truck to carry a piano, the truck doesn't learn how to play
the piano, even though I can run over a series of bumps which will
plink out a tune. Is that really such a far out concept? Must I really
accept that there could be be built a clever enough track that the
truck becomes a virtuoso pianist?

So machine cannot think because a truck cannot play well piano?






By Gödel's theorem, and the existence of intensional modal
variant,
there is room for quality.

Room for quality, or room for anything we care to imagine?

Room for all machines dreams, and room for all consistent machine's
dream relative realizations.

Is there something it doesn't have room for though?

Itself.

Sense is what makes sense itself make sense of itself. It's the
universal bootstrap - hence essential, or essence, or oriental (in the
sense of primary orientation).

I could be willing to make sense of this in the comp theory.

Are you including the literal meaning of sense as tangible detection
as well as the logical sense of coherence? If so, then cool, how does
it work?

The logical sense of coherence is in the "Dt", the tangible detection is in "p", and the machine's body and relative belief is in "Bp". The Bp & Dt & p is a variant of the self-reference logic. The non first person communicable part of the logic of that variant (named X1* in AUDA) is the qualia logic, or the sensible matter hypostasis. The bootstrap law is given by p -> [] <> p, with []p defined roughly by Bp & Dt & p. Bp is Gödel probability applied on the arithmetical sigma_1 sentence p. Dp is ~B~p. <> p is ~ [] ~, and t is "1=1".




It sounds like bones are ontologically less important than brains?

I don't see why. Brains are also locally stable patterns obtained by a relative statistics on
infinities of (infinite) computations.



I forget the Paramecium bursaria. Apology.
But can we be sure that the Paramecium can see through them?
It looks more like a paramecium invaded by cyanobacteria, imo.

Maybe our cells are invaded by mitochondria? It may still contribute
to high level sense.

Sure.


It is the favorite number of Ramanujan. The guy knew that it makes
sense to say that 1+2+3+4+5+ ... = minus 1/12. 24 plays a peculiar
role in the partition of numbers, also in geometry and gravitation.

Interesting.

In string theory, you can compute the mass of the photon. A long computation (from precise general axiom) leads spectacularly to a sum of two terms which when evaluated gives (1+2+3+4+ ...) + 1/12. 
Of course this only shows that IF string theory is correct then the mass of the photon is zero (because it is obvious that 1+2+3+4+5+ ... = minus 1/12, isn't it?).









I don't think we differ. My point is that we can keep the scientific
attitude in theology.
Usual scientists ignore the mind-body problem. My work has consisted
in showing that comp does not solve it per se, but leads to clear and
transparent mathematical formulation of it, notably through the
subproblem of the justification of the beliefs in physical entities,
without postulating them.

I see it as not a mathematical formulation of the mind-body problem as
much as the expression of the primordial symmetry in a mathematical
context. The difference being that other expressions of the symmetry
contain other truths not found within arithmetic sensibility.

Who said this? The pope? The Ayatollah? The government?

It's not an authoritative proposition, it's a voluntary interpretation
(which, if I'm right, is what half of the universe is anyhow).

You dream aloud. But a part of this might make sense in the comp theory. The Löb formula itself is a form of placebo for making true some belief.







That would be mistake. But the whole point is that the machine can
already explain too you that the reason you believe they cannot think
is a confusion of the type belief/qualia. It is a confusion between
Bp
and Bp &p. The machine knows the intensional difference, and can only
hope for their possible extensional equivalence (like when saying
"yes" to the doctor).

That reasoning has no lower limit though. Is it confusion to believe
that a trashcan that says THANK YOU on the lid is not really offering
thanks? Where is the line where it suddenly becomes racist to call a
puppet a puppet and not a person?

When a puppet acts like a person, or was known to act like that (in
case of comatose state).

Acts like a person in whose opinion?

In our opinion, or in the opinion of the universal numbers in its neighborhood.







Pain hurts.

Well, this is tautological.

No, it isn't. Sweet could hurt instead.

Define pain, then. I define it by what hurts. If sweet could hurt, it
would be painful indeed.

That's where we disagree. I don't think that qualia is synonymous with
it's function.

I did not say that.



Brains have added complexity.
Computer add complexity. But locally we feel it makes some task
easier. But complexity grows.

That added complexity isn't to make tasks seem easier for the computer
though.

For the owner of the computer, like for the owner of the brain. The
person will feel thinking as easy as breathing. But it is not.

It is not easy in one sense, but in the native 1p sense, it is that
easy.

But here all the problem is in linking the easy 1p and the less easy 3p.



If you built a universe from scratch and forgot to include this
experiential simplicity, you would not have our universe.

We don't have to include it. Brains are the simplifier tools.







My solution is to see that they are
both parts of a single irreducible symmetrical ontology.

In a too much fuzzy theory, alas (for me).

I don't see the fuzzy.

Study the work of other people. Address their problem, with or without
your "theory" as training.

That would be worthwhile I'm sure, but unfortunately it would be too
much of a distraction.

