Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead

[Evgenii Rudnyi]

My comments to Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow,
especially to the statement from the book

“Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is
dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science,
particularly physics. Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of
discovery in our quest for knowledge.”

http://blog.rudnyi.ru/2012/07/philosophy-is-dead.html

Evgenii

[John Clark]

On Sat, Jul 7, 2012  Evgenii Rudnyi <use...@rudnyi.ru> wrote:

> Hawking and Mlodinow start with the statement that free will is illusion

If they said that, and I don't recall that they did, they were being much too kind in equating the "free will" noise to something as concrete as illusion.

> An interesting question is however, where resulting visual mental concepts are located.

I find it about as interesting as asking where "big" or the number eleven is located and shows the same profound misunderstanding of the situation on so many different levels that it's hard to know where to begin.  

“Today we know that helium and lithium, atoms whose nuclei contain two and three protons, were also primordially synthesized, in much smaller amounts, when the universe was about 200 seconds old.”

> However, is this knowledge or a belief? Assume that there was Big Bang described by the M-theory as supposed by the book.

The Big Bang does not need anything as exotic as M-theory to make that prediction, from just humdrum nuclear physics, the same ideas that made the H-bomb, we can calculate that if the universe started from 100% hydrogen, the simplest element, that was at several hundred billion degrees Centigrade then in about 200 seconds as a result of fusion reactions you'd have 74.9% Hydrogen 24.9% Helium and .01% deuterium and 10^-10 % Lithium, and you can calculate that in the in 13.7 bullion years since then these percentages should have changed very little, and when know that these are exactly the observed values we see today. This is far too good a agreement for it to be coincidence.

 > It well might be that philosophers are less informed about the M-theory but

Forget M-theory, most professional philosophers are totally ignorant about ANY of the huge philosophical developments that have happened in the last 150 years; they know nothing about Quantum Mechanics or Relativity or the profound works of Godel or Turing, they know that DNA has something to do with heredity but could not tell you exactly what or how it works, they don't even know it's digital;  they've heard of Darwin but have only the haziest understanding of what he said and have even less interest in it; maybe they know the Universe is expanding but the knowledge that it's accelerating hasn't trickled down to them yet because that was only discovered 15 years ago and they're slow learners; they don't even know that light is a wave of electric and magnetic fields or understand simple classical mechanics and prefer to talk about the worst physicist who ever lived, Aristotle. In short most modern philosophers are philosophical ignoramuses.         
 

> In the book, there are many statements against religion.

Thank God!

> comments in Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow,

“Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead.

Philosophy isn't dead but professional philosophers are as good as, they haven't made a contribution to our understanding of how the world works in centuries, scientists and mathematicians have had to pick up the slack.

  John K Clark  

 

[Bruno Marchal]

On 07 Jul 2012, at 19:40, John Clark wrote:

On Sat, Jul 7, 2012  Evgenii Rudnyi <use...@rudnyi.ru> wrote:

> Hawking and Mlodinow start with the statement that free will is illusion

If they said that, and I don't recall that they did, they were being much too kind in equating the "free will" noise to something as concrete as illusion.

It depends on the definition.

> An interesting question is however, where resulting visual mental concepts are located.

I find it about as interesting as asking where "big" or the number eleven is located and shows the same profound misunderstanding of the situation on so many different levels that it's hard to know where to begin.

OK.

 

“Today we know that helium and lithium, atoms whose nuclei contain two and three protons, were also primordially synthesized, in much smaller amounts, when the universe was about 200 seconds old.”

> However, is this knowledge or a belief? Assume that there was Big Bang described by the M-theory as supposed by the book.

The Big Bang does not need anything as exotic as M-theory to make that prediction, from just humdrum nuclear physics, the same ideas that made the H-bomb, we can calculate that if the universe started from 100% hydrogen, the simplest element, that was at several hundred billion degrees Centigrade then in about 200 seconds as a result of fusion reactions you'd have 74.9% Hydrogen 24.9% Helium and .01% deuterium and 10^-10 % Lithium, and you can calculate that in the in 13.7 bullion years since then these percentages should have changed very little, and when know that these are exactly the observed values we see today. This is far too good a agreement for it to be coincidence.

Some people mean by "Big Bang": the origin of the universe. I have few doubt that we share a reality with a big explosion sometimes ago, but I am quite neutral on the idea that this is the beginning of the (even just physical) story. And it is the not the beginning of the non physical story (arithmetic).

 > It well might be that philosophers are less informed about the M-theory but

Forget M-theory, most professional philosophers are totally ignorant about ANY of the huge philosophical developments that have happened in the last 150 years; they know nothing about Quantum Mechanics or Relativity or the profound works of Godel or Turing, they know that DNA has something to do with heredity but could not tell you exactly what or how it works, they don't even know it's digital;  they've heard of Darwin but have only the haziest understanding of what he said and have even less interest in it; maybe they know the Universe is expanding but the knowledge that it's accelerating hasn't trickled down to them yet because that was only discovered 15 years ago and they're slow learners; they don't even know that light is a wave of electric and magnetic fields or understand simple classical mechanics and prefer to talk about the worst physicist who ever lived, Aristotle. In short most modern philosophers are philosophical ignoramuses. 

I can agree, and I think this comes from the abandon of the scientific attitude in the human science, since theology get transfered from the academy to the "political argument from authority".

It is the passage from "?" to "!".

       
 

> In the book, there are many statements against religion.

Thank God!

Indeed. 

I mean if "religion" is identify with some of its terrestrial current manifestation, those using argument from authority. 

> comments in Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow,

“Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead.

Philosophy isn't dead but professional philosophers are as good as, they haven't made a contribution to our understanding of how the world works in centuries, scientists and mathematicians have had to pick up the slack.

By method they do rigorous philosophy implicitly, except some times in the intro and conclusion of papers. They do bad philosophy when they talk philosophy, as they imitate the philosophers who does bad philosophy "professionally". 

Philosophy should not be taught by words. It can be taught only through the art, music, novel, movies, fictions, ... Nobody can think at your place. Philosophy, and a part of theology, are private things. Inspiration is possible, but communication miss the points.

Bruno

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

[Bruno Marchal]

I am not so much in favor of "professional philosophers", which does
not mean that some of them do good ... science (like Maudlin, Slezak,
even McGuin: it is real reasoning).

But that statement looks like the blind arrogance of physics, which
ignores the mind body problem systematically for years.

Consciousness might be the grain of sand which will remind us that we
might try to be a bit more modest.

To say that scientists have become the bearer of the knowledge quest
is a truism becoming false when the scientist put a problem under the
rug.

Bruno


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

[Evgenii Rudnyi]

On 07.07.2012 19:40 John Clark said the following:

> On Sat, Jul 7, 2012 Evgenii Rudnyi<use...@rudnyi.ru> wrote:
>
>> Hawking and Mlodinow start with the statement that free will is
>> illusion
>>
>
> If they said that, and I don't recall that they did, they were being
> much too kind in equating the "free will" noise to something as
> concrete as illusion.
>

John,

I have a general question first. Let us assume the M-theory or any other
Theory-of-Everything you like. In the last chapter of Grand Design,
there is a comparison of such a theory with the Game of Life: simple
rules deterministically produce complex patterns.

Now is my questions. We observe different patterns like

I have done it according to my will
Free will is illusion
the "free will" noise
etc.

The formation of these patterns follows rules of the
Theory-of-Everything. Small particles moves this and that way and
occasionally we have a pattern above.

What I cannot comprehend though is why some people, which after all are
also just occasional conglomerates of small particles obeying the
Theory-of-Everything, react very differently when they see some pattern
above.

Do you know what part of the Theory-of-Everything responsible for such
behavior of a conglomerates of particles in this case?

Evgenii

[John Clark]

On Sun, Jul 8, 2012 Evgenii Rudnyi <use...@rudnyi.ru> wrote:

 > What I cannot comprehend though is why some people, which after all are also just occasional conglomerates of small particles obeying the Theory-of-Everything, react very differently when they see some pattern

I don't understand your confusion, people are made of many parts so they behave in complex ways, so sometimes you need adjectives to describe them that are unnecessary for simpler conglomerates of particles, adjectives like intelligence, consciousness, I, you , and me. 
 

> Do you know what part of the Theory-of-Everything responsible for such behavior of a conglomerates of particles in this case?

If you knew the Theory-of-Everything (assuming there is one and there might not be) that would be a very nice thing to know but it would be a little like knowing the rules of Chess, it's important but it alone won't make you a grandmaster.  If you want to understand why people are the way they are I don't think the Theory-of-Everything would help you much, you'd do much better studding Evolutionary Biology, neurology, or computer science. 

  John K Clark

[Bruno Marchal]

On 08 Jul 2012, at 19:29, John Clark wrote (to Evgenii Rudnyi)

If you want to understand why people are the way they are I don't think the Theory-of-Everything would help you much, you'd do much better studding Evolutionary Biology, neurology, or computer science.  

Yes, computer science might help to understand why people are the way they are. But computer science, the theory of, and by,  universal machines, already must explain, assuming comp, why people believe in fermions and bosons, making it a theory of everything, or at least a good candidate for it, especially if you take into account computer science *and* computer's computer science (that is, what computer can guess or can experience without ever being able to justified rationally: what I like to call "machine's theology, or "Tarski minus Gödel").

If a machine postulates comp, which by definition is true for her, she can already justify rationally, using her bet in comp, why she has beliefs that she cannot justify rationally. Comp itself constitutes such a belief.

Bruno

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

[meekerdb]

On 7/9/2012 6:16 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 08 Jul 2012, at 19:29, John Clark wrote (to Evgenii Rudnyi)

If you want to understand why people are the way they are I don't think the Theory-of-Everything would help you much, you'd do much better studding Evolutionary Biology, neurology, or computer science.  

Yes, computer science might help to understand why people are the way they are. But computer science, the theory of, and by,  universal machines, already must explain, assuming comp, why people believe in fermions and bosons,

How do you derive fermions and bosons from comp?

Brent

making it a theory of everything, or at least a good candidate for it, especially if you take into account computer science *and* computer's computer science (that is, what computer can guess or can experience without ever being able to justified rationally: what I like to call "machine's theology, or "Tarski minus Gödel").

If a machine postulates comp, which by definition is true for her, she can already justify rationally, using her bet in comp, why she has beliefs that she cannot justify rationally. Comp itself constitutes such a belief.

Bruno

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

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[Bruno Marchal]

On 09 Jul 2012, at 17:26, meekerdb wrote:

On 7/9/2012 6:16 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 08 Jul 2012, at 19:29, John Clark wrote (to Evgenii Rudnyi)

If you want to understand why people are the way they are I don't think the Theory-of-Everything would help you much, you'd do much better studding Evolutionary Biology, neurology, or computer science.  

Yes, computer science might help to understand why people are the way they are. But computer science, the theory of, and by,  universal machines, already must explain, assuming comp, why people believe in fermions and bosons,

How do you derive fermions and bosons from comp?

By using addition and multiplication first, to define the observer and prove its arithmetical existence.

And then looking which measure exist on the observer's neirghborhoods, at the meta-level. 

The measure one is given by the logic of Bp & Dt, and similar one,  i.e. the logics S4Grz1,  Z1* or X1*, which admit a quantization []<>p, from which we can hope (if comp and the classical theory of knowledge is true), and to make the usual (à-la Feynman) derivation of the different statistics. This is technically hard, despite shown decidable.

The point is that comp explains why people *believes* in such things. It is too early to say that we got those fermions  and bosons, of course. The arithmetical quantum logic has to undergone some hard test in math to make that possible. But if comp is true, that should work, unless there is no bosons nor fermions in nature, or that they are geographico-historical accidents (making QM also accidental).

The basic of this is explained in the second part of sane04. You need to accept a representational theory/definition of belief, and the classical theory/definition of knowledge.

Bruno

making it a theory of everything, or at least a good candidate for it, especially if you take into account computer science *and* computer's computer science (that is, what computer can guess or can experience without ever being able to justified rationally: what I like to call "machine's theology, or "Tarski minus Gödel").

If a machine postulates comp, which by definition is true for her, she can already justify rationally, using her bet in comp, why she has beliefs that she cannot justify rationally. Comp itself constitutes such a belief.

Bruno

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

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[John Clark]

On Mon, Jul 9, 2012 at 11:26 AM, meekerdb <meek...@verizon.net> wrote:

> How do you derive fermions and bosons from comp?

I don't know how to derive fermions and bosons from nothing but arithmetic but you can do the next best thing. If the Schrodinger wave function for a particle is a odd function, that is F(x) = -F(-x), then it's a fermion and the probability of 2 fermions occupying the same quantum state is zero, in other words it obeys the Pauli Exclusion Principle and is the reason that the ground beneath your feet, which is made of fermions, is solid and you don't sink to the center of the Earth.

If the Schrodinger wave function for a particle is a even function, that is F(x) = F(-x), then it's a boson and it can ignore the Pauli Exclusion Principle and is the reason light rays, made of bosons, don't scramble each other when they collide at right angles, light particles can occupy the same quantum state and thus can pass through each other and be completely unaffected; it's the reason the light rays that enter our eye are not a hopeless chaotic jumble of information randomized by a astronomical large number of collisions with other photons. 

  John K Clark

   

[meekerdb]

Yep, I knew that.  I thought for a moment that Bruno claimed to derive something like that from comp, but it turns out that all he claims is that if comp is the theory-of-eveything then it must predict everything.

Brent

[Evgenii Rudnyi]

On 07.07.2012 21:54 Bruno Marchal said the following:

>
> On 07 Jul 2012, at 15:31, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:
>
>> My comments to Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard
>> Mlodinow, especially to the statement from the book
>>

>> �Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy

>> is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in
>> science, particularly physics. Scientists have become the bearers

>> of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.�

>>
>> http://blog.rudnyi.ru/2012/07/philosophy-is-dead.html
>
>
> I am not so much in favor of "professional philosophers", which does
> not mean that some of them do good ... science (like Maudlin, Slezak,
> even McGuin: it is real reasoning).

I find philosophy useful as a database of different way of thinking. It
helps not to invent a bicycle again.

Evgenii

[Evgenii Rudnyi]

On 08.07.2012 19:29 John Clark said the following:

I understand that when we come to a human being, complexity growth. My
question though would be in principle. In Grand Design they say that as
it is impossible to use the very basic physical theory in practice, one
needs effective sciences. Yet, if I have understood correctly, the
authors mean that the theory considered in the book can describe
everything including human beings that nothing more than biological
machines.

I do not not understand in this respect your analogy with chess. Do you
mean that I have freedom to play my own game in the M-theory?

Evgenii

[John Mikes]

Bruno, thanks for your 'views' expressed to Evgeniy below.

"...Why people believe..."  I think we agreed that no such thing in our access as a Theory of Everything (omniscience missing) and the figments scientists believe IN are fables.

I apologize for writing in brief "Nature" and not as I usually do: "the existence, nature, the world, you name it..." and for 'humans' in a similar sense, abbreviated from something like: "the portion of the infinite complexity we have actually  conscious access to..." (and I am not sure if 'we' - 'you? - have access to all details of other Loebian machines or jumping bugs how THEY exercise mental functions akin to our thinking in this restricted format we apply as our present life (please: don't ask!)

However I barge in 'asking': what is "rationally"? your word (machine) theology is just another name. If you copy the (religious/philosophical) theology, we are not ahead and if you presume the infinite capabilities of the 'ultimate' Loebian than we don't (can't) understand the term.

(Your last par is a 'human'(!) impersonation of a machine.

Just thinking

JohnM

[Bruno Marchal]

On 09 Jul 2012, at 19:45, meekerdb wrote:

On 7/9/2012 10:33 AM, John Clark wrote:

On Mon, Jul 9, 2012 at 11:26 AM, meekerdb <meek...@verizon.net> wrote:

> How do you derive fermions and bosons from comp?

I don't know how to derive fermions and bosons from nothing but arithmetic but you can do the next best thing. If the Schrodinger wave function for a particle is a odd function, that is F(x) = -F(-x), then it's a fermion and the probability of 2 fermions occupying the same quantum state is zero, in other words it obeys the Pauli Exclusion Principle and is the reason that the ground beneath your feet, which is made of fermions, is solid and you don't sink to the center of the Earth.

