Free will in MWI

[Evgenii Rudnyi]

I have started listening to Beginning of Infinity and joined the
discussion list for the book. Right now there is a discussion there

Free will in MWI
http://groups.google.com/group/beginning-of-infinity/t/b172f0e03d68bcc6

I am at the beginning of the book and I do not know for sure, but from
the answers to this discussion it seems that according to David Deutsch
one can find free will in MWI.

Evgenii
--
http://blog.rudnyi.ru

[Stathis Papaioannou]

One can find or not find free will anywhere depending on how one
defines it. That is the entire issue with free will.


--
Stathis Papaioannou

[John Mikes]

Stathis: what's your definition? - JM

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Stathis Papaioannou

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[Stathis Papaioannou]

On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 5:52 AM, John Mikes <jam...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Stathis: what's your definition? - JM
>
> On Sat, May 5, 2012 at 6:56 PM, Stathis Papaioannou <stat...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> On Sat, May 5, 2012 at 10:46 PM, Evgenii Rudnyi <use...@rudnyi.ru> wrote:
>> > I have started listening to Beginning of Infinity and joined the
>> > discussion
>> > list for the book. Right now there is a discussion there
>> >
>> > Free will in MWI
>> > http://groups.google.com/group/beginning-of-infinity/t/b172f0e03d68bcc6
>> >
>> > I am at the beginning of the book and I do not know for sure, but from
>> > the
>> > answers to this discussion it seems that according to David Deutsch one
>> > can
>> > find free will in MWI.
>>
>> One can find or not find free will anywhere depending on how one
>> defines it. That is the entire issue with free will.

My definition: free will is when you're not sure you're going to do
something until you've done it.


--
Stathis Papaioannou

[meekerdb]

So if carefully weigh my options and decide on one it's not free will?  I'd say free will is making any choice that is not coerced by another agent.

Brent

[Craig Weinberg]

On May 8, 8:22 pm, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote:

>
> So if carefully weigh my options and decide on one it's not free will?  I'd say free will
> is making any choice that is not coerced by another agent.

We have the concept of 'breaking someone's will', which leads me to
think that even being coerced contains the same degree of free will,
except they have chosen to subordinate it to some external agency. The
target is won over by reason, intimidation, confidence, etc, 'an offer
he can't refuse' - ie there is participation even in the face of a
seemingly overpowering coercion. It would seem that there is no
objective created condition that can automatically overpower your will
unless on some level you agree to it - the exception being
physiological conditions which affect consciousness.

Craig

[meekerdb]

When it feels like coercion it's because you have to chose between alternatives both of which are bad.  It it's pay Big George or we break you legs - that's coercion.  If it's a $500 or a date with Kate Beckinsale - that's free will.

Brent

[Quentin Anciaux]

2012/5/9 meekerdb <meek...@verizon.net>

It's compatible with what Stathis said... unti you've made the actual choise, you didn't do it and didn't know what it will be...  "the do something of Stathis can be you're not sure what you'll choose until you've chosen it."
 

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[Craig Weinberg]

On May 9, 12:03 am, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote:

>
> When it feels like coercion it's because you have to chose between alternatives both of
> which are bad.  It it's pay Big George or we break you legs - that's coercion.  If it's a
> $500 or a date with Kate Beckinsale - that's free will.

Yes, but we still can't take the ability to choose for granted though.
If you are unconscious, none of the alternatives exist and no free
will can be exercised. Even though a coerced choice seems like a no
brainer, all choices ultimately have to be 'brainers'.

Craig

[Craig Weinberg]

On May 9, 5:30 am, Quentin Anciaux <allco...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 2012/5/9 meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net>

>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> >  On 5/8/2012 4:24 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
>

> > On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 5:52 AM, John Mikes <jami...@gmail.com> <jami...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >  Stathis: what's your definition? - JM
>

> > On Sat, May 5, 2012 at 6:56 PM, Stathis Papaioannou <stath...@gmail.com> <stath...@gmail.com>
> > wrote:

>
> >  On Sat, May 5, 2012 at 10:46 PM, Evgenii Rudnyi <use...@rudnyi.ru> <use...@rudnyi.ru> wrote:
>
> >  I have started listening to Beginning of Infinity and joined the
> > discussion
> > list for the book. Right now there is a discussion there
>

> > Free will in MWIhttp://groups.google.com/group/beginning-of-infinity/t/b172f0e03d68bcc6

>
> > I am at the beginning of the book and I do not know for sure, but from
> > the
> > answers to this discussion it seems that according to David Deutsch one
> > can
> > find free will in MWI.
>
> >  One can find or not find free will anywhere depending on how one
> > defines it. That is the entire issue with free will.
>
> >  My definition: free will is when you're not sure you're going to do
> > something until you've done it.
>
> > So if carefully weigh my options and decide on one it's not free will?
> > I'd say free will is making any choice that is not coerced by another agent.
>
> > Brent
>
> It's compatible with what Stathis said... unti you've made the actual
> choise, you didn't do it and didn't know what it will be...  "the do
> something of Stathis can be you're not sure what you'll choose until you've
> chosen it."

What difference does it make whether you know what you'll choose
before, during, or after the choice? The key is the word choice
itself. The feeling that we can choose is free will. I can't choose
whether or not I get a fever, and the fact that I don't know that I am
going to get one doesn't make the fever any more of an expression of
my free will. Without the feeling of choice, all of our experiences
would be like getting the fever and we would be helpless spectators to
a deterministic world that we have no investment in.

Craig

Craig

[meekerdb]

Are you saying that one *never* knows what they are going to do until they do it...which then by Stathis defintion means that every action is free will and coercion is impossible?

Brent

[Quentin Anciaux]

2012/5/9 meekerdb <meek...@verizon.net>

 .You have some knowledge of what you'll do... but you can only really "know" retrospectively. Iow, you are your fastest simulator... if it was not the case it would be possible to implement a faster algorithm able to predict what you'll do before you even do it... that seems paradoxical.
 

which then by Stathis defintion means that every action is free will and coercion is impossible?

Coercion limit your choices, not your will, you can still choose to die (if the choice was between your life and something else for example). You can always choose if you can think, it's not because the only available choices are bad, that your free will suddenly disapeared.

Quentin

Brent

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[meekerdb]

I don't see anything paradoxical about it.  A computer that duplicated your brain's neural network, but used electrical or photonic signals (instead of electrochemical) would be orders of magnitude faster.  But this is has no effect on the compatibilist idea of free will (the kind of free will worth having).

 

which then by Stathis defintion means that every action is free will and coercion is impossible?

Coercion limit your choices, not your will, you can still choose to die (if the choice was between your life and something else for example). You can always choose if you can think, it's not because the only available choices are bad, that your free will suddenly disapeared.

So would it be an unfree will if an external agent directly injected chemicals or electrical signals into your brain thereby causing a choice actually made by the external agent?

How is this different from an external agent directly injecting information via your senses causing and thereby causing a choice actually made by the agent?

Brent

[Quentin Anciaux]

It's paradoxical, because if it could, I could know the outcome, and if I could know the outcome, then I can do something else, and If I do something else, then the simulation of that superphotonic computer is wrong hence the hypothesis that it could simulate my choice faster than me is impossible (because if it could, it *must* take in account my future knowledge of my choice, if it does not, it is no faster to simulate what I'll do than me).
 

But this is has no effect on the compatibilist idea of free will (the kind of free will worth having).

 

which then by Stathis defintion means that every action is free will and coercion is impossible?

Coercion limit your choices, not your will, you can still choose to die (if the choice was between your life and something else for example). You can always choose if you can think, it's not because the only available choices are bad, that your free will suddenly disapeared.

So would it be an unfree will if an external agent directly injected chemicals or electrical signals into your brain thereby causing a choice actually made by the external agent?

yes

How is this different from an external agent directly injecting information via your senses causing and thereby causing a choice actually made by the agent?

In the first case *you* choose, in the second case you don't.

 

Brent

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[John Mikes]

On Sat, May 5, 2012 at 6:56 PM, Stathis Papaioannou <stat...@gmail.com> wrote:

...

(JM: what is your definition?)

One can find or not find free will anywhere depending on how one defines it. That is the entire issue with free will.

(JM: what is your definition?)
Stathis:

My definition: free will is when you're not sure you're going to do something until you've done it.

 

JM: Cute. Uncertainty? See below, after Brent's remark ->

*

(Brent: Are you saying that one *never* knows what they are going to do until they do it...which then by Stathis definition means that every action is free will and coercion is impossible? - and furthermore:

So if carefully weigh my options and decide on one it's not free will?  I'd say free will is making any choice that is not coerced by another agent.

Brent

*

Stathis's definition includes both executed and just 'thought-of' decisions as well as those, done upon coertion', an obvious diversion from free will, while Brent presumes to KNOW all influencing(?) agents possible - what my agnosticism denies.

 

My position for denying free will at all comes from the

belief that we are PART of the 'infinite complexity' and

SUBJECT to relations within such. So our decisions are

products of such relational combinations, our genetic(?) built and our wealth of experiential deposits in our mental self(??) whatever that may be.

We only partially know (even: 'about') factors influencing 

our decisions whether we execute them or not.

Another case would be if we are omniscient, of course.

I believe we are not (yet?? - ha ha) omniscient.

JM

[meekerdb]

That's an incoherent paradox.  You've now assumed that not only is your brain simulated, so your action is known in advance, but also that the simulation information is fed back to your brain so it influences the action.  That's changing the problem and essentially creating a brain+simulator=brain'. The fact that brain'=/=brain is hardly paradoxical.

 

But this is has no effect on the compatibilist idea of free will (the kind of free will worth having).

 

which then by Stathis defintion means that every action is free will and coercion is impossible?

Coercion limit your choices, not your will, you can still choose to die (if the choice was between your life and something else for example). You can always choose if you can think, it's not because the only available choices are bad, that your free will suddenly disapeared.

So would it be an unfree will if an external agent directly injected chemicals or electrical signals into your brain thereby causing a choice actually made by the external agent?

yes

Why is it still "you" if your brain is hooked up to something that allows an external agent to control your body?

How is this different from an external agent directly injecting information via your senses causing and thereby causing a choice actually made by the agent?

In the first case *you* choose, in the second case you don't.

?? That's the reverse of your previous post in which you held that an external agent threatening you does not remove your free will.  You said it just limited your choices, you still chose.   Did you read my post correctly?

Brent

[R AM]

On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 1:24 AM, Stathis Papaioannou <stat...@gmail.com> wrote:

My definition: free will is when you're not sure you're going to do
something until you've done it.

My own take on free will is that it is mostly a social construct, so that we can be blamed (and blame others) without feeling bad. The idea of free will only makes sense within a society.

What I want from my decisions is to be correct. I'm not sure what would be added if they also were "absolutely free" or what would be removed if they were not. If you are alone in the jungle, the last thing that will bother you is whether your decisions are absolutely free or not.

I wanted to propose you an experiment. Sit for a moment and try not to think on anything. Sure enough, before 30 seconds have transpired, thoughts will pop up into your mind. Did you decide to think those thoughts? No, because you were actually trying not to think. If you were not doing this exercise but in your normal life and found yourself eating a chocolat bar you would believe that it was you who had decided so. But actually, it just popped up into your mind too. Most of our life is like that.

Ricardo.

[Quentin Anciaux]

Hmm ok... I have to think it a little more.

 

But this is has no effect on the compatibilist idea of free will (the kind of free will worth having).

 

which then by Stathis defintion means that every action is free will and coercion is impossible?

Coercion limit your choices, not your will, you can still choose to die (if the choice was between your life and something else for example). You can always choose if you can think, it's not because the only available choices are bad, that your free will suddenly disapeared.

So would it be an unfree will if an external agent directly injected chemicals or electrical signals into your brain thereby causing a choice actually made by the external agent?

yes

Why is it still "you" if your brain is hooked up to something that allows an external agent to control your body?

I said the contrary... You asked if it would be unfree... I answered "yes"  (it would be unfree in this case).
 

How is this different from an external agent directly injecting information via your senses causing and thereby causing a choice actually made by the agent?

In the first case *you* choose, in the second case you don't.

?? That's the reverse of your previous post in which you held that an external agent threatening you does not remove your

free will.  You said it just limited your choices, you still chose.   Did you read my post correctly?

Yes I read it correctly. If you fed chemicals and electrical signal to my brain then I did not *choose*.

So in the case I'm coerced by an external agent by external means, I can still choose only the available choices are reduced (and all of them can be bad), If  it fed drugs/electrical signal that make me act like a puppet I can't choose.

So in the first case (coerced by external means) I can choose and still have free will albeit having limited bad choices, in the second case (your thought experiment) I don't have free will.

Brent

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[meekerdb]

On 5/9/2012 1:04 PM, R AM wrote:

On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 1:24 AM, Stathis Papaioannou <stat...@gmail.com> wrote:

My definition: free will is when you're not sure you're going to do
something until you've done it.

My own take on free will is that it is mostly a social construct, so that we can be blamed (and blame others) without feeling bad. The idea of free will only makes sense within a society.

Exactly.  It is only in contrast to coerced will.  An extreme example is prisoners of war.  It is generally considered traitorous for a prisoner to give helpful information to the enemy.  But an exception is made for yielding under torture.

Brent

What I want from my decisions is to be correct. I'm not sure what would be added if they also were "absolutely free" or what would be removed if they were not. If you are alone in the jungle, the last thing that will bother you is whether your decisions are absolutely free or not.

I wanted to propose you an experiment. Sit for a moment and try not to think on anything. Sure enough, before 30 seconds have transpired, thoughts will pop up into your mind. Did you decide to think those thoughts? No, because you were actually trying not to think. If you were not doing this exercise but in your normal life and found yourself eating a chocolat bar you would believe that it was you who had decided so. But actually, it just popped up into your mind too. Most of our life is like that.

Ricardo.

 

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[meekerdb]

OK, we agree on that.

 

How is this different from an external agent directly injecting information via your senses causing and thereby causing a choice actually made by the agent?

In the first case *you* choose,

But you said in the first case 'you' were unfree??

in the second case you don't.

?? That's the reverse of your previous post in which you held that an external agent threatening you does not remove your

free will.  You said it just limited your choices, you still chose.   Did you read my post correctly?

Yes I read it correctly. If you fed chemicals and electrical signal to my brain then I did not *choose*.

That's the first case, but not the second.

So in the case I'm coerced by an external agent by external means, I can still choose only the available choices are reduced (and all of them can be bad), If  it fed drugs/electrical signal that make me act like a puppet I can't choose.

So in the first case (coerced by external means) I can choose and still have free will albeit having limited bad choices, in the second case (your thought experiment) I don't have free will.

Brent

Maybe we need to number these:

(1)"...an external agent directly injected chemicals or electrical signals into your brain thereby causing a choice actually made by the external agent."

    To which you answered "Yes (that's unfree)." AND "...in the first case I can still choose."

(2) "...an external agent directly injecting information via your senses..."
   
    To which you answered "...in the second case I don't have free will."

Yet (2) consists only of the external agent talking to you and threatening or cajoling.

Brent

[Quentin Anciaux]

And here I made it clear that the first case was what I was talking about first and the second case was your thought experiment (chemical/electrical puppeting trick) that came after.

Whatever, there is no point repeating I answer I can still choose when I was unfree, I did not say that.

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[Quentin Anciaux]

2012/5/9 Quentin Anciaux <allc...@gmail.com>

So:

1- If someone is threatening me via my senses (via a weapons he holds, on some forces he acts upon me... I still have free will, I've still the ability to choose, some choices are more dangerous, I'm coerced to choose what the agressor wants, but still have the possibility to act otherwise upon my will.

2- If someone is using chemical or electrical agent modifying my brain state and having me acting like a puppet, I don't have free will, I don't have anymore the possibility to act otherwise.

Quentin
 

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[meekerdb]

On 5/9/2012 2:15 PM, Quentin Anciaux wrote:

Maybe we need to number these:

(1)"...an external agent directly injected chemicals or electrical signals into your brain thereby causing a choice actually made by the external agent."

    To which you answered "Yes (that's unfree)." AND "...in the first case I can still choose."

(2) "...an external agent directly injecting information via your senses..."
   
    To which you answered "...in the second case I don't have free will."

Yet (2) consists only of the external agent talking to you and threatening or cajoling.

Brent

And here I made it clear that the first case was what I was talking about first and the second case was your thought experiment (chemical/electrical puppeting trick) that came after.

Whatever, there is no point repeating I answer I can still choose when I was unfree, I did not say that.

OK, I misunderstood what you meant by 'first' and 'second'.   But then I'm not sure what your opinion of (2) and why it is different from (1)?

Brent

[meekerdb]

On 5/9/2012 2:19 PM, Quentin Anciaux wrote:
> So:
>
> 1- If someone is threatening me via my senses (via a weapons he holds, on some forces he
> acts upon me... I still have free will, I've still the ability to choose, some choices
> are more dangerous, I'm coerced to choose what the agressor wants, but still have the
> possibility to act otherwise upon my will.

But if you do decide to comply determinism would say there wasn't a possibility you could
have done otherwise. The other agent was compelling.

>
> 2- If someone is using chemical or electrical agent modifying my brain state and having
> me acting like a puppet, I don't have free will, I don't have anymore the possibility to
> act otherwise.

But is it really different? The words spoken to you also modify your brain state. It's
not 'acting like a puppet' because it changes your mind as well as your action, you still
think you're making a choice - it's not that the external agent just drives the efferent
nerves to your muscles.

Brent

[Quentin Anciaux]

2012/5/9 meekerdb <meek...@verizon.net>

It is in the ability to make a choice yourself, not that there are limited choices options. Coercion limit the available choices... If you are obligated to choose under coercions, the choices are not free, but to act (or not) on them is still free (you still can think) contrary to when in your setting you cannot act at all.

Quentin

 

Brent

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[Quentin Anciaux]

2012/5/9 meekerdb <meek...@verizon.net>

Well it's not an off/on switch... so it depends. I'd say that while you can still think for yourself, then you still have some amount of free will... less and less free while more and more coerced.

Unless there is only one choice left (strange to still called that a choice).. there still some amount of free will.

Because in reality... the world if full of coercions, social, geographical etc... so either the stance is there is no free will because there is always something that limit the availables choices hence the choice itself is not free because it is constrained or until there is no more choices, some amount of free will/self determination is present.

Quentin
 

Brent

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[meekerdb]

On 5/9/2012 3:34 PM, Quentin Anciaux wrote:

2012/5/9 meekerdb <meek...@verizon.net>

On 5/9/2012 2:19 PM, Quentin Anciaux wrote:

So:

1- If someone is threatening me via my senses (via a weapons he holds, on some forces he acts upon me... I still have free will, I've still the ability to choose, some choices are more dangerous, I'm coerced to choose what the agressor wants, but still have the possibility to act otherwise upon my will.

But if you do decide to comply determinism would say there wasn't a possibility you could have done otherwise.  The other agent was compelling.

2- If someone is using chemical or electrical agent modifying my brain state and having me acting like a puppet, I don't have free will, I don't have anymore the possibility to act otherwise.

But is it really different?  The words spoken to you also modify your brain state.  It's not 'acting like a puppet' because it changes your mind as well as your action, you still think you're making a choice - it's not that the external agent just drives the efferent nerves to your muscles.

Well it's not an off/on switch... so it depends. I'd say that while you can still think for yourself, then you still have some amount of free will... less and less free while more and more coerced.

Unless there is only one choice left (strange to still called that a choice).. there still some amount of free will.

Because in reality... the world if full of coercions, social, geographical etc... so either the stance is there is no free will because there is always something that limit the availables choices hence the choice itself is not free because it is constrained or until there is no more choices, some amount of free will/self determination is present.

I agree.  There's no sharp line between coerced and free choice.  In legal cases it's something for juries to decide.  So 'free will' is mainly a social concept meaning 'not unduly influenced and therefore responsible'.

Brent

[Stathis Papaioannou]

On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 10:22 AM, meekerdb <meek...@verizon.net> wrote:

> My definition: free will is when you're not sure you're going to do
> something until you've done it.
>
>
>
> So if carefully weigh my options and decide on one it's not free will?  I'd
> say free will is making any choice that is not coerced by another agent.

Even if you carefully weigh your options you have the feeling that you
could change your mind at the last option. However, I didn't want to
argue about the definition. The point I was making is that different
people can legitimately differ on how they define it, so that
depending on the definition it is or isn't compatible with
determinism.


--
Stathis Papaioannou

[meekerdb]

I agree with that point.  But I also wanted to make the point that there is social concept of free will that has to do with responsibility, and it is compatible with different dualist, determinist, and non-deterministic concepts of will, "free" and otherwise.

Brent

[R AM]

On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 3:07 AM, meekerdb <meek...@verizon.net> wrote:

I agree with that point.  But I also wanted to make the point that there is social concept of free will that has to do with responsibility, and it is compatible with different dualist, determinist, and non-deterministic concepts of will, "free" and otherwise.

Yes, and responsability is linked with punishment which in turn is linked with learning and regulating behavior. It's all social.

It is revealing that when discussing free will, most examples are moral situations. Very rarely free will is exemplified with choosing going to the movies or going to the theather.

Ricardo.

[John Clark]

Stathis Papaioannou wrote

> My definition: free will is when you're not sure you're going to do
something until you've done it.

On Tue, May 8, meekerdb <meek...@verizon.net> wrote:

> So if carefully weigh my options and decide on one it's not free will?

You don't know what the outcome all those options will have on you until you have finished weighing the options and you will know you have completely finished when you act.
 