OK. That why I am not good in saucer. All those guy running after the ball distract me too much. But then I don't pretend marking the goal.








Why qualia help them, or anything do anything? It's reverse
engineering. You are thinking that since qualia helps us, then
logically it must be helpful, but it isn't. Logic doesn't need a
stage
show to help it. Qualia in general does not exist to assist
function.
Of course qualia assists us because we are made of qualia,

?

Ultimately what we are can be boiled down to experiences.

Inner/outer god confusion.

?

I think that, like Benjayk, you might be confusing God (which we don't know) and the inner God, which we know very well. From the point of view of each machine, they are very different. The first one can be said to know almost everything, but can do almost nothing. The other one, knows almost nothing, but can do almost everything, and is responsible for the unavoidable mess in Heaven. (In number's theology).









Fast is relative. It is the time you eat your prey, or the time your
predator eat you. Relative time are quite enough here.

The feeling of vigilance doesn't compute though.

But it might supervene on computation.

Why would it? If anything, machines supervene on a form of vigilance
or READYness (OK, C:>, cursor).

?




A computation could
be any speed but how could it care what that speed is as long as it is
appropriate for the computation context?

As long as you catch the preys, and avoid the predators, things are
cool.



It does not. It come from non computable relation between truth and
relatively simple self-referential loop.
The loop itself is Turing emulable, the link with truth is not.

Ok. Here we only differ in that I will always say 'a loop of what?'.

A loop of a universal numbers reflecting on itself, at some level.
(They are mathematically definable by the use of Kleene's recursion
theorem). Ideal correct machines have already a rich theory of self-
reference, even before entangling themselves in deep dreams.

I don't see anything to support the idea of numbers dreaming.

You can't dismiss comp in that way.



To
suppose something that is so radically theoretical and
counterintuitive as that, I would need a more interesting reason.

Study Gödel 1931, or some book on computability and logic.





Just because we can conceive of the abstraction of a loop doesn't mean
that such a thing can actually exist independently.

It exists in the same sense that the prime numbers exist. Like the
discourse of the self-referential numbers.

Which to me is in a completely figurative sense of existence, having
no causal efficacy by itself.

But it has, in the relevant sense, once you admit there is a substitution level.






Formulate the problem in the comp theory. You answer it before
studying it. There is a still unsolved measure problem, and you talk
like if you knew the consequences of comp. You betray again your
prejudice in the subject matter.

I automatically dismiss anything that is along the lines of 'you are
not qualified to have that curiousity'.

I did not say anything like that.
You have the right of all curiousity. But curiousity is interrgiative
and ask question.
I intervene because you were again talking like if you knew some truth.
No one can do that in science.

My hypothesis is no more presumptuous than any other.

You are saying that you are superior, in some sense, to other entities. You deny a soul to a class of individuals, by invoking fuzzy rhetorical trick reifying your own experience. 





Does comp explain the lack of
new qualia generation or doesn't it? I don't think it can because
there is no handle on what the show actually is, only the plot of the
content of the show. The entire presentation of qualia is, how do you
say, diagonalized?

Comp can be used to formulate the problems.

Yes, the twists that make up the plot. Still it's a script, not a
show.

You confuse the script and the show, for the numbers. The universal numbers plays the shows of the numbers. 






A computer doesn't need me to type on it to compute. Keyboard,
video,
and mouse are for human users, not for the computer.

Wait the bandits invent the buying machine. If we let education going
as it is going, (since Nixon, say), humans will become subroutine for
computations beyond their purposes.

I don't see the connection.

If we dismiss the machines, the machines will dismissed us.
No worry, we will not dismiss them, but we might dismiss ourselves.
Machines might surpass humans also in the case humans abandon
education and research, and accept to be manipulated.

It's not the machines that need help. They are doing just fine. Do you
think conscious machines will reward their aboriginal ancestors? That
they would be more compassionate than Europeans were to Native
Americans or Africans had they only not dismissed them or themselves?

Well, if we invest a bit more in education in general, there are some chances.



Does a computer behave more like a gentle mammal or a relentless
insect?

It depends on its most probable computational history.




(notice that I have no fear of insulting the computer I type
this on).

Easy.








Qualia does not merely represent and simplify information, it
presents
and enriches experience also - which is something that comp does not
do.

?

Comp only manipulates information and does not decorate experience
aesthetically.

It does, thanks to the modalities. It is technicolor inside.

So you say. Why do we need eyes then? How can anyone be color blind?

By having some disease in some part of the cortex inside. The modalities can be stopped to be handled correctly, or self-referentially correctly.








Quanta needs no summary or representation - again, that is for the
convenience of human mathematicians and programmers. Programs
themselves operate only in an uncompressed, unencrypted form of
mind-
numbingly repetitive binary units.

?

Compiling into machine language is necessary to run a program. The
computer has no need for or tolerance of your human programming
language.

It is not the computer, nor the brain which does the thinking, but the
person emulated by layers of intricate universal numbers (with the
brain playing a special relative role in keeping probabilities
reasonable).