If the Schrodinger wave function for a particle is a even function, that is F(x) = F(-x), then it's a boson and it can ignore the Pauli Exclusion Principle and is the reason light rays, made of bosons, don't scramble each other when they collide at right angles, light particles can occupy the same quantum state and thus can pass through each other and be completely unaffected; it's the reason the light rays that enter our eye are not a hopeless chaotic jumble of information randomized by a astronomical large number of collisions with other photons. 

Yes, that is what I was alluding to by mentionning "à-la-Feynman", as this is well explaiend in his famous lecture notes on physics, notably the one on quantum mechanics.

Yep, I knew that.  I thought for a moment that Bruno claimed to derive something like that from comp, but it turns out that all he claims is that if comp is the theory-of-eveything then it must predict everything.

Nowhere is Comp assumed to be the theory of everything. It is just the assumption that "I" am a digital machine (mechanism), to put it shortly.

Then we derive from that assumption that arithmetic is a theory of everything, as good as any other (basically a first order specification of a Turing universal system), and then the derivation is constructive.

It is quite different from what you say.

You did understood the seven steps (not clear for the step 8), but now you seem to have forgotten the points, or even the goal. 

The goal is not to replace physics as a science, but to get a correct picture of the possible reality, and the possible fundamental science, once we assume computationalism without putting first person and consciousness under the carpet.

Main result: Aristotle theology can't work. Plato's theology still work.

Bruno

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

[Bruno Marchal]

On 09 Jul 2012, at 19:52, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:

> On 07.07.2012 21:54 Bruno Marchal said the following:
>>
>> On 07 Jul 2012, at 15:31, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:
>>
>>> My comments to Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard
>>> Mlodinow, especially to the statement from the book
>>>

>>> “Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy

>>> is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in
>>> science, particularly physics. Scientists have become the bearers

>>> of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.”

>>>
>>> http://blog.rudnyi.ru/2012/07/philosophy-is-dead.html
>>
>>
>> I am not so much in favor of "professional philosophers", which does
>> not mean that some of them do good ... science (like Maudlin, Slezak,
>> even McGuin: it is real reasoning).
>
> I find philosophy useful as a database of different way of thinking.
> It helps not to invent a bicycle again.

In many universities, philosophy is literature. When done modestly it
can be very interesting. But this can also be used to make, not
literature, but series of arguments from authority considered as
answering all questions and thinking at our place.

In my youth philosophy was marxism, not presented as a theory
(hypothesis) but as the only right solution to all problems, and you
were treated as crackpot if you dare to have a slight air of
skepticism about that. It was "religion" in the pejorative sense of
the word.

The word "philosophy" is just not well defined as a field. It looks
often just like a boundary inviting you to abandon critical thinking
and the scientific attitude (modesty with respect to the truth we
search) and it leads to idolatry with respect to person, and
dismissing with respect to ideas.

The whole of the human sciences is perverted since theology get out of
the academy. Philosophy is often just a "religious" reaction to
institutionalized "religion". God id dead, said Nietzsche, so ... what
do we do?

Bruno




>
> Evgenii

>
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[Bruno Marchal]

On 09 Jul 2012, at 22:01, John Mikes wrote:

Bruno, thanks for your 'views' expressed to Evgeniy below.

"...Why people believe..."  I think we agreed that no such thing in our access as a Theory of Everything (omniscience missing) and the figments scientists believe IN are fables.

Probably. In which theory? Or if you prefer: in which fables? 

I apologize for writing in brief "Nature" and not as I usually do: "the existence, nature, the world, you name it..."

That might be the object of research. Assuming some well precise "fable". 

and for 'humans' in a similar sense, abbreviated from something like: "the portion of the infinite complexity we have actually  conscious access to..." (and I am not sure if 'we' - 'you? - have access to all details of other Loebian machines or jumping bugs how THEY exercise mental functions akin to our thinking in this restricted format we apply as our present life (please: don't ask!)

The point is that if you accept comp, then you can prove that all correct entities will obeys to the same laws of mind as very simple Löbian machine that we can undertand from the outside in some semi-complete way, meaning we can many positive things about them, even if we can't prove many negative things.

It is a bit like we can understand that a human cells obeys similar laws than bacteria, so that we can learn things on animals and plants by studying first the bacteria, which are more simple.

However I barge in 'asking': what is "rationally"? your word (machine) theology is just another name. If you copy the (religious/philosophical) theology, we are not ahead and if you presume the infinite capabilities of the 'ultimate' Loebian than we don't (can't) understand the term.

All those entities have finite capabilities, or *potentially* (only) infinite one. "rationally" means that the machine

believes in some logic and laws (enough to make it universal in Turing sense).

(Your last par is a 'human'(!) impersonation of a machine.

This is a John-Mikean impersonation of me.

I have no clue why you put *your* boundary on the *human*. I am also a mammal, a living earth creature, a Löbian number (perhaps, if comp is true), a divine word (as a consequence of comp), a universal number, etc.

Just thinking

Just thinking too :)

Bruno

JohnM

On Mon, Jul 9, 2012 at 9:16 AM, Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

On 08 Jul 2012, at 19:29, John Clark wrote (to Evgenii Rudnyi)

If you want to understand why people are the way they are I don't think the Theory-of-Everything would help you much, you'd do much better studding Evolutionary Biology, neurology, or computer science.  

Yes, computer science might help to understand why people are the way they are. But computer science, the theory of, and by,  universal machines, already must explain, assuming comp, why people believe in fermions and bosons, making it a theory of everything, or at least a good candidate for it, especially if you take into account computer science *and* computer's computer science (that is, what computer can guess or can experience without ever being able to justified rationally: what I like to call "machine's theology, or "Tarski minus Gödel").

If a machine postulates comp, which by definition is true for her, she can already justify rationally, using her bet in comp, why she has beliefs that she cannot justify rationally. Comp itself constitutes such a belief.

Bruno

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

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[John Clark]

On Mon, Jul 9, 2012 at 1:59 PM, Evgenii Rudnyi <use...@rudnyi.ru> wrote:

 

> I do not not understand in this respect your analogy with chess.

You may know all the rules of chess but that does not mean you know what all the complex interactions those rules could lead to, and that is why you are not a chess grandmaster despite knowing the rules of the game. And even if a Theory of Everything existed and even if every high school student understood it that would still not be the end of science because all the initial conditions would still need to be found, and even more important all the astronomically, possibly infinitely, large number complex interactions would also be unknown.  I don't see how a Theory of Everything would help you much in meteorology or biology or poetry, those things are too complex for that approach.

  John K Clark

[Alberto G. Corona]

There is something deeply religious in many scientifics in his quest to expand their Truth. And there is also something very philosophical indeed. But they ignore both. They ignore their beliefs and their positivistic metaphisics, born in the disputes between nominalists and realists during the middle ages. And there is no stronger faith than the faith that see himself as aboslute truth about everithing, that ignores its shorcomings and its history, and that show contempt or even denial of entire parts of the reality.

This furious  scientist proselitism us understandable and it is even healthy, because the idea of a objective scientist with no emotions is hypocrite.  

That shows once again that faith is something a society can not live without,. because faith in ultimate, unexplained truths is the prerequisite for any coordinated social action. And the truths upon which a society build itself is its most valuable treasure.  

This seems of topic, but I suggest something to discuss here: shared human conscience. We live in a shared virtual conscience. It is shared because we share the context and it is virtual because it depends in the context of shared beliefs: beliefs in the myths and histories that created our country, beliefs in some moral laws, beliefs in the prestige of some special humans: priests, scientifics, political figures of the past and the present.   We can not verify our beliefs because we have no time and no knowledge to do so. So we resort to faith. faith in authority: being scientific, political or anything. common faith and legitimated authority is necessary to live with others and thus whenever a society is build, it needs it.

And the assault of the foundational social truths and the core beliefs of the people is central for any battle for power

Do the  hawking Theory of everything says something about this? I´m soure, because it is about everyhing, Isn´t?

2012/7/7 Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be>

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[meekerdb]

On 7/10/2012 10:49 AM, Alberto G. Corona wrote:

There is something deeply religious in many scientifics in his quest to expand their Truth. And there is also something very philosophical indeed. But they ignore both. They ignore their beliefs and their positivistic metaphisics, born in the disputes between nominalists and realists during the middle ages. And there is no stronger faith than the faith that see himself as aboslute truth about everithing, that ignores its shorcomings and its history, and that show contempt or even denial of entire parts of the reality.

This furious �scientist proselitism us understandable and it is even�healthy, because the idea of a objective scientist with no emotions is�hypocrite.��

That shows once again that faith is something a society can not live without,. because faith in ultimate, unexplained truths is the prerequisite for any coordinated social action. And the truths upon which a society build itself is its most valuable treasure. �

This seems of topic, but I suggest something to discuss here: shared human conscience. We live in a shared virtual conscience. It is shared because we share the context and it is virtual because it depends in the context of shared beliefs: beliefs in the myths and histories that created our country, beliefs in some moral laws, beliefs in the prestige of some special humans: priests, scientifics, political figures of the past and the present. � We can not verify our beliefs because we have no time and no knowledge to do so. So we resort to faith. faith in authority: being scientific, political or�anything. common faith and legitimated authority is necessary to live with others and thus whenever a society is build, it needs it.

I think you are confounding faith and trust.� Trust is something society, and all of us, cannot live without.� But trust doesn't mean belief without evidence.� As Ronald Reagan famously said, "Trust, but verify."� Faith means trusting and never trying to verify.� That we can live without.� We have trust in authorities who have proven trustworthy in the past.� We bet on many things even though we never have certain knowledge, but that doesn't mean we have no knowledge or that we should not test our knowledge.

And the assault of the foundational social truths and the core beliefs of the people is central for any battle for power

Exactly what happens when beliefs are faith and are divorced from empirical test - then all that remains is a struggle for power to impose arbitrary beliefs to be held on faith.

Brent

Do the �hawking Theory of everything says something about this? I�m soure, because it is about everyhing, Isn�t?

2012/7/7 Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be>

On 07 Jul 2012, at 15:31, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:

My comments to Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, especially to the statement from the book

�Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics. Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.�

http://blog.rudnyi.ru/2012/07/philosophy-is-dead.html

I am not so much in favor of "professional philosophers", which does not mean that some of them do good ... science (like Maudlin, Slezak, even McGuin: it is real reasoning).

But that statement looks like the blind arrogance of physics, which ignores the mind body problem systematically for years.

Consciousness might be the grain of sand which will remind us that we might try to be a bit more modest.

To say that scientists have become the bearer of the knowledge quest is a truism becoming false when the scientist put a problem under the rug.

Bruno


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

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[Evgenii Rudnyi]

On 10.07.2012 09:47 Bruno Marchal said the following:
>

...

> The whole of the human sciences is perverted since theology get out
> of the academy. Philosophy is often just a "religious" reaction to
> institutionalized "religion". God id dead, said Nietzsche, so ...
> what do we do?

In Germany theology still belongs to universities. What I like is that
you will find as a department of theoretical theology as well as a
department of practical theology.

The lectures of Maartin Hoenen on philosophy are attended also be
theologians and it makes it even more enjoyable.

Evgenii

[Evgenii Rudnyi]

On 10.07.2012 18:03 John Clark said the following:

I understand but the question in principle still remains. Who play the
chess, I or the M-theory?

Evgenii

[Evgenii Rudnyi]

On 10.07.2012 19:49 Alberto G. Corona said the following:

> Do the hawking Theory of everything says something about this? I�m
> soure, because it is about everyhing, Isn�t?

Well, it depends. They say

�It is hard to imagine how free will can operate if our behavior is
determined by physical law, so it seems that we are no more than
biological machines and that free will is just an illusion.�

Hence according to the authors, the M-theory governs absolutely
everything including social sciences. But I am afraid that this is not
what you would expect.

Evgenii
--
http://blog.rudnyi.ru/2012/07/philosophy-is-dead.html

[meekerdb]

On 7/10/2012 12:38 PM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:

Hence according to the authors, the M-theory governs absolutely everything including social sciences. But I am afraid that this is not what you would expect.

Why would you not expect a theory-of-everything to include the behavior of people?� Note that 'govern' does not imply 'predictable'.

Brent

[Stephen P. King]

On 7/7/2012 1:40 PM, John Clark wrote:

On Sat, Jul 7, 2012� Evgenii Rudnyi <use...@rudnyi.ru> wrote:

> Hawking and Mlodinow start with the statement that free will is illusion

If they said that, and I don't recall that they did, they were being much too kind in equating the "free will" noise to something as concrete as illusion.

> An interesting question is however, where resulting visual mental concepts are located.

I find it about as interesting as asking where "big" or the number eleven is located and shows the same profound misunderstanding of the situation on so many different levels that it's hard to know where to begin. �

�Today we know that helium and lithium, atoms whose nuclei contain two and three protons, were also primordially synthesized, in much smaller amounts, when the universe was about 200 seconds old.�

> However, is this knowledge or a belief? Assume that there was Big Bang described by the M-theory as supposed by the book.

The Big Bang does not need anything as exotic as M-theory to make that prediction, from just humdrum nuclear physics, the same ideas that made the H-bomb, we can calculate that if the universe started from 100% hydrogen, the simplest element, that was at several hundred billion degrees Centigrade then in about 200 seconds as a result of fusion reactions you'd have 74.9% Hydrogen 24.9% Helium and .01% deuterium and 10^-10 % Lithium, and you can calculate that in the in 13.7 bullion years since then these percentages should have changed very little, and when know that these are exactly the observed values we see today. This is far too good a agreement for it to be coincidence.

�> It well might be that philosophers are less informed about the M-theory but

Forget M-theory, most professional philosophers are totally ignorant about ANY of the huge philosophical developments that have happened in the last 150 years; they know nothing about Quantum Mechanics or Relativity or the profound works of Godel or Turing, they know that DNA has something to do with heredity but could not tell you exactly what or how it works, they don't even know it's digital;� they've heard of Darwin but have only the haziest understanding of what he said and have even less interest in it; maybe they know the Universe is expanding but the knowledge that it's accelerating hasn't trickled down to them yet because that was only discovered 15 years ago and they're slow learners; they don't even know that light is a wave of electric and magnetic fields or understand simple classical mechanics and prefer to talk about the worst physicist who ever lived, Aristotle. In short most modern philosophers are philosophical ignoramuses.� � � � �
�

> In the book, there are many statements against religion.

Thank God!

> comments in Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow,

�Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead.

Philosophy isn't dead but professional philosophers are as good as, they haven't made a contribution to our understanding of how the world works in centuries, scientists and mathematicians have had to pick up the slack.

� John K Clark �
�

Hi,

��� My response to this thread is to reference this interview: http://simplycharly.com/wittgenstein/jaakko_hintikka_interview.php ;-)

-- 
Onward!

Stephen

"Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed." 
~ Francis Bacon

[Alberto G. Corona]

2012/7/10 meekerdb <meek...@verizon.net>

On 7/10/2012 10:49 AM, Alberto G. Corona wrote:

There is something deeply religious in many scientifics in his quest to expand their Truth. And there is also something very philosophical indeed. But they ignore both. They ignore their beliefs and their positivistic metaphisics, born in the disputes between nominalists and realists during the middle ages. And there is no stronger faith than the faith that see himself as aboslute truth about everithing, that ignores its shorcomings and its history, and that show contempt or even denial of entire parts of the reality.

This furious  scientist proselitism us understandable and it is even healthy, because the idea of a objective scientist with no emotions is hypocrite.  

That shows once again that faith is something a society can not live without,. because faith in ultimate, unexplained truths is the prerequisite for any coordinated social action. And the truths upon which a society build itself is its most valuable treasure.  