  >I'd say free will is making any choice that is not coerced by another agent.

So you say the noise "free will" means sometimes being able to do what we want to do, but then we don't have free will most of the time because most of the time we can not do exactly what we want to do, we can't even think what we want to think all the time; nobody wants to think sad depressing thoughts but we often think them nevertheless.  And I don't see why coercion is limited to another agent, if I want to go from point X to Point Y in the shortest path a brick wall will prevent me from doing so just as effectively as a large man with a large club. And of course if there was a reason for making the choice you did then it was deterministic and if there was no reason for making the choice then it was random.

  John K Clark

[meekerdb]

On 5/10/2012 1:08 PM, John Clark wrote:

Stathis Papaioannou wrote

> My definition: free will is when you're not sure you're going to do
something until you've done it.

So by your definition is a there ever a time when you're not exercising free will? 

On Tue, May 8, meekerdb <meek...@verizon.net> wrote:

> So if carefully weigh my options and decide on one it's not free will?

You don't know what the outcome all those options will have on you until you have finished weighing the options and you will know you have completely finished when you act.
 

  >I'd say free will is making any choice that is not coerced by another agent.

So you say the noise "free will" means sometimes being able to do what we want to do,

That isn't what I said.  I said that sometimes we decide what we're going to do before we do it and so, by your definition, we're exercising free will.  Now you may say we're not *sure* we're going to do it until we've done it.  But that's rather like just giving a definition and then just assuming it's never satisfied.  Sometimes we do what we planned to do so what does it mean to say we weren't sure even though we thought we were?

but then we don't have free will most of the time because most of the time we can not do exactly what we want to do, we can't even think what we want to think all the time; nobody wants to think sad depressing thoughts but we often think them nevertheless. 

And I don't see why coercion is limited to another agent,

It's just a definition.  Being obstructed by physics isn't coercion, being threatened by a guy with a gun is because presumably he has some reasons different from yours.

if I want to go from point X to Point Y in the shortest path a brick wall will prevent me from doing so just as effectively as a large man with a large club. And of course if there was a reason for making the choice you did then it was deterministic and if there was no reason for making the choice then it was random.

Coerced/free is a social or legal dichotomy. It admits of degrees.  It's orthogonal to deterministic/random.

Brent

  John K Clark

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[John Clark]

On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 5:01 PM, meekerdb <meek...@verizon.net> wrote:

> So by your definition is a there ever a time when you're not exercising free will? 

No, and that of course means that the "free will" noise is a totally useless concept, a idea so bad it's not even wrong. 

> sometimes we decide what we're going to do before we do it

Yes, and sometimes we change our minds when it comes time to actually act, and as Turing proved in 1936 in general there is no way for you (or anybody else) to know if you will change your mind until you act and observe what you did. There is no shortcut, you can only watch yourself and see what you do.

> and so, by your definition, we're exercising free will. 

And that's why the "free will" idea is so useless; if everything that exists and everything that does not exist has the "klogknee" property then klogknee is as useless as the "free will" noise.

> Now you may say we're not *sure* we're going to do it until we've done it.  But that's rather like just giving a definition and then just assuming it's never satisfied. 

Yes or always satisfied, either way it's pointless.

 

> Sometimes we do what we planned to do

And sometimes we don't and there is no way to discriminate between the two beforehand, you can only observe and see what you eventually do.

> so what does it mean to say we weren't sure even though we thought we were?

Being certain is easy, being certain and correct is not; people can be absolutely positively 100% certain about something and still be dead wrong, in fact it's very very common. You'd have to be pretty damn sure you were going to get 77 virgins in the afterlife to put on a TNT jockstrap and blow yourself up at 40,000 feet; but regardless of his certainty I don't think the underwear bomber was correct.

> Being obstructed by physics isn't coercion, being threatened by a guy with a gun is

Coercion is just a subset of obstruction, a mountain range or a big man with a big gun can both prevent you from going where you want to go and doing what you want to do.

 

> It's orthogonal to deterministic/random.

Orthogonal? There is only one way "it" could not be deterministic and not random, there is only one way "it" was not caused for a reason and not not caused for a reason, and that is if "it" is gibberish. Gibberish is not correct or incorrect, it's just gibberish, like free will.

  John K Clark

[meekerdb]

On 5/11/2012 8:50 AM, John Clark wrote:

Orthogonal? There is only one way "it" could not be deterministic and not random, there is only one way "it" was not caused for a reason and not not caused for a reason, and that is if "it" is gibberish. Gibberish is not correct or incorrect, it's just gibberish, like free will.

  John K Clark

You apparently don't know what 'orthogonal' means.  It means all combinations are possible (given my social/legal definition of 'free will').

Brent

[Bruno Marchal]

On 11 May 2012, at 17:50, John Clark wrote:

On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 5:01 PM, meekerdb <meek...@verizon.net> wrote:

> So by your definition is a there ever a time when you're not exercising free will? 

No, and that of course means that the "free will" noise is a totally useless concept, a idea so bad it's not even wrong. 

That is what people said about consciousness some time ago. I think "free will" is more a problem than something we can evacuate so easily. But for me it is just a sort of generalization of responsibility, like the responsibility to have a nice evening when deciding between going to the theater and the movie, as an example.

We have a local partial control, and can choose in a spectrum of possibilities, and can reason about the consequences, and decide accordingly. 

In the law, it is useful for making a distinction between a criminal and a sick.

> sometimes we decide what we're going to do before we do it

Yes, and sometimes we change our minds when it comes time to actually act, and as Turing proved in 1936 in general there is no way for you (or anybody else) to know if you will change your mind until you act and observe what you did. There is no shortcut, you can only watch yourself and see what you do.

It is not that easy. 

And why did you murder your wife? the judge asked. Oh! it was just an experience in quantum mechanics, I was asking myself if there was a solution of the wave equation where I kill my wife, and well, now I know that me killing my wife is indeed a solution of the correct quantum equation (that the physicists have not yet found, btw).

> and so, by your definition, we're exercising free will. 

And that's why the "free will" idea is so useless; if everything that exists and everything that does not exist has the "klogknee" property then klogknee is as useless as the "free will" noise.

OK. But there are other example. You did acknowledge that between computable and non computable there are intermediates, but there are intermediate between computable and random, and between self-determinism and self-indeterminism. 

> Now you may say we're not *sure* we're going to do it until we've done it.  But that's rather like just giving a definition and then just assuming it's never satisfied. 

Yes or always satisfied, either way it's pointless.

 

> Sometimes we do what we planned to do

And sometimes we don't and there is no way to discriminate between the two beforehand, you can only observe and see what you eventually do.

> so what does it mean to say we weren't sure even though we thought we were?

Being certain is easy, being certain and correct is not;

Being certain is never correct, except for the uncommunicable (private) feeling that someone is conscious, perhaps.

With comp, being correct is difficult, but being both correct and certain is impossible, except for the fixed point, perhaps.

people can be absolutely positively 100% certain about something and still be dead wrong,

Yes.

in fact it's very very common.

Yes. That's why science and religion is really doubt and hope.

Public certainty is the devil.

You'd have to be pretty damn sure you were going to get 77 virgins in the afterlife to put on a TNT jockstrap and blow yourself up at 40,000 feet; but regardless of his certainty I don't think the underwear bomber was correct.

> Being obstructed by physics isn't coercion, being threatened by a guy with a gun is

Coercion is just a subset of obstruction, a mountain range or a big man with a big gun can both prevent you from going where you want to go and doing what you want to do.

Hmm... Coercion involves the free will, or responsibility, of other agents. 

 

> It's orthogonal to deterministic/random.

Orthogonal? There is only one way "it" could not be deterministic and not random, there is only one way "it" was not caused for a reason and not not caused for a reason, and that is if "it" is gibberish. Gibberish is not correct or incorrect, it's just gibberish, like free will. 

From the (many) self-referential points of view of the (different) persons, it can be partially determined and partially not determined. 

Bruno

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

[Craig Weinberg]

On May 11, 11:50 am, John Clark <johnkcl...@gmail.com> wrote:


> Orthogonal? There is only one way "it" could not be deterministic and not
> random, there is only one way "it" was not caused for a reason and not not
> caused for a reason, and that is if "it" is gibberish. Gibberish is not
> correct or incorrect, it's just gibberish, like free will.

On what basis do you claim this dichotomy? Think of a black and white
checkerboard. Is it black? Is it white? Is it neither black nor white?
Even to say that it is both black and white is not sufficient to
describe the checkered pattern of it. This is like free will. Somewhat
deterministic, somewhat indeterministic, but not meaningfully
describable in terms of either of those qualities or lack of qualities
- it is orthogonal to that dichotomy as spring and fall is to winter
and summer or blue and yellow is to red and green. There is no
gibberish involved, it is crystal clear.

Craig

[John Clark]

On Fri, May 11, 2012 at 12:52 PM, meekerdb <meek...@verizon.net> wrote:

>> Orthogonal? There is only one way "it" could not be deterministic and not random, there is only one way "it" was not caused for a reason and not not caused for a reason, and that is if "it" is gibberish. Gibberish is not correct or incorrect, it's just gibberish, like free will.

> You apparently don't know what 'orthogonal' means.

adjective
1) Involving in right angles and used primarily by pretentious people who incorrectly think it makes them sound more intelligent than the word perpendicular.
2) Statistically independent.  

> It means all combinations are possible

You apparently don't know what "orthogonal" means.

  John K Clark

[John Clark]

On Fri, May 11, 2012 at 1:58 PM, Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

> And why did you murder your wife? the judge asked.

If I had a reason I killed my wife and the judge thought that reason indicated I was unlikely to do something like that again (I killed her because she was chasing me with a bloody ax) then the judge should set me free; if the reason I killed her indicates I would be a menace to society in the future (I killed her because I didn't like the twinkle in her eye) then the judge should not set me free. If I killed her for no reason whatsoever then I'm a extremely dangerous ticking time bomb and a few hundred amps of electricity passing through my body would improve me immeasurably in just a few minutes.  

> You did acknowledge that between computable and non computable there are intermediates, but there are intermediate between computable and random, and between self-determinism and self-indeterminism.

Yes, and the technical term for the idea that events are neither random nor deterministic is "gibberish", although some experts prefer the word "bullshit". 

> Coercion involves the free will, or responsibility, of other agents. 

Cannot comment, don't know what  ASCII string "free will" means.

 John K Clark

[meekerdb]

You should get a 21st century dictionary

Definition
orthogonal

In geometry, orthogonal means "involving right angles" (from Greek ortho, meaning right, and gon meaning angled). The term has been extended to general use, meaning the characteristic of being independent (relative to something else).

Brent

[meekerdb]

On 5/11/2012 11:02 PM, John Clark wrote:

On Fri, May 11, 2012 at 1:58 PM, Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

> And why did you murder your wife? the judge asked.

If I had a reason I killed my wife and the judge thought that reason indicated I was unlikely to do something like that again (I killed her because she was chasing me with a bloody ax)

So was that coercing you to run or kill her?  or could you have just chosen to be axed?

then the judge should set me free; if the reason I killed her indicates I would be a menace to society in the future (I killed her because I didn't like the twinkle in her eye) then the judge should not set me free.

Even if the judge thinks you are unlikely to kill anyone else he will still punish you as an example.  But if, for example, you killed her because someone credibly threatened to kill you and your children if you didn't, the judge would consider that a mitigating instance of coercion. 

If I killed her for no reason whatsoever then I'm a extremely dangerous ticking time bomb and a few hundred amps of electricity passing through my body would improve me immeasurably in just a few minutes.  

> You did acknowledge that between computable and non computable there are intermediates, but there are intermediate between computable and random, and between self-determinism and self-indeterminism.

Yes, and the technical term for the idea that events are neither random nor deterministic is "gibberish", although some experts prefer the word "bullshit". 

> Coercion involves the free will, or responsibility, of other agents. 

Cannot comment, don't know what  ASCII string "free will" means.

Are you equally ignorant of the meaning of "responsibility"?

Brent

[Bruno Marchal]

On 12 May 2012, at 08:02, John Clark wrote:

On Fri, May 11, 2012 at 1:58 PM, Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

> And why did you murder your wife? the judge asked.

If I had a reason I killed my wife and the judge thought that reason indicated I was unlikely to do something like that again (I killed her because she was chasing me with a bloody ax) then the judge should set me free; if the reason I killed her indicates I would be a menace to society in the future (I killed her because I didn't like the twinkle in her eye) then the judge should not set me free. If I killed her for no reason whatsoever then I'm a extremely dangerous ticking time bomb and a few hundred amps of electricity passing through my body would improve me immeasurably in just a few minutes.  

> You did acknowledge that between computable and non computable there are intermediates, but there are intermediate between computable and random, and between self-determinism and self-indeterminism.

Yes, and the technical term for the idea that events are neither random nor deterministic is "gibberish", although some experts prefer the word "bullshit". 

The free-will notion is not related to the possible determinacy in the big picture. Events can be neither random, nor *determined* by me in the situation I am embedded in. 

You seems to ignore (again?) the local points of view, and the fact that, although machines can be said determined, they are not entirely determined from what they can know about themselves at the time they decide to act.

So your argument is not against "free-will can make sense", but against the idea that "free-will can make sense from some absolute point of view".

> Coercion involves the free will, or responsibility, of other agents. 

Cannot comment, don't know what  ASCII string "free will" means.

It means the ability to chose among a set of future possibilities on which "I" am currently ignorant. It is the ability to decide, when knowing you are ignorant of many parameters, or to decide in acknowledging absence of complete information. 

It is certainly a tricky notion, like consciousness and conscience/moral responsibility, but I fail to se why you are sure that it does not make (local) sense. 

You are neglecting the particular context, or situation in which agents are embedded. What you say make sense for absolute free will, but not for relative free will of an agent in a complex situation where, although he is determined, he can't be aware of the determination. Situation like that abounds in the laws, jurisprudence, and is capital in the human sciences, and one day in the computer science too (even without comp). 

Free-will is a higher order relational notion, and it is totally unrelated to the determinacy question, although it can be related with some notion of local, actual, self-indeterminacy (but NOT the comp-1-indeterminacy, in this case it *is* more the Turing type of partial indeterminacy). As I. J. Good remarked, it can be related also with relative speed of computation, and this can be useful to understand the role of consciousness in free will.

- Bruno Marchal

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

[John Clark]

On Sat, May 12, 2012  meekerdb <meek...@verizon.net> wrote:

> You should get a 21st century dictionary

In geometry, orthogonal means "involving right angles" (from Greek ortho, meaning right, and gon meaning angled). The term has been extended to general use, meaning the characteristic of being independent (relative to something else).

So lets review:  you said  "It's orthogonal to deterministic/random" and I responded with  "Orthogonal? There is only one way "it" could not be deterministic and not random {independent of determinism and randomness} , there is only one way "it" was not caused for a reason and not not caused for a reason, and that is if "it" is gibberish". That clearly demonstrates two things, I knew EXACTLY what the word "orthogonal" meant and you my dear Brent did not.

  John K Clark

 

[John Clark]

On Sat, May 12, 2012 at 8:34 AM, Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

> although machines can be said determined, they are not entirely determined from what they can know about themselves at the time they decide to act.

As I've said many many times, Turing proved in 1936 that in general there is no shortcut and the only way to know what a machine will do is to watch it and see, even the machine does not know what it will do until it does it.

> It [free will] means the ability to chose among a set of future possibilities

So free will means the ability to choose and the ability to choose means you have free will, and round and round we go. No amount of mental contortions can avoid the fact that you made the choice for a reason or you did not make the choice for a reason. You're a coo coo clock or a roulette wheel, there is no third alternative.    

 

> Situation like that abounds in the laws, jurisprudence,

And that's why  jurisprudence works so poorly and contains so many self contradictions.

> although he is determined, he can't be aware of the determination.

That's what Turing proved and I've been saying for months. So what are we arguing about?

> Free-will is a higher order relational notion, and it is totally unrelated to the determinacy question

Oh I'd forgotten, that's what we're arguing about.

  John K Clark

[meekerdb]

No you don't.  I guess I have to draw a diagram

                               Determined
                                    |
                                    |
                 Coerced-------------------------Free
                                    |
                                    |
                                 Random

What I said was that it's, i.e. coerced/free is a variable orthogonal to deterministic/random, meaning that points in all quadrants of the above diagram are possible.

Brent

[Craig Weinberg]

On May 12, 4:10 pm, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote:

> No you don't.  I guess I have to draw a diagram
>
>                                 Determined
>                                      |
>                                      |
>                   Coerced-------------------------Free
>                                      |
>                                      |
>                                   Random
>
> What I said was that it's, i.e. coerced/free is a variable orthogonal to
> deterministic/random, meaning that points in all quadrants of the above diagram are possible.

Nice. That's part of what I am trying to get at with my diagram:
http://multisenserealism.com/about/#wpcom-carousel-370

Determined = "Sense", Random = "?",
Free = "Sensorimotive" (1p), Coerced = "Electromagnetic" (3p)

Craig

[Quentin Anciaux]

2012/5/12 John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com>

Sometimes, you should really try to let it go, and ?? think ? surely you must be able to do it... you are human ? aren't you ?

Quentin

  John K Clark

 

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[Pierz]

I remember a kid back in secondary school saying to me that if everything was determined - as seemed inevitable to him from his understanding of physics - then you might as well give up and despair, since that was inevitable anyway! I tried to explain that this was a confusion of levels between the absolute and the relative, the same point that Bruno is making. From an absolute perspective, we may be completely determined (or partially random, it makes no difference essentially), from *inside* that system, our best way of acting is *as if* free will/responsibility etc were real. Obviously, if I act as if determinism was not a cause for despair, my life is going to look a lot better than if I did, and seeing as the absolute determinism of things does not tell me which way to decide the issue, I'm forced to use my relative local wisdom to decide on the former.

John Clarke seems to be saying that the law is an ass, not because of human-level failures of reasoning/justice etc, but because the criminal was predestined to act the way s/he did, or behaved randomly, and in either case no reponsibility can be assigned. But the mistake here is the same as the one made by my high school friend. The absolute perspective has nothing useful to say about the local/relative one. If we were to follow this philosophy, the courage of heroes such as Nelson Mandela would be no cause for Nobel Peace Prizes, and the acts of villains such as Anders Breivik no cause for censure, because such of their inevitability in the absolute scheme of things.

The problem is that *not* censuring or *not* awarding prizes are also evaluative acts, about which determinism and the absolute perspective have nothing to say. And I believe that no-one, not even JC himself, can escape the human perspective. When he loads derision and sarcasm on other contributors' arguments, he is acting as if they had a choice in what they believed. There can be no fools in the abolute perpective, as there can be no criminals.

[meekerdb]

On 5/12/2012 6:48 PM, Pierz wrote:
> I remember a kid back in secondary school saying to me that if everything was determined - as seemed inevitable to him from his understanding of physics - then you might as well give up and despair, since that was inevitable anyway! I tried to explain that this was a confusion of levels between the absolute and the relative, the same point that Bruno is making. From an absolute perspective, we may be completely determined (or partially random, it makes no difference essentially), from *inside* that system, our best way of acting is *as if* free will/responsibility etc were real. Obviously, if I act as if determinism was not a cause for despair, my life is going to look a lot better than if I did, and seeing as the absolute determinism of things does not tell me which way to decide the issue, I'm forced to use my relative local wisdom to decide on the former.
>
> John Clarke seems to be saying that the law is an ass, not because of human-level failures of reasoning/justice etc, but because the criminal was predestined to act the way s/he did, or behaved randomly, and in either case no reponsibility can be assigned.

But he just recasts the problem of justice in terms of prospective outcomes. If you
broaden this out you can provide a justification for rule-based justice: it will deter
future crimes prevent vendettas. But then you don't need to know the criminal's reason,
only what the effect on society of punishing him, or not, will be.

> But the mistake here is the same as the one made by my high school friend. The absolute perspective has nothing useful to say about the local/relative one. If we were to follow this philosophy, the courage of heroes such as Nelson Mandela would be no cause for Nobel Peace Prizes, and the acts of villains such as Anders Breivik no cause for censure, because such of their inevitability in the absolute scheme of things.
>
> The problem is that *not* censuring or *not* awarding prizes are also evaluative acts, about which determinism and the absolute perspective have nothing to say.

Sure it does: They are determined.

> And I believe that no-one, not even JC himself, can escape the human perspective. When he loads derision and sarcasm on other contributors' arguments, he is acting as if they had a choice in what they believed. There can be no fools in the abolute perpective, as there can be no criminals.

And we're acting as if he were interested in other's thoughts; which seems doubtful.

Brent

[Pierz]

On Sunday, May 13, 2012 12:58:28 PM UTC+10, Brent wrote:

On 5/12/2012 6:48 PM, Pierz wrote:
> I remember a kid back in secondary school saying to me that if everything was determined - as seemed inevitable to him from his understanding of physics - then you might as well give up and despair, since that was inevitable anyway!  I tried to explain that this was a confusion of levels between the absolute and the relative, the same point that Bruno is making. From an absolute perspective, we may be completely determined (or partially random, it makes no difference essentially), from *inside* that system, our best way of acting is *as if* free will/responsibility etc were real. Obviously, if I act as if determinism was not a cause for despair, my life is going to look a lot better than if I did, and seeing as the absolute determinism of things does not tell me which way to decide the issue, I'm forced to use my relative local wisdom to decide on the former.
>
> John Clarke seems to be saying that the law is an ass, not because of human-level failures of reasoning/justice etc, but because the criminal was predestined to act the way s/he did, or behaved randomly, and in either case no reponsibility can be assigned.