That sounds to me like the song does the singing and songwriting.

Yes. That's the magic of the universal numbers. They can do both.


It
can be seen in that sense, but only figuratively.




Define those terms.

Hemisphere meaning, in this context, half of the cosmos.

I don't take cosmos for granted. It is part of the problem, not the
solution.

The cosmos is only a problem if you assume theory as primitive instead
of cosmos from the beginning.

I don't assume theory as primitive. Only numbers and +, *.
The existence of theories and machines is a theorem in N,+, *.



Which would make sense if we lived in a
world of disembodied theories settling into matter but it seems
obvious that he opposite is the case.

Because we are deluded by the fact that we participate to the drama from inside. 








I grant you that. But with comp we don't attribute qualia to
physical-
machine, only to the immaterial person.

I agree in part, qualia is not attributable to the physical machine,
both the qualia and the physical machine are attributed to the story
that is woven between them.

Good. So all you have to learn is arithmetic,

What does arithmetic have to do with storytelling?

Arithmetic emulate all histories. "we" belongs to an infinity of histories, which branches in the continuum at each indexical possible UD-time step.
Although each individual universal number can only scratch the surface of the Arithmetical Truth, Arithmetical Truth cannot NOT distribute that individual universal number in a very complex structure on which their most probable experiences are projected (by the 1p-invariance for the length of proofs, or length of UD-computations).

So with comp we have already the infinities protecting both the soul of the machines, and matter to be reduced formally or normatively. The choice of a level of substitution is eventually intrinsically a personal choice.

The real difficulty is in the question. Does the parents have the right to say NO to the doctor, for curing their child, by invoking a religious reason. At which age can we ask to the child? (I have no answer, but if the child insists for "yes" or "no", I think it is wise to take this into consideration).

Comp is not a truth. It is not an obligation either. But it is a right.

Bruno



Craig Weinberg

unread,
Feb 5, 2012, 11:32:28 PM2/5/12
to Everything List
It's not an argument from authority, it's an argument from sense. Just
as your theory is contingent upon the acceptance of primitive
arithmetic truth, my hypothesis comes out of a sense primitive. In
order to understand the cosmos as a whole, including subjectivity, we
must invoke our own understanding or mechanism will mislead us into
disproving ourselves. Sense is the price of admission to the real
world.
>
>
>
> >>> I don't think intention can be emulated. A Turing machine's behavior
> >>> can only be scripted or else be an unintentional consequence of the
> >>> script. It can't intentionally transcend it's own script.
>
> >> It can precisely do that. The G and G* logics comes from that very
> >> ability. Universal machine are universal dissident capable of
> >> changing
> >> its own script.
>
> > You don't know that it can change it intentionally though.
>
> But this I don't know for anyone else, except myself perhaps.
> But you can't know that they are zombie, though.

All you need to know is that you can change things intentionally
yourself, but again, under sense, we don't need to literally know
everything, we can connect the dots of our many sense channels and
know that we can trust what they are showing us to a realistic extent.
We don't need to doubt other people's awareness and we don't need to
give a machine the benefit of the doubt. Let the machine convince us
it has intention and let the person convince us they do not.

>
> > It will
> > only change according to what and how it's script allows it to change.
>
> The "allowing" is a universal machine dependent notion, and they are
> many.
>

But what is allowed can never exceed the range of possibilities of the
script. Living organisms seem to be able to do that.

>
>
> >>> Talk with them, meaning internal dialogue?
>
> >> Public dialog. Like in Boolos 79 and Boolos 93. But the earlier form
> >> of the dialog is Gödel 1931.
> >> Solovay 1976 shows that the propositional part of the dialog, with
> >> the
> >> modal Bp, is formalized soundly and completely by G and G*. It is the
> >> embryo of the mathematics of incompleteness, including the directly
> >> accessible and the indirectly accessible parts, and the explanation
> >> of
> >> the why we feel it is the other way around, etc.
>
> > When you talk with them, do they answer the same way to the same
> > question every time?
>
> The conversation is made in Platonia, and is not entangled to our
> history, except for period where I implement it on some machines. Even
> in that case, they didn't dispose on short and long term memories,
> except for their intrinsic basic arithmetical experiences (which
> bifurcate up to you and me).
>

I can't really interpret that in any way other than an evasion of the
question. You say there have been public dialogs at various times. I
asked if the answers are the same every time. You answered in a way
that sounds like 'talking to machines isn't anything like talking and
it doesn't occur in time, but then somehow they become us and then
talking becomes talking.'

> > Do they ever get tired of answering the same
> > question or tired of remaining silent?
>
> So, what I say above explains why such a question is senseless.

I think that the answer has to be either yes or no. If one machine has
ever been silent on a question but then answered it under repeated
questioning, then the answer is yes, otherwise I think it has to be
no. It's a factual question, not a description.

>
> > The idea that Löbian machines
> > are uniform in their response -
>
> They are universal babies. You can except much. They all drool, cough
> and sleep ...

But you can't talk to babies. Nobody claims that their silence on deep
questions indicates sagacity.