This seems of topic, but I suggest something to discuss here: shared human conscience. We live in a shared virtual conscience. It is shared because we share the context and it is virtual because it depends in the context of shared beliefs: beliefs in the myths and histories that created our country, beliefs in some moral laws, beliefs in the prestige of some special humans: priests, scientifics, political figures of the past and the present.   We can not verify our beliefs because we have no time and no knowledge to do so. So we resort to faith. faith in authority: being scientific, political or anything. common faith and legitimated authority is necessary to live with others and thus whenever a society is build, it needs it.

I think you are confounding faith and trust.

Trust is a stress reduction word, a secularization form of faith. Just like fraternity instead of  charity (that means "love"). it was introduced in Europe after the French revolution. 

http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=faith%2Ctrust&year_start=1720&year_end=2012&corpus=0&smoothing=3

The german people in the 30´s had faith or trust on Hitler (and here comes Hitler again).  It does not matter.You can see that the relation of trust with reasonable facts is less tan tenable. The "duck" epistemology of trust is the same as faith. The etimology  of trust in many languages: (allmost all the latin derived languages) is the same as faith. because the faith is the essence of trust. you trust your friends because you belive that you know how your friends act and thing. The mental  operation of trust and faith are the same when you lose your faith in something you loose your trust on it and viceversa. 

Moreover, people have not infinite abilities. they are limited because our brain is limited and not general purpose. we have a mental organ for keeping and changing beliefs and trust or whathever you may call it (let´s call it social capital habilities). For that matter ideologies and religions are the same in psychological terms. A group of ecologists singing in a Al Gore´s conference  and a group of christians like me staring at the window of Vatican have the same brain areas excited. But also an ignorant who praise science looking at Stephen Hawkins.

 A phisicist ignorant in common law of philosophy or History or Morals, or game theory or evolutionary psychology or Theology or ignorant in our traditions and now they came to be not only is sure that he would  say nonsense when talking about things that really matter for our lives, but for sure it  could become as dangerous as the anthropologist that gave support to Hitler. knowledge in a limited field does not mean knowledge in what is important. 

Hawking is simply going beyond what its knowledge authorizes him to talk about.  People tend to extrapolate its self confidence from one field to another. But what is worst, our mind can not distribute our trusts, we tend to grant trust to people no matter what they talk about, specially when most of our limited knowledge comes from people like him. That is part of the economy of computation and our tendency to form closed groups of mutual trust based on common beliefs to optimize our social capital.  Upon a group is stablished and belief is consolidates, we the humans are in disposition to defend it with lies, rejection of facts and violence. No matter how "scientific" of true (all believe that they are) is the set of beliefs. That is the nature of our evolved mind.

So be careful.

 

  Trust is something society, and all of us, cannot live without.  But trust doesn't mean belief without evidence.  As Ronald Reagan famously said, "Trust, but verify."  Faith means trusting and never trying to verify.  That we can live without.  We have trust in authorities who have proven trustworthy in the past.  We bet on many things even though we never have certain knowledge, but that doesn't mean we have no knowledge or that we should not test our knowledge.

And the assault of the foundational social truths and the core beliefs of the people is central for any battle for power

Exactly what happens when beliefs are faith and are divorced from empirical test - then all that remains is a struggle for power to impose arbitrary beliefs to be held on faith.

Brent

Do the  hawking Theory of everything says something about this? I´m soure, because it is about everyhing, Isn´t?

2012/7/7 Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be>

On 07 Jul 2012, at 15:31, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:

My comments to Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, especially to the statement from the book

“Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics. Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.”

http://blog.rudnyi.ru/2012/07/philosophy-is-dead.html

I am not so much in favor of "professional philosophers", which does not mean that some of them do good ... science (like Maudlin, Slezak, even McGuin: it is real reasoning).

But that statement looks like the blind arrogance of physics, which ignores the mind body problem systematically for years.

Consciousness might be the grain of sand which will remind us that we might try to be a bit more modest.

To say that scientists have become the bearer of the knowledge quest is a truism becoming false when the scientist put a problem under the rug.

Bruno


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

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[Bruno Marchal]

I am sure it is.

But when theology is thought in universities today, it is confessional
theology, not the theological hypothetical science, because since 1500
years, this does not really exist. Of course some actual theologians
are serious, and use the confessional constraints as best as possible,
like the USSR artists sometimes did with respect of the local
political authoritarianism.

[Bruno Marchal]

I. To say it is M-theory would be a level error, à-la Searle. I am not
M-theory, not arithmetical truth.

[Bruno Marchal]

On 10 Jul 2012, at 19:49, Alberto G. Corona wrote:

There is something deeply religious in many scientifics in his quest to expand their Truth. And there is also something very philosophical indeed. But they ignore both. They ignore their beliefs and their positivistic metaphisics, born in the disputes between nominalists and realists during the middle ages. And there is no stronger faith than the faith that see himself as aboslute truth about everithing, that ignores its shorcomings and its history, and that show contempt or even denial of entire parts of the reality.

This furious  scientist proselitism us understandable and it is even healthy, because the idea of a objective scientist with no emotions is hypocrite.  

That shows once again that faith is something a society can not live without,. because faith in ultimate, unexplained truths is the prerequisite for any coordinated social action. And the truths upon which a society build itself is its most valuable treasure.  

This seems of topic, but I suggest something to discuss here: shared human conscience. We live in a shared virtual conscience. It is shared because we share the context and it is virtual because it depends in the context of shared beliefs: beliefs in the myths and histories that created our country, beliefs in some moral laws, beliefs in the prestige of some special humans: priests, scientifics, political figures of the past and the present.   We can not verify our beliefs because we have no time and no knowledge to do so. So we resort to faith. faith in authority: being scientific, political or anything. common faith and legitimated authority is necessary to live with others and thus whenever a society is build, it needs it.

And the assault of the foundational social truths and the core beliefs of the people is central for any battle for power

Do the  hawking Theory of everything says something about this? I´m soure, because it is about everyhing, Isn´t?

Yes, physicists talk about that, but they often lacks rigor, as rigor in theology is no more in fashion since a long time for historical reason.

Bruno

2012/7/7 Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be>

On 07 Jul 2012, at 15:31, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:

My comments to Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, especially to the statement from the book

“Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics. Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.”

http://blog.rudnyi.ru/2012/07/philosophy-is-dead.html

I am not so much in favor of "professional philosophers", which does not mean that some of them do good ... science (like Maudlin, Slezak, even McGuin: it is real reasoning).

But that statement looks like the blind arrogance of physics, which ignores the mind body problem systematically for years.

Consciousness might be the grain of sand which will remind us that we might try to be a bit more modest.

To say that scientists have become the bearer of the knowledge quest is a truism becoming false when the scientist put a problem under the rug.

Bruno


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

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[Alberto G. Corona]

2012/7/10 meekerdb <meek...@verizon.net>

Why would you not expect a theory-of-everything to include the behavior of people?  Note that 'govern' does not imply 'predictable'.

A phisicinst theory of everithing , despite the popular belief, does not "govern" the behaviour of the people. No longer than the binary logic govern the behaviour of computer programs. I can program in binary logic whatever I want without limitations. the wetware whose activity produces the human mind could execute potentially any kind of behaviour. Our behaviour is not governed by anything related wth a phisical TOE, but by the laws of natural selection applied to social beings. I can observe the evolution of such behaviours (in a shchematic way) in a binary world within a computer program as well. Robert Axelrod dit it for the first time.

On the contrary, the antrophic principle tell you that is the mind the determinant element for the existence of a TOE. A phisical TOE  It is just the playing field and the stuff upon things are made. 

[Alberto G. Corona]

So the world of the mind in which we live, is a second reality different form the phenomena governed by physical laws. it has been shaped to permit our bodies to survive in the first world of phenomena, by natural selection, but is in this second world of shared conscience created from the mind where we find any meaning. 

 

Even the phisical TOE is part of this second world. there are no countries, no cars, no persons, no electrons outside of the  world of the mind.  Outside of the mind there is only mathematics. And this math has been anthropically selected by the mind. 

2012/7/11 Alberto G. Corona <agoc...@gmail.com>

[David Nyman]

On 11 July 2012 09:55, Alberto G. Corona <agoc...@gmail.com> wrote:

Even the phisical TOE is part of this second world. there are no countries, no cars, no persons, no electrons outside of the  world of the mind.  Outside of the mind there is only mathematics. And this math has been anthropically selected by the mind. 

Well put.  Mind - the epistemological subject - is uniquely characterised by its irreducibly synthetic or compositional character, the reverse polarity of a maximally reduced, "objective" ontology.  This is implicitly assumed by everyone, but explicitly acknowledged by hardly anybody.  Consequently the typical response whenever I express this thought is blank incomprehension.

David

[David Nyman]

On 11 July 2012 09:55, Alberto G. Corona <agoc...@gmail.com> wrote:

but is in this second world of shared conscience created from the mind where we find any meaning. 

Alberto, do you mean "conscience" in the sense of the inner ethical or moral sense, or sentience per se, i.e. "consciousness"?  Forgive me if I have misunderstood you, but I assume you mean the latter.

David 

[Stephen P. King]

Dear Albert,

    Interesting that you bring up http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_cooperation ! Could you elaborate a bit on your thoughts? Do you have any ideas how to model cooperation between computer programs? The main problem that I have found is in defining the interface between computations. How does one define "identity" for a given computation such that it is distinguished from all others?

[John Clark]

On Tue, Jul 10, 2012  Evgenii Rudnyi <use...@rudnyi.ru> wrote:

 

> I understand but the question in principle still remains. Who play the chess, I or the M-theory?

There is no logical reason to think those two ways of explaining the same phenomenon are incompatible. It's true that the reason a toy balloon doesn't collapse is that the momentum of gas atoms inside the balloon impacting the surface is greater than or equal to that of the gas atoms outside the balloon impacting the surface, but it's also true that the reason is just that the pressure inside is greater. Sometimes humans find that a high level description and explanation is more useful and sometimes they do not. Trying to understand how hurricanes work by looking at the level of atoms would not be very enlightening, and super-strings would be even less helpful.

  John K Clark   

[John Clark]

On Tue, Jul 10, 2012  Evgenii Rudnyi <use...@rudnyi.ru> wrote:

> It is hard to imagine how free will can operate if our behavior is determined by physical law

Does that mean you CAN imagine how free will can operate if our behavior is NOT determined by physical law??!!

  John K Clark

 

 

so it seems that we are no more than biological machines and that free will is just an illusion.”

Hence according to the authors, the M-theory governs absolutely everything including social sciences. But I am afraid that this is not what you would expect.

Evgenii
--
http://blog.rudnyi.ru/2012/07/philosophy-is-dead.html

[John Clark]

On Tue, Jul 10, 2012 at 3:29 PM, Evgenii Rudnyi <use...@rudnyi.ru> wrote:

> In Germany theology still belongs to universities. What I like is that you will find as a department of theoretical theology as well as a department of practical theology.

I disagree, I don't like it. You are assuming that there exists a organized field of knowledge called "theology", but I can not find the slightest evidence that is in fact true. Lawrence Krauss said that it is his habit to ask every theologian he meets "what advances in theology have been made in the last 400 years?", but he has never received a straight answer from a single one of them, the best he has gotten was "what do you mean by advances?". A expert in mathematics or physics or biology or literature or ANY other field would not give a weasel answer like that, they'd just rattle off a list of advances, but not theology. He also said he was on a panel at a college and somebody asked another scientist there why there is something rather than nothing and the scientist said "that's a question to ask the head of the theology department not me", but Krauss said "why ask him rather than the college gardener or plumber or cook?". I have no answer to Krauss's question because like him I think that where theology is concerned there is no expertise and no field.

  John K Clark

[meekerdb]

On 7/11/2012 1:29 AM, Alberto G. Corona wrote:

2012/7/10 meekerdb <meek...@verizon.net>

Why would you not expect a theory-of-everything to include the behavior of people?  Note that 'govern' does not imply 'predictable'.

A phisicinst theory of everithing , despite the popular belief, does not "govern" the behaviour of the people.

What does 'govern' mean to you?  constrain? predict? determine?...?

No longer than the binary logic govern the behaviour of computer programs.

Yes, binary logic is not a TOE of computer programs.

I can program in binary logic whatever I want without limitations.

But can you want anything at all?

the wetware whose activity produces the human mind could execute potentially any kind of behaviour. Our behaviour is not governed by anything related wth a phisical TOE, but by the laws of natural selection applied to social beings. I can observe the evolution of such behaviours (in a shchematic way) in a binary world within a computer program as well. Robert Axelrod dit it for the first time.

On the contrary, the antrophic principle tell you that is the mind the determinant element for the existence of a TOE.

The weak anthropic principle just tells you that the physics must be consistent with the existence of people - which so far as I can tell doesn't determine it very well.

A phisical TOE  It is just the playing field and the stuff upon things are made.

Did I write *physical* TOE? 

Brent
"Der Mensh Kann wohl tun, was er will, aber er kann nicht wollen, was er will."
    --- Schopenhauer

[meekerdb]

On 7/11/2012 6:23 AM, David Nyman wrote:

On 11 July 2012 09:55, Alberto G. Corona <agoc...@gmail.com> wrote:

Even the phisical TOE is part of this second world. there are no countries, no cars, no persons, no electrons outside of the  world of the mind.  Outside of the mind there is only mathematics. And this math has been anthropically selected by the mind. 

Well put.  Mind - the epistemological subject - is uniquely characterised by its irreducibly synthetic or compositional character, the reverse polarity of a maximally reduced, "objective" ontology. 

But it isn't uniquely characterized by that.  I don't even know what "irreducibly synthetic" means.  I know what "synthetic" means; it means made (synthesized) of something else, it means artificial, not natural??  But in any case "the subject", the first-person, is also singular and persistent thru time.

There is certainly a tension between knowledge which is subjective and gained from perception and the model of the world based on it which is third-person communicable.  When we bestow the property "exists" on the ontology of the third-person world model, we then take on the task of explaining the first-person subjective in terms of that model.  Everyone on this list (except me) seems to assume this impossible.  This is just the flip side of Bruno's task of explaining the third-person world in terms of subjective knowledge which he models by computational relations like "provable".

Brent

This is implicitly assumed by everyone, but explicitly acknowledged by hardly anybody.  Consequently the typical response whenever I express this thought is blank incomprehension.

David

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[Bruno Marchal]

On 11 Jul 2012, at 19:36, John Clark wrote:

On Tue, Jul 10, 2012 at 3:29 PM, Evgenii Rudnyi <use...@rudnyi.ru> wrote:

> In Germany theology still belongs to universities. What I like is that you will find as a department of theoretical theology as well as a department of practical theology.

I disagree, I don't like it. You are assuming that there exists a organized field of knowledge called "theology", but I can not find the slightest evidence that is in fact true. Lawrence Krauss said that it is his habit to ask every theologian he meets "what advances in theology have been made in the last 400 years?",

You are wrong. There has been constant progress. The number of burning witches has decreased. Also, now when a child is molested by a member of the clergy there is some hope for him to be listen.

A better question would be what advances in theology have been made in the last 10.000 years, the answer, I could argue, would be science, music, and probably many ways to get altered conscious state, and science does include a part of theology among the inquirers. 

You can't reject theology. 

You can only reject *a* theology. 

To reject *all* theologies, you need *a* theology.

but he has never received a straight answer from a single one of them, the best he has gotten was "what do you mean by advances?". A expert in mathematics or physics or biology or literature or ANY other field would not give a weasel answer like that, they'd just rattle off a list of advances, but not theology. He also said he was on a panel at a college and somebody asked another scientist there why there is something rather than nothing and the scientist said "that's a question to ask the head of the theology department not me", but Krauss said "why ask him rather than the college gardener or plumber or cook?". I have no answer to Krauss's question because like him I think that where theology is concerned there is no expertise and no field.

That is not entirely true, at many levels. But it is more a consequence of or lack of seriousness in the field, and the difficulty due to the emotional way humans can react on such matter.

An example of non seriousness in theology is the common belief that science has decided between Aristotle's and Plato's conceptions of reality. We are just very ignorant on that, but we can suggest hypotheses and do reasoning.