But he just recasts the problem of justice in terms of prospective outcomes.  If you
broaden this out you can provide a justification for rule-based justice: it will deter
future crimes prevent vendettas.  But then you don't need to know the criminal's reason,
only what the effect on society of punishing him, or not, will be.

I can see that. But consider that the notion of being able to change the outcome of future society - 'prevent' or 'deter' anything at all - depends on the possibility of variant futures. From the absolute perspective, such variation is impossible (or is merely random and so not subject to reason or 'choice'). So how does one justify any decision? Seen absolutely, it was inevitable and there can be no talk of a good or a bad decision. But such a position is clearly untenable. So if one is forced to make evaluative decisions as if the future were not determined, one can and must also make retrospective evaluations of decisions - as being good or bad, noble or reprehensible, etc. One can do this locally with the awareness that at an absolute level, such an evaluation may be meaningless, and not fall into absurdity or contradiction. In fact it is the attempt to act and evaluate locally as if one had access to the absolute perspective that is doomed to absurdity.

 

> But the mistake here is the same as the one made by my high school friend. The absolute perspective has nothing useful to say about the local/relative one. If we were to follow this philosophy, the courage of heroes such as Nelson Mandela would be no cause for Nobel Peace Prizes, and the acts of villains such as Anders Breivik no cause for censure, because such of their inevitability in the absolute scheme of things.
>
> The problem is that *not* censuring or *not* awarding prizes are also evaluative acts, about which determinism and the absolute perspective have nothing to say.

Sure it does: They are determined.

Sure, but it has nothing evaluative to say, because from an absolute perspective, where all things simply 'are', there is no good or bad, either morally or practically. Evaluation is a human, local activity. Mandela's courage may have been determined from the God's eye view, but who would say he should not be respected, admired and rewarded for it? To deny such affirmation is evaluative too - this is my point - and no value statement of any kind can be  justified by determinism. 

 

> And I believe that no-one, not even JC himself, can escape the human perspective. When he loads derision and sarcasm on other contributors' arguments, he is acting as if they had a choice in what they believed. There can be no fools in the abolute perpective, as there can be no criminals.

And we're acting as if he were interested in other's thoughts; which seems doubtful.

Thankfully, he's not interested in mine. Otherwise I'd have to put up with his condescension, arrogance and stubbornness, 'my dear Brent'.

 

Brent

[R AM]

On Sun, May 13, 2012 at 6:44 AM, Pierz <pie...@gmail.com> wrote:

I can see that. But consider that the notion of being able to change the outcome of future society - 'prevent' or 'deter' anything at all - depends on the possibility of variant futures. From the absolute perspective, such variation is impossible (or is merely random and so not subject to reason or 'choice'). So how does one justify any decision? Seen absolutely, it was inevitable and there can be no talk of a good or a bad decision.

I think determinism should not be confused with fatalism (i.e. it does not matter what you do, things will turn out the same). In determinism it matters what you do, even if what you do is determined. Once an outcome is obtained, we can still analyze the contribution of decisions to that outcome, evaluate them, and most importantly, learn from them. Next time, what we have learned will be taken into account for the next decision. This can take place in a purely deterministic world. Even two deterministic (with some pseudorandomness added) computer chess players playing against each other, can learn from each other mistakes and use what they have learned for future competitions.

 

The point is not changing future outcomes. In fact we don't know what that outcome will be. The point is obtaining good outcomes.

Ricardo. 

[Pierz]

On Sunday, May 13, 2012 6:17:12 PM UTC+10, RAM wrote:

On Sun, May 13, 2012 at 6:44 AM, Pierz <pie...@gmail.com> wrote:

I can see that. But consider that the notion of being able to change the outcome of future society - 'prevent' or 'deter' anything at all - depends on the possibility of variant futures. From the absolute perspective, such variation is impossible (or is merely random and so not subject to reason or 'choice'). So how does one justify any decision? Seen absolutely, it was inevitable and there can be no talk of a good or a bad decision.

I think determinism should not be confused with fatalism (i.e. it does not matter what you do, things will turn out the same). In determinism it matters what you do, even if what you do is determined. Once an outcome is obtained, we can still analyze the contribution of decisions to that outcome, evaluate them, and most importantly, learn from them. Next time, what we have learned will be taken into account for the next decision. This can take place in a purely deterministic world. Even two deterministic (with some pseudorandomness added) computer chess players playing against each other, can learn from each other mistakes and use what they have learned for future competitions.

Obviously, I agree with you. Because the decision-maker is part of the deterministic process, the determinism of the system as a whole is irrelevant from his/her point of view. I am saying that given that any decision-maker is embedded in a relative local system in this way, the idea of free will makes local sense - ie, there are good and bad decisions, easy and difficult decisions, and the idea of morality remain coherent, despite the determinism that is apparent from a God's eye view. I did not say "it does not matter what you do, things will turn out the same". Quite the reverse.

[Bruno Marchal]

On 12 May 2012, at 19:50, John Clark wrote:

On Sat, May 12, 2012 at 8:34 AM, Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

> although machines can be said determined, they are not entirely determined from what they can know about themselves at the time they decide to act.

As I've said many many times, Turing proved in 1936 that in general there is no shortcut and the only way to know what a machine will do is to watch it and see, even the machine does not know what it will do until it does it.

OK. That is the relative indeterminacy that we can use to give meaning to choice, responsibiliy, free will. Nothing to do with quantum, or with the comp first person indeterminacy.

The Turing indeterminacy is not an absolute indeterminacy.What the amchine will do or not is entirely determined by arithmetical truth. It is just that we, observing the machine, cannot know the result in advance. But the result is independent of us, and mathematically well defined.

> It [free will] means the ability to chose among a set of future possibilities

So free will means the ability to choose and the ability to choose means you have free will, and round and round we go.

Right. The ability to choose is a good first approximation of free will. It is not exactly that, because you can choose by throwing a coin, and this wold be a case of choice without free will. So it is probably closer to the ability of making a responsible choice.

No amount of mental contortions can avoid the fact that you made the choice for a reason or you did not make the choice for a reason. You're a coo coo clock or a roulette wheel, there is no third alternative.    

No problem with that.

 

> Situation like that abounds in the laws, jurisprudence,

And that's why  jurisprudence works so poorly and contains so many self contradictions.

Yes.

> although he is determined, he can't be aware of the determination.

That's what Turing proved and I've been saying for months. So what are we arguing about?

To put light on free will, choice, responsibility, etc.

> Free-will is a higher order relational notion, and it is totally unrelated to the determinacy question

Oh I'd forgotten, that's what we're arguing about. 

?

You just it above: the ability of making non random choice, or of doing reasonable choice, or responsible choice, in absence of complete information, I would add.

Bruno

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

[Craig Weinberg]

On May 13, 4:17 am, R AM <ramra...@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sun, May 13, 2012 at 6:44 AM, Pierz <pier...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > I can see that. But consider that the notion of being able to change the
> > outcome of future society - 'prevent' or 'deter' anything at all - depends
> > on the possibility of variant futures. From the absolute perspective, such
> > variation is impossible (or is merely random and so not subject to reason
> > or 'choice'). So how does one justify any decision? Seen absolutely, it was
> > inevitable and there can be no talk of a good or a bad decision.
>
> I think determinism should not be confused with fatalism (i.e. it does not
> matter what you do, things will turn out the same). In determinism it
> matters what you do, even if what you do is determined. Once an outcome is
> obtained, we can still analyze the contribution of decisions to that
> outcome, evaluate them, and most importantly, learn from them. Next time,
> what we have learned will be taken into account for the next decision. This
> can take place in a purely deterministic world.

What would be the point of learning though? What would be the
difference between any one outcome and any other one if decision
making were determined? It is only because of our own experience of
free will that we can project some significance of any particular
outcome. Evolution doesn't care how species mutate or whether
individuals survive, why should the individuals themselves care
either?

> Even two deterministic
> (with some pseudorandomness added) computer chess players playing against
> each other, can learn from each other mistakes and use what they have
> learned for future competitions.

Only if we program them to act like they are doing that. They never
would learn anything on their own.

>
> The point is not changing future outcomes. In fact we don't know what that
> outcome will be. The point is obtaining good outcomes.

Without the existence of free will as a given, there can be no "good".

Craig

[Bruno Marchal]

On 13 May 2012, at 03:48, Pierz wrote:

> I remember a kid back in secondary school saying to me that if
> everything was determined - as seemed inevitable to him from his
> understanding of physics - then you might as well give up and
> despair, since that was inevitable anyway! I tried to explain that
> this was a confusion of levels between the absolute and the
> relative, the same point that Bruno is making. From an absolute
> perspective, we may be completely determined (or partially random,
> it makes no difference essentially), from *inside* that system, our
> best way of acting is *as if* free will/responsibility etc were
> real. Obviously, if I act as if determinism was not a cause for
> despair, my life is going to look a lot better than if I did, and
> seeing as the absolute determinism of things does not tell me which
> way to decide the issue, I'm forced to use my relative local wisdom
> to decide on the former.

OK.

>
> John Clarke seems to be saying that the law is an ass, not because
> of human-level failures of reasoning/justice etc, but because the
> criminal was predestined to act the way s/he did, or behaved
> randomly, and in either case no reponsibility can be assigned. But
> the mistake here is the same as the one made by my high school friend.

Yes. It is the same error, or quite related, to miss the difference
between 1-view and 3-view, despite free will and 1-indeterminacy are
related to different form of indeterminacy. But in both case Clark
abstracts himself from the local situation, like if the local
situation did not add and hide some (personal, local) information.

> The absolute perspective has nothing useful to say about the local/
> relative one.

Right.

> If we were to follow this philosophy, the courage of heroes such as
> Nelson Mandela would be no cause for Nobel Peace Prizes,

OK.
(BTW, since Obama get the Nobel prize of peace, for no reason, and
since he made Guantanamo into US laws), I think the Nobel prize has
lost a lot of its possible appeal, imho).

> and the acts of villains such as Anders Breivik no cause for
> censure, because such of their inevitability in the absolute scheme
> of things.
>
> The problem is that *not* censuring or *not* awarding prizes are
> also evaluative acts, about which determinism and the absolute
> perspective have nothing to say. And I believe that no-one, not even
> JC himself, can escape the human perspective. When he loads derision
> and sarcasm on other contributors' arguments, he is acting as if
> they had a choice in what they believed. There can be no fools in
> the abolute perpective, as there can be no criminals.

Good point.

Bruno


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

[R AM]

On Sun, May 13, 2012 at 3:27 PM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:

What would be the point of learning though? What would be the
difference between any one outcome and any other one if decision
making were determined? It is only because of our own experience of
free will that we can project some significance of any particular
outcome.

Maybe it is because of the significance of outcomes that we believe to have free will.

 

Evolution doesn't care how species mutate or whether
individuals survive, why should the individuals themselves care
either?

Because individuals that care about outcomes survive?

 

Only if we program them to act like they are doing that. They never
would learn anything on their own.

The fact is that learning is possible in a deterministic universe.

 

>
> The point is not changing future outcomes. In fact we don't know what that
> outcome will be. The point is obtaining good outcomes.

Without the existence of free will as a given, there can be no "good".

 There is no problem in having good and bad outcomes in a deterministic universe.

Ricardo.

 

Craig

[Craig Weinberg]

On May 13, 11:46 am, R AM <ramra...@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sun, May 13, 2012 at 3:27 PM, Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com>wrote:
>
>
>
> > What would be the point of learning though? What would be the
> > difference between any one outcome and any other one if decision
> > making were determined? It is only because of our own experience of
> > free will that we can project some significance of any particular
> > outcome.
>
> Maybe it is because of the significance of outcomes that we believe to have
> free will.

That assumes a possibility of significance without it. I don't think
that can be supported.

>
> > Evolution doesn't care how species mutate or whether
> > individuals survive, why should the individuals themselves care
> > either?
>
> Because individuals that care about outcomes survive?

Only if they translate that care into behavior using their free will.
Without free will, care is meaningless to survival.

>
>
>
> > Only if we program them to act like they are doing that. They never
> > would learn anything on their own.
>
> The fact is that learning is possible in a deterministic universe.

Even if it were possible, learning would be irrelevant in a
deterministic universe.

Craig

[John Clark]

On Sat, May 12, 2012  meekerdb <meek...@verizon.net> wrote:

 >I guess I have to draw a diagram

                               Determined
                                    |
                                    |
                 Coerced-------------------------Free
                                    |
                                    |
                                 Random

Thanks but as I said I already knew that orthogonal means at right angles, but what does "free" mean, free to do what? It means the ability to do what you want to do. So if you're free you did what you did for a reason and your desire was that reason. What caused you to have that particular desire (reason) rather than another? The short answer is I don't know. Perhaps it was your heredity or perhaps it was your environment, in either case it would be deterministic; but maybe there was no reason at all for you to have that particular desire, and then it would be random. One thing I do know, it was cause for a reason or it was not caused for a reason. 

> that points in all quadrants of the above diagram are possible.

No they are not because you have not defined what the "coerced-free" axes is, or at least you have not done so in a way that is not riddled with self contradictions. And you have most certainly not demonstrated how it, or anything else for that matter, could be independent (or orthogonal if you want to be pompous) of both determinism and randomness.  

   John K Clark

[John Clark]

On Sat, May 12, 2012 at 9:48 PM, Pierz <pie...@gmail.com> wrote:

 

> John Clarke seems to be saying

No e in my name. Although I'd love to say I'm Arthur C Clarke's illegitimate son the fact is my father's name was Arthur E Clark. 
 

> that the law is an ass, not because of human-level failures of reasoning/justice etc, but because the criminal was predestined to act the way s/he did, or behaved randomly, and in either case no reponsibility can be assigned.

I'm saying precisely the opposite of that, I'm saying responsibility can and should ALWAYS be assigned. Perhaps you chopped up people with a ax because you had bad genes or maybe because you had a bad childhood or maybe a random quantum fluctuation in your brain turned you into a monster; I don't know and I don't care because knowing why you are a monster does not make you one bit less of a monster. That's why I'm in favor of the death penalty.  

  John K Clark

[Stephen P. King]

On 5/13/2012 9:21 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 12 May 2012, at 19:50, John Clark wrote:

On Sat, May 12, 2012 at 8:34 AM, Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

> although machines can be said determined, they are not entirely determined from what they can know about themselves at the time they decide to act.

As I've said many many times, Turing proved in 1936 that in general there is no shortcut and the only way to know what a machine will do is to watch it and see, even the machine does not know what it will do until it does it.

Hi Bruno,

OK. That is the relative indeterminacy that we can use to give meaning to choice, responsibiliy, free will. Nothing to do with quantum, or with the comp first person indeterminacy.

    Is the "relative indeterminacy" a uniform measure? No, it is context dependent.

The Turing indeterminacy is not an absolute indeterminacy.What the amchine will do or not is entirely determined by arithmetical truth. It is just that we, observing the machine, cannot know the result in advance. But the result is independent of us, and mathematically well defined.

    This "cannot know the results in advance" is the SAT problem that I keep trying to get you to look at! All that verbiage about "independent of us" and "mathematically well defined" is rubbish and you know it! You are assuming something that you cannot actually do, pretending that you have access to infinite resources and still are "you". That is where your narrative breaks down.

> It [free will] means the ability to chose among a set of future possibilities

So free will means the ability to choose and the ability to choose means you have free will, and round and round we go.

    The ability to communicate a reasoning as to "why we did what we did" = "free will".

Right. The ability to choose is a good first approximation of free will. It is not exactly that, because you can choose by throwing a coin, and this wold be a case of choice without free will. So it is probably closer to the ability of making a responsible choice.

No amount of mental contortions can avoid the fact that you made the choice for a reason or you did not make the choice for a reason. You're a coo coo clock or a roulette wheel, there is no third alternative.    

No problem with that.

 

> Situation like that abounds in the laws, jurisprudence,

And that's why  jurisprudence works so poorly and contains so many self contradictions.

Yes.

    But it is jurisprudence that actually solves otherwise intractable problems in the real world. The idea that we can create a world where all decisions are done in advance is a fatally flawed fantasy.

> although he is determined, he can't be aware of the determination.

That's what Turing proved and I've been saying for months. So what are we arguing about?

To put light on free will, choice, responsibility, etc.

> Free-will is a higher order relational notion, and it is totally unrelated to the determinacy question

Oh I'd forgotten, that's what we're arguing about. 

?

You just it above: the ability of making non random choice, or of doing reasonable choice, or responsible choice, in absence of complete information, I would add.

    And more! :-D

Bruno

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

-- 
Onward!

Stephen

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

[meekerdb]

On 5/13/2012 9:35 AM, John Clark wrote:

On Sat, May 12, 2012  meekerdb <meek...@verizon.net> wrote:

 >I guess I have to draw a diagram

                               Determined
                                    |
                                    |
                 Coerced-------------------------Free
                                    |
                                    |
                                 Random

Thanks but as I said I already knew that orthogonal means at right angles, but what does "free" mean, free to do what? It means the ability to do what you want to do. So if you're free you did what you did for a reason and your desire was that reason. What caused you to have that particular desire (reason) rather than another? The short answer is I don't know. Perhaps it was your heredity or perhaps it was your environment, in either case it would be deterministic; but maybe there was no reason at all for you to have that particular desire, and then it would be random. One thing I do know, it was cause for a reason or it was not caused for a reason. 

Right, free/coerced still leaves the decision either for a reason or not - that's what "orthogonal" means.

But just noting that it's still for a reason or not doesn't mean it's not coerced or free. It is not coercion when it is in accord with your desire; it's coerced only when it is in accord some other person's desire and contrary to yours.  That's why offering you money to do something is not considered coercion, but threatening you with death or injury if you don't is.  Some libertarians hold that coercion is an incoherent concept, since one can in theory just accept the death or injury, so all decisions are equally 'free'.  You seem to take the opposite view, that since every decision is influenced, they are all equally 'coerced'.  Society has found it useful to make distinction, at least in the application of laws.

> that points in all quadrants of the above diagram are possible.

No they are not because you have not defined what the "coerced-free" axes is, or at least you have not done so in a way that is not riddled with self contradictions.

I have defined it as it is used in common discourse and inlaw: Coerced means influenced by another person so as to determine your decision.  Free means not-coerced.  There is an axis because there are degrees of influence, which are recognized in as degrees of responsibility in law.  If you rob a bank because someone is holding your children hostage and threatening to kill them if you don't, the law considers this coercion and doesn't hold you responsible.

And you have most certainly not demonstrated how it, or anything else for that matter, could be independent (or orthogonal if you want to be pompous) of both determinism and randomness.  

How law and society assigns responsibility and mitigation is obviously independent of whether the world is deterministic or random (which also admit of degrees).

Brent

   John K Clark

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[meekerdb]

On 5/13/2012 9:56 AM, John Clark wrote:

On Sat, May 12, 2012 at 9:48 PM, Pierz <pie...@gmail.com> wrote:

 

> John Clarke seems to be saying

No e in my name. Although I'd love to say I'm Arthur C Clarke's illegitimate son the fact is my father's name was Arthur E Clark. 
 

> that the law is an ass, not because of human-level failures of reasoning/justice etc, but because the criminal was predestined to act the way s/he did, or behaved randomly, and in either case no reponsibility can be assigned.

I'm saying precisely the opposite of that, I'm saying responsibility can and should ALWAYS be assigned.

The question is can it ever be assigned to someone else who caused the criminal to commit the crime.  The law certainly recognizes the possibility of coercing or suborning a crime.

Brent

Perhaps you chopped up people with a ax because you had bad genes or maybe because you had a bad childhood or maybe a random quantum fluctuation in your brain turned you into a monster; I don't know and I don't care because knowing why you are a monster does not make you one bit less of a monster. That's why I'm in favor of the death penalty.  

  John K Clark

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[R AM]

On Sun, May 13, 2012 at 6:19 PM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:

On May 13, 11:46 am, R AM <ramra...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, May 13, 2012 at 3:27 PM, Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com>wrote:

>
>
>
> > What would be the point of learning though? What would be the
> > difference between any one outcome and any other one if decision
> > making were determined? It is only because of our own experience of
> > free will that we can project some significance of any particular
> > outcome.
>
> Maybe it is because of the significance of outcomes that we believe to have
> free will.

That assumes a possibility of significance without it. I don't think
that can be supported.

I don't see what free will has to do with the outcomes of surviving or not surviving. 

 

>
> > Evolution doesn't care how species mutate or whether
> > individuals survive, why should the individuals themselves care
> > either?
>
> Because individuals that care about outcomes survive?

Only if they translate that care into behavior using their free will.
Without free will, care is meaningless to survival.

Individuals that care about outcomes survive. Of course this implies a behaviour directed to producing good outcomes. No free will involved. 

 

> > Only if we program them to act like they are doing that. They never
> > would learn anything on their own.
>
> The fact is that learning is possible in a deterministic universe.

Even if it were possible, learning would be irrelevant in a
deterministic universe.

Whatever. The fact remains that learning is possible in a deterministic world. And individuals that survive thanks to learning, too.

Ricardo.

[Craig Weinberg]

On May 13, 4:19 pm, R AM <ramra...@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sun, May 13, 2012 at 6:19 PM, Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com>wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> > On May 13, 11:46 am, R AM <ramra...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > On Sun, May 13, 2012 at 3:27 PM, Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com
> > >wrote:
>
> > > > What would be the point of learning though? What would be the
> > > > difference between any one outcome and any other one if decision
> > > > making were determined? It is only because of our own experience of
> > > > free will that we can project some significance of any particular
> > > > outcome.
>
> > > Maybe it is because of the significance of outcomes that we believe to
> > have
> > > free will.
>
> > That assumes a possibility of significance without it. I don't think
> > that can be supported.
>
> I don't see what free will has to do with the outcomes of surviving or not
> surviving.