>
> > that all such machines remain silent
> > on all of these questions every time tells me that they clearly
> > possess no awareness.
>
> You have frightening telepathic power.

It's not telepathy, it's first hand knowledge that awareness entails
natural variation in response. You cannot ask any question of any
person over and over and expect to get the same response every time
for every person. That's because awareness is not mechanical. That's
what makes a machine a machine, a lack of capacity to transcend
recursive behavior or deviate from universal behavior.

>
> > Why wouldn't there be one loose lipped machine
> > who let the secrets of their identity slip?
>
> Because I limit myself to ideally self-referentially correct machine.
> They already know that it is insane to let the secret of their
> identity slip.

So it's impossible for a machine to go insane? Seems like another
fundamental difference between minds and machines.

>
> > Rather I think we should
> > take their silence at face value. They know nothing about themselves
> > because there is no self there to know anything.
>
> Not at all. When you ask them why they remain silent on some question,
> they can find answer and provide (theological) theories/hypothesis.

For example?

>
>
>
> >>>> Because they can be aware of the gap between proof and truth. They
> >>>> can
> >>>> even study the rich mathematics of that gap. They already claim
> >>>> having qualia. They are teaching me their theology. That's what
> >>>> AUDA
> >>>> is all about.
>
> >>> What qualia do they have?
>
> >> They are given by some semantics of the SGrz1, Z1* and X1* logics.
> >> Intuitively those concerned perceptible fields, in weird topological
> >> spaces.
>
> > What about them makes them perceptible as opposed to computational?
>
> But they are perceptible, if the theory is correct.

Only because deciding that they are perceptible is the only way to
preserve the possibility that the theory could be correct.

>
>
>
> >> It should determined the first person plural notion.
> >> I am only translating the mind-body problem in an arithmetic + usual
> >> math. problem, by taking seriously the comp hypothesis (without
> >> throwing consciousness and persons away).
>
> >>>> The contrary here is also true.
> >>>> And in the case of consciousness attribution, the naive attitude
> >>>> is
> >>>> less damageable than the skeptical attitude.
>
> >>> Then we should treat corporations as people too?
>
> >> Above some level of self-referential nasty behavior, why not? So we
> >> can prosecute them and send them to jail, in case of abuse of power.
> >> Good idea!
>
> > They can't be jailed though. That's the point. The corporation can
> > just be dissolved and reformed under a different name. People can't do
> > that. Jail is a deterrent for most people but not for any program or
> > organization.
>
> Sure. Good trick to escape responsibilities. But a corporation is not
> a human, and if tretated as an entity, we have to handle it
> correspondingly, with the goal of favoring the general human interest.

My point is that machines cannot be punished or deterred by the threat
of punishment.

>
>
>
> >> <I skip what you say on names>
>
> >>>>> There is no need to explain sense and matter. They are self
> >>>>> explanatory and non-mysterious.
>
> >>>> Ah?
>
> >>> No need to explain those terms in other terms I mean.
>
> >> Ah?
>
> > Terms aren't primitive. They arise from sense and matter. If you say
> > terms are primitive, you have infinite regress of what terms make
> > terms.
>
> I didn't say that. You confuse level. When you say that sense and
> matter are self-explanatory, you just make no sense at all.

You're overthinking it. Sense is the ability to detect and incorporate
what is detected into a larger coherence. Matter is everything which
can be publicly observed in terms like mass, density, relative
location, velocity, etc.

>
> > Sense already takes infinite regress into account.
>
> How? Given that sense are primitive, which makes no sense.

If sense is primitive, then it makes sense by definition. It is that
which makes definition possible: sensorimotive electromagnetism.

>
> > Whatever
> > terms or phenomena you want to make primitive have to first make
> > sense. Nothing can be more primitive than sense because then it
> > wouldn't make -- sense.
>
> I will not study the brain, nor biology, because we don't need that to
> use the brain and being alive.

not sure what connection you're making.

>
>
>
> >>>>> Only the symmetry between them is not
> >>>>> commonly understood.
>
> >>>> It might be non symmetrical. Is that symmetry another assumption?
>
> >>> Not an assumption, an observation/hypothesis.
>
> >> ?
>
> > Symmetry can be observed, no?
>
> Some symmetry can, others cannot, especially those which doesn't
> exist, or mightn't exist.
>

It seems that way because it is more primitive than arithmetic truth.
It transcends certainty.

>
>
> >>>>> Once the symmetry is understood as primitive,
> >>>>> nothing simpler be conjured.
>
> >>>> This looks like nonsense to me. Honest.
>
> >>> should be 'nothing simpler need be conjured'
>
> >> Your symmetry thesis is a way to protect the Aristotelian thesis by
> >> lowering our substitution level down in in the non constructive
> >> transfinite.
> >> You do a reification of transcendence.
>
> > I don't think it has to do with protecting anything, it's a sensible
> > extrapolation of conditions as we find them - a refinement of common
> > sense.
>
> But scientist present them in an hypothetical way, trying to be as
> clear so that we can see the difference with other theories. You don't
> present any difference, you just deny a possibility without presenting
> any argument.