Bruno

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

[meekerdb]

Cooperation implies some common goal.  In general the only goal computer programs have are ones we specify - we don't really want programs that have their own goals.  Military defense systems depend on multiple networked computers that cooperate in tracking, identifying, and destroying enemy missiles.  These have 'identity' in the simple sense of spacetime locus: That one over there can be destroyed while this one over here isn't.

We have goals because we are evolved, social, sexually reproducing animals.  Computers could be like that but then they wouldn't be running *our* programs; they'd be cooperating to achieve their own survival and reproduction.

Brent

[Bruno Marchal]

It is hard to explain. It seems to me that the thought experience illustrate this.

But the incompleteness phenomenon justifies this by making the first person of a machine a necessarily non formal object from the point of view of view of the machine. The machine can describe in her language its possible bodies, and its beliefs, (Bp) but no correct machine can define its knowledge (Bp & p) in its language. The knower has no name for itself, and its logic (S4Grz) does describe an epistemic sort of solipisist.

We do agree on this, and I can only invite you take into account computer science. The incompleteness makes the Theatetical definition of knowledge working on machine, at the price of making the machine firs person self not self-nameable. It makes it ways of reasoning informal, for herself of similar neighbors. The first person is irreducible to anything formal, which makes her bet on a level of substitution into an act of faith.

Bruno

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

[Bruno Marchal]

On 11 Jul 2012, at 22:17, meekerdb wrote:

On 7/11/2012 6:23 AM, David Nyman wrote:

On 11 July 2012 09:55, Alberto G. Corona <agoc...@gmail.com> wrote:

Even the phisical TOE is part of this second world. there are no countries, no cars, no persons, no electrons outside of the  world of the mind.  Outside of the mind there is only mathematics. And this math has been anthropically selected by the mind. 

Well put.  Mind - the epistemological subject - is uniquely characterised by its irreducibly synthetic or compositional character, the reverse polarity of a maximally reduced, "objective" ontology. 

But it isn't uniquely characterized by that.  I don't even know what "irreducibly synthetic" means.  I know what "synthetic" means; it means made (synthesized) of something else, it means artificial, not natural??  But in any case "the subject", the first-person, is also singular and persistent thru time.

There is certainly a tension between knowledge which is subjective and gained from perception and the model of the world based on it which is third-person communicable.  When we bestow the property "exists" on the ontology of the third-person world model, we then take on the task of explaining the first-person subjective in terms of that model.  Everyone on this list (except me) seems to assume this impossible. 

Neither me. Just that if comp is true we got a simpler ontology. 

This is just the flip side of Bruno's task of explaining the third-person world in terms of subjective knowledge

Not at all. I explain the *physical* world in term of first person plural world, themselves describe in third person arithmetic.

Comp is not idealist. 

which he models by computational relations like "provable".

Provable = objective (doubtful) belief

Provable and true/satisfied-in-a-reality = Subjective knowledge (the communicable part).

(Incompleteness forces us to make those nuances).

Bruno

Brent

This is implicitly assumed by everyone, but explicitly acknowledged by hardly anybody.  Consequently the typical response whenever I express this thought is blank incomprehension.

David

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[meekerdb]

In fact one might say that IS the advance in theology over the last 400yrs: It has no subject matter.  Of course Bruno wants "theology" to mean something different than any dictionary definition.

Brent

[Alberto G. Corona]

sorry. It is consciousness instead of conscience.yes.

2012/7/11 David Nyman <da...@davidnyman.com>

[meekerdb]

On 7/11/2012 2:22 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 11 Jul 2012, at 22:17, meekerdb wrote:

On 7/11/2012 6:23 AM, David Nyman wrote:

On 11 July 2012 09:55, Alberto G. Corona <agoc...@gmail.com> wrote:

Even the phisical TOE is part of this second world. there are no countries, no cars, no persons, no electrons outside of the  world of the mind.  Outside of the mind there is only mathematics. And this math has been anthropically selected by the mind. 

Well put.  Mind - the epistemological subject - is uniquely characterised by its irreducibly synthetic or compositional character, the reverse polarity of a maximally reduced, "objective" ontology. 

But it isn't uniquely characterized by that.  I don't even know what "irreducibly synthetic" means.  I know what "synthetic" means; it means made (synthesized) of something else, it means artificial, not natural??  But in any case "the subject", the first-person, is also singular and persistent thru time.

There is certainly a tension between knowledge which is subjective and gained from perception and the model of the world based on it which is third-person communicable.  When we bestow the property "exists" on the ontology of the third-person world model, we then take on the task of explaining the first-person subjective in terms of that model.  Everyone on this list (except me) seems to assume this impossible. 

Neither me. Just that if comp is true we got a simpler ontology. 

This is just the flip side of Bruno's task of explaining the third-person world in terms of subjective knowledge

Not at all. I explain the *physical* world in term of first person plural world, themselves describe in third person arithmetic.

The 'first person plural world' is what I mean by knowledge on which there is intersubjective agreement.

Comp is not idealist.

Yes I understand that.  But doesn't it derive ideas (conscious thoughts) from computation (arithmetic) and the physical world from coherent subsets of ideas.

which he models by computational relations like "provable".

Provable = objective (doubtful) belief

Why do you writer "doubtful".  Why should one doubt what is provable?...because the axioms are dubious?

Provable and true/satisfied-in-a-reality = Subjective knowledge (the communicable part).

But we can't know what is "satisfied-in-a-reality", we can only know what is provable from our premises and what we experience directly.  Are you saying there are provable things that we can't communicate or the there are provable things which are not true (not satisfied-in-a-reality)?

Brent

[Alberto G. Corona]

Stephen:

Well it´s not cooperation between computer programs, but cooperation of entities in the abstract level. This can be described mathematically or simulated in a computer program. In both cases, it starts with a game with its rules  goals  wins and loses is created. 

If the game is simple and/or played by a small number of players (for example two) This game is analtyzed with Game Theory techniques to obtain the stable strategies that make each player to optimize its wins in a way that they can not win more and it is inmune to attacks from other players. This is a Nash equilibrium.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium

But when the game is too complex or the players use different strategies or they evolve and adapt, specially when the sucessful entities give birth to new generations with mutant and/or strategies which are a mix of the parents ones (in a way defined in the game) Then it is necessary to simulate it within an computer programs. This is part of the work of Axelrod. evolution of generations is modeled with a genetic program

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_programming

to summarize, any entity that collaborate need memory of past interactions of each other entity , In other words, it needs individual recongnition ablities and a form of "moral evaluation" of each individual. 

It also needs to punish free riders even at the cost of its own well being, in a way that the net gain of free riders is negative. or else the fhe collaborators will fail and the defectors/free riders will expland.

So the collaborators need to collaborate too  in the task of  punishing free riders because this is crucial for the stability of collaboration in other tasks.

Forgiveness is another requirement of collaboration, specially when the entities produce spurious behaviours of non collaboration, but collaborate most of the time. A premature punishment could make a collaborator to punish in response so the collaboration ends.

In these games the goals are fixed. In more realistic games the goals vary and the means to obtain them depend on knowledge and asssumptions/beliefs, so an homogeneity within the group around both things should be required for collaboration. For sure there is a tradeof between mind sharing and punishment. Less mind sharing, more violent punishment is necessary for a stable collaboration. To verify mind sharing and investment in the group collaboration, periodic public meetings where protocols/rituals of mutual recognition are repeated to assure to each member that the others are in-line. For example, to visit a temple each week, to discuss about the same newspaper or to assist to minoritary rock concerts. (or to mutually interchange checksums of the program content of each entity)

 But this is not the last world. It is a world of infinite complexity. For example, a strategy for avoiding free riders or mind sharing can be exploited by meta-free-riders. Among humans, when trust is scarce, sacrifices in the temples, blood pacts and violent punishments become necessary.to avoid free riders and maintain stable the collaboration.

All of this does not change wjheter the entities are humans, robots or programs. Evolutionary game theory is a field in active research by economist, lawyers,moralists, computer scientists, Philosophers, psichologists etc.

.  Matt Rydley "what is human" is a good introduction.

2012/7/11 Stephen P. King <step...@charter.net>

--

[David Nyman]

On 11 July 2012 21:17, meekerdb <meek...@verizon.net> wrote:

But it isn't uniquely characterized by that.  I don't even know what "irreducibly synthetic" means.  I know what "synthetic" means; it means made (synthesized) of something else, it means artificial, not natural??  But in any case "the subject", the first-person, is also singular and persistent thru time.

"Irreducibly synthetic" is perhaps somewhat inelegant  It does however express the idea that, on the one hand, mind seems to us to be composed of, or (somewhat metaphorically) to be a synthesis of, many ontological elements but, on the other hand, is by no means simply reducible to those elements.

When we bestow the property "exists" on the ontology of the third-person world model, we then take on the task of explaining the first-person subjective in terms of that model.  Everyone on this list (except me) seems to assume this impossible.

I agree of course that the third-person ontology must figure centrally in the explanation.  But assumptions not directly necessitated by any third-person ontology must be introduced (though often only tacitly) in order to adequately characterise any first-person view of it. For example, physiology, biology, chemistry or even psychology can be categorised as merely "effective" levels of description supervening on physics.  But this dismissive move can only be applied to the epistemological analogues of any of these effective concepts at the cost of their actual elimination from the discussion.  Of course we do not actually desist from discussing them as we would be reduced to silence, and this obscures the realisation that, however essential they may be to explanation, they are superfluous to the purported ontology.

David

[meekerdb]

On 7/11/2012 3:47 PM, Alberto G. Corona wrote:

Stephen:

Well it´s not cooperation between computer programs, but cooperation of entities in the abstract level. This can be described mathematically or simulated in a computer program. In both cases, it starts with a game with its rules  goals  wins and loses is created. 

If the game is simple and/or played by a small number of players (for example two) This game is analtyzed with Game Theory techniques to obtain the stable strategies that make each player to optimize its wins in a way that they can not win more and it is inmune to attacks from other players. This is a Nash equilibrium.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium

But when the game is too complex or the players use different strategies or they evolve and adapt, specially when the sucessful entities give birth to new generations with mutant and/or strategies which are a mix of the parents ones (in a way defined in the game) Then it is necessary to simulate it within an computer programs. This is part of the work of Axelrod. evolution of generations is modeled with a genetic program

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_programming

to summarize, any entity that collaborate need memory of past interactions of each other entity , In other words, it needs individual recongnition ablities and a form of "moral evaluation" of each individual. 

It also needs to punish free riders even at the cost of its own well being, in a way that the net gain of free riders is negative. or else the fhe collaborators will fail and the defectors/free riders will expland.

So the collaborators need to collaborate too  in the task of  punishing free riders because this is crucial for the stability of collaboration in other tasks.

Forgiveness is another requirement of collaboration, specially when the entities produce spurious behaviours of non collaboration, but collaborate most of the time. A premature punishment could make a collaborator to punish in response so the collaboration ends.

In these games the goals are fixed. In more realistic games the goals vary and the means to obtain them depend on knowledge and asssumptions/beliefs, so an homogeneity within the group around both things should be required for collaboration. For sure there is a tradeof between mind sharing and punishment. Less mind sharing, more violent punishment is necessary for a stable collaboration. To verify mind sharing and investment in the group collaboration, periodic public meetings where protocols/rituals of mutual recognition are repeated to assure to each member that the others are in-line. For example, to visit a temple each week, to discuss about the same newspaper or to assist to minoritary rock concerts. (or to mutually interchange checksums of the program content of each entity)

 But this is not the last world. It is a world of infinite complexity. For example, a strategy for avoiding free riders or mind sharing can be exploited by meta-free-riders. Among humans, when trust is scarce, sacrifices in the temples, blood pacts and violent punishments become necessary.to avoid free riders and maintain stable the collaboration.

All of this does not change wjheter the entities are humans, robots or programs. Evolutionary game theory is a field in active research by economist, lawyers,moralists, computer scientists, Philosophers, psichologists etc.

.  Matt Rydley "what is human" is a good introduction.

Gintis "Game Theory Evolving" is very good.

Brent

[Bruno Marchal]

What is the difference?

Cf:    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theology

Bruno

Brent

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[Bruno Marchal]

On 12 Jul 2012, at 00:44, meekerdb wrote:

On 7/11/2012 2:22 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 11 Jul 2012, at 22:17, meekerdb wrote:

On 7/11/2012 6:23 AM, David Nyman wrote:

On 11 July 2012 09:55, Alberto G. Corona <agoc...@gmail.com> wrote:

Even the phisical TOE is part of this second world. there are no countries, no cars, no persons, no electrons outside of the  world of the mind.  Outside of the mind there is only mathematics. And this math has been anthropically selected by the mind. 

Well put.  Mind - the epistemological subject - is uniquely characterised by its irreducibly synthetic or compositional character, the reverse polarity of a maximally reduced, "objective" ontology. 

But it isn't uniquely characterized by that.  I don't even know what "irreducibly synthetic" means.  I know what "synthetic" means; it means made (synthesized) of something else, it means artificial, not natural??  But in any case "the subject", the first-person, is also singular and persistent thru time.

There is certainly a tension between knowledge which is subjective and gained from perception and the model of the world based on it which is third-person communicable.  When we bestow the property "exists" on the ontology of the third-person world model, we then take on the task of explaining the first-person subjective in terms of that model.  Everyone on this list (except me) seems to assume this impossible. 

Neither me. Just that if comp is true we got a simpler ontology. 

This is just the flip side of Bruno's task of explaining the third-person world in terms of subjective knowledge

Not at all. I explain the *physical* world in term of first person plural world, themselves describe in third person arithmetic.

The 'first person plural world' is what I mean by knowledge on which there is intersubjective agreement.

OK. Those, when expressible, are belief, and if true (but we can't know that) they become knowledge (but not certainty).

Comp is not idealist.

Yes I understand that.  But doesn't it derive ideas (conscious thoughts) from computation (arithmetic) and the physical world from coherent subsets of ideas.

Consciousness is not really derived. It is only assumed to be associated with relevant computations. We derive from that, but that is not derived from less.

which he models by computational relations like "provable".

Provable = objective (doubtful) belief

Why do you writer "doubtful".  Why should one doubt what is provable?...because the axioms are dubious?

Yes. We cannot know that we are consistent, or correct.

Provable and true/satisfied-in-a-reality = Subjective knowledge (the communicable part).

But we can't know what is "satisfied-in-a-reality", we can only know what is provable from our premises

Making it into a belief. That might be wrong.

and what we experience directly. 

That is true, and undoubtable.

Are you saying there are provable things that we can't communicate

As being proved, we can communicate them as belief, if we believe in the axioms.

or the there are provable things which are not true (not satisfied-in-a-reality)?

That can happen, even if nobody really doubt some simple theory, like arithmetic. 

Bruno

Brent

(Incompleteness forces us to make those nuances).

Bruno

Brent

This is implicitly assumed by everyone, but explicitly acknowledged by hardly anybody.  Consequently the typical response whenever I express this thought is blank incomprehension.

David

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

[meekerdb]

On 7/12/2012 1:08 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 11 Jul 2012, at 23:39, meekerdb wrote:

On 7/11/2012 10:36 AM, John Clark wrote:

On Tue, Jul 10, 2012 at 3:29 PM, Evgenii Rudnyi <use...@rudnyi.ru> wrote:

> In Germany theology still belongs to universities. What I like is that you will find as a department of theoretical theology as well as a department of practical theology.

I disagree, I don't like it. You are assuming that there exists a organized field of knowledge called "theology", but I can not find the slightest evidence that is in fact true. Lawrence Krauss said that it is his habit to ask every theologian he meets "what advances in theology have been made in the last 400 years?", but he has never received a straight answer from a single one of them, the best he has gotten was "what do you mean by advances?". A expert in mathematics or physics or biology or literature or ANY other field would not give a weasel answer like that, they'd just rattle off a list of advances, but not theology. He also said he was on a panel at a college and somebody asked another scientist there why there is something rather than nothing and the scientist said "that's a question to ask the head of the theology department not me", but Krauss said "why ask him rather than the college gardener or plumber or cook?". I have no answer to Krauss's question because like him I think that where theology is concerned there is no expertise and no field.