If you have free will, then the outcome of not surviving presents the
ultimate threat to the continuation of free will, as well as the
complete loss of subjective significance and the expectation of
negative sensory experiences.

If there were no free will, then outcomes of surviving or not
surviving would not be significantly different...they would only be
two differently numbered addresses in an infinite sequence of
meaningless outcomes.

>
>
>
> > > > Evolution doesn't care how species mutate or whether
> > > > individuals survive, why should the individuals themselves care
> > > > either?
>
> > > Because individuals that care about outcomes survive?
>
> > Only if they translate that care into behavior using their free will.
> > Without free will, care is meaningless to survival.
>
> Individuals that care about outcomes survive.

You already said that but you aren't addressing my reply that care in
and of itself cannot impact survival.

> Of course this implies a
> behaviour directed to producing good outcomes. No free will involved.

These two sentences contradict each other. Why "of course"? Only
because through free will you can choose how to make sense of your
circumstances, prioritize which outcomes are most desirable to you,
and which desires you choose to act upon. This is free will. Of course
free will is involved. Nothing but free will is involved.

>
> > > > Only if we program them to act like they are doing that. They never
> > > > would learn anything on their own.
>
> > > The fact is that learning is possible in a deterministic universe.
>
> > Even if it were possible, learning would be irrelevant in a
> > deterministic universe.
>
> Whatever. The fact remains that learning is possible in a deterministic
> world. And individuals that survive thanks to learning, too.

It depends on what you consider learning. Does a stone worn down by
the ocean 'learn' to be smooth? Blue green algae has survived for a
billion years without much learning. Our sense of learning comes
purely out of free will - a desire to enhance our effectiveness in
making more sense and acting more effectively on that sense.

Craig

[Bruno Marchal]

Hi Stephen,

On 13 May 2012, at 19:17, Stephen P. King wrote:

On 5/13/2012 9:21 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 12 May 2012, at 19:50, John Clark wrote:

On Sat, May 12, 2012 at 8:34 AM, Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

> although machines can be said determined, they are not entirely determined from what they can know about themselves at the time they decide to act.

As I've said many many times, Turing proved in 1936 that in general there is no shortcut and the only way to know what a machine will do is to watch it and see, even the machine does not know what it will do until it does it.

Hi Bruno,

OK. That is the relative indeterminacy that we can use to give meaning to choice, responsibiliy, free will. Nothing to do with quantum, or with the comp first person indeterminacy.

    Is the "relative indeterminacy" a uniform measure? No, it is context dependent.

It might be, intuitively, the limit of the uniform measure of the finite section UD_n of UD*. This creates the needed contexts in the limit.

The Turing indeterminacy is not an absolute indeterminacy.What the amchine will do or not is entirely determined by arithmetical truth. It is just that we, observing the machine, cannot know the result in advance. But the result is independent of us, and mathematically well defined.

    This "cannot know the results in advance" is the SAT problem that I keep trying to get you to look at!

That is not Turing universal. By the first person indeterminacy, the complexity is higher in the hierarchy complexity.

All that verbiage about "independent of us" and "mathematically well defined" is rubbish and you know it!

Er, no, I don't know that.

You are assuming something that you cannot actually do, pretending that you have access to infinite resources and still are "you". That is where your narrative breaks down.

This is a bit unclear. We cannot avoid the infinite resource once physics relies on a global (on UD*) first person indeterminacy.

> It [free will] means the ability to chose among a set of future possibilities

So free will means the ability to choose and the ability to choose means you have free will, and round and round we go.

    The ability to communicate a reasoning as to "why we did what we did" = "free will".

Right. The ability to choose is a good first approximation of free will. It is not exactly that, because you can choose by throwing a coin, and this wold be a case of choice without free will. So it is probably closer to the ability of making a responsible choice.

No amount of mental contortions can avoid the fact that you made the choice for a reason or you did not make the choice for a reason. You're a coo coo clock or a roulette wheel, there is no third alternative.    

No problem with that.

 

> Situation like that abounds in the laws, jurisprudence,

And that's why  jurisprudence works so poorly and contains so many self contradictions.

Yes.

    But it is jurisprudence that actually solves otherwise intractable problems in the real world.

Sure. Jurisprudence is full of contradiction, but that's the case in human real life. It is still better than no jurisprudence.

The idea that we can create a world where all decisions are done in advance is a fatally flawed fantasy.

Sure.

Bruno

> although he is determined, he can't be aware of the determination.

That's what Turing proved and I've been saying for months. So what are we arguing about?

To put light on free will, choice, responsibility, etc.

> Free-will is a higher order relational notion, and it is totally unrelated to the determinacy question

Oh I'd forgotten, that's what we're arguing about. 

?

You just it above: the ability of making non random choice, or of doing reasonable choice, or responsible choice, in absence of complete information, I would add.

    And more! :-D

Bruno

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

-- 
Onward!

Stephen

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

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

[John Clark]

On Sun, May 13, 2012  meekerdb <meek...@verizon.net> wrote:

> just noting that it's still for a reason or not doesn't mean it's not coerced or free.

If the reason you acted the way you did was "because I wanted to" then you're free, if it was because of some other reason then you are not, and either that reason itself happened for some other reason of it did not happen for some other reason. I would not have thought that was a controversial statement but for some bizarre reason (or perhaps for no reason at all) around here it is,   

> Free means not-coerced. 

And coerced means not free, I already figured that out.

  John K Clark

[R AM]

I'm saying that decision making, learning, and reinforcement are possible in a deterministic world, and you are not denying it. I guess our points of view are orthogonal.

Ricardo.

[Craig Weinberg]

On May 14, 2:11 pm, R AM <ramra...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm saying that decision making, learning, and reinforcement are possible
> in a deterministic world, and you are not denying it. I guess our points of
> view are orthogonal.

I am denying that meaningful decisions, learning, or reinforcement are
possible in a deterministic world.

Craig

[Stathis Papaioannou]

Perhaps decisions, learning and reinforcement are possible in a
deterministic world but they are not meaningful in the sense you want.
Would you allow that?


--
Stathis Papaioannou

[Craig Weinberg]

On May 14, 11:03 pm, Stathis Papaioannou <stath...@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 12:48 PM, Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > On May 14, 2:11 pm, R AM <ramra...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> I'm saying that decision making, learning, and reinforcement are possible
> >> in a deterministic world, and you are not denying it. I guess our points of
> >> view are orthogonal.
>
> > I am denying that meaningful decisions, learning, or reinforcement are
> > possible in a deterministic world.
>
> Perhaps decisions, learning and reinforcement are possible in a
> deterministic world but they are not meaningful in the sense you want.
> Would you allow that?

I would say that they cannot be meaningful in any sense, but I would
allow that some may consider meaningless unconscious processes to be a
form of decision, learning, or reinforcement. If comp were true that
would have to be the case, but I see the symbol grounding problem/use-
mention distinction as revealing why comp is not likely to be true.

We may use the words 'learning' or 'deciding' figuratively to describe
what a machine does, just as we might anthropomorphize a car's
transmission as 'not wanting to go into fourth gear' or something, but
there is no literal experience of learning, deciding, or wanting that
is going on at the level at which we relate to the machine (individual
physical pieces of machine material may have experiential events of
some kind on a molecular level that might involve some quorum
mechanical decision making, but that doesn't scale up into a greater
coherence).

Craig

[Bruno Marchal]

But a deterministic world, if rich enough to add and multiply, and
thus to contain universal internal observers, leads already to
indeterminist first person realities (even without comp, although it
is simpler to use comp to justify this).

Bruno

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

[R AM]

On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 7:01 AM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:

I would say that they cannot be meaningful in any sense, but I would
allow that some may consider meaningless unconscious processes to be a
form of decision, learning, or reinforcement.

OK, let's take Kasparov vs. Deep Blue, According to you, Kasparov's decision making was meaningful, while Deep Blue's was not. Yet, Deep Blue won. Is this the kind of meaninglessness you are talking here?

Ricardo.

[Craig Weinberg]

If a wave washes one pile of sand onto another, thereby 'adding' them
together, why does that generate universal internal observers?

Craig

[Craig Weinberg]

On May 15, 7:19 am, R AM <ramra...@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 7:01 AM, Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com>wrote:
>
>
>
> > I would say that they cannot be meaningful in any sense, but I would
> > allow that some may consider meaningless unconscious processes to be a
> > form of decision, learning, or reinforcement.
>
> OK, let's take Kasparov vs. Deep Blue, According to you, Kasparov's
> decision making was meaningful, while Deep Blue's was not. Yet, Deep Blue
> won. Is this the kind of meaninglessness you are talking here?

Yes. Deep Blue didn't know the difference between winning or losing,
let alone care. It doesn't know how to play Chess, it only compares
statistics which we apply to Chess playing. Deep Blue could be
executing a thermonuclear holocaust instead of winning a game and it
would never know the difference. Kasparov knows the difference though.
He is playing the game and winning or losing means something to him.

Craig

[R AM]

On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 5:36 PM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:

On May 15, 7:19 am, R AM <ramra...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 7:01 AM, Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com>wrote:

>
>
>
> > I would say that they cannot be meaningful in any sense, but I would
> > allow that some may consider meaningless unconscious processes to be a
> > form of decision, learning, or reinforcement.
>
> OK, let's take Kasparov vs. Deep Blue, According to you, Kasparov's
> decision making was meaningful, while Deep Blue's was not. Yet, Deep Blue
> won. Is this the kind of meaninglessness you are talking here?

Yes. Deep Blue didn't know the difference between winning or losing,
let alone care.

The fact remains that good decision making can take place in a deterministic world. Some decision-making you will label as meaningful, some as meaningless. But good decision-making nevertheless. You cannot win chess withouth making good decisions.

Ricardo.

[Craig Weinberg]

On May 15, 11:59 am, R AM <ramra...@gmail.com> wrote:

I don't think Deep Blue makes any decisions or wins chess, it just
compares statistics and orders them according to an externally
provided criteria. It is a filing cabinet of possible chess games that
matches any particular supplied pattern to a designated outcome. We
are able to project our own ideas and expectations onto our experience
of Deep Blue, but that doesn't mean that there is any actual decision
making going on. There is no decision, only automatic recursive
reactions.

A programmer could easily change Deep Blue to lose every match or to
command a robotic arm to smash it's CPUs. How can good decision making
be claimed if it can just as easily be programmed to make bad
decisions? There is no symbol grounding.

Craig

[R AM]

On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 6:19 PM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:

On May 15, 11:59 am, R AM <ramra...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 5:36 PM, Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com>wrote:

>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> > On May 15, 7:19 am, R AM <ramra...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 7:01 AM, Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com
> > >wrote:
>
> > > > I would say that they cannot be meaningful in any sense, but I would
> > > > allow that some may consider meaningless unconscious processes to be a
> > > > form of decision, learning, or reinforcement.
>
> > > OK, let's take Kasparov vs. Deep Blue, According to you, Kasparov's
> > > decision making was meaningful, while Deep Blue's was not. Yet, Deep Blue
> > > won. Is this the kind of meaninglessness you are talking here?
>
> > Yes. Deep Blue didn't know the difference between winning or losing,
> > let alone care.
>
> The fact remains that good decision making can take place in a
> deterministic world. Some decision-making you will label as meaningful,
> some as meaningless. But good decision-making nevertheless. You cannot win
> chess withouth making good decisions.

I don't think Deep Blue makes any decisions or wins chess,

I'm not sure what you don't see here. Deep Blue has several possible moves and chooses one of them (just as Kasparov does). It makes a decision each move. And given that it eventually gets to check-mate, Deep Blue wins chess.

 

it just
compares statistics and orders them according to an externally
provided criteria. It is a filing cabinet of possible chess games that
matches any particular supplied pattern to a designated outcome. We
are able to project our own ideas and expectations onto our experience
of Deep Blue, but that doesn't mean that there is any actual decision
making going on. There is no decision, only automatic recursive
reactions.

Deep Blue decides what piece to move and where to move it.  That counts as a decision to me.

A programmer could easily change Deep Blue to lose every match or to
command a robotic arm to smash it's CPUs. How can good decision making
be claimed if it can just as easily be programmed to make bad
decisions?

Because Deep Blue wins chess? How else can you win chess except by making good decisions? Ultimately both Kasparov and Deep Blue make a move.

Ricardo.

 

There is no symbol grounding.

 

Craig

[John Clark]

On Tue, May 15, 2012  Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I don't think Deep Blue makes any decisions or wins chess,

That's exactly what a sore looser would say after he'd been thoroughly beaten by a opponent.  And so the last surviving member of the species Homo Sapiens, 4 seconds before the Godlike computer sent it to oblivion forever, turned to the Jupiter Brain and said "nevertheless I still think I'm *really* smarter than you".  

> it just [...]

 

But Kasparov's brain "just" did stuff too, only deep Blue's stuff worked better.

> It is a filing cabinet of possible chess games that matches any particular supplied pattern to a designated outcome.

The observable universe is not large enough to contain a filing cabinet full of all possible chess games.

> A programmer could easily change Deep Blue to lose every match or to command a robotic arm to smash it's CPUs.

And even I could beat Kasparov at chess if a robot or a surgeon first gave Kasparov a brain lobotomy.

  John K Clark

[Bruno Marchal]

Adding is not enough. You need multiplication, and iteration.

Then universal digital creatures appear, by logical consequences, and,
as always, reflect themselves and all universal creatures, digital,
and non digital, which leads them to harder and harder problems and
questions.

Bruno


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

[Craig Weinberg]

On May 15, 12:47 pm, R AM <ramra...@gmail.com> wrote:

But I am sure what you don't see.

> Deep Blue has several possible moves
> and chooses one of them (just as Kasparov does). It makes a decision each
> move. And given that it eventually gets to check-mate, Deep Blue wins chess.

That's only the view of a human being who is familiar with chess. Deep
Blue is neither a human or familiar with chess. When you add 5+6 into
a calculator, it does not 'decide' that the answer is 11 any more than
a square peg decides it doesn't fit in a round hole. If Deep Blue had
a perspective, which it doesn't, it would have no idea who Kasparov is
or that he was the opponent. No clue that check-mating Kasparov is
good or that being check-mated is bad. The game of chess is in the eye
of the beholder, not in the computation of statistics.

>
> > it just
> > compares statistics and orders them according to an externally
> > provided criteria. It is a filing cabinet of possible chess games that
> > matches any particular supplied pattern to a designated outcome. We
> > are able to project our own ideas and expectations onto our experience
> > of Deep Blue, but that doesn't mean that there is any actual decision
> > making going on. There is no decision, only automatic recursive
> > reactions.
>
> Deep Blue decides what piece to move and where to move it.  That counts as
> a decision to me.

I understand that, I'm just trying to tell you why that doesn't work.
Deep Blue decides nothing. We use Deep Blue to inform us what the most
mathematically efficient chess move is and then we can choose to
imagine that we are playing a game against an entity that is deciding
to make those moves. There is no entity there though. The computer is
a puppet.

>
> A programmer could easily change Deep Blue to lose every match or to
>
> > command a robotic arm to smash it's CPUs. How can good decision making
> > be claimed if it can just as easily be programmed to make bad
> > decisions?
>
> Because Deep Blue wins chess? How else can you win chess except by making
> good decisions? Ultimately both Kasparov and Deep Blue make a move.

You can win chess by looking at every possible outcome of every
possible move and putting them in order of how few moves will likely
end the game in your favor. There is no decision at all, you are just
organizing a stack of finite patterns in order of probable efficiency.
There is nothing to decide, you just solve the math problem and report
the result as your move. It's an idiot's way of playing chess, albeit
a very, very fast idiot.

Craig

[Craig Weinberg]

On May 15, 12:56 pm, John Clark <johnkcl...@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, May 15, 2012  Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > I don't think Deep Blue makes any decisions or wins chess,
>
> That's exactly what a sore looser would say after he'd been thoroughly
> beaten by a opponent.

If I were beaten by a human opponent, why would I accuse them of not
making decisions? What does winning or losing a game against a non-
person have to do with awareness and subjectivity? If you get run over
by a car does that mean it's suspicious if you state that the driver
was at fault and not the car?

> And so the last surviving member of the species Homo
> Sapiens, 4 seconds before the Godlike computer sent it to oblivion forever,
> turned to the Jupiter Brain and said "nevertheless I still think I'm
> *really* smarter than you".

I'm not sure why you want to make this about human exceptionalism.
Maybe you have an issue with superiority, but I don't. I'm really not
a big fan of our species. It means nothing to me to be 'better than a
computer' and anyone who it would mean something to I would consider
pretty juvenile. This is about making sense of what the difference
between a living organism and an inorganic machine actually is.
Machines have capacities that organisms don't, and vice versa. So
what?

>
> > it just [...]
>
> But Kasparov's brain "just" did stuff too, only deep Blue's stuff worked
> better.

A car can beat a person running on foot too, but that doesn't mean a
car has legs or runs. Apples aren't oranges.

>
> > It is a filing cabinet of possible chess games that matches any
> > particular supplied pattern to a designated outcome.
>
> The observable universe is not large enough to contain a filing cabinet
> full of all possible chess games.

It doesn't have to have all possible chess games, only the ones which
relate to the opponent's pattern.

>
> > A programmer could easily change Deep Blue to lose every match or to
> > command a robotic arm to smash it's CPUs.
>
> And even I could beat Kasparov at chess if a robot or a surgeon first gave
> Kasparov a brain lobotomy.

But Kasparov would know the difference. Deep Blue never would. Deep
Blue would happily lose the same game over and over forever with a few
changes to its code. It would never beg you to kill them like someone
with a lobotomy might.

Craig

[Craig Weinberg]

On May 15, 1:03 pm, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

> >> But a deterministic world, if rich enough to add and multiply, and
> >> thus to contain universal internal observers,  leads already to
> >> indeterminist first person realities (even without comp, although it
> >> is simpler to use comp to justify this).
>
> > If a wave washes one pile of sand onto another, thereby 'adding' them
> > together, why does that generate universal internal observers?
>
> Adding is not enough. You need multiplication, and iteration.
>
> Then universal digital creatures appear, by logical consequences, and,
> as always, reflect themselves and all universal creatures, digital,
> and non digital, which leads them to harder and harder problems and
> questions.

Even if that's true, from where do they appear? To say they appear is
to admit that they are not themselves contained within addition or
multiplication. To say they are creatures implies a creation. What
necessary logic turns a nuclear chain reaction (addition and
multiplication) into a nursery for problem solving sentience?

Craig

[R AM]

On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 7:22 PM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Deep Blue has several possible moves
> and chooses one of them (just as Kasparov does). It makes a decision each
> move. And given that it eventually gets to check-mate, Deep Blue wins chess.

That's only the view of a human being who is familiar with chess.

I agree that we are not talking about frogs watching chess games. But a human being watching the match will see that Deep Blue makes decisions and wins the game.

Deep
Blue is neither a human or familiar with chess.

When you add 5+6 into
a calculator, it does not 'decide' that the answer is 11 any more than
a square peg decides it doesn't fit in a round hole. 

If Deep Blue had
a perspective, which it doesn't, it would have no idea who Kasparov is
or that he was the opponent. No clue that check-mating Kasparov is
good or that being check-mated is bad. The game of chess is in the eye
of the beholder, not in the computation of statistics.

To me, a good decision in the context of chess is that which allows to win a chess game. Everything else is pretty irrelevant. What is your definition for a good chess decision?

>
> Deep Blue decides what piece to move and where to move it.  That counts as
> a decision to me.

I understand that, I'm just trying to tell you why that doesn't work.
Deep Blue decides nothing.

We use Deep Blue to inform us what the most
mathematically efficient chess move is and then we can choose to
imagine that we are playing a game against an entity that is deciding
to make those moves. There is no entity there though. The computer is
a puppet.

There are two entities there. One is Kasparov and the other one is Deep Blue. Both of them decide what pieces to move. In fact, they move them. Nobody is imagining anything. That is what we see.

You can win chess by looking at every possible outcome of every

possible move and putting them in order of how few moves will likely
end the game in your favor. There is no decision at all, you are just
organizing a stack of finite patterns in order of probable efficiency.

That's a decision to me: several alternatives and the ability to rank them. if you had complete information, that's how you should decide things. Should a human being do otherwise if he had perfect knowledge?

 

There is nothing to decide, you just solve the math problem and report
the result as your move.

The problem is that in the case of chess, the math problem cannot be solved exactly, not even close, with the resources available currently (probably never). Both Kasparov and Deep Blue must resort to heuristics, previous knowledge, and learning. Deep Blue also loses games, it has not perfect knowledge.

Ricardo.

[Craig Weinberg]

On May 15, 3:14 pm, R AM <ramra...@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 7:22 PM, Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com>wrote:
>
>
>
> > > Deep Blue has several possible moves
> > > and chooses one of them (just as Kasparov does). It makes a decision each
> > > move. And given that it eventually gets to check-mate, Deep Blue wins
> > chess.
>
> > That's only the view of a human being who is familiar with chess.
>
> I agree that we are not talking about frogs watching chess games. But
> a human being watching the match will see that Deep Blue makes decisions
> and wins the game.

Just as a human watching a ventriloquist hold a piece of articulated
lumber will see a dummy making conversation and getting laughs.

>
> Deep

Too deep apparently.