I make clear differences from all other theories. I map other theories
along a continuum and explain their shortcomings in terms of their
diametrically opposed theories. When you are trying to reconcile the
entire cosmos, you can't expect that it will fit neatly on the shelf
with instrumental theories.

>
>
>
> >> I think this is against the constitution, Craig. You are believing in
> >> a truth, but keep it to you, and make public a theory instead. You
> >> talk like a prohibitionist.
> >> Nobody can claim truth, for God-sake.
>
> > Except 17?
>
> A machine can say "17 is prime".

Can it? Or do we have to define what prime is for it in advance? Most
machines don't know what 17 or prime is.


> This really means "I think and assert
> that 17 is prime".

I think it only means that a certain set of bits meets a pre-
established criteria associated with another set of bits.

>It also means that machine can justify it by the +
> and * laws.
> Ideally correct machine cannot say, in general "True('17 is prime')".
> They can refer to a reality as such. they are modest.

It makes the entire universe into a uniform meaningless exercise of
self reference.
That doesn't even make sense. Any scientific truth can be expressed in
a poetic form. Genres aren't real.

>
>
>
> >> On the contrary, like Aristotle you go in the intuitive natural
> >> animal
> >> beliefs that reality is WYSIWYG.
>
> > That's only half of reality, but it is only through that reality that
> > we can know any part of the other half.
>
> Argument?

The argument is that all truths beyond our senses are known to us only
through our senses. What is the argument against it?

>
>
>
> >> People like that. Billions years of
> >> "eat or being eaten" make us taking our local neighborhood as being
> >> important and primitively given.
>
> > The whole point of multisense realism is to acknowledge the role of
> > all maps and models, and to organize them in such a way as to reveal
> > their deeper symmetry. Because you argue for devout computationalism
> > (logos), my counterargument has to be anti-comp to pull yours toward
> > the center. The multisense continuum is a framework for seeing not
> > just the relativism and pluralism of the cosmos, but also the non-
> > commutable strengths of each individual approach. The universe needs
> > localists as well as generalists, materialists and idealists, etc.
>
> No problem with that. I wish only you try harder.

Try harder to be impartial, or try harder to stack the deck in favor
of comp?

>
>
>
> >> Then you talk again like if you knew the truth. For humans, and LUMs,
> >> possibilities are already enough frightening.
>
> > Oh, please. Nothing could be more frightening than the actual reality
> > we face in our own civilization as it is every day. It has terrors and
> > nightmares for every appetite. My comments about cell phones not being
> > a member of my family is hardly the sacking of Rome.
>
> But what about a human with a prosthetic brain?
> (I don't care about cell phones).

A beautiful machine is worth caring about too, but it has nothing to
do with it's awareness. I'm not a big car guy but when they wrecked
that Ferrari for this Dr. Dre video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=VA770wpLX-Q) even I had to think 'well, that's a damn shame'.

>
>
>
> >> By lowering the level you can make sense of quasi panpsychic reality,
> >> and still follow the laws of comp.
> >> By putting the level in the non constructive low levels, you just
> >> build a "don't ask shelter" for your theory. It remains even more
> >> bizarre, if the broken silicon glass makes an experience, why would
> >> not a silicon universal machine have one.
>
> > A silicon semiconductor does have an experience, just not the
> > incomprehensible human experience that we superimpose on it's nature.
> > If I use a truck to carry a piano, the truck doesn't learn how to play
> > the piano, even though I can run over a series of bumps which will
> > plink out a tune. Is that really such a far out concept? Must I really
> > accept that there could be be built a clever enough track that the
> > truck becomes a virtuoso pianist?
>
> So machine cannot think because a truck cannot play well piano?

No, a machine cannot think because the only reason that we might be
tempted to think it could can be explained through that example. You
can make the piano more sensitive to bumps, and you can make the bumps
more sophisticated to articulate the piano's mechanism better, but
neither the truck, the piano, nor the bumps can play the piano, they
are all parts of a recording made by humans trying to imitate their
own playing of the piano.
The existence of variables like Dt and p already presupposes sense and
detection of visual symbols.

>
>
>
> > It sounds like bones are ontologically less important than brains?
>
> I don't see why. Brains are also locally stable patterns obtained by a
> relative statistics on
> infinities of (infinite) computations.

So why are brains more associated with human consciousness than bones?

>
>
>
> >> I forget the Paramecium bursaria. Apology.
> >> But can we be sure that the Paramecium can see through them?
> >> It looks more like a paramecium invaded by cyanobacteria, imo.
>
> > Maybe our cells are invaded by mitochondria? It may still contribute
> > to high level sense.
>
> Sure.
>
>
>
> >> It is the favorite number of Ramanujan. The guy knew that it makes
> >> sense to say that 1+2+3+4+5+ ... = minus 1/12. 24 plays a peculiar
> >> role in the partition of numbers, also in geometry and gravitation.
>
> > Interesting.
>
> In string theory, you can compute the mass of the photon. A long
> computation (from precise general axiom) leads spectacularly to a sum
> of two terms which when evaluated gives (1+2+3+4+ ...) + 1/12.
> Of course this only shows that IF string theory is correct then the
> mass of the photon is zero (because it is obvious that 1+2+3+4+5+ ...
> = minus 1/12, isn't it?).