  John K Clark

In fact one might say that IS the advance in theology over the last 400yrs: It has no subject matter.  Of course Bruno wants "theology" to mean something different than any dictionary definition.

What is the difference?

Cf:    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theology

Where's the similarity?

Brent

[Bruno Marchal]

Theology is the study of the truth about us and varied entities. It is concerned with possible deities, transcendental notions, wholeness, possible afterlife, immortality, soul, person, conscience, and the basic question like "who are we?", "what can we expect or hope, or fear?", "is reincarnation possible", etc.

Historic theologies reflects humans prejudices, and some people in some tradition will disqualify some or other tradition, but all in all, theology is the science of the God(s) or what is supposed to be outside us and might justify our existence.

Atheism can be seen as a theology, a bit like zero can be considered as a number. The proposition "God does not exist" is a theological proposition, for a logician. If not, we take the risk of confusing theology with some particular human theologies, but this concerns more history than science. And refusing to admit we do theology, when betting on some reality, makes often scientific statements (beliefs) into pseudo-theological statements (like if we knew the truth).

Bruno

Brent

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[Craig Weinberg]

On Wednesday, July 11, 2012 1:36:32 PM UTC-4, John K Clark wrote:

I disagree, I don't like it. You are assuming that there exists a organized field of knowledge called "theology", but I can not find the slightest evidence that is in fact true. Lawrence Krauss said that it is his habit to ask every theologian he meets "what advances in theology have been made in the last 400 years?", but he has never received a straight answer from a single one of them, the best he has gotten was "what do you mean by advances?". A expert in mathematics or physics or biology or literature or ANY other field would not give a weasel answer like that, they'd just rattle off a list of advances, but not theology.

Then we should stop teaching Newtonian physics as well, since there are no new advances there either.

How about 'Anything that I deem unimportant should be eliminated.'? Do you detect any flaw in that reasoning?

Craig

[Evgenii Rudnyi]

On 11.07.2012 19:36 John Clark said the following:

> On Tue, Jul 10, 2012 at 3:29 PM, Evgenii Rudnyi<use...@rudnyi.ru>
> wrote:
>
>> In Germany theology still belongs to universities. What I like is
>> that you will find as a department of theoretical theology as well
>> as a department of practical theology.
>>
>
> I disagree, I don't like it. You are assuming that there exists a
> organized field of knowledge called "theology", but I can not find
> the slightest evidence that is in fact true.

I am not an expert in this field but here is for example just a link to
the university in Freiburg

http://www.uni-freiburg.de/universitaet-en/fakultaeten-einrichtungen

where you see that the faculty of theology is there. You will find the
same at other German universities.

Evgenii

[Evgenii Rudnyi]

On 11.07.2012 18:26 John Clark said the following:

> On Tue, Jul 10, 2012 Evgenii Rudnyi<use...@rudnyi.ru> wrote:
>
>> It is hard to imagine how free will can operate if our behavior is
>> determined by physical law
>
>
> Does that mean you CAN imagine how free will can operate if our
> behavior is NOT determined by physical law??!!
>
> John K Clark

John,

Good point, indeed. I should confess that as soon as I start thinking of
mathematics then I see no way to define a theory of free will. To this
end, mathematics is no better than physics.

Well, the only reasonable idea in this respect that I have heard so far
is to imagine some master equation that during its evolution in time
will have several solutions at some times. I guess that one could
construct such a function.

The theory of free will could be to be possible in human language though.

Evgenii

>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>> so it seems that we are no more than biological machines and that

>> free will is just an illusion.�

>>
>> Hence according to the authors, the M-theory governs absolutely
>> everything including social sciences. But I am afraid that this is
>> not what you would expect.
>>
>> Evgenii --

>> http://blog.rudnyi.ru/2012/07/**philosophy-is-dead.html<http://blog.rudnyi.ru/2012/07/philosophy-is-dead.html>

>>
>>
>>
>>
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>> everything-list@googlegroups.**com<everyth...@googlegroups.com>
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>> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
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.
>>
>>
>

[Evgenii Rudnyi]

On 11.07.2012 18:21 John Clark said the following:

I have read once Elbow Room by Dennett to understand how free will could
be compatible with determinism. Yet, I have not understood it. I have to
work it out.

Evgenii

[Evgenii Rudnyi]

On 10.07.2012 21:48 meekerdb said the following:

> On 7/10/2012 12:38 PM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:
>> Hence according to the authors, the M-theory governs absolutely
>> everything including social sciences. But I am afraid that this is
>> not what you would expect.
>

> Why would you not expect a theory-of-everything to include the
> behavior of people? Note that 'govern' does not imply 'predictable'.
>

> Brent
>

What do you mean by 'govern' does not imply 'predictable'?

Evgenii

[John Clark]

On Wed, Jul 11, 2012  Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

> To reject *all* theologies, you need *a* theology.

Like "God" this is a example is somebody willing to abandon a idea but not a word; so "God" becomes "something more powerful than yourself" and now "theology" becomes "any field of study you think is important". If you unilaterally decree that words mean whatever you want them to mean then garbled communication is inevitable. 

 John K Clark

[meekerdb]

In Dennett's conception 'free will' is just a marker for responsibility; hence his aphorism, "You can avoid responsibility for everything if you just make yourself small enough."  So where one person might say, "Yes, it was me. I did it." another might say, "I didn't do it of my own free will. I was coerced by threats of being fired." and yet another might say, "I didn't do it. It was just the result of deterministic or random physical processes in my brain and body."

Brent

[meekerdb]

In chaos theory processes are not predictable although they are 'governed' by
deterministic equations. And quantum mechanics is 'governed' by unitary evolution in
Hilbert space and the Born rule - but it's not even deterministic. M-theory is a
quantum-mechanical theory. So to say that everything is 'governed' by M-theory doesn't
tell you that everything is predictable.

Brent

>
> Evgenii
>

[Stephen P. King]

On 7/11/2012 6:47 PM, Alberto G. Corona wrote:

Stephen:

Well it´s not cooperation between computer programs, but cooperation of entities in the abstract level. This can be described mathematically or simulated in a computer program. In both cases, it starts with a game with its rules  goals  wins and loses is created.

Hi Alberto,

    OK, but can we think of the abstract level as the dual of a physical level where physical objects play out their scattering games? What is described by mathematics and/or simulated by computer program does not have to just be some abstraction. We cannot assume absolute closure and any implied externality is just semantics of the abstractions. Abstractions simply cannot exist as free floating entities, for this leads inevitably to contradictions.

If the game is simple and/or played by a small number of players (for example two) This game is analtyzed with Game Theory techniques to obtain the stable strategies that make each player to optimize its wins in a way that they can not win more and it is inmune to attacks from other players. This is a Nash equilibrium.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium

    I understand and agree! My point is that equilibria to obtain, but we cannot substitute the abstract descriptions of games for the actual playing of the games. There is a duality involved that cannot be collapsed without stultifying both sides.

But when the game is too complex or the players use different strategies or they evolve and adapt, specially when the sucessful entities give birth to new generations with mutant and/or strategies which are a mix of the parents ones (in a way defined in the game) Then it is necessary to simulate it within an computer programs. This is part of the work of Axelrod. evolution of generations is modeled with a genetic program

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_programming

    Yes! This is where we get into law of large numbers situations and have some change of discovering the emergence of aspects of reality that we have just been assuming to be a priori given. Some examples of this are Penrose's "spin networks" and Reg Cahill's "Process physics".

to summarize, any entity that collaborate need memory of past interactions of each other entity , In other words, it needs individual recongnition ablities and a form of "moral evaluation" of each individual.

    I agree, but how do we treat the notion of memory such that an arbitrary entity has the capacity to access it? We humans have a large memory capacity that we carry around in our craniums...

It also needs to punish free riders even at the cost of its own well being, in a way that the net gain of free riders is negative. or else the fhe collaborators will fail and the defectors/free riders will expland.

    I suspect that free-riders will be, like the poor, always with us.

So the collaborators need to collaborate too  in the task of  punishing free riders because this is crucial for the stability of collaboration in other tasks.

    But there is a problem with this. There does not exist any finite and pre-given list of what defines a free rider!

Forgiveness is another requirement of collaboration, specially when the entities produce spurious behaviours of non collaboration, but collaborate most of the time. A premature punishment could make a collaborator to punish in response so the collaboration ends.

    This rule is a form of pruning, so we can easily see what effects it has in networks of collaborators. It is an aspect of currying or concurrency.

In these games the goals are fixed.

    This is only for the sake of closure, but closed systems have very short life spans, if any life at all. The trick is to get close to closure but not into it completely. Life exists as an exploitation of this possibility.

In more realistic games the goals vary and the means to obtain them depend on knowledge and asssumptions/beliefs, so an homogeneity within the group around both things should be required for collaboration.

    Right!

For sure there is a tradeof between mind sharing and punishment. Less mind sharing, more violent punishment is necessary for a stable collaboration.

    yes, but can you see how this rapidly suppresses any potential for further evolution. It is in effect the establishment of closure that seals off those involved. North Korea is a nice real world example of this.

To verify mind sharing and investment in the group collaboration, periodic public meetings where protocols/rituals of mutual recognition are repeated to assure to each member that the others are in-line. For example, to visit a temple each week, to discuss about the same newspaper or to assist to minoritary rock concerts. (or to mutually interchange checksums of the program content of each entity)

    Certainly! This shows a rational for the "rituals" that we see as "traditions" in cultures, for example.

 But this is not the last world. It is a world of infinite complexity. For example, a strategy for avoiding free riders or mind sharing can be exploited by meta-free-riders. Among humans, when trust is scarce, sacrifices in the temples, blood pacts and violent punishments become necessary.to avoid free riders and maintain stable the collaboration.

    Are you familiar with Hypergames? Novelity is the result of openness, but at the cost of allowing free riders. They are a necessary evil.

All of this does not change wjheter the entities are humans, robots or programs. Evolutionary game theory is a field in active research by economist, lawyers,moralists, computer scientists, Philosophers, psichologists etc.

   

    Good stuff!

.  Matt Rydley "what is human" is a good introduction.

    I will add this to my list. Thanks! I found this, http://www.scribd.com/doc/47413560/69/MATT-RIDLEY , so far...

[Stephen P. King]

On 7/11/2012 6:47 PM, Alberto G. Corona wrote:

> Matt Rydley "what is human" is a good introduction.

From: http://www.scribd.com/doc/47413560/69/MATT-RIDLEY

MATT RIDLEY

Science Writer; Founding chairman of the International Centre for Life;
Author,F
rancis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code
Collective intelligence
Brilliant people, be they anthropologists, psychologists or economists,
assumethat brilliance is the key to human achievement. They vote for the
cleverestpeople to run governments, they ask the cleverest experts to
devise plans for theeconomy, they credit the cleverest scientists with
discoveries, and they speculateon how human intelligence evolved in the
first place.They are all barking up the wrong tree. The key to human
achievement is notindividual intelligence at all. The reason human
beings dominate the planet is notbecause they have big brains:
Neanderthals had big brains but were just anotherkind of predatory ape.
Evolving a 1200-cc brain and a lot of fancy software likelanguage was
necessary but not sufficient for civilization. The reason someeconomies
work better than others is certainly not because they have
clevererpeople in charge, and the reason some places make great
discoveries is notbecause they have smarter people.Human achievement is
entirely a networking phenomenon. It is by putting brainstogether
through the division of labor � through trade and specialisation �
thathuman society stumbled upon a way to raise the living standards,
carryingcapacity, technological virtuosity and knowledge base of the
species. We can seethis in all sorts of phenomena: the correlation
between technology and connectedpopulation size in Pacific islands; the
collapse of technology in people who


95became isolated, like native Tasmanians; the success of trading city
states inGreece, Italy, Holland and south-east Asia; the creative
consequences of trade.Human achievement is based on collective
intelligence � the nodes in the humanneural network are people
themselves. By each doing one thing and getting goodat it, then sharing
and combining the results through exchange, people becomecapable of
doing things
they do not even understand
. As the economist LeonardRead observed in his essay "I, Pencil' (which
I'd like everybody to read), nosingle person knows how to make even a
pencil � the knowledge is distributedin society among many thousands of
graphite miners, lumberjacks, designers andfactory workers.That's why,
as Friedrich Hayek observed, central planning never worked: thecleverest
person is no match for the collective brain at working out how
todistribute consumer goods. The idea of bottom-up collective
intelligence, whichAdam Smith understood and Charles Darwin echoed, and
which Hayekexpounded in his remarkable essay "The use of knowledge in
society", is one ideaI wish everybody had in their cognitive toolkit.

[John Clark]

On Thu, Jul 12, 2012 at 8:17 AM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Then we should stop teaching Newtonian physics as well, since there are no new advances there either.

Not so. A hurricane simulation is pure Newtonian physics and yet they are far far better now, that is to say they give us better understanding of the storm, than they were 10 years ago or even 5. Theology on the other hand was no good for anything 400 years ago and it's no good for anything today.

 

> How about 'Anything that I deem unimportant should be eliminated.'? Do you detect any flaw in that reasoning?

No, if I feel something is unimportant I generally also feel it would be wiser not to do it and make better use of my time doing something else.

  John K Clark

[meekerdb]

I thought I would test Bruno's idea that theology is the study of what is fundamental.  In the Scottish Journal of Theology archives, which go back to 1899, a search for articles in which the word "fundamental" appears in the abstract or title, turns up one:

The Fundamental Shape of Old Testament Ethics (1971)

Search on "ontolog" produces two

A Trinitarian Ontology of Persons in Society (1994)

The Ontology of Tillih and Biblical Personalism (1962)

[John Clark]

On Thu, Jul 12, 2012 at 3:17 PM, Evgenii Rudnyi <use...@rudnyi.ru> wrote:

> I am not an expert in this field

There are no experts in this field because there is no field.

> but here is for example just a link to the university in Freiburghttp://www.uni-freiburg.de/universitaet-en/fakultaeten-einrichtungen where you see that the faculty of theology is there.

So the field of knowledge that theology deals with is the knowledge of the hijinks going on with the faculty of of one department of the University of Freiburg.

  John K Clark

[Alberto G. Corona]

2012/7/12 Stephen P. King <step...@charter.net>

On 7/11/2012 6:47 PM, Alberto G. Corona wrote:

Stephen:

Well it´s not cooperation between computer programs, but cooperation of entities in the abstract level. This can be described mathematically or simulated in a computer program. In both cases, it starts with a game with its rules  goals  wins and loses is created.

Hi Alberto,

    OK, but can we think of the abstract level as the dual of a physical level where physical objects play out their scattering games? What is described by mathematics and/or simulated by computer program does not have to just be some abstraction. We cannot assume absolute closure and any implied externality is just semantics of the abstractions. Abstractions simply cannot exist as free floating entities, for this leads inevitably to contradictions.

Concerning the question of individuality, A good selfish collaborator must develop an individuality and !self conscience! (and we are talking about collaboration between selfish entities, that want as much benefit from the collaboration as possible).

The point is that the entity must evaluate other individuals, but he is evaluated by others. So to know if others will collaborate with him, he must evaluate himself in relation with the others, that is if I, entity A wants to know what to expect from B, he does evaluate B, but also has to evaluate what itself, A did to B in the past. This self start to have the attributes of a conscious moral being. A measure of self steem becones necessary to modulate what he can realistically demand from the others and so on.

In a computer program, the individuality would be composed of its memory of relevant interactions with others and the evaluation algorithms. It seems that humans can store the details of about 150 other individuals. That´s why companies with less that 150 persons can work efficiently without burocracy. This information is very important and must be syncronized with the others. Most of the talks are about what did who to whom and who deserve something from me because in the past he did something to my friend. Bellond 150 external memory is necessary: written records, registration cards, id numbers, Money

If the game is simple and/or played by a small number of players (for example two) This game is analtyzed with Game Theory techniques to obtain the stable strategies that make each player to optimize its wins in a way that they can not win more and it is inmune to attacks from other players. This is a Nash equilibrium.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium

    I understand and agree! My point is that equilibria to obtain, but we cannot substitute the abstract descriptions of games for the actual playing of the games. There is a duality involved that cannot be collapsed without stultifying both sides.