>
> > Blue is neither a human or familiar with chess.
>
> When you add 5+6 into
>
> > a calculator, it does not 'decide' that the answer is 11 any more than
> > a square peg decides it doesn't fit in a round hole.
>
> If Deep Blue had> a perspective, which it doesn't, it would have no idea who Kasparov is
> > or that he was the opponent. No clue that check-mating Kasparov is
> > good or that being check-mated is bad. The game of chess is in the eye
> > of the beholder, not in the computation of statistics.
>
> To me, a good decision in the context of chess is that which allows to win
> a chess game. Everything else is pretty irrelevant. What is your definition
> for a good chess decision?

You are taking for granted that there is a context of chess to begin
with. That context is a human expectation, not an independent fact.
For Deep Blue there is no chess and no decision, only blind
computation.

A good chess decision is one which leads to an enjoyable experience of
playing the game of chess. It's one which adds meaning to the game for
you and your opponent, and perhaps an audience, which lingers in
people's memory for it's elegant strategy, unique style,
effectiveness, historic significance, etc. Would chess continue to
exist if it was only being played by Deep Blue against an identical
computer? What would the be the point?

>
>
>
> > > Deep Blue decides what piece to move and where to move it.  That counts
> > as
> > > a decision to me.
>
> > I understand that, I'm just trying to tell you why that doesn't work.
> > Deep Blue decides nothing.
>
> We use Deep Blue to inform us what the most
>
> > mathematically efficient chess move is and then we can choose to
> > imagine that we are playing a game against an entity that is deciding
> > to make those moves. There is no entity there though. The computer is
> > a puppet.
>
> There are two entities there. One is Kasparov and the other one is Deep
> Blue.

Deep Blue isn't real. It's a name that was given for specially
assembled and configured microelectronics. Kasparov knows who he is.
He is a living person. Deep Blue knows no more than a collection of
thousands of mousetraps arranged in a particular series.

> Both of them decide what pieces to move. In fact, they move them.
> Nobody is imagining anything. That is what we see.

The computer doesn't decide anything. It moves the only way that it
can move given it's programmed parameters. You can't see someone make
a decision, you can only infer that they are making one. Inferring
that a computer is making a decision is pure anthropomorphizing
projection as far I can see. It's no different from seeing THANK YOU
on a trash can lid and insisting that means that you aren't imagining
that the trash can is being polite.

>
> You can win chess by looking at every possible outcome of every
>
> > possible move and putting them in order of how few moves will likely
> > end the game in your favor. There is no decision at all, you are just
> > organizing a stack of finite patterns in order of probable efficiency.
>
> That's a decision to me: several alternatives and the ability to rank them.

I understand, but it's not a meaningful definition of decision to me.
Does a funnel make a decision when you pour different sized pebbles
into it?

> if you had complete information, that's how you should decide things.
> Should a human being do otherwise if he had perfect knowledge?

Yes. Knowledge is only one aspect of sense. Having perfect knowledge
is a dead end if decisions can't be informed by innovation,
creativity, humor, compassion, etc.

>
> > There is nothing to decide, you just solve the math problem and report
> > the result as your move.
>
> The problem is that in the case of chess, the math problem cannot be solved
> exactly, not even close, with the resources available currently (probably
> never). Both Kasparov and Deep Blue must resort to heuristics, previous
> knowledge, and learning. Deep Blue also loses games, it has not perfect
> knowledge.

The degree to which Deep Blue's computation is perfect or not has
nothing to do with whether it makes decisions or not. If I tell Deep
Blue "This is a really important game, so try harder to win or we are
going to scrap you", it has no way of 'trying harder'. It can only
execute the meaningless sequence of computations which we have forced
it to process.

Craig

[Stathis Papaioannou]

On Wed, May 16, 2012 at 1:28 AM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> But a deterministic world, if rich enough to add and multiply, and
>> thus to contain universal internal observers,  leads already to
>> indeterminist first person realities (even without comp, although it
>> is simpler to use comp to justify this).
>
> If a wave washes one pile of sand onto another, thereby 'adding' them
> together, why does that generate universal internal observers?

I don't think you understood Bruno's original point, which was that
indeterminism (i.e. true randomness) emerges as a first person
phenomenon in a deterministic multiverse. There's no valid argument
that indeterminism is required for consciousness or decision-making,
but even if it were so, a rich enough deterministic world can still
provide it.


--
Stathis Papaioannou

[Craig Weinberg]

On May 16, 2:39 am, Stathis Papaioannou <stath...@gmail.com> wrote:

I don't think you understand what I understand. Of course the
limitation of the 1p view excludes information relative to a 3p view,
but the reverse is true as well. Indeterminism emerges as a third
person phenomenon in that subjective privacy cannot be experienced
through it. Determinism emerges as both a first and third person
phenomenon in the form of sense. Motive or will (or 'energy' in third
person') emerges as an orthogonal category relative to determinism;
self-determination, which is the impulse and capacity to make the
indetermined determined. 'I am become will, the collapser of wave
functions.'

Craig

Craig

[Bruno Marchal]

On 15 May 2012, at 19:44, Craig Weinberg wrote:

> On May 15, 1:03 pm, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
>
>>>> But a deterministic world, if rich enough to add and multiply, and
>>>> thus to contain universal internal observers, leads already to
>>>> indeterminist first person realities (even without comp, although
>>>> it
>>>> is simpler to use comp to justify this).
>>
>>> If a wave washes one pile of sand onto another, thereby 'adding'
>>> them
>>> together, why does that generate universal internal observers?
>>
>> Adding is not enough. You need multiplication, and iteration.
>>
>> Then universal digital creatures appear, by logical consequences,
>> and,
>> as always, reflect themselves and all universal creatures, digital,
>> and non digital, which leads them to harder and harder problems and
>> questions.
>
> Even if that's true, from where do they appear? To say they appear is
> to admit that they are not themselves contained within addition or
> multiplication.

They are. Anything Turing emulable appears, and reappears in
arithmetic, related to bigger and bigger natural numbers.

> To say they are creatures implies a creation.

Why not. You could say that they are created by the addition and
multiplication laws. You need only to bet that 1+1=2 and alike does
not depend on us.

> What
> necessary logic turns a nuclear chain reaction (addition and
> multiplication) into a nursery for problem solving sentience?

The same logic making tiny system Turing universal. Usually some small
part of classical logic is enough.

Bruno

>
> Craig
>
> --
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>

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

[Craig Weinberg]

On May 16, 10:41 am, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
> On 15 May 2012, at 19:44, Craig Weinberg wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> > On May 15, 1:03 pm, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
>
> >>>> But a deterministic world, if rich enough to add and multiply, and
> >>>> thus to contain universal internal observers,  leads already to
> >>>> indeterminist first person realities (even without comp, although
> >>>> it
> >>>> is simpler to use comp to justify this).
>
> >>> If a wave washes one pile of sand onto another, thereby 'adding'
> >>> them
> >>> together, why does that generate universal internal observers?
>
> >> Adding is not enough. You need multiplication, and iteration.
>
> >> Then universal digital creatures appear, by logical consequences,
> >> and,
> >> as always, reflect themselves and all universal creatures, digital,
> >> and non digital, which leads them to harder and harder problems and
> >> questions.
>
> > Even if that's true, from where do they appear? To say they appear is
> > to admit that they are not themselves contained within addition or
> > multiplication.
>
> They are. Anything Turing emulable appears, and reappears in
> arithmetic, related to bigger and bigger natural numbers.

The appearance is contingent though, upon something being able to
recognize the pattern which is appearing to them. That pattern
recognition is not automatically guaranteed by any arithmetic logic.
We need a physical machine that remembers that it can remember, and
can experience that memory as an event. It needs to know what kinds of
strings of remembered digits constitute a meaningful pattern, or that
there could even be such a thing as a pattern. To say that patterns
appear and reappear in arithmetic takes the appearance of pattern
itself for granted, then usurps the primacy of the sense experience
which provides it.

>
> > To say they are creatures implies a creation.
>
> Why not. You could say that they are created by the addition and
> multiplication laws. You need only to bet that 1+1=2 and alike does
> not depend on us.

Because there's no mathematical logic to how or why that creation
could occur. If we posit a universe of arithmetic realism, how can we
accept that it falls off a cliff when it comes to the arithmetic of
it's own origins? What makes 1+1=2? Sense. Not primitive sense either,
but high order cognitive abstraction. There is no '1' or '2'
literally, they are ideas about our common sense - what we have in
common with everything. Numbers are literally 'figures', symbols which
can be applied mentally to represent many things, and to deploy
orderly control of some physical systems - but not everything can be
reduced to or controlled by numbers.

>
> > What
> > necessary logic turns a nuclear chain reaction (addition and
> > multiplication) into a nursery for problem solving sentience?
>
> The same logic making tiny system Turing universal. Usually some small
> part of classical logic is enough.

Why would any kind of universality or logic entail the automatic
development of sentience? What is logical about sentience?

Craig

[John Clark]

On Tue, May 15, 2012  Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> That's exactly what a sore looser would say after he'd been thoroughly beaten by a opponent.

> If I were beaten by a human opponent, why would I accuse them of not making decisions? What does winning or losing a game against a non-person have to do with awareness and subjectivity? If you get run over by a car does that mean it's suspicious if you state that the driver was at fault and not the car?

That's a awful lot of questions and they all seem related to figuring out why I wrote what I did, and yet I don't see how that can possibly be the case. You think I have this thing you call "free will" and you say that means I'm not deterministic, so asking me the reason I wrote that sentence you don't like makes no sense, if I'm not deterministic then obviously there is no reason whatsoever I wrote that sentence.

And someone might think my sentence cause you to write your list of questions, that is to say you wouldn't have written what you did if I didn't first write what I did; but no, you have free will too so you wrote what you did for no reason just like me and it must have been a coincidence that your list of questions came out right after my sentence.  And you believe that although there was no reason behind your list of questions it was not random either, it was caused by nothing and it wasn't caused by nothing, and that doesn't make the free will noise a logical self contradiction because,..., because,... because you just don't want it to be contradictory and if you wish hard enough you can make it so.

>> And even I could beat Kasparov at chess if a robot or a surgeon first gave Kasparov a brain lobotomy.

 

> But Kasparov would know the difference. Deep Blue never would.

Machines can detect when they have suffered damage just like people, otherwise the red warning light on the dashboard of your car would never come on.

  John K Clark

 

[Craig Weinberg]

On May 16, 12:41 pm, John Clark <johnkcl...@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, May 15, 2012  Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >> That's exactly what a sore looser would say after he'd been thoroughly
> >> beaten by a opponent.
>
> > > If I were beaten by a human opponent, why would I accuse them of not
> > making decisions? What does winning or losing a game against a non-person
> > have to do with awareness and subjectivity? If you get run over by a car
> > does that mean it's suspicious if you state that the driver was at fault
> > and not the car?
>
> That's a awful lot of questions and they all seem related to figuring out
> why I wrote what I did, and yet I don't see how that can possibly be the
> case. You think I have this thing you call "free will" and you say that
> means I'm not deterministic,

I don't say that means you're not deterministic, I say that means you
can make determinations. Sometimes those determinations are influenced
more by conditions you perceive as external to yourself, and sometimes
it is you who are influencing external conditions. The result is that
you are neither 100% deterministic nor 100% indeterministic.

> so asking me the reason I wrote that sentence
> you don't like makes no sense, if I'm not deterministic then obviously
> there is no reason whatsoever I wrote that sentence.

I didn't ask you the reason you wrote that sentence, I was giving
examples of how the reasoning you used in that sentence applied to
another situation doesn't work. I point this out only to present an
alternative to you that you can voluntarily choose to reason
differently if it makes the same sense to you as it does to me.

If you are completely deterministic, then how do you know that the car
isn't driving you instead of you driving a car? There are stories
about the drug scopolomine being used to turn people into 'zombies' in
Columbia...whether there is any truth to those stories or not, the
fact that we understand the difference between someone who is able to
determine their own actions vs someone who is under the control of
another would need to be explained in a deterministic world. What
difference could it make who controls you, when everyone is controlled
by physical forces?

>
> And someone might think my sentence cause you to write your list of
> questions, that is to say you wouldn't have written what you did if I
> didn't first write what I did; but no, you have free will too so you wrote
> what you did for no reason just like me and it must have been a coincidence

Some of us have been pointing out repeatedly that free will is neither
fully deterministic nor random, nor fully not deterministic nor
random. Just as Spring is neither fully Summer nor Winter, nor is it
completely not Summer or Winter. Subjectivity sets teleological
purpose as orthogonal to the objective determinism. If you insist upon
arbitrarily reducing the universe to a single dimension of determined
vs random, then you cannot understand consciousness as it actually is.

> that your list of questions came out right after my sentence.  And you
> believe that although there was no reason behind your list of questions

There were all kinds of reasons behind my listing of questions, but
they were mostly my reasons. I created them by reasoning.

> it
> was not random either, it was caused by nothing and it wasn't caused by
> nothing,

It was caused by me. I can be described as nothing or not nothing,
depending on what kind of thing you are comparing me to.

> and that doesn't make the free will noise a logical self
> contradiction because,..., because,... because you just don't want it to be
> contradictory and if you wish hard enough you can make it so.

It's not me that doesn't want it to be a contradiction, it's the
universe. Determinism and randomness are ideas within the experience
of conscious deliberation. Consciousness itself precedes those
categories. It determines and fails to determine. Consciousness is
like the mammal and determinism is the like the primate. You are
flipping the taxonomy and forcing reality which is far richer and
deeper than the intellect into a reduced intellectual framework that
has no way to accommodate the reality of awareness, just as you can't
draw a graph that explains 'dizzy' or 'sleepy'.

>
> >> And even I could beat Kasparov at chess if a robot or a surgeon first
> >> gave Kasparov a brain lobotomy.
>
> > But Kasparov would know the difference. Deep Blue never would.
>
> Machines can detect when they have suffered damage just like people,
> otherwise the red warning light on the dashboard of your car would never
> come on.

The red light doesn't grow out of the dashboard by itself like ours do
though. Nothing in the car will know the difference if you remove it.
Your car has no way to feel that 'It seems like something is wrong but
I'm not sure what'.

Craig

[John Clark]

On Wed, May 16, 2012 at 1:45 PM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote

 

> I don't say that [the free will noise] means you're not deterministic,

I would be glad to hear you say that except that according to illogical Weinbergian logic just because something is not not deterministic does not mean its deterministic, so I don't know what the hell you mean.

>I say that means you can make determinations.

If a determination is not made for a reason then its not a determination, it’s a crap-shoot.

> Sometimes those determinations are influenced more by conditions you perceive as external to yourself,

Sometimes a computer's CPU works on data already in it's memory unit, and sometimes it works on newly inputted data.

> and sometimes it is you who are influencing external conditions.

And sometimes computers output data to external things like printers or video screens or internet connections and sometimes they do not.

> you can voluntarily choose to reason differently

Yes I can change my mind, I've done it before but in the past whenever I changed my internal programming I have always done so for a reason, if I ever find myself changing my mind for no reason then I intend to call 911 because I'm undergoing a serious medical emergency of some sort and a hardware malfunction is going on in my brain.

> If you are completely deterministic, then how do you know that the car isn't driving you instead of you driving a car?

If I determine that the brake needs to be applied I find that my foot depresses the brake peddle and I feel (correctly I think) that I am in control.

> free will is neither fully deterministic nor random, nor fully not deterministic nor random.

That makes no sense. You say "I have free will" so I don't see how randomness can help you clarify what that means because "I" is something but something does not cause random things to happen, nothing does, so the concept of randomness is no help at all in understanding what the ASCII sequence "I have free will" means.

> Just as Spring is neither fully Summer nor Winter,

Large complex things like the weather usually happen for many reasons, but every one of those reasons themselves happened for a reason or they did not happen for a reason. And one thing is beyond dispute to any logical person, spring is summer or spring is not summer.

> If you insist upon arbitrarily reducing the universe to a single dimension of determined vs random, then

Then I have understood the lesson taught on day one of logic 101, that X is Y or X is not Y and there is no third alternative.

> you cannot understand consciousness as it actually is.

I'll be damned if I understand why determinism is supposed to be the enemy of consciousness or why things that happen for no reason at all, randomness, is supposed to make everything all better.

>> that your list of questions came out right after my sentence. And you believe that although there was no reason behind your list of questions

>There were all kinds of reasons behind my listing of questions

Yes, there are many different types of deterministic processes.

> I created them by reasoning.

Yet another deterministic process.

>It was caused by me.

If it's caused then it's obviously deterministic.

>I can be described as nothing or not nothing

Obviously gibberish.

> It determines and fails to determine.

More of the same, up is down black is white gibberish is not gibberish and clarity is nowhere to be found in your universe.

John K Clark

 

 

[Bruno Marchal]

That's correct. It is contingent of the universal number, and the
universal numbers making the first one more relatively probable. But
all that exist in arithmetic.

> That pattern
> recognition is not automatically guaranteed by any arithmetic logic.

In your non-comp theory.

> We need a physical machine that remembers that it can remember,

That's "Bp -> BBp". Universal machine are like that.

> and
> can experience that memory as an event. It needs to know what kinds of
> strings of remembered digits constitute a meaningful pattern, or that
> there could even be such a thing as a pattern. To say that patterns
> appear and reappear in arithmetic takes the appearance of pattern
> itself for granted, then usurps the primacy of the sense experience
> which provides it.

Not really, for it appears and reappears only in the mind of universal
numbers. It makes sense for them, and indeed they will be astonished
that apparent material can lead to that sense. But although locally
true, this is globally wrong. Sense is necessarily a first person
notion, and relies on the abstract but real configuration involving
infinities of arithmetical relations.

>
>>
>>> To say they are creatures implies a creation.
>>
>> Why not. You could say that they are created by the addition and
>> multiplication laws. You need only to bet that 1+1=2 and alike does
>> not depend on us.
>
> Because there's no mathematical logic to how or why that creation
> could occur.

But there is.

> If we posit a universe of arithmetic realism, how can we
> accept that it falls off a cliff when it comes to the arithmetic of
> it's own origins? What makes 1+1=2? Sense.

Truth. Why do you want someone to assess the truth for something being
true. That is anthropomorphic. Th greek get well that point, and
originate the whole scientific enterprise from there, as in the
conclusion of this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69F7GhASOdM

If not, it is the whole idea of a reality which makes no more sense,
and we get solipsist or anthropomorphic.

> Not primitive sense either,
> but high order cognitive abstraction. There is no '1' or '2'
> literally, they are ideas about our common sense - what we have in
> common with everything. Numbers are literally 'figures', symbols which
> can be applied mentally to represent many things,

No. That's number description. Not numbers.

> and to deploy
> orderly control of some physical systems - but not everything can be
> reduced to or controlled by numbers.

But that's what number can discover by themselves. Once you are at the
treshold of numbers, the complexity of the relations (even just
between numbers) get higher than what you can describe with numbers.
the numbers already know that, with reasonable account of what is
knowledge.

>
>>
>>> What
>>> necessary logic turns a nuclear chain reaction (addition and
>>> multiplication) into a nursery for problem solving sentience?
>>
>> The same logic making tiny system Turing universal. Usually some
>> small
>> part of classical logic is enough.
>
> Why would any kind of universality or logic entail the automatic
> development of sentience? What is logical about sentience?

The illogicality of sentience. From the point of view of numbers, when
they look at themselves, they discover, for logical reason, that there
is something non logical about them. Then the comp act of faith
appears to be the simplest way to restore logic, except for that act
of faith and the belief in addition and multiplication.

Bruno


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

[Craig Weinberg]

On May 17, 12:01 am, John Clark <johnkcl...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, May 16, 2012 at 1:45 PM, Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com>wrote

>
> > > I don't say that [the free will noise] means you're not deterministic,
>
> I would be glad to hear you say that except that according to illogical
> Weinbergian logic just because something is not not deterministic does not
> mean its deterministic, so I don't know what the hell you mean.

Why is it Weinbergian logic? Have you not noticed that others here who
are also trying to tell you what orthogonal means? What might that be
about in Clarkian logic?

>
> >I say that means you can make determinations.
>
> If a determination is not made for a reason then its not a determination,
> it’s a crap-shoot.

Determinations are not usually made for A reason, they are made for
MANY reasons. It's always a guess to some degree and an informed
acquiescence to some degree, and a personal preference to some degree.

>
> > Sometimes those determinations are influenced more by conditions you
> > perceive as external to yourself,
>
> Sometimes a computer's CPU works on data already in it's memory unit, and
> sometimes it works on newly inputted data.

'Newly inputted' data is still in it's memory unit. The CPU doesn't
spontaneously generate new feelings like the human mind does.

>
> > and sometimes it is you who are influencing external conditions.
>
> And sometimes computers output data to external things like printers or
> video screens or internet connections and sometimes they do not.

That's true, but they don't care whether they output or not. It's not
driven by their own intention. They won't EVER discover a printer that
is sitting right next to them without having drivers loaded and
configured to even connect.

>
> > you can voluntarily choose to reason differently
>
> Yes I can change my mind, I've done it before but in the past whenever I
> changed my internal programming I have always done so for a reason, if I
> ever find myself changing my mind for no reason then I intend to call 911
> because I'm undergoing a serious medical emergency of some sort and a
> hardware malfunction is going on in my brain.

Did the reason change your internal programming by itself while you
passively watched or did you voluntarily decide to commit to it?

>
> > If you are completely deterministic, then how do you know that the car
> > isn't driving you instead of you driving a car?
>
> If I determine that the brake needs to be applied I find that my foot
> depresses the brake peddle and I feel (correctly I think) that I am in
> control.