I don't understand the minus 1/12 part.

>
>
>
> >>>> I don't think we differ. My point is that we can keep the
> >>>> scientific
> >>>> attitude in theology.
> >>>> Usual scientists ignore the mind-body problem. My work has
> >>>> consisted
> >>>> in showing that comp does not solve it per se, but leads to clear
> >>>> and
> >>>> transparent mathematical formulation of it, notably through the
> >>>> subproblem of the justification of the beliefs in physical
> >>>> entities,
> >>>> without postulating them.
>
> >>> I see it as not a mathematical formulation of the mind-body
> >>> problem as
> >>> much as the expression of the primordial symmetry in a mathematical
> >>> context. The difference being that other expressions of the symmetry
> >>> contain other truths not found within arithmetic sensibility.
>
> >> Who said this? The pope? The Ayatollah? The government?
>
> > It's not an authoritative proposition, it's a voluntary interpretation
> > (which, if I'm right, is what half of the universe is anyhow).
>
> You dream aloud.

Isn't that what you say numbers do also?

> But a part of this might make sense in the comp
> theory. The Löb formula itself is a form of placebo for making true
> some belief.
>
>
>
> >>>> That would be mistake. But the whole point is that the machine can
> >>>> already explain too you that the reason you believe they cannot
> >>>> think
> >>>> is a confusion of the type belief/qualia. It is a confusion between
> >>>> Bp
> >>>> and Bp &p. The machine knows the intensional difference, and can
> >>>> only
> >>>> hope for their possible extensional equivalence (like when saying
> >>>> "yes" to the doctor).
>
> >>> That reasoning has no lower limit though. Is it confusion to believe
> >>> that a trashcan that says THANK YOU on the lid is not really
> >>> offering
> >>> thanks? Where is the line where it suddenly becomes racist to call a
> >>> puppet a puppet and not a person?
>
> >> When a puppet acts like a person, or was known to act like that (in
> >> case of comatose state).
>
> > Acts like a person in whose opinion?
>
> In our opinion, or in the opinion of the universal numbers in its
> neighborhood.
>

We are sharply divided in the US in our opinions about that. Are
universal numbers less conflicted about when life or consciousness
begins and ends? Are they Pro-Life or Pro-Choice?

>
>
> >>>>>>> Pain hurts.
>
> >>>>>> Well, this is tautological.
>
> >>>>> No, it isn't. Sweet could hurt instead.
>
> >>>> Define pain, then. I define it by what hurts. If sweet could
> >>>> hurt, it
> >>>> would be painful indeed.
>
> >>> That's where we disagree. I don't think that qualia is synonymous
> >>> with
> >>> it's function.
>
> >> I did not say that.
>
> >>>> Brains have added complexity.
> >>>> Computer add complexity. But locally we feel it makes some task
> >>>> easier. But complexity grows.
>
> >>> That added complexity isn't to make tasks seem easier for the
> >>> computer
> >>> though.
>
> >> For the owner of the computer, like for the owner of the brain. The
> >> person will feel thinking as easy as breathing. But it is not.
>
> > It is not easy in one sense, but in the native 1p sense, it is that
> > easy.
>
> But here all the problem is in linking the easy 1p and the less easy 3p.

It's not a problem when you realize they are linked in only in their
anomalous symmetry with each other.

>
> > If you built a universe from scratch and forgot to include this
> > experiential simplicity, you would not have our universe.
>
> We don't have to include it. Brains are the simplifier tools.

No, brains are just the meaty end of a simplifier tool which is
semantic and experiential.

>
>
>
> >>>>> My solution is to see that they are
> >>>>> both parts of a single irreducible symmetrical ontology.
>
> >>>> In a too much fuzzy theory, alas (for me).
>
> >>> I don't see the fuzzy.
>
> >> Study the work of other people. Address their problem, with or
> >> without
> >> your "theory" as training.
>
> > That would be worthwhile I'm sure, but unfortunately it would be too
> > much of a distraction.
>
> OK. That why I am not good in saucer. All those guy running after the
> ball distract me too much. But then I don't pretend marking the goal.

This isn't a game though, it's the truth of reality.

>
>
>
> >>>>> Why qualia help them, or anything do anything? It's reverse
> >>>>> engineering. You are thinking that since qualia helps us, then
> >>>>> logically it must be helpful, but it isn't. Logic doesn't need a
> >>>>> stage
> >>>>> show to help it. Qualia in general does not exist to assist
> >>>>> function.
> >>>>> Of course qualia assists us because we are made of qualia,
>
> >>>> ?
>
> >>> Ultimately what we are can be boiled down to experiences.
>
> >> Inner/outer god confusion.
>
> > ?
>
> I think that, like Benjayk, you might be confusing God (which we don't
> know) and the inner God, which we know very well. From the point of
> view of each machine, they are very different. The first one can be
> said to know almost everything, but can do almost nothing. The other
> one, knows almost nothing, but can do almost everything, and is
> responsible for the unavoidable mess in Heaven. (In number's theology).