But when the game is too complex or the players use different strategies or they evolve and adapt, specially when the sucessful entities give birth to new generations with mutant and/or strategies which are a mix of the parents ones (in a way defined in the game) Then it is necessary to simulate it within an computer programs. This is part of the work of Axelrod. evolution of generations is modeled with a genetic program

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_programming

    Yes! This is where we get into law of large numbers situations and have some change of discovering the emergence of aspects of reality that we have just been assuming to be a priori given. Some examples of this are Penrose's "spin networks" and Reg Cahill's "Process physics".

to summarize, any entity that collaborate need memory of past interactions of each other entity , In other words, it needs individual recongnition ablities and a form of "moral evaluation" of each individual.

    I agree, but how do we treat the notion of memory such that an arbitrary entity has the capacity to access it? We humans have a large memory capacity that we carry around in our craniums...

It also needs to punish free riders even at the cost of its own well being, in a way that the net gain of free riders is negative. or else the fhe collaborators will fail and the defectors/free riders will expland.

    I suspect that free-riders will be, like the poor, always with us.

We each one are free riders because we are selfish collaborators. A twist on selfish collaboration is the self deception: our memory is unconsciously distorted to support our case. we thinkl that we deserve more than the fair share etc. 

So the collaborators need to collaborate too  in the task of  punishing free riders because this is crucial for the stability of collaboration in other tasks.

    But there is a problem with this. There does not exist any finite and pre-given list of what defines a free rider!

we all!. The christian analogy of fallen beings is perfect image of what evolutionary game theory teach about  selfish collaboration under darwinian selection!

 

Forgiveness is another requirement of collaboration, specially when the entities produce spurious behaviours of non collaboration, but collaborate most of the time. A premature punishment could make a collaborator to punish in response so the collaboration ends.

    This rule is a form of pruning, so we can easily see what effects it has in networks of collaborators. It is an aspect of currying or concurrency.

In these games the goals are fixed.

    This is only for the sake of closure, but closed systems have very short life spans, if any life at all. The trick is to get close to closure but not into it completely. Life exists as an exploitation of this possibility.

In more realistic games the goals vary and the means to obtain them depend on knowledge and asssumptions/beliefs, so an homogeneity within the group around both things should be required for collaboration.

    Right!

For sure there is a tradeof between mind sharing and punishment. Less mind sharing, more violent punishment is necessary for a stable collaboration.

    yes, but can you see how this rapidly suppresses any potential for further evolution. It is in effect the establishment of closure that seals off those involved. North Korea is a nice real world example of this.

That is very true!.  sucessful groups fix basic dogmas, but maintain inside controlled darwinian  variation/selection games among individuals for the benefit of the whole group. The market of goods and services operates in this way, under the "dogmas" of trade laws:  The offer of goods and services is the variation. The demand for each of them is the selection. In the process, wealth is created because internal needs are satisfied. The same happens in politics, science, sports etc.

 

To verify mind sharing and investment in the group collaboration, periodic public meetings where protocols/rituals of mutual recognition are repeated to assure to each member that the others are in-line. For example, to visit a temple each week, to discuss about the same newspaper or to assist to minoritary rock concerts. (or to mutually interchange checksums of the program content of each entity)

    Certainly! This shows a rational for the "rituals" that we see as "traditions" in cultures, for example.

 But this is not the last world. It is a world of infinite complexity. For example, a strategy for avoiding free riders or mind sharing can be exploited by meta-free-riders. Among humans, when trust is scarce, sacrifices in the temples, blood pacts and violent punishments become necessary.to avoid free riders and maintain stable the collaboration.

    Are you familiar with Hypergames? Novelity is the result of openness, but at the cost of allowing free riders. They are a necessary evil.

Yes, see above. However, dogmas are necessary. The point is a good combination of dogmas rules, rites, traditions and punishments so that  selfishness (perceived internally as freedom) work for the good of the group. and deletereous selfisness (antisocial) is supressed.

All of this does not change wjheter the entities are humans, robots or programs. Evolutionary game theory is a field in active research by economist, lawyers,moralists, computer scientists, Philosophers, psichologists etc.

   
    Good stuff!

.  Matt Rydley "what is human" is a good introduction.

    I will add this to my list. Thanks! I found this, http://www.scribd.com/doc/47413560/69/MATT-RIDLEY , so far...

2012/7/11 Stephen P. King <step...@charter.net>

On 7/11/2012 4:29 AM, Alberto G. Corona wrote:

2012/7/10 meekerdb <meek...@verizon.net>

Why would you not expect a theory-of-everything to include the behavior of people?  Note that 'govern' does not imply 'predictable'.

A phisicinst theory of everithing , despite the popular belief, does not "govern" the behaviour of the people. No longer than the binary logic govern the behaviour of computer programs. I can program in binary logic whatever I want without limitations. the wetware whose activity produces the human mind could execute potentially any kind of behaviour. Our behaviour is not governed by anything related wth a phisical TOE, but by the laws of natural selection applied to social beings. I can observe the evolution of such behaviours (in a shchematic way) in a binary world within a computer program as well. Robert Axelrod dit it for the first time.

On the contrary, the antrophic principle tell you that is the mind the determinant element for the existence of a TOE. A phisical TOE  It is just the playing field and the stuff upon things are made. 

Dear Albert,

    Interesting that you bring up http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_cooperation ! Could you elaborate a bit on your thoughts? Do you have any ideas how to model cooperation between computer programs? The main problem that I have found is in defining the interface between computations. How does one define "identity" for a given computation such that it is distinguished from all others?

-- 
Onward!

Stephen

"Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed." 
~ Francis Bacon

--

[meekerdb]

On 7/12/2012 4:04 PM, Alberto G. Corona wrote:

We each one are free riders because we are selfish collaborators. A twist on selfish collaboration is the self deception: our memory is unconsciously distorted to support our case. we thinkl that we deserve more than the fair share etc. 

"Free rider" doesn't mean just a selfish collaborator.  A free rider is one who benefits from the enforcement of social norms, but doesn't contribute to their enforcement.

Brent

[Alberto G. Corona]

Right. free rider is a pure defector. In a more realistic game, the entities can act with mixed strategies, sometimes as free riders, others as collaborators. This is the meaning of selfish collaborators. With the addition that, sometimes, what benefits the individual benefits also the collaboration.

2012/7/13 meekerdb <meek...@verizon.net>

--

[Stephen P. King]

On 7/12/2012 7:04 PM, Alberto G. Corona wrote:

2012/7/12 Stephen P. King <step...@charter.net>

On 7/11/2012 6:47 PM, Alberto G. Corona wrote:

Stephen:

Well it´s not cooperation between computer programs, but cooperation of entities in the abstract level. This can be described mathematically or simulated in a computer program. In both cases, it starts with a game with its rules  goals  wins and loses is created.

Hi Alberto,

    OK, but can we think of the abstract level as the dual of a physical level where physical objects play out their scattering games? What is described by mathematics and/or simulated by computer program does not have to just be some abstraction. We cannot assume absolute closure and any implied externality is just semantics of the abstractions. Abstractions simply cannot exist as free floating entities, for this leads inevitably to contradictions.

Concerning the question of individuality, A good selfish collaborator must develop an individuality and !self conscience! (and we are talking about collaboration between selfish entities, that want as much benefit from the collaboration as possible).

 Hi Alberto,

    I suspect that the self has a good reason for existing! I will try to reconstruct the rational that occurred to me the first time I read this posting of your. Very good stuff, I must say! Basically, the idea is that if there was no "self" to refer to then all agents would be free riders as there would ultimately be no consequence for defection strategies. Free riders and other parasites live so long as the host they infect is not yet dead. They have no inherent or automomous structure to preserve over arbitrarily many iterations of the game.

The point is that the entity must evaluate other individuals, but he is evaluated by others.

    Right, there is a symmetry involved.

So to know if others will collaborate with him, he must evaluate himself in relation with the others, that is if I, entity A wants to know what to expect from B, he does evaluate B, but also has to evaluate what itself, A did to B in the past. This self start to have the attributes of a conscious moral being. A measure of self steem becones necessary to modulate what he can realistically demand from the others and so on.

    It is here that we get self-reference and its behaviors and phenomena! Jon Barwise (with Seligman) discusses this sort of stuff in his wonderful book Information Flow: The Logic of Distributed Systems . I highly recommend it. You can preview it here.

In a computer program, the individuality would be composed of its memory of relevant interactions with others and the evaluation algorithms. It seems that humans can store the details of about 150 other individuals. That´s why companies with less that 150 persons can work efficiently without burocracy. This information is very important and must be syncronized with the others. Most of the talks are about what did who to whom and who deserve something from me because in the past he did something to my friend. Bellond 150 external memory is necessary: written records, registration cards, id numbers, Money

    Interesting and very proprietary information! It reminds me of the small network stuff that Ball discussed in his book Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another . Where could I read more on this? Is there a cyclical property that acts as a memory of sorts in a network of that size (or less)? I get the image of something like a round robin tournament going on....

If the game is simple and/or played by a small number of players (for example two) This game is analtyzed with Game Theory techniques to obtain the stable strategies that make each player to optimize its wins in a way that they can not win more and it is inmune to attacks from other players. This is a Nash equilibrium.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium

    I understand and agree! My point is that equilibria to obtain, but we cannot substitute the abstract descriptions of games for the actual playing of the games. There is a duality involved that cannot be collapsed without stultifying both sides.

But when the game is too complex or the players use different strategies or they evolve and adapt, specially when the sucessful entities give birth to new generations with mutant and/or strategies which are a mix of the parents ones (in a way defined in the game) Then it is necessary to simulate it within an computer programs. This is part of the work of Axelrod. evolution of generations is modeled with a genetic program

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_programming

    Yes! This is where we get into law of large numbers situations and have some change of discovering the emergence of aspects of reality that we have just been assuming to be a priori given. Some examples of this are Penrose's "spin networks" and Reg Cahill's "Process physics".

to summarize, any entity that collaborate need memory of past interactions of each other entity , In other words, it needs individual recongnition ablities and a form of "moral evaluation" of each individual.

    I agree, but how do we treat the notion of memory such that an arbitrary entity has the capacity to access it? We humans have a large memory capacity that we carry around in our craniums...

It also needs to punish free riders even at the cost of its own well being, in a way that the net gain of free riders is negative. or else the fhe collaborators will fail and the defectors/free riders will expland.

    I suspect that free-riders will be, like the poor, always with us.

We each one are free riders because we are selfish collaborators. A twist on selfish collaboration is the self deception: our memory is unconsciously distorted to support our case. we thinkl that we deserve more than the fair share etc.

    These are the pathologies that I find interesting. What kinds of strategies tend to minimize the "sociopaths"? Maybe the best stratergies are the ones that distract sociopathic choices by nominally increasing the pay-off for that appears to be selfish short term gain. But these would have to be compensated form further down the line of iterations... Not simple....

So the collaborators need to collaborate too  in the task of  punishing free riders because this is crucial for the stability of collaboration in other tasks.

    But there is a problem with this. There does not exist any finite and pre-given list of what defines a free rider!

we all!. The christian analogy of fallen beings is perfect image of what evolutionary game theory teach about  selfish collaboration under darwinian selection!

    I agree 100%.

 

Forgiveness is another requirement of collaboration, specially when the entities produce spurious behaviours of non collaboration, but collaborate most of the time. A premature punishment could make a collaborator to punish in response so the collaboration ends.

    This rule is a form of pruning, so we can easily see what effects it has in networks of collaborators. It is an aspect of currying or concurrency.

In these games the goals are fixed.

    This is only for the sake of closure, but closed systems have very short life spans, if any life at all. The trick is to get close to closure but not into it completely. Life exists as an exploitation of this possibility.

In more realistic games the goals vary and the means to obtain them depend on knowledge and asssumptions/beliefs, so an homogeneity within the group around both things should be required for collaboration.

    Right!

For sure there is a tradeof between mind sharing and punishment. Less mind sharing, more violent punishment is necessary for a stable collaboration.

    yes, but can you see how this rapidly suppresses any potential for further evolution. It is in effect the establishment of closure that seals off those involved. North Korea is a nice real world example of this.

That is very true!.  sucessful groups fix basic dogmas, but maintain inside controlled darwinian  variation/selection games among individuals for the benefit of the whole group. The market of goods and services operates in this way, under the "dogmas" of trade laws:  The offer of goods and services is the variation. The demand for each of them is the selection. In the process, wealth is created because internal needs are satisfied. The same happens in politics, science, sports etc.

    OK, how do we communicate this to a wider audience?

 

To verify mind sharing and investment in the group collaboration, periodic public meetings where protocols/rituals of mutual recognition are repeated to assure to each member that the others are in-line. For example, to visit a temple each week, to discuss about the same newspaper or to assist to minoritary rock concerts. (or to mutually interchange checksums of the program content of each entity)

    Certainly! This shows a rational for the "rituals" that we see as "traditions" in cultures, for example.

 But this is not the last world. It is a world of infinite complexity. For example, a strategy for avoiding free riders or mind sharing can be exploited by meta-free-riders. Among humans, when trust is scarce, sacrifices in the temples, blood pacts and violent punishments become necessary.to avoid free riders and maintain stable the collaboration.

    Are you familiar with Hypergames? Novelity is the result of openness, but at the cost of allowing free riders. They are a necessary evil.

Yes, see above. However, dogmas are necessary. The point is a good combination of dogmas rules, rites, traditions and punishments so that  selfishness (perceived internally as freedom) work for the good of the group. and deletereous selfisness (antisocial) is supressed.

    We are faced with a situation where there is a pay-off for ignoring these facts. People are in a "head in the sand" mode. :'(

[Stephen P. King]

-

    To use a currently in vogue cliché; "they got no skin in the game". There is net no cost for defections.

[Bruno Marchal]

On 12 Jul 2012, at 22:08, John Clark wrote:

On Wed, Jul 11, 2012  Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

> To reject *all* theologies, you need *a* theology.

Like "God" this is a example is somebody willing to abandon a idea but not a word;

Logicians work axiomatically or semi-axiomatically. If an idea/theory seems absurd, we make the minimal change to keep the most of the theory (the words). The term "God" is typical in that setting, and I find absurd to deny some concept by keeping an absurd theory. You do the same with free-will, by saying it is non sense, but this by deciding to accept the nonsensical definition. 

The logicians ways avoid throwing babies with the bathwater.

so "God" becomes "something more powerful than yourself"

This is frequent fro Gof. This means for example that God is not a machine. But This was just one axiom among other, and I use theology in the same sense as any general (non confessional) dictionnary. See my answer to Brent. Theology is concerned with afterlife, soul, deities (non Turing emeulable person), wholeness, fundamental reality, etc.

and now "theology" becomes "any field of study you think is important".

This does not follow from what I said.

If you unilaterally decree that words mean whatever you want them to mean then garbled communication is inevitable. 

I insist I use them in the sense of many, and your way to keep definition explains why you reject the whole notion.

Like some atheists you seem to take seriously the definition of theologian you decry. You might read Aldous Huxley "philosophia perennis".

Bruno

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

[Bruno Marchal]

The last answer does not make sense. He could have said : "I didn't do it, God did it". He imposes his philosophical conception on the situation. But there is no problem, we can send him in jail, and assure him that we too just obey the same equation.

Bruno

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

[Bruno Marchal]

If you believe in physics you are physical-realist, but if you believe that physics is the fundamental science, then you are doing theology, and you are presenting a science as a theology without making that clear, which is exactly the error which has give theology its local bad name.

Or you are just not interested in fundamental questions.

Bruno

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

[Craig Weinberg]

On Thursday, July 12, 2012 3:23:55 PM UTC-4, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:

John,

Good point, indeed. I should confess that as soon as I start thinking of
mathematics then I see no way to define a theory of free will. To this
end, mathematics is no better than physics.

Well, the only reasonable idea in this respect that I have heard so far
is to imagine some master equation that during its evolution in time
will have several solutions at some times. I guess that one could
construct such a function.

The theory of free will could be to be possible in human language though.