How do you know the car isn't controlling your foot instead? According
to your argument, there would be no way to tell the difference as
either description of the event of braking is equally accurate and
deterministic.

>
> > free will is neither fully deterministic nor random, nor fully not
> > deterministic nor random.
>
> That makes no sense. You say "I have free will" so I don't see how
> randomness can help you clarify what that means because "I" is something
> but something does not cause random things to happen,

If you talk to a schizophrenic, what they say will seem more random
than someone else. Their I is causing things to happen with more
randomness.

> nothing does, so the
> concept of randomness is no help at all in understanding what the ASCII
> sequence "I have free will" means.

You are the one who keeps injecting random into this. I don't need
random at all to understand free will. Random is nothing but a quality
of pattern recognition. If we can't find a pattern, we call it random.
Maybe every radioactive decay event in the universe is eventually
going to synchronize to spell out God's name in Red, White, and Blue
letters on his TV screen, how would we know?

>
> > Just as Spring is neither fully Summer nor Winter,
>
> Large complex things like the weather usually happen for many reasons, but
> every one of those reasons themselves happened for a reason or they did not
> happen for a reason.

Um, I'm not saying anything about the weather being deterministic or
not, I am strictly talking about how things can be arranged
orthogonally. I am disproving your claim that everything must be only
one thing or another thing.

> And one thing is beyond dispute to any logical person,
> spring is summer or spring is not summer.

Which is it? Is spring summer or is spring not summer? Isn't spring
nothing but the transition from winter to summer? Without that
transition to summer could you have spring? Spring and summer are just
different degrees of the same thing.

>
> > If you insist upon arbitrarily reducing the universe to a single
> > dimension of determined vs random, then
>
> Then I have understood the lesson taught on day one of logic 101, that X is
> Y or X is not Y and there is no third alternative.

You have understood that all too well, but you have not progressed to
logic 102. There are always more than two alternatives and X and Y are
symbolic constructs, not concrete realities.

>
> > you cannot understand consciousness as it actually is.
>
> I'll be damned if I understand why determinism is supposed to be the enemy
> of consciousness or why things that happen for no reason at all,
> randomness, is supposed to make everything all better.

Determinism and randomness are both figments of consciousness. They
are not the enemy, they are the fruits.

>
> >> that your list of questions came out right after my sentence. And you
> >> believe that although there was no reason behind your list of questions
>
> > >There were all kinds of reasons behind my listing of questions
>
> Yes, there are many different types of deterministic processes.

And I choose among them and/or create my own new processes
dynamically.

>
> > I created them by reasoning.
>
> Yet another deterministic process.

There is a difference between making a determination and being
determined to passively watch a determination be made on your behalf.
Do you deny that? What is that difference? Hint: it's that ASCII
string that you dare not speak.

>
> >It was caused by me.
>
> If it's caused then it's obviously deterministic.

Free will = caused by me (intentionally). You can call free will
deterministic if you want, but what would be the point? What does that
word mean if it includes all possibilities including libertarian free
will?

>
> >I can be described as nothing or not nothing
>
> Obviously gibberish.

Not at all. Some people only consider matter to be things, so I may by
that definition be nothing. Dan Dennett might argue that he and I and
you are nothing.

>
> > It determines and fails to determine.
>
> More of the same, up is down black is white gibberish is not gibberish and
> clarity is nowhere to be found in your universe.

Clarity is a consequence of intention. If your intention is to
describe the universe, then you must clearly describe it in a way that
embraces all of it's involuted paradox/unity.

Craig

[Quentin Anciaux]

2012/5/17 Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com>

Your unique argument against a program being able to be conscious (as conscious as a human can be) is to take a non-conscious program  and to say "see it's not conscious"... well yes it is not, that doesn't mean no program can be.

Quentin
 

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[Craig Weinberg]

What are the properties of arithmetic contingent on?

>
> > That pattern
> > recognition is not automatically guaranteed by any arithmetic logic.
>
> In your non-comp theory.
>
> > We need a physical machine that remembers that it can remember,
>
> That's "Bp -> BBp". Universal machine are like that.

Those are just letters and symbols. What or who makes them mean
something and why?

>
> > and
> > can experience that memory as an event. It needs to know what kinds of
> > strings of remembered digits constitute a meaningful pattern, or that
> > there could even be such a thing as a pattern. To say that patterns
> > appear and reappear in arithmetic takes the appearance of pattern
> > itself for granted, then usurps the primacy of the sense experience
> > which provides it.
>
> Not really, for it appears and reappears only in the mind of universal
> numbers. It makes sense for them, and indeed they will be astonished
> that apparent material can lead to that sense. But although locally
> true, this is globally wrong. Sense is necessarily a first person
> notion, and relies on the abstract but real configuration involving
> infinities of arithmetical relations.

I don't think sense is a first person notion, it is the very capacity
to define first person and third person as separate (opposite) on one
level, and united on another. Sense creates the arithmetical
relations, but not infinitely. Arithmetical relations are derived a
posteriori of sense embodiments. Sense generates the capacities,
intentions, symmetries, and rhythms that underlie recursive
enumeration, as well as frames the context of all sequence and
consequence. It all has to make sense. Not everything has to make
numbers. Dizzy doesn't make numbers, but it makes sense. It is a
sensation that makes sense to an embodied animal, but not to a
computer.

>
>
>
> >>> To say they are creatures implies a creation.
>
> >> Why not. You could say that they are created by the addition and
> >> multiplication laws. You need only to bet that 1+1=2 and alike does
> >> not depend on us.
>
> > Because there's no mathematical logic to how or why that creation
> > could occur.
>
> But there is.

What is it?

>
> > If we posit a universe of arithmetic realism, how can we
> > accept that it falls off a cliff when it comes to the arithmetic of
> > it's own origins? What makes 1+1=2? Sense.
>
> Truth.

Truth requires sense. Not everything that makes sense is true (fiction
for example), but everything that is true makes sense.

> Why do you want someone to assess the truth for something being
> true. That is anthropomorphic.

It's ontologically necessary. What is a truth without it being
detectable in some way to something?

> Th greek get well that point, and
> originate the whole scientific enterprise from there, as in the
> conclusion of this video:
>
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69F7GhASOdM

Great video, but now you are the one anthropomorphizing. Just because
the released man doesn't create the outside world by seeing it doesn't
mean that the outside world can exist without being held together by
experienced sense relations on every level. My computer doesn't create
the internet, but that doesn't mean that the internet isn't created on
computers.

>
> If not, it is the whole idea of a reality which makes no more sense,
> and we get solipsist or anthropomorphic.

That's where sense comes in. Sense divides the totality into
solipsistic/anthropomorphic and objective/mechanemorphic on one level,
but bleeds through that division on another level, thus creating a
diffracted continuum that oscillates through time but remains
continuous across space (and vice versa). Numbers are a synthetic
analysis of that process, distilled to a nearly meaningless but nearly
omnipotent extreme of universality (qualitative flatness). Numbers are
the opposite of the solipsistic personal experience (qualitative depth
asymptotic to 'Selfness' itself). They are the least appropriate tools
to describe feeling.

>
> > Not primitive sense either,
> > but high order cognitive abstraction. There is no '1' or '2'
> > literally, they are ideas about our common sense - what we have in
> > common with everything. Numbers are literally 'figures', symbols which
> > can be applied mentally to represent many things,
>
> No. That's number description. Not numbers.

I'm not talking about the characters "1" or "2", I'm talking about
what they represent. The concept of numbers defines them as figurative
entities, but you make them literal. That's ok with me if you are
doing that for mathematical purposes since it is a powerful way to
approach it, through the negative symmetry, but just as you might
trace a picture better if it's upside down, eventually you should turn
it right side up when you finish. To say that numbers literally exist
but matter does not is the logo-morphic position, orthogonal to both
anthropomorphic and mechanemorphic, but it is still as pathologically
unreal if taken literally. Again, thats ok with me, we need
surrealists too, I'm just saying, when the rubber hits the road, it's
not sanity.

>
> > and to deploy
> > orderly control of some physical systems - but not everything can be
> > reduced to or controlled by numbers.
>
> But that's what number can discover by themselves.

In your logopomorphic theory of comp.

> Once you are at the
> treshold of numbers, the complexity of the relations (even just
> between numbers) get higher than what you can describe with numbers.
> the numbers already know that, with reasonable account of what is
> knowledge.

If the complexity exceeds the capacity of numbers, then you need to
invoke even more complexity in the form of additional forms of
expression of that complexity...out of thin air? With sense,
complexity is generated recursively from bottom up entropy, while
simplicity pulls from the top down toward unity as significance.
Evolution is the interference pattern between them.

>
>
>
> >>> What
> >>> necessary logic turns a nuclear chain reaction (addition and
> >>> multiplication) into a nursery for problem solving sentience?
>
> >> The same logic making tiny system Turing universal. Usually some
> >> small
> >> part of classical logic is enough.
>
> > Why would any kind of universality or logic entail the automatic
> > development of sentience? What is logical about sentience?
>
> The illogicality of sentience. From the point of view of numbers, when
> they look at themselves, they discover, for logical reason, that there
> is something non logical about them.

If there is something non logical about numbers (which are really the
embodiment of pure logic), why does that truth have to be 'discovered'
by them? In our development as children, do we not discover logic out
of the chaos of infancy rather than the other way around? Do we not
learn numbers rather than learn feelings?

>Then the comp act of faith
> appears to be the simplest way to restore logic, except for that act
> of faith and the belief in addition and multiplication.

What kind of faith does a Turing machine have?

Craig

[Craig Weinberg]

On May 17, 7:57 am, Quentin Anciaux <allco...@gmail.com> wrote:

>
> > That's true, but they don't care whether they output or not. It's not
> > driven by their own intention. They won't EVER discover a printer that
> > is sitting right next to them without having drivers loaded and
> > configured to even connect.
>
> Your unique argument against a program being able to be conscious (as
> conscious as a human can be) is to take a non-conscious program  and to say
> "see it's not conscious"... well yes it is not, that doesn't mean no
> program can be.

Yes, in a sense that's true, but since the only example of something
conscious we have is ourselves, the alternative is to take a non-
conscious program and say "there's no reason that some future version
of it can't be just like me eventually. The former makes more sense to
me. It's not only that logic that makes me suspect the former is the
case though. There seems to be a specific, glaring lack of sentience
in all machines that does not reduce in the slightest even as machines
scale up exponentially in complexity. No byte has ever done anything
by itself, and I don't see why it ever would.

I only bring up the shortcomings of machines and programs because
that's the only common sense examples I can really use, but that's
just the tip of the iceberg. I am trying to use that common sense as a
lever to open you up the deeper understanding that I have about how
intention arises from within matter and cannot be transplanted from
the outside as with a computer. It's not a matter of Luddite neophobia
at all, believe me I am a transhumanist to the core, I just think we
are not going to get there without water, sugar, protein, lipids, etc.

Craig

[Bruno Marchal]

The idea is that such properties are not contingent.

You could take any universal system, instead of arithmetic. From the
computability perspective, they are equivalent.

>
>>
>>> That pattern
>>> recognition is not automatically guaranteed by any arithmetic logic.
>>
>> In your non-comp theory.
>>
>>> We need a physical machine that remembers that it can remember,
>>
>> That's "Bp -> BBp". Universal machine are like that.
>
> Those are just letters and symbols. What or who makes them mean
> something and why?

Bp means that some universal machine utters p. Absolutely.
Independently of you and me.
BBp means that the same universal machine now utters Bp.
For any arithmetic (or equivalent) proposition, Bp > BBp, means that
if that machine utters p, it will soon or later utters Bp. And that is
a theorem of arithmetic, making it true independently of you and me.

>
>>
>>> and
>>> can experience that memory as an event. It needs to know what
>>> kinds of
>>> strings of remembered digits constitute a meaningful pattern, or
>>> that
>>> there could even be such a thing as a pattern. To say that patterns
>>> appear and reappear in arithmetic takes the appearance of pattern
>>> itself for granted, then usurps the primacy of the sense experience
>>> which provides it.
>>
>> Not really, for it appears and reappears only in the mind of
>> universal
>> numbers. It makes sense for them, and indeed they will be astonished
>> that apparent material can lead to that sense. But although locally
>> true, this is globally wrong. Sense is necessarily a first person
>> notion, and relies on the abstract but real configuration involving
>> infinities of arithmetical relations.
>
> I don't think sense is a first person notion, it is the very capacity
> to define first person and third person as separate (opposite) on one
> level, and united on another. Sense creates the arithmetical
> relations, but not infinitely. Arithmetical relations are derived a
> posteriori of sense embodiments.

You confuse arithmetic and the human's apprehension of arithmetic.

> Sense generates the capacities,
> intentions, symmetries, and rhythms that underlie recursive
> enumeration, as well as frames the context of all sequence and
> consequence. It all has to make sense.

We need only the idea that a reality can exists beyond human sensing.
This is what I assume by making explicit the arithmetical realism, and
that can be shown enough when we assume that we work locally as
machine, at some description level.
As I already told you, to make this false, you need to build an
explicit non computable and non Turing recoverable function having a
genuine role for the mind. This unfortunately only makes more complex
both mind and matter, making your non-comp hypothesis looking like a
construct for making impossible to reason in that field.

> Not everything has to make
> numbers. Dizzy doesn't make numbers, but it makes sense.

But numbers does not make only numbers. They make and develop sense
for many things far more complex than numbers, that is the point.
Arithmetical truth itself is far beyond of numbers, yet numbers can
relatively develop some intuition about those kind of things.
You just seems stuck in a reductionist conception of numbers and
machines. We know such conception are wrong.

> It is a
> sensation that makes sense to an embodied animal, but not to a
> computer.

How could we know that? Why should we believe that?

>
>>
>>
>>
>>>>> To say they are creatures implies a creation.
>>
>>>> Why not. You could say that they are created by the addition and
>>>> multiplication laws. You need only to bet that 1+1=2 and alike does
>>>> not depend on us.
>>
>>> Because there's no mathematical logic to how or why that creation
>>> could occur.
>>
>> But there is.
>
> What is it?

That the existence of universal numbers, and their many dreams, is a
consequence of logic and arithmetic.

>
>>
>>> If we posit a universe of arithmetic realism, how can we
>>> accept that it falls off a cliff when it comes to the arithmetic of
>>> it's own origins? What makes 1+1=2? Sense.
>>
>> Truth.
>
> Truth requires sense.

Why?

> Not everything that makes sense is true (fiction
> for example), but everything that is true makes sense.

For who?

>
>> Why do you want someone to assess the truth for something being
>> true. That is anthropomorphic.
>
> It's ontologically necessary. What is a truth without it being
> detectable in some way to something?

It is an unknown truth. A billion digit numbers can be prime without
us being able to know it. Some universal machine does not stop on some
argument without anyone being able to prove or know it. Some pebble on
some far away planet can be eroded without anyone knowing it.

>
>> Th greek get well that point, and
>> originate the whole scientific enterprise from there, as in the
>> conclusion of this video:
>>
>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69F7GhASOdM
>
> Great video, but now you are the one anthropomorphizing. Just because
> the released man doesn't create the outside world by seeing it doesn't
> mean that the outside world can exist without being held together by
> experienced sense relations on every level. My computer doesn't create
> the internet, but that doesn't mean that the internet isn't created on
> computers.

But where the first observer come from?

>
>>
>> If not, it is the whole idea of a reality which makes no more sense,
>> and we get solipsist or anthropomorphic.
>
> That's where sense comes in. Sense divides the totality into
> solipsistic/anthropomorphic and objective/mechanemorphic on one level,
> but bleeds through that division on another level, thus creating a
> diffracted continuum that oscillates through time but remains
> continuous across space (and vice versa).

Time and space, looks concrete, thanks to millions years of evolution,
but are much more sophisticated notion than elementary addition and
multiplication to me.

> Numbers are a synthetic
> analysis of that process, distilled to a nearly meaningless but nearly
> omnipotent extreme of universality (qualitative flatness). Numbers are
> the opposite of the solipsistic personal experience (qualitative depth
> asymptotic to 'Selfness' itself). They are the least appropriate tools
> to describe feeling.

Atoms, fields, space, time seems as much.

>
>>
>>> Not primitive sense either,
>>> but high order cognitive abstraction. There is no '1' or '2'
>>> literally, they are ideas about our common sense - what we have in
>>> common with everything. Numbers are literally 'figures', symbols
>>> which
>>> can be applied mentally to represent many things,
>>
>> No. That's number description. Not numbers.
>
> I'm not talking about the characters "1" or "2", I'm talking about
> what they represent. The concept of numbers defines them as figurative
> entities, but you make them literal. That's ok with me if you are
> doing that for mathematical purposes since it is a powerful way to
> approach it, through the negative symmetry, but just as you might
> trace a picture better if it's upside down, eventually you should turn
> it right side up when you finish. To say that numbers literally exist
> but matter does not is the logo-morphic position, orthogonal to both
> anthropomorphic and mechanemorphic, but it is still as pathologically
> unreal if taken literally. Again, thats ok with me, we need
> surrealists too, I'm just saying, when the rubber hits the road, it's
> not sanity.

Hmm...

>
>>
>>> and to deploy
>>> orderly control of some physical systems - but not everything can be
>>> reduced to or controlled by numbers.
>>
>> But that's what number can discover by themselves.
>
> In your logopomorphic theory of comp.

Be polite!

:)

>
>> Once you are at the
>> treshold of numbers, the complexity of the relations (even just
>> between numbers) get higher than what you can describe with numbers.
>> the numbers already know that, with reasonable account of what is
>> knowledge.
>
> If the complexity exceeds the capacity of numbers, then you need to
> invoke even more complexity in the form of additional forms of
> expression of that complexity...out of thin air?

It develops from intuition. Numbers, relatively to universal numbers,
can develop intuition, due to the true relation existing between
numbers, including the truth that they cannot rationally justified. So
it comes from truth.

> With sense,
> complexity is generated recursively from bottom up entropy, while
> simplicity pulls from the top down toward unity as significance.
> Evolution is the interference pattern between them.
>
>>
>>
>>
>>>>> What
>>>>> necessary logic turns a nuclear chain reaction (addition and
>>>>> multiplication) into a nursery for problem solving sentience?
>>
>>>> The same logic making tiny system Turing universal. Usually some
>>>> small
>>>> part of classical logic is enough.
>>
>>> Why would any kind of universality or logic entail the automatic
>>> development of sentience? What is logical about sentience?
>>
>> The illogicality of sentience. From the point of view of numbers,
>> when
>> they look at themselves, they discover, for logical reason, that
>> there
>> is something non logical about them.
>
> If there is something non logical about numbers (which are really the
> embodiment of pure logic), why does that truth have to be 'discovered'
> by them?

Because truth extend logics, and number are constrained by truth,
before what they can believe.

> In our development as children, do we not discover logic out
> of the chaos of infancy rather than the other way around? Do we not
> learn numbers rather than learn feelings?

Because we have brains which sum up millions years of teaching in nine
month, making us believe that walking and seeing is simpler than
trigonometry. Later we can understand that is the contrary.

>
>> Then the comp act of faith
>> appears to be the simplest way to restore logic, except for that act
>> of faith and the belief in addition and multiplication.
>
> What kind of faith does a Turing machine have?

If she is correct, it looks like it is plotinian sort of faith. But a
machine can also develop a faith in mechanism, by surviving back-up,
and be led, with occam, to a more pythagorean sort of faith.

Bruno


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

[Stephen P. King]

Hi Bruno,

I would like to add comments in defense of what I think Craig is
trying to communicate.

Universality is relative independence to a particular means of
expression. It is not Independence in the sense of mutual isolation or
complete absence of relations.

>
>
>>
>>>
>>>> That pattern
>>>> recognition is not automatically guaranteed by any arithmetic logic.
>>>
>>> In your non-comp theory.
>>>
>>>> We need a physical machine that remembers that it can remember,
>>>
>>> That's "Bp -> BBp". Universal machine are like that.
>>
>> Those are just letters and symbols. What or who makes them mean
>> something and why?
>
> Bp means that some universal machine utters p. Absolutely.
> Independently of you and me.
> BBp means that the same universal machine now utters Bp.
> For any arithmetic (or equivalent) proposition, Bp > BBp, means that
> if that machine utters p, it will soon or later utters Bp. And that is
> a theorem of arithmetic, making it true independently of you and me.

And these statements have a definite meaning only because there is
a relatively unambiguous structure of relations within our collective
minds that gives meaning to them. Apart from that structure they are
meaningless. Statements, like objects, cannot have inherent and definite
properties other than just some spectrum of possible properties. Why?
Because properties are the result of actual observations/interactions by
physical systems. Absent the actual means to count the quantity of fruit
in a basket, it is incoherent to say that a certain quantity of fruit in
the basket. We have goten away with talking in ambiguous terms for far
too long.

>
>
>>
>>>
>>>> and
>>>> can experience that memory as an event. It needs to know what kinds of
>>>> strings of remembered digits constitute a meaningful pattern, or that
>>>> there could even be such a thing as a pattern. To say that patterns
>>>> appear and reappear in arithmetic takes the appearance of pattern
>>>> itself for granted, then usurps the primacy of the sense experience
>>>> which provides it.
>>>
>>> Not really, for it appears and reappears only in the mind of universal
>>> numbers. It makes sense for them, and indeed they will be astonished
>>> that apparent material can lead to that sense. But although locally
>>> true, this is globally wrong. Sense is necessarily a first person
>>> notion, and relies on the abstract but real configuration involving
>>> infinities of arithmetical relations.
>>
>> I don't think sense is a first person notion, it is the very capacity
>> to define first person and third person as separate (opposite) on one
>> level, and united on another. Sense creates the arithmetical
>> relations, but not infinitely. Arithmetical relations are derived a
>> posteriori of sense embodiments.
>
> You confuse arithmetic and the human's apprehension of arithmetic.