Through sense I think we can understand them both, or at least
understand why we cannot understand them both.

>
>
>
> >>>> Fast is relative. It is the time you eat your prey, or the time
> >>>> your
> >>>> predator eat you. Relative time are quite enough here.
>
> >>> The feeling of vigilance doesn't compute though.
>
> >> But it might supervene on computation.
>
> > Why would it? If anything, machines supervene on a form of vigilance
> > or READYness (OK, C:>, cursor).
>
> ?
>

The machine is perpetually vigilant, anticipating commands.

>
>
> >>> A computation could
> >>> be any speed but how could it care what that speed is as long as
> >>> it is
> >>> appropriate for the computation context?
>
> >> As long as you catch the preys, and avoid the predators, things are
> >> cool.
>
> >>>> It does not. It come from non computable relation between truth and
> >>>> relatively simple self-referential loop.
> >>>> The loop itself is Turing emulable, the link with truth is not.
>
> >>> Ok. Here we only differ in that I will always say 'a loop of what?'.
>
> >> A loop of a universal numbers reflecting on itself, at some level.
> >> (They are mathematically definable by the use of Kleene's recursion
> >> theorem). Ideal correct machines have already a rich theory of self-
> >> reference, even before entangling themselves in deep dreams.
>
> > I don't see anything to support the idea of numbers dreaming.
>
> You can't dismiss comp in that way.

Why not? What about numbers suggests dreaming?

>
> > To
> > suppose something that is so radically theoretical and
> > counterintuitive as that, I would need a more interesting reason.
>
> Study Gödel 1931, or some book on computability and logic.

Incompleteness says the opposite to me that it does to you. I see
Gödel showing the limitation of arithmetic truth in the face of
organic sense, not the omnipotence of it.

>
>
>
> >>> Just because we can conceive of the abstraction of a loop doesn't
> >>> mean
> >>> that such a thing can actually exist independently.
>
> >> It exists in the same sense that the prime numbers exist. Like the
> >> discourse of the self-referential numbers.
>
> > Which to me is in a completely figurative sense of existence, having
> > no causal efficacy by itself.
>
> But it has, in the relevant sense, once you admit there is a
> substitution level.

Substitution level is an indexical of perception.

>
>
>
> >>>> Formulate the problem in the comp theory. You answer it before
> >>>> studying it. There is a still unsolved measure problem, and you
> >>>> talk
> >>>> like if you knew the consequences of comp. You betray again your
> >>>> prejudice in the subject matter.
>
> >>> I automatically dismiss anything that is along the lines of 'you are
> >>> not qualified to have that curiousity'.
>
> >> I did not say anything like that.
> >> You have the right of all curiousity. But curiousity is interrgiative
> >> and ask question.
> >> I intervene because you were again talking like if you knew some
> >> truth.
> >> No one can do that in science.
>
> > My hypothesis is no more presumptuous than any other.
>
> You are saying that you are superior, in some sense, to other
> entities. You deny a soul to a class of individuals, by invoking fuzzy
> rhetorical trick reifying your own experience.

That is precisely why I am superior to a machine, because I can do
that. A machine can't. It needs a reason to presume it's own
existence. I don't. I can assert my primordial authority because I
feel and know, and understand that I can. I don't need permission from
a program or a script or a rule book. I embody the theory. We don't
view the universe as impartial voyeurs, we are fully immersed within
it. We define it and it defines us.

>
>
>
> >>> Does comp explain the lack of
> >>> new qualia generation or doesn't it? I don't think it can because
> >>> there is no handle on what the show actually is, only the plot of
> >>> the
> >>> content of the show. The entire presentation of qualia is, how do
> >>> you
> >>> say, diagonalized?
>
> >> Comp can be used to formulate the problems.
>
> > Yes, the twists that make up the plot. Still it's a script, not a
> > show.
>
> You confuse the script and the show, for the numbers. The universal
> numbers plays the shows of the numbers.

Why would they play anything? For what audience?
Why wouldn't the machine just route around the disease? If color is
everywhere inside, I don't see why color blindness should be localized
to some part of anything.

>
>
>
> >>>>> Quanta needs no summary or representation - again, that is for the
> >>>>> convenience of human mathematicians and programmers. Programs
> >>>>> themselves operate only in an uncompressed, unencrypted form of
> >>>>> mind-
> >>>>> numbingly repetitive binary units.
>
> >>>> ?
>
> >>> Compiling into machine language is necessary to run a program. The
> >>> computer has no need for or tolerance of your human programming
> >>> language.
>
> >> It is not the computer, nor the brain which does the thinking, but
> >> the
> >> person emulated by layers of intricate universal numbers (with the
> >> brain playing a special relative role in keeping probabilities
> >> reasonable).
>
> > That sounds to me like the song does the singing and songwriting.
>
> Yes. That's the magic of the universal numbers. They can do both.