Mathematics is the last place we should look to define a theory of free will. If you have to look at a symbols as a primary source (and I don't know why anyone would other than out of sentimental reverence) then look at the difference between natural language and mathematics, isolate that difference, and see it as a fraction of a totality of possible spans between closed-literal and open-figurative ontology.

The difference between names and numbers is that numbers can only be augmented in a linear fashion, ie by adding instances of whatever arbitrary number of initial digits you name. With names, you can keep adding names at the primordial level. You don't have to start with red and blue and then define everything in terms of red, blue, red*blue, red-blue, or red+blue. You can have yellow. This is how half of the universe works - the half that sees an outside world generated by the other half.

Craig

Craig

[meekerdb]

On 7/12/2012 9:55 PM, Stephen P. King wrote:

On 7/12/2012 7:42 PM, meekerdb wrote:

On 7/12/2012 4:04 PM, Alberto G. Corona wrote:

We each one are free riders because we are selfish collaborators. A twist on selfish collaboration is the self deception: our memory is unconsciously distorted to support our case. we thinkl that we deserve more than the fair share etc. 

"Free rider" doesn't mean just a selfish collaborator.  A free rider is one who benefits from the enforcement of social norms, but doesn't contribute to their enforcement.

Brent
-

    To use a currently in vogue cliché; "they got no skin in the game". There is net no cost for defections.

No, it doesn't mean there is no cost.  It means that the 'free rider' doesn't pay any  of the enforcement cost.  In a society that forbids theft a burglar is a defector.  The police and courts punish defectors.  A free rider is someone who has his property protected by the police but doesn't pay taxes for them.

Brent

[meekerdb]

On 7/13/2012 12:36 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
> I insist I use them in the sense of many, and your way to keep definition explains why
> you reject the whole notion.

You don't use "theology" in the sense of the papers I see published by faculties in
departments of theology. They are about the dogma of religions, especially Christianity
and Islam.

> Like some atheists you seem to take seriously the definition of theologian you decry.

Of course. Would it be sensible to decry something which was undefined??

Brent

[meekerdb]

On 7/13/2012 12:44 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 12 Jul 2012, at 22:08, meekerdb wrote:

...

In Dennett's conception 'free will' is just a marker for responsibility; hence his aphorism, "You can avoid responsibility for everything if you just make yourself small enough."  So where one person might say, "Yes, it was me. I did it." another might say, "I didn't do it of my own free will. I was coerced by threats of being fired." and yet another might say, "I didn't do it. It was just the result of deterministic or random physical processes in my brain and body."

The last answer does not make sense. He could have said : "I didn't do it, God did it". He imposes his philosophical conception on the situation. But there is no problem, we can send him in jail, and assure him that we too just obey the same equation.

Exactly Dennett's point.

Brent

[meekerdb]

On 7/13/2012 5:53 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote:

The difference between names and numbers is that numbers can only be augmented in a linear fashion, ie by adding instances of whatever arbitrary number of initial digits you name. With names, you can keep adding names at the primordial level. You don't have to start with red and blue and then define everything in terms of red, blue, red*blue, red-blue, or red+blue. You can have yellow. This is how half of the universe works - the half that sees an outside world generated by the other half.

An interesting example.  The reason you can add colors out of sequence is that the spectrum is a continuum; so between any two colors is another, different color.  This actually happened in the case of "orange".  In the time of Chaucer there was no word for "orange", it was just "the color between red and yellow".  The name for the color came from the fruit when it was later imported from the orient.  Consequently all the european languages have almost the same word for this color.

Brent

[Evgenii Rudnyi]

On 12.07.2012 22:08 meekerdb said the following:

The question then would be what determines what a person say. Does
unpredictability that you have mentioned in another message will help in
this respect? If yes, how?

Evgenii

[Evgenii Rudnyi]

On 12.07.2012 22:44 John Clark said the following:

> On Thu, Jul 12, 2012 at 3:17 PM, Evgenii Rudnyi<use...@rudnyi.ru>
> wrote:
>
>> I am not an expert in this field
>>
>
> There are no experts in this field because there is no field.

The field does exist. You may want for example to read Newton. He was a
fan of theology.

Evgenii

[Stephen P. King]

Hi Brent,

    You are right, but we are looking at an abstract cartoon model. Could you help us figure out how to include "enforcement cost" in the game theoretic framework?

[meekerdb]

You mistake the point. Dennet's aphorism is a reductio ad absurdum - illustrating how
ridiculous is is try to avoid responsibility by blaming physical processes.

> Does unpredictability that you have mentioned in another message will help in this
> respect? If yes, how?

If you're asking whether unpredictability eliminates responsibility, the answer is no.

Brent

>
> Evgenii
>

[meekerdb]

On 7/13/2012 10:30 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:

The field does exist. You may want for example to read Newton. He was a fan of theology.

Newton on theology is one of the things I would least like to read.

Brent

[Evgenii Rudnyi]

On 13.07.2012 19:53 meekerdb said the following:

Why? Presumably there were questions that he had found important. It
might be interesting to understand what questions touched him and what
has happened with these questions at present.

In general, I believe that the best approach would be a historical one.
This way one would understand better the subject matter of theology.

Evgenii

[Evgenii Rudnyi]

On 13.07.2012 19:52 meekerdb said the following:

> On 7/13/2012 10:22 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:
>> On 12.07.2012 22:08 meekerdb said the following:

...

>>> In Dennett's conception 'free will' is just a marker for
>>> responsibility; hence his aphorism, "You can avoid responsibility
>>> for everything if you just make yourself small enough." So where
>>> one person might say, "Yes, it was me. I did it." another might
>>> say, "I didn't do it of my own free will. I was coerced by
>>> threats of being fired." and yet another might say, "I didn't do
>>> it. It was just the result of deterministic or random physical
>>> processes in my brain and body."
>>
>> The question then would be what determines what a person say.
>
> You mistake the point. Dennet's aphorism is a reductio ad absurdum -
> illustrating how ridiculous is is try to avoid responsibility by
> blaming physical processes.
>
>> Does unpredictability that you have mentioned in another message
>> will help in this respect? If yes, how?
>
> If you're asking whether unpredictability eliminates responsibility,
> the answer is no.

My question would be not about responsibility, I am not that far. Let us
take a chess game (the example from John). We have two people playing
chess and then for example the M-theory.

How would you characterize the relationship between the M-theory and
players. In what sense it is possible to say that the players play their
own game? How unpredictability would help here?

You have mentioned the chaos theory when you have written about
predictability. Frankly speaking I do not understand the point, the
chaos theory claims. If I understand correctly, it basically says that
the uncertainty in the initial condition brings unpredictability. Yet, I
do not understand where the uncertainty in initial conditions come from.
If we discuss things in principle, then we should consider the case when
the initial conditions are known exactly.

Evgenii

[Evgenii Rudnyi]

On 07.07.2012 19:40 John Clark said the following:
> On Sat, Jul 7, 2012 Evgenii Rudnyi<use...@rudnyi.ru> wrote:
>

...

>> An interesting question is however, where resulting visual mental
>> concepts are located.
>>
>
> I find it about as interesting as asking where "big" or the number
> eleven is located and shows the same profound misunderstanding of the
> situation on so many different levels that it's hard to know where to
> begin.
>

The question where in physicalism numbers are located is also
interesting indeed. If you know the answer, I would appreciate it.

However, visual mental concepts are even more interested as we suppose
that vision is a basic human capability and it exists much longer as
mathematics.

So, according to physics photons are reflected from an object, come to
retina, and then natural neural nets starts information processing. The
question is what happens after that. Provided that the brain is
surrounded by the skull and information processes happen there, one
could expect that mental visual concepts are somewhere within the skull.

Where do you find a profound misunderstanding in the paragraph above?

How would you explain the vision?

Evgenii

[meekerdb]

On 7/13/2012 11:07 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:
> On 13.07.2012 19:53 meekerdb said the following:
>> On 7/13/2012 10:30 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:
>>>
>>> The field does exist. You may want for example to read Newton. He
>>> was a fan of theology.
>>
>> Newton on theology is one of the things I would least like to read.
>>
>
> Why? Presumably there were questions that he had found important. It might be
> interesting to understand what questions touched him and what has happened with these
> questions at present.

One of the questions was whether the godhead was one or three (whatever that means). The
question was settled for a time by persecuting those of opposite opinion. I think now
opposite views are held by divided camps, like the Big Endians and the Little Endians.

>
> In general, I believe that the best approach would be a historical one. This way one
> would understand better the subject matter of theology.

That's like saying it is best to take a historical approach to witchcraft. It's best
because there is no empirical approach and there is no empirical approach because there
are no witches.

Brent

[meekerdb]

I would characterize them as being at separate levels of description.

> In what sense it is possible to say that the players play their own game?

In the sense that there are no significant outside sources influencing the players (like a
grandmaster whispering in their ear).

> How unpredictability would help here?

I don't understand "help". Are you striving to reach some conclusion you have not revealed?

>
> You have mentioned the chaos theory when you have written about predictability. Frankly
> speaking I do not understand the point, the chaos theory claims. If I understand
> correctly, it basically says that the uncertainty in the initial condition brings
> unpredictability. Yet, I do not understand where the uncertainty in initial conditions
> come from. If we discuss things in principle, then we should consider the case when the
> initial conditions are known exactly.

But that's the point. In chaos theory things are only predictable if initial conditions
(and the evolutionary calculations) are carried to infinite precision - which is
impossible. You want to consider a case where we start with infinite information to
predict an outcome which is defined only by finite information?

Brent

>
> Evgenii
>

[John Clark]

On Fri, Jul 13, 2012 Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

>>  Like "God" this is a example is somebody willing to abandon a idea but not a word;

> Logicians work axiomatically or semi-axiomatically. If an idea/theory seems absurd, we make the minimal change to keep the most of the theory (the words).

The changes you make in "God" are as far from "minimal" as you can get, the magnitude of the changes are quite literally infinite. 

>The term "God" is typical in that setting, and I find absurd to deny some concept by keeping an absurd theory.

I don't know what you mean, a theory is a concept and the God theory is a very bad theory and thus so is the concept.

> You do the same with free-will, by saying it is non sense, but this by deciding to accept the nonsensical definition.

That is incorrect. The God theory is perfectly meaningful and so is the astrology theory, it's just that they both happen to be wrong. The free will "theory" on the other hand is no more meaningful than a burp and thus is neither right nor wrong.

> so "God" becomes "something more powerful than yourself"

> This is frequent fro Gof.

Yes, something more powerful than yourself is what those who love the word but not the idea mean when they say "God". And so God, a omnipotent omniscient being who created the universe, suddenly gets demoted and becomes just another yellow bulldozer; and theology, the study of bulldozers, degenerates into diesel engine repair.

>  God is not a machine.

Then there is no alternative, God is not a bulldozer after all, God is a roulette wheel.

 John K Clark

[John Clark]

On Fri, Jul 13, 2012  Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:

The difference between names and numbers is that numbers can only be augmented in a linear fashion

For all numbers x in set X let x=x^2

  John K Clark

 

[John Clark]

On Fri, Jul 13, 2012  Evgenii Rudnyi <use...@rudnyi.ru> wrote:

> There are no experts in this field because there is no field.

The field does exist.

What does a expert on theology know about the nature of reality that a non-expert does not?

> Presumably there were questions that he [Newton] had found important. It might be interesting to understand what questions touched him and what has happened with these questions at present.

I don't think it would be interesting at all, in fact I'd rather have my teeth drilled than read Newton on theology. Newton was I think the greatest genius the Human Race has yet produced, he was also vain arrogant vindictive and completely humorless, but those are all minor points compared with his virtues. The real tragedy was that this colossal intellect was horribly infected with the religious meme. This meme hijacked most of his massive mental machinery and forced it to think and write far more about religion than about Science. Today even Theologians admit that the many millions of words that he wrote about The Bible are worthless, and if there is one thing Theologians have a lot of experience with is worthless ideas. Newton advanced Science more than any other Human Being but I think it's one of the great tragedies of History that the rarest, most valuable quality that has ever existed in the world was not used to full advantage. Imagine what Newton could have accomplished if his mind had not been caught in a infinite loop, and I blame religion for that.

> The question where in physicalism numbers are located is also interesting indeed. If you know the answer, I would appreciate it.

The number eleven is located just below green a little to the right of big above sweet and between fast and pneumatic.

  John K Clark

[Craig Weinberg]

On Friday, July 13, 2012 1:23:00 PM UTC-4, Brent wrote:

An interesting example.  The reason you can add colors out of sequence is that the spectrum is a continuum; so between any two colors is another, different color.  This actually happened in the case of "orange".  In the time of Chaucer there was no word for "orange", it was just "the color between red and yellow".  The name for the color came from the fruit when it was later imported from the orient.  Consequently all the european languages have almost the same word for this color.

The spectrum is a different kind of continuum qualitatively than it is quantitatively. It really isn't accurate to even call the quantitative continuum a spectrum at all, since the continuum itself is a smooth progression of frequency-wavelength, having no spectral-like categorical distinctions itself. Consider though, that the case of orange being the combination of red+yellow is completely different from the case of either yellow or green being any combination of blue and red. This is a big deal. This is the difference between qualia and quanta. In a smooth continuum of e-m wavelengths, it would not be possible for yellow to be anything but a midway tone between red and blue. That is not how it is though. Yellow or green can each be considered primary colors (depending on whether the light is reflected or projected) so that there is no way to get to either of them from only red and blue.

From here we can also see that really any color makes no sense as a purely quantitative variable. There is no quantitative purpose for having a separate quality of 'purple' or 'orange' to adorn the combination of blue/red or red/yellow. The principle that yokes together these primary hues into secondary visual hues is almost as unexplainable mechanistically.

The combination of all hues being either white or black (depending again on direct-projected or indirect-reflected modes) illustrates how qualia collapses into simpler forms, rather than simple forms building into more complex qualia. You can't make color from black and white, but you can make black and white from color, and when you do, it makes perfect sense aesthetically.

Craig

[Craig Weinberg]

On Friday, July 13, 2012 3:38:25 PM UTC-4, John K Clark wrote:

On Fri, Jul 13, 2012  Craig Weinberg wrote:

The difference between names and numbers is that numbers can only be augmented in a linear fashion

For all numbers x in set X let x=x^2

  John K Clark

That doesn't augment the variety of number types in set X, it just states that there should be more of the same number types. Saying 'let the size of Dictionary X = (the size of Dictionary X ^ 2)' does not create any new words in the dictionary.

Craig

[Craig Weinberg]

On Thursday, July 12, 2012 4:29:46 PM UTC-4, John K Clark wrote:

On Thu, Jul 12, 2012 at 8:17 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote:

> Then we should stop teaching Newtonian physics as well, since there are no new advances there either.

Not so. A hurricane simulation is pure Newtonian physics and yet they are far far better now, that is to say they give us better understanding of the storm, than they were 10 years ago or even 5. Theology on the other hand was no good for anything 400 years ago and it's no good for anything today.

Hurricane simulations are improved because of improvements in computation, not because Newton's physics have improved. Likewise, Newton's physics were an improvement on his understandings of the Theology and Natural Philosophy of his time. As people had use for Theology 400 years ago, so do they still have even more use for it today as the increasingly interconnected world requires more understanding of theological differences among cultures.
 

 

> How about 'Anything that I deem unimportant should be eliminated.'? Do you detect any flaw in that reasoning?

No, if I feel something is unimportant I generally also feel it would be wiser not to do it and make better use of my time doing something else.

  John K Clark

Of course, but do you see anything wrong with extending that wisdom about your personal evaluations of what is important to the point of universal law?

Craig

[Alberto G. Corona]

First, i wrote an essay about envy and free riding that may be worth to read for people interested in this subject:

http://es.scribd.com/doc/93890864/Punitive-sentiment-against-successful-individuals-as-a-psychological-device-for-anti-hidden-free-riders-in-ancestral-hunter-gatherers

2012/7/13 Stephen P. King <step...@charter.net>

On 7/12/2012 7:04 PM, Alberto G. Corona wrote:

2012/7/12 Stephen P. King <step...@charter.net>

On 7/11/2012 6:47 PM, Alberto G. Corona wrote:

Stephen:

Well it´s not cooperation between computer programs, but cooperation of entities in the abstract level. This can be described mathematically or simulated in a computer program. In both cases, it starts with a game with its rules  goals  wins and loses is created.