No, you do. You are assuming that differences exist in the absence
of the means to define differences.

>
>
>> Sense generates the capacities,
>> intentions, symmetries, and rhythms that underlie recursive
>> enumeration, as well as frames the context of all sequence and
>> consequence. It all has to make sense.
>
> We need only the idea that a reality can exists beyond human sensing.
> This is what I assume by making explicit the arithmetical realism, and
> that can be shown enough when we assume that we work locally as
> machine, at some description level.

Of course, but this idea requires that there is an entity that can
have those ideas in the first place. We can only reason backwards from
where we are and what we know now.

> As I already told you, to make this false, you need to build an
> explicit non computable and non Turing recoverable function having a
> genuine role for the mind. This unfortunately only makes more complex
> both mind and matter, making your non-comp hypothesis looking like a
> construct for making impossible to reason in that field.
>

Goedel, Turing and others already did this when they proved the
existence of non-computable numbers, relations, etc. The existence of a
non-halting Turing machine is a proof of such. Why is it so difficult
for you to understand this? Recursively enumerable functions are exactly
those functions that can be represented in some formal system. Formal
systems are structures that are known within the minds of conscious
entities that can communicate with each other about these formal
systems. Absent the existence of those conscious entities there are
neither formal systems nor recursively enumerable functions.

>
>
>
>> Not everything has to make
>> numbers. Dizzy doesn't make numbers, but it makes sense.
>
> But numbers does not make only numbers. They make and develop sense
> for many things far more complex than numbers, that is the point.
> Arithmetical truth itself is far beyond of numbers, yet numbers can
> relatively develop some intuition about those kind of things.

You are projecting your ability to know the meaning of a set of
symbols onto the symbols themselves.

> You just seems stuck in a reductionist conception of numbers and
> machines. We know such conception are wrong.

Yes we do, so why persist in error?

>
>
>
>> It is a
>> sensation that makes sense to an embodied animal, but not to a
>> computer.
>
> How could we know that? Why should we believe that?

Because we can demonstrate the ability by physically doing some
action that is meaningful as a computation. It is not difficult to grasp.

>
>
>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>>>> To say they are creatures implies a creation.
>>>
>>>>> Why not. You could say that they are created by the addition and
>>>>> multiplication laws. You need only to bet that 1+1=2 and alike does
>>>>> not depend on us.
>>>
>>>> Because there's no mathematical logic to how or why that creation
>>>> could occur.
>>>
>>> But there is.
>>
>> What is it?
>
> That the existence of universal numbers, and their many dreams, is a
> consequence of logic and arithmetic.

Not just the existence of universal numbers.

>
>
>
>>
>>>
>>>> If we posit a universe of arithmetic realism, how can we
>>>> accept that it falls off a cliff when it comes to the arithmetic of
>>>> it's own origins? What makes 1+1=2? Sense.
>>>
>>> Truth.
>>
>> Truth requires sense.
>
> Why?

Because truth is a valuation that is not assigned or even
meaningful in the absence of the ability to distinguish one value as
different from another.

>
>
>
>> Not everything that makes sense is true (fiction
>> for example), but everything that is true makes sense.
>
> For who?

You, me, Donald Duck...

>
>
>
>>
>>> Why do you want someone to assess the truth for something being
>>> true. That is anthropomorphic.
>>
>> It's ontologically necessary. What is a truth without it being
>> detectable in some way to something?
>
> It is an unknown truth. A billion digit numbers can be prime without
> us being able to know it. Some universal machine does not stop on some
> argument without anyone being able to prove or know it. Some pebble on
> some far away planet can be eroded without anyone knowing it.

Only a possible content of a mind can be true, not something
independent of it.

>
>
>
>>
>>> Th greek get well that point, and
>>> originate the whole scientific enterprise from there, as in the
>>> conclusion of this video:
>>>
>>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69F7GhASOdM

This assumes a set of objects that have specific properties
independent of the observers in the cave. It assumes a pre-existing
world. It assumes many things that are not necessarily real.

>>
>> Great video, but now you are the one anthropomorphizing. Just because
>> the released man doesn't create the outside world by seeing it doesn't
>> mean that the outside world can exist without being held together by
>> experienced sense relations on every level. My computer doesn't create
>> the internet, but that doesn't mean that the internet isn't created on
>> computers.
>
> But where the first observer come from?

Why do you assume that there is a "first"? What if the notion of "A
is first" is just a valuation in the mind of some observer. You might
consider that observers always exist and that it is only within their
field of observations that such concepts as universes and numbers are
meaningful entities.

>
>
>>
>>>
>>> If not, it is the whole idea of a reality which makes no more sense,
>>> and we get solipsist or anthropomorphic.
>>
>> That's where sense comes in. Sense divides the totality into
>> solipsistic/anthropomorphic and objective/mechanemorphic on one level,
>> but bleeds through that division on another level, thus creating a
>> diffracted continuum that oscillates through time but remains
>> continuous across space (and vice versa).
>
> Time and space, looks concrete, thanks to millions years of evolution,
> but are much more sophisticated notion than elementary addition and
> multiplication to me.

You might try to write up a mathematical model of space and time,
or study the tensor based model of General Relativity. It helps to
actually learn what is necessary to model spatial and temporal relations
for multiple objects to have an intuitive grasp on this question that
you are asking.

>
>
>> Numbers are a synthetic
>> analysis of that process, distilled to a nearly meaningless but nearly
>> omnipotent extreme of universality (qualitative flatness). Numbers are
>> the opposite of the solipsistic personal experience (qualitative depth
>> asymptotic to 'Selfness' itself). They are the least appropriate tools
>> to describe feeling.
>
> Atoms, fields, space, time seems as much.

Are they, or are these words just place-holders for the hope of
meaningfulness?

>
>
>>
>>>
>>>> Not primitive sense either,
>>>> but high order cognitive abstraction. There is no '1' or '2'
>>>> literally, they are ideas about our common sense - what we have in
>>>> common with everything. Numbers are literally 'figures', symbols which
>>>> can be applied mentally to represent many things,
>>>
>>> No. That's number description. Not numbers.
>>
>> I'm not talking about the characters "1" or "2", I'm talking about
>> what they represent. The concept of numbers defines them as figurative
>> entities, but you make them literal. That's ok with me if you are
>> doing that for mathematical purposes since it is a powerful way to
>> approach it, through the negative symmetry, but just as you might
>> trace a picture better if it's upside down, eventually you should turn
>> it right side up when you finish. To say that numbers literally exist
>> but matter does not is the logo-morphic position, orthogonal to both
>> anthropomorphic and mechanemorphic, but it is still as pathologically
>> unreal if taken literally. Again, thats ok with me, we need
>> surrealists too, I'm just saying, when the rubber hits the road, it's
>> not sanity.
>
> Hmm...

Do the symbols 1, 2, 3, ... actually refer to objects or do they
refer to some pattern of connections in a physical system? If they are
objects, what other properties do they have? How is is that we can come
to know of these properties?

>
>
>>
>>>
>>>> and to deploy
>>>> orderly control of some physical systems - but not everything can be
>>>> reduced to or controlled by numbers.
>>>
>>> But that's what number can discover by themselves.
>>
>> In your logopomorphic theory of comp.
>
> Be polite!
>
> :)

He is being polite! Me, maybe not so much.

>
>>
>>> Once you are at the
>>> treshold of numbers, the complexity of the relations (even just
>>> between numbers) get higher than what you can describe with numbers.
>>> the numbers already know that, with reasonable account of what is
>>> knowledge.
>>
>> If the complexity exceeds the capacity of numbers, then you need to
>> invoke even more complexity in the form of additional forms of
>> expression of that complexity...out of thin air?
>
> It develops from intuition. Numbers, relatively to universal numbers,
> can develop intuition, due to the true relation existing between
> numbers, including the truth that they cannot rationally justified. So
> it comes from truth.

So numbers have minds of their own?

>
>
>
>> With sense,
>> complexity is generated recursively from bottom up entropy, while
>> simplicity pulls from the top down toward unity as significance.
>> Evolution is the interference pattern between them.
>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>>>> What
>>>>>> necessary logic turns a nuclear chain reaction (addition and
>>>>>> multiplication) into a nursery for problem solving sentience?
>>>
>>>>> The same logic making tiny system Turing universal. Usually some
>>>>> small
>>>>> part of classical logic is enough.
>>>
>>>> Why would any kind of universality or logic entail the automatic
>>>> development of sentience? What is logical about sentience?
>>>
>>> The illogicality of sentience. From the point of view of numbers, when
>>> they look at themselves, they discover, for logical reason, that there
>>> is something non logical about them.
>>
>> If there is something non logical about numbers (which are really the
>> embodiment of pure logic), why does that truth have to be 'discovered'
>> by them?
>
> Because truth extend logics, and number are constrained by truth,
> before what they can believe.

You are treating numbers as if they are conscious entities
themselves. I am OK with that, but I require that there be a common
world wherein we can determine the continuous transformation of one form
of entity into another, an unbroken chain from these numbers to us, such
that their properties are not just some appearance that pops in and out
randomly.

>
>
>> In our development as children, do we not discover logic out
>> of the chaos of infancy rather than the other way around? Do we not
>> learn numbers rather than learn feelings?
>
> Because we have brains which sum up millions years of teaching in nine
> month, making us believe that walking and seeing is simpler than
> trigonometry. Later we can understand that is the contrary.

OK, but this really does not explain anything.

>
>
>>
>>> Then the comp act of faith
>>> appears to be the simplest way to restore logic, except for that act
>>> of faith and the belief in addition and multiplication.
>>
>> What kind of faith does a Turing machine have?
>
> If she is correct, it looks like it is plotinian sort of faith. But a
> machine can also develop a faith in mechanism, by surviving back-up,
> and be led, with occam, to a more pythagorean sort of faith.
>
> Bruno
>
>
> http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
>
>
>

You must admit that you are merely speculating Bruno. Unless you
can physically demonstrate the Turing machine, it is nothing more than
patterns of chalk marks on a board.

--
Onward!

Stephen

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

[Craig Weinberg]

That's still an idea though, ie sense. Sense doesn't need that
property since it can't be explained any other way. I can explain
arithmetic sense as a category of sense, but I can't explain sense as
a category of arithmetic unless you just tack it on and say it must be
part of the package inherently.

>
> You could take any universal system, instead of arithmetic. From the
> computability perspective, they are equivalent.

You can run over anything with a large enough steam roller and it will
be flat. If you don't use a computability perspective, they aren't

equivalent.

>
>
>
> >>> That pattern
> >>> recognition is not automatically guaranteed by any arithmetic logic.
>
> >> In your non-comp theory.
>
> >>> We need a physical machine that remembers that it can remember,
>
> >> That's "Bp -> BBp". Universal machine are like that.
>
> > Those are just letters and symbols. What or who makes them mean
> > something and why?
>
> Bp means that some universal machine utters p. Absolutely.
> Independently of you and me.

But not independently of the universal machine's sense-motive
experience. It has to be able to tell the difference between p and
something else and characterize the nature of that difference. It has
to have the motive power to 'utter', and something has to have the
sense receptivity to detect that something might have been uttered.
Otherwise there is no uttering.

> BBp means that the same universal machine now utters Bp.
> For any arithmetic (or equivalent) proposition, Bp > BBp, means that
> if that machine utters p, it will soon or later utters Bp.

So if I utter 'Toast is square', that means that eventually I will
utter 'I utter Toast is square' and then 'I utter I utter I utter I
utter Toast is squalre'?

> And that is
> a theorem of arithmetic, making it true independently of you and me.

I never argue that sense is dependent on human consciousness at all.
Sense is universal and literally older than time itself.

>
>
>
> >>> and
> >>> can experience that memory as an event. It needs to know what
> >>> kinds of
> >>> strings of remembered digits constitute a meaningful pattern, or
> >>> that
> >>> there could even be such a thing as a pattern. To say that patterns
> >>> appear and reappear in arithmetic takes the appearance of pattern
> >>> itself for granted, then usurps the primacy of the sense experience
> >>> which provides it.
>
> >> Not really, for it appears and reappears only in the mind of
> >> universal
> >> numbers. It makes sense for them, and indeed they will be astonished
> >> that apparent material can lead to that sense. But although locally
> >> true, this is globally wrong. Sense is necessarily a first person
> >> notion, and relies on the abstract but real configuration involving
> >> infinities of arithmetical relations.
>
> > I don't think sense is a first person notion, it is the very capacity
> > to define first person and third person as separate (opposite) on one
> > level, and united on another. Sense creates the arithmetical
> > relations, but not infinitely. Arithmetical relations are derived a
> > posteriori of sense embodiments.
>
> You confuse arithmetic and the human's apprehension of arithmetic.

Not at all. You are assuming that arithmetic is conceivable outside of
some kind of sense faculty and I don't see any reason to agree with
that. It doesn't have to be human apprehension at all, it could be
anything from a single atom to the totality of all mass-energy of the
cosmos as a single unit...or even some other sensible-but-real entity
beyond our ability to conceive through human sense. All of it has to
make sense in some way to some thing. Something has to detect
something.

>
> > Sense generates the capacities,
> > intentions, symmetries, and rhythms that underlie recursive
> > enumeration, as well as frames the context of all sequence and
> > consequence. It all has to make sense.
>
> We need only the idea that a reality can exists beyond human sensing.

I'm fine with that, but no reality can exist beyond sense. Realism is
nothing but a category of sense.

> This is what I assume by making explicit the arithmetical realism, and
> that can be shown enough when we assume that we work locally as
> machine, at some description level.

Its circular reasoning though. If I assume I'm a machine, then I
define everything I do as being mechanical. So what? If I define
myself as a spirit, then I define the universe as a spiritual journey.
What's the difference? They are both equally tautological.

> As I already told you, to make this false, you need to build an
> explicit non computable and non Turing recoverable function having a
> genuine role for the mind.

I don't need to build it, I am living in it already, you just aren't
admitting that it is the case.

> This unfortunately only makes more complex
> both mind and matter, making your non-comp hypothesis looking like a
> construct for making impossible to reason in that field.

I would not even say I have a non-comp hypothesis, I have a meta-comp
conjecture :)

I don't disagree that it might make it impossible to reason in that
field, and because of that, we need other inside-out and upside-down
models (anthropomorphic, mechanemorphic, logomorphic, technemorphic)
to get to our blind spot, but that doesn't change the absolute truth
value of the sense model that encompasses them all, as well as the
relations among them.

>
> > Not everything has to make
> > numbers. Dizzy doesn't make numbers, but it makes sense.
>
> But numbers does not make only numbers. They make and develop sense
> for many things far more complex than numbers, that is the point.

How does it follow from numbers though that they necessarily develop
anything at all? You are suggesting that bytes are alive and do things
on their own, yet we have never seen that to be the case nor does it
make intuitive sense. If that were true, we should see that Bugs Bunny
is having new adventures behind our back on 60 year old celluloid
reels by now. The internet would be haunted by autonomous entities
that we should be looking for like SETI.

> Arithmetical truth itself is far beyond of numbers,

Why should that be and how could that be the case? At what point can
numbers no longer tolerate being numbers and suddenly become...what?
From where?

> yet numbers can
> relatively develop some intuition about those kind of things.
> You just seems stuck in a reductionist conception of numbers and
> machines. We know such conception are wrong.

You confuse your conception of numbers with the reality of (non-human)
sense in general.

>
> > It is a
> > sensation that makes sense to an embodied animal, but not to a
> > computer.
>
> How could we know that? Why should we believe that?

Because we know that we have different channels of sense and we know
that it is not necessary for a computer to have multiple sense
channels, and that in fact, all data must be compiled into a one
dimensional binary stream. Our senses multiply the richness of our
experience, and even simple sensations like a circle quickly invite
imaginative elaboration. If a person is dizzy, they will complain. A
computer will never complain even if it is inside of a washing machine
that never turns off.

>
>
>
> >>>>> To say they are creatures implies a creation.
>
> >>>> Why not. You could say that they are created by the addition and
> >>>> multiplication laws. You need only to bet that 1+1=2 and alike does
> >>>> not depend on us.
>
> >>> Because there's no mathematical logic to how or why that creation
> >>> could occur.
>
> >> But there is.
>
> > What is it?
>
> That the existence of universal numbers, and their many dreams, is a
> consequence of logic and arithmetic.

Which is a consequence of sense and motive.

>
>
>
> >>> If we posit a universe of arithmetic realism, how can we
> >>> accept that it falls off a cliff when it comes to the arithmetic of
> >>> it's own origins? What makes 1+1=2? Sense.
>
> >> Truth.
>
> > Truth requires sense.
>
> Why?

How can something be determined to be true without something else
making sense of it as being true? It's like asking why water can't be
completely dehydrated and still feel wet.

>
> > Not everything that makes sense is true (fiction
> > for example), but everything that is true makes sense.
>
> For who?

For anyone or anything that can in some way experience it as true.

>
>
>
> >> Why do you want someone to assess the truth for something being
> >> true. That is anthropomorphic.
>
> > It's ontologically necessary. What is a truth without it being
> > detectable in some way to something?
>
> It is an unknown truth.

Unknown to us, but not unknown to its own context.

> A billion digit numbers can be prime without
> us being able to know it.

Sure, but if nothing is ever able to know it, then it isn't something
real, it's only an idea of what could be real.

> Some universal machine does not stop on some
> argument without anyone being able to prove or know it. Some pebble on
> some far away planet can be eroded without anyone knowing it.

Yes, I'm not talking about human knowledge. My hypothesis is
panexperiential. We see a pebble but what it is without us is a group
of atoms holding onto each other. It could be a purely tactile-kinetic-
acoustic awareness, or it could be an omniscient state of zen
paralysis. Maybe they experience something only when the status of
that holding changes, so a billion years goes by in ten seconds to
them, who knows. Maybe the pebble is only a fragment of star and the
whole solar system is the entity that lives a billion years in each
second. Lots of possibilities we can't even imagine...

>
>
>
> >> Th greek get well that point, and
> >> originate the whole scientific enterprise from there, as in the
> >> conclusion of this video:
>
> >>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69F7GhASOdM
>
> > Great video, but now you are the one anthropomorphizing. Just because
> > the released man doesn't create the outside world by seeing it doesn't
> > mean that the outside world can exist without being held together by
> > experienced sense relations on every level. My computer doesn't create
> > the internet, but that doesn't mean that the internet isn't created on
> > computers.
>
> But where the first observer come from?

"First" and "come from" are aspects of observerness. Observer is
primordial and absolute (totality/singularity).

>
>
>
> >> If not, it is the whole idea of a reality which makes no more sense,
> >> and we get solipsist or anthropomorphic.
>
> > That's where sense comes in. Sense divides the totality into
> > solipsistic/anthropomorphic and objective/mechanemorphic on one level,
> > but bleeds through that division on another level, thus creating a
> > diffracted continuum that oscillates through time but remains
> > continuous across space (and vice versa).
>
> Time and space, looks concrete, thanks to millions years of evolution,
> but are much more sophisticated notion than elementary addition and
> multiplication to me.

I use time and space to keep it simple. It is really the sense of
continuity and oscillating discontinuity itself which, when multiplied
by many subjects experiencing themselves objectively, gives rise to
the abstractions of space and time.

>
> > Numbers are a synthetic
> > analysis of that process, distilled to a nearly meaningless but nearly
> > omnipotent extreme of universality (qualitative flatness). Numbers are
> > the opposite of the solipsistic personal experience (qualitative depth
> > asymptotic to 'Selfness' itself). They are the least appropriate tools
> > to describe feeling.
>
> Atoms, fields, space, time seems as much.

I agree, but the ability to experience any of them, including numbers,
is more primitive.

Hah. I wasn't trying to be pejorative, just saying that your view
makes sense in my view but my view doesn't make sense in yours.

>
>
>
> >> Once you are at the
> >> treshold of numbers, the complexity of the relations (even just
> >> between numbers) get higher than what you can describe with numbers.
> >> the numbers already know that, with reasonable account of what is
> >> knowledge.
>
> > If the complexity exceeds the capacity of numbers, then you need to
> > invoke even more complexity in the form of additional forms of
> > expression of that complexity...out of thin air?
>
> It develops from intuition.

That's sense!

> Numbers, relatively to universal numbers,
> can develop intuition, due to the true relation existing between
> numbers, including the truth that they cannot rationally justified. So
> it comes from truth.

Truth goes along with what I'm trying to say about quanta being the
flattest and most universal qualia. Absolute truth means true for all
entities on all sense channels, so that necessarily requires that it
be absolutely flat qualitatively (otherwise you are dependent upon
some particular category of conditions, making it a relative truth
rather than absolute).

Under this criteria, numbers are an excellent candidate for universal
truth - almost. Numbers are so qualitatively flat that they act like a
skeleton key, sliding into every form and structure, but it also makes
it too easy to mistake the user of the key for the key itself since
the flattening dis-qualifies non-arithmetic realities. This is what
counting is; an abstraction layer which we use to identify or mention
*that* things are, but it doesn't address the actual experience of
what it is to be presented with those things. We count five apples but
the number five tells us nothing about apples.