Then the singers and songwriters are innocent bystanders?

>
> > It
> > can be seen in that sense, but only figuratively.
>
> >>>> Define those terms.
>
> >>> Hemisphere meaning, in this context, half of the cosmos.
>
> >> I don't take cosmos for granted. It is part of the problem, not the
> >> solution.
>
> > The cosmos is only a problem if you assume theory as primitive instead
> > of cosmos from the beginning.
>
> I don't assume theory as primitive. Only numbers and +, *.
> The existence of theories and machines is a theorem in N,+, *.

But +, * is already a theory of what can be done with numbers.

>
> > Which would make sense if we lived in a
> > world of disembodied theories settling into matter but it seems
> > obvious that he opposite is the case.
>
> Because we are deluded by the fact that we participate to the drama
> from inside.

Why does that prevent us from encountering disembodied theories from
entering our drama?

>
>
>
> >>>> I grant you that. But with comp we don't attribute qualia to
> >>>> physical-
> >>>> machine, only to the immaterial person.
>
> >>> I agree in part, qualia is not attributable to the physical machine,
> >>> both the qualia and the physical machine are attributed to the story
> >>> that is woven between them.
>
> >> Good. So all you have to learn is arithmetic,
>
> > What does arithmetic have to do with storytelling?
>
> Arithmetic emulate all histories.

Only if you believe in emulation.

> "we" belongs to an infinity of
> histories, which branches in the continuum at each indexical possible
> UD-time step.
> Although each individual universal number can only scratch the surface
> of the Arithmetical Truth, Arithmetical Truth cannot NOT distribute
> that individual universal number in a very complex structure on which
> their most probable experiences are projected (by the 1p-invariance
> for the length of proofs, or length of UD-computations).
>
> So with comp we have already the infinities protecting both the soul
> of the machines, and matter to be reduced formally or normatively. The
> choice of a level of substitution is eventually intrinsically a
> personal choice.
>
> The real difficulty is in the question. Does the parents have the
> right to say NO to the doctor, for curing their child, by invoking a
> religious reason. At which age can we ask to the child? (I have no
> answer, but if the child insists for "yes" or "no", I think it is wise
> to take this into consideration).
>
> Comp is not a truth. It is not an obligation either. But it is a right.

Sure, it's a right. So are the other alternatives.

Craig

Jason Resch

unread,
Feb 6, 2012, 8:51:53 AM2/6/12
to everyth...@googlegroups.com


On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 12:23 PM, Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

On 05 Feb 2012, at 17:14, Craig Weinberg wrote:




Talk with them, meaning internal dialogue?

Public dialog. Like in Boolos 79 and Boolos 93. But the earlier form
of the dialog is Gödel 1931.
Solovay 1976 shows that the propositional part of the dialog, with the
modal Bp, is formalized soundly and completely by G and G*. It is the
embryo of the mathematics of incompleteness, including the directly
accessible and the indirectly accessible parts, and the explanation of
the why we feel it is the other way around, etc.

When you talk with them, do they answer the same way to the same
question every time?

The conversation is made in Platonia, and is not entangled to our history, except for period where I implement it on some machines. Even in that case, they didn't dispose on short and long term memories, except for their intrinsic basic arithmetical experiences (which bifurcate up to you and me).



Bruno,

Would you say this is the source of all mathematical truth?  Interview / study of platonic objects and machines?

Thanks,

Jason

Bruno Marchal

unread,
Feb 6, 2012, 12:05:23 PM2/6/12
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
Hi Jason,
I don't think so. We can only explain why we believe in the natural numbers, by having some model for "we". With comp "we" is modeled by natural numbers, (and captured as such by the "doctor" on its hard disk), so I have to postulate the numbers at the start (or other finite equivalent things). Also, we cannot logically derive the laws of addition and multiplication from simpler logical theory. We can only start explanation by agreeing (implicitly) on some system which is at least Turing universal.

I am not sure if analysis is ontological, nor if that question is interesting. What is sure is that analysis and higher order logical tools are a necessity for the numbers to "accelerate" the understanding of themselves.

I am agnostic on some possible platonism extending arithmetic. With comp, this should be absolutely undecidable, because for arithmetical being (of complexity p), bigger arithmetical being (of complexity q bigger than p) can behave analytically. 

With comp, the source of all mathematics is the natural imagination of the universal numbers. It obeys laws, and that is why there is metamathematics (mathematical logic) and category theory, up to, with comp, the theology of numbers.

And the source of physics is the same, but taking the global first person relative self-indetermination into account.
Global means that the indeterminacy bears on the UD-computations (or the theorem of RA and their proofs). the state is relative to its infinities of UM, and other quasi UM machine, implementation/incarnation/interpretations.

Bruno





Reply all
Reply to author
Forward
0 new messages