Hi Alberto,

    OK, but can we think of the abstract level as the dual of a physical level where physical objects play out their scattering games? What is described by mathematics and/or simulated by computer program does not have to just be some abstraction. We cannot assume absolute closure and any implied externality is just semantics of the abstractions. Abstractions simply cannot exist as free floating entities, for this leads inevitably to contradictions.

Concerning the question of individuality, A good selfish collaborator must develop an individuality and !self conscience! (and we are talking about collaboration between selfish entities, that want as much benefit from the collaboration as possible).

 Hi Alberto,

    I suspect that the self has a good reason for existing! I will try to reconstruct the rational that occurred to me the first time I read this posting of your. Very good stuff, I must say! Basically, the idea is that if there was no "self" to refer to then all agents would be free riders as there would ultimately be no consequence for defection strategies. Free riders and other parasites live so long as the host they infect is not yet dead. They have no inherent or automomous structure to preserve over arbitrarily many iterations of the game.

Pure free riders are so. For example An infesting bacteria. But the interesting problem is when there are intellgent agent who uses the information of the self to deceive sometimes (even without being conscious of that) and collaborate in other ocassions depending on needs, the probability of  being unmasked, the cost of other´s  esteem etc. Darwinian selection evolve  the self  to optimize the outcomes from social interaction no matter if the payoff is by means of strategic  small (or big)free ridings within a global strategy of  collaboration. 

The point is that the entity must evaluate other individuals, but he is evaluated by others.

    Right, there is a symmetry involved.

So to know if others will collaborate with him, he must evaluate himself in relation with the others, that is if I, entity A wants to know what to expect from B, he does evaluate B, but also has to evaluate what itself, A did to B in the past. This self start to have the attributes of a conscious moral being. A measure of self steem becones necessary to modulate what he can realistically demand from the others and so on.

    It is here that we get self-reference and its behaviors and phenomena! Jon Barwise (with Seligman) discusses this sort of stuff in his wonderful book Information Flow: The Logic of Distributed Systems . I highly recommend it. You can preview it here.

I´ll take a look. I work in distributed systems. The problem of D Systems of computers is that they usually they are too simple compared with the human networks. The distributed systems are more like ant colonies: Once one computer authenticates itself in the network by using digital IDs or user/password, it becomes a pure collaborator.Ants autenthicate with feromones and they are pure collaborators too, (because ant workers are cloes, and clones are driven by natural selection to behaviours of pure collaboration)

Men are not clones but they are extraordinarily similar (thanks to an evolutionary bottleneck 60.000 years ago). So our optimal strategy is a mix. We do not authenticate only and the fully collaborate. We need much more complex and continuous monitoring of the others and ourselves. We do not communicate data. we transmit data and lies. and lies that we believe that are data that favour our points. So everything is much more complex. However there are ways to study it. For example the human languages can be studied with the shannon laws. usually the words that are shorter carry in less information and occurs frequently: for example Sun, the, or, yes etc. phone carriy less information than smartphone. The human mind, this, devotes more attention to longuer words because they carry more information. Upto now, everithing is identical to an optimal protocol between computers.   What the human add is free ridings: for example people invent longer words and longer prhases that carry no additional information, just to simulate that he transmits more information, suggesting that this person is more interesting that what really it deserves. Advertising uses this in subtle ways. twentynine % discount seems to be more than thirty, for example.

In a computer program, the individuality would be composed of its memory of relevant interactions with others and the evaluation algorithms. It seems that humans can store the details of about 150 other individuals. That´s why companies with less that 150 persons can work efficiently without burocracy. This information is very important and must be syncronized with the others. Most of the talks are about what did who to whom and who deserve something from me because in the past he did something to my friend. Bellond 150 external memory is necessary: written records, registration cards, id numbers, Money

    Interesting and very proprietary information! It reminds me of the small network stuff that Ball discussed in his book Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another . Where could I read more on this? Is there a cyclical property that acts as a memory of sorts in a network of that size (or less)? I get the image of something like a round robin tournament going on....

 

If the game is simple and/or played by a small number of players (for example two) This game is analtyzed with Game Theory techniques to obtain the stable strategies that make each player to optimize its wins in a way that they can not win more and it is inmune to attacks from other players. This is a Nash equilibrium.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium

    I understand and agree! My point is that equilibria to obtain, but we cannot substitute the abstract descriptions of games for the actual playing of the games. There is a duality involved that cannot be collapsed without stultifying both sides.

But when the game is too complex or the players use different strategies or they evolve and adapt, specially when the sucessful entities give birth to new generations with mutant and/or strategies which are a mix of the parents ones (in a way defined in the game) Then it is necessary to simulate it within an computer programs. This is part of the work of Axelrod. evolution of generations is modeled with a genetic program

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_programming

    Yes! This is where we get into law of large numbers situations and have some change of discovering the emergence of aspects of reality that we have just been assuming to be a priori given. Some examples of this are Penrose's "spin networks" and Reg Cahill's "Process physics".

The problem of phisical systems is that they have an state of minimal energy that is "selected" inmediately, without further variations. The Nash equilibrium" is unique and is achieved very fast. The strategy of the entities is simple: Achieve the state of less energy. The study of them is the study of a single interaction, while in darwinian systems the nash equilibriums vary, are chaotic around "attractors" that. they change strategies from time to time by mixing and creating new generations and dying etc.

to summarize, any entity that collaborate need memory of past interactions of each other entity , In other words, it needs individual recongnition ablities and a form of "moral evaluation" of each individual.

    I agree, but how do we treat the notion of memory such that an arbitrary entity has the capacity to access it? We humans have a large memory capacity that we carry around in our craniums...

It also needs to punish free riders even at the cost of its own well being, in a way that the net gain of free riders is negative. or else the fhe collaborators will fail and the defectors/free riders will expland.

    I suspect that free-riders will be, like the poor, always with us.

We each one are free riders because we are selfish collaborators. A twist on selfish collaboration is the self deception: our memory is unconsciously distorted to support our case. we thinkl that we deserve more than the fair share etc.

    These are the pathologies that I find interesting. What kinds of strategies tend to minimize the "sociopaths"? Maybe the best stratergies are the ones that distract sociopathic choices by nominally increasing the pay-off for that appears to be selfish short term gain. But these would have to be compensated form further down the line of iterations... Not simple....

I wrote an essay about all of this. and specially this subject. Envy seems to be a primitive detection mechanism of hidden free riders, (that is deletereous today)

http://es.scribd.com/doc/93890864/Punitive-sentiment-against-successful-individuals-as-a-psychological-device-for-anti-hidden-free-riders-in-ancestral-hunter-gatherers 

So the collaborators need to collaborate too  in the task of  punishing free riders because this is crucial for the stability of collaboration in other tasks.

    But there is a problem with this. There does not exist any finite and pre-given list of what defines a free rider!

we all!. The christian analogy of fallen beings is perfect image of what evolutionary game theory teach about  selfish collaboration under darwinian selection!

    I agree 100%.

 

Forgiveness is another requirement of collaboration, specially when the entities produce spurious behaviours of non collaboration, but collaborate most of the time. A premature punishment could make a collaborator to punish in response so the collaboration ends.

    This rule is a form of pruning, so we can easily see what effects it has in networks of collaborators. It is an aspect of currying or concurrency.

In these games the goals are fixed.

    This is only for the sake of closure, but closed systems have very short life spans, if any life at all. The trick is to get close to closure but not into it completely. Life exists as an exploitation of this possibility.

In more realistic games the goals vary and the means to obtain them depend on knowledge and asssumptions/beliefs, so an homogeneity within the group around both things should be required for collaboration.

    Right!

For sure there is a tradeof between mind sharing and punishment. Less mind sharing, more violent punishment is necessary for a stable collaboration.

    yes, but can you see how this rapidly suppresses any potential for further evolution. It is in effect the establishment of closure that seals off those involved. North Korea is a nice real world example of this.

That is very true!.  sucessful groups fix basic dogmas, but maintain inside controlled darwinian  variation/selection games among individuals for the benefit of the whole group. The market of goods and services operates in this way, under the "dogmas" of trade laws:  The offer of goods and services is the variation. The demand for each of them is the selection. In the process, wealth is created because internal needs are satisfied. The same happens in politics, science, sports etc.

    OK, how do we communicate this to a wider audience?

I don´t know. What I like is to discuss rather than to write alone. To discuss is the best way to learn and to concatenate ideas that are dispersed in the mind.  I wrote some stuff in spanish about this. 

The big picture is group selection and  multilevel selection  . The human societies are entities formed by men,formed by eucariotic cells, formed by procariotic associatios, formed by molecular associations. each upper level is an emergence from the lower level once mechanisms of conflict supression have been developped, so the upper entity can work as an unit of selection itself in this new level, to live in cooperation and conflict with the rest of units of his level and so on.

But the transition in level of complexity never is complete. In each of these levels there are cooperation and conflict simultaneously. each level has supression of conflict mechanisms and all of them have metastatic  (cancerigenous) processes.  

The modern human societies use darwinian processes internally to adapt and solve problemas. In the inmunological system uses it. But also the human brain uses, I guess, an unconscious mechanism of mental variation and selection of ideas by matching them to find (aha!) solutions for problems and creativity. 

 

To verify mind sharing and investment in the group collaboration, periodic public meetings where protocols/rituals of mutual recognition are repeated to assure to each member that the others are in-line. For example, to visit a temple each week, to discuss about the same newspaper or to assist to minoritary rock concerts. (or to mutually interchange checksums of the program content of each entity)

    Certainly! This shows a rational for the "rituals" that we see as "traditions" in cultures, for example.

 But this is not the last world. It is a world of infinite complexity. For example, a strategy for avoiding free riders or mind sharing can be exploited by meta-free-riders. Among humans, when trust is scarce, sacrifices in the temples, blood pacts and violent punishments become necessary.to avoid free riders and maintain stable the collaboration.

    Are you familiar with Hypergames? Novelity is the result of openness, but at the cost of allowing free riders. They are a necessary evil.

Yes, see above. However, dogmas are necessary. The point is a good combination of dogmas rules, rites, traditions and punishments so that  selfishness (perceived internally as freedom) work for the good of the group. and deletereous selfisness (antisocial) is supressed.

    We are faced with a situation where there is a pay-off for ignoring these facts. People are in a "head in the sand" mode. :'(

I think that the Positivism has damaged our intuitive knowledge about all of this stuff. We have common sense, that is an instinctive knowledge of important things for life in society. The greek philosophy aknowledged this fact. Plato and Aristotle accepted as reasonable and true what comes from the internal sense of what is right and makes sense. This faculty were called the Nous.

 Positivism reject this. What is not studied by science does not count as knowledge and must be rejected and, often, laugh at it . This has been the bigger backslash in the self konwledge of Men and his society in the History..

Fortunately there are new scientific tools that permits to recover and legitimize again this knowledge in a scientific way, by studing societies and humans as natural phenomenons,, so the narrow scientist positivists have nothing to object, 

So this is encouraging!

All of this does not change wjheter the entities are humans, robots or programs. Evolutionary game theory is a field in active research by economist, lawyers,moralists, computer scientists, Philosophers, psichologists etc.

   
    Good stuff!

.  Matt Rydley "what is human" is a good introduction.

    I will add this to my list. Thanks! I found this, http://www.scribd.com/doc/47413560/69/MATT-RIDLEY , so far...

2012/7/11 Stephen P. King <step...@charter.net>

On 7/11/2012 4:29 AM, Alberto G. Corona wrote:

2012/7/10 meekerdb <meek...@verizon.net>

Why would you not expect a theory-of-everything to include the behavior of people?  Note that 'govern' does not imply 'predictable'.

A phisicinst theory of everithing , despite the popular belief, does not "govern" the behaviour of the people. No longer than the binary logic govern the behaviour of computer programs. I can program in binary logic whatever I want without limitations. the wetware whose activity produces the human mind could execute potentially any kind of behaviour. Our behaviour is not governed by anything related wth a phisical TOE, but by the laws of natural selection applied to social beings. I can observe the evolution of such behaviours (in a shchematic way) in a binary world within a computer program as well. Robert Axelrod dit it for the first time.

On the contrary, the antrophic principle tell you that is the mind the determinant element for the existence of a TOE. A phisical TOE  It is just the playing field and the stuff upon things are made. 

Dear Albert,

    Interesting that you bring up http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_cooperation ! Could you elaborate a bit on your thoughts? Do you have any ideas how to model cooperation between computer programs? The main problem that I have found is in defining the interface between computations. How does one define "identity" for a given computation such that it is distinguished from all others?

-- 
Onward!

Stephen

"Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed." 
~ Francis Bacon

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[Alberto G. Corona]

We all are thrown to existence in a box. we do not know how nor why and for what purpose. We can choose to concentrate in looking at the things of the box, or we can spend time looking at the limits of the box, at the whys  and what is out and how to go out. Or to discover the final purpose it there is one, and to interrogate the inner self about that.  That is theology. I think that this is a legitimate activity. and a brave one.  

And now my theology:

 The world of the mind is not the world of the phisical phenomenons. If ,as I said above within this topic, there is only mind and math, being matter a perception of the mind, and math  is determined by the mind (I would said created by it)  then existence becomes a tenuous concept.  It depends on the mind. For a chiken, there is no notion of the existence of persons. if existence is a matter of the mind, it is legitimate to interrogate if sometjing, God for example, exist by asking the inner self. 

And maybe god really do exist because our mind tell us so. My father has died, but I have it very present. it is said that the loved ones that have gone away live in our mind. And it may be for a good reason. Maybe to act as idealized superselfs that observe us and force somehow to be good at other alive loved ones. That may be the reason of the existence of God in relation to the other members of our society.

a bit unrelated:

All isucessful deas have some relation with the reality( that is, are in relation other, more basic ideas) and thus describe this reality. The mith of the universal flooding account for a very rich set of geological and moral facts. why may be that marine fossils are in the mountans an  what horrible things happens when men behave as free riders. The first is a scientific hypotesis, not corroborated by data a posteriori in recent times. The second, is valuable information for life in society. That the first is false does not invalidate the second. There is a ground of truth. It must be, because this has been a very sucessful mith.

2012/7/12 John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com>

On Thu, Jul 12, 2012 at 8:17 AM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Then we should stop teaching Newtonian physics as well, since there are no new advances there either.

Not so. A hurricane simulation is pure Newtonian physics and yet they are far far better now, that is to say they give us better understanding of the storm, than they were 10 years ago or even 5. Theology on the other hand was no good for anything 400 years ago and it's no good for anything today.

 

> How about 'Anything that I deem unimportant should be eliminated.'? Do you detect any flaw in that reasoning?

No, if I feel something is unimportant I generally also feel it would be wiser not to do it and make better use of my time doing something else.

  John K Clark

[meekerdb]

On 7/13/2012 4:07 PM, Alberto G. Corona wrote:

It must be, because this has been a very sucessful mith.

Yes, it was no doubt successful in keeping the peasants believing the in divine knowledge of the free loading priests.

Brent

[Alberto G. Corona]

2012/7/14 meekerdb <meek...@verizon.net>

I can play this kind of downgrading ironies with anything. I´m very good at that ;) . 

If a priest. is as you may think someone who proselitize for an idea of life and tries to capitalize from it, then today the workd is full of priests.

[meekerdb]

On 7/13/2012 4:31 PM, Alberto G. Corona wrote:

2012/7/14 meekerdb <meek...@verizon.net>

On 7/13/2012 4:07 PM, Alberto G. Corona wrote:

It must be, because this has been a very sucessful mith.

Yes, it was no doubt successful in keeping the peasants believing the in divine knowledge of the free loading priests.

Brent

I can play this kind of downgrading ironies with anything. I´m very good at that ;) .

Can you show some other sense in which the myth was "successful"?

Brent