What the logomorphic perspective does is invite an elevation of truth
values and universality at the direct expense of qualitatively rich
experience and specificity. It amputates the protocol stack of humans,
animals, organisms, chemicals, even physics and leaves only a
mathematical stump. The assumption is that using the splinters of the
stump, we must be able to build the entire tree, but what keeps
happening is that we get only a Turing Frankentree and splinters in
our hands. The danger is that rather than seeing this a sign to
understand the tree as a unique top-down event in the cosmos as well
as a bottom up assembled machine, we become even more fascinated by
the challenge of transmuting AI gold from leaden code and pursue it
even more avidly and obsessively. This is what is going on in Big
Physics (mechanemorphism) now as well, and in fundamentalist revivals
(Big Religion, anthropomorphism) around the world and Big Business
(technemorphism). All four points on the compass are hyperextended
into pathology until unity can be reconciled.

>
> > With sense,
> > complexity is generated recursively from bottom up entropy, while
> > simplicity pulls from the top down toward unity as significance.
> > Evolution is the interference pattern between them.
>
> >>>>> What
> >>>>> necessary logic turns a nuclear chain reaction (addition and
> >>>>> multiplication) into a nursery for problem solving sentience?
>
> >>>> The same logic making tiny system Turing universal. Usually some
> >>>> small
> >>>> part of classical logic is enough.
>
> >>> Why would any kind of universality or logic entail the automatic
> >>> development of sentience? What is logical about sentience?
>
> >> The illogicality of sentience. From the point of view of numbers,
> >> when
> >> they look at themselves, they discover, for logical reason, that
> >> there
> >> is something non logical about them.
>
> > If there is something non logical about numbers (which are really the
> > embodiment of pure logic), why does that truth have to be 'discovered'
> > by them?
>
> Because truth extend logics, and number are constrained by truth,
> before what they can believe.

I get that truth extends logic, and that numbers are constrained by
truth (which I say is lowest common denominator sense) but I don't get
the last part. Why does truth have to discover itself?

>
> > In our development as children, do we not discover logic out
> > of the chaos of infancy rather than the other way around? Do we not
> > learn numbers rather than learn feelings?
>
> Because we have brains which sum up millions years of teaching in nine
> month, making us believe that walking and seeing is simpler than
> trigonometry. Later we can understand that is the contrary.

You are right in one sense, but that sense doesn't exist until
'later'. Trigonometry is indeed simpler mathematics than the
mathematics underlying human walking and seeing, but the sense
underlying trigonometry is even simpler. That sense is the same common
denominator that makes us a single walking seeing person - it's the
absolute common denominator, simplicity itself - unity, totality,
wholeness, being. It makes no distinction between now and forever,
between everything and nothing. It is the greatest and least inertial
frame possible. For this not to be the case, there would have to be
something preventing it. Some limitation inherent that does not allow
everything to be one thing on some level. Sense does this temporarily,
I think literally, it does it through time.

>
>
>
> >> Then the comp act of faith
> >> appears to be the simplest way to restore logic, except for that act
> >> of faith and the belief in addition and multiplication.
>
> > What kind of faith does a Turing machine have?
>
> If she is correct, it looks like it is plotinian sort of faith. But a
> machine can also develop a faith in mechanism, by surviving back-up,
> and be led, with occam, to a more pythagorean sort of faith.

Sounds like a very Greco-Anglican faith. Where are the Vedic machines?

Craig

[Craig Weinberg]

On May 17, 10:57 am, "Stephen P. King" <stephe...@charter.net> wrote:

Nice! I read your reply after I posted, it's cool that we seem to be
independently thinking along the same lines.

Craig

[Bruno Marchal]

Sense and matter is what I search an explanation for. You start at the
finishing line.

>
>>
>> You could take any universal system, instead of arithmetic. From the
>> computability perspective, they are equivalent.
>
> You can run over anything with a large enough steam roller and it will
> be flat. If you don't use a computability perspective, they aren't
> equivalent.

Which is a defect, imo.

>
>>
>>
>>
>>>>> That pattern
>>>>> recognition is not automatically guaranteed by any arithmetic
>>>>> logic.
>>
>>>> In your non-comp theory.
>>
>>>>> We need a physical machine that remembers that it can remember,
>>
>>>> That's "Bp -> BBp". Universal machine are like that.
>>
>>> Those are just letters and symbols. What or who makes them mean
>>> something and why?
>>
>> Bp means that some universal machine utters p. Absolutely.
>> Independently of you and me.
>
> But not independently of the universal machine's sense-motive
> experience. It has to be able to tell the difference between p and
> something else and characterize the nature of that difference. It has
> to have the motive power to 'utter', and something has to have the
> sense receptivity to detect that something might have been uttered.
> Otherwise there is no uttering.

That part is let to the observer to judge.

>
>> BBp means that the same universal machine now utters Bp.
>> For any arithmetic (or equivalent) proposition, Bp > BBp, means that
>> if that machine utters p, it will soon or later utters Bp.
>
> So if I utter 'Toast is square', that means that eventually I will
> utter 'I utter Toast is square' and then 'I utter I utter I utter I
> utter Toast is squalre'?

In principle, except that all universal machine get bored and stop for
contingent reason. But to do the math, some simplification are in order.

>
>> And that is
>> a theorem of arithmetic, making it true independently of you and me.
>
> I never argue that sense is dependent on human consciousness at all.
> Sense is universal and literally older than time itself.

I have no clue what is that "sense" and how it related to the use of
the word "sense".

That would not make ... sense. You need a conceptor to conceive. But
you don't need one to make a proposition true or false.

> and I don't see any reason to agree with
> that. It doesn't have to be human apprehension at all, it could be
> anything from a single atom to the totality of all mass-energy of the
> cosmos as a single unit...or even some other sensible-but-real entity
> beyond our ability to conceive through human sense. All of it has to
> make sense in some way to some thing. Something has to detect
> something.

This explain what you start from an observer perspective. I don't buy
this if the price is that machine can't think.

>
>>
>>> Sense generates the capacities,
>>> intentions, symmetries, and rhythms that underlie recursive
>>> enumeration, as well as frames the context of all sequence and
>>> consequence. It all has to make sense.
>>
>> We need only the idea that a reality can exists beyond human sensing.
>
> I'm fine with that, but no reality can exist beyond sense. Realism is
> nothing but a category of sense.
>
>> This is what I assume by making explicit the arithmetical realism,
>> and
>> that can be shown enough when we assume that we work locally as
>> machine, at some description level.
>
> Its circular reasoning though. If I assume I'm a machine, then I
> define everything I do as being mechanical. So what? If I define
> myself as a spirit, then I define the universe as a spiritual journey.
> What's the difference? They are both equally tautological.

Not really. If I am a machine, then "physics is in my head". I can
take a look, and compare with facts, so I can test mechanism. I don't
see how your theory (assuming there is one) is testable. It just look
as an negative assertion on a class of possible individuals.

>
>> As I already told you, to make this false, you need to build an
>> explicit non computable and non Turing recoverable function having a
>> genuine role for the mind.
>
> I don't need to build it, I am living in it already,

How do you know that?
How do you justify that?

> you just aren't
> admitting that it is the case.

I am neutral. I just try to make sense of your prejudice against
machine, a priori.

>
>> This unfortunately only makes more complex
>> both mind and matter, making your non-comp hypothesis looking like a
>> construct for making impossible to reason in that field.
>
> I would not even say I have a non-comp hypothesis, I have a meta-comp
> conjecture :)
>
> I don't disagree that it might make it impossible to reason in that
> field, and because of that, we need other inside-out and upside-down
> models (anthropomorphic, mechanemorphic, logomorphic, technemorphic)
> to get to our blind spot, but that doesn't change the absolute truth
> value of the sense model that encompasses them all, as well as the
> relations among them.
>
>>
>>> Not everything has to make
>>> numbers. Dizzy doesn't make numbers, but it makes sense.
>>
>> But numbers does not make only numbers. They make and develop sense
>> for many things far more complex than numbers, that is the point.
>
> How does it follow from numbers though that they necessarily develop
> anything at all?

That is a good question. It is not obvious at all. But Gödel and
others found this.

> You are suggesting that bytes are alive and do things
> on their own, yet we have never seen that to be the case nor does it
> make intuitive sense.

It certainly does, once you assume comp. And it certainly does from a
third person perspective when you look at the arithmetical relations.
Some emulate the galaxy, with all its inhabitants, and in principle,
you can look at them, even talk with them.

> If that were true, we should see that Bugs Bunny
> is having new adventures behind our back on 60 year old celluloid
> reels by now. The internet would be haunted by autonomous entities
> that we should be looking for like SETI.

You drive conclusion too much quickly. I use math to have very high
level perspective on arithmetic, something infinite, you seems to look
just under a tree, and then conclude that there is no mushroom in the
whole forest.

>
>> Arithmetical truth itself is far beyond of numbers,
>
> Why should that be and how could that be the case? At what point can
> numbers no longer tolerate being numbers and suddenly become...what?
> From where?

This is again not easy to explain in few line. It is related to
Tarski, and other, who prove this. After Gödel discover than we can
define arithmetical provability *in* arithmetic, it was soon (if not
earlier) discovered that truth and knowledge by numbers and about
numbers, cannot be defined by numbers.
That is why arithmetic is a good ontology, because it is naturally
creative from inside.

>
>> yet numbers can
>> relatively develop some intuition about those kind of things.
>> You just seems stuck in a reductionist conception of numbers and
>> machines. We know such conception are wrong.
>
> You confuse your conception of numbers with the reality of (non-human)
> sense in general.

Oh? Why not? Why adding something which seems more complex that what
we try to understand. it looks like the God of the gap.

>
>>
>>> It is a
>>> sensation that makes sense to an embodied animal, but not to a
>>> computer.
>>
>> How could we know that? Why should we believe that?
>
> Because we know that we have different channels of sense and we know
> that it is not necessary for a computer to have multiple sense
> channels, and that in fact, all data must be compiled into a one
> dimensional binary stream.

The cerebral stems also simplifies a lot. But adding complexity does
not solve the problem, per se. In the worst case, it dilutes it.

> Our senses multiply the richness of our
> experience, and even simple sensations like a circle quickly invite
> imaginative elaboration. If a person is dizzy, they will complain. A
> computer will never complain even if it is inside of a washing machine
> that never turns off.

It depend which one.

>
>>
>>
>>
>>>>>>> To say they are creatures implies a creation.
>>
>>>>>> Why not. You could say that they are created by the addition and
>>>>>> multiplication laws. You need only to bet that 1+1=2 and alike
>>>>>> does
>>>>>> not depend on us.
>>
>>>>> Because there's no mathematical logic to how or why that creation
>>>>> could occur.
>>
>>>> But there is.
>>
>>> What is it?
>>
>> That the existence of universal numbers, and their many dreams, is a
>> consequence of logic and arithmetic.
>
> Which is a consequence of sense and motive.

Arithmetic cannot be a consequence of anything, except if it assumed
it (or equivalent) already.

>
>>
>>
>>
>>>>> If we posit a universe of arithmetic realism, how can we
>>>>> accept that it falls off a cliff when it comes to the arithmetic
>>>>> of
>>>>> it's own origins? What makes 1+1=2? Sense.
>>
>>>> Truth.
>>
>>> Truth requires sense.
>>
>> Why?
>
> How can something be determined to be true without something else
> making sense of it as being true?

It can be true without anybody capable of determine if it is true or
not. That's the point of being realist.

> It's like asking why water can't be
> completely dehydrated and still feel wet.
>
>>
>>> Not everything that makes sense is true (fiction
>>> for example), but everything that is true makes sense.
>>
>> For who?
>
> For anyone or anything that can in some way experience it as true.

Can the the birth of the universe be experienced? Again, you would
need an observer, before.

>
>>
>>
>>
>>>> Why do you want someone to assess the truth for something being
>>>> true. That is anthropomorphic.
>>
>>> It's ontologically necessary. What is a truth without it being
>>> detectable in some way to something?
>>
>> It is an unknown truth.
>
> Unknown to us, but not unknown to its own context.

?

>
>> A billion digit numbers can be prime without
>> us being able to know it.
>
> Sure, but if nothing is ever able to know it, then it isn't something
> real, it's only an idea of what could be real.

?

>
>> Some universal machine does not stop on some
>> argument without anyone being able to prove or know it. Some pebble
>> on
>> some far away planet can be eroded without anyone knowing it.
>
> Yes, I'm not talking about human knowledge. My hypothesis is
> panexperiential. We see a pebble but what it is without us is a group
> of atoms holding onto each other. It could be a purely tactile-
> kinetic-
> acoustic awareness, or it could be an omniscient state of zen
> paralysis. Maybe they experience something only when the status of
> that holding changes, so a billion years goes by in ten seconds to
> them, who knows. Maybe the pebble is only a fragment of star and the
> whole solar system is the entity that lives a billion years in each
> second. Lots of possibilities we can't even imagine...

That seems to be an acceptance that truth and possibilities can be
independent of sense and observation.

>
>>
>>
>>
>>>> Th greek get well that point, and
>>>> originate the whole scientific enterprise from there, as in the
>>>> conclusion of this video:
>>
>>>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69F7GhASOdM
>>
>>> Great video, but now you are the one anthropomorphizing. Just
>>> because
>>> the released man doesn't create the outside world by seeing it
>>> doesn't
>>> mean that the outside world can exist without being held together by
>>> experienced sense relations on every level. My computer doesn't
>>> create
>>> the internet, but that doesn't mean that the internet isn't
>>> created on
>>> computers.
>>
>> But where the first observer come from?
>
> "First" and "come from" are aspects of observerness. Observer is
> primordial and absolute (totality/singularity).

That's what I thought, but it looks like a reductio of absurdum of non-
comp. That's OK, you are coherent.

Well, it certainly is, with comp, for it relies in the additive and
multiplicative of numbers. But you want them to be primary, and thus
unexplainable. This makes your approach a bit too much like "don't
ask". But even machine will ask, so I search for more understandable
theories.

On the contrary. As I told you, you just reify the first person point
of view. I already know why machine want to do that. The illusion is
true and genuinely felt by them, yet illusory. (in the comp theory).

>
>>
>>
>>
>>>> Once you are at the
>>>> treshold of numbers, the complexity of the relations (even just
>>>> between numbers) get higher than what you can describe with
>>>> numbers.
>>>> the numbers already know that, with reasonable account of what is
>>>> knowledge.
>>
>>> If the complexity exceeds the capacity of numbers, then you need to
>>> invoke even more complexity in the form of additional forms of
>>> expression of that complexity...out of thin air?
>>
>> It develops from intuition.
>
> That's sense!

OK. For machine, it is what depend on both the machine beliefs, and
(arithmetical) truth.

>
>> Numbers, relatively to universal numbers,
>> can develop intuition, due to the true relation existing between
>> numbers, including the truth that they cannot rationally justified.
>> So
>> it comes from truth.
>
> Truth goes along with what I'm trying to say about quanta being the
> flattest and most universal qualia. Absolute truth means true for all
> entities on all sense channels, so that necessarily requires that it
> be absolutely flat qualitatively (otherwise you are dependent upon
> some particular category of conditions, making it a relative truth
> rather than absolute).
>
> Under this criteria, numbers are an excellent candidate for universal
> truth - almost. Numbers are so qualitatively flat that they act like a
> skeleton key, sliding into every form and structure, but it also makes
> it too easy to mistake the user of the key for the key itself since
> the flattening dis-qualifies non-arithmetic realities.

At the ontological level only. Not for the epistemology, which is on
the contrary vaccinated against reductionism.

> This is what
> counting is; an abstraction layer which we use to identify or mention
> *that* things are, but it doesn't address the actual experience of
> what it is to be presented with those things. We count five apples but
> the number five tells us nothing about apples.
>
> What the logomorphic perspective does is invite an elevation of truth
> values and universality at the direct expense of qualitatively rich
> experience and specificity. It amputates the protocol stack of humans,
> animals, organisms, chemicals, even physics and leaves only a
> mathematical stump.

Not at all. comp explains entirely whay arithmetic, seen from inside,
look even beyond the mathematical (and why machine naturally develop
theologies, which goes beyond what they can rationally justified).

What you accuse comp of doing, is what you do on machines. you
amputate their qualitatively super rich epistemological realities by
looking only to the third description of the computations or
arithmetical relations.

The whole complete theology of any universal machine is beyond any
human conceivable domain. But we can get nice big picture of it, in
the study of fixed little a priori correct machine; it is already
quite a mess full of things that *we* can name, in more powerful
theories than arithmetic, and we can see why the machine cannot get
those names, and the catastrophes which can occur if they
inadvertantly give a name to those things. Then we can lift such
theologies for us, with the proviso that we can only bet on our
correctness, and that eventually, we need to refer to truly unameable
things to ensure such theologies makes sense.

You are the reductionist, and this to claim that we (who exactly?)
have something that a vast class of creature cannot have according to
your feeling.

I can understand that before Gödel, we might have tought mechanism is
a reductionism, but after Gödel, mechanism appears to be a vaccine
against reductionism. The self-referentially correct machine is bound
up to be a universal dissident.
If she succeed in never exchanging an atom of security for an atom of
liberty, she can go to heaven (Dt and Co.), if not she can go to hell
(Bf and Co.). Despite it is hard to imagine something less
deterministic than arithmetic, from inside, it is looks like we surf
on a frontier between security (below universality, or sigma_1
completeness, we can control our submachines), and liberty (you can be
become whichever machine you want, you are (at different levels)
Turing universal, or sigma_1 complete. Universal machines, in a sense,
have already a sort of free will possibility, because they are initial
segment of the all histories, or subjective experience, dreams, or the
comp first person experiences.

> The assumption is that using the splinters of the
> stump, we must be able to build the entire tree, but what keeps
> happening is that we get only a Turing Frankentree and splinters in
> our hands.

Possible. But I bet on the contrary. I don't feel superior, and it is
also a hope, and a fear. Typically I dunno. But it is a simple and
elegant hypothesis, with an "effective everything" (the UD, made solid
by Church thesis), and which leads to a physics that we can tested.

> The danger is that rather than seeing this a sign to
> understand the tree as a unique top-down event in the cosmos as well
> as a bottom up assembled machine, we become even more fascinated by
> the challenge of transmuting AI gold from leaden code and pursue it
> even more avidly and obsessively.

It is not without danger. The only danger, both for comp and non-comp,
would be in pretending to know the truth about that. Comp is a type of
technological religion, and the question is really "can your daughter
marry a guy who bet on comp?".

Just make clearer all your terms, learn a bit of logic, and build a
"real" non-comp theory of reality. But the math needed to handle non
comp entities is basically the same than the math for comp, and you
have to conceive quite complex (but existing) entities to escape the
mathematical theologies of the self-referentially correct entity.

Another solution, is that you stop pretending that your theory of
reality decides between comp and non-comp, for you do have some
intuition comparable ... to the machine's intuition. The first person
of the machine already don't believe she is a machine.

> This is what is going on in Big
> Physics (mechanemorphism) now as well, and in fundamentalist revivals
> (Big Religion, anthropomorphism) around the world and Big Business
> (technemorphism).

Business and religion are wonderful things, like money, which is the
blood of economy, unless it is captured by special interest and will
in control. So the state has to be independent of them, or it leads to
Big Gangsterism (current situation, btw).

> All four points on the compass are hyperextended
> into pathology until unity can be reconciled.

That happens all the time with the liars.
The role of the lies in life and in matter is still unclear for me.

I am not sure truth can discover itself. Truth from inside divides
into different perspectives, like the provable, the knowable, the
observable, the sensible. Necessarily when in the case of the "eyes of
a universal machine", with the classical definition. Truth itself,
from inside is not nameable.

>
>>
>>> In our development as children, do we not discover logic out
>>> of the chaos of infancy rather than the other way around? Do we not
>>> learn numbers rather than learn feelings?
>>
>> Because we have brains which sum up millions years of teaching in
>> nine
>> month, making us believe that walking and seeing is simpler than
>> trigonometry. Later we can understand that is the contrary.
>
> You are right in one sense, but that sense doesn't exist until
> 'later'. Trigonometry is indeed simpler mathematics than the
> mathematics underlying human walking and seeing, but the sense
> underlying trigonometry is even simpler. That sense is the same common
> denominator that makes us a single walking seeing person - it's the
> absolute common denominator, simplicity itself - unity, totality,
> wholeness, being. It makes no distinction between now and forever,
> between everything and nothing. It is the greatest and least inertial
> frame possible. For this not to be the case, there would have to be
> something preventing it. Some limitation inherent that does not allow
> everything to be one thing on some level. Sense does this temporarily,
> I think literally, it does it through time.

Ok, but then you reduce the ontology to the arithmetical sense. That
makes sense, even with comp.

>
>>
>>
>>
>>>> Then the comp act of faith
>>>> appears to be the simplest way to restore logic, except for that
>>>> act
>>>> of faith and the belief in addition and multiplication.
>>
>>> What kind of faith does a Turing machine have?
>>
>> If she is correct, it looks like it is plotinian sort of faith. But a
>> machine can also develop a faith in mechanism, by surviving back-up,
>> and be led, with occam, to a more pythagorean sort of faith.
>
> Sounds like a very Greco-Anglican faith. Where are the Vedic machines?

Very close. I have a craving for the study of the relation between
Greeks theologies and Eastern "theologies", it is a rich subject. My
favorite text is the question of king Milinda. The arithmetical
interpretation of Plotinus comes from an earlier arithmetical
interpretation of Lao-Tseu.
I mean all correct machines seems quite Vedic to me.
With comp, the outer-god, the One, cannot recognize itself, but the
inner-god, the soul, the first person, can.

Bruno


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